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
“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 protege you’re trying to help out?” asked the Chief of Naval Ops.
“
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,
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
