Stern felt out of place between two military attorneys in their white uniforms. He was painfully aware that it was a club, and although he had been given a visitor’s pass, he wasn’t a member.
Stern appraised the judge, Captain Gerald Graham. Graham was a big man, burly and freckled. His thick hair was a dark brown with a reddish tint. His hairy forearms protruded from his immaculate uniform. He looked more like a wrestler than a military judge. His reputation as a judge had preceded him though, and it wasn’t that far removed from that of a wrestler. He had been a judge at the Norfolk Naval Base, and his nickname among the attorneys who practiced in front of him—both JAG lawyers and civilian lawyers—was Granite. He was unmovable. When he decided something, no additional argument or evidence would change his mind. He was also not swayed by lawyerly pleas, complaints, or whining. No one considered him unfair, simply unbending, unmovable, and humorless.
Judge Graham addressed the attorneys. “We’re going to conduct this like a regular, ordinary trial. We’re operating under a different set of rules as you know. You will also behave in accordance with the rules of evidence and rules of professional conduct. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” all three lawyers responded simultaneously.
Stern noticed that Graham’s withering gaze was directed mostly at him. He had probably done some research on who the attorneys were. He wasn’t afraid or intimidated. He just didn’t want Graham to hold anything against his client. Duar had enough problems in this trial without the judge holding Stern’s presence against him.
“We have been instructed to get this trial under way as soon as possible. I have been sent out here to do that. I want to start the trial on Monday. Anyone have any objection to that?”
Stern couldn’t believe his ears. He felt like he was being set up. He rose and spoke. “Yes, Your Honor. I have to object. I just arrived. I haven’t even had time to meet my client yet. For whatever reason my access has been denied. I also have very serious concerns about how he has been treated since he was on the ship. There was apparently a night in which he was secreted—”
Judge Graham put up his hand. “I don’t want to hear anything about that. I asked whether anyone had any objection to us beginning on Monday. You have now said that you do have an objection. Right?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“What is your name again?”
“David Stern.”
“Mr. Stern, as I understand it, you are cocounsel in this case representing Mr. Duar in the charges that have been brought against him. Am I correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then that means that your client has been represented by counsel for a time much longer than the short time you have been aboard this ship. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. Commander Little—”
“Has been representing your client since his arrival on this ship, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then the fact that another attorney representing Mr. Duar has not had unfettered access to his client for some unspecified time is not a sufficient reason to continue the trial which I want to start on Monday. Do you have any other objections?”
“No, sir. Just some time to prepare.”
“I suggest you start preparing. We’re going to start this trial on Monday. Commander Watson, will you be ready for the prosecution?”
“Yes, Your Honor. We’re ready to go.”
Judge Graham sat back and removed his reading glasses. “Has everyone read the rules on the conduct of a tribunal?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Good. I’m going to hold you to them. I’ll see you on Monday. All motions will be heard Friday at 0800. Anything else we need to deal with before Friday?”
Stern spoke, “Yes, sir. There is a very large matter which needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. It is a matter of the utmost importance and urgency. Frankly, it shows the extent to which the government is willing to go to obtain a conviction of my client in the absence of evidence.”
“And what might that be?”
“I have been informed by the prosecutor that the government is intending to offer into evidence a supposed confession that was extracted from my client.”
Graham spoke loudly in his booming voice. “And, let me guess,” he said, pointing with his glasses, “it is your position that the confession was extracted by means that violated your client’s due process rights. Am I right?”
Stern didn’t like Graham’s sarcasm. “Only if you believe that having holes burned in your scrotum might be a violation of due process.”
Graham was shocked. “Are you making a claim that your client was tortured and forced to sign a confession?”
“Exactly.” Stern let that idea hover in the room for a moment. He knew that everyone there was picturing a scrotum with holes in it, wondering what that would look like, and how exactly that was accomplished—horrified yet fascinated at the same time. “My client was taken off this ship under the control of the American military—or an intelligence agency, I’m not sure which—and returned in a tortured state with burn marks on his ears and scrotum. I have been given a confession by Commander Watson and told she intended to use it in this case. It is obvious—”
“You want to bring a motion to exclude the confession, I take it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Graham nodded. “That will be our first motion on Friday morning. Anything else?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“See you Friday.”
* * *
The American C-130 Hercules touched down on the enormous concrete runway at the airfield the Soviets had abandoned and that the Georgians had let fall into disrepair. The plane taxied to where two men waited and signaled with flashlights. One of the men placed large wooden chocks behind the wheels, and the pilot shut down the engines.
The side door opened and a single passenger stepped out carefully in the darkness. He was carrying two heavy bags. He looked for whoever he was supposed to report to, but only expected to recognize him by a uniform. He saw Rat standing next to Colonel Beridze, McSwain, and two other Green Berets. He began walking toward them.
Rat extended his hand to the man who set down his two heavy cases. “You must be Mark James. I’m Kent Rathman.”
