Secret Justice

by James W. Huston

  He knocked loudly on the door.

  “Who is it?” Andrea called from inside.

  “Rat.”

  “Kent?”

  “Yeah,” he said, hoping no one was listening. No one in the entire Navy called him Kent except Andrea. He hated that name; it sounded like the name of a kid who might win a spelling bee.

  The door opened and Andrea was standing before him in her uniform slacks, shoes, and a white bra. Her hair was dripping wet.

  His eyebrows went up. “Nice of you to take off your shirt for me.”

  “I don’t really want to talk to you,” she said, with a look he had never seen before.

  He frowned. “Why not?”

  She started to close the door.

  He stuck his foot in the way, keeping the door open a few inches. “What’s going on?”

  She opened it again and said loudly, “I’ve seen him, Kent. I’ve seen what you did! I saw the burn marks on his ears and his balls. How could you do that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Right. You took him off the ship and brought him back and have no idea how he might have gotten tortured in between. Give me a break.” She went to slam the door closed but he pushed it first, throwing it open. He stepped into her room and closed it behind him.

  “You know, Andrea, I’m willing to take my lumps if I did something wrong, but you of all people. You don’t even give me a chance to explain? Did you get all this from Satterly? More of his Doctors sans Whatever? You don’t even ask me?”

  She went to the sink and picked up the hair dryer. She dried her hair vigorously for five minutes. Rat sat in her desk chair and waited. Finally she turned off the hair dryer and retrieved her blouse from the closet. She put it on hurriedly. “I just can’t believe what you did to that man, Kent.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then who did?”

  “The Egyptians. I wasn’t anywhere near it when it happened.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t lie to you. You know that. I’ve always told you there will be things I can’t tell you, and you’ll just have to deal with that. But I won’t lie to you. Never have.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Rat was stung. “Fine.” He considered walking out.

  “You think it’s okay? You just torture someone if you feel like it?”

  “No. It depends on the circumstances.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you’re trying to do. Why you’re doing it.”

  “So sometimes it’s okay?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “The end justifies the means?”

  “No, but it is relevant.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “If you know some guy has a nuclear weapon set to go off in ten minutes, you wouldn’t twist his arm to find out where the bomb was?”

  She hesitated. “That would never happen.”

  “You sure? What if it did?”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  “You’re just afraid of the conclusion.”

  “We never capture somebody who knows where a bomb is.”

  “What if we capture somebody who knows where the most wanted terrorist in the world is, the guy who has a nuclear bomb and is going to set it off? We can’t apply some pressure to find out where that other guy is and stop him before he even plants the bomb? I’ve got no problem with that at all.”

  “So you would just torture him.”

  “In that case I would. I’d be all over his ass. But in a way to get the information, not to hurt him, or maim him. To get intelligence.”

  “That’s real convenient.”

  He stood up to look into her eyes. “Otherwise what? I ask him, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ and he tells me to eat shit, and I say, okay, sorry to ask you a question. What can I do? What are my choices? Yell at him? Threaten him? What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rat shook his head. “People just don’t get what we’re dealing with. No idea. These people are evil, Andrea. They would like nothing better than to murder you. Nothing. And if you had children, they’d like to murder them too. And me, well, we can’t even go into what they’d want to do to me.”

  “But if we torture them, we’re just like them.”

  “That’s such bullshit! People say that all the time, but they don’t really think about it. I don’t say we should torture them for fun, or to punish, just to gain information. And nothing that’s permanent, or just to inflict pain, or intimidate. That’s why water is so good. Effective, and no long-lasting effects.”

  “Unless it kills him.”

  “Yeah, well, that doesn’t happen much.”

  “But it can corrupt you, Kent. Make you calloused to where you don’t care about people anymore.”

  “Who told you that? Satterly?”

  “Well, wouldn’t it? You’re good, Kent. It would take away your goodness. You’d become hardened, and mean.”

  “No, Andrea, I’m not good. Neither are you. None of us is good, not one.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a quote.”

  “From who?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul who?”

  “Paul in Romans.”

  She was shocked. “You’re quoting the Bible? Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, I’m serious. And I can quote Homer and Plato if you want. We aren’t perfect, Andrea. Nobody is. But we have to get these guys. And we need to rethink how. If we play by the same old Geneva Convention rules in a war where they’re not wearing uniforms, killing civilians as their main target, murdering whoever they want and hiding in the shadows, it’s going to be a much longer road and a lot more people are going to get killed. We need to shorten it up a lot. This is one way.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a steep, slippery slope and you won’t be able to stop.”

  “I disagree. But don’t think of me as some evil guy.”

  “I don’t know, Kent. I don’t want us to become like them.”

  “Then don’t. Stay as you are. I sure plan to.”

  “You won’t be able to.”

  He crossed to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She was cold and unyielding. She looked into his eyes angrily. “You holding this against me?”

  “Today I am. I need to think about this.”

  “Even though I had nothing to do with it?”

  “You were there!”

  “No, I wasn’t. You want to know what’s really going on?”

  “Yes.”

