Trinity's Child (32 page)
“Go on where, admiral?” the general asked wearily. “We simply don't know.”
“We know enough, general. We're in the middle of it. We've got the man sitting here. He may not be able to stop it if he wants to. But he has a right to know. A need.”
“Sir, you haven't even told him how the SIOP plan works yet.”
“I will, general. I'd like to get to it before it's too late.”
“I'm sorry, admiral. It's just that the range of unknowns is so great.”
“I know, general. I'm sorry, too. Give him the most optimistic reading.”
“Optimistic.” The general's voice trailed off. Then he came to stiff attention. He began speaking in clipped tones. “End of the northern hemisphere as we know it. United States would go first, Europe almost simultaneously, Soviet Union shortly thereafter. Whether the hemisphere would remain habitable is conjecture. Radiation, natural epidemics, starvation, postwar hostilities would reduce the number of survivors by a factor of five, ten, twenty within months or a few years. Optimistic . . . Small bands of roaming survivors. Tribes with no political connection to one another. After a few decades, life might become similar to life in the Middle Ages. Fiefdoms. Tribal rivalries. Survivors would have severe problems with solar as well as man-induced radiation. The atmosphere's ozone layer, which protects life from natural solar radiation, will be seriously damaged, perhaps destroyed. At least temporarily. It might rebuild itself in twenty, thirty years. Much would depend on activity in the southern hemisphere.”
The general stopped. “Pessimistic,” the admiral demanded.
“Pessimistic,” the general repeated. “Nobody knows. The explosions and the radiation won't kill everybody. A new ice age is possible from the atmospheric dust shielding the sun. Just the opposite is also possible. If the ozone layer is depleted too greatly, man won't be able to handle it even in the southern hemisphere. Then, in theory, the species will die out. Like the dinosaurs. In that sense, it could be
On the Beach.
But from solar radiation. It took two billion years to build the ozone layer and allow life on this planet. We can totally destroy it in the next few hours. . . .”
The general stopped and stared vacantly for a moment. Then he sat down slowly. The only sound was the slight whir of the
E-4's
engines, barely perceptible through the insulation of the briefing room.
After a moment, the successor rose suddenly from his seat, his face not quite ashen but distinctly pallid. “I need a moment by myself,” he said.
Harpoon stared at the man with both impatience and bleak understanding. “We have very little time, sir,” he protested halfheartedly.
“I need a moment by myself,” the man repeated unequivocally.
Without further ado, the successor moved quickly out of the compartment. Not even the Secret Service agent followed. Harpoon shifted from foot to foot, briefly bewildered and uneasy. Little time? They had no time. He looked at his watch—1042 Zulu. But as he looked up to see the successor's back disappear out the doorway, the admiral felt a new wave of pity for this overmatched man. He also held a glimmer of hope that the briefing had penetrated. If so, a moment's delay might be worth it.
Outside the briefing room, the successor moved hurriedly down unfamiliar hallways till he found the staircase. He climbed it and reentered the presidential quarters. Inside his own compartment, he knelt quickly. He needed a briefing from a higher source than Harpoon. He prayed deeply and with a low burble that echoed eerily in the lonely room. The prayer lasted only a moment, and then, with a solemn amen, he rose confidently, the pallor gone from his face.
1100 ZULU
Kazaklis brought the B-52 back toward the North American coastline at one thousand feet, temporarily trading deception for speed. He was in a sprint now, with the unseen Foxbats looping high and around toward him, the old bomber screaming low and vulnerable over the last jagged crags of the ice-locked Beaufort Sea. The B-52 gulped gas ferociously,
Elsie's
precious gift taking them in the wrong direction, the only direction. The pilot's own fuel, adrenaline, pulsed rapidly through his body, deftly tucking questions and fear in some side pocket of his mind. He subconsciously reached for his groin, arranging his vitals for the crunch, and barely caught the urge to remind his copilot to do the same. Instead, he went to the all-channels intercom.
