Secret sanction sd-1 Page 4

  A lot of thought had gone into the arrangement that stretched before us. Thirty-five nude bodies were neatly arrayed in four long columns. Somebody had gone to the trouble of placing props behind the backs of the corpses, so that they all sat up, perfectly erect. It looked ghastly and made it impossible to ignore their faces, although there were a few who were missing faces, or only had parts of them. We all froze in our tracks and there was the sound of a few deep gasps.

  A perfectly prone body can still be an impersonal object, but a body that sits up and stares at you, almost as if it has been resurrected-that’s damned impossible to ignore. The first of us to recover was Dr. Simon McAbee, our friendly pathologist, who rushed forward with his doctor’s bag and a savory gleam in his eyes. He began strolling around like a cavorting housewife in a grocery store meat selection, squeezing this one, prodding that one, trying to decide which was the choicest cut.

  Delbert and Morrow fell in behind me as I began walking the columns, pausing at each body for only a few seconds, no longer than it took to determine what specific trauma caused the death. The bodies had been cleansed, which made it fairly easy to interpret the wounds. I couldn’t be absolutely certain in every case, but what I saw generally met my most dismal expectations.

  Some of the corpses were horribly mangled, but it seemed every single one had been shot in the head. One corpse, though, had no head at all, just an ugly, hacked-on stump at the bottom of the neck. Some of the head entry wounds were from the back or the front, but most were from the side. The entry holes were small, about the size that would be made by a 5.56mm round, which just happens to be the size bullet fired by an M16 rifle, which just happens to be the standard-issue weapon for American troops. The exit holes were large. This, again, is characteristic of the M16 bullet, which tends to tumble once it strikes hard objects, like skulls and bone, collecting a lot of tissue as it speeds through the body, making an ever-widening path and a big, ghastly exit wound.

  At least half the bodies were so seriously mangled, and the nature of the wounds so severe, that they had obviously been hit by mines. It was the kind of mine, though, that intrigued me. American troops are issued something called a claymore, which is an upright mine that sits above the surface, planted on a pair of tiny metal tripods. The great virtue of the claymore is that it is a directional mine. It has a rectangular, curved shape, and the explosives are packed into the concave hollow, while the outward half is packed with thousands of tiny pellets that are propelled forward with great force. It’s a highly favored weapon in ambushes. The mines are triggered by an electric pulse, and the technique of choice is to connect several of these nasty little things together with commo wire into what is called a daisy chain. That way, once the electric charge is triggered, all the mines appear to go off at once. The time it takes for the electric charge to travel the wire actually means the explosions are not precisely simultaneous-there’s a few milliseconds of lag-but, as soldiers are wont to say, it’s close enough for government work.

  The half of the bodies that were badly mangled had lots of little pellet holes. Mysteriously, though, all of the wounds seemed to be somewhere in the back, which implied several possibilities, most of which were damned ugly.

  After the first pass, Delbert, Morrow, and I gathered in a small knot in the back corner and whispered among ourselves. Dr. McAbee and Dr. Whatever-osovich continued to traipse around and pick at pieces of wounded flesh. The Serb was obviously a pathologist, and the two of them were rubbing chins and chatting amicably, just having a gay old time.

  “What do you think?” I asked Delbert and Morrow, waiting to see who would answer first.

  Morrow quickly said, “It’s sobering.”

  “Very sobering,” Delbert quickly one-upped her.

  And indeed it was sobering. Both Delbert and Morrow had been through morgues before, so these were certainly not the first corpses they’d seen. Still, it’s a very breathtaking thing to see thirty-five of them all at once. I had the advantage of having been to war once or twice, but I’ll admit that the sight of lots of dead bodies still taxes my soul in strange ways.

  “It doesn’t look good, does it?” Delbert asked.

  “No,” I grimly admitted. “We won’t know for sure till McAbee’s done, but I’d guess most of the damage was done with M16s and claymores. There was a machine gun or two involved as well, but I can’t even hazard a guess what kind.”

  “Some of them were little more than boys,” Morrow said.

  “Right.”

  “A few were just sprouting pubic hair,” she continued, not as a matter of prurience, but because it exacerbated the seriousness of this. Killing grown men was one thing. Killing teenage boys took it to another level.

  On my first sweep through, I had deliberately ignored the faces. I had focused only on the wounds, because I didn’t want my reason clouded by emotion. Now it was time to go back and look at each corpse anew; to think of them as human beings rather than as butchered slabs of meat filled with clues. Perhaps some of these corpses had done some very nasty things to the Albanians they were herding out of Kosovo; still, I had to remind myself that they were also human beings. Besides, at issue here was not what crimes some, or maybe all, of these men had committed, but what crimes might have been done to them. So I spent another twenty minutes wandering through and trying to order my ever-pliant conscience.

  Dr. McAbee had collected a number of specimens and was now taking photographs of each corpse. He worked efficiently and professionally and completed his work even before I was done.

  He finally walked over to me. “It doesn’t look good, Counselor.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Our host gave me a collection of projectiles removed from the corpses.”

  “Did you personally remove any?”

  “A few.”

