by Brian Haig
I walked over and irritatingly peered across her shoulder at what she was doing. She kept writing. I coughed a few times; loud, obnoxious hacks. She bore down and wrote harder. I clumsily bumped into her chair. She rearranged it and got back to her writing.
I finally said, “Guess you don’t want to know what happened to Delbert. Why he isn’t with us anymore. Or how I got us a five-day extension.”
Then I turned and walked back into my office, closing the door behind me. I stared at my watch. Thirty-six seconds passed before she knocked. Curiosity, it seems, is a far more powerful incentive than anger.
I told her to come in and have a seat, then spent thirty minutes explaining what had really been going on around here while she thought she was innocently trying to get at the truth. Here and there she stopped me to ask a few questions, but mostly she just listened. That gorgeous face of hers traveled through a range of emotions from surprise to hostility, then indignation, then eventually full circle right back to curiosity again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this?” she asked.
I was deathly afraid she’d get around to asking that. I stared at my desktop.
“You bastard. You thought I was Tretorne’s stooge, didn’t you?”
“No, I never thought that,” I lied and winced. It didn’t even sound convincing to me. “I mean, I wasn’t sure,” I amended. “Besides, what does it matter? We have a green light now.”
This was an awful lot of disturbing news to learn in a few minutes, and she needed some time to digest it. She was mad as hell, at them and at me for not trusting her. But she was also a lawyer, and thus was trained to keep her emotions in tight rein.
“Why don’t we just hold a press conference and blow the whistle?” she finally asked.
The truth was, there was no good answer to that. If we were smart, that’s exactly what we’d do. I’d made a deal with the devil, and only a damn fool thinks you can do that and walk away smiling. Now that Morrow was part of the deal, she had a vote and she was having second thoughts. Maybe it was first thoughts. Hell, I guess I was the one having second thoughts.
I said, “Anyway, we always have that option. They screw with us, we bring the whole thing down around their ears.”
She nodded.
“I just don’t see where they can get a new angle on us,” I insisted. I said that to myself and to her.
She nodded again. “You might be right.”
“Aren’t you curious?” I added. “Don’t you want to know if Sanchez and his men did it?”
“I guess,” she said, sounding as if she thought she wanted to but really didn’t.
“Well then, that settles it,” I quickly announced before she could change her mind. Or I could change my mind.
I walked to the door and called Imelda. She came steaming in and I said, “We’ve got five more days. Get us a flight to Aviano for this afternoon. If they don’t have a flight scheduled, tell ’em I said make one. Also, call Lieutenant Colonel Smothers’s office and tell him Captain Morrow and I will be there in an hour.”
“Got it,” she said.
“One other thing,” I said very loudly. “Get someone in here to sweep this damned office for bugs. I don’t want any silly-looking pussies in duck-hunting vests listening in to my conversations.”
That reference to vests confused her a bit, but she nodded anyway. I figured that was as good a way as any to put Tretorne on notice that I’d be watching to be sure he was following his part of the bargain.
I was back in fine fettle, dishing out orders and shoving myself around. It felt good, too. The claustrophobia had cleared away. After packing our bags and loading up several boxes with documents, Morrow and I went to see Lieutenant Colonel Will Smothers, Sanchez’s battalion commander.
We went to his office, and this time he had his lawyer, the same Captain Smith who had filed a complaint against me. Smith started with a smug smile, till we exchanged some surly looks, the way a pair of antagonized lawyers do.
I looked at Smothers. “No need for him,” I said, pointing a digit in Smith’s direction.
Smith’s face showed his outraged surprise that we were about to start this all over again. He was just opening his mouth when Morrow, to my own vast surprise, said, “Get out of here, Smith. If he needs a lawyer, he’ll contact you.”
“I, uh, I…”
I made a menacing move in his direction. “You can no longer serve as his attorney. I’m reserving the right to cite you as part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. If you’re not gone in two seconds, I’ll toss you out that friggin’ window.”
