The Colonels, page 30
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
He took the Fort Bragg telephone directory from his desk drawer, and found the number of the XVII Airborne Corps G-1 (Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel). He dialed the number, then asked for the G-1.
“Colonel,” he said, “this is Colonel Hanrahan of the Special Warfare School. I wondered if you had gotten the TWX about my authority to recruit for Special Forces?”
He listened for a full minute, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was cold and abrupt.
“It is not my understanding, Colonel, that I am to be offered my choice of personnel from rosters prepared by anyone. It is my understanding that I have been given authority to recruit whomever I please. Will it be necessary for me to seek clarification from DCSOPS?”
There was a much shorter reply.
“I am about to put a Lieutenant Ellis on the horn, Colonel. He will give you his serial number and organization. Please see that he is transferred to me, effective today. Thank you very much.”
He took the telephone from his ear and extended it to Ellis.
If Hanrahan stays mad, and asks me for my plan, Mac MacMillan thought, my ass is still going to be in a crack. But if he doesn’t ask me for it, I’m home free. I can stall for a day. And in a day I can find somebody—maybe even Ellis—who can write a goddamned plan.
(Three)
Office of the President
The Army Aviation Board
Laird Army Airfield
Fort Rucker, Alabama
0815 Hours, 26 January 1959
There were two civilians in Colonel Bill Roberts’s office when Major Craig W. Lowell, in an impeccably tailored uniform—but without ribbons—marched in and saluted.
“Good morning, sir,” Lowell said. “You wanted to see me?”
“I’d hoped to see you wearing your ribbons, Major,” Bill Roberts said coldly, but masking it with a smile. “This gentleman wants to take your picture for Time-Life, and I thought you should be wearing your ribbons. Didn’t your secretary relay my message?”
“It must have been garbled, sir,” Lowell said.
Williams stood up and came around the desk.
“Miss Thomas, Mr. Norton, this is Major Craig Lowell, the officer charged with the testing and development of the rocket-armed helicopter.”
Mr. Norton was in his forties, a balding, pudgy, rumpled little man festooned with Nikon cameras. An enormous leather gadget bag was at his feet. Miss Thomas was in her middle twenties. Her hair was blond and long, parted in the middle and hanging below her shoulders. A pair of sunglasses was stuck on top of her head. She wore a pleated, plaid woolen skirt and a soft woolen sweater that did not conceal her ample bosom.
If I had not just spent a rather exhausting night with Jane Cassidy trying to set a world’s screwing record, followed by a prebreakfast encore, I would certainly contemplate jumping your bones, Miss Thomas.
“Pleased to meetcha, Major,” Norton said, offering an indifferent hand.
Miss Thomas offered her limp fingers and a dazzling smile.
“How are you?” she said.
Lowell thought he had Miss Thomas pegged the moment he’d seen the Peck & Peck sweater and skirt, the single string of real pearls, and the loafers. Confirmation came when she spoke. He smiled, remembering Sandy Felter’s remark about people like Miss Thomas: “Is that inbred, genetic, or do they send them to school to learn how to talk with their jaws locked and through their noses?”
Lowell had a lifelong experience with Miss Thomas types, and it had taught him to keep his distance from them.
“I want you to give Mr. Norton and Miss Thomas as much of your time as necessary, Lowell,” Bill Roberts ordered. “Show them everything about our rocket-armed helicopter that’s not classified. If they’d like, take them for a ride.”
“Colonel,” Lowell said, “the entire weapons system is classified secret. What should I show them?”
“Then everything but the weapons system,” Roberts said, annoyed.
“But we came to see the weapons system,” Miss Thomas said, winningly.
“As absurd as it might seem to you,” Lowell said, flashing her a dazzling smile, “we have to go on the premise that you’re Russian spies.”
She was not amused. And there was steel beneath the Peck & Peck smile.
“We’re here with the blessing of the Chief of Information,” she said. “And it was clearly understood by him why we were coming all the way down here. To see the weapons system on your whirlybirds.”
“I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Thomas,” Lowell said.
“That’s ‘Miss,’” she said.
“Right,” Lowell said. “But my hands are tied. You’ll have to take that up with Colonel Roberts.”
Lowell was amused at Roberts’s predicament. Roberts had apparently been so dazzled by the appearance of Time-Life and/or by the dazzling smile, long legs, and intriguing bosom of Miss Thomas that he had forgotten that the project was mostly classified.
Now that it had been brought to his attention, he made up his mind quickly.
“What I’ll do, Miss Thomas, is get on the telephone and see how much of the weapons system can be declassified. I mean, after all, it’s been on television. And failing that, I’ll be more than happy to provide Time-Life with photographs which have been cleared for publication.”
“You mean,” she said, bitchily, “with the sexy parts airbrushed out?”
Roberts laughed uncomfortably.
“Lowell, why don’t you take my car and driver and give these people a tour of the place? Say for an hour? Until I get some answers from Washington.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Lowell said.
“I would hate to think I’m being given the runaround, Colonel,” Miss Thomas said, unpleasantly.
