Secret Sanction (11 page)

“We have just a few opening questions,” I said, placing the tape recorder on the table between us. “If, at any point, you don’t want to answer a question, that’s your right. I must warn you, however, that this is an official investigation, and if anything you say turns out later to be false, that can result in additional charges.”

Delbert and Morrow shot me a pair of “that was a fairly stupid thing to say” kind of looks. The man was already facing thirty-five charges of murder, among sundry other serious offenses, and here I was threatening him with chump change.

Had Sanchez been anything but an officer in the United States Army, then Delbert and Morrow might have had a point. But he was. And he therefore was likely to feel a certain stiffening in his backbone from my warning. An officer’s integrity was still a cherished relic.

“I understand,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Please start with the mission of your team when you went into Kosovo.”

He leaned forward and cupped his hands tightly in front of his lips, which any professional interrogator will tell you is exactly the kind of gesture a man might make when he’s preparing to tell a few whoppers. So much for my warning.

“We were part of an operation called Guardian Angel. The KLA company we’d trained was being put into operation. Our job was to accompany them and provide assistance.”

“Assistance? What kind of assistance?”

“Continued training, help with planning operations, that kind of thing.”

“Weren’t they well trained enough to handle themselves?” “No.”

I withdrew a piece of paper from my bulging legal case. “I have here a copy of the evaluation you gave that team when their training ended. That’s your signature, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing at the tight, almost childlike scrawl at the bottom of the page.

He barely glanced at it. “Yes.”

“You said here they were ready.”

He stared coldly at the paper.“What I said was that they met the minimal standards each KLA company had to attain before they were certified.”

“Was something wrong with those standards?”

“Yes. Those standards are slightly below what a basic trainee gets in our army.We taught them just enough to get them killed,” he said with obvious bitterness in his voice.

Anyway, I moved on. “How was your relationship with your KLA company?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it friendly? Professional? Personal? Impersonal?” “Professional.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“We were told to train them, so we did. It was a job and they were part of it.”

“Did you feel responsible for them?”

“No, I didn’t. It’s not our war, it’s theirs.”

“Good point,” I said.“Still, I’d think it would be awfully hard not to develop some feelings for them. Living and working together, exchanging stories about families, and—”

“Major, we both know where you’re trying to go with this.” “Where am I trying to go?”

“That when the KLA company got slaughtered, we went on some kind of bloody rampage and took revenge. That’s not what happened.”

“No?” I said, interested that he chose the word “slaughtered,” which carried interesting implications. I mean, there’re words like “were shot,” “died,” “got killed,” “were wiped out,” any of which connoted a milder fate than the words “got slaughtered,” in the food chain of death.

“Look, that’s what the press is reporting, but that’s not the way it happened.”

“No? Then tell me what happened.”

“After our KLA company got, uh, wiped out, we reported that back to Tenth Group headquarters. We were told to relocate our base camp and await instructions. So we did.We’d been there about two days when we suspected our new base camp was compromised, so we—”

“Why did you suspect that?” I interrupted.

“Because Sergeant Perrite and Sergeant Machusco detected a Serbian patrol that appeared to be surveilling us.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“The afternoon of the seventeenth. Maybe three o’clock, maybe a little earlier.”

“I don’t remember seeing that in the communications log at the Tenth Group ops center.”

Sanchez seemed to chew on his tongue a moment.“I didn’t report it.”

“Why? I’d think you’d report that immediately.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re a lawyer and you’ve never been in that kind of situation before.”

I had most definitely been in that kind of situation before but wasn’t about to tell him that. Sanchez was giving me the cover he and the rest of his team had concocted, and for the time being, the best path was to hear the entire tale before I looked for ways to tear holes in it.

“What did you do, then?” I asked.

“We grabbed our equipment and ran. We could have been attacked at any moment, so we reverted to an escape and evasion plan we’d planned two days before.”

I thought I saw where this was going. “And were you followed?” I helpfully asked.

“Yes.”

“How did you know?”

“Because we laid trip flares on our trail.”

“How many went off?” I asked.

“I don’t remember exactly. Maybe one, maybe two.”

“Was it one, or was it two?”

“Maybe two. My memory could be wrong, though.”

“What kind of trip flares were they?”

“Star clusters with a string on the pin.”

“How many did you set?”

“I don’t know exactly. I was preoccupied with leading the team out. The trailman was laying the flare traps.”

“What kind of string did he use?”

“I don’t know. Commo wire probably.”

One of the tricks when you’re investigating a conspiracy is to ask detailed questions and just keeping asking for more and more details, because usually the conspirators have only agreed on a broad cover, and it’s the details that get them in trouble. The topic of trip flares was just the kind of detail that was liable to get Sanchez and his team stuck in quicksand.

“So you didn’t feel you had time to make a radio call to the ops center, but you had time to set warning flares on your escape route?”

“It was a matter of priorities. A radio call wasn’t going to do us any good, but warning flares would at least tell us if we were being followed.”

“Then what happened?”

“Our E&E plan called for us to move straight south and cross the border into Macedonia. I became worried that the Serb team tracking us would just call their headquarters and have an ambush set up ahead. I decided to shift our direction to the east.”

“Did you discuss that with anyone in the team?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Is that a definite no?”

“I can’t remember every detail I said to everyone. We were being stalked by a large Serbian unit. Things were happening fast.”

“A large Serbian unit? I’m sure you said it was a small surveillance team. How did it suddenly become large?”

“I made a reasonable assumption. We knew we’d been detected, and it just seemed logical that the Serbs would’ve thrown more men into hunting us down.”

“Why?”

