Kazakhs lost his blank look and shot her a withering glance. “You just get promoted?” Moreau looked back at him stone-faced. He shrugged and motioned to Halupalai to send the brief confirmation request. Kazakhs felt his mind tum muddy. The message told him far more than he ever expected to learn. Timing option one confirmed what he already knew—the Soviets had started it. The orders themselves told him what he also had guessed—the pattern of bunker targets was stretched so thin it was obvious the B-52 fleet had been chewed to pieces on the ground. Soviet communications near zero. Both nations had used an EMP attack. Not surprising. Leningrad standing, Moscow partly destroyed. Mildly surprising. They had given him that information because he needed it to defend himself. But the Looking Glass also was telling him indirectly that major cities still stood in the United States as well. Otherwise the subs would have been ordered to clean out the Soviet cities.
But if it hadn’t all gone in one spasm, if the war was progressing in stages as he would have expected, why were they getting orders like these? Moreau was right, damn her. This meant the end, the whole shooting match. Omega. Omega was a catch-all code. No holds barred.
Kazakhs felt woozy. They were asking a handful of Buffs to stab the king—and not wound him. That was taboo, drilled into them time and time again. The crews had joked sourly about it. Politicians protecting politicians while we nuke the folks. But the instructions had been explicit. If the boss gets caught in the office, so goes it. The Omahas and Cheyennes of Russia would go. But no overt political targets. No accidents, no stray runs, no open alternates, no targets of opportunity. We need somebody to talk to, the Air Force had drilled them. His mind spun. He didn’t like this. He also didn’t like her staring at him, probing him.
“You find a wart on my nose, Moreau?” he blustered.
“You know, Kazakhs,” she said.
Kazakhs fought back an involuntary shudder. He stuck his chin out. “I know it means we don’t have to go in and drop a million tons of concentrated TNT on a bunch of kids, Moreau. Isn’t that better, for God’s sake?”
“You mean more satisfying?”
“Damn right it’s more satisfying.” Kazakhs choked a gurgle out of his voice. The roiling, churning horror of the plume over the Richardsons flashed before his eyes, then quickly disappeared. “Maybe it’ll get it over faster.”
She continued staring at him, her lip curling upward. “Faster,” she said.
“Damn you, Moreau.” Her face settled into a granite shield. “Moreau,” Kazaklis said plaintively, his voice taking on a low, painful whine. Behind him, Halupalai hovered again. He handed the pilot another brief message: “CONFIRM TWO ONE ZEBRA. NCA CODE HENHOUSE.”
Kazakhs handed the message to Moreau. “Look up ‘Henhouse.’”
Moreau did not bother to look at the message. She stared silently at Kazaklis, who returned her stare with uneasy stubbornness. The steady roar of the engines pounded at their ears in an escalating staccato—not a drone now but a racing pulse of explosive individual heartbeats. “They want us to vaporize the Premier, Kazaklis,” Moreau said steadily. “And the Presidium. And the head of the KGB, who controls the warheads. And the head of the Rocket Forces, who controls the missiles. Everybody with any control.”
Kazaklis stuck his chin out. “The bastards started it.”
“The bastards have to stop it. Nobody else can.”
“Look up ‘Henhouse.’”
Moreau held her steady gaze on him silently. His eyes twitched and he tried to cover the sign of his uncertainty. His chin jutted out further. “You want us to nuke kids instead, huh?” he snapped.
She stared. Kazaklis began to bluster defensively.
“It always was abunch of bullshit, leaving the leaders alone. Bunch of fucking politicians protecting another bunch of fucking politicians.” His voice cracked and he tried to cover it by blustering again. “Assholes. Sittin’ down in their holes, flying around in their safe airplanes, pushing their fucking dominoes this way and that way over millions of people. Fuck ’em. They got us into this mess.”
“Somebody’s got to be at the other end of the phone, Kazaklis.” Moreau’s voice quavered now. She had spent her adult life trying to prove she belonged in this bomber, that macho wasn’t just male.
“What fucking phone?” Kazakhs snapped. “You think they’re talking to each other and sending out orders like this?”
“Leningrad’s still standing,” Moreau said, her voice dropping off. “Moscow’s partly standing. Something’s still there. Somebody’s back home to send out this insane crap. Somebody’s over there to take it.”
Kazakhs turned away from her, staring into the flash curtains, the commander in him wrestling with the man who had reached to the curtain and stared into the face of a megaton meant for Irkutsk, who had murmured bye-bye, mamushka. “Look up ‘Henhouse,’” he said.
“You know what comes next,” Moreau said, barely audibly. “Some poor spooked sucker of a second lieutenant lets the chemicals go in Europe. Unlooses the anthrax spores because he’s scared. Some colonel in Korea sees a shadow in the night and fires every tactical missile he’s got.” She sat silently for a moment, the engine sound torturing her. “Submarine commanders will roam around for days, weeks, months—popping one here, popping one there—until they just say screw it and let 240 warheads go at the commies in Nicaragua.”
Kazaklis exploded in frustration. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Write my congressman?”
“Till every last nuke is gone.” Moreau’s voice seemed far off and ghostly now. “Every last biological spore.” She stopped again. “Nobody can turn it off after this. Not ever. Not before everything’s gone.”
Kazaklis felt every muscle, every tendon, turn rigid. “Look up ‘Henhouse,’” he said.
“No,” she said.
Kazaklis looked at her strangely. She stared straight ahead, not a muscle moving. He didn’t know what to do. He felt cornered, trapped in a mad maze from which escape was impossible. His voice turned raw with agony. “It won’t make any difference, Moreau.”
“I know.”
“Nothing will change. Somebody else will do it.”
“I know.”
“Cherepovets will go. Irkutsk will go. Ulan-Ude. Everything will go anyway.”
“I know.”
He paused. Her good eye seemed as distant as her bad. “New York, Coos Bay, everything in between,” he said slowly, pausing very briefly. “Steamboat Springs.”
The good eye glinted at the thought of her father. Then it glazed again. “I know,” she said quietly. “But I’m not going to do it. I can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“Won’t.”
Kazakhs turned away from her, staring into the dirty gray ripples of the flash curtain. “You weren’t going to Irkutsk, either,” he said, knowing that the decision had been forming well before the doomsday orders for the grand tour had arrived.
“They gave us too much time to think.”
“You’d have turned a Minuteman key in the first five minutes.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Bitch,” he said. The ripples mocked him. He saw for the first time that the folds of the curtain were rank with dirt and crud, trapped off years of sweaty and eternally vigilant hands. His soul ached, as if he were deserting all those who had come before him, all those who had kept this aircraft poised and ready, all those who had believed. “Cunt.” His voice carried no emotion. He flexed a fireproofed hand, then reached forward and ran a gloved index finger down the grime of a generation. “Damn you.”