by David Poyer
“I chair a round table twice a year. The appropriate-level administrators. We hash it out, try to keep a geographic balance, and generally that gets approved pretty much the way we send it in. We try to keep the Hill out of it. Keep it responsive to what the agencies need instead of just porking.”
Dan flipped through the binder. He’d have to know it almost cold before the hearing, but his guys would be sitting behind him; they could pass notes if anything tough came up. He wondered if there was enough slack in it to fund something like the Threat Cell.
Meilhamer said, peeling open a Kit Kat, “So how was Leningrad?” Using the old name for the city. And that reminded him all over again. He was back in the corridor looking at the Secret Service agents.
He put the binder down, muttered something, and went out to the hallway. The high corridor echoed. The black stone slabs were cracked. He rubbed his shoe over a tiny misshapen thing that had wiggled in ooze and died a billion years before man had walked the earth. He wasn’t ready for this. Not two marriages in a row. But could he really blame her?
What mere mortal could compete with the most powerful man on the planet?
* * *
He thought about calling her at work, having it out over the phone. But it seemed better to do it face-to-face. So he kept at it until after rush hour, then took the Metro home. Stood watching the other riders as they huddled, each in his or her shell of loneliness.
But when he let himself in, the house was quiet. The oak floors shimmered. He found the note anchored on the kitchen island by a bottle of cumin.
Dan,
I’m headed to the Philippines this afternoon. We need to talk when I get back. It’s not something we can do long-distance. There’s frozen stuff from Schwan’s in the fridge, the turkey mignon and other things you like. Gloria will be in on Tuesday. Her check’s on the hall tree.
You need to take better care of yourself. Remember how this was supposed to be a time for you to unwind and get your bearings? But you just seem more and more stressed.
Take care of yourself. We’ll talk when I get back.
Yours,
Blair
He stood holding the note, looking out into the little yard. A black bird hopped around on the bare parched winter ground. Checking it over, inch by inch. It saw him at the window and cocked its head, evaluating him as a possible threat, before going on with whatever it was doing. He stood watching it for quite a while before he went up for a shower.
11
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA
Another plane, but this one a noisy, unheated transport, high-winged and strut-legged, lurching down through bursts of rain into a mist-shrouded valley. Dan sat strapped in beside a whey-faced Dutch major from Amsterdam. Probably, he figured, on the same kind of mission he was.
He was even more exhausted than he’d been back in D.C. three days ago. But getting shot at had a way of jolting you into alertness. Tracers had just come up for the second time, looking like hot wires reaching up for them. The compartment was crammed with troops in light blue helmets. Folded litters were stacked by the rear ramp.
“So who’s firing?” he shouted.
The major shouted back, “Who knows? They see a plane, they shoot at it. Just saying, ‘Welcome to the former Yugoslavia.’”
It was hard to believe how fast you could go from the Old Executive to a beaten-up, bullet-holed Spanish Army “Aviocar,” letting down through a rainstorm toward what might be the site of the worst massacre on European soil since World War II.
Or so some sources said. Others, that it was the biggest hoax since the Man Who Never Was.
Finding out which was going to be his job.
* * *
He’d gotten his orders from Mrs. Clayton, in her office on the main floor of the West Wing. The ceilings were higher there, the decor more impressive, than in the worker-bee cells beneath. Sebold and Gelzinis had been there when the secretary brought him in. “Mr. Lenson,” the national security adviser had said, with barely a glance at him. “Ready to do some traveling?”
“Ma’am?”
She’d taken off her reading glasses. And for the first time he’d seen the marks of fatigue on her face. She said slowly, kneading her eyes, “News organizations are reporting that Dutch peacekeeping troops have let Bosnian Serb forces carry out a huge massacre of Muslims.”
Gelzinis said, “The UN disarmed them. Made the town what they called a ‘safe area.’ So they couldn’t fight back.”
Clayton gave him a cool look, for what reason Dan couldn’t guess. “But other sources say the reports are hoaxes. They say the townspeople are hiding out in the woods after evacuating the town during an attack by Ratko Mladic. The UN’s holding secret discussions about pulling out of Bosnia. Meaning, we have to come up with a position, a recommendation for the president’s response.”
