The Line bo-2

by Bob Mayer

  Hooker had been promoted to brigadier general in 1944 and then went to London to work in the Military Assistance Group there after the war.

  Boomer wouldn’t be surprised if that organization didn’t have a lot to do with implementing the Marshall Plan in Europe.

  Then back to West Point as an instructor in the history department from 1949 to 1950. Then to a Joint Assignment with the relatively newly established Secretary of Defense’s office. Then back to West Point for a second time, this go around as head of the History Department for fifteen years.

  Hooker had retired in 1969, still at the rank of brigadier general, and had gone to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Boomer assumed that was before legislation had been enacted requiring a certain amount of time before retired military could work in a civilian capacity for the Department of Defense.

  “What’s USSECCON?” Boomer asked Trace, who was lacing up her running shoes.

  “I had to check. It’s a private company called United States Security Consortium headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia,” she said.

  “What does the United States Security Consortium do?”

  “I don’t know. I got the name of the firm by calling around in the D.C. area, but that was it.” Trace came over and pointed over his shoulder.

  “The interesting parts are the fifteen years he was head of the history department and the work he did for the Joint Chiefs. Hell, even what he did in the Ops division during the Second World War. This guy was in all the key places, but he always appeared to be a low-level player.

  “During his time as head of history at West Point, he was gone over eighty percent of the time, doing special missions at the bequest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was in Vietnam in’ sixty-one for almost eight months, going around the country, checking things out, and then going back to the Chiefs and reporting to them.”

  “Guess he didn’t check them out too well,” Boomer said, “or else we might not have gotten involved.”

  “Maybe he did check the situation out very accurately,” Trace replied.

  That startled Boomer. He considered the bio again. Head of one of the academic departments at West Point was a prestigious position. It held the rank of full colonel with automatic promotion to brigadier general upon retirement.

  “Hooker was promoted to brigadier general in’ forty-four,” Boomer noted.

  “Did he take a drop in grade to go back to the Academy?”

  “Yes,” Trace said.

  “For all the high-speed jobs he did, this guy was never promoted beyond one star. Very strange for a Rhodes Scholar who was second in his class and did the job he did during World War II. From looking at his career track I got the impression he deliberately kept a low profile image in his career.”

  Boomer put the register down and started putting on his PT uniform.

  “So, you still haven’t answered my question.

  I would assume from what you wrote in your manuscript that this guy was a player in The Line.”

  “I don’t think he would be just a player,” Trace said, grabbing the keys to her jeep. “I think after a certain time period he was the number one guy in The Line — if it existed.”

  Boomer pulled on his grey PT shorts.

  “Can you use a real person like that in a work of fiction? Won’t you get sued or something?”

  “I’m just using his name in the draft. I’ll change the name later on — make Hooker’s character fictional. It just helps me in writing to use real names. Besides, when did you start worrying about the legalities of the publishing world?”

  Boomer followed her to the door. The anxiety he felt the previous evening during the drive to her house was returning.

  Boomer was a man who survived by his instincts, but he was used to real situations that deserved fear. This was something different. He pulled her close and buried his face in the hollow of her throat.

  “It’s not legalities that concern me, it’s you. I just don’t want you to get hurt or rejected.”

  Trace flashed a dazzling smile and kissed him on the tip of his nose.

  “The people who can hurt me already have.

  That’s the only good thing about losing what’s most important to you — you can stop worrying about losing it.”

  Boomer walked her to the Jeep. His words were lost in the engine noise.

  “I haven’t lost it. Trace.”

  CHAPTER 5

  FORT SHAFTER, OAHU, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

  30 NOVEMBER

  6:45 A.M.LOCAL 1645 ZULU

  “Sergeant Major Skibicki,” Falk said, raising his voice so the man heard him, “take charge of the formation!”

