The Line

CHAPTER 2

The computer screen glowed in the darkened room. A woman sat in front of it, her glasses reflecting the electronic images. She was still except for the repetitive tapping of her right index finger on the scroll key.

As her finger brought forth the words, she read:

Major Benita Trace raised her head when the sharp buzz of the phone interrupted her, fingers paused above the keyboard as she prepared to continue her work. She stood, picking the portable up, and looked out at the ocean as she hit the on switch.

“Hello?”

A voice in a heavy accent was on the other end.

“Hey, sweetheart. Would ya like go to da Bronx zoo and see da boids and the toitles?”

A broad smile crossed Trace’s face.

“Boomer! Where the hell are you?”

“Well, that’s a good question. Can’t tell you exactly, since I’m not flying this dang plane, but somewhere about 35,000 feet over the Pacific, heading in your direction.”

“You’re coming here?”

“Yeah, my boss thought I needed some time off, so he wrangled me TDY orders to 4th TASOSC at Fort Shafter.”

Trace frowned as she read undercurrents in Boomer’s voice.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. Listen, I’m on one of these credit card phones they got in the plane and I have no idea what this is costing me. I just wanted to make sure you were still in Hawaii. We should get together.”

“Absolutely. When are you getting in? I can pick you up at the airport.”

“My flight lands at 1030 but there’ll be someone from the unit at the airport to pick me up and take me over to Fort Shafter to get in briefed How about this evening?”

“Great. When and where?”

“Well, I can tell you the when, how about 1900? The where is up to you. It’s your island, not mine.”

“All right, I’ll make it as easy as possible. 1900 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. You can’t miss it. It’s at the west end of Waikiki.

If you can’t find it, just ask. Meet me in the bar just off the main lobby.”

“OK. 1900, Hilton Hawaiian Village. The bar off the lobby. Sounds good.”

Trace was acutely aware of her racing heart.

“Hey, Boomer?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking forward to seeing you.”

His voice lapsed back into the exaggerated accent.

“Me too, sweetie. See ya tonight.”

The phone went dead and Trace slowly pressed the off button. She sat back down facing the computer screen, but her eyes were no longer taking in the words nor did she feel any inclination to write. Her brain swirled with mixed memories of the past.

She’d first met Boomer Watson at West Point in September of 1978. The incoming class of 1982, of which Trace was a proud member, had just finished their ten-day summer bivouac at Lake Frederick and marched back to the main post of West Point. With every mile the new cadets trudged from the lush mountains of the training area to the gray stone of the academic and barracks area, their anxiety level increased. They were leaving the brutal, two-month old cocoon of Beast Barracks for the unknown terror of the academic year.

“Three-to-one,” less than sympathetic upper class cadre members had chanted at the new cadets, referring to the academic year ratio where there would be three upper class cadets to every plebe as opposed to the survivable one-to-four ratio of Beast.

Trace was in First Company, and as such, was among the lead group to march past the Superintendent’s house under the cold eyes of massed upperclassmen on either side of the road just returned from their own varied summer training. After passing in review in front of the Superintendent, the company commander halted his troops in front of Eisenhower Barracks. With his back to the Plain, he looked over his young charges and smiled.

“The party’s over!

When I dismiss you, you are to pick up your duffle bags which are in Central Area and report to your academic year companies. You’ve all done well this summer. Keep up the good work in your academic year companies. Best of luck!

First Company, dismissed!”

“First to fight, sir!” the plebes dutifully chanted, the last time they would yell the company motto.

Some party. Trace thought as she executed a right face and double-timed through the salley port to the left of Washington Hall into Central Area. Beast had been any 5 thing but fun. From her original squad of twelve new cadets, there were only eight left, the other four opting out of the excitement and returning to the civilian world. Trace herself had more than once seriously considered the lure of a civilian college where women — hell, human beings-were a bit more appreciated.

She joined the horde of green-clad first-year cadets scrambling like ants through the large pile of duffle bags, searching for the one with her name on it. Finding it, she was briefly flustered as to how to handle both the duffle bag and the rucksack on her back. She got a classmate to balance the duffle bag on top of the rucksack, bowing her head forward and almost pushing her to the ground. She slowly made her way out of Central Area, staggering toward the academic year company to which she had been assigned.

“What are you looking at, beanhead?” a voice exploded in her ear as she made her way up the ramp to New South Area.

“No excuse, sir!” Trace automatically snapped as she screeched to a halt, eyes locked straight ahead, or to be more accurate, given the weight on her back, straight downward.

