“Really, really wish…”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
“This is most irregular,” the second assistant to the ambassador from Georgia to Croatia moaned as he looked at the pile of blank passports. “Most irregular.”
“You want irregular?” Chief Adams sighed. “There’s an Albanian hit team on my tail. There’s a plane waiting to fly to the U.S. at the airport. And I’ve got to get from here to there, with these passports, and without getting killed. So just do me a favor and stamp the appropriate spots so I can get the hell out of here before we have a firefight in the embassy, okay?”
“You are joking, yes?” the official moaned.
“I am joking, no,” Adams said, picking up the official stamp. “So you want to stamp them or not? Your call. But I’m not leaving without them.”
“Mike, got the documents,” Adams said, leaning over to look out the window of the van. He was currently parked on Georgian territory, but the minute he pulled out he was going to be in Indian Territory. With no backup.
“Hold one,” Mike said. “Any sign of shooters?”
“Not so far,” Adams replied.
“Well, we’ll just have to go for the trailer.”
“IFOR duty desk, Sergeant Simmons speaking, how may I help you, sir or ma’am?”
Simmons was a reservist from Tennessee with the Fifth Regiment. All in all he’d much rather be back in Murfreesboro watching NASCAR, but duty in Bosnia these days was pretty tame. And the girls were plentiful and downright fine. Cheap too. There was worse duty. He’d already done one tour in the sandbox and that classifed as “much worse.”
“Sergeant,” a man said in a hoarse whisper. “Thank God I finally got to an American. I’ve got a real problem.”
“Sir, IFOR is not available to help distressed citizens…” the sergeant replied, sighing. Every time somebody lost a passport or got mugged or rolled or something, they fucking called IFOR. He flipped open his Rolodex looking for the number for the local police.
“It’s not that,” the man whispered. “I’m running from a group of Albanian terrorists. I’m an Albanian American, okay? My name’s Hamed Dejti. I grew up in San Diego, okay? I was down in Kosovo, I was visiting relatives, okay? I was in a café and I heard some of the men talking about bombing one of the IFOR camps. They had a car and the explosives but they were arguing about who was going to drive it, okay? I guess I left too fast, they must have suspected I heard them. I mean, they were talking about the stupid American that didn’t understand them, okay? I’ve been running from them ever since. I tried to get the border guards to help me…”
“Sir, are you sure about your information?” Simmons said, hitting the alert button and rolling out the duty guard platoon. This wasn’t a mugging. The voice had a definite American accent and the caller was clearly scared. He just wished he had a tracer circuit.
“They said they were going to strike one of the American camps,” the man said, more definitely. “They didn’t say which one. But that’s you guys, right?”
“Where are you right now, sir?”
“I’m at a payphone on Gajdekova Street,” the man said. “The only ones I know about are in a white Lada, parked a half a block from the Georgian embassy. I’m right across the street. I think they want to kill me, but there are too many guards around. I’ll wait here until somebody gets to me. I can’t even get to the American embassy, they cut me off! Please…”
“Sir, I’m scrambling the duty platoon right now,” the sergeant said, looking up as the duty officer walked in, scratching at his stomach under his uniform. “We’re on it.”
“Adams.”
“Cavalry is on the way. As soon as our friends are occupado, boogie. We’re only waiting on you.”
“They’re in the Georgian embassy,” Ctibor said, pointing with his chin.
Yarov leaned down to mask his face and looked towards the gates of the embassy. It was an old mansion with an iron spike fence around the courtyard and a baroque exterior. The guards didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the white Lada, but he could see the van parked by the side entrance.
“Well, we’re in place, but that’s only one of them,” Yarov replied. “We need them all.”
“Why did they go to the embassy?” Ctibor mused.
“Because they knew we couldn’t get at them, there,” Yarov said. “The rest might have already rendezvoused and this is a throw-away group. We’ll wait one night and if they don’t move…”
He looked up and shook his head as a group of Humvees, with the one in the lead sporting the blue light of an MP vehicle, raced down the road at high speed. The side of the Humvees were painted with the American flag and a large yellow blazon he didn’t recognize.
“Fucking IFOR,” Ctibor growled. “Fucking Americans. Why can’t they just go back to their own damned…”
He paused as the vehicles screeched to a stop and began disgorging troops in full body armor.
Yarov started to back away from the Lada and stopped as an M-16 was thrust in his face.
“Up against the wall, dirt bag!” the American private from the Fifth Cavalry screamed, grabbing his arm and turning him around. “Hands above your head.”
He twisted his head sideways and growled as the white van sedately drove out of the main entrance to the embassy. As it passed the street scene of American trooops rounding up “dangerous terrorists,” whoever was driving tooted their horn in farewell.
Fucking Americans.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Jenkins,” Mike said, picking up the phone.
The 757 was configured with a large passenger area in the rear and a small office compartment up front. Mike was currently in the office, discussing the recent mission with Vanner and Adams.
“This is Captain Hardesty,” the pilot said dryly. “You might want to know that we are now ‘feet wet’ over the Adriatic.”
“Thanks,” Mike said, chuckling. “Feet wet” was a military term for leaving an area of operations over the water. Dating back to the Vietnam War, it was the traditional call that the unit and aircraft were safe from interference by hostiles. “I’ll be even more happy when we’re feet wet over the Atlantic.”
“I’ll give you a call,” Hardesty replied. “We will, however, be refueling in England. One hopes that this charter will not cause inconvenient questions to be raised upon landing.”
“Unlikely,” Mike said, smiling. “I think that even if any questions are being raised, the British government is going to be more than willing to avoid them given some of the information we’ve probably acquired.”
“I’ve got at least one name from the British Foreign Office,” Vanner said, looking at his notes. “I haven’t translated the file, yet.”
“More than willing,” Mike repeated.
“I see,” Hardesty replied. “Very well. Flight time to Las Vegas with stops to refuel will be about twenty hours. You might want to get some rest. We’ll also be picking up a change of pilots in England. They’re… briefed.”
“Good to hear,” Mike said. “Talk later.”
“So far, we’re not getting real far on the data we picked up in Rozaje,” Vanner said. “The translation is going really slow. But there’s one bright spot. We don’t have their DVDs, but the video was stored on the computer and then the DVDs were burned from it. I’m going to run a file reconstructor on the data and see if we can find any bits from the previous videos. It doesn’t look like they cleaned the computer but the bits are going to be partial.”