Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  A jungle roar, thousands of voices, guttural, primal, ugly, enveloped the White House. He could hear the angry scourge of metal on metal, cars scraping, colliding, ramming on Pennsylvania Avenue. Horns blared everywhere. Gunfire popped far off and then, in bursts, nearby. Through the awful sound the President heard the familiar whumping of Nighthawk, another in his fleet of Sikorsky helicopters. He strained to see its reassuring outline. A few lights shone brightly, eerily, in the city. But all were doused on the White House lawn. The Secret Servicemen crouched around him, Sedgwick forcing him to hunch down too, and then the group started into the void.

  Gunfire suddenly cracked several yards away from them. Tracer bullets raced across the grounds, briefly freeze-framing in Roman-candle red the figures of men clambering over the East Gate fence. The skeleton of his first helicopter was frozen there, too, gutted and wrapped around a winter-stark oak tree. Then the tracers, green, yellow, red, swept back toward them. Sedgwick hit him first, smothering him, and he felt another body, and another, pound him into the frozen ground. The air whooshed out of him. He heard grunts and a high-pitched ping! ping! like violin strings snapping. “Shit!” someone shouted. He elbowed at Sedgwick viciously, struggling for air.

  “Take it easy, sir,” Sedgwick said. “Just stay down.”

  “Who are those people?” the President demanded, gasping for breath.

  “People, people, sir.” Sedgwick shrugged. “Who knows? Scared people, angry people, spooked people.”

  “But they've got automatic weapons. Tracer bullets, for Christ's sake!”

  “Mr. President, the city of Washington is better armed than most armies. You know that. You can buy a bazooka in a pawn shop across the river in Arlington.”

  “The American way,” the President said tonelessly. Then his voice firmed up. “It's the American way, by God. Help them defend themselves in this moment of peril.”

  Sedgwick remained silent.

  “Why are they shooting at me?” the President asked, his voice ebbing.

  “You've got the last train out of town, Mr. President. They just put a couple of holes in it, though.”

  The agents crouched low in a circle around them. One talked urgently into his radio. “I know that, goddammit,” the agent growled. “Do you want him dead or alive? No, he does not have his vest on! He's got his bathrobe on. Yes, I understand.” The agent edged up to the President. “We don't have time to wait this out,” he said. “Can you see the chopper, Mr. President?”

  The President turned his head toward the whump-whump-whump, picking out the shadow perhaps fifty yards away. Above the helicopter, the tiny red eyes of the Washington Monument winked at him, mocking him. “Yes,” he said to the agent.

  “The marines are gonna open up in a few seconds. We're gonna run. Head down. Full speed. No stopping. Run. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let's go, Mr. President.” It was Sedgwick. “Now!”

  Guilt seized the President. His wife. In the past thirty minutes he had not asked about his wife. His nerves were bursting. He wanted to sleep. The world exploded again. He ran. At the bottom of the helicopter ramp, he stumbled. Two agents caught him and shoved him roughly, like cops with a drunk, up the stairs. Sedgwick held his arm. At the top a hand reached out and pulled them inside and the chopper immediately swept upward.

  The two remaining agents pushed him into a rear seat and left him. Then Sedgwick careened into a seat across the aisle. The helicopter banked sharply over the trees, and out the window the President saw the omnipresent monument flash by as they headed for the familiar course down the river to Andrews. At the Fourteenth Street Bridge he gazed numbly down over a tangle of cars, hopelessly snarled in the desperation to head south. Across the river, fires burned on the runways at National Airport, smashed planes scattered across the broad tarmac.

  “Lear jets,” a voice said. “Every lobbyist in town tried to get out at the same time.”

  The President looked up slowly. An Air Force colonel leaned over him. The President remembered the last word Icarus had said to him.

  “Geronimo,” he replied to the colonel.

  “I suppose so, sir,” the colonel said uncertainly. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is attempting to meet you at Andrews. He instructed me to inform you that our attack was carried out. Omaha went three minutes ago, Cheyenne thirty seconds later. Command has been assumed by the Looking Glass plane.”

