Specter

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.

One shouted something and groped for his AK assault rifle. Roselli squeezed the trigger on his HK, a feather-light caress, and the man pitched up and backward onto the fire. Roselli tensed, waiting for ammo the man might be carrying to cook off… but evidently any spare mags he had were in one of the rucksacks nearby. He fired again, knocking down a second, just as Sterling nailed numbers three and four. Four up, four down. "Alex One, this is Three. Clear."

"We heard you, Three," came the reply. "The party's just beginning!"

"What the shit was that?"

Jankovic ran to the stone parapet, along with the sentry he'd just been inspecting. Those flashes, those explosions, they'd been from the northwest, about where the castle access road came down to join the highway. What had it been? Gunfire? Grenades? It was silent enough now…

He reached into his back pocket and extracted a radio. "Command Center, this is Sergeant Jankovic, west wall. Something is happening at Post One."

"We heard, Sergeant," Captain Chemy's voice snapped back. "We are investigating."

Yes, investigating, Jankovic thought savagely. With your head tucked up your ass…

Jankovic's immediate thought was to lead a party of men down to Sentry Post One to find out what had happened. It could have been an accident… a grenade or some ammo dropped in a fire.

But Jankovic didn't believe that for a moment, not when the night still held the memory of Dubrovnik, and every shadow held the threat of nightmare. If this was an assault of some kind, why would they attack a sentry post outside the walls so noisily?…

… unless they wanted a diversion. Where did they, whoever "they" were, not want the garrison to look?

Jankovic turned, sweeping the compound, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Damn Mihajlovic. It was so brightly lit inside the place that it was hard to see much of anything outside. It would have been better to light the outside and keep the inside dark.

The courtyard below was occupied by a number of confused-looking troops. Four guards stood inside the front gate, and two more in the gate tower above. The east wall was manned by half-a-dozen sentries, including one with a bulky Mitrajez M80 machine gun. An officer stumbled out of the main building, still buckling his trousers as he shouted orders. He was gathering a squad to go down the hill. Someone started up one of the jeeps, backing it out into the courtyard.

Something caught Jankovic's attention, some movement near the gate. He looked back and saw nothing. Three guards…

No, there'd been four. Where was the fourth? As he watched, horrified, part of the shadow behind one of the sentries by the gate seemed to solidify, flowing about the man's neck from behind, dragging him back.

He lifted the radio to his mouth again. "Commander! This is Jankovic! They're inside the castle. Repeat, they're inside the castle, front gate!"

There was a heavy thump from somewhere outside, and the lights went out.

Murdock dropped from the top of the wall and landed in the courtyard, letting his momentum carry him into a low crouch. To his right, the Professor lowered a dead Serb to the flagstone pavement. Another guard stepped out of a low doorway on the west side of the gate tower, and Murdock stopped him with a single three-round burst that punched him back into the room he'd been leaving. Nicholson followed up, tossing a concussion grenade through the stone opening. "Grenade!" Nicholson yelled, and Murdock flattened himself against his side of the gate tower. The blast, a heavy thump that struck him through the soles of his boots, blew out the twentieth-century glass windows that had been installed in sixteenth-century window slits.

Across the courtyard, four more Serbian soldiers appeared bursting out of the barracks door. Murdock dropped two with quick, three-round bursts, tapping the trigger twice and sending both men tumbling across the ground. The other two ran another couple of steps, and then the thunder of Mac's Maremont opened up from the parapet wall above and behind Murdock's position, the muzzle flash stabbing and stuttering against the night. Both Serbs collapsed as though their legs had been yanked out from under them. "This is Alex One-Two" sounded in Murdock's earphone, Mac's call sign. "I'm moving."

The SEALs possessed a considerable advantage in the M-60E3s they were humping, two weapons that could provide them with tremendous portable firepower. The disadvantage was that the gunner had to move each time he gave away his position with the gun's muzzle flash.

