The Day Before Midnight (51 page)

2356:30

2356:31

2356:32

So the fucker was set. Klimov sat before it in immobile fascination as the digits flicked up toward the ultimate moment. He brought an old roller chair in from the storage room. He’d just sit there and be atomized in the detonation.

Gregor walked to him, waiting for the piglet to turn and rise with the pistol. Gregor knew he was close enough. He
felt the murderous rage building within him. He’d kill him with his hands and it would feel good. He’d kill him for Magda already gone and the sleeping millions who’d join her.

Inch by inch he stepped closer.

Klimov just sat there.

2357:45

2357:46

2357:47

He touched the boy on the shoulder, making ready to strike.

Young Klimov slipped forward an inch, then toppled to the cement, hitting it with a sickening thud, and the crack of teeth.

Young Klimov had been shot in the heart with a ballistic knife blade that projected from the center of his chest in a sodden mass of blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were open in absurd blankness.

“He didn’t believe it when I shot him,” said Magda Goshgarian, standing behind him in the doorway. “I wish you could have been there, dear Tata, when the blade went in and the life went out of his eyes.”

“Magda, I—”

He gestured to her but she raised a pistol.

“He knew something was up. He was very smart, the little prick. He’s been nosing around me for weeks now. He came down and I killed him, Tata.”

Then her eyes moved to Gregor’s, and he saw that she was mad, quite mad.

“And I heard you coming, yelling my name with your voice trembling in fear. So I played dead, and off you went. I will shoot you, too, Tata, though I love
you. I
love you almost as much as I love our country, which has lost its way. And as much as I love my lover, Arkady Pashin, for whom I would die. For whom I will die. He is a great man, Tata, a man of Pamyat, and you are merely a man. Now, stand back. It will be over in seconds, my love. You won’t feel a thing—just nothingness, as your atoms are scattered in the blast.”

Peter stood by the mouth of the elevator shaft, listening
to the gunfire below. It sounded horrible, roaring up the dark space of the shaft, no individual sounds to the shots at all, just a mass of noise. He was at the same time fussing with something around his waist.

“Excuse me,” he said to a Delta soldier close by, “is this right?”

The young man looked at it.

“No, sir, you’ve got to rotate the snaplink a half turn so that the gate is up and opens away from the body. And I don’t think you’re in the rope-seat just right. And you’ve got to take up some slack between the snaplink and the anchor point and—”

Peter fumbled with it. He’d never get it right.

“Look, could you fix it for me?” he said.

The soldier made a face, but bent and began to twist and adjust Peter’s rig.

“Dr. Thiokol?”

It was Dick Puller.

“How’s it going down there?” Peter asked.

“Not good. Lots of fire. Very heavy casualties.”

Peter nodded.

Puller checked his watch, then looked at the other Delta boys queueing up for the long slide down to the battle.

“Delta, second squadron, ready for the descent,” an NCO called. “You locked and loaded?”

“Locked and loaded,” came the cry.

“Check your buddies. Remember your quick-fire techniques and to go to the opposite shoulder at these damn corners. No fire on the way down, the show starts about halfway down the corridor. In twos, then, Delta, on rappel, go, go, go.”

As he tapped them off, the Delta men began their slide down.

“More men, maybe that’ll do it,” said Dick.

“That’s it,” said the soldier, rising. “Now you’re rigged right. You just thread the rope through the bit, under your leg. You brake with your right hand—you’re righthanded, right?—by closing it and pressing the rope into your body.”

“Thiokol, what are you doing?” said Puller abruptly.

“I have to get down there.”

Dick Puller’s mouth came open, the only time Peter had ever seen surprise on the leathery, unsurprisable face.

“Why?” the old man finally asked. “Look, they’re either going to shoot their way in and stop Pashin or they’re not. It’s that simple.”

Peter fixed Puller with a harsh look. “It’s not simple. There’s a scenario where it may come down to somebody who knows those consoles and certain launch-abort sequences.” He marveled at the dry irony of it, how it had to turn out so that he, Peter Thiokol,
Dr.
Peter Thiokol, strategic thinker, had to slide down a rope to the worst game of all, war. “There’s more to it than men. Your Delta people may kill all the Russians and the rocket will fly anyway. I have to go. I started this fucking thing, now I’m the one who has to stop it.”

