Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “Okay, Bob, just out of curiosity and not because I seem to have any say in the matter, go ahead and tell me. Where is my wife going tomorrow?”

  “She’s informed her detail she’ll be traveling to Massachusetts tomorrow. She will be flying on Air Force One. She said she will be traveling with a delegation.”

  “So she’s going to Boston on Air Force One. What’s the big deal?”

  “Well, sir, that’s the problem. Mrs. Quaid isn’t flying on Air Force One to Boston. She is flying to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. That’s where that detention camp, Camp Edwards, is. The one where the Jews—I mean, the Israelis are being held. She’s flying with a delegation of Jewish leaders. She told her security detail that there should be trucks standing by at Otis to transfer supplies. Actually, the term she used was ‘relief supplies,’to the detention camp.”

  President Quaid glanced at the ceiling, considering his response.

  “You did the right thing by sharing this, Bob. This isn’t something I’d want to find out from the six o’clock news. Tell me, Bob, do you have a wife?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. Three of them, in fact. All ex-wife types, though. Nobody on board at the moment.”

  “Sometimes, Bob, I think an ex-wife could be the best kind to have. But keep that one under your hat, will you please?”

  “With everything else, sir. With everything else.”

  Lawrence Quaid prided himself on his moral compass. Patted himself on the back for knowing right from wrong. For doing right, opposing wrong. Quaid had become increasingly concerned in recent weeks that this moral compass had not been in his hands all those years but had rather been held by his wife. That she, rather than he, was the good person. That her role was to guide him down the right path. Away from what was expedient but wrong.

  This time, though, he was lost and alone.

  And it didn’t help when his chief of staff Bob Brown bailed out, either. Quaid corrected himself. Brown didn’t really bail out, he thought. I booted him out. Come to think of it, Catherine told me which way to go on that decision, too. I chose not to follow her.

  President Quaid picked up the phone and asked to have Gen. Cruz located. As it turned out, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was in the West Wing and came to the Oval Office at a brisk walk.

  “Mr. President,” he said, slightly out of breath.

  “General,” Quaid said. “I am extremely upset to hear about the mechanical problems that grounded Air Force One.”

  General Cruz looked at the president with a puzzled expression. He said nothing, waiting for Quaid to continue.

  “The First Lady planned on flying to Massachusetts tomorrow, to deliver supplies, relief supplies, to Otis Air Base. General, you can imagine how upset I am that she will be unable to make that trip, can’t you?”

  The general nodded, understanding.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll apologize personally to the First Lady. The Air Force prides itself on maintaining Air Force One scrupulously. Unfortunately, Air Force Two is also undergoing service. This is a major blunder and I take full responsibility for it, sir.”

  “No apology necessary, General. Better safe than sorry, to be trite. So how long do you expect the plane—any plane, in fact—to be unavailable for the First Lady’s use?”

  “Mr. President, for just as long as you say so, I expect.”

  “Thank you, General. I see we understand each other.”

  CHAPTER 37

  The Camp Edwards detainees were sorted into categories. Families were moved to barracks where they could remain together. Some even included a small kitchen. That portion of the base was called Camp Foxtrot. Those age fifty and above were in Camp Alpha, with unmarried men and women in separate buildings. Residents of both camps could visit one another, and they ate in a communal mess hall.

  At the far side of Edwards was Camp Echo, named nostalgically by Base Commander Dancer after the Camp Echo at Guantanamo, where the least cooperative detainees were housed. The residents of Camp Echo were all between eighteen and forty-nine and all potential members of the Israel Defense Forces. Camp Echo was surrounded by a wire fence topped with coiled razor wire. A second identical fence stood a dozen yards outside the inner fence. Wooden guard towers stood at each corner.

  The barracks at Camp Echo showed their hasty and recent renovation. Plywood partitions created a series of separate rooms, each ten feet by eight feet. Windows were covered by plywood. Air circulated from ceiling vents. No light entered from the outside. Each room had a single wire-covered fluorescent fixture. There were no light switches in the rooms, no electrical outlets of any kind. The lights were never turned off—never during the day, never at night.

  Each room had a loudspeaker mounted high on a wall. There were two plastic pails in each room. One held drinking water. The other was the toilet. A plastic pad served as a mattress. Detainees were issued plastic foam blankets that tore when twisted or stretched, designed to prevent suicides. The pads and blankets were collected every morning and handed back every evening.

  When inmates moved from one place to the other, they were shackled at wrists and ankles, blacked-out ski goggles over their eyes, and sound-deadening muffs covered their ears.

  Maj. Dancer designed Camp Echo as a replica of Guantanamo Bay. His only regret was that because he was limited to the existing facility and because of time constraints, the rooms were built from plywood rather than steel shipping containers.

  Keep them guessing, uncomfortable, with absolutely no control. That was a lesson learned at Guantanamo. Hot, then cold. Light, then dark. Silent, then loud. All out of their control. Completely dependent on their interrogator. “Womb rooms,” the soldiers manning the camp called them. Not cells. Womb rooms cut off from everything. From everybody.

