Heart of War

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “It’s been going on for months. Remember when he was flying up to Washington about once a week? He had me calling all over, looking for an excuse for him to jump on a plane for Washington. Every time I saw the word Infantry on a Pentagon schedule, I picked up the phone and called Delta.”

  “I remember.”

  “He called in every debt he had at DESPER to get her reassigned. He used the base closure thing to justify the transfer.”

  “I had no idea.” Ed walked over to a kitchenette in the corner and opened the refrigerator. “Do you want a beer or a glass of wine?”

  “I’ll take a beer, if they’re cold.”

  Ed handed him a can of Budweiser. “Freezing.”

  Randy snapped open the beer and took a sip and tapped his finger on the side of the can nervously. “All I am is a pimp and a beard for the almighty General Beckwith. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Ed put his beer down. “You’ve got to hang in there. This isn’t going to go on much longer. When he misfires in his shot at chief, he’s out. They’ll retire him with a big ceremony on the parade field, and a week later he’ll be out in Desert Hot Springs working on his golf swing.”

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop him, Ed. He’s got a lock on it. All the guys who were on the NSC staff with him are pushing him at the White House. On the E-Ring at the Pentagon, his guys are bumping into each other running around whispering his name.”

  “We’re going to stop him with Bernie King.”

  “General King?”

  “Bernie is running hard. He’s got the strong support of the vice-president and all of the Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. With the kind of stuff you just told me about Beckwith, we’re going to put him away and Bernie’s going to be chief. This president can’t afford to appoint an adulterer to be chief of staff. No way.”

  “Beckwith hates King.”

  “Now you know why. Beckwith can read the tea leaves. Bernie just jumped onto the list.”

  “Well, none of this solves my problem. I can’t stand it anymore, Ed. You guys were right. If Beckwith ever found out I’m gay, he’d run me out so fast, I wouldn’t know what hit me, the two-faced, hypocritical bastard.”

  “Look. You just keep doing what you’re doing, and this whole mess will be over before you know it.”

  “What about us? You’re playing big-stakes poker with this guy, Ed. And he’s got spies everywhere. If he finds out about you and me—”

  Ed interrupted him. “He won’t.”

  “He won’t bother with destroying your career, Ed. He’ll go after you big-time. He’ll court-martial you. You could end up in jail.”

  “Look, Randy. I’ve been at this a long time. You don’t get to be a brigadier general and be a gay man unless you have learned a thing or two about how the game is played. I know Beckwith is a ruthless SOB. But he’s not the only ruthless SOB. We’ve got a few on our team too.”

  “You’re talking about Jack and Terry.”

  “And me. I’m not playing around here, Randy. If this man gets to be chief of staff, it’s going to be over my dead body. I’ll do whatever it takes to bring him down.”

  “You’re not going to sacrifice your career over him.”

  “Whatever it takes, Randy. It’s that important to me.”

  Randy looked at his friend with a renewed respect. It was true that if Bernie King made chief of staff, the Army would be a better place for everyone. Even gay men and women.

  Ed picked up the phone. “What do you want for dinner? I’ll call room service.”

  “I’d rather go out.”

  Ed’s face fell. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Oh, come on. I know a place on the west side. They’ve got wonderful soul food, nobody will know us—”

  “We can’t take that chance. There’s too much at stake.”

  “You see what I mean? I’m so sick of this.”

  Ed put the phone down and took Randy’s hand. “Don’t you think I know how tough it is? I’ve been living like this for twenty-five years. If Beckwith makes chief of staff, it’s going to get a lot worse. He’ll ignore don’t-ask, don’t-tell; he’ll run purges.”

  “I know. I know. It’s just that . . .” His voice trailed off. “It’s hard.”

  “I know it is.” He picked up the phone. “I’m having a big Caesar salad and a filet, and I’m ordering a bottle of Ravenswood zinfandel.”

  “I’ll have the same thing. Make it two bottles of zin.”

  Ed turned around, smiling. “That’s the spirit.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The place was a juke joint tucked into a grove of trees off a state road about twenty miles east of Columbus. Kara parked the car next to a battered Camaro and went inside. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and found him sitting in a booth in the corner, nursing a scotch and water. She walked up and put her purse on the table.

  “I don’t know about you, but this feels familiar, doesn’t it, General?”

  Beckwith looked up. “Sit down, please. I haven’t got much time.”

  Kara slipped into the booth opposite him. A gum-cracking waitress in tight jeans and a plaid shirt tied at the waist sashayed over to the booth. “Will ya’ll be needin’ a menu? Or are ya’ll just drinkin’?”

  “I’ll have a glass of wine. White, please.”

  “Well, we’ve got yer Almaden and yer Gallo and yer Reuniti and yer Franzini—”

  “I was thinking of a nice glass of chardonnay.”

  “Oh, that would be yer Franzini. We’ve got that in a box, ma’am. I’ll get it for ya.” She started to walk away. Kara stopped her.

  “I was looking for something a little better than that.”

  “Yer box wine is yer better wine, ma’am.”

  Kara took a deep breath and smiled. “Just bring me a beer. Any beer.”

