Sensing Tanner’s anguish, Bear did his best to reassure him: “I’ll take care of her. You worry about finding that lake and the train. We’ll be waiting when you get to Trieste.”
As with their hurried trip from Trieste to Innsbruck, Tanner had no timely transportation choices. The next flight to Graz, the largest city near Kulm am Zirbitz and the village closest to the Neumvield See, wasn’t until mid-afternoon. If he took the Mercedes, pushed the autobahn’s generous speed limits, and didn’t get himself lost in the labyrinth of Alpine roads between here and the Neumvield See, he could make the trip in three hours.
It took four, and would have taken longer still if not for the Mercedes’s powerful engine, as Tanner’s route took him deeper and higher into Austria’s eastern Alps with each passing mile.
It was shortly before four when he pulled into Kulm am Zirbitz. The sign on the outskirts—“Hohe 2678 Meters”—put the village at a dizzying nine thousand feet above sea level. Tanner had little trouble believing it as he stared at the peaks, jagged spires of black granite framed by snow-encrusted ridges. The lower slopes were an unbroken carpet of pine and spruce. Here and there Briggs caught glimpses of rivers, veins of silver-blue threading their way through the forests and into the valleys beyond.
As Kulm am Zirbitz was all but unknown to anyone outside of the Steiermark province, Oaken’s search for local amenities turned up little of interest to the typical tourist, but Tanner’s visit was anything but typical. As it turned out, the village was a favorite spot of local bergfisch, or mountain fish, a special breed of divers who preferred Alpine lakes to the oceans. According to Oaken, this village of only twenty-two hundred souls hosted three dive shops.
With daylight rapidly dwindling, Briggs chose the first shop he passed, found a parking spot, and walked inside. A middle-aged man with pale blue eyes and the sloping shoulders of a swimmer came out from behind the counter and smiled broadly. “Guten tag.!”
“Guten tag,” Tanner replied.
“Ah, English?”
Tanner smiled. “Am I that bad?”
“Not at all, not at all. How can I help you?”
Tanner had decided against an elaborate story to cover his search for Istvan’s train. It was probably a draw for local divers, so his interest was unlikely to arouse suspicion. Realizing this, Tanner was curious how Istvan’s canisters had remained undiscovered this long. Perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps they were at this moment sitting on some diver’s souvenir shelf at home, that pair of curious cylinders they hadn’t yet gotten around to inspecting. The thought of it sent a tingle through Tanner’s scalp.
“I was hoping to do a little camping tonight, then some diving tomorrow. From what I hear, you’re the man to see about rentals.”
The man’s smile broadened with the compliment. “Very kind.” He extended his hand. “I’m Jurgen. What kind of equipment do you need?”
“Just diving. I have my own camping gear.”
The owner asked him a series of questions, trying to narrow his needs, before settling on a diving rig. As the owner gathered it from the back, he called, “Where are you headed?”
“Neumvield See.”
“Good choice. Do you need directions? I have good maps.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Tanner replied. “In fact, maybe you can help me with something else. A buddy of mine from Graz told me about this train that went into the lake a few years ago…”
Jurgen walked out of the back room lugging a scuba tank; he slid it into the oversized duffel with the rest of the gear. “The Geist Zug.”
It took a moment for Tanner to translate the words: “The Ghost Train?”
“That’s what we call it around here. Officially it was the Salzburg-Paal number seven. The lake had started eroding a section of track ballast and none of the inspectors caught it. The whole section finally just turned to quicksand. When the train passed over it, the ties gave way. The railroad people thought she grazed the landward slope, started rocking, then rolled over and went in.”
“Survivors?”
“Oh, no. They guessed the time from when she started rocking to when she rolled over was twenty seconds. She sunk like a stone. Plus, it was December. At that altitude, the water runs at about zero Celsius.”
Thirty-two Fahrenheit, Tanner thought. The point where water is more slush than liquid. He tried to imagine the scene: the screams of the passengers, the pounding of the train’s wheels on the tracks, the shrieking of steel … And then the slow, unrecoverable roll toward the lake’s surface, icy water pouring through the windows, filling the passageways as the train spiraled into the deep.
