Chapter 8: Cross Exam
After the judge called the court to order the next day, he added some strict instructions. "I will tolerate no more outbursts from the court or the gallery. Nor will I tolerate movement from one side of the room to the other. You will take your seats now and remain in those seats; should you want to move elsewhere you can do so when the court recesses for lunch.
"I will not tolerate profanity. Counsel, please control your client, and irregardless of his personal views, any further reference to the prosecution's witnesses in derogatory or profane terms will result in punitive fines levied by the court. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Your Honor," the Defense Attorney nodded from behind the table.
"Good. Now, seeing as movement is difficult for some of the prosecution's witnesses, I will allow Master Sergeant O'Hara and Corporal Cameron Arlington to remain in the courtroom for the proceedings. As they are active-serving members of the military, and as it is my understanding that their commanding officer is here, I have every confidence that they have the self-discipline necessary to control themselves and maintain the dignity of these proceedings, and should they not, I have no doubt their commanding officer's presence would encourage them to refrain from outbursts. Also, while I did forbid the use of wheelchairs, I can see that Corporal Arlington is still recovering and she would be more readily available for cross-examination if seated in the courtroom. Now, with all that said…Prosecution, if you could continue, please."
Cam ascended the stand and continued recounting her experiences. It was, Clayton thought, a good thing that the judge had called a recess the other day; Cam had been an emotional wreck the evening before and Shana and Snake Eyes had awoken to hear her screaming from nightmares in the middle of the night; Doc had had to make a house call and give her a sedative so she could sleep. She still looked pale and tired and not at all like herself today, and the jurors looked sympathetic. Even the judge let her proceed at her own pace, refraining from comment during the long pauses when Cam was fighting to keep control of herself.
And it was good for the case, too. After the shocker of the day before the jury had had time for that to sink in and come at this with a fresh mind, only to be even more deeply shocked as they now heard Cam recount how Rosa had cut away the scar tissue over her chest, replacing it with the cultured skin grafts that she had skinned Cam's leg for earlier in her captivity. Abbie didn't show those medical photos in open court, but she did show the picture of Cam's thigh where scars from the skinning still showed, then showed pictures of the remaining tissue graft still growing in a petri dish. There was a sort of recess here while one of the jurors ran for the bathroom to be sick; as she was out of the courtroom and court was recessed, the spectators were treated to a tender moment when Charlie ascended the witness stand to hand Cam a tissue and give her some water and hug her tightly. She buried her face in his jacket, not crying—quite—but definitely drawing on his strength to control herself. And when the jurors were all seated and court resumed, the defense side of the gallery was decidedly more sparse and the prosecution side was a bit more densely packed.
And Kennedy looked even more pissed, and as Cam continued to recount the 'fishing' incident that the jury had already seen on the drone footage, her voice shaking as she described the terror at being thrown bound into the water, the horror at seeing the skeletons, and then the shocking agony of having her arms dislocated.
And then in a low voice and dropped eyes, she described what had followed. She'd learned what they did with slaves they killed, thrown off the platform; how she knew that the tracer chip would still function for a time below water, leading the rescue team there to save Shana, if not her; how she'd given up hope of surviving the experience and simply focused on Shana's survival, how she'd finally told her commanding officer about the tracer chip. She didn't tell them that Shana had gotten angry with her, but Clayton saw Shana's slumped shoulders and tear-bright eyes and knew his fiery Master Sergeant was regretting having gotten angry with Cam.
And then the juror who had gotten sick the first time ran and threw up a second time when Cam described Rosa coming for her; how Cam, drained and exhausted and completely without hope, had done the one thing she hoped would end it for her, lashing out at her tormentor. And she described the retribution for that; being hung with boat anchors tied to her ankles, and her last memory being of excruciating pain and hallucinations of her husband. Some of the jurors had damp eyes by the time her quivering voice finished that part of the tale, and there was a pause of a couple of minutes while she gathered herself before telling them about her fragmented memories of their rescue, about seeing Charlie actually there, and being just aware enough to tell them where Shana was before Stretcher sent her into a medically-induced coma to stabilize her before they moved her.
There was silence for a long moment after she finished. Abbie finally roused herself enough to say, "Thank you. No further questions." And Clayton braced himself as Kennedy's lawyer rose from the defense table.
"I am sorry for what happened to you, Corporal Arlington," and to his surprise, Clayton heard the ring of sincerity in the man's voice. "I realize this has been difficult and I admire your courage. I just want to clear up a few things. Now, you said that Master Sergeant O'Hara was a 'major, irreplaceable part of the team. Do you consider yourself similarly important to your unit?"
