The Day Before Midnight

1800

Witherspoon should have seen them first, but Walls did, or rather sensed them, smelled them, somehow felt them, and his swift elbow into Witherspoon’s ribs was all the signal needed. In Witherspoon’s field of electro-optics, they emerged as phantasms, swirling patterns of dense color swooping abstractly through the green chamber at him. They were dream monsters, humped and horrible, their shapes changing, one beast leaking into another; they were straight from his hyperfervid id, white men with guns in the night.

So die, motherfuckers, thought Witherspoon.

He fired first, the MP-5 bucking in a spasm as it hurried through its little box of bullets. How good it felt! It drove the fear from him. Through the lenses he could not see the streak of the tracers, nor their strikes. But he saw something else: the red darts of sheer heat, which the infrared picked up and magnified, flew into them like glops of color from the brush of a maniac. The shapes slithered, shattered, quivered, and seemed to magically recombine and reform before him. The stench of powder rose like an elixir to his nose. The gun wrenched itself empty.

He scrambled back, laughing madly. God, he’d hit so many. He heard screams behind him. Man, we hit those motherfuckers cold, we blindsided them, man, we took their butts out!

“Down!” screamed Walls, who in the roar of their race back had heard something bounce off the walls, and as if to make the point clearer, he nailed Witherspoon with an open field hit, knocking him down in a tangle of ripped knees and torn palms. Then the grenade detonated.

It was very close. The noise of it was the worst, but not by much. The noise was huge; it blew out both of Witherspoon’s eardrums and left traces of itself inside his skull for what might be forever. Its flash was weird and powerful, particularly through the distortion of his night vision glasses, the hue so hot and bright it had no coefficient in nature. Finally, following these first phenomena, the force of the blast arrived in an instant, and was as mighty as a wallop from Cod. It threw him, rag-doll-like, against the wall. He felt himself begin to bleed abruptly, though as yet there was no pain.

Witherspoon sat up, completely disoriented. For just a second he forgot both who and where he was. He blinked and peeped about like a just-born baby bird, chunks of shell and fluid stuck to his face. In the dark, bats of light flipped and swooped toward him. The air was full of dust and broken neon and cigarette smoke from forties movies. His head ached.

“Come on, boy, shoot back!” came the shout from close at hand, and he turned to see an interesting thing. He was by now only half in his night goggles, which had been blown askew by the grenade, so he saw half of Walls in the stylized abstractions of the infrared, a glowing red god, all anger and sinew and grace; but the other half of Walls was the human half: a soldier, scared to death, full of adrenaline and responsibility, standing against the tide of fire in the blackness and cranking out blasts from his Mossberg, eruptions of flash which, for however brief a fragment of time they lasted, lit the tunnel in pink-orange and almost turned the fierce Walls into a white man.

Walls pumped up dry, but by that time Witherspoon had shaken the dazzle from his brain, gotten a new clip into the German gun, and turned to spray lead down the tunnel, watching the bullets leaking light and describing a tracing of a flower petal as they hurled off into the darkness. The fire came back at him after a pause, angry and swarming. It seemed to be hitting everywhere, pricks of hot coal sent flying against his skin by the bullet strikes.

He knelt, fumbled through a mag change.

“Grenade,” said the resourceful Walls, having thought one step ahead, and Witherspoon caught a glimpse of him as a classical javelin thrower posing for a statue. Then he uncoiled, and as he uncoiled fell forward. Witherspoon heard yells of panic from surprisingly close at hand, but was unfortunately and stupidly looking into the heat of the blast when the grenade detonated. His vision disappeared in a confusion of deep-brain nerve cells firing off and as he fell backward, his night shades fell even farther awry, then slipped away.

“I’m blind, man, I’m blind!” he screamed. Walls had him. The firing seemed to have stopped. Walls put a strong hand around the fleshy part of his arm above the elbow and pulled him backward in a crazy old-nigger scuffle. He felt like one of those clumsy black fools in an old movie.

Walls pulled him back farther and deeper. Gradually, his vision returned to normal. He could see Walls’s sweating face just ahead.

“I can see now.”

“Man, don’t ever look at those suckers when they go off.”

“How many did we get?”

“I don’t know, man. Hard to say. In the dark, it sometime seem like so much more, you know?”

They fell into silence. Witherspoon breathed raggedly, looking for his energy. He felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. He could smell Walls next to him. Yet he sensed no stress in Walls.

“You like this, don’t you?” he asked, amazed.

Walls sniggered. “Shee-itt,” he finally said, “a chance to kill white boys? Man, this is like a vacation!”

“You think they had enough?”

“No. Not these white boys. Most white boys, not these white boys. These white boys pissed.”

From the footsteps she guessed no more than five. She heard them rushing along, their breathing ragged under the equipment they wore and their urgency. Then the first explosion came, its flash bouncing off the walls and through the turns all the way to her, its hot, dry concussion arriving a half second later. There were screams and moans. But then — the sound traveled surprisingly well under the ground, for it had no place else to go except straight to her — she heard the scuffle of feet.

Mother, they are still coming.

I hear them.

This surprised her. In the war, the Americans almost always turned back when they took casualties. On the surface, when they started losing people, they withdrew and called in the airplanes. But in the tunnels there were no airplanes; they simply retreated. Yet these footsteps came on, if anything, more determined than before.

She turned, upset, now frightened, and began to withdraw deeper still into the tunnel.

Hurry, Mother. They must have found the second grenade and disarmed it. They are coming faster.

She raced into the tunnel. By now it had almost disappeared into a trace and the beams the miners had erected for their operations’ had long since vanished; instead, it was the classical Cu Chi passage, a low, cramped crawlspace, fetid and dense. She rushed through it, her fingers feeling the way. She felt as if she were crawling back into the black womb and knew she was very deep and very far.

She halted after a time, turned, and listened. She could no longer hear the men. She thought she was safe.

Am I safe?

Mother, be careful. You must wait.

She was still. Time slowed.

Mother, be patient. Haste kills.

What was it? An odor? Some disturbance in the air? An odd flash of mental energy from somewhere? Or only the return of her old dark instincts? Somehow she knew she was not alone.

Her hand slipped to her belt. She removed the knife. She willed herself to stillness. She willed her body into the walls. She lay motionless and silent in the dark and the loneliness with her daughter. She felt herself attempting to enter into the fabric of the underground, to still the whirl of her atoms and the beat of her heart. She thought she heard something once, and then another something. The time passed; she had no idea how much.

