The Day Before Midnight

1400

Pilots don’t work. This is one of the universal laws of aviation culture. Pilots fly. They are special. They only fly.

“Higher, goddammit,” said Leo Pell to Rick Tarnower, both of whom were pilots and both of whom were working.

Tarnower, twenty-six, was not happy to be laboring next to ground crew in the goddamned unheated hangar of the 83d Tactical Fighter Wing of the Maryland Air Guard at Glenn L. Martin Air Field just north of Baltimore; he had skinned his knuckles evilly twice already, and he was cold and he was greasy and he was a pilot and pilots don’t work.

“Higher, goddammit,” cursed Leo Pell again, his eyes squinting. Leo looked a little like a pig, especially when he squinted, collecting his tiny little eyes up in folds of fat. He was a squat, bald man with thick hands and short pistonlike arms. He had the body of a linebacker and the face of a fireplug and right now he was greasier than any mechanic. He smelled of sweat and joy. It was no coincidence that Leo had named his ship The Green Pig, and that he liked flying it low and slow and bouncing it off the Chesapeake now and again, getting his nose down in the shit, as his men said. There was something definitely anal compulsive about Leo and his willingness to get in close to the elemental stuff of life. Leo Pell was your natural-born ground-support man.

“Leo, goddammit,” Tarnower squealed in response, “I’m not even supposed to be doing this! I’m supposed to be putting together a mission assault profile or—”

Above him loomed the massive wing of an A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-support fighter, called Wart Hog or Flying Pig by its pilot and air crew. It was a big ship with a long bony prow, a single-bubble cockpit, and two high twin rudders, almost like the old B-25 Mitchell of World War II fame. Two gigantic General Electric TF34 GE-100 engines were mounted like spare parts from some surplus airliner halfway back along the fuselage. They looked as if they didn’t quite belong; in fact, the whole airplane had the look of having been designed by a bright but evil eleven-year-old boy with a yellow crayon.

“Rick, chum, we don’t get these goddamned guns bolted up just right, we ain’t got no mission,” Leo said with a grin, which showed his yellow stubby teeth. “Now, boy, people depending on us, and goddammit, I’m not going to let ’em down. Besides”—he smiled his most malicious, most charming smile—“we gonna be live shooting. Twenty mike-mike, goddamn, Rick, twenty mike-mike. Life is good!”

Leo loved shooting better than anything.

All up and down the line the pilots and men of the unit scrambled over their big green ships as they tried to speed-mount two SUU-23 gun pods in the five and seven slots in the external stores loading stations under the big wings of the green birds.

Tarnower cranked on his lug wrench, wiped the sweat from his brow, and — goddamn! — skinned his knuckles again.

“Tighter, sir, you almost got it,” his chief crewman called. “The 20-mil ammo’s just come in.”

“Great,” said Tarnower, twisting the wrench again.

“Hurry up, Larry,” Leo said, and ducked on to the next plane, cackling gleefully.

The assault plan that Delta had worked out was relatively simple. It was now predicted that the ANG A-10s from Martin would be regunned and airborne by 1445 hours. At 1500 the flight would peel through a gap in the Appalachians and hit the South Mountain installation with their external 20-mm cannons, in theory cutting the hell out of Aggressor Force without blowing away the mainframe computer, and at the very least, chopping the hell out of that mysterious tarpaulin that draped the mountain top.

At 1505 hours a flight of fifteen Hueys would deploy to the road moving up the mountain, intersecting it at an altitude of about 1,200 feet, roughly 1,000 feet beneath the installation, but well beyond the point where Aggressor Force had blown the road. To save time, the choppers would not land; they would swoop in in batches of four, and from each, eight Delta Commandos would rappel downward. In less than a minute, Delta felt, one hundred twenty operators could be placed in position for the assault. Divided in two elements, Delta would move up the hill and force the attack against the narrow front of the installation.

Midway during the fight, a sixteenth chopper trailing smoke would break from the formation, careen over the crest of the hill, and be seen to wobble, then land hard at the base of the mountain. Thirty seconds later it would seem to detonate. Actually, this was the detonation of over twenty pounds of C-4 already implanted by a probing force that had located the mouth of the collapsed mine shaft. The blast — or so the plan went — would open a hole big enough for Rat Team Alpha and Rat Team Baker to penetrate the mountain and begin the upward climb into the installation itself, a distance of almost half a mile underground, through uncharted and quite possibly nonexistent tunnels. The two teams would be in radio contact with Rat Six — a radio team at the opening of the shaft — which itself was patched into the Delta command network.

Up top, when the elevator shaft was finally taken, a message would be flashed, and Peter Thiokol, now madly trying to figure out a way to beat the door and its twelve-integer code, would be dispatched to the site to get the door open and get the surviving Delta operators down into the hole. The idea was to bring off the vaunted multiple simultaneous entry — from above and below.

The briefing officer, Skazy, stood back, well pleased with the presentation. It had everything: succinctness, economy of force, a certain audacious daring, split-second timing. It was Delta all the way.

“No, no,” said Dick Puller quickly, “no, no, it’s all wrong.”

The disappointment in the room was audible.

“Goddammit, Major, you haven’t thought it out. You’re willing to spend too much of your own blood on preliminary objectives. You’d waste highly trained specialists taking trees and gullies that are meaningless except as a route to the real objective, which is the shaft to the LCC. And what happens if you make it but you’ve sustained so many casualties you’re effectively out of commission? Who goes down the shaft?”

He stared brutally at Skazy, a former protege now fallen on hard times in his career. This was classic Dick Puller: he had no qualms about blowing people away. Skazy swallowed.

“We thought it was a very sound plan, sir,” he said.

“It’s a very sound plan for a different war, but not for today’s.”

There were a lot of peculiar vibrations in the air. Skazy was popular, hardworking, one of the Delta originals who went all the way back to Eagle Claw. He was a Delta zealot. Nobody liked to see him trashed.

“Colonel Puller,” another Delta officer said, “it’s a good plan. It’s stable, it’s solid, it’s well within our capabilities, it’s—”

But Puller wasn’t interested.

“Mr. Uckley, what’s the latest word on my Ranger battalion?”

“Uh, sir, they’re just entering St. Louis air space. They ran into turbulence coming over the Rockies.”

“Great, and how about Third Infantry?”

“The trucks are hung up in traffic. Evidently, there’s quite a buildup. The state police are trying to hustle them through, but the traffic is a mess. We could divert some helicop—”

“No, we need the choppers for Delta. What’s the disposition on that National Guard infantry unit?”

“Colonel, they’re the perimeter defense team. You said you were afraid we’d be jumped and that—”

“How many?”

“Uh, they’re at company strength now. It’s Company B, 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard. Say, a hundred fifty men. They were on winter maneuvers at Fort Richie. They’ve been trucking in the last few hours.”

“Get ’em assembled,” said Dick.

He turned to the Delta officers.

“You’re grounded. Get Delta on the perimeters, they’re now security. I don’t want Delta into it until we crack the perimeter and carry the elevator shaft. There’s no point in those men dying in the woods like infantrymen. Let ’em die in the shaft, where it’ll do some good.”

