So this was it, huh? This was the cocksucker. Another door.
Walls thought he might laugh. All this way, and he just run up against FUC—
He heard a noise, looked down to see the little Vietnamese woman beneath him a few rungs.
“That’s good, mama-san,” he said. “Good you came along, but there’s no place to go.”
She reached up and tapped his foot, then pointed.
Well, well, hello yourself. Yes, it was another small door or hatch or something, maybe two feet by two feet, covered with metal gridwork. The thing was about five feet farther around the curve of the silo wall. It looked like the entrance to a duct or a vent or the air-conditioning. But it didn’t matter.
“It’s too far,” he yelled. “I can’t reach that far.”
But with her gestures she made him see that she wanted to come up.
The bitch going to try. Don’t she know? Can’t get in. Nothing to it now. All she wrote, end of story, the man he had them beat.
But up she came, like a cat, Jesus, she was so strong. He slid over on the rungs, and up she scrambled, until they shared the same precarious upper rung. She pointed and made interesting facial explanations and ultimately it occurred to him that
He saw now what she meant. He was strong, she was light. If he could just hold her, somehow, maybe she ought to be able to bridge the gap.
Dumb bitch, don’t know when the man got you beat.
“Sure, hon. You just go on. Nathan hold you.”
He tried to turn sideways on the rung beneath, planting one foot real solid; with his arm he embraced the top rung.
Backward, she mounted him, feeling back with one strong supple foot, planting it on his thigh, then with her arm hoisting herself, and planting her other foot while he embraced her around the waist with his arm.
She was light, just bones and strings and skin and short black hair, but she wasn’t that light either, and there was a terrible instant when he couldn’t get set just right as her weight threw him off, and he thought he was losing her. He could feel her tighten, shriek a little, and scream or curse in her language, but in just a second he had her back under control.
“Okay, okay, we be okay, just cool on down, just chill it on down, sugar baby, now,” he moaned through his own pounding breath. He knew whatever he did he couldn’t look down: it was delicate, their position, the two of them supported on the slippery purchase of his one boot on the rung, his other out to balance them, her whole body leaning on his thighbone and the slipperiness of his muscle there.
It wasn’t going to work, goddammit!
But out she strained, out, so far, Jesus, she had guts, and he clung desperately to her waist, feeling it slide against his grip as she leaned ever out for the grid on the little door.
He could hardly see what was going on, just her back ahead of him, inching away from him, and he could feel the great pressure against his forearm, holding her in, and also the great pressure in his other arm, keeping them moored to the top rung. He could feel the sweat pop out of his hairline and begin to trace little patterns down his face. He thought his muscles would cramp; his heart was thudding; he couldn’t get breath and his limbs began to shiver and tremble against the strength that threatened to desert them totally. He heard what sounded like pinging or chipping and realized that she’d gotten her knife out and into the frame of the little door and was trying somehow to jimmy the goddamned thing open and—
Uh—
Suddenly, she took flight and squirmed out of Walls’s grip and he lurched for her. His foot slipped off the rung and he himself fell, in his panic forgetting her as the gravity claimed his body and he knew he was going to die — but then his left arm wrenched him with a whack into the wall and was so panicked it would not let him fly loose and he planted his boot back onto a rung and with his now tragically free hand, grabbed back to the top rung again, and then and only then did he see that the woman had not fallen at all, but like some kind of simian creature now actually rode the grate on the little door which on its delicate hinges swung ever so gently back and forth.
“Jesus, watch yourself,” he shouted.
The little door swung the full 180 degrees, banged into the wall with its desperate cargo; then with a toe she pushed off, clinging like a cat on a screen to the gridwork. Her foot came out, searched for the duct and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting
Jesus, he thought. She made it.
She rested for what seemed to him to be an inhumanly short time and then peeped out, pointing at his loins urgently.
Lady, what the fuck you want?
Then, of course, he caught on: his rope tied in a tight figure-eight on his web belt. He took it off the D-ring, kneaded it free, and tossed it in an unraveling lob toward her; she caught it neatly — she did
Walls tied his end into about a trillion or so knots on the rung. She gestured him on.
Oh, shit, he thought. Hope this sucker holds.
It was only six or so feet, but it seemed a lot farther. The only way he could manage it was upside down like a sloth, his boots locked over the rope, eyes closed as he pulled himself along. Jesus, he felt the give and stretch of the rope bouncing as it fought against his weight, and the dead steel of the twelve-gauge pumpgun hanging off his shoulder and all the little pouches on his belt swinging and the pockets full of loose twelve-gauge shells jingling.
As he edged along the rope, Walls prayed feverishly. His desperate entreaties must have surely paid off, for suddenly he felt her hands pulling at him, and in a squirming frenzy of panic — this was the worst yet, of it all this was the absolute worst — he managed somehow to get himself into the duct opening.
He sat there, breathing hard. In time the various aches of his body started to fire up; he saw that his palms were bleeding from the tightness with which he had clung to the rope, and that he had whacked himself in the shoulder, the arm, the hip, and the shin getting over the threshold of the duct. He didn’t want to think about it though. He just wanted to suck in some air. He wished he had a cigarette.
She was saying something, and after he’d caught up on oxygen he got enough concentration back to say, “Hey, no speakee, sugar. Sorry, can’t understand you, honey.”
But he could read her gestures: she was pointing.
At last it occurred to him to see what they had achieved and the disappointment was crushing: they had achieved nothing; about six feet back the duct ended abruptly in cinderblock.
So what’s the point of the duct, he thought bitterly, knowing it to be another government fuck-up.
But then he saw the point of the duct: a metal box up near the corner of the wall, with metal tubes running out and into it from various points in the wall.
He crawled closer.
A padlock kept the box from human touch, but the box itself looked flimsy enough to beat open.
He squinted at the words on the box:
DOOR ACCESS FUSE PANEL, USAF LCA-8566033 it said.
He recognized only one. It was familiar from his years in prison: DOOR. DOOR. DOOR.
That’s how we get into the sucker, he thought, and began to beat at the metal box.
Dill could hear the firing up ahead, rising, rising still more, rising till it sounded incredible.
“Jesus,” he said to his sergeant.
Then the second gunship went up like a supernova a few hundred feet ahead, its glare spilling across the sky and filling the woods with light.
Dill winced, fell back, his night vision stunned. He blinked, chasing flashbulbs from his brain. You never look into a detonation, he told himself.
He looked back. Most of them — maybe a half of them — were still strung out in the creek bed, coming up
