The Day Before Midnight (41 page)

“Alex, did you know that Ghengis Khan had a special operations team, a Spetsnaz himself, under the leadership of a brilliant young officer who refused all promotion? Do you know what he said? I offer you this to think about: he said, ‘Give me forty picked men, and I will change the world.’”

Alex nodded.

“I will change the world, Alex. With you and forty picked men. Or, rather, sixty.”

They were a perfect team: the general the father who saw and knew all, the major a son who made his father’s vision possible with his own willingness to sacrifice.

“Now, boys,” he said to
his
children, the tough young heroes of 22 Spetsnaz, who would change the world from the perimeter defense of South Mountain, “think of your fathers scrambling through the wreckage of Stalingrad in the subzero
weather, throwing themselves against the SS juggernaut all those long and bloody years. Then think of your grandfathers, who made a revolution and fought great battles against the West to save the world for you. Then be thankful that your test isn’t half so severe as theirs: you’ve only a single night to fight, on a mountaintop in America.”

“Let them come,” said a boy. “Ill talk in bullets.”

“That’s what I like to hear. And remember this: you’re Spetsnaz. No men on this earth have trained as hard or learned as much or given as much to become as good as you. You are the very best in the world. You carry your country’s destiny because you’re strong enough. Your shoulders are broad, your minds clear, your wills strong.”

Alex paused in his thoughts and a twitch played across his face. He realized that it was a smile.

God, he was happy!

He couldn’t wait for it to begin. It was the battle every professional soldier since the time of the Legions had dreamed about: a small-unit defense with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. But only one soldier of all the millions had gotten a chance to fight it, and that was Major Aleksandr Pavlovovich Yasotay of 22 Spetsnaz.

And one other: the unnamed American assault team commander, whom he would soon be meeting.

Skazy was alone with Delta now. He checked his watch and saw that it was 2145; the plan called for them to onload the choppers at 2150. Puller had gone back to the command headquarters to work up his nerve or whatever; and the guy Thiokol, gone too, back to his anagrams and code sequences, tensing up to crack the door.

There was one outsider here, Skazy knew, but said nothing. The young federal agent Uckley, who’d fucked up at the house, had arrived a few minutes ago in Delta cammos, presumably borrowed from one of the men he’d cracked the house with. Somewhere he’d got an MP-5 and an accurized 45. Uckley was here to tag along. All right, kid, thought Skazy. It’s your party too.

“Okay, guys,” Skazy said, “your attention please, just a sec.”

They turned to look at him, faces now blackened, gear checked for the thousandth time, the very best guys there were, weapons cocked and locked, boots tied, all concentration and intensity.

“Guys, it’s just us. Some of you were in ’Nam in the Airborne or the Rangers or
out
in the boonies in an A-team detachment and you remember how it came apart in the end despite all the blood you and your buddies poured into it. And some of you were on the fucked-up Iranian mission with me and remember how it came apart, and how we left bodies burning in the desert. And some of you jumped into Grenada with me, and remember being pinned in that ditch during that long night. Well, the truth is, Delta’s had its ass kicked each time out. Now, right now, I know there’s a guy on that mountain who’s a lot like us, hardcore, pro military, lots of ops under his belt. The Spetsnaz commander. Right now he’s telling his guys how good they are, and how Delta will be coming and how they’re going to kick more Delta ass. Okay? That doesn’t make me too happy, and I don’t think it should make you guys too happy. So no matter what happens, I just think we ought to have a little moment of seriousness here for a moment before we get on board the slicks. I fully expect to die tonight and that doesn’t scare me a bit, because I know if I do, some Delta asskicker is going to come in the hole I opened and finish the job I started, right? So let’s just shake hands, clear our minds, and concentrate on our profession tonight. In other words, guys, let’s just get it done. Tonight, Delta gets it done. Tonight, Delta kicks ass. Fair enough?”

The roar was an explosion.

Skazy smiled. God, he was happy!

