Warriors (9781101621189) (15 page)

On the passenger side of Stefan's van, Dušic buckled into his seat. He said nothing while his friend pulled away from the storage units and headed down the blacktop into the night. Dušic felt gratified that Stefan had found more triggermen to rake any survivors of the blast. The question of personnel had worried him. Did he have enough men to do this thing properly? As the glow of the city's lights receded behind him, Dušic considered his resources. He decided they were sufficient. After all, that American lunatic Timothy McVeigh had destroyed a larger building than the Patriarchate, and he'd done it with fewer support personnel and less expertise. McVeigh had also faced trial, conviction, and execution for the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

With proper fieldcraft Dušic could avoid the fate of an ignorant extremist. Instead, he would take his proper place as a leader in the war to come.

AT DAYBREAK
, the Rivet Joint lifted off the runway at Sarajevo and climbed into Bosnian skies. Sunrise lit the horizon as if the gods had ignited a signal flare. In the cockpit jump seat, Parson squinted, unzipped the left breast pocket of his flight suit, and reached for his aviator's glasses. On the ground below, the misting waters of the Miljacka meandered in cursive lines.

“Motown Six-Four, Sarajevo Tower,” a voice called on VHF. Slavic accent but confident English. “Left turn heading zero-eight-zero, contact departure. Safe flight.”

To Parson, it still felt strange to take off from Sarajevo under reasonably peaceful circumstances, equipped only with a headset, his flight suit sleeves casually rolled up. A couple decades ago he wore a flak jacket and survival vest with a Beretta on his side, the hums and squeaks of the radar warning receiver sounding in his flight helmet. And as a last resort, parachutes hanging in the cargo compartment, straps pre-fitted for each crew member.

He'd flown with such gear pretty recently in Afghanistan. Would he ever lift off from Afghanistan in a time of peace? And here in the Balkans, how fragile was
this peace?

When the Rivet Joint leveled off at altitude, Parson unbuckled and headed aft. In the back, Gold sat next to Irena. Both wore headsets. On the console before her, Irena placed an open checklist and a notepad. Thus far she'd written nothing on the notepad; her pen rested on a clean sheet of paper. Parson took a crew seat at an unused station beside Irena and plugged his headset into an interphone cord.

“Can I get you anything?” Parson asked. Not a question lieutenant colonels often asked junior enlisted personnel, but as an observer, Parson had little to do. Irena, by contrast, had important tasks right now.

“No, thanks,” Irena said. “Just waiting to see if anybody wants to talk to me.”

“Anything yet?”

“No, sir. Not a peep, or at least not one that we care about.”

Parson didn't understand all of this crew's procedures, but he did know that, in a way, they were not just listening but hunting. If the Rivet Joint crew wanted you badly enough, they could find you, listen to you, and get information about you to other people on the ground. The machine's information processing capability, Parson mused to himself, represented the ultimate revenge of the nerds.

He sat silently as he watched Irena do her job. She chatted with crewmates, usually about technical matters he could not follow. Occasionally she tapped a button on her console. Parson heard several conversations in Serbo-Croatian, none of which seemed to interest Irena. At least an hour passed with nothing happening, and Parson almost dozed off, slouched in the crew seat with his harness adjusted loosely.

Irena's body language brought him wide awake. She sat bolt upright, glanced at her watch, and wrote the Zulu time on her notepad. The young linguist froze, listening hard, her pen poised in the air. Her manner put Parson in mind of a bird dog trotting easily along a row of corn stubble until it stopped—locked up on point, with whiffs of prey in its nostrils.

He longed to ask her
What you got?
but he knew to leave her alone for the moment. Gold noticed, too. She watched her colleague, glanced at Parson, looked back at Irena. After a few minutes, Irena spoke on interphone.

“That's the same voice,” she said. “The boss.”

“The same guy the Antonov pilot was talking to?” Parson asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“How did you zero in on him?”

