Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [95]
Maultsby, baffled by the outrageous magnetic beauty of the polar light display, had not turned his plane through 180 degrees. He was forty degrees out. So at eight a.m., when he should have crossed the northern coast of Alaska, he was, astonishingly, more than nine hundred miles off course. He crossed the northern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula instead. And the Chukotka Peninsula was not part of North America. It was the easternmost tip of Asia, and it was part of the Soviet Union.
Despite its cold and awful desolation, the peninsula boasted two military airfields and was ringed by radar stations. This was because the North Pole was one possible route for American bombers on their way to hit Russia. So Maultsby’s plane was detected almost immediately. Six Soviet MiG jets took off to intercept it. The local air defense people sent news of the interloper to Moscow, urgently. After all, if the Americans were going to start a war over Cuba, they might also be planning a simultaneous attack from the east. These messages to Moscow from Chukotka were picked up by CIA listening stations in Alaska and northern Europe. The Americans knew that the MiGs couldn’t reach Maultsby’s altitude, but would they launch a SAM? The crews of American bombers over Norway and Greece were told to turn off their country-and-western stations and go on standby.
“FRANKLINS,” CLEM HAD said when Frankie had called at eleven thirty. He told himself that it was because he couldn’t think of anywhere else, but he had other motives that had a good deal to do with Andrew Marvell’s poem.
Marron refused to set hoof upon the newly ruined land where the lovers’ barn, his stable, had stood. Frankie dismounted and walked the horse through a gap in the surviving trees and tethered him to a sycamore sapling. She and Clem kissed as though each possessed the only oxygen left in the world. Then he led her into the lee of the old gable wall. The morning rain had wandered off like a gray cat bored with a kill, but the wind had a cold edge. Frankie spread her waxed riding coat on the ground and they sat.
Her father’s bare prairie now came to within twenty yards of the remains of the house. Frankie looked out at it and took Clem’s right hand in hers and tucked it up under her jumper and began to cry.
“Hey,” Clem said. “Come on. It’s all right.”
“No, it bloody isn’t,” she sobbed.
And he was dismantled. He was far too young to reassure tearful girls. He had a nipple under his fingers, a partial erection in his jeans, and a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse in his jacket pocket. All he could do was wait.
“It’s all so ghastly. So stupid.”
He thought that praising her breast with his hand might help.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Frankie, I . . .”
“Last Saturday,” she said, with a gulp between the words, “when I rode up and saw the smoke, I didn’t know what to think. Actually, I had the silly idea that you’d been there for ages and lit a cigarette and set the place alight or something. Then I saw it was your father on that machine, and the other men, and I —”
“You thought we’d been found out.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him and said bravely, “But we haven’t. Obviously. I mean, I’d’ve been locked up or something.”
She sniffed again. “Shall we have a smoke first?”
Reluctantly, while weighing the possible meanings of “first,” he withdrew his hand. He fished a light-blue packet of Bristols out of one pocket and the dark-blue book of poetry out of the other.
“What’s that?” she asked when he had lit her up.
“I, er, came across something. Something you might like. A poem.”
“Really? What’s it about?”
“Well, it made me