“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 Kazakhs, 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.”
Kazakhs 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,” Kazakhs repeated.
“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?” Kazakhs came on.
“We were flying a routine proficiency mission. The Looking Glass also ordered my B-52 to head south.”
“South?” Kazakhs sounded puzzled.
“To pick up armaments, I guess.”
“I’ll be damned,” Kazakhs 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.”
Kazakhs 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 inter-ruptus, 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,” Kazakhs 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.