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  All clear.

  I look across the river.

  All clear.

  Garcia and Borozan look at me with expectation. “Well?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “We’re not going across.”

  Chapter 11

  Garcia swears and Borozan says, “Why not, boss?”

  The bridge is empty, long, and oh-so-inviting.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” I say. “You know how good our maps are. There’s no bridge marked on it.”

  “Maybe the map’s wrong,” Borozan says. “It happens.”

  “Or…no offense, jefe, maybe we got turned around somewhere.”

  If I was younger I’d be pissed at that last answer, but since I’m not, I let it slide. “Maybe we do have the wrong map, and maybe we are lost, but for now, we’re not using that bridge. I don’t like it.”

  Garcia says something but I hear something else. A little tinkling sound, like a bell. I hold up my hand and my crew looks to me.

  The little tinkling sound returns. I move a hand and we’re going up the river, slowly, and we’re all scanning, and then I hear a familiar bleating sound, and I feel a bit better. The land to the left rises up and it’s been cut and trimmed, and I smell wood smoke and the rich scent of manure. We get low and slow and come up along a wire pen, and in the pen are scores of sheep. Beyond the pen is a cluster of farm buildings, and a chimney, softly lifting out smoke into the snow.

  Garcia whispers, “Feel like roast mutton later?”

  “No,” I whisper back, looking over the wire fencing, and back to where we were. “Not at the moment.”

  Borozan chimes in. “Then what are you thinking, boss?”

  I rub at my chin. “Freedom. I’m thinking of freedom.”

  I spend a few minutes discussing what I want, and my crew does act like I’ve bumped my head one too many times, but they don’t give me any lip.

  I go back down to the bridge and wait. Back at the farm, Garcia and Borozan are at work, and I check my watch, ignoring the minutes slipping away. I breathe in the cold, sharp air, admire the snowflakes drifting down, and in those brief seconds, I manage not to think of Clayton and Sher.

  Lots of movement, lots of tinkling, lots of bleating.

  Seven or eight sheep are scrambling down the side of the riverbank, and Garcia and Borozan are moving them right along—I don’t think herding sheep was in their job description but they’re definitely rising to the occasion—and then I widen my arms, holding my HK416 in my right hand, and I whistle, whistle, and I block the sheep from going any farther.

  There’s brush and rocks to their right, and an open bridge to their left. The lead sheep moves left, and the rest follow, their little hooves trotting across the wood. Garcia and Borozan catch up to me, and Borozan says, “Hey.”

  Garcia says, “Shit, they stink.”

  I’m not sure what I was going to say, because when the sheep get halfway across, the middle of the bridge explodes with a bright light and a sharp booming crack! that thumps my chest.

  Chapter 12

  It was a long slog, racing down the riverbank, away from the sheep farm, away from the mined bridge. Going upstream would have meant passing that farmhouse, and probably a farmer or three racing out to find out a) who stole their sheep and b) who just turned them into bloody, airborne lamb stew.

  Not to mention a little footbridge down below was blown to splinters.

  The race down the river had been a fast one, as quiet as possible, and even though we don’t hear anything, I’m sure the chase is now on. Villagers around here have definitely been told to report anything suspicious, and while I like to think I’m an easygoing guy, I’m sure if I lived where exploding sheep parts were dropping into my backyard, it would stir me to call the local militia.

  We go on and on, until the raging waters calm some and then widen, and rocks appear, and we wade across knee-deep—finally!—and locate a hidey-hole in a mess of rock splits and fissures. The frozen water in my boots sears when we stop moving.

  There’s the rumble-grumble of artillery in the distance, but we’re so covered up that I can’t make out any flashes of light in the heavy overcast night sky.

  Above us a few more jets fly by, and I admire their professionalism, flying low and slow in the mountain-filled terrain. Everybody save our State Department knows the Russians have been secretly arming and aiding one side of this conflict, and I’m sure those professional jet jockeys up there hail from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

  And I have a quick memory of that briefing back when we were all warm and dry, and when we were five instead of three: what we do tonight might just stave off World War III.

