by David Archer
She was scheduled to go and see her client in just a little over an hour, right after lunch. She honestly wasn't sure what she was going to say to him, and decided not to think about it while she ate. She took the file with her and left the office to head for the Officer's Mess.
Lunch didn't help, because as hard as she tried to avoid any thoughts about Sergeant Foster, those big blue eyes of his kept popping up in her mind. Granted, when he had told her his account of the situation, he had sounded almost like a robot, but there was something so purely innocent about him, despite everything he had seen and done in his military career, that she couldn't help believing he was telling her the truth. That being the case, she wasn't sure that she could live with herself if she didn't fight for him with everything she had.
When her lunch was finished, she walked over to the stockade and signed in. She was escorted to the interview room, and sat down at the table to wait for her client. He was brought in a couple of minutes later, and took the chair across from her.
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Good to see you again, I wasn't sure you'd be back.” He smiled at her to soften the comment.
“Sergeant Foster,” she said, “I'm gonna level with you. Everything I'm doing to try to help you is being blocked at the highest levels, and I don't know that there's anything I can do that isn't going to make things worse. Are you aware that Lieutenant Gibson's father is a United States congressman and maybe running for president?”
Noah let an eyebrow go up a quarter inch. “Seriously? No, I didn't know. The Lieutenant and I didn't move in the same circles, so I never heard about that.” He let out a low whistle. “Now that I know it, though, it makes sense why everything has happened so fast. I mean, I was arrested within two hours of making my initial report, which sort of discounts Colonel Blanchard's claim that he had sent investigators out to the scene of the crime beforehand.”
Mathers felt her eyebrows crunching again. “What you mean by that?”
Noah shrugged. “Where everything happened, it's up in a mountainous region where there aren't any roads. Some places, we had to walk single file going out and coming back, and it took us more than four hours to walk back to the rear. Now, let's do the math. I gave my statement at about fifteen hundred hours, but I was arrested just before seventeen hundred. Since one of the men I brought in would have had to show the investigating unit how to get there, there's no way they could have made it out and back in that short a time.”
“Helicopter. They probably flew out, that would only take minutes.”
“No, Ma'am, with all due respect,” he said. “The whole reason we were out there in that area was because we were searching for some antiaircraft batteries that ISIL had up and operating. A chopper flying over that area would have been shot down, no doubt about it. No, they definitely would have walked, and there's no possible way they could have gotten there, looked the scene over, supposedly discovered that the bodies of the girls were missing, and then come back to make a report that resulted in my arrest.”
Mathers sat there and stared at him. “Is there any possible way that we can prove that?”
Noah shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “In order to make it stick, you can bet Colonel Blanchard has got the whole unit ready to back up his version of how, and probably where, it happened. All the documentation will show the event taking place somewhere close enough to reach in that timeframe, I'd bet on it. They would have gone after the bodies of our men sometime later.”
Mathers leaned forward, her hands open on either side of the file that was lying in front of her. “Sergeant, I'm trying everything I can think of, but the truth is that I've already been informed there's no possible way I can win. In fact, my CO told me this morning that if I continue to try, all I'm going to do is ruin my own career.” She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them again and let them bore into his. “I've tried to decide what to do, and I—I just can't figure it out. A part of me says I need to do everything possible to keep you from getting the death penalty, or at least to make it feasible for us to try the appeal route we discussed the other day, but another part tells me to run from you as fast as I can. Like I said, though, I can't decide, so I'm going to leave this up to you. You tell me what to do, right now, and I'll do it. Do I keep trying, or do I just go through the motions and let them convict you?”
Noah sat forward and put his right hand over her left. “Your CO is right,” he said. “If you keep trying to help me, this whole thing is going to blow up in your face and ruin your life, just the way it's ruining mine. There's no point in both of us going down. Give me whatever it is I need to file in order to fire you, so we can get you out of this mess.”
Mathers sat in her chair, staring at the young man who was looking her straight in the eye as he gave her permission to send him to his death. She already knew enough about his condition to realize that he was simply making what he considered the logical choice, but that didn't assuage her conscience in the least. Without her help, he was going to be convicted, sentenced to death and executed, and probably within a very short time.
She had done a little research on death row at the US Disciplinary Barracks, and found out that there were several people awaiting execution there. Most of them had been waiting for years, but with the appeals process and changes in the White House, there were various reasons why they had not yet had their sentences carried out. Mathers didn't think Foster would get to hang out with them for very long. Her gut hunch said that his execution would happen within months of sentencing, with all of his appeals exhausted as quickly as possible.
“And what if I can't do that?” Mathers asked. “What if my conscience just won't let me walk away? Sergeant Foster, the biggest problem I'm facing right now is the fact that I believe you. Yeah, yeah, I know there's no evidence to back you up, but when I sat here and listened to you the other day, all I heard was a man who was calmly recounting exactly what happened. You weren't telling me some elaborate story, you didn't try to come up with excuses for why no one corroborates your claim, you didn't try to protest that you are being mistreated—hell, Sergeant, all you did was answer my questions. A man who's truly guilty, a man who's trying to put one over on the system, he'll come up with all sorts of things to say to try to throw us off. He'll tell me how the men who are willing to testify against him are upset because he refused to participate in some ritual, or that their ringleader is gay and he refused an advance from him. You didn't give me any BS—you just told me what happened, without any embellishments. In my experience, and in my professional opinion, that is something that only a man telling the truth would do.”
