by Dale Brown
Stoner rose upright about halfway, just enough to see shadows moving on the other side of the hedges. Dropping to his knee, Stoner sighted the AK-47 along the row of bushes. The cold of the night froze him into position, pushing away time, pushing away fear and even adrenaline. It swathed him in its grasp, and he waited, a stone in the night.
Finally, shadows pushed through an opening thirty yards away. One, two…Stoner waited until five had come through, then pushed his finger hard on the trigger, moving across to his left, taking down the black shapes. Cries of pain and agony rose over the fierce report of the gun. The Kalashnikov clicked empty.
Stoner cleared the mag, slammed in a fresh one, and fired in what seemed to be one motion, one moment. The cold of the night intensified, freezing his breath in his lungs as the shouts and screams crescendoed.
His rifle once more empty, Stoner stomped his right foot down and threw himself to the left, spinning amid the gravestones.
He lay on his back, reloading. Stoner heard a rocket-propelled grenade whistle over his head; the sound was more a hush than a whistle, and the explosion a dull thud against the wall of the church.
A second grenade flew past, even closer. But there was no explosion this time; the missile was a dud.
Meanwhile, the squad that had been pinned down rallied to fight the guerrillas near the hedge. The next ninety seconds were a tumult of explosions and gunfire, tracers flashing back and forth, the darkness turning darker. The mortar began firing again, the thud-pump, thud-pump of its shells rocking the ground.
Cries of the wounded rose above the din. Finally, a pair of soldiers ran forward from Stoner’s left—Romanians, rushing the last guerrillas. Three more followed. A man ran up to Stoner and dropped next to him, putting his gun down across his body, obviously thinking he was dead.
“Hey, I’m OK,” Stoner said.
The Romanian jumped.
“It’s OK,” said Stoner. “It’s the American. I’m all right.”
The soldier said something in Romanian, then got up and followed the others surging into the other yard. Stoner rose slowly. When he saw that the soldiers wouldn’t need his help, he turned toward the church.
The trucks had finally arrived, and soldiers were now swarming into the area. The church had been secured; soldiers climbed up the stairs, boxes of documents in their arms. Two guerrillas, bound and blindfolded, sat cross-legged a few feet from the basement entrance. The Romanian soldier behind them raised his rifle toward Stoner as he approached, then recognized him and lowered it.
Stoner pulled his small flashlight from his pocket and shone it into the men’s faces, which were bruised and swollen; both looked dazed.
“You speak English?” he asked them, kneeling so his face was level with theirs. “What are your names?”
Neither man said anything.
“English?” Stoner asked again. “Tell me your names.”
Nothing.
“I can get a message to your families that you’re OK,” Stoner said. “If I knew who you were.”
Their blank stares made it impossible to tell if they were being stubborn or just didn’t understand what he was saying.
Stoner switched to Russian, but there was no recognition. The men were Romanian.
“It would probably be better for you if people knew you were alive,” he said in English. “There’d be less chance of accidents.”
But the men remained silent.
Two other prisoners had been taken, both of them superficially wounded. Neither wanted to talk. At least thirty guerrillas were dead. The Romanians had lost only three men.
With the church and the immediate ground secured, squads of soldiers worked their way through the nearby houses, searching for rebels or anything they might have left behind. Stoner watched them move down the nearby street, surrounding a house, then rousting the inhabitants. Meanwhile, the papers and a computer that had been found in the church basement were loaded into a truck, to be transported to the helicopters and then flown back to Romania.
“Ah, Mr. Stoner,” said Brasov when the colonel found him at the front of the church. “Good information, yes. Good job, American.”
“What are you going to do with the dead guerrillas?” asked Stoner.
“They come back with us,” replied the colonel. “Evidence. If needed.”
“Good. Any of these guys look Russian?”
“You want them to be Russian?”
“Not if they’re Romanian.”
The colonel shrugged.
“I have you to thank. I was not always trusting you,” said the colonel, his English breaking down either because of his fatigue or perhaps his excitement. The operation would make him look very good with the general. “I will not forget.”
The colonel went off to check with his platoon leaders, urging them to move quickly. The phone lines in and out of the hamlet had been cut, and a pair of cell phone blockers had been set up near the church at the start of the assault, but there was no way to guarantee that word of the operation wouldn’t get out. The troops were to muster on the road in ten minutes; they would ride and march back to the helicopters.
Stoner went back over to the dead men, looking at their shoes. To a man they were battered and old; most wore cheap sneakers. He took a few photos with his digital camera, then went down the steps into the church basement to see what the troops had found. The steps opened into a meeting room about thirty by twenty, punctuated by cement columns that held the ceiling up. A small kitchenette sat at the back. There were a few metal chairs scattered to one side, along with a pair of tables propped against the wall. The place looked like a bingo hall between meetings.
