I said again that I needed time to think.
“And no matter what,” Goos said, “I wouldn’t be telling the home office. You know what they say: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. If you need cover, then send Badu an e-mail saying you have an urgent matter.”
I laughed out loud. Badu was infamous for never answering his e-mails. He generally responded only to Akemi.
Back at the Blue Lamp, I went immediately to my room and sat alone on the bed to commune with myself, but I soon realized that my decision had been made in January. Both of my sons were well on their way now. I had no life partner to worry about. Far more important, as I had discerned with a Zastava resting on my temple atop that water tank, I had come to The Hague out of a family obligation to subdue the toxic predators who became a cancer on civilization. I was scared utterly shitless. But my life would not mean what I wanted it to if I didn’t help bring justice to the millions in several nations murdered, tortured, raped, starved, and savagely misled by Laza Kajevic.
24.
Now in Person—June 10
I woke on Wednesday after sleeping better than I had anticipated. My feeling-state was a bit like the first morning of trial, when I employed a meditative effort to freeze away my exploding anxieties over all the things I couldn’t control. As I dressed, the momentousness of what was at hand seemed to enhance my vision, as if I was seeing a more sharp-edged version of myself when I looked in the mirror. If you were very lucky, you experienced times like this, when what you did mattered to thousands more people than just you, and which, for that reason, you’d remember right to the end.
Goos had gotten himself buttoned together. He sported his usual subtle smile when I greeted him at the breakfast table. We ate quickly and for lack of anything else talked about the news that Obama was going to send five hundred Special Forces troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS.
At 10:00, Andersen and a new MP drove us to Barupra. The empty basketball court outside the former base was a staging area for a training session intended to be largely fictitious, in clear sight of the road and whatever surveillance vehicles the Arkans would send by. Fourteen soldiers, all members of the NATO Response Force, a special ops unit, had been outfitted in the camo combat fatigues of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Seven were German, seven were Danish, twelve men and two women.
The commander was a German colonel, Lothar Ruehl. He was thickset and positive, with a ginger bottle-brush mustache, and greeted us with a quiet word of appreciation passed on from General Moen. The shoulder of his make-believe uniform bore a tan patch with a single star and a line, the insignia of a second lieutenant.
Goos and I, both dressed in jeans and running shoes, were outfitted with ballistic helmets and full body armor, which included a groin panel, half sleeves, and a collar. It was heavy but the Velcro strapping allowed more mobility than I expected.
With Ruehl in charge, we acted out the fake operation. I pretended to knock on Ferko’s door, while the squad fanned out to surround the perimeter and then batter its way in. As anticipated, the two local cops guarding the gravesite today wandered up to see what we were doing, but maintained a polite distance. For their sake, a sergeant—who was actually a Danish first lieutenant—went through the charade of shouting out Colonel Ruehl’s orders in Bosnian.
After that, we broke for lunch. The NATO field ration pack was French and, astonishingly, included a tin of chicken paté and a small wheel of Brie, but I was in no state to eat. Ruehl sat with Goos and me and quietly explained the real plan, which, naturally, we couldn’t practice around prying eyes. The colonel repeated the details several times, until we understood the deviations from the maneuvers we’d acted out.
At noon precisely, we started for Vo Selo. The military vehicles were all NATO issue, which apparently was not unusual in BiH. The convoy included a boxy blue armored Mercedes SUV, in which Goos and I rode behind Colonel Ruehl; a canopied 4x4 personnel truck; and an armored personnel carrier, which Goos proudly told me was a Belgian design called a BDX. It looked a little like a miniaturized tank, with four tires, camouflage paint on the plating, and a gun turret.
The hope, as General Moen suggested, was that Kajevic’s thugs would take the size of this force as a measure of how thoroughly they’d scared the crap out of Goos and me last Tuesday night, which they’d probably view with mean-spirited glee. With any luck, they’d still be laughing when we ended up in the middle of Madovic.
Goos and I rode with our helmets in our laps, largely unspeaking due to the loud radio traffic as Colonel Ruehl exchanged encrypted communications with the troops here and the undercover elements who had spent the night in Madovic. The driver, who spoke Serbo-Croatian, also frequently issued phony orders in perfect Bosnian over the Army’s normal channel.
During one of the few quiet moments, I turned to Goos.
“Okay?”
He nodded solidly. “First-class operation,” he said.
“I’m wearing adult undergarments,” I told him. “Just in case.”
He smiled a little less than I’d hoped.
After the fifty-minute ride, we rolled through Vo Selo, where many of the Roma emerged from their tiny sad homes to watch. Up the hill, Ferko’s little castle gave all signs of being abandoned. The place was utterly still. The laundry was no longer flapping on the lines on the balconies, and the shutters on the windows, as well as the front gate, were wide open. The dogs’ blood remained in brown-black circles on the gravel of the courtyard.
Nonetheless, we went through the whole act. The Danish lieutenant handed an electric megaphone to Goos, who asked Ferko in Serbo-Croatian to come out. After a minute without response, it was my turn to yell. I had memorized two words in Romany, Gavva na, which I had been told meant ‘Don’t hide,’ and I screamed them repeatedly while Goos stalked around, calling out more or less what he had last week when Ferko was actually here.
With our signal, the troop truck steamed between the gates and, without stopping, drove right through Ferko’s double front doors, which popped off like a Lego toy. From behind, the soldiers in the 4x4 immediately deployed.
While Goos and I flattened ourselves against the stucco walls by the front doors, four soldiers in full combat array, including helmets and the same body armor we wore, ran to cover the rear. Four more fanned out behind us with their weapons pointed, while another foursome ran through the house, shouting in Bosnian as they cleared each room.
After about ten minutes, Colonel Ruehl, at the SUV, circled his hand, which was the sign that the monks had just appeared at the door of the hospital in Madovic, prepared to depart.