Sex and the High Command

by John Boyd

  As the three men drew down their cones of silence and rode over the bridge, lightning glittered and thunder muttered to the northeast. After they arrived at the bachelor officers’ quarters and received their room assignments, the OD reported to Hansen that his wife had called and wanted him to return the call. The admiral suggested that they meet in the bar for an aperitif after Hansen completed his telephoning, but McCormick declined—he was skipping dinner because he had not slept the night before.

  Helga bubbled with pleasant chatter. The mentholated oil of eucalyptus had her cold under control, and she was excited over his DSM, but still disappointed. “Darn the Navy, anyway, Ben. I missed connections last night, and now, this. Do you know it’s been eighteen months, twenty-eight days, and sixteen hours since I carved a notch on my bra?”

  Hansen chuckled. “Now, tell me about your day.”

  “Oh, just a woman’s day, Ben. I went over and helped Anne lay out Ralph. He was forehanded. He shot himself in the chest so he looked perfectly natural with a suit on. Anne and I almost got into a cat fight. She’s planting a rose over his grave to give his memory a little beauty. I suggested an oak tree because a tree could use his calcium, and the oak tree is Ralph.”

  “I agree, Helga. A rose bush is too feminine. Ralph was as sturdy as Gibraltar.”

  “That’s exactly what I told her, Ben! I said to her, ‘Anne, if Ben were here he’d want you to ship Ralph’s remains to the Gib and bury them in the rock.’ But she’s stubborn.”

  “She should have listened to you, Helga. By the way, dear, I think we should start thinking about a dishwasher for the kitchen.”

  “We have Joan Paula.”

  “I know, Helga, but…” If the admiral had not been waiting, Hansen could have spent hours with her.

  Later, over a bourbon, he related the conversation to the admiral, who listened with interest. Primrose agreed with Helga and him that an oak tree would have been more appropriate than a rose bush over Johnson’s grave, but, rolling his glass around on its bottom rim, the admiral asked, “Why didn’t someone suggest a tombstone?”

  “By heavens,” the captain said, “I never thought about that!”

  “I know,” the admiral nodded. “You’re so committed to improbabilities that you’re overlooking the probable. Well, Ben, what did you think of your first cabinet meeting?”

  Hansen thought for a moment. They were in a social atmosphere, the admiral was topping off his second martini, but a naval officer was always under observation by his seniors. “Some of the arguments weren’t too well defined. Of course, I have a clear idea of Operation Chicken Pluck, but I drew a blank on Alternate Plan B.”

  “Our first Plan B,” the admiral explained, “was to contest the swearing-in of any President-elect endorsed by the FEM’s. Dr. Carey has attacked the Constitution, and the President swears to uphold it when inaugurated. The old Plan B backed up Operation Queen Swap, which was a military operation, but constitutional. Truthfully, I’m happy to shelve Queen Swap. Through sheer intuitive logic—that’s reasoning from unknown facts—I found a flaw in the operation which I’ll explain at a little staff meeting, Friday.”

  Hansen nodded an understanding he didn’t fully possess because Primrose was talking too fast and he was halfway through a double bourbon, his second.

  “It’s easier to grasp politics when you’re swacked,” the admiral said, “so drink up.” Primrose lifted his glass in a junior officer’s toast. “To a bloody war or a sickly season! Now, we’re bringing in Operation Chicken Pluck. This one can’t fail, but it’s an obvious attempt to circumvent the Constitution. Enter, now, Demorest Habersham, the constitutionalists’ exemplar, who regards the first law of the land as holy writ. I tell you, Ben, that man loves the Constitution. When Bertha booted him out of her bedroom, Old Demorest grabbed a copy of the Constitution, rolled it into a cylinder, and went to bed with it… Steward, another round! Understand this, Ben… Operation Chicken Pluck elects as President a great lover who doesn’t know doodly squat about the Constitution. Operation Chicken Pluck elects as Vice President a great fornicator but a poor lover, a wily politician, and Honeysock Dubois doesn’t care doodly squat about the Constitution. Old Honeydew Sucklebois would suspend the Bill of Rights to get a year knocked off the age of consent. Now, who’s throwing his lily-white weight behind these two frauds? None other than our good old constitutional altar boy, D. Habersham.”

