The Day Before Midnight

1500

“This is absurd, isn’t it?” said Peter Thiokol, extravagantly offended. “I mean, the reason you’re trying to find out who breaches security at the South Mountain installation is so that we can figure out who’s in there and then from that maybe I can figure out a way to get by the elevator shaft door, but now you’re interrogating me.”

The two agents had little appreciation of the absurd. They weren’t collectors of ironies, either, and in some future time they wouldn’t hoist a glass in salute to the ludicrousness of this moment.

“Dr. Thiokol, there were thirteen senior people in the MX Basing Modes Croup at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that the Department of the Air Force Strategic Warfare Committee employed to design South Mountain. There are arrest warrants on all of them. It’s a technicality, designed to speed things up, just in case. Now, we have some questions, I’m afraid.”

Peter wondered if he had the energy to explain anything. He felt himself tumbling toward incoherence, as he had before his students that morning. And he knew also where the questioning would go, where it would have to go: toward Megan. He could not stand to go over it, to work out the theories. He had just put it into his bottom drawer and thrown away the key. It was in the deep under-mountain silo of his subconscious.

But the two agents were grimly bland men of indeterminate age and strong will who simply plunged ahead. They were probably not all that different from the Delta officers: hardworking types who drew their power and identities from the potent organizations they had chosen to join and to whose dictates they would not be disloyal.

“For the record, you’re the son of Dr. and Mrs. Nels Thiokol of Edinah, Minnesota.”

“Dr. and Dr. Thiokol. My mother was a damned good ob-gyn. My father was a surgeon. Do we have to go through my whole life?”

They did. This went on for a little while and he answered all the stupid who/when questions curtly, pretending to a charmless boredom in his eyes. But as usual, he felt himself tightening when it came to his twisted adolescence, his wretched relationship with his father, whom he could never please until it occurred to him he wasn’t supposed to please him, and what this led to, all the schools, the expulsions, the business with the sleeping pills, the time he thought of now as only a long dark tunnel as he crawled through slime toward the light.

“Yet you got excellent grades through all this. And your test scores—”

“I’m smart, yes. I finally got my act together my sophomore year at Harvard.”

“What did you discover there?”

Yes, it was the crucial question of his career. He remembered it well, November of ’66, that funky, dreary room in Brattle Hall, which he shared with Mike De Masto, who was now a shrink in Oakwood, just outside of the glamorous burg of Dayton, O. Mike had long hair to his shoulder blades that year and was about Peace. Mike smoked dope and read his sacred texts and organized, orchestrated, and led the burgeoning Harvard antiwar movement. Which of course meant he was getting laid, sometimes two, three, and four times a day. Meanwhile Peter, the soggy little grind with a history of instability, spent the months in the exile of the library, depressed near unto suicide, working like a demon to figure out a way to keep himself alive. And one day he found it.

He found the bomb.

“I became interested in strategic thought at Harvard,” he told the FBI agents. “The bomb, you know. The big bomb. For reasons that were doubtlessly pathological, I drew some queer comfort from an instrument that could wipe us all out in a blinding flash. It gave point to the pointlessness.”

Peter still remembered the image of the nuclear mushroom climbing from its fiery birthing, clawing ever skyward, opening, devouring its way through the heart of civilization.

The bomb became a kind of focal point for his existence: he lost himself in its culture, its byways, its traditions, its intricacies. He learned how to build one, how to hide one, how to plant one, how to use one, how to deliver one. He pored over the interesting work in strategic thought being done at Rand and later at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute. The strategic thinkers, men like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Rowan, and Andy Marshall, were his heroes, outlined against the blue-gray November sky of his imagination. His senior thesis reflected their thought but was his own in the way a promising apprentice can take the line of the masters and push it way out until it’s something altogether new: Strategic Reality: Crisis Thinking for a Nuclear Age, which was later published by Random House.

In fact, everything that Peter ever became, that he ever got, he owed to the bomb. Sometimes, he thought back on that crimped, desperate, achingly lonely little shit he’d been in prep school.

You beat them, he’d tell himself, swelling with radiance at the power of his becoming what he wanted to become, which was important. Everything you have is because of the bomb.

And most of all, he had Megan because of the bomb.

He’d met her in England when he was on his Rhodes studying the impact of weapons systems on policy decisions in immediate pre-Great War Europe in a political science seminar at Balliol. She was on a Rhodes, too, studying art at Keeble, after four years at Bennington. They met at the Bodleian, far from the radical unrest of America and the Vietnam War. She was dark and Jewish and he’d known she was American because she was blowing a bubble.

I beg your pardon, he said, is that real Double-Bubble? Fleers Double-Bubble?

She just looked at him. No smile, her frank eyes devouring him, her beautiful jaw ripping away at the gum. She blew another bubble. Then she reached into her purse and pushed a single piece of genuine Fleer’s Double-Bubble across the three-hundred-year-old oak table at him.

Who are you?

He told only the truth.

I’m the smartest guy you ever met in your life, he had said.

“Did you meet any Communists at Oxford?” one of the agents said.

Peter just looked at him. What could one do with such idiots?

“No. Look. I don’t see any of those people anymore. I haven’t seen them in years.”

The agents exchanged looks. He could tell they thought he was being “difficult.” They tried a different approach.

“Of the eleven senior members of the MX Basing Modes Group, were any of them politically suspect?” asked one of the agents.

“You’ve seen the files. I haven’t.”

The two agents looked at each other, then sighed. One of them wrote something down.

“I’m running very low on time here, guys,” Peter said, smiling with what he thought was a great deal of Ivy League charm. They appeared not to hear.

“Well, then, psychologically suspect? It seems to be a pattern among senior defense analysts, and defense engineers and researchers, particularly the farther reaches of—” The agent struggled for a word.

“The farther reaches of blowing the world up, right?”

“Yes, Dr. Thiokol. Anyway, our investigations have shown that a significant number of these men and women burn out. That is, lose heart, have radical changes in religion, sexual orientation, political ideology.”

“It’s a very intense life. You’re gaming out the end of the world nearly every day, trying to figure new wrinkles, new ways to do it. Nobody gets old.”

“What about this Dr. Michael Greene?”

“Mike? Mike found out he was queer. Anyway, he bailed out before we’d really gotten to the interesting stuff.”

“He’s disappeared, that’s what makes him so interesting. And he’s got AIDS, did you know that, Dr. Thiokol?”

“No, I didn’t. My God, that’s awful.”

“Isn’t it possible that a man who’s dying — well, he’d be vulnerable emotionally to pressures or, rather, too fragile to withstand them. And someone—”

He didn’t know what to say. He knew the weakness of each member of the MX Basing Modes Group. Mike Greene’s was for thin-hipped Gentile athletes, Maggie Berlin’s for greasy mechanics. Niles Fallow had an alcoholic wife; Jerry Theobald suffered from almost incredible drabness; Mary Francis Harmon was a virgin who talked dirty; Sam Bellows was perpetually horny, yet so hangdog he never got laid; Jeff Thaxter was a workaholic who abused his kids; Jim Diedrickson had a son with cystic fibrosis; Maury Reeves’s wife Jill walked out on him for a Marine colonel. And on and on … each of them held in a matrix of weakness and duty. They used to have a joke about what they were doing. They called it the Revenge of the Nerds: little techies, sealed away in anonymous offices in the beast of a building complex called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in picturesque Howard County, figuring out whether the world would end in fire or ice, and if fire, how hot, what color, spreading at what rate, and influenced by what wind patterns?

At last they moved to him.

“Any approaches in the last few months? Any sense of being watched? Any peculiarities in your mail, say, being intercepted, your house being broken into, your papers messed up”

“Absolutely not,” he said, swallowing hard.

They missed it.

“What about your wife? You hear from her?”

“Leave her out of it, please. She’s — she’s off somewhere, that’s all.”

“The marriage. When did it break up?”

“Nine months ago. I don’t talk about it with anybody, do you understand?”

“Megan Wilder, she never gave up her maiden name?”

Peter didn’t like this at all.

“I said I’d prefer not to discuss my private life. She’s with another man now, all right? That’s all there is to say. I upset her, she went with somebody else. How much longer is this going to take?”

“When did you last see her?”

“She came up to Baltimore two weeks ago. It was a kind of a stab at reconciliation. It was kind of okay at the beginning; but the next morning it turned into catastrophe again.”

“This was before or after your breakdo—”

“It was months afterward. That was in July, when I left the committee. But it was no big deal. It was a very mild nervous breakdown, yes, created by a great deal of work stress and the end of my marriage. I just felt used up and incapable of being with other human beings. I spent four weeks at a very discreet loony bin in Ellicott City, where I reread the collected works of Agatha Christie and talked to an insufferable fool about my God complex. In the end I allowed him to convince me that I wasn’t that august gentleman. I was too smart for the job description.”

The agents didn’t crack a smile at this deflection. Nevertheless, tactically the gambit worked; both agents missed his discomfort, and the interrogation headed into less interesting areas.