Skazy said through a tide of awkward phlegm clogging his throat and a wretched moment’s hesitation, “Colonel Puller, with all due respect, those National Guardsmen are teachers, lawyers, construction workers. They’re fat and out of shape. Now, we’ve got a good, sound plan. These guys can’t—”

Dick cut him off, speaking with brutal authority.

“Maryland NG draws preliminary assault responsibility for this operation, working in conjunction with Tac Air. I can’t wait for the goddamned Third Infantry or the goddamned Rangers. I want them deploying via their trucks too; no sense wasting our choppers on troops who can’t rappel. Get Delta on the perimeter, Major. Call the NG and give ’em the good news. What’s the guy’s name?”

“Barnard. He’s an accountant.”

“Well, today he’s an infantry officer.”

And so Dick Puller made the first of his controversial decisions. It was based on a secret conviction: that the planes would not kill enough of Aggressor Force to suppress its calculated fire. The first assault would be a failure: those who waged it were like the Brits who went over the top at the Somme in 1916, a doomed generation. With their lives they would purchase very little: at best, they would bleed Aggressor Force of enough of its will and its health, so that, as he now saw it, a second assault with Third Infantry and the Rangers sometime after nightfall would carry the perimeter. Then the real drama would start: Could Peter crack the door? Could the Delta specialists get down the shaft and into the capsule? Could the Rat Teams get there from the rear?

“Sir, the CO of the Guard wants to talk to you.”

“Put him on.”

Dick took the radio phone.

“Delta Six, over.”

“Delta Six, I’d like a clarification on this order.”

“Affirmative.”

“You got federal specialists in there, commando types, hardcore pro military. But you want my guys to carry the brunt of this attack?”

“Affirmative, Guard Six.”

“Do you have any idea what’s up there? They—”

“I heard. I saw the report.”

“Sir, I’d like to request that my higher headquarters authenticate the or—”

“Captain, you do any damn thing you like, but at 1500 hours I want your company humping that hill. First, you’ll do much better in the light. A night attack’s a terrible thing. Second, and more important, I’ve laid on Tac Air at 1500. You want to hit the Aggressor area just as the Air moves out. Those A-10s are going to make hamburger out of whoever’s up there. You have my word. You’ll be mopping up, that’s all. I’d warn your guys to watch out for unexploded 20-mil shells. Those things can tear a leg off. That’s what you have to worry about.”

Puller’s face was bland and sweet as he lied. He was an excellent liar.

“Oh, Air. Air.”

“A-10s, affirmative, Guard Six. Ever seen em hose something down? Those cannons rip through lumber like a chain saw. You’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Yessir,” said the captain. “I’ll get ’em assembled and on the way, sir.”

“Real fine, Guard Six. Real fine.” He looked at his watch. It was close to 1400 hours. He heard whistles somewhere, and the sound of trucks. It was the Guard, already saddling up.

He felt somebody looking at him. It was the hard, lean face of Skazy, closing in on him.

“What are you looking at?” Puller said.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Dick,” said Skazy.

“You’re out of line, Major,” said Puller, facing him square.

“You wouldn’t send us in from Desert One. You’ve got to send us in here.”

Puller looked hard at him. Skazy had been combat assault commander seven years ago in Eagle Claw. When Puller made the decision to abort, Skazy had called him, to his face, a cowardly motherfucker and taken a punch at him.

“You’ll get your great chance, Frank. Just grow up a little, will you? It’s going to be a long day.”

Skazy said, “Look, Dick, if you have any trouble because it’s me here, and because I took my shot at you at Desert One, that’s fine. A commander deserves support from his juniors. I’ll step out of my command and go in as a regular trooper. McKenzie can take over, he’s a good man. But goddammit, Dick, you’ve got to use us this time.”

Puller looked at him.

“Get back to your unit, Major,” he said.

Outside, the trucks had begun to move toward the mountain.

Rat Team Baker was suiting up in the barn. In the distance a chopper had landed, its blades beating with a liquid slosh of noise against the wooden walls. The rhythm was insistent, urgent, and through it they could hear the sound of the National Guard trucks rumbling down the muddy road toward the mountain. But the two men, aware that in minutes they’d be airborne, worked hard at getting ready.

“Here,” Witherspoon said. “You keep this on your belt.”

“Yo, man, thanks,” said Walls, taking it. It was a Taurus PT-92 9-mm automatic in black matte finish, with a double-stacked magazine that held fifteen rounds. He popped the magazine, which dropped out, then locked back the slide and looked into the chamber, where everything seemed to gleam with bright highlights. He thumbed the slide release, and the heavy sheath of metal slammed forward. The gun snapped in his hand. He reinserted the mag, and rejacked the slide to chamber a round.

“Safety up or down, man?”

“Up is on. You go to red by snapping it down. That’s a double-action piece, so you don’t have to carry it cocked and locked.”

“Cocked and locked it’s gonna be,” said Walls, “just like my old.45. Cocked and locked is best.”

It was a nice piece for backup, but not quite what he wanted for the main work.

“Now, what about Mr. Twelve?” Walls asked, slipping the automatic into an ambidextrous Bianchi holster on his belt.

“Say again?”

“Mr. Twelve Gauge. Shotgun, man.”

“Yeah, so I found one. Here it is,” Witherspoon said, handing the weapon over: a Mossberg 500, with a twenty-inch barrel in a grainy gray Parkerized finish. It had a combat magazine extension beyond the pump reaching out to the muzzle, giving it a chin-heavy, pugnacious profile.

“That piece is very important to the guy that owns it. He didn’t want to give it up. It’s called a Persuader. Now he didn’t want to give it up. It’s his life insurance. But I talked him into it.”

Walls took the gun and knew at once it was made for him. He held it, touched it, rubbed it, smelled it, clicked it. Damn, it felt good.

He began to thread the heavy red plastic double-ought twelve-gauge shells into it, discovering that it would swallow eight of them. Loaded, it felt heavy; all that buckshot slung out under the barrel. He jammed dozens more into the leg pouches of his camouflage pants until his legs felt as if he were exercising. It would mean he might have to lay on the suckers, but it was better to hurt a little and have the spares when you needed them than to be comfortable and come up dry at party time. He’d found that out in a hole somewhere. He held the loaded gun close to him.

Meanwhile Witherspoon was locking a 30-round 9-mm clip into his Heckler&Koch MP-5. The gun had a foolish look to it, a sci-fi look: its ribbed silencer threw it out of proportion.

“Is that a toy, man? It looks like some kind of plastic kid toy.”

“It works great,” said Witherspoon, “a great close-in weapon.”

Then Witherspoon put on his AN/PVS-5C night vision goggles. They looked like a set of binoculars mounted in some kind of scuba-diving mask, which was held on Witherspoon’s head by a harness of elastic straps; they drew their power from a 1.3V DC battery pack he wore at his belt. The glasses responded to heat, and in the cool blackness of a tunnel a man would radiate an orange glow as if he were on fire, making him easy to track and kill.

“You could have used this stuff in ’Nam,” Witherspoon said.

Walls snorted.

“Man, I’m so bad I can see in the dark without help, you know. That’s what kept me alive.”