Then again something else came. The sound of men in heavy equipment crashing through the tunnel, much farther back now, much more frightened, much more reluctant to go on now that the tunnel was shrinking.

She could imagine them right where the bigger tunnel was absorbed into the smaller one, their bravado frozen by its sudden shrinkage and the difficulty of the path that lay before them. Western people did not like to go into the dark alone, where they could not maneuver or talk or see or touch one another. It would stop them if anything would: their simple terror of the close space and the darkness.

The men made brave sounds. They were arguing. One seemed louder. She could not quite understand the distorted sounds. But the yelling grew louder, and then halted entirely. She heard them walking away. Their sounds slowly disappeared.

She almost moved then. But she did not.

Wait, Mother. When you move, you die. Wait. Wait.

The dark pressed upon her like the lid of a coffin. Her hip was wedged against a jutting rock; she could feel it bruise. Her muscles stiffened and began to ache. Her scalp tingled. A cramp tightened her upper arm. Her whole body screamed for the release of movement.

She tried to think of her village before the war came. It was near a place called Ben Suc in the Thanh Dien forest. She had a sister and nine brothers; her father had been a Viet Minh and fought the French with an old carbine until it fell apart, and then he fought them with bamboo spears. But for a time it was a prosperous area, Ben Suc; there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been easy, but they lived well enough by their modest endeavors. She was fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was obliterated by bombs.

She tried to remember: she thought of it as the golden time, those few years before the bombs came. She held on to it, sometime, in the tunnels, and would tell her daughter, Some day you’ll see. Well live in the sunlight. There will be fruit and rice for all. You’ll see, my little one. Then she would sing the child a lullaby, holding her warm and tight and feeling her small heart beating against her own:

There, Mother. Her daughter spoke to her from her heart. Do you feel it? There is another.

Phuong lay very still because she felt his warmth.

He was very good, and like her, he was barefoot. He had no equipment. He moved like a snake, in slow, patient strokes, nothing forced or hastened. He had come ahead under the noise of the men who had halted, covered by the loud drama of their chatter and yelling. He’d moved quickly and soundlessly, hunting her. He was immensely brave, she understood, the very best of them. He was a man she could love, like her husband. He was a tunnel man. Now only the faintest blur, a different shade of dark, he grew larger as he drew nearer; she felt his heat. And then she felt the softness of his breath, and the sweetness of it, and his terrible, terrible intimacy.

I must abandon you, my daughter, she thought. Where I must go next and what I must do, you cannot be a part of. I love you. I will see you soon.

Her daughter was silent … gone. Phuong was alone with the white man in the tunnel.

They were as close as lovers in the dark, his supple body so close to hers that she felt a terrible impulse to caress him, to have him, she who had not had a man in a decade.

But she had him with her blade. It struck with amazing force in the dark as he crawled by. She felt it sink-into the living muscle and she felt the muscles knit to fight it as she forced it deeper, and their bodies locked. Their loins embraced. In the hole sex and death were so much the same it was terrifying. She felt his arms enclose her and his breath was labored and intense as if with sexual energy. His blood felt warm and soft like a spurt of sperm. In frenzy he thrust his pelvis against hers, and the friction, bucking and taking, was not unpleasant. Somewhere in all this his blade probed desperately after her, and he cut a terrible gash into her shoulder, through the cloth, through the flesh, almost to the bone. She felt the knife sawing against her and muffled her scream in his chest.

She pulled her blade out. And jammed it home again. And again. And … again.

Then he was still. He had stopped breathing.

Spent, she pulled away from him and cupped her shoulder. She was covered with their mingled blood. She could not even see him anymore. Her arm throbbed, and she managed to rip a strip of cloth off her tattered shirt, which she tied into a loose tourniquet. Inserting the knife blade, she screwed the thing clockwise until the bleeding stopped and only a huge numbness remained.

She tried to crawl ahead somehow, but her exhaustion was endless. She surrendered to it, lying back, her mouth open, her eyes closed, in the dark of the dark tunnel in the very center of the mountain. It was completely silent. The roof of the tunnel was an inch from her face; she could feel it. She wanted to scream.

And then she heard it from just ahead: a drip of water striking a puddle. And then another. She reached out and felt the water, and pulled herself to it. She drank greedily from the puddle, and only when she was done did she think to reach into the pouch on her belt and find a match.

The light flared dramatically, hurting her eyes, which she clamped shut. Then she opened them. There was an opening in the roof of the tunnel. She looked and realized it was another tunnel, impossibly small.

But, more important, it led up.

He had been hit twice. It didn’t seem fair. Witherspoon lay back, trying to get it all clarified in his head. How many of them could there be? How had the world turned so surrealistic on him?

“You doin’ good, sonny,” said Walls next to him. “Man, like we make these white boys pay, no shit, huh?”

Witherspoon could hardly answer, he hurt so badly. It was a dream fight. Total silence, then the sudden flashes as the bullets whipped by, tearing into the walls of the tunnel, their own quick answers, and the stumbling fallback before the detonation of the grenades. How many times now? Three, four. How many had they killed? How many of their own grenades were left?

But worse: how much tunnel was left?

The answer was depressing: not much.

“Whooo-eee,” moaned Walls softly now, “we at the end of the line, boy.”

Behind them the tunnel stopped. It ended here.

“Nobody’s going home from this party,” Walls said, loquacious at the end as he had been at the start. “But we made them white boys do some paying, right, man?”

Witherspoon was silent. He’d long since lost the MP-5. He had his automatic in his hands, though he was shaking. He could hear the quiet slide of plastic against metal as Walls slid more shells into his Mossberg.

“Shame I couldn’t get this piece back to the guy,” said Walls, cycling the slide with a ratchety snik-snak! “Real nice piece, you know? He take good care of it. No shotgun let you down like no woman.”

“My wife never let me down,” said Witherspoon.

“Sure, boy. You just lie quiet now.”

The smell of powder was everywhere in the tunnel. Witherspoon’s mouth was dry. He wished he had a drink of water or something. His whole left leg was numb; he didn’t think he could move anyway, so at least it was good they had no place to run anymore. He was thinking a lot about his wife.

“Man, Walls. Yo, Walls.”

“Yeah.”

“My wife. Tell her I loved her, you got that?”

“Man, you think I’m going to be around to do any telling?” Walls chuckled at the absurdity of this idea. “Anyway, man, I bet she knows.”

“Walls, you’re a good guy, okay?”

“No, boy. I’m a very bad guy. Fact, I’m a motherfucker. I just happen to do good tunnel work. You best be quiet now. I think it’s coming on to nut-cutting time.”

