the one having second thoughts.
I said, “Anyway, we always have that option. They screw with us, we bring the whole thing down around their ears.”
She nodded.
“I just don’t see where they can get a new angle on us,” I insisted. I said that to myself and to her.
She nodded again. “You might be right.”
“Aren’t you curious?” I added. “Don’t you want to know if Sanchez and his men did it?”
“I guess,” she said, sounding as if she thought she wanted to but really didn’t.
“Well then, that settles it,” I quickly announced before she could change her mind. Or I could change my mind.
I walked to the door and called Imelda. She came steaming in and I said, “We’ve got five more days. Get us a flight to Aviano for this afternoon. If they don’t have a flight scheduled, tell ’em I said make one. Also, call Lieutenant Colonel Smothers’s office and tell him Captain Morrow and I will be there in an hour.”
“Got it,” she said.
“One other thing,” I said very loudly. “Get someone in here to sweep this damned office for bugs. I don’t want any silly-looking pussies in duck-hunting vests listening in to my conversations.”
That reference to vests confused her a bit, but she nodded anyway. I figured that was as good a way as any to put Tretorne on notice that I’d be watching to be sure he was following his part of the bargain.
I was back in fine fettle, dishing out orders and shoving myself around. It felt good, too. The claustrophobia had cleared away. After packing our bags and loading up several boxes with documents, Morrow and I went to see Lieutenant Colonel Will Smothers, Sanchez’s battalion commander.
We went to his office, and this time he had his lawyer, the same Captain Smith who had filed a complaint against me. Smith started with a smug smile, till we exchanged some surly looks, the way a pair of antagonized lawyers do.
I looked at Smothers. “No need for him,” I said, pointing a digit in Smith’s direction.
Smith’s face showed his outraged surprise that we were about to start this all over again. He was just opening his mouth when Morrow, to my own vast surprise, said, “Get out of here, Smith. If he needs a lawyer, he’ll contact you.”
“I, uh, I…”
I made a menacing move in his direction. “You can no longer serve as his attorney. I’m reserving the right to cite you as part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice. If you’re not gone in two seconds, I’ll toss you out that friggin’ window.”
Smith glanced at the window. He studied my face, with all its swells and bruises. He weighed his options. “I’m gonna call the jurisdictional judge again,” he threatened.
“Do that!” I barked. “Be sure to tell him I’ll also cite him as an accomplice in the obstruction charge if he makes a move against me.”
Smith peered at his client, who frankly was looking at him to see what to do. They were both looking to the wrong place. Smith finally figured that out and quickly got up and departed the office. He was smarter than I thought he was.
I was giving Smothers an only slightly milder version of my I’d-also-like-to-rip-your-guts-out look. “Party’s over, Colonel. Lie or mislead us once, and I’ll indict you as a co-conspirator to murder. Got it?”
He nodded.
“Okay, let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me about your role in this Operation Avenging Angel.”
He looked over at Morrow and she somehow managed to hide those sympathetic eyes of hers. In fact, she looked positively fierce.
“Okay,” he said. “My battalion, the First Battalion, we’re the avenging angels. Murphy told you about the operation, right? We’re the ones chosen for it. I’ve got one or two teams in every zone. We do the dirty work.”
“Why just your battalion?” Morrow asked.
“Because we obviously can’t afford any mistakes in this thing, and my teams are the most experienced.”
“And does secrecy have something to do with it?” I guessed.
“There’s that, too,” Smothers admitted. “The less people who know about this, the less chance of a leak.”
“Tell us about Sanchez,” I demanded.
He looked at me. He sort of shrugged. “You sensed it,” he admitted. “I probably made a mistake. Terry’s a good guy, a very likable guy, and he needed the job to get promoted. He did great work in the operations shop and I felt I owed him a chance. Unfortunately, it’s a different thing, you know, between being a staff officer and being in charge of a team.”
“But you gave him the job?” I asked or said or pronounced as a verdict.
“I did.” He glumly nodded. “I thought that if I gave him the strongest team in the battalion, things would work out. Persico’s probably the best warrant in all of Tenth Group. He’s been through some rough shit, and he knows what he’s doing. I thought he’d keep Terry from screwing up. His NCOs are pretty tough, but damned good, and Persico keeps ’em in line.”
“And Sanchez’s performance since then?”
“I guess I’d have to say that on good days, he’s fairly mediocre. Not for lack of trying, though. Christ, I wish some of my guys with more talent would put in half the energy.”
“So it’s a matter of talent?”
“Some guys just do it naturally. Terry has to work at it every minute. Guys like that run scared and his people smell it.”
Morrow said, “When Akhan’s team were killed, what happened?”
Smothers became very focused. His eyes narrowed and he started rubbing his lips. “That happened on the fourteenth. In the morning, I think. Sanchez called on the radio sometime around noon. All he said was Whiskey 66 -that was Akhan’s call sign-was that the Whiskey 66 element was at black. You understand that?” he asked.
Morrow shook her head.
“It’s a color code we use to describe unit strengths. Green means the unit’s at one hundred percent. Red is fifty percent. Black is zero percent. Some of our KLA units have gotten shot up pretty bad, but we’ve never had a whole company, ninety-five men, go from green to black in only a few hours.”
“Did he explain what happened?” Morrow asked.
“Only that they were performing an operation. But that bothered us, because we hadn’t approved an operation for Akhan’s team.”
“According to the statement he gave us, they were attacking a police station in a town named Piluca,” I said.
“Well, that’s what he said. We had a problem with that, though. Piluca wasn’t on our approved target list.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “What approved target list?”
“We get a list of what to hit. It’s screened all the way up the line to the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. The idea is to avoid any kind of screwups.”
“And those are the missions you assign to your teams?”
“That’s right. No targets of opportunity are permitted in Avenging Angel. Everything’s run tight, you know?”
I guess I did know. If the Avenging Angels made a mistake, like the Air Force hitting the Chinese embassy or bombing a column of Kosovar refugees, the ensuing furor would blow the lid right off their secret war.
“Okay,” I said, “so Sanchez reported that his KLA company was wiped out, then what?”
“I ordered him to extricate.”
I said, “General Murphy told us he was ordered to stay in place.”
“That’s not right. We considered it, but I was worried.”
“What specifically worried you?” Morrow asked.
“Sanchez, I guess.”
“What, specifically, about Sanchez?”
“Every time one of our teams train a KLA company, you get this big brother mentality. Not just here; same
