“You’re sure?” Reilly said.
“Positive.” Like Nadaj, this individual had a beard, but the resemblance ended there. He had gray hair and appeared at least ten years older.
Looking at Shenlee, Reilly asked him what happened at the house. “We surprised them,” Shenlee said. “We could see in from outside the house. There were three of them, two men and a woman. I figured this had to be him—”
I said, “I have an idea what might have happened. Nadaj was on the premises but, for whatever reason, was somewhere else at the moment you people arrived. When he saw what was happening, he made tracks.”
I explained to Reilly and Shenlee that Buck and I saw someone going over the wall at the rear of the compound.
“What do we do now?” Reilly asked.
“Give Buck and me a van and one of the maps. If we’re lucky, we might locate him before he gets back to his people.”
Reilly looked uncertainly toward Shenlee.
“No way,” Shenlee said. “No way I let these two out of my sight.”
Ignoring Shenlee, I pointed to the van with the prisoner. “Whoever this individual is, take him back. If he’s the local Mafia chief, kidnapping him will only cause problems. Buck and I’ll try and locate Nadaj.”
Reilly nodded, and ordered his men out of the van. Looking back at me, he said, “We’re on our way back to Bondsteel. You and Romero can catch up with us there.”
Ignoring Shenlee, who was still squawking to Reilly and threatening to have him busted back to E-1, I climbed into the van and turned over the engine. Thirty seconds later, with Buck in the passenger seat, we were on the road.
Chapter 38
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The first problem was to locate a road that would take us in the general direction we wanted to go. Buck had the map spread out on his knees and was trying to read it with the help of his compass and a pencil flash that he had in his mouth. It was already close to 2200.
I said, “If it was Nadaj who went over the wall, he’ll want to get back to Pristina.”
After a while, Buck got a fix on where we were. “There’s what looks like a road leading toward Klina. Just keep going in this direction.”
But as we drove, we began to realize our chances of locating the individual, whoever he was, weren’t great. If he was smart enough to keep off the roads, we could be passing him by at any time and never know it. Because of the hills and largely unpaved roads, driving in Kosovo is a lot like an extended session on top of a bucking bronc, and I had an idea that the mechanics in the vehicle maintenance shop at Camp Bondsteel spent a lot of time replacing struts and shock absorbers.
We rode up and down a lot of hills before arriving at Klina, a small city in which everything was shut up tight. The moon had disappeared, and the night was pitch black. The city had a main drag, but most of the streets were no wider than alleys and hardly wide enough for the van. I decided to circle around, looking for a primary road that might take us somewhere. We were hoping we’d encounter someone on foot on the road—and that he would turn out to be Ramush Nadaj. But as we drove, we began to realize the chances of anything like that happening were extremely remote.
Without any real knowledge of the area and without any idea of where I should be going, we continued to drive more or less in circles. I didn’t want to say it, but maybe Shenlee had been right. This expedition had all the earmarks of a wild-goose chase.
At some point we halted at the side of the road and spent some time studying the map and trying to figure what direction someone on the run might go. The strain of peering through the windshield into the darkness had made me feel tired, and after nearly two hours I turned the wheel over to Buck. As he drove, I kept my eyes peeled, hoping I might see someone on the road. Eventually, there were streaks of gold light in the sky. We’d been driving for over five hours.
Still later, we encountered a farmer driving a hay wagon drawn by a lone ox. He was the first sign of life, the first indication of a new day. We stayed behind him for five minutes before reaching an intersection where we could pass. Farther on, we passed a couple of cars, both of them ancient jalopies, coming in the opposite direction. Then we turned into a narrow dirt road with a lot of rocks on it. There were trees on both sides. Buck halted the van. We were really in the boondocks.
Although I didn’t say anything, I wondered what Buck had in mind. He took another look at the map. Finally, he said, “Does this area look familiar?”
I shook my head. “Should it?”
