Читать книгу Peacemaker - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 7

Bosnia, February 1996

The sea was gray, the sky near the horizon pink, between them a line of silver. It looked as cold as dawn in Canada, but this was the Mediterranean in February. Cold.

He felt the bucking of the aircraft, under it the surge of the deck, under that the throb of the ship, felt these things without feeling them because he had been there so long these were normal, and when he got on shore the lack of vibration would feel wrong, something missing in the universe.

“Ready back there, Lieutenant?”

Fatigue perched on him like a big, obscene bird. Crow picking at roadkill. He roused himself, realized he had been half-asleep, the pilot’s voice in the comm waking him. Was he ready? Ready for one more of Suter’s punitive jobs, one more of his humiliations, one more of his demonstrations that he, Suter, was a lieutenant-commander and Alan Craik was only a lieutenant and it had been a big mistake for Alan to show that he thought Suter was an asshole?

“Yo,” he said.

“O-kay! And they’re off, as the monkey said—”

When he backed into the lawnmower, Alan finished for him. The puck dropped and the cat whacked him in the chest with Gs and the aircraft threw itself at the horizon. It was like the old days for a moment, and he felt the thrill of it, and then it was gone.

They flew into the rising sun, up toward thin strands of cloud like combed-out hair. Alan Craik looked back and saw the carrier, already small, a destroyer just visible in the haze a couple of miles away. Bitterly, he thought that he was off to do an ensign’s job, and behind him on the ship Ensign Baronik would be trying to do Alan’s job and screwing it up because he was only an ensign, and LCDR Suter would be on him like a weasel on a chicken, pleased that this nice piece of warm meat was there for him to savage. Ensign Baronik hadn’t been savvy enough to put space between himself and Alan, and so he was warm meat by association. And he was too young and too scared to tell Suter to back off, as Alan had done.

Alan sighed. God, he was tired. Four hours’ sleep in three days and now this. A lose-lose situation: if he didn’t work his ass off, Suter gave him every shit detail that came along; if he did work his ass off, Suter took the credit—and gave him every shit detail that came along. For Alan, who loved the job and for whom work was life, it was better to work himself to death and know that at least he’d done his best, but helping Suter’s career was bitter medicine. And it was made worse by Suter’s having control of his life—of his orders, of his job, of his fitness reports. And Suter hated him. “You’re supposed to be God’s wet dream,” Suter had hissed at him. “You’re supposed to be hot shit, Craik, and I know you’re not! I see through you! You’re just luck and bullshit wrapped with a ribbon, and I’m gonna untie it. People been hanging medals on you like Christmas ornaments—well, no more, mister. No more! You’re not even gonna get close to glory this trip—no way!”

What was worse, Suter was good at his job. And smart.

“You wanna sleep back there, Lieutenant, go ahead. We got a couple hours, no scenery.”

“Would you ask the stewardess to turn down my bed?” Alan said.

“Jeez, I would, but she’s busy in first class just now.”

Alan smiled, the smile of habit, the sea-duty smile. He started to think about his wife, and home, and what it would be like when this rotten tour was over. He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he was aware of was the pilot telling him they were five minutes from going dry and he could wake up now.

“Must have dozed off.”

“Hey, I thought I had a corpse back there! Feet-dry in four minutes, man. We’re coming in over the islands now—” He started to give a guided tour but clicked off to deal with the comm. Alan consulted his own kneepad: Split was off somewhere in the haze to his left; to his right would be Dubrovnik, down along the coast that was now like a smudge from a dirty thumb. Directly underneath, the island of Brac, one of a series of former resorts that step-stoned down the coast to Dubrovnik. Not resorts now, he thought. He had no intel of fighting down there, but the war had been everywhere, the gruesome agony of a nation turned in on itself. Down there were perhaps only shuttered hotels and distrust; ahead on the mainland were horrors. He had already seen some of them. A so-called “peace accord” had been signed a few weeks before, but people who looked alike and had a common history and common problems were still killing each other, like a trapped animal chewing off its own leg.

The weather inland was lousy. Sarajevo was socked in, as usual. The UN food flights had just ended, and NATO had taken over the airfield. Alan watched the cloud tops, felt his eyes close, nodded forward—

“Cleared for landing. Check your straps, Lieutenant. You know how this goes—ejection position SOP. Make ready—” He felt the familiar turn and sink, deceleration, pressure as he came against the straps, but nothing like a carrier landing—no hook here, and a runway long enough to land a commercial jet. Alan saw the too-close bulk of Mount Igman, acres of dirty snow, low, dark cloud cover obscuring dark slopes, houses flashing underneath, a burned-out car—

A bang and a screech and they swiveled a degree and back and were down. A radar installation flashed past, two trucks angled to it in a plowed space, high snowbanks all around, a French logo. The plane was rolling now, no longer seeming to scream; they swung left into a taxiway, slowed some more and began the long taxi to the intake building. When Alan climbed down, a cold, wet wind slapped at him: welcome to Yugoslavia.

He blew out his breath. Six hours here. To do ten minutes of an ensign’s work. As he humped his pack toward the warehouse building that served IFOR as a local HQ, it started to snow.

The French officer signed for his package and gave him coffee (damned good—bitter, fresh) and asked him to stay to lunch (also damned good, probably, with wine), but a Canadian major with the worried look of an old monkey looked through a doorway and shouted, “That Craik?”

The Frenchman grimaced, winked at Alan. “Just arrived, Major.”

“In here, Craik.” The worry lines deepened and the major turned away, then looked back and said, “Welcome and—so on. Kind of a mess.”

Alan was supposed to sit for six hours and then get a lift to Aviano, sit for four hours, and then get something that might put him near the carrier. Suter’s idea. Nothing was supposed to happen here except turning over a lot of clapped-out aerial photos. “Uh—” he said stupidly at the retreating back, “—my orders have me going to—”

“Orders have been changed!” the voice floated back.

Suter again?

Alan shrugged himself deeper into his exhaustion and went through the door where the major had disappeared. There was a battered corridor, black slush on the floor, hand-lettered signs on pieces of notebook paper drooping from map pins like old flags—“G-3,” “S&R,” “Liaison.” He passed a makeshift bulletin board, most of the postings in both English and French. Well, they were Canadians, after all. At the top of the bulletin board, it said “UNPROFOR,” the acronym of the UN Protection Force that was in the process of pulling out.

“In here!” The major sat in a tiny office that had been a toilet before the sinks were ripped out. An unusable commode was almost hidden by a pile of pubs. “Francourt, Major, Canadian army. You know about all that.” He handed over some message traffic: his orders. Alan’s eyes flashed down it—“… temporary duty … CO UNPROFOR/CO IFOR Sarajevo… liaison and intelligence support and acquisition …” What was this shit?

The major was talking again. “You know UNPROFOR, what we do—?”

“I thought you were IFOR.”

The major shook his head. “UNPROFOR. We’re going, they’re coming.” He jerked his head toward the front of the building where the French officer was. “Unfortunately, some of us are still here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“French and Canadians down here, mostly us and the Italians up above.” He looked at Alan. “Tuzla.” That was “up above,” he meant. There had been a lot of fighting. “We were keeping the peace, ha-ha. You know all that. It says here you speak this African Kissy-willy, that right?” He rattled a piece of paper.

