Chapter 2 : Opening Arguments
It was a strange motorcade that made its way to the courthouse that morning.
Mindful of their cover story, they'd taken Joe vehicles from Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, then requested use of Hamilton's military vehicles to take them the rest of the way to the Federal Courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Those who were to testify; Cam, Shana, Alex, Lady Jaye, Duke, Spirit , Snake Eyes, as well as Lifeline and Stretcher, were packed into the armored Hummer at the end of the motorcade—for that was what it looked like, a line of military vehicles each packed with soldiers being followed by the Hummer.
Flint rode in the lead vehicle with Hawk, contrary to his common custom of riding with Allie wherever they went. As the line of transports pulled up in front of the courthouse, Flint grinned at Hawk and got out first. As the reporters milling around the courthouse steps drew back in confusion, the rest of the vehicles pulled up one by one, disgorging a total of sixteen Joes.
"Atten-HUT!" Flint called in his best drill-sergeant voice, and as smoothly as if these sixteen had practiced it, they drew into four rows of four officers each, each one wearing their dress blues and sporting rank, insignia, decorations and medals. The first row, the front, held Beach Head and Wild Bill; Hawk stepped into the front right corner of the phalanx of officers, Flint stepped into the front left corner, and then he and Flint both called at the same time, "Form ranks!" The four rows of soldiers peeled smoothly apart into two rows of eight, one column headed by Hawk, the other line headed by Flint, Hawk's second in command.
The last vehicle pulled up and disgorged Shana and the rest of the Joes who would be testifying. Although Duke could have been the one to take charge of this group, it had been decided to really impress everyone with Shana's ability and rank, and so she'd been elected, on the way there, to call them into formation. As soon as the Hummer stopped, she got out, and Charlie and Snake Eyes followed next, going to the rear of the vehicle to get Cam's wheelchair out. As they were unfolding it the rest of the testifying team climbed out of the vehicle, Charlie got Cam settled in the wheelchair, and Shana led the march up the sidewalk, followed by Snake Eyes, Allie, Cam in her wheelchair, pushed along by Charlie, Stretcher and Lifeline, with Duke and Alex bringing up the rear. Shana brought her line to a stop, saluted Hawk crisply. He saluted back, and then in perfect unison he and Flint both started their lines for the courthouse, flanking Shana's group as flashbulbs popped and reporters babbled into their microphones.
Hawk stepped into the courthouse first, took his line of eight through the security sensors. Although the amount of metal on his jacket set off the sensors, after a quick wave of the wand he was allowed to pass, courthouse security plainly unsure what to do with the mass number of soldiers descending on them. After Hawk's line went through, Flint took his line as well, and apparently Alex had taken the trouble to find out which courtroom was going to house their trial because Flint made a beeline for the first door on the left. Hawk arranged his line to the right of the hallway, Flint on the left, and then as Shana's group passed through the security sensors everyone snapped to attention. She saluted Hawk again, one more time, before vanishing into the room reserved for witnesses on the far side of the courtroom door, and then Hawk brought his line into the courtroom and got them seated behind the prosecution's table. Moments later, having apparently gotten Shana's group settled, Alex and Federal Prosecutor Abbie Carmichael entered the courtroom and seated themselves at the prosecution's table.
Courtney and Hacker and the rest of the tech team had been in Flint's line, so it wasn't until they were all seated and waiting when he noticed that Courtney was wearing glasses. Since she'd never needed corrective lenses before, it stood out, but apparently, since all of them had been wearing stars and bars and their decorations, and those had caused the courthouse security sensors to go off, apparently courthouse security hadn't even looked twice.
He wasn't sure if it was a good thing (they hadn't been caught sneaking recording devices into the courthouse) or a bad thing (should it really have been that easy to get something into a Federal courthouse?) Granted, they were military, and he had quite a lot of gold braid all over him signifying that he was very high ranked, although he was fairly sure few people in the courthouse (besides his own people) knew just how high.
The prosecution followed moments later, and here came Damien Kennedy seated in a motorized wheelchair accompanied by his team of lawyers. Clayton had heard that he'd hired the best legal team out there, and he knew the truth of that now as he saw the lawyer that had defended a very well known, famous sports star from a DUI charge. However, if that lawyer was able to get Kennedy off on this charge Hawk would eat his cover. Arrested at the scene, with victims being members of the American military…
Kennedy, however, didn't look fazed at all. And while the Joes had taken over the first three rows of courthouse benches behind the prosecution, quite a lot of spectators were filtering in as well. What Hawk couldn't get his head around was the number of people filling in the seats behind the defendants' table—people who were quite plainly supporters of Damien Kennedy.
