The Night Crew (11 page)

The rest of the meal, brief as it was, passed pleasantly enough except for the one guy who sat pissed off, staring at the ugly walls, totally disengaged from the conversation.

Nelson’s vague assurance notwithstanding, it was now clear in my mind that he, and Katherine, intended to use this trial to score points against the administration and the army. Lydia was the public face of the scandal and her court martial would become a media spectacle. In other words it would the perfect showcase for putting the conduct of the war on the docket.

As much as I cared for Katherine and respected her passion and intelligence, I did not always care for her courtroom tactics and I strongly disapproved of her and Nelson using Lydia as an opportunity. A good criminal lawyer plays to only one audience, the jury, and any distraction from that can be harmful to the one person you’re supposed to be concerned with—your client.

I watched the interplay between Katherine and Nelson and had the impression of more going on here than I understood. Also, I don’t think Nelson enjoyed being talked to in this manner by a lowly army lawyer. Billionaires tend to be treated with inflated esteem, if not abject obsequiousness, for the plain and simple reason that they have all the toys. But also, I think, people tend to think—maybe even
believe
—that the accumulation of vast wealth equates to wisdom, just as army people conflate general’s stars with brilliance and sound leadership. Both are flawed assumptions. A general’s stars might as easily result from being Uncle Sam’s nephew, or from rare political instincts—e.g., a gift for sucking up. And a billion dollars in the bank often only means the owner is just greedier and more ruthless. Or luckier.

Nelson dropped me off back at the house and he and Katherine sped off to “take in the sights,” a euphemism for sneaking off, alone, to talk about my favorite subject—me.

Katherine had called ahead and Imelda met me at the door with an ambiguous expression and an expandable folder crammed with pictures that were anything but ambiguous.

It was my first chance to have a word with Imelda, alone, so I asked her, “How long have you been working with Katherine?”

“Why you askin’?”

“Small talk. Old friends catching up.”

“Uh-huh. Answer is, a while.”

“What do you think about this case?”

“A clusterfuck.” She chewed on her tongue a moment, shuffled her feet, then modified that perspective. “A big clusterfuck.”

I nodded. The appellation “clusterfuck” is an old army aphorism that roughly translates to . . . well, who needs an explanation? But discipline is to the army what oxygen is to the body, and when discipline flags, the army becomes rabble, boys being boys—and in this case, I suppose, girls being girls—but not confined to some dark o-club basement.

I thanked Imelda for providing me with a proper orientation, grabbed the folder, fixed a cup of coffee, and went to my bedroom for a firsthand look at the clusterfuck.

Somebody had made the decision to organize the photographs by date and time—Imelda, with her typical Prussian-like efficiency, I suspected—and it was quite helpful. I started at the beginning, and the activities were disturbing, but all in all, not really that bad: June or Andrea dancing or disrobing, or taunting the inmates with sexual gestures, and our client, Lydia, mostly assisting in the inmate degradation. But as time wore on, the activities grew more lurid, more sexually provocative, and well, for want of a kinder term . . . more sexually bizarre.

By night ten of fun and games, it was less fun, more games, if that term could be applied. Many of the inmates now wore makeshift costumes, ranging from loincloths to short skirts, and many wore makeup heavily applied, à la the Roman skits of ancient yore. The girls became more physically and sexually brazen and Lydia had become a more direct participant, frequently joining with June or Andrea in disrobing and playing the tart. There was a lot of fondling and people putting hands where they shouldn’t be.

Another observation: In the earliest photos, these activities were focused on one inmate, one poor soul who bore the brunt of their collective tormenting. Night by night, the number of inmates grew and, by the end, it became seven or eight prisoners, small mobs of men with unhappy, fearful expressions.

