The Day Before Midnight

1700

Uckley sat in the front of the state police car by himself. He felt cold. Somebody had gotten him a blanket, which he pulled around himself. He sat in a festival of pulsing light. It seemed to be the world convention of police cars, and in the dusk, their red and blue lights bounced off the houses and the trees back at him. He had a headache and his guts hurt from the bullet impacts on the vest, but at least he was done vomiting.

Everybody was staying away from him, at least for now, and he was grateful for that small mercy. He stared ahead, seeing nothing. He was exhausted, flattened out. He preferred the numbness, however, because he knew that if he thought about it too much, he’d want to die, just to make it all go away.

The kids were with a state policewoman, but no one really was sure what to do with them, what with the father missing. He thought he’d heard something about them going to their grandmother’s in Hagerstown. He couldn’t look at them, the two little girls, little perfect angels, untouched by corruption or evil. He’d caught just a glimpse: they looked like little petals, perfect and rosy.

Why had she come up the stairs?

Why did I fire?

She came up because she was a mother.

I fired because I’m a policeman.

There: hubris, fete, kismet, karma, whatever. It was somehow written; it was inevitable; it had been decreed.

When he’d gotten back to her, there was nothing to do. Her daughter sat next to her, holding her hand. Soon the other little girl came out and sat on the other side and started to cry. Uckley just looked at them, and at the dead woman, and then went out and got into the car, while various medical people and cops and firemen and citizens rushed about. He yielded to anybody who seemed to know what they were doing.

“A tough break,” said Delta Three suddenly.

Uckley looked up, dazed.

“You okay, Sergeant?” he asked blankly.

The man was on crutches, his thigh heavily wrapped.

“I think I’ll live. Look, if there’s any trouble, I’ll tell ’em how it happened. Shit, Mr. Uckley, you went up there alone against a real bad customer who had two kids hostage, and you cleaned his clock. That’s a good day’s work.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t even do that right.”

“We went into a house where there were three hostages. We got two of them out. That’s a pretty damned good operation anyway you slice it. And that mother, she was a good mom, she’d have rather her kids made it out than herself. So, there you go.”

“The point was to take prisoners,” Uckley said.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but fuck taking prisoners. We put three assholes in the ground, and that’s what we get paid for.”

It was no help.

“Sir, you better report in. You know, at the mountain they’re waiting, and I bet it’s pretty tense there.”

“Yeah,” said Uckley.

With a grim sense of futility he took the radio mike off its arms, feeling his ribs knit up in pain with the effort, and pushed the send button.

“Base, this is Special Agent Uckley, can you give me a call sign and patch me into Delta command?”

“We read you, Bureau One. You’re all set for transmission, over.”

“Delta Six, do you copy? This is Bureau One, over.”

There was static and scrambled noise in the furriness of the transmission, but eventually a voice came out of it at him.

“Bureau One, Delta Six affirmative, we copy. Go ahead.”

“Assault complete. Two hostages freed. We lost one man killed, and two wounded but stable. Uh, we are in command of the situation now. We found three aggressors, heavily armed.”

“Prisoners?” came Dick Puller’s voice through the fog.

“Uh, negative, Delta Six. That’s a negative. Too much firepower. We, uh, we couldn’t get you any prisoners, Delta Six.”

There was silence from the radio.

Uckley rushed to fill it.

“Delta Six, I accidentally shot a civilian. I’d like to request a release. You ought to get yourself another—”

“Negative, Bureau One.”

“For Christ’s sake, I shot a woman to death. I’m no goddamned good to—”

“Bureau One, this is Delta Six. Civilian casualties are a necessary hazard of combat operations. Get a hold on yourself.”

“Colonel Puller, I shot a mother in the heart in—”

“Bureau One, stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen up.”

“Sir, I—”

“Listen up, Bureau One. This is combat operation, and you follow orders, or I’ll have you arrested, goddammit. Son, I don’t have time to screw around here with your delicate feelings. Do you copy?”

“Copy,” said Uckley through a knotted throat and blurry eyes.

“Collect their firearms, feed the serial numbers to the Bureau, and see if you can get a make on them. Then I want you to conduct an examination of the bodies. There should be a medical examiner or something there. Check out those bodies. And the clothes too. Check out the clothes. Do you copy, Bureau One?”

Uckley just looked at the microphone, a dead thing in his hand. He felt impossibly old and impossibly fatigued. It was almost night now and the streetlights had come on.

“I copy,” said Uckley, and got up to do what he had to do.

“End of story,” said Nathan Walls. “As in, end of muthafuckin’ story.”

