Trinity's Child (18 page)

God damn you, the pilot mouthed silently over the droning engines. Kool-Aid. Jonestown. Suicide. Damn you, Moreau.

Far to the south, inside the
Looking Glass,
the isolation also was getting to Alice. Not the smell of the sweat. Not the tediously weaving figure-eight flight pattern in which the pilot had placed them high over the Midwest. Not even the mind's vision— ruthlessly subdued—of the huge pockmarks he knew had been gouged into the dark prairies below. It was the frustration of being gagged, of being inside a command aircraft that could not command.

More than an hour ago, in the last frantic minutes before Icarus had gone, Alice had sent out a flurry of orders, some of them quite unusual. Hurried messages to Greenland and into the Canadian wastes, desperately setting up links between his few surviving B-52's and the still fewer tanker planes that seemed scattered in all the wrong places. He also had sent a single supersonic FB-111 racing far ahead of the B-52's to test America's new air-launched cruise missiles and, more important, to test the Soviet coastal defenses long before the Buffs would get there. But now Alice had no idea what good the tests would do, what the links would accomplish. Since the sizzles and snaps of the electromagnetic pulse, Alice may have been in command. But he was a commander who was deaf, dumb, and blind.

Forlornly he looked down the narrow aisle of the converted old 707 jet. Panels had been unhinged from switchboards to get inside at burned-out wiring. Teletype machines, supposedly the most secure standby for this moment, sat dismembered. The tops were off almost all the computers jammed into the plane's small work space. His battle staff of twenty had jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweaty foreheads poked inside the innards of wounded computers. Circuit boards littered the floor of an airplane usually scrub-brush clean. He stared into his black phone with its white light that now refused to blink.

Slowly Alice rose from his swivel seat and moved toward Sam. He laid a hand on the colonel's shoulder, feeling the wetness seep through a rumpled blue shirt as the man removed his head from the bowels of an open computer. “Anything?” Alice asked.

“I don't know, general.” The colonel brushed an arm across his forehead. “I thought I had it back a minute ago. Then it just flared and went down again. I’d like to get ahold of the frigging egghead who said we could protect an airplane against EMP.”

Alice forced himself to act the commander. “We knew the pulse would raise hell, Sam.” He squeezed the colonel's shoulder. “We'll get it back.”

“I know, sir. Sorry if I sounded down.”

Down, Alice, thought. Good God. How else should the poor bastard sound? He turned and returned to his seat, glancing at a large paper wall map covered with multicolored targets. They would get it back, Alice thought. But they had so little time. How the devil could he run a war if he couldn't talk to anybody? And where the devil was Harpoon, who was supposed to snatch the man who really had to run this war?

*  *  *

Still farther south, in the
E-4,
Harpoon had more elbow room, but no more of anything else. He moved slowly, his white hair marking him regally, through compartment after compartment of the much larger plane. The men and women of his staff withdrew their heads and hands from similarly gutted computers and communications equipment, casting pained looks at the admiral. He nodded at them confidently, disguising his emotions, and moved on.

Like Alice, he had spoken to no one outside since the sizzles and snaps. Like Alice, he had sent out a flurry of desperate messages before the pulse struck them. Unlike Alice, he now had more to worry about than getting his communications gear working again. He had to get the man. And Harpoon was more confident about the first than he was the second.

In the final frenzied moments before the EMP wave, he had rousted a contingent of Secret Service agents working on a counterfeiting case in Baton Rouge, a city that had not been struck. He had tried to patch a radio call through to the potential successor forty miles outside the Louisiana city and cursed the communications system when he couldn't get through. He then had worked out a rendezvous time, cutting it very close considering the panic the agents had described on the ground. He had checked and rechecked the runway dimensions at the Baton Rouge airport and knew the extraordinarily heavy
E-4
had no business putting down on them. He had issued orders for the dispatching of all available troops to the airport when the Secret Service agents told him the rioting quite naturally centered there. But he had no idea whether those orders got through.

