The Day Before Midnight

1100

From a cold start, Delta Force would arrive on site not in three hours, as the Chief of Staff had promised, but in two and a half. It took a miracle of logistical planning, most of it thrown together while the unit — the one hundred twenty men of Special Forces Operational Detachment/Delta — was in the air, being hauled up from Fort Bragg by two C-130s of the first Special Operations Wing of the 23d Air Force. The initial plan was to have them HALO onto the site — to parachute from a high altitude, then open at a low one — in case Aggressor Force, as the occupiers of the complex were now called, had mounted a watch for the approach of airborne troops. But Dick Puller’s first decision, made eleven minutes after his arrival, was no.

He stood in the ramshackle office of the Misty Mount Girl Scout Camp, about a half mile from the mountain, across a flat, snowy meadow that lay at the mountain’s foot.

“I don’t want ’em spread out all over the goddamned landscape,” he snapped, his face set in a glare, “with broken legs and dirty weapons and love affairs with farmer’s daughters. We don’t need it. I won’t begin my assault until I get my tac air, and that’s a good four hours. Land ’em in Hagerstown under battle conditions. I want airfield perimeter security from the state police, I want advance parties on the convoy into us as well as route security, and I want perimeter security set up ASAP upon arrival. Those guys on the mountain sent out a radio transmission; maybe there’s a column of unfriendlies waiting to bounce Delta on the way in. I want the men locked and loaded from minute one. I don’t want any screwing around. Get ’em in here fast, and tell ’em to get working on their assault plan as soon as they get here. First briefing is at 1200 hours and I’ll expect complete terrain familiarity.”

Puller turned from the young man who took this order, a mild-looking twenty-eight-year-old FBI agent of no special ability named James Uckley who had been appointed Dick’s No. 1 guy because he was the first to show up, having been ordered onto the site by a special Bureau flash from his Hagerstown office, where he’d been investigating a bank embezzlement. Dick chose Uckley because he believed that enthusiasm was far more important than intelligence, and Uckley seemed enthusiastic, if bewildered. Moreover, Dick didn’t want smart guys around him to argue with him. Dick liked dumb people who did what they were told, and he liked telling them what to do.

Uckley put this decision out on the emergency teletype which clattered back to the Situation Room, where it was put on to the troops.

“They get those recon shots yet?” Puller demanded.

“Not yet,” said Uckley, looking at the staggering amount of communications equipment that had been set up with surprising speed against one corner of the rickety old wall of the place. Several technicians bent over the stuff, but for some reason Puller refused to acknowledge them, preferring instead to deal with the world through Uckley.

“I’ll sing out if they come over,” Uckley said uncomfortably. In truth, he was a little afraid of Puller. In truth, everybody was a little afraid of Puller. He wasn’t even sure whether he should call him sir, or colonel, or what.

Puller went back to his binoculars. Above him the mountain loomed, white and pristine. The red aerial stood out like a candy cane. He could see no movement.

There was one road up, through rough ground. Halfway up it just stopped, where Aggressor Force had blown it. Smart. No armor would come their way, at least not today.

He looked at his watch—1124. A little more than twelve hours to go. And Delta still wasn’t on the damned ground, this sorry-dick Maryland Guard unit was trying to get its act together, 3rd Infantry was fucking around somewhere on the road, and the only good news was that his Ranger battalion was at least airborne for its cross-country flight and now had an ETA of 1600 hours.

Twelve hours, he thought again. His expression was grim, but this was nothing new: Dick Puller’s expression was always grim. He was born grim. Whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself, although the tension in his face and the way it drew the color from his skin and pulled his muscles taut and his mouth flat suggested something.

At last he asked, “Any word on those locals yet?”

“State police still knocking on doors,” Uckley said.

Puller’s first move was to send state policemen into the town of Burkittsville on a fast canvass of old-timers. Who knew that mountain? What was there? How did you get up it? What was inside it? Dick didn’t trust maps. It was an old ’Nam habit, where a bad map had once almost killed him. It was one of the few mistakes he’d made in his career.

Richard W. Puller was a stern, rangy man of fifty-eight with a gunmetal-gray crew cut that revealed a patch of scalp up top. He had remarkably forceful dark eyes and a way of moving and walking that suggested if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. Someone — not an admirer — once said of Dick Puller, “You’d have to put a full magazine into the bastard to stop him from coming at you, and then his shadow would cut your throat.” He was not a well-liked man and he did not like many people: a wife, his two daughters, a soldier or two along the way, mainly the tough old master sergeant types that got the killing done in the hairy moments and a few guys in elite units the world over, such as SAS, where he’d done a tour of exchange-officer duty.

He also had a talent for the truth. He would tell it, regardless, a gift that did him little political good in the Army, where you had to go along to get along. He was hated by all manner of people for all manner of rudenesses, but particularly for his willingness to look anybody straight in the eye and tell them they were full of shit. He was, in short, exactly the sort of man made for war, not peace, and when a war came, he had a great one.

He was in-country from 1963 to 1970; he did two tours with the 101st Airborne but spent most of his time leading A-team detachments way out off the maps, interdicting North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia or training indigenous troops — Nungs and Montagnards — to fight against the hated North Vietnamese. He got stuck in a long siege in a big A-camp up near the DMZ and with a twenty-four-man team and three hundred indigs he held off a North Vietnamese division for thirty-eight days. When an airborne unit finally fought its way through to relieve them, he had seven Americans and one hundred ten Nungs left alive.

