“Why don’t I talk to him and find out?” Ellis asked.
“I was going to call him in for a chat,” Taylor said.
“If you awe me, Sergeant Major, imagine how you will terrify a kid fresh from the stockade,” Ellis said.
“You’re an officer,” Taylor said.
“I’m also as old as he is,” Ellis said. “If he is going to put the con on anybody, which is what we want to find out, he’s much more likely to try it on me than you.”
“Go ahead,” Hanrahan chuckled. “Let’s find out what we’re dealing with. Where is he, Taylor?”
“They gave them the morning off to get settled. Probably in the barracks.”
Hanrahan looked at his watch.
“You won’t have time. Do it tonight. The other problem is a little stickier. We have a PFC in the same barracks. Very interesting young man. He was an Oberleutnant in the East German army. Crashed through the Berlin Wall in a truck and brought his sister with him. As soon as he got to the States, he enlisted. The CIC, for obvious reasons, has run quite an investigation on him.”
“They think he’s a plant?” Taylor asked.
“No. That question has been settled. He’s who he says he is, and he did what he said he did. There were thirty-seven bullet holes in the truck he came through the wall in. And counterintelligence apparently has some interesting contacts on the other side of the wall. I just read the whole report. The problem with this guy is money. He and his sister are living on what we’re paying him as a private. He made PFC as honor graduate in basic training.”
“Jesus!” Taylor said.
“If he was going to be here, I could fix something,” Hanrahan said. “Get her permission to stay in the Guest House for more than three days. Get her a job in the PX or someplace. But he’s going to Benning for three weeks for jump school, and where he goes, she goes. The way they get the money for her ticket is by not buying any food.”
“I got some friends at Benning,” Sergeant Major Taylor said.
“Not me,” Ellis said. “I was in OCS there.”
“Well, see what you can come up with,” Hanrahan said. “This guy is too proud to take a handout, from what I read. But I am very uncomfortable with one of my people—or his dependent—going hungry. According to the CIC, they’re living on beans and rice and bologna. I won’t have it. Come up with something.”
(Two)
Private Geoffrey Craig was summoned to the orderly room by the intercom system.
He went at the run and was almost there when he saw an officer, a lieutenant. He stopped running, saluted, and walked past. When he was past, he would start running again. Or at least that was his intention. He didn’t get past. The officer examined him closely as he went by, then called him by name.
“Craig?”
Geoff stopped and turned and came to attention.
“Yes, sir?”
“Come with me,” Ellis said.
“Sir, I’ve been ordered to the orderly room,” Geoff said.
“I ordered you to the orderly room,” Tom Ellis said. He turned and walked to the side of the small frame orderly-room building. He got behind the wheel of a jeep and signaled for Geoff to get in.
Geoff was surprised. He had never seen an officer driving himself before.
“My name is Ellis,” Tom said. “I’m the general’s aide-decamp.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Because I am the general’s aide-de-camp, I know about you,” Ellis said. “All about you.”
“Yes, sir,” Geoff said.
“Let there, therefore, be no bullshit between us,” Ellis said.
“Yes, sir,” Geoff said.
Ellis, driving easily, took them out of the Smoke Bomb Hill area.
“We’re going to Camp McCall,” he said. “Do you know where it is? Do you know what it is?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s where we take officers and noncoms who are already pretty good soldiers and turn them into Green Berets. We get very few people right out of basic training, and you are the very first we have ever had straight from the stockade.”
Geoff was very uneasy. He decided against saying anything.
“Turning good soldiers into Green Berets is both difficult and expensive,” Ellis said. “There is a considerable doubt in several people’s minds, including my own, that you are going to be worth the time and effort.”
Geoff couldn’t think of anything to reply to that either.
“Do you even know, for example, what a Green Beret is?”
