Specter (4 page)

Another set of headlights bathed the stone facade of the monastery as a second vehicle swung off the main road. This one was an open-topped jeep, also of Russian manufacture, and it had only a single passenger. Swiftly, Murdock raised his hand to cut off the glare from the headlights, enabling him to study the driver. Oh, Christ, yes ... a short, wiry-looking man with glasses and a dapper mustache, identical to the man in the photograph he'd been shown yesterday. It was Gypsy, damn him, blundering headlong into the Serb party without bothering to scout the place first, and obviously as surprised by the presence of the soldiers as the SEALs had been. Two of the soldiers standing by the fire hurried out from between the parked trucks, signaling for him to stop and get out of his vehicle. Both kept their AK-47s trained on his chest.

“Shit, Lieutenant!” Roselli whispered fiercely. “That's fuckin' torn it!”

Murdock checked to see that his tactical radio was on. It was. “Blue Squad,” he snapped, whispering into the microphone by his cheek. “Ready front!” He was thinking furiously. If they waited, Gypsy might be shot or arrested. So far as the mission requirements went, the balance had just shifted in favor of intervention. “Hasty ambush, single shot, stealthy, mark your targets. Magic, you take the two with our man. I'll drop the guys in the truck. After that, targets of opportunity. Professor, Doc, security, and backup. Rest of you, stand ready, on my signal. Acknowledge.”

“Blue two, roger.”

“Blue three, okay.”

“Four, acknowledged.”

“Blue five, rog.”

“Six, ready to rock.”

“Seven, rog.”

Everyone was ready. Murdock paused, squinting across the barrel of his H&K, checking with his thumb that the fire-selector switch was set to the single red pimple marking single-shot fire. Of all SEAL combat ops, the two most nerve-wrackingly uncertain were those where hostages were scattered among the targets, and those where the attack had to be sprung without prior planning, the so-called hasty ambush, and this attack combined elements of both.

Gypsy was out of his jeep now, his hands raised. One of the soldiers was holding out his hand, demanding something—papers or identification, probably. Not that papers would help the man. Serb rape gangs and the officers above them didn't like the glare of publicity. A stranger who blundered in on a scene like this would probably be arrested at the very least, and quite probably killed. Gypsy was supposed to be a member of the SDA, the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Party for Democratic Action. If he was Muslim and these militiamen found him out, he was a dead man.

Normally, even in a hasty ambush, each man in the squad would have been assigned a different sector, one overlapping the fire sectors of his buddies to left and right, and would open up on full-auto rock-and-roll. With civilian hostages in the line of fire, though, they couldn't risk indiscriminate fire; they would have to target and drop each enemy soldier separately. With eighteen enemy troops and only five shooters, it was a damn-near dead certainty that some, at least, would manage to escape. That was what the backup element, Professor and Doc, was for, to catch runners leaking through the kill zone.

The cardinal rule of this type of ambush was to put down the most dangerous targets first. Ignoring the thrashing of the girl, the rhythmic movements and grunts of the soldier on top of her, the coarse jeers of the men holding her down, Murdock selected one of the two men standing watch in the back of the truck.

Not that they were mounting an especially observant watch. Both were leaning against the side of the truck bed on folded arms, grinning and laughing like the rest as they watched the show taking place between the trucks. At a range of, Murdock estimated, fifteen meters, he picked an aim point inches below the spot he wanted to hit, just in front of the right ear of one of the men and below the line of his fatigue cap. It was a difficult shot for a submachine gun, but the way the targets were leaning against the side of the truck, it was safer going for a headshot than to aim for a center of mass he couldn't see behind a metal barrier that would almost certainly deflect a subsonic 9mm round.

Draw in a
breath ... let part of it out ... a long, careful squeeze
...

The suppressed H&K gave a sharp-edged cough, and the shot punched through the man's forehead just as he turned to say something to his partner on the truck. The impact slapped him back across the roof of the UAZ's cab with a neat, round hole just beneath his hat brim; his friend was just starting to turn to face the dead man, not even aware yet that something was wrong, when a second round drilled through the base of his neck, shattering vertebrae with a crack that sounded larger and louder than the shot itself. Murdock followed that shot with a second make-sure round to the back of the falling man's head, then shifted targets.

