The Air Force special-ops squadron pilots who flew the Pave Lows, however, were used to making the impossible routine. Besides, it was widely acknowledged that nothing could excite a helicopter pilot. Chariot One hovered briefly, aligned north and south to give it some takeoff room, while a SEAL with a pair of Chemlites gave instructions from the ground. Then gently… gently… the big machine settled onto the flagstone pavement, the rear ramp already coming down.
"Let's get the hostages out of there," Coburn said.
Murdock was already pumping his arm up and down, signaling to DeWitt. "Go!" Murdock shouted above the whopping sound of the Pave Low's rotor. "Move! Move! Move!"
The line of former hostages darted out from the main building, doubled over low as they passed beneath the shining arc of the helicopter rotors, the line kept straight by SEAL flankers, who stood to either side with weapons pointed at the sky, waving them along. Escorted by a determined-looking young SEAL, Congresswoman Kingston was first up the Pave Low's ramp. Her chief aide was next, then Colonel Winters, his head wrapped in white gauze. He looked tired and haggard, but when he glanced up and saw Murdock and Coburn watching him, he grinned and gave them a jaunty thumbs-up.
"Thought you might like to know," Coburn said as the rest of the hostages began filing past. "A Delta detachment hit Skopje Airport two hours ago. They took down five tangos and secured the Olympic aircraft, just like clockwork. The flight crew was still being held on board. They're all safe. The Yugoslav Macedonian government forces are in charge now. I imagine the headlines tomorrow will explain how Macedonian troops successfully stormed the aircraft. Our State Department will want to use the incident to strengthen Macedonia's hand in this region."
"So everyone's accounted for then?"
"Everyone."
"Hey, L-T!" DeWitt trotted toward them from the keep. He was holding a sheaf of manila file folders and what looked like a couple of videotapes. "Oh, excuse me, Captain."
"No problem, Lieutenant," Coburn said.
"Whatcha got, Two-Eyes?"
"Scotty blew that safe we found in one of the rooms. Thought you might like a look."
The videotapes were unmarked, but Murdock imagined that they would be important, if for no other reason than that they'd been found in a safe. He accepted the folders from DeWitt and began leafing through them. Most of the papers they contained looked like records, pay vouchers, muster logs, the usual paraphernalia of any military unit, though the entries were made in the Cyrillic alphabet, and the language, Murdock thought, was probably Serbo-Croatian.
One manila envelope tied shut with string, however, contained a stack of 8x10 black-and-white photographs. Murdock shuffled through several of them, then handed the stack to Coburn. "I don't recognize any of these people, sir. Do you?"
"Can't say that I do. I imagine there are some folks back at Langley who could identify them, though." He tapped one of the photographs. "Especially this guy."
All of the photographs featured one particular man, white-haired, in his fifties, perhaps. He might have looked distinguished had he been wearing clothes; as it was, he looked ridiculous, and a bit sad. The photos showed him in a variety of positions with a number of other people, male and female. Whips, leather, and chains were in evidence as well.
"Blackmail, L-T?" DeWitt asked.
"These were in a safe?"
"Yup. In Mihajlovic's office."
"Blackmail, then. Or insurance." Murdock slipped the photos back into the envelope. He felt dirty, having handled them. "In any case, these will tell us who Mihajlovic's man in the Greek government is. He had to have someone there to arrange for the DEA to be infiltrated the way it was. You know, at one point I thought Mihajlovic hijacked that plane in response to our op at the monastery. But he's had this under way for a long time."
Coburn accepted the files from Murdock. "It was probably coincidence that Mihajlovic showed up at the monastery. But I gather the intel boys have quite a bit of material on him. He was ambitious, probably had his eye on a seat in the Yugoslav parliament. Maybe he was aiming higher than that."
"Was he going to use the hostages to bargain with us?" Murdock asked. "Or was he going to stage a faked rescue, be a hero?"
"Maybe these papers will tell us. It's not really our business, though, is it? Our people were being held against their will, maybe being used as a part of Mihajlovic's power games. They could have been killed… and if things had gone bad, we could have ended up with World War III right here. Your people did an excellent job, Lieutenant. You did an excellent job."
"Thank you, Sir."
The last of the hostages had vanished up the Pave Low's ramp, which slowly closed after them. The aircraft paused there a moment, rotors spinning faster, and then the SEAL with the light sticks signaled and the machine raised itself, very slowly, off the ground. Moving up and a little forward, it cleared the castle's north wall with fifteen feet to spare, then banked sharply away toward the lake.
The second Chariot came in hard on the heels of the first, settling to the pavement. Almost the moment its ramp touched the pavement, four SEALs holding a stokes stretcher hurried across from the castle tower.
"Excuse me, Sir," Murdock said.
He trotted over to the medical team. Doc was lying in the stretcher, looking haggard, his face almost unrecognizable beneath the smeared greasepaint. "Damn it, Doc," Murdock said. "You're not supposed to be a patient."
"Hey," Doc replied grinning. "If God had meant us to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, he'd have seen to it that the damned things never got off the ground."
Murdock didn't want to hold up the line. "See you on board, buddy."
"Sure thing, L-T."
Four more SEALs were carrying another Stokes out of the tower now, the motionless form inside wrapped head to toe in a dark blue blanket. SEALs never leave their own behind. Never.
"The boys're ready to mount up," Mac said, materializing at Murdock's side.
"Let's get the hell out of Dodge, Mac."
Minutes later, Murdock was aboard the Pave Low as the special-ops helo lifted up out of the courtyard, banked over the northwest wall, and set a course west for Albania and, beyond that, the waters of the Adriatic.
Doc's Stokes had been slung in a rack designed to carry medevac stretchers. Murdock leaned over the injured SEAL.
"You going to be okay?"
"Ah, sure, Skipper. Just a sprain. You don't think a little thing like that'd keep me away from a party, do ya?"
"Not you, Doc. But you had us worried. I thought you'd gone AWOL. We were taking bets on whether you'd shacked up with some local girl or with a sheep."
"Shit, L-T. Don't lay money on the sheep. You know I never do sheep unless they're really good-looking."
"Good-bye, Macedonia," Roselli said. He was standing nearby, leaning against the Pave Low's fuselage and staring out through one of the few side windows. "Shit, L-T, look at 'em burn!"
Murdock joined Roselli, peering aft. The Pave Low was now well out over the lake, and he could see the eastern shore all the way from the castle to the city of Ohrid, in the north. A good third of that line was dotted with orange points of light, the funeral pyres of burning vehicles. He couldn't see the attack aircraft that had wreaked that destruction, of course, any more than he could see the Navy Tomcats that would be flying a protective umbrella over the Pave Lows all the way back to San Vito. The scene looked deceptively peaceful from here.
He couldn't see the castle either, or the two Achilles Pave Lows. The SEALs of First and Second Platoon would hold the perimeter until both Chariots were well clear, and then they would board the last two choppers and extract as well. They would leave the fortress of Gorazamak behind them untouched, the explosives Scotty had rigged in the ammo storage area disconnected; over forty JNA prisoners were locked up inside the keep, and indiscriminate slaughter was not part of the SEAL repertoire.