Читать книгу The American - Andrew Britton - Страница 17

In spite of her frequent complaints, University Hospital in Georgetown insisted on keeping Naomi Kharmai two extra days for observation. That was two days too long in her opinion, but the additional time did give her a chance to run down some information about Peter Hale, the man who had signed Kealey’s discharge papers. Through discreet inquiries, she was able to find out that he had retired in 2001 despite having been offered command of the Eighth U.S. Army, which was based out of South Korea. It was a three-star position and would have meant a promotion for Hale, a major general at the time. Naomi wondered how the general’s retirement might tie in with Ryan Kealey’s sudden departure from the military.

It had not been difficult to convince the deputy director that she needed a few days of convalescent leave. Although she hated to appear weak in front of Harper, she needed the time if she wanted to speak to Hale in person. Finding his home address had been a little trickier, but she was eventually able to track it down through an acquaintance at the IRS.

Naomi suspected, rightly, that Jonathan Harper would not give her any additional information about Kealey or March. She wanted to know more about both men, though, so that she could draw her own conclusions. From an early age, Kharmai had been able to recognize this need within herself, the desire to place people and things into neat compartments with clearly defined labels. Often, she was able to convict others based on their actions alone, and when it was done, it was done; a judgment reached by Naomi Kharmai had all the permanence of the sun’s place in the universe.

If General Hale wanted to be left alone, he certainly picked the right place for it, she thought. She had missed the turnoff once, and had to backtrack along the rutted dirt road that was bordered on both sides by ragged trees and bushes. After about ten minutes, she located the dented black mailbox marked only by the house number. Hale’s driveway had been recently paved, but was still almost as overgrown as the main road. The branches scraped against the side of her vehicle as she drove deeper into the dense vegetation.

Suddenly the trees were gone and Naomi’s rented Explorer broke into a vast field of wild grass. At the very center stood a large ante-bellum mansion. The front was dominated by a white portico that reflected the red light of the fading sun. The portico was held above the ground by four towering Doric columns, which led in turn to a gabled roof sweeping down to end chimneys that occupied both sides of the house. High windows were shadowed by a trellis overrun with fading vines of blue wisteria, Confederate jasmine, and Lady Bankshire roses. Despite the onset of winter, the pleasant smell of the flowering plants was heavy in the air as Naomi parked the Explorer and walked up to the front door.

Her first knocks went unanswered, and trying the door, she found it locked. Moving around to the rear of the house, she noticed a mud-caked red Chevy pickup parked on a bare patch of ground. Walking over to the vehicle, she placed the palm of her good arm on the hood and felt that it was warm, the engine ticking as it cooled.

“What are you doing?”

She whirled at the voice. Standing before her was a large man wearing a faded-red flannel shirt, brown corduroy pants, and muddy hiking boots. His hair was white and his shoulders stooped with age, but his vivid blue eyes seemed to compensate for the physical toll the years had obviously taken on his body.

“I said, what are you doing?” he asked again.

She smiled and stuck out her hand. “Hi, my name is Naomi Kharmai. I’m looking for General Hale.” The man looked her up and down quickly, and then swallowed her small hand in his. She could feel rough calluses running over her own smooth knuckles.

“Well, you found him. What can I do for you?” he asked.

Naomi held out her credentials, which Hale quickly examined.

“I’m with the Agency, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about some soldiers that were under your command at Fort Bragg,” she said.

Immediately, his face clouded with suspicion.

“I understand completely if you want to call for verification. The number for the switchboard is—”

“I’ll get the number. Follow me.”

He walked around to the rear of the house, a shaded, white wooden porch coming into view. Naomi trailed awkwardly behind, the spiked heels of her knee-high leather boots sinking into the muddy ground.

Hale noticed and laughed heartily. “You picked the wrong shoes for Georgia, Ms. Kharmai.” He reached the screen door of the porch and, to her amusement, held it open for her.

“Why don’t you have a seat here? I’ll be back in a few. Can I get you anything?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you,” she said. Holding her identification by his side, he walked into the main house, disappearing from sight. She turned her attention to the view before her. The sky was something to see after the heavy clouds moving over Washington; ripples of purple, red, and gold were smeared across the orange sky, the sun dipping low on the horizon. The fields behind the house were empty, but far in the distance she could make out several low-slung clapboard buildings framed against a line of gnarled, ancient trees.

