The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  “You think they had enough?”

  “No. Not these white boys. Most white boys, not these white boys. These white boys pissed.”

  From the footsteps she guessed no more than five. She heard them rushing along, their breathing ragged under the equipment they wore and their urgency. Then the first explosion came, its flash bouncing off the walls and through the turns all the way to her, its hot, dry concussion arriving a half second later. There were screams and moans. But then—the sound traveled surprisingly well under the ground, for it had no place else to go except straight to her—she heard the scuffle of feet.

  Mother, they are still coming.

  I hear them.

  This surprised her. In the war, the Americans almost always turned back when they took casualties. On the surface, when they started losing people, they withdrew and called in the airplanes. But in the tunnels there were no airplanes; they simply retreated. Yet these footsteps came on, if anything, more determined than before.

  She turned, upset, now frightened, and began to withdraw deeper still into the tunnel.

  Hurry, Mother. They must have found the second grenade and disarmed it. They are coming faster.

  She raced into the tunnel. By now it had almost disappeared into a trace and the beams the miners had erected for their operations’ had long since vanished; instead, it was the classical Cu Chi passage, a low, cramped crawlspace, fetid and dense. She rushed through it, her fingers feeling the way. She felt as if she were crawling back into the black womb and knew she was very deep and very far.

  She halted after a time, turned, and listened. She could no longer hear the men. She thought she was safe.

  Am I safe?

  Mother, be careful. You must wait.

  She was still. Time slowed.

  Mother, be patient. Haste kills.

  What was it? An odor? Some disturbance in the air? An odd flash of mental energy from somewhere? Or only the return of her old dark instincts? Somehow she knew she was not alone.

  Her hand slipped to her belt. She removed the knife. She willed herself to stillness. She willed her body into the walls. She lay motionless and silent in the dark and the loneliness with her daughter. She felt herself attempting to enter into the fabric of the underground, to still the whirl of her atoms and the beat of her heart. She thought she heard something once, and then another something. The time passed; she had no idea how much.

  Then again something else came. The sound of men in heavy equipment crashing through the tunnel, much farther back now, much more frightened, much more reluctant to go on now that the tunnel was shrinking.

  She could imagine them right where the bigger tunnel was absorbed into the smaller one, their bravado frozen by its sudden shrinkage and the difficulty of the path that lay before them. Western people did not like to go into the dark alone, where they could not maneuver or talk or see or touch one another. It would stop them if anything would: their simple terror of the close space and the darkness.

  The men made brave sounds. They were arguing. One seemed louder. She could not quite understand the distorted sounds. But the yelling grew louder, and then halted entirely. She heard them walking away. Their sounds slowly disappeared.

  She almost moved then. But she did not.

  Wait, Mother. When you move, you die. Wait. Wait.

  The dark pressed upon her like the lid of a coffin. Her hip was wedged against a jutting rock; she could feel it bruise. Her muscles stiffened and began to ache. Her scalp tingled. A cramp tightened her upper arm. Her whole body screamed for the release of movement.

  She tried to think of her village before the war came. It was near a place called Ben Suc in the Thanh Dien forest. She had a sister and nine brothers; her father had been a Viet Minh and fought the French with an old carbine until it fell apart, and then he fought them with bamboo spears. But for a time it was a prosperous area, Ben Suc; there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been easy, but they lived well enough by their modest endeavors. She was fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was obliterated by bombs.

  She tried to remember: she thought of it as the golden time, those few years before the bombs came. She held on to it, sometime, in the tunnels, and would tell her daughter, Some day you’ll see. Well live in the sunlight. There will be fruit and rice for all. You’ll see, my little one. Then she would sing the child a lullaby, holding her warm and tight and feeling her small heart beating against her own:

  Sweet good night, baby sweetness

  in the morning comes calm,

  Sweet good night, baby daughter

  all the war will soon cease,

  Sweet good night, baby sweetness

  in the morning comes—

  There, Mother. Her daughter spoke to her from her heart. Do you feel it? There is another.

