Middleton remembered walking to the church and thinking, I must’ve gotten up pretty damn early if none of the refugees were awake yet, especially with all the youngsters living there. Then he paused, wondering where the British guards were. Two had been stationed outside the church the day before. Just at that moment he saw a window open on the second floor and a teenage girl look out, her long hair obscuring half her face. She was calling, “Green shirt, green shirt . . . Please . . . Green shirt.”

He hadn’t understood. But then it came to him. She was referring to his fatigues and was calling for his help.

“What was it like?” Padlo asked softly.

Middleton merely shook his head.

The inspector didn’t press him for details. He asked, “And Rugova was the man responsible?”

He was even more surprised that the inspector knew about the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Rugova. That fact was not learned until later, long after Rugova and his men had fled from Pristina, and the story of St. Sophia had grown stone cold.

“Your change in career is making sense now, Mr. Middleton. After the war you became an investigator to track him down.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.” He smiled as if that could flick away the cached memories, clear as computer jpegs, of that morning.

Middleton had returned to Camp Broadsteel and served out his rotation, spending most of his free time running intelligence reports on Rugova and the many other war criminals the torn region had spawned. Back at the Pentagon, he’d done the same. But it wasn’t the U.S. military’s job to catch them and bring them to trial, and he made no headway.

So when he retired, he set up an operation in a small Northern Virginia office park. He called it “War Criminal Watch” and spent his days on the phone and computer, tracking Rugova and others. He made contacts at the ICTY and worked with them regularly but they and the UN’s tactical operation were busy with bigger fish—like Ratko Mladic, Naser Oric and others involved in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, and Milosevic himself. Middleton would come up with a lead and it would founder. Still he couldn’t get St. Sophia out of his mind.

Green shirt, green shirt . . . Please . . .

He decided that he couldn’t be effective working from America nor working alone. So after some months of searching he found people who’d help: two American soldiers who’d been in Kosovo and helped him in the investigation at St. Sophia and a woman humanitarian worker from Belgrade he’d met in Pristina.

The overworked ICTY was glad to accept them as independent contractors, working with the Prosecutor’s Office. They became known in the ICTY as “The Volunteers.”

Lespasse and Brocco, the soldiers, younger, driven by their passion for the hunt;