"No." Cam's response was immediate.
"And why not?" When she didn't answer right away, he pressed, "Is that because your-self-esteem and your sense of self-worth are so low?"
"Objection!" Abbie protested as she shot to her feet. "The witness's ego is not the subject of this trial!"
"But it points to motive and reason, Your Honor," the lawyer said, and after a moment the judge nodded.
"I'll allow it, but only up to a point. Please continue, Counsel."
The lawyer turned back to Cam, who squared her shoulders. "I have just recently joined this unit. The mission in the Congo is the first one I went on with them. Master Sergeant O'Hara has been with the unit for a decade now, and is intimately involved in selecting and training newcomers to the unit in hand to hand. She has multiple military operating specialties, each one of which is a valuable asset, where I have one. And my husband has been a member of this unit for nearly eight years and his MOS is the same, so my skills, while helpful, are not unique within the unit."
"So you considered yourself expendable."
"Yes I do."
He turned to face the courtroom, pacing. "So you were expendable and an outsider, a loner—"
She interrupted. "Expendable, yes, in that we have others in the unit who can do what I do. An outsider and a loner, no—General Abernathy, our commanding officer, has very strict views about teamwork being necessary to the cohesiveness of the unit, and he encourages us to make friends and develop interpersonal relationships. Not fraternizing, but he emphasizes that if you care for your fellow soldiers, if they are personal friends, we are more likely to be able to stay alive and together in a hostile situation. Team-building exercises, unit morale, and group training exercises are a very important component of the way our unit is run."
"So would you say that your plan to go deepcover was motivated solely to get back Master Sergeant O'Hara because she was irreplaceable, and not because you felt like an outsider, because you felt alone, because you felt expendable?"
She stared at him in affronted dignity. "Absolutely not. Shana is my commanding officer and mentor and a very close personal friend—the first female best friend I have ever had in my life. Having once been in a human trafficking and slavery situation, I couldn't leave her there. I knew what she was going through because I'd been there myself and I felt that this plan was the best one to get her back, and no one could have pulled it off except someone who had already been there, knew how to act, what to do, what to say, how to behave."
"So you were the only possible candidate to take on this mission."
Cam frowned in puzzlement, but said, "Yes."
The lawyer paced. "So let's review. You're not a very important member of the unit, you're not unique, you have no skills that anyone else in the unit doesn't have. So you're a perfectly ordinary soldier except for this one instance in your past that makes you different and made you essential to the success of the mission. A mission which you came up with. So do you think that subconsciously you might have come up with the idea for this mission in the hope that this will either somehow validate you, make you important and irreplaceable instead of mediocre?"
"No!" Cam's voice was shocked with an edge of anger. "How you could even think that…she was my friend, and I did the only thing I could think of to help her!"
"The only thing you could think of. Which just happened to involve something with which you had unique knowledge of and which no one else could do. Or maybe I'm wrong? Your childhood experiences—you were the sole child of your father, you had all of his attention, and then later in the vacation cabin with your Aunt and Uncle, you were the sole focus of everyone's attention. You crave attention, but you also need direction, someone to tell you what to do, and not being unique anymore in a unit full of soldiers who were all better, stronger, more experienced, irreplaceable, made you feel inferior and weak so you came up with this plan not only to look like a hero and have all eyes on you, but also so that you could escape the military life, a life you'd tried but decided it wasn't for you, and go back to something comforting and familiar—those S&M relationships you had become familiar with. With a Master telling you what to do, what to say, where to go, how to dress, to micromanage every inch of your life, to never have to make decisions for yourself anymore and be the focus of one person's entire attention…that was what you wanted."
"I never…I didn't…" she floundered helplessly, taken aback by the harsh words, the stunning accusation. Clayton, too, was bristling; how dare the man…he knew that there were women who enjoyed role-playing, but to insinuate that Cam, of all people, after what she'd experienced, what she'd gone through—it was incomprehensible. Unthinkable. He badly wanted to ask Abbie to put him on the stand so he could give these people an objective, third-party look at Cam and Shana's abilities and positions in his unit, and resolved to ask her about that the next time the court recessed.
Kennedy, damn his eyes, was sitting there looking smug. Clayton wanted to slap that look off his face; he thought he'd made a point, thought he'd managed to cast a little doubt on Cam's motivation. The lawyer, in the meantime, was pushing some more. "Did you like what happened on the island, Corporal? Was it easier just doing what you were told, blindly and obediently?" he leaned in, eyes intent. "Isn't this exactly what you wanted?"