“Not really,” Geoff confessed. “I mean, I’ve seen the posters, but—”
“Didn’t they teach you to say ‘sir’ in basic training?” Ellis asked, scornfully, but not angrily, a comment reflecting contempt for his training as a soldier, Geoff thought, rather than offense at his lack of military courtesy.
“Sorry, sir,” he said.
They were on a two lane macadam highway now, passing through scraggly stands of pine. MAX SPEED 35 was stenciled to the jeep’s dashboard. The speedometer needle was pointing to 55, almost off the speedometer.
“You don’t like the army, do you?” Ellis asked.
“No, sir, I don’t,” Geoff said. He had been told no bullshit, so there was a no-bullshit answer.
“You think you were screwed by the draftboard?”
“By fate,” Geoff said, and added, “sir.”
“The fickle finger of fate, having fucked, moves on,” Ellis said, and smiled, pleased with himself. “First, you get yourself drafted. Then you run into a nasty sergeant who puts you not only in the hospital with a broken hand but into the stockade. And then you wind up here, where you don’t belong, expected to jump out of airplanes and do other things which make basic training look like girl scout camp by comparison. Is that about the way you see it?”
“Yes, sir, that’s about it,” Geoff said.
“Are you as rich as Colonel Lowell?” Ellis asked.
Jeff hesitated a second. “My father is,” he said.
“You ever hear what Colonel Lowell did at the Bay of Pigs?”
“No, sir.”
“When the whole thing came apart, after Kennedy didn’t send in Naval Aviation to take out the Cuban tanks and they started kicking the shit out of the invasion force, it looked like a buddy of his—a colonel named Felter—was either dead or about to be dead. So Colonel Lowell, ignoring a direct order to mind his own business, went to get him. He hired an airplane, an amphibian, and went down there and pulled his buddy off the beach. Him and what was left of an ‘A’ Team.”
“I didn’t know that,” Geoff said.
“Which explains why you’re here,” Ellis said.
“Excuse me?”
“The general figured he owed Colonel Lowell one,” Ellis said. “What the hell, Special Forces owed Colonel Lowell one ‘A’ Team that otherwise would have gone down the toilet. Taking his punk in-law and trying to run him through Camp McCall and make a man of him didn’t seem to be too much to ask, so here you are.”
“That’s very interesting,” Geoff said. “I didn’t know he’d been involved in the Bay of Pigs.”
“What’s interesting, Craig, is why Colonel Lowell did what he did,” Ellis said. “That’s about as interesting as what he’s doing in the army in the first place. You ever wonder about that?”
“Yes,” Geoff said. “I have.”
“Well, the one thing Colonel Lowell is not is a goddamned fool. He knew what he was getting into when he rented that amphibian. The odds were pretty good that he would get blown away without being able to do a damned thing for his buddy. He knew that. But he went anyway. Why?”
Ellis looked at Geoffrey Craig, and then suddenly swerved the jeep to avoid a pothole.
“You got a buddy you’d stick your neck out for that way?” Ellis asked.
Geoff thought it over and shook his head no.
“You think your father has?” Ellis pursued.
“Probably not,” Geoff said. He ha
d never before even thought of his father in a life-threatening situation.
“The next question you have to ask yourself is why Colonel Lowell arranged to have you sent here,” Ellis said. “It would have been much easier to get you out of the stockade and into some office, pushing a typewriter.”
“Why did he?” Geoff asked.
“He’s your cousin, you figure it out,” Ellis said.
He didn’t say another word for the balance of the twenty-mile trip to Camp McCall.
There was an elaborate gateway to Fort Bragg; a stucco MP guard shack; a billboard giving a map of the post; another billboard reading WELCOME TO FORT BRAGG, THE HOME OF AIRBORNE; a statue of a parachutist; and huge representations of XVIII Airborne Corps and Eighty-Second Airborne Division shoulder patches.
At the entrance to Camp McCall there was just one battered sign painted on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood momentarily lit up by the jeep’s headlights as they passed: CAMP MCCALL. U.S. MILITARY RESERVATION. NO TRESPASSING. And past the sign there was nothing but more Carolina clay and more stands of pine trees.
