Trinity's Child Read online

  “I don't know, Mo,” he said after a moment. “I really don't know.” The wind whistled quietly in the desert. Ahead of him the lieutenant was pawing at the dirt for a souvenir for his daughter. He turned to get her, and she was gone.

  “Mo!” he screamed, putting the lie to the image of total, steely discipline. He sprinted toward the sagging chicken-coop shelter. Through a gaping hole in the roof he peered down into the dark greenness. His daughter sat on the emerald floor, shuddering, her hands holding the broken remnants of a trinitite slab she had just crushed over the head of a rattlesnake. He leaped in, grabbed the girl, and thrust her out, following quickly.

  In the hot desert sun the girl stood trembling, eyes brimming with tears, one hand still full of her broken green prize.

  “I was afraid, Daddy,” she whispered, struggling to control a sob. “He tried to bite me.”

  “He was more afraid than you,” the father said, covering his own racking fear. He drew a deep breath, forced a broad grin, and scooped her into his arms. “Eternal vigilance,” he said.

  She looked up at him reverently, the fear lost now in pride over belonging to a father who, to her, was half-god and who would, although she did not know how at the time, forever change her life. Behind them, the lieutenant rolled his eyes upward, catching the arcing shadow of the buzzard, which, as was its way, had lifted off the Trinity cross and circled now. Eternal vigilance, he thought.

  “After you,” the girl said softly, “I'll do it, Dad.”

  Kazaklis reached for the radio dial, switched it to intercom, and bent over halfheartedly for his helmet. He brushed against the dirty flash curtain, jarring it into a slow, heavy ripple, and forgot the helmet. He called downstairs. “Okay, navigator, give me a course correction for an intercept point in twenty minutes. You heard Elsie's coordinates, 124 degrees west at the circle?”

  No reply returned.

  “Tyler?” Kazaklis said.

  “Timmie?” Tyler said.

  Kazaklis turned toward Moreau, his look despairing. He took his right hand off the controls and rubbed it abrasively up the side of his face, as if he were scouring a frying pan.

  “Tyler!” he ordered.

  Below, Radnor looked curiously at his buddy. Tyler's eyes were riveted again on his son. Cautiously Radnor reached over and nudged the navigator's arm. Tyler turned slowly toward the nudge, but his eyes seemed focused far beyond the tight walls of their compartment.

  “You want me to do it?” Radnor quietly asked.

  Tyler seemed puzzled. “Do it?” he asked.

  “The commander needs a new course to the IP,” Radnor said as unemotionally as he could manage. “Did you get the coordinates?”

  “Oh, sure,” Tyler said blandly. “From the ground. Boy, this is a strange one, isn't it? From the ground. This one's really strange.”

  “Tyler, you want me to do it?” Radnor was getting worried, and his voice reflected it.

  Tyler suddenly exploded. “You do your job, Radnor!” he lashed out. “I'll do mine!” Then, just as quickly, his face changed from fury to intentness. He hunched professionally over his console, worked out the course change, and radioed up to Kazaklis: “Ten degrees left, sir. Maintain altitude. Radar contact approximately twelve minutes.”

  Radnor briefly watched Tyler, who seemed completely normal now, and then turned back to his own console, the corner of his eye catching O'Toole's red boot before his gaze settled back on the hypnotic rhythm of the radar arm sweeping methodically across his screen. The young airman's wife broke through his defenses, a haloed image now of an always smiling, always bubbling woman, always gushing about their future—the two kids they wanted, a boy and a girl; a house with lots of land somewhere in the Big Sky West, their own American dream. And growing old together. He marveled how this young woman, whom he loved so dearly, could derive so much pleasure from the dream of growing old together, sometimes fantasizing about the joys of having grandchildren before they had children.

  “Hey, Radnor,” Tyler said. “I'm sorry I jumped all over you. This one is just kinda getting to me. You know?”

  “Yeah, I know, pal. Me, too,” Radnor said.

  “I'll be glad when it's over.”

  “Me, too.”

  Tyler's voice abruptly turned exuberant. “You know what I'm gonna do when we get back? Buy Timmie a bike! Every boy oughta have a bike, don't ya think?”

  God damn.

  “Don't you really think so?”

