Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  “Komaluk?” Moreau asked.

  “Good Lord, Jesus.”

  “Komaluk?” Moreau repeated. “Is it Komaluk?”

  “Oh, God in heaven, it's a horrible sight. Red fucking crud rolling at us in waves . . .”

  “Commander.” Moreau sounded remarkably calm. She bit off the urge to tell Kazaklis he wasn't glowing in the dark yet. She knew the early-warning stations had been hit. But it was hours ago now. “The vents are closed. It's three hours old. We could fry an egg on the wing. Inside, we're okay. For a while. Let's figure out where it's coming from and how to get out of it.”

  Kazaklis turned away from the window and looked at his copilot. His eyes were wide and frightened like a cornered doe's. Almost instantly they turned their opaque brown again, cutting off the view inside to the self he protected so vigorously.

  “Just remember to hose down this brute when we get to Pear-ee, Josephine,” he said.

  Moreau stifled a smile and said nothing.

  “Komaluk, huh?” Kazaklis wondered aloud. “Maybe. It sure isn't Tuk. Tuk's floating around someplace, too, but not here. We flew straight over it without a whimper, and the winds didn't blow it out to sea.”

  “Komaluk sits on a peninsula,” Moreau said, “the last radar site before the Alaskan border.”

  Kazaklis started to reach for the charts and then radioed downstairs instead. “Nav, give me a reading on Komaluk Beach.”

  “Due west,” Tyler said.

  “That's it.” Outside, the haunting red sky, a maze of ionized particles, seemed to mock him. Komaluk Beach. A handful of ancient shacks, equally old radars, a supply plane twice a month, Playboy centerfolds and a pillow to get you through a nine-month winter. Forgotten by the martini-drinkers in Washington. Never known, in thirty years of cold war, by the people who paid the bills. A dozen men, freezing their gonads, watching, always watching. They still watched. Dust to dust, cold dust to hot dust, sparkling red atoms of eternally vigilant men taunting him for thanks-—thanks for the extra minute, thanks for the extra seconds. Fucking Russians. Well, you said it, pal. This ain't tiddlywinks.

  “Thanks, guys,” Kazaklis said.

  “Sir?” Moreau asked.

  “I said ninety degrees left. Quick.”

  “At Komaluk?” Moreau asked, puzzled.

  “Komaluk's coming toward us, copilot—frying the eggs on your wing.”

  “North's just as safe, commander,” Moreau protested. “Maybe safer. This cloud can't be too wide.”

  “Through our control point? The general's daughter wants to take us through our control point?” Kazaklis said sarcastically. “Highly provocative action, copilot. The Soviets might consider that an act of war.”

  The commander's voice sounded very brittle. Moreau banked the huge plane left. She shrugged. They already had passed through their control point.

  “Message, sir.”

  Alice looked up, startled, pulling his eyes away from the green dots scattered across the middle of the world.

  The colonel handed him a small piece of telegraph paper, its edge torn as it was pulled hurriedly off the decoding machine. The message from Harpoon, dangerously exposed far to the south in Baton Rouge, read: “condor nested.”

  “Thank God,” the general said. But he knew he could not breathe too easily until the message read: “condor aloft.” He turned back to his map, briefly wondering what perversely wry and lost soul had come up with the code names for the event they never expected to happen. Looking Glass, Alice, Icarus, Trinity, Jericho. And Condor, powerful, ominous, lord of all it surveyed. Last of a long and proud line, almost extinct now.

  The din inside the pilot's helmet became thunderous, pounding at his temples, numbing his reasoning the way too much Jack Daniel's did. He was losing it, dammit. He shook his head and stared into the great waves of red, looking for an out. One minute. Two minutes, three minutes, four. The sound pounded deeper into his skull, into the pons, the cerebellum, the cerebrum itself. The neutrons from his own brain, punished by the sound as they had been punished by the bourbon, emitted more slowly now, reducing his respiration, his heart action, his circulation, his reaction time. Five minutes, six. Red waves, ghosts. A dozen men true, winking at him in a red night, their souls divided into a billion particles, crimson and ruby, scarlet and pink. His neutrons slowing, theirs racing. Why would dead men dance while he ebbed? Shake your head again, Kazaklis.

