IX





"Thank you. Next!"

Meg nervously checked her watch as another reporter was quickly ushered out of the room where Chuck Yeager, American hero, sat. It was 1:14, one minute before her interview, and she was near the back of the line of at least sixty reporters inside an office building just behind the airfield.

Damnit…

She hated lines; the only comfort of the situation was that the building was being well air-conditioned. This gave her a reason to wear the jacket, and she did so as everyone else around her froze.

On those around her, they were all reporters who seemed to come from everywhere. Having taken some German in school, she instantly picked up the excited conversation of two men in front of her. They were pretty excited, or at least somewhat happy, to be here. The tone of most of the other reporters, many in English, but many in languages she did not understand, seemed to echo a happiness of being at the ceremony. After all, not only was it an anniversary of Chuck Yeager's first flight, it would also be a ceremony of his fastest flight yet; he was to fly an F-15 to mark his flight, going an estimated ten times faster than the speed of sound. And, on top of it, some speculated that it was possible he wouldn't live to the next decade; he was 64, and anything could happen. As it was, it was held that this would be Yeager's last piloted flight.

….Hmmm…..

This new, final flight was not the intention of Meg's questions; at least, not anymore. After the name Scott Garnet passed through her ears, she realized she had a new purpose. She grasped her jacket, knowing what she had to say.

Of course, a part of her still laughed at the old veterans who jabbered away listlessly, who put the silly idea in her head. A part of her still laughed at Joan O'Meara for her silly obsessions with Mary Garnet, for being a little Japanese sod who taught pointy-eared liberals in San Francisco. A part of her still laughed at Naoto Ohshima for just being there, a kid whose little video game ambitions were nothing more than pipe dreams and foolishness. That part, however, was getting smaller by the minute, and more by the minute she questioned whether she was just going for the risk of making herself look like an idiot or just being downright insane.

What would George say?…. she gave a huff. No. To hell what George says. This is my fucking story, not his. If he wanted it done a certain way, he should have just come out here on his own.

"Next!"

The line was going abnormally quick, especially for the magnitude of the event. Already, ten reporters had come and gone in a span of five minutes. At this, Meg looked around, at first confused, then annoyed. Something was going on with the general. She began to open her mouth.

"What de hell es going on?" Some male with a thick Italian accent in front of Meg suddenly asked the question that she had been about to blurt out. "We still got forty five minutes before he go up. Why de hell they hus'ing everyone?"
"Somethin' 'bout his wife," another reporter, a Southerner, gave his voice. "She's started to get a bit sick out in July, and I reckon its gotten worse since. So he's asked that we only ask a max of two questions when we go in. He doesn't want to stay any longer than he has'ta."
"I vas nevir told of des!"
"Neither was I. We were told three minutes!" Another voice came in. "How in hell do you know this, sir? Are you a reporter?"
"Andrew Outleer, Atlanta Tribune." The Southerner gave a chuckle, albeit one that was tainted with frustration. "Don't worry. I don't think anyone was. I had to ask one of those guards outside about it, and he told me that that's the reason why our interviews are so late."

Great. Meg rolled her eyes. Yet another wonderful setback. Less time. Whoopdie fucking doo to you, Yeager.

Nevertheless, her excitement still built as the line quickly thinned down. She knew what she had to do; she had to figure out a way to at least get some type of indication of whether or not Garnet truly existed, whether the story of Garnet's death was accountable. The general didn't even have to say anything directly; more subtle reactions would be the telling test. Any type of a reaction that seems shocked or the slightest bit negative would tell her. The problem was using the two question limit to her advantage to get such a reaction.

The answer to the problem was simple. She had to start out with something about Scott Garnet. No, make the inquiry about Scott Garnet the next question. The latter made much more sense to Meg; a reporter looking for answers always have to make his or her victim feel comfortable, feel relaxed and complacent, unsuspecting of any real trouble, before firing off the hard questions that will take the old geezer by surprise.

All I'll need, Meg thought to herself as she flipped on her tape recorder to test out the battery, Is a sign. Any sign that will tell me. Just one.

"Next!"

Just two more now stood in front of her. Her muscles began to tense up with expectation; she felt a shiver run down her spine, and a butterfly in her stomach, as the minutes slowly passed. She felt she shouldn't be this excited, and yet felt there was reason to be excited. It seemed like a boring anniversary, and yet there was a secret to uncover. If she could get a hint of anything off of Yeager, she knew, then the implications for the history of many things - NASA, the USAF, the government in general - would be astronomical.

