“I see them, Captain!” Kalojan whispered excitedly, pointing as he handed the infrared binoculars to Nocheki. “There, about one kilometer below us, along the river.”
Nocheki took the heavy binoculars, wondering why Kalojan felt the need to whisper.
“Get the men ready to move out, Sergeant.”
Their breath puffed in the cold.
“Yes, sir.”
Kalojan rendered a curt salute and left where the two of them had positioned themselves upon an outcrop of boulders upon this steep, pine-wooded slope.
Nocheki raised the binoculars to his eyes, resting his elbows for support on a boulder, focusing the powerful night-vision glasses in the direction indicated by Kalojan.
One hundred feet behind him, near two Soviet Chor-7 jeeplike vehicles, six militiamen waited in various relaxed attitudes, their AK-47s slung over their shoulders.
This had been a routine patrol along the river, Nocheki’s patrol following the road that ran parallel to the river, as they did every other night at approximately this time. Routine, yes. . . until the flat, popping sounds of automatic weapons fire had carried faintly yet distinctly on the wind from not too great a distance, sounding to Nocheki’s ears as if it had come from across the river.
He had motioned his second vehicle to follow, instructing his driver to extinguish their headlights and pull sharply off the road and stop. He and Kalojan then left the others and had come to this position that Nocheki remembered from the days of prowling this countryside during his youth.
Verdo Nocheki had been born and raised in the nearby village of Gotse Delchev. He knew this country. He had often wished, patrolling these mountainsides, that he was still a youngster, that he had never grown to become an officer in the Nersko-Tsopska, but wishing did not make things so, and he was far better off than many. The mountains were racked with poverty. At least he ate well and had a roof over his head, he reminded himself, even if his higher standard of living was paid for by serving governmental powers that were hardly to his liking.
As an officer in the field, he was spared having to deal directly with the KDS, State Security, under whose strict control the militia performed necessary but mundane tasks, ordinary police duties such as patrolling this outlying frontier and the streets of Bulgaria’s cities and towns.
Nocheki’s patrol was assigned to be on the lookout for Bulgarians attempting to leave the country, and drug dealers and the like infiltrating illegally. There was, of course, far less likelihood of encountering anyone trying to break into Bulgaria than of running across hapless souls attempting to escape to a better life. And it was rumored that the KDS had a part in the drug smuggling.
A stretch of riverbank, approximately one kilometer away, shimmered in the greenish glow of the binoculars which rendered the night into a sort of dreamlike unreality, though the forms of animals—horses!—and men were real enough.
Nocheki counted eight figures down there. He could see that most of them carried rifles. He could not make out too many details at this distance from higher ground, even with the binoculars’ night-vision capabilities, but he saw that the figures stood in attitudes suggesting to him that the group down there had also heard the gunfire from across the river.
He thought that the gunfire—it had sounded from here like a full-fledged firefight—had its source directly across the river from the position of those one kilometer away.
He lowered the binoculars. He stood, returning to where the drivers of the Chor-7s gunned the vehicles to life. He walked over to Kalojan.
“A rendezvous of some sort, Sergeant Let’s go down and have a look.”
“They will not hear us approach with the river noise in their ears,” Kalojan noted. “Bulgars, you think. Captain?”
“I couldn’t tell. We’ll flank out around them on foot once we get close enough. Radio in air support. A helicopter.”
“Very good, sir”
The two vehicles commenced moving bumpily down in the direction of the group spotted by the side of the river.
A premonition in Captain Nocheki’s gut would not go away.
His patrol netted the occasional refugees trying to leave the country, but he sensed that this was something else.
The sounds of battle from across the river made it so.
He wondered what would happen within the next ten minutes. He wondered if his premonition was one of death.
Narda Rykov tried to ignore the apprehension that had only grown stronger within her in the short minute since the sounds of gunfire she heard popping and cracking from what had seemed to her almost directly across from where she and the seven men stood.
She glanced sideways at Yydasgrei, the leader of these hillsmen.
“I wonder how long we should wait.”
The Bulgar’s hawklike eyes shifted from the gloom-shrouded river.
“A patrol is nearby this night. My fear is that they are already close to us.” He turned to his men, issuing sharp commands in their mountain dialect, which Narda did not understand.
