The Old Bridge

by Andrew Turpin

  They had just come from a meeting with two officials from the War Crimes department of the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo, who wanted to get their investigation under way as swiftly as possible.

  Their next stop was another meeting, this time with detectives who had driven from Split. The officers had Marco in custody and wanted to carry out further interviews with Johnson, Jayne, and Filip.

  The Bosnian authorities had offered to pay his and Jayne’s expenses, so just two days after being reunited with his children in Portland, he had felt obliged to travel again.

  Johnson had already briefed the others on the events of the TV interview between Franjo and Spencer, who had resigned with immediate effect as speaker of the House in an attempt to limit the political fallout. Vic had privately told him that CIA financial forensics teams had already uncovered a paper trail of payments into Watson’s and Spencer’s bank accounts relating to arms deals, dating back twenty years.

  Ana stopped. “But what about Aisha? I mean, I know she didn’t actually press the button in the end, but she did set up the whole bloody thing and put the explosives in place. She was going to do it. I keep thinking about that comment she made to me about having a vision of Franjo’s death.”

  Johnson scratched the old wound at the top of his right ear. “I can’t explain it any better than you can. I think she was a very bitter person. I don’t think it was a case of being radicalized—the fact that she herself didn’t push the button in the end tells you that much. It was more just personal anger. She’d not been able to forgive. FBI and police are trying to get to the bottom of who supplied the explosive. It’s tragic. She’s bound to do a stretch in prison, even if she didn’t actually commit the final act in it all. And her ex-husband will too, almost certainly, for his war crimes. It kind of sums everything up.”

  He focused on Ana. “The Bosnian prosecutor’s office will need to put together a dossier of evidence against Franjo. He’s going to be in front of the court in Sarajevo and we need to make damn sure the case is watertight. I’ve got some new cases that have come in and I’ll likely be starting one of them soon. So I could use some help compiling the dossier. I thought with your research background, and the fact that you’ve done so much work on the Old Bridge already for your book, including finding eyewitnesses to Franjo’s actions with the tank, it would be right up your alley. It might even be helpful for your book and give you more material to write about. Would you work with me on it?”

  Ana nodded. “Of course.”

  “At least you’ve got Patrick Spencer behind bars as well as Franjo,” Jayne said.

  “Yes, he’s done a lot of damage and he’ll pay for what he’s done. But you can’t penalize him for free speech. My worry is that somebody else will just come along and fill his shoes,” Johnson said.

  Johnson gazed over the river and the Old Bridge. The waters of the Neretva seemed to Johnson like a metaphor for many of his investigations over the years. There were many twists, no clear path forward, and rarely a clean ending.

  The death toll at the CBA TV studios had climbed to nineteen since the previous Friday but now looked unlikely to rise further, although a couple of victims remained in critical condition.

  Yes, Franjo and Spencer, their careers in tatters, were facing time behind bars—as were Aisha, Adela, and Marco—and if he had anything to do with it, they would be staying there for a long time.

  But how his nemesis, Robert Watson, had escaped the FBI net and where he had gone to remained a complete mystery, a week after his disappearance.

  One thing was certain, however: Watson’s CIA career was over, just as he had ensured Johnson’s was more than two decades earlier. Johnson suspected, though, that it wasn’t the last he would hear of his old boss.

  Now, though, Johnson suddenly had a string of potential investigative jobs to consider on his to-do list. The previous day, a query had arrived about republican terrorists in Northern Ireland, another one relating to Afghanistan, and various others.

  And what of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and the rest of the former Yugoslavia? What hope for peace?

  “Penny for them, Joe,” Jayne said.

  Johnson realized he had become lost in his own thoughts.

  He turned around. “You know, there was something that Franjo said to me when I was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in that house in Dubrovnik. He said something like people have been fighting each other here for a thousand years, and will be in another thousand. So when we Americans come here thinking we’re going to sort things out, actually, we know nothing. We didn’t twenty years ago and we don’t now. That was the gist of what he said.”

  He paused. “I think he was right. We’re going to get justice for some. But a whole bunch of people have died in a New York television studio as a result of what went on in Bosnia in the ’90s. So what do I know?”

  Johnson turned and kept walking across the Old Bridge.

  Updates and other books in the Joe Johnson series

  I am keen to build a strong relationship with my readers. As part of this, I’m planning to send occasional email updates containing details of forthcoming new books, special offers, and perhaps snippets of background information on the research I’ve done, on plots, and on characters.

  For example, I sometimes join together with other authors for promotions where we might offer a selection of our books at a discounted price.

  If you would like to join my Readers’ Group and receive the email updates, I will send you, FREE of charge, the first few chapters of the third Joe Johnson novel, Bandit Country, which is due to be published soon.