And even if this guy didn't make it past the sound barrier…. Meg could almost feel the small bit maliciousness in her intentions as she looked at the door that had Yeager in it. Even if he didn't, he still died on the project. Yet even I know that the government announced there being no fatalities on Project Blue Gale. They must take great pride knowing that their public thinks they pulled a miracle out of their pants, not having lost a single boy doing it. She gave a chuckle. Well, if they think they can cover something like this up forever, then all the U.S. government has in their pants is a nice big wad of paper that has 'Scott Garnet' written all over it.

"Next!"

It was then her turn. It was time. She took a deep breath as she was quietly ushered through the door by a young man in army fatigues.

"Two questions." Meg held up her press card to the young man. The card was thankfully for the Associated Press, which the Journal was an affiliate of "Remember, two questions."
"No problem, garcon."

Another door was pushed; she came in just as the previous reporter went out. It was a small office space, one no more than seven feet wide on each side, filled with windows and two desks. The desks had been pushed to the sides of the room to leave space for two chairs.

In one of these chairs was Maj. General Charles "Chuck" Yeager, the fastest man alive. He was seemingly robust even in his advanced age, robust, rosy-cheeked and silver-haired. He had a kind smile with white teeth (which Meg perceived to be dentures) which lit his wrinkled face up as he held his hand out to her. His pilot's uniform was without a single wrinkle; his soldier's cap was worn at a smart angle towards the left side of his face. He seemed the very image of an old hero in his waning years; a man with nothing left to prove, yet still soldiering on with the sheerness of his willpower just for the sake of living.

"Please, sit down." He bade her to sit after they shook hands. "My goodness, I've had so many reporters come in and out so quickly! But time is short for me here; I have personal business to take care of after I finish, you see."
"Of course, sir." Meg quietly switched her recorder on. "Its been a long day for both of us. Mine started this morning in New York City looking over some stocks."
"That far away, huh?" The major general mused. "And you're looking at….stocks? You're a financial reporter?"
"I work for the Wall Street Journal."
"Well, at least you started out with a salutation! These reporters come from far and wide to ask the same dumbass questions. 'How do you feel about your flight?' 'How did the original flight change your life?' The same bullshit, and at least ninety percent of 'em are 'Lifestyle' columnists. Nothing like variety, eh? Not even so much as a 'hello' from some of these people."

You want variety? Meg had to suppress flat-out laughing. I'll give you variety. Don't you worry none.

"So, lets get started." Meg searched for a question that would lull the old man's senses. She had forgotten how difficult interviews were. "So…….Do you have any memories you cherish from your times back here forty years ago?"
"Oh…." The general chuckled. "Golly, I have quite a few. I especially loved working with Albert Boyd, God bless him."
"Albert Boyd…?"
"My boss on the X-1 project. He was an observant guy. He could spot things about situations that made things easier for all of us. Most of all he was a man of character. He could spot things about people that most men wouldn't normally notice. He may have been a ball breaker, but he used it for good. He didn't mess around like some men in his position did."
"Hmm…Must have been very interesting to work with him, sir."

It was the perfect opportunity for Meg. It couldn't have been better if it was handed to her on a silver platter. A general question from her, an answer from him involving a co-worker. She knew it was now time for what she had to ask.

"Though….." Meg paused. "I must ask……how did it feel to work with Scott Garnet?"

There was a sudden moment of silence at this. Meg knew she had him. Though his expression wasn't exactly a dead giveaway - Meg kept in mind that Yeager had always been known to be a man who was good at hiding his true expressions and feelings - the silence was. Meg kept the recorder rolling.

"General?" Meg had to keep her delight down. "Sir?"

Yeager's head went down. A small chuckle came from his lips.

"I'm sorry……could you repeat that?"
"…..Scott Garnet." Meg repeated. "Captain Scott Garnet. Hedgehog. You worked with him on the X-1 project, correct?"

There was another long moment of silence. This time, there was no uncertainty for Meg She knew. She knew.

She was hitting something big.

"……Son if a bitch…."

He chuckled again, bending his head down towards the ground. This time, however, his voice was shaking as he laughed, and slowly, the laugh turned into near-hiccups of shock. His hand went to his forehead, and when he rubbed away from his face, Meg's eyes could only widen.

His fingers were wet.

He's…..crying?

"….I….." As Yeager spoke once more, his voice shook again. "I have to go now."

Suddenly, he stood up, leaving Meg sitting alone in the room. He threw several quick, low words to the officer at the door, taking several deep breaths of composition as he did. After a minute of whispers back and forth, he left the room. Outside, Meg could hear the shocked tones of the reporters, followed by several shouts of protest and even yells of anger and protest. The interviews - as far as the general were concerned - were officially over.

"All right madam." The officer motioned to the reporter. "I'm afraid your time is up."