Then Witherspoon pulled on his flak jacket, which had already been mounted with an AN-PRC-88 radio receiver. A pair of headphones with a hands-free mike on a pylon out in front of his lips completed the outfit. He stuffed a book-sized mass of gray clay into one bellows pocket. Walls knew it to be C-4; he’d blown up a few things in his time in the tunnels.

Witherspoon stood, staggered for just a second under the weight of the gear. Walls couldn’t help a little laugh.

“Man, you look like a ghostbuster,” said Walls, “and you talk like an ofay. Man, how long you study, learn to talk that white bullshit? ‘It’s a great close-in weapon,’” Walls mocked through his nose with a cruel grin on his face. “Be natural, my man. Be a nigger. You a nigger, be a nigger.”

“I don’t care how I sound if it keeps me alive and gives me the edge,” said Witherspoon, stung by the accusation.

“A bad nigger with a bad shotgun, that’s the best motherfuckin’ edge,” said Walls.

The men rose from their ritual. Walls pulled on his flak jacket too. He’d nixed the night vision stuff. There were picks, shovels, grenades, and a few other gimcracks to be arranged, but essentially they were ready. Then he noticed a red bandanna on a bench, left over from some cracker handyman or other. Quickly, Walls flicked off his watch cap, snatched it up, expertly spun it into a roll, then tied it Apache-style around his forehead.

“You see, boy,” he said to the horrified Witherspoon, “in the hole it’s hot as shit, and the sweat sting up your eyes. Saw a white guy once blown away ’cause he missed a first shot ’cause he couldn’t see nothing.” He smiled for the first time.

An officer yelled, “Game time, rats.”

The moment had come. Walls grabbed his Mossberg, felt the heave and slap of the automatic at his hip, the weight of the flak jacket. He lumbered out to the chopper.

The tough-looking old white guy stood off to one side as they ran to the slick, watching them go with numb eyes. Brass, Walls thought. White brass. Shit, he hated white brass, stern fuckers with little squinty eyes who looked at you like you were shit on their shoes.

But then the white old guy gave him a little thumbs-up for happy hunting and — fuck it! — hey, winked at him. Walls saw the radiance of something almost never on the pale, slack faces of the white race — belief. That is, belief in him, in Walls.

You may not be much of anything, motherfucker, the old white guy was saying, but damn, boy, you one hell of a tunnel rat.

You got that right, Jack, thought Walls, running the last few yards through the breeze to the bird.

The Vietnamese woman, in black with an M-16 and a pair of gym shoes, was already aboard, a blank look on her face. But as he moved closer, squinting in the bright sunlight, she looked at him.

Jesus, he thought, losing himself in her opaque glare, home again.

The Huey with the two Rat Teams lifted, nose heavy, a bit ungainly, hung for just a second, and then with an agility that even these many helicopters into his career still surprised Puller, zoomed off, and he watched it go.

“Good pilot on that ship,” Major Skazy yelled. “He’ll insert ’em just where you want ’em.”

Puller said nothing. He shifted his vision. Across the white meadow, under the bright sun and blue sky, he now saw the NG trucks in the distance, deuce-and-a-halfs, a convoy of them, small as toys, now lumbering into the woods to begin the ascent to the primary assault position.

The trucks moved poorly, tentatively bunched up; one would spurt ahead, then slow. It was an accordion opening and closing across the landscape.

“Aggressor Force’s going to see them coming,” said Skazy. “Plenty of time to get ready.”

“Aggressor Force was ready anyhow,” said Puller.

“It’s Delta’s job,” said Skazy.

The older man turned to look at the younger. He remembered Skazy at Desert One, his face mottled with fury, coming at him without regard for rank or protocol or career or whatever, just coming at him, screaming, “You gutless old bastard, we can still do it. We can do it with five choppers!” And Puller had said, “Get your men on the planes, Major. Get them on the planes,” as the harsh wind, the noise, the utter confusion had swirled around them.

Now, eight years later, Skazy was still a major. He’d been passed over, his career ruined just as completely as Puller’s for his legendary flip-out. He was still Delta, though, still a true believer.

“Dick,” Skazy was suddenly saying, “let me go in with the NG. Those guys need some experience. Let me take Delta up to support them from the flanks, and to urge them on, give them something to see. Dick, we can—”

“No, Frank. You’ll get carried away, the way you did at Desert One. You’ll lose control, you’ll rush in. You’ll get everybody killed and you still won’t stop the men in the hole.”

He delivered this brutal sentence with a little bit more pleasure than was strictly necessary, as if to indulge the bully in his soul. But it was also that Skazy, brave, hardworking, brilliant, was just a bit reckless. He was a terrible accident waiting to happen. He needed to be led and aimed. He was a perfect subordinate: he wasn’t the man you wanted out there on his own.

“Whatever you say, Colonel Puller,” said Skazy, his face immobile.

Suddenly, he turned.

“Just use us this time, goddammit, Dick. And you weren’t right at Desert One. I was.”

Skazy stormed back to his staff, leaving Puller alone.

Puller looked back to the mountain, feeling suddenly old and a bit scared. Maybe the rat thing was pointless, maybe those tunnels weren’t there at all. And certainly those kids in the trucks would be chopped up. Maybe even Delta couldn’t make it.

He checked his watch. The A-10s ought to be shooting the gap any second now.

He looked back to the mountain. It was a dramatic white hump before him, the red and white aerial like a candy cane at its top, and that peculiar dark stain where Aggressor Force had built its odd tent.

He felt himself being looked at. Up there, Aggressor-One would be looking through his binoculars. Watching. Waiting. Planning.

I hope you’re not half so lucky as you are smart, he thought. It was also a prayer.

Peter had found a little room off Puller’s headquarters and there, with an old Coke machine moaning over his shoulder and girl scout mottos like “Always do your best!” on the rickety walls, he looked at a copy of the single communication Aggressor-One had sent from the mountain.

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 for it, the better.

There was something tantalizing in it, ironic. A strange feeling he got, that it wasn’t a madman’s document, but something far subtler.

It’s a game, he thought.

This guy is playing a game.

But against whom? And why? Why a game? Why now, a game? As if it’s not quite enough to blow the fucking world away, to turn us to ash and dust; he’s got to tweak our nose somehow.

He looked at the “signature” at the end of it: “Commander, Provisional Army of the United States.”

Well, your standard-issue right-wing nutcase psycho, staple of fifty bad movies and a hundred bad novels. It fits perfectly: the inflated rhetorical tone, the sense of epic proportion, the delusion of one self-styled “great man,” reaching out from his wisdom to twist history in the proper direction.

Why don’t I believe it, he wondered.

Because it’s too pat?

Because it matches all our expectations?

Because I’ve a feeling Aggressor-One has seen the movies and read the books too?

He touched his temple, feeling his head begin to throb. Now, try to relate this, the screwball declaration of intent from Aggressor-One, up there with his MX, to this, the mountain of teletype printouts that were being sent from the FBI, at Dick Puller’s order, on the investigation into his identity.

