“No, Ma’am, with all due respect,” he said. “The whole reason we were out there in that area was because we were searching for some antiaircraft batteries that ISIL had up and operating. A chopper flying over that area would have been shot down, no doubt about it. No, they definitely would have walked, and there’s no possible way they could have gotten there, looked the scene over, supposedly discovered that the bodies of the girls were missing, and then come back to make a report that resulted in my arrest.”
Mathers sat there and stared at him. “Is there any possible way that we can prove that?”
Noah shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “In order to make it stick, you can bet Colonel Blanchard has got the whole unit ready to back up his version of how, and probably where, it happened. All the documentation will show the event taking place somewhere close enough to reach in that timeframe, I’d bet on it. They would have gone after the bodies of our men sometime later.”
Mathers leaned forward, her hands open on either side of the file that was lying in front of her. “Sergeant, I’m trying everything I can think of, but the truth is that I’ve already been informed there’s no possible way I can win. In fact, my CO told me this morning that if I continue to try, all I’m going to do is ruin my own career.” She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them again and let them bore into his. “I’ve tried to decide what to do, and I—I just can’t figure it out. A part of me says I need to do everything possible to keep you from getting the death penalty, or at least to make it feasible for us to try the appeal route we discussed the other day, but another part tells me to run from you as fast as I can. Like I said, though, I can’t decide, so I’m going to leave this up to you. You tell me what to do, right now, and I’ll do it. Do I keep trying, or do I just go through the motions and let them convict you?”
Noah sat forward and put his right hand over her left. “Your CO is right,” he said. “If you keep trying to help me, this whole thing is going to blow up in your face and ruin your life, just the way it’s ruining mine. There’s no point in both of us going down. Give me whatever it is I need to file in order to fire you, so we can get you out of this mess.”
Mathers sat in her chair, staring at the young man who was looking her straight in the eye as he gave her permission to send him to his death. She already knew enough about his condition to realize that he was simply making what he considered the logical choice, but that didn’t assuage her conscience in the least. Without her help, he was going to be convicted, sentenced to death and executed, and probably within a very short time.
She had done a little research on death row at the US Disciplinary Barracks, and found out that there were several people awaiting execution there. Most of them had been waiting for years, but with the appeals process and changes in the White House, there were various reasons why they had not yet had their sentences carried out. Mathers didn’t think Foster would get to hang out with them for very long. Her gut hunch said that his execution would happen within months of sentencing, with all of his appeals exhausted as quickly as possible.
“And what if I can’t do that?” Mathers asked. “What if my conscience just won’t let me walk away? Sergeant Foster, the biggest problem I’m facing right now is the fact that I believe you. Yeah, yeah, I know there’s no evidence to back you up, but when I sat here and listened to you the other day, all I heard was a man who was calmly recounting exactly what happened. You weren’t telling me some elaborate story, you didn’t try to come up with excuses for why no one corroborates your claim, you didn’t try to protest that you are being mistreated—hell, Sergeant, all you did was answer my questions. A man who’s truly guilty, a man who’s trying to put one over on the system, he’ll come up with all sorts of things to say to try to throw us off. He’ll tell me how the men who are willing to testify against him are upset because he refused to participate in some ritual, or that their ringleader is gay and he refused an advance from him. You didn’t give me any BS—you just told me what happened, without any embellishments. In my experience, and in my professional opinion, that is something that only a man telling the truth would do.”