Trinity's Child (6 page)

Suddenly Halupalai didn't like this at all. He could handle Kazaklis when he was deadly efficient or wildly, excessively escaping. He could handle the double image and the con. But he looked at Kazaklis now as if he had never seen him before. He was certain Kazaklis didn't even believe what he had said about bomb shelters and wars. That wasn't the subject. It was far more serious than that. It was personal and threatening. Halupalai sucked his stomach in hard. He forced his face to relax, flattening the furrows.

“Why do you stay, Halupalai?”

“Why else, captain, sir?” Halupalai grinned, forcing the smile and forcing the lighthearted sarcasm into his voice. “To keep this world safe from godless communism, captain, sir!”

And then the siren wailed.

Halupalai bolted out of his chair, started his scatback dash past the picture-window vista, and pivoted sharply under the howling klaxon. In the hallway he opened up his long-yardage sprint and collided with the terror-struck Vietnamese counter boy, sending him sprawling back into the darkened cafeteria from which he had been emerging. Halupalai did not pause. The clock was on him now. He had no illusions, no fears, about anything else. This was a drill. That was fear enough. Someone somewhere had a stopwatch on him. So he raced against it, against the others, against the unseen evaluators, against the looming end of his own usefulness.

In the shriek of the siren, Kazaklis heard World War Three. He always did, despite his words to Halupalai, and he wanted it that way. Some always heard drill, to keep their sanity. A few always heard more, to keep the adrenaline pulsing, to keep their speed at optimum. Kazaklis always heard more, and as he wheeled into the hallway, he trailed Halupalai only slightly. He knew Halupalai had to be first. He understood the Hawaiian's need. Still, he would not give him an inch, not lag a quarter-stride now to serve that need. If Halupalai got there before Kazaklis , it would be because Halupalai beat Kazaklis .

Moreau, lying on her bunk in a sleepy reverie, landed on her feet before her brain fully changed gears. Her roommate moved simultaneously, the reflexes automatic, and the two women wedged in the door before Moreau elbowed out first, ripping the chastity belt in the scuffle. Halupalai shot past. Moreau slipped in front of Kazaklis and broke into long, strong strides. Kazaklis cut off the tanker pilot, causing her to stumble.

Tyler, his head swimming in the money curves that would guarantee his family's long-term security, slapped his book shut. He jammed his feet into poised boots, tucking the laces without tying them, and joined the race. In the Alert Facility all minds, except one, were blank.

O'Toole shuddered. His heart leaped, his stomach sank, and he burst out of the icy shower without turning off the water. Radnor stood there, already pulling his flight suit rapidly over his sweaty body. Radnor glanced quickly, with no facial sign of sympathy, at his drenched crewmate. O'Toole caught the look, silently answering it with “Oh, shit!” in his eyes.

“You gonna have one very clean, very cold fanny, pal,” Radnor said as he spun out of the room.

O'Toole grabbed a towel, discarded it immediately, seconds ticking away, and pulled his suit over his dripping body. He forced his wet feet, bare, into his boots, grabbed his socks and his underwear and his flight jacket, and started running. At the locker-room doorway he lurched after another towel for later, missed, dropped his socks, paused, forgot the socks, goddamn these drills, and stepped back up to full speed. He was scared, like a kid on the way to the dentist—not of the wrench of the dental pliers but of the quick stab of the needle. It was going to be balls-freezing cold out there. But he ran.

Outside the Alert Facility a soft mantle of powdery snow blanketed everything except the polished runways, the floodlit B-52's, and the bulbous brown tankers. Fairchild's darkened roads throbbed surreally in the undulating fog-light orange of the scramble signals. A few blue alert trucks sped through the burned light. All others pulled quickly onto the highway shoulders. In the tower a young air controller watched traffic screens monitoring flights at both Fairchild and nearby Spokane International. He quickly aborted an F-15 fighter-interceptor coming in for a touch-and-go landing. But he was drawn away from the flight-control screens to the other computers and their coded printouts. He had heard the sirens, seen his world turn flexing orange, many times before. But this time he paled, the acne on his twenty-one-year-old face turning scarlet against a mask gone white.

