“Holy Mary, mother of God,” she said, and crossed herself.
Kazaklis banked the plane quickly in an attempt to catch a view. The radiation alarm squawked naggingly behind them. “Oxygen!” he ordered. “Vents closed!” By the time Kazaklis had looked again, they were past Moreau's sighting and the clouds had closed again.
“What was it?”
“A hole in the ground,” she replied in clipped, brittle tones. “A very big hole.”
Kazaklis looked at her. She had paled.
“That's all?”
“That's all.”
They were almost on top of Pearl Harbor now. But even at 7,500 feet Kazaklis saw nothing through the murk. “Halupalai, if you're coming up here, come up here now,” the pilot said, more tersely than he intended.
“I'm right behind you, commander,” Halupalai replied.
Kazaklis turned and saw the big Hawaiian, his helmet on, his mask strapped, his eyes glazed. He sat in the jump seat at the pilot's back. Kazaklis reached around and patted him on the knee, then clenched it and squeezed. “Where are we?” the gunner asked.
Kazaklis lifted his shoulders in dismay. “I can't see shit out there. We should be right over Pearl, coming up on Hickam and Honolulu International, Diamond Head on the left. Sure as hell hope we don't have company coming in over two airfields in this muck.”
“That was Schofield,” Halupalai said evenly.
Kazaklis and Moreau exchanged quick and worried glances.
“The hole,” Halupalai said as blandly as a bored tour guide. “That was Schofield Barracks.”
Kazaklis ignored the alarm bells ringing in his head. The island was so small, the B-52 still moving so rapidly, there was no time to think. “I'm gonna take it out over Mamala Bay, bring it around, and come in lower from the south,” he said. “Anybody got problems with that?”
“Let's skip it,” Moreau answered quickly. She sounded even more brittle and quite insistent.
“I'd like to go, captain.” Halupalai addressed Moreau, his voice so level and unemotional it spooked her. Moreau looked at Kazaklis and shook her head slightly.
“I think we all need to see it,” Kazaklis said.
Suddenly the B-52 broke into brilliant sunshine, and below them they caught a split-second view of the flowing Waikiki surf, missing any sighting of the shoreline, and then they were at sea again. “What kind of mountains you got on that rock, Halupalai?” Kazaklis asked. The plane banked hard left now, back toward Diamond Head, and Kazaklis strained for a look out the left-hand window.
“Kaala's the big one, about four thousand feet.” The voice remained tour-guide monotone. “Don't worry about it. It's too far west.” In the distance Kazaklis could see Molokai, once the island of the lepers, perhaps thirty miles away. “Konahuanui about three thousand, Tantalus maybe two thousand, both should stay to your right coming over the top.” Light billowing clouds hovered over Molokai, making it postcard pretty.
The sight mesmerized Kazaklis as he replied, “Hokay, I'm taking it down just under two thousand so we can activate the terrain cameras.” Then, through the windows, he saw the debris in the water, enormous gobs of gunk floating toward the postcard image. “Jesus.” The stunned hush of his voice reverberated through all three helmets. Amid the crazy clutter of splintered wood and junk he saw tangled bodies, and an occasional arm seemed to wave out of the ocean at him. “Good Jesus.” They were halfway through the turn, the first computer images of Oahu dancing nonsensically on the green screens. Kazaklis, being in the left-hand seat, saw the real image first. “No,” he said, “no, no.”
Moreau moaned. “Get us out of here, Kazaklis,” she said, her voice sounding as if she were strangling in her mask.
Halupalai said nothing, his eyes transfixed just to the left of the pilot's helmet as the panorama of Diamond Head, then Waikiki, then Honolulu swept slowly across the cockpit window, the aircraft leveling out and coming straight in, low, at the island's edge.
