The span of the plot is a little more than sixteen hours, from 7 am to 12 midnight. It begins with the kidnapping of a welder in the early hours of the morning, followed shortly with the forceful take-over of the most secret and most potent missile silo in the US by an armed group. As the story unfolds, we find out that the armed group is Russian and their success in taking over the silo was due to vital information passed to their leader by the frustrated wife of the man who designed the facility, however believing their leader was Jewish like her.
Every second now is like a day as American military and special forces join hands to try to regain access to the site and prevent the launch. The race to midnight is long and thrilling. The ending is a dramatic success as the launch of the missile which actually commenced is eventually aborted at the last moment. And on the other hand the setting off of the nuclear bomb right inside the Russian Embassy though also started could not be concluded.
Ironically, the fate of the world eventually depended on Walls, a barely literate convicted black man and ex-Vietnam recruit, and a Vietnamese refugee woman, both of them known as tunnel rats, to get inside the launch control center from the bottom of the mountain. It was Walls who eventually aborted the launch under the instructions of the genius of a designer of the site who was immediately shot by the remaining Russians fighting for their lives. And on the other side, it took a fat alcoholic Russian just turned by CIA agents, to stop the bomb from going off in the Russian Embassy, after taking two bullets from the woman who set it off, a woman he thought he loved and had always told him she loved him, after killing the woman; in his pain as the countdown continued and not knowing what to do he turned to his vodka which he later poured on the timing device which shortcircuited it to achieve the desired aim anyhow.
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