The Day Before Midnight (21 page)

“Phase four nuclear emergency. We’re working for them now, not the Governor. If they say we go, we go. Ours not to etc., etc. Look, the head guy told me those planes laid so much hurt on our friends up the bill, our big problem was going to be matching up body parts. So let’s get humping, huh, guys?”

“Lock and load?”

“Lock and load ’cm up, righto,” sang Barnard. “Full ammo, get the clips into the weapons, get the weapons unslung, have the guys open their clip pouches so they can reload on the double if there’s any kind of a fight and please, puh-lease, tell the boys to be careful. Semiauto. I don’t want any hotshot shooting his foot off.”

Grumblingly, his people started out.

Barnard went back to the radio, a little more confident because his officers and NCOs had obeyed. Around him he could hear them yelling, the men beefing, but, yes, everybody was filing off into the woods.

“Delta Six, this is Bravo, we are deployed and ready to jump.”

“Good work, Captain. Now, you’ve got 60s, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want your 60s in play earliest. We found out in ’Nam it helps the men if their own fire support is emplaced before they move.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the medics circulating behind the assault line, Don’t let ’em cluster together, get ’em into the open. The men like to see the medics. It’ll help them.”

“Yes, sir,”

“Major, finally, this is important. Don’t wait to take fire. Get your fire support going just as you cross that LD, do you read? I want to hear some noise. If any of these gooks are left alive, I want your boys to blow ’em away as they’re coming up the hill. Plenty of ammo. Okay. You copy?”

“I copy, Delta Six.”

“Okay, son,” Dick cooed. “One last thing. Keep the assault line up and moving forward. Don’t let the men hit the dirt and get pinned down. Keep up a heavy, steady volume of
effective fire. And keep that fire low—ricochets kill just as dead as Charlie incoming.”

“Yes, sir,” said Barnard.

He turned to his RTO man.

“Wally, you stay near me, okay?”

“Yes, sir. No sweat.”

“That’s our unit motto,” said Barnard. “No sweat.”

He picked up his own M-16, drew a thirty-round magazine from his pouch, and clicked it into the magazine housing. Up ahead, he could see the trees and he could see his own men spread out through them. It was a bright, white day, the sun on the trees so brilliant it hurt his eyes. The sky was blue as a dream.

Jesus, he thought, I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m a tax accountant. I ought to be sitting at my desk.

“Okay,” he said to his executive officer, “Let’s move ’em out.” The line sounded too John Wayne to be real.

The flame was a silver needle, a blade almost. What it touched, it destroyed. Even through the thick black lenses and amid the showering sparks he could see that its power was absolute. It turned the world to a puddle.

Jack Hummel held the plasma-arc torch against the metal and watched the flame devour the titanium. Down here in the hole the world was serene and logical. He had a job to do, one he knew and almost loved, one he had done many, many times before. It was, after all, only cutting. He had, by this time, opened a deep wound in the smooth block of metal.

But at the same time, and despite the mesmerizing, messianic quality of the flame a few inches beyond his eyes, it was hard to concentrate. It was all so strange, and Jack had the terrible knowledge that he was doing something wrong. He should have fought harder. He should have made them beat him.

But he kept thinking, it wasn’t my fault. It happened so fast. It was … it was hard, you know. You’re in a no-win situation.

And he kept thinking how the world required heroes,
but instead, it had gotten only him, Jack Hummel, podunk welder and former high school glory boy who had the guts of a rat. He began to hate himself.

You fucking scum, he said to himself.

But he knew they’d kill him and kill his kids. What difference did it make if the world got blown up then?

Barnard was amazed, really, at how well it seemed to be going. The guys were handling it like a wild game of cowboys and Indians, racing through the tree stumps, pawing up the slope in their platoon-abreast formation, keeping good contact with each other, John Wayneing it with the best of them. Even the machine-gun crews, with their twenty-three-pound M-60s and their forty to fifty pounds of ammo belts were keeping up, whereas in the exercises the gunners had tended to fall way back while the younger men gamboled ahead, fleet as deer.

