The Day Before Midnight (18 page)

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.