The Day Before Midnight

0900

“Imbecile,” yelled the excited Klimov. “Fool. Idiot. Do you know how much we spend on you? I mean, can you guess?”

Gregor Arbatov said, “No, comrade.”

It was useless to resist. Klimov was making an example of him before all the others. To defy Klimov in public circumstances such as these was to risk more than disaster, it was to risk humiliation. Christ in heaven, it was to risk recall to Russia! Klimov was ruthless. Klimov was tyrannical. Klimov was perhaps psychotic. But worst of all, Klimov was young.

“Well, let me tell you, comrade. I was up half the night going over budgets while you were rooting around under the sheets with your fat friend. It costs us over thirty thousand dollars a year to support you. We pay for the apartment, we give you a food and clothing allowance, we lease your automobile. And how do you repay us, to say nothing of fulfilling your duties? With drivel! With nonsense! With hearsay, gossip, and rumor! Some agent runner you’ve become in your old age, Arbatov. I remember once you were a hero. And now this. What the senator really thinks of SALT II. Where the senator stands on Peacekeeper. What the committee will do when next the Director of Central Intelligence requests a fund increase. I can read all this in The New York Times, where it’s much better written. Thirty thousand buys a lot of subscriptions to The New York Times, Comrade Arbatov.”

Arbatov mewled an explanation, head down, contrite, his eyes riveted on his bleak black shoes.

“In some cases, Comrade Klimov, it takes time before a source can be cajoled into producing high-grade product. It takes much patience and manipulation. I am working diligently to—”

But as he spoke, he sneaked a peek at his tormentor and saw the interest drain from Klimov’s eyes. Klimov was not much on listening. Klimov was a great talker, a lecturer, a young man extraordinarily fascinated with his own life and career; his interest in the human race seemed to stop at the tip of his own nose.

Klimov had ugly eyes, a short temper, and a quick mind. He was what everyone in Washington feared and hated, regardless of political inclination or global loyalty. He was very young, very bright, and very connected.

It was this last that so filled Arbatov with terror. Klimov was the son of the sister of the great Arkady Pashin, GRU’s Chief of Fifth Directorate (Operational Intelligence), the man next in line to be first deputy. And this rotten little Klimov was his nephew!

With Uncle Arkady’s kind intercession, young Klimov had shot through the ranks. To be a deputy rezident at twenty-eight, unheard of in the old days! Poor Arbatov would never make rezident rank. He had no relatives, no supporters in high places.

“Do you think,” said Klimov, “that when Comrade Pashin assumes full operational responsibilities for the organization he will tolerate such foolishness?”

Of course poor Arbatov had no idea what Pashin would or would not tolerate. How could he?

“Do you think because you service a special asset you are invulnerable to criticism and beyond self-improvement?”

Klimov must be feeling especially bold today to even mention the agent Pork Chop, on whom, as much as anything, Arbatov had staked his chances of survival. Was even Pork Chop to be taken from him?

“I–I—” he began to blubber.

“Your special source can easily be serviced by another,” roared Klimov. “You are merely a technician. You can be replaced as simply as one changes a light bulb, comrade.”

Arbatov saw that he was lost. There was but one course left open to him.

“But, comrade,” whined Arbatov, “it’s true I’ve become sloppy in my ways. Perhaps I take too much for granted. I’ve let the Amerikanskis penetrate my inner being. I have allowed myself the vanity of pride in the way I service my primary asset. Let me confess my crimes. I ask the comrade only for a chance to repair the harm I’ve done. Perhaps he’ll give me enough time to prove that I’m not utterly beyond reform. If I fail, I’d gladly return to our motherland, or to any less comfortable post it prefers for me.”

Lick his boots, he told himself. Lick them. He’ll like that.

“Ah!” Young Klimov made a snort of disgust. “These aren’t the old days. No bullets in the neck for such as Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov! We require only that he rededicate himself, as he says he shall.”

“I shall,” squeaked Arbatov as radiant relief beamed from his face. Then he looked down in expiation, aware that in sniveling he had once again survived. The young officers of the embassy apparat, which Klimov ran, looked at him with unconcealed contempt; he could feel their eyes harsh against his fat form. He didn’t care. He could have wept for joy. He had more time.

The meeting turned from Arbatov’s weaknesses to other concerns. Arbatov appeared to be listening intently, a new man. He even took notes eagerly, quite a change from the insolent, lazy old Arbatov. What he was writing down in his little notebook was, This little flicker should burn from the toes up. Over and over.

