The Majors

by W. E. B Griffin

  The plan was to blow the shells when the bus was directly over them. The ANLA sous-chef who pressed the plunger had been well trained when he had been in the French Army, but he was a little nervous, and he pressed the plunger a half-second early.

  The charge exploded under the bus’s engine. The force was sufficient to send what was left of the engine sailing fifty feet into the air, and to neatly sever the bus’s frame immediately behind the engine compartment. The driver and Mr. and Mrs. Rudolf Czernik, of Hamtramck, Michigan, who were riding in the forwardmost passenger seats, died instantly.

  The back of the bus pushed what was left of the severed front of the bus approximately ten meters farther down the road before it dug into the macadam surface and stopped.

  Six more tourists, including one of the interior decorators from New Hope, Pennsylvania, died in the initial explosion. Four others, riding near the front of the bus, suffered injuries that were to be fatal. Many others were injured, some seriously, some slightly.

  But the ANLA plan to kill all on board was a failure: those to the rear of the bus were either unharmed, slightly injured, or simply badly shaken up.

  Within moments of the explosion, legionnaires from a jeep which had been following the bus managed to get the rear door of the bus open. They began to unload first the unharmed passengers and then the injured passengers. The dead were left where they were.

  The surviving passengers were herded into a ditch by the side of the road and told by a legionnaire with a heavy German accent to stay down and not move.

  There was weapons fire now, the sharp crack of .30 caliber rifles and light machine guns, the heavier, booming crack of .50 caliber machine guns, the crumping boom of mortars. The noise was deafening. One of the members of Local 133, ignoring his screaming wife, crawled out of the ditch and reclaimed an M1 Garand and two bandoliers of ammunition from a legionnaire who lay in the road with half of his head blown off. He crawled back into the ditch, opened the action halfway to see if the rifle was loaded, and then crawled to the lip of the ditch.

  He couldn’t see anything, but he emptied the clip into the granite mountain above them, and then he loaded a fresh clip into the Garand. He turned to his wife: “Francine, for the love of God, shut the fuck up!”

  The firing lasted about five minutes. The smell of gunpowder was in the air.

  Then there was silence.

  There came the sound of helicopters. The lithe, blond woman recognized that sound. Help was on the way. Help had come. She put her hand on her ankle. The pain made her want to scream. She had thought she had sprained it. She now realized, dully, that it was broken. It was already swelling and turning blue.

  The sound of the helicopters came closer and closer, and then two flashed overhead. Over the sound of their engines and the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata of their rotors she could hear the sharp cracking roar of machine guns. She waited for the sound of helicopters landing. She had seen helicopter ambulances on television. If they had helicopters with machine guns, they were certain to have helicopter ambulances.

  But there were no helicopter ambulances, and in about ten minutes the sound of the helicopters with the machine guns died out. The helicopters were now flying high, back and forth along the road.

  Legionnaires had now formed a defensive line around the surviving tourists in the ditch. A legionnaire with a medical kit came over to her and looked a moment at the ankle and took a hypodermic needle from his bag. He smiled at her.

  “I don’t want that,” she said. She hurt, she hurt as badly as she had ever hurt in her life, but she wanted to be conscious. She didn’t want to be unconscious, not knowing what was going on, here in the middle of nowhere, where she didn’t really know what had happened, only that she had almost been killed.

  “No, non,” she said, then, “nein,” remembering that some of the legionnaires seemed to be German.

  He pinned her hand painfully to the ground with his knee, grabbed her arm roughly with one hand, and injected her through her blouse sleeve with the other.

  “Damn,” she said, and then it was as if the lights and the sounds and everything else went off.

  She became aware, first, of an old-fashioned ceiling fan turning and creaking above her. She focused her eyes on it. Then she smelled the smell of a hospital. It was disinfectant, what she thought of as chloroform, even though she knew that wasn’t what it was.

  Her mouth was absolutely dry. When she tried to lick her lips, her tongue was dry. She pushed herself up on her elbows. She had the worst headache she had ever had. Even her eyeballs hurt, as if something was pushing them from inside her skull.

  There was a pitcher of something, probably water, and a plastic glass on a small table beside her. She rolled on her side to reach for it. Then she became aware of her leg. There was no pain, but it felt very heavy. She threw the sheet off her and looked.

  She was in a rough white hospital gown. No buttons. It tied in half a dozen places. Whoever had tied her into it hadn’t done a very good job. Her body was exposed from the waist down. She pulled the gown closed over her midsection and upper legs.

  She wondered where her clothing was; there was no closet in the room. Her foot and ankle were in a dirty white plaster of Paris cast. She moved it from side to side. There was a dull pain, nothing that really bothered her.

  She wondered where she was, and looked around for a button to call for a nurse, or a doctor, or somebody. She found it, but someone had tied it in a loop, for some reason just out of her reach.

