Secret Sanction (38 page)

“Then why—”

“Because we couldn’t allow Avenging Angel to be exposed,” Murphy said.

“I don’t get it.”

Tretorne was drumming a finger on the table. “When Sanchez’s team extricated, they didn’t report anything about the ambush. We didn’t learn of it until three days later when Milosevic started holding press conferences.”

I could hear little pieces beginning to fall into place.

“So you arrested Sanchez’s team?”

“Right,” Murphy said.“And they gave us the story about being detected and chased. Jack had NSA check their files and there was nothing that substantiated their story. Nothing contradicted it either, though.”

“Then why was I brought in?”

“That was decided back in Washington.The massacre suddenly had international attention. We all felt the easiest solution for all concerned was to conduct a genuine investigation. Sanchez’s team was sticking with their story, and we were ordered to make it a more convincing tale.”

“And where was this decided?” I asked.

Tretorne didn’t answer, at least verbally. He simply held up a hand and pointed at his cuff link.

I shook my head. Maybe Oliver Stone wasn’t as harebrained as I’d always thought.

With as much disdain as I could, I said, “So you cooked up a deal with Sanchez and his men. They work with you on the cover-up, and they walk away scot-free.”

Murphy did not appear the least bit fazed or ashamed to admit it. “That’s right,” he said, “except you’re forgetting one thing.We have no proof they’re guilty of anything. Maybe it happened exactly the way they said.”

“Really?”I said.“I went to the morgue. I saw the Serb corpses. How do you explain the holes in their heads?”

Tretorne finally stopped tapping the table. “Please believe me, we didn’t know about that until you reported it to Clapper. By then, this thing was already in motion.”

“But you didn’t do anything once you learned of it, did you? You kept right on with the cover-up.”

“We had our reasons,” Murphy said. “But we’re prepared to make a deal with you now.”

I looked down at my watch. In another twenty-seven minutes, Imelda and her crew were going to push a few buttons and unleash an army of hungry reporters on these two. They’d probably guessed what I had in store for them. It was a little like a poker game where they knew I was holding a royal flush, and they wanted me to allow them to take some of their cash out of the pot before I flashed my cards. These guys had balls made of brass.

I chuckled and shook my head. “I’m listening.”

Murphy said, “We’re willing to let you complete your investigation. We won’t hinder you in any way. No more games. We’ll give you the actual logs. We’ll tell you everything we know, and you see if you can find the truth.”

I said, “How kind of you.”

Tretorne ignored my sarcasm and said,“There’s only two conditions.”

“And what are those?” I snarled. I mean, where was this guy coming from? Conditions at this point?

“Hold off on going to the press. When you’re done, come back and talk with us.”

It was a surprising offer, so I took a moment to consider it. Maybe they were just trying to buy time till they could arrange some other diabolical plot against me. If so, they were stupid. They’d just admitted the details of their conspiracy. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a flashback to Operation Phoenix, but running a secret war wasn’t chump change, either. They’d also admitted their orders came from the White House.

But they weren’t stupid men, I reminded myself. God knows, I’d learned that by now. They had to be aware they’d just given me more ammunition to use when I went public and exposed them.

“That it?” I asked.

Tretorne said,“After we talk, if you want to go public, that’ll be your option. We won’t try to stop you.”

I will admit, I was stunned. I had expected that they would look for some last-minute way to shut me up. Maybe this was it. Maybe they were lying their asses off to buy time to find a foolproof solution against Sean Drummond and his goody-two-shoes philosophies. If they were, though, I sure as hell couldn’t see it. I could blow the whistle anytime I liked.

It was my turn to test the waters with a few demands. “No more phone taps? No more bugs in my office? No more following me around?”

Tretorne grinned. “You had all that figured out, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Done,” said Tretorne.

“Oh, and your mole goes,” I said.“Morrow climbs on the next plane.”

Tretorne’s grin became a smile. “You might not want to get rid of her.”

“Oh yeah I would.”

“She’s not working for us.”

I cocked my head a little, and he actually chuckled.

“That little shit Delbert?” I asked.

“Floyd Collins, actually. Floyd’s a real Army lawyer, too. A very ambitious one, although unfortunately, his trial record nowhere near matches the record you were provided in your folder.”

