Warriors (9781101621189) Read online

  Dušic followed him and watched as he extended the legs of the rifle’s bipod, opened the lens caps on the scope, and settled into a prone position. Stefan sighted through the scope along an avenue among the woods; these trees had not grown naturally but had been planted in rows. On a branch perhaps a hundred meters away, Stefan had spiked the page of newsprint. He let out a chestful of air, held his breath, and fired.

  The bullet made a crack as it pierced the sound barrier, but without the usual booming slam of a high-powered rifle. Bark flew from the tree trunk beside the newsprint. The paper appeared untouched.

  “Hmm,” Stefan said. “Would you call that six inches off?” Western measurements for an American scope. He racked the bolt, ejected the expended brass, and chambered a fresh round.

  “At least,” Dušic said. He picked up the fired cartridge and placed it in his pocket. No sense leaving evidence.

  Stefan turned the rifle on its side, looked at the windage knob. “Half minute of angle,” he muttered to himself. “Twelve clicks left.” He turned the knob, counting aloud to twelve.

  The maestro tunes his Stradivarius, Dušic thought. Stefan rested the M24 on the legs of the bipod, sighted, fired again.

  The newsprint barely trembled as the bullet cut through it. Dušic squinted, could not see where the round had hit. Stefan raised his cheek from the rifle stock and looked through the binoculars.

  “Centered pretty well, but a little high,” he said.

  “Maybe crank the elevation down a click or two,” Dušic suggested.

  “No, I like it a little high at this range. From the environment you describe, I’m anticipating a target perhaps two hundred meters out.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” Dušic deferred to Stefan on the technical details of marksmanship. A good officer should not micromanage.

  Stefan fired two more rounds, reloaded, and fired four more, just to confirm the zero point. When Dušic borrowed the binoculars, he saw that all of the bullets had grouped within a centimeter of one another. He gave the binoculars back to Stefan and picked up the rest of the empty brass. The fired cartridges clanked in his pocket like spare change. He stepped through the woods to retrieve Stefan’s makeshift target, and he observed the neat, round holes drilled through the paper. The searing passage of the bullets had left blackened edges around each hole. Two of the rounds had struck in nearly the same spot; their holes overlapped as if two half-moons had linked.

  The whole effort took less than twenty minutes. No curious passersby or farmers angry over trespass ever appeared. Dušic felt gratified as Stefan steered the van back out onto the road. The success of a mission could depend on attention to details, and the two men had just taken care of an important one. Ideally, Dušic would have seen the weapon sighted in well ahead of time, but he’d not expected to need it so soon. The drug bust had forced him to move fast, and he had adapted and recovered. This was war, and war was chaos.

  And now he would send a message: Those who let him down would pay dearly.

  Dmitri should have known better. But what disappointed Dušic even more than the betrayal was Dmitri’s lack of vision. Russians, close cousins to the Serbs, also knew what it meant to struggle for their land and their people. Well, most of them did, but apparently not Dmitri and the rest of that crew. The Russian pilot should have held his tongue and accepted his prison sentence as a matter of Slavic unity.

  As the van crossed from Bosnia into Serbia—the border Dušic hoped to erase someday—he considered operational details for the rest of this side mission. More than likely, no one at the airport knew Stefan’s van. He and Stefan could probably drive around the freight terminal and scout a good firing position, as long as they weren’t too obvious. They didn’t need to enter any secured zone of the airport; Stefan could fire over or through the chain-link fence. The van itself could serve as a hide. As urban sniping environments went, this one seemed quite favorable. And Stefan had plenty of experience in urban sniping.

  A few hours later, in Belgrade, Dušic felt a bit like a fugitive as the airport came into view. Just days ago he’d visited this place openly as an important businessman, a captain of commerce. Now he needed to stay as unobtrusive as possible. Dušic could imagine how President Karadžic and General Mladic must have felt, once-powerful men forced to live this way for years until they were captured.

