The Day Before Midnight (30 page)

“Maybe that damned bomb finally went off, all the white people dead,” said Walls.

“Then all the black people are dead too,” said Witherspoon.

“Man, some nigger scientist ought to figure out a bomb kill only white people. Man, I’d
pay
for something like that.” He laughed, flicked out his cigarette.

“Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy?”

By now Jake’s had filled with workingclass men. Gregor hated them. They were truck drivers, fork-lift operators, warehousemen, painters, postal clerks, all large, most dirty, all tired, most loud. They smoked. The air of the place was blue with smoke. His headache had not gone away even though he’d been splashing vodka on it for some time now.

He was watching the clock crawl through the day until it would be time to call Molly again, and then he heard someone talking about soldiers and a training exercise in central Maryland and looked up to the television set. It was the news hour and the reporter was at a state police roadblock somewhere, where the cars were lined up like it was the end of the world or something.

Gregor leaned forward intently.

“Hey, Mister, who you pickin’ in Eastern Division?”

“Redskins,” Gregor said. “Shhhh, the TV.”

“Redskins won’t even
make
the playoffs!”

The reporter was talking about a military exercise being conducted in the mountains, rumors of plane crashes and helicopters, how traffic was backed up and how civil authorities weren’t able to say when it would all return to normalcy, but that this was one of the prices you had to pay for your democracy.

The reporter, a childish boy, nodded enthusiastically as he spoke, narrowing his eyes for emphasis. Behind him, far in the distance, Gregor could see the fat hulk of a snow-covered mountain. It was white and glistening and looked lovely.

The boy now was rattling on about new troops headed out to the exercise. He’d thrust his microphone up to some soldiers sitting in trucks that were momentarily stopped. The men in the trucks were saying they didn’t know anything about it, they’d just been put on alert that morning in D.C., and about eleven they’d been ordered to load up on the vehicles and here they were.

“But,” the young soldier now told the young reporter, even as the truck was pulling away, “tell you this, we gonna kick ass!”

“Man, that must be some exercise they got going out there,” said a man at the bar. “They say traffic’s backed up all the way to goddamned Baltimore. Never heard of nothing like it.”

“Where?” Gregor asked, adding, “I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.”

“Ah, out Alternate forty, from Middletown to Boonsboro. You ought to be okay you stick to seventy. That mountain, that’s South Mountain, A-forty goes right by it. They got it closed off. Also, all them little hick burgs out there. Funniest goddamn thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Ain’t no government land up there. Plenty up at Aberdeen. Plenty at Fort Meade. Plenty at Pax River, over on the
Shore. Plenty out at Fort Richie. Ain’t no government land at South Mountain, though. Damnedest thing, you can bet.”

“Ummm,” nodded Gregor.

Should I go out there?

I’m closest. Maybe I could get out there and hear something from a soldier or something.

Yes, with your accent and your Soviet visa, yes: and end up in Danbury for twenty years, then home for twenty more in the Gulag. No, the answer was Molly.

He now saw that there was some kind of crisis and that Molly would find it out for him and that he would be first with the news, the whole
apparat
would be working on it, and he, the great Gregor Arbatov, he would find it! He stood, wobbling, and ambled awkwardly back through the crowded room to the men’s bathroom. Inside, he deposited his coins in the slot and tried to call Molly again.

There was no answer.

Oh, Molly, he prayed. Oh, please, please, don’t let me down, when I need you so bad.

The news continued to be bad at Delta Command, even after the debacle at the Hummel house. The Rangers had run into heavy weather over Indiana and had to divert south and take on fuel in Tennessee and were now ETA’d at 1900 hours earliest, and that was with a twilight night drop which Puller didn’t want to risk, so make it 2100 before they were on station and ready to assault. Meanwhile Third Infantry was hung up in the traffic building up outside the roadblocks and was having a hell of a time fighting their way through it. Pentagon analysts had made no further penetrations of the queer message sent by the “Provisional Army of the United States.” Peter Thiokol had come to a standstill in his attempts to understand the identities of Aggressor Force, and therefore was mum on his chances of breaking the reset door code at the shaft entrance. There was, furthermore, no word from the FBI regarding its investigations of his wife, Megan, and any help she could have given them. The two surviving little girls at the Hummel house were too distraught to provide any clues as to the identities of the three men who had held them
hostage for most of the day. The Pentagon kept inquiring as to progress in breaking the seizure; Dick Puller had no progress, but he had final casualty figures of Bravo Company’s assault: fifty-six dead, forty-four wounded, leaving an effective force of less than fifty men. The field hospital set up by Delta medical personnel was being strained to the maximum, and men had already begun to die who would have survived
in
Vietnam, where the airevac system had been
set
up much better.

