The Spoils of War
An exhilarating tale of modern espionage and adventure featuring US Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik.In Tel Aviv, Commander Alan Craik, a US Navy veteran agrees to check out the death of a former Navy enlisted employee. He plans to be out the door and on to his real work in half an hour. But the task quickly turns dangerous, and what should have been a routine investigation becomes something very ugly.Nominal American allies in Israel withhold or alter information; nominal colleagues at home set up their own operation to satisfy the political needs of Washington; a wife betrays her husband and deceit and distrust prove to be the only common denominator.When Mike Dukas, a dogged, cynical special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service joins the investigation, it leads them all from Tel Aviv to Gaza and the Greek island of Lesvos to Jerry Piat, a renegade CIA officer.With agents of Mossad and the Palestinian Authority always close behind them, Alan Craik demands the answers to some far-reaching questions. What are the rules in modern conflict? Where is honour? And what is the cost of telling the truth?
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The Spoils of War
Gordon Kent
T. Cuyler young
Donald G. Cameron
They went further than seemed possible
Table of Contents
The Kosovo-Albania Border, 1997
The late afternoon rain sent the Albanian soldiers into the cover of the trees. Dukas thought the move was probably for the best. What he had seen of the Albanians scared him, and he was glad when they walked off up the road to the stand of oak trees, shouting at each other and carrying their rifles across their necks like ox yokes.
The rain beat on the windshield of Dukas’s borrowed Land Rover and the wipers droned back and forth, harmonizing with the heater and the raindrops on the roof, washing away some of the mud accumulated in a nine-hour drive across “the former Yugoslavia.” There was mud from Bosnia and mud from Croatia and a little mud from Kosovo, all washing off into the ruined tarmac of a road in Albania.
“Have a little faith, okay,” muttered the Mossad guy in the back seat. Actually, there were two Mossad guys in the back seat, but one of them was so obviously a bureaucratic functionary that Dukas ignored him. Dukas tried to adjust his body language so that he was not telegraphing his views on the afternoon quite so blatantly. He looked back.
“When do you want to call this off?” he asked.
“Give the man another hour.”
His name was Shlomo, he had said. Dukas thought the name was funny, but the man himself was serious. Now, he moved his hand slightly to indicate that, no, he didn’t expect their quarry to appear either, and that, yes, they were going to wait an hour because he, Shlomo, was under the scrutiny of someone who had sent a bureaucrat to watch him.
Dukas liked Shlomo. And he didn’t mind helping the Israelis, as long as his own investigations into Bosnian Muslim war crimes benefited from helping them. He pulled a headset up over his ears and keyed his radio.
“Roger, Squid, I copy you,” the voice on the other end said. The Canadians he had picked up as an ops team thought it was hilarious that Dukas was attached to the US Navy, and they called him Squid at every opportunity.
“Give it another six zero minutes.”
“Roger, copy.” The Canadians were in cover along the Albanian side of the border. Dukas had looked for them a few times and failed, but they answered radio calls and they had stayed in their positions all day; now they would all be drenched in addition to tired. By contrast, the Albanians had a roaring fire going in the tree line; at dusk, both the smoke and the fire must have shown for miles. But Dukas would not have been allowed here without the “support” of the Albanians.
A column of headlights showed across the ridge to the south in Kosovo. Dukas and Shlomo had their binoculars up in an instant and then back in their laps. They both sighed on much the same note.
“He’ll come in this lot,” the bureaucrat said.
Dukas shook his head. Shlomo said, “No, David. It’s just local militia crossing the border to buy weapons.”
“Why can’t he be in among them? He could be with them.” The Mossad bureaucrat, who had introduced himself as David, sounded as if he believed that he could make his assertions true by repeating them. He had the makings of a politician, Dukas thought.
“He doesn’t have that kind of contact.”
“You don’t know that.” David sounded petulant.
Dukas listened to them and wondered what made their target, a Lebanese, so important that David would get his penny loafers dirty coming to collect him, especially as it was Dukas who would have to do the work and who would do the interrogation. As was almost always the case when he was working with foreign intelligence people, 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
