by Fritz Galt
“I know who killed the doctor,” she said.
“Who? Was it someone at the bank?”
“Guess again,” she said. “I just had a chat with Ivan Lekic. And, according to him, Bane Djukanovic was imprisoned in the ’70s for mutilating people with his trademark torture method: cigarette burns, just like what happened to John.”
“Why would ‘Number Two’ at ‘our counterpart’s ministry’ be in on this?”
“You mean why would Bane of the MUP kill Dr. Moore?” she spelled out.
“So much for confidentiality.”
“I don’t have time for confidentiality. I’m outta here.”
She couldn’t believe she was passing secrets to Mick. Were these normal conversations between man and wife?
“So it was Bane?” Mick said. “Why would Bane want to kill the doctor over sanctions?”
“That’s not all that Bane is up to,” she said. “According to our friend Ivan, it was Bane Djukanovic who asked him to squelch the Macedonian story.”
“So Bane is in league with Zoran? What a dynamic duo.”
“Well, you’re not Batman,” she said. “We’re closing up the Bat Cave and going home.”
“I still have to finish the oil thing,” Mick said.
“That’s right. Push me over the edge.”
There was a pause. “I’d like to stop by and see you.”
“I’m going to Hungary to see you.”
“Do you remember when we visited that fortress last summer, the smaller one?”
“You mean Ram?”
“Yeah, right. Ram. R-A-M. You got that everybody?”
“Mick. Listen to me. We’re evacuating the embassy as we speak.” She watched Harry Kahler and Tammy Moore in the next office. They clinked champagne glasses before boarding the bus. “You’re talking about ancient history.”
“After the Iron Gates,” he said, clearly ignoring her, “I want you and me to head out of here.”
“Mick. I’m already heading outta here. Now. By bus. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you at Ram tomorrow at noon.”
The receiver clicked dead.
She slammed the instrument down. How unreasonable. How could he expect her to stay behind? She no longer even had house keys.
She sank into her chair and felt tears well up in her eyes. Her office was empty. The building deserted. It was the end of America’s relations with Yugoslavia.
Why was she still hanging around?
Natalie’s footsteps echoed down the back stairwell to the embassy garage.
She and Mick had run the Jeep’s fuel down to empty. And now the embassy gasoline pump was out of order. If she was going to drive out of town, much less to Romania, she needed a full tank of gas. Her best shot was the diplomatic pump several kilometers away.
She started up the Jeep and surprised a former guard who sat outside the gate. He sprang up and helped wave her into traffic. There, she jumped a median and scattered a flock of television cameramen. Out her side window, she stared into the faces of visa applicants who still lined the sidewalk. A coil of black smoke rose from the embassy as the incinerator destroyed its final classified documents.
On Kneza Milosa Street, the evacuation bus slammed its doors shut.
She drove under the darkened windows of MUP headquarters, then uphill toward the diplomatic colony. At the hippodrome, she had to stop as horses crossed the road. Plump, gleaming quarter horses ambled past with trainers personally pulling sulkies behind them. Once they cleared the road, she eased over two speed bumps and then had to brake again. A railroad crossing barrier came down in front of her just as a train appeared on the horizon. She considered driving around the arm, but the crossing guard stared at her and she turned the engine off.
A Bulgarian passenger train lumbered by and finally rolled out of sight around heavy thickets. The guard strode off the stoop of his gatehouse and cranked the armature back up.
Natalie restarted her engine. Now the needle pointed straight down.
The diplomatic pump was nearby in the old diplomatic compound. Chugging badly, the car limped up to the station. A chair stood in the entranceway with a handwritten sign, “Nema petrol.” No gas. A woman in baggy red leather clothes strode out and waved her away.
That was not good. Could she make it to the nearest station, on the other side of the mountain? She nursed the Jeep up the forested incline. The car was on its last cylinder when she reached the top.
There, she found a line of cars waiting. So there was gas. She swung into position just as the engine quit. She would sweat out the long roll down to the gas station.
Releasing and resetting the brake, she’d roll past a café selling ice cream. The café was always filled with graying businessmen who poked at their sundaes without enthusiasm. The place was owned by one of the mafija bosses. A steady business was required.
Through the windshield, Natalie watched drivers suck gasoline in tubes out of their tanks. The gasoline drained into plastic Jerry cans. Since it was illegal to fill canisters at the pump, the only way someone could buy extra gasoline was to drain it from their tank before reaching the station.
Should she do the same? She watched the pale drivers inhaling all those vapors. Naw, she had her pride. And she still had her health.
She had several blocks to go, and stations often ran out of gas. She prepared to wait all night if necessary.
Chapter 25
Rain drummed on the car roof all night. With the first streak of light in the east, Natalie finally reached the pump. Rationing had been temporarily lifted and she was entitled to fill her tank. Minutes later, she pulled away feeling that the whole ordeal had been worth it. Her eyelids drooped, she stunk and her stomach growled. But she had a full tank of gas.
And why was she still in the Balkans? It was all because of Mick. He had returned to Yugoslavia to retrieve his brother, not to chase oil barges. With the doctor dead, he felt he owed it to the doctor’s family to finish the mission for which he had given his life. Just like at Srebrenica, he was getting sucked into the region’s problems and making them his own.
