The Day Before Midnight (50 page)

With a punch of his foot Walls kicked in the door to discover a young man in the blue beret of the Soviet airborne running with an RPG to reinforce the second strongpoint, and he blew him away with Mr. 12, felt the hard kick of gun against his shoulder, cycled the slide in half a second, popping a red from the breech, blew away another as he turned, dipped running across the corridor, blew away a young man with an AK-47 who turned to look at him, and saw himself in the kill zone of still a fourth who, before he could fire, fell back as his head exploded because the Vietnamese woman had shot him there with her Taurus.

Walls winked and gave her the thumbs-up—bitch can
shoot
, no fuckin’ lie!—and dropped to one knee to thread more 12s into the shell port of the gun just in front of the trigger guard, got seven in, flipped it back upright, and threw the pump with a
klak-klak!
just in time to blow up a rather large man with a large automatic rifle. He began to slither ahead, the girl off on his right ten paces back, covering his black ass.

He was thinking, Come on, you motherfuckers, come to me, come to old Walls, Walls got the glory and the truth for you here with Mr. 12 by his side, and indeed he came upon two wounded men busily inserting ammunition into clips, and he did the necessary without a twitch of guilt, pumping the slide as the hot shells flipped from the breech and then he heard a cry and was hit by a spray of gunfire in the wrist, rib, and neck, and went down.

Mother, Mother, her daughter cried from the flames, Help me! Help me!

Phuong ran to her, past the black man who had been shot, but in her way was a white man with a rifle, and so she shot him; then another came and she shot him; there were two more and she shot them. Suddenly, they were everywhere around her and she felt herself hit, but she turned and fired twice more and was so close she could not miss, though she was hit again and again.

Mother, do not let me burn! her daughter screamed.

Phuong rose through her pain, turned to find her daughter, and two more white men fired at her and hit her, but she fired back, hitting them too.

I am coming, she screamed in her heart, and then she saw her daughter and went to her and grabbed her and the burning finally stopped.

Jesus, he hurt, but then he looked and saw that he still had the damn vest on and the bad one in the rib had just flattened itself out while kicking him like a mule. His wrist had been hit with a ricochet, his neck didn’t bleed bad. He pulled himself over to the woman.

She lay quiet. Seven men lay around her. The automatic was on the floor, its slide locked back. He knelt, quickly felt for pulse. Nothing. Her eyes were closed and tranquil.

Jesus, mama-san, he thought, you’re some kind of fine lady.

One of the bad guys was trying to crawl away, leaking blood. Walls put the muzzle of the shotgun against his head and fired. Then he raced on.

Yasotay gave the M-60 a good kick and when that didn’t work, bent, pulled out his boot knife, and popped the feed cover. He could see that a bad shell had become stovepiped into the bolt head. With his knife blade he got some purchase, gave a mighty heave, and popped the thing out. Then, throwing the knife away, he reseated the belt, slammed the feed cover, and pulled the bolt back. He turned to the gunner, who was so overcome at Yasotay’s charisma that he made no move to take over the gun. So Yasotay stood as red flashes zeroed toward him, and he saw the Delta commandos flooding toward him, visibly taken with his extraordinary courage. He pressed the trigger. The gun made him a god. The tracers flicked out, and where they hit they pushed the shadowy figures of Delta down. The gun fired swiftly: it rattled itself free of the first belt and the hot brass shells rattled from its breech, hundreds of them, spilling out and bouncing across the floor. And then it started to rain.

The water pelted Yasotay in the face, and he fell back, stunned. It fell in dense sheets, filling the air, accumulating in lurid, fluorescent-jazzy puddles on the floor, driving the sweat from Yasotay’s hot body. It felt like a miracle. Greedily, he threw his head back and drank. The water poured in, sweet and glorious as vodka. Momentarily, the shooting stopped.

“Drink, boys, damn you, 22 Spetsnaz, drink! It’s a message from God. He sends us water deep under the ground to quench our thirst. Come on, drink, you lovely bastards!” Yasotay was laughing madly, aware that a stray round must have touched off the fire control sprinkler system. But he looked and saw Delta stunned at the sudden gush, and then crazily begin to fall back. Where bullets had failed, water had succeeded.

Then he heard the general.

“Yasotay, damn you. I have it! I have it!”

“Delta Six, this is Cobra, do you copy?”

“Go ahead, Cobra.”

