Warriors (9781101621189) (6 page)

“Nothing you could prove in court,” Gold said. “But it's a classic sign of somebody getting skittish.”

“How do you know this?” Parson said. “You're not a cop.” He didn't doubt her; he just wondered how she could have picked up this particular tidbit. Gold knew so many things, and she never stopped surprising him.

“Interpreting for interrogations,” Gold said. She looked off into the mountains, paused for a moment. Then she said, “I've heard things you wouldn't believe. I've heard things I wish I hadn't heard. And I've seen things I wish I hadn't seen. But I know when people are hiding something.”

A SETBACK, NOTHING MORE
. Dušic told his contacts in Central Asia, along with the European customers for his new product, not to panic. We lost some inventory, he conceded, but Afghanistan had no shortage of poppies. Yes, the risk of detection existed now, but according to all reports, the C-27 had burned on impact. Perhaps the flames had consumed all of the product. Neither the Americans nor the Kyrgyz government had said anything about finding contraband. It would look suspicious if Dušic and his contacts changed the schedules of their flights. Better to let operations continue as normal.

Dušic wanted to focus on the real mission; the dirty business of the drug trade only funded that mission, and drugs already took up too much of his time. At least he'd received some good news from his old army friend Stefan: Three veterans of the Volunteer Guard had pledged their support. And those three might help recruit more.

Stefan had also reported progress on technical issues. Dušic wanted to see for himself—and meet the new volunteers—so he took his Aventador over the border into Bosnia. At the checkpoint, his false passport received barely a glance from the idiot border guard. That border never should have been there, in Dušic's estimation. Greater Serbia should encompass the current Bosnia, and ultimately that was the purpose of his mission. He tried not to let his thoughts about the border ruin his day. For the moment, he enjoyed driving his Lamborghini down the winding rural roads. The sports car was designed for such motoring, not the stop-and-go congestion of Belgrade. He crossed bridges over streams running clear except where the water tumbled fast enough to turn white. The trip brought back memories as he sped past rolling green hills.

Dušic's unit served in this region, near Tuzla, early in the war. He remembered one day with particular vividness. As his men cleared a village of Turks, they found four women attractive enough to keep. The platoon gathered them in a house blown open by shelling, and the men waited for Dušic to come in from the field.

That was the protocol: Officers got first pick, and they each got a woman to themselves. The enlisted had to share. Dušic knew the one he wanted immediately—second from the right in the lineup, hands bound in front of her. Shoulder-length black hair and a cotton peasant blouse over large breasts. She kept staring at the floor, so he placed his hand on her chin and forced her to look at him. Very pretty—fair skin, but eyes filled with Turkish hate.

“It is your lucky day, my little whore,” he said.

The girl spat in his face. His men hooted.

Dušic slapped her. Then he pulled his sidearm. With one hand, he grabbed her by the hair. With the other, he jammed the pistol barrel against her cheek.

“I bet you like it rough,” he said. DuÅ¡ic pulled her hair harder. He heard his men behind him laughing. “You're going to bear a Serb child,” he said, “if I let you live that long.”

Then he dragged her into a back room. How that bitch screamed and cried. In the end, Dušic chose not to shoot her. He figured she was worth leaving for the next patrol that came along. One of the other three women did not survive the night with his men. When they left her untied after all the fun was over, the crazy Turk hanged herself. Dušic could still see that purple, bloated face, the tangled hair. He told his platoon not to worry. Just showed how little value these Muslims placed on life.

Scenes like that raid repeated themselves many times for Dušic, but he remembered that one now because it had taken place not far from here. Younger days, better times, when victory seemed so near. He checked his GPS receiver—the handheld kind carried by soldiers, not the road-based type known to motorists. The place he was going had no street address; Stefan had chosen the location for its remoteness. Dušic was getting close. The GPS screen showed the destination at three-point-six kilometers ahead.

He steered the Lamborghini around a tight, tree-lined curve. When the road straightened, the pines gave way to an open field. The far end of the field bordered a small abandoned village. Five houses, roofs long since torn away by mortar fire, rotted under the advance of vines and weeds. The Turks, unfortunately, had managed to repair and reoccupy most of their damaged homes in this area. But for whatever reason, this village, once cleansed, had stayed that way. Maybe no children or heirs had survived to move back in and reclaim the property.

