The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  But it was still the shot he’d been waiting for.

  You want to take down the senior commander at the first opportunity, Alex knew; nothing quite so devastates an attacking force than to see the man they’ve bonded to over the long years slide backward with his head blown away. And Alex had picked him out almost immediately as the attackers broke from the cover of the trees.

  The unit began to fire. He could see them going down.

  Because the wound that Alex delivered was not quite what Alex had intended, the bullet missed the brain and tore through the muscles and cartilage to the left of the larynx, and, since it was a full metal jacket in 7.62-millimeter NATO, didn’t mushroom and didn’t deliver a killing blast of hydrostatic shock, but rather exited neatly. The captain felt as if he’d been whacked in the throat with a baseball bat; the world went instantly to pieces as he fell backward into the snow. In seconds, however, his head had cleared, and his first thought was not for himself but for his men. He could see many of them were down and that the tracers floated out toward them like confetti thrown at a parade of triumph. The air seemed alive with buzzing, cracking things.

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sir, Christ, Captain, oh, fuck, Captain” came some terrible moaning next to him. His RTO man had been shot in the stomach.

  “Medic!” screamed Barnard.

  A burst of fire, kicking up snow and bits of wood, lashed by him. He scrunched into the earth. His left side felt numb; his head hurt terribly. He rolled over, fighting for breath.

  “Captain, Captain, what do we do?” somebody yelled.

  Alex only had two heavy automatic weapons, the M-60 from the van and the H&K-21, but he knew he had to break the assault’s spine in the very first second or fall victim to a messy perimeter fight that would sap the energy of his men.

  He’d therefore placed the two guns together in the center of his line, thereby, of course, violating all infantry doctrine, because a single grenade or even a well-placed burst of fire could destroy them both. He’d also directed that several two-hundred-round belts be ripped from their canisters and linked, so that they could fire continually without reloading for one full minute. This meant the barrels overheated dangerously; thus, stationed next to each barrel there crouched a trooper with—an astonishing improvisation, come to think of it—a fire extinguisher from the ruins of the installation. As the guns fired, these men squirted cold carbon dioxide onto the barrels and works.

  The guns fired for one minute, one solid minute of full automatic. It didn’t really matter, Alex believed, how accurate they were; what was important was the volume of fire and the impression of endless ammunition hurtling at the attackers. Still, they were very accurate.

  “Bravo, this is Delta Six. This is Delta Six, do you copy? Bravo, what is your situation? We can hear heavy fire. What is your situation? Bravo, don’t let your men bunch up, keep them moving. Act aggressively, Bravo, you’ve got to act aggressively.” Puller gripped the phone. He was aware he was violating his own most precious principle, which was not to interfere with ground forces during maneuver, knowing from bitter experience at Desert One that a staff commander on the radio merely screwed things up. But the sound of the fire from the mountain was heavy and terrifying.

  “I think you’re talking to a dead man, Colonel,” said Skazy.

  Down at the girl scout camp they could hear the gunfire rising from the mountain for a long minute. Then it stopped, and there was silence. Then, now and then, the pop and crack of a single rifle, or a burst of automatic fire.

  “Return their fire, goddammit,” Barnard yelled back, coming out of his shock. Anger, confusion, finally bitterness, began to gnaw at him. He groped around for his M-16, found it, and rolled over. Other shots were beginning to rise from his troops. At least we’re answering them, goddammit, he thought.

  So where was the great Delta? Back on its ass down the mountain! All this shit about Delta in the magazines, and Delta sits on its ass while Bravo Company of the 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, gets ripped to ribbons.

  Barnard got his black plastic rifle up against his shoulder. Squinting over the sights, he could see the gun flashes from Aggressor Force, yet he felt in no particular danger. Languidly, he began to fire, jerking off rounds one, two, three at a time. The rifle had very little kick. He fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another one. After a while it seemed a little stupid.

  “Captain!”

  Someone slid into the snow next to him. It was a Lieutenant Dill from the second platoon, a phys ed teacher at a Baltimore high school.

  “Captain Barnard, I have a lot of hurt men, a lot of dying men. Jesus, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  The captain just looked at him.

  “God, sir, are you—you’re all covered with blood! Medic, get over here.”

  “No, no,” said the captain. “I’m not hurt that bad. Look, if we just pull back they’ll chop us up. I’m going to slide over to where the machine gun should be and see if I can’t set up some covering fire, okay. You wait a minute or two; when I get the fire going, you get the men out of here. Don’t leave anybody behind, Lieutenant!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get the men firing. If they’re not firing, they’re not helping.”

  Barnard began to crawl through the snow. Now and then a bullet would come whipping in his direction. But he made it down the line and found his company’s machine gun, lying on its side half sunk in the snow, a loose belt nearby and a batch of dead shells lying around. He recognized his gunner, a steelworker; half his face was gone where a heavy-caliber bullet had punched through.

