Warriors (9781101621189) (13 page)

“Inside or out?” Irena asked.

“Let's sit outside,” Gold said.

They took seats under the awning, and Gold surveyed her surroundings. From the architecture of the windows, she supposed Muslims owned the café. Irena ordered three cups of Bosnian coffee. When the coffee came and Gold tasted it, the flavor reminded her of the coffees she'd tried in countries farther to the east: very strong and very sweet.

Parson looked pensive. He rested his chin on the crook of his thumb and forefinger, and he ignored his coffee.

“What's on your mind?” Gold asked.

Parson took his hand away from his chin, crossed his legs. “Webster wanted us to make Cunningham really understand what happened here. He hopes OSI will stay on this and see it through. Got any ideas?”

Gold thought for a second. “Maybe bring him here and show him a Sarajevo rose.”

“Maybe.”

Irena glanced up from her coffee. The contentment had drained from her face, and now she looked even more subdued than Parson.

“I just thought of something else we can show him,” Irena said. She explained her idea. It involved a visit to the town of Bratunac. “If Sergeant Major Gold has her United Nations ID card, that might get us on the site.”

“That's not something I want to see,” Parson said, “but if it doesn't make Cunningham feel for this place, nothing will.”

No one spoke for a long while. Eventually, Gold tried to change the mood.

“Let's order some food,” she said.

From far down the street, the growl of motorcycle engines rose. Gold opened her menu and paid the traffic no mind. She thought to ask Irena for a recommendation, but the bikes roared louder now. When she glanced up from the menu, she saw two motorcycles, each with a driver and a rider.

The bikers came on fast, one machine a few yards in front of the other. Each driver gripped the handlebars and throttle; each rider held an object in his right hand. Before Gold could react, before she could even gauge the riders' intent, they hurled their objects toward the café. Over the noise of the cycles, the bikers shouted something in Serbo-Croatian.

One of the objects spun toward Gold's head. She felt the object flick strands of her hair before crashing through one of the café windows. The other object struck the table, broke Irena's cup and saucer, bounced into another window.

“Grenade!” Parson shouted. With broken glass and ceramic still in motion, he leaped from his seat. Arms outstretched, he hit Gold and Irena like a linebacker. His shoulder thudded into Gold's rib cage, and the force of the blow knocked her backward in her chair.

The three of them tumbled to the ground amid shards and spilled coffee. Gold landed on her back and rolled away from the overturned chair. Irena fell onto her side two feet away. Parson grabbed Irena's arm and yanked her close. He crouched over both of them, in a position as if he were starting a push-up.

In that instant, Gold understood what he meant to do: shield them from the blast with his own body. The alpha wolf again, protecting his pack.

Nothing happened. What was the hang time of a grenade? Usually about five seconds, Gold recalled. She took a breath, let it out. That much time had passed.

“Stones,” Irena said. “They're just stones.”

No one moved. Gold's chest hurt like hell from the old gunshot wound and the impact of Parson's shoulder. But as she thought about what he'd done, she put her hand on the side of his neck, met his eyes. Then she moved her hand down to his arm and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I guess I kind of overreacted.” He picked himself up, brushed at the coffee stains on his shirt.

“No you didn't,” Gold said. “They could have been grenades.” She sat up, winced with pain. The back of her hand stung, too. Blood trickled from a cut with a sliver of glass still embedded. Gold picked out the glass, let it drop to the sidewalk. She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wrapped the cloth around her hand.

“Does that need stitches?” Parson asked.

“No, it's not deep.”

“How about you, Irena?” Parson said.

“I'm okay,” Irena said. “Can't say the same for my dress.” Parson had torn the sleeve in his attempt to shield her, and coffee had spilled down the front. The espresso aroma floated stronger in the air, but now it brought no pleasure.

A flush of anxiety came over Gold. Sweat popped out all over her skin. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. You can help beat it just by identifying it, she told herself. PTSD. Not everyone who experienced combat trauma suffered debilitating effects. Gold felt she had nearly overcome her injuries, both physical and psychic. She recalled taking the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics right before leaving active duty. The computerized test included activities such as memorizing symbols associated with numbers, recognizing patterns, and gauging reaction time by clicking the mouse every time an asterisk appeared. Her ANAM results showed no loss of function.

Gold stood, extended her good hand to Irena, pulled her to her feet. Excited voices came from inside the café.

“Oh, they're pissed,” Irena said.

“I would be, too, if some asshole trashed my coffee shop,” Parson said. “What did those bastards yell when they drove by?”

