Moreau looked at him, shook her head, and said nothing.
“You get the feeling we're going around in circles?” he asked, the lightheartedness sounding artificial.
“You get the feeling we shouldn't complete this circle?” she asked. Her voice carried a strange mix of hostility and pensiveness. It so caught Kazaklis by surprise he briefly went wordless. He forced a laugh.
“Reminds me of a Polish joke.”
“Oh, Christ, Kazaklis.”
“These two Polish pilots get into trouble. So the pilot says to the copilot, 'Let's do a 360 and get out of here.'“ Kazaklis laughed. Moreau didn't. Kazaklis went silent again.
“I think the Polacks have taken over the Looking Glass,” he continued after a second. Now his voice was pensive. “Do a couple of 360's and then move ahead one square.” He paused. “What do you make of this crap?”
Moreau thought for a second. “Maybe they're going to pull us back.”
Kazaklis looked at Moreau, tucking his chin into his Adam's apple, his eyes peering mockingly out of the bottom of his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah, Moreau. I can hardly wait.”
“I can think of reasons.”
“I almost forgot you're a general's brat.” Kazaklis immediately wished he had kept his loose tongue tucked away.
“Shove it, Kazaklis.”
“I kick my dog a lot, Moreau.”
She looked at him in curiosity, then shook her head again.
“Well, Moreau,” the pilot continued, “you can explain the strategic reasons to me when we're at low level over Baikal.”
“That's one place we're not going now.”
“I know.”
They dropped off into silence again, the Buff curling into its holding pattern, the hum of the engines deceptively lulling after the bone-jarring rumble with the Foxbats. Both retreated into their private worlds, trying to sort out the tangle of new realities forced upon them in the few short hours since the klaxon's wail at Fairchild, the bombs bursting in Spokane, their own bomb bursting behind them.
“You really don't think about the reliability regulations, do you?” Moreau suddenly broke the silence.
“Oh, God, Moreau, don't start on PRP now.”
“Why don't you think about it?”
Kazaklis sensed danger. His head told him to cut Moreau off. Quickly. But he didn't. “Because it's crazier than what we're doing,” he said sullenly.
“About even-Steven, I'd say. They had to come up with something. They invented the bomb and they had to give it to somebody. So they gave it to the politicians. The politicians kept building the fuckers—you do have me talking locker-room, Kazaklis—so they went out and found themselves thousands of kids to hold them. Kids. God, we're the old-timers. What are you? Thirty-one? I'm twenty-seven. Radnor's twenty-five. Even Radnor's an old-timer. They had twenty-year-olds fiddling with them.”
“It wasn't the kids who finally let it all go.”
“Probably not. Maybe we should thank PRP for that. There was no Personnel Reliability Program for the politicians. You ever hear of a Nixon or a Carter or a Reagan going down to San Antonio to take the test? You think the Politburo got psychological screening, whatever the hell they called it over there?”
“Not a one of 'em woulda passed.”
“No. The whole thing was an attempt at a rational answer to a problem with no rational answer. The shrinks got ahold of it and devised a system that required perfect people. Not many of them around. None of us passed tonight.”
Kazaklis grew nervous. He tried to divert her. “Oh-oh!” he said, throwing up his hands. “Here comes the Boom-Boom Room routine.” He battered her with a staccato recital. “Air Force Regulation 35-dash-99. Section two-dash-three. Figure two-dash-one. Personality and Behavior Factors That May Affect Reliability. Paragraph III. Factors Related to Awareness or Level of Consciousness.” He paused. “You know they spelled 'consciousness' wrong? Left out the first 's.' Little reminder that the people looking for perfect people weren't perfect.”
“Dated 14 April 1981.” Moreau smiled sadly. “You have read the PRP regulations, you phony.” She thought a moment. “A little random reminder. They might miss a digit in a code someday. They might get a random electric pulse in some computer. You think that's how it started?”
“That, pal, we'll never know.”
“No.”
Kazaklis turned thoughtful. “Moreau?” She looked at him. “Did the Boom-Boom Room thing really bother you that much? All the flyin' we did together?”
She looked at him a moment longer. “Sure it did. Who wants to fly with somebody who's been up all night boozing?”
