And, a split-second later, “Holy shit.”
On the screen, smoke and debris spread like an ink-blot from his crosshairs. “Live ammunition,” he reported urgently. “I repeat, we have fired live ammunition. Confirm target status.”
“Copy that,” the voice in his ear said. “Cease firing.” And then, a few seconds later, “Pete, we need to check this out. We may have a blue on blue. Stand by.”
Peter Bower sat back. Despite the chill of the air conditioning, a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead. Blue on blue. The words no pilot, airborne or not, ever wanted to hear. The words denoting that you had just fired a lethal missile at a friendly target.
Then, abruptly, he craned forward. As the smoke cleared he could see on his screen that the target, the small Fiat, must have started making a turn just as he fired. The Hellfire, coming from a height of two thousand feet, had taken a few seconds to reach the ground, and despite the laser-guided aiming system had exploded ten feet or so away. The strike had brushed the car off the road and smashed it into the trees, but it looked as if a figure was even now struggling out of the front passenger door.
“Switch to thermal,” he instructed Linda. Colours blossomed on the screen. Yes, at least one occupant was definitely alive.
“Continue to observe,” the voice in his earphones said. “Pete, we’re trying to find out what just happened here. Must have been some kind of error at the arming stage . . . Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Peter Bower exhaled. Thank you, Lord.
Fifty-eight
KAT HAD NO idea what had just happened. Something had hit them. The car had blown up. Holly had lost control . . . Competing explanations jostled in her head.
Her ears ringing, she lifted her head from the airbag and saw blood. That explained the multiple bangs inside the car, she realised: it had been the sound of the airbags inflating. One had hit her face with sufficient force to make her nose bleed.
Or, to look at it another way, her face had travelled towards the windscreen with so much force that the intervention of the airbag had almost certainly saved her life.
She looked around. The car had spun through almost 180 degrees and was now facing back the way it had come. The driver’s side was caved in where they’d sideswiped an oak tree. There was broken glass everywhere – she could feel it in her own hair, and her lap was full of it – and ribbons of mangled metal behind Holly’s head. But – thank God – Holly was stirring.
Kat pulled at her seatbelt, which had bruised her chest as it tightened and locked. As she fumbled with the catch she looked through the cracked windscreen. It took her a moment to realise that where the car had been seconds before there was now a smoking crater six feet wide.
The belt finally came free and she pulled at the door handle. After another tussle, it opened reluctantly, the frame bent and buckled. She ran around and heaved Holly onto the road.
“It’s OK,” Holly gasped, getting to her feet. “I’m just dazed. Are you all right?”
“I think so. What happened here?” Something Holly had said earlier came back to her. “My God! They were using live ammunition. . .”
“Mortars, yes. But that wasn’t a mortar.” Holly leant against a tree, catching her breath. “That was a mine, or some kind of missile.” She hobbled to the edge of the crater. “At a guess, a Hellfire. You can see how it exploded against the ground, not below it.”
“Meaning what?”
Holly looked upwards, then pointed. “There. See it?”
High above them a tiny speck circled in the darkening sky. It seemed impossible that something so distant could have wreaked such devastation.
“Drone,” Holly said. “Probably a Predator. If so, it has at least three more missiles in its payload.”
“Can they still see us?”
“For sure. We need to get into the trees, quickly. They’ll have infra-red sensors, but the canopy’s pretty high. We should be able to evade detection, at least until it gets dark.” She went to the trunk and pulled it open. The hatch had lost its spring and she had to hold it up with one hand.
“What are you doing?”
“We have to take everything we need. We can’t come back here. It’s too dangerous.”
They trudged into the wood. Fortunately Holly had brought her things in an army field pack. Kat slung her own sports bag over her shoulder, and concentrated on trying to match Holly’s practised military stride. But she found she was shaking with adrenalin.
“Kat?” Holly said. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe that exercise we saw was actually cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“For striking at us. Say they organise some evade-and – resist training with some sort of multi-national component to it. Mortars are fired, there’s a bit of confusion . . . Meanwhile they hit us with a Predator. When it’s announced that a US second lieutenant and an Italian captain of the Carabinieri have been tragically killed, most people will assume we were part of the exercise. And those who do know better are unlikely to kick up much of a fuss.”
“So the Audi was a feint?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’ve had eyes on us all the time. One team on the ground, one in the air.”
Kat felt fear gripping her insides. If Holly was right, the force ranged against them was overwhelming. “What will they do now?”
“I doubt they’ll risk another missile attack. More likely they’ll use the drone as recon, get the guys on the ground to pick us off.”
“Great.”
“On the plus side, I’ve done this before. Evade-and-resist was part of our training.”
“How long did you last?”
“About twelve hours,” Holly admitted. “And from the look of those trucks we saw, there are an awful lot of those guys. This may be tough.”
Fifty-nine
DANIELE BARBO PRESSED a button on his computer and watched another dozen or so files from Barbara Holton’s hard drive reconstitute themselves before his eyes. Enough were readable now to piece together much of the work the American had been doing before her death. Dozens of victim and witness statements, from men as well as women, all relating to atrocities during the break-up of Yugoslavia.
