“So, he’s stalking his old unit?”
“Deep breath, John.”
Wells nodded. Shafer was right. He liked Williams, but they hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years.
“Either way, you’ve got your next move,” Shafer said.
“Noemie Williams.”
“Beats hanging around here waiting for FBI reports, trying to figure out what Duto’s really up to.”
“Amen to that,” Wells said. “But do me one favor. Next time you talk to him, tell him to make the Egyptians go easy on Zumari if they ever catch him. I’d do it myself, but you know it would be counterproductive.”
“Done. Can I run any other chores, my liege?”
“Mind holding on to Tonka a couple more days?”
“The kids like her. Anyway, I think she’s forgotten all about you. Doesn’t even know who you are anymore.”
“I’m going to pretend I don’t get that analogy.”
13
Three months left on the tour. As far as Martin Terreri was concerned, it couldn’t end soon enough. He was done with Poland. Sick of the whole damn country.
Terreri was sick of their living quarters. The Polish government had given his squad two barracks in Stare Kiejkuty, a military intelligence base near the Ukrainian border. The Poles on the base shared a mess hall with Terreri and his men and provided overnight security for the prisoners but otherwise kept their distance. The hands-off attitude was the reason that the United States had chosen to operate here. But the freedom came at a price. Terreri had never felt so isolated. They could leave for day trips, but the Poles required them to return each night, since they hadn’t cleared Polish immigration and officially weren’t even in Poland. And ironically, they lived under harsher conditions than American soldiers almost anywhere else. Bases in Iraq and Afghanistan had the amenities that U.S. troops had come to expect: decent grub, live satellite television, well-equipped gyms. But the Polish army wasn’t much for creature comforts. The showers had two temperatures, scalding and freezing. The food in the mess was sometimes fried, sometimes boiled, always tasteless.
Terreri was sick of the Polish countryside. Not that all the women here were ugly. In Warsaw they were gorgeous, a magic combination of blue-eyed Saxon haughtiness and wide-hipped Slavic sensuality. But the peasant women aged at warp speed. They wore ankle-length dresses to hide their boxy bodies and sat by the side of the roads selling threadbare wool blankets. They had stringy hair and tired, stupid eyes. The men were worse, sallow, with faces like topographic maps and brown teeth from their cheap cigarettes. They rode sideways on diesel- belching tractors, pulling bundles of logs on roads that were more pothole than pavement. No wonder the Russians and the Germans had taken turns beating up on them all these centuries.
Terreri was sick of being alone. He’d promised to e-mail Eileen and the kids every day. He’d even attached a Webcam to his computer for video chats. But the calls, the instant messages, the seeing-without-touching of video, they made him more depressed, reminded him of what he’d left stateside. He almost preferred the old days, when being on tour meant checking in for five minutes once a week.
Terreri was sick of his squad. The Rangers were fine. But the CIA guys, they weren’t soldiers. He could tell them what to do, but he couldn’t
Terreri was just plain sick. Probably because he wasn’t sleeping right or exercising right or eating right. And because of the dirt and lead and chemicals in the air, the stale gray clouds that coated his tongue with a metallic tang that he couldn’t shake no matter how much Listerine he swigged. For a month he’d been fighting a sore throat, a low fever. Callar said he had a virus and antibiotics wouldn’t help. But she was a shrink, not a real doctor, even if she did have an M.D. What did she know about treating sore throats? He bitched at her for antibiotics until she gave him a course. The meds didn’t help his throat, but they gave him diarrhea for a week. He didn’t tell Callar, didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but he knew she knew.
Most of all, Terreri was sick of the work. Which surprised him. He’d been in the interrogation business since 2002. He’d run a squad in Iraq in 2004, when the army and the agency were just learning how to break guys. When Fred Whitby came to him, told him about 673, told him the army and the agency wanted him to run it, he’d jumped at the chance. He believed in the mission. They were doing what couldn’t be done at Guantanamo. Not with the lawyers and the reporters bitching and even the Supreme Court getting involved. The liberals could complain all they liked, but sometimes you had to let the bad guys know they weren’t in charge anymore and the ride was going to hurt.
What he hadn’t expected, though maybe he should have, was that he’d finally lost his taste for wrangling these jihadis. In the last six months, he’d burned out, plain and simple. He was sick of playing Whac-A-Mole with them. Of their lies. Of their historical grievances. Of hearing about the perfection of the Quran and the greatness of the Prophet. They all were reading from the same script, and none of them had any idea how boring it was. They were by and large a bunch of jerk-offs who ought to be herding sheep. But they considered themselves soldiers because they’d gotten a couple of weeks of training with AKs and grenades. The real geniuses, the big winners, they could mix oil and fertilizer to make a truck bomb, something any tenth-grader with a chemistry book could do. They thought that made them terrorist masterminds.
Terreri, he’d never been a cop, but he figured he knew how those LAPD officers in South Central felt. He was wasting his life with a bunch of losers who didn’t understand anything except a closed fist. When this tour was over, he was done with interrogations.
Being here did have a few compensations. Like at no place else he’d ever been, Terreri had free rein. Nominally, he was on special assignment for General Sanchez, but Sanchez had made clear from day one that as far as he was concerned, 673 was nothing more than a line on an org chart. The intel went up to the Pentagon and only then was funneled to Centcom. Basically, nobody in Washington or at Centcom headquarters in Tampa wanted to know anything about their tactics. They wanted only intel.
Terreri agreed. In 2003, 2004, lawyers for the CIA and army spent a lot of time talking about what was legal and what wasn’t. Lots of conference calls, lots of memos. Lots of ass-covering. Now some of those memos had wound up on the front page of
I hereby authorize Task Force 673 to interrogate unlawful enemy combatants, as defined by the Department of Defense, using such methods as its commander deems necessary. I find that the operations of Task Force 673 are necessary to the national security of the United States. Pursuant to that finding, as commander-in- chief of the United States, I find that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to the members of 673 for any actions they shall take against unlawful enemy combatants.
Task Force 673 shall operate only outside the states and territories of the United States. Outside those states and territories, only the Uniform Code of Military Justice and not the laws of the United States shall govern the actions of Task Force 673.
In other words, 673 was in legal limbo, exempt from both military and civilian law in its treatment of detainees. Of course, they weren’t completely off the radar. Their detainees were listed in the prisoner registry, and eventually most of them wound up in Guantanamo. So Terreri’s men had to be sure that they didn’t do too much visible damage. Still, they had plenty of room, and Karp and Fisher, especially, had found ways to take advantage of it.
Then there was the money. The army’s accountants were strict. But the CIA was funding this operation, and the CIA had different rules. In fact, as far as Terreri could see, when it came to spending money on black projects, the CIA had no rules at all. Brant Murphy, who handled logistics for the squad, never turned down a