  “Alice,” the President said. But he was not thinking of the general. He was thinking of impossible dreams.

  “Sir.” The colonel looked at him strangely. “It will be transferred to you, of course, if we reach the national command plane at Andrews.”

  The President's eyes stared, unfocused, at the colonel.

  “The Soviets launched again, sir. Shortly after our response to their attack on the Chinese . . .”

  A numbing electric spasm rippled through the President. Their attack on the Chinese? The colonel handed him a large tumbler of Scotch and continued.

  “. . . Soviet ICBMs and a second shot from their submarines off the East Coast. We have to assume Andrews is targeted by the submarines. You can rest assured we retaliated, as you ordered.”

  The President downed the Scotch, closed his eyes, and appeared to go to sleep.

  Kazaklis held the plane on its southerly course till it was well beyond the cloud, then began a slow, banking turn west again. The altimeter read twenty-seven thousand feet and climbing. Soon he would bank the plane again, north this time, toward the Positive Control Point far ahead above the Arctic coast of Canada at which they would get the final orders to go in. Kazaklis felt good, very good. He had done his job well. By now he had placed the rest of the squadron far out of his mind. They would have separated soon anyway, this being a loner's job, no security to be gained from the cluster target of a squadron. The Buff would go in low and alone, the loneliness being its security. Kazaklis guessed the target would be the primary, although they had practiced for six different Siberian cities. In his mind's eye he could see the course as if he had flown it a hundred times, which, indeed, he had—in simulation. He could see the Buff's white belly melding with the ice floes of the Arctic, ducking around the danger of the SAM base on the frozen coast near Tiksi, racing south over the snow-covered tundra, crisscrossing the Lena River, hiding at three hundred feet in the Verkhoyansk Mountains, breaking out low over the larch forests that hinted at the beginnings of civilization. . . .

  “It's red-neckin' twang! twang! luv-makin' twang! twang! time . . .” The voice pounded into the pilot's helmet, a scratchy electric guitar clawing at his eardrums.

  “What the hell is that?!”

  “Listen to the whippoorwills twang! how they sing twang! twang! Just like us, doin' their thing! twang!”

  “Psywar!” Kazaklis thundered. “Fucking Russians are trying to psyche us!”

  “Conway Twitty,” Moreau replied calmly. “Tyler's trying to convince us.”

  Kazaklis clasped his helmet in both hands, as if he were trying to smother the earphones. “Ty!” he bellowed. “Ler!” twang! twang! “Ty-fucking-ler!”

  “Tyler's picked up a radio station,” Radnor said from below.

  “Get that fucker off!”

  “I knew you guys were wrong,” Tyler said serenely as Twitty's twang wound down. “They're alive down there. It's a drill. All this is simulated. Just like everything else.”

  “Oxy!” a new voice shrieked across the void.

  “Jesus.”

  “I can tell you where the acne-causing bacteria are!”

  “Jesus.”

  “All over your face—lurking, festering, pimpling all over your face!”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Where is your next pimple to be or where is it not to be? That is the question! Wash with new Oxy Wash!”

  “Ty . . . ler. Damn you!”

  “It's a drill.”

  �
�Hel . . . lo again. This is Crazy Eddie, stickin' by the phone so you're never alone. On big-boom night. Hang right in there, kids, at the dial with style—Kay . . . Oh . . . You . . . Double-You!—in humpin', jumpin' Coquille, Oregon!”

  “God damn you, Tyler, get that off.”

  “They're playing music down there.”

  “Oregon, you diddle-brain! It's some stoned disc jockey in Oregon!”

  “It's a drill,” Tyler said confidently. “Pretty fancy one, isn't it?”

  Kazaklis paused for a moment. His thoughts riveted on Oregon. Then he exploded.

  “They're dead, damn you, Tyler! Your wife, your kid, everybody we left behind. Dead, dead, dead. Got that? Dead! You're alive and you got a job to do. Do it. And turn off that fucking radio!”

  The radio went silent, as did the rest of the plane.

  “What an asshole,” Moreau said after a moment.

