by Young, Tom
“You have no doubts about their commitment?” Dušic did not want to have to shoot another weak-minded, untrainable moron.
“None. I interviewed them extensively.”
“Good. Then let us be on our way.”
Dušic turned off the lights in his small-arms room, rolled down the door, and activated the electronic lock. He chained and padlocked his fence, scanned his surroundings for any witnesses. He saw no one, heard only the distant barks of a dog and the rush of traffic on the two-lane highway that ran past the storage units.
“What shall we do in Tuzla?” Stefan asked.
“Little, I hope. I will pay for our rooms with cash, and we will register under assumed names. Barring something unforeseen, all we have left to do is give the shooters their final instructions.”
After the bombing, naturally, there would be much to do. But Dušic’s moves during that dynamic phase would depend on unpredictable factors. Would the Belgrade government begin an offensive against the Turks immediately? Or would politicians follow public opinion rather than lead it? Volunteer militias might have to make the first strikes. In that case, Dušic could find himself leading bands of ruffians in tactical operations rather than commanding entire armies from a post within the Ministry of Defense. No matter. He could lead wherever necessary.
On the passenger side of Stefan’s van, Dušic buckled into his seat. He said nothing while his friend pulled away from the storage units and headed down the blacktop into the night. Dušic felt gratified that Stefan had found more triggermen to rake any survivors of the blast. The question of personnel had worried him. Did he have enough men to do this thing properly? As the glow of the city’s lights receded behind him, Dušic considered his resources. He decided they were sufficient. After all, that American lunatic Timothy McVeigh had destroyed a larger building than the Patriarchate, and he’d done it with fewer support personnel and less expertise. McVeigh had also faced trial, conviction, and execution for the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
With proper fieldcraft Dušic could avoid the fate of an ignorant extremist. Instead, he would take his proper place as a leader in the war to come.
18
AT DAYBREAK, the Rivet Joint lifted off the runway at Sarajevo and climbed into Bosnian skies. Sunrise lit the horizon as if the gods had ignited a signal flare. In the cockpit jump seat, Parson squinted, unzipped the left breast pocket of his flight suit, and reached for his aviator’s glasses. On the ground below, the misting waters of the Miljacka meandered in cursive lines.
“Motown Six-Four, Sarajevo Tower,” a voice called on VHF. Slavic accent but confident English. “Left turn heading zero-eight-zero, contact departure. Safe flight.”
To Parson, it still felt strange to take off from Sarajevo under reasonably peaceful circumstances, equipped only with a headset, his flight suit sleeves casually rolled up. A couple decades ago he wore a flak jacket and survival vest with a Beretta on his side, the hums and squeaks of the radar warning receiver sounding in his flight helmet. And as a last resort, parachutes hanging in the cargo compartment, straps pre-fitted for each crew member.
He’d flown with such gear pretty recently in Afghanistan. Would he ever lift off from Afghanistan in a time of peace? And here in the Balkans, how fragile was this peace?
When the Rivet Joint leveled off at altitude, Parson unbuckled and headed aft. In the back, Gold sat next to Irena. Both wore headsets. On the console before her, Irena placed an open checklist and a notepad. Thus far she’d written nothing on the notepad; her pen rested on a clean sheet of paper. Parson took a crew seat at an unused station beside Irena and plugged his headset into an interphone cord.
“Can I get you anything?” Parson asked. Not a question lieutenant colonels often asked junior enlisted personnel, but as an observer, Parson had little to do. Irena, by contrast, had important tasks right now.
“No, thanks,” Irena said. “Just waiting to see if anybody wants to talk to me.”
“Anything yet?”
“No, sir. Not a peep, or at least not one that we care about.”
Parson didn’t understand all of this crew’s procedures, but he did know that, in a way, they were not just listening but hunting. If the Rivet Joint crew wanted you badly enough, they could find you, listen to you, and get information about you to other people on the ground. The machine’s information processing capability, Parson mused to himself, represented the ultimate revenge of the nerds.
