17.00 hrs.
Chet Freeman didn’t know which smelled worse: himself or the bar he was sitting in.
They’d taken up position by a table next to the toilets. From a surveillance point of view it was perfect: they could see every part of the bar, and there was a direct line to the exit in case of a clusterfuck. From a comfort point of view it was the pits, not least because of the reek of piss and stale cigarette smoke. Chet had been in some rough joints in his time, but this place made the Lamb and Flag in Hereford look like the fucking Ritz.
At least it was warm. The snow had been falling for about an hour and was already a couple of inches thick on the ground. But warmth was the only thing this bar had going for it. A broken fruit machine in one corner. A picture of Milosevic on the nicotine-stained wall alongside it. Three strip lights on the ceiling, of which the middle one buzzed and flickered on and off. Other than that, a short bar with a grossly fat barman and only two optics fixed to the wall behind it — slivovitz and vodka — and ten plastic-topped tables screwed to the ground, each with a red Coca-Cola ashtray overflowing with butts. This was a place for drinking and smoking, nothing more. True, there was an old TV fixed to the concrete wall behind the bar itself. It was on loud enough to hear, but of the twenty-three men — no women — pulling on bottles of warm beer, no one even glanced at it.
Chet looked at his watch. 17.03. Give it another three hours and he’d put money on most of these guys being dead drunk. Or, in one case, just dead.
He scratched at his leg. An insect, probably drawn by his stinking clothes, had bitten him just above the knee. He could feel the bulge of the bite even through the coarse material of his trousers. He scratched it hard and took a small sip from his bottle of Zajecarsko, the local beer.
‘Jesus, buddy, if I didn’t know you better, I’d have said you actually just drank some of that piss.’
Chet’s mate Luke Mercer had a shaved head, slightly crooked teeth and a south London accent. He spoke quietly and his voice was almost drowned out by the noise of Boyzone wailing from the TV. They didn’t want anybody to hear they were talking English.
Luke looked as rough as Chet. Three days’ stubble, and another three days’ dirt beneath it. A black donkey jacket flecked with cement. Worker’s shoes, dirty and heavy. Luke so closely resembled a labourer that no one would give him a second look, not here where everybody was dressed in the same way. Their fellow drinkers might be surprised to learn, though, that the donkey jacket concealed a shoulder holster packing a Sig 9mm pistol and a mike for covert comms fitted under the lapel. The tiny pink radio earpieces each man had in one ear were invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them. They were linked to radio transmitters in the pockets of their tough, battered trousers. This would keep them in contact with the other two members of the unit, Sean Richards — a grizzled old-timer with flecks of grey in his beard, who was as much a fixture of B Squadron as the squadron hangar back in Hereford — and Marty Blakemore, fresh to the Regiment from 3 Para and keen to make a good impression on his first major op.
Sean and Marty were parked in a nondescript white Skoda saloon outside the bar on the opposite side of the street. The boot of the car was filled with heavier weaponry: suppressed M16s, Maglite torch attachments with IR filters, med packs. All four of them knew that this could be a long night, and they needed to be properly equipped.
Chet’s three years in the Regiment had taught him that his chosen career would sometimes mean carrying out operations you didn’t much like and just getting on with the job. Operations that you wouldn’t have thought existed before you walked into the compounds of Hereford HQ. Operations that you wouldn’t talk to anybody about, unless they were badged too. So sometimes, he thought to himself as he sat there, it was good to know you were out to nail a bona fide scumbag. Someone you wouldn’t think twice about sending to meet their maker — though fuck knows what kind of maker would come up with a piece of work like Stevan Ivanovic. As scumbags went, he was solid gold.
Chet knew Ivanovic’s CV well. Four days previously at their forward operating base — a cordoned-off area of a busy UN military installation on the Bosnian border — the ops officer Andy Dell had given Chet’s four-man unit the low-down as he handed round the photograph of a balding, jowly individual with flared nostrils and a sour look.
Andy Dell had the stuck-up tones of a Sandhurst officer, but as Ruperts went he was all right. ‘This is your man,’ he had announced. ‘Born 1957, made Chief of Police in Bosanski Samac, north-eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1992. Lasted eight months in the job, during which time twelve men — all Bosnian Muslims — died in his custody: seven from beatings, five from causes unknown. Six Bosnian males have independently testified that he forced them to perform sex acts on each other just to humiliate them.’
‘Sex acts?’ Chet had interrupted.
