The Day Before Midnight (31 page)

The clothes and personal effects were easy, too, though Uckley had felt a little ghoulish going through them. As for the personal effects, there were none. Each of the three dead aggressors had gone into battle without pictures of loved ones, without Bibles, without even wallets, with nothing tiny or human to sustain them: they were men who seemed to have never been. Their clothes were well-washed but equally vague: heavy black boots of obscure manufacture, also picked up somewhere on the military surplus market. Also, black fatigue pants with huge bellows pockets at the thighs; blue watch shirts, perhaps naval in origin; black sweaters and watch caps. They had gloves, found stored in the shot-up house, and heavy parkas, perhaps for outdoor work. All of the clothes would perhaps in time yield their secrets to the sophisticated microscopic textile testing the Bureau had back in its labs in Washington; but that would take weeks, and in hours the world would be ending. The clothes were therefore of no immediate help.

This left the bodies. This left the hard part.

The three naked men lay on a tarpaulin in the middle of the Burkittsville fire department. Sooner or later a doctor would surely get there who could do this thing more professionally than poor Uckley, the mother killer with the black and blue stomach, but he had not arrived yet and nobody else particularly wanted to do it. So there was Uckley, alone with the three bodies.

Look at them, he told himself.

The big one who’d died upstairs seemed the worst. He’d put the Czech pistol into his mouth and squeezed off a round. The bullet had blown out the back of his skull, leaving his head queerly deflated in appearance, like a melon halved by an ax. But more amazing was his right shoulder, which looked as if a buzz saw had hit it; one of Delta Three’s bullets had really ripped it up. God, how could he go on, hurt like that? Yet Uckley had seen him, climbing the steps, firing, the whole works. In pain like that? This was some kind of Superman. Even the corpse grinned a little at him. What was there in that white-toothed smile? Was it superiority?

Yeah, okay, Uckley thought. So you were the better man.

The other two had taken more hits but looked better. They were just dead men with what looked like red scabs the size of quarters scattered across their bodies, three across the chest of one, eleven spread randomly across the other. Bullet holes, lovely, Uckley thought. He thought of a picture from a history book of proud townspeople standing next to some old-time desperado, hit about a dozen times and now propped up like a cigar store Indian in his coffin, his mustache drooping, his bullet holes shining like buttons in the sun.

Think, Uckley told himself.

Okay, all of them were lean, strong men. They had the flat bellies and sinewy muscles of well-trained professional military men, elite troopers. Their hair was all cut short; one of them had nicked himself shaving that day. They looked to be in their late twenties. All three had patches of scar tissue on their upper arms, and one had quite a few on his wrists and chest. Tattoos? Yes, tattoos, somebody had surgically removed their tattoos!

And goddamn, they were tan. Their faces and their arms were tan; they had the burnished deep color that fishermen get, men who spend their lives in the sun.

Uckley went back to the first one. He looked more closely at his body. Yes, there was a lacework of stitches running up his chest, intersected by another line of stitches.

You’ve been hit before, he thought. You’ve had a very adventurous life, my friend. I’ll bet you could tell me some things if you were alive.

He checked the others for wounds. The one was clean, but the other had a pucker of scar tissue up high, near his collarbone on the right side. It was another bullet hole.

These were clearly tough customers, all right. Somebody else’s Delta.

He wished he knew what to do next. He walked back to the leader. What am 1, a forensic pathologist? I just look and see dead guys, their heads shot away. He remembered the man standing above him, the little girl squirming beneath him. Let the girl go for crissakes, he’d said, and the man had just stared at him.

You had me cold, pal.

Instead, you walked back and blew your brains out.

Uckley knelt. Something in that smile, something mysterious and bright. A commando with movie-star teeth blowing his brains out in the back room of an old house in Burkittsville, Maryland.

Almost involuntarily, Uckley put his finger out. It was the unnaturalness of the dead man’s smile that disturbed him. The teeth were so white. He put his finger in the dry mouth, felt the dry lips and the dry, dead tongue, reached up, pinched, tugged and—

Yes, they were false.

The porcelain bridge came out in his hand.

He checked quickly. All three men had completely false teeth, and almost brand new bridges placed in their mouths.

Witherspoon began to chatter.

“Wow, did you hear that? Man, that sounded like gunfire. You suppose.”

