Secret sanction sd-1

by Brian Haig

  “All right, Drummond, you’re on your own.”

  Now, the general might’ve thought he was making some kind of theatrical point here, but the truth is, he was the fifth high-ranking official in three days to use one of those damned tape recorders as he offered me a little on- and off-the-record guidance. I was actually getting pretty used to watching these guys cover their asses and prod me along my way.

  In the old Army, a man who was about to be executed was marched down a line of his peers and a slow drumroll was sounded to accompany him to the gallows. The modern version of this death march, I was learning, was to stand in front of a bunch of powerful desks listening to lots of windy lectures, all timed to the beat of tape recorders being flicked on and off.

  Chapter 2

  As a burly Air Force tech sergeant ushered me through the aircraft doorway, I immediately spotted Captain James Delbert and Captain Lisa Morrow waiting for me in the cavernous rear of the lumbering C-130. The first thing I noticed, though, was that the C-130, which is a cargo plane, was indeed packed to the gills with cargo. So much for my putative sense of importance. It was worse than that, though. The aircraft was stuffed with feminine hygiene products in OD green boxes.

  A thousand wicked wisecracks crossed my mind, and maybe if Captain Morrow had been a he, instead of a she, I might have let loose. But fifteen years of ingrained sensitivity training stilled my tongue. It’s dicey to tell a risque joke in front of any female soldier. It’s often suicidal in the presence of a female lawyer.

  The second thing I noticed was that both Delbert and Morrow had sour faces. Whether that was because of me or the accommodations, or the fact that, without warning, they’d both been ordered to drop everything and meet me on this airplane was as yet unclear.

  Neither had been told why they had to be here, but both were ridiculously clever and probably had some strong suspicions. For three days, headlines and talk shows around the world had focused on nothing but this case. It wasn’t hard to deduce that a gathering of the Army’s top lawyers on an airplane headed to Europe had something to do with the massacre. They both stood as I worked my way past four massive cartons marked TAMPON, 1 EACH.

  “Delbert, Morrow, good to meet you,” I said, thrusting my hand forward and awarding them my most winsome smile.

  “Good to meet you, too,” said Delbert, a fine-looking soldier, who smiled even more winsomely as he pumped hands with holy fury.

  “No it’s not,” complained Morrow, whose sourpuss gained a few more creases.

  “You’re not happy to be here?” I asked.

  “Not in the least. I was right in the middle of an armed theft trial that has now had to be declared a mistrial.”

  “Were you going to win?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Bullshit,” I told her.

  “What do you know about it?” she asked, becoming instantly suspicious.

  “I know your client was charged with two counts of breaking and entering and one count of armed theft. The breaking and enterings you might’ve managed, but the armed theft? Seven witnesses identified him, the MPs had the weapon he used, his fingerprints were all over it, and he confessed right after he was picked up. Your client should’ve stuck to second-story jobs. He was a complete klutz as a holdup guy.”

  “You checked into my case?” she asked, and it was hard to tell if that made her angry or surprised.

  “Sure.”

  “And you second-guessed me?”

  “No. The trial judge, Colonel Tompson, he second-guessed you. He said you were doing a masterful job. He also said it was hopeless. His exact words were that you were ‘doing a very stylish breaststroke in quicksand.’”

  “So you knew you were pulling me away from my client?” she demanded, nodding her head to punctuate each word.

  And in that instant it was easy to understand why this woman was such a successful attorney. She played for keeps. After eight years of trying cases, she still took it personally. She wasn’t hardened or cynical, not one bit.

  “That’s exactly what I did,” I told her. “I pulled you out of a trial that concerned one soldier and his pissant crimes to put you on the biggest, most important Army case in three or four decades.”

  Now this was the point where we could have launched into one of those libertarian debates that lawyers just love, about how unjust I’d been, about how the rights of one man were every bit as insistent as the needs of the Army. But what would be the point? She might score a nice philosophical victory, but it wasn’t like she could climb off this plane and return to her client’s side. Besides, I had just confirmed what she and Delbert had previously only suspected, and that’s a little like getting hit by a bus. Took the air right out of her lungs.

  The two-star general in charge of the Army’s JAG Corps had told me I could have as many of the Army’s top lawyers to serve on my investigating board as my heart desired. Being one myself, I know that the more lawyers you gather under one roof, the more the situation gets to be like a barroom donnybrook. The rate of progress is nearly always commensurate to the scarcity of lawyers. I therefore informed him that I only wanted two lawyers: one prosecutor and one defender.

  I decided that because there are two ways to look at any case: from the standpoint of guilt, and from the standpoint of innocence. One, obviously, is through the eyes of the prosecutor who must gather the facts, then persuade a board of officers and soldiers that the man at the defense table is not only richly guilty, but deserves to be hung from the highest yardarm. Then there’s the defense side, which understands that American law, even military law, is, at its core, highly procedural: that the rights of the accused always outweigh the needs of justice. Any good defense attorney pays as much attention to the way the culprit was caught, and how the catchers did their job, as to the facts of the case itself.

