was it that he didn’t read Oriental faces well, and hadn’t seen the lines around her eyes, the fatigue pressed deep in the flesh, the immutable sadness.
Mr. Nhai told her what he wanted.
“Tunnels,” she said in halting English.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lathrop said, “a long, terrible tunnel. The worst tunnel there ever was.”
She said something in Vietnamese.
“What did she say?” he asked Mr. Nhai.
“She said she’s already died three times in a tunnel, once for her husband and once for her daughter and once for herself.”
Lathrop looked at her, and felt curiously shamed. He was thirty-one, a graduate of good schools, and his life had been laborious but pleasant. Here stood a woman — a girl! — who had literally been sunk in a universe of shit and death for a decade and had paid just about all there was to pay — and yet was now a child’s nurse, aloof in her beauty. If you saw her in the supermarket, you wouldn’t get beyond the beauty of her alienness: she’d be part of another world.
“Will she do it? I mean”—he swallowed, uncomfortable with the break in his voice—“she’s
Mr. Nhai spoke quickly to the woman in Vietnamese. She replied.
“What did she say?”
“She’d rather not go back to tunnels.”
Lathrop was stymied. He wasn’t sure how much latitude he had in briefing her.
“It’s very important,” he said.
The girl would not look at him.
“I am sorry, Mr. Lathrop. I could talk to her. Make her see. But it would take time.”
Lathrop turned.
“Please,” he said. “It’s an emergency. Lives depend on it.”
The girl’s eyes would not meet his. She spoke quickly to her uncle.
“She says she would be no good in the tunnels. She would do more harm than good in the tunnels. She begs you to understand. In the tunnels, there is great fear for her.”
Lathrop mumbled something banal, made a last attempt at eye contact and failed. He searched his orderly mind for inspiration, and could find none. But in admitting defeat, he relaxed, and thereby found the key.
“Tell her it’s about bombs,” he said suddenly. “The bombs that burned her children. Her daughter. There’s more bombs for more children, for millions and millions of children. Now, if she can believe it, we Americans have to go into tunnels not to kill but to stop bombs falling on children and setting them aflame. It’s the only way, and the time is very, very short.”
The old man began to translate, but Phuong cut him off.
Her eyes looked into Lathrop’s and he was unhinged by their bottomlessness; it was like looking down into the deep black water.
Then, almost demurely, she nodded.
1300
It fell to Peter Thiokol to background-brief the Delta officers, the various state police supervisors, and other federal functionaries who had just showed up, and the liaison officer from the Maryland Air National Guard who would talk on the air strike. Peter knew he was not ordinarily an effective communicator, but in this one area he had maximum confidence. Nobody knew more about the subject at hand than he himself; he had created it from the deepest part of his own mind, and from his own terrors of — and deep fascination for — nuclear war. And also from his deepest vanity: that he could play the most dangerous sport of all and win.
“Peacekeeper is radical in two respects: first, it’s extremely accurate. We use it to target their ICBM silos. We don’t have to neutralize a soft opportunity like a city and kill five million people in order to hurt them.”
The officers looked at him mutely. He radiated conviction and kept his neuroses, of which there were many, well hidden. Peacekeeper was the redeemer. He believed in it; he was its John the Baptist.
“And secondly”—he had them, he could feel it—“these warheads bite very, very deep. By that I mean — this is the key to the concept — they give us access to all hardened targets; So we have the capacity not merely to disarm but to perform an activity we call decapitation. We can cut the head off, cleanly and surgically. Do you understand the implications?”
Of course they didn’t. The parabola of the grenade was the extent of their strategic imagination.
“It means from now on, when we talk, they listen, because we can put the warheads in their pockets. They hate it, let me tell you, the bastards hate it. It scares them. There are Soviet generals who know they’re behind and see Peacekeeper as the beginning of the end. Now,” he went on, getting at last to the crux of the matter, “what terrified me as I thought about ways to deploy Peacekeeper was the knowledge that the
Dick Puller’s voice cut at him out of the dark, impatient with the strategic context that had decreed South Mountain into existence, pressing for the hardcore nuts and bolts.
“Dr. Thiokol, let’s get to the tac stuff. We don’t have to understand it. We just have to shoot our way into it.”
“Then what you have to understand is that now that they’re in command, it’s not only them we’re fighting, it’s the mountain too. It’s the installation. If you bomb, say, or use heavy shells, napalm, that sort of thing, you’ll melt down the up-top mainframe and you’re out of luck. That’s not an accident: it was planned that way.” By me, he didn’t add. “And I’m telling you, the only possible way to get inside is to pop that door without explosive, get down in that hole. It can’t be done any other way.”
“Mr. Thiokol”—the voice was familiar, and Peter eventually recognized it as Skazy’s—“what do you think they’re doing under that tarpaulin they’ve thrown up?”
“I don’t know.”
“What could they do?”
“Well, not much. Dig in, I suppose, dig trenches. Perhaps they have some weapon they don’t want you to see, like a … a — well, I don’t know.”
“Why would they try to cover up like—”
“I don’t know,” Peter said, again irritated to be sidetracked at this silly stuff about the tarpaulin or whatever it was. That wasn’t the
“Mr. Thiokol, uh, Dr. Thiokol, what are our odds at pulling off a multiple simultaneous?”
Peter stumbled again. The jargon was from some other war culture. He didn’t recognize it.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Multiple Simultaneous Entry.” It was Puller. “That’s the Delta Doctrine. Attackers always outnumber defenders, but that advantage is lost if you can get in through only one entrance. We like to go through several at once. Can we get in more than one place at once?”
“No. Only through that shaft. The silo doors are super hard; the exhaust plugs don’t blow until the bird launches. There’s no other access.”
“What about underground? The mines?” Skazy asked.
“Dr. Thiokol does not see our tunnel rats as the answer to anything,” said Dick Puller to the group.
