W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors Read online

  Waterford suffered a heart attack, dying in a way which would have met his approval: in the saddle, at the gallop, almost at the opposition's goal and about to score.

  That left the problem of what to do with 2nd It Craig W.

  Lowell. He was not discharged, but instead swept under the rug. He was sent to Greece, where, it was believed, if he wasn't killed, at least he would be out of sight.

  Forced into it, Craig W. Lowell took to soldiering as if he had been born to be a warrior. He came home from Greece with the second highest decoration for valor the Greek throne bestowed, the highest being reserved for Greek nationals. As

  Bellmon had heard from Red Hanrahan, Lowell had assumed command of a Greek Mountain Division company after the officers had been killed, and despite several serious wounds, repulsed a communist attack, personally killing more than a dozen of the enemy himself.

  After that, Lowell got out of the army, and settled into his new home in Washington Mews with his wife Ilse, a girl he had met in Germany. But then was recalled for Korea. In Korea, he had commanded Task Force Lowell, which spearheaded the breakout from Pusan, earning himself a Distinguished Service

  Cross and a major's golden leaf. But at the moment of his greatest glory, he learned of the death of his wife in Germany.

  Choosing to stay in the army, Lowell had a distinguished military career ahead of him. But the following year, he threw it away, first by cavorting with a visiting movie star in a way unbefitting an officer and a gentleman, and then by defending

  Philip Sheridan Parker IV, who was court-martialed for having found it necessary to shoot an officer who had lost control on the battlefield.

  Bellmon genuinely believed that both Phil Parker and Craig

  Lowell should have resigned from the service. They had not.

  They had volunteered for army aviation, which Bellmon (and most other members of the establishment) regarded as a dumping ground for misfits and the'er-do-wells.

  "I heard about that," MacMillan said. "Where'd they send them?"

  "Lowell went to Germany, Parker to Alaska. We seem to have gotten away from Hanoi."

  "Yeah. OK. Well, this kid sergeant is a real sharp operator.

  He had just come back from leave in Hong Kong. Where he's bought civilian clothes. He's wearing a plaid suit with a suede vest, and he's bought clothes for Wesley too. Pin-striped, double-breasted suit. Looks like a nigger undertaker. So what we have here is Black's colored orderly and this kid who works for him looking like an advertisement in Esquire, and here's all the brass looking like a bunch of bums. So they play the

  Marseillaise and the Star Spangled Banner, and Black, in a tweed suit, troops the colors. And then they load everybody into limousinesŽa Rolls-Royce for Black, and old Packards and old Cadillacs from before War II for everybody elseŽand sirens screaming, they take us into town in a convoy.

  "If Ho Chi Minh didn't know the Americans were coming, the frogs sure arranged for him to find out. Black gets taken to a frog VIP villa, him and Carson Newburgh, and the other generals are spread around among the other frog generals. The rest of us are taken to the Cercle Sportif, which is sort of a golf club, with a place where the frogs jump horses over fences.

  What do you call it?"

  "Steeplechase?"

  "I don't think so. But something like that. Anyway, it's pretty first class. So there's going to be cocktails at five o'clock and then dinner. And then the frogs find out that Wesley and the kid who works for Black, and the other technicians, the cryptographer, the map guys, are enlisted men. And the shit hits the fan. Christ, there are fifteen frogs running around flapping their arms and chattering like whores in a cathouse raid. Enlisted men in the Cercle Sportif! Napoleon will spin in his grave!"

  "I thought you said they were in civvies?" Bellmon asked.

  "They were. And they were all high-class troops, too. They weren't about to piss in the potted palms. But anyway, even

  Black gets involved in this. And he was pissed, too, let me tell you. They finally move them into a hotel in town, which means that they have to lay on transportation for them, to get everybody back and forth..

  "Tell me about the meeting," Bellmon said.

  "I didn't get to go to the meeting," MacMillan said. "First thing in the morning, Felter takes my ass out to the airport.

  We're going to fly to Dien Bien Phu. We did. We just didn't land."

  "No landing strip?"

  "Oh, yeah. Under 105 and mortar fire. The only time they land is to evacuate people. The rest of the supplies go in by being kicked out the door. They don't even put the landing gear down. You know about Air America?"

  "Something."

  "They've got a bunch of ex-air force guys, and some Flying

  Boxcars, and they supply the place. Parachutist replacements jump in. It's safer."

  "You got hit," Bellmon said.

  "They got.50s on the hilltops. And some 20 mm stuff, too.

  I think they got us with.50s. It didn't blow up when it hit us,

  just set the god damned engine on fire."

  "So you went out the door?"

  "There was a French Foreign Legion guy, a frog, which is unusual, in the door. I pushed him out, and then this Greer kid, and then I went out."

