Stephen Hunter
The Day Before Midnight
“Not since Fail-Safe has anyone written a nuclear thriller as good as The Day Before Midnight. … Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum have given a lot of readers a lot of excitement, but it is hard to figure out why there is so much fuss about them with Hunter around.”
— United Press International
“A smoothly believable race-against-time thriller with frightening plausibility.”
— Publishers Weekly“
Mr. Hunter steadily turns up the tension…. Whether heroes or villains or something in between, his people possess a convincing individuality of speech, thought, and action, a personal context that makes them recognizable and comprehensible…. [Stephen Hunter displays] a truly astonishing command of scientific, technical, military, political, and historical information.”
— The Sun, Baltimore
“This book will blow your socks off and singe your eyebrows, and you will love every minute of it.”
— Rocky Mountain News
“His phrasing creates graphic, easily perceived scenarios, forming suitable backdrops for the barrage of action that cranks up around page 2 and doesn’t quit until the last paragraph…. The author keeps the hammer down relentlessly, and there’s no release of tension until the very last minute. It’s an ingenious tale, not easily put down and not easily forgotten.”
— Arkansas Gazette“
Put in your eye drops, throw another log on the fire, and have your spouse call the boss tomorrow and tell her you’ll be late. I don’t care how early the baby got you up the morning before you start The Day Before Midnight, this is one you’re going to have difficulty putting down.”
— Baltimore Daily Record
“A rich and engrossing thriller that will keep … the reader turning the pages far into the night…. Highly entertaining … without so much as a single loose end.”
— The Toronto Star
“A flawless thriller by one of the most gifted young writers in America.”
— Charles McCarry, author of The Secret Lovers and The Last Supper
Author’s Note
Close observers of Maryland geography will immediately recognize that the author has allowed himself to manipulate the landforms of the stale to suit his dramatic purposes. To note two such obvious alterations in reality, South Mountain, though it exists exactly where I have placed it, is not nearly so high and formidable a peak as I have pretended. And the relationship of Burkittsville to South Mountain has likewise been adjusted a few miles to fit the story together more conveniently.I’ve allowed myself a similar latitude in depicting the performance of certain military units. Though in fact the Army’s Special Operation Group/Delta, the Rangers, and the 1st Battalion (Reinf), Third Infantry, as well as light infantry and tactical air support units of the Maryland National Guard and the Maryland Air Guard do exist, the author hopes that readers understand this is a work of fiction, and although it aspires to accuracy in its portrayal of procedure, its depiction of the performance of these units during a national security crisis is wholly a fabrication.Finally, the author would like to thank all who gave so generously of time and energy in his researches. These include colleagues Michael Hill, Randi Henderson, Matt Seiden, Pat McGuire, Weyman Swagger, and Fred Rasmussen; friends Lenne P. Miller, Jr.; Joe Fanzone, Jr.; Gerard F. “Buzz” Busnuk; T. Craig Taylor, Jr.; David Petal; Ernest Volkman; my father-in-law, Richard C. Hageman; my brother-in-law and medical adviser, John D. Bullock, M.D.; my brother, Tim Hunter; and my two children, Jake and Amy, who cooperated (more or less) on a long Sunday drive out to South Mountain. And lastly let me issue special thanks to four believers without whose support I could not have endured: my indefatigable agent, Victoria Gould Pryor; my editors, Peter Guzzardi and Ann Harris of Bantam Books; and most especially, my hardworking, ever cheerful, and forgiving wife, Lucy Hageman Hunter.
0700
It snowed that night, and sometime after three, Beth Hummel awoke, as she always did, to the sound of small bare feet padding urgently across the hard wood of the floor.
“Mommy?”
It was the voice of her older daughter. Bean — derived somehow from Elizabeth — was seven, a careful, grave second-grader who wrote her numbers and her name with exaggerated precision and had filled out her Christmas list from the Sears catalogue as if it were a college application.
Beth rolled gently, hoping not to awaken Jack next to her, and turned to face the child in the darkness. Her daughter was very close, and Beth could smell her, warm and fresh like a loaf hot from the oven.
“Yes, honey?”
“Mommy, it’s snowing.”
“I know. They said it would on the TV.”
“The world is all white. Jesus loves the world, he made it all white.”
“I’m sure he does, honey,” said Beth.
Jack snorted in his sleep, came from unconsciousness with a loggy lurch, half rose, then whispered gruffly, “Shhhhhh, girls.”
He fell back, inert in seconds.
“Mommy, can I get in?”
“Of course, honey,” said Beth, scooting over and lifting the covers so that there was room for Bean, who climbed in and snuggled against her mother. The child was still in a second. Beth could feel her daughter’s heart pumping and the rise and fall of her fragile chest. Her little nose was full; she breathed with a vaguely ragged sound, and Beth worried that it would bother Jack, but behind her he continued to sleep heavily.
Beth drifted off herself then. She was dreaming of tropical beaches. But only an hour or two later another soft tread, slightly swifter, slightly lighter, nudged her from her shallow sleep. Poo — from Phyllis — had discovered the snow.
“Mommy!” Poo whispered in a gleeful rush of excitement, touching her mother with taut fingers. “Mommy, it’s white outside.”
“Shhh, I know,” whispered Beth. Poo was five, a kindergartner, whose blond hair had not yet begun to darken, like Bean’s. She was impossibly beautiful, and as lively as Bean was grave. She was a bossy, feisty child who tormented her older sister, and occasionally her mother. You couldn’t tell her a thing, like Jack.
“Mommy, Jesus loves us.”
“Yes, he does,” said Beth again. The connection between Jesus’s love and the snow dated from an obscure remark made by a Sunday-school teacher a few weeks back to Poo, in November, on the occasion of the season’s first snowfall. Beth had never been too sure what to make of it.
“Mommy, I’m cold. I had a bad dream. Can I come in too?”
Jack sometimes joked that all his life he’d wanted to sleep with two women at the same time and now he sometimes woke up with three of ’em in the same bed.
“Yes, but be careful,” Beth whispered. “Don’t wake Bean or Daddy.”
But Poo hadn’t waited for the answer. That wasn’t her style. She climbed aboard and scuttled like a little commando up the gully between her mother and her father, and slid in between them.
Beth felt the brush of her younger daughter’s toes, cold from the long race across the bare floor. Then Poo seemed to merge with her mother, to simply become one with her, their breaths and rhythms joined. Beth pulled the covers up to her neck, felt the embrace of the warmth, its sluggish, numbing power.