The Spoils of War. Gordon Kent

Dukas suspected that he was being used. He was a cynic. But he was usually right.

      He cleared his throat. The two men in the back fell silent. “How is it that a Muslim Lebanese doesn’t have contacts in Kosovo?” he asked.

      “He’s a city boy,” Shlomo said.

      “You guys said he was an arms dealer.” Dukas turned to look into the back seat. It was dusk, and Shlomo’s face was almost invisible. David was leaning forward into the last sunlight. He seemed excited.

      “I said his efforts helped to put guns in the hands of the Muslims in Bosnia,” Shlomo said.

      The convoy of headlights over in Kosovo had descended the ridge and made it to the checkpoint at the Albanian border.

      Dukas kept going. “Why does he sell arms to Bosnians and not Kosovans?”

      David said, “Why don’t you do your job and let us do ours?” His words hung there for a few seconds. Shlomo’s hand twitched, as if he was going to try and withdraw the words his partner had said.

      Dukas looked at his watch and turned to face the back seat again, bunching the skirts of his raincoat in his fist. “My job is to aid the UN and the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in the apprehension of war criminals.”

      He turned and met David’s eyes, but the younger man returned his look with indifference. Dukas continued, “If the guy we’re after isn’t of interest to me, my job will include dropping you guys at an airport and driving back the nine hours it took me to get here. With nothing. And unless it suits me, my job has nothing to do with helping you do yours.”

      David held his gaze, and then his eyes flicked away as he seemed to lose interest. He shrugged.

      Shlomo shook his head.

      Dukas was considering a further lecture on the subject when he heard a radio tone in his headset.

      “Yeah?”

      “Palm Two has movement on the hillside.”

      Dukas looked over his shoulder through the rain-streaked glass reflexively; in fact, he couldn’t see anything except a yellow smudge where the Albanians had their fire. “Just Albanians,” he said.

      “Palm Two says it’s a sniper with high-res optics and a ghillie suit,” reported the voice in his ear.

      Dukas’s head snapped up.

      “What’s happened?” Shlomo asked from the back seat.

      The windshield wipers cycled. Fifty meters below them, at the checkpoint, an ancient white Zil was being searched thoroughly while its former occupants stood and smoked. One man had a briefcase. This drew Dukas’s eye.

       Surprise, surprise.

      “That’s our guy.” Dukas waved. He was out of the car and moving. He stopped to clutch his headset to his ear. “The guy at three o’clock in the car being searched now. No, not in the car. Next to the car. Yeah! Briefcase. Take him!” He started down the rocky hillside, paused to draw a heavy revolver from his shoulder holster.

      Shlomo caught up with him and they ran down the hill together, raincoats flapping like ungainly wings.

       Boom.

      The shot sounded like a cannon. Two Canadian soldiers, halfway out of their concealment, froze and looked around for the source.

      In his headset, the Canadian voice said, “Sniper!” and then, “Palm Two, do you have a shot?”

       Pop, pop.

      Dukas was now a bystander, lying full length in the wet bracken between two stones with Shlomo wedged in next to him.

       Pop, pop.

      “Hawk One, this is Palm Two. He’s gone. No hits.”

      “Is it safe to move?” Dukas asked. He was soaked; runoff from the hillside was going right down his pants.

      “Wait one.”

      It took the Canadians ten minutes to clear the hillside. They found a small patch of dark khaki polyester and a one-inch square of flannel.

      “That’s off his ghillie suit,” a black Nova Scotian sergeant said. He presented them to Dukas and Shlomo. “That flannel he used to wipe the optics on his rifle.” He sounded as if he was from Boston.

      Dukas knelt by the body. It was impossible to establish whether this was, in fact, the man they’d come for; a fiftycaliber sniper round had removed most of his head. Dukas began to search the corpse. The man had a wallet with American dollars and several forms of ID. His clothes were all international—a Gap sweatshirt with a hood, blue jeans. The briefcase was locked to his wrist; the keys were in his jeans.

      Shlomo leaned in to see what was in the case and Dukas rotated it so that he could see everything.

      “This guy was an arms dealer?” Dukas said.

      Shlomo shrugged. “We make mistakes, too.” Shlomo didn’t seem surprised by the contents.

      Dukas pointed with a booted toe at the remnants of the jawline and lack of a head. “Was that a mistake?” he asked.

      Shlomo raised his hands. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”

      “You going to tell me that the Albanians shot him?” Dukas exhaled sharply. “With a fifty-cal?”

      Shlomo glanced up the hill at the Land Rover. “It wasn’t right, what David said, but he is political and thinks he rules the world, okay?”

      Dukas knelt again by the briefcase and began to inventory the contents. He pulled plastic freezer bags from the zippered liner of his raincoat, assigned a chain-of-custody code to each item, placed it in the freezer bag, and stuck the number on the outside. Most of the items in the briefcase were Roman coins. He did the inventory carefully, because he was angry and he didn’t want to do something stupid. Shlomo watched him for a while and then walked over to the car the dead man had arrived in and began to question the three other occupants in English and then in Turkish. Then Arabic.

      In the inner pocket, Dukas found a red leather calendar book. Once, its edges had been gold-leafed, but it had been used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.

      David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”

      Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.

      Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.

      David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.

      “Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”

      David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.

      Shlomo came back from the car.

      “He attacked me,” David said.

      Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”

      “He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”

      Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”

      David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.

      Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys