St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking

by Dana Haynes

  His father had taught him about Archimedes. Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. His father had called Archimedes a great Arabic thinker. A teacher at school said he was Greek, but Mohamed figured the teacher just got it mixed up.

  He took the opener back to the hatch in the wall. He gently shoved aside all three garbage bins. He knelt and fit the arrowhead end of the opener between the wooden lip of the wall and the metal hasp.

  He slowly, slowly applied pressure. The hasp strained against the single screw head.

  The screw began to move.

  C44

  The team spotted two guards on roving duty. They walked in a pair, clockwise, chatting softly. It took them about thirty-five minutes to make one loop of the perimeter. The team watched them make the loop twice.

  It was after 0200 hours when Fiero gave a signal. She and Brodie McTavish moved downhill, creeping quickly. Finnigan watched them until Fiero seemed to disappear. Then he just watched McTavish. Since he’d met her, he’d known Fiero could move in such a way that she was difficult to track. He called it ghosting or, just to annoy her, that crazy ninja shit you do.

  McTavish got to the fence and found it neither electrified nor well lit. He carried bolt cutters in his rucksack and snipped open a vertical access point.

  Once they were done, Finnigan and the other three mercenaries scuttled downhill and crouched through, into the grounds of Operating Base Šar. McTavish then used simple black twist ties to secure the sides of the fence again, using them almost like sutures. The vertical slit wouldn’t be visible from a distance, but it could be reopened in a heartbeat.

  Fiero appeared out of nowhere, touched Finnigan’s thigh and pointed south. He nodded and followed the perimeter fence toward the motor pool garage.

  She tapped Lo Kwan and Fekadu on their shoulders, pointed toward the exercise field and the twenty-five-foot guard tower. The duo moved north and disappeared from sight after a dozen paces.

  Fiero, McTavish, and the laconic Italian, Bianchi, moved toward the heart of the base and the row of barracks.

  Lt. Akil Krasniqi had hoped to get back to sleep after the major called from Belgrade. But now he needed to organize a night run north into Serbia.

  Krasniqi had nineteen of the grubby little Muslim beggars in Barracks Three. Major Basha wanted thirteen of them transferred to Belgrade. Would they hold onto the last six or dump them in the forest? Krasniqi would follow his orders, either way. For now, his plan was to move while the prisoners were asleep and groggy. Rouse them, get them up and startled, and separate them fast. Move three tonight and let the rest go back to sleep. Wake them up before dawn—the lack of sustained sleep helped keep them off-balance—and move thirteen more north.

  He’d keep them calm by telling them the United Nations can only process so many refugees at a time, and that they’d be reunited by lunchtime.

  Krasniqi rolled out of bed, reaching for his fatigue jacket and his walkie-talkie.

  C45

  Finnigan stole his first car at age twelve. He remained proud of that to this day. In his Long Island neighborhood, the median age for a first Grand Theft Auto was fifteen; maybe fifteen and a half.

  He’d gotten caught, of course, and his mother had screamed at him for a week.

  Detective Patrick Finnigan, upon hearing about it, waited until his wife was celebrating Mass, then took his son out to the garage, to the Charger he’d been rebuilding, and said, “Show me.”

  The two of them laid out on the front seats of the Charger and Michael showed his dad how to find the appropriate wires from within the steering column.

  “What the hell is this?” his dad had asked. “That’s not the way you do it. Who showed you this?”

  “I … I can’t tell you.”

  His father had snorted something that might have been an appreciative laugh. “Look at me. You looking at me?”

  His son nodded.

  “Never, ever, ever get caught stealing another car. Or anything. Just don’t. Okay?”

  His son nodded.

  “See this? This is the ignition wire. Now, watch and learn …”

  The two guards on perimeter duty around KSF Operating Base Šar strolled counterclockwise. Finnigan headed the same direction, in their wake. The land around the fence included several rough drainage ditches and a couple of oil tanks, so the going and the sneaking were easy. But getting caught meant getting shot, so Finnigan took it slow.