Why she ever agreed to remain in the country was a mystery. Yet there she was, sneaking around like a spook instead of fleeing with the rest of the embassy as any normal human would.
The route to Ram was indirect at best. She started out heading south along a familiar back road.
Oncoming traffic was light that morning and people drove slowly to conserve gas. Only one car sped past her heading south.
She passed a one-kilometer-long gas line heading up a hill to a gas station. It wasn’t easy pushing a car uphill all day.
Next, she encountered a military checkpoint. She had to slow down to weave around red and white striped posts. A lone soldier manned the checkpoint. Apparently, he only inspected cars that approached Belgrade and waved her through.
Well beyond Belgrade’s satellite villages, she turned east toward the city of Pozarevac and began a thirty-kilometer stretch of potholes.
In the middle of farmland, she crossed a bridge that passed over the Autoput. Below her was a sight she would never forget. Three columns of troops were driving south. Armored personnel carriers, supply trucks, artillery and tanks rolled off into the distance as far as she could see. What she would later remember most vividly was the vibrating hum of the vehicles shaking the bridge.
Fifteen kilometers from the Autoput, people in the countryside seemed unaware of the troop movement. She rumbled over the tiny streets of Pozarevac, the agricultural hub of Eastern Serbia. As in all farming communities, she found plenty of shops. It was the “big city” for most peasants. There they bought tools, rubber boots, candy and shawls. They did their banking there and bought seed for their cooperatives.
It was an island of refinement in a peasant world, a gleaming city with church towers and a city hall and a television tower that one could see from vast distances over the fields. Here one dressed up
and polished one’s shoes. Here one bought flowers and paid a visit to one’s relatives. Natalie even spotted two Mercedes Benz taxicabs for people really in the money.
She drove around a garden in front of the city hall and stopped for a horse and cart that pulled in front of her. She gave the old man at the reins a respectful amount of time before passing him. A minute later she was out of the leafy, apartment-lined streets and back on flat farmland.
The nose of the Jeep dipped downward as she entered a broad valley just before the Danube. A giant steel mill took up the full length of the valley, smoke belching from four smokestacks. Natalie had to circle a high chain-link fence to get around it.
Soon the road ended at a T. An officer in a blue Yugo police car with white doors and a blue light watched her read the signs. Most traffic turned east toward Golubac, an historically significant Turkish fortress on the Danube halfway to the Iron Gates. Instead, she turned northwest toward Ram and a ferry crossing to the Banat region of Vojvodina.
The previous night, rain had formed deep puddles in the dirt road. She perched the car on one mound, picked her way around a lake of mud and stopped at the next bump to chart a course around the next puddle. It took an hour to drive the few kilometers to Ram.
At one point, she decided it was time to heed nature’s call.
A minute later when she emerged over the edge of a hillock, a boy was driving a herd of swine down the road. She smiled politely and admired the pigs. The boy just stared at her.
She hopped into the Jeep, shoes muddy, and glanced in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. But when had she become a peroxide blonde? Did Mick even like blondes?
A kilometer later, the dirt road ended and she joined up with a paved road. Another blue police car waited at the edge of the asphalt. She had hoped to leave surveillance back in the city.
She proceeded north toward Ram, and noted that the police car didn’t follow.
Ram was a fortress situated in a small village right on one of the widest spots of the Danube. At that point, the river flowed up from the southwest and took a sharp right turn to the southeast where it ran alongside the border of Romania.
Most importantly, when the river reached Ram, it ran smack into the Carpathian Mountains. There it began to wind its way through a narrow gorge, called the Iron Gates. In ancient times, Romans had carved a narrow footpath into the steep cliffs to open up the hilly hinterland.
But a recently completed Yugoslav-Romanian project called the Iron Gates Dam had flooded the gorge and virtually destroyed the historic footpath. It also backed up water onto the plains before the river’s long journey through the mountains. And Ram’s fortress overlooked those flooded plains.
Here, the Danube also marked the northern border of the Ottoman Empire. High cliffs marked the southern shore, affording the Turks a natural advantage for defending their empire.
Further deep in the past, long before the Romans or Turks, Neolithic villages had lined the banks of the gorge. Recent findings of carved figurines spoke of advanced cultures living there.
Natalie and Mick had once visited the small, elevated town and were enchanted to discover what looked like a forgotten fortress. They had been climbing behind several rows of houses to find a good look at the river and stumbled upon the stone military structure clinging to the back of the cliff.
She didn’t want to draw attention to today’s rendezvous with Mick, so she parked downhill near the ferry landing and backtracked on foot up the hill. She found a side street cut out of layers of shale and walked around verdant back yards replete with healthy looking chickens and pigs.
The only way into the fortress was by way of a crumbling ledge. She hugged the castle wall and inched toward a rounded gate. Below, empty space dropped away to the lapping river.
When she finally reached the gate, she was careful to reconnoiter before proceeding. She cupped an ear, but could hear no voices or movement inside.
