The Day Before Midnight (22 page)

He wished he weren’t so tired. On the slope before Aggressor Force’s position, he saw bodies. What, thirty-five, maybe forty? Jesus, they caught us in the open. They just let us get close and they blew us away.

He squinted over the gun barrel. Nope, nothing. Couldn’t hit a goddamn thing with a machine gun, even.

It occurred to him that he might see a little better if he stood up. He thought about it; yes, it made sense. He’d just—oof!—stand up, yes, and then he’d be able to see much better to shoot.

He stood. It worked! He could see them now, or their heads moving, clustered at the center of their line behind the barbed wire. He thought, boy, sure am glad I thought to stand. It seemed entirely logical. He’d worked it out. With his covering fire, most of his guys could get out of the kill zone. That’s why they made me a captain, he thought. ’Cause I’m so smart.

With that thought, he fired.

The gun bucked through twenty-round bursts. He fired at the center of the line. He could see the far-off puffs where the bursts struck. The gun was surprisingly easy to control,
though a bit muzzle-heavy, with the bipod out there pulling it down. Trick was to keep the bursts short, then correct for muzzle drift. Firing it was actually quite a bit of fun. He could move the thing slightly and watch as the bullets stitched small disturbances into the earth. He felt the hot brass pouring out of the breech like the winnings at a slot machine. The gun began to steam; its barrel was melting snow packed in the cooling vents. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. He fired a belt that way in about thirty seconds.

Then laboriously he began to change belts.

“The right, the right, goddamn, the right,”
screamed Alex. Who had fired at them? In less than thirty seconds he lost seven men and one of the rounds clipped the breech of his H&K-21, putting it out of action. The bullets swept in on him. Alex felt their sting and spray. One of his gunners lay on the mud floor of the trench, his right eye smashed.

“The right!” Alex screamed again, sliding to the earth as the bullets began to rip up his position again. He heard the firing rise. All up and down the line his men were answering.

Quickly, he crawled back, turned his binoculars. He could see the gunner, about two hundred meters off on the right. The bullets searched for him, cutting into the snow around him. Yet still he fired, just standing there.
Standing there.
Like some kind of hero. The bullets finally found him.

“Cease fire,” Alex yelled.

“Sir, a bunch of them slipped away while the fire was hitting the gun.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes, twenty or thirty, just got up and ran down the hill.”

“Well, whoever that man was, he was a soldier. I’ll say that.”

“My marriage,” said Peter Thiokol not so much to the agents but somehow to the air itself, “if it had a script, it was written by Woody Allen and Herman Kahn.”

“I don’t understand the reference to Herman Kahn,” one of the FBI agents said.

“In the sense that it followed the classic pattern that Herman identified. The slow, gradual buildup of hostilities, the real arms race, the breakdown in communication, until finally open conflict seems the lesser of two evils. And that’s when you get your classic spasm war. You know, multiple launches by both sides, multiple hits, the global catastrophe, nuclear winter. The end of civilization. That was the drama of our marriage. We blew each other away in the end.”

There was silence from them.

“It was a very intense union,” Peter told them, “but not at first. I just told her I was there at Oxford studying poly sci, which is true. I didn’t tell her about my thing for the bomb or that I had a good line on an Air Force job and that I was heading for D.C. That came out later. I—I couldn’t really figure out how to break it to her. She wasn’t much interested in what I did, at first. She was rather self-involved. Beautiful, the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

“So when did she figure out how you were going to make a living?” said the sharper of the two.

“Oh, finally, I told her. ’Seventy-four. We’d been in Washington a year. I’d just moved from the Strategic Study Group to the Targeting Committee. It was a big leap for me and it meant about ten extra grand a year. Not that we needed the money. Her folks had plenty, but it was nice to be doing well suddenly, and she said she’d finally figured out what strategic meant.”

What does it mean? he’d asked.

It means bombs, isn’t that right?

Yes.

