NO MAJOR TRAFFIC ARTERY CONNECTED Sarajevo directly to Belgrade, so Parson enjoyed the scenery of Bosnia and Serbia as Cunningham drove the rental car along winding two-lane roads. The green hills and lush forests looked like great territory for hunting and trout fishing. Parson wondered how such a beautiful place could have become the scene of the awful things that had happened here. But he’d asked himself the same questions in the countryside of Germany, on the old World War I battlefields of France, and, for that matter, among the fields at Antietam and Gettysburg. The problem lay not in the terrain but in people’s hearts.
He remained angry about the café incident yesterday and puzzled over why those kinds of things were happening now. Anybody here over the age of thirty should have a good idea of where it all could lead. When he tried to put himself in the place of the rock throwers, to imagine what they must have been thinking, his mind could not plumb the depth. The effort made him think of a radar altimeter out of its range, whose beam could not find the ground. So its indicator just went blank. At a mental dead end, he turned his thoughts back to the mission.
“So tell me more about this op,” Parson said.
“I met with Bosnian and Serbian police yesterday,” Cunningham said. “They have a hangar under surveillance at the Belgrade airport. That’s where the opium has been going. I think they’re going to take it down this afternoon.”
“Sounds like somebody’s going to have a bad day.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’ll see some traffickers with their faces in the tarmac.”
“Cool. So what do we do?”
“Just observe, I hope. The Rivet Joint will talk to me on Fox Mike if they hear anything.”
Parson had never witnessed a drug bust, and he looked forward to seeing a little justice in action. At the airport, Cunningham made a cell phone call, then met an unmarked white van in a parking lot near the cargo terminal. The driver, a dark-haired man of about thirty, introduced himself only by his first name. He spoke English with just a trace of a Slavic accent, and he wore civilian clothes: a golf shirt with blue tactical pants, and those black shoes favored by cops all over the world—enough leather almost to pass as low quarters, but with soles fit for running down a criminal.
“I’m Dragan,” he said. “Ministry of Internal Affairs police.”
“Thanks again for your help,” Cunningham said.
“We’ll do this just like we briefed yesterday,” Dragan said. “My uniformed guys are already in position.”
“Where did you learn such good English?” Parson asked.
“University of Chicago. And I have American relatives.”
“Want to do a radio check?” Cunningham asked.
“Sure,” Dragan said.
Cunningham plugged a cord into his VHF-FM radio, inserted an earpiece into his ear. Dragan donned a headset with a lightweight boom mike. The Serbian officer walked several steps away. Cunningham pressed a switch and said, “Radio check.” Lacking an earpiece, Parson did not hear the answer, but he did hear Cunningham when he responded, “Good. Got you five by five.” Cunningham’s pronunciation of “five” sounded like “foiv.”
Dragan came back over to the rental car, and the two lawmen worked out last-minute details. “The flight’s due in about an hour,” Dragan said, “but let’s set up now in case the plane’s early.”
“Yeah, we better,” Cunningham said. “Where do you want us?”
“There’s a few parking spots along the fence near the freight warehouse, and you can see the ramp from there.” Dragan pointed as he spoke. “Just stay in your car unless something crazy happens.”
“Stay in your car.” “Watch what happens.” Parson didn’t like phrases like those. They sounded too much like the world’s initial reaction when the ethnic cleansing began back in the 1990s.
“All right,” Cunningham said. “Holler if you need us.”
Dragan nodded, sat down in his van, started the engine, and drove away. Cunningham steered toward the warehouse, nosed into a parking spot, and shut down the car. He turned up his radio volume and transmitted to the Rivet Joint somewhere overhead, “Motown, this is Dragnet on secure voice. How copy?” He seemed to listen to something in his earpiece, and then he added, “Got you loud and clear.”
