Unsung Warrior Box Set, page 66
part #1 of Unsung Warrior Series
The special forces team stayed on at the caves for a short midday meal, but Maric wanted to get back to the main camp in the forest as soon as he could. He had probably missed a message from Dea during the morning, and Shehu would be making contact about the readiness of his men soon. There was a lot to prepare.
Lami had no news from Shehu yet, but the workers Maric had freed from the heroin lab were itching to get their hands on weapons and begin training. Yes, said Lami when Maric asked him, he could make up the shortfall in hunting rifles. That was perfect, though most of the workers would have AK 74s taken from the first ambush. Shehu was sourcing ammunition for the Russian weapons down south, among other things the attack force would need.
The whole operation was starting to move faster now, and it had the feeling of a snowball gathering speed. Maric knew this feeling. It was the start of the end game, and he would need to be ready.
CHAPTER 24
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The five sticks and the roughly fashioned ‘P’ were outside the barn on the edge of Boluka by the middle of the following morning. It meant the Fifth Brigade hadn’t taken Dea into custody as well.
Unless they’d broken her spirit, or her husband’s, and this was a trap. Maric didn’t think so, but he sent scouts along the treeline in either direction to get a better view. Both reported a lack of activity around the barn.
The scouts time away gave Maric an opportunity to think. He decided he wouldn’t call Ilic’s corrupt and opportunistic police force a brigade anymore. It was the worst kind of insult to any army that used that name. Police were supposed to have a calling, an inner need to protect the people of their community. What Ilic’s forces had done was prey on the people they were supposed to protect, even if they were citizens of a neighboring country.
The Serbian police had let loose their most animal instincts, and thought they could get away with it. Maric decided he would call Ilic’s scum the outlaw plague, until he could think of something worse. When the scouts returned he sent the men who were with him back to the main camp. The usual rules would apply now: if he was caught, he was on his own.
The cows seemed nervous for some reason, and Maric slowed his movements around them. That seemed to calm them, and then he was standing outside the barn. When he could see the interior of the building was clear, apart from Dea, he came in through the side door.
She was busy with her milking duties, and seemed lost in concentration. He had to pat her shoulder to get her attention, and she jumped at that.
“I was so afraid something bad had happened, when you didn’t come yesterday!” she said. Then she realized she might be heard outside the barn, and lowered her voice. “Vinski is alive, but he was badly beaten. I think Ilic suspects him of something. He still acts like an army captain you know. Someone who thinks a lot and says very little.”
Maric nodded his understanding. Vinski had struck him the same way.
“He said nothing to Ilic,” she continued, “I’m sure of that. I have been allowed to clean him up, which has meant cleaning off a little blood and putting on compresses. Most of the damage is bruising. His body is black in places, and I’m not sure they’ve finished with him yet.”
She broke off her story, and Maric caught her hand and held it. She cried silently for a while.
“But there has to be change,” she said at last. “This is no life.”
“It is better to die free than spend your life on your knees,” said Maric quietly. It was a rallying cry he’d heard somewhere. It was often said about a principle, or an idea worth fighting for, but these people were slaves without any hope. Dea gripped his hand tighter.
Normally Maric tried to keep civilians out of his operations. In truth they mostly got in the way. But this was different. These people had so much to gain and so much to lose in what was coming. They had suffered so much. He decided he would use them in this war as much as his conscience allowed, and what he was about to ask them to do was at the limits of his conscience.
“My friend Irena, the one in Ilic’s office, looked at the photo,” said Dea, “but she just pushed it away. She wouldn’t say anything then, but she came to see me the next day.
“She said that Popovic and Ilic are the same man. She sees a number of things like foreign bank accounts in that second name. She doesn’t want her husband harmed, and she said I mustn’t say anything, so I promised her that. But she doesn’t realize you are the only hope of freedom for them both.”
Maric nodded. He was used to taking on responsibility for other people’s lives, but Dea’s childlike hope in him weighed heavily. He shrugged the thought away. He couldn’t get emotionally involved, or he wouldn’t be able to lead his growing arm against Ilic’s forces effectively. He turned his mind back to more practical matters.
“We need a plan for the villagers when the final hours of the battle come,” he said. “Ilic has killed to stop people talking about his crimes before, and he will do so again if he feels he is losing.”
Dea paled at the thought, and Maric brought his other hand around to clasp her hand in both of his.
“Where is Vinski?” he asked gently. “I need to talk to him. If he can’t come to me, I need to go to him.”
Her free hand went to her mouth. It was clear she thought the idea far too dangerous.
“There is a sick bay,” she said, “and one of the women here used to be a nurse. She married an Albanian builder, and he took an offer of work in Boluka. Things are very slow in Albania.”
Maric understood what had happened. It was the same story with his special forces friend Horvat and his sister Mirjana, and Behar, the electrician she was living with. Ilic had pulled in quite a skilled workforce by deceit, and now he controlled them with thoughts of the harm he could inflict on their families.
