Radnor slumped forward, forlornly taking his head in his hands. Maybe he was buggy, not Tyler. He felt his buddy’s hand on his shoulder again, shaking him gently.
“Hey, Radnor, look at that, will you?” Tyler tapped at the radar screen in front of him. “What does that tell you?”
Radnor looked at the radar screen and the jagged Arctic coastline passing beneath them. Good God, how could Tyler ignore that? They didn’t come up here on drills. They could run into MIG’s. Soon.
“We’re at our PCP,” Tyler said, jabbing at the center of the screen. “Now, how come we don’t have orders to pass through the control point?”
“I dunno,” Radnor said dully. “Communications maybe. You know what a few dozen nudets will do. Punch holes in the ionosphere, so you got nothing to bounce high-frequency radio beams off.”
“We got low frequency.”
“Maybe it’s EMP. I dunno, dammit! Maybe they’re changing targets on us. Maybe nobody’s back there. I dunno.”
“We haven’t got any orders, ‘cause it’s a game. It’s all another highfalutin, fancy war game, Radnor. That’s why we haven’t got any orders.”
Radnor looked at Tyler and felt downright afraid of him. Tyler smiled back warmly, reassuringly. Radnor braced himself.
“Tyler,” he said very quietly, “it is real. It is very real. Your wife’s gone. Your kid’s gone. We’re not going back, ‘cause there’s nothing there.”
Tyler’s eyes narrowed hostilely, causing Radnor to shiver. Then the navigator’s expression changed again, becoming pained. “I don’t know why everybody has to lay that one on me,” he said. “It’s cruel, Radnor. Very cruel.”
“Tyler…”
“You guys act like I’m screwing up. Have I screwed up? So they’re trying to make this one seem like the real thing. Another goddamn PRP test. Nothing to go home to. I’m playing along. I’m doing my job. I’ll pretend. But do I keep telling you that your wife is dead? Do I? And Timmie? Huh? It’s cruel. It’s very cruel.”
Radnor turned away. He slowly pulled the sliver from beneath his thumb and then concentrated on his radar screen to distract himself. The coastline slowly inched away from them. The screen seemed fogged, and he reached for a tissue to clean it. The fog did not want to go away.
“Nav!” The commander’s voice cut into the downstairs compartment. “Are we on our PCP?”
“Dead center, commander,” Tyler radioed back firmly.
“Shit,” Kazaklis said. “Okay, we’re gonna put it in a slow orbit.”
Tyler looked over at Radnor and smiled smugly. Radnor took out a second tissue and rubbed at his screen.
Upstairs, the commander’s fingers began an agitated drumbeat on the white engine throttles. “You take it, copilot,” he said to Moreau. “Throttle her back just above stall speed and put her in a goddamn circle.” Moreau began the maneuver without comment, banking the plane to the right. “Assholes,” Kazaklis said, fidgeting angrily in his seat. “So this is what we’re going to do with Elsie’s gas. Bastards! God damn those bastards!” The Master Caution light flashed at Moreau. She pushed the lighted yellow button and it flickered, then came back on. She checked the aircraft’s speed and pushed the button again. It blinked off, then came back on. She ran her eye quickly over the controls, saw no problems, and decided to ignore it. Gremlins, she thought. You get used to that in a thirty-year-old airplane. A high, staccato pinging entered her earphones. She looked quickly at Kazaklis, who stared back at her, perplexed.
“Radiation!” Halupalai cut in. “We’re in radiation! The detector’s jumpin’ off the scale!”
Kazakhs spun around and saw Halupalai hovering over the small black radiation detector.
“Shut the vents!” Kazakhs shouted. Moreau lurched forward at the switches.
“Oxygen!” Kazakhs ordered. He stopped for a second, thinking.
“Can you guys see anything downstairs?”
Radnor stopped rubbing at his screen.
“It’s just a blur, commander,” he said woodenly. “A fuzzy blur.”
“Where?”
“All over the screen.”
“Shit.”
“Fallout,” Moreau said.
“Thanks.”
“From a strike on the radar stations.”
“Thanks again.”
Kazakhs and Moreau sat mutely for a moment, the ping echoing in their helmets.
“I’m gonna have to take a look,” Kazakhs said. He reached forward and pulled at the corner of the flash screen. He froze in awe and horror. Then he gasped. Out the cockpit window, the Arctic air pulsated red. Kazakhs felt his skin creep. The air seemed to dance, tiny crystals glowing and careening off each other in electric spasms. The redness swept at him in relentless ghostly waves, like the fog over his boyhood dunes.
“Good God,” he whispered. Then he yelled, “Full throttle! Get us out of here!”
“Where?” Moreau could barely hear her own voice.
“How the hell do I know? North! They didn’t blow up the whole damn Arctic Ocean!”
“General, Polar Bear One has gone through her PCP.”
“Gone through! On whose authority?”
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t imagine the northern coast of Canada is a very comfortable place to orbit right now.”
“Fallout?”
“It must be floating all over the place up there. The Russians took out every radar installation, Canadian and American, on the Arctic coast. By now the fallout is floating wherever the winds took it.”
Alice thought briefly. “Make it official.”
“Sir?”
“Send them through.”
“Through to where, sir?”
“Just through, dammit! I don’t know where.”
“Winds!” Kazaklis demanded.
“Eighty-five knots,” Tyler responded. “Southerly.” The navigator paused. “Westerly now,” he said. “Ninety-five knots.”
The big bomber bumped violently, groaning under the new pressures. Moreau’s left hand manipulated the throttles, pushing the aircraft to full power, while her right fought to hold it steady against the swirl of the shifting winds. Kazaklis peeked tentatively around the corner of the flash curtain. He looked like a spying spinster, Moreau thought—a spinster whose forehead was popping beads of nervous sweat. Moreau caught her first brief peephole look at the surging red poison outside. She turned away quickly.
“Where is Tuktoyaktuk?” Kazaklis asked desperately.
“One hundred ten nautical miles behind us,” Tyler replied.
On the pilot’s forehead the little beads turned to globules, then to streams. Kazaklis slapped at his helmet to try to stop the pinging whine pounding at his temples. Through the comer of the window he stared into a sky throbbing in spasms of deep scarlet, fading to a hot red glow and then to softly dancing electric pink before the wave of scarlet rushed over them again. He saw no opening.
“Jesus,” he sighed.
“Komaluk?” Moreau asked.
“Good Lord, Jesus.”
“Komaluk?” Moreau repeated. “Is it Komaluk?”
“Oh, God in heaven, it’s a horrible sight. Red fucking crud rolling at us in waves…”
“Commander.” Moreau sounded remarkably calm. She bit off the urge to tell Kazaklis he wasn’t glowing in the dark yet. She knew the early-warning stations had been hit. But it was hours ago now. “The vents are closed. It’s three hours old. We could fry an egg on the wing. Inside, we’re okay. For a while. Let’s figure out where it’s coming from and how to get out of it.”
Kazaklis turned away from the window and looked at his copilot. His eyes were wide and frightened like a cornered doe’s. Almost instantly they turned their opaque brown again, cutting off the view inside to the self he protected so vigorously.