“Now, let’s go back to this Mike Greene …”

The agents asked their little loaded questions, trying to probe or trick him. But it wasn’t much of a contest. Peter began to feel a little like Raskolnikov — superior, implacable, a “new kind of man.” He could see them set up their ambushes, and popped counterambushes on them, reducing them to hostile silence. They couldn’t touch him, and in time they understood this themselves. When they got close they didn’t know it; they couldn’t read him. In time, perhaps, they could break him down and get at … at it, but they didn’t have time. Also, he saw, they were a little bit afraid of him by now, and a little bit unhinged by the theater of reality swirling around them.

The surrender was prosaic, without ritual.

One of them finally said, “We’re going to leave you with a card. If you should think of something, you call us.”

So Peter had his perverse little victory. Mess with Peter Thiokol and see what it gets you!

Peter looked out the window. He could see the mountain itself. He felt a little of that radiant selfhood again. It thrilled and pleased him.

I’m the smartest boy in the class! I can do anything!

Then why couldn’t you hang on to the one person you ever loved, he asked himself.

“Don’t go yet,” he said suddenly.

He rose, went to the window. Outside, on the plain, he could see the jagged streaks of smoke from the wrecked jets rising funereally against the bright blue air. From up on the mountain, the sounds of small-arms fire reached him; the National Guard Infantry, like the Brits of World War I, having taken their wages these long years, now were dying.

He could see Dick Puller hunched over the radio gear, talking frantically to his Guardsman on the mountain; meanwhile, the Delta officers stood by. They looked restless, even hungry, and desperate with frustration. Skazy, their gloomy leader, was clenching and unclenching his hands in anger.

You think you got problems, Peter thought.

He turned to the two agents.

Time to face it, Peter, he told himself. Time to face it at last. Time to stop denying the thing that’s been eating at your stomach lining all these months and that put you in the bin.

“I think my wife betrayed South Mountain,” he said.

Phuong clutched the M-16. They whirled over the mountain, and as they shot up, she felt the strangeness in her stomach; it was as if a window had been opened and the cool air could blow in. The deck beneath her began to rattle and shiver.

“Small arms,” one of the crewmen screamed over the roar of the engine.

She looked; across from her the black Americans, all dressed up like frogmen, clung together. Their eyes were eggs. Her partner, the blond man called Teagarden, another frogman, stared into space, his eyes locked in a faraway glare. His lips moved.

Then they were over the mountain, sliding down its side at an angle, the craft around them feeling warped and broken.

She had seen helicopters die before. You always wondered what it was like when they blazed in flame, then plunged to earth and hit with a detonation like a bomb. Later you went to see them. They looked like the shedded skins of insects, broken metal husks on the floor of the earth. Inside you could see the men, burned meat; the faces were so terrible. Then more helicopters would come and it was time to go back into the tunnels.

“Hang on, everybody,” the crew chief shouted. “Touch down.”

The chopper hit hard. Dust and smoke flew; the air was heavy with vibration. Suddenly men in camouflage, their faces green, their manner urgent, were among them.

“Out, out. Come on, into the trench,” they were shouting.

They scrambled from the helicopter to a fresh ditch nearby, jumping in to find other men there.

“Fire in the hole,” somebody yelled; a huge explosion that sounded like a charge from a terror bomber high up in the clouds where it could not be heard clubbed her in the diaphragm. Trees flew through the air; smoke poured around her. She coughed, taking in the acrid odor of gunpowder.

Mother, it’s all so familiar, said her daughter.

“Okay, Rats,” said the leader-officer. “That was thirty pounds of C-4 and primacord planted into what our maps tell us was once upon a time the entrance to the main shaft of the old McCreedy and Scott Number Four mine. Let’s take a look-see and find out if we punched a hole into it for you.”

They stood and moved toward the smoke. All around, trees had been blasted flat; the snow was black and the smoke still gushed from the crater. Above, the mountain, dense with more trees, rose at a steep angle. They were at its base, completely isolated in the forest. The sounds of gunfire came from far away, and a few other soldiers crouched around, keeping watch.

“I think we poked through,” said one of the soldiers. “That was a shaped charge; it ought to have cut real deep.”

“Okay,” said the small black man, “let me just check this sucker out.”

With a surprising agility he lowered himself into the gap in the earth. In seconds he was back.

“Hoo boy. Got us a tunnel,” he said. “One long, mean mothafucking tunnel. Party time coming, Jack.” He smiled; his teeth were very white and he radiated an electric confidence.

The man Teagarden had explained. This black soldier knew tunnels also; he’d been in them in her country, spent a long time in them. He was a great tunnel fighter.

He now winked at her.

“Me and this lady,” he said to the others, “we the whole show now. This old-time stuff for us, right, pretty lady?”

Yes, it was true. Black men had come into the tunnels too. She had killed black men. They were as brave as any of them.

She smiled, but it wasn’t much of a smile.

“Okay,” said an officer, opening a case, “what we got here is the original 1932 map of Number Four. Shit, this was some operation; you look back through the trees, you see that gap? That’s where the railroad went. Some of the old track is still there. And the foundations from some of the buildings are still here. Anyway, as we figure it, this shaft’ll take you in maybe five hundred feet. Then you get to what they call the lateral tunnel, the connector that held all the actual mining shafts together. There were five deep mining shafts they called Alice, Betty, Connie, Dolly, and Elizabeth. Betty, Connie, and Dollie were the bitches: they caved in. But Alice and Elizabeth ought to still be there. And they should be in pretty good shape, although nobody can say for sure, because sometimes there’s shaft erosion based on moisture, earth shifts, anything. So you head on back through them maybe one thousand feet. Anywhere beyond that point you may run into intersections with the water flues from over the years. We called around to a batch of mining engineers. They think the flues ought to be passable, though it’s going to be real tough going. Uphill all the way. Anyway, if you get close enough to the installation, you’ll hear ’em; the ground is a great conductor. Your target would be the exhaust shafts of corrugated metal that run out of the silo. If you reach those shafts, you let us know. We’ll get a Delta unit here in two minutes, and you can take ’em in the back door.”

“What we do if we run into any little strange men in there?” said the small black soldier.

“Just like in ’Nam, you waste ’em. But there won’t be anybody in there except ghosts. Ghosts don’t bite. You all set?”

“Yes, sir,” said Teagarden.

“Okay, I want a radio check the first two hundred feet. Call signs: You’re Alpha, Witherspoon; Teagarden, you’re Baker. I’m Rat Six, okay? Any questions. Miss Phuong, any questions?”

Phuong offered a tight little smile but shook her head no.

“Okay, and God bless you,” said the officer. “We’re all praying for you.”

“Let’s go to tunnelsville, you peoples,” said the small black man with another of his smiles.

And they began to enter the smoky shaft.

Darkness swallowed them.

Puller could hear the unsureness in the National Guard captain’s voice. It was close to panic.

“Th-there’s a lot of smoke from up ahead, Delta Six,” the man was saying from up on the mountain. “We can’t see too good.”

“Bravo, this is Delta Six,” Puller said, staring in frustration at the white hump a mile before him. “Are you taking fire?”

“No, sir. At least they’re not shooting at us yet. I think they’re waiting to see if the planes are coming back. There was a lot of gunfire on that mountain, Colonel.”

“Bravo, you’ve got to move now. The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be. You’ve got to get your people into the assault line and get them up the hill.”

“Colonel,” said Skazy, “let me get up there. I can—”

“Shut up, Major. Bravo, do you read?”

“Some of the men don’t want to leave the trucks.”

“Christ, he hasn’t even got ’em out of the trucks yet,” Puller said to no one in particular.

“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”

“I copy, Delta.”

“Look, son, let me talk you through this, okay? I’ve been on a few hill jobs in my time.” Dick’s voice was reassuring, authoritative. He’d take this guy in and make him his and make him perform.

“Yes, sir,” came the voice, all thought of Commo protocol having vanished. “We’ve been on exercises for years. It’s just so — so different.”

“In combat, confusion is normal, son. Okay, you want to cross your line of departure, if possible, with platoons abreast and squads abreast within the platoons. You want the squads in column rather than file, so that you can respond instantly with a broad front of heavy fire if you make contact. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your sergeants ought to be able to handle the men,” said Puller, knowing that sergeants may be ornery, bassackwards assholes, but they were the gears that made an army — any army — operate.

“Get your sergeants involved directly. Brief them with the officers and speak to them directly. You want to minimize levels of interpretation, and your officers are probably too distant from the men. The men are going to want the reassurance of the familiar.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was silence from the mountain. The seconds ticked by. Dick lit another cigarette. Its harshness somehow soothed him. Around, several of the Delta officers stood with binoculars.

“He should have picked out his LD and hit it from the trucks running,” said one.

“Yeah, and he should have been tied in with Air,” said the other, “and gone on the dime.”

Sure, they were right. But they were wrong too, Puller thought. Unblooded troops need to be coaxed and nudged; nurtured. You need a mother for your first fight, and a daddy for the next hundred. Then you need a body bag or a shrink.

The National Guard officer’s name was Thomas Barnard and he knew he was in way over his head. The volume of gunfire during the aerial attack had upset him greatly. He was, furthermore, not exactly sure who awaited them; the order from the Governor had simply obligated them to emergency duty at the disposal of the United States Army under a phase four (“nuclear emergency”) alert at the specified locale. The unit had been very close to the end of its two weeks of active duty, and the men were not happy to clamber aboard trucks for the hour drive from Fort Richie to this godforsaken spot.

