The General's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

and purpose
     in the officers and men who had always felt that they were the only thing standing between the Russian hordes and their loved
     ones. It’s sort of like a boxer, training for years for the title match, then finding out that the other contender just dropped
     dead. You’re a little relieved, but there’s also a letdown, a hollow place where your adrenaline pump used to be.
    Anyway, it was that time of day that the Army calls first light, and the Georgia sky was turning pink, and the air was heavy
     with humidity, and you could figure out it was going to be a ninety-degree day. I could smell the wet Georgia clay, the pine
     trees, and the aroma of Army coffee wafting out of a nearby mess hall, or as we call it now, a dining facility.
    I pulled off the road and onto the grassy field in front of the old Battalion Headquarters. Colonel Kent got out of his official
     olive-drab car, and I got out of my pickup truck.
    Kent is about fifty, tall, medium build, with a pockmarked face and icy blue eyes. He’s a bit stiff at times, not clever,
     as I said, but hardworking and efficient. He’s the military equivalent of a chief of police, commanding all the uniformed
     military police at Fort Hadley. He’s a stickler for rules and regulations, and, while not disliked, he’s not anyone’s best
     buddy.
    Kent was all spiffy in his provost marshal’s uniform with his white helmet, white pistol belt, and spit-shined boots. He said
     to me, “I have six MPs securing the scene. Nothing has been touched.”
    “That’s a start.” Kent and I have known each other about ten years, and we’ve developed a good working relationship, though
     in fact I only see him about once a year when a case brings me to Fort Hadley. Kent outranks me, but I can be familiar with
     him, actually give him a hard time, as long as I’m the investigating officer on the case. I’ve seen him testify at courts-martial,
     and he’s everything a prosecutor could ask for in a cop: believable, logical, unemotional, and organized in his testimony.
     Yet, there’s something about him that didn’t play right, and I always had the feeling that the prosecutors were happy to get
     him off the stand. I think, maybe, he comes across as a little
too
stiff and unfeeling. When the Army has to court-martial one of its own, there is usually some sympathy, or at least concern,
     for the accused. But Kent is one of those cops who only sees black and white, and anyone who breaks the law at Fort Hadley
     has personally affronted Colonel Kent. I actually saw him smile once when a young recruit, who burned down a deserted barracks
     in a drunken stupor, got ten years for arson. But the law is the law, I suppose, and such a brittle personality as William
     Kent has found his niche in life. That’s why I was a little surprised to discover that he was somewhat shaken by the events
     of that morning. I asked him, “Have you informed General Campbell?”
    “No.”
    “Perhaps you’d better go to his house.”
    He nodded, not very enthusiastically. He looked awful, actually, and I deduced that he’d been to the scene himself. I informed
     Colonel Kent, “The general is going to have your ass for delaying notification.”
    He explained, “Well, I didn’t have a positive identification until I saw the body myself. I mean, I couldn’t go to his house
     and tell him that his daughter—”
    “Who made the tentative identification?”
    “A Sergeant St. John. He found the body.”
    “And he knew her?”
    “They were on duty together.”
    “Well, that’s a pretty positive identification. And you knew her?”
    “Yes, of course. I made a positive identification.”
    “Not to mention dog tags and the name on her uniform.”
    “Well, that’s all gone.”
    “Gone?”
    “Yes… whoever did it took her uniform and dog tags…”
    You get a sense for these things, or maybe you get a backlog of cases stored in your head, and when you hear the evidence
     and see the