But what he did notice was that a lot of them were unmistakably uneasy at the number of Joes in the courtroom. Not so sure your boy's innocent now, are you? He thought, noticing how one person who made eye contact hastily looked away. It was easy to say you thought he was innocent and being railroaded but it's different now that you see how all of us are firmly convinced our girls—my girls—are telling the truth?
The judge walked n, and the entire courtroom rose. The judge started to seat himself, then looked taken aback at the sea of navy blue military dress uniforms filling the first three rows of seats behind the prosecution's table. However, he refrained from saying anything as he seated himself. "Please be seated. Court is now in session."
Abbie Carmichael rose from her seat. Whether by coincidence or design, she too had worn a navy blue suit that looked a lot like Alex's, though tailored to fit her taller, leggier frame. "Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the matter before the court today is a very serious one. Two active, serving members of the US Army were sold as human slaves and held against their will by the defendant, Mr. Damien Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy has created quite a name and fortune for himself as a financial mogul, running one of the largest international brokerage firms in the world, with an income that spans nearly ten million a year. It is the prosecution's intention to prove that all of this was not enough, that Mr. Kennedy was so warped and morally deficient in his thinking that he believed he was entitled, by virtue of all that money, to own another human being. Although he could have had any woman out there, that there are any number of women willing to throw themselves at his feet the moment he snapped his fingers, he disregarded the debutantes, the eligible young ladies, the movie star he broke up with two months ago that made headlines, it was so sensational…he wanted, instead, a woman whom he had total and complete power over, a woman who he could force to sleep with him when women all over the world would have done it willingly.
"The woman he chose was US Army Master Sergeant Shana O'Hara. Sergeant O'Hara was on a humanitarian mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a contingent of soldiers dispatched by the US at the request of the United Nations to rescue a group of children who were material witnesses for current ongoing war crimes trials levied by the International Criminal Court, of whom my second chair, Alexandra Cabot, was a volunteer member. Master Sergeant O'Hara and her team located the children, liberated them from the rogue militia factions who had captured them, and was facilitating their escape. In the process of ensuring the children were safe, Master Sergeant O'Hara was separated from the group when a bridge gave way and she was swept away from her team in a white-water rapid river. When she finally washed up some distance downstream, the rogue factions who use their aggression to mask their true intentions—raiding and burning villages, capturing the children and selling them on the international slave market—captured her. To them, Master Sergeant O'Hara was a dangerous but priceless commodity; white, adult female, fit, no diseases, in the best of health—but they couldn't sell her in Africa. So they sent her on a long, unimaginable trip by sea, chained to the floor of a cargo container ship, bound for Amsterdam. To keep her compliant she was subjected to forcible drugging.
"Incredibly, Master Sergeant O'Hara came out of that cargo container alive, and a special auction was declared by the slave market officials in Amsterdam, who invited a number of their wealthiest clients to attend an exclusive auction put together specifically to introduce Master Sergeant O'Hara to the wealthiest human traffickers in the world.
"Now one member of the team that escorted Master Sergeant O'Hara in the Congolese jungle refused to accept that her friend and commanding officer would most likely never come home. Although we hear, in the military, the old adage 'we never leave anyone behind', for this unit, this team, those words are written in stone and this member, Corporal Cameron Arlington, came up with a plan to go undercover as a human slave to find her commanding officer and friend and bring her back.
"Corporal Arlington, out of everyone in the unit, was herself uniquely suited to undertake this unimaginable mission. As a child, the death of her father remanded her guardianship to two people who claimed to be her Aunt and Uncle but who, in fact, were just looking for a uniquely vulnerable child around whom they could hatch their plans. At the age of fifteen Corporal Arlington was locked in a basement of an exclusive vacation home in western New York, where that Aunt and Uncle accepted money from a number of unscrupulous, increasingly violent pedophiles who subjected her to unimaginable abuse. It didn't end until the cabin caught fire three years later and she escaped, wandered lost in the New York wilderness until she crossed into the Iroquois reservation. As luck would have it, they recognized her as one of their own—her father was Iroquois—and adopted her into their tribe gave her a home. She, deciding to follow in the footsteps of her beloved father, enlisted in the Army five years later. Last fall she came to the attention of the commander of her unit when they were in a training class together and her superb skills earned her a place with the unit.
"However, she never once forgot where she had been and where she came from, and when a cruel stroke of fate placed a very close friend into the same situation from which she herself had escaped, Cameron Arlington devised a desperate but simple plan; she would go undercover as a slave, scour the markets for her friend and eventually bring her home with the assistance of an implanted tracer chip. And the plan worked—barely. She found Master Sergeant O'Hara, and the dedicated members of their unit found them, just in time to keep them both from death; at the time they were found Master Sergeant O'Hara had been crucified with nails through her wrists for three days and Corporal Arlington had been hung by her wrists with weights on her ankles until she was nearly dead of shock, blood loss, hunger and dehydration. Testimony from the medical professionals who were part of the rescue operation will show that they were both close to death and lucky to escape.