It made him think of Russo, working for NATO back in Italy. Would someone try to get at him through her one day? It was one of the reasons he never talked to her while he was on an op. Nothing could be traced back to her that way. The other reason was that thinking of her distracted him from his work. He needed a certain frame of mind to make life and death decisions, and he couldn’t let his feelings interfere with that.
He reassured himself that Russo worked as a high-ranking NATO operative, and could look after herself. She would also have the best teams in Europe on her trail if she went missing. And Maric himself, of course.
“I’ll need a disguise,” he said to Dea. His camouflage uniform was too modern, and too different, to let him walk about the village unnoticed. Even if he seemed to belong, and had a bag of tools with him and a job to do.
She told him she could get some clothing about his size, if he could wait. But she needed to finish milking, and get the results of her efforts to the mess hall kitchen as soon as she could. Maric said he would wait.
She was so long at the mess hall he began to wonder if she had been detained as well, but then she sidled into the barn with what looked like rags under her arm.
“I was checking on Vinski,” she said. “He is much the same, and the nurse has given him some painkillers, against orders I think. It took a while to get him focused, but when the nurse had gone he had some words for you.
“He says he is too weak to be much use to you at the moment, but he said to trust Costas. His friend was also in the KLA, but Costas doesn’t talk about it. He’s a very quiet man, so I don’t know much about him, but Vinski must trust him completely to risk your life by meeting him.”
Maric thought about the risks for a moment, and then nodded. He pointed toward the bundle of rags.
“Oh yes,” she said, unwrapping some old clothes for him. “Most of the workers will be wearing something similar to this. I covered the clothes in rags so I could say I was on a cleaning detail, if anyone stopped me.”
That was clever. There was a resourcefulness inside some people if they dared to tap it, and Dea was one of those people. Maric shrugged out of his camouflage uniform and tried on the clothes. They were short in the leg, but he would tuck the legs inside his boots so the problem wasn’t noticed. Then he hid his camo outfit at the back of the barn.
“Where do I find Costas?” he said, and she gave him directions.
Maric left the barn carrying a rusty old head assembly for a diesel truck. It gave him a reason to be going somewhere, and a reason to have his face bent down over the machinery. He huffed along, making the old diesel assembly seem heavier than it was.
Costas worked on all the vehicles in the village. He had a helper, one that Vinski and Costas had picked carefully. All three of them knew that an opportunity to do something about their circumstances could occur sometime, and they had to be ready. It was the only thing that made their lives bearable.
Maric’s only worry was that one or two of the mercs, or even Ilic’s ex policemen, the ‘outlaw plague’ as he now liked to call them in his mind, might hang around such places. He would find out when he arrived. That was the nature of recon work.
It wasn’t far to the large double garage that Dea had described, but he got challenged half way by a male voice. Swearing under his breath, Maric said “Costas!” a few times, and pointed toward the garage.
He only had a few words of Albanian, and he wasn’t making any sense of what his questioner was saying. Then he heard the ratcheting sound of a bullet going into the firing chamber of a pistol. He dived into an alleyway a few meters away, dropping the head assembly.
The man with the pistol gave a muffled shout, and ran after him. Maric turned the corner of the alley and flattened himself against the wall behind a down pipe. It wasn’t much in the way of cover, but people in a hurry usually identified the first thing they saw, and didn’t look any deeper.
The tall man smashed the back of his fist into his pursuer’s Adam’s apple, destroying it completely. The man dropped to his knees, his hands coming up as he discovered he couldn’t breath. Maric hit him in the temple with his knuckles bent, where the bones of the skull were thinner. They fractured into pieces wit the force of the blow.
It was always his left hand, his arm muscles attuned to the power that was needed. His bent knuckles had been driven into fine sand at first, and later coarse sand, and then pebbles as his knuckles hardened. His left hand was now an energy efficient, and fast, way to kill. It also suited his long reach. It was the equivalent of a lethal left hook.
The man’s body presented him with a new problem. Maybe Costas could get rid of a body, maybe not. How was he going to make carrying a dead man over to the garage look natural? Maric hurried down the alleyway and turned into a small workroom. It was full of painting gear. He looked around, and assessed the possibilities.
By the time he left the workroom, the man was stretched out on the floor, a couple of boxes next to him looking like an improvised ladder. There was a space on the top shelf now, and a 20 liter pail of paint lay beside him on the floor. It was mostly full, and explained the rapidly swelling side of the man’s skull.
Maric surveyed his handiwork quickly. It would have to do. He hurried back to the head assembly for the truck, and was pleased to see there was still no one around.
Resuming his huffing, labored gait, he made it to the garage and staggered inside. An older man who fitted Dea’s description of Costas looked up from his work at a bench. Maric set the assembly down near him.
CHAPTER 25
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“Lazar?” he said quietly. Without Costas’ helper, translation was going to be awfully difficult. Lazar had a Serbian name and a Croatian mother. Maric hoped his loyalties were in the right place. Dea had said they were, and Vinski vouched for him.
