The Day Before Midnighten-au5A00CF01DC

The Day Before Midnight
by
stephen Hunter
Other Books by Stephen Hunter

DIRTY WHITE BOYS

POINT OF IMPACT

THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT

BANTAM BOOKS NEW YORK TORONTO LONDON * SYDNEY AUCKLAND

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or
events, is entirely coincidental.

THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT A Bantam Book Bantam hardcover edition published
February 1959 Bantam paperback edition 1 January 1990 Bantam reissue 1
December 1993

All rights reserved. Copyright 1989 by Stephen Hunter. Cover art
copyright 7989 by Glenn Harringlon. Library of Congress Catalog Card
Number: 8822177.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this
book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to
the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any
payment for this ' 'stripped book.''

ISBN 0553282352 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the
words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca
Registration. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York. New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

OPM 20 19 18 17 16 15

If you were at Waterloo, If you were at Waterloo, Makes no difference
what you do, If you were at Waterloo. -British schoolboys' rhyme,
nineteenth century

Author's Note

Close observers of Maryland geography will immediately recognize that
the author has allowed himself to manipulate the landforms of the state
to suit his dramatic purposes. To note two such obvious alterations in
reality. South Mountain, though it exists exactly where I have placed
it, is not nearly so high and formidable a peak as I have pretended. And
the relationship of Burkittsville to South Mountain has likewise been
adjusted a few miles to fit the story together more conveniently. I've
allowed myself a similar latitude in depicting the performance of
certain military units. Though in fact the Army's Special Operation
Group/Delta, the Rangers, and the 1st Battalion (Reinf), Third Infantry,
as well as light infantry and tactical air support units of the Maryland
National Guard and the Maryland Air Guard do exist, the author hopes
that readers understand this is a work of fiction, and although it
aspires to accuracy in its portrayal of procedure, its depiction of the
performance of these units during a national security crisis is wholly a
fabrication.

Finally, the author would like to thank all who gave so generously of
time and energy in his researches. These include colleagues Michael
Hill, Randi Henderson, Matt Seiden, Pat McGuire, Weyman Swagger, and
Fred Rasmussen; friends Lenne P. Miller, Jr.; Joe Fanzone, Jr.; Gerard
F. "Buzz" Busnuk; T. Craig Taylor, Jr.; David Petzal; Ernest Volkman; my
father-in-law, Richard C. Hageman; my brother-in-law and medical
adviser, John D. Bullock, M.D.; my brother, Tim Hunter; and my two
children, Jake and Amy, who cooperated (more or less) on a long Sunday
drive out to South Mountain. And lastly let me issue special thanks to
four believers without whose support I could not have endured: my
indefatigable agent, Victoria Could Pryor; my editors, Peter Guzzardi
and Ann Harris of Bantam Books; and most especially, my hardworking,
ever cheerful, and forgiving wife, Lucy Hageman Hunter.

0700.

It snowed that night, and sometime after three, Beth Hummel awoke, as
she always did, to the sound of small bare feet padding urgently across
the hard wood of the floor.

"Mommy?"

It was the voice of her older daughter. Bean--derived somehow from
Elizabeth--was seven, a careful, grave second grader who wrote her
numbers and her name with exaggerated precision and had filled out her
Christmas list from the Sears catalogue as if it were a college
application.

Beth rolled gently, hoping not to awaken Jack next to her, and turned to
face the child in the darkness. Her daughter was very close, and Beth
could smell her, warm and fresh like a loaf hot from the oven.

"Yes, honey?"

"Mommy, it's snowing."

"I know. They said it would on the TV."

"The world is all white. Jesus loves the world, he made it all white."

"I'm sure he does, honey," said Beth.

Jack snorted in his sleep, came from unconsciousness with a loggy lurch,
half rose, then whispered gruffly, "Shhhhhh, girls."

He fell back, inert in seconds.

"Mommy, can I get in?"

"Of course, honey," said Beth, scooting over and lifting the covers so
that there was room for Bean, who climbed in and snuggled against her
mother. The child was still in a second. Beth could feel her daughter's
heart pumping and the rise and fall of her fragile chest. Her little
nose was full; she breathed with a vaguely ragged sound, and Beth
worried that it would bother Jack, but behind her he continued to sleep
heavily.

Beth drifted off herself then. She was dreaming of tropical beaches. But
only an hour or two later another soft tread, slightly swifter, slightly
lighter, nudged her from her shallow sleep. Poo--from Phyllis--had
discovered the snow.

"Mommy!" Poo whispered in a gleeful rush of excitement, touching her
mother with taut fingers. "Mommy, it's white outside."

"Shhh, I know," whispered Beth. Poo was five, a kindergartner, whose
blond hair had not yet begun to darken, like Bean's. She was impossibly
beautiful, and as lively as Bean was grave. She was a bossy, feisty
child who tormented her older sister, and occasionally her mother. You
couldn't tell her a thing, like Jack.

"Mommy, Jesus loves us."

"Yes, he does," said Beth again. The connection between Jesus's love and
the snow dated from an obscure remark made by a Sunday-school teacher a
few weeks back to Poo, in November, on the occasion of the season's
first snowfall.

Beth had never been too sure what to make of it.

"Mommy, I'm cold. I had a bad dream. Can I come in too?"

Jack sometimes joked that all his life he'd wanted to sleep with two
women at the same time and now he sometimes woke up with three of'em in
the same bed.

"Yes, but be careful," Beth whispered. "Don't wake Bean or Daddy."

But Poo hadn't waited for the answer. That wasn't her style. She climbed
aboard and scuttled like a little commando up the gully between her
mother and her father, and slid in between them.

Beth felt the brush of her younger daughter's toes, cold from the long
race across the bare floor. Then Poo seemed to merge with her mother, to
simply become one with her, their breaths and rhythms joined. Beth
pulled the covers up to her neck, felt the embrace of the warmth, its
sluggish, numbing power.

But she could not get back to sleep. She lay in the silence, feeling the
ease and sighs other daughters. Now and then something ticked in the
house, or a draft of uncommonly cold air came through the door. She lay,
waiting for unconsciousness, which did not come. Finally, she looked
over at the clock. It was almost six. The alarm would go off at
six-thirty, and Jack had to be out of the house and in his pickup by
seven for a drive to a new job in Boonsboro; the girls had to be fed and
dressed for the bus by eight. So finally, Beth decided to get out of
bed.

Crossing the floor, she pulled her slippers on and then her robe, a red
polyester thing from Monkey Ward that had seen better days. She hoped
Jack would get her a new one for Christmas in a few weeks, but since he
usually did his shopping at the drugstore on Christmas Eve, she knew it
to be unlikely. She looked back at the three heads sunk into and
embraced by the pillows. Her husband, an athletic and muscular man three
years older than her twenty-nine, slept heavily.

He looked like an animal in a den, lost in dreamless mammal sleep as the
seasons changed. And her two daughters, facing the other direction, out
toward the shaded windows, were delicate and lyrical in the dim light
beginning to stream in at the margins of the shades. They were tiny and
perfect, their nostrils fragile as lace, their lips like candy slices,
the whisper of their breaths soft and persistent. But she was aware that
it was sometimes far easier to love them when they were in repose, as
now, than when they were at each other like wildcats in the backseat of
the station wagon.

She smiled at them--her three charges in the world--and felt something
profoundly satisfactory move through her. Her family. Hers. Then she
crept into the bathroom, quickly squirted some Crest on her toothbrush,
and cleaned her teeth. She headed downstairs to start breakfast.

Beth walked around the house, pulling up the shades.

The morning light was just beginning to show over the trees.

Yes, it had snowed; a light powder, unmarked as yet by human traces, lay
across everything. Maybe Jesus did love them. The world looked freshly
minted. It was radiant as far as she could see. The clouds had cleared
overnight. From the kitchen window, over the sink, she could see the
white roofs of Burkittsville, a collection of sloping rectangles against
the white netting of the snow on the trees. Beyond them was the
mountain.

It wasn't much of a mountain, almost more of a large hill in the
feckless Blue Ridge chain, which had itself seen better days. But to
Beth, who was born and raised in Florida, it was a real mountain, a huge
hump, crusted with pines, that rose two thousand or so feet above the
town. She knew it had been mined for coal back in the thirties, and some
of the old people in the town talked about the great Burkittsville
cave-in of thirty-four, which had ended the mining operations, and
almost ended Burkittsville until Borg-Wamer opened its big plant in
Williamsport twenty miles away, where most of the men worked. Up top she
could see the red and white towers of the phone company's microwave
processing station, or whatever it was.

The mountain was something she liked, and in the spring she and the
girls would drive to the park and go for long walks along the trails at
its base. You got about one thousand feet up it, and there was even an
overlook, where you could sit on a little bench and look across the
valley, see Burkittsville spread out like a collection of dollhouses,
and beyond that the undulating farmland of Maryland. To the left, a dark
blur, was Middletown, and farther out was Frederick, the big city.

It was a lovely view. The girls adored it. Even Jack liked it, though he
wasn't much on views.

Beth shook her eyes from the mountain, and returned to reality. She took
out the Honey Nut Cheerios, shook the box, and got the bad news. There
was enough for only two bowls-- this meant that the third person down
the stairs would have to make do with corn flakes. Beth tried to work
out the political permutations. If Bean came down last, it wouldn't
matter. Bean liked Honey Nuts, but if she couldn't have them, she'd
smile and get on with things. Jack and Poo, however, loved Honey Nut
Cheerios with the frenzy of zealots.

If Poo or Jack came down to see the other finishing the cereal, there'd
be trouble. The Jack-Poo relationship was the volatile one in the family
because Poo was such a replica of her father--stubborn, selfish, vain,
charming. The whole morning could come apart.

Upstairs, Beth heard the shower come on. He was up, that meant, which
was a good start to the day, because she didn't want to have to rouse
him, a task you wouldn't want to wish on a Russian soldier.

But her heart fell.

Bean walked in.

"Honey, what are you doing up? You don't have to get up yet."

"Mommy," said Bean, one small finger rubbing one sleepy eye, her hair a
mess, her little body swaddled in its purple pajamas, "I heard
something. It scared me."

"Oh, honey," said Beth, bending to her daughter, "there's nothing to be
scared of." At that moment a man in black with a large black pistol
stepped into the kitchen. She looked up at him, stunned. She heard the
steps of other men moving speedily through the house.

"Mommy, I'm scared," said Bean.

Two more black-clad men with huge black guns rushed into the kitchen.
They seemed so huge and she felt powerless.

It seemed the world was full of men with guns.

"Please, Mrs. Hummel," said the first man, a blunt, suntanned fellow
with shiny white teeth and blank eyes.

"Don't make any noise. Don't make any problems."

Beth panicked, started to scream, but a hand came over her mouth
roughly, locking it in her throat.

** ** **

Gregor Arbatov spoke the name "Tata," shook a terrible dream of caves
and mountains from his head, and came awake. He found himself where he
should be, in the bedroom of Molly Shroyer in a high-rise apartment in
Alexandria, Virginia. The time on the clock radio was approximately
seven a.m., and already Gregor was late. He was always late.

Gregor still shivered from the dream--he'd been having it more and more
lately, the same damn thing. In it, he'd wrestled someone; it was cold
and dark, a memory of iron Fingers around his throat and hot breath in
his face. He had a sense of his strength ebbing. He took a deep breath,
trying to clear his head, and touched his temples, contemplating the
white ceiling above him. He tried to lose himself in its blankness.

Next to him, Molly Shroyer made a wet noise. He turned to study her
torpid form. She was somewhat less than beautiful.

With a great deal of effort, Molly was able to transform herself into a
reasonably attractive woman by encasing herself in some kind of elastic
device to supply to her body the kind of discipline that her own mind
lacked. A muumuu also worked. Molly breathed heavily under the covers,
and when she breathed, the image of mountain ranges trembling under a
mantle of snow came to Gregor, which is perhaps why he'd been having his
cave dream so frequently; the girl, so big on the outside, was tiny on
the inside. He knew her to be a delicate, vulnerable, tragically
neurotic creature, wretchedly unhappy in her loneliness underneath the
excess flesh.

This was Gregor's specialty. In his own small way he was a legend.
Gregor, nominally second assistant commercial attache in the Soviet
Embassy in Washington, an old D.C. fixture who drank with Western
newsmen, followed the Redskins, filled in at bridge, knew the difference
between a Big Mac and a Whopper, was in actuality an illegal operative
of the GRU, as Red Army Intelligence is called to distinguish it from
the swankier, civilian-run and deeply loathed KGB. His undercover job
consisted of agent running, and as he had worked it out, this primarily
entailed wooing, then seducing, then turning lonely American women who
worked in secretarial or clerical positions in the security or military
establishment.

Molly, for example, was a secretary to a staff assistant of the Senate
Select Intelligence Committee. But Gregor had a few others, all equally
enslaved to him, all equally imperfect, all equally rich in
self-loathing and impoverished in self-esteem. Yet Gregor's talent and
perhaps his most impressive grace was that he loved them all: he really
did.

He was not, despite embassy gossip which he did not discourage, a
particularly gifted sexual athlete. As a technician, he was irredeemably
proletarian: He just got on and plowed until he couldn't plow anymore.
Nor was he unusually endowed in the physical sense. But he had the gift
of conviction, and the patience to listen, and a slightly romantic
tendency. He was kind, considerate, gentle, flirtatious, indefatigable.
He remembered birthdays and anniversaries and special restaurants. He
always brought little gifts. He gave flowers. He nursed his girls slowly
toward friendship and then intimacy and then compromise. It was a good
system, carefully wrought, the result of much experimentation.

But on this morning Gregor awoke with a nightmare and a headache, late.
Molly preferred him to get up before the sun and slip out, a sensible
precaution. He concurred. There were so many foolish ways you could be
tripped up by the FBI, turned out and ejected, and the one place on
earth this GRU agent did not care to see again was Russia.

He headed into the bathroom and caught a quick shower.

A thickish man with exceedingly strong, broad hands, forty-three years
old, his body was extravagantly hairy and he left a trail of fur
wherever he went; Molly said he could turn a bathtub into a national
emergency faster than any man she'd ever known.

You're a whale, he told himself, and it was true. He was easily
twenty-five pounds overweight. You need to exercise, be careful what you
eat and drink. You'll drop dead in bed one night, and then what?

Gregor dried off, squirted on some cologne (he always tried to smell
good), brushed his teeth, pushed the hair he had left on his head into
some semblance of wet order, and quickly climbed into his baggy blue
suit. It would need pressing again before the end of the century or the
end of the world, whichever came first. He tied his black shoes,
thinking how nice it would be to shine them someday. He had owned them
for seven years. A little cracked, perhaps, but extremely comfortable.

Molly snorted like a large African game animal wallowing in the mud.
Without makeup she was quite appalling to look at. In the dark, when he
was riding her like a buffalo, yelping and plunging, it was quite
another thing. Now, in the harsh morning, she was the perfect symbol of
his imperfect life.

Melancholy seeped through him.

He faced an unpleasant day. To begin with, the boy genius Klimov, Deputy
Resident, had called a meeting for the morning, and Klimov had lately
been somewhat unpleasant.

Then Gregor had to service his most important source, the mysterious
Pork Chop, at a shopping mall out in Maryland, a tiresome, dreadful
prospect, very tense, very exhausting.

Then, far worse, he had communications duty that night, which meant
sleeping on a cot in a basement cell that embassy tradition called the
Wine Cellar, attending encryptment equipment in case a hot eyes-only
zapped over from Moscow.

In truth, the Americans at the National Security Agency out at Fort
Meade, in Maryland, would have it unbuttoned before he could; perhaps he
could simply call them and request the message. But the duty, which came
about once a month, was the worst thing in his life: It would upset his
entire system, which depended on a solid ten hours' sleep, plus a little
nap in the afternoon.

And then the other thing gnawing at him, not yet put into words by
anyone, but clearly expressed nevertheless.

For the truth was, he was now in trouble in the embassy. Of late, the
gleanings had gotten thinner and thinner. Where once he'd had nine girls
and his life had been a phenomenon of scheduling, an athletic
extravaganza, the action was now slow. He was losing his touch. Younger
men had been brought in, and they treated him with contempt. Only Pork
Chop seemed to please them, and Gregor was only a cutout to Pork Chop,
who worked for bigger fish.

Klimov, the awful Klimov, was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! With shrewd,
furious eyes and the energy to work like a beaver, tirelessly. A true
believer. A lover of the system, and no wonder. He had a vastly
important uncle who could see that things always came to him. Arbatov
hated Klimov almost as much as he feared him. And he felt exposed,
vulnerable, a target, since he was the only man in the section who was
over forty. And because he'd lasted so much longer than the others.

My time, he thought, is almost over.

Molly's left lid crept open, then her right.

"Are you still here, Gregor? God, you're so late."

"I'm sorry, darling," Gregor said.

She laughed, but then turned petulant.

"Who's Tata?" she demanded. "I heard you say her name. Is she a new
girlfriend, Gregor?"

"No, no, my love," said Gregor. "Tata's a prince. Prince Tatashkin. A
hero from an old story in my childhood. A great knight who saves the
world. He came to me in a dream, that's all."

"It's so hard to be mad at you," she said babyishly, scrunching up her
features into the mask of an infant. "You're so cute. Mowwy wubs her
Gweggyweggy."

She offered a mouth to kiss. He did, gently.

"I love you, too, my love,"' he said, and left.

** ** **

Jack Hummel had seen the movie Psycho at an impressionable age, and for
that reason--Beth never could fully understand it--he had ordered her
never to come in while he was showering.

"Honey," he'd say to her, "if you saw that movie, you'd know. This guy
comes in when this girl is showering. All you can see is his shape
through the curtain, and then--"

"I don't want to hear," she'd say, covering her ears.

So when the door of the bathroom opened and he saw a black shape through
the torrent of water and through the steam and through the translucent
plastic of the curtain, he jumped, of course, feeling the lingering
imprint of the movie.

A second later his anger burst out, on the presumption that Beth had,
once again, forgotten.

"Beth, honey, how many times have I got to--"

But the shower curtain suddenly exploded in a clatter of ripping plastic
and popping rings. Jack's mouth fell open dumbly. In the steam he saw
that it wasn't Beth at all, but some figure out of a terrible dream.

The man stood there in black boots, black combat fatigues, and a black
face mask. He had a gun, too, and it was black. Jack, who knew a little
about such things, recognized it as an Uzi with about half-a-yard of
silencer hooding its short snout.

Jack felt himself pissing in the stall. The water continued to spray
down on him. The man gestured with the gun.

"My children," Jack begged, raising a feeble hand against the surrealism
of the moment.

"Oh, God," he begged again, "please don't hurt my children. Please,
please, don't hurt my children."

Another gunman, this one unmasked, popped into the door. He was deeply
tanned with the white teeth of a toothpaste commercial and the air of
command. He held a black automatic, also silenced.

"Come on, now, Mr. Hummel. You can't stand there all day." He leaned
into the stall and with his free hand turned the water off.

"I hate waste," he said almost conversationally. "Now, come on. Dry off
and get dressed. We've got a job for you.

Herman, if he's slow, you might prod him a little."

He looked at his watch, a fancy black scuba number which he wore
inverted on his wrist.

"We have a schedule to keep."

Jack dressed quickly with shaking knees and trembling fingers, while the
man with the Uzi watched him. He couldn't get the buttons on the fly to
work, and it bothered him that the leader hadn't bothered to wear a
mask. Jack wondered if that meant they'd have to kill them all because
they'd seen his face.

And it was the kind of face you wouldn't forget. He had a pro
linebacker's battered mug with a nose that had been broken dramatically
into a crooked hawk's bill. He had almost expressionless eyes, and his
hair had been cropped close, almost into blond stubble. His cheekbones
were wide and the skin had been tanned until it was almost leathery. He
looked like Jack's old football coach, who'd been one tough son of a
bitch.

"Hurry," said the man with the Uzi.

"Okay, okay," Jack complained, pulling on his work boots.

Downstairs he found his two girls sitting stiffly in their chairs,
eating Honey Nut Cheerios. For once they were quiet at breakfast. His
wife stood at the stove. There was a total of five men in black, four of
them with an assortment of exotic weapons vaguely familiar from the
movies, and the leader with his pistol.

Jack's problem now was shock. The image didn't make any sense at all to
him. It was as if guys out of the TV news had crawled out of the box and
taken over. He stood there trying to put it together.

"You see, Mr. Hummel. No harm done. Breakfast as usual. No problems."

"What do you want?" stammered" Beth. The color had drained from her
face, and her gestures were mechanical. He could see her shaking; she
had wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if the fear had made her
cold. Her eyes were unfocused. Jack longed to touch her and to make the
men go away.

"We don't have a lot of money," he said through a clog of phlegm in his
throat, though he was certain it wasn't money the men wanted. But he
couldn't begin to guess what they were after. What could he--?

"Come this way, please," said the leader.

They went into the living room.

"Now, it's very simple, Mr. Hummel. We have a job to be done. That is,
we may have a job to be done. We can't do it. You can. Therefore, you'll
have to come along."

There was something remote in his voice--not an accent so much as the
effort to pronounce each word perfectly. It had an odd, disconnected
sound to it.

"And if--I'm just asking--if I don't?"

"Best to come, Mr. Hummel. We'll be leaving some people here. Best to
come, Mr. Hummel, and avoid unpleasantness."

"Oh, Jesus," said Jack. "Please don't hurt them. Please, I'll do
anything. Just don't--"

"Mr. Hummel, if you do what you're told, no harm at all will come to
your wife and children. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"You may say good-bye. If all goes well, you'll be back by noon. If not,
it may be a day or so. Your children, however, and your wife, will be
perfectly all right."

"Yeah, yeah," said Jack, wishing he sounded a little less terrified.
"I'll do it. No problem, I'll do it."

"Fine. Then we are off."

"I suppose I'm an idiot for asking. But where are we going?"

"To meet the general, Mr. Hummel."

0800.

Hapgood had tendencies toward comedy which he could not suppress. In his
third grade class picture, for example, amid all the still, grave faces,
his is the only blur; he is laughing at something private, his face gone
in the smear of movement.

"Donny," his mother had said, "Donny, I declare, what are we going to do
with you?"

As it turned out, very little could be done with Donny.

He laughed his way through high school and college and got extremely
high grades. He laughed his way into a marriage and nearly out of it. In
his profession, his humorous impulses continued subversively, for he
made his living amid men who laughed at very little because there was
very little to laugh at.

But he could not resist: In his infantile scrawl he had crayoned a large
sign on a piece of shirt cardboard and taped it above the heavy steel
blast door to the launch control center, where its orange childishness
fluttered against the rows and rows of switches, the bright red no lone
zone imperatives from SAC stamped everywhere in sans serif--forbidding
solitude in proximity to nuclear weapons systems--the constellations of
red and green status lights, the big twenty-four-hour clock, and the
dizzying mesh of wires, cables, and solid-state units that comprised a
communications bank comparable to that of a small midwestern top-forty
radio station. welcome, the cardboard sign said, to THE mirv griffin
show.

Then, just today, on the console panel itself, above the launch enabling
keyhole, the famous little metal slot which would, if penetrated, set in
motion the probable end of the world in fire, he had added, in
ball-point, on an index card, AND HEEEEKE'S MIRV. . . .

The star of the show, MIRV, was the Multiple Independently Targeted
Reentry Vehicle, perched in a cluster atop the bird nested at the center
of Hapgood's command. The ten MIRVS and their second bananas, the
W87/Mk-21 thirty-five-kiloton fissionable warhead, sat atop a tube of
black titanium dubbed, with a sense of humor that the great Hapgood
could only aim for. Peacekeeper.

This was more famous in the lexicon as MX, Missile Experimental. No
longer an experiment, it stood now in its super-hard silo not one
hundred feet from Hapgood, long, silent, and enigmatic. A large-payload
solid-fuel cold-launch four-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, it
was seventy-one feet long and ninety-two inches wide and at launch
weight 193,000 pounds. It was fired by three solid-propellant booster
motors, with storable liquid hypergolic propellant in the fourth-stage
post-boost vehicle. It was guided by an advanced inertial reference
sphere and delivered a payload of 7,200 pounds. Its targets included all
Soviet "super-hard" control centers, fourth generation ICBM silos, and
"very hard leadership bunkers." It was, in short, a head hunter, a
Kremlin buster, a leader killer, an assassin.

"If anybody from Squadron sees that," his partner Tomano informed him,
pointing at the new bit of comedy taped to the launch board, "your ass
is history. This is a no-laugh zone."

"Squadron," replied Hapgood with a snicker, "is two thousand miles away.
Out in Wy-fucking-oming, if memory serves, where the deer and the
antelope roam. We are all by our lonesomes in Burkittsville, Maryland,
the ultimate lone zone of the entire universe. Moreover," he continued
in his grand voice, aching to get a smile out of the dour but focused
Romano, "if I am going to unload thirty-five megatons of nuclear doom on
top of the Soviet Union and face my maker as one-half of the greatest
mass-murder- team in history, I'd prefer to do it with a smile on my
face and a song in my heart. You're too fucking Air Force, man. Lighten
up."

Romano, a captain to Hapgood's first lieutenant, two years older and
maybe ten years wiser, simply made the unhappy face of a man sucking a
Realemon bottle. Still, Romano would go easy on the kid: whatever his
excesses, Hapgood was the best, the sharpest, the smartest missile
officer Romano had ever seen. He knew the procedures and he knew the
boards as if he'd invented them.

Besides, Hapgood was largely correct. He and his friend and superior
officer occupied the only strategic missile silo east of the
Mississippi. Originally a Titan prototype silo, from the late fifties
when the liquid-fuel Titan seemed to be The Answer, it had never been
completely developed and was left to fallow after Air Force enthusiasm
had shifted in favor of the western-states-based solid-fuel Minuteman in
1962. Now the installation, on a bit of government real estate in
centra] Maryland, had been hastened into operational condition because
it was available and obscure, being located halfway between the Pentagon
in Washington and the National Alternate Military Command Center at Fort
Richie, and also because the Titan configuration called for basing bird
and LCC in the same hole rather than remote from each other, as was
Minuteman doctrine.

"Rick, I just had a flash from God," Hapgood suddenly blurted out. "He
wants us to redecorate! Think about it. Rick!

A launch control center done over in--knotty pine!"

In spite of himself, Romano smiled.

"God, Donny, what the fuck are we going to do with you?"

"Pray I turn my key, if turn it I must," said Hapgood, touching the red
titanium key he wore around his neck on a chain and tucked into his
white jump suit's breast pocket.

"But who knows," Hapgood continued, "I might, like, not be in the right
mood, you dig?"

Romano laughed at the kid again. If the word came, Donny would turn, on
cue, and send the bird on its flight.

It was another day in the hole. They would pass it as they had passed so
many others, one day in three, one hundred feet underground in the
hardened command capsule of a missile launch site, aware that if World
War III were fought, they were the ones who would fight it, at exactly
the same time they were convinced that their very presence guaranteed
that it would never be fought.

The chamber of their drama was a one-piece capsule sunk deep into the
earth so that its interior curved at the ceiling line, increasing the
sense of claustrophobia; at forty-one by twenty-six feet, it looked like
some kind of meditation chamber. The steel floor actually floated above
the surface of the capsule, suspended from the roof of the vault by four
hydraulic jacks, to better absorb the impact of a nuclear near-miss. The
men sat at right angles to each other, twelve feet apart, in cushy
swivel chairs complete with seat belts, quite comfortable, quite
adjustable, very jet-age. Before each was the console, that is, a panel
of switches, ten rows of labeled lights, red or green, each a checkoff
to a certain missile function. All these lights were green, meaning the
status was go. It looked like a fuse box in a large apartment building
or the control room of a television station. There was a computer
keyboard by which one entered the daily twelve digit Permissive Action
Link code, or PAL, freeing the machinery for terminal countdown and
launch. There was a radio telephone mounted at the base of the console,
and it also had a few rows of switches, which could zip the caller all
around the installation on various lines. A huge clock hung between the
two units. And, of course, the keyholes, marked launch enabler at each
console, hinged red metal flaps encasing them. Assuming doomsday has
been decreed, the launch siren is wailing, the proper Emergency Action
Message has arrived to the encrypted uplink ("Let's hope our EARN is
true," Hapgood once joked, squinting like a musical comedy marksman) from
any one of several command sources, and the proper PAL twelve-digit code
has been entered in the security system, one has to yank the flap up,
insert the key, then turn smoothly a quarter turn to the right, this
within the same two-second time envelope as one's pal down the console.
One man may not start World War III; it takes brotherhood, the true
meaning of sac's mandatory no lone ZONE signs. One minute after
that--during which Peacekeeper gets a last go-over from its computer
baby-sitters-- the launch enabling circuits get a short blip of energy,
the silo doors are blown, and off the bird flies, its ten warheads, like
ten kings of hell, primed for deployment.

Against another section of- wall there sat quite a bit of communications
equipment, including several teletypes, a satellite communications
terminal, and both high and low frequency radios; and at another, racks
of metal-covered notebooks which contained hundreds of standing orders
and regulations for silo procedure, and at still another, a cot, where
either guy could grab a nap if necessary. There was one peculiarity to
this capsule distinguishing it from the hundreds like it in the missile
fields of the West: a small black glass window mounted to the left of
Hapgood's console, mounted in the very wall of the chamber itself. It
was about a foot square and looked almost like a computer screen. Two
words were stenciled across it in red paint: key vault.

The command capsule was reached by elevator, but not directly. Due to
the configuration of the mountain, there was a long corridor between it
and the elevator. Beyond the capsule the corridor continued, arriving
eventually at a huge safety door, electrically controlled, by which
technicians could access the missile itself. The whole thing was
constructed of concrete doubly reinforced with steel rods and coated
with a special polymer to discourage penetration by the electromagnetic
pulse generated by an airborne nuclear explosion, or by the effects of a
blast itself, that is, anything less than a direct hit by a Soviet
SS-18, carrying a throw-load in the twenty-five-megaton range. And
sealing the capsule off from the rest of the installation was a huge
blast door like a door on a bank vault, usually kept closed tight.

"Junie says we ought to have you guys over," said Roinano.

"Uh, not a good idea," said Hapgood. "I think we're in terminal
countdown. She spends a lot of time on the phone to her mother. And
she's not exactly nuts about the trailer. And look at this."

He made a fishy face, and held up the object of his contempt. It was a
paper lunch sack with grease spots on it.

"Jeez, I remember when she made bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches,
or Reubens, or hot turkey, that you could zap up in the microwave. -Now
look. The sad reality of my marriage."

He pulled out a Baggie with a wilted sandwich in it.

"Peanut butter," he announced.

There was a buzz on the installation phone.

"Oh, hell, now what?" Romano said. Their twenty-four-hour shift had
another ten hours to run. Relief wasn't due until 1800.

He picked up the phone.

"Security Alpha, this is Oscar-one-niner," he said.

"Oscar-one-niner, just a security warning, SOP. Be advised I have some
kind of disabled vehicle just beyond the gate. It looks to be a van of
some sort, off the highway. Looks like some kids in it. Advise SAC or
National Command?"

Romano looked swiftly to the console for his indicators for Outer Zone
Security and saw no blinking lights, then glanced at Inner Zone Security
and confirmed the status freeze. These lights were keyed to the
installation's low-level Doppler Ground Radar networks, which picked up
intruders beyond the perimeter. Occasionally they'd go off if a small
animal rushed through the zone, and a security team would be dispatched
to investigate. But now he saw nothing.

"Security Alpha, what's your security status? I have no OZ or IZ
indicators showing."

"Affirmative, Oscar-one-niner, I don't either."

"Have you notified Primary and Reserve Security Alert Teams?"

"Primary is suiting up, sir, and we woke Reserve, affirmative, sir.
Still, I'd like to put a message through to Command--"

"Uh, let's hold off. Security Alpha. It's only a van, for crissakes.
Keep it under observation, and let your PSAT do the walking. Report back
in five."

"Yes sir," said the security NCO topside.

"I'm surprised he didn't shoot," said Hapgood.

The Air Force Combat Security Policemen who maintained the defensive
perimeters of the installation were traditionally not much loved by the
missile officers. The missile guys viewed them as cops, the
technologically uninitiated.

Besides, the security people were known to have sent complaints to
Missile Command if Capsule personnel showed up with unshined shoes or
uncreased uniforms.

"Jesus," Hapgood, a notorious security baiter, said, "those guys must
think they're in the military or something. I mean, what is this, the
Air Force, for Christ's sake?"

He went back to his homework, part of his program to get an MBA. It was
a case study of difficulties encountered by a fictitious bicycle
manufacturer in Dayton, Ohio. Now, with assets of $5 million, operating
costs of $4.5 million, a decline in sales projected at 1.9 percent over
the next five years, what should CEO Smith do?- Buy a motorcycle,
thought Hapgood.

"I wish he'd call back," said Romano ten minutes later.

Dad was struggling with the spare tire. He crouched next to the vehicle
just off the snowy roadway beyond the gate of the installation. The
voices of impatient children lashed out from within the interior of the
van.

"Dammit, settle down in there," he bellowed. "This isn't easy."

Master Sergeant O'Malley of the Air Force Combat Security Police watched
him from the guardhouse. Even from where he stood he could hear the
children inside the van.

"This guy is making me nervous," he said to the two policemen with him.
All were dressed in the uniforms of a private security service, in
keeping with the sign that stood above the gate house: south mountain
microwave processing STATION/ AT&T/ PRIVATE PROPERTY/ NO ADMITTANCE.

"You want us to frisk him?"

O'Malley vacillated. He looked again at his Alert Status board, and saw
no change in the OZ and IZ lights. He gave a quick visual sweep of the
mountain slope below him, and saw nothing but white snow and black
stubble. He blinked, swallowed. He looked around. Where was his
three-man Primary Security Alert Team? Jesus, those guys were slow!

Finally, he said, "No. We're supposed to keep a low profile. I'll just
go help him along. I don't want him spending the morning here."

O'Malley drew his parka on and stepped out into the roadway, wincing at
the brightness even through his aviator sunglasses. He walked across the
hard, cold road.

"Sir, I have to ask you to move on," he said. "This is private property.
You aren't even supposed to be back on this road."

The dad looked up. He was a suntanned man with very white teeth. He
looked, to the sergeant at any rate, like some kind of athlete, a boxer
maybe. He had a broken nose.

It was a vivid morning, just a little after eight. The sun spread
through the valley. The sky was flawless, dense blue.

The chill in the air rubbed on O'Malley's skin; he could feel the mucus
in his nose freezing.

"I'm sorry," the dad said. "I thought there was a MeDonald's up this
way. I must have taken a wrong turn, and now I've got a flat. Just let
me get this tire fixed and I'm gone."

"Sir," said O'Malley, "if you like, I can call a garage and they can
send a tow truck up here."

"I think I can get it," said the man. "If I can just find the lug wrench
in the toolbox." He reached into the box, which was old and battered. In
the background the kids began to cry.

The young sergeant was by nature suspicious--his profession demanded
it--but when the dad brought out a silenced Heckler & Koch P9 in 9mm,
his first impulse was not to reach for the Smith & Wesson.38 he carried
on his belt, or to cry out. Rather, he was stunned at the incongruity of
it, the sheer, appalling absurdity of such a weapon, here and now, in
the man's hand. But he had no time to react.

The major dropped to one knee, and, aiming from a two-handed isosceles
position, shot O'Malley twice through the center chest from a range of
seven feet, firing 115grain Silvertips, which blossomed like spring
tulips as they tumbled crazily through the young man's chest, knocking
him to the earth inside a second.

The major stepped back from the van and its rear double doors sprang
open. Inside, two men fired a long burst from a bipod-mounted M-60 into
the guardhouse, which shivered, its glass splintering with the impact of
the 7.62-mm rounds.

Inside, the two air policemen died almost instantly amid a spray of
glass chips and wood bits.

The major jumped onto the running board of the van, whacked it with his
gun butt, and the driver gunned it. It slithered, kicking up the dust,
and whipped through a ninety degree turn and smashed through the gate.
Before him, the major could see three nondescript corrugated tin
buildings inside the complex, one of which boasted a red and white radio
tower of perhaps fifty feet.

According to plan, they had thirty seconds from the first shot until
they took out the above-ground communications Romano called back
Security Alpha. There was no answer.

"I wonder what that guy is doing?" he said.

"Those cops. You never know."

"Donnie, take your key off your neck."

"Huh?"

"Do what I say, Donny." He dialed Communications.

There was no answer. He went to the teletype. No messages had come
through on their watch.

"Shit," he said. "I wonder if--"

"Hey, Rick, ease off, man. So the guys haven't answered the phone. What
does that mean, nuclear war? You know as well as I do nobody's getting
down here unless we say so. We control the elevator."

The post's entire defensive response to the attack consisted of an air
security man from the Primary Security Alert Team with a Winchester
twelve-gauge pump. The man with the shotgun fired one shot from behind
the Commo building at the major, who clung to the van as it rushed
through the compound, but he hurried, missed him, spattering his burst
against the van door. Then the van disappeared in a swirl of dust as it
reached and slammed into the communications building.

The air security man rethrew his pump and waited for a target to emerge
from the confusion. He had a queer sense, however, of being watched, and
turned to peer at the Cyclone fence to the left of the gate. He had an
impression of someone scurrying away, but as he brought his weapon to
bear--it would have been a long shot, anyway, for a shotgun-- five
charges went off under the fence. It lifted and twisted in the
concussions. The explosive was plastique, Frenchmanufactured, detonated
by a U.S. Army M-1 Delay Firing Device with a fifteen-second delay.

The young man was blown backward and down by the blasts. When he
regained his senses, he could see troopers in snow smocks with automatic
weapons moving very fast up the hill and through the gaps in the fence.
He was amazed at how many there were, and with what precision they
moved. He wondered where the hell they'd come from, how they'd gotten so
fucking close. He understood, too, that he was probably doomed, that the
post was overwhelmed, that unless the guys in Commo got an emergency
message out to SAC that it was all over. His own inclination was to run,
but he realized he couldn't. A piece of shrapnel from the fence burst
had torn into his knee. Then he realized he'd been hit in the chest too.
There was blood all over the snow, flooding down around his combat boot.
The shotgun slipped from his grip. He wished he'd killed one of the
bastards.

There were three strong points in the compound. The first was the
barracks, where the installation's complement of air policemen was
headquartered. One unit of the assault team broke off from the general
rush and dashed toward it.

Fifty yards out, the four men dropped prone as they deployed their chief
weapon, a Heckler & Koch HK-21. The gunner pumped a three-hundred-round
tracer belt into the building. The tracers flicked out and kicked
through the corrugated tin walls. As the gunner was changing belts and
his loader and one other man were supplying suppressing fire, the fourth
member of the team dashed forward with a three-pound plastique package
with a four-second time-delay mechanism. He primed it and hurled it
through the window.

The detonation was tremendous, blowing out three of the four walls and
collapsing the roof. The barracks team moved through the wreckage of the
building, shooting everything whether it moved or not.

The second strong point was the launch-control facility itself, with its
elevator to the capsule beneath. Generally staffed by three men, it was
this day staffed by only two: They died in the first seconds after the
fence burst, when one superbly trained raider kicked the door open and
fired a long burst from his Uzi. * The third strong point was Commo, the
communications center, which the van team hit, led by the major,
carrying an Uzi. There was smoke everywhere, and as the major kicked his
way through the haze, he fired a burst into the shapes he encountered.
Each went down.

He pushed his way back to the teletype machines and the computer
encrypters and the hardened cables that fed into them.

"There," he commanded.

A man came forward with a huge pair of industrial wire cutters.

"The red ones," the major said. The man with the clippers was well
trained. He knelt, and adroitly began to cut the post's contact to the
outside world, leaving only a single cable.

The major pushed his way through the rubble to the security officer's
office, off the main room. The man himself had already been killed with
a machine pistol burst. He lay across the threshold of his office,
having been the first of the major's victims. A satiny pool of blood
lapped across the linoleum.

The major stepped over him and went swiftly to the wall safe, where his
demolitions man already crouched.

"Any problem?"

"It's not titanium. You'd expect better stuff."

"You can blow it?"

"No problem. I've almost got it rigged," the demo man said. Swiftly, he
pinched a latticework of plastique into the crannies of the safe. He
worked like a sculptor, trying to build a cross current of pressure that
would, upon detonation, spring the box. Then he pressed a small device
called a time-pencil into one corner of the glop.

"Are we clear?" he asked.

The major, in the doorway, gestured his men out.

"Do it," he said.

The demolitions man squeezed the bulb at the end of the pencil, which
released a droplet of acid. As he raced from the building, his gear and
weapons slapping against his body in his sprint, the acid began to eat
through a restraining piece inside the time-pencil. It took seven
seconds. When the wire yielded, a coiled spring snapped a striker down
to a primer cap, which in turn detonated the explosive. The metal tore
in the burst, and the safe was ripped from its moorings in the wall.

The major was the first in, rushing through the smoke.

He rifled through the papers until he found what he wanted.

Outside came the intermittent sounds of gunshots from the mop-up.

He beckoned to his radioman, took the microphone off the man's backpack
of gear.

"Alex to Landlord," he said, "Alex to Landlord, are you there?"

"This is Landlord, affirmative."

"Get the general."

"He's here."

"Yes, I'm here, Alex," came a new voice on the net.

"Sir, we've got it. We're going down below."

"Good." The voice was cheerful. "I'll meet you at the LCF elevator."

Even the major was impressed. In the middle of the smoking battlefield
the general still looked magnificent and unruffled. But then that was
the general's gift. Beyond the force of his intelligence and the depth
of his vision, he radiated confidence, beauty, and supreme knowledge. He
had a way of drawing you to him and making you his absolutely.

"Report, Major?" the general asked.

"Seizure procedure complete. General. We control the compound."

The general nodded, then smiled. His features lit up; his eyes warmed.
His sleek hair was gray, almost white, and had been expensively trimmed.
He wore a Burberry trench coat over a well-cut jump suit. He seemed,
somehow, more like an executive vice-president than a military officer.

"Casualties?"

"None, sir. The surprise was complete."

"Good. No boys hurt. You planned well. Communications out?"

"Yes sir."

"Enemy casualties?"

"Sixteen, sir. Their entire complement."

"The specs called for twenty-four. You'd think in an
independent-launch-capable facility they'd be at full strength."

"Yes, sir."

"They had no idea anybody even knew they were here.

Still, it wouldn't have mattered, would it, Alex? Superb."

"We try, sir," said Alex. "I guess we were lucky. We got through the
radar all right, and caught them asleep."

"The elevator code?"

"Yes sir."

The major went to a computer terminal installed in the wall next to the
double titanium blast proof doors that led to the launch command capsule;
it was configured like a television screen over a typewriter keyboard
and looked a little like a bank machine. He bent to it and typed in the
twelve integers of that day's Permissive Action Link, which he had just
gained from the safe in the security officer's room. access ( K, the
machine responded.

The elevator doors opened.

"Final assault team forward," said the major.

"Time to talk to the boys downstairs," the general said with a smile.

"I'm going to call Command," said Romano. He typed a quick message on
the teletype, then hit the send button.

Nothing happened.

"Goddamnit," said Romano. "Get your pistol out."

Both men carried Smith & Wesson.38s, not for defense but to execute the
other in the event, however unlikely given the screening procedures, of
some kind of psychotic attack.

"Mine's not loaded," said Hapgood. "I never--hey, come on. They aren't
going to--"

The phone buzzed.

"Jesus." Romano jumped. Then he snatched the phone.

"Hello, this is Oscar-one-niner," he said.

"Oscar-one-niner, Christ! You won't believe it. We had a goddamn power
failure up here. Emergency generators are on and we should have full
power back in a sec."

"What about that vehicle?"

"Sir, PSAT got his tire changed. He's outta here. All clear,
affirmative, and PSAT back inside the perimeter."

"That's a big hip hooray. Is this O'Malley?"

"Sir, no, it's Greenberg, code authenticated Sierra-four, Delta-niner,
Hotel-six--"

"That's okay. Alpha Security, I have you authenticated."

"Sir, just to remind you, SOP on power failures is for you to open the
blast door. You wouldn't want to be caught in there, sir, if we lose
power again and the generators go."

"Affirmative, Security Alpha, will do. Jesus, you guys had us scared,"
Romano blurted out.

"Sorry about that, sir. Couldn't be helped."

Romano spun the cylinder on the door, and with a whoosh, the big thing
opened. He leaned out into the corridor and took a deep breath.

"Jesus," said Hapgood. "You were really sweating there."

"Boy, I--"

But a woman's voice suddenly filled the air. Her name was Betty and she
was the voice of the computer.

"Warning," she cooed, "access has been achieved."

At that moment, at the end of the corridor the elevator doors burst
open. A trooper with a laser-sighted Uzi put a beam of red light into
Romano's center chest and fired a burst. As Hapgood watched, his
friend's uniform exploded; Romano's eyes went blank as he pitched
forward, his head askew.

Hapgood knew he was going to die. He could hear them coming down the
corridor, the swift, slapping pound of their boots, driven on by the
shouts of their officer.

"The other one. Quick, the other one."

Panic scampered through the young man's mind and he felt his joints
melt, his will scatter. He knew he could never get the blast door closed
in time.

They're coming for the bird, he thought.

And at that moment he remembered procedure. He turned and sprinted for
the far wall. His one advantage came from Romano. "Take your key off,
Donny." It was a small thing. That was all, but it was enough.

For as Hapgood dashed to the wall, the major ducked forward into the
capsule, and put three Silvertips from a range of ten feet through the
young officer's lungs; but the impact of the bullets only hurried him
those last few feet.

Before him he saw the black window set in the wall, the one that
admitted no light and was the latest wrinkle in installation security.
key vault.

And because Hapgood did not have to get the key off his neck, because he
had it in his hand, he was able to punch through the glass-- "Nooo!"
screamed the major, firing twice more; the man with the laser-guided Uzi
fired the rest of his clip, the bullets slamming into Hapgood, who slid
in bloody splendor down the wall. But he had already dropped the key
into the key vault and, one second later, a half-ton titanium block
slammed down, sealing the key off from reach.

The general wasted no time.

"It couldn't be helped," he said cheerily. "We've made contingency
plans. We'll get what we want. We just won't get it right away."

The general looked at the two combat missile officers soaking in their
own blood. The young one, the boy, had been shot dozens of times. The
back of his jump suit was a spatter of bullet holes and burned fabric.
The general betrayed no surprise or regret. He simply passed on from the
bodies to other issues.

"Get them out of here," said the major. "And get the blood mopped up."

The general turned.

"Commence our occupation phase, Alex," he commanded.

"We'll be having visitors soon, and we've got much work to do."

"Of course, sir."

Alex issued orders quickly. "Get the trucks up here with Hummel and send
the demolition team down to blow the road. Roll out the wire for the
field telephones.

Get the canvas strung out. And get the boys started digging in."

The general turned to the teletype machines against the wall. Five of
them--marked SAC, ERCS, UHF Satellite, Looking Glass, and SLFCS--were
still, as if dead. The sixth--marked National Command--suddenly began to
clatter away insanely.

The general touched Alex on the arm.

"Look, Alex," he said. "They know. The key vault must be rigged to send
a robot signal to Command when it's deployed."

He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex.

"About three minutes. Not bad. Not outstanding, but not bad."

He pulled the message off the platen.

FLASH OVERRIDE FROM: NMCC WASHINGTON D.C.//J3 NMCC// TO: SOUTH MOUNTAIN
MISSILE OPERATIONS OFFICER AIG6843 SECRET FJO//001//02183Z 17 DEC 88
IMPERATIVE YOU CONTACT THIS HQ ASAP. REPEAT. IMPERATIVE YOU CONTACT THIS
HQ ASAP.

The machine spurted again. It was the same message.

"They must really be going crazy in the Pentagon about now," the general
said with something like a chuckle. "Lord, I wish I could see their
faces."

Alex nodded, and hustled out.

The general had two things to do now.

First, he went to the shortwave radio transmitter nestled between two of
the teletypes. It was the Collins 32S-3 model, an older machine that had
been installed in the capsule purely as an emergency backup method of
communication.

He flicked it on, bent to the band selector, and turned it to the 21.2
megahertz setting, then dialed in a more specific frequency on the
tuner. That done, he simply twisted the emission dial to the CW setting
and held it for five seconds exactly, sending out a burst of raw noise
across the airwaves on his frequency. Then he turned it off.

All right, he thought, very-good, according to plan. And now. . .

He pulled one of the chairs from the console over to the operative
teletype. He pushed the red send button. Immediately, it stopped
clattering.

He bent to the keys.

In one swift burst he typed out his message. He had no need to pause to
think. He knew the words by memory, and it was in the spirit of memory
that he delivered them.

Speak, Memory, he thought, as he hit the send button, and the lessons of
the past reached out to twist the present into the future.

0900.

"Imbecile," yelled the excited Klimov. "Fool. Idiot. Do you know how
much we spend on you? I mean, can you guess?"

Gregor Arbatov said, "No, comrade."

It was useless to resist. Klimov was making an example of him before all
the others. To defy Klimov in public circumstances such as these was to
risk more than disaster, it was to risk humiliation. Christ in heaven,
it was to risk recall to Russia! Klimov was ruthless. Klimov was
tyrannical. Klimov was perhaps psychotic. But worst of all, Klimov was
young.

"Well, let me tell you, comrade. I was up half the night going over
budgets while you were rooting around under the sheets with your fat
friend. It costs us over thirty thousand dollars a year to support you.
We pay for the apartment, we give you a food and clothing allowance, we
lease your automobile.

And how do you repay us, to say nothing of fulfilling your duties? With
drivel! With nonsense! With hearsay, gossip, and rumor! Some agent
runner you've become in your old age, Arbatov. I remember once you were
a hero. And now this. What the senator really thinks of SALT II. Where
the senator stands on Peacekeeper. What the committee will do when next
the Director of Central Intelligence requests a fund increase. I can
read all this in The New York Times, where it's much better written.
Thirty thousand buys a lot of subscriptions to The New York Times,
Comrade Arbatov."

Arbatov mewled an explanation, head down, contrite, his eyes riveted on
his bleak black shoes.

"In some cases. Comrade Klimov, it takes time before a source can be
cajoled into producing high-grade product. It takes much patience and
manipulation. I am working diligently to--"

But as he spoke, he sneaked a peek at his tormentor and saw the interest
drain from Klimov's eyes. Klimov was not much on listening. Klimov was a
great talker, a lecturer, a young man extraordinarily fascinated with
his own life and career; his interest in the human race seemed to stop
at the tip of his own nose.

Klimov had ugly eyes, a short temper, and a quick mind.

He was what everyone in Washington feared and hated, regardless of
political inclination or global loyalty. He was very young, very bright,
and very connected.

It was this last that so filled Arbatov with terror. Klimov was the son
of the sister of the great Arkady Pashin, GRU's Chief of Fifth
Directorate (Operational Intelligence), the man next in line to be first
deputy. And this rotten little Klimov was his nephew!

With Uncle Arkady's kind intercession, young Klimov had shot through the
ranks. To be a deputy resident at twenty-eight, .unheard of in the old
days! Poor Arbatov would never make resident rank. He had no relatives,
no supporters in high places.

"Do you think," said Klimov, "that when Comrade Pashin assumes full
operational responsibilities for the organization he will tolerate such
foolishness?"

Of course poor Arbatov had no idea what Pashin would or would not
tolerate. How could he?

"Do you think because you service a special asset you are invulnerable
to criticism and beyond self-improvement?"

Klimov must be feeling especially bold today to even mention the agent
Pork Chop, on whom, as much as anything, Arbatov had staked his chances
of survival. Was even Pork Chop to be taken from him?

"I--I--" he began to blubber.

"Your special source can easily be serviced by another," roared Klimov.
"You are merely a technician. You can be replaced as simply as one
changes a light bulb, comrade."

Arbatov saw that he was lost. There was but one course left open to him.

"But, comrade," whined Arbatov, "it's true I've become sloppy in my
ways. Perhaps I take too much for granted. I've let the Amerikanskis
penetrate my inner being. I have allowed myself the vanity of pride in
the way I service my primary asset. Let me confess my crimes. I ask the
comrade only for a chance to repair the harm I've done. Perhaps he'll
give me enough time to'prove that I'm "not utterly beyond reform. If I
fail, I'd gladly return to our motherland, or to any less comfortable
post it prefers for me."

Lick his boots, he told himself. Lick them. He'll like that.

"Ah!" Young Klimov made a snort of disgust. "These aren't the old days.
No bullets in the neck for such as Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov! We require
only that he rededicate himself, as he says he shall."

"I shall," squeaked Arbatov as radiant relief beamed from his face. Then
he looked down in expiation, aware that in sniveling he had once again
survived. The young officers of the embassy apparat, which Klimov ran,
looked at him with unconcealed contempt; he could feel their eyes harsh
against his fat form. He didn't care. He could have wept for joy. He had
more time, The meeting turned from Arbatov's weaknesses to other
concerns. Arbatov appeared to be listening intently, a new man. He even
took notes eagerly, quite a change from the insolent, lazy old Arbatov.
What he was writing down in his little notebook was. This little fucker
should burn from the toes up. Over and over.

As he was walking from the meeting, someone came flying after him.

"Tata! Tata, stop!"

He turned to see the stout form of his one true friend, Magda
Goshgarian, bearing down upon him.

"Tata, darling, don't you think you laid it on a bit thick?"

Magda was another of the old ones. She had an uncle who was a general of
artillery and was thus safe from Klimov's predations, at least for now.
She was a rumpled, plain woman who wore too much makeup, drank too much,
and danced too much in the Western idiom for her own good. She even went
to discos in Georgetown when she thought she wasn't being watched. She
was perhaps his only remaining friend, now that Klimov had exiled Daniel
Issovich to Krakow and old Pasha Vlietnakov to Ethiopia.

"Darling, you have no idea how abject I can be in the service of
survival," said Gregor. "These young bastards were disgusted? They
haven't seen anything yet. I won't stop at licking his boots. I'll eat
them too. I'll butter them and eat them if it buys me one more day in
the West."

"You are a sorry Communist, Tata."

"No, I'm an excellent Communist. I'm merely a sorry spy."

"Any new fat American girls, Tata?"

Tata was her pet name for him. As he had told Molly Shroyer, it was
derived from the hero of the fourteenth century folk tale. Prince
Tatashkin of the noble heart. Prince Tatashkin, lean and golden, had
gone into the Caves of the Urals, there to fight the Witch of Night
Forever, or so the story went. He was still fighting her all these years
later, losing in the early hours of evening but regaining his strength
in the morning. As long as he fought her each night, there'd be a
morning. It was a wonderful story, never failing to bring tears to
Gregor's eyes, though he was aware that he was Tata to Magda only in the
ironic sense.

"Yes," Gregor said with a sigh. "I've a nice one going now, though she
talks like a baby sometimes. But say, what are you doing here? Didn't
you have Coding Station last night? Why aren't you home in bed?"

"I was in the Wine Cellar, yes, Tata. But the meeting was so early, I
thought I could score a few points with young Klimov by hanging around.
There's a new bitch in the apparatus who may have her eye on my
apartment."

"The blond one? I'd like to set her on fire. I hate the young ones.
Especially the beautiful young ones."

"I hate them too. Gorbachev's dreadful children. Little rats,
squandering all our labors. But, Tata, you must promise to be careful.
Who will fight the Witch of Night Forever if they send you back? Worse,
who will I talk to if they send you back? The walls?"

But Gregor wasn't listening; he was thinking only of himself.

"Do you know, Magda, I had my dream about you last night. I heard you
say my name, and it jolted me awake."

"A dirty one, Tata? Filthy with Western perversions, I hope."

"No, I've told you. A nightmare. Scary. Caves, the like.

Quite awful. As if I really were that damn prince. I remember fingers on
my throat, someone's hot breath. Troubling.

The Witch of Night Forever."

She laughed.

"Gregor, you fool. It's a fairy tale. Look around you, at your dreary
reality and the little snail Klimov hungrily sniffing after you. Is that
the stuff of fairy tales?"

"No," confessed Gregor. "You're right. The age of fairy tales is gone
forever. I believe only in love. Do you love me still?"

"I'll always love you, Tata, love you most of all. You know that."

"Thank God," said Gregor, "that someone does."

It was called the situation room, on the B level, the second
sub-basement level beneath the White House. It wasn't much
architecturally: a conference room, roughly fifteen by twenty feet,
painted a grim institutional green, in which there was one large
conference table and several comfortable chairs. It could have been
located in any ambitious motel chain in America. There weren't even any
maps.

The President of the United States sat in a sweat suit with his eyes
narrowed in extraordinary concentration as a lieutenant colonel in the
Air Force read aloud from a document he held before him.

" 'No man sent us here," the lieutenant colonel read, 'it was by our own
prompting and that of our maker, or that of the devil, whichever you
ascribe it to. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason and the
only thing that has prompted me to come here. I wish to say furthermore
that you had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question
that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.
The sooner you are prepared, the better.

"All right, when did this come over?" the President demanded. He looked
around the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was there, as were the
Chiefs of Staff of the Services, impressive men in their well-tended
uniforms ablaze with decorations. Each was served by an aide of no less
than field grade rank who sat behind him, against the wall. The
Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense had arrived, as had the
Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency filling in for the
Director, who was in Phoenix this morning for a speech; the Director of
the FBI was there, too. Finally, the National Security Adviser. Yet
among the fifteen or so of them, there was not the slightest tick of
sound beyond the rise and fall of breaths and the occasional rattle of
paper.

"Sir," the lieutenant colonel responded, "we received that over the
National Command teletype link from the South Mountain installation at
0823. It followed by three minutes and fourteen seconds a clear-channel
robot signal from the launch command center that the key vault had been
deployed."

"And that means one of our silo officers deposited the key in the key
vault. The significance, Mr. President, is that our officers are
instructed to utilize the key vault only in the last stages of a seizure
operation," said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

"Then let me get this straight. Whoever sent this message--he's in the
silo?"

"Yes, sir."

The President looked again at the peculiar message.

Then, to nobody in particular, he said, "A madman is in a missile silo.
That's the situation?"

There was silence from the military men and civilian security officials
who shared the room with him.

"It's signed 'Commanding Officer, Provisional Army of the United
States," said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

"I assume you have staff psychiatrists at CIA examining it?" the
President said.

"Yes, sir," came the response.

The President shook his head. Then he turned and said! "Would someone
please be so kind as to explain how the hell someone could take over a
missile silo. Especially this missile silo."

His rage turned his skin the color of an old penny and his eyes into
even older dimes. Yet the anger did not dent the laconic voice of the
officer who responded.

"Sir, as you know, the primary defense of a silo is its Doppler
low-level radar, which marks the approach of any moving object. However,
in the last year or so, it's been technically feasible to defeat radar
with some kind of stealth, that is, radar-absorbing material, as some of
our new bombers now have. In other words, it's at least-possible that
men approaching on the ground, very carefully, could have shielded
themselves under some kind of stealth material and gotten through the
radar, close enough to rush the installation in force. That's our
reading."

"So how do they get down below? Don't the officers--"

"Sir, since South Mountain is independent launch capable, its elevator
access is keyed into the PAL mechanism.

This enables us to get down, say, in the event of an emergency, by using
the SAC daily PAL code. If, say, by some freak of nature, both men in
the LCC should come down with disabling stomach problems or heart
attacks. But the men in the capsule don't know this. At least they're
not supposed to."

"But whoever assaulted this installation did know this?"

"Evidently, sir."

"It's frighteningly clear that this man knew an awful lot.

And there's nothing else? No offers to negotiate, no hostages, no
demands for television coverage or cash? Nothing conventional for a
terrorist event?"

"No, sir. We don't even have a reading yet on their unit size. The only
thing we have is an awareness of their impressive level of technical
sophistication as manifested by the seizure, indicating great resources
and resolve, and that document, sent by teletype. Then silence. No
answer to any of our messages."

The President looked again at the message from the mountain. He read the
lines aloud." 'You had better prepare yourselves for settlement of that
question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared
for it."

He paused a second, then looked up to them all.

"Well, let's face it. He's going to launch. Without demands, without
preparations, without anything. He's simply going to fire that missile
if and when he gets that key out.

What's our time frame?"

"Sir, the key vault is designed of high-grade titanium with some
strengthening alloys added. It's very, very hard to get into, designed
to delay any kind of implementation of the launch system for at least
eighteen hours. With the right kind of tools, they could get into that
block, say, by midnight."

"What kind of tools? Saws, drills? Would you be thinking of a
safecracker, something like that?"

"Well, sir, no, not a safecracker. You'd have to burn your way in with a
very powerful plasma-arc torch. It would take a skilled man, a man with
lots of experience."

"Where would they find such a man?"

"Well, sir, you can find them just about anywhere. He'd be a welder."

"Sir," someone said, "if they didn't find out about this until quite
late, there's a chance they might not know about the key vault and they
might not have a welder with them."

The President paused.

Then he said, "Oh, hell. They have a welder. You can bet on it."

** ** **

Jack Hummel shivered, blew a hiss of breath from his chilled lips.

"Pretty damn cold," he said to the fellow across from him.

"Cold here," the man said. "Pretty damn hot up there."

They sat in the back of Jack's van. He was sure he had been brought with
his equipment through town and then he had had the illusion of climbing
over bumpy roads. Soon it got very cold. Then the truck waited for a
time, and Jack had heard some kind of weird commotion up top. Fourth of
July stuff, cracks and pops and snaps. Occasionally, an extra-loud noise
would reach him, thumping on his eardrums. He guessed they were to be
parked halfway up South Mountain.

These guys were taking over the phone company? The man had some kind of
strange gun. It looked big enough to start World War III. It was black
and complicated.

Jack couldn't tear his eyes off of it. He'd never seen anything like it.

"Say, pal, what kind of gun is that?"

The man smiled. His teeth were so blindingly white.

"It's the kind of gun shoot you dead if you don't shut up."

Jack smiled dryly. Some joke.

A few minutes later they drove on. Jack had the sense of gravel under
the tires. Then again they sat and waited.

Jack was squirmy, curious. He was also bored. Jack's problem with life
was that once upon a time he had been quite a good athlete. He had been
quarterback of the Burkittsville Demons and, senior year, taken the
squad to a 2 record; then he'd been a rangy, good-shooting forward for
the cagers, averaging thirteen points a game; and finally, he'd hit.321
as a good-fielding third baseman. Yet his senior year had more or less
been the climax of his life; it had been one long skid ever since. He
was one of those guys good enough to be a star in high school but not
quite good enough to perform at the next level, and when Maryland moved
him from QB--his arm wasn't quite college material--to defensive
halfback his sophomore year, he quit the team and the university.

Now he found himself at thirty-two married to a girl he'd been pinned to
when he quit school. He had two great kids and a profession which, if it
offered steady income and a reasonable standard of living, offered very
little in the glory department.

Jack was used to making some kind of difference. He wasn't at all
pleased at becoming one of life's little guys, workingmen of obscure
skill who keep the country going without attracting much notice.

So there was a little bit of him--beyond, of course, his horror and his
fear for his children--that was somehow slightly tickled by all this.
Whoever these guys were, they had studied him, he realized. They knew
his house and how to get in it, and when he'd be in the shower, and how
best to make him compliant.

His athlete's vanity was pricked: he counted again. He was important.

The door opened.

"Time to go, Mr. Hummel," said the major.

"Sir, there's another development you should be aware of. South
Mountain may be only a part of the problem."

"Jesus Christ," said the President. He began to crunch his molars
together.

"Sir, we monitored a five-second LF radio transmission at 0819 from
within the installation. It was a burst of raw noise sent out on a
frequency of 28.92 megahertz, receivable by anyone pretuned to that
frequency within a radius of, say, two hundred miles. We read it as a
signal from whoever is in there. That means there may be another part to
their operation."

The President shook his head.

Then he said, "I assume that you'll take every precaution, General. And
I assume we've got our security agencies operating at maximum effort to
try to figure out who they are?"

"Mr. President," said the Director of the FBI, "upon receiving the red
flash from Defense, I instigated a crack task force investigation; right
now I've got men working at Defense and in coordination with--"

"All right, all right," said the President.

Then, leaning forward, he said, "General, I order you to target a
short-range missile with a low-yield, maximally clean nuclear warhead
aboard for that mountaintop. If it becomes apparent that whoever is in
that base is about to launch a preemptory mission against the Soviet
Union, then I want you to take the base out. Meanwhile, I want the
proper civil defense authorities to begin an evacuation of the area. I'm
prepared to accept some casualties, but if we move swiftly, we may be
able to limit them. In the meantime, I want--"

"Sir," the Air Force general said, "I wish it were possible."

** ** **

Jack stepped out of the van into bright, cold light. An odd tang hung in
the air; he sniffed hard. Familiar, but still difficult to place. Then
he realized it was gunpowder.

Jack saw that he was inside the perimeter of the phone company's
microwave transmission station for long distance calls.

It looked as though a battle had just been fought up here. All about
him, fit-looking young men in snow smocks bustled about with automatic
weapons and crates of equipment.

Some were digging, some were unspooling barbed wire, some were working
on weapons. And there was something else that Jack noticed instantly: a
sense of wild excitement.

Whatever the hell these kids were up to was going well; they were proud.
It was the locker room at halftime, they were up twenty-one-zip.

"This way, please, Mr. Hummel. You three, bring Hummel's equipment.
Corporal, park his van out of sight and cover it with the tarpaulin."

"What's going on?" Jack asked.

"No questions, Mr. Hummel. Time is of the essence.

Come, please."

Then Jack noticed a weird thing. Over to one side of the place there was
a bunch of young soldiers spreading large sheets of canvas all over the
place. Still others were digging pest holes in the ground about every
twenty-five feet or so, and there seemed to be a lot of rope around. It
looked as though the circus was coming to town; they were putting up the
big top or something and--and then he noticed the bodies.

There were a dozen or maybe more, he couldn't be sure, in the rag-doll
postures of the fallen, inert as stones. He could not tear his eyes away
for a second, and yet did not want to be caught staring. And then he
noticed the buildings in the compound; one had been knocked down by
explosives, and others were tattered by gunfire.

"Who are you guys?"

"This way, please."

They led him to a small building, badly shot up. Inside he was surprised
to find what appeared to be a sophisticated elevator door with its name
stenciled on it. shaft access- restricted ENTRY-- SECURITY-CLEARED
PERSONNEL ONLY.

"This way," said the major.

The door opened with a dull pneumatic sound, and he stepped in with the
major and the men carrying and pushing his equipment. He felt the
elevator begin to sink through the earth.

** ** **

The Air Force Chief of Staff paused, thinking about the man in the
mountain, whoever he was. The fucker! he thought.

Whoever he was, he knew just where we were weakest.

Though the general was in his private life a flamboyant man, a warrior
king of the old style, in this room he kept his voice steady,
professorial, reedy, thin.

"At the installation in question, the Peacekeeper is in a mountain. It's
what we call deep under-mountain basing mode, conceived by Peter
Thiokol's MX-Basing Modes Group out at Hopkins Applied Physics under a
grant from the Air Force Research and Development Division. The thing is
one hundred feet down, surrounded by hard rock. The missile is suspended
by a special shock isolation system that will provide protection from
nuclear attack and induced ground shock.

It's the hardest missile silo in the world, and it would take an
enormously powerful bomb--a bomb so powerful we don't have it in
inventory--to destroy the silo inside that mountain.

We haven't built bombs that big in some time, not since we had B-36s to
deliver them back in the fifties. Today, our missiles are so accurate we
can get by with small bombs, and we can mount ten warheads on a single
missile. But we couldn't de-mothball a bomb that big and get it
delivered for seventy-two hours at the minimum. That's the brutal truth,
Mr. President."

The President said, "What are the odds on a missile intercept if they
get a launch?"

"I'm afraid the news is bad there too, Mr. President," said the Air
Force general. "If you recall, after SALT One we decided against
developing an antiballistic force because we felt it would involve
billions for something that was technically unfeasible. We simply don't
have a bird capable of tracking a Peacekeeper in the boost phase and
destroying it.

Maybe if and when SDI becomes operational--"

"General, what is the mega tonnage in the silo?"

"Sir, you have one missile with ten Mark 21 reentry vehicles, the very
latest. Each warhead is the W87 in the 3.5 kiloton range with extreme
hard target-busting capabilities.

The total package is in the thirty-five-kiloton range."

"Targeting?"

"All for the Soviet Union, sir. The headquarters of the PVO Strany, the
Soviet defense command about thirty miles outside Moscow; the main
long-range transmitters that talk to their subs at Petropavlovsk,
Vladivostok, Dikson Ostrov, Kaliningrad, Matochin Shar, and Arkhangelsk;
the ground control stations for Soviet satellites; their missile command
center at Yevpatoriya in the Crimea; assorted ICBM launch sites spread
throughout the central region; their early warning radars near Minsk and
Novogrod."

"Jesus, their command system. What's the probable Soviet response?"

"If the bird flies, they'll launch on warning, you can bet on it."

"Could we detonate the bombs in the silo?"

"No, sir."

"What about a command disable system?"

"Only from within the launch command capsule. The reality is that
there's no scenario for stopping the launch if they get the key."

"Why? With the Minutemen, it takes/our keys, two sets of two officers in
two separate launch control centers, and any of the three other launch
control centers can inhibit launch."

"Yes, sir. But we felt that made launch control centers vulnerable,
especially to the new SS-24s with their capacity to take out a hardened
silo. If you take out the command capsule, none of the remote silos
could launch. You could hit ten launch control centers and disable one
hundred missiles.

It was too tempting a target for the 24s. Therefore we built South
Mountain as an independent-launch-capable installation.

Even if Washington, SAC, Cheyenne Mountain, the airborne launch control
center, and the ERCS missile are out of the picture, our command and
control system totally fried, the boys in the silo could still launch.
It was Peter Thiokol's idea. The guy at Hopkins who also created up the
key vault."

"Yes, Thiokol," said the President. He'd had lunch with Peter once. An
impressive young man, very smart, though almost totally bloodless where
nuclear war was concerned.

But somehow immature in other ways. The disparity had scared him a
little. But then his mind moved quickly on.

"Then we'll have to use conventional bombs. Drench the place in napalm."

"No, sir," said the Air Force general. "The key to accessing this
installation is getting down the elevator shaft. And accessing that
elevator shaft is by means of a mainframe computer mounted directly
adjacent to it, a Hewlettpackard LC5400. The machine is sheathed in
titanium. We feel that it's pretty invulnerable to small-arms fire, but
any kind of heavy round--above a grenade, say--could damage the
circuits.

And if you damage the circuits, you lock the doors shut. Sir, you'd
never cut through those doors. Never. They weigh eleven tons. So you've
got to limit your applications of high explosive and napalm to the
immediate site area, or you'll seal things up and we'd never get down
there."

"Nerve gas," the President said. "Soak the mountain in nerve gas. Kill
them all. If we have some civilian casualties, then--"

"Mr. President, Peter Thiokol was a step ahead of you there. He reckoned
someone might try to nerve-gas his way in, so he had a filter system
built into the computer. One whiff of bad odor, and the computer locks
the mountain off.

Not to mention that if these troops are as professional as we suspect,
they'll be trained in chemical warfare. They'd just slap on their gas
masks."

Damn Peter Thiokol, the President thought.

He looked at his watch. So, this was it. Here we are.

And what do we do now?

"Sir, I think the solution is simple," came a new voice.

** ** **

"It takes a bit of time, Mr. Hummel. We descend a full hundred feet."

Jack felt the pull on his knees as the chamber plunged down and down.
Jack didn't like it. He had the sense of sinking forever beneath the
waves, a sense of submerging, somehow. You could get so far down you
never got out again.

You were buried.

At last the descent ended and the doors opened.

Beyond, Jack could see a corridor spilling away, lit by the odd bare
bulb. But he also saw the man waiting for him: a trim fellow in his late
fifties, well-cut white-blond hair, a slick, handsome face lit with
charm.

"Welcome, Mr. Hummel," said the man. "Welcome to our little crusade."

Jack just stared at him dumbly. He felt a little as if he were in the
presence of a TV anchorman, or a governor, or a talk show host.
Something about the guy made him swallow hard. Jack felt as if he ought
to ask for an autograph.

"This way now, Mr. Hummel. Come on, can't be slow. I know it's all new
to you, but we are depending on you."

This queerly pleased Jack's ego. A big guy like this depending on him.

"Well, whyn't ya just hire me and leave my wife and kids out of it?"

"Security, Mr. Hummel."

They walked down the corridor, at last came to what appeared to be some
kind of hatch door. Jack ducked his head to enter and still again he
thought of subs: two chairs cater-corner from each other, facing dozens
of switches. NO lone zone the walls said. Jesus, who'd want to be alone
in this creepy place? The only human-scaled thing he could see in the
small room was a crude, hand-lettered index card which read and
heeeere's mirv taped above an odd keyhole garlanded with an uptilted red
flap in the control panel. Jack noticed then that there were two
keyholes but that only one of them had keys in it.

"Say, what the hell is this?" he asked.

"It's a kind of computer facility," said the white-haired man. Jack
didn't buy this at all. Computers, yeah, computers, but something more,
too.

The man took him to a wall. There, before him, stood a broken window;
shards of glass lay on the floor. But behind the window was not a view
but simply a shinier grade of metal.

"Touch it, please, Mr. Hummel."

Jack's fingers flew to the metal.

"Do you recognize it?"

"It's not steel. It's not iron. It's some kind of alloy, something
super-hard." He plunked his finger against it; the metal was dull to the
touch. It didn't retain heat; it didn't scratch; it looked mute and
lifeless. And yet it felt to his touch oddly light, almost like a
plastic.

