Dr. Weisz was deep in thought. She wasn’t exactly sure what to make of all of this. There was a silent pause while the President gave her a moment to ponder it all.
“Do you know Leon Trotsky, Dr. Weisz?”
“I am familiar with some of his works, yes.”
“He made a statement that I still find very true. He said, ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’ I know that these few minutes we’ve had together may not have changed your mind about what has happened, but I hope you will see that there was more to my decision than just revenge.”
“I certainly have a lot to think about, Sir.”
Interrogator
During World War II, Ft. McCoy had been used as a Germany POW camp, in addition to a basic training facility. Now history was repeating itself, and the old National Guard base was reactivated to be an active duty military training facility alongside the POW camp, just as it had been in the 1940s. Ft. McCoy was located in the middle of Wisconsin, in a relatively low-populated area of the state, which made it ideal for a POW camp. The base was also training 12,000 new army recruits at any given time, graduating 1,000 new soldiers a week from their twelve-week basic combat training course.
Ft. McCoy did not house all of America’s POWs, but it did house the prisoners identified as having some sort of intelligence value. Prisoners not being deemed as having intelligence value had been turned over to other POW camps that worked with DHS to provide tens of thousands of prisoners to be used on various work gangs and projects all across the US. The prisoners farmed their own food and carried out a variety of other physical labor services as both a means of keeping them occupied while also helping to rebuild the various areas inside America that had been damaged or destroyed in the war.
Chief Warrant Officer 4 (CW4) Josh Schafer was the senior military interrogator at Ft. McCoy. He was also the XO for an interrogation detachment from the 201st Battlefield Surveillance Brigade, 109th Military Intelligence Battalion. They had thirty-six military interrogators, nine DoD civilian interrogators, and forty-five contract interrogators to handle the 25,000 Islamic Republic, Russian and Chinese POWs currently being held at Ft. McCoy.
CW4 Schafer had just received a new high-value prisoner from Alaska, a Russian Colonel who had been an armored brigade commander before he was captured by US Special Forces. The men that brought him in kept laughing about how he had been captured while he was relieving himself in the woods, not far from his Command vehicle. The SF unit in question had been shadowing the brigade headquarters, and was in the process of preparing to ambush it when they spotted the commander walking in the woods alone. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, they grabbed him and then proceeded to ambush the headquarters unit.
The Russian Colonel had quickly been transferred to a rearguard unit, who had him transferred to Ft. McCoy once he accidentally made mention of the new Russian main battle tank and how it would crush America. Now it was incumbent on CW4 Schafer, to find out as much information as he could about this mystery tank. After spending a couple of hours looking over all of the intelligence and information available on the good Colonel, Schafer felt he was ready to meet him and begin to assess his new prisoner.
Schafer had been an interrogator for sixteen years; he had a BS in psychology and an MA in International Studies. During his career so far, he had fought in the Mexican invasion, and had interrogated numerous Islamic terrorists for the war effort. He had originally been assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division in Israel, but he had been wounded and sent back to the US to recover. Upon recovering from his shrapnel injuries, he was reassigned to the 109th MI battalion and sent to Ft. McCoy. This was his third month at Ft. McCoy, and already he had conducted over 150 interrogations and obtained an incredible amount of intelligence, particularly about the IR military leadership structure and who was loyal to the Caliph versus their country of origin. He was adept at sifting out the radicals versus the pragmatic military leaders. This information was critical in determining who the US and IDF could work with during the occupation, and who was going to present a long-term problem for them. By assessing who could safely be trusted as team players during the occupation of the IR, the U.S. was going to have much greater chance of keeping the peace.
Now it was about finding out what the next steps the Chinese and Russians were up to. CW4 Schafer pushed his chair back away from his desk and computer, grabbed his notepad and tablet, and signaled to his analyst and interpreter that it was time for them to walk to their interrogation booth and get things prepared for the interrogation. Their prisoner was going to be brought to them in about thirty-minutes, giving them plenty of time to get things ready. As they walked out of the Interrogation Control Element (ICE)-the building the interrogators and analyst operated out of when not working with the prisoners-they made their way across the street to the interrogation building. The structure that housed the interrogation booths was connected to the actual POW camp, making easy access to move the detainees in for questioning. Inside were thirty state-of-the-art interrogation booths, which were in use nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Each booth had a separate viewing room connected to it with a one-way mirror (this allowed for rule-keeping monitors to see the interrogation as it was happening). The rooms also had a number of high-tech pieces of equipment that greatly improved the interrogation process. There was a thermal camera, which helped to monitor the prisoner’s body temperature and spikes in perspiration that occur when a person is nervous or lying. In addition to the thermal imaging, there were also half a dozen mini-cameras observing the prisoner; these cameras were looking for any ticks or tells the detainee might have. With the aid of computer software, micro-expressions could be judged to catch eyelid quivering when nervous, slight movements of the lips that might indicate lying, and the dilation of pupils to indicate genuine surprise. CW4 Schafer said a little “thank you” in his head to President Stein as they walked into the room; it was due to his emphasis on improved equipment that he was able to enjoy all of the technology he had at his disposal.
As Schafer and his analyst got their equipment and room set up, their interpreter began to look over the various questions and points of discussion they were going to discuss with the prisoner. This way, he could ask questions for clarification before the interrogation started if he needed to. The thirty-minutes went by quickly, and before long, a knock could be heard at the door, letting them know their prisoner had arrived. The Colonel was wearing the traditional yellow jumpsuit that all prisoners wore; his name and rank were sewn on to the front and back of his jumpsuit, so he could be quickly identified.
Colonel Dimitri Petkovic was the 13th Guard’s Tank Regiment Commander, part of the 4th Guard’s Kantemirovskaya Division (one of several elite Russian armored divisions). He was a career officer who was being fast-tracked to become a division commander until his capture. As he sat down, he thought to himself, “If only I hadn’t waved off my protective detail that evening… all I wanted was a few minutes to relieve my bowels in peace. ” Images of his capture were flashing through his head, and he felt himself being thrown to the ground, gagged and tied up with zip ties. He remembered a series of explosions as they left; the Special Forces must have destroyed his headquarters unit.