“One number leads to another,” Irena said. “I think they took a lot of numbers from the cell phones they picked up in the arrests.”

“Where is he?” Gold asked.

“Not Belgrade. They're tracking.” Irena tilted her head toward the crew members closer to the front of fuselage.

“What did he say?” Parson asked.

“He told somebody to suspend the shipments for now.”

“Sounds like he knows he has a problem,” Gold said.

“Stand by,” Irena said. Some tech talk followed; Parson wasn't sure what she and her crewmates were saying. Then Irena flipped a switch and said, “All right, I'm on that channel, too.”

Now Parson heard other languages as well as Serbo-Croatian. Some of it sounded like Pashto. When Gold leaned forward and turned up the volume on her comm box, Parson was sure. Irena slid her notebook over to Gold, and Gold began to write. Somewhere within this aircraft's equipment racks and miles of wires, digital recorders saved everything. But Parson imagined notes could come in handy, too. Idly, he wondered if whatever the linguists jotted down became a classified document.

Gold lifted her pen from the page, listened for a moment, then resumed scribbling. Parson could see that she wrote in English, so he unfastened his harness and stood to peer over Irena's head. In Gold's handwriting, so elegant it bordered on calligraphy, the notepad read
We may need more of your product in the future, but we can take no more now.
Above that line, Irena had made other notes, mostly in Cyrillic. She also wielded her pen neatly, but with more sweeping lines. Funny how you could always tell women's handwriting from men's. Whenever Parson needed to fill out a hard-copy flight plan, he had to remind himself to print clearly enough so that someone could actually read it.

He could tell Gold enjoyed this new way to put her skills to use. She looked up at him, gave that rare half smile of hers, glanced back to her notes and the console.

The Rivet Joint, Parson judged, had reeled in some pretty damning evidence about the drug trafficking. Cunningham would be pleased. Parson supposed the OSI and all kinds of other agencies had worked with legal beagles for approval of the cell phone monitoring. Maybe the Serbian and Afghan cops could move in and make more arrests. Parson presumed a lot of the data sucked up by this aircraft got beamed back home to the NSA, and perhaps to similar agencies in friendly countries.

He worried, though. The recent riots and burnings made him nervous. By his recollection, things could go very badly very quickly in this part of the world. Parson remembered when the Soviet bloc starting falling apart, and in his historical ignorance, he'd assumed the end of Communist dominance would bring an era of prosperity to Eastern Europe. Democracy and dollar signs, rainbows and puppy dogs. Some countries fared pretty well, but the former Yugoslavia took a different path. He'd seen a reminder of that yesterday that would leave images in his mind forever. He hoped the grave had also moved Cunningham.

The knowledge that such things could happen had always troubled Parson, and he doubted he'd ever reconcile it. Gold, with her knowledge of faith and philosophy, seemed to understand these things better; at least she could find words to help her accept the world as it was. He'd once heard her talk about Calvinist theory and the depravity of man. Parson took that as a fancy way of saying some people were just assholes. He did not consider himself a righteous person, but he knew right from wrong. That at least gave his life a kind of directional stability, the way the lands and grooves inside a rifle barrel impart a spin to the bullet and send it true on its course.

The morning wore on. Irena continued monitoring her circuits, but she never mentioned hearing anything worthwhile. At midday, Parson got up and went to the galley. He opened the refrigerator and gathered the food and soft drinks they had brought for lunch. Gold had picked up a turkey panini and a bottle of green tea. Irena brought a gyro with shavings of beef covered in tzatziki, and vitamin water to drink. For Parson, a ham sandwich, chips, and a Coke. He placed the food on the console table beside Irena's keypad.

“Thanks, sir,” Irena said.

“You should eat healthier,” Gold said.

Parson rolled his eyes, patted Gold's shoulder, sat in his seat, and unwrapped his sandwich. The radios and interphone remained quiet. Between bites, Parson asked Irena, “So what made you choose the Air Force?”