As he was walking from the meeting, someone came flying after him.

“Tata! Tata, stop!”

He turned to see the stout form of his one true friend, Magda Goshgarian, bearing down upon him.

“Tata, darling, don’t you think you laid it on a bit thick?”

Magda was another of the old ones. She had an uncle who was a general of artillery and was thus safe from Klimov’s predations, at least for now. She was a rumpled, plain woman who wore too much makeup, drank too much, and danced too much in the Western idiom for her own good. She even went to discos in Georgetown when she thought she wasn’t being watched. She was perhaps his only remaining friend, now that Klimov had exiled Daniel Issovich to Krakow and old Pasha Vlietnakov to Ethiopia.

“Darling, you have no idea how abject I can be in the service of survival,” said Gregor. “These young bastards were disgusted? They haven’t seen anything yet. I won’t stop at licking his boots. I’ll eat them too. I’ll butter them and eat them if it buys me one more day in the West.”

“You are a sorry Communist, Tata.”

“No, I’m an excellent Communist. I’m merely a sorry spy.”

“Any new fat American girls, Tata?”

Tata was her pet name for him. As he had told Molly Shroyer, it was derived from the hero of the fourteenth-century folk tale, Prince Tatashkin of the noble heart. Prince Tatashkin, lean and golden, had gone into the Caves of the Urals, there to fight the Witch of Night Forever, or so the story went. He was still fighting her all these years later, losing in the early hours of evening but regaining his strength in the morning. As long as he fought her each night, there’d be a morning. It was a wonderful story, never failing to bring tears to Gregor’s eyes, though he was aware that he was Tata to Magda only in the ironic sense.

“Yes,” Gregor said with a sigh. “I’ve a nice one going now, though she talks like a baby sometimes. But say, what are you doing here? Didn’t you have Coding Station last night? Why aren’t you home in bed?”

“I was in the Wine Cellar, yes, Tata. But the meeting was so early, I thought I could score a few points with young Klimov by hanging around. There’s a new bitch in the apparatus who may have her eye on my apartment.”

“The blond one? I’d like to set her on fire. I hate the young ones. Especially the beautiful young ones.”

“I hate them too. Gorbachev’s dreadful children. Little rats, squandering all our labors. But, Tata, you must promise to be careful. Who will fight the Witch of Night Forever if they send you back? Worse, who will I talk to if they send you back? The walls?”

But Gregor wasn’t listening; he was thinking only of himself.

“Do you know, Magda, I had my dream about you last night. I heard you say my name, and it jolted me awake.”

“A dirty one, Tata? Filthy with Western perversions, I hope.”

“No, I’ve told you. A nightmare. Scary. Caves, the like. Quite awful. As if I really were that damn prince. I remember fingers on my throat, someone’s hot breath. Troubling. The Witch of Night Forever.”

She laughed.

“Gregor, you fool. It’s a fairy tale. Look around you, at your dreary reality and the little snail Klimov hungrily sniffing after you. Is that the stuff of fairy tales?”

“No,” confessed Gregor. “You’re right. The age of fairy tales is gone forever. I believe only in love. Do you love me still?”

“I’ll always love you, Tata, love you most of all. You know that.”

“Thank God,” said Gregor, “that someone does.”

It was called the situation room, on the B level, the second sub-basement level beneath the White House. It wasn’t much architecturally: a conference room, roughly fifteen by twenty feet, painted a grim institutional green, in which there was one large conference table and several comfortable chairs. It could have been located in any ambitious motel chain in America. There weren’t even any maps.

The President of the United States sat in a sweat suit with his eyes narrowed in extraordinary concentration as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force read aloud from a document he held before him.

“‘No man sent us here,’” the lieutenant colonel read, “‘it was by our own prompting and that of our maker, or that of the devil, whichever you ascribe it to. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason and the only thing that has prompted me to come here. I wish to say furthermore that you had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared, the better.’”

“All right, when did this come over?” the President demanded. He looked around the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was there, as were the Chiefs of Staff of the Services, impressive men in their well-tended uniforms ablaze with decorations. Each was served by an aide of no less than field grade rank who sat behind him, against the wall. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense had arrived, as had the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency filling in for the Director, who was in Phoenix this morning for a speech; the Director of the FBI was there, too. Finally, the National Security Adviser. Yet among the fifteen or so of them, there was not the slightest tick of sound beyond the rise and fall of breaths and the occasional rattle of paper.

