Secret Sanction by Brian Haig Page A

thoughts?”
    “He’s an impressive officer.”
    “Special Forces battalion commanders usually are.”
    “He’s worried.”
    “Was he telling the truth, though?”
    “Was he being truthful? Maybe. Was he being open? No.” “About what?”
    “About what he thinks of Sanchez. About what he thinks about the orders he’s operating under. About what he thinks about anything.”
    “Why do you think that is?”
    “Because you told him yesterday that he might be a suspect. It might’ve been better if you’d held off on that. You antagonized him.”
    Even Delbert, who’d missed the interrogatory, was vigorously nodding that he agreed with her on this issue.
    I grinned and didn’t say anything. If they didn’t comprehend the way my brilliant legal mind worked, then I wasn’t about to enlighten them. Besides, as I said earlier, these two were hungry thoroughbreds, and if they thought, even for a fraction of a second, that they could get a nose ahead of you, you’d spend the rest of the race staring at their fannies. That was a halfway pretty good proposition, but I didn’t relish the thought of ogling Mr. Delbert’s little tightass one bit.
    The door suddenly crashed open and Imelda bustled back in with three legal clerks in tow, all carrying heavy boxes overflowing with documents.
    “What’s all that crap?” I asked.
    “All the operations orders and the duty communications log, and the personnel files of the accused.”
    “I don’t remember asking for that.”
    “And what are you gonna do without it? You’re not going to get any further on this case unless you go over all this.”
    “And who signed the requisitions?”
    “Don’t be gettin’ stupid on me, Major. I know your signature by now.”
    This caused more dropped jaws from Delbert and Morrow, because forging an officer’s signature is a fairly serious military offense. It gets glacially serious when classified papers such as operations orders and operational duty logs are being requisitioned.
    I turned to Delbert and Morrow. “By the way, make sure Imelda has good, legible copies of both your signatures before the end of business. By tomorrow, mark my words, she’ll be able to fool your own mothers.”
    Imelda smacked her lips a few times and mumbled some unintelligible curse, which is kind of her way of expressing gratitude. Then she marched back out, shooing her three assistants ahead of her.
    We each took a box, then spent the next eight hours trading files back and forth, reading furiously, saying little, and making our first real acquaintance with the nine American soldiers who were accused of mass murder and exactly what they’d been ordered to do across the border in a land called Kosovo.

Chapter 6
    I had two phone calls that night. The first came from a general in the Pentagon and went something like this:
    “Drummond, that you?”
    I squeezed and pinched myself. “It’s me, Drummond.” “General Clapper here.”
    “Morning, sir.”
    “It’s not morning here. It’s eight o’clock in the evening.” “That right? So that’s why it’s two o’clock in the morning here.”
    A mighty chuckle. “How’s it going?”
    “How’s what going?”
    “The investigation, Drummond. Don’t play dumbass.”
    “Sorry, it’s this two o’clock in the morning thing. Try me again at eight, when my mind works like a Cray computer.”
    “Am I hearing the sounds of whimpering?”
    “Yes. Go away and leave me alone.”
    Another chuckle, which was easy for him because it was early evening where he was, and he still had a sense of humor.“Okay, give it to me.”
    “Well, we went to the morgue at Belgrade yesterday and spent some time with about thirty-five corpses. The pathologist is still doing his report, but the preliminary isn’t good. All the perforations in the bodies appear to have been made by American weapons.”
    “We expected that.”
    “Yeah, but I’ll bet you didn’t expect this. Somebody shot each corpse in the