The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  But up she came, like a cat, Jesus, she was so strong. He slid over on the rungs, and up she scrambled, until they shared the same precarious upper rung. She pointed and made interesting facial explanations and ultimately it occurred to him that she was proposing to go over to the little door.

  He saw now what she meant. He was strong, she was light. If he could just hold her, somehow, maybe she ought to be able to bridge the gap.

  Dumb bitch, don’t know when the man got you beat.

  “Sure, hon. You just go on. Nathan hold you.”

  He tried to turn sideways on the rung beneath, planting one foot real solid; with his arm he embraced the top rung.

  Backward, she mounted him, feeling back with one strong supple foot, planting it on his thigh, then with her arm hoisting herself, and planting her other foot while he embraced her around the waist with his arm.

  She was light, just bones and strings and skin and short black hair, but she wasn’t that light either, and there was a terrible instant when he couldn’t get set just right as her weight threw him off, and he thought he was losing her. He could feel her tighten, shriek a little, and scream or curse in her language, but in just a second he had her back under control.

  “Okay, okay, we be okay, just cool on down, just chill it on down, sugar baby, now,” he moaned through his own pounding breath. He knew whatever he did he couldn’t look down: it was delicate, their position, the two of them supported on the slippery purchase of his one boot on the rung, his other out to balance them, her whole body leaning on his thighbone and the slipperiness of his muscle there.

  It wasn’t going to work, goddammit!

  But out she strained, out, so far, Jesus, she had guts, and he clung desperately to her waist, feeling it slide against his grip as she leaned ever out for the grid on the little door.

  He could hardly see what was going on, just her back ahead of him, inching away from him, and he could feel the great pressure against his forearm, holding her in, and also the great pressure in his other arm, keeping them moored to the top rung. He could feel the sweat pop out of his hairline and begin to trace little patterns down his face. He thought his muscles would cramp; his heart was thudding; he couldn’t get breath and his limbs began to shiver and tremble against the strength that threatened to desert them totally. He heard what sounded like pinging or chipping and realized that she’d gotten her knife out and into the frame of the little door and was trying somehow to jimmy the goddamned thing open and—

  Uh—

  Suddenly, she took flight and squirmed out of Walls’s grip and he lurched for her. His foot slipped off the rung and he himself fell, in his panic forgetting her as the gravity claimed his body and he knew he was going to die—but then his left arm wrenched him with a whack into the wall and was so panicked it would not let him fly loose and he planted his boot back onto a rung and with his now tragically free hand, grabbed back to the top rung again, and then and only then did he see that the woman had not fallen at all, but like some kind of simian creature now actually rode the grate on the little door which on its delicate hinges swung ever so gently back and forth.

  “Jesus, watch yourself,” he shouted.

  The little door swung the full 180 degrees, banged into the wall with its desperate cargo; then with a toe she pushed off, clinging like a cat on a screen to the gridwork. Her foot came out, searched for the duct and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting in her ride, until, swinging just a bit, she was able somehow to heave herself at the duct—a sickening thud as she hit too low against the base of her spine, but pivoted in spite of the pain, and with one arm reached out and caught something inside, then with the other pulled herself in.

  Jesus, he thought. She made it.

  She rested for what seemed to him to be an inhumanly short time and then peeped out, pointing at his loins urgently.

  Lady, what the fuck you want?

  Then, of course, he caught on: his rope tied in a tight figure-eight on his web belt. He took it off the D-ring, kneaded it free, and tossed it in an unraveling lob toward her; she caught it neatly—she did every motherfucking thing neatly—and in seconds it was secure on something inside.

  Walls tied his end into about a trillion or so knots on the rung. She gestured him on.

  Oh, shit, he thought. Hope this sucker holds.

  It was only six or so feet, but it seemed a lot farther. The only way he could manage it was upside down like a sloth, his boots locked over the rope, eyes closed as he pulled himself along. Jesus, he felt the give and stretch of the rope bouncing as it fought against his weight, and the dead steel of the twelve-gauge pumpgun hanging off his shoulder and all the little pouches on his belt swinging and the pockets full of loose twelve-gauge shells jingling.

