The Day Before Midnight

1300

It fell to Peter Thiokol to background-brief the Delta officers, the various state police supervisors, and other federal functionaries who had just showed up, and the liaison officer from the Maryland Air National Guard who would talk on the air strike. Peter knew he was not ordinarily an effective communicator, but in this one area he had maximum confidence. Nobody knew more about the subject at hand than he himself; he had created it from the deepest part of his own mind, and from his own terrors of — and deep fascination for — nuclear war. And also from his deepest vanity: that he could play the most dangerous sport of all and win.

“Peacekeeper is radical in two respects: first, it’s extremely accurate. We use it to target their ICBM silos. We don’t have to neutralize a soft opportunity like a city and kill five million people in order to hurt them.”

The officers looked at him mutely. He radiated conviction and kept his neuroses, of which there were many, well hidden. Peacekeeper was the redeemer. He believed in it; he was its John the Baptist.

“And secondly”—he had them, he could feel it—“these warheads bite very, very deep. By that I mean — this is the key to the concept — they give us access to all hardened targets; So we have the capacity not merely to disarm but to perform an activity we call decapitation. We can cut the head off, cleanly and surgically. Do you understand the implications?”

Of course they didn’t. The parabola of the grenade was the extent of their strategic imagination.

“It means from now on, when we talk, they listen, because we can put the warheads in their pockets. They hate it, let me tell you, the bastards hate it. It scares them. There are Soviet generals who know they’re behind and see Peacekeeper as the beginning of the end. Now,” he went on, getting at last to the crux of the matter, “what terrified me as I thought about ways to deploy Peacekeeper was the knowledge that the system itself has tendencies toward destabilization. If those missiles are the best in the world, and if we’re a couple of years ahead of the Soviets in our modernization program as we upscale from Minuteman II to Peacekeeper, then, goddammit, the way we install them has to be the best too. Because”—he probed the air, to stress the point—“if the system is vulnerable to anything, then it tempts the other side to first-strike at its vulnerability. Weakness is destiny; strength is security. The secret of strategic thought is the prevention of first-strike temptation. Our other forty-nine Peacekeepers are going in little dinky Minutemen II holes out west, which is craziness! It offers such a premium for a first strike. That’s why South Mountain’s is the hardest silo basing in the world and that’s why it had to be targeted against Soviet command and communication. We call it Deep Under-Mountain Basing. And that’s why it’s so impossible to get into.”

Dick Puller’s voice cut at him out of the dark, impatient with the strategic context that had decreed South Mountain into existence, pressing for the hardcore nuts and bolts.

“Dr. Thiokol, let’s get to the tac stuff. We don’t have to understand it. We just have to shoot our way into it.”

“Then what you have to understand is that now that they’re in command, it’s not only them we’re fighting, it’s the mountain too. It’s the installation. If you bomb, say, or use heavy shells, napalm, that sort of thing, you’ll melt down the up-top mainframe and you’re out of luck. That’s not an accident: it was planned that way.” By me, he didn’t add. “And I’m telling you, the only possible way to get inside is to pop that door without explosive, get down in that hole. It can’t be done any other way.”

“Mr. Thiokol”—the voice was familiar, and Peter eventually recognized it as Skazy’s—“what do you think they’re doing under that tarpaulin they’ve thrown up?”

“I don’t know.”

“What could they do?”

“Well, not much. Dig in, I suppose, dig trenches. Perhaps they have some weapon they don’t want you to see, like a … a — well, I don’t know.”

“Why would they try to cover up like—”

“I don’t know,” Peter said, again irritated to be sidetracked at this silly stuff about the tarpaulin or whatever it was. That wasn’t the center of it, didn’t they see?

“Mr. Thiokol, uh, Dr. Thiokol, what are our odds at pulling off a multiple simultaneous?”

Peter stumbled again. The jargon was from some other war culture. He didn’t recognize it.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“Multiple Simultaneous Entry.” It was Puller. “That’s the Delta Doctrine. Attackers always outnumber defenders, but that advantage is lost if you can get in through only one entrance. We like to go through several at once. Can we get in more than one place at once?”

“No. Only through that shaft. The silo doors are super hard; the exhaust plugs don’t blow until the bird launches. There’s no other access.”

