Immortal Hate (Harry Bauer Book 5) Read online

  IMMORTAL HATE

  Copyright © 2021 by Blake Banner

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  …what though the field be lost?

  All is not lost; the unconquerable will,

  And study of revenge, immortal hate,

  And courage never to submit or yield:

  And what is else not to be overcome?

  John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) bk 1, 1, 157

  One

  A sudden increase in the intensity of the downpour moved through the dark, quiet room like a heavy sigh. The fall was aging into winter, gray and wet among naked trees. Those trees I could see through the leaded glass in the windows stood like ink-black silhouettes: the ranks of the shades of the dead, among mist that reared and curled slowly, engulfing trunks and skeletal branches, and everything it touched. The downpour eased back to a drizzle, and outside the window a steady drip from the eaves marked the passage of time, yet managed somehow to make the moment still and timeless. The spit and crackle of the fire in the huge stone fireplace created a warm, irregular counterpoint to the wet drips outside.

  I heard the door open behind me, set down my coffee on the mahogany table by my side, stood and turned. It was the brigadier.

  “Harry, good to see you. I hope you’re rested and in good shape?”

  The intonation was like a question, but it was more like a polite order. The Brits have a way of doing that. He was requiring me to be rested and in good shape. I was.

  “I’m fine, thank you, sir.”

  He shut the door. “I have an interesting job for you.” He moved to the credenza and poured himself a cup of strong, black coffee from the silver coffee pot. He spoke as he poured. “You remember Yugoslavia?”

  “Of course. It decomposed in the ’90s into Serbia, Croatia…”

  “Quite so.” He approached the fire, gestured me to sit back down and took an old chesterfield opposite mine. He sipped twice and set the cup down on an occasional table at his side. “There was a lot of ancient ethnic hatred stirred up during that conflict. There are no saints in war, but the Serbians, fired by Slobodan Milošević’s rhetoric, really plumbed the depths, and the Croatians suffered a great deal. Nothing threatens political power, Harry, as I am sure you know, like small, independent, sovereign countries.” He gave a small chuckle. “A five-star general, who shall remain nameless, commented to me just yesterday that we should be thankful for the power of public opinion right now in the West, and for Britain’s nuclear deterrent.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, as I knew I was supposed to.

  “Because, according to him, without those two powerful influences, the European Union, led by French President Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel, would be maneuvering to invade the United Kingdom and subdue it by force. As I say, big political power hates a small, independent, sovereign country. And that is what Slovenia and Croatia became by very substantial votes in national referenda. But Serbia saw itself as the natural heir to Yugoslavia, and Milošević and Radovan Karadžić were both very keen to step into President Tito’s boots. Of course neither of them had a tenth of the charisma, personal power or intelligence of Tito. They, very stupidly, played the Serbian nationalist card to gain the support of the Serbian people, and attempted to break Croatia and Slovenia by force. As I say, a stupid plan that never stood a hope of success and cost them both very dearly.”

  I said, “Milošević is dead and Radovan Karadžić is in prison for the rest of his life.”

  He nodded briefly. “And we must be grateful for that, too. But these were the men who issued the orders and drove the war. Then there were those who relayed those orders and ensured and oversaw their execution. And then again there were those who executed those orders. The further down the line you go, the more numerous these bastards become, and the more direct their connection with the actual, physical crime.”

  “And, I take it, we have identified one of those bastards.”

  “Oh yes, yes indeed, a choice one, Colonel Kostas Marcović.” He took another sip of coffee and smacked his lips. “On the 1st of April, 1991, seeing that Croatia was headed toward independence, the Serb majority in the borderlands of SAO Krajina—that is the Serbian Autonomous Oblast Krajina—declared its intention to secede from Croatia and align itself with Serbia.” He paused a moment, gazing at the fire. “Immediately after Croatia declared independence, Croatian Serbs established, in addition to SAO Krajina, SAO Western Slavonia, SAO Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srijem. And all of these united to form a self-proclaimed proto-state, the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Other areas with Serb majorities began to ally themselves, and the situation soon began to spiral out of control, toward anarchy and chaos. Ethnic hatred, stemming from the Second World War, was deliberately revived and fueled, and, inevitably, atrocities began to be committed in villages and towns across the region.”

  He paused. So far he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, but I knew he was leading up to something, so I sipped my coffee and waited.

