The Day Before Midnight

2200

Now the data was pouring in: the FBI had located the farm rented six months earlier by one “Isaac Smith” on the border of South Mountain from which the Spetsnaz operation was mounted: there the feds found piles of ammunition crating hidden in the barn, a variety of cars, trucks, and buses by which the men had assembled over the past month by a multitude of soft routes down through Canada or up from Mexico, as well as plans, schedules, a food dump, maps, and an informal barracks — all beds made. And they found a few sheets of what appeared to be chemically impregnated white canvas — four, to be exact. The Bureau guessed that these were some sort of crude Stealth technology for defeating South Mountain’s Doppler radar, and reckoned that they were left behind, unused, by the four men who took down Hummel’s house that morning.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the DIA had further information on Spetsnaz history and theory. Spetsnaz people were said to be either the very best, or the very worst, as the case might be: highly motivated, extremely competent, utterly ruthless commando units that had operated most furiously in Afghanistan, where they were thought to be responsible for a number of village atrocities.

Going back through the years, it was clear that wherever the Soviets needed quick, deadly strikes, they used Spetsnaz units: the Prague airport, for example, thought to have been seized by airborne troops in the spring of 1968, when the Russians closed down the Czechoslovakian revolution under Dubcek, was actually taken by a crack Spetsnaz seizure team. And it was a Spetsnaz wet squad that aced the Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin in his Kabul palace in December 1979. Spetsnaz personnel routinely formed the training cadres that the Russians circulated in the third world, having operated in such varied climes as the Peruvian mountains, the Iraqi mountains, the Malay peninsula, the Asian mainland, the paddies of Vietnam, and the highlands of Salvador.

“They’re very good people,” said Skazy, “but we can dust them.”

“The worst part of the operation,” Puller said, “will be the rappel. Sliding down that rope into the darkness. You know they’ll be firing up at you. You’ll put your grenades and maybe a good dose of C-4 down the shaft first, but then there’ll come a moment when the first men of your team have to slide those ropes down into the darkness. And you know enough of the Spetsnaz tunnel defense team will recover to be firing on you as you descend. It’ll be pretty bad, Frank. You figure out yet who’ll be the first man on the ropes?”

Skazy laughed, showing strong white teeth. He was West Point, ’68, and in those days had loved to bus to Princeton, the closest Ivy League school, on weekends, and lounge around in his ludicrous plebe uniform and white sidewall haircut, and just dare the punks to make a comment. He loved to fight. He dreamed of fighting all the time. He burned to test himself in the most fiery of all possible crucibles.

“You don’t lead men from behind,” he said. “I’ll be Number One.”

The answer did not surprise Puller, which was why he asked it.

“I want you to reconsider, Frank,” he said. “A commander risks his operation if he exposes himself pointlessly and gets fataled in the early going.”

“I’d never ask a man to do what I couldn’t,” said Skazy, meaning it and believing it.

“Frank,” said Puller, “look, I’m not going to tell you how to run your assault. But don’t go down that rope first out of some idiotic notion of showing me up. I know you’re pissed at me because of Iran. I know you think I fucked your career. For what it’s worth, I talked to Bruce Palmer and tried to get you your eagle. I told him what happened at Desert One was my fault. It wasn’t yours. Okay?”

Skazy didn’t look at him.

“I’m just trying to do the mission, Colonel. That’s all. I just want the chance. The chance I didn’t get in Iran.”

Puller, who never explained anything, felt the temptation to this time. We couldn’t go with five choppers out of specific mandate by the Joint Chiefs, who overcontrolled the mission beyond belief. I had no choice. I’m an army officer, I get paid to follow orders, and I get paid to take the heat afterward, when they all walk away because of their careers. I could have made a stink, but I didn’t. Which is my way.

But he didn’t say anything.

“Well, Frank, good luck to you, then. It’s Delta’s baby now.”

“Just let us go, this time, Dick. Whatever you do, let us go.”

So many turns and twists and dark ladders now, Walls felt as though he were in somebody’s intestines, following the little trace of light upward. Sometimes this meant almost straight up, as if he were crawling up a chimney, supporting himself on the tension between his knees and his hunched, pressing shoulders, all of it made more difficult by the heavy weight of the remaining shotgun shells in his bellows pockets and the gun itself, wrapped awkwardly about his arm.

Dump the sucker, he thought.

But he could not. He loved the piece. It had never let him down.

And sometimes it meant almost walking rather than climbing, where the floor went to a slant, then switched back, but always, always, it went upward. So upward he fought in the darkness, seeing before him only the little bounce of illumination from the mazelike warren of tunnels. He knew only that there was this hint of light and that there was air in the tunnel, more now, cool and clean, whispering in from somewhere.

Maybe you dead, and this is hell, boy, he thought. Maybe this is forever, crawling through these damned holes, the tunnel rat’s final fate: tunnels to other tunnels. Walls saw it before him: tunnels to heaven, tunnels into space, tunnels forever.

He paused. Sweat was in his eyes. Beginning to craze out a little. There, boy, he told himself. He breathed, realized how hungry he was. He’d kill for a piece of chicken about now: he focused on it for a second, thinking about the crisp outer crust and how he used to rip through it with his teeth, feeling it crunch beneath them, then get at the tender white meat inside that would fall off the bone into your hand, sweet in its own sweet grease. He smiled: his brother James was across from him. They used to joke — when white people died they came back as chickens so black people could eat them and finally do black people some good.

He laughed to himself. Hadn’t thought about that shit in years. Hey man, be nice, get out of this jam, get out of this hole, go back and see James, have some of Mama’s chicken.

Mama was a big Baptist woman. She worked for many years at some Jewish people’s in Pikesville and they treat her good. But nobody else treat her good, not Tyrone, her husband, who disappeared, and Willis, who moved in and used to beat her. His mother was a large, sorrowful praying woman who worked very hard every day in her life and died when her eldest boy, Nathan, was in tunnels in Vietnam and only heard about it from his brother James. Then James got killed. Another boy at a basketball game had a gun, said James called him something bad, shot him.

So Nathan came home to no Mama and no brother James, and all the men he’d fought with in the tunnels were dead too. Death was everywhere, like the rats that prowled the hot alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, in B-more, Maryland, and he could get no job or when he got a job and his head would ache because of the time he was blown up and buried in the tunnel and couldn’t work, he got fired.

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, the sign had said in the DEROS station on the way back from ’Nam, but it was another white lie: today was the first day of no part of your life.

The sign should have said what another sign did say: FUCK NIGGERS.

Walls shook his head. He was gripping the shotgun hard enough to break it; no one understood how full of rage Pennsylvania Avenue could turn a man. Man do anything to get off of Pennsylvania Avenue, and bury his mama and his brother in a nice place in the country. He missed his mama, he missed his brother. He never got off of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he became the dude of Pennsylvania there for a while, boy, the Dr. P of Pennsylvania, he could do anything for you, foxy pussy, some magic pills make you feel good, a piece to make you a man. He was the sultan of Pennsylvania Avenue until—

Walls came out of his reverie when a drop of water hit him in the cheek. Was only this motherfucking tunnel, no lie, Jack, that seemed to go on forever and ever and—

And then he saw it.

Well, a long way to climb to see this shit, but this was it all right, this was what he’d come for.

It was a metal pipe, corrugated, cutting through the tunnel up ahead. But goddamn, it was rusted, and it was from the hole in it that the light originated.

Walls scrambled ahead, not straight up exactly, but on an angle toward that pipe. Was this where white shit came out of the fort in the mountain? But no, didn’t smell like no shit. He got up to it and crouched. Yes, the water came through here and had eaten the flues into the mountain from this spot. This was the main mother of all the tunnels he’d come through, this itty-bitty little thing. He reached up, touched the hole. Yes, by God, man could get through. Walls pulled himself into it. It was like being unborn: it was like crawling back into a pussy. His body had to work in an odd way to get into the rotted pipe, bending here, twisting there, wiggling his skinny hips this-way-that-way and — dammit, fucking gun caught! uh, c’mon, goddammit, uh — yes, yes, yes, again yes.

He was in the sucker.

Okay, motherfucker, where you go? He began to slither forward. His shoulders could barely move. The roof of the pipe was an inch above his nose. He wiggled ahead. He couldn’t turn to see. He could smell the metal. The gun was under him, it hurt — goddamn, it hurt — but he was so trapped he could move forward only by inches. Panic hit him again. Oh, shit, to die like this in some pipe like a turd in the sewer. He screamed, his scream coming back in his face off the metal above him. This was the worst. There was almost no room for movement at all in here; he just had to keep pushing himself forward inch by inch. A man could die in here, stuck and starved to death and the little rats would come and eat the skin and muscles off his bone.

Walls tried not to think of the rats, and thank Cod there weren’t any for him: only the pipe, above him, all around him, and the vague sense of light ahead and the rush now of absolute cool, dry air, and a vague hum. He squirmed on, and the seconds seemed to expand into hours. He felt like he’d been down here forever. He felt like this was his life. He couldn’t remember a goddamned thing, except that this morning he’d been worried about the Aryans whacking his ass in the shower as they’d sworn to do. He figured he ought to pray, but now he was out of gods. He could think of no gods to pray to. The Baptist God of Mama was no good down here. Besides, lots of guys believed in a Baptist God and they got wasted easy, the most recent of them being poor Witherspoon some hours back in the tunnel. But this guy Allah was no treat either, and the guys that ate up his action died just like the Baptists. Larry X, head Fruit of Islam in the pen, he got his throat splayed open as a fish mouth by an Aryan, Allah did his ass no good at all. So Walls could think of no one to pray to, and he just sang a verse of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” thinking, those dudes the closest thing to God I ever heard of, and squirmed ahead, and came, centuries later and awash in his own stench and sweat and terror, to the end of the tunnel.

He squirmed out. And there was God.

Tall and black and blank, God looked down on him impassively, in an air-conditioned chamber with the hum of machines. God was enormous. God was huge. God had no mercy, no meaning, no human face. God was flat and cold to the touch.

God was a rocket.

The teletype clattered for the first time in hours. The general made no move, however, to approach the machine and read the message. He simply remained crouched over Jack Hummerl’s shoulder, seemingly mesmerized by the flame so deep inside the block of titanium, as if he were willing, somehow, the flame to cut more swiftly.

“Sir,” Jack heard someone say. “There’s a message here.”

The general finally tore himself away from the spectacle of the flame, went to the machine and ripped the message off the platen.