Irena took a swallow of her pink vitamin water, thought for a moment, and said, “I guess it was my dad's great-uncle.”

“He was an Air Force man?”

“No, sir. But he helped rescue some American fliers in the Second World War.”

“Oh, yeah? Wow.”

“Recruiters from all the services wanted to sign me up, but I picked Air Force because of that.”

Irena went on to tell a story that rang true to Parson because he'd heard the first half of it. The second half he'd never known.

On August 1, 1943, nearly 180 B-24 Liberators took off from Benghazi, Libya, to bomb German-held oil refineries around Ploesti, Romania. During the flight to the target, cascading navigational errors turned the mission into what fliers of Parson's day called a goat fuck. Some of the aircraft droned right into a firestorm of German antiaircraft guns and got blown out of the sky. More than fifty planes went down, with a loss of several hundred men. However, enough of the formations hit their targets to ignite the refineries into cauldrons of fire. Columns of smoke dark as ink boiled into the air. The day came to be known as Black Sunday.

Some of the airmen bailed out over occupied Serbia and Bosnia. Those lucky enough to parachute into friendly hands found themselves under the protection of Serb guerrillas, then working with the Allies.

For months, hundreds of American fliers hid out in peasant homes, while teams led by guerrilla leader Draža Mihailovic built improvised airstrips. The Serbs did it the hard way, with hand tools and ox carts, mainly by night. Work crews cut down trees, dug out stumps, carried away rocks, and leveled ground so that C-47 transports could land. With little more than signal fires to guide them, the C-47 pilots touched down on dirt and gravel runways in an operation coordinated with help from intelligence agents dropped by parachute. The effort, code-named Operation Halyard, rescued more than five hundred U.S. aviators from imminent capture by the Germans.

“My great-great-uncle helped build the runways,” Irena said.

“So you might say he was an Air Force civil engineer,” Parson said.

“Yes, sir,” Irena said. “Unofficially.”

The story about Irena's Serbian elders reminded Parson that no group was always on the wrong side. You could find great deeds and awful crimes in the history of just about every culture, a truth he had learned from Gold.

By the middle of the afternoon, the Rivet Joint fliers began to wrap up their sortie. One of the officers announced on interphone, “Front-end crew says we're almost bingo fuel, guys. Everybody ready to pack it in?”

Parson was getting hungry, and he looked forward to dinner back at the hotel with Gold, and maybe Irena and Cunningham. So he was glad to hear several crew members answer with “Yes, sir” or “Affirmative.” But Irena did not speak. She furrowed her brow, turned up a volume knob. A conversation in Serbo-Croatian flowed over the circuits, and when the chatter paused, Irena said, “Stand by, sir. Please tell them not to descend yet.” She held up her hand as if to keep the plane at altitude by force of will.

Amid the clicks, hums, and cross-talk, Parson heard the officer say, “Give us just a minute. Markovich is onto something.”

Irena's mouth curved into a hint of a smile. Parson noticed the rose-colored lip gloss, the only thing about her that wasn't all business. He stared at her and her console, dying to know what she was hearing. She gave no hint. Parson could only wait. His eyes focused on Irena's console as he tried to guess what news it had brought. Off interphone, Irena whispered to Gold, “I got a name.” She wrote on her notepad:
Viktor Dušic.

GOLD EXPECTED COLONEL WEBSTER
to show interest when Parson phoned him with the name. But she did not expect him to drop everything, leave Manas in the hands of his vice commander, and fly commercial to Sarajevo. In a rented Ford, Parson and Gold met him at the airport and drove him to the Holiday Inn.

Webster wanted to meet with everyone in private, so they ordered room service for dinner and had the food sent to Cunningham's room. Gold and Parson crowded into the small room. Webster, in khaki trousers and a button-down shirt, took the reclining chair, and Parson introduced Webster and the Serbian police officer, Dragan, to each other. Dragan sat on the desk chair, and he offered up bottles of Tuzlanski pilsner.

