Escape (15 page)

Katz had come to Karp's attention several months earlier during the murder trial of a gang member who'd stabbed a rival to death in the parking lot of a shopping center. Just before Katz's star witness—another gang member who'd been present at the crime—was set to testify, the witness decided he wanted a better deal. He'd agreed to plead guilty to acting in concert with the defendant during the course of the murder and accept ten years in exchange for testifying against his homeboy. But now he and his attorney were demanding no prison time.

According to what Karp had been told by Fulton, who'd heard the story from the police detective assigned to the case, Katz had left the witness waiting room to think over the dilemma. Then he'd spotted a blank videotape lying on a table. Thinking quickly, he'd borrowed a black felt-tip pen, which he used to scrawl in big block letters, "MURDER SCENE—PARKING LOT SURVEILLANCE TAPE" and the date of the murder. He then walked back into the waiting room and tossed the tape onto the table in front of the witness and his attorney.

"He didn't say anything about the tape," Fulton related. "Just, 'Forget it, I don't need you anymore. No deal of any sort. The next time I see you in court, you'll be sitting at the defense table.' He started to walk out but apparently the lawyer for this scumbag beat him to the door, babbling about how there'd been a big misunderstanding. His client was prepared to testify and the original deal was just fine with him. Dude testified and sent his homie upriver for life."

The witness's attorney had cried foul later when he discovered there was no real surveillance tape depicting the murder, but it didn't matter. Katz had never said there was anything on the tape. The lawyer and the witness had just been free to read into it what they wanted.

It was the sort of quick thinking on his feet and under pressure that Karp was looking for in someone to take under his wing and groom for the future as a possible bureau chief. So he'd called the young man in for an interview.

Before Katz arrived, Karp had checked out his file and suddenly wondered if he'd made a mistake. It wasn't the growing up in Queens only a few blocks from where Marlene's parents' home was located, or his top-of-the-class grades he'd received at Columbia Law School, that caught his attention. It was Katz's military record and how he'd behaved after returning from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.

According to the resume, in September 2001 Katz had been in his last year at Columbia when the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.

Two days later, he'd dropped out and enlisted in the army. After basic training, he'd asked to be assigned to Ranger school, one of the toughest units in the U.S. Armed Forces. He'd then been sent to Afghanistan, where he'd been wounded twice. He received the Silver Star for gallantry along with two Purple Hearts and an honorable discharge.

All of that impressed Karp, but then he'd come across a newspaper clipping that someone had seen in the
Times
and inserted in the file. It was actually just a photograph of Katz, looking the part of a college student with his kinky hair bushed out in what Karp thought of as a "Jew Fro," attending an anti-war rally. The photograph showed Katz tossing what the caption said were his medals on the fire, and that rankled Karp.

As a boy growing up in Brooklyn just after the end of World War II, Karp had often gone on walks around the neighborhood with his parents. He was probably seven or eight when he'd remarked about the gold stars he could see in the windows of some of the homes they passed.

"Those are for the boys who didn't come home from the war, Roger,"
his mother tearfully said. He'd never forgotten the sadness in her voice and the way she'd pulled him closer to her.
"That's where their parents live."

They were the local boys—the high school athletes and bookworms, the sons of the local baker, the family who ran the candy store, and the guy who owned the car dealership—who'd become heroes of nearly mythic proportions.

"They were just boys,
" his mother noted, like those who played ball in the Avenue P Park between 4th and 5th streets below Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn.

While conceding to Katz his free-speech rights, Karp couldn't get past the feeling that burning the medals was a slap in the face to all those goldstar moms. The medals had nothing to do with the politics of the war. They were an acknowledgment of personal sacrifice. So his first inclination was to cancel the interview—that kind of cheap theatrics were for defense attorneys. But then his better angels prevailed, and he decided to go through with the interview and ask Katz to explain the photograph.

The young man had been surprised when Karp handed him the newspaper clipping.
"To
be honest, I have another set of medals at home,"
the wise-cracking street kid from Queens joked.
"I
was just trying to get laid by one of those hippie chicks. They really go for that sensitive-war-hero shit."

Army Ranger and war hero or not, Karp was about to kick him out of his office and down to the traffic bureau when the young man realized that flippancy had been the wrong way to handle the question.
"Sorry,"
he'd said.
"I have a bad habit when I'm nervous of being a smartass."

"Then relax and tell me the real story,"
Karp had replied. The answer had surprised him.

Katz said he'd had been raised in one of those intellectual Jewish households where all questions, statements, and firmly held beliefs were examined and debated.

His grandparents and father had fled Germany shortly after
Krystalnacht,
the night in 1938 when anti-Jew riots broke out in Germany and Austria. The Katz family arrived in Queens grateful for the sanctuary and ready to repay the debt. Katz's father, Jacob, had served two tours of duty in Vietnam.

