An Unlawful Order
An Unlawful Order
Carver Greene
Copyright 2011 Carver Greene
ISBN 978-1-257-11989-9
To my fellow Marines—Semper Fidelis
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
The day of the hard landing, Major Tony White and his crew were flying in formation with three other helicopters over open water a mile from the coast of Oahu when they encountered the yacht, a luxury seventy-footer with a raised pilothouse, cruising southwest at about twenty knots. Three women sunbathing nude on the upper deck jumped to their feet and waved.
“Shake it, baby!” Garcia, the crew chief, shouted through the headset, and the copilot flashed a wide grin at White, who nodded and broke formation to circle the yacht. The copilot signaled a thumbs-up.
The girls had already settled back in their loungers. When they noticed the returning helicopter, they sprang to their feet and put on a show of fondling themselves and one another. By now, several men had emerged from a lower deck of the yacht to watch.
“Hey, Major—” White and the copilot glanced over their shoulders at Garcia who was standing in the open doorway, one hand on the bulkhead for security, the other on his crotch, “this is where I get off.”
The copilot laughed. “What’s the matter, Garcia? Wife cut you off?”
“She’s six months pregnant, sir. Won’t even let me see her tits.”
White made one final sweep of the yacht. “Take your last look, Garcia.”
Four miles farther, all three Marines were collecting details about the scene ahead and below. Three Navy ships — an LST, a destroyer, and a carrier — positioned at three, six, and nine o’clock, respectively, were pitching and rolling against a swelling Pacific. The bird ahead of White’s was just touching down on the destroyer. The tower cleared White for the carrier at nine o’clock. He eased off the collective and maneuvered sideways to the ship’s port side and to the helo deck on the stern. Sailors with the haul down cable for equalizing electrostatic potential between White’s bird and the ship were positioning themselves.
But less than fifty feet to the side of the carrier, something went wrong. The helicopter’s engines failed, and the sudden unwelcome reduction of noise throughout the cockpit was replaced with Garcia’s “We’re fucked!”
Apparently, the sailors on the ship thought so, too. They were scrambling to safety. White put the bird in an autorotational spin that secured them over the ship’s deck, but the bird's spinning sent even the emergency crew, who had been standing by with hoses, in a dash.
“Brace yourselves!” White yelled just before the bird bumped hard as a boulder on the deck. Then, “Bail! Bail!” Garcia was the first out. The sight of the young Marine sprinting and nearly tumbling headfirst into the emergency crew flooded White with relief. The copilot wasn’t far behind.
White climbed out of the bird and stormed across the flight deck, ignoring the sailors who called after his well-being. Halfway to the tower, he whipped off his helmet and hurled it against the ship’s bulkhead.
CHAPTER 1
Three weeks later, Captain Chase Anderson was running along her favorite stretch of the base, glancing from time to time at the emerald, fluted Koolau mountain range. A windward gust off the Pacific, chilly even for October, surprised her, knocking her slightly off balance. She’d been too up in her head, distracted by her conversation with Stone. Since his death, she’d become addicted to running. Three-mile runs had extended to five, sometimes six. Once, she’d run nearly nine miles before realizing she would be late for her staff meeting with the general. She had called Sergeant North from her cell phone for a ride back. Lately, since Molly had started kindergarten, Chase found she had so much to tell Stone about all he was missing. So she ran. To an outsider, she might have appeared to be in training for a marathon. To those who knew better, she was running from grief. Chase was, however, running for her life—and for the only life she had left with Stone.
Today, she’d logged two miles, barely time enough to break a sweat, and was telling Stone about how Molly wanted to dress as a hula dancer for Halloween when Sergeant North showed up, slowing the military sedan to a crawl in the middle of the road. Chase ran in place, giving North time to lower the window. Behind his aviator sunglasses and the tease of a new mustache, North looked more like a police officer pulling over a hitchhiker. “Sorry, Captain,” he shouted above the whirring of a helicopter now overhead in approach of the flight line. “We’ve got a crash.”
Chase jumped inside the sedan and reached over a shoulder for the seatbelt as North made a wide u-turn for the office. “What’s down?”
“Another 81, ma’am.”
“Damn it,” she said, and slapped the dash. The day she had learned of Stone’s helicopter crash in Afghanistan, she was running within the perimeter of a desert tent city on the outskirts of Baghdad, daydreaming about him and Molly, when the colonel who was head of Public Affairs flagged her down. The combination of the news and heat had nearly caused her to vomit on the colonel’s boots. Instead, she’d climbed into the colonel’s Humvee and focused on the horizon the way she’d learned to do to combat seasickness aboard a ship.
“The media?”
“MPs at the gate are holding two crews already.” Thanks to the media and their police scanners, bad news traveled fast.
The Marine-81 was their workhorse—and their problem child. Stone’s crash, though, had been “downed by enemy fire,” according to the investigation. These days, especially after the crash that killed the four National AeroStar executives, headquarters in DC was fielding lots of questions from the media about the helicopter’s flightworthiness and about the new defense contracts for additional 81s. The crash that killed the executives was blamed on a faulty swash plate duplex bearing, the part that changes the angle and tilt of the rotor blades. Headquarters grounded the fleet for a while, and the problem was supposedly corrected.
