“That’s right. Only I sent Moore out, too. I came up with the idea that the only way to make this halfway right was to do what Akhan set out to do in the first place. The only problem was that Pajocovic and his unit had left Piluca. We had no idea where they went. So I sent Brian Moore back out with Perrite and Machusco. They snuck into a few local villages and asked around. Pajocovic was known by everyone in our zone. The Hammer, everybody called him. Moore kept asking people if they knew where the Hammer was. Finally, some old man told him that he was with his unit in a little village named Ishatar. That was how Pajocovic operated. He’d sometimes go to local villages, spending a day or so terrorizing the citizens, then he’d go back to his station in Piluca. That’s when I decided what we were going to do.”
“I’m sorry, Terry. You said I decided. Do you mean Chief Persico decided, or you both decided?”
“No. I mean I decided. Persico came to me, and I said this was what we were going to do.”
“I see,” Morrow said.
“Right, so we moved off and I set up an ambush on the road between Piluca and Ishatar. We moved in the night before, around midnight. That gave us plenty of time to set up. Then I waited and-”
“Terry,” she interrupted him. He stopped and blinked a few times.
She said, “Would you like a glass of water?”
He was still rubbing his legs. “Uh… yeah, sure. Please.”
Morrow filled a tumbler, then walked around the table and handed it to him. I thought she’d just made a major blunder, interrupting his flow at the crucial moment. She then went and got a chair and moved it to a position directly in front of him. She sat down and leaned forward so their faces were nearly together. He looked into her eyes again.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess.”
She said, “Terry, you have nothing to prove to us. We’re just trying to get at the truth. God knows, we’re not judging you. We’re lawyers. We’ve never been through what you went through.”
She reached out and laid a hand on his hand. “Just tell us the truth, okay?”
He kept staring into her eyes, the way a small, frightened child looks at his mother. “Okay,” he said.
“Who was making all these decisions, Terry? It wasn’t you, was it?”
“No,” he said, “it was Persico and Perrite.”
“And what were you doing?”
“I did whatever they said to do.”
“Did you try to stop them? Or did you encourage them?”
This actually was a very crucial question because it went to the heart of who bore legal responsibility for the murder of the Serbs. I think Sanchez was past caring about the legal niceties, though. His mind was trapped in a desperate effort to construct a plausible alibi it could sell to itself. His mind was swimming in shame and scrambling for some internal clemency. I think in a strange, remorseful way, he wished he had ordered the ambush, because that might have afforded him some residue of honor.
“I let them do what they wanted to do,” he finally mumbled.
“What happened at the ambush?”
“Well, there was a lot of traffic on the road. We stayed there until nearly eight. Perrite was off on the flank, between us and Ishatar. He had night-vision goggles, you know? He was watching for the vehicles from Piluca. Pajocovic’s vehicles had his station’s name marked on the side, and it was written in Serb, and Brian Moore had written out the words on a piece of paper for Perrite so he’d recognize the right column.”
“Then what happened?” she asked, still with her hand on top of his.
“Around eight, he gave Persico the signal they were coming. Persico was controlling the fires and he waited till the lead vehicle got right over the two antitank mines planted in the road. The explosion sent this big truck catapulting in the air. I remember watching it flip, end over end, like a little Tonka toy.” His hands fluttered through the air to show us how the truck flipped. “It was really a sight, you know? Then we opened up. It lasted only seven or eight minutes, then we left.”
Morrow got up and walked back to her seat at the table beside me. Nobody said anything for a moment. I thought about everything he’d said. Everything made sense now. Well, maybe not everything.
I said, “Terry.”
He looked at me. I tried to sound as gentle and comforting as Morrow had been.
“Someone went through after the ambush was over and shot the Serbs in the head. Was that you?”
He looked at me in shock.
“No,” he said.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“I swear.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“None of us did. I was shooting, just like everyone else. But as soon as Persico shot off the flare to order us to cease fire, we all stopped. Then we all left and started running for the rally point, a mile or so behind the ambush site.”
I said, “And were there still some Serb survivors?”
“Yeah. I never lied about that, you know? There were still a few down there firing back at us.”
I was confused. This made no sense. If there were still survivors firing their weapons when the whole team was headed for the rally point, then who shot them in the head? We all grew quiet. I stared around at the walls for about a minute and tried to think what else to ask.
Imelda suddenly lifted herself out of her chair and approached Morrow and me. She got to the edge of the table, then leaned toward us as though we were judges and she was a lawyer seeking conference in a courtroom.
She whispered, “Ask him how long the Serbs was still shooting. Just ask him that.”
Then she returned to her seat. I looked quizzically at Morrow, and she stared back at me.
I said, “Terry, can you remember how long you heard the Serbs still shooting, after you and the rest of the team were headed for the rally point?”
He rested his chin on his hand and placed the elbow on his knee, then stared down at the floor. He might’ve been Rodin’s Thinker, only there was no purity of contemplation, only anguish on this man’s face.
“A while,” he finally said.
“How long a while?” I asked, finally realizing what Imelda might have figured out.
He rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know, maybe two minutes. Then there was this pause, then we could hear it off in the distance again. But we were getting farther away, and the terrain was hilly, and it sounded like little pops echoing through the hills. Might not even have been shooting, you know?”
“Assume it was. Why do you think they were still firing?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe because it was an ambush, and we were pretty well hidden in our positions. Maybe they thought we were still there.”
“Okay,” I said.
Morrow said, “Terry, now there’re only a few more questions left. How are you doing?”
“All right,” he said, but he looked terrifically relieved to know this was almost over. He’d gone back to that odd leg-rubbing motion.
“When you all got back to Macedonia and were debriefed, why did you decide to lie?”
He suddenly looked pathetically uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that he didn’t seem willing to answer.
That’s when I knew. I said, “Terry, did you make a deal with your team out there?”
He kept staring at the floor and was rubbing his hands on his legs a little more frantically, and I finally figured out why he was doing that. His conscience was impelling the motion. He was trying to rub the guilt off his hands, or erase it from his soul.
“Terry, please answer. Did you make a deal with your team?”
He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“What?” I said.
“Yes, we made a deal.”
I said, “Is that why you went along with the ambush, Terry? Is that why you bought them the time with Smothers? You wanted them to do that ambush, didn’t you? You knew it was a violation of orders, that if they killed Pajocovic and his men they’d be facing court-martial when you all made it back. You knew that if they did that, they would have as much to hide as you? You knew, then, that the team would cover for you, because they needed you to cover for them.”