An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (3 page)

“I’m not—you’ve got it all wrong,” she said. The woman twisted Chase’s wrist and wedged a set of dog tags onto her palm. “I think his kids should have these.” Releasing Chase’s wrist, the woman stormed off toward the parking lot.

Chase was still staring at Major White’s dog tags when she and North pulled up to the front gate. When the MP, a young female corporal, saluted, Chase returned the salute, and slipped the dog tags into the breast pocket of her flight suit as North steered the car to the shoulder. Reporters were milling about, some talking on cell phones. Paul Shapiro, with the
Current,
spotted their car and was already walking toward them with his
long spindly legs, easily ahead of the pack. He looked about the same age as she, maybe a year or so older. He was newly assigned as the paper’s military beat reporter. North slowed the sedan to a stop, and Shapiro walked around to Chase’s door.

“Jackals,” North whispered as Chase opened the door.

Shapiro shouted above the noise of a news helicopter that was flying overhead in small circles like a bird trying to catch the thermals. “Is it true, Captain Anderson? Another 81?”

The others were catching up and shouting, “Are there plans to ground the 81?”

“Are there any survivors?”

“How many casualties?”

“Do you have the names?”

Chase held up a hand and waved everyone toward the base’s welcome sign. “Let’s do this once,” she said. Reporters signaled to their photographers who had been capturing images of a larger-than-usual Saturday morning anti-war protest. The protestors were hamming it up, hoisting anti-war signage and shouting chants she refused to decipher.

When they were finally gathered in a semicircle around her, Chase read North’s media release, punctuating
routine training exercise
,
under investigation
, and
names being withheld pending notification of next of kin
. She asked for questions: She always did, though everyone knew by now she had nothing more she could add other than general statistics about the helicopter. Paul Shapiro blurted, “Can you confirm Major Anthony White as
the pilot?”

“I cannot.”

“Is that a denial?” Shapiro was glaring.

“That’s neither a denial nor a confirmation, Paul.”

His pen hovered above his pocket-sized spiral notebook. “I have it on good authority that the major was drinking in a bar off base last night, Captain. Any comment?”

The urge to tap her breast pocket for assurance of Major White’s dog tags was nearly impossible for Chase to suppress. The reporters, who had been scribbling furiously after Shapiro mentioned Major White, looked up as if Chase had commanded them to do so. For a second, she feared they could see through the pocket of her flight suit at the imprinted information on the dog tags that included Major White’s full name, social
security number, O-positive blood type, and Catholic religious affiliation.

“It would be inappropriate,” she said, willing herself to look relaxed before the cameras, “for me to comment on anything beyond our statement at this point.”

“You Marines,” Shapiro said, shaking his head, “always taking care of your own.”

Chase pretended not to hear the comment and waved for North who was standing off camera. “Pass out the info sheet on the 81.”

At home that evening, an exhausted Chase whipped up waffle batter while Molly worked out arithmetic problems at the kitchen table. Since when were kindergartners expected to know addition? Chase wondered,
What’s left for first grade?
“Try not to use your fingers, sweetie.”

Molly tucked both hands behind her back and searched the ceiling as if she expected the answer for two-plus-one to materialize there. Chase chopped three round slices of banana and set them in front of her daughter. “Watch this,” she said, sliding two slices a good distance across the glass tabletop from the other one. “Two—plus one, right?” Molly nodded. “So, count the slices. What’s the answer?”

Molly smiled, showing off two rows of pretty white baby teeth. “Three.”

Chase smiled. “You want bananas or blueberries in your waffle?”

“Blueberries, please.”

Molly always chose blueberries, just as Stone would have. Chase preferred bananas
and pecans. Waffles had become their Saturday night tradition since Stone’s passing. When Stone was alive, the tradition of waffles on Sunday morning had been his doing, his treat to his girls, he’d say. Molly was too young to remember any of that, and Chase too respectful to encroach on what had been his precious territory. Since she was home every Saturday night anyway, she’d altered the routine. Molly thought it special to have breakfast for dinner.