He also worked for MACV’s Special Observation Group, the mysterious, still-classified intelligence unit that sent ops all over ’Nam, some said even up north. Puller then had a long and flashy career running a Mike Force battalion, a quick reaction team that helicoptered to the relief of A-team detachments in the soup and proceeded to do maximum damage in minimum time. He was an exceedingly aggressive officer, but not a sloppy one. He’d been hit three times, once with a big-ass Chinese.51, the shock of which would have killed most men. It didn’t matter. If you were professional, you got hit, that was all.

But he came back from the war with a special vision, a Mike Force for the world. His idea was that the United States should have at its disposal a group of swift, deadly raiders. He had a dream of a commando group, superbly trained, fast-striking, brilliantly equipped, that could react swiftly to any major incident.

And he had gotten it, too, though as he fought for his project through the tortuous labyrinth of army politics, his personality had assumed the unlovely contours of a zealot. Somewhere in the Pentagon’s D-ring he lost the capacity to laugh; somewhere at some meeting or other he lost his perspective. He won, and Delta Force was the prize: Delta Force, which he had defined and trained and led: which he had, in the final analysis, fathered. And which he had, in the popular view, failed.

A bell rang.

“Sir, the recon photos are coming in,” Uckley shouted as the photos began to roll off the computer transmission platen.

Puller nodded grimly, not really seeing Uckley until the boy handed them over.

Dick looked at the pictures. They were in color, but they were like no pictures Uckley had ever seen. It seemed to be some kind of white-gray blur; in the murk there were little red flashes.

Dick was counting.

“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty …”

Then he went silent.

“Sixty. Sixty of the fucks above ground. These are men, son. Aggressor Force as seen from outer space, a million miles up, portraits courtesy of an Itech infrared floating up there in the sky somewhere. Now, why is that number significant, Uckley?”

Uckley swallowed. He’d never been in the military. He made a guess.

“It’s the size of an infantry platoon?”

“No,” said Puller. “You just guessed, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.

“Good. If you ever guess again around me, I’ll end your career. You’ll be history. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you don’t know, that’s fine. But things go freaky when junior officers try to guess their way through. Is that understood?”

Uckley gulped. The older man’s stare was like a truck pressing on his sternum.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Instantly, the transgression was forgotten.

“An infantry platoon is thirty-two, a company about one twenty-eight. No, the significance of the number is twofold. First, it’s so large that it’s clearly a holding operation. It’s not an in-out job; these guys mean to stay up there until we find the guts to push them off that hill. And secondly, it’s so large that it means these people couldn’t come in private cars. We’d see a caravan. So there’s got to be a staging area around here, maybe a rented farm. Find the farm and maybe you find out who they are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get on that thing, and have the Sit Room send out your pals in the Hoover building to go through the rentals in this area over the last year or so. The state cops could help on that too.”

“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.

As the young man hurried over to the communications room, Puller studied the picture. Yes, he was good. Whoever was running Aggressor Force had been on a few special ops in his own time.

He had at least half of his men on the perimeter and the other half on some kind of work detail up near the launch control facility. Reading the signature of the men and the operation, Puller swiftly concluded that he was up against a well-trained elite unit. Israelis? The Israeli airborne were the best special ops people in the world. South Africans? There were some ass kickers in that fucked-up country, too, you could bet on it. What about Brit SAS? With a regiment of SAS boys, Dick often said to American generals, I could take over any country in the free world, with the exception of the State of California, which I wouldn’t want.

Or maybe they were our own guys.

That thought had gone unspoken so far, and even now no one really wanted to face it. But the truth was, Americans could easily be doing this. Maybe some hotshot in Special Forces got tired of waiting for the balloon to go up. He thought he’d help it, rid the world of commies, and to hell with the two hundred million babies that got burned in the process. “Provisional Army of the United States!”

Dick looked at the picture again.

Who are you, you bastard? When I know who you are, I’ll know how to beat you.

“Sir!”

It was Uckley.

“Sir, Delta’s on the ground at Hagerstown. They’re on their way.”

Puller looked at his watch. Three and a half hours had elapsed since the seizure. Skazy had Delta on the ground now, and moving to the staging area. The choppers for the air assault would be in inside the hour. The A-10 crews were getting their ships gunned up at Martin Airport outside of Baltimore, that was one hangup. Some kind of new weapons pod had to be mounted, 20mm instead of their usual 30-mil cannons, because the big 30s with their depleted uranium shells had too much kinetic energy for the computer in the LCF at the top of the elevator shaft; they’d cut through it and seal the silo off forever. Puller hated what he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t control this. But there wouldn’t be a party until he had his Tac Air, because you don’t send boys in without Tac Air.

They could go soon now.

But Dick didn’t want to move until he knew more. Patience, he thought, patience was the answer. Already Washington was on the horn wanting results. That was shaping up as the hardest battle. But he would wait. There had to be another angle, and he would find it.

He lit a cigarette, one of his beloved Marlboros, felt it cut deep into his lungs. He coughed.

“Sir,” it was one of the Commo specialists, overexcited as usual. “Sir, look.”

Someone else came running into the room, too, a state policeman, and then one of the army Commo teams.

“Look, Colonel Puller. Jesus, look.”

Puller raised his glasses to his eyes and saw that a dark blur had suddenly obscured the mountaintop.

“What is it?” someone yelled. Other men were fumbling with binoculars.

Puller concentrated on the dark stain that now lay draped over the mountain. He gauged it to be about five hundred square feet, undulating slightly, black and blank.

It made no sense at all.

And then he had it.

