aggressive enough.”
“He might not be a killer.”
“How do you get that?”
I sipped from my fourth glass of scotch in only twenty minutes and felt it starting to do fuzzy things to my brain. “I’d guess that something very strange happened out there among those nine men.”
“Strange like what?”
“Well, you need to understand something. This wasn’t combat like in Vietnam or Korea or World War Two, where whole units sometimes snapped and went into some kind of killing frenzy. Sanchez and his guys were under a very different type of strain.”
“So you don’t think it happened the way the newspapers are reporting?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think it was anywhere near that uncomplicated.”
“Why?”
“Because they didn’t kill the Serbs right away. Because they waited two days after Akhan’s guys were killed, which was enough time for their emotions to cool. Because there were nine men in that team, and nine men don’t universally decide to do a rotten thing. Because when things like this happen, there’s nearly always circumstances lurking underneath that are damned hard to fathom if you weren’t there.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I really don’t know.”
She paused for a moment and took a large sip from her scotch. “You were in combat. Did you ever feel the urge?”
I thought about that a moment. “Once, I guess.”
“What caused it?”
“It was a few days after the Gulf War ended. Saddam’s Guards had escaped the net and started slaughtering the Kurds and Shiites, whom our government had encouraged to rise up against the regime after we’d promised we were going to destroy Saddam’s military. It turned out we lied.”
“I think I remember something about that.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t make big news in America. What happened was, they rose up and suddenly the Revolutionary Guards appeared. They never knew what hit them. Thousands of Kurds and Shiites, lots of women and children, began getting slaughtered. The survivors fled the carnage and headed south, into Kuwait. We set up camps and did the best we could to mend their wounds and care for them, and that only made us feel more miserable.”
“So you wanted to avenge them?”
“Nope. We wanted to appease our guilt. Our government had done a very dishonorable thing and these people were paying for it. Only Uncle Sam wasn’t around, having to look them in the eye.”
“So you think that’s what happened here?”
“Nope. That’s not at all what happened here. See, we wanted to, and God knows we talked about it a lot. But talk was all we ever did.”
She drained the last of her scotch, and she looked a little tipsy, and her lips looked kind of moist. I felt kind of frisky, and our eyes came together and met. Then came this long awkward moment.
Chapter 10
The way that look ended was her telling me to get my big shoe off her sandaled foot. She then paid the bill and we parted ways at the elevator, since she wanted to limp the two flights upstairs to her room, while I insisted on ascending in comfort. The last I saw of her, she was careening between the rail and the wall, stumbling occasionally on the steps and trying to appear graceful. Some girls really should stick to Evian water with a twist.
The next morning, my head throbbed ever so lightly on the car ride to the Air Force holding facility, although poor Miss Morrow obviously got the full, vituperative brunt of the scotch. She spent half the ride with her fingers plugged into her ears, trying to protect her addled brain from the raucous roar of six pistons pumping up and down and from Delbert, who seemed in a remarkably chipper and garrulous mood.
This was the day when we would split up and each take different team members to interrogate. If we limited ourselves to two hours with each of the remaining eight team members, then by midafternoon we’d be done. I decided to handle Chief Warrant Officer Mike Persico, Sergeant First Class Andy Caldwell, and Sergeant First Class Francois Perrite.
Michael Persico was forty-six years old. He was a former staff sergeant who’d applied for warrant officer training and been accepted. Every A-team has a chief warrant officer. They are the technical experts of the teams, the masters of every function of the other members, from weapons to communications to medical. Persico had been with the same team the past eighteen years. He was the “old man” of the team, meaning he was like the living, breathing heritage. He had earned a Bronze Star for valor in Somalia, and a Silver Star for valor in the Gulf.
I’d read the citations and was impressed. In the Gulf War, he had helped lead the team deep into Iraq’s desert for a little Scud-hunting. They found one Scud missile, directed an airstrike that annihilated the missile and its launcher, then lost two team members fighting their way back out. In Somalia, Persico and his team had been committed to help save the Ranger company that got bushwhacked trying to nab Aideed. One of Persico’s team members got wounded and he risked his own life to dodge through a hail of Somali fire to save him. Persico was a brave man, there was no question of that.
I studied him closely when he was led into the room. He was average height and build. He looked leathery and tough, with mostly gray hair and harshly weathered skin that had left deep creases on his face, particularly around his mouth. His eyes were gray, like a wolf’s. He moved confidently, like a man who’d gotten most of what he wanted out of life.
He brought a lawyer into the play, a female captain named Jackie Caruthers, who resembled a middle linebacker, only a little bigger, and with a face that looked like it had been kissed by the bumper of a speeding Mack truck.
“Please have a seat,” I said to both of them, and they sat straight across from me.
“You’ve informed your client of the rules?” I asked Caruthers.
“I have,” she said.
“Then if you don’t mind, I’d like to get right into it.”
Persico’s pale gray eyes were taking my measure, like he would a foe on a battlefield.
“Fine with me,” Caruthers answered for him.
I ignored her and looked straight at Persico. “Chief, could you explain the series of events that led to the destruction of the KLA unit you trained?”
He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded.
“All right. The KLA company commander was named Captain Kalid Akhan. He came to us on the afternoon of the thirteenth and said he planned to do a raid on a Serb police compound at dawn the next morning-”
“Did he plan the raid?” I interrupted.
“Yes, sir, he did. He said he had heard from some locals that the police compound was poorly guarded, that the Serbs spent most of their days drinking, and torturing local citizens.”
“And did he have any help from you or your team?”
“No. He pretty much decided what he wanted to do on his own.”
“Pretty much?”
“Completely.”
“Did you like his plan?”
“Looked okay to us. Based on what he said about the Serbs, it sounded like kid’s play.”
“Could you describe that plan for me?”
“Sure. The police station was located in the middle of a village named Piluca. Captain Akhan had ninety-five men. He planned to break ’em into three elements and hit at first light. One element was to go into the village and isolate the police station from the other houses. The second was to build a security screen along the main road that