“Hokay, you guardians of democracy,” Kazaklis said, “secure the family jewels. We're goin' in for the ball-buster.”
The bravado sounded tinny over the tortured scream of the engines, eight jets pushed to their limit. The speed gauge read Mach point-nine-five, just over six hundred miles an hour, just under the speed of sound. The altimeter held briefly, then began to drop again precipitously. At the pilot's right, Moreau helped Kazaklis control the creaking, bumping bomber, forgetting the navigational charts balanced on one knee. In front of them their red screens danced crazily, the night cameras in the Buffs nose picking up the last ice tangles of the sea and converting them into a maze of computer images. Just ahead lay the western mouth of the Mackenzie, where a winter that began in September had petrified the competing forces of the river and the sea, forcing them up into a rock-hard barrier that loomed on the screen.
“Hard left!” Kazaklis barked. The ancient plane moaned as it banked, then leveled out again. “Landfall?”
“River delta,” Moreau replied. “Ice jams in the mouth. Broad outlets beyond. Flat tundra. No landmarks.” It was not an ideal place to do what Kazaklis needed to do.
The altimeter read three hundred feet and wobbled downward.
“Coming up on twenty seconds,” Moreau continued. “Ready . . . now.”
Kazaklis braced himself. The altimeter spun down from two hundred feet, bouncing as badly as the plane. The screen showed the ice barrier moving right.
“Five seconds. Hang on.”
The B-52 struck the roiling coastal winds like a flat rock on water, bellying up, then sagging down precariously, old rivets and younger bones jolted and complaining under the strain. “Jesus!” Moreau blurted involuntarily. “Fifty feet!” Kazaklis said. “Get it up!” The charts bounced unnoticed off Moreau's knee as she helped the pilot tug frantically at the flailing bomber. At fifty feet, she knew well, they were in severe peril. The long, sleek wings flapped like a seagull's, drooping so much on a routine takeoff the designers had given them wingtip wheels. This was not routine, the ice jam still menacing on their right, the Foxbats menacing somewhere unseen. Moreau agonizingly helped Kazaklis nudge the balky plane back up to one hundred feet. He held it there.
“Cut it a little close,” Moreau said brittleley. Then she removed the edge from her voice. “Nicely done, Captain Shazam.”
“Umm,” Kazaklis responded, preoccupied. “What's ahead?”
Moreau reached for the charts. The plane bumped violently again.
“Hands on wheel!” Kazaklis said urgently. “Forget the charts. That's why we got the boys in the loony bin.” He glanced quickly to make certain he had switched to private.
“Flat as a pancake. Dozen arms of the Mackenzie.”
They both knew Arctic rivers were so wide and shallow that radar couldn't pick up their banks.
“Great place to hide,” Kazaklis said sardonically.
“Be lucky to hide a snowball down there.”
“Wanta park it on the river and toss snowballs at 'em?”
Moreau said nothing.
“What about the mountains?”
“Richardsons. We got better charts of the Verkhoyansk.”
“Figures.”
“Maybe twenty miles to the foothills. Low, treeless. Not much better.”
“Book say Foxbats got look-down radar?”
“Says maybe. They were working on it.”
“Shit. Anybody tell the spooks at Langley about eternal vigilance?”
“Foxbats were designed to go after other fighters, not look down on us.”
“That's our edge.”
“Not much.”
Kazaklis eased the speed back to Mach point-eight-five. The Buff was rattling like his pa's old Ford truck. Last flight of the
Polar Bear,
he thought. Still, he didn't want the rivets popping just yet. He switched to all channels.
“Anybody talkin' soprano down in the basement?”
Downstairs, in the navigation compartment, Radnor was on private. He was sweating and bleeding, and he held hard eyes on Tyler. “Don't fuck this one up, Tyler,” he said menacingly. “I want these bastards. For Laura. You got that, buddy boy? For Laura.”