He sat silently as he watched Irena do her job. She chatted with crewmates, usually about technical matters he could not follow. Occasionally she tapped a button on her console. Parson heard several conversations in Serbo-Croatian, none of which seemed to interest Irena. At least an hour passed with nothing happening, and Parson almost dozed off, slouched in the crew seat with his harness adjusted loosely.
Irena’s body language brought him wide awake. She sat bolt upright, glanced at her watch, and wrote the Zulu time on her notepad. The young linguist froze, listening hard, her pen poised in the air. Her manner put Parson in mind of a bird dog trotting easily along a row of corn stubble until it stopped—locked up on point, with whiffs of prey in its nostrils.
He longed to ask her What you got? but he knew to leave her alone for the moment. Gold noticed, too. She watched her colleague, glanced at Parson, looked back at Irena. After a few minutes, Irena spoke on interphone.
“That’s the same voice,” she said. “The boss.”
“The same guy the Antonov pilot was talking to?” Parson asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“How did you zero in on him?”
“One number leads to another,” Irena said. “I think they took a lot of numbers from the cell phones they picked up in the arrests.”
“Where is he?” Gold asked.
“Not Belgrade. They’re tracking.” Irena tilted her head toward the crew members closer to the front of fuselage.
“What did he say?” Parson asked.
“He told somebody to suspend the shipments for now.”
“Sounds like he knows he has a problem,” Gold said.
“Stand by,” Irena said. Some tech talk followed; Parson wasn’t sure what she and her crewmates were saying. Then Irena flipped a switch and said, “All right, I’m on that channel, too.”
Now Parson heard other languages as well as Serbo-Croatian. Some of it sounded like Pashto. When Gold leaned forward and turned up the volume on her comm box, Parson was sure. Irena slid her notebook over to Gold, and Gold began to write. Somewhere within this aircraft’s equipment racks and miles of wires, digital recorders saved everything. But Parson imagined notes could come in handy, too. Idly, he wondered if whatever the linguists jotted down became a classified document.
Gold lifted her pen from the page, listened for a moment, then resumed scribbling. Parson could see that she wrote in English, so he unfastened his harness and stood to peer over Irena’s head. In Gold’s handwriting, so elegant it bordered on calligraphy, the notepad read We may need more of your product in the future, but we can take no more now. Above that line, Irena had made other notes, mostly in Cyrillic. She also wielded her pen neatly, but with more sweeping lines. Funny how you could always tell women’s handwriting from men’s. Whenever Parson needed to fill out a hard-copy flight plan, he had to remind himself to print clearly enough so that someone could actually read it.
He could tell Gold enjoyed this new way to put her skills to use. She looked up at him, gave that rare half smile of hers, glanced back to her notes and the console.
The Rivet Joint, Parson judged, had reeled in some pretty damning evidence about the drug trafficking. Cunningham would be pleased. Parson supposed the OSI and all kinds of other agencies had worked with legal beagles for approval of the cell phone monitoring. Maybe the Serbian and Afghan cops could move in and make more arrests. Parson presumed a lot of the data sucked up by this
aircraft got beamed back home to the NSA, and perhaps to similar agencies in friendly countries.
He worried, though. The recent riots and burnings made him nervous. By his recollection, things could go very badly very quickly in this part of the world. Parson remembered when the Soviet bloc starting falling apart, and in his historical ignorance, he’d assumed the end of Communist dominance would bring an era of prosperity to Eastern Europe. Democracy and dollar signs, rainbows and puppy dogs. Some countries fared pretty well, but the former Yugoslavia took a different path. He’d seen a reminder of that yesterday that would leave images in his mind forever. He hoped the grave had also moved Cunningham.
The knowledge that such things could happen had always troubled Parson, and he doubted he’d ever reconcile it. Gold, with her knowledge of faith and philosophy, seemed to understand these things better; at least she could find words to help her accept the world as it was. He’d once heard her talk about Calvinist theory and the depravity of man. Parson took that as a fancy way of saying some people were just assholes. He did not consider himself a righteous person, but he knew right from wrong. That at least gave his life a kind of directional stability, the way the lands and grooves inside a rifle barrel impart a spin to the bullet and send it true on its course.