  She pushed herself upward on the bed and decided that she would sort of crawl up the headboard and reach the damned cord.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  She slid quickly back into the bed, pulling the sheet over her, and tried to pull the hospital gown, which had ridden up, back down again. The sheets were thin, translucent, and she didn’t want whoever it was at the door to see her hair down there.

  There was a second knock.

  “Come in,” she called, and then she remembered something from her high school French. “Entrez,” she added.

  He was an officer in a French Foreign Legion uniform, a parachutist’s camouflage uniform. He was as deeply tanned as she had ever seen a man tanned. His muscular arms, exposed to the biceps by the neatly rolled up sleeves, were almost chocolate brown. His hair was bleached nearly white. His eyes were hidden behind gold-framed aviator’s glasses. He was, she realized, the most handsome, sexiest, most masculine man she had ever seen.

  He sort of backed into the room, as if finishing a conversation with someone in the corridor.

  “Good afternoon,” he began, artificially cordial, reassuring. “I’m Lieutenant Edward C. Greer, of the United…” He stopped in midsentence. “Holy shit!” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. Just waited for him to go on.

  “United States Army,” he picked up. “I’m temporarily stationed with the French Foreign Legion in Colomb Béchar. You’re in a French Foreign Legion hospital. The doctors assure me that you are in no danger. Arrangements are being made to fly all the Americans from the tour out of here. It will take a few more hours to make the arrangements. In the meantime, if you will give me a name and address of someone you would like notified, the American consul general in Algiers will telephone them and assure them that you’re all right.”

  She nodded.

  “Except, of course,” Lieutenant Greer said, “I don’t need your address.”

  “I thought maybe you’d lost it,” Melody said.

  “If we can get you into a wheelchair,” he said, “I can get you through on the radio. That would be better for your parents, if they heard from you, yourself, rather than one of those State Department assholes.”

  “I’m fine, Ed,” Melody said. “How are you?”

  “What the fuck are you doing here, anyway? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’m not here,” Melody said. “Today I’m in either Strasbourg or Cologne, I forget which, looking at
a cathedral.”

  “You almost got your ass blown off, you know that?” he said, angrily.

  “You look pretty good yourself,” Melody said. “That’s a really nice tan.”

  “You’re not telling me you came here just to see me?” he challenged.

  “I’m queer for desert and rocks,” Melody said.

  “Hey, that was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Six months. I thought maybe six months would change things.”

  “There have been bandits in this area since before the time of Christ,” he said. “While the French make every effort they can to police the area, obviously they aren’t always successful.”

  “Those weren’t bandits,” Melody said. “Whoever it was, was trying to kill us.”

  “And the French Foreign Legion isn’t exactly a police force, either.”

  “What was that, a speech someone told you to give?”

  “His Esteemed Excellency, the Deputy Consul for Public Affairs himself,” Greer said. “I told him he’d better come give it himself, but he said he was going to be needed in Algiers to handle the public relations end of this ‘incident.’”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Learning,” he said.

  “Learning what?”

  “That escorting a civilian bus with a platoon of troops doesn’t always guarantee the safety of the bus, for one thing,” he said.

  “Don’t you care that I love you?” Melody asked.

  “If that fucking charge had gone off a second later,” Greer said, “we’d be sending what was left of you home in a rubber bag.”

  “Were you out there?” Melody asked.

  “I was in one of the gunships,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you land and help us?” Melody demanded.

  “That was their game plan,” he said. “They set that charge conveniently close to an area big enough to take a couple of H-21s.”

  “That’s the one with a rotor at each end?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the Piasecki. Flying Banana. We gave the French fifty, sixty of them. What we were supposed to do was lose our cool when we heard about the bus, and then rush in with H-21s and medical people. When we did that, they would knock out the H-21s.”

  “But we were civilians,” Melody said.

  “You were either French or American, which is nearly as good. You blow away one Frog or two Americans and you get a guaranteed ticket to heaven.”

  “Would that have bothered you?” she asked.

  “Would what have bothered me?”

  “If the bomb had blown me up?”

  “What they’re doing now,” he said, “is sending patrols through the mountains over the airfield. As soon as they’ve been cleared, the air force is sending in a couple of transports from Morocco. They’ll fly you to Algiers.”

  Melody started pulling open the bows fastening her gown.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Greer asked.

  “Looking,” she said.

  “You’re all right. You must have slammed your ankle into a seat or something. You weren’t hit.”

  “I may not have been hit,” Melody said. “But I’m not all right.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, and she heard the concern in his voice. Her nipples were standing up. She was glad for that. She knew he liked it when her nipples were erect.

  “You tell me,” she said. “You’re the one who runs away from me.”

  “Hey, I thought that was all settled. Different folks. You’re your kind of people, and I’m my kind of people. You want to close your goddamned robe? Before somebody comes in here, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Have you had a lot of girls since you came here?” Melody asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Lots of girls.”

  “You used to tell me I had the prettiest teats in the world,” she said. “You find anybody with prettier teats, Ed?”

  “Jesus Christ! You’re really a fruitcake, you know that?”

  “I went to bed with six different guys,” she said.

