Secret Sanction (21 page)

“Now I know how you guys feel,” I said with a commiserating headshake.

“Yeah, it’s rough,” agreed David, and Martie nodded along. “If we get a chance,” I said, “maybe you guys can join me for drinks. I’d love to get some advice on how you handle all this pressure and strain.”

“Sure,” said David, beaming like a poodle that just got its fanny licked by a big, handsome Great Dane.

“So,” I said, reaping the treasures of my disgusting servility, “anything new turn up in the investigation?”

Martie said, “There’s not much to go on.”

I said, “Captain Wolkowitz mentioned that the garrote was manufactured. There are probably only one or two manufacturers who make them. If it were me, I’d get the name of that manufacturer and check to see who bought any in the past year or two.”

“Speaking of the garrote,” Martie said, “we’re a little curious why the killer left it around the victim’s neck.”

“Hmm,” I answered, trying not to appear too certain. “If it were me, I’d guess he knew that if he took it with him, he’d have to find a place to dispose of it. And he’d probably get the victim’s blood spilled on his clothes. I assume there are no fingerprints on the handles?”

“Right. We’re assuming the killer wore gloves. So you think the murderer left it there because it would be too hard to get rid of?”

“Hell, I don’t know a lot about these things,” I lied, “but I’d imagine a garrote is a lot like a disposable razor. I’d guess that was one of the reasons the murderer chose that particular tool. If he used a gun, there’d be the noise and some bullets left around and you could trace them back to the right gun. A knife, and you’d know what type and where to start looking. Besides, a garrote leaves a message. Maybe the killer left it as a warning.”

“Makes sense,” said David, who was taking a liking to me. I could tell.

“You ran traces for shoeprints?” I asked.

“We’re still collecting molds. It was a latrine, though, with a lot of traffic.”

“True, but this
is
the Army. And it’s a public facility, one used by the press, and we all know how much the Army cares about its public image. I’d bet the place got a thorough scrubbing sometime in the evening.You might want to find out who cleaned it, and what time. Also, I think you can narrow it down to rubber-soled shoes. The killer had to sneak up behind him without being heard.”

“Good point,” said David, who had withdrawn a notebook and was scribbling in it. The same guys who teach lawyers must teach these gumshoes, too. I mean, what’s so hard to remember? Garrotes are disposable weapons, and the killer probably wore rubber soles.

“Was there a lot of blood around the body?” I asked.

“All over the wall, the urinals, and the floor. Looked like someone sprayed it on with a hose,” Martie said.

“Yeah, cut arteries are messy things. If you’re lucky, the killer got some on himself, too.”

David added this to the list in his tiny notebook.

I said,“So, what do you figure? Was the killer waiting for him in the bathroom? Maybe hiding in a stall? Or did he just follow him in?”

They both scratched their heads.

I said, “Personally, I’d put my money on the killer following him in. I mean, maybe the killer guessed or maybe even knew that Berkowitz had a weak bladder. Berkowitz was a big boy, and it’s a fairly common side effect of obesity. But, if the killer waited around inside the latrine, he might get noticed. I’d bet he waited outside, then followed him in.”

“Think the killer knew him?” Martie asked.

“Hard to say,” I replied. “You might want to question everybody who came in or out of the press quarters, or the latrine, say between ten and midnight. See if they saw anybody standing around, waiting, or just watching the building.”

Another note was scribbled in David’s little book, then they both stood up.

“Listen, we gotta get runnin’, Major. Hope you don’t mind, but we got lotsa things to do. Mind if we call on you again?”

“On the contrary, I’d very much appreciate it. Maybe I can help.”

“Sure,” said Martie, obviously the leader of the two.

“And remember that offer for drinks,” I called as they walked out. I said it loud enough for the whole office staff to hear. I wanted them to know this visit was friendly.

I doubted, though, that my new, abysmally dressed friends were going to get very far with their investigation. I had this strong sense that the man who murdered Berkowitz was highly trained and had killed a number of times before. If we were in Topeka, Kansas, knowing that much would actually be a lucky breakthrough. It would allow the police to trim their list of suspects down to a nice, workable number. At Tuzla Air Base, with the entire Tenth Special Forces Group in residence, you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a suspect.