Smith glanced at the window. He studied my face, with all its swells and bruises. He weighed his options. “I’m gonna call the jurisdictional judge again,” he threatened.
“Do that!” I barked. “Be sure to tell him I’ll also cite him as an accomplice in the obstruction charge if he makes a move against me.”
Smith peered at his client, who frankly was looking at him to see what to do. They were both looking to the wrong place. Smith finally figured that out and quickly got up and departed the office. He was smarter than I thought he was.
I was giving Smothers an only slightly milder version of my I’d-also-like-to-rip-your-guts-out look. “Party’s over, Colonel. Lie or mislead us once, and I’ll indict you as a co-conspirator to murder. Got it?”
He nodded.
“Okay, let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me about your role in this Operation Avenging Angel.”
He looked over at Morrow and she somehow managed to hide those sympathetic eyes of hers. In fact, she looked positively fierce.
“Okay,” he said. “My battalion, the First Battalion, we’re the avenging angels. Murphy told you about the operation, right? We’re the ones chosen for it. I’ve got one or two teams in every zone. We do the dirty work.”
“Why just your battalion?” Morrow asked.
“Because we obviously can’t afford any mistakes in this thing, and my teams are the most experienced.”
“And does secrecy have something to do with it?” I guessed.
“There’s that, too,” Smothers admitted. “The less people who know about this, the less chance of a leak.”
“Tell us about Sanchez,” I demanded.
He looked at me. He sort of shrugged. “You sensed it,” he admitted. “I probably made a mistake. Terry’s a good guy, a very likable guy, and he needed the job to get promoted. He did great work in the operations shop and I felt I owed him a chance. Unfortunately, it’s a different thing, you know, between being a staff officer and being in charge of a team.”
“But you gave him the job?” I asked or said or pronounced as a verdict.
“I did.” He glumly nodded. “I thought that if I gave him the strongest team in the battalion, things would work out. Persico’s probably the best warrant in all of Tenth Group. He’s been through some rough shit, and he knows what he’s doing. I thought he’d keep Terry from screwing up. His NCOs are pretty tough, but damned good, and Persico keeps ’em in line.”
“And Sanchez’s performance since then?”
“I guess I’d have to say that on good days, he’s fairly mediocre. Not for lack of trying, though. Christ, I wish some of my guys with more talent would put in half the energy.”
“So it’s a matter of talent?”
“Some guys just do it naturally. Terry has to work at it every minute. Guys like that run scared and his people smell it.”
Morrow said, “When Akhan’s team were killed, what happened?”
Smothers became very focused. His eyes narrowed and he started rubbing his lips. “That happened on the fourteenth. In the morning, I think. Sanchez called on the radio sometime around noon. All he said was Whiskey 66-that was Akhan’s call sign-was that the Whiskey 66 element was at black. You understand that?” he asked.
Morrow shook her head.
“It’s a color code we use to describe unit strengths. Green means the unit’s at one hundred per
cent. Red is fifty percent. Black is zero percent. Some of our KLA units have gotten shot up pretty bad, but we’ve never had a whole company, ninety-five men, go from green to black in only a few hours.”
“Did he explain what happened?” Morrow asked.
“Only that they were performing an operation. But that bothered us, because we hadn’t approved an operation for Akhan’s team.”
“According to the statement he gave us, they were attacking a police station in a town named Piluca,” I said.
“Well, that’s what he said. We had a problem with that, though. Piluca wasn’t on our approved target list.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “What approved target list?”
“We get a list of what to hit. It’s screened all the way up the line to the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. The idea is to avoid any kind of screwups.”
“And those are the missions you assign to your teams?”
“That’s right. No targets of opportunity are permitted in Avenging Angel. Everything’s run tight, you know?”
I guess I did know. If the Avenging Angels made a mistake, like the Air Force hitting the Chinese embassy or bombing a column of Kosovar refugees, the ensuing furor would blow the lid right off their secret war.
