W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors Page 6

  Greer, and you'd probably get to be a captain before somebody stuck a knife in your back. What we're talking about here is making you into a responsible senior officer, not somebody who puts in twenty years and retires."

  "I couldn't put up with that West Point bullshit," Greer said.

  "No," Black said, "I don't think you could, either. But you're going to have to get a college degree somehow, Greer.

  Or you might as well get

  "Which brings us back to A&M," Colonel Newburgh said.

  "I can arrange a full scholarship, Greer, if it's a question of money.

  "Thank you," Greer said, but from the tone of his voice, both Newburgh and Black knew that it was thanks for the offer, but not an acceptance of it.

  "You tell me what you want," General Black said. "And you can have it. The commission, too, against my better judgment."

  "I wipe out correspondence courses," Greer said. "Getting a degree isn't going to be a problem."

  "There's a hurry-up program at A&M," Newburgh said.

  "Get your degree in three years. And a regular commission."

  "Or, I can go to helicopter school," Greer said.

  "Helicopter school?" Black asked, surprised. That was the first time that had been mentioned.

  "Which means I get a warrant in six months. Then I go to the University of Chicago, which gives college credit for military experience, including flight school, and take some correspondence courses. Then I apply for a reserve commission, and a competitive tour for a regular commission."

  "You'd have to take the Series 10 courses," Newburgh replied.

  Series 10 courses were correspondence courses offered to enlisted men. If successfully completed, the noncommissioned officer was then eligible to apply for a reserve commission.

  "I already have," Greer said.

  "How'd you do?"

  "Three decimal nine," Greer said. Four decimal zero was perfect.

  "Then what's this warrant officer helicopter pilot business?"

  Black asked.

  "That's where the action's going to be," Greer said. "And the establishment is going to keep it for themselves. If I was a pilot before I took a commission, I'd be in already. Otherwise,

  I'm not sure I could get in."

  "Then what's this bullshit about wanting me to commission you?"

  "I was hoping I could get both out of you," Greer admitted.

  "A commission and flight school."

  Carson Newburgh laughed.

  "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," he said.

  "Mais certainement, mon Colonel," Sergeant Greer said.

  "I think you ought to shrink that oversized head of yours,

  Greer, and I think you're making a serious, perhaps fatal mistake in not going to either the Point, or A&M, or Norwich.

  But if the helicopter school is what you want, I'll see that you get it."

  The middle-aged general and the teen-aged sergeant looked at each other.

  "Thanks," Sergeant Greer said. There was more respect, and affection, in the one word than either General Black or

  Colonel Newburgh had ever before heard from Sergeant Greer.

  "Take off, Greer," General Black said. "And five days is spelled Eff Eye Vee Eee. Not six, not seven, not even five and a half."

  "The sergeant assures the general he will report as required, where required, and when required," Greer said. He saluted crisply, and then he left the room.

  "If that little sonofabitch doesn't wind up either in the stockade or in the hospital with a terminal case of social disease,"

  General Black said, "I think he'll do very well."

  III

  (One)

  Ozark. Alabama

  26 March 1954

  Thirty minutes out of Atlanta, Southern Airways Right 117, a Super DC-3, landed at Columbus, Georgia. Six of the twenty- one passengers who had filled the seats got off, and no one got on. Howard Dutton took advantage of the opportunity to take both of his heavy, bulging, worn briefcases from beneath the seats and put them on the empty seat beside him.

  He was a stocky, square-faced man wearing rimless spectacles, a starched white shirt already well wilted, and a suit that seemed a half size too small for his body. He was always uncomfortable when his briefcases were out of his sight, for they, rather than the turn-of-the-century safe in his office, were really his private and confidential files. His wife, who was his secretary, had the combination to the safe in the office. She had orders, which he believed she followed faithfully, never to mess around in his briefcases.

  His briefcases were rarely out of his sight, even at night, when he kept them at the side of his bed in his frame house on Broad Street. They'contained his secrets. He now had the biggest, most important secret of his life in the double-strap briefcase.

  There were two briefcases. The first he had had since he graduated from the University of Alabama. It closed with one strap. He had carried his books in the single-strapper through the University of Alabama Law School. He had bought the double-strapper after the war, when he had been in Washington as administrative assistant to the Hon. Bascomb J. Henry (DŽ

  Fifth District, Ala.), and the single-strapper just hadn't been big enough to hold all that he had to carry around.

  He resisted the temptation to open the double-strapper and take out the papers which made the secret official. But he rested his hand, casually, on the double-strapper, while he smiled a no-thanks to the stewardess's offer of a Coke-or-coffee and a bag of peanuts.

  Thirty minutes out of Columbus, the Super DC-3 landed again, at Dothan, Alabama, and taxied to the one-floor frame terminal building. From Dothan it would go to Panama City,

  Florida, and from Panama City to Fort Walton Beach, eighty miles down the coast, where the flight would terminate.