Without another word, Meg was escorted out of the room. She could feel the glares from her fellow reporters as she walked out; they began to disperse nevertheless, avoiding a fight with Meg in the process. It became so silent, so quickly, that the slamming of the door to the interview room nearly caused her to jump.

At first, Meg was completely unbelieving of what had happened. She had never seen a man crumble so quickly, specifically not a man like Chuck Yeager. Chuck Yeager was a man who cheated death several times - he was a man who almost died in the French countryside under a hail of German fire. He was a man who broke several ribs in a horse-riding accident, with the marrow missing his heart my mere millimeters and yet still went on to break the sound barrier. He was a man who went into a tailspin at 30,000 feet and dropped almost 27,000 feet before regaining his controls just mere hundreds of feet off of the car. A man who stared into the face of hell so often doesn't just break down and cry. It wasn't characteristic of a military man to have emotion.

Then it hit her.



A very long time ago - back when she was a young child - she had lived in Rome, a place that held a military base, an Air Force base. Her father had been in the Army for several years, and had seen combat at Normandy during the D-Day invasion. According to her mother, very few people in his company had survived the attack; at the end of the war, her father could count the number of survivors on his left hand. His disdain for armed combat, passed down to her, stemmed from this single fact.

When Meg - or Margot, as her original name had been before she had it legally changed to Margaret (it was for reasons that were completely inane; she detested the thought that her name had sounded French) - was seven years old, her father had come home one day, crying. It had been sometime after school had started that year; she remembered that the leaves were starting to fall and that's how she knew. But her father, who was normally a strict, unrelenting man, had come home, sat down at the kitchen table, dropped a piece of paper onto the floor and began weeping violently.

Margot would have laughed at the idea of her daddy crying - after all, boys didn't cry! - but her mother was instantly at the doorway, escorting her out of the room. Margot had been confused, until her mother told her that one of daddy's friends had gone to heaven that afternoon. She was sure it was a car accident of some sort, though she wasn't sure of the details even now; she never bothered to ask. She did, however, ask her mother exactly why her father was crying, to which her mother replied, "Men like your father have to cry when a man like Steve dies."

For ten years, Margot had wondered what her mother could have meant. It would not be until after her father's death, when she was seventeen years old, that she learned. At her father's funeral, two men had come into the funeral home and sat next to her. One of them - short and stocky - had approached the podium and had given a eulogy.

"Vincent was a great man," he had said. "I was proud to serve with him when we went to war; we had been in the same company when we went to Normandy. So many men died in our company..." His voice faltered. "He saved a lot of lives. But he never…..considered himself a hero…….he always thought that the man who was the real hero was our buddy Steve. He always said he owed Steve his life…."

And then, like her father before, Margot had watched his man break down. It was that night she had pressed for answers from her mother, after seeing another show of emotion. And so her mother confessed; Steve was a man who had dragged Margot's father behind a bush on Omaha Beach after he had been injured by shrapnel after carrying several injured men out of the line of fire. Even though he risked his life doing it, Steve then proceeded to step in front of the bush - standing, in full view - to shoot back at the Nazis on the cliff. Miraculously, even though Steve had foolishly been in full view and an all-too-easy target for anyone who would have been able to pick him off, he did not receive a single nick or bruise on the entire face of his body.

Her father, her mother had said, attributed this miracle to the fact that Steve had committed the unselfish act of putting his life on the line to preserve another - an act of heroism. When a military man is indebted that deeply, she had said, when you experience that type of selfless act of humanity, one could only mourn when such a special person was gone. It had been the same for the men at her father's funeral; they, after all, had been among the men whom he had been carrying out when he was injured.



She understood. Men like Yeager didn't cry over men unless they owed a life-debt to them. Men like Yeager didn't cry over men unless they had risked their lives to save them…..or died trying.

She couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible, and yet it had to be true. Through body language alone, Meg learned that Scott Garnet, Captain Scott Garnet, the husband of the writer of children's books, had known Chuck Yeager. Scott Garnet had been a part of the mission to break the sound barrier. And through a single tear, Meg was drunk on the realization that Chuck Yeager owed Scott Garnet a life debt from his time at Edwards back in 1947.

Then, if this was so…. Meg was almost intoxicated. Then the story about how Scott Garnet died….

She had the story; she had the motive to investigate. It was only a matter of permission to investigate from her asshole ex-husband. Then, she would be able to pursue this new venue of knowledge she had acquired. She hadn't felt this pumped up since she first started working; the sensation of the hunt filled her with warmth. She almost snuggled in her jacket - no, Scott Garnet's jacket - as she walked out of the building.

It was no longer about embarrassing the government. It was no longer about upstarting the general. It was about uncovering a mystery.

It was about Scott Garnet.