“Kiswahili? A little—”

“Good. And Italian, it says. Good, just the guy I want. We got a problem up there, I don’t follow it, but there’s a Kenyan medical unit making a hell of a noise, and I haven’t got time to deal with it. You’ve been asked for. Dick Murch—know him?”

His mind was slow because of no sleep, and it was all coming too fast—Yugoslavia, winter, snow, then all of a sudden Kenyans and Swahili. Murch. “Murch. Yeah—Canadian Army intel—”

“He asked for you by name.” The major rattled the paper again. “Your boss messaged us you’re just the man for the job.” The major, a man with decent feelings, glanced a little unbelievingly at Alan. It would be, after all, a shitty job, whatever it was—cold, uncomfortable, fruitless. Alan saw the major understand that Alan’s boss hated his guts. The major’s voice was almost apologetic: “Well—won’t last long. And it’s just being a good listener, eh? And you can take those photos you brought in right up to Murch and save us a step.”

Well, Alan thought, at least there would be wine with lunch before he left.

“There’s a plane going up in—well, it was supposed to leave a half-hour ago, but they never get out on time. One of yours.” He meant that the US had re-opened the airport at Tuzla and was moving there in a big way. Alan doubted the jab about being late; the Air Force, like the Navy, ran a tight operation. The major was just pissed because he was still here. “Dalembert’ll show you which one.” There went wine with lunch. And lunch, probably. A voice in his head said, This is another fine mess you’ve got us into! The voice would have been Harry O’Neill’s, doing one of his imitations. God, he wished O’Neill was with him! The bond of friendship would have got him through this crap. He and O’Neill had been two first-tour IOs together five years ago, winning the Gulf War on brilliance and brashness (with a little help from some pilots). O’Neill would have known how to deal with Suter. O’Neill would have known how to deal with Alan, for that matter. You’re good, Shweetheart—you’re really good—

“Got a weapon?” the major said.

Weapon. Weapon? Alan had to concentrate. “Got an armpit gun in my pack.”

“Wear it. They’re shooting at us up there. I mean, at us. Take off your rank, anything shiny.” He held up a finger. “Lesson: If you try to help some poor sonofabitch who’s being killed by his brother, they’ll both kill you, instead.” He made a gun with his hands and pretended to squint into a sight.

Alan gave another long, fatigued sigh. He unstrapped the pack and began to feel for the Browning nine-millimeter. This was a fine mess.

Fort MacArthur, North Carolina.

The Georgian brick buildings, the green lawns and the old trees looked like a university campus. The classroom looked like a university classroom. The students, in their thirties and forties, might have been university graduate students. But they weren’t. This was the toughest school in America, with the highest rate of flunkout, dropout, and just plain exhaustion. This was what people inside the intelligence community called the Ranch.

Harry O’Neill sat relaxed at one of the student desks. Unlike the rest, he was attentive to the briefing on Africa. The rest were in body positions that suggested that Africa didn’t exist for them. The teacher, himself a case officer no longer active, was pointing a laser pointer at a map with the outlines of countries but no names and asking questions with the resigned tone of a man who knew that he wouldn’t get answers.

“What’s this?” he snapped. When there was no answer, he said, “O’Neill?”

“Rwanda,” O’Neill murmured.

“This?” Silence. He nodded at Harry. O’Neill said, “Burundi.”

The bright dot moved. The teacher waited, flicked an eye at O’Neill. “Zaire.” Then, “Central African Republic. Chad—”

The teacher snapped the pointer off and leaned his butt back against a table, arms crossed, and said, “Okay, okay. You know what’s going on there? Want to do a little central African brief off the cuff, Mister O’Neill?”

Harry smiled. “Off the cuff, sir, let’s see—two years ago, there was a crash—some folks say a shootdown—of an aircraft with the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi aboard. All hell broke loose, with the two major ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, massacring each other. Tutsis came out on top, drove the Hutus into eastern Zaire, where they’re now living in big refugee camps that are being run by their own militias, who got out with their weapons and a big blood lust. When the other shoe drops, there’ll be hell all over again.”

“How come you know all this and the rest of these guys don’t, O’Neill?”

Before Harry could reply, a voice behind him said, low and with a snicker, “Cause dat’s his home, man!”

O’Neill was the only black man in the class.

The teacher snapped erect, face flushed. “All right—who said that—?”

But Harry O’Neill hadn’t stirred. He only smiled and said softly, “Oh, that’s okay, sir. I know who said it.”

When the class ended, most of them stirred and stretched, but a man named Richmond hurried out the door and started down the corridor. Harry O’Neill was just as fast, however; within a few strides, he had caught up and fallen in with the man, draping one arm around the other’s shoulders with what seemed perfect friendliness.

“Richmond, Richmond!” he said. He smiled. He squeezed Richmond’s shoulder. O’Neill had been both a Phi Beta Kappa and a starting defensive end at Harvard; the squeeze had authority. “Richmond, next week we have Close Combat Drill three times, did you know that? And, because I’m near the top of the class, I get to pick my partner, did you know that?” He gave another squeeze. “And Richmond—” His voice took on the same thick, fake-black tone that had been heard in the classroom. “Ah picks yew—man!”

Tuzla.

Alan tried to sleep on the short hop to Tuzla, but it was no good. They’d put him in a “crash-resistant” seat with enough straps to hold back Hulk Hogan, but they hadn’t given any thought to comfort. Most of the huge aircraft was loaded with cargo. The French coffee had lifted him for a little, but that was gone now. He had already had the second surge that comes with real fatigue, the time of being wired, with crash to follow. Except he hadn’t been able to crash. At Tuzla, they made one big turn and went in, with another aircraft on the runway ahead of them and another right behind. Like cyclic ops. Alan tried to find an office for UNPROFOR and finally learned that what was left of it wasn’t at the airfield; it was beyond the city, and he’d need transport. It was like a demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Somebody found him a truck.

The driver was Italian, one of those people who dedicate their lives to not being impressed, so he was not impressed that Alan spoke Italian with a Neapolitan accent. Still, he was willing to talk, so long as it was clear to Alan that he was not impressed by officer rank, either. When they had gone a few kilometers, he stopped.

“Good place to piss,” he said in Italian. “No snipers.” Alan didn’t recognize the Italian word for “snipers” but got it from a pantomime. The second time somebody had pretended to shoot him that day. He got out, and they stood side by side. Lots of other trucks had stopped here for relief; the place was an outdoor toilet, in fact. He climbed back up into the cab, higher than climbing into the old S-3 he had flown in for two years, and they coughed and clanked along. It was an incomparably gloomy scene, as so many land-war scenes are, all dirty snow and mud and artillery damage, and one woman with no teeth and a head scarf and a cow-like stare, watching them go past. Early in the war, a mortar round had landed in a square in Tuzla and killed seventy-one people, most of them children.

The trucker dropped Alan at what had been the UNPROFOR HQ. That was not where Murch was, of course; Murch was in the intel center, in a former school three rubble-strewn blocks away. When Alan had finally humped his pack to the right doorless office, Murch looked at him and said, “Is this the best the States can send us? You look like the meat course in an MRE.”