“It’s a goddamned tarpaulin,” he said. “They’re covering up. They don’t want us to see what they’re doing up there.”

God damn them, he thought.

In the uproar he almost missed Uckley telling him softly that someone had tracked down the man who’d created South Mountain, a guy named Peter Thiokol.

Poo Hummel was at an age where she liked everybody, even men in her bedroom with guns. She liked Herman. And Herman seemed to like her right back. Herman was big and blond and all dressed in black, from his boots to his shirt. His gun was black too. Despite his size, he had gentle eyes — and the bumbling mannerisms of a well-trained circus bear. Not an atom of his body radiated anything except an awesome desire to please. He loved her pink room and especially her toys, which were displayed on shelving her daddy had built. One by one, he took her animals down and studied them with massive concentration. He liked Care Bear and Pound Puppy and all her Pretty Ponies (she had almost a dozen). He liked Rainbow Brite and Rub-A-Dub Doggy and Peanut Butter too. He liked them all.

“This one is very pretty,” he said. It was her favorite, too, a unicorn with a bright pink polyester mane.

Poo was no longer upset that her mother would not stop crying down in the kitchen and that Bean was so quiet. For Poo, it was a great big adventure to have new friends, especially like Herman.

“Will you ever go away?” she asked, squinching up her nose and making a face.

“Sure,” he said. “Soon. I gotta go. I gotta job.”

“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I like you.”

“I like you, too, nice little girl,” he said, smiling.

She liked his teeth especially. He had the whitest, friendliest smile she’d ever seen.

“I want to go out,” she said.

“Oh, no, Poo,” he said. “Just for a little while longer you have to be inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you can go out and play and it will be all fun. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. It’ll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you a present. I’ll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?”

“C’n I have a drink of water?” Poo asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”

Peter Thiokol was rambling.

He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses, imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way altogether and surrendered to incoherence.

“Um, so, um, it’s the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of course we all hope it won’t, anyway, um …”

The note card before him was no help.

It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl, “Decapitation theory — explain.”

Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature section of The Sun.

It wasn’t a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of Shaffer Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?

Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.

But it is interesting, Peter had said.

He struggled to find his focus, a problem he’d been having ever since the problems with Megan.

“Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it’s the idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the—”

“Uh, Dr. Thiokol?”

Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol loved it when someone in his class asked a question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or two. But there were hardly ever any questions.

“Yes?” he said eagerly. He couldn’t see who had spoken.

“Uh,” an attractive girl asked, “are we going to get our midterms back before we have the final?”

Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared with incomprehensible chickentracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table next to his bed. He’d read a few, then lost interest. They were so boring.

“Well, I’m almost done with them,” he lied. “And yes, you will get them back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we’ll have to cancel the final.”

There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this, because he loved to show off so for Megan.

“You show off very well, I must admit,” Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had once said. “It’s your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to end the world.”

The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown — a new start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city, new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired to think or remember.

He’d just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call Megan or not, and praying that she’d call him.

The memory was still brittle. He’d even seen her two weeks ago, in a wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation. She’d simply showed up after months of staying out of touch. For a night it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb, his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.

“Anyway,” he said, still scattered, “urn, on decapitation stuff, um — look, let’s be frank here.” He had this sudden weary urge to cut through to the truth.

“Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to save a few million or billion people. The idea is that Soviet society is so centralized and authority-crazed that if you kill the top few, you wreck them. So you build a missile that’s really an intercontinental sniper rifle. You become the guy in Day of the Jackal. The only problem is, they can do it to us, too.”

They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.

He sighed again.

And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude, Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the Defense Department, prime denizen of the inside-the-beltway Strategic Community, author of the famous essay in Foreign Affairs, “And Why Not Missile Superiority?: Rethinking MAD,” was drowning.

Peter was a tall, reedy looking man of forty-one who looked thirty-five; he had thinning blond hair that exposed a good stretch of forehead, which made him look intelligent. He was also rather handsome in an academic sort of way, but he had a disorganized quality to him, an alarming vagueness that put many people off. Outside his area of expertise, he cheerfully admitted, he was a complete moron.

In a no doubt desperate attempt to camouflage his discomfort, he was dressed as he imagined a professor should dress, that is, as he had remembered them dressing from twenty years before: He wore a tweed jacket so dense it looked like a map of a heather Milky Way, and a Brooks Brothers blue oxford-cloth shirt, that deeper, stormier blue that only Brooks offers, with a striped rep tie, a pair of pleated khakis from Britches of Georgetown, and a pair of beat-up, nearly blackened Bass Weejuns.

The student tried again.

“Uh, Dr. Thiokol? Could you at least tell us if it’ll be an essay exam or a multiple choice? I mean, the test is next week.”

The girl looked a little like Megan. She was dark and beautiful and very slender and intense. He stared at her neurotically, then struggled with the question. Reading more of their essays would just about kill him. But he knew he didn’t have the energy to go back through his chaotic notes to develop some kind of objective thing. He’d probably just give them all B’s, and go back to staring at the phone.

“Well, why don’t we take a vote on it?” he finally said.

But he was suddenly drowned out in the hammering of a huge roar. The class turned from their lecturer to the window, and watched in amazement as a scene from a fifties monster movie began to unreel. A large insect appeared to be attacking the parking lot. As it got closer, the bug became an Army UH-1B Huey helicopter, a great olive drab creature with a huge Plexiglas eye, a bloated thorax, and an almost delicate tail, and as it floated down out of the sky, adroitly sliding through a gap in the trees, its howl caused all the fixtures in the lecture hall to vibrate. Preposterously, it landed in the parking lot, whirling up a windstorm of dust and snow and girls’ skirts.

