Warriors (9781101621189) (17 page)

Stefan walked around the side of the van and opened the back doors. He climbed in and shut one of the doors. In a duffel bag he found a bungee cord, and he hooked one end of the cord to the bottom of the open door. Working on his knees, he attached the other end to the bumper in such a way that the door hung slightly ajar. Stefan crouched and peered through the resulting crack. He took the M24 from its case, rested his back against the inside wall of the van, and looped the sling around his arm. At an oblique angle, he sighted through the opening. With the van parked askew, that opening allowed him to aim toward the freight ramp. Now he had a natural line of fire toward the Antonov.

“Ah,” DuÅ¡ic said, “the perfect urban sniper's hide.”

“Not perfect,” Stefan said, “but it will do.”

Dušic moved to the van's driver seat and adjusted the side mirror to give him a view of the Antonov. The reflection would at least let him see when figures moved toward the aircraft. He'd have to turn in his seat or even get out of the vehicle to positively identify Dmitri.

Fifteen minutes went by with no sign of the crew. The whine of an auxiliary power unit rose from the jet. Dušic cursed under his breath. Apparently a flight engineer was already in the cockpit, powering up systems. What if the whole crew was on board?

“Stay alert,” DuÅ¡ic said. “I do not know if we have missed our chance.”

Stefan turned the zoom adjustment on the rifle's scope, steadied the weapon across his knees. He looked ready. Dušic had studied the fine art of killing, and he knew taking life came more easily with distance from the target. Stefan had a few hundred yards of spatial distance, which made the act a little more antiseptic than a point-blank shot. But psychic distance helped, too. That distance happened naturally when shooting Muslims—inferior people in every way, to Dušic's mind. Less simple to shoot Russians, tied to Serbs by faith and culture. Dušic hoped Stefan could find psychic distance through Dmitri's sin of betrayal, a moral flaw. Stefan would probably need such moral separation. That was one of the few drawbacks to soldiers like Stefan, who killed with premeditation but without rage. They had too much time to think.

At the edge of the mirror, Dušic noticed movement. He twisted to get a better look, and he saw two figures walking toward the Antonov. Both held those large briefcases pilots used to carry their manuals and charts. So it wasn't too late. Thank God.

“You have a target,” DuÅ¡ic said. “The taller one is Dmitri.”

“I see them,” Stefan said. He shifted his shoulders against the wall of the van, thumbed the rifle's safety.

Dmitri put down his briefcase at the foot of the Antonov's crew ladder. He turned and appeared to speak with his copilot. Stefan raised his head from the stock, looked around.

“What are you waiting for?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

Stefan aimed, placed the first joint of his index finger on the trigger. Dmitri began climbing the ladder, holding the rail with his right hand and carrying his briefcase in his left. Stefan still did not fire, and now Dušic was worried.

“You had better—” DuÅ¡ic began, but the rumble of a takeoff drowned out his sentence. He saw recoil jolt Stefan's shoulder, but he heard no report from the rifle at all.

Dmitri slumped on the ladder, clung to the rail with the crook of his arm. He dropped the briefcase, which thudded down the steps and struck the copilot square in the chest. The briefcase bounced to the pavement and broke open, spilling books and papers.

Stefan racked the bolt and chambered a fresh round. He closed one eye, watched through the scope. Dušic saw blood drip from somewhere on Dmitri's body and spill onto the steps below him. As the pilot bled, his arm let go and his body rolled and tumbled down the ladder until he struck the tarmac headfirst. Stains darkened Dmitri's flight suit, but Dušic could not tell exactly where the bullet had struck.

The copilot, most likely still dumbfounded by what was happening, kneeled beside Dmitri. Incomprehension was probably the last emotion he felt. His head jerked, and Dušic saw a burst of vapor: the red mist of the bullet strike. The copilot collapsed across the body of his crewmate.

“Excellent,” DuÅ¡ic said.

