“We didn't have a goddamn television, Carey! That's not me! That's some goddamned colonel. What in hell is going on in there?”
“Ssshh,” said his wife, wrapping her arms more tightly around his thick neck.
The boy appeared in the door. He was beaming as though he'd just been handed his first shotgun, and his hair was slicked back with grease, and as he moved he seemed to float an inch or two above the floor. He pushed the screen door open and held it for a girl about his age, who emerged wearing a long pink chiffon dress. Her hair was piled atop her head and she was wearing pale blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. She was beautiful, and the tinkling of her laughter sounded like pebbles rolling down iron stairs. She was self-assured, womanly, feeling sexy for the first time in her life, and she looked it. Her high heels tap-tap-tap-tapped on the boards of the porch as the two of them descended the stairs. A 1955 Plymouth station wagon was parked on the road in front of the house, and the boy and girl got in the car and switched on the radio to a rock-and-roll station and drove away.
“Who was that?” the General whispered, barely able to talk.
“That was your grandson, going to a dance on his first date in 1959. The girl is the daughter of the colonel who lived here in our house. She had Matt's room, the one at the back, remember? Your son lived across the post, over where the old firing range was, where you took the men for rifle practice. Your grandson lived in the basement with his brother. Remember?”
“A goddamned colonel's daughter! These aren't colonel's quarters! These are captain's quarters!”
“Not in 1959, Ma-a-a-atthew. Colonel Williams lived here then. That was his daughter, Wendy.”
“I don't understand,” said the General in a low, hoarse voice. “I don't know what you're doing to me.”
“I'm not doing anything to you, Ma-a-a-atthew. You're doing it to yourself.”
“What? What am I doing?”
“You're re-creating yourself, Ma-a-a-atthew. In those boys. In your son. In your grandson. This is a glimpse of how it works.”
The General took a deep breath and looked into the far distance, across the parade, across the rooftops, across the treetops, across the ridge into the evening sky.
“You created me,” he said softly. “I'm yours, just like those boys.”
“I know,” said his wife, stroking his silver hair with her thin fingers, bony with enlarged knuckles from arthritis, from age, from being a Randolph, from the grave.
“You can kill me. You can take me with you,” he said. He was still looking away, unblinking, just staring.
“I want out, Carey. Nothing is the same as it was. It's all gone to goddamn hell. All of it. The Army. That goddamned war over there in Vietnam. The country. All gone to hell.”
“I can't take you with me,” she said. “If I could, I would not. Your place is with your son, and with his son. It is why you were left behind, Ma-a-a-atthew. It is why you were spared. So you could love them, so you could leave something of your love behind for them. Before, you did not have the time. You didn't have the heart.”
“I know,” he said. He reached up and took her bony hand in his and held it to his cheek and kissed her fingers.
“I know.”
His voice sounded very far away, as though it had carried from far across the parade, from the trees atop the ridge in the distance. His words boomed against the roof of the porch and shook his teeth and made his eyes hurt. He clung even more tightly to her thin, bony hand and began to cry.
“What was it you always said, deah? That you must lead by example?”
“That's what I said.”
“Now that is what you must do with your love. Lead them by the example of your love. If you do that, everything will turn out all right. You'll see.”
“Why did you always know so much, Carey?”
“I don't,” she said, stroking his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “I always thought I did. Now I know differently. There is so much that escaped me. You hid from me, for a while.”
The General felt his face easing into a smile.
“Powerful Katrinka. That's what I called you after the war. Remember?”
“Not-so-powerful Katrinka. That's what I was. I died, Ma-a-a-atthew. It is you who has the power now.”
“What about you? Can't you help me?”
“You can help yourself now, Ma-a-a-atthew. You have it within you.”
“How?”
“You know what your problem has always been, deah?” She leaned forward and he tilted his head back so they looked in each other's eyes.
“I guess if you won't take me away, you may as well tell me,” he said.
“You never saw the opportunities in your children,” she said. “What has happened to your grandson is a great tragedy, but this is your chance! Your chance to set things straight! Do it out of love, Ma-a-a-atthew. Don't do it because you feel you have to. And for God's sake, don't do it to show them that you can. You've shown the world what you can do. Now show your son, and your grandson. Do it for them, and for me, and for the memories we will share when we are together again. Do it for love.”
“It is so hard,” said the General, still staring at the burnished bronze ridge, the golden sunset, the place where he had felt as happy as he had ever felt in his life.
The General heard a sharp noise like a door slamming. He turned his head. His son was standing in the door grinning at him, the same handsome young man of twelve or so who had left on the date. He was leaning against the door frame, and as the General watched, his grandson materialized next to him, and his son dropped his arm around the other boy's shoulder and the two of them melted into one.
Then they were gone.
“What's happening?” he asked his wife, who just as suddenly was again seated across the porch from him.
“You're finding out how much you love those two boys, Ma-a-a-atthew. I know it's not easy. Just let it happen to you. You will see the power of your love.”
