The Day Before Midnight (19 page)

“Leo, I’m down to zero lead,” came the call.

“Leo, my hydraulics are shot. They put some shit into my wings.”

“Leo, my controls are all mushy.”

“Tango Flight, you stay on station,” said Leo Pell.

“What’s your ammo?” Puller demanded over the radio.

“Sir, I’m all dry,” came the response.

“Delta Six, this is Tango Leader. I’ve got about seven seconds left. I’ll go in again. Tango Flight, form up on Captain Tarnower and head for home.”

“Leo,” said the FAC, “you can’t go in there alone.”

“Hey, I’ve got seven seconds of rock and roll left, you think I’m going to park this pig with it?”

“Jesus,” said the FAC to Puller. “If he’s got the only signature in the sky, their heatseekers will nail his butt sure. Those were Stingers, too, the best. Where the hell they get Stingers?”

Puller didn’t answer.

“What’s his name again?”

“Leo Pell.”

“Major Pell, this is Colonel Puller, do you copy?”

“I copy, Delta Six.”

“I am advised you have a low to zero survival probability.”

“I came to dance, Colonel, not to sit.”

“Good luck, then, Tango Leader.”

Okay now, it was just Leo Pell and the mountain. He
wasn’t worried about the small-arms stuff, though a spider web jinked his bubble where a LMG round had popped through at about ten o’clock, because he was sitting in his titanium bathtub, carrying self-sealing tanks, and had plenty of redundancy in his control systems. And he wasn’t worried about delivering his packages. Going in wasn’t the problem, even if you could see the tracers floating up to swat you. You were okay going in because your exhaust was behind you and their heatseekers wouldn’t see it to read it and chase it. You were okay until you showed them your hot ass.

When you passed the crest, you were wide open. You were like a bitch in heat and the missiles, like stud hounds, came up after you with one thing on their mind. They wanted you up the ass, that’s all there was for them.

So Leo, who wanted to live almost as much as he wanted the sheer gut-thumping joy of pumping twenty mike-mike into the mountain, resolved to juke in like a rock ‘n’ roll melody, up and down and down and up, straighten out for his seven seconds of deliverance, then cut hard to the left, dive for the deck, keep his engines astern from the mountain as much as possible, and just maybe Aggressor Force might not punch him out.

The mountain was fat as a tit in a centerfold. Leo began to evade. He pumped his rudder pedals, he diddled his decelerons, and he rode his stick. His ship,
Green Fig
, dipped and skidded through the air in a flight pattern that was more like a controlled catastrophe than a conscious design. And in his harness Leo felt the plane’s moves to the pit of his stomach and to his heart, which seemed to have gone on vacation for this last long ride.

Meanwhile, blobs of color floated up to smash him. He felt as if he were going down the drain of a brightly lit bubble bath. Strange radiances, odd visions, nightmares, fantasies, dope hallucinations, fever dreams, all floated by. There was a queer underwater quality to it, aquamarine and pastel, everything wonderfully graceful and stately. His plane bumped when hit; they were hitting the
Fig
pretty regularly now, all the guns on the mountain having their way with her.

He felt air suddenly as a stitchwork of holes sparked
through the bubble just over his head; something like a firecracker went off in the cockpit. His left arm went numb. His mirror blew off. Smoke, acrid and rancid, began to fill the cockpit. Didn’t they know the No Smoking sign was lit?

“Tango Leader, watch yourself, lookin’ good, lookin’ real good,” FAC was saying.

Okay now, Leo thought, get in real close, blow those motherfuckers away, hurt ’em, hurt ’em bad now.

Leo saw the mountaintop lined up in the floating circles of his head-up display. The trees were alive with fire and light and commotion. He checked his airspeed, 220, his altitude, 1,450, his angle of attack, 37, the onrushing hump, corrected his deflection just a touch, and it was gun time.

He hit the nipple.

The guns spent themselves in seven long seconds. The twenty mike-mike bursts flicked out like flung pebbles and splashed into the huge sheet of canvas. He had no idea if he was doing any damage at all; he just watched the tracers sink into it.

The crest flashed by and the last few shells flew out into Maryland. Leo cut his throttle, hit his left rudder pedal, banged his decelerons, dipped his nose, and began to dive for the deck and bank at the same moment as his right ailerons cranked up. Something white and mad flashed by as one missile missed, followed in a second by another. No lock-ons yet. A third burned past him from underneath.

