The Day Before Midnight (32 page)

Dick listened, his eyes fixed on nothing.

Finally, he said, “So what’s their recommendation?”

“Frontal attack. They say that his green troops will buckle when they start taking heavier casualties. They want us to throw frontals at ’em again and again.”

“They better send some fresh body bags,” was all Dick said.

Then he asked, “So is that what you think, Major? Frontals?”

“Yes, sir. I think we ought to hit him again. The sooner, the more often, the better. Let me saddle up Delta and we’re off. Bravo in support. Leave a small reserve force here in case that radio message this morning was to another unit ready to jump us from the rear. When the Third Infantry and the Rangers arrive, you can feed them in if we haven’t taken the place down yet.”

Puller went around the room. Everybody said yes. Hit him. Hit him and hit him, and he’ll crack. Waiting solved nothing, especially now that Rat Six had been zapped and there was nothing going on inside the mountain.

Even the morose Lieutenant Dill, the gym teacher who now led what was left of Bravo, had to agree: hit ’em, he said. Hit ’em until they crack.

Finally, Puller got to Peter.

“Since this has become a democracy and we’re polling
the voters, Dr. Thiokol, you might as well throw in your two cents. You tell me. Should I hit him until he cracks?”

Peter considered. He felt Skazy’s hard eyes boring in upon him. But Skazy didn’t scare him; he’d been glared at by furious five-stars in his time.

He said, “And what if he doesn’t crack? What if his men are the best, and when they take casualties they don’t break? What if he’s got enough ammo up there
to
hold off a division? And he knows you can attack only over a narrow front, up one side of the mountain?

“What if, most important of all, the subtlest part of his plan is convincing you that yes, he’s a nut case, he thinks he’s John Brown, and that he’ll come apart under the pressure. What then? And what if you hit him until you run out of men and the bodies pile up like cordwood just outside his perimeter. The Rangers show and the Third Infantry shows, and he guns them down too. And the men that you’ve got left are exhausted and broken. What then?”

“Then he wins.”

“Right. We don’t get in. What if they’re wrong in D.C.?”

“These are experienced guys. Doctors,” argued Skazy.

“Major Skazy, I know a little about psychiatrists. I’m here to tell you there aren’t three of them in the world who could agree on the results of two plus two.”

Skazy was quiet.

Peter said, “I don’t think he’s insane. I think he’s very, very smart, and he’s set up this whole thing, this phony John Brown thing, because he knows our prejudices, and he knows how eager we are to believe in them. He’s encouraging us to believe in them at the cost of our own destruction.”

He didn’t express his worst, most frightening thought, the source of his curiously dislocating sense of weirdness over the past several seconds. The whole thing seemed pulled not out of history, but out of something far more personal. Out of, somehow, memory. His. His own memory. He remembered. Yes, John Brown, but who
thought
of John Brown first and used him as an analogy for a takeover in a missile silo in
Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon?

Peter Thiokol.

Peter thought: This son of a bitch has read my book.

But Puller was speaking.

“I just got a call from Uckley, who examined the three dead aggressors in Burkittsville. They had false teeth.”

He let it sink in.

“Nothing gives a man’s national identity away to forensic pathologists faster than dental work. So these guys had their teeth pulled—all of them—and bridgework from a third-party country inserted, so that in the event of death or capture, their origin couldn’t be traced,” Puller said. “These guys aren’t psychos or fringe lunatics or right-wing extremists or a rogue unit. They’re a foreign elite unit on a mission. They’re here for a specific, rational purpose. We have to wait until we know who they are. Then we’ll know what to do. To squander our limited resources right now is to doom ourselves to failure. We don’t know enough to jump.”

“When will we?” said Skazy bitterly.

“When I say so,” said Dick Puller. “When we know who they are. And not before.”

Witherspoon should have seen them first, but Walls did, or rather sensed them, smelled them, somehow felt them, and his swift elbow into Witherspoon’s ribs was all the signal needed. In Witherspoon’s field of electro-optics, they emerged as phantasms, swirling patterns of dense color swooping abstractly through the green chamber at him. They were dream monsters, humped and horrible, their shapes changing, one beast leaking into another; they were straight from his hyperfervid id, white men with guns in the night.