"Titanium," he guessed.

"Very good. You know your business. Actually, it's a titanium-carbon
alloy. Very tough, very hard. There's probably not another block of
metal like it in the world."

"So?

"So. This block of titanium has descended into a second block of
titanium. When it fell, thousands of pounds of rock above it locked it
into place. It cannot be lifted. We need a welder to cut into the center
of the titanium as fast as possible.

You are a welder."

"Jesus," said Jack. "Titanium's the toughest stuff there is. They build
missile nose cones out of it, for crissakes."

"The melting point of titanium is 3,263 degrees Fahrenheit.

Add the carbon, which has a melting temperature of over 6,500 degrees,
and you are dealing with a piece of material that has been designed to
be impenetrable. Can you penetrate it?"

"Shit," said Jack. "I can get into anything. I cut metal.

That's what I do. Yeah, I can cut it. I have a portable plasma-arc torch
that should get hot enough. Heat isn't the problem: You can make a
puddle out of anything. You can make a puddle of the whole world. The
problem is how much I'm going to have to melt away to get inside. It
takes time.

You cut in circles, narrower and narrower. You cut a cone into its
heart. You dig a tunnel, I guess. So what's at the end of the tunnel? A
light?"

"A little chamber. And in the chamber, a key. The key to all our
futures."

Jack looked at him, trying to connect the dots.

A feeling of intense strangeness came over him.

"You're going to all this trouble for a key? That must be one hell of a
key."

"It is one hell of a key, Mr. Hummel. Now let's get going."

Jack thought about keys. Car keys, house keys, trunk keys, lock keys.

Then, with a woozy rush, it hit him.

"A key, huh? I read a little. Mister. I know the key you need. It's the
key that'll shoot off a rocket and start a war."

The man looked at him.

"You're going to start World War Three?" Jack asked.

"No. I'm going to finish it. It started some time ago.

Now, Mr. Hummel. If you please: light your torch."

A boy rolled out the portable Linde Model 100 plasma-arc cutting control
unit. The coiled i-tubes and the torch itself were atop it. Another boy
wheeled in the cylinder of argon gas.

"I suppose if I--"

"Mr. Hummel, look at it this way. I'm willing to burn millions of
unnamed Russian babies in their cradles. I would have no compunctions
whatever about ordering that two American babies--called Bean and
Poo--join them. After the first million babies, it's easy, Mr. Hummel."

"The torch," Jack Hummel said, swallowing.

** ** **

The President looked into the eyes of the Army Chief of Staff, a
blunt-looking man who bore a remarkable resemblance to a.45 Colt
automatic pistol bullet. On his chest he wore enough decorations to stop
just such a round. "It couldn't be simpler," the general said. "It's
straight infantry work, bayonet work. We have to get our people into
that hole and kill everybody in it before they dig out that key. Say, by
midnight. Or else the bird flies."

"What's the recommendation?"

"Sir, Delta Force is already gearing up for deployment," said the army
general with a small, harsh smile. "Best small-unit men we've got. Our
computer tells us there's also a company of Maryland National Guard
infantry in training not two hours away from the site. That's two
hundred more men, although you'd have to federalize them. I'm sure the
Governor of Maryland would agree. We can truck out elements of the 1st
Battalion, Third Infantry, from Fort Meyer, a good infantry unit, your
ceremonial troops, hopefully by 1300 hours.

I've already put them on alert. Then, I can get you a Ranger battalion
air-dropped into the zone from its home base at Fort Eustis, Washington,
by mid-afternoon, weather permitting.

I can throw together a makeshift chopper assault company from Fort Dix
and I can get you air support from a Wart Hog unit of the Maryland Air
National Guard. With Delta, Third Infantry, and the Rangers, you'll have
the best professional soldiers this country has produced."

"And armor. General. Could we just blow them out?"

"There's only one road up, and the latest information is that they've
destroyed it."

There was silence in the room for a time.

"We're back to rifles and balls," said the Army Chief of Staff.

"Can you do it in time?" the President said to the army general.

"I don't know, Mr. President. We can solve the logistics of it. We can
get the men there in time, and we can send them up the mountain."

"It's going to be a long and bloody day," somebody said.

"But it's a very hard assault. First, you've got to get to the elevator
shaft, and you can only attack on a very narrow front because the
mountaintop is surrounded by cliffs. Once you get to the LCF and its
elevator," the general explained! "you've got to rappel down the shaft,
and fight your way to the LCC, where they're trying to launch the bird."

"Sir," said one of the President's advisers, "you'll have to declare a
phase four nuclear emergency, which empowers federal authorities to
literally take over a given district, and turns all civil authority over
to federal command. You're going to have to turn Frederick County into a
war zone. I think maybe you'd also better raise the defense condition to
a Defcon 4."

"No to that," said the President. "I don't want the Soviets thinking
we're ready to launch. Increase security at all our missile sites and
our satellite receiving stations."

"It's been done, sir," said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

"Okay, go to the phase four. Put out some kind of cover story about a
military exercise to keep the goddamn press out of it. Now it's the
Army's baby, with all due respect to the Air Force. I don't want a lot
of different services falling all over each other's toes. Set up the
roadblocks, seal off the area. Go to war if that's what it takes. But
get those people out of there, or kill them all."

"Yes, sir," said the general. "Now, as for the command--"

"For the commanding officer out there. General, I want the best combat
man you've got. And I don't care if he's a PFC in Louisiana."

"No, sir," said the general. "He's a full bird colonel, retired. But
he's one mean son of bitch."

** ** **

Jack Hummel pulled his goggles down over his eyes and the world
darkened. He held the cutting torch in one hand, and reached back to the
control panel to switch the device on. The current flowed and the
electrode in the tip began to glow from red on through the hues of
orange. He watched it heat and grow within the nozzle, and then when it
became almost white, he released a slow, steady stream of nitrogen.

The gas ignited with a pop. In the crucible of the nozzle it became
ionized--that is, electrified. Jack turned the temperature dial on the
Linde control unit up to the top so the flame would reach the plasma
temperature range, almost fifty thousand degrees.

The flame was a white killer's tongue, as hot as the center of any
nuclear blast, but controlled there at the end of his torch. The men
around him, reacting to the power of flame, drew back instinctively. He
increased the pressure so that the flame was almost a needle that darted
out two inches beyond the nozzle.

"I'm going to cut up into it," he told the general. "That way, the
molten metal will run out via gravity."

The general looked at him.

"It's going to take a long time," said Jack. "Jeez, I don't know, maybe
ten or twelve hours."

The general bent over.

"You know what's at stake. Your own children," he said.

"Do you understand?"

Jack said nothing. Jack knew he could do it: if he could launch missiles
against the Russians, he could murder his own children.

But a part of Jack said. Your children will die anyway if this rocket is
launched.

Yeah, that's tonight. Today it's this fucking block I have to crack.
I'll face tonight when it comes. I got to get them through today first.

"Okay," said Jack.

He bent, holding the plasma-arc torch in one hand, and with his other
touched the smooth, burnished surface of the block of metal. Somewhere
inside was a key.

He touched the torch to the metal. He watched its bright needle attack
and liquify the metal; at fifty thousand degrees the ionized plasma-arc
gas first seemed to define a bubble on the surface of the block, and
then a dimple, and then an indentation, and finally, something very like
a little tunnel. Jack cut deeper; the molten metal ran from the kerf,
the gap gouged by the flame, and down its face like tears.

"The colonel." said the Army Chief of Staff, "did time in SAS in
Malaysia on an exchange officer program. He was Special Forces from the
start and had a brilliant Vietnam. He had seven years there, spent a lot
of time in places we never officially went. He was stuck in a siege
under heavy fire for thirty-eight days, and held out."

"Oh, God, Jim," said the Chief of Naval Operations.

"And, most important," said the general, "he invented Delta. He fought
the Army and the Pentagon to get a Delta Force created when nobody
cared. He trained Delta, he knows Delta, he lives and breathes Delta. He
is Delta."

"Except," said the Chief of Naval Operations, "Dick Puller led Delta
into Iran in 1979, in the operation we called Eagle Claw, and at Eagle
One he panicked. And he canceled the mission when he came up one chopper
short at the staging site."

"At Desert One," said the Army Chief of Staff, "he had to make the most
difficult decision any American soldier has had to make since six June
1944, when Eisen--"

"He failed. He lost his nerve. And retired in disgrace, Jim. Dick Puller
failed. He was a man who trained his whole life for a single moment, and
when it came, he failed."

"I say that when it was decision time, everybody backed away from him.
We all did. The president of the United States did. They hung a poor
colonel who'd bled himself empty for this country for the best part of
thirty years out to dry."

"He's a walking Greek tragedy," said the Naval Chief of Staff, "who blew
the one--"

"Mr. President, if you asked me to name one man who could get you up
that mountain and into that silo before midnight, I'd name Dick Puller.
Dick Puller is the bravest officer I ever served with, and the smartest.
He knows more about combat than any man alive. He's done his share of
the planning and his share of the killing. He's a great soldier.

He's the best."

"I never heard any man say Dick Puller was a coward," said the Air Force
Chief of Staff. "But I never heard any man deny that he was an
obstreperous, willful, self-indulgent, sometime psychot--"

"Jim, this isn't just an old protege you're trying to help out?" asked
the Chief of Naval Ops.

"All right," said the President. "Goddamnit, enough is enough."

He turned to the Army Chief of Staff.

"Then get me this Puller," he said finally. "Call him. I don't care what
it takes, tell him to do it. To get it done."

"If it can be done," said the Army Chief, "Dick Puller will do it."

1100.

From a cold start. Delta Force would arrive on site not in three hours,
as the Chief of Staff had promised, but in two and a half. It took a
miracle of logistical planning, most of it thrown together while the
unit--the one hundred twenty men of Special Forces Operational
Detachment/Delta--was in the air, being hauled up from Fort Bragg by two
C-130s of the first Special Operations Wing of the 23d Air Force. The
initial plan was to have them HALO onto the site--to parachute from a
high altitude, then open at a low one--in case Aggressor Force, as the
occupiers of the complex were now called, had mounted a watch for the
approach of airborne troops. But Dick Puller's first decision, made
eleven minutes after his arrival, was no.

He stood in the ramshackle office of the Misty Mount Girl Scout Camp,
about a half mile from the mountain, across a flat, snowy meadow that
lay at the mountain's foot.

"I don't want'em spread out all over the god damned landscape," he
snapped, his face set in a glare, "with broken legs and dirty weapons
and love affairs with farmer's daughters.

We don't need it. I won't begin my assault until I get my tac air, and
that's a good four hours. Land'em in Hagerstown under battle conditions.
I want airfield perimeter security from the state police, I want advance
parties on the convoy into us as well as route security, and I want
perimeter security set up ASAP upon arrival. Those guys on the mountain
sent out a radio transmission; maybe there's a column of unfriendlies
waiting to bounce Delta on the way in. I want the men locked and loaded
from minute one. I don't want any screwing around. Get'em in here fast,
and tell'em to get working on their assault plan as soon as they get
here. First briefing is at 1200 hours and I'll expect complete terrain
familiarity."

Puller turned from the young man who took this order, a mild-looking
twenty-eight-year-old FBI agent of no special ability named James Uckley
who had been appointed Dick's No. 1 guy because he was the first to show
up, having been ordered onto the site by a special Bureau Hash from his
Hagerstown office, where he'd been investigating a bank embezzlement.
Dick chose Uckley because he believed that enthusiasm was far more
important than intelligence, and Uckley seemed enthusiastic, if
bewildered. Moreover, Dick didn't want smart guys around him to argue
with him. Dick liked dumb people who did what they were told, and he
liked telling them what to do.

Uckley put this decision out on the emergency teletype which clattered
back to the Situation Room, where it was put on to the troops.

"They get those recon shots yet?" Puller demanded.

"Not yet," said Uckley, looking at the staggering amount of
communications equipment that had been set up with surprising speed
against one corner of the rickety old wall of the place. Several
technicians bent over the stuff, but for some reason Puller refused to
acknowledge them, preferring instead to deal with the world through
Uckley.

"I'll sing out if they come over," Uckley said uncomfortably.

In truth, he was a little afraid of Puller. In truth, everybody was a
little afraid of Puller. He wasn't even sure whether he should call him
sir, or colonel, or what.

Puller went back to his binoculars. Above him the mountain loomed, white
and pristine. The red aerial stood out like a candy cane. He could see
no movement.

There was one road up, through rough ground. Halfway up it just stopped,
where Aggressor Force had blown it.

Smart. No armor would come their way, at least not today.

He looked at his watch--1124. A little more than twelve hours to go. And
Delta still wasn't on the damned ground, this sorry-dick Maryland Guard
unit was trying to get its act together, 3rd Infantry was fucking around
somewhere on the road, and the only good news was that his Ranger
battalion was at least airborne for its cross-country flight and now had
an ETA of 1600 hours.

Twelve hours, he thought again. His expression was grim, but this was
nothing new: Dick Puller's expression was always grim. He was born grim.
Whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself, although the tension in his
face and the way it drew the color from his skin and pulled his muscles
taut and his mouth flat suggested something.

At last he asked, "Any word on those locals yet?"

"State police still knocking on doors," Uckley said.

Puller's first move was to send state policemen into the town of
Burkittsville on a fast canvass of old-timers. Who knew that mountain?
What was there? How did you get up it? What was inside it? Dick didn't
trust maps. It was an old 'Nam habit, where a bad map had once almost
killed him. It was one of the few mistakes he'd made in his career.

Richard W. Puller was a stern, rangy man of fifty-eight with a
gunmetal-gray crew cut that revealed a patch of scalp up top. He had
remarkably forceful dark eyes and a way of moving and walking that
suggested if you weren't part of the solution, you were part of the
problem. Someone--not an admirer--once said of Dick Puller, "You'd have
to put a full magazine into the bastard to stop him from coming at you,
and then his shadow would cut your throat." He was not a well-liked man
and he did not like many people: a wife, his two daughters, a soldier or
two along the way, mainly the tough old master sergeant types that got
the killing done in the hairy moments and a few guys in elite units the
world over, such as SAS, where he'd done a tour of exchange-officer
duty.

He also had a talent for the truth. He would tell it, regardless, a gift
that did him little political good in the Army, where you had to go
along to get along. He was hated by all manner of people for all manner
of rudenesses, but particularly for his willingness to look anybody
straight in the eye and tell them they were full of shit. He was, in
short, exactly the sort of man made for war, not peace, and when a war
came, he had a great one.

He was in-country from 1963 to 1970; he did two tours with the 101st
Airborne but spent most of his time leading A-team detachments way out
off the maps, interdicting North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia or
training indigenous troops--Nungs and Montagnards--to fight against the
hated North Vietnamese. He got stuck in a long siege in a big A-camp up
near the DMZ and with a twenty-four-man team and three hundred indigs he
held off a North Vietnamese division for thirty-eight days. When an
airborne unit finally fought its way through to relieve them, he had
seven Americans and one hundred ten Nungs left alive.

He also worked for MACV's Special Observation Group, the mysterious,
still-classified intelligence unit that sent ops all over 'Nam, some
said even up north. Puller then had a long and flashy career running a
Mike Force battalion, a quick reaction team that helicoptered to the
relief of A-team detachments in the soup and proceeded to do maximum
damage in minimum time. He was an exceedingly aggressive officer, but
not a sloppy one. He'd been hit three times, once with a big-ass
Chinese.51, the shock of which would have killed most men. It didn't
matter. If you were professional, you got hit, that was all.

But he came back from the war with a special vision, a Mike Force for
the world. His idea was that the United States should have at its
disposal a group of swift, deadly raiders. He had a dream of a commando
group, superbly trained, fast-striking, brilliantly equipped, that could
react swiftly to any major incident.

And he had gotten it, too, though as he fought for his project through
the tortuous labyrinth of army politics, his personality had assumed the
unlovely contours of a zealot.

Somewhere in the Pentagon's D-ring he lost the capacity to laugh;
somewhere at some meeting or other he lost his perspective.

He won, and Delta Force was the prize: Delta Force, which he had defined
and trained and led: which he had, in the final analysis, fathered. And
which he had, in the popular view, failed.

A bell rang.

"Sir, the recon photos are coming in," Uckley shouted as the photos
began to roll off the computer transmission platen.

Puller nodded grimly, not really seeing Uckley until the boy handed them
over.

Dick looked at the pictures. They were in color, but they were like no
pictures Uckley had ever seen. It seemed to be some kind of white-gray
blur; in the murk there were little red flashes.

Dick was counting.

"Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty..."

Then he went silent.

"Sixty. Sixty of the fucks above ground. These are men, son. Aggressor
Force as seen from outer space, a million miles up, portraits courtesy
of an I-tech infrared floating up there in the sky somewhere. Now, why
is that number significant, Uckley?"

Uckley swallowed. He'd never been in the military. He made a guess.

"It's the size of an infantry platoon?"

"No," said Puller. "You just guessed, right?"

"Yes, sir," said Uckley.

"Good. If you ever guess again around me, I'll end your career. You'll
be history. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"If you don't know, that's fine. But things go freaky when junior
officers try to guess their way through. Is that understood?"

Uckley gulped. The older man's stare was like a truck pressing on his
sternum.

"Yes, sir," he said.

Instantly, the transgression was forgotten.

"An infantry platoon is thirty-two, a company about one twenty-eight.
No, the significance of the number is twofold.

First, it's so large that it's clearly a holding operation. It's not an
in-out job; these guys mean to stay up there until we find the guts to
push them off that hill. And secondly, it's so large that it means these
people couldn't come in private cars.

We'd see a caravan. So there's got to be a staging area around here,
maybe a rented farm. Find the farm and maybe you find out who they are."

"Yes, sir."

"Get on that thing, and have the Sit Room send out your pals in the
Hoover building to go through the rentals in this area over the last
year or so. The state cops could help on that too."

"Yes, sir," said Uckley.

As the young man hurried over to the communications room. Puller studied
the picture. Yes, he was good. Whoever was running Aggressor Force had
been on a few special ops in his own time.

He had at least half of his men on the perimeter and the other half on
some kind of work detail up near the launch control facility. Reading
the signature of the men and the operation. Puller swiftly concluded
that he was up against a well-trained elite unit. Israelis? The Israeli
airborne were the best special ops people in the world. South Africans?
There were some ass kickers in that fucked-up country, too, you could
bet on it. What about Brit SAS? With a regiment of SAS boys, Dick often
said to American generals, I could take over any country in the free
world, with the exception of the State of California, which I wouldn't
want.

Or maybe they were our own guys.

That thought had gone unspoken so far, and even now no one really wanted
to face it. But the truth was, Americans could easily be doing this.
Maybe some hotshot in Special Forces got tired of waiting for the
balloon to go up. He thought he'd help it, rid the world of commies, and
to hell with the two hundred million babies that got burned in the
process. "Provisional Army of the United States!"

Dick looked at the picture again.

Who are you, you bastard? When I know who you are, I'll know how to beat
you.

"Sir!"

It was Uckley.

"Sir, Delta's on the ground at Hagerstown. They're on their way."

Puller looked at his watch. Three and a half hours had elapsed since the
seizure. Skazy had Delta on the ground now, and moving to the staging
area. The choppers for the air assault would be in inside the hour. The
A-10 crews were getting their ships gunned up at Martin Airport outside
of Baltimore, that was one hangup. Some kind of new weapons pod had to
be mounted, 20mm instead of their usual 30mil cannons, because the big
30s with their depleted uranium shells had too much kinetic energy for
the computer in the LCF at the top of the elevator shaft; they'd cut
through it and seal the silo off forever. Puller hated what he couldn't
control, and he couldn't control this. But there wouldn't be a party
until he had his Tac Air, because you don't send boys in without Tac
Air.

They could go soon now.

But Dick didn't want to move until he knew more.

Patience, he thought, patience was the answer. Already Washington was on
the horn wanting results. That was shaping up as the hardest battle. But
he would wait. There had to be another angle, and he would find it.

He lit a cigarette, one of his beloved Marlboros, felt it cut deep into
his lungs. He coughed.

"Sir," it was one of the Commo specialists, overexcited as usual. "Sir,
look."

Someone else came running into the room, too, a state policeman, and
then one of the army Commo teams.

"Look, Colonel Puller. Jesus, look."

Puller raised his glasses to his eyes and saw that a dark blur had
suddenly obscured the mountaintop.

"What is it?" someone yelled. Other men were fumbling with binoculars.

Puller concentrated on the dark stain that now lay draped over the
mountain. He gauged it to be about five hundred square feet, undulating
slightly, black and blank.

It made no sense at all.

And then he had it.

"It's a god damned tarpaulin," he said. 'They're covering up. They don't
want us to see what they're doing up there."

God damn them, he thought.

In the uproar he almost missed Uckley telling him softly that someone
had tracked down the man who'd created South Mountain, a guy named Peter
Thiokol.

** ** **

Poo Hummel was at an age where she liked everybody, even men in her
bedroom with guns. She liked Herman. And Herman seemed to like her right
back. Herman was big and blond and all dressed in black, from his boots
to his shirt. His gun was black too. Despite his size, he had gentle
eyes--and the bumbling mannerisms of a well-trained circus bear. Not an
atom of his body radiated anything except an awesome desire to please.
He loved her pink room and especially her toys, which were displayed on
shelving her daddy had built.

One by one, he took her animals down and studied them with massive
concentration. He liked Care Bear and Pound Puppy and all her Pretty
Ponies (she had almost a dozen). He liked Rainbow Brite and Rub-A-Dub
Doggy and Peanut Butter too. He liked them all.

"This one is very pretty," he said. It was her favorite, too, a unicorn
with a bright pink polyester mane.

Poo was no longer upset that her mother would not stop crying down in
the kitchen and that Bean was so quiet. For Poo, it was a great big
adventure to have new friends, especially like Herman.

"Will you ever go away?" she asked, squinching up her nose and making a
face.

"Sure," he said. "Soon. I gotta go. I gotta job."

"You're a nice man," she said. "I like you."

"I like you, too, nice little girl," he said, smiling.

She liked his teeth especially. He had the whitest, friendliest smile
she'd ever seen.

"I want to go out," she said.

"Oh, no. Poo," he said. "Just for a little while longer you have to be
inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you
can go out and play and it will be all fun. You'll have a good time,
you'll see. It'll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you
a present. I'll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A
pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?"

"Can I have a drink of water?" Poo asked.

"Of course," he said. "Then I'll tell you a story."

** ** **

Peter Thiokol was rambling.

He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses,
imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way
altogether and surrendered to incoherence.

"Urn, so, um, it's the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a
surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of
course we all hope it won't, anyway, urn..."

The note card before him was no help.

It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl! "Decapitation
theory--explain."

Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the
lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature
section of The Sun.

It wasn't a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of
Shatter Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three
times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom
wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?

Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.

But it is interesting, Peter had said.

He struggled to find his focus, a problem he'd been having ever since
the problems with Megan.

"Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it's the
idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like
in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the--"

"Uh, Dr. Thiokol?"

Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol loved it when someone in his class asked a
question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or
two. But there were hardly ever any questions.

"Yes?" he said eagerly. He couldn't see who had spoken.

"Uh," an attractive girl asked, "are we going to get our midterms back
before we have the final?"

Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared
with incomprehensible chicken tracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table
next to his bed. He'd read a few, then lost interest. They were so
boring.

"Well, I'm almost done with them," he lied. "And yes, you will get them
back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we'll
have to cancel the final."

There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to
relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this,
because he loved to show off so for Megan.

"You show off very well, I must admit," Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had
once said. "It's your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to
end the world."

The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown--a new
start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city,
new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to
be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their
faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing
took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired
to think or remember.

He'd just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call
Megan or not, and praying that she'd call him.

The memory was still brittle. He'd even seen her two weeks ago, in a
wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation.

She'd simply showed up after months of staying out of touch. For a night
it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in
the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the
various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb,
his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.

"Anyway," he said, still scattered, "um, on decapitation stuff,
um--look, let's be frank here." He had this sudden weary urge to cut
through to the truth.

"Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to
save a few million or billion people. The idea is that Soviet society is
so centralized and authority crazed that if you kill the top few, you
wreck them. So you build a missile that's really an intercontinental
sniper rifle.

You become the guy in Day of the Jackal. The only problem is, they can
do it to us, too."

They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.

He sighed again.

And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude.
Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master's in nuclear engineering from
M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the
Defense Department, prime denizen of the inside-the-beltway Strategic
Community, author of the famous essay in Foreign Affairs, "And Why Not
Missile Superiority?: Rethinking MAD," was drowning.

Peter was a tall, reedy looking man of forty-one who looked thirty-five;
he had thinning blond hair that exposed a good stretch of forehead,
which made him look intelligent.

He was also rather handsome in an academic sort of way, but he had a
disorganized quality to him, an alarming vagueness that put many people
off. Outside his area of expertise, he cheerfully admitted, he was a
complete moron.

In a no doubt desperate attempt to camouflage his discomfort, he was
dressed as he imagined a professor should dress, that is, as he had
remembered them dressing from twenty years before: He wore a tweed
jacket so dense it looked like a map of a heather Milky Way, and a
Brooks Brothers blue oxford-cloth shirt, that deeper, stormier blue that
only Brooks offers, with a striped rep tie, a pair of pleated khakis
from Britches of Georgetown, and a pair of beat-up, nearly blackened
Bass Weejuns.

The student tried again.

"Uh, Dr. Thiokol? Could you at least tell us if it'll be an essay exam
or a multiple choice? I mean, the test is next week."

The girl looked a little like Megan. She was dark and beautiful and very
slender and intense. He stared at her neurotically, then struggled with
the question. Reading more of their essays would just about kill him.
But he knew he didn't have the energy to go back through his chaotic
notes to develop some kind of objective thing. He'd probably just give
them all B's, and go back to staring at the phone.

"Well, why don't we take a vote on it?" he finally said.

But he was suddenly drowned out in the hammering of a huge roar. The
class turned from their lecturer to the window, and watched in amazement
as a scene from a fifties monster movie began to unreel. A large insect
appeared to be attacking the parking lot. As it got closer, the bug
became an Army UH-1B Huey helicopter, a great olive drab creature with a
huge Plexiglas eye, a bloated thorax, and an almost delicate tail, and
as it floated down out of the sky, adroitly sliding through a gap in the
trees, its howl caused all the fixtures in the lecture hall to vibrate.
Preposterously, it landed in the parking lot, whirling up a windstorm of
dust and snow and girls' skirts.

Peter could hear the giggles and the gossip as two officers in dappled
combat fatigues came loping out of the hull of the craft, grabbed a kid,
spoke to him, and then headed toward his building. But he himself did
not smile. He understood that they were here for him and that something
was terribly wrong. He felt the blood drain from his face.

It took them about thirty seconds to reach Shafier.

And in the next second the doors flew open, and a lean middle-aged
officer walked with utter lack of self-consciousness to the front of the
room.

"Dr. Thiokol," he said without a smile, "we need to talk."

Their eyes met; the fellow looked focused and excited at the same time.
Peter knew many career military types; they were okay> a little
literal-minded, perhaps. And generally quite conformist. But this guy
had something a little extra: He looked like a young dragoon officer
racing toward Waterloo in 1815. Peter had seen it in a few bomber
pilots, usually the wilder kinds, the ones who wanted to go
thermonuclear three times a week.

"Okay," Peter said to his students, "you guys get out of here now."

The students trundled out, gossiping among themselves.

Then the officer held up Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon by
Peter Thiokol, Ph.D.

"In this book you talk about what you call the John Brown scenario,
where a paramilitary group takes over a silo."

"Yes," said Peter. "I was told by a very high-ranking officer that it
was the stupidest thing he'd ever read. It hadn't happened since 1859 at
Harpers Ferry and it couldn't happen now."

"Well, it seems to have happened."

"Oh, shit," said Peter, who didn't like to swear. He found his breath
suddenly ragged. Somebody took over a bird? "Where?" But he knew.

"South Mountain. High-force threshold. Very professional takedown."

The major sketched in the details of the seizure operation as they were
known and it was clear he had been thoroughly briefed.

"How long ago did this happen?" Peter wanted to know.

"Going on three hours now. Dr. Thiokol. We have people there now,
setting up an assault."

"Three hours! Jesus Christ! Who did it?"

"We don't know," said the major. "But whoever, they know exactly what
they're doing. There's been some kind of massive intelligence
penetration. Anyway, the commanding officer/ground wants you along to
advise. All the signs are that they're going for a launch. We have to
get in there and stop them."

So it had started. It was close to the final midnight, and he thought of
all the things he had meant to say to Megan but never had. He could
think of only one thing to say, but it was the sad truth, and he said it
to this soldier.

"You won't make it. You won't get in there. It's too tight.

And then--"

"Our specialty is getting into places," the officer said.

"It's what we do."

Peter saw his name stenciled above his heart against the mud-and-slime
pattern of the camouflage. skazy, it said.

The officer looked at him. They were about the same age, but the officer
had that athlete's grace and certitude to him. His eyes looked
controlled, as if he had mastery even over the dilation of his pupils.
It suddenly occurred to Peter that this would be an elite guy. What did
they call them?

Alpha? Beta? No, Delta Force, that was it, a Green Beret with an
advanced degree in homicide. The guy looked like some kind of
intellectual weight lifter. He had incredibly dense biceps under his
combat fatigues. He'd be one of those self-created Nietzschean monsters
who'd willed himself toward supermanhood by throwing a bar with iron
bolted to the end up and down in some smelly gym for thirty or so years.
Peter felt a sudden sadness for the deluded fool. He had half a mind to
argue, out of sheer perversity. For if the idea that they could get in
was this Skazy's vanity. Delta would be disappointed tonight.

Peter had a sudden sense he was in somebody's bad movie. The world
should end in grace, not Hollywood melodrama.

It couldn't even destroy itself well. He almost had to laugh at earnest
Skazy here, the Delta Viking. It's not an airliner you're trying to
crack, he wanted to say, it's a missile silo, with the best security
system in the world. I ought to know; I designed it.

"Let's go," said Peter. He reckoned the world didn't have much longer to
live, and he wanted to be there for the last act. After all, he'd
predicted it.

And then he thought he ought to call Megan, just in case, but decided,
she's on her own now, let her be on her own.

One of the chief curiosities of modern life, Peter often reflected, was
the acceleration of change.

For he had gone, in the space of a twenty-two-minute helicopter ride,
during which time his thoughts had remained jangled and painfully
abstract, from Hopkins to the middle of a battle zone. He felt as though
he'd down back through time into the Vietnam War, a conflict whose
intricacies he had studiously avoided in his lengthy stay in graduate
school. It was like a TV show from his childhood: He heard the young
Walter Cronkite intoning, "Everything is as it was, except You Are
There."

And so he found himself among military killer types all clustered around
a dilapidated girl scout camp in rural Maryland.

All these lean young combat jocks with crew cuts and war paint on,
festooned with a bewildering variety of automatic weapons, as well as
ropes, explosive packs, radio gear, exotic knives taped upside down on
Various parts of their bodies and, worst of all (and Peter could sense
it, palpable as the smell of kerosene in the air), an ineffable glee.

He shivered. He liked his wars abstract and intellectualized; he liked
the theory of destruction at the global level and the excitement of
thinking in awesome geopolitical terms.

This closeness to the actual tools of small-unit warfare--the wet,
greasy guns, the snicking, clicking bullets, the klaklaklakklak! of
bolts being jimmied, the clank of magazines being locked and unlocked
(the guys were going crazy playing with their weapons) left him more
than a little nervous. The guns especially scared him; guns could kill
you, he knew. He shivered again, as some supernumerary, an FBI guy whose
name he didn't quite catch, took him into the cabin proper, and there he
got his second massive shock.

He expected on the inside just more of what was on the outside: more
special ops pros all talking in hushed tones over detailed maps,
discussing their "assault," or whatever their term was. What he got was
something out of Mark Twain: two country cronies sitting hunched
together, their faces lost in shadow, swapping tall tales amid the
clouds of weed gas and the smell of stale tobacco that brought a pain to
your forehead. The butts, in fact, heaped like a funeral pyre in the
cheap ashtray between the men. This was Mission Central? This was HQ? It
felt like the general store.

"I remember," he heard one of them saying, "I remember.

The world ran on coal in those days."

"Yep, by golly, and a sight it was, them days. We had over two hundred
boys working in the Number Six hole, and, by damn, this was the center
of civilization. Not likes he be now, with just a few hangers-on
scruffin' by. Everybody had a big black car and everybody had a job.
Depression or no.

Burkittsville was coal and coal was Burkittsville, by damn. I remember
it like it was yesterday, not fifty years ago."

Then one of the fogies looked up, and Peter caught a quick glimpse of
his face in the light, even as he felt himself being appraised and then
dispensed with rather magisterially.

Involuntarily, he swallowed. He recognized the guy.

It had to be the famous or infamous Dick Puller, exactly the kind of nut
case you could trust Defense to pull out of the files to take over in an
unconventional situation. Even Peter knew of Dick Puller, his many
moments of glory in far-off paddies and glades, and his one moment of
frozen terror at Desert One.

What Peter saw was a sinewy man in his late fifties with a face that
looked as if it were hacked from ancient cotton canvas. He had a tight
sheen of short iron-gray hair, almost stubble. He had a flat little
hyphen of a mouth. Peter saw also that he had large, veiny hands--strong
hands, worker's hands--and ropy arms. He had a linebacker's body,
lacking the vanity of precisely engineered muscles but possessing--
radiating, in fact--a sense of extraordinary strength. He had eyes like
an ayatollah: hard, black little stones that glittered.

He was in old jungle fatigues, and had a Montagnard bracelet around his
wrist. He wore jungle boots. Yes, goddammit, the faded stencil on his
ample chest bore the legend puller.

" 'Course that damn cave-in closed it all down," said the geezer. "A
black day for Frederick County, Mr. Puller, if I do say so. The
womenfolk wore widder's weeds for a year 'fore they moved away."

"Dr. Thiokol," Dick Puller suddenly said, not ever having been
introduced formally to Peter, "Mr. Brady here tells me something very
interesting about your installation. Something I doubt you even know."

Peter was ready for this.

"That it's built a thousand feet above the ruins of an old coal mine? I
knew that. We had all the old documents. We took test borings. The mine
has been sealed since thirty-four, when it collapsed. Our tests indicated
no presence of geological instability. That mine is history. Colonel
Puller, in case you had some delusion of going in there as a way of
getting into the installation."

Dick's eyes stayed flat and dark as he answered Peter.

"But our reports say that original old undeveloped Titan hole was left
open to the elements since the late fifties. Lots of rain in thirty
years, right, Mr. Brady?"

"Rains a lot in these parts, sometimes like a son of a bitch," said Mr.
Brady. He turned, his leathery old face locking on Peter's. "Son, you
must know about a mess of things, but I have to wonder what you know
about coal. You open a coal seam to a mess of rainwater over a period of
years, you get some damned interesting formations down through a
mountain. Coal is soft boy. Soft as butter."

Peter looked at him.

Then he looked at Dick Puller.

"You get tunnels. Dr. Thiokol," said Dick Puller. "You get tunnels."

** ** **

Gregor beat a hasty retreat from the embassy to the nearest source of
booze, which was Capitol Liquors, three blocks away at L and Vermont, a
harshly lit joint with a pretentious wine display for yuppie Washington,
as if yuppies wandered into such a place. He went in, fought through the
listless crowd of unemployed Negroes who passed the time here, and
bought a pint of American vodka (he could not afford Russian) for $3.95.
Outside, he opened it quickly, threw down a quick hit.

Ah! His oldest and dearest friend, the one who never let him down. It
tasted of wood smoke and fire and bracing winter snows. It belted him
like a two by four between the eyes. He filled with instant love. The
cars whirling up the street, the American automobiles, endless and
gaudy, he loved them. Klimov, little rat Klimov, he loved him. Pashin,
Klimov's powerful sponsor, he loved him.

"To Pashin," Gregor announced to a man standing next to him, "a hero for
our times."

"You said it. Jack," said the man, bringing the muzzle of a bottle of
Ripple in a paper bag up to his lips, drinking. "Git all our asses in
trouble."

Fortified, Gregor lurched ahead. The sun was bright. It hurt his eyes.
He put on his sunglasses, cheap things from the drugstore designed to
look expensive. He felt much better now. He felt in control. He looked
at his watch. He still had some time before his little job.

Gregor wandered around for a few minutes before he finally found what he
was looking for, a public phone. You always call from a public phone.
That was the oldest rule. In Russia you may be sure the public phones
are tapped, but in America you were sure they were not.

Gregor found a quarter, called the number. A woman answered, a new
voice, but he asked for Miss. Shroyer. There was some fumbling, and
finally she came on the phone.

"This is the Sears computer," he said. "Your order is ready. It's"--he
squinted, reading the number of the phone-- "it's 555-0233. Have a nice
day. This is the Sears--"

The phone went dead. He stood, talking into it anyway, holding the
button down, seeing her leave her desk in the Crowell Office Building,
pick up her coat, nonchalantly mosey down to the drinking fountain, take
a long drink, duck into the Ladies' room, her fatness imposing, her huge
back and bent shoulders like a cape, her personality bright and phony,
to the pay phone in the next corridor.

The instrument against which he leaned produced a squawk surprising
Gregor in his reverie, but he freed the receiver button.

"Gregor, good God! The chances you take! Suppose they are watching you?
I told you, Gregor, never, never call me at--"

"Molly, oh, Molly!" sobbed Gregor. "God, darling, your voice, it sounds
so wonderful."

"You fat bastard, you've been drinking already, I can tell. Your words
are all mushed together."

"Molly, listen, please, yes, I had a little taste, that's all--"

"Gregor, don't be sloppy, you know how I detest it when you're sloppy!"

"Molly, please, I had no other place to turn. This Klimov, he's really
after me this time. He wants me. It's worse than ever. God, darling,
they are going to send me back."

"Gregor, you pulled this routine months back. It's where we started."

Gregor sobbed. The sound of his pain and his fright must have been
amplified by the wires of the phone, for it seemed to release in Molly
something his implorings had failed to touch: her pity. He sensed her
compassion suddenly: he sensed her coming to him. He pressed on.

"Please, please, darling. Don't fail me. You've got to get me something.
Something soon. Something big. Something I can give them. Not just your
chicken-shit minutes and the gossip. They can get that from the Post.
No, Molly, if you love me, if you fear for me, if in the smallest,
tenderest part of your baby toe you feel for poor Gregor Arbatov,
please, please, oh, my Molly, please help me."

"Jesus, you bastard," she said. There was almost a laugh in her voice.
"You're so far beyond shame, you're into squalor."

"Please," he begged again.

"Call me in a few days."

"In a few days I'll be on my way to Latvia or some awful place."

"There is no Latvia, Gweggy."

"That's what I mean. Please, Molly. Oh, please, by tonight. I'll call
you at four."

"You're really pushing your luck."

"Oh, Molly, I knew I could count on you."

"I can't--what? Oh, yes, sure." This last was mumbled to an intruder. In
seconds she was back, breathless. "Christ, I have to go, baby doll,
they're calling all of us for something."

"My sweet, I--"

But she had hung up. Strange, no? he thought. But he felt much better
now. He looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. Time for his drive
out to Columbia and his little job for the agent Pork Chop.

** ** **

"Colonel Puller?" It was the FBI agent, Uckley.

"Yes?" asked Puller.

"It's an eyes-only from White House Operations. They want to know what's
happening."

"What's happening?" A quick, angry glance. It was said that Puller had
talked to Carter himself from the ground at Desert One. "Tell'em Delta's
in, we're working out our assault details, we're waiting for Air and the
Third Infantry and have high hopes for the Rangers. Make something up."

"They sound mad," said Uckley, a little unsure at Puller's lack of
interest in Washington.

"I don't give a fuck what they are," said Dick sharply.

He looked over at Peter. "They'll want action. What they don't know, of
course, is that the wrong action is worse than no action. Much worse.
See, I have to fight them just as hard as I have to fight
what's-his-face up in the mountain. Now, Dr. Thiokol. Peter, is it? Okay
if I call you Peter?"

"Sure," said Peter.

"Now, Peter, I checked your file. Very smart guy. Great record. A-plus
on the report card, all the way through." His cold little eyes gazed at
Peter with regret. "But what's this shit about Taylor Manor? Some bin in
Ellicott City. You had a problem?"

"I had some difficulties when my marriage broke up. But that's all taken
care of now."

"You flipped, huh? Let me ask you straight out: How's your head? Screwed
on tight and outstanding? Are you crazy anymore?"

"I'm feeling fine," said Peter evenly, wondering why this bastard hated
him so much. Then he concluded that Puller hated everyone. The man was
sheer aggression.

"What I need from you is a lot of hard work. I need a genius. I need a
guy who knows that mountain who can figure things out for me. See, maybe
I can crack that hole if I can figure out how. But I need a genius along
to whisper in my ear. Can you give me the help I need, no bullshit
games, no little sullen pouts, no prima donna shit. I don't have time
for the star system."

"I'm fine," said Peter again. "You can count on me. I guarantee it."

"Excellent. That's all I need to know. Now--who's up there?"

"Search me," said Peter.

"All right. Why are they up there?"

"To launch," said Peter. "This is the only strategic installation in the
United States with independent launch capability.

There's no point to taking it if you weren't going to make the bird
fly."

"Why? What would be the point?"

"There isn't one that I can figure," said Peter. "Unless it's sheer
nihilism. Somebody just wants the world to end'. It doesn't make any
kind of strategic sense; when the bird flies, the Sovs launch on
warning. Then we all die. The beetles take over."

"Some kind of crazy death wish, like the guy who took the gun into the
airliner and shot the pilot?"

"More than that, but I don't know what it is. But I guarantee you,
there's more, somehow. There's some other aspect to the plan, some wit,
some theory, some long-range aspiration. This is only one part of it,
that I can tell you. This is part of some larger scheme."

"Goddamnit, I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius!"

"I am a genius," said Peter. "But maybe that guy up there is too."

"When you figure it out," said Puller, "I want you to tell me first.
Right away. It's crucial. If I know what's going on, maybe I can figure
out who's doing it. Now, can we get in?"

"No," said Peter.

"Goddamnit," said Dick Puller.

"No, I don't, think you can. I understand they have people up there."

"Sixty well-armed men."

"Military?"

"The very finest. From what I've been able to tell, their seizure op was
very crisply handled. Very neat, very impressive.

Right now they've thrown the god damned thing under some kind of
tarpaulin. We can't see what they're doing up there. Pretty damned
smart. We've got zillion-dollar birds in the sky that can see through
clouds and rain and tornadoes and tell us whether Gorbachev had his eggs
up or over easy.

But there isn't a lens alive that'll see through an inch of canvas. What
do you suppose they're up to?"

"I don't know," said Peter. "I don't have any idea."

"Worse than that, they sent a radio signal to somebody.

Who do you suppose they were talking to. Dr. Thiokol?

Another bunch of commandos, getting ready to jump us as we put our
assault together, really mess us up? Maybe a group to hit our airfields,
stop our god damned Tac Air?

Maybe a part of this other aspect of the plan. What, Dr. Thiokol? Any
ideas?"

"I don't know," said Peter bluntly. "The' only thing I know about is
missiles. And missile basing. And I know this.

You're going to have a hell of a time getting up there, whether you get
hit by another outfit or not. I had access to a computer survey of
small-unit action in Vietnam and it suggests that all the advantages are
with the defenders."

"Jesus, you had to get a computer to tell you that?"

Peter ignored him, plunging onward to the dark heart of the matter. "But
even, say, even if you kill the men on the hill, you've still got to get
through that door to the elevator shaft in the LCF to get to the LCC.
It's the only way down.

And the door is eleven tons of titanium. If you started cutting through
last week, you wouldn't get there by midnight."

"What about just opening the door?" Puller asked.

Peter made an involuntary face that communicated the idea that he was
talking to a child, then said contemptuously! "The door is controlled by
a Category F Permissive Action Link security device. A multiple
twelve-digit code with limited try. Three strikes and you're out."

"How did he get it? Inside job?"

"No, they change the code every twenty-four hours. But one of the
wrinkles here is that the code is kept up top, too, in the security
officer's safe, in case SAC has to get down there. That's the way we
planned it. But nobody is supposed to know this. It was a secret.
Anyway, they must have blown the safe, got the code, and rode the
elevator down and jumped the guys in the hole. Easy."

"Can't we call SAC and get the code?"

Peter made another snotty face. "Come on," he said.

"This guy--"

"Aggressor-One, we've tagged him."

"Yes, Aggressor-One," Peter said, thinking, they certainly got that
right, "he can reset his own code from inside."

"Could we blow through it?"

"You'd need so much explosive, you'd blow the mainframe that runs the
upper installation, including the door code. The doors would lock shut
permanently, you'd never get in."

"Maybe," said Dick Puller.

"Maybe, just maybe they don't know about the key vault. If the guys
inside had enough warning to use the key vault, then they're sitting on
the most useless piece of real estate in America. Because the key vault
was a late modification.

If we knew when they made their intelligence breakthrough, then we'd
know how much they could know. That's the prime question. Do they have a
welder?"

"Let's assume they do. They certainly knew everything else. They knew
the codes, the procedures. They knew the Commo equipment."

If it were possible, the skin on Puller's face seemed to stretch
tighter. He looked like a man with a massive headache.

He lit another Marlboro. He turned back to the old man, who had been
sitting abstractedly during his conversation with Thiokol, chewing on
his dentures.

"Well, Mr. Brady," he said, "you think we could get in from below?"

"No, no," Peter interrupted impatiently. He hated stupidity.

"No, the concrete is super-hardened to thirty-two thousand pounds p.s.i.
It'll stop everything except one of the old super H-bombs. And it's
surrounded by ten million square feet of rock."

"So a man couldn't get in from below? Or get close enough to plant a
small-yield nuclear device. I mean, theoretically?"

"In twelve hours?"

"Yes."

"Well, if he could get up there, I suppose. . . this is highly abstract,
but theoretically, I guess he could get in through the exhaust vanes,
tubes that will blow out if the bird flies. That would get him into the
silo, and if he had a device or the knowhow, he could disable the bird
that way. Theoretically, at any rate."

"Now, Mr. Brady. These tunnels that may be in this mountain. What sort
of shape would they be in?"

"Worse damn shape than you could imagine, Mr. Puller," said the old man,
pausing to hawk up a wad of phlegm.

"Some of'em may go nowhere. Some places they may narrow down so small a
man couldn't get his fist through'em. And black, Mr. Puller. So black
you can't imagine. You have to be underground for dark like that."

"Could men operate down there?"

"Wooooo, Mr. Puller. You wouldn't want to. It'd have to be a certain
kind of man. Down there in the dark, you're always scared. If the
ceiling goes, there's no help for you.

You can't see, you can hardly move. You've always got shit in your
pants, Mr. Puller. A tunnel sits on top of your head something mighty
heavy."

Puller sat back.. Outside he had one hundred twenty of the most highly
trained military specialists in the world. Yet somehow he knew Delta
Force wasn't the answer. This called for someone who probably didn't
exist; a man who could slither up a hole in a mountain in the fetid
shroud of perpetual night, a mile and a half with his fears bouncing
around inside his head like a brass cannonball, and come out at the end
sane and. . .

"I suppose I could get some volunteers from Delta. Mr. Brady, any coal
miners around, men who've been underground?"

"Not in these parts, Mr. Puller. Not anymore. Not since the cave-in."

"Hmmm," Dick Puller said again. Peter watched him.

Puller seemed to implode on himself as he thought, his face gray, his
eyes locked on nothing. It was old Mr. Brady who spoke.

"Now, my grandson, Tim. Tim, he could get you in there."

Dick looked at him.

"Tim wasn't much good at nothing, but he was your natural-born tunnel
man. Wasn't no hole ever made he was afraid of. His daddy, my son Ralph,
was a miner and Tim grew up near holes. When Ralph died in a fire
in'fifty-nine, Tim came to me. I was a state mine inspector up in West
Virginia by that time, and Tim went into a lot of holes with me. Tim was
a tunnel man."

"Where is Tim?" Puller asked, almost fearing the answer.

"Well, you folks had yourself a war few years back. Old Tim, he was
asked to go fight it, and fight it he did. Won some medals. Crawled in
some holes and did some killing.

Tim was what you call your tunnel rat. He was with 25th Infantry, place
called Cu Chi. Those little yellow people built some tunnels, too, and
Tim and his pals went down into'em day after day, month after month. Not
many of those men left alive. Tim didn't make it back, Mr. Puller. Not
outside of a body bag, that is."

Puller looked at Peter Thiokol. He smiled.

"Tunnel rats," he said, turning the phrase over in his mind, absorbed.
"Tunnel rats."

** ** **

The major was deliriously happy. He was an excellent soldier and he
loved battle. He loved to think about it, to dream about it, to plan for
it, and to fight it. Now he scurried over the hill checking on his men
with the boundless energy of a fourteen-year-old boy.

"Any movements?"

"No, sir. It's quiet."

"You know, it might be Marine Recon or Special Forces.

Camouflage experts. You wouldn't see them until it was too late."

"No, sir. There's nothing out there yet. Only state policemen, more to
keep civilians out than to attack us."

His soldiers were young but well trained and especially eager. The very
best. No amateurs here. Men who wanted to be here, who believed. They
were wonderful boys, in their dappled uniforms under the snow smocks,
their equipment hard and clean, their faces clean-shaven, their eyes
keen.

They'd gotten the big tent up in two hours and were now digging under it
furiously. The tent itself was not an impressive structure, but it had
been constructed for a specific purpose and for that purpose it was
perfect. The tent rose on poles no more than five feet off the ground
and the various sheets of canvas that had been crudely lashed together
to form it came, in the end, to about 2,000 square feet. It was meant
for only one thing: privacy. Underneath, the major's men labored
mightily to create their little surprise for anyone coming up to them.
They'd learned about it firsthand, and they were eager to apply it to
other new learners.

Meanwhile, at the outer perimeter of the position, breastworks had been
constructed around the heavy machine-gun positions and a single firing
trench had been dug. The trucks had brought the ammunition, nearly a
million rounds. Hold off an army.

He dashed from position to position, checking lanes of fire and, more
important, resolve.

"How do we feel? Do we feel strong and brave?"

"Yes sir. Strong and brave and well-prepared."

"It's going well, then. It is going as we planned it. It's all on
schedule. It's working. We can all be proud. We've worked so hard, and
it's all paying off."

He had designed well. Only napalm could get them out, and the Army
couldn't use napalm because napalm would melt the big computer. No,
they'd have to come up and do it with lead. Close-in, hand-to-hand. A
real battle.

At one point, at the crest of the mountain, one of the lookouts told him
about the helicopters.

"About twelve of them, sir. To the east. They fell in and landed."

The major looked through his binoculars. He could see quite a little
force gathering its strength a mile away, down in the snowy meadow by
some jerry-built buildings. The twelve choppers sat in formation; there
was some kind of communications trailer, and even as he watched, a
convoy of trucks pulled in. Men hustled and bustled. Someone had erected
a big tent with a huge red cross on its sloping roof. More and more cars
pulled up, and occasionally a helicopter would land or depart.

"They're getting ready, no doubt about it. An air assault.

Of course. That's how I'd do it, at any rate."

"When, sir?"

"Actually, I'm impressed. Whoever is running their show knows what he is
doing. The general and I assumed their first attack would come in the
first three hours, and, that it would be badly coordinated and ill
planned. A lot of smoke and fire, a lot of casualties, no concrete
results. But whoever's down there is waiting. He wants his assault to
count. Helicopters--"

"Airplanes high above, sir. We- catch the glint in the sun
occasionally."

"Yes, an electronic eavesdropper. Be careful what you say, boys. They're
listening. And they're taking pictures. Of our beautiful big tent."

His men laughed.

For the major the pleasure was intense. He had hunted guerrillas for
years: dreadful scrapes, ranging across the countryside.

Occasionally, the enemy would catch a trooper and leave a trail of his
guts for miles until you finally came across the gristle and bone that
was left of him. It was so hard to close with the bastards: they melted
away into an alien landscape.

You could torture their women and remove their children, but they were
always there, just out of reach.

But not now. Now we're on the mountain, and they've got to come up to
us. He had a real battle to fight: a hill to hold for a period of time,
a real mission.

"Look for planes first," he told them. "We know they have A-10s in the
region, in Baltimore. They'll come low over the mountains. They'll
soften us up with those. Then the choppers. You'll see the choppers
swarm up. The A-10s will hold us down while the choppers ferry men in
close. The men will rappel down to the road, because the choppers won't
land. It should be Delta Force, very good men, the best. They'll be very
aggressive. But they'll be stupid, you'll see." He smiled. "It'll be a
great fight, I promise you that.

Oh, it'll be a great fight, boys. One they'll talk about for a hundred
years."

"We'll win it for you and the general, sir," said one of the boys.

The major went over to the ruins of the launch control facility, and
plucked a telephone off one of the standing walls.

The general answered.

"Sir, no sign yet of an assault. I expect it within the hour, however.
They've brought in helicopters and a fleet of trucks. But we'll be ready
for them."

"Good, Alex. I'm counting on you."

"How are things down there, sir."

"Oh, we're making progress. It goes slowly, but it goes.

The flame is bright and hot."

"We'll hold until they have us all."

"You buy me the time I need, Alex. And I'll buy you the future you
want."

1200.

Walls stared at the door. The door was the worst part of it. There had
been other doors, of course, and maybe were still doors to come for him.
But this was the motherfucker of all doors. Massive, green, and iron, it
looked about a million years old. Its hinges were rusty, and scabby
little patches stood out where the years had beaten against it. And
someone had scratched two words that Walls recognized onto it in crude,
desperate letters a foot high: fuck niggers it said, and as Walls saw
it, that's just what the door did.

Walls lay back. He'd go crazy in here soon enough, and then they'd let
him go, and he'd get killed.

Yeah: fuck niggers, that was it all right.

He tried to think of nothingness to rush the time along.

It didn't work. He and the door, they were all that was. He had faced
that, because he was by nature a specialist in reality. And his of the
moment happened to consist of green walls close around him, and the pot
for him to piss in, and the scungy collection of dried snot under his
cot, and some faggot's suggestions carved into the walls. And the door.
That was it, really, the mighty iron door, with its pins and bolts and
massive hinges that sealed him off, and said FUGK niggers.

"Hey, boy."

It was the Pig Watson, calling in from the peephole.

"Hey, boy, get your black ass up, or I give you over to the Aryans, and
they turn you into a bone harmonica."

The Pig Watson unlocked the door with the clank of metal on metal,
hauled the sucker back, and entered. It was such an easy thing to do if
you had a key. Watson was about six four, with acne, his white gut
hanging over his wide black belt like a pillowcase full of lead shot. He
was.basic cracker white, with an art museum of tattoos cut into the skin
of his fat arms and his knuckles saying love and hate. He had two pig
eyes and a little pig nose. He carried a nightstick and could expertly
dial long distance information on your skull.

"What you doin', boy?"

"I was praying," lied Walls, a gifted liar.

"Don't make me laugh, boy. Yer fuckin' prayers already been answered
when you got an extra six weeks solitary before the Aryans get their
paws on you."

And so they had been. An Aryan named Hard Papa Pinkham had taken an
intense liking to the contours of Walls's rear end and one night in the
showers with three of his biker pals had decided to possess it. It was a
short-lived triumph, however; Walls caught him in the corridor between
wings with a straight razor and made certain Hard Papa would never again
have his way in the showers. So much blood.

Who would have thought there was so much blood in a dick?

The Aryans were not pleased and had sworn to make Walls sing an equally
high falsetto.

"Some shot wants to see you, boy," said the Pig Watson.

"Now, you go and be quick or you answer to me. This way."

And so they took Walls from his solitary cell in the B Wing and marched
him through the main hall to the cells of the Aryans, the best-organized
gang in the Maryland penitentiary.

The Aryans had heroin and porn and barbs; they had murder and protection
and laundry; they had shivs and thumpers and knuckles. They ran the
place.

"Hey, mo-fo, your ass gonna be fuckin' worms for sure," one of them
informed him.

"Nigger, you one dead piece of Spam," another decreed.

"Jive, you on the hook," said another.

"You a real popular little songun," said the Pig with a gleeful laugh on
his face. "You know, they got a pool going how long your ass going to
last once you sprung from the tomb."

"Be round'long time," said Walls insolently. "Longer than your fat white
ass."

The Pig thought this was hysterical.

"Dead guys with smart mouths, I love it," he chuckled.

They checked through Processing--Walls was roughly searched, but his
knife had been lodged elsewhere for safekeeping--and he was removed from
the main cell block to the warden's office, where he was ushered by the
Pig Watson into a roomful of suits. And there were also two soldier
boys. The warden signaled Watson oat of the office and he closed the
door behind him.

"And here he is," said the warden, "our favorite parishioner, House
Guest No. 45667. How are you, Nathan?"

Walls just looked at the white faces which always had for him the look
of balloons, smooth and fat and full of gas.

"Specialist four Nathan Walls, goddamn," said the soldier boy, some kind
of super sergeant with all kinds of stripes running up and down his arm.
"Jesus, what a crime, a guy like you ending up in a place like this. I
checked the records.

Man, you were a hero. There's a hundred men alive today because of you,
Mr. Walls."

Walls just put his sullen face on and didn't say anything.

He made his eyes see infinity.

"This hero," explained the warden, "was known on the streets as Dr. P. P
for, excuse my French, pussy. He had nine girls working for him, all of
them beauties. He also specialized in angel dust, uppers, downers,
grass, Mexican mud, and just about everything chemical designed to screw
up the inside of the human head. To say nothing of two or three assaults
with intent, and no end of muggings, breaking and enterings, and
felonious assaults various and sundry. But none of it was Nate's fault.
It was Vietnam's fault, right, Nate?"

Walls flexed his strong hands and made his face as empty as a bucket
with a hole in it. He would not let them get into his head. He was done
with that.

"You were also," said soldier boy, "the best tunnel rat 25th Infantry
ever had. Let's see, three Hearts, Silver Star, two bronzes. Jesus, you
had yourself quite a war down in those holes."

Walls's military exploits had very little meaning to him.

He'd put all that far away in the deepest part of his head, and anyhow,
a tunnel was just a street with a roof on it.

"Mr. Walls, we're in a mess," said the officer, some kind of stem bird
colonel. "And we need a man to help us out of it. At 0700 today, some
kind of military unit seized a national security installation out in
western Maryland. A very crucial installation. Now, it happens that the
only way into this installation may involve a long, dangerous passage in
a tunnel.

Very scary work. We need a man who's fought in tunnels before to take a
team through that tunnel. A tunnel rat. And we need him fast. You're the
only one we could find in our time frame. What do you say?"

Walls didn't even have to think about it. His laugh was rich and merry.
"It don't have nothing to do with me. I'm all done with that shit," he
said. "I just want to be left alone."

"Oh, I see," said the suit. "Now, Mr. Walls, may I tell you that I
believe you're not going to be left alone. In about twenty hours from
now the idea of being'left alone' is going to lose its meaning."

Walls just looked at him.

"Yes, well, what you're going to notice is the warhead of a Soviet SS-18
detonating at about four thousand feet over downtown Baltimore in a
fused airburst for maximum destructive potential. That is, about four
thousand feet over our heads as we speak today. We figure the throw
weight of an 18 to be about fifteen megatons. Now, what you'll sense,
Mr. Walls, is one second of incredible light. In the next nanosecond,
Mr. Walls, your body will be vaporized into sheer energy. As will the
bodies of everybody in the first circle of destruction, which will
extend in a circumference of about three miles from the point of
detonation. What's that, warden, would you say, about a million and a
half people?"

"Yes."

"Yes, and in a wider circle--say, ten miles in diameter-- there will be
extraordinary blast damage and your usual runof-the-mill trauma
associated with high explosive. You know, Mr. Walls, you saw enough of
it in Vietnam: third degree burns, severed limbs, blindness, deep
lacerations and contusions, multiple fractures and concussions. I expect
it will be worst on the kids trapped in the schools. There won't be any
parents around to do much good for them, so they'll just have to do the
best they can, and pray for an early death. Now, in a circle out to
twenty miles you'll have much less actual damage, but the deaths from
radiation poisoning will begin within forty-eight hours. Horrible
deaths; Deaths by vomiting, by dehydration, by nausea. Not a pretty
picture. I'd say in this immediate area no less than three million dead
by the end of the week. Now, Mr. Walls, you project that onto every
major city in America and the Soviet Union and you'll see that we're
talking about some severe consequences. A full nuclear exchange would
involve the deaths of no less than five hundred million people. And, Mr.
Walls, if we don't get into that installation, that's what's going to
happen."

"If the white man blow his ass up, that's his problem," said Nathan
Walls.

"Mr. Walls, the Soviets have some extraordinary hardware at their
disposal, but not even they have been able to build a bomb that
discriminates between races. Think of the bomb as the greatest equal
opportunity employer in history.

It will take us all, Mr. Walls, regardless of our race, creed, or
political affiliation, and it will make ash or corpses of us. And if you
have any illusions of the third world picking up the pieces, I'd advise
you against them. A, there will be no pieces, and B, the radiation
deaths will cirdle the globe. The survivors will be mutant rats and your
friends the cockroaches, who will outlast us all."

This had very little impact on Nathan Walls, who had never, by
inclination or opportunity, had much chance to cultivate the ability to
think in abstract terms. There was, in the entire universe, only one
phenomenon worthy of consideration; his ass. Yet he saw how urgent the
situation was to the suits, even if he could not quite get with the doom
jive offered him by the head suit. And so he decided to play a little
game.

"And if I can get you into this place?"

"You'll have the thanks of your government. And the satisfaction of
knowing yon changed history."

"And I'll throw in another six weeks in solitary," said the warden.

This wasn't quite enough. But Walls reasoned that in the open he might
have a shot at a getaway and, failing that, if by chance he brought it
off, it might jingle out to some loose change for him.

"Couldn" get Nate Walls a shot at another joint?" he asked. "Say,
Allentown, where all the white politicians go?

There's a swimming pool and pussy there, or so they tell it."

"Mr. Walls," said the suit, "you give us Burkittsville and we'll give
you Allentown."

"I'll give him Miami," said one of the other suits.

Even as the leader of Rat Team Baker was being recruited in the Maryland
State Penitentiary in downtown Baltimore, the leader of Hat Team Alpha
was being lured out of retirement in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The
key figure in the seduction was a young man from the State Department
named Lathrop, who found himself nervous and alone in the front room of
a small house off Lee Highway in Arlington, Virginia. It smelled of pork
and odd spices and was decorated cheaply, with sparse furniture from
Caldor's. Awkwardly, as he waited, he looked out the window. There he
saw a young woman wrapped warmly against the chill, playing with three
children. He was struck by her beauty: She had one of those delicate,
pale Oriental faces, and there was something extraordinarily graceful in
her movements.

Someone called his name, and he turned to discover a middle-aged man in
a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of polyester tronsers.

"Mr. Nhai?" he said.

"Yes, Mr. Lathrop. What have we done wrong? Is something wrong with our
papers? All our papers are in order.

The church checked them out very specifically, it's--"

"No, no, Mr. Nhai, this has nothing to do with papers.

It's something quite unusual, uh--" he paused, sensing the utter despair
behind Nhai's obsequiousness. "I have been asked by my government to
bring an unusual request to you."

"Yes, Mr. Lathrop?"

"I can tell you only that we have an urgent security problem a hundred
miles outside of Washington, and it appears that one of the solutions to
this problem may involve a long and dangerous passage through a tunnel.
We've set our computers to work to uncover former soldiers who served in
a unit in Vietnam we caned tunnel rats. That is, soldiers who went into
tunnels, such as the ones at Cu Chi, and fought there."

Nhai's eyes yielded no light. They surrendered no meaning.

They were dark, opaque, steady.

"It turns out these men are very difficult to find. They tended to be
highly aggressive individuals, the sort who don't join veterans' groups.
We've found only one."

Mr. Nhai simply looked at him, sealed off" and remote.

"But one of our researchers found out from a book a British journalist
wrote that there was a single North Vietnamese who had served a decade
in the tunnels who had actually immigrated to this country. A man named
Tra-dang Phuong."

The little man kept looking at Lathrop. His expression hadn't changed.

"He'd had mental problems after the war, and his government sent him to
Paris for treatment. And, by a strange turn of events, he met an
American psychiatric resident there who took an interest in the case,
and arranged for him to come to this country under the sponsorship of an
Arlington Catholic church. We cross-checked our immigration records, and
sure enough, Tra-dang Phuong is here. The man is here, in this house. He
came over in'eighty-three. Our records say he lives here."

"I am Phuong's uncle," Mr. Nhai said.

"Then he's here?"

"Phuong is here."

"Can I see him?"

"It will do no good. Phuong spent ten years in the tunnels. The effects
were grievous. Phuong believes in nothing and wants merely to be left
alone. There's little that makes Phuong happy anymore. Dr. Mayfield felt
that to get Phuong away from the country and the memories would be of
great help. It turns out he was wrong. Nothing is of help to Phuong.
Phuong suffers from endless melancholy and feelings of pointlessness."

"But this Phuong, he knows tunnels?"

"No one knows tunnels like Phuong."

"Sir, would Mr. Phuong be willing to accompany our forces on this most
urgent security operation? To go back into tunnels again?"

"Well, Mr. Lathrop, I seriously doubt it."

"Could we please ask Phuong?"

"Phuong doesn't like to talk."

Lathrop was desperate.

"Please," he almost begged. "Please, could we just ask him?"

Mr. Nhai looked at the young man for quite a while, and then with great
resignation went to get Phuong.

While he waited, Mr. Nhai came back with the nurse and the children that
Lathrop had seen outside in the garden, scrawny, energetic kids, all
tangled up in one another. They ran forward to Mr. Nhai. He nuzzled them
warmly and cooed into their ears.

The nurse stood to one side, watching.

It seemed to take an awfully long time. Lathrop wondered when Phuong
would show.

"Mr. Lathrop," said Mr. Nhai, "may I introduce Tradang Phuong, formerly
of Formation C3 of the Liberation Army of the People's Republic of
Vietnam. She is famous in the north as Phuong of Cu Chi."

Lathrop swallowed. A girl! But nobody--still, they wanted a tunnel rat.
And she was a tunnel rat.

The girl's dark eyes met his. They were lovely, almond shaped. She
couldn't have been more than thirty, or was it that he didn't read
Oriental faces well, and hadn't seen the lines around her eyes, the
fatigue pressed deep in the flesh, the immutable sadness.

Mr. Nhai told her what he wanted.

"Tunnels," she said in halting English.

"Yes, ma'am," Lathrop said, "a long, terrible tunnel.

The worst tunnel there ever was."

She said something in Vietnamese.

"What did she say?" he asked Mr. Nhai.

"She said she's already died three times in a tunnel, once for her
husband and once for her daughter and once for herself."

Lathrop looked at her, and felt curiously shamed. He was thirty-one, a
graduate of good schools, and his life had been laborious but pleasant.
Here stood a woman--a girl! who had literally been sunk in a universe of
shit and death for a decade and had paid just about all there was to
pay-- and yet was now a child's nurse, aloof in her beauty. If you saw
her in the supermarket, you wouldn't get beyond the beauty other
alienness: she'd be part of another world.

"Will she do it? I mean"--he swallowed, uncomfortable with the break in
his voice--"she's got to."

Mr. Nhai spoke quickly to the woman in Vietnamese.

She replied.

"What did she say?"

"She'd rather not go back to tunnels."

Lathrop was stymied. He wasn't sure how much latitude he had in briefing
her.

"It's very important," he said.

The girl would not look at him.

"I am sorry, Mr. Lathrop. I could talk to her. Make her see. But it
would take time."

Lathrop turned.

"Please," he said. "It's an emergency. Lives depend on it."

The girl's eyes would not meet his. She spoke quickly to her uncle.

"She says she would be no good in the tunnels. She would do more harm
than good in the tunnels. She begs you to understand. In the tunnels,
there is great fear for her."

Lathrop mumbled something banal, made a last attempt at eye contact and
failed. He searched his orderly mind for inspiration, and could find
none. But in admitting defeat, he relaxed, and thereby found the key.

"Tell her it's about bombs," he said suddenly. "The bombs that burned
her children. Her daughter. There's more bombs for more children, for
millions and millions of children.

Now, if she can believe it, we Americans have to go into tunnels not to
kill but to stop bombs falling on children and setting them aflame. It's
the only way, and the time is very, very short."

The old man began to translate, but Phuong cut him off.

Her eyes looked into Lathrop's and he was unhinged by their
bottomlessness; it was like looking down into the deep black water.

Then, almost demurely, she nodded.

1300.

It fell to Peter Thiokol to background-brief the Delta officers, the
various state police supervisors, and other federal functionaries who
had just showed up, and the liaison officer from the Maryland Air
National Guard who would talk on the air strike. Peter knew he was not
ordinarily an effective communicator, but in this one area he had
maximum confidence. Nobody knew more about the subject at hand than he
himself; he had created it from the deepest part of his own mind, and
from his own terrors of--and deep fascination for--nuclear war. And also
from his deepest vanity: that he could play the most dangerous sport of
all and win.

"Peacekeeper is radical in two respects: first, it's extremely accurate.
We use it to target their ICBM silos. We don't have to neutralize a soft
opportunity like a city and kill five million people in order to hurt
them."

The officers looked at him mutely. He radiated conviction and kept his
neuroses, of which there were many, well hidden. Peacekeeper was the
redeemer. He believed in it; he was its John the Baptist.

"And secondly"--he had them, he could feel it--"these warheads bite
very, very deep. By that I mean--this is the key to the concept--they
give us access to all hardened targets. So we have the capacity not
merely to disarm but to perform an activity we call decapitation. We can
cut the head off, cleanly and surgically. Do you understand the
implications?"

Of course they didn't. The parabola of the grenade was the extent of
their strategic imagination.

"It means from now on, when we talk, they listen, because we can put the
warheads in their pockets. They hate it, let me tell you, the bastards
hate it. It scares them. There are Soviet generals who know they're
behind and see Peacekeeper as the beginning of the end. Now," he went
on, getting at last to the crux of the matter, "what terrified me as I
thought about ways to deploy Peacekeeper was the knowledge that the
system itself has tendencies toward destabilization.

If those missiles are the best in the world, and if we're a couple of
years ahead of the Soviets in our modernization program as we upscale
from Minuteman II to Peacekeeper, then, goddammit, the way we install
them has to be the best too. Because"--he probed the air, to stress the
point--"if the system is vulnerable to anything, then it tempts the
other side to first-strike at its vulnerability. Weakness is destiny;
strength is security. The secret of strategic thought is the prevention
of first-strike temptation. Our other forty-nine Peacekeepers are going
in little dinky Minutemen II holes out west, which is craziness! It
offers such a premium for a first strike. That's why South Mountain's is
the hardest silo basing in the world and that's why it had to be
targeted against Soviet command and communication. We call it Deep
Under-Mountain Basing. And that's why it's so impossible to get into."

Dick Puller's voice cut at him out of the dark, impatient with the
strategic context that had decreed South Mountain into existence,
pressing for the hardcore nuts and bolts.

"Dr. Thiokol, let's get to the tac stuff. We don't have to understand
it. We just have to shoot our way into it."

"Then what you have to understand is that now that they're in command,
it's not only them we're fighting, it's the mountain too. It's the
installation. If you bomb, say, or use heavy shells, napalm, that sort
of thing, you'll melt down the up-top mainframe and you're out of luck.
That's not an accident: it was planned that way." By me, he didn't add.
"And I'm telling you, the only possible way to get inside is to pop that
door without explosive, get down in that hole. It can't be done any
other way."

"Mr. Thiokol"--the voice was familiar, and Peter even tually recognized
it as Skazy's--"what do you think they're doing under that tarpaulin
they've thrown up?"

"I don't know."

"What could they do?"

"Well, not much. Dig in, I suppose, dig trenches. Perhaps they have some
weapon they don't want you to see, like a... a--well, I don't know."

"Why would they try to cover up like--"

"I don't know," Peter said, again iritated to be sidetracked at this
silly stuff about the tarpaulin or whatever it was. That wasn't the
center of it, didn't they see?

"Mr. Thiokol, uh. Dr. Thiokol, what are our odds at pulling off a
multiple simultaneous?"

Peter stumbled again. The jargon was from some other war culture. He
didn't recognize it.

"I'm sorry, I don't--"

"Multiple Simultaneous Entry." It was Puller. "That's the Delta
Doctrine. Attackers always outnumber defenders, but that advantage is
lost if you can get in through only one entrance. We like to go through
several at once. Can we get in more than one place at once?"

"No. Only through that shaft. The silo doors are super hard; the exhaust
plugs don't blow until the bird launches.

There's no other access."

"What about underground? The mines?" Skazy asked.

"Dr. Thiokol does not see our tunnel rats as the answer to anything,"
said Dick Puller to the group.

"I think they are a delusion," said Peter Thiokol. "And the more time
you waste on it, the less time you have to deal with reality. That door
is it. You've got to get through the door."

Puller said, "Dr. Thiokol, now you know why you're here. You've got to
get us through that door."

And so Peter sat back.

The door. He had to figure the door. The door had just become his
problem.

"Can you do it?" asked Puller.

"There's a code," said Peter. "Whoever is running things up there will
reset the PAL to his own specifications. So that means I've got to break
their code. It's very tricky. There're twelve digits required for an
unlock. It's got what's called a limited try capacity. If you--"

"Can you do it?"

