Specter (10 page)

“That,” Murdock said with feeling, “makes two of us.”

Narednik
Jankovic was the first one to find the blood, a coagulated patch on the beach close to the high-tide line. Most of it had already been absorbed by the sand, but there was no mistaking the slick, dark stain that remained as he turned his flashlight on it. Footprints were visible as well, along with a submachine gun dropped by one of the invaders.

He studied that weapon carefully.
Heckler und Koch
... though the fact that it was a German gun meant nothing. H&K made some of the finest firearms in the world, and plenty of people, from the British SAS to a dozen European and Mideast terrorist groups, used them. The SD3 model, with integral sound suppressor too. The very best. He had the feeling that if he were to disassemble the weapon, he would find that every serial number on every part had been removed or was otherwise untraceable.

He turned his flash back on the blood and the ragged, double line of footprints moving down the shelf of the beach toward the water's edge. Those footprints closely flanked twin furrows that were most likely where a dead or wounded man's toes had plowed through the wet sand as he was dragged along. There was some more blood further along... and there. . . and there. There was something oddly comforting about that stain on the beach and the furrows in the sand, evidence that these commandos were human. They
could
be fought, could be shot and killed.

Jankovic needed that reassurance just now. The slaughter on the beach had been indescribable. In almost four years of fighting Bosniaks, Jankovic had seen plenty of death and suffering, but never,
never
had he seen anything to match the horror that he'd seen tonight. The faceless enemy had killed or wounded a dozen men in seconds, then somehow called down death incarnate from out of the overcast sky.

They
can
die. They
can
be killed.

Jankovic clung to that simple and comforting thought.

“Then what happened, Chief Roselli?”

Roselli's glance traveled from Dulaney, the Navy officer who'd been running the debriefing, to the three civilians in the steel-walled compartment, then across the table to Commander George Presley,
Nassau
's Combat Information Officer.

“Well, sir,” Roselli said slowly, looking back at Commander Dulaney. “The Skipper started around the front of the truck on the left. I think he popped a couple of shots at the runner. I'm not sure.”

“Did the man stop?”

“I think he did, sir. I'm pretty sure he was turning around.”

“And Lieutenant Murdock shot him?” one of the civilians asked.

Damned suit
, Roselli thought. “Uh, yes, sir.”

“I see. Was he armed?”

“I don't know, sir. I was still quite a ways back and couldn't see real well. The truck was in the way.”

“Do you know if any of the militia soldiers at the monastery tried to surrender?”

“Not that I know of, sir. It was all over pretty fast. If any of 'em wanted to, I doubt that they could have.”

“What do you mean by that, Roselli?” Fletcher, the boss suit, asked. “That you weren't taking prisoners?”

“No, sir. I just mean we were in there just taking initials,'cause we were moving too fast to take names.”

“Did you understand, Chief,” Fletcher said, “that your rules of engagement required you not to fire unless you were fired upon? That Lieutenant Murdock violated the ROEs by ordering you to open fire?”

“Well, we didn't have much fuckin' choice—”

“Chief!” Dulaney said sharply. “Please.”

“Well, it's true! Excuse me, sir, but your agent would've been dead if we hadn't opened up when we did, and the whole op would've been for nothing.”

Fletcher leaned over and whispered something to Dulaney.

“Very well, Chief,” Dulaney said a moment later. “You may go.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Fletcher glanced down at a notebook in his hand. “And would you have, ah, Quartermaster First Class Martin Brown step in here, please?”

“Right, sure thing. Uh ... listen, about the L-T—”

“That is all, Chief. Thank you.”

“I just wanted to say that he—”

“That will be
all,
Roselli.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Roselli rose, took a last look at the men gathered there, and walked out of the compartment. In the passageway outside, Prof, Doc, and Magic were waiting for him.

Just four hours ago, they'd been plucked from the sea off the Adriatic coast by a Navy SH-60 Seahawk off the
Nassau.
Flown back to the amphibious assault ship's flight deck, they'd been greeted before they even climbed out of the helo by a team of hospital corpsmen and a ship's doctor who'd bundled Garcia, strapped into a Stokes wire-frame stretcher, off to sick bay. While they were still climbing off the helo, they'd been met by Commander Dulaney himself, who'd told them they had two hours to get cleaned up and squared away for their debriefing.

Dulaney had not looked pleased.

When the SEALs had reported aboard the
Nassau
two weeks earlier, they'd brought full seabags as well as their combat gear; even SEALs couldn't run around aboard ship in their combat blacks all the time, and Murdock had always been a stickler for doing things the Navy way. “The fewer waves, the better,” he'd told the platoon more than once, and so the SEALs had showered and shaved and changed into their blues.

Roselli had felt like he was under a damned magnifying glass throughout the briefing.
Something
had gone sour besides the mission itself, and he couldn't tell what it was.

“So how'd it go, Razor?” Magic asked.

“I'm not sure. Feels like they're railroading the Skipper, though.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You're up next, Magic.”

“Wish me luck, guys.” The big SEAL sniper tugged at the bottom of his blue jumper, took a deep breath, and stepped through the compartment door.

“Shit,” Doc said after the door had clanged shut. He folded his arms and leaned back against the bulkhead. “Here we go with the munchkin madness again.”

“Aw,” Prof added in a mincing, little boy's voice. “Are they upset that we bwoke their itty-bitty rules of engagement?”

“Something like that. Where's Mac and the L-T?”

“They went up on the flight deck. Something about needing some air.”

“Don't blame 'em,” Roselli said. “Maybe I'll join them. Uh, any word on Boomer?”