“Crash site?”
North nodded toward the ocean. “Five miles out. Another routine training exercise.”
“Is there any other kind?” She glanced toward the placid Pacific.
“Colonel Farris is standing by for your call,” North said and leaned over her lap for the glove box, retrieving a small notebook and pen that he held against the steering wheel while she scanned through her cell phone directory for Farris’s number.
“The pilot?”
“No names yet, ma’am,”
The 81 squadron was Stone’s last squadron, so Chase knew most of the pilots; some better than others. Some she knew only through their wives. As she waited for Farris to answer, her thoughts raced ahead to the women who, on this October Saturday morning, were most likely in the middle of their weekly shopping runs to the commissary or cheering their kids through the soccer tournament at the base field. Everyone so unassuming, just as she had been nine months ago before learning the news about Stone’s crash. Even this morning, she’d awakened listening for the familiar rattling of his golf clubs she’d heard him retrieve from the closet by the front
door so many times. She used to know by the zipping and unzipping of golf bag compartments—part of a checks-and-balances system her husband had put in play to account for tees, balls, a glove, even dimes to mark his ball on the greens—that it was sunrise without opening her eyes. Stone had always been an early riser. His body had an internal clock set for six, no matter the time they went to bed, no matter the time of actual sunrise.
The call to Farris dropped. Typical. Cellular service on the base was spotty thanks to radio interference between pilots and the tower. She tried again. This time Colonel John “Flyboy” Farris, Stone’s former squadron commander, answered before the end of the first ring. His voice sounded measured, controlled, the way hers was, too, during one of these situations. The meltdown would come in private, much later. She asked the usual questions and jotted his answers into the notebook: nineteen dead, no survivors, routine training exercise with the Navy.
“Sir, the names?”
“The Chaplain’s Office is making notification this minute.” She detected hesitation in the long pause that followed. Finally, “The pilot was Tony White.”
Three months before Stone’s deployment to Afghanistan, the general had ordered Chase to arrange a dog-and-pony show for the media to prove Marines had confidence in their 81. White had been the pilot. Even then, Stone had objected to her flying in the 81, and they had argued. Arguments had become their norm then. Since reuniting after their first Middle East tour, Stone had become super protective of her and Molly. Never mind that Chase had been in combat herself, outside of Fallujah. Since their return from the Middle East, Chase couldn’t go to the PX without Stone checking on her.
“Skipper,” Farris said, “I trust you’ll handle this delicately.” Skipper was the nickname for the rank of captain and generally used to convey a sense of familiarity, which told her Farris was reaching for an ally. As squadron CO, he knew which fingers would be pointing toward his pilot and crew and who would be questioning his leadership. Colonel Flyboy Farris had another fine mess on his hands, and Chase was swelling with sympathy.
“By all means, sir.”
Harry Truman once said the Marines had a propaganda machine nearly as good as Stalin’s. As a public affairs officer, Chase was never more aware of her role in disseminating that propaganda than in the moments following a helicopter crash. At twenty-nine, her job for seven years had been to tell the Marine Corps story in ways that were sure to increase recruitment and retention. Therefore, all accidents happened during routine training exercises; all accidents were under military investigation; all names were withheld pending notification of next of kin; and all other information was deemed “inappropriate for comment,” the Defense Department’s kinder, gentler approach to No comment.
Back in her office, Chase zipped up a flight suit and laced her boots. She had wanted a shower, but there was no time. According to North, all the local media were now waiting at the gate for her statement, and the wire services were expecting callbacks. In the small mirror of the wardrobe, she checked her reflection. After Stone’s death, she’d chopped off her long dark hair for a cut with a more utilitarian purpose, but she hadn’t returned in months for a trim. She tucked the unruly pieces behind her ears and up into her cap. Her face was still flushed from the run and, judging from her heart rate, from having to face the media. She considered calling in the others on her staff, but Cruise was hosting a birthday party for her son at the Koolau Ranch, which was where Molly was as well, and Staff Sergeant Martinez and his wife, if they’d kept their plans, were sightseeing on the big island. Lieutenant Thompson had deployed a few weeks earlier, and his replacement hadn’t been named as of yet. The others, two Pfcs and a lance corporal, were too green to call. Today’s tragedy would have to be hers and North’s to manage. Nothing new. They’d been a team for years.
Sergeant Harrison North was also twenty-nine and had joined the Marines a week after graduating from high school. The added years of experience he had on Chase made him appear older, or so Stone had said during the only conversation they’d had about North’s infatuation for her. Why did it have to be infatuation, she’d asked Stone one evening while putting away the dishes after dinner, when a man followed a woman into combat and something altogether different for those who followed a man? “Human nature,” Stone had said, handing her a stack of warm plates from the dishwasher. “I can’t speak for women, but a man can’t be that close to a woman without thinking about her sexually.” She could have said the same held true for women, but Stone would have continued to unfairly suspect North when the suspicions belonged elsewhere.