Things were different behind the cheap wood panel wall at the back of the kitchenette. A steel door, pockmarked with bullets, had been pushed down off its hinges to reveal a room stacked with bunk beds. At the far end, tables set up as desks with computers and other office gear had been stripped bare by the soldiers. Paper was strewn everywhere; there were stacks of cardboard boxes in the corner. A pair of AK-47s and three crates filled with ammo lay nearby. Two steel footlockers were being guarded by a soldier. Stoner guessed they contained weapons; the letters on the top were Cyrillic.
Russian, though that didn’t prove much. He took photos anyway.
Quite a bit of blood had been splattered on the floor and walls.
By the time he came back outside, the soldiers were wrapping up, getting ready to leave. Colonel Brasov saw him and walked over, extending his hand.
“Now I hear from my men you are a hero,” said the colonel.
“How’s that?”
“You stopped an ambush.” The colonel pointed toward the back of the churchyard, where Stoner had cut off the guerrillas. “They had a second barracks in that house. You surprised them when they came to surprise my men.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
Brasov slapped him on the back. “You are a funny American. You kill two dozen men, you take no credit.”
“I don’t think it was two dozen.”
“Come on,” Brasov told him. “Time for us all to leave. I’ll buy you drinks when we are back. Come, come.”
Stoner fell in with one of the groups leaving on foot, walking back through the village. The houses were dark. He suspected that the villagers were watching now from behind the curtains and closed doors. Surely they’d known what was going on here. Maybe they were glad to be rid of the guerrillas, or maybe they sympathized with their cause. They were pawns in any event, bystanders whose deaths would not have mattered to either side.
Most of the helicopters had already taken off. The trucks were departing. It was a dangerous time. The operation wasn’t over, but it felt like it was, and the adrenaline that had pushed everyone had dissipated. Officers yelled at their men, trying to remind them of that, trying to get them to move quickly, to look alive. But they were slacking too, and the brief but intense fight had left their voices hoarse.
There were less people here
than Sorina had predicted. But maybe the evidence he wanted would be in the papers, or on the computer.
Stoner pulled his jacket tighter, suddenly feeling the chill of the night.
Brasov began yelling. The lieutenants started waving their arms, urging the men to board the helicopters immediately.
“What’s going on?” Stoner asked the colonel.
“The border stations have been alerted. We have to move quickly.”
Presidential villa,
near Stulpicani, Romania
2155
“LET’S PLAY SOCCER, DAD.”
“Julian, not only is it cold outside, but it’s dark.”
“I meant in the basement.”
Voda looked at his son, then glanced over at his wife, who was reading on the couch.
“I believe it is past your bedtime, young man,” Mircea said.
“Papa said I could stay up late all the weekend.”
“I did,” conceded Voda. While on most matters he considered himself strict, he could not bring himself to enforce an early bedtime, since the night was the only time he had to play with his son.
“Can we play?” asked the boy.
“All right. Let’s go.”
“Mama too.”
“I can’t play,” said Mircea.
“You can keep score.”
She rolled her eyes.
“We can keep score ourselves,” said Voda. “Let Mama read.”
Julian had already grabbed the ball. “If I win, I get extra time to stay up.”
“Even more?” said Mircea.
“And what if I win?” said Voda.
“Nothing. Everyone knows you should win.”
Voda told the security man on duty in the hall that they would be downstairs, so he wouldn’t be alarmed by odd noises. Then he went down the hall and around to the butler’s pantry, where the single door to the basement was located. The stairs, two hundred years old and made of rickety wood, creaked as he came down. The landing was poorly lit, and Voda paused, knowing that his son was lurking nearby, preparing to leap out from the shadows to try and scare him.
“Boo!” yelled Julian, charging at him from his left.
Even though he was expecting him, Voda was a little surprised. He jumped back, amplifying his real shock with a mock expression of horror.
The basement of the old building was a fairly scary place, or at least one that could give rise to the sort of stories common in Transylvania. It was all that was left of the first structure built there, around 1650; it had a dirt floor and very solid stone walls. The original building had burned down or perhaps simply been knocked down to make way for a replacement in the early nineteenth century. It had a footprint three times as large as the original, though it was not nearly so large as the castles and mountain palaces that still dotted the region. Most likely, the house had been built as a summer retreat for a well-to-do but not quite noble family, which is how Voda modestly thought of it now.
“The wine cask is one goal,” said Julian, leading his father into the open space behind the stairs. “The workshop is the other.”
“Whose goal is the cask?” said Voda, as if he didn’t know what the answer would be.
“Mine. You have the door to the workshop.”
“It’s wider than the wine cask.”
“Should we put the cask on its side?”
The barrel was empty, so it would have been easy to do, but Voda declined. He knew that Julian wanted him to protect the doorway because he didn’t like to go into the dank space they called the workshop. It was actually a storage area dug out behind the old foundation. Covered with spiderwebs, it had a double wall and led to an old root cellar. There was no electricity in that part of the basement, and the bare bulbs in this part of the basement sent only dim shadows in its direction.
“First one to five wins,” said Voda.
Julian put the ball down, faked a kick left, then swatted it against the wall on his right. As it bounced back, he ran and toed it forward. Voda couldn’t quite hit it with his foot as it dribbled past him, rebounding softly off the wall near the door. Before he could scoop it up, Julian executed a sliding kick that sent the ball soaring through the open door.
