Trinity's Child Page 14

  Kazaklis chuckled. “Wull, uh, golly gee, I dunno, ma'am,” he mocked her. “You think we have time?”

  Moreau's face snapped left to glare at him; then she merely shook her head in despair. “Kazaklis, I think you'd go to the Last Supper with your fly open.”

  “You shock me,” the pilot replied gravely. “There are limits.”

  “I'm glad to hear that.”

  “That was a men-only outfit, Moreau. The way it was meant to be.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You know your history.”

  “Well, we're making it now . . .” Moreau abruptly caught herself, trying to avoid that trap again. “History, Kazaklis, making history.”

  Some of the bravado seemed to drain out of the pilot's voice as he replied, “Making it or ending it.”

  The plane bumped, a good solid whack of clear-air turbulence, and Moreau automatically reached forward to reset the flashing yellow Master Caution light. She sagged back, pulling at a strap that was pinching at her chest, and saw that Kazaklis didn't notice this time. He seemed lost in thought.

  “Do you care, Kazaklis?”

  “I'm trained not to care. Just like you, Moreau. Just like all of us. PRP uber alles. Six little, six little, six little robots, flying off to war.”

  “Five little robots.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever think much about PRP?”

  “Only when the colonel stares into my bloodshot eyes at oh-eight-hundred.”

  “Like today.”

  “It's such bullshit. Who got the only B-52 off the ground at Fairchild?”

  “I don't mean that part. Not whether you should show up in the morning swallowing aspirin with Listerine. Not the part about writing letters to your congressman or fighting with your husband.”

  “Wife. The regs say wife.”

  Moreau ignored him. “The sanity part,” she continued. “The part that's designed to make sure that insane men won't throw the switch and sane men will.”

  “You want insane men doing it?”

  “You think sane men would do it?”

  Kazaklis, the commander, flinched. He looked at Moreau very carefully. Then he gurgled up a slow, mad cackle and flamboyantly placed his right hand inside his half-open flight jacket. “Josephine, ma chere,” he said in a brutalized French accent, “Pear-ee is yours for zee bidding, Moscow mine for zee taking.”

  “You tried that once before, Nap,” Moreau replied caustically. “In the winter. Froze your pecker, as I recall, giving half the feminine population of Paris a badly needed rest.”

  “A rest? Chere, my poor chere. How little you knew in those days. How, my dear Josephine, did you think I thawed it out?”

  “Okay, okay, okay. PRP's working just fine. It's got you acting like Napoleon and Tyler acting sane. I'm not sure which worries me more. We've got ourselves an Earth-to-Mars case in the basement. He's really spaced out.”

  Kazaklis looked nervously at the radio-channel dial to make sure they were on private, a channel which other crewmen could, but rarely did, interrupt.

  “He's numb. He's denying. And he's functioning. That's the way it's supposed to work.”

  “I'll remind you of that when he wakes up. Meanwhile, Halupalai's too spooked about his own future, about getting too old to do all this, to do any thinking at all. Too old. Now, that is funny. And Radnor's too mesmerized by his oath to God and country.”

  “That's PRP, pal. Five little robots, programmed differently but heading in the same direction, flying off to war.” Kazaklis, the commander, paused for a moment. “Or is it four?” His voice went flat and strained.

  “You'd love that, wouldn't you, macho man?” Moreau pronounced it Match-O, with a bite. “Got your hand on your forty-five? No, PRP's got me hooked, too. Proving I'm one of the boys, just as Match-O as Captain Shazam.”

  “There, along with Maggie Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, goes the theory that rule by the womb will save mankind.”

  “But that's what we robots five are doing, commander,” Moreau said. “Remember?”

  “Saving mankind from the Red Menace,” Kazaklis responded. “Better dead than Red.”

  “We're deterring war, Kazaklis. Did you forget?” She added the last line with a bite. Kazaklis sat silently a moment, then laughed. She turned away abruptly, angry again.

