by Brian Haig
“Isn’t that something. Here I’ve been in the Army all these years and never heard of any such thing.”
“Really something,” he said. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s say a Special Forces A-team went out and did a very bad thing while they were performing a very secret mission. Then, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the Army actually had a lawyer who used to belong to that special unit that doesn’t exist.”
“A guy could write a real great novel about something like that, couldn’t he?”
“Or a few really good newspaper articles. I mean, why would the Army pick a guy like that to head up the investigation?”
“First, there would have to be such a guy. Personally, I did my time in an infantry battalion in the 82nd, and if you’d like, I’ll bring you some witnesses-”
“Of course you did, Major. But what would worry me is that the Army might pick just such a guy because he’d be most likely to feel some sympathy for that A-team. Hell, after living in a secret world, where he’s had to lie to everyone he knows about what he does, he might even be more inclined to help build a cover for that team.”
I grinned at him, and he grinned back at me.
Then he added, “Of course, like I said, all of this was just for the sake of argument.”
“Is there a point to this argument?”
“No, it’s only academic. After all, you’ve already agreed to cooperate with me, so there’s really no need for me to see how far I could go in checking this story.”
“That’s good, because it’s all wrong,” I said.
We both chuckled at the irony of that. There’s nothing like starting a relationship of trust based on what we both knew was an outright lie.
“So,” he said, “what’s their story?”
“Their story is that they were detected by the Serbs and had to fight their way out. The team leader felt the Serbs were boxing his team in. He decided that ambushing a large column was the best way to make the Serbs believe his unit was larger than it was and to make the Serbs slow down and become more cautious.”
Berkowitz let out a loud whistle. “No kidding.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You believe ’em?”
“So far, sure. It meets with the facts, and all nine men are telling the same tale.”
His eyes kind of lit up, and the letters PULITZER seemed to emerge on his forehead. “Jesus, what a great story line.”
“Yeah, it really is, isn’t it.”
“Here these poor bastards were, trapped behind enemy lines, doing a secret mission this administration ordered them to do. They fight their way out, and instead of getting the medals they deserve, they get stuffed behind bars and investigated like common criminals.”
“That about sums it up,” I said. “Frankly, it’s an embarrassment for me to be part of this. I almost can’t stand to look those men in the eyes. I mean, these guys are genuine heroes.”
“No kidding.”
“Nope, no kidding.”
His face got very serious. “You’re sure you’re not kidding, right?”
“God’s honest truth. Left to me, I’d wrap this whole thing up in two days. Only problem is, one of the other investigating team members is a real prick and seems dead set on proving they did something wrong. He keeps nitpicking little details, even though all he’s doing is making a damned nuisance out of himself. The rest of us are convinced he’s an idiot and these men are innocent.”
I could see he was now itching to race out of my office and file a story. The international press were all convinced these guys had committed a heinous crime, and now Jeremy Berkowitz was about to break the real story, that these men were not only innocent, but heroes to boot. He’d paint the administration as cruel and unfair for persecuting these poor, decent guys who were only doing their job the best they knew how. The story would play well. The President, everybody knew, was a draft-dodgin’ lefty who once wrote a letter about how much he detested the military. He wrote that letter a long time before, in a very different era, but the opposing party had a copy of that letter engraved in bronze and kept shoving it in everybody’s face every time the President did anything that could halfway be construed as antimilitary, or antidefense, or anti-American. According to the opposing party, about everything the President ever did fell into one of those categories, and now Berkowitz here was staring at yet another opportunity to remind the great unwashed public that the President once wrote such a letter.
He walked toward the door, then turned around. His feet did this little shifting thing. “You know I have to refer to you in the story?”
“Uh, actually, no,” I lied. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I’d like to call you ‘a source on the investigating team.’ Anything more generic and the story loses credibility. My editors, and the public, they have to know this is coming from inside.”
“I don’t know… there’s only a few of us… and, uh-”
“Hey, Major, I’ve never had a source caught. Trust me on this.”
I let out a heavy sigh and scratched my head a few times. Finally, I reluctantly said, “If it’s absolutely necessary, then okay.”
I felt pretty smug when Berkowitz walked out the door. It isn’t often when you get two vindictive retaliations for the price of one. Berkowitz would print his story, make a big splash, bask in his fifteen minutes of glory, then as soon as I proved that Sanchez and his team had cold-bloodedly murdered the Serbs, he’d look like a worldwide horse’s ass.
The White House and Clapper would have no reason to suspect me of being the leaker. I had pooh-poohed myself in the story. Pretty slick that. Now Delbert or Morrow or whoever was leaking on me was going to be suspected of leaking to the press also.
About a minute after Berkowitz departed, the door flew open and in marched Imelda. She shut the door behind her, then plopped into a seat in front of my desk.
She snorted once or twice, then said, “That a reporter?”
“Yep.”
“That the same reporter that wrote that shitty article?”