“I’m wiped.”

“You’ll fit right in.” Murch looked worn out himself. Alan had met Murch a couple of months before down on the coast; they had done a job together and had hit it off. They had found a shared interest in fishing. Murch was convinced there would be fishing nearby when spring came. His only evidence was that Tito had been a fisherman. “Eaten?”

“Somebody gave me a box lunch. I think I ate it. The French were going to give me real food. With wine.”

“You want to be walked through the chow line first or you want to crash?” There were cartons and fiber barrels everywhere. Murch was in the middle of moving.

“I’m running on empty, man.”

Murch handed him a tan plastic cup of acidic coffee and said, “Ten minutes. Got to brief you. Then—” He looked at his watch. “You can get eight hours and you’ll be off.”

“What the hell is ‘off’?”

Murch jerked his thumb toward the sky. “Up the hill. We’ll give you a Humvee and a driver and a gunner. You’re going up on a peacekeeping mission—between the Italians and the Kenyans.”

Thirteen minutes later, he was asleep.

Eastern Zaire.

The air was damp from rain that had come out of season, making haloes around the gas lamps in the cinder-block building. Insects flew in and out of the haloes. Out in the camp, somebody laughed; somebody screamed. Peter Ntarinada, sitting in the building in the scruffy room he called his office, pushed the gift bottle of Glenlivet across the rickety table. “I want more money and I want more arms,” he said.

The Frenchman poured himself some whiskey. He gave a kind of shrug with one eyebrow. “We don’t give something for nothing, Colonel. Lascelles himself said that times are tight.”

“Something for nothing! Look how I’m living! Is this nothing?” Peter snatched the bottle back, poured more into his own glass. “I’m living like a peasant! I live in this fucking camp that is paved with shit because we don’t have toilets—you call that nothing? Anyway, when we get back into Rwanda, you’ll be repaid. Lascelles knows he’ll be repaid. I have a scheme, you see? To move diamonds out of Angola—”

“Yes, yes.” The Frenchman nodded in the way that means, You told me that three times already. “We want you back in Rwanda, Colonel. We want you in the government there. But, we think—Lascelles thinks—in order for us to, mmm, underwrite you again, we need to have, mmm, insurance.”

“Insurance.” Ntarinada, a man at war, didn’t seem to understand the concept of insurance. In fact, he laughed.

“We want to put in a company of real soldiers, Colonel. Oh, I know, I know! Your men are soldiers, yes, yes, they are very good at beating up civilians and fragging people in churches, but frankly, the Tutsis are trained now, and we have intelligence that the Ugandans and the Tanzanians are helping them. So—we need insurance, and you need real soldiers.”

Ntarinada’s face was drawn tight. He licked his lips. “White soldiers, you mean.”

“One company. The best. They’ll go through the Tutsis like a knife, then you come behind. Yes, white. Sorry—it’s the way the world is, Colonel. They have the guns, they have the training, and they have the recent experience. We’ll give you money and guns if you’ll accept one hundred of the best. To ease things a little, Lascelles will send a man you already know to run things. A friend of yours. Okay?”

Ntarinada was furious, but he contained his rage. “Who?”

“Zulu.”

Ntarinada stared. He was surprised. And impressed.

“Zulu,” the Frenchman said again. “The guy who was here two years ago and shot down the—”

Ntarinada held up a hand. “Not even here—don’t say it out loud.” He let his hand fall with a little slap on the table. He pushed his glass about, picked it up and drank off the rest of it and lifted the bottle to pour more. “A lot has happened since Zulu was here.”

“A lot has happened to him. Bosnia. He’s been fighting in Bosnia.”

Ntarinada nodded. He understood perfectly well how a man like Zulu could be fighting in his own country. “Zulu is a good man. Okay. Tell Lascelles I said okay. But get me money and some guns!” He drank. “I keep overall command,” he said.

The Frenchman shook his head. “Sorry. Zulu.”

“Never!”

“Insurance.” The Frenchman smiled. “How about—shared command? You’re both colonels now.”

Ntarinada looked away into the little room’s shadows. He was looking into a century of colonialism, the bitter darkness of working for the whites. “All right,” he said. “I’ll share command with Zulu.” He ran his hand over his thin face, sighed like a man dying of exhaustion. “You bastards.”

Above Tuzla.

The Canadian driver loved the Humvee and couldn’t stop demonstrating it. Alan got the hairiest ride he’d had on dry land since a drunken Italian had taken him on the Amalfi Drive. He found it oddly exhilarating, maybe from having had eight hours of sleep so deep he didn’t even dream. Still, it was nice to know it was a trip he’d have to make only once.

Except that he made it three times—three times up, three times down. And the last time wasn’t until the next afternoon.

The trouble up there wasn’t something that needed a linguist; it needed a good listener. And Alan was a pretty good listener, like anybody who wants to make it in intelligence. The fact that he knew both languages helped, sure; to the Kenyan doctor in charge of the medical unit, there was a plus in hearing a non-African say that it was baridi, baridi kabisa—bloody cold, man. And Alan had been in Kenya and could at least talk as much as a traveler can about the coast and Nairobi and problems up on the Sudanese border. So he learned that the real trouble between the Italian soldiers and the Kenyan medics was not that the Italians were racists or the Kenyans were bad nurses, but that they had all been there too long and none of them felt he had done shit to help the peace and now they were being pulled out and replaced by NATO. To make it worse, the unarmed Kenyan medics felt isolated by language and color and abandoned by the very people who were supposed to protect them, and they took it out in gallows-humor jokes, and some of the jokes were about how the Italians had got their asses whipped twice in Ethiopia—once by the Ethiopians and once by the Brits and the Kenyans.

For Sale: Like-new Italian rifle. Only dropped once.

The jokes had gone stale, then bad; there had been shouting—and, the doctor admitted, a bad fight, a punch that had emptied the benches and become a brawl. Bad.

So Alan got several of the officers from both units together and badgered them into eating their MREs in the same tent—it was lunch, and partway through one of the Italians produced some wine—and, when a shouting match broke out, he got the doctor to calm down enough to snarl that they, the Kenyans, were catching hell from the Serbs, who were just over the newly drawn border two miles away, and the Italians were doing nothing to stop it.

“We can’t do anything to stop it, you cretin!” the Italian screamed. Alan translated this as “We do everything we can, sir.” The Kenyan hollered, “You were afraid in 1942 and you’re afraid now!” which Alan didn’t translate at all. Another Kenyan, a senior surgeon named wa Danio, shook a finger at the Italians and told them that it was the civilians, the civilians over there, they were being tortured, maimed, massacred, and the Italians were doing nothing. The senior Italian, Captain Gagliano, threw up his hands and said, “Nothing, nothing—there is nothing we can do! Anyway, we are leaving.” After lunch, Doctor wa Danio insisted that Alan come with him to the ward, where he showed him an old man who had had his feet cut off with an axe and who had crawled the three miles to the Kenyan unit.

