Rem Vlachko wasn’t new to hardship. As he stood at the entrance to his safe house on the outskirts of Pisa, Italy, the Serbian-born warrior stared at the maimed remains of the team he had left behind guarding the mobile military assembler he had stolen from the Americans.
Rem stared at their scorched entrails, at their contorted faces, at their frozen screams, and he steeled himself for the difficulties that would follow.
But he was not new to facing adversity.
Rem had first experienced grave misfortune as a young captain in the Serbian army, where he’d served under the brave Milosevic, the man whom his father had sacrificed his own life to protect years before during a failed assassination attempt. Milosevic had taken in the young son of his finest bodyguard and provided for him and his widowed mother. In time the young man grew to become a strong warrior, loyal to none but the great leader himself. In time the young man married a beautiful Serbian woman by the name of Darja from Belgrade and moved to the rural town of Djerkia at the request of Milosevic to lead a defense post against the growing Croatian threat. In time the young captain had a son of his own, a beautiful baby boy named Slobodan, after the great leader himself.
But the day came when Croatian forces, outnumbering Rem’s garrisons twenty to one, approached his town on their way to Belgrade.
The young captain had launched a powerful pre-emptive attack, decimating the enemy’s front through a combination of utter bravery and brilliant battle tactics, leading his smaller army through a string of stunning victories, sending enemy forces running for cover. But the Croats had kept coming, wave after wave, wearing down the tiring defenders, who ran low on ammunition, on supplies, finally collapsing to the much larger enemy force.
The young captain remembered the incoming forces, recalled the explosion just to the right of his jeep, as he led a last-ditch effort to flank the advancing army and give the town’s population enough time to evacuate, to flee north to Belgrade, toward Milosevic’s vast forces already on their way south to reinforce Rem’s brave garrisons.
The unexpected blast had thrown him off his moving vehicle, sending him crashing against a nearby tree, where he lay unconscious while the rest of his men were slaughtered, while his town was slaughtered, while the Croats raped the women, castrated the men, and did things to the children that he didn’t know were possible.
Staring at the Italian countryside just outside his safe house, Rem Vlachko closed his eyes, now remembering the event just as it had happened over twenty years ago.
The young Serbian captain awakened in a roadside ditch, covered by vegetation, his head throbbing, his limbs aching.
Getting up with considerable effort, verifying he was alone, Rem crawled out of the ravine, inspecting the unpaved road where he had been traveling when the mortar attack had surprised his forces.
It was almost five in the evening, meaning he had been out for nearly eight hours.
Breathing heavily while reaching for his holstered sidearm, not certain what had happened to the rest of his men or to the villagers—to his family—but hoping for the best, he used the shadows of the forest south of his town to make his advance a stealth one, careful not to give out his position to possible Croats still in the region.
He walked for about twenty minutes before stumbling onto the first bodies: the lucky Serbian garrisons who had been killed during the final attack, the one he never got the chance to lead.
Rem’s soldiers lay just as they had fallen, some maimed by shrapnel, others unfortunate enough to have caught a bullet in the chest, or in the face. But then he found the others, the ones who had made the mistake of either surrendering or letting the enemy capture them alive. These had their hands and feet nailed to surrounding trees before the Croats plucked out their eyes, cut off their genitals, and left them to bleed to death.
Feeling light-headed, Rem dropped to his knees and vomited, his mind whirling, his body tense, his heart crying out against the brutal treatment his men had received at the hands of the Croats.
On his knees, struggling for control, Rem heard a voice, faint, a mere whisper.
“Kill me . . . please, kill me.”
One soldier had survived.
“Kill me . . . kill me, please,” the voice repeated as the smell of blood, cordite, and burnt flesh continued to assault Rem’s nostrils, triggering a second wave of nausea he had to control.
Struggling to his feet, Rem steeled himself before following the voice, which originated from a large Serbian sergeant named Sveto.
Rem’s eyes filled at the sight of the once-powerful soldier, now naked from the waist down, his wrists bound over his head and nailed to a tree, his groin a mangled mess of blood and hanging flesh, just like his empty eye sockets, blood and dried gel filming his cheeks, his chin, the camouflage shirt of his uniform. Flies buzzed over his wounds, settling on Sveto’s severed genitals and eyeballs by his feet, which had also been nailed to the tree with large rusty nails.
Rem remembered the brave man, five years his senior, father of two beautiful little girls.
Rem remembered Sveto’s wife, an attractive Serbian woman with blond hair and blue eyes, just like his Darja.
Rem had approached the maimed warrior, who had fought by his side valiantly during their initial campaigns, during their initial victories, on one occasion killing several Croats with his bare hands when he ran low on ammunition.
Rem could only imagine the kind of struggle the large soldier must have put up before allowing the enemy to capture him and maim him in this way, just as they had done to a dozen of his men, their lifeless bodies nailed to the trees in a terrifyingly surreal sight that stood for the deep hatred borne by the Croatians against the Serbian population.
This isn’t any way for a soldier to die, Rem’s mind flashed. This isn’t any way for a—
“Kill me . . . please.”
“Sveto, it is me, Rem. I will get you medical help. You must hang in there, my friend.”
“Rem? Please, find my family . . . please, help them. Make . . . sure the monsters . . . do not . . .”
“Your family made it safely to Belgrade,” Rem lied, watching the ends of the emasculated warrior’s lips curve up a notch.
“They . . . they are all right?”