Parson took one of the bottles, and he and Gold leaned against the wall. Cunningham sat cross-legged on the bed, his Beretta and shoulder rig beside him on the bedspread. Next to the weapon, an open manila folder revealed photos of Viktor Dušic at various ages. Some showed a young man in uniform. Others depicted a middle-aged businessman, usually in an expensive-looking suit and tie.

“Witnesses place him at Srebrenica back in 1995,” Webster said. The colonel reminded everyone that more than eight thousand Muslims died there in probably the worst single incident of mass murder in Europe since World War II.

“Why hasn't he been arrested?” Parson asked.

“We've always had bigger fish to fry,” Webster said. “Slobodan MiloÅ¡evic, Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, and other people at the top. This guy was just a lieutenant. But it's always bothered me that more people haven't paid for that crime.”

To get the top commanders took years, Webster explained, let alone the trigger pullers. But Webster wanted the smaller fish, too. Especially if one of them was screwing with his airfield at Manas now, and maybe up to something worse.

Gold wondered just how deeply Webster had been involved with the prosecution of war criminals. Deeply enough, she gathered, to know people with enough horsepower to cut him loose from his post in Kyrgyzstan at a moment's notice. This country lawyer seemed to wield more authority in civilian clothes than in uniform.

“The Russian pilots we busted confirmed they'd been smuggling for DuÅ¡ic, so we went to his office today to arrest him,” Dragan said. “He wasn't there. His secretary said she didn't know where he was, and he wasn't at his home, either. I'm afraid he's gone underground.”

“How did you get the pilots to talk?” Webster asked.

“They were looking at a long prison sentence, but they really didn't want to give us anything. I think they're real scared of DuÅ¡ic. We had to offer complete immunity to get them to sing.”

“Maybe we need to talk to that secretary again,” Cunningham said. Dragan nodded.

If Cunningham had been reluctant to pursue this case to the end, Gold noted, he seemed to have a fire under him now. Gold felt almost guilty about the visit to the mass grave at Bratunac, but perhaps that day had made an impact on the young OSI agent.

Gold watched Parson sip his beer. How he must feel about Srebrenica and all that had happened in Bosnia, she could well imagine. She wouldn't call him a deep thinker, but Parson possessed a basic decency that could propel him to action swift and fierce. Webster seemed cut from similar cloth. However, Gold gathered that the colonel preferred to channel his outrage into the workings of the law. A legal mind of that caliber could have earned millions as a corporate attorney, but Webster apparently spent much of his time making far less in the pursuit of justice. Gold appreciated people who put personal gain aside for better callings. She wished she could articulate a theory about why people chose certain paths, what steered hearts toward good or evil. But she knew the wisdom of sages across the millennia had never answered those questions.

The next morning, Gold rode with Parson and the others to Belgrade. Cunningham and Dragan wanted to question a woman named Milica Vasovic. Gold and Parson had no law enforcement authority, so they could take no role in the interrogation. But Dragan told them they could watch through a one-way window, with no audio feed, as he interviewed the secretary. Cunningham and Webster were allowed to sit in the room with Dragan, deep inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs headquarters.

Dragan ushered Milica to a chair. She was not handcuffed. Given Dragan's courtesy and the lack of restraints, Gold supposed the police considered Milica a witness rather than a suspect. Understandably, the young woman looked scared. Gold wondered if her face always stayed so pale and drawn. She wore her auburn hair at shoulder length, and she had dressed in a gray business outfit with the skirt cut at the knee.

Gold could hear nothing as Dragan began to speak. She didn't know Serbo-Croatian anyway, but now she lacked even the subtle cues of voice tone. Gold had nothing to monitor but body language.

The Serb officer gestured with open hands, fingers spread. He pursed his lips, nodded grimly as if delivering bad news to a friend. Gold detected nothing threatening in his manner, but Milica still seemed ill at ease. Dragan spoke for several minutes. When Milica finally spoke, she did so only briefly. Dragan appeared to ask a question. She spoke again, just for a few seconds. He offered her a cigarette and she took it. Dragan lit it for her, and the smoke curled toward the ceiling.

