Alice still said nothing.
“At Mach two-point-five, eighteen hundred mother-humpin’ miles an hour, he damn near got there. He launched the new cruise missiles off Hope Island, made it through the Soviet perimeter, and did a helluva job evading the MIG’s over the Barents Sea.”
Alice stared vacantly past the colonel at his communications officer, a short, stocky woman perspiring as she still worked frantically to patch together the tools of their control. He couldn’t remember her first name. Why did men want to mate when their world, little world or big world, seemed terminal?
“He was approaching the coast of Finland, west of Murmansk, on a straight shot at Leningrad. He was running out of fuel. It was slow down or flame out. He slowed down. We think a MIG rammed him.”
Alice turned back toward Sam. “So what did we learn?” he asked.
“We learned that, coming straight in, there still are enough MIG’s to stop an armada. We can surmise that some of our electronic-warfare gear, the jamming equipment or the chaff or something, worked better than expected or the MIG wouldn’t have needed to ram him. We learned the cruise doesn’t work. At least in this environment.”
The general’s entire frame seemed to sag. “Eggheads,” he said wearily. “Remember all those four-hundred-dollar suits and alligator briefcases parading into the Pentagon from Seattle and Fort Worth and Long Island? Christ, some of their slide shows would have put Coppola to shame. Bright little farts, weren’t they?”
“It was a great theory, sir. A fifteen-hundred mile cruise missile, launched offshore from a bomber, its computer memory following maps of riverbeds, mountains, bridges, television transmitters. Error probability ninety feet. Aim at home plate and you won’t miss by more than first base. Terrain trackers. Somebody forgot the first whomp would change the terrain.”
“So what do we have?”
“With the cruise launches from the FB-111? They’re going bananas. Running around in circles. Hitting mountains. Nosing into the tundra. One of ’em is heading for Stockholm. It’s only four hundred miles off target. Don’t guess we’ll get the Peace Prize for that one.” The colonel looked at Alice. “It means the B-52’s will have to go all the way in. Use the gravity bombs.”
The general turned away and stared up the aisle of the command post. His staff had done a remarkable job, considering the damage done to both the hardware and the outside atmosphere needed for men to communicate. Of the forty-three different communications systems he normally had at his command, three or four were working intermittently. Only one seemed to be working consistently—the ultra-low frequency system operation through a five-mile-long copper-wire antenna trailing out of the back of me airplane like a fishing line. He always figured that one would be me survivor. Unfortunately, it had its limitations. The frequency was so low and so slow, he could tap out no more than a few words a minute. On a teletype.
Still, the early chaos had settled down to an eerie routine aboard me Looking Glass. He could sense a bizarre fascination among his people as they slowly garnered data about what had worked and what hadn’t, what had survived and what hadn’t. From the Looking Glass, the general thought ruefully, he had at least a blurred view into the new world he had temporarily inherited. He had already decided he didn’t want his inheritance or the responsibility for the next steps. He moved forward where me colonel was scrolling—Christ, they had him thinking computer talk—through tracking maps.
“Sam,” he said, “what the hell is going on with Harpoon?”
“Beats me, sir,” the colonel replied. “I think he’s getting ready to put down in Baton Rouge. That’s where the man is supposed to be, if everything worked right on the ground. God, it’s high-risk. First of all, there are mobs all over every surviving airport in the country.”
“Troops deployed?”
“Several battalions.”
“But it’s the other opposition that worries you?”
“Hell, yes. Nothing visible. But we can’t see beneath the Gulf of Mexico.”
The general stared into the screen. “Pull me on the Buff, Sam,” he said.
“Polar Bear?”
“Yes.”
The screen flicked through a maze of fluttering projections and then settled on a map that boxed part of Alaska, the northernmost reaches of Canada, and the edge of Victoria Island. A small white cursor stood stationary just millimeters shy of the edge of the continent and the beginning of the Beaufort Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. The cursor edged forward, as the computer adjusted to the plane’s flight path, and then stopped again. The B-52 was almost on top of its PCP, the Positive Control Point at which the bomber required further orders from Alice before making the ultimate commitment to go in.
“Do you want to call them, sir?” the colonel asked.
“No!” the general replied in a voice so stem he startled himself. “Goddammit! No!”
The drone of the eight straining engines went unheard by the five people inside Polar Bear One, the din of their own silence overwhelming the mechanical noise. Only Radnor broke the quiet. “Request permission to leave station, sir,” he radioed upstairs. Good God damn, Kazaklis thought. This is the second time in ten minutes Radnor, whose bladder had held through twelve-hour practice missions, had asked to come up to use the head. “Granted,” the pilot grunted. Kazaklis understood what this was. The tension of the rendezvous with Elsie had given way now to a dull, nagging anxiety that crept slowly down the spine and then bored inward to settle, like an ulcer, in the stomach. With Radnor, it seemed, the anxiety was settling a little lower. Where the hell was the Looking Glass? The waiting was worse than the action.
Omaha Beach syndrome, the PRP psychiatrists hot-wired into the pilot’s brain. Your crew is over the side now, commander. Cut away from mother, cut away from their world, their safe ship. Off in a bobbing ocean limbo between a reality understood but left behind and a new reality they can’t comprehend. Don’t want to comprehend. The beach, commander, the alien beach. Make it real for them, commander. Limbo is dangerous.
Fuck off. Wire your postmortem crap into somebody else’s head. Game’s over.
Aha, commander. Can’t handle the end of the world? What does the end of the world mean to you, commander? A father, a mother, a girlfriend? A childhood lake where the rainbow bit, leaped, dived, and fought young hands? A fire in the rain? Those misty Oregon woods where child’s eyes saw pterodactyls swoop on webbed wings and older eyes see them swooping again? Is that your lost world, your new world, perhaps? Pterodactyls swooping again? Have you lost a song? A dream? A memory? You can keep the memory, commander. But memories are dangerous now, devil children of the mind. Revenge is safer.
Kazaklis pulled at the lumbering airplane. The Buff seemed to struggle against him, a friend no more, its wings no longer his wings. He prodded it higher, through 40,000 feet, then 45,000 feet into the rare, thin reaches of the stratosphere where each pound of fuel would yield a few more miles. But the drag of the SRAM missiles, tucked under each wing, tugged against him. The weight of Elsie’s last precious gift rebelled against him. He was a behemoth now, a half-million pounds of gas and weapons and machines and flesh and blood and minds and memories and one useless body blissfully immune to PRP threats of fathers and mothers and lovers and dreams and songs and lost lakes of a world gone. Careful, commander. The aircraft’s sluggish. Who’s sluggish, commander? Weighted down. Omaha Beach syndrome, commander. Fuck off. You’re over the side too, commander. An old girlfriend. Thanks, mind invader. How are you, Sarah Jean? Are you at all, Sarah Jean? Kazaklis shook his head. Go away, girl-image. Gone-image. But seventeen-year-old blond curls tumbled past milky cheeks, over soft shoulders, down around firm breasts hidden, forbidden, beneath a pompon sweater. Coos Bay! Rah! Rah! Got yerself a little blond poon, has ya, bub? Shut up, Pa. Best get the poon, bub, cuz that’s all yer gonna get from that one; mite too fancy, that one. Pa said you were too fancy, Sarah Jean. Halupalai was driving Kazaklis nuts.