Skazy yanked the pull-ring on an eight-second delay detonator jammed into a five-pound block of C-4, looked around, yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and tossed the thing down the shaft. He had a sense of extreme maliciousness: to throw enough explosive to flatten a building down into a hole in the ground, then scamper back until it went boom. He felt giddy and dizzy as the thing fell weightlessly from his fingers and was absorbed by the blackness. He stepped back a few feet, though he knew the blast couldn’t hurt him. He looked about: the dark troopers of the first squadron of the Delta Tunnel Assault Team stood around awkwardly, linked into their harnesses. All were in black; faces, hands, watch caps, armored vests, guns, ropes, knives—all black. In the second before the explosion Skazy had a delirious moment of clarity: it was all behind him now, the stuff with Puller, the so many times Delta had mounted up and gone nowhere, the stand-downs, his own career stalled out by the rumor that he had once smashed a superior in the face. All gone: now there was only Delta, and the moment rushed toward him so beautifully he could hardly stand it.
The explosion was muted from this distance, but still you could feel its force. The ground shook. It was a hard, sharp clap under the earth. Hot gas pummeled up from the shaft and gushed out into the night air.
Skazy tugged once, just for luck, on the metal bit at his belly button through which his ropes ran; he knew they were perfect because he’d done this drill a million times. He went to the shaft and heaved his long rope down it It disappeared, uncoiling, shivering, and clicking off the walls as it fell. Other ropes fell with it down through the long distance. He looked around, and there stood Dick Puller with the earphones and Peter Thiokol looking at him.
“Delta Six, this is Cobra One,” he said into the hands-free, voice-activated mike suspended on its plastic arm inches from his lips, “we are commencing operations. Heaven is falling.” He gave them the thumbs-up.
He saw Dick speak into the microphone, and simultaneously heard the words, “It’s all yours, Frank,” in his ears.
There was something he had to say. “Dick, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it, Frank. Good hunting and God bless you.”
Skazy turned to his sergeant, and said, “Let’s go kill people.”
Then he jumped off into the black space, hurtling down the rope, feeling the rope burn through his harness and between his legs and rip against the leather of his gloves, and he swung into the walls, bounded off the balls of his feet, and continued to whistle down the rope toward the tunnel, his CAR-15 rattling against his back. He was first, but he knew in seconds that around him, like spiders descending from their webs, would come the others of the tunnel assault team, falling through the dark.
The force of the explosion threw Yasotay against the wall of the corridor. One of his eardrums blew out and he twisted his shoulder badly on the wall. Someone shook him alert. All around he saw his men shaking their heads, touching themselves to make certain they were whole, clapping each other to touch other living flesh.
The general yelled from the entrance of the launch control center, “Only a few more seconds. Just hold them a few more seconds.”
Yasotay blinked, found his whistle, blew it twice, hard and sharp. Its strident tones cut through the air of shock that hung like vapor in the air. Yasotay knew the battle would turn in the next second or two.
“On your guns, Spetsnaz, on your guns, boys!”
With that he himself did a stupid, incredibly brave thing. He stood and ran the sixty feet to the shattered elevator door, where the smoke was thicker.
“Sir, no, you’ll—”
But Yasotay ran on, uncaring. He reached the elevator just as the first of the American fighters, who looked like a cossack from black hell, arrived at the end of his long rope. The man separated himself from his harness with an extraordinary economy of motion, and was unlimbering his automatic weapon, when Yasotay brought him down with a short Uzi burst, the dust flying off the man as the bullets punched into him. Yasotay figured he wore body armor, so when he fell back, Yasotay fired again into his head.
“Cobra One, this is Delta Six, do you read? What’s the situation, Cobra One, we hear heavy firing.”
Puller got no answer.
“Skazy’s down, dead probably,” he said to Peter. “They were right on top of them as they came down.”
“Sir,” someone yelled from the shaft. “Somebody’s in the shaft, firing up.”
“Grenades,” yelled Puller. “Grenades, now, lots of them. And then get your asses down there.”
