by Fritz Galt
The hostess left, and the others watched Foster sink to the mat, his legs perfectly crossed.
“Okay, our turn,” Natalie said.
She tried to fold her legs the same way, but she was wearing one of Coleen’s tight skirts, exposing her shapely legs.
“Let ’em dangle,” Foster suggested.
Dangle? Mick looked under the table. Sure enough, there was a foot well under the table.
Natalie wasn’t about to lower her bare feet into the pit. “You do it,” she told her husband.
All Mick could think of was the cockroaches at the Hotel Kladovo. If he was lucky, rats may have eaten all the insects. Nevertheless, he eased his stocking feet under the table and braced for what happened next. He felt around. There was only carpeting.
“It’s safe,” he said at last.
Natalie wasn’t convinced and opted for kneeling.
Jack and Coleen seemed perfectly comfortable using the Westerner’s pit.
“I take it you’ve been here before?” Mick asked.
Jack looked across the table at Coleen.
“I have,” Coleen said, and glanced at Foster.
Jack seemed impressed with his surroundings. “Just how did this place come about?”
“Built twenty years ago by Japanese investors,” Foster said. “Talk about a risky investment. They managed to sell it off to an unlucky Austrian businessman. When he tried to wiggle out of the deal, they stopped him at the border. Made him return to the hotel, live here and run it. No sticking the Bulgarians with a venture they couldn’t afford. If you know anybody who’s interested, there’s a Japanese hotel for sale in Bulgaria.”
Coleen laughed. “Don’t listen to him. The sushi’s great.”
“How do they get raw seafood this far inland?” Natalie asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t ask,” Foster said.
Another young lady with blonde hair and a kimono entered the room and bowed. She poured tea for the group, then knelt patiently between Mick and Foster.
Foster ordered in Japanese, then the waitress took drink orders. After she left, Foster raised his teacup.
“Tonight we celebrate one of the most courageous feats in the annals of British and American covert operations.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Exactly what you accomplished,” Foster continued, “besides ventilating a Romanian checkpoint with bullets, will be left for the students of history to determine.”
“Which raises an interesting question,” Jack said. “I’m glad we nabbed the mayor. That’ll help the German case. But I hope this is to do with more than that.”
Coleen nodded. “I don’t like burning my bridges like that for no reason. We spent over a year building our cover.”
“At our house,” Jack said, “you said that you and Natalie were investigating the Karta which was stolen and redrawn to incite a war with Macedonia. Was Kladovo to do with that?”
“Yes. In an important way,” Mick said. “What really happened in Kladovo took place in the car with the MUP inspector.”
“I didn’t know the MUP was there,” Natalie said.
“Wait,” Foster said. “I don’t know what a MUP is.”
“Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova,” Mick said. “The Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Yugoslav secret police. They tracked us down to the dam and were under strict orders to nail us before we left the country.”
“‘Nail’ as in ‘jail?’” Coleen asked.
“Worse than that,” Mick said. “They wanted us dead.”
Foster looked skeptical. “What did you do to tick them off?”
“We were onto them,” Mick said. “Specifically, we learned of a plot by the MUP, along with the Serbian Church, the underworld and possibly the president, to instigate the aggression against Macedonia.”
“Okay, I can see why they wanted you dead,” Foster said.
“But will they actually invade Macedonia?” Jack asked.
Natalie jumped in. “I saw a long column of the JNA moving south. The entire Autoput is taken up with military equipment and troops moving to the border with Macedonia.”
“Nobody can stop the Yugoslav Army,” Jack said. “Fifth largest in the world.”
“They’re well on their way to steamrolling Macedonia,” Mick said. Then he heard the waitress nearby, so he lowered his voice. “Fortunately for Macedonia, we’ve figured out their scheme.”
“If they’re trying to fool the Yugoslav people,” Foster said, “why not expose the truth? The Serbs will see that they’re being manipulated.”
