Specter

18

All of the SEALs had studied both maps and satellite photographs of the stretch of lake shore directly beneath the castle, knew it well enough to — literally in this case — find the place in the dark. While the rest of the SEALs began unpacking their assault gear, Roselli and Sterling pulled the protective tape off their HKs, cleaned the weapons, and snapped in thirty-round magazines. They broke two sets of NVDs out of their waterproof cases, left all of their extra ammo and gear with the rest of the team, and slipped off into the darkness, moving uphill.

Now, twenty minutes later, they lay among the rocks on the east side of the coast road, using their night-vision gear to peer down on four soldiers standing guard at the entrance to the approach road north of the castle. The soldiers, completely unaware of the black-garbed commandos watching them from the blackness overhead, were not particularly alert. One was pacing back and forth at the entrance to the main road, nervously looking up and down the highway as though he expected an assault to come from the north or the south, rather than from across the lake. The other three seemed to be ignoring the first, sitting and talking, smoking pungent cigarettes and drinking something that was almost certainly not coffee from a couple of thermos bottles stashed in a rucksack.

Roselli wished that Stepano was with him to translate their conversation. Steponit, however, was on another reconnaissance, along with Red, Scotty, and the 2 IC. The two SEALs listened long enough to satisfy themselves that the sentries here were running on routine, that there was no alert out, no indication that the SEAL platoon's arrival had been detected. The nervous guy by the road was a kid, a teenager, and had the look of a new recruit taking his duties very seriously indeed. The other three, probably seasoned campaigners, were passing around a thermos and telling one another stories. From the gestures one was making with his hands and the laughs and declamations being made by the others, the subject was the favorite topic of all soldiers and sailors on duty late at night with no superiors listening in.

Soldiers' bull sessions, Roselli thought, were probably universal, the same no matter what the language or the nationality.

Quietly, he laid a hand on Sterling's arm and squeezed. Like shadows, the SEALs backed away from their observation nest above the storytellers. It was time to get back to the others.

During their sweep of the area, Roselli and Sterling had managed to verify by Mark I eyeball much of the data already acquired through satellite photos. Spy satellites were incredible reconnaissance tools, allowing you to see fantastic detail from a hundred miles up. Many in the Pentagon and in the U.S. intelligence community swore by the high-tech voyeurs, claiming that the age of HUMINT, of intelligence acquired by human agents on the ground, was all but dead.

Few SEALs thought that way, however. There were still too many things that satellites couldn't do… like keep a particular sentry under observation for hours at a time, or catch the pungent whiff of a Russian-made cigarette in the darkness. Checking out an objective personally taught you things about the target, and about the enemy, that you never could have gleamed from the bright, flat, and sterile slickness of a photograph.

The highway, Roselli and Sterling had discovered, was not patrolled or covered by either ambushes or electronic surveillance for at least a hundred meters in either direction. Four men were standing guard at the cutoff road winding sharply up the mountain northwest of the castle. That was a new twist, one added since the last set of satellite photos had been faxed across to the Jefferson, and reason enough for the manned sweep.

What any raid or hostage-rescue assault such as this one required more than anything else was intelligence. How many soldiers occupied the castle? How many were on duty… and where were the off-duty troops quartered? Were there other approaches besides the road leading up to the front gate? Were there machine guns or other heavy weapons on those parapets, or were the troops carrying small arms only? Were there reinforcements closer than the air base at Ohrid?

Many of those questions could be answered by satellite, but not all, and even the best orbital reconnaissance gave, not fact, but probability and guesswork. And the most important questions for this kind of mission could not be addressed by satellite at all. Where were the hostages being kept? Were they being held in the same room, or were they dispersed throughout the objective? How heavily were they guarded? Were they all at Gorazamak, or might some of them have been taken elsewhere for added security?

Roselli and Sterling approached the SEAL base camp south of the beach, a rocky niche tucked away behind boulders and pine trees, close enough to the water that they could hear the steady lap-lap-lap of the waves against the shore.