He turned over the engine. “At the top of this hill is an abandoned mine.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s also a shack, assuming it’s still there.” With the van’s engine working hard, we made it to the top of the hill. My watch said 0630 hours. A weak sun was rising in the east causing the trees to cast long shadows.
For a long moment, Buck and I just sat in the van taking in the scene. Behind the shack was a rugged steep hill thick with brush and scrub pine. Off to our left was a wide rock-filled path, which I assumed led toward the abandoned mine. Some thoughtful person had placed a barrier across the path, a warning to kids and strangers to stay away.
I recognized the shack as the building in which Nadaj and his crew had held me prisoner.
“Yeah,” I said after a moment, “this place is familiar. It turns up regularly in my nightmares, the really bad ones.” I didn’t add that in the recurring nightmare I’m looking up out of a coffin when someone slams down the lid and everything goes black.
I said, “I assume you were looking for it.”
“I knew it was around here somewhere. The thought occurred to me that maybe Nadaj might come over here. Hide out for a while until his friends showed up.”
“It’s a thought. But if he has a phone, he’s probably already let people know where he is. He could be in Pristina by now.”
We climbed out of the van and split up, Buck approaching the shack from one side, me from the other. When I reached the building, I took a careful peek through the window, but didn’t see anyone. The place was empty. I signaled to Buck, who came around from the other side. After I’d kicked open the door and with weapons at the ready, we entered the building together.
The interior was pretty much as I remembered it—table, chairs, a couple of cots, a wooden chest that was supposed to serve as an icebox, but was empty of food. On one side was a small closet, which I opened and found empty except for some newspapers and rags piled in the corner.
Then I noticed it: On the table was a small metal ashtray. In the ashtray were cigarette ashes and two squashed butts. In the air was a faint smell of stale tobacco. Buck had smelled it too. He pointed at the ashtray, and I nodded.
We both had the same thought.
“Let’s get going,” Buck said, speaking loudly.
“No sense hanging around here,” I said.
We clumped out of the shack, making sure as we went that we left the door open. As Buck climbed back into the van and turned over the engine, I removed my boots, unholstered my M-4, stepped back inside, looked the room over.
Did I want to do this?
The trapdoor was adjacent to the table. When I gave Buck a wave, he gunned the engine and started back down the hill.
Just standing there and recalling my experience with Nadaj’s KLA gang in this very building, I could feel my adrenalin rushing, my heart pounding, and my hands sweating. I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to get my emotions under control. I didn’t like the idea of making myself vulnerable to whoever might be playing hide-and-seek with us.
Crossing the wooden floor would be the dangerous part, and I stood there for a long minute just surveying the situation, determining the points on the floor where the boards were nailed over the beams and wouldn’t be likely to creak. It was twenty feet to the other side of the room. Finally, when I moved, I did so very carefully, placing one foot down, then the other. Each time I took a step, I paused, waited, and lis
tened. Just one creaking board would be enough to give away my presence to whoever, when he heard us coming, might have squashed out his cigarette, and decided to make himself scarce by climbing down into the hole beneath the shack.
Whoever he was, he wouldn’t figure that we’d know there was a hidey-hole beneath the floor.
If there was someone down there, I would be very vulnerable until I could get to a point in the room where I wouldn’t be immediately seen if he pushed open the trapdoor. Both Buck and I had arrived on the military scene too late for the Vietnam War, but we’d heard plenty of stories of the damage done by Vietcong concealed in spider holes who would, without warning, leap up and announce their presence with bursts of fire at short range. In some cases, they were able to take out entire squads with these brazen tactics.
The next four or five minutes seemed like an eternity, but that’s how long it took before I was able to cross the floor to a point where I was standing directly behind the trapdoor. If the door moved upward, I would no longer be visible, not immediately at least. Because I didn’t want to risk easing my weight down and perhaps causing a board to creak, I remained upright. I couldn’t see Buck, but I assumed he’d come back up the hill on foot and was somewhere outside the shack.
