Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,86

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