“We’re back to rifles and balls,” said the Army Chief of Staff.
“Can you do it in time?” the President said to the army general.
“I don’t know, Mr. President. We can solve the logistics of it. We can get the men there in time, and we can send them up the mountain.”
“It’s going to be a long and bloody day,” somebody said.
“But it’s a very hard assault. First, you’ve got to get to the elevator shaft, and you can only attack on a very narrow front because the mountaintop is surrounded by cliffs. Once you get to the LCF and its elevator,” the general explained, “you’ve got to rappel down the shaft, and fight your way to the LCC, where they’re trying to launch the bird.”
“Sir,” said one of the President’s advisers, “you’ll have to declare a phase four nuclear emergency, which empowers federal authorities to literally take over a given district, and turns all civil authority over to federal command. You’re going to have to turn Frederick County into a war zone. I think maybe you’d also better raise the defense condition to a Defcon 4.”
“No to that,” said the President. “I don’t want the Soviets thinking we’re ready to launch. Increase security at all our missile sites and our satellite receiving stations.”
“It’s been done, sir,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff.
“Okay, go to the phase four. Put out some kind of cover story about a military exercise to keep the goddamn press out of it. Now it’s the Army’s baby, with all due respect to the Air Force. I don’t want a lot of different services falling all over each other’s toes. Set up the roadblocks, seal off the area. Go to war if that’s what it takes. But get those people out of there, or kill them all.”
“Yes, sir,” said the general. “Now, as for the command—”
“For the commanding officer out there, General, I want the best combat man you’ve got. And I don’t care if he’s a PFC in Louisiana.”
“No, sir,” said the general. “He’s a full bird colonel, retired. But he’s one mean son of a bitch.”
Jack Hummel pulled his goggles down over his eyes and the world darkened. He held the cutting torch in one hand, and reached back to the control panel to switch the device on. The current flowed and the electrode in the tip began to glow from red on through the hues of orange. He watched it heat and grow within the nozzle, and then when it became almost white, he released a slow, steady stream of nitrogen. The gas ignited with a pop. In the crucible of the nozzle it became ionized — that is, electrified. Jack turned the temperature dial on the Linde control unit up to the top so the flame would reach the plasma temperature range, almost fifty thousand degrees.
The flame was a white killer’s tongue, as hot as the center of any nuclear blast, but controlled there at the end of his torch. The men around him, reacting to the power of flame, drew back instinctively. He increased the pressure so that the flame was almost a needle that darted out two inches beyond the nozzle.
“I’m going to cut up into it,” he told the general. “That way, the molten metal will run out via gravity.”
The general looked at him.
“It’s going to take a long time,” said Jack. “Jeez, I don’t know, maybe ten or twelve hours.”
The general bent over.
“You know what’s at stake. Your own children,” he said. “Do you understand?”
Jack said nothing. Jack knew he could do it: if he could launch missiles against the Russians, he could murder his own children.
But a part of Jack said, Your children will die anyway if this rocket is launched.
Yeah, that’s tonight. Today it’s this fucking block I have to crack. I’ll face tonight when it comes. I got to get them through today first.
“Okay,” said Jack.
He bent, holding the plasma-arc torch in one hand, and with his other touched the smooth, burnished surface of the block of metal. Somewhere inside was a key.
He touched the torch to the metal. He watched its bright needle attack and liquify the metal; at fifty thousand degrees the ionized plasma-arc gas first seemed to define a bubble on the surface of the block, and then a dimple, and then an indentation, and finally, something very like a little tunnel. Jack cut deeper; the molten metal ran from the kerf, the gap gouged by the flame, and down its face like tears.
“The colonel,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “did time in SAS in Malaysia on an exchange officer program. He was Special Forces from the start and had a brilliant Vietnam. He had seven years there, spent a lot of time in places we never officially went. He was stuck in a siege under heavy fire for thirty-eight days, and held out.”
“Oh, God, Jim,” said the Chief of Naval Operations.
“And, most important,” said the general, “he invented Delta. He fought the Army and the Pentagon to get a Delta Force created when nobody cared. He trained Delta, he knows Delta, he lives and breathes Delta. He is Delta.”
“Except,” said the Chief of Naval Operations, “Dick Puller led Delta into Iran in 1979, in the operation we called Eagle Claw, and at Eagle One he panicked. And he canceled the mission when he came up one chopper short at the staging site.”
“At Desert One,” said the Army Chief of Staff, “he had to make the most difficult decision any American soldier has had to make since six June 1944, when Eisen—”
“He failed. He lost his nerve. And retired in disgrace, Jim. Dick Puller failed. He was a man who trained his whole life for a single moment, and when it came, he failed.”
“I say that when it was decision time, everybody backed away from him. We all did. The president of the United States did. They hung a poor colonel who’d bled himself empty for this country for the best part of thirty years out to dry.”
“He’s a walking Greek tragedy,” said the Naval Chief of Staff, “who blew the one—”
“Mr. President, if you asked me to name one man who could get you up that mountain and into that silo before midnight, I’d name Dick Puller. Dick Puller is the bravest officer I ever served with, and the smartest. He knows more about combat than any man alive. He’s done his share of the planning and his share of the killing. He’s a great soldier. He’s the best.”
“I never heard any man say Dick Puller was a coward,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff. “But I never heard any man deny that he was an obstreperous, willful, self-indulgent, sometime psychot—”
“Jim, this isn’t just an old protégé you’re trying to help out?” asked the Chief of Naval Ops.
“All right!” said the President. “Goddammit, enough is enough.”
He turned to the Army Chief of Staff.
“Then get me this Puller,” he said finally. “Call him. I don’t care what it takes, tell him to do it. To get it done.”
“If it can be done,” said the Army Chief, “Dick Puller will do it.”
1100
From a cold start, Delta Force would arrive on site not in three hours, as the Chief of Staff had promised, but in two and a half. It took a miracle of logistical planning, most of it thrown together while the unit — the one hundred twenty men of Special Forces Operational Detachment/Delta — was in the air, being hauled up from Fort Bragg by two C-130s of the first Special Operations Wing of the 23d Air Force. The initial plan was to have them HALO onto the site — to parachute from a high altitude, then open at a low one — in case Aggressor Force, as the occupiers of the complex were now called, had mounted a watch for the approach of airborne troops. But Dick Puller’s first decision, made eleven minutes after his arrival, was no.
He stood in the ramshackle office of the Misty Mount Girl Scout Camp, about a half mile from the mountain, across a flat, snowy meadow that lay at the mountain’s foot.