Specter

20

The door banged open, and Kingston's prayers dissolved in sick horror. The man was in uniform, but not of any U.S. military service. There was a lot of gold braid on the unbuttoned jacket, and he held a vicious-looking little pistol with a curved magazine in front of the trigger. Two more soldiers crowded in behind him, brandishing assault weapons.

"Up ladies," the man said, his accent thick and Slavic-sounding. "Everybody up!"

"What do you want with us?" Beth Leary cried from behind the bed.

"He's going to rape us!" Celia screamed.

"I will kill you if you don't do precisely what I tell you!" the man snapped. He added something in a rasping, Slavic tongue, and the two men with him came in and shut the door, taking up positions on either side of it.

The officer shoved his way through the women until he was face to face with Kingston. "You," he said, "will come with me." Moving around behind her, he reached around her with his left arm, not circling her throat as she'd thought he was going to do, but slipping it under her left arm and across her breasts. She caught the sharp tang of his cologne mingled with his sweat. He jerked back suddenly, lifting her off her feet, swinging her about to hold her between his body and the door, backing farther away from the door until his back was up against the wall. Bunny screamed.

"Shut up!" the officer shouted. Still holding Kingston inches above the floor with one arm, he reached out with the deadly-looking little gun, until the muzzle was only a couple of inches from Bunny's right eye. "Shut up, bitch, or you die this instant!"

The woman fell quiet. "That is better," the man said, but he did not relax at all. "Now, we wait."

Stepano had point going up the stairs; Kosciuszko was at his back, moving up the steps backward with his M-16 trained up the stairwell, insurance against someone pulling a hop-and-pop surprise from further up the steps. Frazier followed, then Holt, packing his big M-60 like a child's toy. DeWitt and Fernandez brought up the rear.

"Looks clear," Stepano was saying as he went, a kind of mantra, a chant. "Looks clear… looks clear…"

It was one of those tightly wound spiral stairs, all of stone, winding up the middle of the castle keep. If there was a good place for an ambush…

Movement… a face, a weapon at the landing just above. Stepano fired instinctively, the silenced weapon thuttering briefly as he sent a burst snapping into the target. Stepano took the next few steps three at a time, bounding onto the landing, stepping across the body. The man was still alive, his eyes starting from his head, his hands scrabbling weakly at his chest and shoulder, which were already slick with blood.

He was wearing an officer's uniform… a captain in the JNA.

Stepano grabbed the man's collar beneath his chin. "Kade e Gospogya Kingston?" he demanded. "Where is Ms. Kingston?" Then he repeated it in Serbian, the words almost identical. "Gde ye Gospogya Kingston?"

"Top floor," the wounded man answered, speaking Serbian. He seemed anxious to talk, and Stepano wondered whether that was because he thought he was dying, or because he was terrified of the black-clad apparition looming over him. "Room twelve."

"Are the hostages all together? Or did you spread them out?"

"Women… in room twelve. Men are… are room three. Please. I didn't-" And then he was dead. "Room twelve and three," Stepano told DeWitt.

"Room twelve and room three, people," DeWitt echoed. "Let's go!"

"You wanna split up and take 'em down together?" Holt asked.

"Sounds good," DeWitt said. "Three and three. Kos, you take Bearcat and Scotty. Steponit and Rattler, you two with me. Watch out for a trap."

Stepano didn't think the dying man had lied, but it was certainly a possibility. At the top of the stairs the SEAL squad turned right and pounded down a corridor. Room eight… room ten… there! Room twelve.

Silently, DeWitt deployed his men, Stepano to the left of the door, himself to the right, both crouched below the level of the doorknob in case the opposition tried firing through the door. Rattler took up a crouched position slightly on the right of the door, his shotgun switched to single-shot.

DeWitt held up three fingers… two… one…

Blam! Blam! And the door splintered inward, flying off shattered hinges. Kingston screamed; she couldn't help herself… and then her ears rang with a deafening quickfire chain of explosions and a blinding light like a news reporter's camera strobe set off inches from her face.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, seeing that blinding light even through her closed eyelids, feeling something like a hot blast of air slap her face and clothing and set her skin tingling. When she opened her tear-streaming eyes again, she had a glimpse — just a glimpse — of monsters crashing through the shattered door. They were dressed head to foot in black, with vests heavily laden with arcane and technical-looking gadgets, with visored helmets and with the visible parts of their faces thickly smeared with green and black paint. Their weapons were submachine guns of some kind, but with muzzles as long and as thick as her forearm.

