Secret Sanction (22 page)

After a while, he glanced over and saw me standing observantly in the corner. I apparently aroused his curiosity. He kept glancing over for the next five minutes, until he finally got up from his desk, went to the corner, fixed himself a fresh cup of coffee, then walked over. That’s when I noticed he’d fixed himself two cups of coffee. I also noticed his hands. They were so big and beefy that the coffee cups looked like a couple of thimbles.

His hands matched the rest of him. He was a big, rough-looking man who obviously had had his nose broken at least a few times. He had an enormous, ugly head that seemed to be connected directly to his shoulders, because his neck was the size of a tree stump. He had the standard Special Forces crew cut, and floppy ears that made him look sort of elephantine. A tall man, too, maybe six foot three, with broad, ponderous shoulders.

He squinted at my nametag and the JAG emblem on my collar, then broke into a wide grin. “You the same guy doing the investigation?” he asked.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, quickly grabbing a coffee cup from his hand before he could decide he didn’t want to talk with me and wandered off in search of someone else to hand the coffee to. This made it too awkward for him to try to move on without making himself appear to be my personal errand boy.

His nametag read Williams, and I said, “I take it you’re the ops sergeant.”

“Yup. Welcome to my kingdom.”

“My compliments, Sergeant Major. Looks like a pretty tight ship.”

“We try. Gets a little kinky when you’re running U.S. teams, KLA teams, and trying to keep watch on the bad guys at the same time.”

“Thank God this ain’t a war, huh?”

“Say that again.” He chuckled.“If we’d fought this way in the Gulf War, the Iraqis would still be grilling hot dogs in Kuwait.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Christ, a little girl with one leg could fight a better war than this.”

“How many teams are there?”

“Right now, we’ve got nine U.S. teams inside Kosovo. Then there are sixteen KLA units.”

“You’ve got nine SF teams and another sixteen with the KLA?”

“No. There are nine KLA teams operatin’ with our guys and another seven KLA units without A-teams.”

“I didn’t know there were KLA units operating without Guardian Angels.”

“We call ’em GTs . . . uh, graduate teams.”

“Graduate teams?”

“Yeah. Every KLA unit that goes in starts with baby-sitters, till they’ve done three or four successful missions. Then we cut ’em loose. We still supply ’em, and a few have liaison cells, but they operate more or less independently.”

“They any good?” I asked.

He took my arm and ushered me over to the huge electronic map on the wall. He looked it over for a moment, then pointed toward a blue dot located in the northeastern corner of Kosovo.

“Red dots are Serbs, green dots are our guys, blue dots are KLA. That’s GT team seven there. One of the first teams we formed. Nearly every man had at least a tour in the old Yugoslav army. The commander was an infantry major.”

“They’re pretty deep inside,” I remarked.

“We try to keep the rookie teams as close to the Macedonian border as we can. That way, they get in over their head, it’s a short walk out.”

I stared up at the dot that represented team seven. “That a good team?”

“Very damn good.”

“What have you got them doing?”

“As we speak, they’re pinpointing targets for the flyboys. We issued ’em some laser designators. See that line right there?” He pointed at a string of blinking red dots that were aligned from the northeast to the southwest. “That’s the Serbs’ main supply route. About half the Serbs’ ammo and supplies come down that artery. Team seven’s got guys positioned all along it. They heat up the targets with the lasers every time we’ve got an F-16 that’s got a few extra bombs or missiles to unload.”

“Very impressive,” I said.

“Yeah, well, they’re the exception. Most of these KLA teams aren’t worth pissin’ on. Most haven’t done a damn thing since we put ’em in.You send ’em orders, and they call you back and complain that it’s too hard, or they say they’re doing it, but when you get the recce photos, you find out they didn’t do a damn thing. Waste of food and ammo.”

He kept studying my face as we talked. He had that perplexed look some people get when they’re trying to remember something.

I said, “So tell me, Sergeant Major, how well do you remember Akhan’s company?”

“Ah, a damned shame, that one,” he said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully.

“A good unit?”

“Never really had a chance to find out. Great scores in training, but they got wiped out before they ever had a chance to strut their stuff.”

“Yeah, I heard they ran into a real butcher’s mart at that police station.”

