The Day Before Midnight

body.”

“Thiokol, what are you doing?” said Puller abruptly.

“I have to get down there.”

Dick Puller’s mouth came open, the only time Peter had ever seen surprise on the leathery, unsurprisable face.

“Why?” the old man finally asked. “Look, they’re either going to shoot their way in and stop Pashin or they’re not. It’s that simple.”

Peter fixed Puller with a harsh look. “It’s not simple. There’s a scenario where it may come down to somebody who knows those consoles and certain launch-abort sequences.” He marveled at the dry irony of it, how it had to turn out so that he, Peter Thiokol, Dr. Peter Thiokol, strategic thinker, had to slide down a rope to the worst game of all, war. “There’s more to it than men. Your Delta people may kill all the Russians and the rocket will fly anyway. I have to go. I started this fucking thing, now I’m the one who has to stop it.”

Puller watched him go. He interrupted the Delta assault descent, and the sergeant looked over at Puller and Puller gave a nod, and Peter somehow managed to get the ropes properly seated in the complex rappeling gear strapped to his waist. He was standing right there at the mouth of the tunnel. He poised on the edge for just a second, then caught Dick Puller’s eyes and gave a meek little thumbs-up, more like a child than a commando, and then he was gone.

Walls knew where he was now. He was in, actually inside the white man’s brain. It was a well-lit little room, covered with electronic gear, telephones, screens, dead guys. He jacked another shell into the Mossberg, stepped inside, pulled the goddamned door closed, gave a huge circular mechanism a twist and a clank, locking it. Beyond the white boy with the piece he’d just blown away there was another white guy, burned up like a pig in a North Carolina pit. Whoever he was he sure smelled bad. He went over and poked at him. The guy was barbecued. He’d been burned down to black bone. You could eat him, that’s how bad he’d been burned.

And then still another guy. Walls walked over and poked at him. His face was all smashed; he’d been beaten pretty bad. His leg had been shot. Blood bubbled on his chest. His eyes fluttered open.

“My kids?” he asked.

“Man, I don’t know nothing ‘bout no kids,” said Walls.

“You Army?”

Walls wasn’t sure how to answer this.

“Yo, man,” he said.

“They made me do it,” the guy said. “It wasn’t my fault. But I stopped the general. With the torch.”

“You done more than stop that general, man. You roasted his ass, but good.”

The man’s hand flew up to Walls’s wrist and gripped it.

“Tell my kids I loved them. I never told them, goddammit, but I love them so much.”

“Okay, man, you just rest. If you ain’t dead yet, you probably ain’t going to be dead at all. I don’t see that you’re bleeding. He plugged you over the heart, but I think he missed it. Just sleep or something while I figure out what to do, you got that, man?”

The guy nodded and lay back weakly.

Walls rose. This was the place to be, he thought, right in the middle of the white race’s brain. He had the door locked and a little farther up the tunnel there was a real serious battle going on, and he didn’t see what going up there and getting killed was going to do.

He looked around. These people, shit. Who could build a room like this, what kind of motherfucking asshole? Little white room way down under the ground where you could end the world by pushing some buttons. He looked and saw a key, just like the key in a car, stuck in an ignition switch. At another little place in the room he saw this other key. Like these white guys were going to drive away. There were lights, labels, signs, speakers, radios, typewriters, a wall safe, a big clock on the wall. Damn, it was late! It was nearly midnight.

He laughed.

White people.

And suddenly a white lady was there. It stunned him because he heard her voice in the bright room. He looked around, it sounded like she was just there, but no, no white lady. She was coming over the radio or something.

He tried to understand what she was saying. He couldn’t figure it out, man, it was just jive. These jiving white bitches, they always gave you a hard time, something about some kind of lunch being served or some other shit like that, man, what does this bitch want?

“Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing,” she was saying. “Automatic launch sequence initiation commencing. Gentlemen, you have five minutes to locate abort procedures if necessary. We are in terminal countdown.”

But then he understood. The bitch was going to fire the rocket.

2357:56

2357:57

2357:58

“Now, Magda,” Gregor began, “now, darling, let’s not do anything hasty here. This man Pashin? He may be a handsome charmer, but at the same time, he’s clearly something of a lunatic. Now, darling, believe me, I know what a bastard I’ve been to you and how vulnerable you might be to someone flashy like this, but can’t you see, he’s merely using you? Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Poof! It’s not as if he’ll be waiting somewhere for you, darling. I mean, in just a bloody minute or two we’re all ashes.”

The gun was pointed at his heart. He had seen Magda shoot. Magda was an excellent shot. She wasn’t trembling at all. The flickering colors of the fleeing digits in the timer mechanism illuminated her face, giving it an odd animation. The lights made real her insanity, her tenuous grip on reality, which had opened her to Pashin and made her capable of doing this tragic thing. Pashin had probably purchased her loyalty forever by something as elementary and unremarkable in this world as an orgasm. A quick tongue in the right place and the world was his.

“Please, darling,” he said, “I—”

“Hush, my love,” crooned Magda, her voice deep and throatily sexual. “Now it’s just a matter of waiting as the seconds flow by and we join the great All, Tata.”

He wished now he had made love to Magda. It would have been so easy. Magda had always been available for him. All he’d had to do was ask! And if he’d had her, she’d be his now. It was that simple. But he never had. He’d always taken her for granted. Magda! Silly, goosey woman, a pal, a chum, always willing to listen, to sympathize. She must have loved him secretly for years and been chewed up by the way he took her for granted. And so she turned to Pashin and his mad grandeur.

“Magda, let me tell you, it doesn’t have to end like this, in a flash of flame. Magda, you and I, we can be together. I can take you away from all this. I have friends among the Americans. The two of us, Magda, we can get away from Washington, from the embassy, from all this. We can have a happy life in some American city, Mr. and Mrs. We could adopt a little girl, Magda, a whole family. The Americans will help us. We can have a wonderful life, Magda, I’ll make you so hap—”

Magda’s laugh, sharp and percussive, cut him off.

“What, Gregor Ivanovich. Do you imagine I’m in love with you? That I’d sell my country out for one of your caresses? Men, God, how you all value yourselves! No, Tata, my heart belongs to Arkady Pashin and to his vision of the future, which is a vision of the great Russian past, the past of Pamyat, of Memory, Gregor dear. A pretend Russian like you cannot see this, but I give up my life willingly to my motherland, and to my lover.”

And to his damned quick tongue. Gregor saw how mad Pashin was: to put a tongue to plump Magda! Gregor also saw now that he was doomed. Magda’s loyalty was impenetrable. Pashin had made her his forever with his lunatic’s babble of Memory and Mother Russia. Magda, desperate for something to worship, had bought it all. The crazy bitch! The cunt, the dumb Russian cunt! Women! He hated them, the bitches.

She had him. To rush for the bomb would be to catch a bullet in the heart, like poor Klimov here; he’d be dead before he made it, and even if he wasn’t, he didn’t know how to stop it. Or if he came at her, she’d shoot him.