State of Lies

by Siri Mitchell

  But word must have gotten out because they kept coming. June and I peeked out the window at one point in the afternoon and counted four different people canvassing the street, going from door to door. She sighed as she let the curtain fall back into place. “I don’t think they’re going to go away.”

  I agreed with her. “I might have to say something. Maybe if I give them what they’re looking for, they’ll leave.”

  We came up with a plan. She sent Jim out to gather them all up. That way, when I stepped out onto the front porch, they were all waiting on the walkway, cameras at the ready.

  I explained who I was, confirmed that JB Slater was my father and that, yes, it had been my house that burned down.

  A reporter tilted a microphone in my direction. “Do you know why?”

  “You would have to ask the people who are doing the investigation.”

  “Are they treating it as an accident?”

  “You’ll have to ask them.”

  “Have you been in contact with your father?”

  “My parents are aware of the situation.”

  “Is this connected in any way with his confirmation hearings?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. Generally, when senators have differences with nominees, they talk about them; they don’t set out to destroy each other’s homes. Sometimes a house fire is just a house fire. That’s all I have right now. Thank you.”

  56

  It felt oddly like a betrayal, the meeting I’d arranged with my father’s enemy.

  Steven Edgars looked just like the picture from his company’s website. He had a square, ruddy face softened at the edges by a beard. His hair stood up at the top as if it hadn’t quite realized it was no longer cut in a military high-and-tight.

  “Mr. Edgars?” I held out a hand as he stood.

  “Ms. Porter!” He gave me a searching look and took my hand in his. Giving it a couple of pumps, he squeezed it tightly. He gestured to a seat beside his. “Call me Steve.”

  I chose the seat across from him instead.

  “Looking for new source materials, huh?”

  A waiter brought us menus. We put the conversation on pause to inspect them and to order. Once the waiter had disappeared, I got down to business.

  “I’d like to hear your version of what happened during Desert Sabre on the night of February 24th.”

  He scoffed. “My version? Listen, the truth doesn’t come in coordinated colors. It either is or it isn’t. Collecting ‘versions’ won’t get you any closer to figuring it out; it’ll just confuse you. So what I’m going to tell you is what actually happened. And it’s the truth. You can have it, but you’ll have to take it all. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” He leaned back into his chair with a scowl and fell silent as he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Can you start by telling me the rank you held at the time? What unit you were assigned to and what your duty was?”

  “I was a brand-new captain, the company XO. That’s executive officer.”

  “So with regard to General Slater—”

  “Captain.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He was a captain at the time.”

  “You were the same rank?”

  “JB was my commanding officer, but yes, we were the same rank. I’d just become a captain and he was promoted early out of that war to major. But we were comrades in arms. Or so I thought at the time.” He fell silent as the waiter returned with glasses of water.

  I waited until he left before I spoke. “Can you take me back to that morning? Starting with when you got up?”

  “When I got up?” He snorted. “I’d never gone to sleep. Have you ever been in the desert?”

  “I’ve been to Palm Springs.” My mother had held one of her fundraisers there for the survivors of military members who had been killed on duty. But I hadn’t even finished speaking before he was dismissing my words with a derisive snort.

  “A real desert. Where there’s nothing but sand. Sand upon sand. Miles of sand. It’s not like driving through Arizona or New Mexico, where there’s sagebrush, cactus, and scrub brush to tie things down. That desert, the one over there, it’s real. It’s alive.”

  Okay then.

  “It slowly eats away at you. Starts with sand across the road. Sand in the Hummers. In between the seats. In the engine. Sand in your pockets. In your boots. Inside your socks. Gets into your ears and your mouth.”

  I was getting the idea that he really did not like sand. At all.

  “Annoying. But that’s not all. Everything’s different there. The sun. The night. Sounds. Stars. It’s like you’re trapped inside an hourglass, just waiting to be upended. You start wondering, just how far down does it go? I mean, how far down would you have to dig before you got to something else? Is that all there is? Just sand?” He paused. Stared, vacant-eyed, at something just beyond my shoulder. Then he shifted, pinning me again with his ice-blue gaze. “So I was awake.”

  “Did you know where you were?”

  “What do you mean? I was sitting there in the desert. Sure wasn’t back home in Kansas.”

  “I mean where. Where were you? Exactly? Did you know?”

  “We were where the division told us the satellites told them we were.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, yeah.” His eyes tracked the hostess who was seating a couple at the other end of the room. Then he turned his attention back to me. “I mean, we all had compasses too, right? And the company had maps. But the real triumph of that war was that GPS worked. Granted, there weren’t that many satellites back then, so it was limited, intermittent coverage, but still. Can’t imagine a world without it anymore.”

  “So the war started. Did you know where the Iraqis were at that point?”

  “Didn’t matter. If we found them, we were supposed to neutralize them and move on. We weren’t supposed to get bogged down or committed to any conflicts. The Iraqis we made contact with weren’t the Republican Guard; those guys were the elite, the best of the best. Most of the guys we met that first day surrendered before we even fired a weapon. The real mission was supposed to happen the next day. We were supposed to make a breach through their lines so that everyone else could pass through it, then we were supposed to find and destroy the Republican Guard.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened? What happened is we got so far out in front of our line that we actually made it through their line. By accident. How it works is, you start out in formation and then stuff happens. You’re supposed to stay in communication with everyone so you know where the friendlies are.”

