Specter (31 page)

And it sounded like they needed to talk about Doc.

Damn. It might have been easier if they knew what had happened to him. In over thirty years of operations, SEALs had never left a man behind, and no SEAL had ever been taken prisoner. Not knowing whether he'd died somewhere in Albania or made it as far as Lake Ohrid but come down in the wrong place made it worse. If he was still out there somewhere, alive but wounded, with his radio out...

“Papagos,” he whispered sharply. “Roselli. Go do it. And keep it quiet. The rest of you, with me. We've got some climbing to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.”

He watched as they slipped into darkness.

“Sst. L-T.”

Murdock looked back over his shoulder. Mac was signaling. Red had reached the top of the cliff and secured his end of the line. It was time to go.

“Let's move out,” he told the others.

He'd already decided that he would be the first up the cliff after Nicholson.

Sergeant Jankovic stepped out of the castle's main building, paused for a moment on the stone steps outside, then started walking across the outer courtyard toward the long, low buildings inside the west wall that served the garrison as barracks. He would start his night rounds there.

Jankovic had arrived at Gorazamak only that afternoon and been dismayed to find out that he'd been assigned the two-to-six watch that very night. He well understood the need for nighttime sentry-go—any hypothetical enemy was not going to be so considerate as to delay his attack until dawn—but he could have wished for a little time to get acclimated to the new place. This Ottoman monstrosity filled him with a deep foreboding—what he'd heard Americans liked to call “giving someone the creeps.” The Ottoman Turks had had so much blood on their hands. It was easy to imagine these rough, brown stones crying out for more.

He was still recovering from that night of blood and terror on the beach near Dubrovnik. His personal report to Mihajlovic had been concise and factual. He was pretty sure that that was why the general had asked if he would like temporary assignment to this operation.

At least, that was part of the reason. Some part of Jankovic thought that the larger reason was that he'd encountered what were probably American commandos at Dubrovnik, and Mihajlovic seemed obsessed with the idea that those same commandos might attempt an assault here. Of course, they shouldn't know yet that their politician was being held here. Still, Jankovic was not at all convinced that the Americans hadn't somehow found out that this was where they were keeping her. Their spy satellites . . .

Jankovic glanced up, uncomfortable, and stared for a moment at low-drifting clouds and brilliant stars. He'd heard that the American satellites could see in the dark, could read a newspaper over a man's shoulder, could eavesdrop even on a whispered conversation.... Such powers were awesome, and terrifying.

He looked down at the initials tattooed into the back of his hand.
Only Solidarity Can Save the Serbs.

Jankovic had seen and done terrible things in the past few years, things he was not proud of. At first he'd taken part because he believed in the holy war for homeland and for brother Serbs. Then he'd taken part because not doing so would have marked him.

But God in heaven, how could he continue? Stories kept circulating about Muslim or Croat atrocities against Serbs... but he'd learned to distrust camp talk and official propaganda both. He had
seen
the concentration camps at Manjaca and Kereterm, however, and had a good idea of what went on there, even if the details were never openly discussed. He'd heard screams, seen the bodies stacked in heaps behind a tool shed. And he'd heard of indescribable obscenities... made all the worse because the people he'd heard them from were boasting at the time. Maybe that was camp talk too, but he doubted it.

He'd seen the look in the boaster's eyes, and there were some stories too horrible to be fiction.

Would solidarity save the Serbs from the Americans, when they came?

They would come, Jankovic had no doubt about that. Mihajlovic was holding their people in that stone tower somewhere and Jankovic had no doubt at all that the Americans would find them with their magical technology... and come.

The only question was when.

The Americans could be out there right this moment, watching him through a sniper's nightscope. The thought made his skin crawl, and he hurried his steps across the compound.

Roselli adjusted the gain on his NVDs. The guards had started a small fire, and the glare tended to wash out the image in his night goggles when he looked toward it. It was the same four men, all sitting together now, backs to the night, hands to the fire, and paying no attention at all to their surroundings. Sloppy, sloppy...

He was just glancing at his watch when he heard a click in his Motorola's earpiece, followed by Murdock's voice. “Alex Three, this is One. In position. Over.”

That meant that the SEALs in the L-T's group had made it up the cliff and were waiting outside the castle's walls.

He was so close to the four guards that he didn't dare speak in reply. Instead he reached up and pressed the squelch button three times, then twice:
Alex Three, okay
.

“Three, One. Alex Two in position,” the voice said. “Your show, Three. Over.”

Again, he pressed the squelch button three times, then twice:
Alex Three, okay
.

There was no use waiting any longer. Roselli disliked firing on men from ambush, especially these men who obviously didn't have the faintest idea about what they were doing. One of those people down there, he remembered, was little more than a kid.

A kid who was on the wrong side in a shitty war ... and he should have known the risks when he first picked up an AK to play soldier with his big brothers. That was part of the trouble with the world today, Roselli thought. Too many child-soldiers all over the fucking planet. He pulled a flashbang from his thigh pouch, pulled the pin, let fly, ducking as he did so behind the shelter of the boulder. . . .

Flashbangs had originally been developed by the German GSG-9, a weapon in their war against international terrorism. The SEALs, Delta, the SAS, and a few other special-operations units had picked them up since. A cardboard tube filled with five separate charges timed to burst in rapid succession, the flashbang did exactly that—detonate with a chain of flashes that were momentarily blinding, and with a savage concussion that could leave the target helplessly stunned.

