IT STARTED in the Department of Justice. Forwarded by the Pentagon, it was First Sergeant Driscoll’s written report of his takedown in the Hindu Kush cave. The report-only three pages long, and simply written-detailed what Driscoll and his men had done. What flagged it for the attorney who reviewed the report was the body count. Driscoll reported having killed nine or so Afghan fighters, four of them with a silenced pistol at zero range. Direct shots to the head, the attorney saw, which made his blood run a little cold. It was the nearest thing he’d ever read to a confession of cold-blooded murder. He’d read his share of such confessions but never written so directly. This Driscoll fellow had violated some rules or laws or something, the attorney thought. It wasn’t a battlefield action, not even a sniper’s account of killing people at a hundred yards or so as they stuck their heads up like ducks at a shooting gallery. He’d taken care of the “bad guys” (so he called them) while they slept. Slept. Totally harmless, the lawyer thought, and he’d killed them without as much as a thought and reported it straightforwardly, like an account of cutting the grass in his front yard.
This was outrageous. He’d had “the drop” on them, as they said in Western movies. They’d been unable to resist. Hadn’t even known their lives were in danger, but this Driscoll guy had taken out his pistol and dispatched them like a kid stomping on insects. But they hadn’t been insects. They’d been human beings, and under international law, they’d been entitled to capture and to be transformed into prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Protocols. But Driscoll had killed them, totally without mercy. Worse still, the knuckle-dragger seemed to have given little thought to whether the men he’d killed could have been milked for information. He’d decided, quite arbitrarily, it seemed, that the nine men were worthless, both as human beings and as sources.
The lawyer was young, not yet thirty years of age. He’d graduated Yale at the top of his class before taking an offer to work in Washington. He’d almost clerked for a Supreme Court justice, but had been knocked out of that slot by a hick from the University of Michigan. He wouldn’t have liked it anyway, he was sure. The new Supreme Court, in place for five or so years now, was full of conservative “strict constructionists” who worshipped the letter of the law as if it were Zeus of ancient times. Like Southern Baptists in their country pulpits or on TV on Sunday mornings, which he saw only in glimpses while surfing the channels for the morning talk shows.
Damn.
He reread the report and was again shocked at the bare facts of the third-grade language. A United States Army soldier had killed without mercy, and without regard to international law. Then he wrote a report on the event, outlining the process in stark terms.
The report had come to his desk from a friend and classmate working in the office of the Secretary of Defense, with a cover note saying that nobody in the Pentagon had taken much note of it, but that he, the other attorney, had found it outrageous. The new SecDef had been captured by the bloated bureaucracy on the other side of the river. A lawyer himself, he’d spent too much time with those creatures in uniform. He hadn’t been alarmed by this bloody report, and that despite the fact that the sitting President had issued directives on the use of force, even on the battlefield.
Well, he’d see about this, the attorney thought. He wrote up his own summary of the case, with a blistering cover note that would go to his section chief, a Harvard graduate who had the President’s ear-well, he might; his father was one of the President’s foremost political supporters.
This First Sergeant Driscoll was a murderer, the attorney thought. Oh, in a court of law the judge might take pity on him, noting that he was a soldier on what was a battlefield, sort of. It wasn’t really a war, the attorney knew, since Congress had not declared war, but it was commonly assumed to be so, and the attorney for Driscoll would point that out, and the Federal District Court judge-who would have been selected by the defense for his equanimity to soldiers-would take pity on the killer for that reason. It was a standard defense tactic, but even so, this killer would be slapped down rather hard. Even if acquitted (which was likely, given the composition of the jury that the attorney for the defense would work hard to select, not a difficult task in North Carolina), he’d learn a lesson, and the lesson would be learned by a lot of other soldiers who’d much rather shoot guns on a hillside than sit in a law court.
What the hell; it would send a message, and it was a message that needed to be sent. Of the many things that distinguished the United States from Banana Republics was the military’s unwavering obedience to its civilian leadership. Without that, America was no better than Cuba or frickin’ Uganda under Idi Amin. The scope of Driscoll’s crime, while admittedly small, was beside the point. These people needed to be reminded who they answered to.
The attorney drafted his endorsement to the document and e-mailed it to his section chief with a return-receipt feature allowed on the in-house computer network. This Driscoll guy needed to be slapped down, and he was the man to do it. The young attorney was sure of that. Okay, fine, they’d been after the Emir, but they hadn’t got him, and there was a price for failure in the real world.
After a five-hour journey by car, he boarded a plane in Caracas for the flight to Dallas and points beyond. Shasif Hadi’s carry-on bag held a laptop that had been duly checked at the gate to make sure it was real. Also checked were the nine CD-ROMs in the bag with various games for him to play on the hop across the ocean. Except for one. Even if that one had been examined, it would have been shown to contain gibberish, robustly encrypted data written in C++ computer code that made no sense at all, but unless the TSA had programmers or hackers on staff at the checkpoints, there would be no way of distinguishing it from a regular computer game. He’d been told nothing of the contents and had merely been given a meeting place in Los Angeles to hand it over to someone he would know only by the exchange of carefully scripted recognition phrases.
Once that was done, for appearances’ sake he’d spend a few days in California, then fly to Toronto, and from there back to his semipermanent home base to await another assignment. He was the perfect courier. He knew nothing of genuine value and could therefore betray nothing of value.
He desperately wanted to be more directly involved with the cause, and he’d made this desire known to his Paris contact. He’d been loyal; he was capable and ready to lay down his life if asked. Admittedly, he’d had only rudimentary military training, but there had to be more to this war than pulling a trigger, didn’t there? Hadi felt a pang of guilt. If Allah, in all his wisdom, saw fit to ask more of him, then he would gladly oblige. Similarly, if his destiny was to play only this small role, he should accept that as well. Whatever Allah’s wish, he would obey.
He proceeded through the checkpoint with little trouble beyond the supplemental search most Arab-looking men got nowadays, then made his way to the gate. Twenty minutes later he was aboard the aircraft and belted in.
His total time in transit would be only twelve hours, and that included his automobile ride to his airport of origin. And so he sat in the aft-most first-class seat on the right side of the airbus airliner, playing his mindless shoot-’em-up game and thinking about a movie on the mini-screen provided for free with the cost of the ticket. But he was close to a personal record on the game, and he passed on the movie for the moment. He found that a glass of wine helped his score. Must have relaxed him just enough to steady his hands on the laptop’s trackpad…