Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  Harpoon floundered. He looked at his watch. Damn. “Insane, perhaps,” he said wearily. “Ungodly, for sure. But not treason. It is the system we built to protect ourselves. It is the system the Soviets built to protect themselves.” He paused very briefly. “It isn't working very well.”

  “Isn't working very well,” the successor repeated in a drone. His mind was weaving with the aircraft. “Loco,” he said, the word momentarily jelling his thoughts. He spat the next words: “We runnin' this war from some ward at St. Elizabeth's, Harpoon?”

  Harpoon sagged, then drew himself up again. “Sir,” he said plaintively, “it is crucial that you quickly learn the system so you have some chance of dealing with it. If all of America is destroyed, the Soviets have no hostages and we have nothing to protect. The Soviets don't want that. If all the Soviet Union is destroyed, we have no hostages and they have nothing to protect. We can't possibly want that. Then there is no reason to stop. Ever.”

  “Stop,” the successor repeated.

  Harpoon watched the man closely. He had watched men go crazy dealing with this in peacetime.

  “Who started this, Harpoon?” he asked.

  Damn. There's no time for this crap. “The Soviets, sir.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Four hours. Almost precisely 0600 Zulu.” Harpoon felt his fears turn to exasperation. “That's Greenwich mean time, sir. One A.M. in Washington. Midnight in Omaha.”

  “Winter morning in Moscow. Dark.” The successor's words were detached. “Out of darkness. Into darkness.” His eyes drifted into the gloom of the briefing compartment. His mind drifted, too.

  Now Harpoon felt woozy. Out of darkness, into darkness? Was he quoting from the Bible? He struggled through misty childhood memories of Revelation and Matthew and John. He shook his head.

  “Wintertime,” the colonel intoned seriously. “A time when the Russian psyche is its darkest, its most depressed, its most paranoid. They are so preoccupied with the cold darkness of their long winters that Russian authors have written novels about the theft of an overcoat. Tells you a lot.” Harpoon looked at him in amazement. The colonel paused and then intoned seriously, “It also tells us that if those people were paranoid enough to start this, they are paranoid enough to go down to the last missile.”

  The admiral stared at the Librarian. You little prick. Spent your whole life burrowing through Russian papers looking for the most belligerent statements to use as ammunition. Then Harpoon cursed himself again. They had all used men like that, kept them around to pry more money out of Congress. Just as the Russians had kept men busy collecting the rashest of the American statements, crap from the John Birch Society, nutty statements from half-baked right-wing congressmen with no more influence than Jerry Falwell. Damn. Harpoon continued to stare at the colonel, but he wasn't sure whom he was damning most. The colonel stared back.

  Harpoon shook his head once more and turned toward the successor. The man's face was gone again. He felt like he was wrestling with Jell-O. Harpoon tried to fight down the wisp of a memory, the kind he had successfully suppressed during the total involvement of the past four hours. His eleven-year-old grandson pulled at his sleeve, tugging him back into playfulness after one of those periodic lapses far off into his SIOP world. Earth to Gramps, the boy said. Come in, Cramps. The admiral's grandson had been in Seattle. He winced. The admiral fought back the memory. Earth to the President. “Sir, can we please get on with this?”

  The successor saw the wince. “I see no point,” he said.

  “No point?”

  “I want our remaining ICBM's fired at the blue circles immediately.”

  “Sir, please . . .”

  Even the colonel was shaking his head now, and a pang of fear flashed through Harpoon. The Librarian had no respect for this man at all. For years the colonel had been the used. Now he was going to be the user.

  “Fire them,” the successor said.

  “All our ICBM's were launched or destroyed hours ago,” Harpoon fumbled.

  “Why don't you just get to the point, admiral?” The colonel cut in.

  “Because he needs to know what is at stake, dammit!” Harpoon flared.

  “At stake?” the colonel bored on. “We were attacked. The sovereignty of the United States is at stake. We can give up, or we can use the bombers. To cut the head off the chicken.”

