Even at an indicated airspeed of 370 knots, he could see Christmas trees in some of the farmhouse windows.

(Two) Quarters No. 1 The Army Aviation Center Fort Rucker, Alabama 1230 Hours, 25 December 1961 Lowell turned the Mercedes off Colonel's Row and into the drive leading to Quarters No. 1. Colonel's Row at Fort Rucker looked more like Levittown than Colonel's Row at Bragg, Benning, or Knox. Dependent housing at Fort Rucker was new construction was still going on and the houses were frame, with a little brick facing in the front, one story; the only visual difference between the ranch houses on Colonel's Row and those on any street in a lower-middle-class housing development were the little signs on the lawns providing the occupant's name and rank.

Quarters No. 1 differed from the houses on Colonel's Row only in that it sat on a small knoll on an acre plot and was slightly larger than the colonels' houses.

Quarters No. 1 at Fort Knox was a substantial two-story brick colonial building, the sort of house a vice-president of Ford Motor Company would have. This one, Lowell thought, carrying a dozen roses in green florist's tissue up the narrow concrete walk to the front door, looked like the house of an assistant zone manager for some second-rate life insurance company.

The little sign on the lawn at the entrance to the drive read: P. T. 11005. MAJOR GENERAL.

Jane Jiggs opened the door.

Lowell thrust the flowers at her.

"Merry Christmas, louse," she said.

"Louse?"

"I was sure it was Meissen china," she said. "And what did I get?"

"I'll get you china," he said.

"Oh, I'm only kidding," she said. "Come in. I'll make us a drink and we can watch the kids play with their toy."

"Where's Paul?"

"That's who I mean," she said. "You don't think he'd let the little kids play with that, do you? He and Davis are up to their ears in train parts."

She led him into the living room, where Major General Paul T. Jiggs, Lieutenant Jerome Davis, his aide-de-camp, and the Jiggs children were assembling an elaborate electric train set.

"Santa Claus is here, children," Jane Jiggs said. "Scotch, Craig?"

"Please," he said.

"Not meaning a word of what I have to say," Paul Jiggs said, "you really shouldn't have done this, Craig."

"I got a deal on it," Lowell said. "By which I mean my father-in-law bought the company. He apparently told somebody to send me a sample, and with Teutonic efficiency they sent one of everything they make." He stooped and picked up a locomotive. "Nice, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah!" Paul T. Jiggs, Jr." thirteen, said in awe.

The men laughed.

"I just got off the horn to him," Lowell said. "Generalleutnant von Graffenberg, Retired, extends his best wishes to Major General Jiggs and family on Christmas and for the New Year."

"You repaid the compliment, I hope, Jiggs asked.

"Sure," Lowell said.

"How's Peter-Paul?" Jane Jiggs asked.

"Like this one," Lowell said, touseling the hair of Paul Jiggs, Jr. "Except that he talks English like a limey."

"He was just fourteen?" Jane Jiggs asked as she handed him a drink.

"Last month," Lowell said. "And what interesting has been going on while I have been off, shuffling paper?" Lowell asked. It was evident he wanted to get off the subject of his son.

"Odd that you should mention that," Jiggs said, getting to his feet. "At nine this morning I had a most interesting telephone call from the staff duty officer. It seems the mayor of Eufaula, Alabama, had telephoned him last night, more than a little upset 'furious' was the word the SDO used that one of our airplanes had buzzed his bucolic little town on Christmas Eve."

"No!"

"According to the staff duty officer, the mayor said that this maniac, whoever he was, came like the hammers of hell right down Main Street, twenty feet or so over the trees, scaring dogs and old ladies, and disappeared in the direction of Fort Rucker."

"Did His Honor happen to get a tail number?" Lowell asked.

"No," Jiggs said, "he did not."

"Then I guess you'll have some trouble finding out who did something like that, won't you?" Lowell said. "Pity. We can't have our people going around scaring dogs and old ladies, can we?"

"What the hell is the matter with you, Craig?" Jiggs asked. "How much Mohawk time do you have?"

"More than thirty hours," Lowell said. "We paper shufflers are given first shot at flying the Mohawk."

"You really buzzed Eufaula, Uncle Craig? In a Mohawk?" Paul T. Jiggs, Jr." asked, delighted.

"Is that what I'm accused of?" Lowell asked innocently. "Of course not. I am a responsible field-grade paper-pusher type officer who wouldn't dream of doing something like that. I might have been a little under fifteen hundred feet when I flew down the river, they're having electrical trouble with the Mohawk I was flying, and the altimeter might have been off. But twenty feet off the trees? Me?"

Lieutenant Davis chuckled.

General Jiggs gave him a dirty look.

"Davis," Lowell asked. "Did you know that I served under General Jiggs in Korea?"

"I believe I've heard something about that, sir."

"And have you heard that when he was nothing but a lowly lieutenant colonel, he posed for an obscene photograph?"

"Oh, God!" Jane Jiggs said.

Mary-Beth Davis, Lieutenant Davis's bride of four months, looked baffled.

"It's not as bad as it sounds," Jane Jiggs said to her.

"I think it's a lot worse than scaring dogs and old ladies," Lowell said. "Particularly for a West Pointer who, one presumes, is taught all about the conduct expected of an officer and gentleman." "Show them the picture, Craig," Jiggs said. "Paul!" Jane said.