With only four approved answers—“yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir; sir, may I make a statement”—her conversational options were somewhat limited. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make out the highly shined low quarters of an upperclassman edging up.

“Your damn right, no excuse, beanhead,” the voice growled. An acne-faced man with the yellow shield on his collar denoting a second year cadet — a “yearling” in Academy slang — looked her up and down.

“You’re a mess, miss. You call those boots shined?”

“Ah, lighten up, Greg,” a deep voice spoke from behind her left shoulder.

“They just got back from Lake Frederick.

How do you expect her boots to be shined?”

Trace kept her eyes straight to the front, as the cadet who had stopped her flushed red in the face and looked past her.

“Mind your own business. Boomer.” He turned back to her.

“What company are you going to, miss?”

“I-1, sir.”

“You mean India-One, don’t you?” the upperclassman corrected, using the proper military term.

“Yes, sir.”

“Outstanding,” he purred.

“I’m in I-1, so we’ll be seeing quite a bit of each other. You know what they call it I-1. don’t you?”

Trace considered the potential traps that question entailed, weighed it against the vague constraints of the honor code, and finally answered: “Yes, sir.”

“And what’s that?”

Trace felt the. sweat pouring down her back, adding to the wetness already there from the long hike back.

“Inferno-One, sir.”

“Damn right, miss”—he leaned forward and his hand pulled aside the strap of her rucksack and he read her nametag.

“Miss. Trace. Inferno-One. We’re not like those party people over in 4th Regiment. The heat is on now and it’s only going to get hotter.

This is the 1st Regiment, and you’d better get your act together in a hurry. I will remember you. Next time I see you. those boots had better be spit shined

“Yes, sir.”

The shoes turned and headed away down the ramp. Trace took another step and her knees buckled, the duffle bag sliding off her back, slamming into the ground, while she caught herself from smashing her face into the concrete ramp at the last second.

“Better leave that here, dump your ruck in your room, and come back for it,” the deep voice suggested.

She quickly scrambled to her feet and locked up at attention.

“I can handle it, sir.”

The upperclassman named Boomer chuckled and wagged a finger at her: “Ah, now, now. Is that one of your four answers?”

Trace flushed, her head spinning from the heat and mental and physical exhaustion.

“No, sir.”

“I know they tried to brainwash all the common sense out of your head during Beast, but you’re going to need to turn your brain back on now to survive. They can harass you all they want, but that isn’t going to get you kicked out of here. Flunk a course or two, though, and you’ll be out of here in a heartbeat. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Boomer moved in front of her, his dark eyes finally meeting hers. “One other thing, miss. The secret to survival as a plebe is to become invisible. And as a woman you aren’t going to be able to do that. You might have in Beast, but in your academic company you’re only going to have three or four other female classmates. You’re going to be a shit magnet Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” A bead of sweat was agonizingly making its way down her nose toward the tip, but Trace stayed locked in a rigid position of attention.

“You’ve already got someone’s attention in your company and it’ll only get worse. But the bottom line is, they can’t do nothing to you. You may think they can, and it may sure seem like they are, but they really can’t do anything to you unless you let it get to you. They can scream all they want, and waste your time up until 2000 every evening, but after that they have to let you study and that’s what you have to concentrate on. In other words, decide real quick what’s bullshit and what’s real and don’t let the bullshit get you down. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s a lot of people like Greg, but that doesn’t mean you have to let them get to you, or that you have to become one.

Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right.” He chuckled and his deep voice attempted to get serious.

“Now get out of my sight, beanhead. Move.

Move. Move!”

Trace never forgot those words of advice in the following months. In retrospect she wondered if she would have made it if Boomer hadn’t taken the time and effort to talk to her that day. At the time she had simply thought he was being nice. It was only after she’d been further indoctrinated into the Academy system did she realize that Boomer had been perilously close to being unprofessional by being nice to her.

Nice was not a trait extolled in the Blue Book that ruled cadets’ lives.

Leaning back in her chair. Trace stretched out shoulder muscles sore from her time at the keyboard. She had short dark hair, framing a thin, tanned face out of which two dark eyes blazed behind steel-rim glasses. Her fatigue shirt hung limply over the back of the chair and her camouflage pants were un bloused from the highly shined jungle boots. Trace was slender, one of the few women who looked good in the male-designed Army-issue battle dress uniform, which was actually to her disadvantage among her peers and the Officers’ Wives Club and had proved to be disastrous when it came to a particular high-ranking male officer.

