Blackout (Sam Archer 3) (29 page)

Across the city, in a dark car speeding through south-west London towards Heathrow, the commander of the Panthers thought about the young officer who had tried to interrogate him. He had been telling the boy the truth. Since he could remember, everyone had called him Wulf.

He had been named Ibrahim as a baby, but his nickname had stuck as a child. Nicknames in his squad and in the KLA were common, especially using names of animals due to the time they spent living out on the plains and in the valleys. Sometimes the naming was apt, other times it was because of mannerisms or physical appearance. Bug was named because of the scarring on his face and torso. A Serb phosphorous grenade had gone off right by his ear and had scorched that side of his face to leave scaly burns and webs of scarring. Flea, the best sniper in the KLA, was named because of his disproportionally small head. Worm because of his tall and lanky build and the way he crawled
across
the ground when out in the field. And Spider because of the tattoos on his body. He had two large black-widows inked on his elbows, the webs spreading all the way up his arms.

Wulf had been born in Albania, but had moved to Kosovo as a four year old boy. It was a humble place to grow up
- farming country, tough land and cold weather. He had matured early, forced to fend for himself. He remembered the first time he killed a man. The thief was trying to steal some cattle from his grandparent's farm, in the middle of the night. With no time to alert his grandfather, Wulf had taken his .22 rifle, loaded it and shot the man through the forehead from his bedroom window. By the time he was nineteen, he was an integral part of the Black Panthers, the Special Forces team that carried out the toughest of assignments for the KLA. By the time he was twenty two, he
was leading them, Spider his second in command. When the war broke out, he and his team had been ordered by the KLA command to bring the fight to the Serbs, to take back what was theirs. They operated in the Drenica valley, mostly at night, roaming in the darkness and shadows as they hunted the Serbs, often not returning to the main KLA camp for weeks at a time. During the war they had inflicted hundreds of fatalities on the enemy, but Wulf had never lost a single man, something he took immense pride in. The only real casualty had been to Bug when that grenade went off. But he had survived. These were his men, his sons, his brothers. He would die in an instant for them, and he knew they would do the exact same for him.

Before long, the war had started to swing in the KLA’s favour. They had support from NATO and they had hammered the Serbs, pushing them back towards Belgrade. Wulf and his team were a big reason why the KLA offensive was so successful, and word had quickly spread, their legend and reputation growing not only on their side but with the enemy. However, Wulf wasn’t a stupid man. He knew the war wouldn’t last forever, that he and his men couldn’t spend the rest of their lives out there on the plains, hunting down Serbs and being paid close to nothing by the army command. Kosovo was not an area of wealth. There was nothing to steal, and no one to bribe, and as their offensive had started pushing the Serbs back, Wulf had wracked his brains trying to think of a way he could ensure his men were sufficiently compensated for all their efforts in the war.

And one day, in December 1998, he had found it.

Or more correctly, it found him.

He and his team had just returned from four days out in the field, performing hit and run raids on Serb outposts and camps, and Wulf had seen the headlights of a car approaching them on the dust track that led to their makeshift camp. He had raised a bazooka to his shoulder, ready to fire if the vehicle came any closer, but the driver had stopped eighty yards away so as not to draw fire. A man in a white doctor’s coat had stepped out then began walking over to the camp, his hands in the air, making a point that he wasn’t a threat. Seven sub-machine guns and a bazooka pointed at him, the small man had moved into their camp and approached Wulf, asking him to take a walk with him.

He had a proposition for him.

Once the man was frisked and checked for weapons, Wulf had lowered the bazooka and grabbing his Kalashnikov, turned and walked with the small man, dwarfing him as they strolled side-by-side away from the camp and out of earshot.

The doctor began the conversation by explaining who he was. A University graduate who had been fired from his job when the war had started, due to being Albanian. He had retreated into Kosovo and been left broke and out of work. With the war breaking out
around him his prospects were bleak. However, he said that being fired from his job was the best thing that could have happened to him
.
In any country, war changes everyday rules and common practices, he’d said. Nations fall apart and are restructured when conflicts were resolved, like Nazi Germany after the Second World War. But in that period of confusion and lack of structure, there is the potential for significant money to be made. Amongst so much violence and atrocity, the police and the government were distracted. Illegal activity could flourish, like dry earth under a monsoon, soaking up profit and collateral like dry soil sucked up water.

The doctor had explained that the war would be over soon, looking at Wulf through his spectacles. Order would be restored, and the opportunity for illegal earnings would become far more difficult. The doctor was looking to the future, much like Wulf, and told him of a new trade he had just entered into, one that was already earning him fabulous amounts of money.

Organ harvesting.

Smuggling drugs, weapons and women were common practices all over Eastern Europe, the doctor had told him. They had been for years. One could make a handsome living selling any of the three, but the cash return would never be substantial given the increasing competition out there.

But apparently, the rarest of things to be traded were healthy human organs. Hearts, kidneys, livers and lungs, to be exact. Pure, living, pulsing, fleshy gold. Bags of rare blood types were going at thousands of US dollars each, and a full set of healthy human organs were going at close to fifty. The small doctor explained that he was running a trade with smugglers back in Albania. He would supply the organs, iced and packaged, and the smugglers would then traffick the coolers out of the country through the airport in the capital city, Tirana. The boxes would travel as hidden cargo through to the Ataturk International Airport, in Istanbul, Turkey. All the appropriate workers at each airport had been bribed so seizure of the coolers wasn’t an issue, and from Istanbul the organs would then be transported out and shipped across Eastern Europe to the highest bidder.

The amount of money available was crazy, the doctor told him. $45,000 per body, at least, usually more.  All that money just for one plastic cooler.