"You need a cryptanalyst. Colonel Puller."

Dick Puller's voice was hard.

"I know I do. I don't have time to dig one up. I have to fight with what
I have. That's you."

Peter said nothing. He had a splitting headache. The irony was almost
comic now; Megan, a cultivator of ironies, would have loved it: he had
crafted the system to be impenetrable, and now he had to penetrate it.

Delta staff was working out its assault plan when the first chopper
arrived; before Puller could pull himself away, the second one pulled
in.

His young factotum, Uckley, hustled in.

"They're both here. Jesus, Colonel, you won't believe--"

But Dick merely nodded; he had no time for surprise.

"Dr. Thiokol, you stick with the Delta assault plans team. Uckley, you
buzz FBI.counterintelligence and get us into their loop. I want all
their findings. That's highest priority.

Then you get Martin again, and bug him on regunning A-10s ASAP. Nobody
goes anywhere without air. I'm going to go see the recruits."

Pulling on his coat, he rushed out. The two new Hueys sat out on the
softball field, their rotors whirling up a cascade of snow. He looked
for his prizes and saw a crowd huddled over in the garage and rushed to
it. Entering, he was at first baffled: nothing but state cops and Delta
operators and a few National Guardsmen from the first NG trucks that had
pulled in. But no, he'd missed them, because they were so small.

Yes, they'd be small.

The black man had worn his prison Levi's but had conned a Delta trooper
out of a black commando sweater and a blue wool watch cap that was
pulled down low to his eyes. He was only about five eight, but Dick
recognized certain things immediately: The hands holding a cigarette
were surprisingly large. The eyes were narrow and surly. He held himself
with an impossible combination of insouciance and discipline. He had
some hard sense of self to him, a kind of physical confidence that
burned like heat. He had street smarts. He looked at no one: his eyes
were fierce and set and dark and glared furiously into space. It all
said, don't fuck with me.

As for the woman, it wasn't so much her gender or her unprepossessing
size that shocked him, but her youth. She must have gone into the
tunnels early in her teens, for now, ten years after her ten years then,
she looked just a bit over thirty. And she was beautiful, wouldn't you
know it? Dick's wife had never suspected, but Dick had lived with a
Vietnamese woman for two years during his long pulls in country. Her
name was Chinh; the Communists had finally caught her and killed her.
She died in a burst of plastique on Highway 1 moving into Cholon in '72.
Phuong looked a lot like Chinh: the same dignity, the same sweetness. Or
no, not exactly: Dick thought that with study he could see the weight of
the war on her. He shook his head.

"My rats," he said.

His rats looked at him. The girl had trouble focusing; the black man
looked as if he wanted to fight him.

"You the man?" asked Nathan Walls.

"I am, Mr. Walls."

Walls laughed. "Where's the hole?"

"The hole is at the base of that mountain there," Dick said, pointing to
the dramatic white-hump out the open door, seeming surprisingly close.
"And that"--he pointed out the lumpy, ragged silhouette of the South
Mountain installation at the peak--"that is where we want to go. Where
we need to go."

"So let's do it," said Walls.

Puller went to the woman.

"Chao ba, Phuong?" he asked, meaning Hello, Madame Phuong.

She seemed to relax at the sound other language, issued a shy smile. He
saw that she was scared to death to be among so many large white men.

She said, "Chao ong," meaning. Hello, sir.

"I am privileged that you are here," he said. "We are very lucky to have
you."

"They said there were bombs for children. Firebombs. It was for us to
stop them, sir."

He clung to the formal voice in addressing her, feeling the language, so
far buried in his memory over the past Fifteen years, work itself free
from his brain. "The worst American demon, worse even than the terror
bombers. Some men have taken it over. We have to get it back and the
only way in is through a tunnel."

"Then I am yours to command," she said vaguely.

"Do you have any English, Madame Phuong?"

"Some," she said. "Little." She smiled shyly.

"If you don't understand, stop me. Ask questions. I will explain in your
language."

"Tell me. Just tell me."

He switched to English, addressing them both.

"I want to place you during the assault, which will begin as soon as we
get our air support. We have to blow a hole in the mountain and I want
it done under the cover of a lot of other fireworks going on. I don't
want whoever is up there knowing we've put people in the ground."

"Shit," laughed Walls. "If he smart, he know. If he so smart, he got all
you down here sucking your thumbs, he going to know. He going to be
waiting. Like they was back in his pretty lady's country. Tunnel going
to be hot, let me tell you."

That was part of it, Dick thought. The tunnel rats always knew somebody
was awaiting them.

"Are you hungry? Would you care to eat? You should rest, you'll be going
in soon. And I'd like you to take people along. You shouldn't be alone
in the tunnels."

"In the tunnel," said Walls, "you always alone. But get me a skinny man
who don't get too close and listen to orders."

Dick was a bit undone by Walls's directness, and on this next point he
proceeded with unusual caution, aware he'd entered delicate territory.
"A black man, Mr. Walls? Would you feel more comfortable with another
black man?" Several of the Delta troopers were black.

Walls laughed his hard laugh again. "It don't matter," he said. "In the
hole, everybody's a nigger."

Phuong sat as if in a trance. She was not quite healthy, and had never
been, since the tunnels. Her French psychiatrist had diagnosed her as a
fifth-level schizophrenic, as if so many jolts in the tunnels, the loss
of so many, the experience of so much horror, had finally, almost
mercifully, broken the moorings of her mind, and like a small boat it
drifted this way and that just off shore. She did not like bright
lights, crowds, or to talk much about herself. She liked children,
flowers, the out-of-doors, children especially. She spoke to her
daughter at night, when she was alone, carrying her in a place near her
heart. She remembered watching her daughter dissolve in a blossom of
napalm; the flames had burned her eyebrows and the roar of the
explosions had almost deafened her. She had tried to run into the fire,
but someone had stopped her.

So now she sat in the barn with the black man whom she understood to be
in some queer way her equivalent and at the same time tried to force
herself to demonstrate out of politeness interest in the K ration they
had put with apologies before her. It was getting close to time now, she
could tell, because all the men were grave and drawn and they had at
last stopped playing with their weapons; she recognized the symptoms:
battle was near. She had been there before.

In the old days, her revolutionary fervor, her nationalism, had
sustained her. She believed in her country and in freedom from the hated
white men; it was worth dying for and worth killing for. But the killing
had finally taken its toll: she was thirteen when she went underground
and twenty-three when she came out and had killed over one hundred men,
most of them with an M-1 carbine but more than a few with a knife. Her
skill was stealth and patience: she could lie in the dark forever,
almost still as death. Yet she felt so tired and now she was going back.
To stop bombs from burning more children. To stop the world from
becoming all fire and darkness everywhere.

A man came before her.

"Chao chi," he said, using the familiar, as in. Hello, Sister Phuong.

"Chao ani," she replied, out of politeness, feeling awkward in calling
him brother.

"My name is Teagarden."

The American names were so hard.

"Dee-gar-dahn," she tried. It hurt her mouth.

"Call me brother. I will be your brother in the tunnel.

They asked me to go with you, which is why I call you sister."

She asked her daughter, who still lived in her heart, what do you think
of this man?

He seems decent, her daughter said from her heart. But is he strong.
Mother? In the tunnel, decency doesn't count, only strength.

"Have you ever been in a tunnel, brother?" she asked.

"No," he admitted.

"Why are you here? Did you volunteer for this?"

"Not exactly," he admitted. "They asked me because of the language,
sister."

He is not pleased about it, her daughter told her from her heart. Not
good. In the tunnel, faith is important.

Her frank stare encouraged him to confession.

"To be honest. Sister Phuong, I'm scared to death," he said. "I hate the
dark, I hate close, dirty places. But they asked me, and in our unit it
isn't done to refuse an assignment."

"Can you control your fear?"

"I was in your country for over three years," he said. "I was scared
every day and in battle every other day. I learned to control my fear
there."

Tell him that underground is different, her daughter said.

"Underground is different," she said. "You'll see, it's different.
Control is everything. Iron will, resolve."

"I'll try," he said. He was a healthy, leathery-looking man, about
forty.

"In the dark, everybody is scared. The survivor is the man of control."

"I can only try," said Deegardahn.

"Do you have a family, brother?"

"Yes. Three boys. Great boys. The big one's a hero on a sports team. The
other two, well, it's too soon to tell."

She could see his eyes warm at the mention.

See, Mother, he has children. He has love in his heart.

He is not alone.

"You are a lucky man, brother," she said, "and I will let you come with
me into the tunnel. We will stop the demons from setting the world on
fire."

"Sister, we shall, this I swear to you," said Deegardahn, and thus did
Rat Team Alpha begin its career.

Rat Team Baker began under less auspicious circumstances.

Delta Command selected, for crude and perhaps obvious reasons, another
black man to accompany Nathan Walls. He was a short, muscular staff
sergeant named Jeff Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a proud, furiously
hardworking, and gifted young soldier who had at one time been an
excellent boxer. He was every bit what might be called a team man: he
believed in committing to the larger issue and therefore transcending
the limits of his own rages. His commitment went first to his country,
secondly to the Army, and third to Delta Force, which was the first
team. He had joined Delta from the 3d Ranger Battalion in Fort Eustis,
Washington, just in time to see action in Grenada.

Nate Walls was, by his peculiarities of vision, everything to be
despised, everything that hurt the American black: a lazy no-account
black-as-black northern jive-ass nigger, a dog.

He was poison to the country and to the race.

"Walls?"

"Yo, man."

"Name's Witherspoon. I'll be going with you."

"Man, they pay you for this shit?"

"Yes, they do."

"How much? How much you make?"

"With hazard pay and various allowances, seventeen hundred a month."

A big grin split Nate Walls's face.

"Shit, man," he laughed, "I used to do that kind of change on a Saturday
night on Pennsylvania Avenue. You going to risk your motherfucking ass
for a seventeen spot."

He laughed at the richness of it.

Witherspoon just looked at him, controlling his temper.

Then he turned his wrist, looked at his watch, a big Seiko worn upside
down.

"You'd better get some food. We go at 1450 hours.

That's soon."

"I like that watch, man. That's one pretty piece of jewelry, and I like
jewelry. Let me tell you, in the 'Nam, sergeant named Lopez get himself
a new fancy Seiko scuba watch like that, he take it in a hole. Man, you
could see numbers a mile away. The gooks used it to read by, and then
some gook lady like that pretty girl over there, she put a bullet
through it, right through the number twelve, blow off his hand. When he
scream, she put a bullet down his throat.

I know, 'cause I had to go in and throw some motherfucking wire around
his legs, you know, drag his dead ass out of there. So you want to wear
your fancy watch. Jack, you stay the fuck away from me." He laughed
again.

Witherspoon looked at him.

"I'll take it off before we go and leave it with somebody."

"And, man, that deodorant. I can smell that shit, man, you know. If
there's Charlie Gook in that hole, man, he smell that shit too. Then he
blow your ass away, and mine too.

Man, do us both some good and wipe your arms out, man.

Shit, you sending telegrams."

"There isn't supposed to be anybody in the tunnels."

"Man, lemme tell you, just when you think nobody there, that's when they
put you in a body bag. You married, my man?"

"Yes," said Witherspoon.

"You get any pussy last night, man?"

"Knock it off."

"Shit, man, only ass I had was when some white biker dude use my ass for
fun in the showers. I could check out some pussy about now, let me tell
you, before this last trip."

"They wanted me to go over weapons," Witherspoon said crisply. "You can
do an M-16, or one of these little German machine guns, the MP-5. Or
a.45 or a 9mm automatic."

"Fuck, man, I could never hit the ground with a pistol. I hate them big
automatics too. MacHine guns make my ass nervous, bounce around too
much. I want a shotgun, a pump, sawed down real good. When you fire that
mother, I want a noise louder than hell. Scare Charlie, if it hot down
there.

You ask that girl. Gooks don't like noise."

"These aren't Asians. This isn't Vietnam," Witherspoon said dully.

"Oh yes it is, my man. Oh yes it is. Now, let's see about a shotgun. You
got a shotgun for this nigger?"

Witherspoon said he'd check it out and trotted off.

Walls sat back, smoking a cigarette. The* old feeling was beginning deep
inside him. It was what you felt when you knew the shit was going down,
a kind of loose, trembly buzz in the gut, not really unpleasant, just
odd.

Back in a hole.

Hey, Jack, I was done with holes. Man, my life was golden, you know.

He thought he was going to die today.

Die in a hole.

I thought I was done with that shit, man.

** ** **

Jack Hummel watched the flame eat into the metal. The world was flame.
And as he watched, he fought the temptation to surrender completely to
craft, and to think of nothing but the job. He forced himself to think
about the general.

Guy was plenty strange. First, he made Jack nervous because he was so
sure and calm. And he scared Jack with his magical ways of persuasion
and leadership. And he intimidated Jack because he seemed somehow rich,
or at least upper class, and Jack was a little unsure of himself around
such a customer.

But he also seemed fabulous, somehow, like something out of a movie.
Jack remembered when he'd been a kid there'd been a lot of movies about
crazy generals who tried to take over the world and Jack tried to place
this guy against that context. But it didn't work, because he saw
vapidly handsome star faces, remote and eighteen feet tall in black and
white. No help here; this guy was flesh and bone and charm. The
difference struck Jack as weirdly comical. He laughed in an involuntary
spasm.

"You find this amusing, Mr. Hummel?" said the general over the roar of
the flame.

"No, it's just that--" But Jack couldn't finish.

"That's all right. Laugh away. I'm used to it. I've been laughed at
before."

But Jack's face had locked up. The man's hard eyes, empty of merriment,
nailed into him. The torch wavered and slipped in his grip and he
lowered it.

"And now you can't laugh. I'm used to that too. When people encounter
the strength of my will and understand what I represent, they hardly
find it humorous. I represent the memory, Mr. Hummel. The memory of a
once-great country, but a country now fallen on terrible times, its way
lost, its leaders pathetic, its enemies ravenous with the hunger to rip
it to shreds. And I represent the strength to regain that past. And
these soldiers feel the rightness of my way and the urgency of my moral
mandate. They give themselves to me. It's happened before, only my
predecessor lacked my skill. He had my will, but he didn't have my
talent. You know him, Mr. Hummel. Remember your history. It all happened
right around here. His name was John Brown.

John Brown took over a federal armory with nineteen half wits and idiots,
who came unglued when some townspeople took potshots at him. He was
captured by a junior Marine officer with a toy sword, which bent when
the officer stabbed him. That was less than fifteen miles from here. At
Harpers Ferry. Have you been there, Mr. Hummel?"

Jack wasn't sure if the guy really wanted an answer or not. But this was
getting crazier by the minute. The guy was a real total screwball. So
Jack gave him the earnest response he thought was required.

"Uh, yeah, as a matter of fact. Last year, I think, my wife, she said we
ought to, you know, get more out of the history of the state and--"

"Mr. Hummel, I mention John Brown because in a peculiar way he's quite
important to me. A very bright young man once predicted what I might do,
and called it 'The John Brown Scenario.' Since I hold that young man
dear, it's important to me that I draw the contrast with John Brown.

I've taken over a federal armory that stores missiles instead of
muskets. I'm going to do what has to be done. I'm going to launch a
strike against the Soviet Union. I'm going to give the world the future
it hasn't the guts to get for itself. I'll kill millions, yes, but the
outcome will be survival not only for a political system I believe in
but survival for the planet. The fools who haven't the guts to face this
simply pass it on to future generations, so that when it does
happen--and we both know it will--then everybody dies: Not just the race
but the world. The planet. In my way I'm the most moral man who ever
lived. I'm a great man. They'll hate me for a dozen generations and
worship me for a thousand."

"Uh, yeah, but--"

Jack decided he didn't have the mental equipment to argue with the guy.
Who was he, some dropout from a state university who now made his living
with his hands? What power did he have against a guy like this?

"The torch, Mr. Hummel," commanded the general, the power of his
brilliant eyes surging into Jack.

Obediently, up came the torch and again it began to lick at the metal.

1400.

Pilots don't work. This is one of the universal laws of aviation
culture. Pilots fly. They are special. They only fly.

"Higher, goddammit," said Leo Pell to Rick Tamower, both of whom were
pilots and both of whom were working.

Tamower, twenty-six, was not happy to be laboring next to ground crew in
the god damned unheated hangar of the 83d Tactical Fighter Wing of the
Maryland Air Guard at Glenn L. Martin Air Field just north of Baltimore;
he had skinned his knuckles evilly twice already, and he was cold and he
was greasy and he was a pilot and pilots don't work.

"Higher, goddammit," cursed Leo Pell again, his eyes squinting. Leo
looked a little like a pig, especially when he squinted, collecting his
tiny little eyes up in folds of fat. He was a squat, bald man with thick
hands and short pistonlike arms. He had the body of a linebacker and the
face of a fireplug and right now he was greasier than any mechanic.

He smelled of sweat and joy. It was no coincidence that Leo had named
his ship The Green Pig, and that he liked flying it low and slow and
bouncing it off the Chesapeake now and again, getting his nose down in
the shit, as his men said.

There was something definitely anal compulsive about Leo and his
willingness to get in close to the elemental stuff of life. Leo Pell was
your natural-born ground-support man.

"Leo, goddammit," Tamower squealed in response, "I'm not even supposed
to be doing this! I'm supposed to be putting together a mission assault
profile or--"

Above him loomed the massive wing of an A-10 Thunderbolt II
ground-support fighter, called Wart Hog or Flying Pig by its pilot and
air crew. It was a big ship with a long bony prow, a single-bubble
cockpit, and two high twin rudders, almost like the old B-25 Mitchell of
World War II fame.

Two gigantic General Electric TF34 GE-100 engines were mounted like
spare parts from some surplus airliner halfway back along the fuselage.
They looked as if they didn't quite belong; in fact, the whole airplane
had the look of having been designed by a bright but evil
eleven-year-old boy with a yellow crayon.

"Rick, chum, we don't get these god damned guns bolted up just right, we
ain't got no mission," Leo said with a grin, which showed his yellow
stubby teeth. "Now, boy, people depending on us, and goddammit, I'm not
going to let'em down. Besides"-- he smiled his most malicious, most
charming smile--"we gonna be live shooting. Twenty mike-mike, goddamn.
Rick, twenty mike-mike. Life is good!"

Leo loved shooting better than anything.

All up and down the line the pilots and men of the unit scrambled over
their big green ships as they tried to speed mount two SUU-23 gun pods in
the five and seven slots in the external stores loading stations under
the big wings of the green birds.

Tamower cranked on his lug wrench, wiped the sweat from his brow,
and--goddamn!--skinned his knuckles again.

"Tighter, sir, you almost got it," his chief crewman called.

"The 20-mil ammo's just come in."

"Great," said Tarnower, twisting the wrench again.

"Hurry up, Larry," Leo said, and ducked on to the next plane, cackling
gleefully.

The assault plan that Delta had worked out was relatively simple. It was
now predicted that the ANG A-10s from Martin would be regunned and
airborne by 1445 hours. At 1500 the flight would peel through a gap in
the Appalachians and hit the South Mountain installation with their
external 20-mm cannons, in theory cutting the hell out of Aggressor
Force without blowing away the mainframe computer, and at the very
least, chopping the hell out of that mysterious tarpaulin that draped
the mountain top.

At 1505 hours a flight of fifteen Hueys would deploy to the road moving
up the mountain, intersecting it at an altitude of about 1,200 feet,
roughly 1,000 feet beneath the installation, but well beyond the point
where Aggressor Force had blown the road. To save time, the choppers
would not land; they would swoop in in batches of four, and from each,
eight Delta Commandos would rappel downward. In less than a minute.
Delta felt, one hundred twenty operators could be placed in position for
the assault. Divided in two elements. Delta would move up the hill and
force the attack against the narrow front of the installation.

Midway during the fight, a sixteenth chopper trailing smoke would break
from the formation, careen over the crest of the hill, and be seen to
wobble, then land hard at the base of the mountain. Thirty seconds later
it would seem to detonate.

Actually, this was the detonation of over twenty pounds of C-4 already
implanted by a probing force that had located the mouth of the collapsed
mine shaft. The blast--or so the plan went--would open a hole big enough
for Rat Team Alpha and Rat Team Baker to penetrate the mountain and
begin the upward climb into the installation itself, a distance of
almost half a mile underground, through uncharted and quite possibly
nonexistent tunnels. The two teams would be in radio contact with Rat
Six--a radio team at the opening of the shaft--which itself was patched
into the Delta command network.

Up top, when the elevator shaft was finally taken, a message would be
flashed, and Peter Thiokol, now madly trying to figure out a way to beat
the door and its twelve integer code, would be dispatched to the site to
get the door open and get the surviving Delta operators down into the
hole. The idea was to bring off the vaunted multiple simultaneous
entry--from above and below.

The briefing officer, Skazy, stood back, well pleased with the
presentation. It had everything: succinctness, economy of force, a
certain audacious daring, split-second timing. It was Delta all the way.

"No, no," said Dick Puller quickly, "no, no, it's all wrong."

The disappointment in the room was audible.

"Goddamnit, Major, you haven't thought it out. You're willing to spend
too much of your own blood on preliminary objectives. You'd waste highly
trained specialists taking trees and gullies that are meaningless except
as a route to the real objective, which is the shaft to the LCC. And
what happens if you make it but you've sustained so many casualties
you're effectively out of commission? Who goes down the shaft?"

He stared brutally at Skazy, a former protege now fallen on hard times
in his career. This was classic Dick Puller: he had no qualms about
blowing people away. Skazy swallowed.

"We thought it was a very sound plan, sir," he said.

"It's a very sound plan for a different war, but not for today's."

There were a lot of peculiar vibrations in the air. Skazy was popular,
hardworking, one of the Delta originals who went all the way back to
Eagle Claw. He was a Delta zealot.

Nobody liked to see him trashed.

"Colonel Puller," another Delta officer said, "it's a good plan. It's
stable, it's solid, it's well within our capabilities, it's--"

But Puller wasn't interested.

"Mr. Uckley, what's the latest word on my Ranger battalion?"

"Uh, sir, they're just entering St. Louis air space. They ran into
turbulence coming over the Rockies."

"Great, and how about Third Infantry?"

"The trucks are hung up in traffic. Evidently, there's quite a buildup.
The state police are trying to hustle them through, but the traffic is a
mess. We could divert some helicop--"

"No, we need the choppers for Delta. What's the disposition on that
National Guard infantry unit?"

"Colonel, they're the perimeter defense team. You said you were afraid
we'd be jumped and that--"

"How many?"

"Uh, they're'at company strength now. It's Company B, 123d Light
Infantry, Maryland National Guard. Say, a hundred fifty men. They were
on winter maneuvers at Fort Richie. They've been trucking in the last
few hours."

"Get'em assembled," said Dick.

He turned to the Delta officers.

"You're grounded. Get Delta on the perimeters, they're now security. I
don't want Delta into it until we crack the perimeter and carry the
elevator shaft. There's no point in those men dying in the woods like
infantrymen. Let him die in the shaft, where it'll do some good."

Skazy said throngh a tide of awkward phlegm clogging his throat and a
wretched moment's hesitation, "Colonel Puller, with all due respect,
those National Guardsmen are teachers, lawyers, construction workers.
They're fat and out of shape.

Now, we've got a good, sound plan. These guys can't--"

Dick cut him off, speaking with brutal authority.

"Maryland NG draws preliminary assault responsibility for this
operation, working in conjunction with Tac Air. I can't wait for the
god damned Third Infantry or the god damned Rangers. I want them deploying
via their trucks too; no sense wasting our choppers on troops who can't
rappel.

Get Delta on the perimeter, Major. Call the NG and give 'em the good
news. What's the guy's name?"

"Barnard. He's an accountant."

"Well, today he's an infantry officer."

And so Dick Puller made the first of his controversial decisions. It was
based on a secret conviction: that the planes would not kill enough of
Aggressor Force to suppress its calculated fire. The first assault would
be a failure: those who waged it were like the Brits who went over the
top at the Somme in 1916, a doomed generation. With their lives they
would purchase very little: at best, they would bleed Aggressor Force of
enough of its will and its health, so that, as he now saw it, a second
assault with Third Infantry and the Rangers sometime after nightfall
would carry the perimeter.

Then the real drama would start: Could Peter crack the door?

Could the Delta specialists get down the shaft and into the capsule?
Could the Rat Teams get there from the rear?

"Sir, the CO of the Guard wants to talk to you."

"Put him on."

Dick took the radio phone.

"Delta Six, over."

"Delta Six, I'd like a clarification on this order."

"Affirmative."

"You got federal specialists in there, commando types, hardcore pro
military. But you want my guys to carry the brunt of this attack?"

"Affirmative, Guard Six."

"Do you have any idea what's up there? They--"

"I heard. I saw the report."

"Sir, I'd like to request that my higher headquarters authenticate the
or--"

"Captain, you do any damn thing you like, but at 1500 hours I want your
company humping that hill. First, you'll do much better in the light. A
night attack's a terrible thing.

Second, and more important, I've laid on Tac Air at 1500.

You want to hit the Aggressor area just as the Air moves out.

Those A-10s are going to make hamburger out of whoever's up there. You
have my word. You'll be mopping up, that's all. I'd warn your guys to
watch out for unexploded 20mil shells. Those things can tear a leg off.
That's what you have to worry about."

Puller's face was bland and sweet as he lied. He was an excellent liar.

"Oh, Air. Air."

"A-10s, affirmative. Guard Six. Ever seen'em hose something down? Those
cannons rip through lumber like a chain saw. You've never seen anything
like it!"

"Yes sir," said the captain. "I'll get'em assembled and on the way, sir."

"Real fine, Guard Six. Real fine." He looked at his watch. It was close
to 1400 hours. He heard whistles somewhere, and the sound of trucks. It
was the Guard, already saddling up.

He felt somebody looking at him. It was the hard, lean face of Skazy,
closing in on him.

"What are you looking at?" Puller said.

"I hope you know what you're doing, Dick," said Skazy.

"You're out of line. Major," said Puller, facing him square.

"You wouldn't send us in from Desert One. You've got to send us in
here."

Puller looked hard at him. Skazy had been combat assault commander seven
years ago in Eagle Claw. When Puller made the decision to abort, Skazy
had called him, to his face, a cowardly motherfucker and taken a punch
at him.

"You'll get your great chance, Frank. Just grow up a little, will you?
It's going to be a long day."

Skazy said, "Look, Dick, if you have any trouble because it's me here,
and because I took my shot at you at Desert One, that's fine. A
commander deserves support from his juniors. I'll step out of my command
and go in as a regular trooper. McKenzie can take over,-he's a good man.
But goddammit, Dick, you've got to use us this time."

Puller looked at him.

"Get back to your unit. Major," he said.

Outside, the trucks had begun to move toward the mountain.

Rat Team Baker was suiting up in the barn. In the distance a chopper had
landed, its blades beating with a liquid slosh of noise against the
wooden walls. The rhythm was insistent, urgent, and through it they
could hear the sound of the National Guard trucks rumbling down the
muddy road toward the mountain. But the two men, aware that in minutes
they'd be airborne, worked hard at getting ready.

"Here," Witherspoon said. "You keep this on your belt."

"Yo, man, thanks," said Walls, taking it. It was a Taurus PT-92 9-mm
automatic in black matte finish, with a double stacked magazine that held
fifteen rounds. He popped the magazine, which dropped out, then locked
back the slide and looked into the chamber, where everything seemed to
gleam with bright highlights. He thumbed the slide release, and the
heavy sheath of metal slammed forward. The gun snapped in his hand. He
reinserted the mag, and rejacked the slide to chamber a round.

"Safety up or down, man?"

"Up is on. You go to red by snapping it down. That's a double-action
piece, so you don't have to carry it cocked and locked."

"Cocked and locked it's gonna be," said Walls, "just like my old.45.
Cocked and locked is best."

It was a nice piece for backup, but not quite what he wanted for the
main work.

"Now, what about Mr. Twelve?" Walls asked, slipping the automatic into
an ambidextrous Bianchi holster on his belt.

"Say again?"

"Mr. Twelve Gauge. Shotgun, man."

"Yeah, so I found one. Here it is," Witherspoon said, handing the weapon
over: a Mossberg 500, with a twenty-inch barrel in a grainy gray
Parkerized finish. It had a combat magazine extension beyond the pump
reaching out to the muzzle, giving it a chin-heavy, pugnacious profile.

"That piece is very important to the guy that owns it. He didn't want to
give it up. It's called a Persuader. Now he didn't want to give it up.
It's his life insurance. But I talked him into it."

Walls took the gun and knew at once it was made for him. He held it,
touched it, rubbed it, smelled it, clicked it.

Damn, it felt good.

He began to thread the heavy red plastic double-ought twelve-gauge
shells into it, discovering that it would swallow eight of them. Loaded,
it felt heavy; all that buckshot slung out under the barrel. He jammed
dozens more into the leg pouches of his camouflage pants until his legs
felt as if he were exercising. It would mean he might have to lay on the
suckers, but it was better to hurt a little and have the spares when you
needed them than to be comfortable and come up dry at party time. He'd
found that out in a hole somewhere.

He held the loaded gun close to him.

Meanwhile Witherspoon was locking a 30-round 9mm clip into his Heckler &
Koch MP-5. The gun had a foolish look to it, a sci-fi look: its ribbed
silencer threw it out of proportion.

"Is that a toy, man? It looks like some kind of plastic kid toy."

"It works great," said Witherspoon, "a great close-in weapon."

Then Witherspoon put on his AN/PVS-5C night vision goggles. They looked
like a set of binoculars mounted in some kind of scuba-diving mask,
which was held on Witherspoon's head by a harness of elastic straps;
they drew their power from a 1.3V DC battery pack he wore at his belt.
The glasses responded to heat, and in the cool blackness of a tunnel a
man would radiate an orange glow as if he were on fire, making him easy
to track and kill.

"You could have used this stuff in 'Nam," Witherspoon said.

Walls snorted. ! "Man, I'm so bad I can see in the dark without help,
you know. That's what kept me alive."

Then Witherspoon pulled on his flak jacket, which had already been
mounted with an AN-PRC-88 radio receiver. A pair of headphones with a
hands-free mike on a pylon out in front of his lips completed the
outfit. He stuffed a book-sized mass of gray clay into one bellows
pocket. Walls knew it to be C-4; he'd blown up a few things in his time
in the tunnels.

Witherspoon stood, staggered for just a second under the weight of the
gear. Walls couldn't help a little laugh.

"Man, you look like a ghost buster," said Walls, "and you talk like an
ofay. Man, how long you study, learn to talk that white bullshit? 'It's
a great close-in weapon," Walls mocked through his nose with a cruel
grin on his face. "Be natural, my man. Be a nigger. You a nigger, be a
nigger."

"I don't care how I sound if it keeps me alive and gives me the edge,"
said Witherspoon, stung by the accusation.

"A bad nigger with a bad shotgun, that's the best motherfuckin' edge,"
said Walls.

The men rose from their ritual. Walls pulled on his flak jacket too.
He'd nixed the night vision stuff. There were picks, shovels, grenades,
and a few other gimcracks to be arranged, but essentially they were
ready. Then he noticed a red bandanna on a bench, left over from some
cracker handyman or other. Quickly, Walls flicked off his watch cap,
snatched it up, expertly spun it into a roll, then tied it Apache-style
around his forehead.

"You see, boy," he said to the horrified Witherspoon, "in the hole it's
hot as shit, and the sweat sting up your eyes.

Saw a white guy once blown away "cause he missed a first shot'cause he
couldn't see nothing." He smiled for the first time.

An officer yelled, "Game time, rats."

The moment had come. Walls grabbed his Mossberg, felt the heave and slap
of the automatic at his hip, the weight of the flak jacket. He lumbered
out to the chopper.

The tough-looking old white guy stood off to one side as they ran to the
slick, watching them go with numb eyes.

Brass, Walls thought. White brass. Shit, he hated white brass, stern
fuckers with little squinty eyes who looked at you like you were shit on
their shoes.

But then the white old guy gave him a little thumbs-up for happy hunting
and--fuck it!--hey, winked at him. Walls saw the radiance of something
almost never on the pale, slack faces of the white race--belief. That
is, belief in him, in Walls.

You may not be much of anything, motherfucker, the old white guy was
saying, but damn, boy, you one hell of a tunnel rat.

You got that right. Jack, thought Walls, running the last few yards
through the breeze to the bird.

The Vietnamese woman, in black with an M-16 and a pair of gym shoes, was
already aboard, a blank look on her face. But as he moved closer,
squinting in the bright sunlight, she looked at him.

Jesus, he thought, losing himself in her opaque glare, home again.

The Huey with the two Rat Teams lifted, nose heavy, a bit ungainly, hung
for just a second, and then with an agility that even these many
helicopters into his career still surprised Puller, zoomed off, and he
watched it go.

"Good pilot on that ship," Major Skazy yelled. "He'll insert'em just
where you want "em."

Puller said nothing. He shifted his vision. Across the white meadow,
under the bright sun and blue sky, he now saw the NG trucks in the
distance, deuce-and-a-halfs, a convoy of them, small as toys, now
lumbering into the woods to begin the ascent to the primary assault
position.

The trucks moved poorly, tentatively bunched up; one would spurt ahead,
then slow. It was an accordion opening and closing across the landscape.

"Aggressor Force's going to see them coming," said Skazy.

"Plenty of time to get ready."

"Aggressor Force was ready anyhow," said Puller.

"It's Delta's job," said Skazy.

The older man turned to look at the younger. He remembered Skazy at
Desert One, his face mottled with fury, coming at him without regard for
rank or protocol or career or whatever, just coming at him, screaming,
"You gutless old bastard, we can still do it. We can do it with five
choppers And Puller had said, "Get your men on the planes. Major.

Get them on the planes," as the harsh wind, the noise, the utter
confusion had swirled around them.

Now, eight years later, Skazy was still a major. He'd been passed over,
his career ruined just as completely as Puller's for his legendary
flip-out. He was still Delta, though, still a true believer.

"Dick," Skazy was suddenly saying, "let me go in with the NG. Those guys
need some experience. Let me take Delta up to support them from the
flanks, and to urge them on, give them something to see. Dick, we can--"

"No, Frank. You'll get carried away, the way you did at Desert One.
You'll lose control, you'll rush in. You'll get everybody killed and you
still won't stop the men in the hole;"

He delivered this brutal sentence with a little bit more pleasure than
was strictly necessary, as if to indulge the bully in his soul. But it
was also that Skazy, brave, hardworking, brilliant, was just a bit
reckless. He was a terrible accident waiting to happen. He needed to be
led and aimed. He was a perfect subordinate: he wasn't the man you
wanted out there on his own.

"Whatever you say. Colonel Puller," said Skazy, his face immobile.

Suddenly, he turned.

"Just use us this time, goddammit, Dick. And you weren't right at Desert
One. / was."

Skazy stormed back to his staff, leaving Puller alone.

Puller looked back to the mountain, feeling suddenly old and a bit
scared. Maybe the rat thing was pointless, maybe those tunnels weren't
there at all. And certainly those kids in the trucks would be chopped
up. Maybe even Delta couldn't make it.

He checked his watch. The A-10s ought to be shooting the gap any second
now.

He looked back to the mountain. It was a dramatic white hump before him,
the red and white aerial like a candy cane at its top, and that peculiar
dark stain where Aggressor Force had built its odd tent.

He felt himself being looked at. Up there, AggressorOne would be looking
through his binoculars. Watching.

Waiting. Planning.

I hope you're not half so lucky as you are smart, he thought. It was
also a prayer.

Peter had found a little room off Puller's headquarters and there, with
an old Coke machine moaning over his shoulder and girl scout mottos like
"Always do your best!" on the rickety walls, he looked at a copy of the
single communication Aggressor-One had sent from the mountain.

I wish to say furthermore that you had better prepare yourselves for a
settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than
you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared for it, the better.

There was something tantalizing in it, ironic. A strange feeling he got,
that it wasn't a madman's document, but something far subtler.

It's a game, he thought.

This guy is playing a game.

But against whom? And why? Why a game? Why now, a game? As if it's not
quite enough to blow the fucking world away, to turn us to ash and dust;
he's got to tweak our nose somehow.

He looked at the "signature" at the end of it: "Commander, 'Provisional
Army of the United States."

Well, your standard-issue right-wing nutcase psycho, staple of fifty bad
movies and a hundred bad novels. It fits perfectly: the inflated
rhetorical tone, the sense of epic proportion, the delusion of one
self-styled "great man," reaching out from his wisdom to twist history
in the proper direction.

Why don't I believe it, he wondered.

Because it's too pat?

Because it matches all our expectations?

Because I've a feeling Aggressor-One has seen the movies and read the
books too?

He touched his temple, feeling his head begin to throb.

Now, try to relate this, the screwball declaration of intent from
Aggressor-One, up there with his MX, to this, the mountain of teletype
printouts that were being sent from the FBI, at Dick Puller's order, on
the investigation into his identity.

Quickly his eyes sped over the data. A crash team from the FBI special
antiterrorist squad, working with the assistance of personnel officers
at the Department of Defense and Defense's big mainframes, had done a
fast shakeout on military personnel with a certain pattern of experience
in conjunction with a certain range of political belief, which itself
had been extrapolated from a cluster of skills necessary to plot, stage,
and execute the silo takeover and an assumed cluster of ideological
beliefs necessary to provide the key ingredient: the will.

Among the plotting coordinates in the search for AggressorOne were one
or more of the following: Special Operations experience, including
Special Forces (Army), Ranger (Army), Air Commando (Air Force), SEAL
teams (Navy), and Marine Recon (Marine Corps); Central Intelligence
Agency Special Operations Division (comprised primarily of veterans of
the foregoing) and including those with experience in Operation Phoenix
in Vietnam and counterinsurgency among the Nungs in South Central RVN;
or experience in counterinsurgency operations in the third world, as in
guerrilla hunting with the Peruvian, Bolivian, and Guatemalan rangers
and paratroops; and other odd Agency scams, including the Kurdish
incursion in 1975; and so forth and so on; OSS experience dating back to
World War II, and including Jedburgh Teams who jumped into France
immediately before D-day, and long-range operators among the Kachin
tribes in Burma against the Japanese in World War II. Cowboys, Peter
said to himself. God save us from cowboys. public record or private
reports regarding unusually fierce political opinions, particularly as
regards the Soviet Union. Membership in groups in the FBI Index, such as
the John Birch Society, Posse Comitas, the Aryan Order, so forth, so on.
The fulminators, the sparkplugs, the geezers and whiners, Peter thought,
the Red haters and baiters. professional officers with solid careers
going who had somehow gotten off the track--a CO who screwed them on a
fitness report, a program they were in charge of that was axed, a
command that was riddled with drug abuse that fell scandalously apart, a
stupid and unguarded moment with a reporter that wrecked their
progress--who, surveying the rubble of their lives, might have
ingeniously plotted some kind of revenge against Defense, using their
clearances and friendships to acquire the necessary intelligence to
stage the silo raid. The losers, Peter thought. and finally, membership
in what was called the strategic community, that weird agglomeration
of-inside-the-Beltway types who, unbeknownst to the world in general,
went about their merry way planning its destruction. This meant
familiarity with strategic thought and its particulars, particularly
silo culture and technology, missile}silo security, launch procedures,
strategic targeting initiatives, the top secret Single Integrated
Operation Plan (SIOP), the game strategy by which this country would
fight a nuclear war.

This was the big category. It was all well and good to know how to skulk
through the night with a knife through your teeth, but in the end you
had to know what Peacekeeper was, how it worked, where it was located,
or there was nothing at all to the mission, it was just dreamy nonsense.
For it all turned on the ability, once having gotten into a silo, to get
the bird off its pad. And, in this silo, on knowing that it was even
there--not a thousand men in Washington knew this--and that it was
uniquely vulnerable, launch capable.

He had to know so much, this Aggressor-One! That was the tantalizing
thing about it: whoever he was, he would almost certainly be someone
Peter knew and had worked with.

He has to be one of its.

He looked at the list: Rand Corporation dropouts, disgruntled SAC
colonels, embittered Pentagon jockeys with an intellectual bent,
bypassed generals, flamed-out academics.

All the names were familiar.

Another document clattered off the machine, and Peter examined it. It
described a former civilian analyst for the Air Force of great promise
who was intimately acquainted with Peacekeeper, particularly as it was
to be deployed in the South Mountain installation. He was known for his
hardline attitudes toward the Russians and toward nuclear war in general
and had actually published a famous essay, "And Why Not Missile
Superiority? Rethinking MAD" in Foreign Affairs, making him a hot item
on the Washington circuit, the man who believed war could be fought and
won. He appeared on Nightline and This Week with David Brinkley and Face
the Nation. He had eventually become head of the MX Basing Modes Group
at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in Howard County. But his
personal life had disintegrated under the pressure of his career, his
marriage had broken up, his wife had left him. Now he taught at a
prestigious institution and still consulted with the Pentagon.

"Sir?" It was a young communications technician.

"Yes?"

"There's some men from FBI counterintelligence here.

They have a warrant for your arrest."

"Sir."

Alex blinked in the bright air and looked. He could see the vehicles
lumbering toward him across the meadow.

"No helicopters," he said. "They are not using helicopters, they are
using trucks."

He watched the convoy come.

"All right," he said, "stations, please. Get the men out from under the
tarpaulin and to their combat stations."

A whistle sounded. He could feel men around him running to their
positions, hear the clink and rattle of bolts and belts.

"Steady, boys," he cried. "We have all the time in the world."

He watched the trucks come up the mountain. I would have thought
helicopters, he told himself. They could have gotten more people here
faster with helicopters. But maybe the troops they have aren't
air-assault qualified and would have been more frightened of the flight
than the fight.

No, wait: one helicopter rose. It must be some kind of medevac chopper,
for casualties.

We'll give you some business, fellow, he thought.

He climbed atop a bit of ruin, and shouted, "All right, boys. Company
coming for lunch! Lock and load."

"Sir--"

The boy pointed.

He could see them, low and whizzing over through the gap in the far
mountains across the valley. Eight of them, low to the ground, clearly
A-10s even from this distance.

Well, he had this one figured too.

"Planes," he said. "Missile teams prepare to engage."

The first assault had begun.

** ** **

Gregor Arbatov took Connecticut Avenue out to the Beltway, headed east
through thin traffic, then north down Route 95 toward Baltimore through
even thinner traffic. He had plenty of time. He was not due until two
and he had left at 12:30. The vodka had somewhat calmed him, and his
call to Molly had left him with at least some hope for the future.

Molly would help him somehow. His stomach churned; he wished he had a
Tums, he lived on Tums, his fat tongue always glistened with the
chalky residue of a Tums. But he was out of them.

Whoa, there, Gregor, old fool. You are slipping. With a start he
realized he'd almost missed his exit, and he had to make a sudden dart
across the lanes of the expressway, took the ramp too fast, felt the
whirl of gravity fighting him for control of the car and at last--though
only in this one thing-- regained control. He circled over a bridge to
arrive at Route 175 for another less swift but equally sleek road, and
after a few minutes of zipping through rather attractive Howard County
and the suburban city of Columbia, came to a glass topped pavilion
glinting in the sun.

The exuberance of the place did not faze him. He rather liked shopping
malls; America at her glorious best, all glittery and shiny, all the
people slick and sassy (the women. Lord, the thin, lovely, supple
American women.

Gregor was familiar with American shopping centers-- White Flint was a
favorite. White Marsh out beyond Baltimore, the Inner Harbor in
Baltimore, Owings Mills west of Baltimore, the new Marley Station south
of it, Tyson's Corners in Virginia--because it was Pork Chop's vanity to
be serviced in them. Pork Chop--whoever he was--boasted exemplary trade
craft. Pork Chop hated solitude and privacy, finding safety instead in
mass, particularly in the crowded, bustling venue of the American
shopping center. This suited Gregor perfectly. If he could no longer
justify his existence on the paltry gleanings from his girls, then he
could by his ability to please Pork Chop, whom he had never made
anxious, whose signals he never missed, and whose wants and needs
supplied the pretext for his survival.

Gregor never knew when Pork Chop would demand servicing. It all depended
upon the Washington Post personal ads, which he checked each day. Most
days there was nothing, sometimes weeks would pass: and then, as
yesterday, it would be there.

Darling, I love you. Meet me at D-13-3. Your little Pork Chop.

The code was simple. Gregor simply referred to the previous Sunday's
Post, Section D, page 13. On that page would be an ad for some kind of
chain bookstore well represented in the area, usually a B. Dalton's or a
Waldenbooks.

At the bottom of the ad would be listed the various locations.

The third of them--in this case the Columbia Mall, in a B. Dalton's
advertisement--would be the site for the beginning of the ritual of the
meet on the next day. It was clever and simple and impenetrable, unless
of course one knew the key, and only Gregor knew the key, which he had
received on a special Eyes Only document two years earlier.

Pork Chop had been quiet ever since a furious spurt of activity three
months ago; therefore Gregor was somewhat astonished when he'd come
across the message in yesterday's paper. But it had made him happy,
though it was his bad luck to draw the time-consuming and frequently
exhausting job the same night he had communications duty in the Wine
Cellar, and exactly when Klimov was so furious at him for so many other
failings.

Well, that was more of his rotten luck. He journeyed through the parking
lot like a lost traveler, experiencing one of the real drawbacks of
capitalism: lack of adequate parking places. It was, after all, near
Christmas. The Americans would be out in force today, loading up on
goods for their favorite holiday. But eventually Gregor found a spot in
the far environs, and began the long trek to the building proper.

Suddenly, there was a roar; involuntarily, he ducked, stunned at the
noise. He looked up. Six jets whooshed overhead.

So low! Incredible! They were a kind of thing Gregor had not seen
before, like backward-headed flying crucifixes, their long prows so far
ahead of their stubby straight wings.

And they were green, not silver. Gregor shook his head.

Should I know this airplane?

But the jets were gone then, flashing over the trees.

"They're sure in a hurry," a lady a few feet ahead of him said.

"Must have a fire to go to," Gregor joked.

"Maybe," said the woman with a laugh. "Or girlfriends to show off for."

Inside, it was like the spring, calm and pleasant, climate perfectly
controlled. But Gregor immediately broke into one of his familiar
shirt-drenching sweats, as if he were in the jungle. As he sailed
forward, all business, something caught his eye; and then another thing
and then another! Capitalism!

It was a festival! He loved America! He stopped to admire a particularly
nice sweater in Woody's men's department and they had some nice colorful
ties there too. Then, it was time to eat. He bought a chocolate chip
cookie and a peach yogurt and a bag of popcorn and a chili dog. Only
eventually did he find his way to the store of the ad, B. Dalton. He
stepped into it, browsed for a while, noticing the piles of best sellers
up front. The big book was a lurid thing about a dark KGB plot to
subvert America by infiltrating a television network.

Then, there was a book about a Hollywood actress with the sexual desire
of a stevedore. There, was an inspirational volume by a millionaire
businessman. There were books about ways to make money on the stock
market and to make yourself thin and happy forever, about how to be
aggressive and how to be sensitive and how to get people to like you
better.

That's what I need, he thought.

Gradually, he made his way to the back of the store, to the inevitable
section marked Classics. Here, he dawdled a bit longer. He'd always
wanted to study literature and still loved it, even if he'd actually
been educated all those years back as a chemist. He examined
Shakespeare's Hamlet and Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment and the great
Tolstoi's War and Peace and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Now, this was more like it! Then his fingers found the inevitable copy
of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, exactly the volume that every
bookstore in America would be certain to keep on its shelves. His
fingers touched the fat thing, rubbing it softly. He began to feel
excited, and sent a quick nervous look around the store. It was full of
shoppers, of course, but as an experienced watcher himself, he could see
no visible signs of observation.

The ritual was exact: He would pick it up, turn to page 300 and there
discover a very small piece of paper with one single number on it: 2 it
might say, or perhaps 3. That was all.

To anyone else it would be meaningless. Only Gregor knew that it
indicated he must leave the store, turn to the right--always the
right--and begin to walk through the mall counting exits, and at the
second or the third, leave the building.

Except that this time there was no slip.

Gregor stared in stupefaction. He felt the bell tolling for himself in
his own head. His heart began to break. The air was suddenly hot and
gassy. Pork Chop was such a pedant!

Pork Chop never made mistakes! Pork Chop was slow, calm, steady,
patient!

Gregor felt the panic come over him. Was he being set up? Was this some
kind of ruse? A test? He swallowed harshly, feeling the book grow heavy
in his hands. The damned thing weighed a ton.

"That's a wonderful book," a woman said to him. "I've read it six
times."

"Yes, it's wonderful," said Gregor, staring absurdly at her. Was she an
FBI agent? He swallowed, waiting for her to speak again. He wished he
could breathe, or charge his wan and twisted smile with some
spontaneity. She looked at him with searching eyes, an attractive but
unremarkable American.

It was as if she were about to speak.

But she merely smiled enigmatically as his heart pounded in his chest,
and then walked away.

He looked down at the book; it was shaking in his trembling hands. He
began to flip through the pages while looting his memory for clues. Had
he made some stupid mistake? Was it another bookstore, another mall,
another day? The possibilities raced by like the rushing seconds on a
digital clock. He grew confused. His head ached.

Think, you idiot!

He knew he could not stand there holding the book until his beard grew
and the world ended.

He rifled the pages as his mind imploded on him and like the dart of a
white bird, quick and furtive... a little piece of paper from somewhere
in the five hundreds broke free from the volume and began to pirouette
toward the earth. Gregor watched it flutter, dip, then land. He could
read the message: it was a single integer--i.

Thank God, Pork Chop! You didn't let me down!

His relief was radiant with bliss. His knees shuddered in pleasure. He
took a deep suck of air, felt it flood into his lungs. He put the book
back on the shelf, and turned very adroitly and walked out.

Light as a dancer, Gregor turned to the right, as the absolute rule of
the code demanded. He continued to walk until he found the fourth exit
on the right, and stepped out into the bright sunlight, which made him
blink after the interior of the mall. The bitter chill attacked him
also. He struggled with his sunglasses, then began to walk up the row of
cars that was immediately in front of him as he clung to the right-hand
margin of the sidewalk out of the mall.

He walked on through the crisp air, examining the cars in the row to his
right. At last he noticed a plaid scarf crumpled in a rear window well.

In the summer it might have been a madras jacket or a picnic tablecloth
or even, as it was once, a Scotch cooler: but always it was something
plaid. And always the automobile was different, presumably something
rented under a pseudonym.

Pork Chop was very careful with details like this.

Gregor looked at the vessel of his deliverance. It was a Ford. The
bright sun burned down and the clouds of his own raw breath floated
majestically before him. He could feel the sweat inside his collar begin
to freeze.

Yet he did not move forward; he could not. Something rapped in his
chest. He could not deny that he was still extremely upset.

But he could not just stand there either; nothing attracts attention in
America more than a man standing still in a parking lot. Parking lots
are a thing one goes through on the way to the other destinations; no
one's destination in America is ever just a parking lot. So Gregor
continued his walk until he was out of acres of cars and headed into the
woods, another extremely bad idea.

He headed back.

Do it, he commanded. Time is flying.

He was shaking horribly. He forced himself to go to the car and peeked
in. He could see the briefcase on the floor of the backseat on his side,
its top unzipped.

Just open the door, fool, and do it.

Gregor went to the car. The rear door was unlocked, as usual. He put his
hand on the handle, pressed the button, and-- But then he tried to
remember back, two years ago, when his services to Pork Chop started and
that moment of explanation. Specifically, he pawed through his memory to
recall if it was part of his official instructions that the exit code be
placed between pages 300 and 301, or if that was merely Pork Chop's own
personal signature, something the spy had begun doing on his own. As a
long-time agent-runner, Gregor knew that agents all had signatures,
little things that worked into the ritual of communication
subconsciously so they were unique, a part of the sub-verbal language
between themselves and their cutouts.

Gregor's sense of unease grew palpable. It felt like a brass egg jammed
in his windpipe. The professional part of him, the deep-cover operative
in an enemy country, came bristlingly alive. But so did the coward. He
wanted to weep.

He felt his knees begin to knock. Pork Chop, why are you doing this to
me? Have you grown sloppy. Pork Chop? Have you grown cunning, or greedy?
It happened to agents all the time. Pork Chop, what is going on? He
realized his vanity had betrayed him again; he'd allowed himself to love
Pork Chop as the only steady constellation in his whirling cosmos.

He was a hopeless neurotic, always falling for lovers who were fated to
betray him! It was a pattern, and now Pork Chop was repeating it.
Suddenly, he hated Pork Chop! Pork Chop was slime, offal, defecation!
Pork Chop was. . .

In a blast of desperation, almost more to escape his problems than to
master them, Gregor walked to the other side of the car, where the doors
were locked. He looked around. There was no one coming, though far off
he could see people walking to and from parked cars. He reached in his
pocket, took out a Swiss army knife, and with a swift plunge jammed it
through the rubber seal of window and leaned against it with all his
strength. Nothing happened. He looked around, almost catatonic with
fear. But though he could see others moving in the lot and cars
patrolling for empty spaces, no one was near him and no car came his
way. Once more he leaned heavily upon the handle of the knife, calling
up all the strength that he had, pulling the strength from the well of
his fear. Suddenly, he felt something give. He had managed somehow to
jam the window down an inch. With a mighty shove he got it down another
and another and... he realized now he could get his hand in.

He looked around again, nervously, stunned at what he had done. No, no
one had yet seen him. Breathing hard-- good Lord, he was going to have a
heart attack!--he pushed his fat hand through the slot of the window,
reached for the lock button, and with an--oof! almost, no, almost,
yes!--got it open. Disengaging, he quickly opened the door. The smell of
the new car rose to his nostrils, a rich American smell. He reached
across the front seat and tugged at the briefcase and--it would not
come! There seemed to be a bit of an impediment, as if he were pulling
from the wrong angle, and Gregor gave a little tug and-- Gregor had a
brief impression of an insect buzzing swiftly by his face, or perhaps it
was more like the sudden swoop of a small, darting bird, an angry
swallow or hummingbird flashing by, harmless but nevertheless confusing,
disorienting, completely stunning, and then in the next second, even as
these impressions accumulated, he heard the sound of a dense thunk,
metallic and vivid with texture, and then the low hum of something
shivering rapidly. Gregor stood back, stupefied, trying to make sense of
it all. His heart began to thunder again. Quickly, he checked himself;
he seemed all right and-- Then he saw, sunk into the car roof just a few
inches beyond his eyes, something particularly bright and evil. It was
the blade of a vicious fighting knife, smooth with oil and glinting in
the light. Its top edge was savagely serrated, all the better for sawing
through flesh, and, driven with enormous force, it had sunk nearly half
its length into the car roof.

What blade remained visible was a long, graceful shank of steel. At its
base were two prongs; it appeared to have no grip at all.

Gregor recognized it immediately; it was the blade of a Spetsnaz
ballistic knife, a weapon carried by the GRU's Special Raiding Forces,
his country's equivalent of the American Green Berets or the British
Special Air Service regiment.

The blade was locked onto its hilt atop a powerful coiled spring; it
could be used as a conventional fighting knife, but when a button of the
cross guard was triggered, the spring sprang, and the blade was driven
forward with enormous velocity, literally fired. It could kill silently
at twenty-five meters and was a special assassination weapon not only of
Spetsnaz but of KGB and all the Eastern bloc secret services, a favorite
device of the masters of the mokrie dela, the wet job, at the KGB
procedures school at Karlovy Vary, on the Black Sea. Gregor bent to the
case and saw the gleaming metal of the hilt inside and a wire rigged
from the trigger button in the cross guard through the case to the Floor.
It was designed so that when he picked the case up, it fired through the
open mouth of the case.

He sat back. He realized that if he'd come through the unlocked door,
the proper door, and had been leaning across the case as he tried to
lift it, the blade would have speared him through the center chest; he
would have been dead in seconds, choking on his own blood in the
backseat of this little car.

Someone had planned his murder.

He vomited.

Then, very quickly, he began to walk away.

** ** **

Poo Hummel said, "Mommy. Mommy. Airplanes!" She ran to the window, drawn
by the roar of the low-flying craft. Herman, her guardian, watched her
go, took a quick look at his watch.

So late, he thought.

I would have thought it would have been earlier. They are doing such a
bad job of it.

"Poo, you be careful," Beth Hummel screamed from her bedroom.

But Poo had her nose pressed against the glass, drawn by the noise, the
spectacle of the big, slow ships zooming overhead toward the mountain.

Herman was next to her, with a hand on her shoulder.

"Herman, what are they doing?" Poo asked.

"Oh, I don't know," said Herman. "They probably came to show off for all
the children of the town, to make them happy and excited with their
noise and to make the snow melt faster."

"They look like scarecrows," said Poo.

Herman wasn't listening. Suddenly grave, he said, "Let's go into the
basement, all right. Poo? We'll take your mommy and your sister into the
basement and we'll have a little party."

But Poo had made the kind of connection of phenomena, intuitive but
brilliant, with which children often astonish adults.

"Herman," she asked, squinching up her eyes, "did the airplanes come for
you?"

"No," said Herman. But he knew men would, soon enough. And he knew what
he was expected to do then.

"Herman, I like you," said Poo as he lifted her up. She gave him a
squeeze and a kiss.

"I like you too, Poo."

** ** **

You feel like you're the king of creation in an A-10.

You're up front and the plane itself--wings, engines, rudders is way
back. You sit at the end of the long snout in a fishbowl wide and bright
to the world and the only thing in your head-up display is a little
rubbery smudge of nose. It's really just you, slung out there. That's
why pilots like Leo Pell loved the ship; you really fly her, you're
really airborne, on the wind. It's World War II stuff. Jugs and Bostons
low-level over the hedgerows of occupied Europe.

"Delta Six, this is Papa Tango One, do you copy?" asked Major Pell in
The Green Pig, leading Tango flight toward South Mountain, which rose
like a glob of ice cream before him.

"Uh, roger, I copy. Papa Tango One," came the response in his earphones
from his forward air controller, on the ground with Delta.

"You want us to rough up this old mountain. Delta Six?" asked Pell.

"That's a big rug," said the FAC. "Twenty mike-mike only."

"Uh, I got that. Delta, and we're only packing twenty mike-mike. Papa
Tango to Tango Flight, let's arm guns, boys."

Pell's finger snaked off his stick to his armament control panel on the
left lower quadrant of his instrument board; he hit a switch and the red
gun ready light went on up at the top of the panel. His hand back on the
stick, his thumb grazed the little nipple, red and lively, beneath it.

His plane felt giddy, alive, teenaged. Pig was lighter than a dream
today because she didn't have the usual wing load of external stores for
air support jobs and wouldn't even be firing her heavy 30-mm gun that
ran through the center of the fuselage. Instead, she wore the two gun
pods under her wings that Leo and his boys had labored so furiously to
mount up.

"Papa Tango, Delta Six, do you copy?"

"I copy."

"Leo, you all clear on targeting?"

"Hey, Delta, I read you loud and clear."

"Leo, they tell me there's some kind of tarpaulin or something on top of
the mountain and some breastworks or trenches or something right at its
edges. You want to put your ordnance into the trenches, you got that?"

"Map coordinates bravo zero niner. Delta, I read you, and I've got the
map on my knee and I have visually acquired the target."

"You may commence your run anytime, then. Papa Tango."

"I read you. Delta. Tango Flight, time to party. On my mark. Tango
Flight, five-second bursts at max altitude 3200, do you read?"

"With you, flight leader," came a stereo of replies.

Then the smart-ass Tarnower. "Wahoo, Leo, let's do this sucker up good."

"Watch the chatter on the air. Tango Two," said Leo, a stickler for
combat protocol. But he himself felt the exultation.

The mountain, white as a sugarloaf, was quite near now, and below it all
the patchwork of Maryland spread out like a pale geometry problem of
infinite detail, cross-hatched cornfields, clumps of black-broccoli
trees, silvery roads.

He took a deep breath and slid from formation like a gull, feeling--even
through the network of strapping, the constriction of the flight suit,
the heaviness of the helmet-- the swooshing, stomach-feathering sense of
gravity releasing its hold. Down the plane slid, down, down, on a line
like a baseball fired toward home. He flew straight and level, taking no
evasive action, confident that his bus could not be budged from the air
and that his butt could not be peppered by small arms, because he sat,
actually. Inside a titanium bathtub configured into the cockpit. Leo's
sensations speeded up immensely. He had fired many times before and in
'Nam he'd fired live at gooks in his T-28 with six 50s. But twenty
mike-mike against real bogies fifteen minutes out of home without even
having to go to war with Russia to bring it off!

Goddamn, and wahoo yourself. Tango Two.

In his head-up display, a sheet of Plexiglas on which the complex
deflective computations for nailing a scudding T-72 were projected, the
targeting angle solved neat as a bow tie, Leo saw just mountain against
the floating neon circles of his gunsight. He had no trouble bringing
the two circles together and holding the mountain in them. He could see
the brown patch of canvas or whatever, looking like an OD handkerchief
on the mountaintop, and there appeared to be some movement in the trench
at its edge. His blood sang in his ears.

The mountain grew before him. He checked his angle of attack indicator
and discovered himself sailing in at thirty degrees, just right, just
the way the books said to do it.

Leo touched the gun nipple.

He loved this part best. The twenty mike-mikes shuddered under him,
their seven barrels whirling in their pods under the fuselage like
threshing machines. He saw the tracers float out before him, fall away,
disappear into the mountain.

Where they fell, they destroyed. It was awesome, godlike.

The snow rose in a cyclone of disturbance as the burst leapt across the
tarp and at the trench.

Leo fired for five seconds until the mountain was real as a nightmare
before him. He pulled up, hearing in his headphones a litany of
destruction as the other elements in the flight placed their bursts in
the target zone.

But then: "Goddamn, Tango Leader, I have a goddamn missile lock-on."

It was Tango Four, Leo could tell, his voice broken with fear.

"Go to ECM, Tango Four, dispense your chaff and evade, evade--"

Leo heard the explosion.

"Ah, fuck, he, fuck, he got me, goddamn, filling with, goddamn, smoke,
ah, shit--"

"Flame out your bad engine, son," Leo said, "and ride it down. Tango
Four, you're okay."

Leo turned his head back as he climbed and turned, and saw his flight
spread out behind him as the mountain shrank to a lump. Tango Four
pulled from the parade of ships, pulling out, its left-side General
Electric bleaching the day of color with white fire. It began to slide
downward.

"Ride it down. Tango Four, you can pull an abort in a farmyard, plenty
of parking places down there--" Leo argued, a sane voice in a crazy
world.

"She's going to blow," said Tango Four, "and I'm ejecting."

"Negative, Four, you haven't the aiti--"

But it was too late. Tango Four panicked and ejected at an altitude of
four hundred feet. His chute was only half open when he hit the ground.
The big plane hit just ahead of him, detonating in a huge smear of fire.

"All right. Tango Flight, let's get it together," Leo said to dead
silence on the horn. "Goddamnit, Delta Six, where'd that fucking SAM
come from? Who the fuck are these guys?"

"Tango, we had no idea they had SAM capability. Shit, it looked like a
Stinger."

The Stinger was very bad news. Designated the FIM-92A, it could reach
speeds of Mach 2.2 and used proportional navigation and passive infrared
homing to engage high speed, extremely maneuverable targets from just
about any angle, out to a range of 3.5 miles. It was also highly
resistant to electrocountermeasure jamming. It was a bitch. Nobody
wanted to go into Stinger country.

"Goddamn," said a Tango flyer, "Goddamn, Leo, I got a bad hydraulic
light on, I'm pulling out."

"That's a big negative," said Leo, "we got some business to finish.
Delta Six, you want us to hit it again?"

A new voice came on the net.

"Uh, Tango, Colonel Puller here, that's an affirmative to the max, you
got that? We've got some kids about to jump off against the position,
and they need all the help they can get."

"Leo, this goddamn hydraulic is--"

"Off the air. Tango Seven, do you copy. Off the god damned air!"

Leo led the flight around in a twelve-mile left-hand circle for a second
run. The mountain grew before him.

"All right. Tango Flight," he ordered, "we're going in in two elements,
I'll take the first element, the two and three ships. We'll come in
north to south, say at 2200, evasive action, electrocountermeasures.
I'll dump some flares if they send the Stingers up. Captain Tarnower,
you take the second element, the six, seven, and eight ships, from east
to west.

Okay, on my mark divide. Let's mark it, guys, and now."

Leo pulled from the formation, dipped to the earth, seeing in his rear
mirror that three of his six remaining ships stayed with him, while
Tarnower, in the Tango Five ship, banked right, taking two birds in
behind him.

Who the fuck are these guys? Leo was thinking. Where the hell did they
get Stingers?

"Let's shake it. Tango Flight," he ordered.

"Flight leader sounds solid," said Puller to the FAC.

They could see the dark ships splitting into two formations, rolling
apart from each other and getting down to an assault altitude.

"Leo's the best," said the FAC. "Humps tourists for Continental. But
damn, he likes that Green fig."

Around them, the Delta commandos stood watching the show. The drifting
tendril of smoke from Tango Four's crash inscribed a crazy line against
the bright blue sky.

Puller blinked. His head ached, all the noise from the jets. He looked
at his watch--1442. He could see the National Guard trucks pulled off
about halfway up the hill, where Aggressor Force had blown the road and
had made out some activity through his binoculars as the officers got
the men out and into some kind of attack formation.

"They're going in again, sir," said Skazy.

"Lookin' good, lookin' real good. Tango Flight," the FAC said into his
microphone.

The planes hit the mountain from two directions, one flight then the
other. When they fired. Puller could see the empty cannon shells cascade
from their pods in a fur of smoke. The tracers plunged from under the
fuselage like darts. Where they fell against the mountain they ripped
it.

But something was wrong.

"They're firing much longer," said Puller. "Goddamnit, they're firing
much longer."

The FAC said, "Uh, I think some of the guys are really pouring it on."

"Bullshit," said Puller, "they're just hose piping their ammo away so
they don't have to go back."

He grabbed the mike away from the FAC.

"Tango Flight, Delta Six here, goddammit, you men, slow your fire down,
you're wasting rounds on nothing."

"Tango Flight, this is Tango Leader, you guys conserve your ammo, you
hear. Goddamnit."

"Leo, I'm dry," a voice came.

"Six, you pumped most of your shit into Washington County, goddammit, I
saw--"

"Missiles," said Skazy on the ground. "They've fired more missiles."

"Heatseekers," said the FAC.

The missiles, leaking thin streaks of white gas, went like fast dogs for
the planes, which themselves began to fantail and scud, breaking this
way and that as the missiles hunted them. They broke from their
formation like the petals of an immense rose unfolding over the white
mountain. Most of the missiles failed to lock on, whirling off until
they burned through their few seconds of fuel, at which point their
contrails disappeared and they fell to earth. But-- "Missile lock-on,
goddamn, missile lock-on!" came the scream over the radio. A missile hit
an A-10 engine with a thud heard on the ground, and dissolved it in a
burst of light; the plane wobbled; a second missile, seeking the larger
heat signature of the burning power plant, plunged into it, and the
plane fell from the sky dead.

"Goddamn, I've got no controls, nothing's respon--"

The sentence ended in a cornfield.

"Leo, I'm down to zero lead," came the call.

"Leo, my hydraulics are shot. They put some shit into my wings."

"Leo, my controls are all mushy."

"Tango Flight, you stay on station," said Leo Pell.

"What's your ammo?" Puller demanded over the radio.

"Sir, I'm all dry," came the response.

"Delta Six, this is Tango Leader. I've got about seven seconds left.
I'll go in again. Tango Flight, form up on Captain Tarnower and head for
home."

"Leo," said the FAC, "you can't go in there alone."

"Hey, I've got seven seconds of rock and roll left, you think I'm going
to park this pig with it?"

"Jesus," said the FAC to Puller. "If he's got the only signature in the
sky, their heatseekers will nail his butt sure.

Those were Stingers, too, the best. Where the hell they get Stingers?"

Puller didn't answer.

"What's his name again?"

"Leo Pell."

"Major Pell, this is Colonel Puller, do you copy?"

"I copy. Delta Six."

"I am advised you have a low to zero survival probability."

"I came to dance. Colonel, not to sit."

"Good luck, then. Tango Leader."

Okay now, it was just Leo Pell and the mountain. He wasn't worried about
the small-arms stuff, though a spider web jinked his bubble where a LMG
round had popped through at about-ten o'clock, because he was sitting in
his titanium bathtub, carrying self-sealing tanks, and had plenty of
redundancy in his control systems. And he wasn't worried about
delivering his packages. Going in wasn't the problem, even if you could
see the tracers floating up to swat you. You were okay going in because
your exhaust was behind you and their heatseekers wouldn't see it to
read it and chase it. You were okay until you showed them your hot ass.

When you passed the crest, you were wide open. You were like a bitch in
heat and the missiles, like stud hounds, came up after you with one
thing on their mind. They wanted you up the ass, that's all there was
for them.

So Leo, who wanted to live almost as much as he wanted the sheer
gut-thumping joy of pumping twenty mike-mike into the mountain, resolved
to juke in like a rock'n' roll melody, up and down and down and up,
straighten out for his seven seconds of deliverance, then cut hard to
the left, dive for the deck, keep his engines astern from the mountain
as much as possible, and just maybe Aggressor Force might not punch him
out.

The mountain was fat as a tit in a centerfold. Leo began to evade. He
pumped his rudder pedals, he diddled his decelerons, and he rode his
stick. His ship. Green Pig, dipped and skidded through the air in a
flight pattern that was more like a controlled catastrophe than a
conscious design. And in his harness Leo felt the plane's moves to the
pit of his stomach and to his heart, which seemed to have gone on
vacation for this last long ride.

Meanwhile, blobs of color floated up to smash him. He felt as if he were
going down the drain of a brightly lit bubble bath. Strange radiances,
odd visions, nightmares, fantasies, dope hallucinations, fever dreams,
all floated by. There was a queer underwater quality to it, aquamarine
and pastel, everything wonderfully graceful and stately. His plane
bumped when hit; they were hitting the Fig pretty regularly now, all the
guns on the mountain having their way with her.

He felt air suddenly as a stitch work of holes sparked through the bubble
just over his head; something like a firecracker went off in the
cockpit. His left arm went numb.

His mirror blew off. Smoke, acrid and rancid, began to fill the cockpit.
Didn't they know the No Smoking sign was lit?

"Tango Leader, watch yourself, lookin' good, lookin' real good," FAC was
saying.

Okay now, Leo thought, get in real close, blow those mother-fuckers
away, hurt'em, hurt'end bad now.

Leo saw the mountaintop lined up in the floating circles of his head-up
display. The trees were alive with fire and light and commotion. He
checked his airspeed, 220, his altitude, 1,450, his angle of attack, 37,
the onrushing hump, corrected his deflection just a touch, and it was
gun time.

He hit the nipple.

The guns spent themselves in seven long seconds. The twenty mike-mike
bursts flicked out like flung pebbles and splashed into the huge sheet
of canvas. He had no idea if he was doing any damage at all; he just
watched the tracers sink into it.

The crest flashed by and the last few shells flew out into Maryland. Leo
cut his throttle, hit his left rudder pedal, banged his decelerons,
dipped his nose, and began to dive for the deck and bank at the same
moment as his right ailerons cranked up. Something white and mad flashed
by as one missile missed, followed in a second by another. No lock-ons
yet. A third burned past him from underneath.

He felt cold air again, more of it. The bubble around him seemed to
liquifv into smaller bubbles, until finally it was a cascade of
glittering diamonds. Smoke rose from beneath him, everywhere. The
controls were a mess. The stick had turned into a delinquent child, a
horrible son with a mind of his own and no respect for poor old Dad. Leo
could see no sky, but only Maryland, the Free State, big and white,
reaching up to absorb him.

The plane hit in a wild blur of thrown snow and earth, and for an
instant there was no fire and then there was nothing but fire, fire
everywhere, fire forever. The fire rose like a ritual offering. Smoke
peeled away from it, fanning in the breeze.

"Shit," said the FAC stupidly, "Goddamnit. What I want to know is, who
are those guys? Where'd they get Stingers? What are they, the U.S.
Army?"

"We don't know who they are. Kids?" asked Puller.

"What?"

"Kids, did he have kids?"

"Ah, he had a lot of kids. Five, six, I don't know. Six of 'em, I think.
Goddamn, Leo Pell dead, I can't believe it!"

"The good ones always have kids, for some reason," Puller said. "I don't
know why, I've never figured it out, but the real good ones always leave
a mess of kids."

He turned to Skazy, murder in his eyes.

"Beep the Guard," he said. "Get'em moving."

1500.

"This is absurd, isn't it?" said Peter Thiokol, extravagantly offended.
"I mean, the reason you're trying to find out who breaches security at
the South Mountain installation is so that we can figure out who's in
there and then from that maybe I can figure out a way to get by the
elevator shaft door, but now you're interrogating me."

The two agents had little appreciation of the absurd.

They weren't collectors of ironies, either, and in some future time they
wouldn't hoist a glass in salute to the ludicrousness of this moment.

"Dr. Thiokol, there were thirteen senior people in the MX Basing Modes
Group at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that the Department of the Air
Force Strategic Warfare Committee employed to design South Mountain.
There are arrest warrants on all of them. It's a technicality, designed
to speed things up, just in case. Now, we have some questions, I'm
afraid."

Peter wondered if he had the energy to explain anything.

He felt himself tumbling toward incoherence, as he had before his
students that morning. And he knew also where the questioning would go,
where it would have to go: toward Megan. He could not stand to go over
it, to work out the theories. He had just put it into his bottom drawer
and thrown away the key. It was in the deep under-mountain silo of his
subconscious.

