The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

“Here,” he called, but his voice caught in some phlegm and it didn’t come out quite right, and so he said it again, “Here!” and it came out too loud, too shrill for a battlefield full of the dead, where he was the only man without a gun.

  “This way, please, Dr. Thiokol,” yelled Dick Puller.

  Peter began the short climb up the hill to the launch control facility, or what remained of it. All around him men moaned and shivered. If only it didn’t feel so unreal, if only the smell of blood and gunpowder weren’t so dense, if only the lights from the flares and the hovering choppers weren’t flickering dramatically, the flares hissing and leaking sparks, the chopper lights wobbling drunkenly. Up ahead, men were consumed in the drama of their equipment, clicking bolts, loading clips, smearing their faces.

  Someone was shouting. “Okay, now, goddammit, everybody out of here but the Delta Tunnel Assault Team. You guys in the second element, you form up over there on Captain McKenzie. The rest of you guys, Rangers especially, please back off and give us some fucking room to operate.”

  He could see the men rigging themselves with complicated harnesses and thought for just a minute they were parachutes. Parachutes? No, then he realized that it was rappeling gear by which the Delta commandos would slide on ropes down the shaft. Coils of green rope lay about on the ground.

  “Thiokol, hurry up, come on,” said Puller, up at the door.

  Peter scrambled up the rest of the way.

  “It’s not damaged, sir,” said a young soldier. “We tried to hold our fire away from it.”

  Peter saw the elevator door set in its frame of solid titanium, the only hard, gleaming thing among the blown-out walls and the shattered floorboarding. Hard to believe this had once been inside a building and that the building itself had stood quite normally until just a few hours ago. And on the hard cool face of the titanium was the computer terminal, which looked for all the world like a bank money machine.

  “There’s still current,” said Puller.

  “Oh, there’s current,” said Peter. “There’s a solar cell up top, and every day the sun shines, it recharges the batteries. The shaft access unit is independent of outside power. It can go for six days without sun and the computers inside it keep running.” He was aware he was ranting like a pedant. “The question is the shield.”

  Peter bent to it. A solid Plexiglas sheet covered the keyboard and the screen. Now, if they were smart and had the time, they’d have jimmied the mechanism on the screen access itself, so that before he had to solve the door, he’d have to hack or bash or cut his way through the protective screen. With a screwdriver they could have won. But he thought no, no, not this Russian. This Russian thinks he’s smarter than me. He’s going to beat me at my own game.

  Peter touched the red plastic button just under the terminal.

  With a quiet grind the Plexiglas shield unlimbered from the keyboard and lifted like a praying mantis rising from the grass. It folded itself back and out of the way.

  Two words stood on the blank screen.

  ENTER PROMPT they said, two gleaming little green words in the bottom left of the screen.

  So far, for two words.

  Peter swiftly typed ACCESS and pressed the enter button.

  The machine responded ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK CODE.

  Eleven hyphens blinked beneath the mandate and the prompt stood in front of the leftmost.

  So here it is.

  You punch in twelve numbers. No more, no less. To make it interesting, there’s no limit on the integers between the hyphens. Thus the code may be twelve numbers long, or it may be twelve million; it just has to have eleven hyphens in it. And then you push Enter.

  If you are wrong, the machine will shout STRIKE ONE.

  If you are wrong again, the machine will shout STRIKE TWO.

  If you are wrong a third time, the machine will figure out that somebody who doesn’t know is trying to guess his way in, and it will shout ACCESS DENIED and arbitrarily assign twelve new numbers that only it knows and that only another computer can figure out in about 135 work hours.

  “Can you do it?” asked Skazy. “Peter, I came a long way for this party. I brought a lot of people with me. Can you do it?”

  He thinks all this is about him, Peter thought.

  “Shhh,” said Puller. “Peter, we could move away if it would help.”

  “No,” said Peter. He bent to the keys, took a deep breath. Focus. Where’s my focus? Just shine my focus on it and work it through. He knew it would help him to talk.