“Yeah, a nasty business, that was,” he issued forth without the slightest hint of genuine remorse. Then the corners of his mouth twisted up, and his head canted to the side. “Hey, you ever been to Bragg?”

“Years ago. I was assigned there back when I was in the infantry.”

“Yeah, I knew I seen you before.”

“Five glorious years in the 82nd. Ooorah!” I said.

He lowered his voice.“Right, and I was Columbus’s first mate on the friggin’
Santa Maria.
You don’t remember me, do ya?”

“Nope, I’m afraid I don’t.”

He winked.“ ’Course, you don’t. I didn’t recognize your name ’cause the outfit didn’t use names when we screened. We just gave you all numbers, so’s to make sure there was no favoritism or command influence. But I never forget a face.”

I looked at Williams and tried to place him. The voice was somehow disturbingly familiar, as were the eyes, but I couldn’t recall from where, and that worried me.

“Sorry, Sergeant Major, you’ve got the wrong guy. I never heard of the outfit.”

His smile broadened. “Remember the POW camp? Remember that big, surly asshole wearing a hood that kept kickin’ the crap outta you?”

This I remembered all too well. The outfit had a six-month-long test you had to pass in order to get in. About one in every twenty applicants managed to survive the ordeal. One of the passages the outfit expected all recruits to endure was two weeks in a POW camp that was about as brutally realistic as they could make it. For some reason, this huge interrogator who was working the hard sell developed a very nasty affection for me. He liked me so much, he made sure I got one-hour personal workouts with him every day. When he was done, I had two fractured ribs, a broken nose, and two missing teeth to remember him by.

“You were that prick?” I asked.

“Hey, no hard feelings.” He chuckled. “That was my job.”

“A job, huh? Well, you certainly seemed to enjoy it.”

That brought another chuckle.“Part of the job, too. We were supposed to make it look like we were having balls of fun, ’cause they figured that would scare the crap outta you guys.”

“It did,” I said very earnestly.“I dreamed about you for years.” I didn’t mention that they were nightmares, but I was sure he got the point.

“Well, you were a tough little bastard.You shoulda broke and told me what I wanted to know. You’d of saved yourself a lot of agony. And it sure didn’t help, you being such a wiseass all the time. Did you know all those sessions were taped?”

“I guess I missed that. A guy gets a little preoccupied when he’s being bounced off walls and punched silly. You were very good at keeping my attention.”

“Yeah, well, there was one of those little tiny cameras in the corner ceiling. Every night, Colonel Tingle, the camp commandant, would review the tapes, and he’d get all over my ass for letting you mouth off at me that way. I told him after that first week you weren’t gonna break, but he kept scheduling you to come back.” He shook his head as though he were remembering some disastrous blind date. “You know, you being such a tough motherfucker, that’s what got you into the outfit. As I remember, you couldn’t shoot worth a shit.”

“Never could,” I admitted.

“So you left the outfit and became a lawyer?” he asked. “Yeah. After five years, I decided I needed to preserve my mental health.”

“Hey, got that. I was there six years; probably one or two too many. That POW training thing was my final fling. They let me go after that.”

“You’ve been here ever since?”

“Yeah, it’s not a bad unit. Ain’t the outfit, but then, nothing else is.”

“I guess. Anyway, we’re both a little old for that stuff now.” I walked over to the wall of communications consoles, and he followed me over.

“You’re in contact with all the teams inside the zone?” “Yep.”

“I guess the teams have to make daily sitreps, don’t they?” “Twice a day. One at first light, one at dusk. That’s why we have ten of these communications consoles. That way, we can handle the load and collect all the sitreps together.”

“Anybody ever miss?” I asked.

“Once in a blue moon. Not our guys, though. They never miss. It’s the KLA guys, they get sloppy sometimes.”

“What do you do when you don’t get a timely sitrep?” “Try to initiate contact. We’ve never had to go beyond that, ’cause so far it’s always worked. If we still couldn’t get contact, we’d get a bird up immediately. And if that didn’t work, we’d get a recon team in there, right quick.”

“Why wouldn’t you just wait till the next sitrep time to see if they establish contact on their own?”

He looked at me like that was a spectacularly stupid question.“Come on, you know this shit. Those sitreps are their only lifeline. Miss even one and we start moving heaven and earth to find out what happened.”