Diamond Head still stood at the right, and the serene surf of Waikiki, its white curls starting almost a mile offshore, still rolled placidly toward the land. Not even gunk remained to spoil the waters. All else had changed. It was as if a great hand had sliced angrily at the man-made concrete jungle of towering beachfront hotels, creating a desert in its place. On the left, toward downtown Honolulu and Hickam Air Force Base, not even rubble remained. Toward the right and the majesty of the Head, the hand seemed to have grown weary of its task and left the litter in larger and larger mounds. At the end of the once magical Waikiki strip, and the foot of Diamond Head, the mounds were perhaps thirty feet high where thirty-story condominiums had stood. Behind it all, where the island rose toward the low Koolau Mountains dividing Oahu's windward and leeward sides, the smoke and fires began, clouding the view of the interior.
Of the three now silent people in the aircraft, only Halupalai had a real perception of the topography. But as he surveyed it, every nerve ending in his body dead now, it made no sense. Ocean water flowed where Hickam had been, widening the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor by perhaps a mile. A wall of still-smoldering earth stood at its edge like a levee holding the waters out of the no-man's-land that had been Honolulu International. There was absolutely no human movement in the city area, no sign that anything human had ever been there, and Halupalai drew his eyes away quickly, searching for something, anything, through the rapidly approaching smoke. The brown clouds billowed here, wafted there, depending on what was left to burn. The plane was coming straight in at the Punchbowl, the natural volcanic crater which had been made a national cemetery after the great war in the Pacific. Halupalai, his numbed nerves throbbing again, probed desperately for a sign of the natural crater's edge, seeking a glimpse of the endless rows of plain white markers over the last war's dead. But it wasn't there, the volcanic rim having been pushed over into the crater itself, creating a plateau, burying the long-dead deeper. Then they were in the smoke.
Kazaklis moved his eyes rapidly back and forth between the windows and his green screen. He throttled the plane back, but held it safely at well over stall speed. The altitude reading was eighteen hundred feet. The island was narrow here, eight to ten miles wide, and they'd be beyond it in a moment. Out the window, wind-whipped fires raged in the forests of the edge of the Koolau. On the screen the low peak of Tantalus passed by quickly and Konahuanui loomed above him on the right. The plane bumped badly. The green screen flashed the opening of the mountain pass, the Pali, dead ahead. The smoke gave way briefly, sunlight sparkling in as if it didn't belong, and the scenic wonder of the Pali opened ahead of them. In the pass, a few hundred feet below and just in front of them, they caught a quick glimpse of small and ragged bands of people waving, the sunlight glinting off their frantic signals. The Master Caution light flashed. Moreau punched it. Halupalai whimpered. The light flashed again. Moreau punched it. Out the side window she saw the signals were angry, the sunlight glinting off gun barrels. The violently bumping aircraft popped and cracked and shuddered.
“They're shooting at us!” she shrieked.
And then the people were gone, the smoke back.
“Get us out of here, Kazaklis!”
The pilot wrenched at the throttles and climbed. “We're on their side,” he murmured, disbelieving.
“No one is on their side,” Moreau said quietly. She hit the Master Caution button. And they climbed through the smoke, three people knowing they had been granted what they came here to get—a new view of the world, imprinted in their minds forever, be that minutes or years.
At Olney, the voice jarred the radio operator into excited attention, even though he didn't have the vaguest idea what the man was saying. The voice sounded scratchy, guttural—and Russian, for Christ's sake. It arrived on an ultra-high-frequency radiotelephone and he had not intercepted it. The call was meant for him. Briefly he floundered. Would he blow the spy's cover by responding in English? Ridiculous. He didn't speak a word of Russian and no one else in this place did either. He frantically
waved at a young woman passing his shock-and soundproof windows. “Pit Stop Two,” he said into the receiver. “You will need to speak English.” He heard a crackling noise on the radio. He saw the woman poke her head in the door. “Get the boss!” he snapped. “On the double!”
“Yes?” a new voice asked. “Am I speaking to the alternate command facility for the Federal Emergency Management Agency?” The words flowed at him in perfectly modulated American English of the kind used by late-news television announcers who had not yet learned the need for the tiny, calculated speech flaw that would set them apart and move them to prime time.
The radio operator floundered again, confused. “This is a priority channel”—that's rich, he thought, not having spoken to anyone all night—”you are required to identify yourself.”