After another five minutes, I was ready to concede there was no one down there and was about to call out to Buck. For some reason, though, I decided to give it another minute—and it was at that moment that I heard something, the sound of someone moving. It seemed to come from somewhere beneath the wooden floor. Another couple of minutes went by. Then the trapdoor slowly began to move upward, its rusty hinges creaking ever so slightly. As the trapdoor continued to rise, I saw the barrel of an automatic weapon moving from side to side, establishing a field of fire from one wall to the other. Whoever he was, he was good, and he was being very careful.
When he didn’t see anyone, he readied himself to climb out. As he pushed the trapdoor up a little higher, I could see his arm, then the back of his head. I thought I recognized it. Just the sight of Nadaj together with the stink rising out of the hole was enough to send me over the edge.
His last movement offered me the opportunity I wanted. I reached out, grabbed the barrel of the weapon, and ripped the gun from his hands. At the same time, I shoved the table away, which upended it, and kicked the trapdoor open the rest of the way. Then I fastened my hand around his arm and yanked him the rest of the way out of the hole.
When I saw his startled look, I couldn’t resist.
“Hello, Ramush.”
His eyes flashed, and when I saw the beginnings of that goofy smile, it brought back more memories. The knife he produced, seemingly from out of nowhere, was the same one he’d waved in front of my face at our first meeting, with the dark handle and curved blade—the one he was going to use to cut off my nose. I was ready for him. Before he could slash me with it, I smashed the barrel of my automatic against his face. When he made another pass at me with the blade, I clobbered him again. Blood spurted from somewhere. I suppose the smart thing would have been to shoot him then and there, but I decided to hit him again, catching him just below his left eye. Although his face now looked like hamburger, he was tough, and he still hung on to the knife. In an effort to make him drop the blade, I hit him again. By this time blood was all over. I grabbed his wrist and forced his arm downward, but he still had some resistance. He stepped and dodged, and somehow got his arm loose. I anticipated his next move—and ducked as he swung and narrowly missed slashing off my ear.
With my hand squeezing his wrist, he finally had to drop the knife, but my gun hand struck the upended table, causing me to lose my grip on the automatic—and it fell to the floor. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“Goddamn!”
All I could think to do was kick the gun to keep Nadaj from grabbing it. But that didn’t help much either. Down on his knees, he was closer to the weapon than I was, and scrambled after it. Just as he picked it up, Buck came crashing through the door and Nadaj fired in his direction. Blinded by his own blood and with an eye closed, he wasn’t even close, and that one shot was all he got.
After I’d leaped on top of Nadaj and wrestled the gun from his hand, I said, “You tried to kill my partner.” Again, I smashed him with the weapon.
I said, “And that’s for Fabiola’s brother!”
Holding his arm over his bloody face, Nadaj looked about the way I must have looked almost a year ago, before they tossed me into the hole. For some reason, that made me feel good. A second later, I felt Buck’s hand on my upper arm, preventing me from swinging again.
I was breathing hard. As I got to my feet, Buck said, “Why didn’t you just shoot the bastard?”
“I’m too softhearted.”
“No, you’re a vindictive son of a bitch.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue the point.
As Buck kept his weapon trained on Nadaj, I put my boots back on and brought some rope back from the vehicle. We made sure that Ra-mush Nadaj was trussed up good and tight before we shoved him into the back of the van, and then got going.
Roughly three miles from the shack, on the road back toward Camp Bondsteel, we saw a distant cloud of dust rapidly coming our way. It was a pickup truck barreling down the center of the road with its horn blasting. As Buck swerved at the last minute, doing a good job of keeping the van out of a ditch running parallel to the road, the other driver raised his fist while the half dozen guys in the rear laughed and waved their automatic weapons.
“I wonder if that gentleman has a driver’s license,” Buck said when we were back in the middle of the road.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Driver’s licenses in Kosovo are optional.”
