“I’ll make you a deal,” she said.
“Ms. Wilder, we don’t have a lot of time. Time is of the essence.”
Original line, she thought. Where do they get these guys? You’d think they’d at least go to the trouble to find someone that she could relate to. But then she understood that in the whole apparatus there was nobody she could relate to; by the very act of joining the apparatus, such a man would forever lose purchase on the possibility of relating to her.
“Here’s the deal. You let me work for a little while longer. Turn on your little tape machines or whatever. You let me work, and as I work I’ll answer any question you want. Is that fair?”
“I take it you understand you’re in grave trouble.”
“I guess I always have been,” she said.
She was a beautiful woman, with a high, aristocratic face, a strong nose, and piercingly intelligent eyes. She had a supple body under jeans and a paint-spattered smock. She wore black high-topped Reeboks and round, owlish glasses. Her hair, black and lustrous, was drawn back tightly into a surprisingly girlish ponytail.
“We have information that suggests—”
“Let me just start where you want to end up. Won’t that save some time?”
“Yes,” the older man said.
She took a deep breath.
“Well, I did it. Yes. Whatever he says I did, I did it.”
“You gave foreign agents certain materials which—”
She laughed, involuntarily. “Foreign agents” sounded so forties.
“Materials?” she said. “I gave them everything.”
They just looked at her.
“I had a little camera. Called a Minox, very cute. Later, sometimes, I’d just haul the stuff to the library and make Xerox copies of it. He made it so easy. He was so sloppy. The stuff was everywhere, he just left it lying around. He must have been in love with me or something.”
Then she looked at them hard.
“But the joke’s on him. And you. I gave it to a guy who’s on our side. He’s just another Jew. He’s an Israeli. The Israelis are our side. So you can do to me what you did to Jonathan Pollard, and it doesn’t matter. Throw me in prison and send the key to the dead-letter bin, What do you think of that?”
“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” said the oldest of the men.
“Do you have ten hours and a bottle of very cold white wine?”
“We have ten minutes and a thermos of very hot coffee.”
“Then I guess I’d better hurry,” she said, and began to explain.
The shattered unit collapsed in the snow reminded Dick Puller of his own A-detachment after the fight at Anh Tran in July of ‘65. When the 82d had finally fought its way through, the survivors of the thirty-eight-day siege by the NVA in division strength just watched them come, numb and flat. He knew the feeling: the sense that your bones have melted, the way your brain fills with white fog and your joints are stiff and slow; and another thing, too, like persistent background music that will not go away—the terrible guilt you feel at the whimsy of the battle and all the good people who’ve died in spaces you’ve just moved out of or are about to move into. He shook his head. At the end, they’d depressed the 105s point-blank and fired canisters of fleschette into the NVA waves that had come at them as the perimeter shrank so small you couldn’t even call in Tac Air. Dick shivered. Fuck if that hadn’t been a fight. That was the fight to end all fights, a month of taking frontals and watching them burn away your best people until you were left with a shell of your team and less than a third of your brave, tough little Nungs. In the end we won. But won what, and why? He could still taste the bitterness.
Bravo, having straggled down the mountain, had made a stab at reforming just at its base, where the forest met the meadow and where the road began its switchbacks up to the summit. Dick rode in with the first medevac chopper and with several of the Delta officers to debrief the survivors.
Now he walked among them. The boys sat singly in the snow, having found one another and then collapsed in a loose circle, their olive drab uniforms dark blots against the blinding whiteness that surrounded them. Many were wounded though many were not. Some had weapons, some did not. Some cried. Some laughed hysterically; some merely stared at Dick with furious, dark hostility. Some chattered helplessly with the cold, their lips blue, their faces drawn and slack. They looked exhausted or sick. Their young faces had the shock of nihilism. Their gear was all fouled up, their pouches open, their straps tangled, their boots unbloused. Not many had helmets.
