Which actually was true. And which actually was why I became a lawyer. I developed this huge phobia that I would end up like my father, in love with combat. And maybe I’d end up just like him in another regard, too, with an arrow stuck in my rear end. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
“All right,” I asked, relishing my victory, “were you ever married?”
“That’s too personal.”
“No limits to this game, lady. This is a blood sport. Answer the question.”
“Okay, I was. My husband was also an Army lawyer,” she said and seemed suddenly very sad. “One day I came home early from a trip, and there he was, in bed with a twenty-year-old paralegal.”
“How long were you married?” I asked. Although the game has a one-question rule, I was taking advantage of the most supreme rule: to wit, that higher rank doth make its own rules.
Her eyes seemed fixated on something inside her tiny shot glass. “Three years. We met in my second year of law school and got married right after it was over. I guess I blame myself. I’ve always worked too hard and I… well… I, uh, I guess he felt neglected.”
“Drink!” I barked.
She looked at me in shock. “What?”
“You heard me! Drink!”
She gulped it down, then gave me this really cute, really spiteful look. “How did you know?”
“You said too much. You’re the type who likes to keep everything private.”
“All right. Were you ever married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Were you ever in love?”
“One question to a turn.”
“You asked two the last time.”
“Okay. I was in love once.”
“And why didn’t you marry her?”
“You’re over your limit.”
She gave me a pleading look. “I’ll drink the scotch and cede the round. Please. Just answer.”
“Drink first,” I insisted, and she did. “Because you can’t marry your dog, no matter how much you love her,” I said, giving her a perfectly evil smile.
She frowned. “That sucked.”
“So did the lily perfume,” I said, which nearly made her fall off her chair, she laughed so hard. “By the way,” I added, “it’s three to two, my favor. You pay for the drinks.”
She stuck two fingers up, the bartender grinned, and two more drinks instantly appeared. The bartender was Italian, and he obviously thought I was trying to get her drunk as hell before I took her upstairs and screwed her lights out. In America, that’s considered caddish behavior, bordering on rape. But this was Italy, where the rules are different. Here it’s considered delightfully good form, since nearly anything that results in a roll in the hay is probably good form. He gave me this fawning, jealous smile as he brought the drinks, and I gave him a manly nod of acknowledgment.
“What did you think of Sanchez?” she asked.
“Seemed a nice enough fella,” I admitted.
“I thought so, too.”
“Was he what you expected?” I asked.
“No. Not at all what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. I’ve defended a number of killers. He didn’t strike me as the type. Too soft maybe. Not aggressive enough.”
“He might not be a killer.”
“How do you get that?”
I sipped from my fourth glass of scotch in only twenty minutes and felt it starting to do fuzzy things to my brain. “I’d guess that something very strange happened out there among those nine men.”
“Strange like what?”
“Well, you need to understand something. This wasn’t combat like in Vietnam or Korea or World War Two, where whole units sometimes snapped and went into some kind of killing frenzy. Sanchez and his guys were under a very different type of strain.”
“So you don’t think it happened the way the newspapers are reporting?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think it was anywhere near that uncomplicated.”
“Why?”
“Because they didn’t kill the Serbs right away. Because they waited two days after Akhan’s guys were killed, which was enough time for their emotions to cool. Because there were nine men in that team, and nine men don’t universally decide to do a rotten thing. Because when things like this happen, there’s nearly always circumstances lurking underneath that are damned hard to fathom if you weren’t there.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I really don’t know.”
She paused for a moment and took a large sip from her scotch. “You were in combat. Did you ever feel the urge?”
I thought about that a moment. “Once, I guess.”
“What caused it?”
“It was a few days after the Gulf War ended. Saddam’s Guards had escaped the net and started slaughtering the Kurds and Shiites, whom our government had encouraged to rise up against the regime after we’d promised we were going to destroy Saddam’s military. It turned out we lied.”
“I think I remember something about that.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t make big news in America. What happened was, they rose up and suddenly the Revolutionary Guards appeared. They never knew what hit them. Thousands of Kurds and Shiites, lots of women and children, began getting slaughtered. The survivors fled the carnage and headed south, into Kuwait. We set up camps and did the best we could to mend their wounds and care for them, and that only made us feel more miserable.”
“So you wanted to avenge them?”
“Nope. We wanted to appease our guilt. Our government had done a very dishonorable thing and these people were paying for it. Only Uncle Sam wasn’t around, having to look them in the eye.”
“So you think that’s what happened here?”
“Nope. That’s not at all what happened here. See, we wanted to, and God knows we talked about it a lot. But talk was all we ever did.”
She drained the last of her scotch, and she looked a little tipsy, and her lips looked kind of moist. I felt kind of frisky, and our eyes came together and met. Then came this long awkward moment.
Chapter 10
The way that look ended was her telling me to get my big shoe off her sandaled foot. She then paid the bill and we parted ways at the elevator, since she wanted to limp the two flights upstairs to her room, while I insisted on ascending in comfort. The last I saw of her, she was careening between the rail and the wall, stumbling occasionally on the steps and trying to appear graceful. Some girls really should stick to Evian water with a twist.
The next morning, my head throbbed ever so lightly on the car ride to the Air Force holding facility, although poor Miss Morrow obviously got the full, vituperative brunt of the scotch. She spent half the ride with her fingers plugged into her ears, trying to protect her addled brain from the raucous roar of six pistons pumping up and down and from Delbert, who seemed in a remarkably chipper and garrulous mood.
This was the day when we would split up and each take different team members to interrogate. If we limited ourselves to two hours with each of the remaining eight team members, then by midafternoon we’d be done. I decided to handle Chief Warrant Officer Mike Persico, Sergeant First Class Andy Caldwell, and Sergeant First Class Francois Perrite.
Michael Persico was forty-six years old. He was a former staff sergeant who’d applied for warrant officer training and been accepted. Every A-team has a chief warrant officer. They are the technical experts of the teams, the masters of every function of the other members, from weapons to communications to medical. Persico had been with the same team the past eighteen years. He was the “old man” of the team, meaning he was like the living, breathing heritage. He had earned a Bronze Star for valor in Somalia, and a Silver Star for valor in the Gulf.
I’d read the citations and was impressed. In the Gulf War, he had helped lead the team deep into Iraq’s desert for a little Scud-hunting. They found one Scud missile, directed an airstrike that annihilated the missile and its launcher, then lost two team members fighting their way back out. In Somalia, Persico and his team had been committed to help save the Ranger company that got bushwhacked trying to nab Aideed. One of Persico’s team members got wounded and he risked his own life to dodge through a hail of Somali fire to save him. Persico was a brave man, there was no question of that.