“It’s too late for that,” Natalie said. “The people are beating their war drums. They’re demonstrating in the streets, clamoring for action. They’re worse than the army.”
“Do we have any hope of catching the perpetrators?” Coleen asked.
“The CIA wants us out, and NATO doesn’t have the means to chase crooks around Serbia.”
“Indict them,” Foster said.
“The International War Crimes Tribunal is designed to kick in after the fact, not before a war starts.”
Coleen looked aghast. “Then how can we use all the intelligence you’ve gathered?”
Mick leaned forward. “We’re up against some sly bastards. Their weapons are religion, history and the media. We have to stay one step ahead of them. We have to outsmart them. Short of someone vaporizing Belgrade, we in this room are the only ones who can stop them. But we need your help.”
“What can we do?” Coleen asked.
The entire group listened eagerly.
Mick was about to tell them, but just then the waitress came in to place square plates of sushi around the table.
Alec Pierce watched luggage fly through cracked plastic strips onto a short conveyor belt.
The conveyor led straight into Skopje’s arrivals terminal and dumped everything on the floor. A mob reeking of garlic pushed for access to their bags. A bottle of vodka had broken in the plane’s cargo bay, and several bags smelled of distilled potatoes.
He had come to Macedonia for one purpose. He thought Dragana and he were a team, but now he saw clearly. She was using him to her own ends. He had to find the Karta and stop her nationalistic ambitions before she incurred the wrath of the Yugoslav Army.
He would leave Macedonia with the Karta.
At last, his gym bag emerged from outside. It bounced off someone’s black leather bag and flipped lightly onto the concrete floor.
Wedging his feet between others, and throwing an elbow here and there, he managed to retrieve his bag.
A line of taxis waited in the darkness at the curb. He opened the door of the first one, slid onto the back seat and asked to go to his favorite hotel in downtown Skopje. “Skopje grad, molim vas. The Grand Hotel.”
The cabby leaned into his ignition key, but brute force alone could not start the car. He helped Alec out and set his bag in the next car in line. He shrugged good-naturedly. He must have waited all evening for that flight.
Alec repeated the hotel name to the second cabby, and they shot off down the dark country road.
“Are you businessman?” the man asked.
Alec wasn’t about to divulge his identity to a nosy informant.
“Student? Are you professor?”
What was his identity? He had made no effort to build a cover.
The man gave up and turned the radio on. “English,” he said. “I speak.”
“Good,” Alec said. “I speak.”
“VOA Europe.” The cabby’s intonation mimicked the hyped-up voice of the radio announcer.
They listened to a Johnny Cash song. Then Dolly Parton singing.
The tunes blended well with the sad state of the country.
After chasing the last piece of raw fish around his plate with chopsticks, Mick glanced from face to face. He knew what they had to do. But how would they go about doing it?
“We need to take stock of our situation and agree upon a line of attack.”
“
State what you know so far,” Jack said.
“We know some of the major players,” he began. “They are Zoran Rodic, Bane Djukanovic, and Alec, my brother.”
“Mind filling us in on their roles?” Foster prompted.
“Zoran is a young Serbian warlord. We know that he stole the Karta, an ancient map of Serbia. He has shown it to the Serbian and Greek patriarchs and gotten their approval to redraw its boundaries. We know the map went to Budapest next, where a forger began to expand Serbia’s borders. But Macedonian nationalists, led by my brother’s lover Dragana Alexandrov, crashed in and made the artist expand Macedonia’s borders instead. Then the nationalists headed for Macedonia with the Karta. What they intend to do with it there, we don’t know, but it seems to be out of Zoran’s hands.”
He grabbed a plastic bottle of mineral water and unscrewed the top. The others waited attentively for him to take a swig.
“Bane Djukanovic is a deputy minister and presidential appointee at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He had a hand in a number of nasty incidents. Leaving cigarette burns on people’s skin is his trademark. He tortured and killed our embassy doctor and coerced the forger in his usual way.”
