The Day Before Midnight

by Stephen Hunter

  “I have it. I have it!” the general yelled, holding the key aloft. “Come, Alex, we’re there, we’ve won.”

  In his hands the general held two red titanium keys, each weighing about an ounce, each about two inches long, and jagged and fluted as any key would be.

  “Here, take it. Now, on my mark.”

  He pressed a key into Yasotay’s hand and had an odd sense that in Yasotay’s mad eyes something weird and sad danced.

  But the general raced to station two.

  There were two stations. At each, not much: a telephone, a wallful of buttons, a computer, and all of it, really, irrelevant, except for the keyholes under the rubric LAUNCH ENABLE.

  “Put your key in, Alex,” the general commanded, inserting his own.

  Yasotay put his key in.

  Immediately, a red light began to flash in the command capsule.

  The prerecorded voice stated, “We have launch condition Red, please authenticate, we have launch condition Red, please authenticate.”

  “The computer, Alex. Do what I do. The numbers are there.”

  Before Yasotay was a set of twelve numbers; they were the proper, preset Permissive Action Link for that day that he had obtained by blowing open the safe in the security shed eighteen hours earlier.

  Yasotay punched in the twelve numbers, as the general had done.

  “We have an authenticated command to launch, gentlemen,” came the voice of the beautiful woman out of the speakers. “We have an authenticated command to launch. Turn your keys, gentlemen.”

  There was something tender in her sweet voice.

  “Alex,” said the general, “on my command.”

  Alex’s eyes came up to meet the general’s, then went back to the key.

  “Alex, three, two, one.”

  The general turned his key.

  It did not move.

  The sound of gunfire rose and rose. Shouts, screams, explosions.

  “Alex?”

  Yasotay looked up. The general saw something odd on his face, impenetrably sad and remote. He had not turned his key.

  “Is this right, Arkady Simonovich Pashin? Can you say, irredeemably, in God’s eyes, in Marx’s eyes, in Lenin’s eyes, in the eyes of our children, that this is right?”

  “I swear to you, my friend. It’s too late to go back. The bomb in Washington goes off soon. If we don’t fire now, this second, the Americans respond with all their Peacekeepers and death will be forever and ever. Come, my friend. It’s time. We must do that hard, terrible thing, our duty. We must be men.”

  Imperceptibly, Yasotay nodded, then looked back to the key. His fingers touched it.

  “On my command,” said Pashin. “Three, two—”

  Pashin had the impression of conflagration, of flames unending and unceasing, spreading through the world, eating its cities, its towns, its villages, its fields, of the long and total death of fire, in its immense but necessary and cleansing pain. He thought of babies in their cribs and mothers in their beds, but then he saw that it was not the world but his own hand and arm that were in flames, and then the pain hit. He turned into the mad eyes of the American Hummel and his torch, which now climbed from the blazing arm and sought him where he was softest, burned through his tissues, through throat to larynx, through cheeks to tongue, through eyes to brain, and the pain was—

  Yasotay watched the general burn. In a queer sense he was relieved, and then he saw that he had merely acquired another responsibility. The general’s pain was extraordinary, yet it did not move Alex. He watched as the American drove the torch deep into the face and the face melted. Alex, in his years of war, had seen many terrible things but nothing quite as terrible as this, and after a time, numb as he was, he decided enough was enough and he shot the American in the chest with his P9. The man slid to the floor and the torch went out at last.

  Then Alex stood; the machinery to launch the missile was still intact. He could not turn two keys at once, however. He had to find someone, anyone, that was all. He turned and rose to get a man, and at last saw his own death, in the form of a black American commando with a red bandanna and a shotgun and frenzied eyes, and Alex, still numb, lifted the P9 in a nominal attempt at self-defense, but then the American blew him away.

  Gregor looked at his watch.

  Midnight was very close.