“Okay,” I said, “so Sanchez reported that his KLA company was wiped out, then what?”
“I ordered him to extricate.”
I said, “General Murphy told us he was ordered to stay in place.”
“That’s not right. We considered it, but I was worried.”
“What specifically worried you?” Morrow asked.
“Sanchez, I guess.”
“What, specifically, about Sanchez?”
“Every time one of our teams train a KLA company, you get this big brother mentality. Not just here; same thing happened in northern Iraq with the Kurds. Bosnia, too. They’re just so damned helpless and needy and eager. American soldiers can’t resist it.”
“So you were worried that Sanchez couldn’t control the situation?”
“Two of our other A-teams had their Kosovars get beat up pretty good, and we actually had to stand them down and let the Group psychiatrist and chaplain help them sort through it. A lot of guilt and other powerful emotions get unleashed. It would take a real strong leader to hold it together and… yeah, I guess I was worried that Terry couldn’t do it.”
I gave him a steady look. “The suicide and the attempted suicide, they weren’t members of those two other teams, were they?”
He nodded, a painful, jerking motion. “Yes, they were. Like I said, the emotions become very powerful.”
“But Sanchez and his team, they didn’t extricate?” I asked.
“No, not when I told them to. For two days, they kept reporting heavy Serb activity in their sector. Sanchez said he felt it was too risky to move south.”
“And how did you respond to that?”
“What could I do? He was the guy on the ground. I did ask the NSA station here to increase surveillance over Zone Three, so we could get a picture of what was happening.”
“And did they?” Morrow asked.
“They put a thermal up for an hour or two each day. The films showed Sanchez’s team in their base camp, but there were no signs of unusual Serb activity. Basically, though, we had to believe him.”
Now I understood why NSA used a thermal gatherer over Zone Three during those days. They weren’t looking for targets that required pictorial analysis. They were looking for human heat sources, like Serb soldiers in the woods.
I said, “So his team finally extricated four days later?”
“Right. But you had to figure it would’ve taken a day and a half, maybe two days, to make it out on foot. So there were only two days unaccounted for.”
“When they got back, did they report the ambush?”
“No,” Smothers said, and you could hear a note of anger in his voice. “We debrief every extricating team. They never mentioned it. They just insisted the area was crawling with Serbs, so it took them a while to make it out.”
I said, “Then three days later, Milosevic started holding his press conferences, and what did you do?”
“I went to General Murphy. I told him I thought Sanchez’s team might’ve done it. It was the same sector they were in. It was three days after Akhan’s unit was killed. It all fit.”
Morrow said, “Back to what happened to Akhan and his unit. Did Sanchez and his men clarify what occurred?”
“It was discussed during the debriefings.”
“And what did they say?” Morrow asked.
“They all said Akhan made the decision to attack the station himself. They couldn’t stop him. Zone Three was where most of Akhan’s men lived. The commander of Piluca’s police station was supposed to be a real cruel bastard, and he’d supposedly murdered or tortured some of their family members. It made sense. We’ve had other KLA units launch off on private vendettas.”
I said, “Have one of your people run a copy of the debriefing notes over to my office as soon as we’re done.”
“Okay.”
“Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth?” I asked.
He looked at me strangely. “No, not really,” he said. “None of us liked lying to you. But we believe in what we’re doing out here.”
Well, so much for truth and justice being the American way. I turned to Morrow and she indicated she had no more questions, either. I gave Smothers a long, solemn look. He stared back, clear-eyed, not the least bit bothered by the fact he’d been involved in a massive cover-up, or that he’d lied in an official investigation. This boy would get ahead, I thought to myself. He was a true believer.
We left him there and headed to the airfield, where a C-130 was already revved up and waiting.