In 1992 the sudden opening of combat flight slots to female pilots had seemed to Trace as a particular stroke of luck. She’d just served in the Gulf War piloting a UH-60 Blackhawk air ambulance with the 82nd Airborne Division and had received a Bronze Star for valor when she’d flown a rescue mission for a team of Navy SEALS pinned down on the first day of the ground war.

Her excellent record and her skills as a pilot had garnered her a slot as one of the first three women to go through Apache flight training.

Her husband, John, had not been thrilled with the idea. He was a classmate and they had married in the excitement and fear of graduation. He wanted the two of them to settle down with concurrent tours at graduate school and then back to the Military Academy as instructors. But Trace had loved flying too much and insisted on the opportunity that presented itself.

Trace had fallen in love with the powerful attack helicopter and graduated at the top of her class, despite subtle — and not-so-subtle — attempts on the part of both her male peers and instructors to sabotage her invasion of their aerial domain.

After graduating, she’d been assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division’s Apache Battalion in South Korea in late 1992, while her husband was attending Johns Hopkins back in the States for graduate schooling. As the only woman in the unit, she’d faced a wall of hostility penetrated only by many of the men’s attempts to get into her flight suit. They hated her, but they wanted to screw her, which in retrospect, Trace found to be an apt commentary on the state of women in the military.

Her new battalion commander. Lieutenant Colonel Warren, had been none too pleased to in brief her. He didn’t want her, but the Department of the Army had cut the orders and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. His comments were succinct and to the point: make one mistake and she would be gone from his unit.

Two weeks after getting in-country, she’d joined the rest of the pilots at the base’s officer club early one Friday evening for a “Hail and Farewell.” It was an Army tradition to greet incoming members of the unit and to bid goodbye to those departing back to the States. Trace sat through the speeches and plaques for the farewells and waited for the hails. The new officers. Trace among them, were lined up to “Do The Lance.”

The Lancers was the battalion’s nickname, and the physical symbol of that nickname was an eight-foot bamboo lance. The long center of the haft had been hollowed out, the tip was now removed, and it was ceremoniously filled with beer. Each new officer was required to take the Lance and empty it in one continuous drink, never removing the end of the haft from their lips. Since it contained six beers, the first two officers, both second lieutenants, failed to the derision of the other officers of the battalion.

When it was Trace’s turn, the volume level in the room in the officer’s club reached new levels as they waited for her to fail. Trace, however, had learned the art of chugging from her plebe classmates in I-One on their lonely Saturday nights in Eisenhower Hall where the only thing they could do was drink as much beer as quickly as possible.

Since the line for the draft beer was always long, they had quickly gotten into the habit of buying several pitchers each and getting swiftly drunk before having to return to their Academy cells at the stroke of midnight.

Trace took the lance from LTC Warren and proceeded to drink it dry to the consternation of the other pilots. When done, she turned it upside down and offered it as evidence “to the disbelievers in the crowd. She thought the whole thing childish, but she knew if she wanted to fit in at all, this was one way she would have to try.

The rest of the evening proceeded with great quantities of beer being imbibed and ever taller tales of flying derring do being told. Trace kept quiet and switched her drinking to coffee and soda. She knew better than to talk about her Bronze Star mission, or any of the other ones she’d flown in the Gulf. Coming from her it wouldn’t command respect but animosity. She also knew better than to get further drunk around aviators, whose sexual reputation around the Army was built upon numerous O-club excursions with women, married or not, in uniform or not, it didn’t matter.

Anything that was female and breathing was considered fair game. And here in this O-club, Trace was the only female around other than the Korean waitresses.

By eleven, over half the officers had left to crawl off to the Korean bars outside the gates and link up with local women who were willing, for hard currency, to give in to the men’s lust.

Trace decided it was time for her to get back to her BOQ room when she was stopped in the dark foyer of the club by LTC Warren.

“Where’d you learn to drink like that?” he demanded, his face bright red and his eyes blinking, trying to focus.

“Proper training, sir,” Trace replied, trying to be diplomatic.

“So can you take it all down like that?” Warren slurred.

Trace had no doubt what he was referring to and tried to slip around him. She’d been in this situation before and knew that discretion was the better part of valor, especially with one’s own battalion commander. She now accepted that it was going to be a very long year.

Warren reached out and grabbed her shoulder, which shocked Trace.

“So do you swallow?” Warren was pressed up against her in the corner formed by a telephone booth and the wall.