  “But?”

  “But sand happened. And wind. And weather. It was a regular mess. Before you know it, we were out there in the middle of the desert. I’m looking around realizing we haven’t seen anyone in a while. It’s like we’re on our own planet. Know what I’m saying? And it’s not conducive to life.”

  “You were supposed to be scouting, weren’t you? It wasn’t unexpected that you’d be out in front of everyone.”

  “Sure, but problem is, we hadn’t encountered anyone. Scouts go ahead of the main contingent until they encounter the enemy, and then they report back where he is. No enemy, no reporting back, no stopping. We could have gone completely through their lines into Kuwait and back into Iraq for all I knew. And then we start noticing the terrain looks a little sketchy. One of our trucks thinks they spot a mine. And that’s when JB ordered us to stop.”

  “Do you know what the orders from headquarters were at that point?”

  “No. But I heard later we were supposed to fall back. The general wanted to regroup and start up again with the sun.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I’m wondering what’s going on, so I go up to JB. He takes me aside. Turns out, he thinks we’re smack in the middle of a minefield. But it’s not on any map. JB orders everyone to stay put. We argued about whether to call in our position. JB, you can
tell he’s worried about how it’s going to look. He has no idea where we are in relation to anyone else. Do we have support behind us or have we gone so far ahead of everyone into Iraq that we’re on our own? But that’s not the worst part. We’re sitting out there in the desert just waiting to blow up, and all of a sudden, the guys with the infrared scopes start spotting people. Lots of them. All around.”

  “How many?”

  “More than us.”

  “What did the captain do?”

  “He leaves me in charge of the company and goes out there on his own to meet them.”

  “What about his RTO? Isn’t he supposed to stick with the captain?”

  He took a drink of water. “Supposed to. But JB ordered him to stay with me and the rest of the command group. If someone’s going to shoot the captain, we needed to be able to tell headquarters about it. So JB’s out there on his own.”

  “Does anyone else know about this?”

  “Besides me, the RTO, and top? No. Thing about minefields is, you don’t want anyone panicking. So JB goes out there, hands up. Talks to them. Then he turns around and tells us to put our rifles down. I’m thinking he’s surrendered us, right? But then he goes out there again, talks to them some more. Brings one of them back with him. Guy opens a map, starts pointing to this and that. Turns out he shows JB a lane through that minefield, back to their position.”

  “Back to the Iraqi position? The Iraqis, who outnumbered you, led you back to their own position?”

  “That’s what it seemed like. JB takes the map and orders us to head out. So I argue with him. Why are we trusting the enemy? In the middle of the night? As we sit there in a minefield? Only due to the grace of God we hadn’t blown ourselves up by that point.”

  “What did the captain say?”

  “Said to trust him. Said it’d work out just fine.”

  “So you let the Iraqis lead you through it?”

  “We did. JB said he’d convinced them the rest of the corps was right behind us and they might as well just cooperate.”

  “That’s what he said? But it sounds like you didn’t believe him.”

  “I did at first. The others thought JB had balls of steel, but I figured those Iraqis were like all the other units we’d come across. They couldn’t surrender fast enough. They just wanted the war to be over. But then I get a look at them. They’re weren’t regular Iraqi army.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “They cared too much. They had actual uniforms. Other thing? Their place wasn’t bombed to crap. We’d been bombing the Iraqis every day since the middle of January, and that place hadn’t been touched. Camouflaged pretty good. And it was state of the art.”

  “So you went there and did what?”

  “Guy opens the gate and invites us in like it’s some hotel or something. Takes the captain on a tour.”

  “Did you go along?”

  “No. But I saw enough to know their equipment, the weapons, they were top-of-the-line. Straight from Mother Russia. And recent.”

  “The Iraqis fought with Soviet weapons. That was widely known.” At least that’s what I’d gathered from my father over the years.

  “Not those weapons. We fought all kinds of Iraqis for the next four days, and I never saw the kinds of things I saw there.”

  “Did the captain make any remarks about them?”

  “Yep. He lined us all up and used them as target practice.”

  I felt my brows peak. “The Iraqis?” My father had ordered a slaughter?

  “No. The installation. The weapons. Destroy everything. That was his order. We blew it all up.”

  “That was the overall mission, right? To destroy the Republican Guard.”

  “Right. That was the mission: to destroy them and their weapons so the pathway to Baghdad would be clear. JB kept us away from them, and could be everyone else thought they were Republican Guard, but I got close enough to hear some of them talking. They weren’t speaking Arabic. They were speaking Russian.”

  57

  I heard myself gasp.

  Edgars sent me a wry smile. “He never talks about that when people ask him about the war, does he?”

  Russians? Had my father made some sort of deal with the Russians? That might be a fact worth killing someone over. “The Russians were known to have sent military advisers to the Iraqis. They helped build up the army.”