But then Walls’s hand stole over his mouth and pulled him down with more strength and will than the larger, younger man ever thought the smaller, older one possessed.

Then he heard the whisper in his ear.

“Okay, now, man, you just take it easy, you just keep it quiet. Okay, man? Okay?”

Witherspoon nodded and Walls let slip his mouth.

“Shit, you—”

“Shhhhhh. Old Charlie, he in the tunnel. Yep. Charlie here. Charlie come a-hunting. Yep, old Charlie, you can’t hold him back. He’s come a-hunting.”

Witherspoon looked at him, feeling his eyes bulge and his heart begin to triphammer.

“Hey—”

“Hey, nothing. You listen to Walls. Walls knows Charlie Walls and Charlie, man, them two go way back.”

Walls seemed, queerly, to be fading on him, to be transfiguring into some other creature: he slid back, as if to allow his blackness to be absorbed by the tunnel. At the same time, Walls had unslung Mr. Twelve, and adroitly peeled off
the black tape that masked the muzzle and the ejector port. With one swift metallic
klak!
the old tunnel rat pumped a big double-ought into the chamber.

“Okay, you listen,” Walls said softly. “Time to gear up. Get your shit on, get your piece ready. Tunnel be hot. Charlie hunting us, man, we got to hunt Charlie. Only way to stay alive.”

Witherspoon threw on his flak jacket and picked up his German machine pistol. He cocked it, drawing back the knob that ran through the housing over the barrel; it clicked locked and solid. He slid the night vision goggles down across his face, popped off the lens cap, and turned on the device from the battery pack at his belt. As he diddled with the image intensifies and the focus, the tunnel leapt to life in a kind of aquamarine as the electro-optics picked up the infrared beam from the lamp atop the goggles; he had a sense of being underwater, everything was green, green and spooky. He turned to Walls and faced a man on fire. The convict’s face burned red and yellow like some hideous movie special effect; Witherspoon almost laughed at the strangeness, the comedy of it all, but it was only that Walls, excited, had begun to pulse with blood, and from so close, all that heat, all those agitated molecules, came through the lenses like a movie monster.

“Okay,” said Walls soothingly, “now, this is how it got to be. We got to move forward, and make our contact as early as we can. Okay, we hit Charlie, we fall back. We hit him again, we fall back. See, in a one-way tunnel, you got only one chance, man. You got to hit that sucker and hit him over and over. You got to hope he runs out of men before you run out of tunnel. Because if you run out of tunnel before he runs out of men, you’re one trapped rat. Man, the tunnels I been in all had holes at
both
ends, this fucker only one end. These white bitches, they always let you down.”

“Okay, I’m with you.”

Something flashed in Witherspoon’s psychedelic vision: it was Walls’s teeth.

He was smiling.

“Whistle while you work, man,” Walls said merrily.

*   *   *

Phuong, in the tunnel called Alice, also heard the gunshots.

Mother, her daughter said, Mother, the Americans are coming for us.

I know, she said. Let them come.

But her response was different, because unlike Rat Team Baker, she had not come to the end of her tunnel; she still believed there was something ahead. Thus her thought was to continue her movement.

She reached to her belt and swiftly removed one M-26 fragmentation grenade, smooth as an egg. Then she knelt, took off her tennis shoes, and quickly unlaced them and threw the shoes away, behind her. She swiftly tied a loop around the lever of the grenade with just enough tension to hold it in close enough. Then, gingerly, she pulled the pin. She felt the lever strain against the shoelace. With her knife she began to saw through the lace. At last, only a hair’s width of lace remained, just the thinnest, tiniest membrane of woven cotton. Gingerly, she set the thing down in the center of the tunnel, on its base. She knew that if men came through the tunnel single file, without lights, they would kick it; when they kicked it, or bumped it, the thing would fall on its side, the shoelace would pop and—

Two hundred yards farther on she repeated the process with the other lace.

Let the Americans come, she thought. Let them come for Phuong, as before. And as before, Phuong will be ready. I will save my child from the fire.

Turning, she fled deeper into her home, the tunnel.

Peter was writing.

Provisional army of us??? code/I 12 digits II suppressed integer/1 syllabification correspondence????vowel repetition significance??? 12 = 12 = 12 = 12// Simple integer equivalent?? 12 = 12 = 12 = twelve????

