The Day Before Midnight

you can attack only over a narrow front, up one side of the mountain?

“What if, most important of all, the subtlest part of his plan is convincing you that yes, he’s a nut case, he thinks he’s John Brown, and that he’ll come apart under the pressure. What then? And what if you hit him until you run out of men and the bodies pile up like cordwood just outside his perimeter. The Rangers show and the Third Infantry shows, and he guns them down too. And the men that you’ve got left are exhausted and broken. What then?”

“Then he wins.”

“Right. We don’t get in. What if they’re wrong in D.C.?”

“These are experienced guys. Doctors,” argued Skazy.

“Major Skazy, I know a little about psychiatrists. I’m here to tell you there aren’t three of them in the world who could agree on the results of two plus two.”

Skazy was quiet.

Peter said, “I don’t think he’s insane. I think he’s very, very smart, and he’s set up this whole thing, this phony John Brown thing, because he knows our prejudices, and he knows how eager we are to believe in them. He’s encouraging us to believe in them at the cost of our own destruction.”

He didn’t express his worst, most frightening thought, the source of his curiously dislocating sense of weirdness over the past several seconds. The whole thing seemed pulled not out of history, but out of something far more personal. Out of, somehow, memory. His. His own memory. He remembered. Yes, John Brown, but who thought of John Brown first and used him as an analogy for a takeover in a missile silo in Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon?

Peter Thiokol.

Peter thought: This son of a bitch has read my book.

But Puller was speaking.

“I just got a call from Uckley, who examined the three dead aggressors in Burkittsville. They had false teeth.”

He let it sink in.

“Nothing gives a man’s national identity away to forensic pathologists faster than dental work. So these guys had their teeth pulled — all of them — and bridgework from a third-party country inserted, so that in the event of death or capture, their origin couldn’t be traced,” Puller said. “These guys aren’t psychos or fringe lunatics or right-wing extremists or a rogue unit. They’re a foreign elite unit on a mission. They’re here for a specific, rational purpose. We have to wait until we know who they are. Then we’ll know what to do. To squander our limited resources right now is to doom ourselves to failure. We don’t know enough to jump.”

“When will we?” said Skazy bitterly.

“When I say so,” said Dick Puller. “When we know who they are. And not before.”

1800

Witherspoon should have seen them first, but Walls did, or rather sensed them, smelled them, somehow felt them, and his swift elbow into Witherspoon’s ribs was all the signal needed. In Witherspoon’s field of electro-optics, they emerged as phantasms, swirling patterns of dense color swooping abstractly through the green chamber at him. They were dream monsters, humped and horrible, their shapes changing, one beast leaking into another; they were straight from his hyperfervid id, white men with guns in the night.

So die, motherfuckers, thought Witherspoon.

He fired first, the MP-5 bucking in a spasm as it hurried through its little box of bullets. How good it felt! It drove the fear from him. Through the lenses he could not see the streak of the tracers, nor their strikes. But he saw something else: the red darts of sheer heat, which the infrared picked up and magnified, flew into them like glops of color from the brush of a maniac. The shapes slithered, shattered, quivered, and seemed to magically recombine and reform before him. The stench of powder rose like an elixir to his nose. The gun wrenched itself empty.

He scrambled back, laughing madly. God, he’d hit so many. He heard screams behind him. Man, we hit those motherfuckers cold, we blindsided them, man, we took their butts out!

“Down!” screamed Walls, who in the roar of their race back had heard something bounce off the walls, and as if to make the point clearer, he nailed Witherspoon with an open field hit, knocking him down in a tangle of ripped knees and torn palms. Then the grenade detonated.

It was very close. The noise of it was the worst, but not by much. The noise was huge; it blew out both of Witherspoon’s eardrums and left traces of itself inside his skull for what might be forever. Its flash was weird and powerful, particularly through the distortion of his night vision glasses, the hue so hot and bright it had no coefficient in nature. Finally, following these first phenomena, the force of the blast arrived in an instant, and was as mighty as a wallop from Cod. It threw him, rag-doll-like, against the wall. He felt himself begin to bleed abruptly, though as yet there was no pain.

Witherspoon sat up, completely disoriented. For just a second he forgot both who and where he was. He blinked and peeped about like a just-born baby bird, chunks of shell and fluid stuck to his face. In the dark, bats of light flipped and swooped toward him. The air was full of dust and broken neon and cigarette smoke from forties movies. His head ached.

“Come on, boy, shoot back!” came the shout from close at hand, and he turned to see an interesting thing. He was by now only half in his night goggles, which had been blown askew by the grenade, so he saw half of Walls in the stylized abstractions of the infrared, a glowing red god, all anger and sinew and grace; but the other half of Walls was the human half: a soldier, scared to death, full of adrenaline and responsibility, standing against the tide of fire in the blackness and cranking out blasts from his Mossberg, eruptions of flash which, for however brief a fragment of time they lasted, lit the tunnel in pink-orange and almost turned the fierce Walls into a white man.

Walls pumped up dry, but by that time Witherspoon had shaken the dazzle from his brain, gotten a new clip into the German gun, and turned to spray lead down the tunnel, watching the bullets leaking light and describing a tracing of a flower petal as they hurled off into the darkness. The fire came back at him after a pause, angry and swarming. It seemed to be hitting everywhere, pricks of hot coal sent flying against his skin by the bullet strikes.

He knelt, fumbled through a mag change.

“Grenade,” said the resourceful Walls, having thought one step ahead, and Witherspoon caught a glimpse of him as a classical javelin thrower posing for a statue. Then he uncoiled, and as he uncoiled fell forward. Witherspoon heard yells of panic from surprisingly close at hand, but was unfortunately and stupidly looking into the heat of the blast when the grenade detonated. His vision disappeared in a confusion of deep-brain nerve cells firing off and as he fell backward, his night shades fell even farther awry, then slipped away.

“I’m blind, man, I’m blind!” he screamed. Walls had him. The firing seemed to have stopped. Walls put a strong hand around the fleshy part of his arm above the elbow and pulled him backward in a crazy old-nigger scuffle. He felt like one of those clumsy black fools in an old movie.

Walls pulled him back farther and deeper. Gradually, his vision returned to normal. He could see Walls’s sweating face just ahead.

“I can see now.”

“Man, don’t ever look at those suckers when they go off.”

“How many did we get?”

“I don’t know, man. Hard to say. In the dark, it sometime seem like so much more, you know?”

They fell into silence. Witherspoon breathed raggedly, looking for his energy. He felt as though he could sleep for a hundred years. He could smell Walls next to him. Yet he sensed no stress in Walls.

“You like this, don’t you?” he asked, amazed.

Walls sniggered. “Shee-itt,” he finally said, “a chance to kill white boys? Man, this is like a vacation!”

“You think they had enough?”

“No. Not these white boys. Most white boys, not these white boys. These white boys pissed.”