The Line

by Bob Mayer

  "Task Force Baum was sent out to find some hidden gold?"

  The general glanced at her, his eyes taking in her youth. "The world's a hard place . . . the last four years have seen to that. Dying on an expedition to . . . recover some lost gold is just one of thousands of . . . reasons people have died over the past years. No matter what the reason was . . . they were still fighting Germans. And they did a hell of a job of killing . . . Krauts all the way in to Hammelburg. Shit, after all the crap I've . . . been through, here I am dying of a damn . . . broken neck from a car accident. But this . . . this stuff now . . . this is going too far."

  "Why would this Line want gold?"

  "They need money . . . for their plans."

  The nurse was standing still, as if afraid any movement on her part might derail his train of thoughts. "Tell me about The Line."

  21 DECEMBER 1945, EVENING

  The nurse was coming out of the mess hall when she saw the crowd outside the west wing of the infirmary dissipating. She made her way through to the door and showed her ID to the MP on duty.

  Inside, three other nurses were gathered around the duty desk, speaking in hushed tones. She ignored them and looked down at the duty officer's log. When she got halfway down the page, a single line entry caused a bitter smile to come to her lips:

  general patton died at 1745, 21 december 1945, with sudden stopping of the heart.

  "Did you hear?'' the head nurse whispered to her.

  In reply the nurse held up the medical report.

  "No, I meant about the autopsy.'' The head nurse glanced around nervously. "They're not doing one."

  "So?" The nurse was distracted, her mind elsewhere.

  "So!" The head nurse leaned forward and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. "That closes the investigation. No autopsy, no investigation.''

  The nurse had been secluded during Patton's tenure at the hospital, doing nothing but work, sleep and eat. She had not bothered with the gossip that had flown about over the weeks.

  The head nurse continued, feeling important with her information. "I talked to a captain in Criminal Investigation. He told me that they were suspicious about the accident. That it might have been a deliberate attempt on the General's life. But now that there won't be an autopsy, there's no possibility of an investigation.''

  "Who signed off on the release for the body without an autopsy?" the nurse asked, interested in who would want to keep the accident from being investigated.

  "Some colonel from Washington. A Colonel Hooker."

  ***

  Major Benita Trace raised her head when the sharp buzz of the phone interrupted her, fingers paused above the keyboard as she prepared to continue her work. She stood, picking the portable up, and looked out at the ocean as she hit the on switch. "Hello?"

  A voice in a heavy accent was on the other end. "Hey, sweetheart. Would ya like go to da Bronx zoo and see da boids and the toitles?"

  A broad smile crossed Trace's face. "Boomer! Where the hell are you?"

  "Well, that's a good question. Can't tell you exactly, since I'm not flying this dang plane, but somewhere about 35,000 feet over the Pacific, heading in your direction."

  "You're coming here?"

  "Yeah, my boss thought I needed some time off, so he wrangled me TDY orders to 4th TASOSC at Fort Shafter."

  Trace frowned as she read undercurrents in Boomer's voice. "Is something wrong?"

  "No, nothing's wrong. Listen, I'm on one of these credit card phones they got in the plane and I have no idea what this is costing me. I just wanted to make sure you were still in Hawaii. We should get together."

  "Absolutely. When are you getting in? I can pick you up at the airport."

  "My flight lands at 1030 but there'll be someone from the unit at the airport to pick me up and take me over to Fort Shafter to get inbriefed. How about this evening?"

  "Great. When and where?"

  "Well, I can tell you the when, how about 1900? The where is up to you. It's your island, not mine."

  "All right, I'll make it as easy as possible. 1900 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. You can't miss it. It's at the west end of Waikiki. If you can't find it, just ask. Meet me in the bar just off the main lobby."

  "OK. 1900, Hilton Hawaiian Village. The bar off the lobby. Sounds good."

  Trace was acutely aware of her racing heart "Hey, Boomer?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm looking forward to seeing you."

