The roar was an explosion.
Skazy smiled. God, he was happy!
Peter stared at the face. It was a shrewd, wary face, cosmopolitan, comfortable, sure. It was also handsome, radiant with confidence. You could almost feel the charisma leaking from it. The eyes were bright and hard.
Arkady Pashin, he thought. I never even heard of you. But you certainly heard of me.
His eyes scanned the biographical data. Military and engineering all the way, another smartest boy in the class.
He tried to see a pattern, a meaning, in the Agency information. But he found nothing — it read like your run-of-the-mill defense pro, like any of a hundred generals he had known, only Russian style, with one of those famous cold, hard, serious defense minds, with the inevitable right wing twist, the Pamyat thing.
But there was this one peculiarity: “In November of 1982 Arkady Simonovich Pashin formally notified his headquarters that he would henceforth be known simply as Arkady Pashin. No information is available as to the reason for such an unprecedented decision. None of our sources have any idea as to its meaning.”
Why on earth would he have done this?
A weirdness passed through Peter, some twisted nerves firing, and the strange sensation that the name alteration had to do with him too. It was connected to him. He shivered.
Peter tried to think about the Russian thinking about him and realized how important he was to the guy. He sends a guy to fuck my wife and then he himself comes over to this country and he charms her. He has her in that room in that fake Israeli embassy, and he looks at the woman I’m in love with. He’s probably seen movies of her fucking Ari Gottlieb.
Peter shivered again; it was so intimate somehow; he felt hideously violated. His most closely held vulnerability — Megan — had been taken from him, turned, and used against him, used as a weapon. He had an image of this guy going through telescopic photos of him, going through the detritus of his life, trying to figure it all out, trying somehow to enter Peter — to, in some perverse and pathological way, to become him.
He reached back, pulled out his wallet, and got out his wife’s picture. She still looked good to him. He set the photo down next to Pashm’s and looked at the two of them together. Megan’s shot was a head-on, without angle, casual. It caught her grace and the brains behind her ears and maybe just a little bit of her neuroticism. Looking at her, he suddenly acquired a terrible melancholy.
God, baby, I set you up for them, didn’t I?
I made it so easy for them.
He looked at Pashin, the man in the mountain.
Your whole thing is that you think you’re smarter than me. You and your little tribe of cronies, what’s it called, this screwball outfit, Pamyat, Memory. He felt a little twist of shame. He knew himself he had no memory, no sense of the historical past.
It doesn’t mean anything to me, he thought. Only one thing means anything to me.
Megan.
And you took her from me.
He looked again at the picture. No, Comrade Pashin. I’m smarter than you. I’m the smartest guy in the class. I’m the smartest guy you ever met.
He began to doodle with the name, Arkady Pashin and the name Peter Thio—
He stood up suddenly. A terrible excitement came over him, and a terrible pain. He had some trouble breathing, and yet at the same time he filled with energy.
I think I have you, he thought. The only thing I have to do is look where you think I don’t have the guts to look. But I’m a realist. And this is how I beat you.
I can look at anything. Even if it kills me.
He left his desk, strode through the operations room, not seeing Dick Puller or the others, and pushed his way to the Commo room.
He picked up a phone.
“Is this a clear line?”
“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.