Secret Sanction
Authors: Brian Haig
The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations and public figures are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are totally imaginary.
Copyright © 2001 by Brian Haig
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc., Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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First eBook Edition: July 2001
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2766-9
Contents
For Lisa, my love also Brian, Patrick, Donnie, and Annie
S
pecial thanks to Linda Janklow, who gave me this chance, and Luke Janklow, who gives the words “agent” and “friend” the highest connotations. And Chuck Wardell and Pete Kinney, two great former soldiers who were the inspiration for Sean Drummond. Also special thanks to Rick Horgan, the editor who struggled to wring out all my bad jokes and mushy ideas. Those that survived are not Rick’s fault; they are reflections of my own literary shortcomings and bad taste. Finally, thanks to all the wonderful people at Warner Books, especially Mari Okuda and Roland Ottewell, who did the painful but, in my case, very necessary task of making this book readable.
But my greatest thanks goes to the men and women of the United States Army and the allies who serve beside them. They are out there upholding our most laudable ideals.
F
ort Bragg in August is so hellish, you can smell the sulfur in the air. Actually, though, it’s not sulfur, it’s 98 percent humidity, mixed with North Carolina dust, mixed with the raunchy bouquet of about thirty thousand men and women who spend half their lives scurrying about in the woods. Without showers.
The moment I stepped off the plane, I had this fierce urge to call my bosses back in the Pentagon and beg them to reconsider. Wouldn’t work though. “Sympathy,” the Army likes to say, is found in the dictionary between “shit” and “syphilis,” and regarded accordingly.
So I hefted up my duffel bag and oversize legal briefcase and headed for the taxi stand. Of course, this was Pope Air Force Base, which adjoins Fort Bragg, which makes it all one big, happy military installation. No taxi stand, and shame on me for not knowing that. I therefore marched straight to a payphone and called the duty sergeant at the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division. These are the same men and women who make their living flinging themselves out of airplanes and praying their government-issued parachutes open before their fragile bodies go splat. Mostly their prayers work. Sometimes not. “Headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, Sergeant Mercor,” a stern voice answered.
“Major Sean Drummond, here,” I barked, doing my finest impersonation of a bitchy, obnoxious bully, which, by the by, I always do pretty well.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“How can you help me?” I demanded.
“Sorry, sir, I don’t get it.”
“That’s pretty damned obvious, isn’t it? Why wasn’t the duty jeep waiting for me at the airport? Why am I standing here with my thumb up my ass?”
“We don’t send jeeps out to the airport to pick up personnel. Not even officers, sir.”
“Hey, Sergeant, think I’m stupid?”
I let that question linger a moment, and you could almost hear him grinding his teeth to keep from answering.
Then, much friendlier, I said, “Look, I don’t know if you weren’t properly instructed, or just plain forgot. All I know is, the general who works upstairs in that building of yours promised a jeep would be waiting when I arrived. Now if it were to get here inside twenty minutes, then we’ll just write this off as an inconvenience. Otherwise . . .”
There was this fairly long pause on the other end. The thing with Army sergeants is that they have incredible survival instincts. They have to. They spend their careers working under officers, some of whom happen to be pretty good, but plenty of whom aren’t, and a man must be pretty damned artful to treat both with perfect equanimity.
“Sir, I...well, uh, this is really irregular. No one told me to have a jeep there to meet you. I swear.”
Of course nobody told him. I knew that. And he knew that. But there was a world of daylight between those two facts.
“Listen, Sergeant. . . . Sergeant Mercor, right? It’s ten-thirty at night and my patience wanes with each passing minute. What will it be?”
“All right, Major.The duty driver will be there in about twenty minutes. Don’t be screwing me around, though. I’m gonna put this in the duty log. The colonel will see it in the morning,” he said, making that last statement sound profoundly ominous.
“Twenty minutes,” I said before hanging up.
I sat on my duffel bag and waited. I should’ve felt bad about fibbing, but my conscience just wasn’t up to it. I was tired, for one thing, and royally pissed off for another. Besides, I had a set of orders in my pocket that assigned me to perform a special investigation. In my book, at least, that entitled me to a special privilege or two.
Private Rodriguez and the duty jeep showed up exactly twenty minutes later. I was pretty damned sure Sergeant Mercor had instructed Rodriguez to get lost, or drive around in circles, or do about any damned thing except arrive one second earlier than twenty minutes. That’s another thing about Army sergeants. They’re woefully vengeful little creatures.
I threw my duffel into the back of the humvee and climbed in the front.
“Where to?” Private Rodriguez asked, staring straight ahead. “Visiting Officers’ Quarters. Know where they are?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Drive.”
A moment passed before Rodriguez sort of coughed, then said, “You assigned here, sir?”
“Nope.”
“Reporting in?”
“Nope.”
“Passing through?”
“You’re getting warmer.”
“You’re a lawyer, right?” he asked, glancing at the brass on my uniform that identified me as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG for short.
“Rodriguez, it’s late and I’m tired. I appreciate your need to make conversation, but I’m not in the mood. Just drive.”
“Hey, no problem, sir.”