  His voice lapsed back into the exaggerated accent. "Me too, sweetie. See ya tonight."

  The phone went dead and Trace slowly pressed the off button. She sat back down facing the computer screen, but her eyes were no longer taking in the words nor did she feel any inclination to write. Her brain swirled with mixed memories of the past.

  She'd first met Boomer Watson at West Point in September of 1978. The incoming class of 1982, of which Trace was a proud member, had just finished their ten-day summer bivouac at Lake Frederick and marched back to the main post of West Point. With every mile the new cadets trudged from the lush mountains of the training area to the gray stone of the academic and barracks area, their anxiety level increased. They were leaving the brutal, two-month old cocoon of Beast Barracks for the unknown terror of the academic year. "Three-to-one," less than sympathetic upper class cadre members had chanted at the new cadets, referring to the academic year ratio where there would be three upper class cadets to every plebe as opposed to the survivable one-to-four ratio of Beast.

  Trace was in First Company, and as such, was among the lead group to march past the Superintendent's house under the cold eyes of massed upperclassmen on either side of the road just returned from their own varied summer training. After passing in review in front of the Superintendent, the company commander halted his troops in front of Eisenhower Barracks. With his back to the Plain, he looked over his young charges and smiled. "The party's over! When I dismiss you, you are to pick up your duffle bags which are in Central Area and report to your academic year companies. You've all done well this summer. Keep up the good work in your academic year companies. Best of luck! First Company, dismissed!"

  "First to fight, sir!" the plebes dutifully chanted, the last time they would yell the company motto.

  Some party, Trace thought as she executed a right face and double-timed through the sally port to the left of Washington Hall into Central Area. Beast had been anything but fun. From her original squad of twelve new cadets, there were only eight left, the other four opting out of the excitement and returning to the civilian world. Trace herself had more than once seriously considered the lure of a civilian college where women—hell, human beings—were a bit more appreciated.

  She joined the horde of green-clad first-year cadets scrambling like ants through the large pile of duffle bags, searching for the one with her name on it. Finding it, she was briefly flustered as to how to handle both the duffle bag and the rucksack on her back. She got a classmate to balance the duffle bag on top of the rucksack, bowing her head forward and almost pushing her to the ground. She slowly made her way out of Central Area, staggering toward the academic year company to which she had been assigned.

  "What are you looking at, beanhead?" a voice exploded in her ear as she made her way up the ramp to New South Area.

  "No excuse, sir!" Trace automatically snapped as she screeched to a halt, eyes locked straight ahead, or to be more accurate, given the weight on her back, straight downward. With only four approved answers—"yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir; sir, may I make a statement"—her conversational options were somewhat limited. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make out the highly shined low quarters of an upperclassman edging up.

  "Your damn right, no excuse, beanhead," the voice growled. An acne-faced man with the yellow shield on his collar denoting a second year cadet—a "yearling" in Academy slang—looked her up and down. "You're a mess, miss. You call those boots shined?"

  "Ah, lighten up, Greg," a deep voice spoke from behind her left sh
oulder. "They just got back from Lake Frederick. How do you expect her boots to be shined?"

  Trace kept her eyes straight to the front, as the cadet who had stopped her flushed red in the face and looked past her. "Mind your own business, Boomer." He turned back to her. "What company are you going to, miss?"

  "I-1, sir."

  "You mean India-One, don't you?" the upperclassman corrected, using the proper military term.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Outstanding," he purred. "I'm in I-1, so we'll be seeing quite a bit of each other. You know why they call it I-1, don't you?"

  Trace considered the potential traps that question entailed, weighed it against the vague constraints of the honor code, and finally answered: "Yes, sir."

  "And what's that?"

  Trace felt the sweat pouring down her back, adding to the wetness already there from the long hike back. "Inferno-One, sir."

