Secret sanction sd-1

by Brian Haig

  “What happened was Persico took me off in the woods. He told me what the recon team found in Piluca. He spoke real quiet, but he was accusing me. You know what I mean? He was staring at me like I was some kind of monster. Like it was my fault.”

  He paused for a moment, but the leg rubbing continued.

  “They all loved Akhan, you know? Something about him. I don’t know what it was, but they worshipped him. I think they believed I deliberately set him up to die. Like maybe I was jealous. That’s stupid, though, you know? He wasn’t even a soldier. Besides, I liked him, too. I wouldn’t have done that to him. When we came back out of the woods, they were all looking at me that way. They started avoiding me.”

  Morrow said, “But there was no overt mutiny?”

  “Not like you might see on a ship maybe, not that way, but it was a mutiny. Yeah, it was a mutiny. I knew they weren’t going to do what I said anymore. You know what I mean, right? They weren’t gonna let me lead them. We were in the middle of enemy territory, and there wasn’t anything I could do. You see that, right?”

  Morrow said, “Terry, at 1200 hours you reported to Colonel Smothers that Akhan’s team was black. He then directed you to begin extraction. At the 1800 sitrep that night, you reported that there was too much Serb activity in your vicinity to safely extricate your team. You reported the same thing at the 0600 sitrep the next morning, and the 1800 sitrep that evening. Why did you report that?”

  The spectacle of Lisa Morrow soothingly taking him through this journey, and of Terry Sanchez mentally crumbling, had so thoroughly captivated my attention that it actually took me a moment to realize the timely brilliance of her question. If it had in fact been a mutiny, why had Sanchez conspired in the effort to keep the team in Kosovo? Had someone held a gun to his head?

  “Persico told me to.”

  “I’m sorry, Terry, I don’t understand. Chief Persico told you to say what?”

  His leg stroking got a little more frenetic. “Yeah.”

  “No, Terry, what did Chief Persico instruct you to report?”

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, appearing confused. “He told me to buy us some time.”

  “Why, Terry? Time for what?”

  “Time to set it up. Time to do it.”

  “But you were ordered to extract. What more was there to do?”

  “Well, you know,” he said, still avoiding her eyes.

  “No, Terry, I don’t know. Please tell me.”

  “Get Pajocovic.”

  “Pajocovic? Wasn’t he the station commander in Piluca?”

  He glanced up at her, as though she was already supposed to know this. Unless I missed my guess, Terry Sanchez’s mind was getting very, very mushy.

  “Yeah,” he said with an expression of vast impatience. “Who else do you think we ambushed?”

  Suddenly, an avalanche of missing pieces came tumbling into place. The column they’d ambushed wasn’t picked for its size, it was picked to punish the man who killed Akhan and put his head on a stake.

  Morrow never stuttered or blinked an eye. “So you and Chief Persico kept the team in the base camp while Perrite and Machusco went back out and searched for this man Pajocovic? Is that what happened?”

  “That’s right. Only I sent Moore out, too. I came up with the idea that the only way to make this halfway right was to do what Akhan set out to do in the first place. The only problem was that Pajocovic and his unit had left Piluca. We had no idea where they went. So I sent Brian Moore back out with Perrite and Machusco. They snuck into a few local villages and asked around. Pajocovic was known by everyone in our zone. The Hammer, everybody called him. Moore kept asking people if they knew where the Hammer was. Finally, some old man told him that he was with his unit in a little village named Ishatar. That was how Pajocovic operated. He’d sometimes go to local villages, spending a day or so terrorizing the citizens, then he’d go back to his station in Piluca. That’s when I decided what we were going to do.”

  “I’m sorry, Terry. You said I decided. Do you mean Chief Persico decided, or you both decided?”

  “No. I mean I decided. Persico came to me, and I said this was what we were going to do.”

  “I see,” Morrow said.

  “Right, so we moved off and I set up an ambush on the road between Piluca and Ishatar. We moved in the night before, around midnight. That gave us plenty of time to set up. Then I waited and-”

  “Terry,” she interrupted him. He stopped and blinked a few times.

  She said, “Would you like a glass of water?”

  He was still rubbing his legs. “Uh… yeah, sure. Please.”

  Morrow filled a tumbler, then walked around the table and handed it to him. I thought she’d just made a major blunder, interrupting his flow at the crucial moment. She then went and got a chair and moved it to a position directly in front of him. She sat down and leaned forward so their faces were nearly together. He looked into her eyes again.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  She said, “Terry, you have nothing to prove to us. We’re just trying to get at the truth. God knows, we’re not judging you. We’re lawyers. We’ve never been through what you went through.”

  She reached out and laid a hand on his hand. “Just tell us the truth, okay?”

  He kept staring into her eyes, the way a small, frightened child looks at his mother. “Okay,” he said.

  “Who was making all these decisions, Terry? It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No,” he said, “it was Persico and Perrite.”

  “And what were you doing?”

  “I did whatever they said to do.”

  “Did you try to stop them? Or did you encourage them?”