“Sir,” the lieutenant colonel responded, “we received that over the National Command teletype link from the South Mountain installation at 0823. It followed by three minutes and fourteen seconds a clear-channel robot signal from the launch command center that the key vault had been deployed.”

“And that means one of our silo officers deposited the key in the key vault. The significance, Mr. President, is that our officers are instructed to utilize the key vault only in the last stages of a seizure operation,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“Then let me get this straight. Whoever sent this message — he’s in the silo?”

“Yes, sir.”

The President looked again at the peculiar message. Then, to nobody in particular, he said, “A madman is in a missile silo. That’s the situation?”

There was silence from the military men and civilian security officials who shared the room with him.

“It’s signed ‘Commanding Officer, Provisional Army of the United States,’” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“I assume you have staff psychiatrists at CIA examining it?” the President said.

“Yes, sir,” came the response.

The President shook his head. Then he turned and said, “Would someone please be so kind as to explain how the hell someone could take over a missile silo. Especially this missile silo.”

His rage turned his skin the color of an old penny and his eyes into even older dimes. Yet the anger did not dent the laconic voice of the officer who responded.

“Sir, as you know, the primary defense of a silo is its Doppler low-level radar, which marks the approach of any moving object. However, in the last year or so, it’s been technically feasible to defeat radar with some kind of stealth, that is, radar-absorbing material, as some of our new bombers now have. In other words, it’s at least possible that men approaching on the ground, very carefully, could have shielded themselves under some kind of stealth material and gotten through the radar, close enough to rush the installation in force. That’s our reading.”

“So how do they get down below? Don’t the officers—”

“Sir, since South Mountain is independent launch capable, its elevator access is keyed into the PAL mechanism. This enables us to get down, say, in the event of an emergency, by using the SAC daily PAL code. If, say, by some freak of nature, both men in the LCC should come down with disabling stomach problems or heart attacks. But the men in the capsule don’t know this. At least they’re not supposed to.”

“But whoever assaulted this installation did know this?”

“Evidently, sir.”

“It’s frighteningly clear that this man knew an awful lot. And there’s nothing else? No offers to negotiate, no hostages, no demands for television coverage or cash? Nothing conventional for a terrorist event?”

“No, sir. We don’t even have a reading yet on their unit size. The only thing we have is an awareness of their impressive level of technical sophistication as manifested by the seizure, indicating great resources and resolve, and that document, sent by teletype. Then silence. No answer to any of our messages.”

The President looked again at the message from the mountain. He read the lines aloud. “‘You had better prepare yourselves for settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.’”

He paused a second, then looked up to them all.

“Well, let’s face it. He’s going to launch. Without demands, without preparations, without anything. He’s simply going to fire that missile if and when he gets that key out. What’s our time frame?”

“Sir, the key vault is designed of high-grade titanium with some strengthening alloys added. It’s very, very hard to get into, designed to delay any kind of implementation of the launch system for at least eighteen hours. With the right kind of tools, they could get into that block, say, by midnight.”

“What kind of tools? Saws, drills? Would you be thinking of a safecracker, something like that?”

“Well, sir, no, not a safecracker. You’d have to burn your way in with a very powerful plasma-arc torch. It would take a skilled man, a man with lots of experience.”

“Where would they find such a man?”

“Well, sir, you can find them just about anywhere. He’d be a welder.”

“Sir,” someone said, “if they didn’t find out about this until quite late, there’s a chance they might not know about the key vault and they might not have a welder with them.”

The President paused.

Then he said, “Oh, hell. They have a welder. You can bet on it.”

Jack Hummel shivered, blew a hiss of breath from his chilled lips.

“Pretty damn cold,” he said to the fellow across from him.

“Cold here,” the man said. “Pretty damn hot up there.”

They sat in the back of Jack’s van. He was sure he had been brought with his equipment through town and then he had had the illusion of climbing over bumpy roads. Soon it got very cold. Then the truck waited for a time, and Jack had heard some kind of weird commotion up top. Fourth of July stuff, cracks and pops and snaps. Occasionally, an extra-loud noise would reach him, thumping on his eardrums. He guessed they were to be parked halfway up South Mountain.

These guys were taking over the phone company?