The doctor said that he and the smugglers had been doing this for almost three months, but had recently run into some problems. Namely, supply and demand. The operation couldn’t flow without healthy bodies to harvest. Basically, what he needed from Wulf was to not kill every enemy combatant he and his men engaged out on the plains. The doctor needed hostages, prisoners of war, people who figured they would be held for ransom and returned at a later date after negotiation. In return for the capture and delivery, the doctor said he was willing to give Wulf a ten per cent cut. Four and a half
thousand US dollars per captive. Wulf had considered the offer, but like any shrewd businessman, he knew it couldn’t run without his help. They had settled on his cut being twenty five per cent. Over $11,000 per body.

Once they returned to camp, Wulf had gathered up his men, informing them of the proposed deal and asking what they thought. He emphasised how the war wouldn’t last forever, that they needed to think of the future. Given their faith in him as a leader, the whole team had agreed on the plan straight away. He had turned to the doctor and said they had a deal. Once delivery arrangements and locations had been agreed, the two men shook hands and the doctor had got in his car and driven off. Once he was gone, the eight man team sitting around a fire, a discussion began concerning the acquisition of the bodies to be harvested. Spider had then come up with a great idea.

Why try to capture the enemy during a gunfight when you could just kidnap them instead?

The deal with the doctor and the traffickers had started working perfectly. Given that the Panthers were away from the main KLA camp for weeks at a time, no one back at command usually had any idea what they were up to or even where they were. They had gone deep into Serb territory, targeting the rural areas towards Bosnia and a town near the border called Priboj. The late-night covert entry-and-kidnap raids were always followed by a meeting on a dirt road with two smugglers sent by the doctor, both dressed as KLA soldiers. They told the hostages they were being taken to a detainee camp in northern Albania, and from there an exchange and ransom would be arranged with the Serbian government in Belgrade.

However, the captives were taken to a long, secluded house near the border instead. Once they arrived, their hands bound, they were shepherded out of the vehicle and then executed with a single bullet to the head, no one around to hear the gunshot or see the bodies fall. Meanwhile, the doctor was inside the house, preparing for surgery, and hours later a fresh set of organs would be bagged, tagged and iced, already on their way to the airport in Tirana, the body of the host buried on the journey in an unmarked grave that no one would ever find. Sometimes there was also a request for blood, so some of the bodies were drained by the doctor and the blood bagged and sealed. Before long the profits had started to come back to Wulf and his men, and they were handsome to say the least.

The trafficking had continued successfully for months, Wulf becoming wealthier and wealthier as each body was delivered to the doctor and harvested, the money deposited into an offshore bank account. Wulf wasn’t a greedy man and kept his men fully informed about the exact amount of money they were making, promising to divide it up when the war was over, giving each man a foundation from which to buy a home or set up a new life. Through January and most of February, they had snatched and traded a
hundred and fifteen of the enemy, mostly men but sometimes women and children, the entire family set. Once his men got a taste for it, they had wanted to keep up the supply of bodies and the cash return and so the rules were loosened slightly. They had been forced a few times to kidnap people from their own side, not something Wulf was proud of, but he had to look at the bigger picture and their futures.

But then everything had changed.

It happened the night the two US marines and the British army soldier had arrived at the camp holding their families in March 1999.

Wulf and his team had just been returning from a late
night trade on the road with the two smugglers disguised as KLA. The radio on Spider’s uniform had suddenly started squawking, a guard at the camp where the women and children were based saying that they were under attack by three men, all of them NATO soldiers. Once Spider had raced back to camp and told Wulf, the entire team had piled into their cars and roared across the valley. They’d seen a NATO Humvee up ahead, coming from the camp and on its way along the dirt track. Bug had stepped out and hit it first time with a bazooka, the rocket whooshing through the night and hitting the reinforced metal plate on the side of the truck, smashing it over with a large explosion.

They had moved in and captured the three men inside, binding their hands and feet. Wulf had sent Crow and Grub to the township and the two men had returned devastated, confirming that everyone there had been killed. The squad had then proceeded to stamp, punch and beat the trio of murderers, kicking them in the face and pistol-whipping them. Every member of the squad had wanted to kill all three of them there and then, disembowel and crucify them, leave them nailed to trees with their intestines hanging out. But Wulf had ordered no. He’d said that was too quick a death. He wanted their deaths and pain to last weeks, months.

So he and his men had taken the murderers to their camp and thrown them into one the huts. Then the next night they started on one of them, taking away a piece of him at a time, the man screaming like a girl, the men laughing as they removed his toes one by one, a different one each night. They left them gathered in a pile there on the earth, letting the guy get a good look at the pile every night before they took another one.

But then disaster had struck. The three men had been rescued. Wulf still couldn’t believe it had happened, how it had been done, right under their noses in the night.

Soon after, he and his team were arrested by Serbian police. The chief of security at the Ataturk airport had been tipped off about the smuggling, and had contacted the Serbian police who had ambushed the doctor at the house and Wulf and his men at one of their
roadside trades. They had walked right into the trap, and an entire division of armed police sprung on them, taking them completely unawares. The game was up.

They were taken back to Belgrade, imprisoned and put on trial and charged for war-crimes. Ethnic cleansing, kidnap, murder, and organ harvesting. Once the KLA heard about it, they officially expelled them, turning their backs and forgetting all the hard work the Panthers had done for the Army in the war. The Serbian government were similarly outraged by the conspiracy, and were desperate to keep the harvesting a secret from the rest of the world, so the entire squad were sent away for life to
Ferri
, the darkest, most remote prison in the country, a place that wasn't on any map and that virtually no one knew about. A man didn’t go to
Ferri
to serve time for his crimes. He went there to die.