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He watched the Italians bail out; they emptied the chopper like apples coming out of a basket. Alan jumped into the dark after them and hit the snow running, staggered, felt somebody hit him from behind, and he was up and following the dark line of figures ahead of him. They weren’t trotting, they were sprinting, or so it seemed. Somebody passed him, too eager. He whispered, “No—” It must be the Kenyan medics. “Polepole, polepole—” But they surged ahead of him. Only Doctor wa Danio back there now, floundering a little in the snow.
They came out into the village street. It felt like a tunnel, the snowpiles high on each side, thrown up there with shovels, tree limbs overhead like fingers, then charcoal sky. It was lighter in the east, noticeably so now. Faint lights showed in a few of the houses, maybe not even electric, but they were mostly blocked by the snowbanks. He slipped in a frozen rut and almost went down; ahead of him, the Italians were sliding, lurching. His feet made loud crunching noises, like the other feet, all out of step as he’d briefed them so there would be no pounding rhythm. Otherwise, it was silent. Not a tunnel but a tomb. A tomb with running men, running figures that would have been dark shadows moving through their town if anybody had seen them. Ghosts in NVGs.
A cow was walking down the other side of the road. Its breath came out in steamy puffs. Suddenly, it frisked to the side, stood splay-legged, staring at them. It jumped again, then tried to run back up the street, sliding.
He was hyperventilating now. Only a hundred meters, and he was puffing as if he was running the mile. Too fast, too fast, he thought. He didn’t dare look at his watch, fearful he might fall. Then he was at the driveway that ran up to the house, which had been somebody’s pride once, a sign of some kind of wealth in this pitiful place. The house stood back among some scruffy trees that were only big enough to make a chopper landing there impossible; it had a low wall around it, the remains of gate pillars, all visible on the aerial photography. Gagliano’s team were already spread along the cover of the wall, the two shooters out where they could get at the armored car if it came.
He turned into the drive. No lights showed in the house. They still had surprise. They had wanted to cut off the house’s communications, but it had a spindly radio tower on the roof and there was no getting at it easily. They were just going to go in, and the hell with it. Somebody up there had plastique, if they needed it.
As Alan got close, he saw the crouching figures, weapons ready, and two more, only shapes to him, near the house, moving nearer. Several had already put up their night-vision goggles. The two closest to the house would be the sergeant and his partner, he thought. They were to try the door, place the plastique if they had to. If they could go in, they would, stun grenades ready; four more men behind them. The hope was to invade the house before any defense could be laid on. That was the hope.
Alan flopped into the snow facing the door. The Beretta was in his hand. When had he done that? He held his breath. What were they doing up there? The sergeant and his partner had disappeared into a little portico, like something on a cuckoo clock, with a little peaked roof. Alan could see nothing, then made out one of them bent over or kneeling. What the hell was he doing, looking through the keyhole?
The man stood up. “Aperto,” he whispered. Open. Jesus, the front door was open. Just like a small town anywhere.
The four men got up, ready to go, and there was movement in the portico and suddenly it looked different, blacker, the door open, and the silent figures rushed forward. He wanted to go in. He looked at his watch, couldn’t find it because of the heavy glove. The hell with it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Surely not. Yet—
A shot boomed from the house. Everybody on the snow tensed; you could hear nylon rustle, a piece of ice crumble. Then hell broke loose, brief hell, loud hell: shots in quick succession, too many to count, and the thud of a stun grenade, the flash in an upstairs window as well as the doorway. A voice. Then somebody screaming, the words not Italian, not one of his. Then he was up and running for the door, and somebody was reaching back for him, hand on his arm, “Tenente, subito, subito—” Quick, quick.
