The Rendition (5 page)

“Everything worked out, I guess. I'm really grateful.”

She frowned. “You are military.”

“Of course. I was—”

“Things would have been easier if you'd had ID, Captain. Or your KFOR badge. I guess you know that. I won't ask what happened to it.” She looked at me sternly. “One of your colleagues signed you in. You're Captain Sanchez?” When I nodded, she said, “George Sanchez?” When I again nodded, she consulted her clipboard. “I mean Gerald Sanchez.”

“That's correct.”

“Why did you nod when I said George?”

“I didn't hear you, ma'am. I've still got a headache.”

“And Geraldo is with an ‘o'?”

“It's pronounced ‘Heraldo,' ma'am.”

Then she read off an Army serial number. When I nodded my head, she jotted something down on the clipboard.

“Someone in the Pentagon vouched for you, Captain Sanchez. Told Colonel Brooks you were to be admitted immediately and with the highest priority. You're in a private room. We've been treating you like a VIP.” She nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Call me if you need anything.”

With Colonel Raymond gone, I looked around. As far as hospital rooms go, it was nice. Next to my bed was a table. On the far wall was a washbasin and next to the basin was a large window, sunshine coming through some curtains. A corpsman came in, got the tube off my arm, hooked me up to another one. Another corpsman said he was there to change my bandages. Even lying in bed watching people work was tiring. After a while, I dozed off.

Early in the evening, Colonel Raymond returned. When I asked her again about the people who brought me in, she said, “There were three of them, Captain. All Americans. That's all I can tell you.”

“Are they still around?”

“I don't believe so. Colonel Brooks said they left in a hurry. They didn't say where they were going. But we've cut a set of orders for you.”

“For Geraldo Sanchez?”

“For Geraldo Sanchez, Captain, U.S. Army. You'll be leaving tomorrow, Captain. For Landstuhl. You can maybe catch up with those people up in Germany, Captain.”

“Maybe,” I said, although I was pretty sure that whoever brought me in was long gone. I assumed it was Angel and Scott, and I wondered how they'd found me. And I had a dreamy recollection of a voice that sounded like Buck's.

The last thing I could remember was being tossed back into the
hole that I'd come to think of as a kind of coffin, a place from which I never thought I'd get out of alive. The third person must have been Buck. But how could he have known who to call in the State Department? Or in the Pentagon? Or wherever? And who could have rustled me up a military identity on such short notice?

Afterward, a nurse came in with a tablet and said I'd sleep better if I took it. Before falling asleep I had more time to think. The mission to get Ramush Nadaj had really gone off the rails. We were shorthanded from the start. It was a totally black operation, freelance, and only three of us had gone in. We didn't have fallback, no Plan B. And not much of a Plan A, now that I think of it.

The worst of it was, I'd let myself become a prisoner. That's not supposed to happen.

That was my last thought before falling asleep.

Early the following morning, I drank a liquid breakfast, had a bath, got my bandages changed. Nurses came by at regular intervals. Colonel Raymond was right. I was being treated like a VIP. As he was drawing blood, the corpsman told me I'd be flying from Pristina to Ramstein in Germany, at 1500 hours. I couldn't help thinking about the mission. Whenever I caught up with Buck, I'd have a lot of questions. I'd let him know how close I came to not making it out of there, although I was pretty sure he knew that already. Give him a piece of my mind, anyway. For the first time in a while, I felt myself smiling. At two hours before flight time, Colonel Raymond came in to give me a folder containing my medical records and flight orders.

“Have a safe trip, Captain.” She emphasized the “Captain.”

Minutes later, I was wheeled out of the hospital and placed in an ambulance that took me out to an airport where I was rolled up the cargo ramp of a gray aircraft that I recognized as a C-130—which had an American flag painted on the tail fin and U.S. Air Force in block letters on the fuselage. When we were airborne, a corpsman made his way through the mountain of cargo every so often to ask how I was doing and if I wanted anything.

