“Just remember to hose down this brute when we get to Pearee, Josephine,” he said.
Moreau stifled a smile and said nothing.
“Komaluk, huh?” Kazakhs wondered aloud. “Maybe. It sure isn’t Tuk. Tuk’s floating around someplace, too, but not here. We flew straight over it without a whimper, and the winds didn’t blow it out to sea.”
“Komaluk sits on a peninsula,” Moreau said, “the last radar site before the Alaskan border.”
Kazakhs started to reach for the charts and then radioed downstairs instead. “Nav, give me a reading on Komaluk Beach.”
“Due west,” Tyler said.
“That’s it.” Outside, the haunting red sky, a maze of ionized particles, seemed to mock him. Komaluk Beach. A handful of ancient shacks, equally old radars, a supply plane twice a month, Playboy centerfolds and a pillow to get you through a nine-month winter. Forgotten by the martini-drinkers in Washington. Never known, in thirty years of cold war, by the people who paid the bills. A dozen men, freezing their gonads, watching, always watching. They still watched. Dust to dust, cold dust to hot dust, sparkling red atoms of eternally vigilant men taunting him for thanks—thanks for the extra minute, thanks for the extra seconds. Fucking Russians. Well, you said it, pal. This ain’t tiddly winks.
“Thanks, guys,” Kazakhs said.
“Sir?” Moreau asked.
“I said ninety degrees left. Quick.”
“At Komaluk?” Moreau asked, puzzled.
“Komaluk’s coming toward us, copilot—frying the eggs on your wing.”
“North’s just as safe, commander,” Moreau protested. “Maybe safer. This cloud can’t be too wide.”
“Through our control point? The general’s daughter wants to take us through our control point?” Kazakhs said sarcastically. “Highly provocative action, copilot. The Soviets might consider that an act of war.”
The commander’s voice sounded very brittle. Moreau banked the huge plane left. She shrugged. They already had passed through their control point.
“Message, sir.”
Alice looked up, startled, pulling his eyes away from the green dots scattered across the middle of the world.
The colonel handed him a small piece of telegraph paper, its edge torn as it was pulled hurriedly off the decoding machine. The message from Harpoon, dangerously exposed far to the south in Baton Rouge, read: “CONDOR NESTED.”
“Thank God,” the general said. But he knew he could not breathe too easily until the message read: “CONDOR ALOFT .” He turned back to his map, briefly wondering what perversely wry and lost soul had come up with the code names for the event they never expected to happen. Looking Glass, Alice, Icarus, Trinity, Jericho. And Condor, powerful, ominous, lord of all it surveyed. Last of a long and proud line, almost extinct now.
The din inside the pilot’s helmet became thunderous, pounding at his temples, numbing his reasoning the way too much Jack Daniel’s did. He was losing it, dammit. He shook his head and stared into the great waves of red, looking for an out. One minute. Two minutes, three minutes, four. The sound pounded deeper into his skull, into the pons, the cerebellum, the cerebrum itself. The neutrons from his own brain, punished by the sound as they had been punished by the bourbon, emitted more slowly now, reducing his respiration, his heart action, his circulation, his reaction time. Five minutes, six. Red waves, ghosts. A dozen men true, winking at him in a red night, their souls divided into a billion particles, crimson and ruby, scarlet and pink. His neutrons slowing, theirs racing. Why would dead men dance while he ebbed? Shake your head again, Kazakhs.
“Thirty years of eternal vigilance.”
“Come again, commander?”
Kazakhs shook his head.
“You okay, commander?” Moreau asked.
“Ten degrees left,” he said sluggishly.
Moreau moved the bomber left again. Kazakhs watched an ice-white beacon edge toward the nose of the B-52. Then, suddenly, the beacon turned to a shimmering star, the redness washed away over the wings, and the sky opened again into a black and familiar panorama. Kazakhs slowly let the curtain slip back into place and sagged back into his seat.
“We’re out of it,” he said. He felt an arm on his shoulder and turned numbly around. Halupalai hovered over him with a confused look on his face. In the background Kazaklis could hear a new din and it took him a moment to realize it was the audio alert for an incoming message. Halupalai handed him a small piece of paper.
The pilot examined the code-garbled lettering, turned to look into Halupalai’s blank face, and then examined the encrypted message again. Behind his ear, the telegraph clattered. The message was so brief he did not need his code book to unravel it.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Kazaklis asked.
“That’s it, commander,” Halupalai answered. “The machine’s sending bomb codes now. To arm the weapons.”
Kazaklis stared unseeing into the flash curtains. His bedeviled brain felt like mush. Something was wrong. The world behind him was not functioning properly. He had the sinking feeling everything was out of control. The message made no sense. He reached for the code book to confirm what he already knew. Finished, he looked back at Halupalai.
“Did you decode it?”
“Regulations, sir. Three of us have to confirm it.”
“How do you read it?”
“Same as you, commander.”
“Dammit, Halupalai, tell me what you read.”
“Proceed. And you, sir?”
“Proceed.”
“Proceed?” Moreau interrupted. “Proceed where?”
They ignored her.
“Take it down to Tyler.”
“Tyler?”
“Tyler! The navigator has to confirm it.”
Halupalai disappeared into the back of the compartment. Kazaklis sat waiting.
“Proceed where?” Moreau asked again.
“Something’s screwed,” Kazaklis said.
“Commander!” Moreau asked more urgently.
“We got your message, copilot. No boy. No girl. It’s a person. Tyler? Do you read that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well?”
“It says proceed, sir.”
“Confirmed.”
“Sir?” Tyler asked strangely. “Proceed where?”
Kazakhs turned his head away from Moreau. His eyes lingered briefly on the red bomb lever and then focused on the pouch of navigation charts at his left. In those charts the route to their primary target—across Faddeevski Island and toward Tiksi, through the Verkhoyansk Mountains and along the Lena River, down the frozen shore of Baikal and back up the loop toward Irkutsk—was cross-hatched into one-kilometer squares. A generation of satellites and several generations of spies and tourists and Soviet dissidents had mapped every isolated grain elevator and tower, every mountaintop and missile battery a ground-hugging bomber might find troublesome, no bugsquishing wanted. Behind him, in the storage bays between the pilot and the gunner, similar charts were filed for every inch of the Soviet Union—and China. On the chance the Yellow Peril decided to become perilous again. He had charts of every railroad crossing and gravel road from Shanghai to Sevastopol.
“How the hell do I know?” Kazakhs roared. “Just proceed!” And the groaning bomber, nudged by Moreau, banked blindly north again.
In the Looking Glass, the colonel nudged the preoccupied general. “Opposition, sir.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. Coming out of the Leningrad-Moscow corridor at the Buffs. Coming out of Siberia.” He paused. “Coming out of the Gulf.”
“The Gulf?” Alice swiveled an alarmed look at Sam.