* * *
It occurred to Peter that he should eat something. He was beginning to feel shaky and his head ached. It had been hours since he’d eaten, way back in another lifetime.
But he could not leave the door behind.
The damned door.
It was a simple idea really, you just had to write the program and that was that. That, in fact, was its brilliance—its simplicity. Peter knew that if Delta fought its way to the elevator shaft in the launch control facility, he’d confront the computer-coded door to the shaft itself. It was the mega-door, the ultra-door, the total door. To pop it, you had to know the twelve-digit code. Except that the aggressors would have changed the code—easily done from inside the launch control center at the computer terminal.
Change it to what?
There it was: the new code would be twelve letters or numbers long, or a combination thereof, or less (but not more). Peter assumed that it would be a consciously selected sequence, because—well, because, it would be part of Aggressor-One’s game. That’s how his mind works, and I’m beginning to get a feel for it.
The terror was in the computer program itself. The program, conceived and written by Peter Thiokol of the MX Basing Modes Group, had been designed exactly to prevent what Peter now had to do. That is, he had built into its system a limited-try capacity. If the right code were not hit in the first three attempts, the program reasoned that interlopers were knocking at the door and automatically changed the code to a random sequence of numbers, and it would take another computer at least 135 hours to run through the millions and millions of permutations, even working at macrospeed.
Three strikes and you’re out, Peter thought.
But it had been so smart—so necessary—because the heart of South Mountain is that it’s independent-launch capable. Suppose the missile base is under assault by specially trained Soviet silo-seizure teams of the sort CIA said they were working up? Suppose Qaddafi sends a suicide team in? Suppose—oh, no, this is too wild!—right wing elements of the American military attempt to take over the silo in order to launch a preemptive strike against Johnny Red? In all those scenarios, exactly as projected in the chapter in his book on the John Brown scenario, it fell to the door and the key vault more than any complement of air security policemen or the Doppler radar to hold the intruders at bay.
The joke was, he was fighting himself.
Through the medium of his poor wife, he had provided John Brown, Aggressor-One, or whoever he was, with all his stuff: his ideas, his insights, his theoretical speculations. He knows exactly what I know, Peter thought. In a terrible way, he is me. I’ve permutated. I’ve cloned a perfect twin; he’s absorbed my personality.
Peter turned back to the documents the Agency psychologists had put together on “John Brown.” As he read the psychological evaluation, he realized they could have been talking about him. And that’s what troubled him the most. It was as if John Brown had begun with him, or with his book, or perhaps with his famous essay. And that he’d built his plan outward from that, mastering not so much South Mountain as Peter Thiokol.
He shivered. It was getting cold. He looked at his watch. The digital numbers rushed by:
6:34.32
6:34.33
6:34.35
Less than six hours to go.
John Brown. John Brown, you and your door. Three strikes and I’m out.
He started to doodle: Peter Thiokol=John Brown = 12 = 9=12 = 9?
Goddamn, he thought, it would make so much more sense if John Brown had twelve letters in it—the way Peter Thiokol did.
The general was on the phone most of the time with Alex up at ground level, listening impassively. Or he was standing politely back, watching Jack Hummel dig through the block of titanium that stood between himself and the second launch key.
Jack was quite deep by this time. It was difficult finding the space to maneuver so deep in the metal. And his arms ached and the sweat ran down his face. And, Jesus, he was hungry.
“Mr. Hummel. Mr. Hummel, how would you say it’s going?”
“Look, you can see for yourself. I’m in here all the way. I’m really getting deep now.”
He felt the general over his shoulder, peering down the shaft he’d opened, the wound in the metal.
“You’re on the right line?”
“Absolutely. I’m going right into the center, that I can tell you. If this chamber or whatever you say it is is in the center, then I’ll get it.”
“How much longer?”
“Well, I can’t say. You said the block was two hundred forty centimeters in diameter, and I’ve gone maybe a third of that. So I’m close. Another two, three hours, I don’t know. We’ll just see.”
