No Survivors (38 page)

“You ready?” he asked Riva, who was standing behind the camera.

“Sure,” the Italian replied. “We’re running now. Just speak whenever you want.”

Vermulen cleared his throat, gave a sharp sniff, then looked directly at the camera.

“My name is Lieutenant General Kurt Vermulen. I retired from the U.S. Army after twenty-eight years’ service as a commissioned officer, during which I was proud, and honored, to serve the country I love. I am now in the province of Kosovo, Yugoslavia, in the Zvečan industrial plant. Within a few miles of here, units of the Kosovo Liberation Army are operating, assisted by fighters, weapons, and money provided by the forces of international Islamist terrorism. And this”—he pointed to the case on the desk—“is their ultimate weapon. It is a—”

From the corridor outside there came the crackle of small-arms fire, immediately answered by a blast of firing from the far side of the office door, through which could be heard an animal howl of pain. The door burst open and Marcus Reddin backed into the room. He was unsteady on his feet and his left arm was hanging uselessly beside him, blood pouring from the through-and-through bullet wound that had ripped open his shoulder.

“Red!” shouted Vermulen. Drawing the pistol that was holstered around his waist, he ran to his friend’s aid.

“Sorry, man . . . screwed up,” Reddin gasped.

Vermulen could hear footsteps scurrying down the basement corridor. Without looking back at Riva, he shouted, “Take cover!” Then he grasped his pistol in both hands, held it up to his face, and stood in the shelter of the door frame, steeling himself for the moment when he would have to step into the corridor and start firing.

But Vermulen never took that step. Not when there was a gun in his back and an Italian voice in his ear saying, “Drop your weapon, General.”

 

 

 

One hundred and twenty miles to the west, a helicopter landed on a patch of open ground near the Croatian village of Molunat. A small group of people was waiting for it. While the engines still ran, they hurried toward the chopper, instinctively bending over, even though the rotor blades were well above their heads. In the midst of the men there was a smaller, slighter figure, a woman whose blond hair was whipped around her face by the wind from the rotors. She was in the grip of two men, who had grabbed her upper arms. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and she stumbled as they dragged her up to the helicopter and bundled her through the open side door. After she was in, one of the men reached up toward the open door, holding a thin cardboard file. An unseen figure from within the cabin took the file and slid the door closed, and the helicopter rose again into the cloudy night sky.

“
W
elcome to Rock City, ma’am.” Kady Jones had been flown directly from Washington to Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany. She’d been briefed on the way. There was reason to believe that another one of the Russian bombs had been uncovered in Kosovo. She would be making a determination as to whether it was genuine or not. The tone of the briefings had been urgent, but routine: nothing to worry about. After they were over, she’d received another message, requesting details on her height, body measurements, and shoe size. The moment the cabin door had opened, she’d been led straight to a military transport, already laden with a full army explosive-ordnance-disposal team and its equipment. Another dozen men sat silently and impassively in futuristic black uniforms. Before she’d even strapped on her belt, the wheels were already rolling. Once they were in the air, one of the men in black came over.

“Major Dave Gretsch,” he said. “Just wanted to introduce myself, let you know my men and I will be securing the area for you tonight. There’s a chance we may be seeing some action, but just do what we ask, and we’ll make sure you’re fine. Meantime, anything you need to know, just ask.”

“Who are you guys?” Kady asked.

Gretsch gave an apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. But we’re the best, is all you need to know.”

“Oh. . . . Well, where are we going, exactly?”

“Can’t say that, either. They haven’t told me yet. Fact, I was kinda hoping you might know.”

“So I can ask, but you can’t answer . . .”

“Sure looks that way, but that’s the army for you.”

Now it was ten at night and she’d just arrived at the Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia. As the soldiers got to work unloading their weapons and equipment, she’d been greeted by an air-force corporal, a woman, who was leading her toward a waiting Humvee.

“We call it Rock City ’cause of all the crushed rock everywhere—place was like a sea of mud till they laid that down,” she explained. “Any-ways, they got a room set aside for you in the officers’ quarters, though I don’t guess you’ll be getting much sleep.”

