"Lieutenant!" Brown breathed, his mouth inches from Murdock's ear, the whisper so soft it was almost drowned by the raucous laughter twenty meters away. "Lieutenant! What're we gonna do?"
Silently, Murdock laid one finger across his lips and shook his head, a dark warning. There was nothing they could do at the moment, not without jeopardizing the mission. A firefight here might draw down the full force of whatever Serb warlord ruled this stretch of forested Balkan mountainsides. Gypsy could be captured. One or more of the team might be captured… and wouldn't the trial of a U.S. Navy SEAL look good on Serbian television? Belgrade had been itching for a confrontation with the Americans, something that would help Yugoslavia's neo-Communist dictatorship pull together the popular support they needed to stay in power… and to keep the war in Bosnia going. The situation, Murdock thought, was a damned international incident begging to happen.
He felt Roselli moving up on his right, felt the SEAL tense as he saw what was happening in front of the monastery. He laid a steadying hand on the SEAL's shoulder. Not yet.
It looked like the militiamen were planning on going about this methodically. They'd taken one of the younger girls and dragged her off away from the others. Two men disappeared through the monastery's door and reappeared a moment later, lugging a torn, water-stained mattress between them.
This, Murdock thought with a trembling, barely contained fury, was the reality of war in the Balkans, something the politicians and the Beltway bureaucrats never seemed able to squarely face. For years now, as the Yugoslav civil war ground on, sometimes hot, sometimes merely simmering, rape had been commonly practiced by both sides, but it was the Serbs who'd transformed rape into state policy, a means of demoralizing civilians and forging closer bonds among troops of uncertain loyalties, a way of emptying cities of enemy ethnic populations, and even one aspect of the detestable notion of "ethnic cleansing." Muslim women had been the most frequent targets. These people were probably Muslims, though since Bosniak women did not wear the chador there was no way to single them out. The younger girl who had been separated from the others was wearing Western-style blue jeans, and the other two wore casual dresses. None had coats against the cold, night air. Likely they'd either been snatched from their homes in some village or taken from one of the huge, Serb-controlled camps that more and more were beginning to resemble places with names like Buchenwald and Auschwitz.
While some of the men held the other two women apart, next to the fire, others dragged the third to the mattress. It took three of them to pin her down on her back while a fourth peeled off her jeans. When her legs were bare, a ponderously fat militiaman with a Josef Stalin mustache began using a bayonet to slice away her blouse; the others laughed and hooted wildly as the girl screamed, thrashing about in their grip. The older woman shouted something, her voice shrill and cracking. A big soldier in crossed ammo bandoliers and an ill-fitting fur schapska backhanded her savagely, and her shout was broken off in a muffled sob. A young militiaman with a thin, straggly mustache grabbed the other teenage girl from behind, tearing at her sweater as he dragged her to the ground. His comrades howled with laughter and urged him on.
Murdock touched his tongue to lips suddenly gone dry. There was no question about intervening; similar dramas were being played out daily throughout the former Republic of Bosnia, and the SEALs could not possibly stop the rape that had become a special Cain's mark of this war. Hell, at this point intervention was as likely to get the women killed as anything else. But to be forced to lie there in the bushes and watch, helpless to do anything at all…
Another set of headlights bathed the stone facade of the monastery as a second vehicle swung off the main road. This one was an open-topped jeep, also of Russian manufacture, and it had only a single passenger. Swiftly, Murdock raised his hand to cut off the glare from the headlights, enabling him to study the driver. Oh, Christ, yes… a short, wiry-looking man with glasses and a dapper mustache, identical to the man in the photograph he'd been shown yesterday. It was Gypsy, damn him, blundering headlong into the Serb party without bothering to scout the place first, and obviously as surprised by the presence of the soldiers as the SEALs had been. Two of the soldiers standing by the fire hurried out from between the parked trucks, signaling for him to stop and get out of his vehicle. Both kept their AK-47s trained on his chest.
"Shit, Lieutenant!" Roselli whispered fiercely. "That's fuckin' torn it!"
Murdock checked to see that his tactical radio was on. It was. "Blue Squad," he snapped, whispering into the microphone by his cheek. "Ready front!" He was thinking furiously. If they waited, Gypsy might be shot or arrested. So far as the mission requirements went, the balance had just shifted in favor of intervention. "Hasty ambush, single shot, stealthy, mark your targets. Magic, you take the two with our man. I'll drop the guys in the truck. After that, targets of opportunity. Professor, Doc, security, and backup. Rest of you, stand ready, on my signal. Acknowledge."
"Blue two, roger."
"Blue three, okay."
"Four, acknowledged."
"Blue five, rog."
"Six, ready to rock."
"Seven, rog."
Everyone was ready. Murdock paused, squinting across the barrel of his HK, checking with his thumb that the fire-selector switch was set to the single red pimple marking single-shot fire. Of all SEAL combat ops, the two most nerve-wrackingly uncertain were those where hostages were scattered among the targets, and those where the attack had to be sprung without prior planning, the so-called hasty ambush, and this attack combined elements of both.
Gypsy was out of his jeep now, his hands raised. One of the soldiers was holding out his hand, demanding something — papers or identification, probably. Not that papers would help the man. Serb rape gangs and the officers above them didn't like the glare of publicity. A stranger who blundered in on a scene like this would probably be arrested at the very least, and quite probably killed. Gypsy was supposed to be a member of the SDA, the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Party for Democratic Action. If he was Muslim and these militiamen found him out, he was a dead man.
Normally, even in a hasty ambush, each man in the squad would have been assigned a different sector, one overlapping the fire sectors of his buddies to left and right, and would open up on full-auto rock-and-roll. With civilian hostages in the line of fire, though, they couldn't risk indiscriminate fire; they would have to target and drop each enemy soldier separately. With eighteen enemy troops and only five shooters, it was a damn-near dead certainty that some, at least, would manage to escape. That was what the backup element, Professor and Doc, was for, to catch runners leaking through the kill zone.
The cardinal rule of this type of ambush was to put down the most dangerous targets first. Ignoring the thrashing of the girl, the rhythmic movements and grunts of the soldier on top of her, the coarse jeers of the men holding her down, Murdock selected one of the two men standing watch in the back of the truck.
Not that they were mounting an especially observant watch. Both were leaning against the side of the truck bed on folded arms, grinning and laughing like the rest as they watched the show taking place between the trucks. At a range of, Murdock estimated, fifteen meters, he picked an aim point inches below the spot he wanted to hit, just in front of the right ear of one of the men and below the line of his fatigue cap. It was a difficult shot for a submachine gun, but the way the targets were leaning against the side of the truck, it was safer going for a head-shot than to aim for a center of mass he couldn't see behind a metal barrier that would almost certainly deflect a subsonic 9mm round.
Draw in a breath… let Part of it out… a long, careful squeeze…