The Day Before Midnight

“Is anybody there? Is anybody, I repeat anybody, there?”

“Maybe that damned bomb finally went off, all the white people dead,” said Walls.

“Then all the black people are dead too,” said Witherspoon.

“Man, some nigger scientist ought to figure out a bomb kill only white people. Man, I’d pay for something like that.” He laughed, flicked out his cigarette.

“Rat Six, this is Team Baker, do you copy?”

By now Jake’s had filled with workingclass men. Gregor hated them. They were truck drivers, fork-lift operators, warehousemen, painters, postal clerks, all large, most dirty, all tired, most loud. They smoked. The air of the place was blue with smoke. His headache had not gone away even though he’d been splashing vodka on it for some time now.

He was watching the clock crawl through the day until it would be time to call Molly again, and then he heard someone talking about soldiers and a training exercise in central Maryland and looked up to the television set. It was the news hour and the reporter was at a state police roadblock somewhere, where the cars were lined up like it was the end of the world or something.

Gregor leaned forward intently.

“Hey, Mister, who you pickin’ in Eastern Division?”

“Redskins,” Gregor said. “Shhhh, the TV.”

“Redskins won’t even make the playoffs!”

The reporter was talking about a military exercise being conducted in the mountains, rumors of plane crashes and helicopters, how traffic was backed up and how civil authorities weren’t able to say when it would all return to normalcy, but that this was one of the prices you had to pay for your democracy.

The reporter, a childish boy, nodded enthusiastically as he spoke, narrowing his eyes for emphasis. Behind him, far in the distance, Gregor could see the fat hulk of a snow-covered mountain. It was white and glistening and looked lovely.

The boy now was rattling on about new troops headed out to the exercise. He’d thrust his microphone up to some soldiers sitting in trucks that were momentarily stopped. The men in the trucks were saying they didn’t know anything about it, they’d just been put on alert that morning in D.C., and about eleven they’d been ordered to load up on the vehicles and here they were.

“But,” the young soldier now told the young reporter, even as the truck was pulling away, “tell you this, we gonna kick ass!”

“Man, that must be some exercise they got going out there,” said a man at the bar. “They say traffic’s backed up all the way to goddamned Baltimore. Never heard of nothing like it.”

“Where?” Gregor asked, adding, “I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.”

“Ah, out Alternate forty, from Middletown to Boonsboro. You ought to be okay you stick to seventy. That mountain, that’s South Mountain, A-forty goes right by it. They got it closed off. Also, all them little hick burgs out there. Funniest goddamn thing, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Ain’t no government land up there. Plenty up at Aberdeen. Plenty at Fort Meade. Plenty at Pax River, over on the Shore. Plenty out at Fort Richie. Ain’t no government land at South Mountain, though. Damnedest thing, you can bet.”

“Ummm,” nodded Gregor.

Should I go out there?

I’m closest. Maybe I could get out there and hear something from a soldier or something.

Yes, with your accent and your Soviet visa, yes: and end up in Danbury for twenty years, then home for twenty more in the Gulag. No, the answer was Molly.

He now saw that there was some kind of crisis and that Molly would find it out for him and that he would be first with the news, the whole apparat would be working on it, and he, the great Gregor Arbatov, he would find it! He stood, wobbling, and ambled awkwardly back through the crowded room to the men’s bathroom. Inside, he deposited his coins in the slot and tried to call Molly again.

There was no answer.

Oh, Molly, he prayed. Oh, please, please, don’t let me down, when I need you so bad.

The news continued to be bad at Delta Command, even after the debacle at the Hummel house. The Rangers had run into heavy weather over Indiana and had to divert south and take on fuel in Tennessee and were now ETA’d at 1900 hours earliest, and that was with a twilight night drop which Puller didn’t want to risk, so make it 2100 before they were on station and ready to assault. Meanwhile Third Infantry was hung up in the traffic building up outside the roadblocks and was having a hell of a time fighting their way through it. Pentagon analysts had made no further penetrations of the queer message sent by the “Provisional Army of the United States.” Peter Thiokol had come to a standstill in his attempts to understand the identities of Aggressor Force, and therefore was mum on his chances of breaking the reset door code at the shaft entrance. There was, furthermore, no word from the FBI regarding its investigations of his wife, Megan, and any help she could have given them. The two surviving little girls at the Hummel house were too distraught to provide any clues as to the identities of the three men who had held them hostage for most of the day. The Pentagon kept inquiring as to progress in breaking the seizure; Dick Puller had no progress, but he had final casualty figures of Bravo Company’s assault: fifty-six dead, forty-four wounded, leaving an effective force of less than fifty men. The field hospital set up by Delta medical personnel was being strained to the maximum, and men had already begun to die who would have survived in Vietnam, where the airevac system had been set up much better.

It was six o’clock. Six hours to go.

Puller headed off to find Thiokol and monitor the latest in FBI investigation reports. But he didn’t make it very far.

“Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!”

It was a Spec 4, one of the Commo specialists.

“Yeah?”

“Sir, we were supposed to get a response every fifteen minutes from Rat Six on the other side of the mountain. They’ve missed two checks now.”

“Have you tried to call them?”

“Yessir. No answer.”

Puller took the microphone.

“Rat Six, this is Delta Six, do you copy?”

There was no answer, only silence on the radio.

Puller tried a few more times.

“Who’s in that area?” he asked one of his sergeants.

“Sir, besides the Rat Six Team, nobody. Except we’ve got the mountain ringed with state policemen, so there should be a cop a little farther out.”

He consulted a map, then went to the radio and called state police headquarters at the roadblock on Route 40 a few miles away.

“Ninety-Victor, this is Delta Six, do you read?”

“Affirmative, we have you, Delta Six, we copy.”

“Ninety-Victor, you got a man on, uh, looks like Moser Road?”

“Yes, sir, had that one sealed off for quite a time.”

“Can you patch me through to him, 90-Victor.”

“Yes, sir. You just hang in there.”

A few moments passed.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor, at the roadblock on Moser Road, about three miles due west of South Mountain. I’ve been requested to contact you.”

“Yes, 22-Victor, I copy. Listen, son, you heard anything recently?”

“Just what I figured on, sir.”

“And what was that, 22-Victor?”