The Line

by Bob Mayer

  Old houses that were quarters for the permanent faculty at West Point, the heads of each department, lined the road to her left. She wondered which one Colonel Hooker had lived in during his long tenure as head of the history department. The entrance to the cemetery, directly across the street from the fire department, appeared on her right. The old cadet chapel had been transplanted here in 1910, stone by stone, after the present chapel had been built, and stood just inside the gate.

  Trace went past the entrance to the cemetery and continued to the post exchange parking lot. The cemetery was now off to her right, shielded from the parking lot by a line of eight-foot-high trees. Trace parked and sat still for a few minutes, collecting her thoughts. The PX wasn't open yet. That was obvious from the fact there were no other cars in the lot. The post gas station was directly ahead and it too wasn't open.

  Trace remembered Boomer's statement about being paranoid, but she felt there was no reason why she couldn't at least go into the cemetery and find out exactly where Custer was buried. Despite her time at the Academy, she had never entered the cemetery; she'd never had reason to.

  Trace left the car and walked through a gap in the trees at the edge of the parking lot. Among the grave markers in front of her, one immediately stood out: a massive concrete pyramid, at least twenty feet high. She followed the gravel road around, checking out the stones as she went. Many of the markers were relatively new, within the last several decades, so she knew she had to get to the older section of the graveyard.

  Passing the pyramid, which on the other side showed itself to be a mausoleum, she came upon another elaborate marker, this one consisting of several columns holding up a roof with an eagle on top. She recognized the name: Major General Daniel Butterfield, born October 31, 1831, died July 17, 1901. Butterfield, a graduate, was the man who had written the traditional military bugle call "Taps" among many other accomplishments in his life.

  Trace knew she was getting closer to Custer as the markers got older. A large tree hung over an obelisk at the edge of the next row of graves. A small placard was nailed high up on the tree and Trace walked up and read it: "FAGUS, SYLVATICA, PENDULA, A WEEPING BEECH," it said, identifying the tree. Trace walked around the tree and looked to see over whose grave it wept. The bronze plaque on the base of the obelisk told all:

  GEORGE A. CUSTER

  LT. COL 7TH CAVALRY

  BVT. MAJ GENL. U.S. ARMY

  BORN ECEMBER 15TH

  1839 HARRISON CO. OHIO

  KILLED WITH HIS ENTIRE COMMAND

  IN THE BATTLE OF LITTLE BIG HORN

  JUNE 23RD 1873

  Trace pulled out the letter and looked. It said the diary was to the left of the base of the monument, between Custer's and his wife's grave. But there was no grave to the left, just the weeping tree.

  Trace went RN Daround the obelisk, to the other side. A bronze buffalo head stuck out of the side facing the tree. On the far side, a soldier on a horse was emblazoned, along with the family name of Custer at the base. To the left, a long, stone grave marker read:

  elizabeth bacon

  wife of george a. custer, major general u.s.a.

  april 8, 1842 - april 4, 1933.

  The top edge of Mrs. Custer's marker was on line with the front edge of her husband's. The diary lay in between.

  The cemetery was on a level with the Plain, a hundred feet above the Hudson River. A hundred and fifty feet from Custer's grave, there was a low stone wall, then the heavily wooded ground on the other side precipitously descended down to Target Hill Field at river-level where Trace had spent many an afternoon playing soccer in intramurals. She could hear the descending whine of a helicopter engine coming from that direction; it must be the Huey that had flown by while she was driving around the Plain shutting down. The sewage treatment plant for the Academy was also down there, and the smell of the plant was well known to cadets because every time they had to take their two-mile physical fitness test run, the course went out past the treatment plant and then back.

  Trace looked about in the immediate vicinity of the grave. The cemetery was empty, and this spot wasn't visible from either the PX parking lot or the building that housed the caretaker of the cemetery. To the left of the Custers, Trace was interested to see the name Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter when it was fired upon at the beginning of the Civil War. She wondered who else that had been such an integral part of the country's history was buried here, but now was not the time. The PX would be opening shortly, and she needed to go in there and get the equipment to uncover the diary.

  The doors to the PX were unlocked at exactly at eleven, and Trace was the third person in. She went to the back of the store where the four seasons section was and quickly found what she was looking for—a small hand spade that she could easily fit into the pocket of her coat. In hardware she picked up a measuring tape and took her purchases to the front. She was required to show her ID card before paying, then she made her way out into the parking lot.

  The weather was still cold and gray with a low overcast sky. Trace could hear distant cheers coming from the vicinity of the track and field stadium down at river-level below the cemetery, next to Target Hill Field. She passed her car and slipped between the trees into the cemetery. She walked directly to Custer's grave.

  There was still no one about, so Trace kneeled in the hard earth and pulled out the tape measure. Two feet to the left, on line with the front of the gravestone. She dug the point of the spade into the earth and began digging. She was grateful the ground wasn't frozen or else it would have required dynamite to make any sort of penetration. Trace felt very exposed as she continued to dig and kept glancing about, keeping an eye out.