And they were furthermore baffled to detruck and discover themselves in the middle of some movie. These were mainly young blue-collar workers from the Baltimore area who had signed up because the weekend a month and the two weeks a year of low intensity army games added a nice little chunk of bucks to a parched family budget. Now they had stumbled into a little war. It was particularly intimidating to be issued large amounts of live ammunition and grenades. It had put a chill through the men, the grenades especially; in training, live grenades are treated with the awkward care of nuclear weapons because they are so dangerous. Now they were handed out like candy bars by grinning, loosey-goosey commandos. It scared his guys. None of them had a particular desire to be Rambo.

“Okay,” Barnard told his NGOs and his officers with a transparent heartiness, “let’s get ’em spread out, platoons abreast, through the trees.”

The guys just looked at him.

“Tom, the fucking professionals are sitting on their asses down there. Why are we the ones up here? I heard machine guns. Those guys on that mountain have missiles.”

“Phase four nuclear emergency. We’re working for them now, not the Governor. If they say we go, we go. Ours not to etc., etc. Look, the head guy told me those planes laid so much hurt on our friends up the bill, our big problem was going to be matching up body parts. So let’s get humping, huh, guys?”

“Lock and load?”

“Lock and load ’cm up, righto,” sang Barnard. “Full ammo, get the clips into the weapons, get the weapons unslung, have the guys open their clip pouches so they can reload on the double if there’s any kind of a fight and please, puh-lease, tell the boys to be careful. Semiauto. I don’t want any hotshot shooting his foot off.”

Grumblingly, his people started out.

Barnard went back to the radio, a little more confident because his officers and NCOs had obeyed. Around him he could hear them yelling, the men beefing, but, yes, everybody was filing off into the woods.

“Delta Six, this is Bravo, we are deployed and ready to jump.”

“Good work, Captain. Now, you’ve got 60s, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want your 60s in play earliest. We found out in ’Nam it helps the men if their own fire support is emplaced before they move.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the medics circulating behind the assault line, Don’t let ’em cluster together, get ’em into the open. The men like to see the medics. It’ll help them.”

“Yes, sir,”

“Major, finally, this is important. Don’t wait to take fire. Get your fire support going just as you cross that LD, do you read? I want to hear some noise. If any of these gooks are left alive, I want your boys to blow ’em away as they’re coming up the hill. Plenty of ammo. Okay. You copy?”

“I copy, Delta Six.”

“Okay, son,” Dick cooed. “One last thing. Keep the assault line up and moving forward. Don’t let the men hit the dirt and get pinned down. Keep up a heavy, steady volume of effective fire. And keep that fire low — ricochets kill just as dead as Charlie incoming.”

“Yes, sir,” said Barnard.

He turned to his RTO man.

“Wally, you stay near me, okay?”

“Yes, sir. No sweat.”

“That’s our unit motto,” said Barnard. “No sweat.”

He picked up his own M-16, drew a thirty-round magazine from his pouch, and clicked it into the magazine housing. Up ahead, he could see the trees and he could see his own men spread out through them. It was a bright, white day, the sun on the trees so brilliant it hurt his eyes. The sky was blue as a dream.

Jesus, he thought, I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m a tax accountant. I ought to be sitting at my desk.

“Okay,” he said to his executive officer, “Let’s move ’em out.” The line sounded too John Wayne to be real.

The flame was a silver needle, a blade almost. What it touched, it destroyed. Even through the thick black lenses and amid the showering sparks he could see that its power was absolute. It turned the world to a puddle.

Jack Hummel held the plasma-arc torch against the metal and watched the flame devour the titanium. Down here in the hole the world was serene and logical. He had a job to do, one he knew and almost loved, one he had done many, many times before. It was, after all, only cutting. He had, by this time, opened a deep wound in the smooth block of metal.

But at the same time, and despite the mesmerizing, messianic quality of the flame a few inches beyond his eyes, it was hard to concentrate. It was all so strange, and Jack had the terrible knowledge that he was doing something wrong. He should have fought harder. He should have made them beat him.

But he kept thinking, it wasn’t my fault. It happened so fast. It was … it was hard, you know. You’re in a no-win situation.

And he kept thinking how the world required heroes, but instead, it had gotten only him, Jack Hummel, podunk welder and former high school glory boy who had the guts of a rat. He began to hate himself.

You fucking scum, he said to himself.

But he knew they’d kill him and kill his kids. What difference did it make if the world got blown up then?

Barnard was amazed, really, at how well it seemed to be going. The guys were handling it like a wild game of cowboys and Indians, racing through the tree stumps, pawing up the slope in their platoon-abreast formation, keeping good contact with each other, John Wayneing it with the best of them. Even the machine-gun crews, with their twenty-three-pound M-60s and their forty to fifty pounds of ammo belts were keeping up, whereas in the exercises the gunners had tended to fall way back while the younger men gamboled ahead, fleet as deer.

Barnard had picked a tree about fifty yards ahead as his last line of departure; he’d fire there. He could see the crest now, the white-and-red striping of the radio mast against the blue sky, and some kind of low, dark tent just barely visible, but everything else was quiet. The trees had been chopped up by the A-10s; it was like hustling through an exploded toothpick factory over rough ground where the twenty-millimeter shells had plowed the earth. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”

“Delta, I have no contact yet. It’s all quiet. Maybe they left or something.”

“Get your assault support fire going, Bravo.”

“I thought I’d wait just—”

“Get it going, Bravo, that’s a command.”

“Affirmative, Delta,” said Barnard, handing the phone mike back to his RTO.

“Open fire!” he screamed.

Along the lumbering line, the Guardsmen began to hip-shoot their M-16s, jinking out rounds in semiautomatic. Up ahead, Barnard saw, the snow was beginning to fly where the torrent of 5.56-millimeter bullets popped into the earth.

“Go,” he screamed again, “come on, goddammit, hurry.”

His sergeants took up the cry and the volume of fire increased as the men syncopated their shots to their own rushing footsteps. So full of the blood-thinning joy and terror of the moment as they were, they began also to scream. The noise rose, unwilled, from their lungs. It was a moment of glory: the rush of the screaming infantry against the white hill under the blue sky, the punctuation of the rifles, and now the higher, faster whipping of the M-60s anchoring either end of the line, really pouring out the fire, raking what was visible of the hilltop less than a hundred yards ahead now as they—

Alex shot the officer in the throat from about two hundred meters with a scoped G-3; he’d been aiming for the head but the captain, bumbling along beside his RTO man just off the assault line, must have stepped on a log or something and so he rose in the scope just as Alex’s patient finger carefully stroked the trigger.

But it was still the shot he’d been waiting for.

You want to take down the senior commander at the first opportunity, Alex knew; nothing quite so devastates an attacking force than to see the man they’ve bonded to over the long years slide backward with his head blown away. And Alex had picked him out almost immediately as the attackers broke from the cover of the trees.

The unit began to fire. He could see them going down.

Because the wound that Alex delivered was not quite what Alex had intended, the bullet missed the brain and tore through the muscles and cartilage to the left of the larynx, and, since it was a full metal jacket in 7.62-millimeter NATO, didn’t mushroom and didn’t deliver a killing blast of hydrostatic shock, but rather exited neatly. The captain felt as if he’d been whacked in the throat with a baseball bat; the world went instantly to pieces as he fell backward into the snow. In seconds, however, his head had cleared, and his first thought was not for himself but for his men. He could see many of them were down and that the tracers floated out toward them like confetti thrown at a parade of triumph. The air seemed alive with buzzing, cracking things.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sir, Christ, Captain, oh, fuck, Captain” came some terrible moaning next to him. His RTO man had been shot in the stomach.

“Medic!” screamed Barnard.

A burst of fire, kicking up snow and bits of wood, lashed by him. He scrunched into the earth. His left side felt numb; his head hurt terribly. He rolled over, fighting for breath.

“Captain, Captain, what do we do?” somebody yelled.

Alex only had two heavy automatic weapons, the M-60 from the van and the H&K-21, but he knew he had to break the assault’s spine in the very first second or fall victim to a messy perimeter fight that would sap the energy of his men.

He’d therefore placed the two guns together in the center of his line, thereby, of course, violating all infantry doctrine, because a single grenade or even a well-placed burst of fire could destroy them both. He’d also directed that several two-hundred-round belts be ripped from their canisters and linked, so that they could fire continually without reloading for one full minute. This meant the barrels overheated dangerously; thus, stationed next to each barrel there crouched a trooper with — an astonishing improvisation, come to think of it — a fire extinguisher from the ruins of the installation. As the guns fired, these men squirted cold carbon dioxide onto the barrels and works.

The guns fired for one minute, one solid minute of full automatic. It didn’t really matter, Alex believed, how accurate they were; what was important was the volume of fire and the impression of endless ammunition hurtling at the attackers. Still, they were very accurate.

