The president, listening wordlessly to Pete Lund’s concise update of the latest turn of events in Rome, stood at one of the tall casement windows behind his desk, his back to Lund, his hands clasped stiffly behind his back like a soldier standing at ease, as if contemplating the scenic D.C. vista beyond the White House grounds, dominated by the Washington Monument obelisk in the distance.
Lund concluded his report with, “And that’s all we have right now, sir.”
The president turned, and Lund realized that he had not been gazing out of the window. The president’s eyes were clamped shut, and as he turned, he raised a hand to massage them.
Lund figured that the chief executive, like everybody else, was stemming back tears for all of mankind at the murder of a helpless child and her father at terrorist hands.
But tears would not get the job done.
“Did you hear the statement I made to the press, Pete?”
“Sorry, sir, I was on that satellite hookup with Cody.”
“I mourned our losses,” the president told him. “I said we were considering every option at our disposal. They kept wanting to know about retaliation. I didn’t tell them about Cody and his men.”
“They’re taking on incredible odds, going into Bulgaria after Kamal,” Lund said. “There’s no way we can help them once they cross the river separating Bulgaria and Greece.”
“If I know Cody, and I think I do, even though I’ve never met the man,” said the president, “they would have gone in even if you had ordered him not to, Pete. You do know the guy. You tell me. Cody saw Laura Parker slaughtered in front of his eyes. He won’t allow himself to slow down or rest until he’s caught Kamal, and I’ll wager that those three men of his feel the same way.”
“I wouldn’t care to take that wager, sir.” Lund cracked a small smile with no humor in it. “I just don’t like the odds. We’re taking a million-to-one shot that they’ll get into Bulgaria, into Sofia, destroy Kamal and his connections, and get away without sustaining casualties. We’re taking those odds because Kamal’s connections in Sofia are the KGB. and who knows how the hell this thing is wired—and because, as you say, Cody would have gone after the guy on his own without our blessings after what happened in Rome. But those are the odds against them the minute Cody’s Army starts into Bulgaria; a million to one. And from here on out, there isn’t a damn thing we can do to help them.”
“They’ll be on their own,” the president agreed, “but somehow I’ve got a hunch that that’s the way Cody and his men prefer to operate.”
For the first half hour he spent with the guy, Cody could not get over the impression that he had met Milos Bakous somewhere before, though he knew his path had never crossed that of the Greek CIA contact in the mountain village of Sidhirokastron. Then it occurred to him.
Bakous was a living, breathing double of Anthony Quinn’s immortal Zorba the Greek, from the movie of the same name: a gruff, coarse, uneducated mountain man in whose eyes and smile flashed the earthy sensuality and good humor that was his Greek birthright.
The four-wheel-drive vehicle driven by Bakous bounced and groaned its way up a steep, narrow dirt road, its headlights piercing the wall of gloom ahead like two luminious fingers pointing the way.
“It will not be long now, my friends,” Bakous told his four passengers. “I had feared we might encounter trouble. These hills are full of bandits. Travel by night is very dangerous.”
He pulled at the steering wheel in order to avoid a particularly deep gouge in the mountain road and only barely succeeded, the jolt rocking the vehicle almost enough to tip it over onto its side.
“If this vehicle of yours makes it,” Caine grunted, readjusting his position, “we should make it, more or less.”
Bakous chuckled heartily at that.
“Oh, do not worry about my truck, Englishman. It has seen worse, I assure you. Why, only last week—”
“If we’re almost to the crossing point,” Cody said, breaking in, “maybe we’d better kill the headlights.”
Bakous must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. The Greek had a real gift for gab.
Bakous snuffed the headlights, continuing on guided by parking lights only.
It had been three hours since Cody and his men had left Major Brazi’s office in Rome. The U.S. transport plane arranged by Colonel Adams had landed Cody’s Army at a private airfield leased by a dummy CIA paper corporation. From there four American “civilian engineers” and their gear had been helicoptered to Sidhirokastron where Bakous owned a sweetshop in the picturesque village at the foot of the Rhodopes.
Cody had allowed himself a catnip, as had Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy, during the flight from Rome. He now felt rejuvenated, fully awake despite the hour and the nonstop pace they had kept up since receiving word the day before of the embassy takeover. He had learned in Nam how to relax himself to sleep when the opportunity presented itself, not a deep sleep but that light rest wherein one remains subconsciously aware of what is happening around oneself while the body recharges by, for all practical purposes, “falling asleep.”
