Specter (28 page)

One of the first ordeals undergone by recruits at BUD/S training at Coronado involves dropping them into a nine-foot-deep tank of water with their hands and feet tied, requiring them to sink to the bottom, then push themselves off and back to the surface. After that, they learn tricks ... like donning a face mask, or swimming the entire fifty-meter length of the pool, hands tied. The process is called “drown-proofing,” and it is designed to strip recruits of the panic reflex that is the usual cause of drowning.

Despite the weight, Murdock stayed at the surface, kicking hard and moving his arms, treading water until he spotted his flotation pack a few yards away. Moments later, he was lying across the raft, savoring air and the lack of any need to move.

As he lay there, bobbing low in the water, he heard someone splutter and gasp for breath, not far to his left. Gently, he began kicking, propelling his ungainly life preserver toward the sound. Softly, he called out the password: “Shadow.”

“Bucephalus.”

It was Nicholson—Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Eric “Red” Nicholson, of Gold Squad. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Swallowed a little water.” He was shivering. “Damn, we were loaded a bit heavy that time, weren't we?”

“We've done worse.”

The difference was that training was always different from the real thing. There were no instructors standing by, ready to share the mouthpiece from their scuba tanks, no divers ready to go in and pull you out if you found yourself facing something you could not handle. Even on a mission, SEALs generally tried to stage a “dip test,” dropping into a water tank with their full equipment loadout as a buoyancy test. There'd been neither time nor facilities for that luxury this time around. They'd just been lucky that the waters of the lake were as calm as they were.

Working quickly, Nicholson and Murdock strapped their flotation packs together, then got rid of all excess weight. They gathered in their parachutes, bundled them with their reserve chutes and harnesses, and let them sink. Their bailout bottles and masks—Murdock found his mask had snagged somehow beneath his reserve chute pack—went too, sinking into nine hundred feet of water. They freed their weapons, balancing them atop the float packs. After that, they drifted motionless for a time, huddling together for warmth, with Murdock continuing to show his flashing beacon, but turned so that it could not be seen from shore. After five minutes, two other SEALs—Frazier and Sterling—paddled up, giving the recognition sign. After another five minutes, no one else had shown up. By this time the whole team ought to be down, and hypothermia in the cold water was becoming a serious concern.

Side by side, the four SEALs began kicking their raft of inflated nylon bundles toward the shore.

General Mihajlovic had not been able to sleep.

He liked Gorazamak, liked this mountain lake with its clear air and rugged, beautiful terrain. Years ago, he'd come here as a tourist. He and Katrina, his young wife, had stayed at the Mladinski Center, up in Ohrid, and the two of them had done some marvelous hiking in the federal park that enclosed most of the mountains and forest to the east.

That had been in 1979 ... or 1980? No, it had been the year before Tito had died, the year before the federation of republics that Tito had forged from the blood and agony of war had begun to unravel.

So much had changed in just fifteen years. A whole new world had come into being. And an old one had died.

He walked the stone parapets of the inner ward, a solitary watchtower overlooking the black waters of the lake. Blood and agony had returned to the Federation, despite the best efforts of Tito and everyone after him.
Katrina
...

In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic had become the leader of the Communist Party in Serbia, still a position of tremendous power despite the toppling of Communist regimes that had eventually reached even into the Kremlin. His public vision of a “Greater Serbia” had proven to be the trigger that had driven the two restive northern republics of the federation, Slovenia and Croatia, to elect non-Communist governments three years later, and to declare their independence. Within a year of that, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia had broken away as well. The Albanian population of Kosovo was restless, as always, and Bulgaria was again casting covetous eyes on Macedonia. The situation had been deteriorating faster than even the most gloomy of pessimists in Belgrade could have imagined.

Then, early in 1991, Serbian nationalists had staged demonstrations that verged on riots in several Croatian towns. They'd been deliberately incited by Milosevic's people, of course, with the aim of provoking either a pro-Serb military coup in Zagreb, or the implementation of martial law. When that failed, Serbia's state-controlled radio and TV stations had broadcast reports, all completely fabricated, that ethnic Serbians living in Croatia were being massacred, a prelude to reintroducing federal rule in the breakaway republic.

The plot had been badly mishandled. Those responsible had forgotten that many Serbs living in Serbia opposed the state as much as Croats living in Zagreb ... and worse, that there were other forms of communication available besides the official news media, forms not under the state's control. The truth had gotten out, the clumsy lie had been revealed. A pro-democratic mob had besieged the TV studios in Belgrade, demanding that those at the station responsible for this blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion be fired. Milosevic had panicked and ordered the police to disperse the crowd. Hundreds had been arrested, and hundreds more badly beaten.

According to the official reports, only two had died in the riot that day, shot down outside the television studios when the police opened fire on the demonstrators. The actual number of fatalities, counting the casualties in Belgrade's back streets and those who had died in the SBD's interrogation chambers, had been higher than that. How much higher would probably never be known.

Damn it, Katrina hadn't even been involved! The shot that had struck her down hadn't even been aimed at her. She'd been sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe on Skadarska Street, and a stray bullet fired somewhere else in the city had found her, a senseless, random twist to the violence that flamed everywhere in Yugoslavia now, either openly, as in Bosnia, or quietly smoldering just beneath the surface.

Mihajlovic was determined to end that violence, one way or another. Milosevic was an idiot, pompous, strutting, narrow-minded, conscious only of his own power, alternately defying NATO and the West, then caving in to their demands. Yugoslavia needed a
strong
leader, one who had the full support of the Federation's 180,000-man, 2,000-tank army.

Someone like General Vuk Mihajlovic.