‘Blow jobs, since you ask. Three women have accused him of rape. One of them was fifteen years old; another ended up face down in the river after she spoke out.’
‘And we get to slot this cunt, right?’ Luke had asked.
‘Do me a favour, Luke, and shut the fuck up till I’ve finished.’ Luke, who had been brought up by his dad on a council estate in Lewisham, always had something to say, and it didn’t always endear him to the Ruperts. ‘Ivanovic is on the run. He left his post as Chief as Police in ’93, after which he was a leading figure in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Our boys tried to get their hands on him during the siege of Sarajevo. Too slippery. He’s been underground since the end of the Bosnian war. Only he’s just stuck his head above the parapet. The Firm have definite intel on his location, and the war-crimes tribunal at the Hague want him in the dock for persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.’
It all made sense. Chet had been around long enough to know that it wasn’t just the ragheads who could be religious nuts. When it came to ethnic cleansing, some of those Serbs were pure Domestos.
Turning their attention to a map of the region, Dell had pointed at the FOB, situated just west of the Serb border. ‘You’re to insert into Serbia by vehicle in the guise of UN peacekeepers. They’re a common sight, so you shouldn’t attract too much attention. Our intel suggests that Ivanovic is hiding out in Prizkovo, a one-horse town twenty miles south of Belgrade. We have the imagery for you to study. When you get to the area you’ll need to ditch the UN gear. That part of Serbia is a nationalist hotbed. The peacekeepers know that the best way to preserve the peace is to keep away.’
‘Good job we’re not there to keep the peace, then,’ Luke had murmured.
The ops officer had ignored him. ‘We have reports that Ivanovic is surrounded by at least four heavies,’ he continued. ‘They’re dispensable, but Ivanovic needs to be alive. You’ve been given temporary powers of arrest. These probably won’t stand up in an international court of law, and Ivanovic will most likely know that. He’s not going to come quietly.’
Quiet. Noisy. It made no difference to Chet. He was just looking forward to getting his hands on this bastard. And it wouldn’t be long now.
He picked up a dinar from the sticky table and flicked it in the air.
‘Tails,’ said Luke. He looked like he wanted a response, but he wasn’t going to get one from Chet, who just scowled and continued to flip the coin.
Flick, catch.
Flick, catch.
‘You going to do that all night, buddy?’ Luke asked. ‘’Cos I don’t mind telling you, it’s getting on my wick.’
Flick, catch. Flick, catch.
The TV behind the bar was grainy and flickered every few seconds. To Chet’s relief, the music came to an end and an image caught his attention. The British Prime Minister, Alistair Stratton, his boyish face earnest and open, his suit well cut and his red tie perfectly neat, was sitting in an anodyne studio being interviewed by some bird Chet recognised but couldn’t name. What the fuck Stratton was doing on Serbian TV, Chet didn’t know. Certainly the punters in the bar paid as little attention to him as they had to Boyzone.
‘Always the fucking way,’ Luke drawled. ‘You come on holiday to get away from it all…’
Chet glanced back up at the screen. ‘Stratton’s all right,’ he said.
‘Stratton,’ Luke replied, ‘is a politician. Therefore Stratton is a wanker. End of.’
Chet shrugged. He wasn’t going to argue. But he had enough friends in the regular green army to know that in the year since Stratton had come to power, things for them had improved. Better kit, better conditions. It was no secret in the military that the government was gearing up to move into Kosovo if Milosevic carried on giving the Albanians the Stalin treatment, but really Chet knew very little about the politics. That wasn’t his business. All he knew was that anyone who supplied his mates with the gear and the weapons they needed to do their jobs was OK by him. As Luke would say: end of.
Still, it was odd to come across Stratton’s voice in this back end of nowhere, miles from home and translated into impenetrable Serbian by the subtitles at the bottom of the screen. The PM’s earnest tones reached Chet’s ears.
‘The trouble with talking about faith is that frankly people think you’re a nutter…’ Stratton smiled a boyish smile. ‘But yes, my faith is extremely important to me. You know, in this job, you’re asked to make some pretty tough decisions, and I’d like to think that my faith always puts me on the right path…’
Chet heard Luke snort. Did Stratton know that at that moment a four-man SAS unit was preparing to make an illegal arrest on foreign soil, and most likely take out a number of foreign nationals as they did so? If so, had he consulted the big guy upstairs about the rights and wrongs of it? Chet didn’t much care either way. The only things he had faith in were his Sig and the PPK strapped to his left ankle. The disco gun, they called it back home, but there’d be no dancing tonight.