“You know, Lieutenant, we Africans are supposed to be uncivilized, but this is a horror. This is not stupid men swinging pangas; this is deliberate, organized hell. The Italians think we are savages, but we know those bastards over there are monsters!” He showed Alan a woman who had been gang-raped and beaten. A child with one hand, the other lost when he had tried to keep his already wounded father from being beheaded. Alan had a child. He felt sick, then thought what it would be like to sit here week after week, helpless to stop it …

So Alan went down the mountain. On the way down, he figured how it could be done. A warning bell rang in his head but he turned it off, paid no attention, and instead he listened to an inner voice that said, Okay, Suter, you want liaison and intelligence support and acquisition. I’ll give it to you, right up the nose.

He told Murch that the problem up there was not language or jokes or nationalities, it was frustration, fighting men and medical personnel who were frustrated and angry and unappreciated. They wanted to go in and make one hit on the Bosnian Serbs who were committing the atrocities before they were pulled out.

“We can’t go in there,” Murch said. “We’re protectors. Not aggressors.” Murch’s mouth seemed to lose some of its muscle: he was afraid.

“They say there was US armor up there a week ago and it got turned back.”

“Mm, yeah, all the women and kids in a Serb village blocked the road, lay down in front of a tank—they’re fanatical up there. Leave it.”

“Going in to get war criminals would be allowed.”

“I’m not at all sure of that, and we don’t know anything about war criminals over there.”

“The Kenyans say that they know for certain of a house ten miles in that serves as a command center for the butchery. They say it’s used for torture. Everybody knows it, they say.”

“Oh, Christ, Alan, ‘everybody—’” He was afraid of his place, his next evaluation, his career. Fuck him.

“Look, the Italians are good guys and they’re hot to trot. They’ve been sitting up there for two months and their hands have been tied and they’ve had to watch—to watch—while civilians get slaughtered, because of this phony ‘border.’ They want to do something.”

“We all want to do something. Alan, there’s nothing—”

“Yes, there is.” He was feeling pretty good, still. He thought he’d start to sink, but he hadn’t. It was two in the afternoon; he felt really good. Not wired, but charged. “Hit that two-bit torture center in Pustarla.”

“We can’t do that! Al, look, you’re exhausted, you’re not thinking clearly—”

“If we have intelligence that the house is a center for war crimes, we can go in and hit it. In and out.”

“I don’t have the authority.” Murch’s face got stiff. “Canada prides herself on not involving UNPROFOR ground forces.” His voice became pleading. “We’re out of here! IFOR has the responsibility now!”

“UNPROFOR hit Udbina and took out the airfield! UNPROFOR used artillery in Sarajevo! What the fuck, you’re making noise about a goddam hit on one house?”

“Udbina was part of Deny Flight. Alan, please! Go see IFOR.”

They both knew that was bullshit. IFOR command was back in Sarajevo, and they’d say it was an UNPROFOR problem, because weren’t the Italians and the Kenyans the remnant of UNPROFOR? “The Italians are fed up. Their colonel might say no, but he’s taking a few days R and R in Dubrovnik. A company-level hit, that’s all they want. We’d need choppers; I think two would do it.” He was thinking of his own experience, of being pulled out of a firefight by two marine helos. Of course, these guys wouldn’t be US marines. And Alan wouldn’t have his wife in command of the choppers this time. “Who’s got big choppers? You guys have two brand-new Griffons. No? I’ll check the order of battle.”

“Alan—we don’t have the intelligence!”

Alan stared at him, saw a man who wasn’t fed up with bullshit yet, maybe wanted to dedicate his life to bullshit. Why had he thought he liked this guy? He went to the outer office and got the package of photos he’d brought in that morning—all photos that had already passed through his hands once—and pulled a couple and went back to Murch, got a grease pencil, and began to make small circles.

“What the hell is that?”

“This is intelligence.”

Murch leaned in close. “Fuck, man—”

“I could do better with a stereo magnifier.”

Murch provided one. In fifteen minutes, Alan had marked the house that they said was a torture center, five “suspected grave sites,” an outbuilding that the Kenyans’ patients told them was a torture chamber. “Crematorium,” he said, circling something with a chimney.

“Aw, shit—!”

“You been there?”

“No, but—”

“It’s as good as the crap the CIA gives the President.” He handed the photos to Murch. “Copies to whoever has to okay the choppers, plus the Italians, plus me, plus the chopper crews; give us blowups of the house and surroundings. You got a problem?”

Murch shook his head. “Man, you’re something else.” He looked as if he might cry.

“You asked for me.” He was checking the order of battle. “The French have five Pumas; they’re pretty ballsy—they picked those SAS guys out of Gorazde.”

It turned out that Murch wasn’t such a bad guy, after all: he said, “Don’t ask the French.” Alan stared at him. The French had been part of UNPROFOR, were now in IFOR, but a different sector. What was wrong? Murch dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “Just don’t ask the French right now, okay?” The two intel officers looked at each other.

Problem—he means there’s a problem. Leak?

“Gotcha.”

While he was getting his materials together, Murch bent over the aerial photos. When Alan was ready to leave, Murch handed him one with grease-penciled circles. “There’s two armored cars by a building down the road—has to be the police station. One’s in the snow, no tracks around it, so I think it’s down. Probably parts; the embargo’s hurting them bad.” Murch tapped the photo and Alan put it down and looked at it with the magnifier. “I think it’s an AML, maybe French-made, but they’ve licensed countries all over the place. Old, but one of them’s operational—look at all the tracks.” Alan grunted. “Scout car configuration,” Murch went on. “Just machine guns, no cannon—see the shadow?” Alan punched Murch on the shoulder. “We’ll need a couple of shooters. Good catch.” Murch, he decided, was a really okay guy. Just a little—let’s use a polite word—cautious.

He went back up the mountain. The nineteen-year-old driver was beside himself. The gunner, hanging on the back, was not so delighted; he didn’t even get to fire his weapon. Up on the mountain, the Italians were skeptical and the Kenyans wary, but Alan explained how it could be done and asked them to say yes. Two squads plus medics. “Plus me,” the Kenyan surgeon said.

“And you?” the hawk-faced Italian captain said to Alan. It was a challenge. These guys were ready to dislike anybody.

“You want me?”

“I want you to believe in your intelligence. Enough to go along, I mean.”

What had Suter said? He was going to keep Alan away from anything that even smelled like glory? He grinned. “Count me in. As an observer, of course.” He didn’t say that he might be risking a court-martial.

The Kenyans and the Italians looked at each other.

“When?”

Alan thought about his own orders, about how long it would take Suter to figure something out. “Soon,” he said.

The Italian officer murmured, “If I give my colonel time to hear about it before we do it, well—”

The Kenyan surgeon said, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow dawn,” Alan said.

The three of them looked at each other. They shook hands. He turned the problem of the helos over to the Italian captain and went back to the Kenyan hospital and spent time interviewing the civilians, getting as much hard data as he could on the house in Pustarla. Murch would be putting together a route, he hoped; he should have the latest data on Serb positions and air defenses. Alan’s belief from shipboard intel was that there was no air defense, but out in the Med he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to this hate-filled line where Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs were supposed to divide themselves, and people who happened to be in the minority on either side were being terrorized.