She sucked in her breath, then passed through the gate and edged into the first room of the gatehouse. She was at the bottom of a turret. A doorway on the other side led to the courtyard.
Despite the cool day with heavy clouds veiling the sun and a steady breeze off the river, she was perspiring. She stood in the shadows and peered into the courtyard.
The gray rock fortress had fallen into ruin. Soldiers had last occupied it at the start of the Twentieth Century, and no one had tried to restore it since. Now it only testified to the transience of nationhood and military might.
In recent years, locals had built campfires in the grassy courtyard. And it probably made a great hideout for children despite its dangerous drop-offs.
Fortunately this morning, it was empty.
She tramped along a worn path through tall grass and peered through a large hole that faced the river. A cannon may have blasted the gaping aperture. Now it framed a majestic view of the mighty Danube at its widest point.
She caught a figure in the opening. In profile against the dramatic backdrop sat Mick, like a small boy, hugging his knees to his chest.
“Hello, old man.”
“Hello, cutie. I like your new hair.”
So Mick did like blondes.
Mick turned fully toward her. Half his face was covered with a white bandage.
She gasped. What had they done to him?
She squeezed through the fortress wall to where he sat over the water. She smothered him in a hug, and he nearly passed out.
Behind the bandage, his face was pale and expressionless. His stout arms could barely return the ardor of her affection.
She looked him in the eyes. “What in God’s name happened to you?”
He shrugged it off.
“Do you have first-aid cream on that thing?”
He nodded.
“What is it? Stitches?”
“A few.”
“Mick, why in the world did you ever come back?”
He sighed and quoted an old saying. “Once you drink from the Sava, you will always return.”
She sat down in the grass and crossed her legs. The vista was immediate and stunning. “This is what they’re fighting for. Sometimes it almost seems worth the trouble.”
“They’re fighting phantoms,” he said.
“I’m not so sure. I just saw an incredible convoy heading south toward Macedonia. The army is on the march.”
“So they finally set their sights on Macedonia. They wouldn’t listen to me at Langley.”
“What can they do in Langley?”
“What can we do here?”
She had no answer.
He went on. “At least we know who our enemy is.”
“And that is…?”
“Zoran, Bane and a handful of Macedonian nationalists. What a winning combination. We’ve got to get the Karta back. It has been severely altered. I found the forger, tortured like the doctor. He said that Macedonian nationalists had forced him to erase half of Serbia to claim it for themselves.”
“Wasn’t Patriarch Savic about to reveal the Karta along with the Greek patriarch?”
“The plan changed behind their backs,” he said. “Either somebody wanted to provoke the Serbs, or the Macedonian nationalists got carried away. The Karta now shows a Greater Macedonia.”
She examined the crust of blood on the edges of his bandage. “Everything is in place for a war. Yesterday, Savic led a rally to rescue Serbian churches in Macedonia. Apparently the Macedonians want an expanded Macedonia, and Zoran gets his provocation to send in his militias. Savic sits back and watches the conflagration and then swoops in to claim the rewards. But how does Bane fit in?”
“The only theory I have is that since he’s a political appointee, he’s coordinating the invasion for Nikic.”
“But we don’t even understand his tactics.” She poked at the bandage and Mick flinched. “For example, why do you suppose Bane’s suppressing the story of the killings? I’m as perplexed as the poor reporters who faithfully visi
ted me each afternoon.”
“Someone other than Bane performed the massacre,” he said. “Maybe Macedonian nationalists jumped the gun.”
She sat back and smelled the sweet honeysuckle in the wind. “And how’s Alec involved?”
“It appears that he and Dragana have split up, if pulling a gun on each other in Budapest qualifies. She’s one of the nationalists.”
She rocked forward and indicated his cheek. “Is this a gunshot wound?”
“No. Nothing that bad.”
“Looks bad enough. So who is Alec working for?”
“Zoran.”
She squeezed his shoulder and he nearly jumped off the cliff.
“I forgot to tell you about the sore shoulder.”
She kept her hands to herself. “Who did this to you?”
“Alec.” He leaned back on his good elbow. “In my stupidity, I thought I had him figured out as either a moderate or working undercover. Not some mobster’s goon like he’s turned out to be.”
She had trouble visualizing her brother-in-law doing such a thing to Mick. “How did he do it?”
“He drew a gun on me. Then he pistol-whipped me. I fell on my shoulder.”
“Okay, that’s it,” she decided. “We’re not going to get into fratricide. The bloodshed ends here.”
“You’re right. We’ve got to act fast. We’ve got to get to Macedonia for the Karta.”
“No,” she said. “I’m talking about leaving Europe.”
“We need to finish our mission and stop the oil.”
“Don’t you see where all this is heading? Just forget the damned oil. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. If I don’t stop the oil barge at the Iron Gates Dam, I won’t have the Agency behind me.”
“What’s so important about the Agency?”
“Natalie. It’s about the doctor, and Ivan and Petra, and all the other poor victims of this regime. I’ve got to stop this invasion. We can really help these people that we care about. The CIA can go to hell, but I need them behind me. I don’t want to ever again give up the power to make things right.”