  The most important building at Camp Echo was the JIF, the Joint Interrogation Facility. It was constructed from cinderblocks, with sound-deadening vermiculite pellets poured through the holes in the blocks. It, too, had no windows and it, too, was separated into a warren of small rooms accessible only by a single door from the common hallway. Each room had a wall-mounted camera.

  Following the pattern created at the interrogation camp established at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and continued at Guantanamo Bay, the detainees at Camp Echo were nameless, identified in camp records only by numbers, bestowed on them sequentially in the order in which they were processed. The Nazis used the same procedure at Auschwitz.

  Camp Echo’s detainees were numbered 00001 to 01657. There was considerable discussion when the detainee database was first established as to how many digits the numbers should have. Five digits provided for a maximum of 99,999 persons.

  “If we need more numbers than that,” Maj. Dancer joked, “we’ll have bigger problems than reprogramming the database.”

  Edwards wasn’t America’s first concentration camp. The Confederacy warehoused 45,000 Union prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia. Some 13,000 died. At the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, called by its inmates “Hellmira,” almost 3,000 of the 12,000 Confederates held there died one winter. Within two months of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were herded into ten internment camps, some for as long as five years.

  Camp Edwards improved on earlier versions.

  The interrogation unit remained unused for the first week after the detainees arrived. One day, however, a De Havilland C-7A Caribou transport aircraft bearing no markings but painted in Army olive drab landed at Otis Air Base next to Camp Edwards. Twenty men and women in jeans and T-shirts walked down the stairway rolled up to the twin-engine aircraft. They assembled in the mess hall, which was cleared of both detainees and the Massachusetts National Guards troops who staffed the camp.

  Dancer gave a short speech welcoming the young men and women to Camp Edwards, careful to casually drop a reference to his time at Guantanamo to let them know he’d paid his dues.

  The next person who stood in front of the group loo
ked decidedly nonmilitary. His posture, his physique, the very way he walked and stood and carried himself showed he spent his days at a desk or, more likely, hunched over a computer. Besides, although he wore a suit and a tie, his shoes looked like they’d last been polished in whatever Chinese shoe factory manufactured them.

  “My name is Wilson Harrison,” the man said. The twenty men and women were casually draped around wooden chairs dragged into a rough semicircle in front of him.

  “I am a deputy United States attorney general. More importantly, I am temporary special legal assistant to the president. I am told that you were each hand-selected from the Military Intelligence Corps, that you are the cream of the crop from Huachuca.” He was referring to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where Army interrogators were trained.

  “You have not been told why you’ve been brought here, although I suspect you have a good idea, right?” He was met with grins and nods. “Here is what you don’t know.” He reached into his briefcase and dropped a handful of gold-colored objects on the table behind him, stepping aside so they could be seen.

  “These are Israel Defense Forces dog tags. They were found on the bottom of Boston Harbor, directly underneath where the two ships that carried the detainees of this facility were anchored. Somebody from those ships fired rocket-propelled grenades at two United States Coast Guard vessels, sinking both vessels and killing ten people, ten American military personnel.

  “We believe that the people who did this wore these dog tags and that they threw them overboard before fleeing from the ships, along with all the other people held at this camp. We’ve separated all the men and women of military age. They are in this portion of the camp, which we’ve called Camp Echo.” He noticed smiles on several faces and knowing nods on others.

  Echo was military slang for an interrogator. Each person in the room was an echo, and they understood that this part of the camp was built for their use.

  “Your job is to determine which of the detainees at Camp Echo belong to these dog tags. The president has determined that every detainee at this camp is an enemy combatant. Some of them may hold dual US-Israeli citizenship. That doesn’t matter.”

  Dancer interrupted. The major knew how to address soldiers.

  “He means that it don’t mean shit if somebody was born in the US of A. We treat ’em all the same. Nobody gets special treatment—that is, unless they earn it. Got that?”

  He was met with smiles and a few raised fists, plus a few scattered shouted HOO-AHs.

  Harrison nodded and continued.

  “These detainees, these foreign military personnel, are the first soldiers of any other nation to kill American military personnel on American soil—well, technically on American waters—since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812. The president views this conduct as an act of war, even though the country these people are from no longer technically exists.”

  He held the dog tags in front of his chest, jingling them. “Your job is to identify these people, these murderers. Once that is done, they will be given hearings and, if you do your jobs properly, will be found guilty.”

  Again Dancer interrupted. “And shot. Nobody kills American soldiers and lives to brag about it. Right?”

  This time every person in the room rose to his or her feet. Fists pumped in the air. “USA, USA, USA” broke out. When they returned to their seats, Harrison spoke again.

  “There’s more. Major, the doors and windows are sealed, correct? The perimeter of this building is patrolled? There is nobody outside the building who can hear what we say, correct?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Harrison. Just as I was ordered to do. This building is tight. What gets said here stays here. And every soldier in this room knows that, knows that damn abso-fucking-lutely. Am I correct?”

  This time he was met with stern, serious expressions and a roomful of “yes sirs.”

  Harrison turned to the soldiers again.

