The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  Still, now and then there’d be one a little more interesting than the others—with, say, a little pain in his eyes or a faraway look or a peculiar haunted look. Or maybe even the suggestion of evil, as if the owner enjoyed the power of death that was his profession.

  “This one.”

  “This one. You know this one?”

  “No. No, I’m just curious. He looks as if he’s had an interesting life.”

  One of the men breathed heavily, almost a sigh.

  “He was a colonel in the Special Forces. He was in Vietnam for seven straight years and spent a long time out there in what they called Indian country.”

  She couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant.

  “But, yes, he has had an interesting life. He’s now in Bangkok, Thailand, where he runs a very proficient private army that protects a heroin merchant. Could we go on, Mrs. Thiokol?”

  “I’m not being very much help, am I?”

  “Don’t worry about pleasing us, Mrs. Thiokol. Pleasing us has no meaning. Finding the man or men behind all this, that has some meaning. Fred, would you get me another cup of coffee?”

  She went on. But none of them bore the faintest resemblance to that charming, forceful man in the Israeli consulate that morning.

  “I’m sorry. They’re beginning to blur together. I’ve been looking at them for hours now. I don’t think he’s here.” Somehow she suspected he wouldn’t be.

  “You’ve been looking at them for about half an hour. It doesn’t appear to me that you’ve been concentrating.”

  This irritated her.

  “I have been concentrating. I have a visual imagination, and that man’s face is in it. I know that face. I can call it up even now, I can remember it. Do you want me to go through it again?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe if you had one of those police sketch artists I could describe him, and then the computer could help you find him.”

  “We’ve found that’s a very long shot. Statistically, it almost never works out.”

  “Maybe I could draw him. I mean, I’m—”

  They looked at one another as though they really were Three Dumb Men. You could fly a plane through those open mouths. It seemed so elementary to her.

  “An artist, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Yes, goddammit. Why the hell didn’t we think of that sooner?”

  “It’s my fault, I should have—”

  “Don’t worry about that now. Fred, get her some paper and a—is a pen all right?”

  “A pen is fine.”

  She took the Bic, a fineline, and faced the blank sheet in front of her.

  “All right,” she said, taking a deep breath. She hadn’t drawn in years. She felt the pen in her hands grow heavy and then, experimentally, she drew a line, which seemed to lead her to another and then another and then … suddenly, she was in a frenzy of drawing, she didn’t want ever to stop drawing. And as she worked, she felt the details pouring back into her mind. She remembered the curious formality to the man, and yet his cheer and his sense of command. You just knew this was a man who got things done. Then she reminded herself that at the time she had thought he was a Jew, a hero of Israel. How could she have been so wrong? Still she felt herself drawing a hero of Israel, a Jew. So there was something in him that she responded to, that was genuine even under the cleverly constructed fiction and the guile that had gone into constructing the fiction. She decided then that he really was a hero, of sorts, and that he was probably as brave as any Israeli hero, and she tried to draw that, too—his courage. She decided that he was a special man, and she tried to draw that. She tried to draw his charisma, which was the hardest. Is it in the eyes, some steely glint, some inner fortitude? Is it in the jut of the chin, the set of the mouth, the firmness of posture, the clarity of vision, the forthrightness in the way he turns his whole face toward you and never gives you the half-and three-quarter looks so much a part of the repertoire of the people who like to think themselves “charming”? She tried to draw that.

  But a face was emerging from all this thought, and her fingers hurt where she had pressed down upon the pen. Somehow, through her illusions, her eyes and her hands had not lied.

  She looked at him. Yes, that was him. Yes, forget the bullshit, that’s him. Maybe his vitality obscured his age and his bright eyes obscured the tension deep inside him, but that was him. Maybe the hair wasn’t right, because she tended not to notice hair. But that was him.

  She felt them crowding around, watching.

  “There,” she finally said. “Does that look like anything?”

  They were very quiet. Then, one by one, they spoke.

  “No. It’s real good. You really made him come alive. But no, no, that’s not anybody I’ve looked at today,” said the first Dumb Man.

  “Just for a second,” said the second Dumb Man, “it was shaping up like a SAC colonel who got the ax seven years back when he got involved in some crooked real estate deal. He was a leading candidate early this afternoon, until they found him in Butte, Montana, teaching junior high.”

  The long seconds passed, and then it became extremely obvious that the third Dumb Man, who was the youngest, the one who did the phone calling and got the coffee, had not vet spoken.

  ‘“Fred?”

  Finally, Fred said, “I think you better get the Agency.”

  Then he walked over to the table, where four or five more huge volumes of photos lurked. He read the words on their binders, selected one, and as he brought it to her, she could hear their breaths come in harshly. She could not see what the book was, but he opened it quickly, found a certain page.

  There, before her, were about a half dozen men, all in uniform. But it was not an American uniform, as had been the case with all the others she had looked at. It was a tunic-collared uniform, with off-colored shoulder boards and lots of decorations. The faces were flinty, pouchy, grim, official.

  She put her finger out, touching one.