Then he went to the phone.

Jack heard the call.

“Major Yasotay. Tell the men they no longer need to obey language discipline. The Americans seemed to have figured out who we are.”

He put down the receiver and spoke quickly in another language to one of the guards in the command capsule. The silent boy responded and raced out; Jack heard them all talking, and then he recognized the language.

Impulsively, he turned and stood.

“You guys are Russians!” he shrieked. “I heard you. That’s Russian. You’re fucking Russians!” His heart pounded in the awful loneliness of the moment. He couldn’t believe he was defying the general.

The general looked at him, and for just a moment Jack saw a hint of surprise flicker across the man’s smooth, handsome face.

“And so if we are, Mr. Hummel? What possible difference could that make to your family?”

“I’m not helping any Russians,” Jack said with absolute finality, feeling that he’d somehow made his breakthrough and had located sufficient grounds upon which to make his stand, though he felt his heart’s thudding go off like a jack-hammer and his knees begin to knock.

The general spoke quickly in Russian, and instantly two of the young troopers ducked into the room, their weapons aimed at Jack.

“Let’s end the farce, Mr. Hummel, without any silly fuss. If I say the word, my men fire. Then I’ll have to put a message through to the men at your family’s house and your wife and children die. There can’t be but an inch or two of metal left in there. Well get through it, with or without you. Your sacrifice accomplishes nothing; the sacrifice of your family accomplishes nothing.”

“Oh, no? Buddy, you may know missiles, but you don’t know welding. I give a yank on the tubes here”—he yanked the rubber hoses that ran from his torch to the cylinder of gas nearby—“and rip the sealers out, and you lose all your gas, then you’re out of fucking luck until you get a new cylinder in. Like, say, by noon tomorrow, huh?”

Jack’s knees shivered with desperate bravado. He felt the torch trembling in his hand. But he was right, of course; the whole crazy thing depended on nothing more than the seal between the hose and the tank; give it a hard yank, and this was all history.

The Russian understood immediately.

“Mr. Hummel, don’t do anything foolish. I haven’t lied to you, I guarantee it. Your wife and children are safe. Listen, you’ve been working hard. Take a break. We’ll leave you alone. Think about it, then give me your answer. All right?”

He smiled, spoke to the two soldiers, and the three of them exited. Jack felt a surge of triumph. It had pleased him to see the suave general suddenly at a loss, scuttling backward absurdly. But the triumph turned quickly to confusion. Now what should he do? Pull the hose? Boy, if he did that, they came in and blew him away and blew away his family. The world lived, the Hummels died. Fuck that. As long as I hold this goddamned tube, I got some power. It occurred to him that he could hold them off. He looked and saw the big metal door to the center. If he could get that locked, then maybe—

Then he saw the yellow sheet from the teletype lying on the counter and picked it up.

Arkady Pashin, First Deputy of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, you are hereby directed to cease operations within the South Mountain Silo Complex. The following conditions are offered:

1. You and all men of Spetsnaz Brigade No. 22 will be given safe escort back to the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities have not yet been notified of your identities or the extent of your operation or your connection to the group PAMYAT.

2. All your wounded will be tended and returned to the Soviet Union at their earliest convenience.

3. No intelligence interrogations or debriefings will be held.

4. If the condition listed in paragraph 1 is unacceptable, the United States will also guarantee your delivery (and delivery of any men who chose to accompany you) into neutral country of your selection.

5. A tender of asylum is also hereby offered for you or any of your men who chose to so decide, and with it the offer of a new identity in comfortable surroundings in this country.

General Arkady Pashin, the mission which you have planned cannot succeed. I implore you, in the name of our common humanity and your code of ethics as a military professional, to cease and desist before the gravest possible consequences result.

It was signed by the President of the United States.

The President! The President was involved. This really impressed Jack. His spirits burgeoned. If the President was involved, that meant it was just about over. The Army would be here at any moment! If I can just get the door sealed, I can—

He looked up and the world disintegrated in red dazzle and befuddlement as a dot of gunsight laser struck his eyes, blinding him.

Yank it! he thought, and pulled on the hose, but something exploded in his leg and he fell yelping as his leg collapsed. The pain was extraordinary, but even as he fell, the torch slipped from his fingers, and as he hit the deck he rolled, scrambling, full of athletic passion, to reach it and yank that son of a bitch. But the commando who had shot him was through the opening of the capsule and on him. It was over in seconds.

“Stop the bleeding,” said the general.

“You’re crazy,” Jack Hummel shouted. “You’re fucking crazy, you’ll—”

People were all over him. He lay flat on his back. Somebody shot something into his leg, and it stopped hurting and began to feel as if it were filling with whipped cream. A bandage was applied.

“He shot you very cleanly, Mr. Hummel. Right through the meat of the thigh. You’ll live to be a hundred.”

“You’re crazy,” shouted Jack again. “You’re going to blow up the world. You’re a fucking screwball.”

“No, Mr. Hummel, I’m quite sane. I may be the sanest man in the world. Now, Mr. Hummel, you’re going to have to go back to the torch, and as you cut, bear in mind that this man here will have a pistol on the back of your neck every second of the time. One slip and you’re dead and your family is dead. They will go unmourned in the funeral pyre of the world.”

The general leaned over. His charm ducts opened and Jack felt the scalding bliss of attention rush across him.

“But listen here, young man. When you get the key loose and we do what we must, I’ll let you call them. There’ll be time. I’ll have my men bring them up here. Don’t you see, Mr. Hummel. In here, in this mountain, it’s the only safe place. Mr. Hummel, think of the world you’ll inherit. It’s all yours for a little bit of further effort.”

It wasn’t that the guy was nuts that was so unsettling to Jack Hummel; it’s that he seemed sane — that he knew, absolutely and without doubt, what must be done.

“Think of your kids, Mr. Hummel.”

“Why are you doing this?” Jack blurted out involuntarily. “Jesus, why? You’ll kill a billion people.”

The general smiled bitterly. Jack had the sense he was really seeing the man for the first time.

“The fact is, I’ll kill only a few hundred million. I’ll save billions. I’m the man who saved the world. I’m a great man, Mr. Hummel. You are lucky to serve me.”

The general gave another little smile.

“Now, cut, Mr. Hummel. Cut.”

Jack felt himself surrendering again. What could he do against such an operator, so much better than he was, so much stronger, smarter, who had it all figured out.

The flame ate into the metal.

Scurrying like a swift night lizard, Alex moved from position to position with a sweet word, a pat of encouragement, an invocation to patriotism and sacrifice, a reminder of the traditions. He was not an eloquent man and certainly not a glib one, but his blunt simplicity and, most of all, his belief, did what it was supposed to.

“How are we here, boys?” he said, glad to be speaking in Russian again.

“Fine, sir. Ready. Ready as we’ll be.”

“On our nightscope we picked up their trucks moving toward the mountain. Our infrared also picked up the heat of their helicopter engines turning over. The Americans will be here soon, boys. And this time there’ll be lots more of them.”

“We’re ready, sir. Let them come.”

“Good lads. This isn’t Afghanistan now, where the issues grow hazy and you wonder why the fellow next to you has to die. This is the battle we all trained for.”

He believed it. The general had explained it all to him, and he believed in the general. The general was a great man, a man who understood the whole world and what was best. You could believe in the general. Alex had come back from Afghanistan hungry for a fight to believe in: he’d seen too much meaningless death in the gulches and canyons and enfilades, too many guts spilled out on the rocks, seen too many black flies corpulent with Russian blood. Yet he came back, like the veterans of many another war, unappreciated and unloved, to nothing except a bitter peace. He came back needing a faith, a redeemer, a confessor, a messiah, and he’d found them all in the general.

“It’s changing,” pointed out the general. “This Gorbachev, with his damned glasnost, is turning the country your men fought and died for into a little America. We are becoming soft and bourgeoisified. We are becoming our enemies, even as our enemies are preparing to destroy us. In America this second they are preparing to deploy a new generation of missile that dooms us, the madmen! And this fool Gorbachev has stripped us of mid-range nuclear weapons and hints of yet broader initiatives. Jews are brought back from the Gulag and allowed to become celebrities for their antisocial tendencies! American music is played on the radio. Our teenagers no longer join the Party, they are too busy dancing. And all this was going on while your men were bleeding slowly to death in Afghanistan. Only a few of us have the memory to understand this. Memory, Alex, that is the key. From memory, Pamyat, comes everything, a belief in our land, the courage to do something about the unpleasant present. Few enough have the guts to realize this, and fewer still the guts to do anything about it. Where is the leadership, the passion, the courage?”

“Sir, it’s with one man. It is with you.”

The general especially hated America. He called it “One big moral and intellectual concentration camp.” Only men of courage could stand against the hated America and its plans to destroy Russia.

“Alex, did you know that Ghengis Khan had a special operations team, a Spetsnaz himself, under the leadership of a brilliant young officer who refused all promotion? Do you know what he said? I offer you this to think about: he said, ‘Give me forty picked men, and I will change the world.’”

Alex nodded.

“I will change the world, Alex. With you and forty picked men. Or, rather, sixty.”

They were a perfect team: the general the father who saw and knew all, the major a son who made his father’s vision possible with his own willingness to sacrifice.

“Now, boys,” he said to his children, the tough young heroes of 22 Spetsnaz, who would change the world from the perimeter defense of South Mountain, “think of your fathers scrambling through the wreckage of Stalingrad in the subzero weather, throwing themselves against the SS juggernaut all those long and bloody years. Then think of your grandfathers, who made a revolution and fought great battles against the West to save the world for you. Then be thankful that your test isn’t half so severe as theirs: you’ve only a single night to fight, on a mountaintop in America.”

“Let them come,” said a boy. “Ill talk in bullets.”

“That’s what I like to hear. And remember this: you’re Spetsnaz. No men on this earth have trained as hard or learned as much or given as much to become as good as you. You are the very best in the world. You carry your country’s destiny because you’re strong enough. Your shoulders are broad, your minds clear, your wills strong.”

Alex paused in his thoughts and a twitch played across his face. He realized that it was a smile.

God, he was happy!

He couldn’t wait for it to begin. It was the battle every professional soldier since the time of the Legions had dreamed about: a small-unit defense with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. But only one soldier of all the millions had gotten a chance to fight it, and that was Major Aleksandr Pavlovovich Yasotay of 22 Spetsnaz.

And one other: the unnamed American assault team commander, whom he would soon be meeting.

