Warriors (9781101621189) (21 page)

“I have used one or two.”

“These are yours, if you choose to help me. I need you to take care of that damned American jet.”

“Not really the weapon for that, Viktor.”

“True enough. But my options are temporarily limited.”

Dušic explained that he would love to blow that Yankee airplane out of the sky and kill every meddler aboard. But he would settle for merely disabling the plane. Bratislav could use a technique employed by low-budget terrorists all over the world. The method involved pulling the retaining pin on the grenade, then either wrapping the lever with thin tape or placing the grenade inside a foam or plastic cup. In time, the lever would force its way through the tape or cup, and the grenade would detonate. A poor man's delayed-fuse bomb.

“Very imprecise, Viktor. Without experimentation, we cannot know when the grenades will explode.”

“An inelegant solution, I admit. But for this, we do not need precision. I do not even care if the grenades explode on the ground or in the air. If you bring down the plane, so much the better. But even if you only rupture tires, it will ground the Americans, delay them.”

“You wish me to plant these aboard the jet?”

“Yes. Whenever you can, but preferably three days from now. Will you help me?”

Bratislav stared into the distance for several seconds. “I will,” he said. DuÅ¡ic noted that he did not ask how much he would get paid.

“It is a pleasure to know you, Bratislav. But now to details. Can you get these grenades through security? I assume you must pass through some sort of checkpoint on your way to work.”

“Yes, but the security agents are accustomed to seeing me. They have X-ray, but my toolbox is always filled with metal objects. Some agents hardly look at the screen.”

“Very good, very good.” DuÅ¡ic slapped his old customer on the back. “You need a new car, my friend. If you succeed, you can get that and more.” DuÅ¡ic wrote out a check, tore it in half, and explained his method of payment. Bratislav gasped when he saw the amount, and he did not complain about having to wait for the other half.

ABOARD THE RIVET JOINT
, the day that had begun so promisingly turned frustrating. Gold had noticed the crew's excitement when they picked up Dušic's trail while the aircraft was still climbing. Irena and her crewmates relayed Dušic's position, somewhere in northern Bosnia. But then the contact went cold. The eavesdropping electronics sensed no signal from any number associated with Dušic or his helpers. Gold followed the crew's speculation as they chatted on interphone: Maybe the cell tower went dark. Maybe we have a malfunction; everybody check circuit breakers. Or maybe Dušic's team got wise.

To pass the time, Gold and Irena talked shop. Gold had read there were more than seven thousand languages spoken around the world.

“I had no idea there were so many,” Irena said. “How is that even possible?”

“Micro-languages exist in pockets isolated by geography. You still have remote tribes deep in jungles, that sort of thing. And the sad part: One of those languages goes extinct about every two weeks.”

“That's a shame. I hope somebody's recording the last speakers. Have you ever visited any of those tribes?”

“One,” Gold said. “In Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley people have a language all their own.”

“Do you speak it?”

“Not a word. Lucky for me, a lot of the Korengalis speak Pashto, too.”

During lulls in the conversation, Gold heard only the surf of the slipstream and the unbroken hiss of circuitry. After a few unproductive hours, the mission commander spoke up on interphone.

“Crew,” he said, “I just got some bad news from the ground. Agent Cunningham says they didn't find DuÅ¡ic, but they found where he'd been. He left behind some dead police officers.”

Irena leaned back in her seat, stared straight ahead at her console. Gold could see the disappointment in her eyes, not just for the immediate mission, but for the turn of events in her native land.

“What's going on down there?” Irena asked. She didn't press her interphone switch when she spoke. A rhetorical question, Gold realized, that Irena probably meant in the larger sense. What was happening with her people and her country? Would a handful of hotheads succeed in bringing back one of the darkest chapters of the late twentieth century?

Gold had seen evil in many forms, but she found something especially disturbing about hate that could lie dormant for decades, then explode in a paroxysm of violence like a forgotten land mine. That's what had happened in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and now there were people who wanted it to happen again. What was the half-life of hate? Generations, apparently.

The Rivet Joint continued its mission and never picked up another hit. After the front-end crew called back to say they'd reached bingo fuel, the jet turned for its temporary home. The aircraft landed at Sarajevo after dark. On the parking apron, the engines whined down, leaving only the buzz of avionics sounding through the aircraft. The lights inside the plane blinked, an occurrence that no longer concerned Gold. She'd spent enough time around Parson to know the electrical interruption happened as the crew switched from the onboard auxiliary power unit to an external generator cart.