For this op, however, that was not a serious problem, since the SEALs were going to be moving constantly anyway. If they stopped in one position for more than a few seconds, the enemy would move in troops enough to pin them down like butterflies on a board. If they kept moving, the Serb defenders of Gorazamak would never be able to organize an effective defense, would never even be able to guess how many invaders they were fighting or where they were coming from.

Kick ass and take initials, the SEAL saying went, 'cause we're gonna be moving too fast to take names!

When Mac had cut the main outside power lines leading to the castle, the defenders had been left in blind confusion, but the SEALS couldn't expect that to last for long. They had to take advantage of the darkness — and their high-tech night-vision gear — before the Serbs found their generator.

"Alex One!" Murdock called to his men over the tactical channel. "One-One! Move!"

Mihajlovic had just fallen asleep; it felt as though he'd only just closed his eyes. The crump of a grenade blast, followed by the rattle of a machine gun, instantly brought him wide awake. An attack! Rolling over in bed, he fumbled for his bedside lamp, then cursed when he turned the switch and the light didn't come on. He rose, fumbling about in the dark. Someone pounded on the door to his room.

"Enter, damn it!"

The door opened, and a soldier entered, an assault rifle in one hand, a heavy-duty flashlight in the other. The movements of the light sent fantastic shadows dancing around the room. "My General!"

"What is it?"

"An attack, my General!"

"Yes, yes, I can hear that, damn you!" More explosions, and the crackle of automatic weapons were sounding outside. "Who? Where?"

"Sir!" The man snapped to attention and tried to deliver an official report. "Sir, unknown forces of unknown strength and composition have entered the compound at the gate tower! Sir!" Another rumbling boom echoed through the stone walls of the tower.

Mihajlovic was already pulling his uniform trousers up over his pajama bottoms. "Has Communications reported the attack?"

"Sir… I'm not sure-"

"Go to Communications. Have the duty officer flash a Priority One message to Ohrid Command Center, my authorization. Tell them we're under attack and require immediate assistance. Understood?"

"Yes, my General!"

"Next. Go down to the basement. To the generator room. If you don't know how to start the generator, find someone who can. Get us some power, damn it!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Go! Do it!"

"Sir!"

Mihajlovic found his way to a dresser drawer, opened it, and fumbled inside. His hand closed on the small, cold, stamped-metal shape of an M610, the Yugoslav version of the Czech-made CZ-61 machine pistol. By touch, he checked that the twenty-round magazine was in place, then snicked back the charging knob, chambering a round.

Continuing to rummage in the drawer, at last he found the other necessity… a flashlight. Flicking it on, he hurried to the door of his room and stepped out into the corridor.

Whoever was attacking Gorazamak would be professional, well-trained, and moving hellishly fast. He had to get to the prisoners before they did.

Magic Brown hunched a little lower, his right eye pressed against the rubber-rimmed eyepiece of his low-light sniperscope. From this vantage point thirty feet above the bailey courtyard, he had a clear view of nearly the entire inside of the castle's ward. To his right, along the base of the east wall, was a long, low building that satellite photos had identified as a barracks. To the left was a smaller building that had once been a stable and was now a motor pool. A dozen cars, small trucks, and military vehicles were parked outside. Directly opposite was the castle keep, a five-story tower with an irregular circumference, topped by a spiky array of communications antennae.

Nicholson and Papagos had gone right, moving along the front of the barracks, stopping at each doorway to toss in a grenade. Murdock had gone left, sweeping through the motor pool, while Mac, with his 60-gun, had paced Murdock on the stable roof.

The courtyard had been transformed into a bloody slaughter pen, swept by fire from three directions now, and with a dozen bodies sprawled on the flagstone pavement already. The detonations of hand grenades from left and right followed one after another with metronomic precision. The thump and roar of 40mm grenades fired from M203s added to both the confusion and the slaughter.

Defenders continued to show themselves, despite the casualties they'd suffered already.

"Target," Higgins said at his right side. "Right of the tower, on the parapet walk." The Professor was pulling double duty, as communications center for the platoon and as Magic's spotter.