“You’re the one who requested me.”
“Yes. This is Mick McSwain, with the Green Berets, and this is Colonel Beridze of the Georgian Army. Is that your detection gear?”
“Pleased to meet you,” James answered. Then to Rat, “Yeah.”
“Who do you work for?” Beridze asked.
“For the United States,” James answered.
“This way,” Rat pointed, heading toward the waiting trucks. “Thanks for coming to Georgia. Sorry to drag you here on such short notice. Your gear make it through intact?”
“Sure, no problem. And I’ve been here before. Several times.”
Rat looked at him with surprise. “Why?”
James looked over his shoulder to see that Beridze couldn’t hear. “Ever heard of Gamma Kolos?”
Rat shook his head.
“Our good Russian friends had a great idea. They thought maybe plants—crops—would grow better if they were radioactive. So they buried cesium 137 in the ground on a bunch of farms trying to irradiate the plants and see if they’d grow. They sort of forgot about the cesium they left in the ground, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they left about a thousand of these cesium canisters all over the damned place. They don’t even know where they are, but a bunch of them were in Georgia. We helped them look for them.”
“Are you serious? Find any?”
“I’m very serious, and yeah, we found a lot of them. But I’m sure there are a lot of them still out there, waiting for some farm kid to plow them up, open the canister, and die.”
“Isn’t cesium the very same stuff that’s in some of these RTGs we’re looking for?”
“The very same. Really bad shit. Gamma emitter. Can kil
l you very dead. Half-life of about thirty years. And in the Gamma Kolos program that this Russian brain surgeon came up with, it’s in the form of pellets or even a fine powder, like talcum. Blow that shit up and it will float all over the place taking radiation, death, and contamination with it. Hell, you don’t really have to even do that. Just open the can and people start dying.”
They reached the truck.
“Did you read the reports?” Rat asked.
“Yeah,” James said.
Rat waited. “So what do you think?”
James shook his head in disgust. The truck’s headlights illuminated his frowning face. “Pretty damned predictable. Russians made about five hundred of these remote generators. Have to assume someone will get ahold of one of them when you leave them in the middle of goddamned nowhere. The cesium cores are the worst. The others use radioactive strontium.”
“Strontium?” Rat asked.
“It’s a beta-emitter with a half-life of twenty-eight point five years.”
James carefully placed his heavy bags in the backseat of one of the trucks.
“Could they use strontium for a dirty bomb?” Rat asked.
“It’s not as bad as cesium, but it would still be a really nasty, ugly, dirty bomb. Not that it would kill all that many people, but imagine a city that is radioactive. Imagine Manhattan deserted for years. Not one or two years, ten or twenty. A ghost town.” He looked up. “How many of the cores did they get?”
“We think at least ten.”
“Any idea where they are?”
“We think they’re in the Pankisi gorge.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’re going into the gorge tomorrow. We’ve got to find the cores before they do something with them. The colonel here,” Rat said indicating Beridze, “says there are a few places where you expect people holding these things to hide. We’re going to check them out. What’s the range on your gear?”
“Depends on how much radiation there is and how well shielded it is. Generally, it’s very sensitive.”
“What about just flying a helicopter down the gorge? Could that do it?”
“If they’re well shielded, we’ll need to be within a few feet.”
Rat was disappointed. “This may be a waste of time.”
“Depends on what your expectations are. You just want to find out whether somebody has these cores, right?”
“And where they are. We need to get to them. And I’m beginning to suspect who it is, which makes the need to find them all that much greater.”
“Who?”
They climbed into the trucks. “Duar’s people.”
James was shocked. “I thought we captured him.”
“We did. But we didn’t shut down his organization. Can you tell us whether these radioactive cores are in the gorge?”
“I can probably find out if they’re there, but if it’s a negative report—if we find no signs of them—we still can’t say with that much certainty that they’re not there. How big is this gorge?”
“It’s about twenty miles across and fifty miles long.”
“And it’s full of revolutionaries, terrorists, and rebels?”
“Not so many, but enough to make it difficult. That’s why we’re training the Georgian Army. But the worst of it is they’re hiding among the general population and refugees. It’s hard to pick them out.”
“So maybe we should do a flyby in the helicopter tonight—see if we get any readings. If not, we’ll have to go in on the ground,” James said as he climbed into the truck and leaned his head back on the back of the seat. The exhaustion from the long trip was catching up with him.
* * *
The three FBI forensic experts sat in DeLong’s office with their roll-on luggage and equipment stacked behind them. The leader of the team, Peter Symmes, spoke. “So what exactly is our role here?” He had that federal look about him, dark blue pants, cheap polo shirt, and government-issue haircut.
DeLong was quite proud of himself that he had convinced the police chief of Monrovia to allow the FBI to assist in the investigation. What he didn’t know was whether it was too late. “To assist the Liberian police in the investigation.”