  Prosecutors are the spoiled stepchildren of the law. They get to decide which cases they’ll try: If the facts don’t favor them, or they detect any infringements on the rights of the accused, they simply take a pass. Defense attorneys are eternally cursed. They get appointed only after a prosecutor has decided there’s at least a 99 percent chance of a conviction. There are plenty of prosecutors who win almost all the time. There is only a small handful of defense attorneys who win even half the time.

  Lisa Morrow was the exception. After eight years as a defense attorney, she had won 69 percent of her cases. She’d defended murderers, rapists, thieves, child molesters, and about every other assortment of bad guy imaginable. But, she had never defended anyone accused of violating a rule of the Geneva Convention. For that matter, neither had I. For that matter, neither had anyone; at least anyone who was still wearing a uniform.

  James Delbert had a 97 percent conviction rate and even by the lopsided nature of the way the law is stacked in his favor, that’s pretty damned striking. Even the best prosecutors sometimes get tripped up by things beyond their control, such as witnesses who fall apart on the stand or aren’t terribly convincing, or a court-martial board that just acts in wild-assed ways that are contrary to all logic. Even the most brilliant prosecutor is still going to occasionally lose.

  Before this moment, I had never met either of them. They were handpicked because I told Major General Clapper that I didn’t want just any couple of attorneys. I wanted the prosecutor and defense counsel with the best win-loss records in the Army. He picked them, then gave me copies of their military files. And I must admit that I spent considerably more time with my nose stuffed inside Morrow’s packet than Delbert’s. There was this great picture of her in there, standing stiffly at attention in her dress greens, and that picture offered my only hope that this investigation might have a few good angles. Or curves. Or whatever.

  Nor did it take more than a quick glance to see why so many juries and boards had fallen under her sway. I don’t know that I’d describe her as beautiful, although she certainly was that. She just had the most sympathetic eyes I ever saw, which as I mentioned be
fore is not a real popular emotion in the Army, unless, that is, it happens to be pasted on a gorgeous female face. Then exceptions get made.

  Delbert, on the other hand, looked every bit the soldier. Trim, fit, handsome, with straight, dark hair that sat perfectly in place without a single stray strand. He had one of those razor-sharp faces, and eyes that looked ready to pounce. I could see where a jury or a board would look at him and think only of their duty.

  I would have liked to have talked with them, but the thing about riding in the rear of a C-130 is that once the engines kick in, the racket gets simply awful. Unlike civilian airliners that are packed with sound insulation, the Air Force saves money on all that crap by simply requiring its passengers to wear earplugs the whole trip. Pretty slick, if you ask me: Even if it is brought to you by the same fellas who are known for buying three-hundred-dollar hammers and five-thousand-dollar toilets. But like I said earlier, what’s important inside the military machine ain’t always the same as what’s important on the outside.

  The thing about a transatlantic plane ride is that it gives you plenty of time to read and digest. And while I had assured General Partridge that I’d already familiarized myself with the particulars of this case, the truth is that in the past two days, between meetings with lots of very important Army officials, a meeting with a very antsy aide from the personal staff of the President of the United States, and assorted others, I barely had time to breathe.

  I knew little more than had been described to me by these Washington people, and the interesting thing about that was that all of them seemed to be convinced these nine men had done nothing wrong. Nobody had said that outright, because that would’ve infringed on the code of neutrality the law demands in these things. But I’m a careful listener; I can sniff a subtlety or a nuance from ten miles away. If I was the more suspicious sort, I might even believe that all those powerful people in Washington knew something I didn’t. And I do happen to be the more suspicious sort.

  My legal case was stuffed with a number of news articles, a few preliminary statements given by the accused, and a long-winded statement written by a Lieutenant Colonel Will Smothers, who was the direct commander of the accused.

  I dug into them, and the facts were these. A Special Forces A-team comprising nine men from the Tenth Special Forces Group had been assigned to train a group of Kosovar Albanians who had been driven from their homeland by the Serbian militia. It was part of the effort to build up the Kosovar Liberation Army, or KLA. They spent seven or eight weeks training their recruits, then were given secret orders to accompany the unit they trained back into Kosovo.

  A week later, the Kosovar unit attempted a raid on a village and all of them were killed. The A-team, against orders-make that supposedly against orders-took it on their own to seek vengeance, or justice, or something. They set an ambush on a well-known Serbian supply route and unleashed blistering fury on a Serb column containing thirty-five men.

  The next Serb column to come down that route discovered their slaughtered brethren, found lots of expended American munitions and several pieces of discarded American equipment, informed their superiors, and, after several very dramatic press conferences, the international media became persuaded that some American troops must’ve done a terrifically bad thing.

  The Army put two and two together and arrested the entire A-team, who were currently being held in detention at an air base in Italy.

  Now here’s where the case gets both real interesting and real mawkish. The United States and NATO were bombing the hell out of the Serbs in a desperate attempt to coerce them into changing their stance toward Kosovo. As much as this sounded like war, and I’d bet it sure as hell felt like war, at least to the folks being bombed, the legal nicety of a state of war had not been declared. The rules of the Geneva Convention are written to cover a state of war, so exactly what laws were supposed to govern the behavior of these soldiers? Some lawyers love those kinds of questions. Others loathe them. I, for instance, fall squarely into the loathing category. I happen to be pretty simpleminded. Black and white are my favorite colors. Gray just doesn’t suit my mental complexion.