“Yes. You and I bought them time. We slowed the Croats and allowed the villages to reach safety,” said Rem, controlling his growing nausea. “Now be quiet and let me help you.”
Sveto shook his head. “No. No help for me. They . . . they can not see me . . . like this. I . . . they deserve . . . better . . . start a new life . . . Belgrade . . . please kill me . . . the pain.”
The words chiseling away what sanity he had left, Rem inhaled deeply, agreeing to grant this brave warrior the wish to die with honor rather than live in shame. Rem had reached for his sidearm, wrapped the pants of the sergeant’s uniform around the muzzle, and fired once into Sveto’s head, putting him out of his misery, the cotton fabric absorbing most of the report.
And Rem had gone on, slowly advancing toward his town, which he reached by sunrise, his heart sinking when he spotted the widespread fire, the columns of billowing smoke rising up to a cloudy sky.
Bracing himself for the worst while praying for the best, Rem Vlachko walked down the once-picturesque streets, now resembling a hazy war zone, a man-made inferno that threatened to crush his sanity.
But he pressed on, unable to find anyone alive, his wide-eyed stare absorbing the burning sight, the smoke stinging his eyes. Death reigned on the streets of Djerkia, on the sidewalks, inside wrecked cars and trucks—everywhere.
Then he began to see the bodies of the civilians caught while trying to escape. Women, old and young, had their skirts raised. The Croats had raped them before shooting them in the head. And to his horror many girls, some less than ten years old, had also been violated. Their thin and pale legs spread apart, dry blood staining their groins, single bullet holes in their foreheads.
Bastards.
They’re all a bunch of fucking bastards.
Finding it hard to breathe, his heartbeat pummeling his temples, Rem reached his block, froze when spotting the two bodies in front of his house, one of the largest in town, given his high-ranking status in the local military.
On the grass, just beyond the waist-high picket fence, Darja lay dead, her skirt not lifted but torn off, just like her blouse, exposing the brutality of the Croats, who had not only raped her but impaled her with a broomstick and sliced off her breasts.
The world spinning around him, Rem also saw the second body, Slobodan’s. The Croats had castrated him and plucked out his little eyeballs, just as they had done to Rem’s soldiers.
Dropping to his knees, hugging the lifeless bodies, Rem Vlachko had sworn then never to stop hunting those who had murdered his family, his men. He swore to eliminate the enemies of Serbia until the day he died. And he had done just that, launching a solo attack against the rear of the Croat forces, now engaged with a large deployment of men Milosevic had sent south.
Rem killed many Croats in the coming days, eventually rejoining his army, becoming a national hero, rising to the rank of colonel within a year, and driving some of the most successful campaigns against the Croatians and then the Albanians, eliminating as many of them as he could, cleansing the enemy of his people, the murderers of his family.
But the day came when his great leader was ousted by NATO forces, by the evil Americans. Exiled, Milosevic and many of his military leaders became war criminals.
Wanted for crimes against humanity.
Standing in front of his safe house in Italy, Rem Vlachko slowly let out his breath through clenched teeth.
What about the crimes committed againt my family, you bastards? How about the brutal rape and the murder of my Darja? Of my little Slobodan? Who was brought to trial for their murders? Who?
Determined to continue fighting to avenge their deaths—as well as the injustices being committed by NATO countries against Milosevic—Rem had devised a plan to escape the massive purges and manhunts that followed Milosevic’s fall. Rem had eluded the NATO forces and intelligence organizations that found so many of his fellow officers and brought them to trial. He had gone underground in Chechnya, where he capitalized on the ongoing struggle that Russia had with its former republic by becoming an arms merchant, using his contacts from his days in Serbia to funnel weapons to the Chechnyan army. His ability to find the finest instruments of war in record time earned him a lot of business not just in the former Soviet Union but also in the Middle East, and then in North Africa, Indonesia, and Latin America.
As his profits grew so did the price the international law enforcement community put on his head, something Rem Vlachko saw as the highest form of flattery, for it meant he was making a difference; he was succeeding in his cause: to make his enemies pay for their transgressions against his family, against Serbia’s true government. Such international exposure caught the attention of Rolf Hartmann and Christoff Deppe, the men behind the stunning success of CyberWerke in the past ten years, raising it from a little-known German company to a conglomerate that had become bigger than any other corporation on the planet.
Deppe had provided the arms merchant with his biggest opportunity yet: run his advanced weapons acquisition team, a group of shadowy operatives charged with anything from eliminating the competition to stealing their warfare technologies—anything to keep CyberWerke at the front of the pack. Rem’s assignment took him to the far reaches of the globe, staging accidents, suicides, coercions, technology theft, and even an occasional assassination. For such services, CyberWerke provided Rem with unlimited access to the finest weaponry in the world, tripling his income in the past several years, driving his competition out of business, establishing him as the finest black-market provider in the world, second to none.
And all due to his new connections at CyberWerke.
Rem walked back inside the safe house and examined the damaged door of the room which had been built based on the intelligence gathered about the USN Orb.
CyberWerke’s intelligence on the stolen Orb was obviously flawed, he thought, deciding that in hindsight he should have doubled or even tripled the security, because this had not been the first time he had been burned by bad intel.
Rem only now realized that the missing Orb was certainly in a class all by itself, far more advanced than the very best technology CyberWerke could produce, and certainly ahead of the other stolen USN nanoweapons, like the ones he had planted at the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, at Deppe’s request.
Considering his options, the former Serbian officer decided that the best course of action was to reach Deppe in Berlin immediately and deliver the bad news personally.