  *****

  In the PX parking lot an MP car pulled up to Trace's rental car, noted the license tag, then drove away to park near the main PX itself. The MP in the car picked up his radio mike and called it in to Sergeant Taylor. Within four minutes a van pulled up, and a major—identified as Quincy by his nametag—and a young captain stepped out. The MP pointed out the car to them.

  Quincy glanced around, then pointed at the PX. "She must be inside." He jabbed a finger at the MP. "You stay here and watch the car." He grabbed the other officer. "Let's go. Captain Isaac." The two entered the PX and began a systematic search of the store.

  *****

  The spade hit something solid about ten inches down. Trace continued to excavate, adding to the small pile of dirt next to the hole. She brushed away with her fingers and exposed a red plastic surface. She carefully dug around, until she reached the edges—about ten inches long by eight wide. She pressed the point of the spade in along the sides, breaking the box free from the dirt. After four minutes, it came loose and she held in her hands a plastic box, the seams wrapped in duct tape. It was heavy, as if whatever it contained was solid and filled most of the space inside.

  *****

  "She's not in here," Captain Isaac said. They were standing at the checkout counters, having been through the entire store twice.

  Major Quincy looked out into parking lot, noting the location of the car, and thinking furiously. "Could she be at the gas station?"

  Isaac shrugged. "Let's check it out."

  The two officers double-timed across the parking lot and after a brief look inside, insured that the object of their search wasn't there. "Where the hell is she?" Quincy muttered.

  Isaac pointed. "The cemetery?" he guessed.

  "What would she be doing in there?" Quincy asked, moving before Isaac had a chance to answer. The two headed for the break in the trees.

  *****

  Trace shoved the dirt back into the hole, but the absence of the box left a depression there that would be noticeable to the first person passing by. She pulled her key chain out and flipped open the small knife attached to it and began cutting open the duct tape to see what was inside.

  "There she is!" a voice cried out.

  Trace looked up and she didn't have to consider the sit
uation very long. Two officers, their long black raincoats flapping in the wind, were racing toward her. She tucked the box under her arm and ran in the opposite direction, straight for the wall enclosing the cemetery. She made it there with a fifty-meter lead on her pursuers. She looked down the rock-and-tree-strewn slope on the other side, unable to see the bottom. She knew it had to come out around Target Hill field, and she also knew that that was putting herself in a dead-end situation, but a glance over her shoulder convinced her that it was better than the one she was currently in. The two officers had drawn .45 caliber pistols from the pockets of their raincoat and the lead one—a major from the oak leaves on his collar—halted briefly and fired, the round cracking by. Trace threw herself over the wall and began scrambling downhill.

  *****

  Quincy and Isaac made it to the wall in time to see Trace disappear into the woods below. "Follow her!" Quincy ordered. "I'll get the van and meet you there." He turned and ran back to the PX parking lot.

  *****

  Trace cursed as she slipped on the steep slope. She dropped the box as she desperately grabbed with both hands for a low tree branch to arrest her fall. The box continued downslope on its own. Trace followed it at a slightly slower pace and reclaimed it when it lodged next to a small boulder. She could hear the yells from what must have been the scout jamboree at the stadium off to her far right. She glanced over her shoulder and couldn't see any pursuit, but she assumed there had to be. She didn't know how they had found her. Maybe the damn checkout women in the PX were scanning IDs for all she knew. At this point it didn't really matter.

  Trace tried to come up with a plan as she continued down. She knew that there was only one way out once she got to the bottom. Target Hill Field was a level area surrounded on two sides by the mountains and on the third by the Hudson. She would have to go to the right, past the sewage treatment plant. She also knew that whoever was after her also knew that and they could cut her off. She increased her pace, ignoring safety for speed.

  She broke out of the trees just to the left of the sewage treatment plant and skidded to a halt, trying to catch her breath as she looked around. The Huey helicopter she had seen was parked in the middle of the nearest soccer field.

  She heard a distant yell above and behind her. No time and no other options. She ran forward to the helicopter. It was open; the crew must have been over at the scout jamboree. A sign giving the aircraft's specifications was leaning up against the open left cargo door; obviously the aircraft was a static display for the scouts to look at later in the day.

  Trace swung open the left pilot's door and settled into the seat. There wasn't time to do it by the book, the way she'd been trained at Fort Rucker over ten years ago. She flicked the generator switch to start and opened the fuel flow. She grabbed the throttle and rolled it to the start position while pulling the start trigger. She was rewarded with the turbine engine slowly whining to life. She breathed a short prayer of thanks that the battery had been up to power as she watched the N-l gauge—the indicator of the engine's RPMs—slowly rise. The engine was still warm from its recent shutdown, so the startup was much faster than starting a cold engine.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spotted one of the officers emerge from the woods and look about. The N-l gauge hit fifteen percent, and the blades overhead began to slowly turn. The officer stared at the helicopter in surprise and then began running forward. Trace increased torque on the throttle, turning on the inverter switch, going to full power. She knew she was risking overheating the engine, but the options seemed limited as the officer pointed his pistol at her from forty feet away and fired a shot. The bullet ricocheted off the Plexiglas to Trace's right, cracking it.