You think about bombs. You think about war all day. I thought it was more abstract, somehow. Thinking about strategies and that sort of thing, chess and so forth. Or about history, like your project at Oxford. But it’s very specific, isn’t it?

Yes, very, he said. He’d spent the day contemplating the effects of a nine-megaton fused airburst from a W53/Mk-6 reentry vehicle delivered by a Titan II at four thousand feet versus the same hardware and throw-weight in a fused air-burst at two thousand feet in terms of fireball circumference
vis-a-vis damage radius to a soft target like an industrialized urban base the size of, say, downtown Vladivostok.

I look on it as thinking about
peace
, he said. Ways to keep the peace.

By building more and better bombs?

He sighed, not at the stupidity of it, but because he knew that from that moment on, there was no turning back, no recall.

“How did your wife take the news?”

“Not too well.”

“No kids?”

“The bomb was our baby, she used to say. But Megan was too beautiful for pregnancy. She didn’t want to lose her waistline. She’d never admit that, but that’s it. And the bomb. It wasn’t that it would blow the world up, it’s that it would blow
her
up. She took it personally. She took everything personally.”

Peter, she once said to him, do you realize you are the only man in the Western world who has nightmares about nuclear bombs
not
exploding?

“She’s famous, your wife?”

“In a very small world. She makes sculptures that are highly thought of. She gets great reviews, and sells the stuff for a ton of money. I liked it. It was very impressive. And I think the reason she never left me was that she drew off of me and what I did. Her art would have suffered. She made these anguished things, these masses of mashed tin and plaster and painted surfaces. It was our old pal, Mr. Bomb.”

“Was she untrue?”

It took Peter a long second to make sense of the word. It was so quaint and comical.

“I don’t know. She went to New York once a month or every six weeks. She said she had to get out of Washington. At first I went with her, but I didn’t really go for those people. Assholes, all of them. It was still the sixties for them. It always will be.”

“Politics. Was she in a ban-the-bomb group or anything?”

“No. She was too vain to join groups. She wouldn’t join any group she couldn’t be the leader of. Then I published
my
essay, and I became the celebrity and started going on the tube and that really hurt her.”

“‘And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD’?”

“Yes.”

He remembered: the argument was simple. MAD—mutual assured destruction, the crux of strategic thought—was a fallacy. We could deploy our MXs before the Soviets improved their 18s and got their 24s on line and it would be possible, under certain rigidly controlled circumstances, to make aggressive moves against the Soviet Union without fear of retaliation. Eastern Europe, for example. In other words, it was theoretically possible, if we could get our MXs out and Star Wars going, to win without the big launch. Reagan loved it. It made Peter the superstar of the sunbelt right.

“That’s what got me the head of the MX Basing Modes Group. I was making eighty thousand a year, I was suddenly very high-profile, I’m on TV, journalists are coming courting. And she hated it. I think that’s what finally drove her to him.” He paused. “She started up with him right after that. I think she’s with him now.”

“Who is he?”

“I met him once. His name was Ari Gottlieb. He was an Israeli painter, briefly big in Manhattan. Very handsome man, taught a course at the Corcoran. She met him at some Washington art thing. It was a very difficult time. We were in the middle of this squabble over MX basing modes.”

“She was different after meeting him?”

“Yes. It was about two years ago. Congress had settled on an initial deployment of one hundred missiles to go into Minuteman II silos and we
knew
that was tragically wrong because it completely invalidated the premise and that it was dangerous and we had to put at least one in an independent-launch-capable super-hard silo, to beat the new inertial guidance system of the SS-18, to say nothing of the next-generation missiles. So we were working crazily on South Mountain to be our first deployed independent-launch-capable Peacekeeper unit, but trying to keep it within the congressional guidelines. We were cheating, in other words. And she hated it, because the thing just was eating up my time and my mind.
And I was fighting for this fifteen-million-dollar gimmick called the key vault, which
nobody
wanted, and let me tell you, it was maximum-effort time. She hated that the most, I guess. That it absorbed me so completely. And maybe that finally pushed her over.”