  He was heavier here by several pounds, and he wasn’t smiling. He had no charisma, only power. But it was the same, the white-blond hair, the wise cosmopolitan eyes, the sureness of self and purpose, and the wit that lurked in him. It was all there, though in latent form.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “You’re sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

  “Leo, look for yourself. That’s the face she drew! That’s it!”

  But Leo didn’t want to believe it.

  “You’re absolutely sure, Mrs. Thiokol?”

  “Leo, look at the picture!”

  “Fuck the picture,” Leo said. “Mrs. Thiokol? Megan, look at me. Look at me. This is the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life. Look at me, and tell me this is the man you met in what you thought was the Israeli consulate in New York City.”

  “She drew the picture from memory,” Fred said. “She couldn’t have known.”

  “Yes, it’s him.”

  “Leo,” said Fred, “I should know, I spent nine years in counterintel. He was one of our big bad bogeymen. We tracked him all over New York back when he was operational. He was a hell of a pro, I’ll say that.”

  Leo just said, “You better call the White House. And the people at South Mountain.”

  “Who is he?” asked Megan, and nobody would look her in the eye until finally Leo, the oldest of the Three Dumb Men, turned to her and said, “You’ve just identified the lieutenant general who is the head of the First Directorate of the Soviet GRU, Mrs. Thiokol. Head of Russian Military Intelligence.”

  She didn’t believe him.

  “I—” she started, then stopped.

  Finally, she said, “His name. Tell me his name, just so I know it.”

  “His name is Arkady Pashin.”

  The dust floated up through the hole in the wall, drifted in layers through the flickering beam of Walls’s light. Cool air, dense and almost gaggingly sweet with corruption, raced through his., nose. He fell back, vomited, retched himself empty in a series of dry,
shivering spasms. At last he stood.

  Man, he thought, I don’t wanna go in there, no, sir.

  You gotta, boy. No other place to go. You maybe find something in there. You go on forward now, boy.

  Shit.

  Stop your cursing. You go forward, black and proud, or you die. Same as the streets, motherfucker, same as any tunnel ever made. Man stand up, man be black and proud, man go ahead. No one gonna raise up against you, not down here.

  Black and proud, he thought, black and proud!

  Ducking, he willed himself through the space into some farther chamber. He was braced for what he saw, yet still the power of it, when the circle of light fell upon it, was shattering.

  Black and proud, he said to himself, holding himself together, yes, sir, black and proud!

  It was the face of death. He’d seen it a jillion times, of course, from cartoon pirate flags and Halloween masks and scary movies and even cereal boxes, jokey and funny—but not jokey here: the leering skull’s face, its splayed grin hideous and total, the face from beyond the Great Divide. Yet its power still shocked him—that, and the fact that flesh, rotted and filthy, still clung wormlike to the clean white bone of the skull. The eyes were gone—or were they merely swollen grotesquely, so they no longer looked like eyes? The hair hung in stiff hunks down across the face, and atop the head, which was at the crazy angle of uncaring, was a metal miner’s helmet, its little light long since spent. The spindly creature’s hands, frail and bony-looking, held a pick that had fallen across and joined the dead man’s chest, sinking through its blackened corruption, joining the slithery lungs—things moved in there as the beam disturbed them. Quickly, he flashed the beam about, and everywhere the bright circle prowled it revealed the same: dead men, commingled with their still-hard equipment, now in the process of rejoining the elements, sinking into the maggoty forever. He had the horrified sense of not being alone: other small living things, grown fat on this feast, moved and shook their scaly tails at him as the light prodded them.

  Walls fell back. He had an image of the world gone to death: the world, like this desperate chamber, filled up with corpses, heaped and rotting.

  Black and proud! he told himself.

  Again he vomited, not even having the strength to lean forward to avoid befouling himself. But there was nothing left to puke. His lungs and chest seemed to rupture in the effort of expulsion, but nothing remained to expel. Shakily, he stood, wondering if he could step forward blindly, did, felt something beneath him fight just a split-second, then yield to the impact of his boot.

  He was in something.

  He shook his boot off, staggered forward. Everywhere the maggoty, glistening bodies Jay, beyond color, beyond everything except their own disintegration. He stumbled ahead, finding himself in a larger chamber, then saw the drama of it. His beam flicked backward in confirmation, and there revealed the fallen tunnel, a hopeless no-exit of collapsed coal. These men, what? fifty or so? had been trapped back here in the coffin. They’d known they hadn’t the strength or the time to tunnel back out through the fallen chamber, and had thought therefore to dig laterally, from their tunnel—Cathy, wasn’t it? something beginning with a C—into his tunnel, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, that bitch, that white bitch, had betrayed them as she had betrayed him. She had been just inches away before exhaustion and airlessness had overcome the last of them, and they’d died in a frenzy of effort.

  Walls wept for their effort and guts. White boys in a tunnel, digging for their lives. Tunnel men, like he was. Hey, man, dyin’ underground no way to die, Walls knew, having seen enough of it himself in his time.

  But why are they rotting now?

