Bassett chuckled. “Someone who was dependent on them, you mean. That’s what’s interesting about armies. They defy the laws of nature. In armies, the fittest insure that those less fit depend on them for their survival.”
“Wonderful. Gibson’s following his dick around, and I’m following him, hoping like hell his dick doesn’t get him lost.”
“You’d better pray that he succeeds in keeping his affair a secret, because if word gets around this post that he’s screwing around, he’ll take you down with him. They’ll say it’s your fault, that you weren’t running a tight ship, that you’d let moral standards slip.”
Slaight started laughing. “And . . . I waited thirty . . . years . . . for this!” he sputtered between guffaws.
Bassett joined in the laughter. It was hilarious. God had set a trap and he’d walked straight into it. It was another of His marvelous jokes. You spent a lifetime getting power that, firmly in your grasp, just reminded you every day how small it was and how little it meant.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
JACEY HAD spent the day brooding about what she had learned from Dorothy’s E-mail and had concluded that there just wasn’t an easy way to approach Ash. What she needed to ask him was: Why? Why hadn’t he told her about the party on Labor Day? Why hadn’t he told her he had been at a party with Dorothy less than twenty-four hours before she died?
She had so many other questions. Was he trying to hide something? Had he taken someone else to the party? Was it some kind of a guy thing, where he and all these big-time six-stripers didn’t want her around? That couldn’t be it. She was friends with them, and as a cadet captain, she was one of them, and her boyfriend was one of them. It had been her dream since she was a little girl, looking through her father’s West Point yearbooks. She thought those guys in their uniforms with all the stripes on their shoulders looked so cool. When they changed the law to allow women into West Point, all she wanted to do was become a cadet, earn those stripes, and be one of the cadet commanders. And now she was. The only difference between her and the others who commanded companies and battalions at West Point was that her father was the Supe.
But so what? That didn’t change who she was. They were still her friends. Or were they? Was there something going on at that party they didn’t want the Supe’s daughter to know about?
She walked into the company Orderly Room. “Hey, have you seen Ash?”
“I think he and the band are rehearsing up in Building Seven-twenty.”
“Thanks.” She walked out of the barracks and turned up the stairs leading to a building that had once housed Cadet Supply and the tacs for the Third Regiment. Cadet bands had commandeered a room in the basement as a rehearsal space. She could hear them as she climbed the stairs. They were playing something by the Replacements, and Ash was singing. It was a sweet song, and she stopped outside the building listening for a moment. He had a real feel for the song. It was about a girl, a lonely girl who danced alone, twirling by herself in nightclubs. No one can get close to her, and even if they do, they can’t figure out who she is. She heard him singing her favorite lines, and he knew how to deliver them, as if the girl is forever just out of reach, and he knows why she’s like that, and the saddest thing is, there’s nothing he can do about it. The way he sang it, the song had a trancelike quality, and she felt herself falling into the web spun by the words and the pealing, lilting notes of the lead guitar . . .
Suddenly, she heard a loud clang as the drummer broke a stick on the cymbal, and the rest of the instruments trailed away, and Ash said, let’s try it again from the top, and the drummer said he didn’t have any extra drum sticks, and she heard Ash curse, and she could hear them packing up their instruments. She opened the door. Ash looked over.
“Hey, Jace, where you been?”
“Around.”
Ash stuck his mike stand in the corner and walked over to her. “Want to go down to the Firstie Club for a beer?”
“Why not?”
He turned to the rest of the band. “You guys coming?” There were a couple of nods. “See you down there.” He zipped up his dress gray coat and perched his cap jauntily at the back of his head. When they stepped outside, it felt to Jacey like the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. She shivered and pulled her sweater closed.
“You want to get a coat?” he asked.
“No, let’s walk.”
They made their way down the narrow stairs. At the bottom, he stopped. “Remember when we used to walk down Bremerton Road and stop and kiss in the dark behind the mess hall?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to go around that way?”
“No.”
They started walking toward Thayer Road. “You’re a woman of few words tonight.”
They were stopped across from the library. Cadets carrying armloads of books were pushing through its huge oaken doors.
“I read Dorothy’s E-mail, Ash. I know you and Favro and Reade and Lessard and Ivar and Rose had a keg party on Labor Day out at some lake. What I don’t know is, why did you freeze me out? Why didn’t you take me? And why didn’t you tell me Dorothy was there?”
He reached for her hand, but she pulled away. “We’d better go somewhere and talk.”
“We can talk right here.”
“Jace, there’s a lot more to this than you know.”
“Really?” She made a show of checking her watch. “We’ve got time. Why don’t you start at the beginning and fill me in.”
He looked around. They were alone. A brisk wind was coming off the river. “Let’s go back to your room.”
“Belle is studying.”
“Then we’ll go to mine.”
“I’m not moving until you tell me why you betrayed me.”
“Betrayed you? How do you figure that?”
