Memorial Bridge (33 page)

Arranged in formation at that end of the room, like the bomber squadron, were three rows of five ebony Windsor chairs, and for a mad moment Dillon thought he heard the empty chairs roaring at him like warplanes. He faced away and walked to the empty easel beside the lectern to set up his cardboard charts. He put his binder on the lectern, carefully aligning it with the corner of the shelf so that when he opened his briefing book it would be centered before him. The act was merely superstitious, though, since by now Dillon was perfectly capable of laying out his proposals without a note. With a once rare and, to him, offensive resignation, he admitted again that the perfection of his preparations would make no difference.

Two and a half hours later he was standing at that lectern, having just delivered his report, a straightforward description of what he'd dubbed the Office of Special Investigations. Dillon's proposals, elaborated with
charts and graphs, had seemed so simple and logical that he could not imagine them not carrying, but on another level, the one on which he had been steadily rebuffed by these very men for months now, he knew better. They were generals and colonels, all in their new blue uniforms with silver stars and eagles on their shoulders, and huge, beautiful patches of ribbons on the left sides of their chests, trophies of their harrowing bomber missions over Germany and Japan, badges of valor and of membership in a rare fraternity to which Sean Dillon could never hope to be admitted.

General Thomas M. Eason, the chief of staff, was there. So were the vice chief; the provost marshal; the air inspector; the assistant chief of staff, operations; the assistant chief of staff, intelligence; and the most famous of them all, General Mark Macauley, the bomber command hero of the night raids on Berlin, and now the commander of the fledgling Strategic Air Command.

In the silence that followed his briefing, Dillon understood that the resistance of the men in front of him was so complete they might not raise an objection to what he'd proposed, or ask a question or comment at all. What better way to express their resentment at having been ordered here by Crocker?

As he looked across the room at the faces of the uniformed men staring back at him, Dillon recalled the meeting in Crocker's office years before. Because that had been a Bureau case built around his discovery of Sylvia Yergin, it had not mattered what OSS and G-2 and CIC representatives had made of him. But these were men whom he was supposed to convert to his way of thinking, and he knew that the opposite had just occurred. A wall of glass bricks, one for each word he spoke, had arisen between his audience and his lectern.

Randall Crocker sat immobile and inexpressive in the front row between the only other two civilians in the room, his deputy and one of Forrestal's. Crocker's left leg was stretched out rigidly in front of him. He was dressed in a dark suit, and his breast pocket carried a crisp, steepled handkerchief. Crocker had kept himself aloof from Dillon all winter and spring, but Dillon had chosen to read that as the preoccupation of a man with huge and urgent other tasks. In fact, Crocker had been sucked into the fan of Forrestal's emotional distress. As the conflict between the navy and the air force had heated up, Forrestal's bias toward the navy had come out and he'd begun to treat Crocker, his old Wall
Street friend, like yet another enemy. But few knew of that intensely personal struggle yet, certainly not Dillon. Randall Crocker's reaction to his briefing, the one that mattered most, was the one that Dillon had not dared to predict. It unsettled him that even now he could not read the man who had brought him here.

"Questions, gentlemen?" Dillon said at last.

No one spoke.

Forrestal's deputy leaned to whisper in Crocker's ear, but Crocker ignored him.

"Well, I have a question," the gruff, portly Macauley said. From his chair in the second row he pointed with a dead cigar at the easel. "I see it on the chart there, and I heard you say it. But I guess I still don't get it."

"Sir?"

"I would have this OSS operation—"

"OSI, General, not OSS." Dillon smiled self-deprecatingly. "Most definitely not OSS."

The bomber general waved his cigar impatiently. "OSI then. I would have it in my command, but the damn thing wouldn't report to me?"

" 'Report' to you, sir?" Throughout his presentation Dillon's palms had remained dry. Now he calmly picked up the long, rubber-tipped wooden pointer and aimed it at the organizational chart. "I would assume 'reporting,' sir."