Skazy was alone with Delta now. He checked his watch and saw that it was 2145; the plan called for them to onload the choppers at 2150. Puller had gone back to the command headquarters to work up his nerve or whatever; and the guy Thiokol, gone too, back to his anagrams and code sequences, tensing up to crack the door.

There was one outsider here, Skazy knew, but said nothing. The young federal agent Uckley, who’d fucked up at the house, had arrived a few minutes ago in Delta cammos, presumably borrowed from one of the men he’d cracked the house with. Somewhere he’d got an MP-5 and an accurized 45. Uckley was here to tag along. All right, kid, thought Skazy. It’s your party too.

“Okay, guys,” Skazy said, “your attention please, just a sec.”

They turned to look at him, faces now blackened, gear checked for the thousandth time, the very best guys there were, weapons cocked and locked, boots tied, all concentration and intensity.

“Guys, it’s just us. Some of you were in ’Nam in the Airborne or the Rangers or out in the boonies in an A-team detachment and you remember how it came apart in the end despite all the blood you and your buddies poured into it. And some of you were on the fucked-up Iranian mission with me and remember how it came apart, and how we left bodies burning in the desert. And some of you jumped into Grenada with me, and remember being pinned in that ditch during that long night. Well, the truth is, Delta’s had its ass kicked each time out. Now, right now, I know there’s a guy on that mountain who’s a lot like us, hardcore, pro military, lots of ops under his belt. The Spetsnaz commander. Right now he’s telling his guys how good they are, and how Delta will be coming and how they’re going to kick more Delta ass. Okay? That doesn’t make me too happy, and I don’t think it should make you guys too happy. So no matter what happens, I just think we ought to have a little moment of seriousness here for a moment before we get on board the slicks. I fully expect to die tonight and that doesn’t scare me a bit, because I know if I do, some Delta asskicker is going to come in the hole I opened and finish the job I started, right? So let’s just shake hands, clear our minds, and concentrate on our profession tonight. In other words, guys, let’s just get it done. Tonight, Delta gets it done. Tonight, Delta kicks ass. Fair enough?”

The roar was an explosion.

Skazy smiled. God, he was happy!

Peter stared at the face. It was a shrewd, wary face, cosmopolitan, comfortable, sure. It was also handsome, radiant with confidence. You could almost feel the charisma leaking from it. The eyes were bright and hard.

Arkady Pashin, he thought. I never even heard of you. But you certainly heard of me.

His eyes scanned the biographical data. Military and engineering all the way, another smartest boy in the class.

He tried to see a pattern, a meaning, in the Agency information. But he found nothing — it read like your run-of-the-mill defense pro, like any of a hundred generals he had known, only Russian style, with one of those famous cold, hard, serious defense minds, with the inevitable right wing twist, the Pamyat thing.

But there was this one peculiarity: “In November of 1982 Arkady Simonovich Pashin formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as Arkady Pashin. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning.”

Why on earth would he have done this?

A weirdness passed through Peter, some twisted nerves firing, and the strange sensation that the name alteration had to do with him too. It was connected to him. He shivered.

Peter tried to think about the Russian thinking about him and realized how important he was to the guy. He sends a guy to fuck my wife and then he himself comes over to this country and he charms her. He has her in that room in that fake Israeli embassy, and he looks at the woman I’m in love with. He’s probably seen movies of her fucking Ari Gottlieb.

Peter shivered again; it was so intimate somehow; he felt hideously violated. His most closely held vulnerability — Megan — had been taken from him, turned, and used against him, used as a weapon. He had an image of this guy going through telescopic photos of him, going through the detritus of his life, trying to figure it all out, trying somehow to enter Peter — to, in some perverse and pathological way, to become him.

He reached back, pulled out his wallet, and got out his wife’s picture. She still looked good to him. He set the photo down next to Pashm’s and looked at the two of them together. Megan’s shot was a head-on, without angle, casual. It caught her grace and the brains behind her ears and maybe just a little bit of her neuroticism. Looking at her, he suddenly acquired a terrible melancholy.

God, baby, I set you up for them, didn’t I?

I made it so easy for them.

He looked at Pashin, the man in the mountain.

Your whole thing is that you think you’re smarter than me. You and your little tribe of cronies, what’s it called, this screwball outfit, Pamyat, Memory. He felt a little twist of shame. He knew himself he had no memory, no sense of the historical past.

It doesn’t mean anything to me, he thought. Only one thing means anything to me.

Megan.

And you took her from me.

He looked again at the picture. No, Comrade Pashin. I’m smarter than you. I’m the smartest guy in the class. I’m the smartest guy you ever met.

He began to doodle with the name, Arkady Pashin and the name Peter Thio—

He stood up suddenly. A terrible excitement came over him, and a terrible pain. He had some trouble breathing, and yet at the same time he filled with energy.

I think I have you, he thought. The only thing I have to do is look where you think I don’t have the guts to look. But I’m a realist. And this is how I beat you.

I can look at anything. Even if it kills me.

He left his desk, strode through the operations room, not seeing Dick Puller or the others, and pushed his way to the Commo room.

He picked up a phone.

“Is this a clear line?”

“Yes, sir,” said a young soldier.

Swiftly, he dialed a number, heard it ring, ring again.

A man’s voice answered with a name.

“This is Dr. Peter Thiokol,” he said, “calling from the South Mountain operational zone. I want to speak to my wife.”

Now was the lonely time. Dick Puller felt he ought to be doing something better, smarter, harder, more brilliant. Instead, he just sat there, puffing on a Marlboro, wondering why he ever decided to become a soldier, while inside it felt as though cold little spiders were crawling through his intestines. He felt so tight he could hardly breathe.

You became a soldier because you were good at it.

Because you always dreamed of leading desperate men in a desperate battle.

Because it seemed important.

Because it was in your genes.

Because you were scared to do anything you weren’t sure you’d be good at.

Dick puffed harshly on the cigarette. He was an old man, he knew, fifty-eight his last birthday, with lovely daughters and a wife he’d die for, the perfect soldier’s wife, who did much and asked little.

Your life has been one long self-indulgence, he thought, hating himself, wishing he could call her or the girls. He couldn’t. Jennie was married to a good Airborne major in Germany and Trish was in law school at Yale. And Phyllis — well, Phyllis wouldn’t know what to do if he called. He’d never called before, only sending her his dry little letters from various hot locales, lying cheerfully about the food (which was always bad) and the danger (which was always high) and the women (who were always numerous). If he called now, he’d scare her to death, and what good would that do?

“Sir, Sixguns One and Two airborne, checking in.”

His air force. The two gunships that would double as troop carriers and fly into the sure death of Stinger country.

“Acknowledge,” said Puller, listening as the battle began to orchestrate itself, outside his hands now that all the planning was done, all the speech-giving over, and it came down only to the boys and their rifles.

“Sir, Halfback and Beanstalk are in position at the IP.”

This was the Rangers, backed by Third Infantry.

“Acknowledge.”

“Sir, Cobra One reports onloading the slicks accomplished. Any messages?”

“No. Just acknowledge. You hear from Bravo yet?”

“That’s a negative, sir.”

“Figures,” Puller said, seeing in his head the slow and clumsy progress of the reluctant remnants of the National Guard unit in the dark toward their reserve position to the left of the assault line, straggling awkwardly through the snow and the trees, out of contact, scared and exhausted and very, very cold. Bravo would be slow tonight.

“Sir, it’s almost time. Will you be on the mike?”

“Yes, just a sec,” said Dick, lighting another butt.

Inside, he felt himself tightening even further. Somehow it hurt to breathe. His lungs ached, his joints pinched. So many things could go wrong. So many things had gone wrong. In any operation, count on a sixty percent fuck-up rate. The way you win a war has nothing to do with brilliance; it has to do simply with showing up and fucking up less than the other guy. Some Napoleon! And now there was nothing to do but wait just a few more minutes.

At this point at Midway, Raymond Spruance went to bed, figuring he’d done his best.

U. S. Grant got drunk.

Georgie Patton gave a lecture on patriotism.

Ike Eisenhower prayed.

Dick Puller went back to work.

Thinking, yes, still, now, with just minutes to go he might have missed something, he began to page again through the various Spetsnaz documents and photographs that had poured in the past hour or so. There was too much to be gotten through; he was simply scanning the material, hunting for associational leaps, for blind luck, for — well, for whatever.

The dope included more reports on known Spetsnaz operations, defector debriefings (significantly all third party; no known man had defected from a Spetsnaz unit proper); satellite photos, newspaper accounts, everything the CIA had vacuumed up in thirty years of Russia watching, which had been shipped him high speed via phone computer line.

Lazily, more to drive the anxiety from his brain than for any real reason, he skimmed through it.

What if the Rangers bog down and the pretty kids of Third Infantry turn out not to be worth a shit off a parade ground?

What if the Soviets have more men and ammo than we ever suspected?

What if there’s not as much titanium between Pashin and that key as we thought?

What if Thiokol can’t get through the shaft door?

What if the Delta assault team can’t fight its way to the LCC?

What if—

And then his eyes hit something.

“Stop the attack!” he screamed. “Tell all units to hold!”

“Sir, I—”

“Tell all units to hold!”

There was a pause and some fumbling at the other end as the FBI agents debated among themselves what to do. He thought they might be trying to cross-check the authenticity of his call over another line while he waited, and as he stood there, he felt his chest seem to fill with gravel and his breath wheezed between the loose stones.

Funny, he thought. The world may end tonight and yet that doesn’t mean a thing to me. But here I am waiting to talk to my wife and I’m shaking like a leaf.

He wondered if he had the strength for the next few minutes.

And then he heard her voice.

“Peter?”

Her voice had a sadness in it, as if weighted with regret. Megan never apologized, not formally, not for anything; but she had little signals by way of indicating her small responsibility for whatever might have happened, and it was in this softened tone he heard her say his name. It did exactly what he had willed it not to: it earned his instant and total forgiveness and his total surrender. Shorn of his moral certitude, he knew he was lost.

“Hi,” he said softly and raggedly. “How are you?”

“God, Peter, it’s so awful. These awful men. They’ve been here for hours.”

“It’s unpleasant, yes,” Peter said, irked instantly at the way he immediately agreed with her. “But look, you’ve got to give them everything you can. Later, if you can demonstrate how hard you worked for them, it’ll help. I guarantee it.”

“I suppose,” she said. “It’s just all so awful. They’re going to send me to prison, aren’t they?”