With the final three nights left to view, I took a break and mulled this over. Despite the altruistic protestations of all five of the accused, judging by the prisoners’ expressions and the gleeful expressions of their tormentors, the purpose and scope of these nightly assaults had grown beyond any attempt to “soften-up” the prisoners for interrogation, if indeed that had ever been a motive, which I doubted. They now were engaging in all-out orgies. These were carnal fantasies acted out by five young Americans with no restraints and no other purpose than to play out their own weird desires, fixations, and obsessions.

A third observation: It was becoming harder and harder for the five participants to get off; not in any physical sense, though certainly that was also possible, but in the more subliminal, psychosexual department. Like a timid married couple who start with the missionary position, then decide a little variety might be nice, then progress from position to position, a journey through all 236 pages of the Kama Sutra, until pretty soon the whips and chains come out, and then they are making S&M porn flicks and posting them on the Internet. And in line with that thought, for the opening nights at Al Basiri there were only a few pictures, but as the sessions wore on, the production increased to as many as thirty photos for one particularly ribald evening.

The question was why? As in why, as their behavior sank to more perverse levels, did the desire grow to record it? Certainly, these people did not have their heads screwed on right.

Danny Elton and Mike Tiller were always behind the camera, or cameras. One or the other was included in some shots, but never both at once. Several times I noted photos of the girls engaged in some particular activity, but with shots of the same activity taken from different angles, so definitely there were two cameras, with two photographers, at work.

Indeed, I was not looking forward to the final three nights for, as I mentioned, the level of perversity had already reached nauseating heights. Nonetheless, the worst time to see these images for the first time would be gaping, with my mouth open, in the presence of a court martial board, so I continued.

The ladies were now bringing in toys and instruments, and forcing the inmates to actively engage in increasingly disgusting behavior, from oral sex, to humping one another, to jamming playthings into various orifices. Some of the participants had bloody noses, bruises, and contusions, evidence that when persuasion and verbal coercion failed, brute force replaced them. The aforementioned shot of Lydia peeing on a man’s face occurred with two nights left, which tells you something about what followed.

It was clear that the charade had now come full circle, from the girls as performers to the inmates as the main show. Less clear was what Lydia was doing during these final two nights in the chamber of horrors. She was not visible in any of the pictures. Andrea and June appeared sporadically—pointing out various activities, screaming in inmate’s ears, smiling, laughing, mugging it up—but Lydia was nowhere in sight. Hopefully this meant she was not present, though I suspected otherwise.

I stuffed the last picture into the expandable file, then I leaned back to get a breath. The total ran to 406 photographs—406 moments in time from which you could try to extrapolate what happened in between.

A picture is a snapshot, absent dialogue or any enlightening script, but here we had an entire collage of arresting imagery that told a story, if only it could be interpreted. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then 406 pictures is sensory overload, countless small mysteries that compound and complicate a giant mystery.

I placed the folder on my bedside table, turned off the lamp, and mentally addressed this mystery. Nothing in the personal or professional backgrounds of Andrea Myers, June Johnston, or Lydia Eddelston indicated a proclivity toward such aberrantly appalling behavior. A country girl, a city girl, and a girl from the suburbs of Cincinnati—culturally, socially, and physically, as different as three young ladies could be.

But in a long career practicing criminal law, I had learned this: what you see usually is only the shadow of the truth. And in this case there were too many images and too many crimes—torture, physical assault, rape, various violations of the Geneva Convention—and murder.

I lay down, counted sheep, and tried to wipe the 406 images from my mind before I floated off to sleep.

I don’t think I succeeded, because when I awoke the next morning, the sheep were all sweaty and tired.

Chapter Eleven

I’m not a breakfast person and Imelda knows this, yet she had assembled a large feast of omelets and cheesy fried potatoes and greasy grits, southern style. I made a quick mental note to call my cardiologist just looking at it. “You look like crap,” she said as I came downstairs to the kitchen.

“Thank you.”

