Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (57 page)

 
          
“What?”
McLanahan retorted.

 
          
“You
could be a danger to yourself and to HAWC,” Samson went on. “You’re obviously
failing to recognize this, both of you. If you don’t retire, I’ll be forced to
have you confined as a matter of national security as well as the safety of
this facility.”

 
          
David
Luger didn’t look stunned, or surprised, or angry, or even disappointed—he
looked completely hollow. He stood motionless; his head bowed, his arms hanging
limply at his sides, as if in complete surrender or emotional shutdown.

 
          
Patrick
McLanahan exploded. “Hey, Dave, forget about all that! He’s full of shit,” he
shouted. No reaction. He took David by the shoulders and shook him. gently at
first, and then harder. “Dave. You okay,
Texas
?”

 
          
At
that moment. Hal Briggs and two of his security officers entered the office.
Every room at Dreamland was continually monitored with video and audio, and
security units were trained to respond to even a hint of violence or a breach
in security. One of the Security Force officers had his MP5K submachine gun
drawn and at port arms; the other had his hand on the handgrip of his weapon
but did not draw it. Briggs had his hand on his pearl-handled .45-caliber
automatic pistol—the one that had once belonged to Lieutenant General Brad
Elliott, his mentor—but had not drawn it either.

 
          
“Dave!
Dave, are you all right?” McLanahan cried to his friend and partner. It
appeared as if Luger was in a semicatatonic state, unable to move or respond.
“Jesus, Hal, it’s like his entire voluntary nervous system has shut down. Call
the chopper and let’s get him airlifted to
Las Vegas
now.” Briggs and the second security
officer safetied their weapons and quickly, firmly, took McLanahan and Luger
out of Samson’s office, while the third man continued to cover the action with
his drawn weapon.

 
          
As
he was being hustled out, McLanahan turned to Samson and said, “We're not
finished here, Samson.”

 
          
“Seventeen
hundred hours, General,” Samson responded. “On my desk. Or else.”

On the Albania-Macedonia border

That evening

 
          
Once
one of the world’s greatest empires under Alexander the Great, the Republic of
Macedonia had been in an almost constant state of occupation and combat for
over two thousand years, brutally repressed and colonized by Rome, Byzantium,
the Huns, the Visigoths, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Nazi Germany, and Serbia. It
was not until the 1980 death of Yugoslavian strongman Josip Broz. known as
Marshal Tito, and the collapse of the
Soviet Union
in 1992. that
Macedonia
was able to slip out of the grasp of
regional overseers and declare itself an independent democratic republic.

 
          
But
independence was not without conflict.
Macedonia
had been a “melting pot” of many different
ethnic and religious peoples for thousands of years, and now they all wanted a
say in the direction and future of their newly independent republic. Those
forces—Albanians. Greeks, Serbs, Slavs, Turks, and Bulgars—all sought to drive
the new nation apart and carve it up for themselves.

 
          
As
a result, most of
Macedonia
’s borders were heavily armed and fortified,
and the nation invested heavily in counterinsurgency and border patrol forces.
Border skirmishes, especially between Muslim Albania and Orthodox Christian
Macedonia, were so common and so brutal that almost since its first day of
membership. United Nations peacekeepers had been sent to
Macedonia
to try to keep the peace and settle border
claims between it and its neighbors.
Macedonia
had become a favorite route for Albanian
gunrunners to ship weapons to Kosovo Liberation Army rebels, and there had been
many border skirmishes between Macedonian Army forces and well- equipped
smugglers.

 
          
The
government of
Macedonia
vowed to vigorously defend its borders
against any nation that tried to violate its sovereignty and neutrality, but it
was a poor nation, with only a small conscript army, so it was forced to ask
for outside help. The U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization was allowed
to stage security, surveillance, and supply missions out of bases in
Macedonia
during the Kosovo conflict. In return,
Macedonia
was made a member of the “Partnership For
Peace,” the group of prospective NATO members, was offered millions of dollars
in military and economic aid by the West, and was being considered for full
membership in the European Union and the World Trade Organization.

 
          
Some
of the bloodiest battles between Albanian gunrunners and Macedonian police and
border guards were near the town of
Struga
, on the northern shore of
Lake
Ohrid
in the
Vardar
Valley
of southwestern
Macedonia
. It was an easy, straight shot northward up
the valley to the Yugoslavian
province
of
Kosovo
and the heart of central
Europe
, and southbound to
Lake
Ohrid
and eventually to the
Aegean Sea
. The city of Ohrid, a few miles away, was
known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” because of its combination of
Christian—Catholic, Episcopal, Orthodox—and Muslim holy sites, churches,
mosques, monasteries, cathedrals, along with several castles and fortifications
dating back to the rule of Alexander the Great.

