“Good God, Condor—”
“And stop callin' me Condor, dammit. This is your President speakin', not some damned dyin' bird.”
Alice felt the blood rise in his face. “Sir, ears are opening. They can mouse us. We can mouse them. We're getting the first bits of messages moving inside Russia.”
There was a pause. “You don't think you should've told your . . . me . . . about that, Alice?”
“Sir, we can't make sense out of it yet. It's snatches. Bits and pieces. All we can determine is they're rattled. Just as we are.”
“You think we're rattled?”
Alice sighed. “Yes, sir.” The general felt someone hovering at his elbow. He impatiently brushed the figure back.
“I'm gonna tell you somethin', Alice. Straight out. Thing that's rattlin' me most is my own damned military geniuses.”
Alice took a deep breath. “In this one, sir, there are no military geniuses.” The figure tugged persistently at his sleeve. He turned angrily and saw his communications officer waving papers at him. “Excuse me a moment, sir,” Alice said, cupping the phone. He could hear protests squawking out of the receiver. “For Christ's sake, lieutenant, I'm talking to your Commander-in-Chief,” he snapped at the young woman.
“He needs to know this, sir,” she replied, unyielding. “The Bisons have turned. Shortly after Polar Bear One turned, the Soviet squadron approaching them also turned.”
Alice looked at her in disbelief. “You positive?”
“Positive?” The woman shrugged. “Tonight?” She shrugged again. 'Tm as sure as I am about Polar Bear One. Same data. Same source.”
Alice scanned the readouts hurriedly. “And the rest of them?” he asked.
“Proceeding, sir. As before.”
Alice stared into the black phone, from which he could hear a persistent babble tugging at him. To the general it seemed an eternity before he spoke into the phone again.
Beneath the Maryland farmlands, the dismayed radio operator ran his fingers through his still-damp hair, massaging the roots thoughtfully. He could hear the hum of the giant turbines, one floor below, methodically cleansing their air. It wasn't that dirty out there, he thought. Yet. He glanced at the bank of telegraph machines to his left, leafing through the last printouts. Routine stuff until almost an hour after his midnight shift had begun. A string of the usual fifteen-minute communications checks in Greenwich mean time: “NORAD COMM CHECK 0500 CHEYENNE . . . NORAD COMM CHECK 0515 CHEYENNE.” The last had come at 0545, followed by a gushing volume of increasing status alerts, urgent alarms, and finally the list of impact areas. Then the machine stopped at 0630 and the paper roll was blank. He glanced at a clock marked Zulu—1204. Four minutes past seven. The sun would be coming up soon. He turned to the tall balding man watching him.
“I just don't understand it, sir,” the technician said. “Half the time I can hear the Looking Glass talking to the E-4. But I can't hear the E-4, and neither of them seems to hear us.”
“Keep trying,” the man said halfheartedly. “We don't have a helluva lot to tell them anyway, do we?”
“Maybe not. But one more EMP whomp and we won't be talking to anybody.”
“Son,” the man said, “after the next whomp we won't be talking to each other.”
The technician slumped in his government-issue secretarial chair. “Dammit—pardon me—but wouldn't they want to know about the signals from Russia?”
“Hmmph,” the older man grunted, unimpressed. “Moscow calling.”
“It's not Moscow. It's north of there, in the dingleberries. But they're directing the messages at the United States.”
“Son,” the man said patronizingly, “you're listening to some spook from the CIA trying to tell us we left a bridge open over the Volga. We know that.”
The technician returned disconsolately to his radio. His superior, a retired brigadier general now running the Central Atlantic regional civil-defense program, wandered slowly out of the room. As he left, he glanced at a wall map of the Washington metropolitan area with 466 pinpoints for the air-raid sirens he had triggered at 1:10 in the morning—after the first missile had landed. Shit-pot full of good they did, he thought, moving on into the empty briefing room. The plans called for the governors and leaders of a half-dozen states to relocate here. Not a one had arrived. Neither had his staff of forty. He was stuck down here with the normal nighttime crew of seven, plus two. The only outsiders who had shown up were two young nurses from the standby list. The way they looked when they showed up—bruised, clothes torn—he figured they had been more worried about being raped than nuked. Not even a doctor had shown up. He felt very left out.
