Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  “Hello, general,” the President said numbly. “The Preme sends his regrets.” He instantly wished he had begun the conversation differently.

  “I'll bet,” Icarus responded caustically. “His little con didn't work. He overshot Andrews by thirteen miles. The blast wave rolled right up Rock Creek Park and took out Walter Reed. My father was there.”

  “Sorry,” the President said, truly feeling it.

  “It's irrelevant. He was sick. He was a soldier. A father should die before his son. The hospital wasn't the target. Andrews wasn't the target. You were the target. Our little wonder weapons aren't as surgical as we like to think. You can't do brain surgery with a nuke. Especially a Navy nuke. You are very lucky, Mr. President. You get what I won't—a second chance.”

  “A second chance?”

  “SIOP is now developing a more appropriate response. There have been some unusual developments. The Premier has got a lot of problems. You get a second chance to save the world from those bastards, Mr. President.”

  The President glanced around the Situation Room, his memory playing tricks, conjuring up a rhododendron garden he had planted as a young congressman at a happy first Washington home along a quiet street shaded by pin oaks.

  “Save the world,” the President repeated. “I think we have a different vision of that, general.”

  Kazaklis felt the Buffs power gush through him, its swept-back wings becoming his wings, its immensity his immensity, its surging fuel his rushing blood. The altimeter, racing up the thermometer stem at the edge of the radar screen, seemed to monitor his adrenaline, too. He heard his voice say flaps up, wheels up. He saw the adrenaline climb to five hundred feet, one thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, and soar further. He became the Buff. There was nothing else.

  For Moreau, PRP ruled as it should. She flew mechanically, robotlike, following the flawless lead of Kazaklis in equally flawless precision. Flaps up, wheels up.

  Behind her, the now calm voice of the Fairchild air controller cleared the second B-52, then the third and the fourth. The quietly nasal echo of his farewell probed for an escape from her subconscious. But thoughts did not escape. Moreau's mind was on autopilot. She searched the dark night sky for other aircraft, as she always did on drills. She fine-tuned the moves Kazaklis made, as she always did on drills. Somewhere, the knowledge rested that the air controller's strange farewell was for her. But it was bracketed, closed off, shut away along with the hidden memory of her friendship with the young kid from the Bronx, the speeding drives through the desert that had terrified him so, the black jeep careening through canyon-road turns, barreling across dunes. The drives had stopped, although the big-sister/little-brother friendship had not, after a magnificent autumn day, an Indian-summer sun bleaching the desert with the dancing heat rivulets of one last mirage before winter. Moreau unleashed all the power of the jeep in a rapturous race through the open sagebrush. She dug into deep sand unexpectedly, spun wildly, flipped, banged the roll bar violently into the desert ground, and landed wheels down. She came up squealing in delight, grinning from ear to ear. The kid's face went bloodless. “Melech hamafis,” he said quietly. It was some time before she learned the meaning of the Yiddish phrase, and it did not penetrate now. This is a test. Z-n-n-n-n-n. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Z-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.

  The whine cut into the PRP-induced veneer around Moreau. It was an alarm whine, routine enough, too, but beckoning her to take control of the climbing bomber from a pilot preoccupied with other tasks. Still, it startled her and her body jerked almost imperceptibly.

  She turned and saw Kazaklis reaching for the lead-lined flash curtain. He tugged at the dirty-gray screen, drawing it across his side of the cockpit window. Moreau made no move to pull her curtain, completing their isolation from the night sky and the last of the outside world. This was a drill. It was against regulations to fly with the nuclear blinds drawn on a drill. She had never pulled the curtain. The whine stopped.

  “I've got it now, copilot,” Kazaklis said. “Pull your curtain.”

  Moreau looked at him strangely.

  “Draw your curtain, copilot.”

  Moreau exploded. Her words, vibrating in her own helmet, seemed to echo back at her. “Are you nuts, Kazaklis ? We've got commercial jets out there, ranchers landing their goddamn Cessnas and Comanches at Spokane International. This brute is a bug-squisher. I'm not pulling the screen in a drill. No way!”

