The Skorpion Directive (19 page)

No one spoke for a while, but the question was circling in the air above them like the Mariner’s albatross.

“And
did
the Americans do it?” asked Brancati finally.

Dalton stared at the page for a time, his features hardening up. They began to think he wasn’t going to answer, but he did. “Yes. We did that.”

Veronika seemed to diminish, as if something tangible was leaving her body. She did not look at Dalton again for a while, but she listened to what he had to say and never forgot it.

“How?” asked Brancati.

Again, a very long and difficult silence.

Dalton let out a long breath and began in a low, flat tone as if reciting a line of dry statistics.

“Podujevo. It’s in northern Kosovo. NATO was trying to stop the Serbs from massacring Albanian Muslims. I was part of that operation, just not a well-known part. We had Nighthawks overhead. There were a few Predators, but we weren’t assigned one.”

“Who was
we
?” asked Veronika in a soft voice.

“
We
were a Special Forces hunter-killer unit. We were boots on the ground, and we had air cover to take out targets we indicated. We worked all over northern Kosovo during the NATO bombing campaign, trying to protect Bosnian Muslims from the KLA extermination squads. My fire team had been inserted into the Podujevo area during the night, a HALO drop. The idea was to light up, use laser beams, to paint targets for the strike fighters upstairs. We had two F-117 Nighthawks committed to lay down GBUs—sorry—Paveways. They’re a kind of precision laser-guided munition. They home in on a target identified by a laser beam, marking it. That morning, we lost a Nighthawk to a Serb SAM over Belgrade, so we knew we had a limited time frame to make a difference on the ground. We saw a large group of KLA holing up in this building, no markings on it. Turned out it was a mosque. So we set up a strike with the Forward Fire group, painted the building up with our lasers. The Nighthawk laid down some Paveways. We blew it to bits.”

Here Dalton stopped, seeing again in his mind that huge swirling cloud of red-and-green fire, smoke rising up, the shattering roar of the strike. His own unit, five men, their black-painted faces lit up by the fires of the burning building, pulling back into the hills. A two-day hump to their extraction point. And the after action, the Damage Assessment Board verdict that they had just incinerated a mosque crowded with civilians.

Neither Brancati nor Veronika Miklas had anything to say. It was obvious to anyone watching that Dalton was in a very private hell and nothing they could say would relieve him. After a moment he came back to the surface, finished the story.

“Well . . . What we didn’t know at the time was that a hundred and fifty-six men, women, and children had been herded into that mosque two days before and held there while the KLA lured us in. They had a tunnel dug in the basement. They made quite a show of going in and out for days. They knew we had a lot of eyes in the air and that we’d pay a lot of attention to that kind of concentration of troops—”

“But in the days before, you were not on the ground,” said Brancati, “not when they did that. How could you know?”

“We should have checked out that mosque up close before we targeted it and we didn’t. I got aggressive, and all those civilians died . . .”

“La nebbia di guerra
,
Micah . . .”
said Brancati.

“Fog of war? Maybe. In the beginning, it tore me up. I couldn’t cope with it. Got so bad, I had to pop an Ativan whenever I thought of it. So after a while I just . . . stopped thinking about it. I closed it off, sealed it shut, buried it deep. Nobody else wanted to talk about it either, sure as hell not the brass at CENTCOM or the Pentagon. So we didn’t. Not ever.”

“And what is there to say?” asked Brancati, who had his own demons in the cellar. “What is the use of raising the dead?”

“
Someone
has raised the dead,” said Veronika, but not unkindly. “This Smoke person, do you think he could have been there at Podujevo?”

“Yes. In fact, I’m almost certain he was. But that doesn’t explain how he knew I was there too. It was a black op. We were never officially there.”

“You may have a traitor,” said Brancati. “In your house.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think the man you fought in my apartment was one of these Skorpions?” asked Veronika.

“I think he probably was. We made a real project out of them. Killed and wounded fifty, sixty of them, in hot little engagements all around northern Kosovo.”

“Did you take part in any of the war crimes investigations afterward?” asked Brancati.

“No. Not that any of the brass would have wanted me anywhere around those trials, not after what we did to the people in that mosque. Right after the Kosovo war, I got seconded to the CIA. My operational area shifted to London, and at that time our chief interest was in terror finance. I remember hearing something about a group of Skorpions being tried this year, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I didn’t really like to think about the Kosovo war at all. I did do some work for the Agency in Pristina a while back, trying to deal with ex-KLA involved in the drugs-for-weapons trade.”

“Are these Skorpions still
active
?” Veronika asked.

“Yes,” put in Brancati. “Back in the late nineties, there were only a few, five hundred or less. But now—the war in Kosovo never really ended—much of the criminal enterprise in Italy is done by ex-Skorpions, Serbs and Croats working to fund the new KLA so they can take Kosovo back. Galan did a study for me last year. He reached an estimate of over a thousand current members of the Skorpions and related KLA—”

“A
thousand
?” asked Veronika.

“Galan did a study for you? Does it still exist?”

“Yes. I have a copy on file at the office.”

“Did it include head shots of KLA people?”

“Yes. Hundreds of them. Galan was very thorough. And he had good contacts all over the Balkans.”

“We need to look at those. Can you send us the file? You’ve got my e-mail?”

“I do. I will,” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost dawn. We should look at the other material.”

Veronika opened the second file, another Word document, this one titled DALTON TWO:

“Dobri Levka,” said Brancati. “I know that name.”

“Yes, you do. Levka was a Croatian freelancer Mandy Pownall and I picked up last year on Santorini. The kid was working for the other side. The Russians had a cell operating out of an office building in Istanbul, their cover was trade and commerce. Levka was supposed to help take Mandy and me out of the picture. We changed his mind.”

Dalton had to smile at the memory.

The kid had real sand. Levka was the kind of knocked-around, hardscrabble roustabout you tended to find along the fringes of chronic war zones. Like a true mercenary, Levka was ready to take the round if he had to—the fortunes of war, and no hard feelings—but he had also been nimble and nervy enough to try to talk himself out of that bullet if given half a chance.

“Levka kept his word. He knew the people we were up against. He helped us out in Istanbul. Levka and I took Lujac’s Riva away from the KGB and drove it all the way to Kerch, chasing the Russians. After Kerch, Mandy and I went to Langley to help Cather out of a fix, and Levka got Lujac’s Riva.”

“One more file,” said Veronika. “Called Dalton Three.”

“Open it,” said Dalton.

It turned out to be a scanned-in note, in a rough scrawl, with a short typed message attached.

“Who’s Piotr Kirikoff ?” asked Veronika.

“He was the Russian FSB officer who was running the ring we took apart in Istanbul last winter. We nearly caught him in Kerch. He got out two hours before we got there. He murdered a Navy corpsman and a Latvian woman. We found their bodies in the basement of a clinic in Kerch. They had been beaten to death.”

“So this was Galan’s urgent message to you,” said Brancati. “Why didn’t he come to me first?”

“He said nothing to you?”

Brancati shook his head.

“No. He simply asked for a week’s leave, said he was going to Vienna on some business. He was a private man. I thought he might be meeting someone, a contact. He had a very strict sense of tradecraft, and, as he says, he did not like to talk unless he had something useful to talk about. His methods were his own. He was like an oyster, and I have never attempted to pry him open. And he said nothing about being ‘watched.’ ”