DeWitt's team was scouting the approaches to the castle itself. The remaining SEALs had been stowing their gear and laying out the markers, tetrahedral reflectors that would show up on a properly set multi-mode radar like tiny suns and guide in Alexander's second element. A four-man cordon had been thrown out around the beachhead, to give early warning of the approach of hostiles, And one man, Doc, was still missing.

Murdock was with Higgins and Kosciuszko, crouched over the sat-comm unit, speaking quietly into the microphone. "Copy that, Olympus," he was saying as Roselli and Sterling drew close. "We'll try to do our best to have things quiet by the time they get here. Alexander out."

"Skipper," Roselli said as Murdock handed the microphone back to Higgins. He slid the NVDs off his head and switched them off to save the batteries. "We're back."

"Let's have it, guys."

Quietly, turning a red-filtered flashlight on one of the NSA maps of the area faxed to them earlier from Washington, Roselli showed Murdock where he and Sterling had been. "Four sentries here," he said, pointing. "This part of the road is clear… and over here too. We made it as far up the hill above the main road as this part of the cliff. No other hostiles. No alarms. And no sign that we're expected."

"Okay," Murdock said, nodding. "Olympus says that Chariot is set to ride, but Achilles is late."

"Damn. How late, L-T?"

"We won't know until they get to San Vito, will we?" A grim smile showed in the darkness. "But we're to Charlie Mike."

Continue mission. "I'd damn well say we'd better. Shit, L-T, we're close enough to smell the tangos. If they told us to abort and extract, I'd be damned tempted to develop fucking radio trouble."

"You and me both, Razor." A rustle in the vegetation upslope, and the softly whispered sign and countersign, warned of DeWitt's return.

"Hello, L-T," DeWitt said softly. "You guys here having a picnic on the beach?"

"Pull up a rock, Two-Eyes. Whatcha find?"

DeWitt took the NSA map, pulled a pencil from his vest, and began pointing out the route his patrol had taken. "Two decent approaches, L-T, unless you're partial to going up the access road?"

"I don't think this time."

"Thought not. Okay, we got as far around the front of the castle as here. The structure really is built into the side of the mountain. The south slope isn't too bad… about thirty percent up through here, and we could climb that without too much difficulty. If we work our way up this cliff here, on the southeast corner, we could climb this rock face, fix lines to the edge about here, and rappel onto the outer ward wall."

"That's fine," Murdock said, studying the map. "Except that we'll be coming over the east wall, which seems to be where they expect us."

Gorazamak's weakness was the cliff rising behind its east wall, a tactical disadvantage that hadn't worried the Ottoman ruler who'd built it since the tower was little more than a police outpost on the road to Korc, not a bastion expected to withstand a siege. The bad guys inside could be counted on to have the wall beneath the eastern cliffs thoroughly covered with fire.

"Right. Well, the other approach could be tricky with all the ice and snow, but it's up this way." He pointed to a narrow ravine northwest of the outer castle wall and south of the access road. A stone bridge crossed the ravine just outside Gorazamak's gate tower. "Red says he could scale that, no sweat, and drop lines to the rest of us. The ravine is pretty narrow in through here, more like a chimney than anything else. We climb up and come out by the bridge."

"Right outside the main gate?"

"Two possibilities. We take out the guards at the front gate quietly and walk right in. Or we climb the wall here… or here. The gate tower sticks out from the wall about a meter or so. We could pull a ninja-of-the-night stunt and go right over the top without being seen. Advantage too is that the power lines for the place go in right here, next to the gate."

"They'll have a generator."

"Which probably hasn't been used for a while. It'll take time to find the damned thing and crank it up."

Murdock nodded. Roselli could almost hear the wheels turning. When the L-T had first taken command of Third Platoon, Roselli had had his doubts about the man. Shit, the guy was a ring-knocker, an Academy grad, and though that kind of crap might sit well with the bean-counters at the Navy Department, it didn't mean a hell of a lot in the field. Men had died in combat because their officers were too tight-assed to blend well with their men.

