Trinity's Child (13 page)

“Geronimo,” Icarus radioed upward.

Alice looked at his watch. 0630 Zulu.

“Your computers show the projected impact areas in the United States?” Icarus asked.

Alice ran his eyes across the computer data. He frowned, pausing again, even more briefly this time, as his eyes landed on the puzzling sequence of missile launches—first the limited Soviet attack, then our limited response, then the craziness around the world, then . . . why the devil had we let half our ICBMs go in response to a small Soviet retaliatory attack on the Chinese? A fuck-up? Murphy's Law—If something can go wrong, it will? Something he didn't know? He shook his head slightly and looked at Sam.

“Alice!” Icarus barked into the phone.

Sam's face was impassive.

“Affirmative,” Alice replied.

“Print 'em out. You aren't gonna have your computers long.”

“It's been done, sir.”

“Old buddy?” Icarus said hurriedly to Alice. “You see General Moreau again, you tell him any apology that ends with 'fuck you' ain't an apology.”

Alice felt his baritone voice catch, but he covered it and hurried. “He won't hold you to it, sir.”

“Happy hunt—”

Alice heard no hzzzzzzzz. Just a snap, like a twig breaking. And silence. He cradled the phone. Good-bye, old friend, he said silently. Then he heard the noises. Low popping sounds. Subtle electric crackles. Grunts from his surprised crew. He looked down the aisle of the
Looking Glass
plane and saw his computers flaring and dying, the men and women of his battle staff shouting futilely into radios that didn't work.

To the south, in the more sophisticated
E-4,
Harpoon also heard the twig snap and saw the lights blink out on all his multicolored phone consoles. He felt the same tickling sensation he had felt on the palm-print authenticator. But again he knew it was his imagination. The plane did not even ripple in flight. He had felt nothing. So this is EMP. They knew a lot about nuclear effects, but very little about electromagnetic pulse. All they knew was that, unlike most nuclear effects, the massive power surge from EMP passed harmlessly through humans. It ate communications gear instead, moving thousands of miles in microseconds. He had a helluva mess to clean up inside America's premier communications plane.

Sedgwick reached under the President's arms and hoisted him to his feet. Then he pushed him forcefully toward the Situation Room exit, following a detachment of Secret Servicemen over the flattened door and up the stairs. On the first floor they moved quickly, maneuvering around broken plaster and shards of glass, an occasional overturned chair, a fallen chandelier. At the Oval Office the President fought to a stop. The door was blown open, the great windows shattered behind his desk. The office was dark, illuminated only by twenty-two pinpoints of light from the phone console hanging powered, but powerless, over the side of his desk. Sedgwick pushed him on, past the Cabinet Room and finally through the broken French doors leading out to the Rose Garden. The din staggered him.

A jungle roar, thousands of voices, guttural, primal, ugly, enveloped the White House. He could hear the angry scourge of metal on metal, cars scraping, colliding, ramming on Pennsylvania Avenue. Horns blared everywhere. Gunfire popped far off and then, in bursts, nearby. Through the awful sound the President heard the familiar whumping of Nighthawk, another in his fleet of Sikorsky helicopters. He strained to see its reassuring outline. A few lights shone brightly, eerily, in the city. But all were doused on the White House lawn. The Secret Servicemen crouched around him, Sedgwick forcing him to hunch down too, and then the group started into the void.

Gunfire suddenly cracked several yards away from them. Tracer bullets raced across the grounds, briefly freeze-framing in Roman-candle red the figures of men clambering over the East Gate fence. The skeleton of his first helicopter was frozen there, too, gutted and wrapped around a winter-stark oak tree. Then the tracers, green, yellow, red, swept back toward them. Sedgwick hit him first, smothering him, and he felt another body, and another, pound him into the frozen ground. The air whooshed out of him. He heard grunts and a high-pitched ping! ping! like violin strings snapping. “Shit!” someone shouted. He elbowed at Sedgwick viciously, struggling for air.

“Take it easy, sir,” Sedgwick said. “Just stay down.”

“Who are those people?” the President demanded, gasping for breath.

