Call to Duty

by Richard Herman

“Can you remember you’re Jan van Duren?”

  His panic came back as pieces of his memory came into focus. “Didn’t you kill him, too?”

  “Yes.”

  The simple answer stunned him back to rationality. “Why?”

  “It was a mistake,” she said and turned away, looking across the Rhine and into France.

  THREE

  Navaree Sound, near Hurlburt Field, Florida

  A gentle breeze drifted down Navarre Sound, touching the smooth surface of the Inland Waterway. It reached the causeway that crossed the sound and ruffled the palm fronds that marked the roof of the Pagoda, the tropical outdoor bar that was nestled on the sand next to the bridge. Underneath the branches, S. Gerald Gillespie found a seat at the bar among the other Wednesday night regulars who gathered for the volleyball league. Mike the bartender automatically drew a draft beer, dropped a wedge of lime in, and shoved it toward Gillespie. “Yo, Gill, playing tonight?” he asked.

  “Not unless someone needs a fourth,” Gillespie answered. He wasn’t much of a volleyball player but was always available as a substitute. With a little luck, he thought, Allison’s team might be one player short and need a fourth. What a sacrifice, he thought, playing on Allison’s team, laughing at his own ineptness as the only male on the team of four. The league rules dictated that the teams had to be mixed with at least one female member and all the teams but one were made up of three males and one female. Allison, in her own contrary way, insisted on doing exactly the opposite.

  The first two teams were warming up on the sandy court next to the beached catamarans and Gillespie moved over to the railing to watch. He liked the good-natured crowd that played at the Pagoda and they had readily accepted him into their midst, even though he was a klutz at volleyball. Everyone had a good time at the beach bar—it was Mike the bartender’s number one and most rigidly enforced rule.

  Behind the volleyball players, the setting sun cast a golden shadow down the sound, creating a gentle glow. “Best sunsets in northern Florida,” the man leaning over the rail next to him said. Two F-15 fighters from nearby Eglin Air Force Base arced across the sky in tight formation and the old frustration caught in Gillespie’s throat. I should be flying those, he said to himself.

  Gillespie was still coddling his beer when the first match ended. He could see Allison’s team had its full complement of four and he secretly envied the lone male player who was surrounded by three of the best-looking women at Navaree Beach. Damn, he muttered to himself, why can’t I be that lucky. Unfortunately, women thought of S. Gerald Gillespie as “cute” and since he had bright green eyes, freckles, and red hair on top of his skinny five-foot four-inch body, he understood why they tended to pat him on top of his head. “Yo, Gill,” Mike the bartender called, “Donna’s Dynamos need a fourth. You up?” Gillespie gave an inward moan and joined the team led by Donna Bertino, a pixieish seventh-grade teacher who reminded Gillespie of her students. He lined up directly opposite Allison at the net, not exactly what he wanted.

  On the fourth rotation, he found himself back at the net with Allison, totally distracted by the image towering over him. She was straight out of any issue of Playboy and what she did for her thong bikini was criminal. He had visions of his face buried between her large breasts. Donna, his team captain, served and the return was set up for Allison to spike. She jumped and reached high above her head, smashing the ball down onto Gillespie. The ball caromed off his head and bounced into the water over twenty feet away. Everyone laughed as Gillespie staggered about, claiming he had been taken advantage of. It was going to be a long game.

  The game turned into an upset and the tough and wiry Donna spurred her team on, defeating Allison’s Amazons. Afterward, the winners, per Mike the bartender’s second rule, set a round of beers. Donna stood beside him on the sand and talked about the game, professionally dissecting his play. “Actually, you’re pretty good,” she told him. “You anticipate well and move faster than hell. But, you’re intimidated by the other players. Don’t let their height get to you.” She looked over his shoulder. “Oh, oh. Bimbo alert.” He turned and looked up into Allison’s beautiful face.

  “Hope I didn’t hurt you out there, Carrot Top,” Allison said, giving his hair a playful scrub as she walked by.

  “No problem,” Gillespie called to her back, wanting to stroke her perfect buttocks. He turned back to Donna. “Got to go. Early-morning flight at oh-dark-early. Thanks for the game.” He glanced in the direction of Allison before he made his way along the path to the parking lot, feeling very much like the defeated male. He was hopelessly in love.