Dušic slowed as he passed the dead village. Stefan should be somewhere near, he noted. The GPS receiver indicated
DESTINATION REACHED
.

There. Two black SUVs sat idling on a dirt path that led deeper into more fields. Green stalks of corn grew in some of the fields, but part of the land lay fallow, producing nothing but brush and sapling trees.

Mines, Dušic supposed, were the reason these fields remained untended. Farmers wouldn't dare drive a tractor over land where mines might remain. Do-gooders had worked on demining here for years, but they hadn't cleared every field.

Dušic braked, turned off the blacktop and onto the dirt path. Just as Stefan had promised, the path was dry and level—suitable for parking the Aventador. Dušic would take his car no farther; he would ride in Stefan's vehicle from here.

The driver's door on one of the SUVs opened. Stefan stepped out of a Toyota, looked at Dušic, grinned, and stretched his arms wide. Dušic's friend appeared a little older now, the inevitable toll of time and too much slivovitz. More white in that shock of black hair, deeper lines across his forehead. But the green eyes still seemed alert, and Stefan wore no glasses. Maybe he still possessed the keen eyesight of the sniper he had once been. Dušic emerged from the Lamborghini, embraced his war comrade.

“Wealth will ruin you, yet,” Stefan said. “Who drives a car like that to a meeting in the woods?”

“Risk has rewards,” DuÅ¡ic said.

“So you can pay our recruits well,” Stefan said. “Let me introduce you.”

Stefan motioned to the other SUV, and three men got out. Dušic looked them over with the eye of an officer sizing up new personnel. All seemed fit; that was good. No middle-age paunches among them, though he knew they had to be middle-aged if they were old enough to have served in the war. The bald-headed one carried the stocky build of a weight lifter. The scar across his cheek looked more like the result of a knife fight in a bar than a combat wound. The second man wore his hair cropped close. Black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. Maybe trying a little too hard to look tough. Thinner than his bald colleague. The third stranger was dressed much like Dušic: conservative blazer with a starched shirt open at the collar. Long gray hair tied at the back of his head.

“Gentlemen,” Stefan said, “this is our paymaster.”

DuÅ¡ic shook hands with the men, noted their names: Andrei, Nikolas, Yvgeny. “I have not met troops in the field for a long time,” he said. “I feel like a young man again.”

“We will conduct the demonstration farther down the path, away from the road,” Stefan said, “for obvious reasons.” He told the three men to follow him in their vehicle. “Do not drive past the point where I stop,” he added.

Stefan climbed back into his own SUV, and Dušic joined him on the passenger side. A leather rifle case rested on the back seat.

“How well do you know the landowner here?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

“He is a loyal Serb,” Stefan said. “He gave permission for the demonstration, and he asked no questions. I told him nothing he doesn't need to know—only to expect a loud noise. He will not allow the local Turks on his property, so we have privacy for this test.” Stefan started the engine and drove down the path. The SUVs rolled by the overgrown, abandoned field on the left, the cornfield on the right. Both fields ended at a line of trees, and the path narrowed as it twisted into the woods. Brambles slapped at Stefan's windshield. The dense shade darkened the afternoon to near twilight.

“What about these three ruffians?” DuÅ¡ic asked. “How much do they know?”

“Only that they will join a special operation on behalf of their people. One with a difficult but necessary opening shot.”

Dušic considered that for a moment. Wise of Stefan to hold his tongue for now. He made an excellent aide. But sooner or later these men would need to know the true nature of their mission. Dušic asked himself whether he should tell them today. Perhaps, but only after a little more observation.

“So did you have difficulty putting the device together?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

“No, it is actually very simple. I want a live demonstration to make sure my procedures were correct. But this is the same system the towel heads have used for years.”

“Very good. We can afford no mistakes when we go operational.”

The woods opened up to more fields, these planted in wheat. The land sloped downward for several hundred meters until the woods began again. Stefan stopped his vehicle, and the other SUV parked behind him.

“You will find field glasses in the glove box,” Stefan said. DuÅ¡ic opened the compartment and found a fine set of Leupold binoculars. Stefan always valued good optics, DuÅ¡ic recalled. DuÅ¡ic had seen his friend use rifle optics to deadly effect. “Look to the left of the path,” Stefan said, “and you will see a metal barrel in the woods.”