The man had some kind of strange gun. It looked big enough to start World War III. It was black and complicated. Jack couldn’t tear his eyes off of it. He’d never seen anything like it.

“Say, pal, what kind of gun is that?”

The man smiled. His teeth were so blindingly white.

“It’s the kind of gun shoot you dead if you don’t shut up.”

Jack smiled dryly. Some joke.

A few minutes later they drove on. Jack had the sense of gravel under the tires. Then again they sat and waited.

Jack was squirmy, curious. He was also bored. Jack’s problem with life was that once upon a time he had been quite a good athlete. He had been quarterback of the Burkittsville Demons and, senior year, taken the squad to a 9–2 record; then he’d been a rangy, good-shooting forward for the cagers, averaging thirteen points a game; and finally, he’d hit.321 as a good-fielding third baseman. Yet his senior year had more or less been the climax of his life; it had been one long skid ever since. He was one of those guys good enough to be a star in high school but not quite good enough to perform at the next level, and when Maryland moved him from QB — his arm wasn’t quite college material — to defensive halfback his sophomore year, he quit the team and the university.

Now he found himself at thirty-two married to a girl he’d been pinned to when he quit school. He had two great kids and a profession which, if it offered steady income and a reasonable standard of living, offered very little in the glory department.

Jack was used to making some kind of difference. He wasn’t at all pleased at becoming one of life’s little guys, workingmen of obscure skill who keep the country going without attracting much notice.

So there was a little bit of him — beyond, of course, his horror and his fear for his children — that was somehow slightly tickled by all this. Whoever these guys were, they had studied him, he realized. They knew his house and how to get in it, and when he’d be in the shower, and how best to make him compliant.

His athlete’s vanity was pricked: he counted again. He was important.

The door opened.

“Time to go, Mr. Hummel,” said the major.

“Sir, there’s another development you should be aware of. South Mountain may be only a part of the problem.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the President. He began to crunch his molars together.

“Sir, we monitored a five-second LF radio transmission at 0819 from within the installation. It was a burst of raw noise sent out on a frequency of 28.92 megahertz, receivable by anyone pretuned to that frequency within a radius of, say, two hundred miles. We read it as a signal from whoever is in there. That means there may be another part to their operation.”

The President shook his head.

Then he said, “I assume that you’ll take every precaution, General. And I assume we’ve got our security agencies operating at maximum effort to try to figure out who they are?”

“Mr. President,” said the Director of the FBI, “upon receiving the red flash from Defense, I instigated a crack task force investigation; right now I’ve got men working at Defense and in coordination with—”

“All right, all right,” said the President.

Then, leaning forward, he said, “General, I order you to target a short-range missile with a low-yield, maximally clean nuclear warhead aboard for that mountaintop. If it becomes apparent that whoever is in that base is about to launch a preemptory mission against the Soviet Union, then I want you to take the base out. Meanwhile, I want the proper civil defense authorities to begin an evacuation of the area. I’m prepared to accept some casualties, but if we move swiftly, we may be able to limit them. In the meantime, I want—”

“Sir,” the Air Force general said, “I wish it were possible.”

Jack stepped out of the van into bright, cold light. An odd tang hung in the air; he sniffed hard. Familiar, but still difficult to place. Then he realized it was gunpowder.

Jack saw that he was inside the perimeter of the phone company’s microwave transmission station for long distance calls.

It looked as though a battle had just been fought up here. All about him, fit-looking young men in snow smocks bustled about with automatic weapons and crates of equipment. Some were digging, some were unspooling barbed wire, some were working on weapons. And there was something else that Jack noticed instantly: a sense of wild excitement. Whatever the hell these kids were up to was going well; they were proud. It was the locker room at half-time, they were up twenty-one-zip.

“This way, please, Mr. Hummel. You three, bring Hummel’s equipment. Corporal, park his van out of sight and cover it with the tarpaulin.”

“What’s going on?” Jack asked.

“No questions, Mr. Hummel. Time is of the essence. Come, please.”

Then Jack noticed a weird thing. Over to one side of the place there was a bunch of young soldiers spreading large sheets of canvas all over the place. Still others were digging postholes in the ground about every twenty-five feet or so, and there seemed to be a lot of rope around. It looked as though the circus was coining to town; they were putting up the big top or something and — and then he noticed the bodies.