Yasotay killed the first four men the same way, gunning them as they slid off their ropes. It was terribly easy. But then the men stopped coming. Smoke floated everywhere, the smell of burned powder curled up his nostrils, and he was struggling to change clips in anticipation of more Americans, when he heard something bounce hard on the floor of the car, and then another and another and—
He’d just gotten away from the shaft when the first grenade went off, then another and another and another. He felt his arm go numb as it took several pieces of shrapnel. Leaking blood, he staggered down the corridor to his first strong point, where he had his M-60 and a batch of men with automatics.
He just got behind the barrier when the next group of Delta commandos hit the floor of the elevator shaft.
“Sir, we have targets.”
“Take them, take them,” yelled Yasotay, breathing hard. The M-60 fired, its tracers racing out, filling the shaft door. The others were firing, too, the bullets hitting the door, tearing it apart, ripping into the masonry and the metal. But then, incredibly, out of the door there came with a sickening thud a large chunk of doughy-looking C-4 with something stuck in it. Yasotay saw it come, land halfway between the elevator opening and his own position, and started to scream at his people to get down, when it detonated.
The explosion seemed even bigger than the last one. Again, like a rag doll, he was twisted backward by the blast, separated from his gun and from his senses. He had the sensation of going down a drain, of being swirled through a spiral of hot gasses and wild sensory impressions while large black Americans beat on him with baseball bats and American women poured hot coffee on him. His arm was on fire and he at least had the sense to beat it out against his leg. He blinked, tried to will himself to clarity and command. There now was smoke everywhere and a bell had begun to sound. A Spetsnaz trooper, shocked and disoriented by the blast, stood next to him with a stunned look on his face, and as Yasotay watched, a small red dot appeared on his center chest, and then a burst exploded it, blowing out his heart, pushing him back. The trooper fell with the terrible gravity of a building whose underpinnings had been cut out, with total animal death, oblivious and absolute, and his arms splayed out on the impact of his crash to the floor.
Yasotay gathered his Uzi and looked down the hall. He saw the Delta people had laser-sighting devices and were very good shots. They fired not out of fear or excitement but out of calm professional purposefulness, behind what cover was available, with extraordinary accuracy. The red streaks from their weapons cut through the smoke, and when they touched flesh, bullets followed. Their first premium was the gunner. He was hit twice in the head. Next to him, the loader was dying with a hurt look on his face, his blood pumping in spurts from a large gap in his throat. The blast had knocked half the barricade away and two or three men lay sprawled beyond it. The gun itself lay on its side, its bipod up like the feet of a dead animal on the road, its belt a tangle. It was useless.
Yasotay fired his clip—he was the only man in the position firing—then dropped back to the floor and slithered across it like a wily old lizard.
“Come on, boys, you’ve got to fire back. Come on, get the guns going, boys,” he yelled as cheerily as he could. “Your mothers will curse you if you don’t get some fire going, fellows.” His team began to return the fire, but they were clearly shaken by the laser sights.
Yasotay smacked another clip into his Uzi. Then, with calm deliberation, he stood, aimed at a Delta commando com
ing at him in the dark, and killed the man with a single burst to the brain. He found another target in a second and fired into the ribs. He found a third and hit him in mid-body. By this time, like angry birds, the red streaks sought him through the smoke and the darkness. And as they climbed to find him, one of his men found the courage to race out of the shelter of the barricade to retrieve the M-60.
“That’s it!” Yasotay shouted. He waited one more second, then dropped out of gun range. Overhead the world seemed to explode as the tracers tore through the air. But he heard another sound: his own M-60. God, he was glad he’d brought it, because the damned thing had so much authority that it drove anything that faced it into retreat.
“Sir, they’re falling back.”
Indeed, the Delta commandos, faced with the heavy gun, straggled backward. They were hung up in the elevator shaft entrance and its environs.
Then Yasotay’s M-60 jammed.
It was the second big blast that panicked Jack. It was so close! He blinked, terrified, and felt his pants fill with liquid. He realized he’d urinated. Then it sounded as if hundreds of kids were beating on the walls with two-by-fours, the sounds wooden and unconvincing. What? He couldn’t figure it out, until at last it occurred to him he was hearing small-arms fire.