  The waitress walked away. Kara looked across the table at Beckwith. “Your wife told me all about you and Lieutenant Worthy, so if you’re in a hurry, you can skip that part.”

  Beckwith’s eyes widened. “You talked to my wife?”

  “This morning. We had coffee in the breakfast nook, overlooking the garden. Very peaceful.”

  “What did she say, exactly?”

  “She said you were supposed to meet Sheila out by the firing range, but you never made it.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “No idea about what, General? That your wife knew you were having an affair? Or that she and I had a little talk?”

  Beckwith glared at her. “Don’t you get insubordinate with me, Major.”

  Kara glared right back. “General, I didn’t ask to be put in this spot between the two of you. I’m not a marriage counselor, and I’m sure as hell not a priest taking confession.”

  The waitress appeared with a tall bottle of Bud. “Will there be anything else?” Kara shook her head. Beckwith stared at his drink. “My name is Enid. People call me Ennie. Ya’ll just yell if ya need me.”

  After the waitress walked behind the bar, Beckwith looked up from his drink.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me where you were the night Sheila was killed?”

  “I don’t have to answer your goddamned questions.”

  “All right, then, I’ll just take what your wife told me to Hollaway and let him take it from there.”

  “I was nowhere near Sheila Worthy that night.”

  “So your wife says.”

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  “You know I can’t do that. I’ve been assigned to this case as prosecutor, and I’ve got an ironclad obligation to pursue all leads. If I don’t, I could be charged with obstruction of justice.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Really? That’s supposed to make me feel better?” She took a long pull on the bottle of Bud. “You can’t guarantee that, General.”

  “Yes, I can. As the commanding general, I’m the court-martial c
onvening authority. I’m the one who would have to approve charges against you. No one can overrule the commanding general.”

  “That assumes you’re going to remain commanding general, doesn’t it?”

  Beckwith looked at her, his eyes full of fire. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m just telling you the way things look from my perspective, sir.”

  “Look, Major, we can do this the easy way, or we can do it the hard way. Your choice.”

  “The easy way is, I believe you and your wife that you were with her, not Sheila. That would mean I’m taking the word of two people who have a lot to lose and everything to gain if I believe them. That would mean I’m in the pocket of two people whose marriage is a sham, who are virtually living a lie every day of their lives.” She took another sip of beer. “And the hard way would be?”

  Beckwith took a Polaroid photograph from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to her. “Recognize these?”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  Beckwith held his finger to his lips. “Sssshhh.” He unfolded a sheet of paper and handed it to her. “This is an inventory of the contents of the two overnight bags in the photograph. The bags were seized as evidence during the investigation of Worthy’s death and are under my control.” He pushed the paper across the table. “You’ll take special notice of items four, five, sixteen, and seventeen. Item four is a motel receipt for a double room, paid for with an American Express card. Item five is your American Express card receipt. Item sixteen is a list of the contents of Sergeant Nukanen’s bag, which was found in your car. Item seventeen is a female diaphragm showing signs of recent use.”

  Kara looked up from the paper. “You fucking bastard.”

  “You’re spending your nights screwing this hotshot NCO, and you’re going to sit here and tell me that I’m the one who’s living a lie? You’ve got a lot of nerve, Major.”

  “It’s a long way from fraternization to adultery, General. And an even longer way from there to murder.”

  He had a sadistic little smirk that told her just how much he was enjoying this. “And I guess you’re the one who can tell me just how far that is.”

  “You’re damn right I am.” Kara glared at him. “I’ll tell you what, General Beckwith. You go right ahead and do what you have to do, and I'll do what I have to do, and we’ll see who comes out ahead. You may ruin my career, but I swear to God, you’re the one who’s got some explaining to do, and no amount of backing and filling is going to get you promoted to chief of staff.”

  Beckwith shrugged. “I take it you haven’t discussed this with Sergeant Nukanen. You’ll probably end up with a reprimand of some sort that will prevent your promotion to lieutenant colonel, thus effectively ending your career on a sour but hardly disastrous note. But I happen to know what Sergeant Nukanen’s brigade commander does with fraternizing NCO’s in his command. He’ll run Nukanen through a special court-martial, reduce him in grade to private, throw him in the stockade for six months, and give him a less than honorable discharge from the service. You’ll go on and get a position with some big city law firm, but Sergeant Nukanen? He’ll have trouble getting work pounding condominium roofing nails in a hundred-degree sun down on the Gulf Coast.”

  “You’re threatening to railroad him. That’s illegal. I’ll stop you.”

  Beckwith sipped his drink calmly. He looked up at her with an indulgent smile. “Your trouble is, you haven’t been in the Army long enough to learn how the system works, Guidry. We’re not running a democracy here. Politicians are always saying, this is a nation of laws, not men. Well, this is an Army of men, not laws. There are men working for me who owe me not just their loyalty but their lives, and they will do what I say, even if they personally disagree with me. Therefore, if I say Sergeant Nukanen’s career is finished, he’s finished. You don’t have a say in the matter, Guidry. I do. That’s the difference between a general and a major.”

  Kara leaned against the plastic back of the booth. “You’d do anything to make chief of staff, wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  He smiled. “You’re damn right it is.”