There were a dozen or maybe more, he couldn’t be sure, in the rag-doll postures of the fallen, inert as stones. He could not tear his eyes away for a second, and yet did not want to be caught staring. And then he noticed the buildings in the compound; one had been knocked down by explosives, and others were tattered by gunfire.

“Who are you guys?”

“This way, please.”

They led him to a small building, badly shot up. Inside he was surprised to find what appeared to be a sophisticated elevator door with its name stenciled on it. SHAFT ACCESS-RESTRICTED ENTRY — SECURITY-CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“This way,” said the major.

The door opened with a dull pneumatic sound, and he stepped in with the major and the men carrying and pushing his equipment. He felt the elevator begin to sink through the earth.

The Air Force Chief of Staff paused, thinking about the man in the mountain, whoever he was. The fucker! he thought. Whoever he was, he knew just where we were weakest.

Though the general was in his private life a flamboyant man, a warrior king of the old style, in this room he kept his voice steady, professorial, reedy, thin.

“At the installation in question, the Peacekeeper is in a mountain. It’s what we call deep under-mountain basing mode, conceived by Peter Thiokol’s MX-Basing Modes Group out at Hopkins Applied Physics under a grant from the Air Force Research and Development Division. The thing is one hundred feet down, surrounded by hard rock. The missile is suspended by a special shock isolation system that will provide protection from nuclear attack and induced ground shock. It’s the hardest missile silo in the world, and it would take an enormously powerful bomb — a bomb so powerful we don’t have it in inventory — to destroy the silo inside that mountain. We haven’t built bombs that big in some time, not since we had B-36s to deliver them back in the fifties. Today, our missiles are so accurate we can get by with small bombs, and we can mount ten warheads on a single missile. But we couldn’t de-mothball a bomb that big and get it delivered for seventy-two hours at the minimum. That’s the brutal truth, Mr. President.”

The President said, “What are the odds on a missile intercept if they get a launch?”

“I’m afraid the news is bad there too, Mr. President,” said the Air Force general. “If you recall, after SALT One we decided against developing an antiballistic force because we felt it would involve billions for something that was technically unfeasible. We simply don’t have a bird capable of tracking a Peacekeeper in the boost phase and destroying it. Maybe if and when SDI becomes operational—”

“General, what is the megatonnage in the silo?”

“Sir, you have one missile with ten Mark 21 reentry vehicles, the very latest. Each warhead is the W87 in the 3.5 kiloton range with extreme hard target-busting capabilities. The total package is in the thirty-five-kiloton range.”

“Targeting?”

“All for the Soviet Union, sir. The headquarters of the PVO Strany, the Soviet defense command about thirty miles outside Moscow; the main long-range transmitters that talk to their subs at Petropavlovsk, Vladivostok, Dikson Ostrov, Kalingrad, Matochin Shar, and Arkhangelsk; the ground control stations for Soviet satellites; their missile command center at Yevpatoriya in the Crimea; assorted ICBM launch sites spread throughout the central region; their early warning radars near Minsk and Novogrod.”

“Jesus, their command system. What’s the probable Soviet response?”

“If the bird flies, they’ll launch on warning, you can bet on it.”

“Could we detonate the bombs in the silo?”

“No, sir.”

“What about a command disable system?”

“Only from within the launch command capsule. The reality is that there’s no scenario for stopping the launch if they get the key.”

“Why? With the Minutemen, it takes four keys, two sets of two officers in two separate launch control centers, and any of the three other launch control centers can inhibit launch.”

“Yes, sir. But we felt that made launch control centers vulnerable, especially to the new SS-24s with their capacity to take out a hardened silo. If you take out the command capsule, none of the remote silos could launch. You could hit ten launch control centers and disable one hundred missiles. It was too tempting a target for the 24s. Therefore we built South Mountain as an independent-launch-capable installation. Even if Washington, SAC, Cheyenne Mountain, the airborne launch control center, and the ERCS missile are out of the picture, our command and control system totally fried, the boys in the silo could still launch. It was Peter Thiokol’s idea. The guy at Hopkins who also created up the key vault.”

“Yes, Thiokol,” said the President. He’d had lunch with Peter once. An impressive young man, very smart, though almost totally bloodless where nuclear war was concerned. But somehow immature in other ways. The disparity had scared him a little. But then his mind moved quickly on.

“Then we’ll have to use conventional bombs. Drench the place in napalm.”

