West and south of Bosnia lay the new Federated Republic of Yugoslavia — which was to say Serbia and a scattering of smaller states from Vojvodina in the north to Montenegro and Macedonia in the south. Of all the Yugoslav republics, Serbia had kept the closest semblance to the old Communist regime and had proven itself more than willing to keep fighting to maintain Serbian hegemony over the Balkans.
And squarely between the Federated Republic and Croatia lay tragic Bosnia-Hercegovina, a triangular block of mountainous land both shared and claimed by Croats, Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians. It was there that the Yugoslav civil war had been most savagely fought since early 1991, there that the world had first heard the sickening phrase "ethnic cleansing." Now Bosnia was being divvied up between the Serbs and the Croats, with eager help from Bosnian Serbs openly armed and supported by the remnant of the Yugoslav federation. Lately, Serbians and Croatians, after a period of halfhearted cooperation against the Muslims, had begun fighting each other again, squabbling over the dismembered corpse of Bosnia as the UN, NATO, and the United States all helplessly watched, proposed partition plans, and attempted to impose laughably short-lived truces. The resulting tangle of territories defined by ethnic groups, religions, and nationalistic loyalties made even the most convoluted gerrymanderings of political districts back in the States look tame by comparison.
Like many Americans, Murdock had for a long time been uncertain about just what role the United States should play in the Balkans, when he thought about it at all. On the one hand were the stories of the atrocities, especially those reportedly committed by the Serbs against the Muslims — stories of whole village populations rounded up, packed aboard cattle cars, and shipped to concentration camps where starvation, beatings, torture, and mass executions were being used to exterminate an entire people. Stories of children being thrown beneath tank tracks, stories of the wholesale slaughter of men and the systematic rape of women, in a campaign designed to empty entire districts for Serb occupation.
Stories, in other words, that sounded chillingly like another type of "ethnic cleansing" carried on by another supposedly civilized nation half a century earlier.
On the other hand, there was the feeling that the United States had no business getting involved in this quagmire. The animosities in this tortured hodgepodge of states and peoples went back a long, long way. Those mountains looming into the eastern sky had been bathed in blood time after time over the centuries. The anarchist who'd started World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand had done so on the anniversary of a Serbian defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. The Serbs still called the Bosniaks "Turks," bringing to mind the centuries of misrule by the Ottoman Empire. These people had long memories.
Could anything the United States did make any difference here at all?
Murdock didn't know… and, in fact, the politics of this war, the decisions in Washington that had brought him onto this beach, were not his concern. He and his men had a mission to carry out.
According to the briefing Third Platoon had received yesterday aboard the Nassau, this particular stretch Of Croatia, together with most of the former Bosnian territory inland, was now under the control of the Serbian Volunteer Guard — a local militia unit composed of pro-Serb Bosnians — and a Serbian motorized infantry brigade. The Serbs were trying yet again to seize Dubrovnik. When Yugoslavia had started breaking up in 1991, Croatia had grabbed all of the former Yugoslav naval bases save one, the Montenegran port at Kotor, sixty kilometers east of Dubrovnik. Now, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Republic was trying to get some of those ports back, as well as to seize the initiative in the squabble with Croatia over the Bosnian corpse.
A rusted wire fence marked the official boundary between Croatia and Bosnia, but since the entire area was under Serbian control at the moment, the border was not patrolled. After a careful reconnaissance, searching for mines, patrols, or automated sensors, the SEALs crossed the wire into Bosnia halfway between the village of Mjini and Cilipi International, the shut-down airport twenty kilometers east of Dubrovnik.
There'd been a number of SEAL ops into the Balkans in recent months, all of them highly classified, with missions ranging from scouting out antiaircraft batteries to pulling full recons on stretches of the Adriatic coast that might become landing beaches if the decision was made to send in the Marines. Blue Squad's orders this night were to slip ashore unseen, rendezvous at the St. Anastasias Dominican monastery with a local contact in the pay of the CIA, and collect from him a list of Serbian units in the area and their deployments. The information might — might — be useful soon, in the event that the President decided to punish Serbian aggression by ordering air strikes.
A spook job, then. The SEALs and the Company had a long working partnership, one begun during World War II between the SEALs' forerunners in the old Underwater Demolition Teams and the CIA's predecessors with the OSS. Though he'd been on plenty of intelligence ops before — maybe because he'd been on plenty of them before — Murdock didn't like this sort of mission. For one thing, the civilian agency rarely had its priorities straight. Agency suits were as likely to request some routine bit of intel-gathering that could as easily have been handled by satellite as they were to load the team down with a dozen conflicting mission requirements, an often deadly misuse of assets. For another, Langley too often showed a nasty tendency to regard combat teams as expendable.
Murdock did not regard his men as expendable. He'd argued hard against this mission when Captain Coburn, SEAL Seven's skipper, had asked him to take it on. In the end, he'd accepted it, though. While SEAL commanders were notorious throughout the Navy for their willingness to argue orders that they considered impossible or suicidal, mission refusals nonetheless didn't look good on a Team's quarterly reports. It could mean cuts in the NAVSPECWAR budget, and with the fierce competition for money in a fast-shrinking military, that could mean the end of careers, even the end of the Teams.
Beyond the wire border was a pine forest and the start of a steep climb up the southern flank of Gora Orjen, the forest-covered line of mountains that walled the coastal strip off from the interior highlands between Dubrovnik and Kotor. As Murdock started to climb, he wondered if survival of the SEALs had really come down to nothing more than this, the willingness of low-man-on-the-totem-pole officers like himself to accept dubious missions.
Well, at least his was not one of those Agency Rambo ops piggybacking everything onto the field team from beach reconnaissance to a hostage rescue. Blue Squad had a single objective this time, a single mission to carry out. According to Frank Fletcher, the Agency's combat team handler aboard the Nassau, it was a quick-in, quick-out piece of cake. Murdock would have felt more confident of that assessment had he not known that a hell of a lot of similar ops had gone badly wrong in the past. "A piece of cake," in Company parlance, all too often was rock-hard, fire-hot, and frosted with blood.
2
"Something's wrong, L-T. We got uninvited guests."
Murdock closed his eyes and gave an almost inaudible groan. "Okay, Razor. Let's hear it."
The squad had stopped for a rest and a position check just down the hill from the monastery, and Murdock had sent Razor and Magic on ahead to check out the objective. Now Roselli was back, and the expression on his painted face, just visible in the cloud-muffled moonlight, told Murdock that things were turning sour.