Then he went down the mountain again and used Murch’s computer to write a report on suspected war crimes and criminals in the Bosnian-Serb Pustarla region, pulling in this and that from Intelnet, creating a nice little package of the kind that admirals liked to be briefed from—maps, pretty pictures, juicy quotes from victims. Murch had marked out a route and made a real briefing packet he could use with the troops. He was liking Murch again.

“You got a journalist in your pocket?” he asked Murch.

“Are you wacko? Jesus, Craik—!”

“Wassamattayou? You never heard of PR? Nothing covers your ass like a news report, Murch.”

“Suppose this bombs out?”

Alan had thought about that. “If you’ve got a journalist in your pocket, it’ll come out as a victory no matter what. I’ll get some color photos for him, give him the story, exclusive. He’ll kiss my ass if I ask him to. Yes or no?”

“My boss—”

“Fuck your boss! Yes or no? If the story is out quick, nobody will dare bitch. ‘Brave UNPROFOR Forces Score One for Humanity!’ Come on!”

Murch rubbed his jaw. “There’s a Brit named Gibb, he’s okay, he—”

“Tell him to be at my Humvee in ten minutes. He can watch the prep and he can be there when it’s over, first to interview the brave troops and all that crap. He cannot go along. I’m outa here.”

Then he went back up the mountain, the journalist Gibb laughing nervously as the Humvee spun mud and gravel into the black gulf at the edge of the road. Gibb was on something, might have been a better companion if he hadn’t been, but Alan suspected the man was strung out like everybody else, thought he needed help—whatever gets you through the night. Alan left him in the Kenyans’ civilian ward. He spent half an hour with the hawk-faced captain and the Kenyan surgeon and a cluster of men in battle dress, planning. It was going to be kept simple, except nothing involving death is ever simple. The captain was unhappy about the armored vehicle but didn’t want to use anti-tank rockets—they had old Canadian Hellers—which he thought might go right through the meager armor without exploding. He was taking bullet-trap grenade launchers with HEAT, instead. Alan frowned when he heard but muttered, “Well, it’s your call.” Except that he would be there, too.

Two Ukrainian Mi-26s “diverted” from Zagreb would come in at 0300, and Alan would brief their crews. Off at 0445. Seven hours from now.

He slept.

When he woke, he reached for Rose and murmured her name. His hand felt the grit of the floor and he remembered where he was, a cot in the company office. Through the door, he could see men in flight suits and hear their talk, all charged up. The chopper crews. He had slept right through their arrival. Sitting up, he felt how tired he really was, and he thought, This isn’t a good idea. I’m wiped. But it was too late.

He put his wallet and his tags in his pack, checked himself for anything that would show he was American. His watch. His wedding ring; it came off hard, and he sucked the knuckle and got it off with the spit. Reluctantly, he put the Browning in the bag; he wanted to carry it, but it had been his father’s and had personal engraving on it. Even his skivvies, which had a label. Then he dressed from the skin out in stuff the Italians had given him. No rank marks. This is really stupid, he thought. He pushed the pack toward the Italian captain. “If something happens—I’m anonymous. My people will figure it out.” He wrote a couple of lines to Rose and stuffed the paper in the pack and pushed away the thought of what she would say if she could see him. Then he was on.

“It’s a short trip, gentlemen—ten miles in, ten out. I figure six minutes’ flying time each way, including diversion. The target is a house in a village called Pustarla, just one street and a few houses around it. Problem: there’s deep snow everywhere. Roads around the place took a week to get plowed, then some of it was done with horses—we got aerial photos. Only two sure places to put down a chopper, the town soccer field, which I’ve marked Bravo, and this smaller place marked Alpha, which is cleared—for a helo, we think, but the helo wasn’t there yesterday. We believe no land mines. It’s a hundred meters from the target; the soccer field is close to four hundred. The village street is a mess—ruts, ice, high banks. The police station is three hundred meters farther along; there should be ten to twelve guys there, well armed, capable. Respect them! They’ve got two armored cars, one probably inoperable because it hasn’t been dug out of the snow.

“We’re going in to Alpha as our primary landing zone; Bravo is backup and will be where the helos go if there’s trouble while the troops are at the target. That would leave us four hundred meters to cover on foot to get out.” He didn’t like that part. Four hundred meters could be a long way in snow.

“If the Yugoslavs scramble aircraft, they’re only fourteen minutes away. However, if they do that they’re going to get pasted.” Deny Flight was still on under a different name, the pilots impatient because nothing much was happening in deep winter. The F-16s and F-18s, Jaguars, Hornets, Tornados, and Fighting Falcons of several countries would love it if the Serbs scrambled so much as a flying chicken.

The Ukrainian choppers had come with crews and their own ground defense, two tough guys each with squad weapons. Alan made sure there would be room for prisoners and material coming back, double-checked with the Kenyans and the Italian ground troops. It would be tight: the Kenyans had insisted on sending two medics per helo; they wanted in on the action. The Italians were sending twenty altogether, two teams they had decided to call Romulus and Remus. Oh, shit, why not? Gagliano had told him that the Dutch had a mortar unit up the hill that was itching to put stuff over the border if the militia there made a move; the Canadians would have two electronics surveillance F-16s in the air, with the new US Air Force operation at Tuzla on alert. Certain shrugs, looks, and evasions suggested that the operation had been put together the way crucial spare parts were sometimes got—what was called “moonlight acquisition.”

“Captain Gagliano will brief you on the operation itself. I want to remind everybody—everybody—of what we’re after: intelligence. One, prisoners; two, electronics—computer stuff, direct links, comm, anything; three, records, including photos. We’re going to go in, grab what we can, and get out. If we have to shoot up somebody who happens to be a war criminal—” He looked around. “Sending messages is part of intelligence, too. I don’t object to sending a message.” Somebody guffawed.

Translations were going on all over the tent. The Kenyans and Italians had already got together with the Ukrainians, and they’d cobbled up some kind of signal system, with somebody who could speak English on each team. Still, it would be hairy, he thought. Speed, they had to emphasize speed. Surprise and speed, and baling wire and spit.

The big helos pounded south from the takeoff, seeming for three minutes to be heading back toward Srebnik, as if they might be taking hospital cases out. Then they cut sharply east, then east and north, two hundred feet off the deck. It was still dark, but the first light made the eastern horizon visible. The chopper interior smelled of metal and hot oil and sweat. Somebody passed gas, not helping matters at all.

“Four minutes.”

The word went along the helo, quattro minuti, quattro minuti.

Alan was in the second helo with the Kenyan surgeon and the hit team, Remus. Gagliano was in the lead aircraft with the Romulus team, which would protect against the police. They had two shooters with shoulder-fired antitank weapons, at least one guy with a rotating rocket grenade launcher. If things went right, Romulus would already be on the street when Alan’s helo touched down.

Thirty seconds on the street, he thought, forty-five max if the ruts are bad. How long did it really take you to trot a hundred meters in full battle gear? He shifted uneasily. The Italian body armor felt strange; so did the helmet. NATO gear, but not quite right, somehow. He was too thin for the body armor. He had a 9mm Beretta in a holster, a weapon he’d never liked as well as the Browning. Different safety, different trigger pull. If he had to use it, it would be in close, fast. Not good with an unfamiliar gun. What was he doing here, anyway?

