Warriors (9781101621189) Page 23

  “When game day arrives,” Parson said, “how about if I come with you and handle comms with the Rivet Joint? That will free you up to watch the crowd and the cars.”

  “Works for me,” Cunningham said.

  Up on the roof of the Patriarchate, two policemen in tactical gear pointed and conferred. Defensive marksmen, Parson guessed. Snipers getting the range and angle of all their likely shots. Men who looked like they knew their jobs; Parson certainly hoped they did. But he dared not make predictions about how this would all go down. Dušic knew his job, too, that son of a bitch. Everybody involved on both sides here brought experience. Everybody was a warrior.

  • • •

  FOR DUŠIC, CONDITIONS COULD NOT get much worse. In Belgrade with one day to go, he conducted surveillance at the Patriarchate. The central dome, topped by a cross, overlooked the grounds and the street below, where officers busied themselves stringing razor wire. The columns and arched windows conveyed a stateliness not diminished even by coils of concertina and flashing lights of squad cars.

  The Holy Assembly of Bishops had never seen such a high level of security. Police had also built a sandbagged gun emplacement that covered Kralja Petra. If they had gone that far, no doubt they planned other measures as well. Dogs, snipers, explosives detectors. God only knew what else. Maybe the Americans had heard something in that damnable airplane of theirs. Or maybe Dušic’s efforts at stirring up trouble in advance had worked too well, and the Turks had made some kind of threat of their own. Either way, he knew he must alter his tactics.

  In Stefan’s van, now bearing stolen plates, Dušic told Stefan to make no more passes along the block where Kralja Petra began. Circling would invite suspicion. Dušic had seen enough, anyway.

  “What do you think?” Stefan asked. At least he was sober this morning.

  “The mission will require some precision,” Dušic said.

  “How so?”

  “I will drive the Citroën. I need your skills for something else.”

  “Viktor, driving the bomb is the most dangerous task.”

  “I have faced danger before. And you can see for yourself what we are up against. The tactical environment has changed.”

  Dušic suspected American eavesdropping had more to do with this than Muslim terrorists. Americans had hit him, quite literally, with setbacks before. In 1995, after the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica and much of the rest of Bosnia, his unit took up positions in the town of Lisina, near Banja Luka. The mission: guard the air defense control sites that directed Serb antiaircraft missiles. Those missiles had scored a great victory earlier in the year when they’d shot down U.S. fighter pilot Scott O’Grady. That American bastard had eluded capture after ejecting from his F-16, but presumably he’d learned a lesson about trifling with Serbs.

  When Dušic’s platoon began protecting a radio relay tower at Lisina, they expected little resistance. Those pathetic blue helmets of the United Nations would not dare try to take the relay tower by force; they could barely protect themselves. And according to intelligence, no Muslim forces operating in that region possessed the strength to attempt such an operation. If enemy forces made such an effort, Dušic’s platoon would rip them apart. Dušic had ringed the tower with a series of gun pits. The position of the automatic weapons created interlocking fields of fire; Dušic’s men could have held off a force three times their number. He took pride in the impregnable defense that he and his NCOs had created. Dušic could still smell the freshly dug earth, the well-oiled weapons. It was in September; the coolness at night offered the first hint of fall.

  But on one evening, with no warning, no approach by any visible enemy, the world exploded. As Dušic and Stefan rode in a truck between the relay tower and a nearby radar warning site, thunder pealed from a cloudless sky. Fire and smoke erupted from the earth with volcanic force.

  “Air strike!” Dušic shouted. Those NATO meddlers again and their damned endless supply of aircraft. Dušic, Stefan, and the truck driver leaped from the vehicle to take cover in a ditch. The ground rolled and shuddered with one more explosion. A scent of explosives filled Dušic’s nostrils, but he had difficulty placing the odor. Not like gunpowder, and certainly not like old-fashioned cordite.

  What was more strange, Dušic heard no jets. Usually the whistling of turbines accompanied any air attack. Even jets dropping bombs from high altitude left at least a faint noise signature. But instead, a deathly quiet descended on the hills.

  “What in the name of holiness is that?” Stefan asked.

