The Line

by Bob Mayer

  WAIAWA, HAWAII

  3 DECEMBER

  6:20 a.m. LOCAL/1620 ZULU

  From the hillside Boomer could clearly see the Arizona Memorial and the entire harbor spread out below him. He was above the Pacific Palisades in the jungle that clung to the side of the mountains. Skibicki had driven them there in the dark, going up an old trail until it gave out in a small clearing, hidden by the overhanging trees.

  Boomer glanced over. Vasquez was in the back seat, sleeping. Skibicki had strung a hammock between two trees and was quietly snoring.

  Boomer looked along the southern coast of Oahu in the quiet splendor of the rising sun. He wondered if any place could be further from the cold gray walls of West Point in December than Hawaii? Boomer couldn't imagine the Academy on the slopes of Diamond Head. Such martial learnings seemed so far removed from the tropical paradise around him. But he only had to look down at the harbor and the constantly lit white building above the rusting hulk of the Arizona to know that war had come here too.

  Boomer twisted the focus on the binoculars. There was a launch heading out to the Memorial. He scanned it. Everyone on board was Navy except for one man in a suit. As he checked the man out, a sound to the side drew his attention.

  It was Skibicki stirring. The sergeant major swung his feet to the ground, still supported by the hammock. "How's the head?"

  Boomer reached up and felt the bandage the sergeant major had applied in the dark. "I've got a little bit of a headache, but other than that, it's all right."

  Skibicki glanced down at the harbor. "What's up?"

  "Not much," Boomer replied. "What's the plan now?"

  Skibicki stood up. "We wait. I'm willing to bet that there will be no sign of what happened last night in the tunnel, but I'm sure that there will be someone posted there, waiting for us to come back. There's not much we can do right now.

  "We wait," Skibicki repeated. "Let's hope Trace comes up with something today."

  "And if she doesn't?" Boomer had to ask.

  "Then we will have to do something."

  *****

  Eight kilometers to the south, Mike Stewart tried hard to look suitably impressed as he was briefed.

  "At precisely zero-seven-fifty-four the Antietam, an Aegis cruiser, will pass in review right there," the Navy captain said, pointing across the harbor, the crisp starched line of his dress whites accentuating the movement.

  Stewart wished he didn't have to wear this damn suit everywhere. He could feel a trickle of sweat down his back despite the offshore breeze and the sun not being much over the horizon yet. Stewart was standing on the edge of the Arizona Memorial, gazing out across the harbor at the sleek gray ships riding at anchor. He wondered how the Navy officer managed to look so cool and collected.

  "At zero-seven-fifty-four plus twenty seconds, a flight of F-16 Fighting Falcons will fly in from the north," the captain said, pointing toward the lush green hills bathed in the bright sunlight, "in a missing-man formation, and head out to sea. At zero-seven-fifty-four plus forty seconds, the bugler will begin playing Taps, at which time the President's party—"

  "I have the time schedule of the ceremony," Stewart interrupted as gently as possible. "Getting back to security. What about sea and air control? The media will certainly have helicopters and chartered boats, and you also will have private boats coming—" Stewart stopped at the captain's bark of a laugh.

  "There will be no problem with either unauthorized aircraft or vessels." The captain swept his arm around the harbor. "Everything you see here is Navy. No ship can get into this harbor without us clearing it at the mouth. We will have Marine Corps helicopter gunships on station to keep away any unauthorized aircraft."

  Stewart was more than satisfied with all that he had seen and been briefed on so far—yet General Maxwell's words echoed in his ears: "... particularly with regard to the military installations he'll be visiting."

  But Pearl was as safe as you could get, Stewart reasoned, as he followed the captain to the launch that was waiting to take them ashore. As he made the short hop into the boat, Stewart glanced down and through the green water the rusting round hole that had once been the mount for one of the Arizona's main guns was clearly visible. He felt a momentary chill. There were hundreds of bodies still entombed in the wreckage there. That thought immediately led him to the realization that those men had also thought themselves safe that Sunday morning so many years ago, nestled in the bosom of the Pacific Fleet.