Chapter 16

G
eneral Chuck Murphy looked profoundly pissed off, and I guess I didn’t blame him. Nobody likes to start their day inspecting a purple-faced corpse in a blood-soaked latrine, and it must have dawned on Chuck Murphy that his sterling career had just moved one notch closer to the ledge of oblivion. The Army expects its commanders to maintain law and order on their compounds. Dead, internationally renowned journalists littering up your latrines falls just a wee bit outside those parameters.

“Good morning, General,” I said, falling into the seat across from his desk.

“Major,” he replied, which I considered a notable response only insofar as he failed to wish me a good morning back.

“Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, sir. I’m sure you’re having a real busy day, but I have a few questions I really have to get answered.”

“My time is your time,” he said, glancing impatiently at his watch.

“Okay, here’s the thing. We’ve interviewed Sanchez and all his men. We’ve been through the operations logs. We’ve viewed the Serb corpses. I guess what I still don’t get is what Sanchez and his guys were doing inside Kosovo in the first place.”

“Haven’t we been through this already? It’s a classic military assistance action. We arm and train the Kosovars to fight their own battles.”

“Whose idea was it?”

“Whose idea was what?” he asked in a very brittle tone. “The whole operation. I mean, somebody somewhere had to say,‘Hey, I’ve got this great idea.We should use the Tenth Group to help the KLA.’ Every military operation has a godfather. Who was that guy?”

“I’ll be damned if I know, Drummond. These things usually just evolve. I’d guess this happened like that.”

“Who gave you the orders, General?”

“My orders were signed by General Partridge, the JSOC commander.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know much about these things. I would’ve thought you were working for the NATO commander in Brussels. I mean, isn’t he the guy in charge of Europe and this whole Kosovo thing?”

“He is, but Special Forces rarely work for theater commanders. We usually get our marching orders direct from Bragg. The word for it is ‘stovepipe.’”

“Really? Why?”

“Because of the special nature of our operations. Conventional force commanders aren’t expected to understand our unique capabilities, how to properly employ us. This isn’t unusual, Drummond. Check the record. They did it this same way in Mogadishu and Haiti.”

“So then where does General Partridge get his orders from?” “From the Joint Chiefs.”

“Does he deal straight with the White House?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Just curiosity,” I lied. “I mean, I’m new to all this high-level stuff, so I’m trying to figure these things out.”

He gave me a hard, discerning look.“Has this got something to do with your investigation?”

“Well, yes, but only in sort of a roundabout way. See, Sanchez and his men are saying their ambush was an act of self-defense. You see the problem there? I mean, some folks might say that’s pretty convoluted logic. An ambush is a form of attack, right? I’m just trying to determine what constituted self-defense. To do that, I might have to interview the people who crafted this operation in the first place. You know, to find out their idea of what constitutes self-defense.”

“It wasn’t anybody at the White House, I can tell you that. General Partridge doesn’t work for anyone in the White House. No . . . let me rephrase that. He, of course, works for the Commander in Chief, who happens to be the President, but everything is channeled through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

“So maybe the idea for this operation originated with someone in the Pentagon, or maybe from General Partridge’s staff?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Do you have time for one more question?” I asked, since he kept staring at his watch to remind me how ridiculously busy he was.

“One more, Drummond. That’s it,” he said, shaking his head. “You might not believe this, but I’m actually a fairly busy man.”

“Oh no, I believe that, General. I’m just thankful every day that I’m not the guy in your shoes,” I said, and he looked at me with fire in his eyes, trying to figure what I meant by that. I continued: “So how often were Sanchez and his men required to give situation reports to your headquarters? I mean, you must have some kind of standard operating procedure that dictates that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“Well, I just read the operations order for Sanchez’s operation. According to that, he was supposed to provide a situation report twice a day. Once at dawn and once at dusk.”