The first man through rolled to the right, so low he might have been sitting down, his weapon held high and stiff-armed; he nearly collided with the soldier crouched in the corner, who had fallen to the floor and had his hand over his eyes. The submachine gun spoke — a fluttering whisper — and the stunned soldier's face came apart.

A second black-clad figure had rolled through the door to the left close behind the first. The other Serb soldier had had his head turned away from that dazzling light and was still on his feet. As the black apparitions burst into the room, he tried to raise his assault rifle, but before he could fire he was slammed back against the wall by the attacker's shot and the gun went clattering into the floor.

"Stop!" the officer holding Kingston screamed, his mouth an inch from her right ear, the muzzle of his machine pistol pressed against her head. She knew he was shouting, could feel his chest moving and feel the breath on her face, but her ears were still ringing from the explosions and his voice seemed very far away. "Stop now or I kill them!"

"American Special Forces," one of the men shouted back. "Hurt her and you're dead, y'hear me? You can't get out of here. Best thing for you to do is drop your gun and give it up!"

Everything seemed suspended in time and space. Both invaders had their weapons turned now, aimed — she was certain — directly at her, and there was a third invader still in the hallway, covering them all with something that didn't even look wholly like a gun. Kingston found herself looking straight down the black openings at the fronts of those heavy barrels. The women were flat on their faces or on their hands and knees, knocked down by the explosions; only Ellen Kingston was still upright, and that was only because her captor was still holding her up off the floor. She swung her legs, kicking at him, but he only tightened his grip painfully across her chest.

"No! You will drop weapons!" her captor shouted. "Now! Then back out of the way!"

It happened so fast she could scarcely tell what had happened. The black figure on the right took two steps further to the right, the muzzle of his gun still aiming at a point directly behind Kingston's head. He said something… and it wasn't English. What was he saying? The words were liquid and Slavic-sounding, spilling out so quickly she felt completely bewildered. She'd assumed her rescuers would be Americans, not… God, was that Russian he was speaking?

Her captor stiffened; the muzzle of his gun left her head, sweeping across an arc to aim at the Russian-sounding man. Her captor screamed something…

The other invader's strange weapon spoke twice, a sound like the double slam of a door. At almost the same instant, her captor's gun fired, and the rattling crack it made was far louder in that narrow hotel room than the gunfire from the other weapon.

And the Russian-sounding man was already lunging toward her; she saw the bullets striking his vest, opening holes in the nylon fabric, and the little gun was still firing, the muzzle flash dragging up across the black-clad body…

And then she was on the ground, and her captor was limp beneath her and her deliverer was a dead weight lying on top of her and Celia was screaming and screaming and Ellen thought if this went on much longer she would surely shoot Celia herself.

The weight was lifted off her and she sat up, gasping for breath. Bunny knelt beside her, holding her upright, helping her over to the bed.

"It's okay!" the man was saying, shouting to be heard above Celia. "Everybody stay down! I'm Lieutenant j.g. DeWitt, and we're here to get you out. Stay calm, stay quiet, and stay on the floor. Okay?"

"You're… American?" Monica Patterson asked.

"They're American!" Celia cried.

… and then the women were leaping to their feet, screening now for sheer, adrenaline-shaking joy.

"Stay down!" DeWitt bellowed, and the screaming stopped as though cut short by the throwing of a switch. As the women parted before him, he moved across the room to kneel above the body of the man who'd somehow called her captor's shots to himself. The man in the hallway with the strange gun came in and checked each of the uniformed soldiers briefly, then knelt beside the other two. The women watched quietly, sensing the life-and-death drama, afraid to speak, afraid almost to breathe.

"This one's still alive," the man with the strange gun told DeWitt.

"I don't give a fuck about him. Tie him and then mount guard at the door."

"Aye, aye, sir."

DeWitt kept working with the wounded man, pulling a first-aid kit from one of his pouches, opening the man's vest. There was a lot of blood. "Aw, shit, Steponit! Shit! Talk to me! Shit!"

"He gonna make it, sir?"

"Watch that door!"

"Yessir."

"Shit, Steponit. What the fuck did you tell the bastard to piss him off so bad?"

"Told him… he was coward," the wounded man said. God, he was smiling. "Called him… filthy coward, hide behind women, small… small penis. Called him everything I could think of. Then… said his wife was probably making it with his neighbor while he terrorized innocent women…"

"Shit, Steponit. Didn't anybody ever tell you it isn't a good idea to piss off a guy who had a gun?"