But the two agents were grimly bland men of indeterminate age and strong
will who simply plunged ahead. They were probably not all that different
from the Delta officers: hardworking types who drew their power and
identities from the potent organizations they had chosen to join and to
whose dictates they would not be disloyal.

"For the record, you're the son of Dr. and Mrs. Nels Thiokol of Edinah,
Minnesota."

"Dr. and Dr. Thiokol. My mother was a damned good oh-gyn. My father was
a surgeon. Do we have to go through my whole life?"

They did. This went on for a little while and he answered all the stupid
who/when questions curtly, pretending to a charmless boredom in his
eyes. But as usual, he felt himself tightening when it came to his
twisted adolescence, his wretched relationship with his father, whom he
could never please until it occurred to him he wasn't supposed to please
him, and what this led to, all the schools, the expulsions, the business
with the sleeping pills, the time he thought of now as only a long dark
tunnel as he crawled through slime toward the light.

"Yet you got excellent grades through all this. And your test scores--"

"I'm smart, yes. I finally got my act together my sophomore year at
Harvard."

"What did you discover there?"

Yes, it was the crucial question of his career. He remembered it well,
November of '66, that funky, dreary room in Brattle Hall, which he
shared with Mike De Masto, who was now a shrink in Oakwood, just outside
of the glamorous burg of Dayton. Mike had long hair to his shoulder
blades that year and was about Peace. Mike smoked dope and read his
sacred texts and organized, orchestrated, and led the burgeoning Harvard
antiwar movement. Which of course meant he was getting laid, sometimes
two, three, and four times a day. Meanwhile Peter, the soggy little
grind with a history of instability, spent the months in the exile of
the library, depressed near unto suicide, working like a demon to figure
out a way to keep himself alive. And one day he found it.

He found the bomb.

"I became interested in strategic thought at Harvard," he told the FBI
agents. "The bomb, you know. The big bomb. For reasons that were
doubtlessly pathological, I drew some queer comfort from an instrument
that could wipe us all out in a blinding flash. It gave point to the
pointlessness."

Peter still remembered the image of the nuclear mushroom climbing from
its fiery birthing, clawing ever skyward, opening, devouring its way
through the heart of civilization.

The bomb became a kind of focal point for his existence: he lost himself
in its culture, its byways, its traditions, its intricacies. He learned
how to build one, how to hide one, how to plant one, how to use one, how
to deliver one. He pored over the interesting work in strategic thought
being done at Rand and later at Herman. Kahn's Hudson Institute.

The strategic thinkers, men like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter,
Henry Rowan, and Andy Marshall, were his heroes, outlined against the
blue-gray November sky of his imagination. His senior thesis reflected
their thought but was his own in the way a promising apprentice can take
the line of the masters and push it way out until it's something
altogether new: Strategic Reality: Crisis Thinking for a Nuclear Age,
which was later published by Random House.

In fact, everything that Peter ever became, that he ever got, he owed to
the bomb. Sometimes, he thought back on that crimped, desperate,
achingly lonely little shit he'd been in prep school.

You beat them, he'd tell himself, swelling with radiance at the power of
his becoming what he wanted to become, which was important. Everything
you have is because of the bomb.

And most of all, he had Megan because of the bomb.

He'd met her in England when he was on his Rhodes studying the impact of
weapons systems on policy decisions in immediate pre-Great War Europe in
a political science seminar at Balliol. She was on a Rhodes, too,
studying art at Keeble, after four years at Bennington. They met at the
Bodleian, far from the radical unrest of America and the Vietnam War.
She was dark and Jewish and he'd known she was American because she was
blowing a bubble.

I beg your pardon, he said, is that real Double-Bubble?

Fleer's Double-Bubble?

She just looked at him. No smile, her frank eyes devouring him, her
beautiful jaw ripping away at the gum. She blew another bubble. Then she
reached into her purse and pushed a single piece of genuine Fleer's
Double-Bubble across the three-hundred-year-old oak table at him.

Who are you?

He told only the truth.

I'm the smartest guy you ever met in your life, he had said.

"Did you meet any Communists at Oxford?" one of the agents said.

Peter just looked at him. What could one do with such idiots?

"No. Look, I don't see any of those people anymore. I haven't seen them
in years."

The agents exchanged looks. He could tell they thought he was being
"difficult." They tried a different approach.

"Of the eleven senior members of the MX Basing Modes Group, were any of
them politically suspect?" asked one of the agents.

"You've seen the files. I haven't."

The two agents looked at each other, then sighed. One of them wrote
something down.

"I'm running very low on time here, guys," Peter said, smiling with what
he thought was a great deal of Ivy League charm. They appeared not to
hear.

"Well, then, psychologically suspect? It seems to be a pattern among
senior defense analysts, and defense engineers and researchers,
particularly the farther reaches of--" The agent struggled for a word.

"The farther reaches of blowing the world up, right?"

"Yes, Dr. Thiokol. Anyway, our investigations have shown that a
significant number of these men and women burn out.

That is, lose heart, have radical changes in religion, sexual
orientation, political ideology."

"It's a very intense life. You're gaming out the end of the world nearly
every day, trying to figure new wrinkles, new ways to do it. Nobody gets
old."

"What about this Dr. Michael Greene?"

"Mike? Mike found out he was queer. Anyway, he bailed out before we'd
really gotten to the interesting stuff."

"He's disappeared, that's what makes him so interesting.

And he's got AIDS, did you know that. Dr. Thiokol?"

"No, I didn't. My God, that's awful."

"Isn't it possible that a man who's dying--well, he'd be vulnerable
emotionally to pressures or, rather, too fragile to withstand them. And
someone--"

He didn't know what to say. He knew the weakness of each member of the
MX Basing Modes Group. Mike Greene's was for thin-hipped Gentile
athletes, Maggie Berlins for greasy mechanics. Niles Fallow had an
alcoholic wife; Jerry Theobald suffered from almost incredible drabness;
Mary Francis Harmon was a virgin who talked dirty; Sam Bellows was
perpetually horny, yet so hangdog he never got laid; Jeff Thaxter was a
workaholic who abused his kids; Jim Diedrickson had a son with cystic
fibrosis; Maury Reeves's wife Jill walked out on him for a Marine
colonel. And on and on... each of them held in a matrix of weakness and
duty. They used to have a joke about what they were doing. They called
it the Revenge of the Nerds: little techies, sealed away in anonymous
offices in the beast of a building complex called the Johns Hopkins
Applied Physics Lab out in picturesque Howard County, figuring out
whether the world would end in fire or ice, and if fire, how hot, what
color, spreading at what rate, and influenced by what wind patterns?

At last they moved to him.

"Any approaches in the last few months? Any sense of being watched? Any
peculiarities in your mail, say, being intercepted, your house being
broken into, your papers messed up "Absolutely not," he said,
swallowing hard.

They missed it.

"What about your wife? You hear from her?"

"Leave her out of it, please. She's--she's off somewhere, that's all."

"The marriage. When did it break up?"

"Nine months ago. I don't talk about it with anybody, do you
understand?"

"Megan Wilder, she never gave up her maiden name?"

Peter didn't like this at all.

"I said I'd prefer not to discuss my private life. She's with another
man now, all right? That's all there is to say. I upset her, she went
with somebody else. How much longer is this going to take?"

"When did you last see her?"

"She came up to Baltimore two weeks ago. It was a kind of a stab at
reconciliation. It was kind of okay at the beginning, but the next
morning it turned into catastrophe again."

"This was before or after your breakdo--"

"It was months afterward. That was in July, when I left the committee.
But it was no big deal. It was a very mild nervous breakdown, yes,
created by a great deal of work stress and the end of inv marriage. I
just felt used up and incapable of being with other human beings. I
spent four weeks at a very discreet loony bin in Ellicott City, where I
reread the collected works of Agatha Christie and talked to an
insufferable fool about my God complex. In the end I allowed him to
convince me that I wasn't that august gentleman. I was too smart for the
job description."

The agents didn't crack a smile at this deflection. Nevertheless,
tactically the gambit worked; both agents missed his discomfort, and the
interrogation headed into less interesting

"Now, let's go back to this Mike Greene..."

The agents asked their little loaded questions, trying to probe or trick
him. But it wasn't much of a contest. Peter began to feel a little like
Raskolnikov--superior, implacable, a "new kind of man." He could see
them set up their ambushes, and popped counter ambushes on them, reducing
them to hostile silence. They couldn't touch him, and in time they
understood this themselves. When they got close they didn't know it;
they couldn't read him. In time, perhaps, they could break him down and
get at... at t(, but they didn't have time. Also, he saw, they were a
little bit afraid of him by now, and a little bit unhinged by the
theater of reality swirling around them.

The surrender was prosaic, without ritual.

One of them finally said, "We're going to leave you with a card. If you
should think of something, you call us."

So Peter had his perverse little victory. Mess with Peter Thiokol and
see what it gets you!

Peter looked out the window. He could see the mountain itself. He felt a
little of that radiant selfhood again. It thrilled and pleased him.

I'm the smartest boy in the class! I can do anything!

Then why couldn't you hang on to the one person you ever loved, he asked
himself.

"Don't go yet," he said suddenly.

He rose, went to the window. Outside, on the plain, he could see the
jagged streaks of smoke from the wrecked jets rising funereally against
the bright blue air. From up on the mountain, the sounds of small-arms
fire reached him; the National Guard Infantry, like the Brits of World
War I, having taken their wages these long years, now were dying.

He could see Dick Puller hunched over the radio gear, talking
frantically to his Guardsman on the mountain; meanwhile, the Delta
officers stood by. They looked restless, even hungry, and desperate with
frustration. Skazy, their gloomy leader, was clenching and unclenching
his hands in anger.

You think you got problems, Peter thought.

He turned to the two agents.

Time to face it, Peter, he told himself. Time to face it at last. Time
to stop denying the thing that's been eating at your stomach lining all
these months and that put you in the bin.

"I think my wife betrayed South Mountain," he said.

** ** **

Phuong clutched the M-16. They whirled over the mountain, and as they
shot up, she felt the strangeness in her stomach; it was as if a window
had been opened and the cool air could blow in. The deck beneath her
began to rattle and shiver.

"Small arms," one of the crewmen screamed over the roar of the engine.

She looked; across from her the black Americans, all dressed up like
frogmen, clung together. Their eyes were eggs. Her partner, the blond
man called Teagarden, another frogman, stared into space, his eyes
locked in a faraway glare.

His lips moved.

Then they were over the mountain, sliding down its side at an angle, the
craft around them feeling warped and broken.

She had seen helicopters die before. You always wondered what it was
like when they blazed in flame, then plunged to earth and hit with a
detonation like a bomb. Later you went to see them. They looked like the
shedded skins of insects, broken metal husks on the floor of the earth.
Inside you could see the men, burned meat; the faces were so terrible.
Then more helicopters would come and it was time to go back into the
tunnels.

"Hang on, everybody," the crew chief shouted. "Touch down."

The chopper hit hard. Dust and smoke flew; the air was heavy with
vibration. Suddenly men in camouflage, their faces green, their manner
urgent, were among them.

"Out, out. Come on, into the trench," they were shouting.

They scrambled from the helicopter to a fresh ditch nearby, jumping in
to find other men there.

"Fire in the hole," somebody yelled; a huge explosion that sounded like
a charge from a terror bomber high up in the clouds where it could not
be heard clubbed her in the diaphragm. Trees flew through the air; smoke
poured around her. She coughed, taking in the acrid odor of gunpowder.

Mother, it's all so familiar, said her daughter.

"Okay, Rats," said the leader-officer. "That was thirty pounds of C-4
and primacord planted into what our maps tell us was once upon a time
the entrance to the main shaft of the old McCreedy and Scott Number Four
mine. Let's take a look-see and find out if we punched a hole into it
for you."

They stood and moved toward the smoke. All around, trees had been
blasted flat; the snow was black and the smoke still gushed from the
crater. Above, the mountain, dense with more trees, rose at a steep
angle. They were at its base, completely isolated in'he forest. The
sounds of gunfire came from far away, and a few other soldiers crouched
around, keeping watch.

"I think we poked through," said one of the soldiers.

"That was a shaped charge; it ought to have cut real deep."

"Okay," said the small black man, "let me just check this sucker out."

With a surprising agility he lowered himself into the gap in the earth.
In seconds he was back.

"Hoo boy. Got us a tunnel," he said. "One long, mean mothafucking
tunnel. Party time coming. Jack." He smiled; his teeth were very white
and he radiated an electric confidence.

The man Teagarden had explained. This black soldier knew tunnels also;
he'd been in them in her country, spent a long time in them. He was a
great tunnel fighter.

He now winked at her.

"Me and this lady," he said to the others, "we the whole show now. This
old-time stuff for us, right, pretty lady?"

Yes, it was true. Black men had come into the tunnels too. She had
killed black men. They were as brave as any of them.

She smiled, but it wasn't much of a smile.

"Okay," said an officer, opening a case, "what we got here is the
original 1932 map of Number Four. Shit, this was some operation; you
look back through the trees, you see that gap? That's where the railroad
went. Some of the old track is still there. And the foundations from
some of the buildings are still here. Anyway, as we figure it, this
shaft'll take you in maybe five hundred feet. Then you get to what they
call the lateral tunnel, the connector that held all the actual mining
shafts together. There were five deep mining shafts they called Alice,
Betty, Connie, Dolly, and Elizabeth. Betty, Connie, and Dollie were the
bitches: they caved in. But Alice and Elizabeth ought to still be there.
And they should be in pretty good shape, although nobody can say for
sure, because sometimes there's shaft erosion based on moisture, earth
shifts, anything. So you head on back through them maybe one thousand
feet. Anywhere beyond that point you may run into intersections with the
water Hues from over the years. We called around to a batch of mining
engineers. They think the Hues ought to be passable, though it's going
to be real tough going. Uphill all the way. Anyway, if you get close
enough to the installation, you'll hear'em; the ground is a great
conductor. Your target would be the exhaust shafts of corrugated metal
that run out of the silo. If you reach those shafts, you let us know.
We'll get a Delta unit here in two minutes, and you can take'em in the
back door."

"What we do if we run into any little strange men in there?" said the
small black soldier.

"Just like in 'Nam, you waste'em. But there won't be anybody in there
except ghosts. Ghosts don't bite. You all set?"

"Yes, sir," said Teagarden.

"Okay, I want a radio check the first two hundred feet. (Jail signs:
You're Alpha, Witherspoon; Teagarden, you're Baker.

I'm Bat Six, okay? Any questions. Miss. Phuong, any questions?"

Phuong offered a tight little smile but shook her head no.

"Okay, and God bless you," said the officer. "We're all praying for
you."

"Let's go to tunnelsville, you peoples," said the small black man with
another of his smiles.

And they began to enter the smoky shaft.

Darkness swallowed them.

** ** **

Puller could hear the unsureness in the National Guard captain's voice.
It was close to panic.

"Th-there's a lot of smoke from up ahead. Delta Six," the man was saying
from up on the mountain. "We can't see too good."

"Bravo, this is Delta Six," Puller said, staring in frustration at the
white hump a mile before him. "Are you taking fire?"

"No, sir. At least they're not shooting at us yet. I think they're
waiting to see if the planes are coming back. There was a lot of gunfire
on that mountain. Colonel."

"Bravo, you've got to move now. The longer you wait, the harder it's
going to be. You've got to get your people into the assault line and get
them up the hill."

"Colonel," said Skazy, "let me get up there. I can--"

"Shut up, Major. Bravo, do you read?"

"Some of the men don't want to leave the trucks."

"Christ, he hasn't even got'em out of the trucks yet," Puller said to no
one in particular.

"Bravo, this is Delta Six."

"I copy, Delta."

"Look, son, let me talk you through this, okay? I've been on a few hill
jobs in my time." Dick's voice was reassuring, authoritative. He'd take
this guy in and make him his and make him perform.

"Yes, sir," came the voice, all thought of commo protocol having
vanished. "We've been on exercises for years. It's just so--so
different."

"In combat, confusion is normal, son. Okay, you want to cross your line
of departure, if possible, with platoons abreast and squads abreast
within the platoons. You want the squads in column rather than file, so
that you can respond instantly with a broad front of heavy fire if you
make contact. Got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your sergeants ought to be able to handle the men," said Puller,
knowing that sergeants may be ornery, bassackwards assholes, but they
were the gears that made an army-- any army--operate.

"Get your sergeants involved directly. Brief them with the officers and
speak to them directly. You want to minimize levels of interpretation,
and your officers are probably too distant from the men. The men are
going to want the reassurance of the familiar."

"Yes, sir."

There was silence from the mountain. The seconds ticked by. Dick lit
another cigarette. Its harshness somehow soothed him. Around, several of
the Delta officers stood with binoculars.

"He should have picked out his LD and hit it from the trucks running,"
said one.

"Yeah, and he should have been tied in with Air," said the other, "and
gone on the dime."

Sure, they were right. But they were wrong too. Puller thought.
Unblooded troops need to be coaxed and nudged; nurtured. You need a
mother for your first fight, and a daddy for the next hundred. Then you
need a body bag or a shrink.

The National Guard officer's name was Thomas Barnard and he knew he was
in way over his head. The volume of gunfire during the aerial attack had
upset him greatly. He was, furthermore, not exactly sure who awaited
them; the order from the Governor had simply obligated them to emergency
duty at the disposal of the United States Army under a phase four
("nuclear emergency") alert at the specified locale.

The unit had been very close to the end of its two weeks of active duty,
and the men were not happy to clamber aboard trucks for the hour drive
from Fort Richie to this godforsaken spot.

And they were furthermore baffled to detruck and discover themselves in
the middle of some movie. These were mainly young blue-collar workers
from the Baltimore area who had signed up because the weekend a month
and the two weeks a year of low intensity army games added a nice little
chunk of bucks to a parched family budget. Now they had stumbled into a
little war. It was particularly intimidating to be issued large amounts
of live ammunition and grenades.

It had put a chill through the men, the grenades especially; in
training, live grenades are treated with the awkward care of nuclear
weapons because they are so dangerous. Now they were handed out like
candy bars by grinning, looseygoosey commandos. It scared his guys. None
of them had a particular desire to be Rambo.

"Okay," Barnard told his NCOS and his officers with a transparent
heartiness, "let's get'em spread out, platoons abreast, through the
trees."

The guys just looked at him.

"Tom, the fucking professionals are sitting on their asses down there.
Why are we the ones up here? I heard machine guns. Those guys on that
mountain have missiles."

"Phase four nuclear emergency. We're working for them now, not the
Governor. If they say we go, we go. Ours not to etc., etc. Look, the
head guy told me those planes laid so much hurt on our friends up the
hill, our big problem was going to be matching up body parts. So let's
get humping, huh, guys?"

"Lock and load?"

"Lock and load'em up, righto," sang Barnard. "Full ammo, get the clips
into the weapons, get the weapons unslung, have the guys open their clip
pouches so they can reload on the double if there's any kind of a Bght
and please, puh-lease, tell the boys to be careful. Semiauto. I don't
want any hotshot shooting his foot off."

Grumblingly, his people started out.

Barnard went back to the radio, a little more confident because his
officers and NCOS had obeyed. Around him he could hear them yelling, the
men beefing, but, yes, everybody was filing off into the woods.

"Delta Six, this is Bravo, we are deployed and ready to jump."

"Good work. Captain. Now, you've got 60s, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"I want your 60s in play earliest. We found out in 'Nam it helps the men
if their own fire support is emplaced before they move."

"Yes, sir."

"Get the medics circulating behind the assault line. Don't let'em
cluster together, get'em into the open. The men like to see the medics.
It'll help them."

"Yes, sir."

"Major, finally, this is important. Don't wait to take fire.

Get your fire support going just as you cross that LD, do you read? I
want to hear some noise. If any of these gooks are left alive, I want
your boys to blow'em away as they're coming up the hill. Plenty of ammo.
Okay. You copy?"

"I copy. Delta Six."

"Okay, son," Dick cooed. "One last thing. Keep the assault line up and
moving forward. Don't let the men hit the dirt and get pinned down. Keep
up a heavy, steady volume of effective fire. And keep that fire
low--ricochets kill just as dead as Charlie incoming."

"Yes, sir," said Barnard.

He turned to his RTO man.

"Wally, you stay near me, okay?"

"Yes, sir. No sweat."

"That's our unit motto," said Barnard. "No sweat."

He picked up his own M-16, drew a thirty-round magazine from his pouch,
and clicked it into the magazine housing.

Up ahead, he could see the trees and he could see his own men spread out
through them. It was a bright, white day, the sun on the trees so
brilliant it hurt his eyes. The sky was blue as a dream.

Jesus, he thought, I'm thirty-seven years old and I'm a tax accountant.
I ought to be sitting at my desk.

"Okay," he said to his executive officer, "Let's move'em out." The line
sounded too John Wayne to be real.

The flame was a silver needle, a blade almost. What it touched, it
destroyed. Even through the thick black lenses and amid the showering
sparks he could see that its power was absolute. It turned the world to
a puddle.

Jack Hummel held the plasma-arc torch against the metal and watched the
flame devour the titanium. Down here in the hole the world was serene
and logical. He had a job to do, one he knew and almost loved, one he
had done many, many times before. It was, after all, only cutting. He
had, by this time, opened a deep wound in the smooth block of metal.

But at the same time, and despite the mesmerizing, messianic quality of
the flame a few inches beyond his eyes, it was hard to concentrate. It
was all so strange, and Jack had the terrible knowledge that he was
doing something wrong.

He should have fought harder. He should have made them beat him.

But he kept thinking, it wasn't my fault. It happened so fast. It was...
it was hard, you know. You're in a no-win situation.

And he kept thinking how the world required heroes, but instead, it had
gotten only him. Jack Hummel, podunk welder and former high school glory
boy who had the guts of a rat. He began to hate himself.

You fucking scum, he said to himself.

But he knew they'd kill him and kill his kids. What difference did it
make if the world got blown up then?

** ** **

Barnard was amazed, really, at how well it seemed to be going. The guys
were handling it like a wild game of cowboys and Indians, racing through
the tree stumps, pawing up the slope in their platoon-abreast formation,
keeping good contact with each other, John Wayneing it with the best of
them.

Even the machine-gun crews, with their twenty-three-pound M-60s and
their forty to fifty pounds of ammo belts were keeping up, whereas in
the exercises the gunners had tended to fall way back while the younger
men gamboled ahead, fleet as deer.

Barnard had picked a tree about fifty yards ahead as his last line of
departure; he'd fire there. He could see the crest now, the
white-and-red striping of the radio mast against the blue sky, and some
kind of low, dark tent just barely visible, but everything else was
quiet. The trees had been chopped up by the A-10s; it was like hustling
through an exploded toothpick factory over rough ground where the
twenty-millimeter shells had plowed the earth. The smell of gunpowder
hung in the air.

"Bravo, this is Delta Six."

"Delta, I have no contact yet. It's all quiet. Maybe they left or
something."

"Get your assault support fire going. Bravo."

"I thought I'd wait just--"

"Get it going. Bravo, that's a command."

"Affirmative, Delta," said Barnard, handing the phone mike back to his
RTO.

"Open fire!" he screamed.

Along the lumbering line, the Guardsmen began to hip shoot their M-16s,
jinking out rounds in semiautomatic. Up ahead, Barnard saw, the snow was
beginning to fly where the torrent of 5.56-millimeter bullets popped
into the earth.

"Go," he screamed again, "come on, goddammit, hurry."

His sergeants took up the cry and the volume of fire increased as the
men syncopated their shots to their own rushing footsteps. So full of
the blood-thinning joy and terror of the moment as they were, they began
also to scream. The noise rose, unwilled, from their lungs. It was a
moment of glory: the rush of the screaming infantry against the white
hill under the blue sky, the punctuation of the rifles, and now the
higher, faster whipping of the M-60s anchoring either end of the line,
really pouring out the fire, raking what was visible of the hilltop less
than a hundred yards ahead now as they--

Alex shot the officer in the throat from about two hundred meters with a
scoped G-3; he'd been aiming for the head but the captain, bumbling
along beside his RTO man just off the assault line, must have stepped on
a log or something and so he rose in the scope just as Alex's patient
finger carefully stroked the trigger.

But it was still the shot he'd been waiting for.

You want to take down the senior commander at the first opportunity,
Alex knew; nothing quite so devastates an attacking force than to see
the man they've bonded to over the long years slide backward with his
head blown away. And Alex had picked him out almost immediately as the
attackers broke from the cover of the trees.

The unit began to fire. He could see them going down.

Because the wound that Alex delivered was not quite what Alex had
intended, the bullet missed the brain and tore through the muscles and
cartilage to the left of the larynx, and, since it was a full metal
jacket in 7.62-millimeter NATO, didn't mushroom and didn't deliver a
killing blast of hydrostatic shock, but rather exited neatly. The
captain felt as if he'd been whacked in the throat with a baseball bat;
the world went instantly to pieces as he fell backward into the snow. In
seconds, however, his head had cleared, and his first thought was not
for himself but for his men. He could see many of them were down and
that the tracers floated out toward them like confetti thrown at a
parade of triumph. The air seemed alive with buzzing, cracking things.

"Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sir, Christ, Captain, oh, fuck, Captain," came
some terrible moaning next to him. His RTO man had been shot in the
stomach.

"Medic!" screamed Barnard.

A burst of fire, kicking up snow and bits of wood, lashed by him. He
scrunched into the earth. His left side felt numb; his head hurt
terribly. He rolled over, fighting for breath.

"Captain, Captain, what do we do?" somebody yelled.

Alex only had two heavy automatic weapons, the M-60 from the van and the
H&K-21, but he knew he had to break the assault's spine in the very
first second or fall victim to a messy perimeter fight that would sap
the energy of his men.

He'd therefore placed the two guns together in the center of his line,
thereby, of course, violating all infantry doctrine, because a single
grenade or even a well-placed burst of fire could destroy them both.
He'd also directed that several two-hundred-round belts be ripped from
their canisters and linked, so that they could fire continually without
reloading for one full minute. This meant the barrels overheated
dangerously; thus, stationed next to each barrel there crouched a
trooper with--an astonishing improvisation, come to think of it--a fire
extinguisher from the ruins of the installation. As the guns fired,
these men squirted cold carbon dioxide onto the barrels and works.

The guns fired for one minute, one solid minute of full automatic. It
didn't really matter, Alex believed, how accurate they were; what was
important was the volume of fire and the impression of endless
ammunition hurtling at the attackers. Still, they were very accurate.

"Bravo, this is Delta Six. This is Delta Six, do you copy?

Bravo, what is your situation? We can hear heavy fire. What is your
situation? Bravo, don't let your men bunch up, keep them moving. Act
aggressively. Bravo, you've got to act aggressively." Puller gripped the
phone. He was aware he was violating his own most precious principle,
which was not to interfere with ground forces during maneuver, knowing
from bitter experience at Desert One that a staff commander on the radio
merely screwed things up. But the sound of the fire from the mountain
was heavy and terrifying.

"I think you're talking to a dead man. Colonel," said Skazy.

Down at the girl scout camp they could hear the gunfire rising from the
mountain for a long minute. Then it stopped, and there was silence.
Then, now and then, the pop and crack of a single rifle, or a burst of
automatic fire.

"Return their fire, goddammit," Barnard yelled back, coming out of his
shock. Anger, confusion, finally bitterness, began to gnaw at him. He
groped around for his M-16, found it, and rolled over. Other shots were
beginning to rise from his troops. At least we're answering them,
goddammit, he thought.

So where was the great Delta? Back on its ass down the mountain! All
this shit about Delta in the magazines, and Delta sits on its ass while
Bravo Company of the 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard, the
butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, gets ripped to ribbons.

Barnard got his black plastic rifle up against his shoulder.

Squinting over the sights, he could see the gun flashes from Aggressor
Force, yet he felt in no particular danger. Languidly, he began to fire,
jerking off rounds one, two, three at a time. The rifle had very little
kick. He fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another one. After a while it
seemed a little stupid.

"Captain!"

Someone slid into the snow next to him. It was a Lieutenant Dill from
the second platoon, a phys ed teacher at a Baltimore high school.

"Captain Barnard, I have a lot of hurt men, a lot of dying men. Jesus,
let's get the fuck out of here."

The captain just looked at him.

"God, sir, are you--you're all covered with blood! Medic, get over
here."

"No, no," said the captain. "I'm not hurt that bad. Look, if we just
pull back they'll chop us up. I'm going to slide over to where the
machine gun should be and see if I can't set up some covering fire,
okay. You wait a minute or two; when I get the fire going, you get the
men out of here. Don't leave anybody behind. Lieutenant!"

"Yes, sir."

"Get the men firing. If they're not firing, they're not helping."

Barnard began to crawl through the snow. Now and then a bullet would
come whipping in his direction. But he made it down the line and found
his company's machine gun, lying on its side half sunk in the snow, a
loose belt nearby and a batch of dead shells lying around. He recognized
his gunner, a steelworker; half his face was gone where a heavy-caliber
bullet had punched through.

The captain wiggled forward through the snow, breathing hard. God, it
was cold now. He seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he was so wet with
the snow that he'd begun to go numb. Pulling the gun to him, he managed
with his stiff, fat fingers to get the latch off the breech and get a
belt unrolled, and set the lead cartridge into the guides. He slammed
the latch shut and drew back the bolt.

"Movement?" Alex asked his gunners.

A bullet hit the logs before them, kicked up a cloud of smoke.

"On the left; there's a group on the left."

The gunner swung the H&K-21. Indeed, a wretched huddle of men appeared
to be crawling forward. Or perhaps not crawling forward, but merely
crawling anywhere, forward being the direction they'd settled on.

"Yes, there"--Alex pointed--"take them down, please."

The gun fired a long burst and Alex watched as the tracers flicked out
and seemed to sink toward the men.

Where they struck they kicked up snow and the men disappeared in its
swirl.

"Some in the center," somebody said. "However, I think they're
retreating.".

"You have to fire an.vway," said Alex. "It will give the next assault
team something to think about."

The H&K-21 fired briefly; more tracers streamed down the mountain, found
their targets.

"Rather horrible," said one of the loaders.

"Not a good attack," said Alex. "'I don't think these are elite troops
I'd anticipated. I think they were amateurs.

Casualties?"

"Sir, two men dead in the covering fire and three wounded."

"Well," said Alex. "They did do some damage then. And ammunition. We
used a lot of ammunition in a very short time. That, too, I snppose,
hurts us. But it Cost them so much. I didn't think it was their style,
to die like that."

The captain drew the grin to him. He couldn't see much now, just barbed
wire, some smoke, the aerial, the damned tent, and lots of high blue sky
above.

He wished he weren't so tired. On the slope before Aggressor Force's
position, he saw bodies. What, thirty-LIFE, maybe forty? Jesus, they
caught us in the open. They just let us get close and they blew us away.

He squinted over the gun barrel. Nope, nothing. Couldn't hit a goddamn
thing with a machine gun, even.

It occurred to him that he might see a little better if he stood up. He
thought about it; yes, it made sense. He'd just---oo--stand up, yes, and
then he'd be able to see much better to shoot.

He stood. It worked! He could see them now, or their heads moving,
clustered at the center of their line behind the barbed wire. He
thought, boy, sure am glad I thought to stand. It seemed entirely
logical. He'd worked it out. With his covering fire, most of his guys
could get out of the kill zone. That's why they made me a captain, he
thought. "Cause I'm so smart.

With that thought, he fired.

The gun bucked through twenty-round bursts. He fired at the center of
the line. He could see the far-off puffs where the bursts struck. The
gun was surprisingly easy to control, though a bit muzzle-heavy, with
the bipod out there pulling it down. Trick was to keep the bursts short,
then correct for muzzle drift. Firing it was actually quite a bit of
fun. He could move the thing slightly and watch as the bullets stitched
small disturbances into the earth. He felt the hot brass pouring out of
the breech like the winnings at a slot machine. The gun began to steam;
its barrel was melting snow packed in the cooling vents. He had no idea
if he was hitting anything.

He fired a belt that way in about thirty seconds.

Then laboriously he began to change belt!

"The right, the right, goddamn, the right," screamed Alex. Who had fired
at them? In less than thirty seconds he lost seven men and one of the
rounds clipped the breech of his H&K-21, putting it out of action. The
bullets swept in on him. Alex felt their sting and spray. One of his
gunners lay on the mud floor of the trench, his right eye smashed.

"The right!" Alex screamed again, sliding to the earth as the bullets
began to rip up his position again. He heard the firing rise. All up and
down the line his men were answering.

Quickly, he crawled back, turned his binoculars. He could see the
gunner, about two hundred meters off on the right. The bullets searched
for him, cutting into the snow around him. Yet still he fired, just
standing there. Standing there. Like some kind of hero. The bullets
finally found him.

"Cease fire," Alex yelled.

"'Sir, a bunch of them slipped away while the fire was hitting the gun."

"You saw them?"

"Yes, twenty or thirty, just got up and ran down the hill."

"Well, whoever that man was, he was a soldier. I'll say that."

** ** **

"My marriage," said Peter Thiokol not so much to the agents but somehow
to the air itself, "if it had a script, it was written by Woody Allen
and Herman Kahn."

"I don't understand the reference to Herman Kahn,'" one of the FBI
agents said.

"in the sense that it followed the classic pattern that Herman
identified. The slow, gradual buildup of hostilities, the real arms
race, the breakdown in communication, until finally open conflict seems
the lesser of two evils. And that's when you get your classic spasm war.
You know, multiple launches by both sides, multiple hits, the global
catastrophe, nuclear winter. The end of civilization. That was the drama
of our marriage. We blew each other away in the end."

There was silence from them.

"It was a very intense union," Peter told them, "but not at first. I
just told her I was there at Oxford studying poly sci, which is true. I
didn't tell her about my thing for the bomb or that I had a good line on
an Air Force job and that I was heading for D.C. That came out later.
I--I couldn't really figure out how to break it to her. She wasn't much
interested in what I did, at first. She was rather self-involved.
Beautiful, the most beautiful woman I ever saw."

"So when did she figure out how you were going to make a living?" said
the sharper of the two.

"'Oh, finally, I told her. 'Seventy-four. We'd been in Washington a
year. I'd just moved from the Strategic Study Group to the.Targeting
Committee. It was a big leap for me and it meant about ten extra grand a
year. Not that we needed the money. Her folks had plenty, but it was
nice to be doing well suddenly, and she said she'd finally figured out
what strategic meant.'"

What does it mean? he'd asked.

It means bombs, isn't that right?

Yes.

You think about bombs. You think about war all day. I thought it was
more abstract, somehow. Thinking about strategies and that sort of
thing, chess and so forth. Or about history, like your project at
Oxford. But it's very specific, isn't it?

Yes, very, he said. He'd spent the day contemplating the effects of a
nine-megaton fused airburst from a W53/Mk-6 reentry vehicle delivered by
a Titan II at four thousand feet versus the same hardware and
throw-weight in a fused airburst at two thousand feet in terms of
fireball circumference visa-vis damage radius to a soft target like an
industrialized urban base the size of, say, downtown Vladivostok.

I look on it as thinking about peace, he said. Ways to keep the peace.

By building more and better bombs?

He sighed, not at the stupidity of it, but because he knew that from
that moment on, there was no turning back, no recall.

"How did your wife take the news?'' "Not too well."

"No kids?"

"The bomb was our baby, she used to say. But Megan was too beautiful for
pregnancy. She didn't want to lose her waistline. She'd never admit
that, but that's it. And the bomb. It wasn't that it would blow the
world up, it's that it would blow her up. She took it personally. She
took everything personally."

Peter, she once said to him, do you realize you are the only man in the
Western world who has nightmares about nuclear bombs not exploding?

"She's famous, your wife?"

"In a very small world. She makes sculptures that are highly thought of.
She gets great reviews, and sells the stuff for a ton of money. I liked
it. It was very impressive. And I think the reason she never left me was
that she drew off of me and what I did. Her art would have suffered. She
made these anguished things, these masses of mashed tin and plaster and
painted surfaces. It was our old pal, Mr. Bomb."

"Was she untrue?"

It took Peter a long second to make sense of the word. It was so quaint
and comical.

"I don't know. She went to New York once a month or every six weeks. She
said she had to get out of Washington.

At first I went with her, but I didn't really go for those people.
Assholes, all of them. It was still the sixties for them.

It always will be."

"Politics. Was she in a ban-the-bomb group or anything?"

"No. She was too vain to join groups. She wouldn't join any group she
couldn't be the leader of. Then I published my essay, and I became the
celebrity and started going on the tube and that really hurt her."

" 'And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD'?"

"Yes."

He remembered: the argument was simple. MAD-- mutual assured
destruction, the crux of strategic thought-- was a fallacy. We could
deploy our MXS before the Soviets improved their 18s and got their 24s
on line and it would be possible, under certain rigidly controlled
circumstances, to make aggressive moves against the Soviet Union without
fear of retaliation. Eastern Europe, for example. In other words, it was
theoretically possible, if we could get our MXS out and Star Wars going,
to win without the big launch. Reagan loved it. It made Peter the
superstar of the sunbelt right.

"That's what got me the head of the MX Basing Modes Group. I was making
eighty thousand a year, I was suddenly very high-profile, I'm on TV,
journalists are coming courting.

And she hated it. I think that's what finally drove her to him." He
paused. "She started up with him right after that. I think she's with
him now."

"Who is he?"

"I met him once. His name was Ari Gottlieb. He was an Israeli painter,
briefly big in Manhattan. Very handsome man, taught a course at the
Corcoran. She met him at some Washington art thing. It was a very
difficult time. We were in the middle of this squabble over MX basing
modes."

"She was different after meeting him?"

"Yes. It was about two years ago. Congress had settled on an initial
deployment of one hundred missiles to go into Minuteman II silos and we
knew that was tragically wrong because it completely invalidated the
premise and that it was dangerous and we had to put at least one in an
independent launch-capable super-hard silo, to beat the new inertial
guidance system of the SS-18, to say nothing of the next-generation
missiles. So we were working crazily on South Mountain to be our first
deployed independent-launch-capable Peacekeeper unit, but trying to keep
it within the congressional guidelines.

We were cheating, in other words. And she hated it, because the thing
just was eating up my time and my mind.

And I was fighting for this fifteen-million-dollar gimmick called the
key vault, which nobody wanted, and let me tell you, it was
maximum-effort time. She hated that the most, I guess.

That it absorbed me so completely. And maybe that finally pushed her
over."

"How was she different?"

"I'd finally screamed at her"--he remembered the night, a livid memory,
like a scar, still tender to the touch--"that maybe she hated what I was
doing, but I was doing something. Something. That I believed. That she
sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never doing,
anything, never believing in anything. That she was too precious to do
anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was
different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing
this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was
all."

"And that was it?"

"In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn't
even bothered to change the pillowcases.

She had to let me know. She had to hurt me."

He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the
final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she'd finally launched,
and now he had to counter strike on warning or lose his hardware in the
silos.

"Cheap aftershave," he said. "English Leather, can you believe that?"

"What happened?"

Peter couldn't reach it, couldn't touch it.

The pause lengthened.

"And?"

"Look, it was a very intense relationship. I was capable of. . ."

"Capable of what. Dr. Thiokol?"

"I guess finally I hit her." He remembered the evening, June it was,
leafy June, the air full of light, the trees green, the breeze sweet and
lovely. He'd never hit anything before.

He remembered the way her head jolted on the impact and the way her eyes
went blank and then her face broke up with fear. She fell back, leaking
blood, her nose mashed. Spasm war: the end. She cried. He felt so
shitty, he tried to help her, but he was afraid he'd think about Ari
Gottlieb again and hit her some more. He told her he was feeling pretty
fucked up in the head, she ought to get out of there. He might kill her.
And he told her he was going to get a gun and kill Ari Gottlieb. That
was June.

"It was something else too."

Peter turned so that he didn't have to look at the two of them. After
all the denying, it was time to reach in and go where he was most
terrified to go. He finally faced it.

"I'd also--well, I did a lot of work at home, and I found
stuff--rearranged. Out of order. Slightly scrambled. It really scared
the hell out of me. I guess I couldn't deal with it."

"It was her?"

"It had to be."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"I just put it into the deep part of my head and covered it up with
everything I had. Have you ever heard of denial?

You refuse to deal with reality. That's when I flipped, I really
flipped. I crashed in July."

There was another long silence.

"It sounds like a classic," said one of the agents. "They probably had
the two of you under surveillance for a long time, knew exactly how
vulnerable she was. They built her a dream man, tailored exactly to your
weaknesses. He seduced her. And recruited her. That's how they did it."

"Who? Gottlieb was an Israeli, for Christ's sake. They're on our side,
for God's sake."

"Well, in some things. In others, maybe not. Maybe-- well, who knows?
She'll have to tell us."

This struck through Peter's defenses. Ashamed, he still reacted
instinctively. "Go easy on her. The truth is, no matter what, I still
love her. I never loved anyone before and I'll never love anyone else.
It was my fault. It wasn't hers--"

Finally, he'd run out of words.

He sat for a while after they rushed off with their little treasure,
feeling awfully rocky inside. Had he just betrayed her? He wasn't sure
anymore where the higher loyalties lay.

He hated the idea of disappointing her again, after everything else. He
also felt close to her. He realized it had pleased him to talk of her.
He wanted to reach out for her. It was dark in the room. He thought of
Megan, Megan's laugh, which he had not heard for ages.

He remembered the last time he'd seen her. Two weeks ago, after such a
long time. They'd talked for a while, and for a while everything seemed
fine and there seemed to be some chance for them. He was out of the bin
and teaching at the Hopkins and everything was fine. The key vault thing
was finally going through, they'd just sent him the final design
configuration and the Northrop design team had really done a good-- But
in the morning she'd been angry with him. She said he was happy only
because the project was going well. He was still a part of it, wasn't
he? He still drew power and pleasure from its evil.

He'd gotten angry. Shouts, screams, accusations, the same old business,
the air hot with neurotic fury. He'd watched her go off.

Still, she'd looked so damn beauti-- Certain things clicked in the
machine of a brain he had and Peter recognized from the pattern that a
wondrous possibility had just been opened.

But he also had a moment of real loneliness. Jesus, Megan, what the fuck
have you done now? What the fuck have I done?

And then he thought. Where is Puller? Where is Puller?

** ** **

They reached the lateral tunnel without much trouble, and Rat Team Alpha
headed one way, toward the shaft called Alice. That left Team Baker to
veer toward Elizabeth.

"We going' to fuck this Elizabeth," said Walls. "We going' crawl up this
white bitch's pussy, and fuck her to death. Give her some lovin' like
she never thought of. Once they go black, they never go back."

"Shut up," said Witherspoon, an edge on his voice.

"Man, you talk like you married to a white bitch."

"I am. Shut up."

"Man, no wonder you so mellow. Man, I was cashing in on white pussy
every night, I tell you--"

"Shut up. Nobody talks about my wife like that. She's a terrific gal who
just happens to be white, goddammit."

Walls snickered, a deep contemptuous sound. So rich.

This jive-ass white boy nigger is full of himself, Mr. Delta Mean
Mother fucker, see how he do if Charlie's up ahead. He shit up his pants
real good.

He liked the darkness, the cool air of the tomb. The tunnel was
narrowing, too, closing down. The initial shaft had been cleanly cut
into the mountain, almost like a stairwell, its walls flat and more or
less smooth. A little railroad track had run through it where the miners
pushed their little trains. It had a comfy feel to it.

But now, after the separation of the teams, the walls were closing in.
It was coolish and clammy in there; he could smell the coal dust in the
air, and something else, too, a tang or something. Witherspoon's
powerful beam cut like a sword all around, jiggering nervously this way
and that, its white circle roaming all over the place like a man's hands
on a woman's body. Meanwhile, Walls kept his beam straight ahead.

"Man, you must be nervous or something."

Witherspoon didn't say a thing. The night vision goggles pressed against
his head tightly, pinching it, and it was less than pleasant. And he was
a little jumpy, it was true. In Grenada he had been amazed by how
un-nervous he was, but it had happened so fast, there wasn't time to be
nervous. The stick had landed, they shucked their'chutes and were
hauling ass up this little ravine toward the airfield HQ, when
literally, all hell had broken loose. Some lucky Cubie had been gazing
skyward when the black-painted Charlie-130 Here had down in for the
insertion, and had seen the black-clad commandos floating to earth.

And Jesus, after that, forget the mission, the job had just been to stay
alive. It was like crawling through the Fourth of July, all the
fireworks in the world floating out at you, trying to knock you off.

But this was different. Witherspoon hadn't thought a lot about the
underground. He was Special Forces, Ranger, and Delta, the best of the
best of the best. Courage was his profession. But, uh, like, a tunnel?
In a mountain? He cleared his throat. Soon he'd have to face the horror
of dumping the beam and going to infrared. Ceiling getting real low.

"Hey, man?" Walls's voice, soft now, its mocking edge gone. "Man, you
scared? You ain't said much."

"I'm okay," Witherspoon said.

"Man, this ain't nothing. In the 'Nam, the tunnels so low you got to
crawl through them, you know. And man, them people they shit in those
tunnels, they got no other place to shit. And over the years, man, the
shit mount. Man, finally, you crawling through shit. You think this is
bad, you try crawling on your belly through shit waiting for some gook
girl like that pretty number in the other tunnel waiting to stick a
razor blade in your throat."

But this was plenty bad enough for Witherspoon.

He was really having trouble with his... breathing now. The blackness,
the closeness of it, the sense of the tomb. And men had died here,
hadn't they? Fifty years back, in this same hole, over a hundred of
them.

** ** **

"Rat Team Baker, do you copy? Baker, this is Rat Six, you guys copy?"
The voice was loud in his ears.

"Roger and copy. Six," said Witherspoon into his Prick 88's hands-free
mike.

"Jesus, you guys were supposed to log in fifteen minutes ago. What the
hell is going on in there?" Something in Rat Six's white voice really
irked Witherspoon.

"No sweat. Six, we're just bumbling along. Hey, hold your water, okay.
Six?"

"Let's stick to radio SOP, Sergeant. You want to tell us what's up?"

"Affirmative, Six, we're through the main shaft and we've gotten into
the lateral and we're looking for this Elizabeth.

The farther out we get, the lower the ceiling is. This tunnel's drying
up to nothing."

"How's your pal?"

"He's doing fine," said Witherspoon, sensing his partner next to him.

"Roger that. Baker, you guys stick to the schedule now, okay. You let us
know anything turns up."

"So what's going on there?"

"National Guard guys got their butts shot on", that's what. These are
mucho tough hombres, these guys. Baker, you watch your ass."

"Affirmative, Six, and out."

And then Walls said, "Shit, man, I think that's it."

His beam flicked out and nailed a gap in the wall, no bigger than a
crawl space, low and ominous in the white shine of the bulb.

It was the tunnel called Elizabeth.

"Oh, baby," said Walls, "have I got a dick for you."

"Smoke," said Poo. "Smoke. It's burning. It's a fire."

They could see the column of smoke rising, drifting, on the wind.
Several of the neighbors were out on their snowy lawns, staring.

"Herman, why is it burning?"

"It's an airplane," Herman said. "An airplane has crashed in the fields
and now it is burning. It must be some kind of terrible accident."

They were in the basement, peering out of the small cellar window. The
smoke smeared across the bright blue sky through the lacework of the
trees.

"Can we go look at it?"

"No," said Herman. "I think we'd better stay here. It will be very hot.
The firemen will take care of it."

"Is the man all right?"

"The man?"

"The man that drives the airplane. Is he all right?"

"I'm sure he's all right. Poo, I'll tell you, they push a button and the
tops fly off and they pop out. Just like toast from a toaster. And they
float down to the ground under a big umbrella and they're all right."

"Do they get another airplane? If they break their airplane, do they get
another airplane?"

"Oh, yes. They get another airplane."

Just then, the Burkittsville fire engine went crashing by the house, and
headed out the road toward the field.

Beth Hummel looked at Herman now. She'd made the connection between the
whirling jets and the crashed airplane and her vanished husband and
Herman.

"Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here?"

"Please, lady," he said. "We mean you no harm. Please, okay, you just do
what we want, no harm comes to nobody, okay? We're just guests, for a
little while longer, okay. Then everybody's okay, just fine, super good.
Okay?"

"Oh, Lord. Why? Why is this happening?"

"It has to happen," Herman said. "It has to happen. It's for everybody's
own good."

Just then there was a knock at the door. They could hear it from
downstairs. It grew louder.

** ** **

Dick Puller put down the microphone, lit a cigarette. A loud roar rose
and beat at them as four medevac choppers rushed overhead to the base of
the mountain to pick up the wounded.

"How bad?" asked Skazy.

"He wasn't making a lot of sense," said Puller. "I gather it was pretty
bad. Of the hundred and forty men in the company, he had confirms on
forty fatals sure. Maybe fifty.

He said he had a lot of men shot up. The walking wounded got a lot of
them off the hill. Not too many guys left untouched.

Unit morale shattered. Nonexistent. I told him he had to go back."

Puller smiled a crooked, sardonic smile.

"And?"

"And he told me to get fucked. His manners aren't any better than yours.
Major."

"The CO?"

"Didn't make it back. He was last seen on the M-60, giving covering
fire. I don't even know his name."

"I think it was Barnard."

"I think you're right," said Puller. He could see the choppers on the
ground, far off, their rotors glistening in the bright sunlight, the
dust and snow stirring and whirling. Tiny figures rushed around them.
Above them, the mountain rose in a rainbow arc, implacable and
immutable. The little red and white aerial seemed to wink at them over
the black stain of the tarpaulin. They hadn't even found out what was
under the tarp.

"You've got to send Delta in now. Colonel Puller. You can't let them
have time to regroup or those men will have died for nothing."

"They were never ungrouped. Major Skazy. Don't you understand that yet?
Delta goes when I say and not a second before. I'd advise you to back
the fuck off, young Major," said Puller.

He fixed his eyes on Skazy, who met his gaze fiercely.

"When are we going?" the major said, his face impassive, his eyes unlit.

"After dark. We've got to let those rats see if they've got a chance at
opening a back door. We've got to get Thiokol time to get us beyond the
door of the elevator shaft. I'll get you your god damned chance. Major.
You have my word."

He turned and found a seat on a folding lawn chair some thoughtful
trooper had pulled out for him. He checked his watch. There was going to
be a long night ahead.

"Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!"

It was Peter Thiokol, his demeanor adolescent and abandoned in
excitement, jumping crazily as he ran toward them.

** ** **

"Who would that be?" Herman demanded.

"I--I don't know," Beth Hummel stammered.

"Is it the airplane driver?" Poo asked.

"Mommy, I bet it's my teacher," said Bean. "They want to know why I'm
not in school."

Herman pulled Beth close to him.

"Who?" he demanded.

"Herman, you're hurting Mommy," said Poo. "You'll make her cry. You'll
make Mommy cry. Herman, don't hurt my mommy."

Poo began to cry.

"If it's a neighbor, they'll know I'm in here," said Beth.

Herman thought in a frenzy.

"All right," he said finally, "you go answer. Say nothing.

Remember, I'll be behind the door. I'll hear it all. Don't do anything
stupid. Please, these other men will be here with the children, don't do
anything stupid, don't force us to do anything we don't want to do."

He released her.

"Don't do anything stupid. Please." He pressed the muzzle of the
silenced Uzi against her ribs, just once, lightly, so she could feel it.

Beth climbed the steps. She could see the shape in the window of the
door and went to it.

"Yes?"

God, it was Kathy Reed, from next door.

"Beth, what is going on, have you heard? Three planes have crashed.
Someone says there's terrible shooting going on at South Mountain and
that the state police have closed all the roads. There was an explosion
on the road up to the mountain in the morning. They say there are
helicopters in the valley and soldiers and--"

"I don't know. There's nothing on the news."

"God, do you suppose they have gas or something up there, and there's
some kind of leak. What kind of telephone station could it be?"

"I--I don't know," said Beth. "If there were any danger, I'm sure the
government would tell us."

"I'm so scared, Beth. Bruce is away. Beth, he's got the car. If there's
an evacuation, will you take us? God, Beth, I've got the twins and--"

"Oh, Kathy, don't worry. I'll take you if it comes to that.

I swear it. You go inside now and relax. If I hear anything, I'll tell
you. I promise."

"You won't forget?"

"No, I swear. I swear it."

Thank you, Beth. It means so much."

She went back to her own house. Beth closed the door.

"Mommy, why was Mrs. Reed crying? Was she scared of Herman?"

"No, honey. No, she was just upset. Was that all right?"

"That was fine," said Herman. "That was okay, lady, you did real good."

"Who are you?" said Poo. "You're not from around here at all, are you?
You're from far away."

"Very far away," he answered.

** ** **

"Yes, what is it. Dr. Thiokol?" Dick Fuller asked, pulling himself away
from Skazy.

"Something's just occurred to me. I--I should have thought of it
earlier." He was momentarily put off by the sense of distance between
the two officers; he had the sudden, awkward sense of being an outsider
at some kind of intense family dispute. But he plunged on.

"It may be of some help. You ought to hear this, too, Major Skazy."

"Go on."

Peter said, "Well, we think we know who compromised South Mountain. I've
told the FBI. All right?"

"Yes?"

"Now, we think this person was photographing documents and plans in my
own home. I was very sloppy, it was--"

"Just go on," said Puller.

"Well, this person left my house before the planning was quite complete.
Do you understand?"

Neither of them did, apparently. They stared at Peter as if he were
stupid. Military men, he told himself, be patient.

Explain it slowly. Connect all the dots for them.

"She left before the key vault was designed. So whoever planned
whatever's going on up there never knew about the key vault. Until--"

"Until when?"

"She came back two weeks ago. She came back to tell me she'd thought it
over and she just wanted to see me-- well, I'll spare you the pitiful
details. But she was in the house. I slept with her a last time. The
vault had been improved, it was designed, they were implementing it, and
they sent me the dope. She could have seen it."

"Dr. Thiokol, in all due respect, I don't know what the hell you're
driving at here," said Puller, glowering furiously at him, almost rigid
with impatience. "We already know there's been an intelligence leak
of--"

Asshole! Peter thought. Stupid asshole!

"If they know about the key vault, they found out very late. Two weeks
ago! Probably, maybe, possibly too late to figure it into their original
operational plans. If that's the case, they probably didn't bring a
welder along. So they would have had to pick one up here. Don't you see?
They would have had to hire one or kidnap one or'something like that.
Now, if they did that, they wouldn't try and hold him for two weeks.
They'd do it right before they jumped and they'd do it close by. I'm
saying, maybe we can trace it."

"All right."

Their eyes remained abstracted, unfocused, lacking that primal spark of
inspiration. They still didn't quite see it.

"Look, if you were going to force a man to perform a job for you, how
would you get him to do it? Think of a bank president robbers take in
order to get him to open the safe.

How do they do it? Well, they find hostages. They leave somebody at his
house with his wife and kids, right? Now, maybe that's what they've done
here, maybe there's a wife and some kids and some very bad baby-sitters
not too far from where we stand. And suppose--"

"Prisoners!" said Skazy, getting to it first. "Yes, prisoners.

We get prisoners, we find out what and who we're up against."

But Dick Puller was already on the move. He hurried into the command
post and quickly located his young assistant from the FBI, James Uckley,
who for the past several hours had been ripping teletype info and filing
reports himself to the Bureau on the operation and feeling sorry for
himself for incurring Puller's wrath.

It didn't take Puller long to explain what he wanted, and from then it
didn't take Uckley long to find what they were looking for. He began
with the Yellow Pages and started calling welding services. At the fifth
entry--Jackson Hummel, 19 Main Street, Burkittsville, 555-2219--there
was no answer.

He then called the Burkittsville police station, talked to a sergeant
and had a request; the sergeant returned the call almost immediately.
No, it did not appear that Jack Hummel had opened his service for
business that day. The cop had asked on both sides and found that Jack
was expected in Boonsboro that day at the Chalmers plant. Uckley called
Chalmers, to discover that no, goddammit, the welder had not showed up,
nobody knew where he'd gone, maybe he was sick. He called the cop back
and asked if Jack could be sick. The cop didn't know but said he could
stop by Jack's house which was just up the road. It would be real easy,
the cop said.

No, said Uckley. They'd handle it themselves, but please stand by in
case further help was needed. His next phone call was to the elementary
school, where it only took him a few minutes to learn from the principal
that Jack Hummel did have two daughters, Elizabeth called Bean and
Phyllis called Poo, and that indeed both of them were unexpectedly
absent today.

Uckley thanked her and got off the phone.

"I think we've got a Condition Red," he told Dick Puller.

"It looks like they've got this guy Hummel in the mountain-- he's their
cutter--and his wife and kids in his house."

Puller nodded.

"All right," he said. "Major Skazy, I want four of your best operators."

"Yes, sir, I can--"

"Just go get them, Major. Get them now."

"Yes, sir," said Skazy, clearly irked at how summarily he was being
dismissed.

Puller pulled Uckley aside, out of the hearing range of the others.

"I think you'll have to handle this one. He'll get you those Delta
specialists and you ought to have police backup, but don't let the
police get too close. They might mess things up. You never know how well
these little country-town cops are going to handle heavy business.
Besides, you'll do better with fewer rather than more people. But we
need to take that house down and we need to talk to those people."

He looked at his watch.

"And we need to do it fast."

"Yes, sir," said Uckley, swallowing.

He looked hard at Uckley. The young man returned the stare, but seemed
scattered, his thoughts not quite together.

"You've had SWAT training, I assume?"

"Yes," Uckley said, barely remembering the frenzied week four years
earlier at Quantico.

"All right, good. You're clear? I mean, absolutely clear?

There's a mother and two little girls in that house. I'm sure they are
lovely people. But you must understand what's important, you and the men
you take into that house."

Uckley looked away, through the window. The mountain gleamed.

"The men in that house are important. The mother, the two girls--" Dick
hesitated a second, then plunged ahead in full adult awareness of the
ruthless thing he was about to do.

Did he have to say it, actually put it in words? Uckley shot a squirrely
look back at him. Dick could tell from the hurt and confusion lurking in
his eyes that yes, he did have to say it.

"Look, I have two daughters myself. There's nothing more precious to me
in the world than the two of them, and certainly that's true for this
Hummel too. But you've got to think hard here, Uckley. You have to see
through to what's important. You have to weigh the potential immediate
loss against the other, far greater, far more devastating loss. That's
what we're paid to do."

Like an idiot, the young federal agent simply looked at him.

"The mother and the two girls aren't important. You may have to lose
them. If it comes to it, you'll have to lose them rather than risk
losing the prisoners. The Delta people are very good; they've been
trained to take down a building and set free the hostages. But they'll
shoot for the head, and you've got to stop them. You've got to take
prisoners, Jim.

Do you understand that?"

Uckley said he did.

** ** **

The answer to all problems is vodka, Gregor Arbatov had decided. It was
Russia's main contribution to the culture of the world, more important
than Tolstoi, more passionate than Dostoevski, more lasting than world
communism.

He now sat with a glass of it in a dark bar called Jake's on Route 1 in
the seedy little Maryland town of Laurel, not far from Columbia. He was
exceedingly happy. A beautiful American lady of perhaps sixty with
perhaps half her own teeth and none of her own hair and a tattoo had
just brought him a refill, with a golden smile and a hearty laugh. He
loved her.

She was a saint. Saint Teresa of the Order of the Vodka. She reminded
him of his wife, whom he hadn't seen in years.

But what he loved most was what the vodka did to him.

It blurred his terrors, it mellowed his brain. It seemed to leak
straight through his skull and penetrate to the very center of the organ
itself, mollifying, subjectifying, calming, soothing, as it went.

"Ah, Miss. Another, please."

"Sure, hon. You surely do sop it up."

He smiled. His teeth were not terribly impressive either.

Her eyes were merry.

"You kinda cute," she said, handing the glass down to him. "Bartender's
a close personal friend of mine. He said this one's on the house."

Gregor smiled. Somewhere under the bulge of his gut that hung down over
his lap his dick stirred.

But then he thought of young Klimov. Trying to kill him.

And his dick withered.

Clouds came across his wide face; fear flashed in his little eyes. The
waitress was gone. The only thing that was there was the whisper of the
blade as it darted by him, and the thrum of its vibration as it plunged
into the car roof.

Gregor blinked, came out of it, and dived into the vodka.

Yes, so much better.

Gregor sat back. He had figured it out.

It was Klimov. Really, he could almost sympathize with the younger man.
He wished to move his least productive agent out. He could not simply
fire him, the time had passed for that, he had fired too many others, if
he fires him then it reflects poorly on Klimov. Therefore, with a little
ingenuity, perhaps aided by the intercession of his powerful uncle
Arkady Pashin of GRU, he penetrates the Pork Chop security arrangements,
sets up a phony meet, and then arranges for his rotten apple to die.

The results are interesting and beneficial to everyone except poor
Gregor, who in theory is now dead, six inches of Spetsnaz blade cleaving
his fat chest. But Klimov has eliminated his bad apple in a dramatic
way, with a minimum of personal embarrassment. He can be protected in
this maneuver by the importunings of Pashin, watching over his little
nephew, wielding his great power and influence like a sword.

At the same time, Pork Chop has been discredited. To what purpose?
Perhaps whoever controls Pork Chop has accumulated too much power in the
higher ranks and must therefore be destroyed by a rival. Surely the
rival in question would be, again, Pashin.

Good God, realized poor Gregor, he had been targeted for execution by a
senior general in the GRU, one of the most powerful men in the Soviet
Union.

There was only one answer: vodka.

"Miss. Another one."

Gregor swallowed the liquid. It dashed down his throat.

He felt his face burning red. He looked at the empty glass in his fat
hand.

Lumbering with agility that might have surprised his many enemies in
this world, Gregor made it to the men's room, pulled out a pocketful of
change, and with studied labor and enormous effort called the one person
in the world he felt he could trust, Magda Goshgarian.

The phone rang time and time again. Finally, her groggy voice came on.

"Magda!"

"Tata! I am stunned. What on--"

"Magda, listen please. I need a favor. I will be continually in your
service if you can help me. Please, I cannot begin to tell you how--"

"Stop sniveling, Tata. Are you drunk? You sound pathetic."

"Magda, something is going on."

"Yes, it is. Young Klimov wants to bite your head off."

"No, something else. Magda, I am--indisposed."

"Is it a woman, Tata? Some American bitch with a baby in her belly that
came from your tiny dick?"

"No, no. It has nothing to do with women. It has to do with the fact
that I must stay clear of the embassy for a few days now while I sort
some matters out."

"You're going over. Tata, don't you implicate me, they are watching me
too. I swear, Tata, if you go, you'll leave such a mess--"

"No, I swear. I swear on my father's grave and the great Marx's image
that I'll remain true. It's just that for technical reasons, I am
indisposed tonight. Alas, I have cipher clerk duty in the Wine Cellar
tonight. I--"

"Tata, I--"

"I know you did it last night. But since you have therefore rested
today, you are therefore automatically my replacement.

I call merely to ask you to take the duty for me. You can tell Klimov I
called you from my afternoon pickup and that it was going very slowly
for me and that I was afraid therefore I would not be back in time and
that I therefore asked you to take the watch. And that you have not
heard from me since. I think you'll find him surprisingly agreeable."

"Tata, I--"

"Please, darling. I'll buy you a dinner. I'll buy you the most
extraordinary dinner in some ridiculously expensive Georgetown
restaurant. I have a little squirrel fund hidden away, that's all, and I
can afford it, I promise."

"Tata--"

"Magda, you know you cannot deny me one single thing.

It is not your nature to deny me."

"You are such a sniveling, craven fool."

"Magda, you have no idea how desperately I need the help. You'll help?"

At last she surrendered.

"All right."

"I love you, darling."

"It means I'll have to do double duty tomorrow. My system will be upset
for weeks."

"Pick your restaurant, Magda, and you shall have whatever you want."

Gregor hung up. Now, if he could call the other woman in his life, Molly
Shroyer, and if she had found anything for him, then maybe, maybe he
could make himself seem so important to Klimov that the young killer
would desist.

Gregor dialed the second number. Molly answered curtly and he unlimbered
the Sears code, then hung up and waited.

And waited. And waited. He hung around the bathroom so long he thought
he might be arrested for perversions, or beaten up by truck drivers or
some such.

It rang.

Gregor picked it up.

"Gregor, I've got only a second," she said.

"Darling, I--"

"Gregor, shut up! Something' big is happening out in Maryland, so big
they won't tell even us. All the senators on the committee and the
senior staff have been to the White House and there's some kind of news
blackout, but nobody's talking. The only thing is that it's very, very
serious."

"Out in Maryland?" Gregor said. Then he remembered the airplanes roaring
over the Columbia Mall.

"But what could--"

"Gregor, as soon as I know, I'll let you know. I have to run now, love.
Really, it's serious."

"Yes, I--"

The phone clicked dead.

Damn! he thought. I need vodka.

** ** **

Phuong loved the darkness, the stillness, the sense of being totally
alone. She felt whole in darkness.

The narrow walls of the mining shaft seemed to be leaning in, and she
could feel the man beside her breathing hard. She could sense his fear.

Yet for Phuong the tunnels meant one thing. They meant safety. Up above,
her child had been turned to ashes and shards by napalm. Up above, her
father had died, her mother had died, her brother had been maimed. Her
sunny village was blasted into nothingness by terror bombers. Hard men
in helicopters came to kill them, and to poison the jungle. So she faced
the darkness with something close to peace. She knew no fear. Her feet
found the way. She sensed the walls and the low ceiling and the rough
transit of the floor. The darkness was everywhere.

Teagarden, the American, fought against it. His beam was a desperate
protest against it, a plea for mercy almost.

His beam flashed nervously. In the tunnels in her homeland, one never
used light. Light was an American invention; it was the invention of men
who feared the dark. But Phuong and the men and women who fought with
her over the long years never used light; they learned, instead, to feel
their way with their hands. They learned to sense, from variations in
the atmosphere and gradations in odor, the approach of strangers.

Mother, can you smell him, her daughter asked from her heart. He's
terrified. His body stinks with fear.

I smell him, too, she replied.

Ahead, the tunnel narrowed even further.

"Sister Phuong, one moment please," the American said in Vietnamese. "I
have to report."

He knelt, turned his beam off. The darkness was complete.

She heard him fumbling.

"Rat Six, this is Team Alpha, we're about seven hundred yards in, no
sign of this tunnel Alice yet. Do you copy. Six?"

"Alpha, that's an affirmative, good and clear."

"Uh, Six, we'll keep on picking our way along."

"Go to it. Alpha. We're counting on you. How's your partner?"

"She's real stable. Six, wish I could say the same for myself. Out, now.
Six."

"Roger that and out. Alpha."

He flicked his beam back on.

"Are you ready, Sis?" he said in Vietnamese.

"Yes."

"Then let's go on."

"Brother Dee-gard-ahn, why do you come? Why not just stay here? I'll go
on. You're very scared. Brother, I can tell. I know my way. I won't get
lost."

"I have to work the radio, Sis."

"Brother, tunnels are no place for terror. Fear, yes.

Fear, always. Fear, importantly. But terror, no, because terror leads to
panic. Not many people can fight in a tunnel.

Not being one of them is no disgrace. We learned it because it was the
only way we had against your flying demons and terror bombers."

"I'm not one of them, you're saying."

"I can tell. Brother. I can sense it."

"No, it's all right. It's just walking, I can handle it.

There's no fighting, it's just walking." He smiled with a great deal of
effort.

"Then let's go. Brother American," she said.

Alex, in the lull after the failed attack, scampered over his position
checking on his men/telling them how well they had done.

"Is that all they'll send, do you think?" he was asked.

"No, they'll come again. And again. And again. I think the troops they
send against us next will be better. Finally, they'll send the very
best. It'll be a night fight, great fun."

Morale was high. The boys seemed to be holding together very well. Down
in the missile silo, the general reported good progress on the cutting.
It would be sooner than everybody thought. He'd lost only ten dead and
had eleven wounded, this from the terrifying air assault and the
infantry assault. He had ample supplies of ammunition left. He was in an
excellent situation, all things considered. Only two things really
bothered him. First, the loss of one of his two light machine guns in
the infantry assault, and second, that he had used so many of the
Stinger missiles in defending against the air attack. He had only seven
left.

"Sir, great shooting on that last bird," someone called.

"You can still see her burning down on the plain." And you could: the
smoke rose still from the wreck, drifted up through the bright sky,
where it shredded and dissipated in the wind.

"No, nothing," said Alex. "It was just luck." Of course it hadn't been.
When the last plane came in by itself, it had been Alex with the M-60
who alone had refused to dive, even when the cannon shells were cutting
away at him. He'd tracked the pilot all the way, and when the plane had
ruddered hard to the left, he'd jumped up from the gun position like a
duck hunter and held the weapon in his arms, pumping his rounds into the
craft. He'd seen the tracers flick into the bubble cockpit, seen the
bright glass haze as they tore through and the plane began to wobble,
then never gathered enough altitude to make it out of the dive, and sank
to the ground.

Alex had never shot down an airplane before. He felt queerly pleased.

"Now, back to the digging," he said. "Enough congratulations.

Time to get back to work. Whose turn is it? Whose shift? Red Platoon?"

"Blue Platoon," the call came. "Red Platoon's already dug down to hell."

There was some laughter.

"All right," Alex said, loving them, "Blue Platoon, in the trenches
under the canvas. Red Platoon's turn to sunbathe on the perimeter."

"But Blue Platoon shot down the helicopter. Don't we get a reward?"

"Lucky shot," yelled one of the boys of Red Platoon.

"Now you'll dig till you've blisters the size of coins, just like--But
Alex interrupted the horseplay.

"You said the helicopter went down? I didn't see it crash."

There was a moment of silence.

"Sir, we shot down a helicopter. It went over the hill and crashed."

Alex listened carefully. He remembered the medevac chopper taking off at
the beginning of the assault, but it should have hovered downslope. It
clearly wasn't a gunship, because it hadn't brought any fire to bear on
his position. But why would a medevac chopper have ventured over the
firefight, particularly when it was so easy to avoid it? The more he
thought about it, the more it bothered him. Then he said! "Everybody who
fired on the helicopter, fall in on me, please."

In the end about twenty men from Blue Platoon came over and gathered
around Alex.

"Tell me about this helicopter," Alex said, "One of you.

Slowly. Not all at once. The man who spoke first."

"Sir," the boy eventually said in slow country rhythms.

"Sir, during the last run of the aerial attack, a helicopter flew low
over the trees. We saw it only very late in its approach, because
everyone was undercover from the airplanes. Naturally--" he clapped his
rifle, a Fabrique Nationale FAL, "I fired on it."

"What kind of helicopter?"

"UH-1B. The Huey, so famous from Vietnam."

"You hit it?"

"I--I think so, sir."

"How many rounds?"

"Sir?"

"How many rounds did you put into it? What kind of sight picture did you
have? Were you leading it? Were you in the full or semiautomatic mode?
Where were you firing?"

The boy was silent, baffled.

"Please be honest with me," said Alex. "I mean you no disrespect. You
are a brave and dedicated man. But I have to know the answers to these
questions as completely as you can tell me."

"Sir, then the truth is, I fired hurriedly. I had no time to really aim
competently. I was firing semiautomatic and perhaps I got off seven or
eight rounds."

"Did you see any damage? I mean, ruptures in the steel, smoke, flames,
blown rotors, that sort of thing?"

"Not really, sir. It was so fast."

"How about any of you others. Who else thinks they scored hits?"

A few hands rose.

"Full-auto or semi?"

The answers were all semi; the stories were all the same: jerked shots
fired desperately at a flashing target, no real sight pictures, less
than a magazine apiece fired at the machine.

"Yet it crashed?"

"Yes sir. It crossed the crest, whirled down the mountain, out of
control. We lost sight of it from here. But there was an explosion at
the base of the mountain."

"Did you see it hit?"

"No, sir. It hit behind some trees. Down there you can see how thick the
trees are. It hit right there. A few seconds later there was an
explosion."

"Was the explosion exactly at the point of impact?"

"Sir, it's hard to say. It seemed to be more or less at the point of
impact. Perhaps the machine bounced when it hit, then exploded. It's--"

But Alex was already gone.

"Sergeant," he shouted, "I want you to put together a team of ten of
your very best men. I think something's up, something I don't like. I
don't know what. I want you to go down the hill and check out that
helicopter wreck."

1600.

"I don't know," said Delta Three. "I hate to go in blind.

It's against everything they teach us." He was looking through
binoculars from well back in the room of a house on Main Street, in
Burkittsville, at the front of Jack Hummel's place some two hundred
yards down the road.

"We don't have time for a recon," said Jim Uckley.

"Listen, it's even possible there's no one in there except the mother
and her two sick little girls."

"Then what happens," said Delta Three, "if I get a peripheral cue, turn
and fire and blow away a child? It's no good, Mr. Uckley. I'm not going
to risk civilians like that. I couldn't live with myself if--"

Some Delta! thought Uckley.

"Look, man," he said, "we don't have a lot of time. We got to help those
guys on the mountain. We've got to improvise something."

"I'm not going in without a floor plan, sure information on how many guys
there are and a good idea of where they are in the house and where these
children might be. And I'm not going in without multiple simultaneous
entries. You're too fat a target. I don't mind taking chances. I was hit
twice in Vietnam, in fact. But goddammit, I'm not going in and risk
kids' lives."

