The Day Before Midnight (54 page)

The call came at 1:30
A.M.
It awakened Megan on the cot in the small room off the studio. She shook the confusion out of her head, blinked, and thought for just a moment it was Peter again, and the sound of his voice, twisted but recognizable over the wires, came to her in memory. Her heart quickened. She saw his face. She smelled him. In her heart she touched him. But then she heard the yelling, the screaming, the pounding. The agents were acting like boys at some Fourth of July celebration. It was juvenile, party time, and it felt all wrong to her, somebody else’s party. She was frightened.

She got up and went into the studio. They were still pounding each other on the back and shaking hands and hugging and she had a terrible feeling of isolation from them. Then she looked and saw that the older one, the one called Leo, wasn’t part of it.

He walked over to her. Duty, that bitch, shone on his constricted face. There was triumph in him, but no pleasure and actually a good deal of pain.

“Mrs. Thiokol, at about midnight tonight our Delta force unit fought its way into the installation at South Mountain and managed to disable the Peacekeeper missile just prior to launch.”

“So there’s not going to be a World War Three?” she asked hollowly, as if she cared.

“Not tonight,” he said, but there was something else on his face. She knew, of course.

“Peter didn’t make it, did he?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry to say, he didn’t. He was hit in the head at the last second after Delta broke in and stopped the launch.”

I see.

She took a deep breath. She thought of her squashed tins, crumpled and lurid on the floor. His head, smashed by the bullet. Peter limp on the floor of some hard governmental site, among lean soldiers busy with the drama of their own existence. It was so imbecilic, she almost laughed.

“If it means anything, they say he was a hero. An incredible hero.”

Oh, this was rich. “A hero.” Oh, Jesus, spare me, you asshole. I mean, who gives a fuck? Am I on your team now? Am I supposed to sleep with some hideous little medal?

“No, no, it doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and went back to her room so that they could not see her grief.

Walls sat mute in the chair, facing the dead board of switches. He felt absolutely wrung out. He felt like he was back in solitary, in the little cell with
FUCK NIGGERS
scratched into the door.

Then he smiled.

Come through some doors today, yes, sir.

Walls waited in the launch control center for another hour, just like that, sitting there, trying to feel something. The only thing he felt was hunger. He was ravenous. He noticed a brown paper sack lying on the console, spotted with grease. He opened it, and discovered a peanut butter sandwich in a Baggie, a bag of Fritos, and an apple. He gobbled down the sandwich but was still hungry. But he didn’t feel as if he had the energy left to open the Fritos.

Finally, the phone rang again. He picked it up.

“Yo?”

“Walls, this is Delta Six. We’ve mopped up the Soviet resistance now. You can come out.”

“Yes, suh. You best get some medics here. Man in here, hurt bad.”

“Yes, we have medics now.”

Walls picked up his shotgun, went to the door and threw
the heavy lock, and stepped out. He didn’t understand then, though he did shortly afterward, that he was not only stepping out of the capsule, but also stepping into history.

As he put his foot out, a flash went off. He paid it no mind. It was a picture, taken by a Ranger who’d thought to bring his Nikon along, and the picture ended up four days later on the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
, as the story of the Day Before Midnight, as the press took to calling it, became the story of the decade, or maybe the second half of the century. The picture showed a handsome black man with a red bandanna around his head. His face was dirty and drawn, glistening with sweat, somehow very sexy. He looked tough and beautiful and quite dangerous, all of which he was, and very, very brave. His eyes were the eyes of a battle-weary soldier: They showed wariness and fatigue, and something else as well, a profound humanity. He carried his shotgun with him, and had it at a jaunty angle; his camouflage fatigues were sodden with sweat and his hips were narrow, his shoulders broad. The veins and muscles on his arms stood out.

He became the icon of all of them, all the men who’d died or fought at South Mountain. The newsmagazines developed charts to show how he’d gotten in, where he’d hit people, the chances he’d taken, the luck he’d had, the brains and cool he’d shown. That he was functionally illiterate, and an authentic criminal, by the perverse currents loose in American culture in the late 80s, helped him. It made him a man of massive flaws, no Occidental superman of bland personality. His courage, however, was incontrovertible: A general was quoted in
Time
saying that he’d give up all his medals to have fought Walls’s fight into the mountain, one of the great feats of arms in history. Of course Walls never served another day in jail: he was a hero; he had defined a new life out of the old one, on his guts and talent.

