Halupalai said nothing, his eyes transfixed just to the left of the pilot’s helmet as the panorama of Diamond Head, then Waikiki, then Honolulu swept slowly across the cockpit window, the aircraft leveling out and coming straight in, low, at the island’s edge.
Diamond Head still stood at the right, and the serene surf of Waikiki, its white curls starting almost a mile offshore, still rolled placidly toward the land. Not even gunk remained to spoil the waters. All else had changed. It was as if a great hand had sliced angrily at the manmade concrete jungle of towering beachfront hotels, creating a desert in its place. On the left, toward downtown Honolulu and Hickam Air Force Base, not even rubble remained. Toward the right and the majesty of the Head, the hand seemed to have grown weary of its task and left the litter in larger and larger mounds. At the end of the once magical Waikiki strip, and the foot of Diamond Head, the mounds were perhaps thirty feet high where thirty-story condominiums had stood. Behind it all, where the island rose toward the low Koolau Mountains dividing Oahu’s windward and leeward sides, the smoke and fires began, clouding the view of the interior.
Of the three now silent people in the aircraft, only Halupalai had a real perception of the topography. But as he surveyed it, every nerve ending in his body dead now, it made no sense. Ocean water flowed where Hickam had been, widening the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor by perhaps a mile. A wall of still-smoldering earth stood at its edge like a levee holding the waters out of the no-man’s-land that had been Honolulu International. There was absolutely no human movement in the city area, no sign that anything human had ever been there, and Halupalai drew his eyes away quickly, searching for something, anything, through the rapidly approaching smoke. The brown clouds billowed here, wafted there, depending on what was left to burn. The plane was coming straight in at the Punchbowl, the natural volcanic crater which had been made a national cemetery after the great war in the Pacific. Halupalai, his numbed nerves throbbing again, probed desperately for a sign of the natural crater’s edge, seeking a glimpse of the endless rows of plain white markers over the last war’s dead. But it wasn’t there, the volcanic rim having been pushed over into the crater itself, creating a plateau, burying the long-dead deeper. Then they were in the smoke.
Kazakhs moved his eyes rapidly back and forth between the windows and his green screen. He throttled the plane back, but held it safely at well over stall speed. The altitude reading was eighteen thousand feet. The island was narrow here, eight to ten miles wide, and they’d be beyond it in a moment. Out the window, wind-whipped fires raged in the forests of the edge of the Koolau. On the screen the low peak of Tantalus passed by quickly and Konahuanui loomed above him on the right. The plane bumped badly. The green screen flashed the opening of the mountain pass, the Pali, dead ahead. The smoke gave way briefly, sunlight sparkling in as if it didn’t belong, and the scenic wonder of the Pali opened ahead of them. In the pass, a few hundred feet below and just in front of them, they caught a quick glimpse of small and ragged bands of people waving, the sunlight glinting off their frantic signals. The Master Caution light flashed. Moreau punched it. Halupalai whimpered. The light flashed again. Moreau punched it. Out the side window she saw the signals were angry, the sunlight glinting off gun barrels. The violently bumping aircraft popped and cracked and shuddered.
“They’re shooting at us!” she shrieked.
And then the people were gone, the smoke back.
“Get us out of here, Kazakhs!”
The pilot wrenched at the throttles and climbed. “We’re on their side,” he murmured, disbelieving.
“No one is on their side,” Moreau said quietly. She hit the Master Caution button. And they climbed through the smoke, three people knowing they had been granted what they came here to get—a new view of the world, imprinted in their minds forever, be that minutes or years.
At Olney, the voice jarred the radio operator into excited attention, even though he didn’t have the vaguest idea what the man was saying. The voice sounded scratchy, guttural—and Russian, for Christ’s sake. It arrived on an ultra-high-frequency radiotelephone and he had not intercepted it. The call was meant for him. Briefly he floundered. Would he blow the spy’s cover by responding in English? Ridiculous. He didn’t speak a word of Russian and no one else in this place did either. He frantically waved at a young woman passing his shock-and soundproof windows. “Pit Stop Two,” he said into the receiver. “You will need to speak English.” He heard a crackling noise on the radio. He saw the woman poke her head in the door. “Get the boss!” he snapped. “On the double!”
“Yes?” a new voice asked. “Am I speaking to the alternate command facility for the Federal Emergency Management Agency?” The words flowed at him in perfectly modulated American English of the kind used by late-news television announcers who had not yet learned the need for the tiny, calculated speech flaw that would set them apart and move them to prime time.
The radio operator floundered again, confused. “This is a priority channel”—that’s rich, he thought, not having spoken to anyone all night—“you are required to identify yourself.”
“Certainly. I am Pyotr Krilenko, attaché to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Premier is with me and must speak to your superior on a matter of utmost importance.”
The radio operator blanched. He could hear the Premier’s guttural Russian instructions to the interpreter in the background. He turned and saw the director looking at him questioningly. At sixty-four, the Northeast regional civil-defense director was an embittered man, and had been long before 0600 Zulu. He played by the book. The single star given him by the Army, before he also was presented with his walking papers, was a testament to how well he played by the rules. He was not a risk-taker. He never understood that a second star, perhaps a third, might have come with that occasional risk. He took the radiophone matter-of-factly and listened briefly. His brow furrowed before speaking.
“We are at war, sir,” he said sternly, struggling for some truly historic response. Nothing occurred to him. “Under no circumstances would I supply such information to you.”
At the other end, two persons were on the phone. The first words came in irritable and occasionally angry Russian. Then they were translated flawlessly, but with the emotion removed, in the modulated tones of Pyotr Krilenko. Krilenko spoke in the first person, as if the words were coming directly from the Soviet Premier.
“I repeat, sir, I am not seeking information. I know the precise location of your E-4 aircraft. It is flying now over Jonesboro in the state of Arkansas.” The director flinched. The son of a bitch knew more than he did. “I ask you once again, on behalf of all humankind, to assist me in making radio contact with that aircraft.”
The director drew himself up militarily, not forgetting the presence of his young radio operator. “I will not confirm the existence of any aircraft,” he said.
“You will not provide a radio patch to the President, whom I know and you know is aboard the E-4 aircraft?”
“I will not confirm the existence of any aircraft,” he repeated, feeling satisfaction well up in him. Nicely handled.
“Will you, for the sake of both our nations, transmit a message to the E-4 aircraft informing the President that I wish to communicate with him directly?”
The director stared into the awestruck face of his radio operator. “Absolutely not,” he said. Then, more for the young radioman, he added: “I don’t know who you are. You could be calling from Joe’s Pizza Parlor.”