And so it was. They heard the scuffles in the dark but had no targets. That was the terrible thing about it all: they could not fire until fired upon; it was a question of lying still and waiting for the world to end. Witherspoon raised the pistol, a Browning 9-mil. He had thirteen rounds in the mag, and then that was it. And there was no place else to go.

They could hear them getting closer now, edging along. Damn, these were brave men too. It pissed Witherspoon off to be matched against such good ones. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. But these guys, no matter how many you killed, they just kept coming. They were the best.

The 1st Battalion of the Third Infantry was only three hours late, the convoy having gotten all fouled up in the amazing pile-up of traffic outside the operational area.

There was something peculiar about these men, Puller thought, watching as they climbed down from the big trucks just outside his headquarters in the falling dark. Then it struck him: they were all handsome and white and their hair was cut short around their ears in a style he hadn’t seen for years, what used to be called white sidewalls; they had the odd appearance of Prussian cadets. He noticed next that instead of the ubiquitous M-16, black plastic and famous, they carried the old wooden-stocked M-14 in 7.62mm, a real infantry battle-fighting rifle. And then he noticed, good Christ, their fatigues were starched!

“Who the hell are these guys?” he asked Skazy.

“Ceremonial troops. They guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shit like that. They march in parades, bury people in Arlington. Pull duty at the White House. Hollywood soldiers.”

“Jesus,” said Puller.

He found the CO, a full bird colonel, rare for a battalion, even a reinforced one, and introduced himself.

“I’m Puller,” he said. “Colonel, get your men out of the trucks and distribute ammo. You can even chow ’em down if you’ve got time. But keep ’em near the trucks. We’re going to get the ball rolling real soon now, I hope, depending on what I hear from the Pentagon and whether this young hotshot I have working on the door problem thinks he has a shot at getting the shaft open.”

The colonel just looked at him.

“Sir, maybe you’d like to tell me what this is about.”

“Nobody briefed you, Colonel?”

“No, sir. I’m under the impression it’s some kind of nuclear accident and we’d be pulling containment duties.”

“It’s a night infantry assault, Colonel, and you’ll be pulling perimeter penetration duties, supported by a shot-up company of National Guardsmen who’ve already lost half their manpower, some state policemen, a local cop or two, and any high school ROTC units I can round up, and maybe, if the goddamned weather holds, a Ranger battalion now somewhere between here and Tennessee in a couple of C-130s. Your job is to get Delta in close so it can jump the silo. You might want to think about reforming your squad heavy weapons teams into an ad hoc machine-gun platoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Brief your senior NCOs and your officers now. There’ll be a final briefing at 2000 hours. You can check with Delta staff for maps. I’ll expect all your officers to know the terrain backward and forward by then.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“You in Vietnam, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir. I was a captain with the 101st, a company commander.”

“Well, you’re back there, Colonel, except that it’s a little colder and a lot more important.”

Walls fired. He fired again. He fired again. Beside him, Witherspoon fired with the pistol. Walls could hear it going off like the bark of a dog. Meanwhile, heavy automatic fire came at them, tracer, and as it skittered overhead it whistled on back to the end of the tunnel, and began to ricochet. Spent rounds whirled through the dark space over their heads. It was like being in a frying pan at full sizzle, bubbles of hot grease dancing everywhere, flying through the air in angry flecks. That’s what Walls thought of. But of course it wasn’t. It was just the tunnel.

The Charlies broke off contact.

“Okay,” Walls said. “Goddamn, I think I got one that time. Man, can’t be too many left. Man, we may be out of tunnel, but them boys goin’ be out of peoples real soon now, you hear that, boy?” He laughed deeply at the idea.

“Man, like to kill me a whole muthafucking platoon of them boys before I’m done!” He laughed again, and then noticed the silence from Witherspoon. He reached to him and found that the young soldier had died sometime during the fight. He had simply and quietly bled to death.

Walls shook his head in disappointment. Now who was he going to talk to? Man, this was worse than solitary.

He heard noises up ahead, the click of guns being checked and readied. Okay, white boys coming again. He tried to think of them as Klansmen, big crackers in pickups with ax handles and flaming crosses. Or big Irish Baltimore cops with red faces, motherfuckers on horses, man, who’d just as soon smash you as look at you. Or fancy white-boy suits look at you like you a piece of shit a dog dumped on the street.

He laughed again, threw the slide on the Mossberg, felt a shell lifted into place.

“Hey, come on, motherfuckers!” he yelled, laughing. “Come on, white motherfuckers, Dr. P got some shit for you boys!”

It then occurred to him that there was an even larger joke he could play on them! He could blow them all up! For hadn’t Witherspoon, the perfect little soldier boy, hadn’t he carried C-4 explosive in a block somewhere on him? Walls had blown tunnels in the ’Nam with this stuff; he knew it well. He rolled to Witherspoon’s body.

Sorry, boy, he said to the corpse. Got me some lookin’ to do. He probed, scared that the white boys would hit him before he could rig his big surprise. But then he came across it in a bellows pocket of the field pants, a greasy brick about the size of a book. He got it out and began to squeeze and mold it in his strong hands, working some warmth and flexibility into its chilled stiffness.

Gonna make me a bomb, he thought, blow those muthafuckers up.

Okay, finally, he had a lump about the size of a deflated football, maybe a pound’s worth of the stuff. He had one grenade left. He took it off his belt and carefully unscrewed the fuse assembly and tossed away the egg. He bent to Witherspoon and probed him until he came across a coil of primacord in a pocket. He unraveled a bit of the primacord — it felt like putty and was an extremely hot-firing explosive fuse substance — onto the tip of the grenade’s blasting cap at the end of the fuse, and then he plunged this into a glop of the C-4, quickly kneading the C-4 around the grenade fuse, but careful to make sure that the grenade lever was free, so it could pop off when he pulled the pin. He worked hard, laughing softly to himself, knowing that time was very, very short. For sure, they’d seen the tracers striking the rear wall. They knew he was out of tunnel.

“Hey, white-boy motherfuckers, you boys want to get laid? Hah, old Walls got some fine-lookin’ bitches for you, man. Got a nice high yaller, got me a couple white chicks, got me a redhead, got me some real foxes, man. Come on and get it, white boys.”