  He looked into the welter of rooms that lay behind the vault door. He wondered if the great Tolstoi had ever conjured such a moment: fat Gregor, scared so badly the shit was almost about to run down his pulpy legs, going into a maze to stop a man with a bomb who would merely destroy the world. It was too absurd, not Tolstoi at all but more the ancient Russian folktale. He was Tatashkin, going off to fight the Witch of Night Forever. The world chooses such terrible champions to defend her! he thought bitterly.

  Liquid courage. He pulled the bottle from his pocket, sloshed it to find it only half full, unscrewed the cap, and threw down a long, hot swallow. The world blurred perceptibly, turned mellow and marvelous. Now he felt ready. He put aside his servility and his avuncularity and his sniveling obsequiousness, his need to please all his masters; and he put aside his fear: he decided that he could kill and after that he decided that he would kill.

  Gregor walked into the dark corridor.

  Klimov had switched the lights off.

  Gregor slipped out of his shoes. He began to pad down the hall. His nervousness had left him. His heart was beating hard, but not out of fear, rather out of excitement. Now he had him: little Klimov, the piglet, who had killed his friend Magda and would just as soon kill the world. With the vodka he was able to imagine pressing the life out of the piglet’s throat, watching his eyes go blank and dull as death overcame them.

  Gregor glanced through the first doorway; inside there was a filing cabinet, three obsolete portable coding machines, nothing else.

  He walked on. He breathed in small wheezes, evenly, quietly, only through his nose. He felt his eyes narrow. In a curious way he felt himself concentrate as he had never concentrated before, or as he had not concentrated in years. He flexed his hands, tried to limber up his muscles.

  He tried to remember the lessons from so many years ago.

  Any part of your body is a killing weapon: the heel of the palm driven upward against the nose or into the throat; the edge of the hand against the neck; the knee, planted with thunderous force into the testicles; the bunched fist, one knuckle extended in the form called the dragon’s head, into the temple; the elbow, like a knife point, driven into the face; the thumbs into the eyes. You are all weapons; you are a weapon.

  Gregor slid around the second doorway: more filing cabinets, old trunks, hanging uniforms.

  He proceeded. The next little room bore outmoded communications and coding equipment, too bulky to be shipped back, too sensitive to be abandoned, too imperishable to be destroyed. The following room contained weapons, a row of old PPsH-41s locked in their rack, some RPGs chained to a circular stand. Also some stores of explosives and detonating devices, left over, all of it, from the maniac Stalin’s reign, when it seemed that war would break out at any moment and every second commercial attaché might be turned into a saboteur or a partisan.

  And on to another room, which had nothing in it but furniture from some purged functionary’s office, cast off as if it, too, had been contaminated by political unorthodoxy, and it, too, had been consigned to a Gulag.

  In the last room he found the ratfuck Klimov.

  And he found the bomb.

  Gregor recognized it, of course, from the drawings he’d seen: it was a variation on the American W54, the famous suitcase bomb called a Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was in the one-kiloton range, from here easily powerful enough to vaporize all primary governmental structures and, by virtue of blast, heat, and electromagnetic pulse, completely destroy the Pentagon across the river in Virginia, while doing massive damage to CIA up the river in McLean and, in its farther reaches, rupturing the communications at the National Sec
urity Agency in Maryland. The thing looked like a big green metal suitcase sitting there on the table. It was open, its padlocks sprung. The top was off, and the firing mechanism appeared to be quite simple, a crude timing device, digitalized for the modern age. The numbers fled by in blood red like a third-rate American spy movie.

  2356:30

  2356:31

  2356:32

  So the fucker was set. Klimov sat before it in immobile fascination as the digits flicked up toward the ultimate moment. He brought an old roller chair in from the storage room. He’d just sit there and be atomized in the detonation.

  Gregor walked to him, waiting for the piglet to turn and rise with the pistol. Gregor knew he was close enough. He felt the murderous rage building within him. He’d kill him with his hands and it would feel good. He’d kill him for Magda already gone and the sleeping millions who’d join her.

  Inch by inch he stepped closer.

  Klimov just sat there.