‘‘I asked every member of the company to come forward with what they knew about Dorothy just before she died. You were there at the company meeting. You heard me. You knew I was looking for anything that would help us find out why Dorothy died. And you were with her at a keg party the day before she died and you didn’t tell me? You held back, Ash. That’s betrayal, in case you’re having trouble with the definition of the word.” He stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, like he was cold. But he wasn’t cold, and she knew it. “What’s the matter, Ash? Are you covering up something, or covering up for someone?”
“Look, Jace. Nothing happened. You’ve got to believe that.”
“If nothing happened at the party, then why didn’t you come right out and tell me about it?”
“You know who was there. Rose is the Honor Chairman. Favro’s Second Regimental Commander, he’s Honor Vice Chair. Reade’s Brigade Adjutant. Lessard’s First Regimental CO, and he’s an Honor rep, and Ivar—”
“Ivar gained over a thousand yards last year.”
“Yeah. It was like, Dorothy drops dead, and if it got out that she was partying, and somehow it turned out . . .” He stopped and turned to her pleadingly.
She finished the sentence for him: “If something happened to her at the party which contributed to her death, there’d be major trouble, and some big-time stud cadets would get damaged if not canned, and the hallowed Honor Committee would be left without its hallowed Chairman, and in general, a world of shit would rain down on shoulders upon which shit has never fallen. Does that sum it up?”
“Yeah.”
“So to stand up for your buddies, you decided it was necessary to cut me out of the loop. Didn’t you trust me, Ash? Was that it?”
“I trust you, Jace, but—”
“Your buddies don’t.”
“Your dad’s the Supe, Jace. It’s different than it was last year.”
She stared at him in the darkness, trying to make out his eyes. “Bullshit. My father being Supe wouldn’t mean squat if you took me to the keg party and all everybody did was drink beer and go swimming in the lake and grab a room and execute the horizontal workout. That d
escribes every cadet party we’ve been to. What was different this time, Ash? Why was this party off limits to me? Did something happen you don’t want me to know about?”
“Nothing happened. Dorothy wasn’t even drinking. I can swear to that. I was drawing most of the beers. You’re right about it not being any different than any other cadet party. We had a cabin. Guys had dates. You know.”
“So you had a date? Is that it, Ash? You were fucking somebody else at the party?”
“No. No. You’ve got it wrong.”
“Then why didn’t you take me, Ash?”
He paused, scraping his foot across the grass. “The guys didn’t want you at the party because of your dad. They were afraid, you know, if guys got rowdy and stuff, you would tell your father and somebody might get in trouble.”
“That is so totally wrong, and you know it.”
“I tried arguing with them about it, but Favro and those guys, they just said no.”
“You could have skipped the party. Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I think something happened at the party you’re not telling me about.”
“You’re wrong, Jace. Nothing happened. I swear.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me about Dorothy being at the party? You’re running around in circles. I can’t follow you.”
“The guys are afraid it will get to General Gibson. Don’t you see, Jace? He made us. You, me, Favro, Reade, Rose, Lessard, every one of us. Gibson picked us. He gave us our stripes. He’s the one who’s restoring West Point’s values. He’s the one who has raised standards at the Academy higher than they’ve ever been. We can’t let him down. We owe him, Jace.”
He stood there silently looking into her eyes. For Jacey, time came to a standstill. Her mind wandered, flooded with the images and memories.
They had stopped on a grassy area across from Cullum Hall. Her father had told her they used to hang a wall of curtains all the way around the field during football practice, so scouts from rival teams couldn’t drive onto Academy grounds and shoot sixteen-millimeter footage of Army plays. Now her eyes found Cullum Hall, just across the road. On the walls inside hung memorials to past superintendents and professors and commandants and graduates who had been killed in action. Absently, it occurred to her that one day a plaque would be mounted there memorializing her own father. Her eyes drifted to the night sky, dazzled with stars. The awful thing was, she agreed with him. Gibson was the man. He embodied the warrior spirit that was supposed to infuse every corpuscle of cadet blood.
“So you didn’t tell me about Dorothy being at the party because you’re afraid you’d be letting down General Gibson? I don’t believe it, Ash. If you worship him so much, don’t you think he’ll listen to you when you tell him the same thing you’ve told me? That she was there, but nothing happened at the party? I don’t get it, Ash.”
Suddenly, an image of Dorothy formed in her mind, reminding her what had brought them to the open field across from Cullum Hall. “This isn’t about Gibson, it’s about Dorothy! You’re hiding something, Ash. And you’re afraid. We’ve been together all this time, and I can’t figure you out. It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
Ash dropped his head slowly, his eyes finding the ground. “The thing of it is, you’re the Supe’s daughter. Gibson’s a powerful guy, Jace. In our world, the Corps of Cadets, the Com rules. We don’t have your father to protect us.”
As a smile formed slowly on her face, she wondered if he could see her in the darkness. Probably not, and probably just as well. “You know what I learned from Dorothy’s death? People can die, even people you love, and West Point just sits here on the Hudson and goes on without them. I’ve got news for you, Ash. The Academy was here nearly two hundred years before we first passed through the gates. It’ll be here two hundred years after we’re gone. West Point’s a living thing, Ash. The Com doesn’t rule West Point. He’s just another temporary caretaker, like my dad.”
