by Joseph Badal
Bob had been ordered to keep his mouth shut about his and George’s little excursion into Bulgaria, and about Bulgarian involvement in child kidnappings. The woman from the U.S. Embassy in Athens had explained that divulging what he knew would be politically naive and could be damaging to Bob’s military career. The press conference had been in violation of that order.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Stefan Radko sipped the raki from the glass in his hand. He stared at the television screen with an intensity that made his eyeballs ache and his brain fuzzy. The American Army officer read from a piece of paper and told the world about his son’s kidnapping, about the death of a man named George Makris, and many other things. The words the American spoke barely made an impression on Stefan. The man’s comments about how Makris was shot in an orphanage filtered through Stefan’s anger. He knew he had shot and killed the man, and that made him feel good for a second or two.
He concentrated on the American’s face, memorizing every feature. “Robert Danforth,” he said over and over again. “Robert Danforth, the man who murdered my only child, Gregorie. Robert Danforth, you will die a horrible death.” He pointed a finger at the television screen. “I will live to see you dead.”
Stefan finished the remainder of his drink and poured another measure of the strong Turkish alcohol. He continued staring at the television.
Vanja entered the room. “Were you talking to someone?” she asked.
Stefan swallowed half his drink. His eyes still glued to the television screen, he said, “A dead man. I was talking to a dead man.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Two days after the press conference, Bob limped across the carpet, came to attention, and reported to Colonel Gray, who sat on the other side of a desk, bracketed by the American flag and the unit flag.
“Christ, Bob, take a seat,” Gray said. He took a deep breath and grimaced as though he had a sudden pain. Exhaling slowly, he pulled open his desk drawer and removed a bottle of antacid tablets.
“Damn ulcer,” he said. He poured water from a carafe into a glass, popped two tablets into his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of water. Bob waited while the Colonel took another deep breath.
“Well, your trip into Bulgaria ruffled a few feathers,” Gray said. “But that press conference really did it.” Gray looked uneasy, almost sick.
“Yes, Colonel,” Bob said. “I hope I haven’t caused you any trouble.”
Gray waved a hand. “Nothing I can’t take care of. But I’ve got orders for you.” Gray paused and cleared his throat. An apologetic look crossed his face. “I’m damned pissed off about this, Bob.” He reached across his desk and handed Bob a sheet of paper.
Bob read the document, then looked over at Colonel Gray. “This is a request from me to resign my commission and be discharged, Colonel, I–“
“That’s right, Bob. The Army decided your trip to Bulgaria wasn’t in the best interests of the military services. Disobeying the order to keep your mouth shut was a foolish thing to do. You’ve got forty-eight hours to pack up. You’ll be honorably discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”
Bob realized his mouth was hanging open. He slammed it shut. He felt as though he would choke. When confident he could speak without his voice croaking, he said, “What if I refuse to sign, Colonel?”
“Then you’ll be the oldest Captain in the U.S. Army. They’ll never promote you. I’ve already tried to stop this, Bob. The decision’s been made.”
“This hurts, Colonel,” Bob said, his face feeling flushed. “The Army was going to be my career.” Bob clenched his jaw and lasered his eyes at Gray. “Colonel, I’d do the same thing all over again. Even knowing this would happen.”
Gray smiled at Bob. “So would I, Bob.”
“I guess I’d better go home and tell Liz,” he said. “Am I excused, sir?”
Gray stood and came around his desk. Bob also got up and came to attention. “At ease,” Gray said. “I want you to know I don’t agree with the Pentagon’s decision. The Army needs officers like you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Bob said. “Looks like I’d better start thinking about another career.”
Gray reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a business card. “This man asked me a bunch of questions about you. He seemed impressed with what you did, going into Bulgaria, bringing back the little girl.” He handed the card to Bob.
“Cultural attaché? What does he want?”
“He wants to talk to you about a job.”
“Sir, if the Army doesn’t want me, I doubt the State Department is going to feel I’m diplomatic material.”
Gray smiled at Bob. “For your information, that cultural attaché business at the Embassy in Athens is nothing but a front. He’s CIA.”
PART II
1999
CHAPTER ONE
Liz lay next to Bob, one of her legs across his. She lightly rubbed his chest. “You made me feel wonderful,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“There’s a snake in the bed; it’s about to bite you.”
“Umm,” Bob said.
Liz poked him. “You’re not even listening to me. What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry.” He turned toward her, stroked her thigh. “You know, the Agency ought to hire you as an interrogator.”
“Dammit, Bob. What’s wrong?”
Bob sighed. “I’m worried about the situation in Kosovo.”
“What do you have to do with that mess?”
“You know I can’t say.”
“What can you say?”
“That it’s a mess.”
“You’re just full of useful information,” Liz said, slipping out of bed.
CHAPTER TWO
Bob looked around Jack Cole’s spacious office while he waited for the CIA’s Special Operations Chief – and his long-time friend – to finish the phone call that had interrupted their conversation. He looked at the walls and thought about what could have been hanging there: the Silver Star Jack had earned in Vietnam, the Bronze Star with “V” device, the two Purple Hearts, the citations he’d won in his twenty-some years with the CIA. But there was only one “ego” item in sight: The photo of Jack’s sailboat.