Harpoon emerged from the neutered satellite-tracking compartment into the curved outer hallway of his command plane, returning a snap salute from a one-star Air Force general. Their eyes locked briefly, transmitting an unspoken message of despair, and they began to move past each other wordlessly.

Abruptly Harpoon stopped. “Where are we now, general?” he asked. “Precisely.”

“Just north of Texarkana, sir.”

“The pilot's keeping us away from Shreveport?”

“Christ, yes, admiral. The Russians kicked hell out of Barksdale Air Force Base. The fallout's pretty mean.”

“Yes.” Harpoon suddenly felt very tired. “We'll get to Baton Rouge early.”

“Very.” The general looked at Harpoon anxiously. “We'll have to orbit quite a while. We can't go down and wait.”

Harpoon said nothing.

“We shouldn't go down at all, admiral,” the general volunteered cautiously. “This baby would have trouble handling those runways under ideal circumstances.”

Harpoon's eyes flashed at him. “We're not fighting this war without the Commander-in-Chief, general.”

“He might not even be there.”

Harpoon's eyes drifted.

“Who's he going to command, admiral?” the general asked softly.

Harpoon's eyes returned to his fellow officer and remained on him implacably. “We're going down for the man.”

On the ground, not too far beyond Harpoon's approaching command plane, a young Secret Service agent cradled a submachine gun as he crouched behind the half-open door of an armored troop carrier commandeered after rioters had disabled his group's helicopter. “Spray them,” his superior said. He looked uncertainly at the senior agent. Two of their eight-man contingent were already dead and one other was wounded. They were no more than twenty miles out of Baton Rouge. Ahead of them, on State Route 77, the road was barricaded by perhaps a dozen locals and three battered old cars.

“Spray them, dammit.” The voice was insistent.

The young agent unloaded his Uzi into the three vehicles. A wisp of smoke rose from the middle car. He heard groans. A rifle shot snapped back from the barricade, its bullet pinging off the top of the armored door.

“Okay, everybody open up,” the senior agent ordered.

The country road erupted in a thunder of automatic gunfire. The middle car broke into flames. The others began smoldering in the light rain of the Louisiana night. The thunder fell off into a brief silence and the senior agent bellowed, “Now! Move it!” The armored car gunned toward the barricade, then cut to the side and clipped the fender of one of the smoking cars before rumbling onward into the blackness.

Kool-Aid. In the cockpit of
Polar Bear One,
Kazaklis still was glaring at Moreau, who smiled back innocently, when the outside world clattered in at them for the first time in an hour.

“JIMA 14, JIMA 14.” The voice, laced with the raspy twang of western Canada, scratched its way into the cockpit. “This is Klickitat One. I see ya up there, Yank, but I don't hear ya. Aincha got a few words for a cold and lonely Canuck?”

“Who the hell is Klickitat One?” Kazaklis asked Moreau.

“Beats me. Some rattled bush pilot?”

“No. He's on our emergency frequency. He must be a radar-watcher at some fire base. He knows he shouldn't be calling. Check the book. Fast.”

Moreau shuffled quickly past the reams of Siberian flight charts on her right and retrieved a two-inch-thick book. It was well-worn and marked in faded black letters: “Procedures—Top Secret.” She thumbed immediately to the right page. “Ask him 'How's fishing?' she said.

Klickitat One replied immediately. “Through the ice. Grayling and northern pike.”

Kazaklis looked at Moreau and she nodded. “Reply: 'Walleyes not biting, partner?'“ she said. Kazaklis gave the acknowledgment.

“Oh, Yank, I'm glad it's you,” the voice responded. “After two hours of this, and everybody gettin' drunker'n a skunk over at Ruby's in Yellowknife, I thought I was seein' thangs. You're a Buff? Just one of ya's?”

“This is
Polar Bear One,”
Kazaklis replied, ignoring the rest.

“Out of?”

“Come on, Klickitat. What's goin' on?” Kazaklis asked angrily. “We're on an open channel.”