  Plenty of time remained for scouting. As the van rolled along the airport’s perimeter road, Dušic could see the big tail of the Antonov looming among the warehouse and hangars. When the van moved farther along the road and closer to the aircraft, he spotted a ground power cart’s cable plugged into a receptacle on the side of the Antonov. The cargo doors yawned open. So the schedule had been correct. The ground crew was loading cargo for a departure this evening.

  “There is your target area,” Dušic said. “The pilot will be a thin man with gray and black hair, and he is often unshaven. I will help you identify him. Get him first, and if you can hit other crew members, so much the better.”

  Stefan said nothing. He lowered his sunglasses and peered over the lenses. The gesture made Dušic think of a musician examining a score, or perhaps a civil engineer sizing up the river where he must build a bridge. Professional analysis.

  Dušic envied his friend’s cool detachment. Killing unemotionally came with so much more precision and elegance. Many times when Dušic had killed, he’d done so in fury. Righteous anger had its place, but so did cold blood.

  Stefan drove past the Antonov, and he began to circle the airport. A Qatar Airways jet lifted off, its vertical fin bearing the company’s logo. The logo, painted in burgundy, depicted the antlered head of an Arabian oryx. Dušic noted that if circumstances allowed, Stefan could try to time his shot with the roar of a takeoff and mask what little sound escaped the rifle’s suppressor.

  In the flow of traffic, Stefan followed the lanes to a parking deck marked AERODROM NIKOLA TESLA. Stefan grunted in dismissal. The parking deck was no good. No clear shot, and with other vehicles and people too close. This environment called for a bit of blending in, but not too much. The vehicle needed to remain far enough from passersby so that no one could look inside. But a van simply parked on the shoulder of the highway would draw the immediate attention of police.

  After a right turn down another access road, Stefan slowed to survey other possibilities. Across the access road from the freight terminal, an office building bore a sign that read JAT TEHNIKA, an aviation engineering company. The company’s maintenance hangars probably operated in shifts around the clock, but Dušic supposed these office workers would all go home soon.

  “What do you think?” Dušic asked.

  Stefan craned his neck to look back toward the freight ramp and the Antonov. He pulled into the Jat Tehnika parking area and nosed into one of several open spaces.

  “If the car park does not fill up,” Stefan said, “I can make this work. But it is a longer shot than I anticipated.”

  Dušic did not worry about the distance. He had seen Stefan kill at much greater ranges.

  A balding man wearing a loosened tie, his paunch bulging beneath a white dress shirt, emerged from the office building. Two of his coworkers followed. The balding man carried car keys in his right hand. He pressed a button on a key fob to unlock his gray sedan, then sat in the car and drove away. His colleagues followed him.

  “I think this car park will empty out rather than grow more crowded,” Dušic said. He checked his watch. “We have more than an hour before the aircraft takes off. Drive around for a bit and then come back.”

  “Very well.”

  The two men cruised the airport grounds for a time, avoiding passing the same area more than once or twice. They threaded among the taxis waiting at Arrivals, coursed through the traffic dropping off people at Departures. When they returned to Jat Tehnika, sunset shot the sky scarlet.

  “Will you have gl
are in your eyes?” Dušic asked.

  “I am more concerned about the firing angle,” Stefan said. He stopped with the van diagonally across two empty parking spaces. Shut off the engine and set the parking brake.

  “Do not park carelessly,” Dušic said. “It could draw the attention of traffic police.”

  “I’m afraid I have to,” Stefan said. “Watch.”

  Stefan walked around the side of the van and opened the back doors. He climbed in and shut one of the doors. In a duffel bag he found a bungee cord, and he hooked one end of the cord to the bottom of the open door. Working on his knees, he attached the other end to the bumper in such a way that the door hung slightly ajar. Stefan crouched and peered through the resulting crack. He took the M24 from its case, rested his back against the inside wall of the van, and looped the sling around his arm. At an oblique angle, he sighted through the opening. With the van parked askew, that opening allowed him to aim toward the freight ramp. Now he had a natural line of fire toward the Antonov.

  “Ah,” Dušic said, “the perfect urban sniper’s hide.”

  “Not perfect,” Stefan said, “but it will do.”

