Foreign and Domestic Page 12

  Paslowski had driven him the short way to the Pentagon, where they walked through several vault doors on an inner ring of the building to enter the IG’s office. He had been waiting twenty minutes in the general’s office, standing in front of the big wooden desk with no paper or appearance of functionality other than a laptop computer with a red Ethernet cable and a white Ethernet cable serving both his secure and nonsecure internet and e-mail networks.

  “Chief tells me you’re wanted for murder in North Carolina.”

  “That’s not true,” Mahegan replied.

  “That’s not true, sir. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right, sir? Right, captain?” Bream corrected him again.

  Mahegan saw where the general was headed and decided to avoid the “Who’s on first” conversation. Arrogant prick. “Yes, sir.”

  “So, Chief’s not telling the truth?”

  The general was standing in front of him now, about three feet away. They were nearly eye-to-eye, but Mahegan knew that Bream gained an inch or two with the Army boots. Bream leaned against the outer edge of the polished mahogany desk. There was a phone on the credenza next to the dueling pistols behind the desk and beneath a rare window in the inner rings of the Pentagon.

  “Just saying he’s wrong, is all. Sir.”

  “You’re just being investigated, then. Right?”

  Mahegan suddenly got the distinct impression that the general was playing him the way an interrogator might begin to work a prisoner of war. His first clue was the general’s version of the “stress position” by making him wait for twenty minutes standing in his office as opposed to sitting on the sofa directly outside the door. Second, he began with the classic, “When did you stop beating your wife?” question. He could answer at his own peril.

  “I was swimming and found a dead body. I did the right thing and turned it in,” Mahegan said.

  “Like finding a lost watch. You just turned it in?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You keep dropping ‘sirs’ around me, soldier, and we’re going to be having an entirely different conversation.”

  “Sir, I’m not in the Army anymore. What do you want? How did you even find me?” Though Mahegan thought he knew the answer to the last question, he remained concerned about the ultimate purpose for his visit to the Inspector General of the Army.

  Bream crossed his arms and rested them on his chest. He dropped his head and stared at his boots, as if he was thinking.

  “As you know, your sugar daddy, Bob Savage, has formally challenged my dishonorable discharge ruling. I’m willing to listen to a West Point classmate, but I’ve taken some heat in the media over that ruling, too. So, what I want with you is to go back to exactly one year ago and have you tell me about how you killed the detainee, Commander Hoxha, you had in your possession. With my investigation into Copperhead, we’ve learned some things and received some statements that compete with your and your team’s version of events.”

  Exactly as Mahegan had expected, Bream did not address the question about how the Inspector General goons found him. As Bream had referenced, Savage and Bream had been West Point classmates. How Bream had been promoted past colonel, much less beyond Savage’s rank, was a mystery to Mahegan. Mahegan had heard that Bream had taken a few jabs from conservative talk show hosts about his challenge of Mahegan’s honorable discharge.

  “Sir, we all provided statements on what you’re asking me. General Savage reported it up the chain of command, and we were all cleared after an independent investigation. And what does Copperhead have to do with this?”

  “That’s not telling me anything I don’t know, Mahegan. Copperhead was the crew that got called in to clean up your mess. While you were down in the valley airlifting Colgate’s remains back to Bagram, the Copperhead forensics team went in there. It was their last mission. They were in the second vehicle.”

  Mahegan remembered wondering why the contractors were milling around the intact Humvee.

  “I’ve got nothing to add, sir. And this is the first I’m hearing that Copperhead had stayed behind. I thought the entire scene was evacuated.”

  Bream seemed to consider this. The man probably thought Mahegan was being insubordinate.

  “You lawyering up? That it?”

  “I was told you don’t allow lawyers,” Mahegan replied, edging toward confrontation.

  Bream looked away, a creepy smile crossing his face.

  “They’re allowed to be present. They just can’t say anything.”

  “Sounds like the Taliban. Judge and jury,” Mahegan said, and then after a noticeable pause, “sir.”