But all that was in the future. For now Walls simply stepped out, blinked at the flashbulb, and walked forward, unsure where to go. The soldiers, most of them from the Ranger battalion who’d come down to relieve Delta, stood a little in awe of him.

Then someone said, “Way to go, Delta.”

“Delta did it,” someone else said.

“Delta got it done,” another said.

“That’s Delta. That’s the best.”

“Goddamn, Delta kicked ass.”

Then someone clapped and then someone else, and in seconds it was an ovation, and Walls just stood there, a little unsure what to do, whom to report to, grinning modestly.

Then the man who saved the world uttered the sentence that made him a global sensation.

“What’s for breakfast?”

The truck with the three hearses left the Soviet Embassy at six A.M., went out Constitution to the Roosevelt Bridge, and picked up the George Washington Parkway. It was followed the whole way to the Beltway by the FBI van.

“They’re going to Dulles,” said the driver.

“I know,” said Nick Mahoney.

The Soviet truck turned off the Dulles access road, shot by the huge gull-shaped terminal, and turned down a road marked Cargo Access Only. The FBI vehicle did not bother to mask its surveillance, which extended only to the point of a huge Cyclone fence marked
AEROFLOT.
Beyond, Virginia technically became Russia; the truck sped through the gate and disappeared into the hangar.

“Wanna go back?” asked the driver.

“No,” said Mahoney. “Just park here, right out in the open. I want the bastards to see us good. To know that we’re watching.”

Mahoney got out of the van, leaned against it, lit a cigarette, and peered nakedly through the fence. It was chilly; the sun was beginning to rise. Mahoney looked at it.

Hello, sun, he thought. Nice to see you.

In time, a single figure emerged from the hangar and walked across the tarmac to the gate.

“Mahoney, what do you want?” he said tiredly. “Do you want me to officially complain again? We’ve all had a difficult night.”

“I’ll say. So how close did it go before he stopped it, Max?”

Max Stretov was senior KGB, in charge of embassy security. He and Mahoney were old antagonists.

“You tell me, Mahoney.”

“You know our mikes aren’t that good. But just after midnight all hell broke loose in your place, I’ll tell you that. You had your doctors in there, all your security personnel, senior KGB and GRU
Rezidents
, the whole staff, the works. You think we don’t know how close it came?”

Stretov just looked at him. Then he said, “He was yours all along, I suppose. Poor Gregor, we never had him fixed for a double.”

“That’s the joke. We had him spotted but never turned him. We were using him for low-level disinformation. He wasn’t big enough for anything else. I guess he was big enough last night, huh?”

“This fellow Pashin—”

“The late Arkady Pashin.”

“Yes. He was a madman, you understand. Part of an insane group called Pamyat that pines for the old ways. What he did he did on his own.”

“Yeah, sure. That’s the line, huh? We’ll let the smart guys figure that one out. By the way, Max, I got something for you.”

“You know I can’t take anything from you.”

“Bend the rules a little, buddy.”

Mahoney reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a small military ribbon, blue and white.

“One of the guys in the outfit had it,” he said. “It’s nothing, just a little trinket. You do me a favor, you give it to Gregor’s widow, okay?”

The Russian looked at it, recognized it as the ribbon signifying the Silver Star, and knew that Mahoney had won it as a Marine captain outside Ap Hung Nghia in 1966.

“I can’t take it, Mahoney. But it’s a nice thought. He deserved it, I’ll say that. The Goshgarian bitch put two bullets into him, and he lived long enough to stop the world from ending. Fortunately, he was an alcoholic. He shorted out the detonator mechanism with vodka. Such an absurd victory. Anyway, I wish I could take it from you.”

“Yeah, well, I wish you could too. I’ll say one thing: for a little fat fuck, he was a prince.”

“A prince,” agreed the Russian, turning back to the hangar.

It was dawn now, and looked to be another fine, bright cold Maryland day. Dick Puller was by himself, outside the command center. Actually, he’d wandered away in the night, and let other experts take over. It was for the medical people to handle now, because there were so many wounded and there was the terrible task of extracting the badly hit up the elevator shaft to the mountaintop and then to the medevac choppers.