They’d be coming, he knew. They’d come through that door there, these army guys, and they’d kill everybody, and that was it.
He turned to the mad general and said, “I don’t think—”
“Burn it! Burn it, you fool. My hand must get into it! Burn it through, goddamn you, Hummel.”
The pistol came close to his skull and rested there.
Jack’s will collapsed. He wasn’t strong enough. He was going to die, he knew. He’d never see his kids again or his wife: he was a fool and a loser and a vain and worthless man, and this was the one test that counted and he was fucking it up and this guy would kill him or the Army would kick its way in and kill him.
But he tried.
“I can’t,” he said. “I won’t.”
The general placed his pistol next to Jack’s head. Jack felt the circle of the muzzle boring against the frail bone of his temple. There was a click.
“Do it,” commanded the general.
Jack plunged the torch back into the long slash in the metal and watched as the hot bright needle of flame melted the last rim of titanium around the black hole. He could tell: it was done. You could get your hand in now. It was over.
He looked up.
“It’s finished,” he said.
The general’s arm rose and came down and Jack accepted the blow across the face. It went off like a thunderclap, the sound of the pistol barrel striking bone and shaking brain and the world wobbled out of sight with the surge of pain, and then became blurry.
Jack felt himself sliding away and knew the warm wetness on his face was blood. But through his daze he saw the general reach in, struggle once, and then emerge with the key.
“Yasotay. Yasotay, I have it!”
The first blast knocked Walls to his knees and he almost fired the shotgun involuntarily. The second blast, even louder, really scared him. The gunfire rose like the sound of the ocean, beating and crashing against the walls.
He turned to the woman.
“Okay, mama-san,” he said. “You just cover my ass, okay?”
Something that passed for acceptance radiated from her dark eyes for just a second and she turned and muttered something to herself and Walls, then realized she was praying. She was giving herself up to God for what would happen in the next two seconds or so. So he himself said a quick one. Dear God, he said, if you’re a white man or a brown man or a yellow man I don’t know, but please don’t let these guys blow up the world before I move my momma and my brother James to the country. And if you do, then fuck you, ’cause you be dead too.
With a punch of his foot Walls kicked in the door to discover a young man in the blue beret of the Soviet airborne running with an RPG to reinforce the second strongpoint, and he blew him away with Mr. 12, felt the hard kick of gun against his shoulder, cycled the slide in half a second, popping a red from the breech, blew away another as he turned, dipped running across the corridor, blew away a young man with an AK-47 who turned to look at him, and saw himself in the kill zone of still a fourth who, before he could fire, fell back as his head exploded because the Vietnamese woman had shot him there with her Taurus.
Walls winked and gave her the thumbs-up—bitch can shoot, no fuckin’ lie!—and dropped to one knee to thread more 12s into the shell port of the gun just in front of the trigger guard, got seven in, flipped it back upright, and threw the pump with a klak-klak! just in time to blow up a rather large man with a large automatic rifle. He began to slither ahead, the girl off on his right ten paces back, covering his black ass.
He was thinking, Come on, you motherfuckers, come to me, come to old Walls, Walls got the glory and the truth for you here with Mr. 12 by his side, and indeed he came upon two wounded men busily inserting ammunition into clips, and he did the necessary without a twitch of guilt, pumping the slide as the hot shells flipped from the breech and then he heard a cry and was hit by a spray of gunfire in the wrist, rib, and neck, and went down.
Mother, Mother, her daughter cried from the flames, Help me! Help me!
Phuong ran to her, past the black man who had been shot, but in her way was a white man with a rifle, and so she shot him; then another came and she shot him; there were two more and she shot them. Suddenly, they were everywhere around her and she felt herself hit, but she turned and fired twice more and was so close she could not miss, though she was hit again and again.
Mother, do not let me burn! her daughter screamed.
Phuong rose through her pain, turned to find her daughter, and two more white men fired at her and hit her, but she fired back, hitting them too.
I am coming, she screamed in her heart, and then she saw her daughter and went to her and grabbed her and the burning finally stopped.