“No, sir,” said the Air Force general. “The key to accessing this installation is getting down the elevator shaft. And accessing that elevator shaft is by means of a mainframe computer mounted directly adjacent to it, a Hewlett-Packard LC5400. The machine is sheathed in titanium. We feel that it’s pretty invulnerable to small-arms fire, but any kind of heavy round — above a grenade, say — could damage the circuits. And if you damage the circuits, you lock the doors shut. Sir, you’d never cut through those doors. Never. They weigh eleven tons. So you’ve got to limit your applications of high explosive and napalm to the immediate site area, or you’ll seal things up and we’d never get down there.”

“Nerve gas,” the President said. “Soak the mountain in nerve gas. Kill them all. If we have some civilian casualties, then—”

“Mr. President, Peter Thiokol was a step ahead of you there. He reckoned someone might try to nerve-gas his way in, so he had a filter system built into the computer. One whiff of bad odor, and the computer locks the mountain off. Not to mention that if these troops are as professional as we suspect, they’ll be trained in chemical warfare. They’d just slap on their gas masks.”

Damn Peter Thiokol, the President thought.

He looked at his watch. So, this was it. Here we are. And what do we do now?

“Sir, I think the solution is simple,” came a new voice.

“It takes a bit of time, Mr. Hummel. We descend a full hundred feet.”

Jack felt the pull on his knees as the chamber plunged down and down. Jack didn’t like it. He had the sense of sinking forever beneath the waves, a sense of submerging somehow. You could get so far down you never got out again. You were buried.

At last the descent ended and the doors opened.

Beyond, Jack could see a corridor spilling away, lit by the odd bare bulb. But he also saw the man waiting for him: a trim fellow in his late fifties, well-cut white-blond hair, a slick, handsome face lit with charm.

“Welcome, Mr. Hummel,” said the man. “Welcome to our little crusade.”

Jack just stared at him dumbly. He felt a little as if he were in the presence of a TV anchorman, or a governor, or a talk show host. Something about the guy made him swallow hard. Jack felt as if he ought to ask for an autograph.

“This way now, Mr. Hummel. Come on, can’t be slow. I know it’s all new to you, but we are depending on you.”

This queerly pleased Jack’s ego. A big guy like this depending on him.

“Well, whyn’t ya just hire me and leave my wife and kids out of it?”

“Security, Mr. Hummel.”

They walked down the corridor, at last came to what appeared to be some kind of hatch door. Jack ducked his head to enter and still again he thought of subs: two chairs catercorner from each other, facing dozens of switches, NO LONE ZONE the walls said. Jesus, who’d want to be alone in this creepy place? The only human-scaled thing he could see in the small room was a crude, hand-lettered index card which read AND HEEEERE’S MIRV taped above an odd keyhole garlanded with an uptilted red flap in the control panel. Jack noticed then that there were two keyholes but that only one of them had keys in it.

“Say, what the hell is this?” he asked.

“It’s a kind of computer facility,” said the white-haired man. Jack didn’t buy this at all. Computers, yeah, computers, but something more, too.

The man took him to a wail. There, before him, stood a broken window; shards of glass lay on the floor. But behind the window was not a view but simply a shinier grade of metal.

“Touch it, please, Mr. Hummel.”

Jack’s fingers flew to the metal.

“Do you recognize it?”

“It’s not steel. It’s not iron. It’s some kind of alloy, something super-hard.” He plunked his finger against it; the metal was dull to the touch. It didn’t retain heat; it didn’t scratch; it looked mute and lifeless. And yet it felt to his touch oddly light, almost like a plastic.

“Titanium,” he guessed.

“Very good. You know your business. Actually, it’s a titanium-carbon alloy. Very tough, very hard. There’s probably not another block of metal like it in the world.”

“So?”

“So. This block of titanium has descended into a second block of titanium. When it fell, thousands of pounds of rock above it locked it into place. It cannot be lifted. We need a welder to cut into the center of the titanium as fast as possible. You are a welder.”

“Jesus,” said Jack. “Titanium’s the toughest stuff there is. They build missile nose cones out of it, for crissakes.”

“The melting point of titanium is 3,263 degrees Fahrenheit. Add the carbon, which has a melting temperature of over 6,500 degrees, and you are dealing with a piece of material that has been designed to be impenetrable. Can you penetrate it?”