  It is also a war crimes investigation and is set in Northern Ireland in 2013, with flashbacks to 1984. Most of the action is set in Belfast, south Armagh and Boston, Massachusetts.

  To get the sample chapters of Bandit Country, just click on this link:

  www.BookHip.com/VSMXXD

  You might want to take a look at the first book in the series, The Last Nazi, if you haven’t read it already. It is available on Amazon at the following US and UK links:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074V5XNPF/

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B074V5XNPF/

  If you enjoyed this book please write a review

  As an independently published author, through my own imprint The Write Direction Publishing, I find that honest reviews of my books are the most powerful way for me to bring them to the attention of other potential readers.

  As you’ll appreciate, unlike the big international publishers, I can’t take out full-page advertisements in the newspapers or place posters on the subway.

  So I am committed to producing work of the best quality I can in order to attract a loyal group of readers who are prepared to recommend my work to others.

  Therefore, if you genuinely enjoyed reading this novel, then I would very much appreciate it if you would spend five minutes and leave a review—which can be as short as you like—preferably on the page or website where you bought it.

  You can find the book’s page on the Amazon website by typing ‘Andrew Turpin The Old Bridge’ in the search box. Once you have clicked on the page, scroll down to ‘Customer Reviews’, then click on ‘Leave a Review.’

  Reviews are also a great encouragement to me to write more.

  Many thanks!

  Thanks and acknowledgments

  I would like to thank everyone who reads The Old Bridge—which is my second novel in the Joe Johnson series, following The Last Nazi. I hope you enjoy the book and that it proves entertaining and even informative.

  Throughout the long process of research, writing, and editing, there have been several people who have helped along the way.

  Once again, my brother Adrian read through several early drafts of the book and gave me various ideas for improvements while also giving me advice on the television studio scenes in the book—something he’s well qualified to do as a broadcast engineer who now runs his own pro
fessional photography, lighting design and cinematography business, The Light Direction, based in Kendal, Cumbria. Adrian also helped with the graphics for my website and reader emails. But most of all, he kept me at the coalface by giving endless encouragement at times when I was stuck or feeling as though I was struggling to make headway.

  Other people also read the book at early stages and gave me feedback that helped me to improve it. In particular, I would like to thank David Cole. My parents, Gerald and Jean Turpin, also read it and provided encouragement.

  My two editors, Katrina Diaz Arnold, owner of Refine Editing, and Jon Ford, again did a great job in terms of improving the manuscript. I would like to thank both of them—the responsibility for any remaining mistakes lies solely with me.

  Once again, I would also like to thank the team at Damonza for what I think is another great cover design.

  I guess I should also thank our dog, Coco, because I tend to get many of my plot ideas and crystallize my thoughts while out on my daily one hour walk with him.

  Author’s note

  I am aiming to set the Joe Johnson series in the “real world,” against a broadly factual historical backdrop, although the key characters and the plots are obviously fictional. This is true of The Old Bridge, just as it was with The Last Nazi.

  Today, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the other countries of the former Yugoslavia are popular and beautiful holiday destinations for many people. For a casual visitor, it is easy to forget that in the early 1990s, a series of brutal civil wars—Europe’s worst since the Second World War—raged across that region as the six republics that formed Yugoslavia fell apart.

  These wars, sectarian in nature, involved battles between the various ethnic groups that comprise the population there. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia were the principal theaters for this conflict as the Bosnian Serbs, Muslims, and Croats turned on each other after several decades of relative peace following the formation of Yugoslavia post the Second World War.

  During those decades, the type of marriage portrayed in The Old Bridge between Franjo Vuković, a Bosnian Croat, and Aisha Delić, a Bosnian Muslim, was relatively common.

  However, once the conflict began, that all changed. And despite the peace agreements and the redrawing of borders, the fault lines between ethnic groups and the underlying political and social tensions remain. It has been a difficult peace.

  As is often the case in wartime, and particularly in wars that are sectarian in nature, a large number of war crimes were committed by all sides—although principally by Serbs and Croats against Muslims—as attempts were made by the various ethnic groups to drive others out of territories that they wanted to claim for themselves.

  In fact, the conflict in Bosnia led to the first crime of genocide seen in Europe since the Second World War, at the town of Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Muslim men and boys. Many other similar incidents have not been officially categorized as genocide—but were in all but name.

  There were also many instances of crimes against humanity, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes, and many ended up in the concentration camps run by the Serbs and the Croats, of which the Croat-controlled Heliodrom, mentioned in this book, was just one. Other notorious camps included the Serb-controlled Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje sites, among many.

  Estimates of the number of people killed during the conflicts across the region range from 130,000 to 140,000. There is no question that the majority of these were Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims.

  The United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, to prosecute the most serious crimes committed during the conflict. It indicted 161 people in total, and the final trial to be completed was that of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2017 after being found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Some of the charges were related to the Srebrenica massacre.