Mladic was the Bosnian Serb military leader. “What’s the CIA say’s happening?” Dan asked.
She frowned. “There’s not much coming out of the Agency. I’m not sure why. They just keep saying they’re ‘preparing a report.’ The embassy’s lost its usual contacts. Of course, we have imagery. But it doesn’t give us what we need. We’ve got to find out what’s going on on the ground.”
Gelzinis elaborated. The Bosnian Muslims were begging the UN not to abandon them. The Saudis and Turks wanted to know what was being done to protect the Muslims. The Bosnia working group had just broken from a meeting. They needed a fast, objective opinion, from someone outside State and the other diplomatic and intel stovepipes, on (1) whether there’d actually been a massacre, and (2) whether air and Tomahawk strikes could retrieve the situation.
When he finished, Sebold jumped in. “We know this is outside your current taskings. But this thing’s blindsided us. Mrs. C asked who I thought had the smarts and gumption to get in there, with the experience to give us a trustworthy opinion on the missile-strike question. The pointer stopped on Daniel V. Lenson.”
* * *
They hadn’t asked if he wanted to go. But he figured that was because it didn’t actually matter.
He’d left D.C. via a Military Air Command flight to Joint Task Force Provide Promise, a U.S. operational headquarters in the NATO compound in Naples. Dan had flown over in khakis, but they told him everybody went in-country in BDUs, the camo battle dress. He drew fatigues, cap, field jacket, socks, and boots. Uniform issue was followed by an update on Bosnia and the UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force.
He’d tried to concentrate, but right now all he retained was seven points. He’d watched so many PowerPoint briefs he was starting to think in bullets:
• Bosnia and Herzegovina, formerly one of the six republics of Yugoslavia, was made up of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims.
• All Bosnians were racially identical and spoke the same language.
• Bosnian Croats were Catholic.
• Bosnian Serbs were Greek Orthodox.
• Bosnian Muslims were Muslim.
• Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, was grabbing as much land as he could in Bosnia to build a Greater Serbia.
• The whole place was coming apart at the seams.
Or as the briefer, a reserve Navy captain, had put it more succinctly, “Terrible shit’s been happening in the Balkans for a thousand years. They took forty years off. Now they’re at it again.”
Maybe that was flip, Dan thought, peering down between towering mountains. Below their wings a village passed in which every house was roofless, in whose dirt streets no one moved. But what else could you say about a country disintegrating into tribes? For the past couple of years a skin-thin UN contingent supported by NATO air power had kept the lid on. Now it was off again.
The briefer had shaken his hand good-bye. “You know they won’t want you there,” she’d said.
“The Serbs?”
“Well, them too. But I’m talking about the UN. The chief of staff, Cees Nikolai. Watch out for him.”
“He hasn’t signed off on me?”
“UNPROFOR isn’t a U.S. operation. We have units down along the Macedonian border, but they don’t work for Nikolai.”
“They don’t?”
“No, they’re under a Finnish dude who works for the UN commander in Zagreb. But that’s separate from the UNPROFOR structure. Confused yet?” Dan nodded. “Good, then you’re going out oriented properly. Anyway, we’ve got a liaison who’ll meet you, but we most definitely do not have the stick up there. If we told Nikolai you were coming, guess what? You wouldn’t go.”
“So … you didn’t,” Dan said, getting that sinking feeling again.
“Exactly right, Commander.” The captain had patted his back fondly, like an older sister. “You have a great time now. Hear?”
* * *
For some reason the UN had put its headquarters for the whole Bosnian protection effort in a besieged city under shellfire. Sarajevo lay along a thin blue-and-white lace of river. On the final approach, Dan made out the Olympic stadium, left over from ’84. Housing blocks. A sizable downtown, with ten-story buildings. A haze of wood-smoke. Minarets, and church spires, and the needle-and-globe television towers you saw in Bahrain and Saudi. The turboprop, wings groaning and hold-downs rattling, sideslipped precipitously toward a strip that suddenly came into view between steep hillsides. The folded, rounded mountains didn’t look too different from those he’d grown up among. That was the creepiest thing of all, how much like home it looked.