Jesus, he hurt, but then he looked and saw that he still had the damn vest on and the bad one in the rib had just flattened itself out while kicking him like a mule. His wrist had been hit with a ricochet, his neck didn’t bleed bad. He pulled himself over to the woman.
She lay quiet. Seven men lay around her. The automatic was on the floor, its slide locked back. He knelt, quickly felt for pulse. Nothing. Her eyes were closed and tranquil.
Jesus, mama-san, he thought, you’re some kind of fine lady.
One of the bad guys was trying to crawl away, leaking blood. Walls put the muzzle of the shotgun against his head and fired. Then he raced on.
Yasotay gave the M-60 a good kick and when that didn’t work, bent, pulled out his boot knife, and popped the feed cover. He could see that a bad shell had become stovepiped into the bolt head. With his knife blade he got some purchase, gave a mighty heave, and popped the thing out. Then, throwing the knife away, he reseated the belt, slammed the feed cover, and pulled the bolt back. He turned to the gunner, who was so overcome at Yasotay’s charisma that he made no move to take over the gun. So Yasotay stood as red flashes zeroed toward him, and he saw the Delta commandos flooding toward him, visibly taken with his extraordinary courage. He pressed the trigger. The gun made him a god. The tracers flicked out, and where they hit they pushed the shadowy figures of Delta down. The gun fired swiftly: it rattled itself free of the first belt and the hot brass shells rattled from its breech, hundreds of them, spilling out and bouncing across the floor. And then it started to rain.
The water pelted Yasotay in the face, and he fell back, stunned. It fell in dense sheets, filling the air, accumulating in lurid, fluorescent-jazzy puddles on the floor, driving the sweat from Yasotay’s hot body. It felt like a miracle. Greedily, he threw his head back and drank. The water poured in, sweet and glorious as vodka. Momentarily, the shooting stopped.
“Drink, boys, damn you, 22 Spetsnaz, drink! It’s a message from God. He sends us water deep under the gr
ound to quench our thirst. Come on, drink, you lovely bastards!” Yasotay was laughing madly, aware that a stray round must have touched off the fire control sprinkler system. But he looked and saw Delta stunned at the sudden gush, and then crazily begin to fall back. Where bullets had failed, water had succeeded.
Then he heard the general.
“Yasotay, damn you. I have it! I have it!”
“Delta Six, this is Cobra, do you copy?”
“Go ahead, Cobra.”
“Sir, this is Captain McKenzie. Skazy’s dead and so are most of my people down here. We’ve got maybe sixty or seventy percent casualties, dammit, and now it’s raining.”
“Raining?”
“The goddamn fire system went off, and it’s pouring cats and dogs, Delta Six.”
Peter said, “Tell him to push it anyway, it’s only water.”
“Cobra, you’ve got to push ahead. Where are you?” “Sir, I’m into the corridor and past the first strong point, but they’ve set up a real motherfucker down there, they’ve got a goddamned M-60 and it’s kicking our asses. They’ve got some kind of Russian Rambo down here who stands up and laughs at us. He must have killed forty of our guys already. Jesus, he is one tough son of a bitch.”
“Waste his ass,” said Puller. “Blow his guts out.”
“Our lasers aren’t working in the rain, goddammit. Sir, I’ve got a lot of dead and wounded.”
“Delta, you’ve got to get into that launch control center.”
“Sir, every man I throw down there gets wasted. They’ve got this goddamn place zeroed. I need more C-4, more men, and more time. And more lasers.”
“Cobra, you’ve got to get it done, that’s all. Now, press the attack, son, or your wives and children will curse you from here to eternity.”
“Jesus,” said the young captain.
The general watched Yasotay run through the rain. He moved with surprising grace, given his condition. Most of his hair was burned away, as were his eyebrows. His face was bright red from excitement, although peppered with shrapnel and bleeding from several places. One arm had had its sleeve burned away, and the bare limb underneath was blackened and crusty with scabbing. His other arm was sodden with blood. Yet the man moved with such relish it was difficult to fathom. He was pure war.
The Day Before Midnight Page 39