The only damn reason I’m even up here is because this shitbird’s spinning some fantastic story about being hired by a general’s wife to rough up some colonel’s wife. That story caught the eye of General Molloy, the Sixth Army IG, who thinks this Willis character has got something to do with a case that’s got his balls in an uproar. The general considers the timing of this guy’s AWOL as concurrent, suspicious, and potentially implicating in the assault on that colonel’s wife.
My guess is this clown Willis thinks he can leverage that bullshit story into the Army smoothing over this armed robbery charge the Seattle PD has on him…and maybe putting a big dent in any time in the stockade he’s going to do for being AWOL.
In other words, he’s just another scumbag who thinks he’s got the goods to get himself off the hook.
Orr displayed his credentials at the jail’s front desk. Several jailers—a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a man with no stripes at all—studied the documents and then gave him a thorough once-over.
“How come you’re not in uniform?” the lieutenant asked.
“CID doesn’t wear uniforms when working cases off post. It’s SOP.”
“How do I know you’re from the Army? You could be anybody with phony credentials, Mr. Orr.”
“It’s Master Sergeant Orr…and I’m not anybody. I’m the man on that ID. Now, are you going to let me do my job? Or do I have to get a federal court order? Because I can lay one on you inside of an hour.”
“It’s the Friday before Christmas, Sergeant Orr. I don’t think anybody’s going to be in a hurry to give you a court order.”
With cold confidence, Orr replied, “You want to test that presumption?”
The lieutenant took the credentials to another desk and made a hushed phone call. Just watching the body language, Orr could tell the man was being scolded by the person on the other end of the line. He hung up the receiver with a repentant, “Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Take him inside,” the lieutenant told the sergeant.
As they walked down the hallway to the interview room, the sergeant said to Orr, “Sorry for that, buddy…but we don’t get you Army dicks around here too often.”
Orr just nodded. He’d assume the use of dicks referred to his being a detective and nothing else.
Willis was already seated at the table when the CID man entered the room. “You can take the cuffs off him,” he told the jailer. “We’re just going to have a friendly little chat.”
A look of disappointment spread across the prisoner’s face as Orr introduced himself. “I thought they’d send a JAG lawyer for something as juicy as what I’ve got,” Willis said.
“Whether or not you see a JAG lawyer anytime soon depends on whether I think your story’s full of shit or not, son.”
“What I’m gonna tell you is one hundred percent on the level, Sarge. But maybe we can talk about getting me out of this shithole before Christmas first?”
“Not likely you’ll be going anywhere quite that fast, sport, even if you’ve got a story that solves every mystery in the universe.”
“Maybe not every mystery, but I’ve got enough to get a crooked general and his wife in Dutch.”
Willis launched into a tale about the night he and another soldier—a buck sergeant named Riddle—were sent to the home of a Colonel Miles, who was in Korea, with instructions to deliver a message to his wife.
Orr knew who Riddle was. The man was languishing in the Monterey County Jail down in California, awaiting trial on a variety of civil charges stemming from the attempted home invasion at the Miles house. To date, he’d said nothing about the motivation behind the crime. At every court appearance, however, he’d whined about how Jillian Miles should be the one in jail, “Because it was her that shot me, not the other way around.”
“You said you were sent,” Orr said to Willis. “Who sent you?”
“The post commander’s wife, Mrs. Whitelaw.”
“Seems kind of unlikely a yardbird like you would make the acquaintance of a general’s wife.”
Willis then related how Mrs. Whitelaw had been quietly searching for a few handymen to do some miscellaneous tasks, men who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Only one company commander on post suspected she was talking about something other than household chores. Eager to curry the general’s favor and not caring what he had to do to gain it, he figured Riddle and Willis, two of his men with checkered records and a loose grasp on propriety, were just the handymen she was looking for.
Orr asked, “Did you ever actually meet Mrs. Whitelaw?”