He knelt by a boy, one of the few who still had his weapon. He didn’t have his helmet, but he had his weapon.
“Pretty tough up there, Specialist?”
The boy’s eyes swung to him at an idiot’s cadence. The boy just looked at him like a jerk. What, twenty-two? In ’Nam they were younger, even, in their teens. Dick, then a captain, had even had a seventeen-year-old; the gooks had caught him coming in off an ambush patrol and he’d died screaming in his own guts out beyond the wire.
“Son, I’m talking to you,” Dick said in a stronger voice.
“Huh? Oh, sorry, uh, sir.”
“They hit you pretty bad?”
“They had us cold. Just cut us up.”
“Did you do much damage?”
“Sir?”
“I said, did you hurt them?”
The question had no meaning.
Dick seized the M-16 from the boy’s limp hands, brought it to his nose, pulled the charging handle under the sight assembly. The ejector port snapped open; Dick sniffed the breech. It smelled of clean oil but not powder. He could see an immaculate cartridge sitting in the chamber.
“You didn’t see any targets?”
The boy looked at him, ashamed.
“I—I was too scared to think about that,” he said.
“I see,” said Dick. “Well, you’ve got a few hours to pull yourself together. Then tonight you go back. Tonight we all go back.”
The boy looked at him.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said baldly.
“Neither do I,” said Dick, “but I don’t see anyone else here, do you?”
“No, sir.”
Dick stood, winked at the kid, earning a little smile.
“I’ll try to do better tonight, sir,” the kid said.
“You don’t have to do better, you just have to be there.”
He could see the other Delta officers moving through the collection of dazed men while the Delta medics worked to patch the walking wounded.
Finally, Skazy came over to him.
“It’s not good,” he said.
“Anybody get close enough to get a peep under the canvas?”
“Nobody got within a hundred yards of their position.”
“So who are we fighting, Major? What’s your reading?”
“Whoever he is, he’s very good. He read the terrain, so he knew exactly the point of attack. He put his automatics in the center of the line and he must have linked belts. The volume of fire was terrific. The kids seem to agree there were two heavy guns hosing them down, plus lots of small arms. Lots of fire, so ammo must not be a problem. But that guy up there, he’s been in a fight or two in his time. He knows his business. I’ll bet we find he’s Forces. I mean, this is straight ’Nam, your basic A-team scenario, defending a tight hilltop perimeter against superior numbers way, way out in Indian country. That’s Forces work.”
“I was in a few fights like that,” Dick said.
“I was too,” said Skazy. “As long as his ammo holds out, he’s going to be a motherfucker to kill.”
“Did Bravo do any damage?”
“Evidently someone covered the withdrawal with some fire from one of the M-60s and some of the men think he may have hit people.”
Dick shook his head sadly.
“Where’s, the CO?”
“Over there. Young guy, first lieutenant. Named Dill. The real CO, that Captain Barnard, he didn’t mak
e it off the hill.”
Dick found Dill sitting by himself smoking a cigarette, staring out into the distance in the bright sun.
“Lieutenant?”
Dill looked up slowly at him.
“Yes, sir?”
“Lieutenant, when you’re talking to me, you’ll be on your goddamned feet, if you please. Stand up.”
Dill rose to the unpleasantness in Puller’s voice with the look of a martyr.
“Excuse me, but, sir, we’ve just been through—”
“Lieutenant, you let me do the talking, all right? You just nod your head when I say so.” The young National Guard officer blinked. “This is pathetic. This is disgraceful. Get these people together. Get them out of the open. Do you have security teams out?”
“No, sir, I thought—”
“What happens if the people on the hill send an assault squad down here? They could set up an LMG about four hundred meters up the slope and dust every man here. Or maybe there’s another enemy unit in the vicinity, and they’re going to come out of the trees firing full automatic.”
Dill, a thick-set, athletic-looking man who nevertheless had something of the surly melancholic about him, simply responded by falling into a deeper glumness.
