“Now, Lowell,” Bellmon said. “Where is Mrs. Sims?”
“I must again respectfully decline to answer the question,” Lowell said. “My personal life is my own business.”
“The hell it is!” Hanrahan snapped. “We’re about to abort this operation because of your ‘personal life.’ Now stop fucking around, Craig!”
“Abort the operation? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Colonel Lowell,” Bellmon said. “Mrs. Bellmon and I were entertained at dinner last night at the Club on Pope Air Force Base. While Mrs. Bellmon was in the ladies’ room, she overheard a conversation between two Air Force officers’ wives not known to her. They were commenting that Mrs. Sims was really in the middle, with her boyfriend about to try to get her husband out of a POW camp.”
Lowell didn’t say anything for a moment. Bellmon, and Hanrahan too, were really enraged. Bellmon was being very formal, “Colonel” and “Mrs. Bellmon.” They were among his oldest, closest friends. He knew they would be unhappy when they learned—as they inevitably would—about Dorothy, but he had not expected this cold rage.
Choosing each word carefully, Lowell said, “General, I can assure you that she didn’t hear anything from Mrs. Sims.”
“Where is she, God damn it? You’re not qualified to make that judgment,” Bellmon snapped.
“Has Monte Cristo been aborted?” Lowell asked.
“Where is she?”
That answered the question. If Monte Cristo had been aborted, they wouldn’t care where she was.
“With her parents, sir, in Winston-Salem,” Lowell said. He moved his eyes to the clock. “That’s about a hundred miles. She should just be getting there.”
“Get on the telephone,” Bellmon said. “And get her back down here right away. I don’t care what you tell her, just get her back down here.”
Bellmon used a telephone across the conference table. “You understand that we’ll have to talk to her.”
“I don’t know the number,” Lowell said. “And I don’t know her maiden name.”
Hanrahan reached across the conference table and pulled the telephone back to him. He consulted a directory, and started to dial a number.
“That’s the outside line, General,” MacMillan said.
“Goddamn,” Hanrahan said, then reached for another telephone and dialed a number. “This is General Hanrahan, Captain,” he said. “I need the next of kin of an Air Force dependent wife, Mrs. Thomas Sims. Her husband is Lieutenant Colonel. Her first name is Dorothy. I don’t have a serial number. I’ll stay on the line.”
“When you get her—” Bellmon said, and then interrupted himself. “I presume Mac was right, she’s traveling in your airplane?” Lowell nodded. “Tell her you’ll meet her in Fayetteville. Tell her to leave her children where they are.”
“I’m not sure she’ll do that, General,” Lowell replied.
“Why not? She was willing to cache them to spend the weekend with you. You’re obviously very persuasive, Lowell. Talk her into it.”
Lowell was about to say, “I resent the implication of that, General.” But he stopped himself in time.
Hanrahan wrote something with a red nylon-tipped pen on a sheet of lined paper and slid the pad and the outside-line telephone across the table to Lowell. Lowell dialed the number.
“Persons’ residence,” a deep, sonorous—probably black—male voice answered.
“Mrs. Thomas Sims, please,” Lowell said. “Colonel Lowell is calling.”
There was a small squeal, feedback, toward the end of his sentence. Bellmon had thrown a switch to amplify both ends of the conversation over loudspeakers.
“Hold the mouthpiece close in front of your mouth,” Bellmon said.
Another male voice, assured, came on the line.
“Colonel,” he said. “This is Hartley Persons, I’m Mrs. Sims’s father. Has this telephone call to do with Colonel Sims?”
“No, sir,” Lowell said. “It does not.”
“I see,” Dorothy’s father said. “Well, she’s just this moment walked in the door. She’s upstairs changing. I’ll see if she can come to the phone.”
When Dorothy came on the line it was obvious that her father was listening.
“This is Mrs. Sims,” Dorothy said. “What can I do for you, Colonel?”
“Can your father hear what I’m saying?” Lowell asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, Colonel,” the male voice said, “I can.”