  “Fucking Americans,” Dušic said, “and maybe the British. I do not know how but I know who.”

  “Our men,” Stefan cried.

  “Back in the truck—now,” Dušic ordered. “Get me back to the radio tower.”

  They scrambled back into the vehicle, and the driver made a three-point turnaround. When the truck topped the rise, the scene made Dušic sweat and shake.

  The relay tower lay toppled. So did most of the trees around it. The low buildings at the tower base had been reduced to chunks of concrete. Flames flickered across churned and blackened soil.

  Dušic’s platoon seemed to have vanished. Some strange weapon had visited such destruction on the site that Dušic could not even recognize where the gun pits had been dug. He called names, but no one answered. He saw no intact bodies, only limbs and viscera in the dim light as darkness closed in. He realized that’s all that would have been left of him and Stefan had they remained at the site for five more minutes. Silence reigned until one man, and only one man, began to scream. He yelled no words, simply howled an unintelligible animal sound. Fear and pain had taken him to a primal place.

  Dušic and Stefan ran toward the cries. They found a young razvodnik with both legs and one arm ripped off. Blood and soil covered him so that he appeared like some shrieking ghoul that had crawled up from the grave. But he did not shriek for long. The shrieks turned to gurgles, and the boy died clutching Stefan’s hand.

  Later, Dušic learned what had rained down such hell. Not an airplane but a naval vessel. The USS Normandy, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, had fouled the beautiful Adriatic with its presence. The warship had launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against air defense sites in Bosnia. The crushing blows helped force Serb leaders to sign that document of shame, the Dayton Accords.

  The Americans had bested Dušic on that day. He would not let it happen again.

  26

  ON THE OPENING DAY of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, the Rivet Joint powered through a cloud layer and leveled above a pearl undercast. Gold glanced outside through the cockpit windows when she got up to stretch her legs. The mist spanned from horizon to horizon; it appeared to wrap the entire earth in a peaceful embrace. Gold felt a twinge of irony as she gazed out from behind her sunglasses, knowing what lay beneath the clouds. She returned to her seat beside Irena, took off her shades, put on her headset, and began listening.

  Now that authorities knew Muslim fighters were trickling into Bosnia, attracted by the new tensions, Gold owned a bigger piece of the mission. The Rivet Joint flew mainly to zero in on Dušic and his men, and that remained Irena’s focus. But Gold tuned to a broadband setting, listening to a wide spectrum of channels to pick up on signs of more triggermen arriving from abroad. Whatever she heard might not help capture Dušic, but it might measure how dangerous the atmosphere had become. With her fluent Pashto and smattering of Arabic, she was glad to help. She just wished the circumstances were different.

  Gold adjusted a volume setting, clicked her ballpoint pen. She tapped the pen on the top page of a fresh notepad. The effort left a pattern of little black dots.

  “Nervous?” Irena asked.

  “More like worried,” Gold said. “I hope Lieutenant Colonel Parson and the other guys don’t run into trouble today.”

  “Me, too. Have you heard anything interesting?”

 
; “Negative. You?”

  “Snake eyes. It’s like Dušic has dropped off the grid.”

  Gold did not like the sound of that. You could call a man like Dušic a lot of things, but not stupid. He had figured a way to exploit religious and ethnic hatreds so deftly that he might just start a new war almost by himself. What a tragic human failing that people so often killed over what they found most holy. After years of reflection, Gold thought she had finally begun to understand why. God was eternal and unchanging. But religion—how man approached God—was a human institution. So of course religion could be as flawed and misused as any other human institution.

  The airplane banked into the initial turn of a holding pattern. Gold heard one of the officers up front check in with Parson on the ground in Belgrade.

  “Dragnet,” the crewman called, “this is Motown on station. How copy?”

  “Dragnet has you five by five,” Parson said. “Got anything for me?”

  “Negative. We’ll advise. Everything normal down there?”

  “Pretty much. Just a lot of people who don’t like to have to wait.”

  That relieved Gold a little. Parson seemed safe enough for now with Cunningham and Dragan close by. So far so good, but the day had only begun.

