“Bandits twelve miles and closing,” Tyler radioed, his voice devoid of emotion. “High terrain at twelve o’clock. Lift it. Dead ahead. Lift it.” Effortlessly the pilot lifted the plane, the captain’s bars also rising. In front of her, Moreau’s screen filled with ominous red clutter. On the right of her screen the yellow groundtracking altimeter, a little thermometer-like image displaying the plane’s height over the ground, plunged rapidly. It bottomed out at twenty-five feet. Ka-whack! The brittle, cracking sound came from the bomber’s spine. Moreau shuddered. The thermometer darted back up, even as Kazakhs nosed the bomber down over the other side of a ridge into a long, shallow valley. She glanced quickly at the pilot. His face remained impassive, his eyes glued on his own screen as they had been since the beginning of the ducking, darting roller-coaster ride through the mountains minutes ago. ‘Too close, pilot,” she said. His eyes held unblinking to the screen. He’s part of the damned computer too, she thought. The Foxbats followed. “Bandits ten miles and closing.”
Kazakhs dropped the aircraft low into the valley. He had taken his pursuers on a long zigzag chase through the frozen mountains. He was back now, almost where he started, one ridge from the delta. In front of him the red screen still danced in leaping signals of danger, a vivid tableau he read as naturally as he had read the green screen just hours ago, taking his toy aliens up against the canyon wall. His mind was blank, as it had been then, his various other worlds excluded. No room to think. Thinking caused fuck-ups. Thinking would tell him that it was him or them, perhaps even bring in the emotion of fear. So his mind read the computer and sent light-speed signals to the fingers adept at so many tasks. He had taken the aliens up against the wall. He knew their secrets. But they never stopped chasing.
Long ago Kazakhs had accepted the inevitability of succumbing—somewhere—a minor slip, a SAM battery in Tiksi, a MIG roaring out of some niche in the Baikals, suicidal in its determination to save kids and lovers and parents in the city on the lake. Or simply sputtering engines, Elsie-style, and a crash somewhere in the wilderness short of the Chinese escape city. But not in a bleak and frozen valley in the Canadian Yukon, which he saw only in red computer images. “Bandits eight miles and closing.” He felt very tired.
“We’ve lost, Kazakhs,” Moreau said softly.
He stared into the red screen, a vivid computer-game house of horrors now. The last flight of the Polar Bear, his mind said, thoughts finally invading its sanctum. He turned and looked at her, pain but not fear in his eyes.
“They’re taking their own sweet time, aren’t they?” Moreau’s voice was soothing and also unfrightened. She was readier than she thought, and had been, she realized, for some time.
Kazaklis broke his silence, still blustering. “You shovelin’ decoys back there, Halupalai?” Then he went on private, his voice dreary. “Cat’s got the mouse, Moreau, and he’s playing.”
“You gave it a classy run through the hills, Kazaklis.”
The pilot ignored the compliment. “They really screwed up on the first pass. They’ll close a couple more miles. All they gotta do is stay away from Halupalai’s guns.”
“Don’t imagine that has them terrified.”
“No. Not four of ’em with six missiles left.”
They went quiet again, the bomber noise rattling through their silence like a tin can full of loose pebbles as it raced along the valley floor. Kazaklis tapped the throttles, edging the speed back up toward Mach point-nine. His sweeping, swaying evasive maneuvers turned halfhearted, seeming to invite the missile launches. Then he reached over and nudged his copilot. “Maybe we oughta give ’em one more thrill,” he said, his voice impishly childlike.
Moreau looked at him and saw the brown eyes twinkling again, the perfect white teeth gleaming. “Don’t give me that sucker-bait Boom-Boom Room smile of yours, macho man,” she said. But she smiled, too.
“Bandits seven miles and closing,” the radio squawked.
“What if I put this hunk in a loop and came back on top of ’em?” Kazaklis chuckled. “Maybe they’d all die of heart attacks, huh?”
“Jesus, Kazaklis,” Moreau said, smiling at his childishness. “The wings would snap like twigs.”
“Maybe the shrapnel would get ’em.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Sure surprise the shit out of ’em.” Kazaklis continued chuckling quietly, then peered sheepishly around the corner of his helmet. “Not such a good idea, huh?”
“Kazaklis, you really are a case,” Moreau said. “Born a couple of generations too late. You should have been a barnstormer, the Great Waldo Pepper defying death and deformity for the hayseeds in Iowa. Till you piled in, a legend.”
“Woulda lived longer,” he said pensively. But his voice changed pitch almost immediately. “The Great Kazaklis. Yeah. With you strapped to the struts of my Sopwith Camel.”
“Then you’d have to share the glory. You wouldn’t like that.”
“Naw, suppose not.” Then he laughed uproariously. “With your knockers, lady. Share the glory with your knockers. Them homy old farmers would just be a-twitchin’, waitin’ for a look at the tits when your blouse blew off.”
Tyler cut in. “You have significant terrain at ten o’clock. High terrain at three o’clock. High terrain seven miles dead ahead.” The valley was closing around them. Moreau faded off. Their Loony Tunes navigator finally sounded as if he were navigating, their gunner was silently defending them with gum wrappers, their pilot was buried, as ever, in boobs. But she liked them, all of them. Suddenly she became very angry.
“Goddammit, how we screwed up!”
The mood change jolted Kazakhs. “The odds were a hundred to one,” he said defensively.
“Not you,” she said. “The fucking world. All of us. Anybody could have seen this coming. Why the hell didn’t we see this coming?”
Kazakhs sighed. “The world’s always been a dangerous neighborhood, Moreau. It became a very small neighborhood when we started packin’ around zip guns that could snuff any city or cave in any mountain.”
“High terrain five miles ahead,” Tyler said.
Moreau froze.
“Or Tyler’s high terrain,” she thought aloud.
Kazakhs looked at her strangely.
“Arm the first bomb,” Moreau said slowly. Kazakhs did not respond. “Arm bomb number one, dammit!”
“That’s crazy.”
“Not as crazy as doing a loop, Waldo. Do it fast!”
The pilot’s mind began racing again. He did not need to tote up his weaponry—six Short Range Attack Missiles tucked under his wings, four one-megaton hydrogen bombs stashed in the bay just fifty feet behind him. He ruled out the SRAM’s immediately. He could make them turn circles, twist into figure eights, slip around a corner, and strike a target thirty-five miles behind him. But they were too difficult to reprogram quickly. The bombs were a different story.
Kazakhs had never seen inside the bulbous gray packages he carried, but he had a working knowledge of their innards.
They were a complicated piece of machinery, maybe too complicated now. They certainly were not designed for Moreau’s sudden brainstorm. The brutes were so powerful they required a nuclear explosion to set off the thermonuclear explosion. So they contained a plutonium trigger to set off a small nuclear bomb that ignited a Styrofoam explosive that finally detonated the thermonuclear explosion. The temperature inside reached twenty million degrees before the casing went. But the bombshells held far more than explosives. They contained altitude and velocity sensors, a drogue parachute to slow their descent, a delay fuse to give him a few extra seconds to escape. They also contained extraordinary safety devices. Hydrogen bombs had careened off the top of ICBM’s, fallen out of B-52’s, rolled off aircraft carriers, disintegrated in space launches. But none had ever exploded accidentally.