Secret Justice

by James W. Huston

  The DCI nodded reluctantly. “I’m afraid that’s right, sir. Our hands are pretty much tied. We don’t torture people. Short of that, there’s really no way to get them to talk, at least not these kinds of men. With a common criminal you can negotiate a shorter sentence, or get them to turn state’s evidence, but a terrorist? He’s not afraid of a sentence. Not even afraid to die. He won’t disclose anything without strong encouragement.”

  “Then why try to capture them at all? Why not just drop a bomb on this meeting and be done with it?”

  Stuntz nodded. “Just say the word.”

  Kendrick shook his head. “Seriously. Why can’t we squeeze them a little?”

  Woods replied, “We signed the Convention against Torture in 1994. Promised all the civilized countries in the world not to do that.”

  “I can see that you don’t want political torture, death squads, people out of control, but it seems to me that professional interrogators ought to have some more tools in their box to find out what people like Duar are planning.” He paused and was acutely aware of the silence. “Am I way off base here?”

  St. James was uncomfortable. “Sir, it’s one of the things that sets us apart. We don’t execute prisoners, we don’t torture people to get information from them. It makes us different. If we stoop to that level, we’ve taken the first step of becoming like them, where human life doesn’t matter. They may not value our lives, but we value theirs. I think we need to resist the temptation. What else would make us different?”

  “A lot,” Kendrick said, growing more annoyed. “What can we do? Can we take away his food? Can we yell at him? Can we threaten him?”

  Woods spoke. “We have some things we can do, but they’re very limited. Some sleep deprivation, some harassment, those sorts of things, but if you actually read the Geneva Convention, even those things are probably across the line.”

  “Do what you can. We need to know what he knows,” Kendrick said. He sat back and thought. “But then what? A tribunal, right? Where?”

  St. James interjected, “Couldn’t we bring him back and try him here? Why go through the difficulty of a tribunal?”

  Stuntz almost laughed. “And give him one of our patented American circus trials? You can’t be serious.”

  “I am very serious. The tribunal sounds like a short cut. Like a Kangaroo court. Why not just do it the usual way? I mean we tried Ramsey Yousef for trying to blow up the World Trade Center. I didn’t hear any complaints about a circus trial.”

  “I sure did,” the Attorney General said.

  “Well, in any case, he wasn’t successful, and we were. He was convicted and sits in prison forever. Why can’t we do that again?”

  Stuntz leaned forward. “Because we don’t have to. We captured this guy outside of the United States. He doesn’t get the protections of the Constitution. He can’t get some wise-ass lawyer to stand up and start making a bunch of noise on his behalf at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers. And if we use the tribunal, more evidence is admissible. Some hearsay comes in. We don’t have to get a unanimous verdict. We don’t have to expose the case, the result, the vote, whatever, to much of an appeal. Hell, when they did a tribunal back in World War II they even did it here on U.S. soil when they captured those six German spies—two of whom were U.S. citizens. And they were executed. Like this guy ought to be.”

  President Kendrick spoke. “It seems to me the tribunal is the path of least resistance and most likely success. Mr. Attorney General, am I right?”

  “That’s all true, sir. That’s how the DOD wrote the rules. I’m sure those rules will be tested someday, but that’s how they stand—”

  Stuntz interrupted. “Your question, Mr. President, was what do we do now? Notwithstanding what the Director has said about the value of interrogation, I see great value in trying this terrorist, and, if the evidence supports it, executing him—”

  “We don’t have the balls to execute him,” the Attorney General said, then catching himself and wishing he hadn’t said it.

  The President looked at him bemusedly.

  “Whether we have the—courage—is certainly something that we want to consider,” the Attorney General continued. “But the real issue, Mr. President, is whether to keep this tribunal secret. We have rules on the conduct of these tribunals, and we’ve had test runs with low-level terrorists. But this one is the big one. So do we tell people we’re doing it? Or do we keep it completely secret?”

  “We can’t keep it secret,” Stuntz said with the great authority he always thought his statements carried. “The rules have been published for months—we told everyone they wouldn’t be conducted in secret, and the ones we’ve done were public. We can’t very well go back on that. Well, I guess we could, but it would look very suspicious.”

  Woods shook his head. “Secrecy would be a bad idea anyway. All it takes is one person to think something’s wrong, or unfair, and you’d be unable to stop the publicity. Just one sailor could mention the trial in an e-mail to his family, or the Washington Post, that the world’s number-one terrorist happens to be on the Belleau Wood and was being tried. I can guarantee you that that will happen. Then the newspapers start calling and accusing us of bad faith. What are we trying to hide? We didn’t even tell them that he had been captured? Why not reassure the American people of our competence by showing them that we can and in fact did capture the world’s leading terrorist?”

  “Sarah?”

  “I think the Director is right, Mr. President. It’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to keep the lid on the fact that we have Duar. And once the press gets wind of it, they will absolutely go berserk. Some of that may go our way, but a lot of it will be accusatory if we try to keep it secret. I’m afraid if word gets out that we’re going to try Duar aboard the Belleau Wood, and not bring him back to the States, somebody is going to think that’s unfair. We’ve seen it already in some previous cases. But for this one, people are going to go all out. Maybe Duar will get American lawyers involved. I think we should take control of this right away. Hold a press conference. Announce the capture of Duar today, before it gets stale, and tell them he’s going to be tried in a tribunal.”