Peter could hear the giggles and the gossip as two officers in dappled combat fatigues came loping out of the hull of the craft, grabbed a kid, spoke to him, and then headed toward his building. But he himself did not smile. He understood that they were here for him and that something was terribly wrong. He felt the blood drain from his face.

It took them about thirty seconds to reach Shaffer.

And in the next second the doors flew open, and a lean middle-aged officer walked with utter lack of self-consciousness to the front of the room.

“Dr. Thiokol,” he said without a smile, “we need to talk.”

Their eyes met; the fellow looked focused and excited at the same time. Peter knew many career military types; they were okay, a little literal-minded, perhaps. And generally quite conformist. But this guy had something a little extra: He looked like a young dragoon officer racing toward Waterloo in 1815. Peter had seen it in a few bomber pilots, usually the wilder kinds, the ones who wanted to go thermonuclear three times a week.

“Okay,” Peter said to his students, “you guys get out of here now.”

The students trundled out, gossiping among themselves.

Then the officer held up Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon by Peter Thiokol, Ph.D.

“In this book you talk about what you call the John Brown scenario, where a paramilitary group takes over a silo.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “I was told by a very high-ranking officer that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever read. It hadn’t happened since 1859 at Harpers Ferry and it couldn’t happen now.”

“Well, it seems to have happened.”

“Oh, shit,” said Peter, who didn’t like to swear. He found his breath suddenly ragged. Somebody took over a bird? “Where?” But he knew.

“South Mountain. High-force threshold. Very professional take-down.”

The major sketched in the details of the seizure operation as they were known and it was clear he had been thoroughly briefed.

“How long ago did this happen?” Peter wanted to know.

“Going on three hours now, Dr. Thiokol. We have people there now, setting up an assault.”

“Three hours! Jesus Christ! Who did it?”

“We don’t know,” said the major. “But whoever, they know exactly what they’re doing. There’s been some kind of massive intelligence penetration. Anyway, the commanding officer/ground wants you along to advise. All the signs are that they’re going for a launch. We have to get in there and stop them.”

So it had started. It was close to the final midnight, and he thought of all the things he had meant to say to Megan but never had. He could think of only one thing to say, but it was the sad truth, and he said it to this soldier.

“You won’t make it. You won’t get in there. It’s too tight. And then—”

“Our specialty is getting into places,” the officer said. “It’s what we do.”

Peter saw his name stenciled above his heart against the mud-and-slime pattern of the camouflage.

SKAZY, it said.

The officer looked at him. They were about the same age, but the officer had that athlete’s grace and certitude to him. His eyes looked controlled, as if he had mastery even over the dilation of his pupils. It suddenly occurred to Peter that this would be an elite guy. What did they call them? Alpha? Beta? No, Delta Force, that was it, a Green Beret with an advanced degree in homicide. The guy looked like some kind of intellectual weight lifter. He had incredibly dense biceps under his combat fatigues. He’d be one of those self-created Nietzschean monsters who’d willed himself toward supermanhood by throwing a bar with iron bolted to the end up and down in some smelly gym for thirty or so years. Peter felt a sudden sadness for the deluded fool. He had half a mind to argue, out of sheer perversity. For if the idea that they could get in was this Skazy’s vanity, Delta would be disappointed tonight.

Peter had a sudden sense he was in somebody’s bad movie. The world should end in grace, not Hollywood melodrama. It couldn’t even destroy itself well. He almost had to laugh at earnest Skazy here, the Delta Viking. It’s not an airliner you’re trying to crack, he wanted to say, it’s a missile silo, with the best security system in the world. I ought to know; I designed it.

“Let’s go,” said Peter. He reckoned the world didn’t have much longer to live, and he wanted to be there for the last act. After all, he’d predicted it.

And then he thought he ought to call Megan, just in case, but decided, she’s on her own now, let her be on her own.

One of the chief curiosities of modern life, Peter often reflected, was the acceleration of change.

For he had gone, in the space of a twenty-two-minute helicopter ride, during which time his thoughts had remained jangled and painfully abstract, from Hopkins to the middle of a battle zone. He felt as though he’d flown back through time into the Vietnam War, a conflict whose intricacies he had studiously avoided in his lengthy stay in graduate school. It was like a TV show from his childhood: He heard the young Walter Cronkite intoning, “Everything is as it was, except You Are There.”

And so he found himself among military killer types all clustered around a dilapidated girl scout camp in rural Maryland. All these lean young combat jocks with crew cuts and war paint on, festooned with a bewildering variety of automatic weapons, as well as ropes, explosive packs, radio gear, exotic knives taped upside down on various parts of their bodies and, worst of all (and Peter could sense it, palpable as the smell of kerosene in the air), an ineffable glee.

He shivered. He liked his wars abstract and intellectualized; he liked the theory of destruction at the global level and the excitement of thinking in awesome geopolitical terms. This closeness to the actual tools of small-unit warfare — the wet, greasy guns, the snicking, clicking bullets, the klaklaklakklak! of bolts being jimmied, the clank of magazines being locked and unlocked (the guys were going crazy playing with their weapons) left him more than a little nervous. The guns especially scared him; guns could kill you, he knew. He shivered again, as some supernumerary, an FBI guy whose name he didn’t quite catch, took him into the cabin proper, and there he got his second massive shock.

