Secret sanction

Chapter 4

I had fourteen years in the Army-the first five in the infantry, then three years at law school, six months at the JAG School, then the rest practicing military law. I’d prosecuted and I’d defended, and I’d developed the opinion that the best place to begin a murder investigation is at the morgue. There’s something about a pale body lying on a cold slab that gets your attention. It reminds you of the solemnity of your purpose. Somewhere connected to that body are a family and friends, and they miss the spirit that once inhabited that flesh. The lawyer is their last and only hope for justice. The body can’t vocalize, but it cries out for justice, plainly and dramatically.

I’d told them back in Washington that my investigating team was going to visit the morgue on the outskirts of Belgrade where the bodies were stored, only this turned out to be not quite so simple as it sounded. The problem was that the bodies were in Serbia, and we were still dropping lots of large metal canisters filled with explosives on that country’s villages and cities. So there were a few understandable complications.

I met with two stiff-necked foreign service officers back in Washington who lectured me like I was some kind of idiotic novice in international affairs. Well, I am a novice, but I am also a lawyer, and a stubborn one, and I was not about to back off. This was a case that crossed international boundaries, and I really didn’t care if the Secretary of State herself had to get on a phone and plead with Bad Boy Billy Milosevic himself to get us in. He’d let Jesse Jackson in. So why not us?

Well, there were a lot of peevish faces, but I guess I knew a little bit more about this stuff than those two State Department jerks, because a UN diplomat asked Milosevic if we could come, and he did not even hesitate.

He said yes. Of course he said yes. I knew he was going to say yes. See, he knew that our word was infinitely more credible than his, and he wanted more than anything for my team to verify that there were in fact thirty-five slaughtered bodies in that morgue. Still, his assent had its worrisome aspects. If he was willing to let us come see the bodies, then he must’ve been pretty damned sure that our boys killed them.

We all got a good night’s rest, and at five in the morning on day two of our investigation, Captains Delbert and Morrow, myself, and a pathologist, who’d flown in from Frankfurt the night before, all climbed aboard a snazzy Blackhawk helicopter and began our flight. The pathologist was sort of an odd-looking duck with a misshapen head, pale, almost translucent skin, and these hyper-looking, bulgy eyes. Appearances aside, I’d been assured he was one of the best.

The flight took about three hours, and we had to land and refuel once. The guys who refueled us were Serbian soldiers, and I won’t say they seemed too happy to see us. I didn’t take any offense, though. After all, our airmen were at that moment pounding the bejesus out of some part of their country.

Two sedans with Serb military drivers awaited us at the Belgrade International Airport. No one said a word as we drove through the city, going straight to the morgue. It was not the fancy-type morgue like you so often see back in the United States. In fact, it was a pretty grim, ramshackle, dilapidated old building, and I have to admit that seemed fitting, because most of the inhabitants were past caring about their accommodations.

A Serbian doctor named Something-o-vich met us at the entry and escorted us through a series of dark and dirty hallways, down some stairs, and into a gloomy cellar. American morgues are normally so clean and sterile you really could eat off the floors, if you were inclined to do such a ghoulish thing. This morgue stunk of rotting cadavers and was filthy from the rafters down.

The basement was cold and dank and had the kind of dim hanging lamps that tall people bang their heads against. I, thankfully, am a nicely compact five foot ten, so I survived right nicely. Poor Delbert is about two inches above six feet and he walks like he’s on a parade ground, with a stiff rod jammed up his you-know-what, so he picked up some nasty lumps on his forehead.

We took a left at the end of the hallway, and you knew by the way our footsteps echoed that we’d just entered a very large room. The doctor reached over and flipped a switch. Ten long fluorescent bulbs flickered, and crackled and popped, then finally illuminated everything.

A lot of thought had gone into the arrangement that stretched before us. Thirty-five nude bodies were neatly arrayed in four long columns. Somebody had gone to the trouble of placing props behind the backs of the corpses, so that they all sat up, perfectly erect. It looked ghastly and made it impossible to ignore their faces, although there were a few who were missing faces, or only had parts of them. We all froze in our tracks and there was the sound of a few deep gasps.

A perfectly prone body can still be an impersonal object, but a body that sits up and stares at you, almost as if it has been resurrected-that’s damned impossible to ignore. The first of us to recover was Dr. Simon McAbee, our friendly pathologist, who rushed forward with his doctor’s bag and a savory gleam in his eyes. He began strolling around like a cavorting housewife in a grocery store meat selection, squeezing this one, prodding that one, trying to decide which was the choicest cut.

Delbert and Morrow fell in behind me as I began walking the columns, pausing at each body for only a few seconds, no longer than it took to determine what specific trauma caused the death. The bodies had been cleansed, which made it fairly easy to interpret the wounds. I couldn’t be absolutely certain in every case, but what I saw generally met my most dismal expectations.

Some of the corpses were horribly mangled, but it seemed every single one had been shot in the head. One corpse, though, had no head at all, just an ugly, hacked-on stump at the bottom of the neck. Some of the head entry wounds were from the back or the front, but most were from the side. The entry holes were small, about the size that would be made by a 5.56mm round, which just happens to be the size bullet fired by an M16 rifle, which just happens to be the standard-issue weapon for American troops. The exit holes were large. This, again, is characteristic of the M16 bullet, which tends to tumble once it strikes hard objects, like skulls and bone, collecting a lot of tissue as it speeds through the body, making an ever-widening path and a big, ghastly exit wound.