  2357:45

  2357:46

  2357:47

  He touched the boy on the shoulder, making ready to strike.

  Young Klimov slipped forward an inch, then toppled to the cement, hitting it with a sickening thud, and the crack of teeth.

  Young Klimov had been shot in the heart with a ballistic knife blade that projected from the center of his chest in a sodden mass of blood. Blood also flowed from his mouth and nostrils. His eyes were open in absurd blankness.

  “He didn’t believe it when I shot him,” said Magda Goshgarian, standing behind him in the doorway. “I wish you could have been there, dear Tata, when the blade went in and the life went out of his eyes.”

  “Magda, I—”

  He gestured to her but she raised a pistol.

  “He knew something was up. He was very smart, the little prick. He’s been nosing around me for weeks now. He came down and I killed him, Tata.”

  Then her eyes moved to Gregor’s, and he saw that she was mad, quite mad.

  “And I heard you coming, yelling my name with your voice trembling in fear. So I played dead, and off you went. I will shoot you, too, Tata, though I love you. I love you almost as much as I love our country, which has lost its way. And as much as I love my lover, Arkady Pashin, for whom I would die. For whom I will die. He is a great man, Tata, a man of Pamyat, and you are merely a man. Now, stand back. It will be over in seconds, my love. You won’t feel a thing—just nothingness, as your atoms are scattered in the blast.”

  Peter stood by the mouth of the elevator shaft, listening to the gunfire below. It sounded horrible, roaring up the dark space of the shaft, no individual sounds to the shots at all, just a mass of noise. He was at the same time fussing with something around his waist.

  “Excuse me,” he said to a Delta soldier close by, “is this right?”

  The young man looked at it.

  “No, sir, you’ve got to rotate the snaplink a half turn so that the gate is up and opens away from the body. And I don’t think you’re in the rope-seat just right. And you’ve got to take up some slack between the snaplink and the anchor point and—”

  Peter fumbled with it. He’d never get it right.

  “Look, could you fix it for me?” he said.

  The soldier made a face, but bent and began to twist and adjust Peter’s rig.

  “Dr. Thiokol?”

  It was Dick Puller.

  “How’s it going down there?” Peter asked.

  “Not good. Lots of fire. Very heavy casualties.”

  Peter nodded.

  Puller checked his watch, then looked at the other Delta boys queueing up for the long slide down to the battle.

  “Delta, second squadron, ready for the descent,” an NCO called. “You locked and loaded?”

  “Locked and loaded,” came the cry.

  “Check your buddies. Remember your quick-fire techniques and to go to the opposite shoulder at these damn corners. No fire on the way down, the show starts about halfway down the corridor. In twos, then, Delta, on rappel, go, go, go.”

  As he tapped them off, the Delta men began their slide down.

  “More men, maybe that’ll do it,” said Dick.

  “That’s it,” said the soldier, rising. “Now you’re rigged right. You just thread the rope through the bit, under your leg. You brake with your right hand—you’re righthanded, right?—by closing it and pressing the rope into your body.”

  “Thiokol, what are you doing?” said Puller abruptly.

  “I have to get down there.”

  Dick Puller’s mouth came open, the only time Peter had ever seen surprise on the leathery, unsurprisable face.

  “Why?” the old man finally asked. “Look, they’re either going to shoot their way in and stop Pashin or they’re not. It’s that simple.”

  Peter fixed Puller with a harsh look. “It’s not simple. There’s a scenario where it may come down to somebody who knows those consoles and certain launch-abort sequences.” He marveled at the dry irony of it, how it had to turn out so that he, Peter Thiokol, Dr. Peter Thiokol, strategic thinker, had to slide down a rope to the worst game of all, war. “There’s more to it than men. Your Delta people may kill all the Russians and the rocket will fly anyway. I have to go. I started this fucking thing, now I’m the one who has to stop it.”