And so it was: their lights came up onto sheer wall, where the livid pick marks of the mining tools of fifty years or so back still gleamed in the light of the beam.

The tunnel called Elizabeth had simply ceased to exist. She yielded to mountain.

“Son of a bitch,” said Witherspoon. “You mean that’s it?”

“‘Less you wants to start to dig, man. Figure you got to dig about a half a mile straight up. Then you be at where you want to be at.”

“Goddamn,” said Witherspoon, really pissed. All this way, all this low walking and crawling through this damn tomb, and here they were; they had come to nothing.

Walls sat down.

“Goddamn this bitch. Can’t never trust no white woman. You looks at ’em and they crosses they legs. Oh, except your old lady, of course.” He reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette, flicked a light from a Bic lighter, and inhaled.

“You smoke here?” asked Witherspoon.

“Hey, why not? Not nobody here but us spooks.” He laughed. “Man, I thought I was gonna be a muthafuckin’ hero. Man, now we just walk back, and that’s that. You know, Spoon, here’s what I was gonna do. I figure we run into some shit, man, smoke and lights and fireworks everywhere, man, old Walls just pull a fade. He go for a nice walk in the country. Not too bad, huh? I tell you, boy, only way old Walls going to get his ass a little quiet time to hisself.” He laughed again.

“Yeah, that’s real great,” said Witherspoon. “You’re really talking like a hero now. Your momma would be proud.”

“My momma be dead,” said Walls, laughing again.

Witherspoon slipped off his MP-5, his flak jacket, slid the night vision goggles off his head, and tried to arrange the angle-head flashlight upon them so that its beam fell on the end of the tunnel. Then he went to the wall and began to feel around. The light caught him and he cast a giant shadow.

But he could feel nothing. It was solid rock. His fingers, long and ebony, flew across it.

“Man, you wastin your time. Relax. Have a smoke. Then we go back to the world.”

In time Witherspoon gave up. There seemed no point. They were licked.

He fumbled with the Prick-88 strapped into the webbing of his vest, and picked up the earphones and put the hands-free mike in front of his lips.

“Rat Six, this is Rat Team Baker, do you copy?”

He listened intently. There was no answer.

“Shit,” he said, “we must be inside too far. They aren’t reading us.”

“Maybe they asleep,” said Walls. “You get an easy job like sitting on your butt while two niggers do all the shit work, man, you get a white man’s job, you fall asleep. Call their asses again.”

“Rat Six, Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy? Do you copy?”

Silence.

“Is anybody there? Is anybody, I repeat anybody, there?”

“Maybe that damned bomb finally went off, all the white people dead,” said Walls.

“Then all the black people are dead too,” said Witherspoon.

“Man, some nigger scientist ought to figure out a bomb kill only white people. Man, I’d pay for something like that.” He laughed, flicked out his cigarette.

“Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy?”

By now Jake’s had filled with workingclass men. Gregor hated them. They were truck drivers, fork-lift operators, warehousemen, painters, postal clerks, all large, most dirty, all tired, most loud. They smoked. The air of the place was blue with smoke. His headache had not gone away even though he’d been splashing vodka on it for some time now.

He was watching the clock crawl through the day until it would be time to call Molly again, and then he heard someone talking about soldiers and a training exercise in central Maryland and looked up to the television set. It was the news hour and the reporter was at a state police roadblock somewhere, where the cars were lined up like it was the end of the world or something.

Gregor leaned forward intently.

“Hey, Mister, who you pickin’ in Eastern Division?”

“Redskins,” Gregor said. “Shhhh, the TV.”

“Redskins won’t even make the playoffs!”

The reporter was talking about a military exercise being conducted in the mountains, rumors of plane crashes and helicopters, how traffic was backed up and how civil authorities weren’t able to say when it would all return to normalcy, but that this was one of the prices you had to pay for your democracy.

The reporter, a childish boy, nodded enthusiastically as he spoke, narrowing his eyes for emphasis. Behind him, far in the distance, Gregor could see the fat hulk of a snow-covered mountain. It was white and glistening and looked lovely.

The boy now was rattling on about new troops headed out to the exercise. He’d thrust his microphone up to some soldiers sitting in trucks that were momentarily stopped. The men in the trucks were saying they didn’t know anything about it, they’d just been put on alert that morning in D.C., and about eleven they’d been ordered to load up on the vehicles and here they were.

“But,” the young soldier now told the young reporter, even as the truck was pulling away, “tell you this, we gonna kick ass!”

