When Chase finally reached General Hickman by phone—he’d been tied up with a visiting admiral from Pearl Harbor for several hours—she discovered him genuinely concerned. “I heard you were in a wreck yesterday. How are you?”
“A little stiff from whiplash, but not bad, considering, sir.”
“I’d like to see you in my office first thing in the morning.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
He hung up without stating the purpose for the meeting and before Chase could explain she was at the mercy of others for transportation. Just as well. He would have expected her to figure out the latter on her own. She blamed the pain. She wasn’t thinking clearly, except how grateful she was that Hickman had hung up before she’d embarrassed herself. She made a mental note to call for a rental car.
For a few moments, Chase sat there with the phone still cradled against her neck as she stared out the window at the busy tarmac. Stone’s squadron of 81s (she still thought of 464 as Stone’s squadron) was quiet at hangar one, like obedient pets, waiting. No maintenance crews were hustling about today. Other than the parked cars in the lot, she could have believed everyone had been ordered home for the day.
Life at the other four hangars was active, though. A Cobra gunship was taxiing past the still 81s on its way to hangar three. It slowed to a hover yards ahead of the Marine on the ground who waved commands. The Cobra finally settled onto the tarmac and the rotor blades slowly came to a halt. From hangar two, a Huey taxied by and lifted off. She felt the vibrations as it soared overhead.
There was a knock on her door. “Enter.”
It was North. “Paul Shapiro on line 2, ma’am. He won’t talk to me. Says he’ll only talk to you.”
“Line 2?”
He nodded and was about to dash out of her office when she stopped him. “North,” she said, “a couple of things—” She gestured him in the office and motioned for him to close the door.
“Yes, ma’am?” His face was stitched with concern. How well they knew each other. How much they’d been through together. North was the only person she knew she could count on.
“Two things,” she started. “First, there’s absolutely nothing going on between Colonel Figueredo and me.”
North had taken the chair in front of her desk, and was sitting upright on the edge. “Okay, ma’am, but you don’t—”
“Second,” she interrupted, “did anyone from 464 notify us about a hard landing that Major White may have had in his 81 about three weeks or so ago?”
“No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “No hard landing or any aircraft incident that I’m aware of. What makes you think White had a hard landing?”
“Shapiro’s got a source that’s hinting there was one.” She paused. Just how far should she involve her sergeant? What she really wanted to do was pick up the phone and call Colonel Farris and ask the outright question, but if Shapiro was right, she would be showing too much of her hand. If she uncovered evidence of a cover-up, she’d have to take the evidence directly to N.I.S.
If she was wrong and insinuated too much too quickly—
“Who are you close to over there at 464?” she asked North.
North thought for a moment. “There’s a crew chief I did a feature on a few months ago. He was pretty happy with the story, especially when it showed up in his hometown paper.”
“Right,” she said. “I remember that. Listen, I need you to wander over to 464, talk to the crew chief on the pretense of another feature on whatever and see if you can glean anything about this so-called hard landing. And while you’re at it, take his temperature on the 81.” North raised his eyebrows. “Don’t kid me,” she added, “you sergeants know more about what’s really going on around here than anyone else, especially more than most officers.” She smiled.
“Roger that, ma’am. Headed there A-SAP.”
Before she dismissed him, she glanced at line two of the telephone that was still blinking. “There’s more we need to talk about, North, but I need to take this call.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am,” he said, and closed the door behind him.
She opened the Current to the obituaries and gasped when she saw that someone from the Appleton family had provided the same photograph of Melanie that Chase had seen in Major White’s cockpit. Chase scanned the obit. Melanie had been twenty-eight and was survived by her father and her brother, who were all mentioned by name.
She punched the blinking light on her telephone. “Captain Anderson.”
An exasperated Shapiro blurted, “Finally! We have to talk.”
“I know.”
“When?”
“Now. And it’s my turn to ask the questions.” She pushed the newspaper aside. Underneath was the yellow notepad with the spidery cluster she’d created.