  “Shut up!”

  “I fucked six different guys, some of them two and three times, and it was never like it was with you,” she said.

  “Goddamn you, will you shut up!”

  “So I figured it was worth the trip over here,” she said. “It took a little doing to get the money from my father. After what I got into with you, he decided I needed a keeper. I had a hard time ditching her. The cops in Coblenz are probably dragging the river for my body.”

  She looked up at him and forced a smile on her face, and then she saw his cold eyes and rigid jawline and that was too much. The whole trip, even nearly blown up, had been for nothing.

  She let out a little howl, and threw herself on her side. “Get the hell out of here!” she said. “Leave me alone!”

  She heard footsteps and figured that it was him, leaving the room. But then the bed sagged, and she knew he was sitting on it. She held her breath for a moment, and then rolled over to him, her arms out, reaching for him.

  “Oh, baby,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I’ve missed you.”

  “That’s why you sent me all the letters, right? Not even a lousy postcard!”

  “I just didn’t want you to get into something you shouldn’t,” he said.

  She moved her face to his, found his mouth. She put her tongue in his mouth, felt him shiver, as he always did. Then she thrashed around in his arms.

  “Let go of me!” she said. He let go of her, surprised.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” she asked, as she shrugged out of the hospital gown.

  “Jesus, Melody, what about your ankle?”

  “Fuck my ankle,” she said. “Take your damned clothes off!”

  (Four)

  Extract from the Southern Star

  Volume 87, No. 42

  Ozark, Alabama

  30 September 1957

  OZARK, Sept 30—Mayor and Mrs. Howard Percy Dutton announce the wedding of their daughter Melody Louise, to First Lieutenant Edward C. Greer, United States Army, in Algiers, Algeria, September 28.

  The previously scheduled nuptials, delayed because of Lieutenant Greer’s reassignment from Camp Rucker, were conducted in the English Church in Algiers (Episcopal) by the Rev. Ronald I. Spiers, chaplain to the British Consulate General in Algiers.

  Lieutenant Greer is an assistant military attaché at the United States Consulate General, Algiers, where the couple will reside.

  XIII

  (One)

  Washington, D.C.

  1 September 1957

  At the conclusion of his first day on the job as Deputy Chief, Plans and Requirements Section (Fiscal), Aviation Maintenance Section, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics (DCSLOG), Major Craig W. Lowell caught a cab at the Pentagon and had himself driven to the Park-Sheraton Hotel.

  He had arrived the night before from Frankfurt, and there were a number of things he had to do, starting with unpacking, thinking about getting a place to live, and getting an automobile.

  But the first thing he did when he got to the Park-Sheraton was walk in the bar and order a very dry martini. He had reached the conclusion within an hour of reporting for duty that he was not going to like his new assignment at all. He was going to be a glorified clerk, despite his awesome title, and he was surrounded with horse’s asses from his immediate superior, a Lieutenant Colonel Dillard, upward.

  He quickly downed the first martini and was halfway through the second when the inevitable thought occurred to him: if he was going to have to spend his time moving paper around on a desk, he had might as well do that at Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes, where he at least owned half the store.

  He realized then that both the thought—and martinis—were dangerous at the moment. He set the martini down, scribbled his name on the bar check, and walked out of the bar and to the desk, where h
e asked for his key.

  The desk clerk handed him a telephone message along with the key: “Please call Col. Newburgh.” There was a number.

  He didn’t know a Colonel Newburgh, and he wondered how Colonel Newburgh, whoever the hell he was, had found him at the Park-Sheraton. The temptation was to crumple the message up and forget about it, but he knew he could not afford to offend any of his new superiors. He went to his room (there had been no suites available, something else that annoyed him) and took off his tunic, pulled down his tie, and dialed the number.

  “Burning Tree,” an operator announced, and for a moment, Lowell thought that he had dialed the wrong number. Burning Tree liked to refer to itself as the President’s golf course. There were few colonels among its members.

  “Colonel Newburgh, please,” he said, however, just to make sure.

  “May I ask who’s calling?” the operator said.

  “Major Lowell,” he said.

  “Colonel Newburgh is expecting your call, sir,” the operator said. “He’s in the steam room. Will you hold, please?”

  In a moment, a deep, somewhat raspy voice said, “Newburgh, here.”

  “Major Lowell, sir,” Lowell said. “Returning your call.”

  “Glad I caught you, Lowell,” Newburgh said. “What I had in mind was a couple of drinks and dinner. I hope you haven’t made other plans.”

  “Sir, do I know you?”

  “We’ve met,” Newburgh said. “And we have a number of mutual friends.”

  “May I ask who, sir?”

  “Bob Bellmon, for one,” Newburgh said. “Paul Jiggs for another. He is, that is, Bob is going to eat with us.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Colonel,” Lowell said. “What time?”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to get a car. So if I sent mine for you, that’d give you half an hour to get ready…”

  “I’ll just jump in a cab,” Lowell said.

  “You know where it is?”