The Day Before Midnight

him.

“You’ll get your great chance, Frank. Just grow up a little, will you? It’s going to be a long day.”

Skazy said, “Look, Dick, if you have any trouble because it’s me here, and because I took my shot at you at Desert One, that’s fine. A commander deserves support from his juniors. I’ll step out of my command and go in as a regular trooper. McKenzie can take over, he’s a good man. But goddammit, Dick, you’ve got to use us this time.”

Puller looked at him.

“Get back to your unit, Major,” he said.

Outside, the trucks had begun to move toward the mountain.

Rat Team Baker was suiting up in the barn. In the distance a chopper had landed, its blades beating with a liquid slosh of noise against the wooden walls. The rhythm was insistent, urgent, and through it they could hear the sound of the National Guard trucks rumbling down the muddy road toward the mountain. But the two men, aware that in minutes they’d be airborne, worked hard at getting ready.

“Here,” Witherspoon said. “You keep this on your belt.”

“Yo, man, thanks,” said Walls, taking it. It was a Taurus PT-92 9-mm automatic in black matte finish, with a double-stacked magazine that held fifteen rounds. He popped the magazine, which dropped out, then locked back the slide and looked into the chamber, where everything seemed to gleam with bright highlights. He thumbed the slide release, and the heavy sheath of metal slammed forward. The gun snapped in his hand. He reinserted the mag, and rejacked the slide to chamber a round.

“Safety up or down, man?”

“Up is on. You go to red by snapping it down. That’s a double-action piece, so you don’t have to carry it cocked and locked.”

“Cocked and locked it’s gonna be,” said Walls, “just like my old.45. Cocked and locked is best.”

It was a nice piece for backup, but not quite what he wanted for the main work.

“Now, what about Mr. Twelve?” Walls asked, slipping the automatic into an ambidextrous Bianchi holster on his belt.

“Say again?”

“Mr. Twelve Gauge. Shotgun, man.”

“Yeah, so I found one. Here it is,” Witherspoon said, handing the weapon over: a Mossberg 500, with a twenty-inch barrel in a grainy gray Parkerized finish. It had a combat magazine extension beyond the pump reaching out to the muzzle, giving it a chin-heavy, pugnacious profile.

“That piece is very important to the guy that owns it. He didn’t want to give it up. It’s called a Persuader. Now he didn’t want to give it up. It’s his life insurance. But I talked him into it.”

Walls took the gun and knew at once it was made for him. He held it, touched it, rubbed it, smelled it, clicked it. Damn, it felt good.

He began to thread the heavy red plastic double-ought twelve-gauge shells into it, discovering that it would swallow eight of them. Loaded, it felt heavy; all that buckshot slung out under the barrel. He jammed dozens more into the leg pouches of his camouflage pants until his legs felt as if he were exercising. It would mean he might have to lay on the suckers, but it was better to hurt a little and have the spares when you needed them than to be comfortable and come up dry at party time. He’d found that out in a hole somewhere. He held the loaded gun close to him.

Meanwhile Witherspoon was locking a 30-round 9-mm clip into his Heckler&Koch MP-5. The gun had a foolish look to it, a sci-fi look: its ribbed silencer threw it out of proportion.

“Is that a toy, man? It looks like some kind of plastic kid toy.”

“It works great,” said Witherspoon, “a great close-in weapon.”

Then Witherspoon put on his AN/PVS-5C night vision goggles. They looked like a set of binoculars mounted in some kind of scuba-diving mask, which was held on Witherspoon’s head by a harness of elastic straps; they drew their power from a 1.3V DC battery pack he wore at his belt. The glasses responded to heat, and in the cool blackness of a tunnel a man would radiate an orange glow as if he were on fire, making him easy to track and kill.

“You could have used this stuff in ’Nam,” Witherspoon said.

Walls snorted.

“Man, I’m so bad I can see in the dark without help, you know. That’s what kept me alive.”

Then Witherspoon pulled on his flak jacket, which had already been mounted with an AN-PRC-88 radio receiver. A pair of headphones with a hands-free mike on a pylon out in front of his lips completed the outfit. He stuffed a book-sized mass of gray clay into one bellows pocket. Walls knew it to be C-4; he’d blown up a few things in his time in the tunnels.

Witherspoon stood, staggered for just a second under the weight of the gear. Walls couldn’t help a little laugh.

“Man, you look like a ghostbuster,” said Walls, “and you talk like an ofay. Man, how long you study, learn to talk that white bullshit? ‘It’s a great close-in weapon,’” Walls mocked through his nose with a cruel grin on his face. “Be natural, my man. Be a nigger. You a nigger, be a nigger.”

“I don’t care how I sound if it keeps me alive and gives me the edge,” said Witherspoon, stung by the accusation.

“A bad nigger with a bad shotgun, that’s the best motherfuckin’ edge,” said Walls.

The men rose from their ritual. Walls pulled on his flak jacket too. He’d nixed the night vision stuff. There were picks, shovels, grenades, and a few other gimcracks to be arranged, but essentially they were ready. Then he noticed a red bandanna on a bench, left over from some cracker handyman or other. Quickly, Walls flicked off his watch cap, snatched it up, expertly spun it into a roll, then tied it Apache-style around his forehead.

“You see, boy,” he said to the horrified Witherspoon, “in the hole it’s hot as shit, and the sweat sting up your eyes. Saw a white guy once blown away ’cause he missed a first shot ’cause he couldn’t see nothing.” He smiled for the first time.

An officer yelled, “Game time, rats.”

The moment had come. Walls grabbed his Mossberg, felt the heave and slap of the automatic at his hip, the weight of the flak jacket. He lumbered out to the chopper.

The tough-looking old white guy stood off to one side as they ran to the slick, watching them go with numb eyes. Brass, Walls thought. White brass. Shit, he hated white brass, stern fuckers with little squinty eyes who looked at you like you were shit on their shoes.

But then the white old guy gave him a little thumbs-up for happy hunting and — fuck it! — hey, winked at him. Walls saw the radiance of something almost never on the pale, slack faces of the white race — belief. That is, belief in him, in Walls.

You may not be much of anything, motherfucker, the old white guy was saying, but damn, boy, you one hell of a tunnel rat.

You got that right, Jack, thought Walls, running the last few yards through the breeze to the bird.

The Vietnamese woman, in black with an M-16 and a pair of gym shoes, was already aboard, a blank look on her face. But as he moved closer, squinting in the bright sunlight, she looked at him.

Jesus, he thought, losing himself in her opaque glare, home again.

The Huey with the two Rat Teams lifted, nose heavy, a bit ungainly, hung for just a second, and then with an agility that even these many helicopters into his career still surprised Puller, zoomed off, and he watched it go.

“Good pilot on that ship,” Major Skazy yelled. “He’ll insert ’em just where you want ’em.”

Puller said nothing. He shifted his vision. Across the white meadow, under the bright sun and blue sky, he now saw the NG trucks in the distance, deuce-and-a-halfs, a convoy of them, small as toys, now lumbering into the woods to begin the ascent to the primary assault position.

The trucks moved poorly, tentatively bunched up; one would spurt ahead, then slow. It was an accordion opening and closing across the landscape.