  “And?”

  “The bullets are 5.56. The pellets appear to be claymore.”

  “So all the wounds were made by American weapons?”

  “With thirty-five bodies, it would take three X-ray machines and a team of three assistants a full week to prove that beyond any shadow of a doubt.”

  “But is that your general impression?” I asked him.

  His bulgy eyes fixed mine, and he seemed to sigh. “Every wound I saw appeared to come from an American weapon.”

  “What about the head wounds?”

  “Most were shot from a distance of less than two feet. These fools washed the bodies, but I still found some gunpowder samples in their hair.”

  “And how would you guess that happened?”

  “That’s obvious, isn’t it? Someone walked through and made sure there were no survivors.”

  “Nothing’s obvious,” I chided. “Be careful about assumptions.”

  “Of course, you’re right,” he said, although we both knew that it still appeared obvious.

  “Did you tell that Serb doctor to maintain these bodies until we’re done?” I asked him.

  “I did. But he said he can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Milosevic has ordered a large state procession where the families of the dead are to be honored for their sacrifices. After the ceremony, the bodies are to be returned to their families for funerals.”

  “Then the Serbs will create a vast problem for us and themselves.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “If I was the defense attorney for the accused, I would insist on equal right to examine the corpses.”

  “Well, the corpses have now been examined by me.”

  I gave him my best cross-examining look. “And could you tell me, Doctor, with complete certainty, exactly how many of these men were killed with American weapons?”

  “We already went over that.”

  “You’ll go over it on a witness stand, too. If the members of that A-team are charged with murder, how many counts do we charge them with? You have to list those things. Then you have to be able to prove that was exactly how many
people they murdered.”

  “Of course,” he sheepishly said. “I’m sorry. I’ve never handled a situation of this magnitude.”

  “None of us have. But think this way from now on. What I want you to do is classify each corpse. I want to know how many died immediately, and how many were initially wounded, and then dispatched. Can you do that for me?”

  He nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. Now, as the coroner of record, is there anything else you need from this place?”

  “I’d love to have a couple of these bodies to carry back, so I can determine the exact circumstances of death, but that’s not going to be possible.”

  “All right, the first thing you do when we get back is file an official request for just that. I’ll file one, too. We’ll inform Washington that this case could be jeopardized if we don’t have a few bodies.”

  Chapter 5

  We arrived back at Tulza shortly after three. Our stomachs had gone from queasy to growling, so I asked Imelda to scramble us up a meal. Sounds easy, but you have to remember that this was the Army, and the Army has mess halls, and the Army tells you when you can eat and not eat. Three o’clock is one of those “not eat” periods. But you also have to remember that this was Imelda Pepperfield, who can make rocks cry.

  She came huffing back into my office, followed by two of her female legal clerks, both of whom were strikingly deficient on the looks side but undoubtedly had stellar clerical skills. Imelda snorted a few times as her assistants plunked down several trays loaded with meatloaf sandwiches and mashed potatoes larded with a thick, pasty, gravy.

  “Any trouble?” I asked.

  “Nope. That mess sergeant tried to say no, so I kicked his butt a little, and he snapped to.”

  The thing about Imelda is that she was raised in the rural backcountry of Alabama and has all the inflections and manners of a poor, uneducated southern Black girl. And if you are too stupid for words, you buy into that act. I could have looked up her IQ in her military records, but I never bothered. The truth was I never wanted positive confirmation that she is much smarter than me. I did know one of her secrets, that she’d earned two master’s degrees, one in criminal justice and the other in English literature. She never went anywhere without a few thick books hidden in her duffel, usually written by some of those Russian writers with long, impossibly tongue-twisting names.

  Delbert and Morrow were eyeing the meatloaf sandwiches with pure disgust, while I launched in with gusto.

  Imelda gave them a speculative glance, then flapped her arms once or twice. “You got some kinda problem with that meal?”

  Delbert very foolishly said, “Actually, I do. I like to eat healthier.”

  Imelda bent toward him. “You’re not one of those health food pussies, are you?”

  “I try to take care of my body,” Delbert replied stiffly.

  “This is Army-issued food. If Uncle Sam says it’s good for you, it’s good for you.”

  “It’s greasy. And it clogs the arteries.”

  Morrow was watching this exchange, and I saw her quickly grab a sandwich and start chomping. Smart girl, that one.

  Imelda straightened back up, and her eyes turned into blazing hot lasers that bored searing holes into poor Delbert’s forehead.

  “Okay, fancy pants, I’ll remember that. I’ve got your number.”

  Delbert’s eyes shifted in my direction. Unsure of her connection to me, he was imploring me to either intervene or give him a signal to fire at will. Like I’d be stupid enough to step into the middle of this.

  “Who are you looking at?” Imelda barked. “Don’t you look away when I’m talking to you. You either eat that food or you’re gonna get bone-ass skinny these next few weeks.”

  “I like salad,” he said with almost pitiful politeness. “Could you get me a salad?”

  “Salad?” she roared, as though he’d asked for a plate of pickled horse manure.

  “Yes, please.”

  “I don’t fetch rabbit food.”

