One of them finally said, “We’re going to leave you with a card. If you should think of something, you call us.”
So Peter had his perverse little victory. Mess with Peter Thiokol and see what it gets you!
Peter looked out the window. He could see the mountain itself. He felt a little of that radiant selfhood again. It thrilled and pleased him.
I’m the smartest boy in the class! I can do anything!
Then why couldn’t you hang on to the one person you ever loved, he asked himself.
“Don’t go yet,” he said suddenly.
He rose, went to the window. Outside, on the plain, he could see the jagged streaks of smoke from the wrecked jets rising funereally against the bright blue air. From up on the mountain, the sounds of small-arms fire reached him; the National Guard Infantry, like the Brits of World War I, having taken their wages these long years, now were dying.
He could see Dick Puller hunched over the radio gear, talking frantically to his Guardsman on the mountain; meanwhile, the Delta officers stood by. They looked restless, even hungry, and desperate with frustration. Skazy, their gloomy leader, was clenching and unclenching his hands in anger.
You think you got problems, Peter thought.
He turned to the two agents.
Time to face it, Peter, he told himself. Time to face it at last. Time to stop denying the thing that’s been eating at your stomach lining all these months and that put you in the bin.
“I think my wife betrayed South Mountain,” he said.
Phuong clutched the M-16. They whirled over the mountain, and as they shot up, she felt the strangeness in her stomach; it was as if a window had been opened and the cool air could blow in. The deck beneath her began to rattle and shiver.
“Small arms,” one of the crewmen screamed over the roar of the engine.
She looked; across from her the black Americans, all dressed up like frogmen, clung together. Their eyes were eggs. Her partner, the blond man called Teagarden, another frogman, stared into space, his eyes locked in a faraway glare. His lips moved.
Then they were over the mountain, sliding down its side at an angle, the craft around them feeling warped and broken.
She had seen helicopters die before. You always wondered what it was like when they blazed in flame, then plunged to earth and hit with a detonation like a bomb. Later you went to see them. They looked like the shedded skins of insects, broken metal husks on the floor of the earth. Inside you could see the men, burned meat; the faces were so terrible. Then more helicopters would come and it was time to go back into the tunnels.
“Hang on, everybody,” the crew chief shouted. “Touch down.”
The chopper hit hard. Dust and smoke flew; the air was heavy with vibration. Suddenly men in camouflage, their faces green, their manner urgent, were among them.
“Out, out. Come on, into the trench,” they were shouting.
They scrambled from the helicopter to a fresh ditch nearby, jumping in to find other men there.
“Fire in the hole,” somebody yelled; a huge explosion that sounded like a charge from a terror bomber high up in the clouds where it could not be heard clubbed her in the diaphragm. Trees flew through the air; smoke poured around her. She coughed, taking in the acrid odor of gunpowder.
Mother, it’s all so familiar, said her daughter.
“Okay, Rats,” said the leader-officer. “That was thirty pounds of C-4 and primacord planted into what our maps tell us was once upon a time the entrance to the main shaft of the old McCreedy and Scott Number Four mine. Let’s take a look-see and find out if we punched a hole into it for you.”
They stood and moved toward the smoke. All around, trees had been blasted flat; the snow was black and the smoke still gushed from the crater. Above, the mountain, dense with more trees, rose at a steep angle. They were at its base, completely isolated in the forest. The sounds of gunfire came from far away, and a few other soldiers crouched around, keeping watch.
“I think we poked through,” said one of the soldiers. “That was a shaped charge; it ought to have cut real deep.”
“Okay,” said the small black man, “let me just check this sucker out.”
With a surprising agility he lowered himself into the gap in the earth. In seconds he was back.
“Hoo boy. Got us a tunnel,” he said. “One long, mean mothafucking tunnel. Party time coming, Jack.” He smiled; his teeth were very white and he radiated an electric confidence.
The man Teagarden had explained. This black soldier knew tunnels also; he’d been in them in her country, spent a long time in them. He was a great tunnel fighter.