“One and the same, Imelda.”
She seemed to consider that a moment. She played with her hair and fiddled with the rim on her glasses. Then she gave me this stern, disapproving glare, which, given that this was Imelda Pepperfield, could burn paint off walls.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Reporters are nothing but low-life trash. Don’t you let him come suckin’ up here again, stinkin’ up my building. Got that?”
“Sure, Imelda. And thanks.”
She pushed herself out of her chair, grunted something brief that sounded either like, “You’re really very welcome, sir, and I admire the hell out of you,” or “Frigamugit,” then shuffled back out.
In her inimitable way, she was warning me that the surest way to get caught leaking to the press was to allow Berkowitz to show his face here again. What a woman.
Chapter 14
Henry Kissinger once said that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they really aren’t trying to get you. Suddenly I was beginning to think it was true, he was right, and he’d been talking about me.
Someone inside my organization was leaking things to somebody who worked for the President of the United States, who, for some inexplicable reason, spent his early mornings listening to someone talking about me. One, or maybe both, of my co-investigators was spilling their guts about how incompetent I am to the chief of the Army’s JAG Corps. A ruthlessly ambitious reporter knew something very dangerous about my background, and to top everything off, the very same general who got me this assignment had suddenly developed a severe case of character deficiency.
That’s a fairly long list of crappy things to discover in only one day. The problem was, like most paranoids, I wanted someone to lash out at. But who?
There were Delbert and Morrow, neither of whom I knew anything about. That is, a
side from what I’d read in their legal and personnel files. Of course, those files came from Clapper’s office, and I suddenly found myself wondering if they were authentic. As Mssr. Berkowitz had discovered, not all Army files are what they purport to be. Then there was Imelda’s chorus of four legal assistants, any of whom could be passing information along.
I kind of wanted the mole to be Delbert, since I didn’t like him all that much. He struck me as an uptight pretty boy who would put a shiv in his own mother to get ahead. I was praying it wasn’t Morrow. She was gorgeous and had those sympathetic eyes, and I really wanted to see if the body underneath those running pants matched the fervid extremes of my imagination. I’d already built myself this nice little scenario where I cracked the case, got the pretty girl, and rode off into the sunset. I love Imelda, but she was a little too old and gnarly to be climbing up on the back of my horse. It had to be Morrow or nobody. The problem was that Morrow was every bit as scheming and ambitious as Delbert, and as I’d already discovered, she could run circles around him in the sly and devious categories. Sly and devious just happened to be the traits of whoever was ratting me out.
Then just as I’m about to nod off, a new hallucination slowly interrupted my progress. If these guys in Washington were going to all this trouble, they must know something. Something really awful. Like maybe this was one of those White House conspiracies they always make such great movies about, the ones where all these guys in Brooks Brothers power suits get together and start manipulating the organs of government in sinister ways to…
This was when I decided that I was going way too far. The problem with paranoia is that it sneaks up on you. You start by wondering why the guy next door didn’t invite you to his barbecue. Then you’re convinced the whole neighborhood’s in on the conspiracy. Then you’re passing out literature about the Trilateral Commission. Then before you know it there’s a high-powered rifle in your hands, and you’re on a rooftop, and there’s a bunch of angry cops scurrying around who really are trying to get you.
Maybe Clapper just guessed that I was getting bogged down in details. Maybe he really was concerned about my unique background and how that might make me inquisitive about all sorts of innocuous little things that really have nothing to do with guilt or innocence. And now that I thought about it, he never actually came out and asked me to give Sanchez and his crew a clean slate. He just hinted how convenient that would be. What the hell? That was nothing more than a harmless restatement of the obvious. And how did Jeremy Berkowitz know what the President did every morning? Hell, the President’s own wife didn’t know all the things he was doing in that round office.
I awoke the next morning feeling game and fresh. I actually sang while I showered, until the guy two stalls down hurled a bar of soap at me. By the time I reached our little office building, I was actually thinking about being nice to Delbert for a change, which only goes to show you how awfully guilty I felt about all those dark thoughts I’d had the night before.
I noticed when I walked in that everybody was sitting quietly and somberly at their desks. Somberly, like something was terribly wrong. Somberly, like something very distressing was going down. Quietly, like nobody was talking because nobody knew what to say.
I also noticed two big, burly military policemen sipping coffee and lounging by the entrance to my office.
“Excuse me, Major Drummond?” the bigger of the two asked, shoving himself off the wall. He wore captain’s bars, and his nametag read Wolkowitz.
I said, “How can I help you, Captain?”
“We need to talk to you.” He glanced around the office and his face acquired a very portentous cloud. “Alone, if you don’t mind.”
We walked into my office and I politely offered him and his sergeant seats, which they both too brusquely declined. The sergeant pulled a small notebook out of his pocket, poised his pencil, and stared at me like I was the Boston Strangler. I knew this routine.