  “Yes. But those people there that night weren’t advisers. They were soldiers. A whole unit of them. They weren’t there, out in the desert, to advise people. They were there to fight against us.”

  “Against us? On the Iraqi side? If that’s true, then how come none of this ever came out?”

  “Because our boys were focused on the firepower, not the personnel. And as we were blowing things up, those Russians disappeared.”

  “Where did they go?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Poof! Vanished.”

  “Did you ask the captain about it?”

  “He said to let it go. The next day we’d be heading out for the big battle and there was no time for prisoners.”

  “But you weren’t satisfied with that explanation?”

  “I saw what I saw. I heard what I heard.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  He took another drink of water. “I think he made a deal. I think JB traded a lane through that minefield and their installation for the Russians’ freedom. Think about it. It would be embarrassing, come dawn, if we’d been found miles in front of our line, in direct contradiction to the general’s orders. And it would have created an international incident if those Russian soldiers had been discovered in that position. It would have given away their whole game and their lie about just trying to be honest brokers.”

  “Honest brokers of what?”

  “You’re probably too young to remember, but this was the Gorbachev era. It’s still the USSR back then. They’re warming to the West, right? But inside the Kremlin, there’s people who liked things the way they were, and the way they were is that the Soviets were Iraq’s allies. Big-time. They had a treaty with them. For a while there no one knew what the Soviets were going to do. They didn’t know what they were going to do. What they said they were doing was trying to negotiate a peace treaty between Baghdad and the allies. But here’s what I think. I think someone in the Kremlin wanted the good ol’ days back. They liked it better when the Evil Empire was a force to be reckoned with. Someone wanted to fight. But the war accelerated too quickly. We got too far out in front. They weren’t expecting it; we weren’t expecting it. I think that’s what happened.” He sat back. “Hadn’t heard that before, had you?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  The waiter came with our food. We paused our conversation as he set the plates in front of us. There was something about Steven Edgars that I didn’t like. I just wanted to get the interview over with and leave.

  “Can anyone verify what you’ve told me?”

  “JB could. But he won’t. Never said anything about it in any of those TV interviews, did he? And now he’s General Slater on the way to becoming the new secretary of defense. Think he’ll tell anybody about it now?”

  “There wasn’t anyone else who figured it out the way you did?”

  “Let me tell you what it’s like out there in the middle of a war. You know there’s only two outcomes: you survive or you don’t. Any given moment, you’re dead. So those times when you aren’t dead, when you don’t step on the mine, when the grenade doesn’t explode, when you aren’t hit by a bullet, you don’t stop and think, Why the heck haven’t I died yet? You tend to celebrate your incredible good fortune. Who was going to raise his hand that night and say, ‘Pardon me, Captain, sir, but this doesn’t make much sense. We were supposed to end up dead’?”

  “So even if someone did put two and two together, the way you did, no one ever said anything.”

  “I said something. I took Slater aside and gave him a talking-to. Bec
ause what were we supposed to do after that? And how were we going to account for countermanding a direct order?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’d take care of it. And he did. Once the commo got the communications going, JB had the RTO radio in that he’d made a breach. He had that map the Russians had given him; he gave it to the commo so he could tell headquarters right where we were. It identified the entire minefield. And there you go: he became one of the heroes of Desert Sabre.”

  “So to summarize, the truth is—”

  “The truth is that Captain JB Slater illegally collaborated with the enemy. That’s what happened. And you know what he always said in all those interviews he gave afterward? He said, and I quote, ‘Truth is, I’d rather be lucky than good.’” Mr. Edgars snorted. “Rather be lucky than good. But here’s the thing. He was unusually lucky during his career. There were those times in Bosnia and those others in Iraq—again—and then in Afghanistan. How many times did his units find the enemy where they weren’t supposed to be? Or just narrowly miss being hit by air strikes? I’d say he had more luck than one guy deserved.”

  I tried to ignore the twist in my gut. Tried to view what he was saying about my father objectively. “Are you accusing him of something?” I wanted to be crystal clear about what he was saying.

  “I’m saying that not only did he collaborate with the Russians that night in the desert, I think he also collaborated with them his entire career.”

  I tried not to show any outward emotion, but beneath the table, on my lap, my napkin was twisted into knots. “Do you have anything specific? Any proof?”

  “Nothing but suspicions.” He scowled.

  “I would like to believe you, but I really need proof.” He was talking about my father.

  He blinked. “I just laid it all out for you, like I’ve been laying it out for everyone for years. And you know what I’ve gotten for my troubles? Nothing. Nothing but raised eyebrows and dismissals. JB Slater didn’t get any smarter in the years after Desert Sabre. You’d think if you were going to cheat your way to four stars, at least you’d try to look competent about it. You know, when I first met him, I used to think that good-old-boy, country-hick talk of his was a prop. That he was using it to put people off guard. But the more I was around him, the more I discovered that he wasn’t even smart enough to use it as a tool. It’s the only thing he was ever truthful about as far as I know: he really was just a country boy from the backwoods of Arkansas who was lucky enough to marry Miss America.”