  "Damn right, miss"—he leaned forward and his hand pulled aside the strap of her rucksack and he read her nametag. "Miss Trace. Inferno-One. We're not like those party people over in 4th Regiment. The heat is on now and it's only going to get hotter. This is the 1st Regiment, and you'd better get your act together in a hurry. I will remember you. Next time I see you, those boots had better be spit shined."

  "Yes, sir."

  The shoes turned and headed away down the ramp. Trace took another step and her knees buckled, the duffle bag sliding off her back, slamming into the ground, while she caught herself from smashing her face into the concrete ramp at the last second.

  "Better leave that here, dump your ruck in your room, and come back for it," the deep voice suggested.

  She quickly scrambled to her feet and locked up at attention. "I can handle it, sir."

  The upperclassman named Boomer chuckled and wagged a finger at her: "Ah, now, now. Is that one of your four answers?"

  Trace flushed, her head spinning from the heat and mental and physical exhaustion. "No, sir."

  "I know they tried to brainwash all the common sense out of your head during Beast, but you're going to need to turn your brain back on now to survive. They can harass you all they want, but that isn't going to get you kicked out of here. Flunk a course or two, though, and you'll be out of here in a heartbeat. Got that?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Boomer moved in front of her, his dark eyes finally meeting hers. "One other thing, miss. The secret to survival as a plebe is to become invisible. And as a woman you aren't going to be able to do that. You might have in Beast, but in your academic company you're only going to have three or four other female classmates. You're going to be a shit-magnet. Understand?"

  "Yes, sir." A bead of sweat was agonizingly making its way down her nose toward the tip, but Trace stayed locked in a rigid position of attention.

  "You've already got someone's attention in your company and it'll only get worse. But the bottom line is, they can't do nothing to you. You may think they can, and it may sure seem like they are, but they really can't do anything to you unless you let it get to you. They can scream all they want, and waste your time up until 2000 every evening, but after that they have to let you study and that's what you have to concentrate on. In other words, decide real quick what's bullshit and what's real and don't let the bullshit get you down. Got that?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "There's a lot of people like Greg, but that doesn't mean you have to let them get to you, or that you have to become one. Right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "All right." He chuckled and his deep voice attempted to get serious. "Now get out of my sight, beanhead. Move. Move. Move!"

  Trace never forgot those words of advice in the following months. In retrospect she wondered if she would have made it if Boomer hadn't taken the time and effort to talk to her that day. At the time she had simply thought he was being nice. It was only after she'd been further indoctrinated into the Academy system did she realize that Boomer had been perilously close to being unprofessional by being nice to her. Nice was not a trait extolled in the Blue Book that ruled cadets' lives.

  Leaning back in her chair, Trace stretched out shoulder muscles sore from her time at the keyboard. She had short dark hair, framing a thin, tanned face out of which two dark eyes blazed behind steel-rim glasses. Her fatigue shirt hung limply over the back of the chair and her camouflage pants were unbloused from the highly shined jungle boots. Trace was slender, one of the few women who looked good in the male-designed Army-issue battle dress uniform, which was actually to her disadvantage among her peers and the Officers' Wives Club and had proved to be disastrous when it came to a particular high-ranking male officer.

  In 1992 the sudden opening of combat flight slots to female pilots had seemed to Trace as a particular stroke of luck. She'd just served in the Gulf War piloting a UH-60 Blackhawk air ambulance with the 82nd Airborne Division and had received a Bronze Star for valor when she'd flown a rescue mission for a team of Navy SEALs pinned down on the first day of the ground war.

  Her excellent record and her skills as a pilot had garnered her a slot as one of the first three women to go through Apache flight training. Her husband, John, had not been thrilled with the idea. He was a classmate and they had married in the excitement and fear of graduation. He wanted the two of them to settle down with concurrent tours at graduate school and then back to the Military Academy as instructors. But Trace had loved flying too much and insisted on the opportunity that presented itself.