Mick felt the others stir uncomfortably.
“We also know that Bane has been suppressing a story of a Macedonian massacre of Serbs. Why he did this, we don’t know. We do know that he has ordered MUP agents to kill Natalie and me, perhaps because of our knowledge of the plot to redraw the Karta. The rest of the MUP, until recently, was unaware of the Karta plot. An inspector at the MUP named Stojanovic learned, along with me, that the Macedonians redrew the Karta. And in Kladovo, the inspector indicated his shock at Bane’s orders to kill us and cover up the entire case.”
He looked apologetically at Natalie, who urged him to proceed.
“Lastly, there’s my brother, Alec Pierce. His role is unclear at present. He is reportedly responsible for the deaths of Swedish peacekeepers on the Macedonian frontier. He has taken several potshots at me personally. And he seems to be tasked by Zoran to handle the Karta, although he lost it to the Macedonians.”
“Could your brother really be employed by a Serbian warlord?” Coleen asked, dubious.
“We have to assume that he is. When he had time to explain his position to me, he spouted Serbian propaganda and put this dent in my face. He was a prisoner of war in Bosnia for two years. Who knows where his mind’s at now? Unless we learn otherwise, we have to assume that he’s one of the bad guys…and bad news for the CIA. In addition to stopping the invasion, we have to stop him.”
“Hold it right there,” Foster said. “Draw me the bigger picture. I don’t see how all these pieces fit together.”
Mick grabbed the mineral water and took another drink. “Let’s review this one step at a time.” Careful not to omit any relevant details, he recounted the sequence of events from Alec’s killing Swedish peacekeepers in Macedonia, to the Karta’s disappearance, to the news that Serbian troops had begun their march south toward Macedonia.
“Sounds like the Serbian side is in disarray,” Foster said.
“Yet they’re on the march,” Coleen pointed out.
“You can’t just march into another country,” Jack said.
“But the Serbs have built a case for war,” Mick said. “Whether the Karta was intended as a rationale, the Greek and Serbian Patriarchs’ decree was intended as an incentive, or the Macedonian massacre was intended as a provocation, or if all three were intended to work in harmony, some of these things have worked. Serbia feels righteous indignation.”
“This might broaden into a regional conflict,” Jack said.
Mick nodded. “Once the Serbs and Macedonians go at it, the Greeks will be tempted to grab land, the Bulgarians might send in troops to take a chunk, and even Albania, whose brethren make up half of Macedonia’s population, might enter the fray.”
“Totally irresponsible,” Foster said.
“Or totally calculated,” Jack said.
“It takes the highest authority in Yugoslavia to sponsor such a war,” Natalie concluded. “President Nikic has to be involved.”
Mick struggled out of the pit and stood up. “The five of us comprise a very small army, but we have to take up arms. We have to stay focused and take it straight to the enemy. Who is the enemy here?”
The room was silent. The waitress entered and Foster intercepted the bill.
When the waitress left, Natalie broke the silence. “It’s too late to end the provocation. We must stop the invasion. And the only person who can call it off is Yugoslavia’s President Nikic.”
Mick was proud of his wife. He looked around the room. All seemed to accept her conclusion.
“But how do we make him stop the war?” Jack wondered. “What assets do we have? He’s slippery, he’s protected, and even if we kill him, there are more hardliners to take his place.”
“We shouldn’t try to kill him,” Mick said. “But we can neutralize him.”
“How?” Jack asked.
“Legally. Miroslav Nikic has gotten away with everything imaginable and still remains untouched. Why? Because the War Crimes Tribunal has never gathered enough evidence to indict him. But we can get that evidence.”
“Mick, you know it takes years to build a case,” Natalie said.
“That’s true. But if we can show him we have evidence that he provoked the war, he might just reconsider the invasion.”