All the parts of the operation had come together well, Parson thought. If the bust went down shortly, Cunningham could wrap up the whole mission. Parson almost felt sorry the op would end so soon. Webster wanted him to keep Cunningham on task, but what if the task finished now? Then tomorrow Parson would probably have to head back to Manas. He hated to think that his time with Gold would end so soon. And he supposed he’d spend the rest of the year giving safety briefings on how not to kill yourself doing something stupid: Don’t conduct maintenance on top of an airplane without a safety harness. If you work on an electrical component with power applied to the aircraft, pull the component’s circuit breakers and hang warning tags on the breakers and switches. Don’t earn the Darwin Award by walking too close to a jet intake.
“Want some coffee?” Cunningham asked. He reached down to the floorboard and came up with a Thermos. “We’d be all mommucked if we had to do a stakeout without coffee.”
Parson wondered at Cunningham’s slang. Probably the lingo of his coastal North Carolina home. “Sure, thanks,” Parson said. “Now I feel like a real cop.”
Cunningham unscrewed the Thermos, poured the steaming liquid into a paper cup, handed the cup to Parson. Cunningham poured another for himself. Parson took a sip. It tasted nothing like fancy Bosnian coffee. Just black, bitter, and hot: Air Force coffee. Cunningham must have made it himself in his hotel room. Parson blew across the coffee’s surface, scanned the surroundings outside.
“I don’t see any SWAT dudes anywhere,” Parson said.
“There’s one on the roof of the warehouse,” Cunningham said. “Left side. Don’t point if you see him, but he’s up there with some kind of assault rifle.”
Parson squinted, saw nothing at first. But then he caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel.
“All right,” Parson said, “I see him.”
“I think Dragan said there were eight in all. I don’t see the others, though.”
“I’d hate to have all of them come out of nowhere and jump on me.”
“It might get interesting when they make the arrests,” Cunningham said. “Laws and procedures vary from country to country. But you probably won’t see these guys read them their Miranda rights and give them a cookie.”
“I get the feeling you don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Parson said.
“Where I’m from,” Cunningham said, “we believed in what my granddad called tidewater justice. Some of those North Carolina islands were pretty isolated back in the day. If somebody was harassing your daughter or breaking in your house, help might be a long ways away. So we knew how to take care of business ourselves.”
Parson could respect that. Cunningham’s ancestors seemed to have lived by an old code of justice, just as they spoke with remnants of an old English. The OSI man had a way of coming out with words unfamiliar to Parson. But in their context, the old words made sense, and so did the old justice.
Several minutes passed in silence. The two men watched the warehouse and ramp, but nothing moved and no one appeared. Finally Cunningham said, “So Webster tells me you did some flying in these parts.”
“A little bit.” Parson described offloading relief supplies in Sarajevo with the airfield under attack, gunners walking mortar fire toward the airplane.
“That must have sucked,” Cunningham said.
“Pretty much,” Parson said. “We used to take off from Ramstein at oh-dark-thirty so we could get in and out of Sarajevo before the afternoon. By one or two o’clock, the snipers would wake up and start drinking, and those fuckers would shoot at anything.”
Parson didn’t say any more on the subject, but he thought back to that time. He’d always wondered what sort of drunkenness the snipers entered. Parson had known giggling drunks, sobbing drunks, and belligerent drunks. But what combination of slivovitz and hatred would lead you to center your crosshairs on just anybody who presented himself? The thought reminded him of what could be at stake here, given the history of this place.
Every few minutes, arriving aircraft appeared over the roofline of the warehouse—winged specks vectored onto final approach. Eventually one appeared that loomed larger than the rest. The aircraft lumbered through its turn from base leg to final like a flying whale, and it reminded Parson of his own C-5 Galaxy. But the tail looked different: a conventional empennage rather than the Lockheed T-tail. An Antonov An-124. The same type of plane they’d seen picking up cargo at Manas.
“Here comes the guest of honor,” Parson said.
The An-124 disappeared behind the warehouse as it descended the glide slope. Cunningham looked down at his radio, pressed the transmit button, and said, “Roger that. We see it.” When the aircraft reappeared in Parson’s field of view, to the right of the warehouse, it floated just yards above the runway. Now the jet looked even bigger, and its size made it appear to fly with impossible slowness. The An-124 touched down first on its main gear, and then the nose wheels lowered to the pavement. Cunningham made another radio call. “Motown, Dragnet,” he transmitted, “Target’s on the ground.”