He looked into the flame, which was consuming the titanium with a voracious appetite. Even through the density of his lenses he could sense its extraordinary power. Nothing on earth could stand before it; all melted, yielded, liquified, and slid away against the urgency of the heat.
He tried to imagine this little flame grown a million times. He tried to imagine a giant flame, devouring as it flashed across the landscape; he tried to imagine a giant torch cutting its kerf of destruction around the globe, through cities and towns, turning men and women and babies to ashes. He tried to imagine all the death there was, a planet of death. It would be a lone zone that just didn’t stop.
Instead, banal movie images flooded through his head: the mushroom cloud, the wrecked cities, the piles of corpses, the mutated survivors, bands of starving rat people scurrying through the ruins, and now a word from our sponsor, liquid Ivory, for truly smooooth hands.
I can’t see how it would really be, he thought. I just can’t. And the further leap, by which he would admit that such a fate could occur as a direct consequence of his own actions, was entirely beyond him.
It’s not my fault, he told himself. What was I supposed to do, let them kill my kids? Sure, tell me my kids are less important than the world in general: that’s easy for anyone except a dad to say.
He did know it called for an extraordinary man.
And I’m an ordinary one, he concluded. Bomb or no bomb, war or no war, those are my kids!
He looked back to the flame, in its hunger licking its way toward midnight.
“I told you,” Megan told the Three Dumb Men. “How many times do I have to tell you? They claimed they were Israelis. I swear to you I thought they were Israelis. Jews. Just Jews. Are any of you Jewish?”
The Three Dumb Men shook their heads.
“The FBI doesn’t have Jews?” she asked, incredulous. “In this day and age the FBI doesn’t have Jews?”
“You’re changing the subject, Mrs. Thiokol,” said the harshest of them. “We’re under an enormous time constraint here. Please, could we return? You’ve told us of your recruitment, you’ve told us of your mental state, you’ve detailed the information you gave him, you’ve described Ari Gottlieb and this mysterious intelligence officer in the Israeli consulate.”
“That’s all I know. I’ve told you everything I know. Please, I’d tell you anything. But I’ve told you everything.”
It was dark by now, and through the windows she could see lights on in the neighborhood.
“Would anybody like any coffee?” she said.
There was no answer.
“Could I fix myself some coffee?”
“Of course.”
She went to a cabinet where she had a Mr. Coffee machine stored, got it out, fiddled with filters, coffee grounds, water, and finally got the thing to working. She watched the light come on as the coffee began to drip into the pot.
One of the agents went to talk on the phone, then came back.
“Mrs. Thiokol, I’ve directed our counterespionage division to bring our photos by. We’ve also got some photos from the Pentagon for you to look at. We’d like you to try to find the face of the man who recruited you and the face of the man you saw in the consulate, is that all right?”
“I’m h
orrible at faces,” she said.
“We wish you’d try very hard,” said the man. “As I said, time is very important.”
“What’s going on?”
“It would be difficult to explain at this time, Mrs. Thiokol.”
“It’s something out there, isn’t it? Something because of what I told these people, that’s what’s going on, isn’t it? It involves South Mountain, doesn’t it?”
There was a pause. The Three Dumb Men looked at one another, and finally the eldest of them said, “Yes, it does.”
“Has anyone been killed?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Megan stared at the Mr. Coffee. You ought to be feeling something, she thought. You’ve got blood on your hands, so feel it, all right? But she felt only tired. She just felt exhausted.
“It’s Peter,” she said. “He’s out there, isn’t he? You’d want him out there, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh, yes, I believe Dr. Thiokol is on-site.”
“On-site? Is that your word for it? He’s where the shooting is. He’s an awful coward, you know. He won’t be any good around guns at all. He’s best in some kind of room full of books. That’s what he loves, just to read and think and study and be left alone. He’s so neurotic. They won’t put him near the guns and the danger, will they?”