  “Thirty years of eternal vigilance.”

  “Come again, commander?”

  Kazaklis shook his head.

  “You okay, commander?” Moreau asked.

  “Ten degrees left,” he said sluggishly.

  Moreau moved the bomber left again. Kazaklis watched an ice-white beacon edge toward the nose of the B-52. Then, suddenly, the beacon turned to a shimmering star, the redness washed away over the wings, and the sky opened again into a black and familiar panorama. Kazaklis slowly let the curtain slip back into place and sagged back into his seat.

  “We're out of it,” he said. He felt an arm on his shoulder and turned numbly around. Halupalai hovered over him with a confused look on his face. In the background Kazaklis could hear a new din and it took him a moment to realize it was the audio alert for an incoming message. Halupalai handed him a small piece of paper.

  The pilot examined the code-garbled lettering, turned to look into Halupalai's blank face, and then examined the encrypted message again. Behind his ear, the telegraph clattered. The message was so brief he did not need his code book to unravel it.

  “Where's the rest of it?” Kazaklis asked.

  “That's it, commander,” Halupalai answered. “The machine's sending bomb codes now. To arm the weapons.”

  Kazaklis stared unseeing into the flash curtains. His bedeviled brain felt like mush. Something was wrong. The world behind him was not functioning properly. He had the sinking feeling everything was out of control. The message made no sense. He reached for the code book to confirm what he already knew. Finished, he looked back at Halupalai.

  “Did you decode it?”

  “Regulations, sir. Three of us have to confirm it.”

  “How do you read it?”

  “Same as you, commander.”

  “Dammit, Halupalai, tell me what you read.”

  “Proceed. And you, sir?”

  “Proceed.”

  “Proceed?” Moreau interrupted. “Proceed where?”

  They ignored her.

  “Take it down to Tyler.”

  “Tyler?”

  “Tyler! The navigator has to confirm it.”

  Halupalai disappeared into the back of the compartment. Kazaklis sat waiting.

  “Proceed where?” Moreau asked again.

  “Something's screwed,” Kazaklis said.

  “Commander!” Moreau asked more urgently.

  “We got your message, copilot. No boy. No girl. It's a person. Tyler? Do you read that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “It says proceed, sir.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Sir?” Tyler asked strangely. “Proceed where?”

  Kazaklis turned his head away from Moreau. His eyes lingered briefly on the red bomb lever and then focused on the pouch of navigation charts at his left. In those charts the route to their primary target—across Faddeevski Island and toward Tiksi, through the Verkhoyansk Mountains and along the Lena River, down the frozen shore of Baikal and back up the loop toward Irkutsk—was cross-hatched into one-kilometer squares. A generation of satellites and several generations of spies and tourists and Soviet dissidents had mapped every isolated grain elevator and tower, every mountaintop and missile battery a ground-hugging bomber might find troublesome, no bug-squishing wanted. Behind him, in the storage bays between the pilot and the gunner, similar charts were filed for every inch of the Soviet Union—and China. On the chance the Yellow Peril decided to become perilous again. He had charts of every railroad crossing and gravel road from Shanghai to Se
vastopol.

  “How the hell do I know?” Kazaklis roared. “Just proceed!” And the groaning bomber, nudged by Moreau, banked blindly north again.

  In the Looking Glass, the colonel nudged the preoccupied general. “Opposition, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Coming out of the Leningrad-Moscow corridor at the Buffs. Coming out of Siberia.” He paused. “Coming out of the Gulf.”

  “The Gulf?” Alice swiveled an alarmed look at Sam.

  “Submarine launches. From the Yucatan Channel near the Cuban coast.”

  “Christ. What do the missile trajectories show?”

  “Looks like they've targeted Baton Rouge.”

  Alice slumped. “Condor?”

  “Harpoon's got some kind of trouble on the ground.”

  Alice slowly turned back toward his map. He ran his eyes over the green dots. They clustered around Moscow and Leningrad, then became random and isolated as they spread across the expanse of Russia. Smaller clusters at Plesetsk and Tyruatam. Single dots here and there. Command posts. Leadership bunkers. Places where men plan wars. Turn them on. And off. The general allowed the air to whoosh out of him. Opposition. You aren't making this any easier, comrades.