Rodriguez whistled for two minutes, then,“Ever been to Bragg before, sir?”
“Yes, I’ve been to Bragg before. I’ve been to every Army post you can name. I’m still not in the mood to talk.”
“Hey, sure. No problem, really.” Then, only a few moments later, “Y’know, personally, I really like it here.”
Poor Private Rodriguez either had short-term amnesia or he’d been ordered by Sergeant Mercor to find out everything he could about me and report back. That’s another thing about Army sergeants. When they’re curious, they get fiendishly clever.
“So why do you like it here?” I wearily asked, not wanting his ass to get gnawed into little pieces on my account.
“My family comes from Mexico, right? And we settled in Texas, so I like the warm weather. Only they got trees up here, and it rains more. And I love jumpin’ outta airplanes. You know that feeling, right? I see you got wings.”
“Wrong. I went to jump school and did the five mandatory jumps required to graduate. But I’m not Airborne. I hated it. I was scared as hell and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I’ll never jump again. Never.”
“You’re a Ranger. Not many lawyers are Rangers.”
“I’m the most reluctant Ranger you ever saw. I cried and whimpered the whole way through the course. They gave me the tab only because they feared that if they failed me, I might have come back and tried again. They hated me.”
“You got a Combat Infantryman’s Badge,” he said.
Private Rodriguez, annoyingly clever fellow that he was, kept adjusting the rearview mirror to study the various items on my uniform. In civilian life, nobody wears nametags or badges or patches, or any other kind of silly accoutrement that advertises anything about you. In the Army, the longer you’re in, the more your uniform resembles a diary. It’s a wonder the old-timers can even walk under all that weight.
“I used to be infantry,” I admitted.
“And you went to combat.”
“Only because they shipped me off before I could figure out how to go AWOL. I spent the whole time huddled in deep fox-holes, praying nobody noticed me.”
“No offense, sir, but why would a guy wanta stop being an infantry officer just to become a lawyer?”
That’s another thing with the Army.What’s important on the inside can be quite a bit different from what’s important on the outside.
“Someone gave me a test and, wouldn’t you know it, turned out my IQ was over twenty. Bastards said I was too smart to be an infantry officer anymore.”
“No shit?” he asked, quite sincerely, too, which tells you miles about infantry officers.
“Yeah. Not a lot above twenty, just a little. You know the Army, though. Rules are rules.”
“You go to law school and all that?”
“Yeah, I went to law school and all that. You done asking questions?”
“No, sir, only a few more. Why you here?”
“Passing through, Private. I thought we already covered that.” “Passing through to where?”
“To Europe.”
“Would that be . . . uh, Bosnia?”
“That’s where it would be.”
“Then what you doing here?”
“I’m supposed to catch a C-130 that leaves Pope Field at seven o’clock in the morning, and military air bases don’t exactly run like civilian airports, with connecting flights and all that stuff. As a result, I have to sleep here.”
A more truthful reply would have included the fact that I had an appointment in the morning with a general named Partridge, and only after he was through with me was I allowed to head for Bosnia. But Private Rodriguez, and thereby Sergeant Mercor, did not need to know all that. In fact, nobody but the general, myself, and a few very select people back in Washington needed to know all that.
“VOQ just ahead,” Private Rodriguez announced, pointing out the windshield at a bunch of long blockhouses.
“Thanks,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot, and I retrieved my duffel from the rear.
“No problem. Hey, one thing, sir. That Sergeant Mercor you spoke with, well, he really is a prick. If I were you, and I didn’t really have permission from the general, I’d get my butt on that airplane as early as I could.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I muttered.
That’s how business is done in the Army. I scratched his ass, so he scratched mine. Sounds simple, but it can be very protean in practice. I left him there and walked into the VOQ, checked in, and found my room. In less than a minute I was undressed, in bed, and asleep.
It didn’t seem like a full five hours later when the phone beside my bed rang and the desk clerk informed me that General Partridge’s military sedan was waiting in the parking lot. I showered and shaved with dazzling speed, then rummaged through my duffel for my battle dress and combat boots. This was the only appropriate attire when meeting with Clive Partridge, who truly was one of the meanest sons of bitches in an institution not known for producing shrinking violets.
The drive out to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which is, among other things, the headquarters for the United States Army Special Forces Command, took slightly shy of thirty minutes. General Partridge’s driver, unlike Private Rodriguez the night before, said not a word. I chalked that up to his being grumped up about having to chauffeur a lowly major, instead of the four-star general he worked for. Headquarters guys get real fussy airs that way.
A sour-faced major named Jackson met me outside Partridge’s office and coldly told me to sit and wait. I reminded him that I had to be on a seven o’clock flight to Bosnia, and he reminded me that four-star generals outrank majors. I gave him a fishy-eyed look and instantly decided that maybe General Partridge deliberately surrounded himself with nasty people.
Twenty minutes later, Major Jackson stood up and led me to the hand-carved door that served as the final line of defense into General Partridge’s office. The door opened, I passed through, and marched briskly to the general’s desk. I stopped, saluted crisply, and introduced myself in that strange way Army guys do.