“People, people, sir.” Sedgwick shrugged. “Who knows? Scared people, angry people, spooked people.”

“But they've got automatic weapons. Tracer bullets, for Christ's sake!”

“Mr. President, the city of Washington is better armed than most armies. You know that. You can buy a bazooka in a pawn shop across the river in Arlington.”

“The American way,” the President said tonelessly. Then his voice firmed up. “It's the American way, by God. Help them defend themselves in this moment of peril.”

Sedgwick remained silent.

“Why are they shooting at me?” the President asked, his voice ebbing.

“You've got the last train out of town, Mr. President. They just put a couple of holes in it, though.”

The agents crouched low in a circle around them. One talked urgently into his radio. “I know that, goddammit,” the agent growled. “Do you want him dead or alive? No, he does not have his vest on! He's got his bathrobe on. Yes, I understand.” The agent edged up to the President. “We don't have time to wait this out,” he said. “Can you see the chopper, Mr. President?”

The President turned his head toward the whump-whump-whump, picking out the shadow perhaps fifty yards away. Above the helicopter, the tiny red eyes of the Washington Monument winked at him, mocking him. “Yes,” he said to the agent.

“The marines are gonna open up in a few seconds. We're gonna run. Head down. Full speed. No stopping. Run. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Let's go, Mr. President.” It was Sedgwick. “Now!”

Guilt seized the President. His wife. In the past thirty minutes he had not asked about his wife. His nerves were bursting. He wanted to sleep. The world exploded again. He ran. At the bottom of the helicopter ramp, he stumbled. Two agents caught him and shoved him roughly, like cops with a drunk, up the stairs. Sedgwick held his arm. At the top a hand reached out and pulled them inside and the chopper immediately swept upward.

The two remaining agents pushed him into a rear seat and left him. Then Sedgwick careened into a seat across the aisle. The helicopter banked sharply over the trees, and out the window the President saw the omnipresent monument flash by as they headed for the familiar course down the river to Andrews. At the Fourteenth Street Bridge he gazed numbly down over a tangle of cars, hopelessly snarled in the desperation to head south. Across the river, fires burned on the runways at National Airport, smashed planes scattered across the broad tarmac.

“Lear jets,” a voice said. “Every lobbyist in town tried to get out at the same time.”

The President looked up slowly. An Air Force colonel leaned over him. The President remembered the last word Icarus had said to him.

“Geronimo,” he replied to the colonel.

“I suppose so, sir,” the colonel said uncertainly. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is attempting to meet you at Andrews. He instructed me to inform you that our attack was carried out. Omaha went three minutes ago, Cheyenne thirty seconds later. Command has been assumed by the
Looking Glass
plane.”

“Alice,” the President said. But he was not thinking of the general. He was thinking of impossible dreams.

“Sir.” The colonel looked at him strangely. “It will be transferred to you, of course, if we reach the national command plane at Andrews.”

The President's eyes stared, unfocused, at the colonel.

“The Soviets launched again, sir. Shortly after our response to their attack on the Chinese . . .”

A numbing electric spasm rippled through the President.
Their attack on the Chinese?
The colonel handed him a large tumbler of Scotch and continued.

“. . . Soviet ICBMs and a second shot from their submarines off the East Coast. We have to assume Andrews is targeted by the submarines. You can rest assured we retaliated, as you ordered.”

The President downed the Scotch, closed his eyes, and appeared to go to sleep.

Kazaklis  held the plane on its southerly course till it was well beyond the cloud, then began a slow, banking turn west again. The altimeter read twenty-seven thousand feet and climbing. Soon he would bank the plane again, north this time, toward the Positive Control Point far ahead above the Arctic coast of Canada at which they would get the final orders to go in. Kazaklis  felt good, very good. He had done his job well. By now he had placed the rest of the squadron far out of his mind. They would have separated soon anyway, this being a loner's job, no security to be gained from the cluster target of a squadron. The Buff would go in low and alone, the loneliness being its security. Kazaklis  guessed the target would be the primary, although they had practiced for six different Siberian cities. In his mind's eye he could see the course as if he had flown it a hundred times, which, indeed, he had—in simulation. He could see the Buff's white belly melding with the ice floes of the Arctic, ducking around the danger of the SAM base on the frozen coast near Tiksi, racing south over the snow-covered tundra, crisscrossing the Lena River, hiding at three hundred feet in the Verkhoyansk Mountains, breaking out low over the larch forests that hinted at the beginnings of civilization. . . .

