by Scott Turow
“Boom,” Merry said, as he rose from the limo. We shook and he slapped me on the shoulder, offering a welcoming smile. I couldn’t help wondering how our warmth struck my ex. On the driveway, Ellen hovered in a somewhat starstruck posture, with her hands in the air as if she was afraid to touch anything.
Merriwell reached back into the car for a weathered caramel-colored briefcase and I walked him over to Ellen, whom he thanked several times. She tried to gossip about a mutual friend, a former MIT classmate of Howard’s who now taught there, but Merry had little to say on that score, and she realized, with visible disappointment, that she had no option but to say good-bye. I hugged her farewell with profuse thanks of my own. Tonight, I’d be on my way back to Bosnia, via JFK, to meet with Madame Professor Tchitchikov and Goos at Barupra.
Merriwell watched her clack her way down her driveway.
“Truly your ex-wife?”
“Truly.”
He shook his head in amazement.
“Not in this lifetime,” he said. “And you trust her discretion?”
“Completely.” As the wife of a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Ellen took pride in her ability to keep secrets, and even after our divorce she had never spilled any of them, even the juiciest about prominent folks around town.
“And what about you?” I asked Merry. “Are things any better with your ex-to-be?”
“No improvement,” he answered wearily, “but despite that, I am far better.” He looked it. He sported a vacation tan and appeared far less tired. Gesturing to the guesthouse, he suggested we get started, because he had to head back to the airport in two hours. “As usual the world is falling apart,” he said.
The guesthouse was compact and tasteful, clearly the work of the same architect who’d designed the main house. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms, each with its own bath. Downstairs it was all open space off the beautiful kitchen, with its gorgeous hand-tooled cabinetry in some reddish South American wood. The windows were large, to catch the astounding light off the lake, and were dressed in billowing scarlet roman shades raised with surgical precision to half height. A small dining table separated the living area from the kitchen, and there Merriwell and I placed ourselves in leather Breuer chairs with chrome arms.
I served coffee and put out a basket of muffins Ellen, despite my protests, had asked a caterer to deliver this morning. I’d also taken the precaution of borrowing a bottle of scotch, which I’d positioned innocently at the far corner of the kitchen counter, but Merry never even seemed to look that way. He put the briefcase on a chair he pulled beside him. It was one of those wonderful old valise-type bags lawyers used to carry when I started practice, with a hinged brass mouth that opened wider than the compartment below, and a leather strap that fit into the lock on the other side to close it.
To start, I told him that I had not authorized or engineered the leak to the Times, but he waved that off. Merriwell was a veteran of domestic political wars as well as the ones we got into overseas, and seemed to regard both the leaking and the denial as part of the game.
As we turned to business, there was a notable change in Merriwell’s air, which instantly struck me as not simply businesslike, but dour and solemn. He secured a sheaf of papers about three inches thick from the case.
“I’ve brought what I’ve received,” he said. “There is more coming, but you’ll be interested in what’s here. Because time is limited, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what you’re bound to figure out on your own, so you can ask questions now. No bar on more later.”
“Any overall comment?” I asked him.
Merry stopped to frown, a lip puffed up, the expression drawing deeper grooves in his narrow face.
“Overall, I am chagrined and surprised,” he said. “And still disbelieving.”
The concession was enticing, but I waited politely. From the shiny edges at the top of the stack, I could tell there were a number of 8-by-10 photographs.
“Your request for official photography was quite brilliant,” he said.
I told him it wasn’t my idea.
“Never fail to take credit for the accomplishments of your staff,” he answered, and smiled. “All right,” he said. “At Eagle Base they photographed everything, including the playing of reveille, retreat, and taps. Here’s taps on April 27, 2004.”
It was a flash photo of a bugler at the base of the empty flagpole. The shot was in color, and the figure against the blue night made a striking image, but on first glance the picture seemed otherwise unremarkable.
“Back here,” said Merriwell.
At the top of the photograph, rising up the page, there was a line of lights moving off sinuously in the distance.
“Convoy?”
“So it appears.”
I looked more closely. The red taillights were visible on one or two of the vehicles, and the headlights appeared as a swath of brightness in front of them. The vehicles—trucks I’d say—were departing. I counted, although the last of them were little more than a blur.
“About twenty?”
“Give or take.”
“And what time was this photo taken?”
“Taps is twenty-two hundred hours.”
Ferko said the first men arrived at Barupra a little before midnight. Travel time to the village would have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes, even on the bad roads of those days.
“Any theories about what they might have been doing with an extra hour and a half?” I asked.
“I’m happy to explain what you see in front of you, Boom, but I’ll have to keep any speculations to myself.”
“Well, if I said that was enough time to change uniforms and rehearse an impending operation, is there any obvious reason I’d be wrong?”
He shook his head tersely—either indicating that I was right or that he wouldn’t be drawn into commentary—then reached back to the stack.
