Chapter 9 Summary

Billy is in the hospital after the plane crash. He is unconscious. Valencia, who dearly loves her husband, races to the hospital. She gets into an accident on the way that smashes up the back of her car. However, it is still drivable. She drives it to the hospital and parks. She cries in the car without turning it off. Fumes from the ruined exhaust get into the car and she dies of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Billy is unconscious and does not know anything about this. His roommate is Bertrand Copeland Rumfoord, a seventy-year-old retired Brigadier General who acts as if he is half that age. He is a professor and the official Air Force Historian. His new wife, his fifth, is twenty-three. She comes in to give her Bertrand a stack of books about the United States Army Air Corp in World...