The General leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes and he heard a wind, a strong wind, a storm wind, sustained and frightening, whipping through his ears like a freight train, then he opened his eyes and they were gone, all three of them, and he was alone on the porch at Leavenworth, and it was fall, and leaves blew from the trees around the parade ground, swirling around his feet, swirling, swirling, and the wind stung his eyes and he closed them again.
He blinked open his eyes, and he still heard her voice, but he was in the seat of a jet at 33,000 feet, and Lieutenant General Bruce Pelton was sitting next to him reading a magazine. He leaned back in his seat and blinked closed his eyes and listened.
“Ma-a-a-atthew. Ma-a-a-atthew. Can you hear me?” she called as if from far away, across the parade. He could hear her, but he couldn't see her.
“Yes. I can hear you, Carey.”
“Do it for me, Ma-a-a-atthew. Hold me tightly and love me so much that you can love your son, too, Ma-a-a-atthew. It's all there is for us now. There is nothing else.”
“I love you, Carey. And I love that boy, goddammit. I love him and I love his son and I'll die for them if that's what it takes.”
The General felt something on his arm and turned his head. It was Bruce Pelton.
“Are you okay, sir?” his friend asked. He had turned in his seat and was holding the General's wrist, feeling for his pulse.
“I'm okay. You goddamn right I'm okay. Where are we?”
“We've begun our descent into Washington, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton. “We'll be there in a few minutes.”
“Good,” said the General. “I've got a lot to do.”
By the time the plane's wheels touched ground at Washington National Airport, his course of action was clear. If the boy had as good a lawyer as Bruce Pelton said he did, then the boy should be freed from the Long Binh Jail so that he and his attorney could mount a defense. The fact that Jake Rousseau had stabbed him in the back didn't mean the General had exhausted his store of people in po
wer he thought he could count on. Rousseau's defection, however, had given the General pause. There was something behind the indictment of his grandson that he couldn't figure. Rousseau wasn't talking about it, and if he didn't talk, no one would. The General was on his own with this one. It had been years since he had undertaken something completely by himself. It felt good. He felt empowered, and for some reason he didn't really understand, he felt twenty years younger.
“When you get to State, I want you to call the Pentagon and make an appointment for me to see the Secretary of Defense.”
“When would you like to see him, sir?”
“This afternoon. Five o'clock,” said the General.
“I'm sure he'll see you then, sir, if he doesn't have a full calendar.”
“Just tell him I want to see him. He'll clear his goddamned calendar for me.”
The office of the Secretary of Defense was an outside suite on the Pentagon's E-Ring, overlooking the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The General had spent his share of time in the Secretary's office when he was Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. The look of the office hadn't changed much over the years, and neither had the men who occupied it. They were almost without exception confidants of the sitting President, men with a background in industry or finance who seemed to have spent half their lives making a living and the other half stuffing the coffers of the political party to which they owed the good fortune of their friend's election to the presidency and their subsequent appointment to the Cabinet.
The current Secretary of Defense, Samuel Hamilton, was no different. He was a Midwestern industrialist who had spent the Eisenhower years toiling in the vineyards of the Republican National Committee, during which time he had cozied up to the current President, for whom he had been campaign finance chairman in 1960 and 1968.
Now Mr. Hamilton was reaping the rewards of seeds well sown in a twenty-five-year career as a party functionary. He sat at the top of the greatest dollar-expending machine mankind had ever put on the face of the earth—the Department of Defense of the United States of America. It was a little like winning the lottery. One day someone called you on the phone and said your checking account had swollen to the tune of about a hundred billion dollars, and you had a year to spend it. Secretary Hamilton, like any good party fund-raiser, was going to spend his winnings at the stores owned by the men who had helped put his President and himself in their present jobs.
He was doing just that—calling his friends at various defense industries to report on his recent fact-finding journey to some twenty-five military installations around the globe—when the call came from Assistant Secretary of State Bruce Pelton that his friend Matt Blue wanted to see him at five o'clock. He hadn't seen the old warhorse since they had run into each other at a polo match down in Charlottesville a year or so ago. He had heard that the President had moved one of his California buddies into the Ambassador-at-Large slot that General Blue had occupied for the past few years. The General was probably looking to do some part-time consulting for DOD. The cloak of retirement wasn't going to ride very comfortably on the General's broad shoulders. He'd have to find something for his old friend to do that would get him out of the house a few days a week. Shouldn't be too much trouble. Maybe he could put him in charge of the study group that was looking into closing down some under-used military posts overseas. The General's extensive military and foreign-relations background made him just right to head up such a difficult inquiry, one that would step on all kinds of military toes domestically and an equal number in NATO.
The buzzer on his intercom startled him.
“Mr. Secretary, General Blue is here to see you,” said his executive assistant, whom he'd brought with him from Kansas City. She couldn't get over the fact that he was really the Secretary of Defense, and insisted on calling him “Mr. Secretary” even when they were alone and she was taking dictation or bringing him coffee. She'd been with him for twenty years. They knew each other as well as if they were man and wife. It was a cute affectation, and he let her indulge herself, but he teased her about calling him by his title.
“Send him in, Miss Secretary,” he barked into the intercom. He hoped the General had heard him tease her. It was the kind of familiarity he enjoyed.
