Secret Sanction (43 page)

“Okay,” I grumbled. “Just remember. I don’t have a Pudley. Maybe I’m not a Humongo, but damn it, I’m no Pudley.”

“Eat,” she ordered.

“Maybe I need to wear different pants or something,” I mumbled.

She was still smiling when we went out and caught a sedan to the air base.

Chapter 31

T
erry Sanchez looked thinner. And more gaunt. There were dark, hollow pockets around his eyes, so deep it actually seemed as if his eyeballs were sucking in all the skin around them. His eyeballs themselves looked like brittle crystals that could shatter at any minute. He shambled when he walked, and his arms hung limply by his sides. I had the sense of a man who was rapidly deteriorating.

I pointed at the chair in the middle of the floor and asked him to be seated. He slumped into it and stared at me with a blank expression. I repeated the same explanation I had used the day before, taking care to update our understanding of what had happened in Kosovo.

His eyes were wandering around the room as I spoke, and he appeared too listless to be fazed that we had learned so much about the terrible events that occurred out there.

I paused, but before I could continue, Morrow suddenly said, “Terry.”

He looked up at her. Her voice became very soft, mellow and soothing. Almost like a violin playing a lullaby. Or maybe more like a concerned mother talking to a hurt child.

“Terry, we know now what happened out there.We want to hear your side, though. Do you understand what’s happening here?”

He stopped gazing around the room and looked into her eyes. “Yes.”

“Good,” she said, offering him a gentle smile. She was taking over the interrogation.

“It’s important for you to know we haven’t made any judgments yet. Things like this are never black and white. You were under terrible pressures. You were trying to do what was right. We want to hear your side.”

He was now staring into her eyes, as though they were a life raft he wanted to climb into.

She continued. “We’re going to ask some difficult questions now. The cover-up has fallen apart. Jack Tretorne and General Murphy just want us to find the truth. The other members of your team have all been truthful. It’s your turn, Terry. Okay?”

He nodded, but his eyes stayed glued to hers. It was almost like he was mesmerized. I knew in that instant that I could never do what Morrow was doing. She sensed that Terry Sanchez was drowning. She sensed that his insides were seething with turmoil, that he required a sympathetic listener or else he would just fall to pieces. Sympathy is not my strong suit.

“Good, Terry. Why don’t we start with the decision that led Captain Akhan to raid the police station in Piluca?”

He licked his lips a few times, and I thought of a man who was stuck in a desert and was staring at an oasis off in the distance. His only company the past few weeks had been the same men who obviously detested him for whatever he’d done out there. Some part of him had to be begging for the chance to explain himself to someone who wasn’t there. Morrow expertly sensed that.

He said, “I know what you’ve been hearing from the others about that. They’re wrong, though. It’s not the way it happened.”

Morrow said, “Then please tell us what did happen.”

He said, “Akhan begged me to let him hit that station. A lot of his men lived near Piluca, and they were begging him. I guess he wasn’t strong enough to say no. He wasn’t really a soldier, you know. There was a Serb captain named Pajocovic. He’d terrorized that town for a year. A number of Akhan’s men had lived there. Some of them had family members who were tortured or killed by him. You see why they wanted to hit that station?”

“Of course,” Morrow said.“It makes perfectly good sense. But it wasn’t on the approved target list, was it?”

“I told Akhan that. I swear I did, but he said the target list didn’t apply to him and his men. He said that list only applied to my team. He was right about that, you know.”

“Yes, Terry, according to the rules, he was right. Did you want him to raid that station at Piluca?”

“Sure. I understood what his men were feeling.”

“Then—”

“No, wait,” Sanchez said, almost coming out of his chair.“You have to understand. Nobody understands. My mother and father, they’re from Cuba. They came over in ’61, with the first big wave. My father, he was recruited by the CIA to go back. He was on the first wave to hit the beach. His friends were dying all around him, but he fought for three days. He fought until the American ships that brought him there pulled out and abandoned them. Then the American planes left and there was no hope. The Bay of Pigs, you remember it? My father spent three years in a Cuban prison. We finally traded some tractors to get him and the others freed.”

Morrow was following along with more gentle nods. She bent forward and rested her chin on her hands, as though everything he was saying made perfectly good sense. Frankly, he was rambling. I thought his mind was becoming incoherent.