  “Reminds me of my first SAC briefing.” Kazaklis ignored her, continuing to chuckle. “Colonel gave us the full works—failure of deterrence, men, means the failure of our mission! We are here to prevent war, not fight it. But one of the new guys pops up: 'Does that mean if it all starts we don't have to go?' Jesus. You'd think the Russians had just infiltrated a commissar onto the Command Balcony. The colonel wriggled like he had a SAM up his behind. 'Son,' he said, the others being men, of course, 'are you on Dris-tan?'“

  “And you never saw him again,” Moreau said.

  “Nope.”

  “Probably the sanest one in the room. You tell him nuclear war is insane. So the world goes nuts and he asks if it's sane or insane to go nuts with it. Not exactly an illogical question.”

  “Sanity is what everybody else is doing, Moreau.”

  “Right. Like Jonestown. Nine hundred little robots marching up to the Kool-Aid barrel. Like the arms race. Crazy to build fifty thousand nuclear weapons. But if everybody else is doing it, it's crazy not to build them. That means mass suicide is sane. It's crazy to do it, but if everybody is doing it, it's sane. Right?”

  “You think too much, college girl,” Kazaklis said. Suddenly he didn't like this. At all.

  “Getting a little close to home?”

  “You on Dristan?” the commander asked, his voice betraying no humor at all. “Be careful. PRP would give you the hook right now. Pull your ejection lever.”

  “When we get back, you can report me to PRP while I'm turning you in to the Equal Rights Commission.” She paused. “Dristan. You never did understand the narcotic, did you? Pumping your goddamn quarters into that goddamn machine. You got better. It got better.” She paused again. “Who won, Kazaklis?”

  Kazaklis looked at her curiously, then very carefully. He wanted her to stop. Now. But Moreau, caught up in it all, went on.

  “Remember Yossarian in Catch-22? Only sane man in a crazy world. So sane they thought he was crazy. He didn't want to fly his B-25 on any more of those World War II suicide runs. So he told the shrinks he was crazy. And why do you think you're crazy, Yossarian? Because I don't want to fly anymore. Then you must be sane, because it's crazy to want to fly into flak and Messerschmitts. You mean you think I'm crazy but if I'm crazy enough to want to stop flying I must be sane because it's crazy to want to fly? That's right, Yossarian. Catch-22.”

  “Next,” Kazaklis said wearily, “you'll tell me B-25 spelled backwards is B-52.”

  “Very shrewd, Kazaklis.”

  “I think you'd better shut up. Now.”

  “Oh, don't worry, commander. PRP's working. The five little robots are droning mechanically along. We're all heading for Irkutsk on the Doomsday Express, each for our own individualized, preprogrammed reasons. Me too. PRP's ingenious. PRP's the Catch-22 of World War III. Commander. Sir.”

  Kazaklis tuned her out. Damn her. This was a new side of her. Unexpected. But he blamed himself for playing along with her too long. Everyone was spooking. Even he was spooking.

  The plane hit another pocket of clear-air turbulence. Thwack! The big bomber shuddered. Moreau efficiently pulled on the wheel, flicked out the Master Caution light, and did a routine sweep of the instrument readings.

  She's all right, Kazaklis decided. Her way of venting. Everyone in the plane could use some venting, but he didn't want the rest of the crew hearing hers. He switched to all channels.

  “This is your captain speaking,” Kazaklis said brightly. “On behalf of Strangelove Airlines and your flight crew I'd like to welcome you aboard our Stratocruiser flight to Irkutsk, with possible intermediate passovers—little pun there, folks, heh-heh, for o
ur Jewish passengers—in Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, and other scenic Soviet cities. Our estimated time of arrival in Irkutsk is ten p.m., local time. Barring local air-traffic problems, folks, and you, heh-heh, know how pesky those can be . . .”

  The pilot's mind was racing in one direction while his words moved in another. Damn, he wished he would hear something.

  From Omaha, from the Pentagon, from the Looking Glass. From the tanker. From somebody.

  “. . . As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing some mild clear-air turbulence. Absolutely nothing to concern you, of course. For those of you who are not familiar with our safety procedures, however, I wish to point out that the little red lever to the left of your seat is not an armrest. I repeat, the little red lever is not an armrest. . . .”

  He knew he wouldn't hear much in any case. Just orders. Go or don't go, although there seemed little doubt about that one. And where. That could always change.