  Three people got off at Dothan, two of them standing by the Super DC-3 while a ground crewman opened the door in the fuselage and removed their luggage. Howard Dutton had no luggage besides the briefcases. The single-strapper held two soiled white shirts, identical to the one he was wearing, a soiled sleeveless undershirt, soiled boxer shorts, and a soiled pair of black nylon socks.

  Howard Dutton had gone from Ozark, Alabama, to the nation's capital, to the halls of Congress, to the seat of power, to deal with some of the most powerful men in the nation, with a change of underwear and two extra shirts, and he had returned victorious.

  A warm feeling swept through him, instantly replaced by one of annoyance, concern, and a little anger. He had seen his daughter, Melody, standing inside the plate glass doors of the terminal. Howard Dutton dearly loved his daughter Melody, who was seventeen, and a senior at Ozark High School, and had been touched that she had driven all the way here from

  Ozark to meet her daddy.

  But then he had noticed how Melody was dressed. Melody was wearing a white T-shirt, through which the brassiere re- straining her pert young breasts was clearly visible, and a pair of blue shorts that were so short they reminded Howard, to his immediate shame, of the shorts worn by a whore in a Birmingham brothel he had gone to one drunken weekend when he was at the university.

  That was a hell of a thing for a father to think about his own seventeen-year-old daughter, he thought, but the cold facts were that that's how the whore had been dressed. Melody, of course, was simply blind to what she looked like. She had never seen a whore, as far as he knew, and probably wasn't sure what one did. It was hot, and, still a child, she did what she had done when she had been a child. She took off as many clothes as she could.

  Howard mentally cursed his wife. Wives were supposed to see about that sort of thing, make sure their daughters looked respectable when they went in public.

  Melody ran out of the building and gave him a hug and a wet kiss.

  "How's my favorite daddy?" she asked.

  If it was anyone's fault that she was running around in public looking like a fancy lady in a Birmingham whorehouse, Howard

  Dutton decided, it
damned sure wasn't this innocent child's.

  "You shouldn't have come all the way here in this heat," he said. "You should have sent Clem." Clem was the janitor at the bank, an amiable elderly black man who sometimes drove the car.

  "I was bored out of my gourd, Daddy," Melody said.

  "That's the only reason, you were bored?"

  "And I missed my favorite daddy," she said. She hugged him again. One of the other debarking passengers happened to be male, happened to see Melody hugging her daddy, and happened to appreciatively notice Melody's pink buttocks, about half of which were visible below the blue shorts.

  Goddamned pervert! Howard Dutton thought. Looking at an innocent young girl like that!

  He walked Melody around, rather than through, the Dothan

  Municipal Airport Terminal Building, to where she had parked the car, its nose against a cable strung between creosoted six-by-sixes stuck in the reddish clay. He set the double-strapper on the ground and opened the door of the 1951 Ford Super

  Deluxe. He tossed the single-strapper onto the back seat, and then picked up the double-strapper and tossed that onto the floor in the back.

  "You want me to drive, Melody, honey?" he asked.

  "No, I don't," she said. "You are one of the world's worst drivers."

  He had been afraid of that, and would really have preferred to drive, but he knew that you had to force yourself to let them grow up, and driving cars was part of growing up.

  He took off his suit jacket, its inner pockets sagging with the weight of still more paper, and carefully laid it on the seat back so that it wouldn't slide off the slippery plastic upholstery.

  The senator had sent one of his assistants to take him to

  Washington National from the Capitol. In a 1953 Mercury four door. With an air conditioner. That air conditioner had really been nice in the muggy heat of Washington, and the muggy heat of Washington wasn't anything like the muggy heat here.

  He really wished he could have an air conditioner.

  The 1951 Ford Super Deluxe belonged to the Farmers and

  Planters Bank of Ozark, of which Howard Dutton was president and chairman of the board. While the bank could well afford, financially, an air-conditioned Mercury for its president and chairman of the board, Howard Dutton could not afford, socially, to drive anything that suggested the bank was getting rich on the sweat of its depositors. Howard's father had taught him that. Depositors were just looking for some excuse to badmouth their bankers.

  Maybe soon. Not right away, but soon, when everybody had a little more money, because of what he was doing for them, he could at least get a car with a god damned air conditioner.

  He decided that they would go home the long way. Indulge himself. For one thing, Prissy (for Priscilla, Mrs. Howard Dutton) had told him on the phone that Tom Zoghby had dropped dead. One moment, Tom had been talking with somebody

  (Dudley Claxton, he thought Prissy said) and the next moment he was dead on the floor. Right on the sidewalk in front of

  Zoghby's Emporium.