He now winked at her.
“Me and this lady,” he said to the others, “we the whole show now. This old-time stuff for us, right, pretty lady?”
Yes, it was true. Black men had come into the tunnels too. She had killed black men. They were as brave as any of them.
She smiled, but it wasn’t much of a smile.
“Okay,” said an officer, opening a case, “what we got here is the original 1932 map of Number Four. Shit, this was some operation; you look back through the trees, you see that gap? That’s where the railroad went. Some of the old track is still there. And the foundations from some of the buildings are still here. Anyway, as we figure it, this shaft’ll take you in maybe five hundred feet. Then you get to what they call the lateral tunnel, the connector that held all the actual mining shafts together. There were five deep mining shafts they called Alice, Betty, Connie, Dolly, and Elizabeth. Betty, Connie, and Dollie were the bitches: they caved in. But Alice and Elizabeth ought to still be there. And they should be in pretty good shape, although nobody can say for sure, because sometimes there’s shaft erosion based on moisture, earth shifts, anything. So you head on back through them maybe one thousand feet. Anywhere beyond that point you may run into intersections with the water flues from over the years. We called around to a batch of mining engineers. They think the flues ought to be passable, though it’s going to be real tough going. Uphill all the way. Anyway, if you get close enough to the installation, you’ll hear ’em; the ground is a great conductor. Your target would be the exhaust shafts of corrugated metal that run out of the silo. If you reach those shafts, you let us know. We’ll get a Delta unit here in two minutes, and you can take ’em in the back door.”
“What we do if we run into any little strange men in there?” said the small black soldier.
“Just like in ’Nam, you waste ’em. But there won’t be anybody in there except ghosts. Ghosts don’t bite. You all set?”
“Yes, sir,” said Teagarden.
“Okay, I want a radio check the first two hundred feet. Call signs: You’re Alpha, Witherspoon; Teagarden, you’re Baker. I’m Rat Six, okay? Any questions. Miss Phuong, any questions?”
Phuong offered a tight little smile but shook her head no.
“Okay, and God bless you,” said the officer. “We’re all praying for you.”
“Let’s go to tunnelsville, you peoples,” said the small black man with another of his smiles.
And they began to enter the smoky shaft.
Darkness swallowed them.
Puller could hear the unsureness in the National Guard captain’s voice. It was close to panic.
“Th-there’s a lot of smoke from up ahead, Delta Six,” the man was saying from up on the mountain. “We can’t see too good.”
“Bravo, this is Delta Six,” Puller said, staring in frustration at the white hump a mile before him. “Are you taking fire?”
“No, sir. At least they’re not shooting at us yet. I think they’re waiting to see if the planes are coming back. There was a lot of gunfire on that mountain, Colonel.”
“Bravo, you’ve got to move now. The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be. You’ve got to get your people into the assault line and get them up the hill.”
“Colonel,” said Skazy, “let me get up there. I can—”
“Shut up, Major. Br
avo, do you read?”
“Some of the men don’t want to leave the trucks.”
“Christ, he hasn’t even got ’em out of the trucks yet,” Puller said to no one in particular.
“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”
“I copy, Delta.”
“Look, son, let me talk you through this, okay? I’ve been on a few hill jobs in my time.” Dick’s voice was reassuring, authoritative. He’d take this guy in and make him his and make him perform.
“Yes, sir,” came the voice, all thought of Commo protocol having vanished. “We’ve been on exercises for years. It’s just so—so different.”
“In combat, confusion is normal, son. Okay, you want to cross your line of departure, if possible, with platoons abreast and squads abreast within the platoons. You want the squads in column rather than file, so that you can respond instantly with a broad front of heavy fire if you make contact. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your sergeants ought to be able to handle the men,” said Puller, knowing that sergeants may be ornery, bassackwards assholes, but they were the gears that made an army—any army—operate.