It had been like this in Vietnam, push-push nonstop with only scattered, captured moments, a respite here or there, for days at a time, and if you wanted to stay alive, you learned how to grab five or ten or thirty minutes of shut-eye while a buddy covered your ass, and then you watched out for him while he did the same.
Cody and his men had piled their gear and themselves into Bakous’s four-wheel-drive. The Greek briefed them on what he had been able to put together since being contacted by CIA control agents in Athens, and Cody again found himself marveling at the power Lund wielded.
They had left the village, heading north along secondary roads carved through mountainous countryside cloaked in darkness.
The Greek mainland—bordered on the east by Turkey and the Aegean Sea; on the west by the Ionian Sea; on the south by the Sea of Crete, and on the north by Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria—comprises the southernmost tip of the Balkan Peninsula, a natural “bridge” between three continents—Africa, Asia, and Europe—that, as such, had served as a crossroad for merchants and conquerors throughout recorded history.
At several thousand feet above sea level the night air was frosty and brittle with a pine-scented, whistling wind that sharply bit into your lungs if you breathed of it too deeply.
“I have an inflatable raft stowed away behind the backseat,” Bakous told them. “Bulletproof, of course, should there be any trouble.”
“And we are expecting trouble.” Caine nodded. “That’s a bloody fact.”
“Bandits are our main concern, I think,” the Greek opined. “At least on this side, and this side is all that concerns Milos, no?” He unloaded a hearty Zorba guffaw. “Then the night’s work is cone for me and it’s back to bed and my woman.”
“Have you worked with people of the NFO before?” Cody asked.
“Many, many times,” Bakous assured him expansively. “The Bulgars, they are a trustworthy people also. You will be in good hands, I think.”
“I’d feel a whole heap better if we knew the moniker of this NFO contact we’re supposed to link up with,” Hawkins grumbled from the backseat where he jounced along between Murphy and Caine.
“I was told only to alert my Bulgar friends and tell them to arrange to meet you at the river with someone from the National Freedom Organization who is to be your principal connection in the country. I contact them by shortwave radio, and even that is dangerous. There was much arranging to be done at that end as well, considering the time element, you understand? I myself was contacted only hours ago, awakened from a sound, er, sleep with my woman. She was very angry that I had to leave her.”
“Milos sounds like a Greek Rufe Murphy,” Caine noted under his breath.
“And what is that?” a puzzled Bakous asked. “Milos does not understand. Is this a slang word, what you say I am?”
They had not given Bakous their names, standard operating procedure on a mission like this.
“He just means that you must be one mighty lover man, dude,” Rufe explained with a grin. “A ladies’ man.”
Bakous brightened like a kid on Christmas morning when the subject turned to sex.
“Ah, yes, my friends, I am that, I can assure you. The women”—he sighed—“they are everything, no? All that is beautiful in life. What would life be without them? I may never understand them, but I would never be without one!”
“Looks like you pegged old Milos right on the button, tea bag.” Hawkeye grinned. “A Greek Rufe Murphy!”
“Yes, that is Milos.” Bakous nodded, savoring the sound of it. “I am a Greek Rufe Murphy!”
Cody cracked a small grin to himself in the darkness at the easy flow of camaraderie between these men, which meant that his men were back on an even keel after the gut-wrenching ordeal of witnessing the cold-blooded murder of a child in Rome; a shocking blow to the spirit and soul of men even as combat-toughened as these. But like Cody, his men had submerged that unthinkable horror and pushed on like the pros they were, this mild banter in a high-risk situation their way of dealing with the truth that this could be the last night of living for each of them.
The Bulgars are a Turko-Tartar race with origins in the steppes of southern Russia; illiterate, rough-hewn “mountain people” of southern Bulgaria whom the average Bulgarian—and most anyone else, for that matter—considered uncivilized and clannish, which, to a major degree, was true. They were also fiercely independent and wholly without fear.
