Secret Sanction (18 page)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Berkowitz, we don’t get the
Washington Herald
out here. Is there something I should know about?”

This sly grin crossed his lips. “Nah. It’s just that some military guys don’t like my writing slant very much. I always worry about it.”

“Well, don’t. I never read the papers. They make pretty good toilet paper in an emergency, but of course, then you end up with all this black ink stuck to your fanny, which is damned hard to explain to your proctologist.”

He edged over and planted his big ass on the corner of my desk. “Hah-hah! That’s a good one, too. By the way, call me Jeremy.” He stuck out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Jeremy. Call me Major Drummond.” “Okay, if that’s what you’re comfortable with,” he said, becoming more amiable by the second now that he thought I didn’t know he’d raped me on the front page of his paper.

“So what’re you doing out this way, Jeremy? Checking out the good restaurants?”

“Hah-hah.” He gave me another dose of that same phony laugh.“Actually, I’m doing a story on how the operation’s going. Of course, I’m also working on the ambush story, and I thought I’d stop by and see if you changed your mind.”

“Changed my mind?”

“Yeah. About talking with me.”

“Geesh, this is tough, Jeremy. I’d love to, I really would.” “Then what’s stopping you?”

I rubbed my jaw a few times and gave him the squinty, calculating look people say makes me resemble a Turkish rug merchant. “Well, there’s a certain amount of risk in it for me. I mean, what do I get out of it? I just don’t see that it’s worth my risk.”

Jeremy stared at my desktop for a moment, contemplating this new twist. Then he tentatively said,“The paper provides me this very tiny pool of money for occasions like this. Perhaps a small emolument would be in order?”

I got rid of the rug merchant look and replaced it with my best “Gee, I’m shocked as hell” look. “Jeremy!” I yelled.

“Sorry,” he declared, quite insincerely, “I didn’t mean to insult you, but lots of you military guys insist on being paid.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No, really. I’m talking colonels, even some generals.” “Generals?”

“Greediest sons of bitches you ever saw.”

“Was that how you got my name? Did you pay someone for it?” “I didn’t pay anyone, but that’s as much as I’m gonna say.” I grinned. “Yeah, sure. More power to you. In fact, confidentiality was gonna be one of my requirements.”

He gave me this real righteous look and sketched a cross on his heart. “They could stick hot pokers up my ass and I wouldn’t divulge.”

By the look of him I suspected he might be telling the truth. About the hot poker thing, anyway. But just wave one juicy Big Mac under this guy’s nose and he’d be singing arias.

Then he said, “What other requirements you got?”

“I want a two-way street. I give you info, you give me info.” He actually looked relieved. “Just info? That’s all? Hey, no problem.”

“Okay, me first. What nasty rumors are you hearing back in Washington about the investigation?”

“I would’ve thought you’d know more about that than me.” “Well, I’m stuck out here, and like I said, I don’t read the papers.”

He grinned.“The stuff I’ll give you, you won’t find in the papers. Least, not yet.”

“Like what, Jeremy?”

He bent toward me, very conspiratorially.“Well, did you know, for instance, that the President starts every day with a fifteen-minute update on your investigation?”

I tried my best not to look surprised. “Of course he does,” I said, as though I already knew that, as though where else could the briefer possibly be getting his information, if not from me? Except that I hadn’t given out fifteen minutes of information on the investigation since we started. Not to anyone, not even Clapper. So where the hell was the information coming from?

“They say this thing has him tied up in knots,” he added. “The press secretary says that’s because his conscience is eating him alive, that the thought that our soldiers—American soldiers—would massacre a bunch of Serbs has him begging forgiveness from the Lord every night.”

“But you don’t believe that?” I asked.

“The only time that son of a bitch prays is when a camera’s around. And if he’s got a conscience, it’s news to me. News to his wife, too, I’d imagine.”

“Maybe he’s worried that this thing might erode support for the whole operation.”

Berkowitz jumped off the desk and his whole body shook like a bag of Jell-O that had been tossed out of an airplane. “Horsecrap.”