Parson waited a moment to make sure Cunningham wasn’t still listening to the radio. When the OSI agent shifted his gaze to outside the car, Parson asked, “Is the Rivet Joint hearing anything?”
“Not that they mentioned,” Cunningham said.
Several minutes later, the whine of the Ivchenko-Progress engines rose as the aircraft taxied toward the ramp. Exhaust gases shimmered from the tailpipes, and grass alongside the taxiway whipped and danced in the jet blast. The noise grew louder as the pilot nudged the power on the number four engine to help with the turn. The Antonov swung ninety degrees to the left and rolled into the freight ramp. A ground crewman stood by the corner of the warehouse, held his thumb in the air to indicate good wingtip clearance. The plane eased forward several feet, stopped. Its engines quieted to idle.
Cunningham turned the volume control on his radio and transmitted, “Dragnet copies.” He turned to Parson and said, “The pilot’s already on the phone to someone.”
Parson wondered what that meant. Maybe the pilot was just checking in with a wife or girlfriend. But Irena probably wouldn’t bother to mention something that routine. Didn’t really matter, though. Dragan and his boys would probably roll up everybody, ground crew and flight crew, and sort the innocent from the guilty later.
A ground crewman connected an external power cart to the jet, and the four engines shut down. A sprinkle of raw fuel fell from each nacelle as the combustion flames were extinguished and the drain valves closed. The fuel droplets left dark stains on the pavement underneath the wings. Parson watched with professional interest, and he wondered if this crew would ever fly again. Screw ’em if they carried drugs knowingly.
“So what now?” Parson asked.
“This might take a while,” Cunningham said. “I think Dragan wants to wait and see if they offload cargo and then put it right back on the plane. That’ll be a good indication they’re pulling something out of the packing material.”
The Antonov crew opened the aft ramp and the pilots went inside, but half an hour went by before any cargo came off. The loadmasters eventually began using the jet’s internal crane to lift the pallets. Parson had never seen such a device; no American military cargo plane had one. He decided the crane was pretty novel, but in the end no more efficient than sliding cargo over the omnidirectional rollers on the floor of a C-5. As the third pallet got lowered onto a forklift, Cunningham pressed his transmit switch and said, “Dragnet copies.” Then he told Parson, “The pilot’s talking to somebody who sounds like a boss. Irena says they never used the word ‘opium,’ but the conversation seems suspicious.”
“Anything a prosecutor could use?” Parson asked.
“Probably not. The evidence that really matters is the dope itself. We’ll probably know about that in just a little while.”
The forklift disappeared into the shadows inside the warehouse. For about twenty minutes, Parson saw no activity on the ramp. He began to wonder if the ground crew had quit for the day. But then the forklift rattled its way out of the warehouse and back to the Antonov, carrying a pallet of assorted boxes just like the ones the workers had offloaded.
“Uh-oh,” Cunningham said. “I think that’s what Dragan was looking for.”
The forklift driver wore a light blue work shirt, untucked. A cigarette dangled from his lips, half an inch of ash sagging from the cigarette’s tip. The ash fell onto the man’s lap, and he looked down and brushed at his clothing. He did not see the two policemen sprinting toward him.
Both officers wore black balaclavas, black tactical vests, black cargo trousers. One carried a Zastava M21 assault rifle. The other ran with a pistol in one hand. Pistol Guy grabbed the forklift driver by the shirt, yanked him off the forklift, yelled something in Serbo-Croatian. The driver struggled, and the officer jerked him into a choke hold and wrestled him to the pavement.
“Damn,” Cunningham said. “Getting all tidewater on him.”
The officer with the rifle reached up to the forklift, apparently shutting off its engine. Then he pointed the rifle at the driver while the other officer took out a set of flex-cuffs. When the driver resisted being rolled onto his stomach, the cop slugged him, pushed him over, cuffed him. Two other policemen charged into the aircraft.