Chet’s attention wandered from the blaring TV and he started to scan the other drinkers. They were hard-looking men. Flinty-eyed and rough-faced, their hands big and their skin chapped. One of them stood up from the bar and lurched towards the toilet. He noticed Chet and Luke sitting there. Newcomers. He stopped to give them a look that told them how unwelcome they were.
The look Chet and Luke returned was cool. Unruffled. Perhaps the Serbian decided it wasn’t worth his while kicking it off with these two. Perhaps he’d never intended that in the first place. He found his way into the foul-smelling toilets, leaving the two SAS men to continue scanning the remainder of the clientele.
One of them was their key to Ivanovic. And if everything went according to plan, they’d soon know which one.
17.32 hrs.
Stratton had been replaced by some incomprehensible game show. Chet and Luke’s beers were still full. It wouldn’t be long before someone clocked that they weren’t really drinking. Their contact was now seventeen minutes late. It was beginning to look like he’d bailed out, which would mean the last few days had been for nothing.
A voice in the earpiece. Sean, outside in the Skoda. ‘OK, fellas. The preacher’s arrived. About fucking time too — it’s Baltic out here, so make him feel comfortable. He looks about twelve.’
‘The preacher’. Prearranged code for the tout they were awaiting.
Ten seconds later the door opened. The icy air from outside disturbed the warm fug of the bar, and a young man walked in. Only three men clocked his arrival: the fat bartender and Chet and Luke. Unlike almost everyone else in the room, he was clean-shaven. He wore jeans, a thick lumberjack shirt, a hat that covered his ears and was tied under his chin, and a black rucksack over his shoulder. The rucksack was the sign by which the unit were to recognise him, but it made the kid look more like a student than a worker. Everything had a dusting of snow over it.
As the door closed behind him, he looked round nervously, like a teenager not sure if his girlfriend had stood him up.
Chet looked towards the frosted glass at the front of the bar. He could just make out two silhouettes, one on either side of the door. He knew what that meant: Sean and Marty, having clocked the kid, had moved from the Skoda and were now standing guard outside, ready to burst in if anything kicked off.
The kid’s glance fell on Chet and Luke, and he nodded slightly.
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Chet cursed quietly and looked away. He could sense Luke doing the same. This dickhead might be here to help them, but as touts went he was clearly wet behind the ears, and if he stood there gawping at them much longer, he was going to screw the whole operation.
Chet slid the dinar off the table once more.
Flick, catch.
Flick, catch.
The tout was looking around now. His eyes narrowed, as if he had seen something — or someone — he’d been looking for. He slipped the rucksack off his shoulder, carrying it by his side, and approached the bar. The tout chose his place carefully, selecting a stool next to one of the regular drinkers.
That was the sign. The kid was too scared to meet with the unit. Too scared to point out their man in an overt way. So the spooks had got to work on him. It was local knowledge that Ivanovic was in the area. Nobody knew where, but they did know that one of his guys drank in this bar during his time off. The kid was to come in here at a given time and take a seat next to the target. If they wanted to find Ivanovic, all they had to do was follow Ivanovic’s man.
Chet stopped flipping his coin and took another pretend pull on his beer as he scoped out the tout’s new drinking buddy. He could only see the guy’s back. He was broad-shouldered and had thick black hair, slightly greying. He sat hunched forward, his elbows on the bar. When the tout sat next to him, he made no attempt at conversation.
The younger man pointed at one of the optics and ordered a slivovitz, which the fat bartender plonked in front of him. Then he settled down to drink it. Just another loser passing the time.
17.46 hrs.
Ivanovic’s man stood up.
As he turned away from the bar, Chet could see he was unsteady on his feet. His face looked like it had been carved out of rock, with an immense flat nose — well reddened from booze — hooded eyes and deep frown lines on his forehead. He scowled at nobody in particular and walked uncertainly towards the street door. Chet pressed the button on the transmitter in his pocket. ‘Eyes on Target 1,’ he murmured. ‘He’s leaving now.’
‘Roger that,’ came Sean’s voice in his ear.
Chet and Luke waited until their man was outside before scraping back their chairs and moving towards the exit. Chet could sense the tout watching them over his shoulder, but he gave no sign of recognition. That was for the kid’s safety.