  As he edged along the rope, Walls prayed feverishly. His desperate entreaties must have surely paid off, for suddenly he felt her hands pulling at him, and in a squirming frenzy of panic—this was the worst yet, of it all this was the absolute worst—he managed somehow to get himself into the duct opening.

  He sat there, breathing hard. In time the various aches of his body started to fire up; he saw that his palms were bleeding from the tightness with which he had clung to the rope, and that he had whacked himself in the shoulder, the arm, the hip, and the shin getting over the threshold of the duct. He didn’t want to think about it though. He just wanted to suck in some air. He wished he had a cigarette.

  She was saying something, and after he’d caught up on oxygen he got enough concentration back to say, “Hey, no speakee, sugar. Sorry, can’t understand you, honey.”

  But he could read her gestures: she was pointing.

  At last it occurred to him to see what they had achieved and the disappointment was crushing: they had achieved nothing; about six feet back the duct ended abruptly in cinderblock.

  So what’s the point of the duct, he thought bitterly, knowing it to be another government fuck-up.

  But then he saw the point of the duct: a metal box up near the corner of the wall, with metal tubes running out and into it from various points in the wall.

  He crawled closer.

  A padlock kept the box from human touch, but the box itself looked flimsy enough to beat open.

  He squinted at the words on the box:

  DOOR ACCESS FUSE PANEL, USAF LCA-8566033 it said.

  He recognized only one. It was familiar from his years in prison: DOOR. DOOR. DOOR.

  That’s how we get into the sucker, he thought, and began to beat at the metal box.

  Dill could hear the firing up ahead, rising, rising still more, rising till it sounded incredible.

  “Jesus,” he said to his sergeant.

  Then the second gunship went up like a supernova a few hundred feet ahead, its glare spilling across the sky and filling the woods with light.

  Dill winced, fell back, his night vision stunned. He blinked, chasing flashbulbs from his brain. You never look into a detonation, he told himself.

  He looked back. Most of them—maybe a half of them—were still strung out in the creek bed, coming up over the ice, pulling themselves up rough stairways of stone, up gulches, scrambling up little gulches and whatever. It would take an hour for all of Bravo to make it up.

  But now he had twenty-five guns, M-16s, full auto, and he could hear the firing beckoning him onward, and it was time to go.

  “Almost there,” he said.

  “Bob, a lot of us are going to get killed,” said one of the men.

  “Yeah, Bob, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a chance against all that.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Dill, “I get the impression the Russians don’t know we’re here. And, like, those other guys are counting on us. I think there’s a pretty good fight going on, and we ought to be there helping.”

  Dill knew he wasn’t an eloquent man and even by his standards his little speech had been pretty lame, but at least he hadn’t whined and sounded utterly preposterous, and so he simply
walked ahead through the snow, slipping between the trees, trying to figure out if he was going in the right direction or not. He thought they were with him, but he didn’t want to turn around to look, because it might scare them away.

  He came to a meadow shortly. Up ahead there appeared to be a kind of fireworks display going on; he couldn’t make it out.

  It was all wrong somehow, nothing at all like what he expected. He had no idea if he was in the right place. The feeling was all wrong too; there was a crazy sense of festival to it, none of the noise was distinct, but simply a blur of imprecise sound. He couldn’t see anything well, just sensing confusion, as if too much were going on, really, to decipher.

  “Bob, is this where we’re supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dill. “I’m not sure. I hope we’re on the right hill.”

  “We have to be on the right hill. There’s only one hill.”

  “Uh—”

  Dill now saw someone emerge before him. He smiled, as if to make contact, and realized in a second he was staring at a Soviet Special Forces soldier with camouflage tunic, black beret, and an AK-47 at the high port. The man was the most terrifying thing Dill had ever seen. Dill shot him in the face.