Magic eased the muzzle of his Remington to the right, and the cross-hairs centered on the magnified image of a Serb militiaman standing in a half crouch, holding a general-purpose machine gun.

"Got him."

Part of Magic's pre-mission studies had involved going over dozens of satellite photos with calipers and a scale, measuring out ranges. This target was close, as sniping went — about eighty meters. Magic drew down slightly, since his rifle was sighted in at the lowest possible adjustment of 150 meters.

Aim… hold… squeeze…

The Remington's report was lost in the general caCophony of battle. The target staggered and went down like a sack of meal.

"Hit," Higgins said. "Clean kill."

"Damn straight."

"Target. Top of the tower, left side."

Nothing visible there but a shape filling an opening against the sky… someone peeking through one of the rampart openings, looking for a clear shot. Another sniper. Magic wondered if the target was engaged in a countersniper role right now, searching for Magic at the same moment Magic was lining up on him…

"Hit," Higgins reported. "He's down. Can't tell if he's out."

"He's out," Magic said. "Saw his brains splatter."

"Nice. Target…"

The slaughter continued.

"Okay!" DeWitt called. "Alex Two, we're climbing!"

DeWitt and Gold Squad — minus Nicholson and Sterling — had worked their way around to the southeastern side of the castle. Built partly into the side of the mountain, the outer wall was only fifteen feet high here, as opposed to the thirty feet of the west wall, and it was an easy climb. The rocks set into the outer wall, roughly cut and crudely mortared, protruded enough that a good climber could have made it without the rope. The trouble, of course, was that there were more sentries back here, precisely because the enemy knew that the physical layout of Gorazamak was vulnerable at this point.

The moment the grenade and machine-gun bursts went off, however, most of the soldiers atop those walls would be turning their backs on the mountain, staring across the courtyard to see what was going on at the main gate. They were human, after all… and not particularly well trained or disciplined.

Holt and Kosciuszko tossed the grapnels, using easy, overhand tosses that cleanly paid out the trailing lines. The three-pronged hooks snagged across the top of the battlements; Holt and Kos gave the lines experimental tugs, then pulled them taut. DeWitt and Stepano started climbing, swarming up the line in a rapid hand-over-hand ascent, their feet only occasionally using projecting stones for leverage up. At the top, they clung to their lines with their left hands, keeping their suppressed HKs at the ready in their right. DeWitt edged his NVD-encased head above the opening of one of the parapet firing slots and caught sight of the back of a soldier vanishing into the main tower. He paused, looked both ways, then hauled himself through the opening and onto the parapet walk. Some thirty feet below the walk on the other side, gunfire blazed across the bailey, and an explosion shattered one of the doors leading to the barracks. He glimpsed running men, saw them jerk and twist and fall.

He nearly stepped on a body lying sprawled across the parapet walk, a Serb soldier with a neat, round hole just below his right eye and the back of his head missing. DeWitt heard scuffing sounds — boots on stone steps — and looked up; another trooper was just reaching the parapet walk from a stairway coming up the inside of the wall from the bailey. Before DeWitt could trigger his HK, however, the soldier gave an odd, forced sigh, then toppled sideways off the stairs. DeWitt turned his electronic gaze to the northwest, across the courtyard to the gate tower. He couldn't see anyone there, but he knew that Magic Brown was behind one of those windows above the main gate, and that he'd just silently marked down these two guards at least. DeWitt gave a jaunty salute in the direction of the gate, knowing that Magic would be watching him through his scope, then turned and headed for the back of the main tower.

The main tower — the castle keep — was directly adjacent to the east wall, with only the width of the parapet walk separating it from the ramparts. A single door in the keep's eastern wall gave access from the walk directly to the tower's third floor. Overhead, the keep rose for another forty feet to the very top of the tower.

"Alex One, Alex Two!" he called over his Motorola. "We're on the parapet okay. Moving."

