Now came my close-up. Behind the house, the Response Force members had covertly planted something like a cherry bomb, meant to sound like a blowout on the armored vehicle. At that bang, one of the soldiers protecting the courtyard was going to pretend to panic and fire his assault rifle toward the front door. One round would supposedly ricochet and strike me in the lower forearm. The uncomfortable part was that combat troops didn’t use blanks. Colonel Ruehl assured me that the shooter was a first-class marksman, but there was still going to be live fire within a yard of me, and in the moment, as three bullets suddenly chewed into the stucco, pulverizing it into a fine white dust, I didn’t need any acting lessons to scream as loud as I could and spin to the ground.
The lieutenant rushed to me and emptied a vial of blood from inside his sleeve all over my hand, which he then wrapped in his bandanna. The troops on the perimeter ran to the rear and pretended to discover that the explosion was a blowout, not armaments, with the mounting of a spare undertaken with the speedy precision of a pit crew. The soldier who’d supposedly shot me dashed up to the lieutenant and me, pleading for understanding. Playing the sergeant, the lieutenant screamed out orders, still in Bosnian, while Ruehl and Goos and my accidental assailant all grabbed me by the elbows and dragged me to the SUV.
The convoy was in motion immediately, but we were underway only a minute or two when a police car came tearing up. The cop clearly had been watching from someplace below us. The Bosnian-speaking sergeant leaned out his window to explain I had been shot accidentally and had suffered an arterial bleed and would be dead shortly unless they got me to a surgeon. Lying across the backseat of the SUV, with my back against the rear passenger’s-side door and my hand in the air, I did my part by moaning and crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
I don’t know what the cop’s orders were—he probably was unwitting and simply reporting to a superior officer—but he bought what he was told completely. He sprinted back to his vehicle and set off his Mars lights and the hee-haw siren to lead us at maximum speed as we tore through Vo Selo and reached the mountain road. The 4x4 was next, with us in the SUV right behind it. The armored vehicle, trailing because of the tire change, arrived at the rear of the speeding convoy. It was impressively nimble and stayed on our tail, even though we were going over 100 kilometers per hour on the straightaways.
In the SUV, Goos and I said very little. The radio screamed at intervals with at least six different voices. Two or three soldiers somewhere were continuing the Bosnian narration of events, but Ruehl now and then switched to a NATO frequency for brief traffic in English. I took it that Kajevic, code-named Vulture, and his bodyguards were so far unsuspecting and still walking in slow procession from the hospital toward the monastery.
We were no more than a minute outside of Madovic when an emergency call barked from the radio.
“Up high, they see us coming and don’t like it,” Ruehl explained. NATO was all over the radio traffic from the monastery. Whoever watched out for Kajevic had ordered the local police to do what they could to detain us.
As we spun through the last turn on the hillside, we could see that the cop who’d been leading us had suddenly pulled over with his beacons still spinning. He was out of his car, one hand in a white glove raised to bring us to a halt. With the radio mike to his mouth, Ruehl ordered the convoy to proceed at top speed. The troop truck bore down on the cop and he sprang out of the way at the last second, literally diving off the road, while the vehicle hit his hat, which had gone flying. As we tore by, I could see the officer lying in a bush about six feet below the roadside, with a hand over his head to shelter him from the dust and flying gravel.
We were coming straight downhill and must have reached the turn to Madovic at about 60 miles per hour, skidding around it. One of the strengths of the plan to seize Kajevic on the way back to the monastery was, as General Moen explained, that Vulture could not get any visual directions from the top of the mountain. The infrared surveillance of the bodyguards, which had detected the AKs under the rassas, had shown no radios. But that missed the obvious.
As we flew into Madovic, just above the main square, the three monks were in sight. They had come to a halt a hundred yards in front of us on the narrow road that crossed through the town. One of the three had his cell phone to his ear. Looking back, I saw a black sedan throwing a fog of dust as it raced down from the monastery, while police sirens were suddenly echoing from at least two directions.
Halfway to the monks, our SUV stopped. The 4x4 braked another twenty yards ahead, while the armored vehicle surged to the front, bearing down on Kajevic. Goos and I were supposed to take shelter on the floor, but instead we knelt in the foot wells, our eyes just high enough to see through the windows on Goos’s side. The SUV was parked laterally to block the road, and Ruehl and the driver jumped out to take up spots behind the vehicle, the young driver leveling his assault rifle across the hood. Crouched beside him, Ruehl raised the electric megaphone. In front of us the troops flowed out of the rear of the 4x4 in precision, each one rolling as he or she landed and quickly assuming a combat position on their bellies with their rifle sights trained on Kajevic and his bodyguards, only a few yards away. The four supposed tourists, with their hidden pistols now drawn, had crept near the monks to close off the rear.
Through the megaphone, Colonel Ruehl spoke in Serbo-Croatian, reading from a paper in his hand. Goos whispered the translation:
“Laza Kajevic, surrender at once. You are under arrest pursuant to the warrant of the United Nations and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.” The words echoed off the small buildings of the square. A few residents, initially drawn by the commotion, scattered at the sight of the automatic rifles, retreating indoors. I could hear some of them screaming.
The monk with the cell phone lost his high round hat. He groped under the rassa and suddenly swung up his AK. It was no more than a quarter of the way to horizontal when two separate bursts of automatic fire struck him. The monk flew backward, almost as if hit by a grenade, spattering blood over Kajevic beside him. The other bodyguard raised both his hands and fell to his knees.
In the process of covering up from the gunfire, Kajevic had also dropped his clerical hat. Now he feigned incomprehension, as if he didn’t understand the language or perhaps had been mistaken for someone else. But there was no doubt it was he. The infamous hairdo had been shorn to a moderate length and had gone white, or been dyed that color. The untamed beard was real and covered his whole face, including furry patches on his cheeks. He wore heavy black glasses and he was a great deal fatter than in his sleek days of vitriol and menace. But it was Kajevic, with the same wild eyes, and he was clever enough to know he was wanted alive. He ran.
He scampered wide around the armored BDX and dodged between the soldiers on their bellies, who, as he’d expected, hesitated to shoot. Nor could anybody get a hand on him, despite two of the troops’ diving efforts. As Kajevic sprinted, he reached into the left pocket of his rassa and produced a Glock pistol, which he held beside his ear, dashing straight toward us in the SUV. Ruehl stood up and yelled to him to stop and Kajevic answered by shooting once at Colonel Ruehl, who screamed out. The driver sank instinctively beside the colonel to attend to him. I had the crazy thought that Kajevic was going to stop to shoot Goos and me, too, but he knew this was his one chance to escape and he was at top speed, clearly headed for the black car that was barreling down from the monastery.
As Kajevic galloped toward us, I ducked in the floor well behind the front seat. I felt Goos lean back against me. Scared stiff, I assumed he was seeking cover, but what he wanted was leverage. As Kajevic drew abreast, running for his life, Goos suddenly kicked open the back door on his side. It caught Kajevic full force. His face smashed against the window and he reeled backward and lost his footing.