The Day Before Midnight

2300

“And where have you been, dear Comrade Arbatov?” asked the KGB man Gorshenin. “The alert for a possible defection went out at seven P.M. when you failed to arrive for your communications duty.”

“I was detained, comrade,” said Arbatov, blinking, wondering why Magda hadn’t alibied for him. Like some idiotic spy melodrama, the lamp in the KGB security office on the third floor had been turned so that it broadcast a steady, irritating beam in his eyes. So stupid! “On a mission. As I explained to Magda Goshgarian, who agreed to stand in for me.”

“The notification of your defection comes from your own unit commander, Comrade Klimov.”

“Comrade Klimov is mistaken.”

“Hmmm. Comrade Klimov is not the sort to be mistaken.”

“Yes, well, this once, he’s mistaken. Look, would I have come back to finish up my night duty if I were trying to flee the coop? Wouldn’t I be at some FBI estate eating steak and squeezing the bottoms of tarts?”

Gorshenin, a humorless youngster of thirty-two with a brightly lit bald head and two dim little technocrat’s eyes behind his glasses, looked at him without emotion. These young ones never showed emotion: they were machines.

“Explain please your whereabouts today.”

“Ah, comrade, you know that GRU operations are off limits to KGB, no? I can’t inform you, it’s the rules. Both units operate here by strictly enforced rules. Or would you prefer the Washington station be entirely staffed by GRU and all you KGB lads could go on to some interesting city like Djakarta or Kabul?”

“Attempts at levity are not appreciated, comrade. This is serious business.”

“But, comrade, that’s just it, it isn’t serious.” Gregor was using all his charm, making sly eye movements at the young prick, smiling with sophisticated wisdom and slavish eyelash flutters. “Frankly, this young Klimov and I don’t get along. I’m old school, orthodox, hardworking, play by the rules. Klimov is all this modern business, he wants corners cut, this sort of thing. So we are locked in struggle, you know. This is just a little business to embarrass me.”

Gorshenin eyed him coolly. He touched his finger to his lips.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know how such things can happen in a unit.”

“So it’s merely personal, you see. Not professional. That’s all. A misunderstanding between the generations.”

Gorshenin licked at the bait. Went away. Came back, licked some more. Then bit.

“So, there seems to be a morale problem in GRU?” he said.

“Oh, it’s nothing. We’ll work it out amongst ourselves. Most of our chaps are good fellows, but sometimes one bad apple can — well, you know the saying. Why, only yesterday Magda was saying to me—”

But Gorshenin was no longer listening. His eyes were locked in an abstract of calculus. He whirled through his calculations.

“Ah, say, old fox, do you know what would be the wonderful solution to your problems?”

“Eh? Why, the only solution is that I’ll just wait it out.”

“Now, Gregor Ivanovich, don’t be hasty. You know how excitable young Klimov is. Suppose he were to really fly off the handle? It could be the Gulag for you, no?”

Arbatov shivered.

“Now, Gregor Ivanovich, consider. A transfer to KGB!”

“What! Why, that’s pre—”

“Now, wait. Stop and consider. I could get you in, at the same posting. A man of your experience and contacts. Why, you’d be invaluable.”

Gregor made as if to study the proposition.

“It could be a very profitable move for you. Very comfortable too. None of this backbiting, this snipping and nipping like two hungry pups in a crate.”

Gregor nodded, the temptation showing like a fever on his fattish face.

“Yes, it sounds interesting.”

“Now, of course, I’d have to have something to take to Moscow. You know, I couldn’t just say, we want this man, we must have this man. I’d have to have something, do you know?”

You are such an idiot, young Gorshenin. A real agent-runner is smoother; he’s got that easy, cajoling charm, that endless persistence and sympathy as he guides you on your way to hell. Arbatov should know: he’d guided a few toward hell.

“A present?” he said as if he were a moron.

“Yes. Oh, you know. Something small, but just to show you were enthusiastic, do you know? Something minor but flashy.”

“Hmmm,” said Arbatov, considering gravely. “You mean something from the Americans?”

“Yes! Something from the Americans would do nicely.”

“Well, actually, it’s a fallow time. You know how it is in this business, young Comrade Gorshenin. You plant a thousand seeds and then you must wait to harvest your one or two potatoes.”

Gorshenin appeared disappointed.

“A shame. You know I’d hate to have to turn you back to Klimov with a bad report on our interrogation. He’d not see the humor in it.”

“Hmmm,” said Arbatov, gravely considering again. “KGB has the GRU code book, of course.”

The idiot Gorshenin swallowed and the greed beamed from his eyes like a television signal. The code book was the big secret; it was the treasure; if KGB could get its hands on just one code book for just one hour, it would be able to read GRU’s cable traffic for years to come. And the man who brought it in …!

“I’m sure we do,” said Gorshenin, poorly affecting nonchalance. “I mean the things are left around in installations all over the world.”

Such a terrible lie, so thin and unconvincing. The books were, of course, guarded like the computer codes that launched the SS-18s.

“Yes, well, a shame. You see, though the book is locked except when the communications officer uses it to decode or to encode high priority messages, he’s an old friend of mine, and one night he called up and realized he’d left delicate medicines there. Barbiturates, did you know the poor man was addicted? Anyway, in his despair he gave me the combination. I was able to retrieve his drugs for him. I actually committed the combination to memory.”

“Surely it has been changed,” said Gorshenin too quickly.

“Perhaps, but not the last time I had communications duty.”

The two men looked at each other.

A small object was pushed across the table at Arbatov. It was a Katrinka camera.

“Aren’t you late for your duty in the Wine Cellar, comrade?” Arbatov glanced at his watch.

“Very late,” he said. “It’s nearly midnight.”

The hole glistened open, dilating as the metal around it liquified. Jack thought of a birth: a new world would come out of this orifice. The black hole would spread and spread and spread, consuming all. A terrible sadness filled him.

“There, go on. Go on,” insisted the general. “You’re almost there, go on, go on!”

The flame ate the metal, evaporating it.

Suddenly there came the sound of the opening of the elevator door and the rush of boots. Men raced down the outside corridor. Shouts and alarms rose. For just a second Jack thought the American Army had arrived, but it was only the Russian. The language rose and yelped through the halls. Orders were hurled at men by NCOs. Jack heard ammunition crates being ripped open, the clank and click of bolts being thrown, magazines being loaded, automatic weapons being emplaced. He heard furniture being shoved into the corridor as barricades were hastily erected. The atmosphere seethed with military drama; Jack was in the middle of a movie.

The general was talking earnestly in Russian with the tough-looking officer who’d come to Jack’s house that morning. They nodded their heads together, the younger man explaining, the general listening. Then the two of them departed from the capsule to check the preparations.

Jack stood. He was alone with the guard who’d shot him. His leg had stiffened and the pain was immense. He had a throbbing headache.

“You speak English, don’t you?” he said to the boy who stared at him with opaque eyes, blue as cornflowers. He had a rough adolescent complexion and teeth that could have used braces. But he was basically a good-looking, decent kid, a jock, maybe a rangy linebacker or a strong-rebounding forward.

“Do you know what they’re going to do?” Jack said. “What have they told you? What do you guys think is going on? You guys must not know what’s going on.”

The guard looked at him.

“Back to work.”

“These guys are going to fire the rocket. That’s what’s in here, the key to shoot the missile off. Man, they’re going to blow the world away, they’re going to kill mil—”

The boy hit him savagely with the butt of his AK-47. Jack saw it coming and with his good athlete’s reflexes managed to tuck his face just a notch and take the blow at the hinge of the jaw rather than in the mouth and cheek, and though he knew in the instant the pain and concussion erupted in his head his jaw was broken, he had a perverse pleasure in the fact that his teeth hadn’t been blasted out. He sank with a mewling scream to the floor, and the boy began to kick him in the ribs.

“No, God, please, no!” Jack begged.

“American pig shit motherfucker, kill all our babies with your goddamned rocket!” the boy howled in pain as genuine as Jack’s.

Jack thought he’d blacked out, but the kicks stopped — the boy was dismissed to the tunnel defense team by the tough major or whatever — and the major pulled Jack to his feet.

“Watch what you say, Mr. Hummel,” he said. “These kids know their pals are upstairs getting killed. They’re in no mood for charity.”

“Fuck you,” Jack screamed through his tears. “The Army’s coming in here and they’re going to kill your asses before you get this goddamned key, and—”

“No, Mr. Hummel,” said the general. “No, they’re still hours away. And you’re minutes away.”

The major raised his pistol and placed it against Jack’s skull. His eyes were drained of emotion.

“Do you wish to say ‘fuck you’ now, Mr. Hummel?” he asked.

Jack wished he had the guts to say it. But he knew he didn’t. It was one thing to be brave in the abstract, it was another thing with a goddamned gun up against your head, especially when everything about the Russian suggested that without blinking an eye he’d pull the trigger. Hell, they could cut the last inch or so of metal away with a Bic lighter, that’s how little was left.

The general leaned over, picked up the torch, and placed the sputtering thing in Jack’s hand.

“We’ve won, Mr. Hummel. We’ve done it, don’t you see?”

He turned and crossed the small room to a radio set between the teletype machines. He turned a few buttons and knobs, then looked back.

“It’s all history, Mr. Hummel. We’ve won.”

Dick Puller had left the command post and was airborne in a command chopper with his radio, hovering out of range, watching, giving orders over the radio.

“Cobra Three, you people have to bring more of your automatics into play. I can see a slacking off there, do you copy?”

“Delta Six, goddammit, I have four men dead and nine wounded on this side!”

“Do the best you can, Cobra Three. Bravo, this is Delta Six, any movement there?”

“Delta Six, their fire isn’t dropping a goddamn bit. I’ve still got people coming in.”

“Get ’em in and get ’em shooting, Bravo. It’s the guns that’ll win this thing.”

It was a question of which the men hated more, the Soviets dug in at the ruins of the launch control facility who would not stop firing, or the dry voice over the radio, clinical, impatient. The bird floated tantalizingly beyond them all, its lights running insolently in the night.

The Soviets were firing flares, which hung in the air under parachutes leaking flecks of light down across the scene, giving it a horrible weirdness. It looked like some musty nineteenth-century battle painting: the flickering lights, the heaps of bodies, the gun flashes cutting through the drifting smoke, the streaks of tracer darting about, tearing up the earth wherever they struck. All of it was blue with a smear of moonlight, white with a smear of gun smoke, dark where the mud and blood commingled on the earth.

And there were extraordinary moments of valor. A Soviet trooper crawled out of the perimeter, stood, and rushed into the American lines. He had nine grenades in his belt, and when he leapt among the Americans — he’d been hit three times but he kept coming — he detonated himself, killing eleven Rangers and quelling the fire on the front for three long minutes. Then there were the three Spetsnaz gunners on the right, isolated from the larger body of troops and unable to resupply themselves with ammunition. Down to a single magazine apiece, they mounted their bayonets, climbed out of their trench in a banzailike charge, and, screaming as they came, ran at the Americans, shooting from the hip. One was hit immediately, center chest, by a burst of MP-5 fire from a Delta; but the other two leapt like fawns as the tracers searched them out. As they came they fired, but as they came they were hit, and eventually the bullets dragged them down, but the last one got into a Delta hole and killed a man with his bayonet before his partner fired the full mag of 5.56mm into him.

Another hero turned out to be Dill, the gym teacher. He took his leadership responsibilities overzealously. He led three assaults from the left side, from which his unit had come. He killed nine Russians and was hit twice. His men kept up the fire and by this time the stragglers had joined them.

The wounded crawled among the besiegers, handing out ammunition. James Uckley, with no place else to go, had separated himself from the Delta troopers with whom he’d flown in and taken up a position on the right. He had a CAR-15, and with little regard for his own life he lay in a shallow trench close to the Soviet position and fired magazine after magazine into it. He couldn’t see anything except the answering gun flashes and had no idea whether or not he was helping. He just had the sense of the weapon shaking itself empty. Still, he kept firing, feeling his skin turn to black leather as the powder rose and sank into it. Overhead, the bullets whistled close and at least three times he’d felt zeroed as the bullets struck close, kicking up a spray of snow and dust. But everything had missed so far. On his left were two state policemen and two Hagerstown policemen, each with shotguns; they fired too.

