Kazaklis dropped the aircraft low into the valley. He had taken his pursuers on a long zigzag chase through the frozen mountains. He was back now, almost where he started, one ridge from the delta. In front of him the red screen still danced in leaping signals of danger, a vivid tableau he read as naturally as he had read the green screen just hours ago, taking his toy aliens up against the canyon wall. His mind was blank, as it had been then, his various other worlds excluded. No room to think. Thinking caused fuck-ups. Thinking would tell him that it was him or them, perhaps even bring in the emotion of fear. So his mind read the computer and sent light-speed signals to the fingers adept at so many tasks. He had taken the aliens up against the wall. He knew their secrets. But they never stopped chasing.
Long ago Kazaklis had accepted the inevitability of succumbing—somewhere—a minor slip, a SAM battery in Tiksi, a MIG roaring out of some niche in the Baikals, suicidal in its determination to save kids and lovers and parents in the city on the lake. Or simply sputtering engines, Elsie-style, and a crash somewhere in the wilderness short of the Chinese escape city. But not in a bleak and frozen valley in the Canadian Yukon, which he saw only in red computer images. “Bandits eight miles and closing.” He felt very tired.
“We've lost, Kazaklis,” Moreau said softly.
He stared into the red screen, a vivid computer-game house of horrors now. The last flight of the Polar Bear, his mind said, thoughts finally invading its sanctum. He turned and looked at her, pain but not fear in his eyes.
“They're taking their own sweet time, aren't they?” Moreau's voice was soothing and also unfrightened. She was readier than she thought, and had been, she realized, for some time.
Kazaklis broke his silence, still blustering. “You shovelin' decoys back there, Halupalai?” Then he went on private, his voice dreary. “Cat's got the mouse, Moreau, and he's playing.”
“You gave it a classy run through the hills, Kazaklis.”
The pilot ignored the compliment. “They really screwed up on the first pass. They'll close a couple more miles. All they gotta do is stay away from Halupalai's guns.”
“Don't imagine that has them terrified.”
“No. Not four of 'em with six missiles left.”
They went quiet again, the bomber noise rattling through their silence like a tin can full of loose pebbles as it raced along the valley floor. Kazaklis tapped the throttles, edging the speed back up toward Mach point-nine. His sweeping, swaying evasive maneuvers turned halfhearted, seeming to invite the missile launches. Then he reached over and nudged his copilot. “Maybe we oughta give 'em one more thrill,” he said, his voice impishly childlike.
Moreau looked at him and saw the brown eyes twinkling again, the perfect white teeth gleaming. “Don't give me that sucker-bait Boom-Boom Room smile of yours, macho man,” she said. But she smiled, too.
“Bandits seven miles and closing,” the radio squawked.
“What if I put this hunk in a loop and came back on top of 'em?” Kazaklis chuckled. “Maybe they'd all die of heart attacks, huh?”
“Jesus, Kazaklis,” Moreau said, smiling at his childishness. “The wings would snap like twigs.”
“Maybe the shrapnel would get 'em.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Sure surprise the shit out of 'em.” Kazaklis continued chuckling quietly, then peered sheepishly around the corner of his helmet. “Not such a good idea, huh?”
“Kazaklis, you really are a case,” Moreau said. “Born a couple of generations too late. You should have been a barnstormer, the Great Waldo Pepper defying death and deformity for the hayseeds in Iowa. Till you piled in, a legend.”
“Woulda lived longer,” he said pensively. But his voice changed pitch almost immediately. “The Great Kazaklis. Yeah. With you strapped to the struts of my Sopwith Camel.”
“Then you'd have to share the glory. You wouldn't like that.”
“Naw, suppose not.” Then he laughed uproariously. “With your knockers, lady. Share the glory with your knockers. Them horny old farmers would just be a-twitchin', waitin' for a look at the tits when your blouse blew off.”