“So,” Parson said, “do you think she's lying?”

“No. She doesn't look like she's hiding anything.”

“How's that?”

“Gestures. She's facing him, not shifted to the side. She's making eye contact.”

“So?”

“I've seen a lot of interrogations,” Gold said. “You learn what lying looks like.”

Parson at least had the grace not to ask her for details. But Gold had interpreted the words of many suspects under questioning, nearly all of them guilty. Some cursed and spewed threats. Some spat. Some refused to talk at all. Some broke down and sobbed. At one point or another, most attempted to lie. When they did so, they looked away. They looked at the floor. They folded their arms, clenched their fists. Only the most expert operatives could fake the gestures of honesty. That feat required both knowledge and presence of mind. It was almost as hard as defeating a lie detector.

Milica began to weep. She placed her cigarette in an ash tray. She opened her purse, found a tissue, and dabbed at her eyes. Gold wondered how much Dragan was telling her. At a minimum, she supposed, he was telling Milica about the narcotics trafficking. But if he wanted her cooperation, he might also talk about her boss's history.

That would amount to a gamble, though. What if the woman was a hard-line Serb nationalist? What if that's why Dušic hired her in the first place? Not likely, Gold considered. Women could hate just as well as men, but an educated European woman of the professional class didn't fit the usual profile of a bigot.

Dragan opened a manila envelope. From the envelope, he drew a handful of black-and-white prints. Gold saw that he had taken the gamble. One photograph showed a pile of skulls, some still wearing blindfolds. Fresh dirt surrounded the skulls, as if they had just been dug from the ground. The terrain did not look like Bratunac; the picture showed a different mass grave somewhere else. Another photo depicted Sarajevo in flames, smoke billowing from an office tower. Yet another showed a victim of shelling. A man in civilian clothing sat up on a stretcher, holding his right leg. The foot was gone; the ankle ended in a tangle of lacerated muscle tissue. Shrapnel did not cut cleanly but ripped and tore.

Milica turned away from the photos. She cried for a few minutes. Dragan placed his hand on her shoulder. Then she seemed to pull herself together. With a fresh tissue, she wiped her eyes again. She blew her nose. She picked up the cigarette, tapped the ash into the ash tray, and took a long drag.

Come on girl, Gold thought. Find your courage. Do the right thing.

The secretary exhaled a plume of smoke. Took another drag, held it. Gold had never smoked, but she'd observed that smoking brought its own particular syntax to body language. As Milica kept the nicotine inside her lungs to calm her nerves, she was thinking. When oxygen debt finally got the better of her, she let out the smoke and put down her cigarette. She opened her purse, took out her cell phone. Scrolled through stored contacts. Now and then she stopped and read off a number. Dragan jotted the numbers onto a writing pad.

“That looks like progress,” Parson said.

“It does,” Gold said. “But can't the Rivet Joint crew pick up the phone communications anyway?”

“They can. But I think if they have numbers, they can narrow things down a lot quicker. They have DuÅ¡ic's cell, but they might not have all his contacts.”

Gold looked forward to flying again, to seeing what else Irena might learn armed with new intelligence. Parson would want to get back into the air as well. Strange to see him on duty wearing blue jeans instead of a flight suit.

The interview ended, and everyone filed out of the interrogation room. Gold and Parson waited for about half an hour in the observation room. Maybe the police were briefing Milica on the steps they'd take to protect her now that she'd cooperated, Gold thought. Gold wished she could meet the young woman, offer some assurance that she'd made a good decision. But by the time Dragan came into the observation room, Milica had gone home.

“Did you get anything useful?” Parson asked.

“We did,” Dragan said. “Seems our friend DuÅ¡ic has a right-hand man named Stefan, and she gave us his phone number.”

“She looked pretty rattled,” Gold said.

