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  Halupalai had memorized Air Force Regulation 35-99, especially the section dealing with “Personality and Behavior Factors That May Affect Reliability.” He recalled the category “Factors Relating to Thinking or Attitude.” One of the first line items instructed the crews to look for “Arrogance—Individual assumes or presumes the possession of superior or unique ideas or abilities.” Kazaklis at his Space Invaders game? Or the next line item: “Lack of humor—especially the inability to laugh at oneself, at one's mistakes or weaknesses.” Moreau stalking away from the pilot's toothy grin? Halupalai himself, still dreaming about a weakness almost fifteen years old? Halupalai knew that Air Force Regulation 35-99 could get anyone in this bunker on one item or another. Or it could get none of them. He had memorized the PRP regs, run his life by them, so they would not get him.

  Still, he also knew that Kazaklis, so cocksure of his own ability, passed. And he knew that Moreau, so steeled in her determination to cover the pensive side of her nature with Darth Vader jeeps and maps to Tahiti, also passed. Even together, two scorpions in the bottle of a B-52 cockpit, they made it. The Air Force was far more likely to bump Tyler for his family troubles, far more likely to come at Halupalai if he weren't careful. Kazaklis was safe; Moreau perhaps safer. They would never pull the trigger in paranoia; they would always pull it when ordered. You got to know people well in this kind of life—six people crammed into the tiny upstairs-downstairs crew compartment of a giant bomber scraping American rooftops in practice after practice for a suicidal low-level run into Russia.

  At forty-four, Halupalai was far older than anyone else in the crew. Kazaklis was next at thirty-one; Moreau just twenty-seven; the others still younger. This was a youthful game. They kept him here only because he was a gunner, an anachronism who filled a seat, the only noncommissioned officer aboard the bomber. He knew he had less function now than he had in that most splendid world above Vietnam, where at least he had his bubble and the sky was beneath him, endless in its eternity. In the nuclear bomber he had been placed forward with the rest of the crew, no windows for him in either the alert facility or his airplane, his useless gun run by remote control and radar. Still, he was content with that, and careful with it.

  It had occurred to Halupalai that he should put in for retirement. His twenty years were up. But what other world was there for him? Back to the islands, which he had left after high school, a muscular and sought-after prep football player, one of those Hawaiian wonders who had spun into glamour and success in the Coast Conference in the sixties? UCLA's headlines had eliminated any chance of that, especially when he became an All-American, the young blonds hanging on him the way they hung on Kazaklis now. Then his college glory expired into flaky real-estate huckstering and flimflam Southern California deals selling overpriced sports cars to the few aging alums whose memories yellowed more slowly than his scrapbooks. He joined the Air Force shortly before Vietnam really ignited, spurning the chance at officers' school to avoid any more disappointments. He also raced through three marriages with less and less likely women, all island-struck, starting with a UCLA cheerleader who was more attracted to the beachboy than the man in him. Now, in middle age, he knew where none of the women were, not even the fifteen-year-old daughter he had fathered so long ago.

  Halupalai glanced around his bunker world, the one place, along with the tight compartment of his B-52, that he felt at home. Free. Unfettered. Alone.

  He watched Kazaklis, his rear end swaying left and right with the descending adversaries. Above the pilot, Halupalai's eyes drew themselves to the sign that demanded: “Are You EWO Ready?”

  Hell, yes, Halupalai told himself, he was EWO ready. On his nuclear uniformed upper arm, just below the mailed fist clutching lightning bolts, he wore another patch that showed he had flown 163 missions in Vietnam. He was the only one here who had dropped a real bomb, the only one who had seen a real SAM missile. EWO ready? Hell, yes, he was Emergency War Order ready. His eyes flicked past the sign to a row of clocks on which the hands edged past ten p.m. local time, past 0600 Zulu.

  Two

  0605 ZULU

  Beneath Omaha, across the fruited plain from Cheyenne Mountain, SIOP and RSIOP hummed quietly in their clean-room niche around the corner and below the Command Balcony. The two huge computers were engaged in their usual mortal combat, deadly deities calculating the megadeaths they had imposed on each other, calculating the megadeaths they had absorbed, strategizing moves and countermoves in the great chess game they had played now for decades. SIOP, an acronym for Single Integrated Operating Plan, always won. SIOP was America, containing all the nation's nuclear capabilities on the silicon chips that ran the modern world. Each bomber was a data bit, as was each submarine and each intercontinental missile and each warhead that could be spewed out of each weapon. Cities were data bits, as were earth satellites. Armies were data bits, as were civilians. Even SIOP was a data bit, as was the President of the United States. RSIOP represented America's evaluation of Russia's system, with its own world broken down into bits. SIOP and RSIOP were practicing now, testing each other. But SIOP never lost a practice. Since 1958, when the United States Congress amended an appropriations bill at the height of the early cold war, it had been against the law to use federal funds to study nuclear surrender. That made it difficult for SIOP to lose, not knowing how to give up.

