Man in the Middle

by Brian Haig

  But since it wasn’t Charabi, I was down to the usual suspects: terrorists, people who sell captives to terrorists, or garden-variety ass-holes who kipnap and kill at random, just for kicks. Maybe the MP sergeant was right. Maybe “CHA” referred to letters on a license plate. Or maybe Bian, out of her mind with pain and fear, had been doodling gibberish in her own blood.

  I felt as bad as I had ever felt. I had missed something, a clue, a brilliant revelation, a magical key that could unlock the truth and save her life. Yet, irrational and superstitious as it sounds, a feeling, an instinct, some primitive premonition was telling me that Bian was still alive.

  But if I couldn’t save her, it was time for the last thing I wanted to do, and the one thing I had to do. Somebody needed to notify her loved ones, and that kind of bad news is best delivered by someone who knows and cares for her. So I walked to the office of the corps G1—the head personnel weenie—where a staff sergeant sat behind a short desk directly inside the door.

  Personnel clerks have more power in a single finger than all the generals and colonels in the Army. With a single keystroke they can have your paycheck sent to Timbuktu, or you sent to Timbuktu, or alter the religious preference in your personnel file to Muslim, which is not the best faith to have before a promotion board these days. So I smiled courteously and said, “Good afternoon, Sergeant. Major Mark Kemble, First Armored Division. Can you please tell me how to get hold of him?”

  “Professional or personal?” he asked. “Sorry. Gotta ask.”

  “Both. His fiancée was kidnapped.”

  “I’m on it, sir,” he replied, and began punching buttons and at the same time eyeing his computer screen. After a few seconds, he articulated, “Kemble . . . Kimble? An ‘e’ or an ‘i’?”

  “Why do you think the Army sewed this nametag on my uniform?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “So I can remember how to spell it.”

  Old joke—bad joke—but he laughed anyway. “I’ll try both,” he suggested, then did a few more keyboard punches, and he asked, “The rank and unit . . . you’re sure?”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . .” He bent forward and pressed his nose an inch from his screen, “I’ve got three Kembles with ‘e’s . . . and wow, one with an ‘i’ . . . you know . . . same as that guy with the missing arm in that old TV series, and . . . hey. Look at that . . .”

  I leaned forward. “What?”

  “He’s a Richard also. Personal hobby . . . sorry. You know we got two William Clintons in theater? A George Bush, too. How’d you like to be that poor schlub? I’ll bet he takes a world of shit, and—” He saw my face and said, “Sorry. I get carried away.” He added, “Our Kembles and Kimbles are all enlisted—no Marks, no majors.”

  “Is your system inclusive?”

  “It’s connected directly to unit SIDPERS,” he explained, referring to the Army’s computerized personnel system, which I knew was updated daily. “But maybe your guy DEROSed,” he hypothesized, meaning he rotated back to the States. “Or,” he suggested, frowning, “could be he’s in a classified assignment. I’ve run into this before. These black unit types—Delta Force, Task Force 160, various snake-eaters— they think they’re too good for the theater database.”

  I could see that this upset his clerkish sensibilities. I said, “So those are the possibilities. What do we do?”

  “What I always do.” He giggled. “Kick it downhill.” He picked up the phone, read off the number for his counterpart in the First Armored Division from a sheet on his desk, dialed, and then we waited. He identified himself to whoever answered, and handed me the phone. I explained to whomever I was talking to who I was looking for. After a few moments, the voice said, “There’s no Mark Kemble in the division.”

  “This is a notification issue. Help me out here.”

  He said, “Let me talk to my boss. Hold on.”

  A new voice came on, a major named Hardy, who said, “Sir, could you tell me what this is about?”

  “As I informed your sergeant, notification. Major Mark Kemble’s fiancée was kidnapped in Badhdad yesterday.”

