The European members of NATO and the non-NATO members of KFOR vowed to continue the United Nations peacekeeping efforts in Kosovo and the Balkans, but without the United States, it seemed almost pointless. But the European nations had been demanding a greater role in security missions in Europe, so few could really complain when the United States unceremoniously left the field and went home — no one really expected it to happen so suddenly.
“Who’s the closest air defense assets we can call on?” the commander asked.
“The Three-thirty-fourth Fighter Squadron out of Thessaloniki,” his deputy said, punching up the unit’s satellite and airborne telephone channels to its command post. “They have cross-border air defense arrangements with Macedonia — they can scramble fighters and have them up here in ten minutes.”
“Get them up here straightaway,” the commander ordered. “Comm, C-1, broadcast warning messages on all frequencies, get that hostile turned around. Notify Skopje and American Navy air traffic control about an unknown target we have marked as ‘Hostile.’”
“And if he doesn’t turn around?”
“There’s not a bloody thing we can do about it,” the commander said. “We might be able to convince Italy or Turkey to send a couple fighters up to take a look, but even they don’t want to waste any fuel or air-frame time on anyone who’s not a threat to their country. We just watch and—”
“Snap target! Snap target!” one of the radar technicians shouted. He immediately marked the new high-speed target with a blinking circle symbol, then sent an alert to every crew station. “Designate Highspeed One … snap target, snap target, second high-speed target, designate Highspeed Two.”
“O-1, this is C-1,” the senior controller on board the AWACS radar plane radioed on intercom to the operations crew commander. “We’ve got target Highspeed One, climbing through angels forty, range three miles and closing fast, speed eight hundred and increasing. Highspeed Two is following the same track, two seconds behind Highspeed One.”
“Missile attack!” the commander shouted. “Missile evasion tactics, now! Shut down the radar! Countermeasures ready!” He punched the HOT button on his intercom panel so he could talk to both the ops crew and flight crew. “Missile attack, missile attack, pilot, turn ninety left and descend to angles one-zero now.” At the same time, the crew defensive systems officer began sending out radar and infrared jamming signals and ejecting chaff and flare bundles, trying to spoof and decoy the incoming missiles.
But it was far too late — once the R-60 missile locked on, there was little a big aircraft like an E-3 AWACS could do to evade it. The missiles plowed into the aircraft with a direct hit, the first missile into the rotodome and the second missile into the forward fuselage section.
He could see it all clearly right in front of him, even though it was over three miles away: the decoys flying out of the AWACS plane, the flares a hundred times brighter and hotter than the aircraft; the AWACS plane trying a steep turning descent, one that the crew had obviously practiced before but still looked so steep and fast that it was doubtful if the crew could have pulled out of it even if they survived the missile attack; then the twin streaks of light, the huge blossoms of flames, the pieces of the jet flying apart, and the rolling, tumbling mass of burning metal and jet fuel on its final flight, straight down.
“Target destroyed,” Yegorov reported.
“I see it,” Stoica gasped. “My God. How many?”
“Twenty crew members. Sixteen operations, four flight.”
Stoica switched the multifunction display to another mode so he wouldn’t have to watch the plane burn on the ground. “They should have gone home when the Americans did,” he murmured. “Leaving an AWACS radar plane up here, all alone, with no air cover? It was suicidal.”
“It was homicidal — and we did it,” Yegorov said. “But we’ve got a job to do, just like they did. Business is business.”
The Mt-179 Shadow headed southwest, still in a shallow, high-speed descent. As they approached the Yugoslavian republic of Kosovo, Stoica increased his descent rate until they were at five hundred feet above the ground at six hundred knots airspeed. Ground radar coverage was much better in United Nations-patrolled Kosovo, and they had to be at terrain-masking altitude long before they reached the radar pickets. Using the infrared scanner, Stoica could easily see all the terrain even in pitch darkness. Ten minutes later, they crossed the Albanian border and swept down the gently rolling hills across the Drin River valley to the town of Kikesi I Ri, or New Kukes, in northeastern Albania.
New Kukes was a relocated town, built by the Albanian government only thirty years earlier with Soviet assistance; the old town had been deliberately flooded after construction of a hydroelectric power-generating dam on the Drin River. The Drin River valley is narrow and hilly, with what seems like a perpetual foggy haze obscuring the ridges and mountain tops nearby. The native population of twelve thousand had swelled to over one hundred thousand with Kosovo refugees, although that number had decreased to just a few thousand refugees since KFOR had established its peacekeeping force in 1999 and allowed the refugees safe passage across the border. The huge Kukes carpet factory employed nearly a thousand workers, and the copper and chromium mines in the region employed another few thousand. But by far the biggest employers in the region were the black-market weapons salesmen, the Albanian Mafia, the drug lords, and the prostitutes, preying on the refugees and supporting ethnic Albanian Kosovar freedom fighters in their continuing struggle to form an independent Muslim nation in Kosovo.
The center of both legitimate and illegitimate commerce in northeastern Albania was the Kukes carpet factory, several kilometers from the center of town; it was by far the biggest industrial facility in the entire valley. The refugee camps that had been set up near the factory were smaller than before, but the remaining parts of the camp had evolved into a semipermanent series of shacks, tents, and wooden buildings, reminiscent of an Old West mining camp evolving into a real town, with ankle-deep mud streets, wooden sidewalks, almost no running water, and just as many animals wandering the street as vehicles. Several of the larger wooden buildings, two or three stories high, were saloons, restaurants, or shops on the ground floor, with offices on the middle floors and apartments on the upper floors for the wealthier merchants, government officials and bureaucrats, and underworld bosses and lieutenants.
Behind the wooden buildings were the shacks for the workers, and beyond those was the tent city, built by NATO military engineers and international relief organizations, for Kukes’ other group of residents — the Kosovo Liberation Army training center. At any given time, over five hundred men, women, and children as young as fourteen and as old as sixty were in training at the Kukes camp by Kosovar instructors, overseen and administered by the Albanian Army. They trained in hand-to-hand combat, mountaineering, land navigation, basic maneuvers, and small-arms tactics, along with political and religious indoctrination courses. The top twenty percent of each class were sent to Albanian regular army bases at Shkoder, Gjader, and Tirana for advanced military training; the top five percent of those, who showed especial aptitude in military arts as well as hotter than usual hatred for non-Muslims, were sent to training centers in Libya, Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria for advanced combat and terrorist training.
Under the NATO peacekeeping umbrella, safe from hit-and-run raids by Serb paramilitaries and border police, the Kukes training camp was allowed to grow and flourish. In exchange for food, housing, and training, the recruits worked the carpet factory and mines, provided security for the smugglers and drug dealers, and did odd jobs around the tent city. An hour before sunrise, with the first hints of the morning light filtering through the low overcast, the day shift workers were having breakfast and getting ready to head to work, and the graveyard shift for both the mines and the carpet factory were just getting ready to leave — when the Metyor-179 Shadow stealth bomber began its bomb run.