Delta Three was a sanctimonious Southerner in his late thirties with the
righteous jaw set of a zealot. He was rawboned and tough, a master
sergeant. Uckley hated him. The other three Deltas--he didn't have time
to learn their names so he'd simply christened them Deltas One through
Four-- seemed like decent kids. But goddamn this adult!

"Officer," Uckley called to the Burkittsville cop who was with them in
the house. "Any chance you could, uh, get us a floor plan or something.
So we knew--"

"No," said the cop. "That house is one hundred years old and they didn't
make floor plans in those days, they just built 'em and built'em a damn
sight better'n they do now."

Great. Another zealot who loved to express his opinions.

The cop was about fifty-five and plainly pissed off that all this
government beef had come gunslinging into his town. But in a phase four
emergency, federal officers called the shots, and he'd buy the idea that
young Uckley was calling these.

"Neighbors," said Delta Four. "They'd have been in the house, right?
Maybe you could round one up and get some kind of a drawing or diagram.
Then we'd at least have some idea."

The cop chewed this one over. Finally, he allowed that Kathy Reed lived
next door.

"Call her," said Uckley. "Tell her it's an emergency, ask her to walk
down the street to us."

"That's good," said Delta Four. "Maybe we can rock and roll after all."

In a few minutes, Kathy Reed, her twin boys, Mick and Sam, and a
scroungy mutt that turned out to be named Theo showed up. Kathy was in
her housedress still and looked as though a few days had passed since
she'd last washed her hair.

"Bruce is away," she began to explain, "I'm sorry about the way I look,
but it's so hard to--"

"Mrs. Reed?" Uckley asked. "I'm James Uckley, Special Agent, Federal
Bureau of Investigation. These men here with me are a special assault
team from the Army's Delta Group."

He watched her mouth lengthen, then form the perfect rictus of an 0. She
was a woman who at one time or other might have been attractive but had
been ground to a nub by the trench work of motherhood. She swallowed, her
eyes going big, then said, "Is this about the mountain. There's
something going on on the mountain, right?"

"Yes, this does have to do with the mountain. Now, what I wanted to ask
you about was your neighbor, Mrs. Hummel."

"Beth? Is Beth in trouble?"

"Well, that's what I want you to tell me. Did you talk to her today?"

"Yes, sir. About an hour ago."

"And how did she seem?"

"Uh, the same."

"The same?"

"It was just Beth, that's all. I was the scared one. Because I thought
there was gas or an atom bomb on the mountain. She said she'd drive us
out of here if there was an evacuation. Bruce has the car. He travels a
lot."

"Did she invite you in?"

"Uh, no."

"Was that unusual?"

"Well, we have coffee nearly every morning. Beth's my best friend. She's
everybody's best friend. I guess it was."

"Was she nervous? Unsettled?"

"Come to think of it, yes, I suppose she was."

"What about her kids?"

"What about them?"

"Did she say anything about them being sick?"

"Sick! What have they got? Sam was with Poo all yesterday.

That means Sam will be coming down with it. Did she tell you they were
sick?"

"They're not in school. She called in."

"That's peculiar. I know she would have said something about it. But she
didn't mention it."

"Mrs. Reed, I'd like you to talk to the sergeant here. I want you to
draw us a diagram of Mrs. Hummel's house.

Meanwhile, I think I'll go down there and knock on the door and see what
I can see."

"Be careful," said Delta Three.

"Oh, I will," said Uckley.

The knock on the door surprised them. Herman looked at his men, then at
the lady and her children. Goddamn!

Who could this be?

"All right," he said. "As before. Remember, no fancy stuff, lady. These
men here are with your children. You don't want anything happening, do
you understand?"

Beth Hummel nodded gravely.

"Don't hurt my children."

"Nobody gets hurt," said Herman.

He knelt at the foot of the cellar steps, crouching in the darkness. His
silenced Uzi covered the entrance. He watched the lady walk to the door,
peek out, then open it.

"Mrs. Hummel?"

"Yes."

Herman could see a bland young man in a sports coat and tie under a
bland black raincoat. He looked to be about thirty.

"Hi, my name's Jim Uckley, I'm with Ridgley Refrigeration, we're putting
in the plant out in Keedysville. Listen, I had an appointment with your
husband today at two and he wasn't there. I was just wondering if--"

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Uckley. Jack's in Middletown. There was a
breakdown in the high school heating system. The main duct split and he
had to go weld it up. I'm real sorry if he missed his appointment, but
sometimes these emergencies come up and--"

"Oh, listen, that's all right. I understand. Would it be all right if I
came in and--"

Herman put his hand on the Uzi trigger and drew the weapon to his
shoulder. Let this man come in and he'd squeeze off a three-round burst.

"Mr. Uckley, have you had the flu this year? It's horrible stuff. Would
you believe that both my girls are down with it.

Why, Bean's been vomiting for two days. It's a horrible thing. And the
house is a disaster. You can imagine, with two sick children, how
terrible it is."

"Well, ma'am, I sure don't want to add to your difficulties.

Maybe you could tell your husband I'll call him in the morning. It's a
pretty big job we have in mind, and we'd like to talk to him soon as we
can."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Uckley. I'll see that he gets the message."

She closed the door.

Herman slithered to the window, peeked over the edge, and watched the
young man mosey down the walk and climb into a little blue car and drive
away. He raced to the back of the house and followed the car after it
had turned up the block and headed on down to Route 17 and out of town.
All right, maybe it's just a man about a job, he thought as he lost
track of the car.

"Yep, they're there, you bet, I could almost smell'em," said Uckley.

"How many?" asked Delta Three.

"I couldn't exactly ask," said Uckley, who was feeling somewhat heroic
in regard to his exploit. "So what have you got?"

"Three-bedroom house, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry
downstairs. Stairs up front from the living room and out back from the
dining room. Tough to crack with five guys."

"Hmmm," said Uckley. He was basically an accountant.

He had an M.B.A. from Northwestern and had heard that five years in the
Federal Bureau of Investigation Embezzlement Division looked great on a
resume, especially if you wanted to go into tax accountancy, where the
bucks were. He was engaged to a girl named Sally and had been born and
raised in Rockford, Illinois. He had begun the day going over the books
of Mid-Maryland Federal Savings, where the vice president had fled with
over $48,000 in bank funds, looted from a variety of accounts over the
past several weeks. The man had left with his twenty-three-year-old
secretary, leaving behind a forty-two-year-old wife and three children.

"Tough to crack especially when we don't know how many there are or
where they are."

"Is it best to infiltrate slowly or hit'em with a rush?"
Uckley asked.

"The Israelis like to go in fast, low, and hard. GSG-9 will wait until
the cows come home, inserting their operators a lick at a time."

"That's a tough place to rush," said Uckley. "You could stage from Mrs.
Reed's place next door, but nothing on the other side." He looked at his
watch. Time was really flying. It would be dark soon.

"So, who's got an idea?"

They just looked at each other.

What am I doing here, Uckley thought. He wished he could concentrate a
little bit better.

"Look, what about this?" said Delta Three. "We set off a smoke grenade
in Mrs. Reed's house, call the fire department.

Say, you and me ride in on the truck, rush up the lawn. Except we hit
the Hummel place instead. We're in raincoats. Meanwhile Rick and Gil
move in on the place from behind; they go through that back door, into
the kitchen. We go in, yelling "Fire, fire, you have to evacuate.' We've
got our pieces under our raincoats. Then we take'em out."

It was better than anything Uckley could come up with.

** ** **

Megan Wilder took the tin can and put it in a vise. She spun the handle,
watched the tin crumple. The can imploded and ruptured, achieving
various interesting configurations of destruction as she drew the jaws
of the vise closer and closer.

It finally became a fully formed blossom of catastrophe, the light
glinting in fascinating patterns off its tortured sides.

Quickly she spun the handle the other way, plucked the crippled thing
from the vise's grip, and took it over to a table.

There she had several dozen other crumpled cans.

She stared at them. Some had collapsed neatly; there was something bland
and banal in their demise. Others, like this one, had a curious inner
vitality and force; they fought the jaws with every last shred of
resilience. And when they died reluctantly, they died most
spectacularly, forming orchids of broken metal. Of the dozens there were
perhaps less than five that really touched her, that spoke to her,
including the last one. She took them all to another part of the room.

Megan Wilder specialized in what she called "constructions" or,
sometimes, "destructions," depending on her mood and her honesty. Their
form attempted to push out the boundaries of art; they would not fit
into conventional categories.

They were not quite sculptures, because although they occupied space and
had plastic form, they had at the same time not escaped entirely from
the tyranny of the frame and the organizing impulse of two dimensions.
They were meant, in short, to be viewed only from one angle, and
although certain influential critics had denounced this as cowardice to
the tyranny of convention, she could not force herself to abandon it.

But neither, of course, were they paintings, although they depended for
their impact on color as it defines form.

For she implanted the twisted tin buds with other shapes that took her
fancy--beer bottles, for example, the insides of burnt-cut calculators,
filaments from light bulbs, this, that, and the other thing, the
detritus of American society--and stapled them inside rough frame and
shelves that she had constructed herself, against a plasterboard
backing. When by accident she found harmony, she destroyed it. She was
interested in disharmony, the radical lack of symmetry and structure
that somehow especially pleased her since Ari had left.

Anyway, when she got these items arranged just so, she painted them. Not
Hat black like Nevelson's bleak little masterpieces, but comic-book
colors, hot pink, Popsicle orange, sunburst yellow, mashed-banana
yellow, a rainbow, a riot of flat, harsh, hot colors. There were critics
who also despised this. Color is dead, they had decreed, and it irked
them that she hadn't read their position papers. They could really be
nasty, too, particularly one faggot on Art News.

It didn't matter. Megan was really beyond other people now. After all
the years and all the pain, she'd finally fought her way to her own
private place. She'd finally found her own voice. It felt authentic and
passionate. It satisfied her.

The work was going so well now, it was a shame it had to end. In fact,
the imminence of its end gave it all a certain perishability and
poignance that made her almost cry, something no man had ever been able
to do, short of punching her, and both Peter and Ari had punched her.
You could forgive Peter, he was an asshole genius with an IQ of about
900 and an emotional age of about eleven, but Ari had been different;
she had expected so much more.

Thus when the knock came and she became aware of the shapes of men in
suits moving around the studio, up on its roof, out back in the frozen
garden, it did not surprise her, but merely filled her with regret. It
had to happen sooner or later and it was happening sooner. What seemed
to her tragic was that she'd never see the series of constructions
played out unimpinged upon, untainted by the inevitable scandal.

"It's open," she called.

There were three of them. Gentiles, strong-looking older men without
irony or outrage in their eyes. They identified themselves as something
or other from the FBI; she immediately forgot their names and ranks.
Their blankness surprised her. She didn't see the need for it. People
could be so cruel.

They said she ought to call a lawyer. She didn't feel like it.

She just wanted to go on working, she was so close to being finished.

"Do you have a lawyer, Ms. Wilder?"

"I have an agent," she said.

"It's not the same thing."

"I suppose I have a lawyer. My father would be able to call him, I
suppose."

"I hope you'll cooperate with us, Ms. Wilder. Time is very important,
and your cooperation would help you enormously later."

"I'll make you a deal," she said.

"Ms. Wilder, we don't have a lot of time. Time is of the essence."

Original line, she thought. Where do they get these guys? You'd think
they'd at least go to the trouble to find someone that she could relate
to. But then she understood that in the whole apparatus there was nobody
she could relate to; by the very act of joining the apparatus, such a
man would forever lose purchase on the possibility of relating to her.

"Here's the deal. You let me work for a little while longer. Turn on
your little tape machines or whatever. You let me work, and as I work
I'll answer any question you want.

Is that fair?"

"I take it you understand you're in grave trouble."

"I guess I always have been," she said.

She was a beautiful woman, with a high, aristocratic face, a strong
nose, and piercingly intelligent eyes. She had a supple body under jeans
and a paint-spattered smock. She wore black high-topped Reeboks and
round, owlish glasses.

Her hair, black and lustrous, was drawn back tightly into a surprisingly
girlish ponytail.

"We have information that suggests--"

"Let me just start where you want to end up. Won't that save some time?"

"Yes," the older man said. , She took a deep breath.

"Well, I did it. Yes. Whatever he says I did, I did it."

"You gave foreign agents certain materials which--"

She laughed, involuntarily. "Foreign agents" sounded so forties.

"Materials?" she said. "I gave them everything."

They just looked at her.

"I had a little camera. Called a Minox, very cute. Later, sometimes, I'd
just haul the stuff to the library and make Xerox copies of it. He made
it so easy. He was so sloppy. The stuff was everywhere, he just left it
lying around. He must have been in love with me or something."

Then she looked at them hard.

"But the joke's on him. And you. I gave it to a guy who's on our side.
He's just another Jew. He's an Israeli. The Israelis are our side. So
you can do to me what you did to Jonathan Pollard, and it doesn't
matter. Throw me in prison and send the key to the dead-letter bin. What
do you think of that?"

"Maybe you'd better start at the beginning," said the oldest of the men.

"Do you have ten hours and a bottle of very cold white wine?"

"We have ten minutes and a thermos of very hot coffee."

"Then I guess I'd better hurry," she said, and began to explain.

** ** **

The shattered unit collapsed in the snow reminded Dick Puller of his own
A-detachment after the fight at Anh Tran in July of '65. When the 82d
had finally fought its way through, the survivors of the
thirty-eight-day siege by the NVA in division strength just watched them
come, numb and flat. He knew the feeling: the sense that your bones have
melted, the way your brain fills with white fog and your joints are
stiff and slow; and another thing, too, like persistent background music
that will not go away--the terrible guilt you feel at the whimsy of the
battle and all the good people who've died in spaces you've just moved
out of or are about to move into.

He shook his head. At the end, they'd depressed the 105s point-blank and
fired canisters of fleschette into the NVA waves that had come at them
as the perimeter shrank so small you couldn't even call in Tac Air. Dick
shivered. Fuck if that hadn't been a fight. That was the fight to end
all fights, a month of taking frontals and watching them burn away your
best people until you were left with a shell of your team and less than
a third of your brave, tough little Nungs. In the end we won. But won
what, and why? He could still taste the bitterness.

Bravo, having straggled down the mountain,, had made a stab at reforming
just at its base, where the forest met the meadow and where the road
began its switchbacks up to the summit. Dick rode in with the first
medevac chopper and with several of the Delta officers to debrief the
survivors.

Now he walked among them. The boys sat singly in the snow, having found
one another and then collapsed in a loose circle, their olive drab
uniforms dark blots against the blinding whiteness that surrounded them.
Many were wounded though many were not. Some had weapons, some did not.

Some cried. Some laughed hysterically; some merely stared at Dick with
furious, dark hostility. Some chattered helplessly with the cold, their
lips blue, their faces drawn and slack. They looked exhausted or sick.
Their young faces had the shock of nihilism. Their gear was all fouled
up, their pouches open, their straps tangled, their boots unbloused.

Not many had helmets.

He knelt by a boy, one of the few who still had his weapon. He didn't
have his helmet, but he had his weapon.

"Pretty tough up there. Specialist?"

The boy's eyes swung to him at an idiot's cadence. The boy just looked
at him like a jerk. What, twenty-two? In 'Nam they were younger, even,
in their teens. Dick, then a captain, had even had a seventeen-year-old;
the gooks had caught him coming in off an ambush patrol and he'd died
screaming in his own guts out beyond the wire.

"Son, I'm talking to you," Dick said in a stronger voice.

"Huh? Oh, sorry, uh, sir."

"They hit you pretty bad?"

"They had us cold. Just cut us up."

"Did you do much damage?"

"Sir?"

"I said, did you hurt them?"

The question had no meaning. , Dick seized the M-16 from the boy's limp
hands, brought it to his nose, pulled the charging handle under the
sight assembly. The ejector port snapped open; Dick sniffed the breech.
It smelled of clean oil but not powder. He could see an immaculate
cartridge sitting in the chamber.

"You didn't see any targets?"

The boy looked at him, ashamed.

"I--I was too scared to think about that," he said.

"I see," said Dick. "Well, you've got a few hours to pull yourself
together. Then tonight you go back. Tonight we all go back."

The boy looked at him.

"I don't want to go back," he said baldly.

"Neither do I," said Dick, "but I don't see anyone else here, do you?"

"No, sir."

Dick stood, winked at the kid, earning a little smile.

"I'll try to do better tonight, sir," the kid said.

"You don't have to do better, you just have to be there."

He could see the other Delta officers moving through the collection of
dazed men while the Delta medics worked to patch the walking wounded.

Finally, Skazy came over to him.

"It's not good," he said.

"Anybody get close enough to get a peep under the canvas?"

"Nobody got within a hundred yards of their position."

"So who are we fighting. Major? What's your reading?"

"Whoever he is, he's very good. He read the terrain, so he knew exactly
the point of attack. He put his automatics in the center of the line and
he must have linked belts. The volume of fire was terrific. The kids
seem to agree there were two heavy guns hosing them down, plus lots of
small arms.

Lots of fire, so ammo must not be a problem. But that guy up there, he's
been in a fight or two in his time. He knows his business. I'll bet we
find he's Forces. I mean, this is straight 'Nam, your basic A-team
scenario, defending a tight hilltop perimeter against superior numbers
way, way out in Indian country. That's Forces work."

"I was in a few fights like that," Dick said.

"I was too," said Skazy. "As long as his ammo holds out, he's going to
be a motherfucker to kill."

"Did Bravo do any damage?"

"Evidently someone covered the withdrawal with some fire from one of the
M-60s and some of the men think he may have hit people."

Dick shook his head sadly.

"Where's. the CO?"

"Over there. Young guy, first lieutenant. Named Dill.

The real CO, that Captain Barnard, he didn't make it off the hill."

Dick found Dill sitting by himself smoking a cigarette, staring out into
the distance in the bright sun.

"Lieutenant?"

Dill looked up slowly at him.

"Yes, sir?"

"Lieutenant, when you're talking to me, you'll be on your god damned
feet, if you please. Stand up."

Dill rose to the unpleasantness in Puller's voice with the look of a
martyr.

"Excuse me, but, sir, we've just been through--"

"Lieutenant, you let me do the talking, all right? You just nod your
head when I say so." The young National Guard officer blinked. "This is
pathetic. This is disgraceful.

Get these people together. Get them out of the open. Do you have
security teams out?"

"No, sir, I thought--"

"What happens if the people on the hill send an assault squad down here?
They could set up an LMG about four hundred meters up the slope and dust
every man here. Or maybe there's another enemy unit in the vicinity, and
they're going to come out of the trees firing full automatic."

Dill, a thick-set, athletic-looking man who nevertheless had something
of the surly melancholic about him, simply responded by falling into a
deeper glumness.

Finally, he said, "We got killed up there while you guys sat down here
and did crosswords. That's not fair. That's just not fair. I want to
know who's up there and why we have to die to get them and what is--"

"There's a madman with an ICBM and a launching pad.

Lieutenant, if we don't get up there, all this, everything you see,
everything you've ever dreamed or hoped for and loved or cherished, it's
all gone in a few seconds. Do you understand?"

"Who?" was all the stunned officer could say.

"We'll know when we kill him."

"He's one of you, isn't he?" the officer said. "He's some kind of Delta
guy or Green Beret. He's one of your little club, isn't he?"

Dick had no answer to this charge.

"Get your men organized, and get them under shelter.

Form them up into their squads and platoons, and take roll.

Get them fed. You've got to make them a unit again. Lieutenant, because
we go back tonight. If you can't do it, I'll find somebody that can."

The lieutenant looked at him, sighed, and went to look for his
sergeants.

It had to be Delta Three, goddammit, thought Uckley.

He knew he had to say something and that time was slipping away. But
Delta Three wouldn't sit still. He was exceedingly agitated and kept
repeating himself to the firemen, who milled in jittery excitement
around the big red truck in the Burkittsville Volunteer Fire Department.

"You guys go to the house on the right. Only to the right. The one with
the smoke coming out of it. Don't worry about the smoke; it's just a
chemical device in a pail or a pot or something up on the second floor.
Get in there, and take cover; we think there's going to be some shooting
next door.

No matter what you hear, you keep your heads down, is that understood?"

The firemen nodded and giggled excitedly among themselves.

They were amateurs, too, volunteers, townspeople, and this was shaping
up like a great adventure to them.

Finally, Delta Three came back, breathing hard. Uckley was aware that he
ought to have been more assertive, but Delta Three had one of those
flinty, righteous personalities that assumed its own perfection as a
basic operating principle.

"You set, sir?" he asked.

Uckley thought he was set. He had on a black fireman's slicker and
helmet, remembering that when he was a kid he wanted to grow up and be a
fireman; he had an ax; he also had his own Smith & Wesson 686 .357
Magnum, which he had bought used from a retiring agent and hadn't fired
in eleven months. Delta Three meanwhile took the moment to do a fast
check on his own weapons for the upcoming close encounter, an accurized
Colt.45 automatic for backup and a H&K MP-5 with the thirty-round mag
and the collapsing skeleton stock, which had been jammed shut, hanging
on a sling under his slick and shiny coat. Both men had Kevlar
bulletproof vests on also.

"Delta Three?"

The soldier didn't look at him. He was still checking gear. It was
getting so close to Go time. He had two smoke grenades on his belt and
two stun grenades and two teargas grenades. He had a gas mask in a case.
He had a fighting knife.

"The boots," he said to Uckley. "You think we ought to change our
boots?"

The man looked down to point out that he had on Corcoran jump boots.

How could he be thinking about shoes at a time like this?

"I don't think there's time," said Uckley, who was wearing black
Florsheim wingtips.

"Yeah, I suppose you're right. Things are going to happen damned fast."

"Delta Three?"

The man finally looked at him.

"I just want to make one thing clear to you. They made it very clear to
me, it has to be clear to you."

Delta Three's eyes were guileless and"-blue. They were somehow Baptist
eyes, Uckley thought. They wouldn't know sophistication or irony or
cynicism; they'd know only duty, honor, country. They'd know mission.

"This is a prisoner mission. Not a hostage-freeing mission, a
prisoner-taking mission. We've got to stick by our priorities. D-do you
understand that?"

Delta Three just looked at him.

"You have to understand what's important here," said Uckley, not quite
believing it himself.

"She's smoking!" came the call from one of the firemen at the
binoculars. "Boy, she's really smoking."

The men climbed aboard the fire engine.

"}Vhoo-eeeeeee!" some idiot yelled.

** ** **

Teagarden thought: I am in a jam.

"Sister Phuong?"

"Yes," came the voice back to him in the dark.

"I think I'd like to rest."

"Yes."

He sat down, considering.

He could tell from his dancing beam that the tunnel grew smaller still
ahead and began to curl and meander. It looked like an intestine.
Teagarden was having trouble breathing.

He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and his legs working. He was
aware that exceedingly weird things were going on inside his head. He'd
never really thought of the dark before, not of this kind of dark
anyhow.

It wasn't night. Teagarden had fought in the night. The night was not a
problem. Because in the night there was space. You could put your hand
out and feel the air. You could look up and see the sky, however
indistinctly. The night had textures to it, striations in the darkness.
One could befriend and ultimately seduce the night, turn it for you.

But not this. It was absolute. It had no gradations, no subtleties, no
nuances. It seemed as leached of meaning as of color. It was too stark.
He didn't really think he could go on.

Yet he couldn't really go back. Teagarden was Delta, top of the pyramid.
Delta culture, surprisingly informal in a lot of ways, was also
unforgiving in others. It had its own Bushido.

The guys got to wear shaggy hair and blue jeans and sweatshirts as long
as they kept their rounds in the 9-zone on the range, could crack an
occupied 747 in less than thirty seconds, could fieldstrip an AK-47
blindfolded. But there were lots of guys-- Berets, Rangers, FBI SWAT,
SEALS, Air Commandos--who had those skills. So what Delta had was this
other thing, this, uh, spirit: if you were Delta, you never said no. You
just went. It really came down to that one thing: if you were Delta, you
never said no. That was an absolute as binding as the dark. When it came
time to go, you put aside the bullshit, threw your life into the hot
frying pan of fate, and you went.

I cannot go, thought Teagarden.

I am thirty-seven years old, a Green Beret, a "Nam veteran, the holder
of several medals, by all credentials one of the bravest professional
soldiers in the world. I cannot go.

He began to cry. He hated himself. He wanted to die.

He bit his lip, hoping for blood. Searing pain Hashed from the wound. He
hated himself. He was weak and worthless. There seemed to be no escape
at all.

Teagarden pulled his.45 from the holster. There was a shell in the
chamber and the piece was cocked and locked.

He thumbed the safety down; it unlocked with a little snik! that sounded
like a door slamming in the dark. He put the muzzle in his mouth. It had
an oily taste, and was big, enshrouded as it was in its slide housing.
With his thumb he found the trigger.

"Brother Teagarden."

He didn't say anything.

"Brother Teagarden, don't do it," she said in Vietnamese.

"Go back to the big tunnel. Wait there. I'll go as far as I can, and if
I find something, I'll come back. Then we'll call them.

We won't tell them. Nobody will ever have to know."

"You're so brave. Sister," he said. "I'm not brave. Not down here."

"Brother, nobody will know."

"I will know."

"Learn to forgive yourself. That is the lesson of the tunnels. Forgive
yourself."

He couldn't see her at all. He could almost sense her, though, her heat,
her nearness, her living flesh. Next to it he felt a little stupid. The
pistol grew heavy. He put it down. He locked it and put it into his
holster; "I'll just go back a little ways, okay? I just can't go any
farther. Sister Phuong."

"It's all right. Brother Teagarden," said Phuong.

Turning, she went deeper into the tunnel.

"Mommy," said Poo Hummel, "Mrs. Reed's house is on fire!"

Herman turned, went to the window. Yes, black smoke poured from the
upper doors of the old house next door. He watched it gush and float up
to the sky. Then he heard sirens.

Herman licked his lips. He didn't like this at all. First a man in a
sports coat, now this.

"Herman, is Mrs. Reed going to die?" asked Poo.

"No, I don't think so, little girl."

"Will the Firemen come and save Mrs. Reed?"

"I'm sure the firemen will come," said Beth Hummel.

They were all gathered in the living room of the Hummel house. Herman
looked out the window again. He could see just smoke, and otherwise
nothing.

"Does the lady smoke?" Herman wanted to know.

Beth looked away. Then she said, "No, she quit last year."

Herman nodded. His two men looked at him.

"Get your weapons out," he said. "I think we're going to be hit. You go
to the kitchen--"

"Oh, God--" said Beth, "Oh, God, the girls, don't hurt the girls, I tell
you, please--"

Bean began to cry. She was older than her sister and may have just
understood it all that much better. She didn't like the guns, because
they made people dead on television.

"Herman, I'm scared," said Poo. "I don't want to be dead."

"Please let us go," said Beth Hummel. "We didn't do anything to you. We
never did anything to anybody."

Herman looked at the woman and her two terrified children. He tried to
think what to do. He hadn't come all this way to make war on children
and women. Little Poo came across the room to him and put her arms out,
and Herman swept her up.

"Don't go away, Herman. Please don't go away. Don't let the firemen make
you dead."

"Nothing's going to happen to Herman," he said. "You and your sister,
you go upstairs, you stay in your rooms no matter what. No matter what!"
he finished savagely. "Now, run. Run, Poo. Take care of your sister."

Poo scrambled up the stairs, pulling Bean along. The younger one was the
stronger one.

"You, lady, you're grown-up. You gotta take your risks with the rest of
us."

"Who are you? What is this?"

"Here they are," said the man at the window. He had an FAL, not a
house-to-house weapon, with an utterly worthless Trilux night sight.
"Should I fire?"

"No, no," said Herman. "Maybe they are just firemen.

Get up on the stair landing, get ready to jump in either direction,
depending on which way they come. You"--he pointed to the other--"you
get to the rear, in the kitchen. If they come--"

The man cocked his weapon, a Sterling submachine gun, in answer.

"Get to the door, lady," Herman ordered, his voice taut and ugly. He
pressed the silenced Uzi against her back. Then he slid the bolt back,
locking it. As he held it tightly he felt the safety in the grip yield
to the pressure in his palm.

Peering through the window, he saw the firemen racing to unlimber hoses,
and others heading into the Reed house with axes and oxygen masks on.

Two firemen in heavy slickers broke from the truck and headed toward the
Hummel house.

He could hear them yelling, "Anybody in there? You've got to get out!"
They were knocking on the door.

Uckley's heart was pumping like crazy; his knees felt like jelly, loose
and slippery. He didn't see how" they'd support him on the run to the
house. It bounded in his vision as he and Delta Three careened toward
it, though, of course, he was the one doing the actual bounding. Delta
Three had a slight lead as they clambered up the porch steps and made it
to the door. He saw Delta Three's slicker open and billow like a cape as
the muzzle of the sub-machine gun came out.

"Anybody in there? Goddamnit, you've got to get out, the flames may
spread!" Delta Three screamed, pounding on the door.

Nothing happened for just a second. Delta Three leaned into the door,
dropped his ax, his eyes shooting toward Uckley. Uckley now had the
Smith in his hand, though he was surprised to find it there, not having
remembered reaching for it.

"Mark your target," muttered Delta Three under his breath, then paused
for just a second to hit the speaker button on his belt and talk into
the radio mike he had pinned to his collar. "Delta units, this is Delta
Three, green light, green light, green light!" the words increasing with
energy and urgency.

Delta Three kicked in the door.

Herman heard a burst of gunfire from the kitchen, things breaking, men
screaming, everything mixing together in a welter of confusion. "Attack,
attack," yelled the man in the kitchen, firing again. Herman pulled Mrs.
Hummel to him and back as the door before him burst open and the two
firemen who were police agents plunged through the door.

Though the gunfire rose from the kitchen, he stared for just a second at
the bulging eyes and distended faces of the men opposite them. Then he
fired, the gun pumping with that terrible noiseless stutter of the
silencer, its shells cascading out. He put a burst into them, knocking
them back, pushed the woman forward at them, spun, and ran for the
steps. A bullet came after him, hit him high in the arm and pushed him
down, bloodying his lip. He screamed, spun to see the wretched woman in
the crossfire, crawling, her face wild with terror. He fired again,
watching the bullets rip up the room.

The man upstairs came to the landing to give covering fire, his big FAL
jacking out heavy.308s that exploded chairs and set curtains aflame. But
Herman could see nothing to fire at, had no idea where the shot had come
from that had hit him.

He pushed his way up the stairs, slipped once, felt the blood on his
arm, and then the pain erupted, freed from its sheath of shock. He'd
been hit before, but not like this, in the bone; the pain was awesome,
huge, enveloping. He tried to switch the Uzi to his good hand as the
blast of covering fire gave him the time, but now he saw shapes in the
window. They were firing fast, and the man above him pitched' forward
and slammed down the steps. Herman turned, dropping his Uzi, and
clambered up, clawing for his pistol.

"My babies, my babies," the woman was screaming! "Oh, God, don't hurt my
babies."

"Go after him," wheezed Delta Three. "I don't think I can move anymore."

Uckley was all right. He'd been hit three times in the first burst, but
the Kevlar, combined with the subsonic velocities of the silenced
9-millimeter ammunition of the Uzi, had saved him. He felt as though
he'd had the shit beat out of him, which, in effect, he had, for the
vests, which will stop a pistol bullet, won't absorb its impact
entirely, and the strikes had been like well-delivered punches to the
midriff. Delta Three, on the other hand, was much unluckier. One of the
bullets had hit him high in the leg. He was bleeding badly, even though
he'd been able to fire a magazine, hitting the big one once as he ran up
the steps and completely taking out the small one at the landing where
he'd stood firing randomly into the room.

"You okay?" asked Uckley. He wasn't sure he wanted to go after the
vanished big guy.

"Go after him, goddammit," said Delta Three, busy trying to get a
tourniquet around his leg. "Go, go now, man. I'll be okay."

Uckley knelt, thumbed the cylinder free on the now empty Smith, and
ejected the shells. Then he dropped a speedloader into the cylinder, the
six slugs held in a metal disk. He spun the release knob on the device,
depositing the six 125-grain Federal Magnums in their chambers. He
snapped the cylinder shut, shucked off the rain slicker.

"Here," wheezed the Delta imperative. "Take this too."

He held out what appeared to be some kind of customized 45 automatic,
with a fancy wraparound rubber grip. Uckley took the new gun, wedging it
into his belt in the small of his back. It was cocked and locked.

Breathing hard, he said, "Okay, I'll go get him."

He lurched by, but Delta Three grabbed him.

"Be careful, Uckley. There's kids in there."

Beth Hummel saw one of them with a big pistol like a cowboy dip gingerly
through the door and peer around, his eyes wide with excitement. She
could hear his ragged breathing.

He seemed to pause, gather himself up. Nimbly he dashed past her,
stooped to the man on the floor, satisfied himself that he was dead,
kicked his rifle away, then ducked back.

"Are you hit?" he whispered hoarsely.

"My children! God, please, my chil--"

"Are you hit?"

"No. I--I don't think so. My children are upstairs. Please don't let
them get hurt."

"Listen, you crawl to the door and out. There's medical personnel
outside."

"My children. Please--"

"Your kids will be all right. I'm FBI, Special Agent. I can handle
this." But she didn't think he could. He seemed very young and
frightened. She watched him go to the foot of the stairs.

"Uckley!" The call came from outside.

The man paused. "Yes?"

"The guy's dead in the kitchen, but so's Delta Two; Delta One is hit.
You're on your own."

"Check," said Uckley. "Get the goddamn state cops here."

She had the terrible sense of a man not wanting to do what he had to do
but doing it anyway. With the gun as a kind of magic device, as if he
could draw his strength and power from it, he threw himself up the first
flight of steps to the landing, whirled up the second flight, pointing
with his big silver gun.

Oh, Jesus, she thought, oh, Jesus, let my babies be all right.

Uckley reached the top of the stairway and looked very quickly down the
hall. Using the two-handed grip, he thrust the Smith in front of him,
searching for a target. He just saw doorways, some opened, some closed,
all more or less dark.

They told you never, absolutely never, go down a hall or room to room
against an armed man. Wait for backup. Always wait for backup, the guy
has such an advantage over you, he can hear you coming, he can drop you
anytime. Action always beats reaction.

But Uckley didn't have much choice, he figured. The whole thing had
teetered out of control in that first crazy second of gunfire, and now
the only thing was to stay alive and not to kill anybody wrong. He
didn't really think he had the grit for this. This was supposed to be a
Delta thing, all these special operators, and where were they? Out on
the porch.

"Hey!" he called. "This is Special Agent James Uckley of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. The house is surrounded.

Give yourself up." He heard his voice bang around the empty walls of the
old house.

He. thumbed back the hammer on the Smith.

Herman was hardly conscious. He kept slipping in and out, as if the
gears weren't holding in his mind. He cowered in the lee of the doorway
in Jack and Beth Hummel's bedroom.

He was trying to keep a tight grip on the pistol, a Czech CZ-75, with
his weak left hand. His right was useless; the bullet had smashed into
the shoulder. He was sitting in a pool of blood. His head ached; he was
very sad but not especially frightened.

"Give yourself up," the call came again.

Now, that was a laugh. He knew what he had to do. It was very simple
what you did in enemy territory to save yourself the horror of
interrogation and the danger of compromising yourself. You always knew.

But Herman thought, why not one more? After so many, why not one more,
why not this bhindering policeman who shot my men. He edged his way up
until he was on his feet.

He cocked the CZ. All right, he thought, all right, Mr. Policeman.

He slid to the doorway. He thought he could make out the man at the end
of the hall, low. How many others would there be? There'd be hundreds,
hundreds and hundreds. So many. But just one more for now. Then he heard
cars pull up in front of the house, sirens blaring. Red and blue light
pulsed through the windows.

He lifted the pistol with the weak hand at what might have been the man
but might also, in his blurry eyesight, have been a shadow. He fired.

Uckley panicked as the bullet came plowing his way. It smashed against
the wall behind him, showering him with dust. Two more shots came and he
drew back. Then he plunged forward, firing wildly, insanely, six fast
blasts with the Smith until he'd reached a doorway across the hall. He
got out a speed loader, popped open his cylinder, ejected six shells,
set the nose of the new rounds in their chamber, twisted it to free
them, then snapped the cylinder shut. He got out the.45 from his belt
and thumbed off what he took to be the oversize safety. It was a new gun
to him; he wasn't especially sure how it worked, and so'it scared him.
He peeked down the hall, saw only darkness.

"Mommy," somebody called. "Mommy, help me."

Oh, shit, Uckley thought. Then in his peripheral vision something
flashed and he flinched, ducked back, aware from the buck and the blast
that he'd fired the.45, one reflex shot (it had been so easy).

It was the mother. She'd come up the steps. He hadn't heard her, it
wasn't his fault! He'd told her to get out. He looked at her. She'd sat
down against the wall, her legs weirdly akimbo. Her head hung forward in
a way no living person's would hang. There was a lot of blood on her.

Oh, no, goddammit, goddammit, oh, shit, I shot the woman!

He stared at her, ashamed and disgusted. The gunsmoke reached his nose,
acrid and dense.

I told you not to come up, he felt himself screaming. I didn't hear you!
I didn't hear you!

Footsteps clambered at him.

Uckley spun, dropped to a knee, found the target picture and-- It was a
child on churning legs, just a small shape in the darkness, screaming
"Mommy" and coming at him.

"Get back," he shouted, because behind the child now he saw another
shape from another dark doorway, leaning out with a pistol.

Uckley dived.

He hit the little girl.

"Get down, get down, get down," he screamed, louder than she did. He hit
his head on the wall, a stunning blow.

His weapons dropped away. He felt the girl squirming under him. He heard
footsteps.

The man stood over him.

The little girl was screaming, "Mommy, Mommy, my mommy is dead!"

Uckley held her tight to him.

He looked up.

The man, bleeding badly, stood over him. He was a heavy blond guy with a
crew cut and a thick face.

"Let the kid go, for Christ's sake, let the kid go," Uckley begged.

The man turned and walked away. Uckley said to the girl, "Run
downstairs. Run, now!"

He picked up the pieces, and with a gun in both hands he started down
the hall.

Then he heard the shot.

** ** **

"If you've spoken to Peter," said Megan Wilder, "then you know our
relationship became spectacularly deranged at the end. I'm not sure even
yet if he did it to me or I did it to him or, out of some kind of crab
nebulae of neurotic energy, we did it to each other." She laughed
ironically at the lunacv of it.

The three agents watched her without cracking so much as a snicker. She
thought of them as the Three Dumb Men.

They just sat there, their faces slack and dull, listening. They hadn't
even taken their coats off, and it was tropical inside the studio.

Megan bent forward, trying to find a new angle into her construction.
She saw now that she had committed a fundamental design error at the
very beginning. She had found the circuit board to a personal computer
and loved it: it was so intricate, so cunning, so full of texture and
meaning; and she had put it exactly in the center of the piece. Then she
had painted it hot pink with a spray can. It was an inescapable fact. It
was the absolute, the total, the implacable. But that was all wrong, she
saw now. Then you could not discover the image, and meet it on your
terms. Rather, it hit you in the face: it was like an ugly truth that
would not go away, so obvious and pitiful that it dared you to recognize
it, and made you aware of your cowardice for the fact that you could
not.

"This," she said to the Three Dumb Men, pointing to it! "this has to go.
It's too clever."

She pried the board off the backing, ripping her finger on a staple in
the process. She began to bleed. She chucked the thing away, and it hit
with a clatter in the far reaches of the room. Only the pink-edged
silhouette was left where the board had been pulled out, and small
specks of furry pink light, where the spray paint had penetrated. She
liked it; it was much better that way, suggestive and elliptical rather
than pontificating.

Almost at once she began to feel better about the piece.

Maybe she had solved it after all; maybe there was an end to the
equation in sight.

"You see, he lied. I lied too. In the end I lied more than he did. In
the end all I did was lie. But Peter lied first and he lied worst.
Worse, he was a coward. He didn't tell me because he couldn't tell me.
He knew I would hold it against him, what he did. And he was right, I
would have, and maybe I would have left him. But I didn't really and
truly know until I was in love with him and we were married and the
fiestalt had just gotten too complicated and there were no easy
answers."

She paused. "He didn't tell me, you see, because in his heart of hearts,
way, way, down, Peter is ashamed. That's the key to him."

The Three Dumb Men just looked at her, with their long, glum, midwestern
faces, like Grant Wood's gothic Americans.

"So here I am, married to this bomb thinker with an IQ of several
thousand, whom I love so desperately I think I may die from it. But he
always had his mistress. That bitch. He'd never give her up, he was so
selfish. To have him, I had to have her. Oh, these brilliant men, I tell
you, they can be real motherfuckers. So I--"

"You mean this Maggie Berlin?" one of them interrupted.

She laughed. The idiot!

"No, no, Maggie was just another screwed-up defense genius. No, it was
the other bitch. I always thought of her as a woman, you see, and I
still think there was sex under it all.

He laughed at me, and maybe Freud is both wrong and dead, but I think
there was sex under it always, all the time, ever since the start, ever
since Harvard, when he couldn't get laid and his roommate was the big
stud for peace. No, her. The bomb. He could never leave her alone. He
couldn't stop thinking about her. She was his Circe, his Alice Through
the Looking Glass, his Ginger Lynn. He really did love her, in his way.
And so she hurt me and so I chose to hurt him through her. That's the
pathology of it. Surely it's transparent.

I mean, you must see stuff like this all the time?"

The Three Dumb Men were silent.

"Well, that's context, at any rate. It enables you to understand why I
was vulnerable to Ari Gottlieb."

She bent to the piece again. She began to regret having so summarily
dismissed the computer circuit board. It occurred to her that she ought
to retrieve it. But she knew to do so would be to stamp herself as an
idiot forever in these men's minds. She looked at her watch. Time was
flying, wasn't it? Getting close to five. We're all getting older until
one day, poof, Peter's Ginger Lynn goes down on her knees, opens her
mouth, and sucks off the world--the ultimate blowjob. She laughed, a
little more crazily than she had intended. She felt a little like
crying.

"So, anyway, Peter is the flavor of the month in Washington circles
because his let's-nuke-the-Russians number is just the tune Reagan and
his chums want to hear. It's got a good beat and they can dance to it.
They give it an eighty.

And suddenly he's Mr. Bomb, he has this terrible committee job, and it's
eating up his time and he's loving it. I admit it. I couldn't handle it.
And who should show up then but Ari Gottlieb. I guess if I had to design
the PJM, I'd design Ari.

That's Perfect Jewish Male. I mean, he was like Alan Bates in An
Unmarried Woman, just too good to be true. He was incredibly
good-looking but not in a pretty or an ofiputting way. In a kind way,
somehow. He never raised his voice.

When he laughed--oh, listen to me, I sound like I'm in a musical--when
he laughed, he really made you feel like it was you and he alone in the
most brilliant private joke ever told. I liked the way his skin crinkled
right by his eyes, into two little deltas, like flint arrowheads. It had
a nice texture to it. He was very gentle, very confident. He wasn't
afraid.

Peter was rigid with fear and guilt, but Ari was without fear.

When he saw you, Jesus, how he lit up! His gift was for focus. He made
you feel like you were the only person in the world, there was nobody
else. I met him at an opening two years back."

"Date please."

"Who remembers dates?"

"Could it have been January?"

"No. The weather was warm. It was very warm, I remember, because Ari and
I had a Coke from one of those hot dog wagons on the street outside the
Corcoran and--no, no, yes, it was January. It was a surprisingly warm
January day.

Peter was locked up. It had really gotten crazy with the group. Congress
had just done something about putting the MXS in old silos or something
and--"

"January eleven?"

"Maybe."

She hated them. She just looked at them.

"Anyway, it was my idea. It wasn't Ari's idea. It was my idea. He was an
Israeli citizen. He'd been in their Airborne troops or something, which
I heard was a big thing over there. He knew people in the embassy. I
just wanted to--to hurt Peter."

"Was he interested?"

"No. Not at first. He thought it was foolish. Israel doesn't have big
missiles, Israel doesn't care about big missiles, that's what he said.
But I said the information was valuable. Israel could use it somehow,
they were clever. Jews are always clever."

"And so he relented?"

"Finally. You see, for me it gave me a chance to do something. And it
wasn't like giving it to the Communists. It was to people on our side.
To other Jews."

"Yes."

"And he went to them, and they said yes, they'd look at it, and finally
he said this man wanted to meet me and talk to me, but it wouldn't do to
be seen at the embassy, could I go up to New York and meet him at the
consulate. The Israeli consulate."

"Yes."

"Yes, and so I did. I met an Israeli intelligence officer at the Israeli
consulate and it was very nice. He was a brilliant, commanding man, very
considerate, very charming. He said he didn't want me to get into
trouble, did I know what I was doing, was I sure, blah blah blah. He
pointed out that Jonathan Pollard had been arrested and that our
government was making ugly noise about prosecuting him to the max, and
that if I got caught, maybe there wasn't much they'd be able to do
about it."

"And--"

"And I didn't care. I was sure. And so I started doing it.

It was easy." She felt so smug when she said it. She'd had a great deal
of curiosity about this moment. Would she turn her confession into what
Peter used to call one of her "productions"?

Well, yes, she had.

She felt the eyes of the Three Dumb Men upon her.

"After all," she said, "it was only the Israelis. I mean, they are our
friends, the last time I looked at the Washington Post."

"Mrs. Thiokol--do you mind if I call you that?"

"No, that's fine."

"Mrs. Thiokol, could you tell me a little about Ari Gottlieb? I mean, I
don't suppose you have any pictures."

"Yes, I have three of his pictures. Abstract impressionism.

He was not very good, that's the fun--oh, you mean, his photograph. No,
I'm sorry. I don't."

"Could you tell us about him?"

"He was just everything I wanted. Except he had one flaw."

"What was that."

"It wasn't his fault. He couldn't help it."

"What was it?"

"He wasn't Peter Thiokol."

She continued. "If anything, he was too perfect. Ari was beautiful and
loving and never moodv and very sexv. And dull."

"He left you?"

"After an odd weekend in an inn in Virginia a while ago.

Very strange."

"How strange?"

"I can't say. I slept through it all. I passed out after too much
champagne. He was very offended. He left the next day. He had to go back
to Israel. To his wife."

"When was this?"

"Two weeks or so. I don't really remember. Who remembers dates?"

"And so you're alone."

"I was alone even when I was married."

"Tell me about this Israeli intelligence officer."

"Oh, you know. Very clever man, very warm. Charming.

Mysterious. I could tell he was a legend, even there in the consulate.
They all looked at him. He was a special man.

I remember after it was over, we went out on Seventy-third Street and he
helped me get a taxi. You felt safe with him.

And he--"

"Excuse me, Mrs. Thiokol?" It was, she saw, the youngest of the Three
Dumb Men. He was slightly more tentative than the others and he could
see his interruption irritated her.

"Yes?"

"You said Seventv-third Street."

"Yes."

"I used to be in our New York bureau. You mean Eightyfourth Street."

She was confused to sense no softness in his position.

"All right, I got the address mixed up. Who remembers addresses? And
what dif-- No, I'm sorry, it was Seventythird Street! I'm not going to
let you bully me. It was between Madison and Park. A lovely old
brownstone. The Star of David on the (lag, all the pictures of
Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir and Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, all the
bustle, all the workers, all the--"

But she could feel him staring at her.

"I'm sorry," he finally said. "I know the building very well. It's a
brownstone all right, but it's at Eighty-fourth, between Madison and
Fifth, near the museum. I worked there, I used to go into that building
regularly. We had a cooperating deal with Mossad for security."

"I--I mean--"

And then she could think of nothing to say.

"Are you sure it was Seventy-third Street?"

She nodded dumbly.

"You see," he said, "it would be pretty easy to do. Rent the house. For
one morning you hang out the flag. You hang some pictures. Some people
rush around, looking busy. An hour after you've gone, they've cleared
out. That's all."

She felt a hole open: it was dark and huge. She was falling. No one was
there to catch her.

Peter! she thought. God, Peter!

And then she said, "They fooled me. They just fooled me."

"Yes, ma'am. I'm afraid they did," said one of the Three Dumb Men.

She began, very softly, to weep.

"Oh, Peter," she wept, "oh, Jesus, what have I done?"

1700.

Uckley sat in the front of the state police car by himself.

He felt cold. Somebody had gotten him a blanket, which he pulled around
himself. He sat in a festival of pulsing light. It seemed to be the
world convention of police cars, and in the dusk, their red and blue
lights bounced off the houses and the trees back at him. He had a
headache and his guts hurt from the bullet impacts on the vest, but at
least he was done vomiting.

Everybody was staying away from him, at least for now, and he was
grateful for that small mercy. He stared ahead, seeing nothing. He was
exhausted, flattened out. He preferred the numbness, however, because he
knew that if he thought about it too much, he'd want to die, just to
make it all go away.

The kids were with a state policewoman, but no one really was sure what
to do with them. what with the father missing. He thought he'd heard
something about them going to their grandmother's in Hagerstown. He
couldn't look at them, the two little girls, little perfect angels,
untouched by corruption or evil. He'd caught just a glimpse: they looked
like little petals, perfect and rosy.

Why had she come up the stairs?

Why did I fire?

She came up because she was a mother.

I fired because I'm a policeman.

There: hubris, fate, kismet, karma, whatever. It was somehow written; it
was inevitable; it had been decreed.

When he'd gotten back to her, there was nothing to do.

Her daughter sat next to her, holding her hand. Soon the other little
girl came out and sat on the other side and started to cry. Uckley just
looked at them, and at the dead woman, and then went out and got into
the car, while various medical people and cops and firemen and citizens
rushed about. He yielded to anybody who seemed to know what they were
doing.

"A tough break," said Delta Three suddenly.

Uckley looked up, dazed.

"You okay. Sergeant?" he asked blankly.

The man was on crutches, his thigh heavily wrapped.

"I think I'll live. Look, if there's any trouble, I'll tell'em how it
happened. Shit, Mr. Uckley, you went up there alone against a real bad
customer who had two kids hostage, and you cleaned his clock. That's a
good day's work."

"Yeah, but I didn't even do that right."

"We went into a house where there were three hostages.

We got two of them out. That's a pretty damned good operation anyway you
slice it. And that mother, she was a good mom, she'd have rather her
kids made it out than herself. So, there you go."

"The point was to take prisoners," Uckley said.

"Begging your pardon, sir, but fuck taking prisoners. We put three
assholes in the ground, and that's what we get paid for."

It was no help.

"Sir, you better report in. You know, at the mountain they're waiting,
and I bet it's pretty tense there."

"Yeah," said Uckley.

With a grim sense of futility he took the radio mike off its arms,
feeling his ribs knit up in pain with the effort, and pushed the send
button.

"Base, this is Special Agent Uckley, can you give me a call sign and
patch me into Delta command?"

"We read you. Bureau One. You're all set for transmission, over."

"Delta Six, do you copy? This is Bureau One, over."

There was static and scrambled noise in the furriness of the
transmission, but eventually a voice came out of it at him.

"Bureau One, Delta Six affirmative, we copy. Go ahead."

"Assault complete. Two hostages freed. We lost one man killed, and two
wounded but stable. Uh, we are in command of the situation now. We found
three aggressors, heavily armed."

"Prisoners?" came Dick Puller's voice through the fog.

"Uh, negative. Delta Six. That's a negative. Too much firepower. We, uh,
we couldn't get you any prisoners. Delta Six."

There was silence from the radio.

Uckley rushed to fill it.

"Delta Six, I accidentally shot a civilian. I'd like to request a
release. You ought to get yourself another--"

"Negative, Bureau One." '"

"For Christ's sake, I shot a woman to death. I'm no god damned good to--"

"Bureau One, this is Delta Six. Civilian casualties are a necessary
hazard of combat operations. Get a hold on yourself."

"Colonel Puller, I shot a mother in the heart in--"

"Bureau One, stop feeling sorry for yourself and listen up."

"Sir, I--"

"Listen up. Bureau One. This is combat operation, and you follow orders,
or I'll have you arrested, goddammit. Son, I don't have time to screw
around here with your delicate feelings. Do you copy?"

"Copy," said Uckley through a knotted throat and blurry eyes.

"Collect their firearms, feed the serial numbers to the Bureau, and see
if you can get a make on them. Then I want you to conduct an examination
of the bodies. There should be a medical examiner or something there.
Check out those bodies. And the clothes too. Check out the clothes. Do
you copy, Bureau One?"

Uckley just looked at the microphone, a dead thing in his hand. He felt
impossibly old and impossibly fatigued. It was almost night now and the
streetlights had come on.

"I copy," said Ucklev, and got up to do what he had to do. * * *

** ** **

"End of story," said Nathan Walls. "As in, end of muthafuckin story."

And so it was: their lights came up onto sheer wall, where the livid
pick marks of the mining tools of fifty years or so back still gleamed
in the light of the beam.

The tunnel called Elizabeth had simply ceased to exist.

She yielded to mountain.

"Son of a bitch," said Witherspoon. "You mean that's it?"

" 'Less you wants to start to dig, man. Figure you got to dig about a
half a mile straight up. Then you be at where you want to be at."

"Goddamn," said Witherspoon, really pissed. All this way, all this low
walking and crawling through this damn tomb, and here they were; they
had come to nothing.

Walls sat down.

"Goddamn this bitch. Can't never trust no white woman.

You looks at'em and they crosses they legs. Oh, except your old lady, of
course." He reached into his pocket, took out a cigarette, flicked a
light from a Bic lighter, and inhaled.

"You smoke here?" asked Witherspoon.

"Hey, why not? Not nobody here but us spooks." He laughed. "Man, I
thought I was gonna be a muthafuckin' hero. Man, now we just walk back,
and that's that. You know, Spoon, here's what I was gonna do. I figure
we run into some shit, man, smoke and lights and fireworks everywhere,
man, old Walls just pull a fade. He go for a nice walk in the country.
Not too bad, huh? I tell you, boy, only way old Walls going to get his
ass a little quiet time to hisself." He laughed again.

"Yeah, that's real great," said Witherspoon. "You're really talking like
a hero now. Your momma would be proud."

"My momma be dead," said Walls, laughing again.

Witherspoon slipped off his MP-5, his flak jacket, slid the night vision
goggles off his head, and tried to arrange the angle-head flashlight
upon them so that its beam fell on the end of the tunnel. Then he went
to the wall and began to feel around. The light caught him and he cast a
giant shadow.

But he could feel nothing. It was solid rock. His fingers, long and
ebony, flew across it.

"Man, you wastin' your time. Relax. Have a smoke.

Then we go back to the world."

In time Witherspoon gave up. There seemed no point.

They were licked.

He fumbled with the Prick-88 strapped into the webbing of his vest, and
picked up the earphones and put the hands free mike in front of his lips.

"Rat Six, this is Rat Team Baker, do you copy?"

He listened intently. There was no answer.

"Shit," he said, "we must be inside too far. They aren't reading us."

"Maybe they asleep," said Walls. "You get an easy job like sitting on
your butt while two niggers do all the shit work, man, you get a white
man's job, you fall asleep. Call their asses again."

"Rat Six, Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy? Do you copy?"

Silence.

"Is anybody there? Is anybody, I repeat anybody, there?"

"Maybe that damned bomb finally went off, all the white people dead,"
said Walls.

"Then all the black people are dead too," said Witherspoon.

"Man, some nigger scientist ought to figure out a bomb kill only white
people. Man, I'd pay for something like that."

He laughed, flicked out his cigarette.

"Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy?"

** ** **

By now Jake's had filled with workingclass men. Gregor hated them. They
were truck drivers, fork-lift operators, warehousemen, painters, postal
clerks, all large, most dirty, all tired, most loud. They smoked. The
air of the place was blue with smoke. His headache had not gone away
even though he'd been splashing vodka on it for some time now.

He was watching the clock crawl through the day until it would be time
to call Molly again, and then he heard someone talking about soldiers
and a training exercise in central Maryland and looked up to the
television set. It was the news hour and the reporter was at a state
police roadblock somewhere, where the cars were lined up like it was the
end of the world or something.

Gregor leaned forward intently.

"Hey, Mister, who you pickin' in Eastern Division?"

"Redskins," Gregor said. "Shhhh, the TV."

"Redskins won't even make the playoffs!"

The reporter was talking about a military exercise being conducted in
the mountains, rumors of plane crashes and helicopters, how traffic was
backed up and how civil authorities weren't able to say when it would
all return to normalcy, but that this was one of the prices you had to
pay for your democracy.

The reporter, a childish boy, nodded enthusiastically as he spoke,
narrowing his eyes for emphasis. Behind him, far in the distance, Gregor
could see the fat hulk of a snowcovered mountain. It was white and
glistening and looked lovely.

The boy now was rattling on about new troops headed out to the exercise.
He'd thrust his microphone up to some soldiers sitting in trucks that
were momentarily stopped. The men in the trucks were saying they didn't
know anything about it, they'd just been put on alert that morning in
D.C., and about eleven they'd been ordered to load up on the vehicles
and here they were.

"But," the young soldier now told the young reporter, even as the truck
was pulling away, "tell you this, we gonna kick ass!"

"Man, that must be some exercise they got going out there," said a man
at the bar. "They say traffic's backed up all the way to god damned
Baltimore. Never heard of nothing like it."

"Where?" Gregor asked, adding, "I don't want to get stuck in traffic."

"Ah, out Alternate forty, from Middletown to Boonsboro.

You ought to be okay you stick to seventy. That mountain, that's South
Mountain, A-forty goes right by it. They got it closed off. Also, all
them little hick burgs out there. Funniest goddamn thing, though."

"What's that?"

"Ain't no government land up there. Plenty up at Aberdeen.

Plenty at Fort Meade. Plenty at Pax River, over on the Shore. Plenty out
at Fort Richie. Ain't no government land at South Mountain, though.
Damnedest thing, you can bet."

"Ummm," nodded Gregor.

Should I go out there?

I'm closest. Maybe I could get out there and hear something from a
soldier or something.

Yes, with your accent and your Soviet visa, yes; and end up in Danbury
for twenty years, then home for twenty more in the Gulag. No, the answer
was Molly.

He now saw that there was some kind of crisis and that Molly would find
it out for him and that he would be first with the news, the whole
apparat would be working on it, and he, the great Gregor Arbatov, he
would find it! He stood, wobbling, and ambled awkwardly back through the
crowded room to the men's bathroom. Inside, he deposited his coins in
the slot and tried to call Molly again.

There was no answer.

Oh, Molly, he prayed. Oh, please, please, don't let me down, when I need
you so bad.

The news continued to be bad at Delta Command, even after the debacle at
the Hummel house. The Rangers had run into heavy weather over Indiana
and had to divert south and take on fuel in Tennessee and were now ETA'd
at 1900 hours earliest, and that was with a twilight night drop which
Puller didn't want to risk, so make it 2100 before they were on station
and ready to assault. Meanwhile Third Infantry was hung up in the
traffic building up outside the roadblocks and was having a hell of a
time fighting their way through it.

Pentagon analysts had made no further penetrations of the queer message
sent by the "Provisional Army of the United States." Peter Thiokol had
come to a standstill in his attempts to understand the identities of
Aggressor Force, and therefore was mum on his chances of breaking the
reset door code at the shaft entrance. There was, furthermore, no word
from the FBI regarding its investigations of his wife, Megan, and any
help she could have given them. The two surviving little girls at the
Hummel house were too distraught to provide any clues as to the
identities of the three men who had held them hostage for most of the
day. The Pentagon kept inquiring as to progress in breaking the seizure;
Dick Puller had no progress, but he had final casualty figures of Bravo
Company's assault: fifty-six dead, forty-four wounded, leaving an
effective force of less than fifty men. The field hospital set up by
Delta medical personnel was being strained to the maximum, and men had
already begun to die who would have survived in Vietnam, where the
air-evac system had been set up much better.

It was six o'clock. Six hours to go.

Puller headed off to find Thiokol and monitor the latest in FBI
investigation reports. But he didn't make it very far.

"Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!"

It was a Spec 4, one of the Commo specialists.

"Yeah?"

"Sir, we were supposed to get a response every fifteen minutes from Rat
Six on the other side of the mountain.

They've missed two checks now."

"Have you tried to call them?"

"Yes sir. No answer."

Puller took the microphone.

"Rat Six, this is Delta Six, do you copy?"

There was no answer, only silence on the radio.

Puller tried a few more times.

"Who's in that area?" he asked one of his sergeants.

"Sir, besides the Rat Six Team, nobody. Except we've got the mountain
ringed with state policemen, so there should be a cop a little farther
out."

He consulted a map, then went to the radio and called state police
headquarters at the roadblock on Route 40 a few miles away.

"Ninety-Victor, this is Delta Six, do you read?"

"Affirmative, we have you. Delta Six, we copy."

"Ninety-Victor, you got a man on, uh, looks like Moser Road?"

"Yes, sir, had that one sealed off for quite a time."

"Can you patch me through to him, 90Victor."

"Yes, sir. You just hang in there."

A few moments passed.

"Delta Six, this is 22-Victor, at the roadblock on Moser Road, about
three miles due west of South Mountain. I've been requested to contact
you."

"Yes, 22-Victor, I copy. Listen, son, you heard anything recently?"

"Just what I figured on, sir."

"And what was that, 22Victor?"

"Well, sir, I figure the helicopter finally burned down to the ammo."

"Say again, 22Victor."

"Well, sir, right from where that helicopter crashed and exploded, about
twenty minutes ago, all the ammo cooked off. It was about ten or twenty
seconds of gunfire. That was all."

Dick put the microphone down.

"Delta Six?"

Dick said nothing.

"Delta Six, this is 22-Victor. Do you require further assistance?"

But Dick said nothing.

Goddamn him.

He turned, looked at the mountain about a mile off.

Goddamn him: he'd found Rat Six. He'd wiped it out.

And he'd sent men into the tunnels after the Rat Teams.

"Sir, do you want to send a party around to check out the Rat Six
position?"

Puller shook his head. What was the point? AggressorOne had topped him
again. His rats were dead in their holes.

And there was nothing Puller could do about it now except order up the
body bags and pray for Peter Thiokol.

"Thiokol?"

Peter looked up from the Aggressor-One document, from his notebook, from
his FBI counter intel reports. It was Skazy.

"Look, we have to talk."

"About what? I have a lot of--"

"Out in the barn."

"What is this?" said Peter, reading at once something tense and guilty
on the officer's face. "What's going on?"

"In the barn, please. Dr. Thiokol."

Peter waited a few minutes, then went out and moseyed around back to
where Skazy and two other Delta officers awaited. The men were smaller,
leaner Skazys: lean, serious guys in cammo fatigues, bulging with belts
and knives and grenades.

"So? What's the--"

"We want you to keep an eye on someone for us."

"That's not my job," said Peter. "I'm not here to keep an eye on
anybody."

"On Dick Puller," said Skazy.

Peter felt his face betray some shock.

"There was a time," said Skazy, "when Dick Puller was the best man this
Army had. It was an honor to serve under him, let me tell you. He was a
great officer. He was a professional's professional. But he lost it."

"What are you talking about?" Peter didn't like this a bit.

"Sometimes these guys who've seen so much combat lose the edge. They
can't send boys to die anymore. They don't have the balls for the big
leap. They delude themselves; they don't close out the engagement, they
don't get in tight, they're not willing to take casualties, they're not
willing to see their own troops die to take an objective. And so you get
what you've got right now: a sense that all around us things are going
on, but right here, right at the point of the crisis, nothing is
happening, except that we're marking time."

Peter felt himself a poor advocate for Puller.

"Look, he's trying, he can't do much until--"

Skazy bent close.

"In the Iranian desert there came a moment he'd trained his life for. It
didn't come down like it was laid out, and it meant taking a big chance,
it meant going for it. You know what they say in this business? Who
dares, wins. That's the First principle of special operations. In the
desert, Dick Puller lost the talent to dare. That guy up there on that
mountain, he's still got it."

"What are you saying?" Peter said.

"I'm saying if he panics again, I'm going to take him out.

And push forward and deal with the consequences later. It's what I
should have done in the desert. You just watch him. If you see signs
that he's breaking down, you let me know, got it?"

Peter saw now that he was in some twisted, sick family drama. It was
some humorless parody version of a sixties sitcom. My Three Sons as
written by Edward Albee, in which the oldest boy. Crazy Skazy here, was
going to knock off Dad, Fred MacMurray/Dick Puller, while the two
younger boys, himself and the other son, poor dumb Uckley, sat around
wondering what to do.

"You'd better reconsider what--"

"Thiokol, if he freezes, you sing out, you hear. That's your real job.
Now, you'd better get back to your god damned door."

The farther along he got, the better Teagarden felt, when he knew it
should be just the opposite. No matter how you cut it, he knew, he was
welshing out. He was ejecting.

Color him gone.

Yet his relief as the tunnel called Alice widened, as its dog legs and
juts eventually straightened themselves out, was enormous and
liberating. Goddamn, it felt so good; he'd felt this way in 'Nam, way
out in Indian country, he'd been just a kid, it was '71 or so and he was
new to the Forces. It was after a long goddamn time in a little place,
getting hit every night, that at last a relief column had broken
through. It felt just like that. He couldn't smell the sky yet, or see
the stars--if there were stars; he had no idea what time it was-- but he
wasn't going deeper and deeper into the god damned darkness.

He almost wanted to whistle. But suddenly he heard something just ahead.
It was like a little rustle or something, up against the rock. What, had
Rat Six sent more guys in? He froze, caught. To run into an officer and
have to explain what the hell he was doing broken off from his partner,
here, hundreds and hundreds of feet back, almost in the lateral tunnel,
that was trouble. He ransacked his own mind for an excuse, something to
put between himself and his disgrace.

The radio!

The Prick-88 wasn't working, they weren't getting through, he'd come on
back to reestablish contact before-- A light beam shot out, hit him in
the eyes, pinning him.

"Hey! Jesus, you guys, you scared me. What the hell, you checking on us.
Rat Six? I lost radio contact, came back to get a clear line. Listen,
we're way the hell back there."

Another light struck him, blasting his vision, filling his brain with
exploding sparks. He heard muttering, the soft jingle of equipment.

"What's going on, guys? Like, is all this really--"

A hand like a darting bat flew in front of his eye, landed at his chin,
and with a strong yank pulled him back until he crashed against a strong
body; the hand pulled his chin up. opening his throat to the attack. At
almost precisely the same second, though Teagarden never saw it, the
other hand drew the evil edge of a very sharp combat blade across his
throat, cutting with icy precision through skin, cartilege, and on down
to the carotid artery, which it severed.

My sons! he thought. Jesus, my sons!

But, stunned as he was, Teagarden at least had a second left for a
reflex, and as he died, his finger tensed on the MP-5's trigger and the
little gun barked out a four-round burst. The bullets smashed
pointlessly into the ground, and immediately other men were on
Teagarden, beating at him with rifle butts.

This was the hard part.

The guns were easy: A Fabrique Nationale FAL, in 7.62-mm NATO, or.308,
serial number 1488803-213; a 9mm Uzi, manufactured also by Fabrique
Nationale under license from the crafty Israelis, serial number
10945873-38771 with a very professionally made but otherwise untraceable
silencer that extended a good seven inches beyond the barrel; and a
British L2A3, called a Sterling, in 9mm also, serial number 129848-555;
plus one handgun, a Czech CZ-75, serial number ground off. This
information had been forwarded to Washington, but the stuff felt as
though it came from the immense pool of surplus weapons held in obscure
warehouses the world over and belonging to no country but only to the
fraternity of international arms dealers. It could have all been bought
from The Shotgun News.

The clothes and personal effects were easy, too, though Uckley had felt
a little ghoulish going through them. As for the personal effects, there
were none. Each of the three dead aggressors had gone into battle
without pictures of loved ones, without Bibles, without even wallets,
with nothing tiny or human to sustain them: they were men who seemed to
have never been. Their clothes were well-washed but equally vague: heavy
black boots of obscure manufacture, also picked up somewhere on the
military surplus market. Also, black fatigue pants with huge bellows
pockets at the thighs; blue watch shirts, perhaps naval in origin; black
sweaters and watch caps. They had gloves, found stored in the shot-up
house, and heavy parkas, perhaps for outdoor work. All of the clothes
would perhaps in time yield their secrets to the sophisticated
microscopic textile testing the Bureau had back in its labs in
Washington; but that would take weeks, and in hours the world would be
ending. The clothes were therefore of no immediate help.

This left the bodies. This left the hard part.

The three naked men lay on a tarpaulin in the middle of the
Burkittsville fire department. Sooner or later a doctor would surely get
there who could do this thing more professionally than poor Uckley, the
mother killer with the black and blue stomach, but he had not arrived
yet and nobody else particularly wanted to do it. So there was Uckley,
alone with the three bodies.

Look at them, he told himself.

The big one who'd died upstairs seemed the worst. He'd put the Czech
pistol into his mouth and squeezed off a round.

The bullet had blown out the back of his skull, leaving his head queerly
deflated in appearance, like a melon halved by an ax. But more amazing
was his right shoulder, which looked as if a buzz saw had hit it; one of
Delta Three's bullets had really ripped it up. God, how could he go on,
hurt like that?

Yet Uckley had seen him, climbing the steps, firing, the whole works. In
pain like that? This was some kind of Superman.

Even the corpse grinned a little at him. What was there in that
white-toothed smile? Was it superiority?

Yeah, okay, Uckley thought. So you were the better man.

The other two had taken more hits but looked better.

They were cd docs just dead men with what looked like red scabs the size
of quarters scattered across their bodies, three across the chest of
one, eleven spread randomly across the other. Bullet holes, lovely,
Uckley thought. He thought of a picture from a history book of proud
townspeople standing next to some old-time desperado, hit about a dozen
times and now propped up like a cigar store Indian in his coffin, his
mustache drooping, his bullet holes shining like buttons in the sun.

Think, Uckley told himself.

Okay, all of them were lean, strong men. They had the flat bellies and
sinewy muscles of well-trained professional military men, elite
troopers. Their hair was all cut short; one of them had nicked himself
shaving that day. They looked to be in their late twenties. All three
had patches of scar tissue on their upper arms, and one had quite a few
on his wrists and chest. Tattoos? Yes, tattoos, somebody had surgically
removed their tattoos!

And goddamn, they were tan. Their faces and their arms were tan; they
had the burnished deep color that Rshermen get, men who spend their
lives in the sun.

Uckley went back to the first one. He looked more closely at his body.
Yes, there was a lacework of stitches running up his chest, intersected
by another line of stitches.

You've been hit before, he thought. You've had a very adventurous life,
my friend. I'll bet you could tell me some things if you were alive.

He checked the others for wounds. The one was clean, but the other had a
pucker of scar tissue up high, near his collarbone on the right side. It
was another bullet hole.

These were clearly tough customers, all right. Somebody else's Delta.

He wished he knew what to do next. He walked back to the leader. What am
I, a forensic pathologist? I just look and see dead guys, their heads
shot away. He remembered the man standing above him, the little girl
squirming beneath him. Let the girl go for crissakes, he'd said, and the
man had just stared at him.

You had me cold, pal.

Instead, you walked back and blew your brains out.

Uckley knelt. Something in that smile, something mysterious and bright.
A commando with movie-star teeth blowing his brains out in the back room
of an old house in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Almost involuntarily, Uckley put his finger out. It was the
unnaturalness of the dead man's smile that disturbed him. The teeth were
so white. He put his finger in the dry mouth, felt the dry lips and the
dry, dead tongue, reached up, pinched, tugged and-- Yes, they were
false.

The porcelain bridge came out in his hand.

He checked quickly. All three men had completely false teeth, and almost
brand new bridges placed in their mouths.

** ** **

Witherspoon began to chatter.

"Wow, did you hear that? Man, that sounded like gunfire.

You suppose--"

But then Walls's hand stole over his mouth and pulled him down with more
strength and will than the larger, younger man ever thought the smaller,
older one possessed.

Then he heard the whisper in his ear.

"Okay, now, man, you just take it easy, you just keep it quiet. Okay,
man? Okay?"

Witherspoon nodded and Walls let slip his mouth.

"Shit, you--"

"Shhhhhh. Old Charlie, he in the tunnel. Yep. Charlie here. Charlie come
a-hunting. Yep, old Charlie, you can't hold him back. He's come
a-hunting."

Witherspoon looked at him, feeling his eyes bulge and his heart begin to
trip hammer.

"Hey--"

"Hey, nothing. You listen to Walls. Walls knows Charlie Walls and
Charlie, man, them two go way back."

Walls seemed, queerly, to be fading on him, to be transfiguring into
some other creature: he slid back, as if to allow his blackness to be
absorbed by the tunnel. At the same time. Walls had unslung Mr. Twelve,
and adroitly peeled off the black tape that masked the muzzle and the
ejector port.

With one swift metallic klak! the old tunnel rat pumped a big
double-ought into the chamber.

"Okay, you listen," Walls said softly. "Time to gear up.

Get your shit on, get your piece ready. Tunnel be hot.

Charlie hunting us, man, we got to hunt Charlie. Only way to stay
alive."

Witherspoon threw on his flak jacket and picked up his German machine
pistol. He cocked it, drawing back the knob that ran through the housing
over the barrel; it clicked locked and solid. He slid the night vision
goggles down across his face, popped off the lens cap, and turned on the
device from the battery pack at his belt. As he diddled with the image
intensifiers and the focus, the tunnel leapt to life in a kind of
aquamarine as the electro-optics picked up the infrared beam from the
lamp atop the goggles; he had a sense of being underwater, everything
was green, green and spooky. He turned to Walls and faced a man on fire.
The convict's face burned red and yellow like some hideous movie special
effect; Witherspoon almost laughed at the strangeness, the comedy of it
all, but it was only that Walls, excited, had begun to pulse with blood,
and from so close, all that heat, all those agitated molecules, came
through the lenses like a movie monster.

