The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  “Okay, you listen,” Walls said softly. “Time to gear up. Get your shit on, get your piece ready. Tunnel be hot. Charlie hunting us, man, we got to hunt Charlie. Only way to stay alive.”

  Witherspoon threw on his flak jacket and picked up his German machine pistol. He cocked it, drawing back the knob that ran through the housing over the barrel; it clicked locked and solid. He slid the night vision goggles down across his face, popped off the lens cap, and turned on the device from the battery pack at his belt. As he diddled with the image intensifies and the focus, the tunnel leapt to life in a kind of aquamarine as the electro-optics picked up the infrared beam from the lamp atop the goggles; he had a sense of being underwater, everything was green, green and spooky. He turned to Walls and faced a man on fire. The convict’s face burned red and yellow like some hideous movie special effect; Witherspoon almost laughed at the strangeness, the comedy of it all, but it was only that Walls, excited, had begun to pulse with blood, and from so close, all that heat, all those agitated molecules, came through the lenses like a movie monster.

  “Okay,” said Walls soothingly, “now, this is how it got to be. We got to move forward, and make our contact as early as we can. Okay, we hit Charlie, we fall back. We hit him again, we fall back. See, in a one-way tunnel, you got only one chance, man. You got to hit that sucker and hit him over and over. You got to hope he runs out of men before you run out of tunnel. Because if you run out of tunnel before he runs out of men, you’re one trapped rat. Man, the tunnels I been in all had holes at both ends, this fucker only one end. These white bitches, they always let you down.”

  “Okay, I’m with you.”

  Something flashed in Witherspoon’s psychedelic vision: it was Walls’s teeth.

  He was smiling.

  “Whistle while you work, man,” Walls said merrily.

  * * *

  Phuong, in the tunnel called Alice, also heard the gunshots.

  Mother, her daughter said, Mother, the Americans are coming for us.

  I know, she said. Let them come.

  But her response was different, because unlike Rat Team Baker, she had not come to the end of her tunnel; she still believed there was something ahead. Thus her thought was to continue her movement.

  She reached to her belt and swiftly removed one M-26 fragmentation grenade, smooth as an egg. Then she knelt, took off her tennis shoes, and quickly unlaced them and threw the shoes away, behind her. She swiftly tied a loop around the lever of the grenade with just enough tension to hold it in close enough. Then, gingerly, she pulled the pin. She felt the lever strain against the shoelace. With her knife she began to saw through the lace. At last, only a hair’s width of lace remained, just the thinnest, tiniest membrane of woven cotton. Gingerly, she set the thing down in the center of the tunnel, on its base. She knew that if men came through the tunnel single file, without lights, they would kick it; when they kicked it, or bumped it, the thing would fall on its side, the shoelace would pop and—

  Two hundred yards farther on she repeated the process with the other lace.

  Let the Americans come, she thought. Let them come for Phuong, as before. And as before, Phuong will be ready. I will save my child from the fire.

  Turning, she fled deeper into her home, the tunnel.

  Peter was writing.

  Provisional army of us??? code/I 12 digits II suppressed integer/1 syllabification correspondence????vowel repetition significance??? 12 = 12 = 12 = 12// Simple integer equivalent?? 12 = 12 = 12 = twelve????

  He set up a simple a=1, b= 2, c=3 scheme to see what the thing decrypted out to. It decrypted out to … nonsense.

  He played with themes of 12: 4 3’s, 2 6’s, 3 4’s, 12 1’s … 12. Twelve, he kept thinking, twelve!

  Suddenly bells were ringing. What the fuck? He looked up as a bunch of Commo specialists in the room jumped, shocked out of what they were doing.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Peter asked.

  “It means Priority One,” said one of the kids. “It means they’ve got something for us.”

  “You better go get the hotshots.”

  But by the time Peter got to the flash teletype, Skazy had already taken up the prime position.

  “Okay,” he said greedily, “okay, here it comes,” as the machine spat out its information.

  Skazy read the document quickly and summarized.

