“Give the gun back, sir.”
Harpoon’s voice was patient but persistent, as if he were talking to a child. The successor stared at him numbly, holding the submachine gun loosely in his lap, then slowly handed it up to the agent, who stood precariously behind Harpoon.
“Do you understand what’s happening, sir?”
“Troops should’ve cleared the crud off the runway,” the successor said in a blank monotone.
“The crud on the runway…” Harpoon strained to keep his voice even over the engine roar. “My troops, sir. Your troops. They’re the crud on the runway. On their bellies. Shooting the animals. Clearing a path for this aircraft. They’re shooting their own people, sir. Your people. People so sweat-stinking scared I can smell the terror in here.” The plane bumped. “Thanks, marine.”
The nose of the giant plane lifted. It tilted left as one set of wheels left the ground. Whump! The plane tilted right. Whump! The admiral heard the flaps curl back into the wings as the E-4 climbed. “You’ve got a decision to make very soon, sir. Do you understand SIOP? Do you understand transattack deterrence theory? Do you know how to issue nuclear orders? Do you know who I am? Do you know who TACAMO is?” He stopped, feeling the weight press down on him as the plane reached for altitude. “Do you want to be briefed?”
The successor sighed. Harpoon felt uneasy. He knew that most of the military officers aboard this aircraft shared his views about the next steps. He also knew that not all of them did. His mind saw the colonel—the Librarian, they called him, a Russian expert whose bespectacled eyes were forever magnified in that if-you-knew-what-I-know look.
Harpoon looked at the successor. The man’s face was certain again. Crap. He shoved his own fear back down into the pit of his stomach. The little white light was blinking urgently at him again, and he reached over to pick up the phone.
“Hey, Radnor?”
Radnor ignored Tyler, staring instead into the flickering radar screen that showed the Canadian coastline giving way to the frozen reaches of the Beaufort Sea and then the Arctic Ocean as they moved north toward Russia again. “Radnor?” Keep the sonuvabitch out of your head, Radnor. He’s gonna drive you over the edge, take you with him. Blank him out. Focus on north, north toward the bastards who stole your dream. Stole Laura.
“Hey, Radnor. I’m serious. Really serious.”
Radnor’s eyes bored into his radar screen. His world narrowed to the edges of the scope. He had no peripheral vision. Tyler would be in his peripheral vision. O’Toole would be there. The world would be there. His wife. His dream. His future. “Radnor.” Keep out of my head, damn you, Tyler.
“I’ll go halfway with you, Radnor. I’ll say it happened. I will. I promise you. But you gotta go halfway with me.”
Block him. He’s the threat now. ‘Talk to me, buddy. Radnor. Talk to me. Please.” God damn you, Tyler. Shut up. Live in your own screwed world. Stay out of mine. “Radnor!”
“Shut up, Tyler,” Radnor said quietly, fingering the broken pencil.
“Radnor, go halfway with me. Just say Timmie isn’t dead. Forget my wife. Radnor, please.”
Radnor turned slowly and looked into Tyler’s grotesque and mournful face.
“Just Timmie. You don’t have to say anything about my wife, Radnor.”
Radnor felt dizzy. He forced the jagged edge of the broken pencil against his palm, hard, till it hurt, till the skin broke and blood appeared. “Forget my wife.” Radnor burst. Laura! The pencil became a dagger, the palm a fist. The fist rose high, then lunged downward.
Upstairs, the red of the flight panel throbbed hypnotically and Moreau stared into the glowing gauges as she mechanically completed a course correction. Her mind felt flooded with novocaine, half struggling with the aircraft, half struggling to untangle the befogged memory of her father’s schedule in semi-retirement. Thursday night. Friday morning. Was this a lecture day at the Academy in Colorado Springs? You’re dead then, Dad. Dead under the megatons that caved in Cheyenne Mountain and brushed the dust of the Academy up into the clefts of Pike’s Peak. Or are you home in Steamboat Springs, sheltered farther back in the mountains? The dancing red fallout clouds moving slowly east across the desert from the wasteland of San Francisco and Sacramento. The fog rolling south from the missile fields of Wyoming, sweeping over the white tops of the Medicine Bow Mountains, crossing the Continental Divide, oozing through the high cut of Rabbit Ear Pass. Be there, Dad. Please, Daddy. Be where you can fight, dig, run, hide, struggle to live. Don’t be dead…
Radnor’s shriek cut through the earphones in the B-52. Moreau jerked to attention. Kazakhs lost his thoughts of Sarah Jean. Halupalai sat bolt upright, startled out of the farewell to the fifteen-year-old daughter he had not seen for years.
Downstairs, Radnor’s fist smashed into the worktable in front of Tyler, blood from his own hand spattering across the navigation charts. Tyler reared back in his seat and sat frozen, tears streaming down his face. “I spanked him, Radnor.” Radnor picked up his hand and slammed it down again. And again. He felt nothing. Out of the comer of his eye, in the unwanted peripheral vision of Tyler’s broader screen, he saw the first white intrusion. Then the second, and a third creeping forward. He fixed his eyes on the screen, then relaxed his hand until the bloody pencil released on the console in front of Tyler. Radnor pulled back to his own position. “Incognitos,” he said calmly into the all-channels radio. “Incognitos at twelve o’clock.”
The admiral’s brow furrowed. He clutched the white phone tightly to his jaw and stared intently past the successor. “Forty miles?” he repeated. “Then thirty-six?” He frowned. “No buckshot pattern? Smart little bugger, isn’t he? Thirty-one. Twenty-four. Crap.” Harpoon let the phone edge imperceptibly down his chin and brought his eyes into hard focus on the successor. “Sir, would you fasten your belt, place your head in your lap, and brace yourself?”
The man stared back at Harpoon blankly. The admiral’s eyes moved away again.
“Dancing ’em up our tailpipe, huh?” His eyes twitched slightly in thought, his mind taking him deep beneath the sea into a more familiar world. The old submariner saw depth-charge patterns. “At what intervals? Crap. Do we know if it’s a Yankee-class boat?” He listened. “It better be. Yeah, they’ve got sixteen tubes. No, with multiple warheads he’d crisscross us.” He knew the Soviet submarine captain would fire from all his missile tubes. The heat from one launch set off enemy detectors as surely as the heat from sixteen. You didn’t hold back in this kind of war. If you did, you sank with unused missiles. “Nineteen miles? Dud? Mr. President, get your head down!”
The successor looked totally confused. This was not part of the game plan—move quickly, act decisively. What the devil was going on?
“We can figure on two, maybe three duds in the sixteen.” Pause. “You got me there, pal. It’s Russian goddamn roulette. Fourteen miles?” The admiral’s free hand pulled at his open collar. He tried to calculate the pattern marching on them—a string of detonations, probably sixty miles long, cutting slightly diagonally right to left across their takeoff route.
“Mr. President. Please. Do you realize what is happening? A Soviet submarine has launched missiles at us. They are patterned to cross our route. Exploding every fifteen seconds. Do you understand?”
The successor’s eyes narrowed warily. He seemed frozen.
“Dammit!” the admiral erupted. “Get your fucking head down!” He reached over and shoved the man’s head down to his knees. “Ten miles?” he repeated into the phone. “Port side, aft?” he asked, slipping into more comfortable lingo. He started to order hard right rudder. “Get those damned guards down! Propped up against the bulkheads! Hands off weapons!” The successor glanced indecisively upward at the agents. They looked at each other and began to move.