Now the inevitable progression of the battle was in the American favor, no matter the ferocity of the Soviets. The Americans had more weapons and with each passing minute more were brought into play. The reserve companies of the Third Infantry got in close and with their heavier M-14s began to raise the volume of fire. Additional elements of Bravo staggered in through the woods. State and local policemen, a few FBI men, some of Bravo’s walking wounded, most of the Delta intelligence staff, all arrived, found some kind of weapon, and struggled up in the dark to the firing line, found a scrap or bit of cover, and commenced fire.

Only one man in all this did not fire. This was Peter Thiokol, who lay on his face about two hundred meters off the site of the battle, feeling useless. He was terrified, yet his mind did not associate what was going on with any notion of war, which he had seen only represented on television or in the movies, where everything is clear, the relationship of friend to foe, the layout of the terrain. Now everything was strange. He could make no sense of it. An odd idea leapt into his head: he felt present at some ancient religious ceremony, where priests were sacrificing young men up there at the vivid altar with crude, cruel bronze blades. The young men went willingly to their doom, as if in doing so they guaranteed themselves a place in heaven. It had a late Aztec feel to it, or a sense of the Druid’s return — the devil was here, Peter knew, looking over the shoulders of the priests up there with their bright blades, laughing, urging them on, congratulating himself on having a nice day with an idiot’s drooling, half-moon smile. Tracers filled the air; he could hear them cracking. Occasionally, they’d hit close, driving him back. But he kept peering over the lip of his trench, fascinated.

“Better stay down, doc,” someone said. “You get killed peeking and all this ain’t worth shit.”

Peter shivered, acknowledging the wisdom in the advice, and hunkered down, wishing he could make the noise go away.

Finally, the Russian response seemed to falter. Skazy, noticing the decrease, led a Delta party of six men and breached the final Soviet trench on the right side. It was a terrifying run up the hill, and all around him the fire flicked out, yet he jumped into the trench, and discovered only corpses. With an M-60 he began to pour fire into the Soviet position from up so close that the Russians had almost no chance. With his gun working from almost zero range, it ceased to be a battle and became a butchery.

There was a pause in the firing.

Smoke licked the battlefield’s horrible stillness.

A Delta interpreter asked through a loudspeaker if the Spetsnaz people wished to accept an honorable surrender and medical attention. The few Russians responded with gunfire.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra, there’s no answer.”

“Do you have targets?”

“Most of them are down.”

“Ask ’em again.”

Skazy nodded to his interpreter. The man spoke again in Russian. A burst of gunfire responded, hitting him in the chest and throat, knocking him down.

“Christ,” said Skazy into his hands-free mike, “they just hit our interpreter.”

“All right, Major,” said Dick, “body-bag ‘em.”

Skazy finished the job.

Walls beat the tin door off the junction box with the stock of the Mossberg, badly chewing the wood in the process. No time to worry about that now.

The box, ripped open, yielded a terrifyingly complex mesh of wires crowding in on the junctions. It made no sense to him. It was like so much of the world: all wired up, all fixed, all fancy and complicated, beyond him. It could have been the same old sign.

FUCK NIGGERS it could have said.

He looked at it, feeling the rage grow and seethe. He’d felt this way on the streets sometimes. Hey, he was a hero, goddammit, he went into tunnels for his motherfuckin’ Uncle and did what Uncle said and killed yellow people and did shit no man should have to do and was hit three times and almost killed a hundred more times and then it was, thanks Jack, and good-bye to you and good luck to you.

NO BLACK BOYS NEED APPLY it could have said.

NO BLACK TUNNEL RATS NEED APPLY.

NO SILVER STAR WINNERS NEED APPLY.

NO THREE-TIME PURPLE HEARTS NEED APPLY.

FUCK NIGGERS.

That was some sign.

The Vietnamese woman said something and it pissed him off. It was that singsongy shit they all had, you couldn’t make no sense out of it. She thought he knew what the fuck to do. Like he was some kind of while guy, he had all the goddamn motherfucking answers.

Hon, it don’t mean shit to me. It’s just some wires from white boys, that only white boys can figure out.

He felt like crying. He felt trapped in the tiny little space. Come all this way for nothing. Grief beat at him. But then he figured, fuck it, got to do something. He pulled out his knife. Hey, he was going to use it to stick in some guy instead of sticking it into some wires.

He was just going to stick it in, fuck the wires up, see what happen. But then he remembered the word DOOR from the front of the tin box. He stared at the wires coming into the box. They came out of the walls, most of them, through little tubes. Let’s see, door be that say, let’s see if we can’t find some goddamned wire come from that way. He looked. Sure enough, most of the wires came from some other way, but one trace of wires plunged outside toward the box from his left, from the direction of the duct entrance. Walls hacked at the tubing covering the batch of wires, chipping away little nuggets of rubber that fell like raisins to the floor, until he had some bare wire revealed. He was acting just like he knew what the fuck he was doing.

The woman was so close in the little chamber. She looked at him like he knew what he was doing too. He laughed again. She didn’t know shit either. He thought it was pretty funny, the two of them in a little space off a rocket that was going to end the world, hacking on some wires like they knew what they were doing, a nigger boy and a gook girl, the two lowliest forms of scum on the earth which was going to be blown to shit if they didn’t stop it. She laughed too. She must have been in on the joke, because she thought it was funny too.

They both had a good laugh as Walls chopped his way through the wires. Then, just for the fuck of it, he cut through some more wires. With the blade of his knife as a kind of stick, he lifted one tuft of wires over across the gap and shoved it against the other wires and—

Walls shook the spangles from his eyes and found himself against the wall. Felt like his old daddy had whacked him upside the head one. His nose filled with an acrid odor. His head hurt. When he blinked he saw blue balls and flashbulbs. His teeth hurt. Someone was playing music inside his head. His knife lay on the floor, smoking. What the fuck had—

But the woman was at the mouth of the duct, screaming.

Walls crawled over. Man, he felt smoked himself. Could hardly remember who he was, Jack.

But he remembered when he saw the door into whatever the fuck else was down here: it was open.

Jesus fuck, he’d done it. He’d gotten into whitey’s secret place.

He grabbed for his shotgun, seeing that it would be easy to reach the open door, swing over to the ladder, then get inside.

He pulled the Taurus 9-mm automatic out of his holster and handed it over to her.

“You know how one of these things work, hon?”

He pointed to the safety lever locked up.

“Push that down, babe,” he gestured with his finger, “and bang-bang! You got that? Down and bang-bang!”

The woman nodded once, smiled. The gun was big in her tiny hands, but she looked as though she’d been born with it there.

He reached, and the shotgun came up into his hands. It felt smooth and ready and he still had a pocket full of twelves.

The woman looked at him.

“Ass-kickin’ time,” he said.

The shooting had stopped. Peter looked up. There seemed to be some kind of delay, some sort of hassle up at the launch control facility, and then he heard a roar and looked up as the command chopper, beating up a screen of snow and dust, lowered itself awkwardly from the sky and he saw Dick Puller leap out. The chopper zoomed skyward.

He heard his name called then.

“Dr. Thiokol. Where are you? Where the hell is he? Anybody seen that bomb guy? Dr. Thiokol?”

Shivering, Peter rose.

“Here,” he called, but his voice caught in some phlegm and it didn’t come out quite right, and so he said it again, “Here!” and it came out too loud, too shrill for a battlefield full of the dead, where he was the only man without a gun.

“This way, please, Dr. Thiokol,” yelled Dick Puller.

Peter began the short climb up the hill to the launch control facility, or what remained of it. All around him men moaned and shivered. If only it didn’t feel so unreal, if only the smell of blood and gunpowder weren’t so dense, if only the lights from the flares and the hovering choppers weren’t flickering dramatically, the flares hissing and leaking sparks, the chopper lights wobbling drunkenly. Up ahead, men were consumed in the drama of their equipment, clicking bolts, loading clips, smearing their faces.

Someone was shouting. “Okay, now, goddammit, everybody out of here but the Delta Tunnel Assault Team. You guys in the second element, you form up over there on Captain McKenzie. The rest of you guys, Rangers especially, please back off and give us some fucking room to operate.”

He could see the men rigging themselves with complicated harnesses and thought for just a minute they were parachutes. Parachutes? No, then he realized that it was rappeling gear by which the Delta commandos would slide on ropes down the shaft. Coils of green rope lay about on the ground.

“Thiokol, hurry up, come on,” said Puller, up at the door.

Peter scrambled up the rest of the way.

“It’s not damaged, sir,” said a young soldier. “We tried to hold our fire away from it.”

Peter saw the elevator door set in its frame of solid titanium, the only hard, gleaming thing among the blown-out walls and the shattered floorboarding. Hard to believe this had once been inside a building and that the building itself had stood quite normally until just a few hours ago. And on the hard cool face of the titanium was the computer terminal, which looked for all the world like a bank money machine.

“There’s still current,” said Puller.

“Oh, there’s current,” said Peter. “There’s a solar cell up top, and every day the sun shines, it recharges the batteries. The shaft access unit is independent of outside power. It can go for six days without sun and the computers inside it keep running.” He was aware he was ranting like a pedant. “The question is the shield.”

Peter bent to it. A solid Plexiglas sheet covered the keyboard and the screen. Now, if they were smart and had the time, they’d have jimmied the mechanism on the screen access itself, so that before he had to solve the door, he’d have to hack or bash or cut his way through the protective screen. With a screwdriver they could have won. But he thought no, no, not this Russian. This Russian thinks he’s smarter than me. He’s going to beat me at my own game.

Peter touched the red plastic button just under the terminal.

With a quiet grind the Plexiglas shield unlimbered from the keyboard and lifted like a praying mantis rising from the grass. It folded itself back and out of the way.

Two words stood on the blank screen.

ENTER PROMPT they said, two gleaming little green words in the bottom left of the screen.

So far, for two words.

Peter swiftly typed ACCESS and pressed the enter button.

The machine responded ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK CODE.

Eleven hyphens blinked beneath the mandate and the prompt stood in front of the leftmost.

So here it is.

You punch in twelve numbers. No more, no less. To make it interesting, there’s no limit on the integers between the hyphens. Thus the code may be twelve numbers long, or it may be twelve million; it just has to have eleven hyphens in it. And then you push Enter.

If you are wrong, the machine will shout STRIKE ONE.

If you are wrong again, the machine will shout STRIKE TWO.

If you are wrong a third time, the machine will figure out that somebody who doesn’t know is trying to guess his way in, and it will shout ACCESS DENIED and arbitrarily assign twelve new numbers that only it knows and that only another computer can figure out in about 135 work hours.

“Can you do it?” asked Skazy. “Peter, I came a long way for this party. I brought a lot of people with me. Can you do it?”

He thinks all this is about him, Peter thought.

“Shhh,” said Puller. “Peter, we could move away if it would help.”

“No,” said Peter. He bent to the keys, took a deep breath. Focus. Where’s my focus? Just shine my focus on it and work it through. He knew it would help him to talk.

“Here’s the trick. Pashin thinks he’s me. He had to become me to beat me, that’s his game. It’s obvious, really. He dropped his patronymic in November of ‘eighty-two because that was the month I published my famous piece in Foreign Affairs about how a well-based MX could give us more than parity. That’s when he starts: he’s working through my life, processing my information, trying to become me to destroy me. He’s obsessing on me, looking for my code. He wants to crack my code. So he starts with something stupid. He gets rid of his middle name. Why? Because numbers are important to me, so they’re important to him. And that left him with twelve letters in his name. Just like mine. ARKADY PASHIN becomes PETER THIOKOL.”

He looked at them. Their faces were dumb.

“And twelve letters just happens to be the length of a Category F PAL code. That’s the kind of perverse correspondence that would appeal to him. So if you give each of the letters in my name a simple arithmetic value, with A as one and Z as twenty-six, you get a twelve-unit entry code that stands for me.” He gave a little chuckle, and his fingers tapped the numbers in.

He pushed Enter.

The opening was gigantic, or so it seemed. It was big enough for a man to get his hand into.

“Yes,” croaked the general. “Yes, now, move aside.”

Jack Hummel felt himself being shoved aside.

“Now, yes,” said the general, “now we are there.”

Jack saw him bend and plunge his arm into the deep gash in the metal he had opened.

“Yes,” he said, his face enflamed with the effort of it. “Yes, I’m in the gap, I can feel the damned thing, Yasotay, I can feel it, ah, oh, I can’t quite get a grasp on — Yasotay, is there a man here with small hands, extremely small, a woman’s-size hands?”