It was six o’clock. Six hours to go.

Puller headed off to find Thiokol and monitor the latest in FBI investigation reports. But he didn’t make it very far.

“Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!”

It was a Spec 4, one of the Commo specialists.

“Yeah?”

“Sir, we were supposed to get a response every fifteen minutes from Rat Six on the other side of the mountain. They’ve missed two checks now.”

“Have you tried to call them?”

“Yessir. No answer.”

Puller took the microphone.

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

There was no answer, only silence on the radio.

Puller tried a few more times.

“Who’s in that area?” he asked one of his sergeants.

“Sir, besides the Rat Six Team, nobody. Except we’ve got the mountain ringed with state policemen, so there should be a cop a little farther out.”

He consulted a map, then went to the radio and called state police headquarters at the roadblock on Route 40 a few miles away.

“Ninety-Victor, this is Delta Six, do you read?”

“Affirmative, we have you, Delta Six, we copy.”

“Ninety-Victor, you got a man on, uh, looks like Moser Road?”

“Yes, sir, had that one sealed off for quite a time.”

“Can you patch me through to him, 90-Victor.”

“Yes, sir. You just hang in there.”

A few moments passed.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor, at the roadblock on Moser Road, about three miles due west of South Mountain. I’ve been requested to contact you.”

“Yes, 22-Victor, I copy. Listen, son, you heard anything recently?”

“Just what I figured on, sir.”

“And what was that, 22-Victor?”

“Well, sir, I figure the helicopter finally burned down to the ammo.”

“Say again, 22-Victor.”

“Well, sir, right from where that helicopter crashed and exploded, about twenty minutes ago, all the ammo cooked off. It was about ten or twenty seconds of gunfire. That was all.”

Dick put the microphone down.

“Delta Six?”

Dick said nothing.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor. Do you require further assistance?”

But Dick said nothing.

Goddamn him.

He turned, looked at the mountain about a mile off.

Goddamn him: he’d found Rat Six. He’d wiped it out. And he’d sent men into the tunnels after the Rat Teams.

“Sir, do you want to send a party around to check out the Rat Six position?”

Puller shook his head. What was the point? Aggressor-One had topped him again. His rats were dead in their holes. And there was nothing Puller could do about it now except order up the body bags and pray for Peter Thiokol.

“Thiokol?”

Peter looked up from the Aggressor-One document, from his notebook, from his FBI counterintel reports. It was Skazy.

“Look, we have to talk.”

“About what? I have a lot of—”

“Out in the barn.”

“What is this?” said Peter, reading at once something tense and guilty on the officer’s face. “What’s going on?”

“In the barn, please, Dr. Thiokol.”

Peter waited a few minutes, then went out and moseyed around back to where Skazy and two other Delta officers awaited. The men were smaller, leaner Skazys: lean, serious guys in cammo fatigues, bulging with belts and knives and grenades.

“So? What’s the—”

“We want you to keep an eye on someone for us.”

“That’s not my job,” said Peter. “I’m not here to keep an eye on anybody.”

“On Dick Puller,” said Skazy.

Peter felt his face betray some shock.

“There was a time,” said Skazy, “when Dick Puller was the best man this Army had. It was an honor to serve under him, let me tell you. He was a great officer. He was a professional’s professional. But he lost it.”

“What are you talking about?” Peter didn’t like this a bit.

“Sometimes these guys who’ve seen so much combat lose the edge. They can’t send boys to die anymore. They don’t have the balls for the big leap. They delude themselves; they don’t close out the engagement, they don’t get in tight, they’re not willing to take casualties, they’re not willing to see their own troops die to take an objective. And so you get what you’ve got right now: a sense that all around us things are going on, but right here, right at the point of the crisis, nothing is happening, except that we’re marking time.”