  This actually was a very crucial question because it went to the heart of who bore legal responsibility for the murder of the Serbs. I think Sanchez was past caring about the legal niceties, though. His mind was trapped in a desperate effort to construct a plausible alibi it could sell to itself. His mind was swimming in shame and scrambling for some internal clemency. I think in a strange, remorseful way, he wished he had ordered the ambush, because that might have afforded him some residue of honor.

  “I let them do what they wanted to do,” he finally mumbled.

  “What happened at the ambush?”

  “Well, there was a lot of traffic on the road. We stayed there until nearly eight. Perrite was off on the flank, between us and Ishatar. He had night-vision goggles, you know? He was watching for the vehicles from Piluca. Pajocovic’s vehicles had his station’s name marked on the side, and it was written in Serb, and Brian Moore had written out the words on a piece of paper for Perrite so he’d recognize the right column.”

  “Then what happened?” she asked, still with her hand on top of his.

  “Around eight, he gave Persico the signal they were coming. Persico was controlling the fires and he waited till the lead vehicle got right over the two antitank mines planted in the road. The explosion sent this big truck catapulting in the air. I remember watching it flip, end over end, like a little Tonka toy.” His hands fluttered through the air to show us how the truck flipped. “It was really a sight, you know? Then we opened up. It lasted only seven or eight minutes, then we left.”

  Morrow got up and walked back to her seat at the table beside me. Nobody said anything for a moment. I thought about everything he’d said. Everything made sense now. Well, maybe not everything.

  I said, “Terry.”

  He looked at me. I tried to sound as gentle and comforting as Morrow had been.

  “Someone went through after the ambush was over and shot the Serbs in the head. Was that you?”

  He looked at me in shock.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “I swear.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “None of us did. I was shooting, just like everyone else. But as soon as Persico shot off the flare to
order us to cease fire, we all stopped. Then we all left and started running for the rally point, a mile or so behind the ambush site.”

  I said, “And were there still some Serb survivors?”

  “Yeah. I never lied about that, you know? There were still a few down there firing back at us.”

  I was confused. This made no sense. If there were still survivors firing their weapons when the whole team was headed for the rally point, then who shot them in the head? We all grew quiet. I stared around at the walls for about a minute and tried to think what else to ask.

  Imelda suddenly lifted herself out of her chair and approached Morrow and me. She got to the edge of the table, then leaned toward us as though we were judges and she was a lawyer seeking conference in a courtroom.

  She whispered, “Ask him how long the Serbs was still shooting. Just ask him that.”

  Then she returned to her seat. I looked quizzically at Morrow, and she stared back at me.

  I said, “Terry, can you remember how long you heard the Serbs still shooting, after you and the rest of the team were headed for the rally point?”

  He rested his chin on his hand and placed the elbow on his knee, then stared down at the floor. He might’ve been Rodin’s Thinker, only there was no purity of contemplation, only anguish on this man’s face.

  “A while,” he finally said.

  “How long a while?” I asked, finally realizing what Imelda might have figured out.

  He rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know, maybe two minutes. Then there was this pause, then we could hear it off in the distance again. But we were getting farther away, and the terrain was hilly, and it sounded like little pops echoing through the hills. Might not even have been shooting, you know?”

  “Assume it was. Why do you think they were still firing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess maybe because it was an ambush, and we were pretty well hidden in our positions. Maybe they thought we were still there.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Morrow said, “Terry, now there’re only a few more questions left. How are you doing?”

  “All right,” he said, but he looked terrifically relieved to know this was almost over. He’d gone back to that odd leg-rubbing motion.

  “When you all got back to Macedonia and were debriefed, why did you decide to lie?”

  He suddenly looked pathetically uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that he didn’t seem willing to answer.

  That’s when I knew. I said, “Terry, did you make a deal with your team out there?”

  He kept staring at the floor and was rubbing his hands on his legs a little more frantically, and I finally figured out why he was doing that. His conscience was impelling the motion. He was trying to rub the guilt off his hands, or erase it from his soul.

  “Terry, please answer. Did you make a deal with your team?”

  He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “What?” I said.

  “Yes, we made a deal.”

  I said, “Is that why you went along with the ambush, Terry? Is that why you bought them the time with Smothers? You wanted them to do that ambush, didn’t you? You knew it was a violation of orders, that if they killed Pajocovic and his men they’d be facing court-martial when you all made it back. You knew that if they did that, they would have as much to hide as you? You knew, then, that the team would cover for you, because they needed you to cover for them.”

  He kept staring at the floor, and that was an answer in itself. I looked at Morrow, and she stared back at me. There was nothing more to be gained by talking with Terry Sanchez. We now knew everything he knew. We knew everything, except the most crucial thing. Who killed the last of the Serbs?

  Chapter 32

  After Imelda escorted Sanchez back to his cell, we all desperately needed to take the edge off. I ordered everyone to take a break. Imelda and her ladies went off in search of a coffee machine. I asked Imelda to notify the Air Force warden that I wanted to see him. And I asked her to bring back two cups of coffee, one for Morrow and one for me.

