One Minute Out
Babic himself doesn’t eat with the detail. He takes his meals inside the house.
So that’s where I’m headed.
Tonight’s going to be a bitch, if experience is any guide.
Whatever, I tell myself. I’ll adapt and overcome.
Hopefully.
My principal trainer in the CIA’s singleton operator school, the Autonomous Asset Development Program, was an old Agency shooter and Vietnam vet named Maurice. And Maurice had a saying that has stuck with me over the years, possibly because he screamed it into my ear something like half a million times.
“Hope is not a strategy.”
Nearly two decades living downrange has me convinced that Maurice was right, yet still I plan on scooting down this hillside, climbing up the opposite hillside, and hoping like hell I can get in my target’s face.
One last time that angry voice in my head implores me to stand down. C’mon, Gentry. Just lie here and wait for Babic to walk his fat ass back in front of your optic again. Then you can smoke him and be gone: quick, clean, and safe.
But no. I’m going in, and I know it.
I look up at the sky, see the sun lowering over the hills on the other side of the valley, and begin slowly stretching my tight and sore muscles, getting ready for the action to come.
I’ve got to load up the Jeep and position it for a fast getaway, and then I have to change into black, pull on a ski mask, and head out through the foliage towards my target.
This is a bad idea and I know it, but that bent and broken moral compass of mine is in the driver’s seat, it’s more powerful than the angry voice of reason, and it’s telling me that a quick and painless end for Ratko Babic would be no justice at all.
TWO
The general woke in time for dinner, made his way down to the dining room in his large but simple farmhouse, and sat at the table alone. Often old friends dropped in, fellow officers from the war, men who had served their sentences and then returned to the area or who had somehow avoided being charged with crimes in the first place. Only once had he met with another Serbian wanted by the authorities for his actions, but this man had soon after been killed in a shootout in Sarajevo.
This evening Babic had no guests; it was just him, the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock in the main entryway, and the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen as the cook and her two assistants prepared dinner.
One hundred meters away, most of his security boys from Belgrade would themselves be sitting down to dinner in front of the bunkhouse.
Ratko ate the same food as the men, a habit he’d picked up as a young officer in the Yugoslav army. The Hungarian wine he drank was better than the Žilavka, a Bosnian wine provided to the security team, but that was a small personal allowance to his wealth and his seniority, and none of the boys from Belgrade who watched over him judged him for saving the good stuff for himself.
He’d earned some perks for his lifelong dedication to the cause, and the men from Belgrade all knew it.
Babic put a napkin in his shirt as his chief protection agent leaned into the dining room. “You okay, boss?”
“Fine, Milanko. When I’m finished, I want to go spend time with the boys.”
“Sounds good, sir.” Milanko stepped back into the living room to return to the TV he’d been watching.
Tanja served the old man a steaming bowl of podvarak: sauerkraut casserole filled with bacon and bits of beef.
“Hvala,” he said. Thank you.
Tanja bowed a little and left the dining room.
She didn’t like him; it was obvious to the general that she didn’t approve of what he had done or what he did now, but she’d been sent from Belgrade along with the others and she did what she was told, and that was all an old officer like Babic expected out of anyone.
Petra came in next with a basket of bread and a plate of butter and put it next to him with a nod and a little smile, and Babic reached out and grabbed the nineteen-year-old girl’s ass as she walked away.
She didn’t turn back or even adjust her stride. This was a nightly occurrence for her; she was past the point of caring.
“Cold little bitch,” he said under his breath. Tanja and Milena were plain and middle-aged. Petra, on the other hand, was young and beautiful. But Babic didn’t push it with Petra, because, like all the others here on the farm around him, she came from Belgrade, and Ratko knew he could do just about whatever the fuck he wanted till the day he died, as long as he didn’t leave the farm, and as long as he didn’t piss off the Branjevo Partizans—the Belgrade mob.
He watched her ass wiggle out of the room and then returned his attention to his food.
Behind him the window displayed only darkness, but if he’d bothered to turn his head and peer out, if he’d retained the vision of his younger days, and if he’d concentrated hard in just the right portion of the property, he might have been able to detect a brief flash of movement—fast, from right to left, from the fence line towards the back of the house.
But instead, he dug into his podvarak and sipped his wine, and his mind shifted again to the glorious past.
* * *
• • •
After dinner Babic and his protection agent Milanko headed over to the bunkhouse to chat and smoke with the crew still eating there.
He enjoyed his evening visits with the boys; they made him feel respected, important, vital. Long ago it was a sensation he’d known so fully and so well, but now it was a feeling that only came in passing.
As he and Milanko walked through the night, behind them the dogs began barking. The general sighed.
They never shut up.
* * *
• • •
Damn dogs. I mean . . . I love dogs, who doesn’t, but not when they’re compromising my op. I knew about the two massive black Belgian Malinois, but their kennels are behind the farmhouse, and I ingressed from the west side and was careful to stay out of the dogs’ line of sight. But clearly they smell me here on the southern side of the building, because they’re going fucking bonkers back there now.
As I squat here picking the lock on the door to a utility room in the darkness, I will myself to go faster and for the two big furry assholes around the corner of the house to shut the hell up.
I’ve used silver-lined body suits to hide my smell from dogs in the past, and they function as advertised, but it’s July and hot as hell here, so if I had put a scent guard on under my ghillie suit I would have dropped dead in my overwatch from heat exhaustion.
With the way I reek right now, the dogs are probably barking out of disgust and not to alert their handlers, but no matter the reason, I have to get this door open, pronto. I’ve been defeating locks for twenty years, and I’m pretty good at it, but this isn’t the movies. It takes time and concentration.