“It's red-neckin'
twang! twang!
luv-makin'
twang! twang!
time . . .” The voice pounded into the pilot's helmet, a scratchy electric guitar clawing at his eardrums.

“What the hell is that?!”

“Listen to the whippoorwills
twang!
how they sing
twang! twang!
Just like us, doin' their thing!
twang!”

“Psywar!” Kazaklis thundered. “Fucking Russians are trying to psyche us!”

“Conway Twitty,” Moreau replied calmly. “Tyler's trying to convince us.”

Kazaklis clasped his helmet in both hands, as if he were trying to smother the earphones. “Ty!” he bellowed. “Ler!”
twang! twang!
“Ty-fucking-ler!”

“Tyler's picked up a radio station,” Radnor said from below.

“Get that fucker off!”

“I knew you guys were wrong,” Tyler said serenely as Twitty's twang wound down. “They're alive down there. It's a drill. All this is simulated. Just like everything else.”

“Oxy!”
a new voice shrieked across the void.

“Jesus.”

“I can tell you where the acne-causing bacteria are!”

“Jesus.”

“All over your face—lurking, festering, pimpling all over your face!”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Where is your next pimple to be or where is it not to be? That is the question! Wash with new Oxy Wash!”

“Ty . . . ler. Damn you!”

“It's a drill.”

“Hel . . . lo again. This is Crazy Eddie, stickin' by the phone so you're never alone. On big-boom night. Hang right in there, kids, at the dial with style—Kay . . . Oh . . . You . . . Double-You!—in humpin', jumpin' Coquille, Oregon!”

“God damn you, Tyler, get that off.”

“They're playing music down there.”

“Oregon, you diddle-brain! It's some stoned disc jockey in Oregon!”

“It's a drill,” Tyler said confidently. “Pretty fancy one, isn't it?”

Kazaklis paused for a moment. His thoughts riveted on Oregon. Then he exploded.

“They're dead, damn you, Tyler! Your wife, your kid, everybody we left behind. Dead, dead, dead. Got that? Dead! You're alive and you got a job to do. Do it. And turn off that fucking radio!”

The radio went silent, as did the rest of the plane.

“What an asshole,” Moreau said after a moment.

“Conway Twitty or Crazy Eddie?” Kazaklis  asked.

The first lurch of the helicopter caught the President by surprise, snapping him out of his grogginess and throwing him half out of his seat toward the aisle. Sedgwick caught him. “Fasten your belt, sir,” the young naval aide said. “It's going to get rough.”

The President looked at him uncertainly. In the disarray of the last few moments his mind had taken refuge in the safety of just another routine
Nighthawk
flight to
Air Force One.
Ahead were more speeches, more parade caravans, with “Hail to the Chief” greeting him at every public pause.

“We're not going to make it to Andrews, sir,” Sedgwick said. His voice had a slight note of alarm, but the President failed to perceive it. “Just strap yourself in.” The President felt the young aide shove his shoulders back into the seat and pull the belts around him. “We're diverting, sir, making a run for it.”

“Run?”

“It's safest, sir.”

“President doesn't run.”

Sedgwick looked into the President's uncomprehending face. He sighed but tried to hide the emotion by turning away. He fastened his own belts and gazed out the porthole window. Below him the blackness was nearly total as the powerful helicopter cut desperately back across the slum warrens of Southeast Washington. A few lights shone in the void—careening auto headlights, a small fire, the electrical dance of a loose power line. The blast effects had not reached this far. The psychological effects had. As had the power outages. The chopper raced across the District line into the middle-class suburbs of Maryland, but nothing changed below. This was going to be very close. Sedgwick's skin crawled.