Chase slipped on her dog tags and tucked the cold metal beneath her T-shirt. “Okay, North,” she called out. North knocked anyway before entering and handed over a draft of a media release. He set the three-inch binder containing their entire file on the 81 on the single empty corner of her desk.
“Next of kin?”
“Notifications still being made, ma’am.”
She read over the release, mentally checking off time, date, and place. She rang up headquarters, and Major O’Donnell, the G-1 officer for General Hickman, answered. “This is what we get for coming in this weekend to catch up on paperwork,” he teased.
“No rest for the wicked, sir.” They’d known each other since their combat tour in Iraq, and O’Donnell’s had been the first familiar face she’d seen in Hawaii.
“General Hickman’s on the line with Colonel Farris,” he said. “I’ll notify him you’re holding.”
Brigadier General “Wild Bill” Hickman was not the first Marine Chase had had to win over. He was a Desert Storm veteran who had the distinction of having flown more combat missions than any pilot on active duty and he’d made it clear he didn’t have much use for female Marines. He let her get halfway through the reading of the news release before he interrupted. “MPs tell me the gate’s overrun with media. Who told them about the crash?” At the accusatory tone, she instinctively glanced up at North who was now standing in front of her desk, awaiting her next order.
“Most likely they picked it up from scanners, sir—”
North read the situation and rolled his eyes. She continued, “I understand they were at the gate before my office was even notified.” There was a click, and it took a moment to register that the general had actually hung up on her. “I’ll take that as a yes on the statement,” she said, dropping the phone in the cradle and forcing a smile as North held out a wad of pink telephone message slips.
“He’s a piece of work—”
Chase held up a hand to stop him. She took several of the phone messages for herself and handed back the rest. “Remember, don’t let these guys draw you into any speculation about the 81 or the cause of the crash. And hurry. They’re waiting for us at the gate.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am.” North excused himself and disappeared into his office. A few seconds later, he was identifying himself as a Marine with Public Affairs who was calling with a media release about a helicopter crash. At times, their voices broke into unison during the reading of the release; other times, a morbid musical round.
She finished her calls first and flipped through the folder North had prepared to the page buried in the back, the list of dead Marines, the top of the list for the name of the pilot: Major Anthony White; 33; home-of-record: Chevy Chase, Maryland; next-of-kin: Kitty White, 2 children.
She didn’t know Major White other than the time she’d flown with him, at least not in the sense of knowing that brings shock and grief. General Hickman had instructed her to orchestrate a media day for the 81. Her job, as Hickman put it, had been to show them we’re not afraid to fly in the damn thing. Chase and her staff invited local and national media to ride aboard an 81 during a training exercise that would demonstrate just how efficient the helicopter was at lifting heavy equipment such as trucks and howitzers.
The night before the media circus, however, Stone could no longer hide his true fears about her flying in an 81. How often she looked back
on that argument, replaying it word for word, with the sense that Stone had foreshadowed his own fatal crash. “They should ground the entire fleet,” he had said that night, pacing the kitchen, “until they can figure out what’s wrong with the swash-plate bearing.” Chase had been stir-frying vegetables in the wok. She pressed a foot on the lever of the garbage can and tossed in the spines of red and green pepper. Ginger, sesame oil, and soy sauce were filling up the kitchen and making her eyes water. She had glared at Stone and nodded toward Molly, who was coloring in a book at the kitchen table, and Stone had dropped the subject until the next morning.
Since their return from the Gulf, and on learning six months later that Stone was headed back for a second tour, he had vacillated between an almost cavalier lack of concern for her and Molly to one of over concern. He had never been one to resent her status as a military officer, not like other husbands they knew with military wives. But nothing had been the same since they’d been torn apart for that year. Then again, few Marines on the base had returned from this war unscathed. Any hint of post-traumatic stress disorder grounded a pilot indefinitely. She had stopped attending the wives’ club events because the air was too thick with denial.
Stone’s solution had been to drink—when he wasn’t scheduled to fly. Chase came to prefer the evil of his flying to the evil of his drinking. What had started with a beer or two every night led to his hitting the hard stuff they stored in the small cabinet above the refrigerator for the friends who used to drop by. During his first tour, Stone had lost his best friends when the 81 he was flying went down in a hard landing on the desert floor. His crew chief, Mouse, and copilot, Hammer, had been like brothers. The bird had bumped hard and flipped on its side, Mouse and Hammer’s side. Chase had tried often to talk to Stone about survivor’s guilt, but his eyes would dim. The one night she suggested he talk to a doctor, he had thrown a glass so hard into the kitchen sink that it shattered, sending glass clear across the kitchen. He had crunched across the shards on the way to the front door. How Molly had slept through it all, she couldn’t imagine. Maybe the poor child had been so frightened, she just pretended to sleep.
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 1