“What do you want?” Dorothy asked.
“I want you to come back to Fayetteville right away,” Lowell said. “It’s very important that you do. I’ll explain when you get here.”
“Your plane is already gone,” Dorothy said. “It’s raining cats and dogs, and I’m going to come home in the morning. On my dad’s plane.”
“That’ll be too late,” Lowell said.
“Oh, my God, are you going tonight?” Dorothy said.
“Well,” Bellmon said, bitterly, quietly. “Guess who else is in on our little secret?”
“Dorothy,” Lowell said. “I can’t explain on the telephone. But it’s very important that I see you tonight.”
“It seems to me, Colonel,” Dorothy’s father said, “that if you are asking my daughter to travel in this rain, you owe her at least some sort of explanation.”
“I’ll explain on the way to the airport, Dad,” Dorothy said. “Can I use your plane?”
“Who is this man, Dorothy?”
“Is there a number where you can be reached?” Dorothy asked. Lowell looked at Bellmon, and pointed to the telephone he was using. Bellmon nodded, and Lowell gave her that number.
“Something is the matter, isn’t it?” Dorothy asked.
“The jig is up,” Lowell said. “Brace yourself for that.”
She paused, and then said, “I’ll call when I know something.”
The line went dead. Bellmon made a movement with his hand. The telephone loudspeakers popped. He had shut them off.
“How much does your lady friend know?” Bellmon asked.
“That we’re going,” Lowell said. “Nothing else.”
“You told her that, did you?”
“No, sir. She put that together herself.”
“Your hands are completely clean, in other words?” Bellmon asked, icily sarcastic.
“No, sir,” Lowell said. “One thing slipped out of me. She knows I know her husband is in Dak Tae.”
“Was that part of your comfort-the-poor-POW-wife routine?” Bellmon asked.
“Was that a rhetorical question, sir, or do you really want to know?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me in that tone of voice, Colonel Lowell!” Bellmon snapped.
“Why did you tell her you knew where her husband is confined? God damn it, Craig. That’s Top Secret, and you know damned well it is,” Hanrahan said, angrily.
“No excuse, sir.”
“Let’s hear the circumstances,” Hanrahan said.
“Yes, sir,” Lowell said. “I was talking to her about Phil Parker’s wife. As ‘Dr. Parker.’ She somehow got the idea that Dr. Parker was a man and violating POW wives’ confidences. I am ashamed to say, in my defense of Toni Parker, I said that ‘her husband is in Dak Tae with yours.’”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Hanrahan said, disgustedly.
“Having admitted that I was wrong, however,” Lowell said, “I fail to see the reason for the hysteria. At least, so far as Mrs. Sims is concerned. Those women Barbara heard talking in the can at the Pope O Club scare the hell out of me.”
“Colonel!” Bellmon raged. “Don’t you ever again dare refer to my wife by her first name!”
“I can’t believe you’re serious,” Lowell said.
“I am perfectly serious,” Bellmon fumed. “I cannot tell her about your despicable conduct, Lowell, obviously, but I can certainly see to it that you never speak her name again.”
“For Christ’s sake, Bob,” Lowell said. “Listen to yourself! Be
fore you start making moral judgments, ask me what’s going on between me and Dorothy Sims.”
“I know all I need to know,” Bellmon snapped.
“I don’t think so,” Lowell said. “For one thing, she had already made up her mind to divorce him before I came along. For another, I intend to marry her.”
“The facts are, Colonel,” Bellmon said, “that in addition to blatantly violating the security of an important operation, you have been committing open and notorious adultery with the wife of a brother officer, who just happens to be in a POW camp. I can think of nothing more contemptible. Be advised that it is my intention to bring charges against you.”
Lowell looked at him, shook his head, and laughed.
“You know what you can do with your charges, Bob,” he said. “Stick them right up there with your moral purity.”
Bellmon, moving so quickly that his blow landed before anybody could think of stopping him, reached across the table and struck Lowell with his fist. Not expecting the blow, Lowell fell to the floor, dragging his chair with him.
