After the fall of the Soviet Union, Michael Smith visits New Castle, New Hampshire every Wednesday, to meet a retired pipefitter named Gus who worked at the nearby Portsmouth Naval Shipyard back in the day. Every Wednesday, the two sit by a park bench and talk about the shipyard over coffee. On Michael’s fourth visit to the park bench, he interrogates Gus for his role in the sinking disaster of the USS Thresher, a submarine that sank in 1963 and killed more than 100 passengers and crew. Michael reveals that following the fall of the Soviet Union, confidential files have been opened implicating Gus in a scheme to sink the Thresher.  Gus reveals that his father, a deacon and veteran, compelled him to sabotage the Thresher. Gus’s father served in the military occupation forces after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After Gus’s father died later of lung cancer due to the radiation, in 1962 Gus found color films that his father had illicitly taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the complete destruction of nuclear warfare. Gus tells Michael that the films shook him at the time, making him disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy. Gus continues his story by telling Michael how after a drunken stupor during which he expressed his disdain at Kennedy, a man named “Chandler” targeted him to sabotage the submarine. Chandler posed as a U.S. Defense Department employee, and told Gus to simply cause delays in the submarine’s development so that the U.S. military budget would be reined in and peace between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be reached. In reality, Chandler gave Gus a bomb to smuggle in, which sank the _Thresher _and killed everyone on board. Wracked with guilt decades later, Gus cries telling this story to Michael. In a dramatic turn, Michael kills Gus with a ballpoint pen—Michael is not an American, but actually a Russian operative named Misha carrying out an assassination to tie up loose ends. As Gus takes his last dying breath, he thanks Misha for relieving him of his guilt by killing him. Misha’s supervisor Vladimir meets with him after carrying out his mission and scolds him for his sloppiness before musing that the Cold War is not over.