The TRIBUNAL (31 page)

    “What were you doing near the airport that night?”

    “Looking for the Dragons’ headquarters.”

    “Did you tell this to Mr. Stone?”

    Stone was on his feet. “Of course he didn’t, Your Honor! We’re as surprised as you are. We’ve been sandbagged by the defense. They gave us no notice of these documents or the photograph.”

    Judge Davidson ignored Stone. “Did you tell this to Mr. Stone?” he repeated.

    “No.”

    “Where did you get the idea to claim you were civilians?” Judge Davidson asked.

    Kevin was now a spectator to the cross-examination.

    “Before the investigators asked me questions, they explained to me that if Bojanovic and I were civilians, they could convict Draga of a war crime. If we were in the military, then it was just part of the war. I wanted Draga to pay for killing my friend. So, I told them we were civilians. I didn’t know that all this would come out.” He looked down again at the photograph.

    “Mr. Anderson,” Judge Davidson said. “I don’t believe any further questions from you are necessary.”

    “I agree, Your Honor.” Kevin sat down.

    “Mr. Stone,” Judge Davidson said. The judge was clearly in control now. “You don’t have any more questions either.”

    Stone rose shakily to his feet. “No, Your Honor.”

    “The witness may be excused.”

    The usher quickly drew the blinds. The witness couldn’t wait to get out of the courtroom. When he had gone, Judge Orozco said, “I think we have heard enough for today. We’ll reconvene tomorrow at 9:30 a.m.”

    Bradford Stone leaped to his feet. “Madam President, I would ask that you order Mr. Anderson to provide us with copies of all of his exhibits. He’s being quite unfair.”

    “No,” Judge Davidson replied pointedly. “You know that the defense doesn’t have to disclose their impeachment in advance. You’d better warn your witnesses to tell the truth.”

    Kevin couldn’t help but smile. He looked down, trying hard to suppress it. He looked over at Diane. She was looking at him with pride. He looked back at Draga. He was reading the sports page. An admiring audience of one wasn’t bad, Kevin decided.

    Silently, he thanked Nihudian for the legal ammunition he had provided. Without it, Kevin knew he would have had great difficulty impeaching this very critical witness, and no chance at all of winning Draga’s acquittal – and Ellen’s release.

    He just wished his dear friend had been here to see it.

    

    

    At that moment, the trial of Draga was the furthest thing from the minds of the three kidnappers. They were doing chores in the barn when they suddenly heard the sound of a car coming down the road.

    “Quick!” Hans yelled to Anna. “Hide the girl!”

    Anna grabbed Ellen by the hand and led her to the back of the barn and one of the stalls for the cows. “Get down here,” she ordered sternly.

    Anna knelt down with Ellen; both were out of sight of anyone entering the barn.

    Ellen, taken by surprise, started sobbing quietly. She hated being pushed around. Besides, the stall reeked of cow manure. Anna held her finger to her lips signaling Ellen to be quiet. Ellen obeyed.

    Hans went out to meet the visitor.

    Ellen could hear a car engine running. She looked through a small crack in the boards where she was huddled. She saw Hans talking to a man who was standing next to a pickup truck. The man handed Hans some papers, then got back in his truck.

    Ellen considered trying to scream, but then she thought about the basement and the rats. Anyway, she wasn’t sure the man could hear her over his engine. She watched him as he drove past the barn and back toward what she suspected was the main road. As the white truck passed she was able to make out the Dutch writing: “Province of Utrecht.”

    When the man had left, Hans returned to the barn and Anna stood up.

    “It’s clear now,” Jan said.

    Ellen stood up as well. “Who was it?”

    “None of your business,” Hans replied.

    “I don’t like it when you make me hide.” Ellen stepped into the open doorway of the barn, wanting to breathe the fresh air and see the sky. “I want my mommy and daddy. I miss them.”

    No one replied.

    Ellen sat down and played with Johanna. The puppy was licking her face and jumping all over her. “I’d like to write my parents another letter,” she said. “Would you send it for me?”

    “Maybe,” Jan replied.