  God damn. Timmie is only three years old. Is. God damn. Was. Radnor's mind was beginning to spin now. “My wife wasn't on duty today,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “That was real tough for the boy out on the runway. It wasn't a drill, was it?”

  “I dunno.” Tyler's voice went dull.

  Radnor groped for words. His mind felt waxen. “My wife . . .” He stumbled. “Laura must feel rotten about it.”

  “One hundred twenty-four degrees west . . .” Tyler said.

  God damn. Radnor shook his head violently. He forced the haloed image out of his head. He would be glad when this one was over, all right, even though he had no doubt how it would end.

  Upstairs, Kazaklis completed the course maneuver and looked at his watch, the luminous face staring back at him like a jack-o'-lantern. 0830 Zulu—12:30 in Spokane, two and a half hours into the mission. Good God, 150 minutes. The shrinks talked about delayed-shock syndrome, the flip-outs coming months or years later. But they never could simulate this one, try as they might. Everybody tried, especially after we started talking about fighting it instead of deterring it. His memory froze on a television news clip he had seen a few weeks earlier, with some civil-defense bureaucrat testifying before Congress. A congressman asked him how you hardened an industrial plant against nuclear attack. With bulldozers, sir. Bulldozers? With an attack imminent, sir, you plow dirt over the essential machinery. Dirt? It enables the machinery to absorb a higher level of psi's, sir. What? Pounds per square inch, sir, during a detonation. And after the detonation? We dig the machinery out, sir. Who the hell is “we”? The survivors, sir. And what do these patriotic survivors do for electrical power after a couple of megatons has flattened Pittsburgh? Kazaklis remembered that the bureaucrat looked at his inquisitor as if the congressman had a brain the size of a wart. The bureaucrat, after all, had studied this. Sir, the civil-defense man said, do you realize that if we strung together all the automobile batteries in Pittsburgh we'd have enough power to run U.S. Steel for two years? He had a vision of ant brigades of Russians, one brigade plowing dirt over the factories in Irkutsk right now, the other wiring automobiles together. Lots of luck, comrades. He sighed.

  Dammit, he had a few wires to string together in his airplane. Yossarian, huh? Those guys went through forty to fifty missions, skies black with flak, before it was bananas time. But his crew got it all compressed into ten hours, with no Betty Grable pinups to go back to, nothing to go back to. The eggheads could do all the planning they wanted, line up the bulldozers and the PRP shrinks, and there still was no way to figure human responses to this one. No way at all. Hell, so far they had had the easy part. Except for their little minuet with the nudets at the beginning, this had been two and a half hours of droning, dull flight. Maybe that was the problem. It was too dull.

  “Copilot,” Kazaklis said brusquely, “get on the horn and see if you can pick up Elsie. She's less than four hundred miles away.”

  It wasn't going to be dull much longer. Refueling was enough to make anybody sweat blood. Then they'd be near the PCP, the positive control point at which they had to wait for confirmed orders to go in. Then across the Arctic ice. Then the coastal defenses of Russia. And after that . . .

  Moreau adjusted the radio frequency and put out the call. “This is Polar Bear calling Elsie. Do you read? Date's on, sweetheart. Do you read me, Elsie'? This is Polar Bear One. You ready for the dance? Acknowledge. Polar Bear calling Elsie. Do you read?”

  Moreau's hand involuntarily jerk
ed to her ear at the squawk of static. A jackhammer of sounds, bz-zuz-zuz-eeee-eowwww-eee-zzzzz-zap, pounded her eardrums. The static broke intermittently with a babble of disconnected words, “. . . bear . . . extreme . . . condenser . . . breakaway . . . effort . . .”

  “I think we're being jammed,” Moreau said to Kazaklis.

  “No,” the pilot replied. “Klickitat got through. They're receiving but patching their gear with Band-Aids. Tell 'em we understand, we have an IP in sixteen minutes, and we want to refuel at thirty-four thousand feet. We'll pick 'em up on radar soon.” He thought quickly. The two aircraft were closing on each other at twenty miles a minute. “Tell 'em to try again in five minutes.”

  This is going to be some refueling, Kazaklis thought. Elsie's running out of gas and can't talk. Tyler, who's absolutely essential to this high-wire act, is downstairs talking to Timmie. And the Russians, if they've got anything left at all, could be watching and listening. Moreau finished the message and switched to private. “This is gonna be real fun,” she said. “I think you ought to let Radnor handle the refueling navigation.”