  Irena loosened her shoulder straps and leaned back in her seat. Fiddled with the controls on her console.

  “Still nothing,” she said.

  Gold listened to her own channels. Eventually she picked up a conversation in Pashto. Pakistani accent.

  “I have made it to Bihac, my brother,” the voice said. Gold tried to bring up a map of the Balkans in her head. She did not have a photographic memory, but like most experienced soldiers she possessed a fair knowledge of geography. Where was Bihac? Oh, yeah. Northern Bosnia.

  “What mood did you find?” An older voice in Pashto. Maybe some organizer or middleman.

  “The faithful are tense, but things remain quiet at the moment. The crusaders burned a mosque a few days ago.”

  “If they try to wipe out our people again, we will take revenge.”

  “Indeed. The supplies have arrived in good order.”

  Supplies? Probably weapons and ammunition. With the cycle of mosque and church burnings, Dušic had created the perfect backdrop for what he wanted to do, and it continued to feed on itself.

  “Are we recording this?” Gold asked on interphone.

  “Always,” a crewman answered. “What do you have, Sergeant Major?”

  “Foreign fighters coming into Bosnia, I think.”

  “Lovely.”

  • • •

  AT THE SPECIFIED TIME, Dušic met Stefan and the razvodniks at Pionirski Park. Dušic drove Stefan’s van. Stefan arrived in the Citroën, now heavy, wired, and deadly. Nikolas, Andrei, and the other men came in two Land Rovers. Mist drizzled from an overcast sky. In the distance, a church bell tower tolled a trezvon while Dušic addressed his team. Though Dušic still held to the agnosticism taught by his earliest Communist teachers, he took the triple rings of soprano, alto, and bass bells as an auspicious sign. As a commander on the verge of his signature mission, he wanted his words to inspire.

  “History teaches that any war left unfinished must be fought again,” Dušic said. “And so we shall. I know you may find today’s operation distasteful. I share your feelings. But today we only set the priming charge. The real explosion comes later. A few of the good must die so that we may eliminate the evil, the Turks who have infested this land long enough. Go with courage. If you survive, I will reward you and offer you further missions. If I should fall, press on without me. Stefan will know how to see that you get the other half of your checks.”

  Dušic explained how the tactical situation had changed, and he outlined his plans for addressing that problem. The razvodniks would no longer fire indiscriminately, at least not at first. They were to aim for police officers and any defensive snipers on the rooftops. Stefan had his own specific targets: the machine gunner and anyone else who looked particularly dangerous. Further, Dušic himself would drive the car bomb. When he finished speaking, he slipped his arms into his body armor, hefted the armor into place, and began snapping the fasteners closed. He held out his hand for the key to the Citroën.

  “Are you sure about this, Viktor?” Stefan asked.

  “I am. I need you for your marksmanship now. Any fool can drive a car.”

  Stefan smiled faintly, handed over the key. “And you have the number to call to detonate the weapon?”

  “I do.” Dušic patted an outer pocket attached to his body armor, which contained his mobile phone. “But if something happens to me, you know what to do.”

  “I have the number as well. Do not forget that you must turn on the trigger phone and your own cell.”

  “Then all is in readiness,” Dušic said. “Gentlemen, execute the mission.”

  Stefan pumped his fist into the air and sat down in the van. The razvodniks climbed into their SUVs. At the wheel of the Citroën, Dušic inserted the key into the ignition. As he started the engine, he eyed the trigger phone duct-taped to the console. Two wires led from the phone. The wires ran under the seat and back toward the trunk.

  • • •

  INSIDE A MOBILE COMMAND POST on Kralja Petra, Parson listened on VHF through a lightweight headset. He still felt a little strange performing official duties in civilian clothing. Performing those duties surrounded by Serbian policemen made it all even weirder. At one time, these guys might have been his enemies; he even wondered if any of them had ever manned antiaircraft guns. But today they nodded to him politely enough. Maybe they’d gotten word he and Cunningham were friends of Dragan.

