The Abomination (38 page)

US AIR FORCE
pilot Major Peter Bower edged the joystick further forward, the instruments in front of him reacting immediately as his aircraft straightened. He had another forty minutes of flying left. After that, even if the flight wasn't over, he'd get up from his seat, stretch, and hand the controls to another pilot. Then, putting on his sunglasses against the glare of the early-morning sun, he'd stroll out of the air-conditioned Flight Centre into the dry heat of the Nevada desert and get himself some breakfast at the BX, which he would eat while reading his emails and surfing the net on his tablet computer. After an hour and a half he'd come back on shift and be assigned a different flight, perhaps one over Afghanistan. He preferred the Afghan flights. Everybody did: you knew that the drone you were piloting was involved in a real mission, as opposed to the endless exercises that characterised NATO's European operations.

Like this one. “I have the target,” he reported, his voice professionally calm. “One pale small Fiat automobile. One Predator, four missiles. Awaiting orders.”

“Copy that,” Linda Jessop said to his right. She was operating the sensors – the various cameras, satellite links and imaging systems that were their drone's eyes and ears. Although like many sensor operators Linda was technically employed by a private contractor rather than the Air Force, the two of them had flown together for about four years. In all that time they hadn't left the ground once.

Nor had they actually set eyes on the aircraft they were flying today, although they were very familiar with the model. The Pentagon had purchased over three hundred and sixty Predator UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, usually known as drones – and was currently using them in conflicts all over the world. Peter and Linda flew live missions almost every day. Together with their colleagues, they had been responsible for the deaths of over 2,500 people since the start of the so-called War on Terror.

The Predator they were piloting this morning had been launched from Aviano Air Base in Italy, before flying a few hundred miles to Croatia to take part in a small-scale evade-and-resist exercise. The Hellfire missiles were therefore disarmed: any instruction to fire them would result in a simulated laser strike, a “kill” in name only.

Mistakes using Predators were vanishingly rare. At every step of the way orders were checked and double-checked. It was, Major Bower liked to boast to his friends, the safest and most accurate way to wage warfare ever invented – at least, for the aircrew.

“Targets acquired,” Linda confirmed.

The voice of his controller filled his headphones. “Pilot, Sensor: you are cleared to engage.”

Even though it was only an exercise, Peter Bower felt the familiar small jolt of adrenalin that came from being given the command to fire. Despite what some people claimed, you never treated it as a video game. He had flown too many conventional airborne sorties and seen too many targets disappear under his crosshairs not to appreciate what his orders meant for those on the receiving end.

Quickly the two of them ran through the pre-launch checklist. On a good day they could do this in twenty-one seconds: coding the weapons, confirming their status, arming the laser and locking on to the target.

Today was a pretty good day: twenty-one and a half.

“Three, two, one,” he counted. “Rifle.” Next to him, Linda pressed a red button on the side of her joystick. “Three, two, one. Impact.”

And, a split-second later, “
Holy shit.
”

On the screen, smoke and debris spread like an ink-blot from his crosshairs. “Live ammunition,” he reported urgently. “I repeat, we have fired live ammunition. Confirm target status.”

“Copy that,” the voice in his ear said. “Cease firing.” And then, a few seconds later, “Pete, we need to check this out. We may have a blue on blue. Stand by.”

Peter Bower sat back. Despite the chill of the air conditioning, a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead.
Blue on blue
. The words no pilot, airborne or not, ever wanted to hear. The words denoting that you had just fired a lethal missile at a friendly target.

Then, abruptly, he craned forward. As the smoke cleared he could see on his screen that the target, the small Fiat, must have started making a turn just as he fired. The Hellfire, coming from a height of two thousand feet, had taken a few seconds to reach the ground, and despite the laser-guided aiming system had exploded ten feet or so away. The strike had brushed the car off the road and smashed it into the trees, but it looked as if a figure was even now struggling out of the front passenger door.

“Switch to thermal,” he instructed Linda. Colours blossomed on the screen. Yes, at least one occupant was definitely alive.

“Continue to observe,” the voice in his earphones said. “Pete, we're trying to find out what just happened here. Must have been some kind of error at the arming stage . . . Don't worry, we'll get to the bottom of it.”

Peter Bower exhaled.
Thank you, Lord
.

KAT HAD NO
idea what had just happened. Something had hit them. The car had blown up. Holly had lost control . . . Competing explanations jostled in her head.

Her ears ringing, she lifted her head from the airbag and saw blood. That explained the multiple bangs inside the car, she realised: it had been the sound of the airbags inflating. One had hit her face with sufficient force to make her nose bleed.

Or, to look at it another way, her face had travelled towards the windscreen with so much force that the intervention of the airbag had almost certainly saved her life.

She looked around. The car had spun through almost 180 degrees and was now facing back the way it had come. The driver's side was caved in where they'd sideswiped an oak tree. There was broken glass everywhere – she could feel it in her own hair, and her lap was full of it – and ribbons of mangled metal behind Holly's head. But – thank God – Holly was stirring.

Kat pulled at her seatbelt, which had bruised her chest as it tightened and locked. As she fumbled with the catch she looked through the cracked windscreen. It took her a moment to realise that where the car had been seconds before there was now a smoking crater six feet wide.

The belt finally came free and she pulled at the door handle. After another tussle, it opened reluctantly, the frame bent and buckled. She ran around and heaved Holly onto the road.

“It's OK,” Holly gasped, getting to her feet. “I'm just dazed. Are you all right?”

“I think so. What happened here?” Something Holly had said earlier came back to her. “My God! They were using live ammunition. . .”

