The Day Before Midnight Page 3

  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.”

  “Yessir,” 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 McDonald’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 115-grain 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 center.

  Romano called back Security Alpha. There was no answer.

  “I wonder what that guy is doing?” he said.

  “Those cops. You never know.”

  “Donny, 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 lifte
d and twisted in the concussions. The explosive was plastique, French-manufactured, 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?”

  “Yessir.”

  “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?”

  “Yessir.”

  The major went to a computer terminal installed in the wall next to the double titanium blastproof 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 OK, 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.

  “Goddammit,” 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.