  "Where was Felter?"

  "You know Felter," MacMillan said. "He knows how to

  take care of Number One. He was out the door like a shot."

  "But nobody else got out?"

  "If we hadn't been standing in the door, we wouldn't have

  gotten out," MacMillan said. "It was hairy."

  "Then what?"

  "So we land in the trees. Smashed my god damned watch.

  So I started sneaking around in the bushes, and I see that the

  Viet Minh, the communists, have caught the frog, and, honest to God, Bob, they're about to cut off his dick and feed it to him. So I shot one of them..

  "With what? You were specifically ordered to go unarmed."

  "I shot them with that.32 Colt you gave me in the stalag,"

  MacMillan said. "A god damned good thing I had it, too. And then I ducked behind a tree, to kiss my ass good-bye, because the slopes I don't blow away had Chink submachine guns. And then, all of a sudden, Boom! Boom!"

  "What was that?"

  "That's this Greer kid. He's got a sawed-off Winchester

  Model 12, loaded with single ought buckshot. He blew one slope's head half off, and a hole right through the other one.

  No shit, right through him. You could put your fist in the hole."

  "Where was Felter?"

  "After it's all over, the little bastard walks up, calm as shit, out of the jungle. He told me not to take a gun, but he had that god damned.45 he always carries."

  "And then you walked into Dien Bien Phu?"

  "Walked is not the word. It took us four days. We crawled.

  We ran. We climbed trees. But we did very little walking. The legionnaire, who had been there before, made us hide all day, and move at night. Very hairy. The woods were full of gooks looking for us. We.hid in trees. Got eaten alive by bugs. And then, and this was the hairy part, we had to get into Dien Bien

  Phu. They got a major base and a couple of outposts, separated, and as far as they're concerned, anybody out there in the woods is a bad guy. If it moves, shoot it."

  "But you made it."

  "Yeah."

  "The French didn't see anybody get out of the C-47," Bellmon said. "That's when they sent the casualty cables."

  "Anyway, we got there. You wouldn't believe that place,

  Bob. It's like what France in War I must have been. Everything underground. The gooks lay in harassing and intermittent all the time, and then, every once in a while, they shoot boom boom boom, twenty-four hours a day. So the officers stay half drunk, and the troops stay mostly drunk."

  "Can they hold it?"

  "No way," MacMillan said. "After we kept the gooks from cutting off his dick, the legionnaire told us what
ever we wanted to know. I don't know how the hell they're doing it, but the communists are moving 105 howitzers... ours, incidentally, ones the First Cay lost in Korea... over those god damned mountains by hand. And ammunition for them. More and more all the time. There's no way the frogs can hold Dien Bien Phu.

  The legionnaire told me that there's a couple of more cannon every day. Sooner or later, that's it."

  "You didn't go to the meetings in Hanoi at all?"

  "No, but Sandy got a report from Black, and I was there when he told him."

  "Well?"

  "The frogs are crazy. They want the First Cay, all right, and they want the 187th RCT, right now, but they want it under

  French command. They want to run the show."

  "How did you get out of Dien Bien Phu?" Colonel Bellmon asked, half idle curiosity, half because he wanted to consider the ramifications of MacMillan's last remark.

  "On an ambulance plane," MacMillan said. "Once you go into Dien Bien Phu, you stay there. Which is why they're not putting any more women in there. The only way to get out is on an ambulance plane. The gooks use the Red Crosses as aiming points."

  "You say Colonel Black told Felter the French wanted command of American troops?"

  "That's what he said," MacMillan replied. "That's when he started talking French. He told them that there was absolutely no way the American people would stand still for putting American troops under French command, even if, which he doubted they would, they would stand still for Americans being sent there at all."

  "And their response?"

  "They would rather have their dicks cut off with dignity than admit that they had to have the Americans bail their ass out again."

  "So what's going to happen, Mac?" Bellmon asked.

  "Dien Bien Phu is going to fall," MacMillan said. "If we sent in a couple of divisions, maybe, just maybe, we could have it. Otherwise, it goes."

  "What do you mean, it'?"

  "All of it, the whole god damned colony."

  Bellmon didn't say anything for a long time.

  "You want to play golf, Mac?" he said, finally.

  "One more thing," MacMillan said.

  "What?"

  "Thanks for not running right over to Roxie when the cable came," MacMillan said.

  "I figured you'd turn up," Bellmon said. "God takes care of fools and drunks and you qualify on both counts."

  They locked eyes for a moment.

  "So Lowell got through flight school?" MacMillan said, closing the subject.

  "Not without difficulty, I understand, between us," Bellmon said. "He is not a natural-born aviator."

  "The Duke generally hires people to do dirty jobs like that,"

  MacMillan said. "They sent him to Seventh Army, huh?"