Kenny Katz had been walking to class at Columbia University on the far north end of Manhattan Island that morning on September 11, 2001, when he saw the dark plume of smoke rising from the southern end. He'd run into the student center and made it to the television lounge just in time to see the second airliner crash into the tower, and he stayed to watch as it all came plummeting to the ground.

An overwhelming anger began to burn inside of him. He'd always planned on applying to the New York District Attorney's Office when he got out of law school, hoping to work in the homicide bureau putting away killers. Here was murder on a scale that no DAO or international court of law could ever fathom; it was going to take more than talk and law books to deal with the murderers of 9/11.

Even as U.S. lawmakers and the president were making plans to go after Al Qaeda and their hosts, the Taliban in Afghanistan, he'd walked into his counselor's office at the law school and announced that he would be taking a leave from law school to join the army. He just wanted to let the man know that he planned to return when he could to resume his studies.

Katz didn't know what sort of response he'd get, but it wasn't what he'd hoped. The man, a noted liberal scholar, had looked at him with a bemused smile on his face and shaken his head. "Look, Kenny," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, as if Katz had just told him he planned to run away and join the circus. "We're all upset about what happened, but let's not all go off half-cocked to 'save the world' from a few misguided Muslims. Besides, I have it from reputable sources that there's a good chance the Republicans—or maybe somebody even more sinister—was behind this as an excuse to go to war for oil."

"That's about the stupidest thing I ever heard," Katz heard himself say to the man who could easily derail his pursuit of a law degree. "You stay here until they come for you with their Qur'an and their bombs. Me, I'm off to put a stop to it if I can."

"Good luck with that," the counselor said scornfully. "I doubt Columbia will have a place for you when you get back."

"I doubt I'd want it if you did," he'd retorted.

During basic training and in Ranger School, Katz had spent his free time studying up on Islamic extremism and the road leading to the attack on the World Trade Center, and saw a nation that was slow to respond to an impending threat. Most of that was due to weak-willed politicians who hamstrung any attempts to stop a growing sense on the part of the terrorists that America was too cowardly to stand up to them. And it had been going on for a long time and through several administrations and congresses—from the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 servicemen; to the 1988 bombing and the deaths of 259 passengers and crew aboard an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland; the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya; the attack in 2000 on the USS
Cole;
and finally the attack on the World Trade Center. All those lives had been lost, while America's elected officials slept and worried about their next election.

No more, he thought, as his company at last received their orders to deploy to Afghanistan, where they would be assigned to hunt bin Laden and his associates in the mountains around Tora Bora. "We
had him, too,"
Katz recalled for Karp.
"But once again, the politicians and the bureaucrats kept clicking around and let him get away because they didn't want to offend our supposed allies in Pakistan.
" He'd soon grown jaded to the fact that partisan politics mattered more than the lives of U.S. soldiers. His father had warned him that ever since Vietnam, the politicians, not the generals, had been in charge of the battlefield, and they were more worried about what the press would say than they were about an American son coming home in a body bag.

"
All this crap you hear about we don't know who we're fighting ... that it's not like a conventional war because the terrorists don't have a standing army, is just pure horse manure,"
Katz had said to Karp that day in his office. "We
know who they are. We know where they are. We know that during the
night
they're trying to kill U.S. troops, and then smiling and waving at us the next day. They hide in houses with women and children, and then when we shoot back and civilians are killed, they wring their hands and cry about the Americans for the press. We don't lack the ability to fight these guys, we lack the will to do what it will take to make Americans safe again."

However, as much as he learned to despise politicians, Katz had a profound love for the men he fought with. "We
were from all over the place,"
he told Karp.
"Rich, poor, black, white, Jew, and even a couple of Muslim guys who hated these bastards more than we did because of what they were doing in the name of the Qur'an. "

One night his unit received information from Pakistani intelligence officers that a high-level Al Qaeda leader was hiding out in a nearby village. "We
didn't really
trust those
guys,"
he said of the Pakistanis.
"Half of them were Al Qaeda or willing to lie or run off if someone slipped them a few dollars, but this seemed like good intel so we went."

They were making their way through a narrow ravine when they were ambushed. The two men on point went down in the first fusillade, while the rest of the company was pinned down in the rocks.

Sgt. Kenny Katz jumped from the relative safety of the rocks and sprinted for the wounded men.
"I don't remember making a conscious decision to do it,"
he said.
"I still don't think of it as heroic. My guys were hurt, and I wasn't going to leave them out there to die."
He made it to the first man and miraculously dragged him back to safety as the bullets rang off the rocks all around them. Then he went back for the second soldier.