  “You agree, Mr. Attorney General?”

  “I do. We’d be happy to try him here in the United States, but I frankly don’t want to give him a platform. I don’t want him to hold press conferences every day talking about how evil America is, and how we don’t appreciate his objectives, and how we need to pull out of the Middle East and abandon Israel. I’m sick of hearing that crap. I say put him on trial aboard the Belleau Wood under the rules developed by the Department of Defense.”

  Kendrick rubbed his chin. “Mr. Stuntz, you have your military prosecutors ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get them out there. Let’s get this thing under way as soon as possible.”

  Stuntz hesitated. “Are we going to go for a capital charge? Do we have the nerve to execute this murderer?”

  “Capital charge? Absolutely. Does everybody agree?” Kendrick asked, implying only one correct answer.

  Those around the table nodded.

  They were about to leave when St. James spoke. “We’d better have a damage-control plan too.”

  Stuntz replied, “Damage to what?”

  “When this thing hits the press, which it will do, we’d better be ready to respond.”

  Kendrick frowned, not following her at all. “We won’t need damage control, Sarah,” Kendrick said decisively. “We’re not getting anything out of this guy. So I’m going public with this today. We’ll tell them we’ve captured Duar. Big kudos all around. He’s being held in an ‘undisclosed location’—I love that—and that we are evaluating whether to put him on trial in a tribunal or simply hold him as a combatant until the cessation of hostilities. The cessation of hostilities, of course, is up to us to define.” He smiled. “Since we’re fighting terrorists, that could be when there’s no more terrorism. We could put hi
m on trial then, at the end of hostilities. We could just put the evidence in a box, wait as long as we want, then pull it out when we felt like it, years from now. But of course we have no intention of doing that. I kind of like where we are on this one, frankly. We’re going to push it as hard and as fast as we can. String him up.”

  * * *

  Rat stepped out of the shower in his condo in Washington, D.C. Unlike many of those who worked for him in his cover as the CEO of a security company, he lived in Washington itself, not in one of the suburbs. He loved the energy of the city. He dried off and picked up the portable phone on the cradle next to his bed. As he toweled off his legs he speed-dialed and put the phone against a shoulder.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. I’m back.”

  “Yeah. Where you been?” Andrea Ash asked, knowing she wouldn’t get an answer.

  “Right here in my apartment. I was just watching television here for the last few days.”

  “To think you were there the whole time and I never thought to call.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “You know, same old stuff. Practicing medicine in a Navy hospital. It’s like practicing law in jail.”

  “Come on, Bethesda’s a good hospital.”

  “It is. I just like making fun of it.”

  “You doing anything tonight?”

  “Not really.”

  He glanced at the clock. It was seven o’clock. “Did you eat yet?”

  “Only once.”

  “Perfect. How about I pick you up in twenty minutes and we go out for dinner?”

  “Sounds great. See you then.”

  Rat dressed and drove to Maryland. He had met Andrea on his first assignment for the CIA. Intelligence had learned of an Algerian who intended to shoot down the Blue Angels. It had fallen to him to stop it. She was the flight surgeon for the Blue Angels, the second woman to hold that position. When she moved to Maryland to work at Bethesda they had started dating seriously. He hadn’t dated anyone seriously for almost three years. Andrea though had gotten deep inside him. She confounded him and drove him crazy, and he loved it.

  He ran up to her door and banged on it loudly. The door opened and Andrea smiled at him. She kissed him gently. “I missed you.”

  “Likewise,” he said. “Come on. I’m starved.”

  They drove to a nearby seafood restaurant that Andrea loved. Rat thought it was below average because most of their fish was frozen, but the atmosphere was perfect. They had mastered the nautical decor and every room was walled off by enormous salt water aquariums with Chesapeake and Atlantic fish swimming around.

  They ordered and sipped their iced tea as they waited for their food. “So, really,” Andrea pressed. “Where have you been?”

  “You know I can’t talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to know exactly where you have been or exactly what you have been doing, just tell me basically where in the world you have been. What continent?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re not much fun.”

  “No doubt. But at least I’m back.”

  “How long are you going to be here?”

  “I never know.”

  “No, you never do. I’m getting used to it, but not completely.”

  Their food arrived and they began eating the steaming seafood off the oversized plates.

  “I talked to my detailer today,” she said.

  Rat was surprised. Detailers were in charge of job assignments. They were the people you talked with when you were ready to rotate to your next job in the Navy. “You’ve only been at this job for six months.”

  “They have a burning need for a flight surgeon on one of the carriers. Since going to sea is career enhancing they wanted to know if I wanted the job.”

  “It’s easy. The answer is no.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yep. Just like that.”

  “Easy for you to say. Everything you do is golden. Everything you think about or say is automatically career enhancing. But what about for me?”

  Rat looked at her curiously. “Where is this coming from? Last time we talked, you didn’t even want a Navy career. You wanted to get out and earn some money as a real doctor.”

