The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (37 page)

“I said, ‘Well, Bill—it's a movie.' There was not a whole lot much more you could say about it, other than that.”

 

Z
EKE DIDN'T KILL
anyone in Louisiana. A former marine who was on Zeke's Blackwater team said that no one even discharged his weapon, because it was well known that if you did, Blackwater would fire your ass. Besides, they were in the sticks. They weren't in New Orleans. It was quiet where they were, really sort of boring, except when Zeke told the story that a gang was coming to get at the narcotics. Even then, the former marine listened with half an ear. That guy was always telling stories.

 

T
HE VOLUNTEER FROM
the shelter in Louisiana received a call one day from Linda Clark. Linda told the volunteer that she'd been speaking to the Lord, and the Lord had instructed her to forgive the volunteer for breaking up her marriage to Bill. By this time, the volunteer was living in fear of the man she knew as Zeke, and so she asked Linda the one thing she really wanted to know: Is he dangerous?

Oh, I don't think so, Linda said.

But what about the video footage he sent? the volunteer asked. What about the footage of him executing people?

And that's when the volunteer found out about
Team Dragon.
That's when she found out about
everything
, including the fact that
he had never been to Afghanistan or Iraq. She was hoping that she could keep the affair from her husband, but she wound up confessing it all, and once she did, he forgave her, as the victim of a skilled predator.

“So I dodged a bullet,” she told me. “And so did you.”

It was embarrassing to think of it that way, of course—embarrassing to think that Zeke had singled me out the way he'd singled out so many others, embarrassing to think that I was one of his victims.

“Hey, look at it this way,” the volunteer said. “At least you didn't have sex with him.”

 

T
HE OLD SOLDIER
was surprised to hear Zeke's name when I called him on the phone. “William Clark from California?” he asked, and when I told him what I was calling about, he responded immediately. “Well, if he's the security manager at a nuclear plant, he bullshitted his way into it. He was like that as a teenager. He was one of the most grandiose, storytelling individuals I've ever met.”

Indeed, in May 1975, the soldier had been arrested for the sake of one of Clark's stories. At the time, the most famous mercenary in the world was a man named Michael Hoare, who had raised private armies in the Congo and the Seychelles. Clark said he had been a Ranger, but now, like the soldier, he was in the 34th Infantry. He and a friend told the soldier that they knew somebody who worked for Michael Hoare, and that Hoare was looking for new recruits. First, though, they had to prove that they were brave and that they were ruthless. And so one night, Clark convinced the soldier to throw a bomb at the window of the S&S Truck Stop. It bounced off the bulletproof glass and exploded in the parking lot. They were arrested, along with three others, and spent the night in jail, before their CO got them out the next morning. There was no friend they were defending; there was no
FBI agent. There were only a bunch of ignorant kids beguiled by a shot at glory, and in the story the old soldier tells, “I disassociated myself from William Clark as soon as I got back to the base.”

So he was living it, even then—the fantasy that has consumed his life, as well as the lives of everybody who has trusted him. Court records from McIntosh County indicate that there were no charges of attempted murder, as Zeke had said; the charge was “criminal attempt,” and it was dropped when it came to the docket. His military records indicate that although he might have gone to Ranger School, he did not graduate, and although he was assigned to a Ranger battalion, he finished out his career in the 34th Infantry, with an undistinguished rank and without a Ranger tab. There was no career as a Green Beret, as he had told his son; nor had he ever served in Vietnam. The gooks had not broken him, but he had come damned close to breaking Rick, who, when I told him the military records confirmed that he'd been lied to since he was four years old, said simply, “I want to put my head through a wall.”

 

W
HEN
Z
EKE HAD
the cell-phone conversation with his handlers in the restaurant, I knew that his story had only two possible outcomes, and that both were monstrous. If Larry and Kyle were real, then Zeke was an assassin in the employ of a secret governmental agency that had seen fit to give him a job at a nuclear plant just as he was starting to go crazy with guilt and shame. If they weren't real, then Zeke was not just a liar; he was a liar who was willing to engage in complicated three-way public conversations with people who didn't exist. He was a liar with an alias and fake passports, a liar who maintained extensive stocks of boarding passes and hotel-room keys, a liar who packed a duffel bag and kept it in his house in order to further the fiction that his next
mission was one phone call away. He was a liar who conflated his lies with threats so that skepticism would be conflated with fear. He was a deranged liar, and he was the security manager of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan.

I have a pretty good idea of what the answer is. After all, Zeke told the volunteer the exact same things about the handler that he told me, with the exact same proviso: that this was the first time he had talked about him to another living soul. And Linda Clark said that when Zeke got phone calls from his girlfriends, he often told Linda that his handler was on the line, and that he had to take the call in private.