“God, I'm surprised everybody in the outfit wasn't juiced to the gills,” Kazaklis said, melancholy creeping into his voice.
“A lot of 'em were. The brass went nuts trying to trace the marijuana roaches in Minuteman launch capsules. The Soviet Rocket Forces had a vodka problem that made you look like a Mormon. You were all right. A pig, but all right.”
Kazaklis grinned broadly. “Moreau, you're getting downright friendly in your sunset years.”
“Hours.”
“Don't get maudlin. It violates PRP.”
“Everything violates PRP. Paragraph I. Suspiciousness. Arrogance. Lack of Humor. Inflexibility. Preoccupation.” She paused. “Then comes Sensitivity. Now, that is dangerous. We sure didn't want sensitive people around the bomb. Paragraph II. Impulsiveness. Destructiveness. You like that one? Destructiveness.”
“Maybe I oughta message San Antonio that we've been showing destructive tendencies. Pull us off the duty.”
“Temper Tantrums.”
“Whoops.”
“Excessive Talking.”
“There goes the general's daughter.”
“Decreased Talking. Then in Paragraph III we have Daydreaming lumped in with Alcohol and Drug Intoxication, your favorite.”
Kazaklis grunted.
“Oh, I'm not taking another zing at you, Kazaklis.” She smiled, a faint and distant smile. “You were always full of more shit than booze.”
Kazaklis finally laughed uproariously.
“Unusual Happiness,” she said. “Paragraph IV. Unusual Happiness is followed by Unusual Sadness. And Suicide.”
The drone of the engines cut through the pause. Then Moreau went on quietly, still quoting from the regulations: “Suicide: Particularly significant when accomplished through the deliberate detonation of a weapon. . . .”
Kazaklis stared hard at her. She seemed far away, and briefly, he felt angry again, not being able to sort out his own new uncertainties.
“Moreau,” he said slowly, “you and I both chose this path. You signed up for this trip. You signed up for the saki-and-bow-to-the-emperor squad.” But he knew she wasn't talking about her suicide. He knew she was talking about distant decisions made by others that meant the world now must absorb fifty thousand of the gray packages the crew of Polar Bear One had discharged in the wilderness of the Richardson Mountains. She was talking about a world that was taking the kamikaze oath. His skin tingled. Then the audio alert startled him again.
“Here come the orders to return to Spokane,” he said blandly. “You think we'll get a ticker-tape parade?”
In the Looking Glass, the black phone lighted again. The general reached for it quickly.
“Alice?” the voice said. “Harpoon.”
“Good grief, man, how are you? We were worried.”
“I need a word.”
“Hard to talk now.”
“A word.” The voice was insistent.
“Take it easy, Harpoon. What's on your mind?”
“Never mind. I have it.”
“Hey, buddy, what gives?”
“Call them back.” The voice was plaintive.
“Call who back, Harpoon? What the devil are you talking about?”
“The bombers, general. Please.”
Alice reached for another Pall Mall, not caressing it at all this time. “Harpoon, the orders are out.
Under National Command Authority. Condor's authority.”
The phone seemed to go dead for a moment.
“Harpoon?” Alice asked.
The phone connection suddenly sounded very weak. “Never mind,” Harpoon said faintly. “I've got it. It's anthropocide. Yes, that's it. Anthropocide.” Then Alice heard Harpoon click off.
The general looked up at Sam with deep concern. “I don't think Harpoon has both oars in the water,” he said bleakly.
Halupalai spent several painstaking minutes decoding the latest orders while Kazaklis and Moreau fidgeted up front. At last he handed Kazaklis the message, and the pilot flooded it with his red-filtered flashlight. Moreau watched his face grow tight as he quickly scanned the single long sheet.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, his voice rising slowly in disbelief. “They want us to run all over Russia. . . .”
REF TWO ONE ZEBRA. IMPRO PATTERN ONE. PRECISE DELIVERY TO COORDINATES MANDATORY. TARGETS HARDENED. STRIKE ALL TARGETS. PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS. REPEAT. PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS. CAUTIONS. MOSCOW REGION PARTLY INTACT. LENINGRAD REGION WHOLLY INTACT. NO COVER. SOVIET COMMUNICATIONS BELIEVED NEAR ZERO. REF TWO ONE ZEBRA.