He expected on the inside just more of what was on the outside: more special ops pros all talking in hushed tones over detailed maps, discussing their “assault,” or whatever their term was. What he got was something out of Mark Twain: two country cronies sitting hunched together, their faces lost in shadow, swapping tall tales amid the clouds of weed gas and the smell of stale tobacco that brought a pain to your forehead. The butts, in fact, heaped like a funeral pyre in the cheap ashtray between the men. This was Mission Central? This was HQ? It felt like the general store.

“I remember,” he heard one of them saying, “I remember. The world ran on coal in those days.”

“Yep, by golly, and a sight it was, them days. We had over two hundred boys working in the Number Six hole, and, by damn, this was the center of civilization. Not likes he be now, with just a few hangers-on scruffin’ by. Everybody had a big black car and everybody had a job, Depression or no. Burkittsville was coal and coal was Burkittsville, by damn. I remember it like it was yesterday, not fifty years ago.”

Then one of the fogies looked up, and Peter caught a quick glimpse of his face in the light, even as he felt himself being appraised and then dispensed with rather magisterially. Involuntarily, he swallowed. He recognized the guy.

It had to be the famous or infamous Dick Puller, exactly the kind of nut case you could trust Defense to pull out of the files to take over in an unconventional situation. Even Peter knew of Dick Puller, his many moments of glory in far-off paddies and glades, and his one moment of frozen terror at Desert One.

What Peter saw was a sinewy man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if it were hacked from ancient cotton canvas. He had a tight sheen of short iron-gray hair, almost stubble. He had a flat little hyphen of a mouth. Peter saw also that he had large, veiny hands — strong hands, worker’s hands — and ropy arms. He had a linebacker’s body, lacking the vanity of precisely engineered muscles but possessing — radiating, in fact — a sense of extraordinary strength. He had eyes like an ayatollah: hard, black little stones that glittered. He was in old jungle fatigues, and had a Montagnard bracelet around his wrist. He wore jungle boots. Yes, goddammit, the faded stencil on his ample chest bore the legend PULLER.

“‘Course that damn cave-in closed it all down,” said the geezer. “A black day for Frederick County, Mr. Puller, if I do say so. The womenfolk wore widder’s weeds for a year Tore they moved away.”

“Dr. Thiokol,” Dick Puller suddenly said, not ever having been introduced formally to Peter, “Mr. Brady here tells me something very interesting about your installation. Something I doubt you even know.”

Peter was ready for this.

“That it’s built a thousand feet above the ruins of an old coal mine? I knew that. We had all the old documents. We took test borings. The mine has been sealed since ’thirty-four, when it collapsed. Our tests indicated no presence of geological instability. That mine is history, Colonel Puller, in case you had some delusion of going in there as a way of getting into the installation.”

Dick’s eyes stayed flat and dark as he answered Peter. “But our reports say that original old undeveloped Titan hole was left open to the elements since the late fifties. Lots of rain in thirty years, right, Mr. Brady?”

“Rains a lot in these parts, sometimes like a son of a bitch,” said Mr. Brady. He turned, his leathery old face locking on Peter’s. “Son, you must know about a mess of things, but I have to wonder what you know about coal. You open a coal seam to a mess of rainwater over a period of years, you get some damned interesting formations down through a mountain. Coal is soft, boy. Soft as butter.”

Peter looked at him.

Then he looked at Dick Puller.

“You get tunnels, Dr. Thiokol,” said Dick Puller. “You get tunnels.”

Gregor beat a hasty retreat from the embassy to the nearest source of booze, which was Capitol Liquors, three blocks away at L and Vermont, a harshly lit joint with a pretentious wine display for yuppie Washington, as if yuppies wandered into such a place. He went in, fought through the listless crowd of unemployed Negroes who passed the time here, and bought a pint of American vodka (he could not afford Russian) for $3.95. Outside, he opened it quickly, threw down a quick hit.

Ah! His oldest and dearest friend, the one who never let him down. It tasted of wood smoke and fire and bracing winter snows. It belted him like a two by four between the eyes. He filled with instant love. The cars whirling up the street, the American automobiles, endless and gaudy, he loved them. Klimov, little rat Klimov, he loved him. Pashin, Klimov’s powerful sponsor, he loved him.

“To Pashin,” Gregor announced to a man standing next to him, “a hero for our times.”

“You said it, Jack,” said the man, bringing the muzzle of a bottle of Ripple in a paper bag up to his lips, drinking. “Git all our asses in trouble.”

Fortified, Gregor lurched ahead. The sun was bright. It hurt his eyes. He put on his sunglasses, cheap things from the drugstore designed to look expensive. He felt much better now. He felt in control. He looked at his watch. He still had some time before his little job.

Gregor wandered around for a few minutes before he finally found what he was looking for, a public phone. You always call from a public phone. That was the oldest rule. In Russia you may be sure the public phones are tapped, but in America you were sure they were not.

Gregor found a quarter, called the number. A woman answered, a new voice, but he asked for Miss Shroyer. There was some fumbling, and finally she came on the phone.

“This is the Sears computer,” he said. “Your order is ready. It’s”—he squinted, reading the number of the phone—“it’s 555-0233. Have a nice day. This is the Sears—”

The phone went dead. He stood, talking into it anyway, holding the button down, seeing her leave her desk in the Crowell Office Building, pick up her coat, nonchalantly mosey down to the drinking fountain, take a long drink, duck into the ladies’ room, her fatness imposing, her huge back and bent shoulders like a cape, her personality bright and phony, to the pay phone in the next corridor.