“I’m afraid your phone might be tapped.”
“Oh, come on, Paul. I can admit to being confused over some of this—how your sister ended up with Major White’s dog tags?—but this paranoia is wearing thin.” She was gauging every word, aware that whatever she said could wind up on page one.
“I just don’t want to endanger you any further.”
Chase felt a chill creep down her spine. She glanced at her watch. Molly would be calling soon. “First question,” she blurted. “What was the connection between your sister and Major White?”
“They were—close.”
“Intimate?” She conjured the woman as she had appeared the morning of the crash. Desperate. Flustered. Rifling through her purse for the dog tags. The heavy dark curtain of her hair falling across her face. Then as she’d appeared at the memorial service, grief-stricken and frightened.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “What I want to know—”
“Second question,” she interrupted. “Since you don’t believe Melanie—your sister—committed suicide, what do you believe happened to your sister?”
After a moment of silence, she asked again, “Paul?”
His voice whispered through the line. “I think she was killed because she’d learned too much about the 81.”
Chase glanced at her notepad, at 81 crash. From that she had connected herself, HMH-464, Major White, Melanie Appleton, Paul Shapiro, and Colonel Figueredo. She opened the binder that contained all her office had on the 81: photographs at various angles, schematic drawings, statistical info about weight loads, and so on.
“So you believe there’s really some sort of conspiracy surrounding the 81?”
“I really don’t want to talk about this over your line,” he said. “I was hoping we could meet somewhere.”
“I don’t even have a car right now,” she reminded him.
“I’m worried about you. They must have followed you to the restaurant. If we hadn’t moved to the back booth — my fault. I should have learned after what happened to Melanie —” His voice cracked when he said her name.
“They? We? Paul, who are you talking about?”
“Someone’s afraid the 81 will be grounded, and yet that’s exactly what should be done according to Tony White. It should be scrapped. Three weeks ago, White told Melanie that his hard landing had been wiped off the report that gets sent to DC. With new contracts for a new attack helicopter in the pipeline, someone clearly doesn’t want to draw negative attention to National AeroStar.”
“If the 81 needs to be grounded for maintenance checks, everyone here from Colonel Farris to General Hickman would be 100 percent behind the move. Safety is a mantra of this base.”
“I’m still trying to piece it together, myself, Captain Anderson. Someone over there wants to hide the facts about the 81.”
“You said at the restaurant you didn’t believe Major White’s crash was an accident. That would mean someone deliberately killed not only White but his crew and the other Marines on board.”
“It’s possible the crash was an accident. But you have to admit his crash would have been avoided if White’s hard landing several weeks ago had been reported. What’s the procedure when a pil
ot has a hard landing?”
“A report is sent to DC, and a base directive, at the very least, is issued to ground all our 81s until maintenance checks clear each of them.” She glanced out the window at the still 81s.
“One more thing—I got a strange call this morning. The guy wouldn’t give his name. Just said he’d noticed I’d been writing a lot about the 81 and that I should do a little investigative reporting about why there were so many crashes lately.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him it would help if he knew something specific, but there was so much noise in the background, I couldn’t make out what he said. Anyway, I just thought I’d share it. I get a lot of weird calls, but given what White told Melanie last week before the crash, and your wreck yesterday—”
A reluctant Sergeant Cruise had eased open the office door. “Sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but your daughter’s on line three.”
“Thank you,” she said, and waited for the door to close again. “Paul, I need to go. Let me ask around about this so-called hard landing. I’ll get back to you.”
Later that afternoon, North tapped at her door. He was back from his visit to 464 and from his talk with the crew chief who, according to North, had been so glum about White’s crash and the friends he’d lost, he’d been only mildly talkative and even less informative.
“But if I didn’t know better, ma’am, I’d say everyone’s tightening the ship over there,” North said. “Loose lips sinking ships, and all that shit. Probably doesn’t help me being with Public Affairs. He knows my job involves talking to the media. I got the sense he didn’t even want to be seen talking to me.”