“Fucking towel heads,” Irena said.

“That's just great.”

The waiter came back outside, waving his arms and talking fast. Irena spoke with him for several minutes. The man went back inside, and through the shattered windows Gold saw him pick up the telephone.

“He wanted to make sure we're all right,” Irena said. “I told him we're fine. He also wants to know if we'll stay to tell the cops what we saw.”

“Hell, yeah, I'll make a police report,” Parson said. “I'd like to strangle those sons of bitches.”

When the police arrived, both officers spoke English well enough to take statements from Parson and Gold without translation. One of the cops went to the trunk of his squad car and brought back a first-aid kit. He wiped the cut on Gold's hand with an alcohol pad, which burned a little. The officer agreed that she did not need sutures, and he placed an adhesive bandage over the cut.

Irena addressed the police in Serbo-Croatian. After she'd spoken with them, she said, “They're offering us a ride back to the hotel.”

“That's good,” Parson said. “I've had enough playing tourist.”

The officers talked to the waiter and manager, took some notes, and opened the back doors of the squad car, a VW Polo. Gold squeezed into the middle between Parson and Irena. During the drive back to the hotel, the police chatted with Irena. The car stopped in front of the Holiday Inn, and Gold, Parson, and Irena got out, waved thanks to the police officers.

In the lobby, Parson asked, “What did you guys have so much to talk about?”

“They were real curious about what we're doing,” Irena said. “I just told them we were on vacation.”

“Smart.”

“I don't know if they bought it. They also said this is about the third time in a week they've had low-grade violence. Nobody's been killed like in that riot at Zvornik, but this stuff seems to be spreading.”

Parson shook his head but he said nothing. Irena went upstairs to change out of her ruined dress. Gold accompanied Parson to the hotel restaurant.

“I need a beer,” Parson said. “You want a glass of wine?”

“Too early for me,” Gold said. But she did not begrudge Parson his beer. Though he showed no signs of emotion, his feelings had to have taken a wild ride. He'd made a split-second decision to save others with a move that could have cost him his own life. That the grenades turned out to be rocks made Parson's impulse no less impressive to Gold. And after someone had acted to sacrifice himself, you could hardly expect him just to forget about it and go have lunch.

When the waitress brought Parson his lager, he took a long pull, then set the glass onto a napkin. He looked like his nerves had settled a bit, so Gold decided to see if he felt like talking.

“This place gets to you, doesn't it?” she asked.

“Well, it's kind of hard to ignore flying rocks and busting windows.”

“I mean even before that.”

Parson took another drink, put the glass back down. With his index finger, he traced a line in the condensation sweating on the outside of the glass. After a few moments he said, “Yeah, I guess you could say this is where I got my education.”

He told her about that night mission long ago when he'd seen the ground fire from his C-130. Through intel briefings and news reports, he'd come to realize he'd watched part of the Srebrenica massacre as it unfolded.

“I was pretty young back then,” Parson said. “I guess I just couldn't reconcile a world where those things could still happen.” He went on to say he'd seen awful things in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. But he was older and more jaded then. Bosnia had first taught him that cruelty persisted in human nature like a dominant gene. “I don't know the things you know,” he added. “I don't know about philosophy and history and religion; I just fly airplanes. But it seems the more I learn about what we're capable of, the worse it gets. I don't see how you stand it.”

Gold liked it that he'd said “what
we're
capable of.” Not this group or that group. He might feel older and more jaded, but he was also older and wiser.

“I can stand it,” Gold said, “because I never lose hope.” She never lost hope, she told him, because in addition to the horrors she'd witnessed, she'd also seen great kindnesses. And sometimes great courage to enable the kindnesses. “Remember how you came after me when the insurgents captured me in Afghanistan? You had almost no support at all—just determination and a rifle.”

“Seemed like the thing to do.”

“That's my point. I don't believe you gave it much thought. You just did it. You went with your gut. Pure instinct. All to help somebody you didn't even know at the time.”

“I'm nothing special.”

Gold put her hand over his. She looked at one of his fingers, the tip nipped off by frostbite when he'd rescued her.

“That's right,” she said. “You're nothing special. Well, no. Yes, you are. I hope you don't mind me saying that. But I mean there are a lot of brave, kind people out there like you. That's why I have hope.”

Parson stared into his beer. “You're killing me,” he said. Gave a slight smile, shook his head. “But I suppose that's something to think about. I know some pretty high-speed folks, myself.” He looked straight at Gold when he said that.

