The Aviators

by W. E. B Griffin

  I'll drink vodka.

  As they walked through the Dant carport Johnny asked, "Who's the Dragon Lady? What the hell was that all about?"

  "I don't know her name," Geoff said. "She's a friend of Joan Dant's. She was there when that fucking chancre mechanic showed his ass. Maybe she shouldn't have run the Bellmons off, but I don't blame her for being pissed. I'm pretty fucking pissed myself."

  "I don't have any idea what you're talking about," Oliver said.

  By then they had crossed the adjoining backyards, separated by a low line of hedges, and were at the Craigs' back door. Geoff opened it, and Oliver followed him inside.

  Geoff went to the bar, gestured toward a bottle of Ambassador Twelve-Year-Old scotch, and raised his eyebrows in question.

  "I better not," Oliver said. "You have any vodka? I go from here to report to the General." Geoff found a bottle of vodka and a glass and handed them to Oliver. Then he poured an inch of scotch in another glass, drank it down, grimaced, and poured another inch.

  "He was a good guy," he said. "What the hell happened?"

  "You know?"

  "We were out there," Oliver said. "A few miles north of Enterprise. They lost the rear rotor and went in like a stone, straight down from twenty-five hundred. "

  "Christ!" Geoff said, exhaled audibly, and then took a sip of the scotch. "He wasn't back from 'Nam a year. . . eight months," he added thoughtfully, "something like that. Maybe less. His wife is seven months gone."

  "Tell me about the chancre mechanic," Oliver said. "In fact, start from the beginning." Geoff shrugged. And then, obviously collecting the facts in his mind, he walked into the living room and opened a cigar box on a table beside a Charles Eames chair. He held up two until Oliver shook his head no, then put one back in the box. After that he went to a drawer in the kitchen cabinets and took out a box of wooden matches. And after that he went through what to Oliver was an unnecessarily slow ritual of lighting the long, fairly thick, nearly black cigar. He finally got it going, took a puff, looked at the glowing end, and turned to face Johnny Oliver.

  "Dant was over here about six," Geoff said. "He saw my lights on. I was cracking the goddamned books. He made me a deal. If he could borrow my car, he would go by the Commissary and the Class VI store and pick up steaks and beer and booze. Then Joan wouldn't have to drive him to work.

  What the hell, it saved me a trip out there to get the booze, so I let him have it."

  "You were pretty good friends?" Geoff hesitated a moment before answering.

  "No, not really. He was really a hotshot. Big deal. A Board Test Pilot, dealing with a student schmuck like me: But Ursula and Joan are pretty close, so what the hell? Anyway, when he left, I went back to the books. Joan came over-she usually does-about half past eight. So I retreated to the office. About quarter to nine, the two of them come in the office, and they tell me that they heard on the radio that a large chopper went in, and they're afraid maybe it's Dant.

  So, wiseass that I am, I tell them that if the radio station knows, the Board knew, and if it was Jack, they would have called and told her. Or something. They come back in thirty minutes and tell me Joan's called the Board, and they won't tell her zilch. I told her to come home and sit by the phone, and I'll see what I can find out. So I called the pilots' lounge at the Board, and there's no answer. So I called the Board OD-another chickens hit sonofabitch-and he tells me to mind my own goddamned business. So that's when I called you."

  "I'm on Bellmon's shit list for telling you what I did," Oliver said. "He was there when you called. We were just back from the wreck."

  "How did Dant buy it?"

  "For however long it takes to drop from twenty-five hundred feet. They must have known they were in the deep shit. But they kept their cool. They made radio reports, and they cut the switches. There was no fire. It came down straight and level. They were still in their seats when we got there."

  "How the hell can a rotor come off?" Geoff asked.

  Oliver shrugged helplessly.

  "Tell me about the chancre mechanic," he said.

  "Well, after you gave me the word, I went over there. I didn't say a word, not to Joan, and not to Ursula. That was tough, 'cause Ursula kept telling her everything was just ginger-peachy. I was there about five minutes when the notification team arrived. Jesus Christ, that was a bitch. Joan looked at me, and I know she knows I knew."

  "You did the right thing," Johnny Oliver said.

  "Tell me about it," Geoff said. "Well, they were all right. Some major from the Board, a guy from the AG, a chaplain, and a doctor."

  "What about him?" Oliver asked.

  "Oh, he was all right," Geoff said. "Joan knew him. He's a baby doctor, I think. Anyway, he gave her some pills and told her not to take them unless she thought she really needed them. "

  "Then what chancre mechanic are you talking about?" Oliver interrupted.

  "Chancre mechanics, plural-two of them," Geoff said.