So die, motherfuckers, thought Witherspoon.

He fired first, the MP-5 bucking in a spasm as it hurried through its little box of bullets. How good it felt! It drove the fear from him. Through the lenses he could not see the streak of the tracers, nor their strikes. But he saw something else: the red darts of sheer heat, which the infrared picked up and magnified, flew into them like glops of color from the brush of a maniac. The shapes slithered, shattered, quivered, and seemed to magically recombine and reform before him. The stench of powder rose like an elixir to his nose. The gun wrenched itself empty.

He scrambled back, laughing madly. God, he’d hit so many. He heard screams behind him. Man, we hit those motherfuckers cold, we blindsided them, man, we took their butts
out!

“Down!” screamed Walls, who in the roar of their race back had heard something bounce off the walls, and as if to make the point clearer, he nailed Witherspoon with an open
field hit, knocking him down in a tangle of ripped knees and torn palms. Then the grenade detonated.

It was very close. The noise of it was the worst, but not by much. The noise was huge; it blew out both of Witherspoon’s eardrums and left traces of itself inside his skull for what might be forever. Its flash was weird and powerful, particularly through the distortion of his night vision glasses, the hue so hot and bright it had no coefficient in nature. Finally, following these first phenomena, the force of the blast arrived in an instant, and was as mighty as a wallop from Cod. It threw him, rag-doll-like, against the wall. He felt himself begin to bleed abruptly, though as yet there was no pain.

Witherspoon sat up, completely disoriented. For just a second he forgot both who and where he was. He blinked and peeped about like a just-born baby bird, chunks of shell and fluid stuck to his face. In the dark, bats of light flipped and swooped toward him. The air was full of dust and broken neon and cigarette smoke from forties movies. His head ached.

“Come on, boy, shoot back!” came the shout from close at hand, and he turned to see an interesting thing. He was by now only half in his night goggles, which had been blown askew by the grenade, so he saw half of Walls in the stylized abstractions of the infrared, a glowing red god, all anger and sinew and grace; but the other half of Walls was the human half: a soldier, scared to death, full of adrenaline and responsibility, standing against the tide of fire in the blackness and cranking out blasts from his Mossberg, eruptions of flash which, for however brief a fragment of time they lasted, lit the tunnel in pink-orange and almost turned the fierce Walls into a white man.

Walls pumped up dry, but by that time Witherspoon had shaken the dazzle from his brain, gotten a new clip into the German gun, and turned to spray lead down the tunnel, watching the bullets leaking light and describing a tracing of a flower petal as they hurled off into the darkness. The fire came back at him after a pause, angry and swarming. It seemed to be hitting everywhere, pricks of hot coal sent flying against his skin by the bullet strikes.

He knelt, fumbled through a mag change.

“Grenade,” said the resourceful Walls, having thought one step ahead, and Witherspoon caught a glimpse of him as a classical javelin thrower posing for a statue. Then he uncoiled, and as he uncoiled fell forward. Witherspoon heard yells of panic from surprisingly close at hand, but was unfortunately and stupidly looking into the heat of the blast when the grenade detonated. His vision disappeared in a confusion of deep-brain nerve cells firing off and as he fell backward, his night shades fell even farther awry, then slipped away.

“I’m blind, man, I’m
blind!”
he screamed. Walls had him. The firing seemed to have stopped. Walls put a strong hand around the fleshy part of his arm above the elbow and pulled him backward in a crazy old-nigger scuffle. He felt like one of those clumsy black fools in an old movie.

Walls pulled him back farther and deeper. Gradually, his vision returned to normal. He could see Walls’s sweating face just ahead.

“I can see now.”

“Man, don’t ever look at those suckers when they go off.”

“How many did we get?”

“I don’t know, man. Hard to say. In the dark, it sometime seem like so much more, you know?”