“How was she different?”

“I’d finally screamed at her”—he remembered the night, a livid memory, like a scar, still tender to the touch—“that maybe she hated what I was doing, but I was doing something.
Something.
That I believed. That she sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never
doing
anything, never
believing
in anything. That she was too
precious
to do anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was all.”

“And that was it?”

“In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn’t even bothered to change the pillowcases. She had to let me know. She had to hurt me.”

He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she’d finally launched, and now he had to counterstrike on warning or lose his hardware in the silos.

“Cheap aftershave,” he said. “English Leather, can you believe that?”

“What happened?”

Peter couldn’t reach it, couldn’t touch it.

The pause lengthened.

“And?”

“Look, it was a very intense relationship. I was capable of…”

“Capable of what, Dr. Thiokol?”

“I guess finally I hit her.” He remembered the evening, June it was, leafy June, the air full of light, the trees green, the breeze sweet and lovely. He’d never hit anything before. He remembered the way her head jolted on the impact and the way her eyes went blank and then her face broke up with fear. She fell back, leaking blood, her nose mashed. Spasm
war: the end. She cried. He felt so shitty, he tried to help her, but he was afraid he’d think about Ari Gottlieb again and hit her some more. He told her he was feeling pretty fucked up in the head, she ought to get out of there. He might kill her. And he told her he was going to get a gun and kill Ari Gottlieb. That was June.

“It was something else too.”

Peter turned so that he didn’t have to look at the two of them. After all the denying, it was time to reach in and go where he was most terrified to go. He finally faced it.

“I’d also—well, I did a lot of work at home, and I found stuff—rearranged. Out of order. Slightly scrambled. It really scared the hell out of me. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.”

“It was her?”

“It had to be.”

“Why didn’t you
say
something?”

“I just put it into the deep part of my head and covered it up with everything I had. Have you ever heard of denial? You
refuse
to deal with reality. That’s when I flipped, I really flipped. I crashed in July.”

There was another long silence.

“It sounds like a classic,” said one of the agents. “They probably had the two of you under surveillance for a long time, knew exactly how vulnerable she was. They built her a dream man, tailored exactly to your weaknesses. He seduced her. And recruited her. That’s how they did it.”

“Who? Gottlieb was an Israeli, for Christ’s sake. They’re on our side, for God’s sake.”

“Well, in some things. In others, maybe not. Maybe—well, who knows? She’ll have to tell us.”

This struck through Peter’s defenses. Ashamed, he still reacted instinctively. “Go easy on her. The truth is, no matter what, I still love her. I never loved anyone before and I’ll never love anyone else. It was
my
fault. It wasn’t hers—”

Finally, he’d run out of words.

He sat for a while after they rushed off with their little treasure, feeling awfully rocky inside. Had he just betrayed her? He wasn’t sure anymore where the higher loyalties lay. He hated the idea of disappointing her again, after everything
else. He also felt close to her. He realized it had pleased him to talk of her. He wanted to reach out for her. It was dark in the room. He thought of Megan, Megan’s laugh, which he had not heard for ages.

He remembered the last time he’d seen her. Two weeks ago, after such a long time. They’d talked for a while, and for a while everything seemed fine and there seemed to be some chance for them. He was out of the bin and teaching at the Hopkins and everything was fine. The key vault thing was finally going through, they’d just sent him the final design configuration and the Northrop design team had really done a good—

But in the morning she’d been angry with him. She said he was happy only because the project was going well. He was still a part of it, wasn’t he? He still drew power and pleasure from its evil.

He’d gotten angry. Shouts, screams, accusations, the same old business, the air hot with neurotic fury. He’d watched her go off.

Still, she’d looked so damn beauti—

Certain things clicked in the machine of a brain he had and Peter recognized from the pattern that a wondrous possibility had just been opened.