She walked out of the room, past Lowell.
She had a nice, springy, feminine walk, and she smelled of something both very appropriate and very expensive.
Smith, he decided. Not Vassar. Smith. And then the graduate school of journalism at Columbia. And then journalism. Journalism was chic, Time-Life even more chic, a perfect place to meet someone of one’s own background, someone to marry before establishing a home in Mamaroneck, or Princeton, or Darien, there to breed another generation of teeth-clenchers to be dispatched to Country Day School, Miss Porter’s, St. Mark’s, and then Harvard, Smith, Yale, and Vassar.
Major Craig W. Lowell had been privately tutored before entering St. Mark’s, from which he had been expelled before going on to Harvard, from which he had also been expelled. He was, he realized, mocking his own, and wondered why. And then he understood. He resented the intrusion of that world into this one. And he understood that it was important that this long-legged blonde must not learn any more about him than he had to tell her.
Her questions began as soon as they began the ride from Laird Field through Daleville to the main post.
“Have you been in the army long, Major…Lowell, is it?”
“Lowell,” he confirmed. He did the arithmetic. “Thirteen years,” he said.
“West Point?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I came in the army as an enlisted man.”
“Battlefield commission?” she asked, hopefully.
He looked into the back seat. She was scribbling into a notebook. Her legs were crossed and her hair had fallen forward. She looked up at him. Her eyes were light blue, intelligent.
“Nothing as romantic as that,” he said. “I was commissioned into the finance corps, and then transferred to armor.”
“Oh?”
“I wasn’t a very good finance clerk,” he said.
“Where are you from?”
“Long Island,” he said. “A little village on Long Island. Glen Cove.”
“Oh?” she said. “I’m from Scarsdale. You don’t sound like a New Yorker.”
“I don’t suppose I am, anymore,” he said.
“Are you married?”
“I have a twelve-year-old son,” he said.
“Here?”
“In Germany.”
She was clever, and put that together.
“You married a German girl?”
“Yes,” Lowell said. “When I was nineteen.”
She was too polite—and it was not germane to her story—to probe further into his personal life.
“When did you become a pilot?”
“The army calls us aviators,” he said. “In 1954.”
“And you’re the man responsible for the rocket-armed helicopters?”
“Oh, no,” Lowell said. “Get that straight. Two men were responsible for that: Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan and First Lieutenant Edward C. Greer.”
She made him spell the names and then said: “I’d like to talk to them.”
“That’ll be difficult,” Lowell said. “Lieutenant Greer was killed just before Christmas. And Colonel MacMillan was transferred. I’ve taken over for them. But the work was already mostly done when I did.”
“Greer was killed in that accident we saw on television?”
“Yes.”
“And the other one, MacMillan, was the one who shot up the Russian tanks?”
“I don’t think it’s been determined, officially, who did that,” Lowell said.
“But this MacMillan has been transferred, right?” she asked. She had put that together, too.
“It was a routine transfer,” Lowell said. “As I told you, the development work on the rocket-armed helicopter is about over.”
“Huh!” she snorted.
“And I was brought in to take over since it was,” he went on.
She closed her reporter’s notebook and put it in her purse. Lowell had been ordered by Colonel Roberts to take them on a tour of the post. He pointed out Hanchey Field, the world’s largest heliport, and the post hospital, and the dependent housing area.
She asked only one more question.
“Is that where you live, Major Lowell?”
“No, ma’am, I live off post,” he said.
When the hour was over, they returned to the Army Aviation Board.
“We’ll have to get you another guide, Miss Thomas,” Colonel Roberts said. “Major Lowell is going on leave.”
“Oh?” she asked.
Roberts looked at Lowell.
“While you were gone,” he said, “the post commander telephoned and recommended that Major Lowell be placed on leave. Lowell has been working very hard lately.”
“Sir, I can put that off until Miss Thomas and Mr. Norton are through here,” Lowell said.
“I wouldn’t think of it, Major,” Colonel Bill Roberts said, icily. “If the post commander thinks you should go on leave, I think you should go on leave.”
“Yes, sir,” Lowell said.
“Thank you for the cook’s tour, Major Lowell,” Miss Thomas said, offering her hand.
He took it, and met her eyes. Her hand was warm and soft, and something else. Vibrant, he thought.
“My pleasure, Miss Thomas,” Lowell said. Then he shook hands with her photographer, saluted Colonel Roberts, and left the office.
As he got into Bill Franklin’s car to leave the field, he thought about what had happened the night before. Sometimes after a really wild session in bed, he was hornier than he would have been after a quickie. And the session with Jane Cassidy had been wild. Once she had let the barrier of fidelity down, all of her suppressed hungers had rushed out.
It had left him with the odd feeling that he was being used. It was not a pleasant feeling, and it occurred to him that women must also often feel that way: Jane Cassidy didn’t love him, or even particularly like him. She was just hot for his body.
He laughed at himself: Oh, you poor, used dear, you!
