" 'Someone will do something'. " Thorpe shook his head. "Right."
"I work for Congress," Parker said, "and the Pentagon does listen when the purse strings get tightened. This won't be swept under the rug."
"I think you're wrong about that. Maybe this whole thing wasn't to test the SEAL-Delta working relationship but rather the Hummingbird missile. Did you know it was going to be tested? You were in missiles, if I remember rightly."
Parker's eyes narrowed. "I knew the Hummingbird was an option available to the assault force."
"How much does one of those things cost?" Thorpe asked. "A million? Two?"
"Actually just under a million a pop," Parker answered, "but they're reusable — if they're not destroyed during the mission — with an estimated life of fifteen launches per. So that cuts down the cost considerably per launch."
"And you're telling me testing that wasn't the primary purpose of this exercise?" Thorpe asked once more. "Especially after they used the cruise missiles last year in the Sudan and Afghanistan?"
"Listen, Mike, there's not a—"
"I've heard it all," Thorpe said. "You think they assigned you to the slot you're in because they liked you? They did it to get you out of the way. We made some bad enemies—"
"Who were exposed," Parker noted.
Thorpe laughed. "Yeah, but how many of them are in jail? They're still all out there, doing their thing." He opened the door to the van. "I've got to go. Good luck with your report."
Chapter Three
Fadeyushka pulled his left leg out of the swampy mud and found his boot had not come up with his foot. He cursed and fell to his knees in the dank, cold water, his fingers frantically tearing into the ooze, searching for the boot.
He looked over his shoulder, through the dead trees and stunted growth, in the direction he had come. Nothing. He felt worn leather then and pulled. The boot came loose grudgingly, with a sucking noise, water pouring out of it. He took a moment to catch his breath.
He was on the north bank of the Sava, the river dividing Croatia from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The terrain was flat, wet, and crossed by innumerable streams coming from the hills to the north. Stunted pine trees covered the few dots of land that were above water. It was totally inhospitable terrain.
Most of the bridges over the Sava had been destroyed in the last five years of fighting. Fadeyushka had swum the river the previous evening under the cover of darkness, almost being swept away by the strong current. Once on the Croatian side he had stolen an old bike from a shack and ridden west, following the river.
Sarajevo lay a hundred and fifty kilometers to the south. It had taken Fadeyushka five days to walk the distance, hiding during the day, traveling only at night. Weaving his way through the hodgepodge of sectors controlled by warring factions and avoiding the UN IFOR — Implementation Force — roadblocks that tried to keep those factions from each other's throats.
Fadeyushka's eyes darted about, searching as he remembered the history of the past few years that had brought him to this place, events that he had had nothing to do with, but which had swept him up in their own inexorable tide.
He had been a schoolteacher when it all began. April 1992. The sixth. Fadeyushka knew the date as everyone in this part of the world because it was the moment when his life changed even though he didn't know it at the time. On that date, Serb gunmen opened fire on peace demonstrators in Sarajevo, killing five and wounding over thirty. The once-proud city, host of the Winter Olympics in 1988, fell into a four-year-long siege. By the end of June 1992, the UN Protective Force, UNPROFOR, took over the Sarajevo Airport trying to keep the city alive via an airlift of essential supplies as the Serbs blockaded all ground routes in and out.
The Serbs — and the Croatians, Fadeyushka had to admit— had picked their time to act with shrewdness. The world had been focused on the Persian Gulf War and reaction was very slow. The UN had expanded its efforts in putting the force into the Middle East to counter Saddam Hussein. Ethnic fighting in the Balkans had been far from the headlines and thus the world's interest. It took years of atrocities for the UN and NATO to respond in ever-increasing increments, but never strong enough to achieve any sort of lasting peace.
Even the presence of UN peacekeepers did little to stop the mayhem. In January 1993 the deputy prime minister of Bosnia was pulled out of a UN car and shot to death by Serb militia. Fadeyushka knew these dates by heart, having watched his countrymen die. In 1994, a mortar attack on a marketplace in Sarajevo killed sixty-eight and wounded over two hundred. Footage of this attack briefly made the lead story around the world and NATO issued its strongest warning ever, demanding that the Serbs pull their heavy weapons back from Sarajevo.
While those highly publicized attacks were going on, a more insidious action was taking place. Ethnic cleansing, a rather neat term in Fadeyushka's opinion for murder on a large scale. Muslim versus Christian. Serb versus Croat. The borders in this part of the world had been drawn by outsiders after the First World War and then again after the Second World War, with little regard to culture or the people who actually lived there.
The Soviet Bloc had kept things under relative control until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. For three years a tenuous peace had been maintained until 1992. For years, fierce fighting swept back and forth across the rough terrain of the Balkans. Even Fadeyushka had been sucked into the war, being drafted into a local militia unit and marched south to help protect his brethren in one of the many small, unprotected towns outside Sarajevo.
Finally, in 1995, even NATO had had enough and surgical air strikes against Serb sites were conducted. Force was what it took to bring the Serbs to the peace talks. On the fourteenth of December, 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed. Over sixty thousand NATO troops under a UN mandate moved into the area to enforce the Accords. The IFOR, Implementation Force, separated the area into three regions and maintained a tenuous peace.
At least a couple of years. Four months ago, things had begun to unravel. As NATO and the UN went through a period of self-questioning about whether to keep the IFOR in place, Serbian Muslims infiltrated Croat Christian havens on hit-and-run strikes, trying to achieve through terror what they hadn't been able to by direct force of arms. Ethnic Albanians used the opportunity to try to break away in Kosovo to the east and the Serbs turned their wrath on them. The entire situation deteriorated rapidly.
Terror. Fadeyushka now knew the meaning of that word well. He emptied the water and mud out of his boot and tugged it on. What caused him to hurry was the person who had shot the front tire of his commandeered bicycle as he'd made his way down a winding dirt road a few miles to the east twenty minutes ago. The round had blown out the tire and knocked Fadeyushka off the bike. He'd grabbed his AK-47 and scrambled to his feet, only to have another round hit the stock of the gun, smashing it from his hands.
A strangely accented voice had called out in Russian, ordering him to run. He'd paused and a bullet had hit him in the left shoulder, spinning him completely about. Like the previous two, Fadeyushka never heard the shot. The voice again ordered him to run.
And he had. He hadn't stopped until now. He hoped whoever had shot at him had been left behind, but he couldn't count on it. He got the boot on and, breath regained, he once more began to run at a steady pace.
Before, every time he had tried to turn left or right, a bullet had hit a tree or splashed into the water in front of him, corralling him back in the direction his unseen pursuer wanted him to go in, following the swampy bank of the Sava River into even more desolate territory. As he'd run, he'd wrapped a makeshift bandage around his shoulder, but the cloth was soaked through now and Fadeyushka felt faint from the loss of blood.