“Was something wrong with those standards?”
“Yes. Those standards are slightly below what a basic trainee gets in our army. We taught them just enough to get them killed,” he said with obvious bitterness in his voice.
Anyway, I moved on. “How was your relationship with your KLA company?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it friendly? Professional? Personal? Impersonal?”
“Professional.”
“Could you elaborate?”
“We were told to train them, so we did. It was a job and they were part of it.”
“Did you feel responsible for them?”
“No, I didn’t. It’s not our war, it’s theirs.”
“Good point,” I said. “Still, I’d think it would be awfully hard not to develop some feelings for them. Living and working together, exchanging stories about families, and-”
“Major, we both know where you’re trying to go with this.”
“Where am I trying to go?”
“That when the KLA company got slaughtered, we went on some kind of bloody rampage and took revenge. That’s not what happened.”
“No?” I said, interested that he chose the word “slaughtered,” which carried interesting implications. I mean, there’re words like “were shot,” “died,” “got killed,” “were wiped out,” any of which connoted a milder fate than the words “got slaughtered,” in the food chain of death.
“Look, that’s what the press is reporting, but that’s not the way it happened.”
“No? Then tell me what happened.”
“After our KLA company got, uh, wiped out, we reported that back to Tenth Group headquarters. We were told to relocate our base camp and await instructions. So we did. We’d been there about two days when we suspected our new base camp was compromised, so we-”
“Why did you suspect that?” I interrupted.
“Because Sergeant Perrite and Sergeant Machusco detected a Serbian patrol that appeared to be surveilling us.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“The afternoon of the seventeenth. Maybe three o’clock, maybe a little earlier.”
“I don’t remember seeing that in the communications log at the Tenth Group ops center.”
Sanchez seemed to chew on his tongue a moment. “I didn’t report it.”
“Why? I’d think you’d report that immediately.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re a lawyer and you’ve never been in that kind of situation before.”
I had most definitely been in that kind of situation before but wasn’t about to tell him that. Sanchez was giving me the cover he and the rest of his team had concocted, and for the time being, the best path was to hear the entire tale before I looked for ways to tear holes in it.
“What did you do, then?” I asked.
“We grabbed our equipment and ran. We could have been attacked at any moment, so we reverted to an escape and evasion plan we’d planned two days before.”
I thought I saw where this was going. “And were you followed?” I helpfully asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you know?”
“Because we laid trip flares on our trail.”
“How many went off?” I asked.
“I don’t remember exactly. Maybe one, maybe two.”
“Was it one, or was it two?”
“Maybe two. My memory could be wrong, though.”
“What kind of trip flares were they?”
“Star clusters with a string on the pin.”
“How many did you set?”
“I don’t know exactly. I was preoccupied with leading the team out. The trailman was laying the flare traps.”
“What kind of string did he use?”
“I don’t know. Commo wire probably.”
One of the tricks when you’re investigating a conspiracy is to ask detailed questions and just keeping asking for more and more details, because usually the conspirators have only agreed on a broad cover, and it’s the details that get them in trouble. The topic of trip flares was just the kind of detail that was liable to get Sanchez and his team stuck in quicksand.
“So you didn’t feel you had time to make a radio call to the ops center, but you had time to set warning flares on your escape route?”
“It was a matter of priorities. A radio call wasn’t going to do us any good, but warning flares would at least tell us if we were being followed.”
“Then what happened?”
“Our E amp;E plan called for us to move straight south and cross the border into Macedonia. I became worried that the Serb team tracking us would just call their headquarters and have an ambush set up ahead. I decided to shift our direction to the east.”
“Did you discuss that with anyone in the team?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Is that a definite no?”
“I can’t remember every detail I said to everyone. We were being stalked by a large Serbian unit. Things were happening fast.”
“A large Serbian unit? I’m sure you said it was a small surveillance team. How did it suddenly become large?”
“I made a reasonable assumption. We knew we’d been detected, and it just seemed logical that the Serbs would’ve thrown more men into hunting us down.”
“Why?”
“Because the Serbs would’ve loved to kill or capture an American A-team. The whole focus of America’s strategy in this thing is to avoid losing any men. Everybody knows that. The Serbs sure as hell know it. The American people have a very low interest in what’s happening here. Casualties would wreck everything. Look what happened in Somalia.”
I couldn’t argue against that. “How far behind you was the Serbian unit?” I asked.
“How would I know? They were behind us, that’s all I knew.”
“But you said several trip flares went off. If the flares went up into the sky, you must’ve been able to judge the distance they were behind you.”
He looked at me a moment before he answered. Like most folks, he wasn’t used to being interrogated and obviously wasn’t enjoying the experience.
“I didn’t see them go off.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. I was busy leading the unit. I was reading the map and compass and watching ahead.”
“Then how did you learn the warning flares went off?”
“Someone told me.”
“Who told you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Now it was my turn to stare at him. I worked my face into as much disbelief as I could summon and stayed silent. He stared back until he grew uncomfortable.
He finally said, “Look, the word was passed up the file, I guess. I don’t remember exactly who told me.”
I stayed quiet another moment, but he decided not to embellish any further. “Okay,” I said, “what did you do then?”
“We walked the rest of the day, zigzagging so our route wasn’t predictable. We could see dust columns over the treetops, and occasionally we heard the sounds of vehicles off in the distance.”
“And what did you interpret that to mean?” I asked.
“The Serbs were moving mobile forces around to try to trap us.”
“Did you discuss that with any team members?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I remember discussing it with Chief Persico, my team deputy.”
“But you still didn’t make any radio reports back to Tenth Group headquarters?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We were moving fast. Things were happening quickly. Besides, what could they do about it?”
“Provided an aerial recon to let you know your situation. Offered you air cover. Maybe even mounted an aerial extraction to get you out of there.”
He had not expected me to answer that question so spontaneously and appeared nettled for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Look, I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking that clearly at the moment. I was just trying to get my team out alive.”
“Maybe,” I said back, just to let him know I wasn’t buying it.
“Besides, I was worried about the Serbs intercepting a radio transmission. They would’ve vectored in and known exactly where we were.”
“I thought they already knew exactly where you were. You were being followed, right?”
“No, I said I assumed they knew where we were. I was told trip flares had gone off, but that didn’t mean they knew exactly where we were.”