“Shit,” said Jack. “I can get into anything. I cut metal. That’s what I do. Yeah, I can cut it. I have a portable plasma-arc torch that should get hot enough. Heat isn’t the problem: You can make a puddle out of anything. You can make a puddle of the whole world. The problem is how much I’m going to have to melt away to get inside. It takes time. You cut in circles, narrower and narrower. You cut a cone into its heart. You dig a tunnel, I guess. So what’s at the end of the tunnel? A light?”

“A little chamber. And in the chamber, a key. The key to all our futures.”

Jack looked at him, trying to connect the dots.

A feeling of intense strangeness came over him.

“You’re going to all this trouble for a key? That must be one hell of a key.”

“It is one hell of a key, Mr. Hummel. Now let’s get going.”

Jack thought about keys. Car keys, house keys, trunk keys, lock keys.

Then, with a woozy rush, it hit him.

“A key, huh? I read a little, Mister. I know the key you need. It’s the key that’ll shoot off a rocket and start a war.”

The man looked at him.

“You’re going to start World War Three?” Jack asked.

“No. I’m going to finish it. It started some time ago. Now, Mr. Hummel. If you please: light your torch.”

A boy rolled out the portable Linde Model 100 plasma-arc cutting control unit. The coiled tubes and the torch itself were atop it. Another boy wheeled in the cylinder of argon gas.

“I suppose if I—”

“Mr. Hummel, look at it this way. I’m willing to burn millions of unnamed Russian babies in their cradles. I would have no compunctions whatever about ordering that two American babies — called Bean and Poo — join them. After the first million babies, it’s easy, Mr. Hummel.”

“The torch,” Jack Hummel said, swallowing.

The President looked into the eyes of the Army Chief of Staff, a blunt-looking man who bore a remarkable resemblance to a.45 Colt automatic pistol bullet. On his chest he wore enough decorations to stop just such a round. “It couldn’t be simpler,” the general said. “It’s straight infantry work, bayonet work. We have to get our people into that hole and kill everybody in it before they dig out that key. Say, by midnight. Or else the bird flies.”

“What’s the recommendation?”

“Sir, Delta Force is already gearing up for deployment,” said the army general with a small, harsh smile. “Best small-unit men we’ve got. Our computer tells us there’s also a company of Maryland National Guard infantry in training not two hours away from the site. That’s two hundred more men, although you’d have to federalize them. I’m sure the Governor of Maryland would agree. We can truck out elements of the 1st Battalion, Third Infantry, from Fort Meyer, a good infantry unit, your ceremonial troops, hopefully by 1300 hours. I’ve already put them on alert. Then, I can get you a Ranger battalion air-dropped into the zone from its home base at Fort Eustis, Washington, by mid-afternoon, weather permitting. I can throw together a makeshift chopper assault company from Fort Dix and I can get you air support from a Wart Hog unit of the Maryland Air National Guard. With Delta, Third Infantry, and the Rangers, you’ll have the best professional soldiers this country has produced.”

“And armor, General. Could we just blow them out?”

“There’s only one road up, and the latest information is that they’ve destroyed it.”

There was silence in the room for a time.

“We’re back to rifles and balls,” said the Army Chief of Staff.

“Can you do it in time?” the President said to the army general.

“I don’t know, Mr. President. We can solve the logistics of it. We can get the men there in time, and we can send them up the mountain.”

“It’s going to be a long and bloody day,” somebody said.

“But it’s a very hard assault. First, you’ve got to get to the elevator shaft, and you can only attack on a very narrow front because the mountaintop is surrounded by cliffs. Once you get to the LCF and its elevator,” the general explained, “you’ve got to rappel down the shaft, and fight your way to the LCC, where they’re trying to launch the bird.”

“Sir,” said one of the President’s advisers, “you’ll have to declare a phase four nuclear emergency, which empowers federal authorities to literally take over a given district, and turns all civil authority over to federal command. You’re going to have to turn Frederick County into a war zone. I think maybe you’d also better raise the defense condition to a Defcon 4.”

“No to that,” said the President. “I don’t want the Soviets thinking we’re ready to launch. Increase security at all our missile sites and our satellite receiving stations.”

“It’s been done, sir,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“Okay, go to the phase four. Put out some kind of cover story about a military exercise to keep the goddamn press out of it. Now it’s the Army’s baby, with all due respect to the Air Force. I don’t want a lot of different services falling all over each other’s toes. Set up the roadblocks, seal off the area. Go to war if that’s what it takes. But get those people out of there, or kill them all.”

