I then turned to Morrow. “Any thoughts?”
“He’s an impressive officer.”
“Special Forces battalion commanders usually are.”
“He’s worried.”
“Was he telling the truth, though?”
“Was he being truthful? Maybe. Was he being open? No.”
“About what?”
“About what he thinks of Sanchez. About what he thinks about the orders he’s operating under. About what he thinks about anything.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because you told him yesterday that he might be a suspect. It might’ve been better if you’d held off on that. You antagonized him.”
Even Delbert, who’d missed the interrogatory, was vigorously nodding that he agreed with her on this issue.
I grinned and didn’t say anything. If they didn’t comprehend the way my brilliant legal mind worked, then I wasn’t about to enlighten them. Besides, as I said earlier, these two were hungry thoroughbreds, and if they thought, even for a fraction of a second, that they could get a nose ahead of you, you’d spend the rest of the race staring at their fannies. That was a halfway pretty good proposition, but I didn’t relish the thought of ogling Mr. Delbert’s little tightass one bit.
The door suddenly crashed open and Imelda bustled back in with three legal clerks in tow, all carrying heavy boxes overflowing with documents.
“What’s all that crap?” I asked.
“All the operations orders and the duty communications log, and the personnel files of the accused.”
“I don’t remember asking for that.”
“And what are you gonna do without it? You’re not going to get any further on this case unless you go over all this.”
“And who signed the requisitions?”
“Don’t be gettin’ stupid on me, Major. I know your signature by now.”
This caused more dropped jaws from Delbert and Morrow, because forging an officer’s signature is a fairly serious military offense. It gets glacially serious when classified papers such as operations orders and operational duty logs are being requisitioned.
I turned to Delbert and Morrow. “By the way, make sure Imelda has good, legible copies of both your signatures before the end of business. By tomorrow, mark my words, she’ll be able to fool your own mothers.”
Imelda smacked her lips a few times and mumbled some unintelligible curse, which is kind of her way of expressing gratitude. Then she marched back out, shooing her three assistants ahead of her.
We each took a box, then spent the next eight hours trading files back and forth, reading furiously, saying little, and making our first real acquaintance with the nine American soldiers who were accused of mass murder and exactly what they’d been ordered to do across the border in a land called Kosovo.
Chapter 6
I had two phone calls that night. The first came from a general in the Pentagon and went something like this:
“Drummond, that you?”
I squeezed and pinched myself. “It’s me, Drummond.”
“General Clapper here.”
“Morning, sir.”
“It’s not morning here. It’s eight o’clock in the evening.”
“That right? So that’s why it’s two o’clock in the morning here.”
A mighty chuckle. “How’s it going?”
“How’s what going?”
“The investigation, Drummond. Don’t play dumbass.”
“Sorry, it’s this two o’clock in the morning thing. Try me again at eight, when my mind works like a Cray computer.”
“Am I hearing the sounds of whimpering?”
“Yes. Go away and leave me alone.”
Another chuckle, which was easy for him because it was early evening where he was, and he still had a sense of humor. “Okay, give it to me.”
“Well, we went to the morgue at Belgrade yesterday and spent some time with about thirty-five corpses. The pathologist is still doing his report, but the preliminary isn’t good. All the perforations in the bodies appear to have been made by American weapons.”
“We expected that.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet you didn’t expect this. Somebody shot each corpse in the head.”
“All of them?”
“Well, a few didn’t have much left for heads, and one didn’t have any head at all, but from what we could tell, yeah, about all of them.”
“Why didn’t Milosevic and his people make hay of that in the press conferences?”
“You’ll really have to ask him, General. I do recommend, however, that you wait until it’s morning over here. From what I hear, he’s not as nice a guy as I am.”
“That’s a debatable point. Are you getting sufficient cooperation?”
“Sure. They love us around here. We got the best tents in the compound.”
“We got your request for Milosevic to postpone his state funeral and hold on to the bodies.”
“Good. The coroner’s sending one through his channels, too.”
“Won’t make any difference. I took yours over to the State Department and got laughed out of the building.”
“Did you meet with these two guys, one real tall and skinny, and one real short and fat?”
“Sounds like them.”
“Likable couple, aren’t they? The Laurel and Hardy of international diplomacy.”
“They liked you a lot, too. They studied your request and the words ‘fat chance’ and ‘fathead’ got mentioned a few times.”
“A fella can’t ask for much more than that, can he?”
“How damaging will it be if the request is denied?”
“It creates an opening for a good defense attorney to poke a few holes.”
“Well, nothing more to be done about that. Need anything else from me, Sean?”
“No, sir. But thanks for asking.”
He hung up, and I hung up, and it took a few minutes before I dozed off again. Major General Thomas Clapper was the closest thing to a friend I had in this case. He had taught me military law way back when he was a major and I was a brand-new lieutenant going through my basic officer’s training. If I wasn’t the worst student he ever had, the other guy must have been a stone-cold putz. One can only imagine his dismay when, four or five years later, I approached him to ask if he would sponsor my application to law school and the JAG Corps. I’ve never understood what went through his brain at that instant, but he said yes, and the rest is legal history.
Unlike my own lethargic career, Thomas Clapper was always on a fast track. He was now the two-star general who headed up the corps of Army lawyers. This is the largest law firm in the world, with offices spread around the globe, handling everything from criminal to contracts to real estate law. It is a corps of over a thousand military lawyers and judges and more than twice as many legal specialists of various varieties. It is a corner of the Army few people know exists, filled with grating personalities, oversize egos, and rawly ambitious lawyers. It takes an iron-fisted tyrant to keep all those egos in check, although Clapper was seen as a benevolent dictator, and thus