“As I said, sir,” Alice replied, slightly irritably, “there are no geniuses in this one. I don't know what this means. I can make an optimistic guess.”
“A smoke signal.” The voice was contemptuous.
“You might call it that.”
“Alice,” the successor said slowly, “Harpoon told me all about smoke signals. So fifteen Russian bombers turned around. I read this little war chant as sayin' we got one deserter and they got fifteen. You read it different?”
Alice took a long deep breath, letting the air out slowly. “Yes, sir, I believe I do.”
“Maybe you want to believe it more than you do believe it.”
“Perhaps, sir.”
“I ain't into wishful thinkin'.”
“Please, sir. Turn the bombers.” Alice closed his eyes, embarrassed. He thought he sounded more pathetic than convincing, and he didn't like those near him to be listening. “See what happens. We have so little time.”
The general waited through a brief pause. Then the successor continued. “Alice, lemme ask you somethin'. You say ears are openin' up and we're hearin' folks and folks're hearin' us?”
“Yes, sir. Not very well.”
“Wel-l-l-l, Alice, I truly hope the Premier is eavesdroppin' right now. 'Cuz he can shove his Bisons right up his rosy-red bee-hind. He started this and he better start duckin'. And you hear this, general. You put another bomber on the henhouse. Damned fast. Got that?”
Alice clamped his eyes tightly closed. He saw the black hole of Omaha, the surf crashing over a reef forever forbidden to him. “I hear you, sir,” he said.
“And if there's ears out there, Alice, some of 'em's ours. So you send out general orders, right now, to shoot down Polar Bear One. No questions. Just shoot. Hear?”
Alice could feel beads of sweat popping on his forehead. He brushed at his face with a sleeve that was already damp. When he spoke, his own voice sounded foreign. “I hear you, sir,” he said again.
“Don't sound very convinced, general.”
“I don't believe I am, sir.”
The pause was quite brief. “You tread careful, Alice, or you'll find yourself in deep shit. Deep shit indeed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We can send out the orders from here.”
Alice thought only for a split second. “I'd suggest you do that, sir.”
“I hear you right, Alice?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a moment of silence. Then the phone connection clicked and huzzed out.
“You get the duty, Kazaklis,” Moreau said. Kazaklis looked into her ghostly white face and the wet smudges she had tried to blot away. “Or we'll be down to two little robots.”
“I know,” the pilot said.
“Send him up here first, will you? He's really a case.”
“Help him, Moreau,” Kazaklis said in tones more tender than she had ever heard him use.
The pilot then swung slowly out of his seat and started down the aisle. Tyler's boots rested pigeon-toed a few feet behind the cockpit, his body pointing directly down the middle of the walkway. Only his head was out of line, crazily crooked, where Moreau had moved it from the well which had broken his neck. It rested at the foot of the jump seat on which the red code box sat, and directly behind Halupalai's seat. Halupalai, however, still stood fro
zen against the instrument panel, his arms stretched outward almost in a crucifixion stance, little yellow gauge lights glowing around him. Kazaklis moved carefully past Tyler and placed a hand on Halupalai's elbow.
“Come on, old boy,” Kazaklis said soothingly. “Go up front with Moreau.” The gunner didn't move. Halupalai's arm was leaden. Kazaklis tugged at it lightly before noticing the shredded radio wire. He reached up and gently eased Halupalai's helmet off his head, dropping it into O'Toole's seat with one hand and softly massaging the tight tendons of his friend's neck with the other. He leaned forward and placed his mouth near Halupalai's ear. “Please, ace,” he whispered. “Go up with Moreau for a while. You know how women are. She's a little twittery. She needs you. Please.”
Halupalai slowly turned his head, fastening big and mournful eyes on Kazaklis. The eyes blinked once, transmitting the briefest subliminal message of the kind that could pass only between friends. It said: Stop the con, Kazaklis. Then the eyes went balefully blank again and the pilot's heart sank. “Get your ass up front, sergeant,” Kazaklis said with quiet firmness.