The Teams were just that… teams, and a man's background or wealth or family or political connections didn't cut him a damned thing when it came to that special warrior's brotherhood shared by all who'd gone through BUD/S and won their Budweisers.

Murdock was different. He cared for his men, loved his men… and they loved him back. It wasn't a thing that most SEALs could put into words; hell, they wouldn't even try. But Roselli had seen the look in Murdock's eyes when they'd reached the beach earlier and confirmed that Ellsworth was missing. At that moment, Roselli had known that he would follow Murdock anywhere, up the face of a sheer cliff, into a storm of automatic-weapons fire, straight into Hell if he had to. Because he cared for his people.

"You know," Murdock said softly, "it's just possible that we could manage both approaches. How about if we try this?"

It had taken Doc about ten minutes to get down out of that damned tree, but he'd finally made it. While he didn't have any climbing line on him, he had perhaps the next best thing. Carefully, he'd reached up to his shoulder and grabbed the rip cord for his reserve chute, yanking it out and down. With a rustle of nylon, his reserve had spilled from the pack and dropped toward the ground. Next, Doc had unlocked his harness quick release, and then, grasping hold of his reserve chute's risers, he'd unsnapped his harness. His chute had slipped a foot or two and the branches supporting him had creaked and swayed alarmingly, but he'd managed to slide all the way down the reserve, landing in the snow at the base of the tree with an agonizing thump a moment later.

God, his ankle hurt. First things first, though. Swiftly, he broke out his primary weapon, fished a magazine from his load vest, and snapped it home. The HK CAW had originally been developed as a contender in the U.S. military's search for a combat shotgun. It looked more like a gadget out of science fiction than a serious weapon, all clean lines and sharp angles and with a bull-pup receiver in the butt, set behind the hand grip. The ten-round box magazine could be emptied one shot at a time, or with a twice-per-second cyclic that was death incarnate at close quarters.

Too bad most of his ammo was gone now. He had just five loaded magazines for the thing tucked into various pouches in his vest — four after he'd untaped the weapon and snapped a mag into the receiver. Fifty rounds was enough to do some serious hurt, but when they were gone Doc would be left with his Beretta secondary, and four clips. Alone, he wouldn't last long.

Weapon ready, he checked his ankle. He was pretty sure from the feel of the thing that it was sprained rather than broken. Gingerly manipulating it, he felt no crepitus — the grinding sensation of two jagged ends of bone grating across each other — and he could still flex it up and down, though he couldn't move it back and forth. With care, he could put weight on it; it hurt like hell when he tried, but he could manage it. He could feel the ankle swelling inside his boot.

Well, there was nothing for it then but to strap himself up and make do. He didn't remove the boot; if the ankle ballooned too much while he had it off he'd never get the thing back on afterward. Instead, he unlaced the boot, then relaced it as tightly as he could manage. After that, he found a branch — there were plenty lying nearby that had fallen when he'd hit the tree — and fashioned a splint out of two inch-thick sticks and a roll of gauze from his first-aid kit. Could he walk? He tried a mincing step, using his CAW as a crutch. Shit… he could walk, but not very well, and anything requiring climbing or jumping was definitely out. Facing south, he could make out a bit of a glow beyond the trees where the castle lay about a half a mile distant. The dogs were still barking.

His options were limited. He had his tactical radio, of course, but he was out of line-of-sight from the rest of the team and they might not hear him. Even if they did, he couldn't risk calling them until after the raid had started and then they would be too busy to bother with him. So he could sit tight and call in a rescue chopper once the second-wave elements arrived, but that could evolve into a pretty complicated rescue mission in its own right, especially if hostiles were running through these woods. He could hobble back down to the beach and signal for a pickup there.

Or he could make for the castle.