Noah smiled. “Lieutenant Mathers,” he said, “what on earth do you think truth has to do with it? This case isn't about who's telling the truth, or there would've been a real investigation of my report. Since we know there wasn't one, then all this case really is about is pinning the blame for the congressman's son's death on somebody as quickly as possible. Now, I've admitted that I shot him, and they got all the other guys making statements saying that I did it just because I'm nuts, and calling me a liar about what really happened. People who just want to put something away as fast as possible don't want to take the time to examine the facts. It's easier just to point their fingers and say I did it, and here's what they're going to do to punish me, put the whole thing to bed in a hurry. That's all they want to do.”
“That doesn't make them right,” Mathers said. “You want my opinion, it makes them monsters. I went to law school because I believe in the law; I joined the Army because I wanted to make a difference in military law. Now I'm just supposed to walk away and watch you go into the lethal injection chambers? How am I supposed to live with myself, after that? You answer that for me.”
Noah pulled his hand back. “Lieutenant, I'm not the one who put you in this position. In fact, I'm the one who's actually in this position, not you. You have an out; I don't. You can walk away; all I can do is move forward, propelled a
long by a system that is being used by a political machine to cover up what really happened, to make me pay for Lieutenant Gibson's crimes. If you can show me any fairness in that, then maybe I can help you figure out how to live with yourself when this is all over.” He rubbed his hands over his face, and she thought the gesture was odd. Most people used it to try to get themselves under control, but if there was one thing she knew already about Foster, it was that he never lost control in the first place. He put his hands down, and looked her in the eye once more. “Lieutenant, I don't want to feel like I've hurt someone who's innocent. Give me the form I need to file, so that I can release you.”
“No,” she said. “I don't want to do that.”
“There really isn't much choice,” Noah said. “You can't win, and continuing to try will only hurt your career. If I'm going to die, I'd rather die knowing that I at least tried to always do the right thing.”
“Yeah, well that's pretty much how I feel, too. If they win, then sometime, maybe a few months, maybe a few years, they're going to kill you. When that day comes, it'll be over for you, but I'll have to keep living with it. Frankly, I don't know if I can. If I don't do whatever I can for you, then the day may come when I just can't cope with being me anymore.” She looked down at the file in front of her and opened it up. “Sergeant Wolf,” she said, “tell me about your childhood.”
Noah's eyes went wide. “My childhood? Surely you've been able to get at least that much information, right?”
She nodded. “Yes, but I want to hear from you. Please, go on.”
Noah let out a long sigh. “Okay, but you're getting the Reader's Digest condensed version. Seven years old, I saw my father kill my mother and then himself. Got sent to the foster care system, lived there for almost a year before my grandparents showed up to take me, lived with them for a short time until they figured out I was a Pinocchio, then they couldn't cope with me anymore and I ended up back in the foster system. Grew up there, spent most of my time in a couple different foster homes, until something happened that made everyone afraid of me. I joined the Army to get out of my hometown, and I finally felt like I'd found a place where I fit in. The same parts of me that were considered a problem in civilian life became assets in the military, and I got a stack of commendations about what a fantastic soldier I was.”
Matters had been scribbling furiously, even though she had a recorder lying on the table taking in every word and shoving them into its memory chip. She looked up at him. “What do you mean, that your grandparents figured out you were a Pinocchio?”
Noah shrugged. “That's what a friend of mine used to call me, a Pinocchio. Pinocchio was a puppet who wanted to be a real boy, everybody knows that story. In my case, it sort of describes how I am, a real person but without any emotions, without any sense of what it means to be human. I don't know how to act like a real person, so I just mimic the people around me. That works fine, until I'm confronted with a situation that's so unusual that there isn't any right or normal way to handle it.”
“Such as what happened with Lieutenant Gibson and the other men, right?”
“Yep. I've never had the opportunity to watch someone else decide how to handle that type of thing, so I just went with what I thought was the most logical thing to do. Since it was obvious to me that Gibson would rather kill me than let me report what he'd been doing, the logical thing seemed to be for me to kill him first. Same with the other men: since they wanted to kill me to keep me from turning them in, the logical choice would be for me to kill them first.”
She scribbled for a few seconds more. “Here's a question,” she said. “You said that you told the men who surrendered that you were much better at combat than they were, and that they couldn't win. Apparently, they believed you, but the question is, did you believe it yourself? Do you honestly think you're that good, that you could have taken all of them out?”
Both of Noah's eyebrows went up, and Mathers read his expression as a way of saying, Well, duh!
“Of course I did,” he said aloud. “And every one of them knew it was true.”