With Murdock's first shot the signal, all five SEALs were shooting now, sending round after round snapping into the bewildered, close-packed gaggle of militia troops in a sudden, devastating fusillade. The sound-suppressed shots were far louder than television thrillers portrayed them, reminding Murdock of the noise made by someone beating a rug, but without the ear-splitting crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier.

The man demanding Gypsy's papers dropped to his knees, as Gypsy, his glasses and face and overcoat splattered with blood, screamed. The other armed militiaman spun toward the gunfire, his AK coming up to his shoulder just as Brown punched two rounds squarely into his chest.

The SEAL volley scythed through the Serb militiamen, dropping them one after another. A soldier in greatcoat and steel helmet fumbled for his AK, then slumped against the truck's flag-painted door; the camo-garbed man next to him gave a gasp that ended in a strangled gurgle as blood sprayed from his opened throat. A bearded soldier backlit by the fire fumbled with the AK slung muzzle-down over his back; by the time he had the weapon twisted around to where he could use it, four rounds from two different directions had slammed into his chest, pitching him back against the fifty-five-gallon drum, and then drum and body together hit the pavement with a thud and a clatter, spilling burning wood across the ground. Nearby, the big soldier on top of the naked girl lurched to his knees, his trousers bunched ridiculously around his ankles as he yelled something that could only be an obscenity and groped for a rifle, and then three bloody holes popped open across his face in one-two-three succession. The back of his head exploded; the girl shrieked hysterically as he collapsed in a bloody-headed sprawl across her legs. The soldiers holding her let go and rose in a confused tangle, colliding with one another and then going down, as splatters of their blood flicked across the stones at their backs. Two broke and made a dash for the cemetery wall off to the right. Murdock pivoted, taking careful aim, leading his target. His first round missed; his second caught the lead runner and flopped him facedown in the grass. His companion leaped over the still-rolling body, raced for the wall, then spun kicking as Doc opened up from the trees to the right with a well-aimed, three-round burst.

In front of the monastery door, a bearded soldier had grabbed the older woman from behind. Now, using her as a shield, he was edging sideways up the steps and toward the monastery door, but before he could reach it a bloody third eye winked open just above the bridge of his nose, and he flopped back against the massive wood door of the building in a gory splatter of blood and brains. SEALs trained long and hard to make difficult shots past the shoulders of human shields.

Murdock shifted his H&K left and right. No clear targets ... no clear targets. . . .

“Razor! Boomer!” Murdock called over the tactical channel. He thumbed his magazine release, dropping a partly full mag, snapped a full one into its place. “With me! Bounding overwatch!” Rising, he stepped from the brush, H&K held tightly against his shoulder as he rushed forward, thumbing his H&K's selector to three-shot-burst mode. He reached the closest truck, then waited as Boomer and Razor dashed up from the treeline, weapons at their shoulders. Bodies lay everywhere. Most were motionless, but a screaming militiaman writhed head-down on the monastery steps, both hands clutching at a baseball-sized hole in his stomach. His shirt and the stone steps beneath him were covered with blood that looked black through the NVDs. Murdock fired once, putting three closely spaced rounds through the wounded man's skull, and the screaming stopped.

That particular scream, at any rate. The naked girl was still alternately shrieking and gasping as she struggled to free herself from beneath the dead weight of the man lying across her legs. Gypsy was kneeling beside his jeep, eyes wide and staring, moaning and rocking back and forth. The other two women were leaning against one another on the blood-smeared monastery steps, sobbing hysterically. “Mac!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Get Gypsy down and safe!”

“Right, L-T!”

Some part of Murdock's mind had been keeping track of targets going down, just like in the Fun House back at Little Creek. He'd counted fifteen floppers ... was that right? Four ... eight . . . ten ... right. Fifteen down. That left three. Sound-suppressed shots snapped out nearby. . . .

“Blue five,” Boomer's voice sounded over the radio. “One flopper. He's down.”