  Puller watched him go. He interrupted the Delta assault descent, and the sergeant looked over at Puller and Puller gave a nod, and Peter somehow managed to get the ropes properly seated in the complex rappeling gear strapped to his waist. He was standing right there at the mouth of the tunnel. He poised on the edge for just a second, then caught Dick Puller’s eyes and gave a meek little thumbs-up, more like a child than a commando, and then he was gone.

  Walls knew where he was now. He was in, actually inside the white man’s brain. It was a well-lit little room, covered with electronic gear, telephones, screens, dead guys. He jacked another shell into the Mossberg, stepped inside, pulled the goddamned door closed, gave a huge circular mechanism a twist and a clank, locking it. Beyond the white boy with the piece he’d just blown away there was another white guy, burned up like a pig in a North Carolina pit. Whoever he was he sure smelled bad. He went over and poked at him. The guy was barbecued. He’d been burned down to black bone. You could eat him, that’s how bad he’d been burned.

  And then still another guy. Walls walked over and poked at him. His face was all smashed; he’d been beaten pretty bad. His leg had been shot. Blood bubbled on his chest. His eyes fluttered open.

  “My kids?” he asked.

  “Man, I don’t know nothing ‘bout no kids,” said Walls.

  “You Army?”

  Walls wasn’t sure how to answer this.

  “Yo, man,” he said.

  “They made me do it,” the guy said. “It wasn’t my fault. But I stopped the general. With the torch.”

  “You done more than stop that general, man. You roasted his ass, but good.”

  The man’s hand flew up to Walls’s wrist and gripped it.

  “Tell my kids I loved them. I never told them, goddammit, but I love them so much.”

  “Okay, man, you just rest. If you ain’t dead yet, you probably ain’t going to be dead at all. I don’t see that you’re bleeding. He plugged you over the heart, but I think he missed it. Just sleep or something while I figure out what to do, you got that, man?”

  The guy nodded and lay back weakly.

  Walls rose. This was the place to be, he thought, right in the middle of the white race’s brain. He had the door locked and a little farther up the tunnel there was a real serious battle going on, and he didn’t see what going up there and getting killed was going to do.

  He looked around. These people, shit. Who could build a room like this, what kind of motherfucking asshole? Little white room way down under the ground where you could end the world by pushing some buttons. He looked and saw a key, just like the key in a car, stuck in an ignition switch. At another little place in the room he saw this other
key. Like these white guys were going to drive away. There were lights, labels, signs, speakers, radios, typewriters, a wall safe, a big clock on the wall. Damn, it was late! It was nearly midnight.

  He laughed.

  White people.

  And suddenly a white lady was there. It stunned him because he heard her voice in the bright room. He looked around, it sounded like she was just there, but no, no white lady. She was coming over the radio or something.

  He tried to understand what she was saying. He couldn’t figure it out, man, it was just jive. These jiving white bitches, they always gave you a hard time, something about some kind of lunch being served or some other shit like that, man, what does this bitch want?

  “Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing,” she was saying. “Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing. Gentlemen, you have five minutes to locate abort procedures if necessary. We are in terminal countdown.”

  But then he understood. The bitch was going to fire the rocket.

  2357:56

  2357:57

  2357:58

  “Now, Magda,” Gregor began, “now, darling, let’s not do anything hasty here. This man Pashin? He may be a handsome charmer, but at the same time, he’s clearly something of a lunatic. Now, darling, believe me, I know what a bastard I’ve been to you and how vulnerable you might be to someone flashy like this, but can’t you see, he’s merely using you? Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Poof! It’s not as if he’ll be waiting somewhere for you, darling. I mean, in just a bloody minute or two we’re all ashes.”

  The gun was pointed at his heart. He had seen Magda shoot. Magda was an excellent shot. She wasn’t trembling at all. The flickering colors of the fleeing digits in the timer mechanism illuminated her face, giving it an odd animation. The lights made real her insanity, her tenuous grip on reality, which had opened her to Pashin and made her capable of doing this tragic thing. Pashin had probably purchased her loyalty forever by something as elementary and unremarkable in this world as an orgasm. A quick tongue in the right place and the world was his.