Yasotay spoke quickly in Russian to an NCO, and there was a brief conference and a name was called out and—

Sirens started howling. Lights began flashing.

Jack Hummel jumped, turned in panic; he felt the men around him panic.

“Now, now, Mr. Hummel,” came the reassuring voice of the general. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

Suddenly, the room was filled with the laconic yet lovely voice of a woman.

“Warning,” she said in her slow, unhurried prerecorded voice, “there has been an unsuccessful attempt at access.”

“He’s up there,” the general said to Alex. “My old friend Peter Thiokol, he’s up there, trying to get inside. Peter, you’ll never make it, my friend,” the general said.

STRIKE ONE, the computer said.

“It didn’t work,” said Skazy.

“No, it didn’t,” said Peter.

“You’re sure you did it right?” asked Puller, his voice suddenly older and weaker. “You didn’t—”

“No, no, the code isn’t right. We try again.”

He crouched, and his fingers flew back to the keys.

“So maybe he’s an arrogant son of a bitch and he’s not quite willing to give up totally on his own identity. Not quite. So he’s got the twelve numbers, but they’re the numbers that correspond to his name, the egotistical bastard.”

He computed swiftly, and typed it in.

Then he pressed Enter.

She was called Betty. She was the voice of the computer. She spoke from perfect preordained wisdom. She knew everything except fear and passion.

“Warning,” she repeated. “There has been a second attempt at access.”

“He thought of everything, didn’t he, Alex?” said the general. “You see, it warns them when interlopers are coming. It gives silo personnel plenty of time to call SAC, and if they are in danger of being overrun, they can either fire the missile or dispose of their keys. He is so very, very smart, Peter. So very smart. A genius.”

STRIKE TWO, the computer told him.

Peter let his breath slide out in a hiss of compressed disappointment. He sought to replace it but couldn’t get anything in because his chest was so tight.

WARNING, the computer told him, ONE MORE STRIKE AND YOU’RE OUT.

“It didn’t work either,” said Skazy with something like a whimper.

Puller had sat down by himself. He said nothing. Around them soldiers stood stupidly.

“We could still try to hit the bird as it goes out the silo,” said Skazy. “We could rig our 60s and hit it in a crossfire and—”

“Major,” said Peter, “it’s titanium. No bullet, no explosive is going to bring it down.”

“Shit,” said Skazy. “Well, get the C-4. Get all the C-4 we’ve got, well try to blow the door open. Then, if we’ve still got some time, we’ll call in some real heavy air strikes and maybe—”

“No,” said Peter. “No, forget it.”

He stared at the keys. He’d always been the smartest boy in the class. Everywhere. Every time. All his life.

“Pashin really wants to become me,” he said again, almost in astonishment. Then he gave a little laugh, rich with contempt. He thought about his wife and threw his worst secret out for them.

“He thinks that’s his strength, his pathological edge. But it’s not. It’s his weakness. It’s how he’s overreached. You know, he wanted to become me so bad that he fucked my wife. Yeah, the man in the silo, the man one hundred feet below us now, this very second, this Comrade General Pashin, having her fucked wasn’t enough for him.”

“Peter,” said Puller, something twisted in his voice, as if he were confronting a man on the cusp of breakdown.

But Peter rushed on, now unable to stop.

“That was the last thing,” he told the horrified men, and the broken timber of his voice held them. “He had her drugged and he fucked her two weeks ago in Virginia. He became me through Megan. He had her, the motherfucker. So let’s do this. If you mathematically split the difference between the value of the two names encrypted into numbers, then you define the actual merge: you define exactly where he becomes me and where he fucked my wife and where he wants to fuck us all.” He gave another little laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.

Okay, Russian, he thought. Let’s party. Heaven is falling.

Peter knelt, quickly typed in twelve numbers.

He turned to Skazy.

“Piece of cake,” he said.

He pressed Enter.

Betty spoke again in her seductive voice. She sounded like a lover, rich and throaty — full of confidence on a hot summer’s afternoon in sweaty sheets, her words cutting through the siren and the pulsing red light.

“Warning,” she cooed, “access has been achieved.”

Yasotay looked at the general and the general looked back at Yasotay and there was just a moment of panic.

Then a man raced in.

“They’ve opened the elevator shaft!” he cried.

“He’s through the doors,” said the general. “Goddamn him, Peter Thiokol, goddamn him.”

It was ten till midnight.

Gregor asked the KGB security man at the front desk if Comrade Klimov was about.

“He just went downstairs,” said the man. “Just a second, comrade. I can call down to the Wine Cellar and—”

“No, no,” said Gregor. “No, that’s all right. I’ll go on down after him.” He smiled weakly and the KGB man looked at him suspiciously, then consulted his list.

“You’re late.”

“I was in conference,” said Gregor. He stepped past the man, into the stairwell which was dark and curved away, out of sight toward the cellar. It was very quiet. He licked his lips. Pausing, he reached into his pocket, took out the vodka, and for courage took a deep swallow, feeling its nuclear fire as it went down. For courage, he said. Oh, please, for courage. He screwed it shut, put it away. Gingerly, he headed down, twisting ever so gently as the stairs wound around on themselves.

He reached the bottom, paused again. It was very dark here; someone had turned out the lights. He looked down the hall. Only the light in the coding cell was open, some fifty paces ahead. He stepped into the darkened corridor, heart hammering.

The device, he thought. The device is in the Wine Cellar, that maze of chambers behind the vault door where all the installation’s little treasures were kept. If there’s a device, and if Klimov means to set it off, then that’s where he’ll be.

He thought of Magda. Klimov would come in to her; she’d recognize a superior, and violate procedure, yes. She’d open the barred door and Klimov would smile at her and kill her swiftly, with a silenced pistol, a ballistic knife, his bare hands. Then he’d have to find the vault combination in the drawer, open the heavy door, and go on in to the labyrinth in there.

Gregor hoped he was wrong. Please let me be wrong, he prayed. Let me find fat Magda reading some absurd American romance novel or cinema magazine or writing a letter to one of her many lovers or her husband or petitioning for a higher living allowance or deciding whether or not to change the color of her nails from Nude Coral to Baby Hush or …

“Magda,” he called softly as he walked down the hall, his head pulsing with pain. “Magda, Magda, are you—”

The cage door to the Wine Cellar door was wide open.

Magda lay on her back, her thighs open, her garters showing, her dress and slip up around her hips. Her face was in shadow.

“Oh, God,” sobbed Gregor. The vision of her death robbed him of all strength and will. His Magda was gone. He wanted to sit down and cry and wail with rage. She would never call him Tata, her very own Prince Tatashkin, noble hero who fought the Witch of Night Forever again. A tear formed in the corner of his eye.

Then he saw that beyond Magda, the vault door lay open. Inside it was dark; he could see the corridor leading away, like a maze, and all the low, black openings off it. Once it had housed the liquid treasures of exalted inebriation, inebriation in a hundred exotic hues and tones, each more rarefied than the one before; now it was a super-hardened puzzle, a collection of possibilities, all of them bad.

Move, Gregor. Time is short. You fat, putrid old man, move. Move! Move!

He had an inspiration, and ran to Magda’s desk and pulled open the third drawer.

There, an old Tula-Tokarev automatic pistol should have been awaiting him.

It was gone, and so was its spare magazine.

Gregor looked into the open strong room, where the device was and where Klimov was with the gun.

He looked at his watch.

It was very near midnight.

Walls hand-over-handed down the rope the six feet back to the ladder, there awkwardly transferred his weight to the top rung, and pivoted, unfolding, from the fetal to a hanging position, planting his boots on a rung five feet below. Damn, it was easy! He scrambled up the ladder and through the open door. The woman was right behind him. He found that he had climbed into some sort of deserted corridor which led down the way to another door. He thumbed the safety off the shotgun; opening its little blazing dot to the world, saying, Ready, Jack. Then he edged along, gun at the ready. Very tricky here. He tried to think it out: his job had been to see how close he could get, then go back and get other guys to plant a bomb or something. But that was all shot now. Now, he was in the goddamn place and it was hours since he’d been in contact: he had no idea who was here. Maybe all those soldiers had gotten into the hole already and he and the girl could just sit down and have a nice Coke and make their report and go home. But he didn’t think so. Those guys who came after him in the tunnel, man, they were too fucking good. They were tough motherfuckers. You don’t get guys like them out easy.

So he figured he’d managed now to get into the place where they could fire the rocket. But nobody had told him what it was like. What should he look for? He remembered as a kid when in school they made them watch rockets shoot little balls or white guys into space from Florida. It was some kind of big room with white guys in white shirts sitting at panels. Somehow he knew that wasn’t right. He figured it’d be a little place, a little room somehow. And as they drew nearer to the far door, Walls became aware of a peculiar sound; it was tantalizingly familiar, coming at him from somewhere in his memory. A siren. The police after him. He stopped. He felt her hand on his arm. He turned, looked at her.

“Some kind of siren,” he said. “You know, like the police are here or something.”

He could see she didn’t comprehend.

“That’s okay,” he said. “We just goin’ to nose ahead and see what’s up. We go real slow. We not goin’ to do nothing stupid, okay, lady? No heroes. We ain’t going to be no heroes. Being hero, that’s the way you get fucked up, and Walls done being fucked up. We just ease our way on up and see what’s to see.”

Phuong looked at the black man. She had no idea what exactly was going on, where exactly they were. But she understood that they were very near the men who would drop the bombs and turn the world’s children to flames. Her heart filled with hate and anguish. She had an image of her daughter in that one instant before the napalm flooded in searing brightness across her: The child ran, screaming, Mother, Mother, as the big jet rushed lazily overhead, and two black, spinning eggs fell from it, drifting in their stately course to earth.

Mother, Mother, the girl cried, and the wall of flames fell over her and the heat beat at Phuong, pushing her back and down and she felt her heart melt and her brain die and she wanted to run into the fire, but hands held her back.

She knew then why she was here, why she had come this long way back into her past.

Mother, her daughter called her, Mother.

I am here, she sang in her heart, joyous at last, for it was time to run into the fire.

Skazy yanked the pull-ring on an eight-second delay detonator jammed into a five-pound block of C-4, looked around, yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and tossed the thing down the shaft. He had a sense of extreme maliciousness: to throw enough explosive to flatten a building down into a hole in the ground, then scamper back until it went boom. He felt giddy and dizzy as the thing fell weightlessly from his fingers and was absorbed by the blackness. He stepped back a few feet, though he knew the blast couldn’t hurt him. He looked about: the dark troopers of the first squadron of the Delta Tunnel Assault Team stood around awkwardly, linked into their harnesses. All were in black; faces, hands, watch caps, armored vests, guns, ropes, knives — all black. In the second before the explosion Skazy had a delirious moment of clarity: it was all behind him now, the stuff with Puller, the so many times Delta had mounted up and gone nowhere, the stand-downs, his own career stalled out by the rumor that he had once smashed a superior in the face. All gone: now there was only Delta, and the moment rushed toward him so beautifully he could hardly stand it.

The explosion was muted from this distance, but still you could feel its force. The ground shook. It was a hard, sharp clap under the earth. Hot gas pummeled up from the shaft and gushed out into the night air.

Skazy tugged once, just for luck, on the metal bit at his belly button through which his ropes ran; he knew they were perfect because he’d done this drill a million times. He went to the shaft and heaved his long rope down it It disappeared, uncoiling, shivering, and clicking off the walls as it fell. Other ropes fell with it down through the long distance. He looked around, and there stood Dick Puller with the earphones and Peter Thiokol looking at him.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra One,” he said into the hands-free, voice-activated mike suspended on its plastic arm inches from his lips, “we are commencing operations. Heaven is falling.” He gave them the thumbs-up.

He saw Dick speak into the microphone, and simultaneously heard the words, “It’s all yours, Frank,” in his ears.

There was something he had to say. “Dick, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Frank. Good hunting and God bless you.”

Skazy turned to his sergeant, and said, “Let’s go kill people.”

Then he jumped off into the black space, hurtling down the rope, feeling the rope burn through his harness and between his legs and rip against the leather of his gloves, and he swung into the walls, bounded off the balls of his feet, and continued to whistle down the rope toward the tunnel, his CAR-15 rattling against his back. He was first, but he knew in seconds that around him, like spiders descending from their webs, would come the others of the tunnel assault team, falling through the dark.