Bob noticed there were more lines in Jack’s face and that his once sandy-blond hair had turned almost completely gray. Jack looked older than his fifty-two years. But the blue eyes were still alert, intelligent.
Jack replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle. “Bob, I don’t have to tell you how important this is,” he said. “You’re the only man in the Agency with the knowledge and experience to pull this off. You speak Serbo-Croatian, you’ve got years of fieldwork, you recruited our agents in Yugoslavia. Besides, as my Covert Operations Chief, you have to do what I tell you to do.”
Bob didn’t reply. Jack was just stating facts.
“The wild card over there is the Serb President,” Jack said. “His only concern is his own political survival. We’re convinced he won’t agree to any settlement involving Kosovo becoming an independent province. All our intelligence reports tell us the man is unstable, a megalomaniac with an insatiable appetite for power. If he isn’t controlled, sooner rather than later, this thing in the Balkans could become a regional disaster.”
“So you want to take out the Serb leader?” Bob asked.
“I wish it were that simple,” Jack said. “Killing the leader of a foreign country is not an option anymore. Not since Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided to handcuff the Agency.”
“I can’t believe any President would sign that legislation.”
Jack nodded. “We’ve got to find a way to limit the Serbs’ capacity to wage war, and maybe get the Serb President indicted for war crimes at the same time.”
“Tall order,” Bob said.
“I want you and your team to come up with a plan I can sell to the Director. I suggest you find a way to dilute the support the Serbs have in the international community. If we make it embarrassing enough f
or the Serbs’ allies to associate with the Serb President and his henchmen, maybe we can politically and economically isolate the Serbs. Without the Russians, for example, the Serbs’ supply lines will dry up.”
“How much time do I have?”
“Three weeks at best. We’ve got to knock the Serb leadership down a peg. Maybe that will keep the President from having to commit American ground troops to a potentially very bloody war.”
Bob reviewed agency files on the Serb President for hours, met with intelligence, diplomatic, and military experts on the Balkans, and even contemplated how – despite U.S. laws against it – an assassin might get close to the Serbian leader. He‘d come to a dead-end. The Serb leader never stayed in one spot for very long. Never slept in the same building two nights in a row. According to a CIA informant within the Yugoslav People’s Army, no one outside his inner circle knew the Serb President’s plans more than four hours in advance. He never appeared in public without an impenetrable ring of bodyguards.
Bob had called his three top aides to a strategy session. They tossed ideas around, and then discarded them all. Bob checked his watch. They’d been at it for ten straight hours. While his people continued rehashing possible plans, Bob looked around the room and considered their skills.
Forty-five-year-old Frank Reynolds, a bookish, twenty-two-year employee of the CIA, with an IQ in the stratosphere, had spent most of his career with the Agency analyzing message traffic and news reports coming out of the Balkans, Turkey, and Greece. He’d studied Serbo-Croatian at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast, in Monterey, California, and received his doctorate in Balkan Studies at Georgetown. He knew more about the Serb leadership now ruling Yugoslavia than anyone in the free world. Frank’s salt and pepper hair, as usual, looked as though it had never known a comb. The man was impatiently drumming the table with his fingers.
Thirty pounds overweight, Tanya Serkovic wore frumpy, grandmotherly dresses. She had thick, shoulder-length black hair, violet-colored eyes, and exotic Slavic features, with a trace of Oriental blood showing in the shape of her eyes. A Bosnian who was a former analyst with the Yugoslavian Intelligence Service, an expert in Eastern European Languages, and also fluent in Greek and Italian, she’d witnessed the genocide perpetrated by the Serbs against her people. She’d fought with the Bosnian resistance, and fled to the United States when Serb hit squads were sent to assassinate her.
Raymond Gallegos had the dark good-looks of a Latin moviestar and the intelligence of a brain surgeon. A highly decorated Army veteran, who got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in geography after two tours in Vietnam, he’d spent years with the National Security Agency as a cartography consultant. He knew every foot of the Balkans the way most people knew their own homes or neighborhoods.
They all looked exhausted. “Okay, people,” Bob said. “We’ve had a long day. Let’s all go home and sleep on it.”
They all groaned, as though disappointed about having to call it quits.
“I’ll see you at 7 a.m.,” Bob said. “We need to come up with something really soon.”
CHAPTER THREE
Liz looked out the living room window and saw Bob’s car pull into the driveway. She glanced at the grandfather clock in a corner of the room. Already half past ten. She went to the front door and watched through a glass panel while Bob slowly climbed out of his car and walked toward the house. He looks like a zombie, she thought. An old zombie. She opened the door and met him. She took his briefcase and topcoat, placing them on a chair in the entry. The dark circles under his eyes and the sallow cast to his skin were hard to miss. How can he continue working at this pace? she wondered. This was the third night in a row he’d come home after ten.
“How were your classes today?” he asked.