  “Jesus, Bob, you killed that guy.”

  “Bet your ass I did,” said Dill. “Now, come on, goddammit!”

  All up and down the line, without orders or thought or guidance behind them, the troopers began to fire.

  They dropped to one knee and began to squeeze bursts off into the Soviet position, stunned at how quickly and totally the scurrying figures fell before them, and how long it took the Russians to respond and how easy it all had been.

  Yasotay stared in stupefaction. In that second he knew the position was lost.

  Delta moved in from the right, firing as its men deployed. The helicopters were a ruse, the infantry was a ruse, the brilliant American commander had somehow gotten the Delta unit up the hard cliffs to the right in the dark—impossible, impossible! thought Yasotay bitterly—and sent them in.

  Now it was only a matter of seconds.

  He saw the defenses were disintegrating, that he could not fight an enemy on two fronts, he was flanked, his complex scheme of drawing the frontal into the trenches had come undone. Now the job was simply to get the tunnel defense team down, and devil take the rest.

  Yasotay fired a burst at the rushing figures from the right, but like the brilliant troops they were, they came low and hard, with disciplined fire and movement. He could see them now at the far end of the trench, firing their M-16s from the hip, long, raking bursts into his troops, while others broke off and hit his trenches from the side. More and more of them were coming, and as they came, they killed without mercy.

  It sickened Yasotay that men so good should die so fast.

  Yasotay pulled his whistle out and bleated two brief blasts, waited a second, and then bleated two more.

  He watched as his soldiers rose in a scurry from their positions, first the Red Platoon, then the Blue Platoon, each putting out a covering fire as the troopers from Delta closed in from the right and the infantry poured over the main trench at the front. He saw the choppers landing and still more men pouring out and scrambling toward him; then it was time to run himself.

  Turning, he slithered through the fire back to the ruined structure that housed the elevator shaft access. Time was short; flares hung in the sky, hissing and popping; everywhere tracers arced through the atmosphere, and where they struck they kicked up blossoms of dust. It all had a terrible slow-motion sensation to it, the desperate run to the elevator shaft, the insistent bullets taking his men down.

  He made it.

  “Tunnel team inside.”

  Fifteen men, the maximum, wedged their way into the car; with the fifteen below, that would give him thirty.

  “The gun?” his sergeant major yelled.

  The gun? Here it was. Yasotay had to face it, the hardest choice. He had one heavy automatic left. He thought of the mad, fat American standing out in the snowy meadow firing the M-60 from the shoulder as their own fire splashed around him. Before he died, goddamn him, his bullets had shattered the breach of Yasotay’s H&K-21. Now he had one belt-fed weapon, the M-60; if he took it, he doomed the boys up top. They wouldn’t have the fire to hold the Americans off. Yet if the Americans got into the tunnel, he’d need the damned thing.

  “Major Yasotay,” the sergeant major shouted again. “The gun?”

  Yasotay hated himself.

  “In the elevator,” he said. “It has to go down.”

  “Gun forward,” yelled the sergeant major, and the weapon was passed through the crowd until it reached the elevator.

  “You boys, God bless you,” Yasotay called. “You hold them. You hold them till hell freezes. It’s for the motherland and your children will love you for it.”

  “We’ll hold the bastards till Gorbachev comes to accept their surrender,” said a voice in the darkness, sheer bravado, for now it was very late, Yasotay could tell.

  He bent quickly to the computer terminal still mounted in the seared metal side of the elevator shaft.

  He typed ACCESS.

  The prompt came:

  ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK

  He typed in the twelve numbers the general had made him memorize, pressed the command key, and the thing winked at him.

  OK

  He stepped inside the elevator, and the door closed with a pneumatic whoosh, sealing him in for the journey down and sealing out the vision of night combat left behind.

  2300

  “And where have you been, dear Comrade Arbatov?” asked the KGB man Gorshenin. “The alert for a possible defection went out at seven P.M. when you failed to arrive for your communications duty.”