“Man, that must be some exercise they got going out there,” said a man at the bar. “They say traffic’s backed up all the way to goddamned Baltimore. Never heard of nothing like it.”

“Where?” Gregor asked, adding, “I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.”

“Ah, out Alternate forty, from Middletown to Boonsboro. You ought to be okay you stick to seventy. That mountain, that’s South Mountain, A-forty goes right by it. They got it closed off. Also, all them little hick burgs out there. Funniest goddamn thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Ain’t no government land up there. Plenty up at Aberdeen. Plenty at Fort Meade. Plenty at Pax River, over on the Shore. Plenty out at Fort Richie. Ain’t no government land at South Mountain, though. Damnedest thing, you can bet.”

“Ummm,” nodded Gregor.

Should I go out there?

I’m closest. Maybe I could get out there and hear something from a soldier or something.

Yes, with your accent and your Soviet visa, yes: and end up in Danbury for twenty years, then home for twenty more in the Gulag. No, the answer was Molly.

He now saw that there was some kind of crisis and that Molly would find it out for him and that he would be first with the news, the whole apparat would be working on it, and he, the great Gregor Arbatov, he would find it! He stood, wobbling, and ambled awkwardly back through the crowded room to the men’s bathroom. Inside, he deposited his coins in the slot and tried to call Molly again.

There was no answer.

Oh, Molly, he prayed. Oh, please, please, don’t let me down, when I need you so bad.

The news continued to be bad at Delta Command, even after the debacle at the Hummel house. The Rangers had run into heavy weather over Indiana and had to divert south and take on fuel in Tennessee and were now ETA’d at 1900 hours earliest, and that was with a twilight night drop which Puller didn’t want to risk, so make it 2100 before they were on station and ready to assault. Meanwhile Third Infantry was hung up in the traffic building up outside the roadblocks and was having a hell of a time fighting their way through it. Pentagon analysts had made no further penetrations of the queer message sent by the “Provisional Army of the United States.” Peter Thiokol had come to a standstill in his attempts to understand the identities of Aggressor Force, and therefore was mum on his chances of breaking the reset door code at the shaft entrance. There was, furthermore, no word from the FBI regarding its investigations of his wife, Megan, and any help she could have given them. The two surviving little girls at the Hummel house were too distraught to provide any clues as to the identities of the three men who had held them hostage for most of the day. The Pentagon kept inquiring as to progress in breaking the seizure; Dick Puller had no progress, but he had final casualty figures of Bravo Company’s assault: fifty-six dead, forty-four wounded, leaving an effective force of less than fifty men. The field hospital set up by Delta medical personnel was being strained to the maximum, and men had already begun to die who would have survived in Vietnam, where the airevac system had been set up much better.

It was six o’clock. Six hours to go.

Puller headed off to find Thiokol and monitor the latest in FBI investigation reports. But he didn’t make it very far.

“Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!”

It was a Spec 4, one of the Commo specialists.

“Yeah?”

“Sir, we were supposed to get a response every fifteen minutes from Rat Six on the other side of the mountain. They’ve missed two checks now.”

“Have you tried to call them?”

“Yessir. No answer.”

Puller took the microphone.

“Rat Six, this is Delta Six, do you copy?”

There was no answer, only silence on the radio.

Puller tried a few more times.

“Who’s in that area?” he asked one of his sergeants.

“Sir, besides the Rat Six Team, nobody. Except we’ve got the mountain ringed with state policemen, so there should be a cop a little farther out.”

He consulted a map, then went to the radio and called state police headquarters at the roadblock on Route 40 a few miles away.

“Ninety-Victor, this is Delta Six, do you read?”

“Affirmative, we have you, Delta Six, we copy.”

“Ninety-Victor, you got a man on, uh, looks like Moser Road?”

“Yes, sir, had that one sealed off for quite a time.”

“Can you patch me through to him, 90-Victor.”

“Yes, sir. You just hang in there.”

A few moments passed.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor, at the roadblock on Moser Road, about three miles due west of South Mountain. I’ve been requested to contact you.”

“Yes, 22-Victor, I copy. Listen, son, you heard anything recently?”

“Just what I figured on, sir.”

“And what was that, 22-Victor?”

“Well, sir, I figure the helicopter finally burned down to the ammo.”

“Say again, 22-Victor.”

“Well, sir, right from where that helicopter crashed and exploded, about twenty minutes ago, all the ammo cooked off. It was about ten or twenty seconds of gunfire. That was all.”

Dick put the microphone down.

“Delta Six?”