Tyler stared back at his crewmate. The navigator's face twisted grotesquely, but it wore a look of vague understanding. “Yeah, I got it, Radnor. For Laura.” Tyler had tears in his eyes. He brushed them away with a fireproof glove and switched radio channels. His voice squeaked in a forced falsetto, a forced joke. “Radnor says I ain't gonna need my jewels anymore, commander.” Radnor swore at him silently, then felt the tears welling in his eyes, too.
“You okay down there, navigator?” The pilot's voice was very concerned.
“He's okay,” Radnor said flatly. The radio fell silent for a moment. Radnor's eyes continued to lock on Tyler. Both men were crying.
“Well, give me a reading, fellas,” Kazaklis said blandly. “Come on.”
Tyler turned toward his screen, its rotating arm stretching out one hundred miles, far beyond the nose cameras available to the pilots. “High terrain sixteen miles,” he said professionally. “Dead ahead. Five hundred feet elevation, rising to fifteen hundred. Knobs rising eighty, a hundred feet along the way. Watch 'em.”
In the cockpit Kazaklis shook his head at Moreau. Tyler's emotions were bobbing up and down like a weekend sailboat in a storm.
“Bandits?” the pilot asked.
“Not yet,” Tyler said firmly now. “Screen's clear as a bell.”
Kazaklis relaxed briefly, even as the wheel tugged harshly at his forearms. Clear as a bell. Suddenly he drew bolt upright. “Gunner!” he yelled. “You got the jammer on?”
In the rear of the compartment the commander's alarmed voice jolted Halupalai out of a morose daydream. He stared, panicky, at the confusion of unfamiliar switches in front of him. Briefly, he couldn't find the right one. Then he flicked it, sending out the powerful beams that helped hide them. He turned to see Kazaklis craning his head toward him. Halupalai looked away quickly. Shit, Kazaklis thought. The whole damn place is a funny farm.
“Bandits,” Tyler broke in. “Southeast. Eighty miles. Just over Mach one.”
“Shit,” Kazaklis said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The successor strode into the briefing room with a new certainty, and Harpoon, who had presided over the deathly silent group during the several minutes of the man's absence, felt a sudden shiver of concern.
“Are you a believer, admiral?” the successor asked abruptly.
“A believer?” Harpoon repeated, mystified.
“In the Lord.”
Harpoon blinked at him.
“Admiral?”
“There are no atheists in foxholes, sir,” Harpoon said limply. “We are in one very large foxhole.”
“Good.” The successor beamed. “I hope you took advantage of this lull to pray. I did. I feel much better.”
Harpoon looked around the room for help. He found none. The successor shifted gears rapidly. “Okay,” the man said, “now that you gentlemen have finished with the melodrama, how do we win this war?” Harpoon made no reply. His mind spun. He stared into the man's calm and confident face, trying to keep the consternation off his own, and turned slowly back to his maps.
A deep and foreboding sense of futility swept over the admiral. He felt trapped between the successor's dangerously simple certainty, which had returned so abruptly, and the system's dangerously complex certainty, which never changed. Harpoon was losing to both—and he knew it. He also knew the stakes.
“SIOP,” he began slowly, “was devised shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. It means Single Integrated Operating Plan and was devised to coordinate all the nuclear forces at our command. We could not have a submarine striking a target that a bomber had struck earlier or a bomber attacking a target that had been destroyed by an ICBM. Over the years, as both the Soviet and our forces became vastly more complex, the system necessarily became highly computerized.”
The admiral heard an impatient rustle behind him. “Don't need a history lesson, Harpoon,” the successor said curtly.
“You may need everything you can get, sir.” Harpoon surprised himself with the directness of his reply. He continued without turning from the maps.
“By the beginning of this decade, we had more than forty thousand targets and innumerable combinations of options programmed into the computers. Clearly, no man or staff of men could possibly handle such complexities in the minutes available in a nuclear crisis. We had serious doubts that a national leader could make a decision to respond at all, let alone order a balanced response, in the time available to him. Indeed, that is what happened. . . .”
“Are you tellin' me that the President . . .”—the successor fumbled—“my predecessor did not respond . . . ?” His voice had gone sullenly incredulous.