Pale Horse Coming

by Stephen Hunter

“Sam?” he finally said, and his tone carried the whole story.

  “Yeah?”

  “Sam, nobody would do it. It’s too tricky. I can see the point, too, can’t you? I mean, either your thing is going to go off or it’s just a bottle of Pepsi-Cola and we can all laugh about it, that’s all. And if it’s the first, getting another man killed, I mean, what the hell good does it do? One’s enough, by my reckoning. I wish Earl were here. He could do it.”

  “Well, Earl isn’t here, dammit, and we will just have to deal with that.”

  “How do you feel, Sam?”

  “This palaver is no help at all. But my hands hurt like hell, my arms are weakening, my lower back is cramping and my knees are shaking. Oh, and my vision is blurring.”

  “Sam, I…”

  “Yes, Harry?”

  “Sam, I can’t stay here. A mortar shell goes off this close to me and I’m cooked too, along with you. I’m sorry, Sam. You see what it is, don’t you? Either them Army boys are going to get here or not, and either there’s a mortar shell in there or there ain’t. My being here, it don’t matter.”

  “All right, Harry.”

  “Do you want me to say anything to your wife and kids?”

  “Only what they know. That I loved them, that I wish I was a better man for them. Now get the hell out of here, Harry, and get busy on your praying.”

  But Harry wasn’t listening.

  Some sort of ruckus came up outside, a welter of noise and emotion, hard to make out, though indistinct sentence fragments came around the corner and into the room where Sam so delicately stood, the ribbon taut, the pains scaling his arms and legs, the sweat running down his face into his bushy eyebrows.

  “You can’t—”

  “I told—”

  “Sheriff, we tried—”

  “She wouldn’t listen—”

  “Now, Mrs. Longacre,” cooed the sheriff, “this is a very dangerous—”

  “Goddamn you,” came the clear, hard tones of Connie Longacre, “you get out of my way, Harry Debaugh, or I will sic such a crew of lawyers on you, you will wish you had never ever set foot on this planet from whatever coward’s rocket ship you arrived on.”

  And with that, she stepped around the door, the sheriff and two deputies in pursuit, but unable to stand against her force of will.

  Connie was beautiful. She had blond hair and soft skin and a nose like an ax blade. She could have used more chin, and eyes of blue or green instead of sea gray, and she could have dressed more like the woman she was instead of in jeans and boots and a sweater, but she was still such a heartbreaking vision Sam almost started to cry.

  “Connie, for God’s sakes, get out of here. This is—”

  “Sam, I tried to stop her.”

  “Mrs. Longacre, this is a crime scene, and you are not authorized.”

  “Ma’am, your husband—”

  “You shut up, all of you. I’ve heard enough. You run away, you little man, and pray I can help Sam or my husband, Rance, will be very angry.”

  “Sam, I—” began the sheriff.

  “Sam, what is all this nonsense?”

  “Connie, please, this thing could go off at any moment.”

  “Mrs. Longacre, won’t you please come this way and—”

  “Don’t you touch me!” she screamed, and the two deputies jerked backward. The sheriff yielded, then surrendered.

  “All right, Sam,” she said, approaching as steadily as a three-masted schooner under nine sheets and a full breeze, “what the hell have we got going on here?”

  “Connie, I cannot—”

  “I am not going to go sit in the car, Sam, while you blow up, so you had better tell me what to do and tell me now!”

  CONNIE cut slowly, with perfect concentration. The surgical shears were sharp, and she cut in smooth strokes, unfaltering, unperturbed, unhurried, as if she’d worked with bombs her entire life. She had most of the back end of the box off now.

  “What do you see?”

  “Just a second.”

  With a deft snip, the scissors closed their last. She set them down gingerly, then with her pale and elegant but steady hands, removed the rear of the box.

  The smell of Cosmoline immediately flooded the room.

  “How disgusting,” she said.

  “It’s government gun grease.”

  “There seems to be wads of paper or something.”

  “Can you get them out so you can see?”

  “I can try. How are you doing, darling?”