  "They came as the notification team was leaving. By then the house was getting full of people."

  "Including the Dragon Lady?"

  "She got there right after the notification team did. I don't know I told you who she is. Some friend of Joan Dant's. But she was helpful. And then, as I said, these two chancre mechanics show up, and they ask to speak to Joan alone, so they go into the bedroom. The redhead goes with them. The next thing I hear is Joan wailing, I mean, really wailing, howling, like a run-over dog. And then the redhead throws them out.

  She can throw a real mad. And has a very colorful vocabulary. She told the tall sonofabitch-I don't remember the words, but you could tell he didn't expect to hear them from a woman."

  "I don't understand," Johnny said.

  "The clowns weren't doctors. . . I mean, they aren't assigned to the hospital treating people. They're pathologists, the redhead told me they said. Anyway, what they're doing is studying the effects of a crash on the body. What they

  wanted was Joan to sign some paper authorizing them to cut up Dant to see what the damage was. Not the cause of death, if you follow me, but the other damage. How many bones were broken, what happened to the organs. . . . You get the picture? Not an ordinary autopsy. They wanted to cut him up in little pieces. . . and 'retain specimens.' In other words, put his brain and his liver and whatever in jars."

  "Oh, shit! And they told the wife what they wanted?"

  "After she told them no, they told her how important it was, and how she was selfishly standing in the way of science. That's when the redhead threw them out. Five minutes later you showed up. The redhead had calmed Joan down to the point where she wasn't moaning, and she'd just told me what happened, when you rang the doorbell." Oliver exhaled audibly and shrugged.

  "Put a uniform on, Geoff," Oliver said.

  "What the hell for?"

  "Because we're going out to see Bellmon and you're going to tell him what you told me."

  "I don't think I want to do that," Geoff Craig said.

  "I'm not asking you, Geoff," Oliver said.

  Geoff Craig's eyes and lips tightened. He met Oliver's eyes and locked with them for a long moment.

  "What the hell," he said. "I'll have to go out there anyway to get my car back, won't I?"

  "The damage is done here," Oliver said. "The thing to do is see that it doesn't happen again."

  "You don't really think Bellmon will do anything about it, do you? Those clowns will say they were just doing their duty. "

  "I don't know if he will or not, but I think we have to find out. "

  "You get me their names, Johnny, and I'll make sure they don't do it again," Geoff said, almost conversationally, and with a smile.

  Johnny Oliver suddenly remembered that before he had gone to flight school, Geoff Craig had been a Green Beret.

  And Johnny Oliver had seen that look, and that smile, on the faces of Green Berets before.

  "And get yourself court-martialed," Oliver said.

  "No way. They would have to ask
me why I did it. They wouldn't like the answer. And they really wouldn't like to see it reported in the newspapers: 'Decorated Vietnam Veteran Charged with Assault on Army Doctors.' "

  "Don't be a damned fool," Johnny Oliver said.

  "Did it ever occur to you, Captain," Geoff Craig said, "that the trouble with you Regular Army career types is that you worry more about your sacred careers than about right and wrong?"

  "Get dressed," Oliver said flatly.

  "Yes, Sir, Captain," Geoff said, and gave a mocking salute.

  [FOUR]

  Office of the Commanding General

  The Army Aviation Center & Fort Rucker, Alabama

  1145 Hours 12 January 1964

  There were several hundred first lieutenants currently undergoing flight training at the Army Aviation Center. Major General Robert F. Bellmon knew little about any of them except that they almost invariably exceeded the criteria established (in the most part by him) for the selection of officers for flight training. That is, they met stiff physical standards, they had exceeded a specific score on what was the Army variation of an IQ test, and, over all, they had been judged to be worth the expenditure of an awesome amount of the Army's money-the money being devoted to the effort to teach them how to fly.

  Moreover, since there were three times as many applications for flight training as there were spaces, it had been possible for the selection boards to select. the cream of the applicants. In a very real sense, Bellman thought, the first lieutenants in flight training were the creme de la creme. And under any other circumstances he would have been very favorably impressed with First Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig, who at the moment sat in a leather chair at the other side of Bellmon's desk. He was tall and well set up, and he looked like an officer.

  You could deny it all you wanted to, but looks did count, and young Craig looked like a recruiting poster. His uniform was impeccably tailored. And, beyond all that, there was obviously some substance to Lieutenant Craig: on his chest, in addition to his parachutists' wings, were ribbons representing the Silver Star; two Bronze Stars; four Purple Hearts; service within the Republic of South Vietnam; and an array of foreign decorations, including the two awards of the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, with Palm.