Icarus glanced sideways almost stealthily, feeling as if he were intruding into a valued colleague's soul. At his right sat Harpoon. The admiral. Suddenly the general wished he had come to know him better. His number two. They came and went so fast in this business. Odd job for a sailor, holed up down here running SIOP and the targeting staff. But his number two was always a sailor, always a submariner, a bow to the Navy's persuasive role in nuclear deterrence. Nuclear war, buddy boy, Icarus told himself. The game just changed. The admiral was white-haired and open-collared. His face was tanned and Marlboro-man craggy, a contradiction in a man who spent so much of his life away from the sun, deep beneath the sea, prowling. The red police-car lights of the Command Post whipped across Harpoon's forehead as his unrevealing eyes darted almost imperceptibly between the large missile-display screen and the row of relentless clocks. The clocks said six minutes past midnight, Omaha time; 0606 Zulu. Twenty-four minutes left for Omaha, perhaps two minutes for the President.

“Turn off the fucking red lights,” Icarus barked into the P.A. system. “We know we got an emergency, for Christ's sake.”

He turned squarely toward the admiral, eyeballing him across the bank of multicolored phones on the Command Balcony. He had to send the man out now, off in the giant
E-4
command plane idling on a runway just minutes away. Then the country would have at least two command planes up. Harpoon in the
E-4;
Alice, his friend and fellow general, already up in the always-flying
Looking Glass
plane. They would run the show after he was gone. That was the system. Harpoon also had another job—finding a surviving President. Any surviving President, most likely a successor. Harpoon turned slowly to face him and stared without expression at the general.

“It's time to go, admiral,” Icarus said softly.

“The Navy doesn't like to abandon ship, general.”

“This is my ship, admiral. You got a new one now.”

“Still . . .”

“You don't want me to order you to do your duty.”

“No.”

The admiral rose, picked up the satchel at his side, gazed one last time down at the men below, and then snapped a salute. The general saluted back.

“Godspeed,” Icarus said.

“God grace,” Harpoon replied.

The general watched the sailor's ramrod-straight back move across the Command Balcony. The admiral tapped a young escort on the shoulder. Even now, twenty minutes before the No Lone Zone beneath Omaha would become most lonely indeed, the admiral could not move alone here. The two of them disappeared around the balcony's corner and the general returned his attention to the screens.

The admiral moved quickly now, striding into a tiny hallway and up to the vault door that sealed the post off against gases and biological spores. At one time, long ago, the door offered some blast protection. Not now. Man had moved beyond defense in that area. Two guards, dressed ranger-style in berets and ascots, stood barrierlike at the door. Holsters were unsnapped over pearl-handled pistols.

“Open it up,” the admiral said.

“Sir,” one protested firmly, the awe of military brass ruthlessly drummed out of him.

“Open it.”

“Sir. I am not allowed.”

“You been practicing practices, son,” the admiral said without rancor. “The door will be opened.” Harpoon gestured at the red cipher box behind them. “Zebra One, Charlie Six, Zebra Three, Alpha One-Niner.” The guard fingered his sidearm, as he had been trained, then turned and punched the instructions into the code box. He looked up without expression and asked: “Code word?”

“Jericho.” And the walls came tumbling, Harpoon thought.

“Jericho,” the guard repeated in an emotionless voice. He turned and spun the wheel on the back of the door. The door hissed, then gave way. The admiral and his escort moved quickly through it into an empty hallway. The door hissed behind them, sealed again, for the last time now. The admiral glanced at an elevator door, decided against trusting technology tonight; and headed for the stairway, choosing the short walk to the surface. He took the stairs two at a time, followed by his escort. At the top, he met two more stern guards.

“ID, sir,” the first said.

The admiral unsnapped the sealed plastic card from his shirt pocket, handed it to the young man, and watched as the card passed first under ultraviolet light and then through an electronic authenticator.

“Right hand,” the guard said.

The admiral laid his hand on a plastic square. He thought he felt the probes tickle but knew that was his imagination.

“Code.”

“Jericho.”

“Your card, sir,” the guard said, returning the ID. “The alert truck is at the door.”

