“Where is the E-4 now, Smitty?” Alice asked.
“About a hundred miles away, sir. North of Memphis. Circling over the river on the Arkansas-Tennessee border.”
“They’ll spot us pretty soon.”
“Yes, sir. Figure it out, too.”
“Yes, I know.”
The pilot of the E-4 had kept his windows unscreened since dawn, shortly before the grotesque scene with Harpoon. He had a dull, nagging headache. He took the eyepatch off one eye and placed it over the other. He was having a difficult time keeping the aircraft out of the dirty clouds. The flight was becoming more unreal than he had dreamed in his worst nightmares. The sporadic clouds moved to higher and higher altitudes, better for the people below, not good for them. Far below, the Mississippi Valley lay quiet and placid, seemingly as untouched as a day ago.
Untouched. He shivered as he thought of the admiral. The poor bugger must have gone over the side. He didn’t know the admiral well, a swabbie in among all the flyboys. But he had seemed like a steady, level man. Christ, this kind of pressure could get to anybody. He double-checked the position of the Looking Glass. Was everybody going bananas? Why had Alice brought the plane so near them? They were scarcely a hundred miles away. And closing on him. He tried to radio the Looking Glass one more time. No response again. He went to the intercom. On the other end, the Librarian seemed momentarily puzzled. Then he shrieked at the pilot: “Evade him! Run for it!” The pilot’s head throbbed. Evade him? It made no sense for the Looking Glass to crowd them, to come in where one missile could get them both. It made less sense to start a panicky run away from the SAC command plane. Especially in this environment. He took the aircraft out of its circle and headed east. But he did not do it in a beeline. He continued to avoid the clouds.
Something godawful had happened. The aircraft had decompressed. Kazaklis knew that, but he didn’t care. He felt too good. She felt too good. In front of him the azure blue of the sky bathed him, soothed him, entranced him. His hand moved slowly on her thigh, incredibly sensitive fingers probing each taut muscle, each sensuous sinew. The sinews seemed to ripple in response, drawing him farther. Five seconds had passed.
She struggled, her senses sending conflicting messages. Her mind was sludgy, her body not. Her first thought was that the bullet had done it, illogically, irrationally chewing a hole in the pressurized crew compartment long after it had been fired. Her second thought came from a different part of her body, the lonely, aching part that had reached out earlier. The hand massaged deadened cords suddenly alive. She wanted to die this way, in euphoria and ecstasy. She turned and leaned left. Ten seconds had passed.
Kazakhs turned also, and looked at her. Moreau’s face was haloed and shimmering, her eyes a ravishing match of sparkling sapphire and uncut diamond. He leaned toward her, brushing past lightning-bolt jewelry. Her lips were blue. She was dying. He touched her face. She slumped, raven lady, into his lap.
“No-o-o-o!” he screamed. Frantically he lurched at his dangling oxygen mask, drawing it to his face first, not out of selfishness but out of rigid training. If he went, she went, and he was going fast. He took one breath, then another and another, the raw oxygen driving ecstasy out and some sensibility in. Moreau’s head lay peacefully between his legs, her eyes barely open. Another three or four seconds had passed, but Kazakhs had gained a few. He quickly drew the mask from his face and stretched it down into his lap, over hers. He pulled her partly upright and looked into her face. She wobbled back out of insensibility, briefly into the rapture again, and then flashed pure fear at him. Now he was going again. He had trouble finding the radio button. He couldn’t remember her name. “Get… on… your… own…” Each word required a monumental effort. He took the mask away, roughly shoving her back toward her seat. He breathed. His peripheral vision was gone, narrowed into a tight tunnel, and he couldn’t see her. The aircraft had nosed over slightly, the air speed increasing, and he pulled back on the wheel to level it. He could do no more. He breathed deeply and wasn’t certain whether the light-headedness was coming from the hypoxia or the sudden gush of oxygen. Slowly, so agonizingly slowly, his senses returned. Twenty, thirty seconds passed. Moreau. That was her name. Moreau!
He turned suddenly toward her in alarm. She sat with her shoulders hunched, the mask clasped over her face, staring straight ahead. They said nothing for a full minute—well beyond the recovery time, the brain responding almost as soon as the blood circulated the oxygen upward from their lungs. Then Moreau said, “Unseasonably cold for Hawaii, isn’t it?” Her voice was strained, but together they began to take the aircraft down where they could breathe.
Minutes later, Halupalai’s parachute opened at eight thousand feet, jerking him out of six miles of free fall. He did not feel it. He was alive but still unconscious. He awakened minutes later as his boots slammed into the sea, his weight taking him down toward the depths, then his buoyance popping him back to the surface. His island was gone, lost over the horizon, obscured by the swells. But Halupalai was not looking for his island. He was looking for the choppers. He was not bobbing in the mid-Pacific but in the South China Sea, as he had the last time he pulled the lever so long ago. With his good arm, he activated his rescue beacon. The Air Force would risk fifty men to pull one downed flier out of the drink. Soon the silence would be broken by the distantly accelerating whump-whump-whump of the rescue team. The rope would come down, the divers, too, joining him in the swells. He waited confidently.
Several hundred miles to the southwest, the beleaguered captain of the newly commissioned nuclear carrier Ticonderoga heard no distress calls and sent no search plane. His ship carried the proud name of a mothballed carrier from the previous great war. But the routine shakedown cruise had become a nightmare of a kind that no previous war, no training in Annapolis, could have prepared him for.
Shortly before 0600 Zulu, not long after sunset last night in these waters, America’s vast military communications network had filled his radio room with a babble of escalating alert messages. Then they stopped, almost precisely as he saw the first eerie flare of light far over the horizon. Twenty minutes later he saw a second and larger flare, then several more. He knew little of the condition of the world. But he knew that Pearl, his next port of call, was no longer there. He also knew that, for him and his crew of four thousand, Pearl Harbor’s disappearance was irrelevant. They would never reach a safe harbor, Pearl or any other. They had spent the night, and now the morning hours, frantically dodging Soviet attack submarines. They had peppered the waters around them with nuclear depth charges. He had sent out wave after wave of search aircraft. But he was losing.