  Donna watched him go. “Men are so stupid,” she grumbled to herself.

  The ungainly shadow came to life in the early-morning dark that enveloped Hurlburt Field. Slowly, and then with increasing speed, the six-bladed, seventy-two-foot diameter rotor of the MH-53J Pave Low helicopter beat at the air and became a blur as it picked up rpm. Then the shadow moved across the ramp into a takeoff position. In the cockpit, Captain S. Gerald Gillespie sat in the left seat, reading the before-takeoff checklist. As the instructor pilot for this mission, he also had to play copilot. “Checklist complete,” he told the lieutenant sitting in the right seat, the aircraft commander’s position. He called the control tower for a release and they were cleared for takeoff. The lieutenant gave the command and Gillespie reached for the throttles on the overhead panel and moved them forward. Because the aircraft was well below its maximum gross takeoff weight of forty-two thousand pounds, the Pave Low helicopter lifted easily into the air and flew across the incredibly even treetops of the pines that covered the terrain north of Hurlburt Field.

  Gillespie monitored the instruments and the FLIR scope, forward-looking infrared, under his night vision goggles as they flew through the dark. He glanced over at the lieutenant who was also wearing a bulky pair of ANVIS-6 goggles. Although the NVGs, night vision goggles, were designed to enable the pilot to see outside visual references in the dark and still be able to look under them to see the instruments, it was difficult to constantly transition between the two. So Gillespie read the instruments out for the lieutenant, making things much easier. “Piece of cake,” Gillespie said over the intercom, trying to reassure the young pilot. Engine noise from the two 4,330-horsepower turbo shaft engines and the whirling seventy-two-foot rotor reduced normal conversations to screaming matches without the intercom.

  “Easy for you to say,” the lieutenant replied, tension straining his voice.

  The flight engineer sitting between and slightly aft of the two pilots glanced at Gillespie and shook his head. The sergeant had flown with the lieutenant before and didn’t trust him. Gillespie knew what the sergeant was thinking—the kid flew by the numbers, relied heavily on instruments, and couldn’t fly by the seat of his pants. He was low on PT, pilot technique. Not good, Gillespie thought; in this squadron, you’ve got to be able to do it all.

  The 20th Special Operations Squadron, better known as the Green Hornets, in the 1st SOW, 1st Special Operations Wing, flew the Air Force’s most sophisticated helicopter and ruthlessly trained to “conduct day or night low-level penetration into hostile or enemy territory to accomplish clandestine infiltration/exfiltration, aerial gunnery support, and reinforcement throughout the world.” At least that’s what the official paperwork said. For the generals and colonels, that meant the crews had to be carefully selected and trained, every mission deliberately planned on the ground, and above all, flying safety had to be paramount. Gillespie and the sergeant agreed with all that, as far as it went. But training and experience had added two other factors to their personal equations for success that caused the same generals and colonels to grind their teeth in their sleep and fear for their jobs. Gillespie and the sergeant knew that for a slow-moving, noisy helicopter to survive in modern combat, the pilot had to have an instinctive feel for flying the machine and every one of the six crewmen had to have balls that required specially designed skivvies to support.

&nbs
p; In spite of his desire to fly high-performance fighters, his frustration at being a complete idiot on the volleyball court, and his unrequited lust for the tall and beautiful Allison, every inch of S. Gerald Gillespie’s small frame was packed with what it took to live up to the motto of the 1st SOW—Any time, any place. He didn’t know it, but the sergeant sitting next to him did.

  Gillespie cross-checked their position on the inertial navigation set by map reading through the FLIR. They were on course and close to the small clearing they had picked as their first LZ, or landing zone. “You should have the LZ on the nose, in sight,” he told the lieutenant.

  “Tallyho,” he replied. “Jesus Christ! It’s too fucking small for a night landing!”

  “Don’t panic,” Gillespie said. “It would be a helluva lot smaller without NVGs. You’ve done it before during the day and it hasn’t changed size just because you’re wearing night vision goggles. I’ll talk you through it.” With deliberate casualness, he kept his eyes on the FLIR, instrument panel, and outside references as he talked the pilot down. They touched down with a hard bump in the center of the clearing. “As advertised,” he told the lieutenant, “a piece of cake.” Even in the dim yellow glow of the instrument lights, he could see the kid was drenched in sweat. The sergeant only shook his head. “You want me to do the next one?” Gillespie said.

