Unsung Warrior Box Set, page 62
part #1 of Unsung Warrior Series
The new camp was several kilometers away from the old one. It made one point of a right-angled triangle with the village and the hunter’s cave, which was to the south.
Gjoni made his way to the hunter’s cave several times a day, and Maric put in an appearance nearly every day. Both of them were appreciative of any snippets of intel, but the second site, where Popovic kept the troublemakers from the village, remained a mystery.
Then on the fourth day, a hunter came in from a routine circuit selling venison jerky to the villagers with a strange story. It was all Maric needed. He gathered his team together.
“You sure this is the place?” said Juric, looking around. He and Maric were standing on a weathered limestone flatland near the top of a ridge north-west of Vracevo. The limestone was a dirty white and had an assortment of ragged weeds and wildflowers scattered across it.
It had taken more than an hour to get to the place, in one of the hunter’s trucks, and it had all been on gravel roads. The hunter had stayed behind with his truck, somewhere north of them. He wasn’t, of course, superstitious in any way, but he firmly believed in leaving certain areas alone.
The limestone flatland was called the Devil’s Run, in the local dialect. Some of the villagers said the Monastery up behind Vracevo had been built to keep an eye on the devil’s comings and goings. Maybe, and maybe not. Maric wasn’t going to judge local beliefs, but he did have a strong feeling it was another kind of devil that stalked the area now.
“It’s a big area, but we’ll find what we’re looking for,” said Maric, casting glances ahead of him. “Let me know if you see a heap of rocks piled around a central chimney.”
Juric looked at him sideways, but went back to scanning the area.
“Locals say the devil has been pretty active around here lately,” said Maric. “Know how they can tell?”
Juric shook his head.
“Smell of vinegar,” said Maric. “Though I think they’ve got their traditions crossed. It’s witches that sour milk and turn wine to vinegar, not the devil. But whatever, its a useful pointer for us.”
“Pointer to what?” said Juric, becoming intrigued.
Maric was smiling.
“Know what else smells like vinegar?” he said quietly. Juric shook his head.
“The process of turning opium into heroin,” said Maric. “And just when heroin has come back into fashion in Europe. That would be a good reason for Popovic to take an interest in smuggling the stuff.
“Drug use is a fad that comes and goes like anything else. There are always idiots with nothing better to do with their lives.”
“So we’re looking for a heroin lab?” said Juric, becoming more animated. Maric nodded.
“Pile of rocks?” said Juric. “Big old square chimney rising out of the middle of them?”
Maric turned to look, and Juric pointed to a column that stuck out of the limestone on his far left. The tall man nodded, and the two men jogged toward it.
Juric winced with the pain as he started out, but soon settled to a steady pace. His shoulder would need another few days before it was as good as it had been before he was wounded. Maric made the sign for silence, and the men slowed as they approached the structure.
The formation was a pancake stack, layers about the thickness of a brick, each one beveled where the upper edge had been weathered. It was maybe a meter by two, and taller than a man. There was no smell of vinegar.
Juric beckoned Maric over, and pointed. There was a slight discoloration on some of the rocks piled about the base of the chimney. Maric rubbed his fingers across it, attempting to activate the volatile chemicals within the strange smears. It took a while for his body warmth, and the oils on his fingers, to work. It was a trick he’d learned long ago.
Then he put his fingers to his nose, and gave the faint smell a chance to let itself be known. It was weak, but it was the smell of vinegar that he inhaled. He smiled in satisfaction.
Popovic’s lab might not be cooking heroin today, but it had been, and not that long ago. There must be a vent here that originated somewhere below. He motioned to Juric, and the two men headed away from the chimney. They got to the edge of the limestone field, and began to scout out the gullies on the downward side of the flatland. It didn’t take them long to find an entrance.
Maric lined up points on the surrounding hills to fix their position, and then they backtracked across the limestone. They plowed through the scrub until they found the hunter and his truck.
“No attempt to hide their tracks once they got near the lab,” said Maric acidly. He was insulted that someone could be so professionally inept. Who had trained these idiots? Were there no standards left in the world today? Then he realized how silly his thoughts were getting.
The two men worked out a plan. They would need someone in the area for a while to see what the daily routine for the lab was. The workers that had been press-ganged from Boluka, and possibly others, would be brought in each day from somewhere nearby.
There would be a pattern to the lab’s activities as well. The first step would be to bring in the raw material and heat it, followed by treating it with chemicals to concentrate the opioids. After that they would let it dry, and process it further so it was ready for sale on the streets. Each day would be something different.
The important thing for Maric’s team was to take down the guards before they could raise an alarm. They wanted to minimize injuries among the workers.
CHAPTER 18
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Clearing out confined spaces was a specialist skill, and the two hunters who were now part of Maric’s team needed some intensive training. The tall man had no idea what they would find in the cave system under the limestone field, but his team needed to be prepared. Surveillance had confirmed that a dozen or more people arrived there on a daily basis.
