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.”
In the end about twenty men from Blue Platoon came over and gathered around Alex.
“Tell me about this helicopter,” Alex said. “One of you. Slowly. Not all at once. The man who spoke first.”
“Sir,” the boy eventually said in slow country rhythms. “Sir, during the last run of the aerial attack, a helicopter flew low over the trees. We saw it only very late in its approach, because everyone was undercover from the airplanes. Naturally—” he clapped his rifle, a Fabrique Nationale FAL, “I fired on it.”
“What kind of helicopter?”
“UH-1B. The Huey, so famous from Vietnam.”
“You hit it?”
“I—I think so, sir.”
“How many rounds?”
“Sir?”
“How many rounds did you put into it? What kind of sight picture did you have? Were you leading it? Were you in the full or semiautomatic mode? Where were you firing?”
The boy was silent, baffled.
“Please be honest with me,” said Alex. “I mean you no disrespect. You are a brave and dedicated man. But I have to know the answers to these questions as completely as you can tell me.”
“Sir, then the truth is, I fired hurriedly. I had no time to really aim competently. I was firing semiautomatic and perhaps I got off seven or eight rounds.”
“Did you see any damage? I mean, ruptures in the steel, smoke, flames, blown rotors, that sort of thing?”
“Not really, sir. It was so fast.”
“How about any of you others. Who else thinks they scored hits?”
A few hands rose.
“Full-auto or semi?”
The answers were all semi; the stories were all the same: jerked shots fired desperately at a flashing target, no real sight pictures, less than a magazine apiece fired at the machine.
“Yet it crashed?”
“Yessir. It crossed the crest, whirled down the mountain, out of control. We lost sight of it from here. But there was an explosion at the base of the mountain.”
“Did you see it hit?”
“No, sir. It hit behind some trees. Down there you can see how thick the trees are. It hit right there. A few seconds later there was an explosion.”
“Was the explosion exactly at the point of impact?”
“Sir, it’s hard to say. It seemed to be more or less at the point of impact. Perhaps the machine bounced when it hit, then exploded. It’s—”
But Alex was already gone.
“Sergeant,” he shouted, “I want you to put together a team of ten of your very best men. I think something’s up, something I don’t like. I don’t know what. I want you to go down the hill and check out that helicopter wreck.”
1600
“I don’t know,” said Delta Three. “I hate to go in blind. It’s against everything they teach us.” He was looking through binoculars from well back in the room of a house on Main Street, in Burkittsville, at the front of Jack Hummel’s place some two hundred yards down the road.
“We don’t have time for a recon,” said Jim Uckley. “Listen, it’s even possible there’s no one in there except the mother and her two sick little girls.”
“Then what happens,” said Delta Three, “if I get a peripheral cue, turn and fire and blow away a child? It’s no good, Mr. Uckley. I’m not going to risk civilians like that. I couldn’t live with myself if—”
Some Delta! thought Uckley.
“Look, man,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of time. We got to help those guys on the mountain. We’ve got to improvise something.”
“I’m not going in without a floorplan, sure information on how many guys there are and a good idea of where they are in the house and where these children might be. And I’m not going in without multiple simultaneous entries. You’re too fat a target. I don’t mind taking chances. I was hit twice in Vietnam, in fact. But goddammit, I’m not going in and risk kids’ lives.”
Delta Three was a sanctimonious Southerner in his late thirties with the righteous jaw set of a zealot. He was raw-boned and tough, a master sergeant. Uckley hated him. The other three Deltas—he didn’t have time to learn their names so he’d simply christened them Deltas One through Four—seemed like decent kids. But goddamn this adult!
“Officer,” Uckley called to the Burkittsville cop who was with them in the house. “Any chance you could, uh, get us a floorplan or something. So we knew—”
“No,” said the cop. “That house is one hundred years old and they didn’t make floorplans in those days, they just built ’em and built ’em a damn sight better ’n they do now.”
Great. Another zealot who loved to express his opinions. The cop was about fifty-five and plainly pissed off that all this government beef had come gunslinging into his town. But in a phase four emergency, federal officers called the shots, and he’d buy the idea that young Uckley was calling these.
“Neighbors,” said Delta Four. “They’d have been in the house, right? Maybe you could round one up and get some kind of a drawing or diagram. Then we’d at least have some idea.”
The cop chewed this one over. Finally, he allowed that Kathy Reed lived next door.
“Call her,” said Uckley. “Tell her it’s an emergency, ask her to walk down the street to us.”
“That’s good,” said Delta Four. “Maybe we can rock and roll after all.”
In a few minutes, Kathy Reed, her twin boys, Mick and Sam, and a scroungy mutt that turned out to be named Theo showed up. Kathy was in her housedress still and looked as though a few days had passed since she’d last washed her hair.