Halupalai smiled faintly, almost unnoticeably. “Where you gonna go, commander?”
The question had an eerie ring, and it sent an alarm through Kazaklis. But he forced the super-con, Boom-Room Room smile anyway, tightened his brotherly grip on Halupalai's taut neck, and said cheerily, “You can pick the island, beachboy.” Kazaklis felt Halupalai's tendons grow tighter.
“I didn't mean to hurt him,” the gunner whispered, haunted.
“I know, pal,” Kazaklis said. “I know, I know.” He took Halupalai by both arms and pulled him away from the wall.
Kazaklis watched as Halupalai moved toward the cockpit, edging his way in a crab-walk, his back to the bulkhead, his arms still outstretched to feel his way, his eyes held unseeing far above the form beneath him. He saw Halupalai lower himself uneasily into the pilot's seat and reach out tentatively to touch the one-fingered glove. Then Kazaklis went about his business, which was body stacking. Kazaklis struggled to get Tyler's corpse down the narrow ladder, thinking briefly of simply dropping it, and then, out of respect, dismissing the thought and doing it the hard way. At the bottom he dragged the limp heap, trying to avoid looking at the lolling head, and placed the navigator next to O'Toole. Then he moved Radnor, building a bleak pyramid in the narrow space leading to the sealed chamber holding their remaining bombs. He turned and went to Tyler's seat. He sat down, and for no reason, sorted out the mess, stacking the jumbled papers, wetting his fingers and trying to erase the now dried spatters of blood. His eyes fastened unexpectedly on the hallowed Kodak print, a little boy staring round-eyed and worshipfully at him.
Suddenly he felt exhausted. He laid his head down on Tyler's desktop and drifted into a fitful half-sleep. He saw Sarah Jean— rah! rah!—her breasts now tight little mailed fists flouncing beneath a soft sweater, her hand reaching toward his groin, clasping, pulling at a red lever. Nikko turned scrawny and old, taunting him with a lightning-bolt tongue. A little boy shivered in the rain, scrounging among the beetles, digging the life-giving pitch out of rotting hulks in a primeval swamp, feeding his precious find to the giant insects, and the pterodactyls devoured the white capsules he offered, swooped over the rubble of his splintered forest, arched triumphantly over the pulverized cities of his adulthood, their giant wings shrouds now, casting widening shadows as they dived into a flawless crater in which Halupalai lofted a perfect pass and Moreau leaped as the spheroid soared higher and farther—rah! rah!—and a little boy placed a match to a perfect tepee frame of the bulbous gray firewood the world had given him, and he built a fire in the rain.
“They'll shoot you, general.”
“Sam.” Alice looked deeply into the troubled face of his colleague, seeing great pain, which he appreciated, and great doubt, which he understood. “Sam, I should find such an angel of mercy.”
The general turned briefly away, reached into the satchel at his side, and withdrew the special-issue revolver he had carried since he won his first star. He looked at it fondly. It was a general officer's tool never used. He felt every eye in the Looking Glass on him now, but he had no sense of embarrassment at all.
“You know, Sam,” Alice said thoughtfully, “they tell us at West Point that every war is made up of a million private wars. They tell us only once, because no officer likes it that way. Not very disciplined, private wars.” He paused and sighed. “I've just fought mine. As God is my witness, I don't know if I won or lost.”
“Ten of our bombers, general,” Sam said quietly. “What does it mean? You can't call back the submarines. You can't hold the rest of the world together.” The voice turned beseeching and Alice knew that Sam's war was raging now. “It won't change anything, general.”
“Change anything?” Alice sounded detached, even to himself. “I don't believe that's what private wars are all about, Sam.”
Alice felt the finely etched security of the gun handle in his palm. Then he flipped the weapon neatly, catching it by the barrel, and placed it atop the code box. He stood, perfectly erect, and held unflinching eyes on his friend and subordinate.
“I just gave you an order, Sam,” he said firmly. “Just disobeyed one, too. First in more than thirty years. I'm tired. I'm going back to lie down.” He started to turn. “I'll understand, warrior,” he added. Then he walked out of the compartment, into the aircraft's rear cabin, and lay down on its single cot, his back turned toward a doorway intentionally left open.