"Can… can we help get him on the bed?" Kingston asked, sitting up. Her hearing was fully recovered now, though there was still a faint ringing in her ears. She tasted salt on her lips, and she realized her nose was bleeding.

"Thanks, ma'am, but we'd better leave him where he is for now."

"What about this one?" Unsteadily, she moved over to the body of the man who'd been holding her. The braid on his uniform suggested that he was of very high rank. A general? She thought so. He was lying on his stomach, his wrists strapped behind his back with a length of white plastic. Gently, she rolled him onto his side. For a moment, his eyes locked with hers, and she thought she saw recognition there.

"Katrina," he said.

And then the eyes were no longer focused. He was dead.

"Shit! No!" DeWitt shouted. "No, Goddamn it!"

"He's gone, XO."

Kingston moved over to DeWitt's side. "He… he saved my life, Lieutenant. He may have saved all of us."

"Yeah." DeWitt looked up at her as though seeing her for the first time. "Yeah, but that's why we're here, isn't it? You're Congresswoman Kingston?"

"That's me."

"Okay." He drew himself up straighter. "I want you to be in charge of your people here. Is anybody missing from your party now? Anybody taken someplace else? To the bathroom? Whatever?"

"The women are all here, Lieutenant," she said. "I don't know about the men."

"Some of our boys are taking care of the men right now," DeWitt told her. "Is anyone in here hurt? Does anyone need medical attention?"

"We're all fine, Lieutenant," Kingston told him.

"You've got some blood on your face."

"From that, that explosion."

"Flash-bang. Got your attention, didn't it?"

"I'm okay." She smeared at the blood on her lip and decided that she didn't want to see what she looked like right now. Gunfire crackled in the distance. "Is… I mean, are you still fighting?"

The lieutenant's mouth, almost invisible under layers of black and green paint, quirked upward. "Yes, ma'am. But it'll be okay. You ladies just do what you're told and everything'll work out fine." He turned away then and crouched inside the shattered door.

With a jolt of insight, she realized that these young men had fought their way to her, one had died for her, and now the others had placed themselves between her and her former captors. From the look of those two, she wouldn't care to be in the army boots of anyone trying to recapture the hostages.

As she lowered herself to the floor, however, she caught sight of one of the soldiers lying in the corner, the first one to be shot when the Americans had burst in. His head was turned to face her; the lower jaw was missing, and one of the eyes had popped out of its socket. There was blood everywhere, all over the shattered face, draining down the front of his tunic, pooling on the floor, splattered across the wall behind him.

Grimly, Kingston turned her eyes away and told herself that she would not be sick.

For a moment, she'd been caught up with the traditional, romantic image of heroes to the rescue. That body, in a way words never could, snapped her back to reality. There was nothing romantic about war.

Sitting on the House Military Affairs Committee, Kingston knew a fair amount about things military. DeWitt had said he was Special Forces when he came through the door… but he'd given his rank as lieutenant j.g. There were no junior-grade lieutenants in the Army. That was a Navy rank, equivalent to an Army first lieutenant. If he was Navy, he had to be a SEAL.

An elite murder squad she'd once called the SEALS. Shit! Ellen Kingston lay on the floor and thought about her distinguished colleague from Virginia, the one that had a son who was a Navy SEAL.

God help me, she thought. The next time I see Charles Fitzhugh Murdock, I'm going to grab the guy, kiss him on the mouth, and swear never, never, never to vote against Navy Special Warfare appropriations again.

"One-One, this is Two-One." DeWitt was speaking so quietly Kingston almost couldn't catch the words. He seemed to be talking into a pencil mike extending from his helmet around to just in front of his paint-smeared lips. "I have six women, fifth floor back. All safe, no injuries." He took a breath. "Three tangos down. One of ours down."

She couldn't hear the reply.

"Steponit, L-T. He's dead." Another long pause. "Roger that," he said after a moment. And then "I copy."

He turned slightly, facing the women. "Okay, ladies," he said. "We're gonna have a short wait. The other guys outside have pretty much mopped up on the tangos — the terrorists, I mean. The other hostages, the men, are all safe. Twelve men, including the five guys on your staff, ma'am. They were being held in another room on the other side of the building."

"Thank God," she said. "What about the airplane's crew?"

"I don't know about them, ma'am. They may still be with the plane, and someone else'll be taking care of them. Now, we have helos inbound for you. What we're gonna do is wait until the helos are here. Then we're gonna walk down the stairs, go out into the courtyard, and climb aboard. Ms. Kingston, I want you to be in charge of the people in this room, okay? You feel up to that?"

