“It’s the Kurds we’re here to discuss with you, Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine, reaching out with her right hand to stroke Doug’s biceps and remind him of who and where he was. “Nobody cares that you released copies of that tape to the media three years ago.”
“The Ford Commission came to no decision as to how that tape got into the hands of the press,” Kelly corrected, rubbing his eyes and forehead again but with only his left hand, his eyes winking at the others through the gaps between his fingers.
“We’re not here to trick you into an admission,” said the woman in a sharper tone than any she had used earlier this night. “I’ve told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit,” said the veteran, the word soft and savage.
He was as wired as he had been the moment he walked into the room.
They were lying to him the way they had lied so often in the past, and through the flashes and roar of that past in his memory Tom Kelly shouted, “I told ’em I’d leave ’em alone if they’d do the same! I wasn’t gonna talk to anybody, I wasn’t gonna claim a fucking pension, and if they thought the answer was a chemical debriefing, then the team they sent to take me better be ready to play for keeps. Are you ready? Are you ready, sonny?”
“The material at the head of that tape,” said the other man in confusion and bureaucratic concern, a turnabout so unexpected that it penetrated Kelly’s fury as the woman’s voice could not have done at this moment, “was simply to explain to third parties why we were bringing it to you, Mr. Kelly. If something happened on the way, that is. The real information’s further back on the tape.”
“Jesus,” said Tom Kelly, the rage draining from him like blood from a ruptured spleen and leaving him flaccid. “Jesus.”
“We understand that your fuse is short, Mr. Kelly,” said Elaine. “We have no intention of lighting it, none whatever.” She snapped her purse closed and set it deliberately on a bookshelf before she stepped over to the VCR.
“Nobody cares about the – incident, do they?” said Kelly, slumping back against the door and almost wishing there were a chair in arm’s reach for him to sit on. “Well, that’s a relief.”
He looked around the office, taking stock as the VCR whirred to eject the tape into Elaine’s hand. The only thing that didn’t belong was the attache case lying on Bianci’s otherwise orderly desk. Dull black and unremarkable at first glance, the case was in fact a Halliburton – forged from T-6061 aluminum like the plating of an armored personnel carrier. The three-rotor combination lock hidden under the carrying handle was not impossible to defeat, and the sides could be opened with a cutting torch or the right saw – but anything of that sort would take time, and you could park a car on the case without even disturbing the watertight seal.
“It’s old news,” Doug was saying. “Do you care that somebody blew away the secretary of defense in Dallas in ’63? It’s like that.”
“Like I say, glad to hear it,” the veteran said.
It wasn’t that he believed Doug in any absolute sense. Public release of the White Plains footage had squeezed the US government to take action against the State of Israel in ways that the highest levels had no wish to do once immediate tempers had cooled. A matter that had subsided into legal wrangling and the bland lies of politicians on both sides exploded into popular anger, spearheaded by members of Congress and the Senate to whom the massacre of American servicemen was not to be ignored as a matter of Middle Eastern policy.
There had been an immediate cutoff of aid to Israel – the munitions which fed the war in Lebanon to which US policy had abandoned Israeli troops, and the hard currency which alone kept afloat an economy which could not support its own welfare state, much less a protracted war. The aid had been resumed only after the Israeli minister of defense had resigned and thirty-seven serving members of the armed forces were given prison sentences ranging from two years to life after a public trial humiliating to the State which tried them.