They stepped out into the cold night air. It had been dark for no more than half an hour, but already it must have been two below. Chet gave himself a moment to take everything in. The street was lined with Communist-era concrete buildings — ‘Makes Peckham look like Belgrave fucking Square,’ Luke had noted when they first arrived — and while the falling snow softened everything a little, Priskovo was still as bleak as the bar they’d just walked out of. The road itself wasn’t busy. A half-empty blue and white bus trundled past, then a couple of vans with tarpaulin over the back. A few locals hurried past on the pavement, huddled against the snow and concentrating on nothing other than getting home. Certainly they paid no attention to Chet or Luke.
Ivanovic’s man had turned left out of the bar. He’d gone about twenty metres and was weaving his drunken way towards a white Ford Transit with a dent in the back. Sean and Marty had crossed the road and returned to the Skoda — just two more faceless figures in the snow — and were opening the doors to climb back in. Chet and Luke had another Skoda, but theirs was brown. They got in and Chet switched on the engine. The wipers cleared the snow from the windscreen to reveal Ivanovic’s man getting into the Transit. Seconds later he moved off. Chet followed, and in his rear-view mirror could see the white Skoda pull out as well.
The Transit drove quickly, swerving slightly as it went. Luke shook his head. ‘Dumber than a box of rocks…’
Chet didn’t answer. The snow was hurtling against the windscreen and the road was treacherous. He kept his eye firmly on the target and drove on.
17.51 hrs.
The thin young man whose black rucksack was now lying at the foot of his bar stool was called Anton. He had been cold when he walked into the bar. Now the blood in his veins was running hot. The heat of excitement. It had gone well. He had earned his 50,000 dinars. Now all he wanted to do was get out of this horrible place and back to his small apartment, where his girlfriend was waiting for him. He would buy her flowers. And if he bought her flowers, perhaps she would give him something in return.
The slivovitz made his eyes water and his throat burn. But he supposed he’d better finish it. He caught the barman’s eyes and nodded — a friendly gesture that wasn’t returned. Anton shrugged, then watched as the guy wiped the bar with a frayed, grey rag and picked up the bottle that Ivanovic’s man had left.
A confused look crossed the barman’s face. He held up the bottle, and Anton immediately saw what was puzzling him. The bottle was full.
The heat in Anton’s veins turned to ice. He dismounted from the bar stool, grabbed his rucksack, then ran to the door and out into the street.
They were waiting for him there.
Two men, each twice as broad as Anton, and twice as strong. They grabbed him, one man to each of his thin arms.
‘ Pogmati! ’ he yelled in Serbian. ‘Help me!’
But none of the passers-by was going to do that.
The two men pulled Anton along the pavement for about thirty metres, then turned into an alleyway. It was dark here, and the snow was drifting against the wall on one side. The tips of Anton’s feet left two lines in the powder as the men dragged him along the alley and out into a courtyard surrounded by the high walls of deserted buildings. Breeze-blocks were piled in one corner and an old cement mixer stood nearby, but it was clear from the virgin snow that nobody had been here recently.
Again Anton shouted for help. But there was no one to hear, and his voice just echoed off the walls.
The first blow was not the hardest, but it was the one that shocked him most: a sudden and brutal knee to the groin that bent him double with pain. From that moment on, Anton was unable to distinguish between the two men. One of them struck him on the side of his head with a wooden cosh. As Anton collapsed to the ground, the other man started kicking him in the stomach and the face. Thirty seconds later blood was oozing from his nose and spewing from his mouth. His teeth were smeared crimson and he was vaguely aware of the way the blood first stained, then melted the snow around him.
He tried to shout again, but the wind had been knocked from his lungs and he couldn’t so much as croak. He didn’t see the knife — smooth on one side, jagged and cruel on the other — until its point was pressed against his neck.
For the first time, one of the men spoke. His voice was heavy and rasping. ‘ Sisadzijo! Cocksucker! That pretty little bint of yours waiting back in your flat. My friends are fucking her right now. When we’ve finished with you, we’ll go join them. Let her know what it’s like to feel real men inside her.’
Anton forced himself to speak. ‘ Molim te… Please… please leave her alone. I’ll tell you everything…’ They laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound.
‘Tell us everything?’ the man with the knife said. ‘Don’t be stupid. We know everything. You think your little game in the bar was a secret?’ Another boot to the stomach. ‘We’re not torturing you, sisadzijo. We’re killing you.’
