Unsung Warrior Box Set, page 56
part #1 of Unsung Warrior Series
She laughed at that, and he felt better. Goddamit, this being tied to one woman had all sorts of implications. It was still worth it though. The sight of Russo spread across her own patio table, in the faint glow from the lights of the city, was a compelling argument.
Yukovic’s office wasn’t that much different to Cal’s. Maybe it was the structure that grew up around command, maybe it was the sort of men who took on those jobs, but both offices were small and neat.
“You have some ideas for me,” said Maric, once he’d sat in the army regulation chair opposite Yukovic. The sergeant major nodded.
“Remember how Juric is stuck in a kind of no-man’s land?” he said, and Maric inclined his head to one side. This was interesting. Juric was one of three newly-graduated elite force soldiers Maric had borrowed from Croatian special forces for the NATO mission in Albania.
The young man had developed something like hero worship for Maric. The tall man had once explained to him that terrorists and others allowed to stand trial, and spend time in prison, became figureheads for other idiots who copied their actions.
When it looked like The Count was going to survive the attack on his base in the Albanian Mountains, Juric had shot him, ‘attempting to escape’. Maric had supported that story, as had Yukovic, but it hadn’t been accepted everywhere. The mission had been a joint NATO/US operation, and the US were pushing to have Juric dismissed. They hadn’t got the intel they wanted out of the Count, and now they were wanting someone to pay for that.
Fortunately the US – Croatian special military relationship required unanimous decisions where military action was concerned, so that proviso saved Juric. Since Yukovic was against dismissal, the new elite forces man was stuck between the two sides, and going nowhere.
“Juric really needs to be out in the field, consolidating his skills,” said Yukovic. “The time he spent with your recon team was ideal, but it needs to be built on. I haven’t talked to the man himself yet, but he could be part of your team if you go ahead with this Kosovo thing.”
“Won’t that stop him working for any country in NATO in the future if people find out?” said Maric. “Won’t the US spin it as desertion, something like that?” The Sergeant Major nodded.
“But he needs to be doing something, and it may be the best chance of a future he’s got.” Then Yukovic started to count off points on his fingers.
“He could be reinstated because your team makes a real difference over there, he could be picked up outside NATO because he will have a lot more experience, your boss could find a place for him in your organization, or he could get killed in action. Any one of those would be a step up from where he is now.”
Maric looked up at the ceiling. Juric was good, but he was too eager to please, not independent enough. On the other hand, this would get him out of his current pickle.
His file said he had no immediate family, and that was probably the cause of his jumpiness. A ‘family’ like the army was a good place for him. A little more training, and Maric could see the special forces soldier starting to steady up, become more mature.
“Let’s get him in and talk to him,” he said. The Sergeant Major nodded, and reached for the phone.
CHAPTER 8
________________
“I was hoping you would ask me,” said Juric, looking anywhere but at Yukovic. Special forces were trained to be calm in any situation, but Maric could tell Juric was uncomfortable. It was understandable, with any career he might have in the military very uncertain at the moment.
Yukovic raised his eyebrows. “You knew we were looking at the situation in Kosovo?” he said skeptically.
“No, nothing like that,” said Juric. “I knew about Marko’s family problem, and of course no one’s likely to go into Kosovo, but if you wanted completely off the books you might talk to Maric. Sorry, LCol Maric, and then he might want expendables like myself.
“It was a wild guess really – just wishful thinking.”
Maric was impressed. Juric hadn’t been too wide of the mark.
“But, um, I’ve got some ideas too,” said Juric in a rush. “Novak and Radic quit special forces training about three-quarters of the way through. They’re gutted they didn’t make it, and Novak had some sort of virus most of the time. He figures he could have graduated. Radic’s tough enough, but he isn’t so good on logistics and strategy. The man’s an exceptional foot soldier though.
“They’re talking about leaving the army since they dipped out of the course, and taking up a trade. If you wanted them in on this, I think they’d grab at the chance. There might be an elite forces position at the end of it, there might not, but they would give it a go.”
Maric looked at Yukovic, who looked away. He didn’t want to give Maric his opinion in front of Juric, and that was fine.
“I’ve been trying to get intel,” said Juric quickly, not sure if his first point had scored him any marks. “There are a lot of Albanians in the north of Kosovo who served in the late 1990s against the Serbs. They’re aged forty now, or a bit more.