"Yes, Lieutenant."

"I want you to make sure everyone's with us when we start to move and to make sure everyone stays together. Hold hands, so no one gets lost. If anyone wanders off, we won't be able to come back for them, understand?"

"Perfectly, Lieutenant."

"Okay. Just sit tight for now. You'll be on that chopper and on your way home before you know it."

The women started cheering again, a sound that seemed incongruous with so much death and sadness in that room… and yet Kingston felt the overwhelming sense of relief as well. They were going… home! Bunny leaned over and tried to kiss DeWitt and got black greasepaint smeared on her cheek.

"Settle down, all of you," DeWitt said, easing Bunny aside with one hand. "I'm afraid we're not out of this yet."

The women withdrew to the back of the room and at DeWitt's orders got back down on the floor, but they continued to talk among themselves in excited whispers. Kingston wanted to cry. Home! Thanks to… what was his name? Steponit, DeWitt had called him. Thanks to Steponit, they were going home.

She wondered, though, as they crouched on that blood-smeared floor. Who was the "Katrina" that her captor had confused her with?

"Olympus, Olympus, this is Phalanx." Higgins crouched on the stone floor of the gate tower, speaking into the mike of his sat comm. "Olympus, come in."

"Phalanx, this is Olympus," a voice said in his headset. "Go ahead."

"Olympus, Nike. I say again, Nike."

With scrambled encryption on both ends, there was no real need for special code phrases, and communications protocol even suggested using clear language on an encrypted channel for clarity's sake. With the Greek theme of this mission, however — Alexander, Olympus, and Phalanx — the name of the Greek goddess of victory had been too perfect not to incorporate as well. The word Nike meant "Mission successful, all hostages safe." Had he instead said Samothrace, the reference would have been to the Nike of Samothrace, the famous statue of victory lacking arms and a head.

It would have been the grim announcement that the mission had been successful, but that some of the hostages had been wounded or killed.

Medusa was the code word that had been chosen to announce disaster.

"Well done, Phalanx," the voice in the headset said. "Well done!" There was a burst of static, and Higgins thought he heard a babble of voices in the background. No… that was cheering.

Damn it, he thought. Don't start celebrating yet! How about getting us out of here first?

"Okay, Phalanx," the voice of Olympus said after a moment. "Here's the word! Chariot and Achilles left San Vito twelve minutes ago. They're on the way and should be over your position in… make it thirty-nine minutes. That's three-niner minutes. Think you boys can hold out that long?"

"Copy that as three-niner minutes, roger. We'll manage till then."

A dull thump sounded from outside the castle walls, toward the northwest. Higgins looked up, meeting Magic's eyes.

"Phalanx out," he added.

"Thirty-nine minutes, huh?" Magic said. Another thump echoed from the woods outside. "From the sound of things, someone just stumbled across ol' Razor's and Jaybird's handiwork down there. Thirty-nine minutes just might be too long."

"Spit it out, Mac."

Murdock was standing in the rotunda just inside the entrance to the keep. The sounds of battle had died out minutes ago, and the SEALs had been systematically moving through the building. Mac, his M-60 balanced over his shoulder, his helmet off and his NVDs pushed back up on his forehead, looked haggard. The actual firefight had lasted less than five minutes, but combat could drain a man in seconds. Especially this kind of combat, driving, close-quarters, unrelenting, and unimaginably vicious.

"The XO and Rattler are with the women," MacKenzie said. "Bearcat and Scotty are with the men. The compound is secure, but don't take that as gospel, 'cause there are a hell of a lot of places to hide in this rat's nest. We've counted twenty-nine dead-uns so far, but the estimate was anywhere up to fifty bad guys inside the walls. Some may have jumped the walls and run. Some may still be hiding."

"Everybody okay so far?"

"Everybody except Steponit."

"Yeah." From what DeWitt had told him over the radio, Steponit had drawn the enemy commander's attention enough for DeWitt to shoot the bastard. Unfortunately, the bastard had killed Stepano before he'd died.

Damn! First Doc, now this.

"Now, the kicker," Mac was saying. "Magic and the Prof report activity on the access road. At least two claymores that Razor and Jaybird set up down there were triggered about five minutes ago. No other contact, no sign of the enemy. We have to assume that they're out there watching us, probably trying to figure how to get at us."

"It would be nice to know what we're facing out there," Murdock said, considering the tactical aspects of the situation.

"You thinking of a sneak-and-peek, L-T?"

Murdock sighed. "Negative. We don't have the manpower, and I don't want anyone left behind when the helos show. Ammo?"