Stefan did not reply. He ejected the empty brass and put down the M24. With one swift motion, he released the bungee cord and closed the rear door. DuÅ¡ic moved to get out of the driver seat, but Stefan said, “No. You drive.” Stefan came forward, stepped over the console, and lowered himself into the passenger seat. DuÅ¡ic started the engine.

“That was fine work, my friend,” DuÅ¡ic said. He stepped on the accelerator and drove out of the parking area.

Stefan reached under the seat and produced a bottle of slivovitz. The image on the label appeared festive: a cluster of ripe plums. He twisted the cap, broke the seal. Took a long swallow, closed his eyes hard, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Stefan stared out the window. He did not offer a drink to Dušic.

ALOFT IN THE RIVET JOINT
, Gold sat in what had become her accustomed seat next to Irena. A night flight this time, but night and day hardly existed in the back end of the surveillance jet. No windows, just computers and monitoring gear. Gold imagined Parson found a much better view up front in the cockpit jump seat. The plane had taken off into a clear Balkan night with a glittering canopy of stars. Cunningham sat in the back with Gold and Irena. All three wore headsets for monitoring the Rivet Joint's channels.

Thanks to information given up by Dušic's secretary, Milica, they now monitored another specific cell phone. The mission reminded Gold of a jigsaw puzzle with tiny pieces. If you found where one piece fit, the picture took shape a bit more, and offered further clues to solve the rest of the puzzle.

But so far tonight, nothing. Irena doodled on her notepad. Her console's utility light cast a pale glow on the paper. She drew a picture of a seagull in flight, wings outstretched in a glide. She wrote characters in Cyrillic, which Gold could not decipher. She went back to the seagull and drew a little set of headphones on it.

“So you're putting him to work, too,” Gold said.

“Might as well,” Irena said.

“This makes me think of my granddad's stories,” Cunningham said.

“How's that?” Irena asked.

“He'd fly these long patrols off the Outer Banks, looking for submarines. Hours and hours of droning, and then all of a sudden things would get exciting.”

The OSI agent described his grandfather's flights in a Stinson 10A, a little yellow single-engine plane that looked nothing like a threat to the Third Reich. The Stinson skimmed just a few hundred feet above the ocean. The elder Cunningham had talked about how he learned to recognize the difference between heavily loaded freighters riding low in the water, and empty vessels riding high. From time to time, he would catch a glimpse of a dark form beneath the waves. Sometimes he discerned only the shadow of a cloud. But sometimes the dark form held a consistent shape and course, and turned out to be a member of Admiral Doenitz's wolf pack.

“My granddad hunted with his eyes,” Cunningham said, “and you guys hunt with your ears. Except your plane cost a few dollars more.”

“Just a few,” Irena said.

Parson came into the aft section of the airplane. He held a slip of thermal paper in his hand. Gold wondered about the serious look in his eyes. Parson seemed to enjoy flying with this crew, learning about a corner of the Air Force he hadn't experienced before. At altitude in the Rivet Joint, he'd appeared as relaxed as Gold had ever seen him while on duty. But now he wore his mission face.

Standing behind Irena, he plugged his headset into a spare interphone cord, pressed his talk switch, and said, “Just got this satcom message.” He dropped the paper on the table in front of Cunningham. The message read

TWO RUSSIAN PILOTS WHO TURNED EVIDENCE AGAINST DUSIC WERE SHOT DEAD TODAY. SNIPER FIRE AS THEY PREPARED TO BOARD AIRCRAFT. NO ONE SAW ANYTHING. INTERNAL AFFAIRS MINISTRY POLICE INVESTIGATING.

WEBSTER.

“Oh, my God,” Irena said. “What does all this mean?”

“It means DuÅ¡ic is one dangerous son of a bitch,” Cunningham said. “He's an arms dealer, so we know he has resources. But this is damned crazy, so it means he's unpredictable. No telling how he'll use those resources.”

