Secret Justice

by James W. Huston

  “Captain, we have another sonar contact bearing three-six-zero at thirty thousand yards.”

  Captain Pugh glanced at the chart. This contact would take them well north of the projected route of the Monrovian Prince, but he had already viewed all the sonar contacts in the immediate vicinity. He could check this contact out and return to the projected track without losing too much time. He turned to the Officer of the Deck. “Take heading three-six-zero, set twenty knots.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The large submarine turned slowly from east to north and began its pursuit of the newest sonar contact.

  * * *

  Judge Royce Wiggins spoke to Skyles, “Mr. Skyles, do you plan on calling any witnesses for the defense?”

  Skyles rose slowly. “Yes, Your Honor. The defense would like to call Andrea Ash.”

  The gallery, which had been readmitted, turned as one to look at her. The marshal went into the hallway and called her name. She walked into the courtroom and lit it up. Her shimmering white uniform and bright look brought energy to the entire procedure. It was something she had encountered for so long she barely noticed. But this felt different. She didn’t know what the signals were that people were giving off. She had been unable to watch the trial because of the judge’s rule excluding witnesses until they had testified. She had waited for Rat at the end of each day though. She had been warned by Skyles not to because it would put her testimony in jeopardy. The jury would assume that she was testifying because of her relationship with Rat. She said she would take that risk. Rat didn’t seem to mind.

  Her shoulder boards were different from Rat’s only in that she wore the medical insignia that Satterly had worn instead of Rat’s five-pointed star.

  Skyles asked, “Do you know Dr. Satterly?”

  “I work with him aboard the Belleau Wood.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “I haven’t been aboard that long, but I see him frequently throughout the day.”

  Wolff wasn’t going to let Skyles have much room. “Objection, Your Honor. What is the possible relevance of any of this testimony?”

  “Mr. Skyles?”

  “It is to show the bias of the witness on whom Mr. Wolff has relied so heavily in his otherwise nonexistent case. If Dr. Satterly’s testimony is—”

  “That’s enough, Mr. Skyles. Overruled,” Wiggins said to Wolff, annoyed by Skyles’s editorializing.

  Skyles looked at Andrea. “Have you ever heard Dr. Satterly say anything that made you believe he was out to get Lieutenant Rathman?”

  “He used those very words. One time he said to me that he was going to get Lieutenant Rathman if it was the last thing he did.”

  “What did you take that to mean?”

  “He seemed to take the death of that terrorist personally. He was really offended by the fact that he died. He blamed his death on Lieutenant Rathman. He wanted him to be punished.”

  “Did he say these things to you?”

  “Several times.”

  “Did he ever call Lieutenant Rathman any names in your presence, anything critical?”

  “Well, he called him a murderer. He said he was a murdering barbarian, and that he was cold and amoral.”

  “Do you know Lieutenant Rathman?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How?”

  “When I was the flight surgeon for the Blue Angels he was assigned to the team to defend one of the pilots from an attempt to assassinate him, to shoot down the team. I met him in California and got to know him.”

  “Did you form a personal relationship with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you maintained that personal relationship with him?”

  “Yes, we continue to date.”

  “Are you the kind of person who would lie or make things up to protect him?”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

  Skyles paused. “You sure?”

  “Yes. Quite.”

  Skyles nodded, letting her testimony sink in with the jury. “Did Dr. Satterly do anything else that made you think he was out to get Lieutenant Rathman?”

  “He told me he’d done a tour with NATO in Belgium. He loved his tour of duty there, and made friends with one of the European lawyers assigned to NATO headquarters. I don’t recall his name—I’m not sure he told me. He stayed in contact with him. He e-mails him maybe once a month.”

  Skyles waited, letting the tension build. He then asked, “Why does that matter?”

  “That European lawyer is now assigned to the International Criminal Court in Holland—the court set up to try international war criminals. As soon as the terrorist died on board the Belleau Wood, Dr. Satterly e-mailed his friend and told him the ICC should put Lieutenant Rathman on trial. As a war criminal.”

  Skyles looked at each of the jurors. He wanted them to smell the conspiracy that lurked behind the curtain somewhere. A conspiracy so deep he couldn’t get to it, but he knew it was there, and he knew the jury would smell it if he let them. People loved to believe in government conspiracies. All it would take was one juror to think something was wrong with this trial, something they couldn’t see, some reasonable doubt, and he would have a hung jury. Good enough. But if enough bought it, Rathman would walk. “Did he tell you he had e-mailed this European attorney?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know he did?”

  “I brought a copy of it with me,” she said, holding up a piece of paper.

  Wolff was stunned. He stood.

  “Did he give it to you?” Skyles continued quickly.

  “No.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “I asked to borrow his computer when he was gone because mine didn’t have the right Ethernet card to work on the ship and I couldn’t do e-mail yet. When I turned on his computer I found this e-mail saved to the hard drive and printed it.”

  Skyles glanced at Wolff, who was turning scarlet.

  “What is the name of this European attorney? The one Dr. Satterly e-mailed?”

  She looked at the “To” block of the e-mail. “Didier Picque.”