“One minute.” Uno minuto, uno minuto …

He would be among the last out, only the Kenyans behind him, then the Ukrainian rangers who would stay with the chopper. He put his hand on the buckle, ready to unstrap. Where were his gloves? On his hands, of course. It was cold out there. Strange weapon, gloves, Christ—

“Thirty seconds.” Trenta secondi—

“Avanti!”

He watched the Italians bail out; they emptied the chopper like apples coming out of a basket. Alan jumped into the dark after them and hit the snow running, staggered, felt somebody hit him from behind, and he was up and following the dark line of figures ahead of him. They weren’t trotting, they were sprinting, or so it seemed. Somebody passed him, too eager. He whispered, “No—” It must be the Kenyan medics. “Polepole, polepole—” But they surged ahead of him. Only Doctor wa Danio back there now, floundering a little in the snow.

They came out into the village street. It felt like a tunnel, the snowpiles high on each side, thrown up there with shovels, tree limbs overhead like fingers, then charcoal sky. It was lighter in the east, noticeably so now. Faint lights showed in a few of the houses, maybe not even electric, but they were mostly blocked by the snowbanks. He slipped in a frozen rut and almost went down; ahead of him, the Italians were sliding, lurching. His feet made loud crunching noises, like the other feet, all out of step as he’d briefed them so there would be no pounding rhythm. Otherwise, it was silent. Not a tunnel but a tomb. A tomb with running men, running figures that would have been dark shadows moving through their town if anybody had seen them. Ghosts in NVGs.

A cow was walking down the other side of the road. Its breath came out in steamy puffs. Suddenly, it frisked to the side, stood splay-legged, staring at them. It jumped again, then tried to run back up the street, sliding.

He was hyperventilating now. Only a hundred meters, and he was puffing as if he was running the mile. Too fast, too fast, he thought. He didn’t dare look at his watch, fearful he might fall. Then he was at the driveway that ran up to the house, which had been somebody’s pride once, a sign of some kind of wealth in this pitiful place. The house stood back among some scruffy trees that were only big enough to make a chopper landing there impossible; it had a low wall around it, the remains of gate pillars, all visible on the aerial photography. Gagliano’s team were already spread along the cover of the wall, the two shooters out where they could get at the armored car if it came.

He turned into the drive. No lights showed in the house. They still had surprise. They had wanted to cut off the house’s communications, but it had a spindly radio tower on the roof and there was no getting at it easily. They were just going to go in, and the hell with it. Somebody up there had plastique, if they needed it.

As Alan got close, he saw the crouching figures, weapons ready, and two more, only shapes to him, near the house, moving nearer. Several had already put up their night-vision goggles. The two closest to the house would be the sergeant and his partner, he thought. They were to try the door, place the plastique if they had to. If they could go in, they would, stun grenades ready; four more men behind them. The hope was to invade the house before any defense could be laid on. That was the hope.

Alan flopped into the snow facing the door. The Beretta was in his hand. When had he done that? He held his breath. What were they doing up there? The sergeant and his partner had disappeared into a little portico, like something on a cuckoo clock, with a little peaked roof. Alan could see nothing, then made out one of them bent over or kneeling. What the hell was he doing, looking through the keyhole?

The man stood up. “Aperto,” he whispered. Open. Jesus, the front door was open. Just like a small town anywhere.

The four men got up, ready to go, and there was movement in the portico and suddenly it looked different, blacker, the door open, and the silent figures rushed forward. He wanted to go in. He looked at his watch, couldn’t find it because of the heavy glove. The hell with it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Surely not. Yet—

A shot boomed from the house. Everybody on the snow tensed; you could hear nylon rustle, a piece of ice crumble. Then hell broke loose, brief hell, loud hell: shots in quick succession, too many to count, and the thud of a stun grenade, the flash in an upstairs window as well as the doorway. A voice. Then somebody screaming, the words not Italian, not one of his. Then he was up and running for the door, and somebody was reaching back for him, hand on his arm, “Tenente, subito, subito—” Quick, quick.

“Lights!” he bellowed in Italian. Speed was more important now than invisibility. A flashlight bounced off painted walls, some godawful blue; then a light came on in a corridor beyond, and he was being waved in. Overhead, feet pounded and doors banged, and automatic fire started somewhere outside, maybe the outbuilding in back, somebody hosing. The screamer dropped to a lower key and gurgled, and the Kenyan medics were already inside and headed up a stairway to Alan’s left. He shoved ahead, was aware of more shots outside, prayed it wasn’t the armored car already but the other building, the torture place. Ahead were bare rooms, what had been some sort of dining room, now an office. He saw two wooden desks, several chairs; a bare overhead bulb threw a sickly light, hardly more than a wash of yellow-gray.

“Get the computer!” he shouted. One of the Italians started to wrestle with the monitor, and Alan pushed the man’s hands away, tore out the cords and gave him the computer itself. He didn’t know the words for keyboard or monitor. “Only this!” he shouted. The man passed it to somebody else. Alan raced around the room, opening drawers, dumping files. There was a fax machine. Could they take it? Would there be anything worth saving on it? No, he decided, too bulky, must have been the first one ever made, huge. He shoved papers into a pile with his feet, and somebody began to stuff them into a pack. He added notebooks, a weird kind of rolodex, a card file. Then he stood in the middle of the room, for just an instant paralyzed, unable to think. Too much stuff, no way to sort it out. Couldn’t read it, didn’t know the language—what the hell—

“Tenente?”

The sergeant was framed by an archway, dark wood with things like spools sticking down all the way around. He had a civilian, hands held behind (plastic cuffs; they’d begged them from the MPs). The man was in pajamas, barefoot. Alan made a savage gesture. “Take him!”

“All of them?”

“How many?”

“Three. Sleeping upstairs. One is—” He made a gesture.

“Take them, take them—they can help carry this shit. What’s upstairs?”

“Bedrooms. Nothing.”

Alan grabbed a flashlight and sprinted up. The stairs went like a square corkscrew, up-turn, up-turn, up-turn. There were heavy doors everywhere, all open. The grenade had left burn marks and the place stank, and smoke drifted in the flashlight beam with dust. He went along, shining the light into each room, the Beretta ready but feeling awkward and too big, sliding the light around the door and then looking. The sergeant had been right; there seemed to be nothing. Graffiti, old magazines, a girl’s photo, clothes. Not military, these people. He had done five of the rooms when he flashed the light in one and something pinged and he swept the light back, not knowing what it had been, a shape or a sign, what? And the light showed another anonymous room, this one seeming unused, even austere. But something—

An ashtray. He went in and shone the light down into it. Big, plastic, empty. Wiped clean. Around the edge, “Chicago Bears Football.”

Small world. That’s what had caught him, something out of place that had put little hooks into his consciousness, like burrs catching a sweater. Chicago Bears Football. Here?