“Bravo, this is Delta Six. This is Delta Six, do you copy? Bravo, what is your situation? We can hear heavy fire. What is your situation? Bravo, don’t let your men bunch up, keep them moving. Act aggressively, Bravo, you’ve got to act aggressively.” Puller gripped the phone. He was aware he was violating his own most precious principle, which was not to interfere with ground forces during maneuver, knowing from bitter experience at Desert One that a staff commander on the radio merely screwed things up. But the sound of the fire from the mountain was heavy and terrifying.

“I think you’re talking to a dead man, Colonel,” said Skazy.

Down at the girl scout camp they could hear the gunfire rising from the mountain for a long minute. Then it stopped, and there was silence. Then, now and then, the pop and crack of a single rifle, or a burst of automatic fire.

“Return their fire, goddammit,” Barnard yelled back, coming out of his shock. Anger, confusion, finally bitterness, began to gnaw at him. He groped around for his M-16, found it, and rolled over. Other shots were beginning to rise from his troops. At least we’re answering them, goddammit, he thought.

So where was the great Delta? Back on its ass down the mountain! All this shit about Delta in the magazines, and Delta sits on its ass while Bravo Company of the 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, gets ripped to ribbons.

Barnard got his black plastic rifle up against his shoulder. Squinting over the sights, he could see the gun flashes from Aggressor Force, yet he felt in no particular danger. Languidly, he began to fire, jerking off rounds one, two, three at a time. The rifle had very little kick. He fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another one. After a while it seemed a little stupid.

“Captain!”

Someone slid into the snow next to him. It was a Lieutenant Dill from the second platoon, a phys ed teacher at a Baltimore high school.

“Captain Barnard, I have a lot of hurt men, a lot of dying men. Jesus, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The captain just looked at him.

“God, sir, are you — you’re all covered with blood! Medic, get over here.”

“No, no,” said the captain. “I’m not hurt that bad. Look, if we just pull back they’ll chop us up. I’m going to slide over to where the machine gun should be and see if I can’t set up some covering fire, okay. You wait a minute or two; when I get the fire going, you get the men out of here. Don’t leave anybody behind, Lieutenant!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the men firing. If they’re not firing, they’re not helping.”

Barnard began to crawl through the snow. Now and then a bullet would come whipping in his direction. But he made it down the line and found his company’s machine gun, lying on its side half sunk in the snow, a loose belt nearby and a batch of dead shells lying around. He recognized his gunner, a steelworker; half his face was gone where a heavy-caliber bullet had punched through.

The captain wiggled forward through the snow, breathing hard. God, it was cold now. He seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he was so wet with the snow that he’d begun to go numb. Pulling the gun to him, he managed with his stiff, fat fingers to get the latch off the breech and get a belt unrolled, and set the lead cartridge into the guides. He slammed the latch shut and drew back the bolt.

“Movement?” Alex asked his gunners.

A bullet hit the logs before them, kicked up a cloud of smoke.

“On the left; there’s a group on the left.”

The gunner swung the H&K-21. Indeed, a wretched huddle of men appeared to be crawling forward. Or perhaps not crawling forward, but merely crawling anywhere, forward being the direction they’d settled on.

“Yes, there”—Alex pointed—“take them down, please.”

The gun fired a long burst and Alex watched as the tracers flicked out and seemed to sink toward the men. Where they struck they kicked up snow and the men disappeared in its swirl.

“Some in the center,” somebody said. “However, I think they’re retreating.”

“You have to fire anyway,” said Alex. “It will give the next assault team something to think about.”

The H&K-21 fired briefly; more tracers streamed down the mountain, found their targets.

“Rather horrible,” said one of the loaders.

“Not a good attack,” said Alex. “I don’t think these are elite troops I’d anticipated. I think they were amateurs. Casualties?”

“Sir, two men dead in the covering fire and three wounded.”

“Well,” said Alex. “They did do some damage then. And ammunition. We used a lot of ammunition in a very short time. That, too, I suppose, hurts us. But it cost them so much. I didn’t think it was their style, to die like that.”

The captain drew the gun to him. He couldn’t see much now, just barbed wire, some smoke, the aerial, the damned tent, and lots of high blue sky above.

He wished he weren’t so tired. On the slope before Aggressor Force’s position, he saw bodies. What, thirty-five, maybe forty? Jesus, they caught us in the open. They just let us get close and they blew us away.

He squinted over the gun barrel. Nope, nothing. Couldn’t hit a goddamn thing with a machine gun, even.

It occurred to him that he might see a little better if he stood up. He thought about it; yes, it made sense. He’d just — oof! — stand up, yes, and then he’d be able to see much better to shoot.

He stood. It worked! He could see them now, or their heads moving, clustered at the center of their line behind the barbed wire. He thought, boy, sure am glad I thought to stand. It seemed entirely logical. He’d worked it out. With his covering fire, most of his guys could get out of the kill zone. That’s why they made me a captain, he thought. ’Cause I’m so smart.

With that thought, he fired.

The gun bucked through twenty-round bursts. He fired at the center of the line. He could see the far-off puffs where the bursts struck. The gun was surprisingly easy to control, though a bit muzzle-heavy, with the bipod out there pulling it down. Trick was to keep the bursts short, then correct for muzzle drift. Firing it was actually quite a bit of fun. He could move the thing slightly and watch as the bullets stitched small disturbances into the earth. He felt the hot brass pouring out of the breech like the winnings at a slot machine. The gun began to steam; its barrel was melting snow packed in the cooling vents. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. He fired a belt that way in about thirty seconds.

Then laboriously he began to change belts.

“The right, the right, goddamn, the right,” screamed Alex. Who had fired at them? In less than thirty seconds he lost seven men and one of the rounds clipped the breech of his H&K-21, putting it out of action. The bullets swept in on him. Alex felt their sting and spray. One of his gunners lay on the mud floor of the trench, his right eye smashed.

“The right!” Alex screamed again, sliding to the earth as the bullets began to rip up his position again. He heard the firing rise. All up and down the line his men were answering.

Quickly, he crawled back, turned his binoculars. He could see the gunner, about two hundred meters off on the right. The bullets searched for him, cutting into the snow around him. Yet still he fired, just standing there. Standing there. Like some kind of hero. The bullets finally found him.

“Cease fire,” Alex yelled.

“Sir, a bunch of them slipped away while the fire was hitting the gun.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes, twenty or thirty, just got up and ran down the hill.”

“Well, whoever that man was, he was a soldier. I’ll say that.”

“My marriage,” said Peter Thiokol not so much to the agents but somehow to the air itself, “if it had a script, it was written by Woody Allen and Herman Kahn.”

“I don’t understand the reference to Herman Kahn,” one of the FBI agents said.

“In the sense that it followed the classic pattern that Herman identified. The slow, gradual buildup of hostilities, the real arms race, the breakdown in communication, until finally open conflict seems the lesser of two evils. And that’s when you get your classic spasm war. You know, multiple launches by both sides, multiple hits, the global catastrophe, nuclear winter. The end of civilization. That was the drama of our marriage. We blew each other away in the end.”

There was silence from them.

“It was a very intense union,” Peter told them, “but not at first. I just told her I was there at Oxford studying poly sci, which is true. I didn’t tell her about my thing for the bomb or that I had a good line on an Air Force job and that I was heading for D.C. That came out later. I–I couldn’t really figure out how to break it to her. She wasn’t much interested in what I did, at first. She was rather self-involved. Beautiful, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

“So when did she figure out how you were going to make a living?” said the sharper of the two.

“Oh, finally, I told her. ’Seventy-four. We’d been in Washington a year. I’d just moved from the Strategic Study Group to the Targeting Committee. It was a big leap for me and it meant about ten extra grand a year. Not that we needed the money. Her folks had plenty, but it was nice to be doing well suddenly, and she said she’d finally figured out what strategic meant.”

What does it mean? he’d asked.

It means bombs, isn’t that right?

Yes.

You think about bombs. You think about war all day. I thought it was more abstract, somehow. Thinking about strategies and that sort of thing, chess and so forth. Or about history, like your project at Oxford. But it’s very specific, isn’t it?

Yes, very, he said. He’d spent the day contemplating the effects of a nine-megaton fused airburst from a W53/Mk-6 reentry vehicle delivered by a Titan II at four thousand feet versus the same hardware and throw-weight in a fused air-burst at two thousand feet in terms of fireball circumference vis-a-vis damage radius to a soft target like an industrialized urban base the size of, say, downtown Vladivostok.

I look on it as thinking about peace, he said. Ways to keep the peace.

By building more and better bombs?

He sighed, not at the stupidity of it, but because he knew that from that moment on, there was no turning back, no recall.

“How did your wife take the news?”

“Not too well.”

“No kids?”

“The bomb was our baby, she used to say. But Megan was too beautiful for pregnancy. She didn’t want to lose her waistline. She’d never admit that, but that’s it. And the bomb. It wasn’t that it would blow the world up, it’s that it would blow her up. She took it personally. She took everything personally.”

Peter, she once said to him, do you realize you are the only man in the Western world who has nightmares about nuclear bombs not exploding?

“She’s famous, your wife?”

“In a very small world. She makes sculptures that are highly thought of. She gets great reviews, and sells the stuff for a ton of money. I liked it. It was very impressive. And I think the reason she never left me was that she drew off of me and what I did. Her art would have suffered. She made these anguished things, these masses of mashed tin and plaster and painted surfaces. It was our old pal, Mr. Bomb.”

