by Thomas Perry
“The vice chancellor has given us exclusive access to a room on this campus that conforms to the security requirements for storing highly classified technical information. The room has one steel door and no windows,” Mr. Ross said. “The file will be locked in a safe except while you’re alone in there reading it for one hour a day. Then the file gets locked up again until you come back.”
“Why would I want to read it?”
Mr. Ross shrugged. “Because you want to know the truth.”
“And why do you want me to read it?”
“Because I think once you know everything about him, you’ll figure out how to find him. If you do, you’re the one he might talk to.”
Julian looked straight into Ross’s eyes. “I think he was framed.”
“That’s what you think now. Maybe when you know more about him you’ll think something different. But it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is that you can’t let this alone.”
Julian looked at the other two men. “How much is redacted?”
Mr. Ross said, “This isn’t some copy released under the Freedom of Information Act. This is the real thing. Nothing is redacted.”
36
Julian sat in the single folding chair at the folding table in the small utility room beneath the stands of the football stadium. A row of four-inch pipes that ran floor to ceiling was the only adornment to the windowless concrete walls. Each had a five-inch valve that looked like a little brass wheel. There was an overhead fluorescent light mounted on the concrete ceiling. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a safe. He opened the thick blue folder. It was the standard military personnel format with a thick sheaf of papers speared and held on the left and right by metal pieces folded down and secured. Julian began to read.
The old man’s last name was Kohler, first name Michael, middle name Isaac. He was born in Bay Village, Ohio, on July 10, sixty-one years ago. Julian looked up from the blue folder and thought. Bay Village sounded like a suburb of Cleveland on the shore of Lake Erie. He pictured it as one of those old places that had a park with a white wooden bandstand at its center and a ring of redbrick buildings that held stores and restaurants.
Michael Isaac Kohler graduated with a BA in economics and political science from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That meant he had won a scholarship or that his parents had been rich, or nearly rich. Julian had never been able to place the old man’s accent because it conveyed only the north-central part of the country, and he used standard grammar. What had Kohler wanted to be, in those days when he came home after college? Whatever it was, he didn’t get to do it. He was drafted that summer, and sent through the machine—basic training, infantry school, advanced infantry with courses in hand-to-hand, sniper training, and survival school, and then off to Vietnam. Two tours, and then home. Why two? Why didn’t he take his discharge after surviving the first tour?
Julian leafed through the pages secured to the right side of the folder. They contained the dates and locations of Kohler’s training and the certifications he’d earned, and copies of the orders to report to various places.
Julian lifted another page and found copies of citations. Two Purple Hearts, a year and a half apart. Bad luck there. He made a good target. But after that: a Bronze Star and, later, a Silver Star. They gave you the last two only for gallantry under fire. The old man was a war hero, somebody who had not only done something but saved people while he was at it.
Julian remembered watching the old man in Chicago, and again in San Francisco. He had seen him burn whatever fear he must have been feeling and convert it into alertness, energy, and motion. There was never a second when he hadn’t known what to do.
Julian leafed through the rest of the thick file to get a quick overview. There was the transfer to military intelligence. He’d spent the next year at the Monterey language school. No, a year and a half. And there were the honorable discharge papers, just like Julian’s. That was where the military part of the record ended.
Julian turned back through the pages of the military record to the recommendation for the Silver Star. There was the usual businesslike description of what Kohler had done, written by Kohler’s company commander, Captain J. W. Marks. Kohler had been one of the men who arrived in Vietnam early in 1972, just before the Easter Offensive. That was the moment when the enemy chose to stop relying on the patient Viet Cong guerrilla campaign that had pecked away at the Americans for years, and began the North Vietnamese Army invasion, complete with tanks and heavy artillery.
At the time of the invasion, Kohler had been out in the jungles north of Quang Tri with ARVN rangers searching for small Viet Cong units. One night, after the rangers had found signs of enemy activity, Kohler and the rangers had blacked their faces and hands and gone out to sneak up on the enemy guerrillas, capture one, and bring him back to be searched and interrogated. They captured four.
What they discovered was that something big was coming. These troops were from far away in the north. They weren’t locals wearing black pajamas and sandals made from tire treads. They were soldiers with full military uniforms and gear.
Julian looked for the next part of the story. It wasn’t in the citation, but he could easily supply what wasn’t said. Kohler must have conveyed his concern to Captain Marks, who had reported it up the chain of command, but the reports had gone unnoticed among the thousands of pieces of intel that a war produced every day.
Kohler went out alone to search for more evidence that a major attack from the north was coming. Two days later, as he came in from one of his solo night recons, he found himself behind several platoons of North Vietnamese troops moving in on three sides of the ARVN camp, preparing to massacre the rangers. Kohler began a one-man attack, firing at the enemy, exhausting his ammunition, throwing his grenades, and taking a North Vietnamese machine gun, which he turned on the attackers. Kohler drew the enemy’s fire, which led his ARVN rangers to the enemy soldiers’ positions and gave them somebody to shoot at. The rangers rallied. They suffered light casualties and retreated successfully, taking their wounded with them.