“Just sayin’.” She played with something on the stove a moment. I could hear the sounds of Katherine banging around upstairs, dressing, primping, and whatever else women do in the mornings. Imelda turned around and asked me, “What’d you think about them pictures?”

“I think our clients are toast if they get entered into evidence.”

This was the correct legal response, however that’s not what Imelda meant. I knew that, and she acted as if I annoyed her. “I mean, why do you think them little girls acted like that?”

I answered truthfully, “I have no idea.” I then threw out a few of the theories that Katherine and Nelson seemed to believe in, ending with the ever-popular, “Because they were ordered to? Because they caved into high level pressure to force the prisoners to talk?”

“Hmmpf. Bullshit.”

“Right.” I crossed my arms and leaned against the breakfast table. “Can you elaborate on that thought?”

I should mention here that Imelda spent nearly thirty years as an enlisted female before she traded her spurs for a life. She is not particularly attractive, she is slightly heavy, spare with the makeup, probably has never been to a professional hairdresser, and her taste in civilian attire, as with many soldiers spoiled by a lifetime of uniforms, was somewhat questionable. For example, at that moment, she wore baggy blue sweatpants with a shapeless army sweatshirt, white socks with sandals, and her hair was shorn close enough to her scalp that she could be mistaken for a frumpy male with two misshapen lumps glued to her chest.

But the army has never been fully comfortable with women in its ranks, and the regulations concerning female appearance, attire, and adornments—regarding such items as earrings, makeup, proper hair length and style, and the wear of uniform skirts—reflect the ambiguity of a claustrophobic institution with a strong masculine ethos, mutating uncertainly to adapt to a new germ. During my seventeen years in service, the regulations regarding female appearance have changed so many times they should be written with quick-drying ink. And like many female lifers, Imelda eventually decided that her appearance and her attire were irrelevant, and she adapted to the masculine mores that became her life.

But she is still a woman, with all that implies—one who experienced the same frustrations, burdens, and mixed expectations as Lydia, June, and Andrea. So I was anticipating some kernel of insight, some enlightening clue about female drives and perspectives that would break the entire mystery wide open.

After banging around a few pots and pans in the sink, she said, “What happened in them pictures was sick.”

“I certainly understand that. But why did the girls engage in such obscene behavior?”

“Dumb question. Girls ain’t
that
different from boys.”

“Meaning what?”

“You best get to know them girls better. Especially your client.”

She turned back around and began washing something in the sink. In her uniquely polite way, this session was obviously over.

And at that moment, Katherine appeared, dressed—uncharacteristically—in a short skirt, black pumps, and a dark, low-cut blouse. She was also going heavy in the blush and lipstick department, and whatever gook girls put on their eyes these days. It was the sexiest I had ever seen her look—I mean, she looked
really
sexy—and my mouth hung open, but she was staring at her watch and said, “We’ve got an eight o’clock with the prison commandant. Come on, we have to hurry.”

At the gate to West Point, the same diligent young MP was on duty, and he peeked in at Katherine, apparently seeing past her attractive camouflage and politely observed, “You look mighty nice for a terrorist today, ma’am.”

Katherine smiled back just as politely and announced, “Today I’m a hostage.”

“Uh-huh . . . well, you look good for one of them, too.”

“I’m not joking. This man kidnapped me.”

He looked at me and asked, “That right, sir?”

“She’s lying.”

He looked at her. “What about that, ma’am?”

“Would I be with him otherwise?”

“Well . . .” He bent forward and examined me more closely. “You know, she’s gotta point, sir.”

“She got me shot,” I informed him, truthfully. “In Korea.”

“Ah . . . well . . . that sounds pretty serious.”

“In the stomach,” I clarified. “It really hurt.”

“Okay . . . uh . . . she ever apologize for that?”

“She thanked the man who shot me.”

His face formed a frown and his eyes turned to Katherine. “I did not,” she insisted, very emphatically. “He’s mistaking envy for gratitude.” He waved us through and saluted me, though I don’t think he meant it.