  The captain wiggled forward through the snow, breathing hard. God, it was cold now. He seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he was so wet with the snow that he’d begun to go numb. Pulling the gun to him, he managed with his stiff, fat fingers to get the latch off the breech and get a belt unrolled, and set the lead cartridge into the guides. He slammed the latch shut and drew back the bolt.

  “Movement?” Alex asked his gunners.

  A bullet hit the logs before them, kicked up a cloud of smoke.

  “On the left; there’s a group on the left.”

  The gunner swung the H&K-21. Indeed, a wretched huddle of men appeared to be crawling forward. Or perhaps not crawling forward, but merely crawling anywhere, forward being the direction they’d settled on.

  “Yes, there”—Alex pointed—“take them down, please.”

  The gun fired a long burst and Alex watched as the tracers flicked out and seemed to sink toward the men. Where they struck they kicked up snow and the men disappeared in its swirl.

  “Some in the center,” somebody said. “However, I think they’re retreating.”

  “You have to fire anyway,” said Alex. “It will give the next assault team something to think about.”

  The H&K-21 fired briefly; more tracers streamed down the mountain, found their targets.

  “Rather horrible,” said one of the loaders.

  “Not a good attack,” said Alex. “I don’t think these are elite troops I’d anticipated. I think they were amateurs. Casualties?”

  “Sir, two men dead in the covering fire and three wounded.”

  “Well,” said Alex. “They did do some damage then. And ammunition. We used a lot of ammunition in a very short time. That, too, I suppose, hurts us. But it cost them so much. I didn’t think it was their style, to die like that.”

  The captain drew the gun to him. He couldn’t see much now, just barbed wire, some smoke, the aerial, the damned tent, and lots of high blue sky above.

  He wished he weren’t so tired. On the slope before Aggressor Force’s position, he saw bodies. What, thirty-five, maybe forty? Jesus, they caught us in the open. They just let us get close and they blew us away.

  He squinted over the gun barrel. Nope, nothing. Couldn’t hit a goddamn thing with a machine gun, even.

  It occurred to him that he might see a littl
e better if he stood up. He thought about it; yes, it made sense. He’d just—oof!—stand up, yes, and then he’d be able to see much better to shoot.

  He stood. It worked! He could see them now, or their heads moving, clustered at the center of their line behind the barbed wire. He thought, boy, sure am glad I thought to stand. It seemed entirely logical. He’d worked it out. With his covering fire, most of his guys could get out of the kill zone. That’s why they made me a captain, he thought. ’Cause I’m so smart.

  With that thought, he fired.

  The gun bucked through twenty-round bursts. He fired at the center of the line. He could see the far-off puffs where the bursts struck. The gun was surprisingly easy to control, though a bit muzzle-heavy, with the bipod out there pulling it down. Trick was to keep the bursts short, then correct for muzzle drift. Firing it was actually quite a bit of fun. He could move the thing slightly and watch as the bullets stitched small disturbances into the earth. He felt the hot brass pouring out of the breech like the winnings at a slot machine. The gun began to steam; its barrel was melting snow packed in the cooling vents. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. He fired a belt that way in about thirty seconds.

  Then laboriously he began to change belts.

  “The right, the right, goddamn, the right,” screamed Alex. Who had fired at them? In less than thirty seconds he lost seven men and one of the rounds clipped the breech of his H&K-21, putting it out of action. The bullets swept in on him. Alex felt their sting and spray. One of his gunners lay on the mud floor of the trench, his right eye smashed.

  “The right!” Alex screamed again, sliding to the earth as the bullets began to rip up his position again. He heard the firing rise. All up and down the line his men were answering.

  Quickly, he crawled back, turned his binoculars. He could see the gunner, about two hundred meters off on the right. The bullets searched for him, cutting into the snow around him. Yet still he fired, just standing there. Standing there. Like some kind of hero. The bullets finally found him.

  “Cease fire,” Alex yelled.

  “Sir, a bunch of them slipped away while the fire was hitting the gun.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes, twenty or thirty, just got up and ran down the hill.”

  “Well, whoever that man was, he was a soldier. I’ll say that.”

  “My marriage,” said Peter Thiokol not so much to the agents but somehow to the air itself, “if it had a script, it was written by Woody Allen and Herman Kahn.”

  “I don’t understand the reference to Herman Kahn,” one of the FBI agents said.

  “In the sense that it followed the classic pattern that Herman identified. The slow, gradual buildup of hostilities, the real arms race, the breakdown in communication, until finally open conflict seems the lesser of two evils. And that’s when you get your classic spasm war. You know, multiple launches by both sides, multiple hits, the global catastrophe, nuclear winter. The end of civilization. That was the drama of our marriage. We blew each other away in the end.”

  There was silence from them.

  “It was a very intense union,” Peter told them, “but not at first. I just told her I was there at Oxford studying poly sci, which is true. I didn’t tell her about my thing for the bomb or that I had a good line on an Air Force job and that I was heading for D.C. That came out later. I—I couldn’t really figure out how to break it to her. She wasn’t much interested in what I did, at first. She was rather self-involved. Beautiful, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

  “So when did she figure out how you were going to make a living?” said the sharper of the two.