  Boomer looked at the senior NCO who walked to the front of the gray-clad phalanx of soldiers. Skibicki was a short man with a barrel chest and gray hair. His face had the leathery look of a man who spent most of his waking hours in the elements. Boomer noticed that one side of Skibicki’s skull was slightly concave, and a nasty scar lay there under his thinning hair. The name sounded vaguely familiar to Boomer, and he tried to recall if he’d served with the sergeant major sometime in the past.

  Skibicki immediately began barking commands, moving people about until they had enough room between each soldier to do the exercises. Then they began: pushups, situps, crunches — a whole regimen of muscle-numbing work.

  Boomer had thought he was in shape, but the older man put them through exercises Boomer hadn’t done since he’d gone to scuba school several years ago. He noted Sergeant Vasquez at the front of the PT formation.

  She was quite an impressive figure in shorts and T-shirt as she pumped out pushups, the muscles in her arms rippling from the exertion.

  In twenty minutes, they were done. Skibicki reformed the unit and returned it to Colonel Falk. The XO gave instructions for the various ability group runs and dismissed the soldiers to finish the physical training on their own. He waved for Boomer to come over as the groups dispersed.

  “I’d like you to meet our sergeant major,” Falk said, indicating Skibicki.

  “This is Major Boomer Watson. Major, Sergeant Major Skibicki.”

  “Sir,” Skibicki extended a callused hand. Boomer met the hard grip and they stared at each other for a second before the sergeant major let go.

  “Skibicki’s the man you need if there’s anything you want,” Falk said.

  He pushed a button on his watch.

  “Well, I’ve got to get running.” With that, the Colonel took off, his skinny legs carrying him rapidly away.

  “Where are you in from, if you don’t mind me asking?” Skibicki said.

  “I’d prefer not to say,” Boomer replied.

  Skibicki nodded to himself, accepting the sentence as a fact rather than a rebuke. Boomer figured Skibicki could find out more about him with one phone call using the NCO old boy network than he himself could tell him.

  Skibicki cocked his head like an old dog trying to remember a scent.

  “Was your father in the service?” he asked.

  Boomer nodded. “Yes.”

  “Mike Watson? Special Forces?”

  “Yes.”

  Skibicki nodded.

  “I thought so. I served with him in Vietnam. He was a good man. He saved my life.”

  Boomer stiffened. He’d never met anyone who’d known his dad in Vietnam. He’d read the official notification of death and pored over the Medal of Honor citation numerous times, but the pieces of paper gave him little information.

  “Were you with him when he was killed?”

  Skibicki grimaced and tapped the left side of his head where Boomer had noticed the slight depression in the skull.

  “I got hit in the head during that mission. Damn near killed me. Now I got a steel plate. I was a young E-Five, full of piss and vinegar on my first tour with Special Forces.

  Your dad got me out of there still breathing.”

  Boomer leaned forward.

  “I’d like to talk with you about my
dad. I never really knew him or what happened.”

  Skibicki nodded.

  “You were what — nine, ten? — when he died?”

  “Ten.”

  “I remember him having pictures of his wife and son in the team house at the launch site. He was a good man.”

  Skibicki idly rubbed the side of his head.

  “Are you sure you want to know what happened?”

  “Of course I want to know,” Boomer said.

  The sergeant major looked at him hard.

  “You know the saying’let sleeping dogs sleep?” or something like that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to know what happened to your dad.”

  Boomer returned the sergeant major’s look, his body stiffening.

  “I want to know.”

  Skibicki nodded “OK.

  “You’re going to be here a while, right? We’ll talk. Right now, we need to finish PT.”

  8:45 A.M.LOCAL 1845 ZULU

  “Sir, there’s an encrypted message for the commander in here,” Boomer held out the one-inch binder that he’d picked up from the Fort Shafter Secure Communication/ Intelligence Facility (SCIF). The binder contained all the classified messages for the TASOSC received during the past twenty-four hours.

  “All the rest is routine traffic decoded by the SCIF and I’ve Xeroxed copies and put them in the appropriate boxes.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Falk looked up from the mound of paperwork that always covered his desk. He turned around and pulled open the drawer of a secure file cabinet behind him. Falk removed a small pad and tossed it to Boomer.

