The woman was so close in the little chamber. She looked at him like he knew what he was doing too. He laughed again. She didn’t know shit either. He thought it was pretty funny, the two of them in a little space off a rocket that was going to end the world, hacking on some wires like they knew what they were doing, a nigger boy and a gook girl, the two lowliest forms of scum on the earth which was going to be blown to shit if they didn’t stop it. She laughed too. She must have been in on the joke, because she thought it was funny too.
They both had a good laugh as Walls chopped his way through the wires. Then, just for the fuck of it, he cut through some more wires. With the blade of his knife as a kind of stick, he lifted one tuft of wires over across the gap and shoved it against the other wires and—
Walls shook the spangles from his eyes and found himself against the wall. Felt like his old daddy had whacked him upside the head one. His nose filled with an acrid odor. His head hurt. When he blinked he saw blue balls and flashbulbs. His teeth hurt. Someone was playing music inside his head. His knife lay on the floor, smoking. What the fuck had—
But the woman was at the mouth of the duct, screaming.
Walls crawled over. Man, he felt smoked himself. Could hardly remember who he was, Jack.
But he remembered when he saw the door into whatever the fuck else was down here: it was open.
Jesus fuck, he’d done it. He’d gotten into whitey’s secret place.
He grabbed for his shotgun, seeing that it would be easy to reach the open door, swing over to the ladder, then get inside.
He pulled the Taurus 9-mm automatic out of his holster and handed it over to her.
“You know how one of these things work, hon?”
He pointed to the safety lever locked up.
“Push that down, babe,” he gestured with his finger, “and bang-bang! You got that? Down and bang-bang!”
The woman nodded once, smiled. The gun was big in her tiny hands, but she looked as though she’d been born with it there.
He reached, and the shotgun came up into his hands. It felt smooth and ready and he still had a pocket full of twelves.
The woman looked at him.
“Ass-kickin’ time,” he said.
The shooting had stopped. Peter looked up. There seemed to be some kind of delay, some sort of hassle up at the launch control facility, and then he heard a roar and looked up as the command chopper, beating up a screen of snow and dust, lowered itself awkwardly from the sky and he saw Dick Puller leap out. The chopper zoomed skyward.
He heard his name called then.
“Dr. Thiokol. Where are you? Where the hell is he? Anybody seen that bomb guy? Dr. Thiokol?”
Shivering, Peter rose.
“Here,” he called, but his voice caught in some phlegm and it didn’t come out quite right, and so he said it again, “Here!” and it came out too loud, too shrill for a battlefield full of the dead, where he was the only man without a gun.
“This way, please, Dr. Thiokol,” yelled Dick Puller.
Peter began the short climb up the hill to the launch control facility, or what remained of it. All around him men moaned and shivered. If only it didn’t feel so unreal, if only the smell of blood and gunpowder weren’t so dense, if only the lights from the flares and the hovering choppers weren’t flickering dramatically, the flares hissing and leaking sparks, the chopper lights wobbling drunkenly. Up ahead, men were consumed in the drama of their equipment, clicking bolts, loading clips, smearing their faces.
Someone was shouting. “Okay, now, goddammit, everybody out of here but the Delta Tunnel Assault Team. You guys in the second element, you form up over there on Captain McKenzie. The rest of you guys, Rangers especially, please back off and give us some fucking room to operate.”
He could see the men rigging themselves with complicated harnesses and thought for just a minute they were parachutes. Parachutes? No, then he realized that it was rappeling gear by which the Delta commandos would slide on ropes down the shaft. Coils of green rope lay about on the ground.
“Thiokol, hurry up, come on,” said Puller, up at the door.
Peter scrambled up the rest of the way.
“It’s not damaged, sir,” said a young soldier. “We tried to hold our fire away from it.”
Peter saw the elevator door set in its frame of solid titanium, the only hard, gleaming thing among the blown-out walls and the shattered floorboarding. Hard to believe this had once been inside a building and that the building itself had stood quite normally until just a few hours ago. And on the hard cool face of the titanium was the computer terminal, which looked for all the world like a bank money machine.
“There’s still current,” said Puller.
“Oh, there’s current,” said Peter. “There’s a solar cell up top, and every day the sun shines, it recharges the batteries. The shaft access unit is independent of outside power. It can go for six days without sun and the computers inside it keep running.” He was aware he was ranting like a pedant. “The question is the shield.”
Peter bent to it. A solid Plexiglas sheet covered the keyboard and the screen. Now, if they were smart and had the time, they’d have jimmied the mechanism on the screen access itself, so that before he had to solve the door, he’d have to hack or bash or cut his way through the protective screen. With a screwdriver they could have won. But he thought no, no, not this Russian. This Russian thinks he’s smarter than me. He’s going to beat me at my own game.
Peter touched the red plastic button just under the terminal.
With a quiet grind the Plexiglas shield unlimbered from the keyboard and lifted like a praying mantis rising from the grass. It folded itself back and out of the way.
Two words stood on the blank screen.
ENTER PROMPT they said, two gleaming little green words in the bottom left of the screen.
So far, for two words.
Peter swiftly typed ACCESS and pressed the enter button.
The machine responded ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK CODE.
Eleven hyphens blinked beneath the mandate and the prompt stood in front of the leftmost.
So here it is.
You punch in twelve numbers. No more, no less. To make it interesting, there’s no limit on the integers between the hyphens. Thus the code may be twelve numbers long, or it may be twelve million; it just has to have eleven hyphens in it. And then you push Enter.
If you are wrong, the machine will shout STRIKE ONE.
If you are wrong again, the machine will shout STRIKE TWO.
If you are wrong a third time, the machine will figure out that somebody who doesn’t know is trying to guess his way in, and it will shout ACCESS DENIED and arbitrarily assign twelve new numbers that only it knows and that only another computer can figure out in about 135 work hours.
“Can you do it?” asked Skazy. “Peter, I came a long way for this party. I brought a lot of people with me. Can you do it?”
He thinks all this is about him, Peter thought.
“Shhh,” said Puller. “Peter, we could move away if it would help.”
“No,” said Peter. He bent to the keys, took a deep breath. Focus. Where’s my focus? Just shine my focus on it and work it through. He knew it would help him to talk.