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  Moreau stared straight ahead, ignoring him this time.

  Even the refueling problem was irrelevant. Of all the grand theories that had failed tonight, Kazaklis knew that he and the four others in Polar Bear One now were about to test the most dubious theory of all. That a thirty-year-old B-52 could somehow worm its way unseen into the heart of Russia and get out again. He knew the odds on that one—one hundred to one at best. This night, his throbbing skull told him, was not at best. He already had one dead crewman and another who was psyched into a jack-off world all his own. He could only guess about refueling tankers and communications. Of the six Buffs on alert at Fairchild, his was the only one still flying. That meant, he was sure, that of the hundred Buffs on alert tonight, maybe twenty were in the air. And that meant four thousand SAM missiles, plus countless fighter-interceptors, could pick away at twenty SAC bombers. The PRP psychiatrists would work him over good for that thought. The intercontinental missiles, they would counsel reassuringly, already had destroyed almost all the SAM bases. That's what they're for. Sure thing. So now we get to wander through fifteen hundred miles of radioactive fallout. The shrinks never answered that one. Are you afraid? they asked instead. No, Kazaklis was not afraid. But PRP had not freeze-dried his psyche to the point where he had any illusions. He knew, as all the bomber pilots knew, that once it went, it went. He knew that, for God and country, he now was a rational suicide. Contrary to the public's vision of nuclear war—one poof and it's all over—he now faced a ten-hour drone into Russia with sheer boredom and raw tension alternately ripping at frayed nerves and eating at trained minds, one threatening to drive them all nuts if the other didn't. His chore, as commander, was to hold them all together while they rationally committed suicide.

  “Banzai,” he said, grinding out the cigarette after the stub began burning his lips.

  “Pardon?” Moreau said, her voice still reeking with anger.

  “I said you're right. I'm an asshole. Report me to the Equal Rights Commission. But don't forget to tell them you're a pain in the asshole.” He stared into the curtains. “And give me a fuel reading.”

  Moreau glared at him. “Two hundred ninety-three thousand pounds,” she said curtly.

  The pilot seemed not to hear her as he moved the plane across Dawson Creek in northern British Columbia, then veered it slightly eastward, putting it on a bearing almost due north toward Great Bear Lake.

  The plane remained at forty-four thousand feet, an efficient if easily tracked altitude. The pilot assumed the Russians were watching them, but that was irrelevant. Coming over the Pole, any of the major cities in the Soviet Union were possible targets and the Russians could only guess at their destination. Although Leningrad and Vladivostok were five thousand miles apart on opposite Soviet coasts, Polar Bear One could reach either city with an arrival-time difference of no more than half an hour. The Russians would be expecting a Western-based plane to go for the Siberian coastal city with its array of military targets. It so happened that neither Vladivostok nor Leningrad was their primary. But the time for diversion, for hiding in the weeds at low level, would come later. Their progress was methodical and scrupulously planned, taking them slowly, speed not being one of the Buffs virtues, toward a rendezvous point where a tanker would or would not be waiting.

  “Roger, two hundred ninety-three thousand pounds,” Kazaklis repeated the fuel reading.

  Almost half-empty, Kazaklis thought.

  More than half-full, the shrinks in his mind replied.

  Enough to get to the primary target and limp, perhaps, a few hundred miles away into the Siberian wastes, Kazaklis thought.

  More than enough to make the low-level raid on the great dam on the Angara River, take out the industrial complex at Irkutsk, and destroy the troop placements and nuclear reactor at Ulan-Ude, the shrinks replied.

  Not enough for the escape to the northern Chinese city of Tsitsihar, Kazaklis thought.

  “Wishing you hadn't elbowed in front of my roomie, commander?” Moreau broke into his reverie.

  “Are you EWO ready?” Kazaklis replied.

  “Peace is my profession, commander.”

  “Flying off valiantly to save the American way, huh?”

  “Hamburgers, baseball, and vaginal sprays, commander.”

  “Flavored?” Kazaklis asked.

  “You like relish?” Moreau parried innocently.

  “Never tried it,” Kazaklis continued.

  “Thought you'd tried everything.”

  “Oh,” Kazaklis rebutted in mock surprise, “you meant hamburgers.”