Chapter 29
We pulled up to the marble entrance of the same Italian hotel on the hill, and my mouth watered. Morrow and I got side-by-side rooms and stowed our gear. My room had one of those cushy German featherbeds, which made me think God just might love me after all. It also had a minibar. A well-stocked minibar. My body hurt like hell and I stared at the row of tiny Dewar’s bottles. Dr. Drummond screamed at me to give that pain what it needed. I fought the temptation and went back downstairs to the lobby.
Imelda and two of her girls took rooms a floor below us and rented a full suite to use for our office. When Morrow and I got outside to take the van to the air base, Imelda and her assistants were still lugging computers and boxes of paper up the entry stairs to the elevator. Imelda was bellowing at them to move their asses, and the girls were giggling at her. They’d obviously figured out her secret. She really was a softie, like one of those dogs that barks a lot but don’t bite too hard.
It took fifteen minutes to get to the Air Force holding facility. The same pudgy Air Force major was there to meet and greet us. He was being real deferential and courteous, virtually fawning, I guess because he didn’t want to get any dishonorable mention in our report. I treated him coldly, and Morrow followed my lead. Let him sweat.
Morrow and I had spent a lot of time considering our next move. Our first inclination was to start the re-interrogation of the team with Sanchez. We needed one of the nine to break, and he was the one carrying the most baggage. All we needed was one. Like with all conspiracies, once that first man broke, there’d be a chain reaction. We’d pit them against one another, and threaten and make deals until we had the whole story, as well as a slew of witnesses to testify against one another.
But the more we talked about it, the more we persuaded ourselves that Sanchez probably wasn’t the right man. He’d obviously made some kind of pact with his troops. And for whatever went wrong out there, he was ultimately responsible, and therefore had the most to lose. It is a prosecutor’s maxim: Most to lose very often equals last to confess.
It was Morrow’s notion to bring in Persico first. I thought it was a real dumb idea. Well, at first, anyway, but the more I considered it, the better sense it made. I
n every organization, there’re two kinds of leaders. There’s the leader appointed by the system. That was Sanchez, the guy with a commission provided by the United States Senate and two silver bars on his collar. Then there’s the leader appointed by the men themselves. That was Persico, the guy with Silver and Bronze Stars on his chest. Get him to talk, and the rest would follow.
But there was another reason, too. At some point while in Kosovo, the formal chain of command in Sanchez’s team simply disintegrated. That’s what Imelda had detected in their statements. Quite possibly, there’d been a mutiny. We were sailing on instinct there, but based on our earlier interrogatories, there’d been no indication that Sanchez was in charge. There had to be a trigger for that. The team probably had doubts about Sanchez all along, but soldiers, especially experienced noncommissioned officers, generally adhere to the arrangements the Army makes. Unless, that is, some dramatic event comes along and persuades them otherwise.
Something had happened out there. Something powerful. I was guessing it occurred around the fourteenth, because that’s when the team began acting in odd and mysterious ways. That’s when Akhan’s company got wiped out. That’s when Sanchez got on the radio and claimed they couldn’t extricate. That’s when the chain of events began that led eventually to a narrow road between two hills where thirty-five men were slaughtered. It was just a guess, but I was pretty sure that was the day Persico took over command of that team.
Morrow and I positioned ourselves in the interview room and began arranging tables and chairs into a rough-and-tumble resemblance of a courtroom. Imelda showed up a few minutes later with both her girls. They began setting up a desktop computer and a court transcription device. Morrow and I had decided to formalize the atmosphere, to make it look as much like an actual courtroom as we could. It would get the witnesses thinking about what lay ahead.
We were finally ready and I sent Imelda to bring in the first witness. It took a few minutes, during which we all sat around nervously and waited.
Finally the door opened and Imelda came through, followed by Chief Persico. She formally announced him, as though she were a court bailiff. He casually, but not at all casually, looked around and studied the new setup. Again, I had the impression of a man checking the field of battle, trying to calculate his odds.