“Was she untrue?”

It took Peter a long second to make sense of the word. It was so quaint and comical.

“I don’t know. She went to New York once a month or every six weeks. She said she had to get out of Washington. At first I went with her, but I didn’t really go for those people. Assholes, all of them. It was still the sixties for them. It always will be.”

“Politics. Was she in a ban-the-bomb group or anything?”

“No. She was too vain to join groups. She wouldn’t join any group she couldn’t be the leader of. Then I published my essay, and I became the celebrity and started going on the tube and that really hurt her.”

“‘And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD’?”

“Yes.”

He remembered: the argument was simple. MAD — mutual assured destruction, the crux of strategic thought — was a fallacy. We could deploy our MXs before the Soviets improved their 18s and got their 24s on line and it would be possible, under certain rigidly controlled circumstances, to make aggressive moves against the Soviet Union without fear of retaliation. Eastern Europe, for example. In other words, it was theoretically possible, if we could get our MXs out and Star Wars going, to win without the big launch. Reagan loved it. It made Peter the superstar of the sunbelt right.

“That’s what got me the head of the MX Basing Modes Group. I was making eighty thousand a year, I was suddenly very high-profile, I’m on TV, journalists are coming courting. And she hated it. I think that’s what finally drove her to him.” He paused. “She started up with him right after that. I think she’s with him now.”

“Who is he?”

“I met him once. His name was Ari Gottlieb. He was an Israeli painter, briefly big in Manhattan. Very handsome man, taught a course at the Corcoran. She met him at some Washington art thing. It was a very difficult time. We were in the middle of this squabble over MX basing modes.”

“She was different after meeting him?”

“Yes. It was about two years ago. Congress had settled on an initial deployment of one hundred missiles to go into Minuteman II silos and we knew that was tragically wrong because it completely invalidated the premise and that it was dangerous and we had to put at least one in an independent-launch-capable super-hard silo, to beat the new inertial guidance system of the SS-18, to say nothing of the next-generation missiles. So we were working crazily on South Mountain to be our first deployed independent-launch-capable Peacekeeper unit, but trying to keep it within the congressional guidelines. We were cheating, in other words. And she hated it, because the thing just was eating up my time and my mind. And I was fighting for this fifteen-million-dollar gimmick called the key vault, which nobody wanted, and let me tell you, it was maximum-effort time. She hated that the most, I guess. That it absorbed me so completely. And maybe that finally pushed her over.”

“How was she different?”

“I’d finally screamed at her”—he remembered the night, a livid memory, like a scar, still tender to the touch—“that maybe she hated what I was doing, but I was doing something. Something. That I believed. That she sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never doing anything, never believing in anything. That she was too precious to do anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was all.”

“And that was it?”

“In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn’t even bothered to change the pillowcases. She had to let me know. She had to hurt me.”

He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she’d finally launched, and now he had to counterstrike on warning or lose his hardware in the silos.

“Cheap aftershave,” he said. “English Leather, can you believe that?”

“What happened?”

Peter couldn’t reach it, couldn’t touch it.

The pause lengthened.

“And?”

“Look, it was a very intense relationship. I was capable of…”

“Capable of what, Dr. Thiokol?”

“I guess finally I hit her.” He remembered the evening, June it was, leafy June, the air full of light, the trees green, the breeze sweet and lovely. He’d never hit anything before. He remembered the way her head jolted on the impact and the way her eyes went blank and then her face broke up with fear. She fell back, leaking blood, her nose mashed. Spasm war: the end. She cried. He felt so shitty, he tried to help her, but he was afraid he’d think about Ari Gottlieb again and hit her some more. He told her he was feeling pretty fucked up in the head, she ought to get out of there. He might kill her. And he told her he was going to get a gun and kill Ari Gottlieb. That was June.

“It was something else too.”

Peter turned so that he didn’t have to look at the two of them. After all the denying, it was time to reach in and go where he was most terrified to go. He finally faced it.

“I’d also — well, I did a lot of work at home, and I found stuff — rearranged. Out of order. Slightly scrambled. It really scared the hell out of me. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.”

“It was her?”

“It had to be.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I just put it into the deep part of my head and covered it up with everything I had. Have you ever heard of denial? You refuse to deal with reality. That’s when I flipped, I really flipped. I crashed in July.”

There was another long silence.

“It sounds like a classic,” said one of the agents. “They probably had the two of you under surveillance for a long time, knew exactly how vulnerable she was. They built her a dream man, tailored exactly to your weaknesses. He seduced her. And recruited her. That’s how they did it.”

“Who? Gottlieb was an Israeli, for Christ’s sake. They’re on our side, for God’s sake.”

“Well, in some things. In others, maybe not. Maybe — well, who knows? She’ll have to tell us.”

This struck through Peter’s defenses. Ashamed, he still reacted instinctively. “Go easy on her. The truth is, no matter what, I still love her. I never loved anyone before and I’ll never love anyone else. It was my fault. It wasn’t hers—”

Finally, he’d run out of words.

He sat for a while after they rushed off with their little treasure, feeling awfully rocky inside. Had he just betrayed her? He wasn’t sure anymore where the higher loyalties lay. He hated the idea of disappointing her again, after everything else. He also felt close to her. He realized it had pleased him to talk of her. He wanted to reach out for her. It was dark in the room. He thought of Megan, Megan’s laugh, which he had not heard for ages.

He remembered the last time he’d seen her. Two weeks ago, after such a long time. They’d talked for a while, and for a while everything seemed fine and there seemed to be some chance for them. He was out of the bin and teaching at the Hopkins and everything was fine. The key vault thing was finally going through, they’d just sent him the final design configuration and the Northrop design team had really done a good—

But in the morning she’d been angry with him. She said he was happy only because the project was going well. He was still a part of it, wasn’t he? He still drew power and pleasure from its evil.

He’d gotten angry. Shouts, screams, accusations, the same old business, the air hot with neurotic fury. He’d watched her go off.

Still, she’d looked so damn beauti—

Certain things clicked in the machine of a brain he had and Peter recognized from the pattern that a wondrous possibility had just been opened.

But he also had a moment of real loneliness. Jesus, Megan, what the fuck have you done now? What the fuck have I done?

And then he thought, Where is Puller? Where is Puller?

They reached the lateral tunnel without much trouble, and Rat Team Alpha headed one way, toward the shaft called Alice. That left Team Baker to veer toward Elizabeth.

“We goin’ to fuck this Elizabeth,” said Walls. “We goin’ crawl up this white bitch’s pussy, and fuck her to death. Give her some lovin’ like she never thought of. Once they go black, they never go back.”

“Shut up,” said Witherspoon, an edge on his voice.

“Man, you talk like you married to a white bitch.”

“I am. Shut up.”

“Man, no wonder you so mellow. Man, I was cashing in on white pussy every night, I tell you—”

“Shut up. Nobody talks about my wife like that. She’s a terrific gal who just happens to be white, goddammit.”

Walls snickered, a deep contemptuous sound. So rich. This jive-ass white boy nigger is full of himself, Mr. Delta Mean Motherfucker, see how he do if Charlie’s up ahead. He shit up his pants real good.

He liked the darkness, the cool air of the tomb. The tunnel was narrowing, too, closing down. The initial shaft had been cleanly cut into the mountain, almost like a stairwell, its walls flat and more or less smooth. A little railroad track had run through it where the miners pushed their little trains. It had a comfy feel to it.

But now, after the separation of the teams, the walls were closing in. It was coolish and clammy in there; he could smell the coal dust in the air, and something else, too, a tang or something. Witherspoon’s powerful beam cut like a sword all around, jiggering nervously this way and that, its white circle roaming all over the place like a man’s hands on a woman’s body. Meanwhile, Walls kept his beam straight ahead.

“Man, you must be nervous or something.”

Witherspoon didn’t say a thing. The night vision goggles pressed against his head tightly, pinching it, and it was less than pleasant. And he was a little jumpy, it was true. In Grenada he had been amazed by how un-nervous he was, but it had happened so fast, there wasn’t time to be nervous. The stick had landed, they shucked their ‘chutes and were hauling ass up this little ravine toward the airfield HQ, when literally, all hell had broken loose. Some lucky Cubie had been gazing skyward when the black-painted Charlie-130 Herc had flown in for the insertion, and had seen the black-clad commandos floating to earth.

And Jesus, after that, forget the mission, the job had just been to stay alive. It was like crawling through the Fourth of July, all the fireworks in the world floating out at you, trying to knock you off.

But this was different. Witherspoon hadn’t thought a lot about the underground. He was Special Forces, Ranger, and Delta, the best of the best of the best. Courage was his profession. But, uh, like, a tunnel? In a mountain? He cleared his throat. Soon he’d have to face the horror of dumping the beam and going to infrared. Ceiling getting real low.

“Hey, man?” Walls’s voice, soft now, its mocking edge gone. “Man, you scared? You ain’t said much.”

“I’m okay,” Witherspoon said.

“Man, this ain’t nothing. In the ’Nam, the tunnels so low you got to crawl through them, you know. And man, them people they shit in those tunnels, they got no other place to shit. And over the years, man, the shit mount. Man, finally, you crawling through shit. You think this is bad, you try crawling on your belly through shit waiting for some gook girl like that pretty number in the other tunnel waiting to stick a razor blade in your throat.”