“Lights!” he bellowed in Italian. Speed was more important now than invisibility. A flashlight bounced off painted walls, some godawful blue; then a light came on in a corridor beyond, and he was being waved in. Overhead, feet pounded and doors banged, and automatic fire started somewhere outside, maybe the outbuilding in back, somebody hosing. The screamer dropped to a lower key and gurgled, and the Kenyan medics were already inside and headed up a stairway to Alan’s left. He shoved ahead, was aware of more shots outside, prayed it wasn’t the armored car already but the other building, the torture place. Ahead were bare rooms, what had been some sort of dining room, now an office. He saw two wooden desks, several chairs; a bare overhead bulb threw a sickly light, hardly more than a wash of yellow-gray.
“Get the computer!” he shouted. One of the Italians started to wrestle with the monitor, and Alan pushed the man’s hands away, tore out the cords and gave him the computer itself. He didn’t know the words for keyboard or monitor. “Only this!” he shouted. The man passed it to somebody else. Alan raced around the room, opening drawers, dumping files. There was a fax machine. Could they take it? Would there be anything worth saving on it? No, he decided, too bulky, must have been the first one ever made, huge. He shoved papers into a pile with his feet, and somebody began to stuff them into a pack. He added notebooks, a weird kind of rolodex, a card file. Then he stood in the middle of the room, for just an instant paralyzed, unable to think. Too much stuff, no way to sort it out. Couldn’t read it, didn’t know the language—what the hell—
“Tenente?”
The sergeant was framed by an archway, dark wood with things like spools sticking down all the way around. He had a civilian, hands held behind (plastic cuffs; they’d begged them from the MPs). The man was in pajamas, barefoot. Alan made a savage gesture. “Take him!”
“All of them?”
“How many?”
“Three. Sleeping upstairs. One is—” He made a gesture.
“Take them, take them—they can help carry this shit. What’s upstairs?”
“Bedrooms. Nothing.”
Alan grabbed a flashlight and sprinted up. The stairs went like a square corkscrew, up-turn, up-turn, up-turn. There were heavy doors everywhere, all open. The grenade had left burn marks and the place stank, and smoke drifted in the flashlight beam with dust. He went along, shining the light into each room, the Beretta ready but feeling awkward and too big, sliding the light around the door and then looking. The sergeant had been right; there seemed to be nothing. Graffiti, old magazines, a girl’s photo, clothes. Not military, these people. He had done five of the rooms when he flashed the light in one and something pinged and he swept the light back, not knowing what it had been, a shape or a sign, what? And the light showed another anonymous room, this one seeming unused, even austere. But something—
An ashtray. He went in and shone the light down into it. Big, plastic, empty. Wiped clean. Around the edge, “Chicago Bears Football.”
Small world. That’s what had caught him, something out of place that had put little hooks into his consciousness, like burrs catching a sweater. Chicago Bears Football. Here?
He picked it up with the hand that held the Beretta and with the other swept the light over the walls. Nothing. Yes, something. A color photograph, held to the old wallpaper with transparent tape. He went close and looked at it. Was it anything? A man in camos with an assault rifle raised above his head, standing over what Alan was pretty sure was a corpse. Something written on the too-blue sky with a felt pen, Cyrillic and unreadable. Alan peeled it from the wall and started to stuff it into his jacket, and he saw color on the back as well, another photo, female and nude and—
He saw the movement before he heard the man, and he ducked and swung the light and glimpsed a broad, dark face, contorted by the flinch that meant he was in the act of firing. Alan had time to think that the man was half-dressed and therefore cold, somebody who had been in the house and had managed to hide, and he kept the light moving, meaning to blind the man but in fact giving him something to shoot at. Better for the man if he had been an inexperienced shooter, but he wasn’t; he knew enough to aim, and habit makes you aim at what you can see. He had a nine-millimeter CZ that sounded louder than the grenade and made a flash that blinded them both. Alan shot on instinct, on terror, not sure he hadn’t yelped. He was slow because of the strange pistol, wrong size, too heavy goddamit take forever to point! But the man was only five feet away. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Four sounds running into two like more grenades, flashes of fire, blood and bone on the wall, the smell of copper and gunfire. Alan reacted away, stepping to the side, moving the light away so he wouldn’t be a target; he knew the other man was down, and his ears were dead to sound from the shots, his eyes dazzled, but he knew he had heard something, seen something else out there—a second man?