Costas was now looking intently at Maric. He would be wondering who the new face in the village was. Probably one of Ilic’s enforcers he hadn’t met, but it paid to be careful. He put down the torque wrench he was holding, and picked up a long-handled screwdriver.
Maric approved. A much more useful weapon. He liked the guy straight away, and hoped the missing Lazar could be found soon. An unconscious, bound Costas, stuffed into the little office Maric could see at the back of the garage, wasn’t going to help either of them. Then Costas turned his head to one side.
“Lazar!” he barked, and there was a commotion outside. A young man entered, throwing the side door open with a bang. He was describing in very vehement language why he was far too busy trying to find a piece in the scrap heap outside to jump when Costas called. The flow of Albanian shut off as he saw Maric.
“Croatian?” tried the tall man, in that language, and he saw a glimmer of recognition in Lazar’s face.
“English?” he said, and both Costas and Lazar looked alarmed.
“Ne, ne, er, no!” said Lazar, pushing his hands down toward the floor repeatedly. It was not, apparently, safe to be heard speaking English.
Maric thought he understood. The NATO forces that had pushed the Serbs back to their borders in the 1990s spoke English. It was a common tongue for all the countries taking part. For Ilic and his men, therefore, it was the language of the enemy.
“This way,” said Lazar quietly, pointing toward the office at the back. Costas rolled down the two doors at the front of the garage, and then the three men found somewhere to sit in Costas’ office.
“War is coming,” said Maric, once he had established his connection to Vinski. Lazar continued translating smoothly for Costas.
“When he sees that he will lose, Popovic will try to kill all the people of the village. He will kill everyone who has witnessed his operation here, apart from his own men.”
Maric saw no need to pass on the information that Popovic was also the notorious war crimes commander Vuk Ilic. That could be discussed later. Keeping the villagers alive when the battle for Boluka started was the first priority.
Costas didn’t seem to be surprised by the talk of war. Vinski and he must have talked about the possibility many times. It might be NATO, or it might be a rival drug lord, but someone might one day challenge Popovic. They didn’t understand yet that Maric was neither of those things.
“You have weapons I think,” said Maric, and Costas raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “What you need is a place you can defend until my people can break through Popovic’s lines and reach you.”
Costas looked at Lazar, and the younger man said a few words in Albanian.
“A choke point?” said Maric. “A defensible position? Somewhere the villagers can all reach in a hurry?”
“Perhaps we have a place,” said Lazar. “Something we don’t tell you yet.”
Maric nodded. He understood their reticence. They had probably been planning for something like this for months, or even years. There was likely to be only one place that really fitted that description.
“Rifles? Ammunition?” said Maric, and Costas nodded. That was one less job for Maric, and he ticked it off his mental checklist. Smuggling items like that into Boluka would have been difficult.
“You must not tell anyone else about this,” said Maric. “People who know something is coming act differently, and the guards will pick that up. It must be only you two who know, and when the time comes you spread the word. Do you understand?”
The two men understood.
“When you let us know?” said Lazar, and Maric shook his head.
“If you know a task force is coming, you can be tortured for that information, or you can be overheard,” he said. “I won’t put any of my soldiers at risk like that. But you’ll know when the time is near. You will hear the gunfire, and then I think some heavier weapons. The sounds of battle will arrive at the edge of the village, and then someone will come to help you.
“I think they should come to the garage. One of you is always here?”
Costas said something to Lazar, who passed the information on to Maric. Yes, one of them was always here.
There was a sudden shout some distance away, and then the sound of running feet. Damn, thought Maric. The dead merc had been discovered sooner than he expected. Lazar looked quizzically at him, and Maric explained what had happened. The two men looked at the tall man with a new respect.
“Costas say stay here,” said Lazar. “Truck leave soon, and truck need come here first. You hide on truck, yes?”
Maric nodded his agreement, and spent an uncomfortable hour or so inside a cramped cupboard after Lazar had shifted most of the tools out of it. ‘Soon’ apparently had a fairly loose meaning in village time. Still, a ride out of Boluka would be handy. Maric presumed this was the same truck that brought in supplies each day.
It left each day about 1 pm, and discipline would be a lot tighter around the village with the discovery of a dead soldier, whatever the reason. Then Maric heard something rumble to a stop outside the double garage, and the motor switch off. Lazar came to get him.
“Truck brings us extra things,” he said. “We do small repair works for people in other villages to pay. You understand?”
Maric grinned. Costas and Lazar were smuggling goods right under the noses of the smugglers. They probably brought in alcohol and tobacco, the most likely currency in the village now that normal payment for work done had been suspended.
Maric was impressed with the way Costas kept the two men in the cab busy while Lazar showed him a hiding place in the back. The truck had a covered in deck, and Maric would be safe in the darkness until he decided to leave bail out into the forest. That would be somewhere along the 4WD track, but the men in the truck wouldn’t see him go.
Ten swaying minutes later, he felt the farm track change to the rutted 4WD track in the forest. He let the truck carry him until he was at the closest point to the new camp, and eased out from under the canvas.