  Trace had fallen in love with the powerful attack helicopter and graduated at the top of her class, despite subtle—and not-so-subtle—attempts on the part of both her male peers and instructors to sabotage her invasion of their aerial domain.

  After graduating, she'd been assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division's Apache Battalion in South Korea in late 1992, while her husband was attending Johns Hopkins back in the States for graduate schooling. As the only woman in the unit, she'd faced a wall of hostility penetrated only by many of the men's attempts to get into her flight suit. They hated her, but they wanted to screw her, which in retrospect, Trace found to be an apt commentary on the state of women in the military.

  Her new battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Warren, had been none too pleased to inbrief her. He didn't want her, but the Department of the Army had cut the orders and there wasn't anything he could do about it. His comments were succinct and to the point: make one mistake and she would be gone from his unit.

  Two weeks after getting in-country, she'd joined the rest of the pilots at the base's officer club early one Friday evening for a "Hail and Farewell." It was an Army tradition to greet incoming members of the unit and to bid goodbye to those departing back to the States. Trace sat through the speeches and plaques for the farewells and waited for the hails. The new officers, Trace among them, were lined up to "Do The Lance."

  The Lancers was the battalion's nickname, and the physical symbol of that nickname was an eight-foot bamboo lance. The long center of the haft had been hollowed out, the tip was now removed, and it was ceremoniously filled with beer. Each new officer was required to take the Lance and empty it in one continuous drink, never removing the end of the haft from their lips. Since it contained six beers, the first two officers, both second lieutenants, failed to the derision of the other officers of the battalion.

  When it was Trace's turn, the volume level in the room in the officer's club reached new levels as they waited for her to fail. Trace, however, had learned the art of chugging from her plebe classmates in I-One on their lonely Saturday nights in Eisenhower Hall where the only thing they could do was drink as much beer as quickly as possible. Since the line for the draft beer was always long, they had quickly gotten into the habit of buying several pitchers each and getting swiftly drunk before having to return to their Academy cells at the stroke of midnight.

  Trace took the lance from LTC Warren and proceeded to drink it dry to the consternation of the other pilots. When done, she turned it upside down and offered it as evidence to
the disbelievers in the crowd. She thought the whole thing childish, but she knew if she wanted to fit in at all, this was one way she would have to try.

  The rest of the evening proceeded with great quantities of beer being imbibed and ever taller tales of flying derring-do being told. Trace kept quiet and switched her drinking to coffee and soda. She knew better than to talk about her Bronze Star mission, or any of the other ones she'd flown in the Gulf. Coming from her it wouldn't command respect but animosity. She also knew better than to get further drunk around aviators, whose sexual reputation around the Army was built upon numerous O-Club excursions with women, married or not, in uniform or not, it didn't matter. Anything that was female and breathing was considered fair game. And here in this O-Club, Trace was the only female around other than the Korean waitresses.

  By eleven, over half the officers had left to crawl off to the Korean bars outside the gates and link up with local women who were willing, for hard currency, to give in to the men's lust.

  Trace decided it was time for her to get back to her BOQ room when she was stopped in the dark foyer of the club by LTC Warren.

  "Where'd you learn to drink like that?" he demanded, his face bright red and his eyes blinking, trying to focus.

  "Proper training, sir," Trace replied, trying to be diplomatic.

  "So can you take it all down like that?" Warren slurred.

  Trace had no doubt what he was referring to and tried to slip around him. She'd been in this situation before and knew that discretion was the better part of valor, especially with one's own battalion commander. She now accepted that it was going to be a very long year.

  Warren reached out and grabbed her shoulder, which shocked Trace. "So do you swallow?" Warren was pressed up against her in the corner formed by a telephone booth and the wall.

  "Sir, let go of me," Trace said, her stomach doing flip-flops.

  Warren let go of her shoulder, but instead of backing off, he reached out with both hands and placed one directly over her left breast and began squeezing and, with the other, tried to unzip her flight suit from the top.