“I’d thought about the same thing,” Johnson admitted. “And I’ve got an idea, but it’s a long-shot.” He brought up a picture of a similar van. This one was apparently filled with people, and unless Mike was mistaken, they were all female except the driver. “The Chechens are into everything you can think of in the way of illegal moneymaking. Money laundering, drugs, gun running, what have you. All of them aren’t funding the resistance in Chechnya, but a good bit of the money flows that way. But one of the things they’re into is the sex trade.”
“Slaving,” Mike said.
“Bingo,” Johnson replied. “It’s not exactly the way that it’s portrayed in the news media, though. Yeah, some of the girls are snatched off the street. But most of them are sold by people that have authority over them. Parents, orphanages, what have you. The Chechens go on regular rounds and gather up girls, then sell them to various buyers.”
“There’s a main market,” Pierson said. “Eagle Market in Bosnia.”
“Agreed,” Johnson said. “I ran that idea past the analysts and Langley and they put it as a low-order probability. The max prob is the device is going through Georgia or St. Petersburg to be shipped elsewhere, or down to Chechnya, possibly into Georgia, to be refurbished and used against the Russians.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “But if it’s internal to Russia, it’s not our ballgame. And all of that more or less ignores the passenger van anomaly.”
“You want to try to track it?” Pierson asked.
“That’s why I’m here,” Mike replied. “And why I put that jet on standby. Do we have anyone in Bosnia that’s a kind of expert in the slave trade?”
“I don’t have that info right here,” Johnson said. “But I can round it up.”
“Call me,” Mike replied, standing up. “Pierson will give you my scrambler code.”
“You’re going to Bosnia?” Pierson asked. “Now?”
“Better now than later,” Mike said, shrugging. “We’re five days behind them. I don’t know how long it takes to refurbish a nuke…”
“Depending upon their equipment,” Johnson interjected, “as little as ten hours. I checked. If they’re planning on planting it somewhere, they’ll probably trap it. Longer for that.”
“But we don’t have all the time in the world,” Mike finished, looking at the face of the terrorist “engineer” and burning it into his brain. “When I get there, I’m going to need a radiation detector. Preferably something I can secret on my person and use covertly.”
“We can do that,” Pierson said, standing up as well. “I’ll get you a contact in IFOR to get the stuff and the name of a person to guide you around.”
“Johnson, thanks for the brief,” Mike said, walking to the door. “And you need to update your intel. At the island — one got away.”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson said as Mike left the room. “Although, I’d love to know where he gets his intel. As far as I knew, just about everybody on that island got vaporized. And I didn’t know that the guy who armed the nuke escaped.”
“Let’s just say that some people are tough to get an after-actions report out of,” Pierson replied with a sigh.
The Gulfstream V was sitting at an out-of-the-way hangar at Moscow International when Mike arrived. He paid off the taxi driver and strode over, his jump bag on his shoulder. It was all the luggage he was carrying. It held the usual toiletries, a couple of pairs of socks and underpants and two shirts. Between that and the jacket and jeans he was wearing, he figured it would do. It also held his “walking-around money,” about sixty thousand dollars in mixed euros and dollars, mostly hundreds. The door of the plane was open and the steps down, but nobody seemed to be around.
“Hello, the plane,” he called, stepping up to the door.
“Mr. Jenkins?” the pilot asked, stepping out of the cockpit. He had a strong southern British accent and a military bearing. Mike pegged him immediately for former Royal Air Force.
“The same,” Mike replied, handing over his entirely fictitious passport.
“John Hardesty, sir,” the pilot said handing back the passport after a searching study. “I’m pleased to be piloting you to wherever your destination might be.”
“Former military?” Mike asked, stepping past him and tossing his jump bag on one of the front seats.
“Astute of you to guess, sir,” the pilot replied neutrally.
“Okay,” Mike said, shrugging. “RAF… Tornadoes. Close?”
“Bang on, sir,” the pilot replied, frowning.
“And you got out as… oh, a major I’d say,” Mike continued, grinning. “Because you could see from there on out it was going to be, at best, squadron command and much more likely a coalition staff position. Flying was going to go away.”
“Did you read my bio or something?” Hardesty asked, going from somewhat annoyed to amused.
“No,” Mike replied, shrugging. “Just a very ‘astute’ judge of character. Bit of a hobby figuring out plane drivers’ backgrounds.”
“And may I ask what your profession is, sir?” Hardesty queried carefully.
“I do odd jobs,” Mike replied, sitting in one of the forward seats.
“If you’ll pardon me, sir,” the pilot said, still curious. “You don’t get the money to charter a jet, much less have it sit around on call, by digging ditches with a shovel.”
“I’ve used a shovel in my time,” Mike said, smiling broadly. “But I usually prefer to find the local guy with a backhoe. Quicker and easier to hide the bodies. You ready to go?”
“Of course, sir,” the pilot said, reevaluating his passenger. “We’re refueled. I need to do a preflight.”
“Make it snappy, please,” Mike said, pulling out his satellite phone. “I’m in a bit of hurry.”
“Well, Mr. Jenkins,” Hardesty replied, smiling faintly, “it would help if we knew where we were going.”
“Someplace in Bosnia,” Mike said. “Just head for Sarajevo and I’ll try to get a better read when we’re in-flight. I’m expecting some calls.”
Mike looked out at the tiny airport that served the town of Herzjac and thought about its recent history.
Herzjac was on the border of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just over the Bosnian side. The Bosnian civil war had raged for years, with the various factions gaining and losing ground. As soon as it broke out, the UN, with the connivance of the Russians and certain European countries, notably France and Germany, had slapped a weapons embargo on the entire region. The problem with that was that the Serbians had, traditionally, held most of the military bases and production in their areas. Tito had been a Serb, and while forcing everyone into a “pan-Slavic” society, he had ensured that some Slavs were more equal than others. Since Russia and France had long running ties to the Serbian factions, it quickly became clear that rather than being a “humanitarian” move, the weapons embargo was designed to disarm, and keep disarmed, the “other” sides of the multisided war.
This meant that the Serbians had an immediate jump-start in the war and they had pressed their advantage home mercilessly. Thousands had been killed in the fighting and in “ethnic cleansing” in areas the Serbs overran. Of course, they were not the only perpetrators; when Croats or Bosnian Muslims retook regions that had been “ethnically cleansed” of their families, they were less than gentle with the Serbian inhabitants.
There had been various attempts to bring peace, but it wasn’t until the U.S. stepped in, covertly, that peace had actually been possible. The U.S. had secretly supplied the Croatians with training personnel, equipment and even real-time intelligence. Using those assets, the Croatians had retrained their army along American lines and used American real-time intel and “shock” tactics, multipronged heavy armor converging columns, to entrap the main Serb field army and virtually destroy it.