Tyler cut in. “You have significant terrain at ten o'clock. High terrain at three o'clock. High terrain seven miles dead ahead.” The valley was closing around them. Moreau faded off. Their Loony Tunes navigator finally sounded as if he were navigating, their gunner was silently defending them with gum wrappers, their pilot was buried, as ever, in boobs. But she liked them, all of them. Suddenly she became very angry.
“Goddammit, how we screwed up!”
The mood change jolted Kazaklis. “The odds were a hundred to one,” he said defensively.
“Not you,” she said. “The fucking world. All of us. Anybody could have seen this coming. Why the hell didn't we see this coming?”
Kazaklis sighed. “The world's always been a dangerous neighborhood, Moreau. It became a very small neighborhood when we started packin' around zip guns that could snuff any city or cave in any mountain.”
“High terrain five miles ahead,” Tyler said.
Moreau froze.
“Or Tyler's high terrain,” she thought aloud.
Kazaklis looked at her strangely.
“Arm the first bomb,” Moreau said slowly. Kazaklis did not respond. “Arm bomb number one, dammit!”
“That's crazy.”
“Not as crazy as doing a loop, Waldo. Do it fast!”
The pilot's mind began racing again. He did not need to tote up his weaponry—six Short Range Attack Missiles tucked under his wings, four one-megaton hydrogen bombs stashed in the bay just fifty feet behind him. He ruled out the SRAM's immediately. He could make them turn circles, twist into figure eights, slip around a corner, and strike a target thirty-five miles behind him. But they were too difficult to reprogram quickly. The bombs were a different story.
Kazaklis had never seen inside the bulbous gray packages he carried, but he had a working knowledge of their innards. They were a complicated piece of machinery, maybe too complicated now. They certainly were not designed for Moreau's sudden brainstorm. The brutes were so powerful they required a nuclear explosion to set off the thermonuclear explosion. So they contained a plutonium trigger to set off a small nuclear bomb that ignited a Styrofoam explosive that finally detonated the thermonuclear explosion. The temperature inside reached twenty million degrees before the casing went. But the bombshells held far more than explosives. They contained altitude and velocity sensors, a drogue parachute to slow their descent, a delay fuse to give him a few extra seconds to escape. They also contained extraordinary safety devices. Hydrogen bombs had careened off the top of ICBM's, fallen out of B-52's, rolled off aircraft carriers, disintegrated in space launches. But none had ever exploded accidentally.
Briefly Kazaklis cursed the safeties—six coded interlocks known as the Permissive Action Link. The PAL was no pal now. He would be in one helluva hurry. Still, he had the codes. He did not think long. It was a long shot, but Moreau's cockeyed plan was not that cockeyed. It would require exquisite skill, exquisite timing, and exquisite luck. And those self-assured Russian fighter pilots would have to be so cocky they'd hold off a few minutes longer. Would he be that cocky? Yeah, he answered himself. If he were given a little more bait, which he intended to give the Russians, Kazaklis the Great would be that cocky. He smiled.
“Moreau,” he said, “you're too fucking smart to die so young.” Without pause, he continued: “Tyler, are the Russians flying in formation?”
“They're closing fast, commander.” Tyler now sounded confused and scared.
“Are they flying in formation, dammit!”
“Yes, sir,” the navigator flustered.
Kazaklis smiled again.
“Hokay, you guardians of democracy,” he exulted into the intercom, “secure the family jewels again. Our buddy with no jewels to lose has come up with a real ball-buster!”
Kazaklis immediately banked the plane left toward the last ridge between him and
the river delta. He punched the bomb code into the little cipher box next to him, unlocking the interlocks and arming one bomb. His mind sprinted through timing calculations. Thirty seconds from release to detonation. Thirty seconds at six hundred miles an hour. Five miles. He would have to be damned lucky to catch the MIG's roughly that distance behind him. He did not bother to ask if they had followed his banking left turn. He didn't need to ask, feeling their lust for a crack at him in the wide-open Mackenzie flats. They'd wait for that shot. Just as he would, if he were on the chase.
“You may sit down, colonel,” Harpoon said evenly. “Mr. Burr will yield the floor in a moment.”
