by Young, Tom
Inside the barn, Dušic found an old milk stool lying on its side. He set it upright in the middle of the floor.
“Sit,” he commanded.
Andrei eased the officer down onto the milk stool. The wounded man looked around at his captors.
“Just leave me alone,” he said. “You can get away if you leave now.”
“Let me worry about that,” Dušic said.
“He is bleeding, sir,” Nikolas said. “Shall we bandage his wound?”
Dušic considered the suggestion. Not a bad idea, really. He didn’t want the prisoner to pass out from blood loss before interrogation. “Yes,” Dušic said. “Go ahead.”
“There is a kit in the back of the vehicle,” Stefan said.
Nikolas went outside, and Dušic regarded the prisoner. The man wore the emblem of the ministry of internal affairs of the Serbian entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dušic did not particularly like harming an officer wearing a Republika Srpska patch on his uniform, but duty sometimes required unpleasant tasks. Besides, this policeman represented a pale version of Republika Srpska, not the Greater Serbia that Dušic envisioned. Under Dušic’s leadership, Republika Srpska would be born again.
Nikolas came back with the medical kit. Evidently, Stefan had bought it only recently; it was still wrapped in a shopping bag from a Sarajevo pharmacy. Nikolas removed the kit from the bag. Inside the kit he found a small pair of scissors. He cut away the prisoner’s sleeve to reveal torn muscle tissue still oozing blood. The kit contained tubes and vials of ointments and antiseptics. Nikolas began fumbling through them.
“Just put a tight bandage on him so he stops bleeding,” Dušic said.
“Yes, sir,” Nikolas said.
The prisoner watched as Nikolas wrapped the wound in gauze. Blood soaked through the cloth even as Nikolas added layers. When he finished, he tied the loose ends together in a square knot. A blotch of burgundy spread through the bandage from the inside, creeping through the gauze strand by strand. The wounded man would interpret the medical help as mercy, Dušic knew. Good.
“So tell me,” Dušic said, “how did you know where to find us?”
The man looked up at Dušic. “I cannot tell you that,” he said.
“You will tell me that, and you will do so quickly.”
The prisoner made no response. He simply gazed out a window, no doubt hoping to see his deliverance arrive. Dušic slapped him. The palm of Dušic’s hand stung, and Dušic liked that. Surely the man’s face stung worse.
“Look at me, fool,” Dušic said. “Answer my question.”
The man ran his tongue across the inside of his lower lip. He spat a mixture of blood and saliva. “You know I cannot do that.”
Dušic pulled the pistol from his waistband, clicked off the safety. “I will kill you if you do not.”
“Viktor,” Stefan said, “he is a Serb police officer.”
“So are the other officers we just shot. What is wrong with you? This man has information I need.”
Stefan looked stricken, and that worried Dušic. This was no time for Stefan or anyone else on the team to go soft. True, killing Serbs brought no pleasure. But this one and several more at the Patriarchate must die for Greater Serbia. Then the real battles could begin. When the war against the Turks resumed, Muslims would die in numbers that would make the 1990s war look like a skirmish.
Dušic knew he didn’t have much time. He needed to make a tactical retreat out of here, but not before he learned how the police had located him. Maybe this officer did not fear a bullet to the head. The man was a Serb, after all, and even if he served a weak government, the courage of his ancestors flowed through his veins. A fine thing, really. Dušic would just have to give him something else to fear. He pointed to the pharmacist’s plastic bag, now lying discarded amid the straw.
“Give me that,” he ordered. Nikolas handed him the bag.
With one hand, Dušic snapped the bag open. He still held the pistol in the other hand. He placed the bag over the prisoner’s head and squeezed it tight around the man’s neck.
The prisoner gasped, and the bag collapsed around his head. Plastic took the form of his nose and open mouth. He used his good arm to claw at the bag, and he tried to stand. Dušic forced him back down onto the milk stool. The prisoner struggled and kicked as he began to suffocate, but his injury and blood loss had left him too weak to offer real resistance.
