William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

In the cockpit, the pilot clicked off. A perplexed look spread across his face. Win this war? He thought the objective was to end it.

“Alice is calling, sir.”

The President lifted his loose hand, raising one finger and wagging it in a silent instruction to keep the general holding while he finished his present conversation.

“Afraid the culture gap is too great to give you any advice on that, Mr. Premier,” he said into the phone. “What we do here is pray… I understand… Yes… Thank you, sir. Thank you greatly… Yes, he’s on the line now. I’d best get on with it… Good luck to you, too.” He handed up one phone and beckoned for the other.

“General,” he said, not wasting a second. “The situation?”

“Tough, sir. He’s got a half-mile on us and he’s evading expertly.”

“It’s imperative that this happen fast now. Our situation’s changed.”

“Sir?”

“We’ve found a way through to TACAMO—”

“Good God, sir,” Alice interrupted, “that means we can succeed.”

“I’m afraid it also means we can fail, general. The Premier, bless his black little heart…” He suddenly remembered the Soviet leader could hear his every word. “Uh, pardon me, Mr. Premier, that’s American idiom—the Premier has found a radio routing. Unfortunately, someone in the E-4 discovered the routing a few moments earlier. The E-4 has made contact.”

“Shit!” Alice didn’t bother to apologize. “Conflicting orders.” Alice’s voice went quietly somber. “It dooms us, Mr. President.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s in your lap, general. The E-4 got a locator message through. The TACAMO planes have asked for confirmation and codes. The messages don’t move instantly. It’ll take a few minutes to move the codes. Not many. Can you catch him in five minutes?”

In the Looking Glass, Alice’s heart sank. He stared out the window at the tail section of the E-4, so close… so distant. The planes’ four huge contrails flooded past him, the vapor mixing with dark exhaust as if the man in the black eyepatch were stoking the furnace with everything now. Smitty hung on him, just above the contrails, following every swoop of the gleaming plane, chasing the huge tail into the fog of each cloud and then out again for a zigzag in the fading sunlight. The E-4 yielded a little meaningless space here, a little there. Then the pilot, flying like the best, which he was, took the lost space back. It would take a miracle to catch him in less than twenty minutes, and he couldn’t guarantee it even then.

“General?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” he replied with great sadness. “It is impossible.”

The President paused only briefly. “Try,” he said.

Alice shook his head dismally. “Of course I’ll try, sir.”

“General, they should have stocked these damned places with braille watches. What the hell time is it?”

“2034, sir.”

“Okay, you call me back in two minutes—2036 on the nose. We’re counting in seconds now, but I have to deal with TACAMO, too.” He paused. “Everything— everything —rides with you now, general,” he added quietly.

“Yes, sir. I know, sir.”

In the Looking Glass, Alice heard the disconnection. He reached over and grabbed Smitty’s shoulder. “I want you to burn out every fan in those engines of yours, Smitty,” he said. “We’ve got five minutes. Or it’s all over.”

Smitty turned and started to shake his head. But the general no longer was looking at him.

“Will somebody get me a fucking cigarette?”

The copilot offered him another Carlton.

He waved it away. “A real goddamned cigarette!”

Condor entered the communications room alone, unannounced, and almost completely without fanfare. Several heads turned briefly, because none of those present, with the exception of the Librarian, had seen the man before. One young officer saluted. He immediately felt awkward. Saluting was an unnecessary formality here, and he had done it out of nervousness.

The Librarian immediately ushered Condor to a telegraph operator. That somewhat surprised him, because he had expected voice communication. But these were the rules, and they were to be scrupulously followed. TACAMO wanted the message on paper and it would arrive in specific sequence or it would be ignored. Any suspicions about the validity and they might come back for voice confirmation. But voices meant nothing with the stakes this high. The message would be sent with word codes first, authenticator codes second, and messages last. The message would be simple enough, being just three words: “SIOP PRIME CONFIRMED.”

The Librarian already had begun sending the word codes.

Sending the information from the Sealed Authenticator System was slightly more complex. As Alice had done earlier, TA-CAMO had randomly requested several series of letters and digits rather than the entire list. This was a precaution against interception. If someone were listening—as indeed the Soviet Premier was doing in a cold sweat at this very moment—it would do the eavesdropper no good. For the next set of orders, if needed, a different series would be requested. The entire message would automatically be encrypted and decoded by computer—by eye and hand, if necessary—at the other end. It was cumbersome, but these were orders involving thousands of nuclear warheads. With the unconventional relay they were using, it would take perhaps five or six minutes. The Librarian and Condor embarked immediately on the difficult portion, the authenticator codes. The time was 2036 hours.

In the cockpit of the Looking Glass, the communications officer also snapped an unnecessary salute. But she did it intentionally, with tears in her eyes, a smile on her face, and a single Pall Mall cigarette proffered in her other hand. Alice accepted a cigarette, snorted through his nose as if he were catching a cold, snapped his hand to his brow in a flawless West Point tribute, and quickly turned away so she would not see the real him, as if she had not already. He stared through his own mist at the other aircraft, still too distant. His people had given him everything. But they were not going to make it. His watch read 2036. He snorted again, trying to cover that tribute to them, too, by giving Smitty an unusually brusque order to futilely push the Looking Glass beyond limits already reached. Then he grabbed the cockpit phone to the President, placing the cigarette behind his ear.

On the flight deck of the E-4, the pilot with the black eyepatch turned his head away from the wispy clouds ahead of him and probed the shadows in the rear of his spacious cockpit. The Secret Service agent stood at the door with his Uzi, still symbolizing his protection against madness. With a shiver of sadness mixed with surprise, the pilot suddenly saw madness in a different perspective.

“I have the Premier on the other line, Alice. His people are monitoring the transmission. The E-4 has begun the authenticator codes. You have three, maybe four minutes. That transmission must be interrupted.” The President paused, hoping he did not have to ask. “Can you do it in that time?”

Alice stared straight ahead. The Looking Glass flew slightly above the E-4, Smitty avoiding the five-mile copper trailing wire normally used as a VLF radio antenna. It was out as a snare now, whipping dangerously beneath them. The heat warps from the command plane’s giant engines rippled the air between them, causing the massive tail section to wobble like a ghostly mirage, always beyond his grasp. On the side of the stabilizer fin Alice could see the American flag fluttering in the heat rivulets, painted stars wobbling in triumph, stripes flowing as if the nation’s proud emblem had been planted atop a hill taken. The hill remained more than a quarter-mile away, and it remained secure.