Trinity's Child (9 page)

“Voice confirmation,” Kazaklis said into the direct channel to the tower. “Sequence one, go. Sequence two, go. Code: Trinity. Confirm.”

“Confirm Trinity,” a solemn voice, touched with a Bronx accent, replied. “Confirm go.”

Inside the Buff, the radio went deathly silent. Then Kazaklis placed his hands on the throttles and began the crew check.

“Copilot ready?”

“Ready,” Moreau replied.

“Nav ready?”

“Ready,” Tyler responded.

The voice from the control tower cut in, its tone hysterically different. “Go! For God's sake, man, go! Get your bloody ass out of here. Go! Go! Go! This one is no shit!”

The voice almost wept. Kazaklis stopped the crew check and hit the throttles. He was calm, feeling the dance of danger he loved.

“Melech hamafis,”
the tower voice whispered.

The words sailed past Kazaklis. He was rolling now, the engines growing deafening in their roar.

“Any questions?” he radioed to his crewmates, the tone commanding and nonchalant.

“Any jokes?” he asked.

B O P H U . . .

The President opened his eyes slowly.

THAT...

He strained to focus, lost everything in a blur, then focused again.

S W A N A

The lettering, in large black capitals, formed fuzzily in front of him in a slightly skewed, dream-world eye chart reading vertically. His legs felt leaden. His head seemed propped high on a soft pillow. He tried to move and felt the pillow ripple like Jell-O. He turned and immediately became violently sick. His head rested on his appointment secretary's belly. A huge gray file cabinet, still locked tight with its contents marked “
top secret
” in stark red, lay across his old friend's face and chest. Red also seeped out from beneath the cabinet, rivulets edging across the pillow toward the President's head. He tried to wrench away, but Bophuthatswana, and years of American intelligence on the tiny all-black African nation, pinned his legs to the floor in a similar gray cabinet. Sedgwick, the duty officer, was pulling at the file cabinet to free him.

“Hang tough, Mr. President,” the duty officer said. “Have you out in a minute.”

As Sedgwick heaved at the file cabinet, the President scanned the Situation Room. His last formal briefing here had been confident and absolutely secure, with elaborately locked doors sealing off the rest of the world. Now the chairs were scattered about, the conference table cracked, files scattered, the main door sprung closed, jammed on its hinges. Pieces of acoustical ceiling wobbled loosely above him, as if caught in a breeze. The Zulu clock was frozen on 0608—eight minutes past one in the morning. Still, the room was far from destroyed. In one corner the Emergency War Orders officer stood unruffled, his suit hardly mussed, his black briefcase intact. He wore his usual blank expression. Others were moving about the room methodically.

“So where'd we get it?” the President asked.

“Not exactly sure,” Sedgwick replied, finally rolling the cabinet off his legs. “Somewhere northwest of here. Definitely not southeast at Andrews. Not close. Not far. Coupla miles.”

“Why are we alive?”

He immediately regretted the question, for he knew his old friend, who seemed to be the only casualty, was not. A wave of dizziness hit him. But his mind was clearer now. He struggled painfully to pull away from the body.

“Take it easy, Mr. President. The explosion was relatively small. I think they were telling the truth about a ground burst, which, as you know, digs a big hole but concentrates the damage. Not like Hiroshima. They were trying to be surgical. That's for sure.”

“So we've got a big hole a couple of miles from the White House. What else?”

“Well, unless it landed in the park, it had to strike a residential area, upper Northwest Washington probably. Out near the cathedral, I'd guess. Maybe as far as Chevy Chase, but I doubt it.”

“And killed a lot of people.”

“At this time of night, probably fifty thousand, maybe more. Hard to say. The big apartment buildings absorb the shock wave fairly quickly. That's why we're okay.”

The President did a quick mental tally. The area was old, established Washington. He had lived there as a young congressman. He guessed a fourth of the Congress lived in the area. So did several members of his Cabinet. And a helluva lot of the national press corps, he thought ruefully. They loved the old oak-lined streets, the quick access down Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues to the power centers of the capital.