A good point, Gold thought, and a frightening one. Money and irrationality made a bad combination. And irrationality had to play a role. Why else would you commit murder to protect a drug ring that's already been exposed?

“Well, sir, I sure hope we can find something useful,” Irena said. She turned a volume control as if that somehow could extract more information from the earth below.

“Can you get a fix on his location?” Parson asked.

“The guys up there will try,” Irena said, pointing to crew members in seats farther forward. “It'll help if he makes a call.”

For Gold, the latest turn of events brought forth an old sadness. She struggled to reconcile the things that had happened in this part of Europe during the 1990s. Someday she would step back from the action and take the rest of her life to reflect and study. Gold looked forward to an academic career, spending her days among students, surrounded by marble, mahogany, and great thoughts. But for now she would ride this expensive piece of machinery and help Parson see this thing through to the end. Parson seemed to have carried a free-floating grudge ever since the Bosnian War, a resentment that such things could happen in his lifetime. And now he could affix that grudge to a face and a name: Viktor Dušic.

“Do your drug cases always get this weird?” Parson asked Cunningham.

“Not usually,” the OSI agent said. “Most of the time it's some dumb airman selling pot out of his car. The crime rate in the military is actually lower than in the general population, but we still get a few losers.”

Cunningham explained how he'd spent more of his career protecting service members than arresting them. On one of his first deployments, the Air Force gave him a tough task: help stop the rocket and grenade attacks launched every night against one of the forward bases in Afghanistan. The QRF teams, the quick reaction force, had killed a few insurgents; one trio of bad guys had gotten vaporized when an Apache gunship caught them on infrared. But the rockets kept coming. An RPG-7 round exploded just outside Cunningham's hooch one night. He clutched his mattress, rolled it off the bed frame, and took cover under it on the floor, wondering if a Posturepedic would stop shrapnel. At that moment he realized he needed to get creative. The coalition couldn't just shoot its way out of this problem.

He noted that every Wednesday and Sunday local merchants set up a market outside the base, selling rugs and junk souvenirs to GIs. Cunningham suspected some of the merchants were scoping out the base for targets. But even if they weren't actively helping the bad guys, they probably knew the bad guys. Or they knew somebody who knew the bad guys.

Cunningham made a suggestion to the commander: Tell those merchants no more market days until they give us some names, or at least until those rocket attacks stop. On the days they sold to Americans, the merchants probably made more money than they could earn otherwise in a year. He got the idea from the old watermen back home. Their livelihoods depended on the market for the seafood they caught. No market, no money.

Money talked. The merchants fingered some Haqqani Network bastards, and a night raid by American and Afghan special ops troops netted twenty terrorists. Twelve captured, eight dead. Half of them came from Pakistan.

“But even that,” Cunningham said, “seems like simple stuff compared to this.”

“Webster wants this guy real bad,” Parson said.

“I do, too,” Cunningham said.

“I see why,” Irena said. “It's hard to believe I've been listening to the voice responsible for that.” She pointed to the satcom message.

“He's responsible for a lot more than that,” Gold said.

“Damned straight,” Parson said. “Hey, we might have a long night ahead of us. Who wants coffee?”

“I do, sir,” Irena said.

“Make it two,” Cunningham said.

“Three,” Gold said.

Parson made two trips to the galley. Each time he came back with two foam cups of bitter black coffee. He kept the fourth cup for himself, and did not return to the cockpit. With no more open crew stations available, he stood behind Gold's seat, sipped from his cup and watched the linguists work. Gold calculated that, at the moment, he cared more about catching bad guys than flying airplanes.

Irena removed her shoulder straps but kept her lap belt fastened. She slid her seat back a bit, clearly trying to get comfortable and concentrate better. Voices in Serbo-Croatian, Italian, and German flowed through the circuits. Irena showed interest in none of it. But after another hour of flying, suddenly her back stiffened. She turned a volume knob, wrote down the time.