"The next thing I knew, I was
sitting on
the ground feeling like somebody had punched me in the guts,"
he said.
"I looked down and could see I was bleeding on one side of my ribs.
I was amazed that it didn't hurt, and only then realized that bullets were
singing
all around me still. "

Instead of running back to cover, he went forward and retrieved the body of the second man, but he was dead. He was crawling back toward his company when a bullet struck his hip.
"Shattered the joint,"
Katz said.
"But I was lucky. I didn't lose my leg, just got me a new titanium hip joint and a small limp. Lots of guys got it worse."

Katz was silent for a minute, looking down at the newspaper photograph in his hands. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes.
"Anyway, I was discharged and forced Columbia to let me pick up where I left off. They didn't want to but I had a good lawyer. I got out, went to work for you, and now here we sit."
Karp nodded at the photograph.
"I don't know if I have the right to ask,"
he said. "
But I take it you weren't there to pick up chicks."

Katz smiled.
"Well, not entirely,"
he laughed.
"No. To be honest, I didn't intend to be there at all. I was just finishing law school and in fact was moving out of my apartment near campus for the one I'm in now in the Lower East Side. You'll see the date, May
3, 2003.
Ring a bell?"

"No, not really,"
Karp replied.

"That was the day after the president landed on the aircraft carrier off of Iraq and declared
'Mission
Accomplished,'"
Katz said.
"I was angry. I'd just been e-mailing with a buddy who was still in, but now they were stationed in
An
bar Province. The mission was anything but over. They were up to their necks in a guerrilla war. Nothing the boys couldn't've handled if they'd been
given
the right equipment and support, including enough troop strength to root out those motherfuckers. These insurgents are like cockroaches
—
doesn't do you any good to kill most of them, you've
got to
kill all of them or they'll lay eggs. In this case that means some asshole talking shit to a bunch of poor, ignorant locals until dying for Allah looks like a good deal. But my buddy was telling me they weren't getting the right equipment
—no
body armor, unless they bought it themselves, no armor for the frickin' Humvees, which were never meant to be fighting vehicles. But here's the president declaring 'Mission Accomplished.' What a bunch of crap."

Katz suddenly stopped talking. His face had grown red with anger. He tried to laugh it off.
"Look at me, giving an overlong closing argument when all you asked for was a simple answer to a simple question
..."

But Karp waved his hand.
"This wasn't a simple question, and it taught me a lesson about jumping to simple conclusions before learning all the facts. Please, finish your story."

"Well, the long and short of all that was this mission wasn't going to be over for a long time, and not without a lot of guys dying before the politicians learned to quit trying to tell the military how to conduct wars," Katz said. "We're going to have to accept that people will die who you wish did not have to die. But a lot fewer of those kinds of people will die if by their deaths the war and the killing stops, or in that part of the world, slows down to a trickle. And when you wage war, do so with a plan for what you're going to do when the initial round of shooting stops. Have a Marshall Plan on how to turn your former enemies into your grateful friends. But the politicians fucked this one up from the word go."

Katz drew a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.
"So that's my soapbox speech and brings me to crossing campus with a duffel bag full of my stuff, pissed off about 'Mission Accomplished,' and I find myself at this anti-war demonstration."

"So that's why you threw your medals on the fire,"
Karp said.

Katz nodded.
"Yeah. The 'anything for peace' crowd are not exactly my people; if they get their may, it will eventually mean slavery and subjugation for the non-Muslim world. But I was thinking about my buddies fighting and dying while politicians did nothing to support them.
So
I pretty much walked up, tossed the medals on the fire, and walked away. Just so happened that a photographer was there to catch the moment. Then I made the mistake of giving the guy my name. So, anything else you need to know about me?"

"Yeah,"
Karp said with a nod.
"How would you like to work in the homicide bureau full-time, only you'd have to put up with me kibitzing from time to time?"

"That's an affirmative,"
Katz said and then shook his head.
"I thought when I saw that photograph you were going to fire my ass."

"Nah,"
Karp lied, and they both knew it.
"I was just going to ask if it got you laid by one of those hippie chicks."

"Don't I wish,"
Kenny replied.
"But no, I'm saving myself for marriage."

"Yeah, I'll bet,"
Karp laughed. "But
now you don't have your medals to impress your future bride with."

"Actually, I do,"
Katz said. "As soon as
I tossed them in the fire, I regretted it. I earned those suckers the hard way.
So
I wrote to the army and got a duplicate set. Got 'em framed and hanging on the wall of my apartment right below a photograph of me and my unit on top of the Khyber Pass."

Months later, Karp turned when the door to the dayroom opened and Jessica Campbell, wearing red institutional "pajamas" special to the psychiatric ward, shuffled in, escorted by a guard. This mission was still not accomplished either.