“A good lawyer will get you off. Your father will know some hotshot; he’ll get you out of it. I guarantee it, Megan.” He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Look, I don’t know what they’ve told you—”

“Not much. It’s something terrible though, isn’t it?”

“It’s a mess.”

“It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s all my fault. I see that now. How I played into their hands and made it easy for them. Now I need your help. Your absolute, total, trusting help.”

“Yes. Tell me what I can do.”

He paused.

“This Soviet officer you identified. The older man, Pashin.”

There was silence. He waited as long as he could, until he could wait no longer.

“Somehow,” he said to her finally, “it was personal with him. That is, between him and me. It was intimate and personal. That’s why you were so important to him. Megan, I have to go where I’m scared to go, and look at what I don’t want to see. You’ve got to take me there, and be strong, and make me see the truth. It’s the most important thing you’ll ever do, do you see?”

Too much emotion tainted his voice, and he struggled to hold the words in proper register. But the words were treacherous; they broke and splattered on him and odd high notes, strange sounds of anxiety, splashed through them. He felt as if he were weeping, but he could feel no tears.

Megan was still silent.

Then she said, “Peter, there are men here. All around me. Don’t make me talk in front of them. Can’t we do it later, in private? I’ll tell you everything in private.”

“There isn’t time. There’s a question I have to ask you. Only one.”

He waited, but she wouldn’t help him.

In the silence, he thought, the sex with Ari. He was good at it? He was really good at it? He was better than me?

Stop it, he told himself.

He’d played the whole thing to get here, and now that he was here, he had a moment’s terror.

You can look at anything, he told himself. You’re a realist. That’s your strength. That’s how you’ll beat him.

“Tell me if I’m not right. I’ve figured out how his mind works. I can read him now. I get him now.”

“Ari?”

“Ari! Ari’s nothing, Megan. Ari’s a tool, a big stud for hire. No, it’s this other guy. He’s the one that’s pulling the strings. Megan, there was a night, wasn’t there, where you passed out? Where you had too much to drink or you were tired or something? Some night where you can’t quite account for four or five hours? In fact, you probably haven’t really acknowledged it in your own mind, because at some subconscious level you’re not quite ready to face it. But wasn’t there a night when … when you can’t really remember what happened?”

Her silence grew, and as it grew it confirmed his suspicion.

Finally, she said, “He said it was the champagne. That I had too much and that I passed out. We had gone to an inn in Middleburg, Virginia, for a ‘romantic weekend’ at a very lovely inn. But I passed out Saturday night. When I awakened I could tell … that it had been romantic.”

Peter nodded.

“When was this?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“After—?”

“Yes. After I had been with you. I went straight from you to Ari. I’m sorry.”

“And that was the last time you saw him?”

“Yes. I took some pictures of some documents you had. I just gave him the camera. We didn’t use the usual routine. And then we went to this inn. And the next morning he left me. Said he was returning to his wife in Israel. He just walked away from me. I cried, I begged. He hit me. Peter, he hit me, and then he just left me in that place, as if I didn’t matter to him.”

You didn’t.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“Peter, is that all? You called—”

“Megan, you should be all right. That lawyer, he’ll get you a walk. Those FBI guys, throw a little charm at them. They’ll melt. They’re men, after all. And when this is over—”

“Peter, God, it’s dangerous out there, isn’t it? But you’re safe, aren’t you? You’re back, far away from the guns, aren’t you? You’re not going to do anything stup—”

He was lost now. He felt it slipping away. He saw her in the room, in the dark, drugged, helpless, and unresistant. He wondered what they used and how compliant she’d been. He knew she’d been utterly, totally compliant. He felt her shame and debasement. The image of it brought the tears at last from him, and he felt himself begin to sob like an idiot child.

“Baby, when it’s over,” he heard himself saying, “we can go to New York. We can have another life, I swear it. We can move to New York so you can be with the people you like and I can teach, maybe, or—”

He could hear her crying too.

“I miss you so,” she was saying. “Peter, I’m so sorry this all happened, I’m so, so sorry and be careful, please, stay away from the—”

“Dr. Thiokol!”

It was the hard voice of Dick Puller punching at him through his grief.

“Megan, I have to go.”

“Thiokol! I need you ASAP!”

“I have to go,” he repeated. And then he said, “Thanks, I think I can take the guy now,” and hung up. The sports coat seemed to constrict him strangely and he pulled it off and threw it in the corner. He felt much better.

He turned, tried not to see the men staring at him in amazement, and discovered Puller bearing down on him like a juggernaut, waving a photograph.

“Peter, look at this,” said Puller. “Tell me if it’s what I think it is.”

Peter blinked to clear his eyes, felt like a fool, an idiot, but noted that Puller was far too intense to notice. As his focus sharpened he saw what he was supposed to see. It appeared to be an extremely high aerial view of South Mountain; he could see the launch control facility roof, the barracks roof, the wire perimeter, and the silo hatch, and the access road leading up. Yet there was something subtly wrong with the photo, in the relationship, say, between the buildings, the angles of the siting, in a hundred little areas. He concentrated, but couldn’t quite;—

“It just came over from CIA. They got it with a Blackbird three months ago over Novomoskovsk near Dnepropetrovsk where Spetsnaz has its big training camp. Damn, if they’d have only read it then. If they were sharp in that damned agency, instead of—”

But Peter just stared at the picture.

“It’s where they prepped the mission. It’s their rehearsal site.”

Peter stared hard.

Something’s wrong with it, he thought. He saw what looked like diagonal slashes in the earth, or sergeant’s chevrons, or a giant tire track rolling across the mountaintop.

“What are these marks? I see these marks in the snow, what are they?”

Puller looked at them.

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? They’re trenches. That’s what’s under that goddamn tarpaulin.”

Peter didn’t get it.

“What you’re looking at, Dr. Thiokol, is his plan. Yasotay’s defense plan. You see how the trenches take the configuration of a V and fall back toward the elevator shaft?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll fall back, trench by trench, toward that last redoubt. When we assault we’re always in a crossfire kill zone from the two arms of the V. You can’t flank it because it’s too wide. You can bet the trenches are linked by tunnels, which they’ll blow as they fall back. It’s the way the Muhajadeem fight in Afghanistan. He must have lost a thousand men trying to take hills like this. He’s the hill expert of all time. Each one of these trenches will cost us an hour and a hundred casualties. In effect, we have to take the same trench, over and over. The attack will never make it. It’ll get hung up in the trenches.”

But Peter wasn’t really paying any attention. He was staring, fascinated, at the photograph. There was something weird about it. He could not tear his eyes away. It was something he knew, yet something he didn’t know. His mind struggled to interpret the competing phenomena; he searched for a theory to unify his perceptions of distress.

“Look!” Peter suddenly shouted. “Look! Look at this!” He knew there was something about the picture that bugged him; he’d been over and over the top of South Mountain before and during the construction. He knew it as well as he knew Megan’s body. No man knew it better.

“See, here. They haven’t bothered to plant the trees to the left and the right of the assault site. They’ve just left the area bare, but you can see the way they’ve sculpted the land form to match the shape of the earth. But their original satellite pictures must have been taken early and they didn’t bother to check the later ones carefully; see, we actually moved the site of the barrack about fifteen feet to the left, and we didn’t build this additional wing to the launch control facility, although it was in the plans they got from Megan. But most important, the creek’s missing. They don’t have the creek because there wasn’t a creek.”

Puller looked at him strangely.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You told me the problem with the assault site was that it had such a narrow front that all the attacks had to come across this meadow here. Right? And those are the men that go into the guns, right?”

Puller looked at him.

“But that’s not right. There’s a creek bed, here, on the left.” His finger probed at a place on the denuded photograph that showed sheer cliff.

“It’s supposed to be impassable, too steep to climb, but I’m telling you, the creek cut into it. You could get people up it and hit them from this other side, I know you could. You don’t have to attack on that narrow front only. You could get soldiers up there and hit them from the left and bypass the fall-back trenches. I swear to you, there’s a creek bed. You don’t see it in the winter because it’s dry and under snow and you don’t see it during the summer because of the trees, but it’s there and it’s another way to the top.”

Puller looked at it hard.

“Come with me.”

They ran to the command center to look at the national geodesic survey map.

“Dr. Thiokol, there’s no creek marked here.”

“That’s a 1977 map. The creek, we opened the creek when we excavated for the shaft, last year. That’s why. I’m telling you, you can get soldiers up that side of the mountain and the Soviets don’t know.” His finger shot out to a marker on the map. “Those men are the men you send. They’re the ones who’ll get you into the perimeter and to the elevator shaft. Your Rangers and regular infantry won’t make it.”

Puller leaned forward.

“Those guys,” Peter yelled, pointing at the mark on the map that stood for a group of men. “Who are those guys?”

“That’s Bravo,” said Puller. “Or what’s left of it.”

Walls was in the cathedral of the missile.

It towered above him in the gray half-light. He felt so small.

He reached out and put his hand to the skin of the thing, which was not cold and clammy and metallic as he imagined. Indeed, it had no sense of machine to it. Even as his fingers lingered in stupidity upon it, it did not warm to the touch. It drew no energy from his hand. It was … most peculiar … it was nothing.

He could not know it. He could not feel it. It had no meaning. It wasn’t exactly that he was dwarfed into nothingness, that his smallness was made manifest by his proximity to the seven-story bigness of it, it was just that it was so blank. It was an abstraction. There was no feeling of its having any sense. He could not begin to figure out how to connect to it. It was just an immense black apex, smooth and blank, huge beyond knowing, disappearing as it rose above him, throwing in the half-light the tiniest smudge of his own reflection back at him, but more shadow than anything, a sense of movement and shape, that was all. It had no human face. He sensed that it didn’t … again, this was very peculiar … it didn’t care about him.

It befuddled him. He felt his reactions slow way down, as if he’d been drugged. It had a weird radiance, a kind of halo. It almost felt as though it came from some dead religion or something; he’d once come across something just as strange in the ’Nam, a giant stone head with thick lips and staring eyes amid the bougainvillea and the frangipani, and you could look at it for a century or two and not learn one thing from it.

Tentatively, he walked its circumference, though there wasn’t much room between the skin of the thing and the concave of the cement wall that encircled it. His head was back, his mouth was open. It never changed. From any angle it was the same.

His head ached. He became aware of small noises, tickings, pingings, obscure vibrations. At the same time he smelled the odors of wiring and cement and wax. It smelled like electricity in there.