  Primrose topped off his third martini, almost below the stem of the glass, and resumed, “Once he’s nominated those two frauds, in comes the new Plan B.”

  Hansen nodded as an expediency and said, “He seemed upset about Alternate Plan B.”

  “And well he should be,” Primrose said, “because that’s my plan! Constitutional, but a military doomsday plan. The code name’s Operation Ultimate Thule. That one’s a brain wrencher.”

  Bemusedly he rolled his empty glass around on its empty bottom and looked over at Hansen with eyes that were balanced on the edge of reveries. “Ben, are you a Christian?”

  Here it comes, Hansen thought, and braced himself. “Yes, sir.”

  Primrose set his glass firmly on its bottom. His face hardened. His eyes focused. “Then, Captain, pray that the President never invokes Operation Ultimate Thule.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Hansen’s answer was deliberately formal. Admiral Meriweather Primrose had issued an order.

  CHAPTER 7

  John Pope drove his turbine over the Potomac on a bright August morning and headed southwest toward Fairfax Junction. He was a male Caucasian, 5 feet 11 inches tall, gray-eyed, with no birthmarks and one scar from a Vietcong bullet on his left hip. He was an FBI operative on assignment, driving his own Mustang with a 30-0-0 hunting rifle in the trunk. He was almost happy.

  Before him the nearly empty speedway cleaved the green of Virginia beneath a sky polka-dotted with clouds. Within him, lyrical memories sang of pursuits along the tango-swirls of mountain roads with curves ill-met by moonlight at 90 miles an hour. Again he heard the boomelay-boom of exhausts beneath the tintinnabulations of chassis, the sopranos of tires shrieking into the bass of crashed roadblocks. On per diem, with mileage paid, John Pope was heading home to the high country to slice another slit in the death of a thousand cuts he was meting out to Jake “Big Red” Barnard. His spirits quickened to his rising wind of passage, but he was still not completely happy even at 110 miles per hour.

  Born in Dalton, Georgia, Pope had worked his way through Tusculum by running whiskey out of the hills for Jake Barnard until, in the summer before his senior year, he had shifted to dirt-track racing to finance a criminology course at the University of Virginia. He chose criminology because he wanted to work for the Internal Revenue Department. The turnabout was caused by an unpaid bonus promised him by Jake Barnard if he made a rush delivery to Knoxville on time. Pope made the run with minutes to spare, but Big Red reneged on the bonus because it was Pope’s last delivery for the summer. In the ensuing argument, the 220-pound man had given the 160-pound youth a beating which had led to a feud rivaling the Hatfield- McCoy feud.

  One year after Pope returned as a revenuer, he had stopped every runner in the hills from working for Jake. He used railroad torpedoes instead of nails to blow tires. He felled trees on back-country roads to trip detouring runners. In six months he made 16 arrests and 14 convictions without arousing the antipathy of his friends because his pattern of arrests had been obvious from its outset. Runners not working for Barnard were waved on after a discussion of the weather.

  Pope left Barnard’s stills alone. He wanted a maximum flow with no outlet because the pay drivers demanded to run whiskey for Big Red would drive the price of his moonshine too high for the market.

  When, in the glow of a September evening, Big Red made his move. Pope knew. He had been drifting along the ridges above Jake’s cabin waiting for the White to roll out of the barn, piled high with hay from a farm that grew only corn. Then Pope sprinted a mile in less than
six minutes to a logging road where his partner waited in an Impala powered by a LeBaron engine.

  It took Pope less than ten minutes, driving without lights, to spot the White on an upgrade, and he slowed his car, turned on the lights. Wires on the fan belt antiqued his engine sound, and with seeming effort the Impala overtook the truck. As he passed, he flicked his brights as his partner leaned out and called up to the cab, “Bridge block on the Clinch.”

  “Thanks,” Jake yelled, and swung his truck on a road too narrow for a U-turn to back up and head back to Treadway and the state road south. As Jake nosed into the shoulder, Pope reversed his car to block the rear of the truck, and by the light of headlights reflected from tree boles, Jake Barnard’s career as a moonshiner came to an end.