“Were you on duty when Sanchez’s team was in the zone?” “Part of the time, but I gotta tell you, Major, paesan to paesan, we’ve been told to watch what we say to you about that.”

I figured that Sergeant Major Williams and I had shared some pretty intimate times together. I mean, a certain amount of repartee develops between a beater and his beatee. So I pressed my luck.

“Who told you that?”

The smile had left his face, and he began shaking his head. “Can’t really say. But you better play this real smart. Don’t go actin’ like the same stubborn shit I remember. Might not have seemed like it, but that POW camp was just kid’s play. What’s goin’ down around here’s for keeps.”

Just at that moment a fella with a full bird on his collar, who looked like he just bit into a big, saucy lemon, walked over to join us. He glanced at me like I was the guy who had just de-flowered his virginal daughter, then grabbed Williams by the sleeve.

“Excuse me, Sergeant Major, we’ve got another update to send to team four. Would you step over and join me?”

The colonel dragged Williams to a corner, then the colonel’s forefinger started doing a tap dance on Williams’s chest. I could see Williams’s feet shuffling, and I guessed he was getting his ears cleaned out pretty good. I can’t really say that bothered me all that much. I mean, the guy once spent two weeks beating the doo-doo out of me, and I don’t care what he said about it being just a job and all that.When someone spends about twenty hours turning you into pulp, you can tell whether he sees it as work or sport. Maybe that’s why he left the outfit after six years. Maybe the outfit sensed he was going over the edge. If they’d asked me at the time, I would’ve sworn he was so far over the edge that he’d hit the pitch-black bottom.

At any rate, the watchdogs were on to me, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any more help here. I retreated quietly and thought about Williams’s warning. There were lots of ways to interpret it. Maybe the word had been put out to stay away from me because I was investigating some of their brethren, and everybody wanted to make damn sure they did nothing to help put some of their own guys away. From a technically legal standpoint, that was a large-scale conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice. From a human standpoint, it was an understandable, and in some ways even admirable, fraternal response.

The hitch was that added warning about this being for keeps. I mean, at right about that moment, a big, bloated corpse was packed in a container of dry ice, on the back of a C-130, winging its way to Washington. I’d call that “for keeps.”

I reached down and fingered the .38 caliber that rested in the holster on my hip. The time had come for me to actually get some ammunition for this thing. On the other hand, given my deplorable marksmanship skills, I’d probably stand a better chance if I just threw the damn pistol at anyone who was coming after me.

Chapter 17

T
he fellow waiting for me back at my office looked like a spook. Maybe it was all those James Bond movies. Or maybe it was all those spymaster novels that were the rage during the cold war, but sunglasses and trench coats had become the shibboleths for anybody connected with intelligence collection. Now just how an NSA guy expected to be perceived as a daring spy was beyond me. I mean, give me a break. NSA guys and gals don’t do secret missions or any of that crap. Hollywood sometimes portrays them as furtive skulduggers, but that just goes to show what happens when you give guys like Oliver Stone a camera and a license to interpret the universe. The NSA folks are terrestrial gazers. They rely on satellites and fancy airplanes with lots of odd gizmos to do all their work. Still, I guess you can’t fault them for wanting to exploit that spurious image Hollywood has created for them. I mean, it’s a cheap way to have a little sex appeal.

At any rate, this guy was sitting in a chair beside my office door, trench coat slung across his lap,
Washington Post
splayed open, just trying his damnedest to look like some nonchalant, hotshot, dashing operative. Actually, he pulled it off pretty well. He was a handsome guy with slicked-back blond hair, grayed nicely at the temples, and by his build I’d say he and the NSA gymnasium were fairly well acquainted. Most NSA folks look like clerks with wide, flat asses. That’s what comes from sitting all day and peering at the world through a satellite aperture.

“Hi,” I said as I walked past him.

The newspaper was instantly closed, he popped out of his chair and followed me. “You’re Major Drummond?”

“Last time I checked,” I said.

He trailed me into my lair, where I got myself situated behind my desk, and he got his self situated in front of my desk. Digging his wallet out of his trench coat, he flung it open to show me some kind of ID. He tried to do this swiftly, the way some cops do, but I caught a glimpse of the letters NSA before he slammed it shut with a quick, violent swinging motion. I wondered if this guy was on steroids.