“Sir, this is Captain McKenzie. Skazy’s dead and so are most of my people down here. We’ve got maybe sixty or seventy percent casualties, dammit, and now it’s raining.”

“Raining?”

“The goddamn fire system went off, and it’s pouring cats and dogs, Delta Six.”

Peter said, “Tell him to push it anyway, it’s only water.”

“Cobra, you’ve got to push ahead. Where are you?” “Sir, I’m into the corridor and past the first strong point, but they’ve set up a real motherfucker down there, they’ve got a goddamned M-60 and it’s kicking our asses. They’ve got some kind of Russian Rambo down here who stands up and laughs at us. He must have killed forty of our guys already. Jesus, he is one tough son of a bitch.”

“Waste his ass,” said Puller. “Blow his guts out.”

“Our lasers aren’t working in the rain, goddammit. Sir, I’ve got a lot of dead and wounded.”

“Delta, you’ve got to get into that launch control center.”

“Sir, every man I throw down there gets wasted. They’ve
got this goddamn place zeroed. I need more C-4, more men, and more time. And more lasers.”

“Cobra, you’ve got to get it done, that’s all. Now, press the attack, son, or your wives and children will curse you from here to eternity.”

“Jesus,” said the young captain.

The general watched Yasotay run through the rain. He moved with surprising grace, given his condition. Most of his hair was burned away, as were his eyebrows. His face was bright red from excitement, although peppered with shrapnel and bleeding from several places. One arm had had its sleeve burned away, and the bare limb underneath was blackened and crusty with scabbing. His other arm was sodden with blood. Yet the man moved with such relish it was difficult to fathom. He was pure war.

“I have it. I have it!” the general yelled, holding the key aloft. “Come, Alex, we’re there, we’ve won.”

In his hands the general held two red titanium keys, each weighing about an ounce, each about two inches long, and jagged and fluted as any key would be.

“Here, take it. Now, on my mark.”

He pressed a key into Yasotay’s hand and had an odd sense that in Yasotay’s mad eyes something weird and sad danced.

But the general raced to station two.

There were two stations. At each, not much: a telephone, a wallful of buttons, a computer, and all of it, really, irrelevant, except for the keyholes under the rubric
LAUNCH ENABLE.

“Put your key in, Alex,” the general commanded, inserting his own.

Yasotay put his key in.

Immediately, a red light began to flash in the command capsule.

The prerecorded voice stated, “We have launch condition Red, please authenticate, we have launch condition Red, please authenticate.”

“The computer, Alex. Do what I do. The numbers are there.”

Before Yasotay was a set of twelve numbers; they were the proper, preset Permissive Action Link for that day that he had obtained by blowing open the safe in the security shed eighteen hours earlier.

Yasotay punched in the twelve numbers, as the general had done.

“We have an authenticated command to launch, gentlemen,” came the voice of the beautiful woman out of the speakers. “We have an authenticated command to launch. Turn your keys, gentlemen.”

There was something tender in her sweet voice.

“Alex,” said the general, “on my command.”

Alex’s eyes came up to meet the general’s, then went back to the key.

“Alex, three, two, one.”

The general turned his key.

It did not move.

The sound of gunfire rose and rose. Shouts, screams, explosions.

“Alex?”

Yasotay looked up. The general saw something odd on his face, impenetrably sad and remote. He had not turned his key.

“Is this right, Arkady Simonovich Pashin? Can you say, irredeemably, in God’s eyes, in Marx’s eyes, in Lenin’s eyes, in the eyes of our children, that this is right?”

“I swear to you, my friend. It’s too late to go back. The bomb in Washington goes off soon. If we don’t fire now, this second, the Americans respond with
all
their Peacekeepers and death will be forever and ever. Come, my friend. It’s time. We must do that hard, terrible thing, our duty. We must be men.”

Imperceptibly, Yasotay nodded, then looked back to the key. His fingers touched it.

“On my command,” said Pashin. “Three, two—”

Pashin had the impression of conflagration, of flames unending and unceasing, spreading through the world, eating its cities, its towns, its villages, its fields, of the long and total death of fire, in its immense but necessary and cleansing
pain. He thought of babies in their cribs and mothers in their beds, but then he saw that it was not the world but his own hand and arm that were in flames, and then the pain hit. He turned into the mad eyes of the American Hummel and his torch, which now climbed from the blazing arm and sought him where he was softest, burned through his tissues, through throat to larynx, through cheeks to tongue, through eyes to brain, and the pain was—

Yasotay watched the general burn. In a queer sense he was relieved, and then he saw that he had merely acquired another responsibility. The general’s pain was extraordinary, yet it did not move Alex. He watched as the American drove the torch deep into the face and the face melted. Alex, in his years of war, had seen many terrible things but nothing quite as terrible as this, and after a time, numb as he was, he decided enough was enough and he shot the American in the chest with his P9. The man slid to the floor and the torch went out at last.

