She made a mental note to have her uniforms tailored and pinned the silver captain’s bars to her collar. Funny no one had mentioned she was losing weight. But you could conceal a lot in utilities, and if you rarely left the house anymore … Still, it seemed as if Samantha or Paige, her two closest friends who lived with their Marine husbands on either side of her and Molly, might have said something.
On good days, and this was arguably a simplification, all a public affairs officer had to worry about was proofing the base newspaper before it went to press or answering correspondence from the public. Bad days meant helicopter crashes and dead Marines. More than a year had passed since the last crash for a Hawaii-based squadron. On the East Coast, however, within the past sixty days, New River Air Station in North Carolina had suffered one crash with fatalities and two hard landings, during which no one was seriously injured. Marine Aircraft Group-39, stationed at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, had recently lost a helicopter during a routine training exercise over the Chocolate Mountains in Arizona. No survivors. In Afghanistan, two helicopters crashed in separate incidents, killing everyone aboard. A half dozen crashes in Iraq. No survivors. In the majority of these crashes, the helicopter was the new model 81, touted as the Corps’s aviation workhorse and the largest helicopter in the Western world.
The glass front door to the Public Affairs Office was unlocked and the aroma of Kona coffee, as well as the heavy metal music clanging through the sound system, verified North’s presence.
Before the assignment to Hawaii, she and North had worked together in Iraq and before that at Camp Pendleton, and this had produced a bond she could tell the others in the Hawaii office sometimes envied. North had followed her to Iraq and then to Hawaii. How he convinced his monitor in DC to assign him to Chase’s public affairs unit she couldn’t imagine. Nor could she even allow herself to imagine the rumors that hovered around his insistency. Twice he had threatened to leave the Marines if not assigned to her command: when she was ordered to Iraq—his first two requests to accompany her denied—and afterward, when she was assigned to Hawaii.
To an outsider, their relationship probably appeared oddly inappropriate, but not to them. North had saved her life by shielding her from an IED explosion, taking the brunt of shrapnel he still carried in his shoulder and right hip. She had saved his life during a firefight on the outskirts of Fallujah. Once, while she had been suffering heat exhaustion after a particularly dangerous mission with Marines under orders from legendary General John Armstrong—a mission that resulted in a grueling firefight with insurgents—North had forced his canteen in her hand and ordered her to drink.
She was determined not to give Armstrong ammunition to think that she, or any other woman for that matter, didn’t belong. Every female Marine knew all it took was for one of them to fail and new policy would be written overnight to stall advances for women at least a generation. How many times had she been accused of martyrdom for the sake of advancing women in the Corps? Stone and her parents had warned against pushing herself too hard. “Think of Molly,” her mother had said after learning Chase was deploying with Armstrong’s regiment. And poor Molly, abandoned by two deployed parents, had been shipped off to live in Virginia with her grandparents.
Chase located North in the break room. Instead of a flight suit or cammies, he was dressed in a white T-shirt and his dress blue trousers with the blood stripe running along the outer legs. Blood stripes represented the bloodshed of Marines during the Mexican-American battle at Chapultepec in 1847. Only male officers and noncommissioned officers, meaning corporals and above, were permitted to wear blood stripes. A few women in the late Eighties petitioned the Pentagon for a uniform change, citing the male-only use of blood stripes as perpetuating the gender gap. Things like blood stripes hardly bothered Chase. Since there were no women at Chapultepec, the men could have them as far as she was concerned, especially since the tradition of the blood stripes had extended to a mild form of hazing for newly promoted corporals—mild if you weren’t the one being kicked in the legs by your fellow Marines on promotion day. Officers didn’t participate in the hazing ritual, and what a shame. Over the years, she could recall a few she’d have liked to kick.
North glanced down at the blue trousers, lifting his heels to check the length. “I was just making sure they still fit. I haven’t worn them in a year, you know.” The Marine Corps Ball to celebrate the Corps’s November Tenth anniversary was less than two weeks off. This year, Stone’s former squadron, HMH-464, was again hosting the event in its hangar. Last year, Stone had been in charge of the ceremony.