Bellmon came charging around the end of the table, his fists balled, obviously ready to throw another punch.
“For God’s sake, General!” General Hanrahan said, stepping in his path. “Control yourself.”
Bellmon looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. And then his face changed and took on a look of horror, as if he had just realized what he had done.
“I have been a soldier thirty-one years,” General Bellmon said, very softly, very distantly, with unnatural calm. “That is the first time I have ever completely lost control of myself. I offer you my shamed apologies, Colonel. I offer you all my shamed apologies.”
“Don’t be an ass, Bob,” Lowell said from the floor, examining the blood he had wiped from the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t you say one more goddamned word, Lowell!” Hanrahan said loudly, almost a shout, pointing his finger at Lowell. “You just sit down in your goddamned chair and don’t say one goddamned word!”
Lowell turned the chair upright and sat down in it.
“What I meant to say, sir,” Lowell said, “is that General Bellmon owes me no apology.”
“You’re goddamned right he doesn’t, you sonofabitch!” MacMillan said. “If you weren’t always fucking anything you can talk into a horizontal position, none of this would have happened! You knew her husband was a POW, damn you!”
Lowell lost his own temper, but he was not a shouter by nature.
“What about your enlisted women, Mac?” he asked, his voice almost conversational. “When you have them in the sack, do you ask them if any of their husbands are in a POW camp?”
From the stricken look on MacMillan’s face both Hanrahan and Bellmon saw that Lowell had struck home, that MacMillan had indeed violated the unwritten code that officers do not have sexual congress with enlisted women. It was, in fact, more of a violation of the officers’ code than Lowell’s having an affair with an officer’s wife. Even with a POW officer’s wife.
MacMillan looked as if he were going to say something, but didn’t.
MacMillan realizes, Bellmon thought, that Lowell knows. And no matter what he said, he would only dig himself in deeper.
“That’s enough from both of you,” General Bellmon said.
“The problem we have before us,” Hanrahan said, “is whether or not we have compromised our mission.”
“If it were up to me,” General Bellmon said, “I would have already scratched this operation.”
“I have to say this again,” Lowell said. “I’m worried about what Barbara overheard in the Pope Officers’ Club.”
“Yes,” General Bellmon agreed. He did not remonstrate with Lowell for calling Mrs. Bellmon by her Christian name.
Hanrahan went to the door and opened it.
“Sergeant Major,” he ordered. “Get the commanding officer of the CIC detachment on the phone, and tell him to get over here.”
Bellmon looked at him curiously.
“I’m going to ask him what his people have heard,” Hanrahan explained.
(Two)
Dorothy Sims telephoned thirty minutes later. She was at the Winston-Salem airport, waiting for the pilots of her father’s Lear jet. She had the children with her. They had insisted on leaving, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that.
“That poses a problem,” Bellmon said. “If this thing is still going to be Go, what do we do about her kids? If she is willing to voluntarily enter the detention facility?”
“I’ll meet her,” MacMillan said. “I’ll take Roxy with me. Roxy can keep the kids at our house.”
“OK,” Bellmon said. He did not look directly at MacMillan. He had not looked at him since Lowell had—obviously with conviction—accused him of sleeping with enlisted women. Something an officer just didn’t do.
“I’ll send Patricia in with her,” Hanrahan said. “That way there will be another civilian car.” He reached for one of the on-post telephones and told his wife that she was going to have to help baby-sit the Sims kids—she knew why—and that Roxy MacMillan would be calling with the details.
He pushed the telephone to MacMillan, who called Roxy and told her essentially the same thing, except that she was to pick him up right away at the Center. When he hung up, he looked at General Bellmon, who nodded, and then he left the room.
When the door was closed behind him, Lowell said, “About Mrs. Sims.” Both Bellmon and Hanrahan looked at him. “She’s no slut. She’s an officer’s wife—”
“I don’t think I want to hear any of this,” Hanrahan interrupted him.
