An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (2 page)

Chase slipped on her dog tags and tucked the cold metal beneath her T-shirt. “Okay, North,” she called out. North knocked anyway before entering and handed over a draft of a media release. He set the three-inch binder containing their entire file on the 81 on the single empty corner of her desk.

“Next of kin?”

“Notifications still being made, ma’am.”

She read over the release, mentally checking off time, date, and place. She rang up headquarters, and Major O’Donnell, the
G-1 officer for General Hickman, answered. “This is what we get for coming in this weekend to catch up on paperwork,” he teased.

“No rest for the wicked, sir.” They’d known each other since their combat tour in Iraq, and O’Donnell’s had been the first familiar face she’d seen in Hawaii.

“General Hickman’s on the line with Colonel Farris,” he said. “I’ll notify him you’re holding.”

Brigadier General “Wild Bill” Hickman was not the first Marine Chase had had to win over. He was a Desert Storm veteran who had the distinction of having flown more combat missions than any pilot on active duty and he’d made it clear he didn’t have much use for female Marines. He let her get halfway
through the reading of the news release before he interrupted. “MPs tell me the gate’s overrun with media. Who told them about the crash?” At the accusatory tone, she instinctively glanced up at North who was now standing in front of her desk, awaiting her next order.

“Most likely they picked it up from scanners, sir—”

North read the situation and rolled his eyes. She continued, “I understand they were at the gate before my office was even notified.” There was a click, and it took a moment to register that the general had actually hung up on her. “I’ll take that as a yes on the statement,” she said, dropping the phone in the cradle and forcing a smile as North held out a wad of pink telephone message slips.

“He’s a piece of work—”

Chase held up a hand to stop him. She took several of the phone messages for herself and handed back the rest. “Remember, don’t let these guys draw you into any speculation about the 81 or the cause of the crash. And hurry. They’re waiting for us at the gate.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am.” North excused himself and disappeared into his office. A few seconds later, he was identifying himself as a Marine with Public Affairs who was calling with a media release about a helicopter crash. At times, their voices broke into unison during the reading of the release; other times, a morbid musical round.

She finished her calls first and flipped through the folder North had prepared to the
page buried in the back, the list of dead Marines, the top of the list for the name of the pilot: Major Anthony White; 33; home-of-record: Chevy Chase, Maryland; next-of-kin: Kitty White, 2 children.

She didn’t know Major White other than the time she’d flown with him, at least not in the sense of knowing that brings shock and grief. General Hickman had instructed her to orchestrate a media day for the 81. Her job, as Hickman put it, had been to
show them we’re not afraid to fly in the damn thing
. Chase and her staff invited local and national media to ride aboard an 81 during a training exercise that would demonstrate just how efficient the helicopter was at lifting heavy equipment such as trucks and howitzers.

The night before the media circus,
however, Stone could no longer hide his true fears about her flying in an 81. How often she looked back on that argument, replaying it word for word, with the sense that Stone had foreshadowed his own fatal crash. “They should ground the entire fleet,” he had said that night, pacing the kitchen, “until they can figure out what’s wrong with the swash-plate bearing.” Chase had been stir-frying vegetables in the wok. She pressed a foot on the lever of the garbage can and tossed in the spines of red and green pepper. Ginger, sesame oil, and soy sauce were filling up the kitchen and making her eyes water. She had glared at Stone and nodded toward Molly, who was coloring in a book at the kitchen table, and Stone had dropped the subject until the next morning.

Since their return from the Gulf, and on
learning six months later that Stone was headed back for a second tour, he had vacillated between an almost cavalier lack of concern for her and Molly to one of over concern. He had never been one to resent her status as a military officer, not like other husbands they knew with military wives. But nothing had been the same since they’d been torn apart for that year. Then again, few Marines on the base had returned from this war unscathed. Any hint of post-traumatic stress disorder grounded a pilot indefinitely. She had stopped attending the wives’ club events because the air was too thick with denial.