He looked at it again, in wonder. It wasn’t at all like the rocketship he’d imagined, to the degree that he’d imagined rocketships at all. It had no fins, for one thing. How could they steer it without fins? It had no numbers either, and he had the vague supposition that it should have black and white checks on it somewhere, as well as big fat USAF initials, like the Tac ships in ’Nam. He also had this idea that there’d be a huge superstructure like a battleship’s control tower up next to it, and lots of guys scurrying around: nope, nothing. It was so huge it didn’t look like it could fly at all. The big tube just sat on a tiny framework of girders, nothing elaborate, and its exhaust cupolas extended beneath that, into a pit. As he looked up it, it disappeared, yielding some seventy feet up to nothingness. Then, another hundred or so feet up was the circular image of the sealed silo hatch, which appeared from down here to resemble a manhole cover.

He wondered what to do. Should he blow it up? He wasn’t sure. He tried to remember. Goddamn, if that Witherspoon were here, he’d know what to do. But Walls wasn’t at all sure if he should blow it up. He might get in big trouble. And even if he was supposed to blow it up, there was the problem of how to blow it up. He had no grenades left. He had no C-4 left. He could see no cables to cut or hoses to rip. He didn’t think firing a few Mr. 12s into a thing this big would do any damage. And anyway, wasn’t there an A-bomb in there? He wondered where it would be. He didn’t think it would be a terribly good idea to shoot the rocket and make the bomb blow up, because wasn’t that what they were trying to stop?

Shit, he thought, baffled by it.

At last he stumbled on a ladder. It was really a series of rungs in the concrete and, craning, he saw that the rungs led a perilous way up the yawning side of the concrete tube to a very small door, halfway up to the silo hatch.

Walls tried to figure out what to do. A certain part of him said, just wait here until they come get you, you’re okay now. But another part said, they wanted to get into this place real bad, only way to get into this place is up that ladder.

Maybe you’re the only dude get into this place. The onliest.

He laughed at that. All those white motherfuckers running around with their helicopters and shit, and here little nigger Nathan Walls, Dr. P of Pennsylvania Avenue, son of Thelma and brother to James, both dead, but Nathan, Nathan, he the onliest peoples to make it in. And what then?

Then you kill more white boys, he thought.

He had at that second just the briefest animal sensation of warmth and motion, and then he was hit hard by a flying bunch of muscle, yanked down, as if under the pounce of a cat, and pinned against the cement. And he felt the blade come up hard and tight against his throat, and he knew he was going to die.

In the first slick, Skazy was on the radio.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra One, I’d like an amplification of that last order, please.”

“Cobra One, hold tight in your ships, that is all.”

Skazy sat, breathing hard, feeling it all come apart in his mind. He remembered Desert One, the confusion of rushing men, out-of-control machines, and unsure command. He remembered Dick Puller off on his own like some kind of moody Achilles, out of reach.

Colonel Puller, there’s rumors all over the—

It’s an abort, Frank. Get Delta on the—

An abort! We can still take these motherfuckers! Goddamn, we don’t need six chops! We can do it with five, we can get in there and blow these motherfuckers away and—

Back to the ship, Major!

That’s when Skazy had hit him. Yes, he’d hit a superior officer in the face, and remembered the shock, the totality of it, when Puller fell back, his face leaking blood, the unexpected look of hurt on it.

Someone grabbed him.

Frank, get out of here. Dick’s decided. Get back to your people.

You cowardly motherfucker, you don’t have the guts for this kind of work, he remembered screaming, the wounded, enraged son who’d just learned his father was merely a man.

“Delta Six, Cobra One, what the hell is going—”

“Off the net, Cobra One, you’re in a holding position until release, out.”

Goddamn, said Skazy to himself.

“I’m going back to command,” he told McKenzie, and disengaged himself from the chopper, dipped under its roaring rotor, and headed back to Puller.

There were fifty-five of them and they were lost and had been lost and they were way behind schedule, and it was cold as shit and even if the world was hanging in the balance, they didn’t care, they just wanted to be warm. Sure, okay, you can make so many speeches, but the guys had been shot at today and most of them were still in bad shock from the first fight. These guys had been playing at war and they’d never seen anyone die and suddenly they’d seen a whole batch of people die, mostly their friends.

“Lieutenant, I think we’re lost,” said the sergeant.

“We can’t be lost,” said Dill. “It’s just over here.”

“I’m afraid some of the guys may have wandered away.”

“Goddammit,” said Dill, “they were supposed to stay in close. You get lost on this mountain, you could be in real danger.”

He looked back. Bravo was spread out through the trees; he could see the blurry shapes against the white of the snow, each trailing a bright plume of breath, each groaning laboriously, each cursing under the discomfort, strung out, uncoordinated. Jesus, what a parade to save the world, Dill thought. You poor guys. You couldn’t lick a stamp to save your life. He almost laughed.

“Tell the sergeants to get the guys together. I mean, we’re just supposed to wait is all, in case they need us.”

Jesus, he thought, poor Bravo can’t even wait right.

“Yes, sir. But we’re already way behind. Like, it’s quarter after and those guys should have started shooting and I don’t hear a damn thing.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dill, not sure what to do, “I’m sure they have their reasons.”

It had seemed so easy in the briefing. Bravo was to move up behind the Rangers and Third Infantry, then peel off to the left to get out of the way of the support groups, the medics, the ammo carriers, that sort of thing. And just wait in good order in case they were needed. So they were essentially out of it. The ones that were here, they’d made it. They were alive! Whatever, they had made it. It was time for the pros to take over.

But he was anxious that he hadn’t heard anything on the radio for a while.

“MacGuire?”

“Sir?”

“You sure that thing is working?”

He heard fumbles, mumbles. MacGuire was new to the PRC-25. Huston, his regular, was dead.

“It’s not working.”

“Oh, shit,” said Dill. “Can you fix it?”

“Uh, sir, it’s the batteries. They’re dead. We’ve been out of contact now for about ten minutes.”

“You got any extras?”

“Yes, sir, in my pack.”

“Great. Maybe they’ve surrendered and we don’t know it yet.”

He crouched as the boy struggled first with his pack, then with the radio. Dill thought he ought to say something to the kid about checking stuff like that before they started out. But Dill was gentle; he was good with kids, and they responded to him, which is why he coached basketball for a living at a high school outside Baltimore.

In a few seconds there was a gravelly growl as the boy got the walkie-talkie back in working order, and then handed it over to Dill, who hit the receive button to hear himself being vigorously paged by the old bastard colonel who was running things.

“—vo, goddammit, Bravo, this is Delta Six, where are you, Bravo? Goddammit, where—”

“Delta Six, affirmative, Bravo here, do you copy?”

“Dill, where the fuck have you been?”

“Ah, sorry, Delta Six, we had a temporary malfunction and lost contact there for a second or so, over.”

“You were out of contact for nearly ten minutes, soldier. Are you in position?”

Dill grimaced.

“Well, not exactly, sir. Tough going up here. We’re more or less where we’re supposed to be, about halfway up. I can’t see the Rangers or Third Infantry. But it gets real steep ahead, I can see that, and I—”

“Dill, there’s a change in plan.”

Dill waited. The colonel said nothing.

“Delta Six, I don’t read you, ah, over.”

“Dill, I’m advised that ahead of you there’s a creek bed.”

“Sir, I don’t recall any creek bed on my map. I really looked hard at it, too, sir.”

“I am advised that it’s there, nevertheless, Dill, and that you ought to be able to get a raiding party up that—”

Raiding party?

“—up that groove in the rocks and onto the perimeter flank pretty easily.”

“In support of the main attack, Delta Six?” asked Dill, computing the problem.

“Negative, Bravo. You are the main attack.”

Dill looked at the little box in his hand. Goddamn that kid, why hadn’t he discovered his dead batteries ten minutes from now rather than where he was.

“Sir, I don’t think my men are—”

“Bravo, this isn’t a request, this is an order. Look, Dill, sorry, but it’s how things have to go. The Rangers will never make it in the face of the heavy fire without help from the side. The front is too narrow and we believe there’s a network of trenches in their position. We have to take this fucking place in one stroke. You guys are it. Get humping, Lieutenant. It’s time to go to war.”

Tagged again, Dill thought.

He wished they’d leave him alone so he could get at the vodka in his pocket. At least with vodka he’d have a chance or something. But no, the Americans just kept drilling him, going over and over it again, where the bomb was, its fusing mechanism, the disarming steps, just in case, a crash course in nuclear technology, all a blur to him.

I want vodka.

But now the van had stopped. They were out of time.

“Okay, Greg,” said the FBI agent called Nick, “we’re on I Street, two blocks down from the embassy, right in front of the MPAA. You know the neighborhood. Just a few feet down to Sixteenth, then your left and there you are. We’ve halted traffic, we’ve got the place sealed off, and we’ve got enough SWAT people around to crack Nicaragua. But we’ve been feeding cars along so they won’t catch on. Okay, the street is clean, it’s sanitary, no mugger’s going to knife you on the way in.”

Gregor thought the man was hyperventilating. He looked as if he were going to have an attack of some sort. He looked as if he needed a bottle of vodka himself.

“Greg, you paying attention here, fella?”

“Yes, of course,” said Gregor.

“You sort of looked like you were dreaming about what was between Molly Shroyer’s legs there for a sec, old guy.”

“Actually, I am fine.”

“Good man, Greg. Anybody going to give you a hard time getting in? You code-cleared, all that?”

“I’m known. No difficulties. Well—”

“Well what?”

“I have been out of contact for twelve hours. It is not possible to know how they’re going to react. There might be a few questions, maybe an unpleasantly or two. But nothing I cannot handle.”

“Great. In other words, these guys may roust you just going through the door?”

“No. No, I am a trusted man. Nothing will happen.”

The American looked at him with great doubt on his plump, tough face. Then he said, “You want a piece, Greg, in case it should get hairy down in the Wine Cellar with this Klimov? I’ve got a nice H and K I could lay on you.”

“There’s a metal detector. If KGB security finds I am armed, it will be the end, There will be no way to get downstairs.”

“Sure?”

“Certain.”

“Now, don’t rush it, guy. That’s how these things fall apart. You get anxious, you try and force it, bingo, it’s history. There’s plenty of time. Hell, it’s not even eleven. You’re just old Gregor, in from the cold, looking to relieve your pal Magda downstairs. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Gregor.

“Time to go, guy.”