But this was plenty bad enough for Witherspoon.

He was really having trouble with his … breathing now. The blackness, the closeness of it, the sense of the tomb. And men had died here, hadn’t they? Fifty years back, in this same hole, over a hundred of them.

“Rat Team Baker, do you copy? Baker, this is Rat Six, you guys copy?” The voice was loud in his ears.

“Roger and copy, Six,” said Witherspoon into his Prick-88’s hands-free mike.

“Jesus, you guys were supposed to log in fifteen minutes ago. What the hell is going on in there?” Something in Rat Six’s white voice really irked Witherspoon.

“No sweat, Six, we’re just bumbling along. Hey, hold your water, okay, Six?”

“Let’s stick to radio SOP, Sergeant. You want to tell us what’s up?”

“Affirmative, Six, we’re through the main shaft and we’ve gotten into the lateral and we’re looking for this Elizabeth. The farther out we get, the lower the ceiling is. This tunnel’s drying up to nothing.”

“How’s your pal?”

“He’s doing fine,” said Witherspoon, sensing his partner next to him.

“Roger that, Baker, you guys stick to the schedule now, okay. You let us know anything turns up.”

“So what’s going on there?”

“National Guard guys got their butts shot off, that’s what. These are mucho tough hombres, these guys, Baker, you watch your ass.”

“Affirmative, Six, and out.”

And then Walls said, “Shit, man, I think that’s it.”

His beam flicked out and nailed a gap in the wall, no bigger than a crawl space, low and ominous in the white shine of the bulb.

It was the tunnel called Elizabeth.

“Oh, baby,” said Walls, “have I got a dick for you.”

“Smoke,” said Poo. “Smoke. It’s burning. It’s a fire.”

They could see the column of smoke rising, drifting, on the wind. Several of the neighbors were out on their snowy lawns, staring.

“Herman, why is it burning?”

“It’s an airplane,” Herman said. “An airplane has crashed in the fields and now it is burning. It must be some kind of terrible accident.”

They were in the basement, peering out of the small cellar window. The smoke smeared across the bright blue sky through the lacework of the trees.

“Can we go look at it?”

“No,” said Herman. “I think we’d better stay here. It will be very hot. The firemen will take care of it.”

“Is the man all right?”

“The man?”

“The man that drives the airplane. Is he all right?”

“I’m sure he’s all right. Poo, I’ll tell you, they push a button and the tops fly off and they pop out. Just like toast from a toaster. And they float down to the ground under a big umbrella and they’re all right.”

“Do they get another airplane? If they break their airplane, do they get another airplane?”

“Oh, yes. They get another airplane.”

Just then, the Burkittsville fire engine went crashing by the house, and headed out the road toward the field.

Beth Hummel looked at Herman now. She’d made the connection between the whirling jets and the crashed airplane and her vanished husband and Herman.

“Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?”

“Please, lady,” he said. “We mean you no harm. Please, okay, you just do what we want, no harm comes to nobody, okay? We’re just guests, for a little while longer, okay. Then everybody’s okay, just fine, super good. Okay?”

“Oh, Lord. Why? Why is this happening?”

“It has to happen,” Herman said. “It has to happen. It’s for everybody’s own good.”

Just then there was a knock at the door. They could hear it from downstairs. It grew louder.

Dick Puller put down the microphone, lit a cigarette. A loud roar rose and beat at them as four medevac choppers rushed overhead to the base of the mountain to pick up the wounded.

“How bad?” asked Skazy.

“He wasn’t making a lot of sense,” said Puller. “I gather it was pretty bad. Of the hundred and forty men in the company, he had confirms on forty fatals sure. Maybe fifty. He said he had a lot of men shot up. The walking wounded got a lot of them off the hill. Not too many guys left untouched. Unit morale shattered. Nonexistent. I told him he had to go back.”

Puller smiled a crooked, sardonic smile.

“And?”

“And he told me to get fucked. His manners aren’t any better than yours, Major.”

“The CO?”

“Didn’t make it back. He was last seen on the M-60, giving covering fire. I don’t even know his name.”

“I think it was Barnard.”

“I think you’re right,” said Puller. He could see the choppers on the ground, far off, their rotors glistening in the bright sunlight, the dust and snow stirring and whirling. Tiny figures rushed around them. Above them, the mountain rose in a rainbow arc, implacable and immutable. The little red and white aerial seemed to wink at them over the black stain of the tarpaulin. They hadn’t even found out what was under the tarp.

“You’ve got to send Delta in now, Colonel Puller. You can’t let them have time to regroup or those men will have died for nothing.”

“They were never ungrouped, Major Skazy. Don’t you understand that yet? Delta goes when I say and not a second before. I’d advise you to back the fuck off, young Major,” said Puller.

He fixed his eyes on Skazy, who met his gaze fiercely.

“When are we going?” the major said, his face impassive, his eyes unlit.

“After dark. We’ve got to let those rats see if they’ve got a chance at opening a back door. We’ve got to get Thiokol time to get us beyond the door of the elevator shaft. I’ll get you your goddamned chance, Major. You have my word.”

He turned and found a seat on a folding lawn chair some thoughtful trooper had pulled out for him. He checked his watch. There was going to be a long night ahead.

“Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!”

It was Peter Thiokol, his demeanor adolescent and abandoned in excitement, jumping crazily as he ran toward them.

“Who would that be?” Herman demanded.

“I–I don’t know,” Beth Hummel stammered.

“Is it the airplane driver?” Poo asked.

“Mommy, I bet it’s my teacher,” said Bean. “They want to know why I’m not in school.”

Herman pulled Beth close to him.

“Who?” he demanded.

“Herman, you’re hurting Mommy,” said Poo. “You’ll make her cry. You’ll make Mommy cry. Herman, don’t hurt my mommy.”

Poo began to cry.

“If it’s a neighbor, they’ll know I’m in here,” said Beth.

Herman thought in a frenzy.

“All right,” he said finally, “you go answer. Say nothing. Remember, I’ll be behind the door. I’ll hear it all. Don’t do anything stupid. Please, these other men will be here with the children, don’t do anything stupid, don’t force us to do anything we don’t want to do.”

He released her.

“Don’t do anything stupid. Please.” He pressed the muzzle of the silenced Uzi against her ribs, just once, lightly, so she could feel it.

Beth climbed the steps. She could see the shape in the window of the door and went to it.

“Yes?”

God, it was Kathy Reed, from next door.

“Beth, what is going on, have you heard? Three planes have crashed. Someone says there’s terrible shooting going on at South Mountain and that the state police have closed all the roads. There was an explosion on the road up to the mountain in the morning. They say there are helicopters in the valley and soldiers and—”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing on the news.”

“God, do you suppose they have gas or something up there, and there’s some kind of leak. What kind of telephone station could it be?”

“I–I don’t know,” said Beth. “If there were any danger, I’m sure the government would tell us.”

“I’m so scared, Beth. Bruce is away. Beth, he’s got the car. If there’s an evacuation, will you take us? God, Beth, I’ve got the twins and—”

“Oh, Kathy, don’t worry. I’ll take you if it comes to that. I swear it. You go inside now and relax. If I hear anything, I’ll tell you. I promise.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No, I swear. I swear it.”

“Thank you, Beth. It means so much.”

She went back to her own house. Beth closed the door.

“Mommy, why was Mrs. Reed crying? Was she scared of Herman?”

“No, honey. No, she was just upset. Was that all right?”

“That was fine,” said Herman. “That was okay, lady, you did real good.”

“Who are you?” said Poo. “You’re not from around here at all, are you? You’re from far away.”

“Very far away,” he answered.

“Yes, what is it, Dr. Thiokol?” Dick Puller asked, pulling himself away from Skazy.

“Something’s just occurred to me. I–I should have thought of it earlier.” He was momentarily put off by the sense of distance between the two officers; he had the sudden, awkward sense of being an outsider at some kind of intense family dispute. But he plunged on.

“It may be of some help. You ought to hear this, too, Major Skazy.”

“Go on.”

Peter said, “Well, we think we know who compromised South Mountain. I’ve told the FBI. All right?”

“Yes?”

“Now, we think this person was photographing documents and plans in my own home. I was very sloppy, it was—”

“Just go on,” said Puller.

“Well, this person left my house before the planning was quite complete. Do you understand?”

Neither of them did, apparently. They stared at Peter as if he were stupid. Military men, he told himself, be patient. Explain it slowly. Connect all the dots for them.

“She left before the key vault was designed. So whoever planned whatever’s going on up there never knew about the key vault. Until—”

“Until when?”

“She came back two weeks ago. She came back to tell me she’d thought it over and she just wanted to see me — well, I’ll spare you the pitiful details. But she was in the house. I slept with her a last time. The vault had been improved, it was designed, they were implementing it, and they sent me the dope. She could have seen it.”

“Dr. Thiokol, in all due respect, I don’t know what the hell you’re driving at here,” said Puller, glowering furiously at him, almost rigid with impatience. “We already know there’s been an intelligence leak of—”

Asshole! Peter thought. Stupid asshole!