“I’ve put out feelers toward that area, and got a few positive responses. Some of these guys won’t rest until Kosovo is truly independent. The place is over 90% Albanian, and they’re all Albanian, so I can understand the motivation. Some of them just want revenge for things that happened during the war, but the rest are good soldiers.”
Maric wouldn’t take on men who just wanted revenge, because discipline would be a problem. But Juric was right, the older men were a group who had been through basic training, and had some combat experience. He felt the old tightening of his muscles, and the acceleration of his heartbeat. This was a doable mission. He could be back in action again very soon.
“We appreciate you coming in,” said Yukovic, more warmly this time. “There’s a lot more to be discussed, but we’ll let you know what we decide in a few days.”
Juric stood up and saluted smartly, then turned and marched out of Yukovic’s office. Maric closed the door behind him, and then the two men got down to some serious talking. What it came down to in the end was one name, Stanley Shehu.
He had commanded an army battalion in the early hostilities in Kosovo, and he lived maybe 70 klicks on rough roads from where Marko’s sister and partner had disappeared. If anyone could shed light on the area, and help form an underground task force, it would be him.
Maric would be going in alone. Juric, Novak and Radic would be at Yukovic’s training camp within a day – if they were interested in joining the op – and the sergeant major would be pushing them every waking hour to get them ready. They would join Maric when the tall man gave them a time and a place.
Both men sat back in their chairs and stretched. The plan, such as it was, appeared to be watertight. Maric had brought in the equipment he had stashed at Russo’s apartment from his last mission in Albania, and Yukovic would add more to it.
Travel within the EU with military grade equipment wasn’t a problem, but the EU border out of Croatia would be more difficult. Maric would be leaving from the long US maintained runway at Udbina, not far from Yukovic’s special forces base.
The sergeant major would arrange a civilian flight over some of the non-EU states. They were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia. Maric would go out on a ‘sightseeing tour’ over the Adriatic sea, and the impressive knot of limestone mountains further down the coast. He wouldn’t be returning.
Two days later it was dawn over Kosovo on a dull, gray morning. A small plane high above was already in daylight at GL+2000m, but long shadows covered the ground below in darkness.
Maric was ready for the drop. He patted the pilot on the shoulder, and the plane lifted up into an almost stalled position. Maric headed back down the aisle to the side door in the eight-seater, and forced it open against the wind. Moments later he tumbled backwards, and was gone.
The parachute was latest tech. It was practically invisible to anyone on the ground. Maric dropped out of the sunshine and into the darkness before he opened the canopy, and then he was flying on instruments. The altimeter gave him height, and the GPS gave him location.
He adjusted his position to stay directly over the drop zone. It was a field in a valley, somewhere along a range of hills. When he sensed a low, imposing mass on his right, he knew he had dropped below the hills on that side. Then the altimeter was fast approaching to GL+0, and he flared out.
Calibrating ground level off a map was always an inexact process, and Maric sensed something rushing up at him far too early. He pulled on the control lines hard, and lifted his legs until he was almost horizontal. He thought he’d got away with it, until his back started to skid along the ground, and then he was skating across the ground like a stone on ice.
When he picked himself up, his back was saturated. Great, he thought, he’d just found the one patch of swampy ground in the entire paddock. His military gear had been hanging in the lines above him, and now lay beside him. Fortunately it seemed to have avoided any damage.
Maric was hauling in the canopy lines when he felt something hard shoved into his back. He froze. He hadn’t picked up the intruder on his internal radar, which made him think the man, or woman, didn’t have the intent to harm him. The person had arrived far too quickly to have come in from the surrounding scrub. So, a camouflaged and prepared position near the middle of the field. Someone with experience.
The rustle of wind through the canopy, and the soft ground, had masked the footsteps. Maric figured it was a welcoming committee, of sorts.
“And whose side might you be on, friend?” said a gravelly voice, in very good English.
“If you’re holding the gun, then I’m on your side,” said Maric, and started rolling in the canopy lines again. There was something like a snort of laughter behind him. The voice was older, fifties maybe, and the man knew that English was Maric’s first language. The tall man thought he knew who his captor might be.
“Was told you were too smart to be caught napping,” said the voice, “was told you were the sort of man could be the tip of the spear,” and Maric understood what he meant. People that joined a cause needed to believe in the leadership. Before the man behind him, and his people, took orders from Maric, they needed to know why they should.