  Phuong lay very still because she felt his warmth.

  He was very good, and like her, he was barefoot. He had no equipment. He moved like a snake, in slow, patient strokes, nothing forced or hastened. He had come ahead under the noise of the men who had halted, covered by the loud drama of their chatter and yelling. He’d moved quickly and soundlessly, hunting her. He was immensely brave, she understood, the very best of them. He was a man she could love, like her husband. He was a tunnel man. Now only the faintest blur, a different shade of dark, he grew larger as he drew nearer; she felt his heat. And then she felt the softness of his breath, and the sweetness of it, and his terrible, terrible intimacy.

  I must abandon you, my daughter, she thought. Where I must go next and what I must do, you cannot be a part of. I love you. I will see you soon.

  Her daughter was silent … gone. Phuong was alone with the white man in the tunnel.

  They were as close as lovers in the dark, his supple body so close to hers that she felt a terrible impulse to caress him, to have him, she who had not had a man in a decade.

  But she had him with her blade. It struck with amazing force in the dark as he crawled by. She felt it sink-into the living muscle and she felt the muscles knit to fight it as she forced it deeper, and their bodies locked. Their loins embraced. In the hole sex and death were so much the same it was terrifying. She felt his arms enclose her and his breath was labored and intense as if with sexual energy. His blood felt warm and soft like a spurt of sperm. In frenzy he thrust his pelvis against hers, and the friction, bucking and taking, was not unpleasant. Somewhere in all this his blade probed desperately after her, and he cut a terrible gash into her shoulder, through the cloth, through the flesh, almost to the bone. She felt the knife sawing against her and muffled her scream in his chest.

  She pulled her blade out. And jammed it home again. And again. And … again.

  Then he was still. He had stopped breathing.

  Spent, she pulled away from him and cupped her shoulder. She was covered with their mingled blood. She could not even see him anymore. Her arm throbbed, and she managed to rip a strip of cloth off her tattered shirt, which she tied into a loose tourniquet. Inserting the knife blade, she screwed the thing clockwise until the bleeding stopped and only a huge numbness remained.

  She tried to crawl ahead somehow, but her exhaustion was endless. She surrendered to it, lying back, her mouth open, her eyes closed, in the dark of the dark tunnel in the very center of the mountain. It was completely silent. The roof of the tunnel was an inch from her face; she could feel it. She wanted to scream.

  And then she heard it from just ahead: a drip of water striking a puddle. And then another. She reached out and felt the water, and pulled herself to it. She drank greedily from the puddle, and only when she was done did she think to reach into the pouch on her belt and find a match.

  The light flared dramatically, hurting her eyes, which she clamped shut. Then she opened them. There was an opening in the roof of the tunnel. She looked and realized it was another tunnel, impossibly small.

  But, more important, it led up.

  He had been hit twice. It d
idn’t seem fair. Witherspoon lay back, trying to get it all clarified in his head. How many of them could there be? How had the world turned so surrealistic on him?

  “You doin’ good, sonny,” said Walls next to him. “Man, like we make these white boys pay, no shit, huh?”

  Witherspoon could hardly answer, he hurt so badly. It was a dream fight. Total silence, then the sudden flashes as the bullets whipped by, tearing into the walls of the tunnel, their own quick answers, and the stumbling fallback before the detonation of the grenades. How many times now? Three, four. How many had they killed? How many of their own grenades were left?

  But worse: how much tunnel was left?

  The answer was depressing: not much.

  “Whooo-eee,” moaned Walls softly now, “we at the end of the line, boy.”

  Behind them the tunnel stopped. It ended here.

  “Nobody’s going home from this party,” Walls said, loquacious at the end as he had been at the start. “But we made them white boys do some paying, right, man?”

  Witherspoon was silent. He’d long since lost the MP-5. He had his automatic in his hands, though he was shaking. He could hear the quiet slide of plastic against metal as Walls slid more shells into his Mossberg.

  “Shame I couldn’t get this piece back to the guy,” said Walls, cycling the slide with a ratchety snik-snak! “Real nice piece, you know? He take good care of it. No shotgun let you down like no woman.”

