"Sir!" The man snapped to attention, the rifle flicking from port arms to present arms with drill-book precision. "I recognize you, sir!"
"Good evening, Corporal. At ease, at ease. I'm just out for some fresh air."
"Yes, my General," the sentry said, relaxing only slightly.
"So. Quiet night?"
"Very quiet, sir." The sentry relaxed a bit more, enough to nod toward the lake. "I did see some lights out there… or I thought I did. They were too far away, though, for me to tell what they were, and they disappeared a few minutes later. I reported them and was told they were probably Albanian aircraft."
"No doubt. No doubt." Mihajlovic took the powerful 7x40 binoculars slung around his neck and raised them to his eyes, scanning the horizon slowly. There was little to see along the opposite shore of the lake now, with fewer lights than there were to the north and south. That patch of starlike lights almost directly opposite from the castle would be the Albanian village of Lin, just behind their border crossing at Cafasan. There was nothing else for the whole length of the lake until the village of Pogradec, twenty kilometers to the south, or the cluster of lights at Struga at the northern end of the lake.
After a moment, he lowered the binoculars, leaned against the cold, damp stone of the parapet, and helped himself to a Turkish cigarette. He did not offer the soldier one, of course. Too much familiarity between the officers and the men was not good for discipline.
"I see nothing now. Was it an aircraft, do you think? Or a boat?"
"I'm sorry, my General, but it was impossible even to tell that. I assumed that it was a low-flying aircraft. It was moving so slowly, it seemed very far away."
"Ah. Still, we've had some strange reports tonight from Ohrid Traffic Control," Mihajlovic said. He took a drag on the cigarette, and the tip flared a brilliant orange. "Something's going on over there. Radar jamming. Aircraft being scrambled. Lots of radio traffic between their military bases and Tirand. It is possible that you saw one of their aircraft moving against the mountains. Or a small boat patrolling their end of the lake."
"Could it have anything to do with us, General?"
"I very much doubt it." He laughed. "Most likely their radar net is down again and Tirand is getting panicky. But keep a sharp lookout nonetheless. Those people have no reason to love us and cannot be trusted. There is Kosovo, remember."
"Yes, my General." The man stiffened again to attention, boot heels clicking.
Kosovo, Mihajlovic reflected, was another of the Federation's restive republics, this one tucked in between Montenegro and Serbia in the north and Macedonia and northeastern Albania to the south. The cradle of Serbian civilization in the Middle Ages, and the center of their empire, Kosovo had later belonged to Albania, and today over eighty percent of its population was ethnic Albanian. In a region known for the long and bitter memories of its varied peoples, Kosovo was a festering wound that would cause more bloodshed one day.
All the more reason to reunite the Federation now under a strong and able hand.
"Carry on!"
"Yes, my General!"
It is for you, my Katrina, he thought, turning and walking away. We will have an end to the killing. It is just too bad that there must be more killing before we — and you — can find peace.
Doc pulled down his right steering toggle slightly, easing into a right-hand turn. Damn! The castle was reaching up for him right off the mountain, like it was trying to claw him from the sky.
Man, he must have overshot the DZ by a good five miles. It was these damned chutes, configured a bit larger than standard in order to support the heavier-than-usual weight carried by the SEAL jumpers. Once he'd lost his gear, there'd been no way to compensate for the greater lift. He'd known he was in trouble right out of the aircraft, when he'd yanked his rip cord and, instead of a satisfying crack-and-snap hauling him upright, there'd been a sickening flutter and the heart-stopping rush of a too-fast descent, spiraling dizzily toward the right. Looking up, he'd not been able to see the canopy well enough in the darkness to know what had gone wrong; the chute had opened at least partly, or he'd still be in free fall.
The danger was that his canopy might have either twisted about its middle, a condition called the "Mae West" because of the chute's resemblance to a huge brassiere, or curled up on one side or the other in what was known as a "cigarette roll." In either case, the recommended procedure was for the jumper to immediately activate the reserve chute.
But the reserve was smaller than the main and not designed for extended HAHO flight. It would never take him as far as Lake Ohrid, and Doc had no desire to sample the inside of an Albanian jail. He decided to buy some time by jettisoning his ruck early. He had lots of time — hell, it would take him a couple of minutes to fall thirty thousand feet even without a half-open canopy. He was dropping at about twenty meters per second… that gave him better than eight minutes. Plenty of time.
As soon as he'd unstrapped the ruck from his legs, then hit the emergency release, his fall had slowed dramatically. Working at the toggles, he could feel the chute responding now to his guidance, and when he unsheathed the flashlight from his vest pocket and turned it on the canopy, everything looked all right, at least so far as he could see. Possibly one side of his chute had rolled under, but the shock of dropping the gear had freed it.
The problem was that his angle of approach had been calculated on his weight plus the better than one hundred pounds he'd been carrying. Without the ruck he was seventy-some pounds lighter, and dropping along a corresponding shallower descent path. Unfortunately, he had nothing to go on for navigation except for his compass, and that only showed direction, not how far he'd traveled. When he finally dropped beneath the overcast, he saw that he'd overshot the DZ by quite a bit; he was still over the lake, but not by much… and that damned castle looked like it was going to do its best to take him out.
He had too much forward speed to simply dump air and drop. What he needed to do was pull a 180 before he crashed into the castle walls or into the mountain beyond, and get back where he belonged, out over the lake. And that was going to take some doing… especially if his chute had suffered any damage earlier.
He was across the beach now. Shit! There was a warm updraft coming off the land. It felt as if he were actually rising. Pulling harder on the toggle, he started to slip to the left. Too late. He was going to hit…
No… he was going to pass right over the damned place! He felt awkward, as though he had no control at all. It was damned frustrating, too. The castle was laid out below him exactly the way it had looked in those satellite photos, with a smaller, inner tower rising from the rear of a roughly oval walled court. With a properly working chute, he could have dropped in anywhere he pleased, touching down right atop one of those stone parapets if he'd wanted. Ram-air chutes gave a jumper unprecedented control and accuracy whenever everything went right.
But of course, in combat things never went right, not one hundred percent anyway, and that was why an op this complex was using the middle of the lake as a DZ, instead of down there inside the castle keep.
The scenery from up here was nothing less than magnificent, a literal bird's-eye view. Doc had read recently that the Albanians' name for their own country was Shqiperia, "the land of Eagles," and that the Albanians were Shqiptars, "the Eagle Men." Eagle Men, my ass, he thought, a little wildly under the surge of adrenaline coursing through his system. They ain't got nothing on me!