“Well, Mrs. Thiokol, we really don’t know. Some other people are handling that operation. I don’t know if he’ll be up near the shooting or back where it’s safe. If it comes to it, I suppose he might have to be where there’s firing. And I’m sure, given what’s involved, he won’t be a coward.”
“Maybe that’s what I wanted. Maybe what I really wanted was to get him killed.”
“You’d have to talk to your psychiatrist about that, Mrs. Thiokol. Fred, call counterintel again, those damned books ought to be here by now.”
“I just called them, Leo.”
“Well, call them again, or something, don’t just sit there.”
“All right.”
“The coffee’s ready,” Megan said. “Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”
“Yes,” one of the Dumb Men said, “I’d like some, please.”
She poured it.
“Mrs. Thiokol, let’s talk about this. How did you contact your friend and how were the materials picked up. Was it through Ari?”
“Only once, just a few weeks ago. He sent me specially. But more commonly we had it set up in New York so that—do you really want to hear this? I mean, it’s just details, you know, the little silly business that seemed so ridiculous to me and—”
“Please, tell us.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“Well, it was so stupid and complicated. They explained it to me very carefully. I checked the Sunday Post. I picked an ad with the name of a chain bookstore in it. Then I dropped a personal ad off for the Post classifieds. Cash, they said, always pay cash. Through a code, I identified the store. Then I rented a car. Oh, and I had to remember to get something plaid. Then I went to the store on the appointed day—it was usually in a mall someplace around the Beltway—and I wrote a number on a scrap of paper, and I put it at page 300 of Gone with the Wind, which I loved when I was a girl and which they always have. And then …”
“Who serviced the drop? Do you know?”
“Well, I was so curious I once stayed to check. A fat nervous-looking middle-aged man. He looked like a slob. He was no—”
The door opened, and several agents, laden with material, began to troop in. The photo books had arrived.
Arbatov drove aimlessly through the traffic, down Route 1 to the Beltway. He almost turned down it, but decided at the last moment not to and was glad of that decision, for when he passed over it, he saw a ribbon of light, signifying a terrible traffic backup, all the car lights frozen solid on the big road.
The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams. The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never had traffic jams because they didn’t have cars.
He thought he ought to try Molly again. Pulling off the road, he went into a crummy little place in College Park. He stepped into the same thing he’d left behind at Jake’s—his life wasn’t getting any better!—which was another crowded, seedy bar full of smoke and lonely drinkers, except that by this time a new, ludicrous note had been added, a go-go dancer, a fat one of the sort Gregor specialized in. She looked like a truck driver’s woman. She undulated to dreadful rock music up on a little stand, a bland, dull look on her bovine face. She looked a little like Molly Shroyer, that was the terrible thing.
Gregor found a pay phone, and dialed. He heard the phone buzz once, twice, three times, four times, damn! Where was she? She could not possibly still be at her office! What was going on?
He saw his great coup slipping away. Suppose Molly had not been able to find anything else out? The thought made him extremely nervous, so instead he instantly conjured up his most comforting illusion, seeking solace and serenity in the scenario.
Molly found him some wonderful stuff, absolute top of the line, and tomorrow he’d walk into little monkey Klimov, throw the documents down on the desk and say, “There, there, you little piglet, look at what Gregor Arbatov has uncovered. The great Gregor Arbatov has penetrated to the very center of the capitalist war machine. He has extraordinary documents on the crisis in central Maryland, and you thought he was nothing but a sniveling fool. Well, young whelp, it’s you who’ll do some sniveling soon enough, you and your powerful uncle Arkady Pashin, who’ll do you no good at all. You’re the one who’ll be recalled to the Mother Country, not the great Gregor Arbatov.”
It was such a wonderful moment, he hated to relinquish it, but at that second some equally drunken American prodded him, wanting the phone, and he realized he stood in a smoky bar in College Park while a great American whore shook her milk-jug tits at him and he stood and breathed cigarette smoke and clung to a phone that was not being answered.