Quickly his eyes sped over the data. A crash team from the FBI special antiterrorist squad, working with the assistance of personnel officers at the Department of Defense and Defense’s big mainframes, had done a fast shakeout on military personnel with a certain pattern of experience in conjunction with a certain range of political belief, which itself had been extrapolated from a cluster of skills necessary to plot, stage, and execute the silo takeover and an assumed cluster of ideological beliefs necessary to provide the key ingredient: the will.

Among the plotting coordinates in the search for Aggressor-One were one or more of the following:

— Special Operations experience, including Special Forces (Army), Ranger (Army), Air Commando (Air Force), SEAL teams (Navy), and Marine Recon (Marine Corps); Central Intelligence Agency Special Operations Division (comprised primarily of veterans of the foregoing) and including those with experience in Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and counterinsurgency among the Nungs in South Central RVN; or experience in counterinsurgency operations in the third world, as in guerrilla hunting with the Peruvian, Bolivian, and Guatemalan rangers and paratroops; and other odd Agency scams, including the Kurdish incursion in 1975; and so forth and so on; OSS experience dating back to World War II, and including Jedburgh Teams who jumped into France immediately before D-day, and long-range operators among the Kachin tribes in Burma against the Japanese in World War II. Cowboys, Peter said to himself, God save us from cowboys.

— public record or private reports regarding unusually fierce political opinions, particularly as regards the Soviet Union. Membership in groups in the FBI Index, such as the John Birch Society, Posse Comitas, the Aryan Order, so forth, so on. The fulminators, the sparkplugs, the geezers and winners, Peter thought, the Red haters and baiters.

— professional officers with solid careers going who had somehow gotten off the track — a CO who screwed them on a fitness report, a program they were in charge of that was axed, a command that was riddled with drug abuse that fell scandalously apart, a stupid and unguarded moment with a reporter that wrecked their progress — who, surveying the rubble of their lives, might have ingeniously plotted some kind of revenge against Defense, using their clearances and friendships to acquire the necessary intelligence to stage the silo raid. The losers, Peter thought.

— and finally, membership in what was called the strategic community, that weird agglomeration of inside-the-Beltway types who, unbeknownst to the world in general, went about their merry way planning its destruction. This meant familiarity with strategic thought and its particulars, particularly silo culture and technology, missile silo security, launch procedures, strategic targeting initiatives, the top secret Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP), the game strategy by which this country would fight a nuclear war.

This was the big category. It was all well and good to know how to skulk through the night with a knife through your teeth, but in the end you had to know what Peacekeeper was, how it worked, where it was located, or there was nothing at all to the mission, it was just dreamy nonsense. For it all turned on the ability, once having gotten into a silo, to get the bird off its pad. And, in this silo, on knowing that it was even there — not a thousand men in Washington knew this — and that it was uniquely vulnerable, launch capable. He had to know so much, this Aggressor-One!. That was the tantalizing thing about it: whoever he was, he would almost certainly be someone Peter knew and had worked with.

He has to be one of us.

He looked at the list: Rand Corporation dropouts, disgruntled SAC colonels, embittered Pentagon jockeys with an intellectual bent, bypassed generals, flamed-out academics. All the names were familiar.

Another document clattered out of the machine, and Peter examined it. It described a former civilian analyst for the Air Force of great promise who was intimately acquainted with Peacekeeper, particularly as it was to be deployed in the South Mountain installation. He was known for his hard-line attitudes toward the Russians and toward nuclear war in general and had actually published a famous essay, “And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD” in Foreign Affairs, making him a hot item on the Washington circuit, the man who believed war could be fought and won. He appeared on Nightline and This Week with David Brinkley and Face the Nation. He had eventually become head of the MX Basing Modes Group at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in Howard County. But his personal life had disintegrated under the pressure of his career, his marriage had broken up, his wife had left him. Now he taught at a prestigious institution and still consulted with the Pentagon.

“Sir?” It was a young communications technician.

“Yes?”

“There’s some men from FBI counterintelligence here. They have a warrant for your arrest.”

“Sir.”

Alex blinked in the bright air and looked. He could see the vehicles lumbering toward him across the meadow.

“No helicopters,” he said. “They are not using helicopters, they are using trucks.”

He watched the convoy come.

“All right,” he said, “stations, please. Get the men out from under the tarpaulin and to their combat stations.”

A whistle sounded. He could feel men around him running to their positions, hear the clink and rattle of bolts and belts.

“Steady, boys,” he cried. “We have all the time in the world.”

He watched the trucks come up the mountain. I would have thought helicopters, he told himself. They could have gotten more people here faster with helicopters. But maybe the troops they have aren’t air-assault qualified and would have been more frightened of the flight than the fight.

No, wait: one helicopter rose. It must be some kind of medevac chopper, for casualties.

We’ll give you some business, fellow, he thought.

He climbed atop a bit of ruin, and shouted, “All right, boys. Company coming for lunch! Lock and load.”

“Sir—”

The boy pointed.

He could see them, low and whizzing over through the gap in the far mountains across the valley. Eight of them, low to the ground, clearly A-10s even from this distance.

Well, he had this one figured too.

“Planes,” he said. “Missile teams prepare to engage.”

The first assault had begun.

Gregor Arbatov took Connecticut Avenue out to the Beltway, headed east through thin traffic, then north down Route 95 toward Baltimore through even thinner traffic. He had plenty of time. He was not due until two and he had left at 12:30. The vodka had somewhat calmed him, and his call to Molly had left him with at least some hope for the future. Molly would help him somehow. His stomach churned; he wished he had a Turns, he lived on Turns, his fat tongue always glistened with the chalky residue of a Turns. But he was out of them.

Whoa, there, Gregor, old fool. You are slipping. With a start he realized he’d almost missed his exit, and he had to make a sudden dart across the lanes of the expressway, took the ramp too fast, felt the whirl of gravity fighting him for control of the car and at last — though only in this one thing — regained control. He circled over a bridge to arrive at Route 175 for another less swift but equally sleek road, and after a few minutes of zipping through rather attractive Howard County and the suburban city of Columbia, came to a glass-topped pavilion glinting in the sun.

The exuberance of the place did not faze him. He rather liked shopping malls; America at her glorious best, all glittery and shiny, all the people slick and sassy (the women, Lord, the thin, lovely, supple American women!).

Gregor was familiar with American shopping centers — White Flint was a favorite, White Marsh out beyond Baltimore, the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Owings Mills west of Baltimore, the new Marley Station south of it, Tyson’s Corners in Virginia — because it was Pork Chop’s vanity to be serviced in them. Pork Chop — whoever he was — boasted exemplary trade craft. Pork Chop hated solitude and privacy, finding safety instead in mass, particularly in the crowded, bustling venue of the American shopping center. This suited Gregor perfectly. If he could no longer justify his existence on the paltry gleanings from his girls, then he could by his ability to please Pork Chop, whom he had never made anxious, whose signals he never missed, and whose wants and needs supplied the pretext for his survival.

Gregor never knew when Pork Chop would demand servicing. It all depended upon the Washington Post personal ads, which he checked each day. Most days there was nothing, sometimes weeks would pass: and then, as yesterday, it would be there.

Darling, I love you. Meet me at D-13-3. Your little Pork Chop.

