The Day Before Midnight (36 page)

Walls wept for their effort and guts. White boys in a tunnel, digging for their lives. Tunnel men, like he was. Hey, man, dyin’ underground no way to die, Walls knew, having seen enough of it himself in his time.

But why are they rotting now?

Walls worked his mind against it and then he had it. Of course. They’d been sealed off in airless, germless protection down here for their long half-century, and without air, there is no rot. They had quietly mummified, turning to leather and sinew, perhaps even refrigerated by the coolness. But then—he struggled to remember the details as they had been explained to him—the hole had been left open for years and years and finally, last summer, when they excavated for the missile shaft, it had rained even more, and the rain had poured into the open mountain and eaten its way down through the coal, and eventually reached and punctured this coffin. And when it violated the grave, it admitted grave robbers, the millions of germy little creatures that turned flesh to horror.

Git your ass going, boy!

Walls had entered the main tunnel now, where the rest of the miners were. His light flashed upon them. The ceiling was low. Walls tried not to imagine it but he could not avoid it: thinking of them trapped down here in the dank dark, feeling the air ebb in slow degrees, waiting for a rescue that wouldn’t—couldn’t—come.

He walked forward, bumped his head, crouched, walked forward some more. He felt the cool pressure of air, and had a bad moment as he imagined his lungs filling with microscopic maggoty things, with the wormy crawlers and creepers that scuttled through the flesh. He felt very close to panic,
even he, Walls, the hardest, meanest, baddest tunnel dick of all time, and not a slouch of a street player either, thank you, ma’am. Maybe this was the worst moment for him: standing among the corpses, no place to go, it seemed, but to join them. He saw an image of himself, a ragged, mealy hunk of rot spangling a few old African bones. Years later white people would come and hold up a Walls drumstick and with great distaste say, “Good Lord, Ralph, this fellow’s limbs are so darned much thicker than the others; why, he must have been a colored man!” But then Walls got hold of himself, yessir, saying it over and over, black and
proud!
black and
proud!
and the panic flapped out of his chest and found some other chest to fill somewhere in the world: old Walls was back.

No stiffs going to get the best of this nigger, no,
sir!

This boy goin’
live.
Jack, don’t you know?

Walls crawled forward, feeling. He didn’t need his lamp now, he didn’t need nothing. He flicked it off. He loved the darkness. He was the man of darkness. He was home in the darkness; it was his natural element. He had this tunnel
beat.
This motherfucker was his, its ass belong to
him.

In the dark his fingers reached out. He was alone with the dead but no longer afraid.

Then he saw the light. Milky, luminous, faraway, but light nonetheless.

Okay, motherfucker, he thought.

The breeze continued to blow, and he was surprised at how strong and sweet it smelled. He crawled over bodies, feeling them crumble beneath him. They couldn’t harm him, they were only the dead.

He came to it at last. Air poured down from the hole in the roof. He looked up. There was the light, far away, a long life’s upward chimney crawl or squirm. But light. The light at the end of the—whatever.

Okay, Jack, he thought. Here comes Walls.

He wrapped his friend and companion Mr. Twelve tightly to him, and began his journey toward the light.

It was a chasm by now, a tunnel into the heart of the metal.

“Mr. Hummel?”

“Yes, sir?”

“How much farther?”

“Last time I measured, I’d gone one hundred twenty-five centimeters. That puts us maybe ten or fifteen away.”

“Time, please.”

“Oh, say three, four hours. Midnight. We get there at midnight.”

“Excellent. And then we can all go home.”

He’d been cutting for hours now, and the ache in his arms from the awkwardness of holding the torch deep in the guts of the titanium block was terrific. Yet he was proud, in a terrible way. Lots of guys couldn’t have done what he’d done. He’d done a beautiful job, clean and elegant and precise. He’d just quit bitching and gotten it done. But he was still scared.

“The Army. It’s up top, trying to break in, isn’t it?”

“It is, Mr. Hummel.”

“What happens to me when those guys kick the doors down and start shooting?”

“They can’t get down here.”

“They’ll figure out a way. They’re smart guys.”

“Nobody is that smart.”