  The words came to the forefront of his mind as clearly as if General Maxwell was there speaking them: What if the very security offered here was the threat itself? "Bullshit," Stewart muttered out loud.

  "Excuse me?" the naval officer asked, perplexed.

  "Nothing," Stewart said. He reeled in his wild train of reasoning. Damn General Maxwell, he thought; until this trip was over, Stewart knew his mind would have no rest, but he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for.

  *****

  Boomer put the binoculars down. Skibicki and Vasquez were heading down into town to get some fast food, while Boomer remained behind. No sense in all three of them being in the same place in public.

  Boomer knew the man in civilian clothes on the memorial and he knew where he worked. He registered that fact and filed it for future use. He didn't like Skibicki's plan of waiting but he didn't have any better ideas at the moment. But if they didn't hear from Trace by tomorrow morning, Boomer now had an idea what he was going to do.

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

  3 December 1995

  6:30 p.m. LOCAL/ 2330 ZULU

  The old man in the high-backed chair twisted the ring on his finger as he listened to the report over the secure phone. His aide shifted uncomfortably on the other side of the desk when the phone call ended.

  "Your men did poorly," Hooker said.

  "Yes, sir," the aide acknowledged.

  "The superintendent is very upset."

  To that the aide had nothing to say.

  "And worse," Hooker continued, "this woman—this Major Trace—she's still unaccounted for. The helicopter has not been reported anywhere."

  "I have my men still looking, sir."

  "I will have to take care of this personally," Hooker said.

  "Sir, I don't think—"

  Hooker cut off the protest. "We have reached a critical juncture and I can't leave this to amateurs anymore."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you know what she dug up at West Point?"

  "No, sir."

  Hooker leaned back in his leather seat. "I believe I know," he murmured. His voice became sharper. "Delay my flight to Oahu for a day. I want to get a resolution on this problem. File a flight plan for New York."

  "Yes, sir."

  CHAPTER 19

  WEST POINT MILITARY RESERVATION, NEW YORK

  3 DECEMBER

  7:00 P.M. LOCAL/ 2400 ZULU

  Pain from the left leg was the first thing Trace felt. It was a dull, deep throbbing midway up her thigh. She said a brief prayer of thanks for the feeling because it let her know she was still alive. She blinked, clearing her eyes. It was dark out, and there was no sound, not even the usual noises of the forest. The interior of the cockpit was deathly quiet, and she could barely make out the shapes of objects inside and nothing outside.

  Trace forced herself to keep still as she did an internal inventory of her body, gently flexing various muscles, working top to bottom. She almost fainted from the explosion of agony when she got to her left leg and attempted to flex her quadracep. Broken at the very least. She looked down, but it was too dark to tell. She knew something was across the top of the legs, as she could feel a straight pressure across both.

  Other than the leg, though, she felt reasonably OK, considering the state the helicopter was in. A few bruises and bumps, but nothing major. She reached out with her right hand and flicked on the overhead cabin light. At least there was still some juice in the battery.

  In the dim glow of the overhead s
he tried to see what her situation was. Still in the pilot's seat on the right side, Trace's body hung in the harness. But it wasn't just the harness that held her in place. The control panel had buckled and the metal edge above where the various gauges had once been was now pressed down against her legs. A red seepage on both legs showed where the metal had cut into flesh.

  The helicopter lay against the side of the mountain, a pile of torn and shattered metal and Plexiglas. The main rotor had twisted on impact and sliced through the rear half of the bird, separating the tail boom from the main cabin. Trace knew if it had come down in the opposite direction it would have bisected the cabin up front and her body in the process. The steel support cable that had hooked under the right skid had snapped and now lay coiled underneath the aircraft, pointing back toward the still-standing power lines.