"I mean reporting in a military sense. The chain of command. This operation, the way you outline it, would be outside the chain of command."

"No, sir. Simply that the chain of command would run more directly to the chief of staff." Dillon tapped the chart at three points. "Regional OSI commanders would, as you say, 'report' to the OSI director, who would report in turn to the chief of staff."

"Why not through the IG?" another asked. Then Dillon saw that the voice belonged, in fact, to the inspector general. If they had had a common strategy of responding to Dillon with a monolithic silence, it was broken. As usual with these bastards, self-interest had prevailed. One at a time, Dillon felt, he could handle them.

"As I said, sir, there are two reasons for reserving an independent OSI from the regular command structure. First, the difficulty inherent in an investigative agency whose mission may on occasion involve investigation of persons senior in the chain of command—"

"That's ridiculous," the bomber general barked. "You're saying they might investigate me?"

Dillon eyed General Macauley carefully. "You are familiar, perhaps, General, with the case of General Hill?"

"I know all about Charlie Hill."

"Then you know that while serving as director of the Air Technical Service Command, responsible for the purchase of all army air force's equipment during the war, General Hill used his influence over the assignment of contracts for personal gain."

"I know Charlie was accused of—"

"General, if I may, please." Dillon's voice rose sharply. He was ten, even twenty years younger than these men. They were not accustomed, to say the least, to juniors compelling their attention. Blood burned in Macauley's face. To avoid even the appearance of deference, he began noisily to unwrap the cellophane from a new Garcia y Vega. He exchanged an exasperated glance with the inspector general, then concentrated on managing his cigar. Dillon nevertheless continued to address him. "The investigation into allegations against General Hill was severely hindered by the inability of the relatively junior investigative officers to obtain cooperation from their seniors. As you no doubt heard, General Hill at one point issued orders forbidding the release of his own records, and the provost marshal backed him up." Dillon faced the air inspector. "And the inspector general at the time tried to overrule General Hill, but lacked the authority to do so. Hill's records were not made available until General Marshall himself intervened, and by then the records were incomplete."

The vice chief broke in, "The Charlie Hill case hardly justifies what you've proposed. You don't rearrange the flight plan of an entire squadron because of one enemy ack-ack gun. You take the gun out and maintain course."

"As you know, General, the Hill case was not the only one. There were twenty-seven separate cases developed by CID inside the Air Technical Service Command alone."

"But how many brought to court-martial?"

"My point exactly. It was precisely the knowledge that he would almost certainly
not
be court-martialed, even if accused, that stimulated every officer who abused his trust in that command to do so."

"You did not conduct those investigations, Mr. Gillen. You weren't
even here. Where
were
you during the war anyway?"

"My name is Dillon. I was in Washington throughout the war. It is correct to say I did not conduct those investigations, but it has been my responsibility to acquaint myself with the records of those who did. For your information, those records are in the files of seven different Defense Department agencies. Yet taken together they absolutely established that graft in the amount of millions of dollars had corrupted the procurement system even before the war ended. And then after the war, with the project of military surplus disposal, the problem worsened. Tens of millions of dollars of simple theft and bribery are at issue now. Dozens of separate cases involving everything from the illegal consignment of surplus GI clothing to unlicensed profiteers, up to and including the covert shipment of twenty-two decommissioned fighter bombers to the Irgun resistance in Palestine, in violation of the Neutrality Act."

"The air force did not do that."

"It is the air force's job to see that such things don't happen. And if they do, to bring those responsible to justice. Yet to date, almost all charges have been brought against enlisted men and NCOs. In the cases I'm referring to, the variously constituted courts-martial have so far convicted four supply clerks, thirteen mechanics and repairmen, an armorer, a wire technician and two parachute riggers."