  The base motor pool was a classic auto garage, with one rolling bay door and room inside for maybe a dozen vehicles, including trucks. From the first window he came to, Finnigan spotted a lube/oil/filter pit for basic maintenance, partially occluded by a late-model Jeep. Maybe a quarter of the vehicles within were in some state of disassembly and repair. The rest were just parked.

  He circled the garage, checking every window. No lights shone. He sketched the building’s geometry in his head and determined that there were no hidden rooms within. He also caught no signs of any security wiring. Who steals a truck from inside a military base out in the middle of Kosovo’s version of the ass-end of nowhere? Nobody—and the security precautions reflected that theory.

  He spotted two doors and picked the one farthest from the well-lit admin building. He placed the Halligan bar against the doorjamb, brace hand near the wood, pressure hand out at the far end of the handle, and applied the slightest pressure. Then slightly more.

  He watched as the tongue of the lock slid free of the doorjamb. Once it was out, the door swung open with no significant damage or noise.

  There was no way of knowing how many refugees they’d be driving out. Once inside, Finnigan moved toward the largest supply truck he could find, a massive diesel Scania with a detachable canvas top stretched over steel ribs. He drew his penlight and shone it across the truck’s canvas side. He did the same for two more trucks.

  He glanced at an oil barrel, standing upright, between the tops. Something lay across the top, looking a bit like laminated place mats you might find in a diner.

  Finnigan moved closer and ran his light over them.

  They were magnetized, rubber logos, the kind that can be adhered to the door of a truck, then easily peeled off.

  They bore the logo of Ragusa Logistics.

  Lo Kwan reached the wooden guard tower first. It stood twenty-five-feet tall with four sturdy legs and a simple wooden box with a hip-high support wall and a roof over it—like every guard tower ever built at every army base on earth.

  The mercenary preferred to work with his hands free, so he didn’t bother carrying a rifle. He tested the lowest rung of the tower ladder and found it well constructed and sufficiently nailed. It made no noise as he applied weight to it. He glanced around again and saw no one close, although he thought he saw more lights on, inside the admin building, than he’d noticed before. Could be an illusion, he told himself.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. The sniper, Fekadu, nodded. Clear.

  Lo began climbing. He tested every rung before trusting it. He worked slowly. Quick movements will catch a person’s peripheral vision, especially at night, in ways that a slow and steady motion won’t.

  He heard floorboards creak overhead. The guard in the tower, ambling slowly from side to side, partly to keep an eye on the base below but partly to keep awake. Lo had done his fair share of late-night sentry duties, and he knew what every good soldier knows: Gen. Boredom and Gen. Fatigue undermine more campaigns than the finest strategists.

  He reached the point at which his head was almost level with the underside of the floorboards. He paused and listened. The highway, only a kilometer away, provided a regular swoosh of late-night traffic. An air-conditioning system atop the admin building chugged. Crickets chirped in the fields around the base, and bats flitted in and out of the small forest to the east.

  He heard an ou
ter door of the admin building swing open and slam shut on springs. He heard the low murmur of voices speaking a Slavic tongue.

  The guard in the tower moved in that direction to see what was going on.

  Lo Kwan took the last two rungs. He spotted the sentry, his back to him, wearing fatigues and lace-up boots. The sentry held his carbine, rather than slinging it over his shoulder (Good on you, soldier, Lo thought). The man was average in size, with a buzz cut and a black beret cocked at a fuck-you angle.

  Lo stepped up and onto the platform, moved behind the sentry. He reached up and swept the man’s beret forward, covering his mouth with it. He locked his other forearm around the man’s throat, tight. He swung his legs around the man’s hips, leaned, and tipped them both onto their backs. Lo’s rucksack took the brunt of the fall.

  The sentry reached for the thing that was being pushed into his mouth. Naturally, that meant dropping his rifle, which, like all well-maintained carbines, did not discharge on impact.

