Warriors (9781101621189) by Tom Young Page B

out of the sky. Parson and Gold survived the crash landing, but the ordeal of surviving a winter storm and evading insurgents had left them with scars both visible and unseen.
    Parson brought his thoughts back to the current problem. So we have regular Afghan flights into Kyrgyzstan, he noted, and a permanent ground crew here. Nothing necessarily incriminating there. But regular flights? How much cargo would Afghanistan really need to send out of the country?
    â€œSo what do you think?” Parson asked.
    Gold stopped and looked down at the concrete for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak, but the roar of a KC-135’s takeoff drowned her out. As the tanker jet retracted its landing gear and banked to the south, she said, “You touched a nerve somewhere.”
    â€œHow’s that?” Parson said.
    â€œYou made his palms sweat.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œDid you see the way he was rubbing his hands along his legs?”
    Parson tried to recall the interview. Yeah, he remembered that. But so what? “Does that mean anything?” he asked.
    â€œNothing you could prove in court,” Gold said. “But it’s a classic sign of somebody getting skittish.”
    â€œHow do you know this?” Parson said. “You’re not a cop.” He didn’t doubt her; he just wondered how she could have picked up this particular tidbit. Gold knew so many things, and she never stopped surprising him.
    â€œInterpreting for interrogations,” Gold said. She looked off into the mountains, paused for a moment. Then she said, “I’ve heard things you wouldn’t believe. I’ve heard things I wish I hadn’t heard. And I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t seen. But I know when people are hiding something.”

6
    A SETBACK, NOTHING MORE . DuÅ¡ic told his contacts in Central Asia, along with the European customers for his new product, not to panic. We lost some inventory, he conceded, but Afghanistan had no shortage of poppies. Yes, the risk of detection existed now, but according to all reports, the C-27 had burned on impact. Perhaps the flames had consumed all of the product. Neither the Americans nor the Kyrgyz government had said anything about finding contraband. It would look suspicious if DuÅ¡ic and his contacts changed the schedules of their flights. Better to let operations continue as normal.
    DuÅ¡ic wanted to focus on the real mission; the dirty business of the drug trade only funded that mission, and drugs already took up too much of his time. At least he’d received some good news from his old army friend Stefan: Three veterans of the Volunteer Guard had pledged their support. And those three might help recruit more.
    Stefan had also reported progress on technical issues. DuÅ¡ic wanted to see for himself—and meet the new volunteers—so he took his Aventador over the border into Bosnia. At the checkpoint, his false passport received barely a glance from the idiot border guard. That border never should have been there, in DuÅ¡ic’s estimation. Greater Serbia should encompass the current Bosnia, and ultimately that was the purpose of his mission. He tried not to let his thoughts about the border ruin his day. For the moment, he enjoyed driving his Lamborghini down the winding rural roads. The sports car was designed for such motoring, not the stop-and-go congestion of Belgrade. He crossed bridges over streams running clear except where the water tumbled fast enough to turn white. The trip brought back memories as he sped past rolling green hills.
    DuÅ¡ic’s unit served in this region, near Tuzla, early in the war. He remembered one day with particular vividness. As his men cleared a village of Turks, they found four women attractive enough to keep. The platoon gathered them in a house blown open by shelling, and the men waited for DuÅ¡ic to come in from the field.
    That was the protocol: Officers got first pick, and