    “I think I’ll go do that now. It’ll cheer me up.”

    “Okay,” Anna said. She followed Ellen into the house.

    Ellen went into the house, her head down. She sat at the table with a paper and pencil. “Province of Utrecht.” How could she let her parents know?

    When they had finished dinner that night, Ellen got out her letter and showed it to Jan. She had addressed an envelope as well. “Here’s my letter. You can read it. I followed all the rules.”

    Jan looked at the letter.

    “Will you send it? I’ll give you the money for a stamp.”

    “We’ll see,” Jan replied.

    “Here’s eighty cents.” Ellen took a small coin purse out of her backpack and counted out the coins. “We need to talk about an allowance. If I’m still here by Saturday, I think you should pay me an allowance.”

    “You’re not serious,” Hans said.

    “I get eleven Euros a week at home. I do a lot more chores here than I do at home.”

    “Don’t you have homework to do now?” Hans asked.

    “You sound like my Dad. He doesn’t even let me digest my food.” She turned to Anna. “Men,” she said, shaking her head as she got up from the table.

    That night Jan re-read Ellen’s letter, just to be certain. It looked harmless enough.

    Without telling anyone, he mailed it the next day.

    

    The letter arrived on Saturday afternoon.

    When Kevin pulled up in front of the house from a bicycle ride, Diane called to him from the door. “We got a letter from Ellen!”

    Kevin dropped his bike and ran inside.

    There was an envelope on the table, in Ellen’s handwriting, but with no return address. The postmark was again from Amsterdam. This time there was no demand from the kidnappers, just a short letter from Ellen:

    Dear Mom and Dad,

    I miss you very much. Don’t worry about me. I am being taken care of and am fine. I’m keeping up with my schoolwork, even my Dutch. I’m learning new words such as Ut, which means out, and recht, which means right. I hope that I will see you again soon, but don’t worry.

    Love,

    Ellen

    “Where’s the clue?” Kevin immediately asked Diane.

    “I was looking for that myself. Do you think there is something about out and right, like outright, or right out?”

    Kevin read and re-read the letter. “I don’t know, but she’s trying to tell us something.” He couldn’t figure out what it was.

    “Did you call Detective Weber?”

    “Yes.”

    “At least Ellen is still okay. It’s her handwriting all right.”

    “She seems to be okay, if you can believe the letter. But maybe they are making her write it.”

    An hour later Detective Weber arrived. She examined the letter. “This is strange. Why would the kidnappers just let her write home, with no demand or other communication?”

    “I was wondering about that myself,” Kevin said. “It seems like they’re taking an unnecessary risk.”

    Detective Weber rubbed her chin as she studied the letter. “Up to now they’ve been very professional about everything. I don’t see the purpose in sending this letter.”

    “I bet she’s put a clue in this letter,” Kevin said. “I just can’t figure out what it is.”

    “I thought it might have something to do with the words ‘out’ and ‘right,’” Diane said. “That’s just kind of out-of-context. She picked those words for a reason.”

    “She spelled the word ‘out’ wrong,” Detective Weber observed. “We spell it ‘uit’ in Dutch, not ‘ut’. And she capitalized it. Wait a minute. When you put Ut and recht together, you get Utrecht. We have a province named Utrecht.”

    Kevin looked at the letter. “That’s it! How big is the province of Utrecht?”

    “Well, the good news is that it’s the smallest province in Holland,” the detective replied. “The bad news is that there are a lot of farms in the province.”

    “This narrows it down quite a bit, though, doesn’t it?” Diane asked hopefully.

    “It does,” the detective said. “I’m going to get all our manpower over to Utrecht. And I’ll get this letter fingerprinted. Your daughter is quite clever about feeding us information without her captors realizing it.”

    Diane and Kevin looked at each other proudly. Could this be the break they needed? They were afraid to get their hopes up too much, but both were ecstatic with the newest developments.

    “I still think that Vacinovic is involved in this in some way,” Diane said.

    “Would you mind if I contacted him now?” Kevin asked Detective Weber. “If he’s not involved, maybe the secret police have heard something in Serbia that might help your investigation.”

