by Joseph Badal
Bob assumed the kidnappers had stashed a vehicle somewhere near the border. Or a Serb helicopter would pick up the men once they crossed into Serbia. The latter alternative would be the worst. He said a silent prayer the Serbs would try to escape on foot or in a vehicle. A helicopter would be easy to detect. But if they got Michael on board a chopper and managed to take off again, there wasn’t much the Americans would be able to do. An escape on foot or by motor vehicle would slow them down.
“Mr. Danforth,” the co-pilot announced over the plane’s intercom, “I’ve got a call for you.”
Bob grabbed the telephone receiver from its place on the bulkhead. “Danforth,” he said.
“Bob, it’s Jack. I just called the house and Liz told me what you were up to. Are you nuts?”
“Any news?” Bob asked.
“Nothing yet. What do you think you’re going to do?”
“Listen, Jack, let’s not get into a pissing match over my flying over there. You don’t like it, then fire my ass.”
“Okay, okay, calm down,” Jack said. “I’m at the 82nd’s headquarters. I’ll have a car pick you up at the airstrip.”
“Have there been any Serb helicopters in the area of the border?” Bob asked.
“We’ve been watching. Not a one.”
Bob sighed and, in a quiet voice, said, “Thank God.” Then he said, “They’ve got to be going straight north. They wouldn’t risk going in any other direction. They’ve got to get into Serbia as quickly as possible.”
“We’re assuming the same thing. When are you due to land?”
Bob checked his watch. “Three hours.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The rising sun had brightened the sky above the valley, but the road was in cold shadow. Michael, his hands still bound in front and tethered to one of the Serb soldiers, noticed Sokic’s men’s disdainful looks at the scattering of refugees they were beginning to encounter. Their hatred toward the Kosovars was palpable.
One of the soldiers spat at a dirty, bedraggled man shuffling south, everything he now owned in the world on his back, in his hands. A couple of the others slung curses at the frightened people they passed, taunting them. The leader of the Serb unit told his men to shut up.
Michael looked at the refugees’ expressions and saw the same fear and despair he’d seen thousands of times in the past few weeks. Their faces were open books, which Michael had learned to read. They’d lost everything and knew they had no reason to believe they would ever return to their homes. He wondered if they could see the same look on his face.
Michael had a sudden sinking feeling. He told himself he could never lose hope. His worst enemy was hopelessness. Never give up. But he knew the Serbs would commandeer the first vehicle they came across, and then his situation would turn from dire to hopeless. As long as they were on foot, they couldn’t put much distance between themselves and the Macedonian border. But with a car or truck, even a horsedrawn wagon . . .. And once they moved into a Serb village or town, U.S. planes would be unable to spot them – if there were planes out looking for him in the first place.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“82nd Air—”
“This is NIMA calling for Jack Cole.”
“Hold on.”
Jack had been pacing the command center like a caged animal. He rushed to the speakerphone. “This is Jack Cole.”
“Matthews at NIMA. I think we got something. One of our satellites crosses over the area where the Jeep is located every twenty-two minutes. We zeroed in on the coordinates of that spot and checked every satellite pass from 1918 hours on. Absolutely nothing occurred until 0512 hours, your time. We saw the heat signatures of six people around one vehicle. At 0534 hours, the men are gone and the Jeep is lying in the ravine fifty yards away.”
“How about the people?” Jack blurted. “Could you pick up their signatures moving away from the site?”
“Not on the same satellite pass. And, for whatever reason, we didn’t detect them during the 0556 overflight. But at 0618, six separate heat signatures were picked up in the hills a couple miles north of the abandoned Jeep.”
“Could be any group of people,” Jack said, playing devil’s advocate, although his instincts told him they’d located Michael and his captors.
“Yeah, maybe. But we’ll have sunlight on the 0640 SAR pass. I may be able to tell you a whole lot more in . . . six and-a-half minutes.”
“Okay, we’ll continue keeping this line open until then. I’ll see if I can hold my breath that long. And, Matthews, good work.”
