High Crimes

“Thank you, General. Now, sir, Detachment 27 was sent down to El Salvador to take reprisals for the Zona Rosa bombing, isn’t that correct?”

A rueful smile. “No, counselor, that’s not correct. We were sent to locate the murderers, the so-called urban guerrillas who murdered four marines. Not to take revenge.”

“Thank you for that distinction, General. And would it be correct to point out, sir, that you had a personal stake in that mission?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Really? You weren’t a close friend of one of the marines killed in the Zona Rosa bombing on 19 June 1985, a Marine Force Recon, Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Ross?”

“Well, there’s another important distinction to make,” he said, quite reasonably. “I was indeed an acquaintance of Arlen Ross—”

“No, sir,” she interrupted. “Not an ‘acquaintance.’ A friend.”

The general shrugged. “If you wish. A friend. I have no quarrel with that. Lieutenant Colonel Ross was, sadly, among those killed in the Zona Rosa. But make no mistake, counselor. I was there at the direction of the President of the United States. I most certainly did not use the might of the United States Army Special Forces to carry out my own personal vendetta.”

“I certainly never implied such a thing, General,” Claire said, feigning astonishment. “Merely that you might have had a personal stake in the mission, as anyone might have who’d had a close friend killed a few days before by antigovernment rebels.”

But the general was too shrewd for that. Not for nothing had he advanced as high as he had, and as quickly. “That’s very generous of you, counselor,” he said brusquely, “but I operate at the behest of my commander-in-chief. Not as some Mafioso out for blood.”

Never lose control of the witness, Claire reminded herself, and here she was doing just that. This line of cross-examination was clearly a mistake.

“General,” she said, “when we met for a pretrial interview at your office in the Pentagon, did you warn me not to pursue this matter because it might be damaging to my career?”

General Marks regarded her for a few seconds with an indecipherable stare. He had been briefed. He knew about the secret tape recording of Henry Abbott. “Yes, I did,” he replied at length. “I was quite frankly concerned that you were on some sort of self-destructive kamikaze mission, counselor, because the client is your husband.”

There, it was finally out. She had no doubt that all of the panel members already knew that Tom was her husband. But now the fact, in all its complexity and ambiguity, lay out there on official display.

“I was concerned,” he went on, “that if you continued to pursue this case without knowing all the facts, you’d end up looking foolish in the extreme. You are, after all, married to a man who may be a murderer. You’re not exactly objective.” He smiled sadly. “You are the same age as my daughter. I can’t help but take a fatherly concern.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you, General,” she said without irony. “I certainly appreciate your concern and your solicitude.” And she decided to move right in for the kill. “General Marks, when my client allegedly fired upon the civilians, how far away were you standing?”

“I wasn’t there,” he said. “The unit was being led by my XO, Major James Hernandez. I was issuing commands over the radio.”

“Major James Hernandez, who is still your XO, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Now, General, it is alleged that my client killed eighty-seven people, and it occurs to me that killing eighty-seven people must take some time, isn’t that right?”

“Alas, no,” the general replied. “It can be done in a surprisingly short time, counselor, I am sorry to say.”

“Really?”

“It would surprise you,” he said, and gave another sad smile. “Sergeant Kubik fired two hundred rounds. The M-60 machine gun fires at a rate of five hundred fifty rounds per minute. So firing two hundred rounds takes not much more than twenty seconds, counselor.”

Ordinarily, the general’s reply would have been devastating. But Claire knew where this was going. “Twenty seconds,” she mused.

“A little bit more.”

“But I thought there are only one hundred rounds in a belt,” she said, playing the ingenue.

“That’s true,” the general replied, “but he had apparently linked two belts together, using a technique he said he’d learned from a squad leader in Vietnam. That way, the second belt pulls evenly.”

“If the ammo belt gets twisted, what happens?”

“The weapon will jam.”

Claire nodded, and began to pace in front of the witness rail, thinking. “So, if one of your men had grabbed Sergeant Kubik’s ammo belt and twisted it, his weapon would have jammed, and he’d have been unable to fire.”

“Only if someone could get close enough to grab the belt.”

“And no one could?”

“Seriously? A man firing a machine gun?”

“None of your men could have bounded up to him in a few steps and grabbed the weapon out of his hands? Or twisted the ammo belt so that the gun jammed?”