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  “Said go for the IP and wait. Orbit and wait until we found you or ran out of gas. So we been waiting.”

  “That's all?”

  “That's it. Haven't heard a peep since.”

  “Seven minutes to IP, two minutes to radar contact,” Moreau cut in. “Estimating arrival zero-eight-four-niner, Zulu.”

  “Roger, Polar Bear,” Elsie said. “We got a little housekeeping to do here. Let's get back together on radar contact. Commander?”

  “Elsie?” Kazaklis came on.

  “We were flying a routine proficiency mission. The Looking Glass also ordered my B-52 to head south.”

  “South?” Kazaklis sounded puzzled.

  “To pick up armaments, I guess.”

  “I'll be damned,” Kazaklis said absentmindedly. But it made sense. At least the B-52 was aloft and safe, which most of the bomber force almost certainly was not. “Must be figurin' on a long war.”

  “Yeah, twelve, fifteen hours at least.”

  Kazaklis stifled a chuckle. He decided he liked Elsie.

  “Now, listen, commander.” The tanker pilot's voice turned deadly serious. “We're going to stick with you down to the last drop. There's no way you're gonna get all the fuel you want. But breakaway means breakaway. Got it? Coitus interruptus, pal. On the first word.”

  “Got it, Elsie. Back to teen time.”

  “No, this is kiddie time,” the refueler said solemnly. “Anybody who'd let this stuff go is loonier than Captain Kangaroo.”

  “Yeah,” Kazaklis said. “See you soon, mate.”

  “Propositioned at last. Okay. Elsie out.”

  For the next minute no one said a word in Polar Bear One, as each crew member steeled himself in his own private way for minutes of sheer terror. Moreau felt her nerve endings begin to scream beneath the unheard din of the engines. She took her left hand and clenched her right elbow, pulling the hand tightly down toward the wrist as if to force the nerves back down where they belonged. Ironic, she thought, that this moment would produce more palpable fear than the bombs going off. But she could feel the fear in the plane, wisping up out of the basement, spreading to Halupalai and then edging forward into the cockpit. The bombs had come at them out of the blue—theoretical death dancing in unseen particles that might be eating at the marrow of their bones, rolling shock waves that could crush them or massage them, take your pick. But this was no theoretical terror. This was known. And there was no one in the B-52 who wouldn't admit to being petrified with fright the first time they went through a midair refueling, and few who would deny being scared stiff each time since.

  In the Looking Glass, Alice flinched. The white light had suddenly begun blinking at him. He stared at it, mesmerized. The blinking continued insistently.

  “General, for Christ's sake!”

  Alice flinched again, turning to look vacantly at Sam. The colonel's eyes were riveted on the light.

  “General!”

  Alice shook his ruddy head, as if to clear it. He reached slowly for the persistent phone, lifting it gingerly. “Alice,” he said cautiously into the speaker.

  “Harpoon,” a voice crackled instantly back through the void.

  Alice slumped over the phone, the tension oozing out of him. “Jesus,” he muttered. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “No, old friend, but we might need His help,” the phone voice replied. “Do you have anything working?”

  Alice relaxed, and shook his head ruefully. He gazed down the aisle. His eyes stopped on his chief communications officer, a chunky young woman. She was intently prying into the bowels of a teletype machine with a hairpin.

  “Harpoon, you old sea dog, we're patching things together with hairpins.” Alice paused and winked at the communications officer, too roguishly from one officer to another, too blithely for the circumstances. “Had to be some reason for letting women into the Air Force.”

  Harpoon chuckled—his first laugh, half-laugh that it was, since 0600 Zulu. His crew was using everything available, too, amid curses and whistles of amazement at the damage a few high-energy pulses could do to the best communications equipment a technological society could produce—and had spent billions to protect. Slowly, very slowly, some of the gear was coming back. “Did you ever dream EMP could be this bad?” the admiral asked his Air Force counterpart.

  “I dreamed a lot of things, Harpoon.”

  “Yes.”

  “You getting anything from the ground?”

  “An Arkansas radio station. Some good hillbilly music.”

  “Hmmph. We got Kansas. They're still quoting cattle prices.

  Did you know on-the-hoof is down to seventy-one bucks a hundred?”