Anton shook his head just as he felt a warm sensation spread across his trousers. The men laughed again. ‘Pissed himself. What a joke.’
Anton closed his eyes and started to pray, murmuring words he hadn’t uttered since he was a reluctant child taken to the Orthodox church his mother attended. ‘ Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name… ’
When he opened his eyes again, he wondered for a moment if his prayer had been answered. The man was no longer pressing the knife against his neck, but was standing, looking down at him.
Pushing himself up into a sitting position, Anton looked, through his blood-bleary eyes, towards the two men. The knife man still had the blade in his hand; but his accomplice had something else. It was a thin loop of plastic, about fifty centimetres long, the ends fastened with a small notch. Only when the man holding it started to approach him did Anton work out what it was: a cable tie.
A fresh wave of dread crashed over him. He had heard of these people and what they did with this simple, everyday item. If he didn’t get away now, he never would. He scrabbled around, but a final kick in the chest was enough for the man with the knife to floor him again; seconds later the other one was forcing the loop of plastic over his head.
Anton’s hands went to his neck, as though he was strangling himself. In truth he was protecting it. The knife man was having none of it: with a flick of his wrist he slashed the back of Anton’s hand so deeply that he felt the blade hit bone. The pain was searing, and the blood smeared all over the back of his hands and down his shirt. So much blood. But he kept a hold of his neck because to let go would be suicide.
The knife man dropped the bloodied blade in the snow. Then he grabbed Anton’s hands and pulled them down to his side.
‘ Ne… No… I’m begging you…’ Anton’s desperate plea was cut short by the sudden tightening of the cable tie around his neck — a sharp yank that forced the plastic to squeeze his skin and severely restrict the flow of air into his lungs.
The two men stood back to watch as Anton desperately tried to loosen the cable tie. To get his fingers in between the plastic and the skin. It was impossible.
His lungs started to burn as his body silently screamed for air. He fell to his knees again, his panic matched only by the agony of his breathlessness. The knife was still there on the ground, no more than two metres away. Anton reached for it with his damaged, bleeding hand.
If he could just cut through…
But as he stretched for the knife, one of the men was there, stamping on the back of his hand with such force that Anton would have screamed like an animal if he’d only had the breath.
He collapsed.
Everything was spinning now. Confused. He saw the snow falling in slow motion. He saw the blood pumping from his hands. He saw the two men standing over him, the bright light of cruelty in their eyes.
And there was a moment, before Anton passed into unconsciousness and then death, when the pain disappeared and the lack of oxygen in his blood left him with only a sleepy, doped-up feeling.
The two men didn’t wait to check that he was dead. They knew the cable tie would do its work, and anyway they still had to get their rocks off with Anton’s girlfriend.
18.00 hrs.
The little town soon melted away into deserted outskirts, then came empty countryside. After following the Transit for ten minutes, Chet pulled over and allowed the white Skoda to overtake. Ivanovic’s man was probably too drunk to clock a tail, but they still had to follow SOPs. Once Sean and Marty were trailing the van, Chet caught up with them and followed at a distance.
Luke was studying a small map of the area, following their route carefully by the light of a thin, red-filtered torch. On his lap was a bulky GPS unit, blinking their position at him.
The snow fell harder, making the going slow, and the number of other cars was reducing. The white Skoda had been leading for about five minutes when Chet’s earpiece burst into life. It was Sean. ‘No one else on the roads. We should kill the lights.’
‘Roger that.’ Chet pulled up and turned off the headlamps; up ahead he could see the white Skoda had done the same. Beyond that, only just visible through the blizzard, were the red rear lights of the Transit. Chet reached behind the driver’s seat and located his night-vision headset, which he put on and engaged. The world became bathed in green light, and the tail lights of the Transit were perfectly bright. So long as they had line of sight, they could follow a couple of klicks behind and Ivanovic’s man would be none the wiser.
They drove in silence, Luke keeping any wisecracks to himself. After another five minutes, Luke — who was still consulting the map — spoke into the comms. ‘This road ends at the edge of a large lake,’ he said so that both Chet and the others could hear. ‘Unless our man fancies a swim, that’s where we’ll be stopping. There’s no other roads off this one.’
‘How far to the water’s edge?’ Sean asked.
‘Two klicks, buddy. No more.’
‘We’ll stop a klick away and approach on foot,’ Chet said. ‘Our man might be pissed up, but that doesn’t mean his friends are. Any closer than that and they’ll be able to hear our vehicles even if they can’t see them.’