“What does that mean exactly? Do we have control of the scene?”
“No, you don’t. But the police—”
“Has the car been moved?”
“No. It’s in exactly the same place it was when it landed. It has rained several times though.”
Symmes grimaced. “That’s always helpful.” Symmes thought about the investigation for a moment. The one thing he didn’t want was to be involved in an investigation that was going to be a failure. He was positive that if he was given a free hand and control of the evidence he would find out what had happened. But in his experience, when he went to a third world stink hole, and all the people who thought they were smart were walking around booting evidence out of sight, the likelihood of a successful investigation fell off the table. Either he was in charge, or he was gone. “What do you want out of this?”
“Who did this, how they did it, and why. We’ll be working with you. We have people running down the victim’s family, friends, other possible motives. But we need your help on the bomb. One of the . . . people on my staff said he thought it was C4.”
“On what basis did he make that statement?”
“He examined the photographs.”
Symmes tried not to show his contempt for such opinions. There was nothing he liked better than an amateur telling him the exact type of explosive used in a car bomb from a photograph. Even he couldn’t do that.
“Maybe you can tell us,” DeLong said, reading Symmes’s silence. “Tell us what it was, where it came from, whatever. Look, we need some help here. We may be on to something. They don’t have much terrorism here. If that’s what it was—but it probably wasn’t some loan shark angry at a debtor, or someone who hates banks that blew up someone to make a point. It may be that some bad people are here and we need to know what they’re doing and why. And at the end of the day, it’s always about us.”
Symmes nodded.
“I’ve arranged for a vehicle to take you guys over to the scene. Remember, no jackets, hats, or anything else that say FBI.”
Symmes shook his head. “So the geniuses can take credit for our work.”
“I don’t really care who gets credit. What I care about is finding out who did this.”
“I care about both. Because we want them to call us first the next time, and they’re more likely to do that when they know that we can help them, and that we will.”
“True enough, but you saw the same messages I did. Washington wants this done quietly. We don’t want whoever is behind this to know we’re even sniffing around.”
“Don’t you think it may be sort of obvious? I mean I’m not exactly five foot six and black like most of the men around here.”
“Nothing we can do about that.”
Symmes stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Colonel Zurab Beridze placed the detailed topographical map of the Pankisi gorge on the hood of the Russian-made diesel truck. It had six wheels, two rows of seats in the front—enough for six men—and a large bed with benches in it capable of carrying ten more men in the back. The truck, like the other behind it, was old and worn with visible rust on the sides. The taut canvas top over the bed was equally tired and had innumerable small holes, as if it had been splattered with acid. Beridze motioned for Rat, McSwain, and a Georgian Army captain to look at the map with him. “This is Captain Eldar Kolbaia,” he said, gesturing to a soldier. “He will be in charge of this mission.” Rat nodded at him and the man returned his nod. He was tall and in good shape. Very confident.
Beridze put his hand on the map. “Here it is,” he said in his heavily accented English, pointing to the dirt road that ran around a small mountain and entered the Pankisi gorge. “The only way in from here.”
Rat looked at the map then at
the colonel. “How often do you have someone drive through the gorge?”
Beridze thought for a moment as he rubbed his face. “Perhaps once a month.”
“Any problems?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What kind?”
“People shoot at us from the hills; usually a long way off. Not very accurate. Also sometimes groups of people in the camps cross the road at the same time to block the road. Others approach to see who’s inside, probably trying to decide whether to kill us. Or kidnap us,” Beridze said with complete seriousness. “It is very, how do you say, um, tense? Difficult?”
The colonel continued. “So you go into the gorge . . . here. Based on the infrared images from the helicopter last night, most people are here, here, and here,” he said, pointing with his thick finger. “The road is very rough. To get to the last place, and to get out from there you have to climb up a steep hill. Then back here. It is about eight hours.” He looked at his captain. “You have a radio. Call if you need any help, and call from each enclave to report entering and leaving.”
“You’re not coming with us?” Rat asked, surprised.
Beridze shook his head vigorously. “I would not contribute. And a colonel is a much more interesting person to kidnap than a captain.”
“What about kidnapping Americans?”
“Yes. It is a risk. That is why we gave you Georgian uniforms. Don’t speak where anyone can hear you. Does your man have to get out of the vehicle for his machine to work?”
“No.”
“Good. Stay in, stay out of sight.”
The colonel said to the captain, “You had better get going. I don’t want you to be left trying to get out of the gorge at night.”
Rat nodded as he rested his hand on his MP5N, his favorite weapon. He felt for the extra clips in his belt, his grenades, and his .45 caliber handgun, a Para-Ordnance 14.45 LDA. He had even brought his night-vision goggles for good measure. He had heard the colonel’s speech before; he knew after dark the gorge would grow much more dangerous. But he liked to believe that he did too.
Secret Justice Page 21