Kady was led to her room, little more than a cubicle with a camp bed, inside a basic, prefabricated structure. The corporal politely instructed her to get changed and wait for further instructions. On the bed were arranged a set of combat fatigues, a T-shirt, a flak jacket, a pair of boots, and a helmet. Now she knew why they’d wanted to check her size.

But what kind of battlefield was she heading into?

I
n the rest of Yugoslavia, the civil wars had been fought on a large scale: a conflict of armies, air forces, and artillery barrages, with towns besieged, territories conquered, populations deported, raped, and slaughtered. So far, Kosovo had been different. Resistance to the Serbs had been peaceful for so long that most people, on both sides, were taken by surprise when hostilities began. The attacks were random and sporadic: guerrilla assaults on one-off targets, rather than organized military campaigns. As he drove northward, deeper into Kosovo, Carver saw occasional signs of fighting—a burning building in the distance, a truck filled with soldiers almost knocking him off the narrow two-lane road as it thundered by.

He was miles from anywhere, in open countryside, when the phone rang. It was Grantham.

“Change of plan,” he said. “Forget Trepca. You’re being rerouted to Pristina airport, which is actually located at a place called Slatina, about twenty kilometers east of Pristina city. We have new information. I’m just going to hand you over to Ted Jaworski. He’s an American colleague, heading up a task force looking at this issue from the Washington end.”

“Good evening, Mr. Carver . . .”

Carver did not reply. His headlights had just picked out a roadblock a few hundred yards down the road. A couple of armed Serbian paramilitaries, in the same blue uniforms as the men at the border post, were standing by a crude barrier made of planks and oil drums, lit by spotlights shining down into the road. Their truck was parked behind the barrier, across the road, just to underline the idea that no one was getting by.

“Mr. Carver . . . ?”

“Yeah, I can hear you.”

“Okay, you need to know the way this situation is developing. We believe that Vermulen’s backer, a man named Waylon McCabe—”

“I know who he is.”

The men by the roadblock were waving at Carver, indicating that he should stop.

“Well, McCabe may be planning a double cross.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m saying I agree—that’s what I’d expect him to do. Hold on, I’ve got company. . . .”

Carver put the phone down on the passenger seat as one of the paramilitaries appeared at his window, rotating his finger in the air to indicate that he should wind it down. As Jaworski’s disembodied voice crackled from the phone, “Carver? Are you there?” and Grantham barked, “Stop pissing around,” the paramilitary started jabbering in Serbian.

“Sorry,” said Carver, playing the dumb foreigner. “Don’t understand.”

He was wearing a hunting vest, with external pockets at chest and hip level. Slowly, he reached into one of the chest pockets and pulled out his BBC press card.

“Journalist,” he said, pointing at himself. “BBC . . . British, yes?”

The man turned back toward his mate and waved at him to come over. That gave Carver the opportunity to pick up the phone.

“Sorry about that. I’m at a roadblock. Be right with you.”

He put the phone down again as the second paramilitary came up and in heavily accented English said, “Road close. You no go. Close. Yes?”

“I understand, yes,” Carver said. “But I must go. BBC.”

Before the argument could go any further, the Serbs were distracted by the arrival of another car, a decrepit Škoda, which pulled up behind Carver. It had a big bundle on its roof wrapped in plastic, which made him think it must have crossed the border just behind him.

One of the Serbs pointed at the pennant fluttering from the radio aerial. It bore a black double-headed eagle against a red background, the national symbol of Albania. He walked up to the car, ripped off the pennant, threw it to the ground, and spat on it before grinding it into the dirt with his boot heel. Then, while his partner pointed his gun at the car, the paramilitary ripped open the driver’s door and dragged out an unshaven black-haired man in his thirties, wearing an Adidas track-suit over a red-and-black-striped AC Milan soccer shirt. The man was pleading, pointing back to the car as he staggered forward a few paces before being thrown to the ground.