Peter stared at the face. It was a shrewd, wary face, cosmopolitan, comfortable, sure. It was also handsome, radiant with confidence. You could almost feel the charisma leaking from it. The eyes were bright and hard.

Arkady Pashin, he thought. I never even heard of you. But you certainly heard of me.

His eyes scanned the biographical data. Military and engineering all the way, another smartest boy in the class.

He tried to see a pattern, a meaning, in the Agency information. But he found nothing—it read like your run-of-the-mill defense pro, like any of a hundred generals he had known, only Russian style, with one of those famous cold, hard, serious defense minds, with the inevitable right wing twist, the Pamyat thing.

But there was this one peculiarity: “In November of 1982 Arkady Simonovich Pashin formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as Arkady Pashin. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning.”

Why on earth would he have done this?

A weirdness passed through Peter, some twisted nerves firing, and the strange sensation that the name alteration had to do with him too. It was connected to him. He shivered.

Peter tried to think about the Russian thinking about him and realized how important he was to the guy. He sends a guy to fuck my wife and then he himself comes over to this country and he charms her. He has her in that room in that fake Israeli embassy, and he looks at the woman I’m in love with. He’s probably seen movies of her fucking Ari Gottlieb.

Peter shivered again; it was
so intimate
somehow; he felt hideously violated. His most closely held vulnerability—Megan—had been taken from him, turned, and used against him, used as a weapon. He had an image of this guy going through telescopic photos of him, going through the detritus of his life, trying to figure it all out, trying somehow to enter Peter—to, in some perverse and pathological way, to
become
him.

He reached back, pulled out his wallet, and got out his wife’s picture. She still looked good to him. He set the photo down next to Pashm’s and looked at the two of them together. Megan’s shot was a head-on, without angle, casual. It caught her grace and the brains behind her ears and maybe just a little bit of her neuroticism. Looking at her, he suddenly acquired a terrible melancholy.

God, baby, I set you up for them, didn’t I?

I made it so easy for them.

He looked at Pashin, the man in the mountain.

Your whole thing is that you think you’re smarter than me. You and your little tribe of cronies, what’s it called, this screwball outfit, Pamyat, Memory. He felt a little twist of shame. He knew himself he had no memory, no sense of the historical past.

It doesn’t mean anything to me, he thought. Only one thing means anything to me.

Megan.

And you took her from me.

He looked again at the picture. No, Comrade Pashin. I’m smarter than you. I’m the smartest guy in the class. I’m the smartest guy you ever met.

He began to doodle with the name, Arkady Pashin and the name Peter Thio—

He stood up suddenly. A terrible excitement came over him, and a terrible pain. He had some trouble breathing, and yet at the same time he filled with energy.

I think I have you, he thought. The only thing I have to do is look where you think I don’t have the guts to look. But I’m a realist. And this is how I beat you.

I
can look at anything. Even if it kills me.

He left his desk, strode through the operations room, not seeing Dick Puller or the others, and pushed his way to the Commo room.

He picked up a phone.

“Is this a clear line?”

“Yes, sir,” said a young soldier.

Swiftly, he dialed a number, heard it ring, ring again.

A man’s voice answered with a name.

“This is Dr. Peter Thiokol,” he said, “calling from the South Mountain operational zone. I want to speak to my wife.”

Now was the lonely time. Dick Puller felt he ought to be doing something better, smarter, harder, more brilliant. Instead, he just sat there, puffing on a Marlboro, wondering
why he ever decided to become a soldier, while inside it felt as though cold little spiders were crawling through his intestines. He felt so tight he could hardly breathe.

You became a soldier because you were good at it.

Because you always dreamed of leading desperate men in a desperate battle.

Because it seemed important.

Because it was in your genes.

Because you were scared to do anything you weren’t sure you’d be good at.

Dick puffed harshly on the cigarette. He was an old man, he knew, fifty-eight his last birthday, with lovely daughters and a wife he’d die for, the perfect soldier’s wife, who did much and asked little.