He felt cold air again, more of it. The bubble around him seemed to liquify into smaller bubbles, until finally it was a cascade of glittering diamonds. Smoke rose from beneath him, everywhere. The controls were a mess. The stick had turned into a delinquent child, a horrible son with a mind of his own and no respect for poor old Dad. Leo could see no sky, but only Maryland, the Free State, big and white, reaching up to absorb him.

The plane hit in a wild blur of thrown snow and earth, and for an instant there was no fire and then there was nothing but fire, fire everywhere, fire forever. The fire rose
like a ritual offering. Smoke peeled away from it, fanning in the breeze.

“Shit,” said the FAC stupidly. “Goddammit. What I want to know is, who are those guys? Where’d they get Stingers? What are they, the U.S. Army?”

“We don’t know who they are. Kids?” asked Puller.

“What?”

“Kids, did he have kids?”

“Ah, he had a lot of kids. Five, six, I don’t know. Six of ’em, I think. Goddamn, Leo Pell
dead
, I can’t believe it!”

“The good ones always have kids, for some reason,” Puller said. “I don’t know why, I’ve never figured it out, but the real good ones always leave a mess of kids.”

He turned to Skazy, murder in his eyes.

“Beep the Guard,” he said. “Get ’em moving.”

“This is absurd, isn’t it?” said Peter Thiokol, extravagantly offended. “I mean, the reason you’re trying to find out who breaches security at the South Mountain installation is so that we can figure out who’s
in
there and then from that maybe I can figure out a way to get by the elevator shaft door, but now you’re interrogating
me.”

The two agents had little appreciation of the absurd. They weren’t collectors of ironies, either, and in some future time they wouldn’t hoist a glass in salute to the ludicrousness of this moment.

“Dr. Thiokol, there were thirteen senior people in the MX Basing Modes Croup at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that the Department of the Air Force Strategic Warfare Committee employed to design South Mountain. There are arrest warrants on all of them. It’s a technicality, designed to speed things up, just in case. Now, we have some questions, I’m afraid.”

Peter wondered if he had the energy to explain anything. He felt himself tumbling toward incoherence, as he had before his students that morning. And he knew also where the questioning would go, where it would
have
to go: toward Megan. He could not stand to go over it, to work out the theories. He had just put it into his bottom drawer and thrown away the key. It was in the deep under-mountain silo of his subconscious.

But the two agents were grimly bland men of indeterminate age and strong will who simply plunged ahead. They
were probably not all that different from the Delta officers: hardworking types who drew their power and identities from the potent organizations they had chosen to join and to whose dictates they would not be disloyal.

“For the record, you’re the son of Dr. and Mrs. Nels Thiokol of Edinah, Minnesota.”

“Dr. and
Dr.
Thiokol. My mother was a damned good ob-gyn. My father was a surgeon. Do we have to go through my whole life?”

They did. This went on for a little while and he answered all the stupid who/when questions curtly, pretending to a charmless boredom in his eyes. But as usual, he felt himself tightening when it came to his twisted adolescence, his wretched relationship with his father, whom he could never please until it occurred to him he wasn’t
supposed
to please him, and what this led to, all the schools, the expulsions, the business with the sleeping pills, the time he thought of now as only a long dark tunnel as he crawled through slime toward the light.

“Yet you got excellent grades through all this. And your test scores—”

“I’m smart, yes. I finally got my act together my sophomore year at Harvard.”

“What did you discover there?”

Yes, it was the crucial question of his career. He remembered it well, November of ’66, that funky, dreary room in Brattle Hall, which he shared with Mike De Masto, who was now a shrink in Oakwood, just outside of the glamorous burg of Dayton, O. Mike had long hair to his shoulder blades that year and was about Peace. Mike smoked dope and read his sacred texts and organized, orchestrated, and led the burgeoning Harvard antiwar movement. Which of course meant he was getting laid, sometimes two, three, and four times a day. Meanwhile Peter, the soggy little grind with a history of instability, spent the months in the exile of the library, depressed near unto suicide, working like a demon to figure out a way to keep himself alive. And one day he found it.

He found the bomb.

“I became interested in strategic thought at Harvard,”
he told the FBI agents. “The bomb, you know. The big bomb. For reasons that were doubtlessly pathological, I drew some queer comfort from an instrument that could wipe us all out in a blinding flash. It gave point to the pointlessness.”

Peter still remembered the image of the nuclear mushroom climbing from its fiery birthing, clawing ever skyward, opening, devouring its way through the heart of civilization.