“It wasn't your fault, good friend,” Moreau said in a voice that washed over Halupalai in the same massaging rhythm of the airplane's vibrations, the same rhythm of her fingers.
Halupalai was unaccustomed to the front seat and equally unaccustomed to the comfort of a woman's hand. When he first came up front, he had said nothing. Then he had begun to babble, gushing all the guilt of a lifetime at the woman kneading his shoulders. But now he sensed that Moreau was having no easier time than he. That added to his guilt, but he tried to pull himself together.
“I didn't mean it to be that way with Tyler,” he said, painfully firming up his voice.
Moreau looked at him in anguish. Halupalai had sensed correctly that she was having trouble, and not simply with the task of calming him. “You saved us,” she said. The words sounded hollow, even to her. In some unfathomable way, she was finding the turnabout run more difficult than the plunge into Russia. They had programmed her to die, not to live, not to deal with the new problems of surviving. She tried to finish her thought. “Tyler went crazy.”
Halupalai looked at her with a strange childlike expression. “Is it all right to kill crazy people now?” The look on Moreau's face turned from anguish to raw pain. Halupalai floundered. He wanted away from the subject. He wanted to tell her something else, but he didn't know how.
“Moreau . . . ?”
She sighed and squeezed his shoulder lightly.
“Moreau,” he continued tentatively, “you shouldn't fight with Kazaklis all the time. He's really okay.”
Moreau's fingers tightened noticeably on his shoulder, but he went on.
“He's got a side he never lets you see.”
She said nothing.
“Please, Moreau. It's important.”
“I know,” Moreau finally replied. “We've all got that side, Halupalai.”
“Please,” he insisted.
She stared hard into Halupalai's open face. He sounded as if he were writing his will. She shivered, and then she nodded and patted his shoulder reassuringly. He smiled. They both went silent, each into a separate world, and Moreau felt the shame and guilt well up, only to be replaced by fear—a great fear of a new unknown. Until now her future had been ordained and simple— a robot pilot's death in the death of a doomed world. It no longer was quite that simple, and the simplicity suddenly seemed cleaner, preferable. What kind of void was she entering now, with what kind of shadow of a man? Could she survive in this new wilderness? Did she want to survive? Di
d she want to walk into the new emptiness with a man whose other side she had never seen? She shuddered, realizing shamefully that her mind had cut Halupalai out of that world. She reached for him. But he was gone, having shuffled silently back to his proper place in the dark redness. She was very afraid. Where was Kazaklis? He seemed to have been gone forever.
Sedgwick felt something jabbing at him. He didn't want to awaken. He was very comfortably, sleepily cold. He brushed at the irritant, the pain from his hands racking him out of his grogginess. His hands hurt more than his broken legs now. Near him he heard brush crackle, snow crunch, as something suddenly withdrew from him.
“You soldier?” a frightened, squeaky voice asked.
Sedgwick forced his eyes open. The light had changed to the difficult shadows of a murky false dawn. Or perhaps the fires had moved closer. He had trouble focusing his eyes. He saw a small form pulling away through the winter-barren skeletons of the underbrush.
“Don't go!” Sedgwick pleaded, stretching a bloodied hand outward.
“You American?” the voice asked suspiciously.
Sedgwick forced his eyes to focus and saw a young boy, perhaps eight years old, black and cherub-faced. The boy backed slowly away, holding a stick in defense.
“Don't go,” Sedgwick said again. “Please.”
“Soldiers nuked us.”
“Get your daddy. Please.”
“M' daddy's dead.”
“Please, boy”—don't call him boy, Sedgwick, you klutz—”please get someone. Your mama.” Sedgwick's head was swimming, pain overwhelming desperation, then desperation overwhelming pain. “The President is down there.” The boy said nothing. Sedgwick despaired at the very absurdity of what he had said, and he began to slip away again, his mind fuzzily telling him not even a child could believe him. “Your mama,” he whimpered one more time, his head falling back into the snow.
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