The Day Before Midnight (47 page)

The general leaned over, picked up the torch, and placed the sputtering thing in Jack’s hand.

“We’ve won, Mr. Hummel. We’ve done it, don’t you see?”

He turned and crossed the small room to a radio set between the teletype machines. He turned a few buttons and knobs, then looked back.

“It’s all history, Mr. Hummel. We’ve won.”

Dick Puller had left the command post and was airborne in a command chopper with his radio, hovering out of range, watching, giving orders over the radio.

“Cobra Three, you people have to bring more of your
automatics into play. I can see a slacking off there, do you copy?”

“Delta Six, goddammit, I have four men dead and nine wounded on this side!”

“Do the best you can, Cobra Three. Bravo, this is Delta Six, any movement there?”

“Delta Six, their fire isn’t dropping a goddamn bit. I’ve still got people coming in.”

“Get ’em in and get ’em shooting, Bravo. It’s the guns that’ll win this thing.”

It was a question of which the men hated more, the Soviets dug in at the ruins of the launch control facility who would not stop firing, or the dry voice over the radio, clinical, impatient. The bird floated tantalizingly beyond them all, its lights running insolently in the night.

The Soviets were firing flares, which hung in the air under parachutes leaking flecks of light down across the scene, giving it a horrible weirdness. It looked like some musty nineteenth-century battle painting: the flickering lights, the heaps of bodies, the gun flashes cutting through the drifting smoke, the streaks of tracer darting about, tearing up the earth wherever they struck. All of it was blue with a smear of moonlight, white with a smear of gun smoke, dark where the mud and blood commingled on the earth.

And there were extraordinary moments of valor. A Soviet trooper crawled out of the perimeter, stood, and rushed into the American lines. He had nine grenades in his belt, and when he leapt among the Americans—he’d been hit three times but he kept coming—he detonated himself, killing eleven Rangers and quelling the fire on the front for three long minutes. Then there were the three Spetsnaz gunners on the right, isolated from the larger body of troops and unable to resupply themselves with ammunition. Down to a single magazine apiece, they mounted their bayonets, climbed out of their trench in a banzailike charge, and, screaming as they came, ran at the Americans, shooting from the hip. One was hit immediately, center chest, by a burst of MP-5 fire from a Delta; but the other two leapt like fawns as the tracers searched them out. As they came they fired, but as they
came they were hit, and eventually the bullets dragged them down, but the last one got into a Delta hole and killed a man with his bayonet before his partner fired the full mag of 5.56mm into him.

Another hero turned out to be Dill, the gym teacher. He took his leadership responsibilities overzealously. He led three assaults from the left side, from which his unit had come. He killed nine Russians and was hit twice. His men kept up the fire and by this time the stragglers had joined them.

The wounded crawled among the besiegers, handing out ammunition. James Uckley, with no place else to go, had separated himself from the Delta troopers with whom he’d flown in and taken up a position on the right. He had a CAR-15, and with little regard for his own life he lay in a shallow trench close to the Soviet position and fired magazine after magazine into it. He couldn’t see anything except the answering gun flashes and had no idea whether or not he was helping. He just had the sense of the weapon shaking itself empty. Still, he kept firing, feeling his skin turn to black leather as the powder rose and sank into it. Overhead, the bullets whistled close and at least three times he’d felt zeroed as the bullets struck close, kicking up a spray of snow and dust. But everything had missed so far. On his left were two state policemen and two Hagerstown policemen, each with shotguns; they fired too.

Now the inevitable progression of the battle was in the American favor, no matter the ferocity of the Soviets. The Americans had more weapons and with each passing minute more were brought into play. The reserve companies of the Third Infantry got in close and with their heavier M-14s began to raise the volume of fire. Additional elements of Bravo staggered in through the woods. State and local policemen, a few FBI men, some of Bravo’s walking wounded, most of the Delta intelligence staff, all arrived, found some kind of weapon, and struggled up in the dark to the firing line, found a scrap or bit of cover, and commenced fire.

