I woke on Wednesday after sleeping better than I had anticipated. My feeling-state was a bit like the first morning of trial, when I employed a meditative effort to freeze away my exploding anxieties over all the things I couldn’t control. As I dressed, the momentousness of what was at hand seemed to enhance my vision, as if I was seeing a more sharp-edged version of myself when I looked in the mirror. If you were very lucky, you experienced times like this, when what you did mattered to thousands more people than just you, and which, for that reason, you’d remember right to the end.
Goos had gotten himself buttoned together. He sported his usual subtle smile when I greeted him at the breakfast table. We ate quickly and for lack of anything else talked about the news that Obama was going to send five hundred Special Forces troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS.
At 10:00, Andersen and a new MP drove us to Barupra. The empty basketball court outside the former base was a staging area for a training session intended to be largely fictitious, in clear sight of the road and whatever surveillance vehicles the Arkans would send by. Fourteen soldiers, all members of the NATO Response Force, a special ops unit, had been outfitted in the camo combat fatigues of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seven were German, seven were Danish, twelve men and two women.
The commander was a German colonel, Lothar Ruehl. He was thickset and positive, with a ginger bottle-brush mustache, and greeted us with a quiet word of appreciation passed on from General Moen. The shoulder of his make-believe uniform bore a tan patch with a single star and a line, the insignia of a second lieutenant.
Goos and I, both dressed in jeans and running shoes, were outfitted with ballistic helmets and full body armor, which included a groin panel, half sleeves, and a collar. It was heavy but the Velcro strapping allowed more mobility than I expected.
With Ruehl in charge, we acted out the fake operation. I pretended to knock on Ferko’s door, while the squad fanned out to surround the perimeter and then batter its way in. As anticipated, the two local cops guarding the gravesite today wandered up to see what we were doing, but maintained a polite distance. For their sake, a sergeant—who was actually a Danish first lieutenant—went through the charade of shouting out Colonel Ruehl’s orders in Bosnian.
After that, we broke for lunch. The NATO field ration pack was French and, astonishingly, included a tin of chicken pâté and a small wheel of Brie, but I was in no state to eat. Ruehl sat with Goos and me and quietly explained the real plan, which, naturally, we couldn’t practice around prying eyes. The colonel repeated the details several times, until we understood the deviations from the maneuvers we’d acted out.
At noon precisely, we started for Vo Selo. The military vehicles were all NATO issue, which apparently was not unusual in BiH. The convoy included a boxy blue armored Mercedes SUV, in which Goos and I rode behind Colonel Ruehl; a canopied 4x4 personnel truck; and an armored personnel carrier, which Goos proudly told me was a Belgian design called a BDX. It looked a little like a miniaturized tank, with four tires, camouflage paint on the plating, and a gun turret.
The hope, as General Moen suggested, was that Kajevic’s thugs would take the size of this force as a measure of how thoroughly they’d scared the crap out of Goos and me last Tuesday night, which they’d probably view with mean-spirited glee. With any luck, they’d still be laughing when we ended up in the middle of Madovic.
Goos and I rode with our helmets in our laps, largely unspeaking due to the loud radio traffic as Colonel Ruehl exchanged encrypted communications with the troops here and the undercover elements who had spent the night in Madovic. The driver, who spoke Serbo-Croatian, also frequently issued phony orders in perfect Bosnian over the Army’s normal channel.
During one of the few quiet moments, I turned to Goos.
“Okay?”
He nodded solidly. “First-class operation,” he said.
“I’m wearing adult undergarments,” I told him. “Just in case.”
He smiled a little less than I’d hoped.
After the fifty-minute ride, we rolled through Vo Selo, where many of the Roma emerged from their tiny sad homes to watch. Up the hill, Ferko’s little castle gave all signs of being abandoned. The place was utterly still. The laundry was no longer flapping on the lines on the balconies, and the shutters on the windows, as well as the front gate, were wide open. The dogs’ blood remained in brown-black circles on the gravel of the courtyard.
Nonetheless, we went through the whole act. The Danish lieutenant handed an electric megaphone to Goos, who asked Ferko in Serbo-Croatian to come out. After a minute without response, it was my turn to yell. I had memorized two words in Romany, Gavva na, which I had been told meant ‘Don’t hide,’ and I screamed them repeatedly while Goos stalked around, calling out more or less what he had last week when Ferko was actually here.
