Warriors (9781101621189) (28 page)

Stefan, Saint Sava bless him, had backed the Aventador into the barn. By the time Dušic pulled around the side of the house where police could see him, he'd be facing forward and gaining speed. He took his CZ 99 from his waistband, placed the weapon on the seat beside him. Curled his fingers around the padding of the steering wheel, took in a deep breath. Stepped on the accelerator.

GOLD TRIED TO PROCESS
several things happening at once. Bullets pocked the ground around her. Dragan fell as if tripped; he was shot in the leg. He dropped the fire extinguisher, and it tumbled into the dirt. Blood spurted from the wound in his thigh.

He shouted something in Serbo-Croatian. Another officer grabbed the extinguisher and ran. Gold and Parson kneeled beside Dragan, took hold of his arms, and dragged him to cover behind his van.

In the corner of her eye, she saw someone toss a grenade out the window of the house. The explosion hurled shrapnel against the police vehicles.

A blue sports car, something fast and expensive, charged from behind the house.

From inside the home, a gunman kicked open the front door. He screamed as he trained his rifle on the nearest officers—a guttural, primal cry. The man held down the trigger of an AK-47 and sprayed. Police officers fell—some perhaps from bullets, some from grenade shrapnel, and some as they dived for cover.

The sports car fishtailed as its tires found purchase. Though police vehicles blocked the road in one direction, officers had opened a path for ambulances in the other. The driver aimed for that opening.

“Take my weapon,” Dragan told Parson. “Don't let that son of a bitch get away.”

Dragan placed the heel of his hand against the ground. Winced in pain. Raised himself so Parson could get the rifle's sling off his shoulder. Parson freed the rifle, checked the fire selector.

The sports car sideswiped a police cruiser and shot the gap in the roadblock. The officers concentrated their rounds on the most immediate threat, the rifleman at the door. No one except Parson tried to aim at the car. He shouldered that strange-looking weapon of Dragan's. Sighted through the scope, swore. Too many policemen between him and his target. No clear shot.

The gunman who'd just come out of the house kept firing, but he began to stagger. As rounds struck him, his body jerked like a poorly manipulated marionette. He fell to his knees, blood streaming from wounds. Hands dripping. Lower jaw shot away. His rifle clattered from his fingers. He tumbled forward down the steps, dark smears behind him. The man lay on the flagstones with his head tucked under his shoulders, knees beneath his chest.

“Get DuÅ¡ic!” Dragan yelled to Gold and Parson. “Chase him down!” Then he shouted something in Serbo-Croatian.

Gold looked at Dragan's wound. Messy, but she had seen injuries bleed a lot faster. Maybe the bullet had not cut a major blood vessel.

“I'll be fine,” Dragan said. “The keys are in my vehicle. Go, go, go!”

Gold pulled open the driver's door of Dragan's police van. Parson jumped into the passenger seat. The van had been parked on the end of the line of police vehicles, facing onto an open road. But pursuing a fast car that had a head start seemed a hopeless task.

“We'll never catch him in this,” Gold said as she started the engine.

“We don't have to,” Parson said. “Just get me close enough, and I'll catch him with this.” He gestured with the weird rifle. “To hell with observing and witnessing,” Parson added.

Maybe he'd given up on taking Dušic alive. But shooting him dead seemed a better option than letting him escape. Gold put the transmission into drive and peeled out in pursuit.

•   •   •

DUÅ IC COULD NOT BELIEVE
his luck. No, not luck. Initiative, enabled by Stefan's self-sacrifice. His friend no doubt was dead by now. Dušic would mourn later. In days to come, he knew, he would have much to consider about his brave but troubled war comrade, addicted to drink and haunted by needless guilt. But now the mission demanded Dušic's full attention.

The winding road from the farming village denied the Aventador's main advantage—top-end, flat-out speed. But the Lamborghini still took curves better than anything those lapdogs were driving. In the rearview mirror Dušic could see them coming now in a police van. He almost laughed; that thing would never catch him. He braked for a bend in the road, felt the car's suspension compress and expand. The turn placed a screen of trees between Dušic and the vehicle giving chase. He steered out of the curve and saw a tractor on the road in front of him.

The tractor was cresting a rise; Dušic could not see beyond the hill.