  “. . . From time to time I will point out some areas of interest along our flight path. At the moment, we have just passed into Canada's Northwest Territories. Those of you on the right of the aircraft would have a magnificent moonlight view of frozen Great Slave Lake. On the left the panorama of the Mackenzie Mountains, and beyond them, the romantic Yukon, would also be stunning. If we had windows, heh-heh. . . .”

  PRP wouldn't want them to know what had happened back home. PRP wouldn't want them to know if they were expected to penetrate Russia against full defenses or massive clouds of fallout. Not yet. PRP would want them to be five little robots.

  “. . . Now, folks, please settle back, enjoy your flight, and if our charming stewardess can be of any assistance to you, please call on her.”

  Kazaklis bowed grandly toward Moreau.

  “Coffee, tea, or Kool-Aid?” she said sweetly into the open mike.

  God damn you, the pilot mouthed silently over the droning engines. Kool-Aid. Jonestown. Suicide. Damn you, Moreau.

  Far to the south, inside the Looking Glass, the isolation also was getting to Alice. Not the smell of the sweat. Not the tediously weaving figure-eight flight pattern in which the pilot had placed them high over the Midwest. Not even the mind's vision— ruthlessly subdued—of the huge pockmarks he knew had been gouged into the dark prairies below. It was the frustration of being gagged, of being inside a command aircraft that could not command.

  More than an hour ago, in the last frantic minutes before Icarus had gone, Alice had sent out a flurry of orders, some of them quite unusual. Hurried messages to Greenland and into the Canadian wastes, desperately setting up links between his few surviving B-52's and the still fewer tanker planes that seemed scattered in all the wrong places. He also had sent a single supersonic FB-111 racing far ahead of the B-52's to test America's new air-launched cruise missiles and, more important, to test the Soviet coastal defenses long before the Buffs would get there. But now Alice had no idea what good the tests would do, what the links would accomplish. Since the sizzles and snaps of the electromagnetic pulse, Alice may have been in command. But he was a commander who was deaf, dumb, and blind.

  Forlornly he looked down the narrow aisle of the converted old 707 jet. Panels had been unhinged from switchboards to get inside at burned-out wiring. Teletype machines, supposedly the most secure standby for this moment, sat dismembered. The tops were off almost all the computers jammed into the plane's small work space. His battle staff of twenty had jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweaty foreheads poked inside the innards of wounded computers. Circuit boards littered the floor of an airplane usually scrub-brush clean. He stared into his black phone with its white light that now refused to blink.

  Slowly Alice rose from his swivel seat and moved toward Sam. He laid a hand on the colonel's shoulder, feeling the wetness seep through a rumpled blue shirt as the man removed his head from the bowels of an open computer. “Anything?” Alice asked.

  “I don't know, general.” The colonel brushed an arm across his forehead. “I thought I had it back a minute ago. Then it just flared and went down again. I’d like to get ahold of the frigging egghead who said we could protect an airplane against EMP.”

  Alice forced himself to act the commander. “We knew the pulse would raise hell, Sam.” He squeezed the colonel's shoulder. “We'll get it back.”

  “I know, sir. Sorry if I sounded down.”

  Down, Alice, thought. Good God. How else should the poor bastard sound? He turned and returned to his seat, glancing at a large paper wall map covered with multicolored targets. They would get it back, Alice thought. But they had so little time. How the devil could he run a war if he couldn't talk to anybody? And where the devil was Harpoon, who was supposed to snatch the man who really had to run this war?

  * * *

  Still farther south, in the E-4, Harpoon had more elbow room, but no more of anything else. He moved slowly, his white hair marking him regally, through compartment after compartment of the much larger plane. The men and women of his staff withdrew their heads and hands from similarly gutted computers and communications equipment, casting pained looks at the admiral. He nodded at them confidently, disguising his emotions, and moved on.

  Like Alice, he had spoken to no one outside since the sizzles and snaps. Like Alice, he had sent out a flurry of desperate messages before the pulse struck them. Unlike Alice, he now had more to worry about than getting his communications gear working again. He had to get the man. And Harpoon was more confident about the first than he was the second.

