The Day Before Midnight

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 suspended 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