The grenade landed just short of the fire. Roselli heard someone shout. . . and then the night was filled with crackling thunder and shrill screams. As the echo of the final blast was still ringing in the air, Roselli and Sterling rose together atop the boulder. The four Serb soldiers sprawled in a circle about the fire, two lying flat, two on hands and knees. Roselli saw the black trickle of blood from the ear of one, from the nose of another.

One shouted something and groped for his AK assault rifle. Roselli squeezed the trigger on his H&K, a featherlight caress, and the man pitched up and backward onto the fire. Roselli tensed, waiting for ammo the man might be carrying to cook off. . . but evidently any spare mags he had were in one of the rucksacks nearby. He fired again, knocking down a second, just as Sterling nailed numbers three and four.

Four up, four down. “Alex One, this is Three. Clear.”

“We heard you, Three,” came the reply. “The party's just beginning!”

“What the shit was that?”

Jankovic ran to the stone parapet, along with the sentry he'd just been inspecting. Those flashes, those explosions, they'd been from the northwest, about where the castle access road came down to join the highway. What had it been. . . gunfire? Grenades? It was silent enough now....

He reached into his back pocket and extracted a radio. “Command Center, this is Sergeant Jankovic, west wall. Something is happening at Post One.”

“We heard, Sergeant,” Captain Cherny's voice snapped back. “We are investigating.”

Yes, investigating,
Jankovic thought savagely.
With your head tucked up your ass
...

Jankovic's immediate thought was to lead a party of men down to Sentry Post One to find out what had happened. It could have been an accident. . . a grenade or some ammo dropped in a fire.

But Jankovic didn't believe that for a moment, not when the night still held the memory of Dubrovnik, and every shadow held the threat of nightmare. If this was an assault of some kind, why would they attack a sentry post outside the walls so noisily? ...

... unless they wanted a diversion. Where did they, whoever “they” were,
not
want the garrison to look?

Jankovic turned, sweeping the compound, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Damn Mihajlovic. It was so brightly lit inside the place that it was hard to see much of anything outside. It would have been better to light the outside and keep the inside dark.

The courtyard below was occupied by a number of confused-looking troops. Four guards stood inside the front gate, and two more in the gate tower above. The east wall was manned by half-a-dozen sentries, including one with a bulky Mitrajez M80 machine gun. An officer stumbled out of the main building, still buckling his trousers as he shouted orders. He was gathering a squad to go down the hill. Someone started up one of the jeeps, backing it out into the courtyard.

Something caught Jankovic's attention, some movement near the gate. He looked back and saw nothing. Three guards...

No, there'd been four. Where was the fourth? As he watched, horrified, part of the shadow behind one of the sentries by the gate seemed to solidify, flowing about the man's neck from behind, dragging him back.

He lifted the radio to his mouth again. “Commander! This is Jankovic! They're inside the castle. Repeat, they're
inside the castle, front gate!
”

There was a heavy thump from somewhere outside, and the lights went out.

Murdock dropped from the top of the wall and landed in the courtyard, letting his momentum carry him into a low crouch. To his right, the Professor lowered a dead Serb to the flagstone pavement. Another guard stepped out of a low doorway on the west side of the gate tower, and Murdock stopped him with a single three-round burst that punched him back into the room he'd been leaving. Nicholson followed up, tossing a concussion grenade through the stone opening.

“Grenade!” Nicholson yelled, and Murdock flattened himself against his side of the gate tower. The blast, a heavy thump that struck him through the soles of his boots, blew out the twentieth-century glass windows that had been installed in sixteenth-century window slits.

Across the courtyard, four more Serbian soldiers appeared bursting out of the barracks door. Murdock dropped two with quick, three-round bursts, tapping the trigger twice and sending both men tumbling across the ground. The other two ran another couple of steps, and then the thunder of Mac's Maremont opened up from the parapet wall above and behind Murdock's position, the muzzle flash stabbing and stuttering against the night. Both Serbs collapsed as though their legs had been yanked out from under them. “This is Alex One-Two” sounded in Murdock's earphone, Mac's call sign. “I'm moving.”

The SEALs possessed a considerable advantage in the M-60E3s they were humping, two weapons that could provide them with tremendous portable firepower. The disadvantage was that the gunner had to move each time he gave away his position with the gun's muzzle flash.

For this op, however, that was not a serious problem, since the SEALs were going to be moving constantly anyway. If they stopped in one position for more than a few seconds, the enemy would move in troops enough to pin them down like butterflies on a board. If they kept moving, the Serb defenders of Gorazamak would never be able to organize an effective defense, would never even be able to guess how many invaders they were fighting or where they were coming from.

Kick ass and take initials,
the SEAL saying went, '
cause
we're
gonna be moving too fast to take names!

When Mac had cut the main outside power lines leading to the castle, the defenders had been left in blind confusion, but the SEALs couldn't expect that to last for long. They had to take advantage of the darkness—and their high-tech night-vision gear—before the Serbs found their generator.

“Alex One!” Murdock called to his men over the tactical channel. “One-One! Move!”

Mihajlovic had just fallen asleep; it felt as though he'd only just closed his eyes. The crump of a grenade blast, followed by the rattle of a machine gun, instantly brought him wide awake. An attack! Rolling over in bed, he fumbled for his bedside lamp, then cursed when he turned the switch and the light didn't come on. He rose, fumbling about in the dark. Someone pounded on the door to his room.

“Enter, damn it!”

The door opened, and a soldier entered, an assault rifle in one hand, a heavy-duty flashlight in the other. The movements of the light sent fantastic shadows dancing around the room. “My General!”