From beneath the bunk something scraped against the floorboards.
Briggs snaked his arm under the bunk, fingers groping along the cable until he touched something solid. Curved, plastic … A handle. Moving with exaggerated slowness, he grasped the handle and began pulling. After a few seconds, the edge of a stainless-steel case appeared.
Heart in his throat, Tanner wriggled the case from side to side until it slid from under the bunk. It was slightly dented but looked otherwise undamaged. The latches were sprung. He opened the lid.
Like Root’s case from the bank, this one was lined with what had once been foam, now black and fuzzy with mildew. Also like Root’s case, into the foam had been cut two cylindrically shaped notches. They were empty.
With little Oxygen left, Tanner had no time for disappointment. Using the ropes, he finned back through the train out the window, and headed for the surface. Ten feet beneath the surface he felt the first hollow hiss from his regulator. He spit out the mouthpiece and broke into the air.
How long? Briggs thought. How much of a headstart did Svetic have, and where was he? The truth was, it was probably already too late. Having won his prize, Svetic would go to ground. But where? Bosnia? Somewhere else? He could be anywhere.
Tanner stroked to the platform, pulled himself up, then shrugged off his tank and removed his fins. It was fully dark now, the sky black and clear; stars glittered overhead. He checked his watch: almost eight o’clock.
The red message light on his sat phone was blinking. He picked it up and scrolled through the display. There were two messages. The first one — simply “Urgent, call me” from Cahil — came in a few minutes after he went into the water. The second one was from Susanna:
“Briggs, it’s me. Where are you? We’re leaving; he just told me. I don’t know what’s happened, but something’s changed. They’re in a hurry. I don’t know where we’re—”
Suddenly in the background Tanner heard a male voice — graveled with a German accent: “What are you doing? Who are you talking to?” There were a series of thumps, followed by a sharp flesh-on-flesh crack. Susanna screamed.
The phone went dead.
43
Tanner laid the phone aside, stared dumbly at it a moment, then leaned his head back and gulped air. Susanna... What did it mean? Was Litzman on to her, or in his hurry to leave had he simply been rough with her? He prayed it was the latter. If not, Susanna was already dead.
Dammit, dammit, dammit … He should have been there; should’ve pulled her out and sent her home. Kestrel was gone, Susanna was gone … Briggs felt things closing in around him. He felt trapped, powerless.
Beside him, the phone was still blinking. He grabbed it and dialed Cahil, who answered immediately: “Where are you?”
“Neumvield See. They’re gone.”
“I figured as much. I think I know where they are.”
“Explain.”
Cahil recounted his movements after they parted ways in Innsbruck. Upon arriving in Trieste he went straight to the Piazetta dead drop. Inside was a note from Susanna: “Overheard L; Svetic here, staying Hotel Abbazia; L men watching, expecting Svetic departure.” Cahil penned a response, then left a chalk mark on the pillar along Rive Tralana.
“From there I went straight to the Abbazia. She was right: Svetic’s there with two of his men. Not for long, though.”
“Why?”
“There’s a storm brewing here, a bad one judging by the commotion. I trailed them a bit; they ate, did some shopping, then took a taxi to the harbor and booked three tickets on a ferry called the Aurasina. It was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning, but they’ve pushed the departure ahead to midnight.”
“Trying to outrun the storm,” Tanner said. Svetic’s choice of transportation made sense, he decided. Svetic wouldn’t dare risk Kestrel at a border crossing or an airport checkpoint. Ports had always been and always would be the first choice of smugglers. “Where’s it headed?”
“Zadar, Sibenek, Split—”
“That’s how he’s getting home.” Any one of those ports would put Svetic within fifty miles of the Bosnian border and well within reach of whatever help he needed to make a covert crossing.
“My thought exactly,” Cahil replied. “You remember the description of Svetic we pulled out of Grebo?”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t lying; it was right on the money. Problem is, Risto Svetic isn’t Risto Svetic.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Svetic may be his real name, but he goes by something different: Trpkova.”
“That can’t be, Bear.”
“I was standing five feet from him. It’s him.”
In the early and mid-nineties Risto Trpkova was the commander of an ATU, or antiterrorist unit within the Kaznjenicka Bojna, or KB, a Bosnian paramilitary group known better by its later nickname, the Convict’s Battalion. Following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, waves of Serbian-backed anti-Muslim violence erupted in Bosnia. To combat this, the Bosnian government organized and dispatched the KB to protect heavily populated Muslim areas. Of all the parties involved, Bosnia alone wanted to maintain the diverse ethnicity of its country, so it recruited into the KB soldiers of all cultural and religious identities, from Eastern Orthodox, to Muslim, to Roman Catholic. Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats served alongside Kosovoans, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. For several years the KB was effective, protecting Muslim enclaves from Serbian attack, intercepting Serbian weapons convoys, and gathering evidence of mass murders and concentration camp atrocities.
In 1995, realizing it had little chance of controlling the KB by force of arms, Serbia changed tactics and reverted to the same tactics it had used to incite its own incursions into Bosnia. Soon reports of KB atrocities began finding their way into the European press. Serbian enclaves were being attacked without provocation by Muslim-led KB units manned by prison inmates whose sentences had been commuted in exchange for their service. Like wild animals, the Convict’s Battalion roamed the Bosnian countryside, killing innocent Serbians, raping women and girls, and burning villages. The ruse worked.
Under pressure from the West, the Bosnian government ordered the KB disbanded. Most units complied and soldiers returned to their parent units. A few units refused, went to ground, divided into guerrilla teams, and continued their missions. One of these was commanded by a then little-known colonel named Risto Trpkova. Pressure to apprehend Trpkova mounted. Serbia denounced him as a terrorist, followed soon after by Bulgaria, Germany, and Macedonia.
Trpkova and his unit continued to operate in the highlands of Bosnia, harrassing Serbian forces, disrupting supply lines, and gathering evidence of Serbian “ethnic cleansing.” In July of 1997 a company of French UN peacekeepers was ambushed near Mostar, Bosnia. To a man the company was slaughtered. The first unit to reach the scene was Serbian. Predictably, evidence implicating Trpkova’s unit was found.
Two months later the UN’s Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague indicted Trpkova for crimes against humanity and called for his capture and extradition to stand trial.
Tanner asked Cahil, “How sure are you about this?”
“Very. He’s had some work done on his face, but it’s him.”
Tanner believed him. Not only was Bear as reliable as the setting sun, but he was even-keeled to a fault. Most importantly, he’d met Risto Trpkova.
Anxious to shore up the Bosnian government and assuming Belgrade was manufacturing evidence against the KB, in 1996 the CIA launched StrikePlate, an operation designed to gather evidence supporting claims of Serbian atrocities. Seconded to Langley from Holystone, Cahil had led a team through Albania and into southern Bosnia. After a few month’s work, they established contact with Trpkova’s unit outside Foca. Before any exchange of intelligence could take place, the situation deteriorated and Trpkova and his unit were forced to flee.