“Yes, sir,” said a young soldier.
Swiftly, he dialed a number, heard it ring, ring again.
A man’s voice answered with a name.
“This is Dr. Peter Thiokol,” he said, “calling from the South Mountain operational zone. I want to speak to my wife.”
Now was the lonely time. Dick Puller felt he ought to be doing something better, smarter, harder, more brilliant. Instead, he just sat there, puffing on a Marlboro, wondering why he ever decided to become a soldier, while inside it felt as though cold little spiders were crawling through his intestines. He felt so tight he could hardly breathe.
You became a soldier because you were good at it.
Because you always dreamed of leading desperate men in a desperate battle.
Because it seemed important.
Because it was in your genes.
Because you were scared to do anything you weren’t sure you’d be good at.
Dick puffed harshly on the cigarette. He was an old man, he knew, fifty-eight his last birthday, with lovely daughters and a wife he’d die for, the perfect soldier’s wife, who did much and asked little.
Your life has been one long self-indulgence, he thought, hating himself, wishing he could call her or the girls. He couldn’t. Jennie was married to a good Airborne major in Germany and Trish was in law school at Yale. And Phyllis—well, Phyllis wouldn’t know what to do if he called. He’d never called before, only sending her his dry little letters from various hot locales, lying cheerfully about the food (which was always bad) and the danger (which was always high) and the women (who were always numerous). If he called now, he’d scare her to death, and what good would that do?
“Sir, Sixguns One and Two airborne, checking in.”
His air force. The two gunships that would double as troop carriers and fly into the sure death of Stinger country.
“Acknowledge,” said Puller, listening as the battle began to orchestrate itself, outside his hands now that all the planning was done, all the speech-giving over, and it came down only to the boys and their rifles.
“Sir, Halfback and Beanstalk are in position at the IP.”
This was the Rangers, backed by Third Infantry.
“Acknowledge.”
“Sir, Cobra One reports onloading the slicks accomplished. Any messages?”
“No. Just acknowledge. You hear from Bravo yet?”
“That’s a negative, sir.”
“Figures,” Puller said, seeing in his head the slow and clumsy progress of the reluctant remnants of the National Guard unit in the dark toward their reserve position to the left of the assault line, straggling awkwardly through the snow and the trees, out of contact, scared and exhausted and very, very cold. Bravo would be slow tonight.
“Sir, it’s almost time. Will you be on the mike?”
“Yes, just a sec,” said Dick, lighting another butt.
Inside, he felt himself tightening even further. Somehow it hurt to breathe. His lungs ached, his joints pinched. So many things could go wrong. So many things had gone wrong. In any operation, count on a sixty percent fuck-up rate. The way you win a war has nothing to do with brilliance; it has to do simply with showing up and fucking up less than the other guy. Some Napoleon! And now there was nothing to do but wait just a few more minutes.
At this point at Midway, Raymond Spruance went to bed, figuring he’d done his best.
U. S. Grant got drunk.
Georgie Patton gave a lecture on patriotism.
Ike Eisenhower prayed.
Dick Puller went back to work.
Thinking, yes, still, now, with just minutes to go he might have missed something, he began to page again through the various Spetsnaz documents and photographs that had poured in the past hour or so. There was too much to be gotten through; he was simply scanning the material, hunting for associational leaps, for blind luck, for—well, for whatever.
The dope included more reports on known Spetsnaz operations, defector debriefings (significantly all third party; no known man had defected from a Spetsnaz unit proper); satellite photos, newspaper accounts, everything the CIA had vacuumed up in thirty years of Russia watching, which had been shipped him high speed via phone computer line.
Lazily, more to drive the anxiety from his brain than for any real reason, he skimmed through it.
What if the Rangers bog down and the pretty kids of Third Infantry turn out not to be worth a shit off a parade ground?
What if the Soviets have more men and ammo than we ever suspected?
What if there’s not as much titanium between Pashin and that key as we thought?
What if Thiokol can’t get through the shaft door?
What if the Delta assault team can’t fight its way to the LCC?
What if—
And then his eyes hit something.
“Stop the attack!” he screamed. “Tell all units to hold!”
“Sir, I—”
“Tell all units to hold!”
There was a pause and some fumbling at the other end as the FBI agents debated among themselves what to do. He thought they might be trying to cross-check the authenticity of his call over another line while he waited, and as he stood there, he felt his chest seem to fill with gravel and his breath wheezed between the loose stones.
Funny, he thought. The world may end tonight and yet that doesn’t mean a thing to me. But here I am waiting to talk to my wife and I’m shaking like a leaf.
He wondered if he had the strength for the next few minutes.
And then he heard her voice.
“Peter?”
Her voice had a sadness in it, as if weighted with regret. Megan never apologized, not formally, not for anything; but she had little signals by way of indicating her small responsibility for whatever might have happened, and it was in this softened tone he heard her say his name. It did exactly what he had willed it not to: it earned his instant and total forgiveness and his total surrender. Shorn of his moral certitude, he knew he was lost.
“Hi,” he said softly and raggedly. “How are you?”
“God, Peter, it’s so awful. These awful men. They’ve been here for hours.”