The pilot came back and spoke to the Dutchman in Spanish. “Approach control has problems with the runway,” his seatmate told Dan. “Let me give you some advice. Wear your flak jacket whenever you’re in the open. Be aware of mines. Be especially alert around the cemeteries. They like to plant them there and get the people visiting their dead relatives.
“That’s a two-thousand-foot mountain,” the major added, pointing off to the south. “They’re not supposed to shoot, but we’ll still do evasive as we come in. If you look down, you’ll see something interesting.”
They roller-coastered past the mountain toward the shortest runway he’d ever seen. And there they were, tucked under the trees overlooking the city whose lights were sparkling on here and there down in the shadows of the hills. Artillery. Troops shading their eyes up at them. The drab green, knobby turrets of T-54s. Campfires. Tents. Pickup trucks with what looked like ZSU-44s in tow.
“JNA. Yugoslav Army,” the Dutchman said grimly as the fuselage bucked, throwing them together. They grappled like wrestlers, off balance. He pushed Dan away. “The fucking Serbs.”
* * *
Now and then during the trip, Dan had wondered darkly why Clayton wanted him for this. Surely State or CIA could confirm a massacre. Blair was in the Philippines. So it couldn’t be that. Or could it? Sending the inconvenient husband off to vanish? Playing Captain What’s-his-name … Bathsheba’s husband … started with a U … to De Bari’s King David?
Or was he going over the cliff, into post-traumatic stress, disorientation, madness? He’d been told before he was prone to imagining more was going on than met the eye. On the other hand, in the China Sea, in the Caribbean, in D.C. years before, more had. Like the wisdom scrawled in the ship’s heads: Just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you.
Now he took slow, deep breaths as the landing gear shrieked on wet pavement. He tried to divert his apprehension by lacing the too-big boots tighter around two pairs of socks.
Uriah, he thought then, fear settling in his bowels like an impacted turd. The dutiful, unsuspecting Hittite. Who’d snapped off a salute, barked, “Aye aye, sir,” and marched off to Rabbah, never to return.
* * *
Sarajevo International looked like an airport in West Virginia that had been shelled and looted. Battered concrete-block buildings. Barbed wire. A rusty truck loaded with gravel. More gravel lay piled along the runway. Shell holes pocked the tarmac. The French seemed to be running things. At least there were French flags flying. The blue UN banner too. The plane emptied fast, blue-bereted noncoms shouting the troops out. A swarm of hungry-looking handlers clawed at the cargo. A forklift snarled away with the palleted stuff, trickling rice as it jolted over craters.
The mountains looked much higher than from the air. A turbulent river foamed along south of the airstrip. Past it a blue-gray escarpment towered like a barrier between worlds. It was capped with snow. Valleys opened to his left, to his right; ahead loomed an even more enormous peak, so high his neck flashed a twinge as he looked up at it. He remembered watching skiers tear down its flanks on television, years before.
“Let’s go,” said the Dutchman. “We need to get off this strip.”
Dan flinched. Ducking, he followed at a jog through air that was warmer than he’d expected toward the largest building. A huge black U and N were painted on its roof.
* * *
He sat nursing a paper cup of Nescafé in a cold office that smelled of piss with Captain Manuel “Buddy” Larreinaga, U.S. Army. The American liaison was dark and short, and his border twang sounded strange in the split heart of Eastern Europe. He and the Dutchman sat on opposite sides of the table in their different green-and-brown camo patterns and did not look at each other. Both smoked, though, and Dan’s eyes stung as they went over the route and what might ambush them along the way. He kept expecting the captain to ask exactly why Dan was here, but he never did. As if there was no point questioning anything from Higher.
The hulking armored car Larreinaga called a “transporter” was painted a white that looked dingy at close range. Its cramped interior stank of sweat and cheese and diesel fuel, but Dan felt more secure with steel around him. He clicked open a firing port as they growled and lurched into a city that had undergone a siege almost as long as that of Stalingrad.
