I said, “I heard he was a great soldier.”
He shook his head. “Great? No, great’s not an adequate word. I knew your father, too, Drummond. Did you know that? Now, your father, he was a great soldier. A real bastard to work for, I hear, but a great soldier. Lee was more than that. I saw two of his officers throw themselves in front of bullets to protect him. Think anybody would’ve thrown themselves in front of your father to save him?”
Knowing my father as I did, I could see people shoving him in the way of bullets to save themselves. I mean, I love and adore my father, but the man has some serious warts.
The general had made his point, so he continued. “If there was any chance in hell your client was innocent, I’d have no problem with what you did. Hell, I’d lead the assault on Lee’s door. I’d help ransack his attic. But Whitehall’s guilty. A thorough Article 32 investigation was conducted before I recommended this court-martial. I’ve never seen a more airtight case.”
An Article 32 investigation is the military’s version of what would be called a grand jury in the civilian world, only instead of a closed jury, the Army appoints a major or a lieutenant colonel to determine if there’s enough evidence and grounds to convene a court-martial.
Anyway, I opened my lips and started to say something, but he sliced his arm through the air for me to keep my mouth shut. He was one of those daunting men who, even in civilian clothes, had an air of authority that brooked no disagreement.
“I’ve checked on you, Drummond. Everybody says you’re a damned good lawyer and an ethical officer. So ask yourself this. We offered you a deal where you’d save your client’s life in exchange for avoiding the character assassination of one of the finest men I’ve ever met. What’s the point of destroying Lee’s reputation, and maybe this alliance, just to try to keep a murderer out of jail? You’ve got plenty of courtroom experience, right? How do you gauge your odds in this case? This wouldn’t even be a Pyrrhic victory; it would be a Pyrrhic defeat. Your client’s the one who created this situation, not us. How far are you willing to go? How much damage are you willing to inflict in his name?”
These were profoundly worthy questions, and it was obvious the general was well-grounded in the kind of ethical issues that bedevil us lawyers. The problem was there was a new fly in the ointment.
I tried to keep my voice and eyes steady. “General, my client is innocent.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious. He was framed.”
He closed his eyes, a sign of weary resignation.
Finally his lids came apart and he frowned at me with an expression of bottomless disappointment. “So that’s how you’re going to play it?”
“General, that’s how I have to play it.”
He abruptly stood up, so I stood up, too. He just stared at me until I got tired of being stared at and headed for his door.
“Drummond?” he called before I made it out.
I turned around and faced him.
“Just be sure you can still look yourself in the mirror when this is done.”
I nodded and left.
I have to tell you that among the many mischaracterizations perpetrated by the media and Hollywood is the one that depicts Army generals as plump, cigar-chomping, ego-inflated morons who are so busy spit-shining their own asses they can barely find their way to the eighteenth hole of the golf course. There’re some of those, to be sure, and if Spears’s legal adviser ever made general there’d be one more. But General Spears was more redolent of the larger breed – serious, thoughtful, sharply intelligent, the kind of person you just can’t help respecting. The kind of person you want to respect you, too.
Spears had commanded a unit in the Gulf War that tore the hell out of two of Saddam’s best divisions, and, although he was unaware of it, I was there, and I witnessed it, and he was a hell of a soldier. And he was now sitting on top of an explosive situation. With less than a few minutes’ warning, he could be entangled in the biggest war to hit the planet since World War Two.
The worst of it was, I possessed not a single shred of evidence that Thomas Whitehall was innocent. I had a hunch. And as anyone in the legal profession will tell you, when you act on a hunch it’s like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the cylinder. And Spears was right; when this was over, I’d better be able to look in a mirror and not have it shatter.
CHAPTER 24
What Katherine figured was that she would kill two birds with one stone. Colonel Barry Carruthers, the military judge assigned to our case, was set to arrive on a military flight at 7:00 A.M. at Osan Air Base. This much Katherine knew because it was widely reported on the news.
Katherine would have preferred to meet him at the ramp as he walked off the plane, but because he was landing at a military air base, there was no way in hell she’d be able to get her associates through the strictly controlled gates. She therefore calculated the time it would take to get the judge by military convoy up to Yongsan Garrison.
She arranged her welcoming party to meet and greet Barry Carruthers right outside the main gate at exactly 8:10 A.M. And at 8:10 exactly seven buses, two or three dozen taxis, and a few people on bicycles suddenly appeared. Then, after about a minute of people rushing off their conveyances and getting organized, there they were, 620 practitioners of backwards love, most dressed normally, but a select few making a statement with flamboyant outfits.
Right beside them, in front of God and country and some dozen film crews, stood yours truly struggling not to look as uneasy and abashed as I felt. I was in uniform, too. I knew I was going to pay for it, but hey, in for a nickel, in for a dollar.
I was there because Imelda’s sharp criticisms guilted me into it. I was there because I wanted my client to know I was unconditionally committed to his defense. I was there because I wanted Katherine to trust me and let me in on her secrets. I was there because I prayed Katherine was right, that maybe we could gull the Army into cutting a better deal for Tommy Whitehall.
At least she’d done the wise thing and gotten a legal permit. She’d applied through the Seoul mayor’s office using a false name, and under the guise we wanted to publicly welcome the judge. This was technically true, at least depending on your definition of the word “welcome.” Since even the Korean papers had been describing Colonel Barry Carruthers as a Judge Roy Bean kind of guy – the last of the great hanging judges – I think the Koreans were fairly delighted at the idea of an American welcoming party, so they put all the appropriate stamps on Katherine’s request and even promised to provide security.
That’s why there were about two dozen Korean riot police in blue suits, wearing those spiffy shielded helmets and holding black batons behind their body shields. The shields looked badly scratched and dented, because one thing a Korean riot policeman gets plenty of is on-the-job practice.
I could barely imagine what the police were thinking when they spotted us, because there’d sure as hell never been a demonstration like this in the history of the Republic of Korea. The officer in charge of the platoon was on the radio, red-faced and screaming frantically at somebody on the other end, no doubt trying to inform the city officials that this wasn’t a welcoming party after all, but a demonstration, and, hey, you’ll never guess what kind of people are here.
So we locked arms and waited. The camera crewmen were all taking a particular interest in me, since after all, I was the only person in uniform in this crowd. I looked anxiously at my watch. I hoped Carruthers’s convoy didn’t have a radio, or, if it did, that nobody had thought to call and recommend they divert to a different entry point onto post. If that happened, we’d look like a bunch of dopes.