Halupalai had not been back in the redness more than five minutes before he decided to go home. In that short time his mind took a thousand life trips, following a thousand tangled paths all leading to dead ends. Then it returned to the equally dead red cubicle in which he seemed forever entombed. And so he decided to go home, back to a place where the coral bits would wash up around sun-browned feet, back to a world of blue lagoons that made room for dark gray fins and small boys, too.
Quickly and efficiently, as he had done in Vietnam, Halupalai reached for the small green oxygen bottle he would need for the ride down. He attached it, snapped the mask back over his face, and pulled the green ball that released the last artificial air he ever wanted to breathe. It flooded his lungs, causing a brief moment of headiness again. He placed one hand over the ejection lever and used the other to close his helmet visor. He began to disconnect the radio wire so he would not whiplash on the way out. He paused, the guilt and shame enveloping him briefly, and reached for the radio switch. “I'm sorry,” he said. Then he quickly disconnected the radio with one hand and hit the lever with the other. Kazaklis and Moreau did not have time to turn around.
Forty thousand feet above the ocean, and thirty-five miles from his boyhood island, the air slammed into Halupalai at almost six hundred miles an hour. He was protected somewhat—by his helmet and the steel seat that had shot out of the top of the aircraft with him. The temperature, even in these latitudes, was seventy below zero. But he did not feel the cold. The jolt knocked him unconscious immediately, and also broke the arm he had used to disconnect the radio wire after his brief farewell. He tumbled, his body tucked in fetus form, end over end, downward. He would fall in that manner for more than thirty-thousand feet. Then, below ten-thousand feet, the parachute would pop. That much was a virtual certainty. The parachute rarely failed. The body often did. In any case, the chute then would waft him slowly down into the cradle of the sea.
In the aircraft, Kazaklis and Moreau heard a tremendous thunderclap, although, in truth, there were two claps, one following the other so quickly their ears could not make the differentiation.
The first came from the small explosive charge that propelled Halupalai away. The second came almost simultaneously from the rapid decompression of the aircraft, the oxygen being sucked out of the B-52 almost as rapidly as Halupalai had left. With the instant change in pressure, all other loose items rushed out of the upper compartment—charts, manuals, alert bags, unfinished box lunches. Tyler's body swept up through the well and out the hole above the gunner's seat. O'Toole's body jammed in the well and kept Radnor aboard, too. In the cockpit, a fog briefly clouded the fliers' vision as all on-board water vaporized. Both the pilot's and the copilot's fingertips began to turn blue, although not from the cold. Almost instantly, both Kazaklis and Moreau began suffering acutely from the symptoms of hypoxia. At this altitude they had fifteen, perhaps twenty seconds to take supplemental oxygen. After that their brains would cease functioning with any rationality. A few seconds later they would be unconscious. Shortly after that, they would be dead. Kazaklis and Moreau were well-trained to recognize the deadly effects of hypoxia, but the condition is subtle and hypnotic, affecting airmen much the way nitrogen overload affects scuba divers. Its symptoms are lightheadedness, euphoria, well-being, even eroticism. And so Kazaklis, his tired but now soaring mind recalling the warmth and pleasure of Moreau's unexpected bear hug, reached for his copilot's thigh instead of his oxygen.
Fourteen
1800 ZULU
Sedgwick glanced fuzzily at the clock—1720 Zulu—flinched, and then moved his eyes to the President, who lay near him. The I.V. still hung above the man's arm just as an I.V. hung above his. Sedgwick shifted uncomfortably in the wetness of his bed. Beneath his buttocks the I.V. tubing dripped slowly and steadily, the serum solution and the last dose of morphine washing through his sheet and soaking into the mattress as it had for the past half-hour. His eyes moved slowly from the President's I.V. bag to his. The solution was depleting at the same rate. That was a good sign. He followed his own tubing down beneath the top sheet where he had moved his right arm. A small spot of blood stained the sheet where he had pulled back the medical tape and foggily removed the tubing from his arm. The President moaned slightly and babbled a few incoherent words. Across the room the nurses stopped their conversation, looked at the man, and began to draw another small dose of the peace-giving drug they would inject directly into the tube running into the President's veins. Sedgwick flailed at his bedsheets and screamed, now wanting to draw attention to himself and away from the President. The nurses moved to Sedgwick first, one to each side of the bed.