Finally, he said, “We got killed up there while you guys sat down here and did crosswords. That’s not fair. That’s just not fair. I want to know who’s up there and why we have to die to get them and what is—”
“There’s a madman with an ICBM and a launching pad. Lieutenant, if we don’t get up there, all this, everything you see, everything you’ve ever dreamed or hoped for and loved or cherished, it’s all gone in a few seconds. Do you understand?”
“Who?” was all the stunned officer could say.
“We’ll know when we kill him.”
“He’s one of you, isn’t he?” the officer said. “He’s some kind of Delta guy or Green Beret. He’s one of your little club, isn’t he?”
Dick had no answer to this charge.
“Get your men organized, and get them under shelter. Form them up into their squads and platoons, and take roll. Get them fed. You’ve got to make them a unit again, Lieutenant, because we go back tonight. If you can’t do it, I’ll find somebody that can.”
The lieutenant looked at him, sighed, and went to look for his sergeants.
It had to be Delta Three, goddammit, thought Uckley. He knew he had to say something and that time was slipping away. But Delta Three wouldn’t sit still. He was exceedingly agitated and kept repeating himself to the firemen, who milled in jittery excitement around the big red truck in the Burkittsville Volunteer Fire Department.
“You guys go to the house on the right. Only to the right. The one with the smoke coming out of it. Don’t worry about the smoke; it’s just a chemical device in a pail or a pot or something up on the second floor. Get in there, and take cover; we think there’s going to be some shooting next door. No matter what you hear, you keep your heads down, is that understood?”
The firemen nodded and giggled excitedly among themselves. They were amateurs, too, volunteers, townspeople, and this was shaping up like a great adventure to them.
Finally, Delta Three came back, breathing hard. Uckley was aware that he ought to have been more assertive, but Delta Three had one of those flinty, righteous personalities that assumed its own perfection as a basic operating principle.
“You set, sir?” he asked.
Uckley thought he was set. He had on a black fireman’s slicker and helmet, remembering that when he was a kid he wanted to grow up and be a fireman; he had an ax; he also had his own Smith&Wesson 686 .357 Magnum, which he had bought used from a retiring agent and hadn’t fired in eleven months. Delta Three meanwhile took the moment to do a fast check on his own weapons for the upcoming close encounter, an accurized Colt .45 automatic for backup and a H&K MP-5 with the thirty-round mag and the collapsing skeleton stock, which had been jammed shut, hanging on a sling under his slick and shiny coat. Both men had Kevlar bulletproof vests on also.
“Delta Three?”
The soldier didn’t look at him. He was still checking gear. It was getting so close to Co time. He had two smoke grenades on his belt and two stun grenades and two teargas grenades. He had a gas mask in a case. He had a fighting knife.
“The boots,” he said to Uckley. “You think we ought to change our boots?”
The man looked down to point out that he had on Corcoran jump boots.
How could he be thinking about shoes at a time like this?
“I don’t think there’s time,” said Uckley, who was wearing black Florsheim wingtips.
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Things are going to happen damned fast.”
“Delta Three?”
The man finally looked at him.
“I just want to make one thing clear to you. They made it very clear to me, it has to be clear to you.”
Delta Three’s eyes were guileless and blue. They were somehow Baptist eyes, Uckley thought. They wouldn’t know sophistication or irony or cynicism; they’d know only duty, honor, country. They’d know mission.
“This is a prisoner mission. Not a hostage-freeing mission, a prisoner-taking mission. We’ve got to stick by our priorities. D-do you understand that?”
Delta Three just looked at him.
“You have to understand what’s important here,” said Uckley, not quite believing it himself.
“She’s smoking!” came the call from one of the firemen at the binoculars. “Boy, she’s really smoking.”
The men climbed aboard the fire engine.
“Whoo-ceeeeee!” some idiot yelled.
Teagarden thought: I am in a jam.
“Sister Phuong?”
“Yes,” came the voice back to him in the dark.
