“South Mountain. High-force threshold. Very professional take-down.”
The major sketched in the details of the seizure operation as they were known and it was clear he had been thoroughly briefed.
“How long ago did this happen?” Peter wanted to know.
“Going on three hours now, Dr. Thiokol. We have people there now, setting up an assault.”
“Three hours! Jesus Christ! Who did it?”
“We don’t know,” said the major. “But whoever, they know exactly what they’re doing. There’s been some kind of massive intelligence penetration. Anyway, the commanding officer/ground wants you along to advise. All the signs are that they’re going for a launch. We have to get in there and stop them.”
So it had started. It was close to the final midnight, and he thought of all the things he had meant to say to Megan but never had. He could think of only one thing to say, but it was the sad truth, and he said it to this soldier.
“You won’t make it. You won’t get in there. It’s too tight. And then—”
“Our specialty is getting into places,” the officer said. “It’s what we do.”
Peter saw his name stenciled above his heart against the mud-and-slime pattern of the camouflage.
SKAZY, it said.
The officer looked at him. They were about the same age, but the officer had that athlete’s grace and certitude to him. His eyes looked controlled, as if he had mastery even over the dilation of his pupils. It suddenly occurred to Peter that this would be an elite guy. What did they call them? Alpha? Beta? No, Delta Force, that was it, a Green Beret with an advanced degree in homicide. The guy looked like some kind of intellectual weight lifter. He had incredibly dense biceps under his combat fatigues. He’d be one of those self-created Nietzschean monsters who’d willed himself toward supermanhood by throwing a bar with iron bolted to the end up and down in some smelly gym for thirty or so years. Peter felt a sudden sadness for the deluded fool. He had half a mind to argue, out of sheer perversity. For if the idea that they could get in was this Skazy’s vanity, Delta would be disappointed tonight.
Peter had a sudden sense he was in somebody’s bad movie. The world should end in grace, not Hollywood melodrama. It couldn’t even destroy itself well. He almost had to laugh at earnest Skazy here, the Delta Viking. It’s not an airliner you’re trying to crack, he wanted to say, it’s a missile silo, with the best security system in the world. I ought to know; I designed it.
“Let’s go,” said Peter. He reckoned the world didn’t have much longer to live, and he wanted to be there for the last act. After all, he’d predicted it.
And then he thought he ought to call Megan, just in case, but decided, she’s on her own now, let her be on her own.
One of the chief curiosities of modern life, Peter often reflected, was the acceleration of change.
For he had gone, in the space of a twenty-two-minute helicopter ride, during which time his thoughts had remained jangled and painfully abstract, from Hopkins to the middle of a battle zone. He felt as though he’d flown back through time into the Vietnam War, a conflict whose intricacies he had studiously avoided in his lengthy stay in graduate school. It was like a TV show from his childhood: He heard the young Walter Cronkite intoning, “Everything is as it was, except You Are There.”
And so he found himself among military killer types all clustered around a dilapidated girl scout camp in rural Maryland. All these lean young combat jocks with crew cuts and war paint on, festooned with a bewildering variety of automatic weapons, as well as ropes, explosive packs, radio gear, exotic knives taped upside down on various parts of their bodies and, worst of all (and Peter could sense it, palpable as the smell of kerosene in the air), an ineffable glee.
He shivered. He liked his wars abstract and intellectualized; he liked the theory of destruction at the global level and the excitement of thinking in awesome geopolitical terms. This closeness to the actual tools of small-unit warfare — the wet, greasy guns, the snicking, clicking bullets, the klaklaklakklak! of bolts being jimmied, the clank of magazines being locked and unlocked (the guys were going crazy playing with their weapons) left him more than a little nervous. The guns especially scared him; guns could kill you, he knew. He shivered again, as some supernumerary, an FBI guy whose name he didn’t quite catch, took him into the cabin proper, and there he got his second massive shock.
He expected on the inside just more of what was on the outside: more special ops pros all talking in hushed tones over detailed maps, discussing their “assault,” or whatever their term was. What he got was something out of Mark Twain: two country cronies sitting hunched together, their faces lost in shadow, swapping tall tales amid the clouds of weed gas and the smell of stale tobacco that brought a pain to your forehead. The butts, in fact, heaped like a funeral pyre in the cheap ashtray between the men. This was Mission Central? This was HQ? It felt like the general store.
“I remember,” he heard one of them saying, “I remember. The world ran on coal in those days.”
“Yep, by golly, and a sight it was, them days. We had over two hundred boys working in the Number Six hole, and, by damn, this was the center of civilization. Not likes he be now, with just a few hangers-on scruffin’ by. Everybody had a big black car and everybody had a job, Depression or no. Burkittsville was coal and coal was Burkittsville, by damn. I remember it like it was yesterday, not fifty years ago.”
Then one of the fogies looked up, and Peter caught a quick glimpse of his face in the light, even as he felt himself being appraised and then dispensed with rather magisterially. Involuntarily, he swallowed. He recognized the guy.
It had to be the famous or infamous Dick Puller, exactly the kind of nut case you could trust Defense to pull out of the files to take over in an unconventional situation. Even Peter knew of Dick Puller, his many moments of glory in far-off paddies and glades, and his one moment of frozen terror at Desert One.
What Peter saw was a sinewy man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if it were hacked from ancient cotton canvas. He had a tight sheen of short iron-gray hair, almost stubble. He had a flat little hyphen of a mouth. Peter saw also that he had large, veiny hands — strong hands, worker’s hands — and ropy arms. He had a linebacker’s body, lacking the vanity of precisely engineered muscles but possessing — radiating, in fact — a sense of extraordinary strength. He had eyes like an ayatollah: hard, black little stones that glittered. He was in old jungle fatigues, and had a Montagnard bracelet around his wrist. He wore jungle boots. Yes, goddammit, the faded stencil on his ample chest bore the legend PULLER.
“‘Course that damn cave-in closed it all down,” said the geezer. “A black day for Frederick County, Mr. Puller, if I do say so. The womenfolk wore widder’s weeds for a year Tore they moved away.”
“Dr. Thiokol,” Dick Puller suddenly said, not ever having been introduced formally to Peter, “Mr. Brady here tells me something very interesting about your installation. Something I doubt you even know.”
Peter was ready for this.
“That it’s built a thousand feet above the ruins of an old coal mine? I knew that. We had all the old documents. We took test borings. The mine has been sealed since ’thirty-four, when it collapsed. Our tests indicated no presence of geological instability. That mine is history, Colonel Puller, in case you had some delusion of going in there as a way of getting into the installation.”
Dick’s eyes stayed flat and dark as he answered Peter. “But our reports say that original old undeveloped Titan hole was left open to the elements since the late fifties. Lots of rain in thirty years, right, Mr. Brady?”