The Day Before Midnight Page 10

  “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 Rat 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 trousers.

  “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 called 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 Tra-dang 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 of her 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 confid
ence. 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 eventually 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 irritated 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 ’em 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 High
way 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 of her 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.”