“Okay, then how do we get that evidence?” Jack said. “He’s like Howard Hughes, a recluse.”
In the silence that ensued, Foster shook his head in wonder. “Boy, and I thought Bulgaria was a mess.”
“What kind of evidence are we talking about?” Natalie asked.
“Taped meetings, written messages, recorded telephone conversations,” Mick said. “Our advantage is that we know the enemy’s key players. Now we must find them, tape them and get our evidence.”
“And who, exactly, do you mean by ‘we?’” Natalie asked.
He looked at the tops of down-turned heads. “Whoever wants to go back to Belgrade.”
The summer night in Skopje was bursting with life.
People strolled past the arched entrance to the Grand Hotel and inhaled the mouth-watering aroma of fried trout, fresh from Lake Ohrid.
It was tempting, but too expensive. Alec could find cheaper food elsewhere.
He walked down to the nearby Vardar to get his bearings. Along the riverfront were old Roman baths that he could swear looked like naked women lying on their backs.
He put the thought out of his mind and lifted his gaze. Minarets from numerous mosques pierced the night sky. A castle and a Macedonian Orthodox cathedral surveyed the teeming city. A warm breeze cooled his sweaty brow and carried friendly voices his way.
He turned back to the hotel. The fish smelled too good.
Jack Hamlin, British agent and UN observer, looked around the table. Nobody had taken up Mick’s offer to volunteer and return to Yugoslavia. “Let’s head for the hotel bar,” he suggested. Some after-dinner drinks might break the impasse.
“Make that the dance floor,” Foster said.
“Fine with me.” Jack squirmed out from under the table. Upon leaving the restaurant, he bowed to the Bulgarian geisha girl. The response was cold.
He noticed that Foster had a spring to his step. The previous year, Foster had invited them down to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Apparently he had read in a newspaper that a statistically minuscule number of men who had never married by the age of forty would ever marry at all. Foster had waited patiently until he turned forty, then celebrated the fact that he would probably never marry.
Jack had always wished the opposite.
Of course, Foster didn’t exactly spurn women. It took just the right woman to turn him on. Coleen had already discovered that she was that kind of woman.
Jack ordered a vodka and found a seat in a dark corner where he could observe the others.
Foster and Coleen we
re already twirling under a disco ball. Mick and Natalie were just warming up.
Jack had barely endured the year away from his beloved London. Like a submariner, he had surfaced in public only twice in the past year. Once he had come up for air in Paris. The other time, he had shown up in Bucharest.
Over the year, he had noted Coleen’s attraction to Foster with abstract interest. Personally, he found his working relationship with her entirely professional. That long year in Kladovo, she had been attentive in public, kind at home, chipper when he felt down, and she had slept in her own room.
But in the past few minutes, she had turned wild and unpredictable. He watched her fingers dig into Foster’s back. Her long, tanned legs plunged deep between her partner’s on the dance floor. Her red hair flew about as he had never seen before. She was free.
Natalie also looked sharp. She looked fifteen years younger than when she arrived in Kladovo, scared and running from the goon squad. Her skirt shimmied up and down her well-turned thighs. And Mick steered her about adroitly until she was dizzy. They communicated well and seemed to enjoy being together. Tonight they, too, had a bit of tiger in them.
His vodka wasn’t hot like some brands sold in London. It was nice and clean. He ruminated over Mick’s offer to help implicate the perpetrator of the plot against Macedonia. He weighed his duty to self against the needs of humanity. It took specific skills and knowledge to penetrate Belgrade. He had everything it took, but self-confidence. He could easily become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.
By the time the couples finished their exuberant workout and settled down to some cold Bulgarian brew, the vodka had taken effect. He was feeling bold and detached.
“Sign me up,” he told Mick.
“For what?”
“For the mission.”
“Oh that,” Mick said. “I almost forgot.”
Chapter 29
On the streets of Skopje the next morning, Alec found people going about their normal business, unaware of any threat.