Puller watched him go. He interrupted the Delta assault descent, and the sergeant looked over at Puller and Puller gave a nod, and Peter somehow managed to get the ropes properly seated in the complex rappeling gear strapped to his waist. He was standing right there at the mouth of the tunnel. He poised on the edge for just a second, then caught Dick Puller’s eyes and gave a meek little thumbs-up, more like a child than a commando, and then he was gone.

Walls knew where he was now. He was
in
, actually
inside
the white man’s brain. It was a well-lit little room, covered with electronic gear, telephones, screens, dead guys. He jacked another shell into the Mossberg, stepped inside, pulled the goddamned door closed, gave a huge circular mechanism a twist and a clank, locking it. Beyond the white boy with the piece he’d just blown away there was another white guy, burned up like a pig in a North Carolina pit. Whoever he was he sure smelled bad. He went over and poked at him. The guy was barbecued. He’d been burned down to black bone. You could eat him, that’s how bad he’d been burned.

And then still another guy. Walls walked over and poked at him. His face was all smashed; he’d been beaten pretty
bad. His leg had been shot. Blood bubbled on his chest. His eyes fluttered open.

“My kids?” he asked.

“Man, I don’t know nothing ‘bout no kids,” said Walls.

“You Army?”

Walls wasn’t sure how to answer this.

“Yo, man,” he said.

“They made me do it,” the guy said. “It wasn’t my fault. But I stopped the general. With the torch.”

“You done more than stop that general, man. You
roasted
his ass, but good.”

The man’s hand flew up to Walls’s wrist and gripped it.

“Tell my kids I loved them. I never told them, goddammit, but I love them so much.”

“Okay, man, you just rest. If you ain’t dead yet, you probably ain’t going to be dead at all. I don’t see that you’re bleeding. He plugged you over the heart, but I think he missed it. Just sleep or something while I figure out what to do, you got that, man?”

The guy nodded and lay back weakly.

Walls rose. This was the place to be, he thought, right in the middle of the white race’s brain. He had the door locked and a little farther up the tunnel there was a real serious battle going on, and he didn’t see what going up there and getting killed was going to do.

He looked around. These people, shit. Who could build a room like this, what kind of motherfucking asshole? Little white room way down under the ground where you could end the world by pushing some buttons. He looked and saw a key, just like the key in a car, stuck in an ignition switch. At another little place in the room he saw this other key. Like these white guys were going to drive away. There were lights, labels, signs, speakers, radios, typewriters, a wall safe, a big clock on the wall. Damn, it was late! It was nearly midnight.

He laughed.

White people.

And suddenly a white lady was there. It stunned him because he heard her voice in the bright room. He looked
around, it sounded like she was just there, but no, no white lady. She was coming over the radio or something.

He tried to understand what she was saying. He couldn’t figure it out, man, it was just jive. These jiving white bitches, they always gave you a hard
time
, something about some kind of lunch being served or some other shit like that, man, what
does
this bitch want?

“Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing,” she was saying. “Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing. Gentlemen, you have five minutes to locate abort procedures if necessary. We are in terminal countdown.”

But then he understood. The bitch was going to fire the rocket.

2357:56

2357:57

2357:58

“Now, Magda,” Gregor began, “now, darling, let’s not do anything hasty here. This man Pashin? He may be a handsome charmer, but at the same time, he’s clearly something of a lunatic. Now, darling, believe me, I know what a bastard I’ve been to you and how vulnerable you might be to someone flashy like this, but can’t you see, he’s merely
using
you? Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Poof! It’s not as if he’ll be waiting somewhere for you, darling. I mean, in just a bloody minute or two we’re all ashes.”

The gun was pointed at his heart. He had seen Magda shoot. Magda was an excellent shot. She wasn’t trembling at all. The flickering colors of the fleeing digits in the timer mechanism illuminated her face, giving it an odd animation. The lights made real her insanity, her tenuous grip on reality, which had opened her to Pashin and made her capable of doing this tragic thing. Pashin had probably purchased her loyalty forever by something as elementary and unremarkable in this world as an orgasm. A quick tongue in the right place and the world was his.