“I’m not interested in any justification you might offer,” Bellmon said.
“She’s an officer’s wife, like Roxy,” Lowell pursued. “And Patricia Hanrahan and Barbara.”
“Not exactly, Colonel,” Bellmon said, growing angry again. “Not exactly. The similarity between your Mrs. Sims and Roxy and Barbara ends with the fact that they all are POW wives.”
“Get off your self-righteous horses and listen to me,” Lowell said.
“How dare you?” Bellmon snapped.
“What’s your point, Lowell?” Hanrahan said, impatiently.
“What…what…” Lowell said, stumbling, and then going on, “has come to pass between Mrs. Sims and myself does not alter the fact. She is an officer’s wife, and she has not been running off at the mouth about this operation any more than Roxy and Barbara have. Don’t you think Mrs. Hanrahan knows what’s going on around here? Don’t you know that Barbara Bellmon knows everything about this operation but the date?”
“Barbara,” Bellmon said, and corrected himself, “Mrs. Bellmon has nothing but the vaguest suspicion what’s planned,” he said.
“That’s why she picked up on the ladies’ room gossip, right?” Lowell said. “If she thought it was just gossip, do you think she would have told you?”
Bellmon thought that over a moment.
“You’ve made your point,” he grudgingly admitted.
“Not completely,” Lowell said. “I don’t think we have been compromised. I don’t want Monte Cristo aborted because of some notion you have that because Dorothy Sims doesn’t measure up to your notion of what a POW wife should be that she’s been running around shooting off her mouth.”
General Hanrahan shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
The telephone rang. Bellmon answered it.
“Yes, he’s here,” he said. There was a pause. “OK,” he said, and hung up. “That was Outfielder,” he said. “He said to keep you here. You can tell him how much you feel we can rely on your Mrs. Sims not having blown this operation. The decision whether or not to abort is his.”
“It’s not going to be that easy,” Lowell said. “The Mouse has one major character flaw.”
“Which is?”
“He doesn’t believe what Patton had to say about not taking counsel of your fears,” Lowell said. “You start talking ‘compromised, compromised,’ you�
��re going to make the abort decision for him,” Lowell said.
“And I should encourage Felter to go?” Bellmon said. “And risk the lives of two hundred thirty-eight officers and men? Not to mention the international military and political implications if Monte Cristo gets wiped out on landing?”
“I’ve never been accused of being a fool,” Lowell said. Bellmon snorted. “All right. In a tactical situation,” Lowell said, qualifying his statement. “I can see no reason not to go.”
“You don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, Lowell,” Bellmon said, more calmly. “And you wouldn’t be going alone.”
“I have more to lose than I ever have before,” Lowell said. “I really want to come back from this operation.” Bellmon looked at him. “But that isn’t the point,” Lowell went on. “The point is that if we abort Monte Cristo, we will very likely never get another chance. And it will be aborted unless we—unless you, General—give Felter a little backbone.”
“You’re not accusing Felter of cowardice, are you?”
“I’m accusing Sandy of being very very cautious by nature,” Lowell said. “I’m not accusing him of anything else.”
“And what happens if we go, and the entire North Vietnamese army is waiting for us?”
“We’ve considered that,” Lowell said. “We even have the letters from the President to the next of kin all typed up and ready for his signature. Eisenhower had a speech ready, too, in case the invasion of France failed.”
Bellmon looked at him.
“I’ve got to take a leak,” Bellmon said and walked out of Conference Room II.
When they were alone, Hanrahan said, “I hope you realize that no matter what happens, Duke, you’re through.”
“I have that feeling,” Lowell said. “I’ve had it before.”
“If you came out of this with the Congressional, they’d hand it to you at your retirement parade. You finally went too far. Was this piece of ass worth it?”
“Would you believe it’s not a piece of ass, Paul?” Lowell replied.
“I might,” Hanrahan said. “Bellmon won’t. And it doesn’t matter one way or the other, so far as you’re concerned.”
The Generals Page 32