  “Shut up, colonel,” Harpoon said flatly. They were talking as if the successor had left the compartment. But the successor was not listening anyway, tracking on his own course now.

  “Precisely how many Americans are dead?” the man interrupted.

  “Twenty to thirty million,” Harpoon said, swiveling his glare away from the colonel and into the blank face. “More will die from radiation, riots, disorder. Maybe forty million total. If we can stop now.”

  “Russians?”

  “Fifteen, twenty million. Maybe thirty million with the side effects. If we can stop.”

  “So we have lost.”

  Harpoon sagged in despair. “Sir,” he said desolately, “this isn't victory by body count. Can't you understand? It isn't over, for God's sake. Our bombers are under way for a second strike. Our submarines have been given predetermined orders for a third strike. We can't talk to our submarines. We can't talk to the Russians. Between us we have more than forty thousand warheads left. We don't know how to stop it.” He slumped further, feeling trapped and helpless. “It isn't over,” he repeated hauntedly. “It's out of control.”

  “Eighty miles,” Radnor's voice droned into the cockpit. “Seventy.”

  “Foxbat!” Kazaklis demanded the specs on their adversaries.

  “Top speed, Mach two-point-eight,” Moreau replied. “Range fifteen hundred miles. One way. Toughest in high-altitude dogfights. Most sophisticated—”

  “Armaments?” Kazaklis interrupted. He knew the Foxbat was sophisticated—maybe too sophisticated—and he already had begun calculating that to his advantage, the tortoise plotting against the hare. The fighters were three minutes away. If they missed on this run—and they could, because they were approaching too fast—their speed would take them on a long looping turn, giving him invaluable time.

  “Four AA-6 ACRID air-to-air missiles,” Moreau replied immediately. “Warheads nonnuclear. Heat-seekers, range fifty miles.

  Radar-guided, range twenty miles. They'll try 'em both ways. Gun pack, two twenty-three-millimeter machine guns.”

  “Sixty miles.”

  “Evasive action,” Kazaklis ordered. His words were distant now, as if they were trailing several moves behind his mind. “Close air intakes. Hokay, buddies, let's see how the cossacks like their eggs fried in their own grease.”

  Moreau began the swaying, groaning maneuver back into the radioactive cloud. “Fifty miles,” Radnor said. “Forty miles. Missiles launched! One. Two . . .” He paused. “Six launches!”

  “Decoys out!”

  “Decoys dispatched.” Halupalai instinctively placed his hand on the Gatling-gun trigger, the Vietnam reflex, and then pulled it back.

  “Thirty miles.”

  “Clouds?” Kazaklis wanted the red crud badly, not only because it would spook the racing MIG pilots but more importantly because the dancing radioactivity might clutter the missile guidance systems.

  Downstairs, Radnor stared at his radar. He saw six little blips racing at him, four larger ones swooping ahead of the missiles and climbing. From the other direction the fog was creeping slowly across his screen, nearing the center. “Twenty degrees left,” he said. “Countdown?”

  “No time,” Kazaklis barked. “Twenty degrees left,” he repeated.

  Moreau reacted. Radnor interrupted. “Bandits twenty miles. They're climbing, commander.”

  “Yeah, they screwed up. They were up our gazoom before they saw us. They're trying to eat speed.”

  The pilot's voice crackled with tension. But it also carried the slightest touch of satisfaction. He knew that a B-52, once it was found, could be sh
ot down by almost anything that flew. He needed every edge he could get.

  The successor had gone silent again. Harpoon peered out at him. He seemed in a daze, so lost and alone. A wave of sympathy flooded through Harpoon, then departed swiftly. He felt alone too, grappling with forces careening out of his control. Suddenly, in the faint light, Harpoon thought he saw in the phallic shadow of the Secret Service agent's gun barrel what Icarus must have seen in the projection of Soviet missiles arching down on him in Omaha. The thought startled him. The pressure was getting to him. Then he saw Icarus sending him away—Godspeed, God grace. He saw the unfrightened face of his young escort turn toward a last gin-rummy game, the vaulted doors sealed below him. He saw the rockets' red glare of a long-ago Fourth of July, the future stretched limitlessly beneath him in the monumental splendor of his nation's capital, and he heard his bride whisper, Never say good-bye. And he pulled himself together, signaled the projectionist to bring up the third map, and decided to plod on, his way.

