Warriors (9781101621189) (16 page)

Against whatever skills Cunningham possessed, the big drunk's size and strength seemed only to work against him. When the drunk swung down with the bottle, Cunningham stepped inside the arc of the swing. He took the man's wrist in what could have been a dancer's move. Sidestepped behind the drunk, folded the bottle arm against the man's back. Bent the man's hand.

Gold heard the wrist crack. The bottle dropped and shattered. The drunk screamed. Cunningham kicked his feet out from under him and dropped him to the ground. Dragan pulled his handgun, pointed it at the man, and shouted,
“Policija!”
Then he smiled slightly and added in English, “Police, you stupid son of a bitch.”

Cunningham turned toward the drunk's friend. The man raised his hands and said, “Soh-ree, soh-ree.”

“Cover this genius for me while I make a phone call,” Dragan said to Cunningham. Cunningham drew his own service weapon. Dragan dialed his mobile phone. “I'll get a car down here to take this guy to jail,” he said.

“Why the fuck did they pick on us?” Parson asked.

“He got drunk in there talking about how much he hated Muslims,” Dragan said. “Wait—hang on.” The Serb officer began speaking on the phone in his native language.

Webster picked up the thought. “He got all drunked up, and then he came out here and heard us speaking English. Maybe he noticed your blue jeans.”

“Oh, shit,” Parson said. “My bad.”

Gold could understand Parson's mistake. Every U.S. military member knew you didn't advertise your nationality in certain places. You wouldn't put on a cowboy hat to walk through a mall in Saudi Arabia. But blue jeans shouldn't have been enough to cause trouble in the former Yugoslavia. The atmospherics here were changing, and not for the better.

Dragan ended his mobile call, and he spoke in Serbo-Croatian to the drunk's friend. The man responded with what sounded like gratitude and apology, and he turned and walked away.

“Damn,” Parson said to Cunningham, “you just about made that guy kick his own ass.”

“They teach you all kinds of good stuff in OSI,” Cunningham said. “He shouldn't have made me get all tidewater on him.”

“Guess not.”

Dragan pulled the injured drunk to his feet, sat him in a chair, and handcuffed him. The man moaned when the cuff went around his right hand.

“Quit crying,” Dragan said. “You did it to yourself.” Then Dragan switched to Serbo-Croatian and spoke for two full minutes. A lecture.

A police car pulled up in front of the pub. Its lights flashed, but the officers did not use the siren. When two uniformed police officers got out of the vehicle, Dragan motioned them over and briefed them. Then he said in English, “You know why I despise people like our Nobel Peace Prize winner here? If they could, they would drag us straight back to hell.”

DUÅ IC TURNED ON
his laptop computer in his hotel room in Tuzla. Ever since the arrests at the airport, he had worried whether any of the fliers or ground crew would talk. He'd awakened this morning with a brilliant idea: check the flight schedule for the Russian freight airline he'd been using. The police would surely have impounded the aircraft. If they released it, and if the same flight crew flew it out, that would be a good indication those fools had cooperated with the authorities.

The airline's website came up quickly; DuÅ¡ic had listed the address under “Favorites.” Only the company's best customers got passwords to view the flight schedules and crew rosters. DuÅ¡ic typed
ZASTAVA#1
, then pressed
ENTER
. He gazed out the window while he waited for the schedule to pop up. Outside, the early morning fog drifted like smoke from a firefight.

The flight schedule appeared on his screen, with origin and destination cities listed in alphabetical order. He chose cities of origin and began scrolling down: Adana, Ankara, Aviano Air Base, Bali. Dušic stopped when he found the Slavic spelling for Belgrade:
Beograd
.

And there it was. Same tail number, same crew. Departing this evening.

Dmitri had betrayed him.

Dušic felt anger rise within him. The emotion came in hard lines and sharp points, like a bucket full of nails. He could not tolerate security breaches such as this. By now, all his underlings should have understood the price of failing him, but he could see they needed a reminder. He phoned Stefan in the next room.

“Change of plans,” DuÅ¡ic said. “Pack your things.”

“What is wrong?” Stefan asked.

“Get in here and I will tell you.”

Stefan sat on the bed while Dušic briefed him. He nodded gravely, opened his mouth to speak. But he held his silence until Dušic finished outlining his plan.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Stefan asked finally. “It could jeopardize the main operation. And the damage is already done.”

“I intend to see no more damage is done.”

“But we are so close to zero hour, Viktor. We have only to drive the bomb to the Patriarchate and get the
razvodnik
s in place with their weapons.”

“Who is to say more people will not talk?” DuÅ¡ic said. “What if the
razvodnik
s lose their nerve? I find a little retribution tends to keep mouths closed.”

“It is risky to return to Belgrade now.”

DuÅ¡ic closed his eyes and sighed. He mustered patience he could find for no one but Stefan. The man had proved his courage and loyalty, and he deserved a little forbearance. “My friend,” DuÅ¡ic said, “if you wanted safety, you would not have chosen the path of the warrior.”