“Who are you guys? Tell me, at least.”

“Patriots.”

“I know enough to know all soldiers think they’re patriots.”

“No, most soldiers are cynics. We are the true thing.”

“But if you shoot this thing off,
everybody
will die. Because the Russians will shoot off theirs, they’ll shoot off everything they’ve got, and
everybody
dies!”

It scared him to defy the man. But it just blubbered out.

The general smiled with kind radiance.

“Mr. Hummel, I could never permit a full-scale nuclear exchange. You’re right, that would be the end of the planet. Do you think I could convince all these men to come with me on this desperate mission only to end the world?”

Jack just looked at him and had no answer.

“You see, Mr. Hummel, war doesn’t make sense if everybody loses, does it? But if we can
win?
What then? Then,
isn’t it the moral responsibility of a professional soldier to take advantage of the situation? Isn’t that where the higher duty lies? Doesn’t that save the world rather than doom it? Millions die; better that, over the long run, than billions! Better a dead country than a dead world? Especially if the millions are in the enemy’s country, eh?”

The man’s eyes, beaming belief and conviction, radiated passion and craziness. It frightened Jack. He swallowed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I assure you, Mr. Hummel, I do. Now, please, the flame.”

Jack put the flame in the hole. He had a feeling of terrible guilt.

“We’re done,” announced the engineer sergeant.

“At last,” shouted Alex. “God, you men have worked so hard. Get the tarpaulin pulled back.”

With grunting and heaving the men of the Red Platoon pulled back and discarded the heavy sheets of canvas that had obscured their work.

In the darkness Alex couldn’t see much, but he knew what was there.

“They’ll never get through that,” he said. “We should know, eh? We learned the hard way?”

“Yes, sir,” said the engineer sergeant.

The air was crisp and cold and above them the stars towered, spinning firewheels, clouds of distant cosmic gas. All around it was quiet, except for the press of the breeze through the trees and the occasional mumble or shiver of a man in the dark.

“And just in time
too,”
Alex said. “They’ll be coining soon, and in force.”

“No signs yet?”

“No, it’s all quiet down there. They brought some trucks up a few minutes back.”

“Reinforcements,” somebody said. “We hurt them bad, they needed more men.”

“Sir!”

The call arose from a dozen places on the perimeter.
Alex turned with his binoculars, even as he heard the roar. At first he could see nothing, but then someone screamed, “The road! The road!”

He lifted his binoculars and watched, and even at this distance could make out the spectacle. A plane came down and even though it was only a phenomenon of landing lights, glowing cockpit, and blinkers at the wingtips, it seemed heavy in the air as it floated awkwardly down, touched the straight-running line of the highway, bounced once, twice, skidded a bit as a braking chute popped, and then slowed.

“C-130,” Alex said.

The plane eventually halted to let out its men; then it simply taxied off the roadway and into the fields, where it fell brokenly into a ditch to make room for another plane, which in seconds followed the same drunken path downward to the highway. Then another, and finally a fourth.

“Very neat,” said Alex. “Nicely done. Good pilots, brave men, landing on a roadway.”

“More visitors?” said one of the others.

“Elite troops. Rangers, I suppose. Well, well, it’s going to be an interesting next few hours.”

He looked at his watch. Midnight was coming. But would it come soon enough?

There wasn’t much to it, really: Dick Puller was a great believer in simplicity and firepower, not ornamentation and cleverness. What he’d come up with seemed like something out of World War II, say, the Pointe du Hoc assault at Normandy, a Ranger legend.

Here, as there, the Rangers would carry the primary site assault responsibility, moving over the same ground as Bravo earlier in the day. There were more of them, and they were much more proficient. Their commanding officer, ah old Puller buddy, had already dispatched the men directly from the planes to the mountain. They were already moving up the hill. They would be supported on the right by Third Infantry, which with its longer-range M-14s would provide accurate covering fire, before moving in after the Rangers had reached the perimeter. On the radio the Rangers would be Halfback, Third Infantry Beanstalk.

“Lieutenant Dill?”

“sir?”