  “My wife never let me down,” said Witherspoon.

  “Sure, boy. You just lie quiet now.”

  The smell of powder was everywhere in the tunnel. Witherspoon’s mouth was dry. He wished he had a drink of water or something. His whole left leg was numb; he didn’t think he could move anyway, so at least it was good they had no place to run anymore. He was thinking a lot about his wife.

  “Man, Walls. Yo, Walls.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My wife. Tell her I loved her, you got that?”

  “Man, you think I’m going to be around to do any telling?” Walls chuckled at the absurdity of this idea. “Anyway, man, I bet she knows.”

  “Walls, you’re a good guy, okay?”

  “No, boy. I’m a very bad guy. Fact, I’m a motherfucker. I just happen to do good tunnel work. You best be quiet now. I think it’s coming on to nut-cutting time.”

  And so it was. They heard the scuffles in the dark but had no targets. That was the terrible thing about it all: they could not fire until fired upon; it was a question of lying still and waiting for the world to end. Witherspoon raised the pistol, a Browning 9-mil. He had thirteen rounds in the mag, and then that was it. And there was no place else to go.

  They could hear them getting closer now, edging along. Damn, these were brave men too. It pissed Witherspoon off to be matched against such good ones. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. But these guys, no matter how many you killed, they just kept coming. They were the best.

  The 1st Battalion of the Third Infantry was only three hours late, the convoy having gotten all fouled up in the amazing pile-up of traffic outside the operational area.

  There was something peculiar about these men, Puller thought, watching as they climbed down from the big trucks just outside his headquarters in the falling dark. Then it struck him: they were all handsome and white and their hair was cut short around their ears in a style he hadn’t seen for years, what used to be called white sidewalls; they had the odd appearance of Prussian cadets. He noticed next that instead of the ubiquitous M-16, black plastic and famous, they carried the old wooden-stocked M-14 in 7.62mm, a real infantry battle-fighting rifle. And then he noticed, good Christ, their fatigues were starched!

  “Who the hell are these guys?” he asked Skazy.

  “Ceremonial troops. They guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shit like that. They march in parades, bury people in Arlington. Pull duty at the White House. Hollywood soldiers.”

  “Jesus,” said Puller.

  He found the CO, a full bird colonel, rare for a battalion, even a reinforced one, and introduced himself.

  “I’m Puller,” he said. “Colonel, get your men out of the trucks and distribute ammo. You can even chow ’em down if you’ve got time. But keep ’em near the trucks. We’re going to get the ball rolling real soon now, I hope, depending on what I hear from the Pentagon and whether this young hotshot I have working on the door problem thinks he has a shot at getting the shaft open.”

  The colonel just looked at him.

  “Sir, maybe you’d like to tell me what this is about.”

  “Nobody briefed you, Colonel?”

  “No, sir. I’m under the impression it’s some kind of nuclear accident and we’d be pulling containment duties.”

  “It’s a night infantry assault, Colonel, and you’ll be pulling perimeter penetration duties, supported by a shot-up company of National Guardsmen who’ve already lost half their manpower, some state policemen, a local cop or two, and any high school ROTC units I can round up, and maybe, if the goddamned weather holds, a Ranger battalion now somewhere between here and Tennessee in a couple of C-130s. Your job is to get Delta in close so it can jump the silo. You might want to think about reforming your squad heavy weapons teams into an ad hoc machine-gun platoon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Brief your senior NCOs and your officers now. There’ll be a final briefing at 2000 hours. You can check with Delta staff for maps. I’ll expect all your officers to know the terrain backward and forward by then.”

  “Y-yes, sir.”

  “You in Vietnam, Colonel?”

  “Yes, sir. I was a captain with the 101st, a company commander.”

  “Well, you’re back there, Colonel, except that it’s a little colder and a lot more important.”