“It’s unpleasant, yes,” Peter said, irked instantly at the way he immediately agreed with her. “But look, you’ve got to give them everything you can. Later, if you can demonstrate how hard you worked for them, it’ll help. I guarantee it.”
“I suppose,” she said. “It’s just all so awful. They’re going to send me to prison, aren’t they?”
“A good lawyer will get you off. Your father will know some hotshot; he’ll get you out of it. I guarantee it, Megan.” He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Look, I don’t know what they’ve told you—”
“Not much. It’s something terrible though, isn’t it?”
“It’s a mess.”
“It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s all my fault. I see that now. How I played into their hands and made it easy for them. Now I need your help. Your absolute, total, trusting help.”
“Yes. Tell me what I can do.”
He paused.
“This Soviet officer you identified. The older man, Pashin.”
There was silence. He waited as long as he could, until he could wait no longer.
“Somehow,” he said to her finally, “it was personal with him. That is, between him and me. It was intimate and personal. That’s why you were so important to him. Megan, I have to go where I’m scared to go, and look at what I don’t want to see. You’ve got to take me there, and be strong, and make me see the truth. It’s the most important thing you’ll ever do, do you see?”
Too much emotion tainted his voice, and he struggled to hold the words in proper register. But the words were treacherous; they broke and splattered on him and odd high notes, strange sounds of anxiety, splashed through them. He felt as if he were weeping, but he could feel no tears.
Megan was still silent.
Th
en she said, “Peter, there are men here. All around me. Don’t make me talk in front of them. Can’t we do it later, in private? I’ll tell you everything in private.”
“There isn’t time. There’s a question I have to ask you. Only one.”
He waited, but she wouldn’t help him.
In the silence, he thought, the sex with Ari. He was good at it? He was really good at it? He was better than me?
Stop it, he told himself.
He’d played the whole thing to get here, and now that he was here, he had a moment’s terror.
You can look at anything, he told himself. You’re a realist. That’s your strength. That’s how you’ll beat him.
“Tell me if I’m not right. I’ve figured out how his mind works. I can read him now. I get him now.”
“Ari?”
“Ari! Ari’s nothing, Megan. Ari’s a tool, a big stud for hire. No, it’s this other guy. He’s the one that’s pulling the strings. Megan, there was a night, wasn’t there, where you passed out? Where you had too much to drink or you were tired or something? Some night where you can’t quite account for four or five hours? In fact, you probably haven’t really acknowledged it in your own mind, because at some subconscious level you’re not quite ready to face it. But wasn’t there a night when … when you can’t really remember what happened?”
Her silence grew, and as it grew it confirmed his suspicion.
Finally, she said, “He said it was the champagne. That I had too much and that I passed out. We had gone to an inn in Middleburg, Virginia, for a ‘romantic weekend’ at a very lovely inn. But I passed out Saturday night. When I awakened I could tell … that it had been romantic.”
Peter nodded.
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“After—?”
“Yes. After I had been with you. I went straight from you to Ari. I’m sorry.”
“And that was the last time you saw him?”
“Yes. I took some pictures of some documents you had. I just gave him the camera. We didn’t use the usual routine. And then we went to this inn. And the next morning he left me. Said he was returning to his wife in Israel. He just walked away from me. I cried, I begged. He hit me. Peter, he hit me, and then he just left me in that place, as if I didn’t matter to him.”
You didn’t.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been a great help.”
“Peter, is that all? You called—”
“Megan, you should be all right. That lawyer, he’ll get you a walk. Those FBI guys, throw a little charm at them. They’ll melt. They’re men, after all. And when this is over—”
“Peter, God, it’s dangerous out there, isn’t it? But you’re safe, aren’t you? You’re back, far away from the guns, aren’t you? You’re not going to do anything stup—”
He was lost now. He felt it slipping away. He saw her in the room, in the dark, drugged, helpless, and unresistant. He wondered what they used and how compliant she’d been. He knew she’d been utterly, totally compliant. He felt her shame and debasement. The image of it brought the tears at last from him, and he felt himself begin to sob like an idiot child.
“Baby, when it’s over,” he heard himself saying, “we can go to New York. We can have another life, I swear it. We can move to New York so you can be with the people you like and I can teach, maybe, or—”
He could hear her crying too.
“I miss you so,” she was saying. “Peter, I’m so sorry this all happened, I’m so, so sorry and be careful, please, stay away from the—”
“Dr. Thiokol!”
It was the hard voice of Dick Puller punching at him through his grief.
“Megan, I have to go.”
“Thiokol! I need you ASAP!”
“I have to go,” he repeated. And then he said, “Thanks, I think I can take the guy now,” and hung up. The sports coat seemed to constrict him strangely and he pulled it off and threw it in the corner. He felt much better.
He turned, tried not to see the men staring at him in amazement, and discovered Puller bearing down on him like a juggernaut, waving a photograph.
“Peter, look at this,” said Puller. “Tell me if it’s what I think it is.”