She released his hand. Something to think about, indeed, she thought. You could dwell on darkness or focus on light.

Gold thought she detected a hint of relief in Parson's eyes; she hoped so, anyway. He didn't say anything for a few minutes, and she just let him sip his beer and come down from the adrenaline high of the day's events. Or was he coming back up from a low?

Either way, Parson maintained his usual stoic demeanor. Gold had seen it in worse situations. When Cunningham entered the restaurant, Parson nodded to him as if nothing had happened.

“What have you guys been into today?” Cunningham asked.

Gold told him about the cathedral visit and the vandalism at the café. She left out how Parson had tried to shield her and Irena because she knew he wouldn't feel like talking about it.

“That rock-throwing thing sucks,” Cunningham said.

“Yeah, it does,” Parson said.

“Well, we all have a big day tomorrow,” Cunningham told Parson. “The Rivet Joint will go up, and they want Sergeant Major Gold to go up with them. You and I are taking a road trip.”

“Where to?”

“Belgrade.”

NO MAJOR TRAFFIC ARTERY CONNECTED
Sarajevo directly to Belgrade, so Parson enjoyed the scenery of Bosnia and Serbia as Cunningham drove the rental car along winding two-lane roads. The green hills and lush forests looked like great territory for hunting and trout fishing. Parson wondered how such a beautiful place could have become the scene of the awful things that had happened here. But he'd asked himself the same questions in the countryside of Germany, on the old World War I battlefields of France, and, for that matter, among the fields at Antietam and Gettysburg. The problem lay not in the terrain but in people's hearts.

He remained angry about the café incident yesterday and puzzled over why those kinds of things were happening now. Anybody here over the age of thirty should have a good idea of where it all could lead. When he tried to put himself in the place of the rock throwers, to imagine what they must have been thinking, his mind could not plumb the depth. The effort made him think of a radar altimeter out of its range, whose beam could not find the ground. So its indicator just went blank. At a mental dead end, he turned his thoughts back to the mission.

“So tell me more about this op,” Parson said.

“I met with Bosnian and Serbian police yesterday,” Cunningham said. “They have a hangar under surveillance at the Belgrade airport. That's where the opium has been going. I think they're going to take it down this afternoon.”

“Sounds like somebody's going to have a bad day.”

“Yeah, I suppose you'll see some traffickers with their faces in the tarmac.”

“Cool. So what do we do?”

“Just observe, I hope. The Rivet Joint will talk to me on Fox Mike if they hear anything.”

Parson had never witnessed a drug bust, and he looked forward to seeing a little justice in action. At the airport, Cunningham made a cell phone call, then met an unmarked white van in a parking lot near the cargo terminal. The driver, a dark-haired man of about thirty, introduced himself only by his first name. He spoke English with just a trace of a Slavic accent, and he wore civilian clothes: a golf shirt with blue tactical pants, and those black shoes favored by cops all over the world—enough leather almost to pass as low quarters, but with soles fit for running down a criminal.

“I'm Dragan,” he said. “Ministry of Internal Affairs police.”

“Thanks again for your help,” Cunningham said.

“We'll do this just like we briefed yesterday,” Dragan said. “My uniformed guys are already in position.”

“Where did you learn such good English?” Parson asked.

“University of Chicago. And I have American relatives.”

“Want to do a radio check?” Cunningham asked.

“Sure,” Dragan said.

Cunningham plugged a cord into his VHF-FM radio, inserted an earpiece into his ear. Dragan donned a headset with a lightweight boom mike. The Serbian officer walked several steps away. Cunningham pressed a switch and said, “Radio check.” Lacking an earpiece, Parson did not hear the answer, but he did hear Cunningham when he responded, “Good. Got you five by five.” Cunningham's pronunciation of “five”
sounded like “foiv.”

Dragan came back over to the rental car, and the two lawmen worked out last-minute details. “The flight's due in about an hour,” Dragan said, “but let's set up now in case the plane's early.”

“Yeah, we better,” Cunningham said. “Where do you want us?”

“There's a few parking spots along the fence near the freight warehouse, and you can see the ramp from there.” Dragan pointed as he spoke. “Just stay in your car unless something crazy happens.”

“Stay in your car.” “Watch what happens.” Parson didn't like phrases like those. They sounded too much like the world's initial reaction when the ethnic cleansing began back in the 1990s.

“All right,” Cunningham said. “Holler if you need us.”