  Walls worked his mind against it and then he had it. Of course. They’d been sealed off in airless, germless protection down here for their long half-century, and without air, there is no rot. They had quietly mummified, turning to leather and sinew, perhaps even refrigerated by the coolness. But then—he struggled to remember the details as they had been explained to him—the hole had been left open for years and years and finally, last summer, when they excavated for the missile shaft, it had rained even more, and the rain had poured into the open mountain and eaten its way down through the coal, and eventually reached and punctured this coffin. And when it violated the grave, it admitted grave robbers, the millions of germy little creatures that turned flesh to horror.

  Git your ass going, boy!

  Walls had entered the main tunnel now, where the rest of the miners were. His light flashed upon them. The ceiling was low. Walls tried not to imagine it but he could not avoid it: thinking of them trapped down here in the dank dark, feeling the air ebb in slow degrees, waiting for a rescue that wouldn’t—couldn’t—come.

  He walked forward, bumped his head, crouched, walked forward some more. He felt the cool pressure of air, and had a bad moment as he imagined his lungs filling with microscopic maggoty things, with the wormy crawlers and creepers that scuttled through the flesh. He felt very close to panic, even he, Walls, the hardest, meanest, baddest tunnel dick of all time, and not a slouch of a street player either, thank you, ma’am. Maybe this was the worst moment for him: standing among the corpses, no place to go, it seemed, but to join them. He saw an image of himself, a ragged, mealy hunk of rot spangling a few old African bones. Years later white people would come and hold up a Walls drumstick and with great distaste say, “Good Lord, Ralph, this fellow’s limbs are so darned much thicker than the others; why, he must have been a colored man!” But then Walls got hold of himself, yessir, saying it over and over, black and proud! black and proud! and the panic flapped out of his chest and found some other chest to fill somewhere in the world: old Walls was back.

  No stiffs going to get the best of this nigger, no, sir!

  This boy goin’ live. Jack, don’t you know?

  Walls crawled forward, feeling. He didn’t need his lamp now, he didn’t need nothing. He flicked it off. He loved the darkness. He was the man of darkness. He was home in the darkness; it was his natural element. He had this tunnel beat. This motherfucker was his, its ass belong to him.

  In the dark his fingers reached out. He was alone with the dead but no longer afraid.

  Then he saw the light. Milky, luminous, faraway, but light nonetheless.

  Okay, motherfucker, he thought.

  The breeze continued to blow, and he was surprised at how strong and sweet it smelled. He crawled over bodies, feeling them crumble beneath him. They couldn’t harm him, they were only the dead.

  He came to it at last. Air poured down from the hole in the roof. He looked up. There was the light, far away, a long life’s upward chimney crawl or squirm. But light. The light at the end of the—whatever.

  Okay, Jack, he thought. Here comes Walls.

  He wrapped his friend and companion Mr. Twelve tightly to him, and began his journey toward the light.

  It was a chasm by now, a tunnel into the heart of the metal.

  “Mr. Hummel?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How much farther?”

  “Last time I measured, I’d gone one hundred twenty-five centimeters. That puts us maybe ten or fifteen away.”

  “Time, please.”

  “Oh, say three, four hours. Midnight. We get there at midnight.”

  “Excellent. And then we can all go home.”

  He’d been cutting for hours now, and the ache in his arms from the awkwardness of holding the torch deep in the guts of the titanium block was terrific. Yet he was proud, in a terrible way. Lots of guys couldn’t have done what he’d done. He’d done a beautiful job, clean and elegant and precise. He’d just quit bitching and gotten it done. But he was still scared.

  “The Army. It’s up top, trying to break in, isn’t it?”

  “It is, Mr. Hummel.”

  “What happens to me when those guys kick the doors down and start shooting?”

  “They can’t get down here.”

  “They’ll figure out a way. They’re smart
guys.”

  “Nobody is that smart.”

  “Who are you guys? Tell me, at least.”

  “Patriots.”

  “I know enough to know all soldiers think they’re patriots.”

  “No, most soldiers are cynics. We are the true thing.”

  “But if you shoot this thing off, everybody will die. Because the Russians will shoot off theirs, they’ll shoot off everything they’ve got, and everybody dies!”

  It scared him to defy the man. But it just blubbered out.

  The general smiled with kind radiance.

  “Mr. Hummel, I could never permit a full-scale nuclear exchange. You’re right, that would be the end of the planet. Do you think I could convince all these men to come with me on this desperate mission only to end the world?”

  Jack just looked at him and had no answer.

  “You see, Mr. Hummel, war doesn’t make sense if everybody loses, does it? But if we can win? What then? Then, isn’t it the moral responsibility of a professional soldier to take advantage of the situation? Isn’t that where the higher duty lies? Doesn’t that save the world rather than doom it? Millions die; better that, over the long run, than billions! Better a dead country than a dead world? Especially if the millions are in the enemy’s country, eh?”

  The man’s eyes, beaming belief and conviction, radiated passion and craziness. It frightened Jack. He swallowed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Hummel, I do. Now, please, the flame.”

  Jack put the flame in the hole. He had a feeling of terrible guilt.

  “We’re done,” announced the engineer sergeant.

  “At last,” shouted Alex. “God, you men have worked so hard. Get the tarpaulin pulled back.”

  With grunting and heaving the men of the Red Platoon pulled back and discarded the heavy sheets of canvas that had obscured their work.