She was startled by the sound of the screen door squealing open on rusty hinges. Hale reappeared with a bottle of beer in one hand. He handed Naomi her credentials and eased his weight into a chair of wrought iron across from her.

“Well, you checked out, young lady. I’m a little confused, though. Seems like you could get any information you needed from John.”

“You know Deputy Director Harper?”

“Oh, sure,” Hale responded, an easy grin spreading over his worn features. “He sent us a lot of good people for some operations we ran in Kosovo and, before that, Iraq. Hell of a guy to have in your corner.”

She nodded respectfully and pointed to the buildings in the distance. “Are those part of your property?”

The general nodded in affirmation. “They used to be the slave quarters. What you’re looking at is just a little piece of the land attached to this house. There’s over a hundred acres beyond those trees there, mostly empty fields. They used to hold corn, cotton, tobacco, anything that would turn a profit. The plantation was built in 1857 by a Confederate colonel who died at Shiloh. It was actually in my wife’s family for over a century, until she passed away three years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Naomi said, with as much sympathy as she could muster. Hale nodded his head sadly.

“I sure do miss her. This is a lot of space for one person.”

Naomi waited the decent interval, but the general beat her to the punch. “So, what kind of information are you looking for? Is this about Kealey?”

Once again she was surprised. “How did you know?”

“It was just a guess. You’ve seen the file, I imagine. Everything you need should be in it.”

“Not quite everything,” she said. “Why did he leave? I mean, he made major in eight years. Isn’t that good, even for a Green Beret?”

Peter Hale laughed and took a long pull from his beer. “First of all, they don’t like to be called Green Berets. That’s what they wear, not who they are. And to answer your question, yes, that is damn good. Ryan Kealey was going places.” The amiable expression faded from the general’s face as he looked out across the fields. His voice lowered, as if to reveal a confidence. “It’s a damn shame what happened to him. Was there anything in the file about Bosnia?”

“No. Please tell me,” she said. The tinge of desperation in her own voice was disappointing to Naomi Kharmai, but she knew that Hale was probably her only chance for answers.

“To understand,” he said, “you have to have some idea about what was going on at the time. The Serbs were killing the Muslims indiscriminately, without regard to age or gender. It wasn’t just murder, it was torture, mutilation, and gang rape. It was genocide on a grand scale. In 1995 alone, it’s estimated that 7,000 Muslims were slaughtered, and that’s a low-ball figure. The full measure of what happened there never really made its way into the international press, but Europe hasn’t seen anything worse since the Holocaust. So you can imagine, it was a very dangerous time for the American soldiers who were stationed there as part of the NATO peacekeeping force.”

Naomi nodded slowly, her gaze focused on the dark buildings in the distance. “Please, go on.”

“Kealey was there in an advisory capacity only, working under the ground commander, General Wilkes. He was a first lieutenant at the time, if I’m not mistaken, based at Camp Butmir in Sarajevo with the NATO contingent.

“Occasionally, Kealey would go out with the SFOR patrols. There was a young Muslim girl who took a particular shine to him; she might have been twelve or thirteen years old. I can’t remember her name; someone told me once, but I’ve forgotten it now. Of course, I wasn’t in Bosnia at the time. This information comes from the soldiers who were on patrol with him. Anyway, there was this girl, a pretty little thing from all accounts. She would bring him chocolate, flowers, that sort of thing. I guess it was a schoolgirl crush. Ryan would always stop to talk with her for a little while. The other soldiers used to kid him about it, said he was leading her on. One day, the girl’s mother came out of the house crying, screaming at the soldiers. Turns out the Serbian militia found out that the girl was talking to the Americans. You can guess what happened from there.”

“They killed her?”

“If that was all, then it wouldn’t have been so bad. They raped her repeatedly, beat her face in so that she couldn’t be recognized, and then disemboweled her while she was still alive. Her mother identified her by a birthmark on her leg, and even then she had to look at the body twice to be sure.”