“If they know about the key vault, they found out very late. Two weeks ago! Probably, maybe, possibly too late to figure it into their original operational plans. If that’s the case, they probably didn’t bring a welder along. So they would have had to pick one up here. Don’t you see? They would have had to hire one or kidnap one or something like that. Now, if they did that, they wouldn’t try and hold him for two weeks. They’d do it right before they jumped and they’d do it close by. I’m saying, maybe we can trace it.”

“All right.”

Their eyes remained abstracted, unfocused, lacking that primal spark of inspiration. They still didn’t quite see it.

“Look, if you were going to force a man to perform a job for you, how would you get him to do it? Think of a bank president robbers take in order to get him to open the safe. How do they do it? Well, they find hostages. They leave somebody at his house with his wife and kids, right? Now, maybe that’s what they’ve done here, maybe there’s a wife and some kids and some very bad baby-sitters not too far from where we stand. And suppose—”

“Prisoners!” said Skazy, getting to it first. “Yes, prisoners. We get prisoners, we find out what and who we’re up against.”

But Dick Puller was already on the move. He hurried into the command post and quickly located his young assistant from the FBI, James Uckley, who for the past several hours had been ripping teletype info and filing reports himself to the Bureau on the operation and feeling sorry for himself for incurring Puller’s wrath.

It didn’t take Puller long to explain what he wanted, and from then it didn’t take Uckley long to find what they were looking for. He began with the Yellow Pages and started calling welding services. At the fifth entry — Jackson Hummel, 19 Main Street, Burkittsville, 555–2219—there was no answer. He then called the Burkittsville police station, talked to a sergeant and had a request; the sergeant returned the call almost immediately. No, it did not appear that Jack Hummel had opened his service for business that day. The cop had asked on both sides and found that Jack was expected in Boonsboro that day at the Chalmers plant. Uckley called Chalmers, to discover that no, goddammit, the welder had not showed up, nobody knew where he’d gone, maybe he was sick. He called the cop back and asked if Jack could be sick. The cop didn’t know but said he could stop by Jack’s house which was just up the road. It would be real easy, the cop said.

No, said Uckley. They’d handle it themselves, but please stand by in case further help was needed. His next phone call was to the elementary school, where it only took him a few minutes to learn from the principal that Jack Hummel did have two daughters, Elizabeth called Bean and Phyllis called Poo, and that indeed both of them were unexpectedly absent today.

Uckley thanked her and got off the phone.

“I think we’ve got a Condition Red,” he told Dick Puller. “It looks like they’ve got this guy Hummel in the mountain—he’s their cutter — and his wife and kids in his house.”

Puller nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Major Skazy, I want four of your best operators.”

“Yes, sir, I can—”

“Just go get them, Major. Get them now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skazy, clearly irked at how summarily he was being dismissed.

Puller pulled Uckley aside, out of the hearing range of the others.

“I think you’ll have to handle this one. He’ll get you those Delta specialists and you ought to have police backup, but don’t let the police get too close. They might mess things up. You never know how well these little country-town cops are going to handle heavy business. Besides, you’ll do better with fewer rather than more people. But we need to take that house down and we need to talk to those people.”

He looked at his watch.

“And we need to do it fast.”

“Yes, sir,” said Uckley, swallowing.

He looked hard at Uckley. The young man returned the stare, but seemed scattered, his thoughts not quite together.

“You’ve had SWAT training, I assume?”

“Yes,” Uckley said, barely remembering the frenzied week four years earlier at Quantico.

“All right, good. You’re clear? I mean, absolutely clear? There’s a mother and two little girls in that house. I’m sure they are lovely people. But you must understand what’s important, you and the men you take into that house.”

Uckley looked away, through the window. The mountain gleamed.

“The men in that house are important. The mother, the two girls—” Dick hesitated a second, then plunged ahead in full adult awareness of the ruthless thing he was about to do. Did he have to say it, actually put it in words? Uckley shot a squirrely look back at him. Dick could tell from the hurt and confusion lurking in his eyes that yes, he did have to say it.

“Look, I have two daughters myself. There’s nothing more precious to me in the world than the two of them, and certainly that’s true for this Hummel too. But you’ve got to think hard here, Uckley. You have to see through to what’s important. You have to weigh the potential immediate loss against the other, far greater, far more devastating loss. That’s what we’re paid to do.”

Like an idiot, the young federal agent simply looked at him.

“The mother and the two girls aren’t important. You may have to lose them. If it comes to it, you’ll have to lose them rather than risk losing the prisoners. The Delta people are very good; they’ve been trained to take down a building and set free the hostages. But they’ll shoot for the head, and you’ve got to stop them. You’ve got to take prisoners, Jim. Do you understand that?”

Uckley said he did.

The answer to all problems is vodka, Gregor Arbatov had decided. It was Russia’s main contribution to the culture of the world, more important than Tolstoi, more passionate than Dostoevski, more lasting than world communism.

He now sat with a glass of it in a dark bar called Jake’s on Route 1 in the seedy little Maryland town of Laurel, not far from Columbia. He was exceedingly happy. A beautiful American lady of perhaps sixty with perhaps half her own teeth and none of her own hair and a tattoo had just brought him a refill, with a golden smile and a hearty laugh. He loved her. She was a saint. Saint Teresa of the Order of the Vodka. She reminded him of his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

But what he loved most was what the vodka did to him. It blurred his terrors, it mellowed his brain. It seemed to leak straight through his skull and penetrate to the very center of the organ itself, mollifying, subjectifying, calming, soothing, as it went.

“Ah, Miss. Another, please.”

“Sure, hon. You surely do sop it up.”

He smiled. His teeth were not terribly impressive either. Her eyes were merry.

“You kinda cute,” she said, handing the glass down to him. “Bartender’s a close personal friend of mine. He said this one’s on the house.”

Gregor smiled. Somewhere under the bulge of his gut that hung down over his lap his dick stirred.

But then he thought of young Klimov. Trying to kill him. And his dick withered.

Clouds came across his wide face; fear flashed in his little eyes. The waitress was gone. The only thing that was there was the whisper of the blade as it darted by him, and the thrum of its vibration as it plunged into the car roof.

Gregor blinked, came out of it, and dived into the vodka.

Yes, so much better.

Gregor sat back. He had figured it out.

It was Klimov. Really, he could almost sympathize with the younger man. He wished to move his least productive agent out. He could not simply fire him, the time had passed for that, he had fired too many others, if he fires him then it reflects poorly on Klimov. Therefore, with a little ingenuity, perhaps aided by the intercession of his powerful uncle Arkady Pashin of GRU, he penetrates the Pork Chop security arrangements, sets up a phony meet, and then arranges for his rotten apple to die.

The results are interesting and beneficial to everyone except poor Gregor, who in theory is now dead, six inches of Spetsnaz blade cleaving his fat chest. But Klimov has eliminated his bad apple in a dramatic way, with a minimum of personal embarrassment. He can be protected in this maneuver by the importunings of Pashin, watching over his little nephew, wielding his great power and influence like a sword. At the same time, Pork Chop has been discredited. To what purpose? Perhaps whoever controls Pork Chop has accumulated too much power in the higher ranks and must therefore be destroyed by a rival. Surely the rival in question would be, again, Pashin.

Good God, realized poor Gregor, he had been targeted for execution by a senior general in the GRU, one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

There was only one answer: vodka.

“Miss. Another one.”

Gregor swallowed the liquid. It dashed down his throat. He felt his face burning red. He looked at the empty glass in his fat hand.

Lumbering with agility that might have surprised his many enemies in this world, Gregor made it to the men’s room, pulled out a pocketful of change, and with studied labor and enormous effort called the one person in the world he felt he could trust, Magda Goshgarian.

The phone rang time and time again. Finally, her groggy voice came on.

“Magda!”

“Tata! I am stunned. What on—”

“Magda, listen please. I need a favor. I will be continually in your service if you can help me. Please, I cannot begin to tell you how—”

“Stop sniveling, Tata. Are you drunk? You sound pathetic.”

“Magda, something is going on.”

“Yes, it is. Young Klimov wants to bite your head off.”

“No, something else. Magda, I am — indisposed.”

“Is it a woman, Tata? Some American bitch with a baby in her belly that came from your tiny dick?”

“No, no. It has nothing to do with women. It has to do with the fact that I must stay clear of the embassy for a few days now while I sort some matters out.”

“You’re going over. Tata, don’t you implicate me, they are watching me too. I swear, Tata, if you go, you’ll leave such a mess—”

“No, I swear. I swear on my father’s grave and the great Marx’s image that I’ll remain true. It’s just that for technical reasons, I am indisposed tonight. Alas, I have cipher clerk duty in the Wine Cellar tonight. I—”

“Tata, I—”

“I know you did it last night. But since you have therefore rested today, you are therefore automatically my replacement. I call merely to ask you to take the duty for me. You can tell Klimov I called you from my afternoon pickup and that it was going very slowly for me and that I was afraid therefore I would not be back in time and that I therefore asked you to take the watch. And that you have not heard from me since. I think you’ll find him surprisingly agreeable.”