“Hey, there, sailor,” said the one on the left, placing a calming hand on his head.
“What the hell is this?” demanded the one on the right, as she prepared to insert the hypodermic into the tubing above the revealing bloodstain.
Sedgwick forced his clouded mind and hurting body to function together. His right hand darted from beneath the sheet and grasped the nurse's wrist, twisting until the hypodermic clattered to the floor. He reared up painfully and lunged at the other nurse, grabbing her by the neck of the dress, ripping the fabric. Both nurses reared back, stunned.
The nurse on the left screamed urgently. “Help us! For God's sake, someone help us!”
Sedgwick lunged again, shredding the front of her dress until she was naked to the waist. He twisted the fabric in a lock around his hand. “Shut up!” he ordered. “Shut up and listen!” He fumbled briefly for the most compelling words. “We're going to die,” he said.
“You're not going to die,” the nurse on the right said, nervously trying to calm him. “Let us give you something for the pain, sir.”
“Fuck the pain!” He could hear the noise of someone approaching from another room. “Listen to me! Stop the President's morphine!” The hurting was beginning to overwhelm him, but he fought it back down.
The nurse on the left whimpered. The nurse on the right persisted in trying to soothe him. “You don't want him to suffer.” She brought her free hand down on his chest and pushed. He wrenched at her arm again.
“Screw the suffering!” His words began to gush as he heard others approach. “There's not enough morphine in the world to stop the suffering! Don't you understand? It's better that he hurt! You must understand, damn you! Damn you . . . damn you . . . can't you understand . . . ?”
Sedgwick felt someone roughly pulling his arms away from the nurses. He sagged back, closing his eyes and yielding briefly to the pain. He reopened them slowly. A man held him down. On his left the nurse had withdrawn, sobbing lightly and covering her breasts with her arms. On his right the other nurse stared at him angrily, curiously. Sedgwick's eyes begged now. “Please hear me,” he pleaded. “You were outside. You saw. You have no idea what can still happen. He must be able to think. To feel. Please understand. . . .” All the strength began to ebb out of him. “Please . . .” he muttered. The nurse's face blurred. He felt her patting him on the shoulder. He thought he saw her fuzzy face nod comfortingly. But by that time he was well on his way out again.
Alice clenched Smitty's shoulder, and the pilot turned away from the unshielded cockpit windows—away from the smoke and crud floating over the Ozarks—and looked up at his commanding officer. “You doing okay, general?”
Alice smiled. “It's my job to ask you that, Smitty.”
“Oh, I'm doing all right,” the pilot said. “You ever think it would be this way, sir?”
“Tell you the truth, Smitty, I don't know what I thought.”
“No, I guess none of us did.”
“I'm very proud of you, old friend. All of you people.”
The pilot turned back to his work and said nothing. They were in an extremely hot area, flying directly through the radioactive debris floating away from the crater-gouging attack on the Missouri Minuteman fields. Even with the vents closed, the radiation ate at them now. The general shuddered. It would not kill him. He
would go much faster now that his new course was set for a deadly midair meeting with Condor. But he shuddered nevertheless and forced his thoughts back to his crew, of whom he was immensely proud.
Alice had come close to not telling his staff, letting Sam and the cockpit crew know and allowing the rest to carry on routinely. Sam had wagged his head at the thought, and he had been correct. The crew was too tight a group, confined in quarters too small, confined too many months and years in a life too otherworldly for any of them to have missed the dynamics of the decision. Or to have misunderstood—even in the sodden depression that pervaded the airplane after their orderly military world had been shattered by his earlier decision. They had accepted the new decision sadly and fatalistically—but without a single objection. A few moments ago, when the Looking Glass passed over the devastated missile fields, the crew had filed into the cockpit one by one. They had peered down into the moonscape of the once pastoral Missouri farmland, saw crater overlapping crater where the missiles had been planted with other crops. Then they had returned quietly to work. He understood their need for that. It gave meaning to this final mission.