The bomb became a kind of focal point for his existence: he lost himself in its culture, its byways, its traditions, its intricacies. He learned how to build one, how to hide one, how to plant one, how to use one, how to deliver one. He pored over the interesting work in strategic thought being done at Rand and later at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute. The strategic thinkers, men like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Rowan, and Andy Marshall, were his heroes, outlined against the blue-gray November sky of his imagination. His senior
thesis
reflected their thought but was his own in the way a promising apprentice can take the line of the masters and push it way out until it’s something altogether new:
Strategic Reality: Crisis Thinking for a Nuclear Age
, which was later published by Random House.

In fact, everything that Peter ever became, that he ever got, he owed to the bomb. Sometimes, he thought back on that crimped, desperate, achingly lonely little shit he’d been in prep school.

You beat them, he’d tell himself, swelling with radiance at the power of his becoming what he wanted to become, which was important. Everything you have is because of the bomb.

And most of all, he had Megan because of the bomb.

He’d met her in England when he was on his Rhodes studying the impact of weapons systems on policy decisions in immediate pre-Great War Europe in a political science seminar at Balliol. She was on a Rhodes, too, studying art at Keeble, after four years at Bennington. They met at the Bodleian, far from the radical unrest of America and the Vietnam War. She was dark and Jewish and he’d known she was American because she was blowing a bubble.

I beg your pardon, he said, is that
real
Double-Bubble?
Fleers
Double-Bubble?

She just looked at him. No smile, her frank eyes devouring him, her beautiful jaw ripping away at the gum. She blew another bubble. Then she reached into her purse and pushed a single piece of genuine Fleer’s Double-Bubble across the three-hundred-year-old oak table at him.

Who are you?

He told only the truth.

I’m the smartest guy you ever met in your life, he had said.

“Did you meet any Communists at Oxford?” one of the agents said.

Peter just looked at him. What could one do with such idiots?

“No. Look. I don’t see any of those people anymore. I haven’t seen them in years.”

The agents exchanged looks. He could tell they thought he was being “difficult.” They tried a different approach.

“Of the eleven senior members of the MX Basing Modes Group, were any of them politically suspect?” asked one of the agents.

“You’ve seen the files. I haven’t.”

The two agents looked at each other, then sighed. One of them wrote something down.

“I’m running very low on time here, guys,” Peter said, smiling with what he thought was a great deal of Ivy League charm. They appeared not to hear.

“Well, then, psychologically suspect? It seems to be a pattern among senior defense analysts, and defense engineers and researchers, particularly the farther reaches of—” The agent struggled for a word.

“The farther reaches of blowing the world up, right?”

“Yes, Dr. Thiokol. Anyway, our investigations have shown that a significant number of these men and women burn out. That is, lose heart, have radical changes in religion, sexual orientation, political ideology.”

“It’s a very intense life. You’re gaming out the end of the
world nearly every day, trying to figure new wrinkles, new ways to do it. Nobody gets old.”

“What about this Dr. Michael Greene?”

“Mike? Mike found out he was queer. Anyway, he bailed out before we’d really gotten to the interesting stuff.”

“He’s disappeared, that’s what makes him so interesting. And he’s got AIDS, did you know that, Dr. Thiokol?”

“No, I didn’t. My God, that’s awful.”

“Isn’t it possible that a man who’s dying—well, he’d be vulnerable emotionally to pressures or, rather, too fragile to withstand them. And someone—”

He didn’t know what to say. He knew the weakness of each member of the MX Basing Modes Group. Mike Greene’s was for thin-hipped Gentile athletes, Maggie Berlin’s for greasy mechanics. Niles Fallow had an alcoholic wife; Jerry Theobald suffered from almost incredible drabness; Mary Francis Harmon was a virgin who talked dirty; Sam Bellows was perpetually horny, yet so hangdog he never got laid; Jeff Thaxter was a workaholic who abused his kids; Jim Diedrickson had a son with cystic fibrosis; Maury Reeves’s wife Jill walked out on him for a Marine colonel. And on and on … each of them held in a matrix of weakness and duty. They used to have a joke about what they were doing. They called it the Revenge of the Nerds: little techies, sealed away in anonymous offices in the beast of a building complex called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in picturesque Howard County, figuring out whether the world would end in fire or ice, and if fire, how hot, what color, spreading at what rate, and influenced by what wind patterns?