“Why did they extricate?”
“Because the Kosovar unit they were training were all dead.”
“How long had they been dead?”
“Three or four days.”
“When their Kosovars were killed, didn’t they report that immediately?”
“I believe they did. I’d have to check the operations logs to see exactly when they reported it, but I think so.”
“Then why weren’t they ordered to extricate at that point?”
“Because I made a decision to leave them in place.”
“Why?”
“Because, after their Kosovars were ambushed, Terry automatically relocated his team to a new base camp, one known only to his team. Their safety wasn’t at issue.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“We’re training more Kosovar guerrilla units, and when we infiltrate those units into Kosovo, we might have wanted to use Sanchez’s team to perform the same Guardian Angel function with a new team. I hadn’t made a decision yet. I was keeping my options open.”
I said, “How is morale in the unit, General?”
“Great. In fact, as high as I’ve ever seen.”
“Why so high?”
He offered us a very humble smile and genuflected ever so slightly. “I’d like to take credit for it, but the truth is that soldiers are always happiest when they’re in action.”
“No disillusionment with the mission?”
“These are soldiers, Major. They don’t question the mission.”
Like hell they don’t. Personally, I’d never met a soldier yet who didn’t spend every waking hour dissecting every aspect of the mission and moaning miserably about the complete idiots who designed it. Anyway, I said, “I heard you’ve had a suicide and an attempted suicide.”
“Every unit has suicides.”
“True, but you’ve had one successful and one attempt in only a few months.”
His eyes got real narrow. “Look, Major, the Group hadn’t had a suicide for three years. Our number came up. I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but go study any unit and you’ll see we’re way below average.”
“You must’ve investigated the causes of the suicides?”
“An investigating officer was appointed in the case of the successful one.”
“And what did he find?”
“The man was a staff sergeant with serious marital problems. He had a son with Down’s syndrome. He had a drinking problem, and his peers afterward described him as a borderline manic-depressive.”
“And the attempted suicide?”
“There was no investigation, but the unit commander told me that the man suspected his wife of cheating while he was stuck here.”
The general then looked down at his watch, and a pained expression instantly popped onto his face. “Listen, I’ve got to get down to the operations center. We’re doing two insertions today, and I have to be on hand.”
“Of course, General,” I said. “Sorry to take so much of your time.”
I was lying, of course. I would love to have had this guy in a room for about twelve hours, with a few hot klieg lights and some small pointy objects to jam under his fingernails. Sometimes you can just smell a lie. If anything he said was true, it was an accident.
Then again, maybe I was just jealous. Here sat this hulking Adonis, a Rhodes scholar, the youngest general in the Army, a guy people had been predicting would be a four-star ever since he wore diapers. And here was me, a run-of-the-mill major, whose bosses considered him expendable, and, believe me, there’d been no crowd of adoring fans crammed around my crib talking about the glorious future that lay ahead of me.
What I found intriguing was the gap between the time when Sanchez’s team reported that their Kosovars were all dead and when they extricated. Murphy really didn’t seem to have a good explanation for that. Give him a few days and I was sure he’d think one up, though.
I turned to Morrow right after we got out of the building. “I don’t see why the press always writes him up as such an attractive guy. I didn’t think he was so attractive, did you?”
She gave me an amused smirk. “Oh, I don’t know. Some women might find him attractive.”
“Some women?”
“Blind ones might not notice, but the rest of us would probably say he’s pretty cute.”
I had to think about that a minute. I mean, get real. How can a six-foot-five, 240-pound former right tackle be called cute?
“So what do we know?” I finally asked.
Delbert rubbed his chin and said, “We know Sanchez’s team was the pick of the litter.”
“Right.”
Morrow said, “We know that all of a sudden nobody seems to know Terry Sanchez very well.”
I said, “Yeah, a little odd, isn’t it? All of a sudden, he’s a leper.”
We all thought about that, then Delbert said, “So, what’s on for this afternoon?”
“We’re going to Albania to visit a refugee camp.”
“Why? When are we going to see Sanchez and his men?”
“Look, Delbert, consider that it’s a near certainty that Sanchez and his team killed thirty-five men. Worse, somebody went around afterward and did the coup de grace, perhaps out of spontaneous rage, or perhaps in a more premeditated way to ensure there were no witnesses. Do we all agree with that?”
“Of course,” Delbert said, with Morrow nodding along in a very thoughtful way.
“We’ve got corpses, and we’ve got weapons, and we’ve got suspects in detention. What don’t we have?”
“Motive,” Delbert said.
“Right,” I said, playing the obnoxious law professor to the full hilt.
Chapter 7
The flight to Albania took about two hours. We had to wind down the coastline of Bosnia, then veer sharply to the left. Albania itself is a small place, very poor, filled with dilapidated Stalinist architecture, which never was known for its splendor or its charm, and lots of shabbily dressed people. The Albanians are called the Bird People because they live largely in mountains. They’re known pretty much throughout Europe as somewhat touchy folks, particularly since they have this quaint old custom, called a blood feud, which dictates that if anyone kills an Albanian, then the family of the victim inherits an obligation to start knocking off the killer’s family. Sometimes these blood quests pass down through five or six generations, and I figured there must be something in the mountain air, because to me that sounds an awful lot like West Virginia.
At any rate, aside from this sedulous custom, the Albanians are not known for a heck of a lot. They invented the necktie. They were led before World War Two by a guy named King Zog, who, as his name implies, was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill royalty figure, but a guy with a big handlebar mustache who rode around the country with bandoleers strapped across his shoulders, marrying exotic foreign beauties and doing pretty much what he wished. Then they were led, during the cold war, by a guy named Enver Hoxha, who was so obnoxiously paranoid that he built concrete pillboxes on nearly every single acre in the country and placed long upright poles in all the fields to keep assaulting helicopters or parachutists from landing. More bizarre still, he actually allied Albania with Red China, which had to be one of the most moronic geostrategic gestures in history. Not surprisingly, Albania ended up the poorest and loneliest country in Europe.
But, in spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, the Albanians are a fairly tough and hardy folk. They don’t mess with others, and they don’t expect to be messed with in return. They’re surprisingly hospitable folks, too. And brave and determined as well, which was partly the cause of the current difficulty, because the shaky