Sometimes you just outsmart yourself. I had thought Delbert, or Floyd, had just seemed too obvious to be the mole.

“Okay, he goes,” I said. “I won’t have you owning anyone’s vote.”

“Done,” Tretorne said.

“And I’ll have to tell Morrow what’s going on. She’ll have to be cleared, too.”

“Okay.”

I got up and started to leave. I made it to the door before Murphy said, “One more thing, Major.”

I turned around and faced him. That big, handsome face was staring up at me.

He said,“Sometimes those principles they teach at West Point about duty and honor and country, sometimes they clash against one another. The world’s not as pristine as West Point makes it out to be. Sometimes you have to decide which of those three is most important.You have to decide which principle you need to sacrifice.”

I stared back at him. I knew he was reciting the rationalization he’d employed to justify his own dishonesty in this affair. And it got me feeling real righteous and uppity.

I said, “I didn’t go to West Point, so I don’t know about all that. I tell you what I do know. I know what makes us different from the Serbs. We don’t coddle our murderers. We don’t lie to the world when our troops commit a massacre. We wash our laundry in the open. That’s duty and honor and country, all in one.”

He shook his head in a condescending way, like I just didn’t get it. Only he was wrong. He was the one who didn’t get it. At least that’s what I thought.

Chapter 28

A
good night’s sleep did a lot for my disposition, but I couldn’t say the same for my body. My bruises and broken ribs sort of calcified, and the pain seeped down through another few layers of tissue. I awoke feeling terrifically stiff and sore. I limped to the latrine tent, took a long, hot shower, and tried to coax the warm water into soothing my aches and pains. I ended up with crinkly, wrinkled fingers, but my wounds proved impregnable. I was still sore as hell.

Clapper had not made his normal two o’clock call. I guessed he was too abashed to talk with me. Delbert was gone when I walked into the office. He left a note in my message box: It read “Sorry,” and it was signed Floyd G. Collins, Captain, JAG. Probably it was best that Murphy and Tretorne sneaked him out in the middle of the night. Probably if I’d seen Floyd I would’ve done something stupid, like reposition his nose so it stuck out through the back of his head. He lied to me, screwed me, and trampled all over his oath as an officer and a lawyer. I have this bad habit of taking things too personally. Tretorne and Murphy must’ve figured that out about me.

Morrow was back at her desk, rabidly scribbling something in longhand. She coldly ignored me as I walked by. I went to the coffee urn and began making a cup. I made as much noise as I could, clanging my spoon against the side of my mug, knocking the coffeepot around, then took several real noisy, annoying sips as I tested my mix of sugar and cream. She kept right on giving me the bone-chilling indifference routine. She was good at it, too. Personally, I’ll take the hot, smoldering treatment any day. You can always duck a punch.

I walked over and irritatingly peered across her shoulder at what she was doing. She kept writing. I coughed a few times; loud, obnoxious hacks. She bore down and wrote harder. I clumsily bumped into her chair. She rearranged it and got back to her writing.

I finally said,“Guess you don’t want to know what happened to Delbert. Why he isn’t with us anymore. Or how I got us a five-day extension.”

Then I turned and walked back into my office, closing the door behind me. I stared at my watch. Thirty-six seconds passed before she knocked. Curiosity, it seems, is a far more powerful incentive than anger.

I told her to come in and have a seat, then spent thirty minutes explaining what had really been going on around here while she thought she was innocently trying to get at the truth. Here and there she stopped me to ask a few questions, but mostly she just listened. That gorgeous face of hers traveled through a range of emotions from surprise to hostility, then indignation, then eventually full circle right back to curiosity again.

“Why didn’t you tell me about all this?” she asked.

I was deathly afraid she’d get around to asking that. I stared at my desktop.

“You bastard. You thought I was Tretorne’s stooge, didn’t you?”

“No, I never thought that,” I lied and winced. It didn’t even sound convincing to me.“I mean, I wasn’t sure,” I amended.“Besides, what does it matter? We have a green light now.”

This was an awful lot of disturbing news to learn in a few minutes, and she needed some time to digest it. She was mad as hell, at them and at me for not trusting her. But she was also a lawyer, and thus was trained to keep her emotions in tight rein.