“Certainly. I am Pyotr Krilenko, attache to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Premier is with me and must speak to your superior on a matter of utmost importance.”
The radio operator blanched. He could hear the Premier's guttural Russian instructions to the interpreter in the background. He turned and saw the director looking at him questioningly. At sixty-four, the Northeast regional civil-defense director was an embittered man, and had been long before 0600 Zulu. He played by the book. The single star given him by the Army, before he also was presented with his walking papers, was a testament to how well he played by the rules. He was not a risk-taker. He never understood that a second star, perhaps a third, might have come with that occasional risk. He took the radiophone matter-of-factly and listened briefly. His brow furrowed before speaking.
“We are at war, sir,” he said sternly, struggling for some truly historic response. Nothing occurred to him. “Under no circumstances would I supply such information to you.”
At the other end, two persons were on the phone. The first words came in irritable and occasionally angry Russian. Then they were translated flawlessly, but with the emotion removed, in the modulated tones of Pyotr Krilenko. Krilenko spoke in the first person, as if the words were coming directly from the Soviet Premier.
“I repeat, sir, I am not seeking information. I know the precise location of your E-4 aircraft. It is flying now over Jonesboro in the state of Arkansas.” The director flinched. The son of a bitch knew more than he did. “I ask you once again, on behalf of all humankind, to assist me in making radio contact with that aircraft.”
The director drew himself up militarily, not forgetting the presence of his young radio operator. “I will not confirm the existence of any aircraft,” he said.
“You will not provide a radio patch to the President, whom I know and you know is aboard the E-4 aircraft?”
“I will not confirm the existence of any aircraft,” he repeated, feeling satisfaction well up in him. Nicely handled.
“Will you, for the sake of both our nations, transmit a message to the E-4 aircraft informing the President that I wish to communicate with him directly?”
The director stared into the awestruck face of his radio operator. “Absolutely not,” he said. Then, more for the young radioman, he added: “I don't know who you are. You could be calling from Joe's Pizza Parlor.”
There was a pause and then the Russian words continued, more pensive than angry. “I am who I am,” the interpreter continued. “You, sir, are a fool.”
The director flushed. “I find that . . .” he blustered. “I find that incredibly insulting!”
Again the conversation paused. Then the Premier responded in brief and calm tones. The director could hear the interpreter questioning him quietly in Russian and the Premier responding insistently, “Da! Da!”
“What's going on?” the director demanded.
“The Premier wishes it to be said,” the interpreter replied, shifting out of the first person, “that he is surprised you find his words insulting. It would surprise him if you could find your rectum with both hands and a hunting dog.”
Kazaklis emerged from the smoke at twenty thousand feet as he swung westward around Kahuku Point, trying to avoid the un-needed horror of an outward flight over the floating death in the channel between Oahu and Molokai. In the distance he saw Halupalai's island, Kauai, glimmering flawlessly and invitingly due west and almost directly in front of them. Somehow, he had to thread the needle between Halupalai's personal trauma—a home lost—and the collective trauma of a second overflight of the obscene debris of Oahu—a civilization lost. They may have needed one look at that. They did not need two.
None of them had spoken since the emergency climb away from the Pah. The shock from what they had seen and the unexpected reception from their own dying people had numbed their sensibilities. Kazaklis and Moreau acted by rote. Halupalai, with nothing to do, sat stoically and apparently deep in thought. Kazaklis concentrated on getting the aircraft up and away from the mildly radioactive clouds so he could open the vents and get them off oxygen. Moreau sat rigidly at his right, methodically punching the Master Caution light over and over again like a catatonic resident of some asylum.
“What the fuck's the matter with that thing?” Kazaklis finally asked irritably. “Is it on the fritz again?”
The pilot's abrupt question jarred Moreau out of her trance. She had become so accustomed to pushing the button every time the plane bumped that it had not occurred to her that the light had been flashing since they pulled away from the mountain pass. She punched it again, watching it flicker and light up still one more time. Quickly she began checking the other instruments. She froze. “Something's wrong,” she said. “We show a fuel leak.”
