“Rose, what in the hell are you doing here?” he asked when he opened the door.
“I had to come and see you, sir. I think they’re tapping my phone. I couldn’t call.”
Gibson looked around. The street behind his house was empty. “I think you’d better get back to the barracks. Aren’t you under room arrest?”
“Yes sir. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“I don’t think I can help you, Rose. Not now.”
“Sir, I would rather come inside. I think I can explain what the problem is.”
Gibson looked up and down the street again. “All right, but you’d better make this quick.” He led Rose back to his library and sat down.
“May I sit, sir?”
“Yeah. Sit. But get with it, Rose. I don’t want you seen in my quarters. That wouldn’t serve either of our interests.”
“I agree, sir.”
“So why did they arrest you again? Did that CID agent get them to hang that dead bitch around your neck again?”
“It’s not Dorothy Hamner, sir. It’s the Honor Committee.”
“What!”
“Slaight’s daughter and that piece of shit Prudhomme got into the committee files. Kerry is charging me with conspiracy to deny due process—”
“I’ll charge them with theft! They’re using illegally obtained evidence! They can’t do that!”
“Prudhomme has his keys, sir. He’s Third Regimental Honor Rep. Any Honor Committee member has free access to the files.”
“They can’t prove anything. Those files are clean.”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“I thought I told you to sanitize the cases we fixed.”
“I did, sir.”
“Then they can’t show any violations of procedure. They can’t prove this due process shit. I showed you how to fix the case files so every ‘t’ was crossed and every ‘i’ was dotted.”
“I did everything you told me, sir. The problem is your recommendations for separation and dismissal. They’ve established a pattern in the guilty verdicts you signed off on, sir. Every time we fixed a case, you recommended dismissal. In the other cases, you recommended dismissal only sixty percent of the time. In three other cases, you reversed the findings of the committee, and in two more, you recommended suspension for a year.”
“You didn’t meet the proper standard I set in those cases, Rose.”
“In the three cases you reversed, those guys handed in term papers they didn’t even write.”
“You think I give a shit about term papers? Those three men are warriors. All three of them stand at the top of their class in leadership. I did what was best for the Army when I reversed those verdicts.”
“The problem I’ve got is, your reversals of those verdicts and your suspensions of the other two are what tipped off Prudhomme and Slaight and Kerry. They were looking for inconsistencies, and they found them. Now I stand accused of fixing the cases you didn’t reverse.”
“That’s a problem you and your counsel will have to deal with, Mr. Rose.”
“I need your testimony, sir. I need you to explain to the prosecutor that my actions were consistent with the standards you set.”
“I’d love to see you try to convince someone of that.” Gibson got up from his chair. “You’re on your own now, Rose. This will be the last time you and I speak.”
“No, it won’t, General Gibson. You and I are in this together. I kept written records of every conversation we ever had. Every time I left your office, I went back to my room and typed up notes on what you told me.”
Gibson froze. “What did you say?”
“I said I kept notes. Kerry doesn’t know about them—”
Gibson started at him. “You little shit, I ought to—”
Rose held up his hands defensively. “You don’t know where the notes are. I do. You’re not cutting me loose, General Gibson. If I go down, you’re going down with me.”
Gibson stopped, sinking back into his chair.
“You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you, Rose? You’ve been listening to me, and you’ve been watching me, but you haven’t learned the lessons I’ve tried to teach you. What happened? I made you Honor Chairman. I promoted Favro to Regimental Commander and made him Vice Chairman. I put everything in place. I made you the most powerful man in the Corps of Cadets, and what did you do? You listened to your cock instead of me. That Honor Committee crap is the least of your problems. You don’t need me testifying for you. You need a lawyer who knows a good headshrinker who can go in there and explain that you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.”
“Oh, but I did, sir,” said Rose. “I took lessons from the master.”
Gibson sat there staring at Rose. He thought he heard a banging noise. It sounded like someone was knocking on the door. He turned his head. Colonel Bassett and Agent Kerry were standing in the door of his library.
Bassett crossed the room and stood next to his chair. “General Gibson, please stand, sir.”