That ended the argument. Whenever Stefan needed persuading, Dušic found he could appeal to his war comrade's soldier ethic or Serb pride. Either worked pretty well.

They checked out of the hotel, and Dušic paid with cash. Stefan drove the van. He scanned the terrain as the vehicle rolled by villages, forests, and fields. The fog was lifting now, and sunlight dappled the wet road.

“Has that M24 ever been fired?” Stefan asked.

“No,” DuÅ¡ic said. “It is brand-new.”

“If we're going to do this, I will need to sight it in, at least roughly.”

“Very well. Find a good place and do what you need to do.”

With the sound suppressor, Stefan could sight in the rifle without drawing too much attention. The device would eliminate much of the rifle's report, though not all. Dušic thanked his stars and his own good judgment that he'd purchased the full M24 sniper system, silencer included. Cutting corners never paid off. When it came to weaponry, he believed in eliminating every technical disadvantage. You still needed the right men behind those weapons, but you owed your troops proper equipment.

Stefan slowed as he approached an open meadow, but then he accelerated, evidently rejecting the spot as too exposed. He repeated the process at two other fields. But at a bend in the road where the forest grew so near that spruce limbs overhung the pavement, Stefan coasted to a stop. He examined the woods, and he pulled the van onto a farm path.

“This spot will do,” Stefan said. “If we are discovered, we can just say we were poaching game.”

Dušic hoped it wouldn't come to that, but they had to take the risk. Without fine-tuning the rifle's optic, Stefan's bullet might fly wild and render this entire side mission pointless. Stefan shut off the engine, unbuckled his seat belt, got out, and opened the back doors of the van. He lifted the M24 from its case. Paused and looked around.

“I have no paper targets,” Stefan said.

On the floor of the van, Dušic saw a yellowed copy of
Politika Ekspres
, a defunct nationalist tabloid. He tore off the front page and folded it in half. “Use this,” he said.

Stefan took the paper, turned, and stalked into the forest. The crackle of his footsteps over twigs and spruce needles remained audible even after he disappeared from view. When he returned, he gathered up a box of 7.62-millimeter cartridges. For ammunition, Dušic had also selected the best: hollow-point, match-grade bullets, 175-grain. Expensive little bastards, nearly a hundred dinars every time you pulled the trigger. Stefan pressed four of them into the rifle's magazine and closed the bolt on a chambered round. He carried the weapon, the box of ammunition, and a pair of binoculars to the edge of the woods. The nearest house was about a kilometer away.

Dušic followed him and watched as he extended the legs of the rifle's bipod, opened the lens caps on the scope, and settled into a prone position. Stefan sighted through the scope along an avenue among the woods; these trees had not grown naturally but had been planted in rows. On a branch perhaps a hundred meters away, Stefan had spiked the page of newsprint. He let out a chestful of air, held his breath, and fired.

The bullet made a crack as it pierced the sound barrier, but without the usual booming slam of a high-powered rifle. Bark flew from the tree trunk beside the newsprint. The paper appeared untouched.

“Hmm,” Stefan said. “Would you call that six inches off?” Western measurements for an American scope. He racked the bolt, ejected the expended brass, and chambered a fresh round.

“At least,” DuÅ¡ic said. He picked up the fired cartridge and placed it in his pocket. No sense leaving evidence.

Stefan turned the rifle on its side, looked at the windage knob. “Half minute of angle,” he muttered to himself. “Twelve clicks left.” He turned the knob, counting aloud to twelve.

The maestro tunes his Stradivarius, Dušic thought. Stefan rested the M24 on the legs of the bipod, sighted, fired again.

The newsprint barely trembled as the bullet cut through it. Dušic squinted, could not see where the round had hit. Stefan raised his cheek from the rifle stock and looked through the binoculars.

“Centered pretty well, but a little high,” he said.

“Maybe crank the elevation down a click or two,” DuÅ¡ic suggested.

“No, I like it a little high at this range. From the environment you describe, I'm anticipating a target perhaps two hundred meters out.”

“That sounds reasonable.” DuÅ¡ic deferred to Stefan on the technical details of marksmanship. A good officer should not micromanage.

Stefan fired two more rounds, reloaded, and fired four more, just to confirm the zero point. When Dušic borrowed the binoculars, he saw that all of the bullets had grouped within a centimeter of one another. He gave the binoculars back to Stefan and picked up the rest of the empty brass. The fired cartridges clanked in his pocket like spare change. He stepped through the woods to retrieve Stefan's makeshift target, and he observed the neat, round holes drilled through the paper. The searing passage of the bullets had left blackened edges around each hole. Two of the rounds had struck in nearly the same spot; their holes overlapped as if two half-moons had linked.