  Dušic moved to the van’s driver seat and adjusted the side mirror to give him a view of the Antonov. The reflection would at least let him see when figures moved toward the aircraft. He’d have to turn in his seat or even get out of the vehicle to positively identify Dmitri.

  Fifteen minutes went by with no sign of the crew. The whine of an auxiliary power unit rose from the jet. Dušic cursed under his breath. Apparently a flight engineer was already in the cockpit, powering up systems. What if the whole crew was on board?

  “Stay alert,” Dušic said. “I do not know if we have missed our chance.”

  Stefan turned the zoom adjustment on the rifle’s scope, steadied the weapon across his knees. He looked ready. Dušic had studied the fine art of killing, and he knew taking life came more easily with distance from the target. Stefan had a few hundred yards of spatial distance, which made the act a little more antiseptic than a point-blank shot. But psychic distance helped, too. That distance happened naturally when shooting Muslims—inferior people in every way, to Dušic’s mind. Less simple to shoot Russians, tied to Serbs by faith and culture. Dušic hoped Stefan could find psychic distance through Dmitri’s sin of betrayal, a moral flaw. Stefan would probably need such moral separation. That was one of the few drawbacks to soldiers like Stefan, who killed with premeditation but without rage. They had too much time to think.

  At the edge of the mirror, Dušic noticed movement. He twisted to get a better look, and he saw two figures walking toward the Antonov. Both held those large briefcases pilots used to carry their manuals and charts. So it wasn’t too late. Thank God.

  “You have a target,” Dušic said. “The taller one is Dmitri.”

  “I see them,” Stefan said. He shifted his shoulders against the wall of the van, thumbed the rifle’s safety.

  Dmitri put down his briefcase at the foot of the Antonov’s crew ladder. He turned and appeared to speak with his copilot. Stefan raised his head from the stock, looked around.

  “What are you waiting for?” Dušic asked.

  Stefan aimed, placed the first joint of his index finger on the trigger. Dmitri began climbing the ladder, holding the rail with his right hand and carrying his briefcase in his left. Stefan still did not fire, and now Dušic was worried.

  “You had better—” Dušic began, but the rumble of a takeoff drowned out his sentence. He saw recoil jolt Stefan’s shoulder, but he heard no report from the rifle at all.

  Dmitri slumped on the ladder, clung to the rail with the crook of his arm. He dropped the briefcase, which thudded down the steps and struck the copilot square in the chest. The briefcase bounced to the pavement and broke open, spilling books and papers.

  Stefan racked the bolt and chambered a fresh round. He closed one eye, watched through the scope. Dušic saw blood drip from somewhere on Dmitri’s body and spill onto the steps below him. As the pilot bled, his arm let go and his body rolled and tumbled down the ladder until he struck the tarmac headfirst. Stains darkened Dmitri’s flight suit, but Dušic could not tell exactly where the bullet had struck.

  The copilot, most likely still dumbfounded by what was happening, kneeled beside Dmitri. Incomprehension was probably the last emotion he felt. His head jerked, and Dušic saw a burst of vapor: the red mist of the bullet strike. The copilot collapsed across the body of his crewmate.

  “Excellent,” Dušic said.

  Stefan did not reply. He ejected the empty brass and put down the M24. With one swift motion, he released the bungee cord and closed the rear door. Dušic moved to get out of the driver seat, but Stefan said, “No. You drive.” Stefan came forward, stepped over the console, and lowered himself into the passenger seat. Dušic started the engine.

  “That was fine work, my friend,” Dušic said. He stepped on the accelerator and drove out of the parking area.

  Stefan reached under the seat and produced a bottle of slivovitz. The image on the label appeared festive: a cluster of ripe plums. He twisted the cap, broke the seal. Took a long swallow, closed his eyes hard, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Stefan stared out the window. He did not offer a drink to Dušic.

  21

  ALOFT IN THE RIVET JOINT, Gold sat in what had become her accustomed seat next to Irena. A night flight this time, but night and day hardly existed in the back end of the surveillance jet. No windows, just computers and monitoring gear. Gold imagined Parson found a much better view up front in the cockpit jump seat. The plane had taken off into a clear Balkan night with a glittering canopy of stars. Cunningham sat in the back with Gold and Irena. All three wore headsets for monitoring the Rivet Joint’s channels.