Agent Kerry opened a brushed-aluminum box. Gibson could see a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tape was running. “You are under apprehension, General,” said Kerry. He turned to Bassett and grinned. “That felt good.”
CHAPTER 56
* * *
SLAIGHT ACCOMPANIED General Meuller and General Drabonsky when they traveled across the Potomac to meet with the Speaker of the House of Representatives in his private office in the Capitol Building. Slaight handed the Speaker a list of the charges that had been filed against General Gibson.
“We are going to make history at West Point, sir. There has never been a court-martial of a general officer until now, but General Gibson will face a jury of his peers in two months’ time.”
General Drabonsky was standing next to Slaight. “Mr. Speaker, I will deal with Congressman Thrunstone in the budget negotiations for the time being because the law says that I have to. But I want you to understand that your Chairman of the National Security Committee has been listening to General Gibson ever since you gave him the committee. The brutish manner in which he treated General Slaight in the hearing was a direct result of General Gibson’s involvement in those hearings. I want Congressman Thrunstone instructed that he is to issue an apology to General Slaight and to his daughter. If that apology is not forthcoming, I will cut off negotiations and report to the President. I am certain that he will take my case to the American people. The United States military will not put up with the kind of behavior your National Security Committee Chairman exhibited to General Slaight.”
The Speaker pledged that he would talk to Thrunstone and was certain that General Drabonsky’s demands would be met. If there was one thing a politician didn’t want, it was to lose a fight with men in uniform.
Slaight and his bosses left the Capitol that day feeling pretty good about the future of the Army and most especially about the future of West Point. The Speaker had asked them if he could join them for the Army–Navy game. They had said yes, of course. That’s what you do with politicians. You take them to ball games and you show them a good time and then you get back in the trenches and go at them with everything you’ve got.
Back at West Point, Slaight called for an assembly of the entire Corps of Cadets in Ike Hall. When they were seated in the huge auditorium, he had all the doors closed and ordered that MPs stand guard outside. The only people in the auditorium were the cadets and General Slaight.
He walked out onto the stage and spoke to them without notes. “You people have just gone through a pretty extraordinary couple of weeks, haven’t you?”
The cadets stirred in their seats. Slaight heard a few hundred “yes sirs.”
“Each of you is entitled to take your own lesson from what you’ve witnessed here at West Point. That’s part of being a cadet. You watch and you listen and you figure things out on your own. But I want you to understand something about West Point from my point of view as well. It’s hard when you reach my age a
nd rank to go back in your mind and try to see things as you saw them when you were a cadet, just as I’m sure it’s hard for you to imagine how I see things as a general. I have spent quite a bit of time since I became Supe trying to imagine my way into your shoes. They’re the same shoes I wore, and this place is not so very different from the West Point I remember from thirty years ago. When I was a cadet there were officers who I did not respect, and there were officers I thought the world of. The same was true of cadets. I had guys in my company who I wouldn’t have followed across the street to McDonald’s, and there were guys I would have followed through a ditch filled with burning oil. That’s the way people are. There are good ones and there are bad ones, and it’s up to you to take example from those you respect. You cadets are free to consider my performance as Superintendent any way you want. I am certain there are those of you who think I’m a flaming asshole.”
There was a good deal of laughter, which Slaight allowed to subside before he continued. “And there are those of you who think I am without fault. I am standing here to tell you today that I am neither. I am a man. I am a husband. I am a father. I am an Army officer. I try to meet my obligations in each of those roles as well as I can, but I know that sometimes I fall short. I thought for a time that I failed my daughter in not protecting her from harm, but I realize now that I did not fail her, because she is out there in this auditorium today among you. Today she is a cadet, as are you all. Soon, you will be officers, and, much sooner than you think, you will be husbands and wives and mothers and fathers. You are part of a great continuum, ladies and gentlemen of the Corps of Cadets. West Point is no more or less than the Corps of Cadets makes it. I am the Supe, sure. But I am merely a temporary custodian, pushing a broom behind the Long Gray Line. It’s up to you cadets to keep West Point alive by making over your lives in its image, carrying its history and its honor into your futures. I wish each of you the happiness in your lives that I feel right now, as I look out at this sea of gray.’’
