She continued. “We’re going to ask some difficult questions now. The cover-up has fallen apart. Jack Tretorne and General Murphy just want us to find the truth. The other members of your team have all been truthful. It’s your turn, Terry. Okay?”
He nodded, but his eyes stayed glued to hers. It was almost like he was mesmerized. I knew in that instant that I could never do what Morrow was doing. She sensed that Terry Sanchez was drowning. She sensed that his insides were seething with turmoil, that he required a sympathetic listener or else he would just fall to pieces. Sympathy is not my strong suit.
“Good, Terry. Why don’t we start with the decision that led Captain Akhan to raid the police station in Piluca?”
He licked his lips a few times, and I thought of a man who was stuck in a desert and was staring at an oasis off in the distance. His only company the past few weeks had been the same men who obviously detested him for whatever he’d done out there. Some part of him had to be begging for the chance to explain himself to someone who wasn’t there. Morrow expertly sensed that.
He said, “I know what you’ve been hearing from the others about that. They’re wrong, though. It’s not the way it happened.”
Morrow said, “Then please tell us what did happen.”
He said, “Akhan begged me to let him hit that station. A lot of his men lived near Piluca, and they were begging him. I guess he wasn’t strong enough to say no. He wasn’t really a soldier, you know. There was a Serb captain named Pajocovic. He’d terrorized that town for a year. A number of Akhan’s men had lived there. Some of them had family members who were tortured or killed by him. You see why they wanted to hit that station?”
“Of course,” Morrow said. “It makes perfectly good sense. But it wasn’t on the approved target list, was it?”
“I told Akhan that. I swear I did, but he said the target list didn’t apply to him and his men. He said that list only applied to my team. He was right about that, you know.”
“Yes, Terry, according to the rules, he was right. Did you want him to raid that station at Piluca?”
“Sure. I understood what his men were feeling.”
“Then-”
“No, wait,” Sanchez said, almost coming out of his chair. “You have to understand. Nobody understands. My mother and father, they’re from Cuba. They came over in ’61, with the first big wave. My father, he was recruited by the CIA to go back. He was on the first wave to hit the beach. His friends were dying all around him, but he fought for three days. He fought until the American ships that brought him there pulled out and abandoned them. Then the American planes left and there was no hope. The Bay of Pigs, you remember it? My father spent three years in a Cuban prison. We finally traded some tractors to get him and the others freed.”
Morrow was following along with more gentle nods. She bent forward and rested her chin on her hands, as though everything he was saying made perfectly good sense. Frankly, he was rambling. I thought his mind was becoming incoherent.
“You understand?” he continued. “He didn’t blame them though. It was his country. That happened to my family. I knew how these Kosovars felt. The others, the rest of the team… they didn’t, you see? These men weren’t fighting for America. They were fighting to free their own homeland. We can’t tell them what to hit and what not.”
It suddenly struck me that Terry Sanchez was stretching desperately. The Bay of Pigs and what was happening in Kosovo could not be more different. Faced with overpowering guilt, his mind was trying to construct a rationalization, any rationalization that would absolve or soften what he had done. Not an atonement, but an escape.
Morrow said, “Was Akhan’s operation properly planned?”
“Sure. I went over it with him for two days. I told him we couldn’t lift a finger to help him, because it wasn’t an approved target for us, but I told him everything to do. I even had Akhan send three men down to town the day before. They checked all over. All they saw was a bunch of drunk Serb police lounging around. It should’ve been easy.”
“Then what happened, Terry?”
“I don’t know for sure. Nobody knows for sure. What I think happened was one of Akhan’s men was a mole. It’s happened with other teams, you know? The Serbs send spies into the camps to be recruited in the KLA. I think that’s what happened here. I think one of his men tipped off the Serbs. That’s not my fault, you see? They were waiting for him. I told him before he went down there that if he got in trouble, we couldn’t lift a finger to help him. He understood that. It wasn’t my fault, you see? I told him.”
Morrow was in her full sympathetic mode, nodding and pursing her lips, but Sanchez wasn’t through. He was speaking louder now, almost frantic.
“That’s what the men in my team couldn’t get through their heads. You see that, right? I didn’t get Akhan killed. I didn’t make him go down there. I didn’t order him to do it. Whoever told the Serbs he was coming, he was the one who got Akhan killed. I just let Akhan do what he and his men wanted to do. You understand that, right?”
“I understand,” Morrow said. “What happened when Perrite and Machusco and Moore returned from Piluca?”
“What happened?” he said. “What happened was they all turned against me. None of them liked me much anyway. They never did, not from the day I took over the team. Persico, Perrite, Machusco, Caldwell, and Butler, they’d all been together over ten years. The Moores had been there six years. It was like trying to join a family, only I didn’t have the right blood.”
“Was there a mutiny? Did they approach you? What exactly happened, Terry?”
He finally broke eye contact with Morrow. He looked over at Imelda and her girls as though he were seeing them for the first time. Then he started rubbing his legs with his hands. Not a massaging motion, but a slow, methodical stroke with his fingers stiffened and his palms wide open. It seemed unconscious and mechanical.
“What happened was Persico took me off in the woods. He told me what the recon team found in Piluca. He spoke real quiet, but he was accusing me. You know what I mean? He was staring at me like I was some kind of monster. Like it was my fault.”
He paused for a moment, but the leg rubbing continued.
“They all loved Akhan, you know? Something about him. I don’t know what it was, but they worshipped him. I think they believed I deliberately set him up to die. Like maybe I was jealous. That’s stupid, though, you know? He wasn’t even a soldier. Besides, I liked him, too. I wouldn’t have done that to him. When we came back out of the woods, they were all looking at me that way. They started avoiding me.”
Morrow said, “But there was no overt mutiny?”
“Not like you might see on a ship maybe, not that way, but it was a mutiny. Yeah, it was a mutiny. I knew they weren’t going to do what I said anymore. You know what I mean, right? They weren’t gonna let me lead them. We were in the middle of enemy territory, and there wasn’t anything I could do. You see that, right?”
Morrow said, “Terry, at 1200 hours you reported to Colonel Smothers that Akhan’s team was black. He then directed you to begin extraction. At the 1800 sitrep that night, you reported that there was too much Serb activity in your vicinity to safely extricate your team. You reported the same thing at the 0600 sitrep the next morning, and the 1800 sitrep that evening. Why did you report that?”
The spectacle of Lisa Morrow soothingly taking him through this journey, and of Terry Sanchez mentally crumbling, had so thoroughly captivated my attention that it actually took me a moment to realize the timely brilliance of her question. If it had in fact been a mutiny, why had Sanchez conspired in the effort to keep the team in Kosovo? Had someone held a gun to his head?
“Persico told me to.”
“I’m sorry, Terry, I don’t understand. Chief Persico told you to say what?”
His leg stroking got a little more frenetic. “Yeah.”
“No, Terry, what did Chief Persico instruct you to report?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, appearing confused. “He told me to buy us some time.”
“Why, Terry? Time for what?”
“Time to set it up. Time to do it.”
“But you were ordered to extract. What more was there to do?”
