Briefly Kazakhs cursed the safeties—six coded interlocks known as the Permissive Action Link. The PAL was no pal now. He would be in one helluva hurry. Still, he had the codes. He did not think long. It was a long shot, but Moreau’s cockeyed plan was not that cockeyed. It would require exquisite skill, exquisite timing, and exquisite luck. And those self-assured Russian fighter pilots would have to be so cocky they’d hold off a few minutes longer. Would he be that cocky? Yeah, he answered himself. If he were given a little more bait, which he intended to give the Russians, Kazakhs the Great would be that cocky. He smiled.
“Moreau,” he said, “you’re too fucking smart to die so young.” Without pause, he continued: ‘Tyler, are the Russians flying in formation?”
“They’re closing fast, commander.” Tyler now sounded confused and scared.
“Are they flying in formation, dammit!”
“Yes, sir,” the navigator flustered.
Kazakhs smiled again.
“Hokay, you guardians of democracy,” he exulted into the intercom, “secure the family jewels again. Our buddy with no jewels to lose has come up with a real ball-buster!”
Kazakhs immediately banked the plane left toward the last ridge between him and the river delta. He punched the bomb code into the little cipher box next to him, unlocking the interlocks and arming one bomb. His mind sprinted through timing calculations. Thirty seconds from release to detonation.
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.
Briefly Kazakhs cursed the safeties—six coded interlocks known as the Permissive Action Link. The PAL was no pal now. He would be in one helluva hurry. Still, he had the codes. He did not think long. It was a long shot, but Moreau’s cockeyed plan was not that cockeyed. It would require exquisite skill, exquisite timing, and exquisite luck. And those self-assured Russian fighter pilots would have to be so cocky they’d hold off a few minutes longer. Would he be that cocky? Yeah, he answered himself. If he were given a little more bait, which he intended to give the Russians, Kazakhs the Great would be that cocky. He smiled.
“Moreau,” he said, “you’re too fucking smart to die so young.” Without pause, he continued: “Tyler, are the Russians flying in formation?”
“They’re closing fast, commander.” Tyler now sounded confused and scared.
“Are they flying in formation, dammit!”
“Yes, sir,” the navigator flustered.
Kazakhs smiled again.
“Hokay, you guardians of democracy,” he exulted into the intercom, “secure the family jewels again. Our buddy with no jewels to lose has come up with a real ball-buster!”
Kazakhs immediately banked the plane left toward the last ridge between him and the river delta. He punched the bomb code into the little cipher box next to him, unlocking the interlocks and arming one bomb. His mind sprinted through timing calculations. Thirty seconds from release to detonation.
Thirty seconds at six hundred miles an hour. Five miles. He would have to be damned lucky to catch the MIG’s roughly that distance behind him. He did not bother to ask if they had followed his banking left turn. He didn’t need to ask, feeling their lust for a crack at him in the wide-open Mackenzie flats. They’d wait for that shot. Just as he would, if he were on the chase.
“You may sit down, colonel,” Harpoon said evenly. “Mr. Burr will yield the floor in a moment.”
The colonel hesitated, fussily adjusting his glasses, and slowly seated himself. The others, with the exception of the admiral and the successor, shifted uncomfortably. The two men stared at each other wearily. The successor spoke first.
“Do you want to be remembered as an Aaron Burr, Harpoon?” he asked.
“Of course not, sir. I’ve devoted my life to my country. I love it. I will fight for it, as I am tonight, to the death.”
“You don’t seem to be sayin’ that.”
“Sir”—Harpoon felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding—“I’m not simply being asked to fight to my death tonight. I’m being asked to fight to the death of my country.”
“You sayin’ we’ve been wrong?”
Harpoon thought for a moment, not to resolve doubts but to find the proper words. He looked at the row of clocks. They had thirty, perhaps forty-five minutes.
“We don’t have time for apple pie, sir. In any normal sense, we are the wronged party tonight. This is not a normal night.” He paused. “No finer nation has ever been conceived on this earth. We have tried to correct wrongs within our own borders. We have tried, with less success—and often using our own standards—to correct them outside our borders. I believe we, like few nations, have tried to do our best by the world.” He paused again, and swept his eyes around a quietly vibrating compartment in which all other eyes were cast downward except those of the successor and the colonel. “No nation is always right. We’ve made mistakes, yes. Our largest was the relentless accumulation of the weapons we are now using. There will be no winners tonight, sir. But perhaps, just perhaps, we can find the wisdom to salvage a touch of the humanitarianism of which our country has been so justly proud.”
Harpoon stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and there was silence in the compartment. He stared at the successor without challenge and the man stared back with curiosity. Mistakes. God forgive them, they had made so many. God forgive him, he had participated in so many.
“So you want me to be remembered as an umbrella-totin’ Chamberlain, buying peace at any price?”
Harpoon felt helpless. After all the combativeness of the briefing, he once again felt empathy for the unprepared human being in front of him. Perhaps he was asking too much, asking him to break out of a lifelong mind mold in mere minutes. In the seventies he had spent several months at the War College in Washington. One of the lecturers was a stooped old professor of philosophy from a liberal Ivy League college. One of Rickover’s perverse tests, he and his officer colleagues had concluded. The professor had pushed them about the tree in the wilderness and they had perfunctorily debated whether it made a sound, missing his point. On his final day, the old man told them they were all left-siders, playing chess and war. Right-siders play different games and survive. In his final message—and Harpoon recalled each word now—the man said without enmity: “This generation of men may be the most shortsighted in history. It not only consumes the earth’s resources, robbing the future of its heritage, it also toys childlike with a power that could rob the past of its existence. Chess is a simple game, gentlemen.” Only now did Harpoon realize that the tree was the earth.
“No, sir,” Harpoon said, “I want you to be remembered.”
The successor looked at him without understanding.