“What a difference a year makes,” she said, pouring coffee.
“You can say that again.”
“So …” she said, taking note of the length of his trousers and where they broke across the top of his foot, “they look regulation to me.”
North was turning slowly for her inspection. “Yeah—guess I’ve gained back those ten pounds.”
They chatted about their roles in the upcoming anniversary ceremony, about the cooling island temperatures, and about how quiet the morning had been so far, which was code for no calls from the media. She retreated to her office on the second floor with coffee and a resolve to clear her desk and to prepare for the staff meeting that would include funeral details for White and the others. Coming down the hall were Cruise and Martinez, engaged in a game of playful bickering over who had had the most stressful weekend. She heard North shout back from across the hall, “Hel-lo—have you people been living under a rock for the last forty-eight hours?”
Among the letters on her desk were the usual requests from several seniors groups who wanted tours of the base, as well as a request from the Boy Scouts to use Marine Corps water trucks for their upcoming Jamboree, and a letter from Paramount Pictures requesting fifty Marines as extras in a movie shot. After an hour or so, she pushed from the desk, stretched her calves by flexing her ankles several times, and glanced out the window toward the quiet tarmac. From this height, she could see the entire southern half of Mokapu Peninsula. What this base lacked in grandeur to others, such as Camp Pendleton’s sprawling 197,000 acres, it more than made up for in breathtaking views of the Koolau Mountain range and the turquoise water that encircled the peninsula. She could also make out the rows and rows of helicopters that reminded her of giant grasshoppers that had crawled out of a B movie the night before when no one was looking. In another hour or so, Marines would transform the tarmac into a complicated freeway system.
God help her, but she did love helicopters. As the widow of a pilot, she would have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Truth was, she probably should have been the pilot, not Stone. Yes, he loved flying, but Stone had never gotten over his disappointment at not qualifying for jets. “I might as well be flying a cargo plane,” she’d heard him say too many times. He had failed the decompression chamber, as had most of his friends in flight school, and she’d been quick in those earlier, sweeter moments of their new life together to point this out. When she stopped to think about it, she figured she’d fallen in love with helicopters before she’d even fallen in love with Stone. Or maybe that wasn’t quite true. Maybe she had simultaneously fallen in love with both. Seven years earlier, Stone had been the pilot on her first flight. He was a captain and Chase a lieutenant, both stationed in Okinawa. Chase had pleaded her way through the difficult chain of command to cover a live-fire training exercise for Stars & Stripes that would have normally been assigned to one of the men in her office. The exercise was taking place on a remote island in the South China Sea. Captain Michael “Stone” Anderson was to fly her to the island. He had joked about never having flown a woman before and that if his helicopter were a Navy ship and he believed in all those ridiculous Navy superstitions about it being bad luck for the captain to see a woman on board, he would be compelled to dismiss Chase. Wasn’t she lucky? he’d teased. Chase had not been amused, although she had been intrigued.
She’d studied Stone dur
ing his preflight check—the way he walked with command around the bird, climbing atop to check the upper rotor blades, hopping catlike to the ground. A second or so after he’d disappeared into the cockpit, the top and rear rotor blades had begun to spin, slowly at first, like ceiling fans that had been turned from low to high.
When the crew chief appeared in the doorway and waved her forward, Chase had run hunched under the blades—an instinct or maybe an imitation from all the war movies her father had taken her to see when she was young—and on reaching the side of the bird, she had tossed in her camera bag. The crew chief had grabbed her hand and swung her aboard as the bird teetered slightly off ground, causing Chase to lose her footing. Stone, in the cockpit and wearing a helmet and aviators so that only his mouth was visible, had flashed her a grin. Then the bird lifted, tail-first, and Chase had been aware of a heady weightlessness, or rather recklessness, that felt very much like falling in love.
The hangar doors at 464, Stone’s old squadron, were open, and a color guard detail of Marines, some in flight suits and others in digitals, were practicing the folding of an American flag. She guessed the Marines were the funeral detail, practicing for the memorial service. Chase had a flag, too, though she couldn’t recall where she’d stored it. Probably at the top of their closet above Stone’s uniforms, somewhere safe for Molly, if she wanted it one day.
