The Day Before Midnight Read online

  Puller sat back. Outside he had one hundred twenty of the most highly trained military specialists in the world. Yet somehow he knew Delta Force wasn’t the answer. This called for someone who probably didn’t exist; a man who could slither up a hole in a mountain in the fetid shroud of perpetual night, a mile and a half with his fears bouncing around inside his head like a brass cannonball, and come out at the end sane and …

  “I suppose I could get some volunteers from Delta. Mr. Brady, any coal miners around, men who’ve been underground?”

  “Not in these parts, Mr. Puller. Not anymore. Not since the cave-in.”

  “Hmmm,” Dick Puller said again. Peter watched him. Puller seemed to implode on himself as he thought, his face gray, his eyes locked on nothing. It was old Mr. Brady who spoke.

  “Now, my grandson, Tim. Tim, he could get you in there.”

  Dick looked at him.

  “Tim wasn’t much good at nothing, but he was your natural-born tunnel man. Wasn’t no hole ever made he was afraid of. His daddy, my son Ralph, was a miner and Tim grew up near holes. When Ralph died in a fire in ’fifty-nine, Tim came to me. I was a state mine inspector up in West Virginia by that time, and Tim went into a lot of holes with me. Tim was a tunnel man.”

  “Where is Tim?” Puller asked, almost fearing the answer.

  “Well, you folks had yourself a war few years back. Old Tim, he was asked to go fight it, and fight it he did. Won some medals. Crawled in some holes and did some killing. Tim was what you call your tunnel rat. He was with 25th Infantry, place called Cu Chi. Those little yellow people built some tunnels, too, and Tim and his pals went down into ’em day after day, month after month. Not many of those men left alive. Tim didn’t make it back, Mr. Puller. Not outside of a body bag, that is.”

  Puller looked at Peter Thiokol. He smiled.

  “Tunnel rats,” he said, turning the phrase over in his mind, absorbed. “Tunnel rats.”

  The major was deliriously happy. He was an excellent soldier and he loved battle. He loved to think about it, to dream about it, to plan for it, and to fight it. Now he scurried over the hill checking on his men with the boundless energy of a fourteen-year-old boy.

  “Any movements?”

  “No, sir. It’s quiet.”

  “You know, it might be Marine Recon or Special Forces. Camouflage experts. You wouldn’t see them until it was too late.”

  “No, sir. There’s nothing out there yet. Only state policemen, more to keep civilians out than to attack us.”

  His soldiers were young but well trained and especially eager. The very best. No amateurs here. Men who wanted to be here, who believed. They were wonderful boys, in their dappled uniforms under the snow smocks, their equipment hard and clean, their faces clean-shaven, their eyes keen. They’d gotten the big tent up in two hours and were now digging under it furiously. The tent itself was not an impressive structure, but it had been constructed for a specific purpose and for that purpose it was perfect. The tent rose on poles no more than five feet off the ground and the various sheets of canvas that had been crudely lashed together to form it came, in the end, to about 2,000 square feet. It was meant for only one thing: privacy. Underneath, the major’s men labored mightily to create their little surprise for anyone coming up to them. They’d learned about it firsthand, and they were eager to apply it to other new learners.

  Meanwhile, at the outer perimeter of the position, breastworks had been constructed around the heavy machine-gun positions and a single firing trench had been dug. The trucks had brought the ammunition, nearly a million rounds. Hold off an army.

  He dashed from position to position, checking lanes of fire and, more important, resolve.

  “How do we feel? Do we feel strong and brave?”

  “Yessir. Strong and brave and well-prepared.”

  “It’s going well, then. It is going as we planned it. It’s all on schedule. It’s working. We can all be proud. We’ve worked so hard, and it’s all paying off.”

  He had designed well. Only napalm could get them out, and the Army couldn’t use napalm because napalm would melt the big computer. No, they’d have to come up and do it with lead. Close-in, hand-to-hand. A real battle.

  At one point, at the crest of the mountain, one of the lookouts told him about the helicopters.

