“You are such a sniveling, craven fool.”
“Magda, you have no idea how desperately I need the help. You’ll help?”
At last she surrendered.
“All right.”
“I love you, darling.”
“It means I’ll have to do double duty tomorrow. My system will be upset for weeks.”
“Pick your restaurant, Magda, and you shall have whatever you want.”
Gregor hung up. Now, if he could call the other woman in his life, Molly Shroyer, and if she had found anything for him, then maybe, maybe he could make himself seem so important to Klimov that the young killer would desist.
Gregor dialed the second number. Molly answered curtly and he unlimbered the Sears code, then hung up and waited. And waited. And waited. He hung around the bathroom so long he thought he might be arrested for perversions, or beaten up by truck drivers or some such—
It rang.
Gregor picked it up.
“Gregor, I’ve got only a second,” she said.
“Darling, I—”
“Gregor, shut up! Something big is happening out in Maryland, so big they won’t tell even us. All the senators on the committee and the senior staff have been to the White House and there’s some kind of news blackout, but nobody’s talking. The only thing is that it’s very, very serious.”
“Out in Maryland?” Gregor said. Then he remembered the airplanes roaring over the Columbia Mall.
“But what could—”
“Gregor, as soon as I know, I’ll let you know. I have to run now, love. Really, it’s serious.”
“Yes, I—”
The phone clicked dead.
Damn! he thought. I need vodka.
Phuong loved the darkness, the stillness, the sense of being totally alone. She felt whole in darkness.
The narrow walls of the mining shaft seemed to be leaning in, and she could feel the man beside her breathing hard. She could sense his fear.
Yet for Phuong the tunnels meant one thing. They meant safety. Up above, her child had been turned to ashes and shards by napalm. Up above, her father had died, her mother had died, her brother had been maimed. Her sunny village was blasted into nothingness by terror bombers. Hard men in helicopters came to kill them, and to poison the jungle. So she faced the darkness with something close to peace. She knew no fear. Her feet found the way. She sensed the walls and the low ceiling and the rough transit of the floor. The darkness was everywhere.
Teagarden, the American, fought against it. His beam was a desperate protest against it, a plea for mercy almost. His beam flashed nervously. In the tunnels in her homeland, one never used light. Light was an American invention; it was the invention of men who feared the dark. But Phuong and the men and women who fought with her over the long years never used light; they learned, instead, to feel their way with their hands. They learned to sense, from variations in the atmosphere and gradations in odor, the approach of strangers.
Mother, can you smell him, her daughter asked from her heart. He’s terrified. His body stinks with fear.
I smell him, too, she replied.
Ahead, the tunnel narrowed even further.
“Sister Phuong, one moment please,” the American said in Vietnamese. “I have to report.”
He knelt, turned his beam off. The darkness was complete. She heard him fumbling.
“Rat Six, this is Team Alpha, we’re about seven hundred yards in, no sign of this tunnel Alice yet. Do you copy, Six?”
“Alpha, that’s an affirmative, good and clear.”
“Uh, Six, we’ll keep on picking our way along.”
“Go to it, Alpha. We’re counting on you. How’s your partner?”
“She’s real stable, Six, wish I could say the same for myself. Out, now, Six.”
“Roger that and out, Alpha.”
He flicked his beam back on.
“Are you ready, Sis?” he said in Vietnamese.
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go on.”
“Brother Dee-gard-ahn, why do you come? Why not just stay here? I’ll go on. You’re very scared, Brother, I can tell. I know my way. I won’t get lost.”
“I have to work the radio, Sis.”
“Brother, tunnels are no place for terror. Fear, yes. Fear, always. Fear, importantly. But terror, no, because terror leads to panic. Not many people can fight in a tunnel. Not being one of them is no disgrace. We learned it because it was the only way we had against your flying demons and terror bombers.”
“I’m not one of them, you’re saying.”
“I can tell, Brother. I can sense it.”
“No, it’s all right. It’s just walking, I can handle it. There’s no fighting, it’s just walking.” He smiled with a great deal of effort.
“Then let’s go, Brother American,” she said.
Alex, in the lull after the failed attack, scampered over his position checking on his men, telling them how well they had done.
“Is that all they’ll send, do you think?” he was asked.
“No, they’ll come again. And again. And again. I think the troops they send against us next will be better. Finally, they’ll send the very best. It’ll be a night fight, great fun.”
Morale was high. The boys seemed to be holding together very well. Down in the missile silo, the general reported good progress on the cutting. It would be sooner than everybody thought. He’d lost only ten dead and had eleven wounded, this from the terrifying air assault and the infantry assault. He had ample supplies of ammunition left. He was in an excellent situation, all things considered. Only two things really bothered him. First, the loss of one of his two light machine guns in the infantry assault, and second, that he had used so many of the Stinger missiles in defending against the air attack. He had only seven left.
“Sir, great shooting on that last bird,” someone called. “You can still see her burning down on the plain.” And you could: the smoke rose still from the wreck, drifted up through the bright sky, where it shredded and dissipated in the wind.
“No, nothing,” said Alex. “It was just luck.” Of course it hadn’t been. When the last plane came in by itself, it had been Alex with the M-60 who alone had refused to dive, even when the cannon shells were cutting away at him. He’d tracked the pilot all the way, and when the plane had ruddered hard to the left, he’d jumped up from the gun position like a duck hunter and held the weapon in his arms, pumping his rounds into the craft. He’d seen the tracers flick into the bubble cockpit, seen the bright glass haze as they tore through and the plane began to wobble, then never gathered enough altitude to make it out of the dive, and sank to the ground.
Alex had never shot down an airplane before. He felt queerly pleased.
“Now, back to the digging,” he said. “Enough congratulations. Time to get back to work. Whose turn is it? Whose shift? Red Platoon?”
“Blue Platoon,” the call came. “Red Platoon’s already dug down to hell.”
There was some laughter.
“All right,” Alex said, loving them, “Blue Platoon, in the trenches under the canvas. Red Platoon’s turn to sunbathe on the perimeter.”
“But Blue Platoon shot down the helicopter. Don’t we get a reward?”
“Lucky shot,” yelled one of the boys of Red Platoon. “Now you’ll dig till you’ve blisters the size of coins, just like—”
But Alex interrupted the horseplay.
“You said the helicopter went down? I didn’t see it crash.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Sir, we shot down a helicopter. It went over the hill and crashed.”
Alex listened carefully. He remembered the medevac chopper taking off at the beginning of the assault, but it should have hovered downslope. It clearly wasn’t a gunship, because it hadn’t brought any fire to bear on his position. But why would a medevac chopper have ventured over the firefight, particularly when it was so easy to avoid it? The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Then he said, “Everybody who fired on the helicopter, fall in on me, please.”