  “I take the guy there, then while we’re with him, watching the Egyptians do a kid glove interrogation—he was scared shitless though, so it was sort of effective—then we leave, like we’re supposed to. We go back to get Duar and he’s all messed up and the Egyptians are done with him. We got our intel, but they used the wrong methods. And I was nearby. So the guy who supposedly tortured one of these guys is now responsible for both. That’s how somebody in Washington wants it to look. And now they’re sending me to Georgia.”

  She considered what he had said. “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But probably Stuntz. He thinks I’m the key to taking St. James out of the picture.”

  “What about the guy who died on this ship? Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “That’s how we captured Duar. Does that matter?”

  “Yeah, it matters. And if you did that, it doesn’t justify it just because you got Duar.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He turned and walked out of her room, closing the door loudly behind him.

  * * *

  William DeLong had long wondered what he had done wrong to get assigned as the CIA Station Chief in Liberia. His career had been going so well. But he had obviously pissed someone off and ended up in Liberia, where nothing happened and nothing was ever expected to happen. Monrovia had all the advantages of the usual third world city�
��bad food, unsanitary conditions, unpredictable electricity, and enough discouragement to make him consider extreme scenarios to get home. But DeLong had decided to endure, to be the good soldier, and somehow get his CIA career back on track.

  He got along well enough with the ambassador, Maureen Lips-comb, who had been given the ambassadorship as a political plum for being the Rhode Island campaign chairman of President Kendrick’s election campaign. She had absolutely no foreign policy experience, and no real interest in Liberia or Africa; she hoped to use her current position as a stepping-stone for a run for the governorship of her home state. DeLong thought it was a stupid strategy, but what did he know about politics?

  He now had a mission, a charge from Washington to get to the bottom of the car bombing that had blown some poor old lady sky high in front of a bank.

  He examined the photographs of the remains of the car. The Liberian police had done a good job photographing the scene, but they had rejected the American offer of help in the investigation. They said they could handle it, which DeLong knew to be completely untrue. They were in way over their heads, so the chances of finding whoever did it were small and fading. They had rejected help from the English and French as well, trying, he guessed, to show the world how indepen-dent and competent they were.

  “Ray,” DeLong said to his field officer, Ray Winter, who passed as a member of the State Department, working with visas. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  “Assassination.”

  He agreed. “Why do you say that?”

  “Placement. They intended to blow into her from the engine compartment. If they wanted the bank, they would have put the explosives in the trunk. And judging by the force involved, it was very high explosive. Either a lot of it, or very high-quality stuff. Since it was in the engine cavity, probably high quality. Not enough room for a lot of it. Which means someone had access to military grade explosives, and probably could have put in a lot more. He put in just enough to ensure the driver was killed—in a spectacular way—but not enough to actually take out the building. He was after the old lady.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. She wasn’t political, not involved in anything anyone I have talked to knew anything about, and threatened no one.”

  “What about her family?”

  “Lived alone. Only son works for a local shipping company.”

  DeLong thought about that. “One son?”

  “Only child.”

  “Anything on him?”

  “Haven’t really looked yet.”

  “Any reason he’d whack her? Inheritance? Life insurance? Anything?”

  “I doubt it. She was pretty poor, but I’ll check into it. But could be that he’s the target too. Someone wants something from him.”

  “That’s what I was thinking too. Someone stands to gain from this.”

  “Doesn’t have that random, anarchy sort of look, does it. Looks like a target.”

  “We aren’t going to get much help, but we’ve got to tell Washington why this happened. Their antiterror antennae are up and alert. Anything they can’t explain may be linked to something else they don’t know about. Or something they do.” He stuffed the photos back into the envelope and handed them to Ray. “This could be our ticket out of this shit-hole.”

  Ray nodded, took the envelope, and stood. “I’m going to convince the Monrovian police that they need the FBI even though they don’t know it yet. It’s really our only chance of finding out what the hell happened here.”

  Chapter

  15

  Rat’s airplane flared late and landed hard on the cracked runway at Tbilisi, Georgia. Rat sighed. He hated flying in airlines from places like Georgia and the Ukraine. He didn’t trust them. They didn’t have the budget to keep their airplanes in the condition he had come to expect from American and European airlines. Every flight was an adventure. He felt more exposed and out of control than at almost any other time. Even in the middle of a mission he always felt as if he was in control. But every time he stepped onto an airliner he didn’t trust, he envisioned some drunk pilot flying poorly maintained equipment with him in the back, unable to do anything about it. All for the cause, he thought. What cause? Freedom? The eradication of evil from the face of the earth? The eradication of terrorism? For today, just the cause of helping the Georgians rid themselves of the infection of terrorists who were setting up a Lebanese Bekáa Valley right in the middle of their country, a place where terrorists were welcome from all over the world to come and train, share information, share troops, share ideology, and go forth to commit murder and mayhem on the Western world.

  The four Navy SEALs, on temporary assignment to the CIA’s SAS, hustled down the steps to the tarmac at Tbilisi. Several men were waiting to escort them to one of the three waiting Russian-made MI-24 Hind helicopters. Rat immediately recognized one of them, Captain Mick McSwain of the U.S. Army Green Berets. He had known McSwain for years and had the highest respect for him. “Mick!” he yelled over the sound of the helicopter engines as he stepped onto the ground. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  McSwain smiled. “I could ask you the same thing! What’s a squid doing this far from an ocean? This is Army territory, boy.”