Cam's eyes went from bewildered and confused to cold and angry in one moment. Her hands flew to the buttons on her jacket, then up the shirt. "Let me tell you something, Counsel," she hissed, her inflection making it sound like a dirty word. "No woman ever wants this!"
Clayton had already had an inkling of what she was doing, so he wasn't really surprised to see her stand and yank both jacket and shirt off in one move. He winced at the sight of her scarred back as she turned and showed the courtroom her scars, the ropelike keloid scars writhing across her back, warping the skin, raising one shoulder as it twisted the other. This time the gasps of horror and the mutters from the jurors were audible; it was very clear that the tightening of the skin as scar tissue thickened and hardened had deformed her back and joints, and several of the jurors looked distinctly ill.
Clayton glanced quickly at Kennedy, and froze. There was such a look of…hatred? Rage? Fury?...on the man's face. But the predominant emotion, lust and desire, made his skin crawl. Son of a bitch is getting his rocks off seeing this! Kennedy shifted unobtrusively in his seat, just slightly, but the next moment he reached down, under the table, and Clayton had to throttle down the instinct to jump over the bench and strangle the sick bastard.
However, Clayton wasn't the only one who noticed. One juror, a little old lady who had to have been well in her eighties, stood straight up, and her high-pitched voice cut through the subdued muttering of the courtroom. "That man is getting hard at seeing her!"
Every juror looked at him. Every eye in the room turned to him, saw him with one hand on the table, one under it.
And the room exploded.
"I will kill him if he touches her again."
The defense lawyer raised his eyebrow. "Be careful, Specialist Ironknife. That could be construed as a threat."
Charlie didn't even blink. "It was a threat. And I meant it. I will kill him if he ever touches her again." He shook his head, and for the first time, Clayton looked at him, really looked, and saw how hard all of this had been on Charlie himself. "I was horrified when she told me what she wanted to do, but I understood why she wanted to do it. She and Shana have developed a very close personal friendship outside of the realm of work, of the unit and our jobs as soldiers, and she is a woman who never does anything halfway. Whatever she commits herself to, she gives it everything she has, from her dancing to her friendships to the unit. Despite what she says about not being irreplaceable—none of us is absolutely irreplaceable, not even Master Sergeant O'Hara—General Abernathy handpicks each soldier for this unit, and he picks only those who he feels will be able to fit in and has skills that the unit needs. So none of us is irreplaceable, but there is no such thing as an expendable soldier in our unit, nor is there any way anyone could look at Cam, look at the way she performs her job, and call her 'mediocre'. Except Cam herself—she is harder on herself than she needs to be, drives herself harder than any drill sergeant ever would, and although that striving for perfection is part of what makes her a good soldier, it also drives me nuts as her husband." A ghost of a smile, answered by smiles from the jurors and a ripple of amusement from the gallery. The prosecution's side was packed, now; there were few people left in the defense side of the gallery. Something that seemed to irk Kennedy to no end; he kept looking at the prosecution gallery, particularly the six men from the board of directors for his investment company who were now squeezed into the bench behind Clayton. "And in a way, she is unique. At her prior posting, she was carrying out support for an LRRP—long range reconnaissance patrol. While we have several other Specialists in our unit who also performed similar duties, their specialties are in other areas; survival and communications, and my specialty is in tracking. Hers is in navigation, and let me tell you, in unfamiliar terrain in a part of the world where the star patterns are different, that is a difficult and valued contribution. So no, she is not expendable and we never leave anyone behind."
He pinned the defense lawyer with a glare. "You can say all you want, think what you want, about Cameron Arlington wanting a structured familiar life where everything is regimented for her and she never has to think for herself. If that were indeed true, she would never have come up with this plan on her own, let alone faced all of us down and argued for the logic of her thinking. She had the courage to defy us, to go into this against the displeasure of her commanding officers and at great personal cost to herself, and carry out a plan that, while successful, has cost her so much personally. She fought for what she believed was our only chance to get her friend back, and she succeeded, but it will be months of rehab and surgery before she'll be able to resume even a semblance of 'normal' life. And as for saying she wanted to be the center of attention—she already is. The center of my universe, my world. I cannot imagine living a life without her." His gaze returned to Kennedy. "And I meant what I said. If he touches her again I will kill him."