The Day Before Midnight

attacks. But the men in the capsule don’t know this. At least they’re not supposed to.”

“But whoever assaulted this installation did know this?”

“Evidently, sir.”

“It’s frighteningly clear that this man knew an awful lot. And there’s nothing else? No offers to negotiate, no hostages, no demands for television coverage or cash? Nothing conventional for a terrorist event?”

“No, sir. We don’t even have a reading yet on their unit size. The only thing we have is an awareness of their impressive level of technical sophistication as manifested by the seizure, indicating great resources and resolve, and that document, sent by teletype. Then silence. No answer to any of our messages.”

The President looked again at the message from the mountain. He read the lines aloud. “‘You had better prepare yourselves for settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.’”

He paused a second, then looked up to them all.

“Well, let’s face it. He’s going to launch. Without demands, without preparations, without anything. He’s simply going to fire that missile if and when he gets that key out. What’s our time frame?”

“Sir, the key vault is designed of high-grade titanium with some strengthening alloys added. It’s very, very hard to get into, designed to delay any kind of implementation of the launch system for at least eighteen hours. With the right kind of tools, they could get into that block, say, by midnight.”

“What kind of tools? Saws, drills? Would you be thinking of a safecracker, something like that?”

“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