The Day Before Midnight

“I shall,” squeaked Arbatov as radiant relief beamed from his face. Then he looked down in expiation, aware that in sniveling he had once again survived. The young officers of the embassy apparat, which Klimov ran, looked at him with unconcealed contempt; he could feel their eyes harsh against his fat form. He didn’t care. He could have wept for joy. He had more time.

The meeting turned from Arbatov’s weaknesses to other concerns. Arbatov appeared to be listening intently, a new man. He even took notes eagerly, quite a change from the insolent, lazy old Arbatov. What he was writing down in his little notebook was, This little flicker should burn from the toes up. Over and over.

As he was walking from the meeting, someone came flying after him.

“Tata! Tata, stop!”

He turned to see the stout form of his one true friend, Magda Goshgarian, bearing down upon him.

“Tata, darling, don’t you think you laid it on a bit thick?”

Magda was another of the old ones. She had an uncle who was a general of artillery and was thus safe from Klimov’s predations, at least for now. She was a rumpled, plain woman who wore too much makeup, drank too much, and danced too much in the Western idiom for her own good. She even went to discos in Georgetown when she thought she wasn’t being watched. She was perhaps his only remaining friend, now that Klimov had exiled Daniel Issovich to Krakow and old Pasha Vlietnakov to Ethiopia.

“Darling, you have no idea how abject I can be in the service of survival,” said Gregor. “These young bastards were disgusted? They haven’t seen anything yet. I won’t stop at licking his boots. I’ll eat them too. I’ll butter them and eat them if it buys me one more day in the West.”

“You are a sorry Communist, Tata.”

“No, I’m an excellent Communist. I’m merely a sorry spy.”

“Any new fat American girls, Tata?”

Tata was her pet name for him. As he had told Molly Shroyer, it was derived from the hero of the fourteenth-century folk tale, Prince Tatashkin of the noble heart. Prince Tatashkin, lean and golden, had gone into the Caves of the Urals, there to fight the Witch of Night Forever, or so the story went. He was still fighting her all these years later, losing in the early hours of evening but regaining his strength in the morning. As long as he fought her each night, there’d be a morning. It was a wonderful story, never failing to bring tears to Gregor’s eyes, though he was aware that he was Tata to Magda only in the ironic sense.

“Yes,” Gregor said with a sigh. “I’ve a nice one going now, though she talks like a baby sometimes. But say, what are you doing here? Didn’t you have Coding Station last night? Why aren’t you home in bed?”

“I was in the Wine Cellar, yes, Tata. But the meeting was so early, I thought I could score a few points with young Klimov by hanging around. There’s a new bitch in the apparatus who may have her eye on my apartment.”

“The blond one? I’d like to set her on fire. I hate the young ones. Especially the beautiful young ones.”

“I hate them too. Gorbachev’s dreadful children. Little rats, squandering all our labors. But, Tata, you must promise to be careful. Who will fight the Witch of Night Forever if they send you back? Worse, who will I talk to if they send you back? The walls?”

But Gregor wasn’t listening; he was thinking only of himself.

“Do you know, Magda, I had my dream about you last night. I heard you say my name, and it jolted me awake.”

“A dirty one, Tata? Filthy with Western perversions, I hope.”

“No, I’ve told you. A nightmare. Scary. Caves, the like. Quite awful. As if I really were that damn prince. I remember fingers on my throat, someone’s hot breath. Troubling. The Witch of Night Forever.”

She laughed.

“Gregor, you fool. It’s a fairy tale. Look around you, at your dreary reality and the little snail Klimov hungrily sniffing after you. Is that the stuff of fairy tales?”

“No,” confessed Gregor. “You’re right. The age of fairy tales is gone forever. I believe only in love. Do you love me still?”

“I’ll always love you, Tata, love you most of all. You know that.”

“Thank God,” said Gregor, “that someone does.”

It was called the situation room, on the B level, the second sub-basement level beneath the White House. It wasn’t much architecturally: a conference room, roughly fifteen by twenty feet, painted a grim institutional green, in which there was one large conference table and several comfortable chairs. It could have been located in any ambitious motel chain in America. There weren’t even any maps.

The President of the United States sat in a sweat suit with his eyes narrowed in extraordinary concentration as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force read aloud from a document he held before him.

“‘No man sent us here,’” the lieutenant colonel read, “‘it was by our own prompting and that of our maker, or that of the devil, whichever you ascribe it to. The cry of distress of the oppressed is my reason and the only thing that has prompted me to come here. I wish to say furthermore that you had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared, the better.’”

“All right, when did this come over?” the President demanded. He looked around the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was there, as were the Chiefs of Staff of the Services, impressive men in their well-tended uniforms ablaze with decorations. Each was served by an aide of no less than field grade rank who sat behind him, against the wall. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense had arrived, as had the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency filling in for the Director, who was in Phoenix this morning for a speech; the Director of the FBI was there, too. Finally, the National Security Adviser. Yet among the fifteen or so of them, there was not the slightest tick of sound beyond the rise and fall of breaths and the occasional rattle of paper.

“Sir,” the lieutenant colonel responded, “we received that over the National Command teletype link from the South Mountain installation at 0823. It followed by three minutes and fourteen seconds a clear-channel robot signal from the launch command center that the key vault had been deployed.”

“And that means one of our silo officers deposited the key in the key vault. The significance, Mr. President, is that our officers are instructed to utilize the key vault only in the last stages of a seizure operation,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“Then let me get this straight. Whoever sent this message — he’s in the silo?”

“Yes, sir.”

The President looked again at the peculiar message. Then, to nobody in particular, he said, “A madman is in a missile silo. That’s the situation?”

There was silence from the military men and civilian security officials who shared the room with him.

“It’s signed ‘Commanding Officer, Provisional Army of the United States,’” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.

“I assume you have staff psychiatrists at CIA examining it?” the President said.

“Yes, sir,” came the response.

The President shook his head. Then he turned and said, “Would someone please be so kind as to explain how the hell someone could take over a missile silo. Especially this missile silo.”

His rage turned his skin the color of an old penny and his eyes into even older dimes. Yet the anger did not dent the laconic voice of the officer who responded.

“Sir, as you know, the primary defense of a silo is its Doppler low-level radar, which marks the approach of any moving object. However, in the last year or so, it’s been technically feasible to defeat radar with some kind of stealth, that is, radar-absorbing material, as some of our new bombers now have. In other words, it’s at least possible that men approaching on the ground, very carefully, could have shielded themselves under some kind of stealth material and gotten through the radar, close enough to rush the installation in force. That’s our reading.”

“So how do they get down below? Don’t the officers—”

“Sir, since South Mountain is independent launch capable, its elevator access is keyed into the PAL mechanism. This enables us to get down, say, in the event of an emergency, by using the SAC daily PAL code. If, say, by some freak of nature, both men in the LCC should come down with disabling stomach problems or heart