Dick said nothing.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor. Do you require further assistance?”

But Dick said nothing.

Goddamn him.

He turned, looked at the mountain about a mile off.

Goddamn him: he’d found Rat Six. He’d wiped it out. And he’d sent men into the tunnels after the Rat Teams.

“Sir, do you want to send a party around to check out the Rat Six position?”

Puller shook his head. What was the point? Aggressor-One had topped him again. His rats were dead in their holes. And there was nothing Puller could do about it now except order up the body bags and pray for Peter Thiokol.

“Thiokol?”

Peter looked up from the Aggressor-One document, from his notebook, from his FBI counterintel reports. It was Skazy.

“Look, we have to talk.”

“About what? I have a lot of—”

“Out in the barn.”

“What is this?” said Peter, reading at once something tense and guilty on the officer’s face. “What’s going on?”

“In the barn, please, Dr. Thiokol.”

Peter waited a few minutes, then went out and moseyed around back to where Skazy and two other Delta officers awaited. The men were smaller, leaner Skazys: lean, serious guys in cammo fatigues, bulging with belts and knives and grenades.

“So? What’s the—”

“We want you to keep an eye on someone for us.”

“That’s not my job,” said Peter. “I’m not here to keep an eye on anybody.”

“On Dick Puller,” said Skazy.

Peter felt his face betray some shock.

“There was a time,” said Skazy, “when Dick Puller was the best man this Army had. It was an honor to serve under him, let me tell you. He was a great officer. He was a professional’s professional. But he lost it.”

“What are you talking about?” Peter didn’t like this a bit.

“Sometimes these guys who’ve seen so much combat lose the edge. They can’t send boys to die anymore. They don’t have the balls for the big leap. They delude themselves; they don’t close out the engagement, they don’t get in tight, they’re not willing to take casualties, they’re not willing to see their own troops die to take an objective. And so you get what you’ve got right now: a sense that all around us things are going on, but right here, right at the point of the crisis, nothing is happening, except that we’re marking time.”

Peter felt himself a poor advocate for Puller.

“Look, he’s trying, he can’t do much until—”

Skazy bent close.

“In the Iranian desert there came a moment he’d trained his life for. It didn’t come down like it was laid out, and it meant taking a big chance, it meant going for it. You know what they say in this business? Who dares, wins. That’s the first principle of special operations. In the desert, Dick Puller lost the talent to dare. That guy up there on that mountain, he’s still got it.”

“What are you saying?” Peter said.

“I’m saying if he panics again, I’m going to take him out. And push forward and deal with the consequences later. It’s what I should have done in the desert. You just watch him. If you see signs that he’s breaking down, you let me know, got it?”

Peter saw now that he was in some twisted, sick family drama. It was some humorless parody version of a sixties sitcom, My Three Sons as written by Edward Albee, in which the oldest boy, Crazy Skazy here, was going to knock off Dad, Fred MacMurray/Dick Puller, while the two younger boys, himself and the other son, poor dumb Uckley, sat around wondering what to do.

“You’d better reconsider what—”

“Thiokol, if he freezes, you sing out, you hear. That’s your real job. Now, you’d better get back to your goddamned door.”

The farther along he got, the better Teagarden felt, when he knew it should be just the opposite. No matter how you cut it, he knew, he was welshing out. He was ejecting. Color him gone.

Yet his relief as the tunnel called Alice widened, as its dog legs and juts eventually straightened themselves out, was enormous and liberating. Goddamn, it felt so good; he’d felt this way in ’Nam, way out in Indian country, he’d been just a kid, it was ’71 or so and he was new to the Forces. It was after a long goddamn time in a little place, getting hit every night, that at last a relief column had broken through. It felt just like that. He couldn’t smell the sky yet, or see the stars — if there were stars; he had no idea what time it was — but he wasn’t going deeper and deeper into the goddamned darkness.

He almost wanted to whistle. But suddenly he heard something just ahead. It was like a little rustle or something, up against the rock. What, had Rat Six sent more guys in? He froze, caught. To run into an officer and have to explain what the hell he was doing broken off from his partner, here, hundreds and hundreds of feet back, almost in the lateral tunnel, that was trouble. He ransacked his own mind for an excuse, something to put between himself and his disgrace.

The radio!

The Prick-88 wasn’t working, they weren’t getting through, he’d come on back to reestablish contact before—

A light beam shot out, hit him in the eyes, pinning him.

“Hey! Jesus, you guys, you scared me. What the hell, you checking on us, Rat Six? I lost radio contact, came back to get a clear line. Listen, we’re way the hell back there.”