Peter blinked to clear his eyes, felt like a fool, an idiot, but noted that Puller was far too intense to notice. As his focus sharpened he saw what he was supposed to see. It appeared to be an extremely high aerial view of South Mountain; he could see the launch control facility roof, the barracks roof, the wire perimeter, and the silo hatch, and the access road leading up. Yet there was something subtly wrong with the photo, in the relationship, say, between the buildings, the angles of the siting, in a hundred little areas. He concentrated, but couldn’t quite;—
“It just came over from CIA. They got it with a Blackbird three months ago over Novomoskovsk near Dnepropetrovsk where Spetsnaz has its big training camp. Damn, if they’d have only read it then. If they were sharp in that damned agency, instead of—”
But Peter just stared at the picture.
“It’s where they prepped the mission. It’s their rehearsal site.”
Peter stared hard.
Something’s wrong with it, he thought. He saw what looked like diagonal slashes in the earth, or sergeant’s chevrons, or a giant tire track rolling across the mountaintop.
“What are these marks? I see these marks in the snow, what are they?”
Puller looked at them.
“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? They’re trenches. That’s what’s under that goddamn tarpaulin.”
Peter didn’t get it.
“What you’re looking at, Dr. Thiokol, is his plan. Yasotay’s defense plan. You see how the trenches take the configuration of a V and fall back toward the elevator shaft?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll fall back, trench by trench, toward that last redoubt. When we assault we’re always in a crossfire kill zone from the two arms of the V. You can’t flank it because it’s too wide. You can bet the trenches are linked by tunnels, which they’ll blow as they fall back. It’s the way the Muhajadeem fight in Afghanistan. He must have lost a thousand men trying to take hills like this. He’s the hill expert of all time. Each one of these trenches will cost us an hour and a hundred casualties. In effect, we have to take the same trench, over and over. The attack will never make it. It’ll get hung up in the trenches.”
But Peter wasn’t really paying any attention. He was staring, fascinated, at the photograph. There was something weird about it. He could not tear his eyes away. It was something he knew, yet something he didn’t know. His mind struggled to interpret the competing phenomena; he searched for a theory to unify his perceptions of distress.
“Look!” Peter suddenly shouted. “Look! Look at this!” He knew there was something about the picture that bugged him; he’d been over and over the top of South Mountain before and during the construction. He knew it as well as he knew Megan’s body. No man knew it better.
“See, here. They haven’t bothered to plant the trees to the left and the right of the assault site. They’ve just left the area bare, but you can see the way they’ve sculpted the land form to match the shape of the earth. But their original satellite pictures must have been taken early and they didn’t bother to check the later ones carefully; see, we actually moved the site of the barrack about fifteen feet to the left, and we didn’t build this additional wing to the launch control facility, although it was in the plans they got from Megan. But most important, the creek’s missing. They don’t have the creek because there wasn’t a creek.”
Puller looked at him strangely.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You told me the problem with the assault site was that it had such a narrow front that all the attacks had to come across this meadow here. Right? And those are the men that go into the guns, right?”
Puller looked at him.
“But that’s not right. There’s a creek bed, he
re, on the left.” His finger probed at a place on the denuded photograph that showed sheer cliff.
“It’s supposed to be impassable, too steep to climb, but I’m telling you, the creek cut into it. You could get people up it and hit them from this other side, I know you could. You don’t have to attack on that narrow front only. You could get soldiers up there and hit them from the left and bypass the fall-back trenches. I swear to you, there’s a creek bed. You don’t see it in the winter because it’s dry and under snow and you don’t see it during the summer because of the trees, but it’s there and it’s another way to the top.”
Puller looked at it hard.
“Come with me.”
They ran to the command center to look at the national geodesic survey map.
“Dr. Thiokol, there’s no creek marked here.”
“That’s a 1977 map. The creek, we opened the creek when we excavated for the shaft, last year. That’s why. I’m telling you, you can get soldiers up that side of the mountain and the Soviets don’t know.” His finger shot out to a marker on the map. “Those men are the men you send. They’re the ones who’ll get you into the perimeter and to the elevator shaft. Your Rangers and regular infantry won’t make it.”
Puller leaned forward.
“Those guys,” Peter yelled, pointing at the mark on the map that stood for a group of men. “Who are those guys?”
“That’s Bravo,” said Puller. “Or what’s left of it.”
Walls was in the cathedral of the missile.
It towered above him in the gray half-light. He felt so small.
He reached out and put his hand to the skin of the thing, which was not cold and clammy and metallic as he imagined. Indeed, it had no sense of machine to it. Even as his fingers lingered in stupidity upon it, it did not warm to the touch. It drew no energy from his hand. It was … most peculiar … it was nothing.
He could not know it. He could not feel it. It had no meaning. It wasn’t exactly that he was dwarfed into nothingness, that his smallness was made manifest by his proximity to the seven-story bigness of it, it was just that it was so blank. It was an abstraction. There was no feeling of its having any sense. He could not begin to figure out how to connect to it. It was just an immense black apex, smooth and blank, huge beyond knowing, disappearing as it rose above him, throwing in the half-light the tiniest smudge of his own reflection back at him, but more shadow than anything, a sense of movement and shape, that was all. It had no human face. He sensed that it didn’t … again, this was very peculiar … it didn’t care about him.