The force of the explosion threw Yasotay against the wall of the corridor. One of his eardrums blew out and he twisted his shoulder badly on the wall. Someone shook him alert. All around he saw his men shaking their heads, touching themselves to make certain they were whole, clapping each other to touch other living flesh.

The general yelled from the entrance of the launch control center, “Only a few more seconds. Just hold them a few more seconds.”

Yasotay blinked, found his whistle, blew it twice, hard and sharp. Its strident tones cut through the air of shock that hung like vapor in the air. Yasotay knew the battle would turn in the next second or two.

“On your guns, Spetsnaz, on your guns, boys!”

With that he himself did a stupid, incredibly brave thing. He stood and ran the sixty feet to the shattered elevator door, where the smoke was thicker.

“Sir, no, you’ll—”

But Yasotay ran on, uncaring. He reached the elevator just as the first of the American fighters, who looked like a cossack from black hell, arrived at the end of his long rope. The man separated himself from his harness with an extraordinary economy of motion, and was unlimbering his automatic weapon, when Yasotay brought him down with a short Uzi burst, the dust flying off the man as the bullets punched into him. Yasotay figured he wore body armor, so when he fell back, Yasotay fired again into his head.

“Cobra One, this is Delta Six, do you read? What’s the situation, Cobra One, we hear heavy firing.”

Puller got no answer.

“Skazy’s down, dead probably,” he said to Peter. “They were right on top of them as they came down.”

“Sir,” someone yelled from the shaft. “Somebody’s in the shaft, firing up.”

“Grenades,” yelled Puller. “Grenades, now, lots of them. And then get your asses down there.”

Yasotay killed the first four men the same way, gunning them as they slid off their ropes. It was terribly easy. But then the men stopped coming. Smoke floated everywhere, the smell of burned powder curled up his nostrils, and he was struggling to change clips in anticipation of more Americans, when he heard something bounce hard on the floor of the car, and then another and another and—

He’d just gotten away from the shaft when the first grenade went off, then another and another and another. He felt his arm go numb as it took several pieces of shrapnel. Leaking blood, he staggered down the corridor to his first strong point, where he had his M-60 and a batch of men with automatics.

He just got behind the barrier when the next group of Delta commandos hit the floor of the elevator shaft.

“Sir, we have targets.”

“Take them, take them,” yelled Yasotay, breathing hard. The M-60 fired, its tracers racing out, filling the shaft door. The others were firing, too, the bullets hitting the door, tearing it apart, ripping into the masonry and the metal. But then, incredibly, out of the door there came with a sickening thud a large chunk of doughy-looking C-4 with something stuck in it. Yasotay saw it come, land halfway between the elevator opening and his own position, and started to scream at his people to get down, when it detonated.

The explosion seemed even bigger than the last one. Again, like a rag doll, he was twisted backward by the blast, separated from his gun and from his senses. He had the sensation of going down a drain, of being swirled through a spiral of hot gasses and wild sensory impressions while large black Americans beat on him with baseball bats and American women poured hot coffee on him. His arm was on fire and he at least had the sense to beat it out against his leg. He blinked, tried to will himself to clarity and command. There now was smoke everywhere and a bell had begun to sound. A Spetsnaz trooper, shocked and disoriented by the blast, stood next to him with a stunned look on his face, and as Yasotay watched, a small red dot appeared on his center chest, and then a burst exploded it, blowing out his heart, pushing him back. The trooper fell with the terrible gravity of a building whose underpinnings had been cut out, with total animal death, oblivious and absolute, and his arms splayed out on the impact of his crash to the floor.

Yasotay gathered his Uzi and looked down the hall. He saw the Delta people had laser-sighting devices and were very good shots. They fired not out of fear or excitement but out of calm professional purposefulness, behind what cover was available, with extraordinary accuracy. The red streaks from their weapons cut through the smoke, and when they touched flesh, bullets followed. Their first premium was the gunner. He was hit twice in the head. Next to him, the loader was dying with a hurt look on his face, his blood pumping in spurts from a large gap in his throat. The blast had knocked half the barricade away and two or three men lay sprawled beyond it. The gun itself lay on its side, its bipod up like the feet of a dead animal on the road, its belt a tangle. It was useless.

Yasotay fired his clip — he was the only man in the position firing — then dropped back to the floor and slithered across it like a wily old lizard.

“Come on, boys, you’ve got to fire back. Come on, get the guns going, boys,” he yelled as cheerily as he could. “Your mothers will curse you if you don’t get some fire going, fellows.” His team began to return the fire, but they were clearly shaken by the laser sights.

Yasotay smacked another clip into his Uzi. Then, with calm deliberation, he stood, aimed at a Delta commando coming at him in the dark, and killed the man with a single burst to the brain. He found another target in a second and fired into the ribs. He found a third and hit him in mid-body. By this time, like angry birds, the red streaks sought him through the smoke and the darkness. And as they climbed to find him, one of his men found the courage to race out of the shelter of the barricade to retrieve the M-60.

“That’s it!” Yasotay shouted. He waited one more second, then dropped out of gun range. Overhead the world seemed to explode as the tracers tore through the air. But he heard another sound: his own M-60. God, he was glad he’d brought it, because the damned thing had so much authority that it drove anything that faced it into retreat.

“Sir, they’re falling back.”

Indeed, the Delta commandos, faced with the heavy gun, straggled backward. They were hung up in the elevator shaft entrance and its environs.

Then Yasotay’s M-60 jammed.

It was the second big blast that panicked Jack. It was so close! He blinked, terrified, and felt his pants fill with liquid. He realized he’d urinated. Then it sounded as if hundreds of kids were beating on the walls with two-by-fours, the sounds wooden and unconvincing. What? He couldn’t figure it out, until at last it occurred to him he was hearing small-arms fire.

They’d be coming, he knew. They’d come through that door there, these army guys, and they’d kill everybody, and that was it.

He turned to the mad general and said, “I don’t think—”

“Burn it! Burn it, you fool. My hand must get into it! Burn it through, goddamn you, Hummel.”

The pistol came close to his skull and rested there.

Jack’s will collapsed. He wasn’t strong enough. He was going to die, he knew. He’d never see his kids again or his wife: he was a fool and a loser and a vain and worthless man, and this was the one test that counted and he was fucking it up and this guy would kill him or the Army would kick its way in and kill him.

But he tried.

“I can’t,” he said. “I won’t.”

The general placed his pistol next to Jack’s head. Jack felt the circle of the muzzle boring against the frail bone of his temple. There was a click.

“Do it,” commanded the general.

Jack plunged the torch back into the long slash in the metal and watched as the hot bright needle of flame melted the last rim of titanium around the black hole. He could tell: it was done. You could get your hand in now. It was over.

He looked up.

“It’s finished,” he said.

The general’s arm rose and came down and Jack accepted the blow across the face. It went off like a thunderclap, the sound of the pistol barrel striking bone and shaking brain and the world wobbled out of sight with the surge of pain, and then became blurry.

Jack felt himself sliding away and knew the warm wetness on his face was blood. But through his daze he saw the general reach in, struggle once, and then emerge with the key.

“Yasotay. Yasotay, I have it!”

The first blast knocked Walls to his knees and he almost fired the shotgun involuntarily. The second blast, even louder, really scared him. The gunfire rose like the sound of the ocean, beating and crashing against the walls.

He turned to the woman.

“Okay, mama-san,” he said. “You just cover my ass, okay?”

Something that passed for acceptance radiated from her dark eyes for just a second and she turned and muttered something to herself and Walls, then realized she was praying. She was giving herself up to God for what would happen in the next two seconds or so. So he himself said a quick one. Dear God, he said, if you’re a white man or a brown man or a yellow man I don’t know, but please don’t let these guys blow up the world before I move my momma and my brother James to the country. And if you do, then fuck you, ’cause you be dead too.

With a punch of his foot Walls kicked in the door to discover a young man in the blue beret of the Soviet airborne running with an RPG to reinforce the second strongpoint, and he blew him away with Mr. 12, felt the hard kick of gun against his shoulder, cycled the slide in half a second, popping a red from the breech, blew away another as he turned, dipped running across the corridor, blew away a young man with an AK-47 who turned to look at him, and saw himself in the kill zone of still a fourth who, before he could fire, fell back as his head exploded because the Vietnamese woman had shot him there with her Taurus.

Walls winked and gave her the thumbs-up — bitch can shoot, no fuckin’ lie! — and dropped to one knee to thread more 12s into the shell port of the gun just in front of the trigger guard, got seven in, flipped it back upright, and threw the pump with a klak-klak! just in time to blow up a rather large man with a large automatic rifle. He began to slither ahead, the girl off on his right ten paces back, covering his black ass.

He was thinking, Come on, you motherfuckers, come to me, come to old Walls, Walls got the glory and the truth for you here with Mr. 12 by his side, and indeed he came upon two wounded men busily inserting ammunition into clips, and he did the necessary without a twitch of guilt, pumping the slide as the hot shells flipped from the breech and then he heard a cry and was hit by a spray of gunfire in the wrist, rib, and neck, and went down.

Mother, Mother, her daughter cried from the flames, Help me! Help me!

Phuong ran to her, past the black man who had been shot, but in her way was a white man with a rifle, and so she shot him; then another came and she shot him; there were two more and she shot them. Suddenly, they were everywhere around her and she felt herself hit, but she turned and fired twice more and was so close she could not miss, though she was hit again and again.

Mother, do not let me burn! her daughter screamed.

Phuong rose through her pain, turned to find her daughter, and two more white men fired at her and hit her, but she fired back, hitting them too.

I am coming, she screamed in her heart, and then she saw her daughter and went to her and grabbed her and the burning finally stopped.

Jesus, he hurt, but then he looked and saw that he still had the damn vest on and the bad one in the rib had just flattened itself out while kicking him like a mule. His wrist had been hit with a ricochet, his neck didn’t bleed bad. He pulled himself over to the woman.

She lay quiet. Seven men lay around her. The automatic was on the floor, its slide locked back. He knelt, quickly felt for pulse. Nothing. Her eyes were closed and tranquil.

Jesus, mama-san, he thought, you’re some kind of fine lady.

One of the bad guys was trying to crawl away, leaking blood. Walls put the muzzle of the shotgun against his head and fired. Then he raced on.

Yasotay gave the M-60 a good kick and when that didn’t work, bent, pulled out his boot knife, and popped the feed cover. He could see that a bad shell had become stovepiped into the bolt head. With his knife blade he got some purchase, gave a mighty heave, and popped the thing out. Then, throwing the knife away, he reseated the belt, slammed the feed cover, and pulled the bolt back. He turned to the gunner, who was so overcome at Yasotay’s charisma that he made no move to take over the gun. So Yasotay stood as red flashes zeroed toward him, and he saw the Delta commandos flooding toward him, visibly taken with his extraordinary courage. He pressed the trigger. The gun made him a god. The tracers flicked out, and where they hit they pushed the shadowy figures of Delta down. The gun fired swiftly: it rattled itself free of the first belt and the hot brass shells rattled from its breech, hundreds of them, spilling out and bouncing across the floor. And then it started to rain.

The water pelted Yasotay in the face, and he fell back, stunned. It fell in dense sheets, filling the air, accumulating in lurid, fluorescent-jazzy puddles on the floor, driving the sweat from Yasotay’s hot body. It felt like a miracle. Greedily, he threw his head back and drank. The water poured in, sweet and glorious as vodka. Momentarily, the shooting stopped.

“Drink, boys, damn you, 22 Spetsnaz, drink! It’s a message from God. He sends us water deep under the ground to quench our thirst. Come on, drink, you lovely bastards!” Yasotay was laughing madly, aware that a stray round must have touched off the fire control sprinkler system. But he looked and saw Delta stunned at the sudden gush, and then crazily begin to fall back. Where bullets had failed, water had succeeded.

Then he heard the general.

“Yasotay, damn you. I have it! I have it!”

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

“Go ahead, Cobra.”

“Sir, this is Captain McKenzie. Skazy’s dead and so are most of my people down here. We’ve got maybe sixty or seventy percent casualties, dammit, and now it’s raining.”

“Raining?”

“The goddamn fire system went off, and it’s pouring cats and dogs, Delta Six.”

Peter said, “Tell him to push it anyway, it’s only water.”

