William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“Found the boss, huh?”

“Yes, we found the boss.” Alice paused for a moment, staring into the panels. “Where are we, Smitty?”

The pilot hesitated.

“Over Omaha?”

“It’s safest, general. The cloud is blowing east. And the really dirty clouds from the missile fields won’t reach here for a few hours.”

The general paused again. Then he said. “Open the hole, Smitty.”

“You don’t want to, general.”

“Open it.”

Reluctantly the pilot reached into his flight-jacket pocket and pulled out a black eyepatch. He fitted it snugly over his left eye, making sure the copilot had done the same. He handed another to the general.

“They aren’t going to hit us again here,” Alice protested. “That’s why you’ve got us over Omaha.”

“Just put it on, sir.” There was no give in the pilot’s voice. Alice strapped the patch over one eye and the pilot slowly peeled back the opening, the Velcro sealers scratching through the engine hum like angry cat’s claws.

Briefly the shimmer of a million stars brought goose bumps to the general’s arms. It was so incredibly beautiful up here at night. Then he leaned over Smitty and peered down at the ground forty thousand feet below. His hands began shaking violently. Oh, God, Madge, I’m sorry. Below him, there was nothing but blackness. No lights. No landmarks. No movement of pinprick headlights. Miles away, in a near-perfect arc, orange flames still licked at the edge of the dark, empty circle. Beyond, sporadic fires burned in the prairies. Beyond the fires, not even a Nebraska farmhouse light shone. Even the snow was gone.

The far horizon glowed slightly red and he knew it was not the sunrise. He felt a lump build in his throat. He remembered how much his wife had hated Omaha, with its hayseed social life and the isolation of its long winters. Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed. Smitty’s wife had been down there, too. And the copilot’s.

“Close it up,” he said. Walking back through the main compartment, he couldn’t look at Sam. Alice was pondering how many more cities, how many more wives, he had condemned to that.

Kazaklis took it on himself to inform the rest of the crew and, as commander of a now retreating strategic penetrator, decided it was best to do it face to face. He laid his helmet aside, adjusted the radio headset, and unsnapped the connector above him. With the radio wire hanging loosely, he pulled himself up from his seat, laid his hand on the copilot’s shoulder, and edged his way down the short walkway toward Halupalai. He sat down in O’Toole’s seat, and even before he made the radio attachment, Halupalai’s baleful eyes told the commander that he already knew. There was no argument in them, just a bleak look of failure, and Kazaklis winced at his friend’s discomfort.

“You done great, champ,” Kazaklis said weakly, placing his hand on the gunner’s arm. The pilot groped for words, feeling as wretched as Halupalai looked. “There was no purpose in it, old buddy,” the pilot said plaintively. Halupalai’s round face softened, as if to say he understood lack of purpose above all, and then he wordlessly gestured for Kazaklis to leave and tell the others.

The open hatch to the lower compartment lay just behind Halupalai’s seat, and Kazaklis shuddered as he squinted down into the dark redness in search of a foothold on the ladder. Below him, he saw five legs. He drew in a deep breath and backed down the ladder, stepping over the pretzel twist of O’Toole’s body, which had jammed forward into the back of the downstairs seats during the low-level race through the mountains. One of O’Toole’s legs was bent at the knee between Radnor and Tyler. The other had wrapped itself formlessly around the far side of Tyler’s seat. The discordant scene in the downstairs compartment was far worse then Kazaklis could have imagined, even considering the irrational radio conversations of the past five hours. The two small desktop workplaces, usually scrupulously neat, were a jumbled disarray of navigation papers, some bloodied, and broken pencils.

Neither of the two crew members seemed to notice the disarray, Radnor oblivious even to the pilot’s presence and Tyler craning his neck to watch him suspiciously. Kazakhs stared at Tyler briefly and then pulled O’Toole back to his resting place facing the locked bomb bay. In the little alcove, temporarily out of Tyler’s sight, Kazakhs leaned his forehead against the bulkhead and rubbed his eyes. Then he stepped back over the body, came around the corner, and knelt between the two men, attaching his radio wire.

“Tough down here, huh, guys?” Kazakhs asked, placing a hand on each man’s knee. He felt Tyler’s muscles tighten. Radnor felt as lifeless as O’Toole. Kazakhs cringed and struggled for the right words. But Tyler spoke first.

“I am EWO ready,” he said. His voice was eerily hollow—and menacing—as if it had been reinforced in an echo chamber. He firmly pushed the pilot’s hand off his knee.

“I know you are,” Kazakhs said softly, trying to make the lie soothing and convincing. “We were all EWO ready, nav. We’ve been EWO ready for a long time.” Kazakhs looked compassionately at his deranged crewman and then glanced briefly and mistakenly at the little Kodak icon above the navigator’s console.

Suddenly an elbow ripped viciously into his rib cage and he bowled backward onto his rump, the radio wire whiplashing at his neck. He looked up groggily and saw Tyler place one hand over the photograph as if to hide Kazakhs from the boy instead of the boy from Kazakhs. The other hand darted at the pilot’s radio wire, wrenching it out of its socket and pulling the headset painfully down behind his neck. Tyler jerked at the wire, then relaxed it, then jerked again.

“EEE… WOE… Red… dee!” Tyler screamed hysterically over the roar of the engines, jerking the wire between each tortured and disconnected syllable. “Ready! Ready! Now!” The whiplash pain stunned Kazakhs and he shook his head in an attempt to free it as Tyler’s becrazed outrage disintegrated into a jumble of unrelated mutterings: on the racetrack… cottonmouth… Radnor’s wife … At the mention of his wife, the young radar operator turned for the first time to look expressionlessly at the scene. He made no other move.

Tyler screamed again. “Coward! Coward! Coward!” The words were a tearful wail now, but he jerked at the wire again, and again. Kazaklis, the pain seering at his neck, jammed a steel-plated flight boot into Tyler’s shoulder. The pilot bolted upright, grabbed Tyler around the arms, and shook him violently. The navigator slammed his elbow into the pilot’s ribs and Kazaklis struck him swiftly, a judo chop to the neck. Tyler slumped to the side.

Kazaklis slowly took a step back, the radio wire hanging from his neck like a loose noose. Radnor looked at him strangely but serenely, with the detachment of a man whose soul had taken leave for a more blissful place. He also quietly mouthed unheard words into the radio. Kazaklis took his hand and felt warm, wet blood. The pilot’s taut body drooped. My God. EWO ready…

After a second, Kazaklis forlornly hooked the radio wire back into its socket. “We are not going, Radnor,” he said simply.

Radnor looked at him without chastisement, without any emotion at all. Kazaklis felt a deep, abiding heartache. Radnor was so young, so innocent, his wide eyes blank among a teenager’s harvest of freckles.

“My wife was a cop, commander,” the boyish radar operator said tonelessly.

“I know, Radnor.” The despair in the little basement of his aircraft began to engulf Kazaklis. “A good one.”

“She protected us, commander.”

“I know she did, buddy. You should be proud of her.”