Her brow furrowed as she listened to his words. She slowly returned to the bed and pulled up another chair, sitting down. They both looked at me with eager eyes and I could see the resemblance. Even through the burns that had scarred the entire left side of Galloway’s body, there was no mistaking the similarity between the two.
“I’m not exactly prepared,” I said, breaking the tension.
“It’s okay. I suppose it’s best we start at the beginning.”
“The embassy fire…”
He shook his head and grinned mischievously. “No. That’s the end…more or less. The beginning was Bosnia.”
I settled in for what I knew had to be a story unlike any I could have anticipated.
“The U.S. didn’t want to get involved in the civil war, but that didn’t mean troops weren’t sent over there. There were thousands of troops deployed who were stationed in a safe zone, ready to intervene if need be. And there were some of us there on intelligence gathering missions. What you need to understand is that things were so fucked up over there. The carnage was unlike anything anyone should ever have to see and it gets to you. Our unit’s sole purpose was to try to get intel on Serbian and Croatian movements, plans, et cetera, and that meant turning someone on the inside. We went through thousands of dossiers, looking for someone who would have some motive to help us. We stumbled on a man name Viktor Popovic. Granted, there was nothing too suspicious about him on paper, but when I looked at family history, something struck me as odd.”
“What was that?” I asked, intrigued.
“He was only twenty-three at the time of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence. At which time, he also filed for and was granted a very quick divorce. Upon further inspection, I realized his father was very influential in the Bosnian Serbs. It all could have turned out to be nothing, but something didn’t sit right with me about this. I looked into his former wife and learned she was Muslim. It made me very suspicious. Maybe this guy’s father forced him to divorce her. Maybe he had privileged information regarding the forthcoming ethnic cleansing of the Muslims and wanted to save his son from that. So we took our chances and made our approach to learn more.”
“And what did you learn?” I asked, taking a sip of water.
“That my instincts were right. It took some time to get this guy to open up and talk about everything, but he eventually admitted he tried to fight his father on the matter, but his father promised him his wife would not meet any harm if he agreed to divorce her. So he did. Of course, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was hoping to use his ex-wife as leverage to get him to be my man on the inside. So I did what I could to look into his ex-wife’s whereabouts. We found that she was being held at a sort of concentration camp just over the border from the safe zone. At first, Viktor didn’t want to believe us. He insisted he had been secretly seeing her up until about a month prior when his father put her on a flight to Greece, but I had planted that seed of doubt. Days later, he came to me, furious. He had confronted his father and found out that his wife, Irena, had been taken to a camp. He agreed to help us with any information we wanted, as long as we agreed to bring Irena to safety.”
He shook his head and took a deep breath, briefly looking away as he composed himself. When he looked back up, his eyes were worn, the weariness etched on his face. “I’m not proud of it, but I agreed, although I had no intention of following through. An operation like that could take months to plan and, by that time, I hoped to be long gone with enough information that could help our country should we have to become involved in the conflict.”
“But that didn’t happen, did it?” Mackenzie asked, grabbing her father’s hand, comforting him.
“No, it didn’t. The more I learned about what was going on over there, the harder following my directive to not get involved became. When I learned exactly what was happening in those camps, I knew I couldn’t sit by and do nothing. Based solely on my promise that I would deliver his wife to safety, Viktor had put his own life at risk to help me and my country. And I knew I had to make it right.
“When I approached my team with my plan, I gave them an out. Going in and doing an extraction at the camp would be dangerous. Lives could be lost, but I needed to be true to my word. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. Surprisingly, my entire unit was with me. Since we didn’t have the backing of the U.S. government, we would need to go in, do the extraction, and get back across the border and into the safe zone without being detected or firing a single shot. It was a smaller camp set up at a hotel, but it was still risky, especially without having the luxury of time to properly plan. We were pretty much going in blind, hoping his wife was still alive.”
“You didn’t even know whether she was alive?” Mackenzie asked.
He slowly shook his head. “No, but I knew I would regret it if we didn’t at least try to go in. The following night, we made our way the few kilometers from our base camp and into Bosnian territory. As we approached the hotel, the screams I heard were chilling. The cries…” He shuddered.
“I wished I couldn’t speak their language. That way, I wouldn’t understand their words, begging for their abuser to stop, saying they’d rather die than have to suffer through any more brutality.”
He buried his head in his hands and tugged at the little hair he had. The room was still as we were on the edge of our proverbial seats to find out how the mission went. Francis slowly raised his head and, with a furrowed brow, met my eyes. “I had seen a lot of things during my time with the Rangers,” he started, his voice strained. “And I have seen a lot of things since. But nothing compares to what I witnessed that evening. It’s stayed with me always, and I have a feeling it will until my dying day.”
He stared into the distance as a lone tear trickled down his cheek. I barely saw any combat during my time in the navy, so I had no idea how I would react to the sights and sounds he was describing, albeit vaguely. I knew enough about the conflict in Bosnia to fill in the blanks, though.
“Viktor went in first and made small talk with the Serbian guard stationed at the front, giving us an opportunity to sneak in. Once inside, we broke into teams of two to search for our target. Harrison and I were pretty lucky, finding her in the first room we swept.”
“Harrison Mills?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Wait a minute,” Mackenzie interjected. “Is that…?” She raised her eyebrows, her father simply nodding in response. “How did I not know that?” She leaned back in her chair as she rubbed her temples.
“Not know what?” I asked, feeling like I was missing something.
“That one of the members of my unit eventually moved in next door to us when he transferred to Counterintelligence.”
“Damian’s father?” I looked at Mackenzie.
“Yes.”
“So, besides you, he’s the only one from your team who’s still alive, although he’s supposedly been missing for years.”
He shook his head. “He’s not missing, but we’ll get to that.”
“Okay,” I agreed, curious as to what the story with Mills was.
“Like I was saying, Harrison and I found Viktor’s wife and did a quick extraction. She was in a room with roughly twenty other women, all of them chained to the wall. They were pleading with us to be set free, to take them with us, but I couldn’t. We weren’t even supposed to be there, and I needed to do everything to minimize the potential backlash of causing what could be viewed as an international incident. I hated what I did, but I simply shook my head without giving them so much as an explanation. Later, when I found out that only about twenty women ever made it out of that camp alive…” He let out a breath. “Well, I don’t have to tell you how much that guilt still eats at me to this day.”
“I can imagine,” I commented.
“We were lucky to have even been able to get in and find our target with no issues. But luck eventually runs out, and I knew ours would, too. As we were approaching the lobby, where Viktor was still distracting the guard, I heard two gunshots come from down the hall, followed by frantic shouting from some guards. I knew I shouldn’t have looked back, that I should have kept going, but I needed to know. I saw two of my guys, Ian McKay and Michael Cranston, lying on the floor, each with a bullet hole in their heads. They were both married with children, but their families never got to bury their loved ones. We never got to hand over a body to them so they could properly say their goodbyes. They never got the closure they needed.”