She smiled. She knew what an effort it must be for him to even ask, considering how tired he looked. “Actually, not bad,” she said. “Thank God for graduate courses. My days of teaching Economics to freshmen are long over.”
He appeared to try to laugh, but the sound he made came out more like a grunt.
“I’ve got a plate in the microwave. Why don’t you go upstairs and change while I heat it up?”
Bob planted a kiss on Liz’s cheek, trudged up the stairs, and plodded into the master bedroom. He turned on the television to catch the news. While he undressed, he listened to reports that yet another mass grave had been found in Kosovo. This one, just south of the Serbian border, held three hundred Kosovar Albanian bodies – men, women, and children – all executed with bullets to the back of the skull.
Bob felt a churning in his guts. I can’t take three weeks to come up with a plan, he thought. The Serb hierarchy has got to be stopped yesterday.
The ringing of the telephone interrupted his thoughts. He jerked the receiver from its cradle. Who the hell’s calling at this hour? “Hello!”
“Dad, it’s Mike.”
“Hey, Mike. How ya doin?”
“Great! How are things there?”
“Everything’s fine. Sure you’re okay? You usually don’t call so late.”
“No, no, I’m fine. Thought I’d better tell you before you heard it on the news. Part of the 82nd Airborne’s been put on alert. My unit included. There’s a good chance we’ll be sent to the Balkans to join the part of the unit that’s already there.”
“When?” Bob asked.
“Probably within two to three weeks.”
Bob slumped down on the bed, feeling what little energy he had left drain out of him. “Appreciate you letting me know, Mike,” Bob said, keeping his true emotions from his voice. “Can we get together before you ship out?”
“Sure, Dad. Count on it. I’ll arrange a couple days up there. But, listen, I’ve got to go now. Got a lot of work to do.”
“Okay, Mike. We love you.”
Michael didn’t answer right away. There was a several-second pause before he finally said, “Give Mom a hug for me.” Then he hung up.
“Will do, son!” Bob said to the dead phone line. He felt a tightening in his throat. He knew he’d surprised his son when he’d told him, “We love you.” He balled his fists and told himself he was a shit and a coward. Why hadn’t he said, I love you, instead of We love you. Bob stood up and continued undressing. There were a lot of things he wished he’d done over the last two decades. Not saying I love you was just one of many fuckups when it came to his relationship with his son. How many soccer games and wrestling matches had he said he was going to attend and didn’t? How many birthdays had he missed? He’d put his work first and his family second. He’d been more attentive to Liz and Michael for a couple years after Michael had been kidnapped and found in Bulgaria. But then he reverted back to his old habits..
“Dammit!” he said aloud. Mike and his unit were going to be shipped out to the Balkans. This business with the Serb leader had just become personal.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bob rubbed his eyes. The glare from the overhead fluorescent lights in the Langley conference room were starting to get to him. “All right, where are we going wrong? We haven’t come up with a thing.”
Tanya Serkovic tapped her fingernails on the tabletop and swiveled back and forth in her chair. She gazed around the room at each of the others. “I think we’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle,” she said. “We’re wasting our time talking about assassination squads. Besides, the Serb leader is impossible to isolate.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” Frank Reynolds interjected. “But it sure as hell would be illegal.”
“Yeah, right, Frank,” Tanya shot back. “As I was saying, we need to change our approach.”
“Well, we could catch him with an intern,” Raymond Gallegos offered. “On second thought, forget it! Clinton’s already done that, and it didn’t hurt him a bit.”
Groans and half-hearted laughs.
“Let’s get serious, guys,” Bob said. He got up from his chair and walked over to the blackboard. “Tanya’s right. Let’s loo
k at the problem from a different angle. If we can figure out a way to destabilize the Serb regime . . ..” He let the thought hang while he returned to his chair.
Deep in the bowels of the Central Intelligence Agency complex at Langley, Virginia, Photographic Intelligence Analyst Rosalie Stein inspected the contents of a file. News articles, agent-in-place photographs and reports, and satellite photographs were scattered on the table in front of her. She’d worked through the articles and reports first, but had come up with nothing new. The satellite photographs – hundreds of them – hadn’t been touched. Like leaving dessert until last. She knew analyzing them would be tedious, but it was the part of her job she loved the most.
The National Reconnaissance Office had satellites passing over Serbia sixty times each twenty-four-hour period. Most of the pictures transmitted by the “eyes in the sky” were of scenery, rooftops, and traffic. The definition of the photographs was amazing. Anything that emitted a heat signature – living things, vehicle engines, and smokestacks – could be spotted in the dark by infrared (“IR”) satellites. During daylight hours, the synthetic aperture radar (“SAR”) satellites sent back shots that were so clear individuals could be identified.
Rosalie had to analyze each photo slowly and carefully. She never knew what she might find. After eleven hours, the images were starting to blur. She swept her dark red hair away from her face, while she leaned over and stared at the pictures, searching for something – a clue, an anomaly. Some of the photos revealed Serb military units in the field. But most, as usual, were of open space, or of one Serb town or another. Lots of scenic views. About to call it a day, she glanced again at one last picture, and suddenly shoved all the others aside. She reached for her magnifying lens.
