At last they moved to him.
“Any approaches in the last few months? Any sense of being watched? Any peculiarities in your mail, say, being intercepted, your house being broken into, your papers messed up”
“Absolutely not,” he said, swallowing hard.
They missed it.
“What about your wife? You hear from her?”
“Leave her out of it, please. She’s — she’s off somewhere, that’s all.”
“The marriage. When did it break up?”
“Nine months ago. I don’t talk about it with anybody, do you understand?”
“Megan Wilder, she never gave up her maiden name?”
Peter didn’t like this at all.
“I said I’d prefer not to discuss my private life. She’s with another man now, all right? That’s all there is to say. I upset her, she went with somebody else. How much longer is this going to take?”
“When did you last see her?”
“She came up to Baltimore two weeks ago. It was a kind of a stab at reconciliation. It was kind of okay at the beginning; but the next morning it turned into catastrophe again.”
“This was before or after your breakdo—”
“It was months afterward. That was in July, when I left the committee. But it was no big deal. It was a very mild nervous breakdown, yes, created by a great deal of work stress and the end of my marriage. I just felt used up and incapable of being with other human beings. I spent four weeks at a very discreet loony bin in Ellicott City, where I reread the collected works of Agatha Christie and talked to an insufferable fool about my God complex. In the end I allowed him to convince me that I wasn’t that august gentleman. I was too smart for the job description.”
The agents didn’t crack a smile at this deflection. Nevertheless, tactically the gambit worked; both agents missed his discomfort, and the interrogation headed into less interesting areas.
“Now, let’s go back to this Mike Greene …”
The agents asked their little loaded questions, trying to probe or trick him. But it wasn’t much of a contest. Peter began to feel a little like Raskolnikov — superior, implacable, a “new kind of man.” He could see them set up their ambushes, and popped counterambushes on them, reducing them to hostile silence. They couldn’t touch him, and in time they understood this themselves. When they got close they didn’t know it; they couldn’t read him. In time, perhaps, they could break him down and get at … at it, but they didn’t have time. Also, he saw, they were a little bit afraid of him by now, and a little bit unhinged by the theater of reality swirling around them.
The surrender was prosaic, without ritual.
One of them finally said, “We’re going to leave you with a card. If you should think of something, you call us.”
So Peter had his perverse little victory. Mess with Peter Thiokol and see what it gets you!
Peter looked out the window. He could see the mountain itself. He felt a little of that radiant selfhood again. It thrilled and pleased him.
I’m the smartest boy in the class! I can do anything!
Then why couldn’t you hang on to the one person you ever loved, he asked himself.
“Don’t go yet,” he said suddenly.
He rose, went to the window. Outside, on the plain, he could see the jagged streaks of smoke from the wrecked jets rising funereally against the bright blue air. From up on the mountain, the sounds of small-arms fire reached him; the National Guard Infantry, like the Brits of World War I, having taken their wages these long years, now were dying.
He could see Dick Puller hunched over the radio gear, talking frantically to his Guardsman on the mountain; meanwhile, the Delta officers stood by. They looked restless, even hungry, and desperate with frustration. Skazy, their gloomy leader, was clenching and unclenching his hands in anger.
You think you got problems, Peter thought.
He turned to the two agents.
Time to face it, Peter, he told himself. Time to face it at last. Time to stop denying the thing that’s been eating at your stomach lining all these months and that put you in the bin.
“I think my wife betrayed South Mountain,” he said.
Phuong clutched the M-16. They whirled over the mountain, and as they shot up, she felt the strangeness in her stomach; it was as if a window had been opened and the cool air could blow in. The deck beneath her began to rattle and shiver.
“Small arms,” one of the crewmen screamed over the roar of the engine.
She looked; across from her the black Americans, all dressed up like frogmen, clung together. Their eyes were eggs. Her partner, the blond man called Teagarden, another frogman, stared into space, his eyes locked in a faraway glare. His lips moved.
Then they were over the mountain, sliding down its side at an angle, the craft around them feeling warped and broken.
She had seen helicopters die before. You always wondered what it was like when they blazed in flame, then plunged to earth and hit with a detonation like a bomb. Later you went to see them. They looked like the shedded skins of insects, broken metal husks on the floor of the earth. Inside you could see the men, burned meat; the faces were so terrible. Then more helicopters would come and it was time to go back into the tunnels.
“Hang on, everybody,” the crew chief shouted. “Touch down.”
The chopper hit hard. Dust and smoke flew; the air was heavy with vibration. Suddenly men in camouflage, their faces green, their manner urgent, were among them.
“Out, out. Come on, into the trench,” they were shouting.
They scrambled from the helicopter to a fresh ditch nearby, jumping in to find other men there.
“Fire in the hole,” somebody yelled; a huge explosion that sounded like a charge from a terror bomber high up in the clouds where it could not be heard clubbed her in the diaphragm. Trees flew through the air; smoke poured around her. She coughed, taking in the acrid odor of gunpowder.
Mother, it’s all so familiar, said her daughter.
“Okay, Rats,” said the leader-officer. “That was thirty pounds of C-4 and primacord planted into what our maps tell us was once upon a time the entrance to the main shaft of the old McCreedy and Scott Number Four mine. Let’s take a look-see and find out if we punched a hole into it for you.”
They stood and moved toward the smoke. All around, trees had been blasted flat; the snow was black and the smoke still gushed from the crater. Above, the mountain, dense with more trees, rose at a steep angle. They were at its base, completely isolated in the forest. The sounds of gunfire came from far away, and a few other soldiers crouched around, keeping watch.
“I think we poked through,” said one of the soldiers. “That was a shaped charge; it ought to have cut real deep.”
“Okay,” said the small black man, “let me just check this sucker out.”
With a surprising agility he lowered himself into the gap in the earth. In seconds he was back.