The liaison officer told him he was going to have to be alert in the open. It wouldn’t hurt to beware of windows too, especially facing south. The city was surrounded, and everyone in it was a target. Bridges, crossroads, streets that weren’t masked by buildings, were areas of increased risk. If you had to cross them nobody would laugh if you broke into a jog. The residents had put up signs in the most dangerous areas. He should obey them and cooperate if someone grabbed him to pull him back into cover. “Remember, if you can see a mountain, whoever’s on that mountain can see you,” Larreinaga said.
The signs were daubed on plywood or plastic sheets or chalked on the walls. In English, French, and what must be Bosnian. The streets were pocked with shellbursts. Some of the black ripped-out stars had been filled with gravel. Others hadn’t. Every window had been blown out or shattered. The streets were lined with shipping containers, burned-out buses, wrecked cars, sections of levered-up sidewalk. Two old men huddled over a chess table close under high-school lockers stacked with sandbags. Dan realized they were cover from snipers.
They passed a huge nineteenth-century building, smoke trails like black eyebrows above the empty windows. “That’s from the shelling three years back,” Buddy said. “These people have been through it. War One, War Two, this is War Three for them. That corner—see the bridge? That’s where Gavrilo Princip shot the duke and the duchess. Where World War I started.”
Some streets farther on, the transporter slowed. It wove between giant jacks of rusty I-beams and stopped at a checkpoint. Troops with automatic rifles exchanged shouts with the driver. The transmission whined.
Headquarters was a multistory office building that hadn’t been spared fragment damage. It was ringed with concertina wire, sandbags, parked transporters, and stacks of rusty containers decorated with large-caliber-bullet holes. Women hoed onions in garden patches no bigger than bedsheets. A desert tan French tank aimed its main gun down the street.
“Keep moving, remember,” Buddy said, and they went inside, Dan careful to keep as much metal and concrete between him and the mountain as he could.
* * *
The United Nations Military Observers headquarte
rs held Swedes, Turks, Italians, French, Portuguese, British, Belgians, Japanese, Dutch. The UNMOs wore blue berets and all seemed very busy. Larreinaga did what he could, but Dan didn’t get much attention. Shunted from office to office, he ended up on the fourth floor. The office was on the north, the safe side, and he could look out over the city.
“Commander Lenson. I trust you had a fast and safe trip in. Cigarette?” said a slight, poised officer whose name tag said B FEVRIER.
“Non, merci.” Dan declined the proffered Gauloises bleues.
“We were, I very much regret to say, not prepared for your arrival.”
He’d thought about how he should handle this, and decided on low-key first. He also thought it might help to try it in French. “Je regrette beaucoup d’entendre cela, mon colonel. J’espere que ce sera possible de visiter la site des evenements recentes, en poursuivant les orders de ma gouvernement.”
Fevrier made a half-concealed grimace, as if tasting a bad peanut. “You will excuse me, but perhaps we should conduct our business in English. I have taken the opportunity of calling the chief of staff, Brigadier Nikolai, about your request. I am sorry to say that though it is our desire to help, it is not possible at present to transport anyone to Srebrenica.” He pronounced it Sebreneetsa. “We are as you may have observed in the middle of a war. A confused and ugly little conflict. It is not a time for fact-finding missions.”
“Nevertheless I must insist. The president wants the situation clarified. It would be very desirable if transport and a small escort—”
Fevrier inclined his head politely, as if being introduced to the dignitary Dan had just invoked. He seemed to be listening. A moment later a heavy, close-by crack rattled the windows. Dan stopped speaking, interrupted not by his courteous interlocutor but by the shell.
Fevrier gestured, leaving a trail of smoke in the air. “A 120 mortar … We too would very much like to have the situation ‘clarified.’ Unfortunately we are attempting to police a state of five million people with seven thousand troops, while both Croats and Serbs are trying to tear it in two. Envision two starving wolves, and a tasty piece of fillet. We simply cannot get you to Srebrenica. The peacekeepers there have been ejected. Local resistance has collapsed. Which means Ratko Mladic is in control. We would like to know what is going on there as much as you would. Naples may know more than we. That is where your Predators are controlled from. Have you checked with them?”
