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 thing happened in northern Iraq with the Kurds. Bosnia, too. They’re just so damned helpless and needy and eager. American soldiers can’t resist it.”
“So you were worried that Sanchez couldn’t control the situation?”
“Two of our other A-teams had their Kosovars get beat up pretty good, and we actually had to stand them down and let the Group psychiatrist and chaplain help them sort through it. A lot of guilt and other powerful emotions get unleashed. It would take a real strong leader to hold it together and… yeah, I guess I was worried that Terry couldn’t do it.”
I gave him a steady look. “The suicide and the attempted suicide, they weren’t members of those two other teams, were they?”
He nodded, a painful, jerking motion. “Yes, they were. Like I said, the emotions become very powerful.”
“But Sanchez and his team, they didn’t extricate?” I asked.
“No, not when I told them to. For two days, they kept reporting heavy Serb activity in their sector. Sanchez said he felt it was too risky to move south.”
“And how did you respond to that?”
“What could I do? He was the guy on the ground. I did ask the NSA station here to increase surveillance over Zone Three, so we could get a picture of what was happening.”
“And did they?” Morrow asked.
“They put a thermal up for an hour or two each day. The films showed Sanchez’s team in their base camp, but there were no signs of unusual Serb activity. Basically, though, we had to believe him.”
Now I understood why NSA used a thermal gatherer over Zone Three during those days. They weren’t looking for targets that required pictorial analysis. They were looking for human heat sources, like Serb soldiers in the woods.
I said, “So his team finally extricated four days later?”
“Right. But you had to figure it would’ve taken a day and a half, maybe two days, to make it out on foot. So there were only two days unaccounted for.”
“When they got back, did they report the ambush?”
“No,” Smothers said, and you could hear a note of anger in his voice. “We debrief every extricating team. They never mentioned it. They just insisted the area was crawling with Serbs, so it took them a while to make it out.”
I said, “Then three days later, Milosevic started holding his press conferences, and what did you do?”
“I went to General Murphy. I told him I thought Sanchez’s team might’ve done it. It was the same sector they were in. It was three days after Akhan’s unit was killed. It all fit.”
Morrow said, “Back to what happened to Akhan and his unit. Did Sanchez and his men clarify what occurred?”
“It was discussed during the debriefings.”
“And what did they say?” Morrow asked.
“They all said Akhan made the decision to attack the station himself. They couldn’t stop him. Zone Three was where most of Akhan’s men lived. The commander of Piluca’s police station was supposed to be a real cruel bastard, and he’d supposedly murdered or tortured some of their family members. It made sense. We’ve had other KLA units launch off on private vendettas.”
I said, “Have one of your people run a copy of the debriefing notes over to my office as soon as we’re done.”
“Okay.”
“Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth?” I asked.
He looked at me strangely. “No, not really,” he said. “None of us liked lying to you. But we believe in what we’re doing out here.”
Well, so much for truth and justice being the American way. I turned to Morrow and she indicated she had no more questions, either. I gave Smothers a long, solemn look. He stared back, clear-eyed, not the least bit bothered by the fact he’d been involved in a massive cover-up, or that he’d lied in an official investigation. This boy would get ahead, I thought to myself. He was a true believer.
We left him there and headed to the airfield, where a C-130 was already revved up and waiting.