  “About twelve of them, sir. To the east. They fell in and landed.”

  The major looked through his binoculars. He could see quite a little force gathering its strength a mile away, down in the snowy meadow by some jerry-built buildings. The twelve choppers sat in formation; there was some kind of communications trailer, and even as he watched, a convoy of trucks pulled in. Men hustled and bustled. Someone had erected a big tent with a huge red cross on its sloping roof. More and more cars pulled up, and occasionally a helicopter would land or depart.

  “They’re getting ready, no doubt about it. An air assault. Of course. That’s how I’d do it, at any rate.”

  “When, sir?”

  “Actually, I’m impressed. Whoever is running their show knows what he is doing. The general and I assumed their first attack would come in the first three hours, and that it would be badly coordinated and ill planned. A lot of smoke and fire, a lot of casualties, no concrete results. But whoever’s down there is waiting. He wants his assault to count. Helicopters—”

  “Airplanes high above, sir. We catch the glint in the sun occasionally.”

  “Yes, an electronic eavesdropper. Be careful what you say, boys. They’re listening. And they’re taking pictures. Of our beautiful big tent.”

  His men laughed.

  For the major the pleasure was intense. He had hunted guerrillas for years: dreadful scrapes, ranging across the countryside. Occasionally, the enemy would catch a trooper and leave a trail of his guts for miles until you finally came across the gristle and bone that was left of him. It was so hard to close with the bastards: they melted away into an alien landscape. You could torture their women and remove their children, but they were always there, just out of reach.

  But not now. Now we’re on the mountain, and they’ve got to come up to us. He had a real battle to fight: a hill to hold for a period of time, a real mission.

  “Look for planes first,” he told them. “We know they have A-10s in the region, in Baltimore. They’ll come low over the mountains. They’ll soften us up with those. Then the choppers. You’ll see the choppers swarm up. The A-10s will hold us down while the choppers ferry men in close. The men will rappel down to the road, because the choppers won’t land. It should be Delta Force, very good men, the best. They’ll be very aggressive. But they’ll be stupid, you’ll see.” He smiled. “It’ll be a great fight, I promise you that. Oh, it’ll be a great fight, boys. One they’ll talk about for a hundred years.”

  “We’ll win it for you and the general, sir,” said one of the boys.

  The major went over to the ruins of the launch control facility, and plucked a telephone off one of the standing walls.

  The general answered.

  “Sir, no sign yet of an assault. I expect it within the hour, however. They’ve brought in helicopters and a fleet of trucks. But we’ll be ready for them.”

  “Good, Alex. I’m counting on you.”

  “How are things down there, sir.”

  “Oh, we’re making progress. It goes slowly, but it goes. The flame is bright and hot.”

  “We’ll hold until they have us all.”

  “You buy me the time I need, Alex. And I’ll buy you the future you want.”

  1200

  Walls stared at the door. The door was the worst part of it. There had been other doors, of course, and maybe were still doors to come for him. But this was the motherfucker of all doors. Massive, green, and iron, it looked about a million years old. Its hinges were rusty, and scabby little patches stood out where the years had beaten against it. And someone had scratched two words that Walls recognized onto it in crude, desperate letters a foot high: FUCK NIGG
ERS it said, and as Walls saw it, that’s just what the door did.

  Walls lay back. He’d go crazy in here soon enough, and then they’d let him go, and he’d get killed.

  Yeah: FUCK NIGGERS, that was it all right.

  He tried to think of nothingness to rush the time along. It didn’t work. He and the door, they were all that was. He had faced that, because he was by nature a specialist in reality. And his of the moment happened to consist of green walls close around him, and the pot for him to piss in, and the scungy collection of dried snot under his cot, and some faggot’s suggestions carved into the walls. And the door. That was it, really, the mighty iron door, with its pins and bolts and massive hinges that sealed him off, and said FUCK NIGGERS.

  “Hey, boy.”

  It was the Pig Watson, calling in from the peephole.