The whole effort took less than twenty minutes. No curious passersby or farmers angry over trespass ever appeared. Dušic felt gratified as Stefan steered the van back out onto the road. The success of a mission could depend on attention to details, and the two men had just taken care of an important one. Ideally, Dušic would have seen the weapon sighted in well ahead of time, but he'd not expected to need it so soon. The drug bust had forced him to move fast, and he had adapted and recovered. This was war, and war was chaos.

And now he would send a message: Those who let him down would pay dearly.

Dmitri should have known better. But what disappointed Dušic even more than the betrayal was Dmitri's lack of vision. Russians, close cousins to the Serbs, also knew what it meant to struggle for their land and their people. Well, most of them did, but apparently not Dmitri and the rest of that crew. The Russian pilot should have held his tongue and accepted his prison sentence as a matter of Slavic unity.

As the van crossed from Bosnia into Serbia—the border Dušic hoped to erase someday—he considered operational details for the rest of this side mission. More than likely, no one at the airport knew Stefan's van. He and Stefan could probably drive around the freight terminal and scout a good firing position, as long as they weren't too obvious. They didn't need to enter any secured zone of the airport; Stefan could fire over or through the chain-link fence. The van itself could serve as a hide. As urban sniping environments went, this one seemed quite favorable. And Stefan had plenty of experience in urban sniping.

A few hours later, in Belgrade, Dušic felt a bit like a fugitive as the airport came into view. Just days ago he'd visited this place openly as an important businessman, a captain of commerce. Now he needed to stay as unobtrusive as possible. Dušic could imagine how President Karadžic and General Mladic must have felt, once-powerful men forced to live this way for years until they were captured.

Plenty of time remained for scouting. As the van rolled along the airport's perimeter road, Dušic could see the big tail of the Antonov looming among the warehouse and hangars. When the van moved farther along the road and closer to the aircraft, he spotted a ground power cart's cable plugged into a receptacle on the side of the Antonov. The cargo doors yawned open. So the schedule had been correct. The ground crew was loading cargo for a departure this evening.

“There is your target area,” DuÅ¡ic said. “The pilot will be a thin man with gray and black hair, and he is often unshaven. I will help you identify him. Get him first, and if you can hit other crew members, so much the better.”

Stefan said nothing. He lowered his sunglasses and peered over the lenses. The gesture made Dušic think of a musician examining a score, or perhaps a civil engineer sizing up the river where he must build a bridge. Professional analysis.

Dušic envied his friend's cool detachment. Killing unemotionally came with so much more precision and elegance. Many times when Dušic had killed, he'd done so in fury. Righteous anger had its place, but so did cold blood.

Stefan drove past the Antonov, and he began to circle the airport. A Qatar Airways jet lifted off, its vertical fin bearing the company's logo. The logo, painted in burgundy, depicted the antlered head of an Arabian oryx. Dušic noted that if circumstances allowed, Stefan could try to time his shot with the roar of a takeoff and mask what little sound escaped the rifle's suppressor.

In the flow of traffic, Stefan followed the lanes to a parking deck marked
AERODROM NIKOLA TESLA
. Stefan grunted in dismissal. The parking deck was no good. No clear shot, and with other vehicles and people too close. This environment called for a bit of blending in, but not too much. The vehicle needed to remain far enough from passersby so that no one could look inside. But a van simply parked on the shoulder of the highway would draw the immediate attention of police.

After a right turn down another access road, Stefan slowed to survey other possibilities. Across the access road from the freight terminal, an office building bore a sign that read
JAT TEHNIKA
, an aviation engineering company. The company's maintenance hangars probably operated in shifts around the clock, but Dušic supposed these office workers would all go home soon.

“What do you think?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

Stefan craned his neck to look back toward the freight ramp and the Antonov. He pulled into the Jat Tehnika parking area and nosed into one of several open spaces.

“If the car park does not fill up,” Stefan said, “I can make this work. But it is a longer shot than I anticipated.”

Dušic did not worry about the distance. He had seen Stefan kill at much greater ranges.

A balding man wearing a loosened tie, his paunch bulging beneath a white dress shirt, emerged from the office building. Two of his coworkers followed. The balding man carried car keys in his right hand. He pressed a button on a key fob to unlock his gray sedan, then sat in the car and drove away. His colleagues followed him.

“I think this car park will empty out rather than grow more crowded,” DuÅ¡ic said. He checked his watch. “We have more than an hour before the aircraft takes off. Drive around for a bit and then come back.”

“Very well.”

The two men cruised the airport grounds for a time, avoiding passing the same area more than once or twice. They threaded among the taxis waiting at Arrivals, coursed through the traffic dropping off people at Departures. When they returned to Jat Tehnika,
sunset shot the sky scarlet.

“Will you have glare in your eyes?” DuÅ¡ic asked.

“I am more concerned about the firing angle,” Stefan said. He stopped with the van diagonally across two empty parking spaces. Shut off the engine and set the parking brake.

“Do not park carelessly,” DuÅ¡ic said. “It could draw the attention of traffic police.”

“I'm afraid I have to,” Stefan said. “Watch.”