Silence over the radio meant everyone agreed.
Five minutes later they pulled up in a rough lay-by — more like a ditch — where tractors could pass, though there would be no tractors at this time and in this weather.
Chet turned to Luke and asked, ‘You got a fix?’
Luke took a moment to double-check their position, on both the map and the GPS unit. He nodded. ‘I’ll call it in.’
The secure comms system that allowed them to communicate with base back over the border was installed in the glove compartment. Luke spoke into the bulky handset. ‘Zero, this is Delta Three Tango. Over.’
A moment of silence, then the comms crackled. ‘Delta Three Tango, this is Zero.’
‘Advancing now on the Alpha. Stand by to record our position.’
‘Standing by, Delta Three Tango.’
Luke checked the GPS unit, before reading out their grid reference slowly and clearly. He waited for it to be repeated over the comms before disconnecting and climbing out of the car.
Sean, who had been driving and also had his NV goggles fitted, opened up the boot of the white Skoda to reveal the men’s gear. They took off their donkey jackets and ops waistcoats, fitted their body armour and replaced the waistcoats. Each man put on a helmet, cut away around the ears.
‘UN badges?’ Marty asked. He meant the armbands, powder blue with large white writing. By rights, if they were about to make an arrest under the auspices of the UN, they should be wearing them.
‘Fuck that,’ Sean growled. ‘We’ll be spotted with that shit on.’ The voice of experience and he was right. The white lettering would be a beacon in the darkness.
Each man removed his M16, fully loaded and with Maglites attached; Luke and Marty also mounted their NV on their helmets.
Chet took a kite sight from the boot and used it to scope out the environment: the surrounding countryside was flat and sparse, no less bleak and industrial than the town they’d just left. In the distance he could make out the red lights of the Transit, still ploughing through the snow. Beyond that, perhaps there was another, more distant light; in this visibility it was hard to be sure.
‘I hope our lad in the bar wasn’t bullshitting us,’ Luke said as he slung his assault rifle across his chest. ‘I fucking hate the snow. If we get down to the water and find Mr White Van Man’s just been looking for somewhere quiet to take a leak, I’m heading straight back up there to shove his rucksack up his arse.’ No one replied. ‘Come back Brecon Beacons,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘All is forgiven…’ He cocked his rifle and set it to the lock position.
The unit headed up the road single file, in the tracks left by the Transit so their footprints didn’t show up, each man five metres from the next. The blanket of snow deadened all sound — even their footsteps — and the air was filled with the frosty clouds of their breath.
18.32 hrs.
As unit leader Chet was second in line. He held up one hand. Everyone stopped — including Luke, who was at the front as lead scout but checked the men behind him every twenty seconds. Chet looked through the kite sight to scope out what lay ahead. As he recced the place in his mind, he spoke out loud so that the others could tell what he’d seen.
‘The Transit’s come to a halt approximately 100 metres away, directly to the north,’ he said, his voice barely louder than the settling snow. ‘No other vehicles, no sign of enemy targets. A small copse of trees on its west side, a large building on its east. More trees eastwards of that. Looks like some kind of deserted farmhouse. I can see one, two, three outhouses, but there may be more. Two rooms on the western side of the house have lights on; everything else I can see is in darkness. Luke, I think I can see your lake just beyond the house, but it’s difficult to make out.’
He lowered the sight to see Sean examining the ground in front of them, snow gathering on his beard. ‘One set of vehicle tracks, freshly laid. That’s the Transit. Snow could have covered any others, but I can’t see any indentation. I’d say fuck all else has come up here in the past four or five hours.’
‘Footprints?’ Chet asked.
‘Yeah. A deer. Maybe a wild boar. No sign of humans.’
Chet nodded and turned to Luke and Marty. Their faces were intent. Alert. ‘When we get down there, two groups. Sean, Marty, head to the east side of the house and secure any exits there. If Ivanovic knows we’re coming for him, he’ll most likely try to escape that way. You grab him if he does.’
‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ said Sean.
‘Luke, we’ll take the front. Identify the main power supply and kill the lights. Then house clearance room by room. I want any guards dead before they have the chance to shout out. We’ll flush the fucker out that way.’
Luke nodded.
Each man performed a final check on his weapons, engaged his NV and turned to Chet, waiting for the word.
‘OK,’ he breathed. ‘Let’s move.’