“Dill, congrats. You and your people get to sit this one out. I want you on the left, separated from the main assault force, as high up the crest as you can get. Point being, we may need stretcher bearers if casualties are high, we may need runners if these guys can jam our radios, and we may need the extra firepower if they’re pressed and try to break down the hill in your direction. I make it map coordinates Lima-niner-deuce, have you got that? You can find that point in the dark?”

“Got it,” said Dill, trying to keep the elation out of his voice.

Meanwhile, Puller continued, the Delta Assault Team, the actual shaft-busters whose job it was to rappel down the elevator chute, break into the corridor, fight their way to the launch control center, and disable it, would be choppered in when the launch control facility was taken. Along with them would be Peter himself, ready
to
do battle (he hoped) with his nemesis, the door.

“Any luck on the door, Dr. Thiokol?”

Peter smiled wretchedly. His tweed coat was rumpled, and sweat soaked through his dense blue shirt. The white delta of his T-shirt showed in his open collar.

“I’m working on it,” he said, too brightly. “Confidence is high.”

The party would start at 2200 hours, Puller continued, as the various units continued to move into position until that time. Peter had told them that given the key vault’s construction, the earliest the people inside could get through it was midnight.

“You’re sure of that?” Puller asked for what must have been the millionth time.

Yes, he was. It was the only thing he was sure of. Peter nodded.

Puller turned to the group.

“Any questions?”

“What’s the go code?” somebody asked.

“We go on ‘Heaven is falling.’ From an old poem. Got it? ‘Heaven
is
falling.’”

An officer wanted to know about medical evacuation; he was told that the Delta insertion choppers would double as medevac ships, but they wouldn’t be active until after the insertion.

Tac Air?

Two of the Delta choppers had been fitted with Emerson mini-tats, that is, rotary-barreled 7.62-mm General Electric miniguns on carriages that looked like a 1934 Johnson outboard motor and hung beneath the skids. In the early moments of the assault, these ships, call-signed Sixgun-One and
Sixgun-two, would he available to provide suppressive fire on enemy strong points. But since there was a premium on the choppers, they wouldn’t close within one thousand feet of the targets and their target-time would never be more than twenty-five seconds, because of the Stingers, a devastating SAM, as demonstrated earlier.

“We lose more than two helicopters, then we have trouble getting all our Delta people in there in time,” Puller said. “It’s like the Iranian rescue mission. We need X number of birds to get the job done and there’s not a lot of redundancy in all this. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. You’ll lose some people because we can’t get ’em medevacked out and you’ll lose some people because our air support isn’t top rate, but the alternative is to wait until more stuff can arrive. And that’s no alternative. We go with everything we’ve got.”

“Everything?” somebody wanted to know.

“Yes. In the assault reinforcements I’ve asked the state policemen to join. Anybody know any boy scouts?”

There was some hollow laughter.

“What about our fire restrictions?” the Ranger executive officer asked. “Can we use grenades with that computer up there?”

“Dr. Thiokol?”

Peter cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry, this has to be a gunfight. The titanium casing ought to be able to withstand any number of small-arms hits, up to 7.62 full metal jackets, but I can’t sanction explosives. If you could stick with the gunfire and forgo the explosives, we might get out of this. If that computer goes, it’s all over.”

“Suppose they mine the computer to blow?”

“They won’t,” said Peter. Of this one thing he was absolutely positive. “No, not Aggressor-One. There’s just a little part of him that thinks he’s smarter than everybody. The limited-try code will keep us out, because that’s the way his mind works.”

And because that’s what I designed it to do. He wants to use my stuff to beat
me.

Peter tried to think about the man.

What have I clone to deserve such an enemy? How did I become his Moby Dick? What did I do to him?

“What about in the shaft? Can we use explosives?”

“Negative again,” said Peter. “I know you’ve got to use explosives to get down there. But once you get close to the command center, I’m sorry to tell you you can’t. We just don’t know quite what would happen if you blew the wiring. You might make it impossible for me to abort the launch if they’ve gone to terminal countdown, which is tricky enough anyway; and you might even
cause
a launch. You’ve got to do it with guns once you’re close to the place.”