The Day Before Midnight Page 6

  “The torch,” Jack Hummel said, swallowing.

  The President looked into the eyes of the Army Chief of Staff, a blunt-looking man who bore a remarkable resemblance to a .45 Colt automatic pistol bullet. On his chest he wore enough decorations to stop just such a round. “It couldn’t be simpler,” the general said. “It’s straight infantry work, bayonet work. We have to get our people into that hole and kill everybody in it before they dig out that key. Say, by midnight. Or else the bird flies.”

  “What’s the recommendation?”

  “Sir, Delta Force is already gearing up for deployment,” said the army general with a small, harsh smile. “Best small-unit men we’ve got. Our computer tells us there’s also a company of Maryland National Guard infantry in training not two hours away from the site. That’s two hundred more men, although you’d have to federalize them. I’m sure the Governor of Maryland would agree. We can truck out elements of the 1st Battalion, Third Infantry, from Fort Meyer, a good infantry unit, your ceremonial troops, hopefully by 1300 hours. I’ve already put them on alert. Then, I can get you a Ranger battalion air-dropped into the zone from its home base at Fort Eustis, Washington, by mid-afternoon, weather permitting. I can throw together a makeshift chopper assault company from Fort Dix and I can get you air support from a Wart Hog unit of the Maryland Air National Guard. With Delta, Third Infantry, and the Rangers, you’ll have the best professional soldiers this country has produced.”

  “And armor, General. Could we just blow them out?”

  “There’s only one road up, and the latest information is that they’ve destroyed it.”

  There was silence in the room for a time.

  “We’re back to rifles and balls,” said the Army Chief of Staff.

  “Can you do it in time?” the President said to the army general.

  “I don’t know, Mr. President. We can solve the logistics of it. We can get the men there in time, and we can send them up the mountain.”

  “It’s going to be a long and bloody day,” somebody said.

  “But it’s a very hard assault. First, you’ve got to get to the elevator shaft, and you can only attack on a very narrow front because the mountaintop is surrounded by cliffs. Once you get to the LCF and its elevator,” the general explained, “you’ve got to rappel down the shaft, and fight your way to the LCC, where they’re trying to launch the bird.”

  “Sir,” said one of the President’s advisers, “you’ll have to declare a phase four nuclear emergency, which empowers federal authorities to literally take over a given district, and turns all civil authority over to federal command. You’re going to have to turn Frederick County into a war zone. I think maybe you’d also better raise the defense condition to a Defcon 4.”

  “No to that,” said the President. “I don’t want the Soviets thinking we’re ready to launch. Increase security at all our missile sites and our satellite receiving stations.”

  “It’s been done, sir,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

  “Okay, go to the phase four. Put out some kind of cover story about a military exercise to keep the goddamn press out of it. Now it’s the Army’s baby, with all due respect to the Air Force. I don’t want a lot of different services falling all over each other’s toes. Set up the roadblocks, seal off the area. Go to war if that’s what it takes. But get those people out of there, or kill them all.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the general. “Now, as for the command—”

  “For the commanding officer out there, General, I want the best combat man you’ve got. And I don’t care if he’s a PFC in Louisiana.”

  “No, sir,” said the general. “He’s a full bird colonel, retired. But he’s one mean son of a bitch.”

  Jack Hummel pulled his goggles down over his eyes and the world darkened. He held the cutting torch in one hand, and reached back to the control panel to switch the device on. The current flowed and the electrode in the tip began to glow from red on through the hues of orange. He watched it heat and grow within the nozzle, and then when it became almost white, he released a slow, steady stream of nitrogen. The gas ignited with a pop. In the crucible of the nozzle it became ionized—that is, electrified. Jack turned the temperature dial on the Linde control unit up to the top so the flame would reach the plasma temperature range, almost fifty thousand degrees.