  The second thing was that there were no survivors from that Serb column. Thirty-five men and not one survivor. Now those who know a little about land warfare know that for every man who gets killed in battle, there nearly always are one or two who get wounded. Believe it or not, there are people who actually study and compute these grisly things, and that’s how it comes out. There was a very nasty implication here.

  Finally, the talk show pundits around the beltway were in high dudgeon. This was just the kind of incident that got them standing in long lines at TV studios, and they were trotting out all kinds of theories, from the frivolous to the absurd. The big question was what orders that A-team had been given. Every time the Pentagon spokesman got asked that question, or what limits were set on their behavior, he suddenly got deliciously vague and evasive, in the way all good spokesmen are trained to do. All he’d admit was that the name of the mission was Guardian Angel and that it was some kind of humanitarian thing. Jay Leno couldn’t resist that one. In one of his opening monologues, he awarded it the Most Regrettable Misnomer of the Year prize. The team had obviously not guarded their Kosovars real well, and it didn’t sound like the nine men in that A-team acted the least bit like angels.

  As I read through the documents, I could almost hear the jaws of the alligators snapping in hungry anticipation.

  I read each document, then passed them on to Delbert. He read them, then passed them on to Morrow. We were becoming a smoothly oiled team. A regular lawyers’ production line. By the time we landed at Tuzla Air Base a nice tidy pile of papers was stacked on the seat next to Captain Morrow, and all three of the Army’s top legal guns were snoring loudly.

  Chapter 3

  This time there actually was a vehicle waiting by the ramp to transport us. In fact, there were two humvees; except that one was already filled with this huge brigadier general, in battle dress, with a natty little green beret tucked neatly on top of his head.

  He was about six foot five, and anybody in uniform would recognize him instantly. He’d been an All-America tackle at West Point, first in his class, a Rhodes scholar, and was at this moment in time the youngest brigadier general in the United States Army. That’s a hell of a lot of ego-enhancers for any one man, if you ask me. It’s amazing that he could look in the mirror and not faint. The sum of my own lifelong distinctions was that I once got elected treasurer of my third-grade class. Unfortunately, my triumph was short-lived, since the election got overturned by the principal as soon as it was learned I had a D in math. I don’t mention that second part to too many people. I just let them keep thinking I served out my term with honor and distinction.

  The guy in the jeep didn’t have to mislead anybody about anything. His name was Charles “Chuck” Murphy, and every few years or so, TIME or Life or Newsweek did a nice little feature article on him so that every American could track the career of their army’s most dazzling boy wonder.

  At that moment, though, his face was clouded with anxiety. Or, as my mother would say, he seemed to be “brooding.” I always liked that word. It’s so much better than “anxious” or “unsettled” or “agitated.” When someone broods, it seems to me there’s a bit more inner turmoil, and it sinks a little deeper.

  Anyway, anybody with any sense knew why, because the A-team that was in detention worked for him, which meant his fabulous career was now up for grabs.

  It was obvious that he was about as happy to see me as he would a big-fingered proctologist, but there was nothing he or I could do about that. I therefore walked right up to him and gave him the same kind of snappy salute I’d given General Partridge, his four-star boss, only twelve hours before back at Fort Bragg.

  “Major Drummond, sir.”

  He actually returned the salute. “Welcome to Bosnia, Drummond. How many lawyers are with you?”

  “Three of us, sir.”


  “That’s it? Just three?”

  “We’re heavy hitters,” I announced, giving him my most overconfident smirk.

  “Okay. Stow your gear in the other humvee and follow me.”

  We did, and we peeled out of the airfield about thirty seconds later. We drove past about a mile of large tents built on concrete slabs, large metal containers, and a bunch of prefabricated wooden buildings. Tuzla Air Base had been made the supply and operations center for the Bosnian mission, and, when the situation in Kosovo boiled over, the military decided that it made sense to use it for that purpose as well. And if there’s one thing the military is really good at, it’s creating large, sprawling, impromptu cities out of thin air. Tuzla was a case in point. The place was laid out, dress-right-dress, with long, straight streets and none of that urban clutter or disorder you find in real cities. Lots of soldiers and airmen were walking around or lying around or doing minor chores, and a lot of them stopped and gawked as our procession drove by. Maybe I was imagining things, but I had the feeling we were expected. I had another feeling, too, because the looks we were getting weren’t real warm and friendly.

  We finally came to a two-floored wooden building with a couple of flags out front. This was a signal that it was being used as a headquarters of some sort. Our humvees stopped and we all piled out and walked inside, where lots of soldiers were scurrying about frantically, or posting things on maps hung on walls, or jabbering on phones, or doing about anything to look busy, because the general was here and only a damned fool would choose this moment to look bored or idle.

  We ended up in a meeting room in the back of the building with a large wooden conference table surrounded by some fancy faux leather chairs. General Murphy told us to sit, so we did.