They fell into silence. Witherspoon breathed raggedly, looking for his energy. He felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. He could smell Walls next to him. Yet he sensed no stress in Walls.

“You like this, don’t you?” he asked, amazed.

Walls sniggered. “Shee-itt,” he finally said, “a chance to kill white boys? Man, this is like a
vacation!”

“You think they had enough?”

“No. Not these white boys.
Most
white boys, not
these
white boys. These white boys
pissed.”

From the footsteps she guessed no more than five. She heard them rushing along, their breathing ragged under the equipment they wore and their urgency. Then the first explosion came, its flash bouncing off the walls and through the
turns all the way to her, its hot, dry concussion arriving a half second later. There were screams and moans. But then—the sound traveled surprisingly well under the ground, for it had no place else to go except straight to her—she heard the scuffle of feet.

Mother, they are still coming.

I hear them.

This surprised her. In the war, the Americans almost always turned back when they took casualties. On the surface, when they started losing people, they withdrew and called in the airplanes. But in the tunnels there were no airplanes; they simply retreated. Yet these footsteps came on, if anything, more determined than before.

She turned, upset, now frightened, and began to withdraw deeper still into the tunnel.

Hurry, Mother. They must have found the second grenade and disarmed it. They are coming faster.

She raced into the tunnel. By now it had almost disappeared into a trace and the beams the miners had erected for their operations’ had long since vanished; instead, it was the classical Cu Chi passage, a low, cramped crawlspace, fetid and dense. She rushed through it, her fingers feeling the way. She felt as if she were crawling back into the black womb and knew she was very deep and very far.

She halted after a time, turned, and listened. She could no longer hear the men. She thought she was safe.

Am I safe?

Mother, be careful. You must wait.

She was still. Time slowed.

Mother, be patient. Haste kills.

What was
it?
An odor? Some disturbance in the air? An odd flash of mental energy from somewhere? Or only the return of her old dark instincts? Somehow she knew she was not alone.

Her hand slipped to her belt. She removed the knife. She willed herself to stillness. She willed her body into the walls. She lay motionless and silent in the dark and the loneliness with her daughter. She felt herself attempting to enter into the fabric of the underground, to still the whirl of
her atoms and the beat of her heart. She thought she heard something once, and then another something. The time passed; she had no idea how much.

Then again something else came. The sound of men in heavy equipment crashing through the tunnel, much farther back now, much more frightened, much more reluctant to go on now that the tunnel was shrinking.

She could imagine them right where the bigger tunnel was absorbed into the smaller one, their bravado frozen by its sudden shrinkage and the difficulty of the path that lay before them. Western people did not like to go into the dark alone, where they could not maneuver or talk or see or touch one another. It would stop them if anything would: their simple terror of the close space and the darkness.

The men made brave sounds. They were arguing. One seemed louder. She could not quite understand the distorted sounds. But the yelling grew louder, and then halted entirely. She heard them walking away. Their sounds slowly disappeared.

She almost moved then. But she did not.

Wait, Mother. When you move, you die. Wait. Wait.

The dark pressed upon her like the lid of a coffin. Her hip was wedged against a jutting rock; she could feel it bruise. Her muscles stiffened and began to ache. Her scalp tingled. A cramp tightened her upper arm. Her whole body screamed for the release of movement.

She tried to think of her village before the war came. It was near a place called Ben Suc in the Thanh Dien forest. She had a sister and nine brothers; her father had been a Viet Minh and fought the French with an old carbine until it fell apart, and then he fought them with bamboo spears. But for a time it was a prosperous area, Ben Suc; there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been easy, but they lived well enough by their modest endeavors. She was fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was obliterated by bombs.

She tried to remember: she thought of it as the golden time, those few years before the bombs came. She held on to it, sometime, in the tunnels, and would tell her daughter,
Some day you’ll see. Well live in the sunlight. There will be fruit and rice for all. You’ll see, my little one. Then she would sing the child a lullaby, holding her warm and tight and feeling her small heart beating against her own: