The Rendition

The Rendition

A Novel

Albert Ashforth

Copyright © 2012 by Albert Ashforth

FIRST EDITION

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and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations,
places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses,
locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-60809-059-4

Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing
Longboat Key, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Printed in the United States of America

To Erika,
who is always there

In writing this book, I received help at every stage and of every kind. I am especially indebted to Pat and Bob Gussin, not only for their professional expertise, but also for their extraordinary encouragement and support. Susan Hayes edited the manuscript in a manner that was outstanding in every respect. Manuscript suggestions were also provided by many Mystery Writers of America colleagues and particularly by Pat Carlson, Stacy Kaplan, Bob Knightly, David Linzee, Theasa Touhy, and Kay Williams. Andy Ruch of the Munich Police and Otto Brüstle provided information I could not have found elsewhere. Among the many people I worked for overseas, I want to express my particular gratitude to Monika Zwink, Rosemary Hoffmann, E. M. Huschka, the late Bob Speckhard, and Paul Lovello. To the many military and civilian men and women I have worked with over the years, I want to say how proud I am for having served with you, and how grateful I am for having known you.

Rendition
: The practice of sending a foreign criminal or terrorist suspect covertly to be interrogated in a country with less rigorous regulations for the humane treatment of prisoners.

–
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition

Military terminology is not always understood by civilians, although over time many phrases make their way into the everyday language. Acronyms like GI and KP are used without a second thought. Intelligence agencies, however, are often so super secret, they not only do not want to advertise their activities, they don't want to admit they even exist. As a result, much intelligence terminology remains obscure to civilians. The term “rendition” is a case in point. Its use to signify the illegal abduction of a person from one country to another was coined after the practice came to be an accepted response for combating global terrorism. Rendition has now seeped into the language, but it has only been used in the intelligence sense for the past few years.

Please see the explanations at the end of the book for further insight into military and intelligence terms and acronyms.

The Rendition

It was just before 2400 hours, and it was the kind of chilly night you get in the Balkans in late March. Scattered patches of snow on the forest floor and a few small drifts were the last remnants of winter. After nearly three hours, my jacket had become caked with mud, and the muscles in my shoulders and upper arms no longer just ached—but were now numb. I was in a slight depression in the ground, in a grove of scrub pine and 150 feet from the house, peering through my night-vision goggles, which transformed everything I could see into an eerie shade of green. I was becoming more restless with each passing minute.

I had the feeling we could use more backup. One more guy would make a difference. Two would make one helluva difference. There were just three of us, all dressed in field jackets and black coveralls for the occasion—Larry Scott on the far side of the building, and Angel in the woods about thirty yards away. Angel and I were covering the door we expected them to use when they heard the big bang and came tumbling out of the house. But things were taking longer than planned. Or maybe I just had the jitters and wasn't all that good at this sort of thing anymore. No way could I admit that, of course—not even to myself.

When Buck asked me, I could have said, “No. Absolutely not. Find someone else.” If I had, I'd be back in the States, and whatever I'd be doing would beat chasing around in the woods and playing soldier the way I'd been doing for the last two days. And if it had been anyone but Buck Romero, my old partner, who'd asked me, I would have said just that. “No. N-O. Absolutely not. Find someone else.”

That's the worst of owing people favors. They usually expect you to repay them.

I took another slug from my bottle of water and continued to peer toward the house. There was faint light inside, maybe from some candles, but thick curtains were drawn across the two windows in my line of sight. Scott should have gotten things rolling before this. If the people running this rendition had thought to provide us with some Semtex or C-4 along with the weapons, it wouldn't be necessary to improvise a Molotov cocktail. Still, how long does it take to light a Molotov cocktail and toss it under a car in the garage?

Making sure the volume was down, I decided to break the radio squelch. “What's going on?”

Scott's voice responded, “It's gonna happen. There's a padlock on the garage. I gotta get it open.”

Angel was impatient too. “How long does it take to pick a goddamn padlock? The car should have gone bang at least ten minutes ago.”

“You guys hold your water.”

Angel said, “I been pissing in my pants five minutes already.”

After the explosion, our plan called for them to charge out of the house in this direction—and into the sights of our automatic weapons. I had an M49 machine gun set up on its bipod, and my left hand firmly around the magazine, but the position was becoming more uncomfortable with each passing minute. Again the thought occurred to me that I hadn't fired one of these babies since I last qualified on the range at Fort Bragg. How long ago was that? Ten years? Longer. Time flies.

Hopefully, I wouldn't have to fire it now.

We'd had these people under surveillance for nearly twenty-four hours, watching them come and go. Just three of them were in the building now, doing what I had no idea. Sleeping, probably. What we were aiming to do was execute a quick flushing operation, the kind of thing we had drilled into us at some point during our urban-warfare training. When people are surprised, their responses tend to be pretty predictable.

