Memorial Bridge (56 page)

But the light, real noonday light, blinding and brow-piercing, was what awaited him when finally he pushed the huge carved oak door open and left the church.

Word must have spread around the campus that the President was in the Shrine, because the small circle of peace demonstrators had grown much larger. Policemen were still keeping it off to the side, and now they were wearing riot helmets. The picket line was moving in a broad oval along the sidewalk, perhaps fifty strong now. Policemen and picketers both were staring up at Richard, trying to decide if his appearance at the door meant the Mass was over. As he came down the monumental staircase he drifted to the right, toward the demonstrators. Having seen he was alone, they ignored him now. Richard saw that in addition to the placards he had noted before, some were carrying photographic blowups of war victims, and that was what decided him. He remembered the photo of the napalmed girl which he had kicked at Georgetown a long two years before. In joining the picket line he fell into step with a gray-haired woman who was carrying a picture of a mother bent over her dead baby. His emotion choked him. The woman nodded at him and offered him the photograph to carry. He took it without speaking or looking at the picture again. He was relieved when the woman went off to get another for herself. He was afraid that he would cry.

When a few minutes later he picked his mother out of the crowd that was spilling down the broad stairs—both the casket and the President
had been taken out the side doors—he pictured her not in black but in the tattered blue shirt, once his father's, that she always wore as a gardening smock. As a child he had sat by the hour on the edge of his sandbox, a narrow bench, watching her working at the flower bed, digging with the hand spade, the tails of that shirt flapping behind her, filling him with the family feeling that he treasured. His father now had his mother by the elbow, but she was leading, Richard saw, striding down the stairs at the angle that would bring her to him.

Cass, for her part, had entered the eternity of pure feeling. She was swollen by hurt and anger unlike any that a loved one had ever caused in her before, much less Richard. Richard had done this to her! She took the stairs blindly, seeing nothing but him. The city of Washington, in the distance, was visible to others from that height, but not to her. She could easily have been in another city, another age. Once before she had felt drawn out of herself like this, and she had charged then along Exchange Avenue in Chicago, across from the Stone Gate of the stockyards, stalking the man in the tavern who would tell her what had happened to her Uncle Mike. The man who'd told her was Sean.

Now Sean was holding her back. She pulled her elbow out of his grasp and left him behind as she descended the last of the stairs, brushing by a policeman who said, "Sorry, ma'am," and tried to stop her, but he could not.

Richard had stepped out of the moving circle of protesters and was standing now, waiting with a child's panic in his face, her adult son! Her law student! He held the oversized war photograph in front of himself like a shield, as if that would stop her. The image of the anguished mother registered, but vaguely—she would remember it in detail later—because she was so intent on her son.

She closed the last dozen yards that separated them almost running, in itself an extraordinary violation of decorum for her. She drew her hand back as she moved, free of the impulse to speak because she knew there would never be words to express the betrayal she felt. He made no effort to turn away, but out of paralysis, not stoicism or courage. When the blow struck him, her open hand with all her might flat on his cheek, it stung even her, so sharply she seemed to awaken.

His head snapped away with such force she feared for an instant that she'd really hurt him. But he brought his face quickly back around and she recognized in his stunned expression, as only she could, a flash—she was sure—of gratitude.

When Richard at last found it possible to turn away from her, the God he no longer believed in, not finished with him yet, made his brimming eyes go immediately to the one face in the crowd on the basilica stairs that he truly wanted to avoid.

His father's.

His father was staring at him as from another world. If there was rage in his father at that moment, anything like his mother's, Richard could not see it. He knew he would never see it. What he saw instead and would always see now was nothing. His father's eyes—these were the eyes that would follow him everywhere—were simply blank, like a Greek statue's. The absence of expression in his father's face was so pure a form of personal negation that it cut through Richard like a chilling wind. The dead, he thought with a shudder. His father was staring at him from the world of the dead.

It never occurred to Sean Dillon anyway that he had time to brood about his son's behavior, but when he returned to the Pentagon that afternoon there was Michael Packard waiting for him.

