“Bye-bye, Irkutsk,” Kazaklis said in a strangely quiet voice. “Bye-bye, mamushka,” he added, his voice almost inaudible.
Moreau felt a sudden wave of unexpected sorrow. She turned toward the pilot, watching his shoulders sag, his left hand sliding limply off the red bomb lever, his right slipping disconsolately from the wheel onto the throttle control box between them. Instinctively she slowly placed her hand on his. Neither spoke and Kazaklis let the copilot’s hand remain on his briefly. Then he pulled his hand away and began asking for the vectors for the course change that would take them to the other big-banana target, the city of Ulan-Ude.
“General, they’re seventy-five miles from their PCP.”
Alice stared into the panoramic world map lining one wall of the battle-staff compartment of the Looking Glass. He did not look away.
“Sir, we don’t want them wasting their fuel orbiting and waiting. Doesn’t make sense. Certainly not now.”
When Alice first had come aboard the Looking Glass, as a young pilot twenty years ago, the map had jarred his senses—although not for the reason it caught the attention of most first-time visitors. He had examined it for minutes before realizing what was wrong. The Eurasian continent, not the Americas, occupied the center of the huge wall map. Every map he had seen since childhood placed the Americas in the middle of the world with Eurasia stretching to the right until it stopped abruptly and arbitrarily somewhere beyond the Urals. Then the eyes had to swing far left to pick up the great landmass of Asia as it moved eastward across Siberia and India and China toward the center, America. It was a year later, during a tour of the Far East, before he realized no one else in the world drew maps the way Americans did.
“They’re minutes away, sir. We might have to try several frequencies to get through the crud in the atmosphere.”
On the Looking Glass map a searn ran through the center of the Asian landmass, creating an artificial ridge in a straight line south through central Russia past Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bombay was in the middle of the hump and then the ridge continued through the Indian Ocean to Antarctica. Even here, the general thought, we had to cut and paste to bring our world view into line with others. But it wasn’t conformity, like Americans be grudgingly adopting metrics, that dictated the change in the Looking Glass map. The Looking Glass wanted the target in the middle. All the targets. He pondered, only briefly, whether his Russian counterpart flew high over the ruins of Omsk or Sverdlovsk, staring at a pasted ridge of Middle America—Winnipeg on the hump, and Sioux Falls and Wichita and Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, cut away from the edges of the world and glued together so they could become unglued now.
“Where is their PCP, Sam?” Alice asked. “Precisely.”
“About seventy miles northwest of the old DEW-line radar site at Tuktoyaktuk. Over the Beaufort Sea.”
“You’re kidding. Jesus Christ. What genius planned that one?”
Alice looked back at the map. The Asian landmass, including China—just in case world politics swung again as it had so often in his life—was covered with clusters of small colored dots. Areas of interest, the battle staff called them. Red for ICBM fields, blue for troop concentrations, yellow for submarine and bomber bases, black for oil fields and industrial sites. And green. The damned green dots. He shivered at the thought that it might be time to take the green out and that he might have to give the orders.
“What’s with Baton Rouge?” he asked.
“Still on the ground, sir. No radio contact.”
Alice sank deeper in his chair. What damnable twist of fate had placed him aloft tonight, one of the random eight-hour shifts he drew no more than once a month? Fleetingly he envied his boss—the commanding general, code-named Icarus. Quick, simple, reflexive decisions. No right. No wrong. No thinking. Then a quick, simple good-bye and carry on, a burned-out huzz on the phone in the Looking Glass, and no second thoughts.
“I shouldn’t make this decision, Sam. I’m not even sure it’s legal.”
“It’s legal, sir. Under PD 58.”
“Screw Presidential Directive 58 and its blasted nuclear-command line of authority. It puts me in charge only if there’s no constitutional successor around. We may have a President on the ground in Louisiana.”
The general looked at the colonel wearily. They had known each other many years.
“I don’t want to make this decision, Sam.”
“I know, sir.”
“I’m not sure if it’s right.”
“It’s debatable, general.”
“Goddammit, Sam, I know it’s debatable! That’s the point!”
“Bye-bye, Ulan-Ude,” Tyler repeated exuberantly. The navigator grinned from ear to ear. Radnor tried to ignore him.
“That doggone Kazaklis,” Tyler continued. “He’s so good at this, he just makes it feel real. Man, I could feel us down there in the weeds, skimmin’ over the tundra, cutting through the mountains. Just plain fun, that stuff. Couldn’t you feel it, Radnor? This big baby romping down Baikal, couple hundred feet over the ice, and coming in on Irkutsk. Ready… ready… Now! Ka-whump! And then Ulan-Ude. Ready… ready… Ka-whump!”
Radnor doodled with his pencil, making meaningless marks on a chart.
“I mean, Kazaklis is better at this than they are. They’re doing their damnedest to make this real. But when it comes to games, our boy has ’em all topped. He’s really doing this in living color. He almost had me believing it.”
Radnor’s thumb pressed, white-knuckled, against the center of the pencil. It snapped, sending a painful sliver-spear up under his thumbnail. He slammed the broken pencil down and turned angrily on Tyler, fighting back the urge to grab him, shake him, shout at him. He forced himself to relax and speak quietly.
“You gotta wake up, Tyler. You just gotta.” Radnor paused. “This is real.”
Tyler stared back at Radnor, a grin twisting across his face. He reached across their work console and put his arm on Radnor’s shoulder, as if to comfort him.
“Hey, old buddy, this is getting to you, isn’t it?” Tyler said calmly. “Hang in there, will ya? That wasn’t real. Look at the altimeter. We were at forty-six thousand feet the whole way. We were just talkin’ it through, the same way we do in the alert room.”
“Mission planning!” Radnor shouted, angrily pushing Tyler’s arm away. “Damn you! Wake up! Yeah, we were at forty-six thousand feet. Over Canada. Planning a mission. A real mission, dammit!” Radnor’s voice suddenly turned to quiet pleading. “Please, Tyler.”
The grin faded off Tyler’s face. “Radnor,” he said, pulling his arm back, “if you gotta believe this bullshit to do your job right, go ahead. I don’t need it.”
Radnor’s body wilted in frustration, his eyes catching the red V of O’Toole’s boots. “Tyler, look behind you. Is that real?”
“O’Toole screwed up,” the navigator said, refusing to turn his head toward the corpse. “I feel as bad about it as you do.”
“The missiles, Tyler. We got kicked in the butt by nudets. We almost packed it in. You saw it on your screen. You felt it. Polar Bear Three packed it in. The whole squadron packed it in. Fairchild packed it in. Spokane packed it in.”
“Simulated.” Tyler’s voice turned icily even. “They can simulate anything. You know that. It’s more war games. And when we get back, Radnor, they’re going to rate us on how well you handled it.”