I said to Katherine, “Your sense of humor is improving.”

“It’s being with you, Sean.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Thank you.” This time, she heard
me
.

So we drove in silence to the cadet area, where I found a place to park on the roof of the academic building.

We walked from there along a sidewalk and quickly became engulfed in a sea of gray-clad cadets rushing to change classes. I couldn’t get over how young, how bright-eyed, and how sharp they looked. You could almost believe that West Point was a normal college campus until you see the cadets, who look like the last preserved specimens from some earlier, prehistoric era, clean-cut, fit, earnest, almost startlingly uniform in both dress and appearance.

Like much of the rest of the army, it’s all an illusion, of course. The boys and girls at West Point are no different than, no better and certainly no worse, than thousands of other students at campuses spread across the country; they share the same youthful lusts, the same confused ambitions, the same impatience to graduate and get on with their lives. But they have chosen to do something entirely different afterward, which is what sets them apart from the rest of their generation.

Anyway, as per regulations, every cadet felt the need to salute me; saluting back quickly became tedious, then tiresome. The salute is a quaint custom unique to the military, the army’s equivalent of a secret society handshake, or the pat on the ass that football players use. It is both a gesture and a symbol, one that dates back a thousand years to an age when warriors were called knights, a title that signified rarified qualities of virtue and courage and nobility. They wore armor and helmets then, and they would reach up with one hand to tip the metal visor open so they could identify one another’s faces as they passed. It would always be the right hand, the sword hand, suggesting that the passing warrior’s intentions were nonthreatening and peaceful.

The army, being the army, of course, turned this good-mannered gesture into a requirement—a regulation—and, by compelling the lesser ranks to always initiate the exchange, a sign of subservience. But nobody seems to mind very much, until, like me, you are caught in a hailstorm of saluting cadets.

We were passing now through a bunch of large, gray stone buildings and ended up in an office complex where the academy administrators were housed. With all the lawyers, accused, and witnesses running around, the academy was having to shuffle all available spaces to handle the conferences.

The building and its interior were right out of a nineteenth-century gothic novel—large, arched windows, a forest of aged mahogany, high ceilings, and quaint, ancient lighting—as was the lady who met us by the entrance and escorted us up a long stairway and down several hallways. She was quite slender, with a severe, puckered face, a beehive hairdo, and . . . well, who cares?

A pudgy, bespectacled lieutenant colonel with thinned gray and blond hair on his head, Eggers on his nametag, crossed MP pistols on his collar, and a world of anxiety on his face awaited us at the end of a shiny, long conference table. I had briefly perused his personnel record the night before and recalled that his first name was Paul, he had been the commandant at Al Basari, was a West Pointer from the class of ’82, who had resigned from the active army after five years of service, remained with the National Guard, and now, was facing a career, a reputation, and possibly, a life, in the toilet.

Katherine and I quickly introduced ourselves and settled into the seats directly in front of him. We engaged in inconsequential chatter for a few minutes. Paul Eggers was listed as a witness for the prosecution for all five court martials, and from his hunched posture and guarded tone, it seemed evident he did not regard Katherine or me as hale fellows well met.

After enough time wasted on phony cordiality, I said, in a prosecutorial tone, “Could you please describe your career after you graduated from West Point?”

“After I was commissioned in 1982, I went to the Air Defense Artillery course, then a Hawk battalion in Germany for three years . . .” and so on. The details weren’t all that exciting or pertinent, so the condensed version is this: Paul married his high school sweetheart in the cadet chapel three days after his graduation from West Point, neither he nor she enjoyed the army, he got out, stumbled through a few jobs here and there, finally matriculating to become a software engineer in Cincinnati, which remained his civilian occupation. He continued in the reserves for four years after he left full-time service, then transferred to the National Guard, he claimed to continue to serve his country, though I suspected the chance for a monthly retirement check and full benefits might’ve factored somewhere in the equation. Like many guardsmen of that era, I doubt he thought he would ever see a deployment to a combat zone, and I’m sure it came as a surprise about as welcome as a big throbbing hemorrhoid.