  The phone seemed to go dead for a moment, cracks and pops mockingly interrupting the silence of the two men. Then Alice continued. “Crazy, isn't it? It's so random. We knew EMP would knock out damn near everything. It musta burned out every power grid in the country. I can't even find a staff sergeant down there. But I get a goddamn cowboy quoting yesterday's cattle prices . . .”

  “A tape recording ... an alternate generator . . . some warp in the effect ... we didn't expect to understand it.” Harpoon paused. “But there's still a helluva lot of people alive down there. . . .”

  Alice suddenly banged a beefy hand down on the desk-console in front of him. “Not for long, dammit! Not if we can't talk to anyone!” Alice thought he heard a sigh over the phone.

  “Okay,” Harpoon said. “So what have you been able to do? Can you talk to the bombers?”

  “You kidding? Maybe in an hour or so, using the ultra-low-frequency trailing wire. It's the only thing that seems to be working halfway right. We haven't exactly got an armada up there anyway.” Alice shook his head at the thought of the number of B-52's that had been caught on the ground. He looked questioningly down the aisle at a major. The major nodded affirmatively. “We may have found an eye,” Alice said into the phone. “That'll help.”

  Far to the south of the Looking Glass, Harpoon thought a moment. So some of the camera satellites had survived. That would help. “What about refueling?” he asked.

  “A few tankers got off. We had a handful of others up on training missions. We got through to them, and some ground stations, before the EMP explosions. Some of 'em will be able to rendezvous with the bombers. We had to use the by-guess-and-by-golly plan.” Alice swiveled in his seat and stared at a wall map of the Soviet Union. “And what the hell would you suggest I tell the bombers?” Alice asked tensely.

  “I'm afraid that's your job, Alice,” Harpoon said evenly.

  The tension erupted. “The hell it is!” he shouted into the phone. “It's the Commander-in-Chiefs job! And gettin' him's your job! What the hell are you doing? Taking the scenic route?”

  “I have an appointment in sixty-plus minutes,” Harpoon replied emotionlessly.

  “Sixty-fucking-plus minutes!”

  “Alice,” Harpoon said, the first sign of irritation creeping into his voice, “the man was out in the boonies. We have people after him. I got the word the same time you did. They said it would take four hours. You want me to put this big bird down on that runway and wait? How long you think I'd last?” Harpoon paused, sympathetically, but for emphasis. “Then you could have the submarines and the bombers.”

  Alice slumped again over the phone. The submarines. Jesus. “I'm sorry, Harpoon,” he finally said. “Bad night.”

  “Yes, bad night,” the admiral's voice huzzed back. “I want him as much as you do, Alice.” Then the two officers disconnected, the Looking Glass continuing its slow orbit over the plains, the E-4 moving over the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge.

  “Radar contact!”

  “Ready, Tyler?” Kazaklis asked.

  “Hell, yes. Let's get this refueling done right.” Tyler sounded aggressive and blase at the same time. “Then we can move on to the low-level and get this harebrained stunt over.”

  Moreau looked over at Kazaklis. The pilot stared back, his eyes saying nothing
. He reached into his flight bag for a big red bandanna, the kind he once wore in the Oregon woods. Moreau's skin prickled again.

  “We have to open the flash curtains,” he said.

  “I know,” Moreau said. She also knew that, at night, a nuclear explosion fifty miles in front of them could take her other eye. She also knew that, once again, Kazaklis was playing percentage baseball. Odds were the Russians would not come at them now. But the planes were sitting ducks and Kazaklis was covering his bet. He wrapped the red bandanna, doubled and redoubled in tight folds, over his left eye and tied the kerchief behind his head. If the odds were wrong, there would be one good eye left of the four in the cockpit of Polar Bear One.

  Kazaklis reached across and pulled the dirty-gray curtain. So did Moreau. The night light streamed in and the white radiance of endless snows reflected fluorescently up at them. Moreau blinked at the brightness. It was a wonderland—and very threatening.

  “Helmets!” Kazaklis said into the intercom. “Okay, Elsie, sweetheart, we are at one nautical mile and starting our climb,” Kazaklis drawled into the radio. “You look beautiful up there, baby, just beautiful.”