  “I’m fine. Never been better. I may start to dance any second I’m so happy.”

  “There, there, darling. We’ll have a nice martini when this is over, and then touch fingers and go back to our happy marriages.”

  “Connie, for God’s sakes—”

  “All right, I’m pulling it out, just wait.”

  Using the scissors’ tips as pincers, she eased out a wad of crumpled newspaper, then another, and then another.

  “Now I can see our boy,” she reported.

  “And?”

  “Hmmm. Yes, yes, what a naughty boy he is, too. He’s about eight inches tall with a set of stubby little fins at the end of a shaft at his bottom. His body is egg-shaped, greenish, with striations around the middle. The end is conical, but there’s some kind of gizmo there, a sort of pipe coming out of it. I can’t see for sure, but it looks like a nest of wires at the top.”

  “Can you see if any of those wires leads out of the box, through a hole or something?”

  “It’s too dark, darling. Do you have a flashlight or anything?”

  “Yeah, right here, in my pocket, I’ll just put this down and get it.”

  “Sam, don’t be a smart aleck, even if you’re about to be turned into Swiss cheese.”

  “There’s a flashlight somewhere, but oh, Christ, I don’t know where it is. Get a lamp.”

  “Mary will be so upset.”

  But Connie went to an end table, seized a lamp from it, and ripped off its shade. Carefully holding it so the cord ran free, she brought it over to the package on the dining room table and snapped it on. The harsh, shadeless light made Sam flinch, and he did not need to flinch, for he almost let the ribbon go.

  But Connie was peering in intently at what the light revealed.

  “It does appear there’s a cord tied neatly through the ring at the tip of the pipe, and a taut line runs up to the box and—” she lifted her eyes to follow the cord—“and, yes, darling, it does seem to be stoutly attached to the ribbon you are holding so tightly.”

  “All right. This is what you have to do. You have to reach in there and very delicately unscrew the fuse from the warhead.”

  “I don’t know if I can get my hands in there. It’s very tight. If I bump, the thing may go off, right?”

  “I can’t think of anything else. I’ve got a fairly firm grip for now.”

  But that was a lie. Even as he spoke it seemed the fire in his fingers rose another ten degrees. Connie’s presence let him block the agonies that assailed him, but now that magic was wearing off.

  “Oh, where are those goddamn Army boys?”

  “Just like an army. There’s never one around when you need it.”

  “Connie, this isn’t going to work. We aren’t going to make it.”

  “Sam, we are going to make it. Tell me what to do and stop wasting your breath.”

  “Connie, I—”

  His fingers twitched. It felt like he was hanging off a ledge on their strength alone, and now, one by one, they were dying.

  “Connie, please go.”

  “Could we block it?”

  “What?”

  “Block it. The striker will fall, but if it strikes something else, then there won’t be a boom, isn’t that right?”

  “Can you see in there? Is there a gap?”

  Connie held the blazing bulb close again, and looked carefully.

  “There should be a hole where they removed a safety pin as part of the arming proc
ess.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Listen, these things are made of cheap pan metal. They’re not well made at all. Maybe with something you could scrape around the edge of that hole, enlarge it enough to get something in there to grind away at the hole and enlarge it enough to get something in there.”

  Connie didn’t say a word. She opened the surgical shears, inserted the point ever so delicately into the tiny opening for the safety pin.

  “You’ve got a good grip.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Not quite true. But as good as he could manage, given the pain in his hand.

  “So long, been good to know you,” said Connie, and Sam felt the subtle change in the string when a kind of pressure was applied somewhere far down the system.

  He looked at her. Her eyes were wide, and the harsh light illuminated the beauty of her face like a lamp on a statue in Italy. Her face was completely focused, completely calm. She wasn’t even breathing hard. He yearned to kiss her.

  A sharp pain cut through his arm.

  “Ah,” he said. “I’m checking out. I’m losing it. Go on, get out of here, I can’t hold it, my hand is dead.”

  “Just a second, darling?”

