“Fuck off, old man,” Kazakhs said sharply.
Halupalai watched Kazakhs closely, for the pilot seemed genuinely irritated this time. “That’s okay, Kazakhs,” he finally said. “I evened it up for you.”
“Yeah?”
Halupalai paused again, wondering briefly if he was being unfair to Moreau by continuing. He thought not.
“You know how point-blank she was when she first came here. Had to know everything about everything and everybody. She was a real pisser. But she learned how to fly the Buff faster than anybody I ever crewed with.”
Kazakhs grunted.
“Well, after your little… uh, failure, Moreau comes up to me the way she does—sticking her chin out a foot and boring those laser-beam eyes straight through to the inside of my skull—and asks what’s with Kazakhs. I say whaddaya mean. And she says, very seriously, ‘Everybody’s got a skeleton in his closet, Halupalai.’ I says, are you serious, and she says, yep, she’s serious, she wants to know what skeletons Kazakhs has got in his closet.”
“No shit?” Kazakhs said, surprised.
“So, I look at her,” Halupalai continued, “and say, just as seriously, ‘I wouldn’t open his closet door, Captain Moreau.’ She asks why and I says, ‘Cuz you’d be smothered in pelvic bones.’”
Kazaklis erupted into volcanic laughter. “Pelvic bones!” he roared.
“You know something, Kazaklis?” Halupalai continued quietly. “She laughed as hard as you just did.”
Kazaklis stared at the floor and frowned. His lips puckered outward and his face took on that flagrantly fraudulent double image of little-boy pout and pool-hall hustle that Halupalai had seen so many times it no longer was fraudulent.
“She still walks around here like she’s got cramps twenty-eight days a month,” Kazaklis grumped without looking up. “You think you can trust somebody with nukes if they’re on the rag?”
Halupalai went quiet, wishing he had not told Kazaklis the story.
“You old fart,” Kazaklis said after a moment, his twinkling brown eyes lifting off the floor and out of their pout. “I think you’re in love.”
Halupalai said nothing. Not true, he thought sadly. He felt his stomach, once taut and flat, bulging against his flight suit. He felt his bronzed face tighten into furrows that never quite disappeared now. He felt old and he felt Kazaklis sensing it, too. Their moods changed simultaneously.
“Why don’t you get out of this shit, Halupalai?” Kazaklis said abruptly. “How old are you? Forty-three? Forty-four? Been through Nam. Been in these airplanes for twenty years. Why don’t you just retire and lay in the sun on those islands of yours? This is such bullshit. Sitting here in this godawful overheated bomb shelter waiting for something that will never happen and if it does we couldn’t handle. Get out of it, man.”
Suddenly Halupalai didn’t like this at all. He could handle Kazaklis when he was deadly efficient or wildly, excessively escaping. He could handle the double image and the con. But he looked at Kazaklis now as if he had never seen him before. He was certain Kazaklis didn’t even believe what he had said about bomb shelters and wars. That wasn’t the subject. It was far more serious than that. It was personal and threatening. Halupalai sucked his stomach in hard. He forced his face to relax, flattening the furrows.
“Why do you stay, Halupalai?”
“Why else, captain, sir?” Halupalai grinned, forcing the smile and forcing the lighthearted sarcasm into his voice. “To keep this world safe from godless communism, captain, sir!”
And then the siren wailed.
Halupalai bolted out of his chair, started his scatback dash past the picture-window vista, and pivoted sharply under the howling klaxon. In the hallway he opened up his long-yardage sprint and collided with the terror-struck Vietnamese counter boy, sending him sprawling back into the darkened cafeteria from which he had been emerging. Halupalai did not pause. The clock was on him now. He had no illusions, no fears, about anything else. This was a drill. That was fear enough. Someone somewhere had a stopwatch on him. So he raced against it, against the others, against the unseen evaluators, against the looming end of his own usefulness.
In the shriek of the siren, Kazakhs heard World War Three. He always did, despite his words to Halupalai, and he wanted it that way. Some always heard drill, to keep their sanity. A few always heard more, to keep the adrenaline pulsing, to keep their speed at optimum. Kazakhs always heard more, and as he wheeled into the hallway, he trailed Halupalai only slightly. He knew Halupalai had to be first. He understood the Hawaiian’s need. Still, he would not give him an inch, not lag a quarter-stride now to serve that need. If Halupalai got there before Kazakhs, it would be because Halupalai beat Kazakhs.
Moreau, lying on her bunk in a sleepy reverie, landed on her feet before her brain fully changed gears. Her roommate moved simultaneously, the reflexes automatic, and the two women wedged in the door before Moreau elbowed out first, ripping the chastity belt in the scuffle. Halupalai shot past. Moreau slipped in front of Kazakhs and broke into long, strong strides. Kazakhs cut off the tanker pilot, causing her to stumble.
Tyler, his head swimming in the money curves that would guarantee his family’s long-term security, slapped his book shut. He jammed his feet into poised boots, tucking the laces without tying them, and joined the race. In the Alert Facility all minds, except one, were blank.
O’Toole shuddered. His heart leaped, his stomach sank, and he burst out of the icy shower without turning off the water. Radnor stood there, already pulling his flight suit rapidly over his sweaty body. Radnor glanced quickly, with no facial sign of sympathy, at his drenched crewmate. O’Toole caught the look, silently answering it with “Oh, shit!” in his eyes.
“You gonna have one very clean, very cold fanny, pal,” Radnor said as he spun out of the room.
O’Toole grabbed a towel, discarded it immediately, seconds ticking away, and pulled his suit over his dripping body. He forced his wet feet, bare, into his boots, grabbed his socks and his underwear and his flight jacket, and started running. At the locker-room doorway he lurched after another towel for later, missed, dropped his socks, paused, forgot the socks, goddamn these drills, and stepped back up to full speed. He was scared, like a kid on the way to the dentist—not of the wrench of the dental pliers but of the quick stab of the needle. It was going to be ballsfreezing cold out there. But he ran.
Outside the Alert Facility a soft mantle of powdery snow blanketed everything except the polished runways, the floodlit B-52’s, and the bulbous brown tankers. Fairchild’s darkened roads throbbed surreally in the undulating fog-light orange of the scramble signals. A few blue alert trucks sped through the burned light. All others pulled quickly onto the highway shoulders. In the tower a young air controller watched traffic screens monitoring flights at both Fairchild and nearby Spokane International. He quickly aborted an F-15 fighter-interceptor coming in for a touch-and-go landing. But he was drawn away from the flight-control screens to the other computers and their coded printouts. He had heard the sirens, seen his world turn flexing orange, many times before. But this time he paled, the acne on his twenty-one-year-old face turning scarlet against a mask gone white.
Icarus glanced sideways almost stealthily, feeling as if he were intruding into a valued colleague’s soul. At his right sat Harpoon. The admiral. Suddenly the general wished he had come to know him better. His number two. They came and went so fast in this business. Odd job for a sailor, holed up down here running SIOP and the targeting staff. But his number two was always a sailor, always a submariner, a bow to the Navy’s persuasive role in nuclear deterrence. Nuclear war, buddy boy, Icarus told himself. The game just changed. The admiral was white-haired and open-collared. His face was tanned and Marlboro-man craggy, a contradiction in a man who spent so much of his life away from the sun, deep beneath the sea, prowling. The red police-car lights of the Command Post whipped across Harpoon’s forehead as his unrevealing eyes darted almost imperceptibly between the large missile-display screen and the row of relentless clocks. The clocks said six minutes past midnight, Omaha time; 0606 Zulu. Twenty-four minutes left for Omaha, perhaps two minutes for the President.