The Day Before Midnight

“I came to dance, Colonel, not to sit.”

“Good luck, then, Tango Leader.”

Okay now, it was just Leo Pell and the mountain. He wasn’t worried about the small-arms stuff, though a spider web jinked his bubble where a LMG round had popped through at about ten o’clock, because he was sitting in his titanium bathtub, carrying self-sealing tanks, and had plenty of redundancy in his control systems. And he wasn’t worried about delivering his packages. Going in wasn’t the problem, even if you could see the tracers floating up to swat you. You were okay going in because your exhaust was behind you and their heatseekers wouldn’t see it to read it and chase it. You were okay until you showed them your hot ass.

When you passed the crest, you were wide open. You were like a bitch in heat and the missiles, like stud hounds, came up after you with one thing on their mind. They wanted you up the ass, that’s all there was for them.

So Leo, who wanted to live almost as much as he wanted the sheer gut-thumping joy of pumping twenty mike-mike into the mountain, resolved to juke in like a rock ‘n’ roll melody, up and down and down and up, straighten out for his seven seconds of deliverance, then cut hard to the left, dive for the deck, keep his engines astern from the mountain as much as possible, and just maybe Aggressor Force might not punch him out.

The mountain was fat as a tit in a centerfold. Leo began to evade. He pumped his rudder pedals, he diddled his decelerons, and he rode his stick. His ship, Green Fig, dipped and skidded through the air in a flight pattern that was more like a controlled catastrophe than a conscious design. And in his harness Leo felt the plane’s moves to the pit of his stomach and to his heart, which seemed to have gone on vacation for this last long ride.

Meanwhile, blobs of color floated up to smash him. He felt as if he were going down the drain of a brightly lit bubble bath. Strange radiances, odd visions, nightmares, fantasies, dope hallucinations, fever dreams, all floated by. There was a queer underwater quality to it, aquamarine and pastel, everything wonderfully graceful and stately. His plane bumped when hit; they were hitting the Fig pretty regularly now, all the guns on the mountain having their way with her.

He felt air suddenly as a stitchwork of holes sparked through the bubble just over his head; something like a firecracker went off in the cockpit. His left arm went numb. His mirror blew off. Smoke, acrid and rancid, began to fill the cockpit. Didn’t they know the No Smoking sign was lit?

“Tango Leader, watch yourself, lookin’ good, lookin’ real good,” FAC was saying.

Okay now, Leo thought, get in real close, blow those motherfuckers away, hurt ’em, hurt ’em bad now.

Leo saw the mountaintop lined up in the floating circles of his head-up display. The trees were alive with fire and light and commotion. He checked his airspeed, 220, his altitude, 1,450, his angle of attack, 37, the onrushing hump, corrected his deflection just a touch, and it was gun time.

He hit the nipple.

The guns spent themselves in seven long seconds. The twenty mike-mike bursts flicked out like flung pebbles and splashed into the huge sheet of canvas. He had no idea if he was doing any damage at all; he just watched the tracers sink into it.

The crest flashed by and the last few shells flew out into Maryland. Leo cut his throttle, hit his left rudder pedal, banged his decelerons, dipped his nose, and began to dive for the deck and bank at the same moment as his right ailerons cranked up. Something white and mad flashed by as one missile missed, followed in a second by another. No lock-ons yet. A third burned past him from underneath.

He felt cold air again, more of it. The bubble around him seemed to liquify into smaller bubbles, until finally it was a cascade of glittering diamonds. Smoke rose from beneath him, everywhere. The controls were a mess. The stick had turned into a delinquent child, a horrible son with a mind of his own and no respect for poor old Dad. Leo could see no sky, but only Maryland, the Free State, big and white, reaching up to absorb him.

The plane hit in a wild blur of thrown snow and earth, and for an instant there was no fire and then there was nothing but fire, fire everywhere, fire forever. The fire rose like a ritual offering. Smoke peeled away from it, fanning in the breeze.

“Shit,” said the FAC stupidly. “Goddammit. What I want to know is, who are those guys? Where’d they get Stingers? What are they, the U.S. Army?”

“We don’t know who they are. Kids?” asked Puller.

“What?”

“Kids, did he have kids?”

“Ah, he had a lot of kids. Five, six, I don’t know. Six of ’em, I think. Goddamn, Leo Pell dead, I can’t believe it!”

“The good ones always have kids, for some reason,” Puller said. “I don’t know why, I’ve never figured it out, but the real good ones always leave a mess of kids.”

He turned to Skazy, murder in his eyes.

“Beep the Guard,” he said. “Get ’em moving.”

1500

“This is absurd, isn’t it?” said Peter Thiokol, extravagantly offended. “I mean, the reason you’re trying to find out who breaches security at the South Mountain installation is so that we can figure out who’s in there and then from that maybe I can figure out a way to get by the elevator shaft door, but now you’re interrogating me.”

The two agents had little appreciation of the absurd. They weren’t collectors of ironies, either, and in some future time they wouldn’t hoist a glass in salute to the ludicrousness of this moment.

“Dr. Thiokol, there were thirteen senior people in the MX Basing Modes Croup at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that the Department of the Air Force Strategic Warfare Committee employed to design South Mountain. There are arrest warrants on all of them. It’s a technicality, designed to speed things up, just in case. Now, we have some questions, I’m afraid.”

Peter wondered if he had the energy to explain anything. He felt himself tumbling toward incoherence, as he had before his students that morning. And he knew also where the questioning would go, where it would have to go: toward Megan. He could not stand to go over it, to work out the theories. He had just put it into his bottom drawer and thrown away the key. It was in the deep under-mountain silo of his subconscious.

But the two agents were grimly bland men of indeterminate age and strong will who simply plunged ahead. They were probably not all that different from the Delta officers: hardworking types who drew their power and identities from the potent organizations they had chosen to join and to whose dictates they would not be disloyal.

“For the record, you’re the son of Dr. and Mrs. Nels Thiokol of Edinah, Minnesota.”

“Dr. and Dr. Thiokol. My mother was a damned good ob-gyn. My father was a surgeon. Do we have to go through my whole life?”

They did. This went on for a little while and he answered all the stupid who/when questions curtly, pretending to a charmless boredom in his eyes. But as usual, he felt himself tightening when it came to his twisted adolescence, his wretched relationship with his father, whom he could never please until it occurred to him he wasn’t supposed to please him, and what this led to, all the schools, the expulsions, the business with the sleeping pills, the time he thought of now as only a long dark tunnel as he crawled through slime toward the light.

“Yet you got excellent grades through all this. And your test scores—”

“I’m smart, yes. I finally got my act together my sophomore year at Harvard.”

“What did you discover there?”

Yes, it was the crucial question of his career. He remembered it well, November of ’66, that funky, dreary room in Brattle Hall, which he shared with Mike De Masto, who was now a shrink in Oakwood, just outside of the