Secret sanction

Chapter 34

It was the last time I ever planned to show those guards my orders, to grin stupidly into the camera, and to wait for Miss Smith to open the door. Only it wasn’t Miss Smith who opened the door this time. It was a man, and he was much older than Miss Smith. I knew his real name, too. It was General Clapper.

We stood and looked at each other stupidly for a moment before he thrust out his hand. “Sean, how are you?”

“Pretty crappy,” I admitted.

Then he shook hands with Morrow and she admitted how she felt pretty crappy, too. That’s not the word she used, though. She said abysmal, or some variation of that, because she’s too much of a lady to admit she felt like shit.

Clapper then led us through the facility and back down the stairs to the conference room in the lead-lined basement. Someone had given him a passkey for the door, and he slid it through the little magnetic reader, then swung the door open and we all walked in.

The long conference room table had acquired an abundant audience. Tretorne was there, of course, and he was back to wearing that damned vest he seemed so fond of. Murphy was there, of course. So was his boss, General Clive Partridge, who had all four of those heavy little stars weighing down his shoulders. And so was the White House man who had briefed me before I came out here. He at least was wearing a nice conservative suit and was too modest to try to pretend that he was a field agent. His name was Parker, and he didn’t look happy to be here. None of them looked happy to be here. Hell, Morrow and I didn’t look happy to be here. It was just a great big room filled with unhappy people who were unhappy to see one another.

Morrow and I had made a promise, though, and we were keeping it. We’d worked around the clock the past three days, dissecting the evidence and testimonies, considering every legal angle and alternative, arguing back and forth, often wanting to scratch each other’s eyes out, until we built the packet we intended to present.

Clapper walked around the table and took the seat next to General Partridge. The table had been artfully arranged so that all them were seated on one side, and there were these two empty chairs positioned in the middle of the other side. These, obviously, were intended for Morrow and me. Well, I knew a little about arranging furniture to achieve a certain psychological effect, and I wasn’t about to feel the least bit threatened. We were way past the point where some silly little game was going to manipulate our sensibilities.

I led Morrow over and we both sat down. I glanced at her and she appeared as exhausted as I felt, but she also looked calm and unperturbed. After what we’d been through, the fact that a few of the most powerful men in our country’s national security establishment were seated across from us didn’t seem to bother her in the least.

We spent a few moments digging through our legal cases and withdrawing our findings. We had made only ten copies, each numbered and stamped with the words TOP SECRET: SPECAT. Morrow, being by some order of magnitude the lowest-ranking personage in the room, got up and placed a copy in front of each of the men on the other side of the table.

I said, “Gentlemen, these are our findings. If you’d like, we can pause for twenty minutes to give you time to read them. Otherwise, Captain Morrow will orally present our conclusions.”

General Partridge, being the highest-ranking man across the table, and also the man who ultimately had to decide whether to convene a court-martial or not, made the call.

“Tell us what you found.”

Morrow looked at me, and I nodded for her to proceed.

She cleared her throat once or twice and her eyes swept across the line of faces on the other side of the table. Then she began.

“On the morning of 18 June, at approximately 0800 hours, Captain Sanchez’s A-team did willfully execute an ambush that resulted in the deaths of…”

She spoke for nearly twenty minutes. I was real proud of her. She was organized, succinct, and never strayed an inch from the facts, just like a Harvard-trained lawyer’s supposed to do. She explained everything that occurred, from the assumed betrayal and massacre of Akhan’s company, through the attempted obstruction of justice. The men across the table sat stone-faced and listened without interrupting even once.

I watched their faces and tried to imagine what they were thinking, what they felt, how they were reacting to the story Morrow was so skillfully unraveling. It had not been an easy case to break. Winston Churchill once described the country of Russia as “an enigma, inside a mystery, wrapped inside a puzzle.” What we had been up against was a cornucopia of conspiracies, a convoluted jumble of conspiracies wrapped inside more conspiracies. It was too many layers of collusion and connivance, starting with Persico trying to hide the fact that Perrite had murdered the survivors, to the team making a deal with Sanchez to cover one another’s misdeeds, to the men across the table attempting to subvert our efforts to find out what had really happened. It was all such a hopeless mixture of motives and compulsions that I still wasn’t convinced I had it all sorted out.

Morrow finally finished. There was a moment of fretful silence.

General Partridge reached into his pocket, took out a pack of cigarettes, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a pack of Camels, unfiltered. He extracted one, tapped it gently on his palm a few times, then lit it. Simply amazing. General Murphy got up and went over to a side table, opened a drawer, and fetched a glass ashtray for his boss. Smoking was strictly prohibited in all military and government facilities, but nobody in that room had the balls to remind the meanest, snarliest four-star general in the whole United States Army that this rule applied to him, too. I sure as hell didn’t.