"Okay," said Walls soothingly, "now, this is how it got to be. We got to
move forward, and make our contact as early as we can. Okay, we hit
Charlie, we fall back. We hit him again, we fall back. See, in a one-way
tunnel, you got only one chance, man. You got to hit that sucker and hit
him over and over. You got to hope he runs out of men before you run out
of tunnel. Because if you run out of tunnel before he runs out of men,
you're one trapped rat. Man, the tunnels I been in all had holes at both
ends, this fucker only one end. These white bitches, they always let you
down."

"Okay, I'm with you."

Something flashed in Witherspoon's psychedelic vision: it was Walls's
teeth.

He was smiling.

"Whistle while you work, man," Walls said merrily. * * *

** ** **

Phuong, in the tunnel called Alice, also heard the gunshots.

Mother, her daughter said. Mother, the Americans are coming for us.

I know, she said. Let them come.

But her response was different, because unlike Rat Team Baker, she had
not come to the end of her tunnel; she still believed there was
something ahead. Thus her thought was to continue her movement.

She reached to her belt and swiftly removed one M-26 fragmentation
grenade, smooth as an egg. Then she knelt, took off her tennis shoes,
and'quickly unlaced them and threw the shoes away, behind her. She
swiftly tied a loop around the lever of the grenade with just enough
tension to hold it in close enough. Then, gingerly, she pulled the pin.

She felt the lever strain against the shoelace. With her knife she began
to saw through the lace. At last, only a hair's width of lace remained,
just the thinnest, tiniest membrane of woven cotton. Gingerly, she set
the thing down in the center of the tunnel, on its base. She knew that
if men came through the tunnel single Ble, without lights, they would
kick it; when they kicked it, or bumped it, the thing would fall on its
side, the shoelace would pop and-- Two hundred yards farther on she
repeated the process with the other lace.

Let the Americans come, she thought. Let them come for Phuong, as
before. And as before, Phuong will be ready. I will save my child from
the fire.

Turning, she fled deeper into her home, the tunnel.

Peter was writing.

Provisional army of us??? code'll 12 digits II suppressed integer'll
syllabification correspondence???? vowel repetition significance???
12=12=12= 1211 Simple integer equivalent?? 12 =12 =12= twelve????

He set up a simple a=l, b=2, c==3 scheme to see what the thing decrypted
out to. It decrypted out to... nonsense.

He played with themes of 12: 4 3's, 2 6's, 3 4's, 12 1's 12. Twelve, he
kept thinking, twelve Suddenly bells were ringing. What the fuck? He
looked up as a bunch of Commo specialists in the room jumped, shocked
out of what they were doing.

"What the hell does that mean?" Peter asked.

"It means Priority One," said one of the kids. "It means they've got
something for us."

"You better go get the hotshots."

But by the time Peter got to the flash teletype, Skazy had already taken
up the prime position.

"Okay," he said greedily, "okay, here it comes," as the machine spat out
its information.

Skazy read the document quickly and summarized.

"They've identified the original source of Aggressor-One's communication
and they think from that their psychologists can extrapolate his
motivation, his psychic dynamics, a profile of who he is and what he's
liable to do, what he's capable of, and what we should do."

"So?" said Puller.

Skazy's fast eyes ripped through the letters as they spewed out. Every
twenty or so lines he peeled the paper off the roller and passed it
around the room. The machine clicked for several minutes.

"Of course," said Major Skazy. "That's why it's so familiar, yes."

Puller said nothing for the longest time, letting the younger men absorb
the information.

"All right," said Puller. "Let's have it."

"It sounds familiar," said Skazy, "because it is familiar.

It's John Brown."

There was quiet in the room.

"Yes, it's the same, don't you see?" Skazy rushed on, tumbling with the
information. "It's John Brown's Raid, before the Civil War. He's taken
over a key installation at the center of the military industrial
complex. Right?"

"In 1859," Peter said, "in Harpers Ferry, in fact not seven miles from
here, John Brown led a force of about twenty or so men and took over a
federal arsenal and musket factory. This year, with a few more men, he's
taken over a federal missile silo. Strategic muskets, in other words."

"And the goal is the same," Skazy said, "to start the big war, and to
unleash the forces of good and to drive out the forces of evil. And,
this time, as last time, there's a bunch of elite troops outside the
place who've got the job of going in with bayonets fixed to try to stop
him."

"What's the source?" asked Peter laconically, feeling quite beyond
surprise.

"The message he sent," Skazy answered, "it's from John Brown's
interrogation by federal authorities in the jailhouse at Charlestown,
West Virginia, October 17, 1859, after his capture and before his
execution."

Skazy read from a CIA psychologist's report: " 'Empathetic connection
with historical figure suggests paranoid schizophrenia to an unusual
degree. Such men tend to be extremely dangerous, because in their zeal
they tend to exhibit great will and charisma. Well-known examples
include Adolf Hitler, John Brown himself, Joseph Stalin, Ghengis Khan,
several of the Roman emperors, Peter the Great. The standard symptoms
are highly developed aggressive impulses and the tendency toward the
creation of self-justifying systems of illusion. In the classical cases
such men tend to be the offspring of broken families, generally with
fathers either absent or remote, and strong matriarchal units replacing
the patriarchal.

They are usually marked by abnormally high IQS and extremely
well-developed "game intelligence." Such men, typically, are
extraordinary tacticians and brilliant at solving narrow technical or
strategic problems. They almost always operate from the narrow basis of
their own self-interest. They lack the gift of perspective; their power
stems from their ability to see only the relevant, narrow slice of the
"big picture." They lack associational abilities; they lack,
furthermore, any tendency toward moderation. They are highly
narcissistic, usually spellbinding speakers and almost always completely
ruthless. Historically, their flaw arrives in "overreaching"; they tend
to think they can change the world, and almost always go too far and are
destroyed--usually at great cost to self and families--by their
inability to compromise."

"Everything we need to know about him except how to kill him," said Dick
Puller.

Skazy continued. "From this they expect him to be American military,
extremely proficient in a narrow range, nursing obscure political
grudges. They think his men are Americans, possibly a reserve Green
Beret unit that has come under his spell. They think he's bankrolled by
conservative money. Man"--he whistled--"they've worked up a whole
scenario here. It's about what you'd expect. Screwball general,
impressionable troops, maybe some paramilitary outfit, those pretend
meres who read Soldier of Fortune and wear camouflage fatigues to the
shopping malls. Survivalists, nut cases, that sort of thing."

Dick listened, his eyes fixed on nothing.

Finally, he said, "So what's their recommendation?"

"Frontal attack. They say that his green troops will buckle when they
start taking heavier casualties. They want us to throw frontals at'em
again and again."

"They better send some fresh body bags," was all Dick said.

Then he asked, "So is that what you think. Major?

Frontals?"

"Yes, sir. I think we ought to hit him again. The sooner, the more
often, the better. Let me saddle up Delta and we're off. Bravo in
support. Leave a small reserve force here in case that radio message
this morning was to another unit ready to jump us from the rear. When
the Third Infantry and the Rangers arrive, you can feed them in if we
haven't taken the place down yet."

Puller went around the room. Everybody said yes. Hit him. Hit him and
hit him, and he'll crack. Waiting solved nothing, especially now that
Rat Six had been zapped and there was nothing going on inside the
mountain.

Even the morose Lieutenant Dill, the gym teacher who now led what was
left of Bravo, had to agree: hit'em, he said.

Hit'em until they crack.

Finally, Puller got to Peter.

"Since this has become a democracy and we're polling the voters. Dr.
Thiokol, you might as well throw in your two cents. You tell me. Should
I hit him until he cracks?"

Peter considered. He felt Skazy's hard eyes boring in upon him. But
Skazy didn't scare him; he'd been glared at by furious five-stars in his
time.

He said, "And what if he doesn't crack? What if his men are the best,
and when they take casualties they don't break?

What if he's got enough ammo up there to hold off a division?

And he knows you can attack only over a narrow front, up one side of the
mountain?

"What if, most important of all, the subtlest part of his plan is
convincing you that yes, he's a nut case, he thinks he's John Brown, and
that he'll come apart under the pressure.

What then? And what if you hit him until you run out of men and the
bodies pile up like cordwood just outside his perimeter.

The Rangers show and the Third Infantry shows, and he guns them down
too. And the men that you've got left are exhausted and broken. What
then?"

"Then he wins."

"Right. We don't get in. What if they're wrong in D.C.?"

"These are experienced guys. Doctors," argued Skazy.

"Major Skazy, I know a little about psychiatrists. I'm here to tell you
there aren't three of them in the world who could agree on the results
of two plus two."

Skazy was quiet.

Peter said, "I don't think he's insane. I think he's very, very smart,
and he's set up this whole thing, this phony John Brown thing, because
he knows our prejudices, and he knows how eager we are to believe in
them. He's encouraging us to believe in them at the cost of our own
destruction."

He didn't express his worst, most frightening thought, the source of his
curiously dislocating sense of weirdness over the past several seconds.
The whole thing seemed pulled not out of history, but out of something
far more personal. Out of, somehow, memory. His. His own memory. He
remembered.

Yes, John Brown, but who thought of John Brown first and used him as an
analogy for a takeover in a missile silo in Nuclear Endgames,
Prospects/or Armageddon?

Peter Thiokol.

Peter thought: This son of a bitch has read my book.

But Puller was speaking.

"I just got a call from Uckley, who examined the three dead aggressors
in Burkittsville. They had false teeth."

He let it sink in.

"Nothing gives a man's national identity away to forensic pathologists
faster than dental work. So these guys had their teeth pulled--all of
them--and bridgework from a third-party country inserted, so that in the
event of death or capture, their origin couldn't be traced," Puller
said. "These guys aren't psychos or fringe lunatics or right-wing
extremists or a rogue unit. They're a foreign elite unit on a mission.
They're here for a specific, rational purpose. We have to wait until we
know who they are. Then we'll know what to do. To squander our limited
resources right now is to doom ourselves to failure. We don't know
enough to jump."

"When will we?" said Skazy bitterly.

"When I say so," said Dick Puller. "When we know who they are. And not
before."

1800.

Witherspoon should have seen them first, but Walls did, or rather sensed
them, smelled them, somehow felt them, and his swift elbow into
Witherspoon's ribs was all the signal needed. In Witherspoon's field of
electro-optics, they emerged as phantasms, swirling patterns of dense
color swooping abstractly through the green chamber at him. They were
dream monsters, humped and horrible, their shapes changing, one beast
leaking into another; they were straight from his hyperfervid id, white
men with guns in the night.

So die, motherfuckers, thought Witherspoon.

He fired first, the MP-5 bucking in a spasm as it hurried through its
little box of bullets. How good it felt! It drove the fear from him.
Through the lenses he could not see the streak of the tracers, nor their
strikes. But he saw something else: the red darts of sheer heat, which
the infrared picked up and magnified, flew into them like glops of color
from the brush of a maniac. The shapes slithered, shattered, quivered,
and seemed to magically recombine and reform before him. The stench of
powder rose like an elixir to his nose. The gun wrenched itself empty.

He scrambled back, laughing madly. God, he'd hit so many. He heard
screams behind him. Man, we hit those motherfuckers cold, we blindsided
them, man, we took their butts out!

"Down!" screamed Walls, who in the roar of their race back had heard
something bounce off the walls, and as if to make the point clearer, he
nailed Witherspoon with an open field hit, knocking him down in a tangle
of ripped knees and torn palms. Then the grenade detonated.

It was very close. The noise of it was the worst, but not by much. The
noise was huge; it blew out both of Witherspoon's eardrums and left
traces of itself inside his skull for what might be forever. Its flash
was weird and powerful, particularly through the distortion of his night
vision glasses, the hue so hot and bright it had no coefficient in
nature. Finally, following these first phenomena, the force of the blast
arrived in an instant, and was as mighty as a wallop from God. It threw
him, rag-doll-like, against the wall. He felt himself begin to bleed
abruptly, though as yet there was no pain.

Witherspoon sat up, completely disoriented. For just a second he forgot
both who and where he was. He blinked and peeped about like a just-born
baby bird, chunks of shell and Huid stuck to his face. In the dark, bats
of light Hipped and swooped toward him. The air was full of dust and
broken neon and cigarette smoke from forties movies. His head ached.

"Come on, boy, shoot back!" came the shout from close at hand, and he
turned to see an interesting thing. He was by now only half in his night
goggles, which had been blown askew by the grenade, so he saw half of
Walls in the stylized abstractions of the infrared, a glowing red god,
all anger and sinew and grace; but the other half of Walls was the human
half: a soldier, scared to death, full of adrenaline and responsibility,
standing against the tide of fire in the blackness and cranking out
blasts from his Mossberg, eruptions of Hash which, for however brief a
fragment of time they lasted, lit the tunnel in pink-orange and almost
turned the fierce Walls into a white man.

Walls pumped up dry, but by that time Witherspoon had shaken the dazzle
from his brain, gotten a new clip into the German gun, and turned to
spray lead down the tunnel, watching the bullets leaking light and
describing a tracing of a Hower petal as they hurled off into the
darkness. The fire came back at him after a pause, angry and swarming.
It seemed to be hitting everywhere, pricks of hot coal sent Hying
against his skin by the bullet strikes.

He knelt, fumbled through a mag change.

"Grenade," said the resourceful Walls, having thought one step ahead,
and Witherspoon caught a glimpse of him as a classical javelin thrower
posing for a statue. Then he uncoiled, and as he uncoiled fell forward.
Witherspoon heard yells of panic from surprisingly close at hand, but
was unfortunately and stupidly looking into the heat of the blast when
the grenade detonated. His vision disappeared in a confusion of
deep-brain nerve cells firing off and as he fell backward, his night
shades fell even farther awry, then slipped away.

"I'm blind, man, I'm blind he screamed. Walls had him. The firing seemed
to have stopped. Walls put a strong hand around the fleshy part of his
arm above the elbow and pulled him backward in a crazy old-nigger
scuffle. He felt like one of those clumsy black fools in an old movie.

Walls pulled him back farther and deeper. Gradually, his vision returned
to normal. He could see Walls's sweating face just ahead.

"I can see now."

"Man, don't ever look at those suckers when they go off."

"How many did we get?"

"I don't know, man. Hard to say. In the dark, it sometime seem like so
much more, you know?"

They fell into silence. Witherspoon breathed raggedly, looking for his
energy. He felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. He could
smell Walls next to him. Yet he sensed no stress in Walls.

"You like this, don't you?" he asked, amazed.

Walls sniggered. "Shee-itt," he finally said, "a chance to kill white
boys? Man, this is like a vacation"

"You think they had enough?"

"No. Not these white boys. Most white boys, not these white boys. These
white boys pissed."

From the footsteps she guessed no more than five. She heard them rushing
along, their breathing ragged under the equipment they wore and their
urgency. Then the first explosion came, its Hash bouncing off the walls
and through the turns all the way to her, its hot, dry concussion
arriving a half second later. There were screams and moans. But
then--the sound traveled surprisingly well under the ground, for it had
no place else to go except straight to her--she heard the scuffle of
feet.

Mother, they are still coming.

I hear them.

This surprised her. In the war, the Americans almost always turned back
when they took casualties. On the surface, when they started losing
people, they withdrew and called in the airplanes. But in the tunnels
there were no airplanes; they simply retreated. Yet these footsteps came
on, if anything, more determined than before.

She turned, upset, now frightened, and began to withdraw deeper still
into the tunnel.

Hurry, Mother. They must have found the second grenade and disarmed it.
They are coming faster.

She raced into the tunnel. By now it had almost disappeared into a trace
and the beams the miners had erected for their operations had long since
vanished; instead, it was the classical Cu Chi passage, a low, cramped
crawlspace, fetid and dense. She rushed through it, her fingers feeling
the way. She felt as if she were crawling back into the black womb and
knew she was very deep and very far.

She halted after a time, turned, and listened. She could no longer hear
the men. She thought she was safe.

Am I safe?

Mother, be careful. You must wait.

She was still. Time slowed.

Mother, be patient. Haste kills.

What was it? An odor? Some disturbance in the air? An odd flash of
mental energy from somewhere? Or only the return of her old dark
instincts? Somehow she knew she was not alone.

Her hand slipped to her belt. She removed the knife.

She willed herself to stillness. She willed her body into the walls. She
lay motionless and silent in the dark and the loneliness with her
daughter. She felt herself attempting to enter into the fabric of the
underground, to still the whirl of her atoms and the beat of her heart.
She thought she heard something once, and then another something. The
time passed; she had no idea how much.

Then again something else came. The sound of men in heavy equipment
crashing through the tunnel, much farther back now, much more
frightened, much more reluctant to go on now that the tunnel was
shrinking.

She could imagine them right where the bigger tunnel was absorbed into
the smaller one, their bravado frozen by its sudden shrinkage and the
difficulty of the path that lay before them. Western people did not like
to go into the dark alone, where they could not maneuver or talk or see
or touch one another. It would stop them if anything would: their simple
terror of the close space and the darkness.

The men made brave sounds. They were arguing. One seemed louder. She
could not quite understahd the distorted sounds. But the yelling grew
louder, and then halted entirely.

She heard them walking away. Their sounds slowly disappeared.

She almost moved then. But she did not.

Wait, Mother. When you move, you die. Wait. Wait.

The dark pressed upon her like the lid of a coffin. Her hip was wedged
against a jutting rock; she could feel it bruise. Her muscles stiffened
and began to ache. Her scalp tingled. A cramp tightened her upper arm.
Her whole body screamed for the release of movement.

She tried to think of her village before the war came. It was near a
place called Ben Sue in the Thanh Dien forest.

She had a sister and nine brothers; her father had been a Viet Minh and
fought the French with an old carbine until it fell apart, and then he
fought them with bamboo spears. But for a time it was a prosperous area,
Ben Sue; there were many fruit trees, many cattle; life had not been
easy, but they lived well enough by their modest endeavors. She was
fifteen and still helping with the housework when her home was
obliterated by bombs.

She tried to remember: she thought of it as the golden time, those few
years before the bombs came. She held on to it, sometime, in the
tunnels, and would tell her daughter, Some day you'll see. We'll live in
the sunlight. There will be fruit and rice for all. You'll see, my
little one. Then she would sing the child a lullaby, holding her warm
and tight and feeling her small heart beating against her own:

Sweet good night, baby sweetness in the morning comes calm, Sweet good
night, baby daughter all the war will soon cease, Sweet good night, baby
sweetness in the morning comes--

There, Mother. Her daughter spoke to her from her heart. Do you feel it?
There is another.

Phuong lay very still because she felt his warmth.

He was very good, and like her, he was barefoot. He had no equipment. He
moved like a snake, in slow, patient strokes, nothing forced or
hastened. He had come ahead under the noise of the men who had halted,
.covered by the loud drama of their chatter and yelling. He'd moved
quickly and soundlessly, hunting her. He was immensely brave, she
understood, the very best of them. He was a man she could love, like her
husband.. He was a tunnel man. Now only the faintest blur, a different
shade of dark, he grew larger as he drew nearer; she felt his heat. And
then she felt the softness of his breath, and the sweetness of it, and
his terrible, terrible intimacy.

I must abandon you, my daughter, she thought. Where I must go next and
what I must do, you cannot be a part of. I love you. I will see you
soon.

Her daughter was silent. . . gone. Phuong was alone with the white man
in the tunnel.

They were as close as lovers in the dark, his supple body so close to
hers that she felt a terrible impulse to caress him, to have him, she
who had not had a man in a decade.

But she had him with her blade. It struck with amazing force in the dark
as he crawled by. She felt it sink into the living muscle and she felt
the muscles knit to fight it as she forced it deeper, and their bodies
locked. Their loins embraced. In the hole sex and death were so much the
same it was terrifying. She felt his arms enclose her and his breath was
labored and intense as if with sexual energy. His blood felt warm and
soft like a spurt of sperm. In frenzy he thrust his pelvis against hers,
and the friction, bucking and taking, was not unpleasant. Somewhere in
all this his blade probed desperately after her, and he cut a terrible
gash into her shoulder, through the cloth, through the flesh, almost to
the bone. She felt the knife sawing against her and muffled her scream
in his chest.

She pulled her blade out. And jammed it home again.

And again. And. . . again.

Then he was still. He had stopped breathing.

Spent, she pulled away from him and cupped her shoulder.

She was covered with their mingled blood. She could not even see him
anymore. Her arm throbbed, and she managed to rip a strip of cloth off
her tattered shirt, which she tied into a loose tourniquet. Inserting
the knife blade, she screwed the thing clockwise until the bleeding
stopped and only a huge numbness remained.

She tried to crawl ahead somehow, but her exhaustion was endless. She
surrendered to it, lying back, her mouth open, her eyes closed, in the
dark of the dark tunnel in the very center of the mountain. It was
completely silent. The roof of the tunnel was an inch from her face; she
could feel it.

She wanted to scream.

And then she heard it from just ahead: a drip of water striking a
puddle. And then another. She reached out and felt the water, and pulled
herself to it. She drank greedily from the puddle, and only when she was
done did she think to reach into the pouch on her belt and find a match.

The light flared dramatically, hurting her eyes, which she clamped shut.
Then she opened them. There was an opening in the roof of the tunnel.
She looked and realized it was another tunnel, impossibly small.

But, more important, it led up.

** ** **

He had been hit twice. It didn't seem fair. Witherspoon lay back, trying
to get it all clarified in his head. How many of them could there be?
How had the world turned so surrealistic on him?

"You doin" good, sonny," said Walls next to him. "Man, like we make
these white boys pay, no shit, huh?"

Witherspoon could hardly answer, he hurt so badly. It was a dream fight.
Total silence, then the sudden flashes as the bullets whipped by,
tearing into the walls of the tunnel, their own quick answers, and the
stumbling fallback before the detonation of the grenades. How many times
now? Three, four. How many had they killed? How many of their own
grenades were left?

But worse: how much tunnel was left?

The answer was depressing: not much.

"Whooo-eee," moaned Walls softly now, "we at the end of the line, boy."

Behind them the tunnel stopped. It ended here.

"Nobody's going home from this party," Walls said, loquacious at the end
as he had been at the start. "But we made them white boys do some
paying, right, .man?"

Witherspoon was silent. He'd long since lost the MP-5.

He had his automatic in his hands, though he was shaking.

He could hear the quiet slide of plastic against metal as Walls slid
more shells into his Mossberg.

"Shame I couldn't get this piece back to the guy," said Walls, cycling
the slide with a ratchety snik-snak! "Real nice piece, you know? He take
good care of it. No shotgun let you down like no woman."

"My wife never let me down," said Witherspoon.

"Sure, boy. You just be quiet now."

The smell of powder was everywhere in the tunnel.

Witherspoon's mouth was dry. He wished he had a drink of water or
something. His whole left leg was numb; he didn't think he could move
anyway, so at least it was good they had no place to run anymore. He was
thinking a lot about his wife.

"Man, Walls. Yo, Walls."

"Yeah."

"My wife. Tell her I loved her, you got that?"

"Man, you think I'm going to be around to do any telling?" Walls
chuckled at the absurdity of this idea. "Anyway, man, I bet she knows."

"Walls, you're a good guy, okay?"

"No, boy. I'm a very bad guy. Fact, I'm a motherfucker.

I just happen to do good tunnel work. You best be quiet now.

I think it's coming on to nut-cutting time."

And so it was. They heard the scuffles in the dark but had no targets.
That was the terrible thing about it all: they could not fire until
fired upon; it was a question of lying still and waiting for the world
to end. Witherspoon raised the pistol, a Browning 9-mil. He had thirteen
rounds in the mag, and then that was it. And there was no place else to
go.

They could hear them getting closer now, edging along.

Damn, these were brave men too. It pissed Witherspoon off to be matched
against such good ones. It didn't seem fair, somehow. But these guys, no
matter how many you killed, they just kept coming. They were the best.

** ** **

The 1st Battalion of the Third Infantry was only three hours late, the
convoy having gotten all fouled up in the amazing pile-up of traffic
outside the operational area.

There was something peculiar about these men. Puller thought, watching
as they climbed down from the big trucks just outside his headquarters
in the falling dark. Then it struck him: they were all handsome and
white and their hair was cut short around their ears in a style he
hadn't seen for years, what used to be called white sidewalls; they had
the odd appearance of Prussian cadets. He noticed next that instead of
the ubiquitous M-16, black plastic and famous, they carried the old
wooden-stocked M-14 in 7.62mm, a real infantry battle-fighting rifle.
And then he noticed, good Christ, their fatigues were starched!

"Who the hell are these guys?" he asked Skazy.

"Ceremonial troops. They guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, shit
like that. They march in parades, bury people in Arlington. Pull duty at
the White House. Hollywood soldiers."

"Jesus," said Puller.

He found the CO, a full bird colonel, rare for a battalion, even a
reinforced one, and introduced himself.

"I'm Puller," he said. "Colonel, get your men out of the trucks and
distribute ammo. You can even chow'em down if you've got time. But
keep'em near the trucks. We're going to get the ball rolling real soon
now, I hope, depending on what I hear from the Pentagon and whether this
young hotshot I have working on the door problem thinks he has a shot at
getting the shaft open."

The colonel just looked at him.

"Sir, maybe you'd like to tell me what this is about."

"Nobody briefed you, Colonel?"

"No, sir. I'm under the impression it's some kind of nuclear accident
and we'd be pulling containment duties."

"It's a night infantry assault. Colonel, and you'll be pulling perimeter
penetration duties, supported by a shot-up company of National Guardsmen
who've already lost half their manpower, some state policemen, a local
cop or two, and any high school ROTC units I can round up, and maybe, if
the god damned weather holds, a Ranger battalion now somewhere between
here and Tennessee in a couple of C130s.

Your job is to get Delta in close so it can jump the silo. You might
want to think about reforming your squad heavy weapons teams into an ad
hoc machine-gun platoon."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Brief your senior NCOS and your officers now.

There'll be a final briefing at 2000 hours. You can check with Delta
staff for maps. I'll expect all your officers to know the terrain
backward and forward by then."

"Y-yes, sir."

"You in Vietnam, Colonel?"

"Yes, sir. I was a captain with the 101st, a company commander."

"Well, you're back there, Colonel, except that it's a little colder and
a lot more important."

** ** **

Walls fired. He fired again. He fired again. Beside him, Witherspoon
fired with the pistol. Walls could hear it going off like the bark of a
dog. Meanwhile, heavy automatic fire came at them, tracer, and as it
skittered overhead it whistled on back to the end of the tunnel, and
began to ricochet.

Spent rounds whirled through the dark space over their heads. It was
like being in a frying pan at full sizzle, bubbles of hot grease dancing
everywhere, flying through the air in angry flecks. That's what Walls
thought of. But of course it wasn't. It was just the tunnel.

The Charlies broke off contact.

"Okay," Walls said. "Goddamn, I think I got one that time. Man, can't be
too many left. Man, we may be out of tunnel, but them boys going' be out
of peoples real soon now, you hear that, boy?" He laughed deeply at the
idea.

"Man, like to kill me a whole muthafucking platoon of them boys before
I'm done!" He laughed again, and then noticed the silence from
Witherspoon. He reached to him and found that the young soldier had died
sometime during the fight. He had simply and quietly bled to death.

Walls shook his head in disappointment. Now who was he going to talk to?
Man, this was worse than solitary.

He heard noises up ahead, the click of guns being checked and readied.
Okay, white boys coming again. He tried to think of them as Klansmen,
big crackers in pickups with ax handles and flaming crosses. Or big
Irish Baltimore cops with red faces, motherfuckers on horses, man, who'd
just as soon smash you as look at you. Or fancy white-boy suits look at
you like you a piece of shit a dog dumped on the street.

He laughed again, threw the slide on the Mossberg, felt a shell lifted
into place.

"Hey, come on, motherfuckers!" he yelled, laughing.

"Come on, white motherfuckers. Dr. P got some shit for you boys!"

It then occurred to him that there was an even larger joke he could play
on them! He could blow them all up! For hadn't Witherspoon, the perfect
little soldier boy, hadn't he carried C-4 explosive in a block somewhere
on him? Walls had blown tunnels in the 'Nam with this stuff; he knew it
well. He rolled to Witherspoon's body.

Sorry, boy, he said to the corpse. Got me some lookin' to do. He probed,
scared that the white boys would hit him before he could rig his big
surprise. But then he came across it in a bellows pocket of the field
pants, a greasy brick about the size of a book. He got it out and began
to squeeze and mold it in his strong hands, working some warmth and
flexibility into its chilled stiffness.

Gonna make me a bomb, he thought, blow those muthafuckers up.

Okay, finally, he had a lump about the size of a deflated football,
maybe a pound's worth of the stuff. He had one grenade left. He took it
off his belt and carefully unscrewed the fuse assembly and tossed away
the egg. He bent to Witherspoon and probed him until he came across a
coil of primacord in a pocket. He unraveled a bit of the primacord-- it
felt like putty and was an extremely hot-firing explosive fuse
substance--onto the tip of the grenade's blasting cap at the end of the
fuse, and then he plunged this into a glop of the C-4, quickly kneading
the C-4 around the grenade fuse, but careful to make sure that the
grenade lever was free, so it could pop off when he pulled the pin. He
worked hard, laughing softly to himself, knowing that time was very,
very short. For sure, they'd seen the tracers striking the rear wall.

They knew he was out of tunnel.

"Hey, white-boy motherfuckers, you boys want to get laid? Hah, old Walls
got some fine-lookin' bitches for you, man. Got a nice high yaller, got
me a couple white chicks, got me a redhead, got me some real foxes, man.
Come on and get it, white boys."

Three automatic weapons fired simultaneously and the bullets struck
around him, hitting the walls, the back of the tunnel, cutting him off,
kicking up clouds of coal dust from the floor. But he got the pin from
the grenade, and with a kind of lob-heave launched the thing, felt it
leave his hands, traveling slowly, not far enough, and he knew then he'd
die in the blast too. And he began to scramble backward, away, away,
though there was really no away to go to and-- In the small space the
blast was huge. It lifted and threw Walls through hot light and harsh
air. And dirt, or stone. For the world had been ruptured and the old
mountain heaved, and the ceiling of the tunnel gave. He felt the earth
covering him. He could not move. The tunnel caved in. He was frozen. He
was in his tomb. He was in total blackness. * * *

** ** **

It occurred to Peter that he should eat something. He was beginning to
feel shaky and his head ached. It had been hours since he'd eaten, way
back in another lifetime.

But he could not leave the door behind.

The damned door.

It was a simple idea really, you just had to write the program and that
was that. That, in fact, was its brilliance-- its simplicity. Peter knew
that if Delta fought its way to the elevator shaft in the launch control
facility, he'd confront the computer-coded door to the shaft itself. It
was the megadoor, the ultra-door, the total door. To pop it, you had to
know the twelve-digit code. Except that the aggressors would have
changed the code--easily done from inside the launch control center at
the computer terminal.

Change it to what?

There it was: the new code would be twelve letters or numbers long, or a
combination thereof, or less (but not more). Peter assumed that it would
be a consciously selected sequence, because--well, because, it would be
part of Aggressor-One's game. That's how his mind works, and I'm
beginning to get a feel for it.

The terror was in the computer program itself. The program, conceived
and written by Peter Thiokol of the MX Basing Modes Group, had been
designed exactly to prevent what Peter now had to do. That is, he had
built into its system a limited-try capacity. If the right code were not
hit in the first three attempts, the program reasoned that interlopers
were knocking at the door and automatically changed the code to a random
sequence of numbers, and it would take another computer at least 135
hours to run through the millions and millions of permutations, even
working at macro speed.

Three strikes and you're out, Peter thought.

But it had been so smart--so necessary--because the heart of South
Mountain is that it's independent-launch capable.

Suppose the missile base is under assault by specially trained Soviet
silo-seizure teams of the sort CIA said they were working up? Suppose
Qaddafi sends a suicide team in?

Suppose--oh, no, this is too wild!--right wing elements of the American
military attempt to take over the silo in order to launch a preemptive
strike against Johnny Red? In all those scenarios, exactly as projected
in the chapter in his book on the John Brown scenario, it fell to the
door and the key vault more than any complement of air security
policemen or the Doppler radar to hold the intruders at bay.

The joke was, he was fighting himself.

Through the medium of his poor wife, he had provided John Brown,
Aggressor-One, or whoever he was, with all his stuff: his ideas, his
insights, his theoretical speculations. He knows exactly what I know,
Peter thought. In a terrible way, he's me. I've permutated. I've cloned
a perfect twin; he's absorbed my personality.

Peter turned back to the documents the Agency psychologists had put
together on "John Brown." As he read the psychological evaluation, he
realized they could have been talking about him. And that's what
troubled him the most. It was as if John Brown had begun with him, or
with his book, or perhaps with his famous essay. And that he'd built his
plan outward from that, mastering not so much South Mountain as Peter
Thiokol.

He shivered. It was getting cold. He looked at his watch.

The digital numbers rushed by: 6:34.32 6:34.33 6:34.35 Less than six
hours to go.

John Brown. John Brown, you and your door. Three strikes and I'm out.

He started to doodle: Peter Thiokol = John Brown = 12 9=12=9?

Goddamn, he thought, it would make so much more sense if John Brown had
twelve letters in it--the way Peter Thiokol did.

The general was on the phone most of the time with Alex up at ground
level, listening impassively. Or he was standing politely back, watching
Jack Hummel dig through the block of titanium that stood between himself
and the second launch key.

Jack was quite deep by this time. It was difficult finding the space to
maneuver so deep in the metal. And his arms ached and the sweat ran down
his face. And, Jesus, he was hungry.

"Mr. Hummel. Mr. Hummel, how would you say it's going?"

"Look, you can see for yourself. I'm in here all the way.

I'm really getting deep now."

He felt the general over his shoulder, peering down the shaft he'd
opened, the wound in the metal.

"You're on the right line?"

"Absolutely. I'm going right into the center, that I can tell you. If
this chamber or whatever you say it is is in the center, then I'll get
it."

"How much longer?"

"Well, I can't say. You said the block was two hundred forty centimeters
in diameter, and I've gone maybe a third of that. So I'm close. Another
two, three hours, I don't know.

We'll just see."

He looked into the flame, which was consuming the titanium with a
voracious appetite. Even through the density of his lenses he could
sense its extraordinary power. Nothing on earth could stand before it;
all melted, yielded, liquified, and slid away against the urgency of the
heat.

He tried to imagine this little flame grown a million times. He tried to
imagine a giant flame, devouring as it flashed across the landscape; he
tried to imagine a giant torch cutting its kerf of destruction around
the globe, through cities and towns, turning men and women and babies to
ashes. He tried to imagine all the death there was, a planet of death.
It would be a lone zone that just didn't stop.

Instead, banal movie images flooded through his head: the mushroom
cloud, the wrecked cities, the piles of corpses, the mutated survivors,
bands of starving rat people scurrying through the ruins, and now a word
from our sponsor, liquid Ivory, for truly smooooth hands.

I can't see how it would really be, he thought. I just can't. And the
further leap, by which he would admit that such a fate could occur as a
direct consequence of his own actions, was entirely beyond him.

It's not my fault, he told himself. What was I supposed to do, let them
kill my kids? Sure, tell me my kids are less important than the world in
general: that's easy for anyone except a dad to say.

He did know it called for an extraordinary man.

And I'm an ordinary one, he concluded. Bomb or no bomb, war or no war,
those are my kids He looked back to the flame, in its hunger licking its
way toward midnight.

** ** **

"I told you," Megan told the Three Dumb Men. "How many times do I have
to tell you? They claimed they were Israelis. I swear to you I thought
they were Israelis. Jews.

Just Jews. Are any of you Jewish?"

The Three Dumb Men shook their heads.

"The FBI doesn't have Jews?" she asked, incredulous.

"In this day and age the FBI doesn't have Jews?"

"You're changing the subject, Mrs. Thiokol," said the harshest of them.
"We're under an enormous time constraint here. Please, could we return?
You've told us of your recruitment, you've told us of your mental state,
you've detailed the information you gave him, you've described Ari
Gottlieb and this mysterious intelligence officer in the Israeli
consulate."

"That's all I know. I've told you everything I know.

Please, I'd tell you anything. But I've told you everything."

It was dark by now, and through the windows she could see lights on in
the neighborhood.

"Would anybody like any coffee?" she said.

There was no answer.

"Could I fix myself some coffee?"

"Of course."

She went to a cabinet where she had a Mr. Coffee machine stored, got it
out, fiddled with filters, coffee grounds, water, and finally got the
thing to working. She watched the light come on as the coffee began to
drip into the pot.

One of the agents went to talk on the phone, then came back.

"Mrs. Thiokol, I've directed our counterespionage division to bring our
photos by. We've also got some photos from the Pentagon for you to look
at. We'd like you to try to find the face of the man who recruited you
and the face of the man you saw in the consulate, is that all right?"

"I'm horrible at faces," she said.

"We wish you'd try very hard," said the man. "As I said, time is very
important."

"What's going on?"

"It would be difficult to explain at this time, Mrs. Thiokol."

"It's something out there, isn't it? Something because of what I told
these people, that's what's going on, isn't it? It involves South
Mountain, doesn't it?"

There was a pause. The Three Dumb Men looked at one another, and finally
the eldest of them said, "Yes, it does."

"Has anyone been killed?"

"I'm afraid so."

Megan stared at the Mr. Coffee. You ought to be feeling something, she
thought. You've got blood on your hands, so feel it, all right? But she
felt only tired. She just felt exhausted.

"It's Peter," she said. "He's out there, isn't he? You'd want him out
there, wouldn't you?"

"Uh, yes, I believe Dr. Thiokol is onsite."

"On-site? Is that your word for it? He's where the shooting is. He's an
awful coward, you know. He won't be any good around guns at all. He's
best in some kind of room full of books. That's what he loves, just to
read and think and study and be left alone. He's so neurotic. They won't
put him near the guns and the danger, will they?"

"Well, Mrs. Thiokol, we really don't know. Some other people are
handling that operation. I don't know if he'll be up near the shooting
or back where it's safe. If it comes to it, I suppose he might have to
be where there's firing. And I'm sure, given what's involved, he won't
be a coward."

"Maybe that's what I wanted. Maybe what I really wanted was to get him
killed."

"You'd have to talk to your psychiatrist about that, Mrs. Thiokol. Fred,
call counter intel again, those damned books ought to be here by now."

"I just called them, Leo."

"Well, call them again, or something, don't just sit there."

"All right."

"The coffee's ready," Megan said. "Are you sure you don't want any
coffee?"

"Yes," one of the Dumb Men said, "I'd like some, please."

She poured it.

"Mrs. Thiokol, let's talk about this. How did you contact your friend
and how were the materials picked up. Was it through Ari?"

"Only once, just a few weeks ago. He sent me specially.

But more commonly we had it set up in New York so that--do you really
want to hear this? I mean, it's just details, you know, the little silly
business that seemed so ridiculous to me and--"

"Please, tell us."

She took a sip of coffee.

"Well, it was so stupid and complicated. They explained it to me very
carefully. I checked the Sunday Post. I picked an ad with the name of a
chain bookstore in it. Then I dropped a personal ad off for the Post
classifieds. Cash, they said, always pay cash. Through a code, I
identified the store.

Then I rented a car. Oh, and I had to remember to get something plaid.
Then I went to the store on the appointed day--it was usually in a mall
someplace around the Beltway-- and I wrote a number on a scrap of paper,
and I put it at page 300 of Gone with the Wind, which I loved when I was
a girl and which they always have. And then..."

"Who serviced the drop? Do you know?"

"Well, I was so curious I once stayed to check. A fat nervous-looking
middle-aged man. He looked like a slob. He was no--"

The door opened, and several agents, laden with material, began to troop
in. The photo books had arrived.

** ** **

Arbatov drove aimlessly through the traffic, down Route 1 to the
Beltway. He almost turned down it, but decided at the last moment not to
and was glad of that decision, for when he passed over it, he saw a
ribbon of light, signifying a terrible traffic backup, all the car
lights frozen solid on the big road.

The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody
in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams.
The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never
had traffic jams because they didn't have cars.

He thought he ought to try Molly again. Pulling off the road, he went
into a crummy little place in College Park. He stepped into the same
thing he'd left behind at Jake's--his life wasn't getting any
better!--which was another crowded, seedy bar full of smoke and lonely
drinkers, except that by this time a new, ludicrous note had been added,
a go-go dancer, a fat one of the sort Gregor specialized in. She looked
like a truck driver's woman. She undulated to dreadful rock music up on
a little stand, a bland, dull look on her bovine face. She looked a
little like Molly Shroyer, that was the terrible thing.

Gregor found a pay phone, and dialed. He heard the phone buzz once,
twice, three times, four times, damn! Where was she? She could not
possibly still be at her office! What was going on?

He saw his great coup slipping away. Suppose Molly had not been able to
find anything else out? The thought made him extremely nervous, so
instead he instantly conjured up his most comforting illusion, seeking
solace and serenity in the scenario.

Molly found him some wonderful stuff, absolute top of the line, and
tomorrow he'd walk into little monkey Klimov, throw the documents down
on the desk and say, "There, there, you little piglet, look at what
Gregor Arbatov has uncovered. The great Gregor Arbatov has penetrated to
the very center of the capitalist war machine. He has extraordinary
documents on the crisis in central Maryland, and you thought he was
nothing but a sniveling fool. Well, young whelp, it's you who'll do some
sniveling soon enough, you and your powerful uncle Arkady Pashin, who'll
do you no good at all. You're the one who'll be recalled to the Mother
Country, not the great Gregor Arbatov."

It was such a wonderful moment, he hated to relinquish it, but at that
second some equally drunken American prodded him, wanting the phone, and
he realized he stood in a smoky bar in College Park while a great
American whore shook her milk-jug tits at him and he stood and breathed
cigarette smoke and clung to a phone that was not being answered.

** ** **

Walls was dead and had begun to putrefy. The smell of decay, foul and
noxious, reached his nostrils through death, and involuntarily, he
squinched his face to avoid it, and threw his arm over his face, even in
the grave. Amazingly, the arm still moved, if only in the medium of
dirt. He had a brief moment of black clarity, and then the stench
penetrated again, enough to make a man insane it was so foul, and he
coughed, gagging, and a shiver rolled through him, deep from the bone,
and as he shivered he shook himself from the shallow coating of coal
dust that covered him.

Alive!

He blinked.

God, it was awful, the smell.

He pulled himself upright. His head ached, one arm felt numb, his knees
knocked and quivered, and he was terribly thirsty. The air was full of
dust; his tongue and lips and teeth were coated in dust. He tried to
stagger ahead, but something held him back, pulling at him. He spun to
discover it was the damned shotgun, its loose sling looped around his
arm. With a grunt he pulled it free, searching his belt simultaneously
for his angle-head flashlight. He found it.

Whoo-eee. No going back, no way, no how, no sir. The collapse of the
tunnel, in whose rubble he had been loosely buried, completely sealed
him off! His beam flashed across the wreckage, revealing only a new and
glistening wall of coal and dirt. He was cooked, he now saw.

Dead, he thought. Dead, dead, dead.

He turned to explore what little remained of the sarcophagus.

Blank walls greeted his search in the bright circle of light. It was the
same end of story they had discovered before the tunnel fight. It was
like the door in his cell. Fuck Niggers.

Walls laughed.

You die slow, not fast, he thought. Them white boys have their way with
your nigger ass anyhows.

But still, the smell. He winced. The odor of corruption he recognized
instantly, having encountered it so many times in the long months
underground back in the 'Nam, when the gooks could not get their dead
out of the tunnels and so left them buried in the walls, where
occasionally, after a fight or a detonation, they fell out, or rather
pieces of them did, and with them came this same terrible odor.

Man, how could it smell so? It only your old pal death.

Yet as he pieced the situation together, his curiosity was also aroused.
For the smell had to- come from somewhere. It could not come from
nowhere and it had not been there before the explosion.

He began to sniff through the chamber for that spot where the odor was
at its most absolutely unendurable. Led by his nose, his fingers
searched the crevices in the walls. It didn't take long.

Shit, all right. Yes, sir, here it was. Walls found it. A kind of crack
in the wall, and from the crack, which was low off the floor, there came
a kind of breeze and from the breeze the moist, dank, terrible stench.

Walls searched his belt. Yes, dammit, he still had it, a god damned
entrenching tool. He remembered now that the damned thing had banged
against his legs in the long tunnel fight. Removing it, he quickly
unfolded the blade, locked it into place, and with strong, hard
movements began to smash at the wall, scraping and plunging. The air
filled with more dust, and his eyes began to sting, but still he kept at
it, thrusting and banging away, amazed at how swiftly it went.

With a final crack the wall before him heaved and collapsed.

He stepped back. The dust swirled in his single beam of light, but yes,
yes, there it was, a tunnel.

A way out.

Or no, maybe not out. But to somewhere.

** ** **

Faces. The world had become faces.

"Now, these are American military, Mrs. Thiokol. We put this file
together rather hurriedly, but these are the faces of men who possess
the skill necessary to plan and execute the sort of operation we're
dealing with at South Mountain."

She was amazed by how much she despised soldiers.

These were exactly the kind of men she was never attracted to, that made
her yawn and mope. If she had seen any of these bland, uncomplicated
serious faces at a party, she would have run in the opposite direction.
They looked like insurance agents, with their little haircuts all so
neat, their eyes all so unclouded, their square, jowly heads atop their
square, strong shoulders, over neatly pressed uniform lapels, with great
mosaics of decoration on their square, manly chests.

They looked so boring. Their business was supposed to be death, but they
looked like IBM salesmen. They looked grim and task-oriented and
hideously self-important and dull.

Still, now and then there'd be one a little more interesting than the
others--with, say, a little pain in his eyes or a faraway look or a
peculiar haunted look. Or maybe even the suggestion of evil, as if the
owner enjoyed the power of death that was his profession.

"This one."

"This one. You know this one?"

"No. No, I'm just curious. He looks as if he's had an interesting life."

One of the men breathed heavily, almost a sigh.

"He was a colonel in the Special Forces. He was in Vietnam for seven
straight years and spent a long time out there in what they called
Indian country."

She couldn't begin to imagine what that meant.

"But, yes, he has had an interesting life. He's now in Bangkok,
Thailand, where he runs a very proficient private army that protects a
heroin merchant. Could we go on, Mrs. Thiokol?"

"I'm not being very much help, am I?"

"Don't worry about pleasing us, Mrs. Thiokol. Pleasing us has no
meaning. Finding the man or men behind all this, that has some meaning.
Fred, would you get me another cup of coffee?"

She went on. But none of them bore the faintest resemblance to that
charming, forceful man in the Israeli consulate that morning.

"I'm sorry. They're beginning to blur together. I've been looking at
them for hours now. I don't think he's here."

Somehow she suspected he wouldn't be.

"You've been looking at them for about half an hour. It doesn't appear
to me that you've been concentrating."

This irritated her.

"I have been concentrating. I have a visual imagination, and that man's
face is, in it. I know that face. I can call it up even now, I can
remember it. Do you want me to go through it again?"

"No."

"Maybe if you had one of those police sketch artists I could describe
him, and then the computer could help you find him."

"We've found that's a very long shot. Statistically, it almost never
works out."

"Maybe I could draw him. I mean, I'm--" They looked at one another as
though they really were Three Dumb Men. You could fly a plane through
those open mouths. It seemed so elementary to her.

"An artist, goddammit!" one of them yelled. "Yes, goddammit. Why the
hell didn't we think of that sooner?"

"It's my fault, I should have--"

"Don't worry about that now. Fred, get her some paper and a--is a pen
all right?"

"A pen is fine."

She took the Bic, a fine line, and faced the blank sheet in front of her.

"All right," she said, taking a deep breath. She hadn't drawn in years.
She felt the pen in her hands grow heavy and then, experimentally, she
drew a line, which seemed to lead her to another and then another and
then. . . suddenly, she was in a frenzy of drawing, she didn't want ever
to stop drawing. And as she worked, she felt the details pouring back
into her mind. She remembered the curious formality to the man, and yet
his cheer and his sense of command. You just knew this was a man who got
things done. Then she reminded herself that at the time she had thought
he was a Jew, a hero of Israel. How could she have been so wrong?

Still she felt herself drawing a hero of Israel, a Jew. So there was
something in him that she responded to, that was genuine even under the
cleverly constructed fiction and the guile that had gone into
constructing the fiction. She decided then that he really was a hero, of
sorts, and that he was probably as brave as any Israeli hero, and she
tried to draw that, too--his courage. She decided that he was a special
man, and she tried to draw that. She tried to draw his charisma, which
was the hardest. Is it in the eyes, some steely glint, some inner
fortitude? Is it in the jut of the chin, the set of the mouth, the
firmness of posture, the clarity of vision, the forthrightness in the
way he turns his whole face toward you and never gives you the half- and
three-quarter looks so much a part of the repertoire of the people who
like to think themselves "charming"? She tried to draw that.

But a face was emerging from all this thought, and her fingers hurt
where she had pressed down upon the pen.

Somehow, through her illusions, her eyes and her hands had not lied.

She looked at him. Yes, that was him. Yes, forget the bullshit, that's
him. Maybe his vitality obscured his age and his bright eyes obscured
the tension deep inside him, but that was him. Maybe the hair wasn't
right, because she tended not to notice hair. But that was him.

She felt them crowding around, watching.

"There," she finally said. "Does that look like anything?"

They were very quiet. Then, one by one, they spoke.

"No. It's real good. You really made him come alive. But no, no, that's
not anybody I've looked at today," said the first Dumb Man.

"Just for a second," said the second Dumb Man, "it was shaping up like a
SAC colonel who got the ax seven years back when he got involved in some
crooked real estate deal.

He was a leading candidate early this afternoon, until they found him in
Butte, Montana, teaching junior high."

The long seconds passed, and then it became extremely obvious that the
third Dumb Man, who was the youngest, the one who did the phone calling
and got the coffee, had not yet spoken. "Fred?"

Finally, Fred said, "I think you better get the Agency."

Then he walked over to the table, where four or five more huge volumes
of photos lurked. He read the words on their binders, selected one, and
as he brought it to her, she could hear their breaths come in harshly.
She could not see what the book was, but he opened it quickly, found a
certain page.

There, before her, were about a half dozen men, all in uniform. But it
was not an American uniform, as had been the case with all the others
she.had looked at. It was a tunic-collared uniform, with off-colored
shoulder boards and lots of decorations. The faces were flinty, pouchy,
grim, official.

She put her finger out, touching one.

He was heavier here by several pounds, and he wasn't smiling. He had no
charisma, only power. But it was the same, the white-blond hair, the
wise cosmopolitan eyes, the sureness of self and purpose, and the wit
that lurked in him.

It was all there, though in latent form.

"That's him," she said.

"You're sure, Mrs. Thiokol?"

"Leo, look for yourself. That's the face she drew! That's it!"

But Leo didn't want to believe it.

"You're absolutely sure, Mrs. Thiokol?"

"Leo, look at the picture!"

"Fuck the picture," Leo said. "Mrs. Thiokol? Megan, look at me. Look at
me. This is the most important thing you'll ever do in your life. Look
at me, and tell me this is the man you met in what you thought was the
Israeli consulate in New York City."

"She drew the picture from memory," Fred said. "She couldn't have
known."

"Yes, it's him."

"Leo," said Fred, "I should know, I spent nine years in counter intel. He
was one of our big bad bogeymen. We tracked him all over New York back
when he was operational.

He was a hell of a pro, I'll say that."

Leo just said, "You better call the White House. And the people at South
Mountain."

"Who is he?" asked Megan, and nobody would look her in the eye until
finally Leo, the oldest of the Three Dumb Men, turned to her and said,
"You've just identified the lieutenant general who is the head of the
First Directorate of the Soviet GRU, Mrs. Thiokol. Head of Russian
Military Intelligence."

She didn't believe him.

"I--" she started, then stopped.

Finally, she said, "His name. Tell me his name, just so I know it."

"His name is Arkady Pashin."

** ** **

The dust floated up through the hole in the wall, drifted in layers
through the flickering beam of Walls's light. Cool air, dense and almost
gaggingly sweet with corruption, raced through his. nose. He fell back,
vomited, retched himself empty in a series of dry, shivering spasms. At
last he stood.

Man, he thought, I don't wanna go in there, no, sir.

You gotta, boy. No other place to go. You maybe find something in there.
You go on forward now, boy.

Shit.

Stop your cursing. You go forward, black and proud, or you die. Same as
the streets, motherfucker, same as any tunnel ever made. Man stand up,
man be black and proud, man go ahead. No one gonna raise up against you,
not down here.

Black and proud, he thought, black and proud!

Ducking, he willed himself through the space into some farther chamber.
He was braced for what he saw, yet still the power of it, when the
circle of light fell upon it, was shattering.

Black and proud, he said to himself, holding himself together, yes, sir,
black and proud} It was the face of death. He'd seen it a times, of
course, from cartoon pirate flags and Halloween masks and scary movies
and even cereal boxes, jokey and funny--but not jokey here: the leering
skull's face, its splayed grin hideous and total, the face from beyond
the Great Divide. Yet its power still shocked him--that, and the fact
that flesh, rotted and filthy, still clung wormlike to the clean white
bone of the skull. The eyes were gone--or were they merely swollen
grotesquely, so they no longer looked like eyes? The hair hung in stiff
hunks down across the face, and atop the head, which was at the crazy
angle of uncaring, was a metal miner's helmet, its little light long
since spent. The spindly creature's hands, frail and bony-looking, held
a pick that had fallen across and joined the dead man's chest, sinking
through its blackened corruption, joining the slithery lungs--things
moved in there as the beam disturbed them. Quickly, he flashed the beam
about, and everywhere the bright circle prowled it revealed the same:
dead men, commingled with their still-hard equipment, now in the process
of rejoining the elements, sinking into the maggoty forever. He had the
horrified sense of not being alone: other small living things, grown fat
on this feast, moved and shook their scaly tails at him as the light
prodded them.

Walls fell back. He had an image of the world gone to death: the world,
like this desperate chamber, filled up with corpses, heaped and rotting.

Black and proud! he told himself.

Again he vomited, not even having the strength to lean forward to avoid
befouling himself. But there was nothing left to puke. His lungs and
chest seemed to rupture in the effort of expulsion, but nothing remained
to expel. Shakily, he stood, wondering if he could step forward blindly,
did, felt something beneath him fight just a split-second, then yield to
the impact of his boot.

He was in something.

He shook his boot off, staggered forward. Everywhere the maggoty,
glistening bodies lay, beyond color, beyond everything except their own
disintegration. He stumbled ahead, finding himself in a larger chamber,
then saw the drama of it.

His beam flicked backward in confirmation, and there revealed the fallen
tunnel, a hopeless no-exit of collapsed coal.

These men, what? fifty or so? had been trapped back here in the coffin.
They'd known they hadn't the strength or the time to tunnel back out
through the fallen chamber, and had thought therefore to dig laterally,
from their tunnel--Cathy, wasn't it? something beginning with a C--into
his tunnel, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, that bitch, that white bitch, had
betrayed them as she had betrayed him. She had been just inches away
before exhaustion and airlessness had overcome the last of them, and
they'd died in a frenzy of effort.

Walls wept for their effort and guts. White boys in a tunnel, digging
for their lives. Tunnel men, like he was. Hey, man, dyin' underground no
way to die. Walls knew, having seen enough of it himself in his time.

But why are they rotting now?

Walls worked his mind against it and then he had it. Of course. They'd
been sealed off in airless, germless protection down here for their long
half-century, and without air, there is no rot. They had quietly
mummified, turning to leather and sinew, perhaps even refrigerated by
the coolness. But then--he struggled to remember the details as they had
been explained to him--the hole had been left open for years and years
and finally, last summer, when they excavated for the missile shaft, it
had rained even more, and the rain had poured into the open mountain and
eaten its way down through the coal, and eventually reached and
punctured this coffin. And when it violated the grave, it admitted grave
robbers, the millions of germy little creatures that turned flesh to
horror.

Git your ass going, boy!

Walls had entered the main tunnel now, where the rest of the miners
were. His light flashed upon them. The ceiling was low. Walls tried not
to imagine it but he could not avoid it: thinking of them trapped down
here in the dank dark, feeling the air ebb in slow degrees, waiting for
a rescue that wouldn't--couldn't--come.

He walked forward, bumped his head, crouched, walked forward some more.
He felt the cool pressure of air, and had a bad moment as he imagined
his lungs filling with microscopic maggoty things, with the wormy
crawlers and creepers that scuttled through the flesh. He felt very
close to panic, even he. Walls, the hardest, meanest, baddest tunnel
dick of all time, and not a slouch of a street player either, thank you,
ma'am. Maybe this was the worst moment for him: standing among the
corpses, no place to go, it seemed, but to join them. He saw an image of
himself, a ragged, mealy hunk of rot spangling a few old African bones.
Years later white people would come and hold up a Walls drumstick and
with great distaste say, "Good Lord, Ralph, this fellow's limbs are so
darned much thicker than the others; why, he must have been a colored
man!" But then Walls got hold of himself, yessir, saying it over and
over, black and proudi black and proud} and the panic flapped out of his
chest and found some other chest to fill somewhere in the world: old
Walls was back.

No stiffs going to get the best of this nigger, no, sir} This boy going'
live. Jack, don't you know?

Walls crawled forward, feeling. He didn't need his lamp now, he didn't
need nothing. He flicked it off. He loved the darkness. He was the man
of darkness. He was home in the darkness; it was his natural element. He
had this tunnel beat.

This motherfucker was his, its ass belong to him.

In the dark his fingers reached out. He was alone with the dead but no
longer afraid.

Then he saw the light. Milky, luminous, faraway, but light nonetheless.

Okay, motherfucker, he thought.

The breeze continued to blow, and he was surprised at how strong and
sweet it smelled. He crawled over bodies, feeling them crumble beneath
him. They couldn't harm him, they were only the dead.

He came to it at last. Air poured down from the hole in the roof. He
looked up. There was the light, far away, a long life's upward chimney
crawl or squirm. But light. The light at the end of the--whatever.

Okay, Jack, he thought. Here comes Walls.

He wrapped his friend and companion Mr. Twelve tightly to him, and began
his journey toward the light.

It was a chasm by now, a tunnel into the heart of the metal.

** ** **

"Mr. Hummel?"

"Yes, sir?"

"How much farther?"

"Last time I measured, I'd gone one hundred twenty-five centimeters. That
puts us maybe ten or fifteen away."

"Time, please."

"Oh, say three, four hours. Midnight. We get there at midnight."

"Excellent. And then we can all go home."

He'd been cutting for hours now, and the ache in his arms from the
awkwardness of holding the torch deep in the guts of the titanium block
was terrific. Yet he was proud, in a terrible way. Lots of guys couldn't
have done what he'd done.

He'd done a beautiful job, clean and elegant and precise.

He'd just quit bitching and gotten it done. But he was still scared.

"The Army. It's up top, trying to break in, isn't it?"

"It is, Mr. Hummel."

"What happens to me when those guys kick the doors down and start
shooting?"

"They can't get down here."

"They'll figure out a way. They're smart guys."

"Nobody is that smart."

"Who are you guys? Tell me, at least."

"Patriots."

"I know enough to know all soldiers think they're patriots."

"No, most soldiers are cynics. We are the true thing."

"But if you shoot this thing off, everybody will die.

Because the Russians will shoot off theirs, they'll shoot off everything
they've got, and everybody dies!"

It scared him to defy the man. But it just blubbered out.

The general smiled with kind radiance.

"Mr. Hummel, I could never permit a full-scale nuclear exchange. You're
right, that would be the end of the planet.

Do you think I could convince all these men to come with me on this
desperate mission only to end the world?"

Jack just looked at him and had no answer.

"You see, Mr. Hummel, war doesn't make sense if everybody loses, does
it? But if we can win? What then? Then, isn't it the moral
responsibility of a professional soldier to take advantage of the
situation? Isn't that where the higher duty lies? Doesn't that save the
world rather than doom it?

Millions die; better that, over the long run, than billions!

Better a dead country than a dead world? Especially if the millions are
in the enemy's country, eh?"

The man's eyes, beaming belief and conviction, radiated passion and
craziness. It frightened Jack. He swallowed. "I hope you know what
you're doing."

"I assure you, Mr. Hummel, I do. Now, please, the flame."

Jack put the flame in the hole. He had a feeling of terrible guilt.

"We're done," announced the engineer sergeant.

"At last," shouted Alex. "God, you men have worked so hard. Get the
tarpaulin pulled back."

With grunting and heaving the men of the Red Platoon pulled back and
discarded the heavy sheets of canvas that had obscured their work.

In the darkness Alex couldn't see much, but he knew what was there.

"They'll never get through that," he said. "We should know, eh? We
learned the hard way?"

"Yes, sir," said the engineer sergeant.

The air was crisp and cold and above them the stars towered, spinning
fire wheels, clouds of distant cosmic gas.

All around it was quiet, except for the press of the breeze through the
trees and the occasional mumble or shiver of a man in the dark.

"And just in time too," Alex said. "They'll be coming soon, and in
force."

"No signs yet?"

"No, it's all quiet down there. They brought some trucks up a few
minutes back."

"Reinforcements," somebody said. "We hurt them bad, they needed more
men."

"Sir!"

The call arose from a dozen places on the perimeter.

Alex turned with his binoculars, even as he heard the roar. At first he
could see nothing, but then someone screamed, "The road! The road!"

He lifted his binoculars and watched, and even at this distance could
make out the spectacle. A plane came down and even though it was only a
phenomenon of landing lights, glowing cockpit, and blinkers at the
wingtips, it seemed heavy in the air as it floated awkwardly down,
touched the straight-running line of the highway, bounced once, twice,
skidded a bit as a braking chute popped, and then slowed.

"C-130," Alex said.

The plane eventually halted to let out its men; then it simply taxied
off the roadway and into the fields, where it fell brokenly into a ditch
to make room for another plane, which in seconds followed the same
drunken path downward to the highway. Then another, and finally a
fourth.

"Very neat," said Alex. "Nicely done. Good pilots, brave men, landing on
a roadway."

"More visitors?" said one of the others.

"Elite troops. Rangers, I suppose. Well, well, it's going to be an
interesting next few hours."

He looked at his watch. Midnight was coming. But would it come soon
enough?

1900.

There wasn't much to it, really; Dick Puller was a great believer in
simplicity and firepower, not ornamentation and cleverness. What he'd
come up with seemed like something out of World War II, say, the Pointe
du Hoc assault at Normandy, a Ranger legend.

Here, as there, the Rangers would carry the primary site assault
responsibility, moving over the same ground as Bravo earlier in the day.
There were more of them, and they were much more proficient. Their
commanding officer, an old Puller buddy, had already dispatched the men
directly from the planes to the mountain. They were already moving up
the hill. They would be supported on the right by Third Infantry, which
with its longer-range M-14s would provide accurate covering fire, before
moving in after the Rangers had reached the perimeter. On the radio the
Rangers would be Halfback, Third Infantry Beanstalk.

"Lieutenant Dill?"

"Sir?"

"Dill, congrats. You and your people get to sit this one out. I want you
on the left, separated from the main assault force, as high up the crest
as you can get. Point being, we may need stretcher bearers if casualties
are high, we may need runners if these guys can jam our radios, and we
may need the extra firepower if they're pressed and try to break down
the hill in your direction. I make it map coordinates Lima-niner-deuce,
have you got that? You can find that point in the dark?"

"Got it," said Dill, trying to keep the elation out of his voice.

Meanwhile, Puller continued, the Delta Assault Team, the actual
shaft-busters whose job it was to rappel down the elevator chute, break
into the corridor, fight their way to the launch control center, and
disable it, would be choppered in when the launch control facility was
taken. Along with them would be Peter himself, ready to do battle (he
hoped) with his nemesis, the door.

"Any luck on the door. Dr. Thiokol?"

Peter smiled wretchedly. His tweed coat was rumpled, and sweat soaked
through his dense blue shirt. The white delta of his T-shirt showed in
his open collar.

"I'm working on it," he said, too brightly. "Confidence is high."

The party would start at 2200 hours. Puller continued, as the various
units continued to move into position until that time. Peter had told
them that given the key vault's construction, the earliest the people
inside could get through it was midnight.

"You're sure of that?" Puller asked for what must have been the
millionth time.

Yes, he was. It was the only thing he was sure of. Peter nodded.

Puller turned to the group.

"Any questions?"

"What's the go code?" somebody asked.

"We go on "Heaven is falling.' From an old poem. Got it? "Heaven is
falling."

An officer wanted to know about medical evacuation; he was told that the
Delta insertion choppers would double as medevac ships, but they
wouldn't be active until after the insertion.

Tac Air?

Two of the Delta choppers had been fitted with Emerson mini-tats, that
is, rotary-barreled 7.62-mm Genera] Electric miniguns on carriages that
looked like a 1934 Johnson outboard motor and hung beneath the skids. In
the early moments of the assault, these ships, call-signed Sixgun-One
and Sixgun-two, would be available to provide suppressive fire on enemy
strong points. But since there was a premium on the choppers, they
wouldn't close within one thousand feet of the targets arid their
target-time would never be more than twenty-five seconds, because of the
Stingers, a devastating SAM, as demonstrated earlier.

"We lose more than two helicopters, then we have trouble getting all our
Delta people in there in time," Puller said.

"It's like the Iranian rescue mission. We need X number of birds to get
the job done and there's not a lot of redundancy in all this. Sorry,
that's just the way it is. You'll lose some people because we can't
get'em medevacked out and you'll lose some people because our air
support isn't top rate, but the alternative is to wait until more stuff
can arrive. And that's no alternative. We go with everything we've got."

"Everything?" somebody wanted to know.

"Yes. In the assault reinforcements I've asked the state policemen to
join. Anybody know any boy scouts?"

There was some hollow laughter.

"What about our fire restrictions?" the Ranger executive officer asked.
"Can we use grenades with that computer up there?"

"Dr. Thiokol?"

Peter cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry, this has to be a gunfight. The titanium casing ought to be
able to withstand any number of small-arms hits, up to 7.62 full metal
jackets, but I can't sanction explosives.

If you could stick with the gunfire and forgo the explosives, we might
get out of this. If that computer goes, it's all over."

"Suppose they mine the computer to blow?"

"They won't," said Peter. Of this one thing he was absolutely positive.
"No, not Aggressor-One. There's just a little part of him that thinks
he's smarter than everybody.

The limited-try code will keep us out, because that's the way his mind
works."

And because that's what I designed it to do. He wants to use my stuff to
beat me.

Peter tried to think about the man.

What have I done to deserve such an enemy? How did I become his Moby
Dick? What did I do to him?

"What about in the shaft? Can we use explosives?"

"Negative again," said Peter. "I know you've got to use explosives to
get down there. But once you get close to the command center, I'm sorry
to tell you you can't. We just don't know quite what would happen if you
blew the wiring.

You might make it impossible for me to abort the launch if they've gone
to terminal countdown, which is tricky enough anyway; and you might even
cause a launch. You've got to do it with guns once you're close to the
place."

"Is there any late word on what's under that canvas?" an officer wanted
to know.

"Our analysts in the Pentagon think it might be the emplacement of a
heavy artillery piece," said Puller. "In 'Nam, we used 10.5s to fire
flechette canisters at the NVA. It's possible they brought a heavy piece
up there disassembled.

Or maybe it's a Vulcan or one of those fast-firing Czech 23-mm cannons.
You'll know soon enough."

When he wasn't talking, Peter sat with a kind of rigid politeness
through all this. He knew it wouldn't do for these guys to see into what
he was thinking. But there was a joke in it all, and he thought of the
line, all dressed up and no place to go, for that's exactly what it
might work out to be if he couldn't get them through the door.

"And then Dr. Thiokol opens the door, and Delta goes in, and it's all
over but the cheering," said Puller. "Right, Dr. Thiokol?" Peter nodded.

Right, he thought, nodding politely, except he had no idea in hell what
the door code could be and so knew only one terrible truth:
Aggressor-One had done it.

Welcome to Armageddon.

Bells were ringing, men were hopping around.

Peter looked up from his daze. He heard them shouting, a lot of nos, and
no ways. The general discipline of the briefing was completely
disintegrating.

"What's going on?" he asked the man next to him.

"Didn't you hear, man?" said the fellow, a helicopter pilot. "They got
an ID on these guys. They say they're Russians."

And he heard Skazy talking about something called a Spetsnaz Silo
Seizure team, but others were saying no, no, it couldn't be, why'd they
want to blow away their own country, what the hell did it mean?

And then there was silence.

Peter saw they were all looking at him.

"Dr. Thiokol, here. You make some sense of this for us, will you
please?"

He handed Peter a yellow teletype sheet, with the words priority: flash
across the top. He read the contents swiftly.

FBI hq believe team leader of aggressor forces at South Mountain to be
PASHIN, ARKADY Colonel-General, GRU, First Deputy of GRU, head of
Directorate V, Operational Intelligence. Subject PASHIN according to CIA
records has primary responsibility in GRU the past decade for
penetration of U.S. strategic warfare compounds.

He is a graduate of the Intelligence Faculty of the General Staff
Academy; the Training Centre of Illegals; the Military-Diplomatic
Academy; the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, where he learned
to speak brilliant English; the Special Faculty of Higher
Communications; the Kiev Higher Military Command School; the Special
Faculty of the Second Kharkov Higher Military Aviation and Engineering
School, and the General Staff Academy. He spent a decade in United
States attached to the Soviet U.N. mission. One identifying peculiarity
is that he is only high-ranking Soviet command staff figure on record to
have formally rejected the use of his patronymic. In November of 1982
ARKADY SIMONOVICH PASHIN formally notified his headquarters that he
would henceforth be known simply as ARKADY PASHIN. No information is
available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of
our sources have any idea as. to its meaning. One last item: Subject
PASHIN has been twice named as possible sponsor of group known as PAMYAT
(Memory), thought to be a collection of right wing thinkers agitated
into action by Gorbachev's apparent willingness to meet with West, sign
an INF, and to permit policy of glasnost. PAMYAT has senior analysts
worried; information on it, however, is scant. More follows.

Peter put it down.

"Is it some kind of coup?" asked Dick Puller. "Would the Soviet
military, or this nut-case PAMYAT outfit, be taking over the country,
and they want their finger on a nuclear trigger somewhere for a certain
period of time?"

"No," said Peter. He realized in a second what it was all about. He saw
it. He had been pulled along the pathways of the same argument, knew its
temptations, its hypnotic allure.

He knew how it could seduce a man into believing in the moral good of
pushing the button.

"No, it's not a coup. It's simply logic, or rather strategic logic, and
the willingness to follow it to the end."

He gave a grim little smile. He knew Pashin, knew how his mind worked,
because it worked the way his own did.

"You see," he said, "it's really very simple. This Pashin he's done
something no one else has ever done. He's figured out how to win World
War Three."

He felt the power of Pashin's mind, its reach, its grasp, its subtleties
and, most of all, its will.

He took a deep breath.

"Pashin believes that MX is a first strike weapon, and that when it is
fully operational and we have the advantage, we will push the button and
blow them away--furthermore, that by our own logic, we have to. That's
where these missiles take us. And since the MX is so clearly superior in
terms of accuracy and silo-busting capacity and since our own command,
communication, and control system is so fragile and so unable to
withstand a Soviet first strike, we've got to use it.

It's use it or lose it, and he thinks we'll use it. That's his first
position: it's unassailable, and I can't say--no man can say-- that it's
not a distinct possibility. It's not that we want to, it's that we'll be
afraid not to."

There was silence.

"So from his position the choice isn't between peace and war, it's
between losing and winning an already inevitable war. That's all. Once
you accept that, it all follows, particularly if he's of a conservative
bent, as his membership in this PAMYAT thing would indicate. There's
going to be a nuclear war. It will be fought as soon as our system is
operational, in six months to a year, via an American first strike with
clear weapons superiority, and a complete victory for the United States,
with all their cities ruined and all their birds fractured in their
silos and all their command bunkers turned to barbecue pits. Or it will
be fought now, tonight, in a few hours, and"--he paused, letting it sink
in--"and they will win."

There was silence in the room.

"This is how it works. He fires our MX into the Soviet Union. But it's
important to understand the targeting of this particular missile. Those
ten warheads are zeroed on what we call third and fourth generation hard
targets, as opposed to soft targets such as cities, people, that sort of
thing. Our W87s are sublimely accurate; they never miss; they're sure as
death and taxes. And because of their accuracy the bombs can be quite
small. So the ten warheads deploy against three key long-range radar
installations, the Soviet air defense command, a deep leadership bunker
thirty miles outside Moscow-- the point is to decapitate their
leadership-- and five Siberian missile silos, which, by the time they
strike, will be empty.

The reason, of course, is that once the Soviet radar identifies the ten
incomings, the Russians go crazy and punch out with everything they've
got. Our ten nukes detonate with a total mega tonnage of thirty-five;
they take out the installations I've named and they kill--I don't know,
tops maybe thirty thousand people. Seven to nine minutes later, they hit
us with four thousand megatons; they tag all our cities and missile
silos; they EMP our radars and computers to craziness, they kill maybe
three hundred million of us; they effectively wipe us out. That's it.
Game, set, and match. Soviet Union. Essentially the point of this
Pashin's exercise is to goad his own country into what amounts to a
first strike, because the premium on a first strike is so high. But of
course neither the Politburo nor any sane command group would push the
button. So he does it himself, maybe with the help or under the
inspiration of this Pamyat thing, and with this little commando unit,
based on his intelligence. See? It's easy. It's more than easy, it's
brilliant. And when it's over, he climbs out of the mountain, a chopper
picks him up, and he's tsar of all the Russias."

