Specter (3 page)

Murdock did not regard his men as expendable. He'd argued hard against this mission when Captain Coburn, SEAL Seven's skipper, had asked him to take it on. In the end, he'd accepted it, though. While SEAL commanders were notorious throughout the Navy for their willingness to argue orders that they considered impossible or suicidal, mission refusals nonetheless didn't look good on a Team's quarterly reports. It could mean cuts in the NAVSPECWAR budget, and with the fierce competition for money in a fast-shrinking military, that could mean the end of careers, even the end of the Teams.

Beyond the wire border was a pine forest and the start of a steep climb up the southern flank of Gora Orjen, the forest-covered line of mountains that walled the coastal strip off from the interior highlands between Dubrovnik and Kotor. As Murdock started to climb, he wondered if survival of the SEALs had really come down to nothing more than this, the willingness of low-man-on-the-totem-pole officers like himself to accept dubious missions.

Well, at least his was not one of those Agency Rambo ops piggybacking everything onto the field team from beach reconnaissance to a hostage rescue. Blue Squad had a single objective this time, a single mission to carry out. According to Frank Fletcher, the Agency's combat team handler aboard the
Nassau,
it was a quick-in, quick-out piece of cake. Murdock would have felt more confident of that assessment had he not known that a hell of a lot of similar ops had gone badly wrong in the past.

“A piece of cake,” in Company parlance, all too often was rock-hard, fire-hot, and frosted with blood.

“Something's wrong, L-T We got uninvited guests.”

Murdock closed his eyes and gave an almost inaudible groan. “Okay, Razor. Let's hear it.”

The squad had stopped for a rest and a position check just down the hill from the monastery, and Murdock had sent Razor and Magic on ahead to check out the objective. Now Roselli was back, and the expression on his painted face, just visible in the cloud-muffled moonlight, told Murdock that things were turning sour.

“The objective's there, all right. But it looks like some bad guys've set up shop to do some serious drinking.”

“What, soldiers?”

“If you can call 'em that. For all I know they could be bandits. They don't look much like regular forces.”

Murdock reached for his rucksack and extracted his NVD goggles. “Okay. I'll come have a look.”

Silently, the two crawled upslope across a carpet of pine needles and patches of old snow. At the forest's edge, pine trees gave way to uncut brush and brambles, a perfect screen for the stealthily watching SEALs. Brown was still there, behind a fallen tree trunk, studying the scene through his NVDs.

There was the monastery, just as Roselli had said, a once-proud, gray stone structure now crumbled into ruin. Living quarters to the left, with a chapel under an impressive white dome to the right, and beyond that a small, rock-walled cemetery. Mortar fire and artillery shells had brought much of the building down in a tumble of broken stone, though the facade was still standing, as was most of the chapel. The monks had fled years ago, as had most of the other inhabitants of the area. The mountain road that wound past the monastery grounds to the left was one of the main supply routes used by Serbian forces coming west out of Montenegro.

Slowly, careful not to make even a rustle in the underbrush, Murdock pushed aside some of the weeds. The light from a bonfire burning inside a fifty-five-gallon drum was dazzling to his night optics, and he thumbed down the gain.

Yeah, Razor had been dead on. These weren't regular troops, though the truck parked to the right of the monastery's front steps was military, an ancient and mud-spattered UAZ-66, a one-ton transport that had probably been a hand-me-down from the Soviets. Murdock counted nine soldiers in all, two standing guard in the back of the truck with AK-47s, the rest sitting on the crumbling stone steps or standing around the fire, which they were feeding with scraps of wood and broken furniture.

Regular troops would have been more uniform in their appearance. This bunch sported a ragged mismatch of uniforms and civilian clothing; their weapons included military AK-47s and bolt-action sporting rifles; the crude flag painted on the door of their truck was Serbian. Chances were these were Bosnian Serbs, possibly members of the Serb Volunteers, possibly Chetniks or Beli Orlori or members of one of the other pro-Serb, anti-Muslim militias. No one appeared to be in charge, and if any of them wore rank devices, Murdock couldn't make them out. All were unshaven and dirty-looking. Several brandished unlabeled glass bottles half-filled with clear liquid, and the mingled tangs of cheap alcohol and cigarette smoke were sharp in the air.