A split second later the man was bending over backward, his own pistol jabbed under his jaw and his finger pulling hard on the trigger.
“Now you’re probably wondering why you haven’t blown your own head off,” said Maric calmly. “Well, my finger is jammed behind the trigger, stopping you from doing that.
“The question is, should I remove that finger and let you blow yourself away?
“There would be no fingerprints but yours on the gun. ‘Poor old John Doe’, people would say. ‘He went out into the middle of a field at dawn and ended it all’. Goodbye cruel world and all that. What do you think?”
“I don’t think that will, ah, be necessary,” said the man, working hard to match Maric’s level tone. Maric flicked him upright, and went back to rolling up the canopy into a tight ball. He was impressed with the stranger’s response. Apart from a moment of uncertainty in the man’s eyes, the stranger had adapted fast to the changing situation.
Maric stood upright, the roll of canopy under one arm and the bulk of his equipment over the other shoulder, held up by several straps.
“This way,” said the man, and walked off into the darkness. The first of the dawn light was on the range of hills ahead of them now, and Maric could just make out a vehicle where the field turned into scrub. He trudged after the man, and it was only after they’d climbed into the battered old van, and tossed his gear in the back, that introductions were made.
“Lieutenant Colonel Ljudevit Maric, temporarily assigned to NATO?” said the stranger, as the van eased out onto a rough gravel road. Maric nodded.
“Though not assigned to anybody from the moment I landed on Kosovo soil,” he said. “If we take up arms here, we do it entirely on our own. There’s no one to help us out, and no one to tell our story to the world if it goes wrong.”
“Of course,” said the man bitterly. “All through the land grab wars in this region, was it ever any other way?”
Maric was silent for a while. The Western nations had let the atrocities in the Balkans in the 1990s go on for far too long, and it shouldn’t have done so. To their credit, NATO and the US had stepped in eventually. That didn’t help those who’d been robbed and raped and run off their land for years beforehand. Stanley was right to be aggrieved.
“Stanley Shehu,” said Maric after a while. “Kosovo battalion commander in the war against Serbian aggression twenty years ago. Much decorated war hero.”
Stanley’s waving hand told Maric what he thought of the war hero bullshit, but he nodded all the same, acknowledging his name.
They drove for about twenty minutes, and pulled into a small village of loosely scattered houses. Maric figured it was Remanic, a tiny place well off the beaten track. It was the right size and on the right heading from his landing place. Most of the land had looked like subsistence farming as they drove in.
Maric had done his homework. Agriculture was racing toward self-sufficiency for the country under US aid programs, but the north part of Kosovo had missed out. Most of the problems went back to the earlier war. Farmers had no deeds to their lands now, so they couldn’t officially apply for aid, and the poor state of the roads made it difficult to get produce to markets in the larger cities.
Stanley pulled in outside a large barn, and Maric got out of the van and followed him toward a rambling farmhouse, hauling his gear. They barely had time to settle in, with Stanley putting some breakfast on the table, when there was a knock at the door.
Two men about the same age as Stanley came straight in and stood at either end of the room, where they could see the approaches to the farmhouse. They ignored Maric.
This was getting interesting.
CHAPTER 9
________________
Two more men arrived in the next few minutes. They came in, nodded to Shehu, and went back to take up positions outside the door. Maric figured old habits from the war years died hard. These were clearly Shehu’s men, or they had been when armed gangs attacked the villages around here at will. Some of the gangs called themselves military, some didn’t even bother to do that.
The sun was less than an hour up in the sky, but all the men seemed to have had breakfast. Maric shrugged, and dug in to the simple, but filling, farmer’s breakfast in front of him. Yukovic’s file on Stanley Shehu mentioned that his wife had died of cancer a few years back.
Maric figured it was too early for Shehu to find a replacement yet – if the man eventually decided that was the way he wanted to go. The file also mentioned a son, but there was no sign of him in the house.
One last man arrived as Shehu was clearing the plates away. He got a frown from his old boss, and stood with one of the other men at the far end of the room, looking chastened. He was the first of the men that was obviously armed, a bulge in his side pocket pulling down his jacket.