“It was a group of some ten boys from Posavska Mahala and the surrounding villages who called themselves ‘horses of fire’. I knew most of them personally. In particular, Marijan Brnic. I begged him to let me go, reminding him of his past neighbourly relations with my family. He told me to be glad that he was alone since the procedure was different with others, five or six on one girl. They pulled my friend B. N. (19) by the hair, beat her and put a knife to her throat when she tried to break free. She was raped by two of the group.”
“In the interrogation centre our captors beat us every day. One sergeant liked to show off a technique that he had of extracting teeth with the barrel of a revolver. I lost four teeth that way. . .”
“When the guards were bored they invented games. They ordered us to carry bags full of sand from one side of the camp to the other, then beat us for trying to steal sand without permission and told us to take it back. When we took it back we were beaten for not obeying the first order. This went on for hours.”
“They made us lie on our backs and then they jumped from a table on to our stomachs. They were trying to give us hernias. One man had a hernia the size of a human head. . .”
“We women were stripped naked. Male prisoners were made to masturbate in front of us while being verbally abused by the guards. Then the guards took the women away. Sometimes male and female prisoners were made to dance with each other to music while a female prisoner was being raped. . .”
“They told my friend, ‘Here is a riddle. How is it possible to hold both your ears in one hand?’ When he said he didn’t know, they cut off his ears, put them in his hand and said, ‘There, it is possible to do anything if you are us.’ They made him clean his blood off the knife by licking it. . .”
He found a file simply
entitled “Why?” and opened it. It contained Barbara Holton’s own notes.
– The curious thing is that Bosnia wasn’t a particularly divided country before the war. Twelve per cent of marriages were inter-racial. In the west, north and east, most areas consisted of Croat, Bosniak and Serb communities existing peacefully side by side.
– The flashpoint appears to have come in the early 1990s. Suddenly, the newspapers and radio reports were full of ethnically charged speeches and accusations. Were they the cause of the violence? Or was it something else? How did those inciting the hatred know which buttons to press? How come they were so consistent in their message?
– Both armies, Croat and Serb, employed translators. Who for? Jelena says she knew a girl who was raped in the Birds’ Nest by an American. Check it out?
She’d clearly got as far as working out that there was some kind of pattern, and that military contractors might have been involved, but only at the very end had she gathered any hard evidence that they’d given the orders.
Even so, she’d been killed because of what she knew.
Picking up his phone, he dialled Kat’s pay-as-you-go number, hoping to check on her progress. As he’d half-expected, it went straight through to voicemail.
Ending the call, he looked at the handset and frowned. After his kidnap, he’d been diagnosed as having a form of autism which amongst other things made him incapable of empathising with other people. He himself had always refused to accept the label, believing that he had simply chosen to turn away from the world in order to pursue a higher calling. But he was aware that there was something missing within him; some music other people heard in human voices that was lost to him, some warmth they found in human friendships that was as invisible to him as daylight was to a bat.
It surprised him, therefore, when he caught himself hoping that Holly and Kat were safe.
But then, he reminded himself, both women were useful to him at present. If he was to evade prison and save Carnivia he had to come up with something far more game-changing than the feeble “character reference” Kat had offered him.
Far better to get something on those who had tried to destroy him, enough to constitute a really valuable bargaining chip, and then trade it for his website and his freedom.
Holly and Kat, he reflected, might have a different agenda. He’d have to deal with that when the time came.
In the meantime, there was undoubtedly more to be found on Barbara Holton’s laptop, and then there was Dr Doherty’s paper to be tracked down – the full paper, not just the abstract. He had absolutely no intention of honouring his promise to Kat not to discover any information without sharing it with the other two. Daniele Barbo operated alone, and always had done.
Sixty
IT WAS ALMOST midnight. The two women lay huddled together under a single survival blanket from Holly’s field pack, in a rudimentary concealment shelter constructed from branches.
Holly had taken charge, rightly assuming that enemy-territory evasion techniques lay outside Kat’s field of expertise. As night fell, they lit small fires in different areas to confuse the Predator’s thermal imaging cameras, moving on quickly before the fires took hold. Their shelter, by contrast, had no heat source at all. They were relying on the insulating layer of leaves, and the survival blanket, to mask their body heat from the air.
Plus, Kat reflected, the fact that they had almost no body heat left to detect. She was now wrapped around Holly as intimately as she’d ever been with a lover, every possible inch of their bodies pressed against each other to preserve what little warmth they had left. And she was still shivering.
Occasionally they heard distant shouts from the woods below them, the far-off growl of trucks labouring up and down the hill. Kat found herself repeating the words of the Hail Mary in her head, something she hadn’t done for years. When she got to the end she instinctively reached to cross herself.
“Keep still,” Holly whispered. “We’ll move just before dawn, when they’re resting.”
They’d eaten nothing all night but a bar of chocolate Holly had found in her field pack. But despite her hunger, and the cold numbing her hip where it was pressed into the ground, Kat felt herself drifting off.
