The Day Before Midnight

“Well, sir, I figure the helicopter finally burned down to the ammo.”

“Say again, 22-Victor.”

“Well, sir, right from where that helicopter crashed and exploded, about twenty minutes ago, all the ammo cooked off. It was about ten or twenty seconds of gunfire. That was all.”

Dick put the microphone down.

“Delta Six?”

Dick said nothing.

“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor. Do you require further assistance?”

But Dick said nothing.

Goddamn him.

He turned, looked at the mountain about a mile off.

Goddamn him: he’d found Rat Six. He’d wiped it out. And he’d sent men into the tunnels after the Rat Teams.

“Sir, do you want to send a party around to check out the Rat Six position?”

Puller shook his head. What was the point? Aggressor-One had topped him again. His rats were dead in their holes. And there was nothing Puller could do about it now except order up the body bags and pray for Peter Thiokol.

“Thiokol?”

Peter looked up from the Aggressor-One document, from his notebook, from his FBI counterintel reports. It was Skazy.

“Look, we have to talk.”

“About what? I have a lot of—”

“Out in the barn.”

“What is this?” said Peter, reading at once something tense and guilty on the officer’s face. “What’s going on?”

“In the barn, please, Dr. Thiokol.”

Peter waited a few minutes, then went out and moseyed around back to where Skazy and two other Delta officers awaited. The men were smaller, leaner Skazys: lean, serious guys in cammo fatigues, bulging with belts and knives and grenades.

“So? What’s the—”

“We want you to keep an eye on someone for us.”

“That’s not my job,” said Peter. “I’m not here to keep an eye on anybody.”

“On Dick Puller,” said Skazy.

Peter felt his face betray some shock.

“There was a time,” said Skazy, “when Dick Puller was the best man this Army had. It was an honor to serve under him, let me tell you. He was a great officer. He was a professional’s professional. But he lost it.”

“What are you talking about?” Peter didn’t like this a bit.

“Sometimes these guys who’ve seen so much combat lose the edge. They can’t send boys to die anymore. They don’t have the balls for the big leap. They delude themselves; they don’t close out the engagement, they don’t get in tight, they’re not willing to take casualties, they’re not willing to see their own troops die to take an objective. And so you get what you’ve got right now: a sense that all around us things are going on, but right here, right at the point of the crisis, nothing is happening, except that we’re marking time.”

Peter felt himself a poor advocate for Puller.

“Look, he’s trying, he can’t do much until—”

Skazy bent close.

“In the Iranian desert there came a moment he’d trained his life for. It didn’t come down like it was laid out, and it meant taking a big chance, it meant going for it. You know what they say in this business? Who dares, wins. That’s the first principle of special operations. In the desert, Dick Puller lost the talent to dare. That guy up there on that mountain, he’s still got it.”

“What are you saying?” Peter said.

“I’m saying if he panics again, I’m going to take him out. And push forward and deal with the consequences later. It’s what I should have done in the desert. You just watch him. If you see signs that he’s breaking down, you let me know, got it?”

Peter saw now that he was in some twisted, sick family drama. It was some humorless parody version of a sixties sitcom, My Three Sons as written by Edward Albee, in which the oldest boy, Crazy Skazy here, was going to knock off Dad, Fred MacMurray/Dick Puller, while the two younger boys, himself and the other son, poor dumb Uckley, sat around wondering what to do.

“You’d better reconsider what—”

“Thiokol, if he freezes, you sing out, you hear. That’s your real job. Now, you’d better get back to your goddamned door.”

The farther along he got, the better Teagarden felt, when he knew it should be just the opposite. No matter how you cut it, he knew, he was welshing out. He was ejecting. Color him gone.

Yet his relief as the tunnel called Alice widened, as its dog legs and juts eventually straightened themselves out, was enormous and liberating. Goddamn, it felt so good; he’d felt this way in ’Nam, way out in Indian country, he’d been just a kid, it was ’71 or so and he was new to the Forces. It was after a long goddamn time in a little place, getting hit every night, that at last a relief column had broken through. It felt just like that. He couldn’t smell the sky yet, or see the stars — if there were stars; he had no idea what time it was — but he wasn’t going deeper and deeper into the goddamned darkness.

He almost wanted to whistle. But suddenly he heard something just ahead. It was like a little rustle or something, up against the rock. What, had Rat Six sent more guys in? He froze, caught. To run into an officer and have to explain what the hell he was doing broken off from his partner, here, hundreds and hundreds of feet back, almost in the lateral tunnel, that was trouble. He ransacked his own mind for an excuse, something to put between himself and his disgrace.

The radio!

The Prick-88 wasn’t working, they weren’t getting through, he’d come on back to reestablish contact before —

A light beam shot out, hit him in the eyes, pinning him.

“Hey! Jesus, you guys, you scared me. What the hell, you checking on us, Rat Six? I lost radio contact, came back to get a clear line. Listen, we’re way the hell back there.”

Another light struck him, blasting his vision, filling his brain with exploding sparks. He heard muttering, the soft jingle of equipment.

“What’s going on, guys? Like, is all this really—”

A hand like a darting bat flew in front of his eye, landed at his chin, and with a strong yank pulled him back until he crashed against a strong body; the hand pulled his chin up, opening his throat to the attack. At almost precisely the same second, though Teagarden never saw it, the other hand drew the evil edge of a very sharp combat blade across his throat, cutting with icy precision through skin, cartilege, and on down to the carotid artery, which it severed.

My sons! he thought, Jesus, my sons!

But, stunned as he was, Teagarden at least had a second left for a reflex, and as he died, his finger tensed on the MP-5’s trigger and the little gun barked out a four-round burst. The bullets smashed pointlessly into the ground, and immediately other men were on Teagarden, beating at him with rifle butts.

This was the hard part.

The guns were easy: A Fabrique Nationale FAL, in 7.62-mm NATO, or.308, serial number 1488803–213; a 9 -mm Uzi, manufactured also by Fabrique Nationale under license from the crafty Israelis, serial number 10945873– 38771 with a very professionally made but otherwise untraceable silencer that extended a good seven inches beyond the barrel; and a British L2A3, called a Sterling, in 9mm also, serial number 129848–555; plus one handgun,