A Far Justice

by Richard Herman

  She shook his hand, not sure of it at all.

  “How did you sleep last night?” Derwent asked.

  “Like a log,” Gus replied. He sat down to the ever-present cup of coffee while she made a note in her folder. “Can I ask what’s in there?” He gestured at the folder.

  She closed the folder. “I’m participating in an on-going study about personality disorders. My research group has asked me to evaluate men and women who, shall we say, have problems with the law.”

  “Perhaps,” he ventured, “the problem is with the law and not the individual.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps.” What she didn’t tell him was that part of the study required her to rate the physical attractiveness and intelligence level of her subjects to determine if there was a correlation. Based on the study’s criteria, she rated Gus at the ninety-fifth percentile level on attractiveness and estimated his IQ around 130. But there was something about him she could not identify, and that excited her.

  She opened her notebook. “You’ve told me about flying, but what was it like to fly in combat? Were you afraid?” She couldn’t read the look on his face. Was it a smile?

  “It’s not like anything you can imagine. Of course there’s fear. But that’s when you’re lying in bed waiting for the alarm to go off.” He thought for a moment. “It’s the routine that gets you through. In Saudi, I flew the nightshift and slept during the day. Thank God our quarters were air-conditioned, but the noise on the flight line would usually wake me up by mid afternoon. I had a routine and would get up, exercise, and shower and shave. After that, I’d check my mail, hit the dining hall, and go to the squadron. I was chief of training so I’d fly with different backseaters, weapon systems officers, to check them out and see how good they were. I didn’t have a regularly assigned WSO but preferred to fly with Toby Person. He was the best.”

  He slipped into memory. “One night Toby and I were assigned an area in western Iraq to patrol, all part of the great Scud hunt. Scuds were the missiles Saddam was lobbing into Israel, and we were worried that if we didn’t stop them, Israel would come into the war. That would have ripped the coalition apart so the pressure was really on. To be honest, we weren’t being too successful.” He paused while she made notes. “Toby had been talking to a Saudi liaison officer and studying the charts. He wanted to search a different area but the high rollers wouldn’t buy it.” He scoffed. “They said there was nothing there. So it was the same old routine: listen to whatever Intel was saying, brief the mission, suit up, and step to the jet. I’d preflight the bird and Toby the weapons.” He laughed. “Do you know what’s the last thing you do before climbing up the boarding ladder and strapping the jet on? You take a leak.”

  “Where?” she asked. “Any place that’s convenient. Toby and I used to stand in a corner of the revetment and piss on the sandbags. I’d hum the Air Force song.” He sang a few words. “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder.” He blushed.

  “You have a very good voice,” Derwent said. “What would Toby do?”

  “He’d sing along.”

  He chose his words and images carefully, taking her with him as the mission unfolded. “We’d take a deep breath and climb the ladder. If you’ve got a good crew chief, the cockpit is all set up for you, the switches, everything. You double check anyway. Then it’s crank engines and taxi for the end of the runway to meet up with your wingman for quick check.”

  “Quick check?” she asked.

  “A ground crew from Maintenance gives the jet one last inspection, checking for leaks, cut tires, loose panels, and making sure all the safety pins are pulled. Then you wait to make your takeoff time. The radio call is always the same. ‘Pounder One and Two, taxi into position and hold.’ Now things happen real fast. ‘Pounder One and Two, cleared for takeoff.’ You release brakes and stroke the burners, torching the night. Twenty seconds later, your wingman is rolling and you’re headed for western Iraq.

  “The airborne controller checks you into the area and there is absolutely nothing moving on the ground. So we’d bore holes in the sky until it was time to head for a tanker for an airborne refueling. My wingman always hooked up first but this night, he can’t transfer fuel. So I send him home.” Derwent noted how Gus kept slipping between the past and the present as he talked. “Then we hooked up to take on 9000 pounds of fuel. The boomer cleared us off and we return to the area single-ship to continue the patrol. It’s the same old story, bore holes and turn jet fuel into noise. Then the TSD, the tactical situation display, it’s a screen on the instrument panel with a moving map, cycles to an area I’ve never seen before.

