Duty and Dishonor

by Merline Lovelace

  “Do you recall approximately when the theft occurred?”

  Although Marsh phrased the question in a neutral tone, Julia grasped the sinister implications behind it immediately. Her heart hammering, she gave the only answer she could.

  “I recall exactly when the theft occurred. I spent my birthday, June 10th, at Ta Bi Tha. The next day I reported the gun missing to the military police on Tan Son Nhut.”

  The agent didn’t say a word as he jotted the date down. He didn’t have to. The knowledge that Gabe Hunter had turned up missing eighteen hours later burned in Julia’s mind.

  Her hand shaking, she picked up the final photograph. It displayed two bullets against an opaque white background. One was a shapeless blob. The other had been magnified many times over to show its distinctive tapered shape and crimped ring around the copper jacket.

  “Ballistics theorize that the first round killed Captain Hunter. The second entered his body when he was already on the ground.”

  Julia looked up to find Marsh watching her intently. She had no idea what her face revealed at that moment. She could only hope it was as frozen as the rest of her.

  “The second bullet most likely went in below the navel and spent itself in the soft, internal organs,” he continued. “If it had hit bone, it would’ve flattened on impact and lost its distinctive, tapered shape.”

  She refused to think. Wouldn’t allow herself to feel. She knew that there was worse yet to come.

  Steeling herself, she opened the cover on the autopsy report. Its clinically detached language didn’t soften its blow. Julia got halfway through the description of the remains and couldn’t bring herself to finish. She’d have to read the report sometime, but for now all she could handle was that the fact that Gabe had died from a bullet that entered his skull through the left anterior quadrant of his frontal cranial bone.

  Beneath the autopsy was Claire’s statement. Julia read it swiftly, cringing inside. The disjointed denials that there was anything, anything! between Lieutenant Endicott and Captain Hunter sounded too much like those of a woman who didn’t want to admit the truth.

  “Is there...?” She cleared her throat. It felt as dry and sandpapery as her eyes had earlier.

  “Would you like some water? Or coffee?”

  Marsh’s offer surprised her. She seized on it gratefully. “Coffee, please. Black.”

  “Same for me,” his partner put in when he looked her way.

  He went across the hall, returning a few minutes later with two steaming mugs. He handed her one and passed the other to the elegantly attired black woman. Someone had trained him well, Julia thought, sipping the hot liquid. A wife? He didn’t wear a wedding ring, but a number of men didn’t. His partner?

  Realizing that her thoughts were straying too far afield, Julia reined them in. She took another sip, then set the mug aside.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “We have another statement.”

  “From whom?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel James McMinn, United States Air Force retired. Do you remember him?”

  She nodded slowly. “I knew him as Gator.”

  Until last night, Julia hadn’t thought of Gabe’s hootch mate in years. She probably wouldn’t have recognized him if she’d passed him on the street. She could picture his face in vivid detail now, though. During the long hours before dawn, she recalled a lot of details she’d tried so hard to forget.

  Marsh lifted a typed sheet from the folder in front of him. “Colonel McMinn was interviewed at his home in Florida by one of our agents. We got his statement over the fax right before we left to come over to the Pentagon. I’ll have a copy made for you before we leave.”

  Unlike Claire’s rambling, impassioned statement, Gator’s was short, succinct, and damning.

  Julia listened closely, her hands clasped on the table, as Marsh read the short statement aloud. Then his eyes homed in on her face.

  “It appears that Lieutenant Colonel McMinn has a different opinion of your relationship with Captain Hunter than the one you gave us yesterday, Colonel Endicott. You stated for the record that you weren’t having an affair with Hunter. McMinn states the opposite, based on his personal observations and the information Captain Hunter relayed to him.”

  “I can’t answer for what Hunter told his hootch mate,” Julia returned. “I think the legal term for that kind of second-hand information is hearsay. In my book, it falls somewhere between wishful thinking and sick fantasy.”

  “Whatever your relationship was with the deceased, McMinn describes it as passionate and volatile to the point of violence.”

