Secret sanction

Chapter 16

General Chuck Murphy looked profoundly pissed off, and I guess I didn’t blame him. Nobody likes to start their day inspecting a purple-faced corpse in a blood-soaked latrine, and it must have dawned on Chuck Murphy that his sterling career had just moved one notch closer to the ledge of oblivion. The Army expects its commanders to maintain law and order on their compounds. Dead, internationally renowned journalists littering up your latrines falls just a wee bit outside those parameters.

“Good morning, General,” I said, falling into the seat across from his desk.

“Major,” he replied, which I considered a notable response only insofar as he failed to wish me a good morning back.

“Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, sir. I’m sure you’re having a real busy day, but I have a few questions I really have to get answered.”

“My time is your time,” he said, glancing impatiently at his watch.

“Okay, here’s the thing. We’ve interviewed Sanchez and all his men. We’ve been through the operations logs. We’ve viewed the Serb corpses. I guess what I still don’t get is what Sanchez and his guys were doing inside Kosovo in the first place.”

“Haven’t we been through this already? It’s a classic military assistance action. We arm and train the Kosovars to fight their own battles.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Whose idea was what?” he asked in a very brittle tone.

“The whole operation. I mean, somebody somewhere had to say,‘Hey, I’ve got this great idea. We should use the Tenth Group to help the KLA.’ Every military operation has a godfather. Who was that guy?”

“I’ll be damned if I know, Drummond. These things usually just evolve. I’d guess this happened like that.”

“Who gave you the orders, General?”

“My orders were signed by General Partridge, the JSOC commander.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know much about these things. I would’ve thought you were working for the NATO commander in Brussels. I mean, isn’t he the guy in charge of Europe and this whole Kosovo thing?”

“He is, but Special Forces rarely work for theater commanders. We usually get our marching orders direct from Bragg. The word for it is ‘stovepipe.’ ”

“Really? Why?”

“Because of the special nature of our operations. Conventional force commanders aren’t expected to understand our unique capabilities, how to properly employ us. This isn’t unusual, Drummond. Check the record. They did it this same way in Mogadishu and Haiti.”

“So then where does General Partridge get his orders from?”

“From the Joint Chiefs.”

“Does he deal straight with the White House?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Just curiosity,” I lied. “I mean, I’m new to all this high-level stuff, so I’m trying to figure these things out.”

He gave me a hard, discerning look. “Has this got something to do with your investigation?”

“Well, yes, but only in sort of a roundabout way. See, Sanchez and his men are saying their ambush was an act of self-defense. You see the problem there? I mean, some folks might say that’s pretty convoluted logic. An ambush is a form of attack, right? I’m just trying to determine what constituted self-defense. To do that, I might have to interview the people who crafted this operation in the first place. You know, to find out their idea of what constitutes self-defense.”

“It wasn’t anybody at the White House, I can tell you that. General Partridge doesn’t work for anyone in the White House. No… let me rephrase that. He, of course, works for the Commander in Chief, who happens to be the President, but everything is channeled through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

“So maybe the idea for this operation originated with someone in the Pentagon, or maybe from General Partridge’s staff?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Do you have time for one more question?” I asked, since he kept staring at his watch to remind me how ridiculously busy he was.

“One more, Drummond. That’s it,” he said, shaking his head. “You might not believe this, but I’m actually a fairly busy man.”

“Oh no, I believe that, General. I’m just thankful every day that I’m not the guy in your shoes,” I said, and he looked at me with fire in his eyes, trying to figure what I meant by that. I continued: “So how often were Sanchez and his men required to give situation reports to your headquarters? I mean, you must have some kind of standard operating procedure that dictates that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Well, I just read the operations order for Sanchez’s operation. According to that, he was supposed to provide a situation report twice a day. Once at dawn and once at dusk.”

A quick snarl appeared on his lips, then disappeared almost as quickly. I’m sure he was thinking that if I already knew the answer, why was I wasting his time with the question? Old Chuck obviously didn’t like to play lawyer games. In a thoroughly irritated tone, he said, “Okay.”

“Well, according to the operations logs, Sanchez missed making his reports three times between the fourteenth and the eighteenth. What do you make of that?”

“Maybe he didn’t miss making his reports. Maybe the ops center forgot to log it in. I think we run a pretty tight show here, but the ops center is run by soldiers, and soldiers are not perfect.”

“Yessir, I sure understand that. But I imagine the reason all these teams have to report in twice a day is because they’re operating behind enemy lines. I mean, aren’t those reports really the only way you have to be sure they’re still alive? Wouldn’t some major alarm bells go off if they failed to report?”

“No, not necessarily,” the general said. “In most cases, I think the ops staff would wait before pushing the panic button.”