  Over the decades SIOP and RSIOP had engaged in every conceivable kind of nuclear war. At the moment, SIOP was trying a game of chicken—moving nuclear detonations (nudets, they are called in the world beneath Omaha) methodically across Siberia toward Moscow. In this dance of the nudets, SIOP had moved past Ulan-Ude, and Moscow had not yet responded.

  Omaha, the home of the Strategic Air Command, clearly has better computers than Cheyenne Mountain, the home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Omaha, after all, is the nerve center of the offense; Cheyenne merely the first outpost of the defense. Offense prevails in the world of Omaha and Cheyenne. In most other ways, however, the buried bunker at Omaha is not nearly as imposing as the city inside Cheyenne.

  Unlike the bastion at Cheyenne, the Omaha facility is buried under just twenty-two feet of soil and concrete rather than four thousand feet of mountain granite. Rather than skiers frolicking overhead, the men of Omaha are covered by a broad green lawn manicured to funereal perfection. Instead of a long dank tunnel ending in a twenty-five-ton vaulted door, the Omaha entrance is through swinging office doors.

  Inside the entrance, secretaries type methodically in small offices and men cluster around water coolers much as they would at Prudential Life. The first sign that this isn't an insurance company is the Strategic Air Command motto at the end of the entrance hallway: “Peace ... Is Our Profession.” The next is a rugged bust of General Curtis LeMay, the father of SAC, a man who believed that air power could win any war, a man who, in the sixties, said America should bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age. When America didn't listen, he gave up his military career and ran for Vice-President on the George Wallace ticket. But most notable is the red telephone, encased in glass like a prized butterfly on a pedestal just inside the door. A small bronze plaque notes that this is the original red phone, donated by the Bell Telephone System in appreciation of its historical significance. The real phone, the line to the President, is downstairs. It is yellow. It also is dirty, as if the janitorial service dusts everywhere but there.

  Downstairs, the atmosphere changes abruptly. A sign to the entrance of the bunker says simply: “No Lone Zone.” That means no one can proceed alone, not even a general, not even the general. The guards wear ice-blue berets, pearl-handled pistols, automatic weapons, and stern countenances.

  Beyond them is the Command Balcony, beneath which SIOP and RSIOP hum contentedly and an eleven-man staff watches a bank of other computers with screens not unlike those at Cheyenne. They can communicate with almost anyone, a radar watcher far north on Hudson's Bay or the pilot of the always-flying Looking Glass plane which would take command
after the first missile struck Omaha. In addition to their small screens, the men of Omaha have six large screens, sixteen feet by sixteen feet each, at eye level with the Command Balcony. On those screens computer projections are more easily viewed by all, especially the commanding general of the Strategic Air Command.

  The general, his four stars glowing fluorescently tonight, swiveled left and right in his overstuffed leather chair on the balcony. The general had just turned a pale, luminous blue, so luminous that his body radiated a ghostly metallic halo. The color washed his craggy face down to a sallow, featureless mask. Red lights, like tracer bullets laid against the powder blue of a battlefield at dusk, raced across his forehead.

  He cradled the phone, one of several he had at his reach, including the grungy one which he had not touched. Having listened patiently to his colleague at Cheyenne, he now felt the pumping adrenaline ripple through his body. This didn't happen often enough, the phone flashing urgently, setting his underground empire on the combat footing that called for dim blue lights and red siren flashes calling everyone to attention. He liked it. He had his four stars. He was months from retirement. Taking political flak for computer malfunctions at Cheyenne didn't bother him.

  This, not the decades of watching and waiting, was what it was all about. Of the scores of times that Cheyenne had set this in motion, only five had reached the stage where the exchange seemed imminent. Even during those five episodes the general did not quite reach the point where he had picked up the dirty yellow phone to the President. But he had felt the rest of the thrills, his anticipation far outrunning his apprehension. He had scrambled fighters, placed the nation he was sworn to protect on a war footing. He had felt what a marine must feel on a beach landing, and he had liked it. The general had missed the Second World War. His career had been full of political wars, nonwars, cold wars. The blue lights meant the real thing, and he liked it.

  His fingers jabbed at the controls that would bring what he called the big picture up on all six screens in front of him.

  In front of him the main screen fluttered briefly in a televideo snowstorm and then came into focus.

  WELCOME

  REP. BILLY JOE HARKINS OF ARKANSAS

  HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

  TO COMMAND BALCONY SAC HEADQUARTERS

  Jee-zuz, the general muttered to himself. Visiting congressmen were the bane of all their existences. Billy Joe Harkins, here yesterday to play Dr. Strangelove war and sit in the general's chair, had been even dumber than most. Would you take time to pray? the Bible Belt congressman had asked the general. Jee-zuz.

  “Get that mother-humper off the goddamn screen,” he growled into the public-address system.

  The screen dissolved quickly into snow again, then refocused on a large polar map looking down on the northern hemisphere. The view gave the general the pleasing feeling of looking down on the world. The god's view was flanked, on the other screens, by computerized characterizations of his missile installations, his B-52 bases, the Navy's submarines, and endless data about the activities of the adversary. But his eyes did not get that far.

  Out of the polar map he saw computer projections of missiles crossing all American coastlines. He also saw that the flexing molars in Polyarnny had changed. They had become snaking white lines. He knew instantly where the white lines would end, and when.