“Get your sergeants involved directly. Brief them with the officers and speak to them directly. You want to minimize levels of interpretation, and your officers are probably too distant from the men. The men are going to want the reassurance of the familiar.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was silence from the mountain. The seconds ticked by. Dick lit another cigarette. Its harshness somehow soothed him. Around, several of the Delta officers stood with binoculars.
“He should have picked out his LD and hit it from the trucks running,” said one.
“Yeah, and he should have been tied in with Air,” said the other, “and gone on the dime.”
Sure, they were right. But they were wrong too, Puller thought. Unblooded troops need to be coaxed and nudged; nurtured. You need a mother for your first fight, and a daddy for the next hundred. Then you need a body bag or a shrink.
The National Guard officer’s name was Thomas Barnard and he knew he was in way over his head. The volume of gunfire during the aerial attack had upset him greatly. He was, furthermore, not exactly sure who awaited them; the order from the Governor had simply obligated them to emergency duty at the disposal of the United States Army under a phase four (“nuclear emergency”) alert at the specified locale. The unit had been very close to the end of its two weeks of active duty, and the men were not happy to clamber aboard trucks for the hour drive from Fort Richie to this godforsaken spot.
And they were furthermore baffled to detruck and discover themselves in the middle of some movie. These were mainly young blue-collar workers from the Baltimore area who had signed up because the weekend a month and the two weeks a year of low intensity army games added a nice little chunk of bucks to a parched family budget. Now they had stumbled into a little war. It was particularly intimidating to be issued large amounts of live ammunition and grenades. It had put a chill through the men, the grenades especially; in training, live grenades are treated with the awkward care of nuclear weapons because they are so dangerous. Now they were handed out like candy bars by grinning, loosey-goosey commandos. It scared his guys. None of them had a particular desire to be Rambo.
“Okay,” Barnard told his NGOs and his officers with a transparent heartiness, “let’s get ’em spread out, platoons abreast, through the trees.”
The guys just looked at him.
“Tom, the fucking professionals are sitting on their asses down there. Why are we the ones up here? I heard machine guns. Those guys on that mountain have missiles.”
“Phase four nuclear emergency. We’re working for them now, not the Governor. If they say we go, we go. Ours not to etc., etc. Look, the head guy told me those planes laid so much hurt on our friends up the bill, our big problem was going to be matching up body parts. So let’s get humping, huh, guys?”
“Lock and load?”
“Lock and load ’cm up, righto,” sang Barnard. “Full ammo, get the clips into the weapons, get the weapons unslung, have the guys open their clip pouches so they can reload on the double if there’s any kind of a fight and please, puh-lease, tell the boys to be careful. Semiauto. I don’t want any hotshot shooting his foot off.”
Grumblingly, his people started out.
Barnard went back to the radio, a little more confident because his officers and NCOs had obeyed. Around him he could hear them yelling, the men beefing, but, yes, everybody was filing off into the woods.
“Delta Six, this is Bravo, we are deployed and ready to jump.”
“Good work, Captain. Now, you’ve got 60s, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want your 60s in play earliest. We found out in ’Nam it helps the men if their own fire support is emplaced before they move.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the medics circulating behind the assault line, Don’t let ’em cluster together, get ’em into the open. The men like to see the medics. It’ll help them.”
“Yes, sir,”
“Major, finally, this is important. Don’t wait to take fire. Get your fire support going just as you cross that LD, do you read? I want to hear some noise. If any of these gooks are left alive, I want your boys to blow ’em away as they’re coming up the hill. Plenty of ammo. Okay. You copy?”
“I copy, Delta Six.”
“Okay, son,” Dick cooed. “One last thing. Keep the assault line up and moving forward. Don’t let the men hit the dirt and get pinned down. Keep up a heavy, steady volume of effective fire. And keep that fire low—ricochets kill just as dead as Charlie incoming.”
“Yes, sir,” said Barnard.
He turned to his RTO man.
“Wally, you stay near me, okay?”
“Yes, sir. No sweat.”