Three of Yydasgrei’s men abruptly moved out in different directions, disappearing into the dense inkiness of the rolling forest.
“I do hope the men I am to meet make it across,” Narda said. “I do not want to have unduly risked the lives of you and your men, YydasgTei.”
The mountain man, a towering, bearded, wild-haired fellow in a fur-collared chivva, chuckled a gravelly sound.
“Bulgars live to risk. It is risk that gives life meaning, is it not so, city lady?”
“You are very good to risk your lives for us by selecting this crossing spot and guiding me to it on such short notice.”
“The NFO works against the secret police,” Yydasgrei intoned. “We are allies. Those who rule from the city are the Bulgars’ enemies, and more so xare those sent by the godless Russians.”
She had met them north of Gotse Delchev, in the mountains, the peaks above nine thousand feet capped with their year-round pyramid-shaped crowns of snow, silver in the crisp moonlight, interspersed with pastures and forests at the lower elevations.
The Bulgars, armed to a man with Egyptian Maddi AKM assault rifles, had met and escorted her to where she parked her Volkswagen van a quarter kilometer away from here when the terrain got really impossible.
The Bulgars ruled these mountains after dark much as the frontier across the river fell to the Greek mountain bandits, and anyone who traveled in small numbers after the sun went down did so at their own considerable risk.
Narda carried a Bulgarian Bidja pistol in her purse. She wore dark slacks, a heavy sweater, a black down jacket, and a beret against the cold.
Yydasgrei’s attention snapped back to the direction of the thundering river, again reminding Narda of a hawk. He swung his rifle around, his knees bent slightly.
“They come.”
His men had somehow detected it, too, before she had, fanning out from each other, raising their rifles.
She strained her eyes, and after another moment she discerned the materializing shapes of four men struggling to row an inflatable raft against the bounding, ripping current.
The four leapt from the raft when they neared the river’s edge. They wore backpacks and shoulder-strapped weapons. She watched them gain footing against the furious pull of the river. They muscled the raft ashore, below their position, and for a moment the four coming ashore were unaware of Narda and the hill men. but sae knew this would not stay the case for long.
She could not make out the details of the four as yet, as they emerged from the river, tugging the raft with them. Each man had about him the almost athletic, manly grace of movement that bespoke the type of man she had known she’d come to meet.
Men of violence with the smell of death about them. Men not accustomed to being taken by surprise anywhere, not even by hunters like the Bulgars.
She slid her hand into her purse, curling her finger around the trigger. She realized that she was holding her breath.
Cody felt eyes on them the instant they set down the raft, but he made no quick, obvious response.
“We’re being watched.”
He pitched his voice so his men would hear, but not loud enough to be heard beyond them above the steady drone of the river.
“Thought I recognized that itch up my backside,” Caine muttered.
“Ditto,” Hawkeye threw in, “and I jest knew it wasn’t my damn hemorrhoids.”
The four of them faded away from each other in easy, natural movements, back from setting down the raft, ready to hit the deck or bolt or both at the first sign that something was wrong.
This was the point to which Milos Bakous had directed them, unless they had been swept further downriver than Cody thought, and he had paid close attention to that during the crossing.
If Pete Lund had things as together as Cody thought he did, a group of Bulgar backwoodsmen would be eyeballing them at this moment, along with a representative of the National Freedom Organization.
“You figure there’s someone else around besides our contacts?” Murphy rasped in what he probably considered a whisper. “Like one of those militia patrols?”
Cody peered up the incline, working to separate the shadows there beneath moonlight-dappled, gnarled pines. He discerned the figures of men with rifles staring down at them and the more vague shadows of horses.
Cody waved his men forward.
“Let’s find out.”
When they had practically reached the hill men, he discerned another silhouette in a deeper puddle of gloom, whether by accident or design, he wondered, and he knew that this would be the NFO contact, for she did not belong here with these men.
She stood next to the tallest of the Bulgars, whose clothing, in slightly better condition, tagged him as leader here.
The woman was young, no more than twenty-two or -three, but there was something in her dark eyes and thealmost gypsy, dusky loveliness of her high-cheekboned face that bespoke of experience. Unpleasant experience. Loss and tragedy but experience that forged strength. She stood there, poised coolly, one hand slid inside the purse she held.