I sat behind my desk and tried to look relaxed.
Captain Wolkowitz said, “Could you tell us where you were between 2400 and 0500 hours this morning?”
“No, I cannot tell you where I was. I mean, I could, but you haven’t given me any reason.”
He gave me one of those “Oh brother, what have I done to deserve another smart-assed lawyer” kind of looks. All cops, even military cops, learn to master that look fairly early in their careers.
“Do you know a man named Jeremy Berkowitz?” he asked.
“Again, Captain, why are you asking?”
“I’m asking because Berkowitz was murdered last night.”
I stared at him, and he stared at me.
Then he said, “Now, I’ll ask you again. Did you know Mr. Berkowitz?”
“I met him here yesterday.”
“And where were you last night?”
“I was on my cot, in my tent, trying to fall asleep.”
“You share that tent with anyone?”
“No.”
“Then there are no witnesses to corroborate your story?”
“Captain… uh, Wolkowitz,” I said, pronouncing his name with exaggerated care as though I were committing it to memory, “do you have some reason to suspect me of murdering Mr. Berkowitz?”
He paused, and that was his first serious mistake.
I stood up and pounded a fist on my desk. “I asked you a question, Captain! You’ve got two seconds to answer or I’ll press charges against you for refusing a lawful order.”
He backed up a bit. “Sir, I-”
“What’s your unit?” I barked.
“502nd Military Police Battalion. But, sir, I-”
“Are you gonna answer my damned question or do I need to pick up the phone and call your commanding officer?”
By this time he had backed up all the way to the wall. He obviously was not used to having his suspects, or whatever I was, explode in his face. “Sir, I-”
“You nothing, Captain! Obviously, you’ve already questioned my office staff?”
Like most people do when they get flustered, his eyes quickly darted toward the floor. Mistake number two.
I pounded the desk again and went down about three octaves and up about twenty decibels. “I can’t believe this! See what’s on my collar, Wolkowitz? You know why I’m here at Tuzla? The Secretary of the Army personally appointed me as an Article 32 investigating officer. And you come in here, without my permission, and interview my people?”
I was working up a nice head of steam, and it suddenly struck Captain Wolkowitz that I am a lawyer, and that means I’m genetically long-winded, and I could probably go on like this for hours. He made the wise decision.
“No, sir, you’re not a suspect,” he said, surrendering very nicely. “At least, not yet,” he added, trying to recover at least a bit of ground.
“Then why are you asking me these questions?”
“We found your name in Mr. Berkowitz’s notebook.”
“Berkowitz was a reporter who covers the military. Probably half the names on active duty were written in that book. How many other names were in there?”
“A lot… but only a few of them are assigned here.”
The golden rule of military tactics is that once you’ve taken the offensive, never hesitate or you’ll find yourself in full-scale retreat.
“How did he die?” I demanded.
“He… uh…”
“How did he die, Captain?!!”
“Sir, he was strangled.”
“How was he strangled?”
“With a garrote. His arteries were cut, but the actual cause of death was asphyxiation.”
“And where did this happen?”
“He was staying at the press quarters inside the information officer’s compound. He apparently got up in the middle of the night to go to the latrine. He was murdered right at the urinal.”
“With a garrote, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“Homemade or professional quality?”
“It looked store-bought. A metal wire attached to two wooden handles.”
“Who found him?”
“An AP reporter named Wolf. He had to catch a 5 A.M. flight. When he went into the latrine to clean up, he walked right into it.”
I studied the two of them for a moment. Then I said, “Sergeant, please step out of my office.”
He looked at his captain, who nodded for him to do as he was told. Then I stood up. I walked around the desk and leaned against it. The time had come to eliminate the barriers and restore relations with Captain Wolkowitz.
“You’ve already called the Washington Herald?” I asked in a much calmer, much friendlier tone.
“Yes, sir. They’re real unhappy. This isn’t going down well.”
I chuckled at that. “Their star military reporter murdered while standing at a pisser at an American military installation. I don’t blame them. That’s a pretty hard headline to write.”
Since poor Captain Wolkowitz was charged with the responsibility of maintaining law and order on this compound, he was having a bit of trouble seeing the humor in that.
I said, “Are you aware what Berkowitz was doing here?”
“The information officer told us he was working on a story about the bombing operation.”
“That’s only half of it. The other half was that he was working on a story about my investigation.”
Wolkowitz scratched his head, then said, “The Herald told us he filed a dispatch at about 2330 hours last night. That’s how we narrowed down the time of death. They didn’t say what it was about, though.”
This was where it was going to get tricky. As a lawyer, I’ve been trained to know it’s never a good idea to lie to or mislead the police. Lord knows, I’d counseled enough clients to always tell the truth, because the mere act of lying is a crime. At least it is under military law, which is a bit stingier than civilian law. The trick was that I had to appear forthcoming without actually being all that forthcoming.