“How are you being treated?”
“They’re treating me fine, Major. Why don’t you cut the crap and get to your questions.”
There was no anger on his face, but he was tightly wound up, like a man being led to the scaffold who just couldn’t bring himself to exchange pleasantries with the crowd.
I smiled back nicely. “Okay, we’ll get right down to business.”
“Good.”
“We have just a few opening questions,” I said, placing the tape recorder on the table between us. “If, at any point, you don’t want to answer a question, that’s your right. I must warn you, however, that this is an official investigation, and if anything you say turns out later to be false, that can result in additional charges.”
Delbert and Morrow shot me a pair of “that was a fairly stupid thing to say” kind of looks. The man was already facing thirty-five charges of murder, among sundry other serious offenses, and here I was threatening him with chump change.
Had Sanchez been anything but an officer in the United States Army, then Delbert and Morrow might have had a point. But he was. And he therefore was likely to feel a certain stiffening in his backbone from my warning. An officer’s integrity was still a cherished relic.
“I understand,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Please start with the mission of your team when you went into Kosovo.”
He leaned forward and cupped his hands tightly in front of his lips, which any professional interrogator will tell you is exactly the kind of gesture a man might make when he’s preparing to tell a few whoppers. So much for my warning.
“We were part of an operation called Guardian Angel. The KLA company we’d trained was being put into operation. Our job was to accompany them and provide assistance.”
“Assistance? What kind of assistance?”
“Continued training, help with planning operations, that kind of thing.”
“Weren’t they well trained enough to handle themselves?”
“No.”
I withdrew a piece of paper from my bulging legal case. “I have here a copy of the evaluation you gave that team when their training ended. That’s your signature, isn’t it?” I asked, pointing at the tight, almost childlike scrawl at the bottom of the page.
He barely glanced at it. “Yes.”
“You said here they were ready.”
He stared coldly at the paper. “What I said was that they met the minimal standards each KLA company had to attain before they were certified.”
“Was something wrong with those standards?”
“Yes. Those standards are slightly below what a basic trainee gets in our army. We taught them just enough to get them killed,” he said with obvious bitterness in his voice.
Anyway, I moved on. “How was your relationship with your KLA company?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it friendly? Professional? Personal? Impersonal?”
“Professional.”
“Could you elaborate?”
“We were told to train them, so we did. It was a job and they were part of it.”
“Did you feel responsible for them?”
“No, I didn’t. It’s not our war, it’s theirs.”
“Good point,” I said. “Still, I’d think it would be awfully hard not to develop some feelings for them. Living and working together, exchanging stories about families, and-”
“Major, we both know where you’re trying to go with this.”
“Where am I trying to go?”
“That when the KLA company got slaughtered, we went on some kind of bloody rampage and took revenge. That’s not what happened.”
“No?” I said, interested that he chose the word “slaughtered,” which carried interesting implications. I mean, there’re words like “were shot,” “died,” “got killed,” “were wiped out,” any of which connoted a milder fate than the words “got slaughtered,” in the food chain of death.
“Look, that’s what the press is reporting, but that’s not the way it happened.”
“No? Then tell me what happened.”
“After our KLA company got, uh, wiped out, we reported that back to Tenth Group headquarters. We were told to relocate our base camp and await instructions. So we did. We’d been there about two days when we suspected our new base camp was compromised, so we-”
“Why did you suspect that?” I interrupted.
“Because Sergeant Perrite and Sergeant Machusco detected a Serbian patrol that appeared to be surveilling us.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“The afternoon of the seventeenth. Maybe three o’clock, maybe a little earlier.”
“I don’t remember seeing that in the communications log at the Tenth Group ops center.”
Sanchez seemed to chew on his tongue a moment. “I didn’t report it.”
“Why? I’d think you’d report that immediately.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re a lawyer and you’ve never been in that kind of situation before.”
I had most definitely been in that kind of situation before but wasn’t about to tell him that. Sanchez was giving me the cover he and the rest of his team had concocted, and for the time being, the best path was to hear the entire tale before I looked for ways to tear holes in it.
“What did you do, then?” I asked.
“We grabbed our equipment and ran. We could have been attacked at any moment, so we reverted to an escape and evasion plan we’d planned two days before.”
I thought I saw where this was going. “And were you followed?” I helpfully asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you know?”
“Because we laid trip flares on our trail.”
“How many went off?” I asked.
“I don’t remember exactly. Maybe one, maybe two.”
“Was it one, or was it two?”
“Maybe two. My memory could be wrong, though.”
“What kind of trip flares were they?”
“Star clusters with a string on the pin.”
“How many did you set?”
“I don’t know exactly. I was preoccupied with leading the team out. The trailman was laying the flare traps.”
“What kind of string did he use?”
“I don’t know. Commo wire probably.”
One of the tricks when you’re investigating a conspiracy is to ask detailed questions and just keeping asking for more and more details, because usually the conspirators have only agreed on a broad cover, and it’s the details that get them in trouble. The topic of trip flares was just the kind of detail that was liable to get Sanchez and his team stuck in quicksand.
“So you didn’t feel you had time to make a radio call to the ops center, but you had time to set warning flares on your escape route?”
“It was a matter of priorities. A radio call wasn’t going to do us any good, but warning flares would at least tell us if we were being followed.”
“Then what happened?”
“Our E amp;E plan called for us to move straight south and cross the border into Macedonia. I became worried that the Serb team tracking us would just call their headquarters and have an ambush set up ahead. I