"But our subs, with our subs we can--"

"No," said Peter, "sorry, but they've got our subs zeroed.

They can take some of them out in the first few minutes of the spasm.
Then they can hunt down and kill the Tacamo VLF aircraft that are our
primary sub links and are set to deliver the retaliation message.
They'll go straight for those babies, jam them, EMP them, or just blow
them away. The subs will be out of contact, and will wait to fire while
the Russians hunt them down in the following couple of weeks.

At the worst, they'll have plenty of time to evacuate their cities. They
can outlast or outsmart the subs if they have to and Pashin has forced
them to. That's all; he'll make them beat our subs. They aren't going to
want to fight that fight, but he's taken the element of choice out of
it. And he'll make them do it. And in a terrible, deep way he probably
thinks he's cleaning up the mess the rest of his leaders have made.

He's the cleaning lady."

"Why didn't he take over a Russian missile compound and get his first
strike that way?" somebody asked.

"Because this is the only independent-launch-capable silo in the world.
It's the only one he could take where he himself could push the button.
He's made the hardest choice of all, but by his lights, it's the logical
one. I suppose by a certain moral system it's even the right choice.
He's not a madman, really, he's just operating within the rules of the
game, the game that his country and ours invented."

"Who are those men with him?" somebody asked.

"Washington's sure it's Spetsnaz," said Major Skazy. "Soviet Special
Forces. In the control of the GRU, not the regular Army, and remember
this Pashin is a big-time GRU heavyweight. Anyway, they've been trained
in silo-seizure and blooded in Afghanistan. That explains those tans and
the false teeth, meant to cover up their foreign origin. And there were
sixty? That's four fifteen-man teams, which is the operational unit in
the Spetsnaz organization. And it explains where the god damned Stingers
came from. We've shipped Stingers to the Muhajadeem, to take out the
Soviet MI-26 gunships.

These guys must have bounced a shipment, and they've turned the stuff
around on us. These are very, very good guys. That's why they've been so
tough."

But Puller hadn't been listening. He'd been thinking.

He'd gotten close to the last wrinkle. "Dr. Thiokol," he said suddenly,
"doesn't your theory fall apart on the issue of our response to their
launch? As soon as our radar sees the Russian birds coming, we launch.
And they're blown away.

And the world dies in the rad--"

"You haven't seen it yet. Colonel Puller. Just as I said early on,
something else has to happen. Something to prevent us from launching,
something to totally de-coordinate our response in the crucial seven- to
nine-minute envelope between the launch of this Peacekeeper and the
launch of the Russian massive retaliation."

Again, the silence.

"The launch is only one half of the operation. There's another half of
it, there has to be. I told you this from the very beginning, but I
didn't know what it was. Now I see it.

It explains the radio message that he sent out this morning immediately
after the seizure. He was talking to his other half, telling it to hold
off for eighteen hours because of the key vault."

"Hold off on what?" asked Skazy.

"It's called'decapitation," said Peter, "or leader killing.

It means cutting the heads off. And all the heads are in Washington. You
better bump me through to the FBI fast, because they've got to get
hopping on this. This Pashin's going to launch at South Mountain and
then he's going to nuke D.C."

This was the hardest thing yet. Uckley would rather do anything than
this, but now events were whizzing by and it had been explained to him
in Washington that he had this last job left to do.

"I--I'm not sure I can do it," he said. "Can't you get somebody else?"

After a restrained moment or two of silence, the voice at the other end
of the line at last said, "They can't get there in time. We can send the
photos and documents over the wire to the state police barracks on Route
40 outside Frederick and have them to you in twenty minutes. You're the
senior federal representative there, it has to be you."

Uckley swallowed. What choice did he have?

And twenty minutes later, a state police car whirled into town, its
siren blaring, its flasher pulsing. Seconds after that, the messenger
was delivered to Uckley.

"We got these over the computer hookup from D.C. just a few minutes ago.
Hey, you okay? Man, you look like you had the worst day of your life."

"It wasn't the best."

"I hear there was a bad shooting."

"Yeah. Mine."

"Oh, Jesus, sorry, man. Hey, don't they give you time off for--"

"There's no time for that today. Thanks."

Uckley took the envelope from the man and headed up the walk. The house
was full of lights. A minister had arrived and the family doctor and, a
few minutes back, an older couple he took to be grandparents.

He paused at the door, wishing he were several million miles away,
wishing the whole thing were over, wishing it weren't him. But it was
him, and eventually he knocked.

Minutes seemed to pass before someone answered. It was a man about
sixty, heavyset, with expressionless eyes.

"Yes?" he asked.

"Uh, my name is Uckley. I'm a special agent with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. I'm sorry to have to do this, but I've got to talk to the
girls."

The man beheld him for the longest time.

"The girls are very tired," he finally said. "They've been through a lot
today. Too much. We've just gotten them down. I was going to sedate them
if they have any trouble sleeping. Their grandparents are here. Can't
this wait until some other time?"

"I wish it could. Doctor. But I've got to talk to them.

This is a very urgent situation and time is important."

"Young man, these girls saw their mother shot and killed today. Have you
any--"

"Look, I hate to have to act like a jerk, but you've got to understand
how terribly, terribly urgent this all is. Doctor.

This is what's known as a phase four nuclear emergency, and technically
I have all legal rights to get what I want. Please don't make me have to
be an asshole about this." He felt himself swallowing uncomfortably. His
breath was heavy and his knees felt watery.

The doctor simply glared at him. Then he stepped back and let him in.

Uckley stepped into a terrible silence. The two older people sat on the
sofa. The woman was crying. The man looked numb. There wasn't enough
light in the room. The neighbor, Kathy Reed, fussed at the dinner table.
She had evidently brought some casserole over, but nobody had eaten and
the food lay on the plates glazing with grease in the dim light. There
were still chips of wood and plaster and shreds of tufting everywhere
from the gunfire, and a gritty layer of dust lay over everything, but
evidently the police had covered the blown-out windows with plastic. The
room filled Uckley with the nausea of memory and terror.

"Kathy," said the doctor, "do you think you could go up and get the
girls? This officer says it's urgent that he talk to them."

"Haven't they been through enough--" began Mrs. Reed, her voice rising
with emotion.

"I'm sorry," said Uckley. "It's necessary. But maybe I only need the
oldest one. Uh, Poo?"

"Bean," she said. Then she started up the stairs. But she turned.

"You were so positive this afternoon. You were so excited.

And look what happened. Look what you did to this family."

Uckley didn't know what to say. He swallowed again.

"They were such a happy family. They were a perfect family. Why did you
have to do this to them?"

Uckley just looked at his shoes. The doctor came up to him.

"Were you the man who went upstairs?"

"Yes," said Uckley, swallowing. "You've got to believe I didn't want
anything like that to happen." But the doctor looked as though he didn't
believe it at all.

In a few minutes Kathy Reed brought Bean down the stairs. The girl's
face was wrinkled from sleep, and she had on a pink robe and a pair of
rabbit slippers. She was scrunching her eyes, but when she saw Uckley
waiting for her, she just grew still and grave. She had a peculiar
presence to her, an almost eerie luminescence. Kathy Reed led her down
the steps to Uckley.

"Hi there," he said, his tone chipper. "Hey, I'm real sorry I had to
wake you."

"You don't have to talk to her like a chipmunk," said Mrs. Reed.

Uckley had no talent with kids. He somehow never saw them, and his few
exchanges with them in the past had been perfunctory and stupid. But
now, looking at the girl, her solemn face, her pale button nose, her
huge, dark, questing eyes, her perfect little hands gathered in front of
her, he had the terrible urge to kneel and clasp her to him and beg her
for forgiveness. The skin other neck was so soft.

"My name's Jim," he said. "Honey, I have to ask you to look at some
pictures."

"Are you going to shoot me?" she asked.

The ache he felt splintered into a couple of thousand pieces, and each
of the pieces began to hurt.

"No, honey. What happened was a terrible, terrible accident. I am so
sorry. I'd do anything if it wasn't so."

"Is my mommy in heaven? Nana said you sent her to heaven because Jesus
wanted her as his best friend."

"I guess so. Jesus, uh"--he didn't know what to say-- "Jesus is
sometimes a mysterious guy, you know. But I guess he knows what's the
best thing."

She nodded gravely, considering.

"Jesus loves us very much but he loved Mommy best of all. My mommy will
be very happy with him," she said.

"I'm sure she will. Now, sugar, please, do me this one little favor and
I'll get out of here forever. I've got some pictures. They sent them
from Washington. I want you to look at them and tell me if these are the
men who took your daddy away."

He led her to the table, and she went through the pictures, one after
another, in her deliberate way.

Finally, she picked one, and handed it over.

"Him. He was here this morning. He's my daddy's new boss. He took him to
his new job. He was Herman's friend."

Uckley looked at the picture. It displayed the remarkably robust face of
an obvious professional soldier, a man with a broken nose, a short crew
cut, and a set of hard, flinty eyes.

He wore some kind of camouflage tunic, and Uckley could make out the
spout of an AK-47 over his shoulder, obviously carried on a sling. The
picture had a fuzzy quality in its background, as if taken from hundreds
of feet away through an extremely powerful lens.

He scanned the accompanying sheet.

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY RESEARCH DIRECTORATE:
SOVIET MILITARY DESK/ELITE UNITS SUBDIVISION YASOTAY, ALEKSANDR, Major.
Last authenticated posting, 22 Spetsnaz Brigade, GRU, attached 15th
Guards Motor Rifles, Kabul, Afghanistan. Subject YASOTAY graduated
Reconnaissance Faculty of Frunze Military Academy; the Cherepovetski
Higher Military Engineering School of Communications; the Spetsnaz
Faculty of the Ryazan Higher Parachute School, the Serpukhovski Higher
Command Engineering School. Qualified member Parashutnodesantny Polk
(Soviet Airborne), sniper and HALO insertion trained. Thought to have
seen action in Angola, Central America, the Sino-Soviet border.

Subject YASOTAY first identified by Israeli Mossad when instructor at
Iraqi guerrilla camp in 1972.

Subsequent sightings place him at Karlovy Vary, KGB training camp on the
Black Sea and as infantry adviser to 15 Commando, Cuban force operating
in Angola. Presence Afghanistan authenticated by Agent HORTENSE, Kabul,
14 January, 1984. Mentioned by source FLOWERPOT, Moscow, 1986, as
possible member PAMYAT (Memory), held to be right wing nativist movement
of indeterminate strength, possibly extending to higher councils of
government.

PAMYAT remains of great interest to Western intelligence units.

"Is he a nice man?" asked Bean.

"Yes, honey, he's a very nice man."

"Will he bring my daddy back to me?"

"Yes, honey. I promise you, he will." He looked at her eyes, bold and
honest. "Honey, I promise you, he'll bring your daddy back to you."

2100.

The phone buzzed and buzzed.

"Hello?"

Gregor's heart leapt! The sound of her voice was lyric pleasure, so
intense he thought he'd gag. He was almost too dumbfounded to say
anything, and then he found himself blurting out, "Molly, oh, Molly,
it's you, sweet Jesus, it's you!"

What he heard in response was equally marvelous.

"Oh, God, Gregor, darling, I was afraid I'd missed you and you weren't
going to call anymore! Gregor, I've got it!

You won't believe what's going on, Gregor. It's incredible, and I've got
the whole story for you."

"Molly, what is it? Please, tell me now. I have to know."

"Gregor, this is more than you could have hoped for.

You won't just save your career, you'll make it. It's incredible.

I've got it all for you. Where are you?"

Gregor was in another bar, this one on 14th Street, one of the few
remaining go-go places in the District itself.

"Uh, I'm in Georgetown," he lied.

"Gregor, how soon can you get here? I've got documents, I've got
pictures, I've got reports. God, you won't believe it. It's going on
right now, out in central Maryland. It involves--listen, darling, get
here as fast as you can."

"I'm almost there now. Oh, Molly. Molly, I love you, do you know that? I
love you, I'm so grateful."

Sniveling with joy, Gregor lurched out of the bar. The night air was
fresh and clean; it smelled of triumph. He needed a drink to celebrate.
He looked, saw a liquor store open down the block. But when he got there
and stepped into its fluorescent brightness, he found he had only three
dollars.

"Vodka. A pint, how much?" he demanded.

"Russian stuff's best," the clerk said. "Stolichnaya, four twenty-five.
Absolut, five fifty. Then, there's--"

So Gregor, as he had that morning, bought something called Vodka City,
an American concoction which, quickly sampled outside, had the mere
strength of a small woman's slap to it and didn't quite amplify the joy
he felt hugely enough.

Well, no matter. Any vodka being better than no vodka, he took several
more hits on it as he ran back to his car, which had picked up a fresh
parking ticket. Merrily, he crumpled the ticket into a ball and sent it
sailing into the street. He climbed in, and drove to Alexandria.

It took twenty minutes and several more bolts of the drink before he
pulled into her parking lot. He'd left it this morning in the dark and
now he returned in the dark: full circle. From despair to triumph, his
course magically assured by superior cunning and tactics. He slid the
vodka into his coat pocket and raced to the foyer. There he took the
elevator up and all but flew down the hall.

He knocked.

She threw the door open.

"Gregor!"

God, what a lovely woman! Molly, as usual, wore a muu-muu, but her meaty
shoulders gave her the odd look of a professional football player. She'd
applied two great vivid smears of blue eye shadow; her hair was waved
and exquisite; and she wore, at the end of her stocky legs, two gold
lame strapped high-heeled slippers. Her toenails were painted pink.

"I wanted to look beautiful for this evening," she said.

"You do, my dear. Oh, you do, you look glorious."

She took his hand and pulled him into the room. He was so eager, his
heart was beating like a metronome. He had an erection like an SS-24. He
was set to blast off. The room was candlelit; he could see a bottle of
wine on the table in the rear and two beautiful dinner settings.

"I thought we had something to celebrate," she said.

"We do! We do! This means I can stay forever!"

"Please sit down darling," she said. "May I pour you some champagne?"

"Champagne! Yes! God, wonderful!" The champagne would combine with the
vodka to incredible sensations.

He sat in the big easy chair in the dim living room. She returned
immediately with an unopened bottle and a glass.

"Now, darling. I'm all ears," he said, smiling in the face of her
extraordinary radiance, sucking all the pleasure from the moment he
could.

She sat opposite from him.

"Now, Gregor," she said, "there is one little thing I should tell you
before I begin. One widdle ting." The baby talk brought a foolish,
girlish smile to her plump face. "Puwheeze don't be angry with me."

"I forgive you anything," he said. "I absolve you of all your sins. You
can do no wrong. You're an angel, a dear, a saint." He took her
surprisingly tiny little hand and looked into her eyes. Odd he'd never
really noticed before now, she didn't even have cheekbones. Her face was
a white pillow with eyes.

"I am also," she said, "a special agent in the Counterespionage Division
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," She smiled.

He thought it was a hilarious joke.

"Oh, Molly, you're such a character," he said, laughing, and then he
noticed that the reason the room was so dark was that there were so many
other people in it, and he was so swiftly gobbled up by men in suits, it
stunned him. The lights came on. An agent walked from the bedroom and
snuffed the candles. Others emerged from closets, the bathroom. It was
like the terrible moment at the theater when the play is over, the
lights come up, and you see you've only been in a drafty old building
all along.

Molly stood.

"Okay, Nick," she said. "He's all yours." She turned to him. "Sorry,
honey. Life's sometimes tough. You're a pretty good guy, but Jesus,
you're a shitty spy."

Molly disappeared into the bedroom, and a middle-aged man sat across
from him.

"And so," he said, "we meet at last, Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov. Name's
Mahoney. Nick Mahoney. I've been a close observer of you for two years
now. Say, isn't that Molly a peach? One of the best. She's really
terrific, huh?"

"I--I--"

"Now, Greg old guy. We got us a problem."

Gregor stared at him, stupefied.

"Can I have a drink?"

"Sorry, Greg. Need you sober. Oh, Jesus, do we ever need you sober."

Gregor looked at him.

"Greg, we got us a real, pure-D mess. A grade-A, godawful, major league
mess."

He looked at his watch.

"You ever heard of a guy named Arkady Pashin?"

"I-"

"Of course you have. Well, right about now, Arkady Pashin is the most
powerful man in the world. He's sitting inside an American missile
installation fifty miles outside of Washington and he's about to start
the Big One. Shoot off a bird that will start the last dance. He's got
some Spetsnaz jokers along with him to see that he gets his way. You've
heard of Spetsnaz?"

Gregor swallowed. "Raiders. Cutthroats. Heroes. The very best killers,
it is said. But why?"

"Well, evidently he's trying to goad your people into a first strike
while there's still weapons parity. He's going to fire a ten-warhead bus
targeted against your command and control network, and he knows you guys
will launch on warning. Presto, bingo. World War Three. He knew he could
never get it by the Politburo. So he just did it, you know?

Can you feature that? I mean, you kind of have to admire the guy's
gumption."

Gregor said nothing. Yet it sounded like Pashin.

"Ever hear of some kind of nutsy outfit called Pamyat?"

"Memory," said Gregor. "Lunatics. The ones who hate Gorbachev and
glasnost and INF and everything modern and hopeful and wish to return to
the years of Stalin. Yes. They frighten all of us."

"Yeah, well, it appears your pal Pashin is a charter member. He's got a
great memory, that's for sure. Well, the long and the short of it is
that we have about eight hundred of our best boys up there, just about
to jump off for what looks like a very busy evening, to try to stop this
guy from--"

"But the world will end when you retaliate," Gregor said in horror.

"There you go," said Nick Mahoney with a phony smile.

"Our strategic people think there's another wrinkle. That it's not
enough for Comrade Pashin to twit your people into a first strike, but
that he's also got to do a little something to give your team a big
advantage in the seven-minute envelope between launch and detonation. So
that when our birds fly, they fly poorly, they are uncoordinated, they
are clumsily handled. Hell, brother, they may not even fly at all. You
ever hear of this doctrine the intellectuals call'decapitation'?"

Gregor looked at him.

"As in cutting the head off. And the head of this country is in the very
city you're sitting outside of right now." He smiled.

"Yep, Greg. We figure your pal Pashin's gonna detonate a nuclear bomb
tonight. In an hour or so. Right here in D.C.

Bye-bye White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pentagon War Room, CIA. NSA,
National Bureau of Standards even. Byebye the whole shooting match.
Bye-bye a couple of million sleeping dreamers."

He smiled at Gregor.

"Now, the question is, where would he get a bomb? I mean, if he doesn't
have a Russian missile silo or a missile sub at his command, where does
he get a bomb? Does he buy it at Eddie Bauer's?"

Gregor swallowed. His mouth was awfully dry. If there were going to be a
nuclear detonation, wouldn't it be wiser to get out of there now, while
there was still time? Shouldn't they be evacuating?

"Gregor, do you know where there's a bomb floating around?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Gregor said.

"Now, that's not what I hear. In fact, we work real hard at covering
your place, and we know the rumors just about as well as you do. We
believe there's a one-kiloton nuclear device in the Soviet Embassy. It's
there under strict GRU control, in case push ever comes to shove and the
word goes out for a decapitation mission. That would cut reaction time
to the seconds it took some brave boy to walk over to it and push a
button."

Gregor held his breath. The rumors had always been dark, a sort of bleak
Slavic joke, horrible black rumors, unbelievable.

But they were persistent and had lingered for years.

"See, in the old days," Mahoney explained, "a bomb weighed a couple of
tons. No way anybody was going to smuggle one in. But now we've got
something called Special Atomic Demolition Munition, weighs one hundred
sixty pounds. Delivery system, the big book says, is one strong soldier
with a backpack. Now, we figure there's just such a sweetheart somewhere
on Sixteenth Street, four blocks from the White House. What do you think
of this, old Greg?

Anybody in that building dumb enough to pull the switch on himself?"

Gregor suddenly understood. Now it was clear. Now it made sense.

"Yes, I know such a man. His name is Klimov," said Gregor. "He is the
Deputy Rezident, GRU apparatus, protege and nephew to Pashin."

The agent nodded.

"Probably another member of Pamyat."

"It's worse," Gregor said. "The bomb would be downstairs.

In the code cell, what we call the Wine Cellar. It's the most secure
point in the embassy. Last night my friend Magda Goshgarian was on
cipher watch. If Klimov wanted to detonate this bomb, poor Magda alone
could not stop him."

"Yes. They wanted to launch early this morning. But they ran into an
eighteen-hour delay. In fact, this morning Pashin sent a short burst of
raw noise over the silo radio out into the great beyond to anybody who
has a sophisticated radio transmission and receiving system. Like at
your embassy.

We figure it was some kind of signal to whoever is going to push the
button, to tell him to hold off for further instructions. Tonight the
show is set for around midnight. If we don't break in, Pashin will send
another signal to whoever it is and--well, the button gets pushed. The
bomb in Washington and the missile to Moscow must go off near
simultaneously."

"Yes," said Gregor. "And now I know why they tried to kill me. They
planned so far ahead that they had it set up that this afternoon Klimov
tries to kill me with a Spetsnaz ballistic knife. Because with me dead,
cipher duty reverts to the previous night's officer. To Magda. Again
Magda is in the Wine Cellar, and Klimov will have no problem with poor
Magda. Oh, Magda. Oh, poor Magda, what have I done to you?"

"She's there now?"

"Yes. I called her, asked her to take my duty. Jesus, it's the same
thing, I gave him the same thing. She'll die without a whisper. And the
little piglet will do it, laughing at history and his own glorious
importance."

The two men were silent.

Finally, Gregor said, "This must not happen. You must stop it. Invade
the embassy, no? With police, go in and stop Klimov."

"The embassy is your territory."

"But the rules, they can't mean much now."

"Gregor, old goat. You got KGB with AKS set at full auto, and kamikaze
orders, shoot the hell out of anybody who comes over the wall. And when
the ruckus starts, your friend Klimov goes downstairs a few minutes
early, and pop goes the weasel. Listen good to your pal Nick, your
long-lost best buddy. The only scenario that plays is the following. We
need a guy--a good, brave guy, a guy with no nerves, and balls the size
of Cadillac hubcaps, a tough, smart, shrewd guy, a James Bond guy, but
Russian--to get into the basement and stop this Klimov. That's the best
shot, really the only shot. We got eight hundred commandos in the
mountains; here in Washington we've got room for only one. You dig?"

"Where you going to find this guy?" asked Gregor, still wondering how he
could assist. He figured now they needed help with the floor plans, with
the layout, the entry protocols, the Wine Cellar arrangements, maybe
with the documents that would get the American agent past the KGB door
guards, and. . .

And then he noticed Mahoney looking at him. God in heaven, they were all
looking at him. Molly was looking at him, her big, stupid cow eyes hot
and moist and radiant.

"Oh, Gweggy," she said, "how much better if we had a Green Beret, a
policeman, a federal agent. But we don't, dear Gweggy."

And then Gregor grasped it.

"We have only you, Greg," said Mahoney. "Time to be a hero type. Time to
join the Green Berets, Gregor old pal."

2200.

Now the data was pouring in: the FBI had located the farm rented six
months earlier by one "Isaac Smith" on the border of South Mountain from
which the Spetsnaz operation was mounted: there the feds found piles of
ammunition crating hidden in the barn, a variety of cars, trucks, and
buses by which the men had assembled over the past month by a multitude
of soft routes down through Canada or up from Mexico, as well as plans,
schedules, a food dump, maps, and an informal barracks--all beds made.
And they found a few sheets of what appeared to be chemically
impregnated white canvas--four, to be exact. The Bureau guessed that
these were some sort of crude Stealth technology for defeating South
Mountain's Doppler radar, and reckoned that they were left behind,
unused, by the four men who took down Hummel's house that morning.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the DIA had further information on Spetsnaz
history and theory. Spetsnaz people were said to be either the very
best, or the very worst, as the case might be: highly motivated,
extremely competent, utterly ruthless commando units that had operated
most furiously in Afghanistan, where they were thought to be responsible
for a number of village atrocities.

Going back through the years, it was clear that wherever the Soviets
needed quick, deadly strikes, they used Spetsnaz units: the Prague
airport, for example, thought to have been seized by airborne troops in
the spring of 1968, when the Russians closed down the Czechoslovakian
revolution under Dubcek, was actually taken by a crack Spetsnaz seizure
team.

And it was a Spetsnaz wet squad that aced the Afghanistan president
Hafizullah Amin in his Kabul palace in December 1979. Spetsnaz personnel
routinely formed the training cadres that the Russians circulated in the
third world, having operated in such varied climes as the Peruvian
mountains, the Iraqi mountains, the Malay peninsula, the Asian mainland,
the paddies of Vietnam, and the highlands of Salvador.

"They're very good people," said Skazy, "but we can dust them."

"The worst part of the operation," Puller said, "will be the rappel.
Sliding down that rope into the darkness. You know they'll be firing up
at you. You'll put your grenades and maybe a good dose of C-4 down the
shaft first, but then there'll come a moment when the first men of your
team have to slide those ropes down into the darkness. And you know
enough of the Spetsnaz tunnel defense team will recover to be firing on
you as you descend. It'll be pretty bad, Frank.

You figure out yet who'll be the first man on the ropes?"

Skazy laughed, showing strong white teeth. He was West Point, '68, and
in those days had loved to bus to Princeton, the closest Ivy League
school, on weekends, and lounge around in his ludicrous plebe uniform
and white sidewall haircut, and just dare the punks to make a comment.
He loved to fight. He dreamed of fighting all the time. He burned to
test himself in the most fiery of all possible crucibles.

"You don't lead men from behind," he said. "I'll be Number One."

The answer did not surprise Puller, which was why he asked it.

"I want you to reconsider, Frank," he said. "A commander risks his
operation if he exposes himself pointlessly and gets fataled in the
early going."

"I'd never ask a man to do what I couldn't," said Skazy, meaning it and
believing it.

"Frank," said Puller, "look, I'm not going to tell you how to run your
assault. But don't go down that rope first out of some idiotic notion of
showing me up. I know you're pissed at me because of Iran. I know you
think I fucked your career.

For what it's worth, I talked to Bruce Palmer and tried to get you your
eagle. I told him what happened at Desert One was my fault. It wasn't
yours. Okay?"

Skazy didn't look at him.

"I'm just trying to do the mission. Colonel. That's all. I just want the
chance. The chance I didn't get in Iran."

Puller, who never explained anything, felt the temptation to this time.
We couldn't go with five choppers out of specific mandate by the Joint
Chiefs, who over controlled the mission beyond belief. I had no choice.
I'm an army officer, I get paid to follow orders, and I get paid to take
the heat afterward, when they all walk away because of their careers. I
could have made a stink, but I didn't. Which is my way.

But he didn't say anything.

"Well, Frank, good luck to you, then. It's Delta's baby now."

"Just let us go, this time, Dick. Whatever you do, let us go."

** ** **

So many turns and twists and dark ladders now. Walls felt as though he
were in somebody's intestines, following the little trace of light
upward. Sometimes this meant almost straight up, as if he were crawling
up a chimney, supporting himself on the tension between his knees and
his hunched, pressing shoulders, all of it made more difficult by the
heavy weight of the remaining shotgun shells in his bellows pockets and
the gun itself, wrapped awkwardly about his arm.

Dump the sucker, he thought.

But he could not. He loved the piece. It had never let him down.

And sometimes it meant almost walking rather than climbing, where the
floor went to a slant, then switched back, but always, always, it went
upward. So upward he fought in the darkness, seeing before him only the
little bounce of illumination from the mazelike warren of tunnels. He
knew only that there was this hint of light and that there was air in
the tunnel, more now, cool and clean, whispering in from somewhere.

Maybe you dead, and this is hell, boy, he thought.

Maybe this is forever, crawling through these damned holes, the tunnel
rat's final fate: tunnels to other tunnels. Walls saw it before him:
tunnels to heaven, tunnels into space, tunnels forever.

He paused. Sweat was in his eyes. Beginning to craze out a little.
There, boy, he told himself. He breathed, realized how hungry he was.
He'd kill for a piece of chicken about now: he focused on it for a
second, thinking about the crisp outer crust and how he used to rip
through it with his teeth, feeling it crunch beneath them, then get at
the tender white meat inside that would fall off the bone into your
hand, sweet in its own sweet grease. He smiled: his brother James was
across from him. They used to joke--when white people died they came
back as chickens so black people could eat them and finally do black
people some good.

He laughed to himself. Hadn't thought about that shit in years. Hey man,
be nice, get out of this jam, get out of this hole, go back and see
James, have some of Mama's chicken.

Mama was a big Baptist woman. She worked for many years at some Jewish
people's in Pikesville and they treat her good. But nobody else treat
her good, not Tyrone, her husband, who disappeared, and Willis, who
moved in and used to beat her. His mother was a large, sorrowful praying
woman who worked very hard every day in her life and died when her
eldest boy, Nathan, was in tunnels in Vietnam and only heard about it
from his brother James. Then James got killed.

Another boy at a basketball game had a gun, said James called him
something bad, shot him.

So Nathan came home to no Mama and no brother James, and all the men
he'd fought with in the tunnels were dead too. Death was everywhere,
like the rats that prowled the hot alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, in
B-more, Maryland, and he could get no job or when he got a job and his
head would ache because of the time he was blown up and buried in the
tunnel and couldn't work, he got fired.

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, the sign had said in
the deros station on the way back from 'Nam, but it was another white
lie: today was the first day of no part of your life.

The sign should have said what another sign did say: FUCK NIGGERS.

Walls shook his head. He was gripping the shotgun hard enough to break
it; no one understood how full of rage Pennsylvania Avenue could turn a
man. Man do anything to get off of Pennsylvania Avenue, and bury his
mama and his brother in a nice place in the country. He missed his mama,
he missed his brother. He never got off of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he
became the dude of Pennsylvania there for a while, boy, the Dr. P of
Pennsylvania, he could do anything for you, foxy pussy, some magic pills
make you feel good, a piece to make you a man. He was the sultan of
Pennsylvania Avenue until-- Walls came out of his reverie when a drop of
water hit him in the cheek. Was only this motherfucking tunnel, no lie,
Jack, that seemed to go on forever and ever and-- And then he saw it.

Well, a long way to climb to see this shit, but this was it all right,
this was what he'd come for.

It was a metal pipe, corrugated, cutting through the tunnel up ahead.
But goddamn, it was rusted, and it was from the hole in it that the
light originated.

Walls scrambled ahead, not straight up exactly, but on an angle toward
that pipe. Was this where white shit came out of the fort in the
mountain? But no, didn't smell like no shit. He got up to it and
crouched. Yes, the water came through here and had eaten the flues into
the mountain from this spot. This was the main mother of all the tunnels
he'd come through, this itty-bitty little thing. He reached up, touched
the hole. Yes, by God, man could get through. Walls pulled himself into
it. It was like being unborn: it was like crawling back into a pussy.
His body had to work in an odd way to get into the rotted pipe, bending
here, twisting there, wiggling his skinny hips this-way-that-way
and--dammit, fucking gun crtkg/if! uh, c'mon, goddammit, uh--yes, yes,
yes, again yes.

He was in the sucker.

Okay, motherfucker, where you go? He began to slither forward. His
shoulders could barely move. The roof of the pipe was an inch above his
nose. He wiggled ahead. He couldn't turn to see. He could smell the
metal. The gun was under him, it hurt--goddamn, it hurt--but he was so
trapped he could move forward only by inches. Panic hit him again.

Oh, shit, to die like this in some pipe like a turd in the sewer. He
screamed, his scream coming back in his face off the metal above him.
This was the worst. There was almost no room for movement at all in
here; he just had to keep pushing himself forward inch by inch. A man
could die in here, stuck and starved to death and the little rats would
come and eat the skin and muscles off his bone.

Walls tried not to think of the rats, and thank God there weren't any
for him: only the pipe, above him, all around him, and the vague sense
of light ahead and the rush now of absolute cool, dry air, and a vague
hum. He squirmed on, and the seconds seemed to expand into hours. He
felt like he'd been down here forever. He felt like this was his life.

He couldn't remember a god damned thing, except that this morning he'd
been worried about the Aryans whacking his ass in the shower as they'd
sworn to do. He figured he ought to pray, but now he was out of gods. He
could think of no gods to pray to. The Baptist God of Mama was no good
down here. Besides, lots of guys believed in a Baptist God and they got
wasted easy, the most recent of them being poor Witherspoon some hours
back in the tunnel. But this guy Allah was no treat either, and the guys
that ate up his action died just like the Baptists. Larry X, head Fruit
of Islam in the pen, he got his throat splayed open as a fish mouth by
an Aryan, Allah did his ass no good at all. So Walls could think of no
one to pray to, and he just sang a verse of "Abraham, Martin, and John,"
thinking, those dudes the closest thing to God I ever heard of, and
squirmed ahead, and came, centuries later and awash in his own stench
and sweat and terror, to the end of the tunnel.

He squirmed out. And there was God.

Tall and black and blank. God looked down on him impassively, in an
air-conditioned chamber with the hum of machines. God was enormous. God
was huge. God had no mercy, no meaning, no human face. God was Hat and
cold to the touch.

God was a rocket.

The teletype clattered for the first time in hours. The general made no
move, however, to approach the machine and read the message. He simply
remained crouched over Jack Hummel's shoulder, seemingly mesmerized by
the flame so deep inside the block of titanium, as if he were willing,
somehow, the flame to cut more swiftly.

"Sir," Jack heard someone say. "There's a message here."

The general finally tore himself away from the spectacle of the flame,
went to the machine and ripped the message off the platen.

Then he went to the phone.

Jack heard the call.

"Major Yasotay. Tell the men they no longer need to obey language
discipline. The Americans seemed to have figured out who we are."

He put down the receiver and spoke quickly in another language to one of
the guards in the command capsule. The silent boy responded and raced
out; Jack heard them all talking, and then he recognized the language.

Impulsively, he turned and stood.

"You guys are Russians!" he shrieked. "I heard you.

That's Russian. You're fucking Russians!" His heart pounded in the awful
loneliness of the moment. He couldn't believe he was defying the
general.

The general looked at him, and for just a moment Jack saw a hint of
surprise flicker across the man's smooth, handsome face.

"And so if we are, Mr. Hummel? What possible difference could that make
to your family?"

"I'm not helping any Russians," Jack said with absolute finality,
feeling that he'd somehow made his breakthrough and had located
sufficient grounds upon which to make his stand, though he felt his
heart's thudding go off like a jackhammer and his knees begin to knock.

The general spoke quickly in Russian, and instantly two of the young
troopers ducked into the room, their weapons aimed at Jack.

"Let's end the farce, Mr. Hummel, without any silly fuss. If I say the
word, my men fire. Then I'll have to put a message through to the men at
your family's house and your wife and children die. There can't be but
an inch or two of metal left in there. We'll get through it, with or
without you.

Your sacrifice accomplishes nothing; the sacrifice of your family
accomplishes nothing."

"Oh, no? Buddy, you may know missiles, but you don't know welding. I
give a yank on the tubes here"--he yanked the rubber hoses that ran from
his torch to the cylinder of gas nearby--"and rip the sealers out, and
you lose all your gas, then you're out of fucking luck until you get a
new cylinder in. Like, say, by noon tomorrow, huh?"

Jack's knees shivered with desperate bravado. He felt the torch
trembling in his hand. But he was right, of course; the whole crazy
thing depended on nothing more than the seal between the hose and the
tank; give it a hard yank, and this was all history.

The Russian understood immediately.

"Mr. Hummel, don't do anything foolish. I haven't lied to you, I
guarantee it. Your wife and children are safe.

Listen, you've been working hard. Take a break. We'll leave you alone.
Think about it, then give me your answer. All right?"

He smiled, spoke to the two soldiers, and the three of them exited. Jack
felt a surge of triumph. It had pleased him to see the suave general
suddenly at a loss, scuttling backward absurdly. But the triumph turned
quickly to confusion.

Now what should he do? Pull the hose? Boy, if he did that, they came in
and blew him away and blew away his family.

The world lived, the Hummels died. Fuck that. As long as I hold this
god damned tube, / got some power. It occurred to him that he could hold
them off. He looked and saw the big metal door to the center. If he
could get that locked, then maybe-- Then he saw the yellow sheet from
the teletype lying on the counter and picked it up. * * * Arkady Pashin,
First Deputy of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnove Upravleniye, you are
hereby directed to cease operations within the South Mountain Silo
Complex. The following conditions are offered: 1. You and all men of
Spetsnaz Brigade No. 22 will be given safe escort back to the Soviet
Union. Soviet authorities have not yet been notified of your identities
or the extent of your operation or your connection to the group PAMYAT.
2. All your wounded will lie tended and returned to the Soviet Union at
their earliest convenience. 3. No intelligence interrogations or
debriefings will be held. 4. If the condition listed in paragraph 1 is
unacceptable, the United States will also guarantee your delivery (and
delivery of any men who chose to accompany you) into neutral country of
your selection. 5. A tender of asylum is also hereby offered for you or
any of your men who chose to so decide, and with it the offer of a new
identity in comfortable surroundings in this country.

General Arkady Pashin, the mission which you have planned cannot
succeed. I implore you, in the name of our common humanity and your code
of ethics as a military professional, to cease and desist before the
gravest possible consequences result.

It was signed by the President of the United States.

The President! The President was involved. This really impressed Jack.
His spirits burgeoned. If the President was involved, that meant it was
just about over. The Army would be here at any moment! If I can just get
the door sealed, I can-- He looked up and the world disintegrated in red
dazzle and befuddlement as a dot of gunsight laser struck his eyes,
blinding him.

Yank it! he thought, and pulled on the hose, but something exploded in
his leg and he fell yelping as his leg collapsed. The pain was
extraordinary, but even as he fell, the torch slipped from his fingers,
and as he hit the deck he rolled, scrambling, full of athletic passion,
to reach it and yank that son of a bitch. But the commando who had shot
him was through the opening of the capsule and on him. It was over in
seconds.

"Stop the bleeding," said the general.

"You're crazy," Jack Hummel shouted. "You're fucking crazy, you'll--"

People were all over him. He lay flat on his back. Somebody shot
something into his leg, and it stopped hurting and began to feel as if
it were filling with whipped cream. A bandage was applied.

"He shot you very cleanly, Mr. Hummel. Right through the meat of the
thigh. You'll live to be a hundred."

"You're crazy," shouted Jack again. "You're going to blow up the world.
You're a fucking screwball."

"No, Mr. Hummel, I am quite sane. I may be the sanest man in the world.
Now, Mr. Hummel, you're going to have to go back to the torch, and as
you cut, bear in mind that this man here will have a pistol on the back
of your neck every second of the time. One slip and you're dead and your
family is dead. They will go unmourned in the funeral pyre of the
world."

The general leaned over. His charm ducts opened and Jack felt the
scalding bliss of attention rush across him.

"But listen here, young man. When you get the key loose and we do what
we must, I'll let you call them. There'll be time. I'll have my men
bring them up here. Don't you see, Mr. Hummel. In here, in this
mountain, it's the only safe place. Mr. Hummel, think of the world
you'll inherit. It's all yours for a little bit of further effort."

It wasn't that the guy was nuts that was so unsettling to Jack Hummel;
it's that he seemed sane--that he knew, absolutely and without doubt,
what must be done.

"Think of your kids, Mr. Hummel."

"Why are you doing this?" Jack blurted out involuntarily.

"Jesus, why? You'll kill a billion people."

The general smiled bitterly. Jack had the sense he was really seeing the
man for the first time.

"The fact is, I'll kill only a few hundred million. I'll save billions.
I'm the man who saved the world. I'm a great man, Mr. Hummel. You are
lucky to serve me."

The general gave another little smile.

"Now, cut, Mr. Hummel. Cut."

Jack felt himself surrendering again. What could he do against such an
operator, so much better than he was, so much stronger, smarter, who had
it all figured out.

The flame ate into the metal.

** ** **

Scurrying like a swift night lizard, Alex moved from position to
position with a sweet word, a pat of encouragement, an invocation to
patriotism and sacrifice, a reminder of the traditions. He was not an
eloquent man and certainly not a glib one, but his blunt simplicity and,
most of all, his belief, did what it was supposed to.

"How are we here, boys?" he said, glad to be speaking in Russian again.

"Fine, sir. Ready. Ready as we'll be."

"On our nightscope we picked up their trucks moving toward the mountain.
Our infrared also picked up the heat of their helicopter engines turning
over. The Americans will be here soon, boys. And this time there'll be
lots more of them."

"We're ready, sir. Let them come."

"Good lads. This isn't Afghanistan now, where the issues grow hazy and
you wonder why the fellow next to you has to die. This is the battle we
all trained for."

He believed it. The general had explained it all to him, and he believed
in the general. The general was a great man, a man who understood the
whole world and what was best.

You could believe in the general. Alex had come back from Afghanistan
hungry for a fight to believe in: he'd seen too much meaningless death
in the gulches and canyons and enfilades, too many guts spilled out on
the rocks, seen too many black flies corpulent with Russian blood. Yet
he came back, like the veterans of many another war, unappreciated and
unloved, to nothing except a bitter peace. He came back needing a faith,
a redeemer, a confessor, a messiah, and he'd found them all in the
general.

"It's changing," pointed out the general. "This Gorbachev, with his
damned glasnost, is turning the country your men fought and died for
into a little America. We are becoming soft and bourgeoisified. We are
becoming our enemies, even as our enemies are preparing to destroy us.
In America this second they are preparing to deploy a new generation of
missile that dooms us, the madmen! And this fool Gorbachev has stripped
us of mid-range nuclear weapons and hints of yet broader initiatives.
Jews are brought back from the Gulag and allowed to become celebrities
for their antisocial tendencies!

American music is played on the radio. Our teenagers no longer join the
Party, they are too busy dancing. And all this was going on while your
men were bleeding slowly to death in Afghanistan. Only a few of us have
the memory to understand this. Memory, Alex, that is the key. From
memory, Pamyat, comes everything, a belief in our land, the courage to
do something about the unpleasant present. Few enough have the guts to
realize this, and fewer still the guts to do anything about it. Where is
the leadership, the passion, the courage?"

"Sir, it's with one man. It is with you."

The general especially hated America. He called it "One big moral and
intellectual concentration camp." Only men of courage could stand
against the hated America and its plans to destroy Russia.

"Alex, did you know that Ghengis Khan had a special operations team, a
Spetsnaz himself, under the leadership of a brilliant young officer who
refused all promotion? Do you know what he said? I offer you this to
think about: he said, 'Give me forty picked men, and I will change the
world."

Alex nodded.

"I will change the world, Alex. With you and forty picked men. Or,
rather, sixty."

They were a perfect team: the general the father who saw and knew all,
the major a son who made his father's vision possible with his own
willingness to sacrifice.

"Now, boys," he said to his children, the tough young heroes of 22
Spetsnaz, who would change the world from the perimeter defense of South
Mountain, "think of your fathers scrambling through the wreckage of
Stalingrad in the subzero weather, throwing themselves against the SS
juggernaut all those long and bloody years. Then think of your
grandfathers, who made a revolution and fought great battles against the
West to save the world for you. Then be thankful that your test isn't
half so severe as theirs: you've only a single night to fight, on a
mountaintop in America."

"Let them come," said a boy. "I'll talk in bullets."

"That's what I like to hear. And remember this: you're Spetsnaz. No men
on this earth have trained as hard or learned as much or given as much
to become as good as you.

You are the very best in the world. You carry your country's destiny
because you're strong enough. Your shoulders are broad, your minds
clear, your wills strong."

Alex paused in his thoughts and a twitch played across his face. He
realized that it was a smile.

God, he was happy!

He couldn't wait for it to begin. It was the battle every professional
soldier since the time of the Legions had dreamed about: a small-unit
defense with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. But only one
soldier of all the millions had gotten a chance to fight it, and that
was Major Aleksandr Pavlovovich Yasotay of 22 Spetsnaz.

And one other: the unnamed American assault team commander, whom he
would soon be meeting.

Skazy was alone with Delta now. He checked his watch and saw that it was
2145; the plan called for them to on load the choppers at 2150. Puller
had gone back to the command headquarters to work up his nerve or
whatever; and the guy Thiokol, gone too, back to his anagrams and code
sequences, tensing up to crack the door.

There was one outsider here, Skazy knew, but said nothing.

The young federal agent Uckley, who'd fucked up at the house, had
arrived a few minutes ago in Delta cammos, presumably borrowed from one
of the men he'd cracked the house with. Somewhere he'd got an MP-5 and
an accurized 45. Uckley was here to tag along. All right, kid, thought
Skazy. It's your party too.

"Okay, guys," Skazy said, "your attention please, just a sec."

They turned to look at him, faces now blackened, gear checked for the
thousandth time, the very best guys there were, weapons cocked and
locked, boots tied, all concentration and intensity.

"Guys, it's just us. Some of you were in 'Nam in the Airborne or the
Rangers or out in the boonies in an A-team detachment and you remember
how it came apart in the end despite all the blood you and your buddies
poured into it.

And some of you were on the fucked-up Iranian mission with me and
remember how it came apart, and how we left bodies burning in the
desert. And some of you jumped into Grenada with me, and remember being
pinned in that ditch during that long night. Well, the truth is. Delta's
had its ass kicked each time out. Now, right now, I know there's a guy
on that mountain who's a lot like us, hardcore, pro military, lots of
ops under his belt. The Spetsnaz commander. Right now he's telling his
guys how good they are, and how Delta will be coming and how they're
going to kick more Delta ass. Okay?

That doesn't make me too happy, and I don't think it should make you
guys too happy. So no matter what happens, I just think we ought to have
a little moment of seriousness here for a moment before we get on board
the slicks. I fully expect to die tonight and that doesn't scare me a
bit, because I know if I do, some Delta asskicker is going to come in
the hole I opened and finish the job I started, right? So let's just
shake hands, clear our minds, and concentrate on our profession tonight.
In other words, guys, let's just get it done. Tonight, Delta gets it
done. Tonight, Delta kicks ass. Fair enough?"

The roar was an explosion.

Skazy smiled. God, he was happy!

Peter stared at the face. It was a shrewd, wary face, cosmopolitan,
comfortable, sure. It was also handsome, radiant with confidence. You
could almost feel the charisma leaking from it. The eyes were bright and
hard.

Arkady Pashin, he thought. I never even heard of you.

But you certainly heard of me.

His eyes scanned the biographical data. Military and engineering all the
way, another smartest boy in the class.

He tried to see a pattern, a meaning, in the Agency information. But he
found nothing--it read like your run-of the-mill defense pro, like any of
a hundred generals he had known, only Russian style, with one of those
famous cold, hard, serious defense minds, with the inevitable right wing
twist, the Pamyat thing.

But there was this one peculiarity: "In November of 1982 Arkady
Simonovich Pashin formally notified his headquarters that he would
henceforth be known simply as Arkady Pashin. No information is available
as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources
have any idea as to its meaning."

Why on earth would he have done this?

A weirdness passed through Peter, some twisted nerves firing, and the
strange sensation that the name alteration had to do with him too. It
was connected to him. He shivered.

Peter tried to think about the Russian thinking about him and realized
how important he was to the guy. He sends a guy to fuck my wife and then
he himself comes over to this country and he charms her. He has her in
that room in that fake Israeli embassy, and he looks at the woman I'm in
love with. He's probably seen movies of her fucking Ari Gottlieb.

Peter shivered again: it was so intimate somehow; he felt hideously
violated. His most closely held vulnerability-- Megan--had been taken
from him, turned, and used against him, used as a weapon. He had an
image of this guy going through telescopic photos of him, going through
the detritus of his life, trying to figure it all out, trying somehow to
enter Peter--to, in some perverse and pathological way, to become him.

He reached back, pulled out his wallet, and got out his wife's picture.
She still looked good to him. He set the photo down next to Pashin's and
looked at the two of them together.

Megan's shot was a head-on, without angle, casual. It caught her grace
and the brains behind her ears and maybe just a little bit of her
neuroticism. Looking at her, he suddenly acquired a terrible melancholy.

God, baby, I set you up for them, didn't I?

I made it so easy for them.

He looked at Pashin, the man in the mountain.

Your whole thing is that you think you're smarter than me. You and your
little tribe of cronies, what's it called, this screwball outfit,
Pamyat, Memory. He felt a little twist of shame. He knew himself he had
no memory, no sense of the historical past.

It doesn't mean anything to me, he thought. Only one thing means
anything to me.

Megan.

And you took her from me.

He looked again at the picture. No, Comrade Pashin.

I'm smarter than you. I'm the smartest guy in the class. I'm the
smartest guy you ever met.

He began to doodle with the name, Arkady Pashin and the name Peter
Thio-- He stood up suddenly, A terrible excitement came over him, and a
terrible pain. He had some trouble breathing, and yet at the same time
he filled with energy.

I think I have you, he thought. The only thing I have to do is look
where you think I don't have the guts to look. But I'm a realist. And
this is how I beat you.

I\ can look at anything. Even if it kills me.

He left his desk, strode through the operations room, not seeing Dick
Puller or the others, and pushed his way to the Commo room.

He picked up a phone.

"Is this a clear line?"

"Yes, sir," said a young soldier.

Swiftly, he dialed a number, heard it ring, ring again.

A man's voice answered with a name.

"This is Dr. Peter Thiokol," he said, "calling from the South Mountain
operational zone. I want to speak to my wife."

** ** **

Now was the lonely time. Dick Puller felt he ought to be doing something
better, smarter, harder, more brilliant. Instead, he just sat there,
puffing on a Marlboro, wondering why he ever decided to become a
soldier, while inside it felt as though cold little spiders were
crawling through his intestines.

He felt so tight he could hardly breathe.

You became a soldier because you were good at it.

Because you always dreamed of leading desperate men in a desperate
battle.

Because it seemed important.

Because it was in your genes.

Because you were scared to do anything you weren't sure you'd be good
at.

Dick puffed harshly on the cigarette. He was an old man, he knew,
fifty-eight his last birthday, with lovely daughters and a wife he'd die
for, the perfect soldier's wife, who did much and asked little.

Your life has been one long self-indulgence, he thought, hating himself,
wishing he could call her or the girls. He couldn't. Jennie was married
to a good Airborne major in Germany and Trish was in law school at Yale.
And Phyllis-- well, Phyllis wouldn't know what to do if he called. He'd
never called before, only sending her his dry little letters from
various hot locales, lying cheerfully about the food (which was always
bad) and the danger (which was always high) and the women (who were
always numerous). If he called now, he'd scare her to death, and what
good would that do?

"Sir, Sixguns One and Two airborne, checking in."

His air force. The two gunships that would double as troop carriers and
fly into the sure death of Stinger country.

"Acknowledge," said Puller, listening as the battle began to orchestrate
itself, outside his hands now that all the planning was done, all the
speech-giving over, and it came down only to the boys and their rifles.

"Sir, Halfback and Beanstalk are in position at the IP."

This was the Rangers, backed by Third Infantry.

"Acknowledge."

"Sir, Cobra One reports onloading the slicks accomplished.

Any messages?"

"No. Just acknowledge. You hear from Bravo yet?"

"That's a negative, sir."

"Figures," Puller said, seeing in his head the slow and clumsy progress
of the reluctant remnants of the National Guard unit in the dark toward
their reserve position to the left of the assault line, straggling
awkwardly through the snow and the trees, out of contact, scared and
exhausted and very, very cold. Bravo would be slow tonight.

"Sir, it's almost time. Will you be on the mike?"

"Yes, just a sec," said Dick, lighting another butt.

Inside, he felt himself tightening even further. Somehow it hurt to
breathe. His lungs ached, his joints pinched. So many things could go
wrong. So many things had gone wrong.

In any operation, count on a sixty percent fuck-up rate. The way you
win a war has nothing to do with brilliance; it has to do simply with
showing up and fucking up less than the other guy. Some Napoleon! And
now there was nothing to do but wait just a few more minutes.

At this point at Midway, Raymond Spruance went to bed, figuring he'd
done his best.

U. S. Grant got drunk.

Georgie Patton gave a lecture on patriotismIke Eisenhower prayed.

Dick Puller went back to work.

Thinking, yes, still, now, with just minutes to go he might have missed
something, he began to page again through the various Spetsnaz documents
and photographs that had poured in the past hour or so. There was too
much to be gotten through; he was simply scanning the material, hunting
for associational leaps, for blind luck, for--well, for whatever.

The dope included more reports on known Spetsnaz operations, defector
debriefings (significantly all third party; no known man had defected
from a Spetsnaz unit proper); satellite photos, newspaper accounts,
everything the CIA had vacuumed up in thirty years of Russia watching,
which had been shipped him high speed via phone computer line.

Lazily, more to drive the anxiety from his brain than for any real
reason, he skimmed through it.

What if the Rangers bog down and the pretty kids of Third Infantry turn
out not to be worth a shit off a parade ground?

What if the Soviets have more men and ammo than we ever suspected?

What if there's not as much titanium between Pashin and that key as we
thought?

What if Thiokol can't get through the shaft door?

What if the Delta assault team can't fight its way to the LCC?

What if-- And then his eyes hit something.

"Stop the attack!" he screamed. "Tell all units to hold!"

"Sir, I--"

"Tell all units to hold!"

** ** **

There was a pause and some fumbling at the other end as the FBI agents
debated among themselves what to do. He thought they might be trying to
cross-check the authenticity of his call over another line while he
waited, and as he stood there, he felt his chest seem to fill with
gravel and his breath wheezed between the loose stones.

Funny, he thought. The world may end tonight and yet that doesn't mean a
thing to me. But here I am waiting to talk to my wife and I'm shaking
like a leaf.

He wondered if he had the strength for the next few minutes.

And then he heard her voice.

"Peter?"

Her voice had a sadness in it, as if weighted with regret.

Megan never apologized, not formally, not for anything; but she had
little signals by way of indicating her small responsibility for
whatever might have happened, and it was in this softened tone he heard
her say his name. It did exactly what he had willed it not to: it earned
his instant and total forgiveness and his total surrender. Shorn of his
moral certitude, he knew he was lost.

"Hi," he said softly and raggedly. "How are you?"

"God, Peter, it's so awful. These awful men. They've been here for
hours."

"It's unpleasant, yes," Peter said, irked instantly at the way he
immediately agreed with her. "But look, you've got to give them
everything you can. Later, if you can demonstrate how hard you worked
for them, it'll help. I guarantee it."

"I suppose," she said. "It's just all so awful. They're going to send me
to prison, aren't they?"

"A good lawyer will get you off. Your father will know some hotshot;
he'll get you out of it. I guarantee it, Megan."

He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. "Look, I don't know what
they've told you--"

"Not much. It's something terrible though, isn't it?"

"It's a mess."

"It's all my fault, isn't it?"

"No. It's all my fault. I see that now. How I played into their hands
and made it easy for them. Now I need your help. Your absolute, total,
trusting help."

"Yes. Tell me what I can do."

He paused.

"This Soviet officer you identified. The older man, Pashin."

There was silence. He waited as long as he could, until he could wait no
longer.

"Somehow," he said to her finally, "it was personal with him. That is,
between him and me. It was intimate and personal. That's why you were so
important to him. Megan, I have to go where I'm scared to go, and look
at what I don't want to see. You've got to take me there, and be strong,
and make me see the truth. It's the most important thing you'll ever do,
do you see?"

Too much emotion tainted his voice, and he struggled to hold the words
in proper register. But the words were treacherous; they broke and
splattered on him and odd high notes, strange sounds of anxiety,
splashed through them. He felt as if he were weeping, but he could feel
no tears.

Megan was still silent.

Then she said, "Peter, there are men here. All around me. Don't make me
talk in front of them. Can't we do it later, in private? I'll tell you
everything in private."

"There isn't time. There's a question I have to ask you.

Only one."

He waited, but she wouldn't help him.

In the silence, he thought, the sex with Ari. He was good at it? He was
really good at it? He was better than me?

Stop it, he told himself.

He'd played the whole thing to get here, and now that he was here, he
had a moment's terror.

You can look at anything, he told himself. You're a realist. That's your
strength. That's how you'll beat him.

"Tell me if I'm not right. I've figured out how his mind works. I can
read him now. I get him now."

"Ari?"

"Ari! Ari's nothing, Megan. Ari's a tool, a big stud for hire. No, it's
this other guy. He's the one that's pulling the strings. Megan, there
was a nigfat, wasn't there, where you passed out? Where you had too much
to drink or you were tired or something? Some night where you can't
quite account for four or five hours? In fact, you probably haven't
really acknowledged it in your own mind, because at some subconscious
level you're not quite ready to face it. But wasn't there a night when.
. . when you can't really remember what happened?"

Her silence grew, and as it grew it confirmed his suspicion.

Finally, she said, "He said it was the champagne. That I had too much
and that I passed out. We had gone to an inn in Middleburg, Virginia,
for a'romantic weekend' at a very lovely inn. But I passed out Saturday
night. When I awakened I could tell. . . that it had been romantic."

Peter nodded.

"When was this?"

"Two weeks ago."

"After--?"

"Yes. After I had been with you. I went straight from you to Ari. I'm
sorry."

"And that was the last time you saw him?"

"Yes. I took some pictures of some documents you had. I just gave him
the camera. We didn't use the usual routine.

And then we went to this inn. And the next morning he left me. Said he
was returning to his wife in Israel. He just walked away from me. I
cried, I begged. He hit me. Peter, he hit me, and then he just left me
in that place, as if I didn't matter to him."

You didn't.

"Okay," he said. "You've been a great help."

"Peter, is that all? You called--"

"Megan, you should be all right. That lawyer, he'll get you a walk.
Those FBI guys, throw a little charm at them. They'll melt. They're men,
after all. And when this is over--"

"Peter, God, it's dangerous out there, isn't it? But you're safe, aren't
you? You're back, far away from the guns, aren't you? You're not going
to do anything stup--"

He was lost now. He felt it slipping away. He saw her in the room, in
the dark, drugged, helpless, and unresistant. He wondered what they used
and how compliant she'd been. He knew she'd been utterly, totally
compliant. He felt her shame and debasement. The image of it brought the
tears at last from him, and he felt himself begin to sob like an idiot
child.

"Baby, when it's over," he heard himself saying, "we can go to New York.
We can have another life, I swear it. We can move to New York so you can
be with the people you like and I can teach, maybe, or--"

He could hear her crying too.

"I miss you so," she was saying. "Peter, I'm so sorry this all happened,
I'm so, so sorry and be careful, please, stay away from the--" '"Dr.
Thiokol!"

It was the hard voice of Dick Puller punching at him through his grief.

"Megan, I have to go."

"Thiokol! I need you ASAP!"

"I have to go," he repeated. And then he said, "Thanks, I think I can
take the guy now," and hung up. The sports coat seemed to constrict him
strangely and he pulled it off and threw it in the corner. He felt much
better.

He turned, tried not to see the men staring at him in amazement, and
discovered Puller bearing down on him like a juggernaut, waving a
photograph.

"Peter, look at this," said Puller. "Tell me if it's what I think it
is."

Peter blinked to clear his eyes, felt like a fool, an idiot, but noted
that Puller was far too intense to notice. As his focus sharpened he saw
what he was supposed to see. It appeared to be an extremely high aerial
view of South Mountain; he could see the launch control facility roof,
the barracks roof, the wire perimeter, and the silo hatch, and the
access road leading up. Yet there was something subtly wrong with the
photo, in the relationship, say, between the buildings, the angles of
the siting, in a hundred little areas. He concentrated, but couldn't
quite-- "It just came over from CIA. They got it with a Blackbird three
months ago over Novomoskovsk near Dnepropetrovsk where Spetsnaz has its
big training camp. Damn, if they'd have only read it then. If they were
sharp in that damned agency, instead of--"

But Peter just stared at the picture.

"It's where they propped the mission. It's their rehearsal site."

Peter stared hard.

Something's wrong with it, he thought. He saw what looked like diagonal
slashes in the earth, or sergeant's chevrons, or a giant tire track
rolling across the mountaintop.

"What are these marks? I see these marks in the snow, what are they?"

Puller looked at them.

"Yes, that's it, isn't it? They're trenches. That's what's under that
goddamn tarpaulin."

Peter didn't get it.

"What you're looking at. Dr. Thiokol, is his plan. Yasotay's defense
plan. You see how the trenches take the configuration of a V and fall
back toward the elevator shaft?"

"Yes."

"He'll fall back, trench by trench, toward that last redoubt.

When we assault we're always in a crossfire kill zone from the two arms
of the V. You can't flank it because it's too wide. You can bet the
trenches are linked by tunnels, which they'll blow as they fall back.
It's the way the Muhajadeem fight in Afghanistan. He must have lost a
thousand men trying to take hills like this. He's the hill expert of all
time.

Each one of these trenches will cost us an hour and a hundred
casualties. In effect, we have to take the same trench, over and over.
The attack will never make it. It'll get hung up in the trenches."

But Peter wasn't really paying any attention. He was staring,
fascinated, at the photograph. There was something weird about it. He
could not tear his eyes away. It was something he knew, yet something he
didn't know. His mind struggled to interpret the competing phenomena; he
searched for a theory to unify his perceptions of distress.

"Look!" Peter suddenly shouted. "Look! Look at this!"

He knew there was something about the picture that bugged him; he'd been
over and over the top of South Mountain before and during the
construction. He knew it as well as he knew Megan's body. No man knew it
better.

"See, here. They haven't bothered to plant the trees to the left and the
right of the assault site. They've just left the area bare, but you can
see the way they've sculpted the land form to match the shape of the
earth. But their original satellite pictures must have been taken early
and they didn't bother to check the later ones carefully; see, we
actually moved the site of the barrack about fifteen feet to the left,
and we didn't build this additional wing to the launch control facility,
although it was in the plans they got from Megan.

But most important, the creek's missing. They don't have the creek
because there wasn't a creek."

Puller looked at him strangely.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You told me the problem with the assault site was that it had such a
narrow front that all the attacks had to come across this meadow here.
Right? And those are the men that go into the guns, right?"

Puller looked at him.

"But that's not right. There's a creek bed, here, on the left." His
finger probed at a place on the denuded photograph that showed sheer
cliff.

"It's supposed to be impassable, too steep to climb, but I'm telling
you, the creek cut into it. You could get people up it and hit them from
this other side, I know you could. You don't have to attack on that
narrow front only. You could get soldiers up there and hit them from the
left and bypass the fall-back trenches. I swear to you, there's a creek
bed. You don't see it in the winter because it's dry and under snow and
you don't see it during the summer because of the trees, but it's there
and it's another way to the top."

Puller looked at it hard.

"Come with me."

They ran to the command center to look at the national geodesic survey
map.

"Dr. Thiokol, there's no creek marked here."

"That's a 1977 map. The creek, we opened the creek when we excavated for
the shaft, last year. That's why. I'm telling you, you can get soldiers
up that side of the mountain and the Soviets don't know." His finger
shot out to a marker on the map. "Those men are the men you send.
They're the ones who'll get you into the perimeter and to the elevator
shaft. Your Rangers and regular infantry won't make it."

Puller leaned forward.

"Those guys," Peter yelled, pointing at the mark on the map that stood
for a group of men. "Who are those guys?"

"That's Bravo," said Puller. "Or what's left of it."

** ** **

Walls was in the cathedral of the missile.

It towered above him in the gray half-light. He felt so small.

He reached out and put his hand to the skin of the thing, which was not
cold and clammy and metallic as he imagined.

Indeed, it had no sense of machine to it. Even as his fingers lingered
in stupidity upon it, it did not warm to the touch. It drew no energy
from his hand. It was. . . most peculiar. . . it was nothing.

He could not know it. He could not feel it. It had no meaning. It wasn't
exactly that he was dwarfed into nothingness, that his smallness was
made manifest by his proximity to the seven-story bigness of it, it was
just that it was so blank. It was an abstraction. There was no feeling
of its having any sense. He could not begin to figure out how to connect
to it. It was just an immense black apex, smooth and blank, huge beyond
knowing, disappearing as it rose above him, throwing in the half-light
the tiniest smudge of his own reflection back at him, but more shadow
than anything, a sense of movement and shape, that was all. It had no
human face. He sensed that it didn't. . . again, this was very
peculiar... it didn't care about him.

It befuddled him. He felt his reactions slow way down, as if he'd been
drugged. It had a weird radiance, a kind of halo. It almost felt as
though it came from some dead religion or something; he'd once come
across something just as strange in the 'Nam, a giant stone head with
thick lips and staring eyes amid the bougainvillea and the frangipani,
and you could look at it for a century or two and not learn one thing
from it.

Tentatively, he walked its circumference, though there wasn't much room
between the skin of the thing and the concave of the cement wall that
encircled it. His head was back, his mouth was open. It never changed.
From any angle it was the same.

His head ached. He became aware of small noises, tickings, pingings,
obscure vibrations. At the same time he smelled the odors of wiring and
cement and wax. It smelled like electricity in there.

He looked at it again, in wonder. It wasn't at all like the rocketship
he'd imagined, to the degree that he'd imagined rocketships at all. It
had no fins, for one thing. How could they steer it without fins? It had
no numbers either, and he had the vague supposition that it should have
black and white checks on it somewhere, as well as big fat USAF
initials, like the Tac ships in 'Nam. He also had this idea that there'd
be a huge superstructure like a battleship's control tower up next to
it, and lots of guys scurrying around: nope, nothing. It was so huge it
didn't look like it could fly at all. The big tube just sat on a tiny
framework of girders, nothing elaborate, and its exhaust cupolas
extended beneath that, into a pit. As he looked up it, it disappeared,
yielding some seventy feet up to nothingness. Then, another hundred or
so feet up was the circular image of the sealed silo hatch, which
appeared from down here to resemble a manhole cover.

He wondered what to do. Should he blow it up? He wasn't sure. He tried
to remember. Goddamn, if that Witherspoon were here, he'd know what to
do. But Walls wasn't at all sure if he should blow it up. He might get
in big trouble. And even if he was supposed to blow it up, there was the
problem of how to blow it up. He had no grenades left. He had no C-4
left. He could see no cables to cut or hoses to rip. He didn't think
firing a few Mr. 12s into a thing this big would do any damage. And
anyway, wasn't there an A-bomb in there? He wondered where it would be.
He didn't think it would be a terribly good idea to shoot the rocket and
make the bomb blow up, because wasn't that what they were trying to
stop?

Shit, he thought, baffled by it.

At last he stumbled on a ladder. It was really a series of rungs in the
concrete and, craning, he saw that the rungs led a perilous way up the
yawning side of the concrete tube to a very small door, halfway up to
the silo hatch.

Walls tried to figure out what to do. A certain part of him said, just
wait here until they come get you, you're okay now. But another part
said, they wanted to get into this place real bad, only way to get into
this place is up that ladder.

Maybe you're the only dude get into this place. The onliest.

He laughed at that. All those white motherfuckers running around with
their helicopters and shit, and here little nigger Nathan Walls, Dr. P
of Pennsylvania Avenue, son of Thelma and brother to James, both dead,
but Nathan, Nathan, he the onliest peoples to make it in. And what then?

Then you kill more white boys, he thought.

He had at that second just the briefest animal sensation of warmth and
motion, and then he was hit hard by a flying bunch of muscle, yanked
down, as if under the pounce of a cat, and pinned against the cement.
And he felt the blade come up hard and tight against his throat, and he
knew he was going to die.

** ** **

In the first slick, Skazy was on the radio.

"Delta Six, this is Cobra One, I'd like an amplification of that last
order, please."

"Cobra One, hold tight in your ships, that is all."

Skazy sat, breathing hard, feeling it all come apart in his mind. He
remembered Desert One, the confusion of rushing men, out-of-control
machines, and unsure command. He remembered Dick Puller off on his own
like some kind of moody Achilles, out of reach.

Colonel Puller, there's rumors all over the-- It's an abort, Frank. Get
Delta on the-- An abort! We can still take these motherfuckers! Goddamn,
we don't need six chops! We can do it with five, we can get in there and
blow these motherfuckers away and-- Back to the ship. Major!

That's when Skazy had hit him. Yes, he'd hit a superior officer in the
face, and remembered the shock, the totality of it, when Puller fell
back, his face leaking blood, the unexpected look of hurt on it.

Someone grabbed him.

Frank, get out of here. Dick's decided. Get back to your people.

You cowardly mother-fucker, you don't have the guts for this kind of
work, he remembered screaming, the wounded, enraged son who'd just
learned his father was merely a man.

"Delta Six, Cobra One, what the hell is going--"

"Off the net. Cobra One, you're in a holding position until release,
out."

Goddamn, said Skazy to himself.

"I'm going back to command," he told McKenzie, and disengaged himself
from the chopper, dipped under its roaring rotor, and headed back to
Puller.

There were fifty-five of them and they were lost and had been lost and
they were way behind schedule, and it was cold as shit and even if the
world was hanging in the balance, they didn't care, they just wanted to
be warm. Sure, okay, you can make so many speeches, but the guys had
been shot at today and most of them were still in bad shock from the
first fight.

These guys had been playing at war and they'd never seen anyone die and
suddenly they'd seen a whole batch of people die, mostly their friends.

"Lieutenant, I think we're lost," said the sergeant.

"We can't be lost," said Dill. "It's just over here."

"I'm afraid some of the guys may have wandered away."

"Goddamnit," said Dill, "they were supposed to stay in close. You get
lost on this mountain, you could be in real danger."

He looked back. Bravo was spread out through the trees; he could see the
blurry shapes against the white of the snow, each trailing a bright
plume of breath, each groaning laboriously, each cursing under the
discomfort, strung out, uncoordinated.

Jesus, what a parade to save the world. Dill thought.

You poor guys. You couldn't lick a stamp to save your life. He almost
laughed.

"Tell the sergeants to get the guys together. I mean, we're just
supposed to wait is all, in case they need us."

Jesus, he thought, poor Bravo can't even wait right.

"Yes, sir. But we're already way behind. Like, it's quarter after and
those guys should have started shooting and I don't hear a damn thing."

"Yeah, well," said Dill, not sure what to do, "I'm sure they have their
reasons."

It had seemed so easy in the briefing. Bravo was to move up behind the
Rangers and Third Infantry, then peel off to the left to get out of the
way of the support groups, the medics, the ammo carriers, that sort of
thing. And just wait in good order in case they were needed. So they
were essentially out of it. The ones that were here, they'd made it.
They were alive! Whatever, they had made it. It was time for the pros to
take over.

But he was anxious that he hadn't heard anything on the radio for a
while.

"MacGuire?"

"Sir?"

"You sure that thing is working?"

He heard fumbles, mumbles. MacGuire was new to the PRC-25. Huston, his
regular, was dead.

"It's not working."

"Oh, shit," said Dill. "Can you fix it?"

"Uh, sir, it's the batteries. They're dead. We've been out of contact
now for about ten minutes."

"You got any extras?"

"Yes, sir, in my pack."

"Great. Maybe they've surrendered and we don't know it yet."

He crouched as the boy struggled first with his pack, then with the
radio. Dill thought he ought to say something to the kid about checking
stuff like that before they started out. But Dill was gentle; he was
good with kids, and they responded to him, which is why he coached
basketball for a living at a high school outside Baltimore.

In a few seconds there was a gravelly growl as the boy got the
walkie-talkie back in working order, and then handed it over to Dill,
who hit the receive button to hear himself being vigorously paged by the
old bastard colonel who was running things.

"--yo, goddammit. Bravo, this is Delta Six, where are you. Bravo?
Goddamnit, where--"

"Delta Six, affirmative. Bravo here, do you copy?"

"Dill, where the fuck have you been?"

"Ah, sorry. Delta Six, we had a temporary malfunction and lost contact
there for a second or so, over."

"You were out of contact for nearly ten minutes, soldier.

Are you in position?"

Dill grimaced.

"Well, not exactly, sir. Tough going up here. We're more or less where
we're supposed to be, about halfway up. I can't see the Rangers or Third
Infantry. But it gets real steep ahead, I can see that, and I--"

"Dill, there's a change in plan."

Dill waited. The colonel said nothing.

"Delta Six, I don't read you, ah, over."

"Dill, I'm advised that ahead of you there's a creek bed."

"Sir, I don't recall any creek bed on my map. I really looked hard at
it, too, sir."

"I am advised that it's there, nevertheless. Dill, and that you ought to
be able to get a raiding party up that--"

Raiding party?

"--up that groove in the rocks and onto the perimeter flank pretty
easily."

"In support of the main attack. Delta Six?" asked Dill, computing the
problem.

"Negative, Bravo. You are the main attack."

Dill looked at the little box in his hand. Goddamn that kid, why hadn't
he discovered his dead batteries ten minutes from now rather than where
he was.

"Sir, I don't think my men are--"

"Bravo, this isn't a request, this is an order. Look, Dill, sorry, but
it's how things have to go. The Rangers will never make it in the face
of the heavy fire without help from the side. The front is too narrow
and we believe there's a network of trenches in their position. We have
to take this nicking place in one stroke. You guys are it. Get humping,
Lieutenant. It's time to go to war."

Tagged again. Dill thought.

** ** **

He wished they'd leave him alone so he could get at the vodka in his
pocket. At least with vodka he'd have a chance or something. But no, the
Americans just kept drilling him, going over and over it again, where
the bomb was, its fusing mechanism, the disarming steps, just in case, a
crash course in nuclear technology, all a blur to him.

I want vodka.

But now the van had stopped. They were out of time.

