Specter

17

At the last possible moment, Murdock squeezed the left-hand Capewell release and yanked down. The chute snapped free on that side, billowing up and spilling its remaining air.

Murdock plunged into the water with a splash, bitterly cold, black water enveloping him as his rate of descent drove him down… down… still further down into the depths. The force of the landing tore the oxygen mask from his face. God, the water was cold. Despite his multiple layers, the water of that mountain lake was frigid. Then his equipment strap yanked at his harness, this time from above and behind, threatening to turn him head-down.

The pack included an inflatable rubber raft, a small one, just big enough to support one man and his equipment, and it had begun to inflate as soon as it hit the water. Still descending, Murdock twisted sideways in the water, and the strap was entangling him. Reaching behind his back, he found the gear release and squeezed it; with the jerk, the ruck broke loose, the strap trailing free in the water. His oxygen mask… where was his mask? Was it still attached? He fumbled with the right-side Capewell, trying to release the chute entirely. What he didn't need at the moment was to become entangled underwater in its shrouds. There! He was clear!

A pull ring at his waist inflated the rubber flotation jacket he wore over his combat harness. He estimated, from the pressure on his sinuses and ears, that he must have descended a good forty or fifty feet down before he finally started to rise again. Holding his breath despite the pounding in his chest, the growing, squeezing sensation in his ribs, Murdock kicked toward the surface, kicking… kicking… and then he broke through into blessed, cold air.

Even without his rucksack, Murdock was still heavily weighted down. His MP5 weighed two and a half kilos with a loaded magazine; he had lots more magazines tucked into pockets in his assault vest, not to mention radio, grenades, and at least five kilos more of sundry equipment. Even with the life jacket, each moment, each second brought him closer to being dragged under and drowned.

One of the first ordeals undergone by recruits at BUD/S training at Coronado involves dropping them into a nine-foot-deep tank of water with their hands and feet tied, requiring them to sink to the bottom, then push themselves off and back to the surface. After that, they learn tricks… like donning a face mask, or swimming the entire fifty-meter length of the pool, hands tied. The process is called "drown-proofing," and it is designed to strip recruits of the panic reflex that is the usual cause of drowning.

Despite the weight, Murdock stayed at the surface, kicking hard and moving his arms, treading water until he spotted his flotation pack a few yards away. Moments later, he was lying across the raft, savoring air and the lack of any need to move.

As he lay there, bobbing low in the water, he heard someone splutter and gasp for breath, not far to his left. Gently, he began kicking, propelling his ungainly life preserver toward the sound. Softly, he called out the password "Shadow."

"Bucephalus."

It was Nicholson — Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Eric "Red" Nicholson, of Gold Squad. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Swallowed a little water." He was shivering. Damn, we were loaded a bit heavy that time, weren't we?"

"We've done worse."

The difference was that training was always different from the real thing. There were no instructors standing by, ready to share the mouthpiece from their scuba tanks, no divers ready to go in and pull you out if you found yourself facing something you could not handle. Even on a mission, SEALs generally tried to stage a "dip test," dropping into a water tank with their full equipment loadout as a buoyancy test. There'd been neither time nor facilities for that luxury this time around. They'd just been lucky that the waters of the lake were as calm as they were.

Working quickly, Nicholson and Murdock strapped their flotation packs together, then got rid of all excess weight. They gathered in their parachutes, bundled them with their reserve chutes and harnesses, and let them sink. Their bailout bottles and masks — Murdock found his mask had snagged somehow beneath his reserve chute pack — went too, sinking into nine hundred feet of water. They freed their weapons, balancing them atop the float packs. After that, they drifted motionless for a time, huddling together for warmth, with Murdock continuing to show his flashing beacon, but turned so that it could not be seen from shore. After five minutes, two other SEALs — Frazier and Sterling — paddled up, giving the recognition sign. After another five minutes, no one else had shown up. By this time the whole team ought to be down, and hypothermia in the cold water was becoming a serious concern.

Side by side, the four SEALs began kicking their raft of inflated nylon bundles toward the shore.

General Mihajlovic had not been able to sleep. He liked Gorazamak, liked this mountain lake with its clear air and rugged, beautiful terrain. Years ago, he'd come here as a tourist. He and Katrina, his young wife, had stayed at the Mladinski Center, up in Ohrid, and the two of them had done some marvelous hiking in the federal park that enclosed most of the mountains and forest to the east.

