William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“Radiation!” Halupalai cut in. “We’re in radiation! The detector’s jumpin’ off the scale!”

Kazakhs spun around and saw Halupalai hovering over the small black radiation detector.

“Shut the vents!” Kazakhs shouted. Moreau lurched forward at the switches.

“Oxygen!” Kazakhs ordered. He stopped for a second, thinking.

“Can you guys see anything downstairs?”

Radnor stopped rubbing at his screen.

“It’s just a blur, commander,” he said woodenly. “A fuzzy blur.”

“Where?”

“All over the screen.”

“Shit.”

“Fallout,” Moreau said.

“Thanks.”

“From a strike on the radar stations.”

“Thanks again.”

Kazakhs and Moreau sat mutely for a moment, the ping echoing in their helmets.

“I’m gonna have to take a look,” Kazakhs said. He reached forward and pulled at the corner of the flash screen. He froze in awe and horror. Then he gasped. Out the cockpit window, the Arctic air pulsated red. Kazakhs felt his skin creep. The air seemed to dance, tiny crystals glowing and careening off each other in electric spasms. The redness swept at him in relentless ghostly waves, like the fog over his boyhood dunes.

“Good God,” he whispered. Then he yelled, “Full throttle! Get us out of here!”

“Where?” Moreau could barely hear her own voice.

“How the hell do I know? North! They didn’t blow up the whole damn Arctic Ocean!”

“General, Polar Bear One has gone through her PCP.”

“Gone through! On whose authority?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t imagine the northern coast of Canada is a very comfortable place to orbit right now.”

“Fallout?”

“It must be floating all over the place up there. The Russians took out every radar installation, Canadian and American, on the Arctic coast. By now the fallout is floating wherever the winds took it.”

Alice thought briefly. “Make it official.”

“Sir?”

“Send them through.”

“Through to where, sir?”

“Just through, dammit! I don’t know where.”

“Winds!” Kazaklis demanded.

“Eighty-five knots,” Tyler responded. “Southerly.” The navigator paused. “Westerly now,” he said. “Ninety-five knots.”

The big bomber bumped violently, groaning under the new pressures. Moreau’s left hand manipulated the throttles, pushing the aircraft to full power, while her right fought to hold it steady against the swirl of the shifting winds. Kazaklis peeked tentatively around the corner of the flash curtain. He looked like a spying spinster, Moreau thought—a spinster whose forehead was popping beads of nervous sweat. Moreau caught her first brief peephole look at the surging red poison outside. She turned away quickly.

“Where is Tuktoyaktuk?” Kazaklis asked desperately.

“One hundred ten nautical miles behind us,” Tyler replied.

On the pilot’s forehead the little beads turned to globules, then to streams. Kazaklis slapped at his helmet to try to stop the pinging whine pounding at his temples. Through the comer of the window he stared into a sky throbbing in spasms of deep scarlet, fading to a hot red glow and then to softly dancing electric pink before the wave of scarlet rushed over them again. He saw no opening.

“Jesus,” he sighed.

“Komaluk?” Moreau asked.

“Good Lord, Jesus.”

“Komaluk?” Moreau repeated. “Is it Komaluk?”

“Oh, God in heaven, it’s a horrible sight. Red fucking crud rolling at us in waves…”

“Commander.” Moreau sounded remarkably calm. She bit off the urge to tell Kazaklis he wasn’t glowing in the dark yet. She knew the early-warning stations had been hit. But it was hours ago now. “The vents are closed. It’s three hours old. We could fry an egg on the wing. Inside, we’re okay. For a while. Let’s figure out where it’s coming from and how to get out of it.”

Kazaklis turned away from the window and looked at his copilot. His eyes were wide and frightened like a cornered doe’s. Almost instantly they turned their opaque brown again, cutting off the view inside to the self he protected so vigorously.

“Just remember to hose down this brute when we get to Pearee, Josephine,” he said.

Moreau stifled a smile and said nothing.

“Komaluk, huh?” Kazakhs wondered aloud. “Maybe. It sure isn’t Tuk. Tuk’s floating around someplace, too, but not here. We flew straight over it without a whimper, and the winds didn’t blow it out to sea.”

“Komaluk sits on a peninsula,” Moreau said, “the last radar site before the Alaskan border.”

Kazakhs started to reach for the charts and then radioed downstairs instead. “Nav, give me a reading on Komaluk Beach.”

“Due west,” Tyler said.

“That’s it.” Outside, the haunting red sky, a maze of ionized particles, seemed to mock him. Komaluk Beach. A handful of ancient shacks, equally old radars, a supply plane twice a month, Playboy centerfolds and a pillow to get you through a nine-month winter. Forgotten by the martini-drinkers in Washington. Never known, in thirty years of cold war, by the people who paid the bills. A dozen men, freezing their gonads, watching, always watching. They still watched. Dust to dust, cold dust to hot dust, sparkling red atoms of eternally vigilant men taunting him for thanks—thanks for the extra minute, thanks for the extra seconds. Fucking Russians. Well, you said it, pal. This ain’t tiddly winks.

“Thanks, guys,” Kazakhs said.

“Sir?” Moreau asked.

“I said ninety degrees left. Quick.”

“At Komaluk?” Moreau asked, puzzled.

“Komaluk’s coming toward us, copilot—frying the eggs on your wing.”

“North’s just as safe, commander,” Moreau protested. “Maybe safer. This cloud can’t be too wide.”

“Through our control point? The general’s daughter wants to take us through our control point?” Kazakhs said sarcastically. “Highly provocative action, copilot. The Soviets might consider that an act of war.”

The commander’s voice sounded very brittle. Moreau banked the huge plane left. She shrugged. They already had passed through their control point.

“Message, sir.”

Alice looked up, startled, pulling his eyes away from the green dots scattered across the middle of the world.

The colonel handed him a small piece of telegraph paper, its edge torn as it was pulled hurriedly off the decoding machine. The message from Harpoon, dangerously exposed far to the south in Baton Rouge, read: “CONDOR NESTED.”

“Thank God,” the general said. But he knew he could not breathe too easily until the message read: “CONDOR ALOFT .” He turned back to his map, briefly wondering what perversely wry and lost soul had come up with the code names for the event they never expected to happen. Looking Glass, Alice, Icarus, Trinity, Jericho. And Condor, powerful, ominous, lord of all it surveyed. Last of a long and proud line, almost extinct now.

The din inside the pilot’s helmet became thunderous, pounding at his temples, numbing his reasoning the way too much Jack Daniel’s did. He was losing it, dammit. He shook his head and stared into the great waves of red, looking for an out. One minute. Two minutes, three minutes, four. The sound pounded deeper into his skull, into the pons, the cerebellum, the cerebrum itself. The neutrons from his own brain, punished by the sound as they had been punished by the bourbon, emitted more slowly now, reducing his respiration, his heart action, his circulation, his reaction time. Five minutes, six. Red waves, ghosts. A dozen men true, winking at him in a red night, their souls divided into a billion particles, crimson and ruby, scarlet and pink. His neutrons slowing, theirs racing. Why would dead men dance while he ebbed? Shake your head again, Kazakhs.