You okay?” The sergeant was at the far end of the corridor, assault rifle at the ready.
“Somebody went out the window! Get after him! Now!”
The sergeant shouted, and Alan could feel more than hear feet pounding downstairs.
“I’ve got a man down,” Alan said, shining the light downward.
“One of ours?”
“Theirs.”
“Leave him!”
Shit. Alan inhaled sharply, realizing he’d been holding his breath; the sound shuddered in his chest. He kicked the man’s gun down the corridor and swung the light off him, as if not seeing him made it better.
They had the downstairs almost cleaned out, what little they could take. The sergeant had taken charge, using some system of his own to determine what to take, what to leave. Probably weight. Alan checked his watch. Nine minutes since touchdown. Christ, it seemed like all night.
“You all right, Tenente?”
“You guys missed two of them up there.”
“They’re after the one in the snow, but I told them, no pursuit.” The sergeant was a hard nut. He was more concerned about his men than about Alan’s lost war criminal. Good for him.
“The guy’s naked—in the snow!”
The sergeant nodded as if he had known that all along. “They want you in back,” he said. “Then we go.” He was old for a soldier, probably ready to retire; he wasn’t taking any shit from an American intel officer. A Navy intel officer at that, for Christ’s sake.
The other building had been a cow barn. A few of the stanchions were still there in a row down the left side. The walls were stone, laid up without concrete, the floor, a couple of feet below ground level, mostly dirt with a cracked concrete apron at the front end. Three bodies were laid out on the concrete now, all civilians. There seemed to be far too much blood for only three men, but three was all he could see. There was an under-smell of old cow, on top of that fresh blood, and then shit.
“They tried to shoot it out. One was awake somehow; one of our guys took a hit, he’s not bad. We took out two people. Not in very good shape.” The soldier looked sideways at him. “Really messed up.”
“Torture?”
The soldier nodded. Alan walked down the room, smelled vomit. He already felt sick, was still hyperventilating. There was old blood on the walls down here, probably a lot more soaked into the dirt floor. The stanchions had been used as human restraints, with handcuffs locked to them high and low. At the end of the room was a single chair by itself, almost centered. It looked like a set for a minimalist play. Against the wall was a big washtub, half full of reddened water, a lot of water splashed out on the floor. Ropes and a steel bar, once some sort of tool, hung from the ceiling beam.
“The airplane,” he said. A form of torture.
“They’d cut the eyelids off one guy, then shot him. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll make it.”
Alan got out the point-and-shoot camera and pointed and shot. He felt he was going to throw up. Partly it was almost getting killed, partly it was what he was doing, seeing. And the pain in his side. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble pointing the camera.
“Tenente! Time to go!”
He ran back to the house and took three photos of the interior. Maybe the newsman could do something with them. He didn’t go back upstairs.
Something boomed. He doused his flashlight and started out the front door. The sergeant grabbed his arm, pulled him down. “Police armored car. They’re coming up the street.”
Alan looked around. It was almost light. There was the sergeant, three soldiers. Him. Flames turned the snow pink, the torture barn on fire.
“Everybody else out?”
The sergeant nodded.
“Go?”
The sergeant pointed, got up. They ran for the gate. One man stayed behind, threw something in the door—thud— and the place went up in flames.
A big double boom sounded from the street, probably both shooters at once; flame snicked up through the tree branches like a tongue, then seemed to expand at the bottom, beyond the wall. He was aware of more general firing, faraway pop-pops and louder, more deliberate noise nearby. At the gate, the sergeant thrust out an arm like a traffic cop and held him back, looked, then grabbed him and pushed him in the direction of the choppers. Alan resented it, resented the rough handling and the implication that he didn’t belong there, but he knew the sergeant was right. Anyway, bullets were whiffling near him. He got down. Captain Gagliano and half his Romulus team were trading fire with somebody down the street—quite a way down the street, well beyond the burning armored car. The other way, the rest of Romulus waited to cover the withdrawal. On the other side of the street, several bodies lay in the snow. Serb militia, from the town. One man was in striped pajamas. The sergeant waved an impatient hand at him and Alan began to run. The waiting soldiers got bigger, bigger, and then they, too, were passing him backward through their line, as if he was not quite their main concern just then and they just wanted to make sure he was out of the line of fire …
He hunched his shoulders and ran for the helos.
The temperature in the big tent must have been close to eighty Fahrenheit despite the cold outside. It wasn’t the big propane heater but the press of bodies. Italians, Ukrainians, Kenyans, one American—even a couple of Dutch artillerists who had wandered down, although they hadn’t had provocation enough to fire a shot. It was as noisy as a locker room after a winning game, and just about as smelly, although the over-riding smell was red wine, with some Kenyan cane splashed around the edges.
Feeling no pain, Alan thought. He certainly knew what that meant now. The surgeon had given him two capsules, would have given him four or maybe eight if he’d asked, and on top of that there was the wine. It wasn’t what used to be called Dago Red, either, but Gattinara from a year long enough ago that the stuff didn’t show up in shops any more. Courtesy of Captain Gagliano’s colonel, who was shocked, shocked! to hear of what had happened (you had to be reminded of Claude Rains in Casablanca) but was so delighted he’d released a couple of cases from his own store. Flown in specially as soon as the message flashed that they were out with only three hit, no dead, and two helos full of goodies.
“Well, not exactly goodies,” Alan was explaining slowly to Doctor wa Danio. He spoke with the exaggerated care of a man who has had too much wine, just enough painkiller, and not enough sleep. “We seem to have brought out two oversize sacks of Serb garbage.” He leaned closer. “I am not speaking met-a-phor-i-cally. I mean actual garbage. Rinds and things.” Along with some more useful stuff like names and addresses and computer disks.
Two Ukrainians were doing some sort of dance to music that sounded to Alan like Afro-pop, but he suspected that everything sounded like Afro-pop to him just then. He smiled at the Ukrainians. When he turned back to the Kenyan doctor to tell him how much the Ukrainians amused him, the doctor had been replaced by Captain Gagliano. Gagliano had a glass in one hand and Alan’s neck in the other. “Did we biff them?” he said.
“We biffed them.”
