by Fritz Galt
Chapter 35
Sergeant Mick Pierce, military chauffeur, swept through the first Serbian checkpoint with ease.
The soldier at Pirot waved Mick’s JNA Mercedes through the speed cones and on its way. General Natalie, her hair in a bun and stuffed under the general’s hat, was a dark, severe profile in the back seat. If anything, the soldier looked disappointed that the general didn’t return his salute.
But it was only a matter of time before word spread from the border that they were at large.
The second checkpoint brought trouble.
Mick scanned the entrance onto the Autoput. Like a line of ants, one military vehicle after another passed south along the road. He pulled onto the shoulder atop a small rise. Below him as far as he could see in either direction, Yugoslavia’s troops grimly advanced on Macedonia.
Disturbing as the sight was, something else affected him more. Police cars and personnel carriers blocked the Dimitrovgrad road and began advancing in his direction.
“They found us,” he said. “The general alerted the police and troops and they’re after us.”
“Circle back,” Natalie suggested.
“What was the last town? Sicevo?”
“Whatever. Go there.”
Mick backed away from the ridge and reversed direction with a three-point turn. The Mercedes’ power and handling were put to the test by the road’s rough condition and winding path.
He rushed into a small, flat valley of orchards, then swerved into a farming village. They passed some chicken coops and haystacks just as the police and military detachment crested the hill.
He pulled up to one small cottage with a yellow plaster exterior. The car seemed horribly out of place. Behind a picket fence, a man and his teen-age son sliced into the belly of a pig that lay on a blood-soaked table.
“Oh, crimony.” Natalie craned her neck to see through the rear window. “They turned down our street.”
“Out of the car,” Mick ordered. “I’ll take the driver’s pistol.”
He took her by the hand, led her into the man’s yard and locked the gate behind them. The man and his son stared and gawked.
“Your knife, please,” Mick requested, and snatched it out of the slaughtered animal.
He handed the implement to Natalie, who stared at it with disgust.
Then he yanked her past the house onto a muddy side street. That began a long ascent up through the village. They jogged over a stone bridge that spanned a wide stream.
“Help me find a car,” he said.
“All I see are tractors.”
He spotted a three-wheel tractor that had been converted from a motorcycle. It was attached to a cart stacked with loose hay. He shook his head. “No. We’ve gotta reach Belgrade.”
A rifle cracked behind them, and a bullet drilled a hole through the air overhead. They ducked and headed for the nearest enclosure; a yard stocked with chickens.
“Find cover,” Mick said.
“In this?” Natalie stood ankle-deep in a slick white substance with pig’s blood dripping from the knife.
Mick rolled a barrel of feed to block the way into the yard.
Several young girls hoisted their dresses and backed off a porch into their house.
Mick pushed Natalie down behind a manure pile. Peering through a flock of offended roosters and disgruntled hens, he leveled the sergeant’s pistol at the gate.
A car ground steadily up the road. Suddenly, its front bumper broke through the fence. Boards bounced off its windshield. Unsuspecting chickens squawked and flew into the fan belt. Brown and yellow feathers fluttered everywhere.
A blood-red rooster’s comb stuck against the whitewashed wall behind Natalie.
The police car lurched to a halt in the middle of the yard.
A cop in a blue uniform jumped out, his gun scanning the yard.
Several more cops jumped through the gaping hole created by the car.
Mick reached around from behind the manure pile and took a potshot at the flock of chickens. Squawking birds burst into the air en masse.
Through the curtain of feathers, he saw the shocked cop drop his gun and flee behind the fence.
“Whoa,” Mick yelled. He stood up, fired again, flapped his arms, and followed the flock as it exploded out onto the road.
With a swift kick, he scattered fluffy feathers and found the cop’s gun.
“Which one do you want?” He gestured to the sergeant’s pistol in his hand and the policeman’s gun stuck in white slime and chicken feathers.
“I do have my limits, you know,” she said.
“Same here.” They left the gun on the ground.
The abandoned cop car was still running.
“Jump inside,” he shouted. She took the passenger seat, and he steered toward the opposite wooden fence.
Their bumper hit the horizontal planks and pushed a section onto a second road.
He faced a row of military uniforms.
“Take ’em out,” he said. She flinched and gasped as he tossed his pistol onto her lap.
He gunned the engine.
Soldiers hit the ground as the gun leapt erratically in Natalie’s delicate hand. She emptied a cartridge at random through the walls and windows of buildings.
Past a disintegrating wall of men, there was nowhere to drive. A canvas-covered personnel carrier blocked the way. They skidded to a halt.
“Jump out,” Mick yelled.
He grabbed Natalie and they sprinted away from the road that was littered with petrified soldiers.
A dusty white Lada sat behind the personnel carrier. A driver squatted behind the open door, the muzzle of a gun aimed at them.
Mick recognized the Lada and the man with the broken nose from Szentendre and the Iron Gates. It was Inspector Stojanovic.
“Get in the car,” the inspector whispered, and fired several shots in the air.
Natalie turned to her husband for a better offer.
“He’s a good guy,” Mick said. “Do as he says.”
They slid into the back seat.