"Dare I? They just got married," Lowell said. "Could she stand the shock? She probably has never seen one."

"We'll have to now," Jiggs said. "Otherwise Mary-Beth will think it's really obscene."

"As opposed to what?" Lowell asked innocently. "Come with me, please, Mary-Beth," General Jiggs said. Smiling uneasily, Mary-Beth Davis followed General Jiggs to a small room had ouffitted as a personal office. One wall was covered with photographs. One of the photographs showed a younger Paul Jiggs standing on the engine cover of an M-46 tank, relieving his bladder. He was shaking his fist at the photographer. It was clear that the photographer had called his name to get his attention and had snapped the photograph the instant Jiggs had seen his camera.

"I'm sorry you had to be exposed to something like this, Mrs. Davis," Lowell said unctuously.

"That's the Yalu," Jiggs said.

"What he was doing was what Patton the Elder did in the Rhine," Lowell said.

"I didn't expect to have it recorded for posterity," Jiggs said.

"But once it was, what the hell, hang it on the wall, right?" Lowell said.

"Who took the picture?" Lieutenant Davis asked.

"Do you have to ask?" Jiggs said.

"What's the Yalu'?" Mary-Beth Davis asked.

Lowell and Jiggs exchanged glances.

"It's the border between North Korea and China, honey," her husband, embarrassed, explained to her. "It was as far north as the army got in the war."

"Oh," she said.

"Another officer would have planted a flag," Lowell said. "But you see how General Jiggs chose to mark the spot."

Mary-Beth was aware that she had just revealed her ignorance of something that was important to her husband's boss. She desperately searched her memory and came up with something.

"I was just a kid then," she said, "but that was when all the Americans had to retreat through the mountains in a blizzard?"

"I like to think of it," Lowell said solemnly, "as advancing in the other direction."

"Jesus!" Jiggs said.

Mary-Beth was now genuinely impressed.

"You two were there?" she asked.

"Legends in our own time," Lowell said. "Me for my distinguished service and General Jiggs for... well, now you've seen the photo."

"How would you like to go back, Craig? For Auld Lang zinc General Jiggs asked. Lowell looked at him.

"Somehow I don't think that's an idle question," he said.

"It's not," Jiggs said. "How would you like thirty days in Korea?"

"If I can have a tank battalion or an aviation battalion for the standard tour, I can be on a plane this afternoon," Lowell said. "But do I want to go to Korea for thirty days? No."

"It's for thirty days," Jiggs said, leading everybody out of the office. "That's not up for debate. But you're going for thirty days. The only question is where."

"Because I am suspected of livening things up in Eufaula?" Lowell asked. "Is the mayor that mad?" Jiggs shook his head.

"Then what?" Lowell asked.

"Let's say that some people think you have been working too hard and that you need thirty days away from your typewriter to recharge your batteries."

"Who is some people'?"

"The Vice-Chief of Staff," Jiggs said.

"Paul, honest to Christ," Lowell said, "the only thing I have done that's half an inch out of line was last night. And I don't think the Vice-Chief of Staff has heard about that yet."

"The first proposal is on the Secretary of the Army's desk," Jiggs said. "Thursday, maybe, and no later than one January, it goes to McNamara."

"I know, I wrote it," Lowell said.

"Do you know that McNamara talked to Bill Roberts and Jim Brochhammer?"

"I heard that he did," Lowell said.

"That made a lot of people mad," Jiggs said. "The Secretary of Defense is supposed to get his advice from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not from a buck general and a major."

"They didn't go to McNamara," Lowell said. "He sent for them."

"Right. And if he sends for you, which is considered very likely, the Secretary will be told, Sorry about that, he's out of the country"'

"Christ!"

"What they especially don't want you to tell McNamara, Craig, is In the proposal I wrote, I had twice this many aircraft in the division: 450."

"Four fifty-nine," Lowell corrected automatically. Then he heard what Jiggs had said. "They didn't cut the aircraft in half?" he asked.

"The proposal sent to the Secretary of the Army calls for 289 total, including zero armed Mohawks and zero rocket armed Hueys."

"And what's the reasoning?" Lowell asked icily.

"That we shouldn't be greedy, that it is better to ask for something we have a chance to get, something the air force can't protest violates the Key West Agreement, rather than ask for something we have virtually no chance to get."

"The old foot-in-the-door theory?" Lowell asked sarcastically.

"Sometimes called the old camel's-nose-under-the-tent-flap theory," Jiggs said. "It is believed we can always go back and ask for the rest later."

"When we go back, it will be to defend what we have been given, not to ask for anything more. In the second round we're going to lose, not gain. All this is going to do is increase the aircraft assigned to a division. That would have happened anyway, and it will not result in an air-mobile division, which is what I thought we were building."

"Oddly enough, I said something very much like that when my opinion was asked," Jiggs said. "That was just before I was told that Jim Brochhammer is being sent to Panama for a month to look into tropical operations, and asked where did I want to send you for a month."

"Why don't I just go on leave," Lowell asked, "and happen to bump into McNamara in the locker room at Burning Tree?"

"You are not to go anywhere near Washington for the next thirty days," Jiggs said. "They thought of that too."

"McNamara wants more than recommendations on aircraft augmentation," Lowell said. "He wanted a new concept. We have one to give him."