VIKTOR DUŠIC AWOKE in the morning refreshed from ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. For just a second the unfamiliar surroundings of Bradic’s guest bedroom left him confused. Then he remembered all that had brought him here. He closed his eyes for a moment, relished the sense of accomplishment.
During the night, Dušic had dreamed of final victory. In a mountain village, Serbs gathered to celebrate the death of the last Muslim in the Balkans. The war had raged for years, but the Americans and the British and NATO had stayed away this time, weakened by recession and riven by political infighting.
To honor the architect of final victory, the villagers danced a kolo in Dušic’s honor. The women wore traditional dresses of red and white. The men wore white shirts and red vests. The dancers joined hands and formed concentric rings around Dušic, spun and twirled to the music of tamburicas and frulas.
Dušic stood in the center of the dancers, and he held high the old Mauser he’d used as a crutch. Each time he raised the weapon above his head, the townspeople cheered. They did not know the details of how he had engineered the last stage of their struggle, and they did not care. The villagers knew only that their land was theirs, all theirs, now and forever.
The dream left a glow inside Dušic’s heart, but he knew such a moment of completion lay far in the future. Much work remained. The most immediate tasks concerned eluding capture by the current Serbian authorities, those lapdogs of the West.
His wound felt stiff and sore, but not unbearable. He sat up and examined the dressing. The bandages remained all white, not pinked by bleeding. Bradic had done a good job.
At the foot of the bed, the doctor had left a change of clothes. Bradic had not kept himself as well conditioned as Dušic, so Dušic imagined the dress shirt and black cotton trousers would hang a bit loose on him. Too large would have to do. Dušic put on the clothing, found it ill fitting but adequate. His Mauser stood in a corner. To replace it, Bradic had brought a proper set of crutches. Dušic lifted the crutches from a trunk beside the bed, tested his weight on his good leg. He curled his fingers around the rubber padding of the grips and raised himself to a standing position. He did not call for help; he despised the role of an invalid. Unaided, he hobbled down the hall. What he found disgusted him.
Stefan lay on a couch, still fully dressed. His left arm lolled onto the floor, knuckles against the hardwood. An empty bottle rested beside his hand.
“Get up, you drunkard,” Dušic said. “It is well to celebrate success, but we must remain alert. What if the police showed up right now?”
Stefan stirred, opened his eyes. They were shot with red. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and groaned as he sat up. Put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
“Saint Sava, forgive us,” he said.
Dušic kneeled beside Stefan. The effort sent a stab of pain through Dušic’s leg. He let go of the crutches and grabbed his old comrade by the shoulders.
“You stop this!” Dušic shouted. Looked around, lowered his voice to a hiss. “You know the grand strategy. You know we’ve only set a priming charge. Do not become weak like that lily-livered razvodnik I had to shoot.”
Stefan looked up, perhaps wounded by the implicit threat. He opened his mouth to speak. Before any words came out, Dušic punched his shoulder almost playfully.
“Change is hard, Stefan,” Dušic said. “It requires strong men. Serbian children will sing of us a hundred years from now if we hold fast and see this thing through.”
Stefan raised his head, looked at Dušic. His eyes did not show resolve, but at least his words conveyed purpose.
“Then we shall,” Stefan said.
“Very well. Now check your weapons and make ready for anything. I believe we are as safe here as anywhere, but you must not let down your guard like this again.”
Dušic noticed movement in the corner of his eye. He turned to see Bradic standing in a doorway. Had the doctor heard the conversation? Bradic held two steaming cups.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the doctor said. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Dušic said. “Not at all.”
Bradic came into his living room and set down the cups on a table beside Stefan’s M24 rifle.
“The news reports since last evening are troubling,” Bradic said. “What do you know about that explosion in Belgrade?”
Dušic cut his eyes at Stefan, thought for a moment. He knew Bradic had no use for Muslims. But could the doctor understand the broad context of the events now unfolding? Bradic had received his commission because of his medical training. He’d functioned primarily as a healer, not truly a combat officer. How much steel did he carry in his spine? Better not to have to find out.
“We know only that the Turks have committed an act of war,” Dušic said, “and a war they shall have.”
• • •
OUTSIDE THE SARAJEVO HOLIDAY INN, Gold saw what she considered the saddest sight on earth: preparations for battle. No war had been declared, and top leaders still called for reason. But arson and riots had broken out all over Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia.
The hotel manager remembered what had happened in his neighborhood before, and he’d started stacking sandbags behind all the windows. Razor wire stretched around the hotel grounds. Police and army patrols rumbled past, driving what Gold’s Army colleagues unofficially called BFTWGs, pronounced “biftwigs,” for “big fucking trucks with guns.” The gloom of low-hanging clouds made it all seem even more dire.