“Strange doin's,
Polar Bear.
Sorry. But I need to know. Snow Bird or Cow Pasture?”

Kazaklis paused unhappily. The Canadian radar-watcher, sitting in some lonely outpost on the shores of Great Slave Lake, had just given him the code names for Minot and Fairchild. Shit, he thought. Forty years to plan this, and we're playing British commando games.

“Cow Pasture,” Kazaklis spat into the radio.

“You're it,” the voice crackled up out of the frozen tundra below.

“That's nice, real nice,” Kazaklis said. “Wanta say bye-bye now?”

“Got a message for you,
Polar Bear. Elsie's
had a change in plans. She's been waiting for you at the corner of Ninth and Easy streets. Got that? Easy Nin-er.” “Easy Nin-er,” Kazaklis repeated.

Moreau thumbed rapidly through the book again, tracing E down to nine, and nodded at Kazaklis. “Smack dab on the Arctic Circle, commander,” she said. “At 124 degrees west.”

“Funny way to make a date,” Kazaklis continued with Klickitat.

“Elsie's
choosy, Yank. She's the only girl in town.”

“What made you the matchmaker, Klickitat?”

“Dunno for sure. Maybe you're the only lad.”

“And
Elsie's
too shy to call me herself?”

“Her phone's not workin' too well,
Polar Bear.”

“Why didn't her old man call?”

“Dunno. Lotta phone trouble tonight.”

Kazaklis drummed his fingers on the two upraised white throttles numbered four and five, finally hammering at them so hard the inboard engines gunned in acceleration. Moreau grabbed at the knobs and quickly pulled them back into pitch.

“Goddammit it!” Kazaklis roared at Klickitat. “I don't think I believe you! This is so damned far down the contingency list it's barely in the book.”

“Don't God-damn me, Yank,” Klickitat replied evenly. “This is your fuss. Your people planned it, not mine. Your people built all the toys, not mine. We just happen to be your friends, passin' on a message. Take it or leave it, bucko. Then I'm gonna sit back and wait for the ash to start fallin'.”

Kazaklis took a deep breath. Then he spoke more calmly, breaking out of the lingo. “Klickitat,” the pilot said, “the book says you're real. But you know the game. I gotta take my orders from command authorities.”

“Great theory, Yank. But their phone seems to be off the hook.”

“I just don't believe the Russians took out everything, including the
Looking Glass.
It just isn't possible.”

“Well, I'll tell ya, Yank, on one of those middlin' days, when you look up at the sky and can't quite figure out which way the weather's goin', you got two choices. You can look up and say it's partly cloudy. Or you can look up and say it's partly sunny.”

The conversation paused briefly.

“Now, I can look back south, Yank, and try to figure that out,” Klickitat continued. “I can say there ain't nothin' left a-tall. Or I can say the Russians beat things up a bit but made damn sure they took out your communications. You don't need to look up EMP in your book, do ya?” 

“Nobody knew what it would do.”

“They had a pretty good idea, Yank. One big boom, maybe two, a hundred miles above the prairies would send out enough voltage to burn out damn near every vacuum tube and transistor in America.”

“The command plane was hardened against EMP,” Kazaklis said.

“Nobody knew what it would do,” Klickitat mimicked Kazaklis. “But take your own choice. I do know it ain't all gone. My short-wave's still pickin' up radio stations. Odd places. Iowa. Oregon. West Virginia.”

“Well, what are they saying, for Christ's sake?”

“Oh, not sayin', Yank. Just playin'. Ballads. Blues. Lot of John Lennon. Got myself one of your Moral Majority preachers. Blamin' it all on abortions. Kill and ye shall be killed. Appreciated that, I did. Surprised you ain't listenin'. Disciplined bunch, you guardians of democracy.”

Kazaklis loosened up. “We switched off on a commercial for Oxy-5.”

“Excedrin Headache number seventy-nine didn't do much for me, either.”

“Okay, Klickitat, I guess I got a date on Easy Street.”