“Just once. Me and Riddle were invited to her house, like for a job interview. Apparently, she’d seen a whole bunch of goody two shoes deadbeats before us, and she rejected them all.”
“The interview…is that when she told you to go rough up Mrs. Miles?”
“No, she didn’t tell us nothing specific at the time. She just slipped me a key to a safety deposit box at a Wells Fargo bank in Monterey. Just me, not Riddle. He didn’t get one. Said we’d be told when to check the box for instructions.”
“Who told you when to look in the box?”
“No idea. One morning, a note got slipped under the door of my barracks room.”
“When did you go to the bank?”
“That very morning. Thought I’d get gigged for going missing for a couple hours, but when I got back, nobody said shit to me.”
“What was in the box, Willis?”
“A map to this Colonel Miles’ place—it’s some spread, let me tell you—with written instructions what we were supposed to do and when. There was also a set of keys for the vehicle we were to use for the job, since neither of us had POV.”
Orr looked up from his notebook and asked, “For the record, you mean privately owned vehicle, correct?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know why Mrs. Whitelaw would want to terrorize Mrs. Miles?”
“No. All I know is we were told to give her a message: Quit the real estate business. Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”
“Were you paid for this job in advance?”
“No. The money—five hundred bucks apiece—was supposed to be in that same safe deposit box within twenty-four hours of the job being done.”
“But the job never did get done, did it?”
Willis shook his head. Then he said, “That Miles dame…she could shoot like nobody’s business. I’m lucky to be alive. I read in the papers that she nailed Riddle, though. Is he dead?”
Orr remained poker-faced and didn’t answer.
“You ain’t gonna tell me, are you?”
Look at him, Orr told himself as he watched Willis squirm. He doesn’t even know if his partner is dead or alive. And he doesn’t know what a live Riddle might’ve told investigators, either, which is exactly nothing.
“I’ve got one more question, Willis. Can you prove any of this?”
“Yep.”
“How?”
“I’ve got that map, the keys to that car—I grabbed them when I started running after that crazy woman blew the shit out of it with some elephant gun—and the key to that safe deposit box.”
“Where’s the stuff now?”
“I left it at my sister’s in Portland when I was on the lam. She ain’t gonna get in any trouble, is she?”
“Not if she hands the stuff over without a fuss,” Orr said. “Let’s have her address.” He wrote down the reply and got up to leave.
Willis called after him, “Hey, Sarge…you are gonna get me outta here, aren’t you?”
“Have a Merry Christmas,” Orr replied.
*****
A thousand-foot-tall mountain sat on the boundary between 26th Regiment and 17th Regiment to its east. It was the perfect place for an OP that would provide both units with excellent fields of vision to the north. The only problem was getting to its peak and the unobstructed visibility it offered. Steep-faced at the top and without switchback trails, no vehicles had, so far, found a way
to climb it. A helicopter had tried to place an observation team on the peak, but treacherous winds had prevented a safe landing on the narrow summit.
“We already lost one whirlybird today,” the pilot had radioed as he aborted the attempt, referring to the crash that had taken General Ellis’ life. “I’m not looking to make it two.”
“I got an idea how we can do it, sir,” Sean told Jock. “Give me a three-quarter-ton radio truck with a winch on the front bumper and I’ll get her up that mountain. There’s just a couple of spots where she’d need a little help. That’s when we use the winch. There are plenty of trees up there we can use as anchor points.”
As Jock thought about it, Patchett said, “That’s all well and good, Bubba. But how’re you gonna get her down when you have to?”
“You ever heard the expression disassembly is the reverse of assembly, Top?”
“Of course I’ve heard it, but it’s the other way around, Bubba. Any swinging dick who ever got shown how to tear down a weapon knows it.”
“Well, the same applies here, Top. We come down the reverse of how we got up—using the winch to lower the truck.”
Jock had made his decision. “As far as I’m concerned, if we can get a team of observers up there right now with long-range radios, I don’t care if we leave the truck up there indefinitely.” Then he told Sean, “But don’t make a major project out of it. Especially one that might get somebody accidentally killed. If it doesn’t work out on the first try, forget it. We’ll wait for the wind to die down and let the helicopters do it.”
