what you’ll sense, Mr. Walls, is one second of incredible light. In the next nanosecond, Mr. Walls, your body will be vaporized into sheer energy. As will the bodies of everybody in the first circle of destruction, which will extend in a circumference of about three miles from the point of detonation. What’s that, warden, would you say, about a million and a half people?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, and in a wider circle — say, ten miles in diameter — there will be extraordinary blast damage and your usual run-of-the-mill trauma associated with high explosive. You know, Mr. Walls, you saw enough of it in Vietnam: third degree burns, severed limbs, blindness, deep lacerations and contusions, multiple fractures and concussions. I expect it will be worst on the kids trapped in the schools. There won’t be any parents around to do much good for them, so they’ll just have to do the best they can, and pray for an early death. Now, in a circle out to twenty miles you’ll have much less actual damage, but the deaths from radiation poisoning will begin within forty-eight hours. Horrible deaths. Deaths by vomiting, by dehydration, by nausea. Not a pretty picture. I’d say in this immediate area no less than three million dead by the end of the week. Now, Mr. Walls, you project that onto every major city in America and the Soviet Union and you’ll see that we’re talking about some severe consequences. A full nuclear exchange would involve the deaths of no less than five hundred million people. And, Mr. Walls, if we don’t get into that installation, that’s what’s going to happen.”
“If the white man blow his ass up, that’s his problem,” said Nathan Walls.
“Mr. Walls, the Soviets have some extraordinary hardware at their disposal, but not even they have been able to build a bomb that discriminates between races. Think of the bomb as the greatest equal opportunity employer in history. It will take us all, Mr. Walls, regardless of our race, creed, or political affiliation, and it will make ash or corpses of us. And if you have any illusions of the third world picking up the pieces, I’d advise you against them. A, there will be no pieces, and B, the radiation deaths will girdle the globe. The survivors will be mutant rats and your friends the cockroaches, who will outlast us all.”
This had very little impact on Nathan Walls, who had never, by inclination or opportunity, had much chance to cultivate the ability to think in abstract terms. There was, in the entire universe, only one phenomenon worthy of consideration: his ass. Yet he saw how urgent the situation was to the suits, even if he could not quite get with the doom jive offered him by the head suit. And so he decided to play a little game.
“And if I can get you into this place?”
“You’ll have the thanks of your government. And the satisfaction of knowing you changed history.”
“And I’ll throw in another six weeks in solitary,” said the warden.
This wasn’t quite enough. But Walls reasoned that in the open he might have a shot at a getaway and, failing that, if by chance he brought it off, it might jingle out to some loose change for him.
“Couldn’ get Nate Walls a shot at another joint?” he asked. “Say, Allentown, where all the white politicians go? There’s a swimming pool and pussy there, or so they tell it.”
“Mr. Walls,” said the suit, “you give us Burkittsville and we’ll give you Allentown.”
“I’ll give him
Even as the leader of Rat Team Baker was being recruited in the Maryland State Penitentiary in downtown Baltimore, the leader of Rat Team Alpha was being lured out of retirement in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The key figure in the seduction was a young man from the State Department named Lathrop, who found himself nervous and alone in the front room of a small house off Lee Highway in Arlington, Virginia. It smelled of pork and odd spices and was decorated cheaply, with sparse furniture from Caldor’s. Awkwardly, as he waited, he looked out the window. There he saw a young woman wrapped warmly against the chill, playing with three children. He was struck by her beauty: She had one of those delicate, pale Oriental faces, and there was something extraordinarily graceful in her movements.
Someone called his name, and he turned to discover a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of polyester trousers.
“Mr. Nhai?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Lathrop. What have we done wrong? Is something wrong with our papers? All our papers are in order. The church checked them out very specifically, it’s—”
“No, no, Mr. Nhai, this has nothing to do with papers. It’s something quite unusual, uh—” he paused, sensing the utter despair behind Nhai’s obsequiousness. “I have been asked by my government to bring an unusual request to you.”
“Yes, Mr. Lathrop?”
“I can tell you only that we have an urgent security problem a hundred miles outside of Washington, and it appears that one of the solutions to this problem may involve a long and dangerous passage through a tunnel. We’ve set our computers to work to uncover former soldiers who served in a unit in Vietnam we called tunnel rats. That is, soldiers who went into tunnels, such as the ones at Cu Chi, and fought there.”
Nhai’s eyes yielded no light. They surrendered no meaning. They were dark, opaque, steady.
“It turns out these men are very difficult to find. They tended to be highly aggressive individuals, the sort who don’t join veterans’ groups. We’ve found only one.”
Mr. Nhai simply looked at him, sealed off and remote.
“But one of our researchers found out from a book a British journalist wrote that there was a single North Vietnamese who had served a decade in the tunnels who had actually immigrated to this country. A man named Tra-dang Phuong.”
The little man kept looking at Lathrop. His expression hadn’t changed.
“He’d had mental problems after the war, and his government sent him to Paris for treatment. And, by a strange turn of events, he met an American psychiatric resident there who took an interest in the case, and arranged for him to come to this country under the sponsorship of an Arlington Catholic church. We cross-checked our immigration records, and sure enough, Tra-dang Phuong is here. The man is here, in this house. He came over in ’eighty-three. Our records say he lives here.”
“I am Phuong’s uncle,” Mr. Nhai said.
“Then he’s here?”
“Phuong is here.”
“Can I see him?”
“It will do no good. Phuong spent ten years in the tunnels. The effects were grievous. Phuong believes in nothing and wants merely to be left alone. There’s little that makes Phuong happy anymore. Dr. Mayfield felt that to get Phuong away from the country and the memories would be of great help. It turns out he was wrong. Nothing is of help to Phuong. Phuong suffers from endless melancholy and feelings of pointlessness.”
“But this Phuong, he knows tunnels?”
“No one knows tunnels like Phuong.”
“Sir, would Mr. Phuong be willing to accompany our forces on this most urgent security operation? To go back into tunnels again?”
“Well, Mr. Lathrop, I seriously doubt it.”
“Could we please ask Phuong?”
“Phuong doesn’t like to talk.”
Lathrop was desperate.
“Please,” he almost begged. “Please, could we just ask him?”
Mr. Nhai looked at the young man for quite a while, and then with great resignation went to get Phuong.
While he waited, Mr. Nhai came back with the nurse and the children that Lathrop had seen outside in the garden, scrawny, energetic kids, all tangled up in one another. They ran forward to Mr. Nhai. He nuzzled them warmly and cooed into their ears.
The nurse stood to one side, watching.
It seemed to take an awfully long time. Lathrop wondered when Phuong would show.
“Mr. Lathrop,” said Mr. Nhai, “may I introduce Tra-dang Phuong, formerly of Formation C3 of the Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of Vietnam. She is famous in the north as Phuong of Cu Chi.”
Lathrop swallowed.
The girl’s dark eyes met his. They were lovely, almond-shaped. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, or