“What about underground? The mines?” Skazy asked.

“Dr. Thiokol does not see our tunnel rats as the answer to anything,” said Dick Puller to the group.

“I think they are a delusion,” said Peter Thiokol. “And the more time you waste on it, the less time you have to deal with reality. That door is it. You’ve got to get through the door.”

Puller said, “Dr. Thiokol, now you know why you’re here. You’ve got to get us through that door.”

And so Peter sat back.

The door. He had to figure the door. The door had just become his problem.

“Can you do it?” asked Puller.

“There’s a code,” said Peter. “Whoever is running things up there will reset the PAL to his own specifications. So that means I’ve got to break their code. It’s very tricky. There’re twelve digits required for an unlock. It’s got what’s called a limited try capacity. If you—”

“Can you do it?”

“You need a cryptanalyst, Colonel Puller.”

Dick Puller’s voice was hard.

“I know I do. I don’t have time to dig one up. I have to fight with what I have. That’s you.”

Peter said nothing. He had a splitting headache. The irony was almost comic now; Megan, a cultivator of ironies, would have loved it: he had crafted the system to be impenetrable, and now he had to penetrate it.

Delta staff was working out its assault plan when the first chopper arrived; before Puller could pull himself away, the second one pulled in.

His young factotum, Uckley, hustled in.

“They’re both here. Jesus, Colonel, you won’t believe—”

But Dick merely nodded; he had no time for surprise.

“Dr. Thiokol, you stick with the Delta assault plans team. Uckley, you buzz FBI counterintelligence and get us into their loop. I want all their findings. That’s highest priority. Then you get Martin again, and bug ’em on regunning A-10s ASAP. Nobody goes anywhere without air. I’m going to go see the recruits.”

Pulling on his coat, he rushed out. The two new Hueys sat out on the softball field, their rotors whirling up a cascade of snow. He looked for his prizes and saw a crowd huddled over in the garage and rushed to it. Entering, he was at first baffled: nothing but state cops and Delta operators and a few National Guardsmen from the first NG trucks that had pulled in. But no, he’d missed them, because they were so small. Yes, they’d be small.

The black man had worn his prison Levi’s but had conned a Delta trooper out of a black commando sweater and a blue wool watch cap that was pulled down low to his eyes. He was only about five eight, but Dick recognized certain things immediately: The hands holding a cigarette were surprisingly large. The eyes were narrow and surly. He held himself with an impossible combination of insouciance and discipline. He had some hard sense of self to him, a kind of physical confidence that burned like heat. He had street smarts. He looked at no one: his eyes were fierce and set and dark and glared furiously into space. It all said, don’t fuck with me.

As for the woman, it wasn’t so much her gender or her unprepossessing size that shocked him, but her youth. She must have gone into the tunnels early in her teens, for now, ten years after her ten years then, she looked just a bit over thirty. And she was beautiful, wouldn’t you know it? Dick’s wife had never suspected, but Dick had lived with a Vietnamese woman for two years during his long pulls in country. Her name was Chinh; the Communists had finally caught her and killed her. She died in a burst of plastique on Highway 1 moving into Cholon in ’72. Phuong looked a lot like Chinh: the same dignity, the same sweetness. Or no, not exactly: Dick thought that with study he could see the weight of the war on her. He shook his head.

“My rats,” he said.

His rats looked at him. The girl had trouble focusing; the black man looked as if he wanted to fight him.

“You the man?” asked Nathan Walls.

“I am, Mr. Walls.”

Walls laughed. “Where’s the hole?”

“The hole is at the base of that mountain there,” Dick said, pointing to the dramatic white hump out the open door, seeming surprisingly close. “And that”—he pointed out the lumpy, ragged silhouette of the South Mountain installation at the peak—“that is where we want to go. Where we need to go.”

“So let’s do it,” said Walls.

Puller went to the woman.

“Chao ba, Phuong?” he asked, meaning Hello, Madame Phuong.

She seemed to relax at the sound of her language, issued a shy smile. He saw that she was scared to death to be among so many large white men.

She said, “Chao ong,” meaning, Hello, sir.

“I am privileged that you are here,” he said. “We are very lucky to have you.”

“They said there were bombs for children. Firebombs. It was for us to stop them, sir.”