  The left windshield had shattered upon impact with a boulder on the ground, spraying the inside of the cockpit with shards of clear plastic, flecks of which had cut Trace's hands and face. The gaping hole also allowed in the chill night air and the hint of moisture. Trace again tried moving and a low moan escaped her lips—no way she was using her left leg. She grabbed the edge of the control panel with both hands and pressed. It ignored her attempt. She tried again. Nothing.

  She checked her legs as best as she could. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, for which she was thankful; the specter of bleeding to death was all too real under these circumstances.

  Trace then reached up and switched the radio frequency to the emergency band. She pushed the send trigger on the collective but there was no rewarding hiss of broken static indicating she was transmitting. She tried again. Silence. Trace switched frequencies. Still nothing. After five minutes, she finally gave up. The impact must have broken the radio. At the very least she knew the condition of the helicopter meant the antenna had been sliced when the tail boom was cut off.

  She cast her mind about, searching for a way out of her situation, but the options were not just limited, they were nonexistent. She would have to wait and hope.

  "What now, Recondo?" Trace asked herself out loud. These very hills on the military reservation were where she had earned her "Recondo" badge her second summer at West Point. Billed as a mini-Ranger school, the eight-day-long Recondo training was designed to introduce "yearlings" to the basics of patrolling but, more fundamentally, was designed to introduce cadets to the military practice of being forced to perform difficult mental and physical tasks while under the influence of stress, and sleep and food deprivation. "Good training'' Boomer would call it, and Trace knew he was right. Combat was one of the highest stressors a human could go through and it was almost always under the worst possible conditions.

  Despite her predicament, Trace had to grimly smile as a freezing rain began to fall outside. It seemed things were getting even worse.

  Trace leaned back in the pilot's seat, as comfortable as she could be with immobile legs. She forced her mind away from her pain and discomfort and traveled back. She remembered Camp Buckner and the time her patrol of twenty-six cadets had charged a small hill defended by a squad of 82nd Airborne soldiers. They'd run screaming at the top of their lungs up the grass-covered slope to be met by a barrage of smoke and CS grenades. Hacking and coughing from the tear gas, they'd turned and run back downhill as swiftly as they had advanced. All except one classmate, Trace's bunkmate, Linda Greenberg, who'd simply frozen, standing still among the stinging gas.

  Since the powers-that-be had not thought to issue the cadets gas masks—and the 82nd was not supposed to be using the gas—the cadets could only stand at the bottom of the hill and watch as Linda gagged and vomited all over herself, until finally the gas dissipated. At which point, not to Trace's surprise—she'd already seen enough in her first year at West Point—her male classmates had gathered around Linda and ridiculed her for embarrassing them in front of the enlisted men of the 82nd squad who were laughing from on top the hill at the spectacle of the female cadet covered in puke. They were especially thrilled when it was discovered that Linda had also lost control of her bladder under the effects of the tear gas.

  Trace had taken Linda away from the jeers of their classmates and cleaned her up as best as she could in a nearby stream, giving her the extra set of fatigues from her rucksack to wear. A week later, just after the formal graduation from Recondo training where the cloth patches denoting successful completion of the training were given out by the cadre from the 10th Special Forces Group, the cadets of Trace's company had held their own ceremony where they gave out their own awards. Linda was issued a pair of rubber panties and a vomit bag. Trace was given a Recondo patch made of moleskin—the medic's tool to treat blisters—a reflection on the six runs she'd missed with foot problems during the summer training.

  It was sexist and it was brutal and most certainly "politically insensitive" in modern jargon, but as Trace sat there pinned in the pilot's seat, she also knew it was reality. The Academy had not been designed to prepare cadets to enter the normal world. It had been designed to prepare them to lead in combat and that in itself was the most brutal of all man's endeavors, despite such trappings as glory and honor. That cadets could be so nasty to those who failed to live up to their own standards was not surprising.

