“Where?” Gregor asked, adding, “I don’t want to get stuck in traffic.”
“Ah, out Alternate forty, from Middletown to Boonsboro. You ought to be okay you stick to seventy. That mountain, that’s South Mountain, A-forty goes right by it. They got it closed off. Also, all them little hick burgs out there. Funniest goddamn thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Ain’t no government land up there. Plenty up at Aberdeen. Plenty at Fort Meade. Plenty at Pax River, over on the Shore. Plenty out at Fort Richie. Ain’t no government land at South Mountain, though. Damnedest thing, you can bet.”
“Ummm,” nodded Gregor.
Should I go out there?
I’m closest. Maybe I could get out there and hear something from a soldier or something.
Yes, with your accent and your Soviet visa, yes: and end up in Danbury for twenty years, then home for twenty more in the Gulag. No, the answer was Molly.
He now saw that there was some kind of crisis and that Molly would find it out for him and that he would be first with the news, the whole apparat would be working on it, and he, the great Gregor Arbatov, he would find it! He stood, wobbling, and ambled awkwardly back through the crowded room to the men’s bathroom. Inside, he deposited his coins in the slot and tried to call Molly again.
There was no answer.
Oh, Molly, he prayed. Oh, please, please, don’t let me down, when I need you so bad.
The news continued to be bad at Delta Command, even after the debacle at the Hummel house. The Rangers had run into heavy weather over Indiana and had to divert south and take on fuel in Tennessee and were now ETA’d at 1900 hours earliest, and that was with a twilight night drop which Puller didn’t want to risk, so make it 2100 before they were on station and ready to assault. Meanwhile Third Infantry was hung up in the traffic building up outside the roadblocks and was having a hell of a time fighting their way through it. Pentagon analysts had made no further penetrations of the queer message sent by the “Provisional Army of the United States.” Peter Thiokol had come to a standstill in his attempts to understand the identities of Aggressor Force, and therefore was mum on his chances of breaking the reset door code at the shaft entrance. There was, furthermore, no word from the FBI regarding its investigations of his wife, Megan, and any help she could have given them. The two surviving little girls at the Hummel house were too distraught to provide any clues as to the identities of the three men who had held them hostage for most of the day. The Pentagon kept inquiring as to progress in breaking the seizure; Dick Puller had no progress, but he had final casualty figures of Bravo Company’s assault: fifty-six dead, forty-four wounded, leaving an effective force of less than fifty men. The field hospital set up by Delta medical personnel was being strained to the maximum, and men had already begun to die who would have survived in Vietnam, where the airevac system had been set up much better.
It was six o’clock. Six hours to go.
Puller headed off to find Thiokol and monitor the latest in FBI investigation reports. But he didn’t make it very far.
“Colonel Puller! Colonel Puller!”
It was a Spec 4, one of the Commo specialists.
“Yeah?”
“Sir, we were supposed to get a response every fifteen minutes from Rat Six on the other side of the mountain. They’ve missed two checks now.”
“Have you tried to call them?”
“Yessir. No answer.”
Puller took the microphone.
“Rat Six, this is Delta Six, do you copy?”
There was no answer, only silence on the radio.
Puller tried a few more times.
“Who’s in that area?” he asked one of his sergeants.
“Sir, besides the Rat Six Team, nobody. Except we’ve got the mountain ringed with state policemen, so there should be a cop a little farther out.”
He consulted a map, then went to the radio and called state police headquarters at the roadblock on Route 40 a few miles away.
“Ninety-Victor, this is Delta Six, do you read?”
“Affirmative, we have you, Delta Six, we copy.”
“Ninety-Victor, you got a man on, uh, looks like Moser Road?”
“Yes, sir, had that one sealed off for quite a time.”
“Can you patch me through to him, 90-Victor.”
“Yes, sir. You just hang in there.”
A few moments passed.
“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor, at the roadblock on Moser Road, about three miles due west of South Mountain. I’ve been requested to contact you.”
“Yes, 22-Victor, I copy. Listen, son, you heard anything recently?”
“Just what I figured on, sir.”
“And what was that, 22-Victor?”
“Well, sir, I figure the helicopter finally burned down to the ammo.”
“Say again, 22-Victor.”
“Well, sir, right from where that helicopter crashed and exploded, about twenty minutes ago, all the ammo cooked off. It was about ten or twenty seconds of gunfire. That was all.”
Dick put the microphone down.
“Delta Six?”
Dick said nothing.
“Delta Six, this is 22-Victor. Do you require further assistance?”
But Dick said nothing.
Goddamn him.
He turned, looked at the mountain about a mile off.
Goddamn him: he’d found Rat Six. He’d wiped it out. And he’d sent men into the tunnels after the Rat Teams.
“Sir, do you want to send a party around to check out the Rat Six position?”
Puller shook his head. What was the point? Aggressor-One had topped him again. His rats were dead in their holes. And there was nothing Puller could do about it now except order up the body bags and pray for Peter Thiokol.
“Thiokol?”
Peter looked up from the Aggressor-One document, from his notebook, from his FBI counterintel reports. It was Skazy.
“Look, we have to talk.”
“About what? I have a lot of—”
“Out in the barn.”
“What is this?” said Peter, reading at once something tense and guilty on the officer’s face. “What’s going on?”
“In the barn, please, Dr. Thiokol.”