“Where is the E-4 now, Smitty?” Alice asked.
“About a hundred miles away, sir. North of Memphis. Circling over the river on the Arkansas-Tennessee border.”
“They'll spot us pretty soon.”
“Yes, sir. Figure it out, too.”
“Yes, I know.”
The pilot of the E-4 had kept his windows unscreened since dawn, shortly before the grotesque scene with Harpoon. He had a dull, nagging headache. He took the eyepatch off one eye and placed it over the other. He was having a difficult time keeping the aircraft out of the dirty clouds. The flight was becoming more unreal than he had dreamed in his worst nightmares. The sporadic clouds moved to higher and higher altitudes, better for the people below, not good for them. Far below, the Mississippi Valley lay quiet and placid, seemingly as untouched as a day ago.
Untouched. He shivered as he thought of the admiral. The poor bugger must have gone over the side. He didn't know the admiral well, a swabbie in among all the flyboys. But he had seemed like a steady, level man. Christ, this kind of pressure could get to anybody. He double-checked the position of the Looking Glass. Was everybody going bananas? Why had Alice brought the plane so near them? They were scarcely a hundred miles away. And closing on him. He tried to radio the Looking Glass one more time. No response again. He went to the intercom. On the other end, the Librarian seemed momentarily puzzled. Then he shrieked at the pilot: “Evade him! Run for it!” The pilot's head throbbed. Evade him? It made no sense for the Looking Glass to crowd them, to come in where one missile could get them both. It made less sense to start a panicky run away from the SAC command plane. Especially in this environment. He took the aircraft out of its circle and headed east. But he did not do it in a beeline. He continued to avoid the clouds.
Something godawful had happened. The aircraft had decompressed. Kazaklis knew that, but he didn't care. He felt too good. She felt too good. In front of him the azure blue of the sky bathed him, soothed him, entranced him. His hand moved slowly on her thigh, incredibly sensitive fingers probing each taut muscle, each sensuous sinew. The sinews seemed to ripple in response, drawing him farther. Five seconds had passed.
She struggled, her senses sending conflicting messages. Her mind was sludgy, her body not. Her first thought was that the bullet had done it, illogically, irrationally chewing a hole in the pressurized crew compartment long after it had been fired. Her second thought came from a different part of her body, the lonely, aching part that had reached out earlier. The hand massaged deadened cords suddenly alive. She wanted to die this way, in euphoria and ecstasy. She turned and leaned left. Ten seconds had passed.
Kazaklis turned also, and looked at her. Moreau's face was haloed and shimmering, her eyes a ravishing match of sparkling sapphire and uncut diamond. He leaned toward her, brushing past lightning-bolt jewelry. Her lips were blue. She was dying. He touched her face. She slumped, raven lady, into his lap.
“No-o-o-o!” he screamed. Frantically he lurched at his dangling oxygen mask, drawing it to his face first, not out of selfishness but out of rigid training. If he went, she went, and he was going fast. He took one breath, then another and another, the raw oxygen driving ecstasy out and some sensibility in. Moreau's head lay peacefully between his legs, her eyes barely open. Another three or four seconds had passed, but Kazaklis had gained a few. He quickly drew the mask from his face and stretched it down into his lap, over hers. He pulled her partly upright and looked into her face. She wobbled back out of insensibility, briefly into the rapture again, and then flashed pure fear at him. Now he was going again. He had trouble finding the radio button. He couldn't remember her name. “Get. . . on . . . your . . . own . . .” Each word required a monumental effort. He took the mask away, roughly shoving her back toward her seat. He breathed. His peripheral vision was gone, narrowed into a tight tunnel, and he couldn't see her. The aircraft had nosed over slightly, the air speed increasing, and he pulled back on the wheel to level it. He could do no more. He breathed deeply and wasn't certain whether the light-headedness was coming from the hypoxia or the sudden gush of oxygen. Slowly, so agonizingly slowly, his senses returned. Twenty, thirty seconds passed. Moreau. That was her name. Moreau!