  “Sir,” Harpoon said, “you should briefly examine how other nations reacted.” The successor said nothing. Harpoon flashed a wobbling light on the world. “Most of the less-developed nuclear powers responded reflexively. So did Israel. Only Britain and France held off.”

  “Our allies,” the successor said, his voice still vacant and hollow.

  Harpoon ignored him, wanting to hurry through this part. “The Soviets made no move against Western Europe, moved no troops and launched no weapons. Nor did they move against the Middle East, although the Israelis did. The Israelis always have sought buffer zones—the kind they tried to create in the Sinai, the Golan Heights, Lebanon. They also tend to move when the rest of the world is preoccupied. We were very preoccupied.” He took a deep breath and added: “They created a rather large buffer zone.”

  Harpoon's pointer moved quickly through the Middle East. The red splashed erratically. In Syria, Damascus was red, as was Amman in Jordan, Baghdad in Iraq, Tehran and other targets in Iran. Splotches dotted the region of the world's first civilization along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and through the biblical regions to the edge of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. The destruction leaped over Egypt to the west but continued along the Mediterranean through Libya. Harpoon's pointer quickly moved back over the Persian Gulf to the Indian subcontinent.

  “Others acted completely irrationally.” The pointer skirted past red starbursts in Pakistan and India. “Apparently a defective Chinese missile, aimed at Soviet Central Asia, landed in northern Pakistan near the capital of Islamabad. The Paks thought it came from India. They hit New Delhi with the few crude weapons they had. India responded, also with crude weapons, hitting both Islamabad and Karachi.”

  The successor groped through the maps, his mind inundated, his instincts telling him to take control. Somehow. He remembered the concern about Pakistan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. “Sounds like a Soviet conspiracy to me,” he blurted. “They always wanted Pakistan.”

  Harpoon stumbled to a stop. The colonel broke in. “The President has a point, admiral. The Soviets always wanted a warm-water port. Taking Pakistan gives them one.”

  Harpoon felt like laughing. But he knew the colonel was starting his play for the man. “What in God's name would the Soviets do with a warm-water port after this?” he asked.

  “Straight down the Indus River to the Arabian Sea,” the successor said with new enthusiasm. Let them know you understand strategic thinking too.

  “Nothing,” the colonel said smugly. “If we stop them.”

  “Giving them access to the Indian Ocean,” the successor said. The two military men were talking around him, but he ignored it. He felt relieved. Let them know you understand the Soviet mind.

  Harpoon waved the colonel off, glanced hurriedly at his watch, and continued. He moved the pointer far south. “We don't have any notion what happened in South Africa. They had primitive weapons. They exploded them in their own territory. The motives may have been racial.”

  The pointer skittered back to Asia. “Other than the two superpowers, the Chinese did the most damage and took the worst beating.” The pointer moved quickly along the endless frontier from Samarkand to Vladivostok. “The Soviets had about fifty divisions along the border. The Chinese tried to destroy them. They may have incapacitated a fourth of the Soviet border forces. The Soviets used tactical weapons against Chinese border troops, then, moments before we launched our first major wave of ICBM's—” Harpoon faltered again, puzzled, as Alice had been, by the American attack sequence. But he pushed on, not wanting to clutter the problem further— “the Soviets hit Peking and the industrial city of Wuhan with thermonuclear weapons. They appear to have stopped after that.”

  The successor missed the pause, and the puzzlement. “So only the Chinese helped us,” he said.

  “The Chinese didn't help us,” Harpoon replied more curtly than he intended. He could feel his caution dissolving, his time compressing. “They tried to help themselves, as did everyone else. Anything that makes the Soviets feel more threatened now should be cause for alarm, not satisfaction, inside this aircraft.”