The colonel hesitated, fussily adjusting his glasses, and slowly seated himself. The others, with the exception of the admiral and the successor, shifted uncomfortably. The two men stared at each other wearily. The successor spoke first.
“Do you want to be remembered as an Aaron Burr, Harpoon?” he asked.
“Of course not, sir. I've devoted my life to my country. I love it. I will fight for it, as I am tonight, to the death.”
“You don't seem to be sayin' that.”
“Sir”—Harpoon felt an overwhelming sense of foreboding— “I'm not simply being asked to fight to my death tonight. I'm being asked to fight to the death of my country.”
“You sayin' we've been wrong?”
Harpoon thought for a moment, not to resolve doubts but to find the proper words. He looked at the row of clocks. They had thirty, perhaps forty-five minutes.
“We don't have time for apple pie, sir. In any normal sense, we are the wronged party tonight. This is not a normal night.” He paused. “No finer nation has ever been conceived on this earth. We have tried to correct wrongs within our own borders. We have tried, with less success—and often using our own standards—to correct them outside our borders. I believe we, like few nations, have tried to do our best by the world.” He paused again, and swept his eyes around a quietly vibrating compartment in which all other eyes were cast downward except those of the successor and the colonel. “No nation is always right. We've made mistakes, yes. Our largest was the relentless accumulation of the weapons we are now using. There will be no winners tonight, sir. But perhaps, just perhaps, we can find the wisdom to salvage a touch of the humanitarianism of which our country has been so justly proud.”
Harpoon stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and there was silence in the compartment. He stared at the successor without challenge and the man stared back with curiosity. Mistakes. God forgive them, they had made so many. God forgive him, he had participated in so many.
“So you want me to be remembered as an umbrella-totin' Chamberlain, buying peace at any price?”
Harpoon felt helpless. After all the combativeness of the briefing, he once again felt empathy for the unprepared human being in front of him. Perhaps he was asking too much, asking him to break out of a lifelong mind mold in mere minutes. In the seventies he had spent several months at the War College in Washington. One of the lecturers was a stooped old professor of philosophy from a liberal Ivy League college. One of Rickover's perverse tests, he and his officer colleagues had concluded. The professor had pushed them about the tree in the wilderness and they had perfunctorily debated whether it made a sound, missing his point. On his final day, the old man told them they were all left-siders, playing chess and war. Right-siders play different games and survive. In his final message—and Harpoon recalled each word now—the man said without enmity: “This generation of men may be the most shortsighted in history. It not only consumes the earth's resources, robbing the future of its heritage, it also toys childlike with a power that could rob the past of its existence. Chess is a simple game, gentlemen.” Only now did Harpoon realize that the tree was the earth.
“No, sir,” Harpoon said, “I want you to be remembered.”
The successor looked at him without understanding.
“I don't like you, Harpoon.”
“I know that, sir. I'm sorry, but it's not important.”
“Didn't say I didn't respect you.”
Harpoon was surprised, but he said nothing.
“We're down to it, aren't we?”
“Yes, sir. We have about thirty minutes.”
“And now you're going to ask me to surrender. Can't do that, you know.”
Harpoon looked at him with both consternation and compassion. “Surrender, sir? No. I want you to try—simply try—to use the pause. Try to turn this thing off till we can talk to the Soviets, talk to our submarines.”
“Talk to the Soviets.” The successor shook his head slowly at the thought, and his drawl disappeared immediately. “Dammit, Harpoon, we have been trying to talk to the Soviets for fifty years, and what good's it done us? Hell's bells, mister, we couldn't even talk to them during the Second World War. And they were on our side then. How the devil am I supposed to talk to them? You say I can't even talk to Minneapolis.”
“You can't talk to them now, sir. You may be able to in four or five hours if we don't blow the ionosphere to smithereens again and suck the guts out of our radios and computers.”
“Harpoon, you amaze me. Downright amaze me. You just said I got thirty minutes.”