He clung to the formal voice in addressing her, feeling the language, so far buried in his memory over the past fifteen years, work itself free from his brain. “The worst American demon, worse even than the terror bombers. Some men have taken it over. We have to get it back and the only way in is through a tunnel.”

“Then I am yours to command,” she said vaguely.

“Do you have any English, Madame Phuong?”

“Some,” she said. “Little.” She smiled shyly.

“If you don’t understand, stop me. Ask questions. I will explain in your language.”

“Tell me. Just tell me.”

He switched to English, addressing them both.

“I want to place you during the assault, which will begin as soon as we get our air support. We have to blow a hole in the mountain and I want it done under the cover of a lot of other fireworks going on. I don’t want whoever is up there knowing we’ve put people in the ground.”

“Shit,” laughed Walls. “If he smart, he know. If he so smart, he got all you down here sucking your thumbs, he going to know. He going to be waiting. Like they was back in his pretty lady’s country. Tunnel going to be hot, let me tell you.”

That was part of it, Dick thought. The tunnel rats always knew somebody was awaiting them.

“Are you hungry? Would you care to eat? You should rest, you’ll be going in soon. And I’d like you to take people along. You shouldn’t be alone in the tunnels.”

“In the tunnel,” said Walls, “you always alone. But get me a skinny man who don’t get too close and listen to orders.”

Dick was a bit undone by Walls’s directness, and on this next point he proceeded with unusual caution, aware he’d entered delicate territory. “A black man, Mr. Walls? Would you feel more comfortable with another black man?” Several of the Delta troopers were black.

Walls laughed his hard laugh again. “It don’t matter,” he said. “In the hole, everybody’s a nigger.”

Phuong sat as if in a trance. She was not quite healthy, and had never been, since the tunnels. Her French psychiatrist had diagnosed her as a fifth-level schizophrenic, as if so many jolts in the tunnels, the loss of so many, the experience of so much horror, had finally, almost mercifully, broken the moorings of her mind, and like a small boat it drifted this way and that just off shore. She did not like bright lights, crowds, or to talk much about herself. She liked children, flowers, the out-of-doors, children especially. She spoke to her daughter at night, when she was alone, carrying her in a place near her heart. She remembered watching her daughter dissolve in a blossom of napalm; the flames had burned her eyebrows and the roar of the explosions had almost deafened her. She had tried to run into the fire, but someone had stopped her.

So now she sat in the barn with the black man whom she understood to be in some queer way her equivalent and at the same time tried to force herself to demonstrate out of politeness interest in the K ration they had put with apologies before her. It was getting close to time now, she could tell because all the men were grave and drawn and they had at last stopped playing with their weapons; she recognized the symptoms: battle was near. She had been there before.

In the old days, her revolutionary fervor, her nationalism, had sustained her. She believed in her country and in freedom from the hated white men; it was worth dying for and worth killing for. But the killing had finally taken its toll: she was thirteen when she went underground and twenty-three when she came out and had killed over one hundred men, most of them with an M-1 carbine but more than a few with a knife. Her skill was stealth and patience: she could lie in the dark forever, almost still as death. Yet she felt so tired and now she was going back. To stop bombs from burning more children. To stop the world from becoming all fire and darkness everywhere.

A man came before her.

“Chao chi” he said, using the familiar, as in, Hello, Sister Phuong.

“Chao anh,” she replied, out of politeness, feeling awkward in calling him brother.

“My name is Teagarden.”

The American names were so hard.

“Dee-gar-dahn,” she tried. It hurt her mouth.

“Call me brother. I will be your brother in the tunnel. They asked me to go with you, which is why I call you sister.”

She asked her daughter, who still lived in her heart, what do you think of this man?

He seems decent, her daughter said from her heart. But is he strong, Mother? In the tunnel, decency doesn’t count, only strength.

“Have you ever been in a tunnel, brother?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“Why are you here? Did you volunteer for this?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “They asked me because of the language, sister.”

He is not pleased about it, her daughter told her from her heart. Not good. In the tunnel, faith is important.

Her frank stare encouraged him to confession.

“To be honest, Sister Phuong, I’m scared to death,” he said. “I hate the dark, I hate close, dirty places. But they asked me, and in our unit it isn’t done to refuse an assignment.”

