"How the hell can they carry that much weightr "It's not going to be easy, sir," Ellis said.

"They're going to look very strange standing by the side of the road, trying to tutch a ride," another officer said, and the others laughed.

"I don't think they'll try to do that, sir," Ellis said. "Colonel MacMillan has come to an unofficial arrangement with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. They will report spotting the team."

"What's in it for the highway patrol?" someone asked.

"A bottle of whiskey for each confirmed spotting. The way that rule works, when the problem is later critiqued, half of the men spotted will be presumed killed if they are spotted. And whatever they might have done after having been spotted will be played with that in mind."

"What about the sheriff's deputies?" someone asked.

"That's between the highway patrol and the deputies," Ellis said.

"What are the rules of engagement between our people and yours?"

"If we attack, because of the element of surprise, we have a four-to-one advantage. In other words, if two of my people attack eight of yours, yours are dead. If we attack with the machine gun or the mortar, we have a ten-to-one advantage. With both, a fifteen-to-one advantage."

"And the rocket launcher?"

"There are six rounds for the rocket launcher. One hit with a round on the water tower will take it out; two hits are required for a bridge abutment. There's paint, in lieu of explosive, in the nose of the rocket."

"You're going to shoot paint at the water tower? The university's going to love that."

"I understand that Colonel Wells and Colonel MacMillan have agreed that we'll clean up the mess if you kill us, and that you'll clean it up if we succeed," Ellis said.

"We could just surround the objectives," an officer said. "Hell, I've got 160 cadets."

"However you do it is up to you, sir," Ellis said.

"Where are your people now?"

"All I know, sir, is that they dropped on Mr. Ford's farm at 0415. They could be anywhere," Ellis said. He looked at Colonel Wells. "That's all I have, sir."

"There's just one thing I have," Colonel Wells said. "To put our cadets in the right frame of mind to play this game seriously, before you send them out to protect the campus, I want you to make sure they all understand what happens to them if they are killed or captured. I have made arrangements with the Athletic Department to borrow the stadium for the rest of the weekend. Casualties will be taken to the stadium, where they will spend the rest of the weekend in pup tents and be fed with ten-in-one rations. Signs will be posted around the campus, inviting the curious to come look at the prisoners."

There was laughter at that.

"And remind them that the losers get to scrape off the paint too," Colonel Wells said. "That will be all, gentlemen. Get out there and save Duke from Lieutenant Ellis's barbaric hordes."

(Four) Post Stockade Fort Jackson, South Carolina 0830 Hours, 11 December 1961 The shoulder insignia of the Military District of Washington was worn by officers and men assigned to the Pentagon and to other army units in and near the District of Columbia. It shows two swords crossed over the Washington Monument. Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell and a large number of other officers and enlisted men privately thought of it as the insignia of the "Chairborne Brigade." There were two swords, because the Chairborne Brigade required duplicate copies of everything, and they were unsheathed because the Quartermaster Corps had sent the sheaths to Alaska; the Washington Monument was pictured because without an unmistakable pictograph, the warriors of the Chairborne Brigade would not only be ignorant of what they were doing, they would otherwise not know where they were doing it.

After a satisfactory period of service in Washington on the General Staff of the Army, field-grade officers are awarded the General Staff Corps Badge, a gold and enamel device worn on the right breast pocket of the tunic. Lieutenant Colonel Craig L. Lowell was known to believe the award had been created to give a medal to warriors who otherwise would not get one. One qualified for it by serving two years in the Pentagon without becoming hopelessly lost in the corridors more than twice; by not contracting a social disease; and by having one's name spelled correctly in the Department of Defense telephone directory. Considering the Pentagon, these were notable achievements.

On his relief from assignment to the Pentagon, however, then Major Craig W. Lowell had "neglected" to remove the MDW shoulder insignia from one of his uniform tunics. He had likewise not added the General Staff Corps Badge to his informal (in a stainless-steel soap container from a long discarded shaving set) collection of odd insignia he had once worn, but had left it pinned to the tunic with the MDW shoulder insignia.

Officers wearing such insignia could generally prowl the corridors of the Pentagon without interference. No one paid much attention to majors or lieutenant colonels in the Pentagon anyway, and one so bedecked simply vanished in the horde.

He had been wearing the tunic with the MDW patch and the GSC Badge in his present TDY assignment: doing the hurry up revisions of aircraft requirements for Bob Beilmon and ultimately for the Secretary of Defense. More attention is paid in the Pentagon to somebody with the badge and the MDW patch (the guy has been here two years and possibly blows his way around) than to an officer wearing the insignia of the Army Aviation Center (the guy's on TDY; before I do what he wants me to do, he'll have gone home; so why bother?).

Before he got in the Hertz Ford and rode out to Fort Jackson, Lowell put on the tunic with the MDW patch and the GSC Badge in the motel in Columbia. He was very much aware that many people in the army those who have never been to the Pentagon regard officers assigned to the Pentagon as the mil italy equivalent of divine messenger. When they are not out prowling the boonies, they stand at the right hand of God, otherwise known as the Chief of Staff.

