The Day Before Midnight (16 page)

“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.