  “Volatile, yes, I’ll concede that. Violent...” Julia’s nails dug into the backs of her hands. Deliberately, she relaxed her grip. “I suppose that’s how it must have appeared to Gator. He saw me slap Gabe...Captain Hunter. Once.”

  “According to McMinn, you rocked Hunter back on his heels.”

  “I gave it everything I had,” she replied dryly.

  Her answer earned a quick lift of Marsh’s reddish brown brows. For an instant, his mouth tipped toward a smile.

  Could he be human after all? Julia needed to believe he was.

  The smile died before it was born. “Would you tell us why you slapped Captain Hunter?”

  She wanted to lie. The truth shamed her and only added to the evidence piling up against her. But she knew her only chance of survival was to stick as close to the truth as possible.

  “I had taken a reporter and photographer over to meet with him and some of his crew members. After the briefing, while the others were out of the room, Captain Hunter propositioned me. Crudely. And I slapped him.”

  Marsh didn’t blink. “He propositioned you? To do what?”

  “He invited me to have sex with him.”

  I’m sorry, Claire. So sorry. I can’t deny it any longer.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t have sex with him?”

  “No.”

  “Was that the first time Captain Hunter propositioned you?”

  “In so many words, yes.”

  “So he’d let you know before that he wanted to have sex with you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted slowly, reluctantly. “Several times.”

  Julia saw the speculation, quickly masked, in the gray eyes opposite her.

  “What happened after you slapped Captain Hunter?”

  She struggled to recall what happened after her angry confrontation with Gabe. Those few moments in his room so overshadowed the rest of that long ago morning that she had to force herself to get past them.

  “I think... No, I know. I told Captain Hunter that he’d better not try to fly the journalists until I’d secured the okay through appropriate channels. Then I went back to my office and got on the phone to the MACV Special Projects Division. They worked approval for the flight with the Deputy Commander for Operations.”

  Marsh sent her a curious look. “Why didn’t you just let Hunter press? Wouldn’t it have been his neck on the line if he’d taken them up without proper authority?”

  “Those men were my responsibility. I wasn’t about to let Dean Lassiter and his photographer fly aboard a gunship without proper authorization.”

  Marsh’s partner stirred. Her black eyes widening, she entered the fray for the first time. “Dean Lassiter? Are you talking about the senior White House correspondent and political talk show pop star? The man I keep hearing hailed as the Walter Cronkite of the 90’s?”

  “The same.”

  “I didn’t realize Lassiter had spent time in Vietnam.”

  “He wasn’t there long,” Julia told her with a small, tight smile. “Just long enough to win a Pulitzer.”

  Her smile faded as she caught the quick look Special Agent Lyles exchanged with her partner.

  Oh, smart, Endicott! Real smart! She’d just given them another person to add to their list of interviewees. Dean Lassiter, of all people. She knew what he could do w
ith a story like this.

  “Did you get Lassiter and his photographer clearance to fly with Captain Hunter?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Vaguely, Julia remembered Gabe’s mocking grin when she showed up for the mission briefing with the aeronautical orders. She’d lingered at the briefing to learn the details of the mission. The Italian photographer’s swarthy face had gone pale when he learned they were going after an armed convoy moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Lassiter had scribbled furiously in his notebook.

  He’d written a good story after that mission, Julia recalled. Stark and restrained, it nonetheless conveyed the essence of a gunship mission: hours of flying monotonous circles in the night sky punctuated by moments of gut-sucking as they attacked a moving target. When the target fired back, as it had the night of Lassiter’s first mission, the reporter’s copy had gotten increasingly terse.

  He didn’t sell that story to the New York Times or to anyone else. But he did sell the next one to a major west coast daily, and the one after that. Within a week, he’d established himself among the tight-knit journalistic community. With Gabe greasing the way for him, Lassiter and his photographer always managed to get to the action.

  Gabe. Everything always came back to Gabe.

  “When was your next contact with Captain Hunter?”

  “Two weeks later,” Julia answered slowly. “March 30th.”