  The general shuddered for the first time since his wife had died. He quickly hit controls which moved his status from Snow Man to Big Noise and changed the preliminary attack conference, already under way, to an attack conference. He flicked a switch that interrupted SIOP and RSIOP just as RSIOP was about to respond to the nudets marching on Moscow, turning them to a different problem. He also picked up the grungy yellow phone.

  The kid really had been a little bastard today. Tyler, struggling with former Budget Director Stockman's “The Up Side of Supply Side Economics,” would have been having trouble anyway. But stacking the kid's antics on top of Stockman's obtusities, putting both together in the cramped and overheated library in the Alert Facility with the goddamn sign that asked him always if he were EWO ready, was too much.

  The kid simply had been a little bastard. And his mother hadn't been much better. He was doing all this for them. The Air Force was paying for his master's degree in business administration. So he flew as a navigator aboard a Strategic Air Command B-52 every four days and sat in an overheated blockhouse one week out of three. It was called paying your dues. His wife knew that. Maybe he should chuck it all and become a salesman. Then he could be gone two weeks out of three.

  His wife, of all people, should have handled it better. He could have been PRPed. Kicked out, as he had seen others get the ax for far smaller violations. Six months to go, six months to the degree he had been after so long, six months to the end of his second Air Force tour. Six months to out. And they could have nailed him on PRP. They still could. That would do it nicely, very nicely indeed.

  He read the sentence for the fourth time and clapped the book shut, not able to handle it.

  SAC showed some understanding of the pressures on a twenty-six-year-old father. It was prison, without conjugal privileges, but it wasn't like the submariners, who stayed at sea for months now in the new Tridents. This was one week out of three. SAC had built the little alert annex where families could visit briefly. They had placed the jungle gym and swings out back for the kids. And the boy came almost every day, a little wide-eyed kid who made his father swell with pride. The boy's bulging eyes riveted on the flying suit with its demigod symbols, the child-face painted with both awe and fear the way he watched the Ajax man swoop into a television kitchen, uncertain if the image was there to save or destroy his three-year-old world.

  Tyler hadn't really expected the boy today. It was his first day on alert and a brutally cold winter afternoon, the temperature hovering just at zero. But there he was, a soft little ball wrapped in his snowsuit, and Tyler had swung his son high on the swings, coaxing him: “Take off, Timmie! Reach for the sky!”

  When the time had come to leave, the boy had gone reluctantly and morosely. His mittened hand tugged against his mother as he toddled toward the barbed-wire control point, his snowball head craning back toward the retreating hulk of a father-hero returning to the blockhouse.

  “Timmie!” Tyler heard his wife scream.

  He turned to see the little boy romping toward him. Tyler froze, arms cocked angrily on his hips, and glared at the boy. The boy froze too, fleetingly, staring uncertainly at this other father. He turned and saw his mother racing at him. He bolted in panic, away from both of them, off toward the drooping wings of the airplanes his father flew. He skidded on a patch of ice, slid on his padded behind under a huge sagging wingtip, colliding with a wheel beyond which slender projectiles jutted. Suddenly a white form loomed above him. He heard his mother nearby, heard her land on the frozen tarmac too, the air whooshing out of her in a moan.

  Tyler, who understood, moved more slowly toward them. He had watched the security patrol, a SWAT squad cloaked in winter-camouflage white, appear out of nowhere, training their weapons on the child first, the mother second. He saw one guard trip his wife, instantly spread-eagling her on the runway and placing a foot on her back, a sawed-off Italian riot gun inches from her head. He saw another guard's foot land on the boy, only slightly more gently, but firmly, with a riot gun directed at him, too.

  Tyler edged methodically toward them.

  “Cottonmouth,” he said to the snowmen.

  The foot came off the boy first, then off the woman, more slowly. Tyler picked up the boy and, wordlessly, struck him sharply on the rump. The boy's eyes filled with water that would not leak. Tyler handed him to his mother.

  “You do not go near the bombs,” Tyler said to her tonelessly.

  His wife stared back blankly, stricken eyes saying nothing and everything.

  Now, as it became almost time for lights out in the alert bunker, Tyler reopened the book and reread the sentence, sti
ll unable to handle it.

  “Yes?”

  The voice was groggy and slurred.

  Jee-zuz, the general thought. He's drunk.

  “Mr. President, we face an extremely serious situation. I have asked for a full attack conference. Under my authority, I have moved us from Cocked Pistol to Fast Pace.”

  “Cocked Pace?”

  Jee-zuz.

  The President represented everything the Joint Chiefs had wanted since the bleak days following Vietnam, the rise of OPEC, the humiliation of the hostages, and the Soviet adventures in Africa and Afghanistan. He had begun the development of a trillion dollars' worth of new strategic weapons, although their deployment was just beginning. He had sent the Russians into a cold sweat, yelping that this was the pathway to war. He had ended the last vestiges of detente with the Soviets. Good stuff.

  “Mr. President, I know you are upstairs. But the line is secure. The call was moved, through standard emergency procedures, directly up from the Situation Room.”

  “Who is this?”