  In the final frenzied moments before the EMP wave, he had rousted a contingent of Secret Service agents working on a counterfeiting case in Baton Rouge, a city that had not been struck. He had tried to patch a radio call through to the potential successor forty miles outside the Louisiana city and cursed the communications system when he couldn't get through. He then had worked out a rendezvous time, cutting it very close considering the panic the agents had described on the ground. He had checked and rechecked the runway dimensions at the Baton Rouge airport and knew the extraordinarily heavy E-4 had no business putting down on them. He had issued orders for the dispatching of all available troops to the airport when the Secret Service agents told him the rioting quite naturally centered there. But he had no idea whether those orders got through.

  Harpoon emerged from the neutered satellite-tracking compartment into the curved outer hallway of his command plane, returning a snap salute from a one-star Air Force general. Their eyes locked briefly, transmitting an unspoken message of despair, and they began to move past each other wordlessly.

  Abruptly Harpoon stopped. “Where are we now, general?” he asked. “Precisely.”

  “Just north of Texarkana, sir.”

  “The pilot's keeping us away from Shreveport?”

  “Christ, yes, admiral. The Russians kicked hell out of Barksdale Air Force Base. The fallout's pretty mean.”

  “Yes.” Harpoon suddenly felt very tired. “We'll get to Baton Rouge early.”

  “Very.” The general looked at Harpoon anxiously. “We'll have to orbit quite a while. We can't go down and wait.”

  Harpoon said nothing.

  “We shouldn't go down at all, admiral,” the general volunteered cautiously. “This baby would have trouble handling those runways under ideal circumstances.”

  Harpoon's eyes flashed at him. “We're not fighting this war without the Commander-in-Chief, general.”

  “He might not even be there.”

  Harpoon's eyes drifted.

  “Who's he going to command, admiral?” the general asked softly.

  Harpoon's eyes returned to his fellow officer and remained on him implacably. “We're going down for the man.”

  On the ground, not too far beyond Harpoon's approaching command plane, a young Secret Service agent cradled a submachine gun as he crouched behind the half-open door of an armored troop carrier commandeered after rioters had disabled his group's helicopter. “Spray them,” his superior said. He looked uncertainly at the se
nior agent. Two of their eight-man contingent were already dead and one other was wounded. They were no more than twenty miles out of Baton Rouge. Ahead of them, on State Route 77, the road was barricaded by perhaps a dozen locals and three battered old cars.

  “Spray them, dammit.” The voice was insistent.

  The young agent unloaded his Uzi into the three vehicles. A wisp of smoke rose from the middle car. He heard groans. A rifle shot snapped back from the barricade, its bullet pinging off the top of the armored door.

  “Okay, everybody open up,” the senior agent ordered.

  The country road erupted in a thunder of automatic gunfire. The middle car broke into flames. The others began smoldering in the light rain of the Louisiana night. The thunder fell off into a brief silence and the senior agent bellowed, “Now! Move it!” The armored car gunned toward the barricade, then cut to the side and clipped the fender of one of the smoking cars before rumbling onward into the blackness.

  Kool-Aid. In the cockpit of Polar Bear One, Kazaklis still was glaring at Moreau, who smiled back innocently, when the outside world clattered in at them for the first time in an hour.

  “JIMA 14, JIMA 14.” The voice, laced with the raspy twang of western Canada, scratched its way into the cockpit. “This is Klickitat One. I see ya up there, Yank, but I don't hear ya. Aincha got a few words for a cold and lonely Canuck?”

  “Who the hell is Klickitat One?” Kazaklis asked Moreau.

  “Beats me. Some rattled bush pilot?”

  “No. He's on our emergency frequency. He must be a radar-watcher at some fire base. He knows he shouldn't be calling. Check the book. Fast.”

  Moreau shuffled quickly past the reams of Siberian flight charts on her right and retrieved a two-inch-thick book. It was well-worn and marked in faded black letters: “Procedures—Top Secret.” She thumbed immediately to the right page. “Ask him 'How's fishing?' she said.

  Klickitat One replied immediately. “Through the ice. Grayling and northern pike.”