Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  Out of the corner of his eye, in the unwanted peripheral vision of Tyler's broader screen, he saw the first white intrusion. Then the second, and a third creeping forward. He fixed his eyes on the screen, then relaxed his hand until the bloody pencil released on the console in front of Tyler. Radnor pulled back to his own position. “Incognitos,” he said calmly into the all-channels radio. “Incognitos at twelve o'clock.”

  The admiral's brow furrowed. He clutched the white phone tightly to his jaw and stared intently past the successor. “Forty miles?” he repeated. “Then thirty-six?” He frowned. “No buckshot pattern? Smart little bugger, isn't he? Thirty-one. Twenty-four. Crap.” Harpoon let the phone edge imperceptibly down his chin and brought his eyes into hard focus on the successor. “Sir, would you fasten your belt, place your head in your lap, and brace yourself?”

  The man stared back at Harpoon blankly. The admiral's eyes moved away again.

  “Dancing 'em up our tailpipe, huh?” His eyes twitched slightly in thought, his mind taking him deep beneath the sea into a more familiar world. The old submariner saw depth-charge patterns. “At what intervals? Crap. Do we know if it's a Yankee-class boat?” He listened. “It better be. Yeah, they've got sixteen tubes. No, with multiple warheads he'd crisscross us.” He knew the Soviet submarine captain would fire from all his missile tubes. The heat from one launch set off enemy detectors as surely as the heat from sixteen. You didn't hold back in this kind of war. If you did, you sank with unused missiles. “Nineteen miles? Dud? Mr. President, get your head down!”

  The successor looked totally confused. This was not part of the game plan—move quickly, act decisively. What the devil was going on?

  “We can figure on two, maybe three duds in the sixteen.” Pause. “You got me there, pal. It's Russian goddamn roulette. Fourteen miles?” The admiral's free hand pulled at his open collar. He tried to calculate the pattern marching on them—a string of detonations, probably sixty miles long, cutting slightly diagonally right to left across their takeoff route.

  “Mr. President. Please. Do you realize what is happening? A Soviet submarine has launched missiles at us. They are patterned to cross our route. Exploding every fifteen seconds. Do you understand?”

  The successor's eyes narrowed warily. He seemed frozen.

  “Dammit!” the admiral erupted. “Get your fucking head down!” He reached over and shoved the man's head down to his knees. “Ten miles?” he repeated into the phone. “Port side, aft?” he asked, slipping into more comfortable lingo. He started to order hard right rudder. “Get those damned guards down! Propped up against the bulkheads! Hands off weapons!” The successor glanced indecisively upward at the agents. They looked at each other and began to move.

  “Seven miles,” Harpoon whispered into the phone. Then he barked: “Hard right! Full power, hard right!”

  Suddenly, the presidential compartment turned on its side. The admiral quickly lowered his head into his lap. He felt a weight slam into the back of his seat, a body tumble over his back. Next to him he heard a thud, a whoosh of air, and a muffled chugga-chugga-chugga. He shuddered, but he was counting. Three . . . four . . . Someone screamed. Five . . . six . . . He felt the first ripple, like a sudden squall at sea, and the plane lurched up, then down, metal groaning. He braced himself and waited for the next. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. Metal ground against metal as the pilot struggled to level out. Twenty. Twenty-five. Without raising his head, the admiral reached for the loose telephone receiver. “What gives?” He slowly pulled himself upright, eyes closed in relief. “I'll be damned.” Then he said, “Take her all the way up.”

  Harpoon sighed. As if to himself, he said, “We got the empty chamber.” For a moment he was oblivious to his immediate surroundings, the tension oozing out as he tried to absorb just how lucky they had been. They had survived a dozen rounds—World War Three rounds at just under a megaton each. Then the awful other reality struck him, the low, undulating airport moan echoing in his memory. Baton Rouge had just paid an incredible price for tonight's strange and unheralded presidential visit.

