Warriors (9781101621189)

by Young, Tom

  “You there in the barn,” the officer called. “Identify yourselves.”

  The razvodniks looked at Dušic and Stefan.

  “No one speak,” Dušic said.

  Stefan stepped back from his window and looked around. He propped his rifle against the wall. An ancient scythe lay among decaying straw. The tool bore not only a blade but a cradle—four wooden tines parallel to the blade, to catch the cut wheat or barley. Stefan upended the scythe so that it rested on the end of its handle and on the tips of its blade and cradle. He placed it about three meters back from his window, kneeled, and rested his rifle across the scythe. A stable platform for an accurate shot. Stefan could still see well through the window, but the enemy outside would have difficulty seeing him. Another poetic move, Dušic thought. The reaper and his scythe.

  “You there,” the police officer repeated, “place your weapons on the ground and walk out slowly. You will not be harmed.”

  In the other car, an officer appeared to make a radio call. Sending for backup, presumably. For now, Dušic and his team faced four policemen. Good odds. Those odds would worsen dramatically when backup arrived. Cover and terrain worked in Dušic’s favor. Time did not.

  “Stefan,” Dušic called, “give the man an answer.”

  Stefan adjusted the elevation knob on his telescopic sight. He placed his cheek to the stock and clicked off the safety. The M24 coughed.

  The bullet slammed through the door of the first police car. The officer who had demanded surrender fell and dropped his assault rifle. Weeds and the door obstructed view of his body. After a moment, the man cursed and crawled behind the car with his weapon.

  “Body armor, Stefan,” Dušic said.

  “I see that.”

  Not just any body armor but probably Level III gear, since it had withstood a high-powered rifle bullet. Dušic imagined the door had absorbed some of the energy, too. This operation would require true precision.

  “We do not have all day, Stefan,” Dušic said.

  Stefan racked his bolt, chambered a new cartridge. Adjusted the parallax on the scope. Settled his cheek back on the weapon for another shot.

  At the second police car, an officer crouched by the vehicle. The open passenger door and the dashboard concealed his head and torso, but his legs remained visible underneath the door. Stefan adjusted his aim, tilted the barrel downward just a few degrees.

  The M24 spoke again. Through the lenses of the binoculars, Dušic actually saw the bullet’s trace; the projectile displaced air ahead of it so forcefully that it made a visible shimmer—right under the car door and into the policeman’s leg. Dušic thought he even heard the slap of impact. He knew he heard the cry of agony.

  “I’m shot!” the man shouted. And probably down for good, Dušic figured. A strike from a 7.62 round nearly anywhere on the body would incapacitate.

  “Do not move,” one of his colleagues said.

  “Help me,” the wounded man called. “I’m bleeding.”

  The razvodniks gripped their weapons, looked at Dušic as if they needed guidance.

  “What now?” Nikolas asked.

  Dušic thought for a moment. “Draw the others out,” he said. “Shoot him again. But do not kill him yet.”

  Nikolas gaped with his mouth half open, as if he couldn’t understand simple instructions. Might as well get some use out of this one while I can, Dušic thought. He’s too stupid to last long.

  “Yes, you, imbecile,” Dušic said. “And do not waste ammunition.”

  Nikolas pointed the AK through a window. His hands shook as he fired from an offhand position with no support, and of course the idiot missed.

  “Again,” Dušic ordered. “Try aiming this time.”

  Nikolas kneeled, rested the AK on the stone sill. He popped off two shots on semiauto, and the second round connected. Another hit the same leg, and the wounded officer screamed again.

  “Help me, for God’s sake!” he shouted. “I’m bleeding out.”

  The wounded man’s partner, who had taken cover behind the open driver’s door of the same car, lunged across the front seats and pulled him inside. One of the injured officer’s boots remained visible. Blood trickled off the heel and onto the grass.

  His partner’s head and shoulders bobbed in and out of view behind the windshield. Presumably the partner was trying to render first aid, perhaps apply a tourniquet.

  Stefan shifted his aim, waited. Pressed the trigger.

