The Day Before Midnight (39 page)

Gregor looked at him.

“As in cutting the head off. And the head of this country is in the very city you’re sitting outside of right now.” He smiled.

“Yep, Greg. We figure your pal Pashin’s gonna detonate a nuclear bomb tonight. In an hour or so. Right here in D.C. Bye-bye White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pentagon War Room, CIA. NSA, National Bureau of Standards even. Bye-bye the whole shooting match. Bye-bye a couple of million sleeping dreamers.”

He smiled at Gregor.

“Now, the question is, where would he get a bomb? I mean, if he doesn’t have a Russian missile silo or a missile sub at his command, where does he get a bomb? Does he buy it at Eddie Bauer’s?”

Gregor swallowed. His mouth was awfully dry. If there were going to be a nuclear detonation, wouldn’t it be wiser to get out of there now, while there was still time? Shouldn’t they be evacuating?

“Gregor, do you know where there’s a bomb floating around?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gregor said.

“Now, that’s not what I hear. In fact, we work real hard at covering your place, and we know the rumors just about as well as you do. We believe there’s a one-kiloton nuclear device in the Soviet Embassy. It’s there under strict GRU control, in case push ever comes to shove and the word goes out for a decapitation mission. That would cut reaction time to the seconds it took some brave boy to walk over to it and push a button.”

Gregor held his breath. The rumors had always been dark, a sort of bleak Slavic joke, horrible black rumors, unbelievable. But they were persistent and had lingered for years.

“See, in the old days,” Mahoney explained, “a bomb weighed a couple of tons. No way anybody was going to smuggle one in. But now we’ve got something called Special Atomic Demolition Munition, weighs one hundred sixty pounds. Delivery system, the big book says, is one strong soldier with a backpack. Now, we figure there’s just such a sweetheart somewhere on Sixteenth Street, four blocks from the White House. What do you think of this, old Greg? Anybody in that building dumb enough to pull the switch on himself?”

Gregor suddenly understood. Now it was clear. Now it made sense.

“Yes, I know such a man. His name is Klimov,” said Gregor. “He is the Deputy
Rezident
, GRU apparatus, protégé and nephew to Pashin.”

The agent nodded.

“Probably another member of Pamyat.”

“It’s worse,” Gregor said. “The bomb would be downstairs. In the code cell, what we call the Wine Cellar. It’s the most secure point in the embassy. Last night my friend Magda Goshgarian was on cipher watch. If Klimov wanted to detonate this bomb, poor Magda alone could not stop him.”

“Yes. They wanted to launch early this morning. But they ran into an eighteen-hour delay. In fact, this morning Pashin sent a short burst of raw noise over the silo radio out
into the great beyond to anybody who has a sophisticated radio transmission and receiving system. Like at your embassy. We figure it was some kind of signal to whoever is going to push the button, to tell him to hold off for further instructions. Tonight the show is set for around midnight. If we don’t break in, Pashin will send another signal to whoever it is and—well, the button gets pushed. The bomb in Washington and the missile to Moscow must go off near simultaneously.”

“Yes,” said Gregor. “And now I know why they tried to kill me. They planned so far ahead that they had it set up that this afternoon Klimov tries to kill me with a Spetsnaz ballistic knife. Because with me dead, cipher duty reverts to the previous night’s officer. To Magda. Again Magda is in the Wine Cellar, and Klimov will have no problem with poor Magda. Oh, Magda. Oh, poor Magda, what have I done to you?”

“She’s there now?”

“Yes. I called her, asked her to take my duty. Jesus, it’s the same thing, I gave him the same thing. She’ll die without a whisper. And the little piglet will do it, laughing at history and his own glorious importance.”

The two men were silent.

Finally, Gregor said, “This must not happen. You must stop it. Invade the embassy, no? With police, go in and stop Klimov.”

“The embassy is your territory.”

“But the rules, they can’t mean much now.”