  “Where?”

  “At DaNang.”

  “What happened that day?”

  She stared at him, thinking of all the answers she could give to that question. Finally, she countered with one of her own. “How old are you, Mr. Marsh?”

  He cocked his head. “Forty-two.”

  Forty-two. Four years younger than Julia herself.

  “So you were...what, seventeen in 1972?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Too young for Vietnam,” she murmured, tracing a nail on the polished surface of the table. “Too young to know what happened that day.”

  “Tell me, Colonel.”

  She lifted her gaze to his. “On March 30th, Mr. Marsh, North Vietnam launched the largest offensive of the Vietnam conflict. Suddenly, the war we all thought was over blew up in our faces.”

  Chapter Nine

  DaNang Air Base, Vietnam

  March, 1972

  “That’s China Beach.”

  The pilot’s voice sounded thin and scratchy over the static crackling through Julia’s headset.

  “Always reminds me of the south Texas coastline, down around Padre Island,” he commented.

  She peered through the cockpit windshield at the glistening beach below. A bright aqua sea edged a sweep of sand. The water deepened to emerald a few yards from shore, then to cobalt further out, beyond the barrier reef.

  “The USO shows are pretty good at the Beach Club, and you might actually get a cold beer if you hit the place early enough,” the co-pilot shouted, leaning over the back of her seat. He’d given Julia his headset and his seat soon after take-off from Tan Son Nhut and had to resort to bellowing over the roar of the C-130’s four engines. “Too bad you’re not coming up this way to indulge in a little in-country R&R.”

  The reminder of the reason behind her flight to DaNang obliterated Julia’s momentary pleasure in the scenery. She thumbed the transmit button. “Maybe next time.”

  “Yeah.”

  The pilot banked the cargo plane and brought it around on final approach. In the distance Julia could see the sprawling military complexes and hilltop fire bases that guarded the port of DaNang. The second largest city in the Republic of Vietnam, it looked immense from the air. Leveling the aircraft, the pilot coordinated his approach with the tower. Julia pulled off her headset and started to climb out of the seat.

  The copilot motioned her back. “No, stay there. This old bird can put herself down without much help from either one of us.”

  He hung over her shoulder, pointing out various landmarks as they passed. Marble Mountain guarded the southern approach to the city. Steep, craggy Monkey Mountain loomed over it to the north. Crescent-shaped Half Moon Bay nestled between the two towering peaks.

  As the C-130 swooped closer to the air base, the beauty of the bay gave way to the grim realities of war. Julia saw huge craters in the sand and piles of rubble in the outskirts of the city, remnants of Tet ‘68. Defoliants had denuded a clear zone all around the sprawling air base, which was guarded by sandbags and wire emplacements all along its perimeter.

  Julia had thought Tan Son Nhut a frenetic, busy airport, but from above DaNang Air Base looked even busier. Rows of concrete revetments marched down the length of the runway. Big-bellied cargo planes, needle-nosed fighters, recon birds, light observation craft, and whirring helicopters crowded the taxiways and parking aprons.

  The 130 pilot put his heavy craft down with a breezy skill and a small thump, then reversed thrust. The four powerful turboprop engines whined in protest. The plane shuddered and gradually slowed. With the loss of the cooling airstream, the cockpit filled with suffocating heat and jet fuel fumes. By the time the plane pulled into its parking area, perspiration dampened Julia’s green fatigue shirt and trickled down between her breasts. She pulled off the headset and climbed over the throttles.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she shouted over the whine of the dying engines.

  The pilot gave her a thumbs-up. “Any time, Lieutenant. Nothing we trash haulers enjoy more than ferrying a pretty woman.”

  The co-pilot escorted her back to the cavernous belly, which was crammed with web-covered cargo pallets. Shouldering open the side hatch, he jumped the few feet to the concrete and held up a hand to help her down.

  “Wish we could wait on you, Lieutenant. But we’re only going to be on the ground long enough to dump half our cargo and take on some fuel.”