  “Then I’ll get it myself,” he announced, then stood up and left.

  Imelda flapped her arms a few more times, grumbled something that ended with one of my favorite anatomical organs, then stomped from the room herself.

  Visibly relieved, Morrow placed her half-eaten meatloaf sandwich back on the plate. “Who won that round?” she asked.

  “Who’s fetching the rabbit food?” I answered.

  “She’s the real McCoy, isn’t she?”

  “Last of the breed,” I replied, reaching over for my third sandwich.

  “Did Delbert just start a war?”

  “Hardly. She was only checking his mettle.”

  “How’d he do?”

  “Not bad. She saw you pick up that sandwich, though.”

  “Was that a mistake?”

  I scratched my nose. “Hard to say. Time will tell.”

  These two thoughtful creases appeared between Morrow’s eyebrows. The truth is what I just said made absolutely no sense. Took her a moment, but she figured that out.

  “You run a loose ship, don’t you?” she complained. “She was very disrespectful. I would have thought a former infantry officer would instill a little more discipline in the ranks.”

  Did I mention before that Morrow is an astonishingly beautiful woman? Well, if I didn’t, she is. And there’s nothing like having a great-looking woman challenging your manhood, which was exactly what she was doing. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows were arched up, and her lips were kind of pointing downward, and the average guy would choose just that moment to flex his muscles and mutter something tough and virile to confirm he had something inside those jockey shorts.

  I said, “That’s why stereotypes don’t come with guarantees.”

  See, Captain Lisa Morrow was obviously scared to death of Specialist Seven Imelda Pepperfield. She just wanted to shame me into protecting her. Like I said, she’s a smart girl.

  I finished my third sandwich and glanced at my watch. Unless I missed my guess, there should’ve been a witness waiting outside our door. It actually wasn’t a real hard guess to make, though, since that morning, before we’d left for the morgue, I’d asked Imelda to contact Lieutenant Colonel Will Smothers to request his presence at 1530 hours, which, to the uninitiated, is pretty much the same thing as 3:30P.M.

  I walked over and opened the door. In fact, Smothers was standing there. And surprise, surprise, a bespectacled, slightly overweight, bookish-looking captain wearing JAG insignia stood slightly behind him.

  “Please come in,” I told Smothers.

  He walked by, and I quickly stretched my arm across the doorway, blocking his lawyer, whose nametag read Smith. “You won’t be needed,” I told him.

  Smothers spun back around and faced me. “I want him here.”

  “No,” I said. “This is just an interrogatory. I won’t be reading you your rights, and therefore nothing you say in this session can be used against you. This is merely a background session.”

  Captain Smith screeched in a high-pitched whinny, “If he wants me along, I’m coming in.”

  “Wrong. I’m the chief investigating officer. And if I say no lawyers, there’ll be no lawyers.”

  There was a moment of wordstruck confusion as Smith and Smothers exchanged bewildered looks, both obviously wondering if I could do this. Frankly, I had no idea, but what the hell.

  “No lawyers,” I said, grabbing the door and closing it in Smith’s stricken face. “Please have a seat,” I said as I turned around and faced Smothers.

  The thing about interrogatories with potential suspects is that you lose if you don’t have the upper hand. Smothers outranked me, so I had to make up some lost ground. Besides, lawyers only get in the way. I know. I am one, and I’m always getting in the way.

  I sat behind the desk, and Morrow and I stayed perfectly still. Smothers was trying to compose himself, which wasn’t easy because I had just torn the guts out of his game plan. Finally I withdrew a ta
pe recorder from the desk drawer and turned it on. That’s always great for the nerves, too.

  “Colonel, could you please state your full name and describe your relationship to the accused men?”

  He squared his shoulders. “My name is Will Smothers. I’m their commanding officer.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “I’m the commander of the First Battalion of the Tenth Special Forces Group. The A-team commanded by Captain Terry Sanchez was assigned to my battalion.”

  “Command? Elaborate on that word for me, please. What is your understanding of it?”

  His brow became furrowed for a moment or two. “I guess… well, it means they work for me. That I’m responsible for them.”

  “That’s a good definition. How long have you been in command?”

  “Nearly two years.”

  “How long was Captain Sanchez one of your team leaders?”

  “Maybe half a year.”

  “So you’ve only known him half a year?”

  “No. He was on my staff before that. He worked in the operations office.”

  “Was he in the unit when you arrived?”

  “Yes. I think he got here about six months before me.”

  “So you’ve known him two years?”

  “Yes, two years. That’s about right.”

  All of this was just a warm-up. Always start an interrogation by asking for simple, noncontroversial facts, to get the subject into the mode of answering quickly, almost automatically. Now it was time to dig for a few opinions.

  “Would you say you know him well?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Who made the decision to place him in the team leader position?”

  “Me. It had to be approved by the group commander, but I recommended him.”

  “The group commander would be…?”

  “Brigadier General Murphy.”

  “Is Sanchez a good officer?”

  “Uh… yes. A, uh, well, a very good officer,” he said, suddenly appearing eminently thoughtful. “In fact, outstanding in every way.”