She made a terrible face, her lips snickering in utter contempt, her eyes rolling, and in that second the barrel of the gun wavered, and in that second Gregor Arbatov leapt.
Peter slid through the dark, slid until he thought he’d lost control and was falling, and pulled in on the rope skidding before his eyes to brake himself. Big mistake. He hit the wall hard, feeling the blow ring in his head and his body go spastic in the concussion. Lights popped in his skull; his breath came hard and hot. He could feel the blood on his face, and his will flying out the window. He blinked for control. Below he heard the firing, roaring, incessant. But he just hung there, suspended between worlds. Other men, dark shapes falling, sped past him. His nose rubbed against the shaft; the straps cut into his groin; he had an image from a World War II movie of a paratrooper hanging in a tree. He tugged, twisted, struggled — ah! oops! and there he went again, sliding down, this time with a bit more control. He felt the burn of the rope through his leather gloves and as he swung in toward the wall, this time he caught himself on the balls of his feet and propelled himself outward again, and so eventually tumbled to the bottom.
He alighted on the top of the blown-out elevator car, amid the swirls of its cable. The smell of the explosion, so recent, still hung heavy in the air. He found himself in a crowd in a small space, as other Delta people were busy shedding themselves of coils and snaplinks and D-rings and dropping through the rupture in the roof to get to the fighting. Peter did likewise, though with less agility. Even as he struggled, trying to remember what the boy up top had said, still other Delta raiders landed at the end of their long ropes, unlimbered themselves in the confusion, and dashed off. But it was taking so long!
Finally, he was free, and climbed gingerly down through the hole to discover poor Skazy on his back, staring up in a puddle of blood through lightless eyes at nothing and forever. Peter gagged, first at the sight of Skazy’s hideous face and evacuated skull, and then from the smell, now that blood and bowels had been added to the stench of powder. He turned, found more bodies, stepped over them, and hurried out of the car and down the corridor.
It was his installation all right, now, however, tarnished horribly by the battle and made strange, stranger than he could imagine. The water was an inch deep, and moisture filled the air like a mist. The sprinklers had obviously popped. Bodies lay in the water, dark with their own vital fluids where they seemed to rock back and forth, like floating Marines in the Tarawa surf. He saw some horrible things, but didn’t concentrate on them. Sirens were going, and half the lights were off. Sparks leaked out of wiring ruptures into the water. And he heard the voice, the sweet voice of the angel of megadeath.
“… Launch is imminent. We have an authenticated launch command and launch is imminent. We have an …”
It was Betty, the prerecorded voice of the computer. He thought she sounded a little like Megan.
He tuned out the bad news and sloshed ahead through the mist to the firing, coming at last to a jog in the corridor and peeping around it to discover the epicenter of the battle. The Delta people were still a good fifty meters from the Soviet strongpoint, which was a jerrybuilt assemblage of sandbags, furniture from above, crates, whatever. It mounted at least a dozen guns, all of them firing. The air was busy with lead and noise. Where bullets struck, dust leapt off the wet wall. Meanwhile the Delta people, their guns flicking the red rays of the laser-sighting devices, plugged away, but they had stalled. They were down to the last few yards, but they had stalled. To run into the guns was to die, that was all. Peter could see that they needed explosives or something larger than what they had. It was all fucked up, a mess. It had no order at all, it was just gangs of men shooting each other up in a very small space.
Jesus, he thought, ducking back, feeling for the first time the quiver of real fear. His bowels loosened. He now saw it. They weren’t going to make it.
“You the doc?” a crouching, blackened figure with a CAR-15 and a hands-free mike asked, another Delta Caliban.
“Yes,” he said to the man, evidently the head commando. “Listen, you’ve got to get into that room down there. That’s it. That’s the launch control center.”
“Yeah, sure. After you. Is there a back way into it?”
“No. Just straight ahead. Look, you’ve got to get into it. There’s no other way and there’s not much time.”
“Sorry, but I’ve got to wait until I get some more firepower.”
“They’re all fouled up getting down the shaft,” Peter said. “There isn’t time. Do you hear that, do you know what that voice means?”
“Yeah, I hear it. No, I don’t know what it means.”
“It’s the computer. She’s going to launch the bird in about four minutes.”
The officer looked at him peculiarly.
“You see, we found out in our tests that while all hundred percent of the men in the silos would insert their launch keys, only about sixty percent would actually turn them. So we fail-safed it If they stick both keys in, it initiates a timing device; three minutes later an automatic launch sequence begins. They don’t have to turn the key, they just have to stick it in, and the terminal countdown begins. Now, if it’s a mistake or some terrible fuck-up, there is a way to stand down the launch sequence from the command center. But they can get it only over the radio, it involves a secret meaning for several of the switches pressed in a certain sequence. Only SAC HQ has the sequence. And me. Look, if you get me into that thing, I can stop the bird.”
“Man, I can’t get into the fucking place, you dig? It’s rock and roll out there.”
“You’re going to let a handful of Soviet soldiers stop you? Just rush the place. Please, Jesus, please.”
“Yeah, rush the place, great. Man, I can’t get good suppressive fire on the motherfucks. They’ve got anybody who comes at them zeroed dead. I don’t have enough firepower. Hey, we’ll die to get it done, but there’s no point in just dying to die, man.”
“We can’t be this close and fail.”
“Doc, I’m sorry. I can’t do the impossible. That’s all there is to it.”
“Call Puller.”
“Puller’s not down here. I am. If I wait a few minutes, then maybe I get enough firepower up and move a team down to get some C-4 into them and push off. But my guys are getting torn up. These Russian kids are very tough guys.”
“Please!” Peter shouted, surprised at the violence in his voice. “Goddamn, don’t you see, if you don’t get into that room in the next three minutes or so, all these men have died for absolutely nothing. They’re suckers, jerks, fools. Please, Jesus, if not for me or your kids, for those dead guys who—”
“I can’t!” the officer screamed back, just as loud. “It’s not a question of wanting. I just can’t get you in there. No one can, goddamn you.”
Peter thought he might weep. The sense of helpless rage filled him. So this was it, then. Another two or so minutes, and Pashin had won. Pashin was smarter. Though Peter wondered why he didn’t just turn the keys now and get it over with, if he had ’em both in. And he had to have them both, or he couldn’t have initiated the robot launch sequence.
Then he realized: Pashin must be dead.
“Look,” he said suddenly. “Our guys are in there. They have to be. Some Delta guys are in there, goddammit. We wouldn’t be where we are if this Russian had gotten the keys out and put them in the slot, because he’d have turned them. But somebody stopped him, and that’s why we’re here, don’t you see? Somebody blew his ass away at the last moment, but the keys were already in. We’ve got guys in there, goddammit.”