  The tanker did look beautiful, Moreau thought, hypnotically beautiful. By rote she helped Kazaklis maneuver the bomber up toward the illuminated underside of the KC-135. Her good eye was frozen on the tanker. In reality the two huge aircraft warily closed on each other at near-identical speeds of five hundred miles an hour, the bomber climbing steadily. But the illusion was far different. The tanker, framed in white night lights, seemed slowly to descend on them like a space platform, the glare of its lights blotting out the Arctic stars.

  “Looking good. Stand by for half-mile.”

  Still, it was the breakaways that took your breath. Suddenly your stomach was falling up. But in the illusion, only the surreal white platform moved, taking off straight up, escape-velocity-rapid in the mind's eye, like a Star Wars mother ship accelerating into inky space. Tonight it wouldn't be that way. The tanker might do anything. Barrel roll, snapping off a wing. Sag back into their faces. Nose over on top of them. Moreau shuddered.

  “All crew on oxygen.”

  Moreau turned away from the descending lights. Beyond Kazaklis, out the left window, the moon was setting below them now, a giant yellowish ball perched between two white crags in the far-off Mackenzie Mountains. She flinched, her last moon vision suddenly invading her memory, and snapped her head right. In the crystalline night, she could see forever. Below her, snow and ice, glowing in the Arctic moon-set, stretched flat and endlessly to the horizon. The southernmost arm of Great Bear Lake, clearly outlined, snaked off to the northeast toward the main body of the great frozen lake. Below them the tundra, unmarked by a hint of civilization, ebbed and flowed softly, Sahara-like, in windblown snow dunes and rippling white eddies. Suddenly lights flared far off the wingtip. Moreau lurched toward the flash screen, then slowly pulled her hand back. For God's sake, she told herself, calm down. Even the northern lights are spooking you.

  Kazaklis appeared not to notice. “Closing now,” he said. “Nudge it right. Nudge!”

  Moreau snapped her full attention to the front of the aircraft. The platform was almost on top of them, the immense refueling probe hanging from the tanker's midsection, the probe's green-lit nozzle hovering no more than a dozen feet in front of the windshield. It swayed—inches right, inches left—like a snake's head poised for the strike. Moreau flinched again.

  “Doing just fine. Little left. Little down. Careful, now. Careful! Up a bit!”

  The snake passed over their helmets.

  “Now!”

  Clunk! Moreau felt the angry wrenching of metal, heard the grinding steel teeth lock onto the huge phallic probe just inches behind her head. The great plane heaved, its wings shuddering, and then it began a slow, groaning undulation up and down in rhythm with the tanker. Kazaklis felt the tendons in his arms stretch to the ripping point. Moreau watched her knuckles turn dead white on the wheel as, together, they fought to mate the Buff to the bulbous plane above. The tanker's tail loomed almost directly over their heads, visible and threatening through the overhead windows. But behind them the probe settled into place and the JP-4 jet fuel, lifeblood, began to surge from the tanker into the B-52. Kazaklis relaxed somewhat, took one hand off the wheel, and looked at his watch. It showed 0852, twenty-three minutes since they talked with Klickitat. Good. It was damned good.

  “Beee-yootiful!” Kazaklis radioed above. “Elsie, baby, you did great!”

  “Yeah,” Elsie responded. “Not bad for a dame, huh?”

  Kazaklis turned toward Moreau and winked a grotesque wink, made even more bizarre by the Sinbad look of a pilot with a red bandanna wrapped diagonally over the other eye. He grinned. How the hell did he ever get surrounded by women, working women, in this business?

  “Not bad for a dame, Elsie,” he acknowledged. “Not bad at all.”

  “You looking up at me, commander?”

  “Right up your . . .” Kazaklis paused. “Right up at your lovely frame, Elsie.”

  “Yeah, I know, you dirty old man. Look a little farther up. You see that red on my belly?”

  Kazaklis moved his eyes up the white undercarriage of the tanker until they fixed on the blinking red beacon.

  “Looks like it's working fine, Elsie,” Kazaklis said, puzzled why the pilot would be worried about her beacons.

  “That's what I'm worried about, ace. I'm a black widow tonight. Don't you forget that. A red-bellied black widow. You know about black widows, mate?” Elsie placed an extra edge on the last word.

