A split second of unholy silence pervaded the airplane, blotting out the engine roar. Then the five crewmen felt a slight lurch, sensed an eerie weightlessness, imagined the low groan of the bomb rack rotating to move the next weapon into place.
“Bomb away,” Kazaklis said. The fourth yellow light glared at him from the flight panel. Bombs Released. No duds, Kazakhs prayed silently. Oh, God, no duds.
Briefly, as her mind’s eye had seen on the mission drill, Moreau saw the bomb lift heavenward, hover, and then roll over for its short descent, the drogue parachute popping to slow its fall. She began the turning, lifting escape maneuver and felt the controls tugging back at her, a hand on her arm. She turned toward the pilot.
“Not this time,” Kazaklis said. “Straight at the river mouth. Low.”
Moreau stared at him. Then she understood and her skin crawled. The Russian pilots, suspecting or unsuspecting, still had almost thirty seconds to launch their missiles. Kazaklis wanted no telltale escape maneuvers to tip them off. She drew in her breath. The winds from a one-megaton explosion would whip unimpeded across the open flats, tailing off from more than five hundred miles an hour at the ridge to better than one hundred miles an hour five miles away. The blast wave—a moving wall of crushing pressure—would be worse, far worse. Kazaklis was playing the odds on outrunning the effects rather than outrunning more missiles. Percentage baseball. Moreau accepted that.
In the back, Halupalai sat alone, feeling helpless and useless. And empty. Downstairs, Radnor alternately watched his screen and his crewmate. Since the flailing outburst with the broken pencil, followed by the tearful threat, Tyler had lapsed into a near-catatonic state. He said nothing to Radnor, his only words coming in mechanical and scrupulously precise instructions to the cockpit. Radnor felt no fear, either. Just a deep and pervasive sadness he found impossible to shake. On his screen he saw the four Foxbats racing relentlessly toward the ridge, following their path. “Plus fifteen seconds,” the wooden voice said. “Bandits five miles and closing.” Radnor watched Tyler’s eyes move quickly to the little Kodak print above his console, seeming to see nothing, and then dart back to his screen. “Plus twenty seconds…” Radnor also turned back to his screen.
In the cockpit both Kazaklis and Moreau were counting silently. Tyler’s voice synchronizing perfectly. “Plus twenty-five…” No launches, Moreau pleaded under her breath. No duds, Kazaklis beseeched. “Plus thirty seconds…” Kazaklis shuddered. Come on, baby, come on. “Plus thirty-five…”
“Goddammit!” Kazaklis shouted. “Blow, damn you, blow!”
“Detonation,” Tyler droned.
Kazaklis and Moreau jerked simultaneously. “Climb! Climb! Climb!” Kazaklis yelled, but Moreau had already begun, the two of them pulling together.
“Launches?” Kazaklis demanded of the crew downstairs.
“Plus forty seconds…”
“Bandits?” Kazaklis asked.
“Plus forty-five…”
“Tyler!” Kazaklis thundered. “Damn you! Bandits?” The pilot looked at the altimeter. Five hundred feet, six hundred.
“Plus fifty seconds…”
Kazaklis groaned in frustration.
“It’s not Tyler, sir.” The awestruck voice of Radnor came on. “Oh, God in heaven…” His voice faded briefly. Then he murmured, “There’s nothing to see, commander.”
In the navigation compartment, Radnor’s eyes were glued to his screen. In the center half a white ball expanded furiously, like a malignant brain. The fireball was almost two miles wide and seemed burned into the screen, for Radnor’s senses knew it had expanded and disappeared already. A ghostly plume began emerging from the top, almost as wide, rising a thousand feet a second. The remainder of the screen warped in dancing lines like heat rivulets in the desert. Radnor knew the rivulets were the blast wave, rolling at them just beyond the speed of sound, and also just beyond the speed of aircraft. “Plus sixty seconds…” It was going to be now. Radnor braced himself.
Kazakhs and Moreau held the craft at twelve hundred feet, their knuckles aching. Suddenly they seemed weightless again. A feather wafting in splendid silence. Then the thunder crack snapped at them. The feather lifted high, sank, and lifted again. Kazakhs could hear the rivets groaning. Then it was past. “Friendly little kick in the rump, huh?” he asked, jauntily trying to cover the crack in his voice. Moreau said nothing. “Bandits?” Kazakhs asked again.
“Nothing came through that, commander,” Radnor said very quietly. “Nothing.”
The admiral sat alone in the briefing room, the maps blank now. He picked up the yellow phone. A thousand miles north, the Looking Glass general picked up his black phone instantly in response.
“Alice? Harpoon.”
The line was remarkably clear. Harpoon thought he could hear the general’s sigh of relief.
“You made the snatch?”
“Condor’s nested and fed.”
“You had our dongs shriveling, Harpoon. Rough down there?”
“Ummm. How many Buffs we got left?”
“We might be moused.”
“Alice, old friend, we’ve having enough trouble hearing ourselves tonight.”
“Suppose. Hard to say. Baker’s dozen? They used Foxbats. Strange. My hunch is they were leading the Bears and Bisons in, looking for our advance interceptors. Found some Buffs instead. Musta surprised ’em. Next surprise is for their bombers.”
“Alice?”
“When we start throwin’ rocks at ’em.”
“Ummm. Plan down here is peashooters and Delta Air Lines.”
“Delta Air Lines?”
“Skip it.”
“Must say SAC produced some damn good crews. One of ’em nuked the buggers. Four Foxbats comin’ right up their tail. Made a perfect bomb run. Laid the egg—a megaton, for God’s sake—right in front of ’em. Poof. No more Foxbats. How’s that for a new air-to-air weapon system?”
“Used a bomb, did they? Maybe it saved the Soviet postmaster.”
“Harpoon?”
“I think I snatched a chicken-eater.”
In the Looking Glass, Alice paled. He looked at his primitive wall map, covered with multicolored dots. All he saw was green.
Until the moment just past, the crew of Polar Bear One had never dropped a live bomb—never seen one dropped, except in films. They operated almost entirely on theory, having studied the sterile statistics of escape velocities from both incident and reflected shock waves as well as the punishment their communications and navigation gear might sustain from gamma rays, X rays, skyflash, EMP, ionization, and other phenomena.
Kazakhs did a routine damage check, expecting none and finding only minor radio static as the atmosphere ionized above them. EMP was not a threat from this kind of blast, its effects coming only from extremely high-altitude explosions. He was mildly surprised that EMP hadn’t struck them hours ago, shortly after takeoff. But he assumed that, located in the far Northwest corner of the country, they had been outside the rim of the EMP circle, and about that he had been correct.
Except for the routine damage-control checks with each crew station, not a word had been spoken since Radnor’s quiet confirmation that the MIG’s no longer existed. The altimeter read six thousand feet and Moreau silently pushed the craft higher and higher, back on the northerly course. About four minutes had passed.
“Bank it left,” Kazaklis said.
“No.”
“Bank it left.”
“No. I don’t want to see it.”
“Bank it left.” There was no command in the pilot’s voice, just persistence and a haunting echo of curiosity. She banked left and Kazaklis slowly drew back the curtain.