“Can you control your fear?”

“I was in your country for over three years,” he said. “I was scared every day and in battle every other day. I learned to control my fear there.”

Tell him that underground is different, her daughter said.

“Underground is different,” she said. “You’ll see, it’s different. Control is everything. Iron will, resolve.”

“I’ll try,” he said. He was a healthy, leathery-looking man, about forty.

“In the dark, everybody is scared. The survivor is the man of control.”

“I can only try,” said Dee-gar-dahn.

“Do you have a family, brother?”

“Yes. Three boys. Great boys. The big one’s a hero on a sports team. The other two, well, it’s too soon to tell.”

She could see his eyes warm at the mention.

See, Mother, he has children. He has love in his heart. He is not alone.

“You are a lucky man, brother,” she said, “and I will let you come with me into the tunnel. We will stop the demons from setting the world on fire.”

“Sister, we shall, this I swear to you,” said Dee-gar-dahn, and thus did Rat Team Alpha begin its career.

Rat Team Baker began under less auspicious circumstances. Delta Command selected, for crude and perhaps obvious reasons, another black man to accompany Nathan Walls. He was a short, muscular staff sergeant named Jeff Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a proud, furiously hardworking, and gifted young soldier who had at one time been an excellent boxer. He was every bit what might be called a team man: he believed in committing to the larger issue and therefore transcending the limits of his own rages. His commitment went first to his country, secondly to the Army, and third to Delta Force, which was the first team. He had joined Delta from the 3d Ranger Battalion in Fort Eustis, Washington, just in time to see action in Grenada.

Nate Walls was, by his peculiarities of vision, everything to be despised, everything that hurt the American black: a lazy no-account black-as-black northern jive-ass nigger, a dog. He was poison to the country and to the race.

“Walls?”

“Yo, man.”

“Name’s Witherspoon. I’ll be going with you.”

“Man, they pay you for this shit?”

“Yes, they do.”

“How much? How much you make?”

“With hazard pay and various allowances, seventeen hundred a month.”

A big grin split Nate Walls’s face.

“Shit, man,” he laughed, “I used to do that kind of change on a Saturday night on Pennsylvania Avenue. You going to risk your motherfucking ass for a seventeen spot.” He laughed at the richness of it.

Witherspoon just looked at him, controlling his temper. Then he turned his wrist, looked at his watch, a big Seiko worn upside down.

“You’d better get some food. We go at 1450 hours. That’s soon.”

“I like that watch, man. That’s one pretty piece of jewelry, and I like jewelry. Let me tell you, in the ’Nam, sergeant named Lopez get himself a new fancy Seiko scuba watch like that, he take it in a hole. Man, you could see numbers a mile away. The gooks used it to read by, and then some gook lady like that pretty girl over there, she put a bullet through it, right through the number twelve, blow off his hand. When he scream, she put a bullet down his throat. I know, ’cause I had to go in and throw some motherfucking wire around his legs, you know, drag his dead ass out of there. So you want to wear your fancy watch, Jack, you stay the fuck away from me.” He laughed again.

Witherspoon looked at him.

“I’ll take it off before we go and leave it with somebody.”

“And, man, that deodorant. I can smell that shit, man, you know. If there’s Charlie Gook in that hole, man, he smell that shit too. Then he blow your ass away, and mine too. Man, do us both some good and wipe your arms out, man. Shit, you sending telegrams.”

“There isn’t supposed to be anybody in the tunnels.”

“Man, lemme tell you, just when you think nobody there, that’s when they put you in a body bag. You married, my man?”

“Yes,” said Witherspoon.

“You get any pussy last night, man?”

“Knock it off.”

“Shit, man, only ass I had was when some white biker dude use my ass for fun in the showers. I could check out some pussy about now, let me tell you, before this last trip.”

“They wanted me to go over weapons,” Witherspoon said crisply. “You can do an M-16, or one of these little German machine guns, the MP-5. Or a.45 or a 9-mm automatic.”

“Fuck, man, I could never hit the ground with a pistol. I hate them big automatics too. Machine guns make my ass nervous, bounce around too much. I want a shotgun, a pump, sawed down real good. When you fire that mother, I want a noise louder than hell. Scare Charlie, if it hot down there. You ask that girl. Cooks don’t like noise.”