He picked it up with the hand that held the Beretta and with the other swept the light over the walls. Nothing. Yes, something. A color photograph, held to the old wallpaper with transparent tape. He went close and looked at it. Was it anything? A man in camos with an assault rifle raised above his head, standing over what Alan was pretty sure was a corpse. Something written on the too-blue sky with a felt pen, Cyrillic and unreadable. Alan peeled it from the wall and started to stuff it into his jacket, and he saw color on the back as well, another photo, female and nude and—

He saw the movement before he heard the man, and he ducked and swung the light and glimpsed a broad, dark face, contorted by the flinch that meant he was in the act of firing. Alan had time to think that the man was half-dressed and therefore cold, somebody who had been in the house and had managed to hide, and he kept the light moving, meaning to blind the man but in fact giving him something to shoot at. Better for the man if he had been an inexperienced shooter, but he wasn’t; he knew enough to aim, and habit makes you aim at what you can see. He had a nine-millimeter CZ that sounded louder than the grenade and made a flash that blinded them both. Alan shot on instinct, on terror, not sure he hadn’t yelped. He was slow because of the strange pistol, wrong size, too heavy goddamit take forever to point! But the man was only five feet away. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Four sounds running into two like more grenades, flashes of fire, blood and bone on the wall, the smell of copper and gunfire. Alan reacted away, stepping to the side, moving the light away so he wouldn’t be a target; he knew the other man was down, and his ears were dead to sound from the shots, his eyes dazzled, but he knew he had heard something, seen something else out there—a second man?

His heart was thudding. He raised the Beretta again, and suddenly the corridor was bathed in light, astonishingly bright and white to his dark-accustomed eyes. One of the helos had put on its searchlight. Why now? he had time to think, realizing that the light must be moving over the house but registering at the same time a shadow on the corridor wall, then knowing that the light was coming through a window of the room beyond and catching another figure, because what Alan saw was like a hand clutching at the back of his neck. The shadow not human, distorted by the angle, but there was something wrong with it, anyway; impressions cascaded down his consciousness: kid’s game, the shadows you make with your fingers on the wall, a rabbit, an owl, but this one something bad; then witch, Halloween mask and he couldn’t figure it out, something primitive whispered evil and then the shadow was moving and the light was swinging away, getting watery and fading, and Alan moved to reach the doorway at the side, to put only his hand and an eye out where the bullets would come.

He doused the light and stepped forward, swaying, his balance suddenly all wrong, crashed against the side of the doorway and saw movement. He ducked low and fired, knowing he’d miss because he couldn’t see. Flash and roar and then an answering flash from the corridor, something smaller (a .32 or some goddam thing like a Makorov), and he was trying to get the light on again, his hand suddenly slippery, rotating the flashlight to try to find the rubber button, and it came on, and he saw a face, a large, ferocious face, fired, and it was gone. Down low now, he brought the Beretta around and squeezed, and a window exploded outward as somebody jumped through it.

Alan straightened up. Something was very wrong with his left side. He slipped, knowing he’d slipped in the blood of the downed man, tried to run along the corridor and got to the smashed window bent over and leaning against the wall. Thinking, What kind of maniac goes through a window, taking out the frame and cutting the shit out of himself—? and flashing the light down and getting an immediate gunshot flash from below. He doused the light. His eyes were still dazzled. Below and thirty feet away, somebody was leaping over the snow, and Alan had time only to see that the man was naked and barefoot before the figure disappeared behind the old smokehouse that Alan had labeled “possible crematorium” on the aerial photo. He fired two double-taps and shouted for the sergeant.

Where the hell was everybody? He started back down the corridor, bellowing for the sergeant, and almost fell over the man he’d shot, and he thought The nose, there was something wrong with the nose in the shadow, that’s why I thought it was a witch.

Alan shone the light on the downed man. His own hand was shaking; he could feel sweat on his ribs, jelly in his knees. And pain in his left side. The fucker had hit him, maybe got off a second shot. The body armor had saved him, but he had a hell of a pain.

The man was on his back. Bubbles of blood were coming up. His eyes were open, and Alan felt that the eyes were staring at him, right through the glare of the flashlight.

“Medic!” he shouted.

“Tenente! You okay?” The sergeant was at the far end of the corridor, assault rifle at the ready.

“Somebody went out the window! Get after him! Now!”

The sergeant shouted, and Alan could feel more than hear feet pounding downstairs.

“I’ve got a man down,” Alan said, shining the light downward.

“One of ours?”

“Theirs.”

“Leave him!”

Shit. Alan inhaled sharply, realizing he’d been holding his breath; the sound shuddered in his chest. He kicked the man’s gun down the corridor and swung the light off him, as if not seeing him made it better.

They had the downstairs almost cleaned out, what little they could take. The sergeant had taken charge, using some system of his own to determine what to take, what to leave. Probably weight. Alan checked his watch. Nine minutes since touchdown. Christ, it seemed like all night.

“You all right, Tenente?”

“You guys missed two of them up there.”

“They’re after the one in the snow, but I told them, no pursuit.” The sergeant was a hard nut. He was more concerned about his men than about Alan’s lost war criminal. Good for him.

“The guy’s naked—in the snow!”

The sergeant nodded as if he had known that all along. “They want you in back,” he said. “Then we go.” He was old for a soldier, probably ready to retire; he wasn’t taking any shit from an American intel officer. A Navy intel officer at that, for Christ’s sake.

The other building had been a cow barn. A few of the stanchions were still there in a row down the left side. The walls were stone, laid up without concrete, the floor, a couple of feet below ground level, mostly dirt with a cracked concrete apron at the front end. Three bodies were laid out on the concrete now, all civilians. There seemed to be far too much blood for only three men, but three was all he could see. There was an under-smell of old cow, on top of that fresh blood, and then shit.

“They tried to shoot it out. One was awake somehow; one of our guys took a hit, he’s not bad. We took out two people. Not in very good shape.” The soldier looked sideways at him. “Really messed up.”

“Torture?”

The soldier nodded. Alan walked down the room, smelled vomit. He already felt sick, was still hyperventilating. There was old blood on the walls down here, probably a lot more soaked into the dirt floor. The stanchions had been used as human restraints, with handcuffs locked to them high and low. At the end of the room was a single chair by itself, almost centered. It looked like a set for a minimalist play. Against the wall was a big washtub, half full of reddened water, a lot of water splashed out on the floor. Ropes and a steel bar, once some sort of tool, hung from the ceiling beam.

“The airplane,” he said. A form of torture.

“They’d cut the eyelids off one guy, then shot him. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll make it.”

Alan got out the point-and-shoot camera and pointed and shot. He felt he was going to throw up. Partly it was almost getting killed, partly it was what he was doing, seeing. And the pain in his side. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble pointing the camera.

“Tenente! Time to go!”

He ran back to the house and took three photos of the interior. Maybe the newsman could do something with them. He didn’t go back upstairs.

Something boomed. He doused his flashlight and started out the front door. The sergeant grabbed his arm, pulled him down. “Police armored car. They’re coming up the street.”

Alan looked around. It was almost light. There was the sergeant, three soldiers. Him. Flames turned the snow pink, the torture barn on fire.

“Everybody else out?”

The sergeant nodded.

“Go?”

The sergeant pointed, got up. They ran for the gate. One man stayed behind, threw something in the door—thud— and the place went up in flames.