“Gregor, old goat. You got KGB with AKs set at full auto, and kamikaze orders, shoot the hell out of anybody who comes over the wall. And when the ruckus starts, your friend Klimov goes downstairs a few minutes early, and pop goes the weasel. Listen good to your pal Nick, your long-lost best buddy. The only scenario that plays is the following. We need a guy—a good, brave guy, a guy with no nerves, and balls the size of Cadillac hubcaps, a tough, smart, shrewd guy, a James Bond guy, but Russian—to get into the basement and stop this Klimov. That’s the best shot, really the only shot. We got eight hundred commandos in the mountains;
here in Washington we’ve got room for only one. You dig?”

“Where you going to find this guy?” asked Gregor, still wondering how he could assist. He figured now they needed help with the floor plans, with the layout, the entry protocols, the Wine Cellar arrangements, maybe with the documents that would get the American agent past the KGB door guards, and …

And then he noticed Mahoney looking at him. God in heaven, they were all looking at him. Molly was looking at him, her big, stupid cow eyes hot and moist and radiant.

“Oh, Gweggy,” she said, “how much better if we had a Green Beret, a policeman, a federal agent. But we don’t, dear Gweggy.”

And then Gregor grasped it.

“We have only you, Greg,” said Mahoney. “Time to be a hero type. Time to join the Green Berets, Gregor old pal.”

Now the data was pouring in: the FBI had located the farm rented six months earlier by one “Isaac Smith” on the border of South Mountain from which the Spetsnaz operation was mounted: there the feds found piles of ammunition crating hidden in the barn, a variety of cars, trucks, and buses by which the men had assembled over the past month by a multitude of soft routes down through Canada or up from Mexico, as well as plans, schedules, a food dump, maps, and an informal barracks—all beds made. And they found a few sheets of what appeared to be chemically impregnated white canvas—four, to be exact. The Bureau guessed that these were some sort of crude Stealth technology for defeating South Mountain’s Doppler radar, and reckoned that they were left behind, unused, by the four men who took down Hummel’s house that morning.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the DIA had further information on Spetsnaz history and theory. Spetsnaz people were said to be either the very best, or the very worst, as the case might be: highly motivated, extremely competent, utterly ruthless commando units that had operated most furiously in Afghanistan, where they were thought to be responsible for a number of village atrocities.

Going back through the years, it was clear that wherever the Soviets needed quick, deadly strikes, they used Spetsnaz units: the Prague airport, for example, thought to have been seized by airborne troops in the spring of 1968, when the Russians closed down the Czechoslovakian revolution under
Dubcek, was actually taken by a crack Spetsnaz seizure team. And it was a Spetsnaz wet squad that aced the Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin in his Kabul palace in December 1979. Spetsnaz personnel routinely formed the training cadres that the Russians circulated in the third world, having operated in such varied climes as the Peruvian mountains, the Iraqi mountains, the Malay peninsula, the Asian mainland, the paddies of Vietnam, and the highlands of Salvador.

“They’re very good people,” said Skazy, “but we can dust them.”

“The worst part of the operation,” Puller said, “will be the rappel. Sliding down that rope into the darkness. You know they’ll be firing up at you. You’ll put your grenades and maybe a good dose of C-4 down the shaft first, but then there’ll come a moment when the first men of your team have to slide those ropes down into the darkness. And you know enough of the Spetsnaz tunnel defense team will recover to be firing on you as you descend. It’ll be pretty bad, Frank. You figure out yet who’ll be the first man on the ropes?”

Skazy laughed, showing strong white teeth. He was West Point, ’68, and in those days had loved to bus to Princeton, the closest Ivy League school, on weekends, and lounge around in his ludicrous plebe uniform and white sidewall haircut, and just dare the punks to make a comment. He loved to fight. He dreamed of fighting all the time. He burned to test himself in the most fiery of all possible crucibles.

“You don’t lead men from behind,” he said. “I’ll be Number One.”

The answer did not surprise Puller, which was why he asked it.

“I want you to reconsider, Frank,” he said. “A commander risks his operation if he exposes himself pointlessly and gets fataled in the early going.”

“I’d never ask a man to do what I couldn’t,” said Skazy, meaning it and believing it.

“Frank,” said Puller, “look, I’m not going to tell you how to run your assault. But don’t go down that rope first out of some idiotic notion of showing me up. I know you’re pissed at me because of Iran. I know you think I fucked your career.
For what it’s worth, I talked to Bruce Palmer and tried to get you your eagle. I told him what happened at Desert One was my fault. It wasn’t yours. Okay?”