With our signal, the troop truck steamed between the gates and, without stopping, drove right through Ferko’s double front doors, which popped off like a Lego toy. From behind, the soldiers in the 4x4 immediately deployed.
While Goos and I flattened ourselves against the stucco walls by the front doors, four soldiers in full combat array, including helmets and the same body armor we wore, ran to cover the rear. Four more fanned out behind us with their weapons pointed, while another foursome ran through the house, shouting in Bosnian as they cleared each room.
After about ten minutes, Colonel Ruehl, at the SUV, circled his hand, which was the sign that the monks had just appeared at the door of the hospital in Madovic, prepared to depart.
Now came my close-up. Behind the house, the Response Force members had covertly planted something like a cherry bomb, meant to sound like a blowout on the armored vehicle. At that bang, one of the soldiers protecting the courtyard was going to pretend to panic and fire his assault rifle toward the front door. One round would supposedly ricochet and strike me in the lower forearm. The uncomfortable part was that combat troops didn’t use blanks. Colonel Ruehl assured me that the shooter was a first-class marksman, but there was still going to be live fire within a yard of me, and in the moment, as three bullets suddenly chewed into the stucco, pulverizing it into a fine white dust, I didn’t need any acting lessons to scream as loud as I could and spin to the ground.
The lieutenant rushed to me and emptied a vial of blood from inside his sleeve all over my hand, which he then wrapped in his bandanna. The troops on the perimeter ran to the rear and pretended to discover that the explosion was a blowout, not armaments, with the mounting of a spare undertaken with the speedy precision of a pit crew. The soldier who’d supposedly shot me dashed up to the lieutenant and me, pleading for understanding. Playing the sergeant, the lieutenant screamed out orders, still in Bosnian, while Ruehl and Goos and my accidental assailant all grabbed me by the elbows and dragged me to the SUV.
The convoy was in motion immediately, but we were underway only a minute or two when a police car came tearing up. The cop clearly had been watching from someplace below us. The Bosnian-speaking sergeant leaned out his window to explain I had been shot accidentally and had suffered an arterial bleed and would be dead shortly unless they got me to a surgeon. Lying across the backseat of the SUV, with my back against the rear passenger’s-side door and my hand in the air, I did my part by moaning and crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
I don’t know what the cop’s orders were—he probably was unwitting and simply reporting to a superior officer—but he bought what he was told completely. He sprinted back to his vehicle and set off his Mars lights and the hee-haw siren to lead us at maximum speed as we tore through Vo Selo and reached the mountain road. The 4x4 was next, with us in the SUV right behind it. The armored vehicle, trailing because of the tire change, arrived at the rear of the speeding convoy. It was impressively nimble and stayed on our tail, even though we were going over 100 kilometers per hour on the straightaways.
In the SUV, Goos and I said very little. The radio screamed at intervals with at least six different voices. Two or three soldiers somewhere were continuing the Bosnian narration of events, but Ruehl now and then switched to a NATO frequency for brief traffic in English. I took it that Kajevic, code-named Vulture, and his bodyguards were so far unsuspecting and still walking in slow procession from the hospital toward the monastery.
We were no more than a minute outside of Madovic when an emergency call barked from the radio.
“Up high, they see us coming and don’t like it,” Ruehl explained. NATO was all over the radio traffic from the monastery. Whoever watched out for Kajevic had ordered the local police to do what they could to detain us.
As we spun through the last turn on the hillside, we could see that the cop who’d been leading us had suddenly pulled over with his beacons still spinning. He was out of his car, one hand in a white glove raised to bring us to a halt. With the radio mike to his mouth, Ruehl ordered the convoy to proceed at top speed. The troop truck bore down on the cop and he sprang out of the way at the last second, literally diving off the road, while the vehicle hit his hat, which had gone flying. As we tore by, I could see the officer lying in a bush about six feet below the roadside, with a hand over his head to shelter him from the dust and flying gravel.
We were coming straight downhill and must have reached the turn to Madovic at about 60 miles per hour, skidding around it. One of the strengths of the plan to seize Kajevic on the way back to the monastery was, as General Moen explained, that Vulture could not get any visual directions from the top of the mountain. The infrared surveillance of the bodyguards, which had detected the AKs under the rassas, had shown no radios. But that missed the obvious.
As we flew into Madovic, just above the main square, the three monks were in sight. They had come to a halt a hundred yards in front of us on the narrow road that crossed through the town. One of the three had his cell phone to his ear. Looking back, I saw a black sedan throwing a fog of dust as it raced down from the monastery, while police sirens were suddenly echoing from at least two directions.