Partridge then stared at me. “So what do you recommend, Major? What do I charge, and who do I charge?”

I said, “Why don’t we deal with the most serious charge first? The charge of murder.”

“Go on,” he said, his eyes watching me through a veil of smoke.

In my most lawyerly tone, I began. “The issue of murder becomes very complicated, mainly because when we began this investigation we were deliberately misled into believing that the role of our teams in Kosovo was essentially that of noncombatants, except in instances of self-defense. Only later did we learn of Operation Avenging Angel, and that Sanchez’s team was actually in Kosovo for the express purpose of performing offensive combat operations. Since Sanchez’s team had the legal authority to perform offensive operations, we concluded that the ambush conducted on the eighteenth of June was a tolerable act. It follows that the ambush was not an act of mass murder. It was, however, a willful disobedience of orders, since Colonel Smothers ordered the team to extricate, and since the orders the team were operating under strictly disallowed attacks on targets of opportunity.”

Partridge said, “Noted.” Nothing else, just that.

I continued. “Sergeant Perrite’s initial attack on the remaining survivors was not murder, either. It was a case of willful disobedience of his orders. Also, he abandoned his post in combat, which you’re aware is an added offense. He crossed the line from those infractions to murder when he purposely dispatched the wounded Serbs. He committed multiple acts of first-degree murder and one act of mutilating a corpse. Exactly how many murders he committed is impossible to ascertain. We have included copies of the coroner’s findings in your packet. A minimum of three. As many as ten.”

“Noted,” Partridge said again.

I said, “The act of mutiny is again a matter of extraordinary complexity. The Uniform Code of Military Justice defines mutiny as a deliberate and organized attempt to usurp the authority of the designated leaders of the unit. Over the centuries, there have been many test cases involving multiple variations of mutiny. Captain Morrow and I did as much research as our limited time and resources permitted. We will not bore you with the details, but we found no case in military law that precisely mirrors what happened inside Captain Sanchez’s unit. More able or experienced jurists might argue with our finding; however, our considered judgment is that Captain Terry Sanchez willfully abrogated his responsibility to lead the unit, and that Chief Michael Persico took the commendable step of performing his duties. There seems a strong possibility that had Sanchez not voluntarily relinquished his leadership, there would have been a mutiny, but Sanchez’s own passiveness preempted this offense.”

Partridge flicked an ash in the ashtray. “Noted.”

I said, “There are a host of lesser offenses, which are described and dealt with in your packet, but there are only two additional serious offenses left to be considered.”

“And what are those?” Partridge grunted.

“Conspiracy to obstruct justice, and perjury.”

“Okay,” Partridge said. “How do you two lawyers wanta deal with those?”

“On these two charges we confront the most serious complications. The team’s conspiracy passed through many evolutions, beginning with the joint agreement to make false reports to Colonel Smothers, to their calculated failure to report the ambush, to their willful misleading of Colonel Smothers’s debriefing officer. But then the United States Army and the government of the United States became party to the conspiracy. The interests of the government to protect the cover of a secret war corresponded with the team’s need to cover their crimes, and an overt bargain was reached.”

“Noted,” he said.

I drew in a heavy breath. “General, were you party to or knowledgeable of this agreement?”

“I was,” he frankly confessed.

I said, “Then it is your duty to disqualify yourself from this case. You must cede your authority to decide on our recommendations.”

I expected Partridge to leap across the table and rip out my throat when I said that. Morrow and I had discussed this issue for many hours. We guessed that Partridge was a co-conspirator, making him as much a criminal as any man in Sanchez’s team. He could no longer pass judgment on their crimes. Nor could any of the other men seated on the far side of the table. For that matter, it seemed entirely likely that the entire chain of command above Terry Sanchez, possibly up to and including the Commander in Chief himself, was implicated in the crimes we’d uncovered. Quite possibly, no one in the existing chain of military command could decide on this case. A mass recusal was in order. It made for an interesting precedent, Morrow and I had decided during one of our more academic interludes.

Partridge merely smiled. His Camel pack was lying on the table and he picked it up and carefully placed it in his pocket.

He said, “Okay, Counselor, you done? You said all you wanta say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re right, Drummond. In front of these witnesses, I hereby relinquish my responsibility for judging your recommendations. You’ve done a great job, son. You’ve shown real courage and character and intelligence. Your father would be proud of you. Hell, I’m proud of you.”

I said, “Thank you, General. I’ll be sure to tell my father when I see him next.”

This time he smiled when he said, “I told you before, Drummond, don’t blow smoke up my ass.”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Now, it’s time for a little more off-the-record guidance. You ready to listen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many counts of murder you recommending?”