  “Conway Twitty or Crazy Eddie?” Kazaklis asked.

  The first lurch of the helicopter caught the President by surprise, snapping him out of his grogginess and throwing him half out of his seat toward the aisle. Sedgwick caught him. “Fasten your belt, sir,” the young naval aide said. “It's going to get rough.”

  The President looked at him uncertainly. In the disarray of the last few moments his mind had taken refuge in the safety of just another routine Nighthawk flight to Air Force One. Ahead were more speeches, more parade caravans, with “Hail to the Chief” greeting him at every public pause.

  “We're not going to make it to Andrews, sir,” Sedgwick said. His voice had a slight note of alarm, but the President failed to perceive it. “Just strap yourself in.” The President felt the young aide shove his shoulders back into the seat and pull the belts around him. “We're diverting, sir, making a run for it.”

  “Run?”

  “It's safest, sir.”

  “President doesn't run.”

  Sedgwick looked into the President's uncomprehending face. He sighed but tried to hide the emotion by turning away. He fastened his own belts and gazed out the porthole window. Below him the blackness was nearly total as the powerful helicopter cut desperately back across the slum warrens of Southeast Washington. A few lights shone in the void—careening auto headlights, a small fire, the electrical dance of a loose power line. The blast effects had not reached this far. The psychological effects had. As had the power outages. The chopper raced across the District line into the middle-class suburbs of Maryland, but nothing changed below. This was going to be very close. Sedgwick's skin crawled.

  Across the aisle, the President also stared out the window. He didn't understand the blackness beneath him—the little popping fires, the headlights racing toward each other like more tracer bullets and then poofing out, orange flames merging the two. The scream of Nighthawk One's jet-assisted engines drowned out the whump of the chopper blades. He craned his neck back toward Andrews. What the hell were they doing? God, he was tired. His eyes paused on a full winter-white moon hovering above the dark horizon. The moon burst. It burst into a sun, then into the light of a thousand suns. It was very beautiful.

  The President felt a powerful arm catch him behind the neck, shoving his head down into his lap. Over the searing whine of the engines he thought he could hear Sedgwick counting. He saw only the pure whiteness of the moon. An eternity seemed to pass. Then he felt the second lurch, and briefly he free-floated in the night's first heavenly serenity. Then he heard the screech of tearing metal overwhelm the engine whine. Then he heard nothing, the presidential helicopter breaking in two as the blast wave wafted it like a leaf into a stand of naked pin oaks.

  Moreau helped Kazaklis level out at forty thousand feet and complete the turn north. Then she unsnapped her helmet strap and tried to relax. In front of her the control panel was a bee's hive of honeycombed yellow lights bathed in a red that seemed normal. She lazily panned across the controls until she came to the empty picture tube of her radar screen. She shivered. Staring back was the mirror image of a familiar face altered. The face was strikingly attractive—Moreau knew very well she was attractive— but the geometry was wrong, the symmetry slightly skewed. Staring out of the red screen was a still near-perfect image, but it had one powerful eye and one that looked like it had been copped from Little Orphan Annie. She chuckled mirthlessly. She was enough to spook anyone. Suddenly she thought about O'Toole.

  “Hey, you crazy Irishman,” she radioed into the back of the compartment, “how you doing back there?”

  No answer returned.

  “O'Toole?”

  In the back, Halupalai lifted his hand off his crewmate's closed fist. “He's dead, captain.”

  “Dead?” Moreau's voice trembled in an incredulous whisper.

  “Hypothermia . . . shock . . . heart attack ...” Halupalai's voice was hollow and lost. “Who knows?”

  “Shit, we needed that,” Kazaklis interrupted. “We really needed that.”

  “Sweet Christ, Kazaklis,” Moreau said, more in pain than anger.

  “Cleanest corpse in the Air Force, I'll say that.”

  “Kazaklis!”

  “Don't Kazaklis me, copilot. Now we got a stiff in the back and a wacko in the basement. What do you think about that?”