So from where he sat it looked like the site of some civil disaster. Choppers were ferrying the wounded down from the mountain to the field hospital, where a shock trauma unit had been set up under a large tent with a red cross emblazoned upon it. At the same time, all the world’s ambulances had collected at the tent, too, to transport the less severely wounded to regional facilities. Red lights blinked furiously and the intense commotion generated a sense of blur, of frenzy without direction. Puller just stared at it, barely conscious. He couldn’t find the energy just now to sort it out.

Instead, he had a sense of grief. Yet it was not for himself, though he also had a presentiment of failure, of all the grounds on which he was vulnerable. Without thinking about it much, he knew, in the way these things worked, that he’d be destroyed again. He’d have to answer for Bravo, and why he’d sent it to die twice, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. But the grief he felt at this time was not for himself.

Jesus, a lot of men, good ones, gone forever. That was what left you feeling so degraded and debauched afterward. You just wanted to go off somewhere and lie down and sleep and somehow will them back into their bodies and will them whole and healthy again. But you never could. You wondered if you’d ever look at a hill again and not see its slopes full of dying boys begging for their mothers and asking why it had to be them and not some other guys. It was the one question
he’d never found an answer for in all his years and on all his hills.

He was sitting on a swing, gently rocking back and forth. He looked at his watch—0700. Morning of the new day. The early light was pale, almost incandescent. It played off the snow in peculiar textures, almost turning blue. The sky above the mountain also looked to be blue, blue and pure, without a cloud to mar it anywhere. He shivered, drawing his coat around him; it was very cold. He had a headache and felt older than the blue mountain that humped up before him, benign now, and remote. If there was a lesson in this, he didn’t know it. It was no parable; it was just a battle.

He watched now as a young man left the command center and shuffled across the snowy field toward him. No, it wasn’t Skazy, or poor Uckley, or Dill, or God help him, Peter Thiokol—all his boys who had not made it through the night. Poor Peter, he might even have been the bravest, braver than any soldier. He certainly was smart. Or Uckley, down where he shouldn’t have been, standing out there, drawing the fire that came for Peter. And Frank. Frank, you were a prick and a hothead, and maybe even a psycho, but we needed a man to lead the assault, to go down first, knowing exactly the consequences, and you went without a second thought.

Puller saw that it was the junior Delta officer McKenzie, commander of the last attack on the Soviet strongpoint. He’d be the inheritor of it all.

“Sir, I thought you’d like to know the President is on his way. He’ll be arriving shortly.”

“Umm,” was all Puller could think to say. The news filled him with terrible weariness. He hated that part of it the worst, where the bigshots came by after the battle and asked the kids who’d survived where they were from and told them their folks would be proud of them. Well, he supposed it would mean something to the kids.

“Do you have final casualty figures, Captain?”

“It’s pretty bad, sir. Bravo lost seventy-six killed, maybe another hundred to hundred twenty hit. Delta lost twelve men in the initial assault; then, of the one hundred five we
got into the tunnel, we lost sixty-five dead, the rest hit. Only seven guys in Delta came out without a scratch. Of the first squadron, twenty-two guys, you got one hundred percent fatals. The Rangers lost fifty-one KIA in the assault, maybe another seventy-five wounded. Third Infantry came out with only some mussed hair. Eleven KIA, thirty-one wounded. We lost six helicopter aircrew from the two crashed birds. Then there was that FBI agent Uckley. Also
sixteen state
troopers went along on the final assault. Seven of them were killed, most of the rest hit. Brave guys, those country cops. They grow ’em tough in this state, I’ll say that. Three of the four people we sent into the tunnels, including that poor Vietnamese woman. Jesus, we found her back in the tunnel by the silo access hatch with an empty automatic and seven Russians around her. She did some kind of job, let me tell you. Without her, Walls doesn’t get
close
to the LCC. Then the fourteen men on the mission to open the tunnel for the tunnel rat teams, we lost them all. Then there were three National Guard pilots. And the sixteen men in the installation security complement. And the two officers on silo duty. So we’re looking at two hundred sixty-seven dead. Maybe four hundred wounded. I suppose it could be a lot worse. Hell, at Beirut the Marines lost—”