“Kneel on the floor,” the inspector said.
They knelt.
The car backed up the road and paused. The inspector reached out his side window and blew a hole in the personnel carrier’s auxiliary fuel tank.
Mick sat upright to take a look.
Heat from the bullet ignited the diesel fuel. A fraction of a second later, the truck’s canvas was blown off and the contents of the truck was consumed by fire. The metal frame sagged like melted cheese and its tires and cab billowed with black smoke.
The inspector steered casually out of the village and turned north through open country toward Belgrade.
There were no more police or military in sight.
Mick took a deep sigh. He pried the pistol from Natalie’s hand and helped her to sit up on the back seat.
“Natalie,” he said. “Meet Inspector Stojanovic. Inspector, meet my wife.”
Natalie stared down at the bloody knife still clenched in her hand.
It was a nice day to be on the Aegean Sea, and a lovely opportunity to visit an historic site.
Alec was grateful that Father Jovic’s passes and the monk’s robes worked out so well. The items got him, along with the hooded Terry and Scott, past the ring of Greek patrol boats, the Yugoslav President’s personal security force on the quay and most intimidating of all, the forbidding monk at the gate.
The Greeks couldn’t block passage in and out of the independent state, and Serbs were also on foreign soil. Once the threesome had passed the guard booth, Mt. Athos was theirs.
The monk hadn’t frisked them, which would have given Terry’s gender away instantly. Somehow, Alec didn’t expect monks to frisk anyway. Nevertheless, he was glad they weren’t carrying guns.
He would have to be content with Mick’s condition, that he merely obtain evidence to use against President Nikic.
Once past the gate, he saw no further guards, either Greek or Se
rb. The signed slips of paper had given them the keys to the kingdom.
They mounted the first cliff and took in the view. Like the curved back of a dolphin, the island of Thassos lay in a sparkling sea to the east. High cirrus clouds stretched from the dome of a pastel sky down to the watery horizon.
“Religion seems simpler here,” he said.
“Amen,” Scott said.
The Serbian Orthodox monastery was in an enclosure constructed of the same sun-bleached stone as the cliffs of Mt. Athos.
They climbed past the monastery for a better view into the enclosure. High atop the slope, vegetation hugged close to the ground. Alec knelt behind a lone olive tree that clung to the sea face.
At a stone table and profiled against the deep blue sea, two men sat bent in concentration like players at a chess match.
Alec recognized the profile of one man. The fluffy pompadour and fleshy jowls belonged to none other than the President of Yugoslavia.
“Nikic,” he muttered with venom.
“And there’s Mitsotopolos,” Scott whispered.
The balding Greek Prime Minister frowned in thought.
Alec couldn’t move within earshot without giving their presence away. The conversation belonged solely to the two men. He was reminded of medieval princes dividing up territory, solemnly pledging not to dispute each other’s conquests.
A monk in a dark robe approached them wordlessly. It was another pantomiming priest, perhaps. Alec was unable to see a face beneath the cowl or make out the formless body within the creased folds. The monk reached out and flipped Terry’s cowl off her head, revealing a splash of brown hair and her large blue eyes.
“A woman?” the monk said.
It was a high-pitched voice. Almost feminine.
Alec recognized it at once.
Scott dug into his pocket for the passes, but Alec gently restrained him.
“Yes, Dragana,” he said. He pulled Terry’s hood back over her head. “Another country, another woman.”
“I won’t pretend to understand you.”
“Nor will I pretend to understand you.”
She motioned for the three to follow her.
Scott shot Alec a querying look. Without knowing why he should trust Dragana now, Alec realized that he did. “It’s okay. I’ll follow her.”
Alec and Dragana angled closer to the monastery wall and kneeled behind some bushes. He could still see the two political leaders as well as uniformed guards impatiently pacing between trees, bushes and flowers.
“Where’s the Karta?” he asked her.
“It’s there.” Dragana nodded at the men. “I gave it to the Serbs. Serbia is presenting it to Greece as a warning of Macedonian expansionism. It has served its purpose.”
“Merely to bring the Serbs and the Greeks to the bargaining table?”
“That’s it.”
Alec tilted his head back and looked at the sky, trying to understand. Maybe he didn’t know her at all. She was letting the dream of a larger Macedonia slip away by giving the altered map to the Serbs. Now the Serbs and Greeks had every reason to attack Macedonia. The Macedonian nationalists had played right into their hands.
“Are you aware of how you’ve been used?” he said, incredulous.
“Only to the extent that I’ve allowed myself to be used.”
“How did this bastion of religion ever let you in?”
“I brought the Karta. Do you think the church cares for more killings, invading armies, governments consorting with crooks?”
“Since when does the church care? Have you ever met an honest priest?”
“Well, imagine dedicating your life to silence, isolation and chastity.” She looked over at him, then shook her head. “No, I guess I couldn’t picture that.”
Alec persisted, trying to understand her reasoning. “Would a priest appreciate what you’re seeing down there right now?”
“No. But the monastery approved the meeting of these two leaders.”
Alec felt like he was traveling back to the Middle Ages when the church was more of a political force than a source of religious inspiration.