  Through a window, Parson could see Dragan and Cunningham working outside, making the rounds of the checkpoints and the machine-gun pit. To give them any news from the Rivet Joint, Parson had only to change frequencies. But so far he had nothing to report. Dragan walked with his Vintorez rifle at the ready. Traffic had backed up behind the nearest checkpoint, which was positioned to keep uncleared vehicles well away from the Patriarchate. Officers patrolled the line of cars. A few of the men held the leashes of bomb dogs; Parson recognized a Labrador, a Belgian Malinois, and two German shepherds. The drizzle dampened the Labrador’s fur enough that the animal stopped, shook itself, then resumed sniffing fenders and wheel wells.

  Bishops and priests gathered at the Patriarchate’s entrance. To Parson, they all looked like ancient men of wisdom with their black vestments and long beards. He wondered if any of them had been wise enough to speak out against ethnic cleansing back during the war. That would have required both wisdom and guts.

  At the checkpoint, Dragan and Cunningham conferred about something. Dragan pointed to one of the dog handlers and appeared to give some kind of order. Parson switched to their frequency.

  “Anything the matter?” Parson asked.

  “I noticed a car in line that’s riding low like an overloaded boat,” Cunningham said. “Maybe just bad shocks, but—”

  Cunningham stopped talking. He turned around as if he sensed something wrong.

  At the machine-gun pit, the gunner’s face exploded in a spray of red.

  27

  ABOARD THE RIVET JOINT, Gold stood at the galley and poured cups of coffee for Irena and herself. As she made her way back to her seat, she heard a thump. Very strange. The noise came from somewhere underneath her feet. Felt like driving a car over a shallow pothole. Hot coffee sloshed over Gold’s fingers.

  She put down the cups by Irena’s console, wiped her hands with a handkerchief. From the murmurs and furrowed brows, she could tell the crew was puzzled by the noise.

  A louder bang shook the jet. The airplane began to vibrate. Gold strapped into her seat, glanced over at Irena. Irena yanked her shoulder straps tight. She met Gold’s eyes with an expression that said, I have no idea what’s going on.

/>   Gold’s ears popped. She swallowed hard and they popped again. She put on her headset and listened to the crew on interphone and the radios.

  “What the hell was that?” a crew member asked.

  “I don’t know, but we’re depressurizing.”

  “Everybody on oxygen.”

  Gold donned her sweep-on mask. The first whiff of pure oxygen flooded her lungs with coolness. Irena donned her own mask, gave Gold a thumbs-up. The blinkers on their oxygen regulators flipped from black to white with each breath. Gold felt light in her seat. She heard the crew sort through the emergency in clipped voices.

  “Control, Motown Eight-Six is in an emergency descent to flight level two-five-oh. Rapid decompression.”

  “Motown Eight-Six, we copy your emergency. Report level at two-five-zero.”

  “Can you give us vectors for Sarajevo?”

  “Affirmative. Turn left heading one-seven-zero.”

  “Crew, check in.”

  “Markovich up on oxygen,” Irena said.

  Gold fumbled for her talk switch. “Gold up on oxygen,” she called.

  The rest of the linguists and aviators checked in—nearly thirty people—and the aircraft commander addressed his crew.

  “I have no idea what just happened,” he said, “It sounded like something near the landing gear, so we’ll see if all the wheels come down. Whatever it was obviously opened a hole in the pressure hull. We’ve lost some hydraulics, too. Just stay on oxygen for now. We’ll get on the ground in a few—”

  The aircraft rolled hard to the right. Gold felt the g-forces press her into her seat. Someone cried out off interphone, clearly startled by the wounded airplane’s spasm. Unlike airlift crews used to low-level banking and yanking, these linguists usually cruised in more tranquil flight. Now the Rivet Joint pitched down. Irena grabbed her armrests. For this jet to pitch and roll like a C-130 zipping through mountain passes, something had to be wrong.

  The plane leveled for a moment, yawed left. As the pilots fought for control, something else seemed to draw Irena’s attention. She tapped at her keyboard. What the heck was she doing? Gold realized Irena was still monitoring her channels even as the aircraft staggered on the edge of controlled flight in an emergency descent. The hole in the plane be damned, she still had a job to do.