“What I wouldn’t give to see her,” Jurgen said. “They took some pictures of her. She’s sitting perfectly upright, you know. Like she’s still chugging along the tracks. Ach, that would be a dive to remember.”
“Why haven’t you gone?” Tanner asked.
“Your friend didn’t tell you? The site’s off limits. Verboten by the government.”
“Why?”
“The spring after she went in, the railroad sent some divers down to survey her. About twenty minutes later they popped up five miles into the lake—dead.”
“Undertow,” Tanner said.
“Exactly so. It sucked them straight to the bottom and dragged them for five miles before letting them go. They were beaten to a pulp. So what did the government do? They sent a team from the navy. Two more divers go down, two more pop up. There’s an underground river, you see. It pumps into the lake and circles the shore like a …” The owner hesitated, then made a circling motion with his fingertip.
“Whirlpool?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“How fast?”
“Four, five knots. No one goes near it. Even the bergfisch stay away, and they’re verruckt—crazy! Besides, since no one survived and no bodies were ever recovered. It has become a Heiligtwn—a sacred place. People say, let them rest where they died. It would be almost like grave robbing, you see?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not thinking about—”
Tanner shook his head. “No. I’m not that stupid.”
Oh, but you are, Briggs thought. Without proof to the contrary, he wasn’t willing to believe the Salzburg-Paal’s reputation had deterred Svetic in his search for Kestrel. Somehow Tanner doubted a local ghost story would frighten off a man as driven as Svetic.
Now the question was, How did he make the dive and not end up like the four divers who’d gone before him?
“How deep is the water where she went in?” he asked.
“The deepest part is about two hundred fifty meters—for you, eight hundred feet.”
“Eight hundred feet?” Tanner repeated. “But—”
“No, no, you misunderstand. The train hit a shelf at about sixty feet and stopped rolling. There’s a nice memorial at the spot she went in. The railroad stopped using that line about six years ago. I can draw you a map.”
Jurgen sketched the map, went over it with Tanner, then finished loading the gear into the duffel. As Tanner hefted the bag onto his shoulder and headed for the door, Horgan said, “It’s funny, you know, how thing’s happen.”
Tanner turned back. “How so?”
“No one around here talks about the Salzburg-Paal. It’s been years since anyone’s asked. Now in less than a week I’ve told the story twice.”
“Pardon me?”
“I had another customer—three of them, in fact—”
“When, how long ago?”
“Three, four days.”
Briggs forced a smile. “I’m sure you talked them out of it.”
“I hope so,” Jurgen replied, then shrugged. “Well, at least I haven’t heard of any bodies popping up on the Neumvield.”
Too bad, Tanner thought. If these mystery customers had in fact been Svetic and his men, a few bodies on the Neumvield might have solved his biggest problem. Now he’d have to find out for hi
mself.
The map took him two miles out of town, through a tunnel cut into the side of the mountain, and into the valley beyond. He turned off the main road and drove another mile before spotting the signs Jurgen had mentioned, then followed them to a small gravel clearing surrounded by forest. A sign with red lettering pointed down a trail: “Salzburg-Paal Zug Stelle.”
He got out and started unloading his gear. The sun was an hour from setting, but the surrounding mountains and thick canopy cast the valley in twilight. Briggs clicked on his flashlight and shined the beam into the tree line. He saw only blackness; it was at once beautiful and forbidding. Hansel and Gretel, where are you? he thought. With the forests of Germany and Austria as their inspiration, it was little wonder the Brothers Grimm had managed to conjure up such dark tales.
He put the duffel on his shoulder and started down the trail.
After two hundred yards he came to a wooden footbridge that led him over the old rail line, now partially covered in vines and foliage. Lengths of the old track, brown with rust, peeked through the greenery. Across the footbridge a platform had been built on the shore overhanging the water. At the railing stood a squat, black marble obelisk bearing a gold plaque. In German, it listed the names of the dead in alphabetical order.
