William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“About even-Steven, I’d say. They had to come up with something. They invented the bomb and they had to give it to somebody. So they gave it to the politicians. The politicians kept building the fuckers—you do have me talking locker-room, Kazakhs—so they went out and found themselves thousands of kids to hold them. Kids. God, we’re the old-timers. What are you? Thirty-one? I’m twenty-seven. Radnor’s twenty-five. Even Radnor’s an old-timer. They had twenty-year-olds fiddling with them.”

“It wasn’t the kids who finally let it all go.”

“Probably not. Maybe we should thank PRP for that. There was no Personnel Reliability Program for the politicians. You ever hear of a Nixon or a Carter or a Reagan going down to San Antonio to take the test? You think the Politburo got psychological screening, whatever the hell they called it over there?”

“Not a one of ’em woulda passed.”

“No. The whole thing was an attempt at a rational answer to a problem with no rational answer. The shrinks got ahold of it and devised a system that required perfect people. Not many of them around. None of us passed tonight.”

Kazakhs grew nervous. He tried to divert her. “Oh-oh!” he said, throwing up his hands. “Here comes the Boom-Boom Room routine.” He battered her with a staccato recital. “Air Force Regulation 35-dash-99. Section two-dash-three. Figure two-dash-one. Personality and Behavior Factors That May Affect Reliability. Paragraph III. Factors Related to Awareness or Level of Consciousness.” He paused. “You know they spelled ‘consciousness’ wrong? Left out the first ‘s.’ Little reminder that the people looking for perfect people weren’t perfect.”

“Dated 14 April 1981.” Moreau smiled sadly. “You have read the PRP regulations, you phony.” She thought a moment. “A little random reminder. They might miss a digit in a code someday. They might get a random electric pulse in some computer. You think that’s how it started?”

“That, pal, we’ll never know.”

“No.”

Kazakhs turned thoughtful. “Moreau?” She looked at him. “Did the Boom-Boom Room thing really bother you that much? All the flyin’ we did together?”

She looked at him a moment longer. “Sure it did. Who wants to fly with somebody who’s been up all night boozing?”

“God, I’m surprised everybody in the outfit wasn’t juiced to the gills,” Kazaklis said, melancholy creeping into his voice.

“A lot of ’em were. The brass went nuts trying to trace the marijuana roaches in Minuteman launch capsules. The Soviet Rocket Forces had a vodka problem that made you look like a Mormon. You were all right. A pig, but all right.”

Kazaklis grinned broadly. “Moreau, you’re getting downright friendly in your sunset years.”

“Hours.”

“Don’t get maudlin. It violates PRP.”

“Everything violates PRP. Paragraph 1. Suspiciousness. Arrogance. Lack of Humor. Inflexibility. Preoccupation.” She paused. “Then comes Sensitivity. Now, that is dangerous. We sure didn’t want sensitive people around the bomb. Paragraph II. Impulsiveness. Destructiveness. You like that one? Destructiveness.”

“Maybe I oughta message San Antonio that we’ve been showing destructive tendencies. Pull us off the duty.”

“Temper Tantrums.”

“Whoops.”

“Excessive Talking.”

“There goes the general’s daughter.”

“Decreased Talking. Then in Paragraph III we have Daydreaming lumped in with Alcohol and Drug Intoxication, your favorite.”

Kazakhs grunted.

“Oh, I’m not taking another zing at you, Kazakhs.” She smiled, a faint and distant smile. “You were always full of more shit than booze.”

Kazakhs finally laughed uproariously.

“Unusual Happiness,” she said. “Paragraph IV. Unusual Happiness is followed by Unusual Sadness. And Suicide.”

The drone of the engines cut through the pause. Then Moreau went on quietly, still quoting from the regulations: “Suicide: Particularly significant when accomplished through the deliberate detonation of a weapon–-“

Kazakhs stared hard at her. She seemed far away, and briefly, he felt angry again, not being able to sort out his own new uncertainties.

“Moreau,” he said slowly, “you and I both chose this path. You signed up for this trip. You signed up for the saki-and-bow-to-the-emperor squad.” But he knew she wasn’t talking about her suicide. He knew she was talking about distant decisions made by others that meant the world now must absorb fifty thousand of the gray packages the crew of Polar Bear One had discharged in the wilderness of the Richardson Mountains. She was talking about a world that was taking the kamikaze oath. His skin tingled. Then the audio alert startled him again.

“Here come the orders to return to Spokane,” he said blandly. “You think we’ll get a ticker-tape parade?”

In the Looking Glass, the black phone lighted again. The general reached for it quickly.

“Alice?” the voice said. “Harpoon.”

“Good grief, man, how are you? We were worried.”

“I need a word.”

“Hard to talk now.”

“A word.” The voice was insistent.

“Take it easy, Harpoon. What’s on your mind?”

“Never mind. I have it.”

“Hey, buddy, what gives?”

“Call them back.” The voice was plaintive.

“Call who back, Harpoon? What the devil are you talking about?”

“The bombers, general. Please.”

Alice reached for another Pall Mall, not caressing it at all this time. “Harpoon, the orders are out. Under National Command Authority. Condor’s authority.”

The phone seemed to go dead for a moment.

“Harpoon?” Alice asked.

The phone connection suddenly sounded very weak. “Never mind,” Harpoon said faintly. “I’ve got it. It’s anthropocide. Yes, that’s it. Anthropocide.” Then Alice heard Harpoon click off.

The general looked up at Sam with deep concern. “I don’t think Harpoon has both oars in the water,” he said bleakly.

Halupalai spent several painstaking minutes decoding the latest orders while Kazaklis and Moreau fidgeted up front. At last he handed Kazaklis the message, and the pilot flooded it with his red-filtered flashlight. Moreau watched his face grow tight as he quickly scanned the single long sheet.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, his voice rising slowly in disbelief. “They want us to run all over Russia….”

REF TWO ONE ZEBRA. IMPRO PATTERN ONE. PRECISE DELIVERY TO COORDINATES MANDATORY. TARGETS HARDENED. STRIKE ALL TARGETS. PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS, REPEAT PRIORITY CHEREPOVETS. CAUTIONS. MOSCOW REGION PARTLY INTACT. LENINGRAD REGION WHOLLY INTACT. NO COVER. SOVIET COMMUNICATIONS BELIEVED NEAR ZERO. REF TWO ONE ZEBRA.

Next came a sequence of six targets and coordinates, fuel-depletion estimates, and specific weapon assignments for each. Cherepovets was second on the list, the first being a twin-SRAM attack on a target that by the pilot’s rough reckoning was somewhere in the Urals perhaps a thousand miles east of the coordinates for Cherepovets. He didn’t recognize any of the place-names, including the priority target. Behind the coordinates for Cherepovets the orders read, in brackets, “RYBINSK MINING WORKS.” The four other targets were located in a cluster less than one hundred miles apart and, from the locators, appeared to be in the vicinity of Leningrad but not in the city itself. That gave them a clear run out over the Gulf of Finland to an escape field north of Stockholm, with Helsinki as a nearer but clearly less desirable alternate. However, it was obvious at a glance that the designer of improvised pattern one had made extraordinary assumptions, all optimistic, about fuel consumption. The entire flight was to be made at low level.