Stone’s solution had been to drink—when he wasn’t scheduled to fly. Chase came to prefer the evil of his flying to the evil of his drinking. What had started with
a beer or two every night led to his hitting the hard stuff they stored in the small cabinet above the refrigerator for the friends who used to drop by. During his first tour, Stone had lost his best friends when the 81 he was flying went down in a hard landing on the desert floor. His crew chief, Mouse, and copilot, Hammer, had been like brothers. The bird had bumped hard and flipped on its side, Mouse and Hammer’s side. Chase had tried often to talk to Stone about survivor’s guilt, but his eyes would dim. The one night she suggested he talk to a doctor, he had thrown a glass so hard into the kitchen sink that it shattered, sending glass clear across the kitchen. He had crunched across the shards on the way to the front door. How Molly had slept through it all, she couldn’t imagine. Maybe the poor
child had been so frightened, she just pretended to sleep.

The way Chase had seen it, Stone would eventually fail the flight exam. His blood alcohol level would be too high, and then what? What scared Chase most was her fear about whether she’d still love Stone if he were grounded. More than anything, she hated the stigma of failure in any form, and she hated herself for thinking she might not have it within her to love him enough in his weakest moment.

But on the morning of the media day, Stone had again tried to talk her out of flying with Major White. He had been guiding Molly out the door and to the car for the ride to preschool and whispering over the little girl’s head, “You’re really going to do this?” Chase had nodded and gone about buckling Molly
into the backseat, breathing in the cloud of baby shampoo and mint toothpaste. When she straightened, Stone was still standing in the driveway behind her. Chase cinched her robe. “You do this to me every time you fly, you know.”

“At least I have some control—” And he had stopped. Everyone knew helicopter pilots rarely survived a crash. In an Officers’ Club on a Friday night, drunken pilots might even joke about feeling expendable. Surprising how many people assumed that when a helicopter failed it simply rotored on down. Truth was, it fell with the aerodynamics of a grand piano.

“White’s a good pilot,” Stone had stammered. Chase lifted on her toes to kiss him, but he turned away, muttering as he walked to the driver’s side of their Jeep,
“You’ll be fine.”

That morning, General Hickman hadn’t shown up for the flight. Neither had Colonel Farris, but the assistant secretary of the Navy was there to show the Pentagon’s support for the helicopter. Even a National AeroStar executive showed up. Hickman had pull when he wanted to use it.

While the mechanics, copilot, and crew chief were making preflight checks that morning, reporters and their photographers had nervously joked about karma and about how they’d all be different sorts of newsmakers that evening if the helicopter crashed. Maybe White had heard all this. He was zipped into a flight suit, helmet swinging by one hand when he walked over from the bird. He polled the group for how many had flown in a helicopter. Besides the Pentagon
official and the guy from National AeroStar, only Chase and Paul Shapiro with the
Honolulu Current
newspaper raised their hands. White had broken into a smile, clearly loving all this. With his helmet resting against his left hip under the weight of an arm, Major Tony White exhibited a quiet confidence. He spouted stats about the 81 and about how vital the bird had been during Desert Storm and current Middle East operations. He confessed his number of missions, smiling through it all, and Chase had appreciated how his confidence calmed everyone’s nerves, including hers.

A few minutes later, the group ran behind her, hunched under the spinning blades. She paused outside the bird until everyone had climbed aboard, then signaled a thumbs-up to White. Inside, the crew chief
was passing around headsets. She had reached overhead for hers, heard the crackling of air broken into bits of chatter between White and the tower, and then the nose of the bird lifted. When the theme song for
Hawaii 5-0
filtered through their headsets, the spread of smiles, thigh slapping, and thumbs-up gestures had filled her with assurance for positive press coverage. And the rest of the trip couldn’t have gone better. Major White had acted as if he were a paid tour guide, pointing out Diamond Head and the house portrayed in the television series
Magnum, P.I.
and hovering over Sacred Falls for photographs of the breathtaking eighty-seven foot wall of water that belonged to a beloved part of Hawaiian folklore. He had flown low over the canyon where
Jurassic Park
had been filmed,
and then he’d flown over the Dole Plantation, pointing out the world’s largest maze. Next came a fly-over of Pearl Harbor.
Yes, the positive press for this dog-and-pony show,
she’d thought,
will be well worth all the hassle with Stone.