Three automatic weapons fired simultaneously and the bullets struck around him, hitting the walls, the back of the tunnel, cutting him off, kicking up clouds of coal dust from the floor. But he got the pin from the grenade, and with a kind of lob-heave launched the thing, felt it leave his hands, traveling slowly, not far enough, and he knew then he’d die in the blast too. And he began to scramble backward, away, away, though there was really no away to go to and—

In the small space the blast was huge. It lifted and threw Walls through hot light and harsh air. And dirt, or stone. For the world had been ruptured and the old mountain heaved, and the ceiling of the tunnel gave. He felt the earth covering him. He could not move. The tunnel caved in. He was frozen. He was in his tomb. He was in total blackness.

It occurred to Peter that he should eat something. He was beginning to feel shaky and his head ached. It had been hours since he’d eaten, way back in another lifetime.

But he could not leave the door behind.

The damned door.

It was a simple idea really, you just had to write the program and that was that. That, in fact, was its brilliance — its simplicity. Peter knew that if Delta fought its way to the elevator shaft in the launch control facility, he’d confront the computer-coded door to the shaft itself. It was the mega-door, the ultra-door, the total door. To pop it, you had to know the twelve-digit code. Except that the aggressors would have changed the code — easily done from inside the launch control center at the computer terminal.

Change it to what?

There it was: the new code would be twelve letters or numbers long, or a combination thereof, or less (but not more). Peter assumed that it would be a consciously selected sequence, because — well, because, it would be part of Aggressor-One’s game. That’s how his mind works, and I’m beginning to get a feel for it.

The terror was in the computer program itself. The program, conceived and written by Peter Thiokol of the MX Basing Modes Group, had been designed exactly to prevent what Peter now had to do. That is, he had built into its system a limited-try capacity. If the right code were not hit in the first three attempts, the program reasoned that interlopers were knocking at the door and automatically changed the code to a random sequence of numbers, and it would take another computer at least 135 hours to run through the millions and millions of permutations, even working at macrospeed.

Three strikes and you’re out, Peter thought.

But it had been so smart — so necessary—because the heart of South Mountain is that it’s independent-launch capable. Suppose the missile base is under assault by specially trained Soviet silo-seizure teams of the sort CIA said they were working up? Suppose Qaddafi sends a suicide team in? Suppose — oh, no, this is too wild! — right wing elements of the American military attempt to take over the silo in order to launch a preemptive strike against Johnny Red? In all those scenarios, exactly as projected in the chapter in his book on the John Brown scenario, it fell to the door and the key vault more than any complement of air security policemen or the Doppler radar to hold the intruders at bay.

The joke was, he was fighting himself.

Through the medium of his poor wife, he had provided John Brown, Aggressor-One, or whoever he was, with all his stuff: his ideas, his insights, his theoretical speculations. He knows exactly what I know, Peter thought. In a terrible way, he is me. I’ve permutated. I’ve cloned a perfect twin; he’s absorbed my personality.

Peter turned back to the documents the Agency psychologists had put together on “John Brown.” As he read the psychological evaluation, he realized they could have been talking about him. And that’s what troubled him the most. It was as if John Brown had begun with him, or with his book, or perhaps with his famous essay. And that he’d built his plan outward from that, mastering not so much South Mountain as Peter Thiokol.

He shivered. It was getting cold. He looked at his watch. The digital numbers rushed by:

6:34.32

6:34.33

6:34.35

Less than six hours to go.

John Brown. John Brown, you and your door. Three strikes and I’m out.

He started to doodle: Peter Thiokol = John Brown = 12 = 9 = 12 = 9?

Goddamn, he thought, it would make so much more sense if John Brown had twelve letters in it — the way Peter Thiokol did.

The general was on the phone most of the time with Alex up at ground level, listening impassively. Or he was standing politely back, watching Jack Hummel dig through the block of titanium that stood between himself and the second launch key.

Jack was quite deep by this time. It was difficult finding the space to maneuver so deep in the metal. And his arms ached and the sweat ran down his face. And, Jesus, he was hungry.

“Mr. Hummel. Mr. Hummel, how would you say it’s going?”

“Look, you can see for yourself. I’m in here all the way. I’m really getting deep now.”

He felt the general over his shoulder, peering down the shaft he’d opened, the wound in the metal.

“You’re on the right line?”

“Absolutely. I’m going right into the center, that I can tell you. If this chamber or whatever you say it is is in the center, then I’ll get it.”

“How much longer?”

“Well, I can’t say. You said the block was two hundred forty centimeters in diameter, and I’ve gone maybe a third of that. So I’m close. Another two, three hours, I don’t know. We’ll just see.”

He looked into the flame, which was consuming the titanium with a voracious appetite. Even through the density of his lenses he could sense its extraordinary power. Nothing on earth could stand before it; all melted, yielded, liquified, and slid away against the urgency of the heat.

He tried to imagine this little flame grown a million times. He tried to imagine a giant flame, devouring as it flashed across the landscape; he tried to imagine a giant torch cutting its kerf of destruction around the globe, through cities and towns, turning men and women and babies to ashes. He tried to imagine all the death there was, a planet of death. It would be a lone zone that just didn’t stop.

Instead, banal movie images flooded through his head: the mushroom cloud, the wrecked cities, the piles of corpses, the mutated survivors, bands of starving rat people scurrying through the ruins, and now a word from our sponsor, liquid Ivory, for truly smooooth hands.

I can’t see how it would really be, he thought. I just can’t. And the further leap, by which he would admit that such a fate could occur as a direct consequence of his own actions, was entirely beyond him.

It’s not my fault, he told himself. What was I supposed to do, let them kill my kids? Sure, tell me my kids are less important than the world in general: that’s easy for anyone except a dad to say.

He did know it called for an extraordinary man.

And I’m an ordinary one, he concluded. Bomb or no bomb, war or no war, those are my kids!

He looked back to the flame, in its hunger licking its way toward midnight.

“I told you,” Megan told the Three Dumb Men. “How many times do I have to tell you? They claimed they were Israelis. I swear to you I thought they were Israelis. Jews. Just Jews. Are any of you Jewish?”

The Three Dumb Men shook their heads.

“The FBI doesn’t have Jews?” she asked, incredulous. “In this day and age the FBI doesn’t have Jews?”

“You’re changing the subject, Mrs. Thiokol,” said the harshest of them. “We’re under an enormous time constraint here. Please, could we return? You’ve told us of your recruitment, you’ve told us of your mental state, you’ve detailed the information you gave him, you’ve described Ari Gottlieb and this mysterious intelligence officer in the Israeli consulate.”

“That’s all I know. I’ve told you everything I know. Please, I’d tell you anything. But I’ve told you everything.”

It was dark by now, and through the windows she could see lights on in the neighborhood.

“Would anybody like any coffee?” she said.

There was no answer.

