of bland personality. His courage, however, was incontrovertible: A general was quoted in
But all that was in the future. For now Walls simply stepped out, blinked at the flashbulb, and walked forward, unsure where to go. The soldiers, most of them from the Ranger battalion who’d come down to relieve Delta, stood a little in awe of him.
Then someone said, “Way to go, Delta.”
“Delta did it,” someone else said.
“Delta got it done,” another said.
“That’s Delta. That’s the best.”
“Goddamn, Delta kicked ass.”
Then someone clapped and then someone else, and in seconds it was an ovation, and Walls just stood there, a little unsure what to do, whom to report to, grinning modestly.
Then the man who saved the world uttered the sentence that made him a global sensation.
“What’s for breakfast?”
The truck with the three hearses left the Soviet Embassy at six A.M., went out Constitution to the Roosevelt Bridge, and picked up the George Washington Parkway. It was followed the whole way to the Beltway by the FBI van.
“They’re going to Dulles,” said the driver.
“I know,” said Nick Mahoney.
The Soviet truck turned off the Dulles access road, shot by the huge gull-shaped terminal, and turned down a road marked Cargo Access Only. The FBI vehicle did not bother to mask its surveillance, which extended only to the point of a huge Cyclone fence marked AEROFLOT. Beyond, Virginia technically became Russia; the truck sped through the gate and disappeared into the hangar.
“Wanna go back?” asked the driver.
“No,” said Mahoney. “Just park here, right out in the open. I want the bastards to see us good. To know that we’re watching.”
Mahoney got out of the van, leaned against it, lit a cigarette, and peered nakedly through the fence. It was chilly; the sun was beginning to rise. Mahoney looked at it.
Hello, sun, he thought. Nice to see you.
In time, a single figure emerged from the hangar and walked across the tarmac to the gate.
“Mahoney, what do you want?” he said tiredly. “Do you want me to officially complain again? We’ve all had a difficult night.”
“I’ll say. So how close did it go before he stopped it, Max?”
Max Stretov was senior KGB, in charge of embassy security. He and Mahoney were old antagonists.
“You tell me, Mahoney.”
“You know our mikes aren’t that good. But just after midnight all hell broke loose in your place, I’ll tell you that. You had your doctors in there, all your security personnel, senior KGB and GRU
Stretov just looked at him. Then he said, “He was yours all along, I suppose. Poor Gregor, we never had him fixed for a double.”
“That’s the joke. We had him spotted but never turned him. We were using him for low-level disinformation. He wasn’t big enough for anything else. I guess he was big enough last night, huh?”
“This fellow Pashin—”
“The late Arkady Pashin.”
“Yes. He was a madman, you understand. Part of an insane group called Pamyat that pines for the old ways. What he did he did on his own.”
“Yeah, sure. That’s the line, huh? We’ll let the smart guys figure that one out. By the way, Max, I got something for you.”
“You know I can’t take anything from you.”
“Bend the rules a little, buddy.”
Mahoney reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a small military ribbon, blue and white.
“One of the guys in the outfit had it,” he said. “It’s nothing, just a little trinket. You do me a favor, you give it to Gregor’s widow, okay?”
The Russian looked at it, recognized it as the ribbon signifying the Silver Star, and knew that Mahoney had won it as a Marine captain outside Ap Hung Nghia in 1966.
“I can’t take it, Mahoney. But it’s a nice thought. He deserved it, I’ll say that. The Goshgarian bitch put two bullets into him, and he lived long enough to stop the world from ending. Fortunately, he was an alcoholic. He shorted out the detonator mechanism with vodka. Such an absurd victory. Anyway, I wish I could take it from you.”
“Yeah, well, I wish you could too. I’ll say one thing: for a little fat fuck, he was a prince.”
“A prince,” agreed the Russian, turning back to the hangar.
It was dawn now, and looked to be another fine, bright cold Maryland day. Dick Puller was by himself, outside the command center. Actually, he’d wandered away in the night, and let other experts take over. It was for the medical people to handle now, because there were so many wounded and there was the terrible task of extracting the badly hit up the elevator shaft to the mountaintop and then to the medevac choppers.
So from where he sat it looked like the site of some civil disaster. Choppers were ferrying the wounded down from the mountain to the field hospital, where a shock trauma unit had been set up under a large tent with a red cross emblazoned upon it. At the same time, all the world’s ambulances had collected at the tent, too, to transport the less severely wounded to regional facilities. Red lights blinked furiously and the intense commotion generated a sense of blur, of frenzy without direction. Puller just stared at it, barely conscious. He couldn’t find the energy just now to sort it out.
Instead, he had a sense of grief. Yet it was not for himself, though he also had a presentiment of failure, of all the grounds on which he was vulnerable. Without thinking about it much, he knew, in the way these things worked, that he’d be destroyed again. He’d have to answer for Bravo, and why he’d sent it to die twice, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. But the grief he felt at this time was not for himself.
Jesus, a lot of men, good ones, gone forever. That was what left you feeling so degraded and debauched afterward. You just wanted to go off somewhere and lie down and sleep and somehow will them back into their bodies and will them whole and healthy again. But you never could. You wondered if you’d ever look at a hill again and not see its slopes full of dying boys begging for their mothers and asking why it had to be them and not some other guys. It was the one question he’d never found an answer for in all his years and on all his hills.
He was sitting on a swing, gently rocking back and forth. He looked at his watch—0700. Morning of the new day. The early light was pale, almost incandescent. It played off the snow in peculiar textures, almost turning blue. The sky above the mountain also looked to be blue, blue and pure, without a cloud to mar it anywhere. He shivered, drawing his coat around him; it was very cold. He had a headache and felt older than the blue mountain that humped up before him, benign now, and remote. If there was a lesson in this, he didn’t know it. It was no parable; it was just a battle.
He watched now as a young man left the command center and shuffled across the snowy field toward him. No, it wasn’t Skazy, or poor Uckley, or Dill, or God help him, Peter Thiokol — all his boys who had not made it through the night. Poor Peter, he might even have been the bravest, braver than any soldier. He certainly was smart. Or Uckley, down where he shouldn’t have been, standing out there, drawing the fire that came for Peter. And Frank. Frank, you were a prick and a hothead, and maybe even a psycho, but we needed a man to lead the assault, to go down first, knowing exactly the consequences, and you went without a second thought.
Puller saw that it was the junior Delta officer McKenzie, commander of the last attack on the Soviet strongpoint. He’d be the inheritor of it all.
“Sir, I thought you’d like to know the President is on his way. He’ll be arriving shortly.”