  On their backs, Lo’s legs locking up the sentry’s legs, his arm crushing the man’s carotid artery, jamming the black beret further into his mouth. The man struggled but had no leverage. He tried kicking at the hip-high retaining wall but Lo minimized his leg movements.

  The brain focuses on suffocation before all else: the real threat was the pinched-off carotid, but the wool cap in the man’s mouth, and the panicky tightness when he tried to draw a breath, kept the sentry’s hands busy scrambling for his own face, and not reaching back for Lo’s eyes.

  It would have been much, much easier for a knife artist to kill the sentry, but Katalin Fiero and Michael Finnigan called the tune: All without, or all within. Kill nobody if you can help it but, if the plan goes pear-shaped, kill whomever you come upon. They were still in the kill-nobody phase, but that could change swiftly.

  It took less than sixty seconds for the sentry to slump. Lo had done this enough to know; he waited to feel the man’s thigh muscles, under his own thigh muscles, relax. That was the true sign that he was out and not faking.

  Lo Kwan rolled the man onto his stomach. He reached for the zip ties he carried in a pouch on his belt, secured the man’s wrists behind his back and his ankles to his wrist. He kept the beret stuffed in the sentry’s mouth but cleared his nose.

  He moved back to the ladder, digging a red-filtered penlight out of his rucksack, and flicked in on and off, three times.

  He saw Fekadu sprint from out of a drainage ditch and jump onto the ladder, his sniper rifle bobbing on his shoulder.

  C46

  Fiero heard the telltale chirp of activation from her ear jack.

  “Striker has eyes.”

  Fekadu, the sniper, announcing that he’d taken up position atop the guard tower.

  Fiero tapped her ear jack—everyone would hear the confirmation chirp. No need to comment further.

  Fiero, McTavish, and Bianchi were hunkered down next to Barracks Four, which appeared to be empty. A cluster of old oil barrels had been left to the side of the barrack and made for a good duck blind.

  The big Scotsman made a gesture in the direction of the admin building. They’d all heard the door opening and swinging shut, and the sound of men talking, but too far away for Bianchi to interpret.

  The Italian tensed up and Fiero made a no-go gesture. He settled back down.

  The plan still relied on stealth. The Kosovars were committing major, international crimes from this base. If the team could steal a truck, get the kids on board, and hit the gate—the guards, like all military base guards, would be on the lookout for someone breaking in—they could get to the highway in under a minute. And the troops involved in human trafficking likely would hesitate before getting into a running gun battle on an international highway.

  That was Plan A.

  The chatter continued. The bad news: more soldiers were awake and moving about than they’d hoped for. The good news: the chatter sounded casual; the soldiers weren’t awake and moving about because of St. Nicholas and the mercs.

  Something thumped behind the barracks. McTavish and Bianchi, both down on one knee, twisted in that direction. The Italian rose and crept to the southeast corner of Barracks Four; farther from the light and chatter, close to the forest-side perimeter fence.

  Fiero covered her mouth with her palm, pushing her voice wand closer to her lips. “Striker: eyes on the men by admin?”

  Fekadu replied softly. “Affirm.”

  “How many.”

  “Three.”

  She heard another soft thump from somewhere behind the barracks. Were they being distracted by soldiers talking loud at the well-lit admin building while someone moved up on their flank? Bianchi, at the right rear corner of the building, brought his automatic rifle up to his shoulder, elbow on his knee, eyes on the raised rear sight.

  “Hold fire,” Fiero whispered for the sake of everyone, but mostly for the Italian.

  Bianchi shot her a look. She stared him down.

  He put his good eye back on his rifle sight.