From their reactions when he walked into the administrative office of the Fort Jackson stockade, Lowell decided that neither the captain, the lieutenant, nor the sergeant first class had had much experience with light birds of the General Staff Corps.

The administrative office, in a frame building with exposed studs, was divided by a counter. There was a sign on the door outside that read Knock, Remove Headgear and Wait for Permission to Enter. NO EXCEPTIONS. Lowell pushed open the door and walked in. There was a visrrons anoisma iman sign thumbtacked to the counter with a loose-leaf notebook not far from it.

He walked to the counter and placed on it his attache case and cap with the scrambled eggs on the brim. Ignoring the GI ball-point pen on a chain, he took a pen from his pocket and signed the register: Lt. Col. C. W. Lowell, DC SOPS That wasn't exactly the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It was true, however, that he was on ThY to Bob Beilmon. Brigadier General Beilmon was Director of Army Aviation, Officer of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations. That was close enough.

The sergeant first class walked over to him, smiling.

"Good morning, sir," he said.

Nice guy, Lowell decided. I won't jump on his ass, the way I'd planned to.

"Good morning, Sergeant," Lowell said, and smiled at him. The lieutenant was something else. He was a cadaverous, no longer young first john wearing an MP's leather regalia, a leather Sam Brown belt, and an MP brassard. He was looking at Lowell with frank curiosity, having diverted his attention from the crossword puzzle in the newspaper.

"Lieutenant, haven't you been taught to rise when a senior officer enters the room?" Lowell inquired nastily.

The lieutenant popped to attention. The captain also rose, not quite as rapidly, and walked to the counter.

"How may I help you, Colonel?"

"That would depend on who you are and what you do," Lowell said.

"Sir," the MP captain said, finally getting the message, "Captain Foster, Deputy Confinement Officer, Post Stockade, sir."

He saluted. After a moment Lowell returned it.

"You may stand at ease, Captain," he said.

"How may I help the colonel, sir?" Captain Foster asked.

"You have a private soldier named Craig in here. I wish first to see his file, and then I wish to interview him. Have you a suitable place, something private, with a table and a couple of chairs?"

The captain, Lowell saw, was desperately trying to read what he had written in the visitor's register. With that in mind, Lowell had printed DC SOPS in large, clear letters.

"Sir, the files are not kept here," Captain Foster said.

"Where are they kept?"

"In the Provost Marshal's Office, sir."

"And where is that?"

"Right next door, sir."

"Sergeant," Lowell said, "would you please fetch it for me?" The sergeant looked at the captain, who licked his lips nervously and looked at Lowell, who had raised his eyebrows, questioning delay in responding to his order.

"Tell them I sent you for it," the captain said, and the sergeant lifted a portion of the counter, slipped through it, and went out the door.

"It won't take him a minute, sir," the captain said. He looked like he was about to ask a question.

"How many men have you confined here?" Lowell asked quickly. Over the captain's shoulder he saw the cadaverous lieutenant still standing at rigid attention.

"Two hundred seventeen, sir," the captain said.

"Lieutenant, you may sit down and get on with your duties," Lowell said.

The lieutenant hastily folded his newspaper, dropped it in the wastebasket, and took something from his desk drawer. He then began to study it with rapt fascination.

"How many pretrial?"

The captain had to think about that.

"Fifty-one, sir."

"And how many are confined in hospital?"

"I don't have that off the top of my head, sir," Captain Foster said. "I'll get it for you."

Lowell nodded.

Take your time, Captain. I need time to dream up other appropriate questions to ask.

The captain was still frantically searching for the right list when the sergeant returned, carrying a manila folder.

"Thank you," Lowell said to him, taking the file. He raised his voice slightly. "Get that information for me at your convenience, Captain," he said. "Now I would like the table and chair I requested, so I can read this. And then please send for the soldier in question."

"Would the colonel like to use the confmement officer's office, sir?"

"I would rather not," Lowell said. "Just a room and a table and two chairs will be fine."

"Yes, sir. Will you come with me, please, sir?"

He showed Lowell to a small cubicle, obviously where the officer of the day slept at night.

Lowell walked in, laid the file on the small table, and looked at Captain Foster.

"You have sent for the prisoner?"

"I'll do that right now, sir."

Lowell shut the door in his face. He sat down and opened the file.

There were five charges, the most serious of which was "Assault on a Noncommissioned Officer in the Execution of His Office." The convening authority, the post commander, approving the recommendation of the Board of Investigating Officers, had directed trial by general court-martial on all the charges and specifications.

