Black Flagged

by Konkoly, Steven; A. Sullivan, Felicia

  He didn’t need to familiarize himself with Resja’s file, he just needed the picture for comparison. Files for the first three names appeared on the second screen, each headed by a picture presumably taken for a driver’s license. The FBI’s sophisticated system would display any confirmed pictures associated with the name, and in most cases, this would be a state license photograph. Berg immediately compared the three images to the picture of Resja. He didn’t see any resemblance, so he entered the next three names and waited.

  The results appeared within seconds, and Berg felt an adrenaline rush. One of the pictures was a possible match. Daniel Petrovich. He opened the file to look at the rest of the pictures, drawing in a deep breath as eight photos filled the screen. Three of the pictures showed Petrovich in various naval uniforms. The highest rank evident in the pictures was ensign, denoted by single gold bars on his uniform collar. The earliest photograph pictured Petrovich in the Navy’s summer white uniform, and had likely been taken immediately after receiving his commission as an officer in the United States Navy. Petrovich looked young and optimistic, very different from the malevolent image staring back at him from the single photograph displayed on the other screen.

  Three additional photos had been provided from different state driver���s licenses in Illinois, Massachusetts and California, but evoked no response from Berg. The last picture showed Petrovich in a blue oxford dress shirt, and looked like the most recently taken picture. There was very little trace of Marko Resja in the last image, though it was clear that they were pictures of the same man.

  Berg’s attention was drawn to one of the photos showing Petrovich in a khaki uniform, standing with his arms crossed, on the steel deck of a warship. Industrial buildings loomed in the background, indicating that the picture had been taken while the ship was docked. Petrovich’s dark wavy hair was long and unkempt, pushing the limits of the Navy’s loose grooming standards. His face looked weathered and exhausted, staring with hatred at an object out of the camera’s view. The expression matched the face of Marko Resja on the other screen. Berg couldn’t believe he had stumbled upon this coincidence.

  He had dreamed about this moment since March 24th, 2003, when Dejan Kavich testified in the trial of Srecko Hadzic, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, and infamous commander of “The Panthers.” The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had already spent two weeks presenting evidence against Hadzic, and would soon convict him of running an organized campaign of genocide in the Kosovar border territories.

  Berg had a very personal interest in Hadzic’s trial. One of the CIA’s long established undercover agents in Serbia had vanished without a trace toward the middle of April in 1999, leaving Berg and the CIA stunned. The disappearance was especially difficult for Berg. He had been assigned to groom the agent for the Serbian assignment in 1991, when she was first assigned to the National Clandestine Service.

  A recent graduate from Loyola University in Chicago, Nicole Erak had scored perfect on every aptitude test used to measure a candidate’s suitability for clandestine field assignment, and she spoke flawless Serbian. As a first generation Serbian-American, raised in a predominately Serbian suburb of Chicago, near Palos Hill, Illinois, her recruitment was no coincidence. The CIA had a critical shortage of reliable human intelligence flowing from the Balkans, and she was fast tracked for deployment to the rapidly deteriorating region.

  Two years after her recruitment by a low profile history professor at Loyola University, Nicole was absorbed into Belgrade’s gritty underworld as Zorana Sekulic, where she would emerge hanging on the arms of some of the most notorious men in Europe.

  Ten years after seeing Nicole for the last time, Berg was reading transcripts of the trial, still searching for any possible clues about her disappearance, when he came across the testimony of Dejan Kavich, a low level enforcer within Hadzic’s Panther organization. Kavich recounted dozens of instances where Hadzic had personally ordered the murder of civilians and suspected Kosovar militants, which was nothing new coming from the long string of witnesses that had turned on Hadzic in exchange for Tribunal leniency. However, the Tribunal prosecutors asked Kavich to repeat the details of an incident that they thought would demonstrate Hadzic’s ruthless nature, and this is where Berg’s interest peaked.