Another light struck him, blasting his vision, filling his brain with exploding sparks. He heard muttering, the soft jingle of equipment.

“What’s going on, guys? Like, is all this really—”

A hand like a darting bat flew in front of his eye, landed at his chin, and with a strong yank pulled him back until he crashed against a strong body; the hand pulled his chin up, opening his throat to the attack. At almost precisely the same second, though Teagarden never saw it, the other hand drew the evil edge of a very sharp combat blade across his throat, cutting with icy precision through skin, cartilege, and on down to the carotid artery, which it severed.

My sons! he thought, Jesus, my sons!

But, stunned as he was, Teagarden at least had a second left for a reflex, and as he died, his finger tensed on the MP-5’s trigger and the little gun barked out a four-round burst. The bullets smashed pointlessly into the ground, and immediately other men were on Teagarden, beating at him with rifle butts.

This was the hard part.

The guns were easy: A Fabrique Nationale FAL, in 7.62-mm NATO, or.308, serial number 1488803–213; a 9-mm Uzi, manufactured also by Fabrique Nationale under license from the crafty Israelis, serial number 10945873–38771 with a very professionally made but otherwise untraceable silencer that extended a good seven inches beyond the barrel; and a British L2A3, called a Sterling, in 9mm also, serial number 129848–555; plus one handgun, a Czech CZ-75, serial number ground off. This information had been forwarded to Washington, but the stuff felt as though it came from the immense pool of surplus weapons held in obscure warehouses the world over and belonging to no country but only to the fraternity of international arms dealers. It could have all been bought from The Shotgun News.

The clothes and personal effects were easy, too, though Uckley had felt a little ghoulish going through them. As for the personal effects, there were none. Each of the three dead aggressors had gone into battle without pictures of loved ones, without Bibles, without even wallets, with nothing tiny or human to sustain them: they were men who seemed to have never been. Their clothes were well-washed but equally vague: heavy black boots of obscure manufacture, also picked up somewhere on the military surplus market. Also, black fatigue pants with huge bellows pockets at the thighs; blue watch shirts, perhaps naval in origin; black sweaters and watch caps. They had gloves, found stored in the shot-up house, and heavy parkas, perhaps for outdoor work. All of the clothes would perhaps in time yield their secrets to the sophisticated microscopic textile testing the Bureau had back in its labs in Washington; but that would take weeks, and in hours the world would be ending. The clothes were therefore of no immediate help.

This left the bodies. This left the hard part.

The three naked men lay on a tarpaulin in the middle of the Burkittsville fire department. Sooner or later a doctor would surely get there who could do this thing more professionally than poor Uckley, the mother killer with the black and blue stomach, but he had not arrived yet and nobody else particularly wanted to do it. So there was Uckley, alone with the three bodies.

Look at them, he told himself.

The big one who’d died upstairs seemed the worst. He’d put the Czech pistol into his mouth and squeezed off a round. The bullet had blown out the back of his skull, leaving his head queerly deflated in appearance, like a melon halved by an ax. But more amazing was his right shoulder, which looked as if a buzz saw had hit it; one of Delta Three’s bullets had really ripped it up. God, how could he go on, hurt like that? Yet Uckley had seen him, climbing the steps, firing, the whole works. In pain like that? This was some kind of Superman. Even the corpse grinned a little at him. What was there in that white-toothed smile? Was it superiority?

Yeah, okay, Uckley thought. So you were the better man.

The other two had taken more hits but looked better. They were just dead men with what looked like red scabs the size of quarters scattered across their bodies, three across the chest of one, eleven spread randomly across the other. Bullet holes, lovely, Uckley thought. He thought of a picture from a history book of proud townspeople standing next to some old-time desperado, hit about a dozen times and now propped up like a cigar store Indian in his coffin, his mustache drooping, his bullet holes shining like buttons in the sun.

Think, Uckley told himself.

Okay, all of them were lean, strong men. They had the flat bellies and sinewy muscles of well-trained professional military men, elite troopers. Their hair was all cut short; one of them had nicked himself shaving that day. They looked to be in their late twenties. All three had patches of scar tissue on their upper arms, and one had quite a few on his wrists and chest. Tattoos? Yes, tattoos, somebody had surgically removed their tattoos!

And goddamn, they were tan. Their faces and their arms were tan; they had the burnished deep color that fishermen get, men who spend their lives in the sun.

Uckley went back to the first one. He looked more closely at his body. Yes, there was a lacework of stitches running up his chest, intersected by another line of stitches.