“Cobra, you’ve got to push ahead. Where are you?” “Sir, I’m into the corridor and past the first strong point, but they’ve set up a real motherfucker down there, they’ve got a goddamned M-60 and it’s kicking our asses. They’ve got some kind of Russian Rambo down here who stands up and laughs at us. He must have killed forty of our guys already. Jesus, he is one tough son of a bitch.”

“Waste his ass,” said Puller. “Blow his guts out.”

“Our lasers aren’t working in the rain, goddammit. Sir, I’ve got a lot of dead and wounded.”

“Delta, you’ve got to get into that launch control center.”

“Sir, every man I throw down there gets wasted. They’ve got this goddamn place zeroed. I need more C-4, more men, and more time. And more lasers.”

“Cobra, you’ve got to get it done, that’s all. Now, press the attack, son, or your wives and children will curse you from here to eternity.”

“Jesus,” said the young captain.

The general watched Yasotay run through the rain. He moved with surprising grace, given his condition. Most of his hair was burned away, as were his eyebrows. His face was bright red from excitement, although peppered with shrapnel and bleeding from several places. One arm had had its sleeve burned away, and the bare limb underneath was blackened and crusty with scabbing. His other arm was sodden with blood. Yet the man moved with such relish it was difficult to fathom. He was pure war.

“I have it. I have it!” the general yelled, holding the key aloft. “Come, Alex, we’re there, we’ve won.”

In his hands the general held two red titanium keys, each weighing about an ounce, each about two inches long, and jagged and fluted as any key would be.

“Here, take it. Now, on my mark.”

He pressed a key into Yasotay’s hand and had an odd sense that in Yasotay’s mad eyes something weird and sad danced.

But the general raced to station two.

There were two stations. At each, not much: a telephone, a wallful of buttons, a computer, and all of it, really, irrelevant, except for the keyholes under the rubric LAUNCH ENABLE.

“Put your key in, Alex,” the general commanded, inserting his own.

Yasotay put his key in.

Immediately, a red light began to flash in the command capsule.

The prerecorded voice stated, “We have launch condition Red, please authenticate, we have launch condition Red, please authenticate.”

“The computer, Alex. Do what I do. The numbers are there.”

Before Yasotay was a set of twelve numbers; they were the proper, preset Permissive Action Link for that day that he had obtained by blowing open the safe in the security shed eighteen hours earlier.

Yasotay punched in the twelve numbers, as the general had done.

“We have an authenticated command to launch, gentlemen,” came the voice of the beautiful woman out of the speakers. “We have an authenticated command to launch. Turn your keys, gentlemen.”

There was something tender in her sweet voice.

“Alex,” said the general, “on my command.”

Alex’s eyes came up to meet the general’s, then went back to the key.

“Alex, three, two, one.”

The general turned his key.

It did not move.

The sound of gunfire rose and rose. Shouts, screams, explosions.

“Alex?”

Yasotay looked up. The general saw something odd on his face, impenetrably sad and remote. He had not turned his key.

“Is this right, Arkady Simonovich Pashin? Can you say, irredeemably, in God’s eyes, in Marx’s eyes, in Lenin’s eyes, in the eyes of our children, that this is right?”

“I swear to you, my friend. It’s too late to go back. The bomb in Washington goes off soon. If we don’t fire now, this second, the Americans respond with all their Peacekeepers and death will be forever and ever. Come, my friend. It’s time. We must do that hard, terrible thing, our duty. We must be men.”

Imperceptibly, Yasotay nodded, then looked back to the key. His fingers touched it.

“On my command,” said Pashin. “Three, two—”

Pashin had the impression of conflagration, of flames unending and unceasing, spreading through the world, eating its cities, its towns, its villages, its fields, of the long and total death of fire, in its immense but necessary and cleansing pain. He thought of babies in their cribs and mothers in their beds, but then he saw that it was not the world but his own hand and arm that were in flames, and then the pain hit. He turned into the mad eyes of the American Hummel and his torch, which now climbed from the blazing arm and sought him where he was softest, burned through his tissues, through throat to larynx, through cheeks to tongue, through eyes to brain, and the pain was—

Yasotay watched the general burn. In a queer sense he was relieved, and then he saw that he had merely acquired another responsibility. The general’s pain was extraordinary, yet it did not move Alex. He watched as the American drove the torch deep into the face and the face melted. Alex, in his years of war, had seen many terrible things but nothing quite as terrible as this, and after a time, numb as he was, he decided enough was enough and he shot the American in the chest with his P9. The man slid to the floor and the torch went out at last.

Then Alex stood; the machinery to launch the missile was still intact. He could not turn two keys at once, however. He had to find someone, anyone, that was all. He turned and rose to get a man, and at last saw his own death, in the form of a black American commando with a red bandanna and a shotgun and frenzied eyes, and Alex, still numb, lifted the P9 in a nominal attempt at self-defense, but then the American blew him away.

Gregor looked at his watch.

Midnight was very close.

He looked into the welter of rooms that lay behind the vault door. He wondered if the great Tolstoi had ever conjured such a moment: fat Gregor, scared so badly the shit was almost about to run down his pulpy legs, going into a maze to stop a man with a bomb who would merely destroy the world. It was too absurd, not Tolstoi at all but more the ancient Russian folktale. He was Tatashkin, going off to fight the Witch of Night Forever. The world chooses such terrible champions to defend her! he thought bitterly.

Liquid courage. He pulled the bottle from his pocket, sloshed it to find it only half full, unscrewed the cap, and threw down a long, hot swallow. The world blurred perceptibly, turned mellow and marvelous. Now he felt ready. He put aside his servility and his avuncularity and his sniveling obsequiousness, his need to please all his masters; and he put aside his fear: he decided that he could kill and after that he decided that he would kill.

Gregor walked into the dark corridor.

Klimov had switched the lights off.

Gregor slipped out of his shoes. He began to pad down the hall. His nervousness had left him. His heart was beating hard, but not out of fear, rather out of excitement. Now he had him: little Klimov, the piglet, who had killed his friend Magda and would just as soon kill the world. With the vodka he was able to imagine pressing the life out of the piglet’s throat, watching his eyes go blank and dull as death overcame them.

Gregor glanced through the first doorway; inside there was a filing cabinet, three obsolete portable coding machines, nothing else.

He walked on. He breathed in small wheezes, evenly, quietly, only through his nose. He felt his eyes narrow. In a curious way he felt himself concentrate as he had never concentrated before, or as he had not concentrated in years. He flexed his hands, tried to limber up his muscles.

He tried to remember the lessons from so many years ago.

Any part of your body is a killing weapon: the heel of the palm driven upward against the nose or into the throat; the edge of the hand against the neck; the knee, planted with thunderous force into the testicles; the bunched fist, one knuckle extended in the form called the dragon’s head, into the temple; the elbow, like a knife point, driven into the face; the thumbs into the eyes. You are all weapons; you are a weapon.

Gregor slid around the second doorway: more filing cabinets, old trunks, hanging uniforms.

He proceeded. The next little room bore outmoded communications and coding equipment, too bulky to be shipped back, too sensitive to be abandoned, too imperishable to be destroyed. The following room contained weapons, a row of old PPsH-41s locked in their rack, some RPGs chained to a circular stand. Also some stores of explosives and detonating devices, left over, all of it, from the maniac Stalin’s reign, when it seemed that war would break out at any moment and every second commercial attaché might be turned into a saboteur or a partisan.

And on to another room, which had nothing in it but furniture from some purged functionary’s office, cast off as if it, too, had been contaminated by political unorthodoxy, and it, too, had been consigned to a Gulag.

In the last room he found the ratfuck Klimov.

And he found the bomb.

Gregor recognized it, of course, from the drawings he’d seen: it was a variation on the American W54, the famous suitcase bomb called a Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was in the one-kiloton range, from here easily powerful enough to vaporize all primary governmental structures and, by virtue of blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse, completely destroy the Pentagon across the river in Virginia, while doing massive damage to CIA up the river in McLean and, in its farther reaches, rupturing the communications at the National Security Agency in Maryland. The thing looked like a big green metal suitcase sitting there on the table. It was open, its padlocks sprung. The top was off, and the firing mechanism appeared to be quite simple, a crude timing device, digitalized for the modern age. The numbers fled by in blood red like a third-rate American spy movie.

2356:30

2356:31

2356:32

So the fucker was set. Klimov sat before it in immobile fascination as the digits flicked up toward the ultimate moment. He brought an old roller chair in from the storage room. He’d just sit there and be atomized in the detonation.

Gregor walked to him, waiting for the piglet to turn and rise with the pistol. Gregor knew he was close enough. He felt the murderous rage building within him. He’d kill him with his hands and it would feel good. He’d kill him for Magda already gone and the sleeping millions who’d join her.

Inch by inch he stepped closer.

Klimov just sat there.

2357:45

2357:46

2357:47

He touched the boy on the shoulder, making ready to strike.

Young Klimov slipped forward an inch, then toppled to the cement, hitting it with a sickening thud, and the crack of teeth.

Young Klimov had been shot in the heart with a ballistic knife blade that projected from the center of his chest in a sodden mass of blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were open in absurd blankness.

“He didn’t believe it when I shot him,” said Magda Goshgarian, standing behind him in the doorway. “I wish you could have been there, dear Tata, when the blade went in and the life went out of his eyes.”

“Magda, I—”

He gestured to her but she raised a pistol.

“He knew something was up. He was very smart, the little prick. He’s been nosing around me for weeks now. He came down and I killed him, Tata.”

Then her eyes moved to Gregor’s, and he saw that she was mad, quite mad.

“And I heard you coming, yelling my name with your voice trembling in fear. So I played dead, and off you went. I will shoot you, too, Tata, though I love you. I love you almost as much as I love our country, which has lost its way. And as much as I love my lover, Arkady Pashin, for whom I would die. For whom I will die. He is a great man, Tata, a man of Pamyat, and you are merely a man. Now, stand back. It will be over in seconds, my love. You won’t feel a thing — just nothingness, as your atoms are scattered in the blast.”

Peter stood by the mouth of the elevator shaft, listening to the gunfire below. It sounded horrible, roaring up the dark space of the shaft, no individual sounds to the shots at all, just a mass of noise. He was at the same time fussing with something around his waist.

“Excuse me,” he said to a Delta soldier close by, “is this right?”

The young man looked at it.

“No, sir, you’ve got to rotate the snaplink a half turn so that the gate is up and opens away from the body. And I don’t think you’re in the rope-seat just right. And you’ve got to take up some slack between the snaplink and the anchor point and—”

Peter fumbled with it. He’d never get it right.

“Look, could you fix it for me?” he said.

The soldier made a face, but bent and began to twist and adjust Peter’s rig.

“Dr. Thiokol?”

It was Dick Puller.

“How’s it going down there?” Peter asked.

“Not good. Lots of fire. Very heavy casualties.”

Peter nodded.

Puller checked his watch, then looked at the other Delta boys queueing up for the long slide down to the battle.

“Delta, second squadron, ready for the descent,” an NCO called. “You locked and loaded?”

“Locked and loaded,” came the cry.

“Check your buddies. Remember your quick-fire techniques and to go to the opposite shoulder at these damn corners. No fire on the way down, the show starts about halfway down the corridor. In twos, then, Delta, on rappel, go, go, go.”

As he tapped them off, the Delta men began their slide down.

“More men, maybe that’ll do it,” said Dick.

“That’s it,” said the soldier, rising. “Now you’re rigged right. You just thread the rope through the bit, under your leg. You brake with your right hand — you’re righthanded, right? — by closing it and pressing the rope into your body.”

“Thiokol, what are you doing?” said Puller abruptly.

“I have to get down there.”

Dick Puller’s mouth came open, the only time Peter had ever seen surprise on the leathery, unsurprisable face.

“Why?” the old man finally asked. “Look, they’re either going to shoot their way in and stop Pashin or they’re not. It’s that simple.”

Peter fixed Puller with a harsh look. “It’s not simple. There’s a scenario where it may come down to somebody who knows those consoles and certain launch-abort sequences.” He marveled at the dry irony of it, how it had to turn out so that he, Peter Thiokol, Dr. Peter Thiokol, strategic thinker, had to slide down a rope to the worst game of all, war. “There’s more to it than men. Your Delta people may kill all the Russians and the rocket will fly anyway. I have to go. I started this fucking thing, now I’m the one who has to stop it.”