  Gases spewed from the end of the noise suppressor. Straw stirred on the floor beneath the rifle barrel. The bullet punched a white-rimmed hole through the windshield. Something spattered inside the police car. The policeman who’d tried to help his wounded partner collapsed and did not rise again.

  Unintelligible cries emanated from the police car, probably the wounded man crying out over his partner, now dead, who had likely fallen on top of him. After a few seconds the cries grew weaker. That did not surprise Dušic. Back during the war, his platoon medic told him that if a bullet severed a major artery, a man could bleed to death faster than he could suffocate.

  From the other car, Dušic heard voices. Not panicked wailing but focused conversation. These are trained lawmen, not amateurs, he reminded himself. Do not get careless just because you have the upper hand. Dušic asked himself what he would do in their situation.

  “Men,” Dušic called to his team, “the other two will try something, maybe launch tear gas. If they come from behind cover, I want you to pour fire on them. If they get off a tear gas round, hold your breath and hold your position.”

  Dušic didn’t know if his razvodniks could manage that kind of discipline, and he hoped he wouldn’t find out. One of the officers appeared to grab something from inside the car. Stefan followed the movement through his scope and even put his finger to the trigger, but he did not fire. The policeman had not exposed himself long enough for Stefan to get a shot.

  When the officer appeared again, he came up from behind the car, holding some kind of launcher. He rested his elbows across the trunk lid and fired. Stefan fired, too.

  The bullet knocked the officer backward, and the tear gas canister flew wild. It bounced off the barn’s stone wall and ricocheted into the grass. Most of the white chemical blew harmlessly with the breeze, but enough of it drifted into the barn to burn and sting. Dušic’s eyes streamed, and the razvodniks hacked and cursed.

  “Hold your breaths, idiots,” Dušic ordered. “It will clear in a moment.”

  Rifle fire chattered from outside. Dušic heard the policemen’s bullets slam against the stone wall. He ducked beneath the window, held his pistol with both hands. The air, still tainted with tear gas, felt like barbed wire going down his trachea. It hurt, but he knew if he broke and ran from the cover of the barn, the bullets would hurt more. He cleared his throat, spat phlegm into the straw.

  “Stay put,” Dušic ordered. “If you run now, they will kill you.”

  Andrei placed the barrel of his weapon across a sill. Without aiming, head down and exposing only his hand, he unleashed a burst on full auto. Dušic started to yell at him for wasting ammunition, but he saw how the fusillade made the policemen stay down. That gave him an idea.

  “Stefan,” Dušic said, “if they give you covering fire, can you make some hits?”

  “Absolutely.” Stefan took two extra rounds from his jacket pocket and held them between the fingers of his left hand for quick reloading.

  “Razvodniks,” Dušic called, “do what Andrei just did. On my command, open up on them and keep them pinned down.” More bullets from the policemen’s weapons tore into the barn. Several rounds zinged through the windows and impacted the opposite wall. Flying chips of stone peppered Dušic’s cheek.

  Stefan kneeled once again with his rifle across the scythe. “We will have only a few seconds for this to work,” he said. “Our men have
just one magazine apiece.”

  “I know it,” Dušic said. He thought for a moment and altered his plan slightly. “Nikolas,” he said, “trade weapons with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dušic handed his CZ 99 to Nikolas and took the AK-47. He pulled back the bolt enough to confirm that a round was chambered, smacked the magazine to make sure it seated. He took a position by the barn’s open side door. From there he saw the police car where the two uninjured officers were firing. One of them ejected an empty magazine and slammed home a full replacement.

  “Stefan, are you ready?” Dušic asked.

  “Ready.” Stefan sighted through the scope. The two extra cartridges between his fingers looked like the brass spikes of some ghastly medieval weapon.

  “Fire!” Dušic shouted.

  The razvodniks spewed a hail of bullets from their AKs. Nikolas pumped shot after shot from Dušic’s handgun. Recoil jolted Stefan’s shoulder. He racked his bolt to fire again.