  Kavich described a bloody and hectic week in Belgrade at the beginning of April in 1999, which was nearly the same timeframe associated with Nicole’s disappearance. Though NATO jets were still hampered by thick overcast skies, blood flowed on the streets of Belgrade. At the time, Kavich thought that the sudden civil war between two of Serbia’s most powerful paramilitary groups was a simple blood feud sparked by the unprovoked murder and mutilation of Hadzic’s handicapped brother. His security chief, Radovan Grahovac, had also been killed in the bizarre attack, along with his entire personal security entourage, which suggested that there was more to the event than a simple blood feud.

  After years of investigative research, the Tribunal now understood why Hadzic had initiated a self-destructive war against rival paramilitary leader Mirko Jovic’s “White Eagles.” He not only suffered the loss of his brother and trusted security chief in the brazenly twisted attack, but more importantly to Hadzic, he had been robbed of his entire criminal fortune. Confiscated bank records showed a sudden, systematic transfer of his wealth out of long held European bank accounts, to new accounts scattered throughout the Caribbean and South America. From there, the money vanished along an untraceable trail of wire transfers. Some of the money had been transferred by Hadzic himself at the outset of NATO hostilities, but one hundred and thirty million dollars suddenly left Europe on April 23, 1999, and it all had previously belonged to Hadzic. The result was predictable for a man already considered to be one of the most ruthless and fickle psychopaths in Europe.

  Hadzic dispatched his most trusted Panthers to take immediate revenge, and he particularly wanted to avenge his brother’s death. Pavle Hadzic had been found hacked to death in his wheel chair, the obvious victim of an infamous White Eagle enforcer, Goran Lujic, who had used an ice-climbing axe as his personal calling card for over a decade on the Belgrade organized crime scene. Kavich had participated in two ambushes in Belgrade on the first day of hostilities, and was almost killed the next day in a retaliatory raid by White Eagle commandos on a Panther safe house in Zemun, but the Tribunal wasn’t interested in the back and forth fighting between paramilitary groups. The Hague wanted to pin as many civilian murders on Hadzic as the Tribunal jury could tolerate, and Kavich knew of a particularly gruesome murder.

  On one of the deadlier nights of fighting, Kavich witnessed a bizarre exchange between Hadzic and a trusted Panther sniper, Marko Resja, in the basement of a safe house hidden deep inside a run-down suburb of Belgrade. Resja had arrived by himself, wearing a blood stained, mud caked camouflage uniform devoid of any insignia. A black watch cap was pulled tight over his head to merge with a face smeared black and brown with grease. He walked into the basement carrying a Dragunov sniper rifle in one hand, and large blue nylon duffel bag in the other. Kavich was located at the bottom of the basement stairs when Resja was searched in the landing off the kitchen. He heard one of the guards utter “Oh fuck,” and became momentarily alarmed, but the guard called down “all clear,” and he heard Resja descend the stairs.

  Resja gave Kavich a barely discernible nod as he passed by, which wasn’t unusual. Resja was all business, and didn’t fraternize with many of the Panthers. He spent most of his time in the field stalking Kosovar militia. On that particular night, Resja walked into the room and slung the rifle over his shoulder, freeing one of his hands. He was immediately greeted by Hadzic, who shook his hand enthusiastically, and slapped him on the shoulder. Resja responded with a rare display of friendliness and banter, before he tossed the duffel bag onto the floor, and declared that “he had gotten to the bottom of their problem.”

  Hadzic told the nearest Panther to show him what was in the bag, and th
e burly guard standing next to Resja kneeled down on the floor and opened the zipper. The unmistakable stench of rotting flesh filled the room immediately, and the burly guard gagged, mumbling protests against touching the contents. Hadzic ordered him to remove the contents, and the guard took in a deep breath before turning back to the bag. Resja softly told him to “take out Lujic” first, and this caused some confusion for the guard. Resja added “he’s the one with the short hair.” At this point, everyone in the room was deathly quiet, waiting for the guard to reach into the bag, which he did reluctantly, using both hands to remove the severed head of Goran Lujic, Pavle Hadzic’s presumed murderer.