"Okay, Greg," said the FBI agent called Nick, "we're on I Street, two
blocks down from the embassy, right in front of the MPAA. You know the
neighborhood. Just a few feet down to Sixteenth, then your left and
there you are. We've halted traffic, we've got the place sealed off, and
we've got enough SWAT people around to crack Nicaragua. But we've been
feeding cars along so they won't catch on. Okay, the street is clean,
it's sanitary, no mugger's going to knife you on the way in."

Gregor thought the man was hyperventilating. He looked as if he were
going to have an attack of some sort. He looked as if he needed a bottle
of vodka himself.

"Greg, you paying attention here, fella?"

"Yes, of course," said Gregor.

"You sort of looked like you were dreaming about what was between Molly
Shroyer's legs there for a sec, old guy."

"Actually, I am fine."

"Good man, Greg. Anybody going to give you a hard time getting in? You
code-cleared, all that?"

"I'm known. No difficulties. Well--"

"Well what?"

"I have been out of contact for twelve hours. It is not possible to know
how they're going to react. There might be a few questions, maybe an
unpleasantry or two. But nothing I cannot handle."

"Great. In other words, these guys may roust you just going through the
door?"

"No. No, I am a trusted man. Nothing will happen."

The American looked at him with great doubt on his plump, tough face.
Then he said, "You want a piece, Greg, in case it should get hairy down
in the Wine Cellar with this Klimov? I've got a nice H and K I could lay
on you."

"There's a metal detector. If KGB security finds I am armed, it will be
the end. There will be no way to get downstairs."

"Sure?"

"Certain."

"Now, don't rush it, guy. That's how these things fall apart. You get
anxious, you try and force it, bingo, it's history.

There's plenty of time. Hell, it's not even eleven.

You're just old Gregor, in from the cold, looking to relieve your pal
Magda downstairs. Okay?"

"Okay," said Gregor.

"Time to go, guy."

"Okay," said Gregor again. Somebody slid the van door open and out he
stepped into amber light. It was moist and chilly; the streets glowed;
the air was filled with sparkly mist.

When Gregor breathed it felt like ice sliding down into his lungs, a
great feeling. It made him feel alive. He shivered, drawing the cheap
little overcoat around him, but took comfort from the weight of the
vodka in the pocket. Once he got inside, he promised himself a nice hit,
a drenching, gushing gulp of it, to send all his demons away.

He walked on down to 16th Street, turned left. He could see the building
up ahead on the right, just past the Public Television Office, which
looked far more totalitarian than the Russian building. The embassy was
a big old place, Georgian, once upon a time a capitalist millionaire's
playpen. Up top, the complicated mesh of aerials, microwave dishes, and
satellite communication transmitters looked like some weird spiked
crown.

Gregor crossed the street. Two American cops--the executive protection
service--at the embassy gate watched him come, but they didn't matter.
They were nothing. He knew once he was inside the gate, KGB would be on
him.

Who? Who was captain of the guard that night? If it was Frinovsky, he'd
be all right. Frinovsky was an old man, a cynic like himself, another
secret drinker, a homosexual, a man of appetites and forgiveness. On the
other hand, in KGB as in GRU, these kids were taking over. Ballbusters,
showoffs, zealots, Gorbachev's awful children, all with their pretend
birthmarks. Gorshenin, perhaps. Gorshenin was the worst, a little prick
who kept names and Wanted to Rise. He hated those like Gregor, who only
Wanted to Stay. He was young Klimov's pal too.

Gregor arrived. He flashed his embassy ID to the two cops, who stood
aside, and then he stepped through the gate and headed up the walk
toward the door, toward the bronze plaque, CCCP.

He was back in Russia, and scared shitless. The door opened, a blade of
orange light spilled across the pavement.

It was Gorshenin.

"Arrest that man," the awful Gorshenin shouted.

** ** **

So very deep now. He couldn't have much gas left in the cylinder at all.
The angle was torture. It was like surgery, he was so far inside. The
light from the torch was far, far away, a blur of bright flame through
his black lenses. He could see only more metal. He withdrew.

"What is wrong?" the general said.

"My leg, Christ, it's killing me."

"Get on with it, goddamn you."

"My leg's bleeding again, Jesus, can't you--"

"Get on with it."

"Maybe we missed it or some--"

"No!" screamed the general. "No, you did not miss. The center, you went
into the center. I saw, I measured myself, I know exactly where the cut
should go and how it should proceed. I monitored. You have not failed.
Cut, Mr. Hummel, goddamn you, cut, or I'll have you shot and your
children's bones ground to fertilizer."

Jack looked at him. Crazy fucker, he now saw, crazy underneath, crazy as
a god damned loon.

The general pulled out a pistol.

"Cut!" he said.

Jack turned, and again thrust the torch into the deep gash in the
titanium. The bright flame licked at the far metal, licked and devoured,
drop by drop, and the metal fell away.

Then--pinprick, BB, cavity. Cheerio, nailhead--a minuscule black hole
began gradually to appear in the metal at the end of the tunnel. He saw
it expand as the titanium liquified and fell clear. Jack's heart thumped
and, goddamn him, he couldn't help the excitement.

"I'm there. I'm there," he shouted, giddy with joy. The long journey was
almost over.

Dick Puller hunched over the microphone, sucking on a Marlboro, He drew
the smoke deep into his lungs, held it there, absorbed its heat, and
hissed it out in a dare from his nostrils. His face was bleak and set
and ash gray. Before him stood the map on the wall, with its brave
little pin reading bravo, the radio transmitters, ashtrays, cigarette
packs. Around him nervous staff guys, Commo clerks, state cops holding
cups of coffee, talking quietly, just staring out into space. The air
was heavy with tobacco smoke and pointless, dry chatter and despair.

And there was Peter Thiokol, who'd changed totally. He wore commando
gear now, black field pants and a black sweater, the black knit watch
cap down over his ears so that they were too hot. His glasses looked
fogged.

Peter stood with his arms crossed, trying to get his thoughts assembled.
Hard, under the circumstances. It was like a waiting room outside the
maternity ward in an old Saturday Evening Post cartoon. There was no
real sound in the room, no meaningful sound. He could hear the creak of
boots as the men swayed their weight from foot to foot, or scuffed their
heels against the floor, or exhaled loudly or sighed tragically.
Occasionally, the crackle of static leaked from the speaker of the
radio.

"What's taking them so long?" Peter finally asked, but nobody answered.

He spoke again, because no one else seemed to have the will to.

"Colonel, maybe you ought to contact them again."

Puller just looked up at him, his face gone shockingly aged, broken. He
looked as if someone had been hammering on his head with pipe wrenches
and snow shovels. Peter had never seen this Puller, dazed and old,
caught in the crunch of the stress, the energy bled out of him.

This is what Skazy saw at Desert One, he thought in horror. An old man
without an edge; an old man squashed by the pressure; an old man who'd
sent too many boys to die too many times.

"They're either going to make it or they're not," said one of the other
officers. "Talking to'em during maneuver just screws things up. This,
uh--"

"Dill," said Puller.

"Dill, this Dill, he either gets'em there or he doesn't.

Funny, you train all your life for a spot like this and there's maybe
twenty thousand professional officers who'd give an elbow and a jawbone
to be there, and it comes down to a gym teacher."

After that there wasn't much to say.

"Delta Six, this is Halfback, do you read?"

"I copy. Halfback," said Puller.

"Sir, we still holding?"

"That's affirmative. Halfback."

"Sir, if it comes to it, we'll go in. I mean, we're Rangers.

V/e go in. You just say the word, and we'll jump off."

"That's a negative. Halfback."

"Delta Six, Sixgun-One." It was the lead gunship, still holding on the
strip. "We're ready on the assault too. Give the word, and we'll rock
and roll."

"I said, holding. Holding. Back to radio discipline, all units."

The crackles sputtered out.

Peter looked at his watch. It was 10:35.

"Sir, if I was you," someone whispered to him, "I'd turn that watch
upside down on your wrist. You get up there, you'd be surprised in the
dark, those gooks will zero on the radium in your watch face if it shows.

Peter looked at him, mumbled an insincere, "Uh, thanks," and made the
adjustment.

"Sir, how long will you hold them?' someone asked Puller.

"Until Bravo checks in," was all that Puller could say.

"Colonel Puller."

Skazy stood in the door. He looked like some kind of guardian of hell's
gate, his face blackened like Caliban's, his eyes leaking white rage,
his grim lips pink and hot. He was draped with an immense green rope and
wore several ammunition belts around him. He carried two pistols,
several M-26 and smoke grenades, an angle-headed flashlight, and a
CAR-15.

"Colonel Puller, I'm going to have to ask you to retire, sir. I'm
officially taking command."

Puller stood. He was another large man. Somehow the men between them
melted away.

"Back to your station. Major Skazy," said Puller.

"Colonel Puller, I'm prepared to put you under arrest if you don't move
away from the radio."

Puller spoke quietly.

"Major Skazy, back to your station."

Four Delta commandos, heavily armed, slipped by Skazy and slid into the
room. Though their weapons weren't brandished, everyone knew they were
cocked and unlocked and at Skazy's disposal.

"Sir, I request once more that you move away from the radio. It's time
to go."

Puller reached into his holster, removed his.45, and threw the slide
with a harsh clack that echoed in the still, smoky room. The hammer
locked back.

"Son," he said, "if you don't move out of that doorway and return to
your ship, I'll shoot you in the head. It's that simple."

He leveled the pistol at Skazy.

Instantly, four CAR-15s zeroed on him. Craziness flashed through the
air.

"We'll both die. Colonel," said Skazy.

"Be that as it may," said Puller, "if you don't move away from that
doorway and return to your post, I'll shoot you."

"Colonel," said Skazy, "I have to ask you one more time to move away
from the radio and relinquish command."

He started to walk into the room-- "Stop it!!" screamed Peter, himself
almost out of control as he lurched between them. "Stop it!! This is
infantile!"

"Step aside, Thiokol," said Puller, looking through him.

Skazy had removed an automatic from his belt.

"Thiokol, sit down. This doesn't concern you."

"This is insane," Peter shouted. He was breathing near to
hyperventilation, murderous with rage at the folly and so terribly
scared he could hardly stand still. His blood surged with adrenaline.
"You assholes, you Delta prima donnas and your god damned games, do your
god damned jobs like everybody else! Don't hold yourself so god damned
precious!"

There was a click.

Skazy had cocked his Smith & Wesson.

"Peter, sit down," he said. "Colonel, I have to give you one last chance
to step aside or--"

"Delta Six, this is Bravo, we're up, we're at the top of the hill,
goddammit, we're there Peter saw Puller snap the safety on his pistol as
he slid it into the holster, lean forward, just an old man with a
shit scared look to his face, nothing dramatic, no big line to deliver,
and say, "All units, this is Delta Six, do you copy, Delta Six. Heaven
is falling, I repeat. Heaven is falling. I repeat, Heaven is falling."

Everybody began to run. Someone cheered. Peter took a deep breath and
then was running for his chopper through a commotion of other rising
birds, the whip of snow and dust in the darkness, and the sound, far off
and blurry, of men with guns.

"They're off," yelled the man on the night scope, "five, six, seven,
eight, eight of them. Hueys."

Troop carriers, Yasotay thought. An airborne job, helicopter assault at
night. Let them come, he thought. He'd been on a few and knew how they
got messed up.

"Rockets," yelled Yasotay to his missile people. "Spotters ready. Men on
the first line, eyes front. Get ready, boys.

The Americans are coming."

But before the Delta-laden Hueys could arrive, the first of the two
gunships rose over the treeline, then the other.

They hung obscenely, two black shapes against the white snow of the
valley. Their rotors filled the air with the wicked whup-whup-whup of
the jet engines, loud enough to mask the final movement of troops
through the trees to the point of attack. Worse, at an altitude of some
five hundred to a thousand feet up, the gunship guns had angle on the
ground troops; they'd be firing down on the compound.

"Mark your targets, rockets," Yasotay shouted in the second before the
mini-guns began to fire. The stable world seemed to dissolve. The
mini-guns fired so much faster than conventional machine guns that their
problem wasn't accuracy but ammunition conservation. From each of the
hanging birds the tracers leapt out at the mountaintop like a dragon's
flame, a stream of light almost, and where the hot streaks touched, the
world yielded. But of course in the dark they had no good targets, just
as earlier the A-10s, roaring overhead, had no good targets; shooting at
men is not like shooting at tanks or trucks. And so the bullets, as had
the earlier bullets, bounced across the compound, roiling snow and dirt
but little flesh; but their impact was devastating psychologically
because there seemed no force on earth that could stand against them.

Down in the treeline Yasotay saw movement; infantry, coming hard through
the trees, almost into the open.

"Rockets," he yelled again, knowing he had only seven Stingers left
after the profligacy of the air attack in the afternoon, but knowing
that if he did not push the gunships back the infantry--good infantry,
he presumed, better than the boobs who'd come at him earlier--would get
close. It was a question of timing now; he'd put up a hard fight, then
fall back to the first of the five V trenches; they'd come ahead and
he'd have them in two fires. He'd kill them all. They'd never make it.
They'd never get out of the mess of ditches and counterditches with the
fire pouring in on them from both sides; and every time they made it to
a new trench they'd find it empty, except for booby traps, while more
fire smashed at them from the flanks. He'd seen the Pathans wipe out an
infantry brigade that way, kill four hundred men in ten minutes, and
then retire laughing to their rice pots higher up the mountain.

A Stinger fired, streaking out into the dark at one of the birds--it
missed, lost its power and sank into the trees.

A second, hastily aimed--the gunner hadn't properly acquired his
target--missed worse, but the pilot in one of the gunships blinked and
evaded, and his mini-gun fire swung wildly out of control, missing the
mountaintop and spraying out behind them into Maryland.

A third Stinger missed.

Four left, I have four Ie-- The fourth hit the gunship dead on with a
disappointingly small detonation and just the smallest trace of smoke;
but the bird's purchase on the air was altered and it began to slide
sideways, until its back rotor pulled free and it simply became weight
and fell because it could not glide. It fell into the trees but did not
burn.

The second gunship zeroed on the flash of the missiles coming its way,
though Yasotay gauged the pilot as merely good and not special like some
of the Mi-24 aces in Afghanistan.

But the pilot now had a target and he brought the mini-gun to bear and
Yasotay slid down into the trench as the bullets rushed at him, a
torrent of light. They struck up and down the perimeter trench and dust
showered down, and screams and yelps rose as men cowered under the
torrent.

One of the missile gunners took a full burst of the mini-gun across the
chest and the bullets pulverized him.

The gunship roared in; Yasotay could hear it overhead, circling,
swooping as the pilot overshot the mark, swung back; a spotlight raced
out from the craft, hunting targets.

And then the guns caught it. The chopper pilot, too low, too eager, had
crossed Yasotay's silent first trench in hunt for the missile men; but
he'd forgotten Yasotay's own gunners, who opened up instinctively,
catching the craft easily in ten or twelve streams of fire and the Huey
wobbled, vibrated, and then was gone in a horrid smear of orange flame
spreading bright as day across the night sky.

Yasotay was up even before the flames had drained from the air, and he
saw the field ahead of them filled with rushing infantry and thought it
was too late. But his NCOS, blooded the many years in Asian mountains,
did not panic, and he could hear their stern voices calling out in
reassuring Russian! "To the front. To the front. Targets to the front."

Yasotay fired a flare, and then another.

It was sheer, delirious spectacle.

The infantry came like a tide of insects, scuttling, lurching ahead in
dashes, yet still brave and steady, forcing the gap between itself and
Yasotay's front line, rushing ahead in packs of four or five. Yasotay
fancied he could even see their eyes, wide with fright and adrenaline.
Their backup guns had started, suppressive automatic fire from the
flanks, lancing out over the troops but too high to do any damage.

Then his own fire rose, rose again; the men were on full automatic. The
assault force troopers began to go down, but still they came, brave,
good men, and the battlefield broke apart, atomized, into a hundred
desperate little dramas, as small fire-and-movement teams tried to work
closer. But Yasotay could see that he'd broken the spine of the attack.
He picked up his scoped G-3 and began to engage targets. * * *

** ** **

Puller could hear them dying.

"This is Sixgun-One, he's got missiles coming up, ah, no sweat, they're
missing, that's one past us, oops, two gone, and that's the big-- Hit,
hit, I'm losing it, we're--"

"Charlie, I have you, you're looking swell."

"Major, he's not burn--"

"Christ, he hit hard."

"Delta Six, this is Sixgun-Two, I have missile launchers ahead, and I've
got them engaged--oooooooo, look at them boys dance--"

"Sir, belt's out."

"Get it changed, I'm going in."

"Goddamnit, Sixgun-Two, this is Delta Six, you are advised to hold your
position, I can't risk another lost ship."

"Sir, I got'em running, I can see'em running, I just want to get
closer."

"New belt, skip."

"Let's kick ass."

"Sixgun-Two, hold your fucking position!" Puller roared.

"Colonel, I got those missile guys zeroed, oh, this is great, this is--"

"Shit, sir. there's fire coming up from--"

"Oh, oh, shit, goddammit, hit, I'm--"

"The fire, the fire, the fi--"

"Jesus," somebody at the window said, "his tanks went.

He's all over the sky. It looks like the Fourth of July."

"Delta Six, this is Halfback, I'm taking heavy fire from the front."

"Halfback, get your second assault team up to the initial point."

"Ready to go, sir. Shit, the gunships are both down, that one guy, he's
still burning. The fire is heavy."

"Are your people still advancing?"

"We've got a lot of fire going out, sir."

"But your team, is it still advancing or is it hung up?"

"I don't see much movement out there, but there's a lot of fire. There's
smoke, dust, snow, whatever, I can't see through it. Should I send my
backup yet?"

"Not unless you're convinced your first wave has completely lost it."

"Well, there's fire. Where's that stuff on the left? Where's Bravo?
Where the hell is Bravo? Jesus, Bravo, if you don't help us, we're going
to get butchered and nobody's getting any closer to that hole than they
are now."

The blade touched his throat; he felt it begin to cut-- then halt.

He felt the sinewy muscles so tight against him ease just a notch; then,
swift and silent as his stalker had pounced on him, he was gone. The
weight left Walls's back; rolling over, his fingers flying involuntarily
to the break in his skin where the blade had begun to slice open his
throat, he found himself staring into the mad eyes of his own death,
which this time had by luck decided not to occur.

"Jesus, lady, you scared the shit out of me."

The Vietnamese woman looked at him sullenly. God, how could such a
scrawny creature be so strong? Baby, you had my ass cold. Fifteen years
ago you get me like that and my ticket be punched forever and ever.

He rubbed his neck, which was wet with a trickle of blood.

"I figure you come up the tunnels same as me. Then you run into one of
them pipes for the rocket blast, right? You follow it, and you end up in
here with me, is that right, girl?

Sure it is. No other way it could be. Then, when you hear me coming, you
crawl up inside there--" He pointed to the big cupola of the rocket
exhaust port. He shivered, thinking of her curled up in there, like a
cat actually inside the thing.

"Shit, you look like you been through worse hell than me."

She was smeared with mud and blood; her face was filthy. She had a
crazed look in her dark eyes and her hand kept tightening and loosening
on the haft of the big knife.

One of her trouser legs was ripped out. A terrible gash had left a
cascade of dried blood down one arm; the cut itself had turned black and
glistening. Whoever said their faces were blank? He was wrong, whoever
he was, because Walls now looked hard at the thing he had all those
years ago taught himself was Hat and dull and yellow and saw the same
play of emotions he'd seen on any face: fear, anger, pride, a big charge
of guts, maybe more than a little grief.

"They jump you? Where your partner be at? You know, Stretch. That tall
white dude. Where he be at?"

She shook her head.

He laughed. "He didn't make it? My boy Witherspoon didn't make it
neither. Well, sugar, just you and me, we's all there is, us old-time
rats. Nobody else coming." He stood, picking up his shotgun.

"Okay, lady," he said. "Now, I figure on climbing up this ladder to that
little door. You see it? Way up there? Then, maybe somehow we get
through the door. 'Cause the one thing I know, we don't want to be
sitting next to this big cocksucker"--he looked at the missile--"in case
it gets lit off.

Burn us to shit. You coming or you staying? Best if you come."

She looked at him, her dark eyes crazily boring into his.

Shit, she don't even understand what this is. This is just another
tunnel to her, except that now it's some shit with a rocketship.

"Come on," he crooned. "Take it from me, you don't want to be down here
if this sucker go. Fire come out of the hole, burn you all up like
napalm."

He began to climb up the rungs. He climbed, looking up, watching the
manhole cover of the silo hatch. He wouldn't look down because it was
too far, and Walls, the tunnel champion, was afraid of heights. He
climbed and climbed until he was woozy. Seven fucking stories. It was
high!

He finally reached the door. It was blank and solid.

Hanging groggily on the rungs, he touched it, and it had no spring or
give. It was another door, the door of his life. fuck niggers wasn't
scratched into it, but it could have been, for that was its message.
Like any door he'd ever faced, it only said. You ain't going nowhere.
You ain't invited.

His hand made a fist and he smashed.it, stupidly. His hand crunched in
pain.

So this was it, huh? This was the cocksucker. Another door.

Walls thought he might laugh. All this way, and he just run up against
FVC-- He heard a noise, looked down to see the little Vietnamese woman
beneath him a few rungs.

"That's good, mama-san," he said. "Good you came along, but there's no
place to go."

She reached up and tapped his foot, then pointed.

Well, well, hello yourself. Yes, it was another small door or hatch or
something, maybe two feet by two feet, covered with metal grid work. The
thing was about five feet farther around the curve of the silo wall. It
looked like the entrance to a duct or a vent or the air-conditioning.
But it didn't matter.

"It's too far," he yelled. "I can't reach that far."

But with her gestures she made him see that she wanted to come up.

The bitch going to try. Don't she know? Can't get in.

Nothing to it now. All she wrote, end of story, the man he had them
beat.

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
god damned 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 grid work. Her foot came out, searched for the duct
and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting in her ride,
until, swinging just a hit, 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 fuckup.

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, licked 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 Ivahovich, 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."

"Hmmmm," said Arbatov, considering gravely. "You mean something from the
Americans?"

"Yes! Something from the Americans would do nicely."

"Well, actually, it's a fallow time. You know how it is in this
business, young Comrade Gorshenin. You plant a thousand seeds and then
you must wait to harvest your one or two potatoes."

Gorshenin appeared disappointed.

"A shame. You know I'd hate to have to turn you back to Klimov with a
bad report on our interrogation. He'd not see the humor in it."

"Hmmm," said Arbatov, gravely considering again. "KGB has the GRU code
book, of course."

The idiot Gorshenin swallowed and the greed beamed from his eyes like a
television signal. The code book was the big secret; it was the
treasure; if KGB could get its hands on just one code book for just one
hour, it would be able to read GRU's cable traffic for years to come.
And the man who brought it in. . . I "I'm sure we do," said Gorshenin,
poorly affecting nonchalance.

"I mean the things are left around in installations all over the world."

Such a terrible lie, so thin and unconvincing. The books were, of
course, guarded like the computer codes that launched the SS-18s.

"Yes, well, a shame. You see, though the book is locked except when the
communications officer uses it to decode or to encode high priority
messages, he's an old friend of mine, and one night he called up and
realized he'd left delicate medicines there. Barbiturates, did you know
the poor man was addicted? Anyway, in his despair he gave me the
combination.

I was able to retrieve his drugs for him. I actually committed the
combination to memory."

"Surely it has been changed," said Gorshenin too quickly.

"Perhaps, but not the last time I had communications duty."

The two men looked at each other.

A small object was pushed across the table at Arbatov. It was a Katrinka
camera.

"Aren't you late for your duty in the Wine Cellar, comrade?"

Arbatov glanced at his watch.

"Very late," he said. "It's nearly midnight."

** ** **

The hole glistened open, dilating as the metal around it liquified. Jack
thought of a birth: a new world would come out of this orifice. The
black hole would spread and spread and spread, consuming all. A terrible
sadness filled him.

"There, go on. Go on," insisted the general. "You're almost there, go
on, go on!"

The flame ate the metal, evaporating it.

Suddenly there came the sound of the opening of the elevator door and
the rush of boots. Men raced down the outside corridor. Shouts and
alarms rose. For just a second Jack thought the American Army had
arrived, but it was only the Russian. The language rose and yelped
through the halls.

Orders were hurled at men by NCOS. Jack heard ammunition crates being
ripped open, the clank and click of bolts being thrown, magazines being
loaded, automatic weapons being emplaced. He heard furniture being
shoved into the corridor as barricades were hastily erected. The
atmosphere seethed with military drama; Jack was in the middle of a
movie.

The general was talking earnestly in Russian with the tough-looking
officer who'd come to Jack's house that morning.

They nodded their heads together, the younger man explaining, the
general listening. Then the two of them departed from the capsule to
check the preparations.

Jack stood. He was alone with the guard who'd shot him.

His leg had stiffened and the pain was immense. He had a throbbing
headache.

"You speak English, don't you?" he said to the boy who stared at him
with opaque eyes, blue as cornflowers. He had a rough adolescent
complexion and teeth that could have used braces. But he was basically a
good-looking, decent kid, a jock, maybe a rangy linebacker or a
strong-rebounding forward.

"Do you know what they're going to do?" Jack said.

"What have they told you? What do you guys think is going on? You guys
must not know what's going on."

The guard looked at him.

"Back to work."

"These guys are going to fire the rocket. That's what's in here, the key
to shoot the missile off. Man, they're going to blow the world away,
they're going to kill mil--"

The boy hit him savagely with the butt of his AK-47.

Jack saw it coming and with his good athlete's reflexes managed to tuck
his face just a notch and take the blow at the hinge of the jaw rather
than in the mouth and cheek, and though he knew in the instant the pain
and concussion erupted in his head his jaw was broken, he had a perverse
pleasure in the fact that his teeth hadn't been blasted out. He sank
with a mewling scream to the floor, and the boy began to kick him in the
ribs.

"No, God, please, no!" Jack begged.

"American pig shit motherfucker, kill all our babies with your god damned
rocket!" the boy howled in pain as genuine as Jack's.

Jack thought he'd blacked out, but the kicks stopped-- the boy was
dismissed to the tunnel defense team by the tough major or whatever--and
the major pulled Jack to his feet.

"Watch what you say, Mr. Hummel," he said. "These kids know their pals
are upstairs getting killed. They're in no mood for charity."

"Fuck you," Jack screamed through his tears. "The Army's coming in here
and they're going to kill your asses before you get this god damned key,
and--"

"No, Mr. Hummel," said the general. "No, they're still hours away. And
you're minutes away."

The major raised his pistol and placed it against Jack's skull. His eyes
were drained of emotion.

"Do you wish to say'fuck you' now, Mr. Hummel?" he asked.

Jack wished he had the guts to say it. But he knew he didn't. It was one
thing to be brave in the abstract, it was another thing with a god damned
gun up against your head, especially when everything about the Russian
suggested that without blinking an eye he'd pull the trigger. Hell, they
could cut the last inch or so of metal away with a Bic lighter, that's
how little was left.

The general leaned over, picked up the torch, and placed the sputtering
thing in Jack's hand! "We've won, Mr. Hummel. We've done it, don't you
see?"

He turned and crossed the small room to a radio set between the teletype
machines. He turned a few buttons and knobs, then looked back.

"It's all history, Mr. Hummel. We've won."

Dick Puller had left the command post and was airborne in a command
chopper with his radio, hovering out of range, watching, giving orders
over the radio.

"Cobra Three, you people have to bring more of your automatics into
play. I can see a slacking off there, do you copy?"

"Delta Six, goddammit, I have four men dead and nine wounded on this
side!"

"Do the best you can. Cobra Three. Bravo, this is Delta Six, any
movement there?"

"Delta Six, their fire isn't dropping a goddamn bit. I've still got
people coming in."

"Get'em in and get'em shooting. Bravo. It's the guns that'll win this
thing."

It was a question of which the men hated more, the Soviets dug in at the
ruins of the launch control facility who would not stop firing, or the
dry voice over the radio, clinical, impatient. The bird floated
tantalizingly beyond them all, its lights running insolently in the
night.

The Soviets were firing flares, which hung in the air under parachutes
leaking flecks of light down across the scene, giving it a horrible
weirdness. It looked like some musty nineteenth-century battle painting:
the flickering lights, the heaps of bodies, the gun flashes cutting
through the drifting smoke, the streaks of tracer darting about, tearing
up the earth wherever they struck. All of it was blue with a smear of
moonlight, white with a smear of gun smoke, dark where the mud and blood
commingled on the earth.

And there were extraordinary moments of valor. A Soviet trooper crawled
out of the perimeter, stood, and rushed into the American lines. He had
nine grenades in his belt, and when he leapt among the Americans--he'd
been hit three times but he kept coming--he detonated himself, killing
eleven Rangers and quelling the fire on the front for three long
minutes. Then there were the three Spetsnaz gunners on the right,
isolated from the larger body of troops and unable to resupply
themselves with ammunition. Down to a single magazine apiece, they
mounted their bayonets, climbed out of their trench in a banzailike
charge, and, screaming as they came, ran at the Americans, shooting from
the hip. One was hit immediately, center chest, by a burst of MP-5 fire
from a Delta; but the other two leapt like fawns as the tracers searched
them out. As they came they fired, but as they came they were hit, and
eventually the bullets dragged them down, but the last one got into a
Delta hole and killed a man with his bayonet before his partner fired
the full mag of 5.56mm into him.

Another hero turned out to be Dill, the gym teacher. He took his
leadership responsibilities overzealously. He led three assaults from
the left side, from which his unit had come. He killed nine Russians and
was hit twice. His men kept up the fire and by this time the stragglers
had joined them.

** ** **

The wounded crawled among the besiegers, handing out ammunition. James
Uckley, with no place else to go, had separated himself from the Delta
troopers with whom he'd flown in and taken up a position on the right.
He had a CAR-15, and with little regard for his own life he lay in a
shallow trench close to the Soviet position and fired magazine after
magazine into it. He couldn't see anything except the answering gun
flashes and had no idea whether or not he was helping. He just had the
sense of the weapon shaking itself empty. Still, he kept firing, feeling
his skin turn to black leather as the powder rose and sank into it.
Overhead, the bullets whistled close and at least three times he'd felt
zeroed as the bullets struck close, kicking up a spray of snow and dust.
But everything had missed so far. On his left were two state policemen
and two Hagerstown policemen, each with shotguns; they fired too.

Now the inevitable progression of the battle was in the American favor,
no matter the ferocity of the Soviets. The Americans had more weapons
and with each passing minute more were brought into play. The reserve
companies of the Third Infantry got in close and with their heavier M14s
began to raise the volume of fire. Additional elements of Bravo
staggered in through the woods. State and local policemen, a few FBI
men, some of Bravo's walking wounded, most of the Delta intelligence
staff, all arrived, found some kind of weapon, and struggled up in the
dark to the firing line, found a scrap or bit of cover, and commenced
fire.

Only one man in all this did not fire. This was Peter Thiokol, who lay
on his face about two hundred meters off the site of the battle, feeling
useless. He was terrified, yet his mind did not associate what was going
on with any notion of war, which he had seen only represented on
television or in the movies, where everything is clear, the relationship
of friend to foe, the layout of the terrain. Now everything was strange.
He could make no sense of it. An odd idea leapt into his head: he felt
present at some ancient religious ceremony, where priests were
sacrificing young men up there at the vivid altar with crude, cruel
bronze blades. The young men went willingly to their doom, as if in
doing so they guaranteed themselves a place in heaven. It had a late
Aztec feel to it, or a sense of the Druid's return--the devil was here,
Peter knew, looking over the shoulders of the priests up there with
their bright blades, laughing, urging them on, congratulating himself on
having a nice day with an idiot's drooling, half moon smile. Tracers
filled the air; he could hear them cracking.

Occasionally, they'd hit close, driving him back. But he kept peering
over the lip of his trench, fascinated.

"Better stay down, doc," someone said. "You get killed peeking and all
this ain't worth shit."

Peter shivered, acknowledging the wisdom in the advice, and hunkered
down, wishing he could make the noise go away.

Finally, the Russian response seemed to falter. Skazy, noticing the
decrease, led a Delta party of six men and breached the final Soviet
trench on the right side. It was a terrifying run up the hill, and all
around him the fire flicked out, yet he jumped into the trench, and
discovered only corpses. With an M-60 he began to pour fire into the
Soviet position from up so close that the Russians had almost no chance.
With his gun working from almost zero range, it ceased to be a battle
and became a butchery.

There was a pause in the firing.

Smoke licked the battlefield's horrible stillness.

A Delta interpreter asked through a loudspeaker if the Spetsnaz people
wished to accept an honorable surrender and medical attention. The few
Russians responded with gunfire.

"Delta Six, this is Cobra, there's no answer."

"Do you have targets?"

"Most of them are down."

"Ask'em again."

Skazy nodded to his interpreter. The man spoke again in Russian. A burst
of gunfire responded, hitting him in the chest and throat, knocking him
down.

"Christ," said Skazy into his hands-free mike, "they just hit our
interpreter."

"All right. Major," said Dick, "body-bag'em."

Skazy finished the job.

** ** **

Walls beat the tin door off the junction box with the stock of the
Mossberg, badly chewing the wood in the process.

No time to worry about that now.

The box, ripped open, yielded a terrifyingly complex mesh of wires
crowding in on the junctions. It made no sense to him. It was like so
much of the world: all wired up, all fixed, all fancy and complicated,
beyond him. It could have been the same old sign. fuck niggers it could
have said.

He looked at it, feeling the rage grow and seethe. He'd felt this way on
the streets sometimes. Hey, he was a hero, goddammit, he went into
tunnels for his motherfuckin' Uncle and did what Uncle said and killed
yellow people and did shit no man should have to do and was hit three
times and almost killed a hundred more times and then it was, thanks
Jack, and good-bye to you and good luck to you. no black boys need apply
it could have said.

NO BLACK TUNNEL RATS NEED APPLY.

NO SILVER STAR WINNERS NEED APPLY.

NO THREE-TIME PURPLE HEARTS NEED APPLY.

FUCK NIGGERS.

That was some sign.

The Vietnamese woman said something and it pissed him off. It was that
singsongy shit they all had, you couldn't make no sense out of it. She
thought he knew what the fuck to do. Like he was some kind of white guy,
he had all the goddamn motherfucking answers.

Hon, it don't mean shit to me. It's just some wires from white boys,
that only white boys can figure out.

He felt like crying. He felt trapped in the tiny little space. Come all
this way for nothing. Grief beat at him. But then he figured, fuck it,
got to do something. He pulled out his knife. Hey, he was going to use
it to stick in some guy instead of sticking it into some wires.

He was just going to stick it in, fuck the wires up, see what happen.
But then he remembered the word door from the front of the tin box. He
stared at the wires coming into the box. They came out of the walls,
most of them, through little tubes. Let's see, door be that say, let's
see if we can't find some god damned wire come from that way. He looked.

Sure enough, most of the wires came from some other way, but one trace
of wires plunged outside toward the box from his left, from the
direction of the duct entrance. Walls hacked at the tubing covering the
batch of wires, chipping away little nuggets of rubber that fell like
raisins to the floor, until he had some bare wire revealed. He was
acting just like he knew what the fuck he was doing.

The woman was so close in the little chamber. She looked at him like he
knew what he was doing too. He laughed again. She didn't know shit
either. He thought it was pretty funny, the two of them in a little
space off a rocket that was going to end the world, hacking on some
wires like they knew what they were doing, a nigger boy and a gook girl,
the two lowliest forms of scum on the earth which was going to be blown
to shit if they didn't stop it. She laughed too. She must have been in
on the joke, because she thought it was funny too.

They both had a good laugh as Walls chopped his way through the wires.
Then, just for the fuck of it, he cut through some more wires. With the
blade of his knife as a kind of stick, he lifted one tuft of wires over
across the gap and shoved it against the other wires and-- Walls shook
the spangles from his eyes and found himself against the wall. Felt like
his old daddy had whacked him upside the head one. His nose filled with
an acrid odor. His head hurt. When he blinked he saw blue balls and
flashbulbs.

His teeth hurt. Someone was playing music inside his head.

His knife lay on the floor, smoking. What the fuck had-- But the woman
was at the mouth of the duct, screaming.

Walls crawled over. Man, he felt smoked himself. Could hardly remember
who he was. Jack.

But he remembered when he saw the door into whatever the fuck else was
down here: it was open.

Jesus fuck, he'd done it. He'd gotten into whitey's secret place.

He grabbed for his shotgun, seeing that it would be easy to reach the
open door, swing over to the ladder, then get inside.

He pulled the Taurus 9-mm automatic out of his holster and handed it
over to her.

"You know how one of these things work, hon?"

He pointed to the safety lever locked up.

"Push that down, babe," he gestured with his finger! "and bang-bang! You
got that? Down and bang-bang!"

The woman nodded once, smiled. The gun was big in her tiny hands, but
she looked as though she'd been born with it there.

He reached, and the shotgun came up into his hands. It felt smooth and
ready and he still had a pocket full of twelves.

The woman looked at him.

"Ass-kickin' time," he said.

The shooting had stopped. Peter looked up. There seemed to be some kind
of delay, some sort of hassle up at the launch control facility, and
then he heard a roar and looked up as the command chopper, beating up a
screen of snow and dust, lowered itself awkwardly from the sky and he
saw Dick Puller leap out. The chopper zoomed skyward.

He heard his name called then.

"Dr. Thiokol. Where are you? Where the hell is he?

Anybody seen that bomb guy? Dr. Thiokol?"

Shivering, Peter rose.

"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 keeps 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, / 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'ssize 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 C4 we've got, we'll
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 nicked 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 mail. "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 going' to nose ahead and see what's up.
We go real slow. We not going' 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.

** ** **

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
door.

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 coming 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
midbody.

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 M60.

"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 ground 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 god damned 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.

"I have it. I have it!" the genera] 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 attache 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 rat fuck 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 Security 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 snap link 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
snap link 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 god damned 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 reached up to Walk'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!K 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.

"Please, darling," he said, "I--"

"Hush my love," crooned Magda, her voice deep and throatily sexual.
"Now it's just a matter of waiting as the seconds flow by and we join
the great All, Tata."

He wished now he had made love to Magda. It would have been so easy.
Magda had always been available for him.

All he'd had to do was ask! And if he'd had her, she'd be his now. It
was that simple. But he never had. He'd always taken her for granted.
Magda! Silly, goosey woman, a pal, a chum, always willing to listen, to
sympathize. She must have loved him secretly for years and been chewed
up by the way he took her for granted. And so she turned to Pashin and
his mad grandeur.

"Magda, let me tell you, it doesn't have to end like this, in a flash of
flame. Magda, you and I, we can be together. I can take you away from
all this. I have friends among the Americans. The two of us, Magda, we
can get away from Washington, from the embassy, from all this. We can
have a happy life in some American city, Mr. and Mrs. We could adopt a
little girl, Magda, a whole family. The Americans will help us. We can
have a wonderful life, Magda, I'll make you so hap--"

Magda's laugh, sharp and percussive, cut him off.

"What, Gregor Ivanovich. Do you imagine I'm in love with you? That I'd
sell my country out for one of your caresses? Men, God, how you all
value yourselves! No, Tata, my heart belongs to Arkady Pashin and to his
vision of the future, which is a vision of the great Russian past, the
past of Pamyat, of Memory, Gregor dear. A pretend Russian like you
cannot see this, but I give up my life willingly to my motherland, and
to my lover."

And to his damned quick tongue. Gregor saw how mad Pashin was: to put a
tongue to plump Magda! Gregor also saw now that he was doomed. Magda's
loyalty was impenetrable.

Pashin had made her his forever with his lunatic's babble of Memory and
Mother Russia. Magda, desperate for something to worship, had bought it
all. The crazy bitch! The cunt, the dumb Russian cunt! Women! He hated
them, the bitches.

She had him. To rush for the bomb would be to catch a bullet in the
heart, like poor Klimov here; he'd be dead before he made it, and even
if he wasn't, he didn't know how to stop it. Or if he came at her, she'd
shoot him. Yes, she would. Right in the heart, hating it all, but doing
it just the same, because she saw it as her duty to the damned genius
charlatan, Arkady Pashin, and the motherland for which she thought he
stood.

"Do you know, darling"--he tried a new approach--"the Americans know.
Even now they're attacking the mountain.

Even now Pashin has failed. He's probably already dead, Magda. His dream
is over. At the very least the Americans are in communication with
Moscow. This damned bomb will go off, and the thousands, the millions,
will die, yourself and myself included, but there'll be no war for us to
win, no Russian future based on a great Russian past. Just one ruined
city, and the bones of babies turning black in the night."

He had begun to weep.

He could see the numbers fleeing by. They rushed on remorselessly.

2358:21

2358:22

2358:23

She simply looked at him. There was only pity on her face.

"You poor fool, Tata. You believe in nothing except the religion of the
ass, your own, for which you would do anything.

You snivel and beg and whine. Goddamn you, Tata, why don't you have the
guts to die on your feet! Come at me, you silly, gutless bastard!"

But Gregor fell to his knees.

"Please," he slobbered, broken. "You're right. I don't care about them.
I don't care about any of them. But, Magda.

Magda, please. Please, I don't want to die. Stop it. Stop the bomb!
Please don't kill me! Please!"

She made a terrible face, her lips snickering in utter contempt, her
eyes rolling, and in that second the barrel of the gun wavered, and in
that second Gregor Arbatov leapt.

Peter slid through the dark, slid until he thought he'd lost control and
was falling, and pulled in on the rope skidding before his eyes to brake
himself. Big mistake. He hit the wall hard, feeling the blow ring in his
head and his body go spastic in the concussion. Lights popped in his
skull; his breath came hard and hot. He could feel the blood on his
face, and his will flying out the window. He blinked for control. Below
he heard the firing, roaring, incessant. But he just hung there,
suspended between worlds. Other men, dark shapes falling, sped past him.
His nose rubbed against the shaft; the straps cut into his groin; he had
an image from a World War II movie of a paratrooper hanging in a tree.
He tugged, twisted, struggled--ah! oops! and there he went again,
sliding down, this time with a bit more control. He felt the burn of the
rope through his leather gloves and as he swung in toward the wall, this
time he caught himself on the balls of his feet and propelled himself
outward again, and so eventually tumbled to the bottom.

He alighted on the top of the blown-out elevator car, amid the swirls of
its cable. The smell of the explosion, so recent, still hung heavy in
the air. He found himself in a crowd in a small space, as other Delta
people were busy shedding themselves of coils and snaplinks and D-rings
and dropping through the rupture in the roof to get to the fighting.

Peter did likewise, though with less agility. Even as he struggled,
trying to remember what the boy up top had said, still other Delta
raiders landed at the end of their long ropes, unlimbered themselves in
the confusion, and dashed off. But it was taking so long!

Finally, he was free, and climbed gingerly down through the hole to
discover poor Skazy on his back, staring up in a puddle of blood through
lightless eyes at nothing and forever.

Peter gagged, first at the sight of Skazy's hideous face and evacuated
skull, and then from the smell, now that blood and bowels had been added
to the stench of powder. He turned, found more bodies, stepped over
them, and hurried out of the car and down the corridor.

It was his installation all right, now, however, tarnished horribly by
the battle and made strange, stranger than he could imagine. The water
was an inch deep, and moisture filled the air like a mist. The
sprinklers had obviously popped.

Bodies lay in the water, dark with their own vital fluids where they
seemed to rock back and forth, like floating Marines in the Tarawa surf.
He saw some horrible things, but didn't'concentrate on them. Sirens were
going, and half the lights were off. Sparks leaked out of wiring
ruptures into the water. And he heard the voice, the sweet voice of the
angel of mega-death.

". . . Launch is imminent. We have an authenticated launch command and
launch is imminent. We have an. . ."

It was Betty, the prerecorded voice of the computer. He thought she
sounded a little like Megan.

He tuned out the bad news and sloshed ahead through the mist to the
firing, coming at last to a jog in the corridor and peeping around it to
discover the epicenter of the battle.

The Delta people were still a good fifty meters from the Soviet
strongpoint, which was a jerry built assemblage of sandbags, furniture
from above, crates, whatever. It mounted at least a dozen guns, all of
them firing. The air was busy with lead and noise. Where bullets struck,
dust leapt off the wet wall. Meanwhile the Delta people, their guns
flicking the red rays of the laser-sighting devices, plugged away, but
they had stalled. They were down to the last few yards, but they had
stalled. To run into the guns was to die, that was all. Peter could see
that they needed explosives or something larger than what they had. It
was all fucked up, a mess. It had no order at all, it was just gangs of
men shooting each other up in a very small space.

Jesus, he thought, ducking back, feeling for the first time the quiver
of real fear. His bowels loosened. He now saw it.

They weren't going to make it.

"You the doc?" a crouching, blackened figure with a CAR-15 and a
hands-free mike asked, another Delta Caliban.

"Yes," he said to the man, evidently the head commando.

"Listen, you've got to get into that room down there.

That's it. That's the launch control center."

"Yeah, sure. After you. Is there a back way into it?"

"No. Just straight ahead. Look, you've got to get into it.

There's no other way and there's not much time."

"Sorry, but I've got to wait until I get some more firepower."

"They're all.fouled up getting down the shaft," Peter said. "There isn't
time. Do you hear that, do you know what that voice means?"

"Yeah, I hear it. No, I don't know what it means."

"It's the computer. She's going to launch the bird in about four
minutes."

The officer looked at him peculiarly.

"You see, we found out in our tests that while all hundred percent of
the men in the silos would insert their launch keys, only about sixty
percent would actually turn them. So we fail-safed it. If they stick
both keys in, it initiates a timing device; three minutes later an
automatic launch sequence begins. They don't have to turn the key, they
just have to stick it in, and the terminal countdown begins. Now, if
it's a mistake or some terrible fuck-up, there is a way to stand down
the launch sequence from the command center. But they can get it only
over the radio, it involves a secret meaning for several of the switches
pressed in a certain sequence. Only SAC HQ has the sequence. And me.
Look, if you get me into that thing, I can stop the bird."

"Man, I can't get into the fucking place, you dig? It's rock and roll
out there."

"You're going to let a handful of Soviet soldiers stop you?

Just rush the place. Please, Jesus, please."

"Yeah, rush the place, great. Man, I can't get good suppressive fire on
the mother fucks. They've got anybody who comes at them zeroed dead. I
don't have enough firepower.

Hey, we'll die to get it done, but there's no point in just dying to
die, man."

"We can't be this close and fail."

"Doc, I'm sorry. I can't do the impossible. That's all there is to it."

"Call Puller."

"Puller's not down here. I am. If I wait a few minutes, then maybe I get
enough firepower up and move a team down to get some C-4 into them and
push off. But my guys are getting torn up. These Russian kids are very
tough guys."

"Please!" Peter shouted, surprised at the violence in his voice.
"Goddamn, don't you see, if you don't get into that room in the next
three minutes or so, all these men have died for absolutely nothing.
They're suckers, jerks, fools. Please, Jesus, if not for me or your
kids, for those dead guys who--"

"/ cant!" the officer screamed back, just as loud. "It's not a question
of wanting. I just can't get you in there. No one can, goddamn you."

Peter thought he might weep. The sense of helpless rage filled him. So
this was it, then. Another two or so minutes, and Pashin had won. Pashin
was smarter. Though Peter wondered why he didn't just turn the keys now
and get it over with, if he had'em both in. And he had to have them
both, or he couldn't have initiated the robot launch sequence.

Then he realized: Pashin must be dead.

"Look," he said suddenly. "Our guys are in there. They have to be. Some
Delta guys are in there, goddammit. We wouldn't be where we are if this
Russian had gotten the keys out and put them in the slot, because he'd
have turned them.

But somebody stopped him, and that's why we're here, don't you see?
Somebody blew his ass away at the last moment, but the keys were already
in. We've got guys in there, goddammit."

The officer looked at him.

"We have an authenticated launch command," said Betty on the
loudspeaker. "We are commencing terminal countdown phase. Launch is
three minutes and counting."

"So call him," said the officer.

"Huh?"

"Call him. On the phone. Look, in the wall there. Isn't that a phone?"

Peter looked. The simplicity of it was stupendous. Yes!

Call him!

He picked the phone up and dialed L-5454.

Walls stared at the board, bright with lights. The room seemed full of
white ghosts. The motherfuckers were dead and they were going to kill
the world anyway. White people!

Assholes.

He gripped his shotgun, threw the slide, felt a shell click into the
chamber. He'd blow a hole in the controls, that'd stop it! But he didn't
know where to shoot.

He stood staring at the board furiously, hating himself for being so
stupid. The room made him feel like nothing. He didn't know what to do.

"Terminal countdown is commencing," the white lady was saying on the
radio or whatever.

Damn the bitch!

Suddenly, there was a shrill beeping.

Made his ass jump!

"Terminal countdown is commencing," the white bitch said again.

He picked up the phone.

"Yes," said Peter, shrieking almost with the excitement.

"Yes, Jesus, who is this?"

"Walls," the voice said.

Some Delta people had gathered around Peter. He cupped the receiver.

"He's in there!" he shrieked. "God, a guy is in there.

Walls. Anybody know a Walls?"

"There's no Walls in Delta," said the officer.

"Son, listen," said Peter on the phone, "are you Delta?"

There was no answer. Oh, Christ, had he-- "Uh--I come through the
tunnel, man. You know, from underground."

"Jesus," Peter said, "he's one of the rats. He got in from underneath.
Listen, son, what's the situation there?"

"Man, I think this rocket fixing to go off. Lights blinkin', shit like
that. Man, I blow the controls away with--"

"No, God, no!" shrieked Peter. "Don't shoot anything.

Throw the gun away."

"Yo, okay."

Peter heard the crash as the gun was tossed.

"Is the door locked?"

"Yes, suh. Them guys, whoever the fuck, don't want them getting' in--"

"Listen, Walls. Listen to me carefully now, please, son.

You can stop it."

Peter's heart was pounding. He was gripping the phone so hard he thought
he'd choke it. "Yes, listen. You've got five labeled keys to hit in the
proper sequence. All you have to do is listen, and read the labels, it's
very simple, very easy. All set. Are you all set?"

There was a long silence, heavy and still.

Peter could hear the firing. He could hear the tick of seconds, too,
running off, on the way to forever.

"Son?" he asked again, and thought he heard a sob or something.

"Son? Are you there? Are you there?"

Finally the voice came.

"Then we fucked," it said." 'Cause I can't read."

** ** **

She shot Arbatov twice. The first bullet hit him over the heart, blowing
through the subcutaneous tissue, the muscle, ripping up a lung and
nicking his shoulder blade before exiting with a terrible vengeance
through the back. The second hit farther down, between two ribs, and
plunged through the organs of his belly, terrible, terrible damage.

Then he was on her, crushed her to the ground, and spitting blood, began
to punch her in the face and head. Somehow he got the gun out of her
hand, got it into his fist, and beat her savagely with it. When her eyes
went blank he stopped beating her, and rolled off against the wall. He
wasn't sure if she was dead and he didn't care. It wasn't important. He
was surprised how much blood was in him. It poured out. Shock, numbing
and narcotic, rippled through him. He had an image in his head of golden
wheat weaving in the sun and had a terrible impulse to lay his head down
and rest for a time. But instead, the numbness in the stomach wound
began to wear off and the pain was extraordinary. He couldn't make much
sense out of what was happening.

Bomb, something about a bomb. An atom bomb, that was. Slightly moot now,
however, since he seemed to be dying.

He forced his head to turn, and yes, from the lurid play of light on the
ceiling he could see that the numbers of the timing device were rushing
onward toward 0000. Gregor thought he should get over there. Thus he
ordered his reluctant body to topple forward. Like a tree it went. It
hit the floor with a thud, and his ears rang, though there wasn't much
pain. He began--somehow--to crawl through his own blood toward the
thing, having no idea what he'd do if he actually got there.' Damn you,
Pashin, you took from me the one woman I loved. And also my life.
Goddamn you, Pashin.

Hate was helpful because hate was energy. He began to crawl, but the
damned thing was still far off.

** ** **

Words. Goddamn motherfuckin' white-boy words.

Their shapes were like snakes or bugs, maybe. They swirled and coiled
and twisted about him. Everywhere he looked he could see words on little
black plastic plates that stared at him. They were meaningless. They had
no mercy, they never had, the motherfuckers.

"Walls? Walls, are you there?" the voice came over the phone. It was
twisted with urgency. It connected with so much. All the times white
people had looked at him, their features quizzically perturbed. Son,
can't you read? Son, the world is a threatening place to a young man who
cannot read.

Boy, you'd better learn your ABC's, or you'll stay black and dumb and be
one of the little streetcorner rucks forever and ever.

"Son?"

"Yes, suh," Walls said, hot and bent with shame and furious hatred--
some for himself, and some for this Mister White Man with his concerned
voice, and some for whoever had put him in this white man's room with
the seconds running out and some bad motherfuckin' shit about to go
down.

"Uh, son, tell me," the voice asked, trying to stay calm, odd currents
firing through it. Walls had heard this voice a million times. It was a
white guy who'd just realized he was dealing with Mr.
Dumb-jive-ass-nigger-boy, but also knew if he pissed Mr. D. off, Mr. D.
he take top of the motherfucker's head off, and so going real poh-lite,
you know, like real sloooow, so as not to rile him.

"Uh, son, do you know the letters? Do you know your alphabet? Not words,
now, but do you recognize the letters?"

Walls burned with shame. He shut his eyes. He could feel the tears
running down his face, hot and bright. He squished the phone so hard he
thought it'd snap in two, or maybe melt.

"Terminal countdown has commenced," said the white bitch, snooty and far
off and so much better than him. He wanted to kill the white bitch.

"Yes, suh," he said. "I know my letters pretty good." He was speaking
slow, like a goddamn houseboy.

"Ah, good, great. God, terrific," came the voice. "Now, if we work
together and trust each other and don't panic, we'll be okay, we'll have
plenty of time, we can do it by the letters. Okay, son. We can get it
done, there's still time, okay?"

Walls could feel the panic flashing quick and bright under the man's
voice as it fought through his Adam's apple and throat full of gunk.

"Yes, suh," he said, yassing the man to death, giving him what he wanted
to get him smiling, like he was five again, just yassing and yassing him
to death, all smiles and charm and secret shame. "We do it real slow,
don't panic, we be okay, fine, yes, suh."

"Okay," said the voice, "now, if you're at the phone, you're sitting in
the chair, right?"

"Yes, suh," said Walls, sliding obediently in the chair.

"Now, start at the phone jack, where the cord fits into the wall. Look
at it, okay?"

"Yes, suh." He fixed his eyes on the plug where the cord went into the
wall.

"Now lift your eyes about two inches. To the left is a little handle.
Then there's a ridge. And at the ridge the control console sort of leans
away from you. It's not a straight angle, but it's leaning away, right?"

"Yes, suh."

"Okay, now, on that leaning part--you're looking at its extreme
left-hand side now--on the leaning part there are all kinds of switches.
There's five groupings of two columns, ten columns in all. The column
groupings are broken down so that there's a group of six--three and
three in two columns-- then a group of eight, that's four in each
column, then a group of four, two in each column. And there's five sets
of them, right?"

Fuck you. Jack, thought Walls. Wrong. Wrong and wrong again, sucker. It
was a maze, a gibberish of little white boxes, and switches and wires, a
nightmare. He closed his eyes, hoping it would go away, or that it would
become clear.

When he opened them, he was still in the maze.

"Do you see?" demanded the voice.

"I don't see nothing," he said.

"Look at it! Goddamn you, bastard, look at it He could hear sobbing on
the other end, hysteria, panic, terror.

Walls looked back, tried to see--the switches dazzled and flickered
before him, seeming to squiggle into shapes like some kind of strange
animal, a shape changer, a germy thing in some movie where people got
whacked and cut.

"Terminal countdown has commenced," came the voice of the white bitch,
sweet as sugar. "Terminal countdown has commenced."

Then, yes, he had it! Goddamn mother fuck yesyesyes} he had it. The
columns, two of them twinned, and each of them broken down into little
groupings, five of them, each to its board.

"Goddamn, mother fuck!" he shouted. "Hey, man, I got the bitch, I got the
motherfucker!"

"Great! Great, great, great!" shouted the voice. "Terrific.

Now, it's--"

And the line went dead.

"It's dead, it's dead, it's dead," Peter screeched. "Jesus, it's dead."

"Terminal countdown has commenced," came Betty's voice on the
loudspeaker.

Someone grabbed him, a sergeant, to calm him down.

"Just take it easy," he said.

Peter looked into the dead military eyes. Don't you understand, he
thought, don't you see what's happening? Do you realize what's at stake
here. It's-- "They hit the phone juncture. Doctor. Look."

It was the officer, pointing to a box high up on the wall exposed to
Soviet fire. It had been mutilated by a burst, hinges blown off, the
mechanical guts of the switching mechanisms shredded so that they hung
out like entrails.

"Is there another phone?" the officer asked. "A phone inside that
connector. Anything outside of it's dead. But maybe there's something
inside."

Phones! Who remembered phones! Peter, who'd once lived his life in the
maze of the blueprints of the South Mountain installation, tried to sort
out his phone memories, something he'd never looked at. But it was
there! He remembered, it was there!

"Down the hall," he said. "About twenty feet. There's another phone.
It's just a little ways."

Their unbelieving eyes looked at him.

"You're wide open to the Soviet guns there. Doc."

"The bird is going to fly, goddammit!" Peter said.

"Man, they'll cut you apart."

"I just need a minute on the damn phone."

"We'll give you covering fire," said the officer. "We'll give you all
we've got."

"I'll go with him," somebody said. "He's going to need somebody up with
him firing too."

Peter looked. The soldier had a sheepish look under his filthy face, and
some semblance of familiarity. Then Peter realized: he wasn't a soldier
at all, he was that young FBI agent Uckley. Now, 'what the hell was he
doing down here?

"Let's go," said Peter.

He ran to the corner; around it was the Soviet gun position and the
telephone. Across the way Delta operators were firing on the Soviets.
The noise of the fire was loud and percussive and frightening. Peter
hated it, hated it all: the guns, the loudness, the sense of danger
heavy in the air, and most of all he hated his own fear, which was like
a living presence within him. And he hated her, Betty who was Megan, who
loved him and hated him and whom he could never please.

"Terminal countdown has commenced," Megan said.

Uckley was next to him. He had two of the little German machine pistols
with long clips, one for each hand. He looked scared too.

The Delta troopers on this side of the hall were busy clicking their
bolts or whatever they had to do to fire.

"You ready. Doc?" came the call.

Peter could hardly find his voice. "Uh-huh," he squeaked.

"Okay, Delta, on my mark," said the young officer.

"Go!"

The Delta operators jumped into the hall and began to fire down it. The
noise rose and to Peter it sounded like someone rolling an oil drum half
fall of nuts and bolts down a metal stairwell. He had the impression,
further, of dust gushing and roiling. He ran in panic, splashing through
the water.

The air was full of streaks and flashes. Clouds of mist rose.

The corridor filled with screams. None of this made the slightest sense.
He reached the niche in the wall where the phone was mounted, and
attempted to squeeze into it. A bullet hit close by, evicting a plug of
cement from the wall, which stung him. Bullets were striking all over
the place.

There was something freakish, almost paranormal, in their rapidity. They
flittered like insects, popping off the walls and kicking up gouts of
water on the floor. Next to him the man Uckley was firing bursts from
both guns simultaneously, and squeezing in on him, putting his body
between the Russian fire and himself. He was squished into the darkness
of the wall by Uckley's warmth.

He picked up the phone.

It was dead.

He panicked, then thought to look at the receiver, saw that it was on a
different line, punched the button, and the dial tone leapt into his
ear.

"Hurry," screamed Uckley, firing.

"Terminal countdown has commenced," said Megan.

Shut up, Megan!

Peter dialed.

** ** **

Somehow, Gregor made it to the table itself. It surprised him not to be
dead. Now, however, he had the problem of rising to it. His two wounds
bled profusely. He'd left a liquid trail upon the floor, and his pants
were damp and baggy with blood. An odd noise rose to his ears, in
syncopation with the diminishing raggedness of his breathing. It sounded
like an accordionist whose instrument had been perforated. Then he
realized it was his own body that issued the groaning sound: he had a
sucking chest wound, and the air was leaking out of the ruptured bladder
of his lungs with a pitiful squeak. He tasted blood in the base of his
throat, swallowed it.

Then he rose. Where the strength came from he could not fathom. It was
just there, in his fat, chalky, clumsy bod. He fought through oceans of
pain to get up off the floor until he tottered shakily over the infernal
machine. He breathed in sobs, his chest bubbling greedily. His head
ached and pounded.

Most of his body was numb. His fingers were clumsy. He didn't trust them
to do what he ordered. His tongue felt like a dry lizard in his mouth.
His lips had turned to limestone.

He put a paw on the machine. It simply lay there, though he fancied he
could feel just the faintest thrum of vibration.

2358:35

2358:36

2358:37

The numbers flickered by. No power on earth could stop them. He
stared, almost mesmerized as they dove toward the ultimate, the 2400,
when the bomb would detonate and the world would become midnight.

Gregor started to weep.

What chance had a mere man against such magic?

His thick and sad fingers made an awkward stab at the gibberish of
buttons atop the machine, but he couldn't even coordinate their
movements and get them to touch where he directed them, not that he
really understood where they belonged. He almost passed out.

A tear fell upon the black, blank surface of the bomb console. It lay
there, picking up the flicking red of the rushing numbers. Other than
the timing device, there was only the arming button, its safety pin long
since removed. It had been pushed, and sat, recessed, in its little
receptacle.

He imagined what would happen. It was an implosion device. A sphere of
high explosive packed around a sphere of plutonium around a core of
beryllium as its neutron source.

The explosive would detonate, all its force impelling the plutonium onto
the beryllium in the crucible of the nanosecond, achieving critical mass
and chain reaction.

What can I fight it with?

2358:56

2358:57

2358:58

The phone rang.

Walls looked at it in shock, then picked it up.

"Yo?"

"Walls," it was a shriek, "you there?"

"Shit, yes."

"We've only got a few, oh--ah! Oh, sorry, I just--oh, shit, that hurts,
my leg, oh, Christ, look out, get--okay, you okay? It's kind of hairy
here."

"Go on, man," said Walls.

"Okay, listen to me. You find the columns yet?"

"No sweat, man."

"Great, okay, great. From the left, count over to the third one, okay."

Walls did" it.

"Got that motherfucker."

"Okay, now lean forward, I want you to look at the first letter on each
label, okay. Just the letter."

"No sweat."

"Find the one that starts with a P."

Walls fingered each one until he came on P, for Practical Electrical
Guidance Check.

"Yo."

"Press it."

Walls pushed it.

"Now find the one for A."

Walls's eyes passed over the letters.

A. For Advanced Circuitry Mechanics.

"Yo."

"Punch it--oh, shit. Oh, Lord, punch it. God, they just hit this guy.
Christ, punch it!"

Walls hit it.

"Now an I."

Walls found an I, for Inertial Navigation Circuitry Check.

He pushed it.

"God, great, almost there. Oh! Oh, fuck. God, that was close."

Walls could hear noises and screams in the background.

"The M. Find the M, man."

Walls found it easy. M. M, for Manual Recharge Override.

He pushed it.

"Done!"

"Great, now a B. Find the B and we're done."

Walls read the letters on the labels. His eyes flew down the column,
panicked. He felt a stab of pain. His eyes flooded with tears, blurring
and spangling what he saw.

"Find it? Find it, goddammit, you've just got that one button, come on
now, it's about halfway down."

Walls was sobbing.

"Ain't no fucking B here."

"Goddamn, find it. Find it! A B, goddamn you, find it!"

Walls went over it again.

"Ain't no B here," he cried, hating himself for his inability to change
the hulking reality of the actual, "ain't no B here."

"Final launch sequence commencing," said Betty reasonably.

Puller was hunched up near the shaft doors, listening as one of the
Delta men narrated the events. He could hear the rush of the gunfire as
it filtered up the long tunnel. It sounded like the surf.

"Okay, Delta Six, the doc is on the phone, he seems to have made
contact, the Soviet fire is picking up around them.

Oh, Jesus, he just hit that guy near him."

"Give them covering fire!" Puller snapped.

"We're giving it everything we've got. Delta Six, I can see the doc on
the phone, he's veiling and--oh, shit--"

"Hit?"

"No, it's the voice, she's saying they're going into terminal countdown,
oh, shit, I don't think--"

Puller could hardly breathe. His chest felt as if he were about to have
a heart attack, stony and constricted. He looked away, into the cold
darkness, and suddenly there was an explosion off to the left. Its
force, even from here, was considerable. Puller fell back, momentarily
stunned, and the men around him recoiled against the sudden pressure of
the blast. But it wasn't a bomb.

"The silo door just blew," someone said. "The bird is going to fly."

Indeed, the heavy silo door had just detonated itself into a shower of
rubble. That meant thirty seconds until launch.

From the silo itself there now issued a shaft of light, high and
straight, like a sword blade, narrowing as it climbed in the dark night
sky, laying out the course of the missile that would follow.

"Shit," somebody said. "We didn't make it."

Men were running from the light, scurrying over the ragged face of the
mountain. Now came the roar as primary ignition began; from the exhaust
vanes, four plumes of boiling white smoke billowed out into the night.

"She's going, she's going, she's going," rose the cry.

Puller wondered what it would look like, saw in his deepest brain's eye
the thing emerge, driven skyward by the bright flare at the tail, knew
that it would first be majestic, stately almost, and then would gather
speed and climb skyward with psychotic urgency, rising, its brightness
diminished, until it was gone and the sky was black again.

"We didn't make it," said someone with a ludicrous giggle that Puller
realized was a sob. "We didn't make it.

They beat us, the motherfuckers."

"All right," yelled Peter, squashed in darkness under the body of
Uckley, Uckley's blood dripping down into his face! "now I want you to
read me the first letters on the column.

We can make it, Walls, read them."

"S," came the voice.

Software Integrating Interface Check.

"Yes."

"P."

A bullet hit near Peter's arm.

Practical Electrical Guidance Check.

"Yes."

"A."

Advanced Circuitry Mechanics.

"Yes."

"I."

He could hear the Delta automatic weapons rattling away. Guns were so
loud. When they fired, he felt the hot push of the exploding gases. And
they were firing all around him. Another Delta team had worked its way
down the hall and clustered about him. Their spent brass shells cascaded
down upon him and he thought they looked like raindrops as they bounced
on the floor.

"No, I think that's an L. Look closely."

"Fuck. An L, yeah."

Launch Gantry Retraction Mechanism.

"Yes."

"I."

Inertial Navigational Circuitry Check.

"Yes."

"S."

One of the Delta team was hit and fell with a thud in front of Peter.

Shroud Ejection Mechanism Check.

"Yes."

"A."

Peter tried to think of the next A. A?

A bullet hit two inches from his head, its spray lacerating his face.
The pain was sharp. Jesus! He winced.

What the fuck was this A?

"Read me the letters."

He heard the voice move so slowly through them.

A-N. D-H-E-E. E-E-R. E-S-M. I-R-V."

Now, what the fuck was that?

** ** **

Gregor felt like a fool. He was fighting an atom bomb with a Swiss army
knife. His mind wandered in and out. He looked at the rushing numbers.
He wondered if he'd feel a thing when the bomb detonated.

He'd had some trouble with his thick fingers getting the blade opened.
He remembered how just a few hours ago he'd used it to spring the car
window! How different a world that was! He began to grow woozy with
blood loss. The blade probed stupidly at the arming button. It didn't
seem to make any difference. Yet there came a second when the blade
seemed to lock under something, seemed to hold steady, and Gregor leaned
against it.

There was a pop, and the button itself flashed out of its receptacle and
disappeared. He'd pried it loose! He bent, saw nothing, only a wire lead
headed through a hole down through the armored case.

He stared at it.

His lungs issued the moan of a leaking organ, a last long grace note
falling out of the riddled apparatus. He felt like a fool, an oaf. What
could a man do in the face of such madness?

The numbers flashed ever onward, pulling the world toward fire and
nothingness. He heard himself screaming at the insanity of it. His rage
grew until it was animal, and from all that he had left he screamed
again and again, as if the volume of his voice could somehow halt the
rush of the numbers.

The numbers fell out of focus.

He blinked and they were back.

2359:18

2359:19

2359:20

He screamed again.

Then he lifted the pistol and set its barrel into the receptacle out of
which he'd plucked the button.

He Bred.

The gun bucked in his hand and flew free, out into space. The smell of
powder rose to his nose.

Gregor laughed.

He'd tried to stab, and now shoot, an atom bomb!

At least he had his wit at the end of the world.

It was all sliding away in the foolish flutter of the numbers.

His focus wobbled, then quit altogether. He was lost in blindness. The
pain inside had become awful. A dog was loose in his guts, eating them.

Vodka! Vodka!

He reached into his jacket pocket. It was still there! He pulled the
thing out and, not risking losing his grip on the bomb, he simply
smashed the bottle neck against the table, shattering it, and brought
the jagged nozzle to his mouth.

Hot fire raced down, its taste a century's worth of mercy.

Here's to vodka, I drink to vodka!

He lifted the bottle in toast as the seconds rushed toward the last, the
final, the midnight that was forever.

"I drink to the bomb!" he shouted.

"I drink to the motherland!" he shouted.

"I drink to Comrade General Arkady Pashin!" he shouted.

And he allowed the bomb to drink.

Into the hole blown through the button channel by the bullet he poured
what was left of the vodka.

"Drink, you motherfucker," he shouted. "Drown your sorrows in vodka as
better men before you have, you goat fucking son of a bitch."

The bomb drank the liquid hungrily.

2359:52

2359:53

2359:54

Gregor watched the numbers slide away with growing, hazy
disinterest. They were like a red tide of blood, come to choke the world
in its own rotten evil. A laugh bubbled from Gregor's lips. He watched
the numbers reach toward midnight. . . .

2359:55

2359:56

2359:57

2359:58

2359:58

58

Gregor stared at the number: forever and ever, it would read :58.

Then the light blinked off.

Gregor's head fell forward and he slid to the floor, where he quietly
bled to death.

It was a joke!

It was a fucking joke!

And heeeere's MIRV.

"What's it on? Is it on a piece of paper or something?"

"It's on a card, taped to the--"

"Tear it off! Tear it off!" Peter yelled.

He waited a second.

"What's the letter?"

"B."

B!

Bypass Primary Separation Mode Check!

"Final launch commencing," Megan was saying.

"Punch it."

There was a second in which the universe seemed suspended.

"Punch it! Punch it! Punch it!" Peter was screaming.

"We have an abort," said Megan. "We have a launch abort."

The cheers from Delta rose, filling the corridor.

"You did it. Walls!" yelled Peter, lurching on the sheer joy of it, the
sheer pleasure, looking at his watch to note this moment, to see that it
was ten seconds after midnight, and they'd made it, they'd made it!

I beat you, Megan.

He sobbed the truth.

I love you, Megan, Jesus how I lo--"

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 news magazines 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
big shots 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--"

"All right. Captain. What about that poor welder? The one who burned
Pashin?"

"They think he's going to make it, sir. He's stable. Lost a lot of
blood, but he's looking good."

"I'm glad. What about the Soviets?"

"Well, we figure their strength to have been about seventy.

We've got sixty-two body bags and eight badly wounded."

Then, absurdly chipper in the morning light, McKenzie suddenly smiled.
His face was giddy with innocent enthusiasm.

"Sir, you did it. I mean, you really outfought that guy.

You had him outsmarted at every step of the way. I have to tell you, in
Delta we were pretty pissed off at you yesterday.

But you knew what you were doing. You won. Goddamn, you kicked
Aggressor-One's ass."

There was such indecent worship in the young man's voice, it filled
Puller with nausea. The stupid little prick.

Puller snorted.

"Peter Thiokol did it, McKenzie. I just pointed the soldiers up the
hill."

But he was an argumentative little son of a bitch.

"No, sir. Respectfully, sir, you beat him. And Delta beat him, sir.
That's the lesson. You got a problem, you call the professionals. Your
professional, he'll get it done, sir, your elite soldier."

No, that was not the lesson. Puller saw that now. In the end it wasn't
Delta on the mountain. In the end it wasn't the professionals. It was
the regular people. A black convict. A Vietnamese refugee. A young
federal officer. A neurotic defense consultant. A welder. An Air
National Guard pilot. A gym teacher, an accountant, a housewife.

He looked at the huge mountain that sat atop the surface of the earth
and realized then what you had to do to get to the top of it and stop
the madness.

It wasn't the professionals. It was the regular people, the Rest of Us,
back in the world. It was our mountain, and we had to get up there. If
we didn't, who would?

Suddenly, the pulsing sound of helicopter engines rose above him. Three
huge Sea Stallions in green and white had appeared over it and were
beginning the descent. Even from the distance Puller could make out the
seal of the President of the United States.

"Sir, we ought to be down there. The Joint Chiefs will be along too. And
I bet the press will be here soon. They're going to be all over this
mountain by noon. It's going to turn into a carnival."

Puller rose, threw away his cigarette, and said yes, yes, the captain
was right, they had better go to meet the President.

** ** **

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

STEPHEN HUNTER was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in
1946. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1968 and spent two
years in the United States Army. He joined the staff of the Baltimore
Sun in 1971, where he has been a copyreader, a book review editor, a
feature writer, and a film critic. He is also the author of The Master
Sniper, The Second Saladin, The Spanish Gambit, Point of Impact, and
Dirty White Boys. Mr. Hunter is married and lives in Columbia, Maryland,
with his wife and two children.