The Day Before Midnight (49 page)

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 flames. Her heart filled with hate and anguish. She had an image of her daughter in that one instant before the napalm flooded in searing brightness across her: The child ran, screaming, Mother, Mother, as the big jet rushed lazily overhead, and two black, spinning eggs fell from it, drifting in their stately course to earth.

Mother, Mother, the girl cried, and the wall of flames fell over her and the heat beat at Phuong, pushing her back and down and she felt her heart melt and her brain die and she wanted to run into the fire, but hands held her back.

She knew then why she was here, why she had come this long way back into her past.

Mother, her daughter called her, Mother.

I am here, she sang in her heart, joyous at last, for it was time to run into the fire.

Skazy yanked the pull-ring on an eight-second delay detonator jammed into a five-pound block of C-4, looked around, yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and tossed the thing down the shaft. He had a sense of extreme maliciousness: to throw enough explosive to flatten a building down into a hole in the ground, then scamper back until it went boom. He felt giddy and dizzy as the thing fell weightlessly from his fingers and was absorbed by the blackness. He stepped back a few feet, though he knew the blast couldn’t hurt him. He looked about: the dark troopers of the first squadron of the Delta Tunnel Assault Team stood around awkwardly, linked into their harnesses. All were in black; faces, hands, watch caps, armored vests, guns, ropes, knives—all black. In the second before the explosion Skazy had a delirious moment of clarity: it was all behind him now, the stuff with Puller, the so many times Delta had mounted up and gone nowhere, the stand-downs, his own career stalled out by the rumor that he had once smashed a superior in the face. All gone: now there was only Delta, and the moment rushed toward him so beautifully he could hardly stand it.

The explosion was muted from this distance, but still you could feel its force. The ground shook. It was a hard, sharp clap under the earth. Hot gas pummeled up from the shaft and gushed out into the night air.

Skazy tugged once, just for luck, on the metal bit at his belly button through which his ropes ran; he knew they were perfect because he’d done this drill a million times. He went to the shaft and heaved his long rope down
it
It disappeared, uncoiling, shivering, and clicking off the walls as it fell. Other ropes fell with it down through the long distance. He looked around, and there stood Dick Puller with the earphones and Peter Thiokol looking at him.

“Delta Six, this is Cobra One,” he said into the hands-free, voice-activated mike suspended on its plastic arm inches from his lips, “we are commencing operations. Heaven is falling.” He gave them the thumbs-up.

He saw Dick speak into the microphone, and simultaneously heard the words, “It’s all yours, Frank,” in his ears.

There was something he had to say. “Dick, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Frank. Good hunting and God bless you.”

Skazy turned to his sergeant, and said, “Let’s go kill people.”

Then he jumped off into the black space, hurtling down the rope, feeling the rope burn through his harness and between his legs and rip against the leather of his gloves, and he swung into the walls, bounded off the balls of his feet, and continued to whistle down the rope toward the tunnel, his CAR-15 rattling against his back. He was first, but he knew in seconds that around him, like spiders descending from their webs, would come the others of the tunnel assault team, falling through the dark.

The force of the explosion threw Yasotay against the wall of the corridor. One of his eardrums blew out and he twisted his shoulder badly on the wall. Someone shook him alert. All around he saw his men shaking their heads, touching themselves to make certain they were whole, clapping each other to touch other living flesh.

The general yelled from the entrance of the launch control center, “Only a few more seconds. Just hold them a few more seconds.”

Yasotay blinked, found his whistle, blew it twice, hard and sharp. Its strident tones cut through the air of shock that hung like vapor in the air. Yasotay knew the battle would turn in the next second or two.

“On your guns, Spetsnaz, on your guns, boys!”

With that he himself did a stupid, incredibly brave thing. He stood and ran the sixty feet to the shattered elevator door, where the smoke was thicker.

“Sir, no, you’ll—”

But Yasotay ran on, uncaring. He reached the elevator just as the first of the American fighters, who looked like a cossack from black hell, arrived at the end of his long rope. The man separated himself from his harness with an extraordinary economy of motion, and was unlimbering his automatic
weapon, when Yasotay brought him down with a short Uzi burst, the dust flying off the man as the bullets punched into him. Yasotay figured he wore body armor, so when he fell back, Yasotay fired again into his head.

“Cobra One, this is Delta Six, do you read? What’s the situation, Cobra One, we hear heavy firing.”

Puller got
no
answer.

“Skazy’s down, dead probably,” he said to Peter. “They were right on top of them as they came down.”

“Sir,” someone yelled from the shaft. “Somebody’s in the shaft, firing up.”

“Grenades,” yelled Puller. “Grenades, now, lots of them. And then get your asses down there.”

Yasotay killed the first four men the same way, gunning them as they slid off their ropes. It was terribly easy. But then the men stopped coming. Smoke floated everywhere, the smell of burned powder curled up his nostrils, and he was struggling to change clips in anticipation of more Americans, when he heard something bounce hard on the floor of the car, and then another and another and—

He’d just gotten away from the shaft when the first grenade went off, then another and another and another. He felt his arm go numb as it took several pieces of shrapnel. Leaking blood, he staggered down the corridor to his first strong point, where he had his M-60 and a batch of men with automatics.

He just got behind the barrier when the next group of Delta commandos hit the floor of the elevator shaft.

“Sir, we have targets.”