  The flame was a white killer’s tongue, as hot as the center of any nuclear blast, but controlled there at the end of his torch. The men around him, reacting to the power of flame, drew back instinctively. He increased the pressure so that the flame was almost a needle that darted out two inches beyond the nozzle.

  “I’m going to cut up into it,” he told the general. “That way, the molten metal will run out via gravity.”

  The general looked at him.

  “It’s going to take a long time,” said Jack. “Jeez, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve hours.”

  The general bent over.

  “You know what’s at stake. Your own children,” he said. “Do you understand?”

  Jack said nothing. Jack knew he could do it: if he could launch missiles against the Russians, he could murder his own children.

  But a part of Jack said, Your children will die anyway if this rocket is launched.

  Yeah, that’s tonight. Today it’s this fucking block I have to crack. I’ll face tonight when it comes. I got to get them through today first.

  “Okay,” said Jack.

  He bent, holding the plasma-arc torch in one hand, and with his other touched the smooth, burnished surface of the block of metal. Somewhere inside was a key.

  He touched the torch to the metal. He watched its bright needle attack and liquify the metal; at fifty thousand degrees the ionized plasma-arc gas first seemed to define a bubble on the surface of the block, and then a dimple, and then an indentation, and finally, something very like a little tunnel. Jack cut deeper; the molten metal ran from the kerf, the gap gouged by the flame, and down its face like tears.

  “The colonel,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “did time in SAS in Malaysia on an exchange officer program. He was Special Forces from the start and had a brilliant Vietnam. He had seven years there, spent a lot of time in places we never officially went. He was stuck in a siege under heavy fire for thirty-eight days, and held out.”

  “Oh, God, Jim,” said the Chief of Naval Operations.

  “And, most important,” said the general, “he invented Delta. He fought the Army and the Pentagon to get a Delta Force created when nobody cared. He trained Delta, he knows Delta, he lives and breathes Delta. He is Delta.”

  “Except,” said the Chief of Naval Operations, “Dick Puller led Delta into Iran in 1979, in the operation we called Eagle Claw, and at Eagle One he panicked. And he canceled the mission when he came up one chopper short at the staging site.”

  “At Desert One,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “he had to make the most difficult decision any American soldier has had to make since six June 1944, when Eisen—”

  “He failed. He lost his nerve. And retired in disgrace, Jim. Dick Puller failed. He was a man who trained his whole life for a single moment, and when it came, he failed.”

  “I say that when it was decision time, everybody backed away from him. We all did. The president of the United States did. They hung a poor colonel who’d bled himself empty for this country for the best part of thirty years out to dry.”

  “He’s a walking Greek tragedy,” said the Naval Chief of Staff, “who blew the one—”

  “Mr. President, if you asked me to name one man who could get you up that mountain and into that silo before midnight, I’d name Dick Puller. Dick Puller is the bravest officer I ever served with, and the smartest. He knows more about combat than any man alive. He’s done his share of the planning and his share of the killing. He’s a great soldier. He’s the best.”

  “I never heard any man say Dick Puller was a coward,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff. “But I never heard any man deny that
he was an obstreperous, willful, self-indulgent, sometime psychot—”

  “Jim, this isn’t just an old protégé you’re trying to help out?” asked the Chief of Naval Ops.

  “All right!” said the President. “Goddammit, enough is enough.”

  He turned to the Army Chief of Staff.

  “Then get me this Puller,” he said finally. “Call him. I don’t care what it takes, tell him to do it. To get it done.”

  “If it can be done,” said the Army Chief, “Dick Puller will do it.”

  1100

  From a cold start, Delta Force would arrive on site not in three hours, as the Chief of Staff had promised, but in two and a half. It took a miracle of logistical planning, most of it thrown together while the unit—the one hundred twenty men of Special Forces Operational Detachment/Delta—was in the air, being hauled up from Fort Bragg by two C-130s of the first Special Operations Wing of the 23d Air Force. The initial plan was to have them HALO onto the site—to parachute from a high altitude, then open at a low one—in case Aggressor Force, as the occupiers of the complex were now called, had mounted a watch for the approach of airborne troops. But Dick Puller’s first decision, made eleven minutes after his arrival, was no.

