The Day Before Midnight

hundred men, most of them with an M-1 carbine but more than a few with a knife. Her skill was stealth and patience: she could lie in the dark forever, almost still as death. Yet she felt so tired and now she was going back. To stop bombs from burning more children. To stop the world from becoming all fire and darkness everywhere.

A man came before her.

“Chao chi” he said, using the familiar, as in, Hello, Sister Phuong.

“Chao anh,” she replied, out of politeness, feeling awkward in calling him brother.

“My name is Teagarden.”

The American names were so hard.

“Dee-gar-dahn,” she tried. It hurt her mouth.

“Call me brother. I will be your brother in the tunnel. They asked me to go with you, which is why I call you sister.”

She asked her daughter, who still lived in her heart, what do you think of this man?

He seems decent, her daughter said from her heart. But is he strong, Mother? In the tunnel, decency doesn’t count, only strength.

“Have you ever been in a tunnel, brother?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“Why are you here? Did you volunteer for this?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “They asked me because of the language, sister.”

He is not pleased about it, her daughter told her from her heart. Not good. In the tunnel, faith is important.

Her frank stare encouraged him to confession.

“To be honest, Sister Phuong, I’m scared to death,” he said. “I hate the dark, I hate close, dirty places. But they asked me, and in our unit it isn’t done to refuse an assignment.”

“Can you control your fear?”

“I was in your country for over three years,” he said. “I was scared every day and in battle every other day. I learned to control my fear there.”

Tell him that underground is different, her daughter said.

“Underground is different,” she said. “You’ll see, it’s different. Control is everything. Iron will, resolve.”

“I’ll try,” he said. He was a healthy, leathery-looking man, about forty.

“In the dark, everybody is scared. The survivor is the man of control.”

“I can only try,” said Dee-gar-dahn.

“Do you have a family, brother?”

“Yes. Three boys. Great boys. The big one’s a hero on a sports team. The other two, well, it’s too soon to tell.”

She could see his eyes warm at the mention.

See, Mother, he has children. He has love in his heart. He is not alone.

“You are a lucky man, brother,” she said, “and I will let you come with me into the tunnel. We will stop the demons from setting the world on fire.”

“Sister, we shall, this I swear to you,” said Dee-gar-dahn, and thus did Rat Team Alpha begin its career.

Rat Team Baker began under less auspicious circumstances. Delta Command selected, for crude and perhaps obvious reasons, another black man to accompany Nathan Walls. He was a short, muscular staff sergeant named Jeff Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a proud, furiously hardworking, and gifted young soldier who had at one time been an excellent boxer. He was every bit what might be called a team man: he believed in committing to the larger issue and therefore transcending the limits of his own rages. His commitment went first to his country, secondly to the Army, and third to Delta Force, which was the first team. He had joined Delta from the 3d Ranger Battalion in Fort Eustis, Washington, just in time to see action in Grenada.

Nate Walls was, by his peculiarities of vision, everything to be despised, everything that hurt the American black: a lazy no-account black-as-black northern jive-ass nigger, a dog. He was poison to the country and to the race.

“Walls?”

“Yo, man.”

“Name’s Witherspoon. I’ll be going with you.”

“Man, they pay you for this shit?”

“Yes, they do.”

“How much? How much you make?”

“With hazard pay and various allowances, seventeen hundred a month.”

A big grin split Nate Walls’s face.

“Shit, man,” he laughed, “I used to do that kind of change on a Saturday night on Pennsylvania Avenue. You going to risk your motherfucking ass for a seventeen spot.” He laughed at the richness of it.

Witherspoon just looked at him, controlling his temper. Then he turned his wrist, looked at his watch, a big Seiko worn upside down.

“You’d better get some food. We go at 1450 hours. That’s soon.”

“I like that watch, man. That’s one pretty piece of jewelry, and I like jewelry. Let me tell you, in the ’Nam, sergeant named Lopez get himself a new fancy Seiko scuba watch like that, he take it in a hole. Man, you could see numbers a mile away. The gooks used it to read by, and then some gook lady like that pretty girl over there, she put a bullet through it, right through the number twelve, blow off his hand. When he scream, she put a bullet down his throat. I know, ’cause I had to go in and throw some motherfucking wire around his legs, you know, drag his dead ass out of there. So you want to wear your fancy watch, Jack, you stay the fuck away from me.” He laughed again.

Witherspoon looked at him.

“I’ll take it off before we go and leave it with somebody.”

“And, man, that deodorant. I can smell that shit, man, you know. If there’s Charlie Gook in that hole, man, he smell that shit too. Then he blow your ass away, and mine too. Man, do us both some good and wipe your arms out, man. Shit, you sending telegrams.”

“There isn’t supposed to be anybody in the tunnels.”

“Man, lemme tell you, just when you think nobody there, that’s when they put you in a body bag. You married, my man?”

“Yes,” said Witherspoon.

“You get any pussy last night, man?”

“Knock it off.”

“Shit, man, only ass I had was when some white biker dude use my ass for fun in the showers. I could check out some pussy about now, let me tell you, before this last trip.”

“They wanted me to go over weapons,” Witherspoon said crisply. “You can do an M-16, or one of these little German machine guns, the MP-5. Or a.45 or a 9-mm automatic.”

“Fuck, man, I could never hit the ground with a pistol. I hate them big automatics too. Machine guns make my ass nervous, bounce around too much. I want a shotgun, a pump, sawed down real good. When you fire that mother, I want a noise louder than hell. Scare Charlie, if it hot down there. You ask that girl. Cooks don’t like noise.”

“These aren’t Asians. This isn’t Vietnam,” Witherspoon said dully.

“Oh yes it is, my man. Oh yes it is. Now, let’s see about a shotgun. You got a shotgun for this nigger?”

Witherspoon said he’d check it out and trotted off.

Walls sat back, smoking a cigarette. The old feeling was beginning deep inside him. It was what you felt when you knew the shit was going down, a kind of loose, trembly buzz in the gut, not really unpleasant, just odd.