“Okay,” said Gregor again. Somebody slid thë van door open and out he stepped into amber light. It was moist and chilly; the streets glowed; the air was filled with sparkly mist. When Gregor breathed it felt like ice sliding down into his lungs, a great feeling. It made him feel alive. He shivered, drawing the cheap little overcoat around him, but took comfort from the weight of the vodka in the pocket. Once he got inside, he promised himself a nice hit, a drenching, gushing gulp of it, to send all his demons away.

He walked on down to 16th Street, turned left. He could see the building up ahead on the right, just past the Public Television Office, which looked far more totalitarian than the Russian building. The embassy was a big old place, Georgian, once upon a time a capitalist millionaire’s playpen. Up top, the complicated mesh of aerials, microwave dishes, and satellite communication transmitters looked like some weird spiked crown.

Gregor crossed the street. Two American cops — the executive protection service — at the embassy gate watched him come, but they didn’t matter. They were nothing. He knew once he was inside the gate, KGB would be on him.

Who? Who was captain of the guard that night? If it was Frinovsky, he’d be all right. Frinovsky was an old man, a cynic like himself, another secret drinker, a homosexual, a man of appetites and forgiveness. On the other hand, in KGB as in GRU, these kids were taking over. Ballbusters, show-offs, zealots, Gorbachev’s awful children, all with their pretend birthmarks. Gorshenin, perhaps. Gorshenin was the worst, a little prick who kept names and Wanted to Rise. He hated those like Gregor, who only Wanted to Stay. He was young Klimov’s pal too.

Gregor arrived. He flashed his embassy ID to the two cops, who stood aside, and then he stepped through the gate and headed up the walk toward the door, toward the bronze plaque, CCCP.

He was back in Russia, and scared shitless. The door opened, a blade of orange light spilled across the pavement.

It was Gorshenin.

“Arrest that man,” the awful Gorshenin shouted.

So very deep now. He couldn’t have much gas left in the cylinder at all. The angle was torture. It was like surgery, he was so far inside. The light from the torch was far, far away, a blur of bright flame through his black lenses. He could see only more metal. He withdrew.

“What is wrong?” the general said.

“My leg, Christ, it’s killing me.”

“Get on with it, goddamn you.”

“My leg’s bleeding again, Jesus, can’t you—”

“Get on with it.”

“Maybe we missed it or some—”

“No!” screamed the general. “No, you did not miss. The center, you went into the center. I saw, I measured myself, I know exactly where the cut should go and how it should proceed. I monitored. You have not failed. Cut, Mr. Hummel, goddamn you, cut, or I’ll have you shot and your children’s bones ground to fertilizer.”

Jack looked at him. Crazy fucker, he now saw, crazy underneath, crazy as a goddamned loon.

The general pulled out a pistol.

“Cut!” he said.

Jack turned, and again thrust the torch into the deep gash in the titanium. The bright flame licked at the far metal, licked and devoured, drop by drop, and the metal fell away.

Then — pinprick, BB, cavity, Cheerio, nailhead — a minuscule black hole began gradually to appear in the metal at the end of the tunnel. He saw it expand as the titanium liquified and fell clear. Jack’s heart thumped and, goddamn him, he couldn’t help the excitement.

“I’m there. I’m there,” he shouted, giddy with joy. The long journey was almost over.

Dick Puller hunched over the microphone, sucking on a Marlboro. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, held it there, absorbed its heat, and hissed it out in a flare from his nostrils. His face was bleak and set and ash gray. Before him stood the map on the wall, with its brave little pin reading BRAVO, the radio transmitters, ashtrays, cigarette packs. Around him nervous staff guys, Commo clerks, state cops holding cups of coffee, talking quietly, just staring out into space. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke and pointless, dry chatter and despair.

And there was Peter Thiokol, who’d changed totally. He wore commando gear now, black field pants and a black sweater, the black knit watch cap down over his ears so that they were too hot. His glasses looked fogged.

Peter stood with his arms crossed, trying to get his thoughts assembled. Hard, under the circumstances. It was like a waiting room outside the maternity ward in an old Saturday Evening Post cartoon. There was no real sound in the room, no meaningful sound. He could hear the creak of boots as the men swayed their weight from foot to foot, or scuffed their heels against the floor, or exhaled loudly or sighed tragically. Occasionally, the crackle of static leaked from the speaker of the radio.

“What’s taking them so long?” Peter finally asked, but nobody answered.

He spoke again, because no one else seemed to have the will to.

“Colonel, maybe you ought to contact them again.”

Puller just looked up at him, his face gone shockingly aged, broken. He looked as if someone had been hammering on his bead with pipe wrenches and snow shovels. Peter had never seen this Puller, dazed and old, caught in the crunch of the stress, the energy bled out of him.

This is what Skazy saw at Desert One, he thought in horror. An old man without an edge; an old man squashed by the pressure; an old man who’d sent too many boys to die too many times.

“They’re either going to make it or they’re not,” said one of the other officers. “Talking to ’em during maneuver just screws things up. This, uh—”

“Dill,” said Puller.

“Dill, this Dill, he either gets ’em there or he doesn’t. Funny, you train all your life for a spot like this and there’s maybe twenty thousand professional officers who’d give an elbow and a jawbone to be there, and it comes down to a gym teacher.”

After that there wasn’t much to say.

“Delta Six, this is Halfback, do you read?”

“I copy, Halfback,” said Puller.

“Sir, we still holding?”

“That’s affirmative, Halfback.”

“Sir, if it comes to it, we’ll go in. I mean, we’re Rangers. We go in. You just say the word, and well jump off.”

“That’s a negative, Halfback.”

“Delta Six, Sixgun-One.” It was the lead gunship, still holding on the strip. “We’re ready on the assault too. Give the word, and we’ll rock and roll.”

“I said, holding. Holding. Back to radio discipline, all units.”

The crackles sputtered out.

Peter looked at his watch. It was 10:35.

“Sir, if I was you,” someone whispered to him, “I’d turn that watch upside down on your wrist. You get up there, you’d be surprised in the dark, those gooks will zero on the radium in your watchface if it shows.”

Peter looked at him, mumbled an insincere, “Uh, thanks,” and made the adjustment.

“Sir, how long will you hold them?” someone asked Puller.

“Until Bravo checks in,” was all that Puller could say.

“Colonel Puller.”

Skazy stood in the door. He looked like some kind of guardian of hell’s gate, his face blackened like Caliban’s, his eyes leaking white rage, his grim lips pink and hot. He was draped with an immense green rope and wore several ammunition belts around him. He carried two pistols, several M-26 and smoke grenades, an angle-headed flashlight, and a CAR-15.

“Colonel Puller, I’m going to have to ask you to retire, sir. I’m officially taking command.”

Puller stood. He was another large man. Somehow the men between them melted away.

“Back to your station, Major Skazy,” said Puller.

“Colonel Puller, I’m prepared to put you under arrest if you don’t move away from the radio.”

Puller spoke quietly.

“Major Skazy, back to your station.”

Four Delta commandos, heavily armed, slipped by Skazy and slid into the room. Though their weapons weren’t brandished, everyone knew they were cocked and unlocked and at Skazy’s disposal.

“Sir, I request once more that you move away from the radio. It’s time to go.”

Puller reached into his holster, removed his.45, and threw the slide with a harsh clack that echoed in the still, smoky room. The hammer locked back.

“Son,” he said, “if you don’t move out of that doorway and return to your ship, I’ll shoot you in the head. It’s that simple.”

He leveled the pistol at Skazy.

Instantly, four CAR-15s zeroed on him. Craziness flashed through the air.

“We’ll both die, Colonel,” said Skazy.

“Be that as it may,” said Puller, “if you don’t move away from that doorway and return to your post, I’ll shoot you.”

“Colonel,” said Skazy, “I have to ask you one more time to move away from the radio and relinquish command.”

He started to walk into the room—

“Stop it!!” screamed Peter, himself almost out of control as he lurched between them. “Stop it!! This is infantile!”

“Step aside, Thiokol,” said Puller, looking through him.

Skazy had removed an automatic from his belt.

“Thiokol, sit down. This doesn’t concern you.”

“This is insane,” Peter shouted. He was breathing near to hyperventilation, murderous with rage at the folly and so terribly scared he could hardly stand still. His blood surged with adrenaline. “You assholes, you Delta prima donnas and your goddamned games, do your goddamned jobs like everybody else! Don’t hold yourself so goddamned precious!”

There was a click.

Skazy had cocked his Smith & Wesson.

“Peter, sit down,” he said. “Colonel, I have to give you one last chance to step aside or—”

“Delta Six, this is Bravo, we’re up, we’re at the top of the hill, goddammit, we’re there!”

Peter saw Puller snap the safety on his pistol as he slid it into the holster, lean forward, just an old man with a shit-scared look to his face, nothing dramatic, no big line to deliver, and say, “All units, this is Delta Six, do you copy, Delta Six. Heaven is falling, I repeat, Heaven is falling. I repeat, Heaven is falling.”

Everybody began to run. Someone cheered. Peter took a deep breath and then was running for his chopper through a commotion of other rising birds, the whip of snow and dust in the darkness, and the sound, far off and blurry, of men with guns.

“They’re off,” yelled the man on the night scope, “five, six, seven, eight, eight of them. Hueys.”

Troop carriers, Yasotay thought. An airborne job, helicopter assault at night. Let them come, he thought. He’d been on a few and knew how they got messed up.

“Rockets,” yelled Yasotay to his missile people. “Spotters ready. Men on the first line, eyes front. Get ready, boys. The Americans are coming.”

But before the Delta-laden Hueys could arrive, the first of the two gunships rose over the treeline, then the other. They hung obscenely, two black shapes against the white snow of the valley. Their rotors filled the air with the wicked whup-whup-whup of the jet engines, loud enough to mask the final movement of troops through the trees to the point of attack. Worse, at an altitude of some five hundred to a thousand feet up, the gunship guns had angle on the ground troops; they’d be firing down on the compound.

“Mark your targets, rockets,” Yasotay shouted in the second before the mini-guns began to fire. The stable world seemed to dissolve. The mini-guns fired so much faster than conventional machine guns that their problem wasn’t accuracy but ammunition conservation. From each of the hanging birds the tracers leapt out at the mountaintop like a dragon’s flame, a stream of light almost, and where the hot streaks touched, the world yielded. But of course in the dark they had no good targets, just as earlier the A-10s, roaring overhead, had no good targets; shooting at men is not like shooting at tanks or trucks. And so the bullets, as had the earlier bullets, bounced across the compound, roiling snow and dirt but little flesh; but their impact was devastating psychologically because there seemed no force on earth that could stand against them.

