“UNPROFOR hit Udbina and took out the airfield! UNPROFOR used artillery in Sarajevo! What the fuck, you’re making noise about a goddam hit on one house?”
“Udbina was part of Deny Flight. Alan, please! Go see IFOR.”
They both knew that was bullshit. IFOR command was back in Sarajevo, and they’d say it was an UNPROFOR problem, because weren’t the Italians and the Kenyans the remnant of UNPROFOR? “The Italians are fed up. Their colonel might say no, but he’s taking a few days R and R in Dubrovnik. A company-level hit, that’s all they want. We’d need choppers; I think two would do it.” He was thinking of his own experience, of being pulled out of a firefight by two marine helos. Of course, these guys wouldn’t be US marines. And Alan wouldn’t have his wife in command of the choppers this time. “Who’s got big choppers? You guys have two brand-new Griffons. No? I’ll check the order of battle.”
“Alan—we don’t have the intelligence!”
Alan stared at him, saw a man who wasn’t fed up with bullshit yet, maybe wanted to dedicate his life to bullshit. Why had he thought he liked this guy? He went to the outer office and got the package of photos he’d brought in that morning—all photos that had already passed through his hands once—and pulled a couple and went back to Murch, got a grease pencil, and began to make small circles.
“What the hell is that?”
“This is intelligence.”
Murch leaned in close. “Fuck, man—”
“I could do better with a stereo magnifier.”
Murch provided one. In fifteen minutes, Alan had marked the house that they said was a torture center, five “suspected grave sites,” an outbuilding that the Kenyans’ patients told them was a torture chamber. “Crematorium,” he said, circling something with a chimney.
“Aw, shit—!”
“You been there?”
“No, but—”
“It’s as good as the crap the CIA gives the President.” He handed the photos to Murch. “Copies to whoever has to okay the choppers, plus the Italians, plus me, plus the chopper crews; give us blowups of the house and surroundings. You got a problem?”
Murch shook his head. “Man, you’re something else.” He looked as if he might cry.
“You asked for me.” He was checking the order of battle. “The French have five Pumas; they’re pretty ballsy—they picked those SAS guys out of Gorazde.”
It turned out that Murch wasn’t such a bad guy, after all: he said, “Don’t ask the French.” Alan stared at him. The French had been part of UNPROFOR, were now in IFOR, but a different sector. What was wrong? Murch dropped his voice to almost a whisper. “Just don’t ask the French right now, okay?” The two intel officers looked at each other.
Problem—he means there’s a problem. Leak?
“Gotcha.”
While he was getting his materials together, Murch bent over the aerial photos. When Alan was ready to leave, Murch handed him one with grease-penciled circles. “There’s two armored cars by a building down the road—has to be the police station. One’s in the snow, no tracks around it, so I think it’s down. Probably parts; the embargo’s hurting them bad.” Murch tapped the photo and Alan put it down and looked at it with the magnifier. “I think it’s an AML, maybe French-made, but they’ve licensed countries all over the place. Old, but one of them’s operational—look at all the tracks.” Alan grunted. “Scout car configuration,” Murch went on. “Just machine guns, no cannon—see the shadow?” Alan punched Murch on the shoulder. “We’ll need a couple of shooters. Good catch.” Murch, he decided, was a really okay guy. Just a little—let’s use a polite word—cautious.
He went back up the mountain. The nineteen-year-old driver was beside himself. The gunner, hanging on the back, was not so delighted; he didn’t even get to fire his weapon. Up on the mountain, the Italians were skeptical and the Kenyans wary, but Alan explained how it could be done and asked them to say yes. Two squads plus medics. “Plus me,” the Kenyan surgeon said.
“And you?” the hawk-faced Italian captain said to Alan. It was a challenge. These guys were ready to dislike anybody.
“You want me?”
“I want you to believe in your intelligence. Enough to go along, I mean.”
What had Suter said? He was going to keep Alan away from anything that even smelled like glory? He grinned. “Count me in. As an observer, of course.” He didn’t say that he might be risking a court-martial.
The Kenyans and the Italians looked at each other.
“When?”
Alan thought about his own orders, about how long it would take Suter to figure something out. “Soon,” he said.
The Italian officer murmured, “If I give my colonel time to hear about it before we do it, well—”
The Kenyan surgeon said, “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow dawn,” Alan said.
The three of them looked at each other. They shook hands. He turned the problem of the helos over to the Italian captain and went back to the Kenyan hospital and spent time interviewing the civilians, getting as much hard data as he could on the house in Pustarla. Murch would be putting together a route, he hoped; he should have the latest data on Serb positions and air defenses. Alan’s belief from shipboard intel was that there was no air defense, but out in the Med he hadn’t paid a lot of attention to this hate-filled line where Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs were supposed to divide themselves, and people who happened to be in the minority on either side were being terrorized.
Then he went down the mountain again and used Murch’s computer to write a report on suspected war crimes and criminals in the Bosnian-Serb Pustarla region, pulling in this and that from Intelnet, creating a nice little package of the kind that admirals liked to be briefed from—maps, pretty pictures, juicy quotes from victims. Murch had marked out a route and made a real briefing packet he could use with the troops. He was liking Murch again.
“You got a journalist in your pocket?” he asked Murch.
“Are you wacko? Jesus, Craik—!”
“Wassamattayou? You never heard of PR? Nothing covers your ass like a news report, Murch.”
“Suppose this bombs out?”
Alan had thought about that. “If you’ve got a journalist in your pocket, it’ll come out as a victory no matter what. I’ll get some color photos for him, give him the story, exclusive. He’ll kiss my ass if I ask him to. Yes or no?”
“My boss—”
“Fuck your boss! Yes or no? If the story is out quick, nobody will dare bitch. ‘Brave UNPROFOR Forces Score One for Humanity!’ Come on!”
Murch rubbed his jaw. “There’s a Brit named Gibb, he’s okay, he—”
“Tell him to be at my Humvee in ten minutes. He can watch the prep and he can be there when it’s over, first to interview the brave troops and all that crap. He cannot go along. I’m outa here.”
Then he went back up the mountain, the journalist Gibb laughing nervously as the Humvee spun mud and gravel into the black gulf at the edge of the road. Gibb was on something, might have been a better companion if he hadn’t been, but Alan suspected the man was strung out like everybody else, thought he needed help—whatever gets you through the night. Alan left him in the Kenyans’ civilian ward. He spent half an hour with the hawk-faced captain