The Day Before Midnight Read online

  “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 9–2 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 half-time, 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 postholes 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 coining 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 suspende
d 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 megatonnage 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, Kalingrad, 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 four 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 Hewlett-Packard 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 catercorner 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 wail. 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 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.”