Cana followed Novak’s lead in the ‘clear and secure’ exercises like he was an extension of the man, while Tahi stuck equally close to Radic. Maric was pleased with the new men’s progress. He had wondered on several occasions how far the haggard-looking men might have have gone if they’d been given modern training. The abilities that had taken them safely through the Balkan wars were all inborn skill and determination to survive, qualities that some called ‘killer instinct’.
The wars had taken from the two men any chance to lead a normal life. In some ways Maric was glad they had ended up in his operation. They might be able to lay the ghosts of those traumatic years to rest.
Three days later the weather was right, and Maric decided the special forces team was ready. By ten o’clock the old hunters’ truck came up the gravel road and parked alongside an even older truck and two decrepit cars. The vehicles would have been the ones that carried the workers to the heroin lab that morning. All three were locked, and the locks, surprisingly, still worked, but there wasn’t a guard. Maric broke into the truck and removed the distributor cap. Radic just as quickly disabled the two cars.
From there it was a simple matter of following the faint track that led through scrub to the limestone field. It wasn’t long before they spotted the chimney Juric had seen on the first visit.
Gjoni and his team of three hunters took up positions around the chimney, more or less in the center of the broad expanse of cracked and weed-ridden limestone. There was likely to be a ‘back door’ to the cave system, and it was the hunters’ job to stop anyone who was trying to escape. Those who tried to run would get one warning, and then the hunters would shoot to kill.
Maric wanted Popovic unnerved. If there was no sign of anyone at the lab when his men came looking for the workers who had mysteriously vanished, word would quickly spread through his men at Boluka. There was nothing like a good mystery to make an enemy jumpy. Especially when some of their comrades, fully armed, had gone missing.
Maric assumed the lab would be guarded, and he sent Juric in one direction while he took another. They would converge on the gully that housed the entrance to the lab.
There were two men in the gully, one by the entrance and one twenty meters further down, where the gully opened out onto level ground. Juric was in place above the sentry at the entrance when Maric walked round the corner into the gully to confront the other.
The man was smoking, and his gasp of surprise sucked a lungful of smoke deep into his chest. He was trying to lift his AK 74 into a firing position, with tears in his eyes, when Maric’s boot connected with the side of his head.
The other one was quicker to respond, but Juric’s hand clamped around the pistol the man was leveling, his finger sliding in behind the trigger and preventing him from firing it.
“Easy there, soldier,” said Juric. “We don’t want any accidents, do we?”
The man gave up the pistol, but he had a knife halfway out of its sheath when Juric hit his jaw under his ear. He used an open hand strike, and the base of his palm had been hardened until there was no give left in it. The man went out like a light.
Maric used plastic ties to immobile his opponent, and then strolled up to do the same to the other one. Juric had scrambled up the side of the gully onto the limestone field, and now he beckoned the rest of the team in. So far no alarm had sounded, but once a shot was fired they could assume those inside the cave would be ready for them.
Maric’s team spent precious minutes searching for other entrances to the lab, but it appeared there was only the one. That worried Maric. If there was a bottleneck up ahead, it would be easy for Popovic’s men to defend it. The takeover of the cave would take time, and that would put the workers at risk. If they tried to overcome their guards they could get shot for their trouble, and there was always the danger of a stray bullet in a firefight.
Maric went through the entrance going left, and Juric went right. The other four waited for a signal that the first ‘room’ was secure. They came in as backup when the two front men signaled the all clear. Then Maric and Juric ghosted down a long gallery in the limestone that led toward a larger area further in.
This one had lighting. Maric was near the end of the gallery, and he could see a gas lantern in one corner of the cavern, and the shadows suggested there was one more. A mildly sweet smell hung in the air, and Maric figured that was opium in the early stages of the refining process. It was warmer than he expected, and he figured the drying phase of the work was done by gas as well.
Maric signaled his intentions to Juric, and they entered the cavern at speed. They took two steps past the end of the gallery and turned back to back as they surveyed the large, open space. Two men working at a long table turned to look at them open-mouthed. Another man sat on a ledge to Maric’s left, his rifle leaning against the wall of the cave beside him.
He looked up lazily, and then jerked awake. Maric got to him in a moment, but he managed a guttural shout as the tall man closed one hand around his throat. There was a brief struggle as Maric put the man down soundlessly. Juric held his finger urgently to his lips as he looked at the two workers. They understood, and stayed quiet.
There were several openings off the room, but only one, a short passage to their left, shone with light.
There was a tense silence as the two men waited to see if the noises had been heard. It looked like they might have got away with it, until a hesitant voice asked a question from somewhere beyond the end of the passage. They didn’t answer, and the silence dragged on.
Then the first voice was joined by the snarl of a man who understood all to well that something wasn’t right. A burst of automatic rifle fire came down the passageway and swept the far side of the room.
One of the workers staggered back, and fell, and Juric move swiftly to join Maric as they pressed into a corner of the room beside the lighted entrance. Damn it, a hothead, muttered Maric to himself. Just what we need, an idiot who doesn’t even bother to identify his target.