  “Nope.”

  “Tyler sounds like he's ready for the farm.”

  “Maybe he's Yossarian,” Kazaklis said sarcastically. “The only sane one left.”

  “Well, that's an idea worth pondering,” Moreau said, and Kazaklis immediately wished he had kept his mouth shut.

  “We're going to make this airplane function,” the pilot said stonily. “We got a long way to go. We're already down one. We need everybody and we're going to use everybody. Tyler's okay when the heat's on.”

  “Sanity and insanity,” Moreau murmured, ignoring the pilot's words. “How many Minuteman launch-control officers do you think turned the keys? We've got a hundred launch capsules, two men to a capsule, ten missiles each. That's two hundred men with one thousand ICBM's. How many would you bet launched their missiles?”

  Kazaklis felt the anger well up. “Moreau, I'm not getting into this shit with you again. I don't care if you're wacko, I'm wacko, Tyler's wacko, or the President's wacko. We're going to do what we were trained to do. Right now that means refueling this bird.”

  Moreau ignored him again. “My guess is 197.”

  “You're wrong on that one,” Kazaklis snapped. “PRP made sure of that. It took simultaneous key turns. So it might have been two and it might have been two hundred. It sure as hell wasn't 197.” Again Kazaklis wished he had bitten his tongue. Moreau was mousetrapping him into another one of these screwball conversations.

  “My bet's still 197.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Yeah, I figure 196 launched just like nice little robots should. Two figured out a long time ago, talked it over in some bar like your Boom-Boom Room, that they wouldn't do it. And in that one other capsule two guys had their own little World War Three. Number 199 turned right on schedule. Three, two, one . . . mark. Number 200 sat there and stared at the Missiles Away light and froze. No go. He couldn't do it.”

  Moreau paused. Kazaklis wouldn't play. Moreau took his straight-man line anyway.

  “So then what happened? Number 199 took out his handgun. That's what they've got them for. To use on each other. They weren't expecting a commie invasion sixty feet under those wheat-fields. So Number 199 points the forty-five at Number 200 and says: Turn the goddamn key. Number 200 looks at his buddy and shrugs: It's all over, gumdrop, so let's give the mamushka in Kiev ten hours to pack before the Buffs get there. Ka-pow! War's over for Number 200. Omaha overrides his key and the missiles go anyway.”

  Moreau paused again. Kazaklis was seething and she could feel it.

  “Now, the ultimate question is: who was the sane one? Number 200? He tried to give the mamushka, plus a million or so, an extra ten hours. He ends up dead and the mamushka does, too. Number 199? He followed his training, killed a million commie devils and one buddy. And if he's lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—and the Russians missed his capsule, he's sitting down there now in a twelve-by-twelve bunker staring at a dead man. He gets to stay down there two weeks, you know. Those are the orders. Two weeks to let the fallout settle, then dig your way up to what's left of Montana.”

  Moreau felt Kazaklis staring at her. She turned and looked into eyes so angry they glinted.

  “Moreau,” he said very slowly and almost menacingly, “I'm going to tell you something I didn't think I'd ever tell you. You are a good pilot. An excellent pilot. You are better than anyone else I've ever had in the right-hand seat. You probably saved this aircraft when the first bombs went off. You also are a bitch. I never wanted you here. I wish you weren't here now. But I never thought you'd fuck up, mentally or physically. You are fucking up right now.”

  He stopped for a second, then continued.

  “I cannot make it in or out without you. You cannot make it in or out without me. We can be Number 199 and 200. We've got the equipment, too. It's your choice. But I don't want to hear another word of this pop-psychology shit. It's down-to-business time. Understood?”

  Moreau was silent for what seemed an eternity. She wasn't afraid of the pilot's .45. She wasn't afraid of the refueling, the Russian interceptors, the SAM's, or the low-level run over Irkutsk. She was afraid of the logic. She knew Kazaklis was right and she didn't look at him as she finally spoke.

  “Understood, commander,” she said, not making an excuse of how difficult it was to lose her religion, all her belief in the Tightness of her dedication, in one brief wail of a klaxon. “I'm sorry. No more mind-fucking. I'm with you one hundred percent. Mind and body.” She stopped abruptly, and swiveled a quick and challenging look at him. “Kazaklis, please don't smart-aleck that one.”

