Deep in the backyard of the apartment, one of the men removed his ski mask within sight of the powerful night vision enhanced camera lens. The smart lens whirred as it made a few minor adjustments, allowing it to take focused pictures of each figure, while continuing to capture a wider framed video of the apartment. The surveillance camera clicked several times, causing the agent sleeping on the nearby couch to shift. Across the street, a tall black man tightened the straps on his backpack and disappeared with his group through the backyards.
The two agents would rise early and review the digital playback from the camera, eventually catching the only unusual thing they had ever seen at this location. So far, the stakeout had proven to be as boring and mind-numbing as every other. They had been told that more agents would arrive at some point tomorrow morning to bolster each watch section. This news had been the only interesting development in the five months they had been assigned to the stakeout rotation. They weren't told why more agents had been assigned, but everyone had heard rumors about a coordinated effort between the Newark and New York Police Departments to map out Muslim neighborhoods in the Tri-State area. With three mosques within walking distance, the West Side neighborhood definitely qualified for extra attention.
Bonus excerpt from Black Flagged series
A quick note about this bonus excerpt…
When I started Black Flagged Redux, I had a very different concept for the storyline. I had envisioned telling Jessica and Daniel's story from the beginning, alternating between the two characters in Serbia, with flashbacks to their initial training and flash forwards to the life you experienced in the final version of the story. Based on some very solid advice, I decided to stick with a more linear progression of the series. At some point, I'll get back into Daniel and Jessica's history with a book. With that in mind, this was the original beginning to Book Two of the Black Flagged Series. In case you've forgotten, Marko Resja and Daniel Petrovich are one and the same. Enjoy.
Marko Resja stood a few meters away from the raised dirt road, swatting flies away from his grimy, sweat-covered face. August drew stifling heat and oppressive humidity to the Balkan Peninsula, which couldn't have been timed worse for the Yugoslav offensive. The heat seemed to incite the flies, which needed little encouragement in these hills. He wondered if these insects could sense their role in the impending tragedy. It would certainly explain their increased activity.
He raised his twenty-year-old M-76 sniper rifle and stared through the scope, scanning the road as far as was practical. He was assigned to watch the most likely western approach for Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) vehicles and shared the duty with another relatively new member of Hadzic's Panthers. Satisfied that nothing threatened to approach from the outskirts of Divjaka, he lowered the rifle and shrugged at his partner, who spoke into a cheap plastic handheld radio.
Sava looked back at him and rolled his eyes, alternately wiping his forehead and slapping flies away from his ears. His dark green camouflage uniform looked filthy, crusted with light brown mud up to his thighs, and large sweat stains formed odd circular shapes under his armpits and across his chest. The only thing clean about Sava was his assault rifle, which was slung over his left shoulder, freeing him to perform the occasional radio check-in and chain smoke cigarettes. Sava's face disappeared in a cloud of tobacco smoke and reappeared sporting a grin. His teeth stood out through the thin layer of unevenly applied green and black camouflage.
The camouflage greasepaint had nearly worn away over the past three days, as their unit moved through the hills mopping up "suspected" bands of KLA resistance. Apparently, "suspected" had always been a loose term among the Panthers, but since yesterday's gruesome discovery in Klecka, the designation was now applied to any of the ethnic Albanian Kosovars found in the hills.
Regular Yugoslavian security forces captured the KLA stronghold in Klecka and were led to a crematorium by a young man who claimed to have been forced to participate in atrocities against kidnapped Serbians. Evidence of scorched human remains was found in a makeshift crematorium, and several trenches filled with badly decomposing bodies were uncovered in a nearby orchard. Word of the discovery spread like wildfire through Serbian units in the foothills, and Marko's platoon was roused from a deep sleep at three in the morning to prepare for an urgent operation.
Several armored vehicles arrived in the camp shortly thereafter and provided transportation to the outskirts of Divjaka, where a mortar team set up in a clearing to the west. Half of the thirty-man platoon drove to the eastern road on the other side of the village, along with a few of the M-80 armored personnel carriers. The entire platoon's focus was a cluster of homes and structures in northern Divjaka, isolated from the main town, and accessible by two roads, which were now blocked by a heavily armed Serbian paramilitary force.
They loitered in the western tree line until a crimson sun started to creep over the eastern hills of the tight valley, and fingers of deep orange light caught the tops of the trees around them. He could only imagine the terror spreading through the homes in front of them as residents helplessly listened to the distant rumble of idling engines beyond their sight, and waited.
The mortar tubes announced the break of dawn across the valley, firing a volley of 82mm high explosive shells at the closest grouping of structures visible along the road. The shells sailed in a high arc and took an eternity to find earth again. When gravity returned them, the ground behind one of the houses erupted skyward in a light brown cloud, followed by another geyser of dirt from the road. The sharp crunch of the impacts washed through the men, giving rise to a few cheers. Marko felt relieved that the rounds had missed the homes.
The mortar attack lasted five minutes, as the mortar crew haphazardly sent several more salvos into the village, adjusting their aim to "walk" the shells through the entire length of the community. Luckily for the inhabitants, the mortar team never focused on the buildings. Only once did they see a shell make a direct hit, as large wooden chunks of a red roof flew skyward, joining the dust cloud. This led to a chorus of cheers from the men around him, which he pretended to eagerly join. He felt relieved that the mortar attack had done so little damage, but his solace would be short lived.
Without ceremony, the mortar teams disassembled their equipment and loaded it into the troop compartment of one of the M-80s. The entire detachment of regular army vehicles sped away, leaving his squad with their own odd assortment of AUZ jeeps. The ride over had been a "treat" for the Panthers, who would be left behind at Divjaka to do the day's dirty work, and had distracted most of them from the fact that they weren't in the company of regular Yugoslav infantry. Marko noted this as soon as the army convoy arrived at their encampment and dreaded their destination. He knew this would be a difficult day. He truly had no idea how bad it would get, or how important the day would turn out to be for him.
Nenad Sojic, the platoon's de facto leader, spoke to his radio operator, a lean, darker-skinned Serb named Goran, and waved the squad over. Through the radio handset, Goran relayed Sojic's orders to the men positioned on the eastern approach to the village and took a deep drag on his cigarette. Without ceremony, Sojic told them that they would search house to house for KLA insurgents and weapons caches. Once a house was searched, the inhabitants would be sent to a centralized location for further questioning. Even the most naive members of the platoon knew what that meant.