Duck! Look for the nearest exit! Shout and scream! Start shooting!

I've even known people to pray.

We were interested in only one of the people inside, an individual named Ramush Nadaj. It was never explained to us just why someone somewhere wanted Nadaj so badly that they were willing to pay us a bundle to bring him in. In fact, we didn't have even the slightest idea who it was who wanted him. But when you work in intelligence, you get used to things being “compartmentalized,” which is another way of saying the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. During the flight over, we kicked the subject around a bit, but we'd each learned a long time ago that's mostly how it is in this business. Which, of course, doesn't mean we weren't curious as all hell.

The house, which sat on a wooded hill a couple of miles from Pristina, Kosovo's capital, was rectangular, had maybe six rooms and, like most buildings in Kosovo, was built from bulky red cinder blocks. The roof was red slate. An outhouse was in back and the wooden garage with the Opel in it was on the far side. Houses in this part of the world are built for utilitarian purposes. The utilitarian purpose this house was serving was as a hideout for Ramush Nadaj.

Kosovo is probably Europe's poorest country. Although it's technically still a province of Serbia, that situation is due to change if the Kosovo Liberation Army has anything to say about things. From what I could see, with undocumented Albanians streaming in by the bus-loads and joining the ranks of the unemployed, Kosovo was becoming poorer by the day. Despite its eagerness to break free from Serbia, I doubt that a declaration of independence will have any effect on the province's poverty problem—or its crime problem.

We had a VW van sitting off the road a quarter of a mile away. Once we got our man, we'd give him a stiff shot of Thorazine, shove him beneath the floorboards, and hustle him back in the direction of Camp Bondsteel, the U.S. Army installation in Kosovo. But in the same way nature abhors a vacuum, the American government also abhors this kind of extraordinary rendition—or at least says it does. And because there couldn't be any official recognition of what was going down here in the Balkans, military facilities were off limits.

“Completely and totally black,” is the way Buck described the operation for us just before we flew out of Dulles last week.

We'd bring Ramush Nadaj to a helicopter pad located less than a mile from the installation, where a Black Hawk chopper would be waiting to carry him away into the wild blue yonder—and eventually to Jordan, Romania, Bulgaria or perhaps to “the salt pit,” the less than cozy prison our government runs just outside of Kabul in Afghanistan. Before the helicopter ride, they'd exchange his clothes for a jumpsuit in the event he might have a weapon concealed somewhere, stick some more Thorazine into his arm to help him relax, and jam an enema and some Pampers into his ass to keep him occupied after he wakes up—and after all that happened, he wouldn't be our worry anymore.

It was a variation of the operation we ran some years back out of Tuzla, in Bosnia, when we extracted Slobodan Milosevic from the friendly confines of his Belgrade apartment. At the time, he was watching the tube, drinking
raki
and, as he angrily complained in accented English, “not bothering anybody.” That was an undertaking I was also involved in, but in a slightly more peripheral way than I was in this one.

I don't know which I heard first—the twig snapping or our Molotov cocktail exploding.

I must have heard the twig first because I was already moving when the big bang came from the garage. And then I felt a gun barrel thrust so hard into the small of my back that I let out a loud shout. Even as I rolled over and was trying to get my KA-BAR out of the sheath on my hip, I knew it was too late. Someone crunched my arm with a boot, picked up the KA-BAR and barked something at me in guttural Albanian. At that moment, two of the three occupants of the house came scrambling down the stone steps and began running in this direction.

When the barrel of an automatic weapon smashed into my face, I realized that things weren't going down exactly as we'd planned.

Still on the ground, I was able get my arms up, and the second and third hits were less direct. I vaguely remember the shouts, Albanian curses, and then I was being half dragged, half carried back into the woods. When I tried to resist, somebody aimed a boot in the neighborhood of my kidneys. Briefly, I blacked out. There was the sound of automatic weapons, but I wasn't sure who was shooting them. I thought
I heard Angel's voice, and he could have been shouting my name.

When I tried shouting back, another boot smashed into my mouth. I later discovered I had a mouthful of loose teeth.

And then they had me by the legs and were dragging me again. There was the distant sound of an automobile engine, but maybe it wasn't as distant as it sounded. Someone was using me for a punching bag, and something came down on my head. Hard. When I awoke, I hurt all over. Since my brain wasn't processing information with quite the efficiency it normally does, it took maybe thirty seconds to figure out that I was in the trunk of someone's car, which stunk of engine oil and seemed to be bouncing and bumping over a washboard dirt road. It was a safe bet we were on a dirt road since 90 percent of Kosovo's roads are still unpaved.