Taking chances had carried him this far and would have to carry him further. He jerked the wheel, sped around the tractor. Glimpse of a surprised elderly farmer and the plows bolted to his machine.

The top of the hill revealed an onrushing truck. Dušic steered hard again, swerved back into his lane. Blast of a truck horn.

Short straight stretch ahead before the next curve. Dušic pressed down with his right foot, held his left foot poised. Dismissed the pain from the bullet wound and the torn stitches. He would slip to the nearest highway, make a speed dash, and disappear into back roads again. Surely General Mladic and President Karadžic had endured close calls like this.

When at Bradic's house, Dušic had nearly decided his struggle was over. But now he felt renewed, with great deeds ahead of him. For his cause, he might yet draw a blade, chamber a round.

•   •   •

PARSON SWORE
when he lost sight of the Lamborghini. He faced a difficult enough task already: to hit a moving target from a moving platform with an unfamiliar rifle. As a lifelong hunter, he had developed the skills of an experienced marksman. He'd also taken some training; in his wallet he carried a military firearms authorization. The gun card said he was qualified on the M9 aircrew pistol, but it said nothing about a Soviet-bloc automatic weapon that fired tungsten-tipped ammunition.

The van careened through a curve in the road. Gold took the bend so fast, Parson feared the vehicle would roll over. A truck speeding in the opposite direction rocked the van with a wave of displaced air. Gold accelerated out of the curve, topped a hill, and hit the brakes for a damned tractor.

“Hold on,” Gold said.

She took her foot off the brake, stomped the accelerator, and whipped around the tractor. Rifle in his lap, Parson braced himself against the dash as he rolled down his window. The old man driving the tractor shouted something Parson couldn't understand. Seconds later, the tractor became a speck in the rearview mirror. Parson stuck the barrel of the Vintorez out the window. He knew his only hope was to catch Dušic with a crossing shot on the far side of a curve. If the bastard made it to a long straightaway, he'd be gone.

Ahead, Parson caught a glimpse of the Aventador, snatches of blue flashing behind trees. Dušic had a long lead that was getting longer. Parson surveyed the road ahead.

The pavement vanished into another copse of trees. Beyond the trees, the road curved beside a disked field and rose to a higher hilltop.

“When you get past those trees,” Parson said, “I want you to stop.”

“Stop?”

“Stop.”

Gold pressed harder on the gas, and the van groaned with the higher rpm. Mist collected into droplets on the windshield, and the trees flitted by like an irregular picket fence. When the van cleared the woods, Gold hit the brakes.

The vehicle shuddered to a stop as the antiskid engaged. Up the road and uphill, Dušic's car snapped through the curve and accelerated away.

Parson now had a stable shooting platform, with a target moving left to right above him. A fighter pilot would have called it a deflection shot. Parson sighted through the PSO-1 scope, guesstimated the range. That car had a rear-mounted engine, right? For lead, Parson held on to the passenger compartment. Fired a burst.

The noise-suppressed weapon practically whispered, but Parson heard it when three armor-piercing bullets slammed into the Lamborghini's engine. Sounded like three strikes from a jackhammer.

The car showed no immediate sign of damage. If not for the sound of bullets impacting, Parson would have thought he missed. The Lamborghini topped the hill and disappeared. Now Dušic would get away clean if he still had a good power plant.

“Okay,” Parson said, “follow him.”

“Did you hit him?”

“I think I hit the engine. We'll know when we get over that hill.” Parson held out hope. He had made long shots before.

Gold hit the accelerator again. Parson felt himself jerked back against his seat. He appreciated the doggedness of Gold's pursuit, but speed didn't matter anymore. He'd taken his one chance; he'd either connected or missed. They'd find out on the other side of the rise. Parson held his finger across the trigger guard of the Vintorez, strained to see the road ahead.

When the van cleared the crest, Parson spotted the Aventador closer than he'd expected. The car trailed gray smoke. Its engine made a popping noise, and the gray smoke turned black.

On that stretch of country road, the shoulder had eroded. Driving too fast and probably distracted by his wounded engine, Dušic skirted the edge of the road. The Aventador rocked when the wheels left the pavement, and Dušic overcorrected. The car swerved to the opposite shoulder, departed the hard surface completely, and veered into a ditch. Rolled side over side into a field. The Lamborghini came to rest upright on its tires, spattered with mud and smoking.