Murdock peeled back the Velcro cover on his luminous watch dial, checking the time. Zero-two-twenty-six, over two hours since they'd come ashore, less than four and a half hours until sunrise. Damn it, why had the Serbs decided to do their goldbricking
here
, of all the goddamned spots on the Adriatic coast?

The minutes crawled past, and the militiamen showed no sign of moving on. Three of them broke into a ragged and off-key Slavic-sounding song, while the others passed a bottle around.

What to do? The SEALs were supposed to meet their CIA contact here, at this monastery, between 0230 and 0300 hours. They'd deliberately arrived a little early so that they could check the ruins out first, to make certain there was no waiting ambush. Well, this looked like no ambush Murdock had ever seen, but that didn't help any. When the contact, code-name “Gypsy,” showed up, things were going to get damned interesting.

Normally, in a rendezvous like this one, there would have been an alternate meeting site, but Fletcher hadn't been able to designate one. Apparently, communications with CIA assets inside Bosnia were less than ideal at the moment, and Murdock had been told that just setting up this meet had been difficult. Murdock considered splitting his squad and posting them on the mountain road, one up the hill, the other below, with orders to intercept any vehicle with a lone occupant approaching the monastery, but rejected that as too chancy. The SEALs had no idea which direction Gypsy was coming from, or even whether he would be on the road at all. He could be coming up through the woods as the SEALs had, on foot, and might even be watching somewhere nearby, waiting for the noisy party on the monastery steps to break up.

Besides, there was no way to know how Gypsy might react to three or four black-clad, face-painted commandos leaping out of the woods to stop his vehicle. Somehow, Murdock thought that Fletcher and his bosses back at Langley, Virginia, would take a dim view of the SEALs getting caught in a firefight with their man in Bosnia. All things considered, it would be safer to wait here and hope the militiamen got bored and left. Damn it, they must have to answer to
someone.
Sooner or later they would have to go back to base or show up for roll call or whatever it was that paramilitary play-soldiers did when they weren't hunting Croats or Bosnian Muslims. The question was whether or not Gypsy would put in an appearance after they'd gone.

Cautiously, Roselli and Murdock inched back from the edge of the woods. “Looks like a damned convention,” Roselli complained. “Who invited
them
?”

Murdock consulted his watch again: zero-two-twenty-eight. While Murdock hoped that Gypsy was in fact hidden in the woods somewhere waiting it out like the SEALs, there was every possibility that the Company asset would blunder into the Serb militia. Should he call in a report? No ... no time now, and there'd be time enough later, whatever happened. “Go back and get the others,” he told Roselli. “Fill them in. Have them come up quiet, radios open, channel A. But no chatter. Got it?”

“Right, L-T.”

“On the double. But
quiet.
”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Returning to the edge of the woods once more, Murdock took up position to Brown's right. “Looks like they're waiting for someone, Lieutenant,” Brown observed. “Don't know what they're sayin', but a couple of 'em keep lookin' at their watches an' then out toward the road. You think they're waiting for Gypsy?”

“If they are, they're being remarkably casual about it, Magic. It's certainly not an ambush.”

“Yeah. Maybe—”

“Shh!”

Headlights glared on the main road, then swung sharply across the facade of the monastery. A second truck— another UAZ, engine roaring as the driver downshifted-bumped off the main road and turned sharply onto the dirt drive running in front of the monastery. With a squeak of ancient springs and a clatter of gnashing gears, it pulled up directly in front of the monastery door, where it was greeted by the other soldiers with cheers and friendly, bantering calls. Like the first, this second truck bore a painted Serbian flag on the door. The cover had been removed from the rear bed, and Murdock could make out a number of heads behind the glare of the vehicle's headlights. As lights and engine switched off, Murdock could see another ten soldiers in the back of the truck, plus two more up front. No ... scratch that. Three of the people in back were civilians.

