Embry flipped through the pile in front of him. “Major James Hernandez, the XO. The executive officer. Yep, he’s here.”
Claire felt her stomach constrict. “Let me see it,” she said.
Embry handed it to her with an involuntary wince.
Her heart thrumming, she at first skimmed it, then began to read through it very slowly. Her mouth was dry. She felt sick.
The top page was a cover sheet from the Criminal Investigation Division of the United States Army. Statement taken at Fort Bragg, 27 June 1985. The time. HERNANDEZ, James Jerome. His Social Security number. His grade. Then several long blocks of text, each initialed by Hernandez at the beginning and the end of each paragraph. Then several pages of questions and answers.
“I, Major James J. HERNANDEZ,” it began,
make the following free and voluntary statement to JOHN F. DAWKINS, whom I know to be a Criminal Investigator for the United States Armed Forces. I make this statement of my own free will and without any threat or promises extended to me.
On 22JUN85 my unit, Detachment 27 of the Special Forces, a top-secret combat unit, was based at Ilopango, El Salvador. I am the unit’s XO. Our mission was to conduct operations regarding the antigovernment forces in El Salvador. Our CO, Colonel William MARKS, received intelligence from a reliable source that a splinter group of the leftist, antigovernment guerrilla organization FMLN, which had killed four off-duty marines and two American businessmen several days before at the Zona Rosa in San Salvador, had gone to ground in a tiny village outside San Salvador. The village, which was called La Colina, was the birthplace of several of the guerrillas. They were said to be in hiding there.
In the middle of the night, early on 22JUN85, we located the village. The unit split in half to approach the village from two directions. We had silencers on our weapons to prolong the element of surprise, to shoot dogs or geese or whatever animals we might encounter. Both teams moved in and took control of the village, going from house to house, waking inhabitants and rousting them from their huts. We took this approach to ensure that the inhabitants had no firearms.
All of the inhabitants, who numbered eighty-seven individuals, were assembled in an open area that was presumably the town square. They were all civilians, old men and women and children and infants. They were interrogated in Spanish but claimed no knowledge of the whereabouts of the guerrillas. Col MARKS, who remained behind at headquarters, was informed by radio our determination that the intelligence lead was wrong and there were no commandos in hiding in La Colina at that present time. Col MARKS then directed us to leave. There was an exchange between several of the villagers and Sgt KUBIK. Suddenly Sgt KUBIK leveled his M-60 machine gun at the villagers. I noticed he had linked two ammo belts together on his shoulder so he had two hundred rounds. Sgt KUBIK began firing directly at the inhabitants and in a few minutes he had killed them all.
The following questions were asked by J. F. DAWKINS and answered by myself.
Q: Was an attempt made to restrain KUBIK?
A: Yes, but no one could approach him, because he was firing wildly.
Q: Were the civilians checked for weapons?
A: No, because Col MARKS thought we had lost control of the situation and ordered us to move out of there immediately.
Q: Did Sgt KUBIK have any comment after he finished killing the eighty-seven civilians?
A: No, he just said, “Well, now, that takes care of that.”
Claire put down the page she was reading and felt lightheaded. She excused herself and located the women’s room in the corridor outside. The “head.” She staggered to a stall and was sick. Then she washed her face at the sink with a brown block of army-issue soap.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As she waited to be admitted to the brig, she found herself lost in thought.
It is shortly after their wedding, on their honeymoon, in fact. They are checking into the Hotel Hassler in Rome, at the head of the Spanish Steps, on the Piazza Trinità dei Monte. She’d wanted to stay at a more modest pensione nearby, the Scalinata di Spagna, but Tom insisted they treat themselves to some serious luxury. The reservation, however, has been lost. A screwup. The suite he’d reserved is no longer available. The most they can offer, with deepest apologies, is a “junior suite.” Tom flushes, slams his fist down on the counter. “We made a reservation, goddamn it,” he thunders. Everyone in the lobby turns, appalled and fascinated. The reservation clerk is all apologies, flustered, humiliated. He almost dances before them. Tom glowers terribly, but then, just as quickly as he ignited, he cools. He nods. “See what you can do,” he says.
There are other times, she now remembers.
The time when his assistant at Chapman & Company confused the date of a lunch meeting with a big-time potential investor so that Tom missed the appointment. He flew into a rage, became abusive, and fired her, but then relented a few hours later and hired her back.
The time when a neighbor accidentally swerved his Range Rover into their lawn and gouged out a rut. Tom came storming out of the house, face dark with fury, but by the time he reached the neighbor’s car he seemed to have cooled down.
The time when, as he was walking with Annie in Harvard Square, she reached out to pet a dog, and the dog growled and snapped at her, and Tom grabbed the dog by the scruff of the neck until it yelped. The owner protested angrily; Tom set the dog back down, and it slunk away, tail between its legs. “Don’t you worry about anything,” he said to Annie.
There were dozens of such incidents, but what did they mean? A man who didn’t want his perfect honeymoon spoiled. An overly exacting boss. A meticulous homeowner. An overprotective father. In the course of marriage-even a relatively brief one, as theirs had so far been-you witness anger and sadness. You see the best in your spouse, and you see the worst. Tom had a quick temper, but he’d never directed it at her, never at Annie, and he’d always managed to contain it.
And then there was the way he had paralyzed the U.S. Marshals agent who had pursued him at the shopping mall. No doubt it was his Special Forces training. Had he really been unnecessarily brutal? They were trying to imprison him for a crime he insisted he hadn’t committed. He hadn’t killed the man.
Even the ruthless way he’d fought off the marshals at the lakeside cabin in the Berkshires-but was that anything more than self-protection, the survival instinct?
Did all these things really make him a killer?
“Hey, where’s the rest of my team?” Tom asked. He’d begun to exhibit the occasional flash of joviality, which for some reason irritated Claire. They met in the small glass-walled room that adjoined his cell. This time they had removed all restraints, presumably as a sign of respect to her.
“Just me right now,” Claire said quietly. “I want to know about La Colina. What really happened.”
He cocked his head, squinted. “I told you-”
“I’ve just read seven statements. They’re all substantially the same-”
“They’re probably identical. The military can be clumsy in their forgeries.”
“Who’s Jimmy Hernandez?”
“Hernandez? The executive officer of my detachment. Marks’s number two. Kid from Florida, son of Cuban immigrants-”
“Is he honest? A truth-teller?”
“Claire,” Tom said with exasperation. “Honesty is a relative concept to these people. Their CO tells them to fart, they fart. And if he tells them it’s gardenias, they’ll say it’s gardenias. Hernandez is Marks’s asshole buddy. He’ll say whatever Marks tells him to say.”