  “Run across 'em, Elsie. Deadliest of your species.”

  “Gender,” she corrected him. “A little black lady spider, with a red spot on her belly. Known for killing the daddy.”

  “Right after screwin',” Kazaklis said flatly.

  “Right after screwin', mate.”

  Moreau tightened her grip on the wheel. This was certain death for the crew of Elsie. And for Polar Bear One? A midair collision, at worst. For a few extra hours, at best. Assuming something else didn't get them. Which was a big assumption. What did that add to the chances of a suicide mission? One percent? Doubtful. Training was driving them now. Moreau wasn't sure this was percentage baseball. Neither, apparently, was Kazaklis.

  “You sure you want to go down to the last drop?” the pilot asked Elsie.

  “Nervous?” Elsie asked.

  “Serious.”

  “What are your chances of getting in now?”

  “Next to zero.”

  “What are your chances of getting out?”

  “Zero.”

  “What are your chances of getting in with more fuel?”

  “Next to zero.”

  “And out?”

  “Next to zero.”

  “We'll go down to the last drop, commander.” Elsie's radio voice crackled but did not crack.

  Kazaklis stared vacantly up at the tanker, briefly fixing on the ghostly vapor trails streaming out of her four engines. The exhaust poured out steel-mill-hot and then froze, snap, into ice-crystal fog faster than the eye could see. He remembered teenage jet trails that had seemed to go on forever. Now he had to watch them snap out again. “You got balls, Elsie,” he said, and only he seemed to notice the choke in his voice.

  “No, commander,” Elsie replied. “They issued us everything but those. What we got, if you want to get schmaltzy, is our duty.” Then she added, with a wry chuckle, “And if you want to get technical, we got our orders—empty the pump, Polar Bear.”

  “Okay,” Kazaklis acquiesced. The pilot could feel the anxiety building. Everybody was scared stiff, including him. “What's your best fuel estimate?”

  Elsie's voice returned firmly. “Eight minutes. Ten minutes.”

  “How do you plan to break away? Without power, you can't go up and you could belly in on top of us. We can't go up through you.”

  “I ought to be able to hold it level for a moment,” Elsie replied. “If I can
't, I'll nose it down slightly. If that doesn't work, I'll put it in a spin. Left. Got that? Left.”

  Moreau had a nightmare vision of tangled wings. But she also knew what a spin meant to Elsie.

  “Got it,” Kazaklis said.

  “You put the brakes on and dive. Fast. Got that?”

  Kazaklis paused and thought hard. Percentage baseball, he sighed silently. He switched to the intercom and radioed downstairs: “Keep your mother-lovin' eyes peeled down there. We've got the window open and don't need visitors.” Then he spoke to Elsie again. “We got it, Elsie. Your soulmate on my right will handle that part.”

  Moreau looked at Kazaklis in surprise. He reached up slowly and pulled away the protective bandanna. Then he locked both eyes on the contrails from Elsie's four engines and didn't say another word. Nor did she, as her arms locked on the controls just as firmly.

  Moreau last visited her father at Christmas, a month before the flight of Polar Bear One. It was a spectacular holiday of all-day skiing and crackling evening fires with rare steaks and rarer brandy high in the exhilarating alpine air of the Rockies near Steamboat Springs. He had retired there, with four stars, choosing the mountains because he loved them and Steamboat Springs because it was just near enough to keep his distance but also make his occasional lectures at the Academy in Colorado Springs.

  It had not been an easy year for her. Finally, they had put her in a bomber where she was determined to be. Her father had sent congratulations, no more, when she got the assignment at Fairchild. Those first months had not been calm and she had lain awake night after night with pounding migraines for which she could not find relief because PRP would find the migraines. And then there was the men thing, the flamboyant, compulsive, self-destructive men thing which she had stopped, cold turkey, like a nun, a nuclear nun, almost a year ago.

  So Steamboat Springs had been a tonic. Her father was in his sixties, the strands of iron gray turned to a sheath of steel. But he still stood ramrod straight, still forced her to her physical limits as they raced through the deep powder of this cold winter's early snows. The only sign of age was in his eyes, the radiant blue having faded some, the riveting gaze occasionally drifting into a distant other world.