Specter (34 page)

“Told him ... he was coward,” the wounded man said. God, he was smiling. “Called him ... filthy coward, hide behind women, small . . . small penis. Called him ... everything I could think of. Then ... said his wife was probably making it with his neighbor while he terrorized innocent women . . .”

“Shit, Steponit. Didn't anybody ever tell you it isn't a good idea to piss off a guy who had a gun?”

“Can . . . can we help get him on the bed?” Kingston asked, sitting up. Her hearing was fully recovered now, though there was still a faint ringing in her ears. She tasted salt on her lips, and she realized her nose was bleeding.

“Thanks, ma'am, but we'd better leave him where he is for now.”

“What about this one?” Unsteadily, she moved over to the body of the man who'd been holding her. The braid on his uniform suggested that he was of very high rank. A general? She thought so. He was lying on his stomach, his wrists strapped behind his back with a length of white plastic. Gently, she rolled him onto his side. For a moment, his eyes locked with hers, and she thought she saw recognition there.

“Katrina,” he said.

And then the eyes were no longer focused. He was dead.

“Shit!
No!”
DeWitt shouted. “No, Goddamn it!”

“He's gone, XO.”

Kingston moved over to DeWitt's side. “He . . . he saved my life, Lieutenant. He may have saved all of us.”

“Yeah.” DeWitt looked up at her as though seeing her for the first time. “Yeah, but that's why we're here, isn't it? You're Congresswoman Kingston?”

“That's me.”

“Okay.” He drew himself up straighter. “I want you to be in charge of your people here. Is anybody missing from your party now? Anybody taken someplace else? To the bathroom? Whatever?”

“The women are all here, Lieutenant,” she said. “I don't know about the men.”

“Some of our boys are taking care of the men right now,” DeWitt told her. “Is anyone in here hurt? Does anyone need medical attention?”

“We're all fine, Lieutenant,” Kingston told him.

“You've got some blood on your face.”

“From that, that explosion.”

“Flashbang. Got your attention, didn't it?”

“I'm okay.” She smeared at the blood on her lip and decided that she didn't want to see what she looked like right now. Gunfire crackled in the distance. “Is . . . I mean, are you still fighting?”

The lieutenant's mouth, almost invisible under layers of black and green paint, quirked upward. “Yes, ma'am. But it'll be okay. You ladies just do what you're told and everything'll work out fine.” He turned away then and crouched inside the shattered door.

With a jolt of insight, she realized that these young men had fought their way to her, one had died for her, and now the others had placed themselves between her and her former captors. From the look of those two, she wouldn't care to be in the army boots of anyone trying to recapture the hostages.

As she lowered herself to the floor, however, she caught sight of one of the soldiers lying in the corner, the first one to be shot when the Americans had burst in. His head was turned to face her; the lower jaw was missing, and one of the eyes had popped out of its socket. There was blood everywhere, all over the shattered face, draining down the front of his tunic, pooling on the floor, splattered across the wall behind him.

Grimly, Kingston turned her eyes away and told herself that she would
not
be sick.

For a moment, she'd been caught up with the traditional, romantic image of heroes to the rescue. That body, in a way words never could, snapped her back to reality. There was
nothing
romantic about war. . . .

Sitting on the House Military Affairs Committee, Kingston knew a fair amount about things military. DeWitt had said he was Special Forces when he came through the door ... but he'd given his rank as lieutenant j.g. There were no junior-grade lieutenants in the Army. That was a Navy rank, equivalent to an Army first lieutenant. If he was Navy, he had to be a SEAL.

An elite murder squad she'd once called the SEALs. Shit! Ellen Kingston lay on the floor and thought about her distinguished colleague from Virginia, the one that had a son who was a Navy SEAL.

“One-One, this is Two-One.” DeWitt was speaking so quietly Kingston almost couldn't catch the words. He seemed to be talking into a pencil mike extending from his helmet around to just in front of his paint-smeared lips. “I have six women, fifth floor back. All safe, no injuries.” He took a breath. “Three tangos down. One of ours down.”

She couldn't hear the reply.

“Steponit, L-T. He's dead.” Another long pause. “Roger that,” he said after a moment. And then: “I copy.”

He turned slightly, facing the women. “Okay, ladies,” he said. “We're gonna have a short wait. The other guys outside have pretty much mopped up on the tangos—the terrorists, I mean. The other hostages, the men, are all safe. Twelve men, including the five guys on your staff, ma'am. They were being held in another room on the other side of the building.”

“Thank God,” she said. “What about the airplane's crew?”

“I don't know about them, ma'am. They may still be with the plane, and someone else'll be taking care of them. Now, we have helos inbound for you. What we're gonna do is wait until the helos are here. Then we're gonna walk down the stairs, go out into the courtyard, and climb aboard. Ms. Kingston, I want you to be in charge of the people in this room, okay? You feel up to that?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“I want you to make sure everyone's with us when we start to move and to make sure everyone stays together. Hold hands, so no one gets lost. If anyone wanders off, we won't be able to come back for them, understand?”

“Perfectly, Lieutenant.”

“Okay. Just sit tight for now. You'll be on that chopper and on your way home before you know it.”

The women started cheering again, a sound that seemed incongruous with so much death and sadness in that room ... and yet Kingston felt the overwhelming sense of relief as well. They were going ...
home!
Bunny leaned over and tried to kiss DeWitt and got black greasepaint smeared on her cheek.

“Settle down, all of you,” DeWitt said, easing Bunny aside with one hand. “I'm afraid we're not out of this yet.”

The women withdrew to the back of the room and at DeWitt's orders got back down on the floor, but they continued to talk among themselves in excited whispers. Kingston wanted to cry. Home! Thanks to ... what was his name? Steponit, DeWitt had called him. Thanks to Steponit, they were going home.