  Harpoon opened his eyes slowly. Across from him an unconscious agent, apparently the one who had tumbled over his seat, lay limp over the successor's knees. At Harpoon's side, the judge still slumped forward in the crash position. The new blue fabric of his swivel chair was shredded, white stuffing edging out of three small craters. The seat padding, absorbing some of the impact of the bullets, had saved the aircraft from a perhaps-fatal skin-piercing decompression. The padding had not saved the judge. The back of his shirt was red. The Bible had skittered just out of reach of a hand that dangled loosely to the carpeted floor. Behind the judge's chair, the other agent rose shakily from his knees, staring numbly at the machine gun he had jammed into the back of the seat as he fell.

  Harpoon felt ill. Being a submariner himself, he doubted the Soviet commander had fired on direct orders from Moscow. The poor bugger must have been cornered, an American sub on his tail. The orders had come out of sealed contingency plans written years ago in some Soviet think tank, just as similar contingency plans had been created by bright young Americans in the sterile offices of the Rand Corporation and the gingerbread rooms of the Hudson Institute. Harpoon's mind drifted to his last undersea command and the sailing orders he had carried. Don't sink with the nukes. Cornered? Fire. At any available target.

  Harpoon finally looked at the successor and saw dumbfounded shock and horror. Damn. He wanted the man scared, but not this way. Leaders were not supposed to see blood. It made them erratic and irrational, stalling some, drawing a need for vengeance out of others. Computer dots representing neutered millions were much safer. The innocent-looking dots insulated the mind. Harpoon shuddered. He had a helluva sales job ahead of him.

  “Incognitos like hell,” Kazaklis snapped. “Not up here. Them's bandits.” He adjusted his helmet. “Distance,” he demanded. “Velocity.”

  “Hundred miles,” Radnor snapped back. “Fast. Mach two-plus. Darned near Mach three.”

  “No, no. Check again.” The pilot's voice sounded dubious, not alarmed.

  “Affirmative. Eighteen hundred miles an hour. Three, correction, four bandits.”

  “Battle stations!” Kazaklis ordered. “Helmets! Oxygen! Defense!” He did not wait for responses. “Jamming! Chaff! Shove that stuff like hay, gunner. Decoys ready?”

  Kazaklis glanced quickly at his copilot. “Honored?”

  “They cared enough to send the very best,” Moreau responded snapping her oxygen mask.

  “Too good. Too fast for an old bucket of bolts like us. MIG-25 Foxbats. They must be very hungry. And suicidal. No way those gas-guzzlers can get back home.”

  “Makes 'em meaner.”

  “Meaner than us? You got hemlock in your canteen, too, pal. This is the joust of the kamikazes.”

  In the softened lights of the corporate-bland and distractingly spotless briefing compartment, three computerized maps glowed on the wall behind Harpoon's chiseled features. One showed the United States, another the Soviet Union, and a third displayed, in Mercator map distortion, the world. The vibration of the aircraft, and the tiny imperfections of the computer's microdot drawings, caused small but mind-bending warps in such familiar outlines as the Florida spit and the Puget Sound cut. Less familiar outcroppings and indentations such as Kamchatka and the Black Sea also wobbled slightly out of tune with reality. But the Mercator distortion, that mapmaker's deformity that enlarged the northernmost parts of the world by creating a squared globe, was the greatest. The landmass of Asia seemed to overwhelm the rest of the world. The successor saw that first.

  Harpoon had led him silently down one level into the half-light of this room. The man had been unable to speak during the introductions to half a dozen somber Air Force generals and a single prim colonel. To cover, he had stared stonily into each set of grim eyes and clasped each outstretched hand too firmly.

  The officers sat now at an oval boardroom table, the generals
seeming to stare at him like vultures in the gloom, the colonel's eyeglasses glinting eerily. The successor had seated himself intentionally to the side, away from them. In his lap he held the portable Seal, which the uninjured Secret Service agent had carried from the other room. In front of him Harpoon seemed to glow luminously in front of the maps. The maps confused him. They pulsed at him—circles and starbursts and pinpoints, some in blue, some in red; clusters of starbursts in some places, huge blank pieces of nothingness in others.