    “Go ahead. Our surveillance of him hasn’t paid off. Just let me know in advance when you’re going to meet with him.”

    Detective Weber packaged up Ellen’s letter and took it with her to be processed.

    “What do we do now?” Diane asked after the detective had left.

    “What do you say we take a ride?” Kevin said mischievously.

    “You mean to see for ourselves what the province of Utrecht looks like?”

    Diane and Kevin got out their map of Holland. The city of Utrecht was located in the center of Holland, about a forty-five minute drive from Wassenaar. Upon arriving in Utrecht, Kevin and Diane visited the VVV, Holland’s tourist agency, and got more detailed maps of the province.

    Detective Weber was right, there was a lot of agricultural land in the province. They spent the afternoon driving around the small, country roads peeking down driveways leading to farm after farm.

    “This is so frustrating,” Diane said. “I can feel that Ellen is around here somewhere. But how do we figure out where?”

    They became more discouraged as they drove on through the province. “We need more clues,” Kevin said. “I hope we hear from Ellen again. She’s gotten us this close.”

    When they returned that evening, there was a message from Detective Weber. The police laboratory had found some fingerprints on the letter and envelope.

    Most were Ellen’s, but they also developed some adult fingerprints as well. They were checking those prints in their databases.

    “What a roller coaster,” Diane said as she slumped on the couch.

    Kevin sat down and took her hand. “We know she’s alive. It’s her handwriting on the letter, and it was postmarked yesterday. Thanks to Ellen, we’ve narrowed it down to the province, and we know she’s on a farm. Now we have fingerprints, too.”

    “Oh Kevin, it’s been eight days. Can you imagine what she’s going through? She’s never been away from home this long. Who knows the conditions she’s being kept in.”

    Kevin tried to picture Ellen on a farm somewhere in the country they’d seen that day. He hoped she wasn’t locked in some cold, drafty barn. The winter temperatures in Holland were hovering below freezing. He hoped she was not sitting somewhere, shivering in the cold.

    The next day, Sunday, Diane and Kevin stayed home. Diane finished her brief. It was first-rate. She argued that although evidence of the atrocities against the Serb people were not a justification for war crimes, the evidence was relevant to explain the state of mind of the people who committed the acts.

    “While the court may justifiably view the ‘honor of Serbia’ as irrelevant to the question of whether war crimes were committed,” Diane had written, “it is legitimately relevant to the question of whether the crimes were carried out by the highly-trained group of dispassionate warriors commanded by the accused, or passionate and misguided men with whom the accused had no connection and over whom he exercised no control.”

    She ended her brief by attaching the note from the kidnappers as an exhibit, and making a personal plea. “The small amount of the court’s time spent on this matter may make a lifetime of difference to our family. Please give us the latitude to present this evidence.”

    On Monday morning, the two of them went to court for another week of Draga’s trial. They filed Diane’s brief first thing in the morning, then spent the next five days listening to the testimony of Muslim witnesses who had been subjected to beatings, torture, and rape in the Serb-run camps in Bosnia. Kevin and Diane listened to tale after tale of horrible mistreatment and inhumane abuse.

    Just as Bradford Stone had told the Court, a pattern emerged as the witnesses paraded before the Tribunal and told their stories. At each of the camps, Omarska, Foca, and Keraterm, men in Black Dragon uniforms had come to the facility and beaten, tortured, raped, extorted, and often murdered Muslim prisoners.

    Kevin’s cross-examinations were difficult. He had one goal during his questioning – to get the names of the men in black uniforms. He began compiling a list, which he had marked as defense exhibit 5. Whenever a witness identified an alleged Black Dragon, Kevin had them write his name on the list. His only hope was that at the end of all this testimony, none of the names on this list would match the list of real Black Dragons under Draga’s command. So far, that part of his strategy had been successful.

    The mood of the court, however, had swung against the defense, as the flood of heart-wrenching stories poured forth. Just before they concluded on Friday, Judge Davidson quizzed Bradford Stone. “We’ve heard the pattern that you have referred to, Mr. Stone. How much more evidence do you have?”