  Goran’s face had been brutally beaten, showing extensive bruising and pulverized eye sockets. One of his ears was missing, which Kavich learned was the result of Resja’s extensively thorough torture routine. Resja announced that Lujic had confessed to torturing Pavle for access information to Hadzic’s accounts, and eventually killing him. The money was promptly transferred to accounts owned by Lujic’s boss, Mirko Jovic, leader of “The White Eagles.” Resja added that he had hacked off Lujic’s head with the same axe used against Pavle. Hadzic nodded with stunned approval, and looked down at the bag, which contained still another surprise.

  While squirming under the knife, Lujic had implicated someone close to the Panther organization. He told Resja that they had learned of Pavle’s access to the money through a woman that frequented the company of Radovan Grahovac’s men in Belgrade. Apparently Radovan, or one of his close associates suffered from loose lips while under the spell of liquor and beautiful women. One of the nightclub regulars had learned that Pavle actively managed his brother’s vast monetary fortune, and the rest was history. Marko had found her hiding in a small White Eagle safe house on the outskirts of Belgrade, and used the same axe on her.

  Hadzic grew impatient while Resja explained, and demanded to see the other head, but it was obvious that the guard still holding Lujic’s head was in no condition to pull another one out of the bag. He was barely holding onto the first. On Resja’s cue, he dropped the head back into the bag, which made an awful thunk against the concrete floor beneath the bag. Resja impassively pulled the other severed head out of the bag, his hand wrapped tightly around a long, thick spread of filthy, matted black hair.

  He announced “Zorana Sekulic,” and “held the head up high, like Perseus is often pictured holding the Gorgon Medusa’s severed head.” Sekulic had been beaten worse than Lujic, bruises and contusions covering nearly every square centimeter of her once beautiful, angular face. Both eyes had been gouged out, and she was only identifiable by her long hair and a single diamond stud nose ring, which was miraculously still visible on her battered nose.

  A few members of the Tribunal had chuckled at Kavich’s obviously coached reference to Greek mythology, even admonishing the prosecution to cut the theatrics, but according to Kavich, nobody had laughed in that putrid, candlelit basement of the safe house. Everybody in that room knew Zorana, and everybody in that room had partied in the clubs with her at some point very recently. Hadzic had probably seen every one of them alone in her company within the past month, and the implications of her treachery were apparent to even the dimmest of henchmen huddled in that basement. They all wanted to run for the staircase, because Hadzic looked like he had reached the point of critical mass.

  “I hope you fucked her corpse,” Kavich remembered him saying to Resja, before demanding to see the head of Mirko Jovic in the same bag. Resja told Hadzic “I’ll see what I can do,” and walked out of the basement. When asked what happened to Resja, Kavich commented that nobody ever saw him again. They all assumed he had been killed trying to find Jovic, and ended up in one of dozens of unmarked mass graves found in the fields surrounding Belgrade.

  Berg remembered reading the transcript of Kavich’s testimony with a strange sense of detachment. He had finally uncovered Nicole Erak’s fate, and the name of the man who brutally killed her, but he felt no closure. Hadzic was eventually convicted of Lujic’s murder, but no formal charges were filed against Hadzic pertaining to the brutal murder of Zorana Sekulic. The Hague issued a warrant and summons for Marko Resja, adding another name to the already impossibly long list of thugs and murderers associated with the paramilitary groups that flourished under Slobodan Milosevic’s regime. Nobody cared about finding Marko Resja except the CIA, and Berg knew that even the CIA’s interest had a limited half-life.

  Agency attempts to locate information regarding Marko Resja led nowhere. Berg, and other members of the CIA wanted to find Resja, and make him pay horribly for Nicole’s death, but Resja had indeed disappeared shortly after Nicole’s murder. Belgrade in the spring of 1999 had a way of eating people up, and spitting them out.

  The memory of Nicole Erak’s murder faded quickly at Langley. One year after Berg read Kavich’s testimony, a star was added to The Memorial Wall in the Original Headquarters Building in honor of Nicole’s sacrifice, but no name was added to the Book of Honor below it. The nature and fact of Nicole Erak’s service to the United States would remain a guarded secret for eternity. Berg had attended the ceremony, which always drew a smaller crowd when the name was unknown. He shared a few knowing glances, and returned to his office to move on. With the War on Terror in full swing throughout the Middle East, turmoil in the Balkans was the least of the CIA’s worries. The Counter Terrorism Center demanded his full attention, which he’d delivered uninterrupted, until about five minutes ago.