Scott and Terry had moved up to them for a closer look at the drama taking place within the holy compound.
“If I had a gun,” Scott whispered, “I could pick off the president from right here.”
“We can’t get ourselves caught,” Terry said.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Alec said.
Then Scott and Terry got to their feet and edged closer to the monastery for a listen.
When Alec turned back to Dragana, she withdrew her hand from her robe. Calmly, she pulled out a long-barreled .38 with a silencer. “Now’s our chance.”
Alec remembered his vow to Mick to merely collect information, and stood up to block her shot. “Killing the president won’t stop the invasion. The whole machinery is set in motion.”
Dragana removed the hood from her glistening black hair. Her brown eyes glowered from her heart-shaped face. “I’ve been working toward this moment for years. Now, please stand back.”
“Wait. If he dies, who’ll replace him? More of the same, or worse. More butchers. More Zorans. We need more than that. I beg you to wait.”
“Wait for what? This is the result of waiting. Do you know how long I worked on Professor Cercic to get you involved?”
“Dear old Professor Cercic? I thought I was working on him.”
She smiled. “I got him to take you as a student.”
“Four years ago? You were in Belgrade all those years before the war?”
She nodded.
“For all those years you never introduced yourself to me, and I never laid eyes on you? Why did you even target me in the first place?”
“I thought the assets of the American Embassy could help implicate Zoran.”
“You knew Zoran way back then?”
“I worked for him.”
“And you knew that I worked for the Americans?”
“Everyone knew that your brother did. I could only assume that you did.”
He closed his eyes. He began to recall his miraculous escape from the slaughterhouse outside Srebrenica, that distant summer morning. Many young Bosnian men sank to their knees as if in prayer as bullets drilled their chests. No bullet ever hit him. He had remained standing, dumbfounded, looking at the carnage at his feet. He recalled a Serbian lad, just a farm boy, tossing him a rifle and telling him to run.
“You’ll need it,” the kid had explained, nodding at the gun.
Alec had taken the rifle and run. At first it didn’t matter where he ran. He ran because he was alive. He then lived through revolutions in Albania, uprisings in Kosovo. Many inebriated nights later at a café in Skopje, he had ceased his running and begun his stalking.
“And when we finally met in Belgrade, you didn’t fall in love with me at first sight, did you,” he said, feeling bitter.
“It wasn’t first sight.”
Together, under pink and green silk quilts, they had hatched their plan. Together, they would nail the man who had instigated the war in Bosnia. God, how she had figured him out in no time flat. She had learned to speak his language, how he loathed the ineptitude of the West and the legal restraints on the CIA. Since he was presumed dead, nobody was looking for or following him. He was the perfect mark. So she had given him a new identity, more than a name. A purpose in life. She had even given him a battle cry. He would “take matters into his own hands.”
“And you already knew Zoran by then.”
“Since school days.”
He reflected on this. Their introduction to Zoran at a paramilitary training camp in Bosnia had seemed anything but natural. There Alec had stood, an American behind Serb lines, volunteering for service to a young warlord.
While fretting over his own cover at the time, Alec hadn’t pondered too deeply the speed with which Dragana had slipped under Zoran’s arm. If anything, animal lust had seemed natural, the instant intimacy that formed d
uring times of war.
“How did you ever get hooked up with a beast like Zoran?”
“I clawed and scratched my way into his confidence,” she said. “Of course, I knew him from elementary school. But I revived our acquaintance by engineering a ‘chance encounter’ at the Hyatt, then further discussions in his room. In his hot tub, actually. He said he remembered me from our childhood. He wanted to set me up in an acting career. I was finally in. I overheard most of his conversations about his oil trucks in Slavonia, his casinos, his paramilitary force in Bosnia and his long-term plan to invade former areas of Yugoslavia, including Macedonia, my homeland. I discovered you, a lonely bachelor studying military history with a brother and sister-in-law at the American Embassy. Since I needed more help to save Macedonia, I began to work on Professor Cercic.”
He was stunned. Suddenly the enormity of her commitment hit him. In the end, she had used Professor Cercic to get him to smuggle the map to Hungary.
“Okay,” he said. “So you used me pretty well. And now you don’t need me.”
“I have the situation well under control.” She hefted the long-barreled pistol.
“What you don’t understand is that the West has more assets in place than you realize,” he said. “You can make a real difference for Macedonia. We may be slow to anger and slow to react, but once the doctor was tortured and killed, Mick committed himself to this operation. We’re now this close to obtaining hard evidence.”
“Look down there,” she said. “That is your hard evidence.”
“We need something that the War Crimes Tribunal can use. A taped conversation, a written order. Then we can blackmail him.”
She lowered the pistol and studied him, hard. “Something has really changed in you. You’ve killed so many people just to get this opportunity. What’s stopping you now?”
“It’s my brother. My ever-rational brother.”
“He’s CIA.”
“The CIA wants me dead. He’s saving me from the CIA. I owe him for that.”
“What does he want from you?”
“Direct evidence of President Nikic’s involvement,” he said. “We’ll be able to coerce Nikic, threaten to give the War Crimes Tribunal his file unless he commands the army to stop.”