  Harpoon struggled for a place to begin. He had stood in front of these maps a hundred times, confidently talking the modern-war code language of Counterforce and Countervailing strategies, of Slickems and Tercoms, of ICBM vulnerabilities and Circular Error Probables. He had listened to experts, talked as an expert, poising nudets against Moscow in the twentieth century's greatest bluff. Until a few hours ago the pinpoints and starbursts and circles had been no more than shrewd computerized chess moves. Now the game's pawns were grandmothers in Boston, school kids in Tucson, peasant farmers in Staraya Russa, pink-cheeked students in Gorki.

  Harpoon stared for a moment longer into the successor's expectant face. He had to take time to flesh out the awful realities—give this unprepared man more than knee-jerk knowledge, knee-jerk knowledge being deadly dangerous. How could he explain that all the blustering talk of the past thirty years meant nothing now, that the few elite insiders had worried about just one thing: how do you turn the monster off once you've turned it on? How could he explain that, even now, both nations still were bluffing? Bombers bluffing submarines, submarines bluffing Soviet ICBM reserves in a plan started and not stopped by dead computers? That each new call of the bluff raised the stakes until the last of the world's fifty thousand nuclear weapons took out the last pea patch in Arkansas, the last hog wallow in Uzbekistan? How did he explain that the blue chips were great cities? That the cities were hostage to each other? New York for Leningrad? And New York would go first because that was the way they had built the system? In planning it had seemed to have a certain bleak logic. In reality it took on a grotesque surreality.

  “Harpoon,” the successor said, suddenly breaking his silence, “you do seem to have a propensity for waitin' for World War Four.”

  All eyes turned toward him and he drew the Presidential Seal in tighter, like a shield, certain that his fear and uncertainty had screamed out of their hiding place and into his voice. To the others the words sounded as if they had been fired from a cannon. The colonel stifled a chuckle.

  Harpoon felt ill again. World War Four? Maybe he should be laughing along with the colonel, he thought bleakly. That was the first joke he'd heard all night. “Major,” he said to an unseen officer in a separate cubicle, “will you dim the Soviet Union and the world so we can take a closer look at the United States?”

  The compartment grew slightly darker, but the United States loomed boldly in a crazy quilt of red and blue splotches that made the successor's skin crawl, partly because he knew what it must mean, partly because he didn't understand at all. Harpoon stepped slightly to the side, so the entire country was in view, and brushed the light pointer across wide regions.

  “What you are seeing, sir, gives you a fair representation of the present condition of the United States,” Harpoon began. “In a moment you will see that the Soviet Union is in roughly the same condition. The red markings indicate targets that have been hit. In the first exchanges, all of which took place within the first hour, both nations expended about a third of their arsenals but exercised some restraint. The objective was to do our best to disarm each other, concentrating on missile fields, military installations, and communications facilities. Of course, we could not disarm each other. Therefore, both nations also randomly hit some cities that were not primary military targets. The theory is that randomly striking a few major cities, such as New Orleans, which you were near”—the pointer skittered several hundred miles south of their present location—”makes the threat of the next strike more intimidating.”

  The successor's eyes froze on Baton Rouge. To the north, Shreveport, the home of a bomber base, was red. To the south, New Orleans was red. He began to sweat. He could feel the crud eating at him.

  Harpoon sensed the man's fear, it being so normal. “It is unlikely that the radiation harmed you, sir,” he said quietly. The successor slumped, humiliated. Damn you, admiral. “Major, bring up the Soviet Union.” The top of Asia sprang back into the room.

  “For New Orleans, we took Odessa,” Harpoon said quickly, flashing the pointer at a red starburst at the top of the Black Sea. Then the pointer fluttered back to the United States. “We were surprised by the attack on Los Angeles, because it is such an attractive hostage for the second strike. When it became clear Los Angeles was lost”—the pointer skittered to Asia again, and the successor's mind began to wobble with it—”the computer suggested we take out Kiev. Some cities were military targets or so near them that the distance was irrelevant. That accounts for the destruction of cities such as Seattle and Vladivostok. So, as you can see, both nations have a few areas of almost total destruction, other pockets of major destruction, but large regions that remain basically untouched.”

  Harpoon paused and looked at the man. His eyes were riveted on the United States, his face blank. To Harpoon, he did not appear to be listening closely. Harpoon was wrong. He was listening quite closely. But he was confused. He saw far too much blue, and he didn't understand.