Only one man in all this did not fire. This was Peter Thiokol, who lay on his face about two hundred meters off the site of the battle, feeling useless. He was terrified, yet his
mind did not associate what was going on with any notion of war, which he had seen only represented on television or in the movies, where everything is clear, the relationship of friend to foe, the layout of the terrain. Now everything was strange. He could make no sense of it. An odd idea leapt into his head: he felt present at some ancient religious ceremony, where priests were sacrificing young men up there at the vivid altar with crude, cruel bronze blades. The young men went willingly to their doom, as if in doing so they guaranteed themselves a place in heaven. It had a late Aztec feel to it, or a sense of the Druid’s return—the devil was here, Peter knew, looking over the shoulders of the priests up there with their bright blades, laughing, urging them on, congratulating himself on having a nice day with an idiot’s drooling, half-moon smile. Tracers filled the air; he could hear them cracking. Occasionally, they’d hit close, driving him back. But he kept peering over the lip of his trench, fascinated.

“Better stay down, doc,” someone said. “You get killed peeking and all this ain’t worth shit.”

Peter shivered, acknowledging the wisdom in the advice, and hunkered down, wishing he could make the noise go away.

Finally, the Russian response seemed to falter. Skazy, noticing the decrease, led a Delta party of six men and breached the final Soviet trench on the right side. It was a terrifying run up the hill, and all around him the fire flicked out, yet he jumped into the trench, and discovered only corpses. With an M-60 he began to pour fire into the Soviet position from up so close that the Russians had almost no chance. With his gun working from almost zero range, it ceased to be a battle and became a butchery.

There was a pause in the firing.

Smoke licked the battlefield’s horrible stillness.

A Delta interpreter asked through a loudspeaker if the Spetsnaz people wished to accept an honorable surrender and medical attention. The few Russians responded with gunfire.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra, there’s no answer.”

“Do you have targets?”

“Most of them are down.”

“Ask ’em again.”

Skazy nodded to his interpreter. The man spoke again in Russian. A burst of gunfire responded, hitting him in the chest and throat, knocking him down.

“Christ,” said Skazy into his hands-free mike, “they just hit our interpreter.”

“All right, Major,” said Dick, “body-bag ‘em.”

Skazy finished the job.

Walls beat the tin door off the junction box with the stock of the Mossberg, badly chewing the wood in the process. No time to worry about that now.

The box, ripped open, yielded a terrifyingly complex mesh of wires crowding in on the junctions. It made no sense to him. It was like so much of the world: all wired up, all fixed, all fancy and complicated, beyond him. It could have been the same old sign.

FUCK NIGGERS
it could have said.

He looked at it, feeling the rage grow and seethe. He’d felt this way on the streets sometimes. Hey, he was a hero, goddammit, he went into tunnels for his motherfuckin’ Uncle and did what Uncle said and killed yellow people and did shit no man should have to do and was hit three times and almost killed a hundred more times and then it was, thanks Jack, and good-bye to you and good luck to you.

NO BLACK BOYS NEED APPLY
it could have said.

NO BLACK TUNNEL RATS NEED APPLY.

NO SILVER STAR WINNERS NEED APPLY.

NO THREE-TIME PURPLE HEARTS NEED APPLY.

FUCK NIGGERS.

That was some sign.

The Vietnamese woman said something and it pissed him off. It was that singsongy shit they all had, you couldn’t make no sense out of it. She thought he knew what the fuck to do. Like he was some kind of while guy, he had all the goddamn motherfucking answers.

Hon, it don’t mean shit to me. It’s just some wires from white boys, that only white boys can figure out.

He felt like crying. He felt trapped in the tiny little
space. Come all this way for nothing. Grief beat at him. But then he figured, fuck it, got to do something. He pulled out his knife. Hey, he was going to use it to stick in some guy instead of sticking it into some wires.

He was just going to stick it in, fuck the wires up, see what happen. But then he remembered the word
DOOR
from the front of the tin box. He stared at the wires coming into the box. They came out of the walls, most of them, through little tubes. Let’s see, door be
that
say, let’s see if we can’t find some goddamned wire come from
that
way. He looked. Sure enough, most of the wires came from some other way, but one trace of wires plunged outside toward the box from his left, from the direction of the duct entrance. Walls hacked at the tubing covering the batch of wires, chipping away little nuggets of rubber that fell like raisins to the floor, until he had some bare wire revealed. He was acting just like he knew what the fuck he was doing.

