Secret sanction
Brian Haig
Chapter 1
Fort Bragg in August is so hellish, you can smell the sulfur in the air. Actually, though, it’s not sulfur, it’s 98 percent humidity, mixed with North Carolina dust, mixed with the raunchy bouquet of about thirty thousand men and women who spend half their lives scurrying about in the woods. Without showers.
The moment I stepped off the plane, I had this fierce urge to call my bosses back in the Pentagon and beg them to reconsider. Wouldn’t work though. “Sympathy,” the Army likes to say, is found in the dictionary between “shit” and “syphilis,” and regarded accordingly.
So I hefted up my duffel bag and oversize legal briefcase and headed for the taxi stand. Of course, this was Pope Air Force Base, which adjoins Fort Bragg, which makes it all one big, happy military installation. No taxi stand, and shame on me for not knowing that. I therefore marched straight to a payphone and called the duty sergeant at the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division. These are the same men and women who make their living flinging themselves out of airplanes and praying their government-issued parachutes open before their fragile bodies go splat. Mostly their prayers work. Sometimes not.
“Headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, Sergeant Mercor,” a stern voice answered.
“Major Sean Drummond, here,” I barked, doing my finest impersonation of a bitchy, obnoxious bully, which, by the by, I always do pretty well.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“How can you help me?” I demanded.
“Sorry, sir, I don’t get it.”
“That’s pretty damned obvious, isn’t it? Why wasn’t the duty jeep waiting for me at the airport? Why am I standing here with my thumb up my ass?”
“We don’t send jeeps out to the airport to pick up personnel. Not even officers, sir.”
“Hey, Sergeant, think I’m stupid?”
I let that question linger a moment, and you could almost hear him grinding his teeth to keep from answering.
Then, much friendlier, I said, “Look, I don’t know if you weren’t properly instructed, or just plain forgot. All I know is, the general who works upstairs in that building of yours promised a jeep would be waiting when I arrived. Now if it were to get here inside twenty minutes, then we’ll just write this off as an inconvenience. Otherwise…”
There was this fairly long pause on the other end. The thing with Army sergeants is that they have incredible survival instincts. They have to. They spend their careers working under officers, some of whom happen to be pretty good, but plenty of whom aren’t, and a man must be pretty damned artful to treat both with perfect equanimity.
“Sir, I… well, uh, this is really irregular. No one told me to have a jeep there to meet you. I swear.”
Of course nobody told him. I knew that. And he knew that. But there was a world of daylight between those two facts.
“Listen, Sergeant… Sergeant Mercor, right? It’s ten-thirty at night and my patience wanes with each passing minute. What will it be?”
“All right, Major. The duty driver will be there in about twenty minutes. Don’t be screwing me around, though. I’m gonna put this in the duty log. The colonel will see it in the morning,” he said, making that last statement sound profoundly ominous.
“Twenty minutes,” I said before hanging up.
I sat on my duffel bag and waited. I should’ve felt bad about fibbing, but my conscience just wasn’t up to it. I was tired, for one thing, and royally pissed off for another. Besides, I had a set of orders in my pocket that assigned me to perform a special investigation. In my book, at least, that entitled me to a special privilege or two.
Private Rodriguez and the duty jeep showed up exactly twenty minutes later. I was pretty damned sure Sergeant Mercor had instructed Rodriguez to get lost, or drive around in circles, or do about any damned thing except arrive one second earlier than twenty minutes. That’s another thing about Army sergeants. They’re woefully vengeful little creatures.
I threw my duffel into the back of the humvee and climbed in the front.
“Where to?” Private Rodriguez asked, staring straight ahead.
“Visiting Officers’ Quarters. Know where they are?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Drive.”
A moment passed before Rodriguez sort of coughed, then said, “You assigned here, sir?”
“Nope.”
“Reporting in?”
“Nope.”
“Passing through?”
“You’re getting warmer.”
“You’re a lawyer, right?” he asked, glancing at the brass on my uniform that identified me as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG for short.
“Rodriguez, it’s late and I’m tired. I appreciate your need to make conversation, but I’m not in the mood. Just drive.”
“Hey, no problem, sir.”
Rodriguez whistled for two minutes, then, “Ever been to Bragg before, sir?”
“Yes, I’ve been to Bragg before. I’ve been to every Army post you can name. I’m still not in the mood to talk.”
“Hey, sure. No problem, really.” Then, only a few moments later, “Y’know, personally, I really like it here.”
Poor Private Rodriguez either had short-term amnesia or he’d been ordered by Sergeant Mercor to find out everything he could about me and report back. That’s another thing about Army sergeants. When they’re curious, they get fiendishly clever.
“So why do you like it here?” I wearily asked, not wanting his ass to get gnawed into little pieces on my account.
“My family comes from Mexico, right? And we settled in Texas, so I like the warm weather. Only they got trees up here, and it rains more. And I love jumpin’ outta airplanes. You know that feeling, right? I see you got wings.”
“Wrong. I went to jump school and did the five mandatory jumps required to graduate. But I’m not Airborne. I hated it. I was scared as hell and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I’ll never jump again. Never.”
“You’re a Ranger. Not many lawyers are Rangers.”
“I’m the most reluctant Ranger you ever saw. I cried and whimpered the whole way through the course. They gave me the tab only because they feared that if they failed me, I might have come back and tried again. They hated me.”
“You got a Combat Infantryman’s Badge,” he said.
Private Rodriguez, annoyingly clever fellow that he was, kept adjusting the rearview mirror to study the various items on my uniform. In civilian life, nobody wears nametags or badges or patches, or any other kind of silly accoutrement that advertises anything about you. In the Army, the longer you’re in, the more your uniform resembles a diary. It’s a wonder the old-timers can even walk under all that weight.
“I used to be infantry,” I admitted.
“And you went to combat.”