The NFO, the Bulgarian National Freedom Organization, was a far-flung underground organization that drew its ranks from every station and walk of life across the small country. Hardly a large organization, nor particularly effective in a police state where there seldom could be found any meeting of four or more people where one of them was not an informer for the secret police, the NFO did what it could; it was supplied by the CIA. The most the NFO could generally be counted on was for monitoring military activity, but they also came in for occasional use in other capacities from time to time, and apparently Lund had seen to it that one of their number would meet Cody’s Army on the far side of the Bistritza River, the natural boundary separating Bulgaria and Greece.
The road they had been following took a sudden dip, the four-wheel-drive rocking even more than before, heading down for a moment; then the road became a footpath, rockier and steeper than a road.
“I would prefer not to use even parking lights along here,” Milos grumbled. “If there are bandits around, they will be very curious why we have come so far from the beaten track at such an hour. They will think we are drug smugglers, bringing heroin up from Turkey.”
The four-wheel-drive sashayed dangerously, heading down a steep grade before Milos fought the steering wheel back under control, then he pointed at vague, murky, deep shadows in a sloping meadow surrounded by a towering forest of oak bathed in the silver moonlight.
“Over there are ruins that are said to date to the third century B.C.”
The trail met and ran parallel to a swift, foaming brook that chuckled in the night, the sound barely discernible beneath the vehicle sounds, then the gurgle of the brook and the brook itself yielded, without warning, to the throatier chugging of the Bistritza, half a mile wide, moonlight-shimmering, fluid blackness pulsating the night with its power and presence.
Bakous braked, switching off the motor and the parking lights, the vehicle’s nose to the squat bank of the river.
Nothing could be seen on the far side except the dark shroud of night.
Dark curtain, thought Cody. Iron Curtain.
He said, “Let’s get that raft inflated and move out. Milos, you handle the raft. We’ll stake a defense perimeter, just in case.”
“And remember.” Bakous reminded them as they climbed out of the vehicle, “if, uh, that is to say when you get across, the Bulgars will make themselves known to you. But beware. This stretch of border is heavily patrolled on that side.”
“I’d like to know what of this bleeding business is easy,” Caine grunted. “Might be fun to try our hand at it just once, for a change.”
Apaka gained the deeper shadows of the ruins, flying like a fleet-footed ghost. He went over to where Zharka stood at one of the crumbling walls, staring off at where he had last seen the four-wheel-drive vehicle before it had dipped out of sight on its way to the river.
The eight men of his group, in fatigue jackets and jeans and combat boots, toting AK-47 assault rifles, crouched impatiently around the embers of what had been a fire until they spotted the headlights and doused the fire that had been built behind the highest of the remaining walls of the ancient ruins.
The vehicle had driven past without stopping.
“Well?” Zharka demanded. “How many?”
Apaka, at sixteen the youngest of the group, was not out of breath from his run.
“Five,” he reported. “They do not know we are here, as you suspected, Zharka.”
“What are they doing?”
“I. . .didn’t wait to see.”
Zharka’s open right palm lashed out, slapping the youth across the face with enough force to knock Apaka nearly off-balance.
“Foolish one! I wished to know why they have come here.”
Apaka stepped back. The others got to their feet. Apaka did not touch the stinging spot where he had been slapped.
“Can they be anything but smugglers?”
Zharka considered that for a moment, then nodded and scooped up his rifle.
“You may have a brain in that head of yours after all, boy. Let’s get down there and see!”
Zharka led the way off from the ruins at a jog. The others fell in behind him, Apaka at his side as they moved out.
They had been camped around the ruins for the past several days, using it as a base from which to loot outlying farms in the region. The group moved into an area, set up a camp such as this, stayed there long enough to rob as much as they could before the government or the ill-equipped provincial authorities sent in forces to rout them out, at which time Zharka would move on. It had been a workable way of life for some years, but pickings had gotten progressively leaner for some reason, and this had been the worst month of all, many of the houses they broke into already vacated by farmers and shepherds gone bankrupt because of economic bad times.
And now, Zharka thought, something like this drops into our laps It was almost enough to make one believe in a God Almighty.
“When we get to the fork,” he whispered to the others, “we split up, five to the north of them, four of you with me. Wait for me to open fire, then all of you do the same. Whatever they have will be ours, and we will be gone.”
“What of their bodies?” Apaka asked as they neared the fork in the trail.
“Why, we leave them for the scavengers of the forest, boy,” Zharka said with a snort. “Nothing should go to waste in this country. Not even dead men!”