That had been in 1979… or 1980? No, it had been the year before Tito had died, the year before the federation of republics that Tito had forged from the blood and agony of war had begun to unravel.

So much had changed in just fifteen years. A whole new world had come into being. And an old one had died.

He walked the stone parapets of the inner ward, a solitary watchtower overlooking the black waters of the lake. Blood and agony had returned to the Federation, despite the best efforts of Tito and everyone after him. Katrina…

In 1987, Slobodan Milosevic had become the leader of the Communist Party in Serbia, still a position of tremendous power despite the toppling of Communist regimes that had eventually reached even into the Kremlin. His public vision of a "Greater Serbia" had proven to be the trigger that had driven the two restive northern republics of the federation, Slovenia and Croatia, to elect non-Communist governments three years later, and to declare their independence. Within a year of that, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia had broken away as well. The Albanian population of Kosovo was restless, as always, and Bulgaria was again casting covetous eyes on Macedonia. The situation had been deteriorating faster than even the most gloomy of pessimists in Belgrade could have imagined.

Then, early in 1991, Serbian nationalists had staged demonstrations that verged on riots in several Croatian towns. They'd been deliberately incited by Milosevic's people, of course, with the aim of provoking either a pro-Serb military coup in Zagreb, or the implementation of martial law. When that failed, Serbia's state-controlled radio and TV stations had broadcast reports, all completely fabricated, that ethnic Serbians living in Croatia were being massacred, a prelude to reintroducing federal rule in the breakaway republic.

The plot had been badly mishandled. Those responsible had forgotten that many Serbs living in Serbia opposed the state as much as Croats living in Zagreb… and worse, that there were other forms of communication available besides the official news media, forms not under the state's control. The truth had gotten out, the clumsy lie had been revealed. A pro-democratic mob had besieged the TV studios in Belgrade, demanding that those at the station responsible for this blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion be fired. Milosevic had panicked and ordered the police to disperse the crowd. Hundreds had been arrested, and hundreds more badly beaten.

According to the official reports, only two had died in the riot that day, shot down outside the television studios when the police opened fire on the demonstrators. The actual number of fatalities, counting the casualties in Belgrade's back streets and those who had died in the SBD's interrogation chambers, had been higher than that. How much higher would probably never be known.

Damn it, Katrina hadn't even been involved. The shot that had struck her down hadn't even been aimed at her. She'd been sitting at a table in an outdoor cafe on Skadarska Street, and a stray bullet fired somewhere else in the city had found her, a senseless, random twist to the violence that flamed everywhere in Yugoslavia now, either openly, as in Bosnia, or quietly smoldering just beneath the surface.

Mihajlovic was determined to end that violence, one way or another. Milosevic was an idiot, pompous, strutting, narrow-minded, conscious only of his own power, alternately defying NATO and the West, then caving in to their demands. Yugoslavia needed a strong leader, one who had the full support of the Federation's 180,000-man, 2,000-tank army. Someone like General Vuk Mihajlovic.

He walked to the parapets of Gorazamak, wondering how quickly he should advance things. The extra troops he'd requested had arrived that morning. There was little more to be done here. The annoying thing was that there still was no word from Skopje. The Americans should have launched their assault of the airport by now. Their Delta Force was notorious for its speed of deployment, reaching anywhere in the world within a couple of days at the most. What was keeping them?

Perhaps what was needed was a higher level of visibility. And of urgency. He could have one of the hostages at Skopje shot. That would elicit a response. If necessary, the congresswoman and some of her aides could be paraded in front of the cameras. The thing could be staged so that it looked like Skopje.

A white flash caught Mihajlovic's eye… a splash, he thought, in the water almost directly below the castle. Lake Ohrid was known all over Europe for the size of its trout. That had been a big one.

When this was all over, it would be good to return here for some fishing. If he could just put those memories to rest.

The interior of the ward was brightly lit, but up here on the ramparts it was dark. A barely discernible shadow stepped around the corner of an inner wall, blocking his way.

"Halt!" a voice called out. "Who goes there?"

"Brigade General Mihajlovic."

"Advance and be recognized!"

Mihajlovic took the manual-prescribed two steps forward and stopped. By the light from below, he could make out the sentry's face now, a very young corporal from C Company. He was wearing the somewhat shabby uniform of a typical Macedonian militiaman, but his Automat M70A — a Yugoslav-manufactured, folding-stock version of the ubiquitous AK-47 — was in gleaming, parade-perfect condition.