“Bruce is away,” she began to explain, “I’m sorry about the way I look, but it’s so hard to—”
“Mrs. Reed?” Uckley asked. “I’m James Uckley, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. These men here with me are a special assault team from the Army’s Delta Group.”
He watched her mouth lengthen, then form the perfect rictus of an O. She was a woman who at one time or other might have been attractive but had been ground to a nub by the trenchwork of motherhood. She swallowed, her eyes going big, then said, “Is this about the mountain. There’s something going on on the mountain, right?”
“Yes, this does have to do with the mountain. Now, what I wanted to ask you about was your neighbor, Mrs. Hummel.”
“Beth? Is Beth in trouble?”
“Well, that’s what I want you to tell me. Did you talk to her today?”
“Yes, sir. About an hour ago.”
“And how did she seem?”
“Uh, the same.”
“The same?”
“It was just Beth, that’s all. I was the scared one. Because I thought there was gas or an atom bomb on the mountain. She said she’d drive us out of here if there was an evacuation. Bruce has the car. He travels a lot.”
“Did she invite you in?”
“Uh, no.”
r /> “Was that unusual?”
“Well, we have coffee nearly every morning. Beth’s my best friend. She’s everybody’s best friend. I guess it was.”
“Was she nervous? Unsettled?”
“Come to think of it, yes, I suppose she was.”
“What about her kids?”
“What about them?”
“Did she say anything about them being sick?”
“Sick! What have they got? Sam was with Poo all yesterday. That means Sam will be coming down with it. Did she tell you they were sick?”
“They’re not in school. She called in.”
“That’s peculiar. I know she would have said something about it. But she didn’t mention it.”
“Mrs. Reed, I’d like you to talk to the sergeant here. I want you to draw us a diagram of Mrs. Hummel’s house. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go down there and knock on the door and see what I can see.”
“Be careful,” said Delta Three.
“Oh, I will,” said Uckley.
The knock on the door surprised them. Herman looked at his men, then at the lady and her children. Goddamn! Who could this be?
“All right,” he said. “As before. Remember, no fancy stuff, lady. These men here are with your children. You don’t want anything happening, do you understand?”
Beth Hummel nodded gravely.
“Don’t hurt my children.”
“Nobody gets hurt,” said Herman.
He knelt at the foot of the cellar steps, crouching in the darkness. His silenced Uzi covered the entrance. He watched the lady walk to the door, peek out, then open it.
“Mrs. Hummel?”
“Yes.”
Herman could see a bland young man in a sports coat and tie under a bland black raincoat. He looked to be about thirty.
“Hi, my name’s Jim Uckley, I’m with Ridgley Refrigeration, we’re putting in the plant out in Keedysville. Listen, I had an appointment with your husband today at two and he wasn’t there. I was just wondering if—”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Uckley. Jack’s in Middletown. There was a breakdown in the high school heating system. The main duct split and he had to go weld it up. I’m real sorry if he missed his appointment, but sometimes these emergencies come up and—”
“Oh, listen, that’s all right. I understand. Would it be all right if I came in and—”
Herman put his hand on the Uzi trigger and drew the weapon to his shoulder. Let this man come in and he’d squeeze off a three-round burst.
“Mr. Uckley, have you had the flu this year? It’s horrible stuff. Would you believe that both my girls are down with it. Why, Bean’s been vomiting for two days. It’s a horrible thing. And the house is a disaster. You can imagine, with two sick children, how terrible it is.”
“Well, ma’am, I sure don’t want to add to your difficulties. Maybe you could tell your husband I’ll call him in the morning. It’s a pretty big job we have in mind, and we’d like to talk to him soon as we can.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Uckley. I’ll see that he gets the message.”
She closed the door.
Herman slithered to the window, peeked over the edge, and watched the young man mosey down the walk and climb into a little blue car and drive away. He raced to the back of the house and followed the car after it had turned up the block and headed on down to Route 17 and out of town. All right, maybe it’s just a man about a job, he thought as he lost track of the car.
“Yep, they’re there, you bet, I could almost smell ’em,” said Uckley.
“How many?” asked Delta Three.
“I couldn’t exactly ask,” said Uckley, who was feeling somewhat heroic in regard to his exploit. “So what have you got?”
“Three-bedroom house, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry downstairs. Stairs up front from the living room and out back from the dining room. Tough to crack with five guys.”
“Hmmm,” said Uckley. He was basically an accountant. He had an M.B.A. from Northwestern and had heard that five years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Embezzlement Division looked great on a resume, especially if you wanted to go into tax accountancy, where the bucks were. He was engaged to a girl named Sally and had been born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. He had begun the day going over the books of Mid-Maryland Federal Savings, where the vice-president had fled with over $48,000 in bank funds, looted from a variety of accounts over the past several weeks. The man had left with his twenty-three-year-old secretary, leaving behind a forty-two-year-old wife and three children.
