The Cadet (34 page)

The CCQ pounded on the door of the telephone booth, startling him. “Rod! One minute to first call! You’re marching the squadron, remember?”

Rod drew in a breath. “I have to go. Are you serious about this?”

“Of course I am! You can’t imagine how much I miss you, the excitement of being around the Academy.”

“Then don’t worry about finding a place before you get out here. You can stay with my mom and dad until an apartment comes open.”

“I may have to drive out soon. Real soon. Especially when I tell daddy.”

The CCQ switched on and off the light. “Rod, are you crazy? First call!”

“Do what you have to do, Julie. I really have to go. I love you.” He moved to hang up the phone. He’d never said it before.

“I love you, too—” were the words he heard before the phone clicked dead.

He opened the door to the telephone booth and tumbled out. The CCQ shoved his books at him. “Run! Sly is forming up the squadron for you! Good luck.”

“Thanks.” He raced down the stairwell three steps at a time. The sun was just peeking above the plains to the east, spilling a red glow across the campus.

As he trotted up, Sly stepped back and allowed him to move to the front of the squadron. “It’s about time. What did you do, grab a few extra winks of sleep?”

Rod arranged his books as Wing Staff prepared to call the cadets to attention. “Tell you about it later.”

“I hope it was worth it.” Sly slipped to the flight commander’s position.

As the bugle sounded assembly, the cadets snapped to attention. Looking at the sun glinting off the aluminum buildings and with a slight breeze ruffling the flag above them, Rod whispered to himself. “It will be well worth it.”

O O O

It was the first Saturday night of the semester and Julie wasn’t due out from Virginia for another week. Sitting at his desk in his dorm room, Rod rubbed his eyes and turned the page in his sextants and radar book, one of the final hurdles of completing navigation training. He knew that once he finished the course, the only thing that stood between him receiving his navigator wings was serving as a navigator on a cross-country flight; every cadet was expected to graduate as a fully-qualified navigator, so the sooner he could get through the material, the less stress he’d have finishing everything else.

He pondered the esoteric math described in the text, trying to get a jump on the semester. As cadet squadron commander and with Julie’s presence imminent he knew he’d have a problem of universal magnitude, trying to balance the demands of his classes, his military duties, and Julie’s needs.

The door to his room was open, and at ten at night, the squadron area was about as dead as he had ever heard it. Sounds usually echoed in the new dorm’s hallways, reflecting off bare walls and polished linoleum floors, so a quiet night was more the exception than the norm.

Writing down an equation, he hesitated as he heard a wild whoop reverberate through the hallway. Frowning, Rod stood and padded to the door. He heard a loud thumping, like people running.

Rod looked out into the hall. No one was in sight. But the sound grew louder, almost as a herd of animals stampeding.

The Senior Officer of the Day had made his rounds fifteen minutes earlier and should be at the opposite end of the dorm. There was plenty of time before taps, so there was no reason for anyone to be running to make it back to their room.

Rod walked out into the hall and approached the CCQ desk that was situated at the intersection of two hallways. He rounded the corner and was almost bowled over by a hundred naked bodies. They sprinted past, giggling and making no other sound except for the thumping of their feet.

Water dripped from them, making the floor slippery. Several cadets fell and slid down the hall. Laughing, they were kicked forward and spun across the floor like hockey pucks.

Shorn heads marked them as doolies. Rod was so shocked that the herd passed before he could open his mouth.

“Hey, stop you smacks!” Rod started jogging after them. A thin sheen of water covered the linoleum, slowing him from running full speed.

Within seconds the doolies flowed into the far stairwell and disappeared from sight. The sound of feet trampling down the stairs diffused down the hall.

He stopped, wondering what he’d do if he caught up with the unclothed cadets.

Shaking his head, he started for the CQ desk to warn the command post when he spotted water seeping from the latrine.
What now?

He swung open the bathroom door and heard laughter amid the sound of showers. A quarter inch of water covered the floor.

Rounding the corner, he got his second shock of the night: a thick plywood board at least five feet high was set inside the shower room door, holding back a wall of water like a dam. Cadets dove in the make-shift swimming pool, jumping out of the water, shaking their heads and laughing.

The plywood bulged at the bottom as the water pressure strained to burst the wood. Water leaked from the edges where the seal was not watertight.

Again stumped at anything to say, Rod opened and closed his mouth. As squadron commander, Rod was charged with ensuring the cadets followed the myriad cadet regulations, but there was nothing in the regs that remotely covered anything like this.

Still, someone might get hurt. He was in charge, and had to do something before someone got hurt.

Steam rose as the faucets were turned at full bore. Rod shouted over the noise, “Hey! You guys turn off that water and drain the pool—”

The plywood creaked, and before anyone could react, the dam burst down the middle. A wall of water gushed from the shower area.

Rod scrambled to get out of the way by jumping into a bathroom stall. He climbed onto the toilet and straddled either side of the cover. A flood roared across the latrine floor, followed by cadets tumbling head over heels in the turbulence.