  “I asked Toby, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He said, ‘I got another place to look.’ Well, his ‘other place’ was out of our area and operating anywhere else without clearance was a no-no. I wasn’t about to do it. You should have heard Toby bitch and moan. He can really be creative at times. So I head for the extreme northwestern part of our patrol area, which gets us fairly close to where Toby wants to look, and still keeps us legal. That’s when he finds it on the radar.” He stopped to take a sip of coffee.

  Derwent was caught up and in the cockpit with him. “Toby finds what?”

  “A convoy. The radar has a moving target indicator that only shows what’s moving, and Toby has four big targets moving across the desert in a convoy. Then they disappeared.”

  “Because they stopped moving?” she asked.

  “Exactly. I figure they don’t have warning gear that could have detected our radar and the odds were they’ve stopped to launch the missile. So I tell Toby to freeze the last location of the convoy and put the radar in standby so they can’t detect us –just in case they do have warning gear. I head for the deck.”

  “You’re going to attack them?”

  “No way. I’m going to take a look and report back. I level off at 400 feet, engage the TFR, that’s the terrain following radar, and push it up to 500 knots heading for the convoy’s last location. It’s pretty rough terrain but the TFR is working like a charm. Toby says ‘400 feet ain’t high.’ Stalwart fellow, Toby. So down we go another 200 feet. The turbulence is pounding the hell out of us now and I’m sweating like a pig.”

  “Can you see the ground?” She was breathless, reliving the moment with him.

  He shook his head. “Too dark. We pop to crest a ridge and for a split second, we have altitude. The TEWS, our electronic warning gear, is screaming at us. A hostile radar has picked us up, probably a SAM, that’s a surface-to-air missile. I roll the bird 135 degrees and slam us back to the deck. While this is going on, good old Toby brings the radar back to life and sweeps the target. They’re moving again, and I figure they’ve detected us and are running for cover. Now I got an image on the FLIR, that’s the forward looking infrared, which is like looking at the world through the bottom of a green coke bottle. I see the rocket plume of a SAM at our two o’clock and comin’ right at us. I jink like hell, loading the bird with eight Gs. The missile overshoots. A very bad mistake for them.”

  “How so?”

  “You never lose the right of self-defense and I don’t need clearance to nail ‘em. So sayeth the rules of engagement. Now the FLIR breaks out the target. A truck and a fuel tanker are sandwiching a TEL with a couple more trucks and a bus behind.”

  “TEL?” she whispered. She wasn’t making notes and her eyes were wide and unblinking.

  “TEL stands for transporter, erector, launcher,” Gus said. “A really big vehicle that carries the missile.”

  “So you saw the rocket.”

  “Nope. The TEL was camouflaged. Behind the fuel tanker is a bus and I see a few smaller vehicles flanking the convoy – outriders running escort. A red stream of tracers reaches up from one of those puppies, right at us. Toby’s head is buried in the back, working the radar, getting a system lock-on so he doesn’t see it. The TEWS is still screaming at us and I turn off the audio.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can concentrate. Toby’s got the TEL
locked up and the weapons system is doing its magic. All I got to do is get close enough. Two more SAM’s are coming at us but I figure they’re SA-7s, shoulder-held missiles that aren’t much of a threat, not as long as I can keep us on the deck and going like stink. The tracers cut behind us. The bastards can’t shoot. We over fly the convoy and I rip six Snake Eyes – I mean I rippled six Mark 82, five hundred-pound bombs. Shack.

  “The jet rocks something awful and the lights on the warning panel go crazy. We’re headed down and I stroke the ‘burners and pull, going for the moon. Behind us, the convoy goes up like the Fourth of July on steroids.”

  “What happened?” she asked breathlessly.

  “The fuel tanker and whatever was on the TEL exploded. The warhead I guess.”

  “I mean what happened to you?”