Although I did my best to stay awake, I fell asleep halfway through the flight. When I awoke, two corpsmen were wheeling my cot down the ramp and across the tarmac into a waiting ambulance. Soon afterward, I was in another hospital bed. As she fluffed out a pillow, a nurse with a soft voice told me it was 2230 and said I should get some sleep. Too tired to open my eyes, I nodded and drifted off into dreamland.

“How do you feel?” a nurse asked. She was tall, blonde, and attractive. I guess I was beginning to notice things like that again. It was early afternoon, and I was propped up on a couple of pillows in my hospital room watching a TV game show on Armed Forces Network. I'd already been in the big military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, for five days.

“Never better,” I said, exaggerating ever so slightly. I was still suffering the symptoms of dysentery. And from occasional headaches. And my shoulder sometimes ached so bad I wondered if it would ever get better. The only exercise I'd been getting was short walks around the corridors and daily trips downstairs to the hospital PX for soap, toothpaste, and magazines.

My face was so banged up I hated to look in the mirror. I was scheduled for a nose operation sometime the following week.

“Are you well enough to have a visitor, Captain?” When I nodded, she said, “A female visitor?”

I sat up, wondering who it might be.

“She says if you're not feeling up to it, she can stop by tomorrow. She's waiting for you in the dayroom. She says she only arrived from the States a few hours ago. Would you prefer to take a wheelchair or to walk?”

“I'll walk,” I said, climbing out of bed and grabbing my bathrobe from a peg next to the door. As I navigated the wide corridor, I ran a comb through my hair. It's second nature for me to want to look my best when women are around.

In the hospital dayroom, a bright room with chairs, tables, and a gigantic TV in the corner, a female bird colonel stood by the window gazing out on the parking lot. I looked around. Since the other people in the room were all male GIs, I decided she must be my visitor. I walked over.

“Good afternoon, ma'am.”

Turning, she said, “Alex Klear? I'm delighted to meet you. I'm Colonel Sylvia Frost.”

She knew my name. I found that interesting as all hell. After we'd shaken hands, I said, “People here know me as Captain Geraldo Sanchez.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to continue to be Captain Sanchez until you get back to the States. You'll go back on a military aircraft when you're up to it. We'll handle all that.” She looked around at the dozen or so occupants scattered across the big room—GIs in hospital gowns either reading or talking quietly with one another. Then she pointed the way toward a sofa in the corner and tossed her briefcase down on the adjoining table. “I hope being Captain Sanchez isn't too much of an inconvenience.” She smiled. “It's the best we could come up with on short notice.”

Pointing to my face, I said, “The real inconvenience was having a bunch of fanatics beating up on me for two days.”

Colonel Frost nodded sympathetically. “One of the nurses said you've made significant progress in the time you've been here. I'm happy to hear that.”

“I'm assuming you had something to do with the planning of this operation, Colonel. Am I correct on that?”

“I could use some coffee. Can I get you one?”

I waved off the offer and watched as Colonel Frost, whom I judged to be in her early thirties, made her way to the coffee urn. She had auburn hair, cut short, wide blue eyes, a high forehead, a long face, a gloss over her delicately shaped lips. She wore her fruit salad very well, and since a military uniform can't conceal everything, I concluded that Colonel Frost had a very nice figure. When she eased herself down on the sofa, I thought she might have cheated just a bit on
the army regulation that requires female officers to wear skirts no shorter than knee-length.

I wasn't going to let myself be distracted by the sight of Colonel Frost's thighs.

“I know you had a rough couple of days, Mr. Klear—”

“‘Rough' isn't the word, ma'am.”

“Let's take a step back, shall we? Getting banged around a bit comes with the territory. And you made it back. That's the important thing. We won't try to determine whose fault it was that you became a prisoner.”

“Why not? The fault lies with whoever did the planning. We never had enough people. With five or even four guys, we could have handled this.”

“Well, that's not exactly what I heard. I heard that they made you. Couldn't you people even carry out a simple surveillance?”