Down in the treeline Yasotay saw movement; infantry, coming hard through the trees, almost into the open.

“Rockets,” he yelled again, knowing he had only seven Stingers left after the profligacy of the air attack in the afternoon, but knowing that if he did not push the gunships back the infantry — good infantry, he presumed, better than the boobs who’d come at him earlier — would get close. It was a question of timing now; he’d put up a hard fight, then fall back to the first of the five V trenches; they’d come ahead and he’d have them in two fires. He’d kill them all. They’d never make it. They’d never get out of the mess of ditches and counterditches with the fire pouring in on them from both sides; and every time they made it to a new trench they’d find it empty, except for booby traps, while more fire smashed at them from the flanks. He’d seen the Pathans wipe out an infantry brigade that way, kill four hundred men in ten minutes, and then retire laughing to their rice pots higher up the mountain.

A Stinger fired, streaking out into the dark at one of the birds — it missed, lost its power and sank into the trees.

A second, hastily aimed — the gunner hadn’t properly acquired his target — missed worse, but the pilot in one of the gunships blinked and evaded, and his mini-gun fire swung wildly out of control, missing the mountaintop and spraying out behind them into Maryland.

A third Stinger missed.

Four left, I have four le—

The fourth hit the gunship dead on with a disappointingly small detonation and just the smallest trace of smoke; but the bird’s purchase on the air was altered and it began to slide sideways, until its back rotor pulled free and it simply became weight and fell because it could not glide. It fell into the trees but did not burn.

The second gunship zeroed on the flash of the missiles coming its way, though Yasotay gauged the pilot as merely good and not special like some of the Mi-24 aces in Afghanistan. But the pilot now had a target and he brought the mini-gun to bear and Yasotay slid down into the trench as the bullets rushed at him, a torrent of light. They struck up and down the perimeter trench and dust showered down, and screams and yelps rose as men cowered under the torrent. One of the missile gunners took a full burst of the mini-gun across the chest and the bullets pulverized him.

The gunship roared in; Yasotay could hear it overhead, circling, swooping as the pilot overshot the mark, swung back; a spotlight raced out from the craft, hunting targets. And then the guns caught it. The chopper pilot, too low, too eager, had crossed Yasotay’s silent first trench in hunt for the missile men; but he’d forgotten Yasotay’s own gunners, who opened up instinctively, catching the craft easily in ten or twelve streams of fire and the Huey wobbled, vibrated, and then was gone in a horrid smear of orange flame spreading bright as day across the night sky.

Yasotay was up even before the flames had drained from the air, and he saw the field ahead of them filled with rushing infantry and thought it was too late. But his NCOs, blooded the many years in Asian mountains, did not panic, and he could hear their stern voices calling out in reassuring Russian, “To the front. To the front. Targets to the front.”

Yasotay fired a flare, and then another.

It was sheer, delirious spectacle.

The infantry came like a tide of insects, scuttling, lurching ahead in dashes, yet still brave and steady, forcing the gap between itself and Yasotay’s front line, rushing ahead in packs of four or five. Yasotay fancied he could even see their eyes, wide with fright and adrenaline. Their backup guns had started, suppressive automatic fire from the flanks, lancing out over the troops but too high to do any damage.

Then his own fire rose, rose again; the men were on full automatic. The assault force troopers began to go down, but still they came, brave, good men, and the battlefield broke apart, atomized, into a hundred desperate little dramas, as small fire-and-movement teams tried to work closer. But Yasotay could see that he’d broken the spine of the attack. He picked up his scoped G-3 and began to engage targets.

Puller could hear them dying.

“This is Sixgun-One, he’s got missiles coming up, ah, no sweat, they’re missing, that’s one past us, oops, two gone, and that’s the big — Hit, hit, I’m losing it, we’re—”

“Charlie, I have you, you’re looking swell.”

“Major, he’s not burn—”

“Christ, he hit hard.”

“Delta Six, this is Sixgun-Two, I have missile launchers ahead, and I’ve got them engaged — oooooooo, look at them boys dance—”

“Sir, belt’s out.”

“Get it changed, I’m going in.”

“Goddammit, Sixgun-Two, this is Delta Six, you are advised to hold your position, I can’t risk another lost ship.”

“Sir, I got ’em running, I can see ’em running, I just want to get closer.”

“New belt, skip.”

“Let’s kick ass.”

“Sixgun-Two, hold your fucking position!” Puller roared.

“Colonel, I got those missile guys zeroed, oh, this is great, this is—”

“Shit, sir, there’s fire coming up from—”

“Oh, oh, shit, goddammit, hit, I’m—”

“The fire, the fire, the fi—”

“Jesus,” somebody at the window said, “his tanks went. He’s all over the sky. It looks like the Fourth of July.”

“Delta Six, this is Halfback, I’m taking heavy fire from the front.”

“Halfback, get your second assault team up to the initial point.”

“Ready to go, sir. Shit, the gunships are both down, that one guy, he’s still burning. The fire is heavy.”

“Are your people still advancing?”

“We’ve got a lot of fire going out, sir.”

“But your team, is it still advancing or is it hung up?”

“I don’t see much movement out there, but there’s a lot of fire. There’s smoke, dust, snow, whatever, I can’t see through it. Should I send my backup yet?”

“Not unless you’re convinced your first wave has completely lost it.”

“Well, there’s fire. Where’s that stuff on the left? Where’s Bravo? Where the hell is Bravo? Jesus, Bravo, if you don’t help us, we’re going to get butchered and nobody’s getting any closer to that hole than they are now.”

The blade touched his throat; he felt it begin to cut then halt.

He felt the sinewy muscles so tight against him ease just a notch; then, swift and silent as his stalker had pounced on him, he was gone. The weight left Walls’s back; rolling over, his fingers flying involuntarily to the break in his skin where the blade had begun to slice open his throat, he found himself staring into the mad eyes of his own death, which this time had by luck decided not to occur.

“Jesus, lady, you scared the shit out of me.”

The Vietnamese woman looked at him sullenly. God, how could such a scrawny creature be so strong? Baby, you had my ass cold. Fifteen years ago you get me like that and my ticket be punched forever and ever.

He rubbed his neck, which was wet with a trickle of blood.

“I figure you come up the tunnels same as me. Then you run into one of them pipes for the rocket blast, right? You follow it, and you end up in here with me, is that right, girl? Sure it is. No other way it could be. Then, when you hear me coming, you crawl up inside there—” He pointed to the big cupola of the rocket exhaust port. He shivered, thinking of her curled up in there, like a cat actually inside the thing. “Shit, you look like you been through worse hell than me.”

She was smeared with mud and blood; her face was filthy. She had a crazed look in her dark eyes and her hand kept tightening and loosening on the haft of the big knife. One of her trouser legs was ripped out. A terrible gash had left a cascade of dried blood down one arm; the cut itself had turned black and glistening. Whoever said their faces were blank? He was wrong, whoever he was, because Walls now looked hard at the thing he had all those years ago taught himself was flat and dull and yellow and saw the same play of emotions he’d seen on any face: fear, anger, pride, a big charge of guts, maybe more than a little grief.

“They jump you? Where your partner be at? You know, Stretch. That tall white dude. Where he be at?”

She shook her head.

He laughed. “He didn’t make it? My boy Witherspoon didn’t make it neither. Well, sugar, just you and me, we’s all there is, us old-time rats. Nobody else coming.” He stood, picking up his shotgun.

“Okay, lady,” he said. “Now, I figure on climbing up this ladder to that little door. You see it? Way up there? Then, maybe somehow we get through the door. ’Cause the one thing I know, we don’t want to be sitting next to this big cocksucker”—he looked at the missile—“in case it gets lit off. Burn us to shit. You coming or you staying? Best if you come.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes crazily boring into his.

Shit, she don’t even understand what this is. This is just another tunnel to her, except that now it’s some shit with a rocketship.

“Come on,” he crooned. “Take it from me, you don’t want to be down here if this sucker go. Fire come out of the hole, burn you all up like napalm.”

He began to climb up the rungs. He climbed, looking up, watching the manhole cover of the silo hatch. He wouldn’t look down because it was too far, and Walls, the tunnel champion, was afraid of heights. He climbed and climbed until he was woozy. Seven fucking stories. It was high!

He finally reached the door. It was blank and solid. Hanging groggily on the rungs, he touched it, and it had no spring or give. It was another door, the door of his life.

FUCK NIGGERS wasn’t scratched into it, but it could have been, for that was its message. Like any door he’d ever faced, it only said, You ain’t going nowhere. You ain’t invited.

His hand made a fist and he smashed it, stupidly. His hand crunched in pain.

So this was it, huh? This was the cocksucker. Another door.

Walls thought he might laugh. All this way, and he just run up against FUC—

He heard a noise, looked down to see the little Vietnamese woman beneath him a few rungs.

“That’s good, mama-san,” he said. “Good you came along, but there’s no place to go.”

She reached up and tapped his foot, then pointed.

Well, well, hello yourself. Yes, it was another small door or hatch or something, maybe two feet by two feet, covered with metal gridwork. The thing was about five feet farther around the curve of the silo wall. It looked like the entrance to a duct or a vent or the air-conditioning. But it didn’t matter.

“It’s too far,” he yelled. “I can’t reach that far.”

But with her gestures she made him see that she wanted to come up.

The bitch going to try. Don’t she know? Can’t get in. Nothing to it now. All she wrote, end of story, the man he had them beat.

But up she came, like a cat, Jesus, she was so strong. He slid over on the rungs, and up she scrambled, until they shared the same precarious upper rung. She pointed and made interesting facial explanations and ultimately it occurred to him that she was proposing to go over to the little door.

He saw now what she meant. He was strong, she was light. If he could just hold her, somehow, maybe she ought to be able to bridge the gap.

Dumb bitch, don’t know when the man got you beat.

“Sure, hon. You just go on. Nathan hold you.”

He tried to turn sideways on the rung beneath, planting one foot real solid; with his arm he embraced the top rung.

Backward, she mounted him, feeling back with one strong supple foot, planting it on his thigh, then with her arm hoisting herself, and planting her other foot while he embraced her around the waist with his arm.