Dragan arrived at the hotel with a contingent of Serbian police. In a conference room, they met with their Bosnian counterparts, along with Parson, Webster, Gold, and the Rivet Joint crew. Dragan wore black tactical clothing, pistol and magazines on his belt, Vintorez rifle on a sling over his shoulder. He spoke in Serbo-Croatian for a couple of minutes, then he addressed the Americans.
“I just told my Bosnian Muslim friends we have a common goal now,” Dragan said. “This isn’t 1995. You guys have a role, too. We’ll take all the help we can get.”
“What can we do now that the jet’s grounded?” Parson asked.
“What we need from the jet now is not its wings but its recordings. I think we’ve already got enough to prove Dušic is behind this.”
“You bet we do,” Webster said.
Still the prosecutor, Gold noted.
“Don’t ever think your help isn’t valuable,” Dragan said. “Information from American and British intelligence helped us get Radovan Karadžic back in 2008. I was a rookie officer then, but I took part in Karadžic’s arrest. That bastard had lived as a fugitive for more than a decade.”
Dragan told them about the long hunt for the former Bosnian Serb president. At one point, authorities thought they’d tracked him to a church compound in Pale. The British SAS raided the compound, but found that Karadžic had slipped through their fingers, perhaps by just seconds. Eventually, the politician who’d whipped his people into a genocidal fury changed his name and appearance.
“He went all granola on us,” Dragan said. “Started calling himself ‘Dr. Dabic, alternative healer and spiritual explorer.’ I’m telling you, you can’t make this shit up.”
Most of the Americans laughed, and Dragan continued. Serbian police finally caught up with Karadžic as he rode a bus through the Vracar district of Belgrade. As a young police sniper, Dragan watched the arrest through his rifle scope, ready to fire if Karadžic tried to use deadly force.
“I would have loved to put a round through him,” Dragan said, “but we took him without firing a shot. He just pushed and shoved a little bit.”
“Better that way,” Webster said. “He gets to sit and think about what he did.”
“You should have seen him,” Dragan said. “Long white beard, and he had tied his hair in some kind of topknot like Santa Claus on meth.”
More laughter, but Dragan turned serious.
“We have every law enforcement agency in the world looking for Viktor Dušic,” he said, “but we don’t think he could have gone far. Listen, you got Osama. You got Saddam. We got Karadžic and Mladic. And we will find this son of a bitch.”
• • •
AFTER THE MEETING, Parson bought three cups of coffee in the bar and sat down with Dragan and Webster. The other bar patrons eyed Dragan’s clothing and weapons but did not seem surprised. Perhaps they’d seen it all before.
Parson thought Dragan had given a good briefing, but he still had questions. To begin with, if Dušic hadn’t gone far, where might he be? Traveling by air would likely prove impossible for him. Crossing borders by road would, too, if every country had been alerted.
“He may not need to cross borders at all,” Dragan said. “He could find plenty of sympathy and shelter among the old hard-line Serbs, sad to say.”
“Sounds like he could hide off the grid for a long time,” Parson said.
“Unless someone gives us a tip,” Dragan said. “Even Serbs who hate Muslims might not tolerate what he’s done, if they suspect he did it.”
“Have you found any more evidence?” Webster asked.
“We found the van he used as a getaway vehicle. It’s registered to a guy who served with Dušic back in the war.”
“So if he’s not with the van, how’s he traveling?” Parson asked.
“Not sure. Dušic has a Lamborghini. Witnesses say it was parked at the storage facility where we found the van, but it’s not there now.”
“Storage facility?” Parson asked.
“Yeah. Dušic has a whole row of buildings where he keeps weapons. Most of it’s legal; he’s an arms dealer. No doubt he took some stuff with him, so if—when—we find him, we’re probably in for a fight.”
A fight that, in a larger sense, Parson had fought before. Sometimes old evils returned, and you had to face enemies you believed had been defeated.
He thought of a hunting trip he’d taken a few years ago. An Air Force buddy brought him to the mountains of east Tennessee to pursue wild boar. The animals were descendants of domesticated hogs escaped and gone feral; in just a few generations they returned to their wild nature in both appearance and spirit. An unaccustomed quarry for Parson, more used to taking deer and elk in the West.
For this hunt, Parson did not carry any of his usual scoped rifles, fine-tuned for long-range accuracy. Instead he used a brush gun, a lever-action .30-30 with open sights. Near the end of the day, the dogs jumped a big male hog with black fur and tusks like scimitars. The boar charged uphill through the woods, well ahead of the pack. But the redbones and blueticks gained on their prey, and they cornered it against a rocky outcropping.
