Secret Sanction (46 page)

I said, “Do I need to remind you of your rights again?”

“No, I know my rights.”

“You can spare me your feelings toward lawyers this time, but are you sure you don’t want counsel, Sergeant? I would seriously advise you to have a lawyer present.”

“Nope. There’s enough fucking lawyers in this room already.” “Nobody would argue with that,” I admitted.

Then we looked into each other’s eyes a moment, and he knew that I knew.

I said,“Chief Persico just left. He took responsibility for everything. He said he was the one who made all the decisions, who led the quiet mutiny against Captain Sanchez, who decided to execute an ambush, who ignored the order to extricate.”

He was quietly nodding as I detailed this.

“Of course, Sergeant Perrite, you bear most of the responsibility. You were the one who came back and tried to incite the men against Sanchez.You knew they didn’t like him anyway, and you stoked the fuel. It was your idea to kill Pajocovic, wasn’t it? Yet Chief was in here trying to cover for you.”

He didn’t nod or acknowledge a word, only watched me and listened.

I continued. “Then he confessed that he was the one who went around after the ambush and shot the Serbs in the head. He said he sent everyone else to the rally point, then he snuck across the road and dispatched the last survivors. Then he went down to the site and administered the coup de grâce.”

Perrite was now staring at the end of his lit cigarette, much as Chief Persico had sat and stared at his only thirty minutes before. It was uncanny. Perrite admired the man so much he even affected the same mannerisms.

I said,“The problem, Sergeant Perrite, is that you and I both know he didn’t do that. Don’t we? He was trying to save somebody he cares deeply about, and I only hope to God that man cares as much about him.”

I paused for a moment as he continued to regard his cigarette.

Finally I said, “He was trying to save you, wasn’t he?”

Perrite stayed frozen, still staring at that cigarette for what felt like eternity. I had no idea what he was thinking, because I had no idea how a man like him thought.

Then he nodded dumbly. He was perfectly willing to lie right down to the end, but he was not willing to let Persico take the rap for his crime.

“That’s right,” he finally mumbled. “I did it.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

“Try me. Maybe I would.”

“No, you’re not really soldiers, you and that other lawyer up there,” he said, waving dismissively at Morrow.“You got no idea what it’s like out there. The way you feel about the other men in your team, how you stop thinking when the bullets are flying, how you just do whatever you feel like.”

Suddenly Imelda jumped out of her seat and walked over and stopped right in front of him. Her body was very tense, and her fists were clenched tightly.

“I’ve heard enough of your shit, Sergeant. You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she yelled. “See that damned combat patch on the major’s right arm? See that Combat Infantryman’s Badge on his chest? What you don’t see is the three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars, and the Distinguished Service Cross he earned, too. Know why he’s a lawyer? He spent six months in a hospital recovering after the last one. They wouldn’t let him stay in the infantry after that. Don’t you go thinking you’ve got shit to tell him about what it’s like out there, Sergeant. Now, act like a damn soldier and answer that man.”

Perrite stared up at her and Imelda glared down at him. How she knew about that was beyond me. My citations and awards were inside a musty drawer somewhere, because they were given for operations that nobody knew happened, and nobody was supposed to know happened. Besides, who cared what combat awards lawyers got? But then, Imelda was a sergeant and you may remember my earlier warning that sergeants could be very devious when they wanted to find things out. Make that ditto for Imelda.

Perrite looked at me. He was not only a Special Forces soldier with all the macho baggage that carried, but he was also a Cajun. This added a whole mix of spices to the ordinary Special Forces macho culture, so Imelda had just leveled the playing field a bit.

“That true?” he asked.

“I guess so,” I admitted.

He pondered that a moment, then he made up his mind. “Okay, Major, I was off on the flank, like I said. I heard the ambush go off. I heard the shooting for seven or eight minutes. I got curious.You know what that means, right? Bein’ on security, you always wonder.You wonder if your friends are gettin’ killed, if your guys are winnin’, if things are goin’ to shit.”

He paused and looked up at me.

“I knew I shouldn’t, but I crossed the road and worked my way down, till I was behind the Serbs. I got there just as Chief gave everyone the order to beat feet. There was still some Serbs down there, maybe three or four, still shooting. So I decided to...well, you know, I decided to . . . kill them, I guess.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I dunno. I just felt like it.”

“No. You must’ve had a reason.”

“Okay. Maybe because I wanted a piece of the action. And maybe because Chief should’ve made sure they were all dead so there were no witnesses.”

I said, “And maybe you wanted a trophy?”

He looked at me in alarm.

I said, “When Captain Morrow and I viewed the corpses in the morgue in Belgrade, one had no head left. Was that Captain Pajocovic’s body?”

He turned his eyes away from mine. “I dunno. Mighta been his body. Maybe his head got blown off by the claymores. That happens sometimes.”

“No, Sergeant, I don’t think so. That head looked like it had been hacked off, like maybe with a bayonet. You cut his head off, didn’t you?”

He began fidgeting and suddenly looked nervous. I finally had it all figured out. Perrite was a Cajun. He lived by the old Cajun code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Cultural stereotypes often do happen to be valid. Pajocovic had decapitated Akhan, so Perrite returned the favor in kind.

“What did you do with it, Sergeant?”

He still refused to answer. But he didn’t have to. I knew the answer to this one too. Perrite would’ve wanted his hero to be proud of him, just like a hunting dog brings its trophies back to its owner.

“You brought it to Chief, didn’t you? You wanted him to see what you did, right?”

He sort of straightened up in his seat and he dropped the cigarette on the floor. Unlike Chief Persico though, he did not grind it out. He stomped it out.

“That’s right, that’s what I did.”

“And what did he do?”

“He got real pissed. He tol’ me not to say anything to the others, and he ordered me to bury the head.”

I said, “Thank you, Sergeant Perrite. You may return to your cell.”

Imelda got up and escorted him out. He still had that same jaunty walk.

Chapter 34

I
t 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.”