  In the dark of the Maryland night, Sedgwick had a small fire going. But the cold still worked through to the marrow of his bones. The rear section of Nighthawk One lay nearby, where it had settled after ripping away from the rest of the chopper in the blast-wave crash and sliding down into this black gully. Far off, Sedgwick could hear strange sounds. But in four hours the sounds had not come closer. He had no idea where he was. He could see no lights. It was as if they had dropped off the edge of the world, and yet he knew he could be no more than a dozen miles from Washington.

  On the other side of the fire the President lay quietly under several blankets which Sedgwick had spread over him after pulling the unconscious man from the wreckage. The President had been out since—only an occasional groan or a painful grunt letting the young naval officer know his Commander-in-Chief was still alive. Sedgwick stared at the bundled form. The President's labored breathing caused the blankets to rise and fall ever so slightly. Sedgwick knew he had to get the man out of here soon or the blankets would stop heaving. But he didn't know how.

  III

  The Grand Tour

  Every civilization must go through this. Those that don't make it destroy themselves. Those that do make it wind up cavorting all over the universe.

  —Dr. Theodore B. Taylor, a theoretical physicist who abandoned bomb-making

  Eight

  1000 ZULU

  Outside, incandescent flares floated slowly downward like wounded fireflies, spreading the harsh white light of phosphorous through layered levels of the southern night's drizzle and smoke. No more than one hundred yards from the E-4's wingtip, Harpoon could see the outlines of an overturned and smoldering half-track. The periphery line had been set there, with the shadowy outlines of men crouching behind it and other troops stretching into the darkness on both sides. Beyond, the airport terminal building was burning, orange flames licking into the void and casting different shadows on milling masses of pushing, shoving forms. A quiet, low moan rose and ebbed in the distance, undulating in a haunting sound that cut through the impatient whine of the giant aircraft's engines. This was a safe area, more than 150 miles from the nearest nuclear detonation. The pop-pop-a-pop of automatic-rifle fire, then the quick clatter of a not-too-distant machine-gun burst, snapped Harpoon back to the job at hand. Beneath him, slightly below the only open hatch of the rescue plane, men shouted at him. Harpoon leaned down toward a ramp that did not quite reach the high door of the plane. He grasped a hand that slipped immediately out of his grip, forcing him to reach down a second time, clasp the wrist, and hoist the man the final few feet into the darkened doorway.

  Harpoon probed through the gloom for a look at the man he had hauled aboard. “Mr. President?” he asked tentatively. The man breathed in heavy wheezes. “Barely,” he replied with great effort. “Just barely.”

  “Are you injured, sir? Do you need assistance?” Harpoon signaled a nearby Air Force captain.

  “No, no,” the man replied. His voice sounded very shaky. He started to droop against the bulkhead and the captain rushed to prop him up. “No!” he snapped. “Just get the others so we can get our tails out of here. Before the whole consarned state of Louisiana rushes us!” The captain drew back.

  “How many others?” Harpoon asked.

  “Four.”

  The admiral craned his head out the door into the half-light. On the platform, several feet below, two rotund figures clambered desperately to get aboard. Two less frantic men stood behind them, their backs to the plane, their obscured hands occupied. A group of men in combat gear, their automatic rifles turned outward from the aircraft, shuffled uneasily on the stairs. In the distance Harpoon heard the sharp crack of high-powered rifles, deer rifles, and then a burst of popping return fire, military issue. Near the half-track an airport fuel truck burst into flames, the flare of the explosion capturing a camera-flick image of men and women charging the periphery. He wheeled on the captain. “Get those four aboard and seal this bird up fast,” he ordered.

  Harpoon took the elbow of the dark figure next to him and felt a shiver run through the damp cotton of the man's shirt. The presidential successor withdrew his arm quickly, as if to hide any hint of fear. Don't cover it, Harpoon thought. You'll need every ounce of fear you can muster, you poor bastard. The admiral had no idea who he was getting—couldn't even remember his name, he had been buried in the isolated subterranean world of Omaha's war-gaming computers so long. Just Number Eight, the Secretary of the Interior, code-named Condor. Harpoon was tired, overwrought, and edgy. He also was severely disillusioned four hours after he had seen his computer games become real life. All he knew was that he badly wanted a man with a healthy dose of fear, a dose as potent as his own.