They finally came to a small clearing, and Ellis stopped the jeep. When he turned the headlights off, there was no other light. Ellis produced a flashlight.
“This is the rappelling tower,” he announced, and shined the light on it.
It was built of enormous creosoted pilings, twice the size of telephone poles, bolted together and reinforced with rough timber. There was a storage shed at ground level and a deck on top. A stairway climbed five long flights to the platform. Two sides of the structure were covered with rough planking. The others were open.
Ellis went to the storage shed, unlocked a padlock, pulled open a door, and came out with huge coils of nylon rope. He draped one of them around his neck and handed the other to Geoff Craig, obviously intending for him to do the same thing.
“Truth time,” Ellis said as he picked up shorter lengths of rope, two pairs of leather gloves, and two stainless steel oblong rings. “Watch your step as we go up.”
Geoff was afraid of the tower, an embarrassing fear that increased as they climbed up, seemingly forever.
Finally they reached the top. There was no railing at the edges of the platform, which would have been frightening enough in the daytime. At night, with only Ellis’s flashlight for light, it was terrifying. He felt a little dizzy and had a strong urge to sit right down where he was. If he was sitting down, falling off seemed less of a real possibility.
Ellis moved to the center of the deck, where there was some sort of railing. In a moment Geoff understood its purpose. It was where the rope was tied.
“It is sometimes necessary to descend steep places: buildings, mountains, or whatever,” Ellis said. “This is a mountain climber’s technique, which isn’t nearly as dangerous as it looks.”
Geoff said nothing, unable to accept what seemed obvious. Ellis was going off the side of this thing on a rope. There were two ropes. Ellis therefore expected him to go off the side too.
Ellis immediately proved this by dropping to his knees in front of Geoff and quickly making a sort of harness around his waist and between his legs with a short length of rope and the oblong stainless-steel ring. Then he handed Geoff the light.
“Shine it on me so you can see what I’m doing,” he said. He quickly made a rope harness for himself.
“Now, the way you do this,” Ellis said, “is wrap the descent rope around you like this. You control the rate of descent by friction. It’s that simple.”
“I don’t think I like this,” Geoff said.
“You don’t think you like this, sir,” Ellis said. “I didn’t think you would.”
He went to the railing and tied his rope to it, explaining: “The way I’m tying this, once I’m on the ground all I have to do is jerk on it, and it’ll come loose.”
Geoff didn’t say anything. He now felt both numb and dizzy.
Ellis took the rope from Geoff’s shoulders and tied it to the rail. He then took Geoff’s arm and led him dangerously close to the edge of the deck. He wrapped the rope around him and backed Geoff to the edge.
“You’re tied to the rail,” he said. “You can’t fall. Give the rope a jerk.”
Geoff pulled on the rope, and experienced enormous relief that he was indeed firmly attached to the railing.
“What happens now is we see if you have any balls,” Ellis said. “I’m going down by the rope. You can go down by either the rope or the stairs. If you go down by the stairs, I’ll have you reassigned tomorrow to Headquarters, Fort Bragg, as a clerk or jeep driver or whatever you can do, and no hard feelings. We’ll just tell Colonel Lowell you didn’t have what it takes. Few people do. He’ll understand. If you come down by way of the rope, we will then open the subject of how we can help your buddy Wagner.”
“What do you mean by that?” Geoff asked, curiosity overwhelming everything else.
“Well, the poor sonofabitch and his sister are living on beans and bologna, and Special Forces takes care of its own,” Ellis said. “If you’re going to be one of us, maybe you can help. If you’re not, you can’t.”
Ellis shined the flashlight on his face and grinned broadly at Geoff.
“These things are supposed to be shockproof.” he said. “Let’s see.”
He threw the flashlight up in the air and over the edge of the platform. It spun as it fell, and it took what seemed like a very long time to fall to the ground. Where it went out.
