William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

Far behind Polar Bear One, on the ground in the damp drizzle of the woods of Louisiana, a man in jeans, a yellow chamois shirt, and a down vest watched a group of shadowy figures approach him. He knelt nervously behind a soggy fallen tree, holding a double-barreled shotgun trained on the newcomers. He had used the gun in the past hour. Life had been a bizarre and unexplainable hell since the far-off but near-blinding midnight flashes during this damnable camping trip. Since then, people had gone crazy, and the man had defended himself.

Through the murk, he saw the group of men carefully advancing on him. They held small sawed-off weapons, and the man shivered. He shakily pointed the shotgun at the first shadow and fired. He heard a grunt and the shadow fell. The other shadows faded into the protective cover of the woods. Suddenly the woods thundered with the fire of automatic weapons and the branches splintered above him. He cowered deeper into the semiprotection of the log.

“I’m a federal Cabinet officer!” he shouted, cursing himself for a voice that sounded squeaky with fear.

“Throw your weapon out,” a disembodied voice responded. He paused uncertainly.

The woods thundered again and the spray of wood chips showered him again, closer this time.

“Secret Service!” the disembodied voice said. “Throw your weapon out. Now.”

The man looped his shotgun up over the log, but kept himself protected. He heard crunching footsteps nearing and looked up to see men in bloodied business suits pointing stubby gray submachineguns at him. “Identification,” one said curtly. He reached for his wallet. “Hold it!” the voice commanded. “I’ll get it.” The figure reached over and extracted the wallet, examining it carefully. The man in the jeans heard a sigh of relief from above him. “The Condor is caged,” the figure said over his shoulder to the others, and the weapons were lowered.

The leader of the Secret Service agents beckoned to a man who did not seem to belong with the group. He was short, fat, and carried a small black book. “Do your thing, judge,” the agent said, “and do it fast.”

The ceremony was over in seconds, the man in the jeans so woozy he was not sure what he had pledged to do. Then the lead agent took him by the arm. “Mr. Secretary… Mr. President… we have to get you out of here in one helluva hurry.” Hundreds of miles to the northeast, in an inky blackness somewhere in Maryland, Sedgwick opened his eyes slowly and painfully. It took him a moment to adjust to the near-total darkness. As his eyes focused, he first saw the jagged, twisted metal of the rear section of Nighthawk One. It appeared to have been sheared off only a few feet in front of his seat, and the rest of the chopper was nowhere to be seen. He panicked and turned abruptly to look at the passenger next to him, a sudden surge of pain causing him to faint again. After a moment, his wits seeped back. He turned more slowly this time, saw his companion hunched forward exactly as he had been when the chopper started down. He reached over and grasped the man’s wrist, seeking a pulse. At first, in his grogginess, he missed it. Then he felt a slight but distinct pump… pump… pump.

• 0930 Zulu

“They got the fuel, general.”

“Enough?”

“Marginal.”

“And the tanker?”

“Crashed. Near Great Bear.”

In the Looking Glass, Alice turned away, squeezing the major’s shoulder. He glanced at the row of clocks on the far cabin wall, his eyes quickly passing Moscow time and Washington time and Omaha time. Zulu time read 0930, three and a half hours after the first exchange. Since the conversation with Harpoon, more of their communications had come back up. But not nearly enough. He moved across the narrow aisle to another member of his battle staff.

“Your boys?”

“One of ’em got a few minutes from a tanker out of Thule.”

“The tanker?”

“Down in Baffin Bay.”

“And your other Buff?”

“The tanker out of Goose Bay is still chasing him. Don’t particularly want the B-52 to slow down. Looks like they’ll rendezvous near the east coast of Greenland, north of Iceland. It’s hairy.”

“Yes.” Alice’s voice was tired and he turned toward his old friend for the summary. “So what do we have, Sam?”

“Less than fifteen still flying, sir. Half of ’em refueled. Three or four more will get the fuel. The rest will have to go in with what they have.”

“Did the FB-111 make it in?”

Sam looked at Alice strangely. They had made a guinea pig out of the supersonic fighter-bomber, sending him in too fast to probe the Soviet defenses for the B-52’s. “That wasn’t a fair test, general.”

Alice said nothing. Fair. Damn you, Sam. That’s why we’ve got generals and that’s why we’ve got colonels.

“He never was meant to fly supersonically all the way,” Sam continued. “Little spurts, yeah, for evasion and the final run, sure. Not all the way. He was slurping gas like a Ferrari.”

Alice still said nothing.

“At Mach two-point-five, eighteen hundred mother-humpin’ miles an hour, he damn near got there. He launched the new cruise missiles off Hope Island, made it through the Soviet perimeter, and did a helluva job evading the MIG’s over the Barents Sea.”

Alice stared vacantly past the colonel at his communications officer, a short, stocky woman perspiring as she still worked frantically to patch together the tools of their control. He couldn’t remember her first name. Why did men want to mate when their world, little world or big world, seemed terminal?

“He was approaching the coast of Finland, west of Murmansk, on a straight shot at Leningrad. He was running out of fuel. It was slow down or flame out. He slowed down. We think a MIG rammed him.”

Alice turned back toward Sam. “So what did we learn?” he asked.

“We learned that, coming straight in, there still are enough MIG’s to stop an armada. We can surmise that some of our electronic-warfare gear, the jamming equipment or the chaff or something, worked better than expected or the MIG wouldn’t have needed to ram him. We learned the cruise doesn’t work. At least in this environment.”

The general’s entire frame seemed to sag. “Eggheads,” he said wearily. “Remember all those four-hundred-dollar suits and alligator briefcases parading into the Pentagon from Seattle and Fort Worth and Long Island? Christ, some of their slide shows would have put Coppola to shame. Bright little farts, weren’t they?”

“It was a great theory, sir. A fifteen-hundred mile cruise missile, launched offshore from a bomber, its computer memory following maps of riverbeds, mountains, bridges, television transmitters. Error probability ninety feet. Aim at home plate and you won’t miss by more than first base. Terrain trackers. Somebody forgot the first whomp would change the terrain.”

“So what do we have?”

“With the cruise launches from the FB-111? They’re going bananas. Running around in circles. Hitting mountains. Nosing into the tundra. One of ’em is heading for Stockholm. It’s only four hundred miles off target. Don’t guess we’ll get the Peace Prize for that one.” The colonel looked at Alice. “It means the B-52’s will have to go all the way in. Use the gravity bombs.”

The general turned away and stared up the aisle of the command post. His staff had done a remarkable job, considering the damage done to both the hardware and the outside atmosphere needed for men to communicate. Of the forty-three different communications systems he normally had at his command, three or four were working intermittently. Only one seemed to be working consistently—the ultra-low frequency system operation through a five-mile-long copper-wire antenna trailing out of the back of me airplane like a fishing line. He always figured that one would be me survivor. Unfortunately, it had its limitations. The frequency was so low and so slow, he could tap out no more than a few words a minute. On a teletype.