You’ve been hit before, he thought. You’ve had a very adventurous life, my friend. I’ll bet you could tell me some things if you were alive.

He checked the others for wounds. The one was clean, but the other had a pucker of scar tissue up high, near his collarbone on the right side. It was another bullet hole.

These were clearly tough customers, all right. Somebody else’s Delta.

He wished he knew what to do next. He walked back to the leader. What am 1, a forensic pathologist? I just look and see dead guys, their heads shot away. He remembered the man standing above him, the little girl squirming beneath him. Let the girl go for crissakes, he’d said, and the man had just stared at him.

You had me cold, pal.

Instead, you walked back and blew your brains out.

Uckley knelt. Something in that smile, something mysterious and bright. A commando with movie-star teeth blowing his brains out in the back room of an old house in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Almost involuntarily, Uckley put his finger out. It was the unnaturalness of the dead man’s smile that disturbed him. The teeth were so white. He put his finger in the dry mouth, felt the dry lips and the dry, dead tongue, reached up, pinched, tugged and—

Yes, they were false.

The porcelain bridge came out in his hand.

He checked quickly. All three men had completely false teeth, and almost brand new bridges placed in their mouths.

Witherspoon began to chatter.

“Wow, did you hear that? Man, that sounded like gunfire. You suppose.”

But then Walls’s hand stole over his mouth and pulled him down with more strength and will than the larger, younger man ever thought the smaller, older one possessed.

Then he heard the whisper in his ear.

“Okay, now, man, you just take it easy, you just keep it quiet. Okay, man? Okay?”

Witherspoon nodded and Walls let slip his mouth.

“Shit, you—”

“Shhhhhh. Old Charlie, he in the tunnel. Yep. Charlie here. Charlie come a-hunting. Yep, old Charlie, you can’t hold him back. He’s come a-hunting.”

Witherspoon looked at him, feeling his eyes bulge and his heart begin to triphammer.

“Hey—”

“Hey, nothing. You listen to Walls. Walls knows Charlie Walls and Charlie, man, them two go way back.”

Walls seemed, queerly, to be fading on him, to be transfiguring into some other creature: he slid back, as if to allow his blackness to be absorbed by the tunnel. At the same time, Walls had unslung Mr. Twelve, and adroitly peeled off the black tape that masked the muzzle and the ejector port. With one swift metallic klak! the old tunnel rat pumped a big double-ought into the chamber.

“Okay, you listen,” Walls said softly. “Time to gear up. Get your shit on, get your piece ready. Tunnel be hot. Charlie hunting us, man, we got to hunt Charlie. Only way to stay alive.”

Witherspoon threw on his flak jacket and picked up his German machine pistol. He cocked it, drawing back the knob that ran through the housing over the barrel; it clicked locked and solid. He slid the night vision goggles down across his face, popped off the lens cap, and turned on the device from the battery pack at his belt. As he diddled with the image intensifies and the focus, the tunnel leapt to life in a kind of aquamarine as the electro-optics picked up the infrared beam from the lamp atop the goggles; he had a sense of being underwater, everything was green, green and spooky. He turned to Walls and faced a man on fire. The convict’s face burned red and yellow like some hideous movie special effect; Witherspoon almost laughed at the strangeness, the comedy of it all, but it was only that Walls, excited, had begun to pulse with blood, and from so close, all that heat, all those agitated molecules, came through the lenses like a movie monster.

“Okay,” said Walls soothingly, “now, this is how it got to be. We got to move forward, and make our contact as early as we can. Okay, we hit Charlie, we fall back. We hit him again, we fall back. See, in a one-way tunnel, you got only one chance, man. You got to hit that sucker and hit him over and over. You got to hope he runs out of men before you run out of tunnel. Because if you run out of tunnel before he runs out of men, you’re one trapped rat. Man, the tunnels I been in all had holes at both ends, this fucker only one end. These white bitches, they always let you down.”

“Okay, I’m with you.”

Something flashed in Witherspoon’s psychedelic vision: it was Walls’s teeth.

He was smiling.

“Whistle while you work, man,” Walls said merrily.

Phuong, in the tunnel called Alice, also heard the gunshots.

Mother, her daughter said, Mother, the Americans are coming for us.

I know, she said. Let them come.

But her response was different, because unlike Rat Team Baker, she had not come to the end of her tunnel; she still believed there was something ahead. Thus her thought was to continue her movement.