“Sir, let go of me,” Trace said, her stomach doing flip flops

Warren let go of her shoulder, but instead of backing off, he reached out with both hands and placed one directly over. her left breast and began squeezing and, with the other, tried to unzip her flight suit from the top.

Trace stopped thinking and reacted. She swung an elbow, catching the colonel on the side of the head, knocking him against the phone booth.

He let go of the breast and groped for her crotch. She grabbed both his shoulders, steadying her target, then exploded her knee upward with all her strength.

Warren gasped and immediately let go of her as he sunk to his knees now holding his own crotch. Trace turned and ran out the club, heading directly for her room where she locked the door and remained there all night, half afraid that someone would show up there pounding and demanding to be let in.

The next day she was shocked when Warren walked by her at morning PT formation, acting as if nothing had happened.

After physical training. Trace approached the battalion executive officer. Major Ford, in his office and told him of the previous evening’s incident. His immediate response was not gratifying as a worried look settled in on his face.

“Colonel Warren has a little drinking problem. Captain Trace.” Ford offered a weak smile.

“I’m sure he doesn’t remember what happened.”

“What are we going to do about what he did, sir?” Trace asked.

“We aren’t going to do anything,” Ford replied.

“The colonel was drunk.”

“That doesn’t excuse what he did! He assaulted me,” Trace said, trying to control her anger.

“What happens if he does it again?”

“Just make sure you aren’t around him when he’s drinking and it won’t happen again,” Ford suggested sharply.

Trace gestured around.

“This post is only slightly bigger than the airfield. Am I supposed to hide in my room when I’m not on duty because the colonel has a drinking problem and likes to grope women?”

“It’s your word against his,” Ford said.

“You just said he had a drinking problem,” Trace protested.

“And if I had to testify, I would say he’s the best battalion commander I’ve ever served under and I have no knowledge of a drinking problem.”

Ford leaned forward.

“Listen, let it go. No one wants you-here anyway. Make waves and they’ll ship your ass out of here in a heartbeat.”

Trace felt curiously calm. She was at one of those life points where you know there’s a fork and once you choose your direction, there’s no going back. She’d put up with the sexual harassment from her first day at West Point until the present. She’d been exposed to some situations at West Point that made Warren’s drunken gropings seem insignificant, but she expected more from a forty-year-old battalion commander, especially one she had to serve under for the next year at an isolated base. In fact, one of the reasons-in bitter retrospect the major reason — she’d married so quickly after graduation was for the protection a wedding band would give her among the wolves waiting in the ranks of the real Army. But it was obvious that her wedding band would be no protection here in Korea, especially with her husband thousands of miles away.

“I want to lodge a formal complaint against Colonel Warren,” she said, her voice totally flat.

Ford looked like he had just swallowed a horse turd.

“What?”

“I am going to lodge a formal complaint against Colonel Warren. I will file an assault charge with the military police and a sexual harassment complaint through the chain of command and with the division equal opportunity officer at Camp Casey.”

“You’re crazy,” Ford said.

Trace stood.

“No, sir. I’m pissed.” She turned and left his office.

It had turned into a bloody mess that had gone all the way to the 8th Army Commander in Japan. Trace had been grounded during the investigation and that was used to move her out of the Apache Battalion. The reasoning was that a pilot should fly, not fight legal battles. So in the long run, she’d lost as far as the Army was concerned. Warren was allowed to finish his command if he attended the Army drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. The sexual harassment charge disappeared under volumes of legal whitewashing.

In Army thinking it was better Warren be an alcoholic than a sexual harasser. Everyone remembered Tailhook and no one wanted to be associated with either the case or Trace.

She’d returned to the States four months early, never having had a chance to fly the helicopter she’d been trained for. She’d been shipped to Fort Meade and given a job in public affairs. An assignment close to her husband, but one which kept her away from helicopters.

Aviation branch saw her as a hot potato and a case of good riddance.

Of course, when she had returned from Korea, her home was one of those places where she’d hoped she could get some unconditional support. But she’d heard the tone in her husband’s voice during their long distance conversations and she saw the look in his eyes when they met at the airport. There was no going back from such a look.

He’d stayed for six months until finally Trace had been forced to make him face the fact that he was only there out of some perverse sense of duty and pity. He was worried about his own career now, married to a woman who had gained an unfavorable reputation with the powers-that-be in the green machine. Ultimately, she knew that he had not agreed with her decision to press charges and that knowledge disgusted her. That he would rather her keep quiet about her being groped by another man, rather than possibly upset their career track, was beyond what she could take. Her husband moved out the next day, relieved to be able to put it totally on her shoulders and get on with punching his tickets up the rank structure. The divorce followed as soon as legally possible.