“Tough to crack especially when we don’t know how many there are or where they are.”
“Is it best to infiltrate slowly or hit ’em with a rush?” Uckley asked.
“The Israelis like to go in fast, low, and hard. GSG-9 will wait until the cows come home, inserting their operators a lick at a time.”
“That’s a tough place to rush,” said Uckley. “You could stage from Mrs. Reed’s place next door, but nothing on the other side.” He looked at his watch. Time was really flying. It would be dark soon.
“So, who’s got an idea?”
They just looked at each other.
What am I doing here, Uckley thought. He wished he could concentrate a little bit better.
“Look, what about this?” said Delta Three. “We set off a smoke grenade in Mrs. Reed’s house, call the fire department. Say, you and me ride in on the truck, rush up the lawn. Except we hit the Hummel place instead. We’re in raincoats. Meanwhile Rick and Gil move in on the place from behind; they go through that back door, into the kitchen. We go in, yelling Tire, fire, you have to evacuate.’ We’ve got our pieces under our raincoats. Then we take ’em out.”
It was better than anything Uckley could come up with.
Megan Wilder took the tin can and put it in a vise. She spun the handle, watched the tin crumple. The can imploded and ruptured, achieving various interesting configurations of destruction as she drew the jaws of the vise closer and closer. It finally became a fully formed blossom of catastrophe, the light glinting in fascinating patterns off its tortured sides.
Quickly she spun the handle the other way, plucked the crippled thing from the vise’s grip, and took it over to a table. There she had several dozen other crumpled cans.
She stared at them. Some had collapsed neatly; there was something bland and banal in their demise. Others, like this one, had a curious inner vitality and force; they fought the jaws with every last shred of resilience. And when they died reluctantly, they died most spectacularly, forming orchids of broken metal. Of the dozens there were perhaps less than five that really touched her, that spoke to her, including the last one. She took them all to another part of the room.
Megan Wilder specialized in what she called “constructions” or, sometimes, “destructions,” depending on her mood and her honesty. Their form attempted to push out the boundaries of art; they would not fit into conventional categories. They were not quite sculptures, because although they occupied space and had plastic form, they had at the same time not escaped entirely from the tyranny of the frame and the organizing impulse of two dimensions. They were meant, in short, to be viewed only from one angle, and although certain influential critics had denounced this as cowardice to the tyranny of convention, she could not force herself to abandon it.
But neither, of course, were they paintings, although they depended for their impact on color as it defines form. For she implanted the twisted tin buds with other shapes that took her fancy—beer bottles, for example, the insides of burnt-out calculators, filaments from light bulbs, this, that, and the other thing, the detritus of American society—and stapled them inside rough frames and shelves that she had constructed herself, against a plasterboard backing. When by accident she found harmony, she destroyed it. She was interested in disharmony, the radical lack of symmetry and structure that somehow especially pleased her since Ari had left. Anyway, when she got these items arranged just so, she painted them. Not flat blac
k like Nevelson’s bleak little masterpieces, but comic-book colors, hot pink, Popsicle orange, sunburst yellow, mashed-banana yellow, a rainbow, a riot of flat, harsh, hot colors. There were critics who also despised this. Color is dead, they had decreed, and it irked them that she hadn’t read their position papers. They could really be nasty, too, particularly one faggot on Art News.
It didn’t matter. Megan was really beyond other people now. After all the years and all the pain, she’d finally fought her way to her own private place. She’d finally found her own voice. It felt authentic and passionate. It satisfied her.
The work was going so well now, it was a shame it had to end. In fact, the imminence of its end gave it all a certain perishability and poignance that made her almost cry, something no man had ever been able to do, short of punching her, and both Peter and Ari had punched her. You could forgive Peter, he was an asshole genius with an IQ of about 900 and an emotional age of about eleven, but Ari had been different; she had expected so much more.
Thus when the knock came and she became aware of the shapes of men in suits moving around the studio, up on its roof, out back in the frozen garden, it did not surprise her, but merely filled her with regret. It had to happen sooner or later and it was happening sooner. What seemed to her tragic was that she’d never see the series of constructions played out unimpinged upon, untainted by the inevitable scandal.
“It’s open,” she called.
There were three of them, Gentiles, strong-looking older men without irony or outrage in their eyes. They identified themselves as something or other from the FBI; she immediately forgot their names and ranks. Their blankness surprised her. She didn’t see the need for it. People could be so cruel. They said she ought to call a lawyer. She didn’t feel like it. She just wanted to go on working, she was so close to being finished.
“Do you have a lawyer, Ms. Wilder?”
“I have an agent,” she said.
“It’s not the same thing.”
“I suppose I have a lawyer. My father would be able to call him, I suppose.”
“I hope you’ll cooperate with us, Ms. Wilder. Time is very important, and your cooperation would help you enormously later.”