Matthews said, “I’ll come back on the line the minute I have the next imagery.”
Jack crisscrossed the room. He stopped suddenly after three circuits, spun around, and faced Colonel Sweeney. “Colonel,” he said, “is there something we could be doing right now in anticipation of Matthews telling us they just took a picture of five Serb soldiers and one U.S. Army Captain. If they’re still on foot, they can’t be too far north of here.” Jack smiled at Sweeney and said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a helicopter that could check out the general area?”
Sweeney smiled back. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, walking over to a second telephone where he dialed four numbers. “Jim, Dennis Sweeney here. No, nothing for sure. Listen, get Dombrowsky on the radio and tell him to get his two birds in the air. Tell him he’s probably too far north.”
Jack grinned at Sweeney and thought, thank God for military men with a balls-to-the-wall attitude.
“No, I don’t know exactly where,” Sweeney continued. “Just tell Jess to follow the main road south. Hopefully, I‘ll have more information in a few minutes.”
Sweeney hung up and joined Jack in striding back and forth across the room.
Jack jumped at the sudden sound of Matthews’ voice bursting like an explosion over the speakerphone. “You there, Mr. Cole?”
With Sweeney following him, he rushed over to the phone. “I’m here. Go ahead.”
“We got six men taking a Sunday stroll up the middle of the main north-south road. One of the men is obviously tied up. Without a car, and considering the time sequence, I’d say it’s your man.”
“What’re the coordinates?” Jack shouted.
“Check your fax machine. Our Photographic Intelligence Section sent you the last photographs. The coordinates are printed on the bottom of the pictures.”
“Thanks, Matthews, I owe you one.”
“Just let us know if you find our boy.”
“You can count on it.”
Bob’s legs ached. He stood and tried to stretch them while walking back and forth in the airplane’s cabin but the clearance was too low and bending over while he walked only made his back ache. He returned to his seat and collapsed into it. Less than an hour, he thought as he looked at his wristwatch.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Other than a couple hours sleep between dinner with Jack Cole and going out to meet Stefan Radko at the 82nd compound’s gate, Michael hadn’t slept for twenty-six hours. His head ached. Gingerly he touched his ribs. At least one was broken, he thought, from rolling down the hill and hitting the tree – or from the beating the Serb soldier gave him. He didn’t have to pretend to slow down the Serbs anymore. Going slow now came easily.
Then he heard the sound of an engine approaching from the direction they were walking. His heart sank. He looked ahead at the curve in the road and waited for the vehicle to appear. He said a silent prayer: Please let it be a motorcycle, or a tractor. Something too small to carry all of them, or something slow. Don’t let it be a car or truck.
The oncoming vehicle became louder, and then it came around the curve in the road and entered the straightaway. Michael felt lower than he already felt. It was a sedan.
The Serbs had lined up across the road. They pointed their rifles at the car. Sokic raised an arm. As soon as the car stopped, the soldiers surrounded it and began dragging the occupants – a man and a woman in their thirties, two small children, and an elderly
woman – out onto the road. From the way the soldiers manhandled them, Michael assumed the people from the car must be Kosovar Albanian or Bosnian Muslims. Both hated groups. Less than human to the Serbs.
Sokic shouted orders to his men, three of whom herded the car’s occupants into the trees beyond the road. They’d been gone only a minute, when shots rang out. The men returned a moment later, all smiles.
The soldier guarding Michael pulled on the tether tied to his wrists and jerked him toward the car, shoving him into the backseat. The other soldiers removed the people’s possessions from inside the car and from its roof and tossed them into the ditch by the side of the road. They then piled into the car.
Sokic got behind the wheel. He had barely finished turning the car around, when he began cursing, got out of the vehicle, and walked to the rear fender. He opened the fuel door and unscrewed the gas cap. Then he went over to a sapling by the side of the road, ripped off a branch, and took it back to the car. He stuck the branch into the fuel tank and pulled it out. Only about a quarter of an inch at the bottom of the branch glistened with wetness. Sokic slammed his boot-tip into the car fender. He threw the stick away.