"Two, One, roger," was the reply. AK fire rattled nearby, echoing off stone. "Good hunting!"

Tactically, Gold Squad had a tough choice to make. Since they had no idea where the hostages were being held, they would have to search the entire structure, clearing it as they went. The enemy could be counted on to be keeping the prisoners someplace inconvenient for any invading HRU, someplace easily sealed off and easily defended. Given the architecture of the castle, that meant either all the way down in the basement — possibly even in the old dungeons that had been Gorazamak's principal tourist attraction — or at the very top, in one or several of the rooms that had been remodeled as hotel suites for visitors. The question was whether to take the castle tower from the bottom up r the top down. A wrong decision could cost the hostages their lives.

The preferred means of clearing any building was to go in on the roof, since it was far harder to fight your way up a staircase than down. That wouldn't work here, though, because the enemy had almost certainly posted people on the tower's roof. The gun battle had probably pulled them around to the side facing the bailey, and Magic would be picking them off right now with his usual murderous accuracy… but Magic's vantage point in the gate tower was still well below the top of the keep. He couldn't see inside the ramparts up there, so it was all too possible that someone would still be up there, waiting when Gold Squad fired their climbing lines over the top of the keep.

If they'd been able to carry out a heloborn assault, or if they'd had time to place a sniper on the mountain above the level of the keep and with a clear field of fire onto the roof enclosure, Murdock would almost certainly have decided to have Gold take the roof first and work down. As it was, however, there was a convenient compromise available. Murdock's squad, after knocking loudly at the front gate, would force the front door to the keep and get two men into the basement to check out the rooms down there. The six men of Gold Squad, meanwhile, would take the tower from the middle, going in by way of that wooden door set into the east side of the keep.

All of Gold Squad was on the parapet walk now, Kos and Stepano breaking left and right to cover the flanks, Holt and Frazier aiming their weapons almost straight up, ready to target any curious head that showed itself from the roof. Rattler Fernandez had his CAW unlimbered. As the other members of the squad took up positions against the stonework to the left and right of the door, Fernandez leveled the assault shotgun at the door and opened fire.

There was no way to silence a shotgun. On full auto, the big weapon bellowed a deep-throated slam-slam-slam that echoed back from the cliffs behind them. Rattler had loaded his first mag with slugs rather than shot. The door, an inch-thick, solid wood instead of hollow-core, bucked and cratered under the impacts of the first three one-ounce slugs, then cracked open in a whirlwind of lead and flying splinters. Fernandez shifted his aim and sent two more rounds, a light tap on the trigger for each, slamming into the door's hinges. The ruined door crashed back into the corridor beyond, as Fernandez went full auto, emptying the last of his magazine in a sweep designed to take down any unwanted ambushers guarding the door from the inside.

"Avon calling!" Kos yelled, and he tossed in a concussion grenade as the SEALs pressed back against the wall; the blast rang through the tower like the tolling of a huge bell. Frazier hurled a flash-bang, and as the last detonation died, Holt went through the door, his big M-60 leveled from his hip.

"Passageway clear!" Holt shouted. The other SEALs rushed in, leapfrogging down a darkened corridor that was littered with wood splinters and blast-loosened stones and — yes — two shredded bodies.

"Alex One, Alex Two! We're in! Two tangos down!"

"Copy, Two. We're at the front door!"

Holt's machine gun thundered in the passageway ahead, an ear-splitting blast of hellfury announcing quite definitely that the SEALs had just come calling.

"One, this is Three!" Roselli's voice said in Murdock's ear. "We're coming in the front gate!"

"That's right," Sterling's voice added. "None of this 'friendly fire' shit."

"Come on through," Murdock replied. "Rally at the tower's front door!"

Murdock, crouched next to the main door in the tower, turned to face the front gate. A moment later, Roselli and Sterling trotted through the arch, emerging from the battle fog that wreathed the bailey — like specters, their gear-heavy vests and the NVDs worn beneath their helmets transforming them into nightmare apparitions.