  Just might.

  The three of us sit there, breathing, looking at the ground and each other, and Borozan says, “You knew. You knew something was wrong. What was it?”

  “It was the bridge.”

  “I know that, boss, but what about the bridge?” she asks.

  “I smelled freshly cut wood,” I say. “That means it was recently built. And it was in the wrong place for any farmers and villagers. It wasn’t near any open trails, or a road, or anything else. It was a trap, built just for us.”

  “Assholes,” Borozan says.

  Garcia speaks up. “Why you talking trash all of a sudden?”

  “The hell you mean?” she says.

  Garcia says, “You heard me. I said, why you talking trash? I think you’d be impressed by your relatives being able to pull off something so slick.”

  Borozan shifts her weight and says, “You better explain yourself, Garcia, or I’m gonna put you in a world of hurt, right here, right now.”

  He laughs. “No big secret, is it? Borozan, your last name. It’s a Serb name, am I right? This whole part of Europe is goin’ back to clans, families, tribes and shit, cuttin’ off each other’s heads ’cause some family talked trash to another family five centuries ago. So why not you, huh? You got family members back here, family members you wanna help out?”

  Low and slow, she says, “Knock that off right now, Garcia. It’s been decades since my family immigrated.”

  “But you still got family here, right? Family who you might want to support, help out in the troubles? You know what they say, right? Blood is thicker than water.”

  She says, “I’ll show you some blood, jerk.”

  And just because she’s closer, I punch her on the side of her head when she makes her move.

  She gasps and falls back against a boulder.

  Then I quickly whip my left hand around and slap Garcia across his face.

  Just to show I’m a fair kind of guy.

  Chapter 13

  My two guys sit there in this rock cleft, quiet, shocked.

  Good.

  Mission accomplished.

  I’ve certainly gotten their attention.

  “This is how it’s going to be, and when I’m done, it’s either yes or no. No discussion,” I say. “I’m heading out of here in ninety seconds. If you two want to fight over whose immigrant story is more pure and clean, then you can stay right here and go on as long as you want. Or you can take a nice swallow of shut-the-fuck-up and come with me and get this job done. First and last time you two are going to have a choice on this op. With me, yes or no?”

  “Yes, jefe.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Outstanding,” I say. “Check your gear and get a move on.”

  But when it comes to eighty-five seconds having passed, Garcia says, “Jefe, if I can?”

  “Make it snappy.”

  “No excuse, all on me,” he says. “I…I lost it, just for a second. Won’t happen again. I mean, all the shit that’s happened since we got here and—”

  I interrupt. “The shit began way before we got here.”

  Borozan says, “Boss?”

  I readjust a helmet strap, look at the ghostly faces of my two surviving team members in this cold and wet. “It started back in Italy. Our backup chopper got croak
ed. You know how the Nightstalkers sometimes decide which chopper is primary and which one is secondary? Toss of the coin, that’s it. That wasn’t mechanical failure or pilot error. It was sabotage. So whoever screwed with one of the choppers had a fifty-fifty chance of killing this op before it even started.”

  Garcia whispers something in Spanish. Borozan says, “That means Clayton’s parachute was rigged to fail. They would have tampered with ours as well, except it would have been too suspicious to have all of the chutes fail.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “And once we reached ground, we were harassed, whittled, and chased, with lots of nice traps set along the way. Because they were waiting for us.”

  My two crewmates keep quiet. I say, “But now we have an advantage.”

  Borozan says, “What’s that?”

  “Even though we know we’ve been screwed, we’re still going to finish the op. Let’s move.”

  I try not to pay too much attention to the time—it’s slipping away, like a melting ice cube in your hand in the desert. At one break point, I quietly say to Borozan, “How’s your face?”

  “Won’t know until we get back,” she says. “But that’s not the kind of love tap I’ve come to expect from you.”

