“Oh, don’t worry, commander. PRP’s working. The five little robots are droning mechanically along. We’re all heading for Irkutsk on the Doomsday Express, each for our own individualized, preprogrammed reasons. Me too. PRP’s ingenious. PRP’s the Catch-22 of World War III. Commander. Sir.”
Kazakhs tuned her out. Damn her. This was a new side of her. Unexpected. But he blamed himself for playing along with her too long. Everyone was spooking. Even he was spooking.
The plane hit another pocket of clear-air turbulence. Thwack! The big bomber shuddered. Moreau efficiently pulled on the wheel, flicked out the Master Caution light, and did a routine sweep of the instrument readings.
She’s all right, Kazaklis decided. Her way of venting. Everyone in the plane could use some venting, but he didn’t want the rest of the crew hearing hers. He switched to all channels.
“This is your captain speaking,” Kazaklis said brightly. “On behalf of Strangelove Airlines and your flight crew I’d like to welcome you aboard our Stratocruiser flight to Irkutsk, with possible intermediate passovers—little pun there, folks, heh-heh, for our Jewish passengers—in Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, and other scenic Soviet cities. Our estimated time of arrival in Irkutsk is ten p.m. local time. Barring local air-traffic problems, folks, and you, heh-heh, know how pesky those can be…”
The pilot’s mind was racing in one direction while his words moved in another. Damn, he wished he would hear something. From Omaha, from the Pentagon, from the Looking Glass. From the tanker. From somebody.
“…As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing some mild clear-air turbulence. Absolutely nothing to concern you, of course. For those of you who are not familiar with our safety procedures, however, I wish to point out that the little red lever to the left of your seat is not an armrest. I repeat, the little red lever is not an armrest…”
He knew he wouldn’t hear much in any case. Just orders. Go or don’t go, although there seemed little doubt about that one. And where. That could always change.
“…From time to time I will point out some areas of interest along our flight path. At the moment, we have just passed into Canada’s Northwest Territories. Those of you on the right of the aircraft would have a magnificent moonlight view of frozen Great Slave Lake. On the left the panorama of the Mackenzie Mountains, and beyond them, the romantic Yukon, would also be stunning. If we had windows, heh-heh…”
PRP wouldn’t want them to know what had happened back home. PRP wouldn’t want them to know if they were expected to penetrate Russia against full defenses or massive clouds of fallout. Not yet. PRP would want them to be five little robots.
“…Now, folks, please settle back, enjoy your flight, and if our charming stewardess can be of any assistance to you, please call on her.”
Kazakhs bowed grandly toward Moreau.
“Coffee, tea, or Kool-Aid?” she said sweetly into the open mike.
God damn you, the pilot mouthed silently over the droning engines. Kool-Aid. Jonestown. Suicide. Damn you, Moreau.
Far to the south, inside the Looking Glass, the isolation also was getting to Alice. Not the smell of the sweat. Not the tediously weaving figure-eight flight partem in which the pilot had placed them high over the Midwest. Not even the mind’s vision—ruthlessly subdued—of the huge pockmarks he knew had been gouged into the dark prairies below. It was the frustration of being gagged, of being inside a command aircraft that could not command.
More than an hour ago, in the last frantic minutes before Icarus had gone, Alice had sent out a flurry of orders, some of them quite unusual. Hurried messages to Greenland and into the Canadian wastes, desperately setting up links between his few surviving B-52’s and the still fewer tanker planes that seemed scattered in all the wrong places. He also had sent a single supersonic FB-111 racing far ahead of the B-52’s to test America’s new air-launched cruise missiles and, more important, to test the Soviet coastal defenses long before the Buffs would get there. But now Alice had no idea what good the tests would do, what the links would accomplish. Since the sizzles and snaps of the electromagnetic pulse, Alice may have been in command. But he was a commander who was deaf, dumb, and blind.
Forlornly he looked down the narrow aisle of the converted old 707 jet. Panels had been unhinged from switchboards to get inside at burned-out wiring. Teletype machines, supposedly the most secure standby for this moment, sat dismembered. The tops were off almost all the computers jammed into the plane’s small work space. His battle staff of twenty had jackets off, sleeves rolled up, sweaty foreheads poked inside the innards of wounded computers. Circuit boards littered the floor of an airplane usually scrub-brush clean. He stared into his black phone with its white light that now refused to blink.
Slowly Alice rose from his swivel seat and moved toward Sam. He laid a hand on the colonel’s shoulder, feeling the wetness seep through a rumpled blue shirt as the man removed his head from the bowels of an open computer. “Anything?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know, general.” The colonel brushed an arm across his forehead. “I thought I had it back a minute ago. Then it just flared and went down again. I’d like to get ahold of the frigging egghead who said we could protect an airplane against EMP.”
Alice forced himself to act the commander. “We knew the pulse would raise hell, Sam.” He squeezed the colonel’s shoulder. “We’ll get it back.”
“I know, sir. Sorry if I sounded down.”
Down, Alice, thought. Good God. How else should the poor bastard sound? He turned and returned to his seat, glancing at a large paper wall map covered with multicolored targets. They would get it back, Alice thought. But they had so little time. How the devil could he run a war if he couldn’t talk to anybody? And where the devil was Harpoon, who was supposed to snatch the man who really had to run this war?
Still farther south, in the E-4, Harpoon had more elbow room, but no more of anything else. He moved slowly, his white hair marking him regally, through compartment after compartment of the much larger plane. The men and women of his staff withdrew their heads and hands from similarly gutted computers and communications equipment, casting pained looks at the admiral. He nodded at them confidently, disguising his emotions, and moved on.
Like Alice, he had spoken to no one outside since the sizzles and snaps. Like Alice, he had sent out a flurry of desperate messages before the pulse struck them. Unlike Alice, he now had more to worry about than getting his communications gear working again. He had to get the man. And Harpoon was more confident about the first than he was the second.
In the final frenzied moments before the EMP wave, he had rousted a contingent of Secret Service agents working on a counterfeiting case in Baton Rouge, a city that had not been struck. He had tried to patch a radio call through to the potential successor forty miles outside the Louisiana city and cursed the communications system when he couldn’t get through. He then had worked out a rendezvous time, cutting it very close considering the panic the agents had described on the ground. He had checked and rechecked the runway dimensions at the Baton Rouge airport and knew the extraordinarily heavy E-4 had no business putting down on them. He had issued orders for the dispatching of all available troops to the airport when the Secret Service agents told him the rioting quite naturally centered there. But he had no idea whether those orders got through.
Harpoon emerged from the neutered satellite-tracking compartment into the curved outer hallway of his command plane, returning a snap salute from a one-star Air Force general. Their eyes locked briefly, transmitting an unspoken message of despair, and they began to move past each other wordlessly.