  “Your mind's only in one place, Kazaklis.”

  “You think the Russkies targeted 'em?”

  “Ground zero at Golden Arches? Ending the record at sixty billion burgers?”

  “No, no, no. Hitting the strategic stockpiles of mountain-flowers fragrance.”

  “It sure would turn the American way upside down.”

  “You mean right side up.”

  Moreau gave up, the anger dissipating in a slow, rumbling laugh. “Kazaklis, I don't know where you were hatched. But you're a sketch. A real prick. But a sketch.”

  Kazaklis changed the subject abruptly. “Are you afraid, Moreau?”

  Moreau turned and looked at him, her one good eye piercing through the red lights and framing the pilot's clear, serious face. He stared back, his brown eyes steady and unsmiling. “No,” she said.

  “Why are you here?” he asked curiously.

  “To be with you, you charmer, you,” Moreau purred, although cat's claws scratched through the softness. “Could there be any other reason?”

  The psychiatrists would have nodded in satisfaction. Tension was good for PRP. Diverting. Even the loss of O'Toole was good for PRP. The dispatching of O'Toole gave Halupalai something to do with his time. And while Kazaklis and Moreau sniped at each other in their station up front, Halupalai played alone with his new toys in the now lonely station at the rear of the upstairs compartment.

  The big bomber carried various defense systems, none of them giving SAC crews a great sense of comfort. It carried heat flares that might, just might, draw a Soviet missile away from the hot exhaust of the B-52's engines. It carried bundles of chaff, a sophisticated form of the same tinfoil that World War II pilots used to confuse early radar and some joyriding teenagers used to confound cops in their highway radar traps. Packaged in the right patterns, it might, just might, temporarily distract an attacking MIG. It also carried powerful radar-jamming equipment the Soviets had been breaking down regularly, and the Americans had been upgrading as often, in a thirty-year cat-and-mouse game of technological escalation and counterescalation. The defenses were the responsibility of the Electronics Warfare Officer, who, as the PRP psychiatrists would have put it, was now inoperative. PRP people didn't like the word “dead.” Icarus was inoperative. So was O'Toole. But not Halupalai. In fact, Halupalai was having the time of his life.

  With a verve he hadn't felt since those ancient touchdown runs, the big Hawaiian raced to the rhythm of his new sport. He fired several decoy flares into the void over British Columbia. Hot damn! He wished he'd had those in Nam! Once again he saw the gray intruder racing up out of a bed of cotton-candy clouds far below. Once again he saw the finned threat scar his magnificent landscape, rape his serene world. But this time the shark flash of the Russian missile darted away from the engines of his Buff and suckered into the heat of the flare instead.

  “Whoo-o-e-e-e!” Halupalai exulted, and Kazaklis looked back over his shoulder with a silly grin at the joyfully swaying back of the old man of the aircraft.

  Halupalai's mind raced with fervor. This was good stuff! No more rat-a-tat pop guns for him! Now he knew why the kids, even big kids like Kazaklis, stood glaze-eyed in front of the blip-blip of the computer games while the Amazon Lady and her ancient pinball technology flashed forlornly alone in arcade corners. Now he understood why the generals loaded up their fighters with so many computer toys the pilots couldn't handle
them all. This was fun! This was the future! At the console in front of him he rambunctiously triggered a quick combination that dumped several dozen bundles of antiradar chaff from the belly of the cruising bomber. Broad Slavic faces, bubble-framed in the cockpit canopies of their MIG interceptors, frowned in dismay as they twisted their supersonic fighters this way and that in chase of phantoms. Hot damn!

  “Bandits! Bandits!” The voice, startled and panic-stricken, burst through the radio channels. “On our butt! We got bandits all over our butt!”

  Halupalai froze at the emergency call from below. Then a cackle shattered into his earphones.

  “Halupalai's playing with the tinfoil, Radnor,” Kazaklis said, his voice bubbling with laughter.

  “Damn you, Halupalai,” Radnor said, embarrassed again.

  “I gotta practice,” Halupalai said sheepishly.

  “Gum wrappers, Radnor,” Kazaklis interjected. “You just got attacked by a squadron of gum wrappers.”

  “Oh, shit,” Radnor said, running his hand through sandy hair above a freckled face that had turned red without the assistance of the night lights.