  The dull throb of the headache, which Kazaklis had been subduing all day, crept into the pilot's forehead. He wasn't sure if it was Jack Daniel's or Captain Moreau, and he didn't care. “Draw . . . that . . . screen.”

  Moreau tightened.

  “Take the plane, copilot,” Kazaklis said, his voice abruptly calm.

  He lunged out of his seat and reached across the cockpit toward the second curtain. In the closeness, Kazaklis fumbled across Moreau, his gloved hand accidentally catching her in the left eye before grasping the curtain. He felt the plane nose downward as the copilot dropped the controls, pulling her hand over the eye. Kazaklis wrenched at the curtain, succeeding in closing all but a final narrow gap. He struggled back to his seat and pulled the plane upward again.

  Moreau was mute, furious at both herself and Kazaklis . Her left hand remained riveted over the eye Kazaklis had struck accidentally. Her right stretched forward to close the gap in the curtain, her one eye fixed on the full winter-white moon she moved to eclipse.

  The white moon burst. It burst into a sun, then into ten thousand suns, and the rays washed out the cockpit red. Moreau's eye remained transfixed on the aura of the curtain crack. She was a child again, her father showing her the beauty of the sun's evening rays—Jesus rays, he called them—filtering through pregnant clouds. Then the rays were brighter than Jesus rays, brighter than any sun rays filtered or unfiltered by any cloud. And she saw nothing but white, even after her hand closed the curtain.

  “What the hell was that?” Radnor's startled voice came from below.

  “Melech hamafis,” Moreau answered placidly.

  “Mama,” O'Toole said. “Angelus mortuorum,” he added.

  “Knock it off! Everybody!” Kazaklis ordered.

  “The kid was trying to tell me,” Moreau murmured.

  “Moreau . . .” Kazaklis was almost pleading with her now.

  “In Yiddish.”

  “Moreau. Stop babbling. I need you now.” His voice had no anger in it, just desperation. Kazaklis turned toward his copilot. She turned toward him.

  In the haunted red light of their new cocoon, one of Moreau's eyes peered at Kazaklis in the blazing challenge of its usual unearthly blue. The other stared in dead white. Neither asked for help.

  “The kid told me, Melech hamafis. The king of death is in the room. He was warning me, saying good-bye.”

  “Moreau . . .” The pilot's words trailed off. He knew Moreau had felt little if any pain, that the light had quickly burned away the optic nerve. But he didn't know about the rest of her head, and he did know what was coming next.

  “PRP's back, Kazaklis,” she assured him, the monotone almost as vacant as her eye. “Let's get on with it.”

  Moreau reached forward and gripped the controls. She also knew what was coming next. She braced herself for the wave.

  “Alice here,” the baritone voice responded immediately.

  “Icarus,” the general said unnecessarily, the black phone into which he was speaking connecting only two points—the Command Balcony and the Looking Glass plane. “Harpoon's launched.”

  “I know, sir,” the general in the Looking Glass replied. “We watched him on radar.”

  “God damn you!” Icarus exploded. “If you're watching us, you're too damned close to Omaha. I need at least two of you up there, general.”

  For a moment the phone between the underground post and the flying command post seemed dead, only the low hzzzzzzzz of the radio connection speaking to the contrary. Icarus closed his eyes
and took a deep breath. He didn't want to chew on this man. He was too good. The country was very lucky it had him aboard the Looking Glass on this night. Sheer luck of the draw, too. Every moment since February 3, 1961—through cold wars with the ultimate adversary in Moscow and hot wars with the pests in Hanoi, through detente and confrontation, through Geneva negotiations and vitriolic speeches at the UN—the Looking Glass had been in the air, ready to take command instantly when Omaha went. The fleet of Looking Glass planes was outmoded now, modified old Boeing 707's crammed full of communications gear and a battle staff of twenty. But they still served their purpose, eternally vigilant, one always in the air, rotating on eight-hour shifts with the incoming crew up before the outgoing came down. And always with a general officer aboard. But a general of this man's caliber drew the duty no more than once a month. Top-notch. Friend of his, friend of General Moreau's.

  “We're okay, sir,” Alice interrupted the silence.

  “I'm taking a lot of shit from the politicians tonight.”

  “No apology necessary.”