  “We took a hit. Lost most of our hydraulics and holed the right wing something fierce. We were leaking fuel like a sieve. No way we can make it home so I call for an emergency refueling.” He gave a little laugh. “It was a long way back to the tanker. Almost flamed out for fuel starvation. But we got hooked up and the KC-135 dragged us back to Al Kharj, where we landed.”

  “Did you get a medal?”

  “No way. We had gone out of our area without clearance. Some general at CentCom, that’s Central Command, wanted to court-martial us. But my wing commander, Jim Cannon, wasn’t having any of it since they had shot at us.”

  She reached out and touched his cheek. Her hand was warm and moist. “You’re sweating.”

  “So are you.”

  She pulled her hand back and shook her hair. “It must be the thermostat.”

  Gus sat on his bunk, his back against the wall as he watched Davis Armiston being interviewed by Harm de Rijn on Dutch TV. The overhead lights blinked, warning him that it was fifteen minutes to lights out. “You’re still the same oily son of a bitch,” Gus said to no one. Stop talking to yourself. This place is getting to you.

  The camera zoomed in on Armiston’s face. “While most American’s are opposed to the ICC,” Armiston explained, “there is a substantial, and growing minority who believe we should participate.”

  Now don’t go falling all over yourself with unbridled joy, Harm.

  De Rijn did. “That is very encouraging to hear, especially after the cowboyism and amateurism that has characterized American foreign policy for the last decade.”

  “One of my foreign policy goals,” Armiston replied “is to reach out to our European allies in a meaningful way and rebuild the ties that are the bulwark of the western alliance.”

  “Rebuild, my ass,” Gus said. He hit the power key on his remote control and the TV went blank. He closed his eyes and sat there, his head against the wall.

  “Rebuild what?” Derwent asked from the doorway.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Just a few moments. I was listening to your General Armiston. I take it that you don’t approve of what he said.”

  “Armiston is a total asshole. He’ll say whatever he thinks will get him elected.”

  “Do you know him personally?”

  “I knew him when he was a captain, later a lieutenant colonel, he hasn’t changed a bit.”

  “So he was a fighter pilot like you.”

  “Davis Armiston doesn’t know the meaning of the term.”

  Derwent drew a cup of water at the buffet, and handed him a sleeping capsule. Before he could take it, she sat on the bunk next to him, and as before, placed her fingers lightly on his neck to feel him swallow. “We must be very careful with these,” she murmured. Her fingers lingered longer than necessary. She rose and walked to the door. “Your story about the Scud missile was most exciting. Sleep well.” Then she was gone, closing the door behind her. He heard the lock click and spat the pill into his hand.

  Gus waited for the lights to go out. When it was dark, he walked to the buffet, still holding the capsule. He unrolled the paper towels and placed the pill on the last sheet. Then he methodically rolled the towels back up. We’re getting there.

  ELEVEN

  NATO Headquarters

  Power is a relative thing and the two men sitting in office of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SACEUR, were a case in point. Maximilian Westcot was one of the wealthiest men in the United States and moved on the world stage with ruthless arrogance. He was also the confidant of the President of the United States, and had direct access to sixteen prime ministers and heads of state. On the other side of the desk, General Douglas Hammerly was an accomplished professional warrior who had commanded units in combat and a brilliant strategist. With one order, he could set thousands of men and women in motion. But more importantly, he was a leader men and women willingly followed into combat.

  “The President is walking a tight rope on the Tyler issue,” Westcot explained. “Publicly, he’s concentrating on the Taiwan crises. Behind the scenes, he’s pursuing a two-fold approach to free Gus. He’s willing to let the wheels of diplomacy turn to a certain extent to see if the system can correct itself. At the same time, he’s asked me to explore more informal avenues, including private appeals to the court and some of my European friends.”

  Hammerly understood perfectly: the President was using the backdoor to pressure the ICC, and he, as SACEUR, had better get on board. It was part of the world he lived in where informal links were as important as the formal chains of command. The trick was knowing when and how to respond, and as it was Maximilian Westcot, the response had better be positive. “Given the widespread public demonstrations we’re seeing over here,” Hammerly said, “appealing to their better natures or sense of justice is a waste of time.”

