Part 93 (1/2)

And of course, no Finn O'Leary. We were out there for two whole days. Finally, the word came down to call it.

Oh, was the debrief a b.i.t.c.h.

My boss, Mr. Church, personally flew over and brought along the DMS's top shrink-who is also my personal therapist-Dr. Rudy Sanchez.They interviewed us separately and together, multiple times. They took blood and urine samples. They did MRIs and CT scans. Rudy hooked us up to lie detectors and ran through a minefield of questions. In the privacy of my session with him, I told him about seeing Rattlesnake Team at the site of the Taliban convoy ambush. About how they were eating one of the terrorists. How their eyes were on fire. When I was done, except for the faint whir of the machine and Rudy's shallow breathing, there wasn't a sound in the room.

A lot of the people involved in running those tests, and all of those who'd been out there scouring the ground where we'd been picked up, began avoiding eye contact with me,Top, and Bunny. They didn't find the right kind of evidence to support our stories, and we sure as f.u.c.k weren't changing our stories. Not one word.

I cornered Rudy one afternoon after he came out of Mr. Church's temporary office at the Forward Operating Base Delaram, one of the Marine Corps bases there in Afghanistan.

”Talk to me about those polygraphs, Rude,” I said.

I expected the usual obfuscation he gave when pressed about anything clinical, but he shrugged. ”All three of you believe your stories . . .”

He'd pitched it as a straight answer, but I could hear some reserve in his voice and called him on it.

Rudy smiled. ”Come on, Cowboy,” he said, giving me his best Gomez Addams smile. ”You know how these things work. As I said, the tests verify that you believe your stories, and the lab work is clean. But that's not the same as saying that the stories are believable as described.”

After I gave him three or four seconds of a stony face, he sighed.

”Joe, in the absence of physical evidence or some workable theory that would explain the kinds of things you three claim to have seen-”

” 'Claim to have seen'?!” I said, jumping on it.

”Yes. Claim. There is nothing I know of that can provide a useful framework for constructing a hypothesis that explains it. A tiny woman beating all three of you up, and apparently doing it all at the same time? A woman who was invulnerable to physical a.s.sault by trained special operators, including a knife attack to the face? C'mon, Joe . . . give me a scenario that covers that, and I'll be glad to put it in my report. h.e.l.l, I'll lead with the theory in my summation.”

He knew, as I knew, that there was no theory that could cover it.

”What about the autopsies on Rattlesnake?”

”They've been sealed in freezers and s.h.i.+pped back to the States. Mr. Church wanted the top guy at Mount Sinai to do the post.”

And that's where we left it.