"That man, the defendant, Damien Kennedy, owned the island on which the two soldiers were found, was in fact taken into custody at the same moment he was preparing to again torture Corporal Arlington. The prosecution will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Damien Kennedy bought both women, was instrumental in their captivity, torture and attempted murder; will prove that he was behind the selling and trafficking of a large number of human beings through both direct funding of the slave market at which the two soldiers were purchased but also by keeping sex slaves of his own on a luxury island he purchased and outfitted specifically for this purpose. We will prove beyond a doubt that he was indeed responsible and should be punished to the fullest extent the law allows." She stopped speaking and sat down.
While it was a simplification of what had been an extremely complex operation, Hawk had to admire her way with words and the simple statement of fact that subtly played on jurors sympathies for Shana and Cam. Nevertheless, he braced himself as the defense lawyer got up to make his opening remarks. "Good morning, Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I stand before you today retained by my client to defend him from some heinous charges. Human trafficking? Sexual slavery? Physical abuse? All you need to do is look at him to know that those words are false. My client Damien Kennedy is a wealthy man; wealthy beyond, I'll admit, even my wildest dreams. He holds citizenship in three countries. He owns property in five. He has never been married and even in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, he is considered a very eligible bachelor. He is a businessman who handles multi-million dollar investments for wealthy clients worldwide; he is a philanthropist, investing heavily in charitable organizations all over the world; a pillar of the community he is from, admired and respected in Atlanta for generous donations to hospitals, schools, churches, and eldercare facilities. He is an upstanding American citizen who has never been in trouble with the law, unlike one of his alleged 'victims', Corporal Arlington. The defense will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Master Sergeant Shana O'Hara, despite her admirable dedication to her career with the US Army, was tired of playing soldier and was looking to settle down, to marry someone rich and live the rest of her life in such luxury that she would never again have to work if she didn't want to. Not that I blame her, of course; the life of a soldier is hard and dangerous and Master Sergeant O'Hara is young, vibrant and still has a lot of life ahead of her.
"My client's other accuser, Corporal Arlington, is a different matter. An orphan, abandoned by her mother with a father at an overseas Air Force Base who was never officially proven to be her biological father, she was a loner on base, never formed friendships with other children her age, and was subject to her father's somewhat unusual ideas about raising children. As a child, at the tender age of five Cam Arlington's father would take her out into the woods for days at a stretch carrying only what would fit in a child's backpack, and force her to learn how to kill and cook her own food, how to find and create shelters and weapons. He even reportedly 'lost' her in the woods one weekend to test what she had learned. So at an early age, when other children her age had the luxury of being children, Cam Arlington was having her childhood taken from her. She quickly learned how to manipulate the others around her, how to attract attention, and that need for attention, for love and affection in any form, became the driving force behind her life. She became a follower, someone who took orders and followed commands blindly because she had spent so much of her childhood taking orders from her father that she didn't know what else to do. With her Aunt and Uncle keeping her captive, as much as she may have hated it, the simple fact that here all she had to do was follow orders must have been a relief for young Cam Arlington.
"After the cabin burned down she was again at odds, with no one to tell her what to do. Living with the Iroquois tribe on the reservation gave her a chance to try living alone, and after five years she decided this wasn't for her. She enlisted in the Army, an easy decision for her since it now meant that her entire life would be regimented for her. She would be told when to get up, what to do with every waking minute, when to eat, when to sleep.
"But even here she had problems. Due to her previous experiences as a victim of her Aunt and Uncle's machinations, she could send confusing body signals to those around her, and it was no doubt this that led to a court-martial last summer of two of her commanding officers and one of her fellow cadets. Colonels Hilton and Broadview were both accused of maltreatment, of assault and battery, and a fellow Corporal, Walker, of rape and assault and abuse. Those allegations ended all those soldiers' careers.
"When her fellow soldier, Master Sergeant O'Hara, was captured on a mission she saw it as her chance to escape back into the world she knew, the world she was familiar with, the world she was used to. The world of human trafficking. Except this time she had an excuse, she said she was planning to find her friend. But according to my client's tenants, the individuals Rosa Capelletti and Hans Keil who rented the island, who lived on it and who were the ones responsible for bringing slaves to the island…according to them, the woman we know as Cam Arlington was a nameless faceless slave to them, a slave who never complained even when they hurt her deliberately to see if she was indeed willing. She never told them she was there against her will.
"We will submit evidence that while Master Sergeant O'Hara was indeed there against her will, my client Damien Kennedy was unaware of it. And he had no reason to believe that Cam Arlington was there unwillingly either. My client has been railroaded and manipulated by the people he trusted to care for his island in his absence and by the women he thought were willing, and deserves nothing but pity for the way he has been treated by those he most trusted."
