The Day Before Midnight Read online

  RAVES FOR STEPHEN HUNTER AND THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT

  “Not since Fail-Safe has anyone written a nuclear thriller as good as The Day Before Midnight. … Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum have given a lot of readers a lot of excitement, but it is hard to figure out why there is so much fuss about them with Hunter around.”

  —United Press International

  “A smoothly believable race-against-time thriller with frightening plausibility.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mr. Hunter steadily turns up the tension…. Whether heroes or villains or something in between, his people possess a convincing individuality of speech, thought, and action, a personal context that makes them recognizable and comprehensible…. [Stephen Hunter displays] a truly astonishing command of scientific, technical, military, political, and historical information.”

  —The Sun, Baltimore

  “This book will blow your socks off and singe your eyebrows, and you will love every minute of it.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT

  “His phrasing creates graphic, easily perceived scenarios, forming suitable backdrops for the barrage of action that cranks up around page 2 and doesn’t quit until the last paragraph…. The author keeps the hammer down relentlessly, and there’s no release of tension until the very last minute. It’s an ingenious tale, not easily put down and not easily forgotten.”

  —Arkansas Gazette

  “Put in your eye drops, throw another log on the fire, and have your spouse call the boss tomorrow and tell her you’ll be late. I don’t care how early the baby got you up the morning before you start The Day Before Midnight, this is one you’re going to have difficulty putting down.”

  —Baltimore Daily Record

  “A rich and engrossing thriller that will keep … the reader turning the pages far into the night…. Highly entertaining … without so much as a single loose end.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “A flawless thriller by one of the most gifted young writers in America.”

  —Charles McCarry, author of The Secret Lovers and The Last Supper

  BOOKS BY STEPHEN HUNTER

  POINT OF IMPACT

  THE DAY BEFORE MIDNIGHT

  If you were at Waterloo,

  If you were at Waterloo,

  Makes no difference what you do,

  If you were at Waterloo.

  —British schoolboys’ rhyms,

  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 stale 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 Petal; 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 Gould 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 t
he silence, feeling the ease and sighs of her 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-Warner 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 attaché 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 sen
se. 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.