The code was simple. Gregor simply referred to the previous Sunday’s Post, Section D, page 13. On that page would be an ad for some kind of chain bookstore well represented in the area, usually a B. Dalton’s or a Waldenbooks. At the bottom of the ad would be listed the various locations. The third of them — in this case the Columbia Mall, in a B. Dalton’s advertisement — would be the site for the beginning of the ritual of the meet on the next day. It was clever and simple and impenetrable, unless of course one knew the key, and only Gregor knew the key, which he had received on a special Eyes Only document two years earlier.

Pork Chop had been quiet ever since a furious spurt of activity three months ago; therefore Gregor was somewhat astonished when he’d come across the message in yesterday’s paper. But it had made him happy, though it was his bad luck to draw the time-consuming and frequently exhausting job the same night he had communications duty in the Wine Cellar, and exactly when Klimov was so furious at him for so many other failings.

Well, that was more of his rotten luck. He journeyed through the parking lot like a lost traveler, experiencing one of the real drawbacks of capitalism: lack of adequate parking places. It was, after all, near Christmas. The Americans would be out in force today, loading up on goods for their favorite holiday. But eventually Gregor found a spot in the far environs, and began the long trek to the building proper.

Suddenly, there was a roar; involuntarily, he ducked, stunned at the noise. He looked up. Six jets whooshed overhead. So low! Incredible! They were a kind of thing Gregor had not seen before, like backward-headed flying crucifixes, their long prows so far ahead of their stubby straight wings. And they were green, not silver. Gregor shook his head.

Should I know this airplane?

But the jets were gone then, flashing over the trees.

“They’re sure in a hurry,” a lady a few feet ahead of him said.

“Must have a fire to go to,” Gregor joked.

“Maybe,” said the woman with a laugh. “Or girlfriends to show off for.”

Inside, it was like the spring, calm and pleasant, climate perfectly controlled. But Gregor immediately broke into one of his familiar shirt-drenching sweats, as if he were in the jungle. As he sailed forward, all business, something caught his eye; and then another thing and then another! Capitalism! It was a festival! He loved America! He stopped to admire a particularly nice sweater in Woody’s men’s department and they had some nice colorful ties there too. Then, it was time to eat. He bought a chocolate chip cookie and a peach yogurt and a bag of popcorn and a chili dog. Only eventually did he find his way to the store of the ad, B. Dalton. He stepped into it, browsed for a while, noticing the piles of best sellers up front. The big book was a lurid thing about a dark KGB plot to subvert America by infiltrating a television network. Then, there was a book about a Hollywood actress with the sexual desire of a stevedore. There was an inspirational volume by a millionaire businessman. There were books about ways to make money on the stock market and to make yourself thin and happy forever, about how to be aggressive and how to be sensitive and how to get people to like you better. That’s what I need, he thought.

Gradually, he made his way to the back of the store, to the inevitable section marked Classics. Here, he dawdled a bit longer. He’d always wanted to study literature and still loved it, even if he’d actually been educated all those years back as a chemist. He examined Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment and the great Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Now, this was more like it! Then his fingers found the inevitable copy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, exactly the volume that every bookstore in America would be certain to keep on its shelves. His fingers touched the fat thing, rubbing it softly. He began to feel excited, and sent a quick nervous look around the store. It was full of shoppers, of course, but as an experienced watcher himself, he could see no visible signs of observation.

The ritual was exact: He would pick it up, turn to page 300 and there discover a very small piece of paper with one single number on it: 2 it might say, or perhaps 3. That was all.

To anyone else it would be meaningless. Only Gregor knew that it indicated he must leave the store, turn to the right — always the right — and begin to walk through the mall counting exits, and at the second or the third, leave the building.

Except that this time there was no slip.

Gregor stared in stupefaction. He felt the bell tolling for himself in his own head. His heart began to break. The air was suddenly hot and gassy. Pork Chop was such a pedant! Pork Chop never made mistakes! Pork Chop was slow, calm, steady, patient!

Gregor felt the panic come over him. Was he being set up? Was this some kind of ruse? A test? He swallowed harshly, feeling the book grow heavy in his hands. The damned thing weighed a ton.

“That’s a wonderful book,” a woman said to him. “I’ve read it six times.”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” said Gregor, staring absurdly at her. Was she an FBI agent? He swallowed, waiting for her to speak again. He wished he could breathe, or charge his wan and twisted smile with some spontaneity. She looked at him with searching eyes, an attractive but unremarkable American. It was as if she were about to speak.

But she merely smiled enigmatically as his heart pounded in his chest, and then walked away.

He looked down at the book; it was shaking in his trembling hands. He began to flip through the pages while looting his memory for clues. Had he made some stupid mistake? Was it another bookstore, another mall, another day? The possibilities raced by like the rushing seconds on a digital clock. He grew confused. His head ached.

Think, you idiot!

He knew he could not stand there holding the book until his beard grew and the world ended.

He rifled the pages as his mind imploded on him and … like the dart of a white bird, quick and furtive … a little piece of paper from somewhere in the five hundreds broke free from the volume and began to pirouette toward the earth. Gregor watched it flutter, dip, then land. He could read the message: it was a single integer—4.

Thank God, Pork Chop! You didn’t let me down!

His relief was radiant with bliss. His knees shuddered in pleasure. He took a deep suck of air, felt it flood into his lungs. He put the book back on the shelf, and turned very adroitly and walked out.

Light as a dancer, Gregor turned to the right, as the absolute rule of the code demanded. He continued to walk until he found the fourth exit on the right, and stepped out into the bright sunlight, which made him blink after the interior of the mall. The bitter chill attacked him also. He struggled with his sunglasses, then began to walk up the row of cars that was immediately in front of him as he clung to the right-hand margin of the sidewalk out of the mall.

He walked on through the crisp air, examining the cars in the row to his right. At last he noticed a plaid scarf crumpled in a rear window well.

In the summer it might have been a madras jacket or a picnic tablecloth or even, as it was once, a Scotch cooler: but always it was something plaid. And always the automobile was different, presumably something rented under a pseudonym. Pork Chop was very careful with details like this.

Gregor looked at the vessel of his deliverance. It was a Ford. The bright sun burned down and the clouds of his own raw breath floated majestically before him. He could feel the sweat inside his collar begin to freeze.

Yet he did not move forward; he could not. Something rapped in his chest. He could not deny that he was still extremely upset.

But he could not just stand there either; nothing attracts attention in America more than a man standing still in a parking lot. Parking lots are a thing one goes through on the way to the other destinations; no one’s destination in America is ever just a parking lot. So Gregor continued his walk until he was out of acres of cars and headed into the woods, another extremely bad idea.

He headed back.

Do it, he commanded. Time is flying.

He was shaking horribly. He forced himself to go to the car and peeked in. He could see the briefcase on the floor of the backseat on his side, its top unzipped.

Just open the door, fool, and do it.