Stanley’s English was going to be a godsend. Maric’s Croatian was coming along nicely, from his time in Cista Provo, the village that had adopted him. Unfortunately, Croatian wasn’t a common language in Kosovo. The main tongue here was Albanian, and it had little in common with the other languages around it. Mosha had picked it up for the recent mission against the Count in the Albanian mountains. Mosha was back captaining his own team though, and Cal needed that Gray Ops team elsewhere.
“Let me speak plainly,” said Shehu, when he sat down again.
“My generation has had its war. Many of us have children now, and all of us have extended families – or what’s left of them after the hostilities.
“There’s something like peace now, and we fought for that. We won’t do anything that brings the Serbs back into Kosovo.”
Maric nodded. He had hoped for more, but he could see the old commander’s point of view.
“Have you heard anything out of the ordinary,” he said quietly, “something that might give me a starting point. My sources tell me that it might be around Revatske. I have an old name for a small village, called Boluka, but it doesn’t appear on any maps now.”
Shehu looked at the man at the end of the room who’d arrived late. Some meaning passed between them, and Maric stepped in while he had the chance.
“You know something, I can tell,” he said. “The point of recon is to learn enough to make the mission safe for the main force. You know that as well as I do, Commander! I need to protect the lives of the soldiers who might be called in to deal with this problem.”
Maric was calling on Shehu’s time in the Kosovo military. The KLA commander would have been in Maric’s position at times, wanting information to protect his men. One of the others said something in Albanian, and then several of the men around the room spoke quickly to Shehu. It sounded to Maric like they were giving him permission to speak for them. The old commander looked up at Maric.
“We’re not proud of this, but the KLA cleaned out Boluka during the wars. It had an entirely Serb population. We packed them into trucks and took them to a forestry track on the border with Montenegro. Then we fired into the trees next to them until they fled across the border.”
Maric knew about the KLA’s activities. The Kosovo Liberation Army was the local response to the invasion of Kosovo – still part of Serbia at the time – by Serbian forces trying to move the Albanian population out. That was when the worst of the atrocities were committed in the Kosovo conflict. It looked like the Serbs didn’t have it all their own way.
“Boluka was just a location really,” said Shehu, “a cleared valley in dense forest at the end of a road. Unfortunately for the inhabitants, there were several airplane hangers, and a scattering of huts, at one end of the valley. A long stretch of level ground just beyond had been fenced off from livestock. I think it was supposed to be an airport, but that was never finished.
Yukovic’s office wasn’t that much different to Cal’s. Maybe it was the structure that grew up around command, maybe it was the sort of men who took on those jobs, but both offices were small and neat.
“You have some ideas for me,” said Maric, once he’d sat in the army regulation chair opposite Yukovic. The sergeant major nodded.
“Remember how Juric is stuck in a kind of no-man’s land?” he said, and Maric inclined his head to one side. This was interesting. Juric was one of three newly-graduated elite force soldiers Maric had borrowed from Croatian special forces for the NATO mission in Albania.
The young man had developed something like hero worship for Maric. The tall man had once explained to him that terrorists and others allowed to stand trial, and spend time in prison, became figureheads for other idiots who copied their actions.
When it looked like The Count was going to survive the attack on his base in the Albanian Mountains, Juric had shot him, ‘attempting to escape’. Maric had supported that story, as had Yukovic, but it hadn’t been accepted everywhere. The mission had been a joint NATO/US operation, and the US were pushing to have Juric dismissed. They hadn’t got the intel they wanted out of the Count, and now they were wanting someone to pay for that.
Fortunately the US – Croatian special military relationship required unanimous decisions where military action was concerned, so that proviso saved Juric. Since Yukovic was against dismissal, the new elite forces man was stuck between the two sides, and going nowhere.
“Juric really needs to be out in the field, consolidating his skills,” said Yukovic. “The time he spent with your recon team was ideal, but it needs to be built on. I haven’t talked to the man himself yet, but he could be part of your team if you go ahead with this Kosovo thing.”
“Won’t that stop him working for any country in NATO in the future if people find out?” said Maric. “Won’t the US spin it as desertion, something like that?” The Sergeant Major nodded.
“But he needs to be doing something, and it may be the best chance of a future he’s got.” Then Yukovic started to count off points on his fingers.
“He could be reinstated because your team makes a real difference over there, he could be picked up outside NATO because he will have a lot more experience, your boss could find a place for him in your organization, or he could get killed in action. Any one of those would be a step up from where he is now.”