  “They’ve identified the original source of Aggressor-One’s communication and they think from that their psychologists can extrapolate his motivation, his psychic dynamics, a profile of who he is and what he’s liable to do, what he’s capable of, and what we should do.”

  “So?” said Puller.

  Skazy’s fast eyes ripped through the letters as they spewed out. Every twenty or so lines he peeled the paper off the roller and passed it around the room. The machine clicked for several minutes.

  “Of course,” said Major Skazy. “That’s why it’s so familiar, yes.”

  Puller said nothing for the longest time, letting the younger men absorb the information.

  “All right,” said Puller. “Let’s have it.”

  “It sounds familiar,” said Skazy, “because it is familiar. It’s John Brown.”

  There was quiet in the room.

  “Yes, it’s the same, don’t you see?” Skazy rushed on, tumbling with the information. “It’s John Brown’s Raid, before the Civil War. He’s taken over a key installation at the center of the military industrial complex. Right?”

  “In 1859,” Peter said, “in Harpers Ferry, in fact not seven miles from here, John Brown led a force of about twenty or so men and took over a federal arsenal and musket factory. This year, with a few more men, he’s taken over a federal missile silo. Strategic muskets, in other words.”

  “And the goal is the same,” Skazy said, “to start the big war, and to unleash the forces of good and to drive out the forces of evil. And, this time, as last time, there’s a bunch of elite troops outside the place who’ve got the job of going in with bayonets fixed to try to stop him.”

  “What’s the source?” asked Peter laconically, feeling quite beyond surprise.

  “The message he sent,” Skazy answered, “it’s from John Brown’s interrogation by federal authorities in the jailhouse at Charlestown, West Virginia, October 17, 1859, after his capture and before his execution.”

  Skazy read from a CIA psychologist’s report: “‘Empathetic connection with historical figure suggests paranoid schizophrenia to an unusual degree. Such men tend to be extremely dangerous, because in their zeal they tend to exhibit great will and charisma. Well-known examples include Adolf Hitler, John Brown himself, Joseph Stalin, Ghengis Khan, several of the Roman emperors, Peter the Great. The standard symptoms are highly developed aggressive impulses and the tendency toward the creation of self-justifying systems of illusion. In the classical cases such men tend to be the offspring of broken families, generally with fathers either absent or remote, and strong matriarchal units replacing the patriarchal. They are usually marked by abnormally high IQs and extremely well-developed “game intelligence.” Such men, typically, are extraordinary tacticians and brilliant at solving narrow technical or strategic problems. They almost always operate from the narrow basis of their own self-interest. They lack the gift of perspective; their power stems from their ability to see only the relevant, narrow slice of the “big picture.” They lack associational abilities; they lack, furthermore, any tendency toward moderation. They are highly-narcissistic, usually spellbinding speakers and almost always completely ruthless. Historically, their flaw arrives in “overreaching”; they tend to think they can change the world, and almost always go too far and are destroyed—usually at great cost to self and families—by their inability to compromise.’”

  “Everything we need to know about him except how to kill him,” said Dick Puller.

  Skazy continued. “From this they expect him to be American military, extremely proficient in a narrow range, nursing obscure
political grudges. They think his men are Americans, possibly a reserve Green Beret unit that has come under his spell. They think he’s bankrolled by conservative money. Man”—he whistled—“they’ve worked up a whole scenario here. It’s about what you’d expect. Screwball general, impressionable troops, maybe some paramilitary outfit, those pretend mercs who read Soldier of Fortune and wear camouflage fatigues to the shopping malls. Survivalists, nut cases, that sort of thing.”

  Dick listened, his eyes fixed on nothing.

  Finally, he said, “So what’s their recommendation?”

  “Frontal attack. They say that his green troops will buckle when they start taking heavier casualties. They want us to throw frontals at ’em again and again.”

  “They better send some fresh body bags,” was all Dick said.

  Then he asked, “So is that what you think, Major? Frontals?”