Gregor went to the car. The rear door was unlocked, as usual. He put his hand on the handle, pressed the button, and—

But then he tried to remember back, two years ago, when his services to Pork Chop started and that moment of explanation. Specifically, he pawed through his memory to recall if it was part of his official instructions that the exit code be placed between pages 300 and 301, or if that was merely Pork Chop’s own personal signature, something the spy had begun doing on his own. As a long-time agent-runner, Gregor knew that agents all had signatures, little things that worked into the ritual of communication subconsciously so they were unique, a part of the subverbal language between themselves and their cutouts.

Gregor’s sense of unease grew palpable. It felt like a brass egg jammed in his windpipe. The professional part of him, the deep-cover operative in an enemy country, came bristlingly alive. But so did the coward. He wanted to weep. He felt his knees begin to knock. Pork Chop, why are you doing this to me? Have you grown sloppy, Pork Chop? Have you grown cunning, or greedy? It happened to agents all the time. Pork Chop, what is going on? He realized his vanity had betrayed him again; he’d allowed himself to love Pork Chop as the only steady constellation in his whirling cosmos. He was a hopeless neurotic, always falling for lovers who were fated to betray him! It was a pattern, and now Pork Chop was repeating it. Suddenly, he hated Pork Chop! Pork Chop was slime, offal, defecation! Pork Chop was …

In a blast of desperation, almost more to escape his problems than to master them, Gregor walked to the other side of the car, where the doors were locked. He looked around. There was no one coming, though far off he could see people walking to and from parked cars. He reached in his pocket, took out a Swiss army knife, and with a swift plunge jammed it through the rubber seal of window and leaned against it with all his strength. Nothing happened. He looked around, almost catatonic with fear. But though he could see others moving in the lot and cars patrolling for empty spaces, no one was near him and no car came his way. Once more he leaned heavily upon the handle of the knife, calling up all the strength that he had, pulling the strength from the well of his fear. Suddenly, he felt something give. He had managed somehow to jam the window down an inch. With a mighty shove he got it down another and another and … he realized now he could get his hand in.

He looked around again, nervously, stunned at what he had done. No, no one had yet seen him. Breathing hard — good Lord, he was going to have a heart attack! — he pushed his fat hand through the slot of the window, reached for the lock button, and with an — oof! almost, no, almost, yes! — got it open. Disengaging, he quickly opened the door. The smell of the new car rose to his nostrils, a rich American smell. He reached across the front seat and tugged at the briefcase and — it would not come! There seemed to be a bit of an impediment, as if he were pulling from the wrong angle, and Gregor gave a little tug and—

Gregor had a brief impression of an insect buzzing swiftly by his face, or perhaps it was more like the sudden swoop of a small, darting bird, an angry swallow or hummingbird flashing by, harmless but nevertheless confusing, disorienting, completely stunning, and then in the next second, even as these impressions accumulated, he heard the sound of a dense thunk, metallic and vivid with texture, and then the low hum of something shivering rapidly. Gregor stood back, stupefied, trying to make sense of it all. His heart began to thunder again. Quickly, he checked himself; he seemed all right and—

Then he saw, sunk into the car roof just a few inches beyond his eyes, something particularly bright and evil. It was the blade of a vicious fighting knife, smooth with oil and glinting in the light. Its top edge was savagely serrated, all the better for sawing through flesh, and, driven with enormous force, it had sunk nearly half its length into the car roof. What blade remained visible was a long, graceful shank of steel. At its base were two prongs; it appeared to have no grip at all.

Gregor recognized it immediately; it was the blade of a Spetsnaz ballistic knife, a weapon carried by the GRU’s Special Raiding Forces, his country’s equivalent of the American Green Berets or the British Special Air Service regiment. The blade was locked onto its hilt atop a powerful coiled spring; it could be used as a conventional fighting knife, but when a button of the crossguard was triggered, the spring sprang, and the blade was driven forward with enormous velocity, literally fired. It could kill silently at twenty-five meters and was a special assassination weapon not only of Spetsnaz but of KGB and all the Eastern bloc secret services, a favorite device of the masters of the mokrie dela, the wet job, at the KGB procedures school at Karlovy Vary, on the Black Sea. Gregor bent to the case and saw the gleaming metal of the hilt inside and a wire rigged from the trigger button in the crossguard through the case to the floor. It was designed so that when he picked the case up, it fired through the open mouth of the case.

He sat back. He realized that if he’d come through the unlocked door, the proper door, and had been leaning across the case as he tried to lift it, the blade would have speared him through the center chest; he would have been dead in seconds, choking on his own blood in the backseat of this little car.

Someone had planned his murder.

He vomited.

Then, very quickly, he began to walk away.

Poo Hummel said, “Mommy. Mommy. Airplanes!” She ran to the window, drawn by the roar of the low-flying craft. Herman, her guardian, watched her go, took a quick look at his watch.

So late, he thought.

I would have thought it would have been earlier. They are doing such a bad job of it.

“Poo, you be careful,” Beth Hummel screamed from her bedroom.

But Poo had her nose pressed against the glass, drawn by the noise, the spectacle of the big, slow ships zooming overhead toward the mountain.

Herman was next to her, with a hand on her shoulder.

“Herman, what are they doing?” Poo asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Herman. “They probably came to show off for all the children of the town, to make them happy and excited with their noise and to make the snow melt faster.”

“They look like scarecrows,” said Poo.

Herman wasn’t listening. Suddenly grave, he said, “Let’s go into the basement, all right, Poo? We’ll take your mommy and your sister into the basement and we’ll have a little party.”

But Poo had made the kind of connection of phenomena, intuitive but brilliant, with which children often astonish adults.

“Herman,” she asked, squinching up her eyes, “did the airplanes come for you?”

“No,” said Herman. But he knew men would, soon enough. And he knew what he was expected to do then.

“Herman, I like you,” said Poo as he lifted her up. She gave him a squeeze and a kiss.

“I like you too, Poo.”

You feel like you’re the king of creation in an A-10. You’re up front and the plane itself — wings, engines, rudders — is way back. You sit at the end of the long snout in a fishbowl wide and bright to the world and the only thing in your head-up display is a little rubbery smudge of nose. It’s really just you, slung out there. That’s why pilots like Leo Pell loved the ship; you really fly her, you’re really airborne, on the wind. It’s World War II stuff, Jugs and Bostons lowlevel over the hedgerows of occupied Europe.

“Delta Six, this is Papa Tango One, do you copy?” asked Major Pell in The Green Pig, leading Tango flight toward South Mountain, which rose like a glob of ice cream before him.

“Uh, roger, I copy, Papa Tango One,” came the response in his earphones from his forward air controller, on the ground with Delta.

“You want us to rough up this old mountain, Delta Six?” asked Pell.

“That’s a big rog,” said the FAC. “Twenty mike-mike only.”

“Uh, I got that, Delta, and we’re only packing twenty mike-mike. Papa Tango to Tango Flight, let’s arm guns, boys.”

Pell’s finger snaked off his stick to his armament control panel on the left lower quadrant of his instrument board; he hit a switch and the red gun ready light went on up at the top of the panel. His hand back on the stick, his thumb grazed the little nipple, red and lively, beneath it.

His plane felt giddy, alive, teenaged. Pig was lighter than a dream today because she didn’t have the usual wingload of external stores for air support jobs and wouldn’t even be firing her heavy 30-mm gun that ran through the center of the fuselage. Instead, she wore the two gun pods under her wings that Leo and his boys had labored so furiously to mount up.