Then Alex stood; the machinery to launch the missile was still intact. He could not turn two keys at once, however. He had to find someone, anyone, that was all. He turned and rose to get a man, and at last saw his own death, in the form of a black American commando with a red bandanna and a shotgun and frenzied eyes, and Alex, still numb, lifted the P9 in a nominal attempt at self-defense, but then the American blew him away.

Gregor looked at his watch.

Midnight was very close.

He looked into the welter of rooms that lay behind the vault door. He wondered if the great Tolstoi had ever conjured such a moment: fat Gregor, scared so badly the shit was almost about to run down his pulpy legs, going into a maze to stop a man with a bomb who would merely destroy the world. It was too absurd, not Tolstoi at all but more the ancient Russian folktale. He was Tatashkin, going off to fight the Witch of Night Forever. The world chooses such terrible champions to defend her! he thought bitterly.

Liquid courage. He pulled the bottle from his pocket, sloshed it to find it only half full, unscrewed the cap, and threw down a long, hot swallow. The world blurred perceptibly, turned mellow and marvelous. Now he felt ready. He put aside his servility and his avuncularity and his sniveling obsequiousness, his need to please all his masters; and he put aside his fear: he decided that he could kill and after that he decided that he would kill.

Gregor walked into the dark corridor.

Klimov had switched the lights off.

Gregor slipped out of his shoes. He began to pad down the hall. His nervousness had left him. His heart was beating hard, but not out of fear, rather out of excitement. Now he had him: little Klimov, the piglet, who had killed his friend Magda and would just as soon kill the world. With the vodka he was able to imagine pressing the life out of the piglet’s throat, watching his eyes go blank and dull as death overcame them.

Gregor glanced through the first doorway; inside there was a filing cabinet, three obsolete portable coding machines, nothing else.

He walked on. He breathed in small wheezes, evenly, quietly, only through his nose. He felt his eyes narrow. In a curious way he felt himself concentrate as he had never concentrated before, or as he had not concentrated in years. He flexed his hands, tried to limber up his muscles.

He tried to remember the lessons from so many years ago.

Any part of your body is a killing weapon: the heel of the palm driven upward against the nose or into the throat; the edge of the hand against the neck; the knee, planted with thunderous force into the testicles; the bunched fist, one knuckle extended in the form called the dragon’s head, into the temple; the elbow, like a knife point, driven into the face; the thumbs into the eyes. You are all weapons; you are a weapon.

Gregor slid around the second doorway: more filing cabinets, old trunks, hanging uniforms.

He proceeded. The next little room bore outmoded communications
and coding equipment, too bulky to be shipped back, too sensitive to be abandoned, too imperishable to be destroyed. The following room contained weapons, a row of old PPsH-41s locked in their rack, some RPGs chained to a circular stand. Also some stores of explosives and detonating devices, left over, all of it, from the maniac Stalin’s reign, when it seemed that war would break out at any moment and every second commercial attaché might be turned into a saboteur or a partisan.

And on to another room, which had nothing in it but furniture from some purged functionary’s office, cast off as if it, too, had been contaminated by political unorthodoxy, and it, too, had been consigned to a Gulag.

In the last room he found the ratfuck Klimov.

And he found the bomb.

Gregor recognized it, of course, from the drawings he’d seen: it was a variation on the American W54, the famous suitcase bomb called a Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was in the one-kiloton range, from here easily powerful enough to vaporize all primary governmental structures and, by virtue of blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse, completely destroy the Pentagon across the river in Virginia, while doing massive damage to CIA up the river in McLean and, in its farther reaches, rupturing the communications at the National Security Agency in Maryland. The thing looked like a big green metal suitcase sitting there on the table. It was open, its padlocks sprung. The top was off, and the firing mechanism appeared
to
be quite simple, a crude timing device, digitalized for the modern age. The numbers fled by in blood red like a third-rate American spy movie.