From here, if you craned your head all the way back, you could just see the edge of the castle wall rising from the top of the cliff. The sky was lighter now with moonrise, and the overcast had given way to the scud of broken, patchwork clouds, now revealing, now concealing the stars.
"All I vant is your blood," Magic Brown intoned in low and sepulchral tones, looking up at the castle silhouetted against the ominous sky.
"Wrong country," Papagos said quietly, and a little nervously. "You want Romania." He pointed north. "That way."
"Yeah, I always knew you were a blood-sucker, Magic," Sterling said.
"No, man," Higgins said. "That's Doc. Where the hell is our platoon vampire anyway?"
"If I know Doc," Roselli said, "he's making it right now with some Albanian shepherdess."
"Yeah," Magic added. "Or her sheep."
Their voices were barely audible, their humor tight and hard beneath pre-combat nerves. Murdock considered ordering them to be quiet — they were breaking mission routine — but decided to let it go. They couldn't possibly be heard more than a few feet away.
And it sounded like they needed to talk about Doc.
Damn. It might have been easier if they knew what had happened to him. In over thirty years of operations, SEALs had never left a man behind, and no SEAL had ever been taken prisoner. Not knowing whether he'd died somewhere in Albania or made it as far as Lake Ohrid but come down in the wrong place made it worse. If he was still out there somewhere, alive but wounded, with his radio out…
"Papagos," he whispered sharply. "Roselli. Go do it. And keep it quiet. The rest of you, with me. We've got some climbing to do."
"Yes, sir."
"Aye, aye, Skipper." He watched as they slipped into darkness.
"Sst. L-T."
Murdock looked back over his shoulder. Mac was signaling. Red had reached the top of the cliff and secured his end of the line. It was time to go.
"Let's move out," he told the others.
He'd already decided that he would be the first up the cliff after Nicholson.
Sergeant Jankovic stepped out of the castle's main building, paused for a moment on the stone steps outside, then started walking across the outer courtyard toward the long, low buildings inside the west wall that served the garrison as barracks. He would start his night rounds there.
Jankovic had arrived at Gorazamak only that afternoon and been dismayed to find out that he'd been assigned the two-to-six watch that very night. He well understood the need for nighttime sentry duty — any hypothetical enemy was not going to be so considerate as to delay his attack until dawn — but he could have wished for a little time to get acclimated to the new place. This Ottoman monstrosity filled him with a deep foreboding — what he'd heard Americans liked to call "giving someone the creeps." The Ottoman Turks had had so much blood on their hands. It was easy to imagine these rough, brown stones crying out for more.
He was still recovering from that night of blood and terror on the beach near Dubrovnik. His personal report to Mihajlovic had been concise and factual. He was pretty sure that that was why the general had asked if he would like temporary assignment to this operation.
At least, that was part of the reason. Some part of Jankovic thought that the larger reason was that he'd encountered what were probably American commandos at Dubrovnik, and Mihajlovic seemed obsessed with the idea that those same commandos might attempt an assault here. Of course, they shouldn't know yet that their politician was being held here. Still, Jankovic was not at all convinced that the Americans hadn't somehow found out that this was where they were keeping her. Their spy satellites…
Jankovic glanced up, uncomfortable, and stared for a moment at low-drifting clouds and brilliant stars. He'd heard that the American satellites could see in the dark, could read a newspaper over a man's shoulder, could eavesdrop even on a whispered conversation. Such powers were awesome, and terrifying.
He looked down at the initials tattooed into the back of his hand. Only Solidarity Can Save the Serbs.
Jankovic had seen and done terrible things in the past few years, things he was not proud of. At first he'd taken part because he believed in the holy war for homeland and for brother Serbs. Then he'd taken part because not doing so would have marked him.
But God in heaven, how could he continue? Stories kept circulating about Muslim or Croat atrocities against Serbs… but he'd learned to distrust camp talk and official propaganda both. He had seen the concentration camps at Manjaca and Kereterm, however, and had a good idea of what went on there, even if the details were never openly discussed. He'd heard screams, seen the bodies stacked in heaps behind a tool shed. And he'd heard of indescribable obscenities… made all the worse because the people he'd heard them from were boasting at the time. Maybe that was camp talk too, but he doubted it.
He'd seen the look in the boaster's eyes, and there were some stories too horrible to be fiction.
Would solidarity save the Serbs from the Americans, when they came?
They would come, Jankovic had no doubt about that. Mihajlovic was holding their people in that stone tower somewhere and Jankovic had no doubt at all that the Americans would find them with their magical technology… and come.
The only question was when.
The Americans could be out there right this moment, watching him through a sniper's nightscope. The thought made his skin crawl, and he hurried his steps across the compound.
Roselli adjusted the gain on his NVDs. The guards had started a small fire, and the glare tended to wash out the image in his night goggles when he looked toward it. It was the same four men, all sitting together now, backs to the night, hands to the fire, and paying no attention at all to their surroundings. Sloppy, sloppy…
He was just glancing at his watch when he heard a click in his Motorola's earpiece, followed by Murdock's voice. "Alex Three, this is One. In position. Over."
That meant that the SEALs in the L-T's group had made it up the cliff and were waiting outside the castle's walls.
He was so close to the four guards that he didn't dare speak in reply. Instead he reached up and pressed the squelch button three times, then twice Alex Three, okay.
"Three, One. Alex Two in position," the voice said. "Your show, Three. Over."
Again, he pressed the squelch button three times, then twice Alex Three, okay.
There was no use waiting any longer. Roselli disliked firing on men from ambush, especially these men who obviously didn't have the faintest idea about what they were doing. One of those people down there, he remembered, was little more than a kid.
A kid who was on the wrong side in a shitty war… and he should have known the risks when he first picked up an AK to play soldier with his big brothers. That was part of the trouble with the world today, Roselli thought. Too many child-soldiers all over the fucking planet. He pulled a flash-bang from his thigh pouch, pulled the pin, let fly, ducking as he did so behind the shelter of the boulder.
19
Flash-bangs had originally been developed by the German GSG-9, a weapon in their war against international terrorism. The SEALS, Delta, the SAS, and a few other special-operations units had picked them up since. A cardboard tube filled with five separate charges timed to burst in rapid succession, the flash-bang did exactly that — detonate with a chain of flashes that were momentarily blinding, and with a savage concussion that could leave the target helplessly stunned.
The grenade landed just short of the fire. Roselli heard someone shout… and then the night was filled with crackling thunder and shrill screams. As the echo of the final blast was still ringing in the air, Roselli and Sterling rose together atop the boulder. The four Serb soldiers sprawled in a circle about the fire, two lying flat, two on hands and knees. Roselli saw the black trickle of blood from the ear of one, from the nose of another.