The woman was so close in the little chamber. She looked at him like he knew what he was doing too. He laughed again. She didn’t know shit either. He thought it was pretty funny, the two of them in a little space off a rocket that was going to end the world, hacking on some wires like they knew what they were doing, a nigger boy and a gook girl, the two lowliest forms of scum on the earth which was going to be blown to shit if
they
didn’t stop it. She laughed too. She must have been in on the joke, because she thought it was funny too.

They both had a good laugh as Walls chopped his way through the wires. Then, just for the fuck of it, he cut through some more wires. With the blade of his knife as a kind of stick, he lifted one tuft of wires over across the gap and shoved it against the other wires and—

Walls shook the spangles from his eyes and found himself against the wall. Felt like his old daddy had whacked him upside the head one. His nose filled with an acrid odor. His head hurt. When he blinked he saw blue balls and flashbulbs. His teeth hurt. Someone was playing music inside his head. His knife lay on the floor, smoking. What the fuck had—

But the woman was at the mouth of the duct, screaming.

Walls crawled over. Man, he felt smoked himself. Could hardly remember who he was, Jack.

But he remembered when he saw the door into whatever the fuck else was down here: it was open.

Jesus fuck, he’d done it. He’d gotten into whitey’s secret place.

He grabbed for his shotgun, seeing that it would be easy
to
reach the open door, swing over to the ladder, then
get
inside.

He pulled the Taurus 9-mm automatic out of his holster and handed it over to her.

“You know how one of these things work, hon?”

He pointed to the safety lever locked up.

“Push that down, babe,” he gestured with his finger, “and bang-bang! You got that? Down and bang-bang!”

The woman nodded once, smiled. The gun was big in her tiny hands, but she looked as though she’d been born with it there.

He reached, and the shotgun came up into his hands. It felt smooth and ready and he still had a pocket full of twelves.

The woman looked at him.

“Ass-kickin’ time,” he said.

The shooting had stopped. Peter looked up. There seemed to be some kind of delay, some sort of hassle up at the launch control facility, and then he heard a roar and looked up as the command chopper, beating up a screen of snow and dust, lowered itself awkwardly from the sky and he saw Dick Puller leap out. The chopper zoomed skyward.

He heard his name called then.

“Dr. Thiokol. Where are you? Where the hell
is
he? Anybody seen that bomb guy? Dr. Thiokol?”

Shivering, Peter rose.

“Here,” he called, but his voice caught in some phlegm and it didn’t come out quite right, and so he said it again,
“Here!”
and it came out too loud, too shrill for a battlefield full of the dead, where he was the only man without a gun.

“This way, please, Dr. Thiokol,” yelled Dick Puller.

Peter began the short climb up the hill to the launch
control facility, or what remained of it. All around him men moaned and shivered. If only it didn’t feel so unreal, if only the smell of blood and gunpowder weren’t so dense, if only the lights from the flares and the hovering choppers weren’t flickering dramatically, the flares hissing and leaking sparks, the chopper lights wobbling drunkenly. Up ahead, men were consumed in the drama of their equipment, clicking bolts, loading clips, smearing their faces.

Someone was shouting. “Okay, now, goddammit, everybody out of here but the Delta Tunnel Assault Team. You guys in the second element, you form up over there on Captain McKenzie. The rest of you guys, Rangers especially, please back off and give us some fucking room to operate.”

He could see the men rigging themselves with complicated harnesses and thought for just a minute they were parachutes. Parachutes? No, then he realized that it was rappeling gear by which the Delta commandos would slide on ropes down the shaft. Coils of green rope lay about on the ground.

“Thiokol, hurry up, come on,” said Puller, up at the door.

Peter scrambled up the rest of the way.

“It’s not damaged, sir,” said a young soldier. “We tried to hold our fire away from it.”

Peter saw the elevator door set in its frame of solid titanium, the only hard, gleaming thing among the blown-out walls and the shattered floorboarding. Hard to believe this had once been inside a building and that the building itself had stood quite normally until just a few hours ago. And on the hard cool face of the titanium was the computer terminal, which looked for all the world like a bank money machine.