Thunder Point (3 page)

Wegner ran a hand over his face. “God, but I’m tired.” He turned to Tomic. “Has he a chance?”

Tomic shrugged. “Quite a man, that one. Who knows?”

Schmidt said, “Let’s get some coffee. We’re going to have a long wait.”

Tomic said, “I’ll join you in a minute. I just want to clear my tools away.”

They crossed toward the end hut. He watched them go, waited until they’d gone inside before turning and swiftly crossing to the office. He picked up the telephone and dialed a lengthy series of numbers. As the good doctor had said, the telephone system still worked surprisingly well over there.

When a voice answered he spoke in Serbo-Croatian. “This is Tomic, get me Major Branko.”

There was an instant response. “Branko here.”

“Tomic. I’m at the airfield at Fehring and I’ve got traffic for you. Cessna Conquest just left, destination Sabac. Here is his radio frequency.”

“Is the pilot anyone we know?”

“Name of Dillon — Sean Dillon. Irish, I believe. Small man, very fair hair, late thirties I’d say. Doesn’t look much. Nice smile, but the eyes tell a different story.”

“I’ll have him checked out through Central Intelligence, but you’ve done well, Tomic. We’ll give him a warm welcome.”

The phone clicked and Tomic replaced the receiver. He took out a packet of the vile Macedonian cigarettes he affected and lit one. Pity about Dillon. He’d rather liked the Irishman, but that was life and he started to put his tools away methodically.

And Dillon was already in trouble, not only thick cloud and the constant driving rain, but even at a thousand feet a swirling mist that gave only an intermittent view of pine forest below.

“And what in the hell are you doing here, old son?” he asked softly. “What are you trying to prove?”

He got a cigarette out of his case, lit it and a voice spoke in his earphones in heavily accented English. “Good morning, Mr. Dillon, welcome to Yugoslavia.”

The plane took station to starboard not too far away, the red stars on its fuselage clear enough, a Mig 21, the old Fishbed, probably the Soviet jet most widely distributed to its allies. Outdated now, but not as far as Dillon was concerned.

The Mig pilot spoke again. “Course one-two-four, Mr. Dillon. We’ll come to a rather picturesque castle at the edge of the forest, Kivo it’s called, intelligence headquarters for this area. There’s an airstrip there and they’re expecting you. They might even arrange a full English breakfast.”

“Irish,” Dillon said cheerfully. “A full Irish breakfast, and who am I to refuse an offer like that? One-two-four it is.”

He turned onto the new course, climbing to two thousand feet as the weather cleared a little, whistling softly to himself. A Serbian prison did not commend itself, not if the stories reaching Western Europe were even partly true, but in the circumstances, he didn’t seem to have any choice and then, a couple of miles away on the edge of the forest beside a river he saw Kivo, a fairytale castle of towers and battlements surrounded by a moat, the airstrip clear beside it.

“What do you think?” the Mig pilot asked. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“Straight out of a story by the Brothers Grimm,” Dillon answered. “All we need is the ogre.”

“Oh, we have that too, Mr. Dillon. Now put down nice and easy and I’ll say goodbye.”

Dillon looked down into the interior of the castle, noticed soldiers moving toward the edge of the airstrip preceded by a jeep and sighed. He said into his mike, “I’d like to say it’s been a good life, but then there are those difficult days, like this morning for instance. I mean, why did I even get out of bed?”

He heaved the control column right back and boosted power, climbing fast, and the Mig pilot reacted angrily. “Dillon, do as you’re told or I’ll blast you out of the sky.”

Dillon ignored him, leveling out at five thousand, searching the sky for any sign, and the Mig, already on his tail, came up behind and fired. The Conquest staggered as cannon shell tore through both wings.

“Dillon — don’t be a fool!” the pilot cried.

“Ah, but then I always was.”

Dillon went down fast, leveling at two thousand feet over the edge of the forest, aware of vehicles moving from the direction of the castle. The Mig came in again firing his machine guns now and the Conquest’s windscreen disintegrated, wind and rain roaring in. Dillon sat there, hands firm on the control column, blood on his face from a glass splinter.

“Now then,” he said into his mike. “Let’s see how good you are.”

He dropped the nose and went straight down, the pine forest waiting for him below, and the Mig went after him, firing again. The Conquest bucked, the port engine dying as Dillon leveled out at four hundred feet, and behind him the Mig, no time to pull out at the speed it was doing, plowed into the forest and fireballed.