“What's upstairs?”

“We haven't been up. Part of the old place must be standing. But the concussion would have made quite a mess.”

“Was I out long?”

“No, just seconds, really. Can you move your legs? They don't seem to be broken.”

The President struggled to his feet. He felt as if he had been trampled by a horse. He tried not to show it. He also tried not to show the fear.

“What's next?”

“Communications are out. Briefly. The long lines are down, naturally, but the patch will be through quickly. We'll have Omaha back up any second. We could go downstairs to the shelter. I don't see much point, frankly. We really should get you out of here.”

Sedgwick paused. Then he added: “You have an interrupted message from the Soviet Premier. It was arriving as communications went down.”

The President sighed. “Give it to me.”

The telegram was brief.

“Andrews missile malfuntioning. Deep regrets. Target military. Repeat: Target Andrews. All at stake in your belief in my intentions. Our combined will crucial. Other unexpected complications causing . . .”

The message broke off there. The President rubbed his temples, his head swimming again. A minute ago he had seen nothing to lose in waiting. Deep regrets. Good God.

“Omaha's back,” Sedgwick interrupted, handing him a phone.

“Hello, general,” the President said numbly. “The Preme sends his regrets.” He instantly wished he had begun the conversation differently.

“I'll bet,” Icarus responded caustically. “His little con didn't work. He overshot Andrews by thirteen miles. The blast wave rolled right up Rock Creek Park and took out Walter Reed. My father was there.”

“Sorry,” the President said, truly feeling it.

“It's irrelevant. He was sick. He was a soldier. A father should die before his son. The hospital wasn't the target. Andrews wasn't the target. You were the target. Our little wonder weapons aren't as surgical as we like to think. You can't do brain surgery with a nuke. Especially a Navy nuke. You are very lucky, Mr. President. You get what I won't—a second chance.”

“A second chance?”

“SIOP is now developing a more appropriate response. There have been some unusual developments. The Premier has got a lot of problems. You get a second chance to save the world from those bastards, Mr. President.”

The President glanced around the Situation Room, his memory playing tricks, conjuring up a rhododendron garden he had planted as a young congressman at a happy first Washington home along a quiet street shaded by pin oaks.

“Save the world,” the President repeated. “I think we have a different vision of that, general.”

Kazaklis felt the Buffs power gush through him, its swept-back wings becoming his wings, its immensity his immensity, its surging fuel his rushing blood. The altimeter, racing up the thermometer stem at the edge of the radar screen, seemed to monitor his adrenaline, too. He heard his voice say flaps up, wheels up. He saw the adrenaline climb to five hundred feet, one thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, and soar further. He became the Buff. There was nothing else.

For Moreau, PRP ruled as it should. She flew mechanically, robotlike, following the flawless lead of Kazaklis in equally flawless precision. Flaps up, wheels up.

Behind her, the now calm voice of the Fairchild air controller cleared the second B-52, then the third and the fourth. The quietly nasal echo of his farewell probed for an escape from her subconscious. But thoughts did not escape. Moreau's mind was on autopilot. She searched the dark night sky for other aircraft, as she always did on drills. She fine-tuned the moves Kazaklis made, as she always did on drills. Somewhere, the knowledge rested that the air controller's strange farewell was for her. But it was bracketed, closed off, shut away along with the hidden memory of her friendship with the young kid from the Bronx, the speeding drives through the desert that had terrified him so, the black jeep careening through canyon-road turns, barreling across dunes. The drives had stopped, although the big-sister/little-brother friendship had not, after a magnificent autumn day, an Indian-summer sun bleaching the desert with the dancing heat rivulets of one last mirage before winter. Moreau unleashed all the power of the jeep in a rapturous race through the open sagebrush. She dug into deep sand unexpectedly, spun wildly, flipped, banged the roll bar violently into the desert ground, and landed wheels down. She came up squealing in delight, grinning from ear to ear. The kid's face went bloodless. “Melech hamafis,” he said quietly. It was some time before she learned the meaning of the Yiddish phrase, and it did not penetrate now. This is a test. Z-n-n-n-n-n. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Z-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.