The North Vietnam Army troops recovered very quickly from their minor, momentary setback in this single action. Tank divisions rolled into the central highlands from several directions, including Cambodia. The North Vietnamese Army advanced, slowed only by fierce and costly resistance from the Americans and the ARVN. They got as far as Kon Tum City on June 9, and were stopped there by hard fighting and devastating American air strikes. The date on Captain Marks’s recommendation for the Silver Star was July 1.
Julian had read about the Easter campaign when he was in Ranger NCO school. It was a long, hard holding action, but stopping the invasion at Kon Tum probably delayed the inevitable loss of South Vietnam by three years. Julian wondered. If Michael Kohler had known the future that day, would he have wanted to prolong the Vietnam War by three years?
Knowing the future wouldn’t have mattered, Julian decided. Given the chance, Kohler could only have done the same thing. He wasn’t trying to preserve a strategy, or hold some worthless land a little while longer. He was trying to save men he knew from dying.
Julian stood up from the small table in the concrete room. He closed the blue folder and left it on the table. He went to the door, knocked, and watched the door open. Waters and Harper came in, took the file, and frisked him again. When they found no paper hidden on him, Waters took the file and locked it in the safe in the corner, and they all left the little room. As Waters locked the steel door, Harper handed back Julian’s phone. “See you tomorrow, Julian.”
“Right.” Julian walked down the concrete hallway past the electronic circuit room, and then through the visiting team locker room, and out another steel door that locked behind him when he closed it. Now he was behind the stadium, walking toward the parking lot.
The old man had a military career a lot like his, he thought. They both got sent to fight wars that were lost before they got there.
&nbs
p; 37
It was after midnight. Alan Spencer leaned against the slope of the hill above the dry wash north of the town and looked up at the stars. The sky was black, but there were enough stars to make an explosion of light, maybe twice the number he could see on the clearest nights in Toronto. He saw a meteor streak across his vision and disappear, and decided to take it as a sign.
He sat up and shifted the burden of the .45 pistol, its suppressor, and the extra magazines in his belt. He stood and stared at the road and let his eyes follow it to the town. He could see the buildings, looking like a pile of boxes. Most of them were low rectangles, but there were a few now that had three or four stories, and even two he could spot far off on the south side that looked like office buildings.
It was late enough now so he could take a look at Faris Hamzah’s compound. He walked toward the paved road into town. As he went, he found a stick about four feet long and used it as a walking stick, guessing that it would help make him look from a distance like a harmless old man.
When two sets of headlights approached behind him on the road from the north, he sat and waited for them to pass. They were probably trucks on their way in from Benghazi, but they both had closed-in cargo bays, so he couldn’t tell what they carried. Neither driver seemed to see him, and the trucks rumbled past without a change in speed.
Spencer walked into the village without seeing anybody else. He made his way to the street where Faris Hamzah’s compound was. He stood still for a time and searched for people, but nobody was out on foot tonight, so he began to walk. He stayed far from the compound as he walked up nearby streets, studying it from all sides. While he made his circuit, he searched for guards, and for any monitoring equipment that might have been installed to protect the place. In the thirty-five years since his last visit, the age of cheap alarm systems, surveillance cameras, and other devices had come, and Faris Hamzah would be the ideal customer.
Spencer found cameras. They were all installed at the corners of the buildings, aimed outward at the wall that circled the compound. He looked for glowing lights along the walls that would be the two ends of an electric eye beam six or eight inches above the tops of the walls, and he found those too.
Since he had last seen the place, the gate into the compound had been widened to about twelve feet to accommodate cars and trucks. It was now a set of iron bars with what looked like steel plates welded in behind them to give the gate armor. He stepped close and looked in through the half-inch space between the two sides of the gate. There was an electric motor to open and close the two sides. He supposed that in an emergency the gate could be barred.
The house was grander than he had anticipated. Whatever Faris Hamzah had done since the fall of Gaddafi, he must also have been doing something lucrative earlier, during the regime. The building reminded Spencer of the palaces in Iraq where Saddam Hussein had hidden from assassins and air strikes. The entry had fifteen-foot marble columns, and the walls were stone for the first eight feet from the ground and stucco above. The building missed being luxurious only by the omission of windows on the ground floor. The ones above were small and high, like the gun ports on a fort.
Spencer walked to the dark space between two buildings about 150 feet away across the road, and sat down in the shadows to watch. After a moment he realized the façade of the one beside him was a bricked-in rectangle that had once been open, and then recognized it as the old mechanic’s shop where he had watched the compound thirty-five years ago.
He sat there staring at the gate of Hamzah’s compound, and then he realized that he knew the way in. The walls were too high and smooth to climb and there were electric eyes along the top. But the gate wasn’t smooth, and there were no beams of light running along the top. He had been close enough to study the house through the space between the two sides, and the space between the door and the wall. There had been no wiring, no beams of light.
Spencer ran his eyes over the buildings in the compound. There were no lights on in the second floor of the house, or the other two buildings. There was only a dim light that seeped under the front door of the main house. The occupants, other than the night watch, if there was one, seemed to be asleep.