Women.

Murdock felt a cold, icy slickness in his belly as the soldiers began piling out of the truck. It was a rape party. The women were prisoners, their hands tied behind their backs, their clothing torn and disheveled; the men were laughing and joking with one another as they shoved their captives toward the back of the truck, then handed them down over the tailgate one after another, kicking and wailing, into the waiting hands of the soldiers already on the ground. One woman was probably in her thirties. The other two were younger—teenagers, Murdock thought, though they were so scrawny and bedraggled that it was hard to tell. The two other men stayed in the back of the first truck, standing guard with their AKs, while the rest began crowding around the women.

“
Lieutenant!
” Brown breathed, his mouth inches from Murdock's ear, the whisper so soft it was almost drowned by the raucous laughter twenty meters away.
“Lieutenant! What're we gonna do?”

Silently, Murdock laid one finger across his lips and shook his head, a dark warning. There was nothing they could do at the moment, not without jeopardizing the mission. A firefight here might draw down the full force of whatever Serb warlord ruled this stretch of forested Balkan mountainsides. Gypsy could be captured. One or more of the team might be captured ... and wouldn't the trial of a U.S. Navy SEAL look good on Serbian television? Belgrade had been itching for a confrontation with the Americans, something that would help Yugoslavia's neo-Communist dictatorship pull together the popular support they needed to stay in power ... and to keep the war in Bosnia going. The situation, Murdock thought, was a damned international incident begging to happen.

He felt Roselli moving up on his right, felt the SEAL tense as he saw what was happening in front of the monastery. He laid a steadying hand on the SEAL's shoulder.
Not yet.

It looked like the militiamen were planning on going about this methodically. They'd taken one of the younger girls and dragged her off away from the others. Two men disappeared through the monastery's door and reappeared a moment later, lugging a torn, water-stained mattress between them.

This, Murdock thought with a trembling, barely contained fury, was the reality of war in the Balkans, something the politicians and the Beltway bureaucrats never seemed able to squarely face. For years now, as the Yugoslav civil war ground on, sometimes hot, sometimes merely simmering, rape had been commonly practiced by both sides, but it was the Serbs who'd transformed rape into state policy, a means of demoralizing civilians and forging closer bonds among troops of uncertain loyalties, a way of emptying cities of enemy ethnic populations, and even one aspect of the detestable notion of “ethnic cleansing.” Muslim women had been the most frequent targets. These people were probably Muslims, though since Bosniak women did not wear the chador there was no way to single them out. The younger girl who had been separated from the others was wearing Western-style blue jeans, and the other two wore casual dresses. None had coats against the cold, night air. Likely they'd either been snatched from their homes in some village or taken from one of the huge, Serb-controlled camps that more and more were beginning to resemble places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

While some of the men held the other two women apart, next to the fire, others dragged the third to the mattress. It took three of them to pin her down on her back while a fourth peeled off her jeans. When her legs were bare, a ponderously fat militiaman with a Josef Stalin mustache began using a bayonet to slice away her blouse; the others laughed and hooted wildly as the girl screamed, thrashing about in their grip. The older woman shouted something, her voice shrill and cracking. A big soldier in crossed ammo bandoliers and an ill-fitting fur schapska backhanded her savagely, and her shout was broken off in a muffled sob. A young militiaman with a thin, straggly mustache grabbed the other teenage girl from behind, tearing at her sweater as he dragged her to the ground. His comrades howled with laughter and urged him on.

Murdock touched his tongue to lips suddenly gone dry. There was no question about intervening; similar dramas were being played out daily throughout the former Republic of Bosnia, and the SEALs could not possibly stop the rape that had become a special Cain's mark of this war. Hell, at this point intervention was as likely to get the women killed as anything else. But to be forced to lie there in the bushes and watch, helpless to do anything at all ...