The Day Before Midnight

“See, here. They haven’t bothered to plant the trees to the left and the right of the assault site. They’ve just left the area bare, but you can see the way they’ve sculpted the land form to match the shape of the earth. But their original satellite pictures must have been taken early and they didn’t bother to check the later ones carefully; see, we actually moved the site of the barrack about fifteen feet to the left, and we didn’t build this additional wing to the launch control facility, although it was in the plans they got from Megan. But most important, the creek’s missing. They don’t have the creek because there wasn’t a creek.”

Puller looked at him strangely.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You told me the problem with the assault site was that it had such a narrow front that all the attacks had to come across this meadow here. Right? And those are the men that go into the guns, right?”

Puller looked at him.

“But that’s not right. There’s a creek bed, here, on the left.” His finger probed at a place on the denuded photograph that showed sheer cliff.

“It’s supposed to be impassable, too steep to climb, but I’m telling you, the creek cut into it. You could get people up it and hit them from this other side, I know you could. You don’t have to attack on that narrow front only. You could get soldiers up there and hit them from the left and bypass the fall-back trenches. I swear to you, there’s a creek bed. You don’t see it in the winter because it’s dry and under snow and you don’t see it during the summer because of the trees, but it’s there and it’s another way to the top.”

Puller looked at it hard.

“Come with me.”

They ran to the command center to look at the national geodesic survey map.

“Dr. Thiokol, there’s no creek marked here.”

“That’s a 1977 map. The creek, we opened the creek when we excavated for the shaft, last year. That’s why. I’m telling you, you can get soldiers up that side of the mountain and the Soviets don’t know.” His finger shot out to a marker on the map. “Those men are the men you send. They’re the ones who’ll get you into the perimeter and to the elevator shaft. Your Rangers and regular infantry won’t make it.”

Puller leaned forward.

“Those guys,” Peter yelled, pointing at the mark on the map that stood for a group of men. “Who are those guys?”

“That’s Bravo,” said Puller. “Or what’s left of it.”

Walls was in the cathedral of the missile.

It towered above him in the gray half-light. He felt so small.

He reached out and put his hand to the skin of the thing, which was not cold and clammy and metallic as he imagined. Indeed, it had no sense of machine to it. Even as his fingers lingered in stupidity upon it, it did not warm to the touch. It drew no energy from his hand. It was … most peculiar … it was nothing.

He could not know it. He could not feel it. It had no meaning. It wasn’t exactly that he was dwarfed into nothingness, that his smallness was made manifest by his proximity to the seven-story bigness of it, it was just that it was so blank. It was an abstraction. There was no feeling of its having any sense. He could not begin to figure out how to connect to it. It was just an immense black apex, smooth and blank, huge beyond knowing, disappearing as it rose above him, throwing in the half-light the tiniest smudge of his own reflection back at him, but more shadow than anything, a sense of movement and shape, that was all. It had no human face. He sensed that it didn’t … again, this was very peculiar … it didn’t care about him.

It befuddled him. He felt his reactions slow way down, as if he’d been drugged. It had a weird radiance, a kind of halo. It almost felt as though it came from some dead religion or something; he’d once come across something just as strange in the ’Nam, a giant stone head with thick lips and staring eyes amid the bougainvillea and the frangipani, and you could look at it for a century or two and not learn one thing from it.

Tentatively, he walked its circumference, though there wasn’t much room between the skin of the thing and the concave of the cement wall that encircled it. His head was back, his mouth was open. It never changed. From any angle it was the same.

His head ached. He became aware of small noises, tickings, pingings, obscure vibrations. At the same time he smelled the odors of wiring and cement and wax. It smelled like electricity in there.

He looked at it again, in wonder. It wasn’t at all like the rocketship he’d imagined, to the degree that he’d imagined rocketships at all. It had no fins, for one thing. How could they steer it without fins? It had no numbers either, and he had the vague supposition that it should have black and white checks on it somewhere, as well as big fat USAF initials, like the Tac ships in ’Nam. He also had this idea that there’d be a huge superstructure like a battleship’s control tower up next to it, and lots of guys scurrying around: nope, nothing. It was so huge it didn’t look like it could fly at all. The big tube just sat on a tiny framework of girders, nothing elaborate, and its exhaust cupolas extended beneath that, into a pit. As he looked up it, it disappeared, yielding some seventy feet up to nothingness. Then, another hundred or so feet up was the circular image of the sealed silo hatch, which appeared from down here to resemble a manhole cover.

He wondered what to do. Should he blow it up? He wasn’t sure. He tried to remember. Goddamn, if that Witherspoon were here, he’d know what to do. But Walls wasn’t at all sure if he should blow it up. He might get in big trouble. And even if he was supposed to blow it up, there was the problem of how to blow it up. He had no grenades left. He had no C-4 left. He could see no cables to cut or hoses to rip. He didn’t think firing a few Mr. 12s into a thing this big would do any damage. And anyway, wasn’t there an A-bomb in there? He wondered where it would be. He didn’t think it would be a terribly good idea to shoot the rocket and make the bomb blow up, because wasn’t that what they were trying to stop?

Shit, he thought, baffled by it.

At last he stumbled on a ladder. It was really a series of rungs in the concrete and, craning, he saw that the rungs led a perilous way up the yawning side of the concrete tube to a very small door, halfway up to the silo hatch.

Walls tried to figure out what to do. A certain part of him said, just wait here until they come get you, you’re okay now. But another part said, they wanted to get into this place real bad, only way to get into this place is up that ladder.

Maybe you’re the only dude get into this place. The onliest.

He laughed at that. All those white motherfuckers running around with their helicopters and shit, and here little nigger Nathan Walls, Dr. P of Pennsylvania Avenue, son of Thelma and brother to James, both dead, but Nathan, Nathan, he the onliest peoples to make it in. And what then?

Then you kill more white boys, he thought.

He had at that second just the briefest animal sensation of warmth and motion, and then he was hit hard by a flying bunch of muscle, yanked down, as if under the pounce of a cat, and pinned against the cement. And he felt the blade come up hard and tight against his throat, and he knew he was going to die.

In the first slick, Skazy was on the radio.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra One, I’d like an amplification of that last order, please.”

“Cobra One, hold tight in your ships, that is all.”

Skazy sat, breathing hard, feeling it all come apart in his mind. He remembered Desert One, the confusion of rushing men, out-of-control machines, and unsure command. He remembered Dick Puller off on his own like some kind of moody Achilles, out of reach.

Colonel Puller, there’s rumors all over the—

It’s an abort, Frank. Get Delta on the—

An abort! We can still take these motherfuckers! Goddamn, we don’t need six chops! We can do it with five, we can get in there and blow these motherfuckers away and—

Back to the ship, Major!

That’s when Skazy had hit him. Yes, he’d hit a superior officer in the face, and remembered the shock, the totality of it, when Puller fell back, his face leaking blood, the unexpected look of hurt on it.

Someone grabbed him.