  The successor stiffened. “Harpoon,” he said in bewilderment, “sometimes when you open your mouth I feel like it isn't connected to my ears. Would you like to say that a different way?”

  “No, sir. We are quite pressed for time.” The successor looked at him curiously, but Harpoon had decided to bull onward. It was time to lay it on the line. He beckoned to a three-star general sitting at the briefing table.

  “The general is expert in nuclear effects and their meaning to civilian populations, political structure, social structure, et cetera. Would you speak as briefly as possible to that subject, general?”

  The general rose reluctantly. “Let's try to deal quickly with the rest of the world,” he began. “The world has survived plague, pestilence, famine, earthquakes, floods, wars, disasters of immense proportion—”

  Harpoon frowned. “General,” he interrupted, “keep it short. Please.”

  “Sorry, admiral, but it is important to understand the context. In the 1920's an earthquake killed two hundred thousand people in Tokyo and Yokohama—approximately the number killed in the World War Two atom-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki twenty years later. We have forgotten the earthquake.” He let the words sit very briefly. “My point is simply that the world has absorbed such punishment, natural and man-made, in the past. So when we look at the world map, forgetting the superpowers, we see an incredible amount of damage, grief, and suffering. As it stands now, all of it would be absorbed, even with the radiation effects.”

  Harpoon shifted impatiently from one foot to the other. “Okay, general, the superpowers?”

  “Well, you look at those maps . . .” The general let out a large whoosh of air. “You look at those maps and you see a considerably different picture. Both nations would survive what you see here. I'd also add—pardon me, admiral, but it is worth noting—that the world has suffered similar catastrophes, even worse. In the fourteenth century, when the world's population was a fraction of what it is now, bubonic-plague outbreaks claimed twenty-five million lives in just a few years in Europe and Asia. In this century, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed three times as many as World War One—probably thirty million persons. However—”

  “It would be valuable to recall,” the colonel interrupted, gazing knowingly over his spectacles, “that the Soviet Union accepted fatalities of twenty million during World War Two. Such is their nature.”

  “Bullshit!” All heads turned toward Harpoon. He slammed his light pointer onto the table.

  “Admiral,” the colonel protested. “It is historical fact.”

  “Bullshit!” Harpoon erupted again. “I've been hearing this crap since I was a plebe at Annapolis and I'm sick of it. The historical fact is that twenty million Russians died. The historical bullshit is to say it is in their nature to accept it.”

  The colonel looked away unhappily. The successor glanced first
at the colonel and then at Harpoon questioningly. “I must say, Harpoon,” the man said quietly, “that I seriously doubt the Soviets have the same respect for human life that we do. You disagree?”

  “I am saying, sir, that it does us no good to view our adversary as some sort of subhuman species. It is misleading and dangerous. They are our enemy. But they lose loved ones and they mourn just like us. To view them differently not only gets us nowhere, it leads us in the wrong direction. Would you proceed, general?”

  The general glanced quickly from the successor to the admiral. He continued.

  “However, there is no way to make a comparison between this event and the worst of past disasters. Unlike previous wars, the deaths occurred almost simultaneously over large sections of the two countries. Unlike the largest epidemics, it was accompanied by vast physical destruction. And this event occurred in complex societies which will find it much more difficult to adjust than, say, the agrarian society of China a century ago. The lifeblood of these technological societies—oil, communications, interrelated economic systems—has been destroyed or severely impaired for years or decades.

  “Also, it is impossible to calculate the effect that fear of the unknown—particularly radiation—will have on surviving populations. In that regard, we are as primitive as the Dark Ages populations trying to deal with fear of the plague. In those times, terrified families left loved ones to die alone. They ran, panicked, looted, murdered, raped, committed suicide, and rebelled against authorities who often were as fearful as the populace. Radiation, like the plague, is an unseen, unknown menace—”

  Harpoon tapped his pointer impatiently. “So, general, please, what kind of society do we have below us if we stop now? Briefly. Speculatively, if necessary.”