  Morrow and I were a little dazed. Most trials don’t have all the pathos and theatrics and emotional hysterics that are depicted in all those TV and movie courtroom battles. The truth is, what happens in the courtroom is rarely a battle; it is far more like watching water become ice. Most trials are as well-orchestrated as a Kabuki dance. They bore you almost to death. A smart lawyer knows to always get a good night’s sleep before a court date, because of the stifling somnolence and the fact that judges can get pretty cranky when you nod off in their court. That is, if the judge is awake to catch you. Everything’s tightly scripted, because the last thing any lawyer wants is to have his witnesses up there freewheeling it. While a little spontaneity might make for a more interesting trial, lawyers aren’t looking to be interested. They’re looking to win. Besides, even most of the uncoached folks who climb up onto a witness stand aren’t real interesting, because most folks just aren’t. In fact, they’re less interesting than they might normally be because the lawyers and the judge are making them speak factually, devoid of the lively opinions and exaggerations that lend a little spice and spunk to ordinary conversation. About everything that needs to be sorted out gets sorted out long before the case gets to court, so there are rarely any surprises.

  Add to that, one of the rules of being a lawyer is to never, ever utter a single-syllable word if a more stuffy, five-syllable word can suffice. And displays of emotion are anathema, something that’s cleaved out of you by the second year of law school, or else you’re not allowed to proceed. I mean, just think about how many really interesting lawyers you ever met in your life. Don’t think it improves when you put two or more together in a room.

  That was the world Morrow and I inhabited from day to day. A world of few surprises, sparse drama, a tedious world where your emotions are almost going in reverse. We were both a little startled and disoriented. We felt like someone who had spent their whole life riding a tricycle on backcountry roads, then suddenly got thrust behind the wheel of a twelve-cylinder Maserati on an L.A. freeway.

  It’s one thing to have suspicions about what happened out there. It’s another thing altogether to have a witness flesh it out for you, firsthand, in full-blown emotional Technicolor. Particularly a witness who’s afflicted with gangrene of the soul. There’s a stench to gangrene, and it gets into your mental nostrils and lingers there a while. We both sat quietly at the table for a few minutes. Then Morrow pulled out her trusty pad of yellow legal paper and began making notes.

  I watched her write for a few moments, then said, “About that Pudley thing this morning, I’m sorry.”

  She giggled a little, but it didn’t sound like her heart was in it.

  I added, “I’m also sorry about last night. I drank too much. I didn’t do anything… uh, you know… like, anything too forward when we got to my bedroom, did I?”

  What I hoped she’d say was, well, yes, actually you did. A very naughty thing, too, and you did it four or five times, you animal, but the truth is, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I sure hope you do it again.

  Instead, she said, “Don’t worry. You were snoring before you hit the bed.”

  I said, “Yeah. My ribs were hurting like hell.”

  “It wasn’t your ribs,” she said, still writing.

  “Yeah it was.”

  “It was your conscience.”

  “No it wasn’t,” I lied. “It was my ribs. These ones,” I said, pointing at my side.

  “You’re not as absolute as you like to pretend,” she said, still jotting notes. “You like these men. They’re just like you and that bothers you. Admit it.”

  I thought about that a moment. I’m not the deep, introspective, sensitive type. Every attempt I ever made to fathom my own psyche, I just ended up like one of those rats lost in a maze of twisted turns and dead alleys. But okay, so they were a little like me. Maybe a lot like me. The difference was, I’d never mutin
ied against my senior officers, I’d never let my troops do something I could later blackmail them for, I’d never cut deals with my troops, and I’d never murdered a bunch of wounded men. Those, to me, were fairly gaping distinctions.

  She put down her pen and turned to me. “You know, you’re the right man to head this investigation, but you’re also the wrong man. You’ve shared some experiences with them. No ordinary lawyer, like me, could ever have hoped to comprehend what happened out there. For the same reason, though, you can’t look at them impartially.”

  I stared back at her. This sounded a little too much like psychoanalysis to me. That was Morrow’s problem. The reason her eyes were so damned sympathetic-looking was because she was so damned sympathetic, and she was probing here for a fresh customer.

  I said, “Was that why you wore that dress last night?”

  “What?”

  “That was it, wasn’t it?” I said. “The skimpy dress, that sexy nectar you rubbed on. You thought I needed to get my mind off it. You thought I needed to be saved.”

  She blushed ever so lightly. “Well, didn’t you? The way you were drinking? Did you really think I didn’t know you’d put down a couple before I even got there? Your breath reeked.”

  “My ribs hurt,” I said.

  “Your ribs, my ass,” she said. “You should see your face when these men are testifying. You’re completely absorbed in it. This is too personal for you.”

  Fortunately, Imelda and her ladies walked back in at that moment, because my lips were just parting, and I wasn’t the least bit sure even I wanted to hear what I was about to say. Imelda approached our table with two cups of steaming java. Mine had been prepared just the way I liked it, with just enough coffee to legitimize my addictions for sugar and cream.

  I grabbed Imelda’s sleeve before she could return to her seat. “Hey, Imelda,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “You ever hear of a Pudley?”

  She sort of snorted once or twice. “Hell, who ain’t never heard of Pudleys. Why? You a Pudley?”