William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“What the hell is Two-One Zebra?” Kazakhs demanded in befuddled anger. “Where the hell is Cherepovets? And why the hell are we runnin’ clean across Russia to bomb a friggin’ mine?”

Moreau already had reached for the master book, through which she was flipping rapidly. But she sensed the answer and felt her despair plunge toward despondence. She stopped in a rarely studied appendix, read briefly, and let out a long, low whoosh of air. So it’s come to this, she thought, and she turned almost in challenge on Kazakhs.

“Damn you, Moreau,” the pilot pushed her, “what’s going on?”

“The grand tour,” she said evenly. “That’s what’s going on, Kazakhs. You were right. All over Russia, carving ’em out in the craters.”

Kazakhs stared at her. “Carving out what, Moreau?” he asked with a touch of hostile impatience. “What?”

“Not what,” the copilot replied evenly. “Who.” She turned back to the book. “Twenty-one—Precision nuclear bombardment, hardened emplacements.” She paused. “Zebra—Political-military infrastructure.” She turned the page, broke a plastic-tape seal intricately engraved with the faint outline of an eagle, and glanced hurriedly through contingency instructions they never before had been allowed to read. “Cherepovets (Rybinsk Mine)—Caution. This is not an opportunity target. Strike only on direct orders NCA. Relocation area, timing option one, Omega.”

Now the air whooshed out of the pilot. His gloved forefingers slowly tapped at the wheel. “Leadership bunkers,” he whispered. “So they really want us to go after the big banana.”

“More like somebody’s gone bananas,” Moreau replied. “Somebody who didn’t go to San Antonio for reliability training. Somebody who didn’t read the suicide regs. The world suicide regs. They want us to get the leaders, Kazakhs. The only people who can turn this fucker off.” She stared hard into the pilot’s‘s face. “Request confirmation,” she said flatly.

Kazakhs lost his blank look and shot her a withering glance. “You just get promoted?” Moreau looked back at him stone-faced. He shrugged and motioned to Halupalai to send the brief confirmation request. Kazakhs felt his mind tum muddy. The message told him far more than he ever expected to learn. Timing option one confirmed what he already knew—the Soviets had started it. The orders themselves told him what he also had guessed—the pattern of bunker targets was stretched so thin it was obvious the B-52 fleet had been chewed to pieces on the ground. Soviet communications near zero. Both nations had used an EMP attack. Not surprising. Leningrad standing, Moscow partly destroyed. Mildly surprising. They had given him that information because he needed it to defend himself. But the Looking Glass also was telling him indirectly that major cities still stood in the United States as well. Otherwise the subs would have been ordered to clean out the Soviet cities.

But if it hadn’t all gone in one spasm, if the war was progressing in stages as he would have expected, why were they getting orders like these? Moreau was right, damn her. This meant the end, the whole shooting match. Omega. Omega was a catch-all code. No holds barred.

Kazakhs felt woozy. They were asking a handful of Buffs to stab the king—and not wound him. That was taboo, drilled into them time and time again. The crews had joked sourly about it. Politicians protecting politicians while we nuke the folks. But the instructions had been explicit. If the boss gets caught in the office, so goes it. The Omahas and Cheyennes of Russia would go. But no overt political targets. No accidents, no stray runs, no open alternates, no targets of opportunity. We need somebody to talk to, the Air Force had drilled them. His mind spun. He didn’t like this. He also didn’t like her staring at him, probing him.

“You find a wart on my nose, Moreau?” he blustered.

“You know, Kazakhs,” she said.

Kazakhs fought back an involuntary shudder. He stuck his chin out. “I know it means we don’t have to go in and drop a million tons of concentrated TNT on a bunch of kids, Moreau. Isn’t that better, for God’s sake?”

“You mean more satisfying?”

“Damn right it’s more satisfying.” Kazakhs choked a gurgle out of his voice. The roiling, churning horror of the plume over the Richardsons flashed before his eyes, then quickly disappeared. “Maybe it’ll get it over faster.”

She continued staring at him, her lip curling upward. “Faster,” she said.

“Damn you, Moreau.” Her face settled into a granite shield. “Moreau,” Kazaklis said plaintively, his voice taking on a low, painful whine. Behind him, Halupalai hovered again. He handed the pilot another brief message: “CONFIRM TWO ONE ZEBRA. NCA CODE HENHOUSE.”

Kazakhs handed the message to Moreau. “Look up ‘Henhouse.’”

Moreau did not bother to look at the message. She stared silently at Kazaklis, who returned her stare with uneasy stubbornness. The steady roar of the engines pounded at their ears in an escalating staccato—not a drone now but a racing pulse of explosive individual heartbeats. “They want us to vaporize the Premier, Kazaklis,” Moreau said steadily. “And the Presidium. And the head of the KGB, who controls the warheads. And the head of the Rocket Forces, who controls the missiles. Everybody with any control.”

Kazaklis stuck his chin out. “The bastards started it.”

“The bastards have to stop it. Nobody else can.”

“Look up ‘Henhouse.’”

Moreau held her steady gaze on him silently. His eyes twitched and he tried to cover the sign of his uncertainty. His chin jutted out further. “You want us to nuke kids instead, huh?” he snapped.

She stared. Kazaklis began to bluster defensively.

“It always was abunch of bullshit, leaving the leaders alone. Bunch of fucking politicians protecting another bunch of fucking politicians.” His voice cracked and he tried to cover it by blustering again. “Assholes. Sittin’ down in their holes, flying around in their safe airplanes, pushing their fucking dominoes this way and that way over millions of people. Fuck ’em. They got us into this mess.”

“Somebody’s got to be at the other end of the phone, Kazaklis.” Moreau’s voice quavered now. She had spent her adult life trying to prove she belonged in this bomber, that macho wasn’t just male.

“What fucking phone?” Kazakhs snapped. “You think they’re talking to each other and sending out orders like this?”

“Leningrad’s still standing,” Moreau said, her voice dropping off. “Moscow’s partly standing. Something’s still there. Somebody’s back home to send out this insane crap. Somebody’s over there to take it.”

Kazakhs turned away from her, staring into the flash curtains, the commander in him wrestling with the man who had reached to the curtain and stared into the face of a megaton meant for Irkutsk, who had murmured bye-bye, mamushka. “Look up ‘Henhouse,’” he said.

“You know what comes next,” Moreau said, barely audibly. “Some poor spooked sucker of a second lieutenant lets the chemicals go in Europe. Unlooses the anthrax spores because he’s scared. Some colonel in Korea sees a shadow in the night and fires every tactical missile he’s got.” She sat silently for a moment, the engine sound torturing her. “Submarine commanders will roam around for days, weeks, months—popping one here, popping one there—until they just say screw it and let 240 warheads go at the commies in Nicaragua.”

Kazaklis exploded in frustration. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Write my congressman?”

“Till every last nuke is gone.” Moreau’s voice seemed far off and ghostly now. “Every last biological spore.” She stopped again. “Nobody can turn it off after this. Not ever. Not before everything’s gone.”