"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!

As silently as a huge, gliding eagle, Doc swept over Gorazamak's outer walls, still turning to the left, still high enough that he was able to look down inside the enclosures. He could see men down there easily… a sentry by the front gate, two more men standing together on one of the highest of the inner parapets. Those two were almost lost in the darkness above the light-bathed courtyard below, but Doc caught the flare of a lit cigarette. He was still above the highest of the walls, though considerably below an array of UHF antennas and communications masts on the roof. If he tangled up in those…

But then he was safely past, still slipping left, sliding clear of the loom of the fortress. Now his only worry was slamming into the side of the mountain… or landing in the damned trees.

The mountain bulked above the castle's rocky perch like a solid wall, some of it sheer stone cliffs like the heights below the fortress, most steep and rugged but not impassable, blanketed in thick forest growth. There was lots of snow on the ground, more than there'd been in Bosnia. It reflected light enough from the castle that Doc could easily see the branches reaching up for him, just below his boots.

During the fighting against Communist guerrillas in Malaysia in the early 1950s, the British SAS had developed a new type of parachute insertion, one tailored for the thick forest and jungle of the Malay Peninsula, called "tree jumping." The idea was to deliberately land in the woods, with your chute snagging you far up at the top of the tree canopy, where you could use a long length of line to lower yourself to the forest floor.

The idea hadn't worked out well, and the practice had soon been stopped. Too many troopers had impaled various parts of their anatomy. Doc had a superb imagination… not to mention a thorough medical understanding of just what could happen to a man landing in the treetops. He kept pulling down on the left-hand toggle. Could he tighten his turn… pull it back over the lake?…

No way. He was heading south now, half a mile or more clear of the castle but dropping so fast with his turning maneuver that he didn't have a prayer of reaching the water. Quickly, he assumed the emergency tree-landing position legs tight together to protect his crotch; left arm over his eyes, left hand in his right armpit, palm out; right arm over left arm, with right hand in the left armpit, palm out; head cocked to the left to protect his face and throat…

He felt something brush along his left leg, snag at the shotgun strapped to his side… and then he was crashing down through branches in a series of jerks and jolts. Pain arced through his right leg like an electric shock. Shit! Then his canopy snagged hard and yanked him to a halt; a second later, his back slammed into the tree's trunk with a thump that left him stunned.

Doc held his tree-landing position until he'd stopped falling, then slowly relaxed. After the racket of his landing, it was almost blissfully quiet, except for the barking of a dog somewhere not too far off. The ground, he estimated, was thirty feet down. His right ankle was throbbing, whether broken or sprained, he couldn't tell yet. "The Eagle", he muttered softly to himself, "has landed. Almost."

And he didn't even have the climbing rope carried by those old SAS tree jumpers. There'd been line in his rucksack, but that was lying on a hillside somewhere in Albania right now, along with a flotation device, most of his shotgun ammo, and five hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammo for the 60-guns.

Shit, shit, shit, he thought, swaying slightly, then bumping again into the tree's trunk. Now what?

When they estimated they were a mile from the beach, they'd stopped, according to plan, waiting for another ten minutes. Though they were no longer showing beacons, which might have been visible from the castle at this range, the rallying point was well-enough defined by the lights from the castle that three more men were able to find them — Holt, Roselli, and Brown.

They swam the rest of the way in slowly, taking care not to break the surface with a carelessly kicking foot. They were almost certainly invisible from Gorazamak… but if they weren't, they would be no more suspicious than a mat of black, floating vegetation.

They didn't come ashore on the beach. There was too great a chance that they'd be observed from the walls above, even the possibility that it would be patrolled. Instead, the seven men aimed for the rocks south of the beach. The bottom came up swiftly to meet them there. Soon, their boots scraped against rocks, mud, and weed, and they crawled the last few yards on hands and knees through a thick wall of reeds, still shoving the raft before them.

"Shadow!" a voice called softly from the rocks, a welcome challenge.

"Bucephalus."

DeWitt and six more SEALs were already waiting for them at the rally point. Gold Squad's CO had splashed down closer to the shore than Murdock had, and some of the others — Mac, for instance — had come down just short of the shore. Only one SEAL was missing now, Doc Ellsworth, and he might be arriving at any moment.

The SEALs had just utilized two of their elements for their insertion, air and water. Quietly now, they began preparing to take on the land as well.