  The minute he got home, of course, he would be expected to go see the widow and young Tom and the girls. There was no getting away from that, even if he had wanted to, but at the same time it wasn't the sort of thing you liked to do. That he liked to do. There were a lot of people who really got their pleasure rushing to console a widow and a bereaved family.

  Tom had probably left his family well fixed, which was something. But still, there might be a need for some cash money, and he would have to have a word with young Tom

  (he wouldn't want to bother the widow) about maybe selling some of that land along County Highway 53.

  He was suddenly shamed with the thought. That would be dishonest and unethical, now that he had the secret. He was surprised with himself; he wasn't, no matter what people thought, the kind of banker that went around taking advantage of widows and heirs. After a moment, he was able to convince himself that he had thought about buying the Zoghby land along Highway

  53 without thinking about the secret. The secret was so new, that he just hadn't thought about it. He really hadn't been trying to take advantage of Tom's boy.

  "Go up 84 toward Enterprise," he told Melody.

  There were two ways to get from Dothan to Ozark. The short way was to turn left when leaving the airport, and then left again, and up US 231. The long way was to turn right when leaving the airport, and then right again, on US 84, toward Enterprise, and then, fifteen miles along, turn right again and cut through the Camp Rucker Reservation.

  He was entitled, as a reward, both not to rush home to see the Widow Zoghby and to take a look at Camp Rucker. He was a banker and a lawyer, and he knew he didn't own Camp

  Rucker. But at the same time, he had a special relationship with it that nobody else could claim, not even Congressman

  Henry (May He Rest in Peace).

  In 1934, under Roosevelt's Rural Reclamation Administration, the government had bought from Congressman Henry (and other people) 125,000 acres of worked-out cotton land, after they'd sent experts in who had decided the soil was so poor that nothing man could do was going to make it productive again for at least a generation.

  Goddamned fools had cottoned the land, and just worked it to death, destroying the topsoil, so it blew away, and then, when the rains came, gullied it, so that it wasn't worth a damn for anything. Congressman Henry was as guilty as any of them, so you couldn't just say the dumb rednecks were getting what they deserved, reaping what they had sowed.

  So the goverment had come in and bought it up, paying ten dollars an acre for land that was worth maybe a dollar, a dollar and a half, and they'd sent in the CCC, and stopped what they could of the worst gullying and planted it in loblolly pine, and said that in maybe fifty years they would think of clearing it again for planting. Maybe by that time they would have come up with some way to make topsoil or do something to clay that would make it grow things; and in the meantime they could timber it, twice, and get something out of it.

  And then, six years after that, when the pines were headhigh,

  World War II had come along (or was coming along, and everybody could see it coming) and the military was looking for places to build training bases.

  The land was transferred to the War Department in late

  1939, but it wasn't until late 1941, right before the Japs bombed

  Pearl Harbor, when Howard Dutton had been in his last year in the law school at Alabama, that they announced plans to make it a base. And it was nearly a year after that, November

  1942, before they did anything.

  Once they started, of course, they really got in high gear.

  When Howard Dutton left the Basic Officer's Course in Miami, in the Air Corps, all there was on what was still called "the

  Reclamation Land" was some surveyors' tapes and markers, but when he came back on leave three months later, there was

  Camp Rucker, named for General Rucker, who'd been a Confederate general.

  In ninety days they'd built a military post, everything from barracks to a laundry to rifle ranges. All Howard Dutton had seen around Courthouse Square on his leave, before going over to the China-Burma-India theater as an Air Corps lawyer, was khaki uniforms. And, oh, how the money had rolled in!

  Two divisions, eleven, twelve thousand men each, plus the support troops, had trained at Camp Rucker, and after they had gone off to war, they had changed it into a POW camp, and the place had held more than twenty thousand Italian prisoners from North Africa. They'd been lucky there, the Eyeties were glad to be out of the war, and they'd caused no trouble at all.

  They'd worked the farms. Hell, they'd even made out with the women, but nobody talked about that. There was something unpatriotic about the women doing that, with their own men off to war on the other side. But it happened, even if no one talked about it.

  Right after the war, the place had closed down again, and where there had been twenty thousand soldiers, there was maybe a dozen enli
sted men and a couple of officers, just watching the place, to make sure people didn't steal the place blind.

  It had opened again for the Korean War, not the way it had been (they had trained a National Guard regiment from Wisconsin, not a division) and not for as long. It had closed down again in 1953, last year, with the Korean War still going.

  And when the soldiers went, so had all that government money. When the camp was open, even with the Eyetie prisoners, they'd had to buy all sorts of things, mostly services, from Ozark and Enterprise and even Dothan. There were jobs, that was the thing, jobs ranging from fireman to barber, all kinds of clerks, people to work in the post exchange, fix the telephones, all the things the army needs and can't do for itself.