Puller watched him go. He interrupted the Delta assault descent, and the sergeant looked over at Puller and Puller gave a nod, and Peter somehow managed to get the ropes properly seated in the complex rappeling gear strapped to his waist. He was standing right there at the mouth of the tunnel. He poised on the edge for just a second, then caught Dick Puller’s eyes and gave a meek little thumbs-up, more like a child than a commando, and then he was gone.

Walls knew where he was now. He was in, actually inside the white man’s brain. It was a well-lit little room, covered with electronic gear, telephones, screens, dead guys. He jacked another shell into the Mossberg, stepped inside, pulled the goddamned door closed, gave a huge circular mechanism a twist and a clank, locking it. Beyond the white boy with the piece he’d just blown away there was another white guy, burned up like a pig in a North Carolina pit. Whoever he was he sure smelled bad. He went over and poked at him. The guy was barbecued. He’d been burned down to black bone. You could eat him, that’s how bad he’d been burned.

And then still another guy. Walls walked over and poked at him. His face was all smashed; he’d been beaten pretty bad. His leg had been shot. Blood bubbled on his chest. His eyes fluttered open.

“My kids?” he asked.

“Man, I don’t know nothing ‘bout no kids,” said Walls.

“You Army?”

Walls wasn’t sure how to answer this.

“Yo, man,” he said.

“They made me do it,” the guy said. “It wasn’t my fault. But I stopped the general. With the torch.”

“You done more than stop that general, man. You roasted his ass, but good.”

The man’s hand flew up to Walls’s wrist and gripped it.

“Tell my kids I loved them. I never told them, goddammit, but I love them so much.”

“Okay, man, you just rest. If you ain’t dead yet, you probably ain’t going to be dead at all. I don’t see that you’re bleeding. He plugged you over the heart, but I think he missed it. Just sleep or something while I figure out what to do, you got that, man?”

The guy nodded and lay back weakly.

Walls rose. This was the place to be, he thought, right in the middle of the white race’s brain. He had the door locked and a little farther up the tunnel there was a real serious battle going on, and he didn’t see what going up there and getting killed was going to do.

He looked around. These people, shit. Who could build a room like this, what kind of motherfucking asshole? Little white room way down under the ground where you could end the world by pushing some buttons. He looked and saw a key, just like the key in a car, stuck in an ignition switch. At another little place in the room he saw this other key. Like these white guys were going to drive away. There were lights, labels, signs, speakers, radios, typewriters, a wall safe, a big clock on the wall. Damn, it was late! It was nearly midnight.

He laughed.

White people.

And suddenly a white lady was there. It stunned him because he heard her voice in the bright room. He looked around, it sounded like she was just there, but no, no white lady. She was coming over the radio or something.

He tried to understand what she was saying. He couldn’t figure it out, man, it was just jive. These jiving white bitches, they always gave you a hard time, something about some kind of lunch being served or some other shit like that, man, what does this bitch want?

“Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing,” she was saying. “Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing. Gentlemen, you have five minutes to locate abort procedures if necessary. We are in terminal countdown.”

But then he understood. The bitch was going to fire the rocket.

2357:56

2357:57

2357:58

“Now, Magda,” Gregor began, “now, darling, let’s not do anything hasty here. This man Pashin? He may be a handsome charmer, but at the same time, he’s clearly something of a lunatic. Now, darling, believe me, I know what a bastard I’ve been to you and how vulnerable you might be to someone flashy like this, but can’t you see, he’s merely using you? Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Poof! It’s not as if he’ll be waiting somewhere for you, darling. I mean, in just a bloody minute or two we’re all ashes.”

The gun was pointed at his heart. He had seen Magda shoot. Magda was an excellent shot. She wasn’t trembling at all. The flickering colors of the fleeing digits in the timer mechanism illuminated her face, giving it an odd animation. The lights made real her insanity, her tenuous grip on reality, which had opened her to Pashin and made her capable of doing this tragic thing. Pashin had probably purchased her loyalty forever by something as elementary and unremarkable in this world as an orgasm. A quick tongue in the right place and the world was his.

“Please, darling,” he said, “I—”

“Hush, my love,” crooned Magda, her voice deep and throatily sexual. “Now it’s just a matter of waiting as the seconds flow by and we join the great All, Tata.”

He wished now he had made love to Magda. It would have been so easy. Magda had always been available for him. All he’d had to do was ask! And if he’d had her, she’d be his now. It was that simple. But he never had. He’d always taken her for granted. Magda! Silly, goosey woman, a pal, a chum, always willing to listen, to sympathize. She must have loved him secretly for years and been chewed up by the way he took her for granted. And so she turned to Pashin and his mad grandeur.

“Magda, let me tell you, it doesn’t have to end like this, in a flash of flame. Magda, you and I, we can be together. I can take you away from all this. I have friends among the Americans. The two of us, Magda, we can get away from Washington, from the embassy, from all this. We can have a happy life in some American city, Mr. and Mrs. We could adopt a little girl, Magda, a whole family. The Americans will help us. We can have a wonderful life, Magda, I’ll make you so hap—”

Magda’s laugh, sharp and percussive, cut him off.

“What, Gregor Ivanovich. Do you imagine I’m in love with you? That I’d sell my country out for one of your caresses? Men, God, how you all value yourselves! No, Tata, my heart belongs to Arkady Pashin and to his vision of the future, which is a vision of the great Russian past, the past of Pamyat, of Memory, Gregor dear. A pretend Russian like you cannot see this, but I give up my life willingly to my motherland, and to my lover.”

And to his damned quick tongue. Gregor saw how mad Pashin was: to put a tongue to plump Magda! Gregor also saw now that he was doomed. Magda’s loyalty was impenetrable. Pashin had made her his forever with his lunatic’s babble of Memory and Mother Russia. Magda, desperate for something to worship, had bought it all. The crazy bitch! The cunt, the dumb Russian cunt! Women! He hated them, the bitches.

She had him. To rush for the bomb would be to catch a bullet in the heart, like poor Klimov here; he’d be dead before he made it, and even if he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to stop it. Or if he came at her, she’d shoot him. Yes, she would. Right in the heart, hating it all, but doing it just the same, because she saw it as her duty to the damned genius charlatan, Arkady Pashin, and the motherland for which she thought he stood.

“Do you know, darling”—he tried a new approach—“the Americans know. Even now they’re attacking the mountain. Even now Pashin has failed. He’s probably already dead, Magda. His dream is over. At the very least the Americans are in communication with Moscow. This damned bomb will go off, and the thousands, the millions, will die, yourself and myself included, but there’ll be no war for us to win, no Russian future based on a great Russian past. Just one ruined city, and the bones of babies turning black in the night.”

He had begun to weep.

He could see the numbers fleeing by. They rushed on remorselessly.

2358:21

2358:22

2358:23

She simply looked at him. There was only pity on her face.

“You poor fool, Tata. You believe in nothing except the religion of the ass, your own, for which you would do anything. You snivel and beg and whine. Goddamn you, Tata, why don’t you have the guts to die on your feet! Come at me, you silly, gutless bastard!”

But Gregor fell to his knees.

“Please,” he slobbered, broken. “You’re right. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about any of them. But, Magda. Magda, please. Please, I don’t want to die. Stop it. Stop the bomb! Please don’t kill me! Please!”

She made a terrible face, her lips snickering in utter contempt, her eyes rolling, and in that second the barrel of the gun wavered, and in that second Gregor Arbatov leapt.

Peter slid through the dark, slid until he thought he’d lost control and was falling, and pulled in on the rope skidding before his eyes to brake himself. Big mistake. He hit the wall hard, feeling the blow ring in his head and his body go spastic in the concussion. Lights popped in his skull; his breath came hard and hot. He could feel the blood on his face, and his will flying out the window. He blinked for control. Below he heard the firing, roaring, incessant. But he just hung there, suspended between worlds. Other men, dark shapes falling, sped past him. His nose rubbed against the shaft; the straps cut into his groin; he had an image from a World War II movie of a paratrooper hanging in a tree. He tugged, twisted, struggled — ah! oops! and there he went again, sliding down, this time with a bit more control. He felt the burn of the rope through his leather gloves and as he swung in toward the wall, this time he caught himself on the balls of his feet and propelled himself outward again, and so eventually tumbled to the bottom.

He alighted on the top of the blown-out elevator car, amid the swirls of its cable. The smell of the explosion, so recent, still hung heavy in the air. He found himself in a crowd in a small space, as other Delta people were busy shedding themselves of coils and snaplinks and D-rings and dropping through the rupture in the roof to get to the fighting. Peter did likewise, though with less agility. Even as he struggled, trying to remember what the boy up top had said, still other Delta raiders landed at the end of their long ropes, unlimbered themselves in the confusion, and dashed off. But it was taking so long!

Finally, he was free, and climbed gingerly down through the hole to discover poor Skazy on his back, staring up in a puddle of blood through lightless eyes at nothing and forever. Peter gagged, first at the sight of Skazy’s hideous face and evacuated skull, and then from the smell, now that blood and bowels had been added to the stench of powder. He turned, found more bodies, stepped over them, and hurried out of the car and down the corridor.

It was his installation all right, now, however, tarnished horribly by the battle and made strange, stranger than he could imagine. The water was an inch deep, and moisture filled the air like a mist. The sprinklers had obviously popped. Bodies lay in the water, dark with their own vital fluids where they seemed to rock back and forth, like floating Marines in the Tarawa surf. He saw some horrible things, but didn’t concentrate on them. Sirens were going, and half the lights were off. Sparks leaked out of wiring ruptures into the water. And he heard the voice, the sweet voice of the angel of megadeath.

“… Launch is imminent. We have an authenticated launch command and launch is imminent. We have an …”

It was Betty, the prerecorded voice of the computer. He thought she sounded a little like Megan.

He tuned out the bad news and sloshed ahead through the mist to the firing, coming at last to a jog in the corridor and peeping around it to discover the epicenter of the battle. The Delta people were still a good fifty meters from the Soviet strongpoint, which was a jerrybuilt assemblage of sandbags, furniture from above, crates, whatever. It mounted at least a dozen guns, all of them firing. The air was busy with lead and noise. Where bullets struck, dust leapt off the wet wall. Meanwhile the Delta people, their guns flicking the red rays of the laser-sighting devices, plugged away, but they had stalled. They were down to the last few yards, but they had stalled. To run into the guns was to die, that was all. Peter could see that they needed explosives or something larger than what they had. It was all fucked up, a mess. It had no order at all, it was just gangs of men shooting each other up in a very small space.

Jesus, he thought, ducking back, feeling for the first time the quiver of real fear. His bowels loosened. He now saw it. They weren’t going to make it.

“You the doc?” a crouching, blackened figure with a CAR-15 and a hands-free mike asked, another Delta Caliban.

“Yes,” he said to the man, evidently the head commando. “Listen, you’ve got to get into that room down there. That’s it. That’s the launch control center.”

“Yeah, sure. After you. Is there a back way into it?”

“No. Just straight ahead. Look, you’ve got to get into it. There’s no other way and there’s not much time.”

“Sorry, but I’ve got to wait until I get some more firepower.”

“They’re all fouled up getting down the shaft,” Peter said. “There isn’t time. Do you hear that, do you know what that voice means?”

“Yeah, I hear it. No, I don’t know what it means.”

“It’s the computer. She’s going to launch the bird in about four minutes.”

The officer looked at him peculiarly.

“You see, we found out in our tests that while all hundred percent of the men in the silos would insert their launch keys, only about sixty percent would actually turn them. So we fail-safed it If they stick both keys in, it initiates a timing device; three minutes later an automatic launch sequence begins. They don’t have to turn the key, they just have to stick it in, and the terminal countdown begins. Now, if it’s a mistake or some terrible fuck-up, there is a way to stand down the launch sequence from the command center. But they can get it only over the radio, it involves a secret meaning for several of the switches pressed in a certain sequence. Only SAC HQ has the sequence. And me. Look, if you get me into that thing, I can stop the bird.”

“Man, I can’t get into the fucking place, you dig? It’s rock and roll out there.”

“You’re going to let a handful of Soviet soldiers stop you? Just rush the place. Please, Jesus, please.”

“Yeah, rush the place, great. Man, I can’t get good suppressive fire on the motherfucks. They’ve got anybody who comes at them zeroed dead. I don’t have enough firepower. Hey, we’ll die to get it done, but there’s no point in just dying to die, man.”

“We can’t be this close and fail.”

“Doc, I’m sorry. I can’t do the impossible. That’s all there is to it.”