“Here, I’m afraid, is what will most interest you.” He pulled several photos off the piles. They were black and white, clearly enlarged many times. To me, at first it was like looking at an ultrasound, just lines and blurs and dark spots, although one little rectangle looked whiter than the rest.
“This is a satellite photograph,” Merry said.
“Wow,” I said. “You can get recognizable forms from a hundred miles?”
“It’s an impressive technology.”
“I’ll say.”
“You asked for records of the GPS transponders. As you know, they are worn by our troops and were standard issue even then on operational equipment, like trucks or tanks or aircraft. Whenever they are off-base, the satellite will follow the transponders and photograph their location. There are several more photos here, but they all focus on one truck.”
“As opposed to the troops?”
“Correct.”
“So the soldiers had removed their transponders?”
“Or weren’t our soldiers.”
“But someone neglected one truck?”
“I don’t know why one transponder was left functioning, but by the time the satellite made its next orbit ninety minutes later, there are no photographs.”
“Clearly an oversight that got corrected,” I said. Merry refused to respond.
Beyond the one truck that was automatically highlighted, the others appeared in the photo as grayer boxes with white bumps in front of them, the projections of their headlamps. When I lowered my nose to the page, I could also make out distinct ant-like grains.
“Are these people?”
“That’s my interpretation.”
There were hundreds, once I understood how to recognize the forms. And at the top of the photograph was a stripe of black—the valley that led down to the Cave.
“So this is the residents of Barupra being rounded up?”
“Again, I leave the ultimate explanations to you.” But his face was pouty and somber.
At the first sight of the photograph my pulse had quickened considerably
. The skeptical piece of me, the trained professional, had yearned for solid proof to back up Ferko. I would have been jubilant if I did not recognize that this was a visual record of four hundred people being marched to their deaths. Merry and I said nothing for a second, as I took on his grave mood.
Although the satellite could have been in range only for a few minutes, there were at least a hundred photos. The last showed three trucks, apparently fully loaded, turning toward the winding dirt road that led down to the Cave.
“What do the truck logs we asked for show?”
“Those,” said Merriwell, “you will have to retrieve from our friend Attila. But CoroDyn has been asked to provide them, and Attila called Friday to assure me they should come along shortly. Apparently there were two motor pools, one operational, one logistical. She wanted to know if we needed the records of both and I said yes.”
“And do you know if Yugoslavian-made trucks were ever used in the motor pools?” I was thinking of what Ferko had said in his testimony.
“Not for certain. But most of the frontline equipment, which was US manufacture, had already been moved to Iraq. NATO had seized thousands of vehicles from the various combatant forces. So if some were repurposed, I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, Attila will know.”
“She’s been very helpful so far. I have you to thank for that.”
Merry shook his head resolutely. “Not me,” he said.
“Well, when she picked me up in Sarajevo she said you’d asked her to assist us.”
Merry reclined with a small, skeptical smile.
“With Attila, you always have to bear in mind that there’s an improvisational side to her character. She called me the morning after we met. She knew you were on the way and asked if I had any idea what you were looking for. I spoke well of you—solid guy, that sort of thing—and I might have said there was no reason not to assist you. You’ve met Attila, so you understand. She wants to know everyone’s business.”
I smiled. “She’s very loyal to you.”
“I appreciate that. And so far as I was concerned, she was indispensable. Do you know the saying, ‘Civilians think about strategy, but generals think about logistics’?”
I’d never heard that.
“Well it’s a deep truth,” said Merriwell. “She is truly a logistical genius. No matter how many moving parts had to be coordinated, she could do it. She was more capable than any officer I had in QC. I actually talked about sending her to OTS, but she wasn’t interested while women were excluded from combat. And the truth is that someone as unusual as Attila got a lot less scrutiny as a noncom. But I was a much better commander having her to rely on.”
“She doesn’t think many of your peers would have been as welcoming.”
“Probably not. Her lifestyle was not typical for the Army, especially at that time. But soldiers can be very pragmatic when their lives are at stake. On task, Attila was exceptional.”
“A great soldier?”
“I’d say very good.” I wasn’t surprised that Merry talked about Attila more cold-bloodedly than she did about him. For her, Merriwell occupied that idealized role of mentor and savior. For him, she was a valued cog in a large machine. “She was outstanding when she was at a distance from her commanders and could function with some independence. On the other hand, she was a ridiculous busybody who refused to accept need-to-know limitations. And she has less talent at taking orders. Commands she disagreed with received a very idiosyncratic interpretation. Frankly, I was relieved when she became a civilian employee. I got the benefits of all her abilities, but none of the phone calls and telexes asking me what the hell she was doing now. But she’ll have your truck logs, I’m sure, and will be able to answer your questions. Apparently you’re headed back to Bosnia?”
“Word travels fast.” In preparation, Goos had gotten hold of Attila to secure laborers. Obviously she was Merriwell’s source.
I had our letter to NATO out on the small walnut table where we were seated and ticked through the remaining items.