  “The very attorney mentioned in the Washington Post this morning as the one who allegedly told the Secretary of Defense that if Lieutenant Rathman wasn’t prosecuted here in this court, they would drag him to The Hague and try him as a war criminal?”

  Wolff erupted, “Objection! Hearsay, argumentative, four-oh-three, Your Honor! This is outrageous!”

  “I withdraw the question.” Skyles glanced at the jury, then turned to Wolff. “Your witness.”

  * * *

  Captain Pugh held the Louisiana at periscope depth. He had been watching this latest target on sonar for miles. It had been consistently heading northwest. It looked like just another routine merchant contact, but he had to check it out. He glanced down at the photograph of the Monrovian Prince they had received from Washington again, then at the clock. The sun had broken the horizon and he was up sun of the target. “Up periscope,” he commanded. The cylinder hissed as it quickly moved up past him and brought the eyepiece to his level.

  As the periscope broke the surface of the ocean he looked toward the ship clearly illuminated on the horizon. No telltale cranes, no containers stacked on deck.

  Pugh turned to the Officer of the Deck. “Put me a thousand yards astern of her. Let’s get her name and call it in.”

  The lieutenant complied, turning quickly to port and increasing speed. Minutes later the Louisiana was astern of the ship and Pugh raised the periscope again. He wanted to get a photograph to transmit to Washington with the others he had already sent. The periscope broke the surface. He twisted the handle and digitally zoomed in on the stern of the ship. He read it aloud, “Sea Dragon. Hong Kong.” He squeezed the trigger, capturing the image with the high-resolution digital camera. “Down periscope!” He looked at his lieutenant, the one in charge of electronic warfare. “How’s her radar?”

  The lieutenant had been expecting the question. “Matc
hes the Sea Dragon.”

  Pugh nodded as the periscope retreated into the deck at his feet. “No cranes, no containers, wrong name, wrong city, wrong direction, heading for the wrong port, wrong speed, you name it. Send the name and location off with the others. Set a course for our next contact.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  * * *

  “Would this be a good time to take a break, Your Honor?” Wolff asked, desperate for some time to think, maybe make a few phone calls.

  “No,” Wiggins replied. “It would not.”

  “Very well,” Wolff nodded, as if that was what he expected, trying not to show his frustration and anger.

  He strode slowly to the lectern and looked at Andrea Ash, one of the prettiest women he had ever seen. He could tell the jury loved her. She had come across as capable, bright, energetic, honest, and she had even elicited sympathy for coming to the defense of her boyfriend, a fact that was usually fatal to an ordinary witness’s testimony.

  He also didn’t know what else her little briefcase contained other than the e-mail to Didier Picque. Wolff had sent one of his associates to get Dr. Satterly back to the courtroom to testify in rebuttal and help them attack her, but he hadn’t yet arrived.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant Ash. Or should I call you doctor?”

  “Either one,” she replied.

  “Lieutenant Rathman, Rat as we’ve learned he is called, is your boyfriend. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Wolff didn’t know enough facts so he was going to have to take some chances. “You live together, don’t you?”

  “No. We don’t even live in the same state. And right now I’m stationed aboard the Belleau Wood, which was in the IO but now is in the South Atlantic.”

  “You don’t like Dr. Satterly very much, do you?”

  She shrugged almost imperceptibly. “He’s okay.”

  “Do you think it’s okay to read other people’s mail?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Well, when you were using Dr. Satterly’s computer, his laptop, you came across this e-mail that you’ve shown us here. And probably others, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that his e-mails were none of your business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you read them anyway?”

  “They were about Rat. I was interested.”

  “But they weren’t addressed to you, were they? . . . So you were reading someone else’s mail, or e-mail.”

  “More or less, I guess.”

  “You think that’s okay?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably not the best thing.”

  “He wouldn’t have approved, would he?”

  “Speculation,” Skyles said.

  “Sustained.”

  “But you never asked Dr. Satterly for permission to do that, did you?”

  “No.”

  Wolff nodded. “Haven’t I seen you sitting outside this courtroom for days?”

  “Off and on.”

  “You’ve been here for days, you saw Dr. Satterly come and testify . . . and you never took the opportunity to ask him if he would mind you reading, then printing, and showing to the world, a private e-mail that you found on his computer. Right?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “And what you have come here to say, as I understand it—and correct me if I’m wrong—is that Captain Satterly expressed his concern and anger to a friend of his, a Belgian lawyer, about the torture and death of a man he had treated as his patient.” He waited. “Correct?”

  “Basically.”

  “No further questions.”

  * * *

  The entire National Security Council and a few others met in the situation room at the White House. The tension was clear on President Kendrick’s face. He had heard enough of how hard it was to find “one ship.” All the others in the room felt the same thing. The new information they were hearing was deeply troubling. Kendrick looked at Stewart Woods. “So where are we?”