Maric looked up at the ceiling. Juric was good, but he was too eager to please, not independent enough. On the other hand, this would get him out of his current pickle.
His file said he had no immediate family, and that was probably the cause of his jumpiness. A ‘family’ like the army was a good place for him. A little more training, and Maric could see the special forces soldier starting to steady up, become more mature.
“Let’s get him in and talk to him,” he said. The Sergeant Major nodded, and reached for the phone.
CHAPTER 8
________________
“I was hoping you would ask me,” said Juric, looking anywhere but at Yukovic. Special forces were trained to be calm in any situation, but Maric could tell Juric was uncomfortable. It was understandable, with any career he might have in the military very uncertain at the moment.
Yukovic raised his eyebrows. “You knew we were looking at the situation in Kosovo?” he said skeptically.
“No, nothing like that,” said Juric. “I knew about Marko’s family problem, and of course no one’s likely to go into Kosovo, but if you wanted completely off the books you might talk to Maric. Sorry, LCol Maric, and then he might want expendables like myself.
“It was a wild guess really – just wishful thinking.”
Maric was impressed. Juric hadn’t been too wide of the mark.
“But, um, I’ve got some ideas too,” said Juric in a rush. “Novak and Radic quit special forces training about three-quarters of the way through. They’re gutted they didn’t make it, and Novak had some sort of virus most of the time. He figures he could have graduated. Radic’s tough enough, but he isn’t so good on logistics and strategy. The man’s an exceptional foot soldier though.
“They’re talking about leaving the army since they dipped out of the course, and taking up a trade. If you wanted them in on this, I think they’d grab at the chance. There might be an elite forces position at the end of it, there might not, but they would give it a go.”
Maric looked at Yukovic, who looked away. He didn’t want to give Maric his opinion in front of Juric, and that was fine.
“I’ve been trying to get intel,” said Juric quickly, not sure if his first point had scored him any marks. “There are a lot of Albanians in the north of Kosovo who served in the late 1990s against the Serbs. They’re aged forty now, or a bit more.
“I’ve put out feelers toward that area, and got a few positive responses. Some of these guys won’t rest until Kosovo is truly independent. The place is over 90% Albanian, and they’re all Albanian, so I can understand the motivation. Some of them just want revenge for things that happened during the war, but the rest are good soldiers.”
Maric wouldn’t take on men who just wanted revenge, because discipline would be a problem. But Juric was right, the older men were a group who had been through basic training, and had some combat experience. He felt the old tightening of his muscles, and the acceleration of his heartbeat. This was a doable mission. He could be back in action again very soon.
“We appreciate you coming in,” said Yukovic, more warmly this time. “There’s a lot more to be discussed, but we’ll let you know what we decide in a few days.”
Juric stood up and saluted smartly, then turned and marched out of Yukovic’s office. Maric closed the door behind him, and then the two men got down to some serious talking. What it came down to in the end was one name, Stanley Shehu.
He had commanded an army battalion in the early hostilities in Kosovo, and he lived maybe 70 klicks on rough roads from where Marko’s sister and partner had disappeared. If anyone could shed light on the area, and help form an underground task force, it would be him.
Maric would be going in alone. Juric, Novak and Radic would be at Yukovic’s training camp within a day – if they were interested in joining the op – and the sergeant major would be pushing them every waking hour to get them ready. They would join Maric when the tall man gave them a time and a place.
Both men sat back in their chairs and stretched. The plan, such as it was, appeared to be watertight. Maric had brought in the equipment he had stashed at Russo’s apartment from his last mission in Albania, and Yukovic would add more to it.
Travel within the EU with military grade equipment wasn’t a problem, but the EU border out of Croatia would be more difficult. Maric would be leaving from the long US maintained runway at Udbina, not far from Yukovic’s special forces base.
The sergeant major would arrange a civilian flight over some of the non-EU states. They were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, and North Macedonia. Maric would go out on a ‘sightseeing tour’ over the Adriatic sea, and the impressive knot of limestone mountains further down the coast. He wouldn’t be returning.
Two days later it was dawn over Kosovo on a dull, gray morning. A small plane high above was already in daylight at GL+2000m, but long shadows covered the ground below in darkness.
Maric was ready for the drop. He patted the pilot on the shoulder, and the plane lifted up into an almost stalled position. Maric headed back down the aisle to the side door in the eight-seater, and forced it open against the wind. Moments later he tumbled backwards, and was gone.