“She was. I tried not to frighten her. She's a nice girl, and I don't believe she had any idea her boss was up to no good.”

“Arms dealers aren't usually the salt of the earth,” Parson said.

“Yeah, but everything DuÅ¡ic did in the daylight was legal, and I think that's all Milica knew about.”

When Gold and the others left the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it was nearly seven in the evening. Dragan led the group to a local pub for dinner. During the walk, he stopped at a newsstand for a paper. The police officer tucked under his arm a copy of
Vecernje Novosti
.

The pub appeared to be a watering hole for workmen. Patrons crowded around the bar. Blue smoke hung in the air. Pulsing electronic dance music blared from speakers, though the pub had no dance floor. The music and the chatter and babble of the crowd made conversation difficult, so Dragan suggested a table outside.

Cunningham and Dragan, Gold noted, sat with their backs to the wall so they could observe everyone coming and going. Police instinct, she supposed. Gold sat next to Webster, across from Parson. The waitress came to their table, and she looked no more than nineteen. The woman had dyed streaks of red and purple into her black hair, and she wore a ring through her lower lip. Loose white T-shirt with no bra, black leather pants. Dragan said in English, “Beers?” Parson and Webster said yes. Dragan spoke in his native language, and the waitress nodded and disappeared.

Peals of drunken laughter emanated from the bar. Another workday done for plumbers and electricians, postmen and truck drivers, looking forward to the weekend, Gold imagined. Dragan opened his newspaper and scanned the top fold. He sighed and tossed the paper onto the tabletop without reading further.

“What does it say?” Gold asked.

“More trouble,” Dragan said. “Another riot. Cars torched.”

“What the hell?” Parson said.

“I was just thinking that,” Dragan said. “Why now, after all we've been through? I worry that it won't take much to set off something very bad.”

Without further comment, Dragan watched bar customers come and go. The waitress returned with a tray of beers. She set down each glass with a dull thunk, and she sloshed suds down the side of Parson's glass. He wiped away the spill with his own handkerchief.

“I wonder if the service here is always this good,” Parson said. Dragan shrugged, and he eyed the waitress as she disappeared back inside.

Several minutes later, two men came out. Both looked drunk; Gold gathered they were the source of some of the laughter and roars she'd heard from inside. One of them stopped and stared at Parson. The man swayed on his feet. He looked like he weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it muscle. Beard stubble and a dirty sweatshirt. The other guy was thinner, and both were probably in their thirties. Gold took them for coworkers in some city public works department, or maybe an auto body shop. The big one muttered in Serbo-Croatian, and Dragan looked straight at him. Then the big one spoke in English.

“You Americans,” he said to Parson. Gold couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement.

By way of greeting, Parson raised his beer glass. Probably as good a response as any, Gold figured. Courtesy with as few words as possible was the best way to get rid of a drunk.

“You bomb my country and give it to Turks,” the big guy said. He leaned over Cunningham to glare at Parson.

Dragan spoke in Serbo-Croatian, and the drunk answered with what sounded to Gold like epithets. The smaller guy pulled on the drunk's arm, and the drunk pushed his friend away.

“Come on, dude,” Cunningham said. “We don't want any trouble.”

“You, too, American,” the drunk said.

Once more, Dragan said something in his own language. The drunk spat a response that made Dragan reach for an object under his jacket. His badge or ID, Gold hoped, instead of his gun.

“Policija,”
Dragan said. He flipped open an ID folder, but the drunk didn't see it. The man lunged at Cunningham and Parson, grabbed Cunningham by the shirt collar. Tried to push over Cunningham's chair.

Cunningham did not push back. With what seemed an effortless motion, he took the drunk by the head with both hands and pivoted out of the chair. Using the drunk's own momentum, Cunningham shoved the man's head against the wall. Gold heard a nasty thud when the drunk's skull contacted wood, but the blow did not put him out. He scrabbled to his feet, snatched up a bottle, and raised it like a club.