Spencer thought about his situation. If he didn’t do this tonight before the town woke up, he would be giving Hamzah’s friends and relatives a chance to notice him and report that a suspicious character had appeared. But if he tried to accomplish his purpose tonight, he was probably going to fail. He would get one chance.
He looked at his watch in the moonlight. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. If he was going to make his attempt, this would be the best time to begin. He stood and walked across the street outside of the wall and reached the iron gate. He grasped two of the vertical bars and used the horizontal bars of the frame as footholds, crouched near the top, pulled himself over the gate, and dropped to the ground. He stayed on his belly and crawled into the garden beneath the olive trees. In seconds he was in the center, where the tiled fountain, the big potted plants, and the low, thick canopy of the trees hid him from the cameras.
He had been tense, waiting for the blare of an alarm. Now he waited for the rapid footsteps of a squad of armed bodyguards pouring out of the buildings to kill him. He lay still for a long time and then turned his watch toward the moon so he could read it. Ten minutes had passed. He began to crawl again.
He crawled beside the fine path of pulverized gravel, among the potted palms and agaves. He never lifted his head, simply made for the side of the big house, where the security cameras were turned outward and wouldn’t pick him up. When he reached the side of the house, he sat there resting and rubbing his knees and elbows after his long crawl. He stood and listened, and then moved on.
He stayed beside the house, touching it most of the time to remain in the cameras’ blind spot. It took him another few minutes to reach the back of the house, which had not been fully visible from the streets he had walked earlier.
There was a balcony above him. It was on the second floor, overlooking a small ornamental pond. The pond was a surprise. He ducked closer and saw in the moonlight that there were lily pads on the surface, and he thought he caught the silvery flash of a scaly fish as a slight ripple disturbed the surface.
Spencer looked around him, and noticed that there was a tiny toolshed about the size of an outhouse along the wall, and near it a long, narrow wooden bench, where a person could sit and watch the fish. He opened the door of the shed and tried to see, but it was too dark to make out much. By touch he found a workbench, and on it was a toolbox that consisted of a metal tray with a handle, and some tools. He found a long, narrow screwdriver and stuck it in his belt. He went out again and looked up at the balcony.
He tried lifting the long, narrow bench, and found he could. It was just a thick board with a support at each end. He used the screwdriver to remove the support at one end. He lifted the end that still had its support, rested it on the roof of the toolshed, and climbed it like a ramp. When he was on the toolshed he dragged the bench up there with him.
Spencer stood on the roof and lifted the bench so its remaining support hooked over the railing of the balcony. This time, his ramp was a bit steeper, but he was able to climb hand over hand on the long board as his feet walked him up to the spot where he could grasp the railing.
He climbed over the railing to the balcony, and then looked through the sliding glass window into the room. It was a bedroom, large and luxuriously furnished. He could see into it fairly well because the bathroom had some kind of night-light, and the faint illumination was much brighter than the rest of the compound tonight. This had to be Hamzah’s room. He stepped to the side and looked at the corner near the window. There was nobody in the bed.
Spencer was overwhelmed with disappointment. He felt a weight in his belly, and a sick sense of futility. He had come so far, tried so hard, risked so much to throw away his life because he’d come on the wrong night. Spencer thought about going back the way he’d come. After a mom
ent, he decided that was wrong. He would almost certainly be caught and killed. And maybe he’d simply come to the wrong room.
He tested the sliding door, but it was locked. He used his stolen screwdriver to bend the metal trim around the sliding door outward so he could slip the blade of his knife beside the door and pry the latch up. He slipped it off its bar and slid the door open. He entered and closed the sliding door.
Spencer took out his pistol, screwed the silencer on it, and went to the door that led to the interior of the house. He opened it a crack, looked, and listened. The house was designed in a European style, with a hallway upstairs lined by doors that probably led to bedrooms. But at the center of the upper level the rooms ended and there was a curved staircase leading down to a foyer. He could see that the dim light he had detected from outside came from a chandelier hanging above the foyer. He moved to the railing to look down and see who was awake.
In the light, just inside the large double doors of the front entrance, two men sat on identical armchairs. They wore military battle dress, but their only weapons were holstered pistols. Spencer was sure that somewhere very close to them, possibly in the closet by the door, there would be assault rifles. There was a buzz, and one of the men took a cell phone from his breast pocket and spoke quietly.
Spencer could tell from the rhythms of his speech that he was speaking Arabic, but he couldn’t hear the words from where he was. The man ended his call and said to his companion, “Ten or fifteen minutes.”
Spencer retreated from the railing and moved up the hallway, quietly opening the doors of the rooms. If Hamzah was sleeping in one of the other rooms, he had to find him now. He looked in each room he passed. Only three of the eight rooms were furnished as bedrooms. The others were an office, a conference room, a couple of storerooms, and a lounge of a sort, with a big-screen television, a couple of couches, and a refrigerator.
Spencer slipped inside the nearest of the storerooms, to see if it contained any munitions he could use to rig a bomb. If Hamzah wasn’t here now, sometime he would be.