  Woods looked at Admiral Billy Robinson, the Chief of Naval Operations. The admiral knew that was the only reason he was there: to answer the question that he had no answer to. “Frankly, sir, we don’t know. We can’t find any trace of it. We have been scouring the seas all along the East Coast both north and south of its path, and haven’t seen any sign of it at all. We’ve increased the circle to all possible locations at maximum possible speed in any direction. I’ve also checked with Navy intelligence and the NSA, and we have no satellite interception of its electronic signature. It seems to have vanished.”

  “Is that what you believe has happened, Admiral?”

  “Of course not, Mr. President. That ship is out there, unless it sank, which I doubt. The question now is why are we missing it? Ever since Secretary Stuntz told us to go look, I sent out every ship and airplane available on the East Coast. I’ve sortied a destroyer or frigate every four hours from Norfolk, I sent out every airplane from Oceana; we sent all of our maritime patrol aircraft all over the western Atlantic; we even have our ballistic missile submarines looking for the ship. We have the Reagan returning from the Mediterranean checking the course from the east side, and still nothing. So why are we missing the ship? Two possibilities: One, the ship is not headed for the East Coast of United States at all. Initially we were concentrating on Jacksonville as that is the ship’s destination. That obviously assumes the ship is going to its listed destination—a dangerous assumption. Perhaps it is instead headed for New Orleans, or Tampa, or New York. The other possibility is that the ship has disguised itself. That’s not easy to do without serious structural change. The Monrovian Prince had two large cranes fore and aft, which don’t move. Those are hard to disguise. It also is filled with containers. Those are not easy to disguise either. They could change the name, but the appearance is much harder. Likewise changing the electronics aboard is not impossible, but not easy. But if someone was dedicated to changing the appearance, and they are more clever than we have given them credit for, then they could be out there right now, looking like another ship, and we may have already seen her.”

  “What do you propose to do to find the ship, Admiral? Because if you don’t find it, we could be in for a catastrophe.”

  “Sir, I think we need to put a blockade into effect. I think we need to station Navy ships and Coast Guard cutters at every major port on the East Coast and stop every ship. Some we can let go immediately because they are clearly not our ship, those that are three hundred feet long, or are bulk cargo carriers, etc. But if it is anywhere close to our target ship in size, then we board and make sure we have what we think we have.”

  “How long would it take to put the ships in place to do that?”

  “I’d say about forty-eight hours at a minimum. Probably seventy-two to be effective. I’m also not sure we have enough ships to do it. There are an awful lot of ways to approach every port.”

  “We may not have forty-eight hours,” St. James said. “We’ve all been assuming that the ship was only going to travel at ten knots. But if the ship has picked up speed, it may be here tomorrow. Mr. President, I think we need to put in place assets to attack the ship and sink it. We need to put airplanes on runways with air-to-surface missiles and prepare some SEAL teams to board if that’s what’s necessary. We need to be ready to strike. I don’t think we’re going to stop it in the ocean. We’re missing something.”

  Stuntz looked at St. James and then at Kendrick. He hated agreeing with her, but he had no choice. “I agree, Mr. President. But we will need to know our rules of engagement. If we identify the ship, are we cleared to sink her?”

  President Kendrick looked at Woods. “How sure are we that Wahamed Duar is aboard that ship?”

  “Fairly sure, Mr. President. Not positive, but fairly sure.”

  “Sure enough to kill several innocent civilian employees of a Liberian shipping company? Because if we sink the ship, it’s not just terrorists who
will die, it’s the innocent sailors aboard the ship.”

  Woods considered before speaking. “Sir, if it was up to me, I would wait until the situation developed before making a decision on what we’re going to do. I say let’s see how this plays out. You can certainly give the order to sink it anytime you want but if you give an open order to sink it now, and new information is developed later . . .”

  President Kendrick closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them he looked at Admiral Robinson. “Find that ship. Find it now. Stop every ship on the East Coast that is anywhere close to the right size. If that ship gets anywhere near the United States, I will hold you personally responsible.”

  “Yes, sir,” the admiral replied. “There was one odd thing I might mention. It may mean something, and it may not. We had two sightings today of the same ship. One by one of our Boomers—Captain Pugh reported sighting the Sea Dragon out of Hong Kong at first light, and a couple of hours later it was spotted by one of our P-3s. Both ships had the correct electronic signature, same radar, and the like. If you take the position of the sub sighting, and DR it ahead—advance it based on the known course and speed—you don’t end up at the second sighting. Not even at flank speed. Based on our calculations, the sightings equate to a difference of about thirty nautical miles. Sometimes our airplanes aren’t that good at marking the latitude and longitude that accurately, but with GPS it just isn’t that hard. So it may be that there are two identical Sea Dragons out there. Which I find very strange indeed.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “We’ve got destroyers on the way right now. I just hope they can reach them before dark.”

  * * *

  Judge Wiggins brought the courtroom to order and asked Wolff, “Any rebuttal witnesses?”

  “Just one, Your Honor. We’d like to recall Captain Satterly.” Wolff knew that most, if not all, of his case now turned on the testimony of Dr. Satterly. He’d given the medical evidence of the cause of death and its link to torture. He was the one who had spoken with Mazmin, who brought his “dying declarations” to the jury. If his credibility was lost, the entire case might fail.