  “Hey, boy, get your black ass up, or I give you over to the Aryans, and they turn you into a bone harmonica.”

  The Pig Watson unlocked the door with the clank of metal on metal, hauled the sucker back, and entered. It was such an easy thing to do if you had a key. Watson was about six four, with acne, his white gut hanging over his wide black belt like a pillowcase full of lead shot. He was basic cracker white, with an art museum of tattoos cut into the skin of his fat arms and his knuckles saying LOVE and HATE. He had two pig eyes and a little pig nose. He carried a nightstick and could expertly dial long distance information on your skull.

  “What you doin, boy?”

  “I was praying,” lied Walls, a gifted liar.

  “Don’t make me laugh, boy. Yer fuckin’ prayers already been answered when you got an extra six weeks solitary before the Aryans get their paws on you.”

  And so they had been. An Aryan named Hard Papa Pinkham had taken an intense liking to the contours of Walls’s rear end and one night in the showers with three of his biker pals had decided to possess it. It was a short-lived triumph, however; Walls caught him in the corridor between wings with a straight razor and made certain Hard Papa would never again have his way in the showers. So much blood. Who would have thought there was so much blood in a dick?

  The Aryans were not pleased and had sworn to make Walls sing an equally high falsetto.

  “Some shot wants to see you, boy,” said the Pig Watson. “Now, you go and be quick or you answer to me. This way.”

  And so they took Walls from his solitary cell in the B Wing and marched him through the main hall to the cells of the Aryans, the best-organized gang in the Maryland penitentiary. The Aryans had heroin and porn and barbs; they had murder and protection and laundry; they had shivs and thumpers and knuckles. They ran the place.

  “Hey, mo-fo, your ass gonna be fuckin’ worms for sure,” one of them informed him.

  “Nigger, you one dead piece of Spam,” another decreed.

  “Jive, you on the hook,” said another.

  “You a real popular little songun,” said the Pig with a gleeful laugh on his face. “You know, they got a pool going how long your ass going to last once you sprung from the tomb.”

  “Be round long time,” said Walls insolently. “Longer than your fat white ass.”

  The Pig thought this was hysterical.

  “Dead guys with smart mouths, I love it,” he chuckled.

  They checked through Processing—Walls was roughly searched, but his knife had been lodged elsewhere for safekeeping—and he was removed from the main cell block to the warden’s office, where he was ushered by the Pig Watson into a roomful of suits. And there were also two soldier boys. The warden signaled Watson out of the office and he closed the door behind him.

  “And here he is,” said the warden, “our favorite parishioner, House Guest No. 45667. How are you, Nathan?”

  Walls just looked at the white faces which always had for him the look of balloons, smooth and fat and full of gas.

  “Specialist four Nathan Walls, goddamn,” said the soldier boy, some kind of super sergeant with all kinds of stripes running up and down his arm. “Jesus, what a crime, a guy like you ending up in a place like this. I checked the records. Man, you were a hero. There’s a hundred men alive today because of you, Mr. Walls.”

  Walls just put his sullen face on and didn’t say anything. He made his eyes see infinity.

  “This hero,” explained the warden, “was known on the streets as Dr. P. P for, excuse my French, pussy. He had nine girls working for him, all of them beauties. He also specialized in angel dust, uppers, downers, grass, Mexican mud, and just about everything chemical designed to screw up the inside of the human head. To say nothing of two or three assaults with intent, and no end of muggings, breaking and enterings, and felonious assaults various and sundry. But none of it was Nate’s fault. It was Vietnam’s fault, right, Nate?”

  Walls flexed his strong hands and made his face as empty as a bucket with a hole in it. He would not let them get into his head. He was done with that.

  “You were also,” said soldier boy, “the best tunnel rat 25th Infantry ever had. Let’s see, three Hearts, Silver Star, two bronzes. Jesus, you had yourself quite a war down in those holes.”

  Walls’s military exploits had very little meaning to him. He’d put all that far away in the deepest part of his head, and anyhow, a tunnel was just a street with a roof on it.