While the first paramilitary aimed a couple of halfhearted kicks at the Albanian, the other peered into the car. He gestured at the passengers to get out. A woman emerged from one side, a second, much older female from the other. Carver assumed they were family: the man’s wife and mother, maybe. The missus was hugging an absurdly big pink teddy bear that looked like a prize from a tatty fairground stall. Ma was wrapped in a fringed, woven shawl. The man guarding them lined them up by the side of the road, then half turned to watch his partner kicking the man curled up in the dirt. Neither of the paramilitaries saw what happened next. As Carver looked on, the younger woman flung her teddy bear to the ground as the older one threw back her shawl. Both were carrying guns. Neither hesitated for a second before firing at the paramilitaries.

One went down immediately, clutching his belly and screaming out in pain. The other tried to flee the blast of gunfire, but managed only a few strides before a bullet hit the side of his head, splitting his skull like a teaspoon cracking a boiled egg, and throwing him dead to the ground. Several of the shots had missed, the bullets flying straight past the paramilitaries toward Carver’s car, smashing his rear window and punching into the bodywork.

A voice over the phone cried, “What the hell was that?” but Carver wasn’t around to hear it. He’d already kicked open the car door and rolled out onto the pavement, drawing the Beretta as he went and scrambling into a ditch by the opposite side of the road. A knife had appeared from nowhere in the Albanian’s hand and he was standing over the wounded Serb, grinning at his screams with a look that suggested he was going to enjoy the job of giving him a long, slow, agonizing death. But that could wait. He’d spotted Carver’s dash across the road. As the screams of the wounded man filled the night air, he picked up one of the paramilitaries’ submachine guns and walked toward Carver, peering into the darkness.

The women followed him, the wife crouching low, her pistol held in both hands in front of her, the old woman stomping forward in absolute defiance of any danger.

With a shock of disgust, Carver realized that he was going to have to kill all three of them, the women as well as the man.

He didn’t hesitate.

 

 

 

The whole thing was over in less than five seconds. Afterward, the only sound came from the wounded Serb, whose howls of fear and pain were gradually subsiding to whimpers. Unconsciousness and death would not be far away.

Carver walked back to his car, sickened by the pointlessness of it all. He wondered how many other scenes like this there had been across this benighted country over the past few years and how many more would follow in the years to come.

Ninety minutes ago the people in that car had most likely been standing around in the line by the border crossing, talking and joking like everyone else. They were alive. They had prospects. Now look at them.

He picked up the phone again. The first voice he heard was Jaworski.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Shut it,” snapped Carver. “Five people just died.”

“Okay, let’s start again, nice and polite,” said Jaworski, in a patronizing tone of exaggerated conciliation. “Here’s the situation. Waylon McCabe flew into Pristina a couple of hours back. His plane has been adapted to drop a bomb. He’s also made some kind of alliance with a Serbian warlord, Dusan Darko. We think Darko’s going to seize the weapon Vermulen has located—may have done so already—then hand it over to McCabe. And then we believe McCabe wants to use it to trigger Armageddon.”

Carver gave a snort of disbelief.

“He thinks he’s fulfilling the prophecies of the Book of Revelation,” said Jaworski, with absolute seriousness.

“Jesus wept.”

“That’s kind of an unfortunate choice of words,” said Jaworski.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Get to the airport, obviously, then locate the plane. We tracked it all the way to Slatina and we know it landed. We’re certain it hasn’t taken off—it’s not on any radar. But the last satellite pass we did, there was no sign of it.”

“Okay—I find the plane. Then what?”

“Just observe. Keep us informed. Believe me, you will be playing a major role in resolving this situation by providing the intelligence we need. But I want you to understand, so far as my government is concerned, this is a domestic matter involving U.S. citizens. It will be settled by U.S. agencies, and no one else. Frankly, Mr. Carver, it is none of your business. Your place is in the audience, not on the stage. So do not interfere, and do not, on any account, do anything more than observe and inform.”