There was a pause and then the Russian words continued, more pensive than angry. “I am who I am,” the interpreter continued. “You, sir, are a fool.”
The director flushed. “I find that…” he blustered. “I find that incredibly insulting!”
Again the conversation paused. Then the Premier responded in brief and calm tones. The director could hear the interpreter questioning him quietly in Russian and the Premier responding insistently, “Da! Da!”
“What’s going on?” the director demanded.
“The Premier wishes it to be said,” the interpreter replied, shifting out of the first person, “that he is surprised you find his words insulting. It would surprise him if you could find your rectum with both hands and a hunting dog.”
Kazakhs emerged from the smoke at twenty thousand feet as he swung westward around Kahuku Point, trying to avoid the unneeded horror of an outward flight over the floating death in the channel between Oahu and Molokai. In the distance he saw Halupalai’s island, Kauai, glimmering flawlessly and invitingly due west and almost directly in front of them. Somehow, he had to thread the needle between Halupalai’s personal trauma—a home lost—and the collective trauma of a second overflight of the obscene debris of Oahu—a civilization lost. They may have needed one look at that. They did not need two.
None of them had spoken since the emergency climb away from the Pali. The shock from what they had seen and the unexpected reception from their own dying people had numbed their sensibilities. Kazakhs and Moreau acted by rote. Halupalai, with nothing to do, sat stoically and apparently deep in thought. Kazakhs concentrated on getting the aircraft up and away from the mildly radioactive clouds so he could open the vents and get them off oxygen. Moreau sat rigidly at his right, methodically punching the Master Caution light over and over again like a catatonic resident of some asylum.
“What the fuck’s the matter with that thing?” Kazakhs finally asked irritably. “Is it on the fritz again?”
The pilot’s abrupt question jarred Moreau out of her trance. She had become so accustomed to pushing the button every time the plane bumped that it had not occurred to her that the light had been flashing since they pulled away from the mountain pass. She punched it again, watching it flicker and light up still one more time. Quickly she began checking the other instruments. She froze. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “We show a fuel leak.”
“Instrument malfunction,” Kazakhs said tersely. “Check it again.”
“It’s only a few minutes away, commander,” Halupalai said.
“Double checks,” Moreau said. “Wing tank. Number One.”
Kazakhs craned his neck to peer out the left window at the wingtip sweeping almost one hundred feet behind him. The tip pointed back toward the floating debris, back toward the grotesque skeleton of Honolulu, and Kazakhs refused to allow his eyes to focus beyond the sleek wing. The surface looked sludgy and gray. That was normal. Inside the wing, the latticework structure contained various interconnected fuel reservoirs. But he could not see anything out of the ordinary on the outside. “I can’t see it,” he grumbled.
Kazakhs brought his eyes quickly back to the flight panel, oblivious to the shrouded island rapidly approaching from Moreau’s side of the aircraft. In his preoccupation he did not see any of the emerald beauty of Kauai, the dark rain clouds hanging over its nearest shore, only a few layered shadows of ominous brown clouds moving toward them. Halupalai saw it.
“Just a quick fly-by, commander. You don’t have to go down.”
A fly-by? They just made their fucking fly-by. The gunner’s quiet request did not register properly in the pilot’s preoccupied mind. He had other problems. Serious problems. Kazakhs checked the instruments. They confirmed a fuel leak.
“I think we took a hit,” Moreau said.
Halupalai scrambled out of the jump seat and hunched over the copilot. She could feel the big man’s muscles grow tighter as he draped himself against her and pressed his helmet against the side window. “Come on!” Kazaklis snapped in disbelief. “From those little popguns?”
Moreau shrugged and felt her shoulders jam into Halupalai’s soft gut. Briefly, his presence irritated her. Then she felt a quick surge of alarm. But it rapidly disappeared into the underground of her mind. “Kazaklis, you know damn well I could shove a pencil through the wing of this airplane,” she said, the skin of their aircraft being less than one-quarter inch thick. Halupalai stooped, entranced, over the side window. Far below, clouds obscured the little south-shore village in which he had grown up. “How many pounds we got in that tank?” Normal clouds, he told himself, for his island was the rainy island. “Sixty-five hundred.” Halupalai brushed his eyes and looked beyond the clouds. “Seal the connector valve.” Waimea Canyon opened to him as it did when he was a child, Kalalau Valley beckoning far to the north with its high cliffs and low green wonderlands. “Done.” His eyes glistened, blurring his island and blurring his mind, so that he stood on the shore again and the wave swelled until his neck craned high to watch the sunlight filter through the perfect prism of its massive curl. “Vents open.” The wave crashed, thundering with the infinite power of nature, sending swirls of foam and churning coral bits and little messages from distances undreamed up around the small brown feet of a child long since taken into a different world. “Off oxygen.” He could feel the great aircraft turning. He leaned farther forward, watching his island slip away around the edge of the window, and then he saw the new crater at Kokee where he had played as a child and where the satellite-tracking station had been built much later. “Dammit, Halupalai, sit down!” He could hear the commander’s words, feel Moreau pushing at him now. But he saw another new crater in the desert at Mana, where a child long ago had pressed a small brown face against a chain-link fence to stare curiously into a secret Air Force base. “Halupalai!” The pilot’s arm grabbed at him. He saw another crater. And another. The ugly brown smoke drifted up the low green wonderlands of his valley, Kalalau. Halupalai drew himself up and turned around, unaware of his crewmates, and headed back into the privacy of his adopted world’s redness.
Kazakhs and Moreau exchanged deeply worried glances. But Kazakhs also was trying to sort out his new problems. He knew their golden circle had tightened by several hundred miles. “So much for Australia,” he muttered. Moreau scowled, then turned to look into the shadows at Halupalai. She saw only the arching outline of his massive back. She looked again at Kazakhs and he shook his head slightly in worry. Then they went back to work, honing their new southwesterly course.
Kazakhs and Moreau removed their helmets, feeling the usual sense of relief at shredding the heavy headgear. They also pushed the aircraft upward through thirty-five thousand feet toward an economy altitude they needed more than ever now.
Halupalai had not been back in the redness more than five minutes before he decided to go home. In that short time his mind took a thousand life trips, following a thousand tangled paths all leading to dead ends. Then it returned to the equally dead red cubicle in which he seemed forever entombed. And so he decided to go home, back to a place where the coral bits would wash up around sun-browned feet, back to a world of blue lagoons that made room for dark gray fins and small boys, too.
Quickly and efficiently, as he had done in Vietnam, Halupalai reached for the small green oxygen bottle he would need for the ride down. He attached it, snapped the mask back over his face, and pulled the green ball that released the last artificial air he ever wanted to breathe. It flooded his lungs, causing a brief moment of headiness again. He placed one hand over the ejection lever and used the other to close his helmet visor. He began to disconnect the radio wire so he would not whiplash on the way out. He paused, the guilt and shame enveloping him briefly, and reached for the radio switch. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he quickly disconnected the radio with one hand and hit the lever with the other. Kazakhs and Moreau did not have time to turn around.