The surface of the Neumvield See was perfectly calm, a mirror against which the surrounding mountains shined in the dying light. The air was crisp and still. Briggs stared at the trees along the bank, expecting to see them sway with a gust of wind, but they stood frozen, as though painted against the background. Somewhere an owl gave a double hoot, then went silent.
He knelt down and dipped his fingers in the water. It was cold, no more than sixty-five degrees. He did some quick calculations in his head. Given the temperature and depth, he could afford at most three ten-minute dives.
He was about to slip into his gear when something near the footbridge caught his eye: a chunk of gray amid the foliage. Flashlight held before him, he stepped over the tracks and knelt down. Half-hidden by the undergrowth was a cinder block. Curiously, it was in perfect condition, unblemished by moss or lichen. He turned it over and found the grass underneath still green.
Tanner glanced back at the shoreline, an idea forming in his head.
He rooted around until he found a branch long enough for his needs, then walked back to the memorial, slipped into his dive gear, and lowered himself off the platform and into the water. Stepping carefully, probing ahead with the branch, he waded out until the water reached his chest. Suddenly the branch plunged downward, almost slipping from his grip. Here was the shelf Jurgen had warned him about.
Briggs slipped the mask over his face, took a deep breath then clicked on his headlamp and ducked under the water. It took just five minutes to find what he was looking for. Driven into the rocky sand was a heavy steel stake; attached to this was a rope that trailed over the edge of the drop-off. Like the cinder block on shore, the rope looked brand-new.
Hand-over-hand, he began reeling in the rope. After six feet, the line jerked taught. Unless he was wrong, knotted to the other end he’d find a second, and maybe third, cinder block—and very close by the Salzburg-Paal Geist Zug.
Simple but effective. Tanner thought. Svetic and his men had simply rented a boat and, using the memorial as a starting point, gone fishing, trolling along the shore and dipping the block until they struck something solid. Then, like mountaineers on a fixed line, they had simply followed the anchor to the train and slipped inside—and out of the grasp of the undertow.
With his foot hooked beneath the stake, Briggs resurfaced, tested his regulator, then ducked back under. He grabbed the rope, gave the stake one last tug to be sure it was secure, then kicked once and slipped over the edge.
41
Langley
The message on Oaken’s computer screen became the proverbial crack that shattered the dam. In the space of an hour, the puzzle he’d been pondering snapped into focus. He called Dutcher, who was already at CIA headquarters, and gave him the gist of what he’d found.
“Your theory explains a lot,” Dutcher said. “Get in your car and break some speed limits. I’ll round up Sylvia, George, and Len. We’ll be waiting.”
“Whether we’ve realized it or not, we’ve been making some assumptions,” Oaken told the group an hour later. “The biggest one is that Litzman and Svetic have been collaborating on something—that their goals are tied to one another. Two bad guys, moving from place to place like ghosts … It was a natural hunch.”
“What are you’re saying? It’s all a coincidence?” said Len Barber.
“No, we know better than that The man Briggs and Ian snatched in Innsbruck—Grebo—told them he had no idea what either Svetic or Litzman was up to. I believe him—at least partially. I doubt Svetic told anyone about Kestrel; he wouldn’t share a secret like that unless it were absolutely necessary. As far as Grebo goes, he was simply following orders. He was doing exactly what he’d been instructed to do: Keep Litzman updated on Svetic’s movements.”
Sylvia said. “Whose orders?”
“The Serbian SDB,” Oaken replied. The SDB, or Sluzba Drzavne Bezbednosti, was Serbia’s State Security Service, the country’s foreign intelligence service. “I think this man Grebo is either an SDB operative, or an agent they planted in Svetic’s group.”
“Hang on a moment,” George Coates said. “Serbia? Where did you come up with that?”
“It’s part guess, part deduction.”