His heart was thudding. He raised the Beretta again, and suddenly the corridor was bathed in light, astonishingly bright and white to his dark-accustomed eyes. One of the helos had put on its searchlight. Why now? he had time to think, realizing that the light must be moving over the house but registering at the same time a shadow on the corridor wall, then knowing that the light was coming through a window of the room beyond and catching another figure, because what Alan saw was like a hand clutching at the back of his neck. The shadow not human, distorted by the angle, but there was something wrong with it, anyway; impressions cascaded down his consciousness: kid’s game, the shadows you make with your fingers on the wall, a rabbit, an owl, but this one something bad; then witch, Halloween mask and he couldn’t figure it out, something primitive whispered evil and then the shadow was moving and the light was swinging away, getting watery and fading, and Alan moved to reach the doorway at the side, to put only his hand and an eye out where the bullets would come.
He doused the light and stepped forward, swaying, his balance suddenly all wrong, crashed against the side of the doorway and saw movement. He ducked low and fired, knowing he’d miss because he couldn’t see. Flash and roar and then an answering flash from the corridor, something smaller (a .32 or some goddam thing like a Makorov), and he was trying to get the light on again, his hand suddenly slippery, rotating the flashlight to try to find the rubber button, and it came on, and he saw a face, a large, ferocious face, fired, and it was gone. Down low now, he brought the Beretta around and squeezed, and a window exploded outward as somebody jumped through it.
Alan straightened up. Something was very wrong with his left side. He slipped, knowing he’d slipped in the blood of the downed man, tried to run along the corridor and got to the smashed window bent over and leaning against the wall. Thinking, What kind of maniac goes through a window, taking out the frame and cutting the shit out of himself—? and flashing the light down and getting an immediate gunshot flash from below. He doused the light. His eyes were still dazzled. Below and thirty feet away, somebody was leaping over the snow, and Alan had time only to see that the man was naked and barefoot before the figure disappeared behind the old smokehouse that Alan had labeled “possible crematorium” on the aerial photo. He fired two double-taps and shouted for the sergeant.
Where the hell was everybody? He started back down the corridor, bellowing for the sergeant, and almost fell over the man he’d shot, and he thought The nose, there was something wrong with the nose in the shadow, that’s why I thought it was a witch.
Alan shone the light on the downed man. His own hand was shaking; he could feel sweat on his ribs, jelly in his knees. And pain in his left side. The fucker had hit him, maybe got off a second shot. The body armor had saved him, but he had a hell of a pain.
The man was on his back. Bubbles of blood were coming up. His eyes were open, and Alan felt that the eyes were staring at him, right through the glare of the flashlight.
“Medic!” he shouted.
“Tenente! You okay?” The sergeant was at the far end of the corridor, assault rifle at the ready.
“Somebody went out the window! Get after him! Now!”
The sergeant shouted, and Alan could feel more than hear feet pounding downstairs.
“I’ve got a man down,” Alan said, shining the light downward.
“One of ours?”
“Theirs.”
“Leave him!”
Shit. Alan inhaled sharply, realizing he’d been holding his breath; the sound shuddered in his chest. He kicked the man’s gun down the corridor and swung the light off him, as if not seeing him made it better.
They had the downstairs almost cleaned out, what little they could take. The sergeant had taken charge, using some system of his own to determine what to take, what to leave. Probably weight. Alan checked his watch. Nine minutes since touchdown. Christ, it seemed like all night.
“You all right, Tenente?”
“You guys missed two of them up there.”
“They’re after the one in the snow, but I told them, no pursuit.” The sergeant was a hard nut. He was more concerned about his men than about Alan’s lost war criminal. Good for him.