  “No time for pomp tonight, sir,” he said. “Would you please follow me?” The man edged gratefully away from the door and followed the tall, white-haired military man down a hallway toward dimmed lights. It was a strange aircraft aisle, its contours second nature to the admiral but disorienting to his companion. On one side the wall bent concavely, being the inner side of the aircraft's outer shell. No windows looked out. Instead, occasional windows looked inward from the aisle's other wall. They were thick panes through which the successor peered curiously at beehive compartments of men and women laboring with such preoccupation that they seemed totally unaware of the jungle world out of which he had just emerged. Their jungle, through which they struggled without a glance at their new leader, was a tangled maze of wires, cables, loose data boards, and crippled computer hulks.

  “Lord A'mighty,” the man said wearily, “ol' Harry Truman said he felt like a bale of hay landed on him. Must say I feel like I got the whole barn.”

  “Afraid so, sir,” Harpoon replied, his impatience yielding to sympathy. “Maybe more.”

  The man still peered in the window, his back to the admiral. “How bad is it?”

  “Bad.”

  “We losin?”

  Harpoon paused. He didn't know how to answer.

  “I asked you if we were losing.” The drawl disappeared from the man's voice, a bite replacing it. From the back he looked like a cowboy. As the drawl faded, however, the cowboy appearance dissolved with it. Even dirty and rumpled, Harpoon observed, the jeans were a bit too stiff, the outdoorsman's shirt a touch too new.

  “I'm not sure that's the issue, Mr. President,” the admiral volunteered cautiously. “You need to be briefed.”

  “Not the issue?” The man spun on Harpoon, his face shimmering white in the hallway lights. His hand moved reflexively to his forehead, rubbing at dried blood that was not his own. “Believe me, mister,” he said firmly, no drawl left at all, “winning and losing are the only issues. I don't need a briefing to know that.”

  Without a further word, th
e two of them resumed their walk down the corridor, around a corner, and up a spiral staircase where Harpoon opened the door to the baby-blue presidential compartment, directing the man, then the others, toward seats inside.

  Losing. Harpoon had known fear—that skin-crawling moment of sheer panic when a submariner feels the awesome power of the sea pressing down on him, his delicate mesh of men and machines failing. But he had never known anything like this, a fear that settled in the marrow and stayed there, gnawing. The world had built a similar mesh of men and machines, holding back a power far more awesome than the sea in a fragile balance that could never fail. It had failed and the mesh was unraveling like a dime-store sweater.

  Harpoon had always had nagging doubts, sometimes raging nightmares, about a survival system that called for a never-ending balance of terror. Few men walked away from SIOP at night thinking the nuclear chess game would stay inside a computer forever, year after year, generation after generation. But the men—and then the machines that held the final thread in the weave—had failed so suddenly and so totally. In many ways the machines had been the greater faith of his generation of military men. They had asked for larger, more sophisticated submarines. And got them. Faster, more ingenious airplanes. And got them. Smarter, more deadly missiles. And got them. Then they had asked for more sophisticated, faster, smarter machines to control their machines. Computers to do the instant calculating and communications satellites to pass the instant orders. Encrypters to veil the orders and decoders to unveil them. Radios to talk underwater and through space. Scramble phones that, at the touch of a finger, instantly connected commanders and troops, friends and adversaries, on opposite sides of the globe.

  Now, at the touch of another finger, all the machines that controlled the machines had died. SIOP had died predictably along with Icarus, vaporized in one of thousands of explosions each brighter than a thousand suns. The others had gone less predictably. Inside the greatest surviving communications machine in the world, this airplane, the admiral had watched the computers die, the radios go dead, the telephones fall silent, the mechanical eyes go blind. His staff had patched desperately and brought part of the system back to life for the man now sitting across from him. Losing. You bet we are, Mr. President. But not the way you mean it. Harpoon glanced at his watch—1012 Zulu. They were running out of time.