  There was a long pause. Mention the word “notification” and even the most bloodless military bureaucrat turns into a human being. As military people, we are all sensitive to, and sympathetic toward, the need for speedy notification, not for the soldier, who is beyond caring, but for the families left behind. The Army tends to treat living soldiers like dirt—it may screw up their pay, short them on body and vehicular armor, force them to spend their careers in places they don’t want to live, working for bosses they hate, abusing their families with pay and housing that are a joke—but die, and the Army turns on a dime into the most sensitive, caring organization on earth.

  I have often wondered if the Army doesn’t have it backward— treat the living well and short-shrift the deceased—but honoring our dead is part of our tradition, and in an eerie way, it is a comfort for the living soldiers as well. “You know what . . .” he finally said. “You got bad info.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes. Mark Kemble was KIA five months ago.”

  “I think you’re mistaken.”

  “I think not. We lost only two majors this year. I personally handled the corpse evacuation for both officers.” He added, “Karbala. That’s where Kemble bought it. Bullet through the heart.”

  I suppose I must’ve been in shock, because the next thing I knew the major was asking, “Sir . . . sir . . . Are you still with me?”

  “Uh . . . yes. An administrative glitch, I’m sure and—” I hung up. All I could do was stare at the floor. Mark Kemble . . . dead. For the past five months . . . dead.

  Bian had lied. But, why? Further, if her two days in Baghdad weren’t spent in the loving arms of her fiancé, where had she been, and what had she been doing? The sergeant was staring at me, and I composed myself enough to ask him where the corps G2’s office was located—meaning the chief intelligence officer and staff for the ground war in Iraq.

  He gave me the directions, and I walked as quickly as my feet would carry me, first out of the building, and then toward the skiff he had described. It was a controlled facility with a buzzer by the door, which I pushed, and there was a camera over the entrance into which I smiled.

  Somebody inside electronically unlocked the door and I entered a square building, specifically into a small anteroom that was sparsely furnished. This time, the receptionist was a female buck sergeant who was studying a men’s fitness magazine with considerable intensity, for the articles, I’m sure.

  I interrupted her education and told her I needed to speak with any senior officer who had been here for six months or longer, and who remembered an officer named Major Tran. She told me she would see who she could find, and left.

  She returned about two minutes later, accompanied by a good-looking lieutenant colonel with the emblem of military intelligence on his collar. I introduced myself, he stuck out his hand, and we shook. He said, “Kemp Chester. How can I help you?”

  “Do you have an office?”

  He shook his head. “Only generals have offices. I have a carrel. That okay?”

  “Not okay. Let’s walk.”

  He gave me an odd look, but out of courtesy or curiosity he followed me, first out of the skiff, and then we began walking slowly around the Green Zone compound. There were a lot of ways to get into this, but I needed to cover my tracks, and without preamble I asked, “You knew Major Bian Tran?”

  “Yeah. We worked together. She left . . . oh, two, three months back.” He asked, “Why?”

  “I’m part of the investigating staff for a 15-6 investigation.” He understood that this was a pre-court-martial investigation, the Army equivalent of a grand jury. In response to his raised eyebrows, I assured him, “Relax. She’s not the accused.”

  He seemed relieved to hear this and nodded.

  I continued, in my most lawyerly, officious tone, “Major Tran now works in an investigatory agency in the
Pentagon. She’s a critical witness for what looks likely to turn into a court-martial. The questions I’ll be asking are in the nature of a background check.” At least this last part was true.

  “I see. Well . . . would a few general observations help?”

  “They would. Please proceed.”

  “All-round great officer. Brilliant. Competent. Honest and hardworking, and—”

  “Excuse me . . . Kemp, I can read her efficiency ratings myself. What did you think about her personally?”

  “Well . . . everybody liked her. Ask around. You won’t find a soul with a bad word to say.” He smiled at me. “But if you do, give me his name, so I can lump him up.”

  People get nervous about legal investigations, and I purposely made no response, which usually has the effect of making witnesses nervous and more talkative.

