“Nice to meet you, Jeremy. Call me Major Drummond.”
“Okay, if that’s what you’re comfortable with,” he said, becoming more amiable by the second now that he thought I didn’t know he’d raped me on the front page of his paper.
“So what’re you doing out this way, Jeremy? Checking out the good restaurants?”
“Hah-hah.” He gave me another dose of that same phony laugh. “Actually, I’m doing a story on how the operation’s going. Of course, I’m also working on the ambush story, and I thought I’d stop by and see if you changed your mind.”
“Changed my mind?”
“Yeah. About talking with me.”
“Geesh, this is tough, Jeremy. I’d love to, I really would.”
“Then what’s stopping you?”
I rubbed my jaw a few times and gave him the squinty, calculating look people say makes me resemble a Turkish rug merchant. “Well, there’s a certain amount of risk in it for me. I mean, what do I get out of it? I just don’t see that it’s worth my risk.”
Jeremy stared at my desktop for a moment, contemplating this new twist. Then he tentatively said, “The paper provides me this very tiny pool of money for occasions like this. Perhaps a small emolument would be in order?”
I got rid of the rug merchant look and replaced it with my best “Gee, I’m shocked as hell” look. “Jeremy!” I yelled.
“Sorry,” he declared, quite insincerely, “I didn’t mean to insult you, but lots of you military guys insist on being paid.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, really. I’m talking colonels, even some generals.”
“Generals?”
“Greediest sons of bitches you ever saw.”
“Was that how you got my name? Did you pay someone for it?”
“I didn’t pay anyone, but that’s as much as I’m gonna say.”
I grinned. “Yeah, sure. More power to you. In fact, confidentiality was gonna be one of my requirements.”
He gave me this real righteous look and sketched a cross on his heart. “They could stick hot pokers up my ass and I wouldn’t divulge.”
By the look of him I suspected he might be telling the truth. About the hot poker thing, anyway. But just wave one juicy Big Mac under this guy’s nose and he’d be singing arias.
Then he said, “What other requirements you got?”
“I want a two-way street. I give you info, you give me info.”
He actually looked relieved. “Just info? That’s all? Hey, no problem.”
“Okay, me first. What nasty rumors are you hearing back in Washington about the investigation?”
“I would’ve thought you’d know more about that than me.”
“Well, I’m stuck out here, and like I said, I don’t read the papers.”
He grinned. “The stuff I’ll give you, you won’t find in the papers. Least, not yet.”
“Like what, Jeremy?”
He bent toward me, very conspiratorially. “Well, did you know, for instance, that the President starts every day with a fifteen-minute update on your investigation?”
I tried my best not to look surprised. “Of course he does,” I said, as though I already knew that, as though where else could the briefer possibly be getting his information, if not from me? Except that I hadn’t given out fifteen minutes of information on the investigation since we started. Not to anyone, not even Clapper. So where the hell was the information coming from?
“They say this thing has him tied up in knots,” he added. “The press secretary says that’s because his conscience is eating him alive, that the thought that our soldiers-American soldiers-would massacre a bunch of Serbs has him begging forgiveness from the Lord every night.”
“But you don’t believe that?” I asked.
“The only time that son of a bitch prays is when a camera’s around. And if he’s got a conscience, it’s news to me. News to his wife, too, I’d imagine.”
“Maybe he’s worried that this thing might erode support for the whole operation.”
Berkowitz jumped off the desk and his whole body shook like a bag of Jell-O that had been tossed out of an airplane. “Horsecrap.”
“You don’t think it would do serious damage to the cause if those men are guilty?”
“People ain’t stupid, Major. Besides, what’s there to erode? There is no support for this thing. Okay, my turn, right?”
“Shoot.”
“What’d you do before you became a JAG officer?”
“I was an infantry officer.”
“Where? What unit?”
“Bragg, with the 82nd Airborne. Hoorah!”
His arms reached out and his hands landed on my desk. He looked like a bent-over egg with a smug scowl. “Well, that’s the interesting thing, Major. See, I got a copy of your personnel file from one of my buddies.”
“Yeah?”
“And that’s what it says in your file, so I called a buncha friends of mine who were in the 82nd at the same time. Now here’s a coincidence. One of my buddies was actually a captain in the same battalion your file says you were in.”
“So?”
“So he never heard of you before.”
“That is odd,” I said. “I mean, there’s only like forty officers in a battalion.”
“Yeah, isn’t it.”
“Either he was in a different battalion or you must’ve misread my file.”
“Could be.”
“Yeah,” I said, “probably that’s exactly what happened.”
“So why do you think you were picked to be the chief investigating officer? I mean, no offense, but this is a pretty big one. Wouldn’t you think the Army would pick someone more senior?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Must be because I’m shit-hot and have ethics like a rock.”
“I’ve got a more interesting theory.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
He took his hands off my desk and went over and stood by the wall to contemplate my face from a safer distance.
“There’s this very special unit down at Bragg that’s so outrageously secret that nobody’s ever supposed to have heard of it. Anyone assigned to that unit, while they’re in it, their files are separated from the rest of the Army’s and are administered by a special cell. Of course, once these guys leave that unit… well, then they gotta have regular files like everyone else. So what happens is their files are filled in with units they never really served in.”
“They really do that?” I asked.
“They really do,” he said, grinning. “Nearly always they list units at Bragg. That way, if these guys are ever asked, they can at least sound like they know something about the base.”
“Damn, that’s really cunning of the Army,” I said.
“Of course, those guys are never allowed to disclose they’ve been in that unit, or even that it exists. But it does. Kind of like Delta, that other unit that doesn’t really exist, only the boys in this outfit are tougher, more deadly, and do more dangerous stuff.”
“Isn’t that something. Here I’ve been in the Army all these years and never heard of any such thing.”
“Really something,” he said. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s say a Special Forces A-team went out and did a very bad thing while they were performing a very secret mission. Then, let’s say, just for argument’s sake,