  “One such atrocity, as I am sure you know, was the Vukovar hospital massacre. Ethnic tension between Croats and Serbs, after decades of living as friends and neighbors, and indeed intermarrying and raising families, descended into violence when the Yugoslav army, as it still was then, entered the town. They, with the help of Serbian paramilitaries, devastated the town—quite literally razed it to the ground—and deliberately targeted Croatian property for destruction. The battle lasted eighty-six days, but toward the end the European Community Monitor Mission and the International Committee of the Red Cross negotiated the evacuation of Vukovar hospital. However, before the evacuation could take place, the Yugoslav National Army refused the Red Cross access to the hospital and removed some three hundred people, mainly Croats, and transported them to a farm south of the city, the Ovčara farm.”

  He paused, gazing at the fire. I could see the muscle in his jaw pulsing. We both knew the story, but he needed to tell it, to remember it.

  “There, the prisoners were beaten for several hours. After a while, the Yugoslav National Army pulled out, leaving the prisoners in the custody of the Serbian paramilitaries. The prisoners, having been severely beaten and tortured, were then taken to a mass grave and shot, methodically, systematically, in groups of ten.”

  There was a cold, cont
rolled rage in his face as he narrated this and, as he reminded me of the details, I could feel the hot coals of anger burning in my own gut. He went on.

  “The commander of the Croatian Serb Territorial Army, the group principally responsible for the atrocity, and the Leva Supoderica paramilitary unit that accompanied it, was Miroljub Vujović. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and will presumably be released within the next seven years…,” he paused and held my eye, “unless something were to prevent that from happening. We shall see when the time comes. But one man who was involved in this atrocity, but was never brought to justice because he simply vanished when the war ended, was Colonel Kostas Marcović. He was directly in charge of—and directly involved in—the transportation of the victims, their beatings, their torture and their ultimate murder. Prior to that, we have direct witness testimony which was never heard at the Hague, of his involvement in murders, rapes, massacre and torture which defies belief. His victims include children of both sexes and women and men well into their eighties.”

  He reached in his jacket and pulled out his wallet. From it he extracted a photograph and handed it to me.

  “This is Blanka. That’s the name I gave her. Nobody knows her real name. She was found in a suburban street in Vukovar, clinging to a woman we assumed to be her mother. They were both dead. The woman had been stabbed twenty times. Blanka had been shot in the chest. They had both been raped. Death must have been a blessed release to both of them. Witnesses, Serb and Croat, confirmed that Colonel Kostas Marcović was present during the sacking of that street, and participated in the rape and the murder of its inhabitants. This man qualifies as human only on account of his biology. Any sense of basic, common decency, compassion, kindness, simple pity…!” He shook his head and looked genuinely bewildered, “Is quite unknown to him.”

  I stared at the picture of a frail, smiling little girl of four or five, with pigtails and a pink dress with frills on the sleeves and neck. I felt the hot stir of anger in my belly and mentally shied away from my imagination. I leaned forward to hand back the picture, but he shook his head.

  “Keep it, Harry, to remind you.”

  I nodded and slipped it in my pocket. “I gather he has been found.”

  “Yes. We have a very reliable Croat informant who has found documentary evidence and witness testimony which is pretty conclusive. He fled Serbia in the year 2000 and made his way, via Colombia, to the Caribbean, to a small British dependency called St. George. Capital Jackstown.”

  “I know it, it’s very small.”

  “Roughly eight miles by eleven. As I understand it there is a community of foreigners living there, artists, a few writers, mainly unpublished, poets…arty types who fondly reminisce about the days of anarchic free expression, the counterculture, Leary and Ginsberg. You know the sort of thing.”

  “I get the idea. And a couple of them might be Serbian.”

  “Yes, there are a couple of candidates. You need to go there, get to know them, identify Kostas and eliminate him.”

  I nodded. “Who will I be?”

  “David Friedman, your parents were left-wing radicals who were deeply entrenched in the hippie movement.”

  “The kind of people any self-respecting Communist would have sent to a gulag.”

  “I’m afraid so. You were raised barefoot and windswept, reacted against your parents in your teens and did law and economics at Yale, then returned to your roots in your thirties and decided to go and write your novel somewhere.”

  “I’m a writer?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry. You won’t need to produce anything, but if you do, write it the way you write your reports, but occasionally use a four-syllable word.”

  “Thanks for the advice. What about weapons?”

  “Please don’t blow anything up. This is a clean, low-key job. It’s been jointly commissioned by the Pentagon and MI6, so we have green lights from the US and the UK. You’ll fly by regular charter to Barbados and from Bridgetown you’ll take the ferry to Port Elizabeth, then on to St. George. You can take a knife and a semiautomatic in your luggage. Nothing bigger than that, please. Jackstown is the capital of the island, where the local administration buildings are located, but you will book in at the Father Joseph Hotel in San Fernando, the only other town on the island. There, make noises as though you plan to stay for a long time, ask around for a house to rent. It will be a way of getting involved with the local foreign community and getting some background on our main suspects.”