There is no handler. There was no Larry or Kyle. And yet sometimes I find myself wishing that there were, because the alternative is harder to accept. In the four months I spent with Zeke, he told me exactly two significant facts, two plain truths uncomplicated by falsehood and fantasy: first, that he was security manager of Palisades Nuclear. And second, that last October he had gone to Washington, D.C., in the company of two federal agents and presented his vision of nuclear security to the head of the nuclear-hazards branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

 

H
E WAS WONDERING
if he should tell her. He was wondering if she would love him if he did. I urged him to. It was last December, and he had been married less than two weeks. I was saying goodbye to him for what turned out to be the final time, and I urged him to tell his new wife who he really was, so that he wouldn't make the same mistakes he'd made with Linda. And then the phone rang. It was Baby Doll. He handed the phone to me, and I asked her why she'd married him. She told me that he was tall, that he was not fazed by her multiple sclerosis, and that he was, in her mind, “a gentle protector. He's afraid
that if I found out what he did, I wouldn't love him. But that's not the part of him that I care about. The part that I care about is the courageous part, the part that came to Michigan to start a new life without knowing a soul. The rest—he did what he had to do, what he was asked to do for his country. Others did it, too, and are still doing it. I know he has bad dreams about it. But I want to hold him through his bad dreams. He told me when we first met that we're both wounded souls, and he's right. But that's why I love him.”

 

I
T IS EASY TO THINK OF LYING
as a victimless crime, akin to storytelling, akin to performance—after all, wasn't Zeke performing when he was speaking to his handlers? All those unpublished novels, all those unproduced plays and screenplays; and now, at fifty-three, the chimney sweep finds his true métier, telling tales to a complicit reporter. And yet his victims number more than those whose feelings he's hurt, whose lives he's wrecked. When I called Blackwater about William E. Clark, I asked if Blackwater prohibited its contractors from having sex with the people they were supposed to be protecting.
“What?”
the spokeswoman answered, in disbelief. “Yes. Of course. It's the first thing they're prohibited from doing. It's the worst thing they can do. Does that answer your question?” When I called DynCorp to see if William E. Clark was part of DynCorp's Kosovo Mission—he was, but he wasn't shot; no diplomatic observers were—the spokesman was chiefly concerned with Zeke's claim that he was really in Kosovo for American intelligence. “He's saying DynCorp was his
cover
?” he said. “You have to understand—that's the kind of claim that can put all our guys in jeopardy.” And when I called an FBI agent who until recently had been one of the chief liaisons between the bureau and the CIA, he listened to what I told him about Zeke, then said: “
Fuck
this guy. Expose him. He's an asshole.

Guys like that make it much, much harder for the guys who are legit.”

 

A
STORY ABOUT A LIAR
always turns out to be about one thing: He lied. Zeke says he doesn't talk to his brothers anymore? He lied. Zeke says that he threatened a UPI photographer who took his picture in El Salvador? UPI says it never had a photographer in El Salvador at the time in question.

And yet what haunts me are not Zeke's lies but the truths he told, or tried to tell, from the moment I met him. He was confessing, after all, and though his confession was a failed one, the impulse behind it brought a psychological truth—the momentum of a man unraveling—to his most outrageous falsehoods. He said that he was a nobody. He said he lacked a moral firewall. He said he lied to his mother like he lied to everyone else. He said that his life was a fake. He said that he'd been a lot of people, and that he'd hurt a lot of people. He even said, at length, in a phone message, that he'd never been to Afghanistan or Iraq. I listened, but I didn't believe him, because as invested as I was in telling his story, I was even more heavily invested in proving him a killer and not just a liar. I was aware, all along, that he was one or the other, but somehow I could not bear to think that he was just a liar, and neither could he. It was too shameful. So he said he was a killer instead, because he knew that somehow human sympathy extends to killing even as it ends at lying.

He said that he was talking to me because he needed to burn his bridges; because he needed to be stopped; because he didn't want to hurt any more people. I believed him then. I believe him now.

 

T
OM
J
UNOD
lives in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife, his daughter, and his pit bull, a rescued fighting dog named Carson. Though Junod's been writing for
Esquire
for ten years, he was shocked by the extent of “Zeke's” lies, and to a certain degree still is.

Coda

Bill “Zeke” Clark resigned from Palisades Nuclear in early May 2007, the day “Mercenary” was posted on
Esquire
's website. The story itself prompted several investigations into the question of how someone like Clark was hired in the first place, and one of his former colleagues at Palisades said, “I suspect it's going to change the way the entire industry works, when it comes to hiring people.” Then he added, “If you ever talk to Zeke, tell him he didn't have to lie. We'd have liked him anyway.”

