The Summer House(42)

York thinks, Hold on. This is something.

The odd evidence, the weird occurrences, the outstanding questions…what Marcello told her and Cook earlier, and now what this officer has just confirmed.

Staff Sergeant Jefferson and his squad were heartily disliked by their fellow Rangers. Sliding through. Never really punished. Never really disciplined.

Until now.

A frame job? Could this be a frame job?

Cook says, “Sorry to interrupt, Captain O’Connell, but something’s caught my attention.”

Yes, York thinks. The major sees what I see.

But Cook has another question.

“Staff Sergeant Jefferson’s squad, they were last deployed to Afghanistan two months ago. From what I’m able to puzzle out from their soldier record briefs, they were supposed to be in their area of operations for six months, not two.”

The helicopter sound fades away. O’Connell is staring hard at her boss.

“But I can’t see anything else about their deployment,” he goes on. “Their area of operations. Any missions they went on. Any after-action reports. Why is that?”

O’Connell shrugs. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

York waits. There’s some sort of new tension between O’Connell and her boss.

Cook says, “Captain O’Connell, I think you do know.”

O’Connell’s eyes flash. “You think shit.”

“Some days, yes,” Cook says, his voice calm but hard. “This is a small base. The Rangers are a tight unit. If something odd happened to them while deployed, you’d know. Not all of the details. But you’d know.”

York waits, wondering what O’Connell will do. His face is firm, his eyes set, and she can feel the anger coming off him, like vapor rising from a hot sidewalk after a rainstorm.

“I’ve got nothing to say,” O’Connell says.

“That’s not going to be an option for you, Captain,” Cook says. “We’re CID. You’re going to answer my questions completely and truthfully or we’ll leave and come back. And come back again. And maybe you’ll miss your deadline of being discharged in a few months because hearings have to be held.”

O’Connell looks like he’s about to come across the desk and grab Cook’s cane and beat him with it, but he waits some more. York thinks the Ranger is struggling.

He says, “A couple of the guys in my company got screwed up because they thought they were Ninjas, too. One’s blind. The other’s in a wheelchair for life. That wasn’t good.”

Cook says, “That’s understandable.”

“You can see I don’t particularly like them,” O’Connell says. “But I’m not about to snitch on them.”

“Whatever you say to us will be confidential, Captain O’Connell,” her boss says. “Nothing in print, nothing official.”

O’Connell looks at her, as if for reassurance. York remains silent, not wanting to shatter this mood.

Sorry, Captain, she thinks. No sympathy from me.

The Ranger captain says, “I believe the reason you don’t see any paperwork from their last deployment is that they weren’t under the command of Fourth Battalion. They were temporarily detached elsewhere.”

York says, “The Afghan National Army?”

With disgust, O’Connell says, “As if. No, our friends up in Langley. Staff Sergeant Jefferson and his squad are so good, the Company borrowed them.”

The air seems heavy and threatening. Now, York thinks, now everything has changed in this investigation. What have she and the major stumbled across? The CIA?

Cook says, “All right. The Company. But why were they sent home so early?”

O’Connell rotates slightly in his chair, back and forth, like he’s hoping the longer he waits to reply, the quicker Connie and her boss will leave.

Connie thinks, To coin a phrase, Captain, “As if.”

“There was an incident,” O’Connell finally says. “Staff Sergeant Jefferson and his squad were sent straight home.”

“What was the incident?”

One more pause from O’Connell.

“Staff Sergeant Jefferson and his squad hit a house,” he says. “It was the wrong house. No Al-Qaeda, no Taliban, no ISIS, no insurgents. A house full of civilians.”

Another helicopter comes overhead, and then the noise eases off.

O’Connell says, “And the Rangers slaughtered them all.”





Chapter 34



THE NEWS FROM Captain O’Connell hits me so hard that for a few blessed moments I can’t even feel the pain in my left leg.

“How do you know this?” I ask.

“Like you said,” he says, “I hear things. I hear rumors. But this rumor…so nasty I had to double-check, to verify. I made a call, to an Army intelligence officer I met when I was deployed to Afghanistan. Captain Amy Cornwall.”

“How did she know? Was she there?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” O’Connell says. “But she’s with Langley now, and she did a favor and confirmed it. The squad was in a village called Pendahar, in Khost province. Amy told me that after that house was wiped out, the CIA wanted to cover their big butt and so they sent the Rangers home. Things are so fragile over there, the story about a squad of Rangers committing a war crime would screw up the peace negotiations big-time…Yeah, that’s something the CIA would want to bury deep.”