“Not bad for a dame, Elsie,” he acknowledged. “Not bad at all.”
“You looking up at me, commander?”
“Right up your…” Kazakhs paused. “Right up 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,” Kazakhs 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,” Kazakhs said.
“You put the brakes on and dive. Fast. Got that?”
Kazakhs 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 soul mate on my right will handle that part.”
Moreau looked at Kazakhs 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.
On the last day, they skipped the skiing, walked the snow-banked streets, stopped for Riesling and cheese in an overdone Swiss chalet, and then headed back to their A-frame condo.
The fire seemed brighter than last night, the brandy more heady. Moreau looked at the man, whom she worshipped and after whom she had patterned her life, and knew that if an oedipal complex existed for women, she had it. They both got a little giddy and a trifle silly as the fire burned down, the brandy taking them into the high clouds which provided such ecstasy for them both.
“Are you happy, Dad?” she asked suddenly.
His eyes turned perceptibly gray, and then moved away from hers to stare into the fire. “Happy?” he repeated, as if it were a question he never had been asked. “I suppose happiness is not one of the goals I set in life.”
“No. You only set one real goal, didn’t you?”
“Preserving mankind? Sounds terribly pompous now, doesn’t it?”
“No. No, it doesn’t. It sounds incredibly beautiful. Like you. And you gave that to me.” Moreau looked at her father and saw that not only had his eyes faded, but his face turned sallow and gray now, too. Her heart fell and she took her brandy snifter, clattering it loudly off his in an attempt to regain the silliness and giddiness.
“My God, you are something, old man,” she said brightly. “I could go for you. Did you ever think how remarkable it is we never thought of incest?”
Her father turned back toward her, some of the glitter returning to his eyes at the ludicrous perversity of the thought. “Well, Mo,” he said blandly, “you never brought it up.”
“Father!” she exploded in laughter. “You old bastard, you! The original male chauvinist pig! I never brought it up, huh? You old phony!”
They reached for each other in a bear hug that was sensual beyond measure, sexual not at all.
“Okay, we’ve practiced incest for almost thirty years now, Mo,” he finally said. “Incest of the mind.”