Flames guttered underneath the engine compartment. Something, perhaps a hose, burned as it melted, and fire in liquid form dripped into the grass.

•   •   •

THE PAIN IN DUÅ IC'S LEG
spread as if acid were being poured over it. But the pain did not center on the old gunshot wound. The agony came higher up, where the bone had just broken. Walking had been difficult. Now it was quite impossible.

Where was his weapon? Dear God, that pistol had been on the seat right beside him. He should have known better than to leave it unsecured.

There. On the floorboard. Dušic released his safety belt, leaned forward. The movement magnified his pain so much that he cried out in a growl, but he wrapped his fingers around the grip of the CZ 99.

Heat rose inside the Aventador. Black smoke churned from the engine. Dušic could see no flame, but, damn it to hell, the car had to be burning.

He had come so close. So close. And Stefan had sacrificed all.

But perhaps Dušic had not failed. War seemed imminent all over the former Yugoslavia. He had lit the match, and it yet burned. The burning would continue as long as Serbs never learned the details of his operation.

He knew that if he got captured, his trial would reveal those details day by day, inch by inch, repeated in every news cycle. So he must do one more thing to ensure the success of his mission. Such a shame that he would never get to see that success.

One day, Serbs would dance
kolos
in his honor, like in his dream. Only they would dance without him.

•   •   •

SMOKE FROM THE BURNING LAMBORGHINI
drifted over the police van and stung Parson's nostrils. He'd had Gold stop the van in the middle of the road; there was no place to pull over. Other police vehicles caught up. Out of the corner of his eye, Parson noticed Webster and Petrov emerge from a car.

But Parson kept his gaze focused on Dušic. He could see the man moving inside the car; at least the rollover hadn't killed him. Would he fight or give up now? Parson got out of the van, rested the Vintorez across the hood.

More police officers pulled up. Some got out of their cars, poised with their weapons. One or two held fire extinguishers. Petrov shouted something in his native language, probably “Surrender!” DuÅ¡ic looked toward Parson and the gathering of police. He said nothing, and he made no effort to get out of the Lamborghini. Parson peered unblinking through the rifle scope. Moved the fire selector off the full-auto setting. And waited.

He had a fleeting thought of Cunningham. If the OSI agent had lived, he'd probably be the one holding this weapon. The last time Cunningham had fired a gun, he was in full forward motion. But Parson remained still. As he watched Dušic, he considered all the things he'd witnessed in this part of the world. For Parson, Dušic personified atrocity. This guy didn't deserve to breathe the air. After all the deaths he's caused, Parson thought, we're supposed to go around our asses to bring him in alive? After he helped cause the death of Cunningham, a young man with such a bright future? Webster had said a trial would settle things down. But wouldn't that just give Dušic a forum for his ideas? With the Vintorez in his hands, Parson faced a choice. Under the circumstances, no one would question his decision.

Flames now wrapped around the entire engine compartment. Parson wondered if Dušic was trapped, or if he'd decided to end it all here.

The answer came as Dušic placed the barrel of his gun into his mouth. In the weird center arrow of the Russian scope's reticle, Parson had a good side view of Dušic's arm, hand, and the semiautomatic pistol. Time for justice.

Dušic would have known well the mess small arms make at point-blank range. Perhaps for that reason he hesitated.

Parson did not.

He touched his finger to the trigger of the Vintorez. A single round slammed through the Lamborghini's side window. Blood spattered the glass.

Through window, now nearly opaque from crazing caused by the bullet, Parson could not see exactly where his round had struck. But he could discern movement; at least he'd not blown off Dušic's head. He had aimed as precisely as he could, minding breath control and trigger squeeze, for Dušic's hand.

•   •   •

WEBSTER AND PETROV RAN
toward Dušic's car. Gold caught up with them. Other officers began dousing the engine with fire extinguishers, and the sharp smell of halon mingled with the odor of burning oil, paint, and rubber. Spray from the extinguishers spattered Petrov as he yanked the driver's door.

The open door revealed Dušic with his right hand torn off at the wrist.

Blood covered his shirt, and more blood stained his trousers. Flecks of safety glass tinted red lay in his lap.