“I understand, sir. But one thing…let me pick the driver. I can put a guy behind the wheel with a set of balls big enough that he won’t shit his pants halfway up.”
“Approved,” Jock replied. “Do whatever you have to.”
*****
The driver Sean had in mind was a corporal in the tank battalion maintenance section named Jacob Barefoot, the only man in the regiment taller and burlier than he was. When told he’d been tapped for the job, Barefoot just shrugged and replied, “Sure, Sarge. Why not? But do I have to stay up there? I don’t know anything about calling for fire, and I can’t fix any tanks up on that mountain.”
“No, Jake…all you gotta do is drive a three-quarter-ton with a big radio to the peak. Then you come back down with me.”
To Barefoot, it sounded like an adventure, a brief but interesting change of pace. “Great. When do we leave?”
“How about in ten minutes?”
*****
Gathering the forward observation team, Sean briefed them on his plan to scale the mountain. “We’ll go up the south slope. It ain’t quite as steep…only the top hundred feet or so. That’s where we’ll use the winching gear on the radio truck to pull it to the peak.”
Five sets of wary eyes from the FO team stared at the mountain as he spoke.
“Another reason for going up the south face is there ain’t much snow on that side, not like the other slopes,” he continued, “and we won’t have no line-of-sight problems with the radios talking to Regiment, either. If for some reason we can’t get it all the way to the top, we’ll just anchor the truck with the winch line as high as she’ll go and use a landline relay from the peak. I see you guys already packed the wire reels and phones, so we’re all set on that score. But we only do that as a last resort. It’ll be much better if the truck’s right up there with you, especially if you gotta start fiddling with the radios.”
A Negro lieutenant from Baker Battery named Edgar Thackery, the lead FO and ranking man technically in charge of this operation, asked, “Are you sure we can get that radio truck to the peak, Sergeant? Have you ever done something like this before?”
Sean replied, “Let me tell you something, Lieutenant. I spent the closing days of the last war in the fucking Alps. You better believe we had to winch vehicles—and bigger ones than a stinking little three-quarter-ton—up all kinds of mountains. It ain’t no big thing. You just gotta know how.”
After a final check of their gear, they were ready to go. Sean led in a jeep with Lieutenant Thackery in the passenger’s seat. Behind them followed Jacob Barefoot at the wheel of the radio truck, with a four-stripe sergeant from 17th Regiment up front and three RTOs in the back with the radios. The climb up the south slope was exactly as Sean predicted; in four-wheel drive, the vehicles clambered up the steep slope along dangerously narrow ridgelines that led to that final, undriveable incline. Once they reached it, they parked the jeep and got down to the serious business of winching the truck the last hundred feet uphill.
“Let’s get this right the first time,” Sean said. “We’re gonna use that biggest tree waaaay up at the top for an anchor point.”
Lieutenant Thackery shook his head. “That won’t work, Sergeant. There can’t be enough cable in that winch to reach it.”
“Sure there is, Lieutenant. Just watch.”
It took almost fifteen minutes, but in that time, Sean played out the winch cable, fastened a pulley block to the tree with a woven strap used to lift heavy tank components, and still had just enough cable to reach back to the truck and be hooked to the shackle on her front bumper.
“There you go, Lieutenant,” he said. “All hooked up. Now let’s make the vehicle as light as possible—take all your baggage outta the back and lug it up the hill. Me and Jacob here will bring the truck up to you.”
As they unloaded the gear from the truck, the sergeant from 17th Regiment, a Carolinian named Combs, told Sean in hushed tones, “It ain’t bad enough we got ourselves a nigger leading this goat-rope, but we brung that big dumb Indian along, too. This Army’s going to hell in a handbasket, Sarge.”