At least half the bodies were so seriously mangled, and the nature of the wounds so severe, that they had obviously been hit by mines. It was the kind of mine, though, that intrigued me. American troops are issued something called a claymore, which is an upright mine that sits above the surface, planted on a pair of tiny metal tripods. The great virtue of the claymore is that it is a directional mine. It has a rectangular, curved shape, and the explosives are packed into the concave hollow, while the outward half is packed with thousands of tiny pellets that are propelled forward with great force. It’s a highly favored weapon in ambushes. The mines are triggered by an electric pulse, and the technique of choice is to connect several of these nasty little things together with commo wire into what is called a daisy chain. That way, once the electric charge is triggered, all the mines appear to go off at once. The time it takes for the electric charge to travel the wire actually means the explosions are not precisely simultaneous-there’s a few milliseconds of lag-but, as soldiers are wont to say, it’s close enough for government work.

The half of the bodies that were badly mangled had lots of little pellet holes. Mysteriously, though, all of the wounds seemed to be somewhere in the back, which implied several possibilities, most of which were damned ugly.

After the first pass, Delbert, Morrow, and I gathered in a small knot in the back corner and whispered among ourselves. Dr. McAbee and Dr. Whatever-osovich continued to traipse around and pick at pieces of wounded flesh. The Serb was obviously a pathologist, and the two of them were rubbing chins and chatting amicably, just having a gay old time.

“What do you think?” I asked Delbert and Morrow, waiting to see who would answer first.

Morrow quickly said, “It’s sobering.”

“Very sobering,” Delbert quickly one-upped her.

And indeed it was sobering. Both Delbert and Morrow had been through morgues before, so these were certainly not the first corpses they’d seen. Still, it’s a very breathtaking thing to see thirty-five of them all at once. I had the advantage of having been to war once or twice, but I’ll admit that the sight of lots of dead bodies still taxes my soul in strange ways.

“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Delbert asked.

“No,” I grimly admitted. “We won’t know for sure till McAbee’s done, but I’d guess most of the damage was done with M16s and claymores. There was a machine gun or two involved as well, but I can’t even hazard a guess what kind.”

“Some of them were little more than boys,” Morrow said.

“Right.”

“A few were just sprouting pubic hair,” she continued, not as a matter of prurience, but because it exacerbated the seriousness of this. Killing grown men was one thing. Killing teenage boys took it to another level.

On my first sweep through, I had deliberately ignored the faces. I had focused only on the wounds, because I didn’t want my reason clouded by emotion. Now it was time to go back and look at each corpse anew; to think of them as human beings rather than as butchered slabs of meat filled with clues. Perhaps some of these corpses had done some very nasty things to the Albanians they were herding out of Kosovo; still, I had to remind myself that they were also human beings. Besides, at issue here was not what crimes some, or maybe all, of these men had committed, but what crimes might have been done to them. So I spent another twenty minutes wandering through and trying to order my ever-pliant conscience.

Dr. McAbee had collected a number of specimens and was now taking photographs of each corpse. He worked efficiently and professionally and completed his work even before I was done.

He finally walked over to me. “It doesn’t look good, Counselor.”

“I can see that.”

“Our host gave me a collection of projectiles removed from the corpses.”

“Did you personally remove any?”

“A few.”

“And?”

“The bullets are 5.56. The pellets appear to be claymore.”

“So all the wounds were made by American weapons?”

“With thirty-five bodies, it would take three X-ray machines and a team of three assistants a full week to prove that beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

“But is that your general impression?” I asked him.

His bulgy eyes fixed mine, and he seemed to sigh. “Every wound I saw appeared to come from an American weapon.”

“What about the head wounds?”

“Most were shot from a distance of less than two feet. These fools washed the bodies, but I still found some gunpowder samples in their hair.”

“And how would you guess that happened?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Someone walked through and made sure there were no survivors.”

“Nothing’s obvious,” I chided. “Be careful about assumptions.”

“Of course, you’re right,” he said, although we both knew that it still appeared obvious.

“Did you tell that Serb doctor to maintain these bodies until we’re done?” I asked him.

“I did. But he said he can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Milosevic has ordered a large state procession where the families of the dead are to be honored for their sacrifices. After the ceremony, the bodies are to be returned to their families for funerals.”

“Then the Serbs will create a vast problem for us and themselves.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“If I was the defense attorney for the accused, I would insist on equal right to examine the corpses.”

“Well, the corpses have now been examined by me.”

I gave him my best cross-examining look. “And could you tell me, Doctor, with complete certainty, exactly how many of these men were killed with American weapons?”

“We already went over that.”

“You’ll go over it on a witness stand, too. If the members of that A-team are charged with murder, how many counts do we charge them with? You have to list those things. Then you have to be able to prove that was exactly how many people they murdered.”

“Of course,” he sheepishly said. “I’m sorry. I’ve never handled a situation of this magnitude.”

“None of us have. But think this way from now on. What I want you to do is classify each corpse. I want to know how many died immediately, and how many were initially wounded, and then dispatched. Can you do that for me?”

He nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

“Good. Now, as the coroner of record, is there anything else you need from this place?”

“I’d love to have a couple of these bodies to carry back, so I can determine the exact circumstances of death, but that’s not going to be possible.”

“All right, the first thing you do when we get back is file an official request for just that. I’ll file one, too. We’ll inform Washington that this case could be jeopardized if we don’t have a few bodies.”