She reached to her belt and swiftly removed one M-26 fragmentation grenade, smooth as an egg. Then she knelt, took off her tennis shoes, and quickly unlaced them and threw the shoes away, behind her. She swiftly tied a loop around the lever of the grenade with just enough tension to hold it in close enough. Then, gingerly, she pulled the pin. She felt the lever strain against the shoelace. With her knife she began to saw through the lace. At last, only a hair’s width of lace remained, just the thinnest, tiniest membrane of woven cotton. Gingerly, she set the thing down in the center of the tunnel, on its base. She knew that if men came through the tunnel single file, without lights, they would kick it; when they kicked it, or bumped it, the thing would fall on its side, the shoelace would pop and—

Two hundred yards farther on she repeated the process with the other lace.

Let the Americans come, she thought. Let them come for Phuong, as before. And as before, Phuong will be ready. I will save my child from the fire.

Turning, she fled deeper into her home, the tunnel.

Peter was writing.

Provisional army of us??? code/I 12 digits II suppressed integer/1 syllabification correspondence????vowel repetition significance??? 12 = 12 = 12 = 12// Simple integer equivalent?? 12 = 12 = 12 = twelve????

He set up a simple a=1, b= 2, c=3 scheme to see what the thing decrypted out to. It decrypted out to … nonsense.

He played with themes of 12: 4 3’s, 2 6’s, 3 4’s, 12 1’s … 12. Twelve, he kept thinking, twelve!

Suddenly bells were ringing. What the fuck? He looked up as a bunch of Commo specialists in the room jumped, shocked out of what they were doing.

“What the hell does that mean?” Peter asked.

“It means Priority One,” said one of the kids. “It means they’ve got something for us.”

“You better go get the hotshots.”

But by the time Peter got to the flash teletype, Skazy had already taken up the prime position.

“Okay,” he said greedily, “okay, here it comes,” as the machine spat out its information.

Skazy read the document quickly and summarized.

“They’ve identified the original source of Aggressor-One’s communication and they think from that their psychologists can extrapolate his motivation, his psychic dynamics, a profile of who he is and what he’s liable to do, what he’s capable of, and what we should do.”

“So?” said Puller.

Skazy’s fast eyes ripped through the letters as they spewed out. Every twenty or so lines he peeled the paper off the roller and passed it around the room. The machine clicked for several minutes.

“Of course,” said Major Skazy. “That’s why it’s so familiar, yes.”

Puller said nothing for the longest time, letting the younger men absorb the information.

“All right,” said Puller. “Let’s have it.”

“It sounds familiar,” said Skazy, “because it is familiar. It’s John Brown.”

There was quiet in the room.

“Yes, it’s the same, don’t you see?” Skazy rushed on, tumbling with the information. “It’s John Brown’s Raid, before the Civil War. He’s taken over a key installation at the center of the military industrial complex. Right?”

“In 1859,” Peter said, “in Harpers Ferry, in fact not seven miles from here, John Brown led a force of about twenty or so men and took over a federal arsenal and musket factory. This year, with a few more men, he’s taken over a federal missile silo. Strategic muskets, in other words.”

“And the goal is the same,” Skazy said, “to start the big war, and to unleash the forces of good and to drive out the forces of evil. And, this time, as last time, there’s a bunch of elite troops outside the place who’ve got the job of going in with bayonets fixed to try to stop him.”

“What’s the source?” asked Peter laconically, feeling quite beyond surprise.

“The message he sent,” Skazy answered, “it’s from John Brown’s interrogation by federal authorities in the jailhouse at Charlestown, West Virginia, October 17, 1859, after his capture and before his execution.”

Skazy read from a CIA psychologist’s report: “‘Empathetic connection with historical figure suggests paranoid schizophrenia to an unusual degree. Such men tend to be extremely dangerous, because in their zeal they tend to exhibit great will and charisma. Well-known examples include Adolf Hitler, John Brown himself, Joseph Stalin, Ghengis Khan, several of the Roman emperors, Peter the Great. The standard symptoms are highly developed aggressive impulses and the tendency toward the creation of self-justifying systems of illusion. In the classical cases such men tend to be the offspring of broken families, generally with fathers either absent or remote, and strong matriarchal units replacing the patriarchal. They are usually marked by abnormally high IQs and extremely well-developed “game intelligence.” Such men, typically, are extraordinary tacticians and brilliant at solving narrow technical or strategic problems. They almost always operate from the narrow basis of their own self-interest. They lack the gift of perspective; their power stems from their ability to see only the relevant, narrow slice of the “big picture.” They lack associational abilities; they lack, furthermore, any tendency toward moderation. They are highly-narcissistic, usually spellbinding speakers and almost always completely ruthless. Historically, their flaw arrives in “overreaching”; they tend to think they can change the world, and almost always go too far and are destroyed — usually at great cost to self and families — by their inability to compromise.’”