  But, unlike most of the other student pilots at Rucker, young Craig had already considerable acquaintance with General Bellmon. In fact, the General happened to know a good deal about Craig. And that was the trouble. For there was much that he didn't like about Craig, the General thought, acknowledging his own prejudices.

  But the main thing he didn't like was that Geoff Craig was a Green Beret.

  Like many senior officers, Bellmon was philosophically opposed to the idea of "elite" military organizations. In his experience, the contributions made in the past by the parachute divisions, Ranger battalions, and especially by Special Forces, did not justify their extra cost in terms of materiel, training time, and the transfer of the brightest people from ordinary units to the special ones. Furthermore-although he knew it wasn't their fault; they were encouraged to do so parachutists, Rangers, and especially again Green Berets, thought of themselves as better soldiers than ordinary troops, and they acted accordingly.

  At the moment Geoff Craig was filling in flight school one of the spaces allocated to Special Forces, and not a space filled from out of the Army wide selection process. And that rankled Bellmon-though he acknowledged in fact that if Craig had competed against his peers, Army wide, he probably would have been selected anyhow. But the point was that he hadn't competed. He had been sent to flight school by Brigadier General Paul T. Hanrahan, Commandant of the U.S. Army Center for Special Warfare, at Fort Bragg, as a sort of consolation prize: Craig had gotten his commission in Vietnam, literally on the battlefield. Though he hadn't wanted to take it, he had agreed to do it-after being assured that as soon as he was sent home, he could resign. Between the time of his commissioning and his return home, resignation privileges of "critically needed" commissioned officers (which included everybody in Special Forces) had been suspended. Under normal conditions, that would have meant that Craig would have been assigned to Bragg training would-be Green Berets.

  But Craig had friends in high places-most particularly his father's cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell. Lowell had served as a teen-aged second lieutenant in Greece with Red Hanrahan when Hanrahan had been a lieutenant colonel. They had been Green Berets, in other words, before there were Green Berets.

  And so Bellmon could now see Red Hanrahan and Craig Lowell (two members of the elite taking care of another, younger, fledgling) smiling smugly while they worked out what had to be done with Geoff Craig. Since Geoff had to spend a little more time in uniform, they would send him to flight school-with absolutely no concern that the space could be better used by some young officer who would either fly for the 11th Air Assault or elsewhere in the "ordinary" Army. Bellmon recalled now, angrily, how Red Hanrahan had tried to have Johnny Oliver transferred to Bragg. The only reason he backed off then was because I wanted Oliver for my aide. Otherwise he would have been indignant if I had refused the transfer. The implication being that what Oliver could do for the Berets was vastly more important than anything he could do here.

  And Geoff himself already showed all the signs of Green Beret behavior: which is to say, he already felt free to ignore regulations that applied to lesser mortals. Specifically, Bellmon had learned (unofficially; if he had heard officially, he would have had to do something about it) that Geoff had a twin-engine Beech at the Ozark airport. While the Army was teaching him to fly helicopters, he was being taught to fly the Beech by an IP he had hired-in blatant violation of a prohibition against offpost flying, period.

  Still, despite all the negatives he felt about young Craig, Bellmon was aware that he had to think carefully before taking any action concerning him. For he knew he was emotionally involved in what was going on.

  "Geoff," he said, "the story you've brought me about those pathologists who went out to see Mrs. Dant is what the lawyers call hearsay. You did not actually hear it."

  "No, Sir. The redhead-"

  "Whose name we don't know," Bellmon interrupted.

  "I believe the redhead," Geoff said, and remembered to add, "Sir."

  "But it's hearsay," Bellmon insisted.

  "General," Geoff said, "respectfully. I didn't want to bring this to you. Captain Oliver made it an order."

  "What's your point, Geoff?"

  "Sir, why don't you just forget I came in here?"

  "'And you'll deal with it?" Bellmon asked softly.

  Geoff smiled and shrugged. And Bellmon looked at him icily; he was quite aware of what Craig intended to do to the pathologists.

  "Lieutenant," he said, "I don't know if you know this or not, but my wife and I were having cocktails in Washington with your-with Colonel Lowell-the day your father telephoned and said that you were in the Fort Jackson stockade about to face a general court-martial for breaking your drill sergeant's jaw. I know how you came to be a Green Beret. I would have- hoped you had learned something in the time that has passed." Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig's face went white.

  "Now you listen to me," Bellmon said. "You will let this matter drop right where it is. Right where it is. If one of those doctors who allegedly said something he probably should not have said so much as cuts himself shaving, you had better have an absolutely airtight alibi. You may be a Green Beret, but you are first and foremost, to the exclusion of anything else, a commissioned officer. And you will behave like one. Do you understand me?"