The Day Before Midnight

The agents asked their little loaded questions, trying to probe or trick him. But it wasn’t much of a contest. Peter began to feel a little like Raskolnikov — superior, implacable, a “new kind of man.” He could see them set up their ambushes, and popped counterambushes on them, reducing them to hostile silence. They couldn’t touch him, and in time they understood this themselves. When they got close they didn’t know it; they couldn’t read him. In time, perhaps, they could break him down and get at … at it, but they didn’t have time. Also, he saw, they were a little bit afraid of him by now, and a little bit unhinged by the theater of reality swirling around them.

The surrender was prosaic, without ritual.

One of them finally said, “We’re going to leave you with a card. If you should think of something, you call us.”

So Peter had his perverse little victory. Mess with Peter Thiokol and see what it gets you!

Peter looked out the window. He could see the mountain itself. He felt a little of that radiant selfhood again. It thrilled and pleased him.

I’m the smartest boy in the class! I can do anything!

Then why couldn’t you hang on to the one person you ever loved, he asked himself.

“Don’t go yet,” he said suddenly.

He rose, went to the window. Outside, on the plain, he could see the jagged streaks of smoke from the wrecked jets rising funereally against the bright blue air. From up on the mountain, the sounds of small-arms fire reached him; the National Guard Infantry, like the Brits of World War I, having taken their wages these long years, now were dying.

He could see Dick Puller hunched over the radio gear, talking frantically to his Guardsman on the mountain; meanwhile, the Delta officers stood by. They looked restless, even hungry, and desperate with frustration. Skazy, their gloomy leader, was clenching and unclenching his hands in anger.

You think you got problems, Peter thought.

He turned to the two agents.

Time to face it, Peter, he told himself. Time to face it at last. Time to stop denying the thing that’s been eating at your stomach lining all these months and that put you in the bin.

“I think my wife betrayed South Mountain,” he said.

Phuong clutched the M-16. They whirled over the mountain, and as they shot up, she felt the strangeness in her stomach; it was as if a window had been opened and the cool air could blow in. The deck beneath her began to rattle and shiver.

“Small arms,” one of the crewmen screamed over the roar of the engine.

She looked; across from her the black Americans, all dressed up like frogmen, clung together. Their eyes were eggs. Her partner, the blond man called Teagarden, another frogman, stared into space, his eyes locked in a faraway glare. His lips moved.

Then they were over the mountain, sliding down its side at an angle, the craft around them feeling warped and broken.

She had seen helicopters die before. You always wondered what it was like when they blazed in flame, then plunged to earth and hit with a detonation like a bomb. Later you went to see them. They looked like the shedded skins of insects, broken metal husks on the floor of the earth. Inside you could see the men, burned meat; the faces were so terrible. Then more helicopters would come and it was time to go back into the tunnels.

“Hang on, everybody,” the crew chief shouted. “Touch down.”

The chopper hit hard. Dust and smoke flew; the air was heavy with vibration. Suddenly men in camouflage, their faces green, their manner urgent, were among them.

“Out, out. Come on, into the trench,” they were shouting.

They scrambled from the helicopter to a fresh ditch nearby, jumping in to find other men there.

“Fire in the hole,” somebody yelled; a huge explosion that sounded like a charge from a terror bomber high up in the clouds where it could not be heard clubbed her in the diaphragm. Trees flew through the air; smoke poured around her. She coughed, taking in the acrid odor of gunpowder.

Mother, it’s all so familiar, said her daughter.

“Okay, Rats,” said the leader-officer. “That was thirty pounds of C-4 and primacord planted into what our maps tell us was once upon a time the entrance to the main shaft of the old McCreedy and Scott Number Four mine. Let’s take a look-see and find out if we punched a hole into it for you.”

They stood and moved toward the smoke. All around, trees had been blasted flat; the snow was black and the smoke still gushed from the crater. Above, the mountain, dense with more trees, rose at a steep angle. They were at its base, completely isolated in the forest. The sounds of gunfire came from far away, and a few other soldiers crouched around, keeping watch.

“I think we poked through,” said one of the soldiers. “That was a shaped charge; it ought to have cut real deep.”

“Okay,” said the small black man, “let me just check this sucker out.”

With a surprising agility he lowered himself into the gap in the earth. In seconds he was back.

“Hoo boy. Got us a tunnel,” he said. “One long, mean mothafucking tunnel. Party time coming, Jack.” He smiled; his teeth were very white and he radiated an electric confidence.

The man Teagarden had explained. This black soldier knew tunnels also; he’d been in them in her country, spent a long time in them. He was a great tunnel fighter.

He now winked at her.

“Me and this lady,” he said to the others, “we the whole show now. This old-time stuff for us, right, pretty lady?”

Yes, it was true. Black men had come into the tunnels too. She had killed black men. They were as brave as any of them.

She smiled, but it wasn’t much of a smile.

“Okay,” said an officer, opening a case, “what we got here is the original 1932 map of Number Four. Shit, this was some operation; you look back through the trees, you see that gap? That’s where the railroad went. Some of the old track is still there. And the foundations from some of the buildings are still here. Anyway, as we figure it, this shaft’ll take you in maybe five hundred feet. Then you get to what they call the lateral tunnel, the connector that held all the actual mining shafts together. There were five deep mining shafts they called Alice, Betty, Connie, Dolly, and Elizabeth. Betty, Connie, and Dollie were the bitches: they caved in. But Alice and Elizabeth ought to still be there. And they should be in pretty good shape, although nobody can say for sure, because sometimes there’s shaft erosion based on moisture, earth shifts, anything. So you head on back through them maybe one thousand feet. Anywhere beyond that point you may run into intersections with the water flues from over the years. We called around to a batch of mining engineers. They think the flues ought to be passable, though it’s going to be real tough going. Uphill all the way. Anyway, if you get close enough to the installation, you’ll hear ’em; the ground is a great conductor. Your target would be the exhaust shafts of corrugated metal that run out of the silo. If you reach those shafts, you let us know. We’ll get a Delta unit here in two minutes, and you can take ’em in the back door.”

“What we do if we run into any little strange men in there?” said the small black soldier.

“Just like in ’Nam, you waste ’em. But there won’t be anybody in there except ghosts. Ghosts don’t bite. You all set?”

“Yes, sir,” said Teagarden.

“Okay, I want a radio check the first two hundred feet. Call signs: You’re Alpha, Witherspoon; Teagarden, you’re Baker. I’m Rat Six, okay? Any questions. Miss Phuong, any questions?”

Phuong offered a tight little smile but shook her head no.

“Okay, and God bless you,” said the officer. “We’re all praying for you.”

“Let’s go to tunnelsville, you peoples,” said the small black man with another of his smiles.

And they began to enter the smoky shaft.

Darkness swallowed them.