The door opened and General Blue strode purposefully into the office. The Secretary of Defense stood up and walked around his desk to greet him.
“Matt! Good to see you! You know, I was going to get Jill to call you to arrange lunch next week, then Bruce called and said you wanted to come over.”
The two men shook hands. General Blue was a full six inches shorter than Secretary Hamilton, a man who was ten years his junior but didn't look it. All those years of arranging rubber-chicken speaking engagements for party hopefuls across the country had taken their toll on him. He was fifty pounds overweight, nearly bald, and dark circles under reddened eyes and a tremor of hand belied a somewhat more than recreational interest in gin.
“What can I get for you, Matt?” he asked, walking over to a wet bar behind his desk. He threw a switch, and overhead spots came on, illuminating crystal decanters with gold labels reading Scotch, Bourbon, and Gin.
“What was it you used to say, Matt? Sun's not over the yardarm until the bugler's blown retreat and left his post? Those were the days, huh, Matt? The smell of wet leather on heaving horseflesh . . . you had me convinced you could ride down a polo ball and swat it downfield without giving either the ball or the goal so much as a glance. I'll tell you. Those were the days ...”
He looked over his shoulder at the General.
“Sam,” said the General, “as much as I'd like to, I didn't come here to reminisce about our days on the polo field back at Gates Mills.” The General's face was set sternly, his mouth downturned, his huge eyes hooded by a gravely wrinkled brow.
The Secretary of Defense poured a shot of bourbon into each of two glasses and tossed in a few cubes of ice. He handed one glass to the General.
“You look like you could use a libation,” he said. “I know I sure as hell could.”
He sat down on a leather sofa facing the windows, and sighed audibly. The General sat across from him in an armchair that matched the sofa.
“All those years I dreamed about this office, and now it's mine, Matt. I've been here almost a year and I still have to pinch myself every once in a while to remind me that it's real.”
“I have come to talk to you about my grandson, Sam,” the General interrupted. “He is in a great deal of trouble over in Vietnam, and I want your help.”
“What? Your grandson? What's happened, Matt?”
The Secretary of Defense looked genuinely surprised, which startled the General. He had figured the Secretary would have been well briefed on the situation.
“He has been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy, Sam. They've got him locked up at the Long Binh stockade, and I want you to issue an authorization to release him pending trial by court-martial.”
The Secretary of Defense took a long drink of bourbon and stood up.
“I don't know anything about this, Matt. I'll have to look into it and get back to you. I can't imagine why I haven't been informed, unless it was overlooked by my daily briefing officer while I was on my trip. I just returned from—”
“Jill was telling me outside,” the General interrupted. “I'll wait, Sam.”
“Wait? For what?”
“For you to look into young Matt's situation. I want this taken care of now,” said the General. “I've been getting the goddamned runaround on this thing, Sam, and I want you to authorize that boy's release tonight. Now.”
The Secretary of Defense looked stunned as he sat down at his desk and punched his intercom.
“Jill, get me Colonel Tomkins,” he said.
“One moment, sir,” came the reply.
“Jim Tomkins is my military aide,” the Secretary explained. “A fine, fine man.”
The intercom buzzed.
“
Colonel Tomkins on line one, sir.”
The Secretary of Defense picked up the phone.
“Jim, I want to know what you've got on the arrest of . . .” He turned to the General and covered the receiver. “What is he? A lieutenant? Infantry?”
“That's right, Sam,” said the General.
“I want everything you've got on Lieutenant Matthew Blue, Infantry, Jim. Apparently he's been arrested and is being held in the stockade at Long Binh. Get back to me ASAP.”
He hung up the phone.
“What do you know about this?” asked the Secretary of Defense, turning to his old friend the General.
“Not much more than you do, Sam. They've got him incommunicado over there, and I can't find out a thing about the facts surrounding the charges against him. I was over there yesterday and the day before, and this whole goddamned thing stinks to high heaven if you ask me.”
The two men sat drinking and talking for several minutes when the intercom buzzed.
“Colonel Tomkins for you, sir,” said the intercom.
The Secretary of Defense picked up the phone.
“What have you got, Jim?” he asked.
He listened and nodded his head slowly.
“What about it?” he asked.
More listening. More nodding.
“What did he say?”
The Secretary of Defense stopped nodding and listened intently. He picked up a pen and made a few notes on a pad of paper on his desk.
“Sit tight, Jim. I'll be back to you in a moment.”
He hung up the phone and turned to the General.
“I'm afraid what I've got to say isn't what you came to hear,” he said gravely, tapping the desk with the end of his pen. The Secretary stood up and paced back and forth behind his desk.
“The charges against your grandson are very grave, as I'm sure you understand,” he said. He stopped pacing and turned to face the General. “Anything I undertake to do on his behalf at this point would be seen as command influence. I know you understand how seriously this is taken by all the services, Matt. Anything smacking of command influence could jeopardize the possibility of a fair trial for young Matt. I know you don't want to do anything to lessen his chances to clear his name of this . . . this very serious charge.”
Army Blue Page 26