She nodded. “Probably so.”
“You said earlier that there was more, ma’am.”
Chase looked suspiciously around her office. Shapiro’s talks about conspiracy were finally getting to her. She beckoned North closer, and he crossed the office and knelt beside her desk. Once eye-level, she took him back to the morning of White’s crash and to Melanie Appleton’s visit that morning. She whispered that Melanie was Shapiro’s twin sister and that she was the woman who had leapt from Diamond Head the night of White’s memorial service. “Major White allegedly told Shapiro’s sister he’d had a hard landing in his 81,” she said. She told him about the dog tags, even wincing as she told him about throwing them away, and why—to protect Kitty White from knowing the truth about her husband’s affair.
“I would have done the same, ma’am,” North reassured her. “How many times did we look the other way—” and his voice dropped, “over there—” Chase knew he was talking about Iraq. The stories they could tell but would never tell.
“But here’s the kicker,” she added. “Shapiro’s twin sister had White’s dog tags around her neck when she died.”
North’s expression, the tightly knitted brows and pursed lips beneath his new moustache shifted to surprise. “How the fuck—?”
“That’s what I can’t figure out. Either Melanie Appleton gained access to the base and went through my garbage or someone else did.” Something about this missing piece of the puzzle was pushing against her brain.
“Who else knew you had the dog tags, ma’am?”
She shook her head.
“No one. Not even you, North.” She glanced suspiciously around her office again and back to North whose eyes were also wandering around the room. “Either someone,” she said, “has been in my home and removed the dog tags before I took the garbage to the street that night, or someone boldly went through my garbage at the end of my driveway.”
“You live in base housing—technically, I suppose the provost marshal could access your house if he wanted,” he said. Chase tried to picture the tall Major Sims sneaking into her home and dismissed the notion. As if reading her thoughts, North asked, “Who else has a key to your place?”
“Molly, of course. Samantha Harold who lives next door has a key in case Molly gets locked out. It’s a piece of the puzzle that just won’t fall into place.”
She lifted the heavy binder on the corner of her desk that contained all the info they had on the 81 and turned to the drawings of the swash plate duplex bearing. She eased the binder around the desk for North’s benefit. “Stone told me a long time ago that design problems had been identified and solved.”
“You think there’s a new flaw, ma’am?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Possibly. Or, suppose this design flaw can’t be fixed. What if we’ve been flying this thing all this time on a wing and a prayer?” North half-smiled at her use of the pun. “Seriously, North,” she added, “if this were true, it would mean White’s crash could have been avoided.” White’s crash and how many others? Stone’s? The investigation report attributed his crash to enemy fire. But was it? She stared into North’s face. “What evidence do I have that Stone’s bird was really brought down by enemy fire? What hard evidence do we have that any of the most recent crashes attributed to desert sand and dust is legitimate?”
“Ma’am, I can’t believe the Corps would knowingly put Marines in danger.”
She shook her head. “Not the Corps, North. Just a few Marines who are rotten to the Corps,” and she beat him with a smile to her second pun. Effects of the pain pill were definitely making her loopy. “I’ve also studied the newspaper clippings of the past crashes at Lejeune, the one over the Chocolate Mountains, the one in Afghanistan, and the most recent crash in Baghdad.” She was flipping through the binder to show him the news releases of each crash. “Always a routine training exercise that’s under military investigation,” she said. “The news reports of the Middle East crashes cited problems with sand and dust. Funny how in seven years I can’t remember learning the result of a single crash investigation, except for Stone’s and the one that involved the National AeroStar executives. Someone must be getting this information. Surely the families.”
“You’d think so,” he said.
She dug through the binder to the end. “There are no clippings of lawsuits and no interviews with disgruntled families. My question is, would there have been if each crash had been the result of pilot error? The crashes in the Middle East cited mechanical failure brought on by unseemly weather conditions. Who can blame the manufacturer or the Marine Corps for sand or dust storms?”