“Tata, I—”

“Please, darling. I’ll buy you a dinner. I’ll buy you the most extraordinary dinner in some ridiculously expensive Georgetown restaurant. I have a little squirrel fund hidden away, that’s all, and I can afford it, I promise.”

“Tata—”

“Magda, you know you cannot deny me one single thing. It is not your nature to deny me.”

“You are such a sniveling, craven fool.”

“Magda, you have no idea how desperately I need the help. You’ll help?”

At last she surrendered.

“All right.”

“I love you, darling.”

“It means I’ll have to do double duty tomorrow. My system will be upset for weeks.”

“Pick your restaurant, Magda, and you shall have whatever you want.”

Gregor hung up. Now, if he could call the other woman in his life, Molly Shroyer, and if she had found anything for him, then maybe, maybe he could make himself seem so important to Klimov that the young killer would desist.

Gregor dialed the second number. Molly answered curtly and he unlimbered the Sears code, then hung up and waited. And waited. And waited. He hung around the bathroom so long he thought he might be arrested for perversions, or beaten up by truck drivers or some such—

It rang.

Gregor picked it up.

“Gregor, I’ve got only a second,” she said.

“Darling, I—”

“Gregor, shut up! Something big is happening out in Maryland, so big they won’t tell even us. All the senators on the committee and the senior staff have been to the White House and there’s some kind of news blackout, but nobody’s talking. The only thing is that it’s very, very serious.”

“Out in Maryland?” Gregor said. Then he remembered the airplanes roaring over the Columbia Mall.

“But what could—”

“Gregor, as soon as I know, I’ll let you know. I have to run now, love. Really, it’s serious.”

“Yes, I—”

The phone clicked dead.

Damn! he thought. I need vodka.

Phuong loved the darkness, the stillness, the sense of being totally alone. She felt whole in darkness.

The narrow walls of the mining shaft seemed to be leaning in, and she could feel the man beside her breathing hard. She could sense his fear.

Yet for Phuong the tunnels meant one thing. They meant safety. Up above, her child had been turned to ashes and shards by napalm. Up above, her father had died, her mother had died, her brother had been maimed. Her sunny village was blasted into nothingness by terror bombers. Hard men in helicopters came to kill them, and to poison the jungle. So she faced the darkness with something close to peace. She knew no fear. Her feet found the way. She sensed the walls and the low ceiling and the rough transit of the floor. The darkness was everywhere.

Teagarden, the American, fought against it. His beam was a desperate protest against it, a plea for mercy almost. His beam flashed nervously. In the tunnels in her homeland, one never used light. Light was an American invention; it was the invention of men who feared the dark. But Phuong and the men and women who fought with her over the long years never used light; they learned, instead, to feel their way with their hands. They learned to sense, from variations in the atmosphere and gradations in odor, the approach of strangers.

Mother, can you smell him, her daughter asked from her heart. He’s terrified. His body stinks with fear.

I smell him, too, she replied.

Ahead, the tunnel narrowed even further.

“Sister Phuong, one moment please,” the American said in Vietnamese. “I have to report.”

He knelt, turned his beam off. The darkness was complete. She heard him fumbling.

“Rat Six, this is Team Alpha, we’re about seven hundred yards in, no sign of this tunnel Alice yet. Do you copy, Six?”

“Alpha, that’s an affirmative, good and clear.”

“Uh, Six, we’ll keep on picking our way along.”

“Go to it, Alpha. We’re counting on you. How’s your partner?”

“She’s real stable, Six, wish I could say the same for myself. Out, now, Six.”

“Roger that and out, Alpha.”

He flicked his beam back on.

“Are you ready, Sis?” he said in Vietnamese.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go on.”

“Brother Dee-gard-ahn, why do you come? Why not just stay here? I’ll go on. You’re very scared, Brother, I can tell. I know my way. I won’t get lost.”

“I have to work the radio, Sis.”

“Brother, tunnels are no place for terror. Fear, yes. Fear, always. Fear, importantly. But terror, no, because terror leads to panic. Not many people can fight in a tunnel. Not being one of them is no disgrace. We learned it because it was the only way we had against your flying demons and terror bombers.”

“I’m not one of them, you’re saying.”

“I can tell, Brother. I can sense it.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s just walking, I can handle it. There’s no fighting, it’s just walking.” He smiled with a great deal of effort.

“Then let’s go, Brother American,” she said.

Alex, in the lull after the failed attack, scampered over his position checking on his men, telling them how well they had done.

“Is that all they’ll send, do you think?” he was asked.

“No, they’ll come again. And again. And again. I think the troops they send against us next will be better. Finally, they’ll send the very best. It’ll be a night fight, great fun.”

Morale was high. The boys seemed to be holding together very well. Down in the missile silo, the general reported good progress on the cutting. It would be sooner than everybody thought. He’d lost only ten dead and had eleven wounded, this from the terrifying air assault and the infantry assault. He had ample supplies of ammunition left. He was in an excellent situation, all things considered. Only two things really bothered him. First, the loss of one of his two light machine guns in the infantry assault, and second, that he had used so many of the Stinger missiles in defending against the air attack. He had only seven left.

“Sir, great shooting on that last bird,” someone called. “You can still see her burning down on the plain.” And you could: the smoke rose still from the wreck, drifted up through the bright sky, where it shredded and dissipated in the wind.

“No, nothing,” said Alex. “It was just luck.” Of course it hadn’t been. When the last plane came in by itself, it had been Alex with the M-60 who alone had refused to dive, even when the cannon shells were cutting away at him. He’d tracked the pilot all the way, and when the plane had ruddered hard to the left, he’d jumped up from the gun position like a duck hunter and held the weapon in his arms, pumping his rounds into the craft. He’d seen the tracers flick into the bubble cockpit, seen the bright glass haze as they tore through and the plane began to wobble, then never gathered enough altitude to make it out of the dive, and sank to the ground.

Alex had never shot down an airplane before. He felt queerly pleased.

“Now, back to the digging,” he said. “Enough congratulations. Time to get back to work. Whose turn is it? Whose shift? Red Platoon?”

“Blue Platoon,” the call came. “Red Platoon’s already dug down to hell.”

There was some laughter.

“All right,” Alex said, loving them, “Blue Platoon, in the trenches under the canvas. Red Platoon’s turn to sunbathe on the perimeter.”

“But Blue Platoon shot down the helicopter. Don’t we get a reward?”

“Lucky shot,” yelled one of the boys of Red Platoon. “Now you’ll dig till you’ve blisters the size of coins, just like—”

But Alex interrupted the horseplay.

“You said the helicopter went down? I didn’t see it crash.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Sir, we shot down a helicopter. It went over the hill and crashed.”

Alex listened carefully. He remembered the medevac chopper taking off at the beginning of the assault, but it should have hovered downslope. It clearly wasn’t a gunship, because it hadn’t brought any fire to bear on his position. But why would a medevac chopper have ventured over the firefight, particularly when it was so easy to avoid it? The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Then he said, “Everybody who fired on the helicopter, fall in on me, please.”

In the end about twenty men from Blue Platoon came over and gathered around Alex.

“Tell me about this helicopter,” Alex said. “One of you. Slowly. Not all at once. The man who spoke first.”

“Sir,” the boy eventually said in slow country rhythms. “Sir, during the last run of the aerial attack, a helicopter flew low over the trees. We saw it only very late in its approach, because everyone was undercover from the airplanes. Naturally—” he clapped his rifle, a Fabrique Nationale FAL, “I fired on it.”

“What kind of helicopter?”

“UH-1B. The Huey, so famous from Vietnam.”

“You hit it?”

“I–I think so, sir.”

“How many rounds?”

“Sir?”

“How many rounds did you put into it? What kind of sight picture did you have? Were you leading it? Were you in the full or semiautomatic mode? Where were you firing?”

The boy was silent, baffled.

“Please be honest with me,” said Alex. “I mean you no disrespect. You are a brave and dedicated man. But I have to know the answers to these questions as completely as you can tell me.”

“Sir, then the truth is, I fired hurriedly. I had no time to really aim competently. I was firing semiautomatic and perhaps I got off seven or eight rounds.”

“Did you see any damage? I mean, ruptures in the steel, smoke, flames, blown rotors, that sort of thing?”

“Not really, sir. It was so fast.”

“How about any of you others. Who else thinks they scored hits?”

A few hands rose.

“Full-auto or semi?”

The answers were all semi; the stories were all the same: jerked shots fired desperately at a flashing target, no real sight pictures, less than a magazine apiece fired at the machine.

“Yet it crashed?”

“Yessir. It crossed the crest, whirled down the mountain, out of control. We lost sight of it from here. But there was an explosion at the base of the mountain.”

“Did you see it hit?”

“No, sir. It hit behind some trees. Down there you can see how thick the trees are. It hit right there. A few seconds later there was an explosion.”

“Was the explosion exactly at the point of impact?”

“Sir, it’s hard to say. It seemed to be more or less at the point of impact. Perhaps the machine bounced when it hit, then exploded. It’s—”

But Alex was already gone.

“Sergeant,” he shouted, “I want you to put together a team of ten of your very best men. I think something’s up, something I don’t like. I don’t know what. I want you to go down the hill and check out that helicopter wreck.”