Warriors (9781101621189) Page 22

  Bratislav. Of course. A name that meant “brother of glory.” Bratislav would be years older now. Did he still work for the same aviation services company? Only one way to find out.

  Dušic dialed information and jotted down the number for Aero Drina. He thought for a moment, considered his tactics. He would ask for Bratislav by name, and he’d talk to no one else. If the man wasn’t there, Dušic would drop this idea. But it was worth at least one more try.

  On the third ring, a woman answered. “Aero Drina. How may I help you?”

  “May I speak to Bratislav?” Dušic asked. “I am an old friend.”

  “He is in the break room. I must put you on hold. May I tell him who is calling?”

  Dušic smiled. Nothing like steady employment. “I am Darko,” he lied.

  “One moment, please.”

  After what felt like a long wait, Dušic heard a click on the other end, and a voice said, “This is Bratislav Stekic. But I do not remember any Darko.”

  “Perhaps the receptionist misunderstood,” Dušic said. “My name is Viktor. You may not recall, but I sold you a Mauser many years ago. We talked of the war.”

  Bratislav paused. “Hmm, yes. I still have that rifle. Yes, I do remember you, Viktor. I have taken many red stag with that weapon.”

  “Very good, my friend. I hope my product has served you well.”

  “Indeed, it has.”

  “I am glad. But that is not why I called. May I ask you a question in the strictest confidence? As one old warrior to another.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Have you seen an American military aircraft at Sarajevo?”

  “I have. A large Boeing has been here for a few days. One with many antennas. It takes off for a while and it comes right back here. I have no idea what it does.”

  “It does what Americans have always done, Bratislav. It helps to keep from our people the glory they have earned.”

  Bratislav said nothing. Dušic let silence hover for a moment, to see if the man would hang up or become frightened. Many years had passed since Bratislav’s days as a fighter. Did he still have the spirit?

  “I am listening, Viktor,” Bratislav said finally. “Are you serving our people in some higher capacity now?”

  “Yes, but not the way you are thinking. Would you like to punish the Americans for what they took from us?”

  “Very much, Viktor. But how?”

  “I understand. You need to know more before you commit. Can we meet today?”

  “My shift ends at five. I can see you then.”

  “Tell me where.”

  Bratislav gave Dušic the address of a pub near the airport. They agreed to meet in the parking area, away from the ears of the patrons inside. When Dušic returned to the van, Stefan asked, “Did you have any luck?”

  “Possibly. I never forget a customer, and I found one who might help us give those Americans a bad day.”

  Dušic told Stefan about Bratislav, and he gave him the address. A few hours later Stefan parked outside a pub called Knez Lazar. Music pulsed from the place, some pop tune too modern for Dušic to recognize. The smell of cooked meat, along with garlic and onions, wafted from the kitchen vents. Cevapcici, Dušic guessed. Sausages without casings, grilled over a fire. The pub seemed a hangout for airport workers. Men and women, some still in the duty clothing of baggage handlers, mechanics, and ramp coordinators, entered the building. Without knowing their names, Dušic could not tell which were Muslim, Croat, or Serb. He wondered how much intermingling went on. The thought made him want to vomit. He felt he was about to give a great gift to the Serbs among them. The rest could go to hell.

  Bratislav had said he drove an old Zastava Koral. Perhaps the years since he bought his rifle had not turned out prosperous for him. Unfortunate, but something Dušic could turn to advantage. Thirty thousand euros might mean a lot to a man who could not afford a decent car. Maybe enough to bolster his courage, if need be.

  Right on time, a battered Koral sputtered into the parking lot. One of the fenders had rusted through, and the tailpipe hung by strands of wire. The car belched blue smoke until its driver shut it down.

  Just as Dušic never forgot customers, he never forgot faces. But when Bratislav emerged from his rattletrap, Dušic barely recognized him. The man’s jowls had swollen with weight gain; his mustache and hair had grown bushier and gone gray. His paunch drooped over his belt. He pulled himself up from the car as if the effort hurt. Maybe Bratislav had once scaled mountains in pursuit of stag, but not recently. No matter. The task to which Dušic would set him required a bit of cunning, but not strength.

  Dušic stepped out of the van and waved. His old customer smiled, met him in the middle of the parking area. A handshake showed Bratislav’s grip still firm.

  “So, what have you done all this time, Viktor?” Bratislav asked. “Still selling guns?”

  “To different kinds of buyers now. But yes, I remain in the weapons business.”

  “How may I serve you?”

  Dušic liked this sort of talk. Respectful and to the point. Perhaps somewhere under the rolls of fat and the sagging skin, remnants of a professional soldier still existed.

  “I command a mission that could avenge all the wrongs done to our people in the 1990s,” Dušic said. “For your own protection, I will tell you no more than that. But Americans stand in my way now as they stood in our way back then.”

  “My nephew was killed by a NATO bomb,” Bratislav said. “They did so much worse than merely stand in my way.”

  “Then you need no convincing of the need to punish their continued interference.”

  “None.”

  “And I will make it worth your while. Let me show you something.”