“The guy’s naked—in the snow!”
The sergeant nodded as if he had known that all along. “They want you in back,” he said. “Then we go.” He was old for a soldier, probably ready to retire; he wasn’t taking any shit from an American intel officer. A Navy intel officer at that, for Christ’s sake.
The other building had been a cow barn. A few of the stanchions were still there in a row down the left side. The walls were stone, laid up without concrete, the floor, a couple of feet below ground level, mostly dirt with a cracked concrete apron at the front end. Three bodies were laid out on the concrete now, all civilians. There seemed to be far too much blood for only three men, but three was all he could see. There was an under-smell of old cow, on top of that fresh blood, and then shit.
“They tried to shoot it out. One was awake somehow; one of our guys took a hit, he’s not bad. We took out two people. Not in very good shape.” The soldier looked sideways at him. “Really messed up.”
“Torture?”
The soldier nodded. Alan walked down the room, smelled vomit. He already felt sick, was still hyperventilating. There was old blood on the walls down here, probably a lot more soaked into the dirt floor. The stanchions had been used as human restraints, with handcuffs locked to them high and low. At the end of the room was a single chair by itself, almost centered. It looked like a set for a minimalist play. Against the wall was a big washtub, half full of reddened water, a lot of water splashed out on the floor. Ropes and a steel bar, once some sort of tool, hung from the ceiling beam.
“The airplane,” he said. A form of torture.
“They’d cut the eyelids off one guy, then shot him. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll make it.”
Alan got out the point-and-shoot camera and pointed and shot. He felt he was going to throw up. Partly it was almost getting killed, partly it was what he was doing, seeing. And the pain in his side. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble pointing the camera.
“Tenente! Time to go!”
He ran back to the house and took three photos of the interior. Maybe the newsman could do something with them. He didn’t go back upstairs.
Something boomed. He doused his flashlight and started out the front door. The sergeant grabbed his arm, pulled him down. “Police armored car. They’re coming up the street.”
Alan looked around. It was almost light. There was the sergeant, three soldiers. Him. Flames turned the snow pink, the torture barn on fire.
“Everybody else out?”
The sergeant nodded.
“Go?”
The sergeant pointed, got up. They ran for the gate. One man stayed behind, threw something in the door—thud— and the place went up in flames.
A big double boom sounded from the street, probably both shooters at once; flame snicked up through the tree branches like a tongue, then seemed to expand at the bottom, beyond the wall. He was aware of more general firing, faraway pop-pops and louder, more deliberate noise nearby. At the gate, the sergeant thrust out an arm like a traffic cop and held him back, looked, then grabbed him and pushed him in the direction of the choppers. Alan resented it, resented the rough handling and the implication that he didn’t belong there, but he knew the sergeant was right. Anyway, bullets were whiffling near him. He got down. Captain Gagliano and half his Romulus team were trading fire with somebody down the street—quite a way down the street, well beyond the burning armored car. The other way, the rest of Romulus waited to cover the withdrawal. On the other side of the street, several bodies lay in the snow. Serb militia, from the town. One man was in striped pajamas. The sergeant waved an impatient hand at him and Alan began to run. The waiting soldiers got bigger, bigger, and then they, too, were passing him backward through their line, as if he was not quite their main concern just then and they just wanted to make sure he was out of the line of fire …
He hunched his shoulders and ran for the helos.
The temperature in the big tent must have been close to eighty Fahrenheit despite the cold outside. It wasn’t the big propane heater but the press of bodies. Italians, Ukrainians, Kenyans, one American—even a couple of Dutch artillerists who had wandered down, although they hadn’t had provocation enough to fire a shot. It was as noisy as a locker room after a winning game, and just about as smelly, although the over-riding smell was red wine, with some Kenyan cane splashed around the edges.