  “Who are…? And also, how am I supposed to identify him?”

  “You’ll be given a set of photographs, including the last photographs that were taken shortly before he disappeared…”

  “How old was he then?”

  “He was in his late fifties. There will also be a detailed description of him, including birthmarks and other peculiarities. And finally, we have a few items of his from which we may be able to extract a DNA profile. Nothing certain, but we are working on it.”

  “What about contacts? Do we have anybody there?”

  “No, you’ll be on your own. But this is not going to be a complicated job, Harry. Move in, establish your cover, identify him, eliminate him and move out. Ideally you’ll make it look like an accident…”

  I cut him short. “I’ll know what to do.”

  “Of course you will.” There was a lull in the conversation while the brigadier stared at the fire and I watched the rain through the window. I knew he had something else to say, but he was arranging his thoughts.

  “There is another small matter,” he said. It was a Brit’s way of saying we have a major problem. “I’m going to let the colonel discuss it with you because it is more her province. I know you and she have a sort of adolescent thing going on. I would ask you to suspend it for this conversation. A couple of your last operations have hurt some very influential people very badly, not least the Einstaat Group, and we have seen a couple of pretty intense efforts to discover who you work for.” He turned to look at me, and he wasn’t smiling. “I’m saying that you have been noticed. And there are groups out there, departments, offices…”

  “People…”

  “That too, who would give a great deal to find out who you are and, above all, who you work for. I need you to listen to Jane very carefully. I need you to cooperate with her.”

  I nodded once. “You got it.”

  He pressed a button on the occasional table beside his chair and said, “Jane, when you have a moment, Harry is ready for you.”

  The voice came back, “I’ll be right there.”

  The brigadier stood. “I’ll leave you to it. And, take her seriously this time, will you, Harry?”

  I gave him half a smile. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  He hesitated—it wasn’t the reply he had wanted—but nodded and left. I sat and watched the squally rain batter the trees for a while longer, and five minutes later the door opened again and Colonel Jane Harris came in, in her blue suit, blonde hair and nice legs, carrying her attaché case.

  “Hello, Harry.”

  “Hello, Colonel Jane Harris.”

  “Do you think we can avoid the facetiousness for today?”

  “The brigadier already asked me that. I told him I’d do my best. What do you want to see me about?”

  She sat and placed her attaché case beside her feet.

  “A number of agencies and organizations have taken an interest in you. It’s something I have been worrying about since we first employed you. You have come to people’s attention.” She sighed. “I mean, you’re not exactly a ninja, are you, Harry? If you can choose between twenty pounds of C4 and a stiletto, or a discrete dose of curare, you’ll go for the C4 every time.”

  “Does that count as facetiousness?”

  “It’s a fact. You make a lot of noise. And the result is that people have noticed you and are hunting for you. Their concerns are, who the hell are you? But first and foremost, who the hell do you work for.”

&nbs
p; “Who are these people?”

  She smiled, but the smile was for her, she wasn’t sharing. “They are not people you can go and shoot. The CIA is our biggest concern.”

  “I thought the CIA brass knew about us and cooperated with us.”

  She was shaking her head. “No, certain high-ranking officers in the Agency know about us and use our services, likewise the Pentagon and the White House. But the CIA, as an official federal body, does not know we exist—cannot know we exist.”

  “But...”

  “But you have been noticed, and now they know you exist, and they are very keen to get rid of you and, while they’re at it, find out who you work for.”

  “Yeah, I found that out in Lake Superior[1]. Can’t you just pull strings and call them off?”

  “That’s not the way it works, Harry. It would arouse far too much interest. There’s already too much interest, we can’t afford any more. Unexplained orders from above to ignore an assassin who is killing CIA officers will have all the wrong people asking all the wrong questions, and moving to find out just who we are. We don’t need that, especially if it’s just to cover your ass because you’d rather use an atomic device than a blade.”

  “You made your point.”

  “I hope so. Because if interest does not die down we could be in very serious trouble. All of us. If the Federal Court gets wind of us…”

  “What’s your point, Colonel?”

  “I have more than one.”

  “Can we stop fencing and come to those points?”

  She met my eye and held it. “We’ll do it the way I say and you will take on board what I say. And that includes my telling you that even though your methods are effective, they are also ham-fisted and too noisy. This organization operates in the shadows, Harry, and in silence. We cannot afford any more explosions.”

  She labored the word, so that it meant a lot more than explosions. It meant “Harry behaving like Harry.”

  “Fine, you want me to be more discreet. More knife, less bombs. Taken on board and understood. What else?”