“Mortars, yes. But that wasn't a mortar.” Holly leant against a tree, catching her breath. “That was a mine, or some kind of missile.” She hobbled to the edge of the crater. “At a guess, a Hellfire. You can see how it exploded against the ground, not below it.”

“Meaning what?”

Holly looked upwards, then pointed. “There. See it?”

High above them a tiny speck circled in the darkening sky. It seemed impossible that something so distant could have wreaked such devastation.

“Drone,” Holly said. “Probably a Predator. If so, it has at least three more missiles in its payload.”

“Can they still see us?”

“For sure. We need to get into the trees, quickly. They'll have infra-red sensors, but the canopy's pretty high. We should be able to evade detection, at least until it gets dark.” She went to the trunk and pulled it open. The hatch had lost its spring and she had to hold it up with one hand.

“What are you doing?”

“We have to take everything we need. We can't come back here. It's too dangerous.”

They trudged into the wood. Fortunately Holly had brought her things in an army field pack. Kat slung her own sports bag over her shoulder, and concentrated on trying to match Holly's practised military stride. But she found she was shaking with adrenalin.

“Kat?” Holly said. “I've been thinking. Maybe that exercise we saw was actually cover.”

“Cover for what?”

“For striking at us. Say they organise some evade-and – resist training with some sort of multi-national component to it. Mortars are fired, there's a bit of confusion . . . Meanwhile they hit us with a Predator. When it's announced that a US second lieutenant and an Italian captain of the Carabinieri have been tragically killed, most people will assume we were part of the exercise. And those who
do
know better are unlikely to kick up much of a fuss.”

“So the Audi was a feint?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they've had eyes on us all the time. One team on the ground, one in the air.”

Kat felt fear gripping her insides. If Holly was right, the force ranged against them was overwhelming. “What will they do now?”

“I doubt they'll risk another missile attack. More likely they'll use the drone as recon, get the guys on the ground to pick us off.”

“Great.”

“On the plus side, I've done this before. Evade-and-resist was part of our training.”

“How long did you last?”

“About twelve hours,” Holly admitted. “And from the look of those trucks we saw, there are an awful lot of those guys. This may be tough.”

DANIELE BARBO PRESSED
a button on his computer and watched another dozen or so files from Barbara Holton's hard drive reconstitute themselves before his eyes. Enough were readable now to piece together much of the work the American had been doing before her death. Dozens of victim and witness statements, from men as well as women, all relating to atrocities during the break-up of Yugoslavia.

“It was a group of some ten boys from Posavska Mahala and the surrounding villages who called themselves ‘horses of fire'. I knew most of them personally. In particular, Marijan Brnic. I begged him to let me go, reminding him of his past neighbourly relations with my family. He told me to be glad that he was alone since the procedure was different with others, five or six on one girl. They pulled my friend B. N. (19) by the hair, beat her and put a knife to her throat when she tried to break free. She was raped by two of the group.”

“In the interrogation centre our captors beat us every day. One sergeant liked to show off a technique that he had of extracting teeth with the barrel of a revolver. I lost four teeth that way. . .”

“When the guards were bored they invented games. They ordered us to carry bags full of sand from one side of the camp to the other, then beat us for trying to steal sand without permission and told us to take it back. When we took it back we were beaten for not obeying the first order. This went on for hours.”

“They made us lie on our backs and then they jumped from a table on to our stomachs. They were trying to give us hernias. One man had a hernia the size of a human head. . .”

“We women were stripped naked. Male prisoners were made to masturbate in front of us while being verbally abused by the guards. Then the guards took the women away. Sometimes male and female prisoners were made to dance with each other to music while a female prisoner was being raped. . .”

“They told my friend, ‘Here is a riddle. How is it possible to hold both your ears in one hand?' When he said he didn't know, they cut off his ears, put them in his hand and said, ‘There, it is possible to do anything if you are us.' They made him clean his blood off the knife by licking it. . .”

He found a file simply entitled “Why?” and opened it. It contained Barbara Holton's own notes.

– The curious thing is that Bosnia wasn't a particularly divided country before the war. Twelve per cent of marriages were inter-racial. In the west, north and east, most areas consisted of Croat, Bosniak and Serb communities existing peacefully side by side.

– The flashpoint appears to have come in the early 1990s. Suddenly, the newspapers and radio reports were full of ethnically charged speeches and accusations. Were they the cause of the violence? Or was it something else? How did those inciting the hatred know which buttons to press? How come they were so consistent in their message?

– Both armies, Croat and Serb, employed translators. Who for? Jelena says she knew a girl who was raped in the Birds' Nest by an American. Check it out?

She'd clearly got as far as working out that there was some kind of pattern, and that military contractors might have been involved, but only at the very end had she gathered any hard evidence that they'd given the orders.

Even so, she'd been killed because of what she knew.

Picking up his phone, he dialled Kat's pay-as-you-go number, hoping to check on her progress. As he'd half-expected, it went straight through to voicemail.

Ending the call, he looked at the handset and frowned. After his kidnap, he'd been diagnosed as having a form of autism which amongst other things made him incapable of empathising with other people. He himself had always refused to accept the label, believing that he had simply chosen to turn away from the world in order to pursue a higher calling. But he was aware that there was something missing within him; some music other people heard in human voices that was lost to him, some warmth they found in human friendships that was as invisible to him as daylight was to a bat.

It surprised him, therefore, when he caught himself hoping that Holly and Kat were safe.

But then, he reminded himself, both women were useful to him at present. If he was to evade prison and save Carnivia he had to come up with something far more game-changing than the feeble “character reference” Kat had offered him.

Far better to get something on those who had tried to destroy him, enough to constitute a really valuable bargaining chip, and then trade it for his website and his freedom.

Holly and Kat, he reflected, might have a different agenda. He'd have to deal with that when the time came.