She gave me an amused smirk. “Oh, I don’t know. Some women might find him attractive.”
“Some women?”
“Blind ones might not notice, but the rest of us would probably say he’s pretty cute.”
I had to think about that a minute. I mean, get real. How can a six-foot-five, 240-pound former right tackle be called cute?
“So what do we know?” I finally asked.
Delbert rubbed his chin and said, “We know Sanchez’s team was the pick of the litter.”
“Right.”
Morrow said, “We know that all of a sudden nobody seems to know Terry Sanchez very well.”
I said, “Yeah, a little odd, isn’t it? All of a sudden, he’s a leper.”
We all thought about that, then Delbert said, “So, what’s on for this afternoon?”
“We’re going to Albania to visit a refugee camp.”
“Why? When are we going to see Sanchez and his men?”
“Look, Delbert, consider that it’s a near certainty that Sanchez and his team killed thirty-five men. Worse, somebody went around afterward and did the coup de grace, perhaps out of spontaneous rage, or perhaps in a more premeditated way to ensure there were no witnesses. Do we all agree with that?”
“Of course,” Delbert said, with Morrow nodding along in a very thoughtful way.
“We’ve got corpses, and we’ve got weapons, and we’ve got suspects in detention. What don’t we have?”
“Motive,” Delbert said.
“Right,” I said, playing the obnoxious law professor to the full hilt.
Chapter 7
The flight to Albania took about two hours. We had to wind down the coastline of Bosnia, then veer sharply to the left. Albania itself is a small place, very poor, filled with dilapidated Stalinist architecture, which never was known for its splendor or its charm, and lots of shabbily dressed people. The Albanians are called the Bird People because they live largely in mountains. They’re known pretty much throughout Europe as somewhat touchy folks, particularly since they have this quaint old custom, called a blood feud, which dictates that if anyone kills an Albanian, then the family of the victim inherits an obligation to start knocking off the killer’s family. Sometimes these blood quests pass down through five or six generations, and I figured there must be something in the mountain air, because to me that sounds an awful lot like West Virginia.
At any rate, aside from this sedulous custom, the Albanians are not known for a heck of a lot. They invented the necktie. They were led before World War Two by a guy named King Zog, who, as his name implies, was not your ordinary run-of-the-mill royalty figure, but a guy with a big handlebar mustache who rode around the country with bandoleers strapped across his shoulders, marrying exotic foreign beauties and doing pretty much what he wished. Then they were led, during the cold war, by a guy named Enver Hoxha, who was so obnoxiously paranoid that he built concrete pillboxes on nearly every single acre in the country and placed long upright poles in all the fields to keep assaulting helicopters or parachutists from landing. More bizarre still, he actually allied Albania with Red China, which had to be one of the most moronic geostrategic gestures in history. Not surprisingly, Albania ended up the poorest and loneliest country in Europe.
But, in spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, the Albanians are a fairly tough and hardy folk. They don’t mess with others, and they don’t expect to be messed with in return. They’re surprisingly hospitable folks, too. And brave and determined as well, which was partly the cause of the current difficulty, because the shaky history of the Balkans being what it is, lots of Albanians ended up living in other places, like Macedonia and Kosovo.
Kosovo is kind of a Serb’s Jerusalem, filled with old Orthodox shrines and historically significant places, and although only some 10 percent of the people who live there could claim even a drop of Serbian blood, selfish old Billy Milosevic had decided to rid the land of Albanians, either by killing them or driving them over the mountains into neighboring Macedonia or Albania.
We landed with a mighty series of whumps on a roughed-in airstrip about fifteen miles south of the Kosovar border. Once again, a humvee was standing by when we climbed off the plane, and a Special Forces major named Willis was waiting in the front seat to escort us to a refugee camp, inelegantly named Camp Alpha.
This wasn’t my first introduction to refugee misery. I’d seen similar sights after the Gulf War, when thousands of Kurds and Shiites fled south into Kuwait to try to escape the wrath of Saddam’s Revolutionary Guards. Delbert and Morrow, however, developed an instant case of the wide-eyes, as the troops call it. The wide-eyes are about 30 percent horror, 30 percent pity, and the rest pure guilt.
“You get used to it,” Major Willis said as we drove past row after row of hastily constructed tents, crammed with mostly old men, old women, mothers, and young children. There were very few young men, and many of those we saw were either wearing bandages or missing limbs. Everybody, young and old alike, looked gaunt, hungry, and unhappy. Judging by the smell in the camp, it seemed obvious that two things they were woefully short of were showers and toilets.
“How many are in here?” Delbert asked.
“We’re not sure,” our guide answered. “It kind of shifts from day to day. Sometimes it goes up by a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand.”
“How do you know how many to feed?” Morrow asked.
“The UN caregivers handle all that. There’s no science to it, though. They adjust up as a result of how many people are left in the chow line when the food runs out. You’ll meet the lady who’s in charge of all that. Later.”
We pulled into a small compound surrounded by barbed wire, with two armed guards at the front gate. They recognized Willis and immediately waved us through.
“Our training compound,” Willis announced.
We dismounted and walked into a large tent, where a mixture of Green Berets and Albanians in makeshift uniforms were running what appeared to be an operations center. Willis led us over to a table in the rear and offered us coffee, which we naturally accepted, because real soldiers live on coffee, and we didn’t want to be mistaken for lawyers or anything as shameful as that.
“This is one of three operations centers we’ve set up for training the Kosovar Liberation Army,” Willis said. “The KLA was already fighting the Serbs before NATO started its bombing campaign, but the Serbs rolled right over them. Frankly, the KLA was pretty small, since lots of Kosovar Albanians thought it was doing a lot more harm than good.”
“Why was that?” Morrow asked.
“One of those lamb-being-led-to-the-slaughter things. Like the Jews before the Second World War, you know, kind of hoping the wolf wasn’t really as bad as all that. Lots of Kosovar Albanians thought the KLA fighters were agitating Milosevic and his boys, so they just wanted ’em to stop.”
“Were they?”
“Nah. They were hardly more than a nuisance, but Milosevic was exploiting them to justify his ethnic cleansing. After what he and his thugs did in Bosnia, you wouldn’t think anyone would’ve fallen for his lies, but hope always springs eternal, right?”
“How large is the KLA now?” Delbert asked.
“Maybe five or six thousand, all told.”
“Only five or six thousand? That’s hardly a pinprick.”
“Right, well, the Serbs have been real selective in the way they’ve done their cleansing. About any Albanian male who looks old enough to hump a gun, they take ’em into the woods, shoot ’em, and bury ’em. Real practical, those Serbs. Guess they figure that if they wipe out this generation of Albanian men, they’ll get a bye on vengeance till the next crop gets old enough to fight. Anyway, we try to recruit whatever eligible survivors make it out.”
“That hard to do?” Delbert asked.
“Nope. Hard part’s keepin’ ’em here long enough to teach ’em a few things before they go runnin’ back into Kosovo to start killin’ Serbs. They’re pretty stoked up with hate when they get here.”