  “Break out the message and give me a hard copy to put in the CO’s reading file.” He noted Boomer’s surprise.

  “I know that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done, but Colonel Coulder’s time is too important — or at least that’s what he thinks — to be wasted on breaking out messages, and he delegated it to me, and I’m delegating it to you.

  Like you said yesterday, you do have a TS Q clearance.

  He’s got a briefing at 0900 in the conference room and I don’t have time right now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Boomer said, taking the onetime pad with him to his desk in the next tunnel. Sergeant major Skibicki wasn’t in from PT, and Boomer was anxious to talk to him.

  Boomer sat down and matched up the page number on the pad to the indicator at the start of the message. A onetime pad consists of sheets of six-letter groups. Boomer took the unintelligible six-letter groups on the actual message, matched them with the randomly generated groups on the onetime pad and, using a tri graph which had standard three-letter combinations, he was able to decipher the message.

  Despite all the advances in technology, a onetime pad was still the most secure way to send a message because there were only two copies of the pads in existence-the sender had one and the receiver had one.

  Because the pad letters were randomly generated by a computer, there was no “code” involved that could eventually be broken down.

  The only problem, thus Boomer’s surprise, was that the owner of the onetime pad was supposed to be the one decoding the message. Having someone else do it was a breach of security. Boomer knew that on A teams, detachment commanders sometimes gave the team pads to their communications sergeants to make message sending and receiving easier because commo men had the three letter groups on the tri graph memorized, but he’d never agreed with that policy. He also wondered why the TASOSC commander was even using a onetime pad given the sophisticated transmitting and receiving machinery available at the Fort Shafter SCIF. An A Team used the pads because they only had a limited capability to carry encrypting machinery — thus the code itself had to be unbreakable. At fixed stations like Fort Shafter, the encryption usually was in the sending and receiving technology.

  The letters flowed out under Boomer’s pencil and the message slowly took form. He was surprised to see a Javis report appear — a format for a water drop zone report used by Special Forces.

  Boomer took the deciphered six letter groups and made sense of them on another sheet of paper:

  TO: COMMANDER FOURTH TASOSC

  FROM: TASK FORCE REAPER JAVIS

  MESSAGE CITE ZERO ONE SIX FOUR THREE AAA GUMBO SHARK BBB FOUR TWO ECHO JULIET SEVEN FOUR FIVE EIGHT EIGHT ZERO CCC ONE EIGHT SIX DEG COAST GUARD LIGHT ONE POINT EIGHT KILOMETERS

  DDD ONE ZERO ZERO BY SEVEN TWO ZERO AXIS ZERO ZERO SIX DEG

  EEE ONE TWO ZERO DASH EIGHT ZERO FFP ZERO ZERO SIX DEG GGG EIGHT ZERO TO ONE TWO ZERO MOUNTAINS HHH IR STROBE MARK RP

  III INFILTRATION FOURTEEN PERSONNEL TWO BUNDLE JJJ DTG TWO DECEMBER ONE TWO ZERO ZERO ZULU

  As Boomer finished, a shadow appeared over his desk.

  He looked up into the cold gray eyes of the full-bird colonel he’d glimpsed at a distance during PT. Boomer glanced down at the nametag on the man’s starched fatigues and confirmed the identification: coulder “What are you doing, major?” The voice was the same high-pitched one he’d heard coming from Coulder’s office the previous day.

  Boomer snapped to his feet, holding out the piece of paper on which he had just written the formatted message.

  “Breaking out a message received this morning, sir.”

  Colonel Coulder snatched the message out of Boomer’s hand and looked at it, then his eyes swiveled back up.

  “Who told you to decrypt a message addressed to me?”

  “Colonel Falk, sir. He said to—”

  “When my name is on a damn message, major, I want to see it immediately. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who the hell are you anyway?” Coulder demanded, slipping the message into a file folder under his left arm.

  Boomer was very glad he had gotten his hair cut yesterday afternoon and shined his boots right after physical training.