  They shook hands and smiled, each grateful to see an old friend, as Rat scanned the airport and the waiting helicopters. He noticed numerous American Green Berets and Georgian Army men in the helicopters. A Georgian officer walked toward them slowly. McSwain waited, then introduced him. “Rat, this is Colonel Zurab Beridze. Colonel, Kent Rathman.” Beridze extended his hand and pointed to a helicopter. “You will be with me in this helicopter!” he yelled in heavily accented English.

  Rat nodded and looked at Mick. “Have you established a camp?”

  “Two days ago. This is the last group.”

  “Great. Let’s go. Are we going directly to the camp?”

  Beridze shook his head vigorously. “No. One stop first. We must check a thing. A development.”

  Rat looked at McSwain. “What kind of development?”

  McSwain replied as he watched the colonel struggling for the words. “They found three Georgians murdered near the remains of one of their small, remote power-generating stations.”

  “And?”

  “They’re very concerned. They want to find out what happened. Who did it, and whether they were able to get into the generating station.”

  “How long ago did this happen?” Rat asked as they walked toward the helicopters and the blades began to turn.

  “Found them yesterday.”

  Rat stopped and frowned. “What am I missing?”

  “The generators are nuclear powered. The cores can be removed. They’re radioactive and could be used to make a really nasty dirty bomb.”

  Rat suddenly realized why Johnson’s suspicions were correct, and why they were so ominous. “They know who did it?”

  “They think maybe one of your guys.”

  “My guys?”

  “Your buddies from Sudan.”

  “Duar’s men.”

  “Who else? Why did you think they wanted you?”

  An airman pulled the helicopter door up behind him and directed him to one of the webbed seats of the old Russian beast. It was dirty and noisy. The combined smells of jet fuel, dirt, and stale men pervaded the air in the cramped belly of the ungainly ship. The blades increased in speed, changed pitch, and beat their way into the air, pulling the large helicopter off the ground.

  Rat watched the occupants of the helicopter bounce in unison as they continued to climb and turn away from Tbilisi. McSwain’s words began to haunt him. Nuclear cores that could be used to make a dirty bomb. But if Johnson was wrong and it wasn’t Duar’s people, then who? Chechens for an attack on Moscow? Georgians? Others? The reports he had received had placed Afghanis, Pakistanis, Sudanese, even Saudi terrorists in the Pankisi gorge. A worldwide assembly of evil. Any of them might want radioactive material. And other than the Chechens or Georgian
s, almost any of the others would have America as their target.

  The helicopters flew across the lush countryside for two hours, vibrating the occupants to near numbness, then slowed as they approached the stop Colonel Beridze had promised. Rat glanced at him as he felt the helicopter slow, and Beridze nodded enthusiastically. He pointed down to the ground as the helicopter descended to a large clearing in the woods. The trees weren’t a factor, but the clearing was far from level. The helicopters settled heavily into the knee-high grass as the pilots pushed the collective to the floor, taking all lift off the blades. They shut down the engines and all the men climbed out, grateful for the chance to stretch their legs. Several walked a few steps away and began urinating with groans of relief.

  Beridze gathered Rat and McSwain. “Come. To the truck, there.” He walked westward to where several men stood near a truck at the tree line. The men had dug up the shallow graves of Nino and his men.

  Rat glanced at the three dead men. “How did you find these guys?”

  Beridze looked at the dead men, then pointed. “Local farmer. He was afraid we would blame him. One of the men was shot from the front, the other two shot from behind by automatic weapons. Looks like an ambush by friends. We found no blood from any other men.” He turned to the man next to him and spoke in Georgian. He returned his attention to Rat. “Yes. No evidence of other men being shot. Just the three. Perhaps they had argument—but kill three at once? Three Georgians? Probably armed? That is not so easy.”

  Groomer bent down to examine the bodies. His first tour of duty in the Navy had been as a corpsman. He denied it when asked because he didn’t want to get pigeonholed. He had served as a corpsman with the Marine Corps, then decided he wanted to be a SEAL. He had tried to eradicate any reference to medical skill in his record; he wanted to carry weapons and hurt people that were out to get the United States, not carry water for others who did the fighting. But he remembered enough of his medical training for it to be helpful sometimes.

  He pulled latex gloves out of a pocket and put them on his large hands like someone who had done it hundreds of times. Beridze watched in amazement as Groomer went to the large man with a beard who was lying on his back with two bullet holes in his chest and lifted his arm to check for rigor mortis. The arm was limp and fell softly back to the ground when he let it go. Groomer checked his eyes, his hair, his fingernails. He pulled several maggots off Nino’s face around his eyes and examined them carefully as small red ants from Nino crawled on Groomer’s gloved hands. He looked at the maggots’ stage of development and the number on Nino. He pulled out a magnifying glass and looked at Nino’s face to see how much damage had been done by the fly larvae. He put the glass back, stood up, and removed his gloves. He tossed the gloves on Nino’s chest.