“Could I fix myself some coffee?”

“Of course.”

She went to a cabinet where she had a Mr. Coffee machine stored, got it out, fiddled with filters, coffee grounds, water, and finally got the thing to working. She watched the light come on as the coffee began to drip into the pot.

One of the agents went to talk on the phone, then came back.

“Mrs. Thiokol, I’ve directed our counterespionage division to bring our photos by. We’ve also got some photos from the Pentagon for you to look at. We’d like you to try to find the face of the man who recruited you and the face of the man you saw in the consulate, is that all right?”

“I’m horrible at faces,” she said.

“We wish you’d try very hard,” said the man. “As I said, time is very important.”

“What’s going on?”

“It would be difficult to explain at this time, Mrs. Thiokol.”

“It’s something out there, isn’t it? Something because of what I told these people, that’s what’s going on, isn’t it? It involves South Mountain, doesn’t it?”

There was a pause. The Three Dumb Men looked at one another, and finally the eldest of them said, “Yes, it does.”

“Has anyone been killed?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Megan stared at the Mr. Coffee. You ought to be feeling something, she thought. You’ve got blood on your hands, so feel it, all right? But she felt only tired. She just felt exhausted.

“It’s Peter,” she said. “He’s out there, isn’t he? You’d want him out there, wouldn’t you?”

“Uh, yes, I believe Dr. Thiokol is on-site.”

“On-site? Is that your word for it? He’s where the shooting is. He’s an awful coward, you know. He won’t be any good around guns at all. He’s best in some kind of room full of books. That’s what he loves, just to read and think and study and be left alone. He’s so neurotic. They won’t put him near the guns and the danger, will they?”

“Well, Mrs. Thiokol, we really don’t know. Some other people are handling that operation. I don’t know if he’ll be up near the shooting or back where it’s safe. If it comes to it, I suppose he might have to be where there’s firing. And I’m sure, given what’s involved, he won’t be a coward.”

“Maybe that’s what I wanted. Maybe what I really wanted was to get him killed.”

“You’d have to talk to your psychiatrist about that, Mrs. Thiokol. Fred, call counterintel again, those damned books ought to be here by now.”

“I just called them, Leo.”

“Well, call them again, or something, don’t just sit there.”

“All right.”

“The coffee’s ready,” Megan said. “Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”

“Yes,” one of the Dumb Men said, “I’d like some, please.”

She poured it.

“Mrs. Thiokol, let’s talk about this. How did you contact your friend and how were the materials picked up. Was it through Ari?”

“Only once, just a few weeks ago. He sent me specially. But more commonly we had it set up in New York so that — do you really want to hear this? I mean, it’s just details, you know, the little silly business that seemed so ridiculous to me and—”

“Please, tell us.”

She took a sip of coffee.

“Well, it was so stupid and complicated. They explained it to me very carefully. I checked the Sunday Post. I picked an ad with the name of a chain bookstore in it. Then I dropped a personal ad off for the Post classifieds. Cash, they said, always pay cash. Through a code, I identified the store. Then I rented a car. Oh, and I had to remember to get something plaid. Then I went to the store on the appointed day — it was usually in a mall someplace around the Beltway — and I wrote a number on a scrap of paper, and I put it at page 300 of Gone with the Wind, which I loved when I was a girl and which they always have. And then …”

“Who serviced the drop? Do you know?”

“Well, I was so curious I once stayed to check. A fat nervous-looking middle-aged man. He looked like a slob. He was no—”

The door opened, and several agents, laden with material, began to troop in. The photo books had arrived.

Arbatov drove aimlessly through the traffic, down Route 1 to the Beltway. He almost turned down it, but decided at the last moment not to and was glad of that decision, for when he passed over it, he saw a ribbon of light, signifying a terrible traffic backup, all the car lights frozen solid on the big road.

The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams. The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never had traffic jams because they didn’t have cars.

He thought he ought to try Molly again. Pulling off the road, he went into a crummy little place in College Park. He stepped into the same thing he’d left behind at Jake’s — his life wasn’t getting any better! — which was another crowded, seedy bar full of smoke and lonely drinkers, except that by this time a new, ludicrous note had been added, a go-go dancer, a fat one of the sort Gregor specialized in. She looked like a truck driver’s woman. She undulated to dreadful rock music up on a little stand, a bland, dull look on her bovine face. She looked a little like Molly Shroyer, that was the terrible thing.

Gregor found a pay phone, and dialed. He heard the phone buzz once, twice, three times, four times, damn! Where was she? She could not possibly still be at her office! What was going on?

He saw his great coup slipping away. Suppose Molly had not been able to find anything else out? The thought made him extremely nervous, so instead he instantly conjured up his most comforting illusion, seeking solace and serenity in the scenario.

Molly found him some wonderful stuff, absolute top of the line, and tomorrow he’d walk into little monkey Klimov, throw the documents down on the desk and say, “There, there, you little piglet, look at what Gregor Arbatov has uncovered. The great Gregor Arbatov has penetrated to the very center of the capitalist war machine. He has extraordinary documents on the crisis in central Maryland, and you thought he was nothing but a sniveling fool. Well, young whelp, it’s you who’ll do some sniveling soon enough, you and your powerful uncle Arkady Pashin, who’ll do you no good at all. You’re the one who’ll be recalled to the Mother Country, not the great Gregor Arbatov.”

It was such a wonderful moment, he hated to relinquish it, but at that second some equally drunken American prodded him, wanting the phone, and he realized he stood in a smoky bar in College Park while a great American whore shook her milk-jug tits at him and he stood and breathed cigarette smoke and clung to a phone that was not being answered.

Walls was dead and had begun to putrefy. The smell of decay, foul and noxious, reached his nostrils through death, and involuntarily, he squinched his face to avoid it, and threw his arm over his face, even in the grave. Amazingly, the arm still moved, if only in the medium of dirt. He had a brief moment of black clarity, and then the stench penetrated again, enough to make a man insane it was so foul, and he coughed, gagging, and a shiver rolled through him, deep from the bone, and as he shivered he shook himself from the shallow coating of coal dust that covered him.

Alive!

He blinked.

God, it was awful, the smell.

He pulled himself upright. His head ached, one arm felt numb, his knees knocked and quivered, and he was terribly thirsty. The air was full of dust; his tongue and lips and teeth were coated in dust. He tried to stagger ahead, but something held him back, pulling at him. He spun to discover it was the damned shotgun, its loose sling looped around his arm. With a grunt he pulled it free, searching his belt simultaneously for his angle-head flashlight. He found it.