The instrument against which he leaned produced a squawk surprising Gregor in his reverie, but he freed the receiver button.

“Gregor, good God! The chances you take! Suppose they are watching you? I told you, Gregor, never, never call me at—”

“Molly, oh, Molly!” sobbed Gregor. “God, darling, your voice, it sounds so wonderful.”

“You fat bastard, you’ve been drinking already, I can tell. Your words are all mushed together.”

“Molly, listen, please, yes, I had a little taste, that’s all—”

“Gregor, don’t be sloppy, you know how I detest it when you’re sloppy!”

“Molly, please, I had no other place to turn. This Klimov, he’s really after me this time. He wants me. It’s worse than ever. God, darling, they are going to send me back.”

“Gregor, you pulled this routine months back. It’s where we started.”

Gregor sobbed. The sound of his pain and his fright must have been amplified by the wires of the phone, for it seemed to release in Molly something his implorings had failed to touch: her pity. He sensed her compassion suddenly: he sensed her coming to him. He pressed on.

“Please, please, darling. Don’t fail me. You’ve got to get me something. Something soon. Something big. Something I can give them. Not just your chicken-shit minutes and the gossip. They can get that from the Post. No, Molly, if you love me, if you fear for me, if in the smallest, tenderest part of your baby toe you feel for poor Gregor Arbatov, please, please, oh, my Molly, please help me.”

“Jesus, you bastard,” she said. There was almost a laugh in her voice. “You’re so far beyond shame, you’re into squalor.”

“Please,” he begged again.

“Call me in a few days.”

“In a few days I’ll be on my way to Latvia or some awful place.”

“There is no Latvia, Gweggy.”

“That’s what I mean. Please, Molly. Oh, please, by tonight. I’ll call you at four.”

“You’re really pushing your luck.”

“Oh, Molly, I knew I could count on you.”

“I can’t — what? Oh, yes, sure.” This last was mumbled to an intruder. In seconds she was back, breathless. “Christ, I have to go, baby doll, they’re calling all of us for something.”

“My sweet, I—”

But she had hung up. Strange, no? he thought. But he felt much better now. He looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. Time for his drive out to Columbia and his little job for the agent Pork Chop.

“Colonel Puller?” It was the FBI agent, Uckley.

“Yes?” asked Puller.

“It’s an eyes-only from White House Operations. They want to know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” A quick, angry glance. It was said that Puller had talked to Carter himself from the ground at Desert One. “Tell ’em Delta’s in, we’re working out our assault details, we’re waiting for Air and the Third Infantry and have high hopes for the Rangers. Make something up.”

“They sound mad,” said Uckley, a little unsure at Puller’s lack of interest in Washington.

“I don’t give a fuck what they are,” said Dick sharply. He looked over at Peter. “They’ll want action. What they don’t know, of course, is that the wrong action is worse than no action. Much worse. See, I have to fight them just as hard as I have to fight what’s-his-face up in the mountain. Now, Dr. Thiokol. Peter, is it? Okay if I call you Peter?”

“Sure,” said Peter.

“Now, Peter, I checked your file. Very smart guy. Great record. A-plus on the report card, all the way through.” His cold little eyes gazed at Peter with regret. “But what’s this shit about Taylor Manor? Some bin in Ellicott City. You had a problem?”

“I had some difficulties when my marriage broke up. But that’s all taken care of now.”

“You flipped, huh? Let me ask you straight out: How’s your head? Screwed on tight and outstanding? Are you crazy anymore?”

“I’m feeling fine,” said Peter evenly, wondering why this bastard hated him so much. Then he concluded that Puller hated everyone. The man was sheer aggression.

“What I need from you is a lot of hard work. I need a genius. I need a guy who knows that mountain who can figure things out for me. See, maybe I can crack that hole if I can figure out how. But I need a genius along to whisper in my ear. Can you give me the help I need, no bullshit games, no little sullen pouts, no prima donna shit. I don’t have time for the star system.”

“I’m fine,” said Peter again. “You can count on me. I guarantee it.”

“Excellent. That’s all I need to know. Now — who’s up there?”

“Search me,” said Peter.

“All right. Why are they up there?”

“To launch,” said Peter. “This is the only strategic installation in the United States with independent launch capability. There’s no point to taking it if you weren’t going to make the bird fly.”

“Why? What would be the point?”

“There isn’t one that I can figure,” said Peter. “Unless it’s sheer nihilism. Somebody just wants the world to end. It doesn’t make any kind of strategic sense; when the bird flies, the Sovs launch on warning. Then we all die. The beetles take over.”

“Some kind of crazy death wish, like the guy who took the gun into the airliner and shot the pilot?”

“More than that, but I don’t know what it is. But I guarantee you, there’s more, somehow. There’s some other aspect to the plan, some wit, some-theory, some long-range aspiration. This is only one part of it, that I can tell you. This is part of some larger scheme.”

“Goddammit, I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius!”

“I am a genius,” said Peter. “But maybe that guy up there is too.”

“When you figure it out,” said Puller, “I want you to tell me first. Right away. It’s crucial. If I know what’s going on, maybe I can figure out who’s doing it. Now, can we get in?”

“No,” said Peter.

“Goddammit,” said Dick Puller.

“No, I don’t, think you can. I understand they have people up there.”

“Sixty well-armed men.”

“Military?”

