Uh—
Suddenly, she took flight and squirmed out of Walls’s grip and he lurched for her. His foot slipped off the rung and he himself fell, in his panic forgetting her as the gravity claimed his body and he knew he was going to die — but then his left arm wrenched him with a whack into the wall and was so panicked it would not let him fly loose and he planted his boot back onto a rung and with his now tragically free hand, grabbed back to the top rung again, and then and only then did he see that the woman had not fallen at all, but like some kind of simian creature now actually rode the grate on the little door which on its delicate hinges swung ever so gently back and forth.
“Jesus, watch yourself,” he shouted.
The little door swung the full 180 degrees, banged into the wall with its desperate cargo; then with a toe she pushed off, clinging like a cat on a screen to the gridwork. Her foot came out, searched for the duct and found it, and she pulled herself closer, shifting in her ride, until, swinging just a bit, she was able somehow to heave herself at the duct — a sickening thud as she hit too low against the base of her spine, but pivoted in spite of the pain, and with one arm reached out and caught something inside, then with the other pulled herself in.
Jesus, he thought. She made it.
She rested for what seemed to him to be an inhumanly short time and then peeped out, pointing at his loins urgently.
Lady, what the fuck you want?
Then, of course, he caught on: his rope tied in a tight figure-eight on his web belt. He took it off the D-ring, kneaded it free, and tossed it in an unraveling lob toward her; she caught it neatly — she did every motherfucking thing neatly — and in seconds it was secure on something inside.
Walls tied his end into about a trillion or so knots on the rung. She gestured him on.
Oh, shit, he thought. Hope this sucker holds.
It was only six or so feet, but it seemed a lot farther. The only way he could manage it was upside down like a sloth, his boots locked over the rope, eyes closed as he pulled himself along. Jesus, he felt the give and stretch of the rope bouncing as it fought against his weight, and the dead steel of the twelve-gauge pumpgun hanging off his shoulder and all the little pouches on his belt swinging and the pockets full of loose twelve-gauge shells jingling.
As he edged along the rope, Walls prayed feverishly. His desperate entreaties must have surely paid off, for suddenly he felt her hands pulling at him, and in a squirming frenzy of panic — this was the worst yet, of it all this was the absolute worst — he managed somehow to get himself into the duct opening.
He sat there, breathing hard. In time the various aches of his body started to fire up; he saw that his palms were bleeding from the tightness with which he had clung to the rope, and that he had whacked himself in the shoulder, the arm, the hip, and the shin getting over the threshold of the duct. He didn’t want to think about it though. He just wanted to suck in some air. He wished he had a cigarette.
She was saying something, and after he’d caught up on oxygen he got enough concentration back to say, “Hey, no speakee, sugar. Sorry, can’t understand you, honey.”
But he could read her gestures: she was pointing.
At last it occurred to him to see what they had achieved and the disappointment was crushing: they had achieved nothing; about six feet back the duct ended abruptly in cinderblock.
So what’s the point of the duct, he thought bitterly, knowing it to be another government fuck-up.
But then he saw the point of the duct: a metal box up near the corner of the wall, with metal tubes running out and into it from various points in the wall.
He crawled closer.
A padlock kept the box from human touch, but the box itself looked flimsy enough to beat open.
He squinted at the words on the box:
DOOR ACCESS FUSE PANEL, USAF LCA-8566033 it said.
He recognized only one. It was familiar from his years in prison: DOOR. DOOR. DOOR.
That’s how we get into the sucker, he thought, and began to beat at the metal box.
Dill could hear the firing up ahead, rising, rising still more, rising till it sounded incredible.
“Jesus,” he said to his sergeant.
Then the second gunship went up like a supernova a few hundred feet ahead, its glare spilling across the sky and filling the woods with light.
Dill winced, fell back, his night vision stunned. He blinked, chasing flashbulbs from his brain. You never look into a detonation, he told himself.
He looked back. Most of them — maybe a half of them — were still strung out in the creek bed, coming up over the ice, pulling themselves up rough stairways of stone, up gulches, scrambling up little gulches and whatever. It would take an hour for all of Bravo to make it up.
But now he had twenty-five guns, M-16s, full auto, and he could hear the firing beckoning him onward, and it was time to go.
“Almost there,” he said.
“Bob, a lot of us are going to get killed,” said one of the men.
“Yeah, Bob, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a chance against all that.”
“Yeah, well,” said Dill, “I get the impression the Russians don’t know we’re here. And, like, those other guys are counting on us. I think there’s a pretty good fight going on, and we ought to be there helping.”
Dill knew he wasn’t an eloquent man and even by his standards his little speech had been pretty lame, but at least he hadn’t whined and sounded utterly preposterous, and so he simply walked ahead through the snow, slipping between the trees, trying to figure out if he was going in the right direction or not. He thought they were with him, but he didn’t want to turn around to look, because it might scare them away.
He came to a meadow shortly. Up ahead there appeared to be a kind of fireworks display going on; he couldn’t make it out.
It was all wrong somehow, nothing at all like what he expected. He had no idea if he was in the right place. The feeling was all wrong too; there was a crazy sense of festival to it, none of the noise was distinct, but simply a blur of imprecise sound. He couldn’t see anything well, just sensing confusion, as if too much were going on, really, to decipher.
“Bob, is this where we’re supposed to be?”
“I don’t know,” said Dill. “I’m not sure. I hope we’re on the right hill.”
“We have to be on the right hill. There’s only one hill.”
“Uh—”
Dill now saw someone emerge before him. He smiled, as if to make contact, and realized in a second he was staring at a Soviet Special Forces soldier with camouflage tunic, black beret, and an AK-47 at the high port. The man was the most terrifying thing Dill had ever seen. Dill shot him in the face.
“Jesus, Bob, you killed that guy.”
“Bet your ass I did,” said Dill. “Now, come on, goddammit!”
All up and down the line, without orders or thought or guidance behind them, the troopers began to fire.
They dropped to one knee and began to squeeze bursts off into the Soviet position, stunned at how quickly and totally the scurrying figures fell before them, and how long it took the Russians to respond and how easy it all had been.
Yasotay stared in stupefaction. In that second he knew the position was lost.
Delta moved in from the right, firing as its men deployed. The helicopters were a ruse, the infantry was a ruse, the brilliant American commander had somehow gotten the Delta unit up the hard cliffs to the right in the dark — impossible, impossible! thought Yasotay bitterly — and sent them in.