  Moreau paused, a long pause. “I think you got a lot to learn about life, Captain Shazam,” she finally said. “You think you can do it in ten hours?”

  Kazaklis ignored her. He stared into the flash screen, still thinking about Oregon, which a very long time ago had been home.

  II

  North Toward Nowhere

  We are all born mad. Some remain so.

  —Samuel Beckett

  Five

  0730 ZULU

  On summer mornings, the good mornings along the southwestern coast of Oregon, the mist billows out of the Pacific like death's breath, does its ghostly dance over the dunes, and scuds into the low coastal mountains, where it stops, trapped and surly, hovering in the hollows like a shroud so the sun doesn't come up till midafternoon. The fog wisps in steamy images out of moss so primeval, so lush and verdant and deep, a big man can bury an arm up to the elbow and not get his gnarled fingers on the roots. It clings to the dropping boughs of phallic firs pointing toward a heaven obscured in gray, muted shadows above. It drapes itself over the wet, broken hulks of fallen forest titans that rest, rotting and fertile, in a somber double vision of death and rebirth. For if you look closely through the dim murk of the jungle-forest you can see, with the right eyes, of course, the seed for another epoch's coal, another epoch's oil, another epoch's man—hard, tough, and mean, a survivor who will come back to pick at the few treasures this passing era left behind.

  Not that the new man will be any harder, any tougher, any meaner than the men who roamed here most recently. The hard land of the Umpqua and the Coos and the Coquille breeds tough men and always will. A boy learns his manhood and other lessons early.

  As a small child, Kazaklis had loved it. Even in the most dismal of the rotting hollows his child's fantasies took trips into the distant past where prehistoric pterodactyls swooped through his murk, giant lizards slithered in and out of his own dark pools. And if his young mind turned just right, and he saw with the right eyes, he could see into the future, too. Not his future, but some realm afar—when the hard men did come back long after he was gone. In his child's way, he saw eternity in the woods—the endless turning of a rebuilding earth. His pa—Big Kazaklis, they called him, for he was as hard and tough and mean as any survivor who would ever come back—saw the same things and tried to teach the kid. But the lessons ended, and the kid's visions, too, one somber morning in the woods when the boy shot his pa. Whomp. Just like that. Aimed at the balls and hit him in the thigh. Whomp.

  It was the second shot fired in the Oregon mist that morning, the first coming from Big Kazaklis, although few took account of that later. The first shot caught a startled buck just right, slamming in behind the shoulder exactly where it should and dropping the deer in its track
s. Perfect, except it was the kid's buck, promised to him that very morning as Big Kazaklis drank four-ayem coffee laced with Jim Beam. Got my first poon and got my first buck afore I was twelve, Big Kazaklis had said, and so will you, bub. But the kid froze—cow-brown eyes staring into frightened cow-brown eyes just like his, and even at eleven he felt it was eternity's trade, which he couldn't make—and so his pa fired instead. Humiliation flooded through the boy, having failed the hard man's test. Tears mixed with frustration and anger and hurt. He turned on his old man and fired wildly at his pa's manhood, missing through the blur, missing the balls. Big Kazaklis flailed backward into the crutch of a Douglas fir. Then he laughed, being as hard and tough as the woods. They walked out together, the big man propped on the small boy, leaving the buck behind, leaving a few pints of the old man's blood to fertilize the moss and the tangled timbers in the gray garden of the future.

  At the trailhead, where a rusted old Ford pickup sat hugging the bank of the South Fork of the Coos, the boy shoved his old man into the passenger side and gunned the ancient truck backward up the rutted hard pan of the river road onto the highway. Had someone been watching, all he would have seen was the giant figure of a man propped against the passenger door and two intent cow-brown eyes framed inside the steering wheel as the battered Ford clattered fifteen twisting miles into the town of Coos Bay. Kazaklis bumped it down the main drag of the port town, past the penny parking meters and the drunks lying in the rain, past the whorehouses and the chug-a-tugs with their flotillas of raw logs, past the Sportsmen's garish neon and the freighters stuffed with Yankee wood for Japanese mills, and on up the road to the hospital.