“Take them, take them,” yelled Yasotay, breathing hard. The M-60 fired, its tracers racing out, filling the shaft door. The others were firing, too, the bullets hitting the door, tearing it apart, ripping into the masonry and the metal. But then, incredibly, out of the door there came with a sickening thud a large chunk of doughy-looking C-4 with something stuck in it. Yasotay saw it come, land halfway between the elevator opening and his own position, and started to scream at his people to get down, when it detonated.

The explosion seemed even bigger than the last one. Again, like a rag doll, he was twisted backward by the blast, separated from his gun and from his senses. He had the sensation of going down a drain, of being swirled through a spiral of hot gasses and wild sensory impressions while large black Americans beat on him with baseball bats and American women poured hot coffee on him. His arm was on fire and he at least had the
sense to
beat
it out against his
leg. He blinked, tried to will himself to clarity and command. There now was smoke everywhere and a bell had begun to sound. A Spetsnaz trooper, shocked and disoriented by the blast, stood next to him with a stunned look on his face, and as Yasotay watched, a small red dot appeared on his center chest, and then a burst exploded it, blowing out his heart, pushing him back. The trooper fell with the terrible gravity of a building whose underpinnings had been cut out, with total animal death, oblivious and absolute, and his arms splayed out on the impact of his crash to the floor.

Yasotay gathered his Uzi and looked down the hall. He saw the Delta people had laser-sighting devices and were very good shots. They fired not out of fear or excitement but out of calm professional purposefulness, behind what cover was available, with extraordinary accuracy. The red streaks from their weapons cut through the smoke, and when they touched flesh, bullets followed. Their first premium was the gunner. He was hit twice in the head. Next to him, the loader was dying with a hurt look on his face, his blood pumping in spurts from a large gap in his throat. The blast had knocked half the barricade away and two or three men lay sprawled beyond it. The gun itself lay on its side, its bipod up like the feet of a dead animal on the road, its belt a tangle. It was useless.

Yasotay fired his clip—he was the only man in the position firing—then dropped back to the floor and slithered across it like a wily old lizard.

“Come on, boys, you’ve got to fire back. Come on, get the guns going, boys,” he yelled as cheerily as he could. “Your mothers will curse you if you don’t get some fire going, fellows.” His team began to return the fire, but they were clearly shaken by the laser sights.

Yasotay smacked another clip into his Uzi. Then, with calm deliberation, he stood, aimed at a Delta commando coming at him in the dark, and killed the man with a single burst to the brain. He found another target in a second and fired into the ribs. He found a third and hit him in mid-body. By this time, like angry birds, the red streaks sought him through the smoke and the darkness. And as they climbed to find him, one of his men found the courage
to
race
out
of the shelter of the barricade to retrieve the M-60.

“That’s it!” Yasotay shouted. He waited one more second, then dropped out of gun range. Overhead the world seemed to explode as the tracers tore through the air. But he heard another sound: his own M-60. God, he was glad he’d brought it, because the damned thing had so much authority that it drove anything that faced it into retreat.

“Sir, they’re falling back.”

Indeed, the Delta commandos, faced with the heavy gun, straggled backward. They were hung up in the elevator shaft entrance and its environs.

Then Yasotay’s M-60 jammed.

It was the second big blast that panicked Jack. It was so close! He blinked, terrified, and felt his pants fill with liquid. He realized he’d urinated. Then it sounded as if hundreds of kids were beating on the walls with two-by-fours, the sounds wooden and unconvincing. What? He couldn’t figure it out, until at last it occurred to him he was hearing small-arms fire.

They’d be coming, he knew. They’d come through that door there, these army guys, and they’d kill everybody, and that was it.

He turned to the mad general and said, “I don’t think—”

“Burn it! Burn it, you fool. My hand must get into it! Burn it through, goddamn you, Hummel.”

The pistol came close to his skull and rested there.

Jack’s will collapsed. He wasn’t strong enough. He was going to die, he knew. He’d never see his kids again or his wife: he was a fool and a loser and a vain and worthless man, and this was the one test that counted and he was fucking it
up and this guy would kill him or the Army would kick its way in and kill him.

But he tried.

“I can’t,” he said. “I won’t.”

The general placed his pistol next to Jack’s head. Jack felt the circle of the muzzle boring against the frail bone of his temple. There was a click.

“Do it,” commanded the general.

Jack plunged the torch back into the long slash in the metal and watched as the hot bright needle of flame melted the last rim of titanium around the black hole. He could tell: it was done. You could get your hand in now. It was over.

He looked up.

“It’s finished,” he said.

The general’s arm rose and came down and Jack accepted the blow across the face. It went off like a thunderclap, the sound of the pistol barrel striking bone and shaking brain and the world wobbled out of sight with the surge of pain, and then became blurry.

Jack felt himself sliding away and knew the warm wetness on his face was blood. But through his daze he saw the general reach in, struggle once, and then emerge with the key.

“Yasotay. Yasotay, I have it!”

The first blast knocked Walls to his knees and he almost fired the shotgun involuntarily. The second blast, even louder, really scared him. The gunfire rose like the sound of the ocean, beating and crashing against the walls.

He turned to the woman.

“Okay, mama-san,” he said. “You just cover my ass, okay?”

Something that passed for acceptance radiated from her dark eyes for just a second and she turned and muttered something to herself and Walls, then realized she was praying. She was giving herself up to God for what would happen in the next two seconds or so. So he himself said a quick one. Dear God, he said, if you’re a white man or a brown man or a yellow man I don’t know, but please don’t let these guys blow
up the world before I move my momma and my brother James to the country. And if you do, then fuck you, ’cause you be dead too.