Dillon paused to allow the weight of the litany to accumulate, then he found the eyes of the silver-haired vice chief of staff. "The problem toward the end of the war and immediately afterward was not one enemy ack-ack gun, General, but a massive moral sabotage from within, the effect of which continues in the widespread assumption that the air force does not seriously enforce either its own regulations or the law. That assumption, left unchecked, will cripple the entire air force. It must be clear to every man in this service, no matter what his rank or position, that air force justice is efficient and absolute, and that what it is blind to here is what rank insignia a man wears on his shoulder.
That
is why I propose setting OSI outside the chain of command, and it is why I propose that OSI agents, in conducting investigations, will wear civilian clothes and will not be required to identify themselves by military rank."

"What the hell!" Macauley snapped. "Why not just have a civilian agency then?"

Dillon did not answer. He glanced toward Crocker, whose face showed nothing.

General Eason sat two chairs away from Crocker, also in the front row. Four stars gleamed on his epaulets. Speaking for the first time, he said quietly, "Perhaps there is another explanation for why so few officers have been charged in these investigations. Perhaps it is nothing like what you call 'moral sabotage.'"

"Sir?"

"The obvious other explanation, Mr. Dillon, is that our officers for the most part are what they purport to be, men of honor."

"General, we are talking about an officer corps, during the time in question, of tens of thousands of men."

"Is it unthinkable to you that—?"

"I'm a Catholic, General." Dillon slapped the wooden pointer down onto the lip of the easel. "I've been taught to believe in original sin. And I'm a lawyer. I've been taught to believe we
all
need the limits of the rule of law. General Hill's name is known to all of you because he is the only general officer to have been court-martialed, but I am morally certain, given the quantity of misappropriated supplies and arms, that Hill is not the only general officer to have reaped personal financial gain from the improper discharge of his duty. We will never know for certain because, owing to the chain of command and the dispersal of investigative responsibility, generals are not accountable to anyone but other generals who apparently think criminal behavior by their peers is best punished by a snub at the Officers' Club, if that. In the air force right now—this is as good a summary of my conclusions as any—there is less a rule of law than a rule of privilege."

Having said that, and seeing the subtle jolt backward of their heads, Dillon realized why Crocker had brought in an outsider to do this. His job was to drop his bombs on them and leave. With a sudden fresh rush of authority, Dillon pointed at the wall behind them. "Those paintings back there, gentlemen, are glimpses of the past, if you will permit my saying so. A civilian like me cannot look at such scenes without feeling a kind of awe. They feature the heroic action of individuals, pilots like yourselves, men who made the difference for our country between victory and defeat. But that is not all those pictures feature, as no one knows better than you. You who organized air raids involving hundreds of warplanes flying at night over contested territory know the absolute requirement in the modern era for the submission of the individual will to group effort. You've told your men again and again, reining in
fighter-jocks and daredevils, that the time for individual heroism is over. The principles you have already so effectively applied to operations I only want to apply to security." Dillon swung his arm toward the polarcentric map of the world. "That's the future, and you created it. In conflict with the USSR one thing will count far more than individual action, no matter how heroic, and you know what it is: clear, effective organization responsive to the will of proper authority.

"At the risk of offending you with the obvious, I am telling you that the opposite of such organization is confusion. It is not that there are large numbers of criminals in the air force, or in the officer corps, but that there are human beings who in a situation of confusion will make bad choices. That is what General Hill did. Those of you who know him personally could surely attest that he would not have compromised himself had he known in advance that an aggressive, unintimidated OSI was going to investigate his activity and bring charges against him if his activity proved improper. The confusion of authority among the CID and provost marshal and the IG and JAG, all subject to local commanders in the chain of command, created an opening in enforcement that General Hill knew he could exploit. An OSI, by its very existence, would close that opening, and otherwise honest men would have a good reason for staying honest."

The assistant chief of staff, intelligence, stood up at his place in the last row. A tall man with a neatly trimmed mustache and a hair part sharp enough to focus a camera on, he reminded Dillon of Colonel Cheever, the OSS officer who had challenged him in Crocker's office nearly five years before. Cheever's aristocratic air had impressed Dillon because it was so clearly uncultivated, and he recognized a like sense of self-assurance in this officer.