Dušic raised the binoculars. He rolled a focus knob, and the blurred image clarified into a crisp vision of bark and leaves. He searched for a moment and found the barrel—the common two-hundred-liter drum used by farmers for their pesticides.

“I see it,” DuÅ¡ic said.

Stefan rolled down his window, turned his head back toward the other SUV. “Gentlemen,” he called, “I direct your attention to the tree line.” He turned forward again, reached into his coat pocket, and withdrew a cell phone. With his thumb, he entered a number. Then he held his thumb poised over the
CALL
button. “I don't have a strong signal out here, but I think it will work. Are you ready, Viktor?”

“Fire,” DuÅ¡ic said.

Stefan pressed the button. A moment passed in silence as the call went through, bounced through whatever cell towers the signal needed to transit.

The explosion assaulted Dušic's ears as if the boom came from inside his head. He'd almost forgotten the intensity of an ordnance blast up close. Flame and smoke billowed from where the barrel had rested. The shock wave bounced the soil, made dust erupt from the ground. Branches twisted through the air and fell into the fields.

A few meters from the main explosion, another blast threw rocks and clods into the air. A secondary explosion? Oh, yes, Dušic realized. Not part of Stefan's device. The first explosion had triggered an old mine.

Dirt and bits of wood rained down on the SUVs. Something hard clanged off the hood, left a small dent. A fragment of shrapnel, perhaps.

“Damn it,” Stefan said.

“Excellent,” DuÅ¡ic said. “And you gave your farmer friend a bit more ground to cultivate safely.”

“That was one artillery round,” Stefan said. “For the operation, I will wire several rounds in parallel. This will make the explosion much more powerful.”

“Very good,” DuÅ¡ic said. He opened his door and stepped out. The air smelled of explosives and freshly turned soil. The three recruits emerged from their vehicle. They seemed properly impressed, but one of them, the blazer-clad man named Yvgeny, looked worried.

“You wish us to set off a bomb like this?” he asked.

“Yes, but do not concern yourself,” DuÅ¡ic said. “I will not ask you to die like some wild-eyed Muslim fanatic. Your task is dangerous, to be sure. But not a suicide mission.”

Yvgeny nodded, looked toward the blackened and torn trees. Stefan pulled his rifle case from the back seat.

“I do not get to practice much anymore,” Stefan said. “There is no sense wasting a trip out to the country.” He uncased a scoped, bolt-action Sako and placed it across the hood. Stefan ducked back into the vehicle and retrieved an empty slivovitz bottle. The sight disappointed DuÅ¡ic a little. Stefan had too much of a taste for that plum brandy.

The old sniper trotted down the hill toward the blast site, keeping to the field free of mines. He hunted around for something on the ground, picked up three fist-size stones. These he arranged to form a crude base, and on the stones he placed the bottle.

When he returned to his truck, he wiped away some of the dirt that had fallen onto the hood. Stefan hoisted his rifle and racked the bolt to chamber a round.

“What caliber is that?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

“It is a .308,” Stefan said. He leaned on the hood, using the vehicle as a rest. Sighted through the scope, clicked off the safety. Sighted again, exhaled, held his breath. Pressed the trigger.

The crack of the Sako sounded puny after the earlier explosion. But the .308 made a formidable weapon, especially in Stefan's hands. The bottle disintegrated in a spray of shards. So years and drink had not yet robbed him of his skill. Dušic had seen Stefan's rifles and ruthlessness in action many times.

“Very good, my friend,” DuÅ¡ic said.

Stefan opened the bolt, and the empty brass flipped to the ground. He closed the bolt on a fresh cartridge.

All these things made Dušic feel invigorated. To rejoin his war comrade. To see men under his command, testing military skills and equipment. To breathe fresh air in the field. And to look ahead to the greatest mission of his life. He decided to go ahead and brief the recruits.

“We will finish what we began years ago,” DuÅ¡ic said. “We will take this land—all of it—for our people.”

The recruits looked puzzled, as DuÅ¡ic knew they would. One of them, Nikolas, said, “How can we do this with so few?”

“A fine question,” DuÅ¡ic said. “We entice others to join us. Not just the most ardent patriots like yourselves, but all Serbs, even the armed forces of the Belgrade government. After your mission, Greater Serbia will rise up. And this time we will win. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have weakened the Americans. The British have made drastic cuts in their military. NATO will not stop us again.”