Halfway to the monks, our SUV stopped. The 4x4 braked another twenty yards ahead, while the armored vehicle surged to the front, bearing down on Kajevic. Goos and I were supposed to take shelter on the floor, but instead we knelt in the foot wells, our eyes just high enough to see through the windows on Goos’s side. The SUV was parked laterally to block the road, and Ruehl and the driver jumped out to take up spots behind the vehicle, the young driver leveling his assault rifle across the hood. Crouched beside him, Ruehl raised the electric megaphone. In front of us the troops flowed out of the rear of the 4x4 in precision, each one rolling as he or she landed and quickly assuming a combat position on their bellies with their rifle sights trained on Kajevic and his bodyguards, only a few yards away. The four supposed tourists, with their hidden pistols now drawn, had crept near the monks to close off the rear.
Through the megaphone, Colonel Ruehl spoke in Serbo-Croatian, reading from a paper in his hand. Goos whispered the translation:
“Laza Kajevic, surrender at once. You are under arrest pursuant to the warrant of the United Nations and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.” The words echoed off the small buildings of the square. A few residents, initially drawn by the commotion, scattered at the sight of the automatic rifles, retreating indoors. I could hear some of them screaming.
The monk with the cell phone lost his high round hat. He groped under the rassa and suddenly swung up his AK. It was no more than a quarter of the way to horizontal when two separate bursts of automatic fire struck him. The monk flew backward, almost as if hit by a grenade, spattering blood over Kajevic beside him. The other bodyguard raised both his hands and fell to his knees.
In the process of covering up from the gunfire, Kajevic had also dropped his clerical hat. Now he feigned incomprehension, as if he didn’t understand the language or perhaps had been mistaken for someone else. But there was no doubt it was he. The infamous hairdo had been shorn to a moderate length and had gone white, or been dyed that color. The untamed beard was real and covered his whole face, including furry patches on his cheeks. He wore heavy black glasses and he was a great deal fatter than in his sleek days of vitriol and menace. But it was Kajevic, with the same wild eyes, and he was clever enough to know he was wanted alive. He ran.
He scampered wide around the armored BDX and dodged between the soldiers on their bellies, who, as he’d expected, hesitated to shoot. Nor could anybody get a hand on him, despite two of the troops’ diving efforts. As Kajevic sprinted, he reached into the left pocket of his rassa and produced a Glock pistol, which he held beside his ear, dashing straight toward us in the SUV. Ruehl stood up and yelled to him to stop and Kajevic answered by shooting once at Colonel Ruehl, who screamed out. The driver sank instinctively beside the colonel to attend to him. I had the crazy thought that Kajevic was going to stop to shoot Goos and me, too, but he knew this was his one chance to escape and he was at top speed, clearly headed for the black car that was barreling down from the monastery.
As Kajevic galloped toward us, I ducked in the floor well behind the front seat. I felt Goos lean back against me. Scared stiff, I assumed he was seeking cover, but what he wanted was leverage. As Kajevic drew abreast, running for his life, Goos suddenly kicked open the back door on his side. It caught Kajevic full force. His face smashed against the window and he reeled backward and lost his footing.
The door recoiled but Goos caught it and sprang from the SUV.
I screamed “Goos!” but followed him out. He had thrown himself on top of Kajevic. With his right hand, Goos had Kajevic by the hair, beating his head against the road, while his left hand was on Kajevic’s wrist, holding down the Glock. Kajevic gripped it by the stock, apparently intending to use it as a bludgeon. Frightened by the weapon, I had no choice but to stomp Kajevic’s gun hand, and then grabbed the pistol by the barrel, forcing his wrist back until he released the sidearm. Just as it came free, half a dozen soldiers fell upon us, easing both Goos and me away. They wrestled Kajevic’s hands behind him, zip-tied him, and then picked up the former president by his arms and legs as if he were trussed livestock. Holding him aloft, they ran Kajevic in a bundle up to the truck. The soldiers counted to three in German and tossed Laza Kajevic into the rear like a duffel bag. Several more troops clambered up beside him.