  “Well, whaddaya think?” Kazaklis continued. “Did the American taxpayer get his money's worth out of the great tinfoil race? Or do we still have a Gum Wrapper Gap?”

  Radnor remained silent.

  “Come on,” Kazaklis insisted. “It's the greatest untold story of the cold war. The taxpayer spent billions closing the bomber gap, the missile gap, and the window of vulnerability. He needs to know. How about the gum wrappers?”

  Needing the relief, Moreau suddenly cut in. “We spent millions,” she said, “probing the secrets of SAM missiles captured by the Israelis.”

  “Slipping CIA moles into Russian electronics plants,” Kazaklis added.

  “Sweating Soviet defectors in safe houses all over the Washington suburbs,” Moreau pushed onward.

  “Seducing East German scientists with voluptuous blonds trained in . . . well . . . radar technology,” Kazaklis continued.

  “All to stay ahead in the escalating tinfoil race,” Moreau said seriously.

  “All to find out if the gum wrappers worked,” Kazaklis intoned. “Well, Radnor? Come on, this is crucial. This is a need-to-know situation.”

  Radnor stared sullenly at his fluttering radar screen. He had been through the joke about the Gum Wrapper Gap before. But he wasn't feeling funny.

  “Well?” Kazaklis insisted again.

  “I dunno, commander,” Radnor replied dully. “It startled me. To tell you the truth, it looked like we was being swarmed by a flock of starlings.”

  “Hmmmm.” Kazaklis pondered. “Messy little buggers, aren't they? Crap all over everything. Well, gang, foiled again.”

  “Ohhhh,” Moreau groaned at the pun.

  “Well,” Kazaklis said, “it's pretty tough to make a bunch of gum wrappers look like the biggest bomber in the world.”

  Halupalai grunted this time, not liking the put-down of his new responsibilities.

  “That's okay, Electronics Warfare Sarge,” Kazaklis said. “Next time try Spearmint.”

  “Or Dentyne,” piped in Moreau. “At least it'll smell better back there in the locker room.”

  Halupalai laughed. So, finally, did Radnor. The omnipresent shrinks, always aboard in the spirit of their works, would have been pleased. Humor was good for PRP. Distracting. Helped make the system work.

  Halupalai returned to his chores. The tinfoil was designed to fool fighters. Now he cautiously tested the powerful radar-jammer that should blind ground tracking stations. From forty-four thousand feet the electronic rays poured silently and unseen for hundreds of miles down and out from the B-52, blanketing the Canadian wilderness beneath them.

  In the basement, next to Radnor, the navigator was talking to his son. Reach for the sky, boy! Tyler's fingers reached out toward the wide blue eyes, gently stroking the child's pink cheek. The sky's yours, Timmie. Daddy will take you there, where you can fly high, proud. . . . Below the photograph, Tyler's radar screen erupted in a frenzy of crazily jumbled signals and his temper erupted, too. Irresponsible sonuvabitch!

  “Dammit, Halupalai! Knock that horseshit off! You'll screw up every civilian air controller from Edmonton to Juneau. They'll roast our royal rears when we get back!”

  Halupalai instinctively turned off the jammer. Then he wondered why he was taking orders from Tyler. Then he shrugged it off. No one offered a joke. No one said a word, and they flew on silently, northward.

  Kazaklis rarely went into the woods again. He held tough in school, mainly to avoid being dragged off with his old man. In his spare time, he took to cruising the pinball emporiums, then the pool halls, then the back-room poker games. Pretty soon they said the kid could tune a flipper, palm an ace, too, the way his old man could read the woods. He came back to the weathered old house on the Coos late each night, long after Big Kazaklis was shaking the rafters with that Jim Beam snore. By the time the kid was sixteen they said he could hustle a fiver out of anyone in Coos Bay, just as he could hustle the shorts off anything female. Almost anything female.

  Sarah Jean was a wisp of gossamer, her golden curls flouncing down over tight teenage breasts the way they did in those slow-motion shampoo commercials. She carried him into another world, as if she held the magic to draw him out of the murk of the Coos and into Clairol's fantasyland where the sun always shone, the flowers always bloomed, and a soft wind always tousled the high grass of perfect meadows just as it tousled perfect curls. Sarah Jean was too flawless for poon—how his pa chortled at that—and the closest the captivated kid ever came to her shorts was the tender touch of hands, the tentative move of a sinewy arm over a cashmere sweater. Never had he held anyone—anything— in such awe.