“I think I’d like to rest.”
“Yes.”
He sat down, considering.
He could tell from his dancing beam that the tunnel grew smaller still ahead and began to curl and meander. It looked like an intestine. Teagarden was having trouble breathing. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and his legs working. He was aware that exceedingly weird things were going on inside his head. He’d never really thought of the dark before, not of this kind of dark anyhow.
It wasn’t night. Teagarden had fought in the night. The night was not a problem. Because in the night there was space. You could put your hand out and feel the air. You could look up and see the sky, however indistinctly. The night had textures to it, striations in the darkness. One could befriend and ultimately seduce the night, turn it for you.
But not this. It was absolute. It had no gradations, no subtleties, no nuances. It seemed as leached of meaning as of color. It was too stark. He didn’t really think he could go on.
Yet he couldn’t really go back. Teagarden was Delta, top of the pyramid. Delta culture, surprisingly informal in a lot of ways, was also unforgiving in others. It had its own Bushido. The guys got to wear shaggy hair and blue jeans and sweatshirts as long as they kept their rounds in the 9-zone on the range, could crack an occupied 747 in less than thirty seconds, could fieldstrip an AK-47 blindfolded. But there were lots of guys—Berets, Rangers, FBI SWAT, SEALS, Air Commandos—who had those skills. So what Delta had was this other thing, this, uh, spirit: if you were Delta, you never said no. You just went. It really came down to that one thing: if you were Delta, you never said no. That was an absolute as binding as the dark. When it came time to go, you put aside the bullshit, threw your life into the hot frying pan of fate, and you went.
I cannot go, thought Teagarden.
I am thirty-seven years old, a Green Beret, a ’Nam veteran, the holder of several medals, by all credentials one of the bravest professional soldiers in the world. I cannot go.
He began to cry. He hated himself. He wanted to die. He bit his lip, hoping for blood. Searing pain flashed from the wound. He hated himself. He was weak and worthless. There seemed to be no escape at all.
&nb
sp; Teagarden pulled his .45 from the holster. There was a shell in the chamber and the piece was cocked and locked. He thumbed the safety down; it unlocked with a little snik! that sounded like a door slamming in the dark. He put the muzzle in his mouth. It had an oily taste, and was big, enshrouded as it was in its slide housing. With his thumb he found the trigger.
“Brother Teagarden.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Brother Teagarden, don’t do it,” she said in Vietnamese. “Go back to the big tunnel. Wait there. I’ll go as far as I can, and if I find something, I’ll come back. Then well call them. We won’t tell them. Nobody will ever have to know.”
“You’re so brave, Sister,” he said. “I’m not brave. Not down here.”
“Brother, nobody will know.”
“I will know.”
“Learn to forgive yourself. That is the lesson of the tunnels. Forgive yourself.”
He couldn’t see her at all. He could almost sense her, though, her heat, her nearness, her living flesh. Next to it he felt a little stupid. The pistol grew heavy. He put it down. He locked it and put it into his holster.
“I’ll just go back a little ways, okay? I just can’t go any farther, Sister Phuong.”
“It’s all right, Brother Teagarden,” said Phuong.
Turning, she went deeper into the tunnel.
“Mommy,” said Poo Hummel, “Mrs. Reed’s house is on fire!”
Herman turned, went to the window. Yes, black smoke poured from the upper floors of the old house next door. He watched it gush and float up to the sky. Then he heard sirens.
Herman licked his lips. He didn’t like this at all. First a man in a sports coat, now this.
“Herman, is Mrs. Reed going to die?” asked Poo.
“No, I don’t think so, little girl.”
“Will the firemen come and save Mrs. Reed?”
“I’m sure the firemen will come,” said Beth Hummel.
They were all gathered in the living room of the Hummel house. Herman looked out the window again. He could see just smoke, and otherwise nothing.
“Does the lady smoke?” Herman wanted to know.
The Day Before Midnight Page 21