  The more Dušic talked with Bratislav, the more he liked him. Money or fear could motivate the weak. Bratislav, apparently, responded to higher callings. Yet Dušic would gladly pay him if he succeeded.

  In the back of the van, Bratislav gaped at the store of weapons. Dušic opened a plastic case and revealed a pair of fragmentation grenades.

  “Do you remember these?” Dušic asked.

  “I have used one or two.”

  “These are yours, if you choose to help me. I need you to take care of that damned American jet.”

  “Not really the weapon for that, Viktor.”

  “True enough. But my options are temporarily limited.”

  Dušic explained that he would love to blow that Yankee airplane out of the sky and kill every meddler aboard. But he would settle for merely disabling the plane. Bratislav could use a technique employed by low-budget terrorists all over the world. The method involved pulling the retaining pin on the grenade, then either wrapping the lever with thin tape or placing the grenade inside a foam or plastic cup. In time, the lever would force its way through the tape or cup, and the grenade would detonate. A poor man’s delayed-fuse bomb.

  “Very imprecise, Viktor. Without experimentation, we cannot know when the grenades will explode.”

  “An inelegant solution, I admit. But for this, we do not need precision. I do not even care if the grenades explode on the ground or in the air. If you bring down the plane, so much the better. But even if you only rupture tires, it will ground the Americans, delay them.”

  “You wish me to plant these aboard the jet?”

  “Yes. Whenever you can, but preferably three days from now. Will you help me?”

  Bratislav stared into the distance for several seconds. “I will,” he said. Dušic noted that he did not ask how much he would get paid.

  “It is a pleasure to know you, Bratislav. But now to details. Can you get these grenades through security? I assume you must pass through some sort of checkpoint on your way to work.”

  “Yes, but the security agents are accustomed to seeing me. They have X-ray, but my toolbox
is always filled with metal objects. Some agents hardly look at the screen.”

  “Very good, very good.” Dušic slapped his old customer on the back. “You need a new car, my friend. If you succeed, you can get that and more.” Dušic wrote out a check, tore it in half, and explained his method of payment. Bratislav gasped when he saw the amount, and he did not complain about having to wait for the other half.

  25

  ABOARD THE RIVET JOINT, the day that had begun so promisingly turned frustrating. Gold had noticed the crew’s excitement when they picked up Dušic’s trail while the aircraft was still climbing. Irena and her crewmates relayed Dušic’s position, somewhere in northern Bosnia. But then the contact went cold. The eavesdropping electronics sensed no signal from any number associated with Dušic or his helpers. Gold followed the crew’s speculation as they chatted on interphone: Maybe the cell tower went dark. Maybe we have a malfunction; everybody check circuit breakers. Or maybe Dušic’s team got wise.

  To pass the time, Gold and Irena talked shop. Gold had read there were more than seven thousand languages spoken around the world.

  “I had no idea there were so many,” Irena said. “How is that even possible?”

  “Micro-languages exist in pockets isolated by geography. You still have remote tribes deep in jungles, that sort of thing. And the sad part: One of those languages goes extinct about every two weeks.”

  “That’s a shame. I hope somebody’s recording the last speakers. Have you ever visited any of those tribes?”

  “One,” Gold said. “In Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley people have a language all their own.”

  “Do you speak it?”

  “Not a word. Lucky for me, a lot of the Korengalis speak Pashto, too.”

  During lulls in the conversation, Gold heard only the surf of the slipstream and the unbroken hiss of circuitry. After a few unproductive hours, the mission commander spoke up on interphone.

  “Crew,” he said, “I just got some bad news from the ground. Agent Cunningham says they didn’t find Dušic, but they found where he’d been. He left behind some dead police officers.”

  Irena leaned back in her seat, stared straight ahead at her console. Gold could see the disappointment in her eyes, not just for the immediate mission, but for the turn of events in her native land.

  “What’s going on down there?” Irena asked. She didn’t press her interphone switch when she spoke. A rhetorical question, Gold realized, that Irena probably meant in the larger sense. What was happening with her people and her country? Would a handful of hotheads succeed in bringing back one of the darkest chapters of the late twentieth century?

  Gold had seen evil in many forms, but she found something especially disturbing about hate that could lie dormant for decades, then explode in a paroxysm of violence like a forgotten land mine. That’s what had happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and now there were people who wanted it to happen again. What was the half-life of hate? Generations, apparently.

  The Rivet Joint continued its mission and never picked up another hit. After the front-end crew called back to say they’d reached bingo fuel, the jet turned for its temporary home. The aircraft landed at Sarajevo after dark. On the parking apron, the engines whined down, leaving only the buzz of avionics sounding through the aircraft. The lights inside the plane blinked, an occurrence that no longer concerned Gold. She’d spent enough time around Parson to know the electrical interruption happened as the crew switched from the onboard auxiliary power unit to an external generator cart.

  Irena unplugged her headset and stuffed it into her helmet bag a little more roughly than necessary. The gesture made Gold think of an athlete putting away sports gear after a losing game. The young Serbian-American linguist said nothing, and she looked dejected. Gold could imagine how she felt. Irena probably wondered if she could have done more to save those police officers, even though that made no sense. She cared too much. Gold wished she could tell Irena of an antidote, but none existed. Gold cared too much as well, and she probably always would.

