It befuddled him. He felt his reactions slow way down, as if he’d been drugged. It had a weird radiance, a kind of halo. It almost felt as though it came from some dead religion or something; he’d once come across something just as strange in the ’Nam, a giant stone head with thick lips and staring eyes amid the bougainvillea and the frangipani, and you could look at it for a century or two and not learn one thing from it.
Tentatively, he walked its circumference, though there wasn’t much room between the skin of the thing and the concave of the cement wall that encircled it. His head was back, his mouth was open. It never changed. From any angle it was the same.
His head ached. He became aware of small noises, tickings, pingings, obscure vibrations. At the same time he smelled the odors of wiring and cement and wax. It smelled like electricity in there.
He looked at it again, in wonder. It wasn’t at all like the rocketship he’d imagined, to the degree that he’d imagined rocketships at all. It had no fins, for one thing. How could they steer it without fins? It had no numbers either, and he had the vague supposition that it should have black and white checks on it somewhere, as well as big fat USAF initials, like the Tac ships in ’Nam. He also had this idea that there’d be a huge superstructure like a battleship’s control tower up next to it, and lots of guys scurrying around: nope, nothing. It was so huge it didn’t look like it could fly at all. The big tube just sat on a tiny framework of girders, nothing elaborate, and its exhaust cupolas extended beneath that, into a pit. As he looked up it, it disappeared, yielding some seventy feet up to nothingness. Then, another hundred or so feet up was the circular image of the sealed silo hatch, which appeared from down here to resemble a manhole cover.
He wondered what to do. Should he blow it up? He wasn’t sure. He tried to remember. Goddamn, if that Witherspoon were here, he’d know what to do. But Walls wasn’t at all sure if he should blow it up. He might get in big trouble. And even if he was supposed to blow it up, there was the problem of how to blow it up. He had no grenades left. He had no C-4 left. He could see no cables to cut or hoses to rip. He didn’t think firing a few Mr. 12s into a thing this big would do any damage. And anyway, wasn’t there an A-bomb in there? He wondered where it would be. He didn’t think it would be a terribly good idea to shoot the rocket and make the bomb blow up, because wasn’t that what they were trying to stop?
Shit, he thought, baffled by it.
At last he stumbled on a ladder. It was really a series of rungs in the concrete and, craning, he saw that the rungs led a perilous way up the yawning side of the concrete tube to a very small door, halfway up to the silo hatch.
Walls tried to figure out what to do. A certain part of him said, just wait here until they come get you, you’re okay now. But another part said, they wanted to get into this place real bad, only way to get into this place is up that ladder.
Maybe you’re the only dude get into this place. The onliest.
He laughed at that. All those white motherfuckers running around with their helicopters and shit, and here little nigger Nathan Walls, Dr. P of Pennsylvania Avenue, son of Thelma and brother to James, both dead, but Nathan, Nathan, he the onliest peoples to make it in. And what then?
Then you kill more white boys, he thought.
He had at that second just the briefest animal sensation of warmth and motion, and then he was hit hard by a flying bunch of muscle, yanked down, as if under the pounce of a cat, and pinned against the cement. And he felt the blade come up hard and tight against his throat, and he knew he was going to die.
In the first slick, Skazy was on the radio.
“Delta Six, this is Cobra One, I’d like an amplification of that last order, please.”
“Cobra One, hold tight in your ships, that is all.”
Skazy sat, breathing hard, feeling it all come apart in his mind. He remembered Desert One, the confusion of rushing men, out-of-control machines, and unsure command. He remembered Dick Puller off on his own like some kind of moody Achilles, out of reach.
Colonel Puller, there’s rumors all over the—
It’s an abort, Frank. Get Delta on the—
An abort! We can still take these motherfuckers! Goddamn, we don’t need six chops! We can do it with five, we can get in there and blow these motherfuckers away and—
Back to the ship, Major!
That’s when Skazy had hit him. Yes, he’d hit a superior officer in the face, and remembered the shock, the totality of it, when Puller fell back, his face leaking blood, the unexpected look of hurt on it.
Someone grabbed him.
Frank, get out of here. Dick’s decided. Get back to your people.
You cowardly motherfucker, you don’t have the guts for this kind of work, he remembered screaming, the wounded, enraged son who’d just learned his father was merely a man.
“Delta Six, Cobra One, what the hell is going—”
“Off the net, Cobra One, you’re in a holding position until release, out.”
Goddamn, said Skazy to himself.
“I’m going back to command,” he told McKenzie, and disengaged himself from the chopper, dipped under its roaring rotor, and headed back to Puller.
There were fifty-five of them and they were lost and had been lost and they were way behind schedule, and it was cold as shit and even if the world was hanging in the balance, they didn’t care, they just wanted to be warm. Sure, okay, you can make so many speeches, but the guys had been shot at today and most of them were still in bad shock from the first fight. These guys had been playing at war and they’d never seen anyone die and suddenly they’d seen a whole batch of people die, mostly their friends.
“Lieutenant, I think we’re lost,” said the sergeant.
“We can’t be lost,” said Dill. “It’s just over here.”
“I’m afraid some of the guys may have wandered away.”
“Goddammit,” said Dill, “they were supposed to stay in close. You get lost on this mountain, you could be in real danger.”
He looked back. Bravo was spread out through the trees; he could see the blurry shapes against the white of the snow, each trailing a bright plume of breath, each groaning laboriously, each cursing under the discomfort, strung out, uncoordinated. Jesus, what a parade to save the world, Dill thought. You poor guys. You couldn’t lick a stamp to save your life. He almost laughed.
“Tell the sergeants to get the guys together. I mean, we’re just supposed to wait is all, in case they need us.”
Jesus, he thought, poor Bravo can’t even wait right.
“Yes, sir. But we’re already way behind. Like, it’s quarter after and those guys should have started shooting and I don’t hear a damn thing.”
“Yeah, well,” said Dill, not sure what to do, “I’m sure they have their reasons.”
It had seemed so easy in the briefing. Bravo was to move up behind the Rangers and Third Infantry, then peel off to the left to get out of the way of the support groups, the medics, the ammo carriers, that sort of thing. And just wait in good order in case they were needed. So they were essentially out of it. The ones that were here, they’d made it. They were alive! Whatever, they had made it. It was time for the pros to take over.
But he was anxious that he hadn’t heard anything on the radio for a while.
“MacGuire?”