“Everything we need to know about him except how to kill him,” said Dick Puller.

Skazy continued. “From this they expect him to be American military, extremely proficient in a narrow range, nursing obscure political grudges. They think his men are Americans, possibly a reserve Green Beret unit that has come under his spell. They think he’s bankrolled by conservative money. Man”—he whistled—“they’ve worked up a whole scenario here. It’s about what you’d expect. Screwball general, impressionable troops, maybe some paramilitary outfit, those pretend mercs who read Soldier of Fortune and wear camouflage fatigues to the shopping malls. Survivalists, nut cases, that sort of thing.”

Dick listened, his eyes fixed on nothing.

Finally, he said, “So what’s their recommendation?”

“Frontal attack. They say that his green troops will buckle when they start taking heavier casualties. They want us to throw frontals at ’em again and again.”

“They better send some fresh body bags,” was all Dick said.

Then he asked, “So is that what you think, Major? Frontals?”

“Yes, sir. I think we ought to hit him again. The sooner, the more often, the better. Let me saddle up Delta and we’re off. Bravo in support. Leave a small reserve force here in case that radio message this morning was to another unit ready to jump us from the rear. When the Third Infantry and the Rangers arrive, you can feed them in if we haven’t taken the place down yet.”

Puller went around the room. Everybody said yes. Hit him. Hit him and hit him, and he’ll crack. Waiting solved nothing, especially now that Rat Six had been zapped and there was nothing going on inside the mountain.

Even the morose Lieutenant Dill, the gym teacher who now led what was left of Bravo, had to agree: hit ’em, he said. Hit ’em until they crack.

Finally, Puller got to Peter.

“Since this has become a democracy and we’re polling the voters, Dr. Thiokol, you might as well throw in your two cents. You tell me. Should I hit him until he cracks?”

Peter considered. He felt Skazy’s hard eyes boring in upon him. But Skazy didn’t scare him; he’d been glared at by furious five-stars in his time.

He said, “And what if he doesn’t crack? What if his men are the best, and when they take casualties they don’t break? What if he’s got enough ammo up there to hold off a division? And he knows you can attack only over a narrow front, up one side of the mountain?

“What if, most important of all, the subtlest part of his plan is convincing you that yes, he’s a nut case, he thinks he’s John Brown, and that he’ll come apart under the pressure. What then? And what if you hit him until you run out of men and the bodies pile up like cordwood just outside his perimeter. The Rangers show and the Third Infantry shows, and he guns them down too. And the men that you’ve got left are exhausted and broken. What then?”

“Then he wins.”

“Right. We don’t get in. What if they’re wrong in D.C.?”

“These are experienced guys. Doctors,” argued Skazy.

“Major Skazy, I know a little about psychiatrists. I’m here to tell you there aren’t three of them in the world who could agree on the results of two plus two.”

Skazy was quiet.

Peter said, “I don’t think he’s insane. I think he’s very, very smart, and he’s set up this whole thing, this phony John Brown thing, because he knows our prejudices, and he knows how eager we are to believe in them. He’s encouraging us to believe in them at the cost of our own destruction.”

He didn’t express his worst, most frightening thought, the source of his curiously dislocating sense of weirdness over the past several seconds. The whole thing seemed pulled not out of history, but out of something far more personal. Out of, somehow, memory. His. His own memory. He remembered. Yes, John Brown, but who thought of John Brown first and used him as an analogy for a takeover in a missile silo in Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon?

Peter Thiokol.

Peter thought: This son of a bitch has read my book.

But Puller was speaking.

“I just got a call from Uckley, who examined the three dead aggressors in Burkittsville. They had false teeth.”

He let it sink in.

“Nothing gives a man’s national identity away to forensic pathologists faster than dental work. So these guys had their teeth pulled — all of them — and bridgework from a third-party country inserted, so that in the event of death or capture, their origin couldn’t be traced,” Puller said. “These guys aren’t psychos or fringe lunatics or right-wing extremists or a rogue unit. They’re a foreign elite unit on a mission. They’re here for a specific, rational purpose. We have to wait until we know who they are. Then we’ll know what to do. To squander our limited resources right now is to doom ourselves to failure. We don’t know enough to jump.”

“When will we?” said Skazy bitterly.

“When I say so,” said Dick Puller. “When we know who they are. And not before.”