Irena unplugged her headset and stuffed it into her helmet bag a little more roughly than necessary. The gesture made Gold think of an athlete putting away sports gear after a losing game. The young Serbian-American linguist said nothing, and she looked dejected. Gold could imagine how she felt. Irena probably wondered if she could have done more to save those police officers, even though that made no sense. She cared too much. Gold wished she could tell Irena of an antidote, but none existed. Gold cared too much as well, and she probably always would.

Outside, a pleasant Balkan breeze swept across the airfield. Gold looked forward to a shower, a quick dinner, and maybe some reading in bed. An announcement from the Rivet Joint's aircraft commander interrupted her thoughts of relaxation. The commander spoke as he closed his cell phone.

“Sorry, guys,” he said, “but we're stuck out here for a little bit. They can't send a crew bus to get us until the ramp freeze ends.”

“Why the ramp freeze, sir?” a crewman asked.

“I don't know,” the commander said, “but I bet it has something to do with that.” He pointed to activity taking place farther down the parking apron.

Airport police vehicles, blue lights flashing, surrounded an aircraft. The plane looked like a private charter; it bore no airline livery. Gold didn't know the model, but it was a two-engine jet that looked like it might carry thirty people or more.

As she looked closer, Gold saw the police had their weapons out. Not just pistols, either, but shotguns and assault rifles. She heard no shots. Several men lay prone on the tarmac. Officers trained their guns on the men as other officers handcuffed them. Indistinct shouts mingled with the sounds of truck engines and idling jet turbines.

“Can you hear what they're saying?” Gold asked Irena.

“Not much,” Irena said. “Stuff like ‘Don't move. You're under arrest.'”

“A drug bust?”

“Maybe.”

Eventually, the police yanked the prisoners to their feet. Officers herded them into trucks and vans. Gold counted fourteen men under arrest. The police vehicles sped away. A few minutes later the ramp freeze lifted and the crew bus came.

The bus let the American fliers off at the main terminal. During the wait for the embassy vehicle to take them to the hotel, Irena struck up a conversation with a policeman standing watch at the exit for ground transportation. The man wore full tactical gear—flak vest, kneepads, earpiece—and he carried a rifle with a high-capacity magazine. He spoke amiably enough in Serbo-Croatian, probably charmed by Irena's good looks. But Irena did not smile. Her eyes widened, and she looked worried. She shook her head, said something that sounded like “Thank you,” and rejoined her crew.

“What did he say?” Gold asked.

“He probably told me more than he should have. That charter came in from Bahrain, and it carried Muslim fighters drawn here because of the mosque burnings.”

“Oh, no.”

“He said some were Chechens, some were Kuwaiti, and some came from Saudi Arabia.”

“That's all we need.”

“I'm worried, Sergeant Major,” Irena said. “This place is ready to blow up all over again.”

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING FOUND DRAGAN
, Parson, and Cunningham in Belgrade. Two days remained before the start of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, and Dušic seemed to have vanished. Webster stayed back in Sarajevo, saying only that he needed to make some phone calls. He wouldn't give details, but Parson guessed most of those calls went to The Hague. The Rivet Joint bored holes in the sky and reported nothing. The Serbian police had little choice but to go into full defensive mode.

Parson and Cunningham rode with Dragan in his personal car, a BMW. Dragan wanted to inspect the preparations at the Patriarchate. “I really hoped to take the fight to DuÅ¡ic,” Dragan said, “but it looks like he'll take it to us.”

“Unless he gets cold feet,” Cunningham said.

“I don't think that will happen,” Dragan said. “DuÅ¡ic has crossed the river, and he can't go back. He could have sat in his office for twenty more years, selling weapons and getting richer. But if he knows we're onto his drug trafficking, he also knows his business is gone. I'm thinking the only future he sees for himself is that of a warlord. And for that, he needs a war.”

Dragan stopped his car in front of the Patriarchate. Parson admired the mosaic above the entrance, an image of some religious figure. Gold would know who. But the police activity interested him more.

Officers were building vehicle checkpoints on Kralja Petra and every other approach to the Patriarchate. They were not yet stopping cars, but Parson could see they planned on leaving nothing to chance. A sandbagged machine-gun pit overlooked the checkpoints. While Dragan spoke in Serbo-Croatian with his fellow officers, Parson and Cunningham examined the gun pit.

“They know what they're doing,” Cunningham said.

“How's that?” Parson asked.

“See how they built two rows of sandbags with some space in between? That's good. A rocket-propelled grenade will blow right through one wall. But this way, it'll hit the first wall and detonate. The second wall protects guys from unpleasantness happening at the first wall.”

