The Day Before Midnight (14 page)

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.

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!”