Whoo-eee. No going back, no way, no how, no sir. The collapse of the tunnel, in whose rubble he had been loosely buried, completely sealed him off. His beam flashed across the wreckage, revealing only a new and glistening wall of coal and dirt. He was cooked, he now saw.

Dead, he thought. Dead, dead, dead.

He turned to explore what little remained of the sarcophagus. Blank walls greeted his search in the bright circle of light. It was the same end of story they had discovered before the tunnel fight. It was like the door in his cell. Fuck Niggers.

Walls laughed.

You die slow, not fast, he thought. Them white boys have their way with your nigger ass anyhows.

But still, the smell. He winced. The odor of corruption he recognized instantly, having encountered it so many times in the long months underground back in the ’Nam, when the gooks could not get their dead out of the tunnels and so left them buried in the walls, where occasionally, after a fight or a detonation, they fell out, or rather pieces of them did, and with them came this same terrible odor.

Man, how could it smell so? It only your old pal death.

Yet as he pieced the situation together, his curiosity was also aroused. For the smell had to come from somewhere. It could not come from nowhere and it had not been there before the explosion.

He began to sniff through the chamber for that spot where the odor was at its most absolutely unendurable. Led by his nose, his fingers searched the crevices in the walls. It didn’t take long.

Shit, all right. Yes, sir, here it was. Walls found it. A kind of crack in the wall, and from the crack, which was low off the floor, there came a kind of breeze and from the breeze the moist, dank, terrible stench.

Walls searched his belt. Yes, dammit, he still had it, a goddamned entrenching tool. He remembered now that the damned thing had banged against his legs in the long tunnel fight. Removing it, he quickly unfolded the blade, locked it into place, and with strong, hard movements began to smash at the wall, scraping and plunging. The air filled with more dust, and his eyes began to sting, but still he kept at it, thrusting and banging away, amazed at how swiftly it went. With a final crack the wall before him heaved and collapsed. He stepped back. The dust swirled in his single beam of light, but yes, yes, there it was, a tunnel.

A way out.

Or no, maybe not out. But to somewhere.

Faces. The world had become faces.

“Now, these are American military, Mrs. Thiokol. We put this file together rather hurriedly, but these are the faces of men who possess the skill necessary to plan and execute the sort of operation we’re dealing with at South Mountain.”

She was amazed by how much she despised soldiers. These were exactly the kind of men she was never attracted to, that made her yawn and mope. If she had seen any of these bland, uncomplicated serious faces at a party, she would have run in the opposite direction. They looked like insurance agents, with their little haircuts all so neat, their eyes all so unclouded, their square, jowly heads atop their square, strong shoulders, over neatly pressed uniform lapels, with great mosaics of decoration on their square, manly chests. They looked so boring. Their business was supposed to be death, but they looked like IBM salesmen. They looked grim and task-oriented and hideously self-important and dull.

Still, now and then there’d be one a little more interesting than the others — with, say, a little pain in his eyes or a faraway look or a peculiar haunted look. Or maybe even the suggestion of evil, as if the owner enjoyed the power of death that was his profession.

“This one.”

“This one. You know this one?”

“No. No, I’m just curious. He looks as if he’s had an interesting life.”

One of the men breathed heavily, almost a sigh.

“He was a colonel in the Special Forces. He was in Vietnam for seven straight years and spent a long time out there in what they called Indian country.”

She couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant.

“But, yes, he has had an interesting life. He’s now in Bangkok, Thailand, where he runs a very proficient private army that protects a heroin merchant. Could we go on, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“I’m not being very much help, am I?”

“Don’t worry about pleasing us, Mrs. Thiokol. Pleasing us has no meaning. Finding the man or men behind all this, that has some meaning. Fred, would you get me another cup of coffee?”

She went on. But none of them bore the faintest resemblance to that charming, forceful man in the Israeli consulate that morning.

“I’m sorry. They’re beginning to blur together. I’ve been looking at them for hours now. I don’t think he’s here.” Somehow she suspected he wouldn’t be.

“You’ve been looking at them for about half an hour. It doesn’t appear to me that you’ve been concentrating.”

This irritated her.

“I have been concentrating. I have a visual imagination, and that man’s face is in it. I know that face. I can call it up even now, I can remember it. Do you want me to go through it again?”

“No.”

“Maybe if you had one of those police sketch artists I could describe him, and then the computer could help you find him.”

“We’ve found that’s a very long shot. Statistically, it almost never works out.”

“Maybe I could draw him. I mean, I’m—”

They looked at one another as though they really were Three Dumb Men. You could fly a plane through those open mouths. It seemed so elementary to her.

“An artist, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Yes, goddammit. Why the hell didn’t we think of that sooner?”

“It’s my fault, I should have—”

“Don’t worry about that now. Fred, get her some paper and a — is a pen all right?”

“A pen is fine.”

She took the Bic, a fineline, and faced the blank sheet in front of her.

“All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. She hadn’t drawn in years. She felt the pen in her hands grow heavy and then, experimentally, she drew a line, which seemed to lead her to another and then another and then … suddenly, she was in a frenzy of drawing, she didn’t want ever to stop drawing. And as she worked, she felt the details pouring back into her mind. She remembered the curious formality to the man, and yet his cheer and his sense of command. You just knew this was a man who got things done. Then she reminded herself that at the time she had thought he was a Jew, a hero of Israel. How could she have been so wrong? Still she felt herself drawing a hero of Israel, a Jew. So there was something in him that she responded to, that was genuine even under the cleverly constructed fiction and the guile that had gone into constructing the fiction. She decided then that he really was a hero, of sorts, and that he was probably as brave as any Israeli hero, and she tried to draw that, too — his courage. She decided that he was a special man, and she tried to draw that. She tried to draw his charisma, which was the hardest. Is it in the eyes, some steely glint, some inner fortitude? Is it in the jut of the chin, the set of the mouth, the firmness of posture, the clarity of vision, the forthrightness in the way he turns his whole face toward you and never gives you the half-and three-quarter looks so much a part of the repertoire of the people who like to think themselves “charming”? She tried to draw that.

But a face was emerging from all this thought, and her fingers hurt where she had pressed down upon the pen. Somehow, through her illusions, her eyes and her hands had not lied.

She looked at him. Yes, that was him. Yes, forget the bullshit, that’s him. Maybe his vitality obscured his age and his bright eyes obscured the tension deep inside him, but that was him. Maybe the hair wasn’t right, because she tended not to notice hair. But that was him.

She felt them crowding around, watching.