Naomi shivered once, but it was just the cool breeze coming through the screened walls of the porch. The story did not bother her.

“So Kealey started to ask around. The leader of the local militia was a man by the name of Stojanovic. In truth, he didn’t count for much at the time, didn’t hold a lot of power. Kealey didn’t care; all the fingers were pointing in the same direction. In the end, Ryan went to see the man by himself, against the explicit orders of the unit’s commanding general.

“They found Stojanovic two days later. He was sitting in a chair, his throat cut from ear to ear. There were three dead bodyguards in the house, each shot twice in the head.”

The tingle started to ease its way up the taut muscles of her back, but it wasn’t the story. The story did not bother her, could not break through her defenses. “And this was in 1995? I thought he didn’t leave the army until 2001.”

“He didn’t. There wasn’t enough evidence to court-martial him, and there wasn’t a lot of support for it, either, let me tell you. There was a preliminary hearing, but it didn’t go far. All the soldiers that were interviewed covered for him. Up until that point, Kealey was a hell of a soldier; his evaluations were nothing less than stellar. There was already talk about giving him a company command, but that incident fucked it all up.” Hale laughed, shaking his head. “Excuse my language. You spend enough time around the troops, that’s what happens.”

Naomi gave an understanding smile and pointed at his beer. “I think I will have one of those, if you don’t mind.”

The old soldier hopped to his feet. “Sure, I could go for another myself.” When he went into the house, she was left alone with her thoughts. My God, what kind of man is he? He had risked his life, thrown away a promising career, all over a little girl who he didn’t even know…Who would go to those lengths? Although she couldn’t appreciate the sentiment in his actions, she recognized that Kealey had risen once more in her regard.

Hale was back out the door, handing her a beer. Reclining in his chair, he took another long pull and looked out across the grassy field. Only the very tip of the red sun was visible; it almost looked as though the horizon was on fire. Turning to look at him, Naomi noticed a thoughtful expression on the man’s face.

“You know, Bosnia was Ryan’s last assignment before he came under my command at Bragg. Obviously, the rumors about him had already drifted my way before he first came into my office to report for duty. In the military, everybody has a story and everybody likes to embellish the facts. It’s easy to conjure up some history because no one knows if it’s a lie or not, and there’s no way to find out. But I wanted to know, so I asked him straight up—‘Did you kill those four people in Bosnia?’”

Naomi waited expectantly. “And?”

The general turned toward her. His face was hard to read. “Ryan didn’t say anything. He just stood up, saluted, and walked out. That was when I knew it was true.”

Naomi shivered again, but the air was still…She was glad that she had taken the time to see Hale. The deputy director would never have given her access to this kind of information. For some reason, she really wanted to know the name of the little girl. It seemed important.

“General, there was something else, wasn’t there? Something that happened between March and Kealey—”

The general’s head whipped around. “Where did you hear that name?”

“It came up between the deputy director and Kealey,” she said quietly. “In connection with the death of Senator Levy and the bombing of the Kennedy-Warren.”

Hale’s eyes were closed, his face pale. Naomi noticed that his hands were gripped tightly around the edge of his seat. For a panicked instant, she thought he might be having a heart attack. Then his breathing eased and his iron grip on the chair loosened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just been a long time since anyone’s brought it up…”

“Who is he, General?” she asked softly.

“Please, call me Peter.” His hand moved to wipe the shocked expression from his face. It seemed like an eternity before he spoke again. “Ryan Kealey became part of my 3rd Special Forces Group just after he left Bosnia, in November of 1995. It was nearly two years before he was sent into the field again. During that time, he was the CO of ODA 304.”

“ODA? What does that mean?” Naomi asked.

“Operational Detachment Alpha. It’s Special Forces nomenclature—almost everything in the army has some type of acronym. Anyway, he was honing his skills as a leader, getting the troops ready. Everything was great for a while, I had no trouble with anyone in his company. They were the best I had, even though Kealey bitched all the time because I wouldn’t deploy his unit. I wanted him to get his head right, though; that’s why I kept him at Bragg. After a while, he came to me with a complaint about one of his sergeants.”

