“I waited out here,” Tadlock said. “I don’t mind telling you, it’s creepy as hell in there.”
“How do you know it was a suicide?” Jake asked. “Did he leave a note?”
“No, there was no note. But the pistol is still in his hand.”
“Let’s have a look.”
The three men went back inside the building, which, as Tadlock had said, was completely deserted.
“I’m taking off,” Tadlock said. “I’m going to Missouri. I own a small farm there, I’m going back to work it. My wife and kids are already there, waiting for me.”
“Do you have enough fuel to make it all the way to Missouri?”
“I’m driving a diesel, and running it on jet fuel. I bought thirty gallons extra from someone. I didn’t ask any questions as to where he got it.”
“Well, good luck to you, Chief,” Jake said.
When they stepped into the general’s office, he was still sitting in his swivel chair, facing the window that looked out over the parade ground.
“I left him just the way I found him,” Tadlock said.
Jake walked around to get a closer look at him. He shook his head. “Damn,” he said. “He was a good man. I hate to see this.”
“Ohmshidi killed him,” Tadlock said. “Yeah, von Cairns may have pulled the trigger, but Ohmshidi killed him.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Jake said.
“So now the question is, what do we do with him?”
“Does he have any next of kin?” Clay asked.
“He’s divorced, I know that,” Tadlock said.
“He has a daughter somewhere,” Jake said. “If we looked through all his things, we could probably find out where she is. But then what? The way things are now, what could she do with him?”
“We can’t leave him here,” Tadlock said.
“Let’s bury him out there on the parade ground, under the flagpole,” Clay suggested.
“Damn good idea, Sergeant Major, damn good idea,” Tadlock said.
Clay went to the general’s quarters to get his dress blue uniform and he and Jake dressed the general, including all his medals. While they were doing that, Tadlock rounded up as many officers and men as he could, including seven men who would form a firing squadron to render last honors, and one bandsman who agreed to play taps.
Now the general lay in a main-rotor shipping case alongside a grave that three of the EM had dug. There were over fifty men and women present, in uniform, and in formation. The general was lowered into the grave, and Jake nodded at the firing team. The seven soldiers raised their rifles to their shoulders.
“Ready? Fire!”
The sound of the first volley echoed back from the buildings adjacent to the parade ground.
“Ready? Fire!”
Rifle fire, which, during his life, the general had heard in anger, now sounded in his honor.
“Ready? Fire!”
The last volley was fired, and those who were rendering hand salutes brought them down sharply.
The bandsman, a bespectacled specialist, raised a trumpet to his lips and with the first and third valves depressed, played taps.
Jake thought of the many times he had heard this haunting bugle call, at night in the barracks while in basic training, and in OCS. He had also heard it played for too many of his friends, killed in combat or in aircraft accidents.
The young soldier played the call slowly and stately, holding the higher notes, gradually getting louder, then slowing the tempo as he reached the end, and holding the final, middle C longer than any other note before, he allowed it simply and sadly to . . . fade away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Many of the houses at The Dunes had their own generators as a result of the long power outages following hurricanes. The problem was that at full usage the propane tanks could last for no more than a week. By rationing the usage, Bob was able to get ten days of service; then he, James, and Jerry began taking propane tanks from the unoccupied houses and using them for their own needs.
In addition to taking the propane tanks, they also took the food that many of the houses had in their freezer and pantries They ate the frozen food first so they would not have to keep it cold for too long—and at the beginning of their ordeal, they ate very well: steaks, roasts, lobster, shrimp, and fish.
For better utilization of the food the three families decided to take all their meals together.
“What is this? Leg of lamb?” Jerry asked as he cut into the meat.
“Yes. It came from Dr. Kelly’s freezer,” James said.
“You can say what you want about Dr. Kelly, the man does have good taste,” Bob said. “That’s also where we got the prime rib, isn’t it?”
“And the lobster,” James added.
James Laney did not have a college education, but he had worked himself up from general handyman to plant manager of the Cobb County Electric Cooperative in Georgia. He accomplished this by mastering every job in the plant and even though he was now retired, he kept himself busy by taking care of the houses of the absentee owners: doing electrical repair, plumbing, carpentry, and painting. Bob and Jerry had “elected” him mayor of The Dunes. The election was only partially in jest; James knew all the absentee owners, and had a key to every house.
James had married his wife Cille when he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and though everything seemed stacked against their marriage succeeding, they had celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary earlier this year.
Jerry Cornett was a retired salesman and now the consummate outdoorsman who had fished and hunted around the world. He did his hunting with bows that he made himself, and was a champion bowman, having won so many bow shooting contests that the magazine
Until the collapse of the economy, Bob Varney had been a successful novelist. Success had come late for him—he had written over three hundred books, but most were ghostwriting projects for others. And while his ghostwriting paid well, it left him with a sense of frustration. He saw many of the books he had authored become bestsellers, but he was unable to take advantage of them. Then, two years ago he convinced his editor to let him write his own books. Those books had done very well and at long last, let him build his own career.
Ironically, the career that had taken him so long to build was now nonexistent due to the collapse of the U.S. economy.
Bob was also a retired Army officer who had done three tours in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. It had been forty years since he last flew, and he often watched, with a bit of nostalgia, the service helicopters pass over his house as they flew out to the offshore gas rigs.
Because of his writing and research, he was practically a walking encyclopedia, fascinated by trivia, and he knew diverse facts ranging from the number of words in the King James Version of the Bible—181,253—to the temperature of the sun at its core—twenty-seven million degrees. And he was a Custer expert who could name every officer who made that last scout with Custer, including those who were with Reno and Benteen, and tell what eventually happened to them.
Bob’s only other talent was in cooking, but he excelled in that, his specialty being coming up with very satisfying meals by utilizing what was available. Bob’s wife, Ellen, was a retired schoolteacher, who, in her youth, had taught in Point Hope, Alaska. That remote experience was coming in handy now that the small Fort Morgan Dunes group was isolated from the rest of the world.