  “Here’s the trick. Pashin thinks he’s me. He had to become me to beat me, that’s his game. It’s obvious, really. He dropped his patronymic in November of ‘eighty-two because that was the month I published my famous piece in Foreign Affairs about how a well-based MX could give us more than parity. That’s when he starts: he’s working through my life, processing my information, trying to become me to destroy me. He’s obsessing on me, looking for my code. He wants to crack my code. So he starts with something stupid. He gets rid of his middle name. Why? Because numbers are important to me, so they’re important to him. And that left him with twelve letters in his name. Just like mine. ARKADY PASHIN becomes PETER THIOKOL.”

  He looked at them. Their faces were dumb.

  “And twelve letters just happens to be the length of a Category F PAL code. That’s the kind of perverse correspondence that would appeal to him. So if you give each of the letters in my name a simple arithmetic value, with A as one and Z as twenty-six, you get a twelve-unit entry code that stands for me.” He gave a little chuckle, and his fingers tapped the numbers in.

  He pushed Enter.

  The opening was gigantic, or so it seemed. It was big enough for a man to get his hand into.

  “Yes,” croaked the general. “Yes, now, move aside.”

  Jack Hummel felt himself being shoved aside.

  “Now, yes,” said the general, “now we are there.”

  Jack saw him bend and plunge his arm into the deep gash in the metal he had opened.

  “Yes,” he said, his face enflamed with the effort of it. “Yes, I’m in the gap, I can feel the damned thing, Yasotay, I can feel it, ah, oh, I can’t quite get a grasp on—Yasotay, is there a man here with small hands, extremely small, a woman’s-size hands?”

  Yasotay spoke quickly in Russian to an NCO, and there was a brief conference and a name was called out and—

  Sirens started howling. Lights began flashing.

  Jack Hummel jumped, turned in panic; he felt the men around him panic.

  “Now, now, Mr. Hummel,” came the reassuring voice of the general. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  Suddenly, the room was filled with the laconic yet lovely voice of a woman.

  “Warning,” she said in her slow, unhurried prerecorded voice, “there has been an unsuccessful attempt at access.”

  “He’s up there,” the general said to Alex. “My old friend Peter Thiokol, he’s up there, trying to get inside. Peter, you’ll never make it, my friend,” the general said.

  STRIKE ONE, the computer said.

  “It didn’t work,” said Skazy.

  “No, it didn’t,” said Peter.

  “You’re sure you did it right?” asked Puller, his voice suddenly older and weaker. “You didn’t—”

  “No, no, the code isn’t right. We try again.”

  He crouched, and his fingers flew back to the keys.

  “So maybe he’s an arrogant son of a bitch and he’s not quite willing to give up totally on his own identity. Not quite. So he’s got the twelve numbers, but they’re the numbers that correspond to his name, the egotistical bastard.”

  He computed swiftly, and typed it in.

  Then he pressed Enter.

  She was called Betty. She was the voice of the computer. She spoke from perfect preordained wisdom. She knew everything except fear and passion.

  “Warning,” she repeated. “There has been a second attempt at access.”

 
“He thought of everything, didn’t he, Alex?” said the general. “You see, it warns them when interlopers are coming. It gives silo personnel plenty of time to call SAC, and if they are in danger of being overrun, they can either fire the missile or dispose of their keys. He is so very, very smart, Peter. So very smart. A genius.”

  * * *

  STRIKE TWO, the computer told him.

  Peter let his breath slide out in a hiss of compressed disappointment. He sought to replace it but couldn’t get anything in because his chest was so tight.

  WARNING, the computer told him, ONE MORE STRIKE AND YOU’RE OUT.

  “It didn’t work either,” said Skazy with something like a whimper.

  Puller had sat down by himself. He said nothing. Around them soldiers stood stupidly.

  “We could still try to hit the bird as it goes out the silo,” said Skazy. “We could rig our 60s and hit it in a crossfire and—”

  “Major,” said Peter, “it’s titanium. No bullet, no explosive is going to bring it down.”