“Maybe ten counts, sir. But only one man to be indicted.”

“So, only one man. That’s this Sergeant First Class Perrite. Is that right?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Then aside from this Perrite, none of the rest of them men in that team are guilty of any serious offenses. I mean, we could prosecute Sanchez for gross dereliction of duty, but what would that prove, huh? He’s crazy as a loon already. And we could hit some of the others for various misjudgments, but then we’d look like a bunch of niggling, vindictive pricks, wouldn’t we? So all that leaves is all these conspiracy charges, and if you’re gonna make one charge of conspiracy to obstruct or perjure, or whatever the hell, well, then you’re gonna have to make hundreds of charges that go in every which direction, all the way to the moon. I got all that straight, Counselor?”

“Yes, General. I’d say you have the whole picture.”

He leaned back in his chair. “And Tretorne here, and Murphy, they told you that if you wanted to go public with this thing, then we won’t stop you. That right also?”

“That was the deal, General.”

He nodded. “Well, a deal’s a deal, son. So it’s up to you to decide.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He chuckled. It was a humorless chuckle. “Don’t thank me, Drummond. God, don’t thank me, boy. I just put the biggest heap of shit on your plate you ever smelled. You thought about what’s gonna happen if you go public?”

“I believe I have, General. I think it will incite a considerable scandal.”

He sort of chuckled at that, too, only this chuckle was sort of like the way parents do when their three-year-olds say something cute. Not something worldly or intelligent, just cute.

“Hell, Drummond, if that was the worst of it, none of us woulda got in your way in the first place. Scandals come and scandals go. A few souls go to jail or spend a fortune paying for lawyers, but these days even that ain’t all bad. If their scandal’s big enough, they write a book or get some movie rights before they’re even outta jail. Then they buy themselves a nice place in Malibu or Hilton Head and spend the rest of their lives being shuttled around with first-class seats and getting paid twenty thousand a shot on the speaking circuit. People just can’t get enough of hearing these pricks babble on about their sins. Don’t think there’s a one of us on this side of the table who’s afraid of some pissant scandal.”

He chuckled some more as he turned to the White House man. “Hey, Parker, how many scandals you had to handle for our beloved Commander in Chief?”

Parker chuckled with him. “I don’t wish to sound disrespectful, General, but the man attracts scandals like a wool suit attracts lint. Every time he closes a door in the White House, we all wince and wonder what he’s up to next.”

Partridge turned back and faced me. “See, son, don’t think Tretorne or Murphy or I did this ’cause we’re afraid of some scandal. You been through any the camps while you were here?”

“We have.”

He nodded his approval. “Good for you. Right now we got nearly one and a half million Kosovars in our camps. One and a half million of these poor bastards whose only hope is us. You go public, this whole operation to get them back their homeland’s gonna fall apart. This thing’s hanging together on a thin thread anyway. The Russians are accusing us of genocide. Our NATO allies hate us for making ’em do this. We shamed most of ’em into it. They find out we’re running a secret ground war, they’ll pull the plug faster than you can spit. The Italians won’t let us fly off their soil anymore. The Brits might hang in, but there’ll be nothing to hang on to. Think Congress will let us hang in? I don’t. And I’m the one who’s spent a lot a time up there dealing with those guys. Hell, it might even cause NATO to fall apart. Don’t think the French won’t make a run at it.”

I sat and listened to every word.

“It’s up to you, Drummond. Do what you think is right. Milosevic’s probably got tens of thousands of murderers and rapists and every other assortment of criminal on his rolls. Most of ’em will never see the inside of a courtroom. But you go ahead and pit this one soldier, this Sergeant Perrite, you pit his fate against the fate of one and a half million Kosovars. You decide if going public’s worth giving Milosevic a victory in this thing. You decide if you’re willing to destroy the lives of millions of people so we can get a chance to punish one man for killing some bastards who probably deserved to die anyway. Think about how just it would be for those millions of people to lose their country over some joker named the Hammer.”

He got up and walked out of the room without saying another word. Until this moment, Morrow and I had enjoyed our worm’s-eye view of the world, thinking we were on a mighty crusade to right a terrible wrong. Now we were glued to our seats, too stunned to move. The other men stared at us.

I suddenly felt a tidal wave in my stomach. I quickly blurted out, “If you gentlemen will please excuse us, Captain Morrow and I need some time together.”

Before we left, I turned and looked at General Murphy. He could still look me dead in the eye, and without the slightest hint of guilt or shame. He didn’t smile, though. I’ll give him credit for that. He didn’t rub it in.

He and Tretorne had sucked me in one more time. I really had made a bargain with the devil.