down. The gun fired swiftly: it rattled itself free of the first belt and the hot brass shells rattled from its breech, hundreds of them, spilling out and bouncing across the floor. And then it started to rain.
The water pelted Yasotay in the face, and he fell back, stunned. It fell in dense sheets, filling the air, accumulating in lurid, fluorescent-jazzy puddles on the floor, driving the sweat from Yasotay’s hot body. It felt like a miracle. Greedily, he threw his head back and drank. The water poured in, sweet and glorious as vodka. Momentarily, the shooting stopped.
“Drink, boys, damn you, 22 Spetsnaz, drink! It’s a message from God. He sends us water deep under the ground to quench our thirst. Come on, drink, you lovely bastards!” Yasotay was laughing madly, aware that a stray round must have touched off the fire control sprinkler system. But he looked and saw Delta stunned at the sudden gush, and then crazily begin to fall back. Where bullets had failed, water had succeeded.
Then he heard the general.
“Yasotay, damn you. I have it! I have it!”
“Delta Six, this is Cobra, do you copy?”
“Go ahead, Cobra.”
“Sir, this is Captain McKenzie. Skazy’s dead and so are most of my people down here. We’ve got maybe sixty or seventy percent casualties, dammit, and now it’s raining.”
“Raining?”
“The goddamn fire system went off, and it’s pouring cats and dogs, Delta Six.”
Peter said, “Tell him to push it anyway, it’s only water.”
“Cobra, you’ve got to push ahead. Where are you?” “Sir, I’m into the corridor and past the first strong point, but they’ve set up a real motherfucker down there, they’ve got a goddamned M-60 and it’s kicking our asses. They’ve got some kind of Russian Rambo down here who stands up and laughs at us. He must have killed forty of our guys already. Jesus, he is one tough son of a bitch.”
“Waste his ass,” said Puller. “Blow his guts out.”
“Our lasers aren’t working in the rain, goddammit. Sir, I’ve got a lot of dead and wounded.”
“Delta, you’ve got to get into that launch control center.”
“Sir, every man I throw down there gets wasted. They’ve got this goddamn place zeroed. I need more C-4, more men, and more time. And more lasers.”
“Cobra, you’ve got to get it done, that’s all. Now, press the attack, son, or your wives and children will curse you from here to eternity.”
“Jesus,” said the young captain.
The general watched Yasotay run through the rain. He moved with surprising grace, given his condition. Most of his hair was burned away, as were his eyebrows. His face was bright red from excitement, although peppered with shrapnel and bleeding from several places. One arm had had its sleeve burned away, and the bare limb underneath was blackened and crusty with scabbing. His other arm was sodden with blood. Yet the man moved with such relish it was difficult to fathom. He was pure war.
“I have it. I have it!” the general yelled, holding the key aloft. “Come, Alex, we’re there, we’ve won.”
In his hands the general held two red titanium keys, each weighing about an ounce, each about two inches long, and jagged and fluted as any key would be.
“Here, take it. Now, on my mark.”
He pressed a key into Yasotay’s hand and had an odd sense that in Yasotay’s mad eyes something weird and sad danced.
But the general raced to station two.
There were two stations. At each, not much: a telephone, a wallful of buttons, a computer, and all of it, really, irrelevant, except for the keyholes under the rubric LAUNCH ENABLE.
“Put your key in, Alex,” the general commanded, inserting his own.
Yasotay put his key in.
Immediately, a red light began to flash in the command capsule.
The prerecorded voice stated, “We have launch condition Red, please authenticate, we have launch condition Red, please authenticate.”
“The computer, Alex. Do what I do. The numbers are there.”
Before Yasotay was a set of twelve numbers; they were the proper, preset Permissive Action Link for that day that he had obtained by blowing open the safe in the security shed eighteen hours earlier.
Yasotay punched in the twelve numbers, as the general had done.
“We have an authenticated command to launch, gentlemen,” came the voice of the beautiful woman out of the speakers. “We have an authenticated command to launch. Turn your keys, gentlemen.”
There was something tender in her sweet voice.
“Alex,” said the general, “on my command.”
Alex’s eyes came up to meet the general’s, then went back to the key.
“Alex, three, two, one.”
The general turned his key.
It did not move.
The sound of gunfire rose and rose. Shouts, screams, explosions.
“Alex?”
Yasotay looked up. The general saw something odd on his face, impenetrably sad and remote. He had not turned his key.
“Is this right, Arkady Simonovich Pashin? Can you say, irredeemably, in God’s eyes, in Marx’s eyes, in Lenin’s eyes, in the eyes of our children, that this is right?”
“I swear to you, my friend. It’s too late to go back. The bomb in Washington goes off soon. If we don’t fire now, this second, the Americans respond with
Imperceptibly, Yasotay nodded, then looked back to the key. His fingers touched it.
“On my command,” said Pashin. “Three, two—”
Pashin had the impression of conflagration, of flames unending and unceasing, spreading through the world, eating its cities, its towns, its villages, its fields, of the long and total death of fire, in its immense but necessary and cleansing pain. He thought of babies in their cribs and mothers in their beds, but then he saw that it was not the world but his own hand and arm that were in flames, and then the pain hit. He turned into the mad eyes of the American Hummel and his torch, which now climbed from the blazing arm and sought him where he was softest, burned through his tissues, through throat to larynx, through cheeks to tongue, through eyes to brain, and the pain was—
Yasotay watched the general burn. In a queer sense he was relieved, and then he saw that he had merely acquired another responsibility. The general’s pain was extraordinary, yet it did not move Alex. He watched as the American drove the torch deep into the face and the face melted. Alex, in his years of war, had seen many terrible things but nothing quite as terrible as this, and after a time, numb as he was, he decided enough was enough and he shot the American in the chest with his P9. The man slid to the floor and the torch went out at last.
Then Alex stood; the machinery to launch the missile was still intact. He could not turn two keys at once, however. He had to find someone, anyone, that was all. He turned and rose to get a man, and at last saw his own death, in the form of a black American commando with a red bandanna and a shotgun and frenzied eyes, and Alex, still numb, lifted the P9 in a nominal attempt at self-defense, but then the American blew him away.
Gregor looked at his watch.
Midnight was very close.
He looked into the welter of rooms that lay behind the vault door. He wondered if the great Tolstoi had ever conjured such a moment: fat Gregor, scared so badly the shit was almost about to run down his pulpy legs, going into a maze to stop a man with a bomb who would merely destroy the world. It was too absurd, not Tolstoi at all but more the ancient Russian folktale. He was Tatashkin, going off to fight the Witch of Night Forever. The world