Next came a sequence of six targets and coordinates, fuel-depletion estimates, and specific weapon assignments for each. Cherepovets was second on the list, the first being a twin-SRAM attack on a target that by the pilot's rough reckoning was somewhere in the Urals perhaps a thousand miles east of the coordinates for Cherepovets. He didn't recognize any of the place-names, including the priority target. Behind the coordinates for Cherepovets the orders read, in brackets, “RYBINSK MINING WORKS.” The four other targets were located in a cluster less than one hundred miles apart and, from the locators, appeared to be in the vicinity of Leningrad but not in the city itself. That gave them a clear run out over the Gulf of Finland to an escape field north of Stockholm, with Helsinki as a nearer but clearly less desirable alternate. However, it was obvious at a glance that the designer of improvised pattern one had made extraordinary assumptions, all optimistic, about fuel consumption. The entire flight was to be made at low level.
“What the hell is Two-One Zebra?” Kazaklis demanded in befuddled anger. “Where the hell is Cherepovets? And why the hell are we runnin' clean across Russia to bomb a friggin' mine?”
Moreau already had reached for the master book, through which she was flipping rapidly. But she sensed the answer and felt her despair plunge toward despondence. She stopped in a rarely studied appendix, read briefly, and let out a long, low whoosh of air. So it's come to this, she thought, and she turned almost in challenge on Kazaklis.
“Damn you, Moreau,” the pilot pushed her, “what's going on?”
“The grand tour,” she said evenly. “That's what's going on, Kazaklis. You were right. All over Russia, carving 'em out in the craters.”
Kazaklis stared at her. “Carving out what, Moreau?” he asked with a touch of hostile impatience. “What?”
“Not what,” the copilot replied evenly. “Who.” She turned back to the book. “Twenty-one—Precision nuclear bombardment, hardened emplacements.” She paused. “Zebra—Political-military infrastructure.” She turned the page, broke a plastic-tape seal intricately engraved with the faint outline of an eagle, and glanced hurriedly through contingency instructions they never before had been allowed to read. “Cherepovets (Rybinsk Mine)— Caution. This is not an opportunity target. Strike only on direct orders NCA. Relocation area, timing option one, Omega.”
Now the air whooshed out of the pilot. His gloved forefingers slowly tapped at the wheel. “Leadership bunkers,” he whispered. “So they really want us to go after the big banana.”
“More like somebody's gone bananas,” Moreau replied. “Somebody who didn't go to San Antonio for reliability training. Somebody who didn't read the suicide regs. The world suicide regs. They want us to get the leaders, Kazaklis. The only people who can turn this fucker off.” She stared hard into the pilot's face. “Request confirmation,” she said flatly.
Kazaklis lost his blank look and shot her a withering glance. “You just get promoted?” Moreau looked back at him stone-faced. He shrugged and motioned to Halupalai to send the brief confirmation request. Kazaklis felt his mind turn muddy. The message told him far more than he ever expected to learn. Timing option one confirmed what he already knew—the Soviets had started it. The orders themselves told him what he also had guessed—the pattern of bunker targets was stretched so thin it was obvious the B-52 fleet had been chewed to pieces on the ground. Soviet communications near zero. Both nations had used an EMP attack. Not surprising. Leningrad standing, Moscow partly destroyed. Mildly surprising. They had given him that information because he needed it to defend himself. But the Looking Glass also was telling him indirectly that major cities still stood in the United States as well. Otherwise the subs would have been ordered to clean out the Soviet cities.
But if it hadn't all gone in one spasm, if the war was progressing in stages as he would have expected, why were they getting orders like these? Moreau was right, damn her. This meant the end, the whole shooting match. Omega. Omega was a catch-all code. No holds barred.
Kazaklis felt woozy. They were asking a handful of Buffs to stab the king—and not wound him. That was taboo, drilled into them time and time again. The crews had joked sourly about it. Politicians protecting politicians while we nuke the folks. But the instructions had been explicit. If the boss gets caught in the office, so goes it. The Omahas and Cheyennes of Russia would go. But no overt political targets. No accidents, no stray runs, no open alternates, no targets of opportunity. We need somebody to talk to, the Air Force had drilled them. His mind spun. He didn't like this. He also didn't like her staring at him, probing him.
