The Day Before Midnight

“I think they are a delusion,” said Peter Thiokol. “And the more time you waste on it, the less time you have to deal with reality. That door is it. You’ve got to get through the door.”

Puller said, “Dr. Thiokol, now you know why you’re here. You’ve got to get us through that door.”

And so Peter sat back.

The door. He had to figure the door. The door had just become his problem.

“Can you do it?” asked Puller.

“There’s a code,” said Peter. “Whoever is running things up there will reset the PAL to his own specifications. So that means I’ve got to break their code. It’s very tricky. There’re twelve digits required for an unlock. It’s got what’s called a limited try capacity. If you—”

“Can you do it?”

“You need a cryptanalyst, Colonel Puller.”

Dick Puller’s voice was hard.

“I know I do. I don’t have time to dig one up. I have to fight with what I have. That’s you.”

Peter said nothing. He had a splitting headache. The irony was almost comic now; Megan, a cultivator of ironies, would have loved it: he had crafted the system to be impenetrable, and now he had to penetrate it.

Delta staff was working out its assault plan when the first chopper arrived; before Puller could pull himself away, the second one pulled in.

His young factotum, Uckley, hustled in.

“They’re both here. Jesus, Colonel, you won’t believe—”

But Dick merely nodded; he had no time for surprise.

“Dr. Thiokol, you stick with the Delta assault plans team. Uckley, you buzz FBI counterintelligence and get us into their loop. I want all their findings. That’s highest priority. Then you get Martin again, and bug ’em on regunning A-10s ASAP. Nobody goes anywhere without air. I’m going to go see the recruits.”

Pulling on his coat, he rushed out. The two new Hueys sat out on the softball field, their rotors whirling up a cascade of snow. He looked for his prizes and saw a crowd huddled over in the garage and rushed to it. Entering, he was at first baffled: nothing but state cops and Delta operators and a few National Guardsmen from the first NG trucks that had pulled in. But no, he’d missed them, because they were so small. Yes, they’d be small.

The black man had worn his prison Levi’s but had conned a Delta trooper out of a black commando sweater and a blue wool watch cap that was pulled down low to his eyes. He was only about five eight, but Dick recognized certain things immediately: The hands holding a cigarette were surprisingly large. The eyes were narrow and surly. He held himself with an impossible combination of insouciance and discipline. He had some hard sense of self to him, a kind of physical confidence that burned like heat. He had street smarts. He looked at no one: his eyes were fierce and set and dark and glared furiously into space. It all said, don’t fuck with me.

As for the woman, it wasn’t so much her gender or her unprepossessing size that shocked him, but her youth. She must have gone into the tunnels early in her teens, for now, ten years after her ten years then, she looked just a bit over thirty. And she was beautiful, wouldn’t you know it? Dick’s wife had never suspected, but Dick had lived with a Vietnamese woman for two years during his long pulls in country. Her name was Chinh; the Communists had finally caught her and killed her. She died in a burst of plastique on Highway 1 moving into Cholon in ’72. Phuong looked a lot like Chinh: the same dignity, the same sweetness. Or no, not exactly: Dick thought that with study he could see the weight of the war on her. He shook his head.

“My rats,” he said.

His rats looked at him. The girl had trouble focusing; the black man looked as if he wanted to fight him.

“You the man?” asked Nathan Walls.

“I am, Mr. Walls.”

Walls laughed. “Where’s the hole?”

“The hole is at the base of that mountain there,” Dick said, pointing to the dramatic white hump out the open door, seeming surprisingly close. “And that”—he pointed out the lumpy, ragged silhouette of the South Mountain installation at the peak—“that is where we want to go. Where we need to go.”

“So let’s do it,” said Walls.

Puller went to the woman.

“Chao ba, Phuong?” he asked, meaning Hello, Madame Phuong.

She seemed to relax at the sound of her language, issued a shy smile. He saw that she was scared to death to be among so many large white men.

She said, “Chao ong,” meaning, Hello, sir.

“I am privileged that you are here,” he said. “We are very lucky to have you.”

“They said there were bombs for children. Firebombs. It was for us to stop them, sir.”

He clung to the formal voice in addressing her, feeling the language, so far buried in his memory over the past fifteen years, work itself free from his brain. “The worst American demon, worse even than the terror bombers. Some men have taken it over. We have to get it back and the only way in is through a tunnel.”

“Then I am yours to command,” she said vaguely.

“Do you have any English, Madame Phuong?”

“Some,” she said. “Little.” She smiled shyly.

“If you don’t understand, stop me. Ask questions. I will explain in your language.”

“Tell me. Just tell me.”

He switched to English, addressing them both.

“I want to place you during the assault, which will begin as soon as we get our air support. We have to blow a hole in the mountain and I want it done under the cover of a lot of other fireworks going on. I don’t want whoever is up there knowing we’ve put people in the ground.”

“Shit,” laughed Walls. “If he smart, he know. If he so smart, he got all you down here sucking your thumbs, he going to know. He going to be waiting. Like they was back in his pretty lady’s country. Tunnel going to be hot, let me tell you.”

That was part of it, Dick thought. The tunnel rats always knew somebody was awaiting them.

“Are you hungry? Would you care to eat? You should rest, you’ll be going in soon. And I’d like you to take people along. You shouldn’t be alone in the tunnels.”

“In the tunnel,” said Walls, “you always alone. But get me a skinny man who don’t get too close and listen to orders.”

Dick was a bit undone by Walls’s directness, and on this next point he proceeded with unusual caution, aware he’d entered delicate territory. “A black man, Mr. Walls? Would you feel more comfortable with another black man?” Several of the Delta troopers were black.

Walls laughed his hard laugh again. “It don’t matter,” he said. “In the hole, everybody’s a nigger.”

* * *

Phuong sat as if in a trance. She was not quite healthy, and had never been, since the tunnels. Her French psychiatrist had diagnosed her as a fifth-level schizophrenic, as if so many jolts in the tunnels, the loss of so many, the experience of so much horror, had finally, almost mercifully, broken the moorings of her mind, and like a small boat it drifted this way and that just off shore. She did not like bright lights, crowds, or to talk much about herself. She liked children, flowers, the out-of-doors, children especially. She spoke to her daughter at night, when she was alone, carrying her in a place near her heart. She remembered watching her daughter dissolve in a blossom of napalm; the flames had burned her eyebrows and the roar of the explosions had almost deafened her. She had tried to run into the fire, but someone had stopped her.

So now she sat in the barn with the black man whom she understood to be in some queer way her equivalent and at the same time tried to force herself to demonstrate out of politeness interest in the K ration they had put with apologies before her. It was getting close to time now, she could tell because all the men were grave and drawn and they had at last stopped playing with their weapons; she recognized the symptoms: battle was near. She had been there before.

In the old days, her revolutionary fervor, her nationalism, had sustained her. She believed in her country and in freedom from the hated white men; it was worth dying for and worth killing for. But the killing had finally taken its toll: she was thirteen when she went underground and twenty-three when she came out and had killed over one