  “It does look that away. But Hank Sutherland believes he can win, provided that he finds a key witness and gets him on the stand.”

  “Who is?”

  “Colonel James Cannon,” Westcot replied. “I know what Cannon does. Unfortunately, I goofed, and Sutherland is aware that I know Cannon.”

  Hammerly steepled his fingers and studied Westcot, carefully guarding his words. Cannon was a key player in Operation Phoenix, a top-secret special operation that tracked down and killed terrorists. It had been a long struggle and the ranks of the terrorists had been decimated, largely thanks to Cannon who wielded the knife that targeted individuals with small airborne-delivered, precision-guided munitions. Hammerly made a decision. “I’ll see what I can do. And if Sutherland fails?”

  “Then there will be a rescue mission.”

  “The CIA?”

  Westcot shook his head. “The Director of National Intelligence refuses to get involved. Which, given the current state of our intelligence services, is a very wise move. They would screw it up big time.”

  The general agreed with him. “I assume you’re telling me all this for a reason.”

  Westcot nodded. “We need Sergeant Tyler’s help.”

  “You’ve got it. He’s already providing covert security for Sutherland. By the way, exactly who is the ‘we’ in all this?”

  “Shall we say a non governmental organization with a lot of backing?”

  “Ah,” Hammerly said, his suspicions confirmed, “the dreaded NGO working independently of any established government but certainly supported by a government.”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment on that,” Westcot intoned, playing the same game as the general.

  The Hague

  Alex Melwin sipped at his afternoon tea and eyed the last scone on the teacart as Hank paced the floor. “Why don’t you finish it off?” Hank said. “Take a look at this. It came in today.” He didn’t tell Melwin that the mini disk was courtesy of Cassandra and her team. He made a mental note to introduce Melwin to Cassandra at the right time. He hit the start button on the video player and Toby Person materialized on the screen as he guided a BBC reporter through his mission in the southern Sudan.

  “This is Mission Awana,” Toby said, sweeping the area with a broad wave of his hand. “It’s really a plantation in that we�
��re largely self-sufficient. Thanks to the river, we’ve over 4000 acres under year-round irrigation, and export food, mostly a type of disease-resistant sorghum. We also have some cottage industries that could be commercially successful. Equally important, we have the best schools and the largest medical station in sub Sahara Africa. Our hospital has three doctors, an operating room, a hundred beds, and a training school for nurses and midwives. Our medical teams vaccinate over 10,000 children a year.”

  A loud explosion echoed over him. The men ran and the picture twisted and turned as the cameraman followed Toby and the reporter into a bunker. They all piled inside and were soon joined by a hoard of children. A little girl crawled into Toby’s lap and sucked her thumb. Toby listened as a second explosion shook the bunker. “That’s our daily reminder that we’re caught in a civil war.” The dull whomp of two outgoing mortar rounds reached them. “That’s outgoing counter-battery fire. D’Na is pretty good at discouraging them.” They sat in the stifling heat as silence engulfed them.

  A heavyset figure, about five-feet eight-inches tall, and dressed in combat fatigues filled the doorway to the bunker. Her hair was cut short, her facial features classical Dinka, and her dark skin glowed with health and vitality. She would never be considered beautiful by western standards but she was a strikingly handsome woman. “It’s all clear,” she announced. The children burst from the bunker as she laughed.

  Hank hit the pause button. “I would not want him as a hostile witness on the stand,” he said.

  Melwin swallowed the last of the scone. “Agreed. Much better to take our chances and try to exclude his statement.”

  Hank restarted the video and let it play out. “He is impressive. Any ideas on how to keep it out?”

  “A few,” Melwin replied. “None good. We could call Person as a witness for the defense, and then press the Victims and Witnesses Unit to produce him at the trial, which they probably can’t do. I’ll remind the court that when Person gave the statement, he was not subject to cross examination, and as he is a witness for the defense, the introduction of the statement in his absence is prejudicial to Colonel Tyler’s defense.”