Peter waited a few minutes, then went out and moseyed around back to where Skazy and two other Delta officers awaited. The men were smaller, leaner Skazys: lean, serious guys in cammo fatigues, bulging with belts and knives and grenades.
“So? What’s the—”
“We want you to keep an eye on someone for us.”
“That’s not my job,” said Peter. “I’m not here to keep an eye on anybody.”
“On Dick Puller,” said Skazy.
Peter felt his face betray some shock.
“There was a time,” said Skazy, “when Dick Puller was the best man this Army had. It was an honor to serve under him, let me tell you. He was a great officer. He was a professional’s professional. But he lost it.”
“What are you talking about?” Peter didn’t like this a bit.
“Sometimes these guys who’ve seen so much combat lose the edge. They can’t send boys to die anymore. They don’t have the balls for the big leap. They delude themselves; they don’t close out the engagement, they don’t get in tight, they’re not willing to take casualties, they’re not willing to see their own troops die to take an objective. And so you get what you’ve got right now: a sense that all around us things are going on, but right here, right at the point of the crisis, nothing is happening, except that we’re marking time.”
Peter felt himself a poor advocate for Puller.
“Look, he’s trying, he can’t do much until—”
Skazy bent close.
“In the Iranian desert there came a moment he’d trained his life for. It didn’t come down like it was laid out, and it meant taking a big chance, it meant going for it. You know what they say in this business? Who dares, wins. That’s the first princip
le of special operations. In the desert, Dick Puller lost the talent to dare. That guy up there on that mountain, he’s still got it.”
“What are you saying?” Peter said.
“I’m saying if he panics again, I’m going to take him out. And push forward and deal with the consequences later. It’s what I should have done in the desert. You just watch him. If you see signs that he’s breaking down, you let me know, got it?”
Peter saw now that he was in some twisted, sick family drama. It was some humorless parody version of a sixties sitcom, My Three Sons as written by Edward Albee, in which the oldest boy, Crazy Skazy here, was going to knock off Dad, Fred MacMurray/Dick Puller, while the two younger boys, himself and the other son, poor dumb Uckley, sat around wondering what to do.
“You’d better reconsider what—”
“Thiokol, if he freezes, you sing out, you hear. That’s your real job. Now, you’d better get back to your goddamned door.”
The farther along he got, the better Teagarden felt, when he knew it should be just the opposite. No matter how you cut it, he knew, he was welshing out. He was ejecting. Color him gone.
Yet his relief as the tunnel called Alice widened, as its dog legs and juts eventually straightened themselves out, was enormous and liberating. Goddamn, it felt so good; he’d felt this way in ’Nam, way out in Indian country, he’d been just a kid, it was ’71 or so and he was new to the Forces. It was after a long goddamn time in a little place, getting hit every night, that at last a relief column had broken through. It felt just like that. He couldn’t smell the sky yet, or see the stars—if there were stars; he had no idea what time it was—but he wasn’t going deeper and deeper into the goddamned darkness.
He almost wanted to whistle. But suddenly he heard something just ahead. It was like a little rustle or something, up against the rock. What, had Rat Six sent more guys in? He froze, caught. To run into an officer and have to explain what the hell he was doing broken off from his partner, here, hundreds and hundreds of feet back, almost in the lateral tunnel, that was trouble. He ransacked his own mind for an excuse, something to put between himself and his disgrace.
The radio!
The Prick-88 wasn’t working, they weren’t getting through, he’d come on back to reestablish contact before—
A light beam shot out, hit him in the eyes, pinning him.
“Hey! Jesus, you guys, you scared me. What the hell, you checking on us, Rat Six? I lost radio contact, came back to get a clear line. Listen, we’re way the hell back there.”
Another light struck him, blasting his vision, filling his brain with exploding sparks. He heard muttering, the soft jingle of equipment.
“What’s going on, guys? Like, is all this really—”
A hand like a darting bat flew in front of his eye, landed at his chin, and with a strong yank pulled him back until he crashed against a strong body; the hand pulled his chin up, opening his throat to the attack. At almost precisely the same second, though Teagarden never saw it, the other hand drew the evil edge of a very sharp combat blade across his throat, cutting with icy precision through skin, cartilege, and on down to the carotid artery, which it severed.
My sons! he thought, Jesus, my sons!
But, stunned as he was, Teagarden at least had a second left for a reflex, and as he died, his finger tensed on the MP-5’s trigger and the little gun barked out a four-round burst. The bullets smashed pointlessly into the ground, and immediately other men were on Teagarden, beating at him with rifle butts.
This was the hard part.
The guns were easy: A Fabrique Nationale FAL, in 7.62-mm NATO, or .308, serial number 1488803–213; a 9-mm Uzi, manufactured also by Fabrique Nationale under license from the crafty Israelis, serial number 10945873–38771 with a very professionally made but otherwise untraceable silencer that extended a good seven inches beyond the barrel; and a British L2A3, called a Sterling, in 9mm also, serial number 129848–555; plus one handgun, a Czech CZ-75, serial number ground off. This information had been forwarded to Washington, but the stuff felt as though it came from the immense pool of surplus weapons held in obscure warehouses the world over and belonging to no country but only to the fraternity of international arms dealers. It could have all been bought from The Shotgun News.
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.
The Day Before Midnight Page 24