“Duty rosters? Mess reports? Sick bay?”
“Help yourself.” Merriwell shoved a couple hundred pages between us.
“This is one day?”
“Two actually. You asked for April 27 and 28.”
Goos had correctly assayed the nature of armies and recordkeeping. The first thing I noticed, when I started thumbing through, was that the name of every soldier had been blacked out. I’m sure the look I gave Merry was not kindly.
“I don’t recall agreeing to expurgated records,” I said.
“I believe the agreement was that you’d get whatever the supreme commander was willing to provide. And the supreme commander is not serving up the heads of any soldiers on a silver plate. If there was a massacre—”
“It’s not much of an ‘if,’ Merry, looking at these photographs.”
“If that is what happened—and I remain hopeful of other explanations—then there was a chain of command. And at the top of that chain is where responsibility lies, not with privates and PFCs who were following orders and probably didn’t realize what was going to occur until it happened. Boom, this is what you’re getting.”
“We’ll have to talk about it back at the Court.”
“Our position won’t change,” he answered.
I had no doubt that removing names had been demanded by the Defense Department. And despite my rigid pose, I knew that after months of his net searches of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube, Goos had assembled a good list of many of the personnel at Eagle. Complete duty rosters would have been far better, but the key remained finding a former soldier willing to correspond with us.
The pages in my hands were a maze of black and white, columns of names and units, weapons and language training, assignments and dates on duty. There were pages labeled Combat Support Battle Roster and sign-in sheets from the mess for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There were also stacks of sheets that showed, beside the obscured names, the officers’ and enlisted men’s units and duties for the day. I focused there.
When I reached the records of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, First Battalion, I had something. Against the captain’s report for Charlie Company, I matched assignments with the leave column. Every soldier identified as being part of the Second Platoon had been relieved of duty on the second day, April 28.
I could tell that Merriwell was not happy once I’d pieced that together.
“Is that an ordinary development—an entire platoon on leave?” I asked.
“There might be reasons,” said Merriwell.
“General, I said ‘ordinary.’” I meant to sound testy.
“For a single day, I would not regard it as ordinary.”
I went back to the captain’s report, counting the platoon members with the metal button on the top of my pen. There were thirty-four lines where the names were blacked out. Ferko said some ‘Chetniks’ entered Barupra on foot, the rest in the trucks. The numbers seemed right.
“And who was the captain for the company, and the lieutenant for this platoon?”
Merriwell shook his head with his lips sealed.
I made a face.
“Boom, don’t be greedy,” he said with some exasperation. “You have far, far more information than you did an hour ago.”
I left the table with a heavy sigh, but came back with some of the food the caterer had placed in the fridge. Merriwell and I each had small helpings of chicken salad and a can of soda. In the meantime, he latched the strap over his case.
I asked if I could hitch a ride with him to the airport. I was more than five hours early for my first plane, but I had to make my way from LaGuardia to JFK in New York and didn’t mind getting started on that now. At JFK, I’d find an Internet connection and get some work done. I grabbed my suitcase and joined Merry on the leather bench in the rear of an old Lincoln sedan. As we traveled, I rebooked for a 10 a.m. flight to LGA, then Merriwell and I talked about baseball and the season’s surpr
ises: A-Rod’s play was steady so far. More incredibly, the Trappers were winning. By long experience, I was trying to contain my optimism.
“Can I go back to business and ask about one more thing?” I said when we were still a few minutes away from the Tri-Cities airport.
“You can ask.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t believe that the people in Barupra were murdered in reprisal for setting up your troops for ambush by Kajevic.”
“Because that’s not what happened.”
“Explain.”
“We aren’t going to have another conversation about classified material, are we, Boom?” He told me he was still plodding through the files regarding the efforts to capture Kajevic, but that virtually none of them were going to be released, for fear of compromising Special Forces techniques that were still in use. “But I will tell you explicitly that in my review, I have seen no reports even suggesting that the Gypsies conspired to lure our troops into a trap, nor frankly do I have any memory of hearing that at the time.”
“You won’t deny, General, will you, that it was the Roma who informed Army Intelligence of Kajevic’s whereabouts?”
“I won’t confirm it either.” He turned on the seat to face me. “I’m sorry, Boom, to sound racist, but Army Intelligence—and our Special Forces—knew better than to take Gypsies at their word or to completely depend on them. Assuming the Roma provided information, it would have been corroborated by days of surveillance. And the Roma had no role of any kind in the action, and no advance information about how or when we were going to go after Kajevic. Even if the Gypsies wanted to betray us—which would make no sense given how well we’d treated them—they didn’t know enough to do that.”
“Yet as we’ve already discussed, General, there is every appearance that Kajevic was aware you were coming.”
“I agree. But not because of anything the Gypsies knew. As I’ve explained, our forces couldn’t close off four square blocks in Doboj without informing the local authorities, all of Serb ethnicity. I’ve always assumed that was where the leak came from.”