Squeezed between the Serbs in the backseat, Michael silently mouthed the words, “Run out of gas,” over and over. This time his prayer was answered – a few miles up the road.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Major Jim Taylor picked up the radio transmitter. “Lobo One, this is Mother Goose.” Then he read coordinates into the microphone.
“I copy, Mother Goose. Lobo One out,” said Captain Jess Dombrowsky in his Apache helicopter, in the sky fifty miles inside Yugoslavia.
“You hear that, Ernie?” he asked through his headset.
“Yeah, Jess,” his co-pilot, Ernie Patten, replied.
“How about you guys?” Jess asked, looking out his side window at the second Apache.
“Loud and clear,” declared Scooter James, his wingman.
“Roger,” Billy Herrera, Scooter’s co-pilot said.
“Hold on while I input the coordinates,” Ernie said.
Dombrowsky turned the aircraft due south and pushed the throttle to the Apache’s maximum level cruising speed of one hundred eighty miles per hour.
The radio message had been sent in the clear. Dombrowsky knew that meant the Serb military might have intercepted it. But he had the upper hand – they wouldn’t be able to react in time. Unless the bad guys had MIGs nearby.
Flying at this speed, his wingman and he would be at the designated coordinates before the Serbs could triangulate their location and get planes or troops there. He hoped.
The two Apache helicopters followed the road south, flying at an altitude of three hundred feet. Fifteen miles north of the coordinates they’d been given, the crews encountered a two-thousand-foot mountain intersected by a tunnel. Unable to continue following the road, they gained altitude to hurdle the formation. When Dombrowsky passed over the peak, he realized the rules of the game suddenly changed.
“Holy shit!” the Serb soldier screamed, abandoning his effort to take a leisurely piss against the outside wall of the radar site’s command and control center. Running back inside the installation, he saw his teammate punching buttons on the target acquisition radar console. He’d already locked on the American helicopters. The soldier snatched a telephone from its cradle and called in the sighting to headquarters, while watching his partner at the radar console electronically transmit the enemy helicopters’ locations from the target acquisition radar to the target tracking radar.
The soldier was sure headquarters would notify the Serb Air Force MIG 29 Fighter Wing stationed near Dimitrovgrad, just west of the Bulgarian border – about ninety kilometers northeast of the radar site. Within eight minutes of the radar team’s warning, two MIGs could be racing down the runway at the Dimitrovgrad Air Force Base.
“Our luck just changed, Jess,” Lieutenant Scooter James declared in a voice so calm he might as well have been telling Dombrowsky the time. “Do me a favor, will you, and don’t remind me I volunteered for this mission.”
Dombrowsky smiled and said, “It just gives us added motivation to get the job done quickly, Scooter. Tighten up on my six. We’re going treetop.”
The two Apaches banked off the crest of the mountain and roared down toward the road ahead. Dombrowsky noted the distance to the coordinates Patten had entered: Twelve miles to go – three-and-a-half minutes. Plenty of time, he thought. Unless the bad guys have MIGs close by.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Jack had somehow wrung enough self-discipline from his seemingly demented mind to force himself to sit in a chair. He didn’t know how he would live with it if this turned out badly. He’d taken a seat when he realized his incessant pacing had started to grate on everyone’s nerves. He’d always prided himself on his ability to control his emotions, to maintain self-control under the most arduous of circumstances. But this was personal. Michael Danforth was the son of his best friend. And he had been abducted in retaliation for the CIA’s kidnapping of Antonin Karadjic. He’d authorized that mission.
“Colonel Sweeney, it’s Colonel Nye on the horn,” Sergeant Major Jewell shouted, holding up the telephone receiver, waving it at Sweeney. The tone in Jewell’s voice and the tension evident in his body language caused Jack’s skin to hurt. Every nerve in his body seemed on fire.
