The Death Trust

SIX

The building that housed logistics was a flat brown block with small, mean windows sheathed in silver heat film. I parked the rental in a visitor’s spot out front and jogged the stairs to the third landing. It was warm inside.

A passing sergeant gave me the directions to Captain Reinoud Aleveldt’s cubicle. I threaded my way through the maze of partitions; most were empty. I glanced at my Seiko: 1315. Lunchtime. After a couple of false turns I arrived at a workspace plastered with photos and torn-out magazine spreads of various gliders. Captain Aleveldt wasn’t in his chair.

“Yes? Can I help you?” asked a voice behind me. I turned and saw a man with hair the color of cheddar cheese, ruddy pale skin, and thick fleshy lips which were red-raw dry and wind-chapped. He licked them. He wore running gear ironed with such precision that the knife-edge creases in his shorts were carried on by the creases in his T-shirt. I took a shot. “Captain Reinoud Aleveldt? You got a minute?”

“Actually, I was just on my way out.” The guy was itching to get away and he kept shifting his weight from foot to foot. If he’d been two, I’d have taken him to the potty.

Who gives a fuck? As a general rule, I don’t prepare people I want to question with a preemptive phone call. I like their answers to be off-the-cuff, especially when I’m not sure how a witness fits into the investigation, as was the case here. “Special Agent Vin Cooper, OSI,” I told Aleveldt, flashing my ID to further refine his attention. “Just a few questions, if you don’t mind. I’m investigating the assassination of General Scott.” Why sugarcoat it?

The news appeared to hit Aleveldt like a punch under the rib cage. His jaw dropped slightly, his eyes went wide. I could read him so clearly I considered asking whether he’d like to play a few hands of canasta. “Assassination? But—”

“Got somewhere we can talk, Captain? Like a room with a door?”

He led the way to a meeting room, no doubt resigned to missing his jog, or whatever they did hereabouts for exercise. On two of the walls were enormous Whiteboards filled with hieroglyphics and scribbles slightly less decipherable than Greek. Or, given Aleveldt’s nationality, maybe double Dutch. We both took seats at a cheap black Formica boardroom-style table. “Your English is good,” I said.

“We have to learn it in school.” He was in a daze, still struggling to come to grips with the revised reality of the general’s demise. “…Assassinated?” he repeated.

“Murdered, assassinated — take your pick.” I reached inside my coat, pulled out the notebook, and flipped it open. I’ve found that if people think I’m writing things down, it focuses their minds — perhaps because they realize someone further on down the line could well hold them to their answers. “How often did you fly with General Scott?” I asked, getting on with it.

“I’m a soaring enthusiast; so was Scotty.”

“Scotty?”

“Away from Ramstein, we were friends.”

He licked those red lips and swallowed — that nervous swallow people do. “I saw what happened. One of his wings just…broke off. There was nothing he could have done.”

Roach’s terrifying description came back to me with a rush. My balls felt like they were falling, dragging me down with them. I crossed my legs. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“Sorry…which was?”

“How often did you fly with General Scott?”

“Whenever the conditions were right and he was around — A dozen, fifteen times a year.”

“Is that a lot?”

“It is when you consider that we don’t fly often in winter. Once the weather breaks, it’s almost every weekend.”

“Did you talk to him before going up the last time?”

“Yes. We discussed the conditions. We were both keen to get airborne.”

“Did the general seem concerned about anything that day — anything other than the flying conditions? Anything about his behavior that struck you as odd?” These are the sorts of questions you ask when straws are all you can see and you start clutching at them.

“No, sir. Scotty usually arrived tense, on edge, but that wouldn’t last long. Soaring’s a Zen experience. Just you and the elements. I can highly recommend it.”

“Gravity and I don’t get along,” I said. I could tell he was looking at me as if to say, “You could sure use some of that Zen shit, pal.” If I were him, I’d be looking at me strangely, too. Again I reminded myself I should have detoured and cleaned myself up when I had the chance.

“How was his plane sabotaged, sir?”

“A clamp that held the wings on failed. It’d been tampered with.”

Aleveldt shook his head and frowned. “General Scott was a careful pilot. Always did the walk-around — checked everything, sometimes twice. It’s ironic. Is that the right word?”

“Depends what you mean by it.”

“He spent several thousand dollars upgrading his sailplane several months ago, over the winter when not much soaring is done — to make it safer.”

“Yeah, ironic will do nicely,” I said as a tingle went up the back of my neck and shrank the skin on my scalp. This could be a small but important break. Although it was by no means certain, there was a good chance that it was this very upgrade that provided the opportunity for the clamp to be replaced with a faulty unit. “What did he have done?”

“Avionics. A global positioning system for cross-country flying, a better radio set — more powerful, lighter. Had a couple of instruments replaced, too.”

“Do you know who did the work?”

“Sorry. Can’t help you there. I do a lot of the maintenance on my own plane, but the general was in a different league. Some airframe specialist — whoever was on at the time and depending on what was needed — would do it for him.”

I remembered the conversation I had with Roach on this subject and that feeling across the top of my scalp evaporated.

“Do you know why anyone would want to kill the general?” Aleveldt asked.

“That was my next question.”

“No, no. I don’t understand it. The general was liked and respected. He flew in Vietnam. A war hero. He knew how to look after his people. I could see that. Everyone could.”

