Piranha

would call on air support if things got crazy, probably cancel the meeting tomorrow, and set the process back considerably.

He left his Beretta in its holster, trying to play it as innocently as possible. The door squeaked on its jamb as he pushed inside, and a bell at the corner of the frame rang, but there was no one in sight. He walked in, boots creaking against the old floorboards — there was a basement; they’d have to investigate.

Danny had memorized a set of cumbersome phrases in Serbo-Croatian, meant more to show he was friendly than to really communicate. He rehearsed one—“Vrlo mi je drago sto vas vidim,” or roughly, “pleased to meet you”—as he walked toward a glass display counter about three quarters of the way back in the room. The display was empty, as were the shelves nearby. The place had a slightly sweet smell to it, the sort of scent that might come from cooking cabbage. The faint odor mixed with something more like dirt or mud.

Something moved on his right. He spun, his hands down near his belt and gun.

A figure came from behind a tattered curtain, a thin shadow. He thought it was a boy at first, then realized it was a girl, a young woman really. Maybe five-one, barely ninety pounds. Her hair was very short, unusual for the area.

“Vrlo mi” he started, faltering almost immediately with the pronunciation. He had memorized a phrase for “are you the owner?”—“da li ste sopstvenik?” which was intended to apply to the taxi drivers. He tried to remember it, but before he could, the girl held her hands in front of her, then backed away.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, putting up his own hand.

The girl stopped. The store was unlit, making it difficult to see her face well, but Danny thought she had understood what he said.

“We’re just Americans. Yanks,” he told her. “United States. U.S. We just, uh, looking around. Do you have anything to sell?”

It was lame, but it was all he could think of. Powder, who was a few feet behind him, said they were looking for coffee.

“Powder,” said Danny. “This isn’t a deli.”

“Hey, Cap, you never know. I could go for a good hit of joe right now.”

“We just want to look around,” Danny told the girl. “Okay?”

she stared at him, and then nodded, or seemed to nod.

“You stay with her. Powder, while I check out the stairs.”

“You sure, Cap?”

“I’m sure.”

The urge to take out his gun was overwhelming, but Danny managed to resist, determined to show the young woman he meant no harm. He walked toward an open staircase at the side of the room. A candle and matches were on a small ledge at the base of the steps; he lit them, then, calling ahead, went upstairs. In the glow of the candle, Danny saw the floor of a large room was covered with bird shit; he looked up and saw little remained of the roof. Still, he walked far enough inside to make sure no one was hiding in the shadows, then returned to where Powder was monitoring the young woman.

“Basement next, Powder.”

“Yes, Cap.”

In the basement, Danny found a mattress and some bedclothes about four feet from the bottom step. There was nothing else; no furnace, no washing machine, not even a store of food — just the stone and dirt walls of the foundation.

Danny relaxed a bit as he walked back up the stairs. Idiot policemen were probably just anxious to go home—

or more likely, complete whatever black-market transaction was waiting for them near the checkpoint. Smuggling was a common sideline for the authorities here.

Once back on the main floor, Danny started toward the door, then remembered he hadn’t looked beyond the torn curtain the girl had emerged from.

As he turned and took a few steps toward the concealed area, Powder said something, then shouted. Totally by instinct, Danny ducked as the woman charged past his sergeant. He reached out and grabbed her leg, sending her tumbling against the shelves. A small revolver fell from her hand.

“Shit,” said Powder.

Now standing, Danny clamped his foot on the woman’s arm. The two Yugoslavian policemen charged inside, raking the ceiling with submachine guns. After shouts from the Americans finally managed to calm them, one of the policemen grabbed the woman and hauled her out. Danny — pistol now out — pulled back the curtain.

A boy, three of four years old, sat on the floor in the middle of a small, squalid kitchen, his thumb in his mouth.

By the time Danny got outside, the young woman was gone, and several policemen had poured out of the station next door. As Danny tried to sort out the situation, one of the policemen had said the woman was a known Muslim. Danny tried to find out what would happen to her, but was ignored. Finally, he and his men had no option but to leave. The meeting between the UN and government officials was never held.

Powder had grabbed the pistol and found three bullets loaded, but the firing pug was broken and it probably couldn’t have fired.

Months later, Danny saw a Reuters news story about bodies being unearthed in a field near the same village. There was murky photo of a recently opened ditch. In the corner of the photo were the bodies of a young woman and a small boy, both nude.

Was it the woman and her son? The photo was too poor for him to tell. They could have been anyone in that war, any of a thousand victims, mother and child, sister and brother, innocents slain because of religion, or revenge, or just for the hell of it. It was the reason the U.S. got involved in the first place; to stop shit like that from happening, but reasons, and intentions, and the future didn’t make much difference to the people in that ditch.

Aboard Iowa, over the South China Sea

1600

As she poked into a solid wall of rain just over the ocean, Dog slid Iowa back down through the clouds, holding her steady through a series of buffeting winds. Piranha was ready to dance, but they couldn’t find her a partner; the Navy ASW planes with their sonar buoys had been delayed. Delaford said the Indian sub captain might try to take advantage of the weather to snorkel and recharge batteries. So, with nothing else to, they were trying to find him on the surface. The laborious process of running tracks over the empty water hadn’t yielded any results, however, and Colonel Bastian was starting to feel tired.

“I felt that yawn over here, Colonel,” said the copilot. “I thought we were heading into a hurricane.”

“Very funny, Rosen. Just keep tabs on those Sukhois.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

“We’re not in the Navy yet,” Dog told him.

“No, but we’re low enough to be a ship,” said the copilot. It was only a slight exaggeration — they were at a thousand feet, using every sensor they had, including their eyes.

“Shark Ears,” the Navy Orion with the sonar buoys, checked in. They were still a good forty minutes away.

“Maybe we should set up a refuel,” suggested Rosen. “Extend our patrol and come back and work with them for a while, assuming they don’t totally scrub because of the weather. It’s pretty rough down there, and it’s going to get worse.”

“Good idea,” said Dog.

The tanker was flying a track well to the north east. With the help of Iowa’s sophisticated flight computer system, Rosen quickly plotted a course to rendezvous about thirty minutes away. Eager to get away from the water and the severe weather below, Dog leaned back on the stick and the airplane bolted upright. The air was fairly clear away from the leading edge of the storm, their view unimpeded.

“We may have a contact on the surface,” said Rosen. “Ten miles, two degrees east of our nose, just about in our face.”

Dog immediately began to level off and nudge toward the contact. Delaford, monitoring the feeds on his equipment downstairs, couldn’t find anything. Dog swung Iowa around, holding the Megafortress on her wing, and