Gone Tomorrow - Lee Child [58]
“They couldn’t get that from HRC. Just not possible. Orders and deployment records and after-action reports are classified and retained at Fort Bragg under lock and key.”
“But what happens to officers who lead successful missions?”
“You tell me.”
“They get medals,” I said. “The bigger the mission, the bigger the medal. And army regulation 600-8-22, section one, paragraph nine, subsection D, requires the Human Resources Command to maintain an accurate historical record of each and every award recommendation, and the resulting decision.”
“Maybe so,” Sansom said. “But if it was a Delta mission, all the details would be omitted. The citation would be redacted, the location would be redacted, and the meritorious conduct would not be described.”
I nodded. “All the record would show is a name, a date, and an award. Nothing else.”
“Exactly.”
“Which is all a smart person thinking laterally really needs, right? An award proves a mission succeeded, the lack of a citation proves it was a covert mission. Pick any random month, say early in 1983. How many medals were awarded?”
“Thousands. Hundreds and hundreds of Good Conduct Medals alone.”
“How many Silver Stars?”
“Not so many.”
“If any,” I said. “Not much was happening early in 1983. How many DSMs were handed out? How many DSCs? I bet they were as rare as hens’ teeth early in 1983.”
Elspeth Sansom moved in her chair and looked at me and said, “I don’t understand.”
I turned toward her but Sansom raised a hand and cut me off. He answered for me. There were no secrets between them. No wariness. He said, “It’s a kind of back door. Direct information is completely unavailable, but indirect information is out there. If someone knew that a Delta mission had taken place and succeeded, and when, then whoever got the biggest unexplained medal that month probably led it. Wouldn’t work in wartime, because big medals would be too common. But in peacetime, when nothing else is going on, a big award would stick out like a sore thumb.”
“We invaded Grenada in 1983,” Elspeth said. “Delta was there.”
“October,” Sansom said. “Which would add some background noise later in the year. But the first nine months were pretty quiet.”
Elspeth Sansom looked away. She didn’t know what her husband had been doing during the first nine months of 1983. Perhaps she never would. She said, “So who is asking?”
I said, “An old battleaxe called Svetlana Hoth, who claims to have been a Red Army political commissar. No real details, but she says she knew an American soldier named John in Berlin in 1983. She says he was very kind to her. And the only way that inquiring about it through Susan Mark makes any sense is if there was a mission involved and the guy named John led it and got a medal for it. The FBI found a note in Susan’s car. Someone had fed her the regulation and the section and the paragraph to tell her exactly where to look.”
Elspeth glanced at Sansom, involuntarily, with a question in her face that she knew would never be answered: Did you get a medal for something you did in Berlin in 1983? Sansom didn’t respond. So I tried. I asked him straight out, “Were you on a mission in Berlin in 1983?”
Sansom said, “You know I can’t tell you that.” Then he seemed to lose patience with me, and he said, “You seem like a smart guy. Think about it. What possible kind of operation could Delta have been running in Berlin in 1983, for God’s sake?”
I said, “I don’t know. As I recall, you guys worked very hard to stop people like me knowing what you were doing. And I don’t really care, anyway. I’m trying to do you a favor here. That’s all. One brother officer to another. Because my guess is something is going to come back and bite you in the ass and I thought you might appreciate a warning.”
Sansom calmed down pretty fast. He breathed in and out a couple of times and said, “I do appreciate the warning. And I’m sure you understand that I’m not really allowed to deny anything. Because logically, denying something is the same as confirming something else. If I deny Berlin and every other place