Dillon, trimming as best he could for flying on one engine, lost power and dropped lower. There was a clearing up ahead and to his left. He tried to bank toward it, was already losing height as he clipped the tops of the pine trees. He cut power instantly and braced himself for the crash. In the end, it was the pine trees which saved him, retarding his progress so much that by the time he hit the clearing for a belly landing, he wasn’t actually going all that fast.

The Conquest bounced twice, and came to a shuddering halt. Dillon released his straps, scrambled out of his seat and had the door open in an instant. He was out headfirst, rolling over in the rain, and on his feet and running, his right ankle twisting so that he fell on his face again. He scrambled up and limped away as fast as he could, but the Conquest didn’t burst into flame, it simply crouched there in the rain as if tired.

There was thick black smoke above the trees from the burning Mig and then soldiers appeared on the other side of the clearing. A jeep moved out of the trees behind them, top down, and Dillon could see an officer standing up in it wearing a winter campaign coat, Russian-style, with a fur collar. More soldiers appeared, some of them with Dobermans, all barking loudly and straining against their leashes.

It was enough. Dillon turned to hobble into the trees and his leg gave out on him. A voice on a loudhailer called in English, “Oh, come now, Mr. Dillon, be sensible, you don’t want me to set the dogs on you.”

Dillon paused, balanced on one foot, then he turned and hobbled to the nearest tree and leaned against it. He took a cigarette from his silver case, the last one, and lit it. The smoke tasted good as it bit at the back of his throat and he waited for them.

They stood in a semicircle, soldiers in baggy tunics, guns covering him, the dogs howling against being restrained. The jeep rolled to a halt and the officer, a Major from his shoulder boards, stood up and looked down at him, a good-looking man of about thirty with a dark, saturnine face.

“So, Mr. Dillon, you made it in one piece,” he said in faultless Public School English. “I congratulate you. My name, by the way, is Branko — John Branko. My mother was English, is, I should say. Lives in Hampstead.”

“Is that a fact.” Dillon smiled. “A desperate bunch of rascals you’ve got here, Major, but
Cead míle fáilte
anyway.”

“And what would that mean, Mr. Dillon?”

“Oh, that’s Irish for a hundred thousand welcomes.”

“What a charming sentiment.” Branko turned and spoke in Serbo-Croatian to the large, brutal-looking Sergeant who sat behind him clutching an AK assault rifle. The Sergeant smiled, jumped to the ground and advanced on Dillon.

Major Branko said, “Allow me to introduce you to my Sergeant Zekan. I’ve just told him to offer you a hundred thousand welcomes to Yugoslavia, or Serbia as we prefer to say now.”

Dillon knew what was coming, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. The butt of the AK caught him in the left side, driving the wind from him as he keeled over. The Sergeant lifted a knee in his face. The last thing Dillon remembered was the dogs barking, the laughter, and then there was only darkness.

When Sergeant Zekan took Dillon along the corridor, someone screamed in the distance and there was the sound of heavy blows. Dillon hesitated but the Sergeant showed no emotion, simply put a hand between the Irishman’s shoulder blades and pushed him toward a flight of stone steps and urged him up. There was an oaken door at the top banded with iron. Zekan opened it and pushed him through.

The room inside was oak beamed with granite walls, tapestries hanging here and there. A log fire burned in an open hearth and two of the Dobermans sprawled in front of it. Branko sat behind a large desk reading a file and drinking from a crystal glass, a bottle in an ice bucket beside him. He glanced up and smiled, then took the bottle from the ice bucket and filled another glass.

“Krug champagne, Mr. Dillon, your preferred choice, I understand.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about me?” Dillon asked.

“Not much.” Branko lifted the file, then dropped it on the desk. “The intelligence organizations of most countries have the useful habit of frequently co-operating with each other even when their countries don’t. Do sit down and have a drink. You’ll feel better.”

Dillon took the chair opposite and accepted the glass that Zekan handed him. He emptied it in one go and Branko smiled, took a cigarette from a packet of Rothmans and tossed it across.

“Help yourself.” He reached out and refilled Dillon’s glass. “I much prefer the non-vintage, don’t you?”

“It’s the grape mix,” Dillon said and lit the cigarette.