Dragan nodded, sat down in his van, started the engine, and drove away. Cunningham steered toward the warehouse, nosed into a parking spot, and shut down the car. He turned up his radio volume and transmitted to the Rivet Joint somewhere overhead, “Motown, this is Dragnet on secure voice. How copy?” He seemed to listen to something in his earpiece, and then he added, “Got you loud and clear.”

All the parts of the operation had come together well, Parson thought. If the bust went down shortly, Cunningham could wrap up the whole mission. Parson almost felt sorry the op would end so soon. Webster wanted him to keep Cunningham on task, but what if the task finished now? Then tomorrow Parson would probably have to head back to Manas. He hated to think that his time with Gold would end so soon. And he supposed he'd spend the rest of the year giving safety briefings on how not to kill yourself doing something stupid: Don't conduct maintenance on top of an airplane without a safety harness. If you work on an electrical component with power applied to the aircraft, pull the component's circuit breakers and hang warning tags on the breakers and switches. Don't earn the Darwin Award by walking too close to a jet intake.

“Want some coffee?” Cunningham asked. He reached down to the floorboard and came up with a Thermos. “We'd be all mommucked if we had to do a stakeout without coffee.”

Parson wondered at Cunningham's slang. Probably the lingo of his coastal North Carolina home. “Sure, thanks,” Parson said. “Now I feel like a real cop.”

Cunningham unscrewed the Thermos, poured the steaming liquid into a paper cup, handed the cup to Parson. Cunningham poured another for himself. Parson took a sip. It tasted nothing like fancy Bosnian coffee. Just black, bitter, and hot: Air Force coffee. Cunningham must have made it himself in his hotel room. Parson blew across the coffee's surface, scanned the surroundings outside.

“I don't see any SWAT dudes anywhere,” Parson said.

“There's one on the roof of the warehouse,” Cunningham said. “Left side. Don't point if you see him, but he's up there with some kind of assault rifle.”

Parson squinted, saw nothing at first. But then he caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel.

“All right,” Parson said, “I see him.”

“I think Dragan said there were eight in all. I don't see the others, though.”

“I'd hate to have all of them come out of nowhere and jump on me.”

“It might get interesting when they make the arrests,” Cunningham said. “Laws and procedures vary from country to country. But you probably won't see these guys read them their Miranda rights and give them a cookie.”

“I get the feeling you don't think that's a bad thing,” Parson said.

“Where I'm from,” Cunningham said, “we believed in what my granddad called tidewater justice. Some of those North Carolina islands were pretty isolated back in the day. If somebody was harassing your daughter or breaking in your house, help might be a long ways away. So we knew how to take care of business ourselves.”

Parson could respect that. Cunningham's ancestors seemed to have lived by an old code of justice, just as they spoke with remnants of an old English. The OSI man had a way of coming out with words unfamiliar to Parson. But in their context, the old words made sense, and so did the old justice.

Several minutes passed in silence. The two men watched the warehouse and ramp, but nothing moved and no one appeared. Finally Cunningham said, “So Webster tells me you did some flying in these parts.”

“A little bit.” Parson described offloading relief supplies in Sarajevo with the airfield under attack, gunners walking mortar fire toward the airplane.

“That must have sucked,” Cunningham said.

“Pretty much,” Parson said. “We used to take off from Ramstein at oh-dark-thirty so we could get in and out of Sarajevo before the afternoon. By one or two o'clock, the snipers would wake up and start drinking, and those fuckers would shoot at anything.”

Parson didn't say any more on the subject, but he thought back to that time. He'd always wondered what sort of drunkenness the snipers entered. Parson had known giggling drunks, sobbing drunks, and belligerent drunks. But what combination of slivovitz and hatred would lead you to center your crosshairs on just anybody who presented himself? The thought reminded him of what could be at stake here, given the history of this place.

Every few minutes, arriving aircraft appeared over the roofline of the warehouse—winged specks vectored onto final approach. Eventually one appeared that loomed larger than the rest. The aircraft lumbered through its turn from base leg to final like a flying whale, and it reminded Parson of his own C-5 Galaxy. But the tail looked different: a conventional empennage rather than the Lockheed T-tail. An Antonov An-124. The same type of plane they'd seen picking up cargo at Manas.

“Here comes the guest of honor,” Parson said.