Beyond the outcropping, a sheer rock face dropped five hundred feet to the valley below. With nowhere to run, the boar whirled and fought.
A dog lunged at the boar, bit down on its hindquarters. Parson wanted to fire, but the dogs closed in too near. A redbone snarled and leaped for the boar’s throat. That was the dog’s last mistake.
In a flash of white tusks, the boar gored the redbone in the ribs. The dog yelped and fell back bleeding. Perhaps energized by the smell of blood, the boar shook free of the dog at his hindquarters and gored that animal in the neck. Now two dogs lay whimpering and writhing among dry leaves spattered with blood.
Sensing an opening, the boar plowed through the other three dogs. With a clear target now, Parson took a snap shot, brought the .30-30 to his shoulder and pressed the trigger. The instinctive aim at a moving target felt more like wing shooting than riflery, but Parson knew he’d scored a good hit. The boar stumbled and rolled, yet it ran on.
Surely he’d dealt the animal a mortal wound; the boar left a blood trail that disappeared into a rhododendron thicket. But the sound of its hoofbeats through the leaves continued for several seconds. The wild hog took the bullet and just kept going.
At this point Parson wished he’d never joined this fight. Not his territory, not his game. But the hunt had exacted an awful toll already, and he felt obligated to finish what he’d started.
Rifle across his chest, Parson waded into the thicket. The sun sank lower, and in the heavy vegetation he had trouble distinguishing solid from shadow. He lost the blood spoor, and he had no idea where the boar had gone.
Parson’s buddy stayed back to attend to his two gored dogs, both dying. The other three dogs ranged the mountain, looking for scent. Occasionally one of them bayed, far out of sight, the howl echoing through a forest fast approaching darkness. To Parson, it sounded like a cry of anger and grief.
Just before blackness descended completely, Parson heard an explosion of rustling leaves. At first he could not determine the direction of the sound. Then he saw the boar. Tusks darkened with blood, it charged from behind a dead hickory. The wild hog came straight on, all sinew and spite. Intent on killing again.
Parson shouldered the .30-30 and fired. The bullet sent up a spray of leaves and dirt beside the boar. The animal kept charging. Parson knew if he ran now, the boar would likely catch up with him and slash those tusks through his leg.
With a flick of the wrist, Parson cycled the rifle’s lever. The expended brass tumbled to the dirt.
Nearly too dark to aim now, Parson pointed his barrel at the head of the onrushing boar. He pressed the trigger. The muzzle flash brightened the woods for an instant.
The boar kept coming without so much as a flinch. But then its legs buckled and the hog collapsed. It slid forward across the forest floor until it stopped at Parson’s feet. Bullet wound in the head, another in its side.
Parson chambered another round. Nudged the boar with the tip of his boot. Stone dead.
A question from Dragan brought Parson back to the present day.
“We’re staying,” Webster answered. “In fact, if you take Dušic alive, I’m going to come off active-duty orders.”
“How’s that?”
Webster explained that he was Air National Guard, not regular Air Force. And he wanted to get back to his civilian role and help prosecute Viktor Dušic.
“I’ll even do it pro bono if I have to,” Webster said.
“Who’s going to run Manas Air Base?” Parson asked.
“Are you kidding? There’s fourteen colonels lined up behind me who want to get their tickets punched for command of an expeditionary wing. Get that star pinned on.”
“What about you? Don’t you want to make brigadier general?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” Webster said. “But right now there’s something I want more.”
That impressed Parson. Most colonels would give their left kidney for a star. But he gathered that, for Webster, reaching the pinnacle of an officer’s career was just an afterthought. Something less important than justice.
Dragan’s cell phone rang. He opened it, looked at the screen.
“Excuse me, guys,” Dragan said. “I gotta take this.”
• • •
DUŠIC HAD THOUGHT HIS INSTINCTS never failed him. He could always judge a man’s loyalty, character, and competence. He had seen Bradic in action as a field surgeon during the war, patching up patriots, a patriot himself. But something had happened to the doctor in the intervening years. Dušic realized it too late, on the third day after the bombing. Bradic had gone away in the morning with hardly a word and had never come back. Now Dušic understood why. Two police cars and an armored tactical vehicle rolled down the narrow road to Bradic’s village. From inside the village, two other police cars approached.
As he stood at the window, Dušic’s heart filled more with disappointment than anger. His nation could become so much more if its people would only see the hard things through. So many lacked vision. Evidently, so did Bradic.