Dušic snatched the bag off the man’s head. The prisoner drew a ragged breath that trailed into a spasm of coughing. Sweat dripped from his nose and hair.
“We will take you with us and continue this all day,” Dušic said. He had no intention of taking the man anywhere, but the statement would serve its purpose.
The prisoner shook his head, kept his eyes to the ground. “I cannot,” he said. “I cannot.”
Dušic placed the bag over the policeman’s head. “No!” the man shouted. The plastic muffled his cry. Once again, Dušic squeezed the bag closed around his victim’s neck.
The man writhed, convulsed. Dušic kept his fist tight on the bag for several more seconds. When he released his grip and removed the bag, the prisoner’s lips had turned blue from cyanosis. The man sucked in air, filled his chest. As he exhaled, he hacked and spat.
“Son,” Dušic said, “you are a police officer, not an intelligence agent. You have no state secrets; you could not harm your country if you wanted to. All I want to know is a little about your police procedures.”
The man shook his head. Dušic spread open the bag.
“No,” the officer said. “Please, no.”
“Your friends would not have you suffer to protect such mundane information. Just tell me how you found me.”
The man took another deep breath of air. “Your mobile phones,” he said.
Dušic’s stomach knotted. He’d been careful about what he’d said, especially over his landlines but even on his cell. Had the razvodniks blabbed carelessly? Even if they had, how could the authorities locate him like this?
“How do you track us?” Dušic asked.
“They have an airplane.”
“An airplane? What do you mean? Who is ‘they’?”
“I do not know, exactly, I swear. But I think they are NATO. Or perhaps the UN or the Americans.”
Dušic roared, kicked over the milk stool. The prisoner tumbled into the straw and cried out in pain. God curse those damnable Americans, Dušic thought. Once again interfering in matters not of their concern.
Nikolas righted the stool and helped the prisoner sit back on it.
“I thank you for your service to Serbia,” Dušic said. He pointed the pistol he’d taken from the officer, pressed the muzzle to the man’s temple. Pulled the trigger.
The man collapsed from the stool and fell onto his side. His eyes, already lifeless, stared straight ahead as if he did not want to look at Dušic. A fountain of red jetted from the entrance wound until the blood pressure died away, and then the dead man stopped bleeding.
“Turn off your phones and give them to me,” Dušic said. He collected mobile phones from all the men. “Razvodniks,” he added, “make sure you meet me at Pionirski Park in Belgrade at the appointed time. You will receive no further communication. Now get out of here and lie low until zero hour.”
Riding in the van with Stefan a few minutes later, Dušic pondered his situation. Did the authorities know he was behind a plot to bomb the Assembly of Bishops? The whole plan depended on the false-flag nature of the operation. People must think it a Muslim attack. The authorities would not have a recording of his voice mentioning the Patriarchate on the phone; of that he was certain. Even if an idiot razvodnik made a slip of the tongue, the police would record no evidence any Serb would believe. The Serbian public would just consider it a Muslim ruse. Given the burnings and riots of late, people would readily accuse the Turks of a
ll manner of perfidy. The tinder remained plentiful and dry, just waiting for the match.
In the worst case, narcotics allegations might bar him from high office in the Ministry of Defense. No matter. He could lead a militia of his own funding; he’d planned on doing that in the beginning, anyway. Once the war resumed, no Serbian court would convict him on petty trafficking. And he’d come too far to stop now. The mission was still on.
Stefan drove in silence for several minutes. “Where are we going?” he asked finally. “A different hotel, I presume.”
“Not yet,” Dušic said. He thought for a moment. “Find me a public phone, if you can. A landline.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“A telephone call, obviously.”