  “Shit,” said Skazy. “Well, get the C-4. Get all the C-4 we’ve got, well try to blow the door open. Then, if we’ve still got some time, we’ll call in some real heavy air strikes and maybe—”

  “No,” said Peter. “No, forget it.”

  He stared at the keys. He’d always been the smartest boy in the class. Everywhere. Every time. All his life.

  “Pashin really wants to become me,” he said again, almost in astonishment. Then he gave a little laugh, rich with contempt. He thought about his wife and threw his worst secret out for them.

  “He thinks that’s his strength, his pathological edge. But it’s not. It’s his weakness. It’s how he’s overreached. You know, he wanted to become me so bad that he fucked my wife. Yeah, the man in the silo, the man one hundred feet below us now, this very second, this Comrade General Pashin, having her fucked wasn’t enough for him.”

  “Peter,” said Puller, something twisted in his voice, as if he were confronting a man on the cusp of breakdown.

  But Peter rushed on, now unable to stop.

  “That was the last thing,” he told the horrified men, and the broken timber of his voice held them. “He had her drugged and he fucked her two weeks ago in Virginia. He became me through Megan. He had her, the motherfucker. So let’s do this. If you mathematically split the difference between the value of the two names encrypted into numbers, then you define the actual merge: you define exactly where he becomes me and where he fucked my wife and where he wants to fuck us all.” He gave another little laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.

  Okay, Russian, he thought. Let’s party. Heaven is falling.

  Peter knelt, quickly typed in twelve numbers.

  He turned to Skazy.

  “Piece of cake,” he said.

  He pressed Enter.

  Betty spoke again in her seductive voice. She sounded like a lover, rich and throaty—full of confidence on a hot summer’s afternoon in sweaty sheets, her words cutting through the siren and the pulsing red light.

  “Warning,” she cooed, “access has been achieved.”

  Yasotay looked at the general and the general looked back at Yasotay and there was just a moment of panic.

  Then a man raced in.

  “They’ve opened the elevator shaft!” he cried.

  “He’s through the doors,” said the general. “Goddamn him, Peter Thiokol, goddamn him.”

  It was ten till midnight.

  Gregor asked the KGB security man at the front desk if Comrade Klimov was about.

  “He just went downstairs,” said the man. “Just a second, comrade. I can call down to the Wine Cellar and—”

  “No, no,” said Gregor. “No, that’s all right. I’ll go on down after him.” He smiled weakly and the KGB man looked at him suspiciously, then consulted his list.

  “You’re late.”

  “I was in conference,” said Gregor. He stepped past the man, into the stairwell which was dark and curved away, out of sight toward the cellar. It was very quiet. He licked his lips. Pausing, he reached into his pocket, took out the vodka, and for courage took a deep swallow, feeling its nuclear fire as it went down. For courage, he said. Oh, please, for courage. He screwed it shut, put it away. Gingerly, he headed down, twisting ever so gently as the stairs wound around on themselves.

  He reached the bottom, paused again. It was very dark here; someone had turned out the lights. He looked down the hall. Only the light in the coding cell was open, some fifty paces ahead. He stepped into the darkened corridor, heart hammering.

  The device, he thought. The device is in the Wine Cellar, that maze of chambers behind the vault door where all the installation’s little treasures were kept. If there’s a device, and if Klimov means to set it off, then that’s where he’ll be.

  He thought of Magda. Klimov would come in to her; she’d recognize a superior, and violate procedure, yes. She’d open the barred door and Klimov would smile at her and kill her swiftly, with a silenced pistol, a ballistic knife, his bare hands. Then he’d have to find the vault combination in the drawer, open the heavy door, and go on in to the labyrinth in there.

  Gregor hoped he was wrong. Please let me be wrong, he prayed. Let me find fat Magda reading some absurd American romance novel or cinema magazine or writing a letter to one of her many lovers or her husband or petitioning for a higher living allowance or deciding whether or not to change the color of her nails from Nude Coral to Baby Hush or …

  “Magda,” he called softly as he walked down the hall, his head pulsing with pain. “Magda, Magda, are you—”

  The cage door to the Wine Cellar door was wide open.