“Because the Serbs would’ve loved to kill or capture an American A-team. The whole focus of America’s strategy in this thing is to avoid losing any men. Everybody knows that. The Serbs sure as hell know it. The American people have a very low interest in what’s happening here. Casualties would wreck everything. Look what happened in Somalia.”

I couldn’t argue against that. “How far behind you was the Serbian unit?” I asked.

“How would I know? They were behind us, that’s all I knew.” “But you said several trip flares went off. If the flares went up into the sky, you must’ve been able to judge the distance they were behind you.”

He looked at me a moment before he answered. Like most folks, he wasn’t used to being interrogated and obviously wasn’t enjoying the experience.

“I didn’t see them go off.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I was busy leading the unit. I was reading the map and compass and watching ahead.”

“Then how did you learn the warning flares went off?” “Someone told me.”

“Who told you?”

“I don’t remember.”

Now it was my turn to stare at him. I worked my face into as much disbelief as I could summon and stayed silent. He stared back until he grew uncomfortable.

He finally said, “Look, the word was passed up the file, I guess. I don’t remember exactly who told me.”

I stayed quiet another moment, but he decided not to embellish any further. “Okay,” I said, “what did you do then?”

“We walked the rest of the day, zigzagging so our route wasn’t predictable.We could see dust columns over the treetops, and occasionally we heard the sounds of vehicles off in the distance.”

“And what did you interpret that to mean?” I asked.

“The Serbs were moving mobile forces around to try to trap us.”

“Did you discuss that with any team members?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I remember discussing it with Chief Persico, my team deputy.”

“But you still didn’t make any radio reports back to Tenth Group headquarters?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We were moving fast. Things were happening quickly. Besides, what could they do about it?”

“Provided an aerial recon to let you know your situation. Offered you air cover. Maybe even mounted an aerial extraction to get you out of there.”

He had not expected me to answer that question so spontaneously and appeared nettled for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Look, I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking that clearly at the moment. I was just trying to get my team out alive.”

“Maybe,” I said back, just to let him know I wasn’t buying it. “Besides, I was worried about the Serbs intercepting a radio transmission.They would’ve vectored in and known exactly where we were.”

“I thought they already knew exactly where you were. You were being followed, right?”

“No, I said I assumed they knew where we were. I was told trip flares had gone off, but that didn’t mean they knew exactly where we were.”

The expression on Sanchez’s face was becoming flustered. All of these questions about flares were obviously beginning to unhinge him. Which was exactly what I wanted. If I could divert him away from the canard he and his team had obviously prepared, and force him to start ad-libbing, we’d have our opening.

“Okay, go on,” I told him.

He took a moment to compose himself, then said,“We kept running all day. I hoped that after it grew dark we could turn south again and try and head for the border. Around midnight we drew into a perimeter. We could still hear vehicles moving on the roads around us, so we knew the Serbs were intensifying their search. Then, at around two, another trip flare went off, about a mile away. That’s when I decided.”

“Decided what?” I asked him.

“We had to ambush a Serb column.”

“And why did you decide that?”

“Because we had to get the Serbs’ attention.We couldn’t outrun them. They were building a noose around us. We had to force them to be as cautious as they were forcing us to be. Do you understand that?”

“No,” I said. “Please explain it more clearly.”

“Look, this was their territory. They felt safe. They were moving around at full speed, chasing us on foot, trying to block us with men in vehicles. If I didn’t find some way to make them slow down, they were going to get us.”

“And you figured what? An ambush would make that happen?”

“Sure. They had to know we were dangerous. If they kept acting sloppy, we’d make them pay for it.”

“Didn’t your orders say you were only allowed to kill in self-defense?”

“This was self-defense,” he insisted, like it was indisputable. “So you set an ambush?”

“Right. I decided to hit them at first light. I used the map to pick a spot on the road where there was a double curve with hills on both sides. We moved for about another hour and were in position by around four in the morning. Then we set up the ambush and waited. Every now and again a vehicle passed by, but we let them go through. Then, around six-thirty, a column with about six vehicles came into the killzone and we unleashed.”

“Why did you pick that particular column?”

“Because it was larger. I wanted the Serbs to think we were bigger than an A-team. I wanted them to think there were maybe thirty or forty of us. If we only hit a single vehicle, they might have realized they were only dealing with a small team.”

“But if they’d already spotted you, and they were following you, don’t you think they already had some idea of the size of your unit?”

“That’s exactly the point. I believed they did, and I wanted to make them question that. They had no way of knowing if there was one team or three dozen teams operating in our sector. I figured that if we took on a large column, they might think there were more of us than they’d originally thought.”

“And how long did the ambush take?”

“I don’t know for sure...maybe five minutes, maybe a little longer.”

“Describe it.”

“It was just a standard L-shaped ambush. We planted two command-detonated anti-armor mines in the road to blow the lead vehicle and stop the column. We set up a daisy chain of claymore mines along the opposite side of the road that we blew after the troops emptied out of the trucks and were taking cover behind their vehicles. Then we raked the column with M16s and machine guns for a few minutes. Then we left.”

That answered why so many of the corpses back in Belgrade had their backs shredded with claymore pellets. It was a relief to hear, because the alternative was that Sanchez and his people cruelly blew off a bunch of claymores at the backs of a retreating enemy. If he was telling the truth about this, then he’d at least negated one element that took this beyond a simple fight and onto the precarious grounds of a shocking atrocity.

“Were there any survivors?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they were still shooting when we left.”

“Was the return fire heavy or light?”

“Not heavy, but there was enough of it.”

“How many survivors would you say there were?”

“There were probably four or five who were still firing. And there had to be a fair number of wounded.”

“You know the Serbs are claiming there were no survivors?” “That’s a lie!” he shouted with evident outrage.“There were men still alive on that road when we left.”