“The very finest. From what I’ve been able to tell, their seizure op was very crisply handled. Very neat, very impressive. Right now they’ve thrown the goddamned thing under some kind of tarpaulin. We can’t see what they’re doing up there. Pretty damned smart. We’ve got zillion-dollar birds in the sky that can see through clouds and rain and tornadoes and tell us whether Gorbachev had his eggs up or over easy. But there isn’t a lens alive that’ll see through an inch of canvas. What do you suppose they’re up to?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Worse than that, they sent a radio signal to somebody. Who do you suppose they were talking to, Dr. Thiokol? Another bunch of commandos, getting ready to jump us as we put our assault together, really mess us up? Maybe a group to hit our airfields, stop our goddamned Tac Air? Maybe a part of this other aspect of the plan. What, Dr. Thiokol? Any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter bluntly. “The only thing I know about is missiles. And missile basing. And I know this. You’re going to have a hell of a time getting up there, whether you get hit by another outfit or not. I had access to a computer survey of small-unit action in Vietnam and it suggests that all the advantages are with the defenders.”

“Jesus, you had to get a computer to tell you that?”

Peter ignored him, plunging onward to the dark heart of the matter. “But even, say, even if you kill the men on the hill, you’ve still got to get through that door to the elevator shaft in the LCF to get to the LCC. It’s the only way down. And the door is eleven tons of titanium. If you started cutting through last week, you wouldn’t get there by midnight.”

“What about just opening the door?” Puller asked.

Peter made an involuntary face that communicated the idea that he was talking to a child, then said contemptuously, “The door is controlled by a Category F Permissive Action Link security device. A multiple twelve-digit code with limited try. Three strikes and you’re out.”

“How did he get it? Inside job?”

“No, they change the code every twenty-four hours. But one of the wrinkles here is that the code is kept up top, too, in the security officer’s safe, in case SAC has to get down there. That’s the way we planned it. But nobody is supposed to know this. It was a secret. Anyway, they must have blown the safe, got the code, and rode the elevator down and jumped the guys in the hole. Easy.”

“Can’t we call SAC and get the code?”

Peter made another snotty face. “Come on,” he said. “This guy—”

“Aggressor-One, we’ve tagged him.”

“Yes, Aggressor-One,” Peter said, thinking, they certainly got that right, “he can reset his own code from inside.”

“Could we blow through it?”

“You’d need so much explosive, you’d blow the mainframe that runs the upper installation, including the door code. The doors would lock shut permanently, you’d never get in.”

“Hmmm,” said Dick Puller.

“Maybe, just maybe they don’t know about the key vault. If the guys inside had enough warning to use the key vault, then they’re sitting on the most useless piece of real estate in America. Because the key vault was a late modification. If we knew when they made their intelligence breakthrough, then we’d know how much they could know. That’s the prime question. Do they have a welder?”

“Let’s assume they do. They certainly knew everything else. They knew the codes, the procedures. They knew the Commo equipment.”

If it were possible, the skin on Puller’s face seemed to stretch tighter. He looked like a man with a massive headache. He lit another Marlboro. He turned back to the old man, who had been sitting abstractedly during his conversation with Thiokol, chewing on his dentures.

“Well, Mr. Brady,” he said, “you think we could get in from below?”

“No, no,” Peter interrupted impatiently. He hated stupidity. “No, the concrete is super-hardened to thirty-two thousand pounds p.s.i. It’ll stop everything except one of the old super H-bombs. And it’s surrounded by ten million square feet of rock.”

“So a man couldn’t get in from below? Or get close enough to plant a small-yield nuclear device. I mean, theoretically?”

“In twelve hours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he could get up there, I suppose … this is highly abstract, but theoretically, I guess he could get in through the exhaust vanes, tubes that will blow out if the bird fires. That would get him into the silo, and if he had a device or the knowhow, he could disable the bird that way. Theoretically, at any rate.”

“Now, Mr. Brady. These tunnels that may be in this mountain. What sort of shape would they be in?”

“Worse damn shape than you could imagine, Mr. Puller,” said the old man, pausing to hawk up a wad of phlegm. “Some of ’em may go nowhere. Some places they may narrow down so small a man couldn’t get his fist through ‘em. And black, Mr. Puller. So black you can’t imagine. You have to be underground for dark like that.”

“Could men operate down there?”

“Wooooo, Mr. Puller. You wouldn’t want to. It’d have to be a certain kind of man. Down there in the dark, you’re always scared. If the ceiling goes, there’s no help for you. You can’t see, you can hardly move. You’ve always got shit in your pants, Mr. Puller. A tunnel sits on top of your head something mighty heavy.”

Puller sat back. Outside he had one hundred twenty of the most highly trained military specialists in the world. Yet somehow he knew Delta Force wasn’t the answer. This called for someone who probably didn’t exist; a man who could slither up a hole in a mountain in the fetid shroud of perpetual night, a mile and a half with his fears bouncing around inside his head like a brass cannonball, and come out at the end sane and …

“I suppose I could get some volunteers from Delta. Mr. Brady, any coal miners around, men who’ve been underground?”

“Not in these parts, Mr. Puller. Not anymore. Not since the cave-in.”

“Hmmm,” Dick Puller said again. Peter watched him. Puller seemed to implode on himself as he thought, his face gray, his eyes locked on nothing. It was old Mr. Brady who spoke.

“Now, my grandson, Tim. Tim, he could get you in there.”

Dick looked at him.

“Tim wasn’t much good at nothing, but he was your natural-born tunnel man. Wasn’t no hole ever made he was afraid of. His daddy, my son Ralph, was a miner and Tim grew up near holes. When Ralph died in a fire in ’fifty-nine, Tim came to me. I was a state mine inspector up in West Virginia by that time, and Tim went into a lot of holes with me. Tim was a tunnel man.”