The morning wore on. Irena continued monitoring her circuits, but she never mentioned hearing anything worthwhile. At midday, Parson got up and went to the galley. He opened the refrigerator and gathered the food and soft drinks they had brought for lunch. Gold had picked up a turkey panini and a bottle of green tea. Irena brought a gyro with shavings of beef covered in tzatziki, and vitamin water to drink. For Parson, a ham sandwich, chips, and a Coke. He placed the food on the console table beside Irena’s keypad.
“Thanks, sir,” Irena said.
“You should eat healthier,” Gold said.
Parson rolled his eyes, patted Gold’s shoulder, sat in his seat, and unwrapped his sandwich. The radios and interphone remained quiet. Between bites, Parson asked Irena, “So what made you choose the Air Force?”
Irena took a swallow of her pink vitamin water, thought for a moment, and said, “I guess it was my dad’s great-uncle.”
“He was an Air Force man?”
“No, sir. But he helped rescue some American fliers in the Second World War.”
“Oh, yeah? Wow.”
“Recruiters from all the services wanted to sign me up, but I picked Air Force because of that.”
Irena went on to tell a story that rang true to Parson because he’d heard the first half of it. The second half he’d never known.
On August 1, 1943, nearly 180 B-24 Liberators took off from Benghazi, Libya, to bomb German-held oil refineries around Ploesti, Romania. During the flight to the target, cascading navigational errors turned the mission into what fliers of Parson’s day called a goat fuck. Some of the aircraft droned right into a firestorm of German antiaircraft guns and got blown out of the sky. More than fifty planes went down, with a loss of several hundred men. However, enough of the formations hit their targets to ignite the refineries into cauldrons of fire. Columns of smoke dark as ink boiled into the air. The day came to be known as Black Sunday.
Some of the airmen bailed out over occupied Serbia and Bosnia. Those lucky enough to parachute into friendly hands found themselves under the protection of Serb guerrillas, then working with the Allies.
For months, hundreds of American fliers hid out in peasant homes, while teams led by guerrilla leader Draža Mihailovic built improvised airstrips. The Serbs did it the hard way, with hand tools and ox carts, mainly by night. Work crews cut down trees, dug out stumps, carried away rocks, and leveled ground so that C-47 transports could land. With little more than signal fires to guide them, the C-47 pilots touched down on dirt and gravel runways in an operation coordinated with help from intelligence agents dropped by parachute. The effort, code-named Operation Halyard, rescued more than five hundred U.S. aviators from imminent capture by the Germans.
“My great-great-uncle helped build the runways,” Irena said.
“So you might say he was an Air Force civil engineer,” Parson said.
“Yes, sir,” Irena said. “Unofficially.”
The story about Irena’s Serbian elders reminded Parson that no group was always on the wrong side. You could find great deeds and awful crimes in the history of just about every culture, a truth he had learned from Gold.
By the middle of the afternoon, the Rivet Joint fliers began to wrap up their sortie. One of the officers announced on interphone, “Front-end crew says we’re almost bingo fuel, guys. Everybody ready to pack it in?”
Parson was getting hungry, and he looked forward to dinner back at the hotel with Gold, and maybe Irena and Cunningham. So he was glad to hear several crew members answer with “Yes, sir” or “Affirmative.” But Irena did not speak. She furrowed her brow, turned up a volume knob. A conversation in Serbo-Croatian flowed over the circuits, and when the chatter paused, Irena said, “Stand by, sir. Please tell them not to descend yet.” She held up her hand as if to keep the plane at altitude by force of will.
Amid the clicks, hums, and cross-talk, Parson heard the officer say, “Give us just a minute. Markovich is onto something.”
Irena’s mouth curved into a hint of a smile. Parson noticed the rose-colored lip gloss, the only thing about her that wasn’t all business. He stared at her and her console, dying to know what she was hearing. She gave no hint. Parson could only wait. His eyes focused on Irena’s console as he tried to guess what news it had brought. Off interphone, Irena whispered to Gold, “I got a name.” She wrote on her notepad: Viktor Dušic.
