The Day Before Midnight

Walls had blown tunnels in the ’Nam with this stuff; he knew it well. He rolled to Witherspoon’s body.

Sorry, boy, he said to the corpse. Got me some lookin’ to do. He probed, scared that the white boys would hit him before he could rig his big surprise. But then he came across it in a bellows pocket of the field pants, a greasy brick about the size of a book. He got it out and began to squeeze and mold it in his strong hands, working some warmth and flexibility into its chilled stiffness.

Gonna make me a bomb, he thought, blow those muthafuckers up.

Okay, finally, he had a lump about the size of a deflated football, maybe a pound’s worth of the stuff. He had one grenade left. He took it off his belt and carefully unscrewed the fuse assembly and tossed away the egg. He bent to Witherspoon and probed him until he came across a coil of primacord in a pocket. He unraveled a bit of the primacord — it felt like putty and was an extremely hot-firing explosive fuse substance — onto the tip of the grenade’s blasting cap at the end of the fuse, and then he plunged this into a glop of the C-4, quickly kneading the C-4 around the grenade fuse, but careful to make sure that the grenade lever was free, so it could pop off when he pulled the pin. He worked hard, laughing softly to himself, knowing that time was very, very short. For sure, they’d seen the tracers striking the rear wall. They knew he was out of tunnel.

“Hey, white-boy motherfuckers, you boys want to get laid? Hah, old Walls got some fine-lookin’ bitches for you, man. Got a nice high yaller, got me a couple white chicks, got me a redhead, got me some real foxes, man. Come on and get it, white boys.”

Three automatic weapons fired simultaneously and the bullets struck around him, hitting the walls, the back of the tunnel, cutting him off, kicking up clouds of coal dust from the floor. But he got the pin from the grenade, and with a kind of lob-heave launched the thing, felt it leave his hands, traveling slowly, not far enough, and he knew then he’d die in the blast too. And he began to scramble backward, away, away, though there was really no away to go to and—

In the small space the blast was huge. It lifted and threw Walls through hot light and harsh air. And dirt, or stone. For the world had been ruptured and the old mountain heaved, and the ceiling of the tunnel gave. He felt the earth covering him. He could not move. The tunnel caved in. He was frozen. He was in his tomb. He was in total blackness.

* * *

It occurred to Peter that he should eat something. He was beginning to feel shaky and his head ached. It had been hours since he’d eaten, way back in another lifetime.

But he could not leave the door behind.

The damned door.

It was a simple idea really, you just had to write the program and that was that. That, in fact, was its brilliance — its simplicity. Peter knew that if Delta fought its way to the elevator shaft in the launch control facility, he’d confront the computer-coded door to the shaft itself. It was the mega-door, the ultra-door, the total door. To pop it, you had to know the twelve-digit code. Except that the aggressors would have changed the code — easily done from inside the launch control center at the computer terminal.

Change it to what?

There it was: the new code would be twelve letters or numbers long, or a combination thereof, or less (but not more). Peter assumed that it would be a consciously selected sequence, because — well, because, it would be part of Aggressor-One’s game. That’s how his mind works, and I’m beginning to get a feel for it.

The terror was in the computer program itself. The program, conceived and written by Peter Thiokol of the MX Basing Modes Group, had been designed exactly to prevent what Peter now had to do. That is, he had built into its system a limited-try capacity. If the right code were not hit in the first three attempts, the program reasoned that interlopers were knocking at the door and automatically changed the code to a random sequence of numbers, and it would take another computer at least 135 hours to run through the millions and millions of permutations, even working at macrospeed.

Three strikes and you’re out, Peter thought.

But it had been so smart — so necessary—because the heart of South Mountain is that it’s independent-launch capable. Suppose the missile base is under assault by specially trained Soviet silo- seizure teams of the sort CIA said they were working up? Suppose Qaddafi sends a suicide team in? Suppose — oh, no, this is too wild! — right wing elements of the American military attempt to take over the silo in order to launch a preemptive strike against Johnny Red? In all those scenarios, exactly as projected in the chapter in his book on the John Brown scenario, it fell to the door and the key vault more than any complement of air security policemen or the Doppler radar to hold the intruders at bay.

The joke was, he was fighting himself.

Through the medium of his poor wife, he had provided John Brown, Aggressor-One, or whoever he was, with all his stuff: his ideas, his insights, his theoretical speculations. He knows exactly what I know, Peter thought. In a terrible way, he is me. I’ve permutated. I’ve cloned a perfect twin; he’s absorbed my personality.

Peter turned back to the documents the Agency psychologists had put together on “John Brown.” As he read the psychological evaluation, he realized they could have been talking about him. And that’s what troubled him the most. It was as if John Brown had begun with him, or with his book, or perhaps with his famous essay. And that he’d built his plan outward from that, mastering not so much South Mountain as Peter Thiokol.

He shivered. It was getting cold. He looked at his watch. The digital numbers rushed by:

6:34.32

6:34.33

6:34.35

Less than six hours to go.

John Brown. John Brown, you and your door. Three strikes and I’m out.

He started to doodle: Peter Thiokol = John Brown = 12 = 9 = 12 = 9?

Goddamn, he thought, it would make so much more sense if John Brown had twelve letters in it — the way Peter Thiokol did.

The general was on the phone most of the time with Alex up at ground level, listening impassively. Or he was standing politely back, watching Jack Hummel dig through the block of titanium that stood between himself and the second launch key.

Jack was quite deep by this time. It was difficult finding the space to maneuver so deep in the metal. And his arms ached and the sweat ran down his face. And, Jesus, he was hungry.

“Mr. Hummel. Mr. Hummel, how would you say it’s going?”

“Look, you can see for yourself. I’m in here all the way. I’m really getting deep now.”

He felt the general over his shoulder, peering down the shaft he’d opened, the wound in the metal.

“You’re on the right line?”

“Absolutely. I’m going right into the center, that I can tell you. If this chamber or whatever you say it is is in the center, then I’ll get it.”

“How much longer?”

“Well, I can’t say. You said the block was two hundred forty centimeters in diameter, and I’ve gone maybe a third of that. So I’m close. Another two, three hours, I don’t know. We’ll just see.”

He looked into the flame, which was consuming the titanium with a voracious appetite. Even through the density of his lenses he could sense its extraordinary power. Nothing on earth could stand before it; all melted, yielded, liquified, and slid away against the urgency of the heat.

He tried to imagine this little flame grown a million times. He tried to imagine a giant flame, devouring as it flashed across the landscape; he tried to imagine a giant torch cutting its kerf of destruction around the globe, through cities and towns, turning men and women and babies to ashes. He tried to imagine all the death there was, a planet of death. It would be a lone zone that just didn’t stop.

Instead, banal movie images flooded through his head: the mushroom cloud, the wrecked cities, the piles of corpses, the mutated survivors, bands of starving rat people scurrying through the ruins, and now a word from our sponsor, liquid Ivory, for truly smooooth hands.

I can’t see how it would really be, he thought. I just can’t. And the further leap, by which he would admit that