  Kazaklis chuckled, an honest, straight, relieved chuckle. “No, sir,” he said. “I won't. Tonight I'm going to need both. A mind and a body trained like yours. I'm going to need them badly.” He paused. “Thank you, captain,” he added.

  The two of them could feel the tension flow out of the cockpit of the giant bomber. Then the radio started squawking and the tension was back instantly, but of a different kind. Even through the static, the anxiety in the voice from Elsie crackled like sparks from a broken power line.

  “Polar Bear! Polar Bear. Do you read, Polar Bear? Acknowledge. Closing on your position. IP estimated nine minutes. Do you read, Polar Bear?”

  The voice was female. It also was urgent and brittle, but not frightened.

  “Read you loud and clear now, Elsie,” Moreau answered. “Polar Bear here.” The incoming voice had been so taut and clipped, she added, “Are you Mayday?”

  For a moment only the strange radio sounds of the Arctic night—huzzes and snaps from the aurora borealis, whoosh warps from the nearby magnetic pole—danced into Moreau's headphones. The sounds mesmerized her, tapping a momentary Morse code of guilt against her eardrums. She asked herself if she had been as professional as this pilot, a woman, too, flying in circles for hours now, waiting for them, following a duty that doomed her. She didn't answer herself.

  “Thank God in heaven,” the radio finally whispered in relief. “We found you.”

  Moreau asked: “Repeat. Are you in a Mayday situation?”

  “Negative, Polar Bear.” The voice was loud and clear this time. “Not yet.”

  Moreau looked over at Kazaklis, who seemed deep in thought. His face was furrowed, his eyes staring over the instrument panel into the dull gray of the flash curtain. For no apparent reason he reached forward and ran a finger down a curtain crease. Suddenly Moreau knew what he was thinking. They had to see for this one. She rubbed her good eye, her only eye, and cursed herself for the involuntary display of weakness.

  “Elsie, we need a precise rundown on your condition.” Moreau thought her voice sounded hollow.

  “Precision isn't our game tonight, Polar Bear. Our fuel gauges are bouncing like jumping beans. We might have 100,000 pounds. We should be able to make a precise connect. But I tell you this: we gotta get that probe in the womb fast. No foreplay
. This one's gotta be slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am. How much jizz you need?”

  Moreau turned to Kazaklis, who looked unnecessarily at their fuel gauge and shrugged.

  “All we can get, Elsie.”

  “Okay. Now, get this and get it good.” The voice turned to stone. “When I say breakaway, I mean breakaway. No questions. No good-byes. No screw-ups. One of us is going in anyway. Screw up and we take you with us.”

  “We read you, Elsie,” Moreau said. “Thanks.”

  “That's what we get paid for,” the tanker pilot replied tonelessly.

  “Well, Elsie,” Moreau continued, trying to sound upbeat, “you got the biggest runway in the world below you. Great Bear Lake oughta be frozen twelve feet thick.”

  “Oughta be,” Elsie said. “At sixty below zero. But this big baby ain't a glider, honey. And you hotshots got the ejection seats. Not us. It's a little chilly down there for a San Diego girl anyway. And the nearest hot tub is in Fairbanks.” The radio went silent for a moment, only the haunting huzzes and whooshes echoing in Moreau's ears. Then Elsie added flatly: “Was in Fairbanks.”

  “That bad?” Moreau asked painfully.

  “That bad,” Elsie repeated simply.

  “Damn, I'm sorry.” Moreau's words sounded hollow.

  “Don't be,” Elsie replied with a tinny nonchalance. “In a way, it makes all this easier. We were on our way back, couple hundred miles away, when it went. Looked like the northern lights. Didn't believe it at first. So we started on in. Then we got the call from the Looking Glass.”

  Kazaklis cut in. “What did the Looking Glass tell you?” His voice was urgently curious.

  “Oh, Lordy, a male voice. How nice. Had me worried there for a minute. It's bad enough for the last one to be a flying fuck. But for a while there I thought it was gonna be with another broad. That's adding insult to injury.”

  “The Looking Glass,” Kazaklis repeated.