I have not spoken to Clark since the story's publication, so I have no way of knowing if he's still lying. I have, however, remained in contact with his ex-wife and his son, who told me that after he resigned from Palisades, he left Michigan and moved to the state where his parents are living. There, he “hit bottom,” sustaining himself as a laborer and a construction worker, until November 2007, when he was contacted by a British security company. Then, as Rick Clark says, “he finally got to Iraq. He was doing security for vehicle convoys. But he got over it pretty quick. He didn't want to be a trigger puller. He said it was a young man's game. He even got wounded. He took a piece of shrapnel in his back. All he got was a bad bruise. But if he didn't have body armor, he's toast. He's in Nigeria now. He's training troops. There are troops all over the world, and they need trainers. It's what he wants to do; it's what he's best at.”

This all sounded uncannily familiar, and I asked Rick Clark if he believed his father. “I decided to believe it,” Rick Clark said. “I have no logical reason. But we've pretty much reconciled, and if after everything we've gone through he's still spinning…Well, I want what he's saying to be true.”

At this writing, Bill Clark is still married to Baby Doll.

FROM
Men's Journal

T
HE FIRST GUNSHOT
went largely unnoticed by the climbers. Most were still in their tents—the sun had risen, but it hadn't been up long enough to blunt the knifing cold—and no one expected to hear small-arms fire on a mountaineering expedition, much less at 19,000 feet in the Himalayas. Later, though, a few climbers would recall that the ravens that hung around camp had suddenly lifted from the snow in a small, black, squawking cloud, a missed omen.

Earlier on September 30, 2006, the first clear day in a week, the Sherpas in camp had conducted a ritual for the safety of the climbers. There were at least 100 at Cho Oyu advanced base camp; most had not yet made their attempts on the summit because of the poor weather. The world's sixth-tallest mountain, Cho Oyu is the second most popular Himalayan peak, and it's often used as a test run for those who aspire to climb the most popular one, Mount Everest, 19 miles to the east. As part of their ritual the Sherpas had uttered incantations beneath fluttering Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags and burned juniper, which left a resinous aroma around the 70 or so brightly colored tents.

Among those the Sherpas blessed was Luis Benitez, a 34-year-old commercial guide from Colorado who was getting his three clients ready for the four-day summit push. When the first rifle shot was fired, his crew were in their tents packing, sorting, and repacking, and could have mistaken the gun's report for a snapping tent flap.

A few minutes later, near 8
AM
, Benitez's team had gathered at their dining tent for breakfast. Moments later two of Benitez's Sherpas burst in: “Chinese soldiers are coming, very bad!” This time they all heard the distinctive, percussive cracks from Type 81 assault rifles, the Chinese answer to AK-47s.

Benitez and the others dropped their mugs and ran outside. They were shocked to find a handful of Chinese soldiers belonging to the People's Armed Police, or PAP, a mountain paramilitary unit, lined up on a shelf of ice over the moraine about 500 yards away. They were doing most of the firing. Others, hefting matte black rifles, marched toward the camp. Still other soldiers, in small clusters, perhaps three or four in each, were farther down along the icy, hummocky terrain, about 200 yards. As they popped off rounds, the smell of cordite had replaced juniper in the air.

At first some of the climbers thought the gunmen might be shooting at animals. Then, to their horror, they realized that the soldiers were actually taking aim at two snaking lines of 20 to 30 people moving up a glaciated slope at least 100 yards away. Against the aching white expanse of snow the figures were tiny black silhouettes, but even at a distance of several hundred yards, the climbers could make out that many of the figures were smaller still—children—and stumbling as the bullets thudded around them. At that range, the Type 81s—street-fighting weapons, not sniper rifles—are woefully inaccurate, so the gunmen were essentially taking potshots.

Benitez heard cries of anguish drifting across the glaciated pass, punctuated by the crack-popping of the Chinese Kalashnikovs, which made his ears ring. Taking a grave risk, Romanian climber
Sergiu Matei, 29, took out his Sony DCR170 video camera. “They are shooting them like dogs,” he uttered. Then what looked to be three figures dropped to the snow. Two struggled up and staggered on. One figure tried to crawl, but then collapsed in an immobile heap.

