“Close it up,” he said. Walking back through the main compartment, he couldn’t look at Sam. Alice was pondering how many more cities, how many more wives, he had condemned to that.
Kazaklis took it on himself to inform the rest of the crew and, as commander of a now retreating strategic penetrator, decided it was best to do it face to face. He laid his helmet aside, adjusted the radio headset, and unsnapped the connector above him. With the radio wire hanging loosely, he pulled himself up from his seat, laid his hand on the copilot’s shoulder, and edged his way down the short walkway toward Halupalai. He sat down in O’Toole’s seat, and even before he made the radio attachment, Halupalai’s baleful eyes told the commander that he already knew. There was no argument in them, just a bleak look of failure, and Kazaklis winced at his friend’s discomfort.
“You done great, champ,” Kazaklis said weakly, placing his hand on the gunner’s arm. The pilot groped for words, feeling as wretched as Halupalai looked. “There was no purpose in it, old buddy,” the pilot said plaintively. Halupalai’s round face softened, as if to say he understood lack of purpose above all, and then he wordlessly gestured for Kazaklis to leave and tell the others.
The open hatch to the lower compartment lay just behind Halupalai’s seat, and Kazaklis shuddered as he squinted down into the dark redness in search of a foothold on the ladder. Below him, he saw five legs. He drew in a deep breath and backed down the ladder, stepping over the pretzel twist of O’Toole’s body, which had jammed forward into the back of the downstairs seats during the low-level race through the mountains. One of O’Toole’s legs was bent at the knee between Radnor and Tyler. The other had wrapped itself formlessly around the far side of Tyler’s seat. The discordant scene in the downstairs compartment was far worse then Kazaklis could have imagined, even considering the irrational radio conversations of the past five hours. The two small desktop workplaces, usually scrupulously neat, were a jumbled disarray of navigation papers, some bloodied, and broken pencils.
Neither of the two crew members seemed to notice the disarray, Radnor oblivious even to the pilot’s presence and Tyler craning his neck to watch him suspiciously. Kazakhs stared at Tyler briefly and then pulled O’Toole back to his resting place facing the locked bomb bay. In the little alcove, temporarily out of Tyler’s sight, Kazakhs leaned his forehead against the bulkhead and rubbed his eyes. Then he stepped back over the body, came around the corner, and knelt between the two men, attaching his radio wire.
“Tough down here, huh, guys?” Kazakhs asked, placing a hand on each man’s knee. He felt Tyler’s muscles tighten. Radnor felt as lifeless as O’Toole. Kazakhs cringed and struggled for the right words. But Tyler spoke first.
“I am EWO ready,” he said. His voice was eerily hollow—and menacing—as if it had been reinforced in an echo chamber. He firmly pushed the pilot’s hand off his knee.
“I know you are,” Kazakhs said softly, trying to make the lie soothing and convincing. “We were all EWO ready, nav. We’ve been EWO ready for a long time.” Kazakhs looked compassionately at his deranged crewman and then glanced briefly and mistakenly at the little Kodak icon above the navigator’s console.
Suddenly an elbow ripped viciously into his rib cage and he bowled backward onto his rump, the radio wire whiplashing at his neck. He looked up groggily and saw Tyler place one hand over the photograph as if to hide Kazakhs from the boy instead of the boy from Kazakhs. The other hand darted at the pilot’s radio wire, wrenching it out of its socket and pulling the headset painfully down behind his neck. Tyler jerked at the wire, then relaxed it, then jerked again.
“EEE… WOE… Red… dee!” Tyler screamed hysterically over the roar of the engines, jerking the wire between each tortured and disconnected syllable. “Ready! Ready! Now!” The whiplash pain stunned Kazakhs and he shook his head in an attempt to free it as Tyler’s becrazed outrage disintegrated into a jumble of unrelated mutterings: on the racetrack… cottonmouth… Radnor’s wife… At the mention of his wife, the young radar operator turned for the first time to look expressionlessly at the scene. He made no other move.
Tyler screamed again. “Coward! Coward! Coward!” The words were a tearful wail now, but he jerked at the wire again, and again. Kazaklis, the pain seering at his neck, jammed a steel-plated flight boot into Tyler’s shoulder. The pilot bolted upright, grabbed Tyler around the arms, and shook him violently. The navigator slammed his elbow into the pilot’s ribs and Kazaklis struck him swiftly, a judo chop to the neck. Tyler slumped to the side.
Kazaklis slowly took a step back, the radio wire hanging from his neck like a loose noose. Radnor looked at him strangely but serenely, with the detachment of a man whose soul had taken leave for a more blissful place. He also quietly mouthed unheard words into the radio. Kazaklis took his hand and felt warm, wet blood. The pilot’s taut body drooped. My God. EWO ready…
After a second, Kazaklis forlornly hooked the radio wire back into its socket. “We are not going, Radnor,” he said simply.
Radnor looked at him without chastisement, without any emotion at all. Kazaklis felt a deep, abiding heartache. Radnor was so young, so innocent, his wide eyes blank among a teenager’s harvest of freckles.
“My wife was a cop, commander,” the boyish radar operator said tonelessly.
“I know, Radnor.” The despair in the little basement of his aircraft began to engulf Kazaklis. “A good one.”
“She protected us, commander.”
“I know she did, buddy. You should be proud of her.”
Radnor turned back toward his radar screen. “Who protected her?” he asked vacantly.
Kazaklis choked back the tears again. The red walls closed in on him. He wanted out. Badly.
“I dunno, Radnor,” he said. Then he turned and slowly climbed the ladder back upstairs. It was only after he had returned to his seat, avoiding Moreau’s questioning look, that he realized that not even Halupalai had asked where they were going now.
He also realized that he hadn’t asked himself.
The lights were simply intolerable, so bright, one in each eye, that it took him a fuzzy moment to realize how cold he was. In the background he could hear a pervasive whine. Air-conditioning equipment? Operating-room equipment? Oh, Christ, they had him on the table again. He struggled to remember what it was this time. But he was so cold. He panicked. So this is the way it felt. An icy hand doth taketh. The fear chipped away at the mind fog. Dammit, he had the best doctors in the world. He fluttered his eyes and fought it. The operating-room lights were so strong, moon strobes that bored through his eyes, closed or open. He groaned and felt a hand on his arm. “Doctor?”
“It’s Sedgwick, sir,” a voice replied. “You’ve been out a very long time.”
“Sedgwick?” He didn’t have a doctor named Sedgwick.
“Hang tough, sir. You really got clobbered.”
The President strained to see the man talking to him, but saw only the lights. He heard a distant popping noise. Far off. Much farther off than the chaotic clatter during the race across the South Lawn. Sedgwick. Oh, Jesus. Sedgwick! He tried to pull himself up, and the pain speared through his legs. He felt Sedgwick gently restrain him. He fought through the pain to focus his eyes on the young military aide, but the piercing lights blotted out every thing.
“Where am I, Sedgwick?”