“You find a wart on my nose, Moreau?” he blustered.
“You know, Kazaklis,” she said.
Kazaklis fought back an involuntary shudder. He stuck his chin out. “I know it means we don't have to go in and drop a million tons of concentrated TNT on a bunch of kids, Moreau. Isn't that better, for God's sake?”
“You mean more satisfying?”
“Damn right it's more satisfying.” Kazaklis choked a gurgle out of his voice. The roiling, churning horror of the plume over the Richardsons flashed before his eyes, then quickly disappeared. “Maybe it'll get it over faster.”
She continued staring at him, her lip curling upward. “Faster,” she said.
“Damn you, Moreau.” Her face settled into a granite shield. “Moreau,” Kazaklis said plaintively, his voice taking on a low, painful whine. Behind him, Halupalai hovered again. He handed the pilot another brief message: “CONFIRM TWO ONE ZEBRA, NCA CODE HENHOUSE.”
Kazaklis handed the message to Moreau. “Look up 'Henhouse.'”
Moreau did not bother to look at the message. She stared silently at Kazaklis, who returned her stare with uneasy stubbornness. The steady roar of the engines pounded at their ears in an escalating staccato—not a drone now but a racing pulse of explosive individual heartbeats. “They want us to vaporize the Premier, Kazaklis,” Moreau said steadily. “And the Presidium. And the head of the KGB, who controls the warheads. And the head of the Rocket Forces, who controls the missiles. Everybody with any control.”
Kazaklis stuck his chin out. “The bastards started it.”
“The bastards have to stop it. Nobody else can.”
“Look up 'Henhouse.'”
Moreau held her steady gaze on him silently. His eyes twitched and he tried to cover the sign of his uncertainty. His chin jutted out further. “You want us to nuke kids instead, huh?” he snapped.
She stared. Kazaklis began to bluster defensively.
“It always was a bunch of bullshit, leaving the leaders alone. Bunch of fucking politicians protecting another bunch of fucking politicians.” His voice cracked and he tried to cover it by blustering again. “Assholes. Sittin' down in their holes, flying around in their safe airplanes, pushing their fucking dominoes this way and that way over m
illions of people. Fuck 'em. They got us into this mess.”
“Somebody's got to be at the other end of the phone, Kazaklis.” Moreau's voice quavered now. She had spent her adult life trying to prove she belonged in this bomber, that macho wasn't just male.
“What fucking phone?” Kazaklis snapped. “You think they're talking to each other and sending out orders like this?”
“Leningrad's still standing,” Moreau said, her voice dropping off. “Moscow's partly standing. Something's still there. Somebody's back home to send out this insane crap. Somebody's over there to take it.”
Kazaklis turned away from her, staring into the flash curtains, the commander in him wrestling with the man who had reached to the curtain and stared into the face of a megaton meant for Irkutsk, who had murmured bye-bye, mamushka. “Look up 'Henhouse,'” he said.
“You know what comes next,” Moreau said, barely audibly. “Some poor spooked sucker of a second lieutenant lets the chemicals go in Europe. Unlooses the anthrax spores because he's scared. Some colonel in Korea sees a shadow in the night and fires every tactical missile he's got.” She sat silently for a moment, the engine sound torturing her. “Submarine commanders will roam around for days, weeks, months—popping one here, popping one there—until they just say screw it and let 240 warheads go at the commies in Nicaragua.”
Kazaklis exploded in frustration. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Write my congressman?”
“Till every last nuke is gone.” Moreau's voice seemed far off and ghostly now. “Every last biological spore.” She stopped again. “Nobody can turn it off after this. Not ever. Not before everything's gone.”
Kazaklis felt every muscle, every tendon, turn rigid. “Look up 'Henhouse,'” he said.
“No,” she said.
Kazaklis looked at her strangely. She stared straight ahead, not a muscle moving. He didn't know what to do. He felt cornered, trapped in a mad maze from which escape was impossible. His voice turned raw with agony. “It won't make any difference, Moreau.”
“I know.”
“Nothing will change. Somebody else will do it.”
Trinity's Child Page 30