“I ain’t got time to read you the riot act right now, Combs, but just in case you’re confused, a guy with a shiny bar on his collar gets to be top dog, period. And as far as that big dumb Indian, didn’t they ever tell you peckerwoods that Indians ain’t dumb…and they ain’t afraid of heights, neither?”
The mention of heights made Combs turn to look down the mountain. Immediately, he had to grip the truck’s fender to steady himself; shivers of fear went through him far greater than any the cold might’ve been causing. From this dicey vantage point, he felt sure he was looking down into the yawning mouth of death.
Then Combs pivoted to look at Barefoot, who was casually urinating while precariously balanced on his feet against the howling wind on the icy, forty-degree slope.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Sean said. “That Indian’s got balls, and that’s why I want him behind the wheel, not some chickenshit who’ll get all panicky and fuck up the whole show. Now get your ass up that hill, Sergeant.”
The winching operation didn’t run into trouble until the truck was halfway up that final incline. Tight as a bowstring while scraping along the ground, the cable had picked up a tree branch and fed it into the pulley block, causing a jam before Sean could prevent it.
“HOLD IT, HOLD IT,” Sean called to Barefoot behind the wheel.
He tried to free the branch with his bayonet, but the cold blade just splintered the dead wood, leaving the fragment jamming the pulley firmly in place.
“I’M GONNA HAVE TO BACK OFF THE WINCH JUST A LITTLE AND GET SOME SLACK,” Sean said as he hurried back to the truck, hanging onto the taut cable to keep from falling. “GIMME YOUR STEEL POT, JAKE.”
With Barefoot’s helmet and his own, Sean chocked the truck, one helmet wedged behind each rear wheel. Then he said, “Now Jake, I need you to stand on those fucking brakes with your right foot like your life depended on it, because it kinda does. Pull the throttle lock out all the way when I tell you so she’ll rev up enough to power the wheels and the winch without your foot on the gas. Then you can ride the clutch with your left foot if she starts to go backward, because you only got two feet, right?”
“No problem, Sarge. I’ve got it.” Barefoot didn’t seem at all concerned that he and an untethered truck were about to confirm the laws of gravity while poised above a thousan
d-foot drop.
Sean said, “Okay, I’m gonna go to the front bumper, disengage the winch, and put some slack in the cable. Stand by to kick up the throttle.”
In one quick motion, Sean pushed the lever that disengaged the winch and then gave Jacob a rev it up hand signal, whirling a finger above his head.
The winch disengaged; the cable suddenly fell slack as if it had been severed.
The truck slid slowly backward just a few inches. It hit the chocks—the GI helmets—and began to force them down, each becoming less and less of an obstacle as they cracked their way through frozen turf. With the winch disengaged, the cable offered no resistance to the downhill slide. It remained slack, playing out a few inches at a time to accommodate the truck’s rearward motion.
Sean could hear nothing but the wail of the engine at high rev. He couldn’t hear Combs screaming as he tumbled head over heels down the steep slope, having lost his balance hurrying back to the truck. He bounced off Sean before they could grab hold of each other, spun off him like a top, and continued his plummet along the left side of the truck…
Until Jacob Barefoot stopped him by holding open the door with his left foot. Slamming into that door slowed Combs long enough for the strapping Indian to reach down and grab him by his web gear.
All four wheels of the truck were spinning rapidly, tractionless against the frozen ground, the rear ones bouncing against the helmets. With each bounce, those wheels came closer and closer to skimming right over those chocks.
Sean had worked his way back to Combs at the driver’s door. For a moment, he wondered just how many feet Jacob Barefoot actually had: One foot on the brake, one on the clutch, one out the door stopping this idiot from falling to his death…
The truck was now bouncing up and down against the chocks with a ferocity guaranteed to send them all hurtling off the mountain in a second or two.
Then it all stopped. The screaming of the engine calmed to a high idle; the wheels stopped spinning. Jacob had pushed in the throttle lock. The truck was no longer trying to bounce over the chocks. She was clinging to the mountainside on her own.
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