  Walls fired. He fired again. He fired again. Beside him, Witherspoon fired with the pistol. Walls could hear it going off like the bark of a dog. Meanwhile, heavy automatic fire came at them, tracer, and as it skittered overhead it whistled on back to the end of the tunnel, and began to ricochet. Spent rounds whirled through the dark space over their heads. It was like being in a frying pan at full sizzle, bubbles of hot grease dancing everywhere, flying through the air in angry flecks. That’s what Walls thought of. But of course it wasn’t. It was just the tunnel.

  The Charlies broke off contact.

  “Okay,” Walls said. “Goddamn, I think I got one that time. Man, can’t be too many left. Man, we may be out of tunnel, but them boys goin’ be out of peoples real soon now, you hear that, boy?” He laughed deeply at the idea.

  “Man, like to kill me a whole muthafucking platoon of them boys before I’m done!” He laughed again, and then noticed the silence from Witherspoon. He reached to him and found that the young soldier had died sometime during the fight. He had simply and quietly bled to death.

  Walls shook his head in disappointment. Now who was he going to talk to? Man, this was worse than solitary.

  He heard noises up ahead, the click of guns being checked and readied. Okay, white boys coming again. He tried to think of them as Klansmen, big crackers in pickups with ax handles and flaming crosses. Or big Irish Baltimore cops with red faces, motherfuckers on horses, man, who’d just as soon smash you as look at you. Or fancy white-boy suits look at you like you a piece of shit a dog dumped on the street.

  He laughed again, threw the slide on the Mossberg, felt a shell lifted into place.

  “Hey, come on, motherfuckers!” he yelled, laughing. “Come on, white motherfuckers, Dr. P got some shit for you boys!”

  It then occurred to him that there was an even larger joke he could play on them! He could blow them all up! For hadn’t Witherspoon, the perfect little soldier boy, hadn’t he carried C-4 explosive in a block somewhere on him? Walls had blown tunnels in the ’Nam with this stuff; he knew it well. He rolled to Witherspoon’s body.

  Sorry, boy, he said to the corpse. Got me some lookin’ to do. He probed, scared that the white boys would hit him before he coul
d rig his big surprise. But then he came across it in a bellows pocket of the field pants, a greasy brick about the size of a book. He got it out and began to squeeze and mold it in his strong hands, working some warmth and flexibility into its chilled stiffness.

  Gonna make me a bomb, he thought, blow those muthafuckers up.

  Okay, finally, he had a lump about the size of a deflated football, maybe a pound’s worth of the stuff. He had one grenade left. He took it off his belt and carefully unscrewed the fuse assembly and tossed away the egg. He bent to Witherspoon and probed him until he came across a coil of primacord in a pocket. He unraveled a bit of the primacord—it felt like putty and was an extremely hot-firing explosive fuse substance—onto the tip of the grenade’s blasting cap at the end of the fuse, and then he plunged this into a glop of the C-4, quickly kneading the C-4 around the grenade fuse, but careful to make sure that the grenade lever was free, so it could pop off when he pulled the pin. He worked hard, laughing softly to himself, knowing that time was very, very short. For sure, they’d seen the tracers striking the rear wall. They knew he was out of tunnel.

  “Hey, white-boy motherfuckers, you boys want to get laid? Hah, old Walls got some fine-lookin’ bitches for you, man. Got a nice high yaller, got me a couple white chicks, got me a redhead, got me some real foxes, man. Come on and get it, white boys.”

  Three automatic weapons fired simultaneously and the bullets struck around him, hitting the walls, the back of the tunnel, cutting him off, kicking up clouds of coal dust from the floor. But he got the pin from the grenade, and with a kind of lob-heave launched the thing, felt it leave his hands, traveling slowly, not far enough, and he knew then he’d die in the blast too. And he began to scramble backward, away, away, though there was really no away to go to and—

  In the small space the blast was huge. It lifted and threw Walls through hot light and harsh air. And dirt, or stone. For the world had been ruptured and the old mountain heaved, and the ceiling of the tunnel gave. He felt the earth covering him. He could not move. The tunnel caved in. He was frozen. He was in his tomb. He was in total blackness.