 
          
After
the attack on Kukes, tensions on the Macedonia-Albania border were at a fever
level. Army of the
Republic
of
Macedonia
troops, in retaliation for Albanian
cross-border raids and skirmishes, were suspected of setting off the two
massive explosions at the carpet factory in
Kukes
,
Albania
, killing hundreds. The Albanian Army was
looking for revenge. Sniper, guerrilla, and sabotage attacks along the border
rose in frequency and intensity, threatening to set off a large-scale war. The
tiny Army of the
Republic
of
Macedonia
boasted more modem weapons than its
adversary to the west, supplied mostly by the
United States
in years past, but
Albania
had the tactical and numerical advantage.
Albania
enjoyed a three-to- onc manpower advantage,
a four-to-one artillery advantage, and a six-to-one armored personnel carrier
advantage, and those forces overlooked the Macedonian forces from the mountains
along the border

 
          
That’s
why it was hard for anyone to understand the reason why the Macedonian Army
suddenly commenced an artillery barrage against several security outposts west
of Struga. Just before
midnight
, eyewitnesses claimed that two
self-propelled 70-millimeter artillery units opened fire on two Albanian observation
posts—little more than wood and rock shacks—that overlooked
Lake
Ohrid
.

 
          
The
Albanian Army immediately returned fire. The border defense positions were not
equipped with any modem sensors or special equipment for artillery duels at
night—no night vision, no counterfire radar—so it was rather amazing that the
self-propelled artillery units that were suspected of opening fire first were
hit and completely destroyed by the first volley of return fire. But the
Albanians didn’t stop there. Once the SPAs were destroyed, the nearest
Macedonian firebase was next, then the nearest main base, and finally the city
of
Struga
itself. For the next three hours, the
Albanian Army pounded the city with artillery and rocket fire from eleven
positions overlooking the city, some as far as eight miles away.

 
          
“Perfect,"
Gennadi Yegorov, the weapons officer aboard the Metyor-179 stealth
fighter-bomber, said. “The Albanians are reacting better than we anticipated.”

 
          
The
plan was simple. Some of Pavel Kazakov’s men in Macedonia had stolen and driven
the two artillery pieces—both mobile but not capable of firing a round—from an
armory in Bitola. The self-propelled artillery pieces were undergoing
maintenance and had had their gun barrels removed, so they looked like just another
military vehicle as they rumbled down the highway. In only three hours, they
made the drive west to Struga and waited.

 
          
Meanwhile,
the Mt-179 launched from its secret base near Codlea. With the NATO AWACS
aircraft out of the action—it had not yet been replaced until whoever had shot
the first one down had been discovered—it was child’s play to make the flight
from Codlea across Romania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Macedonia to Ohrid. The
Mt-179 was loaded with four heatseeking air-to-air missiles in its wing root
launchers, along with four laser-guided missiles in its weapons bay. The
Metyor- 179 had a powerful imaging infrared and low-light TV sensor in a
retractable pod in the nose, along with a laser target illuminator.

 
          
Once
the dummy self-propelled artillery units were rolled into place and Kazakov’s
men hightailed it for safety, the charade began. One quick twin launch on the
observation posts from fifteen miles away, a two-minute three-sixty turn, and a
second twin ripple launch on the SPAs to erase the evidence, and the stunt was
complete. Kazakov’s operatives had placed infrared emitters on the artillery
units and near the border observation posts to make it easier for Yegorov to
find and attack the targets from maximum range.

 
          
“Eta
Vehchi chim dva paVtsa abassat. It was easier than
pissing on two fingers,”
Ion Stoica remarked, as they started to receive radio messages about the
rapidly intensifying fighting between
Albania
and
Macedonia
. “That attack had no business working, you
realize that? The same with our departure from Zhukovsky and the success of our
attack on Kukes.”

 
          
“We
were lucky,” Yegorov said. Tt’s sheer paranoia. Besides, those two were ready
to fight anyway—they have been for almost ten years. We just provided a little
push to get them going”

 
          
“So
we’re contributing to the natural order and progression of political and
cultural exchanges between fellow Balkan nations, eh?” Stoica asked, laughing.
“I like that. We’re humanitarians, working to make the world a better place by
allowing the natural harmony and rhythms of the region to develop.” Their
second combat flight was even more successful than the first—and it provided
the spark Kazakov needed to set the Balkans ablaze.

 
          
Instead
of returning to
Romania
, Stoica and Yegorov flew across
Bulgaria
and the
Black Sea
, on their way to a Mctyor- owned industrial
facility and airstrip near Borapani,
Republic
of
Georgia
, the site of another Metyor pipeline. The
return flight was smooth and uneventful. The Mt-179 was enjoying a brisk
tailwind over the Black Sea that was pushing their ground speed to well over
nine hundred kilometers an hour, even with the throttles pulled back to
best-range economy power. At forty-one thousand feet, the sky was clear and the
visibility unrestricted, with the stars shining so brightly that they appeared
close enough to touch. There was a half moon on the rise, but it would be no
factor—they would be on the ground long before anyone on the ground could see
the aircraft with rrtoonlight, Because of fuel considerations, they had already
planned a steep, rapid descent at idle pow'er through Georgian airspace instead
of flying through Turkish coastal radar at low altitude, relying on the
Tyenee’s stealth characteristics to keep it invisible.