  After a moment, he said, “I don’t know if you’ve seen her. Absolute knockout. Incredible body, gorgeous face, and—” He stopped in midsentence and cleared his throat. “That sounds sexist, doesn’t it? I’m just saying—”

  I offered him a manly smile—“She’s hot”—and we ended up manly smiling at each other. I make-believe jotted in a make-believe notebook, and intoned, “Under physical description, the colonel stated, without the slightest innuendo, that the major maintained her body and fitness at Army standards.”

  “Hah . . . that’s a good one.”

  So much for guy bonding. I asked Colonel Chester, “What was Major Tran’s assignment here?”

  “She was assigned to a special cell. Part of G2, the theater intelligence office, but not, if you get my drift.”

  “Sensitive stuff?”

  “Oh . . . very.”

  “Like what?”

  By his expression, you’d think I had just told him I slept with his mother and then bragged to everybody at school about it. “That’s none of your business.”

  “Unless I have a Top Secret clearance, which I do. And unless it’s directly relevant to my investigation, which it is. Please answer my question.”

  LTC Chester, however, was nobody’s fool, and replied, “After I see the written authorization, and after you’re read on. I’m not some cherry second lieutenant, Drummond. Don’t blow smoke up my butt.” He asked, “What’s this 15-6 about, anyway?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Typical lawyer. All take, no give.”

  We did not seem to be bonding, so I took a swing in the dark that wasn’t entirely from the dark. “The cell you referred to was an exploitation unit. She was on the receiving end of CIA messages that pinpointed Iranian movements and activities inside Iraq. Her job was to translate those tips into operational requirements and targets, to look for ways to exploit those insights.”

  He turned and stared at me a moment. He said, “Why did you ask?”

  “Confirmation,” I replied—and now I had confirmation. “Old trick. We often use throwaway questions to ascertain the veracity of our witness.”

  “How am I doing?”

  “Not good, Kemp. Not good at all.” I asked, “How long was she in that job?”

  “Can’t really say. She was already on the staff when I arrived.”

  Bullshit. “Colonel, I can just as easily obtain this information from her personnel file.”

  “Fine. Why don’t you do just that?”

  I ignored his suggestion and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong. She was the operations officer of an MP battalion during the invasion, then she remained in that assignment a few months after Baghdad fell, then was reassigned here, to G2.”

  “More like five months in her battalion. It was the G2 himself who pulled her up, if you’re interested.” He explained, “General Bent-son heard she was fluent in Arabic, had operational experience, and she had a great rep. She cleaned up a very violent section of Baghdad at a time when the rest of city was descending into chaos. Great credentials.”

  “But as an MP.”

  “And she had a secondary specialty in military intelligence. Look . . . frankly—I hope this doesn’t alarm you—most of us full-time MI types, we don’t know squat about this place, about these people, or about this kind of war.” He continued, “Myself, I’m a satellite interpretation guy and this terrestrial stuff is a whole new world.” He enjoyed his own bad pun and chuckled. He then added, “My first months in country, I felt like I was just dropped into Oz—just no happy, dancing little munchkins, and in this case, the Wizard’s a homicidal asshole.”

  This jogged something in my mind, and I asked, “So you would say the major was professionally competent?”

  “I would say she was incredible . . . extraordinary . . . insert whatever superlative you like. She’s a cop and she’s military intelligence— she was the perfect combination.”

  “And there’s no personal bias in your assessment?”

  “Maybe.” He thought about it a few seconds, then said, “Terrorism, if you think about it, is closer to crime than war. Typical intel officers can talk for hours about how an Iraqi division arrays itself on the battlefield, and they stare blankly if asked to explain how an insurgent cell infiltrates a city, chooses its targets, and operates.” He paused then added, with clear admiration, “Bian knew this stuff. She had . . . a sense . . . an intuition for situations. A hunter’s instinct, I guess you’d call it. Every morning, a long line formed in front of her carrel, guys like me, seeking advice.”

  “Plus, she was hot.”

  “Well . . . yeah . . .” He laughed. “Get at the end of that line, though, and it could be ten, eleven o’clock before you got a minute with her.”

