The Day Before Midnight (9 page)

He lit a cigarette, one of his beloved Marlboros, felt it cut deep into his lungs. He coughed.

“Sir,” it was one of the Commo specialists, overexcited as usual. “Sir, look.”

Someone else came running into the room, too, a state policeman, and then one of the army Commo teams.

“Look, Colonel Puller. Jesus, look.”

Puller raised his glasses to his eyes and saw that a dark blur had suddenly obscured the mountaintop.

“What is it?” someone yelled. Other men were fumbling with binoculars.

Puller concentrated on the dark stain that now lay draped over the mountain. He gauged it to be about five hundred square feet, undulating slightly, black and blank.

It made no sense at all.

And then he had it.

“It’s a goddamned tarpaulin,” he said. “They’re covering up. They don’t want us to see what they’re doing up there.”

God damn them, he thought.

In the uproar he almost missed Uckley telling him softly
that someone had tracked down the man who’d created South Mountain, a guy named Peter Thiokol.

Poo Hummel was at an age where she liked everybody, even men in her bedroom with guns. She liked Herman. And Herman seemed to like her right back. Herman was big and blond and all dressed in black, from his boots to his shirt. His gun was black too. Despite his size, he had gentle eyes—and the bumbling mannerisms of a well-trained circus bear. Not an atom of his body radiated anything except an awesome desire to please. He loved her pink room and especially her toys, which were displayed on shelving her daddy had built. One by one, he took her animals down and studied them with massive concentration. He liked Care Bear and Pound Puppy and all her Pretty Ponies (she had almost a dozen). He liked Rainbow Brite and Rub-A-Dub Doggy and Peanut Butter too. He liked them all.

“This one is very pretty,” he said. It was her favorite, too, a unicorn with a bright pink polyester mane.

Poo was no longer upset that her mother would not stop crying down in the kitchen and that Bean was so quiet. For Poo, it was a great big adventure to have new friends, especially like Herman.

“Will you ever go away?” she asked, squinching up her nose and making a face.

“Sure,” he said. “Soon. I gotta go. I gotta job.”

“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I like you.”

“I like you, too, nice little girl,” he said, smiling.

She liked his teeth especially. He had the whitest, friendliest smile she’d ever seen.

“I want to go out,” she said.

“Oh, no, Poo,” he said. “Just for a little while longer you have to be inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you can go out and play and it will be all fun. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. It’ll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you a present. I’ll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?”

“C’n I have a drink of water?” Poo asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”

Peter Thiokol was rambling.

He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses, imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way altogether and surrendered to incoherence.

“Um, so, um, it’s the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of course we all hope it won’t, anyway, um …”

The note card before him was no help.

It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl, “Decapitation theory—explain.”

Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature section of
The Sun.

It wasn’t a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of Shaffer Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?

Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.

But it
is
interesting, Peter had said.

He struggled to find his focus, a problem he’d been having ever since the problems with Megan.

“Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it’s the idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the—”

“Uh, Dr. Thiokol?”

Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol
loved
it when someone in his class asked a question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or two. But there were hardly ever any questions.

“Yes?” he said eagerly. He couldn’t see who had spoken.

“Uh,” an attractive girl asked, “are we going to get our midterms back before we have the final?”

Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared with incomprehensible chickentracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table next to his bed. He’d read a few, then lost interest. They were so boring.

“Well, I’m almost done with them,” he lied. “And yes, you will get them back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we’ll have to cancel the final.”

There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this, because he loved to show off so for Megan.

“You show off
very
well, I must admit,” Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had once said. “It’s your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to end the world.”

The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown—a new start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city, new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired to think or remember.

He’d just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call Megan or not, and praying that she’d call him.

The memory was still brittle. He’d even seen her two weeks ago, in a wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation. She’d simply showed up after months of staying out of touch. For a night it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb, his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.

“Anyway,” he said, still scattered, “urn, on decapitation stuff, um—look, let’s be frank here.” He had this sudden weary urge to cut through to the truth.

“Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to save a few million or billion people. The
idea is that Soviet society is so centralized and authority-crazed that if you kill the top few, you wreck them. So you build a missile that’s really an intercontinental sniper rifle. You become the guy in
Day of the Jackal.
The only problem is, they can do it to us, too.”

They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.

He sighed again.

And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude, Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the Defense Department, prime denizen of the inside-the-beltway Strategic Community, author of the famous essay in
Foreign Affairs
, “And Why Not Missile Superiority?: Rethinking MAD,” was drowning.

Peter was a tall, reedy looking man of forty-one who looked thirty-five; he had thinning blond hair that exposed a good stretch of forehead, which made him look intelligent. He was also rather handsome in an academic sort of way, but he had a disorganized quality to him, an alarming vagueness that put many people off. Outside his area of expertise, he cheerfully admitted, he was a complete moron.

In a no doubt desperate attempt to camouflage his discomfort, he was dressed as he imagined a professor should dress, that is, as he had remembered them dressing from twenty years before: He wore a tweed jacket so dense it looked like a map of a heather Milky Way, and a Brooks Brothers blue oxford-cloth shirt, that deeper, stormier blue that only Brooks offers, with a striped rep tie, a pair of pleated khakis from Britches of Georgetown, and a pair of beat-up, nearly blackened Bass Weejuns.

