The Day Before Midnight (5 page)

And because Hapgood did not have to get the key off his neck, because he had it in his hand, he was able to punch through the glass—

“Nooo!”
screamed the major, firing twice more; the man with the laser-guided Uzi fired the rest of his clip, the bullets slamming into Hapgood, who slid in bloody splendor down the wall. But he had already dropped the key into the key vault and, one second later, a half-ton titanium block slammed down, sealing the key off from reach.

The general wasted no time.

“It couldn’t be helped,” he said cheerily. “We’ve made contingency plans. We’ll get what we want. We just won’t get it right away.”

The general looked at the two combat missile officers soaking in their own blood. The young one, the boy, had been shot dozens of times. The back of his jump suit was a spatter of bullet holes and burned fabric. The general betrayed no surprise or regret. He simply passed on from the bodies to other issues.

“Get them out of here,” said the major. “And get the blood mopped up.”

The general turned.

“Commence our occupation phase, Alex,” he commanded. “Well be having visitors soon, and we’ve got much work to do.”

“Of course, sir.”

Alex issued orders quickly. “Get the trucks up here with Hummel and send the demolition team down to blow the road. Roll out the wire for the field telephones. Get the canvas strung out. And get the boys started digging in.”

The general turned to the teletype machines against the wall. Five of them—marked SAC, ERCS, UHF Satellite, Looking Glass, and SLFCS—were still, as if dead. The sixth—marked National Command—suddenly began to clatter away insanely.

The genera] touched Alex on the arm.

“Look, Alex,” he said. “They know. The key vault must be rigged to send a robot signal to Command when it’s deployed.”

He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex.

“About three minutes. Not bad. Not outstanding, but not bad.”

He pulled the message off the platen.

The machine spurted again. It was the same message.

“They must really be going crazy in the Pentagon about now,” the general said with something like a chuckle. “Lord, I wish I could see their faces.”

Alex nodded, and hustled out.

The general had two things to do now.

First, he went to the shortwave radio transmitter nestled between two of the teletypes. It was the Collins 32S-3 model, an older machine that had been installed in the capsule purely as an emergency backup method of communication. He flicked it on, bent to the band selector, and turned it to the 21.2 megahertz setting, then dialed in a more specific frequency on the tuner. That done, he simply twisted the emission dial to the CW setting and held it for five seconds exactly, sending out a burst of raw noise across the airwaves on his frequency. Then he turned it off.

All right, he thought, very good, according to plan. And now …

He pulled one of the chairs from the console over to the operative teletype. He pushed the red send button. Immediately, it stopped clattering.

He bent to the keys.

In one swift burst he typed out his message. He had no need to pause to think. He knew the words by memory, and it was in the spirit of memory that he delivered them.

Speak, Memory, he thought, as he hit the send button, and the lessons of the past reached out to twist the present into the future.

“Imbecile,” yelled the excited Klimov. “Fool. Idiot. Do you know how much we spend on you? I mean, can you guess?”

Gregor Arbatov said, “No, comrade.”

It was useless to resist. Klimov was making an example of him before all the others. To defy Klimov in public circumstances such as these was to risk more than disaster, it was to risk humiliation. Christ in heaven, it was to risk recall to Russia! Klimov was ruthless. Klimov was tyrannical. Klimov was perhaps psychotic. But worst of all, Klimov was young.

“Well, let me tell you, comrade. I was up half the night going over budgets while you were rooting around under the sheets with your fat friend. It costs us over thirty thousand dollars a year to support you. We pay for the apartment, we give you a food and clothing allowance, we lease your automobile. And how do you repay us, to say nothing of fulfilling your duties? With drivel! With nonsense! With hearsay, gossip, and rumor! Some agent runner you’ve become in your old age, Arbatov. I remember once you were a hero. And now this. What the senator really thinks of SALT II. Where the senator stands on Peacekeeper. What the committee will do when next the Director of Central Intelligence requests a fund increase. I can read all this in
The New York Times
, where it’s much better written. Thirty thousand buys a lot of subscriptions to
The New York Times
, Comrade Arbatov.”