Just then, two Marines emerged from the cavernous dark hangar into sunlight. By the sudden rendering of salutes from the color guard detail, the two were obviously officers. They were dressed in flight suits and looked at first as if they’d come outside to observe the flag-folding practice. But one officer motioned in the opposite direction, and the two began to walk west toward the parking lot, passing in and around the rows of pickup trucks and SUVs.
Chase turned her attention back to the color guard, which had resumed its practice. The Marines suddenly stopped and began to stare in the direction of the two officers across the parking lot. She followed their gaze and had to press her cheek into the cold glass of the window. The two officers had stopped between two rows of vehicles. One officer stood with his hands on his hips while the other gestured like a wild man.
Chase found herself glued to the window, her cheek warming the glass. She didn’t know what she was expecting to witness, but the scene of anger—so violent, so laced with something dreadful—was too intriguing to turn away from, and she wondered how many others in this building were looking down upon the same scene. Just then, the calmer officer glanced over his shoulder at the color guard detail as if he thought they might be within earshot. Whether the officer signaled or not, Chase couldn’t say, but the color guard detail suddenly scrambled for the hangar. By then, the two arguing officers had walked on, too far now from her line of sight.
She considered the view from North’s office down the hall and hurried down the hallway, finding North seated behind his desk, talking on the phone. When he started to his feet, she motioned for him to stay seated. At the window, she scanned the parking lot. The two officers were gone.
A little while later, Aretha Franklin was belting for a little respect, a sure sign Staff Sergeant Martinez, who outranked North and was eight years older, had changed the station to the oldies. In a chair on the other side of Chase’s desk, Cruise was hunched over a stack of dummy layouts and front-page photograph possibilities, unconsciously plucking eyelashes from the rims of her dark eyes in that nervous habit of hers. Chase glanced out her office window and below at the busy tarmac. What a difference from Saturday. Marines in flight suits were hustling from one helicopter to another. A Cobra gunship was taxiing along the tarmac toward its squadron’s hangar. But at HMH-464, the 81s remained morbidly motionless. She wondered how long it would take for the investigation team to rule on Saturday’s crash. A memorial service for White and the others was scheduled for the following morning at the base chapel. Her entire staff would be on call to escort media to the service and to keep pesky reporters away from the families—and from other Marines. Kitty White, according to the base chaplain, was flying her husband’s body back to Maryland the day after for a family funeral.
Chase’s private line rang.
“Public Affairs, Captain—” and a breath later, “Aye-aye, sir—” At the click of a hang-up, Chase pretended for Sergeant Cruise’s sake that someone was still on the line, but she hesitated too long. Cruise looked up, her eyes narrowing into slits. Chase set the phone back into the cradle.
“It was him, wasn’t it?”
Chase shrugged and returned her attention to the stack of layouts.
Cruise, however, flung herself into the back of her chair and the chair smacked against the wall. “He’s one crazy—” She stopped herself when Chase shook her head.
“Staff meeting’s been pushed up,” Chase said. “And you’re talking about our commanding general.” It wasn’t good that Cruise and the others knew so much about Hickman, who was a Naval Academy graduate and celebrated helicopter pilot. But these days, Hickman looked like a man who was prematurely aged from all he’d seen and done. She’d heard him shout at another pilot one night at the club that landing on the deck of a carrier was nothing compared to flying into a hot landing zone in the desert, dust kicking up so bad you had to feel your way into the landing. After the first phase of the war, and amid rumors that Hickman was reckless even by Marine pilot standards, headquarters pulled him out of the desert and assigned him to Hawaii.