Feeling no pain, Alan thought. He certainly knew what that meant now. The surgeon had given him two capsules, would have given him four or maybe eight if he’d asked, and on top of that there was the wine. It wasn’t what used to be called Dago Red, either, but Gattinara from a year long enough ago that the stuff didn’t show up in shops any more. Courtesy of Captain Gagliano’s colonel, who was shocked, shocked! to hear of what had happened (you had to be reminded of Claude Rains in Casablanca) but was so delighted he’d released a couple of cases from his own store. Flown in specially as soon as the message flashed that they were out with only three hit, no dead, and two helos full of goodies.
“Well, not exactly goodies,” Alan was explaining slowly to Doctor wa Danio. He spoke with the exaggerated care of a man who has had too much wine, just enough painkiller, and not enough sleep. “We seem to have brought out two oversize sacks of Serb garbage.” He leaned closer. “I am not speaking met-a-phor-i-cally. I mean actual garbage. Rinds and things.” Along with some more useful stuff like names and addresses and computer disks.
Two Ukrainians were doing some sort of dance to music that sounded to Alan like Afro-pop, but he suspected that everything sounded like Afro-pop to him just then. He smiled at the Ukrainians. When he turned back to the Kenyan doctor to tell him how much the Ukrainians amused him, the doctor had been replaced by Captain Gagliano. Gagliano had a glass in one hand and Alan’s neck in the other. “Did we biff them?” he said.
“We biffed them.”
“We biffed them!” Gagliano nodded. “I hear you were hit.”
“In the ribs.”
“Nothing.”
“They are my ribs.”
“Ribs are nothing. I have one man shot in the neck. The neck is something. One in the arm. He may lose the arm. But your rib does not impress me.” He kissed Alan’s cheek. “What impresses me is you got us in and out and we biffed them.” He leaned his head back and tried to focus. “You want an Italian medal?”
“You can’t have too many medals.”
The captain nodded. “Or too much wine. You want some wine?”
“I think—”
Then he was sitting on the floor and somebody was smiling at him, God knows why. He tried to get up, thought better of it, and sat there, grinning at the noise and the heat and the uproar. The combination allowed him to remember that he had killed a man, this time without feeling sick about it. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Bubbles of blood.
“Lieutenant?”
He looked up. Way up. A very tall, emaciated man in civilian clothes. The man folded himself into pieces and brought his head down to Alan’s level and said, “You look for me, they say.” He had a bony, almost skull-like face, and skin cratered by illness or acne long ago. “I am Marco. Translator?”
“Ah.” Right. That made sense. But why? Aha. Translator, yes. Alan held up a finger. “Momento,” he said, forgetting that Italian was not the language in question. Where had he put it? He patted himself, finally found it in the buttoned breast pocket of the Italian shirt he was wearing. Took it out with great care and unfolded it, presenting it to Marco so that the slightly frivolous backside, showing incomplete but naked female parts, was hidden. It was the picture of the man in camos he’d taken from the bedroom in the house. “What’s that say?” he asked. At least that was what he hoped he asked.
Marco squinted. “Says, ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’”
“What’s that mean? ‘Battle of the Crows’?”
Marco scratched his ruined chin. “Aaah. Well. It’s the Serbs, you see? The Battle of the Crows—hmm. Well.” He sighed. “It happened six centuries ago, okay?”
That was not okay at all. That made no sense. What was this guy, drunk or something?
Detroit.
Radko Panic dropped his heavy coat on the floor, not even thinking, knowing she would hang it up later, if she knew what was good for her, and glanced out of habit at the crappy little table where she put the mail. Bills, junk, ripoffs, he expected, the same as always, but there was a package and his heart jumped. Even the fact that it was different was enough, but there was the color of it, too, and the feel of the paper under his fingers and the string that held it together. The old days. That rough brown paper, that hairy string—relics, he knew now, of a technology he had left behind when he had left the old places. The postmark was French, but he knew it did not come from France.