He thought then of the very different—and very loving—expression on Melody Dutton Greer’s face, when she looked at Jean-Philippe. An expression that reminded him how alone he was. Being with Jane hadn’t changed that. But he was sure that this loneliness would pass—and also that he had handled Miss Thomas (he realized he didn’t even know her first name) the way she needed to be handled.
(Four)
Conference Room 3-101
The Central Intelligence Agency
McLean, Virginia
1815 Hours, 2 February 1959
The red telephone, one of three instruments at the head of the broad table in front of the Director, both buzzed and flashed. It was the presidential office line—a line whose use was restricted to the President’s immediate staff.
The Director said, “Excuse me,” picked it up, said, “Hello,” listened, said, “He’s here; I’ll tell him,” and hung up.
“The President,” he said, “has expressed a desire to see you, Colonel Felter, at seven-thirty.”
“That’s the second time he’s done that,” Felter said. “Made me a colonel. I wish he’d put it in writing.”
“The President can call you ‘colonel’ all he wants, Felter,” the Deputy Director, Covert Operations, said, chuckling. “But before the army will pay you as a colonel, it will have to have the advice and consent of the Senate.”
The men at the table laughed. It was not, Felter realized, the second time, but rather the third or fourth time in the last couple of weeks that the President had called him “Colonel Felter.” For a long time Ike had referred to him simply as “Felter”…calling errand-runners and spear-carriers by their last names was usual.
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” Felter said.
He wondered what the President wanted. He looked at his watch. The meeting here couldn’t last much longer. He would have plenty of time to take the Volkswagen and drive to the White House by half past seven.
The President’s military aide was waiting for him in the basement when he got to the White House.
“Let’s go get a cup of coffee, Felter,” Major General Faye, who was in uniform, said. “You’re fifteen minutes early, and fifteen minutes is one of those time frames that doesn’t give you many other options.”
“Thank you, sir,” Felter said.
They went into the executive mess, and white-jacketed navy stewards brought them coffee and doughnuts. There was hardly time to finish the coffee before they had to get on the elevator and ascend to the presidential apartments.
“Have any idea what he wants with you?” General Faye asked, when they were on the elevator.
“No, sir.”
The Secret Service agent on duty in the upstairs corridor nodded at them, and then held the door at the end of the corridor open for them.
Felter was not surprised to see the senior senator from California and his wife in the presidential apartments. He was close to the President, and the lady and Mamie Eisenhower were cronies. What really surprised him was that his own wife was there. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in the place, but—God knows—Sharon was hardly part of the White House inner circle. All he could figure was that Mrs. Eisenhower had drafted Sharon for some social duty. Sharon smiled nervously at him.
The President came into the room, and on his heels one of the White House butlers carrying a silver tray with silver cups on it.
“Artillery punch,” the President said. “Mamie’s idea. She thought it was appropriate for the occasion.”
Felter quickly searched his mind, wondering if there had been a victory for one of the West Point athletic teams that day. It was the only reason he could imagine for the artillery punch, the army Auld Lang Syne.
“Go on, Senator,” the President said.
“Sandy,” the senator said, “in its infinite wisdom, the United States Senate, on the recommendation of the President, has granted its advice and consent to your promotion to lieutenant colonel.”
“By God, I think he is surprised,” the President said, flashing his world-famous grin.
“Flabbergasted, Mr. President,” Felter said.
“Good,” the President said, taking one of the silver cups from the butler. “I’m pleased to see there is something that can astonish you.” He waited until the other cups had been passed out. Then he went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lieutenant Colonel Felter.”
“Hear, hear,” General Faye said.
“Thank you very much, Mr. President,” Felter said. He looked at Sharon. She was beaming.
My God, he thought, have we come a long way from the Old Warsaw Bakery on the corner of Aldine Street and Chancellor Avenue in Newark, New Jersey.
“And his gracious lady,” the President went on, raising his cup to Sharon.
“Hear, hear,” General Faye said again.
“Sandy, I’ve got to tell you I got my silver leaf with much more pomp and circumstance,” the President said. “In the Malacan Palace in Manila. From General MacArthur. Who was then Marshal of the Philippine Army. Everybody in dress whites. Very grand, indeed.”
“I can think of nothing that would be more grand than this, Mr. President,” Felter said.
“I promoted you a little early, Felter, because I wanted it understood that you had earned it, and it wasn’t something I passed out just before leaving office.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. President,” Felter said.
The President smiled at him. Then he raised his silver cup.
“Absent comrades,” he said.
The others parroted him.
“Get the photographer in here,” the President said.
The photographer appeared immediately.
“We want two pictures,” the President ordered. “One of all of us, and one with just Mrs. Eisenhower, Mrs. Felter, Colonel Felter, and me.”
“Yes, sir,” the photographer said.
“I don’t think it’ll be on the front page of the Washington Post, Felter,” the President said. “But maybe, when you’re as old as I am, it will be kind of fun to take out and look at.”
The President of the United States put his arm around Sandy Felter’s shoulders.
“Say ‘cheese,’ Mrs. Felter,” the President said.
XIII
