The Day Before Midnight

“Captain!”

Someone slid into the snow next to him. It was a Lieutenant Dill from the second platoon, a phys ed teacher at a Baltimore high school.

“Captain Barnard, I have a lot of hurt men, a lot of dying men. Jesus, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

The captain just looked at him.

“God, sir, are you — you’re all covered with blood! Medic, get over here.”

“No, no,” said the captain. “I’m not hurt that bad. Look, if we just pull back they’ll chop us up. I’m going to slide over to where the machine gun should be and see if I can’t set up some covering fire, okay. You wait a minute or two; when I get the fire going, you get the men out of here. Don’t leave anybody behind, Lieutenant!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the men firing. If they’re not firing, they’re not helping.”

Barnard began to crawl through the snow. Now and then a bullet would come whipping in his direction. But he made it down the line and found his company’s machine gun, lying on its side half sunk in the snow, a loose belt nearby and a batch of dead shells lying around. He recognized his gunner, a steelworker; half his face was gone where a heavy-caliber bullet had punched through.

The captain wiggled forward through the snow, breathing hard. God, it was cold now. He seemed to have stopped bleeding, but he was so wet with the snow that he’d begun to go numb. Pulling the gun to him, he managed with his stiff, fat fingers to get the latch off the breech and get a belt unrolled, and set the lead cartridge into the guides. He slammed the latch shut and drew back the bolt.

“Movement?” Alex asked his gunners.

A bullet hit the logs before them, kicked up a cloud of smoke.

“On the left; there’s a group on the left.”

The gunner swung the H&K-21. Indeed, a wretched huddle of men appeared to be crawling forward. Or perhaps not crawling forward, but merely crawling anywhere, forward being the direction they’d settled on.

“Yes, there”—Alex pointed—“take them down, please.”

The gun fired a long burst and Alex watched as the tracers flicked out and seemed to sink toward the men. Where they struck they kicked up snow and the men disappeared in its swirl.

“Some in the center,” somebody said. “However, I think they’re retreating.”

“You have to fire anyway,” said Alex. “It will give the next assault team something to think about.”

The H&K-21 fired briefly; more tracers streamed down the mountain, found their targets.

“Rather horrible,” said one of the loaders.

“Not a good attack,” said Alex. “I don’t think these are elite troops I’d anticipated. I think they were amateurs. Casualties?”

“Sir, two men dead in the covering fire and three wounded.”

“Well,” said Alex. “They did do some damage then. And ammunition. We used a lot of ammunition in a very short time. That, too, I suppose, hurts us. But it cost them so much. I didn’t think it was their style, to die like that.”

The captain drew the gun to him. He couldn’t see much now, just barbed wire, some smoke, the aerial, the damned tent, and lots of high blue sky above.

He wished he weren’t so tired. On the slope before Aggressor Force’s position, he saw bodies. What, thirty- five, maybe forty? Jesus, they caught us in the open. They just let us get close and they blew us away.

He squinted over the gun barrel. Nope, nothing. Couldn’t hit a goddamn thing with a machine gun, even.

It occurred to him that he might see a little better if he stood up. He thought about it; yes, it made sense. He’d just — oof! — stand up, yes, and then he’d be able to see much better to shoot.

He stood. It worked! He could see them now, or their heads moving, clustered at the center of their line behind the barbed wire. He thought, boy, sure am glad I thought to stand. It seemed entirely logical. He’d worked it out. With his covering fire, most of his guys could get out of the kill zone. That’s why they made me a captain, he thought. ’Cause I’m so smart.

With that thought, he fired.

The gun bucked through twenty-round bursts. He fired at the center of the line. He could see the far-off puffs where the bursts struck. The gun was surprisingly easy to control, though a bit muzzle-heavy, with the bipod out there pulling it down. Trick was to keep the bursts short, then correct for muzzle drift. Firing it was actually quite a bit of fun. He could move the thing slightly and watch as the bullets stitched small disturbances into the earth. He felt the hot brass pouring out of the breech like the winnings at a slot machine. The gun began to steam; its barrel was melting snow packed in the cooling vents. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. He fired a belt that way in about thirty seconds.

Then laboriously he began to change belts.

“The right, the right, goddamn, the right,” screamed Alex. Who had fired at them? In less than thirty seconds he lost seven men and one of the rounds clipped the breech of his H&K-21, putting it out of action. The bullets swept in on him. Alex felt their sting and spray. One of his gunners lay on the mud floor of the trench, his right eye smashed.

“The right!” Alex screamed again, sliding to the earth as the bullets began to rip up his position again. He heard the firing rise. All up and down the line his men were answering.

Quickly, he crawled back, turned his binoculars. He could see the gunner, about two hundred meters off on the right. The bullets searched for him, cutting into the snow around him. Yet still he fired, just standing there. Standing there. Like some kind of hero. The bullets finally found him.

“Cease fire,” Alex yelled.

“Sir, a bunch of them slipped away while the fire was hitting the gun.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes, twenty or thirty, just got up and ran down the hill.”

“Well, whoever that man was, he was a soldier. I’ll say that.”

“My marriage,” said Peter Thiokol not so much to the agents but somehow to the air itself, “if it had a script, it was written by Woody Allen and Herman Kahn.”

“I don’t understand the reference to Herman Kahn,” one of the FBI agents said.

“In the sense that it followed the classic pattern that Herman identified. The slow, gradual buildup of hostilities, the real arms race, the breakdown in communication, until finally open conflict seems the lesser of two evils. And that’s when you get your classic spasm war. You know, multiple launches by both sides, multiple hits, the global catastrophe, nuclear winter. The end of civilization. That was the drama of our marriage. We blew each other away in the end.”

There was silence from them.

“It was a very intense union,” Peter told them, “but not at first. I just told her I was there at Oxford studying poly sci, which is true. I didn’t tell her about my thing for the bomb or that I had a good line on an Air Force job and that I was heading for D.C. That came out later. I–I couldn’t really figure out how to break it to her. She wasn’t much interested in what I did, at first. She was rather self-involved. Beautiful, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

“So when did she figure out how you were going to make a living?” said the sharper of the two.

“Oh, finally, I told her. ’Seventy-four. We’d been in Washington a year. I’d just moved from the Strategic Study Group to the Targeting Committee. It was a big leap for me and it meant about ten extra grand a year. Not that we needed the money. Her folks had plenty, but it was nice to be doing well suddenly, and she said she’d finally figured out what strategic meant.”

What does it mean? he’d asked.

It means bombs, isn’t that right?

Yes.

You think about bombs. You think about war all day. I thought it was more abstract, somehow. Thinking about strategies and that sort of thing, chess and so forth. Or about history, like your project at Oxford. But it’s very