“I've done a lot of surveillance and never been made before, Colonel Frost. And something else. What kind of fallback did we have?”

“You're way out of line, mister. You shouldn't be asking a question like that. You wouldn't be here if there hadn't been adequate fallback. I can't see what you're complaining about. A simple rendition, and you messed it up. You people had what you needed to carry out a successful operation.”

I thought about that. It's true our source had pinpointed Nadaj's hideout. They'd supplied our weapons. We'd leased the van. All in all, it was a pretty straightforward job. But the fact was, rightly or wrongly, I was still steaming because of what had happened.

“I'm only alive because they wanted to use me for some kind of propaganda campaign. After they got me to say what they wanted, I would have been dead.”

“Wrong again, my friend. You let yourself become a prisoner—captured by a bunch of amateurs, if you ask me. You're only alive because after you messed things up so royally we were able to locate you. You'd been given a watch and a Leatherman, both of which had GPS transmitters inside. They had you in a shack outside an abandoned
mine—in a pretty remote area, I might add. We had people over there just as quickly as we could.”

“It was over two days—”

“Something else you might consider. We could have let you end up in a civilian hospital. How long do you think you would have lasted there? Treated by an Albanian doctor with a beef against Americans? Someone who's mad because Kosovo's still part of Serbia?” She paused. “Well?”

I knew better than to try and answer that question. I said, “You say you located Nadaj and his people. Is he in custody?”

“Ramush Nadaj is still on the loose. Unfortunately.”

“If he's so important, you could have gone in in force. How many thousand troops do we have in Kosovo?”

“Our troops in Kosovo are peacekeepers, Mr. Klear. They're not here for special ops. No one over here knows anything about this operation. And we want to keep it that way. That's why we called on you people to extract Nadaj—because we couldn't do it any other way.”

“What's so important? What's going down?”

Ignoring the question, she removed a small tape recorder from her briefcase and placed it on an adjacent table. All of a sudden, I knew I was in for a grilling, or as it's known in the military, “a post-op debriefing.”

Pointing to the tape recorder, she said, “Do you mind?”

“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.”

“Are you objecting to being debriefed, Mr. Klear?”

“Hold on a second, Colonel.”

“No, no. You hold on, mister. If you're objecting to being debriefed—”

I shook my head, waved my hand. “Not at all. I'm objecting to being bugged. I'll answer your questions. My suggestion is you take notes. By hand.”

“Some people said you can be difficult. My feeling is you enjoy being difficult.”

“Suit yourself, ma'am.”

We began with my arrival in Skopje a week and a half earlier and
moved into the reason for my coming to Kosovo. After identifying my two partners, I said that all I knew about the mission was that we were to run a rendition.

“Who was the target of the rendition?”

“Someone named Ramush Nadaj. We were provided pictures of him before we left.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Very little. Only that he was a Kosovo national and tied up with the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is considered to be a terrorist organization. At least by some people.”

“You were taken prisoner by Ramush Nadaj and his KLA people. Is that correct?” When I nodded, she asked, “How did that come about?”

“Unknown to us, they'd made us during the surveillance. They knew someone was watching them. They had someone outside the house.” I explained that, because we only had three men, we needed to wait for precisely the right moment to try and roust Nadaj. “Things didn't go exactly as we planned.” Talk about an understatement.

“How long were you in their custody?”

“Although it seemed longer, it was two days.”

“How were you treated?”

“Not well, ma'am.”

“Can you be more specific?”

I pointed to a crease in my forehead and a long gash under my left eye. “I didn't always have these dents in my face, ma'am.” Since I assumed Colonel Frost had spoken with the medical people at Landstuhl, I kept the description as brief as possible. I described being beaten up by Nadaj and his crew. I also described the two nights I spent in the pit beneath the house. As I spoke, Colonel Frost wrote rapidly in her notebook.

“Was there anything else?” When I said that, among other things, they threatened to castrate me, Colonel Frost frowned.