 

C
HO OYU, ELEVATION
26,906
FEET,
lies just north of Nepal in Tibet. Sherpas know it as the Turquoise Goddess, while some Tibetan Buddhists believe that Padmasambhara, who brought Buddhism to Tibet, buried instructions on how to save the earth from chaos somewhere on the mountain. At the height of the main climbing season, in autumn, the slopes of Cho Oyu are as cosmopolitan as an olympiad, as climbers from around the world make for the top of the sacred massif, the easiest of the earth's 14 peaks that rise above 8,000 meters (or 26,247 feet). In September 2006, advanced base camp had alpine athletes from the U.K., France, Australia, New Zealand, Romania, Slovenia, Russia, and the U.S., among others.

With foreign mountaineers and guides like Luis Benitez, Cho Oyu is an international crossroads because of the Nangpa La Pass, not far from where advanced base camp is established most years. Because it is remote, hard terrain, Nangpa La Pass is a difficult part of the border for the Chinese to patrol, and thus it's one of the few places where Tibetans looking to leave their occupied homeland undetected risk the elements for freedom abroad. In 1959 the Dalai Lama used a route like this one to escape into exile; Xinhua, the government-run Chinese news service, has dubbed it a “golden route” for Tibetans seeking asylum from Chinese rule.

It's also a trade route; some of the traders using the Nangpa La Pass had stopped in camp to sell their wares, including knockoff name-brand parkas from Beijing. But the people the Chinese were shooting at now didn't look like traders, and they weren't.
Many were nuns and monks, unable to practice their faith freely in Tibet. While a few Tibetans are able to obtain passports to travel abroad, fleeing refugees violate Article 322 of the Chinese criminal code, are jailed immediately, and, according to Human Rights Watch, are often tortured and then monitored by authorities for years after.

As the shooting erupted around him that morning, Benitez says he contemplated a “Rambo move” to try to disrupt the Chinese soldiers. Only Benitez is no commando; he's a sunny, sincere mountain guide. To his self-confessed shame, Benitez did nothing to stop the soldiers as they used the Tibetans for target practice.

On the one hand, this most recent Himalayan disaster had a familiar ring to it, as the mountaineers had to choose between their own selfish goals and helping others in distress. Several of the climbers, including Benitez, continued up toward the summit after the Chinese soldiers stormed their camp, rounding up refugees.

But in most other respects this incident stood alone: A cold-blooded murder by the host nation's own police left foreign witnesses not knowing at all what to do. Confusing matters further, a handful of commercial outfitters and their guides allegedly told climbers not to tell anyone outside of camp about the shooting. Fearful the Chinese authorities would revoke their permits to operate on Cho Oyu and the Chinese/Tibetan side of Everest, or that they'd seek revenge on the Tibetan cooks and porters in their employ, two of the top Everest guide operations allegedly suppressed news of the shooting.

The incident made headlines, especially in Europe, when it reached the media in October 2006, but drawing on more than 30 interviews, transcripts of interviews conducted by the Washington, DC-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), and visits to Cho Oyu and India, this is one of the most complete accounts yet compiled. Before the climbers spoke out, and Sergiu
Matei aired his video, the Chinese claimed the shooting was in self-defense. Meanwhile, climbers were left to contemplate what it meant for their sport that peers would put personal and commercial goals ahead of reporting an atrocity. The episode could play as farce if it hadn't cost at least one young woman her life and if it hadn't exposed, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the brutal contempt the Chinese authorities continue to have for Tibetans.

 

L
IKE MANY OF THE ESTIMATED
2,500 to 3,500 Tibetans who flee their occupied homeland each year, Kelsang Namtso wanted the freedom to practice Tibetan Buddhism. A serious young woman who dressed in the traditional long skirts of a Tibetan nomad, Kelsang, 17, and her best friend Dolma, 16, rosy-cheeked and more jovial than her friend, left Nagchu, their home in a rural area northeast of Tibet's capital, Lhasa, with the intention of seeking out the Dalai Lama, their leader in exile, in Dharamsala, India.

Kelsang and her five brothers grew up with parents who struggled to make ends meet as semi-nomads, Dolma told me. Forced to recite paeans to Mao Tsetung, Kelsang dreamed of becoming a nun. (In Tibet it's an honor for one child from every family to follow a Buddhist calling; it accrues “merit” for the whole family.) But Kelsang's parents were against it. Her mother had arthritis and felt that her only daughter should be at home helping her. “Her mother didn't want her to be a nun because she was the only girl,” says Dolma. “She said she had to help her mother.”

Undaunted, Kelsang took vows with lamas in secret, stopped listening to music and dancing, which she loved, and maintained a strict vegetarian diet. Eventually, she left under the cover of night for a free life, on September 18, 2006.