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “Take this to N.I.S.?”
She shook her head. “Career suicide. First thing they’ll do is contact General Hickman and Colonel Farris with my unsubstantiated concerns. I’d like to call Farris myself and ask him point blank, but if Shapiro’s right and White’s hard landing went unreported—” She paused to gather her wits, and added, “For now, I want you to just nose around a bit at the NCO club. See what you can find out from a few sergeants after they’ve had a few beers.”
“Anything else?”
She thought a moment, and then she shook her head. “Shapiro’s put me in an awkward position. Both General Hickman and Colonel Figueredo have issued a direct order that I’m to report to them whenever I talk to Shapiro. Until I know for certain who to trust, I’m walking a tightrope. If Shapiro’s right about this, North, we’re about to step into the middle of a firefight.”
“Not like we haven’t been there before, Ma’am.” And they sat in silence, both thinking back to that horrific night in Fallujah.
CHAPTER 9
She was actually relieved when Figueredo finally showed up at 1700 to drive her home, though she realized seconds before he showed up that she could have asked North, Cruise, or Martinez to drive her to pick up Molly and then home. She blamed her fuzzy thinking on the effects of the pain medication, which, sadly, was wearing off again. She couldn’t take another pill until after she put Molly to bed. Then, what if there was some sort of emergency, like a fire? Could she even chance taking another pain pill to help her through the night? “Ready?” Figueredo looked too refreshed to have spent an afternoon at anything called work. She pushed herself out of the chair with both arms, and struggled. Whe
n he rushed to her side to help, she let him.
Gone was the military sedan he’d been driving earlier. He guided her to a vintage BMW, and she wondered what her father would have thought this said about the colonel.
“Want me to take you home first?” he asked as she was buckling her seat belt.
“No, I have to pick up my daughter. If that’s going to be a problem—” She was already unbuckling the seat belt.
“Damn,” he said, “you’re so hardheaded. It’s no problem.” He shut the door. She watched him walk around the front of the car. Despite his cockiness, there was no mistaking Figueredo for anything other than a man who was comfortable in his own skin.
“I have to stop for gas,” he apologized, pulling the seat belt across his chest, and looking over at her with that boyish grin of his. Do they ever grow up? she wondered.
A few minutes later, he was pulling into the parking lot of the base gas station. While he filled the tank, she thought about how, or if she should tell him about the latest conversation with Paul Shapiro. Not telling him was in violation of his direct order.
When they were once again underway to retrieve Molly, she said, “Hickman wants to see me first thing in the morning.” Figueredo was driving with his hands in the ten and two positions; his eyes fixed on the traffic ahead. “He sounded serious,” she added.
No response. Except for saluting the MP at the gate, Figueredo seemed disengaged from the car. A thousand miles away. She tried again. “Paul Shapiro called the office this afternoon.”
“Calling you at home wasn’t enough?” Now she had his attention.
“Why do you get so hostile every time I mention Paul Shapiro? It is my job to talk to reporters, sir.”
“Annoyed is not hostile.”
“Annoyed? Shapiro’s just doing his job.” God, how she wished Stone were here. Stone would have known what to do, how to sort out all this mess. Maybe not, though. His drinking had forced them into secrets and silences that neither felt a sense of urgency to break. During their first tours in the Middle East and that year’s separation, bad things had happened to both of them. He’d been suffering survivor’s guilt. As for herself, she’d finally rationalized all she’d done over there—how a person could change when she felt she could die at any moment. How she’d found herself reaching out with two hands to grab fistfuls of life anywhere and from whomever she could. Over there, you never knew when you could be taken out by a sniper’s round or when you might step on an explosive device in the very spot that just the day before you’d been running with no fear of anything but dehydration. How many friends had she and Stone lost? Her parents were twenty-four years older and hadn’t lost one quarter the number of friends as she and Stone.
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 10