“Yes, sir,” said the general. “Now, as for the command—”

“For the commanding officer out there, General, I want the best combat man you’ve got. And I don’t care if he’s a PFC in Louisiana.”

“No, sir,” said the general. “He’s a full bird colonel, retired. But he’s one mean son of a bitch.”

Jack Hummel pulled his goggles down over his eyes and the world darkened. He held the cutting torch in one hand, and reached back to the control panel to switch the device on. The current flowed and the electrode in the tip began to glow from red on through the hues of orange. He watched it heat and grow within the nozzle, and then when it became almost white, he released a slow, steady stream of nitrogen. The gas ignited with a pop. In the crucible of the nozzle it became ionized — that is, electrified. Jack turned the temperature dial on the Linde control unit up to the top so the flame would reach the plasma temperature range, almost fifty thousand degrees.

The flame was a white killer’s tongue, as hot as the center of any nuclear blast, but controlled there at the end of his torch. The men around him, reacting to the power of flame, drew back instinctively. He increased the pressure so that the flame was almost a needle that darted out two inches beyond the nozzle.

“I’m going to cut up into it,” he told the general. “That way, the molten metal will run out via gravity.”

The general looked at him.

“It’s going to take a long time,” said Jack. “Jeez, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve hours.”

The general bent over.

“You know what’s at stake. Your own children,” he said. “Do you understand?”

Jack said nothing. Jack knew he could do it: if he could launch missiles against the Russians, he could murder his own children.

But a part of Jack said, Your children will die anyway if this rocket is launched.

Yeah, that’s tonight. Today it’s this fucking block I have to crack. I’ll face tonight when it comes. I got to get them through today first.

“Okay,” said Jack.

He bent, holding the plasma-arc torch in one hand, and with his other touched the smooth, burnished surface of the block of metal. Somewhere inside was a key.

He touched the torch to the metal. He watched its bright needle attack and liquify the metal; at fifty thousand degrees the ionized plasma-arc gas first seemed to define a bubble on the surface of the block, and then a dimple, and then an indentation, and finally, something very like a little tunnel. Jack cut deeper; the molten metal ran from the kerf, the gap gouged by the flame, and down its face like tears.

“The colonel,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “did time in SAS in Malaysia on an exchange officer program. He was Special Forces from the start and had a brilliant Vietnam. He had seven years there, spent a lot of time in places we never officially went. He was stuck in a siege under heavy fire for thirty-eight days, and held out.”

“Oh, God, Jim,” said the Chief of Naval Operations.

“And, most important,” said the general, “he invented Delta. He fought the Army and the Pentagon to get a Delta Force created when nobody cared. He trained Delta, he knows Delta, he lives and breathes Delta. He is Delta.”

“Except,” said the Chief of Naval Operations, “Dick Puller led Delta into Iran in 1979, in the operation we called Eagle Claw, and at Eagle One he panicked. And he canceled the mission when he came up one chopper short at the staging site.”

“At Desert One,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “he had to make the most difficult decision any American soldier has had to make since six June 1944, when Eisen—”

“He failed. He lost his nerve. And retired in disgrace, Jim. Dick Puller failed. He was a man who trained his whole life for a single moment, and when it came, he failed.”

“I say that when it was decision time, everybody backed away from him. We all did. The president of the United States did. They hung a poor colonel who’d bled himself empty for this country for the best part of thirty years out to dry.”

“He’s a walking Greek tragedy,” said the Naval Chief of Staff, “who blew the one—”

“Mr. President, if you asked me to name one man who could get you up that mountain and into that silo before midnight, I’d name Dick Puller. Dick Puller is the bravest officer I ever served with, and the smartest. He knows more about combat than any man alive. He’s done his share of the planning and his share of the killing. He’s a great soldier. He’s the best.”

“I never heard any man say Dick Puller was a coward,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff. “But I never heard any man deny that he was an obstreperous, willful, self-indulgent, sometime psychot—”

“Jim, this isn’t just an old protégé you’re trying to help out?” asked the Chief of Naval Ops.

“All right!” said the President. “Goddammit, enough is enough.”

He turned to the Army Chief of Staff.

“Then get me this Puller,” he said finally. “Call him. I don’t care what it takes, tell him to do it. To get it done.”

“If it can be done,” said the Army Chief, “Dick Puller will do it.”