Your life has been one long self-indulgence, he thought, hating himself, wishing he could call her or the girls. He couldn’t. Jennie was married to a good Airborne major in Germany and Trish was in law school at Yale. And Phyllis—well, Phyllis wouldn’t know what to do if he called. He’d never called before, only sending her his dry little letters from various hot locales, lying cheerfully about the food (which was always bad) and the danger (which was always high) and the women (who were always numerous). If he called now, he’d scare her to death, and what good would that do?

“Sir, Sixguns One and Two airborne, checking in.”

His air force. The two gunships that would double as troop carriers and fly into the sure death of Stinger country.

“Acknowledge,” said Puller, listening as the battle began to orchestrate itself, outside his hands now that all the planning was done, all the speech-giving over, and it came down only to the boys and their rifles.

“Sir, Halfback and Beanstalk are in position at the IP.”

This was the Rangers, backed by Third Infantry.

“Acknowledge.”

“Sir, Cobra One reports onloading the slicks accomplished. Any messages?”

“No. Just acknowledge. You hear from Bravo yet?”

“That’s a negative, sir.”

“Figures,” Puller said, seeing in his head the slow and
clumsy progress of the reluctant remnants of the National Guard unit in the dark toward their reserve position to the left of the assault line, straggling awkwardly through the snow and the trees, out of contact, scared and exhausted and very, very cold. Bravo would be slow tonight.

“Sir, it’s almost time. Will you be on the mike?”

“Yes, just a sec,” said Dick, lighting another butt.

Inside, he felt himself tightening even further. Somehow it hurt to breathe. His lungs ached, his joints pinched. So many things could go wrong. So many things
had
gone wrong. In any operation, count on a sixty percent fuck-up rate. The way you win a war has nothing to do with brilliance; it has to do simply with showing up and fucking up less than the other guy. Some Napoleon! And now there was nothing to do but wait just a few more minutes.

At this point at Midway, Raymond Spruance went to bed, figuring he’d done his best.

U. S. Grant got drunk.

Georgie Patton gave a lecture on patriotism.

Ike Eisenhower prayed.

Dick Puller went back to work.

Thinking, yes, still, now, with just minutes to go he might have missed something, he began to page again through the various Spetsnaz documents and photographs that had poured in the past hour or so. There was too much to be gotten through; he was simply scanning the material, hunting for associational leaps, for blind luck, for—well, for whatever.

The dope included more reports on known Spetsnaz operations, defector debriefings (significantly all third party; no known man had defected from a Spetsnaz unit proper); satellite photos, newspaper accounts, everything the CIA had vacuumed up in thirty years of Russia watching, which had been shipped him high speed via phone computer line.

Lazily, more to drive the anxiety from his brain than for any real reason, he skimmed through it.

What if the Rangers bog down and the pretty kids of Third Infantry turn out not to be worth a shit off a parade ground?

What if the Soviets have more men and ammo than we ever suspected?

What if there’s not as much titanium between Pashin and that key as we thought?

What if Thiokol can’t get through the shaft door?

What if the Delta assault team can’t fight its way to the LCC?

What if—

And then his eyes hit something.

“Stop the attack!” he screamed. “Tell all units to hold!”

“Sir, I—”

“Tell all units to hold!”

There was a pause and some fumbling at the other end as the FBI agents debated among themselves what to do. He thought they might be trying to cross-check the authenticity of his call over another line while he waited, and as he stood there, he felt his chest seem to fill with gravel and his breath wheezed between the loose stones.

Funny, he thought. The world may end tonight and yet that doesn’t mean a thing to me. But here I am waiting to talk to my wife and I’m shaking like a leaf.

He wondered if he had the strength for the next few minutes.

And then he heard her voice.

“Peter?”

Her voice had a sadness in it, as if weighted with regret. Megan never apologized, not formally, not for anything; but she had little signals by way of indicating her small responsibility for whatever might have happened, and it was in this softened tone he heard her say his name. It did exactly what he had willed it not to: it earned his instant and total forgiveness and his total surrender. Shorn of his moral certitude, he knew he was lost.