“You don’t think it would do serious damage to the cause if those men are guilty?”

“People ain’t stupid, Major. Besides, what’s there to erode? There is no support for this thing. Okay, my turn, right?”

“Shoot.”

“What’d you do before you became a JAG officer?”

“I was an infantry officer.”

“Where? What unit?”

“Bragg, with the 82nd Airborne. Hoorah!”

His arms reached out and his hands landed on my desk. He looked like a bent-over egg with a smug scowl.“Well, that’s the interesting thing, Major. See, I got a copy of your personnel file from one of my buddies.”

“Yeah?”

“And that’s what it says in your file, so I called a buncha friends of mine who were in the 82nd at the same time. Now here’s a coincidence. One of my buddies was actually a captain in the same battalion your file says you were in.”

“So?”

“So he never heard of you before.”

“That is odd,” I said. “I mean, there’s only like forty officers in a battalion.”

“Yeah, isn’t it.”

“Either he was in a different battalion or you must’ve mis-read my file.”

“Could be.”

“Yeah,” I said, “probably that’s exactly what happened.”

“So why do you think you were picked to be the chief investigating officer? I mean, no offense, but this is a pretty big one. Wouldn’t you think the Army would pick someone more senior?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” I said.“Must be because I’m shit-hot and have ethics like a rock.”

“I’ve got a more interesting theory.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

He took his hands off my desk and went over and stood by the wall to contemplate my face from a safer distance.

“There’s this very special unit down at Bragg that’s so outrageously secret that nobody’s ever supposed to have heard of it. Anyone assigned to that unit, while they’re in it, their files are separated from the rest of the Army’s and are administered by a special cell. Of course, once these guys leave that unit ...well, then they gotta have regular files like everyone else. So what happens is their files are filled in with units they never really served in.”

“They really do that?” I asked.

“They really do,” he said, grinning. “Nearly always they list units at Bragg. That way, if these guys are ever asked, they can at least sound like they know something about the base.”

“Damn, that’s really cunning of the Army,” I said.

“Of course, those guys are never allowed to disclose they’ve been in that unit, or even that it exists. But it does. Kind of like Delta, that other unit that doesn’t really exist, only the boys in this outfit are tougher, more deadly, and do more dangerous stuff.”

“Isn’t that something. Here I’ve been in the Army all these years and never heard of any such thing.”

“Really something,” he said. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s say a Special Forces A-team went out and did a very bad thing while they were performing a very secret mission. Then, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the Army actually had a lawyer who used to belong to that special unit that doesn’t exist.”

“A guy could write a real great novel about something like that, couldn’t he?”

“Or a few really good newspaper articles. I mean, why would the Army pick a guy like that to head up the investigation?”

“First, there would have to be such a guy. Personally, I did my time in an infantry battalion in the 82nd, and if you’d like, I’ll bring you some witnesses—”

“Of course you did, Major. But what would worry me is that the Army might pick just such a guy because he’d be most likely to feel some sympathy for that A-team. Hell, after living in a secret world, where he’s had to lie to everyone he knows about what he does, he might even be more inclined to help build a cover for that team.”

I grinned at him, and he grinned back at me.

Then he added,“Of course, like I said, all of this was just for the sake of argument.”

“Is there a point to this argument?”

“No, it’s only academic. After all, you’ve already agreed to cooperate with me, so there’s really no need for me to see how far I could go in checking this story.”

“That’s good, because it’s all wrong,” I said.

We both chuckled at the irony of that. There’s nothing like starting a relationship of trust based on what we both knew was an outright lie.

“So,” he said, “what’s their story?”

“Their story is that they were detected by the Serbs and had to fight their way out. The team leader felt the Serbs were boxing his team in. He decided that ambushing a large column was the best way to make the Serbs believe his unit was larger than it was and to make the Serbs slow down and become more cautious.”

Berkowitz let out a loud whistle. “No kidding.”

“That’s what they say.”

“You believe ’em?”

“So far, sure. It meets with the facts, and all nine men are telling the same tale.”