After dodging Chinese army patrols in Lhasa, Kelsang and Dolma were crammed into the back of a truck with 75 other refugees numbering monks, nuns, and children as young as seven. Dolma. Kelsang, and the others had paid around $500 each—two
years of wages for rural Tibetans—to two men, illegal guides, who were secretly stowing everyone in the truck. Even before they left, one man's courage deserted him. He jumped off the truck and fled home. As they lurched on into the night, another started vomiting with fear.

As the vehicle rumbled out of Lhasa, sliding past Chinese checkpoints, the mood inside was desperate. Inside the juddering, dark, and airless interior, children began to cry, cries that risked everyone by alerting Chinese border guards. The guides urged them to be silent with hoarse whispers. Guides face up to 10 years in prison for leading refugees out of Tibet.

The guides pushed hard, getting angry if anyone faltered. Temperatures dropped to well below freezing. Dolma and Kelsang walked with the hems of their skirts sodden and caked with snow, their arms folded across their chests to keep their fingers warm as they stumbled and fell. They had left with a store of
tsampa
, roasted barley flour, to sustain them, but their supply ran out; worse, they found themselves without water. At one point they came across herders, who charged them 70 yuan (about $9) for plastic bags of water.

Kelsang, with Dolma at her side, was faring badly. The altitude and lack of food gave her splitting headaches. Finally, 12 days after leaving Lhasa, a monk in the group spotted orange and yellow climbers' tents, incongruous against the dazzling white.

Figures clad in long coats clambered down the rocks toward them. The monk thought they might've been Tibetan monks in religious dress and waved. The refugees embraced one another as relief swept through the group. Then they realized the long coats were actually fur-lined Chinese army-issue, known as
dayi.
The smiles froze on the refugees' faces. Some in the group shouted warnings, “They are soldiers!” and urged everyone to run.

Pandemonium erupted. A soldier started screaming, “
Thama de!
” which translates as “Fuck your mother.” Puffs of snow erupted around them as bullets tore into the ice.

“I heard the bullets zinging past my ears,” says Dolma. “The noise was like,
tag, tag.
And then when they came past my ears, they were like,
pew, pew.
”

Refugees split off running in different directions, which at that altitude is a superhuman feat. A few escaped. Somewhere in the melee Dolma lost Kelsang. Her back to the soldiers, woozy from the altitude, Kelsang presented a slow-moving target. She was a few yards from cresting a ridge and getting out of range when a 7.62mm round tore into her back, just under her left arm. She slumped in the snow and, 20 minutes from freedom, died.

 

B
ACK IN CAMP
S
ERGIU
M
ATEI,
the Romanian climber, switched off his camera. “I didn't want to film her dying,” he said. He had nearly 30 minutes of film that would have a devastating worldwide impact—if he could get it out of the country. Immediately Matei felt a lingering gaze from a soldier nearby. He waved to the soldier and swallowed hard, trying not to betray his fear before walking back to his tent to stow the tape.

Minutes later the Chinese police marched the first of several groups of refugees they'd captured into camp. One group included about a dozen kids.

“The children were in single file, about six feet away from me,” Steve Lawes, a British climber, later told the International Campaign for Tibet. “They didn't see us—they weren't looking around the way kids normally would; they were too frightened. By that time advanced base camp was crawling with soldiers. They had pretty much taken over, and the atmosphere was intimidating. We were doing our best not to do anything that might spark off more violence.”

The soldiers marched the kids into a big green tent flying a Chinese flag, a tent that was off-limits to foreign climbers. About an hour later a PAP soldier entered the camp with an injured
Tibetan on his back. The Tibetan appeared to have been shot in the leg, but the soldier dumped him on the snow like a sack of grain. In all, nearly 30 refugees were brought to the green tent, then herded off to a detention center. There, according to testimony given to the ICT, several were severely beaten.

The climbers were appalled but felt helpless to intervene. A few of the PAP soldiers were actually friendly to the climbers; in their late teens, the soldiers took breaks in camp, lit cigarettes, and carried on as if everything that had just happened was routine, a morning's work.

Four hours later a Tibetan kitchen boy came running to Matei. Someone was hiding in the toilet tent, he said. Matei went to investigate. Hunkered in the latrine, his hands shaking, was a man called Choedron, a poor farmer in his 30s. He had tried to bury himself in rocks, pathetically using a toilet paper bag to cover himself. As the tent zip ripped up, he nearly retched from fright; he feared that a Chinese prison cell, torture, and shame awaited him. Instead, he was confronted with Matei, whose red goatee and shaved head lend him the look of a death metal bassist. Unable to speak Tibetan, Matei repeated the one thing Choedron said: “Dalai Lama.” Choedron put his hands together in veneration. They understood each other.