“Gauges malfunctioning!” Kazakhs 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. Kazakhs, 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. Kazakhs withdrew his upheld arm, took the wheel, and helped Moreau get the nose down.
“Jeezuz,” Kazakhs muttered absentmindedly, “that was closer than a tit when you’re screwin’.”
“Missionary style,” Moreau said blandly.
Kazakhs cocked an eye at Moreau, as if he had lost track. She stared straight ahead, but he laughed anyway.
“Only way I know how, copilot. I’m just a country boy.”
“Uhm.”
They leveled the plane out at 10,500 feet and then quickly adjusted it back to a steady climb rate.
“Well, I owe you one, Moreau,” Kazakhs said.
“We’re even, commander. One airplane for one eye.”
Moreau’s voice was steady. Kazakhs looked at her again to see what he should read into that one. But there was no way of telling. She still stared straight ahead.
“Okay, let’s find out what happened,” Kazakhs changed the subject. “It’s still a long way out of this sonuvabitch.” He switched to all channels. “Navigator, this is the pilot. You guys comfy down there?”
For a moment there was no answer. Then Tyler came on, his voice flat. “Scope’s messed up.”
“You sure? Ours are working now.”
Tyler’s voice turned brittle, his words biting with challenge. “Goddammit, I said my scope’s messed up!”
Down below, the navigator and radar operator sat side by side at small desklike radar consoles in the windowless well hole of the navigation compartment. Alongside Tyler were the stairs leading topside to the other four crew members and behind the stairs a small open space leading to the locked hatch into the landing-hear hold and then the catwalk around the bomb bay. The light always was red here, even in daytime. The place was a closet, claustrophobic, and the pervasive red lighting pulled the walls in even closer.
Since the flash, which had bounced down here like an errant strobe light, Radnor had been transfixed by his radar screen. It was focused tightly on the area in front of the aircraft. The screen had flared with the flash. But now it was normal, except for a little more snow than usual. And an ugly red splotch, pulsing like a jellyfish, that crept out of the corner, partly on the screen, partly hidden beyond its range. But the radar was working.
Radnor looked over at Tyler, whose screen was set on a wider field, yielding a picture in a cross-hatched fifty-mile radius around the plane. Tyler’s screen showed snow flurries too, but it also seemed to be working. The navigator had not moved, his eyes glued to the screen. Radnor leaned toward him for a closer look. His jellyfish, reduced on the broader field, looked like an amoeba under a microscope. Then the circling arm of the radar passed over another amoeba, and another. Radnor felt a sob catch in his throat. The color in his face faded, the freckles throbbing like painful welts in the red night light. Mechanically he did distance calculations. He pulled back away from Tyler’s screen, tears welling in his eyes. He waited, fighting back the tears, swallowing the sob out of his voice. Then he spoke to Kazakhs. “Three detonations, commander.”
“No!” Tyler shrieked the rejection.
“One slightly below us, maybe five miles ahead, fifteen degrees south. The others are behind us, air-burst altitude, due east…” Radnor’s voice broke briefly. Then he added, “Roughly twelve and sixteen miles now.”
“No. No.” Tyler sounded calmer now, but insistent. “Radnor’s wrong. My screen’s a scrambled egg. I don’t see that at all.”
Radnor tried to place a reassuring hand on Tyler’s shoulder. Tyler savagely pushed it away.
Up front, Kazakhs motioned Moreau to go on private once again.
Moreau spoke first. “Tyler hasn’t got much to go home to,” she said quietly.
“Dead center. One on the base and one on the town.”
“Bastards.”
“This ain’t tiddly winks, pal. What would you have done? Hit Grand Coulee Dam and tried to flood us out? They wanted to catch us on the ground. It almost worked. So they kicked us in the butt with two that should have caught us, and almost got us with a misfire….”
“Almost…” Moreau said pensively, rubbing an eye that neither saw nor hurt.
Kazakhs ignored her now. His mind searched through his options. He had at least three problems, and one—the radiation, about which he could do nothing—would have to wait.
“What would you do if you were a submarine commander and your job was to take us out, all the way out?” he thought aloud.
“Hit us again in thirty to sixty seconds,” Moreau replied. “In case I missed, in case somebody escaped, in case my warheads detonated each other. Submarine missiles are not that accurate. And they’re fratricidal.”
“That’s right. They probably sprayed us with a dozen warheads, most of which killed each other. So if you were sitting out in the Pacific guessing ten minutes ago, where would you have dumped the next load?”
“West. They knew we would take off west. And north. Where we’re turning.”
“Right… and wrong. We’re turning south.”
Moreau chuckled for the first time since takeoff. “Tahiti,” she said. “The senator from Vermont would love it. For all we know, he’s President by now.”
“No palm trees for you, Moreau. I gotta loop us around one big hot mother of a cloud. Percentage baseball. And you’ve gotta see if there are any friendlies still flying with us. Check Radnor and then try to find the rest of the squadron.”
Moreau felt the big plane bank sharply left. Percentage baseball, indeed. That’s what Kazakhs said every time he took a risk, and this was damned risky—brushing them up against a very radioactive cloud on the chance they had outguessed a Russian submarine commander. They had already taken one dose of radiation. God knows how large a dose.
“We need a REM count,” Moreau said.
“You’re not glowing in the dark yet, Moreau.”
“Get off my back, Kazakhs. We need to know how much radiation we took.”
“Not now, we don’t. It’s irrelevant, isn’t it? It’s a ten-hour trip. You’re gonna live long enough. We’ll check it if we get out of here right now. I’d rather know if we have any friends with us.”
Radnor already had started looking, and he was confused. “Beats me, captain,” he told Moreau. “I can see only one aircraft on my screen. It’s big enough to be a B-52. Could be commercial, but he’s sure in a strange place. Half-dozen miles behind us, very low, heading northwest.”
Moreau changed radio channels.
“Polar Bear cubs, this is Mama Bear looking for strays,” she said. “Do you read? This is Polar Bear One looking for Polar Bear Two. “