“Sorry about that little touch of violence back there,” Branko told him. “Just a show for my boys. After all, you did cost us that Mig and it takes two years to train the pilots. I should know, I’m one myself.”

“Really?” Dillon said.

“Yes, Cranwell, courtesy of your British Royal Air Force.”

“Not mine,” Dillon told him.

“But you were born in Ulster, I understand. Belfast, is that not so, and Belfast, as I understand it, is part of Great Britain and not the Republic of Ireland.”

“A debatable point,” Dillon said. “Let’s say I’m Irish and leave it at that.” He swallowed some more champagne. “Who dropped me in it? Wegner or Schmidt?” He frowned. “No, of course not. Just a couple of do-gooders. Tomic. It would be Tomic, am I right?”

“A good Serb.” Branko poured a little more champagne. “How on earth did you get into this, a man like you?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“I’ll be honest, Mr. Dillon. I knew you were coming, but no more than that.”

“I was in Vienna for a few days to sample a little opera. I’m partial to Mozart. Bumped into a man I’d had dealings with over the years in the bar during the first interval. Told me he’d been approached by this organization who needed a little help, but were short on money.”

“Ah, I see now.” Branko nodded. “A good deed in a naughty world as Shakespeare put it? All those poor little children crying out for help? The cruel Serbs.”

“God help me, Major, but you have a way with the words.”

“A sea change for a man like you I would have thought.” Branko opened the file. “Sean Dillon, born Belfast, went to live in London when you were a boy, father a widower. A student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at eighteen, even acted with the National Theatre. Your father returned to Belfast in 1971 and was killed by British paratroopers.”

“You
are
well informed.”

“You joined the Provisional IRA, trained in Libya courtesy of Colonel Qaddafi and never looked back.” Branko turned a page. “You finally broke with the IRA. Some disagreement as to strategy.”

“Bunch of old women.” Dillon reached across and helped himself to more Krug.

“Beirut, the PLO, even the KGB. You really do believe in spreading your services around.” Branko laughed suddenly in a kind of amazement. “The underwater attack on those two Palestinian gunboats in Beirut in 1990. You were responsible for that? But that was for the Israelis.”

“I charge very reasonable rates,” Dillon said.

“Fluent German, Spanish and French, oh, and Irish.”

“We mustn’t forget that.”

“Reasonable Arabic, Italian and Russian.” Branko closed the file. “Is it true you were responsible for the mortar attack on No. 10 Downing Street during the Gulf War when the British Prime Minister, John Major, was meeting with the War Cabinet?”

“Now do I look as if I’d do a thing like that?”

Branko leaned back and looked at him seriously. “How do you see yourself, my friend, gun for hire like one of those old Westerns, riding into town to clean things up single-handed?”

“To be honest, Major, I never think about it.”

“And yet you took on a job like this present affair for a bunch of well-meaning amateurs and for no pay?”

“We all make mistakes.”

“You certainly did, my friend. Those boxes on the plane. Morphine ampoules on top, Stinger missiles underneath.”

“Jesus.” Dillon laughed helplessly. “Now who would have thought it.”

“They say you have a genius for acting, that you can change yourself totally, become another person with a look, a gesture.”

“No, I think that was Laurence Olivier.” Dillon smiled.

“And in twenty years, you’ve never seen the inside of a cell.”

“True.”

“Not any longer, my friend.” Branko opened a drawer, took out a two-hundred pack of Rothmans cigarettes and tossed them across. “You’re going to need those.” He glanced at Zekan and said in Serbo-Croatian, “Take him to his cell.”

Dillon felt the Sergeant’s hand on his shoulder pulling him up and propelling him to the door. As Zekan opened it Branko said, “One more thing, Mr. Dillon. The firing squad operates most mornings here. Try not to let it put you off.”

“Ah, yes,” Dillon said. “Ethnic cleansing, isn’t that what you call it?”

“The reason is much simpler than that. We just get short of space. Sleep well.”

They went up a flight of stone steps, Zekan pushing Dillon ahead of him. He pulled him to a halt outside an oak door on the passageway at the top, took out a key and unlocked it. He inclined his head and stood to one side and Dillon entered. The room was quite large. There was an army cot in one corner, a table and chair, books on a shelf and, incredibly, an old toilet and in a cubicle in one corner. Dillon went to the window and peered through bars to the courtyard eighty feet below and the pine forest in the near distance.