“Please, darling,” he said, “I—”

“Hush, my love,” crooned Magda, her voice deep and throatily sexual. “Now it’s just a matter of waiting as the seconds flow by and we join the great All, Tata.”

He wished now he had made love to Magda. It would have been so easy. Magda had always been available for him. All he’d had to do was ask! And if he’d had her, she’d be his now. It was that simple. But he never had. He’d always taken her for granted. Magda! Silly, goosey woman, a pal, a chum, always willing to listen, to sympathize. She must have loved him secretly for years and been chewed up by the way he took her for granted. And so she turned to Pashin and his mad grandeur.

“Magda, let me tell you, it doesn’t have to end like this, in a flash of flame. Magda, you and I, we can be together. I can take you away from all this. I have friends among the Americans. The two of us, Magda, we can get away from Washington, from the embassy, from all this. We can have a happy life in some American city, Mr. and Mrs. We could adopt a little girl, Magda, a whole family. The Americans will help us. We can have a wonderful life, Magda, I’ll make you so hap—”

Magda’s laugh, sharp and percussive, cut him off.

“What, Gregor Ivanovich. Do you imagine I’m in love with you? That I’d sell my country out for one of your caresses? Men, God, how you all value yourselves! No, Tata, my heart belongs to Arkady Pashin and to his vision of the future, which is a vision of the great Russian past, the past of Pamyat, of Memory, Gregor dear. A pretend Russian like you cannot see this, but I give up my life willingly to my motherland, and to my lover.”

And to his damned quick tongue. Gregor saw how mad Pashin was: to put a tongue to plump Magda! Gregor also saw now that he was doomed. Magda’s loyalty was impenetrable. Pashin had made her his forever with his lunatic’s babble of Memory and Mother Russia. Magda, desperate for something to worship, had bought it all. The crazy bitch! The cunt, the dumb Russian cunt! Women! He hated them, the bitches.

She had him. To rush for the bomb would be to catch a bullet in the heart, like poor Klimov here; he’d be dead before he made it, and even if he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to stop it. Or if he came at her, she’d shoot him. Yes, she would. Right in the heart, hating it all, but doing it just the
same, because she saw it as her duty to the damned genius charlatan, Arkady Pashin, and the motherland for which she thought he stood.

“Do you know, darling”—he tried a new approach—“the Americans know. Even now they’re attacking the mountain. Even now Pashin has failed. He’s probably already dead, Magda. His dream is over. At the very least the Americans are in communication with Moscow. This damned bomb will go off, and the thousands, the millions, will die, yourself and myself included, but there’ll be no war for us to win, no Russian future based on a great Russian past. Just one ruined city, and the bones of babies turning black in the night.”

He had begun to weep.

He could see the numbers fleeing by. They rushed on remorselessly.

2358:21

2358:22

2358:23

She simply looked at him. There was only pity on her face.

“You poor fool, Tata. You believe in nothing except the religion of the ass, your own, for which you would do anything. You snivel and beg and whine. Goddamn you, Tata, why don’t you have the guts to die on your feet! Come at me, you silly, gutless bastard!”

But Gregor fell to his knees.

“Please,” he slobbered, broken. “You’re right. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about any of them. But, Magda. Magda, please. Please, I don’t want to die. Stop it. Stop the bomb! Please don’t kill me!
Please!”

She made a terrible face, her lips snickering in utter contempt, her eyes rolling, and in that second the barrel of the gun wavered, and in that second Gregor Arbatov leapt.

Peter slid through the dark, slid until he thought he’d lost control and was falling, and pulled in on the rope skidding before his eyes to brake himself. Big mistake. He hit the wall hard, feeling the blow ring in his head and his body go spastic in the concussion. Lights popped in his skull; his
breath came hard and hot. He could feel the blood on his face, and his will flying out the window. He blinked for control. Below he heard the firing, roaring, incessant. But he just hung there, suspended between worlds. Other men, dark shapes falling, sped past him. His nose rubbed against the shaft; the straps cut into his groin; he had an image from a World War II movie of a paratrooper hanging in a tree. He tugged, twisted, struggled—ah! oops! and there he went again, sliding down, this time with a bit more control. He felt the burn of the rope through his leather gloves and as he swung in toward the wall, this time he caught himself on the balls of his feet and propelled himself outward again, and so eventually tumbled to the bottom.