The Day Before Midnight

“That’s a negative, Halfback.”

“Delta Six, Sixgun-One.” It was the lead gunship, still holding on the strip. “We’re ready on the assault too. Give the word, and we’ll rock and roll.”

“I said, holding. Holding. Back to radio discipline, all units.”

The crackles sputtered out.

Peter looked at his watch. It was 10:35.

“Sir, if I was you,” someone whispered to him, “I’d turn that watch upside down on your wrist. You get up there, you’d be surprised in the dark, those gooks will zero on the radium in your watchface if it shows.”

Peter looked at him, mumbled an insincere, “Uh, thanks,” and made the adjustment.

“Sir, how long will you hold them?” someone asked Puller.

“Until Bravo checks in,” was all that Puller could say.

“Colonel Puller.”

Skazy stood in the door. He looked like some kind of guardian of hell’s gate, his face blackened like Caliban’s, his eyes leaking white rage, his grim lips pink and hot. He was draped with an immense green rope and wore several ammunition belts around him. He carried two pistols, several M-26 and smoke grenades, an angle-headed flashlight, and a CAR-15.

“Colonel Puller, I’m going to have to ask you to retire, sir. I’m officially taking command.”

Puller stood. He was another large man. Somehow the men between them melted away.

“Back to your station, Major Skazy,” said Puller.

“Colonel Puller, I’m prepared to put you under arrest if you don’t move away from the radio.”

Puller spoke quietly.

“Major Skazy, back to your station.”

Four Delta commandos, heavily armed, slipped by Skazy and slid into the room. Though their weapons weren’t brandished, everyone knew they were cocked and unlocked and at Skazy’s disposal.

“Sir, I request once more that you move away from the radio. It’s time to go.”

Puller reached into his holster, removed his.45, and threw the slide with a harsh clack that echoed in the still, smoky room. The hammer locked back.

“Son,” he said, “if you don’t move out of that doorway and return to your ship, I’ll shoot you in the head. It’s that simple.”

He leveled the pistol at Skazy.

Instantly, four CAR-15s zeroed on him. Craziness flashed through the air.

“We’ll both die, Colonel,” said Skazy.

“Be that as it may,” said Puller, “if you don’t move away from that doorway and return to your post, I’ll shoot you.”

“Colonel,” said Skazy, “I have to ask you one more time to move away from the radio and relinquish command.”

He started to walk into the room—

“Stop it!!” screamed Peter, himself almost out of control as he lurched between them. “Stop it!! This is infantile!”

“Step aside, Thiokol,” said Puller, looking through him.

Skazy had removed an automatic from his belt.

“Thiokol, sit down. This doesn’t concern you.”

“This is insane,” Peter shouted. He was breathing near to hyperventilation, murderous with rage at the folly and so terribly scared he could hardly stand still. His blood surged with adrenaline. “You assholes, you Delta prima donnas and your goddamned games, do your goddamned jobs like everybody else! Don’t hold yourself so goddamned precious!”

There was a click.

Skazy had cocked his Smith & Wesson.

“Peter, sit down,” he said. “Colonel, I have to give you one last chance to step aside or—”

“Delta Six, this is Bravo, we’re up, we’re at the top of the hill, goddammit, we’re there!”

Peter saw Puller snap the safety on his pistol as he slid it into the holster, lean forward, just an old man with a shit-scared look to his face, nothing dramatic, no big line to deliver, and say, “All units, this is Delta Six, do you copy, Delta Six. Heaven is falling, I repeat, Heaven is falling. I repeat, Heaven is falling.”

Everybody began to run. Someone cheered. Peter took a deep breath and then was running for his chopper through a commotion of other rising birds, the whip of snow and dust in the darkness, and the sound, far off and blurry, of men with guns.

“They’re off,” yelled the man on the night scope, “five, six, seven, eight, eight of them. Hueys.”

Troop carriers, Yasotay thought. An airborne job, helicopter assault at night. Let them come, he thought. He’d been on a few and knew how they got messed up.

“Rockets,” yelled Yasotay to his missile people. “Spotters ready. Men on the first line, eyes front. Get ready, boys. The Americans are coming.”

But before the Delta-laden Hueys could arrive, the first of the two gunships rose over the treeline, then the other. They hung obscenely, two black shapes against the white snow of the valley. Their rotors filled the air with the wicked whup-whup-whup of the jet engines, loud enough to mask the final movement of troops through the trees to the point of attack. Worse, at an altitude of some five hundred to a thousand feet up, the gunship guns had angle on the ground troops; they’d be firing down on the compound.

“Mark your targets, rockets,” Yasotay shouted in the second before the mini-guns began to fire. The stable world seemed to dissolve. The mini-guns fired so much faster than conventional machine guns that their problem wasn’t accuracy but ammunition conservation. From each of the hanging birds the tracers leapt out at the mountaintop like a dragon’s flame, a stream of light almost, and where the hot streaks touched, the world yielded. But of course in the dark they had no good targets, just as earlier the A-10s, roaring overhead, had no good targets; shooting at men is not like shooting at tanks or trucks. And so the bullets, as had the earlier bullets, bounced across the compound, roiling snow and dirt but little flesh; but their impact was devastating psychologically because there seemed no force on earth that could stand against them.

Down in the treeline Yasotay saw movement; infantry, coming hard through the trees, almost into the open.

“Rockets,” he yelled again, knowing he had only seven Stingers left after the profligacy of the air attack in the afternoon, but knowing that if he did not push the gunships back the infantry — good infantry, he presumed, better than the boobs who’d come at him earlier — would get close. It was a question of timing now; he’d put up a hard fight, then fall back to the first of the five V trenches; they’d come ahead and he’d have them in two fires. He’d kill them all. They’d never make it. They’d never get out of the mess of ditches and counterditches with the fire pouring in on them from both sides; and every time they made it to a new trench they’d find it empty, except for booby traps, while more fire smashed at them from the flanks. He’d seen the Pathans wipe out an infantry brigade that way, kill four hundred men in ten minutes, and then retire laughing to their rice pots higher up the mountain.

A Stinger fired, streaking out into the dark at one of the birds — it missed, lost its power and sank into the trees.

A second, hastily aimed — the gunner hadn’t properly acquired his target — missed worse, but the pilot in one of the gunships blinked and evaded, and his mini-gun fire swung wildly out of control, missing the mountaintop and spraying out behind them into Maryland.

A third Stinger missed.

Four left, I have four le—

The fourth hit the gunship dead on with a disappointingly small detonation and just the smallest trace of smoke; but the bird’s purchase on the air was altered and it began to slide sideways, until its back rotor pulled free and it simply became weight and fell because it could not glide. It fell into the trees but did not burn.

The second gunship zeroed on the flash of the missiles coming its way, though Yasotay gauged the pilot as merely good and not special like some of the Mi-24 aces in Afghanistan. But the pilot now had a target and he brought the mini-gun to bear and Yasotay slid down into the trench as the bullets rushed at him, a torrent of light.