“Where is Tim?” Puller asked, almost fearing the answer.

“Well, you folks had yourself a war few years back. Old Tim, he was asked to go fight it, and fight it he did. Won some medals. Crawled in some holes and did some killing. Tim was what you call your tunnel rat. He was with 25th Infantry, place called Cu Chi. Those little yellow people built some tunnels, too, and Tim and his pals went down into ’em day after day, month after month. Not many of those men left alive. Tim didn’t make it back, Mr. Puller. Not outside of a body bag, that is.”

Puller looked at Peter Thiokol. He smiled.

“Tunnel rats,” he said, turning the phrase over in his mind, absorbed. “Tunnel rats.”

The major was deliriously happy. He was an excellent soldier and he loved battle. He loved to think about it, to dream about it, to plan for it, and to fight it. Now he scurried over the hill checking on his men with the boundless energy of a fourteen-year-old boy.

“Any movements?”

“No, sir. It’s quiet.”

“You know, it might be Marine Recon or Special Forces. Camouflage experts. You wouldn’t see them until it was too late.”

“No, sir. There’s nothing out there yet. Only state policemen, more to keep civilians out than to attack us.”

His soldiers were young but well trained and especially eager. The very best. No amateurs here. Men who wanted to be here, who believed. They were wonderful boys, in their dappled uniforms under the snow smocks, their equipment hard and clean, their faces clean-shaven, their eyes keen. They’d gotten the big tent up in two hours and were now digging under it furiously. The tent itself was not an impressive structure, but it had been constructed for a specific purpose and for that purpose it was perfect. The tent rose on poles no more than five feet off the ground and the various sheets of canvas that had been crudely lashed together to form it came, in the end, to about 2,000 square feet. It was meant for only one thing: privacy. Underneath, the major’s men labored mightily to create their little surprise for anyone coming up to them. They’d learned about it firsthand, and they were eager to apply it to other new learners.

Meanwhile, at the outer perimeter of the position, breastworks had been constructed around the heavy machine-gun positions and a single firing trench had been dug. The trucks had brought the ammunition, nearly a million rounds. Hold off an army.

He dashed from position to position, checking lanes of fire and, more important, resolve.

“How do we feel? Do we feel strong and brave?”

“Yessir. Strong and brave and well-prepared.”

“It’s going well, then. It is going as we planned it. It’s all on schedule. It’s working. We can all be proud. We’ve worked so hard, and it’s all paying off.”

He had designed well. Only napalm could get them out, and the Army couldn’t use napalm because napalm would melt the big computer. No, they’d have to come up and do it with lead. Close-in, hand-to-hand. A real battle.

At one point, at the crest of the mountain, one of the lookouts told him about the helicopters.

“About twelve of them, sir. To the east. They fell in and landed.”

The major looked through his binoculars. He could see quite a little force gathering its strength a mile away, down in the snowy meadow by some jerry-built buildings. The twelve choppers sat in formation; there was some kind of communications trailer, and even as he watched, a convoy of trucks pulled in. Men hustled and bustled. Someone had erected a big tent with a huge red cross on its sloping roof. More and more cars pulled up, and occasionally a helicopter would land or depart.

“They’re getting ready, no doubt about it. An air assault. Of course. That’s how I’d do it, at any rate.”

“When, sir?”

“Actually, I’m impressed. Whoever is running their show knows what he is doing. The general and I assumed their first attack would come in the first three hours, and that it would be badly coordinated and ill planned. A lot of smoke and fire, a lot of casualties, no concrete results. But whoever’s down there is waiting. He wants his assault to count. Helicopters—”

“Airplanes high above, sir. We catch the glint in the sun occasionally.”

“Yes, an electronic eavesdropper. Be careful what you say, boys. They’re listening. And they’re taking pictures. Of our beautiful big tent.”

His men laughed.

For the major the pleasure was intense. He had hunted guerrillas for years: dreadful scrapes, ranging across the countryside. Occasionally, the enemy would catch a trooper and leave a trail of his guts for miles until you finally came across the gristle and bone that was left of him. It was so hard to close with the bastards: they melted away into an alien landscape. You could torture their women and remove their children, but they were always there, just out of reach.

But not now. Now we’re on the mountain, and they’ve got to come up to us. He had a real battle to fight: a hill to hold for a period of time, a real mission.

“Look for planes first,” he told them. “We know they have A-10s in the region, in Baltimore. They’ll come low over the mountains. They’ll soften us up with those. Then the choppers. You’ll see the choppers swarm up. The A-10s will hold us down while the choppers ferry men in close. The men will rappel down to the road, because the choppers won’t land. It should be Delta Force, very good men, the best. They’ll be very aggressive. But they’ll be stupid, you’ll see.” He smiled. “It’ll be a great fight, I promise you that. Oh, it’ll be a great fight, boys. One they’ll talk about for a hundred years.”

“We’ll win it for you and the general, sir,” said one of the boys.

The major went over to the ruins of the launch control facility, and plucked a telephone off one of the standing walls.

The general answered.

“Sir, no sign yet of an assault. I expect it within the hour, however. They’ve brought in helicopters and a fleet of trucks. But we’ll be ready for them.”

“Good, Alex. I’m counting on you.”

“How are things down there, sir.”

“Oh, we’re making progress. It goes slowly, but it goes. The flame is bright and hot.”

“We’ll hold until they have us all.”

“You buy me the time I need, Alex. And I’ll buy you the future you want.”