Well, obviously someone couldn’t, I thought.

“He wasn’t like you’d expect a general officer to be,” he insisted.

“You mean like General von Koeppen?” It just slipped out. I couldn’t help myself.

Aleveldt bunted it away with a shrug. “Scotty was different.”

“So there was nothing about his behavior at all that struck you as odd? He was just the same happy-go-lucky, nice-guy commander of one of the biggest military facilities in the world, who just happened to piss off the wrong mystery people enough for them to kill him in a pretty horrible way.” The living General Scott was still a complete mystery to me. I’d read through his career highlights, met his wife, been to his house, spent some time with his second-in-command, interviewed his gliding buddy, seen the movie, bought the T-shirt and I still knew virtually nothing about the man — what made him tick. Aleveldt shifted in his seat. There was something on his mind. “Go on, Captain,” I said.

“About a year ago…”

“What?”

“He lost a lot of weight, and he wasn’t heavy to start with. He lost the joie de vivre. His son was killed.”

“His boy was a marine, right?” I recalled that Scott’s son was a sergeant in a rifle company. The brief didn’t cover the details of his death.

“General Scott loved his son. They were very close. He was killed in Baghdad, on patrol. There was a problem with it.”

I understood that this would be an issue for any parent, having a son killed, whether it happened on Uncle Sam’s watch or not, but I knew that wasn’t quite what Aleveldt meant. “How? What kind of problem?”

“There was confusion over his death.”

“In what way?”

“The forms that accompanied his son’s body said he’d been killed by a land mine.”

That didn’t sound too confusing to me — tens of thousands of unfortunate people are killed by land mines sitting in the dirt all over the world — and that must have shown on my face.

“Land mines don’t take your head off, sir,” Aleveldt said.

I knew a bit about land mines. They were planted in areas in Afghanistan defended by the Taliban. We had planted a bunch of them ourselves. There were also land mines in the areas once contested by the Soviets. And there were land mines sewn by the mujahedeen who fought against them. For a while, there were more land mines planted in Afghanistan than poppies, and they plant a lot of poppies in Afghanistan. Land mines come in many varieties, from the homemade types to those manufactured with ingenious Swiss-watch precision. There are land mines that’ll remove your foot, land mines to stop tanks, and land mines for just about everything in between. I couldn’t, however, think of a single variety that specialized in decapitation. “Then what did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did General Scott talk to you about any of this?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know so much about it?”

“People talk. A friend of mine was there when General Scott opened his son’s body bag.”

I tried to imagine what it might be like, peeling down the zipper and taking a peek inside at the corpse of your own boy — or what was left of him. It would be the kind of experience that could break a man’s spirit completely. Captain Aleveldt stared at the floor, his shoulders hunched as if he too was imagining it. I mentally gave myself a shake. As a witness, Aleveldt wasn’t worth a hell of a lot, hearsay and supposition not given too much credence in a military courtroom. He had, however, provided me with some new questions which required answers. I suddenly felt like I was going somewhere, even if it was in a bunch of divergent directions all at once. “Who’s this friend of yours, Captain?”

“A doctor. Captain François Philippe.”

“He French? In the Armée de l’Air?”

“No, Belgian. Flemish. He worked in the hospital morgue. François told me that the general asked him to conduct an autopsy on the body.”

“Okay, you said ‘worked.’ Past tense,” I said as I jotted this down.

“He was transferred eleven months ago.”

“You got contact details for him?”

“Back in my cubicle, Special Agent.”

“So, General Scott. You were saying that he was somehow different after the death of his son?”

“Yes.”

“How exactly?”

“I don’t think he cared whether he lived or died.”

That stopped me. I wondered whether Roach had considered the possibility that General Scott had sabotaged his own glider — played a kind of Russian roulette with it. But then why would he go to the trouble of installing all the new avionics? That didn’t make much sense. “Are you talking suicide?”

He thought about that, then shook his head. “No, I don’t think so, sir. He didn’t seem like the type, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. There wasn’t much more I could ask the captain about General Scott; at least, not for the moment. “Are you around, Captain, if I need to talk to you some more — not heading out on leave or anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Well, if you could give me Captain Philippe’s details…”

“Sure.”

I followed him back to his cubicle. Aleveldt checked an address book, copied the information to a Post-It note, and handed it to me. I stuck it in my notebook. “I hope you get the bastards, Special Agent,” he said.

“We’ll do our best, Captain,” I said absently as my phone rang. I knew the number on the screen. “Excuse me,” I said as I answered it.

“How’re you doing?” Masters asked.

“Yeah, my grandmother’s suitcase,” I said.

“Can’t talk?”

“Stuffed racoons. Can you believe that?”

“Okay, well, we’re sorting through Scott’s papers.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Not yet, we’ve only just started. Are you coming back here?”

“On the way,” I said. I rang off and dropped the phone back in my pocket, but it began to ring again. This time I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello…”

“Special Agent Cooper?”

“Yes.”

“Sergeant Fischer. You might not remember me, sir, but we met briefly this morning.”

I remembered her all right: Sergeant Audrey Fischer, the PA in von Koeppen’s office with the unbelievable secretarial skills. “That’s right,” I said after a moment of respectful silence where I pretended to scan my memory banks for recollection. “How can I help you, Sergeant?”

“It’s about General Scott. I have some information that might help you find his killer.”