Slaight turned on his heel and took two steps toward the wings of the stage. Then he stopped and turned his head. “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Beat Navy!”
The Corps rose as one, filling the auditorium with a deafening cheer. Back in the next-to-last row, Jacey turned to Ash, smiling. “Isn’t he great?” she said.
“Yeah,” Ash replied. “He sure is.”
Slaight left Ike Hall with Sam, and they walked back up the hill toward Quarters 100.
“Is Helen going to have to come back for Gibson’s Article Thirty-two hearing?” she asked as they reached Washington Road.
“I don’t think so. The stuff we got from the cadets will put him away for a long, long time.”
“What about her husband?”
“We’re keeping him on until the end of the academic year; then he’s going to retire.”
“I’m glad things worked out for them,” said Sam. “Gibson left such destruction in his wake. It would have been sad to see them taken down with him.”
The Hudson River Valley was ablaze with color. Sam suggested they walk out on Trophy Point. They were standing there, watching the Hudson making its way south toward the Atlantic, when Slaight turned to his wife and said, “Isn’t it amazing? I remember this view from my first day as a plebe, back in 1965. I was standing right on this spot when I took the oath. We swore to defend the nation against enemies both foreign and domestic.”
“I guess the ones we’ve been seeing lately have been the domestic kind,” Sam mused.
He laughed. “I wonder what happened to that guy who was standing out here on Trophy Point with freshly cut hair itching his neck in the hot afternoon sun that day so many years ago.”
Sam shook her head slowly. “That’s easy. He’s the same guy he was then. He’s got the same old haircut. He’s even got the same old wife.”
Slaight hugged her, brushing the graying hair from her forehead so he could see her eyes. “I’ve got a hankering for a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a steak that’s black on the outside and blue in the middle.”
“Me, too.”
They turned and walked back toward Quarters 100, passing the spot where Dorothy Hamner had fallen. Slaight took a quiet pride in the knowledge that her death had not been in vain. Her memory lived on in his daughter and every other cadet at West Point.
Like the memories of those who lay in the cemetery behind the Old Cadet Chapel, the Corps of Cadets carried the memories and the honor of the fallen.
EPILOGUE
* * *
THE NEW Brigade Adjutant made an announcement from the Poop Deck in the mess hall some days later. Walking the area—the ancient form of West Point punishment that had recently been banned in favor of work details, whereby cadets picked up trash and policed the area and worked on projects around the Academy as punishment for their various sins—would be reinstituted on a onetime basis by the Superintendent. The Adjutant then read the Supe’s orders: “For gross lack of judgment, i.e., assaulting fellow cadets and causing bodily harm by use of a steering-wheel lock and fists: fourteen demerits, fourteen hours walking the area, awarded to Cadet Ashford Prudhomme.”
A gigantic roar went up from the Corps of Cadets, as several plebes at a table toward the rear of the mess hall raised an upperclassman on their shoulders and began parading him up and down the aisles between the tables.
The next afternoon, a lone male cadet could be seen walking back and forth down at the far end of Central Area wearing the dress gray uniform, carrying an M-14 rifle on his shoulder. If you were there in Central Area and you got close enough, you could see that when he reached the far northwest corner of the area and stopped to execute an about-face, a hand emerged from one of the barracks windows, holding a fat Creole po’boy sandwich. The cadet walking the area took a huge bite before executing his about-face and marching off once again across the area.
If you were the lone cadet walking the area, what you could see was that the anonymous hand holding the sandwich belonged to a young woman, unlined and slender and as beautiful as anything you’d ever seen in your life.
Except maybe the po’boy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have received advice and counsel from many people during the time I have worked on this book (some of whom wish to remain anonymous), but most appreciated were the invaluable and boundless memories, wisdom, and good humor of David H. Vaught, Gary Moyer, Kathy Pardue, Lieutenant Colonel Norm Grady, and Colonel Fred Black (Ret.) and most especially the nonpareil legal stylings of Major Doug Dribben, JAG extraordinaire.
LKTIV
Los Angeles
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Lucian Truscott Co. Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6351-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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