  For most of his last year at high school, Sarah Jean drew him out of the pool halls and the card rooms. He watched her at the football games, the princess of the Coos, a cheerleader, the tight breasts bouncing as she leaped—rah! rah! Then it was the basketball games, where she also leaped—rah! rah!—the slender thighs spreading exuberantly in a winter cheer. But she was too good and too pure for the usual spread, and the thought barely invaded his mind. He did not go with her to the proms and the sock hops. His pa's old truck was not good enough for that and he understood, just as he understood when she went with others. That would change, just like the poon, when they finally left the sullen Coos. Together.

  For months it went on, with I love you returned by I love you, with long unwatched drives in the rattletrap old Ford truck and longer walks down the majestic dunes where the mist always lifted for Sarah Jean. With her, he recaptured his vision of the future. At the shore they would walk to the highest dune and they would sit, amid the sand ripples and the rustling reeds, dreaming and staring far out to sea, into tomorrow, into the escape they both wanted. They would lie back and watch the jet contrails carry other dreamers to distant alabaster cities, knowing that they would be carried away too. Together.

  It was the night before graduation that Sarah Jean told him. They stood on the dunes, the sun setting in a brilliant spring evening, and she said she was not going with him. She would make the trip into the world with the president of their class—a kid with glasses, for God's sake; but a kid with a scholarship to Stanford, a sure ticket out—and they would be married the next week. Kazaklis stared into the falling sun and knew the reason was his pa's old truck, no ticket that, but he turned toward her anyway with cow-brown eyes dying and disbelieving.

  “Why, Sarah Jean?” he asked, his words strangled in pain.

  “Nothing is forever,” she said simply, and the sun sank.

  “Why not?” he begged, but the pain broke his voice and he couldn't wait for an answer because the tears were welling and he couldn't let her see them. He couldn't let anyone see. So he ran. To the truck. He clattered up the river road, past the old moss-covered house to the trailhead, leaped out and raced into the woods, where it was raining. And he built a fire in the rain, using pit
ch as his pa had taught him—damn his pa—and he sat through the night, crying.

  The next night he graduated, miracle everyone said that was, and took a hustled twenty down to the Sportsmen's and laid it on the felt in front of Nikko. Her talons flicked the Bicycles at him, his fingernails deftly nicking a few edges, and the twenty turned to fifty. Which he pushed across the felt, knowing it was twice the price. The next morning, at the house on the Coos, the raven lady's clinging black trousers were hanging from the antlers over the door. Pinned to the kid's trophy was a note saying he was joining the Air Force because he didn't want to get drafted and muck around in the woods in Nam the way he had mucked around in the woods of the Coos. The real reason was that he wanted to ride the jet contrails. It was a long while before Kazaklis learned that Sarah Jean's first baby had been born just six months later. He never allowed himself to see wisps of gossamer again.

  The radio silence became oppressive. For thirty minutes none of them spoke to each other, except for the occasional monotone course corrections from Tyler. And nothing had come in from the outside.

  Moreau, even though she had been through this dozens of times before in long droning practice runs, felt fidgety. She squirmed in her seat, shifting against the discomfort of her parachute pack and finally relenting against the weight of her bulbous white helmet, lifting it off so her jet-black hair spilled over the fireproof green of her shoulders. She ran an ungloved hand through the hair, giving it a finger comb, and arched her back to loosen the taut muscles.

  It was an inadvertently sensual show and Kazaklis cast a sidelong glance at her, surreptitiously, as if he had caught her in the shower. Without the helmet, she was a woman, all right, and a pretty one, he had to admit. Her face had a soft glow in the red light and the one blank eye gave her what Kazaklis suddenly saw as a mutated beauty, as if she had been transformed from moth to butterfly.

  Shake your head, Kazaklis. Bitch to witch is more like it. Last-woman-in-the-world syndrome.

  Moreau, pensive and restless, suddenly broke the silence. “We gonna make it?” she asked, not seeking confirmation as much as conversation.