  “Apology? You ever hear me apologize to anybody?”

  “Just once, sir.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “To Moreau.”

  “No way.”

  “Well, you were just a pup.”

  “No way!”

  “General, you almost took his wing off.”

  “How do you remember that?”

  “You almost took mine off, too. You were a little eager for a routine strafing practice.”

  Icarus grunted. “I was a pup then. Don't remember any apology, though.”

  “Well, you and Moreau cussed each other like longshoremen for twenty minutes first.”

  “Yeah. Then what'd I say?”

  “You stuck your chin about an inch from his, standing there on the runway, and said: 'You're right. I was wrong. I apologize. Fuck you.'”

  The hzzzzzzz returned. On the Command Balcony, the general averted his eyes from the battle staff. The eyes moistened ever so briefly. Then he chuckled. “Ivan's probably mousing us,” Icarus said.

  “Probably,” Alice replied.

  “You let 'em know my one failing in thirty years, asshole.”

  “Yeah. Just another soft, decadent, capitalist general waiting for his pension and a hundred thou a year at General Dynamics.”

  “Well, if Ivan's listening, he knows the same thing we do. Every one of his Model T missiles is missing by a country mile. What you think of that, Ivan? A fucking country mile.”

  Hzzzzzzz.

  “Those cretins always did have trouble with anything fancier than a screwdriver,” Alice responded.

  Hzzzzzzz.

  Beneath Omaha, Icarus looked up at the sixteen-foot-missile-display screen. He saw the one with his name on it arching down out of suborbit, edging over the Canadian wastes. It was not missing. High above, flying farther away from Omaha at 42,000 feet, the Looking Glass general looked at the same data being relayed to him. Bull's-eye.

  “Cretins,” Icarus said.

  “Cretins,” Alice said.

  The phone conversation paused briefly.

  “Moreau's kid is on alert duty tonigbt,” Icarus said without emotion. “The girl. At Fairchild.”

  Alice thought a second. “He'd probably prefer it that way.”

  “Yeah,” Icarus said. “You getting all the data? The SIOP data?

  Missile-impact projections? The submarine missiles have begun to impact.”

  “Yes, general.”

  “My clock says nineteen minutes.”

  Alice looked at his watch. “0611 Zulu,” he said, preferring to mark time that way. Icarus was looking at his execution date. Alice felt uncomfortable—as if he were running away, being up here.

  “Even all these misses are gonna knock the shit out of your computers and radio gear.”

  “I know, sir.”

  “Might be hours before you get the stuff back up.”

  “We're good, sir.”

  Hzzzzzz.

  “Yeah, I know you are. It's gonna get busy around here. I'll try to get back up to you with a couple of minutes to go. Harpoon, too. Give you both a last good read. If I'm not arguing with some piss-ant politician.”

  “Just be your usual diplomatic self, sir.”

  “You can count on that.”

  Four

  0630 ZULU

  To Halupalai, the wave was mystical, almost metaphysical. His earliest memories, those spellbinding image warps of infancy, etched the wave in some magical place in his mind. Even before he could speak, he toddled down to the sandy beach to watch it for hours, entranced. It emerged from the sea, swelling hypnotically until the little boy's neck craned high to watch the sunlight filter through the perfect prism of its curl. Then it crashed, thundering with the infinite power of nature, and sent swirls of foam and churning coral bits and little messages from distances undreamed washing up around the boy's naked feet. He could imagine no power greater. Soon his father taught him how to meld with it, not conquer it, for that was futile and wrong and ungodly. He learned to slice through its awesome strength, his body a spear, and swim far out beyond into the peaceful cradle of the sea. There he would bob for an entire afternoon before returning, stretching his young body rigid to ride the curl. Still later, he learned how to ride inside the curl, caught within the prism of dancing, holy light. He took endless voyages inside the curl, respectful of its power, worshipful of the halo of green-white radiance surrounding him. One day his father took him to the island of Oahu and they traveled north to the remote beach called Makaha. The boy stood mesmerized. The wave rose out of the ocean like a mountain, taller than the palms, taller than the houses. It loomed four, five times as high as anything he had seen on Kauai. The water roiled like a devil's caldron at his feet. He looked up at his father, his eyes asking in both fear and expectation: Is this the next test? His father shook his head no. This was for fools and haoles, mainlanders who believed they could control all forces. A dozen years later, however, Halupalai came back, a high-school boy full of beer and the playful challenges of a California-born schoolmate, a haole who had conquered every wave from Malibu to San Onofre. Halupalai caught the curl of a thirty-footer, riding it flawlessly and ecstatically, never feeling such exhilaration as he pulled himself from the whirlpool tug of the caldron moments later and threw himself on the beach. His friend never came out. They found him later, his spine snapped clean where the curl had landed on it.