  Mohamed let the garbage hatch thump shut, wincing at the noise, and duckwalked from Barracks Three to a high chain-link fence, beyond which lay a forest. He knelt, further ripping out the knees of the only jeans that still remained from the beginning of the family’s odyssey. For the first time in his fifteen years, he smelled moldering pine needles and rich brown earth and the sweet decay of dead birds and squirrels. The potpourri of it made him dizzy. The forest was loud, too. Why had no one ever told him that forests were loud with frogs and cicadas and owls?

  He took a moment to take in the darkened base. It seemed huge to him, with lights atop tall poles, and wooden buildings with metal roofs. The road through the camp—what he could see of it—was well-paved and smooth. Mohamed had seen well-paved roads only on important government streets, and he subconsciously associated fresh tarmac with power. He wondered what country he was in that had such wealth, that they could pave the roads in the army base.

  He had no doubt they were prisoners. The military types of Syria had been hardened and bitter but didn’t care about the refugees. The military types of Turkey and Greece had been overwhelmed and stunningly disorganized—even from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old—and hadn’t particularly cared about the individual refugees, seeing them only as a river of people that needed to keep flowing, in order to save themselves from drowning in it.

  But the soldiers of this unnamed country cared about the refugees. And, Mohamed realized with terror, they seemed to care for all the worst reasons.

  He had excellent night vision and watched as three men slipped out of the two-story wooden building, about mid-center of the camp, talking and lighting up cigarettes. A fourth soldier joined them, but quickly jogged away. He was gobbled up by the night, only to emerge in the cone of light under one of the poles, twenty yards down.

  Mohamed didn’t want Amira to wake up and find him gone. Or the exotic English adventurer, Jinan, for that matter. He rose and turned, but quickly fell to his knees among the reeds.

  A man appeared at the next low building to Mohamed’s left. The man knelt at the corner, one elbow on his raised knee, and aimed a rifle down the length of the rear side of the barracks buildings.

  The path to the garbage hatch in Barracks Three, and Mohamed’s way back to his sister, intersected perfectly with the sights of that ominously long gun.

  Finnigan got the housing off the steering column of the great Scania truck and separated the wires by color, using a penlight held in his teeth for illumination. His ear jack chirped.

  The languid, almost musical voice of the Ethiopian shooter, Fekadu, whispered to him. “Keeper has a Bravo heading his way.”

  Finnigan twisted the penlight to shine on the webbing between his thumb and fingers. Bravos were the bad guys. That one he knew. Keeper: that’s me. Right.

  He heard gravel crunch. He lay sideway
s on the elevated driver’s seat, his legs dangling horizontally in midair, and slid out of the truck, quietly closed the door.

  With a rumble, the big garage door began to rise, a narrow rectangle of dim light emerging on the cement and growing oblong.

  Finnigan dashed across the garage toward an older-model Jeep. He saw a pair of legs and boots outside the rising door. He slid to one hip like a runner stealing second, gliding under the Jeep, landing inside the lube/oil/filter pit.

  C47

  Lt. Akil Krasniqi smoked down one cigarette and waited for the private to retrieve one of the trucks. Each of the Ragusa Logistics vehicles had the necessary bumper stickers to get through the borders of Schengen Agreement countries without stopping to be searched. He shook a cigarette free of the pack and handed it to Corporal Agon Llumnica, who accepted it and a light.

  “The major wants three of the cattle heading north tonight. The oldest girl we’ve got, and two others; boy and a girl,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll take them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Llumnica drew on his cigarette.

  “You’re the duty officer, soon as I leave.”

  Llumnica straightened up. “Yes, sir!”

  They heard a revving engine from the direction of the motor pool. Llumnica and the private with them finished their smokes, and Lieutenant Krasniqi led them toward the barracks. The truck would meet them there. The man guarding the barracks snapped to attention as they approached.

  The lieutenant made a gesture with his chin and the guard shouldered his rifle, digging keys out of his fatigue jacket.

  Krasniqi led his two men inside, leaving the guard where he was. The private hit the lights, and refugee children began stirring on their cots. As they sat up, rubbing sleep from their eyes, Krasniqi looked at them.