  Pope took the driver’s side of the cab, yelling, “Come out with your hands over your head. You’re under arrest…” By plan, Pope’s partner, a new man on the force, covered the opposite side of the cab and did not hear Pope say, dropping his voice beneath the still-idling engine, “… you pink-whiskered son of a bitch.”

  It was too much for the big man, who recognized the source of the insult. He lowered his hands and charged, but Pope pistol-whipped him with such efficiency that the rookie, thinking Pope was being attacked, was allowed only two strikes after he rushed up before Big Red struck the ground.

  Big Red survived his arrest to get ten years in Atlanta as a second offender. His counsel was a public defender, since Pope had reduced him to poverty.

  The bonus Barnard had promised Pope was ten dollars.

  Pope resigned after his mission was accomplished and joined the Army. His second Purple Heart came from a mortar blast which damaged his optic nerves, and for six weeks his eyes would not focus. After he was shipped back to the States, a therapist with genius helped him regain control of his eyes. She hit on the idea of using her breasts in a darkened room as a focal area for his sight, and when he could spot her nipples at forty paces he was discharged as cured. Although his vision returned, he was left with the knack of throwing his eyes out of focus at will; the resulting expression of gentleness, understanding, and open-hearted candor was such that hoods and women confided in him as they might a priest.

  Now, five years after Barnard’s conviction. Pope was rolling south at a conservative 85 miles an hour, on a hunting trip paid for by the government. Barnard was only one of many pleasant memories, ranking no higher than Pope’s recollection of quail hunting in crisp Octobers, hounds baying under wintry moons, crap games and fist fights, all-day singing and eating on the ground, humping the hired girl and hickory nut hunting, all-night fishing and drinking on the bank, grits and gravy and moonshine and Coke, country music and cornfield mergers—the memories of a boyhood in the South.

  Yet Pope was not completely happy.

  At Covesville, the highway patrol picked him up, but he lost them at Myndus. They radioed ahead, and he was flagged down; but he showed them his orders at Monroe, Virginia, and was waved ahead at 70 miles an hour. Heading west from Lynchburg, he ran a playback of the chase to savor the thrill, and he felt that he had a clue to his disquiet.

  One aspect of his nature he had never fully understood was the rhythm of his biological urges, rising within him like a tidal swell, and preceded by a strange aura. When he felt the far sweep of the skies, grew conscious of the clinging touch of T-shirts, or enjoyed outrunning state patrols—Ah, there it was.

  On no other assignment had his urges been a consideration. On this one, a lack of circumspection could bring about a betrayal of the FBI, his country, and his President. Mr. Powers had specified a virgo intacto, and he dare not let his eyes drift out of focus.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Captain, this is rich. Winken, Thinken, and Prod want us to join them, next Tuesday, to welcome the Russian delegation. To impress the Russkies, they want us to wear dress blues in August. You game?”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  Over the intercom, the admiral’s voice quavered in a childish treble. “Think we should take the side boy with us to broaden his knowledge of protocol?”

  “Let me take the matter under advisement. Admiral. His tutor will be briefing me on his progress at lunch.”

  “How are you coming with Schopenhauer?”

  “He’s winning, Admiral. When I read a page, I have to review two pages to get the gist of the page I read.”

  “He starts getting difficult near the end,” the admiral encouraged, “but I’m calling to remind you that I have a little staff meeting in my conference room at 1330.”

  “Thank you. Admiral.”

  Hansen turned back to his letter from Joan Paula. He was catching on to the breezy language the admiral had picked up from the civilian establishment: Winken, Thinken, and Prod were the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Interior; McCormick was the side boy.

  The line from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” about the world not ending with a bang made mother laugh out loud. She said there was no doubt what those boys were talking about, and no Navy man would be quoting from Eliot. She said she bet you were at a cabinet meeting.

  You complain about things not making sense anymore. They never did to me, either, so I guess I got the Hansen curse. For instance, why am I called Hansen when that means the son of Hans and your name isn’t Hans? If the world was logical, my name would be Helgasdotter, at least in my Scandinavian.