“These aren’t Asians. This isn’t Vietnam,” Witherspoon said dully.

“Oh yes it is, my man. Oh yes it is. Now, let’s see about a shotgun. You got a shotgun for this nigger?”

Witherspoon said he’d check it out and trotted off.

Walls sat back, smoking a cigarette. The old feeling was beginning deep inside him. It was what you felt when you knew the shit was going down, a kind of loose, trembly buzz in the gut, not really unpleasant, just odd.

Back in a hole.

Hey, Jack, I was done with holes. Man, my life was golden, you know.

He thought he was going to die today.

Die in a hole.

I thought I was done with that shit, man.

Jack Hummel watched the flame eat into the metal. The world was flame. And as he watched, he fought the temptation to surrender completely to craft, and to think of nothing but the job. He forced himself to think about the general.

Guy was plenty strange. First, he made Jack nervous because he was so sure and calm. And he scared Jack with his magical ways of persuasion and leadership. And he intimidated Jack because he seemed somehow rich, or at least upper class, and Jack was a little unsure of himself around such a customer.

But he also seemed fabulous, somehow, like something out of a movie. Jack remembered when he’d been a kid there’d been a lot of movies about crazy generals who tried to take over the world and Jack tried to place this guy against that context. But it didn’t work, because he saw vapidly handsome star faces, remote and eighteen feet tall in black and white. No help here; this guy was flesh and bone and charm. The difference struck Jack as weirdly comical. He laughed in an involuntary spasm.

“You find this amusing, Mr. Hummel?” said the general over the roar of the flame.

“No, it’s just that—” But Jack couldn’t finish.

“That’s all right. Laugh away. I’m used to it. I’ve been laughed at before.”

But Jack’s face had locked up. The man’s hard eyes, empty of merriment, nailed into him. The torch wavered and slipped in his grip and he lowered it.

“And now you can’t laugh. I’m used to that too. When people encounter the strength of my will and understand what I represent, they hardly find it humorous. I represent the memory, Mr. Hummel. The memory of a once-great country, but a country now fallen on terrible times, its way lost, its leaders pathetic, its enemies ravenous with the hunger to rip it to shreds. And I represent the strength to regain that past. And these soldiers feel the rightness of my way and the urgency of my moral mandate. They give themselves to me. It’s happened before, only my predecessor lacked my skill. He had my will, but he didn’t have my talent. You know him, Mr. Hummel. Remember your history. It all happened right around here. His name was John Brown. John Brown took over a federal armory with nineteen halfwits and idiots, who came unglued when some townspeople took potshots at him. He was captured by a junior Marine officer with a toy sword, which bent when the officer stabbed him. That was less than fifteen miles from here. At Harpers Ferry. Have you been there. Mr. Hummel?”

Jack wasn’t sure if the guy really wanted an answer or not. But this was getting crazier by the minute. The guy was a real total screwball. So Jack gave him the earnest response he thought was required.

“Uh, yeah, as a matter of fact. Last year, I think, my wife, she said we ought to, you know, get more out of the history of the state and—”

“Mr. Hummel, I mention John Brown because in a peculiar way he’s quite important to me. A very bright young man once predicted what I might do, and called it ‘The John Brown Scenario.’ Since I hold that young man dear, it’s important to me that I draw the contrast with John Brown. I’ve taken over a federal armory that stores missiles instead of muskets. I’m going to do what has to be done. I’m going to launch a strike against the Soviet Union. I’m going to give the world the future it hasn’t the guts to get for itself. I’ll kill millions, yes, but the outcome will be survival not only for a political system I believe in but survival for the planet. The fools who haven’t the guts to face this simply pass it on to future generations, so that when it does happen — and we both know it will — then everybody dies. Not just the race but the world. The planet. In my way I’m the most moral man who ever lived. I’m a great man. They’ll hate me for a dozen generations and worship me for a thousand.”

“Uh, yeah, but—”

Jack decided he didn’t have the mental equipment to argue with the guy. Who was he, some dropout from a state university who now made his living with his hands? What power did he have against a guy like this?

“The torch, Mr. Hummel,” commanded the general, the power of his brilliant eyes surging into Jack.

Obediently, up came the torch and again it began to lick at the metal.