The Day Before Midnight

“My sweet, I—”

But she had hung up. Strange, no? he thought. But he felt much better now. He looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. Time for his drive out to Columbia and his little job for the agent Pork Chop.

“Colonel Puller?” It was the FBI agent, Uckley.

“Yes?” asked Puller.

“It’s an eyes-only from White House Operations. They want to know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening?” A quick, angry glance. It was said that Puller had talked to Carter himself from the ground at Desert One. “Tell ’em Delta’s in, we’re working out our assault details, we’re waiting for Air and the Third Infantry and have high hopes for the Rangers. Make something up.”

“They sound mad,” said Uckley, a little unsure at Puller’s lack of interest in Washington.

“I don’t give a fuck what they are,” said Dick sharply. He looked over at Peter. “They’ll want action. What they don’t know, of course, is that the wrong action is worse than no action. Much worse. See, I have to fight them just as hard as I have to fight what’s-his-face up in the mountain. Now, Dr. Thiokol. Peter, is it? Okay if I call you Peter?”

“Sure,” said Peter.

“Now, Peter, I checked your file. Very smart guy. Great record. A-plus on the report card, all the way through.” His cold little eyes gazed at Peter with regret. “But what’s this shit about Taylor Manor? Some bin in Ellicott City. You had a problem?”

“I had some difficulties when my marriage broke up. But that’s all taken care of now.”

“You flipped, huh? Let me ask you straight out: How’s your head? Screwed on tight and outstanding? Are you crazy anymore?”

“I’m feeling fine,” said Peter evenly, wondering why this bastard hated him so much. Then he concluded that Puller hated everyone. The man was sheer aggression.

“What I need from you is a lot of hard work. I need a genius. I need a guy who knows that mountain who can figure things out for me. See, maybe I can crack that hole if I can figure out how. But I need a genius along to whisper in my ear. Can you give me the help I need, no bullshit games, no little sullen pouts, no prima donna shit. I don’t have time for the star system.”

“I’m fine,” said Peter again. “You can count on me. I guarantee it.”

“Excellent. That’s all I need to know. Now — who’s up there?”

“Search me,” said Peter.

“All right. Why are they up there?”

“To launch,” said Peter. “This is the only strategic installation in the United States with independent launch capability. There’s no point to taking it if you weren’t going to make the bird fly.”

“Why? What would be the point?”

“There isn’t one that I can figure,” said Peter. “Unless it’s sheer nihilism. Somebody just wants the world to end. It doesn’t make any kind of strategic sense; when the bird flies, the Sovs launch on warning. Then we all die. The beetles take over.”

“Some kind of crazy death wish, like the guy who took the gun into the airliner and shot the pilot?”

“More than that, but I don’t know what it is. But I guarantee you, there’s more, somehow. There’s some other aspect to the plan, some wit, some-theory, some long-range aspiration. This is only one part of it, that I can tell you. This is part of some larger scheme.”

“Goddammit, I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius!”

“I am a genius,” said Peter. “But maybe that guy up there is too.”

“When you figure it out,” said Puller, “I want you to tell me first. Right away. It’s crucial. If I know what’s going on, maybe I can figure out who’s doing it. Now, can we get in?”

“No,” said Peter.

“Goddammit,” said Dick Puller.

“No, I don’t, think you can. I understand they have people up there.”

“Sixty well-armed men.”

“Military?”

“The very finest. From what I’ve been able to tell, their seizure op was very crisply handled. Very neat, very impressive. Right now they’ve thrown the goddamned thing under some kind of tarpaulin. We can’t see what they’re doing up there. Pretty damned smart. We’ve got zillion-dollar birds in the sky that can see through clouds and rain and tornadoes and tell us whether Gorbachev had his eggs up or over easy. But there isn’t a lens alive that’ll see through an inch of canvas. What do you suppose they’re up to?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Worse than that, they sent a radio signal to somebody. Who do you suppose they were talking to, Dr. Thiokol? Another bunch of commandos, getting ready to jump us as we put our assault together, really mess us up? Maybe a group to hit our airfields, stop our goddamned Tac Air? Maybe a part of this other aspect of the plan. What, Dr. Thiokol? Any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” said Peter bluntly. “The only thing I know about is missiles. And missile basing. And I know this. You’re going to have a hell of a time getting up there, whether you get hit by another outfit or not. I had access to a computer survey of small-unit action in Vietnam and it suggests that all the advantages are with the defenders.”

“Jesus, you had to get a computer to tell you that?”

Peter ignored him, plunging onward to the dark heart of the matter. “But even, say, even if you kill the men on the hill, you’ve still got to get through that door to the elevator shaft in the LCF to get to the LCC. It’s the only way down. And the door is eleven tons of titanium. If you started cutting through last week, you wouldn’t get there by midnight.”

“What about just opening the door?” Puller asked.

Peter made an involuntary face that communicated the idea that he was talking to a child, then said contemptuously, “The door is controlled by a Category F Permissive Action Link security device. A multiple twelve- digit code with limited try. Three strikes and you’re out.”

“How did he get it? Inside job?”

“No, they change the code every twenty-four hours. But one of the wrinkles here is that the code is kept up top, too, in the security officer’s safe, in case SAC has to get down there. That’s the way we planned it. But nobody is supposed to know this. It was a secret. Anyway, they must have blown the safe, got the code, and rode the elevator down and jumped the guys in the hole. Easy.”

“Can’t we call SAC and get the code?”

Peter made another snotty face. “Come on,” he said. “This guy—”

“Aggressor-One, we’ve tagged him.”

“Yes, Aggressor-One,” Peter said, thinking, they certainly got that right, “he can reset his own code from inside.”

“Could we blow through it?”

“You’d need so much explosive, you’d blow the mainframe that runs the upper installation, including the door code. The doors would lock shut permanently, you’d never get in.”

“Hmmm,” said Dick Puller.

“Maybe, just maybe they don’t know about the key vault. If the guys inside had enough warning to use the key vault, then they’re sitting on the most useless piece of real estate in America. Because the key vault was a late modification. If we knew when they made their intelligence breakthrough, then we’d know how much they could know. That’s the prime question. Do they have a welder?”

“Let’s assume they do. They certainly knew everything else. They knew the codes, the procedures. They knew the Commo equipment.”

If it were possible, the skin on Puller’s face seemed to stretch tighter. He looked like a man with a massive headache. He lit another Marlboro. He turned back to the old man, who had been sitting abstractedly during his conversation with Thiokol, chewing on his dentures.

“Well, Mr. Brady,” he said, “you think we could get in from below?”

“No, no,” Peter interrupted impatiently. He hated stupidity. “No, the concrete is super-hardened to thirty-two