  Dušic charged from the barn. As he sprinted, he angled away from the line of fire. But he ran in a direction that brought the rear of the police cars into view. His vantage point also brought him within good distance to hit the two policemen still standing. He lifted the AK to his shoulder and held down the trigger.

  Dušic’s bullets stitched across the nearest officer. Rounds struck the man’s hip, his armor-protected torso, and his neck. He never saw Dušic until he lay dying.

  A round fired from the barn, probably by Stefan, struck the other officer in the arm. The man fell backward from his crouched stance, dropped his assault rifle. He twisted to place his right hand over the wound in his upper left arm. And he looked right into the muzzle of Dušic’s rifle.

  “Cease firing!” Dušic shouted. He kept the AK leveled at the officer’s head.

  “Please,” the officer said. “Please.” Blood streamed across his fingers and dripped into the dirt.

  Dušic held his fire.

  23

  AT THE SARAJEVO HOLIDAY INN, Parson paced the lobby. Cunningham drummed his fingers on the armrest of a leather chair. Dragan kept checking his watch and looking at his mobile phone. The day had begun well: Gold and the Rivet Joint crew left to go fly. Almost as soon as they got the landing gear up, they received a solid hit on Dušic’s phone. That luck reminded Parson of wading a stream and catching a salmon on the first cast. Police had been dispatched from a station somewhere up in northern Bosnia. They must have found something; they’d called for backup. But after that, nothing.

  “Did they ever get any help?” Cunningham asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dragan said. “I want to get my guys up there, but it’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Can you get somebody to give you clearance?” Parson asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m waiting for. My boss needs to get a green light from their boss.”

  Their boss better get off his ass, Parson thought. When you lost contact with a unit, it usually meant very bad things. Just like when you lost contact with an airplane.

  Finally, Dragan’s cell phone chimed. He spoke for a few seconds in Serbo-Croatian. Then he closed the phone and said, “Let’s move.”

  Parson and Cunningham climbed into one of the two vans that carried Dragan’s de facto SWAT team. They had come for a meeting, not an op, so Parson guessed they didn’t have all their usual gear. But he watched with interest as they set up what equipment they did have. Parson compared their effort to stop some crazy son of a bitch from reigniting a war to aviators working to prevent an accident: If you took out one error, one link in the chain that led to disaster, then the disaster would not happen. In this case, the error that needed taking out was named Viktor Dušic.

  Dragan sat in the back of the van across from Parson. He barked an order in his native language, and the driver pulled out of the parking lot. Four other Serbian police officers rode in the van. Two of them nodded to Parson and Cunningham, said “Hello” in thick Slavic accents. Parson supposed they knew few other words in English. He regretted that he’d not asked Irena how to offer thanks and greetings in Serbo-Croatian.

  A hardside case rested on the floor at Dragan’s feet. Dragan opened it to reveal a stripped-down sniper rifle. Parson had never seen a weapon quite like it. The rifle looked vaguely like a Dragunov: similar shape, with a PSO-1 scope. But a much bigger barrel than a Dragunov, an AK-47, or an SKS. The magazine seemed large, built for big cartridges. If anything, the gun appeared even meaner than a Dragunov.

  “What the hell is that?” Parson asked the police commander.

  “It’s a Vintorez rifle,” Dragan said as he began to assemble the weapon. “The Russians make it.”

  “What does it fire?”

  “It shoots these.” Dragan slid an ammo box from under his seat and opened it. The rounds inside were nearly as thick as a man’s finger. The brass had been necked out to accommodate a good-size bullet, and the cartridges reminded Parson of the large-caliber black-powder ammunition used by the old buffalo hunters. Parson pulled out one of the cartridges. It felt substantial in his hand. He turned it over and examined the head stamp. The stamp read 9X39MM.

  “Nine millimeter,” Parson noted. Not nearly the biggest bullet made, but large for a police or military rifle. And this ammunition differed from the nine-mil pistol bullets he knew well. These cartridges were longer and heavier, designed to penetrate body armor.

  “It’s a subsonic round,” Dragan said, “so you don’t get that supersonic crack.”

