Ultima Thule

“Do you know where hell is?” Lee Marvin growls in headsets. New Year, sixty-eight. Hauling freight ten thousand high, bomber out of Platts, NY, is cruising over white. “Far out,” (someone on intercom), “Iceland’s green, and Greenland’s ice.” Routine run. Five megatons of H-bombs in the bay. Nice. This war’s sure cold. We’re pole patrol, airborne early-warn. Normal day. Wrong code? Overload? Who knows how things occur? Conflagration. Drastic action. Navigator’s station now a blur; rapidly ablaze, reeking smoke like squid’s ink, stink of burning plastic. “Get to Thule! Think! There’s a US base there, if we can lock on to its beacon.” “No dice. We’ll hit the ice. It’s a miss.” No-one had figured on this. High-explosive triggers, to detonate the bombs in anger, are touched off by the burning fuel. Crash site, south of Thule, takes time to find, to figure, in the blinding white. The inferno boils great slabs of ice and each thermo device is charred to charcoal. Plutonium flies everywhere, soaks into tundra, floats on air. They “clean up”, sure, whatever that means. Radioactive poison spores have long lain locked in green-white tiers, but now meltdown nears. A tragedy is forming, nobly. Lightning strikes twice: contaminated ice is, as you read this, globally warming.