Packard closed the door of Dillon's office behind himself, so that they were alone. He crossed to the desk just as his longtime boss was pulling up to it.

"What do you have?"

Packard held out a folder. "An ISIC bulletin."

Dillon took it and opened it, spreading it flat on the desk in front of him. Onto the center of an otherwise blank page three lines of ticker tape had been pasted. "1407/91267 Prior One," he read, "1407 DIA Estimates Officer, Captain John Bowers, USA, KIA 9-12-67, Area Da Nang. Rems Recovered. NOK Notfd."

Dillon stared at the strips of print, running his eyes over them again and again, waiting for the letters to rearrange themselves, to mean something else. When he looked up at Packard, finally, his deputy had turned away and was staring at the map of Southeast Asia that covered the nearby wall.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. That came in an hour ago."

"If the remains were recovered already and the next of kin have been notified, then there's no mystery. Why is this all we have?"

"Standard form, General. Casualty report won't come in until current dailies are posted."

"I want to know what happened to Bowers, and I want to know now. Cut through the dailies. Get back to Saigon, now."

Packard took a step toward the door.

Dillon stopped him. "Wait a minute. I'll do it myself."

"No, I'm—"

"I'm doing it, Mike." Dillon, clutching the folder, crossed ahead of Packard and out.

At the DIA alert center, the communications officer hurriedly and nervously sent off Dillon's demand. Dillon hovered behind him, waiting. In minutes the cipher machine sputtered out the tape of Saigon's reply. The officer read the tape, tore it and looked up at Dillon with an expression of distress. "No information, sir. Full reply pending."

"What do they mean, no information?"

"They must have—"

"Get me patched in to Flynn. Right now."

"I can't, sir. I'd have to go through Com Com MACV, and first I have to file a time request."

Without waiting for the officer to finish, Dillon turned on his heel and left the center. The Pentagon corridors through which he stormed were crowded with personnel. He cut through them as if they were shoppers on F Street. Packard hustled to keep up with him. When they hit a stretch of relatively deserted hallway Dillon said, "This summarizes my entire problem. Go through MACV, file a request, then route through the embassy, all to talk to my own man about what happened to another of my men!" Dillon stopped and faced Packard, poking him. "What did happen to Bowers? Do you know?"

"No, I don't. How could I?"

"They killed him. They killed him."

"Who did?"

Dillon stared back at Packard, unable to put his gut certainty into words.

Years before, Packard had felt self-conscious in calling Dillon General, and at first he had treated it as a joke. But then it became his customary way of addressing his boss, as it was everyone's. So it cut to the heart of their intimacy, of his concern, when he said now, "What, Sean? What are you thinking?"

Instead of answering, Dillon resumed his clipped pace along the hallway until at last he came to the suite of offices that had once been his. The director's office of the Air Force OSI.

Moments later, in the OSI communications center, Dillon stood with General Joe Hough, a protégé, while the OSI system went into play. Within minutes, a message came back from the OSI office at Bien Hoa. It was signed "Freeman" and it detailed what had happened to Bowers.

He went down in a transport helicopter shortly after it took off from the airfield at Da Nang. No hostile or friendly fire: a mechanical malfunction. The two pilots and all thirteen passengers, seven Vietnamese and six Americans, including a bird colonel, were killed. The chopper crashed in the jungle four miles outside the base perimeter. It took eleven hours to recover their bodies. Bowers's remains were now in the MATS morgue at Tan Son Nhut.

Between the OSI office and his own, Dillon stopped Packard. They were standing by a window overlooking the green courtyard that formed the center of the Pentagon, a target bull's-eye, the ultimate ground zero. Dillon looked out on the patch of grass, thinking as he often had before that grass was inappropriate for the place. It should have been paved, a parking lot for tanks. A heliport.

But grass. Grass evoked nearby Arlington, making Dillon think of the Pentagon as the largest tombstone in the world.

"Look, Mike. I want you to forget what I was thinking."