James Ellsworth, Doc to his friends, did not consider himself to be a hero. When he'd joined the Navy five years ago, he'd been a simple, relaxed, laid-back kid from Tennessee, best described by the kids in his boot company as "Old Mellow." He'd volunteered for BUD/S because Joe Saraglio, a good friend at his first duty station, had done so. It had sounded like a lark, learning to scuba dive and to blow things up. Certainly it would be more fun than bedpan duty and morning reports on a naval hospital ward.

One of the first things he'd learned at Coronado was that laid back and relaxed simply didn't cut it. A dozen times during Hell Week he'd come that close to quitting… and rejoining the sane world of showers and clean uniforms and six or eight hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

Why hadn't he quit? Even now, two years later, he wasn't sure. Part of it, at least at first, had been the knowledge that he'd already signed for an extension to his original four-year hitch so that he could take SEAL training. If he left, he was still obligated, and he would be facing ten years of bedpan duty instead of four.

But gradually, he'd realized that there was more to it than that. He loved the Teams, loved the feeling of belonging. Loved the people most, he guessed, though some of them were thorough-going bastards. He'd toughed it out because he'd wanted to belong, and because BUD/S had already taught him that he could do things that he'd never thought himself capable of doing before.

He couldn't think of any other reason to carry on, especially after Joe had managed to get himself killed in a training accident, the silly bastard. That episode had nearly killed Ellsworth, left him feeling like he was caught between two worlds, the SEALs and the rest of the Navy. He couldn't go back… so all that was left was to go ahead.

He'd changed a lot in the years since. Laid-back and relaxed cut it no better as an active-duty SEAL than it had at Coronado. He had a wild rep now, one that he worked hard to live up to. The guys in his platoon joked that Doc's idea of the SEAL acronym wasn't even Sleep, EAt, and Live it up, but that he'd improved on that by changing to SEx and ALcohol.

Okay, so some small, tucked-away part of himself kept telling him that he was trying to die. Like Joe. But Doc's reason for living was the Team, the other guys in the Team, and he wasn't going to let them down. He might get there late, but by hell he would get there!

With the CAW as a crutch, he began hobbling painfully along the hillside, making for the castle lights.

"Okay, Red," Murdock said softly, punching the man's shoulder. "You're on."

The SEAL Teams tended to assemble odd accumulations of talent. Both Murdock and Jaybird had experience sailing, for instance, and Kosciuszko had a pilot's license and flew his own Beachcraft. Red Nicholson's means of unwinding before he'd joined the Navy had been mountain climbing, both free climbing and with all the trimmings. He stood at the bottom of the crevice now, a light nylon line snapped to his belt and trailing out behind. He removed his gloves, stooped to tighten the laces of his boots, then pulled his gloves back on and cinched them snug.

"Heads up," he said. "Climbing."

Murdock and MacKenzie watched as Nicholson ascended the cliff, one arm up, then one foot… then the other arm… the other foot. From there at the bottom, the cliff looked unscalable, at least without pitons and climbing gear, but they were too close to the sentries on those castle ramparts to risk striking steel to rock. At this point, the ravine was perhaps thirty meters deep, a little taller than two telephone poles stacked atop one another.

Nicholson vanished into shadow almost at once. Even in the soft green glow of NVD goggles, it was almost impossible to separate his form from that of the cliff, though Murdock's electronic optics picked up enough IR to pick him out from the cold, black rock.

Leaving Mac to pay out the line as Nicholson climbed, Murdock picked his way back down the steeply slanted floor of the ravine, to where the remaining members of Blue Squad were waiting. Roselli, Magic Brown, Professor Higgins. Nick the Greek Papagos. So few, with both Garcia and Doc missing. Damn! What had happened to Doc? Jaybird Sterling, along with Nicholson because of his climbing skills, had been shifted over to Blue Squad to fill out the numbers. DeWitt and the other five had already left to carry out their part of the mission approach.

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.