She looked up at him reverently, the fear lost now in pride over belonging to a father who, to her, was half-god and who would, although she did not know how at the time, forever change her life. Behind them, the lieutenant rolled his eyes upward, catching the arcing shadow of the buzzard, which, as was its way, had lifted off the Trinity cross and circled now. Eternal vigilance, he thought.
“After you,” the girl said softly. “I’ll do it, Dad.”
Kazaklis reached for the radio dial, switched it to intercom, and bent over halfheartedly for his helmet. He brushed against the dirty flash curtain, jarring it into a slow, heavy ripple, and forgot the helmet. He called downstairs. “Okay, navigator, give me a course correction for an intercept point in twenty minutes. You heard Elsie’s coordinates, 124 degrees west at the circle?”
No reply returned.
“Tyler?” Kazakhs said.
“Timmie?” Tyler said.
Kazakhs turned toward Moreau, his look despairing. He took his right hand off the controls and rubbed it abrasively up the side of his face, as if he were scouring a frying pan.
“Tyler!” he ordered.
Below, Radnor looked curiously at his buddy. Tyler’s eyes were riveted again on his son. Cautiously Radnor reached over and nudged the navigator’s arm. Tyler turned slowly toward the nudge, but his eyes seemed focused far beyond the tight walls of their compartment.
“You want me to do it?” Radnor quietly asked.
Tyler seemed puzzled. “Do it?” he asked.
“The commander needs a new course to the IP,” Radnor said as unemotionally as he could manage. “Did you get the coordinates?”
“Oh, sure,” Tyler said blandly. “From the ground. Boy, this is a strange one, isn’t it? From the ground. This one’s really strange.”
“Tyler, you want me to do it?” Radnor was getting worried, and his voice reflected it.
Tyler suddenly exploded. “You do your job, Radnor!” he lashed out. “I’ll do mine!” Then, just as quickly, his face changed from fury to intentness. He hunched professionally over his console, worked out the course change, and radioed up to Kazakhs: “Ten degrees left, sir. Maintain altitude. Radar contact approximately twelve minutes.”
Radnor briefly watched Tyler, who seemed completely normal now, and then turned back to his own console, the comer of his eye catching O’Toole’s red boot before his gaze settled back on the hypnotic rhythm of the radar arm sweeping methodically across his screen. The young airman’s wife broke through his defenses, a haloed image now of an always smiling, always bubbling woman, always gushing about their future—the two kids they wanted, a boy and a girl; a house with lots of land somewhere in the Big Sky West, their own American dream. And growing old together. He marveled how this young woman, whom he loved so dearly, could derive so much pleasure from the dream of growing old together, sometimes fantasizing about the joys of having grandchildren before they had children.
“Hey, Radnor,” Tyler said. “I’m sorry I jumped all over you. This one is just kinda getting to me. You know?”
“Yeah, I know, pal. Me, too,” Radnor said.
“I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“Me, too.”
Tyler’s voice abruptly turned exuberant. “You know what I’m gonna do when we get back? Buy Timmie a bike! Every boy oughta have a bike, don’t ya think?”
God damn.
“Don’t you really think so?”
God damn. Timmie is only three years old. Is. God damn. Was. Radnor’s mind was beginning to spin now. “My wife wasn’t on duty today,” he said.
“I know.”
“That was real tough for the boy out on the runway. It wasn’t a drill, was it?”
“I dunno.” Tyler’s voice went dull.
Radnor groped for words. His mind felt waxen. “My wife…” He stumbled. “Laura must feel rotten about it.”
“One hundred twenty-four degrees west…” Tyler said.
God damn. Radnor shook his head violently. He forced the haloed image out of his head. He would be glad when this one was over, all right, even though he had no doubt how it would end.
Upstairs, Kazakhs completed the course maneuver and looked at his watch, the luminous face staring back at him like a jack-o’-lantern. 0830 Zulu—12:30 in Spokane, two and a half hours into the mission. Good God, 150 minutes. The shrinks talked about delayed-shock syndrome, the flip-outs coming months or years later. But they never could simulate this one, try as they might. Everybody tried, especially after we started talking about fighting it instead of deterring it. His memory froze on a television news clip he had seen a few weeks earlier, with some civil-defense bureaucrat testifying before Congress. A congressman asked him how you hardened an industrial plant against nuclear attack. With bulldozers, sir. Bulldozers? With an attack imminent, sir, you plow dirt over the essential machinery. Dirt? It enables the machinery to absorb a higher level of psi’s, sir. What? Pounds per square inch, sir, during a detonation. And after the detonation? We dig the machinery out, sir. Who the hell is “we”? The survivors, sir. And what do these patriotic survivors do for electrical power after a couple of megatons has flattened Pittsburgh? Kazakhs remembered that the bureaucrat looked at his inquisitor as if the congressman had a brain the size of a wart. The bureaucrat, after all, had studied this. Sir, the civil-defense man said, do you realize that if we strung together all the automobile batteries in Pittsburgh we’d have enough power to run U.S. Steel for two years? He had a vision of ant brigades of Russians, one brigade plowing dirt over the factories in Irkutsk right now, the other wiring automobiles together. Lots of luck, comrades. He signed.
Dammit, he had a few wires to string together in his airplane.
Yossarian, huh? Those guys went through forty to fifty missions, skies black with flak, before it was bananas time. But his crew got it all compressed into ten hours, with no Betty Grable pinups to go back to, nothing to go back to. The eggheads could do all the planning they wanted, line up the bulldozers and the PRP shrinks, and there still was no way to figure human responses to this one. No way at all. Hell, so far they had had the easy part. Except for their little minuet with the nudets at the beginning, this had been two and a half hours of droning, dull flight. Maybe that was the problem. It was too dull.
“Copilot,” Kazakhs said brusquely, “get on the horn and see if you can pick up Elsie. She’s less than four hundred miles away.”
It wasn’t going to be dull much longer. Refueling was enough to make anybody sweat blood. Then they’d be near the PCP, the positive control point at which they had to wait for confirmed orders to go in. Then across the Arctic ice. Then the coastal defenses of Russia. And after that…
Moreau adjusted the radio frequency and put out the call. “This is Polar Bear calling Elsie. Do you read? Date’s on, sweetheart. Do you read me, Elsie? This is Polar Bear One. You ready for the dance? Acknowledge. Polar Bear calling Elsie. Do you read?”
Moreau’s hand involuntarily jerked to her ear at the squawk of static. Ajackhammer of sounds, bz-zuz-zuz-eeee-eowwww-eee-zzzzz-zap, pounded her eardrums. The static broke intermittently with a babble of disconnected words, “…bear… extreme… condenser… breakaway… effort…”
“I think we’re being jammed,” Moreau said to Kazakhs.
“No,” the pilot replied. “Klickitat got through. They’re receiving but patching their gear with Band-Aids. Tell ’em we understand, we have an IP in sixteen minutes, and we want to refuel at thirty-four thousand feet. We’ll pick ’em up on radar soon.” He thought quickly. The two aircraft were closing on each other at twenty miles a minute. “Tell ’em to try again in five minutes.”