“That goes to show you, I suppose, that you can’t trust what people tell you,” Ellis said.
Geoff didn’t reply. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. In a minute they did. He saw for the first time lights a quarter of a mile or so away, but Ellis was gone.
He considered his options. He could pull himself away from the edge and crawl to the center of the platform, untie the rope, and coil it, and then—very carefully—crawl to the edge of the platform, find the stairs, and very carefully climb down them.
And tomorrow he would be a clerk in some safe office. And this insanity would be over.
And Cousin Craig would hereafter know that he was a wimp. And he would not look too hot in Ursula’s eyes, either, even if he had the balls to go see her.
“Oh, shit!” Geoff said, and stepped off into the darkness.
(Three)
Office of the Commanding General
U.S. Army Special Warfare Center
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
1530 Hours, 12 December 1961
General Hanrahan’s aide-de-camp and sergeant major entered his office together.
“Colonel Miner is on the horn, asking to speak to the general,” Taylor said.
“That’s not why you two are grinning,” Hanrahan said as he reached for the telephone.
Colonel Miner, it soon became clear, wanted to bring with him his warrant officer, his administrative assistant. Hanrahan could see nothing wrong with that and was about to say sure when he saw Sergeant Major Taylor describing the outline of a female form with his hands.
“One moment, please, Colonel,” Hanrahan said, and covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
“Female?” he asked. Taylor nodded. “You’re sure?”
“The lady is a very attractive redhead,” Taylor said. “I don’t know where she got the warrant.”
“Colonel, if your man is able to become Special Forces—qualified,” Hanrahan said, “then certainly I’ll arrange for his transfer.”
Colonel Miner was indignant. He wanted his administrative assistant for administrative purposes. He didn’t plan to have his administrative assistant, “with all respect, blowing up bridges or whatever else you people do.”
“The rule is ironclad, I’m afraid,” Hanrahan said. “Everyone here has to be first parachute-qualified, then go through the basic course.” There was a pause. “Why, certainly it includes you, Miner,” Hanrahan said. “Where did you get the idea that it wouldn’t?”
Taylor and Ellis looked very pleased
with themselves.
“I don’t intend to debate this with you, Colonel,” Hanrahan said, “but we can discuss it further, if you insist, when you’re here for duty.”
He hung the telephone up.
“I don’t see why that was so funny,” Hanrahan said, somewhat sharply.
“Sorry, sir,” Taylor said, wiping the smile from his face.
“As a matter of fact, you should have told Colonel Miner that yourself,” Hanrahan said.
“I did, sir,” Taylor said. “The colonel called and told me to cut orders on his people. When she came on the line, I told his warrant officer as politely as I could that we don’t have women, and she said ‘We’ll see about that’ and hung up. He called back and asked me if I knew what an order was, and I told him yes, sir, that I did and that my orders were that I could cut transfer orders only on qualified people. It was then that he asked to speak to you, sir.”
“We’re off to a flying start, I see,” Hanrahan said. “He hasn’t even reported in, and I’m already a bastard.” And then he changed the subject: “And what have you done about ex-Oberleutnant Wagner’s problem?”
“We have that under control, if not yet completely solved, sir,” Taylor said. “And we have, so to speak, killed two birds with one stone.”
“Who was the other bird?” Hanrahan asked. “Not the Craig boy?”
“Yes, sir,” Ellis said.
Hanrahan made a “Come on” gesture with his hands.
“I ran him off the rappelling tower,” Ellis said. “He’s all right.”
“You ran him off the rappelling tower?” Hanrahan asked, shaking his head. “At night?”
“I thought a little motivation was in order,” Ellis said. “And it worked. He had no sooner hit the ground than he was asking if it was true he would make sergeant when he completes the course.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Hanrahan said. “What about Wagner’s problems?”
“I told Craig all about TPA.*”
“I don’t understand that,” Hanrahan said. “What about TPA?”
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