A loudspeaker went off: "Attention on the parade ground. Attention on the parade ground. Confinee Craig to report to his barracks. Confinee Craig to report to his barracks. On the double." (One) The Coronado Beach Hotel San Diego, California 0845 Hours, 11 December 1961 There were a number of temptations put into the path of a physician, Antoinette Parker, M.D." thought as she watched her husband get dressed, and high among them was a physician's virtually unquestioned access to any number of tranquilizing drugs. There was a plastic bottle of such a drug in her purse. Dr. Emory Stacey m, a colleague at Fayetteville, North Carolina, General Hospital, had given it to her a few days earlier. Dr. Stacey, like Dr. Parker, was a board-certified radiologist. They had become professionally acquainted shortly after Dr. Parker had found employment as what the army called, in its quaint way, a "contract surgeon" at the Fort Bragg hospital. They had quickly become friends, and this friendship bloomed even though Dr. Stacey was a white North Carolinian male who referred to his wife as "the little woman" and who believed the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a national catastrophe of about fifteen on the Richter scale, while Dr. Parker was a black very professional female from Massachusetts who believed that Richard Nixon posed the greatest threat to the republic since Benedict Arnold and who was not at all reluctant to say so.

For her part' Toni did not find Dr. Stacey sexually attractive, and she was sure that as a southern gentleman he would no more make a pass at a black woman than he would join the Abyssiian Baptist Church. Their friendship was thus initially based on mutual respect. Professionally they were head and shoulders over their peers, and that had immediately become apparent to both of them.

They saw themselves in the company of all-too-enthusiastic cutters, who saw carcinoma in every dark smudge of a film and considered it their joyous duty to exorcise the evil with a knife. Compensation for their selfless service to mankind naturally came quickly from the friendly folks at Blue Cross/ Blue Shield.

Emory Stacey and Toni Parker believed surgery to be the last resort, and they found in each other allies of great value when surgery was being debated by the medical staffs of the two hospitals with which they were affiliated. Stacey had come out of Tulane and the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, and had done his residency at the Mayo Clinic. Parker had come out of Harvard and Massachusetts General. Their opinions could not be easily disregarded, and the cutters were often denied the chance to wield their knives.

Later they had become friends. They were both married to and in love with difficult people. Difficult, however, in very different ways. Jo-Ellen Stacey was a tall, good-looking southern belle with the brains of a gnat. Philip Sheridan Parker IV was a highly intelligent, well-educated, extremely capable man who was absolutely convinced that it was graven on stone tablets that he was destined to be a soldier, as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been before him.

In time Emory Stacey learned, though not from Toni, that Phil Parker, who had earned a battlefield promotion to captain in Korea, had also not long afterward been court-martialed there. He had been charged and acquitted of having shot down a cowardly officer who had refused to fight. Legally the accusation was to have been expunged from army records on the return of a not-guilty verdict. But he remained by reputation the cold-blooded coon who had blown away some poor battle weary first john and gotten away with it.

Philip Sheriden Parker IV later trusted the army when he was told that he was not promoted to major when he should have been because somehow the army had lost his records, and as a result his name had not been put before a promotion board. Dr. Toni Parker did not believe that explanation for a second. (The promotion eventually came through.) Toni Parker learned, though not from Emory Stacey, that Jo-Ellen Stacey had had an affair with both her pediatrician and the pilot who had tried, and failed, to teach her to fly an airplane. Emory was not too embarrassed to talk about his wife to Toni, however. He had to talk to somebody, after all, and Toni was smart, sophisticated, discreet, and sexually unavailable. What Emory told Toni about Jo-Ellen was that she was dumb. Plain dumb. Not bad, just dumb. When she ran out of things to say to a man, she pulled her panties down.

And they continued to be married, Emory and Jo-Ellen, Toni and Phil, and there were children; yet, neither Emory nor Toni could imagine a normal married life with their lawful spouses. Still, it was nice to have somebody to talk to.

"He's going to Indochina for a year," Toni Parker told Emory Stacey not long before Phil well, abandoned her yet one more time. "He thinks they have finally recognized his potential."

"What's he going to do in Indochina?"

"Fly airplanes. Kill people. Who knows?"

"You can't talk him out of going?"

"No more than Pavlov could make the dogs stop salivating once he rang the bell," she said. "He has heard the bugle blow and is pawing the ground."

"When's he going?"

"Right away. Everybody else in the army gets three, four months' notice. He sails from San Diego on December eleventh."

"By ship?"

"By aircraft carrier," she said. "That's a big secret, by the way. Don't tell anybody. The military is absolutely convinced that if they stamp Top Secret on somebody's orders, that will make an aircraft carrier loaded with army airplanes and helicopters invisible."

"You're going to stay here?"

"Sure," she said. "What else? I'm an officer's wife, and officers' wives smile bravely and put candles in their windows and wait for their men to come home."

Their eyes met, and he shrugged in sympathy.

"I know a fellow," Emory Stacey said. "He'll be helpful about a house."

"What?"

"Don't you have to give up your quarters when he leaves?" Stacey asked.

"Oh, that's nice of you, Emory," she said, understanding what he had offered: to use his influence to get a black woman and her kids into a decent house.

"Not at all," he said.

"Onr quarters are my quarters," she said. "I hold the assimilated grade of colonel. They're really desperate for physicians, and they provide quarters. Assimilated colonels don't get to live on Colonel's Row, but they do get quarters. I'll stay on the post. I don't want to put the kids in one of your schools."

"No," he agreed.