Free The Death Trust by David Rollins Page B

couldn’t, I thought.
    “He wasn’t like you’d expect a general officer to be,” he insisted.
    “You mean like General von Koeppen?” It just slipped out. I couldn’t help myself.
    Aleveldt bunted it away with a shrug. “Scotty was different.”
    “So there was nothing about his behavior at all that struck you as odd? He was just the same happy-go-lucky, nice-guy commander of one of the biggest military facilities in the world, who just happened to piss off the wrong mystery people enough for them to kill him in a pretty horrible way.” The living General Scott was still a complete mystery to me. I’d read through his career highlights, met his wife, been to his house, spent some time with his second-in-command, interviewed his gliding buddy, seen the movie, bought the T-shirt and I still knew virtually nothing about the man—what made him tick. Aleveldt shifted in his seat. There was something on his mind. “Go on, Captain,” I said.
    “About a year ago…”
    “What?”
    “He lost a lot of weight, and he wasn’t heavy to start with. He lost the joie de vivre. His son was killed.”
    “His boy was a marine, right?” I recalled that Scott’s son was a sergeant in a rifle company. The brief didn’t cover the details of his death.
    “General Scott loved his son. They were very close. He was killed in Baghdad, on patrol. There was a problem with it.”
    I understood that this would be an issue for any parent, having a son killed, whether it happened on Uncle Sam’s watch or not, but I knew that wasn’t quite what Aleveldt meant. “How? What kind of problem?”
    “There was confusion over his death.”
    “In what way?”
    “The forms that accompanied his son’s body said he’d been killed by a land mine.”
    That didn’t sound too confusing to me—tens of thousands of unfortunate people are killed by land mines sitting in the dirt all over the world—and that must have shown on my face.
    “Land mines don’t take your head off, sir,” Aleveldt said.
    I knew a bit about land mines. They were planted in areas in Afghanistan defended by the Taliban. We had planted a bunch of them ourselves. There were also land mines in the areas once contested by the Soviets. And there were land mines sewn by the mujahedeen who fought against them. For a while, there were more land mines planted in Afghanistan than poppies, and they plant a lot of poppies in Afghanistan. Land mines come in many varieties, from the homemade types to those manufactured with ingenious Swiss-watch precision. There are land mines that’ll remove your foot, land mines to stop tanks, and land mines for just about everything in between. I couldn’t, however, think of a single variety that specialized in decapitation. “Then what did?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Did General Scott talk to you about any of this?”
    “No.”
    “Then how do you know so much about it?”
    “People talk. A friend of mine was there when General Scott opened his son’s body bag.”
    I tried to imagine what it might be like, peeling down the zipper and taking a peek inside at the corpse of your own boy—or what was left of him. It would be the kind of experience that could break a man’s spirit completely. Captain Aleveldt stared at the floor, his shoulders hunched as if he too was imagining it. I mentally gave myself a shake. As a witness, Aleveldt wasn’t worth a hell of a lot, hearsay and supposition not given too much credence in a military courtroom. He had, however, provided me with some new questions which required answers. I suddenly felt like I was going somewhere, even if it was in a bunch of divergent directions all at once. “Who’s this friend of yours, Captain?”
    “A doctor. Captain François Philippe.”
    “He French? In the Armée de l’Air?”
    “No, Belgian. Flemish. He worked in the hospital morgue. François told me that the general asked him to conduct an autopsy on the body.”
    “Okay, you said ‘worked.’ Past