With her nothing job at Fort Meade and her husband gone, she’d been lost and confused. The injustice of what had happened to her in Korea and the stonewall of Army brass she’d run into had left her empty and alone.

That was when Boomer Watson had saved her life. She’d never told anyone that, not even Boomer. But she knew it was true. He’d made a special trip from Fort Bragg in between one of his constant deployments to visit her. And he’d kept in touch on the phone, calling whenever he got back from a deployment — sometimes in the middle of the night.

Then, two weeks after John had moved out. Boomer had appeared at Trace’s office, wearing civilian clothes and sporting non-regulation hair with a beard. He was in for two weeks temporary duty. Something to do with an upcoming exercise. He never told her why he was at Fort Meade, but she suspected it had something to do with the National Security Agency which was also headquartered on post.

For two weeks they spent every minute off duty together.

On the third night, as he was getting ready to leave to go back to his BOQ room, she’d asked him to stay. He looked at her, grinned, and joined her on the couch. Two hours later, when he taken her in his arms, she’d pried herself loose and turned all the lights out, before taking her clothes off, going to the bed, and sliding under the covers, unseen.

The next morning she slipped out, getting into the shower while Boomer still slept. She was pleased when the curtain was pulled aside and he stepped in. He grabbed the soap and did the favors.

Later, over breakfast, she asked him how he felt about being with her.

Boomer raised his eyebrows: “What about being with you?”

“Come on, don’t mess with me. You know I’m a marked woman.”

“Hey, I’m not messing with you. All I saw — and see-is a beautiful person and a beautiful woman — that I just made love to. The sex wasn’t bad either. And you know me better than to think I give a shit about my so-called Army career. I’m just having fun down at Bragg. I don’t care if they keep me a major the rest of my career. Sounds good to me.”

He’d gone back to Bragg, and though they’d seen each other over the years, they’d never slept together again. It was as if they’d crossed a line for a reason, then put the line back in place and gone back to the strength of their friendship. Trace had read somewhere that if old lovers stayed in your life they were the truest friends and that was how she felt about Boomer. And now he was coming back into her life.

Trace shook herself out of her reverie and glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to nine. Time to be going. She shrugged on her BDU shin, feeling the stiffness of the starched material. She saved what she’d written, shut the computer down, and the words faded from the screen as she left the house perched on the mountain side overlooking Barbers Point Naval Air Station.

She decided to take the fastest route to work, turning her Jeep Cherokee toward Makikilo Drive and I’ll. Even if her thoughts had not been on the pending arrival of Boomer Watson, there was no chance she could have spotted the two men dressed in black fatigues hidden 600 meters away on the heavily vegetated slope of Puu Makakilo.

The man with the rifle shifted the red illuminated laser aiming circle in the center of the scope reticle and tracked the Jeep as it moved toward the highway. The scope was mounted on a Remington Model 700, 308 caliber, single shot, bolt-action rifle on top of a tripod behind which the man sat cross legged. A thin black cord led from the side of the large scope to a small black box on the ground. The box was a computer that combined the location of the rifle and distance and elevation to the target — determined by ground-positioning radar and the laser range and direction finder in the scope itself, along with weather data, particularly current wind direction and speed (calculated by a small anemometer which popped up on the top of the computer box), to automatically adjust the aiming circle in the scope. Except for the ability to keep the aiming point on target while pulling the trigger smoothly, the computer and scope made an expert marksman out of the most ordinary of shooters. The will to pull the trigger on a human target was, of course, assumed.

The man centered the small pointing circle on Trace’s head and his right forefinger caressed the trigger.

“Pow,” he muttered.

“One dead bitch.” As Trace’s Jeep entered I’ll, he pulled his eye away from the rubber cup on the scope.

“Why are we just sitting here? Why don’t we do it?”

“We wait for orders,” the second man said, noting Trace’s departure time and direction in a small notebook.

“We aren’t the only ones waiting for orders. There are other actions to be coordinated,” he added vaguely.

“We need to get everything and we need to know how she got the information.”

He put the notebook away in his breast pocket and smoothly slid a double-edged commando knife out of a boot sheath. With a flip of his wrist, he threw the knife into the trunk of a tree ten meters away, the razor-sharp blade sinking four inches into the wood.

“We have to go in and get the stuff first. Then grab her. Someone else says when.”