“He thinks that’s his strength, his pathological edge. But it’s not. It’s his weakness. It’s how he’s overreached. You know, he wanted to become me so bad that he fucked my wife. Yeah, the man in the silo, the man one hundred feet below us now, this very second, this Comrade General Pashin,
“Peter,” said Puller, something twisted in his voice, as if he were confronting a man on the cusp of breakdown.
But Peter rushed on, now unable to stop.
“That was the last thing,” he told the horrified men, and the broken timber of his voice held them. “He had her drugged and he fucked her two weeks ago in Virginia. He
Okay, Russian, he thought. Let’s party. Heaven is falling.
Peter knelt, quickly typed in twelve numbers.
He turned to Skazy.
“Piece of cake,” he said.
He pressed Enter.
Betty spoke again in her seductive voice. She sounded like a lover, rich and throaty — full of confidence on a hot summer’s afternoon in sweaty sheets, her words cutting through the siren and the pulsing red light.
“Warning,” she cooed, “access has been achieved.”
Yasotay looked at the general and the general looked back at Yasotay and there was just a moment of panic.
Then a man raced in.
“They’ve opened the elevator shaft!” he cried.
“He’s through the doors,” said the general. “Goddamn him, Peter Thiokol, goddamn him.”
It was ten till midnight.
Gregor asked the KGB security man at the front desk if Comrade Klimov was about.
“He just went downstairs,” said the man. “Just a second, comrade. I can call down to the Wine Cellar and —”
“No, no,” said Gregor. “No, that’s all right. I’ll go on down after him.” He smiled weakly and the KGB man looked at him suspiciously, then consulted his list.
“You’re late.”
“I was in conference,” said Gregor. He stepped past the man, into the stairwell which was dark and curved away, out of sight toward the cellar. It was very quiet. He licked his lips. Pausing, he reached into his pocket, took out the vodka, and for courage took a deep swallow, feeling its nuclear fire as it went down. For courage, he said. Oh, please, for courage. He screwed it shut, put it away. Gingerly, he headed down, twisting ever so gently as the stairs wound around on themselves.
He reached the bottom, paused again. It was very dark here; someone had turned out the lights. He looked down the hall. Only the light in the coding cell was open, some fifty paces ahead. He stepped into the darkened corridor, heart hammering.
The device, he thought. The device is in the Wine Cellar, that maze of chambers behind the vault door where all the installation’s little treasures were kept. If there’s a device, and if Klimov means to set it off, then that’s where he’ll be.
He thought of Magda. Klimov would come in to her; she’d recognize a superior, and violate procedure, yes. She’d open the barred door and Klimov would smile at her and kill her swiftly, with a silenced pistol, a ballistic knife, his bare hands. Then he’d have to find the vault combination in the drawer, open the heavy door, and go on in to the labyrinth in there.
Gregor hoped he was wrong. Please let me be wrong, he prayed. Let me find fat Magda reading some absurd American romance novel or cinema magazine or writing a letter to one of her many lovers or her husband or petitioning for a higher living allowance or deciding whether or not to change the color of her nails from Nude Coral to Baby Hush or …
“Magda,” he called softly as he walked down the hall, his head pulsing with pain. “Magda, Magda, are you —”
The cage door to the Wine Cellar door was wide open.
Magda lay on her back, her thighs open, her garters showing, her dress and slip up around her hips. Her face was in shadow.
“Oh, God,” sobbed Gregor. The vision of her death robbed him of all strength and will. His Magda was gone. He wanted to sit down and cry and wail with rage. She would never call him Tata, her very own Prince Tatashkin, noble hero who fought the Witch of Night Forever again. A tear formed in the corner of his eye.
Then he saw that beyond Magda, the vault door lay open. Inside it was dark; he could see the corridor leading away, like a maze, and all the low, black openings off it. Once it had housed the liquid treasures of exalted inebriation, inebriation in a hundred exotic hues and tones, each more rarefied than the one before; now it was a super-hardened puzzle, a collection of possibilities, all of them bad.
Move, Gregor. Time is short. You fat, putrid old man, move. Move! Move!
He had an inspiration, and ran to Magda’s desk and pulled open the third drawer.
There, an old Tula-Tokarev automatic pistol should have been awaiting him.
It was gone, and so was its spare magazine.
Gregor looked into the open strong room, where the device was and where Klimov was with the gun.
He looked at his watch.
It was very near midnight.
Walls hand-over-handed down the rope the six feet back to the ladder, there awkwardly transferred his weight to the top rung, and pivoted, unfolding, from the fetal to a hanging position, planting his boots on a rung five feet below. Damn, it was easy! He scrambled up the ladder and through the open door. The woman was right behind him. He found that he had climbed into some sort of deserted corridor which led down the way to another door. He thumbed the safety off the shotgun; opening its little blazing dot to the world, saying, Ready, Jack. Then he edged along, gun at the ready. Very tricky here. He tried to think it out: his job had been to see how close he could get, then go back and get other guys to plant a bomb or something. But that was all shot now. Now, he was in the goddamn place and it was hours since he’d been in contact: he had no idea who was here. Maybe all those soldiers had gotten into the hole already and he and the girl could just sit down and have a nice Coke and make their report and go home. But he didn’t think so. Those guys who came after him in the tunnel, man, they were too fucking good. They were tough motherfuckers. You don’t get guys like them out easy.
So he figured he’d managed now to get into the place where they could fire the rocket. But nobody had told him what it was like. What should he look for? He remembered as a kid when in school they made them watch rockets shoot little balls or white guys into space from Florida. It was some kind of big room with white guys in white shirts sitting at panels. Somehow he knew that wasn’t right. He figured it’d be a little place, a little room somehow. And as they drew nearer to the far door, Walls became aware of a peculiar sound; it was tantalizingly familiar, coming at him from somewhere in his memory. A siren. The police after him. He stopped. He felt her hand on his arm. He turned, looked at her.
“Some kind of siren,” he said. “You know, like the police are here or something.”
He could see she didn’t comprehend.
“That’s okay,” he said. “We just goin’ to nose ahead and see what’s up. We go real slow. We not goin’ to do nothing stupid, okay, lady? No heroes. We ain’t going to be no heroes. Being hero, that’s the way you get fucked up, and Walls done being fucked up. We just ease our way on up and see what’s to see.”
Phuong looked at the black man. She had no idea what exactly was going on, where exactly they were. But she understood that they were very near the men who would drop the bombs and turn the world’s children to
