by Fritz Galt
Even his motorboat ride along the eastern shore of Hainan Island in the South China Sea didn’t bring on such nausea. The blunt prow of the ferry flew high and plunged low with each wave.
Setting foot on shore was the highlight of Sean’s day. He survived the crossing without losing his lunch. But a mild headache persisted as he boarded another bus at the landing. Such service.
There was a grocery store, Golden Arches, an outdoor movie theater, a high school, a church, a baseball field, suburban houses. Was he mistaken? He had arrived in southern Florida, not some hardscrabble outpost where American soldiers held a death grip on Cuba’s last vestige of freedom, with Colonel Jack Nicholson’s hardened face bearing down on his troops, forging them into men of iron.
And a red and green stoplight at a place called Camp Delta. He had to let out a laugh. He bet the Taliban and al-Qaeda got a good laugh out of that one. The long, peaked white buildings that looked like a prefab trailers would serve as their new torture chambers.
Sean glanced around the busy intersection where olive-drab cars and buses pulled out of a camp surrounded by razor wire and entered the main road that stretched off into the dusty distance.
“Where’s Camp X-Ray?” he asked the MP.
“Abandoned a few years back,” came the tight-lipped response.
Sean raised an eyebrow. They had certainly moved the prisoners up a few notches. This Camp Delta looked like a Marriott compared with the iron cages of Camp X-Ray that he had seen pictured in the China Daily.
“Take one last look around,” the MP said. “This will be your new home.”
A heavily armed soldier in battle fatigues swung the gate open, and the bus turned into the camp. Slowly it began to dawn on Sean that the prison camp was meant for him.
Harry Black couldn’t wait to leave Washington. He would rather be in Guantánamo and find some way to free Cooper, even before his Piedmont Personnel team arrived from Africa to begin interrogations.
As Harry walked toward his departure gate at Dulles International Airport, a newly arrived flight was just emptying its passengers onto the carpeted terminal. He swam against the current of brown, oriental faces. Where had they all come from?
A Caucasian woman stood out in the crowd. She was a foot taller than the rest. Her shoulder-length blonde hair caught the afternoon light just right.
She was a knockout in her wraparound sunglasses, baby blue business suit and long, lean calves. If he could, he would have hired her on the spot.
But he was in a rush to make his flight to Miami, from which he would transfer to a military flight down to Guantánamo Bay.
Ticket in hand, he jumped into a bus-like vehicle. It chugged to life and began to transport him across snowplowed taxiways out to the far terminal.
Only when he reached the departure gate did he learn that the flight had been delayed and would leave fifteen minutes late. This was going to be a long day spent in airport terminals. He might as well use the extra time wisely and do some research on the Web.
Seated at the boarding gate, he lifted the cover of his laptop and it woke up. He gave the computer a minute to find the Internet hotspot and log him into the net.
First stop on his cyber journey was the Washington Post site. Even though he was right there in Washington, the connection was slow. At last the front page appeared in its onscreen format.
The big story was about the president’s announced engagement. Under that item was another story titled, “Kudos for Administration’s Strong Response to Oscar Night Terrorists.” He skipped both articles.
He clicked on the search box and typed in “Sean Cooper” and pushed Enter.
The list of recent articles on him was nothing short of astounding. His name appeared in twenty Post articles and editorials in the previous two weeks. Man, this guy was a hot item.
The subjects of some headlines were already well known to him.
President’s Fate Rides with Cooper
Cooper Must Have Something to Hide
Immunity for Testimony?
Are Chinese Harboring Cooper?
One headline in particular caught his attention. It raised an issue he hadn’t considered before, that Sean Cooper was implicated in the same crime as the president.
Why Did Cooper Do It?
“Flight 1047 to Miami is now boarding…”
He clicked on all the articles he could find in order to download them to his computer. The process was finished in five minutes, just as the last passengers were boarding.
“You’ll have to turn off your computer until after takeoff,” a gate attendant told him as she handed back the stub of his boarding pass.
“Oh, right.” He hit the Off button and snapped the screen closed before passing through the gate.
That would give him plenty of in-flight reading.
Sandi DiMartino felt like she was back on familiar turf as she entered her office building in Rosslyn, Virginia.
And the men were so gorgeous in Washington, she thought as she rode up a full elevator to the fifteenth floor. Her libido had been rekindled the moment she had stepped off the airplane at Dulles, and she had walked into a crowd of handsome, well-coiffed men.
On her way, she glanced briefly at the dark hulk of Stanley Polk, the Chinagate special prosecutor, sequestered in his gloomy office.
She glanced out the window at the ice-fringed Potomac River and made her way through the sea of desks to her own pile of papers.
Pulling along her luggage as she walked, she attracted stares, young lawyers and clerks rising to their feet.
She stopped at her desk, removed her winter coat and rifled through the huge stack of documents and memos in her inbox.
At last she turned around, and was met by a sea of inquiring faces.
“Well, what?” she asked.
“What do you mean what?” her assistant asked. “That’s what we want to know. Did you find Cooper?”