  “Yes, sir. I think we ought to hit him again. The sooner, the more often, the better. Let me saddle up Delta and we’re off. Bravo in support. Leave a small reserve force here in case that radio message this morning was to another unit ready to jump us from the rear. When the Third Infantry and the Rangers arrive, you can feed them in if we haven’t taken the place down yet.”

  Puller went around the room. Everybody said yes. Hit him. Hit him and hit him, and he’ll crack. Waiting solved nothing, especially now that Rat Six had been zapped and there was nothing going on inside the mountain.

  Even the morose Lieutenant Dill, the gym teacher who now led what was left of Bravo, had to agree: hit ’em, he said. Hit ’em until they crack.

  Finally, Puller got to Peter.

  “Since this has become a democracy and we’re polling the voters, Dr. Thiokol, you might as well throw in your two cents. You tell me. Should I hit him until he cracks?”

  Peter considered. He felt Skazy’s hard eyes boring in upon him. But Skazy didn’t scare him; he’d been glared at by furious five-stars in his time.

  He said, “And what if he doesn’t crack? What if his men are the best, and when they take casualties they don’t break? What if he’s got enough ammo up there to hold off a division? And he knows you can attack only over a narrow front, up one side of the mountain?

  “What if, most important of all, the subtlest part of his plan is convincing you that yes, he’s a nut case, he thinks he’s John Brown, and that he’ll come apart under the pressure. What then? And what if you hit him until you run out of men and the bodies pile up like cordwood just outside his perimeter. The Rangers show and the Third Infantry shows, and he guns them down too. And the men that you’ve got left are exhausted and broken. What then?”

  “Then he wins.”

  “Right. We don’t get in. What if they’re wrong in D.C.?”

  “These are experienced guys. Doctors,” argued Skazy.

  “Major Skazy, I know a little about psychiatrists. I’m here to tell you there aren’t three of them in the world who could agree on the results of two plus two.”

  Skazy was quiet.

  Peter said, “I don’t think he’s insane. I think he’s very, very smart, and he’s set up this whole thing, this phony John Brown thing, because he knows our prejudices, and he knows how eager we are to believe in them. He’s encouraging us to believe in them at the cost of our own destruction.”

  He didn’t express his worst, most frightening thought, the source of his curiously dislocating sense of weirdness over the past several seconds. The whole thing seemed pulled not out of history, but out of something far more personal. Out of, somehow, memory. His. His own memory. He remembered. Yes, John Brown, but who thought of John Brown first and used him as an analogy for a takeover in a missile silo in Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon?

  Peter Thiokol.

  Peter thought: This son of a bitch has read my book.

  But Puller was speaking.

  “I just got a call from Uckley, who examined the three dead aggressors in Burkittsville. They had false teeth.”

  He let it sink in.

  “Nothing gives a man’s national identity away to forensic pathologists faster than dental work. So these guys had their teeth pulled—all of them—and bridgework from a third-party country inserted, so that in the event of death or capture, their origin couldn’t be traced,” Puller said. “These guys aren’t psychos or fringe lunatics or right-wing extremists or a rogue unit. They’re a foreign elite unit on a mission. They’re here for a specific, rational purpose. We have to wait until we know who they are. Then we’ll know what to do. To squander our limited resources right now is to doom ourselves to failure. We don’t know enough to jump.”

  “When will we?” said Skazy bitterly.

  “When I say so,” said Dick Puller. “When we know who they are. And not before.”

  1800

  Witherspoon should have seen them first, but Walls did, or rather sensed them, smelled them, somehow felt them, and his swift elbow into Witherspoon’s ribs was all the signal needed. In Witherspoon’s field of electro-optics, they emerged as phantasms, swirling patterns of dense color swooping abstractly through the green chamber at him. They were dream monsters, humped and horrible, their shapes changing, one beast leaking into another; they were straight from his hyperfervid id, white men with guns in the night.

  So die, motherfuckers, thought Witherspoon.