  Reading the name, Marko Resja, on Keller’s report, hit Berg like a sledgehammer, bringing him right back to the moment he read Kavich’s testimony. His mind flashed to the details of Nicole���s mutilation and murder, and he jumped into action, immediately deciding that if Resja’s face matched one of the operatives listed on the Black Flag roster, he wouldn’t stop until Resja was dead.

  Berg tapped a few more keys, and a new screen replaced Resja’s file. He entered a separate access code, and found himself staring at a new file matrix. He searched the list for Nicole’s code name, Seraph, and opened the file. The words “deceased” filled the top of the screen, just above a searchable image gallery. He stared at the images displayed by the system.

  The first picture was taken by CIA interviewers outside of Loyola University in Chicago, and showed a classically beautiful young woman. She had soft, light brown eyes and jet black hair. Typical of mixed Balkan descent, her skin carried an olive complexion, giving her a unique exotic quality among descendants of northern Serbs, but not enough to draw the wrong kind of nationalist attention in Belgrade. She wore an optimistic, yet guarded smile in the picture, appropriate for a sharp, observant young woman being photographed by complete strangers in a rented apartment on the north side of Chicago.

  The second picture was taken during an early phase of CIA training, and showed much less of the idealistic young college graduate. Taken in one of the classrooms at headquarters, it showed a close-up of Nicole seated behind a desk, staring skeptically at one of the instructors. By this point, she probably understood that she was not being trained to sit behind a desk in McLean, Virginia. Lying to family and friends about the nature of her employment had become second nature, and she might have strongly suspected, by the intensity and subject matter of her training, that her role within the National Clandestine Service would be atypical. She wasn’t receiving the same diplomatic role-play training given to field agents assigned to cover positions at U.S. embassies around the world.

  The third image barely resembled the young woman who had reported to Langley a mere two years earlier. Several close-up shots had been snapped by an embassy “employee” in Belgrade, and caught her exiting a popular cafe on Knez Mihailova Street, near the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art. She wore a gray turtleneck sweater under a tight black leather jacket. Black, knee-high leather boots rose up to meet a tight, dark maroon half skirt, leaving several inches of skin along her legs exposed to the cold Balkan winter. Her black hair was pulled back into a tigh
t bun, accentuating her exotic face. From a distance, she looked like any well dressed, cosmopolitan woman on the streets of Manhattan, but the next image showed a different story.

  He clicked on a close-up of her face, and it showed signs of weariness. Heavy eye shadow outlined her eyes, but couldn’t hide the exhaustion. A small diamond nose ring poked out of her left nostril. This had been recommended by members of Clandestine Branch responsible for creating her cover “legend,” since it was a trend popular among women on the “professional” nightclub scene in Europe, especially Paris, where Zorana Sekulic had spent the last five years studying art and partying. Berg studied the photo closely. She looked hard. Attractive, sexy, an object to behold in Belgrade. But very little trace of Nicole broke through the icy exterior shell she had formed after a year in Belgrade.

  He felt terrible for what had happened to her. She had spent six years in the company of some of the worst monsters in recent human history, spying on them, coaxing information out of them using methods he refused to contemplate. All to be murdered and only God knew what else at the very end of her assignment. The entire Milosevic regime had been about to collapse, and the CIA wanted her out of Belgrade before the NATO bombing started. All she had to do was drive over the border into Hungary or Romania. Less than a two hour drive in either direction, and she could have put it all behind her.

  She refused to leave. Her handler, another deep cover operative assigned to Serbia, had stressed that she was no longer mentally stable enough to remain in place, and that she had begun to show signs of severe schizophrenia. According to his report, she believed she was Zorana Sekulic, and had lost the ability to fully understand her reality. Based on his report, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Serbia, the CIA authorized a forced extraction. A plan was formed by special operators to kidnap her from the streets of Belgrade, but Nicole vanished before the plan could be executed.