“Papa Tango, Delta Six, do you copy?”

I copy.

“Leo, you all clear on targeting?”

“Hey, Delta, I read you loud and clear.”

“Leo, they tell me there’s some kind of tarpaulin or something on top of the mountain and some breastworks or trenches or something right at its edges. You want to put your ordnance into the trenches, you got that?”

“Map coordinates bravo zero niner, Delta, I read you, and I’ve got the map on my knee and I have visually acquired the target.”

“You may commence your run anytime, then, Papa Tango.”

“I read you, Delta. Tango Flight, time to party. On my mark, Tango Flight, five-second bursts at max altitude 3200, do you read?”

“With you, flight leader,” came a stereo of replies.

Then the smart-ass Tarnower. “Wahoo, Leo, let’s do this sucker up good.”

“Watch the chatter on the air, Tango Two,” said Leo, a stickler for combat protocol. But he himself felt the exultation. The mountain, white as a sugarloaf, was quite near now, and below it all the patchwork of Maryland spread out like a pale geometry problem of infinite detail, cross-hatched cornfields, clumps of black-broccoli trees, silvery roads.

He took a deep breath and slid from formation like a gull, feeling — even through the network of strapping, the constriction of the flight suit, the heaviness of the helmet — the swooshing, stomach-feathering sense of gravity releasing its hold. Down the plane slid, down, down, on a line like a baseball fired toward home. He flew straight and level, taking no evasive action, confident that his bus could not be budged from the air and that his butt could not be peppered by small arms, because he sat, actually, inside a titanium bathtub configured into the cockpit. Leo’s sensations speeded up immensely. He had fired many times before and in ’Nam he’d fired live at gooks in his T-28 with six 50s. But twenty mike-mike against real bogies fifteen minutes out of home without even having to go to war with Russia to bring it off! Goddamn, and wahoo yourself, Tango Two.

In his head-up display, a sheet of Plexiglas on which the complex deflective computations for nailing a scudding T-72 were projected, the targeting angle solved neat as a bow tie, Leo saw just mountain against the floating neon circles of his gunsight. He had no trouble bringing the two circles together and holding the mountain in them. He could see the brown patch of canvas or whatever, looking like an OD handkerchief on the mountaintop, and there appeared to be some movement in the trench at its edge. His blood sang in his ears. The mountain grew before him. He checked his angle of attack indicator and discovered himself sailing in at thirty degrees, just right, just the way the books said to do it.

Leo touched the gun nipple.

He loved this part best. The twenty mike-mikes shuddered under him, their seven barrels whirling in their pods under the fuselage like threshing machines. He saw the tracers float out before him, fall away, disappear into the mountain. Where they fell, they destroyed. It was awesome, godlike. The snow rose in a cyclone of disturbance as the burst leapt across the tarp and at the trench.

Leo fired for five seconds until the mountain was real as a nightmare before him. He pulled up, hearing in his headphones a litany of destruction as the other elements in the flight placed their bursts in the target zone.

But then:

“Goddamn, Tango Leader, I have a goddamn missile lock-on.”

It was Tango Four, Leo could tell, his voice broken with fear.

“Go to ECM, Tango Four, dispense your chaff and evade, evade—”

Leo heard the explosion.

“Ah, fuck, he, fuck, he got me, goddamn, filling with, goddamn, smoke, ah, shit—”

“Flame out your bad engine, son,” Leo said, “and ride it down, Tango Four, you’re okay.”

Leo turned his head back as he climbed and turned, and saw his flight spread out behind him as the mountain shrank to a lump. Tango Four pulled from the parade of ships, pulling out, its left-side General Electric bleaching the day of color with white fire. It began to slide downward.

“Ride it down, Tango Four, you can pull an abort in a farmyard, plenty of parking places down there—” Leo argued, a sane voice in a crazy world.

“She’s going to blow,” said Tango Four, “and I’m ejecting.”

“Negative, Four, you haven’t the alti—”

But it was too late. Tango Four panicked and ejected at an altitude of four hundred feet. His chute was only half open when he hit the ground. The big plane hit just ahead of him, detonating in a huge smear of fire.

“All right, Tango Flight, let’s get it together,” Leo said to dead silence on the horn. “Goddammit, Delta Six, where’d that fucking SAM come from? Who the fuck are these guys?”

“Tango, we had no idea they had SAM capability. Shit, it looked like a Stinger.”

The Stinger was very bad news. Designated the FIM-92A, it could reach speeds of Mach 2.2 and used proportional navigation and passive infrared homing to engage high speed, extremely maneuverable targets from just about any angle, out to a range of 3.5 miles. It was also highly resistant to electrocountermeasure jamming. It was a bitch. Nobody wanted to go into Stinger country.

“Goddamn,” said a Tango flyer, “Goddamn, Leo, I got a bad hydraulic light on, I’m pulling out.”

“That’s a big negative,” said Leo, “we got some business to finish. Delta Six, you want us to hit it again?”

A new voice came on the net.

“Uh, Tango, Golonel Puller here, that’s an affirmative to the max, you got that? We’ve got some kids about to jump off against the position, and they need all the help they can get.”

“Leo, this goddamn hydraulic is—”

“Off the air, Tango Seven, do you copy. Off the goddamned air!”

Leo led the flight around in a twelve-mile left-hand circle for a second run. The mountain grew before him.

“All right, Tango Flight,” he ordered, “we’re going in in two elements, I’ll take the first element, the two and three ships. We’ll come in north to south, say at 2200, evasive action, electrocountermeasures. I’ll dump some flares if they send the Stingers up. Captain Tarnower, you take the second element, the six, seven, and eight ships, from east to west. Okay, on my mark divide. Let’s mark it, guys, and now.”

Leo pulled from the formation, dipped to the earth, seeing in his rear mirror that three of his six remaining ships stayed with him, while Tarnower, in the Tango Five ship, banked right, taking two birds in behind him.

Who the fuck are these guys? Leo was thinking. Where the hell did they get Stingers?

“Let’s shake it, Tango Flight,” he ordered.

“Flight leader sounds solid,” said Puller to the FAC. They could see the dark ships splitting into two formations, rolling apart from each other and getting down to an assault altitude.

“Leo’s the best,” said the FAC. “Humps tourists for Continental. But damn, he likes that Green Pig.”

Around them, the Delta commandos stood watching the show. The drifting tendril of smoke from Tango Four’s crash inscribed a crazy line against the bright blue sky.

Puller blinked. His head ached, all the noise from the jets. He looked at his watch—1442. He could see the National Guard trucks pulled off about halfway up the hill, where Aggressor Force had blown the road and had made out some activity through his binoculars as the officers got the men out and into some kind of attack formation.

“They’re going in again, sir,” said Skazy.

“Lookin’ good, lookin’ real good, Tango Flight,” the FAC said into his microphone.

The planes hit the mountain from two directions, one flight then the other. When they fired, Fuller could see the empty cannon shells cascade from their pods in a fur of smoke. The tracers plunged from under the fuselage like darts. Where they fell against the mountain they ripped it.