  A moan escaped Trace's lips. Her leg was throbbing again, even stronger than before. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Trace suddenly remembered the plastic case. She twisted her head and looked between the seats where she had jammed it on takeoff. It was still there.

  That was all that mattered right now. Trace reached for the case, but the pain that jolted out of her right leg was enough to blanket her mind in darkness.

  4 December

  7:45 a.m. LOCAL/1245 ZULU

  Trace hacked and coughed her way awake. Her chest felt terrible and she had a pounding headache. She blearily opened her eyes and quickly closed them. In the pale gray daylight, her current predicament was all too real. She could see the rock wall just in front of the cockpit and the tangle of metal.

  She opened her eyes again and looked down at her legs. There was a dull throbbing pain coming from her left leg and although it was much less than it had been last night she knew if she didn't get help soon, that the situation was going to be very serious. She tried the radio again, on that faint optimism people in grim situations have that something might have changed for the better. It hadn't.

  She glanced around, inventorying everything within reach. The survival vest with its knife. The plastic box. The crushed instrument panel. The overhead controls.

  Very carefully, Trace reached down with her left hand and picked up the box. She drew the knife from the survival vest hooked to the right wall behind her and slit the layers of duct tape around the seam. It took her a while and she was glad to have something to keep her mind off her situation although it took an inordinate amount of attention for her to do this simple task. With the tape gone, she found that a small clasp kept the two sides closed. She unfastened it and opened the box.

  Inside, an object wrapped in black plastic awaited her gaze. She drew out the object and slowly began peeling away the inside layers of protection. Whoever had hidden this had certainly wanted to make sure that it was protected from moisture. With her fingernails, Trace tore open the last thin sheaf of plastic and touched leather. She completely uncovered the object, and a leather-bound diary rested in her hands. On the cover, embossed in gold, were the initials: brh.

  With grimy fingers, Trace flipped open the cover. There was an inscription in large, flowing script on the inside:

  *****

  To my son, Benjamin, on this most happy day of your life—may the words you write within tell a tale of service and honor. Love Mother. 12 June 1930.

  *****

  "Hooker, you asshole," Trace muttered. The effort it had taken to open up the case had exhausted her. She put the diary back inside and slumped back against the seat. After a few minutes she passed into an uneasy slumber.

 
*****

  Trace started awake. For a few brief seconds her mind consoled her with the illusion that she was someplace else. Then she saw the crumpled cockpit surrounding her and felt the throb of pain from her legs and she returned to reality.

  She knew she was close to hypothermia. The lower half of her body was in especially bad shape. Besides the broken leg, she was damp, having been forced to urinate where she sat.

  Trace wrapped her arms tighter around herself and tried to keep her teeth from chattering so loudly. This time of year the training area was deserted and Trace knew the odds of someone stumbling across her location were slim. Looking at the grim side of the equation, she also knew that if no one came before nightfall, she didn't think she could make it through another night.

  Even though it was only three in the afternoon according to the clock on the dashboard, the sun was already low in the western sky. The temperature was also dropping in preparation for nightfall. Trace coughed, trying to clear her throat, but it was no use. The chill had settled into her lungs and the coughing only made it worse.

  There was no feeling in her left leg now, and that worried Trace more than the pain she had felt the past twenty-four hours. Whatever was happening in her lower limbs was bad. She was parched but didn't feel hungry. She leaned her head back against the hard metal of the seat and wished for unconsciousness, but even that desire worried her because she was concerned about waking up in the middle of the coming night. She just wanted it to pass, so that she would be able to wake and see the sun come up the next morning, but the logical, trained part of her mind told her she might not see the next morning.

  Trace frowned through the negative thoughts swirling in her mind. Something was different. She froze, turning her head from side to side and peering about, listening carefully.

  Trace cocked her head. There was no doubt about it now, as the sound grew stronger. A helicopter was heading this way.