The Day Before Midnight (7 page)

“Yes, sir. But we felt that made launch control centers vulnerable, especially to the new SS-24s with their capacity to take out a hardened silo. If you take out the command capsule, none of the remote silos could launch. You could hit ten launch control centers and disable one hundred missiles. It was too tempting a target for the 24s. Therefore we built South Mountain as an independent-launch-capable installation. Even if Washington, SAC, Cheyenne Mountain, the airborne launch control center, and the ERCS missile are out of the picture, our command and control system totally fried, the boys in the silo could still launch. It was Peter Thiokol’s idea. The guy at Hopkins who also created up the key vault.”

“Yes, Thiokol,” said the President. He’d had lunch with Peter once. An impressive young man, very smart, though almost totally bloodless where nuclear war was concerned. But somehow immature in other ways. The disparity had scared him a little. But then his mind moved quickly on.

“Then we’ll have to use conventional bombs. Drench the place in napalm.”

“No, sir,” said the Air Force general. “The key to accessing this installation is getting down the elevator shaft. And accessing that elevator shaft is by means of a mainframe computer mounted directly adjacent to it, a Hewlett-Packard LC5400. The machine is sheathed in titanium. We feel that it’s pretty invulnerable to small-arms fire, but any kind of heavy round—above a grenade, say—could damage the circuits. And if you damage the circuits, you lock the doors shut. Sir, you’d never cut through those doors. Never. They weigh eleven tons. So you’ve got to limit your applications of high explosive and napalm to the immediate site area, or you’ll seal things up and we’d never get down there.”

“Nerve gas,” the President said. “Soak the mountain in nerve gas. Kill them all. If we have some civilian casualties, then—”

“Mr. President, Peter Thiokol was a step ahead of you there. He reckoned someone might try to nerve-gas his way in, so he had a filter system built into the computer. One whiff of bad odor, and the computer locks the mountain off. Not to mention that if these troops are as professional as we suspect, they’ll be trained in chemical warfare. They’d just slap on their gas masks.”

Damn
Peter Thiokol, the President thought.

He looked at his watch. So, this was it. Here we are. And what do we do now?

“Sir, I think the solution is simple,” came a new voice.

“It takes a bit of time, Mr. Hummel. We descend a full hundred feet.”

Jack felt the pull on his knees as the chamber plunged down and down. Jack didn’t like it. He had the sense of sinking forever beneath the waves, a sense of
submerging
somehow. You could get so far down you never got out again. You were buried.

At last the descent ended and the doors opened.

Beyond, Jack could see a corridor spilling away, lit by the odd bare bulb. But he also saw the man waiting for him: a trim fellow in his late fifties, well-cut white-blond hair, a slick, handsome face lit with charm.

“Welcome, Mr. Hummel,” said the man. “Welcome
to
our little crusade.”

Jack just stared at him dumbly. He felt a little as if he were in the presence of a TV anchorman, or a governor, or a talk show host. Something about the guy made him swallow hard. Jack felt as if he ought to ask for an autograph.

“This way now, Mr. Hummel. Come on, can’t be slow. I know it’s all new to you, but we are
depending
on you.”

This queerly pleased Jack’s ego. A big guy like this depending on him.

“Well, whyn’t ya just
hire
me and leave my wife and kids out of it?”

“Security, Mr. Hummel.”

They walked down the corridor, at last came to what appeared to be some kind of hatch door. Jack ducked his head to enter and still again he thought of subs: two chairs catercorner from each other, facing dozens of switches,
NO LONE ZONE
the walls said. Jesus, who’d want to be alone in
this
creepy place? The only human-scaled thing he could see in the small room was a crude, hand-lettered index card which read
AND HEEEERE’S MIRV
taped above an odd keyhole garlanded with an uptilted red flap in the control panel. Jack noticed then that there were
two
keyholes but that only one of them had keys in it.

“Say, what the hell is this?” he asked.

“It’s a kind of computer facility,” said the white-haired man. Jack didn’t buy this at all. Computers, yeah, computers, but something
more
, too.

The man took him to a wail. There, before him, stood a broken window; shards of glass lay on the floor. But behind the window was not a view but simply a shinier grade of metal.

