The plane remained at forty-four thousand feet, an efficient if easily tracked altitude. The pilot assumed the Russians were watching them, but that was irrelevant. Coming over the Pole, any of the major cities in the Soviet Union were possible targets and the Russians could only guess at their destination. Although Leningrad and Vladivostok were five thousand miles apart on opposite Soviet coasts, Polar Bear One could reach either city with an arrival-time difference of no more than half an hour. The Russians would be expecting a Western-based plane to go for the Siberian coastal city with its array of military targets. It so happened that neither Vladivostok nor Leningrad was their primary. But the time for diversion, for hiding in the weeds at low level, would come later. Their progress was methodical and scrupulously planned, taking them slowly, speed not being one of the Buff’s virtues, toward a rendezvous point where a tanker would or would not be waiting.
“Roger, two hundred ninety-three thousand pounds,” Kazakhs repeated the fuel reading.
Almost half-empty, Kazakhs thought.
More than half-full, the shrinks in his mind replied.
Enough to get to the primary target and limp, perhaps, a few hundred miles away into the Siberian wastes, Kazakhs thought.
More than enough to make the low-level raid on the great dam on the Angara River, take out the industrial complex at Irkutsk, and destroy the troop placements and nuclear reactor at Ulan-Ude, the shrinks replied.
Not enough for the escape to the northern Chinese city of Tsitsihar, Kazakhs thought.
“Wishing you hadn’t elbowed in front of my roomie, commander?” Moreau broke into his reverie.
“Are you EWO ready?” Kazaklis replied.
“Peace is my profession, commander.”
“Flying off valiantly to save the American way, huh?”
“Hamburgers, baseball, and vaginal sprays, commander.”
“Flavored?” Kazaklis asked.
“You like relish?” Moreau parried innocently.
“Never tried it,” Kazaklis continued.
“Thought you’d tried everything.”
“Oh,” Kazaklis rebutted in mock surprise, “you meant hamburgers.”
“Your mind’s only in one place, Kazaklis.”
“You think the Russkies targeted ’em?”
“Ground zero at Golden Arches? Ending the record at sixty billion burgers?”
“No, no, no. Hitting the strategic stockpiles of mountain-flowers fragrance.”
“It sure would turn the American way upside down.”
“You mean right side up.”
Moreau gave up, the anger dissipating in a slow, rumbling laugh. “Kazaklis. I don’t know where you were hatched. But you’re a sketch. A real prick. But a sketch.”
Kazaklis changed the subject abruptly. “Are you afraid, Moreau?”
Moreau turned and looked at him, her one good eye piercing through the red lights and framing the pilot’s clear, serious face. He stared back, his brown eyes steady and unsmiling. “No,” she said.
“Why are you here?” he asked curiously.
“To be with you, you charmer, you,” Moreau purred, although cat’s claws scratched through the softness. “Could there be any other reason?”
The psychiatrists would have nodded in satisfaction. Tension was good for PRP. Diverting. Even the loss of O’Toole was good for PRP. The dispatching of O’Toole gave Halupalai something to do with his time. And while Kazaklis and Moreau sniped at each other in their station up front, Halupalai played alone with his new toys in the now lonely station at the rear of the upstairs compartment.
The big bomber carried various defense systems, none of them giving SAC crews a great sense of comfort. It carried heat flares that might, just might, draw a Soviet missile away from the hot exhaust of the B-52’s engines. It carried bundles of chaff, a sophisticated form of the same tinfoil that World War II pilots used to confuse early radar and some joyriding teenagers used to confound cops in their highway radar traps. Packaged in the right patterns, it might, just might, temporarily distract an attacking MIG. It also carried powerful radar-jamming equipment the Soviets had been breaking down regularly, and the Americans had been upgrading as often, in a thirty-year cat-and-mouse game of technological escalation and counter-escalation. The defenses were the responsibility of the Electronics Warfare Officer, who, as the PRP psychiatrists would have put it, was now inoperative. PRP people didn’t like the word “dead.” Icarus was inoperative. So was O’Toole. But not Halupalai. In fact, Halupalai was having the time of his life.
With a verve he hadn’t felt since those ancient touchdown runs, the big Hawaiian raced to the rhythm of his new sport. He fired several decoy flares into the void over British Columbia. Hot damn! He wished he’d had those in Nam! Once again he saw the gray intruder racing up out of a bed of cotton-candy clouds far below. Once again he saw the finned threat scar his magnificent landscape, rape his serene world. But this time the shark flash of the Russian missile darted away from the engines of his Buff and suckered into the heat of the flare instead.
“Whoo-o-e-e-e!” Halupalai exulted, and Kazakhs looked back over his shoulder with a silly grin at the joyfully swaying back of the old man of the aircraft.
Halupalai’s mind raced with fervor. This was good stuff! No more rat-a-tat pop guns for him! Now he knew why the kids, even big kids like Kazakhs, stood glaze-eyed in front of the blip-blip of the computer games while the Amazon Lady and her ancient pinball technology flashed forlornly alone in arcade corners. Now he understood why the generals loaded up their fighters with so many computer toys the pilots couldn’t handle them all. This was fun! This was the future! At the console in front of him he rambunctiously triggered a quick combination that dumped several dozen bundles of antiradar chaff from the belly of the cruising bomber. Broad Slavic faces, bubble-framed in the cockpit canopies of their MIG interceptors, frowned in dismay as they twisted their supersonic fighters this way and that in chase of phantoms. Hot damn!
“Bandits! Bandits!” The voice, startled and panic-stricken, burst through the radio channels. “On our butt! We got bandits all over our butt!”
Halupalai froze at the emergency call from below. Then a cackle shattered into his earphones.
“Halupalai’s playing with the tinfoil, Radnor,” Kazakhs said, his voice bubbling with laughter.
“Damn you, Halupalai,” Radnor said, embarrassed again.
“I gotta practice,” Halupalai said sheepishly.
“Gum wrappers, Radnor,” Kazakhs interjected. “You just got attacked by a squadron of gum wrappers.”
“Oh, shit,” Radnor said, running his hand through sandy hair above a freckled face that had turned red without the assistance of the night lights.
“Well, whaddaya think?” Kazakhs continued. “Did the American taxpayer get his money’s worth out of the great tinfoil race? Or do we still have a Gum Wrapper Gap?”
Radnor remained silent.
“Come on,” Kazakhs insisted. “It’s the greatest untold story of the cold war. The taxpayer spent billions closing the bomber gap, the missile gap, and the window of vulnerability. He needs to know. How about the gum wrappers?”
Needing the relief, Moreau suddenly cut in. “We spent millions,” she said, “probing the secrets of SAM missiles captured by the Israelis.”
“Slipping CIA moles into Russian electronics plants,” Kazakhs added.
“Sweating Soviet defectors in safe houses all over the Washington suburbs,” Moreau pushed onward.
“Seducing East German scientists with voluptuous blonds trained in… well… radar technology,” Kazakhs continued.