The An-124 disappeared behind the warehouse as it descended the glide slope. Cunningham looked down at his radio, pressed the transmit button, and said, “Roger that. We see it.” When the aircraft reappeared in Parson's field of view, to the right of the warehouse, it floated just yards above the runway. Now the jet looked even bigger, and its size made it appear to fly with impossible slowness. The An-124 touched down first on its main gear, and then the nose wheels lowered to the pavement. Cunningham made another radio call. “Motown, Dragnet,” he transmitted, “Target's on the ground.”

Parson waited a moment to make sure Cunningham wasn't still listening to the radio. When the OSI agent shifted his gaze to outside the car, Parson asked, “Is the Rivet Joint hearing anything?”

“Not that they mentioned,” Cunningham said.

Several minutes later, the whine of the Ivchenko-Progress engines rose as the aircraft taxied toward the ramp. Exhaust gases shimmered from the tailpipes, and grass alongside the taxiway whipped and danced in the jet blast. The noise grew louder as the pilot nudged the power on the number four engine to help with the turn. The Antonov swung ninety degrees to the left and rolled into the freight ramp. A ground crewman stood by the corner of the warehouse, held his thumb in the air to indicate good wingtip clearance. The plane eased forward several feet, stopped. Its engines quieted to idle.

Cunningham turned the volume control on his radio and transmitted, “Dragnet copies.” He turned to Parson and said, “The pilot's already on the phone to someone.”

Parson wondered what that meant. Maybe the pilot was just checking in with a wife or girlfriend. But Irena probably wouldn't bother to mention something that routine. Didn't really matter, though. Dragan and his boys would probably roll up everybody, ground crew and flight crew, and sort the innocent from the guilty later.

A ground crewman connected an external power cart to the jet, and the four engines shut down. A sprinkle of raw fuel fell from each nacelle as the combustion flames were extinguished and the drain valves closed. The fuel droplets left dark stains on the pavement underneath the wings. Parson watched with professional interest, and he wondered if this crew would ever fly again. Screw 'em if they carried drugs knowingly.

“So what now?” Parson asked.

“This might take a while,” Cunningham said. “I think Dragan wants to wait and see if they offload cargo and then put it right back on the plane. That'll be a good indication they're pulling something out of the packing material.”

The Antonov crew opened the aft ramp and the pilots went inside, but half an hour went by before any cargo came off. The loadmasters eventually began using the jet's internal crane to lift the pallets. Parson had never seen such a device; no American military cargo plane had one. He decided the crane was pretty novel, but in the end no more efficient than sliding cargo over the omnidirectional rollers on the floor of a C-5. As the third pallet got lowered onto a forklift, Cunningham pressed his transmit switch and said, “Dragnet copies.” Then he told Parson, “The pilot's talking to somebody who sounds like a boss. Irena says they never used the word ‘opium,' but the conversation seems suspicious.”

“Anything a prosecutor could use?” Parson asked.

“Probably not. The evidence that really matters is the dope itself. We'll probably know about that in just a little while.”

The forklift disappeared into the shadows inside the warehouse. For about twenty minutes, Parson saw no activity on the ramp. He began to wonder if the ground crew had quit for the day. But then the forklift rattled its way out of the warehouse and back to the Antonov, carrying a pallet of assorted boxes just like the ones the workers had offloaded.

“Uh-oh,” Cunningham said. “I think that's what Dragan was looking for.”

The forklift driver wore a light blue work shirt, untucked. A cigarette dangled from his lips, half an inch of ash sagging from the cigarette's tip. The ash fell onto the man's lap, and he looked down and brushed at his clothing. He did not see the two policemen sprinting toward him.

Both officers wore black balaclavas, black tactical vests, black cargo trousers. One carried a Zastava M21 assault rifle. The other ran with a pistol in one hand. Pistol Guy grabbed the forklift driver by the shirt, yanked him off the forklift, yelled something in Serbo-Croatian. The driver struggled, and the officer jerked him into a choke hold and wrestled him to the pavement.

“Damn,” Cunningham said. “Getting all tidewater on him.”

The officer with the rifle reached up to the forklift, apparently shutting off its engine. Then he pointed the rifle at the driver while the other officer took out a set of flex-cuffs. When the driver resisted being rolled onto his stomach, the cop slugged him, pushed him over, cuffed him. Two other policemen charged into the aircraft.

Shouts came from within the warehouse. But to Parson's relief, he heard no gunfire. A man screamed; Parson imagined some dumbass had made the mistake of fighting back and wound up with a boot on his face. As Parson tried to follow the action, he noticed Cunningham furrow his brow. The OSI agent pressed his transmit button again and said, “Dragnet copies. But it's too late.”