Evil Deeds (Bob Danforth 1) (57 page)
Read Evil Deeds (Bob Danforth 1) Online
Authors: Joseph Badal
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue, #Espionage
Other than a couple hours sleep between dinner with Jack Cole and going out to meet Stefan Radko at the 82nd compound’s gate, Michael hadn’t slept for twenty-six hours. His head ached. Gingerly he touched his ribs. At least one was broken, he thought, from rolling down the hill and hitting the tree – or from the beating the Serb soldier gave him. He didn’t have to pretend to slow down the Serbs anymore. Going slow now came easily.
Then he heard the sound of an engine approaching from the direction they were walking. His heart sank. He looked ahead at the curve in the road and waited for the vehicle to appear. He said a silent prayer: Please let it be a motorcycle, or a tractor. Something too small to carry all of them, or something slow. Don’t let it be a car or truck.
The oncoming vehicle became louder, and then it came around the curve in the road and entered the straightaway. Michael felt lower than he already felt. It was a sedan.
The Serbs had lined up across the road. They pointed their rifles at the car. Sokic raised an arm. As soon as the car stopped, the soldiers surrounded it and began dragging the occupants – a man and a woman in their thirties, two small children, and an elderly woman – out onto the road. From the way the soldiers manhandled them, Michael assumed the people from the car must be Kosovar Albanian or Bosnian Muslims. Both hated groups. Less than human to the Serbs.
Sokic shouted orders to his men, three of whom herded the car’s occupants into the trees beyond the road. They’d been gone only a minute, when shots rang out. The men returned a moment later, all smiles.
The soldier guarding Michael pulled on the tether tied to his wrists and jerked him toward the car, shoving him into the backseat. The other soldiers removed the people’s possessions from inside the car and from its roof and tossed them into the ditch by the side of the road. They then piled into the car.
Sokic got behind the wheel. He had barely finished turning the car around, when he began cursing, got out of the vehicle, and walked to the rear fender. He opened the fuel door and unscrewed the gas cap. Then he went over to a sapling by the side of the road, ripped off a branch, and took it back to the car. He stuck the branch into the fuel tank and pulled it out. Only about a quarter of an inch at the bottom of the branch glistened with wetness. Sokic slammed his boot-tip into the car fender. He threw the stick away.
Squeezed between the Serbs in the backseat, Michael silently mouthed the words, “Run out of gas,” over and over. This time his prayer was answered – a few miles up the road.
Major Jim Taylor picked up the radio transmitter. “Lobo One, this is Mother Goose.” Then he read coordinates into the microphone.
“I copy, Mother Goose. Lobo One out,” said Captain Jess Dombrowsky in his Apache helicopter, in the sky fifty miles inside Yugoslavia.
“You hear that, Ernie?” he asked through his headset.
“Yeah, Jess,” his co-pilot, Ernie Patten, replied.
“How about you guys?” Jess asked, looking out his side window at the second Apache.
“Loud and clear,” declared Scooter James, his wingman.
“Roger,” Billy Herrera, Scooter’s co-pilot said.
“Hold on while I input the coordinates,” Ernie said.
Dombrowsky turned the aircraft due south and pushed the throttle to the Apache’s maximum level cruising speed of one hundred eighty miles per hour.
The radio message had been sent in the clear. Dombrowsky knew that meant the Serb military might have intercepted it. But he had the upper hand – they wouldn’t be able to react in time. Unless the bad guys had MIGs nearby.
Flying at this speed, his wingman and he would be at the designated coordinates before the Serbs could triangulate their location and get planes or troops there. He hoped.
The two Apache helicopters followed the road south, flying at an altitude of three hundred feet. Fifteen miles north of the coordinates they’d been given, the crews encountered a two-thousand-foot mountain intersected by a tunnel. Unable to continue following the road, they gained altitude to hurdle the formation. When Dombrowsky passed over the peak, he realized the rules of the game suddenly changed.
“Holy shit!” the Serb soldier screamed, abandoning his effort to take a leisurely piss against the outside wall of the radar site’s command and control center. Running back inside the installation, he saw his teammate punching buttons on the target acquisition radar console. He’d already locked on the American helicopters. The soldier snatched a telephone from its cradle and called in the sighting to headquarters, while watching his partner at the radar console electronically transmit the enemy helicopters’ locations from the target acquisition radar to the target tracking radar.
The soldier was sure headquarters would notify the Serb Air Force MIG 29 Fighter Wing stationed near Dimitrovgrad, just west of the Bulgarian border – about ninety kilometers northeast of the radar site. Within eight minutes of the radar team’s warning, two MIGs could be racing down the runway at the Dimitrovgrad Air Force Base.
“Our luck just changed, Jess,” Lieutenant Scooter James declared in a voice so calm he might as well have been telling Dombrowsky the time. “Do me a favor, will you, and don’t remind me I volunteered for this mission.”
Dombrowsky smiled and said, “It just gives us added motivation to get the job done quickly, Scooter. Tighten up on my six. We’re going treetop.”
The two Apaches banked off the crest of the mountain and roared down toward the road ahead. Dombrowsky noted the distance to the coordinates Patten had entered: Twelve miles to go – three-and-a-half minutes. Plenty of time, he thought. Unless the bad guys have MIGs close by.
Jack had somehow wrung enough self-discipline from his seemingly demented mind to force himself to sit in a chair. He didn’t know how he would live with it if this turned out badly. He’d taken a seat when he realized his incessant pacing had started to grate on everyone’s nerves. He’d always prided himself on his ability to control his emotions, to maintain self-control under the most arduous of circumstances. But this was personal. Michael Danforth was the son of his best friend. And he had been abducted in retaliation for the CIA’s kidnapping of Antonin Karadjic. He’d authorized that mission.
“Colonel Sweeney, it’s Colonel Nye on the horn,” Sergeant Major Jewell shouted, holding up the telephone receiver, waving it at Sweeney. The tone in Jewell’s voice and the tension evident in his body language caused Jack’s skin to hurt. Every nerve in his body seemed on fire.
Jack watched Sweeney go over to Jewell’s desk and take the phone from the Sergeant Major’s hand. Sweeney sat on the edge of the desk, holding the receiver against his chest, as though he was preparing himself for bad news. He had obviously picked up on the strain in Jewell’s voice. Jack moved closer.
“Hello, George,” Sweeney said, after moving the receiver to his ear. “Wha–. Yes. Yes. Yes. I understand. Yeah. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Thanks, George. I hope your men are real close to their planes.”
He slammed down the phone, looking meaningfully at Jack. Then he turned to Jewell. “Get Major Taylor on the horn. Have him radio Dombrowsky. The Serbs have jets in the air.”
Jack groaned. The stab of pain he felt in his stomach meant his ulcer was acting up again. That always happened when something bad happened. Things had suddenly turned awful. Then Bob Danforth walked into the room.