  “Had to do it for the good of the group,” I say.

  She suggests that something foul and probably illegal in most states should happen to the group, and we move on. I suppose I should check in with Garcia, but in the excitement of the next several minutes, it slips my mind.

  It begins when, thankfully, the woods end and a field so big I can’t see how far it goes from one end to another appears. We pause at the edge of the thin woods, where hedges butt up against the field, and take a much-needed break.

  With my eyes-of-a-nighttime-God around my head, I scan up and down the field, and so do my two teammates. The sleet continues, but the snow has started to accumulate. There are three big haystacks before us, a tractor, a wagon, and something with circular disks attached that looks like a hay mower. No lights, no sounds, no buildings.

  The map comes out and I find this large farmer’s field well enough. Huddled together, Garcia and Borozan are looking, too. If we can scamper across it, we’ll be in a good position to reach our target before day breaks.

  I put the map away.

  “If we go across this field, we can make up some time,” I say.

  Sleet pitter-patters against our helmets. For once my team is quiet. Borozan says, “I don’t like it.”

  Garcia says, “I don’t like it, either.”

  “Good,” I say. “It’s unanimous.”

  “Boss?” Borozan asks. “Care to share?”

  “The haystacks,” I say. “Too late in the season. And with winter coming, farmers wouldn’t let their equipment stay out exposed like that. Maybe these farmers got caught up in the fighting…who knows. But we’re not running across the field.”

  I point up to our left. “We’re going up this side. There’s a small village up there, but don’t ask me to pronounce the name. Maybe we can steal a car or truck, get on the road, make up some of our time.”

  “Grand theft auto,” Garcia says. “Thought I gave that shit up when I left East LA and joined up.”

  As we start to move Borozan says, “We all got family history, right?”

  I’m about to check in with Garcia about the slap I gave to his face when it happens, a small, metallic click.

  We freeze in place.

  “Garcia?”

  “Not me, jefe.”

  Borozan swears. “That was me, boss. I stepped on something. Feels metallic. Like I closed a switch.”

  Garcia swears, too. “Land mine?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” she snaps back. “You want I should step off it, see what happens?”

  “Quiet,” I say, and I duck down to check out what’s what when this part of the world suddenly lights up.

  Along the treeline and hedges, a row of flares light off, and it’s clear Borozan hasn’t stepped on a land mine but something almost as bad: a set of flares to illuminate the field and us.

  We all drop as machine-gun fire erupts from inside one of the near haystacks, tracer fire skittering overhead.

  As one, we return fire as well, quickly going through one magazine and then another. We call out “Reloading!” where necessary, and the noise of our suppressed fire is overwhelmed by what’s coming at us. But we’re giving as good as we’re getting, and I feel happy that we’re firing back at a visible enemy, not one that tampers with parachutes and mines a wooden bridge.

  The three of us have tracer rounds in our magazines, and maybe luck is on our side, or the rain hasn’t penetrated the hay that far, but soon enough, flames are flickering and it’s getting pretty damn smoky over there. It’s not fair and not nice of me, but when somebody over there starts screaming, I really enjoy the sound.

  I slap Garcia on the head and he starts falling back, and I join him, and Borozan does the same, and we send out a couple more “see ya!” rounds downrange as we slip back into the woods, and damn, wouldn’t you know it, I seem to hit my lower right leg against something sharp because there’s a harsh, biting pain down there, and I ignore it as we haul ass away from the latest kill zone.

  When we catch our breath a little while later, I check my lower leg and see it’s wet with blood.

  My blood.

  I’ve been shot.

  Chapter 14

  We ignore the target village and maneuver to the west, going across smaller, emptier fields and clambering over stone walls. I fight to keep up, fight to ignore the throbbing pain in my lower right leg, fight to ignore the sopping-wet feeling of my pants leg. In all three fights, I’m losing.