He lobbed a flash-bang grenade down the passage, and it seemed to have down the job, but the shooter came up with a pistol as Maric swept into the second chamber. The man was blinded by the flash for all practical purposes, but he was determined to shoot back at something.
Maric had already seen enough stupidity for one day. He wasn’t impressed that a worker had been gunned down for no reason, and turned the attacker’s pistol against him with a flick of his wrist. The muzzle of the weapon was buried in the man’s chest, but the report was still loud in the enclosed space. The man dropped, twitched, and lay still.
Then Maric and Juric hurried on. The flash-bang grenade must have alerted everyone in the cave system by now, and that was going to make things a lot more risky. The rest of Maric’s team assigned themselves duties. Some were attending to the worker in the first chamber who’d been shot, and some were backing up the two men on point, but staying well back.
The chamber narrowed to a doorway, and then opened up again. The second part of the chamber was well lit, and easier for Popovic’s forces to defend. The sweet smell of raw opium in the first cave had been replaced by the vinegary smell of the refining process here. The two special force men pressed against the wall just short of the doorway, sensing what was ahead. Then automatic fire erupted out of the cave and screeched off the limestone walls behind them.
Maric indicated to Juric what he was going to do with sign language, and then shot out one of the lanterns in the room. It hissed gas once its filament was gone, and that gave Maric an idea.
He shot the next one in the center of the container at the bottom of the lantern. It jerked back a few centimeters, but stayed upright. Gas poured from the bullet hole, and then the volatile medium ignited from the still burning filament.
Two of the guards next to the lantern scrambled out of the way of the jet of flame, and all eyes were on the sudden spectacle. Maric took the opportunity to step into the doorway to shoot out the last of the gas lights in the room.
Everything went dark. Then the dark was full of flashes from weapons fire. Maric and Juric waited on the safe side of the doorway for it to cease. A loud voice from the back of the cave eventually gave a sharp command that stopped the shooting. Now every ear in the cave was straining to hear footsteps, or a magazine being changed, anything that might indicate where the enemy was.
Maric was already moving, but in a way that was totally unexpected. He ghosted into the center of the second chamber and turned slowly, hearing the echoes from the sounds of movement, from nervous shuffling, panicked breathing, and the tiny noises that came in from outside. He could hear the harder echoes that came off walls, and the muffled sounds that were bodies. He could ‘see’ two bodies on his left, and one a meter further along. Then he noticed that a body on his right had the strange echo of body armor about it.
Some distance away, he could hear someone scrabbling through a hole too small for them, desperate to find a way out, and he detected another person behind them. Maric took it all in, breathing the room as if it was air.
All the time he was counting, and as he got near to a minute and a half, he eased further into the chamber. By the time he reached his self-imposed time limit, he was resting between two men along the back wall.
Juric had also been counting, and now he opened up through the doorway, firing short bursts into the right side of the cave. The bullets dug holes in the walls, and some skipped once or twice, like stones across water. They all lost their momentum before they reached the back of the cave.
Once again the cave erupted in muzzle flashes, all firing out through the doorway, trying to hit something. All the rifles but one. Sitting in among the shooters, Maric carefully put bullets into the two guards nearest the gallery, one on either side, and heard them fall.
Then he repeated the performance, a little further back. His shots blended in perfectly with the weapons fire all around him, but alarm began to grow as the muzzle flashes in the cave grew less and less.
“Now,” barked the tall man, and Juric lobbed a flare into the middle of the room. Maric had his head turned away, and his eyes closed, but the others were looking for something to shoot at. They were soon blinded. Maric took two quick strides to his left, and took the legs out from under the guard he had sensed with the body armor. Juric stepped into the cave and cut down the last two of the defenders.
The cave system was now theirs. Gjoni would be mopping up the ones Maric had heard trying to find a way out through the vents at the back of the cave system. They wouldn’t get far on the surface.
CHAPTER 19
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The man Maric had upended onto the floor of the cave was a hardened fighter. The tall man had already guessed that from the fact he owned body armor, and wore it on a simple job like duty at the lab.
The man rolled away and bounded up from the floor, and there was a brief tussle over his knife, until Maric had the weapon at the man’s throat. When he stopped showing signs of resistance, Maric stepped back, removing the knife from his grasp, and covered him with a pistol.
The flare wouldn’t last much longer, and Novak, not far behind, headed back along the passageway to find one of the gas lanterns they had passed earlier. When he returned with one he set it on the floor, and the rest of the team spread out to look for the remaining workers.
When the others had moved off through the cave system, Maric’s prisoner started to look edgy, as if he might try to make a break for it.
“Easy, hard man,” said Maric conversationally, on the chance his prisoner spoke English. “You want to live long enough to tell your grandchildren about your exploits.”
“Aint got enny,” said a very English voice, and Maric scrutinized him more closely. He was older than Maric, and he didn’t look particularly English.
“Name?” he said roughly, and the man hesitated. Maric lifted his pistol so it was aimed at the man’s face. Aiming it at his chest had been a small courtesy. A bullet wouldn’t have gone through his body armor.
