“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.”
CHAPTER 3