“You understand?” he continued. “He didn’t blame them though. It was his country. That happened to my family. I knew how these Kosovars felt. The others, the rest of the team . . . they didn’t, you see? These men weren’t fighting for America. They were fighting to free their own homeland. We can’t tell them what to hit and what not.”

It suddenly struck me that Terry Sanchez was stretching desperately. The Bay of Pigs and what was happening in Kosovo could not be more different. Faced with overpowering guilt, his mind was trying to construct a rationalization, any rationalization that would absolve or soften what he had done. Not an atonement, but an escape.

Morrow said, “Was Akhan’s operation properly planned?” “Sure. I went over it with him for two days. I told him we couldn’t lift a finger to help him, because it wasn’t an approved target for us, but I told him everything to do. I even had Akhan send three men down to town the day before. They checked all over. All they saw was a bunch of drunk Serb police lounging around. It should’ve been easy.”

“Then what happened, Terry?”

“I don’t know for sure. Nobody knows for sure.What I think happened was one of Akhan’s men was a mole. It’s happened with other teams, you know? The Serbs send spies into the camps to be recruited in the KLA. I think that’s what happened here. I think one of his men tipped off the Serbs. That’s not my fault, you see? They were waiting for him. I told him before he went down there that if he got in trouble, we couldn’t lift a finger to help him. He understood that. It wasn’t my fault, you see? I told him.”

Morrow was in her full sympathetic mode, nodding and pursing her lips, but Sanchez wasn’t through. He was speaking louder now, almost frantic.

“That’s what the men in my team couldn’t get through their heads.You see that, right? I didn’t get Akhan killed. I didn’t make him go down there. I didn’t order him to do it. Whoever told the Serbs he was coming, he was the one who got Akhan killed. I just let Akhan do what he and his men wanted to do. You understand that, right?”

“I understand,” Morrow said. “What happened when Perrite and Machusco and Moore returned from Piluca?”

“What happened?” he said. “What happened was they all turned against me. None of them liked me much anyway. They never did, not from the day I took over the team. Persico, Perrite, Machusco, Caldwell, and Butler, they’d all been together over ten years. The Moores had been there six years. It was like trying to join a family, only I didn’t have the right blood.”

“Was there a mutiny? Did they approach you? What exactly happened, Terry?”

He finally broke eye contact with Morrow. He looked over at Imelda and her girls as though he were seeing them for the first time. Then he started rubbing his legs with his hands. Not a massaging motion, but a slow, methodical stroke with his fingers stiffened and his palms wide open. It seemed unconscious and mechanical.

“What happened was Persico took me off in the woods. He told me what the recon team found in Piluca. He spoke real quiet, but he was accusing me.You know what I mean? He was staring at me like I was some kind of monster. Like it was my fault.”

He paused for a moment, but the leg rubbing continued. “They all loved Akhan, you know? Something about him. I don’t know what it was, but they worshipped him. I think they believed I deliberately set him up to die. Like maybe I was jealous. That’s stupid, though, you know? He wasn’t even a soldier. Besides, I liked him, too. I wouldn’t have done that to him.When we came back out of the woods, they were all looking at me that way. They started avoiding me.”

Morrow said, “But there was no overt mutiny?”

“Not like you might see on a ship maybe, not that way, but it was a mutiny.Yeah, it was a mutiny. I knew they weren’t going to do what I said anymore. You know what I mean, right? They weren’t gonna let me lead them.We were in the middle of enemy territory, and there wasn’t anything I could do. You see that, right?”

Morrow said, “Terry, at 1200 hours you reported to Colonel Smothers that Akhan’s team was black. He then directed you to begin extraction. At the 1800 sitrep that night, you reported that there was too much Serb activity in your vicinity to safely extricate your team.You reported the same thing at the 0600 sitrep the next morning, and the 1800 sitrep that evening. Why did you report that?”

The spectacle of Lisa Morrow soothingly taking him through this journey, and of Terry Sanchez mentally crumbling, had so thoroughly captivated my attention that it actually took me a moment to realize the timely brilliance of her question. If it had in fact been a mutiny, why had Sanchez conspired in the effort to keep the team in Kosovo? Had someone held a gun to his head?