  He stood in the ramshackle office of the Misty Mount Girl Scout Camp, about a half mile from the mountain, across a flat, snowy meadow that lay at the mountain’s foot.

  “I don’t want ’em spread out all over the goddamned landscape,” he snapped, his face set in a glare, “with broken legs and dirty weapons and love affairs with farmer’s daughters. We don’t need it. I won’t begin my assault until I get my tac air, and that’s a good four hours. Land ’em in Hagerstown under battle conditions. I want airfield perimeter security from the state police, I want advance parties on the convoy into us as well as route security, and I want perimeter security set up ASAP upon arrival. Those guys on the mountain sent out a radio transmission; maybe there’s a column of unfriendlies waiting to bounce Delta on the way in. I want the men locked and loaded from minute one. I don’t want any screwing around. Get ’em in here fast, and tell ’em to get working on their assault plan as soon as they get here. First briefing is at 1200 hours and I’ll expect complete terrain familiarity.”

  Puller turned from the young man who took this order, a mild-looking twenty-eight-year-old FBI agent of no special ability named James Uckley who had been appointed Dick’s No. 1 guy because he was the first to show up, having been ordered onto the site by a special Bureau flash from his Hagerstown office, where he’d been investigating a bank embezzlement. Dick chose Uckley because he believed that enthusiasm was far more important than intelligence, and Uckley seemed enthusiastic, if bewildered. Moreover, Dick didn’t want smart guys around him to argue with him. Dick liked dumb people who did what they were told, and he liked telling them what to do.

  Uckley put this decision out on the emergency teletype which clattered back to the Situation Room, where it was put on to the troops.

  “They get those recon shots yet?” Puller demanded.

  “Not yet,” said Uckley, looking at the staggering amount of communications equipment that had been set up with surprising speed against one corner of the rickety old wall of the place. Several technicians bent over the stuff, but for some reason Puller refused to acknowledge them, preferring instead to deal with the world through Uckley.

  “I’ll sing out if they come over,” Uckley said uncomfortably. In truth, he was a little afraid of Puller. In truth, everybody was a little afraid of Puller. He wasn’t even sure whether he should call him sir, or colonel, or what.

  Puller went back to his binoculars. Above him the mountain loomed, white and pristine. The red aerial stood out like a candy cane. He could see no movement.

  There was one road up, through rough ground. Halfway up it just stopped, where Aggressor Force had blown it. Smart. No armor would come their way, at least not today.

  He looked at his watch—1124. A little more than twelve hours to go. And Delta still wasn’t on the damned ground, this sorry-dick Maryland Guard unit was trying to get its act together, 3rd Infantry was fucking around somewhere on the road, and the only good news was that his Ranger battalion was at least airborne for its cross-country flight and now had an ETA of 1600 hours.

  Twelve hours, he thought again. His expression was grim, but this was nothing new: Dick Puller’s expression was always grim. He was born grim. Whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself, although the tension in his face and the way it drew the color from his skin and pulled his muscles taut and his mouth flat suggested something.

  At last he asked, “Any word on those locals yet?”

  “State police still knocking on doors,” Uckley said.

  Puller’s first move was to send state policemen into the town of Burkittsville on a fast canvass of old-timers. Who knew that mountain? What was there? How did you get up it? What was inside it? Dick didn’t trust maps. It was an old ’Nam habit, where a bad map had once almost killed him. It was one of the few mistakes he’d made in his career.