She suddenly raised her eyes from the pad she was writing on and looked directly into his. “Then why didn't you do it? Why didn't you go ahead and kill them all, so that no one could have contested your report?”
“I didn't need to, they surrendered.”
“Yes, but if you had not offered them the chance to surrender, they would've kept right on trying to kill you. You would have been completely justified in eliminating them all. Why didn't you?”
Noah stared at her for a moment. “Most of those guys were pretty decent people, for the most part, but in all the years that I've been studying humans, one thing I've found is that they tend to be a lot like certain animals. Take wolves, for example: an individual wolf will almost never attack another animal or even a human, unless it feels threatened or is starving. However, an entire wolf pack, if the alpha is aggressive toward that animal or human, will rip it to shreds. It won't matter if they're hungry, because they probably won't eat it anyway. They'll just destroy it.” He leaned forward. “Humans are a lot like that, if they have a leader who will disregard right and wrong. Humans tend to submit to authority, or at least most of them do. If an authority figure tells them to do something, or even worse, leads by example in doing something that's just plain wrong, something they wouldn't normally do on their own, they'll give in to the lure of the taboo and join right in. You understand what I'm trying to say?”
Mathers looked him in the eye. “Pack behavior,” she said. “That's what they call the tendency for people to join in on group actions that they would normally consider unacceptable. What you're saying is that you believe those men would never have done what they did if Lieutenant Gibson hadn't pushed the issue, hadn’t actually allowed or even ordered them to do it. Right?”
“Right. So that means that, in some ways, they were still innocent. They didn't deserve to die just because they were scared of what I might do to them. Now, if they hadn't laid down their weapons, yes, I would've done what I had to do. But once they did, then it became my duty to bring them in alive and unharmed.”
Mathers sat there and looked at him for another long moment, and then began scribbling again. “There you go again,” she said. “The ironic thing is that the very problem you've got, this thing about not having emotions or knowing how to be human, is almost certainly what has made you one of the best men I've ever met. I know a lot of terrific people, but if they had been in your position out there, and known as surely as you did that they could have killed all of the others, you can bet your life that they would have come back alone and sworn up and down that the rest of their unit was wiped out by enemy missile fire. There'd be no search for bodies, so the story would hold up.”
Noah sat silently for a moment, but then reached over and laid a hand on hers, stopping her pen from moving across the paper. “Lieutenant,” he said softly, “I don't know about whether I'm a good man or not. I don't have any reasonable way to judge myself. But this much I have learned, and again, mostly by watching other people. Just because you can do something that may benefit yourself doesn't necessarily make it right to do so. That would be like if you found yourself alone in a building where hundreds of gold bars were stored, and knew with an absolute certainty that you could take a couple of them and no one would ever know.” He leaned his head down a bit more, so that he could look her in the eye more directly. “It would still be stealing, now, wouldn't it?”
THREE
“It just isn't fair,” Mathers said. She was sitting on the couch in her apartment, leaning back against Major Arthur Newman. “Foster is almost certainly telling the truth, but there is absolutely no way that I'm going to be able to save him from being sentenced to die. Makes me sick to think that I chose to become part of a system that can so easily and arbitrarily decide to destroy a man for doing exactly what was right.”
Newman caressed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You didn't make
that choice, Abby,” he said. “You just got handed the bag to hold. The problem is that your client, Foster, had the bad luck to be serving under a psychopath who happened to be the son of a powerful man. Sometimes, no matter how unfair it is, there's just no way to win.”
“And how am I supposed to live with that? Can you tell me how I'm supposed to sleep at night, knowing that a good and innocent man went to death row because he did the right thing? Sergeant Foster shouldn't be standing court-martial, he should be given a medal.” She sat forward suddenly, and spun to look him in the eye. “What if I went to the press? What if I leaked the story of how a congressman can railroad the man who stopped his son from committing even more horrible crimes in the future? Maybe I can get just enough public pressure to at least keep Foster out of the execution chamber.”
Newman was shaking his head. “Abby, it won't work,” he said. “First of all, Congressman Gibson stands a fair chance of being the next president, if he does decide to run. He's popular, and from what I've heard so far, all the speculation polls are finding him to be a very viable and likely candidate. The press is not going to go up against a man like that, not anybody who could get you serious attention, anyway. But even more than that, they would trace the leak back to you and you could be facing a court-martial of your own. If you decide to keep fighting for the Sergeant and end up losing your own career, well, you can console yourself by remembering that it's better to sacrifice your career than your soul.” He pulled her hand up to his lips and kissed it. “Besides, you might decide you like being a stay-at-home mom, and I've never been all that excited about having a wife who works.”
“Art, be serious! I've got to think this through, I can't just lay down on this.”
“Abby, sweetheart, I'm being completely serious,” Newman said. “You cannot win, that much is just true. No matter what you do, your Sergeant Foster is going to end up dead over this. Your CO knows it, Sergeant Foster knows it, and you know it. What you have got to do, if you're going to survive this at all, is detach yourself from it. Stop thinking of Foster as a client, and just think of him as a casualty of war.”