Skazy didn’t look at him.

“I’m just trying to do the mission, Colonel. That’s all. I just want the chance. The chance I didn’t get in Iran.”

Puller, who never explained anything, felt the temptation to this time. We couldn’t go with five choppers out of specific mandate by the Joint Chiefs, who overcontrolled the mission beyond belief. I had no choice. I’m an army officer, I get paid to follow orders, and I get paid to take the heat afterward, when they all walk away because of their careers. I could have made a stink, but I didn’t. Which is my way.

But he didn’t say anything.

“Well, Frank, good luck to you, then. It’s Delta’s baby now.”

“Just let us go, this time, Dick. Whatever you do,
let us go.”

So many turns and twists and dark ladders now, Walls felt as though he were in somebody’s intestines, following the little trace of light upward. Sometimes this meant almost straight up, as if he were crawling up a chimney, supporting himself on the tension between his knees and his hunched, pressing shoulders, all of it made more difficult by the heavy weight of the remaining shotgun shells in his bellows pockets and the gun itself, wrapped awkwardly about his arm.

Dump the sucker, he thought.

But he could not. He loved the piece. It had never let him down.

And sometimes it meant almost walking rather than climbing, where the floor went to a slant, then switched back, but always, always, it went upward. So upward he fought in the darkness, seeing before him only the little bounce of illumination from the mazelike warren of tunnels. He knew only that there was this hint of light and that there was air in the tunnel, more now, cool and clean, whispering in from somewhere.

Maybe you dead, and this is hell, boy, he thought.
Maybe this is forever, crawling through these damned holes, the tunnel rat’s final fate: tunnels to other tunnels. Walls saw it before him: tunnels to heaven, tunnels into space, tunnels forever.

He paused. Sweat was in his eyes. Beginning to craze out a little. There, boy, he told himself. He breathed, realized how hungry he was. He’d kill for a piece of chicken about now: he focused on it for a second, thinking about the crisp outer crust and how he used to rip through it with his teeth, feeling it crunch beneath them, then get at the tender white meat inside that would fall off the bone into your hand, sweet in its own sweet grease. He smiled: his brother James was across from him. They used to joke—when white people died they came back as chickens so black people could eat them and finally do black people some good.

He laughed to himself. Hadn’t thought about that shit in years. Hey man, be nice, get out of this jam, get out of this hole, go back and see James, have some of Mama’s chicken.

Mama was a big Baptist woman. She worked for many years at some Jewish people’s in Pikesville and they treat her good. But nobody else treat her good, not Tyrone, her husband, who disappeared, and Willis, who moved in and used to beat her. His mother was a large, sorrowful praying woman who worked very hard every day in her life and died when her eldest boy, Nathan, was in tunnels in Vietnam and only heard about it from his brother James. Then James got killed. Another boy at a basketball game had a gun, said James called him something bad, shot him.

So Nathan came home to no Mama and no brother James, and all the men he’d fought with in the tunnels were dead too. Death was everywhere, like the rats that prowled the hot alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, in B-more, Maryland, and he could get no job or when he got a job and his head would ache because of the time he was blown up and buried in the tunnel and couldn’t work, he got fired.

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
, the sign had said in the
DEROS
station on the way back from ’Nam, but it was another white lie: today was the first day of no part of your life.

The sign should have said what another sign did say:
FUCK NIGGERS
.

Walls shook his head. He was gripping the shotgun hard enough to break it; no one understood how full of rage Pennsylvania Avenue could turn a man. Man do
anything
to get off of Pennsylvania Avenue, and bury his mama and his brother in a nice place in the country. He missed his mama, he missed his brother. He never got off of Pennsylvania Avenue, but he became the dude of Pennsylvania there for a while, boy, the Dr. P of Pennsylvania, he could do anything for you, foxy pussy, some magic pills make you feel good, a piece to make you a man. He was the sultan of Pennsylvania Avenue until—

Walls came out of his reverie when a drop of water hit him in the cheek. Was only this motherfucking tunnel, no lie, Jack, that seemed to go on forever and ever and—

And then he saw it.

Well, a long way to climb to see this shit, but this was it all right, this was what he’d come for.