Arbatov mewled an explanation, head down, contrite, his eyes riveted on his bleak black shoes.

“In some cases, Comrade Klimov, it takes time before a source can be cajoled into producing high-grade product. It takes much patience and manipulation. I am working diligently to—”

But as he spoke, he sneaked a peek at his tormentor and saw the interest drain from Klimov’s eyes. Klimov was not much on listening. Klimov was a great talker, a lecturer, a young man extraordinarily fascinated with his own life and career; his interest in the human race seemed to stop at the tip of his own nose.

Klimov had ugly eyes, a short temper, and a quick mind. He was what everyone in Washington feared and hated, regardless of political inclination or global loyalty. He was very young, very bright, and very connected.

It was this last that so filled Arbatov with terror. Klimov was the son of the sister of the great Arkady Pashin, GRU’s Chief of Fifth Directorate (Operational Intelligence), the man next in line to be first deputy. And this rotten little Klimov was his nephew!

With Uncle Arkady’s kind intercession, young Klimov had shot through the ranks. To be a deputy
rezident
at twenty-eight, unheard of in the old days! Poor Arbatov would never make
rezident
rank. He had no relatives, no supporters in high places.

“Do you think,” said Klimov, “that when Comrade Pashin assumes full operational responsibilities for the organization he will tolerate such foolishness?”

Of course poor Arbatov had no idea what Pashin would or would not tolerate. How could he?

“Do you think because you service a special asset you are invulnerable to criticism and beyond self-improvement?”

Klimov must be feeling especially bold today to even mention the agent Pork Chop, on whom, as much as anything, Arbatov had staked his chances of survival. Was even Pork Chop to be taken from him?

“I—I—” he began to blubber.

“Your special source can easily be serviced by another,” roared Klimov. “You are merely a technician. You can be replaced as simply as one changes a light bulb, comrade.”

Arbatov saw that he was lost. There was but one course left open to him.

“But, comrade,” whined Arbatov, “it’s true I’ve become sloppy in my ways. Perhaps I take too much for granted. I’ve let the
Amerikanskis
penetrate my inner being. I have allowed myself the vanity of pride in the way I service my primary asset. Let me confess my crimes. I ask the comrade only for a chance to repair the harm I’ve done. Perhaps he’ll give me enough time to prove that I’m not utterly beyond reform. If I fail, I’d gladly return to our motherland, or to any less comfortable post it prefers for me.”

Lick his boots
, he told himself.
Lick them. He’ll like that.

“Ah!” Young Klimov made a snort of disgust. “These aren’t the old days. No bullets in the neck for such as Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov! We require only that he rededicate himself, as he says he shall.”

“I shall,” squeaked Arbatov as radiant relief beamed from his face. Then he looked down in expiation, aware that in sniveling he had once again survived. The young officers of the embassy
apparat
, which Klimov ran, looked at him with unconcealed contempt; he could feel their eyes harsh against his fat form. He didn’t care. He could have wept for joy. He had more time.

The meeting turned from Arbatov’s weaknesses to other concerns. Arbatov appeared to be listening intently, a new man. He even took notes eagerly, quite a change from the insolent, lazy old Arbatov. What he was writing down in his little notebook was, This little flicker should burn from the toes up. Over and over.

As he was walking from the meeting, someone came flying after him.

“Tata! Tata, stop!”

He turned to see the stout form of his one true friend, Magda Goshgarian, bearing down upon him.

“Tata, darling, don’t you think you laid it on a bit thick?”

Magda was another of the old ones. She had an uncle who was a general of artillery and was thus safe from Klimov’s predations, at least for now. She was a rumpled, plain woman who wore too much makeup, drank too much, and danced
too much in the Western idiom for her own good. She even went to discos in Georgetown when she thought she wasn’t being watched. She was perhaps his only remaining friend, now that Klimov had exiled Daniel Issovich to Krakow and old Pasha Vlietnakov to Ethiopia.