  She pulled in the collective with her right hand, keeping the engine at full throttle. With a shudder the helicopter slowly lifted. The officer fired again, missing wildly. Trace kicked the pedals, putting the bulk of the helicopter between her and the man. She wasn't surprised to see a van skid through the chain link fence surrounding the field and come bouncing straight toward her. She pulled further up on the collective and the gap between the skids and the ground grew. With only twenty feet of altitude, she pushed the cyclic over with her left hand and headed along the ground, away from the van.

  "Come on, baby, come on, give me some power," she pleaded as the old Huey strained under the punishment. She leveled off, still only twenty feet above the ground, with the bulk of Storm King Mountain less than 400 meters away. Trace pulled back on the cyclic, slowing her forward progress, and put everything into the cyclic, gaining altitude as quickly as possible.

  She cleared the foothills of Storm King with barely five feet between the skids and the highest tree tops and was off to the west, disappearing from the sight of the two officers below.

  *****

  "What do we do, sir?" Captain Isaac asked, holding his empty .45 in his hand.

  "The bitch has got to land somewhere," Quincy said, "and when she does, she's ours. Let's go alert all the local airfields and the State Police."

  *****

  Trace's options were rapidly dwindling. The thickly overcast sky was pressing down on her, forcing her to stay below 1,500 feet altitude. With the mountainous terrain that surrounded West Point, there were only a couple of directions she could fly. Out the right window, the tree covered slopes of Crow’s Nest and Storm King Mountains loomed, stopping her from going north. To her rear, the low valley of the Hudson beckoned, but Trace instinctively didn't want to go the easy way—that's where they would look first. South, Bear Mountain blocked the way.

  In her haste to simply get away from Target Hill Field, she'd headed west and passed over Washington Gate less than a minute ago—the rear entrance to the Academy from Route 293. For the present she was following the road, fifty feet above the black ribbon. She tried to remember as best she could the surrounding terrain. Following the road was the safest route for the moment. She knew the New York State Thruway was about a dozen miles to the west and she estimated she might be able to follow that to the north and land at Stewart Airfield, a former military airbase, that had been turned over to civilian authority several years previously. Trace figured she had a good chance of landing there and getting away in another rental before the alert went out.

  *****

  At the West Point MP station, Sergeant Taylor received a call from the superintendent's office less than two minutes after getting the radio call from two of his MPs about shots fired near the cemetery and Target Hill Field. He wasn't surprised when the superintendent's aide told him to ignore all reports and that nothing had happened.

  Taylor instructed his MPs to stay away from whatever was going on and to forget about it. Then he picked up the phone and called the same number he had called earlier after realizing he was dealing with the supe's office.

  He started speaking as soon as the other end was picked up. "Harry, it's Sergeant Taylor. Something's happening."

  *****

  Long Pond flashed by on the left, then the flashing yellow light indicating the turnoff for Camp Buckner. Trace banked right, overflying the long barracks that made up the summer training encampment. Popolopen Lake appeared and Trace flittered across the surface, continuing on a southwesterly direction. She knew the Bull Hill firetower was somewhere off to her right, but the cloud cover was so low, the tops of the hills were completely covered.

  Doubt began to creep into Trace's mind. Did 293 intersect the Thruway or did it loop back to Route 6 and Bear Mountain? She had driven out this way numerous times as a cadet but that was over a dozen years ago. Of one thing she was certain: the Thruway was to the west, and it was her best and only shot through the mountains and to Stewart Airfield. She remembered seeing the four-lane highway from her plebe field training at Lake Frederick which she knew was very close, somewhere off to the right. With her hands full of cyclic and collective, there was no way she could check to see if there were any charts in the helmet bag next to the seat. A helicopter needs two han
ds to fly; let go of the controls even for the briefest of seconds and the aircraft will immediately attempt to invert and destroy itself.

  A gap appeared in the solid line of green to Trace's right as the terrain descended below the clouds, an opening heading due west. Trace made her decision and turned, heading directly into the opening. A pond appeared: Lake Frederick? Trace wondered. She was caught between the gray clouds less than a hundred feet above and the black water thirty feet under her skids. The far side of the pond was a solid wall of trees. She was forced to turn left again, southwest, following the pond's surface.

  The pond gave way to swamp and Trace slowed to an airspeed of less than thirty knots. She was looking out to the right when something appeared in the corner of her eyes. As she spun her bead about she screamed a curse and pulled in on the collective as she slammed the cyclic over. High-tension wires were directly ahead, looming down out of the clouds and attached to a tower to her far left.

  For a brief second Trace thought she'd make it as they flashed beneath the cockpit. The toe of the right skid didn't clear. It hooked on the topmost wire. The helicopter tilted and the blades flashed through the steel wires, destroying the wires and themselves in a split second. The helicopter went from an aerodynamic object to a rock.

  Trace's hands were still struggling with the dead controls when the cockpit slammed into the rock wall face, then tumbled to the ground below, coming to a rest in a pile of broken tree limbs, crumpled metal, and shattered Plexiglas.

  CHAPTER 18