The Day Before Midnight

Frank, get out of here. Dick’s decided. Get back to your people.

You cowardly motherfucker, you don’t have the guts for this kind of work, he remembered screaming, the wounded, enraged son who’d just learned his father was merely a man.

“Delta Six, Cobra One, what the hell is going—”

“Off the net, Cobra One, you’re in a holding position until release, out.”

Goddamn, said Skazy to himself.

“I’m going back to command,” he told McKenzie, and disengaged himself from the chopper, dipped under its roaring rotor, and headed back to Puller.

There were fifty-five of them and they were lost and had been lost and they were way behind schedule, and it was cold as shit and even if the world was hanging in the balance, they didn’t care, they just wanted to be warm. Sure, okay, you can make so many speeches, but the guys had been shot at today and most of them were still in bad shock from the first fight. These guys had been playing at war and they’d never seen anyone die and suddenly they’d seen a whole batch of people die, mostly their friends.

“Lieutenant, I think we’re lost,” said the sergeant.

“We can’t be lost,” said Dill. “It’s just over here.”

“I’m afraid some of the guys may have wandered away.”

“Goddammit,” said Dill, “they were supposed to stay in close. You get lost on this mountain, you could be in real danger.”

He looked back. Bravo was spread out through the trees; he could see the blurry shapes against the white of the snow, each trailing a bright plume of breath, each groaning laboriously, each cursing under the discomfort, strung out, uncoordinated. Jesus, what a parade to save the world, Dill thought. You poor guys. You couldn’t lick a stamp to save your life. He almost laughed.

“Tell the sergeants to get the guys together. I mean, we’re just supposed to wait is all, in case they need us.”

Jesus, he thought, poor Bravo can’t even wait right.

“Yes, sir. But we’re already way behind. Like, it’s quarter after and those guys should have started shooting and I don’t hear a damn thing.”

“Yeah, well,” said Dill, not sure what to do, “I’m sure they have their reasons.”

It had seemed so easy in the briefing. Bravo was to move up behind the Rangers and Third Infantry, then peel off to the left to get out of the way of the support groups, the medics, the ammo carriers, that sort of thing. And just wait in good order in case they were needed. So they were essentially out of it. The ones that were here, they’d made it. They were alive! Whatever, they had made it. It was time for the pros to take over.

But he was anxious that he hadn’t heard anything on the radio for a while.

“MacGuire?”

“Sir?”

“You sure that thing is working?”

He heard fumbles, mumbles. MacGuire was new to the PRC-25. Huston, his regular, was dead.

“It’s not working.”

“Oh, shit,” said Dill. “Can you fix it?”

“Uh, sir, it’s the batteries. They’re dead. We’ve been out of contact now for about ten minutes.”

“You got any extras?”

“Yes, sir, in my pack.”

“Great. Maybe they’ve surrendered and we don’t know it yet.”

He crouched as the boy struggled first with his pack, then with the radio. Dill thought he ought to say something to the kid about checking stuff like that before they started out. But Dill was gentle; he was good with kids, and they responded to him, which is why he coached basketball for a living at a high school outside Baltimore.

In a few seconds there was a gravelly growl as the boy got the walkie-talkie back in working order, and then handed it over to Dill, who hit the receive button to hear himself being vigorously paged by the old bastard colonel who was running things.

“—vo, goddammit, Bravo, this is Delta Six, where are you, Bravo? Goddammit, where—”

“Delta Six, affirmative, Bravo here, do you copy?”

“Dill, where the fuck have you been?”

“Ah, sorry, Delta Six, we had a temporary malfunction and lost contact there for a second or so, over.”

“You were out of contact for nearly ten minutes, soldier. Are you in position?”

Dill grimaced.

“Well, not exactly, sir. Tough going up here. We’re more or less where we’re supposed to be, about halfway up. I can’t see the Rangers or Third Infantry. But it gets real steep ahead, I can see that, and I—”

“Dill, there’s a change in plan.”

Dill waited. The colonel said nothing.

“Delta Six, I don’t read you, ah, over.”

“Dill, I’m advised that ahead of you there’s a creek bed.”

“Sir, I don’t recall any creek bed on my map. I really looked hard at it, too, sir.”

“I am advised that it’s there, nevertheless, Dill, and that you ought to be able to get a raiding party up that —”

Raiding party?

“—up that groove in the rocks and onto the perimeter flank pretty easily.”

“In support of the main attack, Delta Six?” asked Dill, computing the problem.

“Negative, Bravo. You are the main attack.”

Dill looked at the little box in his hand. Goddamn that kid, why hadn’t he discovered his dead batteries ten minutes from now rather than where he was.

“Sir, I don’t think my men are—”

“Bravo, this isn’t a request, this is an order. Look, Dill, sorry, but it’s how things have to go. The Rangers will never make it in the face of the heavy fire without help from the side. The front is too narrow and we believe there’s a network of trenches in their position. We have to take this fucking place in one stroke. You guys are it. Get humping, Lieutenant. It’s time to go to war.”

Tagged again, Dill thought.

He wished they’d leave him alone so he could get at the vodka in his pocket. At least with vodka he’d have a chance or something. But no, the Americans just kept drilling him, going over and over it again, where the bomb was, its fusing mechanism, the disarming steps, just in case, a crash course in nuclear technology, all a blur to him.

I want vodka.

But now the van had stopped. They were out of time.

“Okay, Greg,” said the FBI agent called Nick, “we’re on I Street, two blocks down from the embassy, right in front of the MPAA. You know the neighborhood. Just a few feet down to Sixteenth, then your left and there you are. We’ve halted traffic, we’ve got the place sealed off, and we’ve got enough SWAT people around to crack Nicaragua. But we’ve been feeding cars along so they won’t catch on. Okay, the street is clean, it’s sanitary, no mugger’s going to knife you on the way in.”

Gregor thought the man was hyperventilating. He looked as if he were going to have an attack of some sort. He looked as if he needed a bottle of vodka himself.

“Greg, you paying attention here, fella?”

“Yes, of course,” said Gregor.

“You sort of looked like you were dreaming about what was between Molly Shroyer’s legs there for a sec, old guy.”

“Actually, I am fine.”

“Good man, Greg. Anybody going to give you a hard time getting in? You code-cleared, all that?”

“I’m known. No difficulties. Well—”