The student tried again.

“Uh, Dr. Thiokol? Could you at least tell us if it’ll be an essay exam or a multiple choice? I mean, the test is next week.”

The girl looked a little like Megan. She was dark and beautiful and very slender and intense. He stared at her neurotically, then struggled with the question. Reading more
of their essays would just about kill him. But he knew he didn’t have the energy to go back through his chaotic notes to develop some kind of objective thing. He’d probably just give them all B’s, and go back to staring at the phone.

“Well, why don’t we take a
vote
on it?” he finally said.

But he was suddenly drowned out in the hammering of a huge roar. The class turned from their lecturer to the window, and watched in amazement as a scene from a fifties monster movie began to unreel. A large insect appeared to be attacking the parking lot. As it got closer, the bug became an Army UH-1B Huey helicopter, a great olive drab creature with a huge Plexiglas eye, a bloated thorax, and an almost delicate tail, and as it floated down out of the sky, adroitly sliding through a gap in the trees, its howl caused all the fixtures in the lecture hall to vibrate. Preposterously, it landed in the parking lot, whirling up a windstorm of dust and snow and girls’ skirts.

Peter could hear the giggles and the gossip as two officers in dappled combat fatigues came loping out of the hull of the craft, grabbed a kid, spoke to him, and then headed toward his building. But he himself did not smile. He understood that they were here for him and that something was terribly wrong. He felt the blood drain from his face.

It took them about thirty seconds to reach Shaffer.

And in the next second the doors flew open, and a lean middle-aged officer walked with utter lack of self-consciousness to the front of the room.

“Dr. Thiokol,” he said without a smile, “we need to talk.”

Their eyes met; the fellow looked focused and excited at the same time. Peter knew many career military types; they were okay, a little literal-minded, perhaps. And generally quite conformist. But this guy had something a little extra: He looked like a young dragoon officer racing toward Waterloo in 1815. Peter had seen it in a few bomber pilots, usually the wilder kinds, the ones who wanted to go thermonuclear three times a week.

“Okay,” Peter said to his students, “you guys get out of here now.”

The students trundled out, gossiping among themselves.

Then the officer held up
Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon
by Peter Thiokol, Ph.D.

“In this book you talk about what you call the John Brown scenario, where a paramilitary group takes over a silo.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “I was told by a very high-ranking officer that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever read. It hadn’t happened since 1859 at Harpers Ferry and it couldn’t happen now.”

“Well, it seems to have happened.”

“Oh, shit,” said Peter, who didn’t like to swear. He found his breath suddenly ragged. Somebody took over a bird? “Where?” But he knew.

“South Mountain. High-force threshold. Very professional take-down.”

The major sketched in the details of the seizure operation as they were known and it was clear he had been thoroughly briefed.

“How long ago did this happen?” Peter wanted to know.

“Going on three hours now, Dr. Thiokol. We have people there now, setting up an assault.”

“Three hours! Jesus Christ! Who did it?”

“We don’t know,” said the major. “But whoever, they know exactly what they’re doing. There’s been some kind of massive intelligence penetration. Anyway, the commanding officer/ground wants you along to advise. All the signs are that they’re going for a launch. We have to get in there and stop them.”

So it had started. It was close to the final midnight, and he thought of all the things he had meant to say to Megan but never had. He could think of only one thing to say, but it was the sad truth, and he said it to this soldier.

“You won’t make it. You won’t get in there. It’s too tight. And then—”

“Our specialty is getting into places,” the officer said. “It’s what we do.”

Peter saw his name stenciled above his heart against the mud-and-slime pattern of the camouflage.

SKAZY
, it said.

The officer looked at him. They were about the same age, but the officer had that athlete’s grace and certitude to him. His eyes looked controlled, as if he had mastery even over the dilation of his pupils. It suddenly occurred to Peter that this would be an elite guy. What did they call them? Alpha? Beta? No, Delta Force, that was it, a Green Beret with an advanced degree in homicide. The guy looked like some kind of intellectual weight lifter. He had incredibly dense biceps under his combat fatigues. He’d be one of those self-created Nietzschean monsters who’d willed himself toward supermanhood by throwing a bar with iron bolted to the end up and down in some smelly gym for thirty or so years. Peter felt a sudden sadness for the deluded fool. He had half a mind to argue, out of sheer perversity. For if the idea that they could get in was this Skazy’s vanity, Delta would be disappointed tonight.

Peter had a sudden sense he was in somebody’s bad movie. The world should end in grace, not Hollywood melodrama. It couldn’t even destroy itself well. He almost had to laugh at earnest Skazy here, the Delta Viking. It’s not an airliner you’re trying to crack, he wanted to say, it’s a missile silo, with the best security system in the world. I ought to know; I designed it.

“Let’s go,” said Peter. He reckoned the world didn’t have much longer to live, and he wanted to be there for the last act. After all, he’d predicted it.