He was still ordering his younger son around as though he was at the top of the stars-and-bars chain and his boy at the bottom. His father would probably not remember what he had said on the message. He might not even recall that he had phoned. Or the next time Puller saw him he might bring it up and chastise his son for not executing the given order. The old man was as unpredictable in civilian life as he had been on the battlefield. That made him the toughest of opponents. If there was anything a soldier feared, it was an adversary you could never read, a foe who might be more than willing to do whatever it took, however outrageous, to win. Fighting John Puller had been such a warrior. Consequently he had won far more than he had lost and his tactics were now a fixture in the Army training methodology. And future leaders learned about him at the War College and spread the Puller fighting tactics to all sectors of the Army universe.

Puller erased the message. His father would have to wait.

Next stop was CID headquarters.

The CID had been started by General “Black Jack” Pershing in France during World War I. It had become a major Army command in 1971 and was headed up by a one-star. Worldwide, nearly three thousand people were assigned to it, nine hundred of them special agents, like John Puller. It was a centralized stovepipe command structure with the Secretary of the Army at the top and special agents at the bottom, with three layers of bureaucracy in between. It was a lasagna dish with too many noodle beds, Puller thought.

He focused on the SAC. “With an off-post homicide we usually go heavier than a one-man team, sir.”

White said, “I’m trying to get you boots on the ground in West Virginia, but it’s not looking good at this point.”

Puller now asked the question that had been puzzling him ever since learning of the assignment. “The 3rd MP Group has the 1000th Battalion at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. West Virginia is their area of responsibility. They can investigate a colonel’s homicide as well as we can.”