Just as suddenly as the flood had begun, it stopped. Water three inches deep covered the floor and swirled around the drains inset into the tiles. Cadets scrambled out of the bathroom.

“You men! Get back here and clean up this mess!” Rod sloshed through the water and made his way out the latrine. The hallway was deserted, no cadets in sight. With the steam and confusion he hadn’t recognized anyone from his squadron.

Well, he just couldn’t let the water pool; someone had to clean it up, and by the time the janitors made their rounds on Monday, mold might well cover the bathroom floor, not to mention the hallway.

He padded down the hall and started pounding on the doors of doolie rooms. “Uniform is swimsuits and shower clogs. Out in the hall, right now. Move it.” A flurry of activity reverberated down the hall as the doolies frantically changed.

Rod ordered the CQ to open the janitor’s closet and they both pulled out buckets, mops, brooms, and rags, and dumped them in the center of the hall. By the time they’d assembled the cleaning gear the doolies lined the hallway, wearing their swimsuits and gasping for breath.

Rod straightened and put his hands on his hips. “You doolies, grab this gear and start cleaning up the hallway and latrine. I want it in SAMI order in fifteen minutes. Move!”

As the Fourth classmen flew into action, Rod made his way to the CQ desk and dialed the cadet command post to report the activity. He sighed. The campus had been occupied for less than a week, and he suspected that already two traditions had been established: the running of the shrew and pool parties.

O O O

“At ease, Rod, have a seat.” Captain Ranch returned Rod’s salute. The AOC’s eyes were red, tired from riding the “Green Worm,” a tandem German-built bus, with the rest of the faculty and AOCs on the daily round-trip from Lowry. For now, only the senior officers had housing in Douglass Valley; Rod suspected the junior officers groused in silence about having a sixty-mile commute twice a day.

Rod perched at the front of the chair, running over in his mind the outlandish traditions the cadets had been establishing, and wondered exactly which one he would get in trouble over.

Captain Ranch glanced over a sheet of paper, handing it to Rod. “You cadets are making me grow old before my time, Mr. Simone. Tell me what you know about this.”

Rod scanned the paper. This was a new one. It was a report from the base civil engineer. At ten Sunday night, the civil engineers had pinpointed a drastic drop in water pressure in the cadet dorms. The drop had caused a massive back flow in the sewage system. Supposedly, human waste had overflowed from the homes in Douglass Valley and had ruined some of the new houses built especially for the most senior members of the faculty and commandant’s staff.

Rod frowned. “I caught some cadets playing some pranks on Saturday, but nothing happened Sunday night.”

“Not even toilets flushing in unison?”

“Pardon me, sir?” Rod blinked, confused. “Toilets flushing? In unison?”

Ranch said, “That’s right. The base Civil Engineer thinks that if every toilet in the dorm were flushed at exactly the same time, it would create a vacuum large enough to cause the back flow. At least in theory.”

“No, sir. Nothing like that happened. Are you sure it was on Sunday?”

“I’m sure,” Ranch sighed. “Okay, Mr. Simone, you’re dismissed.”

“But, sir, there were some things that happened Saturday night that you should know about—”

“Was anyone hurt? Or were there any regs broken?”

“No, sir. But you should really know about it—”

Ranch waved him away. “I have too much on my plate with this, Mr. Simone. You’re dismissed.”

Rod stood to leave. He saluted. “Good afternoon, sir.”

Ranch returned the salute. “Rod, I know you didn’t have anything to do with the sewage overflow, but the Commandant is wound up about this incident. The damage has to be repaired using funds that had been earmarked to be used on the hill.”

“The hill, sir?”

Ranch swept a hand around the room. “That’s what we call the cadet area. You’re already living in a fishbowl up here. Please make sure it’s a clean one.”

Rod flashed back to the sight of a hundred naked doolies running through the halls and the makeshift swimming pool in the shower room. “Yes, sir,” he assured Captain Ranch. “I know the cadets will do everything they can to stay clean.”

***

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Problems”

September, 1958

Five miles east of the USAF Academy

Colorado Springs, CO

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

—Adlai Stevenson, New York, NY, 27 Aug 1952

It was a near perfect, late-summer Colorado day. And despite George Delante’s sour mood, an impossibly blue sky canopied the view of his thousand acres east of the Academy; the air invigorated him with its slight nip.

Fred walked next to him as they surveyed their sprawling property; a large sign next to the sole dirt road on the property read:

High Country Construction

Custom Lots, Private Golf Course

To the west, the leaves on the aspen and oak trees were tinged with yellow and red, and within the next few weeks a spectrum of spectacular color would flood the Front Range. To the north, prairie grass seemed to stretch to infinity; to the east, rolling hills diffused into Black Forest, a coppice of pine trees that rose in the distance; and to the south—an eyesore of a brick house squat in the middle of a prime, five acre parcel.

George scowled and pulled up short.

Walking while looking down at a topographical map, Fred bumped into him and nearly knocked his father over.

“Watch where you’re going!” George said.

“What’s the matter with you?”

George threw his hand out at the lone house marring the otherwise pristine view. “What the hell do you think?”