  We walked in silence for a few moments among the buildings of the Green Zone. Something wasn’t adding up. Well, actually a lot wasn’t adding up, but what exactly? Everything Kemp Chester said had confirmed my own high estimation of Bian Tran: an impressive officer, bright, resourceful, courageous, and . . . yes, hot. But if I looked back critically over the course of the investigation Bian and I had conducted, nothing she had said, done, or ever advised had been particularly insightful, illuminating, or to borrow Kemp Chester’s more elevated adjective, intuitive. I had ascribed this to her professional limitations as an MP officer—more overseer than sleuth. But if Kemp was right, it was time to consider another cause. Because in those rare instances where the hunter also happens to be the hunted, there’s a big conflict of interest.

  I recalled as well, how eager, how insistent Bian was to come here, to Iraq, in pursuit of bin Pacha and Charabi. Well, this was her war, I had reasoned. She was thinking with her heart instead of her head. In fact, that might still be on the mark, but I now had to consider that her motives were more complicated and darker than I had imagined. Because, not incidentally, coming here also diverted us from finding Clifford Daniels’s murderer.

  Nor, so far, had Kemp Chester contradicted anything Bian herself had told me. There were, however, those troubling things she hadn’t said. Like having been part of the G2 exploitation cell. Possibly it was a matter of her secrecy vows. This might sound redundant, but military intelligence people and secrecy are like Donald Trump with narcissistic bullshit; you can’t believe how far they take it. But no matter how much benefit of the doubt I gave her, even I had trouble with that one.

  And, of course, there was Mark Kemble. Poor, dead Mark Kemble. Why had Bian lied about that? Why keep it hidden? Also, if her two days in Baghdad were not spent in Mark’s company, what had she been doing? And more to the point, why lie about that?

  I must’ve reflected too long, because Kemp Chester was engaged in his own reflections and asked, “Hey, what the hell does this have to do with a 15-6? Isn’t this supposed to be about an officer’s credibility and judgment? What’s going on here?”

  I took a moment and sized him up, as I would any witness on the stand. A good guy, levelheaded, articulate, smart. But clearly he felt a strong affection for Bian, which I understood, because, like nearly any man who met her, I was at least half in love with her. He was trying
to be protective, which raises the ever-provocative question of why he felt Bian needed protection. As they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Not always, but when smoke’s being blown up your butt, you’d better be sure.

  On one hand, I admired and appreciated his loyalty to Bian, and I liked him for it. The occasion, however, called for the other hand, and I gave him a hard stare and asked, “Have I told you how to do your job?”

  “No, but—”

  “Because I would really fucking appreciate it if you reciprocated that professional courtesy.” I allowed him a moment to contemplate the shift in the tenor of our conversation. I said, “Maybe I’ve made this too friendly, too informal. Maybe we should reconvene to an interrogation cell at the MP station.”

  “Okay, okay. Relax . . .”

  I now knew what was really bothering me, and asked, “When Bian was reassigned from her battalion to the corps staff, it was supposed to be for a full year—right?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re really starting to piss me off.”

  “Uh . . . okay, a full year. Her fiancé had just begun his one-year tour in Iraq. Bian wanted to stay for the duration of his tour.”

  “But she rotated stateside after what . . . six, seven, eight months?”

  “Yeah . . . maybe.”

  I offered him another cold stare and he quickly amended his statement. “About seven and a half months . . . She got an early drop. Why is this important?”

  “Why was it curtailed?”

  Kemp now looked restive and a little unhappy. He said, “Why don’t you ask her former boss? Bian and I were friends, and . . . Look, you’re making me very uncomfortable.”

  “And you well know that the personal comfort or discomfort of a professional officer is irrelevant. I asked you a question. Answer it.”

  “Because . . . well, because it was . . . a hardship transfer. Because her fiancé, he died . . . here in Iraq. His death was very rough on her.” He added after a moment, “The general was sympathetic. He personally intervened to arrange a transfer stateside.”