  Thanks to information given up by Dušic’s secretary, Milica, they now monitored another specific cell phone. The mission reminded Gold of a jigsaw puzzle with tiny pieces. If you found where one piece fit, the picture took shape a bit more, and offered further clues to solve the rest of the puzzle.

  But so far tonight, nothing. Irena doodled on her notepad. Her console’s utility light cast a pale glow on the paper. She drew a picture of a seagull in flight, wings outstretched in a glide. She wrote characters in Cyrillic, which Gold could not decipher. She went back to the seagull and drew a little set of headphones on it.

  “So you’re putting him to work, too,” Gold said.

  “Might as well,” Irena said.

  “This makes me think of my granddad’s stories,” Cunningham said.

  “How’s that?” Irena asked.

  “He’d fly these long patrols off the Outer Banks, looking for submarines. Hours and hours of droning, and then all of a sudden things would get exciting.”

  The OSI agent described his grandfather’s flights in a Stinson 10A, a little yellow single-engine plane that looked nothing like a threat to the Third Reich. The Stinson skimmed just a few hundred feet above the ocean. The elder Cunningham had talked about how he learned to recognize the difference between heavily loaded freighters riding low in the water, and empty vessels riding high. From time to time, he would catch a glimpse of a dark form beneath the waves. Sometimes he discerned only the shadow of a cloud. But sometimes the dark form held a consistent shape and course, and turned out to be a member of Admiral Doenitz’s wolf pack.

  “My granddad hunted with his eyes,” Cunningham said, “and you guys hunt with your ears. Except your plane cost a few dollars more.”

  “Just a few,” Irena said.

  Parson came into the aft section of the airplane. He held a slip of thermal paper in his hand. Gold wondered about the serious look in his eyes. Parson seemed to enjoy flying with this crew, learning about a corner of the Air Force he hadn’t experienced before. At altitude in the Rivet Joint, he’d appeared as relaxed as Gold had ever seen him while on duty. But now he wore h
is mission face.

  Standing behind Irena, he plugged his headset into a spare interphone cord, pressed his talk switch, and said, “Just got this satcom message.” He dropped the paper on the table in front of Cunningham. The message read

  TWO RUSSIAN PILOTS WHO TURNED EVIDENCE AGAINST DUSIC WERE SHOT DEAD TODAY. SNIPER FIRE AS THEY PREPARED TO BOARD AIRCRAFT. NO ONE SAW ANYTHING. INTERNAL AFFAIRS MINISTRY POLICE INVESTIGATING.

  WEBSTER.

  “Oh, my God,” Irena said. “What does all this mean?”

  “It means Dušic is one dangerous son of a bitch,” Cunningham said. “He’s an arms dealer, so we know he has resources. But this is damned crazy, so it means he’s unpredictable. No telling how he’ll use those resources.”

  A good point, Gold thought, and a frightening one. Money and irrationality made a bad combination. And irrationality had to play a role. Why else would you commit murder to protect a drug ring that’s already been exposed?

  “Well, sir, I sure hope we can find something useful,” Irena said. She turned a volume control as if that somehow could extract more information from the earth below.

  “Can you get a fix on his location?” Parson asked.

  “The guys up there will try,” Irena said, pointing to crew members in seats farther forward. “It’ll help if he makes a call.”

  For Gold, the latest turn of events brought forth an old sadness. She struggled to reconcile the things that had happened in this part of Europe during the 1990s. Someday she would step back from the action and take the rest of her life to reflect and study. Gold looked forward to an academic career, spending her days among students, surrounded by marble, mahogany, and great thoughts. But for now she would ride this expensive piece of machinery and help Parson see this thing through to the end. Parson seemed to have carried a free-floating grudge ever since the Bosnian War, a resentment that such things could happen in his lifetime. And now he could affix that grudge to a face and a name: Viktor Dušic.