The Day Before Midnight by Stephen Hunter Page A

For a night it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb, his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.
    “Anyway,” he said, still scattered, “urn, on decapitation stuff, um—look, let’s be frank here.” He had this sudden weary urge to cut through to the truth.
    “Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to save a few million or billion people. Theidea is that Soviet society is so centralized and authority-crazed that if you kill the top few, you wreck them. So you build a missile that’s really an intercontinental sniper rifle. You become the guy in
Day of the Jackal.
The only problem is, they can do it to us, too.”
    They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.
    He sighed again.
    And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude, Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the Defense Department, prime denizen of the inside-the-beltway Strategic Community, author of the famous essay in
Foreign Affairs
, “And Why Not Missile Superiority?: Rethinking MAD,” was drowning.
    Peter was a tall, reedy looking man of forty-one who looked thirty-five; he had thinning blond hair that exposed a good stretch of forehead, which made him look intelligent. He was also rather handsome in an academic sort of way, but he had a disorganized quality to him, an alarming vagueness that put many people off. Outside his area of expertise, he cheerfully admitted, he was a complete moron.
    In a no doubt desperate attempt to camouflage his discomfort, he was dressed as he imagined a professor should dress, that is, as he had remembered them dressing from twenty years before: He wore a tweed jacket so dense it looked like a map of a heather Milky Way, and a Brooks Brothers blue oxford-cloth shirt, that deeper, stormier blue that only Brooks offers, with a striped rep tie, a pair of pleated khakis from Britches of Georgetown, and a pair of beat-up, nearly blackened Bass Weejuns.
    The student tried again.
    “Uh, Dr. Thiokol? Could you at least tell us if it’ll be an essay exam or a multiple choice? I mean, the test is next week.”
    The girl looked a little like Megan. She was dark and beautiful and very slender and intense. He stared at her neurotically, then struggled with the question. Reading moreof their essays would just about kill him. But he knew he didn’t have the energy to go back through his chaotic notes to develop some kind of objective thing. He’d probably just give them all B’s, and go back to staring at the phone.
    “Well, why don’t we take a
vote
on it?” he finally said.
    But he was suddenly drowned out in the hammering of a huge roar. The class turned from their lecturer to the window, and watched in amazement as a scene from a fifties monster movie began to unreel. A large insect appeared to be attacking the parking lot. As it got closer, the bug became an Army UH-1B Huey helicopter, a great olive drab creature with a huge Plexiglas eye, a bloated thorax, and an almost delicate tail, and as it floated down out of the sky, adroitly sliding through a gap in the trees, its howl caused all the fixtures in the lecture hall to vibrate. Preposterously, it landed in the parking lot, whirling up a windstorm of dust and snow and girls’ skirts.
    Peter could hear the giggles and the gossip as two officers in dappled combat fatigues came loping out of the hull of the craft, grabbed a kid, spoke to him, and then headed toward his building. But he himself did not smile. He understood that they were here for him and that something was terribly wrong. He felt the blood drain from his face.
    It took them about thirty seconds to reach Shaffer.
    And in the next second the doors flew open, and a