The Day Before Midnight

gas. All around it was quiet, except for the press of the breeze through the trees and the occasional mumble or shiver of a man in the dark.

“And just in time too,” Alex said. “They’ll be coining soon, and in force.”

“No signs yet?”

“No, it’s all quiet down there. They brought some trucks up a few minutes back.”

“Reinforcements,” somebody said. “We hurt them bad, they needed more men.”

“Sir!”

The call arose from a dozen places on the perimeter. Alex turned with his binoculars, even as he heard the roar. At first he could see nothing, but then someone screamed, “The road! The road!”

He lifted his binoculars and watched, and even at this distance could make out the spectacle. A plane came down and even though it was only a phenomenon of landing lights, glowing cockpit, and blinkers at the wingtips, it seemed heavy in the air as it floated awkwardly down, touched the straight-running line of the highway, bounced once, twice, skidded a bit as a braking chute popped, and then slowed.

“C-130,” Alex said.

The plane eventually halted to let out its men; then it simply taxied off the roadway and into the fields, where it fell brokenly into a ditch to make room for another plane, which in seconds followed the same drunken path downward to the highway. Then another, and finally a fourth.

“Very neat,” said Alex. “Nicely done. Good pilots, brave men, landing on a roadway.”

“More visitors?” said one of the others.

“Elite troops. Rangers, I suppose. Well, well, it’s going to be an interesting next few hours.”

He looked at his watch. Midnight was coming. But would it come soon enough?

1900

There wasn’t much to it, really: Dick Puller was a great believer in simplicity and firepower, not ornamentation and cleverness. What he’d come up with seemed like something out of World War II, say, the Pointe du Hoc assault at Normandy, a Ranger legend.

Here, as there, the Rangers would carry the primary site assault responsibility, moving over the same ground as Bravo earlier in the day. There were more of them, and they were much more proficient. Their commanding officer, ah old Puller buddy, had already dispatched the men directly from the planes to the mountain. They were already moving up the hill. They would be supported on the right by Third Infantry, which with its longer-range M- 14s would provide accurate covering fire, before moving in after the Rangers had reached the perimeter. On the radio the Rangers would be Halfback, Third Infantry Beanstalk.

“Lieutenant Dill?”

“Sir?”

“Dill, congrats. You and your people get to sit this one out. I want you on the left, separated from the main assault force, as high up the crest as you can get. Point being, we may need stretcher bearers if casualties are high, we may need runners if these guys can jam our radios, and we may need the extra firepower if they’re pressed and try to break down the hill in your direction. I make it map coordinates Lima-niner-deuce, have you got that? You can find that point in the dark?”

“Got it,” said Dill, trying to keep the elation out of his voice.

Meanwhile, Puller continued, the Delta Assault Team, the actual shaft-busters whose job it was to rappel down the elevator chute, break into the corridor, fight their way to the launch control center, and disable it, would be choppered in when the launch control facility was taken. Along with them would be Peter himself, ready to do battle (he hoped) with his nemesis, the door.

“Any luck on the door, Dr. Thiokol?”

Peter smiled wretchedly. His tweed coat was rumpled, and sweat soaked through his dense blue shirt. The white delta of his T-shirt showed in his open collar.

“I’m working on it,” he said, too brightly. “Confidence is high.”

The party would start at 2200 hours, Puller continued, as the various units continued to move into position until that time. Peter had told them that given the key vault’s construction, the earliest the people inside could get through it was midnight.

“You’re sure of that?” Puller asked for what must have been the millionth time.

Yes, he was. It was the only thing he was sure of. Peter nodded.

Puller turned to the group.

“Any questions?”

“What’s the go code?” somebody asked.

“We go on ‘Heaven is falling.’ From an old poem. Got it? ‘Heaven is falling.’”

An officer wanted to know about medical evacuation; he was told that the Delta insertion choppers would double as medevac ships, but they wouldn’t be active until after the insertion.

Tac Air?

Two of the Delta choppers had been fitted with Emerson mini-tats, that is, rotary-barreled 7.62-mm General Electric miniguns on carriages that looked like a 1934 Johnson outboard motor and hung beneath the skids. In the early moments of the assault, these ships, call-signed Sixgun-One and Sixgun-two, would he available to provide suppressive fire on enemy strong points. But since there was a premium on the choppers, they wouldn’t close within one thousand feet of the targets and their target-time would never be more than twenty-five seconds, because of the Stingers, a devastating SAM, as demonstrated earlier.

“We lose more than two helicopters, then we have trouble getting all our Delta people in there in time,” Puller said. “It’s like the Iranian rescue mission. We need X number of birds to get the job done and there’s not a lot of redundancy in all this. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. You’ll lose some people because we can’t get ’em medevacked out and you’ll lose some people because our air support isn’t top rate, but the alternative is to wait until more stuff can arrive. And that’s no alternative. We go with everything we’ve got.”

“Everything?” somebody wanted to know.

“Yes. In the assault reinforcements I’ve asked the state policemen to join. Anybody know any boy scouts?”

There was some hollow laughter.

“What about our fire restrictions?” the Ranger executive officer asked. “Can we use grenades with that computer up there?”

“Dr. Thiokol?”

Peter cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry, this has to be a gunfight. The titanium casing ought to be able to withstand any number of small- arms hits, up to 7.62 full metal jackets, but I can’t sanction explosives. If you could stick with the gunfire and forgo the explosives, we might get out of this. If that computer goes, it’s all over.”

“Suppose they mine the computer to blow?”

“They won’t,” said Peter. Of this one thing he was absolutely positive. “No, not Aggressor-One. There’s just a little part of him that thinks he’s smarter than everybody. The limited-try code will keep us out, because that’s the way his mind works.”

And because that’s what I designed it to do. He wants to use my stuff to beat me.

Peter tried to think about the man.

What have I clone to deserve such an enemy? How did I become his Moby Dick? What did I do to him?

“What about in the shaft? Can we use explosives?”

“Negative again,” said Peter. “I know you’ve got to use explosives to get down there. But once you get close to the command center, I’m sorry to tell you you can’t. We just don’t know quite what would happen if you blew the wiring. You might make it impossible for me to abort the launch if they’ve gone to terminal countdown, which is tricky enough anyway; and you might even cause a launch. You’ve got to do it with guns once you’re close to the place.”