“The sergeant was March?”

Hale nodded. “He was the platoon sergeant. At first, I was a little skeptical, because he couldn’t point out what the specific problem was. I mean, Jason March was a hell of an NCO. He didn’t have a college degree, otherwise I would have pushed him kicking and screaming into Officer Candidate School. He was a little arrogant, but all leaders have self-confidence…Anyway, I just didn’t buy into what Kealey was saying. Even he was embarrassed to bring it up, because it didn’t sound like much.”

“What did he say?” Naomi’s voice was a gentle probe, almost seductive in cadence and tone.

The general hesitated for a moment. “He said that March never showed any emotion.” He registered Naomi’s reaction and recognized it as his own eight years earlier. “I know, I know. It doesn’t sound like a serious problem. That’s what I thought at the time. But if you think about it, you might understand what that means. For a young soldier in peacetime, the military is not a difficult life. You do what you’re told, show a little respect to your superiors, and take some interest in your job. Anyone can do it. As you gain rank, though, the responsibility grows exponentially, while the pay does not. Now you find yourself held accountable for the lives and well-being of the soldiers under your command…With the responsibility comes stress, and with the stress comes the occasional outburst. Anything else is unnatural.”

“Obviously, I’ve never been in the military, but that doesn’t sound like enough,” she said.

“No, you’re right. It’s not enough. Ryan also told me about the strange expressions that would come over March’s face, and about the fact that he lived off base but no one had ever seen his quarters. To be honest, my opinion of Kealey dropped after this little speech. I mean, it sounded paranoid and more than a little unsubstantiated.”

Naomi could see the pain flicker in the man’s eyes.

“He was right, though. I should have listened to him. I finally deployed Kealey’s unit in the fall of 1997. It was in response to the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran in 1996. If you remember, nineteen U.S. airmen were killed in the attack and Hezbollah claimed responsibility. It took a while, months of gathering intelligence, but we were finally able to pinpoint the architect of the attack: Mohammed Khalil. He had been granted political asylum by Syria, and was shacked up in a house on the Mediterranean coast.

“I needed the best because we only had one shot at it, so I gave Ryan’s unit the go-ahead. It’s called direct action, a mission that results in the capture or death of enemy combatants. It’s usually the last thing SF is called in to do, but it’s important. March was in an overwatch position. He was the only one on the squad to have completed the sniper school at Benning, so he was up on the ridge with the next-best marksman in the unit. It was going to send a message, it would have counted for something…March was supposed to take out the car with Khalil inside, and then notify the team on the ground. Instead, he shot the second sniper and fired on the unit as they came down the hill.”

Naomi couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “They were all killed?”

“All except the captain. The extraction team, which was the other half of the twelve-man detachment, arrived twenty minutes after they lost radio contact. They didn’t know what had gone wrong until later, but they pulled Kealey out with a bad chest wound and a punctured lung. It’s a miracle he survived as long as he did. They found a lot of blood at March’s position, decided that he would probably bleed out, and that was it.”

“So you just assumed he was dead?”

“There was pressure on us to do it that way. With no witnesses, nobody to dispute our version of events, we avoided a potentially huge problem. Until now, that is.”

“Until now.”

Naomi could hardly see Peter Hale, the dark having eased through the tiny holes in the screened walls, discreetly covering the porch with a black shroud. His disembodied voice reached out to her through the cool night air, along with the gentle chirps of crickets hidden among the long blades of grass.

“If Harper is sending you after him, then I hope you’re ready. If you miss him once, he won’t give you a second chance. You should count yourself lucky to have Ryan on your side, but remember what you’re up against…Whatever happens, don’t let March get his hands on you. Believe me, that’s the last thing you want.”

She felt a distinct ripple of fear run through her body in response to the general’s last words. The fear pushed through her imagined wall of stoicism and touched her deep enough to leave her with a cold feeling that lingered in the pit of her stomach. For Naomi Kharmai, the fear was a new and unwelcome sensation.

Thanking him quietly for the beer and the information, she rose and pushed past the screen door. It squeaked angrily on its rusty hinges as she disappeared out into the empty space beyond the elevated porch.