  The lieutenant let out a heavy breath, ripped off the heavy NVGs, and leaned back in his seat. “Yeah,” he said, relief flooding over him.

  They switched places. Gillespie waited a few moments for him to settle down. He should have never removed his NVGs. It was a bad sign and Gillespie used the time to think about what it meant. By squadron standards, the landing was routine and should have been a “piece of cake.” The lieutenant just didn’t have what it took to fly Pave Lows. He knew what he had to do and once they were back on the ground at Hurlburt, he would tell the young pilot, as gently as he could, that he should go fly somewhere else. If the lieutenant didn’t listen to him, he would drop a word into the shell-like ear of Standardization and Evaluation and they would rip him a new one. Standardization and Evaluation, better known as Stand Evil, was the group of officers and NCOs responsible for testing and grading all aircrew members in the wing. Their job was to make sure everyone could hack the mission and to have any poor performer reassigned to a less demanding outfit. They planned on having Gillespie join their ranks when he had a bit more experience as an instructor.

  “Time to boogie,” Gillespie said, now certain that the best way to keep the lieutenant alive was to get him transferred out of the 1st SOW. “Comin’ up. Clear left? Clear right. Overhead?” The MH-53 seemed to take on a new life as it lifted smoothly into the air, pivoted 135 degrees to a new heading, rose out of the clearing, and headed for their next landing zone. For the first time since they had left Hurlburt, the sergeant relaxed into his seat. Gillespie had “the touch.”

  The officers sitting around the table in the conference room at the headquarters of the 1st Special Operations Wing, located a few blocks away from the flight line at Hurlburt Field, could sense the anger and frustration boiling beneath the surface of Colonel Paul “Duck” Mallard, the commander of the 1st SOW. Mallard had just returned from a meeting with his boss, the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, known simply as AFSOC. AFSOC was one of the Air Force’s new commands, just over four years old, and was the air arm of United States Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM. They were worried, for Colonel Mallard was normally a cool and reserved gentleman, courteous to a fault, but always sure of what he wanted. Now something was wrong.

  “Gentlemen,” Mallard said, his voice in tight control, “my boss at AFCOM just received a phone call from General Mado on the STU-Three.” The STU-III was a key-controlled, plug-in-anywhere, secure telephone that could carry top-secret conversations. Mallard paused to stare at his hands, composing his thoughts. No one had to explain who Lieutenant General Simon Mado was; they all knew he was the vice commander of USSOCOM, United States Special Operations Command, the unified command of the Department of Defense responsible for all special operations conducted by the United States military. They were all equally aware that AFSOC, Air Force Special Operations Command, which meant them, fell under the OPCON, or operational control, of USSOCOM.

  To the average civilian it was all alphabet soup, but to the men around the table it was a vital question of command and control. The 1st SOW could only go to war when United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) ordered them to do so. And USSOCOM was commanded by an Army general who had definite ideas about special operations that did not include the Air Force. And even though his vice commander, Lieutenant General Simon Mado, was an Air Force general, Mado would not cross the Army general.

  “No doubt,” Mallard continued, “you have all been following, with some interest, the recent kidnapping of Senator Courtland’s daughter. Apparently, the President is considering a rescue using special forces.” He let the news sink in.

  “The only problem,” the colonel said, biting his words into clean little bullets, “is that we are not part of it.” He stood up and slapped his hands down hard onto the table. “It’s wrong to have a war without us!” He sat back down, once again in firm control. “Unfortunately, you can be sure no one at USSOCOM will press for our involvement.” The “no one” he meant was Mado. That was as close as Mallard would come to openly criticizing a superior. “However,” Mallard continued, “AFCOM has talked to Operations Training at USSOCOM and they have agreed to let us conduct intensive training at a forward location in Thailand.”

  Four hours later, Gillespie found himself standing in a line with his crew and baggage waiting to be manifested onto an MC-130E. Major Eric “E-Squared” Eberhard, a pilot from the 8th Special Operations Squadron that flew the MC-130E “Combat Talon,” was harassing the clerks to “get the lead out” so he could load his passengers and take off. E-Squared Eberhard, who had absolutely no respect for duly constituted authority unless they could outfly him, grinned at Gillespie. “Got to keep the ground pounders on their toes.”