  Outside, a pleasant Balkan breeze swept across the airfield. Gold looked forward to a shower, a quick dinner, and maybe some reading in bed. An announcement from the Rivet Joint’s aircraft commander interrupted her thoughts of relaxation. The commander spoke as he closed his cell phone.

  “Sorry, guys,” he said, “but we’re stuck out here for a little bit. They can’t send a crew bus to get us until the ramp freeze ends.”

  “Why the ramp freeze, sir?” a crewman asked.

  “I don’t know,” the commander said, “but I bet it has something to do with that.” He pointed to activity taking place farther down the parking apron.

  Airport police vehicles, blue lights flashing, surrounded an aircraft. The plane looked like a private charter; it bore no airline livery. Gold didn’t know the model, but it was a two-engine jet that looked like it might carry thirty people or more.

  As she looked closer, Gold saw the police had their weapons out. Not just pistols, either, but shotguns and assault rifles. She heard no shots. Several men lay prone on the tarmac. Officers trained their guns on the men as other officers handcuffed them. Indistinct shouts mingled with the sounds of truck engines and idling jet turbines.

  “Can you hear what they’re saying?” Gold asked Irena.

  “Not much,” Irena said. “Stuff like ‘Don’t move. You’re under arrest.’”

  “A drug bust?”

  “Maybe.”

  Eventually, the police yanked the prisoners to their feet. Officers herded them into trucks and vans. Gold counted fourteen men under arrest. The police vehicles sped away. A few minutes later the ramp freeze lifted and the crew bus came.

  The bus let the American fliers off at the main terminal. During the wait for the embassy vehicle to take them to the hotel, Irena struck up a conversation with a policeman standing watch at the exit for ground transportation. The man wore full tactical gear—flak vest, kneepads, earpiece—and he carried a rifle with a high-capacity magazine. He spoke amiably enough in Serbo-Croatian, probably charmed by Irena’s good looks. But Irena did not smile. Her eyes widened, and she looked worried. She shook her head, said something that sounded like “Thank you,” and rejoined her crew.

  “What did he say?” Gold asked.

  “He probably told me more than he should have. That charter came in from Bahrain, and it carried Muslim fighters drawn here because of the mosque burnings.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “He said some were Chechens, some were Kuwaiti, and some came from Saudi Arabia.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  “I’m worried, Sergeant Major,” Irena said. “This place is ready to blow up all over again.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING FOUND DRAGAN, Parson, and Cunningham in Belgrade. Two days remained before the start of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, and Dušic seemed to have vanished. Webster stayed back in Sarajevo, saying only that he needed to make some phone calls. He wouldn’t give details, but Parson guessed most of those calls went to The Hague. The Rivet Joint bored holes in the sky and reported nothing. The Serbian police had little choice but to go into full defensive mode.

  Parson and Cunningham rode with Dragan in his personal car, a BMW. Dragan wanted to inspect the preparations at the Patriarchate. “I really hoped to take the fight to Dušic,” Dragan said, “but it looks like he’ll take it to us.”

  “Unless he gets cold feet,” Cunningham said.

  “I don’t think that will happen,” Dragan said. “Dušic has crossed the river, and he can’t go back. He could have sat in his office for twenty more years, selling weapons and getting richer. But if he knows we’re onto his drug trafficking, he also knows his business is gone. I’m thinking the only future he sees for himself is that of a warlord. And for that, he needs a war.”

  Dragan sto
pped his car in front of the Patriarchate. Parson admired the mosaic above the entrance, an image of some religious figure. Gold would know who. But the police activity interested him more.

  Officers were building vehicle checkpoints on Kralja Petra and every other approach to the Patriarchate. They were not yet stopping cars, but Parson could see they planned on leaving nothing to chance. A sandbagged machine-gun pit overlooked the checkpoints. While Dragan spoke in Serbo-Croatian with his fellow officers, Parson and Cunningham examined the gun pit.

  “They know what they’re doing,” Cunningham said.

  “How’s that?” Parson asked.

  “See how they built two rows of sandbags with some space in between? That’s good. A rocket-propelled grenade will blow right through one wall. But this way, it’ll hit the first wall and detonate. The second wall protects guys from unpleasantness happening at the first wall.”

  “Sounds like somebody’s thinking.” Based on what Parson had seen at other highly protected venues, he figured the cops would stop each vehicle and inspect the underside with an angled mirror. They’d probably put a spiked chain across the street, and they’d remove the chain only after a bomb dog had sniffed the car. Then the chain would go back into place, and the process would start all over again. A tedious process. Traffic would back up and people would bitch. But, with some luck, the checkpoint might prevent disaster.

  Parson’s thoughts turned to the sky. As another way of preventing disaster, the Rivet Joint would take to the air again as the Holy Assembly of Bishops began. He tried to think of some way he could help. Parson wasn’t a lawman; he could not carry a weapon on the ground here. But he could talk with the jet.