  "Yeah, for a year. Basic utilization tour. Major Lowell will spend the next year being told what to do by lieutenants and captains."

  "At least they'll be older than he is," MacMillan said, and then he walked out of the gazebo and thumbed a tee into the ground.

  Iv

  (One)

  Broadlawns

  Glen Cove, Long island, N.Y.

  12 April 1954

  Only a few of the house's chimneys, and only if you knew where to look for them, could be seen from any point along the fence which enclosed Broadlawns. The fence, which enclosed

  640 acres, more or less (a square mile, as nearly as they bothered to survey in 1768), marched around the property from the low waterline of Long Island Sound, up and down the rocks and boulders and the flat places and the hollows, and was broken only once, at the gate.

  The fence was made of brick pillars, eight feel tall, between which were suspended two iron strips. Every eight inches along the iron strips was a steel pole, pointed at the upper end. The fence and the gate and the gatehouse had been erected as hastily as possible in the early days of the Civil War when one of

  Broadlawns's mistresses had been concerned that the draft riots in New York City, fifteen miles away, might spread to the country. She was in the family way at the time and had to be indulged.

  There was one gate post, to which a bronze sign reading

  BROADLAWN5 was affixed. The other side of the gate was tied to the gatehouse, which was built of granite blocks, and made large enough to house ten or a dozen men and feed them, in case the draft riots did get out of hand, and it was necessary to protect the place in the country, as the family thought of it, with private policemen.

  A policeman lived in the gatehouse now. He had been brought to the gatehouse as a baby, when his father had been in charge of the gate. He had grown up and gone to high school, and to

  Fordham University for two years; and then he had become a

  New York state trooper, and had risen to sergeant in twenty eight years of service. He had retired to the gatehouse, and now his son was a state trooper lieutenant.

  The retired state trooper sergeant had taken over the responsibilities of groundskeeper when the groundskeeper had died. He supervised the men who tended the grounds and the mechanic who kept the lawn mowers and other equipment running, and was responsible for just about everything on the place outside the house. Inside the house was the responsibility of the butler.

  The retired state trooper and his son had been very helpful to the present owner of the house when he had been a young man with access to automobiles easily capable of exceeding the speed limits of the state of New York. There was only one arrest on the records, that for a 105-mile-per-hour chase by seven police cars, the arrest coming only when the car had blown a tire and rolled over. There was a limit to the sergeant's influence with his peers.

  The house was visible from Long Island Sound, but it was so far back from the water, across broad lawns, that it appeared from the water to be smaller than it was. Even up close, standing in the drive, it wasn't very imposing. It was only when one was inside that the size and complexity of the house became apparent. It had begun as a farmhouse; and additions had been made to it, the most recent in 1919. There were now seven bedrooms, a library, a morning room, a drawing room, a living room, a bar, a small dining room, a large dining room, and a breakfast room.

  Many people believed that Broadlawns was a private mental hospital, and others thought it belonged to the Roman Catholic

  Archdiocese of New York and was used as a retreat for clergy who had problems with alcohol or were otherwise mentally disturbed.

  Developers, over the years, studying plats of the land, had often thought it would be a very desirable piece of property to turn into really classy, half-acre, maybe even three-quarters of an acre, plots. They had been informed the property was not for sale. The persistent ones, who believed that everything had its price, were advised by their bankers not to make nuisances of themselves. The people who had owned Broadlawns since

  1768 did not wish to be disturbed, and since they were deeply involved in the real estate business around New York, they were not the sort of people small-potatoes developers could afford to antagonize.

  Most of the property around Wall Street which was not owned by Trinity Episcopal Church was owned by the people who owned Broadlawns. And they had other property as well.

  Broadlawns's butler was a West Indian, a tall, light-brown man with sharp facial features and graying hair. He wore a gray cotton jacket over gray striped trousers. When he walked into the bar to announce a call for Major Craig W. Lowell, his pronunciation was Oxford perfect, and somehow a bit funny.

  "I beg your pardon, Major. The firm is on the line. They wish to transfer a call. Is the major at home?"

  Major Craig W. Lowell, who was a little drunk, looked at him in annoyance.

  "Did they say who?" he asked.

  "No, sir," the butler said.

  "Shit," Major Lowell said. He was a very large man, who wore his blond hair in a short, barely partable crew cut. He was blue-eyed, although his eyes turned icy sometimes when he was annoyed, as they did now and made him look older than his twenty-six years.
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  He unfolded himself from the leather armchair in which he had been slumped, his feet on a matching footstool, a cognac snifter cradled in his hands, and walked to the telephone on the bar. The butler beat him to it, pushed a button on the base of the tefephone, and then picked up the handset and held it out to him.

  "Thank you," Lowell said, and then to the telphone: "This is Major Lowell."