Darkness came early to this side of Oahu, even earlier this time of year. The sliding glass door was open, letting in the cool breeze. Normally she enjoyed the music of wind in the palm fronds, but given the events of the day, she thought the sound mournful, lonely. Poor Kitty White, no doubt this minute surrounded by a throng of
sympathetic officers’ wives, unless she was heavily sedated in bed. Other more fortunate wives would look after Kitty’s children tonight and in the days leading to the memorial service. Kitty would have the rest of her life to deal with being a single parent, just as Chase had.

She turned on the small television mounted under a cabinet and channel-surfed to the local news station, then thought otherwise. Molly didn’t need to hear her mother talking about a helicopter crash. She found a cartoon channel instead. Molly looked up from her homework and smiled, causing Chase’s heart to lurch. Molly was the ultra feminine version of her father.

Later, after the waffles and the dishes, after Molly’s bath and storytelling time, Chase curled up in Stone’s recliner in the den and
pulled her mother’s crocheted afghan over her lap. She waited for the eleven o’clock news. She was holding White’s dog tags. She didn’t know why. Her fingers hypnotically traced the grooves of punched tin.

If Stone would only walk through that front door, she thought.

“So sorry about Tony White,” she would say.

When her face appeared on the television screen, he would say, “You look good, baby.”

Just then, a camera cut to the mob of anti-war protestors. An off-camera reporter asked a woman to comment on the helicopter crash and the nineteen dead Marines. “I only feel bad for their families—I mean, who’s thinking about the families in Iraq? Nineteen
fewer baby killers, if you ask me—”

If Stone were here, she thought, he’d ask about the dog tags, and she would say, “They’re Major White’s—given to me this afternoon by a woman—not the major’s wife.”

And Stone would probably say something like, “Tony was a good pilot before Iraq. Too many close calls—and you know how they treat an officer who can’t keep his family life together.”

“So you think this investigation will reveal pilot error instead of something mechanical?”

Stone would defend his friend. “Engine failure, probably. Over open water, so who knows?” Maybe he would add, “I was a good pilot, Chase.”

Stone, the combat helicopter pilot. Stone, the rock of her life, that is, until his drinking. Now—Stone who had fallen from the sky.

“I never got your dog tags,” she would say to Stone if he were here. “And I can’t give Tony’s dog tags to Kitty. She doesn’t need to know her husband apparently had a mistress.”

“Best to let everyone believe they were lost at sea,” Stone would likely say, and he would be right.

She climbed out of his recliner and shuffled to the kitchen. When she reached the garbage can, she pressed the foot lever and gave one final squeeze before Major White’s dog tags slipped from her hand, like a burial at sea.

CHAPTER 2

M
onday morning, Chase steered a bleary-eyed Molly toward the kitchen and dropped a bag of white powdered doughnuts on the table. “How many?”

Molly held up three fingers. Three had been the number they’d negotiated the night before when Molly had begged for doughnuts rather than cereal “for a change.” Chase was too indulgent. She knew this, just as she knew a day of reckoning would come from it, but for now, what could a few powdered doughnuts hurt? She poured a glass of milk and another of orange juice for Molly and headed for the shower.

Ahead of her was the staff meeting with General Hickman, not to mention whatever carryover there would be from the media circus regarding Saturday’s crash. Of course, there was also the memorial service to face on Tuesday. She thumbed past the rows of uniforms and finally settled on a short-sleeved shirtwaist and a skirt instead of slacks.

After her shower, she leaned over the sink for a closer look in the mirror. The dark circles under her eyes demanded camouflage. She dabbed on a tinted moisturizer and swiped a streak of burgundy eye shadow over the lids of her green eyes. She wiggled into pantyhose and stepped in a skirt she hadn’t worn in a while. The skirt slipped past her waist and hung on her hipbones. She raised the skirt three more times, letting it fall, as if
expecting a different result with each attempt. She turned to the side. Her ribs were showing. For the past several weeks, she had dressed in either digitals—the camouflage utilities—or in a flight suit, both uniforms requiring combat boots. When was the last time she’d worn a skirt? A month ago? This morning, even her high-heeled pumps felt too large and foreign.

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.