  “I’ve got a ride lined up on another plane coming through this afternoon,” she assured him.

  “Good thing. DaNang isn’t my favorite place to hang around after dark. Tough about your photographer friend, by the way. He was some unlucky dude.”

  Yes, he was, Julia thought grimly as she hitched a ride to base ops with one of the crew chiefs. Very unlucky.

  D’Agustino had known the risks when he and Lassiter had followed Gabe north. The pilot had been sent to DaNang for a few weeks to augment its short-handed AC-119 squadron. He’d warned the journalists that the base took in-coming almost every night. It was their decision to leave the relative safety of their hootch to capture the damage from last night’s rocket attack on film...and D’Agustino’s bad luck that a secondary explosion had ripped off his right arm just below the shoulder.

  The MACV Public Affairs duty officer had received the casualty report within an hour of the incident and passed it to Julia’s boss. Her boss had yanked her out of sleep at four this morning with a phone call, furious with her for setting the two newsmen up with Gabe Hunter in the first place. In his words, she’d damn well better get her butt up to DaNang and pull that friggin’ team out of there. He expected her to do whatever was necessary to minimize the brutally adverse stories he expected Lassiter to file as a result of the incident.

  Julia had made it to the Tan Son Nhut aerial port by five. With the help of a scheduler, she called DaNang and discovered that D’Agustino was being med-evac’ed to a civilian hospital in Singapore, and would be shipped home from there. The same helpful sergeant had put her on the first bird leaving for the northern base. The transporter had assured her she wouldn’t have any problem getting herself and Lassiter back, not with all the traffic going in and out of DaNang these days. Now, she just had to convince Dean to return to Saigon with her.

  With a quick smile of thanks for the lift to base ops, she shouldered her purse and climbed out of the truck. The 366th Wing’s public affairs officer was waiting for her, alerted by a radio message relayed from the C-130. Short and stocky and intense behind his wire-rimmed glasses, the captain returned her salute, introduced himself as Chuck
Dillon, and lifted his green fatigue baseball cap to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

  “I’m sure glad to see you, Lieutenant. The old man’s not real happy about the fact that a newsman almost bought the farm on the base last night. If you hadn’t let us know you were coming up, we would’ve put this reporter on a plane out of here ourselves.”

  Julia walked with him to his Jeep. “Do you know where Lassiter is now?”

  “He’s bunking down with Captain Hunter at the old Marine Corps compound on the other side of the base. It’s too close to the perimeter for my comfort, but a lot of the guys prefer it.”

  “They prefer being close to the perimeter?”

  The captain double clutched, sending his vehicle off with a squeal of tires. “Most of the in-coming are aimed at the runways on this side of the base. They usually sail right over the old compound. Once in a while one falls short, though. Like last night.”

  Hot wind whipped at Julia’s face as the Jeep zinged along the perimeter road. They rounded the end of the runway and sped toward a wire-fenced complex of hootches. The Marines who’d originally built these shelters had dug in for war, Julia saw. Instead of the sand bags used elsewhere, they’d stacked sand-filled fifty-gallon drums in double rows around the lower half of the wooden structures. Thick plywood covered the window openings. With their tin roofs and lack of ventilation, the long, ungainly buildings no doubt sucked in heat like a sponge, but they’d protect the occupants from anything but a direct hit.

  Assuming, she thought grimly, the occupants had sense enough to stay inside during an attack.

  The captain returned a loose salute from the guard at the wire gates to the compound and drove through the rows. Tall, feathery banyan trees dotted the complex and afforded some relief from the sun. Patches of scraggly grass grew between the hootches, providing a meager contrast to a landscape of military blacks and browns and grays. Finally, Dillon swung the Jeep around a corner and screeched to a halt beside a white stucco house. Julia stared at the small, shuttered cottage in surprise.

  “This used to belong to a plantation overseer or someone like that,” Dillon explained. “When the French moved out, the Marine commander moved in. Our services squadron commander has it now. He’s on R&R in Thailand, and invited Captain Hunter to bed down here in his absence.”