  “Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I talked to a few doctors out there in the real world, and they’re not all that happy. And the demand for flight surgeons isn’t all that intense. In fact the position doesn’t really exist. It’s only in the Navy they pay you to hang around airplanes, get a few flight hours, give pilots physicals, and call yourself a flight surgeon. It’s a great job, and if you want to keep doing it they’ll make you a captain. If you want to do that, you have to go to sea at some point. This is my chance.”

  “Which carrier?” Rat asked.

  “The USS Belleau Wood. Have you ever been aboard it?”

  Rat suppressed a smile. “Yeah, couple of times. Kind of old, but in really good shape.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I told you. I wouldn’t do it unless you really want to stay in the Navy for a career. Decide that first.”

  Andrea nodded silently as her mind wandered away from Rat and to the question of whether to stay in the Navy for twenty or more years.

  * * *

  Captain Tim Satterly, the surgeon of the Belleau Wood, bent over the unconscious man in his sick bay. Ever since reporting Mazmin’s condition to Captain Hogan and confronting the American wearing a Sudanese Army uniform—probably illegal under the laws of war, Satterly thought—his concern had grown. The man had been mostly unconscious for the better part of two days. The IV antibiotics were having no effect. His fever continued to rage. The chest X rays showed the fluid in the top third of both lungs, and the amount increasing with every hour. Satterly had seen numerous cases of pneumonia. He couldn’t recall one that started in the upper lobes, and he had never seen a case he couldn’t stop. He knew people died from pneumonia every day, but never in his hands. He had also never seen a case get so bad so quickly.

  Mazmin was the only one in sick bay. He lay in the middle bed in the middle room, with unoccupied beds to his left and right over immaculate waxed green tile. Dr. Satterly wore his khaki uniform under his white medical coat. He put the electronic ear-thermometer in the man’s ear canal and received an instantaneous reading—105 degrees. Satterly shook his head. He listened to the man’s labored breathing through his stethoscope. He looked once again at the oxygen number from the clip attached to Mazmin’s forefinger. Sixty percent, and going down. They were fighting a losing battle.

  Satterly was haunted by what this prisoner had said. Tortured, nearly drowned. On a table in a room surrounded by blood and death. The pneumonia he was battling could easily have been caused by the trauma he had described, depending on what was in the water that went into his lungs. He was aware of the risk of believing a prisoner. He had dealt with enough brig rats on the ship and criminals on their way to Leavenworth to realize they could be very creative in their accusations—always close enough to reality to be difficult to disprove. But Satterly found it hard to believe that this prisoner would come to the ship a few hours after his capture with a cohesive story supported by medical evidence that he couldn’t control.

  Satterly’s face reddened again as he thought of the cowboy Special Forces operative torturing a prisoner, violating the Geneva Convention and probably ten other things. Just like the terrorists. The War on Terrorism was a moral war; from his perspective it would be lost when the moral high ground was abandoned. The man lying in front of him showed that either it had been abandoned, or those responsible for preserving the moral high ground didn’t care. Ends were fast becoming more important than means.

  He took the latest chest X ray and jammed it up onto the light box hanging on the bulkhead. It showed faint indications of what might be foreign substances in the lungs, which could account for the aggressiveness of the infection.

  Lieutenant Chris Murphy, his assistant surgeon, was equally
puzzled. They both knew, without saying, that Mazmin was beyond saving. They felt helpless. No one had ever died in sick bay from a sickness since either of them reported to the Belleau Wood. Others had died from trauma, but never from sickness. “What do you think, Captain?”

  “I think if he doesn’t start responding to the antibiotics immediately we’re going to lose him.” He looked at the ice packs surrounding the man’s neck and head and under his arms.

  “What’s making him go so fast?”

  Satterly pointed to the X rays. “Foreign bodies in his lungs. He sucked something into his lungs.”

  Murphy couldn’t believe it. “How?”

  Satterly gave him a knowing, disapproving look. “Is there any doubt?” He watched Mazmin labor in his attempts to breathe. “If he dies, I’m not going to let it rest. I’m going to make sure whoever is responsible for this will pay for it.”

  “How?”

  Satterly didn’t respond.

  “So our guy here,” Murphy said. “If he got tortured like he said, would that cause him to get an infection like this? And how would he get foreign substances if all they were doing was pouring water down his throat?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I guess we should consider he has some rare African disease we’re not familiar with. But it sure looks like regular old pneumonia to me.”

  “What should we do?”

  Satterly pulled the X ray off the light box, and turned it off. “We’re doing everything we can. We’ve got him on our strongest antibiotic, we’ve given him shots, we’re cooling him down, and we’re making no progress. We just have to keep monitoring him and hope he turns around soon, or he’s not going to be with us long.”

  Chapter

  4

  Rat walked straight to the Counterterrorism Center, the CTC, that consumed acres of space on the ground floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He walked across the crowded, humming area full of cubicles where most of the people worked in a frenetic environment. He had never been to the CTC before the War on Terrorism; the Navy’s counterterrorism unit didn’t work with the CIA except in extraordinary circumstances—circumstances that Rat had never encountered.