He nodded like he understood, but she knew that he hadn’t. He was scared, and guys who are scared will do almost anything to make their fear go away.
She gave him a wave. “So long, Ash.”
“I made a mistake, Jace. I told you I was sorry. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Making mistakes is okay, Ash. It happens. But you made excuses. I’m the Supe’s daughter, remember? I don’t buy excuses.”
She walked away into the darkness toward the barracks, leaving him standing alone. When she knew she was far enough away that he couldn’t see her, she turned and looked back. The guy who had just been singing with such empathy and passion about the lost and lonely girl looked like a lost and lonely boy.
Her step quickened. She passed Grant Hall and turned up the ramp to New South Area. Not for the first time in the life of a young woman who had lived in twenty different houses and apartments by the time she departed for West Point at eighteen, the barracks looked like home.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
WALKING BACK to the barracks, Ash was still in shock. It was the depth of Jacey’s anger that surprised him, threw him off balance. He knew he had fucked up. It was just that he hadn’t thought he fucked up big-time. But she did. She sure made that clear enough.
One of the things that attracted him to Jacey in the first place was that she had guts and she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. She was smart and funny and pretty and sexy and all that other stuff, but it was her courage that really grabbed him. You could feel it when you got close to her, like heat from a fire inside her. She had physical courage, which made her every bit as skilled at some of the toughest parts of their military training as any of the guys were. She rappelled down the side of a cliff like a mountain goat, springing easily from one rocky outcropping to another with graceful leaps and sideways jeté’s that were balletlike. She could hump a pack with the best of them. She was among the top ten or fifteen cadets in the whole company in the two-mile run. During night training, she was unafraid to venture into pitch-blackness, following a compass course or her own instincts. One night, leading a patrol, she had fallen down a steep ravine that was invisible in the darkness, and Ash and the others on the patrol had stood there at the top like dummies. They couldn’t see her. They could barely make out the ravine itself. They had no idea what had become of her until they heard her down there, yelling back up to them to come on down, which they did, and she continued the patrol from there, following the ravine to a little knoll she had found on the map. From the knoll she had figured a way to the objective, which they reached about two hours before they had been expected, so their attack against the “enemy” force was a real surprise. Her performance that night was one of the accomplishments that had earned her four stripes and a company command.
Ash could not take lightly her anger or her passion. He was paying the price of guilt for his mistake, and it was a steep one. Yet there was another, more complicated emotion he was dealing with. Even though he was the one who had screwed up, he found it impossible to accept the brutal dismissal she had dealt him. He was angry at himself and at her. But mostly at her. Guys weren’t supposed to put up with shit like that from girls. Just because you screwed up didn’t mean you had to lie down and take whatever she dished out. Hell, West Point taught you that from day one. You’re a warrior. You don’t take shit from anybody.
When he got back to the barracks, he stopped at her room to see if they couldn’t talk it out, but Belle said Jacey didn’t want to see him. Later on he called her, and when she answered, she said something like, “I’ve said all I have to say to you,” and slammed the phone down.
He was really pissed, and the thing that pissed him off the most was when she told him he was scared of Gibson. She didn’t understand that they lived in the real world, and Gibson ran the particular real world they lived in, and you had to respect that. You had to respect power, and Gibson had a shitload of power. That was what she didn’t get. He and
Favro and the rest of the guys didn’t fear Gibson, they respected him. The closest he could come to understanding why she didn’t get it was that she was a general’s daughter. He tried to point out the difference between them, but she didn’t listen. She was so convinced he had betrayed her that she turned down the reason thing and turned up the female thing.
When he hung up the phone he immediately called Rose and told him Jacey knew about the party and that Dorothy was there. Rose told him to meet up in the organ-practice room at the chapel.
Not many cadets knew that there was a little set of stairs behind a door at the side of the Cadet Chapel that led to a small room in the attic. You went up the narrow stairs, and at the top there was a door, and when you opened the door, there was this little room with an organ at one end and a bunch of wooden handles sticking out of the wall over on the right. There were some little firing-slit-type windows on one side, and you could look down and see the whole area of barracks from up there. A guy who was in the choir and also rang the chapel bells on Sunday mornings told him the wooden handles were just like the ones up in the belfry; they used them to practice. He tried it. You’d hit the handle, and you heard a little bell that imitated the sound of one of the big ones in the belfry. He and Jacey used to go up there at night when they were cows. It was quiet and totally private.
Rose was already there when Ash reached the practice room, and the others soon followed: Favro and Reade and Lessard and Ivar. Every guy in the room had the chiseled features of a male model. It was like an unwritten rule at West Point. You didn’t see many guys wearing six stripes who fell very far outside the all-American-boy norm. Like nearly every other cadet, they were in excellent shape.
Ash was standing there with his hands in his pockets looking out one of the little windows when he heard Rose’s voice. He turned around.
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