“Persico told me to.”

“I’m sorry, Terry, I don’t understand. Chief Persico told you to say what?”

His leg stroking got a little more frenetic. “Yeah.”

“No, Terry, what did Chief Persico instruct you to report?” “Oh, sorry,” he said, appearing confused.“He told me to buy us some time.”

“Why, Terry? Time for what?”

“Time to set it up. Time to do it.”

“But you were ordered to extract.What more was there to do?” “Well, you know,” he said, still avoiding her eyes.

“No, Terry, I don’t know. Please tell me.”

“Get Pajocovic.”

“Pajocovic? Wasn’t he the station commander in Piluca?” He glanced up at her, as though she was already supposed to know this. Unless I missed my guess, Terry Sanchez’s mind was getting very, very mushy.

“Yeah,” he said with an expression of vast impatience.“Who else do you think we ambushed?”

Suddenly, an avalanche of missing pieces came tumbling into place. The column they’d ambushed wasn’t picked for its size, it was picked to punish the man who killed Akhan and put his head on a stake.

Morrow never stuttered or blinked an eye.“So you and Chief Persico kept the team in the base camp while Perrite and Machusco went back out and searched for this man Pajocovic? Is that what happened?”

“That’s right. Only I sent Moore out, too. I came up with the idea that the only way to make this halfway right was to do what Akhan set out to do in the first place. The only problem was that Pajocovic and his unit had left Piluca. We had no idea where they went. So I sent Brian Moore back out with Perrite and Machusco. They snuck into a few local villages and asked around. Pajocovic was known by everyone in our zone. The Hammer, everybody called him. Moore kept asking people if they knew where the Hammer was. Finally, some old man told him that he was with his unit in a little village named Ishatar. That was how Pajocovic operated. He’d sometimes go to local villages, spending a day or so terrorizing the citizens, then he’d go back to his station in Piluca. That’s when I decided what we were going to do.”

“I’m sorry, Terry.You said
I
decided. Do you mean Chief Persico decided, or you both decided?”

“No. I mean I decided. Persico came to me, and I said this was what we were going to do.”

“I see,” Morrow said.

“Right, so we moved off and I set up an ambush on the road between Piluca and Ishatar.We moved in the night before, around midnight. That gave us plenty of time to set up. Then I waited and—”

“Terry,” she interrupted him. He stopped and blinked a few times.

She said, “Would you like a glass of water?”

He was still rubbing his legs. “Uh ...yeah, sure. Please.” Morrow filled a tumbler, then walked around the table and handed it to him. I thought she’d just made a major blunder, interrupting his flow at the crucial moment. She then went and got a chair and moved it to a position directly in front of him. She sat down and leaned forward so their faces were nearly together. He looked into her eyes again.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“Okay, I guess.”

She said, “Terry, you have nothing to prove to us. We’re just trying to get at the truth. God knows, we’re not judging you. We’re lawyers. We’ve never been through what you went through.”

She reached out and laid a hand on his hand. “Just tell us the truth, okay?”

He kept staring into her eyes, the way a small, frightened child looks at his mother. “Okay,” he said.

“Who was making all these decisions, Terry? It wasn’t you, was it?”

“No,” he said, “it was Persico and Perrite.”

“And what were you doing?”

“I did whatever they said to do.”

“Did you try to stop them? Or did you encourage them?” This actually was a very crucial question because it went to the heart of who bore legal responsibility for the murder of the Serbs. I think Sanchez was past caring about the legal niceties, though. His mind was trapped in a desperate effort to construct a plausible alibi it could sell to itself. His mind was swimming in shame and scrambling for some internal clemency. I think in a strange, remorseful way, he wished he had ordered the ambush, because that might have afforded him some residue of honor.

“I let them do what they wanted to do,” he finally mumbled. “What happened at the ambush?”

“Well, there was a lot of traffic on the road. We stayed there until nearly eight. Perrite was off on the flank, between us and Ishatar. He had night-vision goggles, you know? He was watching for the vehicles from Piluca. Pajocovic’s vehicles had his station’s name marked on the side, and it was written in Serb, and Brian Moore had written out the words on a piece of paper for Perrite so he’d recognize the right column.”