“Maybe he’s worried that this thing might erode support for the whole operation.”
Berkowitz jumped off the desk and his whole body shook like a bag of Jell-O that had been tossed out of an airplane. “Horsecrap.”
“You don’t think it would do serious damage to the cause if those men are guilty?”
“People ain’t stupid, Major. Besides, what’s there to erode? There is no support for this thing. Okay, my turn, right?”
“Shoot.”
“What’d you do before you became a JAG officer?”
“I was an infantry officer.”
“Where? What unit?”
“Bragg, with the 82nd Airborne. Hoorah!”
His arms reached out and his hands landed on my desk. He looked like a bent-over egg with a smug scowl. “Well, that’s the interesting thing, Major. See, I got a copy of your personnel file from one of my buddies.”
“Yeah?”
“And that’s what it says in your file, so I called a buncha friends of mine who were in the 82nd at the same time. Now here’s a coincidence. One of my buddies was actually a captain in the same battalion your file says you were in.”
“So?”
“So he never heard of you before.”
“That is odd,” I said. “I mean, there’s only like forty officers in a battalion.”
“Yeah, isn’t it.”
“Either he was in a different battalion or you must’ve misread my file.”
“Could be.”
“Yeah,” I said, “probably that’s exactly what happened.”
“So why do you think you were picked to be the chief investigating officer? I mean, no offense, but this is a pretty big one. Wouldn’t you think the Army would pick someone more senior?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Must be because I’m shit-hot and have ethics like a rock.”
“I’ve got a more interesting theory.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
He took his hands off my desk and went over and stood by the wall to contemplate my face from a safer distance.
“There’s this very special unit down at Bragg that’s so outrageously secret that nobody’s ever supposed to have heard of it. Anyone assigned to that unit, while they’re in it, their files are separated from the rest of the Army’s and are administered by a special cell. Of course, once these guys leave that unit… well, then they gotta have regular files like everyone else. So what happens is their files are filled in with units they never really served in.”
“They really do that?” I asked.
“They really do,” he said, grinning. “Nearly always they list units at Bragg. That way, if these guys are ever asked, they can at least sound like they know something about the base.”
“Damn, that’s really cunning of the Army,” I said.
“Of course, those guys are never allowed to disclose they’ve been in that unit, or even that it exists. But it does. Kind of like Delta, that other unit that doesn’t really exist, only the boys in this outfit are tougher, more deadly, and do more dangerous stuff.”
“Isn’t that something. Here I’ve been in the Army all these years and never heard of any such thing.”
“Really something,” he said. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s say a Special Forces A-team went out and did a very bad thing while they were performing a very secret mission. Then, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that the Army actually had a lawyer who used to belong to that special unit that doesn’t exist.”
“A guy could write a real great novel about something like that, couldn’t he?”
“Or a few really good newspaper articles. I mean, why would the Army pick a guy like that to head up the investigation?”
“First, there would have to be such a guy. Personally, I did my time in an infantry battalion in the 82nd, and if you’d like, I’ll bring you some witnesses-”
“Of course you did, Major. But what would worry me is that the Army might pick just such a guy because he’d be most likely to feel some sympathy for that A-team. Hell, after living in a secret world, where he’s had to lie to everyone he knows about what he does, he might even be more inclined to help build a cover for that team.”
I grinned at him, and he grinned back at me.
Then he added, “Of course, like I said, all of this was just for the sake of argument.”
“Is there a point to this argument?”
“No, it’s only academic. After all, you’ve already agreed to cooperate with me, so there’s really no need for me to see how far I could go in checking this story.”
“That’s good, because it’s all wrong,” I said.
We both chuckled at the irony of that. There’s nothing like starting a relationship of trust based on what we both knew was an outright lie.
“So,” he said, “what’s their story?”
“Their story is that they were detected by the Serbs and had to fight their way out. The team leader felt the Serbs were boxing his team in. He decided that ambushing a large column was the best way to make the Serbs believe his unit was larger than it was and to make the Serbs slow down and become more cautious.”
Berkowitz let out a loud whistle. “No kidding.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You believe ’em?”
“So far, sure. It meets with the facts, and all nine men are telling the same tale.”
His eyes kind of lit up, and the letters PULITZER seemed to emerge on his forehead. “Jesus, what a great story line.”
“Yeah, it really is, isn’t it.”
“Here these poor bastards were, trapped behind enemy lines, doing a secret mission this administration ordered them to do. They fight their way out, and instead of getting the medals they deserve, they get stuffed behind bars and investigated like common criminals.”
“That about sums it up,” I said. “Frankly, it’s an embarrassment for me to be part of this. I almost can’t stand to look those men in the eyes. I mean, these guys are genuine heroes.”
“No kidding.”
“Nope, no kidding.”
His face got very serious. “You’re sure you’re not kidding, right?”
“God’s honest truth. Left to me, I’d wrap this whole thing up in two days. Only problem is, one of the other investigating team members is a real prick and seems dead set on proving they did something wrong. He keeps nitpicking little details, even though all he’s doing is making a damned nuisance out of himself. The rest of us are convinced he’s an idiot and these men are innocent.”
I could see he was now itching to race out of my office and file a story. The international press were all convinced these guys had committed a heinous crime, and now Jeremy Berkowitz was about to break the real story, that these men were not only innocent, but heroes to boot. He’d paint the administration as cruel and unfair for persecuting these poor, decent guys who were only doing their job the best they knew how. The story would play well. The President, everybody knew, was a draft-dodgin’ lefty who once wrote a letter about how much he detested the military. He wrote that letter a long time before, in a very different era, but the opposing party had a copy of that letter engraved in bronze and kept shoving it in everybody’s face every time the President did anything that could halfway be construed as antimilitary, or antidefense, or anti-American. According to the opposing party, about everything the President ever did fell into one of those categories, and now Berkowitz here was staring at yet another opportunity to remind the great unwashed public that the President once wrote such a letter.
He walked toward the door, then turned around. His feet did this little shifting thing. “You know I have to refer to you in the story?”
“Uh, actually, no,” I lied. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I’d like to call you ‘a source on the investigating team.’ Anything more generic and the story loses credibility. My editors, and the public, they have to know this is coming from inside.”
“I don’t know… there’s only a few of us… and, uh-”
“Hey, Major, I’ve never had a source caught. Trust me on this.”