Peacemaker. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ Alan was ready to leave, Murch handed him one with grease-penciled circles. “There’s two armored cars by a building down the road—has to be the police station. One’s in the snow, no tracks around it, so I think it’s down. Probably parts; the embargo’s hurting them bad.” Murch tapped the photo and Alan put it down and looked at it with the magnifier. “I think it’s an AML, maybe French-made, but they’ve licensed countries all over the place. Old, but one of them’s operational—look at all the tracks.” Alan grunted. “Scout car configuration,” Murch went on. “Just machine guns, no cannon—see the shadow?” Alan punched Murch on the shoulder. “We’ll need a couple of shooters. Good catch.” Murch, he decided, was a really okay guy. Just a little—let’s use a polite word—cautious.

      He went back up the mountain. The nineteen-year-old driver was beside himself. The gunner, hanging on the back, was not so delighted; he didn’t even get to fire his weapon. Up on the mountain, the Italians were skeptical and the Kenyans wary, but Alan explained how it could be done and asked them to say yes. Two squads plus medics. “Plus me,” the Kenyan surgeon said.

      “And you?” the hawk-faced Italian captain said to Alan. It was a challenge. These guys were ready to dislike anybody.

      “You want me?”

      “I want you to believe in your intelligence. Enough to go along, I mean.”

      What had Suter said? He was going to keep Alan away from anything that even smelled like glory? He grinned. “Count me in. As an observer, of course.” He didn’t say that he might be risking a court-martial.

      The Kenyans and the Italians looked at each other.

      “When?”

      Alan thought about his own orders, about how long it would take Suter to figure something out. “Soon,” he said.

      The Italian officer murmured, “If I give my colonel time to hear about it before we do it, well—”

      The Kenyan surgeon said, “Tomorrow.”

      “Tomorrow dawn,” Alan said.

      The three of them looked at each other. They shook hands. He turned the problem of the helos over to the Italian captain and went back to the Kenyan hospital and spent time interviewing the civilians, getting as much hard data as he could on the house in Pustarla. Murch would be putting together a route, he hoped; he should have the latest data on Serb positions and air defenses. Alan’s belief from shipboard intel was that there was no air defense, but out in the Med he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to this hate-filled line where Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs were supposed to divide themselves, and people who happened to be in the minority on either side were being terrorized.

      Then he went down the mountain again and used Murch’s computer to write a report on suspected war crimes and criminals in the Bosnian-Serb Pustarla region, pulling in this and that from Intelnet, creating a nice little package of the kind that admirals liked to be briefed from—maps, pretty pictures, juicy quotes from victims. Murch had marked out a route and made a real briefing packet he could use with the troops. He was liking Murch again.

      “You got a journalist in your pocket?” he asked Murch.

      “Are you wacko? Jesus, Craik—!”

      “Wassamattayou? You never heard of PR? Nothing covers your ass like a news report, Murch.”

      “Suppose this bombs out?”

      Alan had thought about that. “If you’ve got a journalist in your pocket, it’ll come out as a victory no matter what. I’ll get some color photos for him, give him the story, exclusive. He’ll kiss my ass if I ask him to. Yes or no?”

      “My boss—”

      “Fuck your boss! Yes or no? If the story is out quick, nobody will dare bitch. ‘Brave UNPROFOR Forces Score One for Humanity!’ Come on!”

      Murch rubbed his jaw. “There’s a Brit named Gibb, he’s okay, he—”

      “Tell him to be at my Humvee in ten minutes. He can watch the prep and he can be there when it’s over, first to interview the brave troops and all that crap. He cannot go along. I’m outa here.”

      Then he went back up the mountain, the journalist Gibb laughing nervously as the Humvee spun mud and gravel into the black gulf at the edge of the road. Gibb was on something, might have been a better companion if he hadn’t been, but Alan suspected the man was strung out like everybody else, thought he needed help—whatever gets you through the night. Alan left him in the Kenyans’ civilian ward. He spent half an hour with the hawk-faced captain and the Kenyan surgeon and a cluster of men in battle dress, planning. It was going to be kept simple, except nothing involving death is ever simple. The captain was unhappy about the armored vehicle but didn’t want to use anti-tank rockets—they had old Canadian Hellers—which he thought might go right through the meager armor without exploding. He was taking bullet-trap grenade launchers with HEAT, instead. Alan frowned when he heard but muttered, “Well, it’s your call.” Except that he would be there, too.

      Two Ukrainian Mi-26s “diverted” from Zagreb would come in at 0300, and Alan would brief their crews. Off at 0445. Seven hours from now.

      He slept.

      When he woke, he reached for Rose and murmured her name. His hand felt the grit of the floor and he remembered where he was, a cot in the company office. Through the door, he could see men in flight suits and hear their talk, all charged up. The chopper crews. He had slept right through their arrival. Sitting up, he felt how tired he really was, and he thought, This isn’t a good idea. I’m wiped. But it was too late.

      He put his wallet and his tags in his pack, checked himself for anything that would show he was American. His watch. His wedding ring; it came off hard, and he sucked the knuckle and got it off with the spit. Reluctantly, he put the Browning in the bag; he wanted to carry it, but it had been his father’s and had personal engraving on it. Even his skivvies, which had a label. Then he dressed from the skin out in stuff the Italians had given him. No rank marks. This is really stupid, he thought. He pushed the pack toward the Italian captain. “If something happens—I’m anonymous. My people will figure it out.” He wrote a couple of lines to Rose and stuffed the paper in the pack and pushed away the thought of what she would say if she could see him. Then he was on.

      “It’s a short trip, gentlemen—ten miles in, ten out. I figure six minutes’ flying time each way, including diversion. The target is a house in a village called Pustarla, just one street and a few houses around it. Problem: there’s deep snow everywhere. Roads around the place took a week to get plowed, then some of it was done with horses—we got aerial photos. Only two sure places to put down a chopper, the town soccer field, which I’ve marked Bravo, and this smaller place marked Alpha, which is cleared—for a helo, we think, but the helo wasn’t there yesterday. We believe no land mines. It’s a hundred meters from the target; the soccer field is close to four hundred. The village street is a mess—ruts, ice, high banks. The police station is three hundred meters farther along; there should be ten to twelve guys there, well armed, capable. Respect them! They’ve got two armored cars, one probably inoperable because it hasn’t been dug out of the snow.

      “We’re going in to Alpha as our primary landing zone; Bravo is backup and will be where the helos go if there’s trouble while the troops are at the target. That would leave us four hundred meters to cover on foot to get out.” He didn’t like that part. Four hundred meters could be a long way in snow.

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