  “The blue ovals. . .” the successor began haltingly. “The blue represents cities that were not struck?” His voice was disbelieving and slurred.

  “That is correct, sir,” Harpoon replied. “Not struck in the first attack.”

  Harpoon watched the man's eyes flicker across the map, left to right. On the West Coast the Puget Sound area was a red mass, as was the eastern part of the state of Washington near Spokane. Oregon was untouched. The red continued again in the Bay Area, spreading from San Francisco east beyond the B-52 base at Sacramento. Los Angeles was red. The destruction began again, with a few gaps, in Montana and the Dakotas, spreading in intensity through the missile fields of the Plains states south into Texas. To the east, New England, an advance staging area for the bombers, was a checkerboard of red. Washington, D.C., was a muddle of red and blue, as if the Soviets had tried to carve parts of it away while leaving other parts. Still, throughout the country, blue dominated. Denver was blue, although a huge red starburst glistened just to the south in Colorado Springs. Minneapolis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, many major cities including New York, all were blue.

  “New York . . .” The successor's voice was dull and distant. “What's happening in New York?”

  Harpoon's white eyebrows rose uncertainly. “You saw Baton Rouge, sir,” he replied. “Same thing, I imagine, except much worse. We have to assume civil disorder is rampant in the blue areas.”

  “We can just as easily assume,” the colonel cut in abruptly, “that our civil-defense program is efficiently evacuating the blue areas at this very moment.”

  Harpoon shot an amazed glance across the compartment. “Jee-zuz, colonel,” he rasped. “New York? In the middle of the night? With no electricity?”

  “Just as we should assume the Soviets are evacuating their cities, rapidly and efficiently,” the colonel continued undaunted.

  Grunts emerged from the generals. The successor seemed to miss the entire exchange. “But it wasn't hit . . .” his dull voice interrupted the grunts. “Why?”

  “New York is a hostage city, sir,” Harpoon answered simply. “The blue cities are being held hostage.”

  “Hostage?” The voice went from dull and disbelieving to incredulous.

  “Sir, American cities are being held hostage and Soviet cities are being held hostage. That is the system we built. We are holding each other mutually hostage, just as we were before the war. We left Leningrad, holding it hostage. We are saying to them: You take New York and we will take Leningrad. In the second st
rike. Or the third strike.”

  “Leningrad is standing?” The voice turned guttural. He had not yet focused on the map of the Soviet Union. “Four hours after a sneak attack on the United States, we have left Leningrad”—the voice broke in anger and dismay—”untouched?”

  “That is the system, sir.” Harpoon swore under his breath. He was sounding like a damned New England schoolmaster. But he didn't know how else to answer.

  The successor's eyes darted past Harpoon to the map of the Soviet Union. Across the top of the Eurasian continent, the same mix of red and blue dotted the landmass. He had fewer reference points in a land he had never visited, but the middle of the continent, from east to west along the Trans-Siberian Railway line, was a long red string where the main missile fields had been. Red starbursts blossomed out of Kamchatka and the Arctic coast near Murmansk, which he assumed were submarine bases. He knew from Cabinet meetings that Plesetsk and Tyuratam were missile-and satellite-launching centers. They were red. So were Vladivostok and Odessa, as promised, as well as Sverdlovsk, Tbilisi, and a handful of other major Soviet cities. Moscow was dotted in red, but blue interrupted the blood color. Leningrad, Minsk, Smolensk, Riga, and other metropolitan areas remained blue.

  The successor moved his eyes away from the map and toward Harpoon. Shakily, he started to rise, clattering the Seal to the floor. He sat back down. His face was ghostly white and his mouth moved several times before the words came out. “Treason . . .” he muttered grotesquely. “Ungodly . . . insane . . .” The words trailed off.

  Harpoon felt the plane tilt slightly as the pilot maneuvered in the random pattern of evasion he had been taught. Around the briefing table, the officers swayed with the aircraft, eyes cast downward, light coughs interrupting the rhythmic silence of the moment. Only the colonel, outranked by all but here because he was the command plane's expert in Soviet thinking, nodded almost imperceptibly.