  “It’s failing. It’s failing,” he screamed, for he tried to find his will to compress his aching fingers, but he’d been on this drill for so long, it seemed his whole life, and there was no strength left.

  “Please, Connie, please, run.”

  “Just a second, darling. I almost have it. Now if only there was something I could guide into that hole.”

  She looked about.

  There wasn’t time.

  “Oh, Connie,” said Sam. “Please.”

  “Stop being noble. It’s annoying.” She reached into the box. “Maybe if—”

  It was gone. It was over. He had failed.

  “Connie, I love you.”

  “Of course you do, darling,” Connie said, and his fingers at last failed, and the cord slipped and the pin worked its last tiny bit free and the striker was released, its captured tension in its coiled spring allowed to thrust forward toward freedom, and with a powerful snap it drove ahead.

  Sam closed his eyes, knowing it didn’t matter, for in the next tenth of a second he and Connie would simply cease to exist in their form and instead be rendered—well, he had seen enough deaths by high explosive.

  But it didn’t go off.

  “Jesus!” he said, flexing his fingers to restore the circulation as he fell to his knees.

  He looked at Connie. Her face was gray, her eyes blank, her lips tense, fine beads of sweat upon her brow.

  Then he realized what she had inserted into the hole to keep the striker from the primer.

  It was her finger.

  He raced around the table, took up the scissors and began to cut the box away, until at last he had the destructive device free. He could see it now: her smallest thinnest finger, inserted into the crudely enlarged safety-pin hole in the pipelike pull-fire gizmo.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m going to gently unscrew the device from the fuse well.”

  “Sam, you say the sweetest things.”

  Holding the mortar shell by its warhead against his hip, and with the other hand securing the device, he began the slow process of unwinding the shell from its trigger. It fought him at first, and then he started when some moist warmth clotted up against his fingers and he realized it was her blood. But he un-steadily cranked a tenth of a turn by a tenth of a turn until after what seemed hours the shell itself separated from the firing device. As he set the shell down, something fell to the ground, like a quarter. He saw that it was an artillery shell primer, the necessary ingredient in assuring the explosion.

  “Hold your hand up now to stop the bleeding.”

  Connie lifted her hand, its finger wedged cruelly in the opening of the pull-fire tube. More blood poured down, matting redly in the fiber of her gray sweater. He held her tightly, unsure what to do next. He wasn’t clear if he could just pull it off, or possibly that would maim her finger all the more. He thought maybe he should get her to the faucet and run cold water, but the two of them were on the floor, and she was nestled against him, and it was as close as she’d ever be to him, and he was strangely happy.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “you are so brave. Jesus Christ, you are so brave. Oh, Connie, leave him, and I’ll leave Sally and—”

  “Oh, stop it,” she said. “That would just make a big mess. If you want to be helpful, why don’t you find my purse and get me a cigarette and then make me a nice drink.”

  Then she noticed they were no longer alone.

  “Sam, there’s a man from Mars over there.”

  Indeed, the Martian lumbered over to them. He was some sort of giant robot, stiffly encumbered in armor, his body a bulk of pure iron, his face an iron mask with a tiny viewing hole. He wore immense mittens of steel braid.

  “Say, what part of Mars are you from?” Connie asked.

  The Martian shucked off his huge mittens and removed his mask and revealed himself to be merely “Sergeant Rutledge, U.S. Army, ma’am,” and in seconds everybody else was in there, including police officers, the heroic Harry Debaugh, a medical technician and two more partially disrobed bomb guys, pulling a huge metal box on wheels behind them.

  “Look at all these party crashers,” said Connie.

  But Sam was thinking: damn, damn, damn, another second and I could have kissed her.

  48

  EARL looked at the telegram and wished it hadn’t come. It sat, as yet unopened, on the table on the porch. It actually had arrived yesterday, and Earl could not bring himself to open it. It could only be from Sam. Sam had promised him he’d tell him man-to-man if he’d decided against the plan. Maybe Sam couldn’t come, so Sam had sent a telegram. Earl imagined it said, At midnight, unless I hear from you, I will inform state police. Regards.