  “Major Watson, sir. I’m here TDY.”

  Coulder searched his mind.

  “Are you the fellow Falk told me about yesterday?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “From Bragg?”

  “Yes, sir,”

  “Why are you here?” Coulder demanded.

  “Area orientation, sir,” Boomer answered.

  Coulder stared at him for a few seconds, then held out his hand. At first Boomer thought he was offering to shake hands, but his next words corrected that assumption.

  “Give me the pad,” Coulder ordered.

  Boomer passed over the onetime pad. Coulder glanced at it, then turned and walked away, going into the glassed off conference room at the end of the tunnel. Boomer sank into his chair. The original copy of the message he had transcribed with its six-letter groups was still on the pad of paper.

  He now understood Wilkerson’s anger and frustration yesterday. The last person he’d want to talk to after getting relieved of command was Coulder. Boomer hurriedly tore the top page off and stuffed it into his fatigue pocket, not wanting to risk another encounter with Colonel Coulder over the message.

  Sergeant Major Skibicki had walked in while Coulder was addressing Boomer. The old NCO slowly sank down into his squeaking desk chair after the colonel departed and kicked his feet up on the scarred desktop.

  “Finally met the boss, I see.”

  “Is he always so friendly?” Boomer asked.

  “You caught him on one of his good days,” Skibicki said.

  “Normally he would have locked your heels.”

  “I’m getting a little too old for that kind of crap,” Boomer said.

  “I am too old for that crap,” the sergeant major said.

  “He tried to do it to me once, right after he cacae here and took over.

  Right in front of the troops at an inspection formation.

  Talk about unprofessional. I told him he could shove that shit up his ass. We haven’t had too many discussions since then.”

  “What did he do?” Boomer asked.

  “He tried to get me relieved, but SO COM told him he cou
ld shove that.

  I was the only Special Forces sergeant major on the island and they were damned if they were going to PCS another one here just because he couldn’t get along with me.” Skibicki grinned.

  “Besides, the sergeant major at SO COM Billy Lucius, owes me one, and I want to retire here. Don’t need to be getting shipped back to the states and turn right around.”

  “How many years do you have in sergeant major?”

  “Twenty-nine.” Skibicki gestured around the tunnel.

  “I came on active duty in’ sixty-four; then had a two-year break in service after coming back from my third tour in’nam in 72. Back on active duty in‘74, so I seen it all.

  “This assignment is my last hurrah. Baby-sitting a bunch of headquarters pukes and making sure the police call outside the tunnel is done property. I’ve got more time in uniform than any other person on this entire island. I’ve got more time in grade than Sergeant Major Finley up at the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield. Yet here I am.”

  “How did you—” Boomer halted as Sergeant Vasquez walked in and handed a folder to Skibicki.

  “Here’s the duty roster, sergeant major.” She gave Boomer a smile as she exited the tunnel.

  The gesture hadn’t been lost on Skibicki.

  “Damn Army sure has changed. You saw her at PT?”

  “Yeah. Made me feel out of shape,” Boomer said.

  “Well, be careful of her,” Skibicki warned.

  “We get a lot of people through here TDY, and Vasquez likes playing with’em. Don’t matter if it’s officer or enlisted as long as it has a hard dick. Get your head between her thighs and she’ll crush it like a melon.”

  “I’ll keep that in—” Boomer froze, his eyes locked on a figure that had just walked out of the middle side tunnel and was heading for the glassed-in conference room.

  Boomer slid his seat back until he was hidden from view by the bank of classified filing cabinets.

  “What’s the matter?” Skibicki asked, his eyes following Boomer’s.

  “You know that guy?”

  “Yeah, I know him,” Boomer answered. The door to the conference swung shut and through the glass. Boomer could see the backs of the people attending the meeting, all facing Colonel Coulder who stood at a podium, a map of the island of Oahu pinned to the easel to his left rear. Sergeant Vasquez walked in, handed a folder to Coulder and left the conference room. She gave Skibicki and Boomer another smile as she exited the tunnel.