The parachute was latest tech. It was practically invisible to anyone on the ground. Maric dropped out of the sunshine and into the darkness before he opened the canopy, and then he was flying on instruments. The altimeter gave him height, and the GPS gave him location.
He adjusted his position to stay directly over the drop zone. It was a field in a valley, somewhere along a range of hills. When he sensed a low, imposing mass on his right, he knew he had dropped below the hills on that side. Then the altimeter was fast approaching to GL+0, and he flared out.
Calibrating ground level off a map was always an inexact process, and Maric sensed something rushing up at him far too early. He pulled on the control lines hard, and lifted his legs until he was almost horizontal. He thought he’d got away with it, until his back started to skid along the ground, and then he was skating across the ground like a stone on ice.
When he picked himself up, his back was saturated. Great, he thought, he’d just found the one patch of swampy ground in the entire paddock. His military gear had been hanging in the lines above him, and now lay beside him. Fortunately it seemed to have avoided any damage.
Maric was hauling in the canopy lines when he felt something hard shoved into his back. He froze. He hadn’t picked up the intruder on his internal radar, which made him think the man, or woman, didn’t have the intent to harm him. The person had arrived far too quickly to have come in from the surrounding scrub. So, a camouflaged and prepared position near the middle of the field. Someone with experience.
The rustle of wind through the canopy, and the soft ground, had masked the footsteps. Maric figured it was a welcoming committee, of sorts.
“And whose side might you be on, friend?” said a gravelly voice, in very good English.
“If you’re holding the gun, then I’m on your side,” said Maric, and started rolling in the canopy lines again. There was something like a snort of laughter behind him. The voice was older, fifties maybe, and the man knew that English was Maric’s first language. The tall man thought he knew who his captor might be.
“Was told you were too smart to be caught napping,” said the voice, “was told you were the sort of man could be the tip of the spear,” and Maric understood what he meant. People that joined a cause needed to believe in the leadership. Before the man behind him, and his people, took orders from Maric, they needed to know why they should.
A split second later the man was bending over backward, his own pistol jabbed under his jaw and his finger pulling hard on the trigger.
“Now you’re probably wondering why you haven’t blown your own head off,” said Maric calmly. “Well, my finger is jammed behind the trigger, stopping you from doing that.
“The question is, should I remove that finger and let you blow yourself away?
“There would be no fingerprints but yours on the gun. ‘Poor old John Doe’, people would say. ‘He went out into the middle of a field at dawn and ended it all’. Goodbye cruel world and all that. What do you think?”
“I don’t think that will, ah, be necessary,” said the man, working hard to match Maric’s level tone. Maric flicked him upright, and went back to rolling up the canopy into a tight ball. He was impressed with the stranger’s response. Apart from a moment of uncertainty in the man’s eyes, the stranger had adapted fast to the changing situation.
Maric stood upright, the roll of canopy under one arm and the bulk of his equipment over the other shoulder, held up by several straps.
“This way,” said the man, and walked off into the darkness. The first of the dawn light was on the range of hills ahead of them now, and Maric could just make out a vehicle where the field turned into scrub. He trudged after the man, and it was only after they’d climbed into the battered old van, and tossed his gear in the back, that introductions were made.
“Lieutenant Colonel Ljudevit Maric, temporarily assigned to NATO?” said the stranger, as the van eased out onto a rough gravel road. Maric nodded.
“Though not assigned to anybody from the moment I landed on Kosovo soil,” he said. “If we take up arms here, we do it entirely on our own. There’s no one to help us out, and no one to tell our story to the world if it goes wrong.”
“Of course,” said the man bitterly. “All through the land grab wars in this region, was it ever any other way?”
Maric was silent for a while. The Western nations had let the atrocities in the Balkans in the 1990s go on for far too long, and it shouldn’t have done so. To their credit, NATO and the US had stepped in eventually. That didn’t help those who’d been robbed and raped and run off their land for years beforehand. Stanley was right to be aggrieved.
“Stanley Shehu,” said Maric after a while. “Kosovo battalion commander in the war against Serbian aggression twenty years ago. Much decorated war hero.”
Stanley’s waving hand told Maric what he thought of the war hero bullshit, but he nodded all the same, acknowledging his name.