Barnard had picked a tree about fifty yards ahead as his last line of departure; he’d fire there. He could see the crest now, the white-and-red striping of the radio mast against the blue sky, and some kind of low, dark tent just barely visible, but everything else was quiet. The trees had been chopped up by the A-10s; it was like hustling through an exploded toothpick factory over rough ground where the twenty-millimeter shells had plowed the earth. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”

“Delta, I have no contact yet. It’s all quiet. Maybe they left or something.”

“Get your assault support fire going, Bravo.”

“I thought I’d wait just—”

“Get it going, Bravo, that’s a command.”

“Affirmative, Delta,” said Barnard, handing the phone mike back to his RTO.

“Open fire!” he screamed.

Along the lumbering line, the Guardsmen began to hip-shoot their M-16s, jinking out rounds in semiautomatic. Up ahead, Barnard saw, the snow was beginning to fly where the torrent of 5.56-millimeter bullets popped into the earth.

“Go,” he screamed again, “come on, goddammit, hurry.”

His sergeants took up the cry and the volume of fire increased as the men syncopated their shots to their own rushing footsteps. So full of the blood-thinning joy and terror of the moment as they were, they began also to scream. The noise rose, unwilled, from their lungs. It was a moment of glory: the rush of the screaming infantry against the white hill under the blue sky, the punctuation of the rifles, and now the higher, faster whipping of the M-60s anchoring either end of the line, really pouring out the fire, raking what was visible of the hilltop less than a hundred yards ahead now as they—

Alex shot the officer in the throat from about two hundred meters with a scoped G-3; he’d been aiming for the head but the captain, bumbling along beside his RTO man just off the assault line, must have stepped on a log or something and so he rose in the scope just as Alex’s patient finger carefully stroked the trigger.

But it was still the shot he’d been waiting for.

You want to take down the senior commander at the first opportunity, Alex knew; nothing quite so devastates an attacking force than to see the man they’ve bonded to over the long years slide backward with his head blown away. And Alex had picked him out almost immediately as the attackers broke from the cover of the trees.

The unit began to fire. He could see them going down.

Because the wound that Alex delivered was not quite what Alex had intended, the bullet missed the brain and tore through the muscles and cartilage to the left of the larynx, and, since it was a full metal jacket in 7.62-millimeter NATO, didn’t mushroom and didn’t deliver a killing blast of hydrostatic shock, but rather exited neatly. The captain felt as if he’d been whacked in the throat with a baseball bat; the world went instantly to pieces as he fell backward into the snow. In seconds, however, his head had cleared, and his first thought was not for himself but for his men. He could see many of them were down and that the tracers floated out
toward them like confetti thrown at a parade of triumph. The air seemed alive with buzzing, cracking things.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sir, Christ, Captain, oh, fuck,
Captain”
came some terrible moaning next to him. His RTO man had been shot in the stomach.

“Medic!” screamed Barnard.

A burst of fire, kicking up snow and bits of wood, lashed by him. He scrunched into the earth. His left side felt numb; his head hurt terribly. He rolled over, fighting for breath.

“Captain, Captain, what do we do?” somebody yelled.

Alex only had two heavy automatic weapons, the M-60 from the van and the H&K-21, but he knew he had to break the assault’s spine in the very first second or fall victim to a messy perimeter fight that would sap the energy of his men.

He’d therefore placed the two guns together in the center of his line, thereby, of course, violating all infantry doctrine, because a single grenade or even a well-placed burst of fire could destroy them both. He’d also directed that several two-hundred-round belts be ripped from their canisters and linked, so that they could fire continually without reloading for one full minute. This meant the barrels overheated dangerously; thus, stationed next to each barrel there crouched a trooper with—an astonishing improvisation, come to think of it—a fire extinguisher from the ruins of the installation. As the guns fired, these men squirted cold carbon dioxide onto the barrels and works.

The guns fired for one minute, one solid minute of full automatic. It didn’t really matter, Alex believed, how accurate they were; what was important was the volume of fire and the impression of endless ammunition hurtling at the attackers. Still, they were very accurate.