She put on a stumped look. “Yeah, in a way.”
“Well, where is he?” Ralph, the chief litigator, asked.
“I wish I knew.” Then she shot out, “Does anyone know what GTMO is?”
The staff looked at each other as if she were talking in tongues.
“GTMO,” she repeated. “You know, some place where the military flies former hostages.”
It still didn’t ring a bell.
“Oh, hell,” she said, and picked up her phone. She dialed a friend in Alaska who served in the Air Force. “What’s GTMO?”
“Honey, I don’t have the vaguest idea, but it’s sure nice of you to call.”
She needed a better lead.
Wait, the guy on the ship that she had radioed must have been in the Navy. Maybe someone in the Navy would know.
She consulted her little black book and found the number of Charlie Swain, a friend she had made back in college. He was in ROTC. They had never dated, but had stayed in touch over the years, probably because they had never dated.
“You want to know what GTMO is,” Charlie repeated from his law office. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Sure as shooting. I’m going to storm over there right away.”
“Sandi, planes don’t fly to GTMO,” he said. “And I’m not so sure you’d want to go anywhere near the place.”
“Why’s that?” she asked, suddenly concerned that her plan of attack would fall through.
“Because GTMO is our Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a place where pillboxes outnumber palm trees,” he said.
“I’m not worried about the guns,” she said. “I’m just worried about getting in to see my client. He’s being detained there.”
“Sandi, the last thing in the world I would like to be is a defense attorney for a terrorist held down at Gitmo. Believe me, he’s got zero rights down there, and you’re going to face a military tribunal. Are you up to speed on your military law?”
“I don’t know a thing abou
t it.”
“Neither do I. They operate by their own Military Law, of which I haven’t even read Chapter One.”
“Thanks for your help, Charlie,” she said, setting down the phone.
Sean was off limits to her and the rest of the world. He might as well be on Mars.
After takeoff, with details of the snow-filled Virginia countryside receding below him and passengers stripping down to their tennis outfits and Spring Break gear, Harry Black hauled out his laptop, placed it on his tray table and booted up.
The headline “Why Did Cooper Do It?” was facing him on the screen.
Scanning through the article, he gleaned a few details of Flower’s former life as a financial officer and family man.
The father of two elementary school students and husband of a professional fashion designer, Sean Cooper had a rich and rewarding family life. His company paid for all his overseas trips, including two round trips home for his entire family each year. Furthermore, his company provided him with a car and driver, a house and school tuition at the expensive International School of Beijing.
But that was not to say that Sean was financially dependent on his company. He had an annual income topping $150,000, in addition to health and property insurance benefits. More than half his salary wasn’t taxable, as he didn’t live in the United States.
Cooper was already a happy, wealthy man. Why would he feel the need to take part in a criminal enterprise?
The article went on to speculate that perhaps Cooper was heavily in debt, but that could not be substantiated in any way. He might have been an avid supporter of the president and therefore was facilitating the kickbacks to the president as a means of supporting his re-election. But Cooper wasn’t even a registered voter in his home district in Maryland. Perhaps Cooper sought a political appointment from the president, such as the ambassadorship to China. Again, not likely as Cooper was characterized by colleagues and former classmates as politically naïve.
If Cooper had no reason to pad the president’s pockets, then he must have been after the money. After all, wasn’t he, as a financial officer, intimately familiar with banking procedures? Harry had to concede that anyone who worked solely with money all day must have some interest in or fascination with money. But then, there was no indication that Cooper siphoned off any of the money for himself.
That left only one answer. Cooper had been coerced.
The article explored the possibility that Cooper had been forced by his company to perform the illegal act of sending kickbacks to the president’s Cayman Islands offshore bank account. But the special prosecutor had subpoenaed the entire hierarchy of his corporation and could come up with no one who professed knowledge of the crime.
Besides, how could they have coerced Cooper to perform such a clearly illegal act? Surely they wouldn’t threaten to take away his job, otherwise Cooper would have gone straight to the FBI. Then maybe someone had threatened something other than his job, say, for instance, his legal status in China, his company benefits, or even his or his family’s life.
That was where Harry found himself nodding in agreement.
The article speculated on the highly coincidental fact that the kickbacks occurred well into the period when SARS was running rampant on the streets of Beijing, and most travelers and expatriates had long since fled the country. Yet Cooper’ family had remained. Not only remained, but caught the SARS virus and died.
Why would Sean have remained in Beijing so long, exposing his family to such danger?
Had someone forced them to stay? In which case, Cooper was doubly a victim of the kickback scandal in that it implicated him legally and it cost him his family’s life. In effect, wasn’t Sean Cooper a victim, rather than the perpetrator of a crime?
The newspaper article ended with a sad depiction of a lone man attending the burial of his wife, daughter and son in a Maryland cemetery shortly before the Chinagate scandal broke.
Whatever had caused Sean Cooper to wire kickbacks to the President of the United States was not worth his family’s death.
Harry snapped the laptop shut, and his eyes filled with tears.