They drove for about twenty minutes, and pulled into a small village of loosely scattered houses. Maric figured it was Remanic, a tiny place well off the beaten track. It was the right size and on the right heading from his landing place. Most of the land had looked like subsistence farming as they drove in.
Maric had done his homework. Agriculture was racing toward self-sufficiency for the country under US aid programs, but the north part of Kosovo had missed out. Most of the problems went back to the earlier war. Farmers had no deeds to their lands now, so they couldn’t officially apply for aid, and the poor state of the roads made it difficult to get produce to markets in the larger cities.
Stanley pulled in outside a large barn, and Maric got out of the van and followed him toward a rambling farmhouse, hauling his gear. They barely had time to settle in, with Stanley putting some breakfast on the table, when there was a knock at the door.
Two men about the same age as Stanley came straight in and stood at either end of the room, where they could see the approaches to the farmhouse. They ignored Maric.
This was getting interesting.
CHAPTER 9
________________
Two more men arrived in the next few minutes. They came in, nodded to Shehu, and went back to take up positions outside the door. Maric figured old habits from the war years died hard. These were clearly Shehu’s men, or they had been when armed gangs attacked the villages around here at will. Some of the gangs called themselves military, some didn’t even bother to do that.
The sun was less than an hour up in the sky, but all the men seemed to have had breakfast. Maric shrugged, and dug in to the simple, but filling, farmer’s breakfast in front of him. Yukovic’s file on Stanley Shehu mentioned that his wife had died of cancer a few years back.
Maric figured it was too early for Shehu to find a replacement yet – if the man eventually decided that was the way he wanted to go. The file also mentioned a son, but there was no sign of him in the house.
One last man arrived as Shehu was clearing the plates away. He got a frown from his old boss, and stood with one of the other men at the far end of the room, looking chastened. He was the first of the men that was obviously armed, a bulge in his side pocket pulling down his jacket.
Stanley’s English was going to be a godsend. Maric’s Croatian was coming along nicely, from his time in Cista Provo, the village that had adopted him. Unfortunately, Croatian wasn’t a common language in Kosovo. The main tongue here was Albanian, and it had little in common with the other languages around it. Mosha had picked it up for the recent mission against the Count in the Albanian mountains. Mosha was back captaining his own team though, and Cal needed that Gray Ops team elsewhere.
“Let me speak plainly,” said Shehu, when he sat down again.
“My generation has had its war. Many of us have children now, and all of us have extended families – or what’s left of them after the hostilities.
“There’s something like peace now, and we fought for that. We won’t do anything that brings the Serbs back into Kosovo.”
Maric nodded. He had hoped for more, but he could see the old commander’s point of view.
“Have you heard anything out of the ordinary,” he said quietly, “something that might give me a starting point. My sources tell me that it might be around Revatske. I have an old name for a small village, called Boluka, but it doesn’t appear on any maps now.”
Shehu looked at the man at the end of the room who’d arrived late. Some meaning passed between them, and Maric stepped in while he had the chance.
“You know something, I can tell,” he said. “The point of recon is to learn enough to make the mission safe for the main force. You know that as well as I do, Commander! I need to protect the lives of the soldiers who might be called in to deal with this problem.”
Maric was calling on Shehu’s time in the Kosovo military. The KLA commander would have been in Maric’s position at times, wanting information to protect his men. One of the others said something in Albanian, and then several of the men around the room spoke quickly to Shehu. It sounded to Maric like they were giving him permission to speak for them. The old commander looked up at Maric.
“We’re not proud of this, but the KLA cleaned out Boluka during the wars. It had an entirely Serb population. We packed them into trucks and took them to a forestry track on the border with Montenegro. Then we fired into the trees next to them until they fled across the border.”
Maric knew about the KLA’s activities. The Kosovo Liberation Army was the local response to the invasion of Kosovo – still part of Serbia at the time – by Serbian forces trying to move the Albanian population out. That was when the worst of the atrocities were committed in the Kosovo conflict. It looked like the Serbs didn’t have it all their own way.
“Boluka was just a location really,” said Shehu, “a cleared valley in dense forest at the end of a road. Unfortunately for the inhabitants, there were several airplane hangers, and a scattering of huts, at one end of the valley. A long stretch of level ground just beyond had been fenced off from livestock. I think it was supposed to be an airport, but that was never finished.