"Set at the road entrance?" Murdock asked.

"Claymores are out, Skipper," Sterling told him. "Anybody comes up that way, we'll hear it."

"Okay. Let's get inside. Positions!"

Roselli, Sterling, and Papagos took their places to either side of the front door, weapons ready. Murdock and Nicholson tossed a pair of flash-bangs through the door together, averting their electronic gaze as the first floor of the castle keep lit up in a stuttering chain of light bursts and sense-numbing blasts. They charged through the opening as plaster continued to rain from the ceiling, both as a fine cloud of dust and as chunks the size of dinner plates. A guard staggered erect behind a counter to the left and Murdock shot him down. Another man lay on the stone floor across the room, fumbling with the receiver on his AK until Nicholson put a burst into his head and back.

Left, beyond the counters, an unsteady light spilled through a partly open door. The door opened and an officer emerged, back-lit by an emergency battle lantern.

"I'm on him," Murdock said, thumbing his HK to full auto and spraying a burst across the officer at the level of his chest. The man shrieked and went facedown. Sterling pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade, let it cook off for two seconds, then yelled "Grenade" and hurled it through the open door. There was a tinkling of smashed glass, then a shattering blast that blew out the door. Roselli ducked in, then came back out. "Clear! Three tangos down inside! Looks like the commo shack!"

"One-One," Murdock called into his lip mike. "We're in the front door."

"You're clear outside," Higgins said. "And Two-Eyes is on the third floor."

"Roger that. Keep an eye out for unfriendly neighbors. The commo shack was occupied in here."

"Ay-firmative."

The soft stutter of suppressed fire clattered at Murdock's back. Turning, he saw Nicholson and Sterling in the middle of the rotunda, firing full auto at a trio of half-glimpsed shapes moving on the second-floor balcony at the top of the stairs. One shape slumped over the banister, then dropped to the stone floor below; another spilled onto the stairs, thumping loudly as it rolled halfway down. The third slipped through a door to the left, vanishing.

The lights came on.

"Hello," Jaybird said, reaching up to adjust his night goggles. "Somebody's home!"

"Jaybird! Red!" Murdock snapped. "You've got the basement! Nick, you're with me."

"Right, Skipper."

Together, Murdock and Papagos stormed up the stairs.

"What's happening? What's happening?"

"Easy, Celia," Kingston said quietly. "Worst thing we can do now is panic."

"That's right, Celie," Bunny added. "The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand."

Another explosion sounded, much closer this time, and Kingston was certain she could hear someone screaming in pain. She wondered if the lights would stay on this time.

The women were all in the same room, lying flat on the floor behind the bed with their arms over one another, listening to the approaching thunder. Never in her life had Ellen Kingston felt so utterly and completely helpless. There were six of them, Kingston, the four of her staffers who were women, and one female sergeant who was on Colonel Winters's staff. So far they'd held up remarkably well, Kingston thought, all except Celia, who'd been on the verge of hysterics the whole time and who was certain that they were all going to be raped.

Celia, unfortunately, was the Army sergeant. In Congress, Kingston had delivered speeches several times in favor of bills that would allow women to serve in combat. After observing Celia these past few days, she was beginning to question her stand.

So far, and despite Celia's shrill fears, none of them had been mistreated in any way… none of the women, anyway. She'd not seen any of the male hostages since they'd arrived here — wherever "here" was — and she didn't know where they'd been taken. The soldiers watching them had been stiffly formal and correct, even courteous with an Old World formality; the women had been fed, and several times a day a uniformed woman had escorted them one at a time to the toilet.

But no one had so much as questioned the women or come to tell them why they were being held or what demands were being made for their release. Hour after hour was an agony of not knowing, of wondering what each new sounding of footsteps in the corridor heralded.

Footsteps sounded outside the door, and the rattle of the lock as someone turned the knob. Kingston, braced for the worst, prayed that it would be Americans who opened it.

Celia began to scream.