“Goaaaaal!” yelled the boy.
“I do not think sliding kicks are legal in our game,” Voda teased. “The ground is too hard. You’ll rip your pants.”
“Then we can get new ones.”
“Clothes do not grow on trees,” said Voda, very serious now as he stepped into the darkness to find the ball amid the clutter of the old storeroom. His son’s sense of entitlement bothered him. He did not want him to have to suffer, of course, but still, Justin should understand the value of hard work.
There was a pile of barrels staves immediately to the left of the doorway. Their shapes confused Voda, and he thought for a moment that the ball was among them. Finally he realized it must have gone farther in, and began poking forward cautiously, his eyes still having trouble adjusting to the dark. Ducking toward a shadow in the corner that looked as if it might the ball, he found his head tangled in several long strands of a spiderweb. He tried to pull off the threads, but they stuck to his ear and eyelids even after he rubbed at his face with his sleeve.
“Papa?”
“I’m coming, Julian. It’s hard to see the ball.”
There was a sharp rap and a thud above him.
“What was that?” Voda asked his son.
“I don’t know.”
There was another thud, this one toward the back of the house. Then a shock so strong that the ground shook.
Voda rushed out of the room.
“Papa, what is it?” The boy’s face was filled with fear.
“Go in there,” Voda told him. “Go behind the shelves. Go.”
“Is it an earthquake?”
“Do as I say, Julian.”
“I’m afraid. There’s spiders, and—”
“Go. I’ll be right back.”
Voda had already started for the stairs. The ground was shaking heavily now, and while he could not be sure, he thought he heard the pop of automatic rifle fire. He charged up the stairs just in time to hear Oana Mitca, Julian’s young nanny and bodyguard, shouting that they were under attack.
“Mircea!” Voda yelled for his wife. “Mircea, where are you?”
The guard from the hall was crouched near the door, watching the exterior through the small side window. He had unholstered his gun.
“Where’s my wife?” demanded Voda, but the man didn’t react. Bullets burst through the front of the house, shattering the windows.
“Lights! Lights! Kill the lights!” yelled one of the security people.
Voda ran into his office. He ducked down behind the desk and began working the combination to the small safe. He missed the second number and had to start again.
The tumblers clicked; he slapped open the safe and reached into the bottom, where he had two pistols, one a relatively new Glock and the other an ancient American revolver.
As he rushed from the room, bullets began hitting the rear of the house. The security forces outside were firing furiously; one was firing from upstairs.
Oana Mitca, gun drawn, appeared in the hall.
“Where is my wife?” demanded Voda.
“She’s in the kitchen. Mr. President, we are under attack.”
“Call the army post up the road,” said Voda, rushing past. He yelled for Sergi, his assistant, forgetting that he had left about an hour earlier for a dinner date.
He found Mircea huddled behind the counter of the kitchen with Lienart, the security shift supervisor, who was yelling into his satellite phone.
“We are under attack by the guerrillas,” said Lienart, who had already called the army. “Send everyone you have. Send them now!”
“Mircea.” Voda grabbed his wife’s hand. “Come on.”
She looked up at him from the floor. “Why?” she said. “Why are they after us?”
“Th
e army is five minutes away, Mr. President,” said Lienart.
Just then a rocket-propelled grenade or perhaps a mortar shell struck the back of the house. The brick walls held, but the blast blew out the glass from the windows, sending the shards flying through the rooms. Lienart ran to the window, peered out, then began firing his submachine gun.
“We’re going to the basement,” Voda said, pulling his wife with him.
“Go!” yelled Oana Mitca.
“Come with us!” Voda told her.
She hesitated for a moment. Voda grabbed her arm.
“Now!” he said.
Another shell rocked the house. This one landed on the roof and descended into the second floor before exploding.
Debris showered from above, and part of the kitchen wall crumbled. A beam slapped downward, striking the nanny across the shoulder and throwing her to the floor. Voda let go of his wife and ran to her. As he tried to pull the timber off, another shell hit the house. Red flashed through the house, the air filled with dust and smoke.
“Go,” whispered Oana.
Voda glanced across the floor, made sure his wife was still there, then reached under the fallen beam. He leveraged his back against it, pushing it upward. Oana Mitca crawled forward, groaning as she came free.
“We need to protect you,” she said. Her voice was practically drowned out by the sound of submachine guns.
“Yes, protect us downstairs,” said Voda. “Stay with the boy. That’s your post.”
He pushed her next to his wife, then led them to the door. Just as they started down the stairs, another large round hit the house. The rumbling explosion shook Voda off his feet; he fell down the stairs, tumbling into the women.
They helped each other up. Voda gave his wife the Glock, figuring she would do better with it than the revolver.
“Where’s Julian?” asked Oana Mitca.
“This way, come on,” said Voda, leading them back to the storage room. He kept flashlights near the entrance to the room, but it wasn’t until he started through the doorway that he remembered them. He went back, calling to his son as he grabbed them.