And to think that his company, Piedmont Personnel, had just spent a week trying to track down Cooper and deep six him for the CIA. What kind of bastards was he working for?
He made a decision on the spot, as the young woman beside him slipped out of her sweater to reveal a braless tank top.
He resolved to resurrect both Cooper and his reputation.
Chapter 24
Gradually, as if scales were falling from Sean’s eyes, the Army’s intentions became all too clear.
First two guards clad in camouflage fatigues took him to a maximum-security prison and told him to strip. There in the long hallway of padlocked steel wire doors and not a single voice to be heard but their own, he pulled off the civilian clothes that the Marines had given him.
“Underwear, too,” one of the two guards commanded.
What was this, Abu Ghraib Prison? Sean checked the guards for digital cameras, but they weren’t taking pictures. And their expressions were all business. So he slipped out of his briefs.
“And your eyeglasses.”
“These?” Sean said, pointing to his thin, harmless wire rims.
The guard nodded solemnly.
Sean folded the spectacles, careful not to scratch the lenses, and handed them over. This meant going blind. He had to squint to make out the guards’ faces.
Only after he was stripped of every last possession including his dignity, a guard unlocked a door to one of the cells that was halfway down the hall.
“Step this way.”
It was a neat, spare little chamber with white corrugated walls, a four-foot by four-foot steel wire window facing a small recreation yard, a metal bed bolted to the wall, a floor toilet and a square metal sink with running water. An arrow was painted on the floor for no apparent reason. Perhaps it pointed toward Mecca. On the bed lay a thin foam pad, a blanket and a prison uniform.
He slipped on the orange shorts and pants, then pulled on the orange shirt. Kate would hardly approve of the design or color scheme. It made him look like a walking traffic cone.
He squinted at the pair of flip-flops. He hadn’t worn shoes in days, but slipped his toes into them anyway. After all, his feet were growing cold on the concrete floor.
Then he fumbled through the hospitality kit provided by the prison. There were a couple of towels, a washcloth, a prayer cap, a half-inch thick prayer mat, a book in Arabic that he took a wild guess was the Koran, and a bar of soap.
Despite those homey touches, he was hardly grateful. The army had stuck him in solitary confinement.
“Hey,” he cried. He began to beat his fists against his cell door. The sound echoed down the long, high corridor. “Don’t I get to call a lawyer?”
When his voice stopped reverberating around the cellblock, he heard a pair of guards chuckling in the blurry distance.
He turned back and sat on the corner of the bed, still unable to grasp the full enormity of his plight.
“I am a prisoner,” he whispered to himself. And who knew or cared?
Harry Black observed the arid Guantánamo Bay landscape with interest as the military bus chugged toward Camp America, the living quarters for troops assigned to Camp Delta.
Leaving the airport and harbor behind, he spotted two naval ships at anchor, hidden from the sea. Grinding its way eastward, the olive drab bus proceeded past a group of hurricane shelters. Fortunately, it was the dry season, and he wouldn’t need to worry about crippling storms.
He spotted various signs that pointed to a cemetery, the military training area, and bunkers. They kicked up dust as they passed a trailer park that stretched along the road. He grinned at the irony of the name, Green Acres. Other signs pointed northward to the high school and golf course.
The terrain grew rougher, and the road twisted to get around steep hills that were punctuated by scrub brush. Beyond the immediat
e landscape, a much higher mountain range rose out of the haze. Those had to be in Cuba proper, yet he still couldn’t see the famous fence that divided the American troops from Fidel Castro’s troops.
There were many tactical groups assigned to Gitmo, such as drug interdiction, forward logistics supply, training and prisoner detention, but the underlying reason for the base was to give the Cubans a show of strength.
Border patrols wore combat uniforms, helmets and bulletproof vests, setting a serious tone for other units operating at the base.
After Castro cut off the water and electrical supply in 1964 in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the base had to create a desalinization plant and generate its own electricity. As the challenges escalated, the Americans seemed even more determined to remain and thumb their noses at the Cubans.
Turning southward down Kittery Beach Road, Harry began to get a sense of the famed Cuban beaches. The bus stopped briefly at a traffic light near a heavily guarded complex of sterile new buildings called Camp Delta. He took the opportunity to case the place. Somewhere inside, Sean Cooper must already be familiar with the prison routine.
Then they chugged onward, finally dipping downward to a sprawling complex of offices and living quarters. With Kittery Beach on the left and Windmill Beach on the right, he had arrived at the Guantánamo Riviera.
“Command Post for Interrogations,” the bus driver announced, and the bus ground to a halt.
Squinting in the bright sunlight, Harry looked for the command post. All he saw was miles of identical plywood houses strung along a single road. Side by side, their peaked roofs looked like an unending wave of temporary housing.
Then he spotted a sign under one of the eaves. It had the Defense Intelligence Agency insignia on it, a globe spinning on a torch.
He stepped inside the room. It was a mere fifteen by thirty-foot rectangle packed with naval personnel, working with quiet and efficient purpose. He looked down at his business suit. It not only jarred with the starched uniforms around him, it hardly impressed.