She was light, just bones and strings and skin and short black hair, but she wasn’t that light either, and there was a terrible instant when he couldn’t get set just right as her weight threw him off, and he thought he was losing her. He could feel her tighten, shriek a little, and scream or curse in her language, but in just a second he had her back under control.

“Okay, okay, we be okay, just cool on down, just chill it on down, sugar baby, now,” he moaned through his own pounding breath. He knew whatever he did he couldn’t look down: it was delicate, their position, the two of them supported on the slippery purchase of his one boot on the rung, his other out to balance them, her whole body leaning on his thighbone and the slipperiness of his muscle there.

It wasn’t going to work, goddammit!

But out she strained, out, so far, Jesus, she had guts, and he clung desperately to her waist, feeling it slide against his grip as she leaned ever out for the grid on the little door.

He could hardly see what was going on, just her back ahead of him, inching away from him, and he could feel the great pressure against his forearm, holding her in, and also the great pressure in his other arm, keeping them moored to the top rung. He could feel the sweat pop out of his hairline and begin to trace little patterns down his face. He thought his muscles would cramp; his heart was thudding; he couldn’t get breath and his limbs began to shiver and tremble against the strength that threatened to desert them totally. He heard what sounded like pinging or chipping and realized that she’d gotten her knife out and into the frame of the little door and was trying somehow to jimmy the goddamned thing open and—

Uh—

Suddenly, she took flight and squirmed out of Walls’s grip and he lurched for her. His foot slipped off the rung and he himself fell, in his panic forgetting her as the gravity claimed his body and he knew he was going to die — but then his left arm wrenched him with a whack into the wall and was so panicked it would not let him fly loose and he planted his boot back onto a rung and with his now tragically free hand, grabbed back to the top rung again, and then and only then did he see that the woman had not fallen at all, but like some kind of simian creature now actually rode the grate on the little door which on its delicate hinges swung ever so gently back and forth.

“Jesus, watch yourself,” he shouted.

The little door swung the full 180 degrees, banged into the wall with its desperate cargo; then with a toe she pushed off, clinging like a cat on a screen to the gridwork. Her foot came out, searched for the duct and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting in her ride, until, swinging just a bit, she was able somehow to heave herself at the duct — a sickening thud as she hit too low against the base of her spine, but pivoted in spite of the pain, and with one arm reached out and caught something inside, then with the other pulled herself in.

Jesus, he thought. She made it.

She rested for what seemed to him to be an inhumanly short time and then peeped out, pointing at his loins urgently.

Lady, what the fuck you want?

Then, of course, he caught on: his rope tied in a tight figure-eight on his web belt. He took it off the D-ring, kneaded it free, and tossed it in an unraveling lob toward her; she caught it neatly — she did every motherfucking thing neatly — and in seconds it was secure on something inside.

Walls tied his end into about a trillion or so knots on the rung. She gestured him on.

Oh, shit, he thought. Hope this sucker holds.

It was only six or so feet, but it seemed a lot farther. The only way he could manage it was upside down like a sloth, his boots locked over the rope, eyes closed as he pulled himself along. Jesus, he felt the give and stretch of the rope bouncing as it fought against his weight, and the dead steel of the twelve-gauge pumpgun hanging off his shoulder and all the little pouches on his belt swinging and the pockets full of loose twelve-gauge shells jingling.

As he edged along the rope, Walls prayed feverishly. His desperate entreaties must have surely paid off, for suddenly he felt her hands pulling at him, and in a squirming frenzy of panic — this was the worst yet, of it all this was the absolute worst — he managed somehow to get himself into the duct opening.

He sat there, breathing hard. In time the various aches of his body started to fire up; he saw that his palms were bleeding from the tightness with which he had clung to the rope, and that he had whacked himself in the shoulder, the arm, the hip, and the shin getting over the threshold of the duct. He didn’t want to think about it though. He just wanted to suck in some air. He wished he had a cigarette.

She was saying something, and after he’d caught up on oxygen he got enough concentration back to say, “Hey, no speakee, sugar. Sorry, can’t understand you, honey.”

But he could read her gestures: she was pointing.

At last it occurred to him to see what they had achieved and the disappointment was crushing: they had achieved nothing; about six feet back the duct ended abruptly in cinderblock.

So what’s the point of the duct, he thought bitterly, knowing it to be another government fuck-up.

But then he saw the point of the duct: a metal box up near the corner of the wall, with metal tubes running out and into it from various points in the wall.

He crawled closer.

A padlock kept the box from human touch, but the box itself looked flimsy enough to beat open.

He squinted at the words on the box:

DOOR ACCESS FUSE PANEL, USAF LCA-8566033 it said.

He recognized only one. It was familiar from his years in prison: DOOR. DOOR. DOOR.

That’s how we get into the sucker, he thought, and began to beat at the metal box.

Dill could hear the firing up ahead, rising, rising still more, rising till it sounded incredible.

“Jesus,” he said to his sergeant.

Then the second gunship went up like a supernova a few hundred feet ahead, its glare spilling across the sky and filling the woods with light.

Dill winced, fell back, his night vision stunned. He blinked, chasing flashbulbs from his brain. You never look into a detonation, he told himself.

He looked back. Most of them — maybe a half of them — were still strung out in the creek bed, coming up over the ice, pulling themselves up rough stairways of stone, up gulches, scrambling up little gulches and whatever. It would take an hour for all of Bravo to make it up.

But now he had twenty-five guns, M-16s, full auto, and he could hear the firing beckoning him onward, and it was time to go.

“Almost there,” he said.

“Bob, a lot of us are going to get killed,” said one of the men.

“Yeah, Bob, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a chance against all that.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dill, “I get the impression the Russians don’t know we’re here. And, like, those other guys are counting on us. I think there’s a pretty good fight going on, and we ought to be there helping.”

Dill knew he wasn’t an eloquent man and even by his standards his little speech had been pretty lame, but at least he hadn’t whined and sounded utterly preposterous, and so he simply walked ahead through the snow, slipping between the trees, trying to figure out if he was going in the right direction or not. He thought they were with him, but he didn’t want to turn around to look, because it might scare them away.

He came to a meadow shortly. Up ahead there appeared to be a kind of fireworks display going on; he couldn’t make it out.

It was all wrong somehow, nothing at all like what he expected. He had no idea if he was in the right place. The feeling was all wrong too; there was a crazy sense of festival to it, none of the noise was distinct, but simply a blur of imprecise sound. He couldn’t see anything well, just sensing confusion, as if too much were going on, really, to decipher.

“Bob, is this where we’re supposed to be?”

“I don’t know,” said Dill. “I’m not sure. I hope we’re on the right hill.”

“We have to be on the right hill. There’s only one hill.”

“Uh—”

Dill now saw someone emerge before him. He smiled, as if to make contact, and realized in a second he was staring at a Soviet Special Forces soldier with camouflage tunic, black beret, and an AK-47 at the high port. The man was the most terrifying thing Dill had ever seen. Dill shot him in the face.

“Jesus, Bob, you killed that guy.”

“Bet your ass I did,” said Dill. “Now, come on, goddammit!”

All up and down the line, without orders or thought or guidance behind them, the troopers began to fire.

They dropped to one knee and began to squeeze bursts off into the Soviet position, stunned at how quickly and totally the scurrying figures fell before them, and how long it took the Russians to respond and how easy it all had been.

Yasotay stared in stupefaction. In that second he knew the position was lost.

Delta moved in from the right, firing as its men deployed. The helicopters were a ruse, the infantry was a ruse, the brilliant American commander had somehow gotten the Delta unit up the hard cliffs to the right in the dark — impossible, impossible! thought Yasotay bitterly — and sent them in.

Now it was only a matter of seconds.

He saw the defenses were disintegrating, that he could not fight an enemy on two fronts, he was flanked, his complex scheme of drawing the frontal into the trenches had come undone. Now the job was simply to get the tunnel defense team down, and devil take the rest.

Yasotay fired a burst at the rushing figures from the right, but like the brilliant troops they were, they came low and hard, with disciplined fire and movement. He could see them now at the far end of the trench, firing their M-16s from the hip, long, raking bursts into his troops, while others broke off and hit his trenches from the side. More and more of them were coming, and as they came, they killed without mercy.

It sickened Yasotay that men so good should die so fast.

Yasotay pulled his whistle out and bleated two brief blasts, waited a second, and then bleated two more.

He watched as his soldiers rose in a scurry from their positions, first the Red Platoon, then the Blue Platoon, each putting out a covering fire as the troopers from Delta closed in from the right and the infantry poured over the main trench at the front. He saw the choppers landing and still more men pouring out and scrambling toward him; then it was time to run himself.

Turning, he slithered through the fire back to the ruined structure that housed the elevator shaft access. Time was short; flares hung in the sky, hissing and popping; everywhere tracers arced through the atmosphere, and where they struck they kicked up blossoms of dust. It all had a terrible slow-motion sensation to it, the desperate run to the elevator shaft, the insistent bullets taking his men down.

He made it.

“Tunnel team inside.”

Fifteen men, the maximum, wedged their way into the car; with the fifteen below, that would give him thirty.

“The gun?” his sergeant major yelled.

The gun? Here it was. Yasotay had to face it, the hardest choice. He had one heavy automatic left. He thought of the mad, fat American standing out in the snowy meadow firing the M-60 from the shoulder as their own fire splashed around him. Before he died, goddamn him, his bullets had shattered the breach of Yasotay’s H&K-21. Now he had one belt-fed weapon, the M-60; if he took it, he doomed the boys up top. They wouldn’t have the fire to hold the Americans off. Yet if the Americans got into the tunnel, he’d need the damned thing.

“Major Yasotay,” the sergeant major shouted again. “The gun?”

Yasotay hated himself.

“In the elevator,” he said. “It has to go down.”

“Gun forward,” yelled the sergeant major, and the weapon was passed through the crowd until it reached the elevator.

“You boys, God bless you,” Yasotay called. “You hold them. You hold them till hell freezes. It’s for the motherland and your children will love you for it.”

“We’ll hold the bastards till Gorbachev comes to accept their surrender,” said a voice in the darkness, sheer bravado, for now it was very late, Yasotay could tell.

He bent quickly to the computer terminal still mounted in the seared metal side of the elevator shaft.

He typed ACCESS.

The prompt came:

ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK

He typed in the twelve numbers the general had made him memorize, pressed the command key, and the thing winked at him.

OK

He stepped inside the elevator, and the door closed with a pneumatic whoosh, sealing him in for the journey down and sealing out the vision of night combat left behind.