The Day Before Midnight Read online

  Melancholy seeped through him.

  He faced an unpleasant day. To begin with, the boy genius Klimov, Deputy Rezident, 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 Gweggy-weggy.”

  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 land 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. “Ill 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 SAG 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 HEEEERE’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 Romano 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 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 central 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 HI 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 EAM 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 equipm
ent, 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 throwload 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 Romano.

  “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.”