  As the light invaded the B-52, Halupalai sat with his back to the cockpit. O'Toole sat alongside him. Halupalai closed his eyes instinctively, but even so, even with his back turned, the light was so strong he could see the veins in his eyelids twist like rivers on a roadmap. Just as instinctively, he reached for the ejection lever, as he had in Vietnam. But he pulled his hand back abruptly. He braced himself. He did not want his hand on the lever when this wave hit.

  Up front, Kazaklis began counting even before he looked at Moreau. He continued to count as his own flash-shocked vision fought to focus on her one vacant eye. He ticked off the seconds as he implored her to help him push their aircraft higher, higher.

  Three . . .

  Four . . .

  The Buff was tough. But he knew it broke, sometimes under natural forces they still didn't understand. More than once Kazaklis had felt the godawful shudder, heard the thunderous crack of the B-52 in whiplash, as he roared low over mountain ridges where powerful wind currents collided and clashed.

  Five . . .

  Six . . .

  The Air Force kept the occasional crashes as quiet as possible. But Kazaklis heard. And Halupalai heard. And they both knew another Buffs back had been broken, snapped clean by the same kind of roiling forces that cracked a man's back in the ocean surf.

  Seven . . .

  Eight . . .

  Kazaklis did not know what would happen now, for this would be no natural force and no man had ever felt it, no aircraft had ever been subjected to it. He knew only tha
t survival was ninety percent luck of the draw, ten percent him. He would play the ten percent and climb, climb.

  Nine . . .

  Ten . . .

  Moreau pulled with him, thank God for that. It would take both of them. He squinted, trying to readjust his eyes to the red light. The altimeter read 8,500 feet, 8,600.

  Eleven . . .

  The blast wave arrived with no noise interrupting the engine drone. But Kazaklis felt as if he had been hit in the gut first, then clubbed by a street fighter. The impact hurled him forward into the pinched embrace of his seat harness, then whipped him back. He could feel what he couldn't hear—the B-52's wings groaning under the immense stress. Groggily he fought to keep the plane climbing.

  “Get the nose down, Kazaklis!” Moreau's steely voice hammered through the pilot's haze. “Dammit, you're going to stall us!”

  Fuzzily Kazaklis concentrated on the air-speed gauge. It read under Mach point-five, about 325 miles an hour, two-thirds of the climb speed just seconds earlier. The horizon indicator seemed to have been blown completely out of kilter, showing them at a thirty-five-degree angle of attack, nose up, tail down. The altimeter was at ten thousand feet and still rising. It made no sense at all. His training told him the blast wave would drive the plane down, not up.

  “Gauges malfunctioning!” Kazaklis shouted.

  “No. Nose down!”

  He ignored the copilot's dissent. The air-speed indicator dropped to Mach point-four, yellow alarm lights flashing like bonus lamps in one of his pinball palaces. He ignored them, too— little liars nuked—and held on as if he were strangling the wheel. Mach three-point-five. Kazaklis, following his instincts, was doing everything wrong. Pain stabbed at his forearm. He turned to strike back at Moreau, who had judo-chopped his right arm to loosen the grip that threatened to put them in a fatal stall. She sat hunched over her wheel, nudging the nose down. Mach three-point-seven. Then the aftershock hit, the wave sending a quiet shudder upward through the pilot's feet, and then again, twice more, rapidly, pocketa, pocketa, massaging his back like magic fingers in a cheap motel. All three aftershocks were soft, feathery, gentle—and telling. Kazaklis withdrew his upheld arm, took the wheel, and helped Moreau get the nose down.