But something was wrong.

“They’re firing much longer,” said Fuller. “Goddammit, they’re firing much longer.”

The FAC said, “Uh, I think some of the guys are really pouring it on.”

“Bullshit,” said Puller, “they’re just hosepiping their ammo away so they don’t have to go back.”

He grabbed the mike away from the FAC.

“Tango Flight, Delta Six here, goddammit, you men, slow your fire down, you’re wasting rounds on nothing.”

“Tango Flight, this is Tango Leader, you guys conserve your ammo, you hear. Goddammit.”

“Leo, I’m dry,” a voice came.

“Six, you pumped most of your shit into Washington County, goddammit, I saw—”

“Missiles,” said Skazy on the ground. “They’ve fired more missiles.”

“Heatseekers,” said the FAC.

The missiles, leaking thin streaks of white gas, went like fast dogs for the planes, which themselves began to fantail and scud, breaking this way and that as the missiles hunted them. They broke from their formation like the petals of an immense rose unfolding over the white mountain. Most of the missiles failed to lock on, whirling off until they burned through their few seconds of fuel, at which point their contrails disappeared and they fell to earth. But—

“Missile lock-on, goddamn, missile lock-on!” came the scream over the radio. A missile hit an A-10 engine with a thud heard on the ground, and dissolved it in a burst of light; the plane wobbled; a second missile, seeking the larger heat signature of the burning power plant, plunged into it, and the plane fell from the sky dead.

“Goddamn, I’ve got no controls, nothing’s respon—”

The sentence ended in a cornfield.

“Leo, I’m down to zero lead,” came the call.

“Leo, my hydraulics are shot. They put some shit into my wings.”

“Leo, my controls are all mushy.”

“Tango Flight, you stay on station,” said Leo Pell.

“What’s your ammo?” Puller demanded over the radio.

“Sir, I’m all dry,” came the response.

“Delta Six, this is Tango Leader. I’ve got about seven seconds left. I’ll go in again. Tango Flight, form up on Captain Tarnower and head for home.”

“Leo,” said the FAC, “you can’t go in there alone.”

“Hey, I’ve got seven seconds of rock and roll left, you think I’m going to park this pig with it?”

“Jesus,” said the FAC to Puller. “If he’s got the only signature in the sky, their heatseekers will nail his butt sure. Those were Stingers, too, the best. Where the hell they get Stingers?”

Puller didn’t answer.

“What’s his name again?”

“Leo Pell.”

“Major Pell, this is Colonel Puller, do you copy?”

“I copy, Delta Six.”

“I am advised you have a low to zero survival probability.”

“I came to dance, Colonel, not to sit.”

“Good luck, then, Tango Leader.”

Okay now, it was just Leo Pell and the mountain. He wasn’t worried about the small-arms stuff, though a spider web jinked his bubble where a LMG round had popped through at about ten o’clock, because he was sitting in his titanium bathtub, carrying self-sealing tanks, and had plenty of redundancy in his control systems. And he wasn’t worried about delivering his packages. Going in wasn’t the problem, even if you could see the tracers floating up to swat you. You were okay going in because your exhaust was behind you and their heatseekers wouldn’t see it to read it and chase it. You were okay until you showed them your hot ass.

When you passed the crest, you were wide open. You were like a bitch in heat and the missiles, like stud hounds, came up after you with one thing on their mind. They wanted you up the ass, that’s all there was for them.

So Leo, who wanted to live almost as much as he wanted the sheer gut-thumping joy of pumping twenty mike-mike into the mountain, resolved to juke in like a rock ‘n’ roll melody, up and down and down and up, straighten out for his seven seconds of deliverance, then cut hard to the left, dive for the deck, keep his engines astern from the mountain as much as possible, and just maybe Aggressor Force might not punch him out.

The mountain was fat as a tit in a centerfold. Leo began to evade. He pumped his rudder pedals, he diddled his decelerons, and he rode his stick. His ship, Green Fig, dipped and skidded through the air in a flight pattern that was more like a controlled catastrophe than a conscious design. And in his harness Leo felt the plane’s moves to the pit of his stomach and to his heart, which seemed to have gone on vacation for this last long ride.

Meanwhile, blobs of color floated up to smash him. He felt as if he were going down the drain of a brightly lit bubble bath. Strange radiances, odd visions, nightmares, fantasies, dope hallucinations, fever dreams, all floated by. There was a queer underwater quality to it, aquamarine and pastel, everything wonderfully graceful and stately. His plane bumped when hit; they were hitting the Fig pretty regularly now, all the guns on the mountain having their way with her.

He felt air suddenly as a stitchwork of holes sparked through the bubble just over his head; something like a firecracker went off in the cockpit. His left arm went numb. His mirror blew off. Smoke, acrid and rancid, began to fill the cockpit. Didn’t they know the No Smoking sign was lit?

“Tango Leader, watch yourself, lookin’ good, lookin’ real good,” FAC was saying.

Okay now, Leo thought, get in real close, blow those motherfuckers away, hurt ’em, hurt ’em bad now.

Leo saw the mountaintop lined up in the floating circles of his head-up display. The trees were alive with fire and light and commotion. He checked his airspeed, 220, his altitude, 1,450, his angle of attack, 37, the onrushing hump, corrected his deflection just a touch, and it was gun time.

He hit the nipple.

The guns spent themselves in seven long seconds. The twenty mike-mike bursts flicked out like flung pebbles and splashed into the huge sheet of canvas. He had no idea if he was doing any damage at all; he just watched the tracers sink into it.

The crest flashed by and the last few shells flew out into Maryland. Leo cut his throttle, hit his left rudder pedal, banged his decelerons, dipped his nose, and began to dive for the deck and bank at the same moment as his right ailerons cranked up. Something white and mad flashed by as one missile missed, followed in a second by another. No lock-ons yet. A third burned past him from underneath.

He felt cold air again, more of it. The bubble around him seemed to liquify into smaller bubbles, until finally it was a cascade of glittering diamonds. Smoke rose from beneath him, everywhere. The controls were a mess. The stick had turned into a delinquent child, a horrible son with a mind of his own and no respect for poor old Dad. Leo could see no sky, but only Maryland, the Free State, big and white, reaching up to absorb him.

The plane hit in a wild blur of thrown snow and earth, and for an instant there was no fire and then there was nothing but fire, fire everywhere, fire forever. The fire rose like a ritual offering. Smoke peeled away from it, fanning in the breeze.

“Shit,” said the FAC stupidly. “Goddammit. What I want to know is, who are those guys? Where’d they get Stingers? What are they, the U.S. Army?”

“We don’t know who they are. Kids?” asked Puller.

“What?”

“Kids, did he have kids?”

“Ah, he had a lot of kids. Five, six, I don’t know. Six of ’em, I think. Goddamn, Leo Pell dead, I can’t believe it!”

“The good ones always have kids, for some reason,” Puller said. “I don’t know why, I’ve never figured it out, but the real good ones always leave a mess of kids.”

He turned to Skazy, murder in his eyes.

“Beep the Guard,” he said. “Get ’em moving.”