  At some point we come across a collapsed shed alongside a dirt path, and Borozan checks it out, whispers, “Clear,” and we few, we exhausted few, take cover. Freezing rain is pelting on the tarpaper and wooden roof, and the place smells of old grain and dirt.

  I sit down, grimace and take off my battle pack, retrieve a med kit, and get to work on my leg. Borozan says, “You okay, boss?”

  “I’ve been better, but I’ll pull through.”

  “Need a hand?”

  “If I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

  I wash away the blood the best I can and am thrilled to see the bullet hole’s smaller than it first appeared. It looks like a round fragment tore through the flesh in my right calf and messed things up. I wipe it down, wince as I smear some antibiotic cream on it, and then slap on two gauze bandages, wrapping them nice and tight. All the while, Borozan and Garcia are keeping view of the outside through cracks and gaps in the shed’s wall.

  Good crew, ignoring me, focusing on keeping watch.

  As I put stuff away Borozan says, “Well?”

  “Good to go,” I say. “You?”

  She settles down. “When I was a kid, there was this antique store down the street from our apartment building in Indianapolis. Guy who ran the store loved those old-fashioned pinball machines—you know, the ones with the flippers and the metal ball wandering around, getting slammed and hammered? After school me and a couple of friends, we’d hang out there, go through quarter after quarter, seeing the lights flash and those numbers clunk into view as we ran up the score.”

  Garcia says, “Where we grew up, if we had a cardboard box to play with, we was lucky.”

  I laugh at that and so does Borozan, and she goes on. “Yeah, that was something, but Christ, never thought I’d grow up to be somebody’s pinball, boss. Somebody’s really gone to a lot of trouble to square away this piece of countryside, laying out traps and surprises and shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Makes you wonder just how powerful this Darko is…what kind of friends he has.”

  “Powerful ones, with lots of money and resources,” I say. “That’s for damn sure. Not to raise old wounds and arguments, but the clans and families in this neck of the woods, they really look out for each other.”

  I stretch o
ut my wounded leg, wince at the pain now making its sharp and hot presence known, and Garcia is examining his own map, and so we sit for a few more minutes, checking weapons, reloading where necessary, and then Garcia says, “Jefe, there’s a road up ahead.”

  “I don’t like roads.”

  “Who does,” he says. “Thing is, I like what you said earlier, about stealing a car from that village. Too dangerous to head back there, but here”—he leans over, points a gloved finger at his topo map—“there’s a road here, maybe just a couple of hundred meters. We go up there, set up a nice little reception committee, and we wait.”

  Borozan says, “Wait for somebody to drive by and offer us their car?”

  “Nope, we wait and I’ll show you how we do things in East LA.”

  I think about that for a long, long ten seconds or so. “Risky.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I like it,” he says. “This whole countryside is all screwed up, with the airstrikes and fighting and shooting. One speeding vehicle might not get noticed. We hijack a car, we can make up some serious time, haul ass to just outside of Darko’s compound and get there in time to get the job done.”

  Borozan says, “Sounds crazy to me, too, boss, but I like it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s three of us,” I say, clumsily getting to my feet. “Garcia, it’s your idea, so lead on.”

  He grins. “You got it, jefe.”

  We do move on, though it’s hard to breathe through gritted teeth, working through the pain in my lower right leg. There’s assorted pain meds in my med kit, but I sure as hell won’t be dipping into them until the job is done and we’re someplace relatively safe and secure. We’re trooping through small muddy fields, separated by low hedges and stonework. Off in the distance are small farmhouses. Once, a dog barks and we freeze, and when nothing happens, we move on.

  I hear a truck going by and Garcia turns to me, waves in triumph, and I wave him on. I’m suddenly so very tired, thirsty, and aching. I can take care of one of those things, so I drink some lukewarm water from a tube leading to the water pack on my back, and have a quick memory of being back at Aviano, destroying the evidence of our mission, and I realize no official records will ever exist of what is happening on this cold night in rural Serbia.