“Darling, you have no idea how abject I can be in the service of survival,” said Gregor. “These young bastards were disgusted? They haven’t seen anything yet. I won’t stop at licking his boots. I’ll eat them too. I’ll butter them and eat them if it buys me one more day in the West.”

“You are a sorry Communist, Tata.”

“No, I’m an excellent Communist. I’m merely a sorry spy.”

“Any new fat American girls, Tata?”

Tata was her pet name for him. As he had told Molly Shroyer, it was derived from the hero of the fourteenth-century folk tale, Prince Tatashkin of the noble heart. Prince Tatashkin, lean and golden, had gone into the Caves of the Urals, there to fight the Witch of Night Forever, or so the story went. He was still fighting her all these years later, losing in the early hours of evening but regaining his strength in the morning. As long as he fought her each night, there’d be a morning. It was a wonderful story, never failing to bring tears to Gregor’s eyes, though he was aware that he was Tata to Magda only in the ironic sense.

“Yes,” Gregor said with a sigh. “I’ve a nice one going now, though she talks like a baby sometimes. But say, what are you doing here? Didn’t you have Coding Station last night? Why aren’t you home in bed?”

“I was in the Wine Cellar, yes, Tata. But the meeting was so early, I thought I could score a few points with young Klimov by hanging around. There’s a new bitch in the apparatus who may have her eye on my apartment.”

“The blond one? I’d like to set her on fire. I hate the young ones. Especially the beautiful young ones.”

“I hate them too. Gorbachev’s dreadful children. Little rats, squandering all our labors. But, Tata, you must promise to be careful. Who will fight the Witch of Night Forever if they send you back? Worse, who will I talk to if they send you back? The walls?”

But Gregor wasn’t listening; he was thinking only of himself.

“Do you know, Magda, I had my dream about you last night. I heard you say my name, and it jolted me awake.”

“A dirty one, Tata? Filthy with Western perversions, I hope.”

“No, I’ve told you. A nightmare. Scary. Caves, the like. Quite awful. As if I really
were
that damn prince. I remember fingers on my throat, someone’s hot breath. Troubling. The Witch of Night Forever.”

She laughed.

“Gregor, you fool. It’s a fairy tale. Look around you, at your dreary reality and the little snail Klimov hungrily sniffing after you. Is that the stuff of fairy tales?”

“No,” confessed Gregor. “You’re right. The age of fairy tales is gone forever. I believe only in love. Do you love me still?”

“I’ll always love you, Tata, love you most of all. You know that.”

“Thank God,” said Gregor, “that someone does.”

It was called the situation room, on the B level, the second sub-basement level beneath the White House. It wasn’t much architecturally: a conference room, roughly fifteen by twenty feet, painted a grim institutional green, in which there was one large conference table and several comfortable chairs. It could have been located in any ambitious motel chain in America. There weren’t even any maps.

The President of the United States sat in a sweat suit with his eyes narrowed in extraordinary concentration as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force read aloud from a document he held before him.

“‘No man sent us here,’” the lieutenant colonel read, “‘it was by our own prompting and that of our maker, or that of the devil, whichever you ascribe it to. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason and the only thing that has prompted me to come here. I wish to say furthermore that you had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared, the better.’”

“All right, when did this come over?” the President demanded. He looked around the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was there, as were the Chiefs of Staff of the Services, impressive men in their well-tended uniforms ablaze with decorations. Each was served by an aide of no less than field grade rank who sat behind him, against the wall. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense had arrived, as had the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency filling in for the Director, who was in Phoenix this morning for a speech; the Director of the FBI was there, too. Finally, the National Security Adviser. Yet among the fifteen or so of them, there was not the slightest tick of sound beyond the rise and fall of breaths and the occasional rattle of paper.

“Sir,” the lieutenant colonel responded, “we received that over the National Command teletype link from the South Mountain installation at 0823. It followed by three minutes and fourteen seconds a clear-channel robot signal from the launch command center that the key vault had been deployed.”