“Did he ask you to give a statement?”
“No. I did it on my own.”
“He didn’t coerce you in any way?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re not afraid of harming your career if you say anything critical of the general?”
Hernandez hesitated. “If I had anything critical to say, I’m required to say it. I’m under oath. But he did nothing wrong.”
“Aha. Now, tell me something, Colonel. When you saw Sergeant Kubik discharge his weapon at the civilians, did you personally try to stop him?”
Now Hernandez eyed him suspiciously. Was this a lawyer trick? “No,” he finally said.
“You didn’t?”
“No.”
“Who did try to stop him?”
Hernandez hesitated again. He sat forward in his seat. He looked over at Waldron and company. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone try to stop him.”
“Hmm,” Grimes said. He took a few steps closer. He shrugged and said conversationally, “So you didn’t actually see anyone try to stop him?”
“No, I did not.”
“And, Colonel, since General Marks-then Colonel Marks-was back at headquarters at this time, you were in charge, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Colonel Hernandez, how long have you worked for General Marks?”
“Since 1985.”
“That’s quite some time. He must trust you enormously.”
“I hope so, sir.”
“You’d take a bullet for the general.”
“If given the chance, yes, sir, I would.”
“You’d lie for him, too, wouldn’t you?”
“Objection!” Waldron shouted.
“Withdrawn,” Grimes said. “Okay, now, Colonel Hernandez, I’m going to take you step by step through this incident. We’re going to very slowly explore every single detail, just so’s I don’t miss anything, okay?”
Hernandez shrugged.
In mind-numbing detail, for two hundred questions or more, Grimes took the witness through every point he could think of. It was like watching a movie frame by frame. Where was he standing? What did Sergeant Major so-and-so say?
Then, suddenly, Grimes seemed to veer off course. “Colonel Hernandez, did you consider yourself a friend of Ronald Kubik’s?”
Hernandez’s eyes snaked over to Waldron for a moment. He looked sullen. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“You can tell us the truth,” Grimes prompted, walking away from the witness stand, back toward the defense table.
“No, I did not.”
“You didn’t much like him, did you?”
“I thought he was twisted.”
Grimes stopped and whirled around. “Twisted?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Twisted like sick-twisted?”
“Yeah. Sick.”
“Oh?” Grimes looked curious. “And how was he sick?”
“He was a sadist. He loved to kill.”
“In combat, you mean.”
Hernandez looked confused. “Yeah, when else?”
“You didn’t kill people outside of combat, did you?”
“No. Outside of a designated operation, which wasn’t necessarily combat.”
“I see. So, during a designated operation, he loved to kill.”
“That’s right.”
“Which was his job-your job.”
“Only part of the time-”
“Part of the time it was your job to kill people.”
“Right.”
“And he was good at it. In fact, he loved it.”
“Correct.”
“Would you say Ronald Kubik was a good soldier?”
“What he did was illegal-”
“I’m not asking about what happened on June 22, 1985. I’m asking you, up until that point, up until that night, would you say Ron Kubik was a credit to the Special Forces?”
Hernandez looked trapped and resentful. “Yes.”
“He was really good.”
“Yeah,” Hernandez conceded. “He was so fearless it was scary. He was one of the best guys we had.”
“That’s all I’ve got for this witness,” Grimes said.
“As it’s lunchtime,” Colonel Holt announced, “we will recess for an hour and a half, until fourteen hundred hours.” A rustle, oddly dampened by the soundproofing, arose, along with a flat babble of excited voices. The few spectators got to their feet. Waldron headed for the exit; Hogan, his cocounsel, lagged behind, doing something at the prosecution table. The steel doors opened.
Tom gave Claire a hug and said, “We’re doing great, don’t you think?”
“We’re doing okay,” Claire said. “I think. What do I know?”
At that moment, Hogan brushed by the defense table. When he was next to Tom, he whispered: “You know we’ll get you, you sick fuck, one way or another. In court or out.”
Tom’s eyes widened, but he said nothing. Claire, who had overheard the remark, felt a surge of adrenaline, but then she too said nothing.
Tom held out his wrists for cuffing. The restraints were put back on him and he was led away, back to the brig for a meal in his cell.
Embry came around the table and reached to shake Grimes’s hand in congratulation. Grimes didn’t meet it. He leaned over and spoke to Embry in a low, menacing voice. “What the fuck did you tell them about leaking to the press?”
Embry’s hand dropped slowly to his side. His face darkened almost to purple.
“We saw you, Embry. We saw you having beers with Waldron and company.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s all it was. Beers. I work with these guys, you know. They’re colleagues. I have to live with them, work with them, long after you guys are gone.”
“And that’s why you feel free to divulge confidences to them?” Claire asked.
“Now he’s got you thinking this way? I didn’t tell them a thing, Claire. Not a thing. I never would. It’s unprofessional and it would just get me in trouble. Plus it would make me look like a chump. Anyway, why should I tell them I was party to a conspiracy to violate nondisclosure? That would just get me in a heap of trouble.”
He turned, looking wounded, and walked off.
“You believe him?” Grimes asked.
“I don’t know who to believe anymore,” Claire said. “Let’s get lunch. My car is parked really close. There’s a McDonald’s nearby.”
“I’d go for McDonald’s.”
“Is there a McDonald’s on every army base in the world?”
“Or Burger King.”
On the way to the car, when she was satisfied no one was within earshot, Claire said: “I don’t understand why you didn’t trap him, Grimes. In his statement he says something like, We all tried to stop him. But on the stand he backed down from that. That’s a major contradiction! Why didn’t you bring out that inconsistency?”
“Because that’s not the point of this proceeding,” Grimes said. “We’re looking to lock the witness into his story. Get it on paper. We’re not trying to impeach him here.”
“Explain.”
“Don’t blow your wad at the 32. We’re going to trial, we both know that. So hold our ammo in reserve to blow holes in him at the trial. We treat this hearing like a discovery deposition. Don’t confront the witness with his inconsistencies. Not here. Maybe we’ll point them out at the closing, but I’d rather we didn’t do it even then. Save the big guns for the trial.”
She shook her head at the curiousness of the military system.
“Look,” Grimes explained, “it’s like those different kinds of mousetraps, okay? There’s them sticky-glue traps where the mouse gets stuck to it and keeps wriggling around, alive, and you got to pick it up and throw it away. And then there’s the old-fashioned snap-trap that crushes the little bugger in half a second-breaks his back. A 32 is like a glue trap. You get the witness to poke his little paws in the glue so he’s stuck there, wriggling but alive. You don’t crush the fuckers yet.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to crush the fucker.”
“Because you’re defending your husband. That’s not the way the system works. That would have been ill-advised.”