“Need ourselves a fire, bub, that’s what we need, huh, bub, huh?”
The kid’s cow-brown eyes reverted to their ancestral black. His boots were filled with ice water. He was soaked down to his Fruit of the Loom. He looked about him, and all he could see, as far as the eye reached in the gloom, was wetness. They stood in a rainforest hollow. The shadowy hulk of giant trees lay rotting, their backs grotesquely broken where they had fallen decades ago. It was a dismal swamp, the kind of place in which he had floated through those childhood fantasies until he had been broken of all their allure. He said nothing. To make a fire here was to spark flints in a rain barrel.
“Come ‘ere, bub,” the old man said, pulling the kid toward the decayed body of a fallen fir wider than the boy was tall. His knobby fingers dug into the wet crud, sending giant beetles scrambling, grabbing one with a deadly pinch and thrusting it toward the boy. “Bear food. Kid food, too, if’n ya needs it.” Then he dug further into the flaky corpse of the tree, prying out a glob of sticky amber-colored pitch.
The old man molded the pitch, planted it in a scooped-out trough beneath their shelter tree, and surrounded it with soaked fir needles. With one match the pitch snapped magically into flame, the needles steaming for a second and then crackling too. Expertly, Big Kazakhs added drenched twigs, then wet sticks, and finally soaked logs, the flames from one layer sapping the water out of the next. In a moment the boy was warm, in twenty minutes dry, even with the rain still pelting his poncho.
“That big rottin’ tree’s always gonna be there, bub, with pitch to keep you warm and bugs to keep your stomach full, if’n ya needs ’em. Remember that. Some things is eee-temal, always there for ya, like the mountains.”
The boy stared at the crumbling home of the beetle and the pitch. It was truly a miracle to build a fire in the rain, to create warmth in the cold, and his father had done it. But he could no longer give his pa any satisfaction in the woods.
“Nope,” the kid said quietly. “It’s gonna rot away and be gone. Just like you, Pa. Just like me.” The father looked at the son as forlornly as he could show, because he knew that somehow he had driven the dreams out of the kid—that the boy, barely turned twelve, no longer saw the past or the future. He only saw the present, and that truly was sad, even to Big Kazakhs.
“Oh, yer right about that, bub,” his pa said. “But yer wrong too. Don’t know if yer ever gonna unnerstand.”
Polar Bear One passed into Canada east of Penticton, droned north over the Caribou Mountains of British Columbia, and sliced across the corner of Alberta on a course toward the two immense frozen lakes of the Canadian Northwest Territories, Great Slave and Great Bear. The next hour passed more rapidly than any of the crew expected. PRP cluttered their lives with chores, leaving little time for inward trips, those being risky.
Kazakhs picked up a few radio transmissions from other aircraft, all civilian, most of the calls coming on the emergency frequency but none of them coded JIMA 14, the B-52’s identification for military emergencies. Most were only marginally coherent and Kazakhs answered none. He received no military communications and he slapped a total ban on listening to ground radio. He did not need any more Crazy Eddies or Conway Twittys, and surely not from Coquille.
Kazakhs ordered O’Toole’s body placed downstairs behind Tyler and Radnor in the little basement walkway leading to the sealed-off bomb bay. It was the only place in the small crew compartment of the huge bomber where six feet of now-excess baggage could be stowed relatively inconspicuously. Radnor came up, skittishly, to help Halupalai carry the body.
The PRP psychiatrists, had they been aboard for this ultimate laboratory test of their wisdom, would have observed Tyler with fascination. He ignored the entire proceeding. He did not draw his eyes away from his radar screen as his crewmates struggled to get the body down the ladder flanking his seat. He did not tum once to look at the corpse as it was stretched out behind him. He remained quietly unconcerned, as if the reality of one touchable body was simpler to handle than the vision of distant millions. That was the opposite reaction from the one predicted by the psychiatrists. They said the unseen millions would be more tolerable than looking death in the eye. Psychic numbing, they called it; a lesson from Vietnam that the shrinks concluded would be far more useful in the big war.
Tyler went about his business, watching his screen, charting and plotting, mouthing bland course corrections to Kazaklis. He was the perfect, efficient, no-nonsense navigator, a tribute to the system. He said nothing more about the super con of the mock destruction of his home and family, nothing more about the hoax of this most elaborate practice mission. Nor did he utter a single word indicating he had changed his mind. He engaged in no small talk with Radnor, his seatmate in the basement. He did his job. That was the beauty of PRP. It worked even when it didn’t work.
The presence of O’Toole’s body had a much more profound effect on Radnor. He found himself looking over his shoulder regularly at the placid hulk of the man he last had seen in the shower at Fairchild. O’Toole’s feet pointed toward Radnor’s back, his face hidden just beyond the bulkhead interrupting the radar operator’s line of sight toward the hatch door. So Radnor saw two V-angled boots, two legs, and the beginning of a torso. No more. The body was bathed in the plane’s red night lights, a routine red that now took on a hue of malevolence for the first time in Radnor’s career.
Tyler wasn’t helping matters either. Once, as Radnor drew his eyes back away from O’Toole’s body, he saw Tyler reach reverently forward and carefully touch the little Kodak icon he had pasted above his radar screen, one finger caressing a cherub’s cheek, another seeming to tousle the glossy image of fine blond curls. Radnor could see Tyler speaking softly, a loving incantation to the baby-blue eyes that had filled with tears on the frozen runway such a short time ago. Radnor shuddered. He wanted to scream at Tyler: Take it down, damn you. Take it down. Tyler bothered him almost as much as the nearness of O’Toole’s dead figure. The whole thing gave him the jitters, conjuring up undesirable thoughts about Spokane, Laura, and the world he had left behind forever. Radnor kept no icon of his own. He didn’t need one, Laura’s face being riveted into his mind. He sobbed briefly. Then, as trained, he called on PRP to push those thoughts back down. It was not easy. But he was kept quite busy.
Upstairs, Halupalai now occupied the rear of the topside cabin alone. Had it not been for O’Toole’s demise, Halupalai would have been the most dangerously exposed to wrong thoughts. He was the one about whom the psychiatrists—had they been perched in some dark corner of the nuclear bomber, watching, watching, as Halupalai’s mind often had envisioned them—would have been the most worried. He simply had nothing to do, being the guardian only of the remote-controlled Gatling guns 150 feet behind him in the tail. That left time to think, and thinking truly was dangerous. Kazakhs handled that problem.
“Halupalai?” the pilot asked shortly after the gunner returned upstairs. “You think you can handle O’Toole’s tinker toys for us?”
“You bet, commander,” Halupalai responded excitedly, his enthusiasm briefly running away with him. “I’ve sat next to so many O’Tooles I’ve forgotten most of their names and faces.” The sergeant immediately felt an overwhelming surge of guilt. He had forgotten many faces, but not O’Toole’s, which leaped tauntingly into his mind’s eye now. His voice trailed off. “I think I can do it, commander,” he added.