Suddenly the air erupted, lifting them both off the ground as casually as if they were being tossed in a blanket. Stones and earth rained down on them. Kat’s ears rang. Within moments a second explosion followed, even closer this time.
“Run! Now!” Holly gasped.
They’d already agreed that if they had to make a run for it, the best direction to take would be directly uphill. That way they’d avoid going round in circles or losing their bearings. Now, grabbing her bag, Kat stumbled after Holly.
A third projectile whistled as it fell. Debris pattered on the leaves around them like hail. Kat waited for the shouts and the running boots that must surely follow. None came. Are we running into a trap? It certainly didn’t seem that way, but she was so disorientated, she didn’t trust her own ability to think straight.
Eventually Holly called a halt. Kat collapsed, her lungs heaving. She’d thought herself reasonably fit, but Holly was clearly in a different league.
The woods were once again eerily quiet.
“What’s that?” Holly whispered, cocking her head.
On the night breeze Kat caught the sound of truck engines. But they seemed to be getting fainter, not louder. “Are they leaving?”
“I think so.” Holly sounded worried. “There’s something I don’t like about this. I think we should speak to Daniele.”
“Why him?”
“I suspect he’ll know more about the technology they’re using than I do. Those last explosions – I’m fairly sure they were mortars. But mortars shouldn’t be that accurate, at least not without being zeroed in by a spotter.”
They turned on one of the pay-as-you-go cell phones and dialled. Daniele answered straight away. “What’s up?”
Briefly, Holly explained.
“And you’ve had both phones turned off?”
“All the time.”
There was silence as Daniele thought about this. “Hold on,” he said. “I’m just going to check something online.”
After a minute he came back on. “Those mortars – were they 120 mm?”
“Sounds about right.”
“I think they were GPS-guided. The very latest models, only just on the market. It says here they have a CEP of ten metres. Does that mean anything to you?”
“CEP stands for Circular Error Probability – what used to be called the approximate area of impact,” Holly said. “A CEP of ten metres means fifty per cent of rounds fired will land within ten metres of the target, which is dramatically better than the traditional kind. But I still don’t understand. How could they have our GPS coordinates?”
“Has anyone given you anything electronic? A calculator, alarm clock. . .?”
“Negative.” A thought struck her. “Oh, Jeez.”
“What is it?”
“My CAC – my military identity card. It contains a tracking device.”
“Holly,” Daniele said urgently, “you need to move. Now. If they’re tracking you. . .”
“I know. I’d just worked that out too.” Clamping the phone to her ear, she picked up her field pack and began to run back downhill, gesticulating to Kat to follow her.
“What’s going on?” Kat panted.
“Daniele, what do we do?” Holly said into the phone. “We need to come up with something fast.”
Above them, a projectile whistled through the trees, and a mortar buried itself in the soft earth just yards from where they had been standing a brief while before. The explosion reverberated from the woods like a struck gong. Moments later, another mortar exploded next to the first.
“Holly, stop running!” Daniele shouted into the phone.
“What?” she bellowed, unable to hear a thing.
“I SAID STOP! I have an idea.”
“As long as
they see the CAC card tracker moving on their screens, they know we’re alive,” Holly explained as she took the things she needed out of the field pack.
“OK, I get that. But how does chocolate help?”
“By itself, it doesn’t. Although we could both use the energy.” She broke the bar in half and handed one piece to Kat. “What definitely helps, though, is silver foil.”
She pulled her CAC card out of her fleece by the lanyard round her neck. Unclipping it, she slipped it inside the foil wrapper from the chocolate bar, which she folded over it twice. “Pass me the survival blanket, will you?”
She wrapped the survival blanket around the chocolate foil as tightly as she could, then tied the whole package up with the lanyard. “That should do it. As far as the tracker’s concerned, my GPS gave up the ghost a few minutes after the latest mortar strike.”
“In other words, consistent with a direct hit.”
Holly nodded. “Hopefully, they’ll assume we’re dead. We should take the batteries out of our phones, too, just in case.”
“OK,” Kat said, following Holly’s lead and springing the battery from her phone. “So what’s next?”
“We’ll put a click or so between us and here, in case they come looking. Then we’ll get some rest and wait for daybreak. After that, I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Kat, if they were tracking us through my CAC, that means they could have been following my movements ever since I checked in at Ederle. Camp Darby, Ca’ Barbo, Brezic . . . They’ve simply been biding their time. What’s more, they’ll be able to spot us as soon as we resurface. If we’re to get out of this, we’re going to have to find a way of getting back to Italy that doesn’t require a car, a credit card or going through Passport Control.”
Sixty-one
DANIELE CAUGHT A train out of Venice, then took a taxi. He had never learnt to drive, partly because as a Venetian he rarely needed to, and partly because his brain struggled to process the thousands upon thousands of tiny unstated conventions and interactions that constituted normal behaviour on the road. He understood the rules – but the fact that some rules were habitually broken, while others were not, produced in him a deep sense of perplexity.
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