Paul came off as bright, slightly mentally disorganized, and, to be blunt, he had a fairly flat, lackluster personality. He was, in the contemporary lexicon, a nerd. It struck me that if I went back and examined his record as a cadet, I would find that he was an exemplary student academically, never experienced any disciplinary problems, was somewhat anonymous among his peers, and his only real challenge was in the gym. He had narrow shoulders, skinny arms, and a large rear end matched by a heavy paunch that rolled over his belt—he resembled, I thought, a marshmellow swathed in tan camouflage.

In fact, Paul had as much command presence as a lop-eared beagle. Even his voice was soft and lispy and lacked inflection.

He continued through his rise up the National Guard ranks, culminating with his selection to command a military police battalion with troops scattered across dozens of communities in three different states, which would be completely unacceptable in a regular army unit, but was a fairly common arrangement in the Guard.

Before he bored us to death, I interrupted to ask, “How much notice did you get before your unit deployed to Iraq?”

“Uh . . . well, uh, about sixty days.” He inhaled heavily as though the memory was too painful to recall. “It was all such a mess.”

“How was it a mess?” Katherine asked.

“In the beginning, it was mostly screening. And you know . . . a lot of mixing and patching. About a third of my battalion failed to qualify for combat deployment.” He stared off into space. “Yes . . . I think that’s accurate . . . about a third.”

“That sounds like a large percentage. Why so many?”

“The usual stuff for Guard people. Health problems, pregnancies, family situations, and because we were slated for male prison duty, all the female MPs got reassigned.”

“So you deployed with a lot of people you didn’t know?” I suggested.

“Put it this way,” he replied, edging his plump rear forward in his chair. “They were still throwing last-minute fillers on the bus as we left for the airport.”

I asked, “Had you ever performed prison duty before? I mean, you personally.”

There was a long pause as he seemed to stare off into space again. It struck me that LTC Paul Eggers, despite being in command at the time of the scandal in question, was not currently facing any formal charges or serious disciplinary issues. Though his career and his reputation were sinking fast, he had his twenty years in, and would leave military service with his rank intact, a considerable accrual of lifelong benefits, and without the stain of an Article 15, or worse, a court martial, to blacken his tombstone.

But it did not escape my knowledge, nor I am sure his, that this comfortable arrangement could be changed at the army’s whim. In polite terms, Paul Eggers was in one of those situations where loyalty to the institution equals loyalty back—more bluntly, the army had its big green vise on Paul Eggers’s balls. He had to tread carefully or the conditions of his retirement would change, and he would be publicly disgraced, booted out on his ass, sans any of the goodies America awards its veterans in good standing.

He did not confess this directly, but instead said, “I would say the army gave me a good foundation for the job. A West Point education, over twenty years of solid leadership training and experience, and I had the benefit of superb MP training courses.”

Utter bullshit. This sounded like exactly what Eggers had been told to say by some public relations flack or a mealy-mouthed army attorney—in other words, exactly what I would’ve advised him to say. I was tempted to peek behind him to see the ventriloquist’s hand stuffed up his butt.

Katherine couldn’t resist stating the obvious. “Bullshit.”

This blunt assessment appeared to surprise Eggers and he asked, “What did you say?”

“I’m sure you heard me, Colonel. Neither you, nor your unit, were at all prepared to run a military prison in a combat zone. Your battalion was jerryrigged together at the last minute, and you were thrown into a mission you personally were totally unprepared to undertake.”

Paul Eggers was already shaking his head at Katherine. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, there were a few soldiers who weren’t all that experienced, but I had a fine unit.” As if we needed elaboration, in his most sincere tone, he added, “Good officers, capable sergeants, excellent soldiers.”