Shit! Where were they?

There! A shadow breaking from beneath one of the trucks, running toward the left. Murdock fired, missed, and fired again. The burst smacked chips from the monastery wall close by the corner of the building. The militiaman lurched to a halt, spun about, and thrust his arms into the air.
“Molim!”
the Serb shrieked, his hands waving above his head. It was the young one with the attempt at a mustache. He didn't look any older than the girl he'd been pawing ... a teenager, seventeen or eighteen, Murdock thought. He was babbling incoherently, tears streaming down his face, plainly terrified of these black apparitions that had materialized out of the night.
“Ne! Ne! Molim!”

“Sorry,” Murdock said, and he squeezed the H&K's trigger once more. “Nothing personal. . . .”

He checked his watch. The firefight, from first shot to last, had taken just fifteen seconds.

“Jesus!” Roselli said. “L-T, you killed him!”

“Damn straight.” Murdock checked the kid's right hand. On the back of his wrist were the letters CCCC—Cyrillic initials that stood for “Only Solidarity Can Save the Serbs.”

So much hatred in this land. “Doc! Professor! I think we're still missing one. Any sign of him?”

“Negative, L-T,” Doc's voice came back.

“Same here, sir.”

“Okay. Doc, you come in and help Mac. Professor, you swing around to the rear of the building. Magic, you go with him ... and check inside the building too. Look sharp and stay together. Mac? How's Gypsy?”

Mac had the CIA contact flat on the ground now. The man was trembling, his face and coat covered with blood.

“Shaken up, but I think he'll be okay. All that blood's not his, thank God. He got splashed by the bad guy next to him.”

“Roger that. Anybody in the squad hurt?”

“Hell,” Roselli said. “I don't think the sons of bitches even got off one shot.”

Hadn't they? In the adrenaline-pulsing heat of the firefight, Murdock hadn't even noticed. Now that he thought about it, though, he realized he hadn't heard any unsuppressed gunfire ... just the harsh thumps of the SEAL H&Ks and M-16s.

Doc came trotting up as Murdock peeled off the NVDs, now grown intolerably heavy. “Doc, check our boy out.”

“Right, L-T.”

Murdock and Roselli went to the women next, freeing the one still trapped on the mattress, then using their SEAL diving knives to cut the twine that had been used to bind the wrists of all three. Roselli produced a relatively clean overcoat from somewhere and draped it over the girl's shivering, bony shoulders.
“Silovana sam, ”
she said in a low and trembling voice, repeating the words over and over.
“Silovana sam. . . .”

“Take charge here, Razor,” Murdock said. “See if any of them speak English, see if you can get sense out of them. Check with Doc if you think they need meds or anything.”

“Sure thing, L-T.”

Murdock wished he had someone in the squad who spoke Serbo-Croatian. Normally they'd have had a linguist along, but this op had been too rushed to cover the fine points. Besides, as Fletcher had happily pointed out, Gypsy spoke English and the SEAL squad would not be interacting with anyone else ashore, civilian or military.

Yeah, right.

It was sheer chance that they'd missed him.
Narednik
Andonov Jankovic had been leaning against the wall of the monastery, close beside the southeast corner, when his friends and comrades had begun collapsing left and right, mouths gaping, heads exploding, blood and gore spraying everywhere, all to the almost melodious chuffing ring of sound-suppressed gunfire.

Jankovic's rank of
narednik
was equivalent to that of a senior sergeant, and though he wasn't in uniform he was still an active-duty member of the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army. Six months ago, he'd been seconded to the Serbian Volunteer Guard as an “advisor,” one of thousands of JNA regulars assigned to keep the pro-Serb militias in line. With decent training and fifteen years' military experience, he'd acted instinctively when the militia troops started to fall, rolling around the corner of the building, then scrambling for cover as quickly as he could go. Judging by where the fire was coming from, he thought that one of the parked trucks had shielded him from view, but he couldn't be sure he hadn't been seen; he'd plunged into a shell hole in the side of the monastery's chapel, emerging inside the sacristy. By the time he reached the apse, the sounds of the firefight outside had died away.