A big double boom sounded from the street, probably both shooters at once; flame snicked up through the tree branches like a tongue, then seemed to expand at the bottom, beyond the wall. He was aware of more general firing, faraway pop-pops and louder, more deliberate noise nearby. At the gate, the sergeant thrust out an arm like a traffic cop and held him back, looked, then grabbed him and pushed him in the direction of the choppers. Alan resented it, resented the rough handling and the implication that he didn’t belong there, but he knew the sergeant was right. Anyway, bullets were whiffling near him. He got down. Captain Gagliano and half his Romulus team were trading fire with somebody down the street—quite a way down the street, well beyond the burning armored car. The other way, the rest of Romulus waited to cover the withdrawal. On the other side of the street, several bodies lay in the snow. Serb militia, from the town. One man was in striped pajamas. The sergeant waved an impatient hand at him and Alan began to run. The waiting soldiers got bigger, bigger, and then they, too, were passing him backward through their line, as if he was not quite their main concern just then and they just wanted to make sure he was out of the line of fire …

He hunched his shoulders and ran for the helos.

The temperature in the big tent must have been close to eighty Fahrenheit despite the cold outside. It wasn’t the big propane heater but the press of bodies. Italians, Ukrainians, Kenyans, one American—even a couple of Dutch artillerists who had wandered down, although they hadn’t had provocation enough to fire a shot. It was as noisy as a locker room after a winning game, and just about as smelly, although the over-riding smell was red wine, with some Kenyan cane splashed around the edges.

Feeling no pain, Alan thought. He certainly knew what that meant now. The surgeon had given him two capsules, would have given him four or maybe eight if he’d asked, and on top of that there was the wine. It wasn’t what used to be called Dago Red, either, but Gattinara from a year long enough ago that the stuff didn’t show up in shops any more. Courtesy of Captain Gagliano’s colonel, who was shocked, shocked! to hear of what had happened (you had to be reminded of Claude Rains in Casablanca) but was so delighted he’d released a couple of cases from his own store. Flown in specially as soon as the message flashed that they were out with only three hit, no dead, and two helos full of goodies.

“Well, not exactly goodies,” Alan was explaining slowly to Doctor wa Danio. He spoke with the exaggerated care of a man who has had too much wine, just enough painkiller, and not enough sleep. “We seem to have brought out two oversize sacks of Serb garbage.” He leaned closer. “I am not speaking met-a-phor-i-cally. I mean actual garbage. Rinds and things.” Along with some more useful stuff like names and addresses and computer disks.

Two Ukrainians were doing some sort of dance to music that sounded to Alan like Afro-pop, but he suspected that everything sounded like Afro-pop to him just then. He smiled at the Ukrainians. When he turned back to the Kenyan doctor to tell him how much the Ukrainians amused him, the doctor had been replaced by Captain Gagliano. Gagliano had a glass in one hand and Alan’s neck in the other. “Did we biff them?” he said.

“We biffed them.”

“We biffed them!” Gagliano nodded. “I hear you were hit.”

“In the ribs.”

“Nothing.”

“They are my ribs.”

“Ribs are nothing. I have one man shot in the neck. The neck is something. One in the arm. He may lose the arm. But your rib does not impress me.” He kissed Alan’s cheek. “What impresses me is you got us in and out and we biffed them.” He leaned his head back and tried to focus. “You want an Italian medal?”

“You can’t have too many medals.”

The captain nodded. “Or too much wine. You want some wine?”

“I think—”

Then he was sitting on the floor and somebody was smiling at him, God knows why. He tried to get up, thought better of it, and sat there, grinning at the noise and the heat and the uproar. The combination allowed him to remember that he had killed a man, this time without feeling sick about it. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Bubbles of blood.

“Lieutenant?”

He looked up. Way up. A very tall, emaciated man in civilian clothes. The man folded himself into pieces and brought his head down to Alan’s level and said, “You look for me, they say.” He had a bony, almost skull-like face, and skin cratered by illness or acne long ago. “I am Marco. Translator?”

“Ah.” Right. That made sense. But why? Aha. Translator, yes. Alan held up a finger. “Momento,” he said, forgetting that Italian was not the language in question. Where had he put it? He patted himself, finally found it in the buttoned breast pocket of the Italian shirt he was wearing. Took it out with great care and unfolded it, presenting it to Marco so that the slightly frivolous backside, showing incomplete but naked female parts, was hidden. It was the picture of the man in camos he’d taken from the bedroom in the house. “What’s that say?” he asked. At least that was what he hoped he asked.

Marco squinted. “Says, ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’”

“What’s that mean? ‘Battle of the Crows’?”

Marco scratched his ruined chin. “Aaah. Well. It’s the Serbs, you see? The Battle of the Crows—hmm. Well.” He sighed. “It happened six centuries ago, okay?”

That was not okay at all. That made no sense. What was this guy, drunk or something?

Detroit.

Radko Panic dropped his heavy coat on the floor, not even thinking, knowing she would hang it up later, if she knew what was good for her, and glanced out of habit at the crappy little table where she put the mail. Bills, junk, ripoffs, he expected, the same as always, but there was a package and his heart jumped. Even the fact that it was different was enough, but there was the color of it, too, and the feel of the paper under his fingers and the string that held it together. The old days. That rough brown paper, that hairy string—relics, he knew now, of a technology he had left behind when he had left the old places. The postmark was French, but he knew it did not come from France.

She had left his meal for him and he shoved it into the microwave and pushed buttons without thinking, his face split by a big grin. Rare, that grin. Really rare. He saw himself in the microwave window. He’d had a couple on the way home at the Rouge Tap; the grin, pasted on the microwave as if it belonged to the machine and not to him, was happy. Well, why not? A man deserved to be happy.

He took one of her knives and cut the string. He had surprisingly delicate hands for a big man, but he was a precision toolmaker, did things well, deftly, when he was sober. He slit the tape-shiny ends and slid out the box inside, made of a thin cardboard of the kind that used to come inside shirts. It too was held with tape, and he cut that and put her knife aside, thinking without thinking that the knife was getting dull and what the hell had she been doing with it, sharpening pencils again?

Inside was a photograph and something else. He slid the photo out. He left the something else, like the prize in a Crackerjack box. There had still been Crackerjack boxes when he had first come to America. He had loved them.

The photo, grainy and a little washed-out, showed a man in camo fatigues, one hand raised over his head, an automatic rifle in the raised hand. It was too fuzzy to see what kind of rifle it was. At the man’s feet was something dark, a bundle, a pile, a—what?

He turned the photo over. Big, black letters said, “YOUR BOY AT THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS!!!!”

She came in behind him then; he heard her, didn’t even turn, didn’t speak. He grinned at the back of the photo. He had heard the expression “bursting with pride,” knew now what it meant. He thought he was going to explode with it.

The microwave dinged and she said something and he grunted at her, and she got the food out and began to arrange it at the place she had already set for him. Her hair in some kind of thing, an old bathrobe clutched around her, her face gray, soft, lined, purple shadows under the eyes.

“Is it—from—?” She had had a sweet voice as a young woman; now it was wispy. She was afraid of him. With good reason.

He thrust the photo at her. He sat down and picked up the fork and filled his mouth. Seeing her standing close by, he waved her away and she went over to the sink and held the photo up under the light.

He thrust another forkful into his mouth and then put a long finger down into the narrow box and took out the small thing that was in there. It made him grin again. It was a human eyelid.