She wondered, though, as they crouched on that blood-smeared floor.

Who was the “Katrina” that her captor had confused her with?

“Olympus, Olympus, this is Phalanx.” Higgins crouched on the stone floor of the gate tower, speaking into the mike of his sat comm. “Olympus, come in.”

“Phalanx, this is Olympus,” a voice said in his headset. “Go ahead.”

“Olympus, Nike. I say again, Nike.”

With scrambled encryption on both ends, there was no real need for special code phrases, and communications protocol even suggested using clear language on an encrypted channel for clarity's sake. With the Greek theme of this mission, however—Alexander, Olympus, and Phalanx—the name of the Greek goddess of victory had been too perfect not to incorporate as well. The word
Nike
meant “Mission successful, all hostages safe.” Had he instead said Samothrace, the reference would have been to the Nike of
Samothrace
, the famous statue of victory lacking arms and a head.

It would have been the grim announcement that the mission had been successful, but that some of the hostages had been wounded or killed.

Medusa
was the code word that had been chosen to announce disaster.

“Well done, Phalanx,” the voice in the headset said. “Well done!” There was a burst of static, and Higgins thought he heard a babble of voices in the background. No ... that was cheering.

“Okay, Phalanx,” the voice of Olympus said after a moment. “Here's the word! Chariot and Achilles left San Vito twelve minutes ago. They're on the way and should be over your position in ... make it thirty-nine minutes. That's three-niner minutes. Think you boys can hold out that long?”

“Copy that as three-niner minutes, roger. We'll manage till then.”

A dull thump sounded from outside the castle walls, toward the northwest. Higgins looked up, meeting Magic's eyes.

“Phalanx out,” he added.

“Thirty-nine minutes, huh?” Magic said. Another thump echoed from the woods outside. “From the sound of things, someone just stumbled across ol' Razor's and Jaybird's handiwork down there. Thirty-nine minutes just might be too long.”

“Spit it out, Mac.”

Murdock was standing in the rotunda just inside the entrance to the keep. The sounds of battle had died out minutes ago, and the SEALs had been systematically moving through the building. Mac, his M-60 balanced over his shoulder, his helmet off and his NVDs pushed back up on his forehead, looked haggard. The actual firefight had lasted less than five minutes, but combat could drain a man in seconds. Especially
this
kind of combat, driving, close-quarters, unrelenting, and unimaginably vicious.

“The XO and Rattler are with the women,” MacKenzie said. “Bearcat and Scotty are with the men. The compound is secure, but don't take that as gospel, 'cause there are a hell of a lot of places to hide in this rat's nest. We've counted twenty-nine dead-uns so far, but the estimate was anywhere up to fifty bad guys inside the walls. Some may have jumped the walls and run. Some may still be hiding.”

“Everybody okay so far?”

“Everybody except Steponit.”

“Yeah.” From what DeWitt had told him over the radio, Steponit had drawn the enemy commander's attention enough for DeWitt to shoot the bastard. Unfortunately, the bastard had killed Stepano before he'd died.

Damn!
First Doc, now this.

“Now, the kicker,” Mac was saying. “Magic and the Prof report activity on the access road. At least two claymores that Razor and Jaybird set up down there were triggered about five minutes ago. No other contact, no sign of the enemy. We have to assume that they're out there watching us, probably trying to figure how to get at us.”

“It would be nice to know what we're facing out there,” Murdock said, considering the tactical aspects of the situation.

“You thinking of a sneak-and-peek, L-T?”

Murdock sighed. “Negative. We don't have the manpower, and I don't want anyone left behind when the helos show. Ammo?”

“Not a problem. Most of the boys are down to a couple of clips or so on their original loadouts, but Jaybird and Red just secured the basement to the tower. They've found a couple of rooms down there full of toys.”

“Ah.”

“Mostly Automat M64s and M70s—the old Yugoslav versions of AKs and AKMs. Plenty of seven-six-two by thirty-nine to go with 'em. No five-five-six or seven-six-two NATO. No nine-mils.”

Which meant that when the ammo for the SEALs' M-16s and H&Ks was exhausted, they could use Yugoslav AKs, but they couldn't resupply their own weapons from the Yugoslav stores. The ammo didn't match.

“There's a bonus, Skipper.”

“Yeah?”

“Two RPGs.”

“Like you said,” Murdock told him. “Toys. With a little luck, we won't get to play with 'em. I expect our friends in the trees are going to be kind of cautious for a bit. They might even decide to wait until sunup, by which time we'll be gone with the wind.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But we can't take chances. I want everyone not doing anything else on the walls. How's the front gate?”

Mac frowned. “Wrought-iron bars, and I'm not even sure the thing works. It's probably for show.”

“That's what I thought. We need a barricade up. Maybe one of those army trucks?”

“I'll get on it, Skipper.”

“And have Scotty rig something down there to make some noise after we leave. Something in memory of Doc and Steponit.”

“Yes,
sir!”
And he was gone.

“Halt! Halt or we fire!”

Sergeant Jankovic staggered to a halt, then sank to his knees. His heart was pounding, his breathing coming in ragged, painful gasps. His face and hands were bleeding; he'd slipped on the rocks below the castle and slid perhaps twenty meters to the main road, clawing desperately at the wet rock face all the way down.

He'd thought he was going to have to stagger all the way to Ohrid, but he'd encountered the head of the relief column on the main road, stopped at the point where the castle access road wound down off the hill. The main road was crowded with vehicles of all types, and the soldiers stood about in small groups, nervously fingering their weapons and staring up the hill into the forest.

Four JNA privates advanced, keeping their assault rifles on him. A major walked with them, a TT33 Tokarev pistol in his hand, a furious expression on his face.