“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?”
Kazakhs 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?” Kazakhs 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 Kazakhs 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,” Kazakhs interrupted. “We really needed that.”
“Sweet Christ, Kazakhs,” Moreau said, more in pain than anger.
“Cleanest corpse in the Air Force, I’ll say that.”
“Kazakhs!”
“Don’t Kazakhs 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?”
Kazakhs 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.
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 midaftemoon. 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, Kazakhs 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 Kazakhs, 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.