  Richard W. Puller was a stern, rangy man of fifty-eight with a gunmetal-gray crew cut that revealed a patch of scalp up top. He had remarkably forceful dark eyes and a way of moving and walking that suggested if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. Someone—not an admirer—once said of Dick Puller, “You’d have to put a full magazine into the bastard to stop him from coming at you, and then his shadow would cut your throat.” He was not a well-liked man and he did not like many people: a wife, his two daughters, a soldier or two along the way, mainly the tough old master sergeant types that got the killing done in the hairy moments and a few guys in elite units the world over, such as SAS, where he’d done a tour of exchange-officer duty.

  He also had a talent for the truth. He would tell it, regardless, a gift that did him little political good in the Army, where you had to go along to get along. He was hated by all manner of people for all manner of rudenesses, but particularly for his willingness to look anybody straight in the eye and tell them they were full of shit. He was, in short, exactly the sort of man made for war, not peace, and when a war came, he had a great one.

  He was in-country from 1963 to 1970; he did two tours with the 101st Airborne but spent most of his time leading A-team detachments way out off the maps, interdicting North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia or training indigenous troops—Nungs and Montagnards—to fight against the hated North Vietnamese. He got stuck in a long siege in a big A-camp up near the DMZ and with a twenty-four-man team and three hundred indigs he held off a North Vietnamese division for thirty-eight days. When an airborne unit finally fought its way through to relieve them, he had seven Americans and one hundred ten Nungs left alive.

  He also worked for MACV’s Special Observation Group, the mysterious, still-classified intelligence unit that sent ops all over ’Nam, some said even up north. Puller then had a long and flashy career running a Mike Force battalion, a quick reaction team that helicoptered to the relief of A-team detachments in the soup and proceeded to do maximum damage in minimum time. He was an exceedingly aggressive officer, but not a sloppy one. He’d been hit three times, once with a big-ass Chinese .51, the shock of which would have killed most men. It didn’t matter. If you were professional, you got hit, that was all.

  But he came back from the war with a special vision, a Mike Force for the world. His idea was that the United States should have at its disposal a group of swift, deadly raiders. He had a dream of a commando group, superbly trained, fast-striking, brilliantly equipped, that could react swiftly to any major incident.

  And he had gotten it, too, though as he fought for his project through the tortuous labyrinth of army politics, his personality had assumed the unlovely contours of a zealot. Somewhere in the Pentagon’s D-ring he lost the capacity to laugh; somewhere at some meeting or other he lost his perspective. He won, and Delta Force was the prize: Delta Force, which he had defined and trained and led: which
he had, in the final analysis, fathered. And which he had, in the popular view, failed.

  A bell rang.

  “Sir, the recon photos are coming in,” Uckley shouted as the photos began to roll off the computer transmission platen.

  Puller nodded grimly, not really seeing Uckley until the boy handed them over.

  Dick looked at the pictures. They were in color, but they were like no pictures Uckley had ever seen. It seemed to be some kind of white-gray blur; in the murk there were little red flashes.

  Dick was counting.

  “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty …”

  Then he went silent.

  “Sixty. Sixty of the fucks above ground. These are men, son. Aggressor Force as seen from outer space, a million miles up, portraits courtesy of an Itech infrared floating up there in the sky somewhere. Now, why is that number significant, Uckley?”

  Uckley swallowed. He’d never been in the military. He made a guess.

  “It’s the size of an infantry platoon?”

  “No,” said Puller. “You just guessed, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Uckley.

  “Good. If you ever guess again around me, I’ll end your career. You’ll be history. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you don’t know, that’s fine. But things go freaky when junior officers try to guess their way through. Is that understood?”

  Uckley gulped. The older man’s stare was like a truck pressing on his sternum.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Instantly, the transgression was forgotten.

  “An infantry platoon is thirty-two, a company about one twenty-eight. No, the significance of the number is twofold. First, it’s so large that it’s clearly a holding operation. It’s not an in-out job; these guys mean to stay up there until we find the guts to push them off that hill. And secondly, it’s so large that it means these people couldn’t come in private cars. We’d see a caravan. So there’s got to be a staging area around here, maybe a rented farm. Find the farm and maybe you find out who they are.”