“Call Puller.”

“Puller’s not down here. I am. If I wait a few minutes, then maybe I get enough firepower up and move a team down to get some C-4 into them and push off. But my guys are getting torn up. These Russian kids are very tough guys.”

“Please!” Peter shouted, surprised at the violence in his voice. “Goddamn, don’t you see, if you don’t get into that room in the next three minutes or so, all these men have died for absolutely nothing. They’re suckers, jerks, fools. Please, Jesus, if not for me or your kids, for those dead guys who—”

“I can’t!” the officer screamed back, just as loud. “It’s not a question of wanting. I just can’t get you in there. No one can, goddamn you.”

Peter thought he might weep. The sense of helpless rage filled him. So this was it, then. Another two or so minutes, and Pashin had won. Pashin was smarter. Though Peter wondered why he didn’t just turn the keys now and get it over with, if he had ’em both in. And he had to have them both, or he couldn’t have initiated the robot launch sequence.

Then he realized: Pashin must be dead.

“Look,” he said suddenly. “Our guys are in there. They have to be. Some Delta guys are in there, goddammit. We wouldn’t be where we are if this Russian had gotten the keys out and put them in the slot, because he’d have turned them. But somebody stopped him, and that’s why we’re here, don’t you see? Somebody blew his ass away at the last moment, but the keys were already in. We’ve got guys in there, goddammit.”

The officer looked at him.

“We have an authenticated launch command,” said Betty on the loudspeaker. “We are commencing terminal countdown phase. Launch is three minutes and counting.”

“So call him,” said the officer.

“Huh?”

“Call him. On the phone. Look, in the wall there. Isn’t that a phone?”

Peter looked. The simplicity of it was stupendous. Yes! Call him!

He picked the phone up and dialed L-5454.

Walls stared at the board, bright with lights. The room seemed full of white ghosts. The motherfuckers were dead and they were going to kill the world anyway. White people! Assholes.

He gripped his shotgun, threw the slide, felt a shell click into the chamber. He’d blow a hole in the controls, that’d stop it! But he didn’t know where to shoot.

He stood staring at the board furiously, hating himself for being so stupid. The room made him feel like nothing. He didn’t know what to do.

“Terminal countdown is commencing,” the white lady was saying on the radio or whatever.

Damn the bitch!

Suddenly, there was a shrill beeping.

Made his ass jump!

“Terminal countdown is commencing,” the white bitch said again.

He picked up the phone.

“Yes,” said Peter, shrieking almost with the excitement. “Yes, Jesus, who is this?”

“Walls,” the voice said.

Some Delta people had gathered around Peter. He cupped the receiver.

“He’s in there!” he shrieked. “God, a guy is in there. Walls. Anybody know a Walls?”

“There’s no Walls in Delta,” said the officer.

“Son, listen,” said Peter on the phone, “are you Delta?”

There was no answer. Oh, Christ, had he—

“Uh — I come through the tunnel, man. You know, from underground.”

“Jesus,” Peter said, “he’s one of the rats. He got in from underneath. Listen, son, what’s the situation there?”

“Man, I think this rocket fixing to go off. Lights blinkin’, shit like that. Man, I blow the controls away with—”

“No, God, no!” shrieked Peter. “Don’t shoot anything. Throw the gun away.”

“Yo, okay.”

Peter heard the crash as the gun was tossed.

“Is the door locked?”

“Yes, suh. Them guys, whoever the fuck, don’t want them gettin’ in—”

“Listen, Walls. Listen to me carefully now, please, son. You can stop it.”

Peter’s heart was pounding. He was gripping the phone so hard he thought he’d choke it. “Yes, listen. You’ve got five labeled keys to hit in the proper sequence. All you have to do is listen, and read the labels, it’s very simple, very easy. All set. Are you all set?”

There was a long silence, heavy and still.

Peter could hear the firing. He could hear the tick of seconds, too, running off, on the way to forever.

“Son?” he asked again, and thought he heard a sob or something.

“Son? Are you there? Are you there?”

Finally the voice came.

“Then we fucked,” it said. “‘Cause I can’t read.”

She shot Arbatov twice. The first bullet hit him over the heart, blowing through the subcutaneous tissue, the muscle, ripping up a lung and nicking his shoulder blade before exiting with a terrible vengeance through the back. The second hit farther down, between two ribs, and plunged through the organs of his belly, terrible, terrible damage. Then he was on her, crushed her to the ground, and spitting blood, began to punch her in the face and head. Somehow he got the gun out of her hand, got it into his fist, and beat her savagely with it. When her eyes went blank he stopped beating her, and rolled off against the wall. He wasn’t sure if she was dead and he didn’t care. It wasn’t important. He was surprised how much blood was in him. It poured out. Shock, numbing and narcotic, rippled through him. He had an image in his head of golden wheat weaving in the sun and had a terrible impulse to lay his head down and rest for a time. But instead, the numbness in the stomach wound began to wear off and the pain was extraordinary. He couldn’t make much sense out of what was happening.

Bomb, something about a bomb. An atom bomb, that was. Slightly moot now, however, since he seemed to be dying.

He forced his head to turn, and yes, from the lurid play of light on the ceiling he could see that the numbers of the timing device were rushing onward toward 0000. Gregor thought he should get over there. Thus he ordered his reluctant body to topple forward. Like a tree it went. It hit the floor with a thud, and his ears rang, though there wasn’t much pain. He began — somehow — to crawl through his own blood toward the thing, having no idea what he’d do if he actually got there.

Damn you, Pashin, you took from me the one woman I loved. And also my life. Goddamn you, Pashin.

Hate was helpful because hate was energy. He began to crawl, but the damned thing was still far off.

Words. Goddamn motherfuckin’ white-boy words.

Their shapes were like snakes or bugs, maybe. They swirled and coiled and twisted about him. Everywhere he looked he could see words on little black plastic plates that stared at him. They were meaningless. They had no mercy, they never had, the motherfuckers.

“Walls? Walls, are you there?” the voice came over the phone. It was twisted with urgency. It connected with so much. All the times white people had looked at him, their features quizzically perturbed. Son, can’t you read? Son, the world is a threatening place to a young man who cannot read. Boy, you’d better learn your ABC’s, or you’ll stay black and dumb and be one of the little streetcorner fucks forever and ever.

“Son?”

“Yes, suh,” Walls said, hot and bent with shame and furious hatred — some for himself, and some for this Mister White Man with his concerned voice, and some for whoever had put him in this white man’s room with the seconds running out and some bad motherfuckin’ shit about to go down.

“Uh, son, tell me,” the voice asked, trying to stay calm, odd currents firing through it. Walls had heard this voice a million times. It was a white guy who’d just realized he was dealing with Mr. Dumbjiveassniggerboy, but also knew if he pissed Mr. D. off, Mr. D. he take top of the motherfucker’s head off, and so going real poh-lite, you know, like real sloooow, so as not to rile him.

“Uh, son, do you know the letters? Do you know your alphabet? Not words, now, but do you recognize the letters?”

Walls burned with shame. He shut his eyes. He could feel the tears running down his face, hot and bright. He squished the phone so hard he thought it’d snap in two, or maybe melt.

“Terminal countdown has commenced,” said the white bitch, snooty and far off and so much better than him. He wanted to kill the white bitch.

“Yes, suh,” he said. “I know my letters pretty good.” He was speaking slow, like a goddamn houseboy.

“Ah, good, great, God, terrific,” came the voice. “Now, if we work together and trust each other and don’t panic, well be okay, we’ll have plenty of time, we can do it by the letters. Okay, son. We can get it done, there’s still time, okay?”

Walls could feel the panic flashing quick and bright under the man’s voice as it fought through his Adam’s apple and throat full of gunk.

“Yes, suh,” he said, yassing the man to death, giving him what he wanted to get him smiling, like he was five again, just yassing and yassing him to death, all smiles and charm and secret shame. “We do it real slow, don’t panic, we be okay, fine, yes, suh.”

“Okay,” said the voice, “now, if you’re at the phone, you’re sitting in the chair, right?”

“Yes, suh,” said Walls, sliding obediently in the chair.

“Now, start at the phone jack, where the cord fits into the wall. Look at it, okay?”

“Yes, suh.” He fixed his eyes on the plug where the cord went into the wall.

“Now lift your eyes about two inches. To the left is a little handle. Then there’s a ridge. And at the ridge the control console sort of leans away from you. It’s not a straight angle, but it’s leaning away, right?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Okay, now, on that leaning part — you’re looking at its extreme left-hand side now — on the leaning part there are all kinds of switches. There’s five groupings of two columns, ten columns in all. The column groupings are broken down so that there’s a group of six — three and three in two columns-then a group of eight, that’s four in each column, then a group of four, two in each column. And there’s five sets of them, right?”

Fuck you, Jack, thought Walls. Wrong. Wrong and wrong again, sucker. It was a maze, a gibberish of little white boxes, and switches and wires, a nightmare. He closed his eyes, hoping it would go away, or that it would become clear. When he opened them, he was still in the maze.

“Do you see?” demanded the voice.

“I don’t see nothing,” he said.

“Look at it! Goddamn you, bastard, look at it!”

He could hear sobbing on the other end, hysteria, panic, terror.

Walls looked back, tried to see — the switches dazzled and flickered before him, seeming to squiggle into shapes like some kind of strange animal, a shape changer, a germy thing in some movie where people got whacked and cut.

“Terminal countdown has commenced,” came the voice of the white bitch, sweet as sugar. “Terminal countdown has commenced.”

Then, yes, he had it! Goddamn motherfuck yesyesyes! he had it. The columns, two of them twinned, and each of them broken down into little groupings, five of them, each to its board.

“Goddamn, motherfuck!” he shouted. “Hey, man, I got the bitch, I got the motherfucker!”

“Great! Great, great, great!” shouted the voice. “Terrific. Now, it’s—”

And the line went dead.

“It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead,” Peter screeched. “Jesus, it’s dead.”

“Terminal countdown has commenced,” came Betty’s voice on the loudspeaker.

Someone grabbed him, a sergeant, to calm him down.

“Just take it easy,” he said.

Peter looked into the dead military eyes. Don’t you understand, he thought, don’t you see what’s happening? Do you realize what’s at stake here. It’s—

“They hit the phone juncture, Doctor. Look.”

It was the officer, pointing to a box high up on the wall exposed to Soviet fire. It had been mutilated by a burst, hinges blown off, the mechanical guts of the switching mechanisms shredded so that they hung out like entrails.

“Is there another phone?” the officer asked. “A phone inside that connector. Anything outside of it’s dead. But maybe there’s something inside.”

Phones! Who remembered phones! Peter, who’d once lived his life in the maze of the blueprints of the South Mountain installation, tried to sort out his phone memories, something he’d never looked at. But it was there! He remembered, it was there!

“Down the hall,” he said. “About twenty feet. There’s another phone. It’s just a little ways.”

Their unbelieving eyes looked at him.

“You’re wide open to the Soviet guns there, Doc.”

“The bird is going to fly, goddammit!” Peter said.

“Man, they’ll cut you apart.”

“I just need a minute on the damn phone.”

“We’ll give you covering fire,” said the officer. “We’ll give you all we’ve got.”

“I’ll go with him,” somebody said. “He’s going to need somebody up with him firing too.”

Peter looked. The soldier had a sheepish look under his filthy face, and some semblance of familiarity. Then Peter realized: he wasn’t a soldier at all, he was that young FBI agent Uckley. Now, what the hell was he doing down here?

“Let’s go,” said Peter.

He ran to the corner; around it was the Soviet gun position and the telephone. Across the way Delta operators were firing on the Soviets. The noise of the fire was loud and percussive and frightening. Peter hated it, hated it all: the guns, the loudness, the sense of danger heavy in the air, and most of all he hated his own fear, which was like a living presence within him. And he hated her, Betty who was Megan, who loved him and hated him and whom he could never please.

“Terminal countdown has commenced,” Megan said.

Uckley was next to him. He had two of the little German machine pistols with long clips, one for each hand. He looked scared too.

The Delta troopers on this side of the hall were busy clicking their bolts or whatever they had to do to fire.

“You ready, Doc?” came the call.

Peter could hardly find his voice. “Uh-huh,” he squeaked.

“Okay, Delta, on my mark,” said the young officer. “Go!”