Jack watched Sweeney go over to Jewell’s desk and take the phone from the Sergeant Major’s hand. Sweeney sat on the edge of the desk, holding the receiver against his chest, as though he was preparing himself for bad news. He had obviously picked up on the strain in Jewell’s voice. Jack moved closer.
“Hello, George,” Sweeney said, after moving the receiver to his ear. “Wha–. Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand. Yeah. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Thanks, George. I hope your men are real close to their planes.”
He slammed down the phone, looking meaningfully at Jack. Then he turned to Jewell. “Get Major Taylor on the horn. Have him radio Dombrowsky. The Serbs have jets in the air.”
Jack groaned. The stab of pain he felt in his stomach meant his ulcer was acting up again. That always happened when something bad happened. Things had suddenly turned awful. Then Bob Danforth walked into the room.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Back on foot, Michael heard the whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotors. He knew the sound of the AH-64H, Apache Attack Helicopter, by heart. From the way his captors looked toward the sky, he could tell they recognized the sound, too. Michael felt a tingle run up his spine when the noise grew louder.
Sokic had stopped. He now cocked an ear upward. He looked at Michael. Michael smiled back, watching realization strike.
“Take cover,” Sokic yelled. He dove into a shallow dry ditch beside the road. Dimitrov and Pyotr followed suit. Josef, tugging violently on the rope around Michael’s wrists, dragged him into the ditch on the opposite side of the road and dove on top of him. Vassily dropped into the same ditch, farther down the road.
Helicopter noise grew louder and louder. Then Michael felt the beat of the rotors churning the air above him.
But the choppers moved away, farther down the road, taking Michael’s desperate hope with them.
“Scooter, we’re past the position where those men are supposed to be,” Jess Dombrowsky shouted. “Let’s turn around and make another pass to the north.”
“Roger,” Scooter replied, following Dombrowsky. “We can’t hang around here much longer, though, Jess. Those Serb jets are going to join the party any minute.”
“Damn, that was close,” Josef said, starting to climb out of the ditch.
“Get back down,” Vassily yelled. “The Americans could come back.”
Josef fell back down. “Fucking Americans,” he grumbled. But he raised his head and saw two specks on the horizon about a mile away. They seemed to be getting bigger.
Michael heard the Apaches coming back. It’s now or never, he thought. He snapped his head backward through the half-
foot of space Josef had created by lifting his own head. Michael felt the crunch of bone and cartilage when the back of his head smashed into Josef’s face. A sharp pain shot through Michael’s head, neck, and shoulders, making him forget for a moment about his busted ribs. He felt dizzy. Josef went limp and fell with his full weight onto Michael’s back. Michael peeked over at Vassily through his now-cloudy vision. The Serb appeared to be facing away, his arms covering his head.
Rolling Josef off his back, Michael grabbed the Serb’s AK-47 assault rifle and, with his eyes closed, checked the weapon’s safety. It was off. He opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut, hoping to clear his vision. When he opened them again, he seemed to be able to see a lot better. He pulled the knife from the scabbard on Josef’s belt and cut the Serb’s throat.
He wiped the blade on his fatigue pants, propped the knife upside down between his boots and sawed the ropes on his wrists against its razor-sharp blade. The ropes parted while the Apaches roared overhead on their way back to the north. Their screaming rotors kicked up dust devils that screened Michael from the Serbs. Gripping the knife, he crept on his hands and knees toward Vassily, whose shape appeared dimly in the dust cloud. The Serb still had his head down, protecting his face from the blowing dirt. Then, as the choppers passed them, Vassily suddenly turned toward Michael. Shock showed on his face.
Vassily drew his knife – Michael was too close for him to have time to bring his rifle around. The Serb rolled away and came up on his knees.
They grappled, each with a grip on the other’s knife hand. The Serb was bigger and stronger, but Michael was faster. He broke the Serb’s hold on his wrist, twisted him onto his stomach, heaved himself atop, and drove his knife into the side of Vassily’s neck. Pressing down with all his weight, he waited for his enemy to stop struggling, while warm blood splashed over his hand.