Packard laughed. "Boss, I'm good, I'm even very good. But I don't read your mind."

Dillon looked at him in surprise. "I didn't tell you what I was—"

"You said they killed him." Packard paused. "And I guess they did. The fates. The gods."

"It just shocked me, the plain fact of his being dead, but no details."

"And the details tell us a lot of men died. So we know Bowers wasn't singled out."

Dillon nodded. "Why do I feel relieved? He's still dead."

"You feel relieved because if your first instinct was right, it would mean the end of us."

"You and me?"

"The whole country."

Dillon nodded, then shook with a sudden shudder. He said quietly, "This thing is getting to me, Mike."

He led the way back to his office, Packard following. At his desk, Dillon swiveled absently toward the window, wanting a view to blank from his mind the image of the sterile grass courtyard. His eyes went to
the needle in the distance, the Washington Monument, but he saw it as the K of C bell tower at the Shrine. He thought of Richard.

He wanted to call up Bowers's face, but he could not picture the man. Their encounter had been so short, so many months ago. He closed his eyes, trying for the image of the young captain, but when his mind broke free of his son, he saw instead the wrinkled, bloated drinker's face—Bowers was a drinker—of Richard Riley. Doc Riley. Trust me, Doc. Trust me, Captain.

Doc Riley's remains had never been recovered. And neither had Sean Dillon's ability to trust anyone but himself.

He opened his eyes and swiveled back to Packard. "Bowers's father is a doctor. When I call him he'll ask me exactly what—"

"General Hough said he'd have the autopsy by morning."

"I want to call Dr. Bowers tonight, from home. I'll want the autopsy carried out to him, in Fort Wayne. Send one of our people from the office here. Send Miller."

"Yes, sir."

"Do we have a photograph of Bowers?"

"I can get one from personnel."

Dillon opened the folder and read the strip message again. KIA: such innocuous letters, ruined for the language now forever. KIA, he thought. DIA.
Dia.
He'd never read it as the Greek word before.
Dia:
divided into two parts. He said, "I told Bowers I'd be out on the limb with him. But I wasn't."

"Hey, General, it was an accident. It could have happened on Shirley Highway."

Dillon shook his head. "He extended his tour for me."

"He knew it was important. You gave him a way to think that what he was doing was making a difference."

"But was it? What have I done with all that he sent me? What difference have I been able to make? The war goes on as if we could win it this way, but Bowers's numbers say we can't."

"There are all those other numbers, though. Everybody has his Bowers, General. They cancel each other out. Bowers's death isn't your fault, and neither is the confusion."

"Nothing's my fault. Nothing's anybody's fault. Damn it, everyone in this city is acting like the entire war is an accident! Somebody better start taking responsibility for it. I used to think the President was getting bad advice, but it's him! He has sold himself a complete bill of goods,
and after hearing him at the funeral this morning, I see why. He thinks the only one suffering as a result of the war is him. And anybody who isn't ready to hold his hand and see it his way is sent out of the room. The President is dead wrong in the choices he's made, but he does not know it. From that first NSC meeting on, the men who know better have failed to tell him so. The only people who do are the crazies in the street, and they just make him all the more certain he's right. Compared to them, he is right. But compared to men like Bowers—" Dillon stopped, disgusted with himself. He picked up the cable. After a moment he said quietly, "I'm not letting Bowers die like this, for nothing."

"What can you do, Sean?"

"You mean, besides calling Dr. Bowers and telling him I'm sorry?"

"Yes."

Dillon was so accustomed to answering this question "I don't know" that he almost did so again. Instead, he put the cable down on his desk and touched the button on his intercom. "Helen, send Sergeant Kingfield to my quarters for a set of civilian clothes, a dark business suit, shoes, everything. Tell him to hurry. And Helen."

"Yes, sir?"

"Get me Randall Crocker on the phone."

He snapped the intercom off and looked at Packard. "I want the file of everything Bowers has sent us. I want my own summaries and I want copies of what went to the White House after the CIA, JCS and OSD worked my summaries over."

"That goes all the way back to March."