BEFORE LEAVING THE FIVE PINES, I GO ONLINE AND FIND JACK’S aircraft – a prop, long out of service, that had been designed for the FAC mission. A Bronco. The Marines had used them extensively in Vietnam.
I Googled Marine Corps Bronco recipients of the Navy Cross and found only two: a pilot, Lieutenant Nelson Freeley, of VMO-3, a unit based at a strip near Da Nang, and his observer, Sergeant Jack Ackerman.
Jack’s call sign had been Jackknife 13, which must have morphed into Mac the Knife then just plain Mac, which he abandoned as soon as he came back Stateside and dropped out.
Jack and Nelson had both received the Corps’ second highest award for gallantry for an action in which Jack had guided a force of Marine Corps/ARVN out of the jungle to a beach near a place called Hoi An, where they were rescued by boat.
With no other air assets available, they’d remained on station for as long as their fuel had allowed, advising the unit commander of the exact location of the enemy – which had meant flying below 150 meters, exposed to ground fire throughout. Their ground crew counted more than three hundred holes in the Bronco’s fuselage.
They had severed electrics, hit black boxes, punched through the self-sealing fuel tanks, drilled through the canopy, dented both armor-plated seats and missed their bodies by a centimeter or two, max. That they had both survived was a miracle; that neither had even been scratched almost beyond belief.
I ask Pam if she knows any of this. She shakes her head.
But Hope must have done. Why else had she tucked away the photo in her treasure chest?
On the way back to Camp David, I rack my brains – somehow Duke Gapes connects me to the President and the Engineer, Hope’s portrait of Jack and a nickname I didn’t know he’d had.
The three pieces of jewelry, now on the passenger seat, trigger another memory. Three months before the crash, Pam called to say Jack was dying. The cancer had turned aggressive.
Hope and I flew up that afternoon. It had been a tough month. The workload had been intense. My drinking had gotten heavier. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched, much less held each other, but she gripped my hand the whole way. In the dark of our hotel room near the airport where we stayed before driving up to Tresco, we’d made love with such tenderness I can feel it now.
When we got to the Five Pines the next morning, Jack, amazingly, had rallied. Hope took a photo of him sitting outside, beneath a tree, his blanket around his shoulders. News of her homecoming, Pam said, had given him something to stick around for. But we knew that we were witnessing a burst of light moments before it burned its last.
Four days later, we gathered around his bed. He gave my hand a squeeze, then asked for hers. I heard him whisper something – she never did tell me what, but moments after he died, she retrieved the ankh, the star and the tree of life from under his pillow. The following day, back in Florida, she started on his portrait, and kept working on it, out on the porch, using the photograph as her inspiration, silently, methodically, as, unknown to me, our child had started to grow inside of her.
OK. So Gapes is psychic. However it works in ESP-land, he’d worked out a bunch of things about Hope and me. But that doesn’t explain the portrait. Or, as Hetta pointed out, why he chose to speak in riddles.
Unless that’s the whole point.
The thought makes my blood pump a little faster.
I remember Steve describing the moment Gapes placed his hand against the knots and scars on his face.
Remember, Gapes had told the paraplegic vet.
Memory was important to Gapes.
But so was time. Time figures in this, too. It’s like he was buying us time. Still is, maybe.
What for?
I’m wrestling with this as I grind through the gears on a twisty section of road on the home straight to Thurmont. It’s close to midnight and I suddenly feel drowsy. But Thurmont is only a few miles from Camp David. I don’t need to pull over. I don’t need to stop for coffee. I’m almost there.
Then my head starts to hurt and my vision begins to swim.
I blink. Headlights. Dazzlingly bright. Belonging to something big – something big on my side of the road …
I peer through the windshield.
Coming right for me.
I throw the wheel and send the car off of a six-foot drop. As it starts to roll, out of the corner of my eye I glimpse a big silver grille and red paintwork as the truck thunders past.
The car hits the ground and my head snaps left, then right. Trees, rocks and earth fill my field of vision as it rolls. Then the belt clamps my chest hard against the seat and there’s a bang as the airbag deploys.
A shriek of metal, the sound of glass breaking, the engine surging.
An enormous crash as the lights go out.
Then, at last, silence.
I’m alive, lying on my side, in the darkness.
I pull the airbag away from my face and become aware of the unearthly glow of the instrument panel. I smell damp vegetation and there’s a loud hissing sound from under the hood. The windows have all smashed. My cheek is pressed against wet earth.
I release my belt and try to move, but I’m pinned against the door.
Then, beyond the windshield, beyond some trees that I can begin to make out in the weak ambient light, I hear movement.
I tell myself I’ve imagined it.
I know I haven’t.
Something in the undergrowth. Getting nearer.
I lie there, listening, unable to escape.
Then, a voice in the darkness. ‘Colonel? Colonel Cain?’
I breathe again.
What in God’s name is she doing here?