The break had come from a single phone number, Oaken explained. Of all the encrypted numbers he’d been able to ferret from Karl Litzman’s layered cell-phone accounts, one had resisted all his attempts to crack it Until a few hours before. Realizing it was another Marseilles number, Oaken called Bob, his friend in the consulate’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service. It took Bob less than an hour to track down the lead.
“It’s an apartment block in Ville Tirana,” Bob had reported. “All these Balkan enclaves are crowded into a ten-block radius—Bosnians, Albanians, Serbians, Macedonians … they all live on top of one another.”
“What about this one?”
“Despite the name, Ville Tirana’s almost all Serbs. In fact, I did a little digging. Two months ago, the Marseilles police raided the building and arrested half a dozen Serbs. Word has it they were all former Arkan boys.”
Oaken knew the term. Arkan was the alias for Selijko Razflatovic, who in 1992 had been the commander of the Serb Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary force trained and equipped by the Serbian ministry of the interior—the parent agency of the State Security Service, or SDB—to serve as “special purpose teams” in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Death squads,” Oaken said.
“You got it,” replied Bob. “French intelligence is pretty keen on the neighborhood. My guess is, they think the SDB is using it as a way station for operatives heading into Germany and Great Britain.”
Sylvia Albrecht considered Oaken’s story for a few moments, then said, “And what about Litzman’s contact with the Bosnian enclaves in Marseilles … the Bihac Istina?”
“Window dressing,” Oaken replied. “Groundwork for investigators to follow.”
Coates said, “And Svetic?”
“The Bosnian scapegoat. That’s the one part of the theory that’s still sketchy, but I think we’ll find Risto Svetic’s been a bad guy on the Balkan scene for a while—somebody Serbia can easily paint as a terrorist.”
“If you’re right about this,” Len Barber said, “what’s the end game?”
In answer, Oaken pulled a sheet of paper from his briefcase. “I came across this in passing last week. After I heard back from Bob, I remembered it. It’s a wire story from Reuters.” He handed the sheet to Dutcher, who scanned it then read aloud:
“ ‘Balkan Delegates Meet in Trieste.’ Delegates from Kosovo, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania rounded up a week of talks in the resort city of Trieste, Italy, today. Sponsored by Serbi
a and Montenegro, who last year signed a historic accord binding them into a single entity, the conference is to be the first step in restructuring Yugoslavia into a federation of semi-independent republics. Absent from the conference were representatives from the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which issued a statement condemning Serbia for continuing to wage a ‘covert war of genocide against the Bosnian and Herzegovinian people.’”
Dutcher handed the sheet to Sylvia, who scanned it then passed it to Coates and Barber, who read it then looked up. “And?”
“The story behind the story is that Bosnia didn’t attend the conference because Serbia pressured its neighbors to hold back the invitation,” Oaken said. “Belgrade’s goal is the same as its always been: to put the Balkans back under Serbian control. It’s what started the war in 1990 and they’ve never wavered from it—diplomatic niceties or not. Bosnia, on the other hand, can see the handwriting on the wall. Today it’s a ‘coalition of republics,’ tomorrow a Serbian-controlled nation-state.
“So what’s Belgrade up to? It needs an excuse; it needs leverage; it needs Bosnia surrounded by a sea of angry neighbors that won’t put up a fuss when Serbia marches in and starts carving it up.”
“Enter Litzman,” Dutcher said, picking up Oaken’s line of thought. “He’s going to give them their excuse: a Bosnian-backed terrorist attack against a gathering of delegates from every government except Bosnia.”
“So, let’s put it together,” Sylvia said. “Svetic is meticulous; we know that. Months ago, maybe longer, he begins planning the kidnapping of Amelia Root. What he wants is Kestrel, but he gives his team another reason—money, whatever. He lays out the whens and wheres and hows of the operation, which Grebo then forwards on to the Serbian SDB.” She glanced at Oaken. “Right so far?”
“Yes.”
“The SDB mulls over the information, realizes Svetic’s arrival in Trieste is going to coincide with the conference dates—”
Echo of War Page 29