“Wait for what?”

“Say the team missed the morning report, they might wait until the evening report. Certainly, if a team missed making two sitreps in a row, then flags would go up.”

“And what would that mean? What would happen if a team stopped reporting?”

“We’d increase the aerial recon over their sector. If that didn’t get us anywhere, we might insert a recon team to see what we could discover. We know the locations of their base camps, so we’ve got a general footprint for a search.”

“But none of that happened when Sanchez’s team missed its reports?”

“No.”

“Should it have happened, General?”

He gave me a royally pissed-off look. “Look, the team still made it out okay, all right? No harm, no foul. We haven’t lost a team yet, so I guess we’re doing something right.”

Nobody likes being second-guessed, but General Chuck Murphy obviously liked it less than most people. That’s the problem with being told all your life that you’re something special. You might eventually start to believe it. That big jaw of his was now protruding like the prow of a battleship and his mood was very brackish. I could see I’d about worn out my welcome. Actually, that’s not true. I hadn’t really been welcome in the first place.

I looked at my watch. “Oops. Hey, sir, I really gotta run. I’m supposed to be taking another deposition.”

That wasn’t really true, either. I just couldn’t resist giving him the bum’s rush for a change. I left the way I came in and steered a wide path around that big, beefy sergeant major of his.

I hurried to the Operations Center, which was located in another of the ubiquitous wooden buildings, about five down from Murphy’s headquarters. The guard at the entrance spent about thirty seconds trying to tell me why I wasn’t allowed to enter this supersecret facility before I finally whipped out the nice little set of orders the Secretary of the Army had helpfully provided me. According to these orders, I could enter the White House situation room if I so desired. No kidding.

I followed a trail of stenciled signs that took me down a long hallway, then down a dimly lit stairway. In the basement there was another guard standing before a metal door, but fortunately he and the guard upstairs were in telepathic contact, so all I had to do was whip out my identification card, which was enough for him to confirm that I was, indeed, the exact same asshole with all-inclusive orders his buddy had just met upstairs.

The metal door was flung open, and I instantly entered the next century. Special Forces have almost unlimited budgets, and General Partridge’s boys had spared no expense when they equipped this ops center. A whole wall was covered with a massive electronic map of Kosovo. It was peppered with lots of tiny blinking dots, some red, some green, and some blue. There were three whole banks of Sun microstations manned by grim-looking men who hovered earnestly over their keyboards. Another wall was lined with high-tech communications consoles, where about ten communicators sat very alertly with special headphones on their ears. It looked like AT amp;T’s global nerve center, only all the workers in this room wore battle dress and natty little green berets. Well, everybody except me, of course.

I stood for a while and watched and listened to the bustling activity. Like nearly all the ops centers I’d been in, most of the business was conducted in low decibels. There was this constant, low hum of voices and computer keys being mashed and radio messages being received. Every now and again, somebody dashed across the floor, either carrying a message to some other part of the cell or coordinating some activity. A hulking monster wearing sergeant major’s stripes sat at a big wooden desk in the middle of the floor. Although there were a fair number of officers present, it was clear that this sergeant major was the big boss of this machine and its many moving parts.

After a while, he glanced over and saw me standing observantly in the corner. I apparently aroused his curiosity. He kept glancing over for the next five minutes, until he finally got up from his desk, went to the corner, fixed himself a fresh cup of coffee, then walked over. That’s when I noticed he’d fixed himself two cups of coffee. I also noticed his hands. They were so big and beefy that the coffee cups looked like a couple of thimbles.

His hands matched the rest of him. He was a big, rough-looking man who obviously had had his nose broken at least a few times. He had an enormous, ugly head that seemed to be connected directly to his shoulders, because his neck was the size of a tree stump. He had the standard Special Forces crew cut, and floppy ears that made him look sort of elephantine. A tall man, too, maybe six foot three, with broad, ponderous shoulders.

He squinted at my nametag and the JAG emblem on my collar, then broke into a wide grin. “You the same guy doing the investigation?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, quickly grabbing a coffee cup from his hand before he could decide he didn’t want to talk with me and wandered off in search of someone else to hand the coffee to. This made it too awkward for him to try to move on without making himself appear to be my personal errand boy.

His nametag read Williams, and I said, “I take it you’re the ops sergeant.”

“Yup. Welcome to my kingdom.”

“My compliments, Sergeant Major. Looks like a pretty tight ship.”

“We try. Gets a little kinky when you’re running U.S. teams, KLA teams, and trying to keep watch on the bad guys at the same time.”

“Thank God this ain’t a war, huh?”

“Say that again.” He chuckled. “If we’d fought this way in the Gulf War, the Iraqis would still be grilling hot dogs in Kuwait.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Christ, a little girl with one leg could fight a better war than this.”