“Sounds like somebody's thinking.” Based on what Parson had seen at other highly protected venues, he figured the cops would stop each vehicle and inspect the underside with an angled mirror. They'd probably put a spiked chain across the street, and they'd remove the chain only after a bomb dog had sniffed the car. Then the chain would go back into place, and the process would start all over again. A tedious process. Traffic would back up and people would bitch. But, with some luck, the checkpoint might prevent disaster.

Parson's thoughts turned to the sky. As another way of preventing disaster, the Rivet Joint would take to the air again as the Holy Assembly of Bishops began. He tried to think of some way he could help. Parson wasn't a lawman; he could not carry a weapon on the ground here. But he could talk with the jet.

“When game day arrives,” Parson said, “how about if I come with you and handle comms with the Rivet Joint? That will free you up to watch the crowd and the cars.”

“Works for me,” Cunningham said.

Up on the roof of the Patriarchate, two policemen in tactical gear pointed and conferred. Defensive marksmen, Parson guessed. Snipers getting the range and angle of all their likely shots. Men who looked like they knew their jobs; Parson certainly hoped they did. But he dared not make predictions about how this would all go down. Dušic knew his job, too, that son of a bitch. Everybody involved on both sides here brought experience. Everybody was a warrior.

•   •   •

FOR DUÅ IC, CONDITIONS COULD NOT
get much worse. In Belgrade with one day to go, he conducted surveillance at the Patriarchate. The central dome, topped by a cross, overlooked the grounds and the street below, where officers busied themselves stringing razor wire. The columns and arched windows conveyed a stateliness not diminished even by coils of concertina and flashing lights of squad cars.

The Holy Assembly of Bishops had never seen such a high level of security. Police had also built a sandbagged gun emplacement that covered Kralja Petra. If they had gone that far, no doubt they planned other measures as well. Dogs, snipers, explosives detectors. God only knew what else. Maybe the Americans had heard something in that damnable airplane of theirs. Or maybe Dušic's efforts at stirring up trouble in advance had worked too well, and the Turks had made some kind of threat of their own. Either way, he knew he must alter his tactics.

In Stefan's van, now bearing stolen plates, Dušic told Stefan to make no more passes along the block where Kralja Petra began. Circling would invite suspicion. Dušic had seen enough, anyway.

“What do you think?” Stefan asked. At least he was sober this morning.

“The mission will require some precision,” DuÅ¡ic said.

“How so?”

“I will drive the Citroën. I need your skills for something else.”

“Viktor, driving the bomb is the most dangerous task.”

“I have faced danger before. And you can see for yourself what we are up against. The tactical environment has changed.”

Dušic suspected American eavesdropping had more to do with this than Muslim terrorists. Americans had hit him, quite literally, with setbacks before. In 1995, after the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica and much of the rest of Bosnia, his unit took up positions in the town of Lisina, near Banja Luka. The mission: guard the air defense control sites that directed Serb antiaircraft missiles. Those missiles had scored a great victory earlier in the year when they'd shot down U.S. fighter pilot Scott O'Grady. That American bastard had eluded capture after ejecting from his F-16, but presumably he'd learned a lesson about trifling with Serbs.

When Dušic's platoon began protecting a radio relay tower at Lisina, they expected little resistance. Those pathetic blue helmets of the United Nations would not dare try to take the relay tower by force; they could barely protect themselves. And according to intelligence, no Muslim forces operating in that region possessed the strength to attempt such an operation. If enemy forces made such an effort, Dušic's platoon would rip them apart. Dušic had ringed the tower with a series of gun pits. The position of the automatic weapons created interlocking fields of fire; Dušic's men could have held off a force three times their number. He took pride in the impregnable defense that he and his NCOs had created. Dušic could still smell the freshly dug earth, the well-oiled weapons. It was in September; the coolness at night offered the first hint of fall.

But on one evening, with no warning, no approach by any visible enemy, the world exploded. As Dušic and Stefan rode in a truck between the relay tower and a nearby radar warning site, thunder pealed from a cloudless sky. Fire and smoke erupted from the earth with volcanic force.

“Air strike!” DuÅ¡ic shouted. Those NATO meddlers again and their damned endless supply of aircraft. DuÅ¡ic, Stefan, and the truck driver leaped from the vehicle to take cover in a ditch. The ground rolled and shuddered with one more explosion. A scent of explosives filled DuÅ¡ic's nostrils, but he had difficulty placing the odor. Not like gunpowder, and certainly not like old-fashioned cordite.

What was more strange, Dušic heard no jets. Usually the whistling of turbines accompanied any air attack. Even jets dropping bombs from high altitude left at least a faint noise signature. But instead, a deathly quiet descended on the hills.

“What in the name of holiness is that?” Stefan asked.