Cody knew there would be a pistol in that purse.
He stopped a half dozen paces in front of her and theBulgar. Caine, Murphy, and Hawkins halted behind him spreading out, keeping their eyes on the rest of the Bulgars who stared back at them with grizzled blankness, rifles pointed at the ground but ready to be yanked up with the same speed with which Cody and his men were ready to bring their Uzis around into action.
Cody said to the Bulgar leader, “The wind is a friend.”
He had been given the identification code by Lund.
The Bulgar replied, “When it carries the scent of one’s enemies.” He extended a meaty, roughened hand. “Welcome, tosvarkish.” Cody shook the huge paw. The Bulgar had a knuckle-crunching grip like a steel press. “I am Yydasgrei.” He released Cody’s hand and turned to the young woman at his side. “This is the City lady we bring to meet you.”
The young woman removed her hand from her purse. She stepped forward, not smiling, extending her hand.
“I am Narda Rykov of the Bulgarian National Freedom Organization,” she said in precise, carefully clipped English, her handshake like a massage after the grinding administered by Yydasgrei. “We heard shooting across the river.”
“That trouble is behind us,” said Cody, seeing no reason to tell Narda Rykov too much at this early date. “You’re our transportation into Sofia?”
The beret-topped head nodded crisply.
“I have a van not more than a short hike from here.”
“Then let’s move out. I understand there are regular border patrols along here.”
The piercing call of a nightbird rent the river sounds.
Yydasgrei’s eyes snapped in that direction.
“Border patrol closing in, a quarter kilometer away,” he grunted, half to them, half to himself. “That is one of my men. Good. Tonight we will kill many militiamen!”
The hill man started to turn toward his men and the horses.
Cody stepped forward, halting him with a grip just above the Bulgar’s elbow, a grip with twice the pressure that had been in Yydasgrei’s handshake.
“Tosvarkish, trusted friend, you know this country better than anyone, I am told.”
“Better than anyone.” Yydasgrei said, snarling affirmation, halting his progress of turning away, glaring down at the hand gripping him.
Cody released his grip. He had no desire to force a confrontation with these allies.
“Lead that patrol away from us. Don’t engage them. You and your men have done your part. Now our part begins, brave friend. The work my men and I have come to carry out takes us to the city. We must get there without incident. If we are delayed or detained here, the mission will be finished before it can begin.” He nodded across the river. “One good man has already paid with his life to bring us this far.”
The Bulgar considered that briefly, sternly, then jagged teeth broke into an ear-to-ear grin.
“We will kill many militiamen another night. They are always around. What is it you want us to do, American? You are my friend, CIA. Yydasgrei and his men will do as you say.”
Another birdcall, closer than the first.
Then Cody heard another sound, and the others did too. They looked up into the blackness, but towering trees blocked their lines of vision. But Cody recognized the approaching chopper sounds coming in, making knots from the northwest.
He looked at Yydasgrei.
“Can you evade that chopper?”
The Bulgar laughed.
“Your company sees to it that we can fight back, tosvarkish. We must fire on the Nersko-Tsopska swine if we are to defend ourselves.”
The incoming chopper—it sounded to Cody like a Soviet Mi-24 HIND gunship—dashed their last chance at penetrating Bulgaria without an attention-getting firefight on this side of the river.
“Let’s try pulling out without a fight right now. If not—do what you have to do.”
The mountain man nodded, turned slightly, cupped his hand to his mouth, and made a sharp bird sound different from those before, then snapped orders at his men.
The Bulgars began mounting up, others materialized from where Yydasgrei had positioned them.
The clatter of hooves and a whinnying horse or two and the rumble of the oncoming chopper melded into a cacophony over which Yydasgrei shouted to Cody.
“Good luck, my friends. We will give them a merry chase!”
As the Bulgar spoke, rifle fire opened on them, red pinpoints winking out of the night to the crack of Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles.
A Bulgar horseman emitted a death grunt and pitched backward off his steed. Animals started snorting in panic. Another of Yydasgrei’s men pitched from his saddle under the hail of projectiles that sang through the darkness, ricocheting off rocks, chugging into tree trunks.
“Looks like the chase just came to us,” Hawkeye drawled without enthusiasm.