Almost simultaneously, the cop who’d led us from Vo Selo arrived with his siren blaring. He skidded to a stop near the SUV. He was a brave man, clearly angry now, and he sprinted from his car. In the middle of the street, he braced to shooting position with both hands on his pistol, screaming instructions as he confronted a squad of soldiers in battle gear. The armored vehicle had already spun around to pursue Kajevic. It rolled about thirty yards, until it was between the officer and the SUV, at which point the artillery piece on top of the BDX suddenly spat fire, riddling the police car with high-caliber ammunition. The auto jumped around like a bug. Its tires flattened while its windshield disappeared in a downpour of glass. The cop face-planted in the ground again.
A couple of hundred yards behind him, the black sedan, which I’d lost track of, was suddenly facing the BDX’s gun. The car had screeched to a stop at the foot of the road up to the monastery, but once the police car was destroyed by gunfire, the sedan slammed into reverse and backed up the hill at top speed without ever turning around.
There was a second of quiet in which I rolled toward Goos, but from across the town square, another police car raced in, with its light bar and siren at work. The vehicle skidded up dust, coming to a halt between the 4x4 and the SUV. The fat cop and the wiry cop we’d first met eight days ago got out shouting, both with shotguns in hand. The fat one was red-faced, spitting as he screamed.
Once Kajevic had been taken, Goos and I had viewed the whirl of activity while sitting in the road beside the SUV, almost as if we were in stadium seats. Now I sprang up so the soldiers could see me, yelling out as I pointed, “Those are the ones who kidnapped us!” Goos immediately grabbed me by the belt and dragged me to the ground before either of the cops could make out my location, even though the wiry one had looked like he might have recognized my voice.
He wheeled toward the SUV with his shotgun raised, only to find the armored vehicle now rolling toward him, as the gun turret revolved in his direction. The fat one yelled something and the two cops scampered back into the police car, squealing the tires as the vehicle tore off through the square, its siren still bleating. One of the supposed backpackers ran behind it, snapping pictures of the license plate with his phone.
When I finally looked down, I was astonished that I still had Kajevic’s Glock in my left hand. I laid it on the pavement beside Goos, who was now flat on his back. He was red with pain and grunting with each breath. He clearly had rebroken his ribs.
“Aren’t you the fucking hero,” I said.
“Pure instinct,” he answered. “Good on you with the gun, Boom.”
“It was my extensive training watching crime shows on TV,” I said. “You already had him.” That was true. When I bent the weapon back, Kajevic seemed to have already let go of it. It came away like the stem from a grape.
In the meantime, a medic had appeared, one of the ersatz backpackers. He treated the colonel, who had sustained a wound a bit like the one I had faked, a through-and-through gunshot to the forearm. He did not appear to be bleeding heavily, although from the way he held his arm with his good hand, I took it that the bullet had fractured something.
I sat in the street beside Goos until the medic made his way over. He checked Goos’s vitals, then gave him an injection of some painkiller. After that, he had the presence of mind to remember the initial plan and pretended to examine, then bandage, my hand. I nearly objected, having completely forgotten why he was doing that. There was no point to that exercise anyway. Kajevic’s people would always remember Goos as the guy who’d flattened the president and ended his last chance to escape.
The medic then returned to Ruehl and hopped into the backseat of the SUV, where the driver placed the colonel while Lothar gave us a gallant smile.
Just then, I noticed a low-flying combat helicopter appearing to hop over the mountains as it passed the monastery. The aircraft had a sharp snout that made it resemble a dragonfly, and at the sides were a patch of tiger stripes and two white missile launchers. It hovered over the square, taking its time to put down so that the residents, who’d begun to creep out again from the buildings, could once more retreat.
After the helicopter landed, the armored vehicle advanced to cover the far side of the square, while several soldiers who’d been guarding the 4x4 and Kajevic fanned out, pointing their weapons to establish a perimeter. The truck rolled forward until it was just outside the overhead circle of the chopper blades. I heard the lieutenant shout out “Clear!” and eight soldiers jumped from the rear, moving double time as they carried Laza Kajevic in the air between them. He was bound hand and foot, gagged and still squirming, with a bloody bandage in the middle of his face—Goos, it turned out, had broken his nose. His coarse brown rassa was gathered at his waist, revealing his blue jeans beneath. The soldiers tossed Kajevic through the open door of the chopper as unceremoniously as he’d gone into the truck. Four of them leapt in beside the prisoner.
Colonel Ruehl had remained in the SUV to command the final step of the operation, but the lieutenant took over then and settled in the front passenger’s seat of the chopper. With that, the helicopter was aloft again, soon disappearing behind the mountains.
One old woman came out in its wake and threw both of her shoes in that direction, but I didn’t know if her contempt was for Kajevic or us.