An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Read online

  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.”

  “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

  Monday 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.