He set up a simple a=1, b= 2, c=3 scheme to see what the thing decrypted out to. It decrypted out to … nonsense.

He played with themes of 12: 4 3’s, 2 6’s, 3 4’s, 12 1’s … 12. Twelve, he kept thinking,
twelve!

Suddenly bells were ringing. What the fuck? He looked up as a bunch of Commo specialists in the room jumped, shocked out of what they were doing.

“What the hell does that mean?” Peter asked.

“It means Priority One,” said one of the kids. “It means they’ve got something for us.”

“You better go get the hotshots.”

But by the time Peter got to the flash teletype, Skazy had already taken up the prime position.

“Okay,” he said greedily, “okay, here it comes,” as the machine spat out its information.

Skazy read the document quickly and summarized.

“They’ve identified the original source of Aggressor-One’s communication and they think from that their psychologists can extrapolate his motivation, his psychic dynamics, a profile of who he is and what he’s liable to do, what he’s capable of, and what we should do.”

“So?” said Puller.

Skazy’s fast eyes ripped through the letters as they spewed out. Every twenty or so lines he peeled the paper off the roller and passed it around the room. The machine clicked for several minutes.

“Of course,” said Major Skazy. “That’s why it’s so familiar, yes.”

Puller said nothing for the longest time, letting the younger men absorb the information.

“All right,” said Puller. “Let’s have it.”

“It sounds familiar,” said Skazy, “because it
is
familiar. It’s John Brown.”

There was quiet in the room.

“Yes, it’s the same, don’t you see?” Skazy rushed on, tumbling with the information. “It’s John Brown’s Raid, before the Civil War. He’s taken over a key installation at the center of the military industrial complex. Right?”

“In 1859,” Peter said, “in Harpers Ferry, in fact not seven miles from here, John Brown led a force of about twenty or so men and took over a federal arsenal and musket
factory. This year, with a few more men, he’s taken over a federal missile silo. Strategic muskets, in other words.”

“And the goal is the same,” Skazy said, “to start the big war, and to unleash the forces of good and to drive out the forces of evil. And, this time, as last time, there’s a bunch of elite troops outside the place who’ve got the job of going in with bayonets fixed to try to stop him.”

“What’s the source?” asked Peter laconically, feeling quite beyond surprise.

“The message he sent,” Skazy answered, “it’s from John Brown’s interrogation by federal authorities in the jailhouse at Charlestown, West Virginia, October 17, 1859, after his capture and before his execution.”

Skazy read from a CIA psychologist’s report: “‘Empathetic connection with historical figure suggests paranoid schizophrenia to an unusual degree. Such men tend to be extremely dangerous, because in their zeal they tend to exhibit great will and charisma. Well-known examples include Adolf Hitler, John Brown himself, Joseph Stalin, Ghengis Khan, several of the Roman emperors, Peter the Great. The standard symptoms are highly developed aggressive impulses and the tendency toward the creation of self-justifying systems of illusion. In the classical cases such men tend to be the offspring of broken families, generally with fathers either absent or remote, and strong matriarchal units replacing the patriarchal. They are usually marked by abnormally high IQs and extremely well-developed “game intelligence.” Such men, typically, are extraordinary tacticians and brilliant at solving narrow technical or strategic problems. They almost always operate from the narrow basis of their own self-interest. They lack the gift of perspective; their power stems from their ability to see only the relevant, narrow slice of the “big picture.” They lack associational abilities; they lack, furthermore, any tendency toward moderation. They are highly-narcissistic, usually spellbinding speakers and almost always completely ruthless. Historically, their flaw arrives in “overreaching”; they tend to think they can change the world, and almost always go too far and are destroyed—usually at great cost to self and families—by their inability to compromise.’”

“Everything we need to know about him except how to kill him,” said Dick Puller.

Skazy continued. “From this they expect him to be American military, extremely proficient in a narrow range, nursing obscure political grudges. They think his men are Americans, possibly a reserve Green Beret unit that has come under his spell. They think he’s bankrolled by conservative money. Man”—he whistled—“they’ve worked up a whole scenario here. It’s about what you’d expect. Screwball general, impressionable troops, maybe some paramilitary outfit, those pretend mercs who read
Soldier of Fortune
and wear camouflage fatigues to the shopping malls. Survivalists, nut cases, that sort of thing.”