Walls was dead and had begun to putrefy. The smell of decay, foul and noxious, reached his nostrils through death, and involuntarily, he squinched his face to avoid it, and threw his arm over his face, even in the grave. Amazingly, the arm still moved, if only in the medium of dirt. He had a brief moment of black clarity, and then the stench penetrated again, enough to make a man insane it was so foul, and he coughed, gagging, and a shiver rolled through him, deep from the bone, and as he shivered he shook himself from the shallow coating of coal dust that covered him.
Alive!
He blinked.
God, it was awful, the smell.
He pulled himself upright. His head ached, one arm felt numb, his knees knocked and quivered, and he was terribly thirsty. The air was full of dust; his tongue and lips and teeth were coated in dust. He tried to stagger ahead, but something held him back, pulling at him. He spun to discover it was the damned shotgun, its loose sling looped around his arm. With a grunt he pulled it free, searching his belt simultaneously for his angle-head flashlight. He found it.
Whoo-eee. No going back, no way, no how, no sir. The collapse of the tunnel, in whose rubble he had been loosely buried, completely sealed him off. His beam flashed across the wreckage, revealing only a new and glistening wall of coal and dirt. He was cooked, he now saw.
Dead, he thought. Dead, dead, dead.
He turned to explore what little remained of the sarcophagus. Blank walls greeted his search in the bright circle of light. It was the same end of story they had discovered before the tunnel fight. It was like the door in his cell. Fuck Niggers.
Walls laughed.
You die slow, not fast, he thought. Them white boys have their way with your nigger ass anyhows.
But still, the smell. He winced. The odor of corruption he recognized instantly, having encountered it so many times in the long months underground back in the ’Nam, when the gooks could not get their dead out of the tunnels and so left them burie
d in the walls, where occasionally, after a fight or a detonation, they fell out, or rather pieces of them did, and with them came this same terrible odor.
Man, how could it smell so? It only your old pal death.
Yet as he pieced the situation together, his curiosity was also aroused. For the smell had to come from somewhere. It could not come from nowhere and it had not been there before the explosion.
He began to sniff through the chamber for that spot where the odor was at its most absolutely unendurable. Led by his nose, his fingers searched the crevices in the walls. It didn’t take long.
Shit, all right. Yes, sir, here it was. Walls found it. A kind of crack in the wall, and from the crack, which was low off the floor, there came a kind of breeze and from the breeze the moist, dank, terrible stench.
Walls searched his belt. Yes, dammit, he still had it, a goddamned entrenching tool. He remembered now that the damned thing had banged against his legs in the long tunnel fight. Removing it, he quickly unfolded the blade, locked it into place, and with strong, hard movements began to smash at the wall, scraping and plunging. The air filled with more dust, and his eyes began to sting, but still he kept at it, thrusting and banging away, amazed at how swiftly it went. With a final crack the wall before him heaved and collapsed. He stepped back. The dust swirled in his single beam of light, but yes, yes, there it was, a tunnel.
A way out.
Or no, maybe not out. But to somewhere.
Faces. The world had become faces.
“Now, these are American military, Mrs. Thiokol. We put this file together rather hurriedly, but these are the faces of men who possess the skill necessary to plan and execute the sort of operation we’re dealing with at South Mountain.”
She was amazed by how much she despised soldiers. These were exactly the kind of men she was never attracted to, that made her yawn and mope. If she had seen any of these bland, uncomplicated serious faces at a party, she would have run in the opposite direction. They looked like insurance agents, with their little haircuts all so neat, their eyes all so unclouded, their square, jowly heads atop their square, strong shoulders, over neatly pressed uniform lapels, with great mosaics of decoration on their square, manly chests. They looked so boring. Their business was supposed to be death, but they looked like IBM salesmen. They looked grim and task-oriented and hideously self-important and dull.
The Day Before Midnight Page 27