“There,” she finally said. “Does that look like anything?”

They were very quiet. Then, one by one, they spoke.

“No. It’s real good. You really made him come alive. But no, no, that’s not anybody I’ve looked at today,” said the first Dumb Man.

“Just for a second,” said the second Dumb Man, “it was shaping up like a SAC colonel who got the ax seven years back when he got involved in some crooked real estate deal. He was a leading candidate early this afternoon, until they found him in Butte, Montana, teaching junior high.”

The long seconds passed, and then it became extremely obvious that the third Dumb Man, who was the youngest, the one who did the phone calling and got the coffee, had not vet spoken.

‘“Fred?”

Finally, Fred said, “I think you better get the Agency.”

Then he walked over to the table, where four or five more huge volumes of photos lurked. He read the words on their binders, selected one, and as he brought it to her, she could hear their breaths come in harshly. She could not see what the book was, but he opened it quickly, found a certain page.

There, before her, were about a half dozen men, all in uniform. But it was not an American uniform, as had been the case with all the others she had looked at. It was a tunic-collared uniform, with off-colored shoulder boards and lots of decorations. The faces were flinty, pouchy, grim, official.

She put her finger out, touching one.

He was heavier here by several pounds, and he wasn’t smiling. He had no charisma, only power. But it was the same, the white-blond hair, the wise cosmopolitan eyes, the sureness of self and purpose, and the wit that lurked in him. It was all there, though in latent form.

“That’s him,” she said.

“You’re sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“Leo, look for yourself. That’s the face she drew! That’s it!”

But Leo didn’t want to believe it.

“You’re absolutely sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“Leo, look at the picture!”

“Fuck the picture,” Leo said. “Mrs. Thiokol? Megan, look at me. Look at me. This is the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life. Look at me, and tell me this is the man you met in what you thought was the Israeli consulate in New York City.”

“She drew the picture from memory,” Fred said. “She couldn’t have known.”

“Yes, it’s him.”

“Leo,” said Fred, “I should know, I spent nine years in counterintel. He was one of our big bad bogeymen. We tracked him all over New York back when he was operational. He was a hell of a pro, I’ll say that.”

Leo just said, “You better call the White House. And the people at South Mountain.”

“Who is he?” asked Megan, and nobody would look her in the eye until finally Leo, the oldest of the Three Dumb Men, turned to her and said, “You’ve just identified the lieutenant general who is the head of the First Directorate of the Soviet GRU, Mrs. Thiokol. Head of Russian Military Intelligence.”

She didn’t believe him.

“I—” she started, then stopped.

Finally, she said, “His name. Tell me his name, just so I know it.”

“His name is Arkady Pashin.”

The dust floated up through the hole in the wall, drifted in layers through the flickering beam of Walls’s light. Cool air, dense and almost gaggingly sweet with corruption, raced through his., nose. He fell back, vomited, retched himself empty in a series of dry, shivering spasms. At last he stood.

Man, he thought, I don’t wanna go in there, no, sir.

You gotta, boy. No other place to go. You maybe find something in there. You go on forward now, boy.

Shit.

Stop your cursing. You go forward, black and proud, or you die. Same as the streets, motherfucker, same as any tunnel ever made. Man stand up, man be black and proud, man go ahead. No one gonna raise up against you, not down here.

Black and proud, he thought, black and proud!

Ducking, he willed himself through the space into some farther chamber. He was braced for what he saw, yet still the power of it, when the circle of light fell upon it, was shattering.

Black and proud, he said to himself, holding himself together, yes, sir, black and proud!

It was the face of death. He’d seen it a jillion times, of course, from cartoon pirate flags and Halloween masks and scary movies and even cereal boxes, jokey and funny — but not jokey here: the leering skull’s face, its splayed grin hideous and total, the face from beyond the Great Divide. Yet its power still shocked him — that, and the fact that flesh, rotted and filthy, still clung wormlike to the clean white bone of the skull. The eyes were gone — or were they merely swollen grotesquely, so they no longer looked like eyes? The hair hung in stiff hunks down across the face, and atop the head, which was at the crazy angle of uncaring, was a metal miner’s helmet, its little light long since spent. The spindly creature’s hands, frail and bony-looking, held a pick that had fallen across and joined the dead man’s chest, sinking through its blackened corruption, joining the slithery lungs — things moved in there as the beam disturbed them. Quickly, he flashed the beam about, and everywhere the bright circle prowled it revealed the same: dead men, commingled with their still-hard equipment, now in the process of rejoining the elements, sinking into the maggoty forever. He had the horrified sense of not being alone: other small living things, grown fat on this feast, moved and shook their scaly tails at him as the light prodded them.

Walls fell back. He had an image of the world gone to death: the world, like this desperate chamber, filled up with corpses, heaped and rotting.

Black and proud! he told himself.

Again he vomited, not even having the strength to lean forward to avoid befouling himself. But there was nothing left to puke. His lungs and chest seemed to rupture in the effort of expulsion, but nothing remained to expel. Shakily, he stood, wondering if he could step forward blindly, did, felt something beneath him fight just a split-second, then yield to the impact of his boot.

He was in something.

He shook his boot off, staggered forward. Everywhere the maggoty, glistening bodies Jay, beyond color, beyond everything except their own disintegration. He stumbled ahead, finding himself in a larger chamber, then saw the drama of it. His beam flicked backward in confirmation, and there revealed the fallen tunnel, a hopeless no-exit of collapsed coal. These men, what? fifty or so? had been trapped back here in the coffin. They’d known they hadn’t the strength or the time to tunnel back out through the fallen chamber, and had thought therefore to dig laterally, from their tunnel — Cathy, wasn’t it? something beginning with a C — into his tunnel, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, that bitch, that white bitch, had betrayed them as she had betrayed him. She had been just inches away before exhaustion and airlessness had overcome the last of them, and they’d died in a frenzy of effort.

Walls wept for their effort and guts. White boys in a tunnel, digging for their lives. Tunnel men, like he was. Hey, man, dyin’ underground no way to die, Walls knew, having seen enough of it himself in his time.

But why are they rotting now?

Walls worked his mind against it and then he had it. Of course. They’d been sealed off in airless, germless protection down here for their long half-century, and without air, there is no rot. They had quietly mummified, turning to leather and sinew, perhaps even refrigerated by the coolness. But then — he struggled to remember the details as they had been explained to him — the hole had been left open for years and years and finally, last summer, when they excavated for the missile shaft, it had rained even more, and the rain had poured into the open mountain and eaten its way down through the coal, and eventually reached and punctured this coffin. And when it violated the grave, it admitted grave robbers, the millions of germy little creatures that turned flesh to horror.

