The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [93]
"How was the run today, fellas?" Pete Alexander asked.
"Delightful," Dominic answered. "Maybe we should try it wearing fifty-pound backpacks."
"That could be arranged," Alexander replied.
"Hey, Pete, we used to do that in Force Recon. It ain't fun," Brian objected at once. "Turn down the sense of humor, bro," he added for his brother.
"Well, it's good to see you're still in shape," Pete observed comfortably. He didn't have to do the morning runs, after all. "So what's up?"
"I still wish I knew more about our goal here, Pete," Brian said, looking up from his coffee.
"You're not the most patient guy in the world, are you?" the training officer shot back.
"Look, in the Marine Corps we train every day, but even when it isn't clear exactly what we're training for, we know we're Marines, and we aren't getting set up to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the Wal-Mart."
"What do you think you're getting set up for now?"
"To kill people without warning, with no rules of engagement that I can recognize. It looks a lot like murder." Okay, Brian thought, he'd said it out loud. What would happen next? Probably a drive back to Camp Lejeune and the resumption of his career in the Green Machine. Well, it could be worse.
"Okay, well, I guess it's time," Alexander conceded. "What if you had orders to terminate somebody's life?"
"If the orders are legitimate, I carry them out, but the law-the system-allows me to think about how legit the orders are."
"Okay, a hypothetical. Let's say you are ordered to terminate the life of a known terrorist. How do you react?" Pete asked.
"That's easy. You waste him," Brian answered immediately.
"Why?"
"Terrorists are criminals, but you can't always arrest them. These people make war on my country, and if I'm ordered to make war back, fine. That's what I signed on to do, Pete."
"The system doesn't always allow us to do that," Dominic observed.
"But the system does allow us to waste criminals on the spot, in flagrante delicto, like. You did it, and I haven't heard about any regrets, bro."
"And you won't. It's the same for you. If the President says to do somebody, and you're in uniform, he's the Commander in Chief, Aldo. You have the legal right-hell, the duty-to kill anybody he says."
"Didn't some Germans make that argument back in 1946?" Brian asked.
"I wouldn't worry too much about that. We'd have to lose a war for that to be a concern. I don't see that happening anytime soon."
"Enzo, if what you just said is true, then if the Germans had won World War Two, nobody'd need to care about those six million dead Jews. Is that what you're saying?"
"People," Alexander interrupted, "this isn't a class in legal theory."
"Enzo's the lawyer here," Brian pointed out.
Dominic took the bait: "If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he's out on the street, and then he's subject to criminal sanctions."
"Okay. But what about the guys who carry out his orders?" Brian responded.
"That all depends," Pete told them both. "If the outgoing President has given them presidential pardons, what liability do they have?"
That answer jerked Dominic's head back. "None, I suppose. The President has sovereign power to pardon under the Constitution, the way a king did back in the old days. Theoretically, a president could pardon himself, but that would be a real legal can of worms. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. In effect, the Constitution is God, and there is no appeal from that. You know, except when Ford pardoned Nixon, it's an area that has never really been looked into. But the Constitution is designed to be reasonably applied by reasonable men. That may be its only weakness. Lawyers are advocates, and that means they're not always reasonable."
"So, theoretically speaking, if the President gives you a pardon for killing somebody, you cannot be punished for the crime, right?"
"Correct." Dominic's face screwed in on itself somewhat. "What are you telling me?"
"Just a hypothetical," Alexander answered,