“How many teams are there?”

“Right now, we’ve got nine U.S. teams inside Kosovo. Then there are sixteen KLA units.”

“You’ve got nine SF teams and another sixteen with the KLA?”

“No. There are nine KLA teams operatin’ with our guys and another seven KLA units without A-teams.”

“I didn’t know there were KLA units operating without Guardian Angels.”

“We call ’em GTs… uh, graduate teams.”

“Graduate teams?”

“Yeah. Every KLA unit that goes in starts with baby-sitters, till they’ve done three or four successful missions. Then we cut ’em loose. We still supply ’em, and a few have liaison cells, but they operate more or less independently.”

“They any good?” I asked.

He took my arm and ushered me over to the huge electronic map on the wall. He looked it over for a moment, then pointed toward a blue dot located in the northeastern corner of Kosovo.

“Red dots are Serbs, green dots are our guys, blue dots are KLA. That’s GT team seven there. One of the first teams we formed. Nearly every man had at least a tour in the old Yugoslav army. The commander was an infantry major.”

“They’re pretty deep inside,” I remarked.

“We try to keep the rookie teams as close to the Macedonian border as we can. That way, they get in over their head, it’s a short walk out.”

I stared up at the dot that represented team seven. “That a good team?”

“Very damn good.”

“What have you got them doing?”

“As we speak, they’re pinpointing targets for the flyboys. We issued ’em some laser designators. See that line right there?” He pointed at a string of blinking red dots that were aligned from the northeast to the southwest. “That’s the Serbs’ main supply route. About half the Serbs’ ammo and supplies come down that artery. Team seven’s got guys positioned all along it. They heat up the targets with the lasers every time we’ve got an F-16 that’s got a few extra bombs or missiles to unload.”

“Very impressive,” I said.

“Yeah, well, they’re the exception. Most of these KLA teams aren’t worth pissin’ on. Most haven’t done a damn thing since we put ’em in. You send ’em orders, and they call you back and complain that it’s too hard, or they say they’re doing it, but when you get the recce photos, you find out they didn’t do a damn thing. Waste of food and ammo.”

He kept studying my face as we talked. He had that perplexed look some people get when they’re trying to remember something.

I said, “So tell me, Sergeant Major, how well do you remember Akhan’s company?”

“Ah, a damned shame, that one,” he said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.

“A good unit?”

“Never really had a chance to find out. Great scores in training, but they got wiped out before they ever had a chance to strut their stuff.”

“Yeah, I heard they ran into a real butcher’s mart at that police station.”

“Yeah, a nasty business, that was,” he issued forth without the slightest hint of genuine remorse. Then the corners of his mouth twisted up, and his head canted to the side. “Hey, you ever been to Bragg?”

“Years ago. I was assigned there back when I was in the infantry.”

“Yeah, I knew I seen you before.”

“Five glorious years in the 82nd. Ooorah!” I said.

He lowered his voice. “Right, and I was Columbus’s first mate on the friggin’ Santa Maria. You don’t remember me, do ya?”

“Nope, I’m afraid I don’t.”

He winked. “’Course, you don’t. I didn’t recognize your name ’cause the outfit didn’t use names when we screened. We just gave you all numbers, so’s to make sure there was no favoritism or command influence. But I never forget a face.”

I looked at Williams and tried to place him. The voice was somehow disturbingly familiar, as were the eyes, but I couldn’t recall from where, and that worried me.

“Sorry, Sergeant Major, you’ve got the wrong guy. I never heard of the outfit.”

His smile broadened. “Remember the POW camp? Remember that big, surly asshole wearing a hood that kept kickin’ the crap outta you?”

This I remembered all too well. The outfit had a six-month-long test you had to pass in order to get in. About one in every twenty applicants managed to survive the ordeal. One of the passages the outfit expected all recruits to endure was two weeks in a POW camp that was about as brutally realistic as they could make it. For some reason, this huge interrogator who was working the hard sell developed a very nasty affection for me. He liked me so much, he made sure I got one-hour personal workouts with him every day. When he was done, I had two fractured ribs, a broken nose, and two missing teeth to remember him by.

“You were that prick?” I asked.

“Hey, no hard feelings.” He chuckled. “That was my job.”

“A job, huh? Well, you certainly seemed to enjoy it.”

That brought another chuckle. “Part of the job, too. We were supposed to make it look like we were having balls of fun, ’cause they figured that would scare the crap outta you guys.”

“It did,” I said very earnestly. “I dreamed about you for years.”

I didn’t mention that they were nightmares, but I was sure he got the point.