“Touch it, please, Mr. Hummel.”

Jack’s fingers flew to the metal.

“Do you recognize it?”

“It’s not steel. It’s not iron. It’s some kind of alloy, something super-hard.” He plunked his finger against it; the metal was dull to the touch. It didn’t retain heat; it didn’t scratch; it looked mute and lifeless. And yet it felt to his touch oddly light, almost like a plastic.

“Titanium,” he guessed.

“Very good. You know your business. Actually, it’s a titanium-carbon alloy. Very tough, very hard. There’s probably not another block of metal like it in the world.”

“So?”

“So. This block of titanium has descended into a second block of titanium. When it fell, thousands of pounds of rock above it locked it into place. It cannot be lifted. We need a welder to cut into the center of the titanium as fast as possible. You are a welder.”

“Jesus,” said Jack. “Titanium’s the toughest stuff there is. They build missile nose cones out of it, for crissakes.”

“The melting point of titanium is 3,263 degrees Fahrenheit. Add the carbon, which has a melting temperature of over 6,500 degrees, and you are dealing with a piece of material that has been designed to be impenetrable. Can you penetrate it?”

“Shit,” said Jack. “I can get into anything. I cut metal. That’s what I do. Yeah, I can cut it. I have a portable plasma-arc torch that should get hot enough. Heat isn’t the problem: You can make a puddle out of anything. You can make a puddle of the whole world. The problem is how much I’m going to have to melt away to get inside. It takes time. You cut in circles, narrower and narrower. You cut a cone into its heart. You dig a tunnel, I guess. So what’s at the end of the tunnel? A light?”

“A little chamber. And in the chamber, a key. The key to all our futures.”

Jack looked at him, trying to connect the dots.

A feeling of intense strangeness came over him.

“You’re going to all this trouble for a key? That must be one hell of a key.”

“It is one hell of a key, Mr. Hummel. Now let’s get going.”

Jack thought about keys. Car keys, house keys, trunk keys, lock keys.

Then, with a woozy rush, it hit him.

“A key, huh? I read a little, Mister. I know the key you need. It’s the key that’ll shoot off a rocket and start a war.”

The man looked at him.

“You’re going to start World War Three?” Jack asked.

“No. I’m going to finish it. It started some time ago. Now, Mr. Hummel. If you please: light your torch.”

A boy rolled out the portable Linde Model 100 plasma-arc cutting control unit. The coiled tubes and the torch itself were atop it. Another boy wheeled in the cylinder of argon gas.

“I suppose if I—”

“Mr. Hummel, look at it this way. I’m willing to burn millions of unnamed Russian babies in their cradles. I would have no compunctions whatever about ordering that two American babies—called Bean and Poo—join them. After the first million babies, it’s easy, Mr. Hummel.”

“The torch,” Jack Hummel said, swallowing.

The President looked into the eyes of the Army Chief of Staff, a blunt-looking man who bore a remarkable resemblance to a .45 Colt automatic pistol bullet. On his chest he wore enough decorations to stop just such a round. “It couldn’t be simpler,” the general said. “It’s straight infantry work, bayonet work. We have to get our people into that hole and kill everybody in it before they dig out that key. Say, by midnight. Or else the bird flies.”

“What’s the recommendation?”

“Sir, Delta Force is already gearing up for deployment,” said the army general with a small, harsh smile. “Best small-unit men we’ve got. Our computer tells us there’s also a company of Maryland National Guard infantry in training not two hours away from the site. That’s two hundred more men, although you’d have to federalize them. I’m sure the Governor of Maryland would agree. We can truck out elements of
the 1st Battalion, Third Infantry, from Fort Meyer, a good infantry unit, your ceremonial troops, hopefully by 1300 hours. I’ve already put them on alert. Then, I can get you a Ranger battalion air-dropped into the zone from its home base at Fort Eustis, Washington, by mid-afternoon, weather permitting. I can throw together a makeshift chopper assault company from Fort Dix and I can get you air support from a Wart Hog unit of the Maryland Air National Guard. With Delta, Third Infantry, and the Rangers, you’ll have the best professional soldiers this country has produced.”

“And armor, General. Could we just blow them out?”