  “I was detained, comrade,” said Arbatov, blinking, wondering why Magda hadn’t alibied for him. Like some idiotic spy melodrama, the lamp in the KGB security office on the third floor had been turned so that it broadcast a steady, irritating beam in his eyes. So stupid! “On a mission. As I explained to Magda Goshgarian, who agreed to stand in for me.”

  “The notification of your defection comes from your own unit commander, Comrade Klimov.”

  “Comrade Klimov is mistaken.”

  “Hmmm. Comrade Klimov is not the sort to be mistaken.”

  “Yes, well, this once, he’s mistaken. Look, would I have come back to finish up my night duty if I were trying to flee the coop? Wouldn’t I be at some FBI estate eating steak and squeezing the bottoms of tarts?”

  Gorshenin, a humorless youngster of thirty-two with a brightly lit bald head and two dim little technocrat’s eyes behind his glasses, looked at him without emotion. These young ones never showed emotion: they were machines.

  “Explain please your whereabouts today.”

  “Ah, comrade, you know that GRU operations are off limits to KGB, no? I can’t inform you, it’s the rules. Both units operate here by strictly enforced rules. Or would you prefer the Washington station be entirely staffed by GRU and all you KGB lads could go on to some interesting city like Djakarta or Kabul?”

  “Attempts at levity are not appreciated, comrade. This is serious business.”

  “But, comrade, that’s just it, it isn’t serious.” Gregor was using all his charm, making sly eye movements at the young prick, smiling with sophisticated wisdom and slavish eyelash flutters. “Frankly, this young Klimov and I don’t get along. I’m old school, orthodox, hardworking, play by the rules. Klimov is all this modern business, he wants corners cut, this sort of thing. So we are locked in struggle, you know. This is just a little business to embarrass me.”

  Gorshenin eyed him coolly. He touched his finger to his lips.

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know how such things can happen in a unit.”

  “So it’s merely personal, you see. Not professional. That’s all. A misunderstanding between the generations.”

  Gorshenin licked at the bait. Went away. Came back, licke
d some more. Then bit.

  “So, there seems to be a morale problem in GRU?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. We’ll work it out amongst ourselves. Most of our chaps are good fellows, but sometimes one bad apple can—well, you know the saying. Why, only yesterday Magda was saying to me—”

  But Gorshenin was no longer listening. His eyes were locked in an abstract of calculus. He whirled through his calculations.

  “Ah, say, old fox, do you know what would be the wonderful solution to your problems?”

  “Eh? Why, the only solution is that I’ll just wait it out.”

  “Now, Gregor Ivanovich, don’t be hasty. You know how excitable young Klimov is. Suppose he were to really fly off the handle? It could be the Gulag for you, no?”

  Arbatov shivered.

  “Now, Gregor Ivanovich, consider. A transfer to KGB!”

  “What! Why, that’s pre—”

  “Now, wait. Stop and consider. I could get you in, at the same posting. A man of your experience and contacts. Why, you’d be invaluable.”

  Gregor made as if to study the proposition.

  “It could be a very profitable move for you. Very comfortable too. None of this backbiting, this snipping and nipping like two hungry pups in a crate.”

  Gregor nodded, the temptation showing like a fever on his fattish face.

  “Yes, it sounds interesting.”

  “Now, of course, I’d have to have something to take to Moscow. You know, I couldn’t just say, we want this man, we must have this man. I’d have to have something, do you know?”

  You are such an idiot, young Gorshenin. A real agent-runner is smoother; he’s got that easy, cajoling charm, that endless persistence and sympathy as he guides you on your way to hell. Arbatov should know: he’d guided a few toward hell.

  “A present?” he said as if he were a moron.

  “Yes. Oh, you know. Something small, but just to show you were enthusiastic, do you know? Something minor but flashy.”

  “Hmmm,” said Arbatov, considering gravely. “You mean something from the Americans?”