He walked to the parapets of Gorazamak, wondering how quickly he should advance things. The extra troops he'd requested had arrived that morning. There was little more to be done here. The annoying thing was that there still was no word from Skopje. The Americans should have launched their assault of the airport by now. Their Delta Force was notorious for its speed of deployment, reaching anywhere in the world within a couple of days at the most. What was keeping them?

Perhaps what was needed was a higher level of visibility. And of urgency. He could have one of the hostages at Skopje shot.
That
would elicit a response. If necessary, the congresswoman and some of her aides could be paraded in front of the cameras. The thing could be staged so that it looked like Skopje.

A white flash caught Mihajlovic's eye . . . a splash, he thought, in the water almost directly below the castle. Lake Ohrid was known all over Europe for the size of its trout. That had been a big one.

When this was all over, it would be good to return here for some fishing. If he could just put those memories to rest.

The interior of the ward was brightly lit, but up here on the ramparts it was dark. A barely discernible shadow stepped around the corner of an inner wall, blocking his way.

“Halt!” a voice called out. “Who goes there?”

“Brigade General Mihajlovic.”

“Advance and be recognized!”

Mihajlovic took the manual-prescribed two steps forward and stopped. By the light from below, he could make out the sentry's face now, a very young corporal from C Company. He was wearing the somewhat shabby uniform of a typical Macedonian militiaman, but his Automat M70A—a a Yugoslav-manufactured, folding-stock version of the ubiquitous AK-47—was in gleaming, parade-perfect condition.

“Sir!” The man snapped to attention, the rifle flicking from port arms to present arms with drill-book precision. “I recognize you, sir!”

“Good evening, Corporal. At ease, at ease. I'm just out for some fresh air.”

“Yes, my General,” the sentry said, relaxing only slightly.

“So. Quiet night?”

“Very quiet, sir.” The sentry relaxed a bit more, enough to nod toward the lake. “I did see some lights out there ... or I thought I did. They were too far away, though, for me to tell what they were, and they disappeared a few minutes later. I reported them and was told they were probably Albanian aircraft.”

“No doubt. No doubt.” Mihajlovic took the powerful 7x40 binoculars slung around his neck and raised them to his eyes, scanning the horizon slowly. There was little to see along the opposite shore of the lake now, with fewer lights than there were to the north and south. That patch of starlike lights almost directly opposite from the castle would be the Albanian village of Lin, just behind their border crossing at Cafasan. There was nothing else for the whole length of the lake until the village of Pogradec, twenty kilometers to the south, or the cluster of lights at Struga at the northern end of the lake.

After a moment, he lowered the binoculars, leaned against the cold, damp stone of the parapet, and helped himself to a Turkish cigarette. He did not offer the soldier one, of course. Too much familiarity between the officers and the men was not good for discipline.

“I see nothing now. Was it an aircraft, do you think? Or a boat?”

“I'm sorry, my General, but it was impossible even to tell that. I assumed that it was a low-flying aircraft. It was moving so slowly, it seemed very far away.”

“Ah. Still, we've had some strange reports tonight from Ohrid Traffic Control,” Mihajlovic said. He took a drag on the cigarette, and the tip flared a brilliant orange. “
Something's
going on over there. Radar jamming. Aircraft being scrambled. Lots of radio traffic between their military bases and Tiranë. It is possible that you saw one of their aircraft moving against the mountains. Or a small boat patrolling their end of the lake.”

“Could it have anything to do with us, General?”

“I very much doubt it.” He laughed. “Most likely their radar net is down again and Tiranë is getting panicky. But keep a sharp lookout nonetheless. Those people have no reason to love us and cannot be trusted. There is Kosovo, remember.”

“Yes, my General.” The man stiffened again to attention, boot heels clicking.

Kosovo, Mihajlovic reflected, was another of the Federation's restive republics, this one tucked in between Montenegro and Serbia in the north and Macedonia and northeastern Albania to the south. The cradle of Serbian civilization in the Middle Ages, and the center of their empire, Kosovo had later belonged to Albania, and today over eighty percent of its population was ethnic Albanian. In a region known for the long and bitter memories of its varied peoples, Kosovo was a festering wound that would cause more bloodshed one day.

All the more reason to reunite the Federation now under a strong and able hand.

“Carry on!”

“Yes, my General!”

It is for you, my Katrina,
he thought, turning and walking
away
. We will have an end to the killing. It is just too bad that there must be more killing before we—and you—can find peace.

Doc pulled down his right steering toggle slightly, easing into a right-hand turn. Damn! The castle was reaching up for him right off the mountain, like it was trying to claw him from the sky.

Man, he must have overshot the DZ by a good five miles. It was these damned chutes, configured a bit larger than standard in order to support the heavier-than-usual weight carried by the SEAL jumpers. Once he'd lost his gear, there'd been no way to compensate for the greater lift.

He'd known he was in trouble right out of the aircraft, when he'd yanked his rip cord and, instead of a satisfying crack-and-snap hauling him upright, there'd been a sickening flutter and the heart-stopping rush of a too-fast descent, spiraling dizzily toward the right. Looking up, he'd not been able to see the canopy well enough in the darkness to know what had gone wrong; the chute had opened at least partly, or he'd still be in free fall.

The danger was that his canopy might have either twisted about its middle, a condition called the “Mae West” because of the chute's resemblance to a huge brassiere, or curled up on one side or the other in what was known as a “cigarette roll.” In either case, the recommended procedure was for the jumper to immediately activate the reserve chute.

But the reserve was smaller than the main and not designed for extended HAHO flight. It would never take him as far as Lake Ohrid, and Doc had no desire to sample the inside of an Albanian jail. He decided to buy some time by jettisoning his ruck early. He had lots of time—hell, it would take him a couple of minutes to fall thirty thousand feet even without a half-open canopy. He was dropping at about twenty meters per second ... that gave him better than eight minutes.
Plenty
of time.