  That made sense to Parson. He saw that the Vintorez’s noise suppressor didn’t just screw into the muzzle; it was integrated with the entire barrel. Very quiet and very deadly.

  “You’re loaded for bear, that’s for damned sure.”

  “I got this on special order,” Dragan said. “Just about had to pound my fist on the quartermaster’s desk, because the police don’t normally issue these. But we’re going against an arms dealer. No telling what that nut job keeps up his sleeve.”

  To Parson, it still sounded strange to hear a Serbian police commander speak such flawless English and even use American idioms. But then he remembered Dragan had gone to school in the United States. The 1990s upheaval in the former Yugoslavia scattered a lot of people. Parson considered it his own country’s good fortune that Irena had come to stay. And Serbia benefited because Dragan had left and come back. Parson liked this well-traveled, well-educated cop.

  Maybe there was hope for this place after all. It just depended on who won out—the haters like Dušic and that idiot who’d gotten a beat-down from Cunningham, or the folks like Irena and Dragan who wanted a better future.

  Parson could understand the roots of bigotry. After his C-130 had been shot down in Afghanistan and all his crewmates killed, he’d wanted to blow away every Muslim in the world. He’d probably still think like that, he conceded, if Sophia had not helped him work through his rage. She’d also acknowledged the evils of militant Islam, and she’d helped him put away one militant Islamist for a long, long time.

  What he could not understand was how hate persisted down through generations. Bigotry with such longevity put him in mind of the great rafts of trash that floated across the oceans. He had flown over such collections of garbage: things thrown out and discarded, yet coalescing in the eddy of a far-flung current to create a new eyesore or worse.

  Dragan’s driver accelerated down an on-ramp to the E73. The outskirts of Sarajevo gave way to rural hills. Parson hoped local backup had arrived for the police who’d gone after Dušic; by the time Dragan’s team could get there, it might be too late.

  • • •

  DUŠIC SLUNG THE AK-47 over his shoulder and looked down at the wounded police officer. The man breathed heavily, as if he might hyperventilate. Eyes wide with fear, he stared up at Dušic while holding his hand over the bullet hole in his left arm. Blood slicked his fingers as he
kept pressure on the wound. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The injury bled heavily enough to soak the officer’s sleeve, but Dušic judged that the bullet had not broken the bone.

  “What are you going to do with me?” the officer asked.

  Dušic ignored the question. “Razvodniks,” he called, “check the other policemen. We have a prisoner.” He kicked away the prisoner’s assault rifle, and he reached down and took the man’s sidearm. The officer did not resist. Dušic checked the pistol’s safety and stuck the weapon in his waistband.

  Andrei, Nikolas, and the other men ran from the barn. Stefan remained in place behind his M24, maintaining overwatch. Dušic appreciated the proper procedure; police backup might arrive any moment. He needed to get his team out of the area, but first he needed some information. And he did not want to take the prisoner. Dušic would have to leave bodies and evidence here; he could not avoid it. But he did not wish to leave another body and more evidence somewhere else.

  The razvodniks examined the policemen. Andrei leaned into the police car farthest from Dušic. The result of Stefan’s head shot must have sickened Andrei; he placed the back of his hand over his mouth for a moment. These men were supposed to be veterans, Dušic thought, but perhaps they had grown unused to the gore of battle. They would see much more if they lived long enough.

  Andrei seemed to regain his composure. “All dead, sir,” he said.

  “Good,” Dušic said. “Help me get this prisoner into the barn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Andrei took the wounded man by his good arm. Dušic held the officer by the fasteners on his body armor, and they pulled him to his feet. The man groaned in pain. “My friends,” he said. “You have murdered my friends.”

  “Can you walk?” Dušic asked.

  “Yes. What do you want with me?”

  “I am asking the questions here. Get into the barn.”

  Blood must have pooled inside the man’s sleeve, perhaps contained by the tight weave of tactical fabric. Gouts of it flowed from underneath his cuff and spattered over his hand. The officer staggered as he walked, and he leaned on Andrei. He’d apparently suffered more blood loss than Dušic had expected.