Gold glanced at Parson, who had also noticed Irena's posture. Parson smiled. He had told her these airborne linguists were like English setters: You could tell from their body language when they were onto something. She'd thought it a crude comparison, but he was right.

“I got DuÅ¡ic on two-alpha,” Irena said on interphone. Then she held up her hand for silence. For several minutes she monitored the call and took notes in Cyrillic. The elegant lettering on her writing pad looked almost like written music.

But all at once, something broke the spell for Irena. She slapped her pen down onto the pad. She whispered in English, off interphone, “Give me a fucking break.” The skin on her nose wrinkled as if something smelled bad. A sign of disgust, Gold supposed. First time Gold had ever heard Irena swear.

Irena pressed her interphone switch and said, “All right, he hung up. I'll let you know if I hear anything else.”

“Copy that, Irena,” one of her crewmates said. “We'll geolocate that signal.”

“Is he in Belgrade?” Cunningham asked.

“Negative,” the crewman said, “and I think he's moving.”

“What did he say?” Gold asked.

“He was talking about some kind of operation,” Irena said, “but I couldn't tell much about it.”

“You heard something that pissed you off,” Parson said.

“Yes, sir. He started talking about poetry. And he quoted from
The Mountain Wreath
.”

Irena told them
The Mountain Wreath
was a classic Serbian epic from the 1800s. She also said present-day hard-line nationalists read it as a celebration of ethnic cleansing. Dušic had quoted some favorite lines:

May God strike you, loathsome degenerates,

why do we need the Turk's faith among us?

“But the poet was writing about a tribal way of life that doesn't exist anymore,” Irena said. “That story is an artifact, not a manual for anything we need to do now.”

“Sounds like the way the Confederate flag gets misused,” Cunningham said. “The Stars and Bars should just stand for a bygone era, but dumbasses use it as a symbol of modern hate.”

“Exactly, sir,” Irena said. “I never made that connection before, but you're right.”

Gold could see that Irena took pride in the Serbian language and Serbian literature, and took offense when that literature got used for a twisted purpose. But Irena didn't take more time to talk about old poems. The young linguist spent several minutes conversing on interphone with some of her crewmates. Gold had learned that the people who sat in forward crew stations were not language specialists but electronic warfare officers called Ravens. Irena spoke with the Ravens about where those cell phone signals originated.

“Sir, did you say he was not in Belgrade?” Irena asked.

“That's right, Irena,” the Raven answered. “And here's something else: That new phone number, the Stefan guy, is coming up in the same location.”

“They're riding together?”

“I think so.”

“Damn, you guys are scary,” Parson said.

“If I ever have a girlfriend who flies on one of these planes,” Cunningham said, “I sure won't cheat on her.”

Irena smiled, but she never took her eyes off her console and notepad. “All right,” she said, “if they call anybody else, we'll have even more clues.”

The buzz on the interphone and monitoring circuits settled down for a while. Parson went for more coffee. The brewed stuff had run out; this time he came back with cups of hot water and packets of Nescafé. The packets bore a company website with a dot-UK address. At some point this crew must have stocked up supplies at a British base.

Gold ripped open the packet, poured the instant coffee into the hot water. As she stirred with a plastic straw, she noticed Irena sit up straight.

“She's on point again,” Parson whispered.

“I got another call,” Irena said on interphone. She wrote down the time, adjusted a volume control.

“It's that Stefan number,” the Raven said.

“Roger that,” Irena said. She made more notes in Serbo-Croatian. She stopped writing and leaned back in her seat. Whatever she'd heard drained the color from her face. The lividity of Irena's skin reminded Gold of expressions she'd seen in Afghanistan. People looked that way when frightened.

She picked up her pen again, and now she wrote in English:
HOLY ASSEMBLY OF BISHOPS
.
PATRIARCHATE
. A few lines down she added another phrase:
CAR BOMB
.