Dušic seldom spoke curtly to Stefan, but he was still angry. Those Americans and their damned aircraft. They had helped relieve the siege of Sarajevo, dropping their bundles of rat food to keep the Turk rats from starving. And later, in Kosovo, their bombers had rained hell on Serb troops battling for their cultural heartland. Americans dared not face Serb men toe-to-toe. They preferred to push buttons from thirty thousand feet. Dušic remembered graffiti spray-painted on the wall of a bombed-out bunker by a frustrated Serbian soldier: COME DOWN FROM THE SKY AND FIGHT.
The spy plane that monitored his team’s phones might have come from anywhere. Given the Americans’ aerial refueling capabilities, the aircraft could have taken off in fucking Nebraska.
Or not. What if the plane landed somewhere closer?
Even though Stefan drove, he reached under the seat and took out a new bottle of slivovitz. He cracked the cap, spun it off the bottle, and took a long drink.
“I need you focused,” Dušic said.
“I am focused.”
“Do you need to settle your nerves now when you kill?”
Stefan did not answer. He only stared straight ahead and drove. When he spoke, he changed the subject.
“So who are you going to call?”
“I am going to try to find out where that airplane is based. I do business at all the airports in Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia, and I know people.”
“It could be based anywhere in the world.” Stefan took another drink from the bottle.
“I know that. But if it is close, we might do something about it.”
“Like what?”
Dušic turned in his seat to look back at all the gear he’d brought with him. Some of it he’d gathered only as an afterthought. Like the fragmentation grenades.
24
FROM A MILE AWAY, Parson could see backup had arrived too late. Blue lights flashed from police cars and ambulances. No civilian vehicles, though the first cops on the scene had reported finding a van and SUVs. Dušic and his band of scumbags must have outgunned the police and escaped. The emergency vehicles sat parked near an ancient stone barn in the middle of the Bosnian countryside. Parson wondered about the police officers who had encountered Dušic here. If they’d died, what had been their last thoughts? After bullets tore your flesh and bone, what went through your mind as you looked out over such a pastoral setting?
“Damn it,” Dragan said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.” Then he spoke in Serbo-Croatian, and the vehicle turned onto the farm path.
Guys like Dragan, Cunningham, and me should be coming to a place like this to hunt and smoke cigars, Parson thought, not to sort through a firefight’s aftermath. We should carry shotguns for partridges instead of high-powered rifles for men.
The two vehicles carrying Dragan’s team stopped alongside the path, well away from the police cars and ambulances. Even before Parson left the van, he could surmise what had happened. Bullet holes pocked two of the cars; blood smeared one of the open doors. Two bodies lay across the front seat of the nearest car. A third policeman had died at the other shot-up vehicle. One of the dead officers still gripped the receiver of an assault rifle. Shell casings littered the ground; these men had gone down fighting.
They must have taken fire from the barn, Parson concluded. The angle of bullet strikes on the cars told him, much the way gouges on the ground might tell him the angle of a crashed plane. These poor guys never had a chance. Their enemies had opened up on them from behind the impenetrable cover of stone walls, while the officers’ only protection had been their cars. Most high-powered rifle ammunition could pierce anything on a car except the engine block unless the car was armored. These cars clearly were not.
“I see they tried the only thing that might have worked,” Dragan said.
“What’s that?” Cunningham asked.
Dragan pointed to a tear gas launcher in the grass next to the cars. “They’d have had to put tear gas through one of the windows,” he said, “but the bad guys probably had them too pinned down to get off an accurate shot.”
Parson ached for the dead policemen. All three looked too young to have played any role in the Bosnian War. In those days, Serbian police committed atrocities, but he hoped these guys were different. Maybe they’d thought like Dragan, working for a better future instead of nursing grudges from the past.
Like many war veterans, Parson often thought about returning to places where he’d fought, and Bosnia was his first combat zone. But he’d wanted to see Bosnia in a secure peace, not under threat of a new war. To visit an old battle site gone quiet might bring tranquillity to a warrior, reassure the warrior that despite all the horrors of the world, life’s broad currents tended toward the good. But for Parson, a war that wouldn’t ever quite go away brought the opposite effect.