19
GOLD EXPECTED COLONEL WEBSTER to show interest when Parson phoned him with the name. But she did not expect him to drop everything, leave Manas in the hands of his vice commander, and fly commercial to Sarajevo. In a rented Ford, Parson and Gold met him at the airport and drove him to the Holiday Inn.
Webster wanted to meet with everyone in private, so they ordered room service for dinner and had the food sent to Cunningham’s room. Gold and Parson crowded into the small room. Webster, in khaki trousers and a button-down shirt, took the reclining chair, and Parson introduced Webster and the Serbian police officer, Dragan, to each other. Dragan sat on the desk chair, and he offered up bottles of Tuzlanski pilsner.
Parson took one of the bottles, and he and Gold leaned against the wall. Cunningham sat cross-legged on the bed, his Beretta and shoulder rig beside him on the bedspread. Next to the weapon, an open manila folder revealed photos of Viktor Dušic at various ages. Some showed a young man in uniform. Others depicted a middle-aged businessman, usually in an expensive-looking suit and tie.
“Witnesses place him at Srebrenica back in 1995,” Webster said. The colonel reminded everyone that more than eight thousand Muslims died there in probably the worst single incident of mass murder in Europe since World War II.
“Why hasn’t he been arrested?” Parson asked.
“We’ve always had bigger fish to fry,” Webster said. “Slobodan Miloševic, Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, and other people at the top. This guy was just a lieutenant. But it’s always bothered me that more people haven’t paid for that crime.”
To get the top commanders took years, Webster explained, let alone the trigger pullers. But Webster wanted the smaller fish, too. Especially if one of them was screwing with his airfield at Manas now, and maybe up to something worse.
Gold wondered just how deeply Webster had been involved with the prosecution of war criminals. Deeply enough, she gathered, to know people with enough horsepower to cut him loose from his post in Kyrgyzstan at a moment’s notice. This country lawyer seemed to wield more authority in civilian clothes than in uniform.
“The Russian pilots we busted confirmed they’d been smuggling for Dušic, so we went to his office today to arrest him,” Dragan said. “He
wasn’t there. His secretary said she didn’t know where he was, and he wasn’t at his home, either. I’m afraid he’s gone underground.”
“How did you get the pilots to talk?” Webster asked.
“They were looking at a long prison sentence, but they really didn’t want to give us anything. I think they’re real scared of Dušic. We had to offer complete immunity to get them to sing.”
“Maybe we need to talk to that secretary again,” Cunningham said. Dragan nodded.
If Cunningham had been reluctant to pursue this case to the end, Gold noted, he seemed to have a fire under him now. Gold felt almost guilty about the visit to the mass grave at Bratunac, but perhaps that day had made an impact on the young OSI agent.
Gold watched Parson sip his beer. How he must feel about Srebrenica and all that had happened in Bosnia, she could well imagine. She wouldn’t call him a deep thinker, but Parson possessed a basic decency that could propel him to action swift and fierce. Webster seemed cut from similar cloth. However, Gold gathered that the colonel preferred to channel his outrage into the workings of the law. A legal mind of that caliber could have earned millions as a corporate attorney, but Webster apparently spent much of his time making far less in the pursuit of justice. Gold appreciated people who put personal gain aside for better callings. She wished she could articulate a theory about why people chose certain paths, what steered hearts toward good or evil. But she knew the wisdom of sages across the millennia had never answered those questions.
The next morning, Gold rode with Parson and the others to Belgrade. Cunningham and Dragan wanted to question a woman named Milica Vasovic. Gold and Parson had no law enforcement authority, so they could take no role in the interrogation. But Dragan told them they could watch through a one-way window, with no audio feed, as he interviewed the secretary. Cunningham and Webster were allowed to sit in the room with Dragan, deep inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs headquarters.
Dragan ushered Milica to a chair. She was not handcuffed. Given Dragan’s courtesy and the lack of restraints, Gold supposed the police considered Milica a witness rather than a suspect. Understandably, the young woman looked scared. Gold wondered if her face always stayed so pale and drawn. She wore her auburn hair at shoulder length, and she had dressed in a gray business outfit with the skirt cut at the knee.