  Sam, really, was not a man of war. Sam was a civilian. He thought like a civilian, he reacted like a civilian, he had a civilian’s fears and doubts. Earl was a soldier. Earl killed people. That was a difference in the way the two minds worked that Earl could not bridge.

  He should never have told Sam. He should never have come back. He should have done it on his own.

  Earl sat on the porch of the farmhouse in Florida. He could see the empty barn, the rolling fields, and the long dirt road and in the distance the forest cut with palmetto plants, and above it all a blaze of sun.

  There was nothing to do but wait; the boys would begin to show up tomorrow or the next day, and dark of the moon was but four days off. To make himself useful, he was working with the .38–44 high-velocity cartridges, taking each one from its nest of fifty, and with an awl drilling a hole in the center of the semiwadcutter bullet, so that the bullet would rupture when it went through flesh, on the principle of the dumdum bullet. Illegal to do so in battle, but battle was a different phenomenon. This was a holy war, where the odds would be seven against Thebes. So it was allowed.

  Earl worked steadily, trying to keep his mind clear, trying not to worry. He went over his own private operational plan, trying mentally to take it apart, to see it afresh, to figure on the unintended consequence. He knew that the confidence that he had thought of everything was the true sign of danger.

  Then he saw the car.

  It was a long way off. It pulled up the road, yanking a screen of dust behind it. Under the newspaper next to him on the table was a Colt .357 Trooper, loaded with the dumdums. Earl could get at it fast, but hoped he didn’t have to.

  But soon enough it was recognizable, and Earl put aside his thoughts of the gun. It was the Cadillac limousine that Mr. Trugood seemed to travel the country in.

  Earl sat back, still dumdumming cartridges, until the car arrived, and a fellow popped out obsequiously to spring the door for the august Mr. Trugood.

  Earl stood and beheld. The man was resplendent in cream linen, with a blue shirt and a yellow tie and a nice straw Panama, with a
yellow band to match the tie.

  “Hello, sir,” said Earl, rising.

  “Mr. Earl. You don’t seem happy to see me.”

  “Come on up and get yourself out of that heat.”

  The man came up, following Earl into the squalid living room. He looked about with distaste.

  “It’s certainly not elegant, is it? Well, that’s what sixty dollars a month rents these days.”

  “These boys won’t even notice. They’ll be too busy buzzing among themselves about cartridges and gun actions.”

  “Earl, you’re still not happy that I’m here.”

  “Sir, I don’t want no one down here to see you and identify you. If this thing goes wrong, I want to be the only man with the whole picture. I don’t want it coming back at you.”

  “Yes, and you also don’t want a rich fellow in a fancy car suddenly getting all the natives excited in this backwash, wouldn’t that be equally true?”

  “It would.”

  “Well, we traveled back roads, and after Montgomery I have not been out of the vehicle. Fair enough?”

  “Yes, sir. Since you are paying, you are always welcome.”

  “Earl, I’ve come about the plan.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Earl, I have to say this. I think there’s a mistake.”

  “Since you’re paying all the bills, Mr. Trugood, then if you think there’s a mistake, I’ll listen hard to it and try and get it fixed.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I’ve been butting against it myself. I’m trying to see it fresh. Maybe you’ve seen something I ain’t yet.”

  “It’s not the plan, not really. It’s the bigger picture.”

  Earl squinted. What was this bird up to?

  “Sir?”

  “You’re a Marine. You make your attack, you move on. That’s it, right?”

  It was so true Earl simply nodded.

  “Yes. Well, what about them?” said Davis Trugood.

  “Them?”

  “The Negroes. When you’re done, you’ll have two-hundred-odd convicts and thirty-five odd townspeople stuck upriver miles from civilization. You’ve drowned the prison under twenty feet of black water. What happens to those folks, Earl?”

  Earl thought it over a bit. Finally, he said, “You have a point. But in the war if we’d thought of that stuff, then we’d never have made the first invasion. We’d still be in our boats off Guadalcanal.”