“Instrument malfunction,” Kazaklis said tersely. “Check it again.”
“It's only a few minutes away, commander,” Halupalai said.
“Double checks,” Moreau said. “Wing tank. Number One.”
Kazaklis craned his neck to peer out the left window at the wingtip sweeping almost one hundred feet behind him. The tip pointed back toward the floating debris, back toward the grotesque skeleton of Honolulu, and Kazaklis refused to allow his eyes to focus beyond the sleek wing. The surface looked sludgy and gray. That was normal. Inside the wing, the latticework structure contained various interconnected fuel reservoirs. But he could not see anything out of the ordinary on the outside. “I can't see it,” he grumbled.
Kazaklis brought his eyes quickly back to the flight panel, oblivious to the shrouded island rapidly approaching from Moreau's side of the aircraft. In his preoccupation he did not see any of the emerald beauty of Kauai, the dark rain clouds hanging over its nearest shore, only a few layered shadows of ominous brown clouds moving toward them. Halupalai saw it.
“Just a quick fly-by, commander. You don't have to go down.”
A fly-by? They just made their fucking fly-by. The gunner's quiet request did not register properly in the pilot's preoccupied mind. He had other problems. Serious problems. Kazaklis checked the instruments. They confirmed a fuel leak.
“I think we took a hit,” Moreau said.
Halupalai scrambled out of the jump seat and hunched over the copilot. She could feel the big man's muscles grow tighter as he draped himself against her and pressed his helmet against the side window. “Come on!” Kazaklis snapped in disbelief. “From those little popguns?”
Moreau shrugged and felt her shoulders jam into Halupalai's soft gut. Briefly, his presence irritated her. Then she felt a quick surge of alarm. But it rapidly disappeared into the underground of her mind. “Kazaklis, you know damn well I could shove a pencil through the wing of this airplane,” she said, the skin of their aircraft being less than one-quarter inch thick. Halupalai stooped, entranced, over the side window. Far below, clouds obscured the little south-shore village in which he had grown up. “How many pounds we got in that tank?” Normal clouds, he told himself, for his island was the rainy island. “Sixty-five hundred.” Halupalai brushed his eyes and looked beyond the clouds. “Seal the connector valve.” Waimea Canyon opened
to him as it did when he was a child, Kalalau Valley beckoning far to the north with its high cliffs and low green wonderlands. “Done.” His eyes glistened, blurring his island and blurring his mind, so that he stood on the shore again and the wave swelled until his neck craned high to watch the sunlight filter through the perfect prism of its massive curl. “Vents open.” The wave crashed, thundering with the infinite power of nature, sending swirls of foam and churning coral bits and little messages from distances undreamed up around the small brown feet of a child long since taken into a different world. “Off oxygen.” He could feel the great aircraft turning. He leaned farther forward, watching his island slip away around the edge of the window, and then he saw the new crater at Kokee where he had played as a child and where the satellite-tracking station had been built much later. “Dammit, Halupalai, sit down!” He could hear the commander's words, feel Moreau pushing at him now. But he saw another new crater in the desert at Mana, where a child long ago had pressed a small brown face against a chain-link fence to stare curiously into a secret Air Force base. “Halupalai!” The pilot's arm grabbed at him. He saw another crater. And another. The ugly brown smoke drifted up the low green wonderlands of his valley, Kalalau. Halupalai drew himself up and turned around, unaware of his crewmates, and headed back into the privacy of his adopted world's redness.
Kazaklis and Moreau exchanged deeply worried glances. But Kazaklis also was trying to sort out his new problems. He knew their golden circle had tightened by several hundred miles. “So much for Australia,” he muttered. Moreau scowled, then turned to look into the shadows at Halupalai. She saw only the arching outline of his massive back. She looked again at Kazaklis and he shook his head slightly in worry. Then they went back to work, honing their new southwesterly course.
Kazaklis and Moreau removed their helmets, feeling the usual sense of relief at shedding the heavy headgear. They also pushed the aircraft upward through thirty-five thousand feet toward an economy altitude they needed more than ever now.
Trinity's Child Page 38