  “How many detainees have you taken off the battlefield?”

  “None lately, sir.”

  “Captain, are you the least bit concerned with your discharge rating? Do I need to read you your rights and sit your ass down in the interrogation room?”

  “General, am I being charged with something here? I served my country. I’ve got my papers. The way I see it, my odds are slim with you because you’ve already made up your mind. This is just bureaucratic bullshit. Combat is tough. I’ve lost friends. And I’ve spent a lot more time getting shot at than second-guessing soldiers’ instincts while in combat from behind a mahogany desk in Washington,” Mahegan said.

  Then he added, “Sir.” He looked at Bream’s right-shoulder sleeve, which was noticeably bare of the US Army “combat patch.” In today’s environment, Mahegan could not understand how anyone other than a new enlistee could have escaped combat duty. Mahegan had had eight combat tours in the last thirteen years. A quarter of his entire life had been dedicated to fighting his nation’s enemies and while the general in front of him may have had a distinguished thirty-plus-year career, Mahegan was incredulous at the idea that the man could have avoided combat duty during his entire tenure.

  Bream’s eye twitched in irritation, but he took in Mahegan’s challenge without comment before continuing. “Captain, I make the final call on your discharge. Honorable or dishonorable. You are not helping your case.” Bream paused and smiled. “As I said, we have some new evidence.”

  Mahegan wanted to say, “Bring it on,” but knew better than to further antagonize someone who appeared to be an impossibly powerful individual with unlimited ability to do harm. Like Hoover when he ran the FBI, Mahegan thought. But, the general was dangling something in front of him. A deal, perhaps?

  “What do you know about The American Taliban and his Nuristan hideout you raided that night?” the general asked.

  Mahegan stared at him. He knew a little more than what everyone else knew from the television accounts that had been playing endlessly since yesterday morning’s attack at Fort Brackett. He and his men had hunted Adham with every resource allowable, and some that were not. How did this desk jockey know about Adham’s Nuristan sanctuary, and why was he asking? That information was specially compartmented at the highest classification levels.

  “Other than the news the last twenty-four hours, I’m not sure what you’re talking about, sir.”

  Bream moved from the desk and stood so close to him that Mahegan could count the crow’s-feet on the corners of Bream’s eyes. Three on the left and two on the right. There was a small injection mark at Bream’s hairline. Judging by the smooth forehead, Mahegan figured the general had regular Botox injections. Appearances were important here in the Pentagon, Mahegan surmised.

  “Why would Mullah Adham mention you in connection with the Brackett attack?”

  “Sir, I have no idea. Maybe because my team was assigned with putting pressure on him and we killed one of his most wanted men?”

  “Maybe,” Bream said. “But it looks bad for you . . . and for us. Brings this whole thing with Hoxha back into play.”

  Mahegan thought he understood now. Once Adham had mentioned Mahegan’s name, the Inspector General’s initial investigation would be suspect. And the first rule of bureaucrats, which Bream decidedly was, was to cover one’s
ass.

  Bream changed his tone.

  “I see you looking at my right sleeve, Mahegan. You don’t know me and you don’t know where I’ve been. I see the wheels spinning through your mind, sizing me up, figuring you can take me. Maybe you can. It would be a tough fight for a wounded man. And of course you know it wouldn’t do you any good.”

  Mahegan almost smiled.

  “I played tight end for West Point in 1979, the last class with balls. You know what that means?”

  Mahegan shrugged. “You’ve got a pair?”

  Bream squinted and shook his head.

  “Last all-male class at the Academy. I keep in shape and I’ve served my country. There’s no need to square off with the man who is likely to be the next Chief of Staff of the Army. You should think about that.”

  “Not squaring off, sir. You’re a general. I’m not. It’s that simple. Chief of Staff or not.”

  Mahegan knew one of two things was happening. Either the general was trying to provoke him into violence so he’d have Mahegan on a detainable charge, or he was probing him for unreported details on Adham. It was a classic lose-lose situation. He either reacts to the provocation or reveals details that are still classified beyond the general’s security clearance.