A quick snarl appeared on his lips, then disappeared almost as quickly. I’m sure he was thinking that if I already knew the answer, why was I wasting his time with the question? Old Chuck obviously didn’t like to play lawyer games. In a thoroughly irritated tone, he said, “Okay.”

“Well, according to the operations logs, Sanchez missed making his reports three times between the fourteenth and the eighteenth. What do you make of that?”

“Maybe he didn’t miss making his reports. Maybe the ops center forgot to log it in. I think we run a pretty tight show here, but the ops center is run by soldiers, and soldiers are not perfect.”

“Yessir, I sure understand that. But I imagine the reason all these teams have to report in twice a day is because they’re operating behind enemy lines. I mean, aren’t those reports really the only way you have to be sure they’re still alive? Wouldn’t some major alarm bells go off if they failed to report?”

“No, not necessarily,” the general said.“In most cases, I think the ops staff would wait before pushing the panic button.”

“Wait for what?”

“Say the team missed the morning report, they might wait until the evening report. Certainly, if a team missed making two sitreps in a row, then flags would go up.”

“And what would that mean? What would happen if a team stopped reporting?”

“We’d increase the aerial recon over their sector. If that didn’t get us anywhere, we might insert a recon team to see what we could discover. We know the locations of their base camps, so we’ve got a general footprint for a search.”

“But none of that happened when Sanchez’s team missed its reports?”

“No.”

“Should it have happened, General?”

He gave me a royally pissed-off look. “Look, the team still made it out okay, all right? No harm, no foul. We haven’t lost a team yet, so I guess we’re doing something right.”

Nobody likes being second-guessed, but General Chuck Murphy obviously liked it less than most people. That’s the problem with being told all your life that you’re something special. You might eventually start to believe it. That big jaw of his was now protruding like the prow of a battleship and his mood was very brackish. I could see I’d about worn out my welcome. Actually, that’s not true. I hadn’t really been welcome in the first place.

I looked at my watch. “Oops. Hey, sir, I really gotta run. I’m supposed to be taking another deposition.”

That wasn’t really true, either. I just couldn’t resist giving him the bum’s rush for a change. I left the way I came in and steered a wide path around that big, beefy sergeant major of his.

I hurried to the Operations Center, which was located in another of the ubiquitous wooden buildings, about five down from Murphy’s headquarters. The guard at the entrance spent about thirty seconds trying to tell me why I wasn’t allowed to enter this supersecret facility before I finally whipped out the nice little set of orders the Secretary of the Army had helpfully provided me. According to these orders, I could enter the White House situation room if I so desired. No kidding.

I followed a trail of stenciled signs that took me down a long hallway, then down a dimly lit stairway. In the basement there was another guard standing before a metal door, but fortunately he and the guard upstairs were in telepathic contact, so all I had to do was whip out my identification card, which was enough for him to confirm that I was, indeed, the exact same asshole with all-inclusive orders his buddy had just met upstairs.

The metal door was flung open, and I instantly entered the next century. Special Forces have almost unlimited budgets, and General Partridge’s boys had spared no expense when they equipped this ops center. A whole wall was covered with a massive electronic map of Kosovo. It was peppered with lots of tiny blinking dots, some red, some green, and some blue. There were three whole banks of Sun microstations manned by grim-looking men who hovered earnestly over their keyboards. Another wall was lined with high-tech communications consoles, where about ten communicators sat very alertly with special headphones on their ears. It looked like AT&T’s global nerve center, only all the workers in this room wore battle dress and natty little green berets. Well, everybody except me, of course.

I stood for a while and watched and listened to the bustling activity. Like nearly all the ops centers I’d been in, most of the business was conducted in low decibels. There was this constant, low hum of voices and computer keys being mashed and radio messages being received. Every now and again, somebody dashed across the floor, either carrying a message to some other part of the cell or coordinating some activity. A hulking monster wearing sergeant major’s stripes sat at a big wooden desk in the middle of the floor. Although there were a fair number of officers present, it was clear that this sergeant major was the big boss of this machine and its many moving parts.