“Those fellows in the rear could have been soldiers. They had automatic weapons.”
“I noticed that too,” I said. “I wonder where they could be going.”
Buck only smiled. Neither one of us said what we knew to be the case: we’d caught up with Ramush Nadaj just in time.
Chapter 39
Friday, February 15, 2008
It was a good thing I resisted the urge to shoot Nadaj when I had the chance. At least that’s how Jerry Shenlee explained things at lunch the following day. According to Jerry, Nadaj was much more valuable alive than dead.
“He gassed his own men in Afghanistan,” Jerry told us. “He’s a goddamn war criminal. We have reasons to keep him alive.”
As I poured some vinegar on my salad, I nodded. I was willing to take Jerry’s word for it.
We were in a cozy semiprivate dining room in Camp Bondsteel with a large round table in the middle of it. Shenlee, Captain Reilly, Buck, and I were there shooting the breeze when, to my surprise, we were joined by Sylvia who arrived halfway through the meal. I wondered when she’d arrived in Kosovo.
Needless to say, she immediately became the center of everyone’s attention.
“From what I understand,” she said, “Nadaj is being detained here. Good work, gentlemen. The news will make some people in our nation’s capitol very happy.” She smiled, and raised a glass of orange juice. “It’s taken a while.”
“We found him at a meeting with one of the village Mafia people,” Shenlee said while munching some spareribs. “A couple of us went in after him, but he’d already split.”
That much was accurate.
“After we determined that he was gone, I ordered Klear and Romero to go after him.”
Although that wasn’t exactly the way things happened, Reilly, Buck, and I all remained silent. The fact that Jerry would be taking much of the credit for the capture of Ramush Nadaj wasn’t something that would cause any of us to become bent out of shape. We knew that Jerry had his career to think about. Maybe at some point he’d buy Buck and me lunch.
Or maybe he’d get the government to intercede on my behalf regarding the murder rap that was hanging over my head in Germany. I was scheduled to fly back to Ramstein at 1530, and I made a mental note to catch up with Shenlee
and Sylvia before I left.
Sylvia said, “If Kurt Mehling or anyone else accuses the United States of having employed sarin gas against the Taliban in Afghanistan, we’ll be able to counter the charge. We’ll only need to persuade Mr. Nadaj to say what really happened.”
“What we really ought to do,” Shenlee said, “is turn him over to the World Court in The Hague. Like we did with Milosevic. This guy violated the Geneva Convention. Let them try him for war crimes.”
Nodding, Sylvia said, “That might happen. But it’s a decision that some other people will have to make. Meanwhile, Mr. Nadaj stays in the jail here.”
“And I don’t want to read about this incident in the newspapers,” Shenlee said.
“He’s not our worry anymore,” Buck said. “We’ll forget we ever heard of the guy.” It was Buck who had organized the first Nadaj rendition, and I knew he was relieved that we’d finally managed to remove Nadaj from circulation. Maybe the reputation of the Gold Dust Twins wasn’t as bright and shiny as it once was, but it was at least still in tact. One thing I’ve learned from being involved for twenty years with special ops: be thankful for small favors.
Although she was pretending not to notice me, I could see Sylvia occasionally glancing across the table in my direction. I wondered what the significance might be of that, if any. As I returned to the table with a second cup of coffee, Captain Reilly was carrying his tray toward the exit.
We shook hands and promised to keep in touch. The truth was, I’d never completely stopped wondering how my life would have turned out if I’d stayed with Special Forces. If circumstances hadn’t brought me to the attention of Jim McDaniel, the agency recruiter, I never would have ended up doing the stuff I’ve been doing for so long.
I caught up with Shenlee and Sylvia an hour later in one of the offices in the S-2 section. Sylvia was seated behind the desk gazing at a computer, and Shenlee was resting his rear end against the desk while reading through some files. I had a feeling they’d been talking over the promotions they were likely to receive and the good reports that would go into their personnel files.
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