“It’s the size of an infantry platoon?”
“No,” said Puller. “You just guessed, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.
“Good. If you ever guess again around me, I’ll end your career. You’ll be history. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you don’t know, that’s fine. But things go freaky when junior officers try to guess their way through. Is that understood?”
Uckley gulped. The older man’s stare was like a truck pressing on his sternum.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Instantly, the transgression was forgotten.
“An infantry platoon is thirty-two, a company about one twenty-eight. No, the significance of the number is twofold. First, it’s so large that it’s clearly a holding operation. It’s not an in-out job; these guys mean to stay up there until we find the guts to push them off that hill. And secondly, it’s so large that it means these people couldn’t come in private cars. We’d see a caravan. So there’s got to be a staging area around here, maybe a rented farm. Find the farm and maybe you find out who they are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get on that thing, and have the Sit Room send out your pals in the Hoover building to go through the rentals in this area over the last year or so. The state cops could help on that too.”
“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.
As the young man hurried over to the communications room, Puller studied the picture. Yes, he was good. Whoever was running Aggressor Force had been on a few special ops in his own time.
He had at least half of his men on the perimeter and the other half on some kind of work detail up near the launch control facility. Reading the signature of the men and the operation, Puller swiftly concluded that he was up against a well-trained elite unit. Israelis? The Israeli airborne were the best special ops people in the world. South Africans? There were some ass kickers in that fucked-up country, too, you could bet on it. What about Brit SAS? With a regiment of SAS boys, Dick often said to American generals, I could take over any country in the free world, with the exception of the State of California, which I wouldn’t want.
Or maybe they were our own guys.
That thought had gone unspoken so far, and even now no one really wanted to face it. But the truth was, Americans could easily be doing this. Maybe some hotshot in Special Forces got tired of waiting for the balloon to go up. He thought he’d help it, rid the world of commies, and to hell with the two hundred million babies that got burned in the process. “Provisional Army of the United States!”
Dick looked at the picture again.
Who are you, you bastard? When I know who you are, I’ll know how to beat you.
“Sir!”
It was Uckley.
“Sir, Delta’s on the ground at Hagerstown. They’re on their way.”
Puller looked at his watch. Three and a half hours had elapsed since the seizure. Skazy had Delta on the ground now, and moving to the staging area. The choppers for the air assault would be in inside the hour. The A-10 crews were getting their ships gunned up at Martin Airport outside of Baltimore, that was one hangup. Some kind of new weapons pod had to be mounted, 20mm instead of their usual 30-mil cannons, because the big 30s with their depleted uranium shells had too much kinetic energy for the computer in the LCF at the top of the elevator shaft; they’d cut through it and seal the silo off forever. Puller hated what he couldn’t control, and he couldn’t control this. But there wouldn’t be a party until he had his Tac Air, because you don’t send boys in without Tac Air.
They could go soon now.
But Dick didn’t want to move until he knew more. Patience, he thought, patience was the answer. Already Washington was on the horn wanting results. That was shaping up as the hardest battle. But he would wait. There had to be another angle, and he would find it.
He lit a cigarette, one of his beloved Marlboros, felt it cut deep into his lungs. He coughed.
“Sir,” it was one of the Commo specialists, overexcited as usual. “Sir, look.”
Someone else came running into the room, too, a state policeman, and then one of the army Commo teams.
“Look, Colonel Puller. Jesus, look.”
Puller raised his glasses to his eyes and saw that a dark blur had suddenly obscured the mountaintop.
“What is it?” someone yelled. Other men were fumbling with binoculars.
Puller concentrated on the dark stain that now lay draped over the mountain. He gauged it to be about five hundred square feet, undulating slightly, black and blank.
It made no sense at all.
And then he had it.
“It’s a goddamned tarpaulin,” he said. “They’re covering up. They don’t want us to see what they’re doing up there.”
God damn them, he thought.
In the uproar he almost missed Uckley telling him softly that someone had tracked down the man who’d created South Mountain, a guy named Peter Thiokol.
Poo Hummel was at an age where she liked everybody, even men in her bedroom with guns. She liked Herman. And Herman seemed to like her right back. Herman was big and blond and all dressed in black, from his boots to his shirt. His gun was black too. Despite his size, he had gentle eyes — and the bumbling mannerisms of a well-trained circus bear. Not an atom of his body radiated anything except an awesome desire to please. He loved her pink room and especially her toys, which were displayed on shelving her daddy had built. One by one, he took her animals down and studied them with massive concentration. He liked Care Bear and Pound Puppy and all her Pretty Ponies (she had almost a dozen). He liked Rainbow Brite and Rub-A-Dub Doggy and Peanut Butter too. He liked them all.
“This one is very pretty,” he said. It was her favorite, too, a unicorn with a bright pink polyester mane.
Poo was no longer upset that her mother would not stop crying down in the kitchen and that Bean was so quiet. For Poo, it was a great big adventure to have new friends, especially like Herman.
“Will you ever go away?” she asked, squinching up her nose and making a face.
“Sure,” he said. “Soon. I gotta go. I gotta job.”
“You’re a nice man,” she said. “I like you.”
“I like you, too, nice little girl,” he said, smiling.
She liked his teeth especially. He had the whitest, friendliest smile she’d ever seen.
“I want to go out,” she said.
“Oh, no, Poo,” he said. “Just for a little while longer you have to be inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you can go out and play and it will be all fun. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. It’ll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you a present. I’ll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?”
“C’n I have a drink of water?” Poo asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”
Peter Thiokol was rambling.
He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses, imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way altogether and surrendered to incoherence.
“Um, so, um, it’s the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of course we all hope it won’t, anyway, um …”
The note card before him was no help.
It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl, “Decapitation theory — explain.”
Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature section of The Sun.
It wasn’t a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of Shaffer Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?