The shock of the light stunned Moreau, and at first, she threw an arm up over her good eye. The moonless Arctic night was not dark at all, and the glare, even four minutes later and now forty miles away, overwhelmed all images. Then slowly, over the barrier of her arm, shapes formed and colors bloomed. In the kittywumpis tilt of the aircraft window, the horizon cut diagonally one way and the majestic stem of the cloud the other. Lightning strikes, purple and violet, darted throughout the pillar. The radioactive gases and debris and water vapor churned inward on each other, over and over, the full twelve-mile length, snakes coiling on each other, devouring each other, and then emerging in ugly anger again. It was satanic. As she looked upward at filaments burning at the edge of the troposphere, the power seemed to touch heaven and holiness itself. It was godly. But as she looked down, where the drogue parachute had floated and the mountain ridge now floated in tumult unimaginable, the power seemed to emanate from other regions altogether. No training film, no lecture, no mathematical equation—no amount of psychic numbing—would prepare someone for this.
Kazaklis could not remove his eyes from the mountain ridge. It was gone, gouged out, and in his mind he saw volcanic Mount St. Helens near his boyhood home and he saw his father and he saw his father’s belief in the eternity of nature, and he tried to believe in his father’s belief. But his father had never seen this, and Kazaklis doubted again. One flick of a finger, his finger, had caused this. He knew that thousands of fingers were poised now over thousands of unnatural volcanoes, unnatural suns. In the distance he could not see through the crud to the center where he had caused the temperature to soar to 150 million degrees But he could see the beginning of the flood. He could see where the heat of his own unnatural sun had cooled to the point where it no longer vaporized the northern ice into clouds but melted it instead, creating a gushing and raging new river, miles wide, that raced toward him across the once-frozen Mackenzie delta. He had turned Arctic winter into tropical summer. He cringed. And he doubted.
Moreau looked high toward the heavens once more, where the vapor cloud now stretched laterally away from both sides of the mushroom cap. And she knew that in the heights the ice vapor was cooling again, turning to water droplets that fell and froze once more into crystals and flakes. In the once-clear night sky she could see snow swirls falling from her cloud, a Christmas cloud with Christmas swirls from a Christmas gone. She felt ill and she brushed a fireproofed hand past another fireproofed hand also reaching forward, as the pilot and copilot pulled the curtain closed, together, mutually deciding that their psyches must be numbed again. Quickly. They sat mute, pushing their aircraft higher and away.
“Oh, Kazakhs,” she murmured a moment later, “it was so easy.”
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“Would it be so easy on a city, too?”
“Yeah.” He sounded like a little boy lost.
The return of the successor startled Harpoon. He had cradled the phone moments earlier and drifted off into a mélange of disconnected thoughts. He looked up, momentarily confused, and saw the Uzi first, then the professionally blank expression of the agent, then the unlined face of the successor, and finally the Cheshire-cat smile of the colonel.
“Need to send the orders, Harpoon,” the successor said.
“You’ve decided sir.” It was not a question.
“History won’t wait.”
Harpoon looked at the man sadly. “I hope history hears you.”
The man stared at Harpoon, uncomprehending again, not knowing whether to take umbrage.
“Be careful with the insults, admiral,” the colonel said. “It sounds like losing to me bothers you more than losing to the commies.”
Harpoon looked at the colonel without expression. “You’re a fool,” he said calmly. “An incredibly dangerous fool.” The man’s smug smile dissolved. He took a half-step toward Harpoon. Harpoon stood abruptly. The agent wobbled his Uzi between the two military men. “Why don’t you put that away, sonny,” Harpoon said. “It isn’t going to stop this riot.”
The successor looked on silently while Harpoon reached down and picked up the satchel he had carried out of the blue bunker in Omaha.
“Good luck, sir,” he said, and began to leave.
“You think I’ll need it, Harpoon.” The man had no rancor and no question in his voice.
“Oh, yes, sir. We all needed it tonight. A very large dose of it.”
“Past tense?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Where are you going?”
“To my quarters.”
“We need to lock you in?”
Harpoon paused thoughtfully. “I’ve fired all my weapons,” he said after a moment. The words had a strange ring, even to Harpoon. He turned to leave. The brittle words of the colonel interrupted him.
“Haven’t you forgotten something, admiral?”
Harpoon cocked his head back at the group. The colonel was smiling again, as he gestured at the satchel.
“The card, admiral.”
Harpoon stopped, placing the satchel on the table, and opened it. He withdrew a blue-and-red plastic card, charge-plate size. He looked at it briefly. Across the top was a series of random letters and numbers. In the center, the card said: “top secret crypto, nsa.” At the bottom it said: “sealed authenticator system.”
“You’ll need this,” Harpoon said, handing it to the successor. “Orders to the bombers must go through the Looking Glass. The code at the top will prove you are authentic. The colonel will give you the word codes.”
The successor looked briefly at the card, then raised his eyes to the admiral. “You really forgot to give me this, Harpoon?”
Harpoon looked at the man but felt his eyes glaze. The disconnected thoughts, interrupted by the group’s arrival, rattled erratically in dark crannies of his head again. If the earth falls in the wilderness, does it make a sound? Did a Beethoven ever make music, a Shakespeare poetry? Out of darkness, into darkness. If you deny the future its existence, did you exist? Chess is such a simple game. “I’m really not sure, sir,” Harpoon said, and walked away.
TEN
• 1130 Zulu
The Looking Glass general withdrew a pack of Pall Malls from their normal niche, a cubbyhole to the right of the red lockbox and below a small countdown clock no larger than a starter’s watch. The cigarettes were a ritual. He smoked now only on Looking Glass nights, his wife frowned on it so. Each time he drew the duty, he conducted the preflight briefing, stopped at the vending machine en route to the runway bus, bought a single pack, and slipped it into his flight jacket. Aboard the aircraft he always placed the pack in the same cubbyhole, as if to hide them here, too. At the end of the eight-hour flight he conducted the debriefing, breaking cover by smoking one last cigarette on the ground, and then discarded the pack in a litter can before the drive home into the suburbs. The discarded pack invariably was three-quarters full.
The general took a single cigarette now, caressing it as he might a fine Havana, tapped it twice on die Top Secret papers in front of him, and snapped a match. The match’s flare coincided with the flashing white light on the black phone. He stared at the phone, expecting its signal, and finished the ritualistic lighting of the cigarette as he lifted the receiver.
At first he heard nothing, which was unusual, so he said, “Alice here.”
The pause continued briefly and then he heard in a slightly awkward drawclass="underline" “Condor speakin’.”