He turned suddenly toward her in alarm. She sat with her shoulders hunched, the mask clasped over her face, staring straight ahead. They said nothing for a full minute—well beyond the recovery time, the brain responding almost as soon as the blood circulated the oxygen upward from their lungs. Then Moreau said, “Unseasonably cold for Hawaii, isn't it?” Her voice was strained, but together they began to take the aircraft down where they could breathe.
Minutes later, Halupalai's parachute opened at eight thousand feet, jerking him out of six miles of free fall. He did not feel it. He was alive but still unconscious. He awakened minutes later as his boots slammed into the sea, his weight taking him down toward the depths, then his buoyancy popping him back to the surface. His island was gone, lost over the horizon, obscured by the swells. But Halupalai was not looking for his island. He was looking for the choppers. He was not bobbing in the mid-Pacific but in the South China Sea, as he had the last time he pulled the lever so long ago. With his good arm, he activated his rescue beacon. The Air Force would risk fifty men to pull one downed flier out of the drink. Soon the silence would be broken by the distantly accelerating whump-whump-whump of the rescue team. The rope would come down, the divers, too, joining him in the swells. He waited confidently.
Several hundred miles to the southwest, the beleaguered captain of the newly commissioned nuclear carrier Ticonderoga heard no distress calls and sent out no search plane. His ship carried the proud name of a mothballed carrier from the previous great war. But the routine shakedown cruise had become a nightmare of a kind that no previous war, no training in Annapolis, could have prepared him for.
Shortly before 0600 Zulu, not long after sunset last night in these waters, America's vast military communications network had filled his radio room with a babble of escalating alert messages. Then they stopped, almost precisely as he saw the first eerie flare of light far over the horizon. Twenty minutes later he saw a second and larger flare, then several more. He knew little of the condition of the world. But he knew that Pearl, his next port of call, was no longer there. He also knew that, for him and his crew of four thousand, Pearl Harbor's disappearance was irrelevant. They would never reach a safe harbor, Pearl or any other. They had spent the night, and now the morning hours, frantically dodging Soviet attack submarines. They had peppered the waters around them with nuclear depth charges. He had sent out wave after wave of search aircraft. But he was losing.
The captain nervously tapped his fingers on the papers in front of him. A weather advisory warned him of a tropical storm approaching from the southwest. Briefly the old sailor in him said run for the storm and its cover. The new sailor told h
im there was no cover anywhere. He shuffled through the papers, glancing at the single terse message he had received from the outside since 0600. A priority all-listeners order to bring down a stray B-52. He shook his head wearily. What kind of jackasses were running the show up there? He had a nuclear-powered Victor-class Soviet attack sub on his butt. He was a dead man. And they wanted him to look for Buffs in the mid-Pacific?
Sedgwick awakened in a panic. The clock read 1750 Zulu. How much time could they possibly have? He turned toward the President, and his heart sank. The man lay quietly on his back, the I.V. still feeding into his arm. He reached out toward him and felt the tug of the tubing reinserted in his arm. He fell back and groaned in despair. A cool, comforting hand caressed his forehead. “Easy. Easy. It's going to be all right now.”
Sedgwick stared bleakly into the nurse's sad smile. “Why?” he asked. “Why can't I make you understand?”
“I do understand,” she said softly. “No more morphine.”
Sedgwick's eyes darted to the President's intravenous tube, then to his own. His legs throbbed. He looked back at the nurse in confusion.
“Blood serum,” she said. “Nothing else. He's going to hurt, but he's going to think.”
Sedgwick closed his eyes. “Bless you,” he said. “God bless you.”
The nurse looked at him desolately. “Is it going to do any good?”
“I don't know, miss. I really don't know.” Sedgwick had no idea how SIOP had scheduled the submarines. He was reasonably certain the President did not know either, having had no time for detail before the mad dash out of the White House to Nighthawk One. But Sedgwick knew there was a schedule. In his mind he could see them lurking, ready. He was Navy, and there always was a schedule for the submarines. At 1750 Zulu, it couldn't be far off.
Trinity's Child Page 39