  “Back to Adham. We’ve got intel you may have captured him,” Bream said.

  The comment caught Mahegan off guard. To his knowledge, Adham was still on the run.

  “Sir, are you asking me to discuss specially compartmented information with you? And how could he be in detention if he’s all over the Internet?”

  “Listen, Mahegan. Clearly Adham has something working here in the United States. When you raided and then killed that bomb maker, there was intel that Adham was close by. Then he fell off the radar. And now he’s got hostages. We’ve all seen the footage. And out of over one million service members, he mentions your name? What kind of coincidence is that?”

  Mahegan stared at Bream, debating what to say.

  “I thought you said Copperhead went into Hoxha’s compound after the medevac. Standard docex.”

  Docex was short for “document exploitation.” Even that name was a misnomer because the team, usually contractors, retrieved information off computers, hard drives, cell phones, and other forms of media.

  “Why didn’t they go in with you on the mission?”

  “Sir, my mission was kill and or capture. You should ask General Savage. What I will say is that we had eight seats on the Little Birds. I needed all the firepower I could get. Some of my team went through the shack and collected some intelligence. Scraps of paper. Hoxha’s diary, bullshit like that. The biggest find was the MVX-90s.”

  “I didn’t know about the MVX-90s. That’s interesting, to say the least.”

  “It was all in the report.”

  Bream turned and walked to his window, which opened to a gravel maintenance area and gave him a view of another ring of the Pentagon.

  “You ever ghost a detainee, Mahegan?”

  Mahegan knew the term “ghost” was both noun and verb. A ghost detainee was an individual seized from the battlefield and never entered into the official prisoner of war tracking system. Ghosting allowed the interrogators to avoid Geneva Convention standards for questioning or to extend the official holding period if the capturing unit was unsure of the value of the detainee. Bream was asking him if he had ever taken a prisoner of war and held him without officially documenting his capture or entering him into the Department of Defense database. But while he had taken his share of detainees, he always rapidly turned them over to the Joint Special Operations Command detention center and from there he was unaware of the process.

  He truthfully answered, “No, sir. I have never ghosted a detainee.”

  “Why do I not believe you, Mahegan?” Bream continued to stare through the window at the opposite ring.

  He wanted to say, Maybe some insecurity manifesting itself, sir? Instead, he followed with, “Sir, I’m an operator. I seized my share of prisoners and turned them over to the proper authorities.” After a pause, he added, “And I’ve killed my share of enemies on the battlefield as well.”

  Bream smiled and turned toward Mahegan.

  “You view me as an enemy?”

  “That would be unwise of me, wouldn’t it, sir?”

  Changing tack again, Bream said, “The forensics from yesterday’s attack at Ft. Brackett show DNA from a Middle Eastern male. Probably the same one pictured on the video. The fingerprint database in West Virginia gave us a dossier that indicates he once fought in Nuristan Province for the Taliban, was captured, fingerprinted, and then taken to Bagram, where he was released after a year. Then nothing until this. The question is: How did he get into the country?”

  “Sir, if I might say, this seems different from why you had me come here. What specifically are you asking? Detainees are released all the time. Sometimes they’re recaptured on the battlefield.”

  “You said you’re an operator, Mahegan. You and your men went into Nuristan. Did you pull anyone off the battlefield without telling us? You killed that one prisoner of war. Did you haul any others back and torture them to seek your vengeance for Colgate and your other team members? Maybe fly one back on those secret JSOC airplanes? Maybe he escaped?”

  “Sir, I think you’ve insulted me enough for one day. I served. I defended. I upheld the Constitution. I did it all honorably. I made one big mistake in killing Hoxha. But to answer your questions, no, I didn’t do any of what you suggest.”

  This seemed to satisfy Bream. He nodded and said, “Okay.” Then added, “But something else is not adding up.”

  “I’ve already said too much.”

  “No, you’ve answered the Inspector General’s questions.”