“Why don’t we just hold a press conference and blow the whistle?” she finally asked.

The truth was, there was no good answer to that. If we were smart, that’s exactly what we’d do. I’d made a deal with the devil, and only a damn fool thinks you can do that and walk away smiling. Now that Morrow was part of the deal, she had a vote and she was having second thoughts. Maybe it was first thoughts. Hell, I guess I was the one having second thoughts.

I said,“Anyway, we always have that option. They screw with us, we bring the whole thing down around their ears.”

She nodded.

“I just don’t see where they can get a new angle on us,” I insisted. I said that to myself and to her.

She nodded again. “You might be right.”

“Aren’t you curious?” I added. “Don’t you want to know if Sanchez and his men did it?”

“I guess,” she said, sounding as if she thought she wanted to but really didn’t.

“Well then, that settles it,” I quickly announced before she could change her mind. Or I could change my mind.

I walked to the door and called Imelda. She came steaming in and I said,“We’ve got five more days. Get us a flight to Aviano for this afternoon. If they don’t have a flight scheduled, tell ’em I said make one. Also, call Lieutenant Colonel Smothers’s office and tell him Captain Morrow and I will be there in an hour.”

“Got it,” she said.

“One other thing,” I said very loudly. “Get someone in here to sweep this damned office for bugs. I don’t want any silly-looking pussies in duck-hunting vests listening in to my conversations.”

That reference to vests confused her a bit, but she nodded anyway. I figured that was as good a way as any to put Tretorne on notice that I’d be watching to be sure he was following his part of the bargain.

I was back in fine fettle, dishing out orders and shoving myself around. It felt good, too. The claustrophobia had cleared away. After packing our bags and loading up several boxes with documents, Morrow and I went to see Lieutenant Colonel Will Smothers, Sanchez’s battalion commander.

We went to his office, and this time he had his lawyer, the same Captain Smith who had filed a complaint against me. Smith started with a smug smile, till we exchanged some surly looks, the way a pair of antagonized lawyers do.

I looked at Smothers. “No need for him,” I said, pointing a digit in Smith’s direction.

Smith’s face showed his outraged surprise that we were about to start this all over again. He was just opening his mouth when Morrow, to my own vast surprise, said, “Get out of here, Smith. If he needs a lawyer, he’ll contact you.”

“I, uh,I...”

I made a menacing move in his direction.“You can no longer serve as his attorney. I’m reserving the right to cite you as part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. If you’re not gone in two seconds, I’ll toss you out that friggin’ window.”

Smith glanced at the window. He studied my face, with all its swells and bruises. He weighed his options. “I’m gonna call the jurisdictional judge again,” he threatened.

“Do that!” I barked. “Be sure to tell him I’ll also cite him as an accomplice in the obstruction charge if he makes a move against me.”

Smith peered at his client, who frankly was looking at him to see what to do. They were both looking to the wrong place. Smith finally figured that out and quickly got up and departed the office. He was smarter than I thought he was.

I was giving Smothers an only slightly milder version of my I’d-also-like-to-rip-your-guts-out look.“Party’s over, Colonel. Lie or mislead us once, and I’ll indict you as a co-conspirator to murder. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Okay, let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me about your role in this Operation Avenging Angel.”

He looked over at Morrow and she somehow managed to hide those sympathetic eyes of hers. In fact, she looked positively fierce.

“Okay,” he said. “My battalion, the First Battalion, we’re the avenging angels. Murphy told you about the operation, right? We’re the ones chosen for it. I’ve got one or two teams in every zone. We do the dirty work.”

“Why just your battalion?” Morrow asked.

“Because we obviously can’t afford any mistakes in this thing, and my teams are the most experienced.”

“And does secrecy have something to do with it?” I guessed. “There’s that, too,” Smothers admitted.“The less people who know about this, the less chance of a leak.”

“Tell us about Sanchez,” I demanded.

He looked at me. He sort of shrugged.“You sensed it,” he admitted. “I probably made a mistake. Terry’s a good guy, a very likable guy, and he needed the job to get promoted. He did great work in the operations shop and I felt I owed him a chance. Unfortunately, it’s a different thing, you know, between being a staff officer and being in charge of a team.”