"Not a problem. Most of the boys are down to a couple of clips or so on their original loadouts, but Jaybird and Red just secured the basement to the tower. They've found a couple of rooms down there full of toys."

"Ah."

"Mostly Automat M64s and M70s — the old Yugoslav versions of AKs and AKMs. Plenty of seven-six-two by thirty-nine to go with 'em. No five-five-six or seven-six-two NATO. No nine-mils."

Which meant that when the ammo for the SEALs'M-16s and HKs was exhausted, they could use Yugoslav AKs, but they couldn't resupply their own weapons from the Yugoslav stores. The ammo didn't match. "There's a bonus, Skipper."

"Yeah?"

"Two RPGs."

"Like you said," Murdock told him. "Toys. With a little luck, we won't get to play with 'em. I expect our friends in the trees are going to be kind of cautious for a bit. They might even decide to wait until sunup, by which time we'll be gone with the wind."

"Yes, Sir."

"But we can't take chances. I want everyone not doing anything else on the walls. How's the front gate?"

Mac frowned. "Wrought-iron bars, and I'm not even sure the thing works. It's probably for show."

"That's what I thought. We need a barricade up. Maybe one of those army trucks?"

"I'll get on it, Skipper."

"And have Scotty rig something down there to make some noise after we leave. Something in memory of Doc and Steponit."

"Yes, sir!" And he was gone.

"Halt! Halt or we fire!"

Sergeant Jankovic staggered to a halt, then sank to his knees. His heart was pounding, his breathing coming in ragged, painful gasps. His face and hands were bleeding; he'd slipped on the rocks below the castle and slid perhaps twenty meters to the main road, clawing desperately at the wet rock face all the way down.

He'd thought he was going to have to stagger all the way to Ohrid, but he'd encountered the head of the relief column on the main road, stopped at the point where the castle access road wound down off the hill. The main road was crowded with vehicles of all types, and the soldiers stood about in small groups, nervously fingering their weapons and staring up the hill into the forest.

Four JNA privates advanced, keeping their assault rifles on him. A major walked with them, a TT33 Tokarev pistol in his hand, a furious expression on his face.

"Who the hell are you?" the major demanded. His voice was shaking.

"Sergeant Jankovic, Major, Yugoslav National Army."

"You're from Gorazamak?"

Jankovic nodded. God, he was tired.

"What the hell is going on up there? What's Mihajlovic playing at? Look what happened to my lead element!"

Jankovic looked past the major. At first, the scene scarcely registered on his fire-numbed brain. Only gradually did it dawn on him that those red objects bathed in the headlights of a truck were men… or had been. A jeep sat crossways on the road, its motor still running. Its side had been scoured as though by a titanic shotgun blast; what was left of three or four passengers — it was impossible to tell how many — had literally been blown out of their seats.

"Some kind of booby trap," the major was saying. "If this is Mihajlovic's idea of a training exercise-"

"It is real, Major," Jankovic said as two of the soldiers helped him to his feet. "Gorazamak has been… has been taken by commandos."

"Commandos! Those fantasies again!"

"Not fantasies, Major. I was there, up north, four days ago. Now they're here."

"What commandos? Whose?"

"I don't know, sir. American, I think. Probably parachutists. They hold the castle now."

"And the general?"

"I don't know, sir. I was on one of the walls when they attacked. I… I saw it was hopeless and climbed down the outside of the wall."

"Deserting your post."

Anger flared in Jankovic… but quickly faded. It was the truth, after all. "Sir, the enemy was slaughtering the garrison. Slaughtering them, sir. I… felt it would be best if I could get help."

"You're under arrest."

"Yes, sir."

The officer was staring up the hill, into the forest in the direction of the castle.

"You will ride with me. As guide. Acquit yourself well, and the arrest will be rescinded."

Jankovic sagged, almost falling again. He wanted to tell the major to go to hell, to throw him in prison and be done with it. He didn't want to face these nightmares that appeared out of the night to kill, and kill again. He'd faced them at the monastery, and again on the beach. Now they were here, and Jankovic was beginning to think these night terrors had singled him out personally.

But discipline and training reasserted themselves. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Commandos, eh?" the major said. "We'll see how they stand up to the 434 Motorized."

Only then did Jankovic notice the line of flat, ugly vehicles squatting on their tracks astride the main road, their engines thuttering noisily at idle.

The major grinned at Jankovic's expression. "Parachutists don't stand a chance against armored fighting vehicles, eh?"