Chase stared at White’s name on the list. She couldn’t conjure much more about the man other than the charm he’d affected over the media those months earlier. What she could conjure, however, was the face of a woman in a crisp photograph Major White had wedged into the corner of his curved windshield just after Chase had given him the thumbs-up for take-off. There wasn’t anything particularly unique about the woman. She was pretty enough, with regular features and dark hair. It was the idea of the
woman, Kitty White, there in her husband’s cockpit that had caused Chase to make a mental note of asking Stone whether he flew with a photograph of her, or of her and Molly. And if so, why? Sure, she wanted to think of herself as being there with him always, but not when he flew. He needed a clear head for flying, one for the ethereal side of life, not the earthbound one. But in the flurry of the media circus and its heady aftermath of accolades, Chase had forgotten to ask Stone.

Now Major White was dead, and the photo of his wife, Kitty, lost at sea.

North appeared in Chase’s doorway with an armful of media releases and the car keys. Halfway down the stairwell to the lobby, they heard a pounding on the locked front door.

“What the—?” North raced ahead as if to preempt whatever danger might befall his officer. By the time Chase reached the lobby, he had already unlocked the glass door and was ushering in the woman who looked as if she’d just climbed out of Major White’s photo.

“I’ve seen you on TV,” the woman said to Chase. “You’re taller in person.”

The woman in her jeans, flip-flops, and white tank wasn’t dressed at all the way an officer’s wife was expected to dress outside her home. Yet under these circumstances, who could blame her? “I’m Captain Anderson,” Chase said, “and this is Sergeant North.” The woman pressed a bony hand into Chase’s but ignored Sergeant North’s.

“I’ll get the car,” North muttered, then sprinted down the sidewalk toward the
parking lot.

Chase hadn’t noticed the purse in Mrs. White’s hand until the woman pulled the strap over a shoulder and unzipped the bag. “I know there’s been a crash,” she said, “an 81.”

Chase silently cursed the media and their scanners. “Yes,” she said, glancing out the window. North had parked the car at the end of the sidewalk and was running around to the passenger door to open it for her. She willed herself to look stoically back at Mrs. White. In seven years, Chase had tap-danced her way through dozens of press conferences, soft-shoeing past the questions that might have landed the Marine Corps before a Senate hearing, but never had she faced this situation. It wasn’t as though she wasn’t used to hearing from the next-of-kin. After all,
whenever a helicopter went down, it seemed every mother of a Marine tearfully called Chase’s office and every other Public Affairs office in the country, even if her Marine was stationed a thousand miles from the scene of the accident. Now that the Associated Press had been notified, she knew the voice mail would be full by the time she and North returned. They would have to refer the anxious mothers to the Chaplain’s Office. But here was Major White’s next-of-kin in person. Chase’s face was growing hotter. She knew she was sweating. She nodded toward North in the parking lot. “They’re waiting for me at the front gate.”

Mrs. White seemed awfully young to be the mother of two children, one a preteen, but she had the dried out look of someone
who had spent too much time on Waikiki. When she began rifling through her purse, her hair fell across her face. “It’s Tony, isn’t it?” she said, behind the heavy curtain of hair. Chase resisted the impulse to tuck it behind an ear. She’d never had patience for someone whose eyes she couldn’t see when talking to them.

North was still waiting beside the open door of the sedan. “I’m sorry,” Chase said, “but all names are pending release until the next of kin have been notified.” The woman was still rifling through her purse. “I really need to go,” Chase added.

“No, wait,” the woman said, grabbing Chase’s wrist, fingernails pinching flesh.

Funny how many thoughts can speed through the mind in less than a second. Maybe it was true what people said about
how your whole life flashed in front of you before you died. Had Stone’s before his crash? It wasn’t as if Chase felt in this moment she were about to die, but Mrs. White’s fingernails digging deeper and deeper were causing Chase to imagine Major White’s last seconds. The photograph of this woman flashed through her mind. She saw the background behind the woman’s face and imagined it being taken on that stretch of Perimeter Road where the jungle creeps down the cliff to the shore … or was that a photograph Stone had taken of her and Molly before his deployment, the one still under a magnet on the refrigerator door? Chase imagined White’s eyes fixed on this woman’s face, this face before her now, as he and his bird fell from the sky like a stone. Chase pulled against the woman’s hold. “You need
to go home, Mrs. White.”