Kazakhs took no heed of the mood change. “Congratulations, Lieutenant,” he said. “You may have the first battlefield commission of this here war… or whatever the hell we’re into.”
Halupalai paused again. “I’ll take the job, commander,” he said. “You keep the bars.”
“You sunburned beach bum!” Kazakhs thundered. “Holdin’ out for captain on me, huh?”
Halupalai gazed into the blinking red-and-yellow instrument panel in front of him. Fleetingly the roar of the madding crowds echoed again, the adulation of the California girls tickled at his loins, the succession of three wives clung to his arm and then detached, the great green turf bleached into seedy car lots with overpriced Mercedeses. Twenty years ago he turned down a commission, his own quiet acknowledgment that a college degree in off-tackle slants had brought him more grief than gain.
“Holdin’ out for sergeant, commander. Don’t need the lonely burden and all that.”
Kazakhs chuckled. “You’re never gonna get ahead in this world, sarge.” He motioned for Moreau to take the wheel and, with both hands, lifted the cumbersome white helmet off his head, replacing it with a headset. In the pressurized cabin the heavy, hot helmet was necessary only at moments of risk—takeoff, landing, low-level, combat, and, of course, during the raw tension of air-to-air refueling. So Kazakhs placed it now to his left, just behind the innocently obscure red lever that armed the nuclear weapons. The plane had three such levers, one at each crew station. All three had to be pulled to activate the weapons. His hand brushed past the lever as he reached into the side pocket of his flight jacket and extracted a mangled pack of Camels.
“Watch the match,” Kazakhs said automatically as the cupped light flared briefly in the dark cockpit.
“Afraid you’ll blind me, commander?” Moreau asked blandly.
Kazakhs drew deeply on the stubby little cigarette, the red-orange ember melding into the safety of the night lights, and tried to ignore her.
“Those things’ll kill you, Kazakhs,” Moreau pushed on. She knew Kazakhs always stowed a carton of Camels in his alert bag—along with the candy bars, the first-aid kit, the radio beacon, the .45, the cyanide pill, and other essentials, including Russian rubles and Chinese yuan. She laughed a trifle loudly.
“Think you’re funny, huh?” Kazakhs snapped. “That’s a real ho-ho, Moreau. Anybody tell you about the union rules when they let you in this outfit? We get a cigarette break. A silent one.”
“Well, well. Little touchy tonight? You were ready every time the siren went off. Remember?”
“Just can it, Moreau.”
“I was laughing about the rubles we’ve got stuffed in our bags. Great piece of American ingenuity. Nuke ’em and buy your way out.”
“I brought international wampum, Moreau. Camels and Her-sheys. What you got to sell, pal? Or should I ask?”
Moreau stiffened. “God damn you, Kazakhs,” she said after a moment. “You really are an asshole.”
Kazakhs sighed, then pulled long and hard on the Camel, its ragged bite diverting the headache throbbing lightly at his temples. His mind darted erratically but calmly through what little he knew of the night’s realities. Nuclear weapons, he knew, had been used in anger or error for the first time since Nagasaki. He knew Spokane was gone. He presumed Seattle was gone for the simple reason that he had picked up no air-traffic calls as he had moved past the fringe of the city’s commercial landing patterns. He knew part of his boyhood home, Oregon being a state without strategic targets, was at least functioning and might be for some time, panic aside, because the prevailing westerlies would keep it out of the normal fallout pattern for days. But the frozen subarctic wastes over which he was flying revealed little more. The President could be alive and frantically negotiating. He could be dead. Hell, he could have started it and be orbiting in the National Emergency Airborne Command Post. The E-4. “The Flying Fuehrer Bunker,” Rolling Stone had called it years ago, and the name had stuck in the black, barroom humor of the bomber pilots.
“Achtung!” Kazakhs snorted.
Moreau looked at him strangely, but his gaze held hard and blankly on the flash curtain.
The Looking Glass plane, the flying SAC command post, almost surely was flying. Kazakhs had no illusions about the latest political fad of limited nuclear wars. So he assumed what had happened in Seattle and Spokane had happened all over the United States. Still, the Looking Glass had to be flying. Not a moment had passed in more than two decades without a command post aloft over the Midwest, ready to take control when the land bases went. It was possible the E-4‘s, the President’s giant command plane at Andrews and the carbon-copy aircraft at Offutt in Omaha, were caught on the ground. It was almost impossible to take out the Looking Glass. It had been airborne and he should hear from it. Soon. But his more immediate worry was the refueling planes, not one of which had made it away from Fairchild. An alternate could be waiting for them, out of Eielson in Alaska or perhaps Minot in North Dakota. But the radio hadn’t peeped. Without a refueling rendezvous, they had enough fuel to get in but not out. Moreau’s little joke about the rubles, his about her pretty fanny, wasn’t so funny.
Kazakhs grunted unintelligibly.
Moreau stared straight ahead, ignoring him this time.
Even the refueling problem was irrelevant. Of all the grand theories that had failed tonight, Kazakhs knew that he and the four others in Polar Bear One now were about to test the most dubious theory of all. That a thirty-year-old B-52 could somehow worm its way unseen into the heart of Russia and get out again. He knew the odds on that one—one hundred to one at best. This night, his throbbing skull told him, was not at best. He already had one dead crewman and another who was psyched into a jack-off world all his own. He could only guess about refueling tankers and communications. Of the six Buffs on alert at Fairchild, his was the only one still flying. That meant, he was sure, that of the hundred Buffs on alert tonight, maybe twenty were in the air. And that meant four thousand SAM missiles, plus countless fighter-interceptors, could pick away at twenty SAC bombers. The PRP psychiatrists would work him over good for that thought. The intercontinental missiles, they would counsel reassuringly, already had destroyed almost all the SAM bases. That’s what they’re for. Sure thing. So now we get to wander through fifteen hundred miles of radioactive fallout. The shrinks never answered that one. Are you afraid? they asked instead. No, Kazakhs was not afraid. But PRP had not freeze-dried his psyche to the point where he had any illusions. He knew, as all the bomber pilots knew, that once it went, it went. He knew that, for God and country, he now was a rational suicide. Contrary to the public’s vision of nuclear war—one poof and it’s all over—he now faced a ten-hour drone into Russia with sheer boredom and raw tension alternately ripping at frayed nerves and eating at trained minds, one threatening to drive them all nuts if the other didn’t. His chore, as commander, was to hold them all together while they rationally committed suicide.
“Banzai,” he said, grinding out the cigarette after the stub began burning his lips.
“Pardon?” Moreau said, her voice still reeking with anger.
“I said you’re right. I’m an asshole. Report me to the Equal Rights Commission. But don’t forget to tell them you’re a pain in the asshole.” He stared into the curtains. “And give me a fuel reading.”
Moreau glared at him. “Two hundred ninety-three thousand pounds,” she said curtly.
The pilot seemed not to hear her as he moved the plane across Dawson Creek in northern British Columbia, then veered it slightly eastward, putting it on a bearing almost due north toward Great Bear Lake.