Shouts came from within the warehouse. But to Parson’s relief, he heard no gunfire. A man screamed; Parson imagined some dumbass had made the mistake of fighting back and wound up with a boot on his face. As Parson tried to follow the action, he noticed Cunningham furrow his brow. The OSI agent pressed his transmit button again and said, “Dragnet copies. But it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?” Parson asked.
Cunningham held up his hand for silence as he listened to his earpiece. He nodded, then responded to whatever he’d heard by saying, “Negative. Dragnet out.” He removed his earpiece and said to Parson, “Now, that’s weird.”
“What?” Parson asked.
“Right about the time our boy there got a mouthful of the tarmac, the mission commander in the Rivet Joint recommended an abort.”
“Why?”
“Irena heard something. The Antonov pilot was on the phone again, and his boss said something about an op that had nothing to do with drugs and nothing to do with flying cargo.”
“Still, why would the cops abort?”
“So they could wait and find out whatever those jackasses were talking about. It’s a moot point now, though.”
Parson wondered what that other operation could be. Had they blown a chance to make even bigger arrests?
Several minutes ticked by with no apparent activity. Eventually, Dragan emerged from the warehouse, pistol in hand. He walked casually; the stakeout had ended with success. However, he wore a puzzled expression. Evidently he’d heard the call from the Rivet Joint and, like Cunningham, didn’t know what to make of it. With a practiced motion, he put his handgun’s safety on and slipped the weapon into a concealment holster. As Dragan approached the car, Cunningham rolled down the window.
“You find opium?” Cunningham asked.
“Yeah, a shitload.”
“Your guys okay?” Parson said.
“Yeah, nobody’s hurt on my team. One of the suspects has a broken nose, but he brought it on himself.”
Cunningham laughed out loud. “So his face is all whopperjawed now,” Cunningham said. “Serves him right. Can we see the haul?”
“Yeah, come on in and take a look. The bus will get here soon and take these losers downtown.”
Inside the dimly lit warehouse, Parson needed a few minutes for his eyes to adjust. The black-clad policemen were taking photos and placing evidence in cartons. That evidence consisted mainly of cellophane packages wrapped in clear plastic bags.
Nine men sat on the floor, hands cuffed behind them. Five wore the blue flight suits of some Russian freight airline, and one suffered a black bruise that spread from his swollen nose all the way across both cheekbones. Blood streamed from his nostrils. All the suspects stared silently at the concrete floor. One of the police officers barked something in Serbo-Croatian, apparently an order to stand up, and he marched the men outside.
“Normally I’d feel like spiking the football after a raid like this,” Dragan said. “You don’t get a bust this big every day.”
“I guess you wonder why they wanted you to hold off,” Parson said.
“Yeah. I talked to your Airman Markovich on secure voice after we got everything settled down.”
“So what did she hear?” Cunningham asked.
“Something about the narcotics being just a sideshow, and now it’s time to focus on the main event.”
“Who was the pilot talking to?” Parson asked.
“No idea,” Dragan said. “Not yet, anyway.”
Parson wondered if whoever was on the other end of that phone call knew his little side business had just been shut down for good. If he didn’t know now, Parson realized, he’d know very shortly. The next time he tried to call his minions, he’d get no answer because their cell phones would be sitting in evidence boxes.
And if the drug trafficking was just a sideshow, what was the main event? Webster would sure as hell want to know. So the mission hadn’t ended. Parson knew his part of that mission: help motivate Cunningham to think outside his island.
Dragan ran his fingers through his hair and sighed, looked at the scene around him. “I don’t know what we have here,” he said, “but I really don’t like it.”
“Whatever it is, I think OSI’s part might be wrapped up now,” Cunningham said.
“Not necessarily,” Parson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Webster is real interested in what’s going on here, and he wants you to be, too. You took me on a road trip today. I’m taking you on one tomorrow.”