  “Well, you’re not worth it, General. But Mace is. So you’ve got your deal. I’ll sit on the poop about you and Sheila. But you know something? You’re never going to make chief of staff. And you know why? Guys like you, guys who can’t keep it in their pants, one way or another the word gets out. Somebody’s going to find you out. Some other general, up at the Pentagon. And they’ll take you down, and I’ll be watching, and I’ll be laughing my head off.”

  “You’re learning.”

  Kara drained the last of her bottle of beer and stood up. “There’s only one thing I can’t figure about you, General. You want to know what it is?”

  Beckwith finished his drink and looked up.

  “What I can’t figure is, how do you do it? How do you get these young women like Sheila Worthy to keep fucking you? It must be the stars on your shoulder, General. Because it’s sure as hell not your dick.”

  Beckwith’s face turned red and he made a move, but Kara held up her finger, wagging it at him. She turned to walk away, stopped, and made a show of snapping her finger, like she just remembered something. When she turned to face him, she had a big smile on her face.

  “Almost forgot. Good afternoon, sir.” She snapped a quick salute and walked over and threw a twenty on the bar and pointed at Beckwith. “Ennie? Bring my friend another drink. Make it a double. He’s going to need it.”

  She drove home the long way, a county road around the edge of the military reservation, taking a short cut through the east gate. Driving through Fort Benning felt like passing through the years of her life. There was the medical dispensary where her mother had taken her for flu shots. And down the street—she went ahead and made the corner—was the grade school where she had passed first and second grades. She drove through the housing area of one-story duplexes where they had lived when her father was an instructor at the Infantry School. The trees were taller, and the grass seemed thicker, less trampled by little feet than she remembered, but the dull brick side-by-side duplexes looked just the same, and so did the kids who scampered in the backyards, chasing footballs and playing soccer and building the dirt-berm forts that all kids, even girls, seemed to build on Army posts the world over.

  She felt dislocated, driving through the neighborhood where her father had been a captain, and now here she was, a major. These days she wouldn’t have qualified for on-post housing because she wasn’t married, and she didn’t have kids. She didn’t fit into the Army’s all-encompassing plan the way most officers her age did—insert a kid into slot A, fold second kid, tab B, insert third kid into slot D—and so she was free of the deadly economic noose the military encouraged you to loop around your own neck—get a bunch of kids and a couple of car payments and a load of life insurance and take your chances with the storms of duty reassignments and hardship tours and low pay and bad housing and hope for the best, hope they’re not going to oust you in the next RIF, or worse still, eliminate the very ground you’re standing on, downsize your unit and the post where you’re stationed right out of existence. The world had gone round and round and round since she was a little girl playing in the backyard of one of those duplexes so many years ago. But General Beckwith had reminded her, as if she had needed reminding, that what goes around in the Army doesn’t necessarily come around. The military axiom was the same as it was in Caesar’s day. The guy with the most men and the biggest guns wins.

  She pulled up to a stop sign. She thought she recognized the street, so she turned left. Lee Circle looped around, and there, in the corner of a cul-de-sac, the little postwar duplex was just the way she remembered it, a bit forlorn after all these years, tucked away back there at the edge of a stand of trees. In the backyard she could see the old concrete clothesline poles and a sandbox made of railroad ties. She stopped. There were lights o
n in the living room. She heard a child’s cry. A light snapped on in the bedroom . . .

  He would come home late, still wearing his fatigues, his voice slurred from drinking. The sound of their voices leaked through the thin walls of the duplex, even though she could tell her mother was struggling to keep her voice down.

  Don’t you lie to me. I can smell her on you.

  SLAP.

  The sound of his jump boots pounding the wood floors, a door slammed, her mother sobbing softly in the kitchen.

  Kara backed out of the cul-de-sac and drove out of Lee Circle the way she had come. On the corner was the child-care center where her parents would leave her on nights they went to battalion cocktail parties when she was just five, and then six. The lights were on, and she could see fresh repairs on the part of the roof that had blown off in the storm. Someone was moving around inside. On a whim she pulled into the parking lot and cut the engine.

  She recognized her when she walked in. Her hair was gray now, her body stooped, but her blue eyes blazed just the way she remembered them. “Mrs. Bennett?”

  The old woman lifted her head and squinted through thick glasses. “I’m sorry, we’re closed. I’m just straightening up some things.”

  “Mrs. Bennett, it’s me, Kara Guidry. Do you remember me?”

  Mrs. Bennett put her hands on her hips, and a smile formed at the corners of her mouth. “Little Kara with the pigtails and the missing front teeth? My Lord, young lady, it has been about a hundred years!”

  They embraced. “Closer to thirty, Mrs. Bennett. I was driving by, and I saw you through the window. I hope I’m not interrupting you.”

  “Heavens, no. You know, you’re the second one of my young charges who has stopped by here this week. There was a young boy, he came along a few years after you left, little Tommy Butler. Well, turns out he’s working for a bank downtown, saw the article in the paper and came by the next day, helped clean up. Are you just passing through?”

  “No, I’m stationed here. I’m a JAG officer now. A major.”

  “My goodness! Who would have guessed!”