“Why him?”
“He’s got the least to lose. He didn’t participate in the ambush.”
“That means he also knows the least about it.”
“But he can fill in the blanks between the fourteenth and the ambush.”
She was right, of course. We went and got a cup of coffee while I idly flirted with her. She wasn’t real responsive. Maybe her mind was too preoccupied with what we were doing. Maybe she was still sore over me suspecting her to be the mole.
Ten minutes later, Imelda did her bailiff thing again, announcing Sergeant Ezekial Graves. She was getting better and better at it. I could have sworn she was enjoying her new role.
Sergeant Graves was thin, mulatto-skinned, and handsome. He had large, watery brown eyes, clean-cut features, and a long, narrow chin. The Army chooses soldiers with fairly high IQs for the medic corps. This is one of the things the Army actually does right. Nobody wants a dummy who can’t add feeding morphine into their veins, or struggling to remember exactly how to tie off a tourniquet to stem a pulsing artery.
I introduced myself and Morrow to Graves and explained our purpose again. He seemed a little nervous, although I remembered that Floyd, aka Delbert, had described him as fairly tough. Of course, Floyd was trying to sabotage us, so maybe that was a contaminated judgment. I had a strong suspicion that maybe Sergeant Butler was the tough one, and Delbert had actually been trying to steer us away from Graves.
I told Graves how much we already knew about what had happened out there, adding the new details we had just learned from Perrite. Then I added my admonishments about truthfulness, commenting that we didn’t think he had much to fear, since he didn’t participate in the ambush. By his expression, it struck me that he’d already figured that one out on his own. Like I said, medics are generally pretty smart.
I then said, “Could you please tell us what happened after Perrite, Machusco, and Moore returned from Piluca with their report about the fate of Akhan’s team?”
He bit his lip and looked around the room. He was the newest member of Sanchez’s team, and he was a medic. That cut both ways. He had the lowest loyalty quotient. But he could also be the one who was trying the hardest to fit into the powerful tug of the fraternity.
He stopped looking around, but he began fidgeting with his hands. “I’m not sure what you’re asking, sir.”
He knew damn well what I was asking, and I guessed he was still trying to sort out whether to reveal anything or not.
I said, “Look, Sergeant Graves, the story is coming out. You can’t stop it. The others are coming clean, and it would be a terrific shame if you destroyed yourself for nothing. Now, was there a blowup? Was there a perceptible change in morale, or maybe in the attitude of the team?”
I was trying to pick my words carefully, because some future defense counsel might claim that I had first told him he wasn’t likely to be prosecuted, and now I was discreetly, or indiscreetly, leading him in what to say if he wanted me to lay off him.
He said, “No, sir, there was no blowup. It took a while for the word to get around about what happened down in Piluca. Sergeant Machusco and Sergeant Perrite sort of circulated around and let us know.”
“Did they blame Captain Sanchez?”
“Yes, sir. They didn’t need to, though. We all knew. A team that small gets to be like a family. Not a lot happens we don’t all know about.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. He waited for me to ask the next question but I didn’t.
Finally he said, “It wasn’t like a mutiny or anything, sir. I swear it wasn’t.”
I found it interesting that he would choose to jump to that particular denial. “What was it like?” I asked.
“Well, you have to understand, sir, we all liked Captain Akhan and his guys. It was crazy, really. It wasn’t like we had a whole lot in common with one another, at least with Akhan’s guys. Most of them couldn’t speak any English. They were farmers, butchers, shop people, a few schoolteachers. I don’t know how to explain it. It was kinda like you might feel toward an overeager puppy. But don’t get me wrong; that’s not the way we all felt toward Captain Akhan. No, sir. He was different… real different from them.”
“Different how?” Morrow asked.
“Did you know what he did in real life?” he asked.
Morrow shook her head.
“He was a doctor. A heart surgeon, in fact. Graduated from Harvard Medical School. That’s how I got to know him real well. At night, after the training, he’d take me over to the UN medical tents. They were swamped with all these wounded, sick people pouring out of Kosovo, and we’d work there about seven or eight hours every night. I don’t know how he did it. He’d get up every morning at five-thirty for the training, and since the training program was only six weeks, we were really busting their asses. When we let them go, usually about five, his men would stagger over to get something to eat, then climb right into their sacks. I mean, they were all exhausted. Akhan would skip the meal and work till one, sometimes two or three in the morning. I don’t know how he did it. You had to see him with those people in those tents, though. He wasn’t just a doctor. He was like a saint. You’d get some little kid, with maybe a broken leg and maybe some shrapnel wounds, and the kid would be wailing with pain till Akhan got there. He’d talk to the kid in this incredibly soothing voice while he was operating on him, and the kid would stop crying and just let him do it. None of the other doctors had that touch.”
Graves stopped for a moment and you could see he was in some kind of private reverie.
He finally said, “I mean, Captain Akhan, he didn’t even have to be here. His parents had immigrated to the U.S. a long time before. Did you know he was a U.S. citizen? He had a wife and three little kids, a house in Boston, and he worked in some big hospital there. When this thing blew up, he parked his life, paid his own fare, and got over here. The UN folks wanted him to work in a camp hospital full-time. He refused. He figured that was the coward’s way out. He didn’t know anything about soldiering, but he was smart, and everyone naturally looked up to him.”
Graves’s face had by this point become a study in human agony. It was evident that he, like Persico, had developed a very deep affection for Captain Akhan.
Then Graves said, “I’m sorry. It’s hard to describe sitting here in a room with you all, but he was… well, he was different than anyone I ever met. It’s just hard to put into words. It was like he emitted some kind of strength. You had to like him. Everybody liked him.”
I opened my lips to ask another question, but he cut me off.
“No,” he said. “People didn’t just like him. People sort of loved him. I did. The other guys in the team, even Machusco and Perrite, who’re pretty tough, we all loved him. Even Chief, I think. I mean, the Chief doesn’t show a lot of emotion. That’s not his way, but whenever he and Akhan were together, there was some kind of a special bond there. It really made no sense. I mean, Chief’s a soldier right down to the bone, and Akhan was really a doctor at heart. You wouldn’t think they’d be that close.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “If it wasn’t a mutiny, what did happen?”
“Uh… I guess we all just decided we weren’t going to follow Captain Sanchez anymore. Nobody said anything. It was just a feeling. We didn’t mutiny, though, sir, I swear.”
“But the effect was the same?”
“Yes, sir, I guess it was. It’s odd, though. Even Captain Sanchez seemed to be part of it. Does that make sense?”
“No. Please explain it.”
He looked down and studied the floor, and his face became perplexed as he tried to find the right words. “He just sort of faded out. He was there, but he stopped giving orders. Maybe it was guilt, I don’t know. Chief just sort of filled in the gap and started giving orders.”
I said, “Then you spent a day and a half in your base camp, right?”
“That’s right, sir.”
“What was the team doing during all that time?”
“Waiting.”
“What were you waiting for?”
“I don’t know exactly. I mean, I’m a medic, and I’m the new guy, you know? If they were sick or hurting, they’d talk to me, but nobody wanted my opinion on operations. Perrite and Machusco and the Moores kept going out on their patrols, while I guess they were all trying to think about what to do next. I mean, after what happened