“There’s only one road up, and the latest information is that they’ve destroyed it.”

There was silence in the room for a time.

“We’re back to rifles and balls,” said the Army Chief of Staff.

“Can you do it in time?” the President said to the army general.

“I don’t know, Mr. President. We can solve the logistics of it. We can get the men there in time, and we can send them up the mountain.”

“It’s going to be a long and bloody day,” somebody said.

“But it’s a very hard assault. First, you’ve got to get to the elevator shaft, and you can only attack on a very narrow front because the mountaintop is surrounded by cliffs. Once you get to the LCF and its elevator,” the general explained, “you’ve got to rappel down the shaft, and fight your way to the LCC, where they’re trying to launch the bird.”

“Sir,” said one of the President’s advisers, “you’ll have to declare a phase four nuclear emergency, which empowers federal authorities to literally take over a given district, and turns all civil authority over to federal command. You’re going to have to turn Frederick County into a war zone. I think maybe you’d also better raise the defense condition to a Defcon 4.”

“No to that,” said the President. “I don’t want the Soviets thinking we’re ready to launch. Increase security at all our missile sites and our satellite receiving stations.”

“It’s been done, sir,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“Okay, go to the phase four. Put out some kind of cover story about a military exercise to keep the goddamn press out of it. Now it’s the Army’s baby, with all due respect to the Air Force. I don’t want a lot of different services falling all over each other’s toes. Set up the roadblocks, seal off the area. Go to war if that’s what it takes. But get those people out of there, or kill them all.”

“Yes, sir,” said the general. “Now, as for the command—”

“For the commanding officer out there, General, I want the best combat man you’ve got. And I don’t care if he’s a PFC in Louisiana.”

“No, sir,” said the general. “He’s a full bird colonel, retired. But he’s one mean son of a bitch.”

Jack Hummel pulled his goggles down over his eyes and the world darkened. He held the cutting torch in one hand, and reached back to the control panel to switch the device on. The current flowed and the electrode in the tip began to glow from red on through the hues of orange. He watched it heat and grow within the nozzle, and then when it became almost white, he released a slow, steady stream of nitrogen. The gas ignited with a pop. In the crucible of the nozzle it became ionized—that is, electrified. Jack turned the temperature dial on the Linde control unit up to the top so the flame would reach the plasma temperature range, almost fifty thousand degrees.

The flame was a white killer’s tongue, as hot as the center of any nuclear blast, but controlled there at the end of his torch. The men around him, reacting to the power of flame, drew back instinctively. He increased the pressure so that the flame was almost a needle that darted out two inches beyond the nozzle.

“I’m going to cut up into it,” he told the general. “That way, the molten metal will run out via gravity.”

The general looked at him.

“It’s going to take a long time,” said Jack. “Jeez, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve hours.”

The general bent over.

“You know what’s at stake. Your own children,” he said. “Do you understand?”

Jack said nothing. Jack knew he could do it: if he could launch missiles against the Russians, he could murder his own children.

But a part of Jack said, Your children will die anyway if this rocket is launched.

Yeah, that’s tonight. Today it’s this fucking block I have to crack. I’ll face tonight when it comes. I got to get them through today first.

“Okay,” said Jack.

He bent, holding the plasma-arc torch in one hand, and with his other touched the smooth, burnished surface of the block of metal. Somewhere inside was a key.

He touched the torch to the metal. He watched its bright needle attack and liquify the metal; at fifty thousand degrees the ionized plasma-arc gas first seemed to define a bubble on the surface of the block, and then a dimple, and then an indentation, and finally, something very like a little tunnel. Jack cut deeper; the molten metal ran from the kerf, the gap gouged by the flame, and down its face like tears.

“The colonel,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “did time in SAS in Malaysia on an exchange officer program. He was Special Forces from the start and had a brilliant Vietnam. He had seven years there, spent a lot of time in places we never officially went. He was stuck in a siege under heavy fire for thirty-eight days, and held out.”

“Oh, God, Jim,” said the Chief of Naval Operations.

“And, most important,” said the general, “he invented Delta. He fought the Army and the Pentagon to get a Delta Force created when nobody cared. He trained Delta, he knows Delta, he lives and breathes Delta. He
is
Delta.”