“Well, you were a tough little bastard. You shoulda broke and told me what I wanted to know. You’d of saved yourself a lot of agony. And it sure didn’t help, you being such a wiseass all the time. Did you know all those sessions were taped?”

“I guess I missed that. A guy gets a little preoccupied when he’s being bounced off walls and punched silly. You were very good at keeping my attention.”

“Yeah, well, there was one of those little tiny cameras in the corner ceiling. Every night, Colonel Tingle, the camp commandant, would review the tapes, and he’d get all over my ass for letting you mouth off at me that way. I told him after that first week you weren’t gonna break, but he kept scheduling you to come back.” He shook his head as though he were remembering some disastrous blind date. “You know, you being such a tough motherfucker, that’s what got you into the outfit. As I remember, you couldn’t shoot worth a shit.”

“Never could,” I admitted.

“So you left the outfit and became a lawyer?” he asked.

“Yeah. After five years, I decided I needed to preserve my mental health.”

“Hey, got that. I was there six years; probably one or two too many. That POW training thing was my final fling. They let me go after that.”

“You’ve been here ever since?”

“Yeah, it’s not a bad unit. Ain’t the outfit, but then, nothing else is.”

“I guess. Anyway, we’re both a little old for that stuff now.”

I walked over to the wall of communications consoles, and he followed me over.

“You’re in contact with all the teams inside the zone?”

“Yep.”

“I guess the teams have to make daily sitreps, don’t they?”

“Twice a day. One at first light, one at dusk. That’s why we have ten of these communications consoles. That way, we can handle the load and collect all the sitreps together.”

“Anybody ever miss?” I asked.

“Once in a blue moon. Not our guys, though. They never miss. It’s the KLA guys, they get sloppy sometimes.”

“What do you do when you don’t get a timely sitrep?”

“Try to initiate contact. We’ve never had to go beyond that, ’cause so far it’s always worked. If we still couldn’t get contact, we’d get a bird up immediately. And if that didn’t work, we’d get a recon team in there, right quick.”

“Why wouldn’t you just wait till the next sitrep time to see if they establish contact on their own?”

He looked at me like that was a spectacularly stupid question. “Come on, you know this shit. Those sitreps are their only lifeline. Miss even one and we start moving heaven and earth to find out what happened.”

“Were you on duty when Sanchez’s team was in the zone?”

“Part of the time, but I gotta tell you, Major, paesan to paesan, we’ve been told to watch what we say to you about that.”

I figured that Sergeant Major Williams and I had shared some pretty intimate times together. I mean, a certain amount of repartee develops between a beater and his beatee. So I pressed my luck.

“Who told you that?”

The smile had left his face, and he began shaking his head. “Can’t really say. But you better play this real smart. Don’t go actin’ like the same stubborn shit I remember. Might not have seemed like it, but that POW camp was just kid’s play. What’s goin’ down around here’s for keeps.”

Just at that moment a fella with a full bird on his collar, who looked like he just bit into a big, saucy lemon, walked over to join us. He glanced at me like I was the guy who had just deflowered his virginal daughter, then grabbed Williams by the sleeve.

“Excuse me, Sergeant Major, we’ve got another update to send to team four. Would you step over and join me?”

The colonel dragged Williams to a corner, then the colonel’s forefinger started doing a tap dance on Williams’s chest. I could see Williams’s feet shuffling, and I guessed he was getting his ears cleaned out pretty good. I can’t really say that bothered me all that much. I mean, the guy once spent two weeks beating the doo-doo out of me, and I don’t care what he said about it being just a job and all that. When someone spends about twenty hours turning you into pulp, you can tell whether he sees it as work or sport. Maybe that’s why he left the outfit after six years. Maybe the outfit sensed he was going over the edge. If they’d asked me at the time, I would’ve sworn he was so far over the edge that he’d hit the pitch-black bottom.

At any rate, the watchdogs were on to me, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any more help here. I retreated quietly and thought about Williams’s warning. There were lots of ways to interpret it. Maybe the word had been put out to stay away from me because I was investigating some of their brethren, and everybody wanted to make damn sure they did nothing to help put some of their own guys away. From a technically legal standpoint, that was a large-scale conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice. From a human standpoint, it was an understandable, and in some ways even admirable, fraternal response.

The hitch was that added warning about this being for keeps. I mean, at right about that moment, a big, bloated corpse was packed in a container of dry ice, on the back of a C-130, winging its way to Washington. I’d call that “for keeps.”

I reached down and fingered the. 38 caliber that rested in the holster on my hip. The time had come for me to actually get some ammunition for this thing. On the other hand, given my deplorable marksmanship skills, I’d probably stand a better chance if I just threw the damn pistol at anyone who was coming after me.