  “Where the hell we goin’ this time?” Gillespie asked. They had only been told to take their tropical gear and pack for a thirty-day TDY, temporary duty.

  “You ever been to the Windsor Hotel in Bangkok?” E-Squared asked Gillespie. Gillespie shook his head. “You’ll like it,” the boyish-looking major assured him. “It’s party time.” Eric “E-Squared” Eberhard was infamous for his wild and, at times, very wicked ways. He was also the best aircraft commander in the wing and could employ his MC-130E with a skill, courage, and determination that was the textbook example of what a Combat Talon could do. “We got some serious flying to do. The Beezer has already taken off and will start the party without us.” Hal “the Beezer” Beasely was a craggy lieutenant colonel who flew AC-130 gunships called SPECTRE and shared E-Squared’s penchant for wild parties.

  “At least we got a clue now,” Gillespie told his crew. This was shaping up to be a major training exercise.

  Fort Benning, Georgia

  Command Sergeant Major Victor Kamigami ran down the dirt road, his size-twelve combat boots pounding the hard dirt. He was running alone, much to the relief of the other platoons also doing their early-morning physical training. They all had a healthy respect for the CSM, command sergeant major, a huge Japanese-Hawaiian who stood six feet four and weighed 260 pounds, and hated it when he ran with them. Invariably, Kamigami would set a bruising pace and wear them out. As usual, he wore combat boots, fatigue pants, and a T-shirt, refusing to go along with Army regulations that required shorts and running shoes for physical training. Kamigami claimed that he intended to fight in fatigues and combat boots and would train that way. No one bothered to contradict him. He ran past a platoon moving more slowly down the road and ignored them, deep in thought. “Thank you, Lord, for big favors,” the lieutenant leading the platoon mumbled aloud, meaning every word.

  On this particular morning, Kamigami was th
inking about his last assignment before retiring. He knew it was time to leave the Army, for he was wearing out and slowing down. At first, he had ignored the occasional morning stiffness and the times he could no longer catch a fly between his thumb and index finger on the first try. Then he had accepted it all with philosophical calm. He had no idea what he would do in civilian life, since he had been in the Army since he was seventeen. It had been his life. He thought about his only child, Mazie, who had a good job in Washington, D.C. She had always been the smart one in the family and she might have some good suggestions. Maybe he should take the assignment to the Pentagon that had been offered him. At least, he would be near his only child. He probed his feelings about that offer—Command Sergeant Major of the Army. What a final act, he mused. Then he rejected it.

  Back in his office at Division, showered and dressed in a class B uniform, Kamigami was ready to go to work. He glanced at his watch and decided that an old buddy in charge of senior NCO assignments in PERSCOM, Personnel Command in the Pentagon, should be at work. He grabbed the phone, his massive hand engulfing the receiver, and poked at the buttons. “Brew,” he said, his soft voice totally at odds with his size, “I don’t want it. I’d go crazy in the Pentagon. Nothing but fumble artists and pigeonholers puzzling their way to a promotion there.” He listened to the protests from the other end for a few moments, his round face impassive. “The rumor mill has it that Delta Force is going to need a new CSM.” He listened as the man told him it was out of the question. “Brew, when was the last time you had your attitude adjusted?” he asked. Then he hung up, confident that the skids would be greased and the orders assigning him to Delta Force at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as command sergeant major would be in the mail that day.

  Bangkok, Thailand

  Samkit zipped Heather’s dress up and stepped back to inspect her. “Very pretty, missy,” she said. Heather studied herself in the big mirror in her bedroom and smoothed the sides of the very short, skin-tight, black cocktail dress. Heather had discovered that Chiang preferred her to dress on the flashy side when they were alone and much more conservatively when they went out in public. She was his constant companion now and he was introducing her to the power brokers of Thai society. But they would be alone tonight and she plotted how to entertain him. Chiang was very pleased with her performance in the bedroom but, increasingly, she had to rely on DC for coaching on more intellectual matters. Chiang was proving to be very sophisticated and cultured and Heather sensed that if she was to survive as his consort, she would have to be his match.