Fred lowered his map. He squinted at the sprawling, one story rancher with a walk-out basement. A redwood porch encircled the back, presenting a platform that overlooked a ravine that opened up into a small valley and an unobstructed view of the Front Range. A cement circular driveway was set in the front with a centered fountain and small pines dotted the side yard.

“Come on, get over it, dad,” Fred said. “He’s never going to move. You’ll have to build around it.”

“Easy for you to say. I just paid the damned developer to design the golf course around our lots, but according to the map, that McCluney monstrosity sits smack in the middle of the fourth fairway.”

“Then re-design the course!”

“Are you crazy?” George grabbed the map from Fred and stabbed a finger at the folded paper. “I’ve optimized the lot sizes to bring in the most amount of money, and if we start screwing with the way the course is laid out, the size has to change.”

“You can charge more money for bigger lots—”

“Have I been wasting money sending you to CU? It’s volume that drives profits. More houses, more money; the demand for larger lots just isn’t there. So that … that McCluney property screws up everything.”

George clamped his mouth shut and seethed.
How could the course designer have missed this?

He would have never approved Jim-Tom Henderson selling the five acre lot if he’d known the buyer was the meddling old general. At the time, carving the property out of the original parcel hadn’t seemed that big of a deal; the acreage on the eastern plain was devoid of trees, and everyone thought that nothing would ever come of the worthless old prairie land. But with rising land prices due to the speculation in land from Academy construction, McCluney now owned a plot smack in the middle of his major holding.

George threw the map at Fred; the paper landed at his feet as George turned to look over the rest of his property. He ran a hand through his receding hair. “I can’t do anything without the old cripple throwing a monkey wrench in my plans. First he convinced the Academy Site Selection committee not to build at the south end of Colorado Springs. You don’t know how close I came to losing everything, leveraged with loans out the ass; and if it wasn’t for Jim-Tom’s whoring sister signing over her portion of this prime land, I’d be bankrupt by now. But if that wasn’t enough, McCluney’s now stopped me from turning this parcel into a world-class golf resort!”

“Pop—settle down.”

George put his hands on his hips. A cloud of dust rose from a car driving up the dirt road. The vehicle had come out of nowhere, but with all the construction going on between them and the Academy on the new I-25 interstate highway between Colorado Springs and Denver, it was easy not to have noticed.

George spoke as he eyed the approaching car. “Well, the bastard won’t bother us anymore. Once this summer’s congressional testimonies are released, the public will find out McCluney isn’t quite the saint everyone thinks he is. They’ll discover he’s been taking bribes, receiving kickbacks, lining his own pockets. That will bring him to his knees.” His mouth turned up in a smirk. “Damned general will be sorry he ever messed with the Delantes.”

George stepped back. He closed his eyes and felt the warm sun on his face, smelled the sharp smell of ozone in the mountain air—

The sound of the car pulling up jarred him out of his sense of contentment. He opened his eyes and saw a man in a grey suit, white shirt, black tie, and matching fedora step out of the car and make his way through the dusty prairie grass; dust kicked up along the dirt road drifted to the ground.

George scowled. The man looked straight at him as he walked up. George said, “Who the hell are you?”

The man moved uncomfortably close to him. “Mr. George Delante?”

George took an uncertain step backwards. “Yes.” He narrowed his eyes.

The man reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a white envelope. He slapped it into George’s hand. “Mr. Delante, I’m serving you with a subpoena to appear before a special committee of Congress. They are investigating improprieties during the construction of the United States Air Force Academy, including allegations of blackmail, fraud, and extortion. This official document details the exact time, date, and place to which you must appear. If you do not appear for any reason, then you will be held in contempt of Congress and subject to full prosecution by the United States of America. Do you understand?”

George stared at the white envelope.
What?
The words didn’t make any sense. Hank McCluney had been subpoenaed, not him!
And these allegations of … of blackmail? Extortion? This couldn’t be happening!
He’d covered his trail, paid more than enough money to ensure no one would ever connect him with that
Denver Post
reporter, or the over-ordering of marble tiles, the misappropriated steel girders, the cost-overruns, the hidden fees.…

He felt his head pound with a headache as his vision began to cloud over.

His hands shook. “Get off of my property! Get the hell out of here!”

The man tipped his hat, turned, and rapidly walked to his car.

Still standing, George clenched his mouth; his teeth ground together, making the veins at the side of his face feel tight. His head pounded as the headache grew worse.

He looked down at the subpoena, twisted in his grip. This could ruin him. He didn’t know how this had happened or even what evidence Congress might have to subpoena him; but he knew that somehow Hank McCluney was involved. And the only way he could have discovered the connection with himself was through Tony Rafelli, that dirtbag reporter who’d been taking his money for years.

He balled up the paper and threw it as hard as he could at the man, but the subpoena fell in the dirt, far short of its intended target.

As the car drove away, one thought roared through his mind, over, and over, and over again—how he would pay back both Rafelli and McCluney. He’d make sure the bastards would never bother him again.

It was time to call in favors.

***