The Delta operators jumped into the hall and began to fire down it. The noise rose and to Peter it sounded like someone rolling an oil drum half full of nuts and bolts down a metal stairwell. He had the impression, further, of dust gushing and roiling. He ran in panic, splashing through the water. The air was full of streaks and flashes. Clouds of mist rose. The corridor filled with screams. None of this made the slightest sense. He reached the niche in the wall where the phone was mounted, and attempted to squeeze into it. A bullet hit close by, evicting a plug of cement from the wall, which stung him. Bullets were striking all over the place. There was something freakish, almost paranormal, in their rapidity. They flittered like insects, popping off the walls and kicking up gouts of water on the floor. Next to him the man Uckley was firing bursts from both guns simultaneously, and squeezing in on him, putting his body between the Russian fire and himself. He was squished into the darkness of the wall by Uckley’s warmth.

He picked up the phone.

It was dead.

He panicked, then thought to look at the receiver, saw that it was on a different line, punched the button, and the dial tone leapt into his ear.

“Hurry,” screamed Uckley, firing.

“Terminal countdown has commenced,” said Megan.

Shut up, Megan!

Peter dialed.

Somehow, Gregor made it to the table itself. It surprised him not to be dead. Now, however, he had the problem of rising to it. His two wounds bled profusely. He’d left a liquid trail upon the floor, and his pants were damp and baggy with blood. An odd noise rose to his ears, in syncopation with the diminishing raggedness of his breathing. It sounded like an accordionist whose instrument had been perforated. Then he realized it was his own body that issued the groaning sound: he had a sucking chest wound, and the air was leaking out of the ruptured bladder of his lungs with a pitiful squeak. He tasted blood in the base of his throat, swallowed it.

Then he rose. Where the strength came from he could not fathom. It was just there, in his fat, chalky, clumsy body. He fought through oceans of pain to get up off the floor until he tottered shakily over the infernal machine. He breathed in sobs, his chest bubbling greedily. His head ached and pounded. Most of his body was numb. His fingers were clumsy. He didn’t trust them to do what he ordered. His tongue felt like a dry lizard in his mouth. His lips had turned to limestone.

He put a paw on the machine. It simply lay there, though he fancied he could feel just the faintest thrum of vibration.

2358:35

2358:36

2358:37

The numbers flickered by. No power on earth could stop them. He stared, almost mesmerized as they dove toward the ultimate, the 2400, when the bomb would detonate and the world would become midnight.

Gregor started to weep.

What chance had a mere man against such magic?

His thick and sad fingers made an awkward stab at the gibberish of buttons atop the machine, but he couldn’t even coordinate their movements and get them to touch where he directed them, not that he really understood where they belonged. He almost passed out.

A tear fell upon the black, blank surface of the bomb console. It lay there, picking up the flicking red of the rushing numbers. Other than the timing device, there was only the arming button, its safety pin long since removed. It had been pushed, and sat, recessed, in its little receptacle.

He imagined what would happen. It was an implosion device. A sphere of high explosive packed around a sphere of plutonium around a core of beryllium as its neutron source. The explosive would detonate, all its force impelling the plutonium onto the beryllium in the crucible of the nanosecond, achieving critical mass and chain reaction.

What can I fight it with?

2358:56

2358:57

2358:58

The phone rang.

Walls looked at it in shock, then picked it up.

“Yo?”

“Walls,” it was a shriek, “you there?”

“Shit, yes.”

“We’ve only got a few, oh — ah! Oh, sorry, I just — oh, shit, that hurts, my leg, oh, Christ, look out, get — okay, you okay? It’s kind of hairy here.”

“Go on, man,” said Walls.

“Okay, listen to me. You find the columns yet?”

“No sweat, man.”

“Great, okay, great. From the left, count over to the third one, okay.”

Walls did it.

“Got that motherfucker.”

“Okay, now lean forward, I want you to look at the first letter on each label, okay. Just the letter.”

“No sweat.”

“Find the one that starts with a P.”

Walls fingered each one until he came on P, for Practical Electrical Guidance Check.

“Yo.”

“Press it.”

Walls pushed it.

“Now find the one for A.”

Walls’s eyes passed over the letters.

A. For Advanced Circuitry Mechanics.

“Yo.”

“Punch it — oh, shit. Oh, Lord, punch it, God, they just hit this guy. Christ, punch it!”

Walls hit it.

“Now an I.”

Walls found an I, for Inertial Navigation Circuitry Check.

He pushed it.

“God, great, almost there. Oh! Oh, fuck, God, that was close.”

Walls could hear noises and screams in the background.

“The M. Find the M, man.”

Walls found it easy. M. M, for Manual Recharge Override.

He pushed it.

“Done!”

“Great, now a B. Find the B and we’re done.”

Walls read the letters on the labels. His eyes flew down the column, panicked. He felt a stab of pain. His eyes flooded with tears, blurring and spangling what he saw.

“Find it? Find it, goddammit, you’ve just got that one button, come on now, it’s about halfway down.”

Walls was sobbing.

“Ain’t no fucking B here.”

“Goddamn, find it. Find it! A B, goddamn you, find it!”

Walls went over it again.

“Ain’t no B here,” he cried, hating himself for his inability to change the hulking reality of the actual, “ain’t no B here.”

“Final launch sequence commencing,” said Betty reasonably.

Puller was hunched up near the shaft doors, listening as one of the Delta men narrated the events. He could hear the rush of the gunfire as it filtered up the long tunnel. It sounded like the surf.

“Okay, Delta Six, the doc is on the phone, he seems to have made contact, the Soviet fire is picking up around them. Oh, Jesus, he just hit that guy near him.”

“Give them covering fire!” Puller snapped.

“We’re giving it everything we’ve got, Delta Six, I can see the doc on the phone, he’s veiling and — oh, shit—”

“Hit?”

“No, it’s the voice, she’s saying they’re going into terminal countdown, oh, shit, I don’t think—”

Puller could hardly breathe. His chest felt as if he were about to have a heart attack, stony and constricted. He looked away, into the cold darkness, and suddenly there was an explosion off to the left. Its force, even from here, was considerable. Puller fell back, momentarily stunned, and the men around him recoiled against the sudden pressure of the blast. But it wasn’t a bomb.

“The silo door just blew,” someone said. “The bird is going to fly.”

Indeed, the heavy silo door had just detonated itself into a shower of rubble. That meant thirty seconds until launch.

From the silo itself there now issued a shaft of light, high and straight, like a sword blade, narrowing as it climbed in the dark night sky, laying out the course of the missile that would follow.

“Shit,” somebody said. “We didn’t make it.”

Men were running from the light, scurrying over the ragged face of the mountain. Now came the roar as primary ignition began; from the exhaust vanes, four plumes of boiling white smoke billowed out into the night.

“She’s going, she’s going, she’s going,” rose the cry.

Puller wondered what it would look like, saw in his deepest brain’s eye the thing emerge, driven skyward by the bright flare at the tail, knew that it would first be majestic, stately almost, and then would gather speed and climb skyward with psychotic urgency, rising, its brightness diminished, until it was gone and the sky was black again.

“We didn’t make it,” said someone with a ludicrous giggle that Puller realized was a sob. “We didn’t make it. They beat us, the motherfuckers.”

“All right,” yelled Peter, squashed in darkness under the body of Uckley, Uckley’s blood dripping down into his face, “now I want you to read me the first letters on the column. We can make it, Walls, read them.”

“S,” came the voice.

Software Integrating Interface Check.

“Yes.”

A bullet hit near Peter’s arm.

Practical Electrical Guidance Check.

“Yes.”

“A.”

Advanced Circuitry Mechanics.

“Yes.”

“I.”

He could hear the Delta automatic weapons rattling away. Guns were so loud. When they fired, he felt the hot push of the exploding gases. And they were firing all around him. Another Delta team had worked its way down the hall and clustered about him. Their spent brass shells cascaded down upon him and he thought they looked like raindrops as they bounced on the floor.

“No, I think that’s an L. Look closely.”

“Fuck. An L, yeah.”

Launch Gantry Retraction Mechanism.

“Yes.”

“I.”

Inertial Navigational Circuitry Check.

“Yes.”

“S.”

One of the Delta team was hit and fell with a thud in front of Peter.

Shroud Ejection Mechanism Check.

“Yes.”

“A.”

Peter tried to think of the next A.

A?

A bullet hit two inches from his head, its spray lacerating his face. The pain was sharp. Jesus! He winced.

What the fuck was this A?

“Read me the letters.”

He heard the voice move so slowly through them.

A-N. D-H-E-E. E-E-R. E-S-M. I-R-V.”

Now, what the fuck was that?

Gregor felt like a fool. He was fighting an atom bomb with a Swiss army knife. His mind wandered in and out. He looked at the rushing numbers. He wondered if he’d feel a thing when the bomb detonated.

He’d had some trouble with his thick fingers getting the blade opened. He remembered how just a few hours ago he’d used it to spring the car window! How different a world that was! He began to grow woozy with blood loss. The blade probed stupidly at the arming button. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Yet there came a second when the blade seemed to lock under something, seemed to hold steady, and Gregor leaned against it.

There was a pop, and the button itself flashed out of its receptacle and disappeared. He’d pried it loose! He bent, saw nothing, only a wire lead headed through a hole down through the armored case.

He stared at it.

His lungs issued the moan of a leaking organ, a last long grace note falling out of the riddled apparatus. He felt like a fool, an oaf. What could a man do in the face of such madness?

The numbers flashed ever onward, pulling the world toward fire and nothingness. He heard himself screaming at the insanity of it. His rage grew until it was animal, and from all that he had left he screamed again and again, as if the volume of his voice could somehow halt the rush of the numbers.

The numbers fell out of focus.

He blinked and they were back.

2359:18

2359:19

2359:20

He screamed again.

Then he lifted the pistol and set its barrel into the receptacle out of which he’d plucked the button.

He fired.

The gun bucked in his hand and flew free, out into space. The smell of powder rose to his nose.

Gregor laughed.

He’d tried to stab, and now shoot, an atom bomb!

At least he had his wit at the end of the world.

It was all sliding away in the foolish flutter of the numbers. His focus wobbled, then quit altogether. He was lost in blindness. The pain inside had become awful. A dog was loose in his guts, eating them.

Vodka! Vodka!

He reached into his jacket pocket. It was still there! He pulled the thing out and, not risking losing his grip on the bomb, he simply smashed the bottle neck against the table, shattering it, and brought the jagged nozzle to his mouth.

Hot fire raced down, its taste a century’s worth of mercy. Here’s to vodka, I drink to vodka!

He lifted the bottle in toast as the seconds rushed toward the last, the final, the midnight that was forever.

“I drink to the bomb!” he shouted.

“I drink to the motherland!” he shouted.

“1 drink to Comrade General Arkady Pashin!” he shouted.

And he allowed the bomb to drink.

Into the hole blown through the button channel by the bullet he poured what was left of the vodka.

“Drink, you motherfucker,” he shouted. “Drown your sorrows in vodka as better men before you have, you goat-fucking son of a bitch.”

The bomb drank the liquid hungrily.

2359:52

2359:53

2359:54

Gregor watched the numbers slide away with growing, hazy disinterest. They were like a red tide of blood, come to choke the world in its own rotten evil. A laugh bubbled from Gregor’s lips. He watched the numbers reach toward midnight….

2359:55

2359:56

2359:57

2359:58

2359:58

:58

:58

Gregor stared at the number: forever and ever, it would read:58.

Then the light blinked off.

Gregor’s head fell forward and he slid to the floor, where he quietly bled to death.

It was a joke!

It was a fucking joke!

And heeeere’s MIRV.

“What’s it on? Is it on a piece of paper or something?”

“It’s on a card, taped to the—”

“Tear it off! Tear it off!” Peter yelled.

He waited a second.

“What’s the letter?”

“B.”

B!

Bypass Primary Separation Mode Check!

“Final launch commencing,” Megan was saying.

“Punch it.”

There was a second in which the universe seemed suspended.

“Punch it! Punch it! Punch it!” Peter was screaming.

“We have an abort,” said Megan. “We have a launch abort.”

The cheers from Delta rose, filling the corridor.

“You did it, Walls!” yelled Peter, lurching on the sheer joy of it, the sheer pleasure, looking at his watch to note this moment, to see that it was ten seconds after midnight, and they’d made it, they’d made it!

I beat you, Megan.

He sobbed the truth.

I love you, Megan, Jesus how I lo—