She had left his meal for him and he shoved it into the microwave and pushed buttons without thinking, his face split by a big grin. Rare, that grin. Really rare. He saw himself in the microwave window. He’d had a couple on the way home at the Rouge Tap; the grin, pasted on the microwave as if it belonged to the machine and not to him, was happy. Well, why not? A man deserved to be happy.
He took one of her knives and cut the string. He had surprisingly delicate hands for a big man, but he was a precision toolmaker, did things well, deftly, when he was sober. He slit the tape-shiny ends and slid out the box inside, made of a thin cardboard of the kind that used to come inside shirts. It too was held with tape, and he cut that and put her knife aside, thinking without thinking that the knife was getting dull and what the hell had she been doing with it, sharpening pencils again?
Inside was a photograph and something else. He slid the photo out. He left the something else, like the prize in a Crackerjack box. There had still been Crackerjack boxes when he had first come to America. He had loved them.
The photo, grainy and a little washed-out, showed a man in camo fatigues, one hand raised over his head, an automatic rifle in the raised hand. It was too fuzzy to see what kind of rifle it was. At the man’s feet was something dark, a bundle, a pile, a—what?
He turned the photo over. Big, black letters said, “YOUR BOY AT THE BATTLE OF THE CROWS!!!!”
She came in behind him then; he heard her, didn’t even turn, didn’t speak. He grinned at the back of the photo. He had heard the expression “bursting with pride,” knew now what it meant. He thought he was going to explode with it.
The microwave dinged and she said something and he grunted at her, and she got the food out and began to arrange it at the place she had already set for him. Her hair in some kind of thing, an old bathrobe clutched around her, her face gray, soft, lined, purple shadows under the eyes.
“Is it—from—?” She had had a sweet voice as a young woman; now it was wispy. She was afraid of him. With good reason.
He thrust the photo at her. He sat down and picked up the fork and filled his mouth. Seeing her standing close by, he waved her away and she went over to the sink and held the photo up under the light.
He thrust another forkful into his mouth and then put a long finger down into the narrow box and took out the small thing that was in there. It made him grin again. It was a human eyelid.
2 (#ulink_f7905cbd-859e-50a9-abce-8dc404ba1ed1)
February – April
The succession of naval fleets that guard the Mediterranean is like the turning of a great wheel. Always, at the top, is the fleet in place—one nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, most potent of the weapons in the world, on which the commanding admiral flies his flag; two guided-missile cruisers; destroyers and frigates and submarines; and, around and behind them, support and repair and fueling ships. These ships are six months on station—six months at the top of the wheel—with tenuous lines of communication to the land, to be sure, but alone at sea as ships have always been alone at sea. Then the wheel turns, and the battle group on station turns its bows and heads for the Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar, and at the same time the fleet that has been forming and training on the east coast of the United States puts to sea and begins its voyage to the top of the wheel. The wheel turns, and the new fleet takes its place on station, and the old fleet goes into port at Norfolk, while another fleet trains and forms and readies itself to sail in six months more. And behind it, at the bottom of the wheel, another fleet exists as an idea and a skeletal organization; it will not sail for a year, but already its flag-rank commander is in place with his most important senior officers; the air squadrons that will deploy with the carriers are designated; ships and ships’ companies know where they will be. And even as the wheel turns, other fleets exist, phantom or hypothetical fleets, ideas of fleets that will come into being in eighteen months or two years or five or ten. Other crisis areas, or areas of strategic interest, have their own wheels—Korea, for instance, or the Persian Gulf. Sometimes one area has several wheels.
The wheel turns, and forward into time the fleets move toward their place on the wheel and the six-month period for which they exist: the presence of a battle group in the Mediterranean Sea. It is a figure of life—of coming into being and of going; of being born, and of dying; of existing only as an idea of the future and as a memory of the past.
The battle groups come and go. It is the wheel that is important.