Peter felt himself a poor advocate for Puller.

“Look, he’s trying, he can’t do much until—”

Skazy bent close.

“In the Iranian desert there came a moment he’d trained his life for. It didn’t come down like it was laid out, and it meant taking a big chance, it meant going for it. You know what they say in this business? Who dares, wins. That’s the first principle of special operations. In the desert, Dick Puller lost the talent to dare. That guy up there on that mountain, he’s still got it.”

“What are you saying?” Peter said.

“I’m saying if he panics again, I’m going to take him out. And push forward and deal with the consequences later. It’s
what I should have done in the desert. You just watch him. If you see signs that he’s breaking down, you let me know, got it?”

Peter saw now that he was in some twisted, sick family drama. It was some humorless parody version of a sixties sitcom,
My Three Sons
as written by Edward Albee, in which the oldest boy, Crazy Skazy here, was going to knock off Dad, Fred MacMurray/Dick Puller, while the two younger boys, himself and the other son, poor dumb Uckley, sat around wondering what to do.

“You’d better reconsider what—”

“Thiokol, if he freezes, you sing out, you hear. That’s your real job. Now, you’d better get back to your goddamned door.”

The farther along he got, the better Teagarden felt, when he knew it should be just the opposite. No matter how you cut it, he knew, he was welshing out. He was ejecting. Color him gone.

Yet his relief as the tunnel called Alice widened, as its dog legs and juts eventually straightened themselves out, was enormous and liberating. Goddamn, it felt so
good;
he’d felt this way in ’Nam, way out in Indian country, he’d been just a kid, it was ’71 or so and he was new to the Forces. It was after a long goddamn time in a little place, getting hit every night, that at last a relief column had broken through. It felt just like that. He couldn’t smell the sky yet, or see the stars—if there were stars; he had no idea what time it was—but he wasn’t going deeper and deeper into the goddamned darkness.

He almost wanted to whistle. But suddenly he heard something just ahead. It was like a little rustle or something, up against the rock. What, had Rat Six sent more guys in? He froze, caught. To run into an officer and have to explain what the hell he was doing broken off from his partner, here, hundreds and hundreds of feet back, almost in the lateral tunnel, that was trouble. He ransacked his own mind for an excuse, something to put between himself and his disgrace.

The radio!

The Prick-88 wasn’t working, they weren’t getting through, he’d come on back to reestablish contact before—

A light beam shot out, hit him in the eyes, pinning him.

“Hey! Jesus, you guys, you scared me. What the hell, you checking on us, Rat Six? I lost radio contact, came back to get a clear line. Listen, we’re way the hell back there.”

Another light struck him, blasting his vision, filling his brain with exploding sparks. He heard muttering, the soft jingle of equipment.

“What’s going on, guys? Like, is all this really—”

A hand like a darting bat flew in front of his eye, landed at his chin, and with a strong yank pulled him back until he crashed against a strong body; the hand pulled his chin up, opening his throat to the attack. At almost precisely the same second, though Teagarden never saw it, the other hand drew the evil edge of a very sharp combat blade across his throat, cutting with icy precision through skin, cartilege, and on down to the carotid artery, which it severed.

My sons! he thought, Jesus, my sons!

But, stunned as he was, Teagarden at least had a second left for a reflex, and as he died, his finger tensed on the MP-5’s trigger and the little gun barked out a four-round burst. The bullets smashed pointlessly into the ground, and immediately other men were on Teagarden, beating at him with rifle butts.

This was the hard part.

The guns were easy: A Fabrique Nationale FAL, in 7.62-mm NATO, or .308, serial number 1488803–213; a 9-mm Uzi, manufactured also by Fabrique Nationale under license from the crafty Israelis, serial number 10945873–38771 with a very professionally made but otherwise untraceable silencer that extended a good seven inches beyond the barrel; and a British L2A3, called a Sterling, in 9mm also, serial number 129848–555; plus one handgun, a Czech CZ-75, serial number ground off. This information had been forwarded to Washington, but the stuff felt as though it came from the immense pool of surplus weapons held in obscure warehouses the world over and belonging to no country but only to the
fraternity of international arms dealers. It could have all been bought from
The Shotgun News.