“Nope. He's still in sick bay. I imagine they'll fly him out today. Pneumothroax and he lost a lot of blood. They'll want him in a hospital Stateside pronto.”

“Damn bad luck,” Roselli said.

“Yeah, well, it happens,” Higgins said. “He knew the odds when he got his Budweiser.”

Roselli reached up and fingered the heavy, ugly gold emblem pinned to his dress blue jacket, just above its neatly ordered rows of colored ribbons. Eagle with outstretched wings. Anchor. Trident. Old-fashioned flintlock pistol. The “Budweiser” emblem that marked a man as a SEAL. “I guess so. Any word on what's going down? I feel like we're up for court-martial or worse. Mac got the package back okay, didn't he?”

“Turned it over to Dulaney soon as we stepped aboard,” Higgins said. “Of course, things have been real tense with the Serbs all along. Maybe they're afraid that firefight's going to touch off some worse fighting.”

“Well, shit,” Roselli said with feeling. “Bring 'em on! Let's stop with the pussyfooting and settle this thing, right?”

“Rules of engagement,” Doc snorted. “Who do they think they're shittin' anyway?”

Murdock and MacKenzie had not stayed on the flight deck for long.
Nassau
was in the middle of full flight deck ops, using her catapult to hurl Marine Harriers into the sky one after another. The noise on the flight deck was so loud that anyone without protective headgear would have been deafened in moments, and ordinary conversation, certainly, was impossible. Too, the stink of jet fuel made that “fresh air” Murdock had spoken of rather hard to find. After being confronted by a chief aviation boatswain's mate who told them both point blank that unless they had some specific business on
his
flight deck they'd both be pleased to go play tourist someplace the hell else, they decided to take the man's advice and find a spot for themselves somewhere out of the way.

The crew's lounge, aft and three levels down from the LPH's flight deck, normally didn't cater to either officers or master chief petty officers, and from the looks they were getting, Murdock decided that there probably wasn't any place aboard this ship where he and MacKenzie could unwind, at least not without collecting stares. A ship, even one as large as the
Nassau
with a complement of 58 officers, 882 enlisted men, and 1,924 Marines, is a tight, tiny community where nearly everyone knows nearly everyone else, and where the only thing faster than radio communications is shipboard scuttlebutt. The SEALs had attracted a lot of attention since they'd come aboard two weeks ago, and Murdock still wasn't used to always being watched.

Screw it. He wanted a cola and he wanted someplace to sit and talk with Mac. They ignored the looks, got their drinks from a coin-operated machine near the compartment's forward door, and found themselves a table. The compartment was not too crowded at this hour of the morning. Two sailors were bent over a couple of arcade games aft, and several more were sitting on a sofa, watching television.

“They seemed pretty bent out of shape, Skipper,” Mac said as they sat back in their seats. “They were hitting me with questions about the firefight at the monastery, and about you capping that guy who tried to surrender. How the hell did they find out about that?”

“Easy,” Murdock said. “I told 'em. Hell, I'm not going to lie about something like that.”

Mac shook his head. “Sometimes, Boss, you're just too much the frigging straight arrow.”

“Hell, I didn't like doing it, but there was no way I was going to risk the mission screwing around with prisoners,” Murdock said. “But I don't think that was what was bugging them. It was more like they were worried about, I don't know. What evidence we might have left behind.”

“What, like our IBS? Boomer's piece? That stuff's all sterile.”

“I know. It's just—”

Murdock stopped in mid-sentence, staring at the television monitor across the compartment.

“Lieutenant? What is it?”

Murdock gestured toward the TV.
Nassau
sported her own TV studio on board, but most programming was picked up from Armed Forces Network broadcasts and piped through the ship's closed-circuit network.

At the moment, an attractive, dark-haired, professional-looking woman was on the screen. Visible behind her was the familiar-looking facade of the St. Anastasias Monastery.

“Oh,
shit
,” Murdock said.

“Hey, son,” Mac called to the sailors watching the program. “Could one of you turn that up, please?”

A second class obliged, and Murdock listened to the newscaster's words, comprehension dawning.

“. . . ian officials claim that American commandos carried out the predawn raid as a deliberate provocation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One observer had this to say....”

The woman was replaced on the screen by a military officer, an older man with the single star of a Serbian brigadier general on his gold-heavy epaulets.

“We are convinced this, this unprovoked attack is part of American campaign to win UN approval for further air strikes against Serb forces in Bosnia,” the man said in heavily accented English. A subtitle appeared at the bottom of the screen, identifying him as General V. Mihajlovic. “We invite United Nations to come here, come see evidence of American aggression in Serbian internal affairs.”

The general's face was replaced by a shot of the burned-out trucks in front of the monastery. Greasy black smoke was still curling from the wreckage. “So far,” the woman reporter continued in a voice-over, “American officials here have refused to answer any questions about the incident, or to confirm that American aircraft took part a few hours later in an airstrike against Yugoslavian ground troops near the coast.

“For ACN, this is Marsha Shakarian, Mjini, Yugoslavia.”

“That explains it,” Murdock said. “The news networks got the story before the CIA.”

“It's happened before, Boss.”

“But that means they're going into ass-covering mode. I think the shit's about to hit the fan.”

A chilly wind had been blowing all morning, whipping down off the Khortiatis Mountains with a bitter reminder that winter wasn't quite finished yet. The sky, contrary to the usual blue-sky standards of Greece, was low and overcast, and prone to periodic flurries of snow.

Despite the unpromising weather, however, Congresswoman Ellen Louise Kingston had found an audience for herself. The reporters had been waiting for her just outside the passenger terminal, and as she emerged through the big double doors onto the painted walkway leading to her plane, they started shouting questions to her.