“That’s our unit motto,” said Barnard. “No sweat.”
He picked up his own M-16, drew a thirty-round magazine from his pouch, and clicked it into the magazine housing. Up ahead, he could see the trees and he could see his own men spread out through them. It was a bright, white day, the sun on the trees so brilliant it hurt his eyes. The sky was blue as a dream.
Jesus, he thought, I’m thirty-seven years old and I’m a tax accountant. I ought to be sitting at my desk.
“Okay,” he said to his executive officer, “Let’s move ’em out.” The line sounded too John Wayne to be real.
The flame was a silver needle, a blade almost. What it touched, it destroyed. Even through the thick black lenses and amid the showering sparks he could see that its power was absolute. It turned the world to a puddle.
Jack Hummel held the plasma-arc torch against the metal and watched the flame devour the titanium. Down here in the hole the world was serene and logical. He had a job to do, one he knew and almost loved, one he had done many, many times before. It was, after all, only cutting. He had, by this time, opened a deep wound in the smooth block of metal.
But at the same time, and despite the mesmerizing, messianic quality of the flame a few inches beyond his eyes, it was hard to concentrate. It was all so strange, and Jack had the terrible knowledge that he was doing something wrong. He should have fought harder. He should have made them beat him.
But he kept thinking, it wasn’t my fault. It happened so fast. It was … it was hard, you know. You’re in a no-win situation.
And he kept thinking how the world required heroes, but instead, it had gotten only him, Jack Hummel, podunk welder and former high school glory boy who had the guts of a rat. He began to hate himself.
You fucking scum, he said to himself.
But he knew they’d kill him and kill his kids. What difference did it make if the world got blown up then?
Barnard was amazed, really, at how well it seemed to be going. The guys were handling it like a wild game of cowboys and Indians, racing through the tree stumps, pawing up the slope in their platoon-abreast formation, keeping good contact wi
th each other, John Wayneing it with the best of them. Even the machine-gun crews, with their twenty-three-pound M-60s and their forty to fifty pounds of ammo belts were keeping up, whereas in the exercises the gunners had tended to fall way back while the younger men gamboled ahead, fleet as deer.
Barnard had picked a tree about fifty yards ahead as his last line of departure; he’d fire there. He could see the crest now, the white-and-red striping of the radio mast against the blue sky, and some kind of low, dark tent just barely visible, but everything else was quiet. The trees had been chopped up by the A-10s; it was like hustling through an exploded toothpick factory over rough ground where the twenty-millimeter shells had plowed the earth. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.
“Bravo, this is Delta Six.”
“Delta, I have no contact yet. It’s all quiet. Maybe they left or something.”
“Get your assault support fire going, Bravo.”
“I thought I’d wait just—”
“Get it going, Bravo, that’s a command.”
“Affirmative, Delta,” said Barnard, handing the phone mike back to his RTO.
“Open fire!” he screamed.
Along the lumbering line, the Guardsmen began to hip-shoot their M-16s, jinking out rounds in semiautomatic. Up ahead, Barnard saw, the snow was beginning to fly where the torrent of 5.56-millimeter bullets popped into the earth.
“Go,” he screamed again, “come on, goddammit, hurry.”
His sergeants took up the cry and the volume of fire increased as the men syncopated their shots to their own rushing footsteps. So full of the blood-thinning joy and terror of the moment as they were, they began also to scream. The noise rose, unwilled, from their lungs. It was a moment of glory: the rush of the screaming infantry against the white hill under the blue sky, the punctuation of the rifles, and now the higher, faster whipping of the M-60s anchoring either end of the line, really pouring out the fire, raking what was visible of the hilltop less than a hundred yards ahead now as they—
Alex shot the officer in the throat from about two hundred meters with a scoped G-3; he’d been aiming for the head but the captain, bumbling along beside his RTO man just off the assault line, must have stepped on a log or something and so he rose in the scope just as Alex’s patient finger carefully stroked the trigger.
The Day Before Midnight Page 16