  “Can you answer one of mine, sir?”

  Bream studied him a moment and smiled. “Maybe.”

  “What’s an ordnance officer serving as the Inspector General doing asking sensitive intelligence questions about combat operations and an enemy operative?” Mahegan could guess. Bream was vying for the top position in the Army. He was competing against hardened combat veterans who had led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Bream could bring Adham to his knees through his special police squads, then that might give him an advantage. It was all about positioning to these generals.

  “Fair enough,” Bream responded. “As I said, someone thought there was a nexus between you, Hoxha, and Adham. My information tells me you were near Adham when you captured Hoxha. I’m told it’s even possible that Adham is the one who remotely detonated the bomb, not Hoxha. And, of course, we’ve already mentioned Adham’s statement on Facebook today.”

  Mahegan’s mind reeled. Savage had told him that he, Mahegan, had sent the deadly transmission that had killed Colgate. Was it possible that Adham had killed Colgate and the others?

  “How does any of that involve you?”

  “We were asked to reinvestigate your killing of Hoxha the bomb maker.”

  Mahegan paused. Passive voice. We were asked. Who asked? Instead of pursuing that axis, he said flatly, “But I was cleared.”

  “No such thing as double jeopardy here with this office. We can keep coming back to the well, son. Especially since Savage asked for your discharge to be honorable. That’s still under review, as we have discussed.”

  Bream smiled and patted Mahegan’s left arm, then rested his hand on the deltoid, pushing just enough to make Mahegan feel his scar burning just beneath the warm palm.

  “I’m going to turn you back over to Chief Paslowski. I wanted to talk to you man-to-man before I made a final ruling on your discharge and proceeded with this investigation. The Army gives me wide latitude in determining what should be checked out and what should not be. I haven’t made up my mind yet, and will likely base my decisions on your level of cooperation.”

  Mahegan listened to the man, who now sounded more like a lawyer than a general. This time he wanted to say, Sounds like a fishing expedition, but chose dis
cretion over further verbally sparring with the general. He didn’t like being at the center of this controversy. There were his teammates, who all had submitted statements, and Hoxha, who was dead. He wasn’t sure if any enemy had remained alive on the objective that night, but he was pretty certain his team had killed all of the guards. They were combatants and that was combat.

  “Where are you getting your intel, sir?” The only thing Mahegan could think of was that it was the Docex guys that coughed up some information. If it was the Copperhead team, he knew a few things that could be screwing up the facts. First, they were not accustomed to being in the field on objectives. They did most of their interrogation at Bagram’s prison. Second, they had little to no experience on black operations. Last, they were in a pile of trouble with the Department of Defense and, like tortured prisoners, might have said anything to stay “alive.”

  Bream smiled, knowing he had Mahegan’s attention.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, Mahegan. It is a most unusual source, though.”

  “How unusual?”

  Bream stood and walked over to a map of the world, which hung in a teak frame on his wall. He looked at it, his eyes scanning the oblong cut-out portions that appeared as if a child had taken scissors to a round globe and cut it to lay flat. He seemed to contemplate something, running a finger along his lips.

  “Extremely unusual.”

  At that moment, Chief Paslowski came in the door, big and bulky, his right arm set in a sling, his left arm straight down by his side as if he was hiding something.

  “Chief, I’m done with him,” Bream said.

  “Roger, sir.” Paslowski moved toward Mahegan in the large office. Mahegan was calculating what he could do when Paslowski came up fast with a leather sap and brought it down on Mahegan’s injured left deltoid with force.

  “Make another move, asshole, and I will have to defend the general again,” Paslowski said. Mahegan didn’t go down—he just rubbed his arm as if simply bitten, though it was a solid blow. He looked at Paslowski’s right arm in a sling from where Mahegan had separated it and figured Paslowski had been practicing the left-handed strike. He also figured that Paslowski had looked in Mahegan’s military medical records that showed he had been wounded from flying shrapnel, resulting in the severed rotator cuff and torn deltoid that had left his scar.