The admiral wheeled away, then paused briefly to look back at his escort. “You can't go,” Harpoon said.

“I know, sir.”

“You can't go back, either.”

“I know that, too, sir. Maybe I can find a good gin-rummy game in the cafeteria. Stakes ought to be out of sight tonight.”

The admiral looked deep into the young man's face. There was no fear in it. “Good luck, son,” Harpoon said. He turned away from the young man quickly and began sprinting now. “Shove it up their commie asses, admiral.” The voice trailed off behind him. He ran down the office-hallway entrance to SAC headquarters, past the bust of Curtis LeMay and the glass-encased red phone, and stiff-armed the outside door.

The cold air and the undulating orange alert lights hit him simultaneously. The orange lights played discolike on the neutered mockup of a symbolic Minuteman missile planted for tourists in the snow-covered front yard of the base. The missile seemed to point toward a heaven lost, and momentarily his mind tripped into disarray. The colored lights of a proud nation caromed off a different white symbol reaching toward a different heaven. He shivered, not from the cold but from the flash of the memory, a honeymoon many years ago. It had seemed the right place, the right time; Washington, Fourth of July, after his graduation from Annapolis. He and his bride sat on a Virginia hillside across the Potomac on a muggy night so unlike this one. The world lay at their feet, as did the majesty of a nation he would serve, the rockets' red glare splashing off the Washington Monument, dancing among the flags circling its base. They held each other very close. Life with a submariner, months away beneath the sea, was not going to be easy. Never say good-bye, she said as the sparks of the last rocket faded.

Now she was asleep, alone four miles away in a mock-colonial home too large with their only son grown and gone. He shook his head, ducked it under the open doorway of the blue alert truck, and said, “Bust ass.”

The President stood impatiently in the Situation Room, surrounded by oppressive gray file cabinets filled with background reports on trouble areas and the latest twenty-four-hour summaries of activities in every nation in the world. He was two floors below the Sitting Room, one floor directly below the Oval Office, having come here hurriedly in his bathrobe, but not for the security his staff had urged on him. He came for the telegram. He glanced at the clock: 0606 Zulu.

The telegraph operator, an Army Signal Corpsman wearing a forced look of detachment, handed the message to his bathrobe-clad Commander-in-Chief. The President began reading quickly.

“My dear Mr. President,” the telegram began. “By now you are aware that my government has launched a limited number of nuclear weapons at your country. The missiles are selectively destined for targets which will inflict minimal damage on your nation, its civilian population, and even your military resources. Your wisdom, at this delicate time, can minimize the consequences of this event, which the mistakes of both of our nations have made inevitable. I pray that this may not be another of those mistakes. . . .”

The President let out a low whoosh of air. Mother, he thought bleakly, I'm dealing with a mad general, a rampaging computer, and now a commie religious nut who prays while he nukes me. The paper began to shake in his hand.

“. . . While your warning system undoubtedly has described the attack which is about to arrive, I want absolutely no misunderstanding. We have struck all your bomber bases. There is no way to make a nuclear attack palatable. But these are the least reliable, most vulnerable, and most expendable of your forces. They also cost us billions to defend against, and we no longer can afford the cost. We have launched token attacks against a few Minuteman installations, away from population concentrations, and an attack on your Trident submarine base. These attacks show the obvious: all your targets, like all ours, are vulnerable. Omaha and Cheyenne Mountain will be destroyed. Your command facilities are undefendable, as are ours. I have attempted with great effort to limit civilian casualties. This has not been entirely possible, because your system has allowed civilian populations to thrive around strategic targets. We have never understood that peculiarity of your system. So be it. There is one final element. A single small warhead has been directed at Andrews Air Force Base. My generals promise me it will do little damage beyond the base. The target is symbolic, Andrews being the base from which you normally would leave Washington. We know you have other departure routes, just as you have command facilities that will take over from Omaha. I opposed the inclusion of this target, but in achieving far greater gains for both our nations, I was forced to compromise. Some of my colleagues demanded the inclusion of an intimidation factor. I doubt you will be intimidated. It will do you no personal harm. . . .”