Git your ass going, boy!

Walls had entered the main tunnel now, where the rest of the miners were. His light flashed upon them. The ceiling was low. Walls tried not to imagine it but he could not avoid it: thinking of them trapped down here in the dank dark, feeling the air ebb in slow degrees, waiting for a rescue that wouldn’t — couldn’t — come.

He walked forward, bumped his head, crouched, walked forward some more. He felt the cool pressure of air, and had a bad moment as he imagined his lungs filling with microscopic maggoty things, with the wormy crawlers and creepers that scuttled through the flesh. He felt very close to panic, even he, Walls, the hardest, meanest, baddest tunnel dick of all time, and not a slouch of a street player either, thank you, ma’am. Maybe this was the worst moment for him: standing among the corpses, no place to go, it seemed, but to join them. He saw an image of himself, a ragged, mealy hunk of rot spangling a few old African bones. Years later white people would come and hold up a Walls drumstick and with great distaste say, “Good Lord, Ralph, this fellow’s limbs are so darned much thicker than the others; why, he must have been a colored man!” But then Walls got hold of himself, yessir, saying it over and over, black and proud! black and proud! and the panic flapped out of his chest and found some other chest to fill somewhere in the world: old Walls was back.

No stiffs going to get the best of this nigger, no, sir!

This boy goin’ live. Jack, don’t you know?

Walls crawled forward, feeling. He didn’t need his lamp now, he didn’t need nothing. He flicked it off. He loved the darkness. He was the man of darkness. He was home in the darkness; it was his natural element. He had this tunnel beat. This motherfucker was his, its ass belong to him.

In the dark his fingers reached out. He was alone with the dead but no longer afraid.

Then he saw the light. Milky, luminous, faraway, but light nonetheless.

Okay, motherfucker, he thought.

The breeze continued to blow, and he was surprised at how strong and sweet it smelled. He crawled over bodies, feeling them crumble beneath him. They couldn’t harm him, they were only the dead.

He came to it at last. Air poured down from the hole in the roof. He looked up. There was the light, far away, a long life’s upward chimney crawl or squirm. But light. The light at the end of the — whatever.

Okay, Jack, he thought. Here comes Walls.

He wrapped his friend and companion Mr. Twelve tightly to him, and began his journey toward the light.

It was a chasm by now, a tunnel into the heart of the metal.

“Mr. Hummel?”

“Yes, sir?”

“How much farther?”

“Last time I measured, I’d gone one hundred twenty-five centimeters. That puts us maybe ten or fifteen away.”

“Time, please.”

“Oh, say three, four hours. Midnight. We get there at midnight.”

“Excellent. And then we can all go home.”

He’d been cutting for hours now, and the ache in his arms from the awkwardness of holding the torch deep in the guts of the titanium block was terrific. Yet he was proud, in a terrible way. Lots of guys couldn’t have done what he’d done. He’d done a beautiful job, clean and elegant and precise. He’d just quit bitching and gotten it done. But he was still scared.

“The Army. It’s up top, trying to break in, isn’t it?”

“It is, Mr. Hummel.”

“What happens to me when those guys kick the doors down and start shooting?”

“They can’t get down here.”

“They’ll figure out a way. They’re smart guys.”

“Nobody is that smart.”

“Who are you guys? Tell me, at least.”

“Patriots.”

“I know enough to know all soldiers think they’re patriots.”

“No, most soldiers are cynics. We are the true thing.”

“But if you shoot this thing off, everybody will die. Because the Russians will shoot off theirs, they’ll shoot off everything they’ve got, and everybody dies!”

It scared him to defy the man. But it just blubbered out.

The general smiled with kind radiance.

“Mr. Hummel, I could never permit a full-scale nuclear exchange. You’re right, that would be the end of the planet. Do you think I could convince all these men to come with me on this desperate mission only to end the world?”

Jack just looked at him and had no answer.

“You see, Mr. Hummel, war doesn’t make sense if everybody loses, does it? But if we can win? What then? Then, isn’t it the moral responsibility of a professional soldier to take advantage of the situation? Isn’t that where the higher duty lies? Doesn’t that save the world rather than doom it? Millions die; better that, over the long run, than billions! Better a dead country than a dead world? Especially if the millions are in the enemy’s country, eh?”

The man’s eyes, beaming belief and conviction, radiated passion and craziness. It frightened Jack. He swallowed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I assure you, Mr. Hummel, I do. Now, please, the flame.”

Jack put the flame in the hole. He had a feeling of terrible guilt.

“We’re done,” announced the engineer sergeant.

“At last,” shouted Alex. “God, you men have worked so hard. Get the tarpaulin pulled back.”

With grunting and heaving the men of the Red Platoon pulled back and discarded the heavy sheets of canvas that had obscured their work.

In the darkness Alex couldn’t see much, but he knew what was there.

“They’ll never get through that,” he said. “We should know, eh? We learned the hard way?”

“Yes, sir,” said the engineer sergeant.

The air was crisp and cold and above them the stars towered, spinning firewheels, clouds of distant cosmic gas. All around it was quiet, except for the press of the breeze through the trees and the occasional mumble or shiver of a man in the dark.

“And just in time too,” Alex said. “They’ll be coining soon, and in force.”

“No signs yet?”

“No, it’s all quiet down there. They brought some trucks up a few minutes back.”

“Reinforcements,” somebody said. “We hurt them bad, they needed more men.”

“Sir!”

The call arose from a dozen places on the perimeter. Alex turned with his binoculars, even as he heard the roar. At first he could see nothing, but then someone screamed, “The road! The road!”

He lifted his binoculars and watched, and even at this distance could make out the spectacle. A plane came down and even though it was only a phenomenon of landing lights, glowing cockpit, and blinkers at the wingtips, it seemed heavy in the air as it floated awkwardly down, touched the straight-running line of the highway, bounced once, twice, skidded a bit as a braking chute popped, and then slowed.

“C-130,” Alex said.

The plane eventually halted to let out its men; then it simply taxied off the roadway and into the fields, where it fell brokenly into a ditch to make room for another plane, which in seconds followed the same drunken path downward to the highway. Then another, and finally a fourth.

“Very neat,” said Alex. “Nicely done. Good pilots, brave men, landing on a roadway.”

“More visitors?” said one of the others.

“Elite troops. Rangers, I suppose. Well, well, it’s going to be an interesting next few hours.”

He looked at his watch. Midnight was coming. But would it come soon enough?