Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,87

followed by a meeting on a dirt road with two smugglers sent by the doctor, both dressed as KLA soldiers. They told the hostages they were being taken to a detainee camp in northern Albania, and from there an exchange and ransom would be arranged with the Serbian government in Belgrade.

However, the captives were taken to a long, secluded house near the border instead. Once they arrived, their hands bound, they were shepherded out of the vehicle and then executed with a single bullet to the head, no one around to hear the gunshot or see the bodies fall. Meanwhile, the doctor was inside the house, preparing for surgery, and hours later a fresh set of organs would be bagged, tagged and iced, already on their way to the airport in Tirana, the body of the host buried on the journey in an unmarked grave that no one would ever find. Sometimes there was also a request for blood, so some of the bodies were drained by the doctor and the blood bagged and sealed. Before long the profits had started to come back to Wulf and his men, and they were handsome to say the least.

The trafficking had continued successfully for months, Wulf becoming wealthier and wealthier as each body was delivered to the doctor and harvested, the money deposited into an offshore bank account. Wulf wasn’t a greedy man and kept his men fully informed about the exact amount of money they were making, promising to divide it up when the war was over, giving each man a foundation from which to buy a home or set up a new life. Through January and most of February, they had snatched and traded a hundred and fifteen of the enemy, mostly men but sometimes women and children, the entire family set. Once his men got a taste for it, they had wanted to keep up the supply of bodies and the cash return and so the rules were loosened slightly. They had been forced a few times to kidnap people from their own side, not something Wulf was proud of, but he had to look at the bigger picture and their futures.

But then everything had changed.

It happened the night the two US marines and the British army soldier had arrived at the camp holding their families in March 1999.

Wulf and his team had just been returning from a late night trade on the road with the two smugglers disguised as KLA. The radio on Spider’s uniform had suddenly started squawking, a guard at the camp where the women and children were based saying that they were under attack by three men, all of them NATO soldiers. Once Spider had raced back to camp and told Wulf, the entire team had piled into their cars and roared across the valley. They’d seen a NATO Humvee up ahead, coming from the camp and on its way along the dirt track. Bug had stepped out and hit it first time with a bazooka, the rocket whooshing through the night and hitting the reinforced metal plate on the side of the truck, smashing it over with a large explosion.

They had moved in and captured the three men inside, binding their hands and feet. Wulf had sent Crow and Grub to the township and the two men had returned devastated, confirming that everyone there had been killed. The squad had then proceeded to stamp, punch and beat the trio of murderers, kicking them in the face and pistol-whipping them. Every member of the squad had wanted to kill all three of them there and then, disembowel and crucify them, leave them nailed to trees with their intestines hanging out. But Wulf had ordered no. He’d said that was too quick a death. He wanted their deaths and pain to last weeks, months.

So he and his men had taken the murderers to their camp and thrown them into one the huts. Then the next night they started on one of them, taking away a piece of him at a time, the man screaming like a girl, the men laughing as they removed his toes one by one, a different one each night. They left them gathered in a pile there on the earth, letting the guy get a good look at the pile every night before they took another one.

But then disaster had struck. The three men had been rescued. Wulf still couldn’t believe it had happened, how it had been done, right under their