  “Oh, finally, I told her. ’Seventy-four. We’d been in Washington a year. I’d just moved from the Strategic Study Group to the Targeting Committee. It was a big leap for me and it meant about ten extra grand a year. Not that we needed the money. Her folks had plenty, but it was nice to be doing well suddenly, and she said she’d finally figured out what strategic meant.”

  What does it mean? he’d asked.

  It means bombs, isn’t that right?

  Yes.

  You think about bombs. You think about war all day. I thought it was more abstract, somehow. Thinking about strategies and that sort of thing, chess and so forth. Or about history, like your project at Oxford. But it’s very specific, isn’t it?

  Yes, very, he said. He’d spent the day contemplating the effects of a nine-megaton fused airburst from a W53/Mk-6 reentry vehicle delivered by a Titan II at four thousand feet versus the same hardware and throw-weight in a fused air-burst at two thousand feet in terms of fireball circumference vis-a-vis damage radius to a soft target like an industrialized urban base the size of, say, downtown Vladivostok.

  I look on it as thinking about peace, he said. Ways to keep the peace.

  By building more and better bombs?

  He sighed, not at the stupidity of it, but because he knew that from that moment on, there was no turning back, no recall.

  “How did your wife take the news?”

  “Not too well.”

  “No kids?”

  “The bomb was our baby, she used to say. But Megan was too beautiful for pregnancy. She didn’t want to lose her waistline. She’d never admit that, but that’s it. And the bomb. It wasn’t that it would blow the world up, it’s that it would blow her up. She took it personally. She took everything personally.”

  Peter, she once said to him, do you realize you are the only man in the Western world who has nightmares about nuclear bombs not exploding?

  “She’s famous, your wife?”

  “In a very small world. She makes sculptures that are highly thought of. She gets great reviews, and sells the stuff for a ton of money. I liked it. It was very impressive. And I think the reason she never left me was that she drew off of me and what I did. Her art would have suffered. She made these anguished things, these masses of mashed tin and plaster and painted surfaces. It was our old pal, Mr. Bomb.”

  “Was she untrue?”

  It took Peter a long second to make sense of the word. It was so quaint and comical.

  “I don’t know. She went to New York once a month or every six weeks. She said she had to get out of Washington. At first I went with her, but I didn’t really go for those people. Assholes, all of them. It was still the sixties for them. It always will be.”

  “Politics. Was she in a ban-the-bomb group or anything?”

  “No. She was too vain to join groups. She wouldn’t join any group she couldn’t be the leader of. Then I published my essay, and I became the celebrity and started going on the tube and that really hurt her.”

  “‘And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD’?”

  “Yes.”

  He remembered: the argument was simple. MAD—mutual assured destruction, the crux of strategic thought—was a fallacy. We could deploy our MXs before the Soviets improved their 18s and got their 24s on line and it would be possible, under certain rigidly controlled circumstances, to make aggressive moves against the Soviet Union without fear of retaliation. Eastern Europe, for example. In other words, it was theoretically possible, if we could get our MXs out and Star Wars going, to win without the big launch. Reagan loved it. It made Peter the superstar of the sunbelt right.

  “That’s what got me the head of the MX Basing Modes Group. I was making eighty thousand a year, I was suddenly very high-profile, I’m on TV, journalists are coming courting. And she hated it. I think that’s what finally drove her to him.” He paused. “She started up with him right after that. I think she’s with him now.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I met him once. His name was Ari Gottlieb. He was an Israeli painter, briefly big in Manhattan. Very handsome man, taught a course at the Corcoran. She met him at some Washington art thing. It was a very difficult time. We were in the middle of this squabble over MX basing modes.”

  “She was different after meeting him?”

  “Yes. It was about two y
ears ago. Congress had settled on an initial deployment of one hundred missiles to go into Minuteman II silos and we knew that was tragically wrong because it completely invalidated the premise and that it was dangerous and we had to put at least one in an independent-launch-capable super-hard silo, to beat the new inertial guidance system of the SS-18, to say nothing of the next-generation missiles. So we were working crazily on South Mountain to be our first deployed independent-launch-capable Peacekeeper unit, but trying to keep it within the congressional guidelines. We were cheating, in other words. And she hated it, because the thing just was eating up my time and my mind. And I was fighting for this fifteen-million-dollar gimmick called the key vault, which nobody wanted, and let me tell you, it was maximum-effort time. She hated that the most, I guess. That it absorbed me so completely. And maybe that finally pushed her over.”

  “How was she different?”

  “I’d finally screamed at her”—he remembered the night, a livid memory, like a scar, still tender to the touch—“that maybe she hated what I was doing, but I was doing something. Something. That I believed. That she sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never doing anything, never believing in anything. That she was too precious to do anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was all.”

  “And that was it?”

  “In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn’t even bothered to change the pillowcases. She had to let me know. She had to hurt me.”

  He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she’d finally launched, and now he had to counterstrike on warning or lose his hardware in the silos.

  “Cheap aftershave,” he said. “English Leather, can you believe that?”