“Stefan,” Dušic called from the guest bedroom, “we have been betrayed.”
“I see them!” Stefan shouted from the front room.
At the front of the house, glass shattered. Dušic picked up one crutch, leaned against the wall. As he made his way down the hall he saw that Stefan had knocked out a window and now lay with his M24 pointed over the sill.
Dušic tried to think of escape routes. None existed. The police vehicles, slowing to a stop about two hundred meters distant, blocked the road in both directions. He could not get around them. The Aventador was fast, but in the soft soil of the surrounding fields, it would only bog down.
These lapdogs would not take him alive. He had known all along this operation could cost him his life. Dušic had made his peace with death, as a soldier should. Long ago he had tallied it better to die for Serbs than live with Turks. The Serbs he had killed were martyrs, deaths regrettable but necessary. If he must become a martyr himself, so be it. He tossed aside his crutch, lifted an AK-47. Dragged himself to the window beside Stefan.
“My friend,” Dušic said, “we may not see our work’s fruition.” Dušic placed his hand on Stefan’s shoulder. “But we will cross the river together as warriors.”
Stefan looked at him, eyes hollow. “The fruit of our work is right outside,” Stefan said, “and in Belgrade.”
Stefan’s fatalism pained Dušic, but he had no time to ponder it. Now he had to consider the tactical situation. Bradic’s house had been built with imported brick. Hardly blastproof, but a natural defilade for rifle fire. Dušic thought he might manage to hold out for a time, depending on police weaponry. However this ended, he hoped the traitor Bradic would return to a destroyed home. The doctor had said he’d seen enough of war. Apparently he had meant it. Dušic chided himself for not seeing Bradic’s weakness.
Breeze through the window stirred the curtains. The air carried with it a cool mist descended from clouds scudding low overhead. Already Bradic’s house hinted of desperation, the scene of a last stand. Then let it come, Dušic thought. This is my Kosovo, my Field of Blackbirds. He had wanted victory. He could settle for glory.
On the village road, police officers stepped from their vehicles, took cover in ditches and behind armored doors.
“Fire at will,” Dušic said.
He unleashed a burst from the AK on full auto. Aimed generally at the nearest police car. Chips and white dust flew from the windshield. The glass frosted, crazed, buckled, but never yielded. No round holes. Bullet resistant, then.
Stefan’s M24 whispered through its silencer. A man screamed. A police officer prone on a ditch bank had exposed only his elbow, and that had been target enough for Stefan. The officer disappeared beneath the lip of the ditch. Moans came from the grassy roadside as the man clutched what had to be an incapacitating wound.
“Good shot,” Dušic said. “Stay low and keep your gas mask close.”
As Stefan racked the bolt on his M24, the police returned fire. Slugs slammed into the masonry around the window, tore through the remaining glass, stitched holes in the opposite wall. Chalky powder invaded Dušic’s lungs, dust from bullets against brick. He fought the churn of fear in the pit of his stomach.
Of course he felt fear; strikes of rounds from high-powered rifles would cause anyone to fear. But that was just part of the combat environment. Dušic accepted his fear, moved through it, fired again. His rounds scored the plating of the police tactical vehicle. He hit none of the officers, but that hardly mattered. Dušic had plenty of ammunition. He needed only to make the officers keep their heads down. Buy time. Give himself time to think, even if it was only to think of last words.
“Stefan,” Dušic said, “where is that grenade launcher?”
“In the hall.”
Stefan rolled away from the M24, left it standing on its bipod. He scurried across the room, came back with the RPG-7. Crouched low, handed the loaded launcher to Dušic.
“We shall show these lapdogs how to fight like men,” Dušic said.
He yanked the safety pin from the round’s fuse, pointed the launcher through the broken window. The HEAT round—high-explosive antitank—felt like a heavy lobe at the end of the barrel. Dušic’s leg hurt now, but adrenaline carried the pain to someplace where it could not distract. He curled his fingers around the grip of the trigger mechanism. Aimed. Fired.
The weapon bounced on Dušic’s shoulder. Backblast scorched the floor. The grenade traced a white path to the armored vehicle. A few meters from the barrel of the launcher, the round’s rocket motor ignited. The rocket held true on a short flight to the target. As the round struck the side door of the tactical vehicle, it detonated.
Flying metal sliced through tires, fenders, fuel tanks. Sparks from propellant and explosive mingled with gasoline vapor. After the boom of the grenade blast came the whoosh of ignition, and flames engulfed the truck and the men around it. Writhing figures of fire danced within fire. Police officers sprayed their burning comrades with fire extinguishers. Black smoke lifted into dark clouds.