  “You have to do more than identify the people who wore these dog tags,” he said, now speaking quietly and seriously. “Once you find them, you must, and I emphasize the word must, meaning that you have no choice, you must find out everything they know about another Israeli soldier. This man.” He held up the photograph of Chaim Levi.

  “His name is Chaim Levi. He is a lieutenant in the Israeli Navy. He made his way into this country. We don’t know exactly where he is, although the FBI has determined how he entered this country. It was on a boat, a sailboat that he sailed from somewhere in the Middle East all the way across the ocean to this country, to New England, probably to Maine.

  “We don’t know who was on this boat with him. Most likely other military personnel were with him, probably a highly trained team. We don’t know that, but it only makes sense. We also don’t know for certain that this Lt. Levi was coordinating with the military personnel on those freighters, the ones who are among the detainees in this camp. But that, too, only makes sense. Two units from the same country’s military are infiltrated into this country at roughly the same time in roughly the same area, both by sea. It only makes sense they are working together. The people on the freighters had military weapons with them and didn’t hesitate to use them.” Harrison paused again, looking around the room. Every face was staring at him.

  “What I am about to tell you is known by only a few people. It will not go beyond you. The consequences of your breaching the confidential nature of this information are most serious.”

  Dancer interrupted. “That means you tell anybody squat and your ass will fry in the sizzle seat at Leavenworth. And I’ll press the button to fry you myself. Is that understood?”

  Twenty “yes sirs” rang out.

  Dancer turned toward Harrison and said, “Go ahead, tell them the rest. Tell me the rest; nobody else has.”

  “The president has reason to believe that this Lt. Levi smuggled into this country military weapons,” Harrison said. “The president has reason to believe that among those weapons was a quantity of uranium-235. That is a substance that has only one use. That use is to construct atomic bombs.

  “We don’t know much more than that. We don’t know how much U-235 he had. We don’t even know whether it was in a functional bomb or just the material itself. We don’t know much of anything except that this Lt. Levi sailed a boat containing U-235 and removed that material somewhere along the Maine coast. You are going to wring every bit of information about that material and about this Lt. Levi from every person being held in this camp. The security of this nation depends on your skill in doing this job.”

  “Are any of you going to let your president down? Are you willing to do whatever it takes?” Dancer shouted.

  Shouts of “Hoo-ahhh, hoo-ahhh, USA, USA” filled the room.

  Interrogation was as old as warfare. The Army had a ninety-seven-page interrogation manual and confirmed that the use of torture was prohibited by the Geneva Convention.

  President Quaid didn’t want to violate the Geneva Convention. But he wanted to come right up to the legal line. Attorney General McQueeney’s advice was not what the president wanted to hear.

  “America does not use torture, Mr. President,” she told him. “That’s the law. That’s our history. That’s what we stand for. You permit torture and you violate the law. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Come on, Queen,” President Quaid retorted angrily. “After New York goes up in a radioactive cloud you want me to tell the American people that we could have stopped it from happening but we didn’t want to hurt any of the bad guys?”

  The attorney general refused to back down.

  “I’ve been offering my resignation for a month now, Mr. President,” she said.

  “I know, Queen, and I’ve been refusing it, but maybe it’s time for that after all.”

  “Say the word, and you have my head on a plate, so to speak,” she answered.

  Carol Cabot, the president’s legal counsel, increasingly filled the shoes left va
cant by Bob Brown, the former chief of staff. She sided with the congressional leaders urging the president to do whatever it took to protect the nation.

  “You have all the power in the world,” she’d told the president. “Go ahead and wield it. I’ll cover you with the right paper. My job is to protect you, and you can trust me to do that, sir.”

  Quaid reached Cabot by telephone at her home.

  “Carol, sorry to call you this late, but I’ve made a decision and I want you to make it happen, tomorrow, first thing,” he said. “The Queen’s been offering to resign and I’ve been balking at it. Wrong time for that and all. Well, first thing tomorrow you call her and tell her to get her resignation to me, in writing. I want her resignation on my desk by nine, effective immediately. Second thing, those presidential findings and directives you talked about. Do it. I want them by the end of the day tomorrow. Any questions?”

  “Well, sir, there is one thing. Who will run the shop at Justice starting tomorrow with the Queen out before a new AG is in?”

  “I thought about that, Carol. I like that deputy over there, Harrison. We’ll name him interim attorney general for now and decide later whether to send his name to the Senate for the permanent position. Make that happen, too.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Debra Reuben ran to the kitchen window when she heard a car crunch the gravel driveway. The Honda Accord stopped. Levi got out, waving to the driver. Reuben ran to the front door, shoved it open and stopped, catching her breath, ready to scold Levi for not calling. Instead, she opened her arms wide. He walked into her embrace, and as she tilted her head back he placed his lips on hers. They kissed, deeply and long. Neither wanted to be the first to let go. For the minutes they held one another, neither thought of atom bombs, past, present or future.

  “I was so worried,” Rueben whispered, her lips an inch from his ear. Then she released him, placing her hand on his chest and pushing, not too hard but neither too lightly. “Why didn’t you call? Do you have any idea how scared I was? What if you’d been arrested?”