  He fired first, the MP-5 bucking in a spasm as it hurried through its little box of bullets. How good it felt! It drove the fear from him. Through the lenses he could not see the streak of the tracers, nor their strikes. But he saw something else: the red darts of sheer heat, which the infrared picked up and magnified, flew into them like glops of color from the brush of a maniac. The shapes slithered, shattered, quivered, and seemed to magically recombine and reform before him. The stench of powder rose like an elixir to his nose. The gun wrenched itself empty.

  He scrambled back, laughing madly. God, he’d hit so many. He heard screams behind him. Man, we hit those motherfuckers cold, we blindsided them, man, we took their butts out!

  “Down!” screamed Walls, who in the roar of their race back had heard something bounce off the walls, and as if to make the point clearer, he nailed Witherspoon with an open field hit, knocking him down in a tangle of ripped knees and torn palms. Then the grenade detonated.

  It was very close. The noise of it was the worst, but not by much. The noise was huge; it blew out both of Witherspoon’s eardrums and left traces of itself inside his skull for what might be forever. Its flash was weird and powerful, particularly through the distortion of his night vision glasses, the hue so hot and bright it had no coefficient in nature. Finally, following these first phenomena, the force of the blast arrived in an instant, and was as mighty as a wallop from Cod. It threw him, rag-doll-like, against the wall. He felt himself begin to bleed abruptly, though as yet there was no pain.

  Witherspoon sat up, completely disoriented. For just a second he forgot both who and where he was. He blinked and peeped about like a just-born baby bird, chunks of shell and fluid stuck to his face. In the dark, bats of light flipped and swooped toward him. The air was full of dust and broken neon and cigarette smoke from forties movies. His head ached.

  “Come on, boy, shoot back!” came the shout from close at hand, and he turned to see an interesting thing. He was by now only half in his night goggles, which had been blown askew by the grenade, so he saw half of Walls in the stylized abstractions of the infrared, a glowing red god, all anger and sinew and grace; but the other half of Walls was the human half: a soldier, scared to death, full of adrenaline and responsibility, standing against the tide of fire in the blackness and cranking out blasts from his Mossberg, eruptions of flash which, for however brief a fragment of time they lasted, lit the tunnel in pink-orange and almost turned the fierce Walls into a white man.

  Walls pumped up dry, but by that time Witherspoon had shaken the dazzle from his brain, gotten a new clip into the German gun, and turned to spray lead down the tunnel, watchi
ng the bullets leaking light and describing a tracing of a flower petal as they hurled off into the darkness. The fire came back at him after a pause, angry and swarming. It seemed to be hitting everywhere, pricks of hot coal sent flying against his skin by the bullet strikes.

  He knelt, fumbled through a mag change.

  “Grenade,” said the resourceful Walls, having thought one step ahead, and Witherspoon caught a glimpse of him as a classical javelin thrower posing for a statue. Then he uncoiled, and as he uncoiled fell forward. Witherspoon heard yells of panic from surprisingly close at hand, but was unfortunately and stupidly looking into the heat of the blast when the grenade detonated. His vision disappeared in a confusion of deep-brain nerve cells firing off and as he fell backward, his night shades fell even farther awry, then slipped away.

  “I’m blind, man, I’m blind!” he screamed. Walls had him. The firing seemed to have stopped. Walls put a strong hand around the fleshy part of his arm above the elbow and pulled him backward in a crazy old-nigger scuffle. He felt like one of those clumsy black fools in an old movie.

  Walls pulled him back farther and deeper. Gradually, his vision returned to normal. He could see Walls’s sweating face just ahead.

  “I can see now.”

  “Man, don’t ever look at those suckers when they go off.”

  “How many did we get?”

  “I don’t know, man. Hard to say. In the dark, it sometime seem like so much more, you know?”

  They fell into silence. Witherspoon breathed raggedly, looking for his energy. He felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. He could smell Walls next to him. Yet he sensed no stress in Walls.

  “You like this, don’t you?” he asked, amazed.

  Walls sniggered. “Shee-itt,” he finally said, “a chance to kill white boys? Man, this is like a vacation!”