Hickman was married, although his wife was rarely seen—a tiny, timid creature outweighed by her Louisiana drawl. He paraded her at formal functions or wives’ club gatherings. Hickman never smiled unless he was doing shots at the O’Club or holding kangaroo court, where the mistakes of his staff were retold for jeering. Only Chase was spared this ridicule. She wasn’t sure if she were spared because she was the only woman on his staff or the most junior in rank. At the other major bases—Lejeune in North Carolina and Pendleton—her peers were at least two ranks higher. In fact, she’d assumed her new role by default when her boss, Lieutenant Colonel Silvers, finally received his first set of orders to Iraq. Silvers had been stuck in Hawaii, as he put it to Chase, while everyone else was already on their second or third tour of combat duty. “Why, even you’ve been over there,” he’d said the day she reported for duty on Oahu. “The whole damn thing’s going to be over before I get my chance.” She wanted to ask what newspaper he’d been reading or what television news show he’d been watching for the past five years. There was nothing glamorous about dodging land mines, snipers, insurgent attacks, or suicide bombers. Silvers eventually got his way and off he went, leaving behind a wife and a twelve-year-old son.
At first Hickman resented her. Even told her as much during their first face-to-face meeting.
“You might as well know,” he’d said, looking her up and down while she stood before his desk at attention, her eyes fixed on the taxiing Cobra gunship helicopter she could make out through the window behind him, “you’ve got two strikes against you. I don’t like women in the Marines Corps and you’re too inexperienced for this job.”
She could have advocated for herself on both counts. After a year in Iraq where she was embedded as an escort to news crews wanting to hang with various infantry units from Fallujah to Baghdad, she’d proven herself under the toughest, most primitive conditions. With Hickman, it was the same old game. Never mind the documented success within her service record, she was still a woman. It was okay with her. If she could earn Armstrong’s respect, she could earn Hickman’s.
In a way, she pitied Hickman. Word had it his second star was out of reach. Had the drinking rumors made their way stateside, or had they been following him around for some time, forgiven for an exemplary combat record? With the pressure of possible retirement upon him, Hickman as commanding general of Marine Corps Base, Hawaii, seemed little more than a sad, lame duck.
Still, he hadn’t let up on Chase for months, not until the undeniable success of the 81 media dog-and-pony sh
ow during which Major White had been the pilot. To show his appreciation Hickman had called a surprise formation of his staff officers one Friday afternoon in his office and presented Chase with the Navy Commendation Medal, her second in six short years of service.
Since then, it seemed she could do no wrong. Hickman had readily approved all of her plans for the upcoming spring open house to which the public would be invited, had even thrown his weight around a few DC offices via telephone to secure her a commitment for the Blue Angels. She learned he’d eventually called the director of Public Affairs in DC to sing her praises. Each Thursday, he read the Hawaii Marine cover-to-cover and relayed compliments through Major O'Donnell.
She glanced at her watch. Thanks to the pushed up meeting, she’d miss her chance at a noon run. “Better get to headquarters,” she said to Cruise, and gathered her purse and keys.
Twelve miles northeast of Honolulu, the base was home to about nine thousand Marines and swallowed nearly all of Mokapu Peninsula that connected to the mainland near the cities of Kaneohe and Kailua. Mokapu in Hawaiian means sacred land. The peninsula was sacred to Hawaiians for its rich military history, dating all the way back to the mid-1700s when it was believed that the sheer cliffs of the volcano Ulupa were used as part of the reconnaissance effort to shield torches while relaying information back to lookouts on Mokapu. Many of the earliest inhabitants to the Hawaiian Islands, from as far back as the thirteenth century, were buried on Mokapu. When King Kamehameha moved the monarch to Waikiki in the nineteenth century, Mokapu had been transformed into farmland.
In the late 1800s, a group of American businessmen saw the benefit of controlling Pearl Harbor. With the help of a small detachment of Marines—and this would be the part of military history that always made Chase squirm—they had stormed the Ioloni Palace and overthrown the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liluokalani. When word reached President Grover Cleveland, he denounced the overthrow and ordered the queen reinstated. However, Cleveland was quickly persuaded otherwise, and the queen was removed. Manifest Destiny in full force, by 1918 President Woodrow Wilson had established an army reservation near the Ulupau Crater of the peninsula. Shortly afterward, the Navy adopted the flat, isolated portion of the peninsula as an ideal base for seaplanes and constructed the 7,500-foot runway still in use today.
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 3