Dragan and the other officers examined the scene, taking photographs and writing notes. Investigators wearing latex gloves picked through the evidence. One of them inserted a pencil into the open end of an expended cartridge, lifted the empty brass, and dropped it into a plastic bag.
Inside the barn, Parson found more investigators looking over a fourth body. The dead man had been shot in the arm and in the side of the head. Flies buzzed around the corpse and landed in the blood congealing on straw that covered the floor.
Cunningham came into the barn with Dragan, and Dragan spoke with the other officers in their native language. They conversed in the hushed tones one might use at a funeral.
“Looks like they executed that guy after he got wounded,” Cunningham said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Parson said. “So what are these police doing now?”
“They’ll gather all the evidence they can. Pictures, fingerprints, blood samples. We can look around right here and see pretty well what happened. But if their system is anything like ours, a prosecutor will have to reconstruct the scene in a courtroom.”
“If there’s ever a trial,” Parson said.
“Yeah,” Cunningham said, “these sons of bitches seem like the type to go out shooting and take as many cops with them as they can.”
“That would disappoint Webster. I think he really wants Dušic tried for war crimes.”
“I wish somebody would just blow his ass away.”
You gotta like a tough cop, Parson thought, as long as he’s tough only on people who deserve it. Cunningham’s attitude seemed about right for a coastal country boy from a place called Dare County.
Dragan continued his conversation with the local Bosnian Serb officers. Now they spoke in more animated tones, as if they were debating some point. Parson wondered how much Dragan had told them about Dušic’s intentions to embroil them all in a new war, and to spark that war by murdering their own clergy. Parson also wondered how these Serb cops felt about the recent past. Did they want truth commissions and war crimes trials to sweep away all the denial? Or did they take comfort in denial, in dismissing genocide as the collateral damage to be expected in any war? Judging by their rapid-fire words and hand gestures, they had differing opinions on whatever they were discussing.
Eventually, Dragan broke away from the
conversation. He kneeled by the policeman’s body, looked into the dead man’s face. Parson noticed the equipment on Dragan’s belt: the magazine cases made of ballistic nylon, the mini-flashlight holder, the clip of the folding knife. Though Dragan worked in civilian clothes, he and the uniformed officer fallen before him wore similar tools of the trade. Parson could imagine the bond Dragan must feel with this officer. Cops hated nothing worse than cop killers. If you wanted policemen to give up their vacations, to come in on overtime, to devote all their resources and put aside all their differences in an effort to take you down, just kill one of their fellow officers. The principle held true all over the world.
• • •
DUŠIC AND STEFAN STOPPED at three service stations before they found one with a working public telephone. Little need of public phones anymore, since everyone carried a cell. But now that Dušic knew cell phones betrayed his location, he and his team would not use cells until the day of the bombing. Stefan had rigged the explosives with a cell phone detonator, and Dušic did not want to make him reconfigure the bomb at this late stage. Stefan would turn on the phone only after he’d driven the bomb into place, and the meddling Americans probably would not have enough time to pinpoint the signal. With some luck, Dušic might tilt the odds in his favor. Especially if he could take care of that damned airplane.
He paid cash for a phone card in the service station, then stood in the phone booth with the receiver cradled on his shoulder. He made calls to airports all over the region, but no one among his contacts with air freight companies had seen a suspicious aircraft. Dušic didn’t know exactly what the plane would look like, though he guessed a large multiengine jet, either unmarked or with U.S. Air Force identification. More than likely the plane carried an unusual number of antennas.
Dušic, about to give up, decided to place one more call. He did not trust the freight companies in Sarajevo; they hired too many Muslims and Croats. But many years ago, when he’d first started his business, he’d sold a rifle to a loyal Serb who drove a jet fuel truck in Sarajevo. They had traded war stories and lamented the war’s outcome. The man hated Muslims as much as Dušic, and he hated Americans even more. That womanizing bumpkin Bill Clinton, he’d said, had robbed the Serbs of sure victory. What was that patriot’s name?