  Magda lay on her back, her thighs open, her garters showing, her dress and slip up around her hips. Her face was in shadow.

  “Oh, God,” sobbed Gregor. The vision of her death robbed him of all strength and will. His Magda was gone. He wanted to sit down and cry and wail with rage. She would never call him Tata, her very own Prince Tatashkin, noble hero who fought the Witch of Night Forever again. A tear formed in the corner of his eye.

  Then he saw that beyond Magda, the vault door lay open. Inside it was dark; he could see the corridor leading away, like a maze, and all the low, black openings off it. Once it had housed the liquid treasures of exalted inebriation, inebriation in a hundred exotic hues and tones, each more rarefied than the one before; now it was a super-hardened puzzle, a collection of possibilities, all of them bad.

  Move, Gregor. Time is short. You fat, putrid old man, move. Move! Move!

  He had an inspiration, and ran to Magda’s desk and pulled open the third drawer.

  There, an old Tula-Tokarev automatic pistol should have been awaiting him.

  It was gone, and so was its spare magazine.

  Gregor looked into the open strong room, where the device was and where Klimov was with the gun.

  He looked at his watch.

  It was very near midnight.

  Walls hand-over-handed down the rope the six feet back to the ladder, there awkwardly transferred his weight to the top rung, and pivoted, unfolding, from the fetal to a hanging position, planting his boots on a rung five feet below. Damn, it was easy! He scrambled up the ladder and through the open door. The woman was right behind him. He found that he had climbed into some sort of deserted corridor which led down the way to another door. He thumbed the safety off the shotgun; opening its little blazing dot to the world, saying, Ready, Jack. Then he edged along, gun at the ready. Very tricky here. He tried to think it out: his job had been to see how close he could get, then go back and get other guys to plant a bomb or something. But that was all shot now. Now, he was in the goddamn place and it was hours since he’d been in contact: he had no idea who was here. Maybe all those soldiers had gotten into the hole already and he and the girl could just sit down and have a nice Coke and make their report and go home. But he didn’t think so. Those guys who came after him in the tunnel, man, they were too fucking good. They
were tough motherfuckers. You don’t get guys like them out easy.

  So he figured he’d managed now to get into the place where they could fire the rocket. But nobody had told him what it was like. What should he look for? He remembered as a kid when in school they made them watch rockets shoot little balls or white guys into space from Florida. It was some kind of big room with white guys in white shirts sitting at panels. Somehow he knew that wasn’t right. He figured it’d be a little place, a little room somehow. And as they drew nearer to the far door, Walls became aware of a peculiar sound; it was tantalizingly familiar, coming at him from somewhere in his memory. A siren. The police after him. He stopped. He felt her hand on his arm. He turned, looked at her.

  “Some kind of siren,” he said. “You know, like the police are here or something.”

  He could see she didn’t comprehend.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “We just goin’ to nose ahead and see what’s up. We go real slow. We not goin’ to do nothing stupid, okay, lady? No heroes. We ain’t going to be no heroes. Being hero, that’s the way you get fucked up, and Walls done being fucked up. We just ease our way on up and see what’s to see.”

  Phuong looked at the black man. She had no idea what exactly was going on, where exactly they were. But she understood that they were very near the men who would drop the bombs and turn the world’s children to flames. Her heart filled with hate and anguish. She had an image of her daughter in that one instant before the napalm flooded in searing brightness across her: The child ran, screaming, Mother, Mother, as the big jet rushed lazily overhead, and two black, spinning eggs fell from it, drifting in their stately course to earth.

  Mother, Mother, the girl cried, and the wall of flames fell over her and the heat beat at Phuong, pushing her back and down and she felt her heart melt and her brain die and she wanted to run into the fire, but hands held her back.

  She knew then why she was here, why she had come this long way back into her past.

  Mother, her daughter called her, Mother.

  I am here, she sang in her heart, joyous at last, for it was time to run into the fire.