“Bravo, this is Delta Six. This is Delta Six, do you copy? Bravo, what is your situation? We can hear heavy fire. What is your situation? Bravo, don’t let your men bunch up, keep them moving. Act aggressively, Bravo, you’ve got to act aggressively.” Puller gripped the phone. He was aware he was violating his own most precious principle, which was not
to interfere with ground forces during maneuver, knowing from bitter experience at Desert One that a staff commander on the radio merely screwed things up. But the sound of the fire from the mountain was heavy and terrifying.

“I think you’re talking to a dead man, Colonel,” said Skazy.

Down at the girl scout camp they could hear the gunfire rising from the mountain for a long minute. Then it stopped, and there was silence. Then, now and then, the pop and crack of a single rifle, or a burst of automatic fire.

“Return their fire, goddammit,” Barnard yelled back, coming out of his shock. Anger, confusion, finally bitterness, began to gnaw at him. He groped around for his M-16, found it, and rolled over. Other shots were beginning to rise from his troops. At least we’re answering them, goddammit, he thought.

So where was the great Delta? Back on its ass down the mountain! All this shit about Delta in the magazines, and Delta sits on its ass while Bravo Company of the 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, gets ripped to ribbons.

Barnard got his black plastic rifle up against his shoulder. Squinting over the sights, he could see the gun flashes from Aggressor Force, yet he felt in no particular danger. Languidly, he began to fire, jerking off rounds one, two, three at a time. The rifle had very little kick. He fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another one. After a while it seemed a little stupid.

“Captain!”

Someone slid into the snow next to him. It was a Lieutenant Dill from the second platoon, a phys ed teacher at a Baltimore high school.

“Captain Barnard, I have a lot of hurt men, a lot of dying men. Jesus, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The captain just looked at him.

“God, sir, are you—you’re all covered with blood!
Medic
, get over here.”

“No, no,” said the captain. “I’m not hurt that bad. Look,
if we just pull back they’ll chop us up. I’m going to slide over to where the machine gun should be and see if I can’t set up some covering fire, okay. You wait a minute or two; when I get the fire going, you get the men out of here. Don’t leave anybody behind, Lieutenant!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the men firing. If they’re not firing, they’re not helping.”

Barnard began to crawl through the snow. Now and then a bullet would come whipping in his direction. But he made it down the line and found his company’s machine gun, lying on its side half sunk in the snow, a loose belt nearby and a batch of dead shells lying around. He recognized his gunner, a steelworker; half his face was gone where a heavy-caliber bullet had punched through.

The captain wiggled forward through the snow, breathing hard. God, it was cold now. He seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he was so wet with the snow that he’d begun to go numb. Pulling the gun to him, he managed with his stiff, fat fingers to get the latch off the breech and get a belt unrolled, and set the lead cartridge into the guides. He slammed the latch shut and drew back the bolt.

“Movement?” Alex asked his gunners.

A bullet hit the logs before them, kicked up a cloud of smoke.

“On the left; there’s a group on the left.”

The gunner swung the H&K-21. Indeed, a wretched huddle of men appeared to be crawling forward. Or perhaps not crawling forward, but merely crawling anywhere, forward being the direction they’d settled on.

“Yes, there”—Alex pointed—“take them down, please.”

The gun fired a long burst and Alex watched as the tracers flicked out and seemed to sink toward the men. Where they struck they kicked up snow and the men disappeared in its swirl.

“Some in the center,” somebody said. “However, I think they’re retreating.”

“You have to fire anyway,” said Alex. “It will give the next assault team something to think about.”

The H&K-21 fired briefly; more tracers streamed down the mountain, found their targets.

“Rather horrible,” said one of the loaders.

“Not a good attack,” said Alex. “I don’t think these are elite troops I’d anticipated. I think they were amateurs. Casualties?”

“Sir, two men dead in the covering fire and three wounded.”

“Well,” said Alex. “They did do
some
damage then. And ammunition. We used a lot of ammunition in a very short time. That, too, I suppose, hurts us. But it cost them so much. I didn’t think it was their style, to die like that.”

The captain drew the gun to him. He couldn’t see much now, just barbed wire, some smoke, the aerial, the damned tent, and lots of high blue sky above.