  “Mr. Walls, we’re in a mess,” said the officer, some kind of stern bird colonel. “And we need a man to help us out of it. At 0700 today, some kind of military unit seized a national security installation out in western Maryland. A very crucial installation. Now, it happens that the only way into this installation may involve a long, dangerous passage in a tunnel. Very scary work. We need a man who’s fought in tunnels before to take a team through that tunnel. A tunnel rat. And we need him fast. You’re the only one we could find in our timeframe. What do you say?”

  Walls didn’t even have to think about it. His laugh was rich and merry. “It don’t have nothing to do with me. I’m all done with that shit,” he said. “I just want to be left alone.”

  “Oh, I see,” said the suit. “Now, Mr. Walls, may I tell you that I believe you’re not going to be left alone. In about twenty hours from now the idea of being ‘left alone’ is going to lose its meaning.”

  Walls just looked at him.

  “Yes, well, what you’re going to notice is the warhead of a Soviet SS-18 detonating at about four thousand feet over downtown Baltimore in a fused airburst for maximum destructive potential. That is, about four thousand feet over our heads as we speak today. We figure the throw weight of an 18 to be about fifteen megatons. Now, what you’ll sense, Mr. Walls, is one second of incredible light. In the next nanosecond, Mr. Walls, your body will be vaporized into sheer energy. As will the bodies of everybody in the first circle of destruction, which will extend in a circumference of about three miles from the point of detonation. What’s that, warden, would you say, about a million and a half people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, and in a wider circle—say, ten miles in diameter—there will be extraordinary blast damage and your usual run-of-the-mill trauma associated with high explosive. You know, Mr. Walls, you saw enough of it in Vietnam: third degree burns, severed limbs, blindness, deep lacerations and contusions, multiple fractures and concussions. I expect it will be worst on the kids trapped in the schools. There won’t be any parents around to do much good for them, so they’ll just have to do the best they can, and pray for an early death. Now, in a circle out to twenty miles you’ll have much less actual damage, but the deaths from radiation poisoning will begin within forty-eight hours. Horrible deaths. Deaths by vomiting, by dehydration, by nausea. Not a pretty picture. I’d say in this immediate area no less than three million dead by the end of the week. Now, Mr. Walls, you project that onto every major city in America and the Soviet Union and you’ll see that we’re talking about some severe consequences. A full nuclear exchange would involve the deaths of no less than five hundred million people. And, Mr. Walls, if we don’t get into that inst
allation, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “If the white man blow his ass up, that’s his problem,” said Nathan Walls.

  “Mr. Walls, the Soviets have some extraordinary hardware at their disposal, but not even they have been able to build a bomb that discriminates between races. Think of the bomb as the greatest equal opportunity employer in history. It will take us all, Mr. Walls, regardless of our race, creed, or political affiliation, and it will make ash or corpses of us. And if you have any illusions of the third world picking up the pieces, I’d advise you against them. A, there will be no pieces, and B, the radiation deaths will girdle the globe. The survivors will be mutant rats and your friends the cockroaches, who will outlast us all.”

  This had very little impact on Nathan Walls, who had never, by inclination or opportunity, had much chance to cultivate the ability to think in abstract terms. There was, in the entire universe, only one phenomenon worthy of consideration: his ass. Yet he saw how urgent the situation was to the suits, even if he could not quite get with the doom jive offered him by the head suit. And so he decided to play a little game.

  “And if I can get you into this place?”

  “You’ll have the thanks of your government. And the satisfaction of knowing you changed history.”

  “And I’ll throw in another six weeks in solitary,” said the warden.

  This wasn’t quite enough. But Walls reasoned that in the open he might have a shot at a getaway and, failing that, if by chance he brought it off, it might jingle out to some loose change for him.

  “Couldn’ get Nate Walls a shot at another joint?” he asked. “Say, Allentown, where all the white politicians go? There’s a swimming pool and pussy there, or so they tell it.”

  “Mr. Walls,” said the suit, “you give us Burkittsville and we’ll give you Allentown.”