The whine cut into the PRP-induced veneer around Moreau. It was an alarm whine, routine enough, too, but beckoning her to take control of the climbing bomber from a pilot preoccupied with other tasks. Still, it startled her and her body jerked almost imperceptibly.

She turned and saw Kazaklis reaching for the lead-lined flash curtain. He tugged at the dirty-gray screen, drawing it across his side of the cockpit window. Moreau made no move to pull her curtain, completing their isolation from the night sky and the last of the outside world. This was a drill. It was against regulations to fly with the nuclear blinds drawn on a drill. She had never pulled the curtain. The whine stopped.

“I've got it now, copilot,” Kazaklis said. “Pull your curtain.”

Moreau looked at him strangely.

“Draw your curtain, copilot.”

Moreau exploded. Her words, vibrating in her own helmet, seemed to echo back at her. “Are you nuts, Kazaklis ? We've got commercial jets out there, ranchers landing their goddamn Cessnas and Comanches at Spokane International. This brute is a bug-squisher. I'm not pulling the screen in a drill. No way!”

The dull throb of the headache, which Kazaklis had been subduing all day, crept into the pilot's forehead. He wasn't sure if it was Jack Daniel's or Captain Moreau, and he didn't care. “Draw . . . that . . . screen.”

Moreau tightened.

“Take the plane, copilot,” Kazaklis said, his voice abruptly calm.

He lunged out of his seat and reached across the cockpit toward the second curtain. In the closeness, Kazaklis fumbled across Moreau, his gloved hand accidentally catching her in the left eye before grasping the curtain. He felt the plane nose downward as the copilot dropped the controls, pulling her hand over the eye. Kazaklis wrenched at the curtain, succeeding in closing all but a final narrow gap. He struggled back to his seat and pulled the plane upward again.

Moreau was mute, furious at both herself and Kazaklis . Her left hand remained riveted over the eye Kazaklis had struck accidentally. Her right stretched forward to close the gap in the curtain, her one eye fixed on the full winter-white moon she moved to eclipse.

The white moon burst. It burst into a sun, then into ten thousand suns, and the rays washed out the cockpit red. Moreau's eye remained transfixed on the aura of the curtain crack. She was a child again, her father showing her the beauty of the sun's evening rays—Jesus rays, he called them—filtering through pregnant clouds. Then the rays were brighter than Jesus rays, brighter than any sun rays filtered or unfiltered by any cloud. And she saw nothing but white, even after her hand closed the curtain.

“What the hell was that?” Radnor's startled voice came from below.

“Melech hamafis,”
Moreau answered placidly.

“Mama,” O'Toole said.
“Angelus mortuorum,”
he added.

“Knock it off! Everybody!” Kazaklis ordered.

“The kid was trying to tell me,” Moreau murmured.

“Moreau . . .” Kazaklis was almost pleading with her now.

“In Yiddish.”

“Moreau. Stop babbling. I need you now.” His voice had no anger in it, just desperation. Kazaklis turned toward his copilot. She turned toward him.

In the haunted red light of their new cocoon, one of Moreau's eyes peered at Kazaklis in the blazing challenge of its usual unearthly blue. The other stared in dead white. Neither asked for help.

“The kid told me,
Melech hamafis.
The king of death is in the room. He was warning me, saying good-bye.”

“Moreau . . .” The pilot's words trailed off. He knew Moreau had felt little if any pain, that the light had quickly burned away the optic nerve. But he didn't know about the rest of her head, and he did know what was coming next.

“PRP's back, Kazaklis,” she assured him, the monotone almost as vacant as her eye. “Let's get on with it.”