  Mama’s terrifically excited about your trip home over the weekend. She’s wearing lipstick for the first time in months. She’s getting the house so ready for Captain’s Inspection that she made me take down my disk antenna. I told her you had given me permission to let it stay up, but she said she was senior officer present and it had to come down. So my mother, your Swedish Angel, pulled rank on me.

  How do you get out of this chicken outfit? Anyway, thanks for my dishwasher.

  Love,

  JP

  Folding the letter, he put it into his pocket. Helga’s deduction about the cabinet meeting was technically a breach of security on his part, since the admiral had ordered him to keep the cabinet meeting secret. He was chagrined, not so much by the accuracy of her deduction as by her misinterpretation of the word “bang.”

  Hansen still waited for his duties on Primrose’s staff to be defined, hopefully at today’s meeting. For ten days he had done nothing but read books suggested by the admiral, and not one had any bearing on naval operations. A High Wind in Jamaica had concerned itself with murderous children, Lord of the Flies with a bunch of young savages, and The Painted Bird had been vignettes of Hell described by a boy. He was mystified by the admiral’s choices. A good, wide-open adventure yarn by Max Brand or Zane Grey, Hansen could appreciate, but these books were about imaginary characters in an unreal world.

  He shoved Schopenhauer into his desk and left early for the cafeteria to meet McCormick, planning to get the unofficial scoop out of the way before the arrival of McCormick’s tutor with the official report on the commander’s progress.

  McCormick was waiting and excited. The FBI had sent an operative, this morning, to “shag me a bride,” he reported happily, but he was less enthusiastic about academic life. He was complaining mildly when he looked over and said, “Here comes Mr. Steward.”

  Approaching them was a man, tall and reedy, who walked with the undulations of a goose, and when Hansen got a closer look at the face of their luncheon guest, he decided to order salad. The face was relieved more by liver spots than watery gray eyes which suggested myopia and lost spectacles. Steward extended a flaccid hand to acknowledge McCormick’s introduction, and sat down while Hansen explained to him that he was expected to report McCormick’s progress to the admiral.

  Steward’s eyes fixed on the captain with detached pity. “To a nonacademic man, that task must be as easy as keeping an unsteady finger on an erratic pulse.”

  “What he’s saying, Captain, is that I don’t know where in hell I’m at.”

  “Come now, Commander. We’re not fond of prepositional en
dings. Say, if you must, ‘I don’t know where the hell I am.’ Captain, I detest verbosity. As a grammarian, I’m devoted to enclitics, hiatuses, and total silence. Circumlocution is pussyfooting. Be brief and pithy, it is no matter how witty.”

  Maxims and apothegms shot across the table in twenty-millimeter words at a fifty-caliber rate of fire, and Hansen grew increasingly dismayed. All morning his thoughts had dwelled on the admiral’s staff meeting, wondering what his assignment would be, but Steward forced more serious problems on his mind. Hansen’s pride in the Navy as his country’s first line of defense suffered when civilians such as Steward made him wonder what the first line was defending.

  Admiral Primrose’s “little staff meeting in my conference room” was guarded in the vestibule by two Army MP’s who checked Hansen’s ID card with a thoroughness that surprised him. Then he walked through a short corridor where a magnetic-field deviation recorder surveyed him for hidden weapons. After he was cleared, electronically, he was permitted past a second door guarded by Marine MP’s.

  Primrose was certainly security’ conscious, Hansen commented to himself as he entered the conference room, two stories deep with a length and width to match. On one of the windowless walls was a Mercator projection of the world, done in detail, and the room’s dominant piece of furniture was a horseshoe table, with a dais at the apex of the arc and enough chairs around the interior arc to seat fifty men. At least thirty were present, and Admiral Beauchamp, Primrose’s senior staff officer, was the only familiar face present. Most of the men had a VMI look, and when Hansen recognized Air Chief Talliaferro and Army Chief Ware, he knew that the admiral’s “little staff meeting” was a meeting of the General Staff of the United States.