His eyes kind of lit up, and the letters
PULITZER
seemed to emerge on his forehead. “Jesus, what a great story line.”

“Yeah, it really is, isn’t it.”

“Here these poor bastards were, trapped behind enemy lines, doing a secret mission this administration ordered them to do. They fight their way out, and instead of getting the medals they deserve, they get stuffed behind bars and investigated like common criminals.”

“That about sums it up,” I said. “Frankly, it’s an embarrassment for me to be part of this. I almost can’t stand to look those men in the eyes. I mean, these guys are genuine heroes.”

“No kidding.”

“Nope, no kidding.”

His face got very serious. “You’re sure you’re not kidding, right?”

“God’s honest truth. Left to me, I’d wrap this whole thing up in two days. Only problem is, one of the other investigating team members is a real prick and seems dead set on proving they did something wrong. He keeps nitpicking little details, even though all he’s doing is making a damned nuisance out of himself. The rest of us are convinced he’s an idiot and these men are innocent.”

I could see he was now itching to race out of my office and file a story. The international press were all convinced these guys had committed a heinous crime, and now Jeremy Berkowitz was about to break the
real
story, that these men were not only innocent, but heroes to boot. He’d paint the administration as cruel and unfair for persecuting these poor, decent guys who were only doing their job the best they knew how. The story would play well. The President, everybody knew, was a draft-dodgin’ lefty who once wrote a letter about how much he detested the military. He wrote that letter a long time before, in a very different era, but the opposing party had a copy of that letter engraved in bronze and kept shoving it in everybody’s face every time the President did anything that could halfway be construed as antimilitary, or antidefense, or anti-American. According to the opposing party, about everything the President ever did fell into one of those categories, and now Berkowitz here was staring at yet another opportunity to remind the great unwashed public that the President once wrote such a letter.

He walked toward the door, then turned around. His feet did this little shifting thing.“You know I have to refer to you in the story?”

“Uh, actually, no,” I lied. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“I’d like to call you ‘a source on the investigating team.’ Anything more generic and the story loses credibility. My editors, and the public, they have to know this is coming from inside.”

“I don’t know . . . there’s only a few of us . . . and, uh—” “Hey, Major, I’ve never had a source caught. Trust me on this.” I let out a heavy sigh and scratched my head a few times. Finally, I reluctantly said,“If it’s absolutely necessary, then okay.”

I felt pretty smug when Berkowitz walked out the door. It isn’t often when you get two vindictive retaliations for the price of one. Berkowitz would print his story, make a big splash, bask in his fifteen minutes of glory, then as soon as I proved that Sanchez and his team had cold-bloodedly murdered the Serbs, he’d look like a worldwide horse’s ass.

The White House and Clapper would have no reason to suspect me of being the leaker. I had pooh-poohed myself in the story. Pretty slick that. Now Delbert or Morrow or whoever was leaking on me was going to be suspected of leaking to the press also.

About a minute after Berkowitz departed, the door flew open and in marched Imelda. She shut the door behind her, then plopped into a seat in front of my desk.

She snorted once or twice, then said, “That a reporter?” “Yep.”

“That the same reporter that wrote that shitty article?”

“One and the same, Imelda.”

She seemed to consider that a moment. She played with her hair and fiddled with the rim on her glasses. Then she gave me this stern, disapproving glare, which, given that this was Imelda Pepperfield, could burn paint off walls.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Reporters are nothing but low-life trash. Don’t you let him come suckin’ up here again, stinkin’ up my building. Got that?”

“Sure, Imelda. And thanks.”

She pushed herself out of her chair, grunted something brief that sounded either like, “You’re really very welcome, sir, and I admire the hell out of you,” or “Frigamugit,” then shuffled back out.

In her inimitable way, she was warning me that the surest way to get caught leaking to the press was to allow Berkowitz to show his face here again. What a woman.

Chapter 14

H
enry Kissinger once said that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they really aren’t trying to get you. Suddenly I was beginning to think it was true, he was right, and he’d been talking about me.