“To talk to our bombers. Before they go down to low-level and the best communications system in the world couldn't get through to them.”
Harpoon paused once more. He felt the beads of sweat pop on his forehead. The map's blue ovals pulsated at him mockingly. Behind the successor the arms of the Zulu clock formed a haunting smile, the second hand relentlessly sweeping onward. He scanned the faces of his colleagues. All knew what was coming, but none, except the colonel, met his eyes. The colonel stared back in a mix of challenge and curiosity. Harpoon stared at his rival. My God, was this a chess game too? The colonel smiled. It was now or never. He drew his eyes away and riveted them on the successor, whose blank face seemed to miss the import of the moment.
“Bring them back, sir,” Harpoon said simply.
The words seemed to carom off the fluxing computer maps and echo in the sudden silence of the briefing compartment.
“Bring the bombers back,” Harpoon repeated quietly, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice.
The successor stared at Harpoon, briefly bewildered. Then his face slowly broke into a thin smile. “Now, that's a real good plan, Harpoon,” he said, his voice cutting with sarcasm. “You want me to call up the Soviet bombers and send them home too?”
“If we're lucky, very lucky,” Harpoon replied slowly, “the Soviets will do that themselves. If someone is in control over there. If they can see us. There are many ifs.”
“Yes, mister, there damned well are. And the biggest if is if I feel like surrendering. Which I don't.”
“Surrender?” Harpoon asked, his voice even despite his despair. “How in God's name is that surrender? You still have your submarines. Sixty percent of our strategic weapons are in those boats. Seven thousand city-killing warheads. Maybe, just maybe, bringing back the bombers would get us a truce.”
“Now it's a truce. That's a damned fancy word for surrender. Those uncivilized bastards started this and kicked the pucky out of us, Harpoon. We kicked them back. A relatively even exchange. Except there's ten million more Americans dead. Except we had a damned sight more to lose than those barbarians did. They just brought the United States of America down to their level, Harpoon. Now they'll just go out there and rebuild from the same point as us.” The drawl crept back, as if for emphasis. “That means losin', dang you. And quittin' means surrenderin'.”
“Good God, sir. Nobody's going to rebuild without outside help. Who would you rather be, us or them? Would you like to ask Poland for aid? Czechoslovakia? Hungary? Afghanistan?”
The successor looked around the table. The colonel still rolled his eyes. The others looked at him in solemn anticipation. He turned back toward Harpoon.
“Rebuildin' isn't the point anyway,” he said. “You tell me we only have twenty bombers left and
maybe only a couple will get in. They got a hundred and fifty coming at us, soon to be roaming at will over our country, you say, because we haven't got any consarned peashooters. You're the military man. Would you make that trade?”
Harpoon sensed his last chance. “The bombers aren't the point either,” he said. “Even a couple could take care of Leningrad and what's left of Moscow, plus odds and ends. The subs are the point. They know we've got them. They know we'll use them. You're the politician. Would you take a chance to make that trade, saving your country from total annihilation?”
“A damned Indian smoke signal,” the successor said angrily. “That's what it is. Sounds like we're back in the nineteenth century already.”
“We are, sir.”
“And that's the Jericho decision? To call the bombers back and hope the Kremlin follows suit?”
“To use the pause in any way possible, sir, to settle things down.”
The successor slumped. He caressed the Seal, rubbing the lettering as if it were braille. “What lunatic designed this madness?” he asked disconsolately, the words directed at no one. “There's no way to win.”
“There never was, sir,” Harpoon said quietly.
Harpoon relaxed briefly. Foolishly, he recognized quickly. On the admiral's flank a clatter interrupted the silence as the colonel rose suddenly, pulling himself up so portentously the eyeglasses slipped on his nose. He cleared his throat in a high wheeze.
Harpoon looked at him with a wan smile. “Looks like the colonel has found the stolen overcoat,” he said.
The colonel glared at him. “Are you, or are you not,” the officer demanded, “going to tell the President about cutting the head off the chicken?”
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