  The ICTY also gave its final judgment on November 29, 2017, in the case of an appeal by six men, including the Bosnian Croat army commander Slobodan Praljak, against their previous convictions in 2013 of crimes against humanity, murder, and many other charges while persecuting the Muslim population of Bosnia. The charges included the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar. The Appeals Chamber upheld the 2013 convictions and confirmed the sentences, which in Praljak’s case was twenty years of imprisonment. Praljak immediately drank a poison that he had smuggled into court and died shortly afterward. The ICTY documents relating to this case can be found here: http://www.icty.org/en/press/the-icty-renders-its-final-judgement-in-the-prli%C4%87-et-al-appeal-case

  Praljak is mentioned in chapter thirty-nine of The Old Bridge. Another character mentioned in that chapter, Branko Perić, is fictional.

  Finally, I should note that as Joe Johnson, the lead character in this series, is from the United States, and most scenes are from his point of view, it makes sense to use American English spellings and terminology in most cases, rather than my native British English. Any mistakes in this respect are mine alone—please do point them out to me.

  Background reading and bibliography

  There were a great many fascinating sources of information that I read through and watched as part of the lengthy research process prior to and during the writing of The Old Bridge.

  I could not possibly list them all, but I thought it would be good to give you a flavor of the ones I found most useful here, so that if you would like to find out more about the issues that inspired my plot, you at least have a starting point.

  The classic six-part BBC documentary, The Death of Yugoslavia, first broadcast in 1995, is still available on YouTube. It is probably the best starting point for those who would like to get a feel for the scale of, and background to, the conflict that tore the region apart. It includes dramatic footage of the destruction of the Stari Most—the Old Bridge—in Mostar, by tank fire in November 1993. You can find it on YouTube here.

  There is a book, also called The Death of Yugoslavia, that was published to accompany the series, written by correspondents Allan Little and Laura Silber. It is also well worth reading and is still available on Amazon.

  The transcripts of the trials conducted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague are fascinating to read and give a wealth of useful material.

  A good example is the trial summary and six volumes of judgements from the combined trials of Jadranko Prlić, Bruno Stojić, Slobodan Praljak, Milivoj Petković, Valentin Ćorić, and Berislav Pušić. This trial dealt with the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar using tank shells. The documents can be found at http://www.icty.org/case/prlic/4 and Judgement Volume 2, Section V, gives the most detail on the destruction of the bridge. You will see how I have loosely built my story around the facts outlined in this case.

  There is also a large amount of detail in Volume 2 of this judgement on the war crimes committed at the Heliodrom, the concentration camp near Mostar, by Croat HVO forces against mainly Muslim detainees. Again I have drawn on this detail quite heavily in The Old Bridge.

  A book written by Jadranka Petrovic, The Old Bridge of Mostar and Increasing Respect for Cultural Property in Armed Conflict, also gave some fascinating background on the destruction of the Stari Most. It is an academic study that also makes good use of the ICTY transcripts among the many sources used by the author.

  Ed Vulliamy, a journalist with The Guardian, wrote an eloquent and hard-hitting book, The War is Dead, Long Live the War, about the conflict and the postwar attempts to seek justice for those who were victims of war crimes. This formed very helpful background reading.

  For a broader overview of the ethnic and religious conflict that has existed in the entire Balkan peninsula region for hundreds, even thousands, of years, I would recommend Balkan Ghosts, by Robert D. Kaplan, a jour
nalist who writes for The Atlantic and other media outlets.

  Regarding US policy toward Bosnia and support for the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegović in their battles against the Serbs and Croats, there are very many publications offering deep background of various kinds.

  One that focuses on the role of the CIA and other intelligence services is Cees Wiebes’s book, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-95. This examines the detail behind the controversial US decisions to effectively allow Iran to supply weapons to Bosnia and the thinking behind it, and to permit mujahideen into Bosnia to fight alongside Bosnian forces. At the time, of course, these decisions were driven by the situation on the ground, in which the Muslims were being hit hard by Serb and Croatian forces.

  There is an illuminating 1996 report by the US House of Representatives’ Committee on International Relations, which examines the US role in arms transfers from Iran to Bosnia and Croatia and discusses the effective “green light” given by the Clinton administration to allow this to happen. It is available here.

  A thorough New York Times analysis of Clinton’s Bosnia policy, “The Clinton Record,” can be found here.

  There are various media reports about the relationship between Izetbegović and Osama bin Laden. One good example is here.

  On Aisha’s life in New York, I was inspired by a blog, Slavs of New York, and in particular a piece on Bosnians in Astoria, which led me to the Ćevabdżinica Sarajevo restaurant that I’ve depicted as her favorite hang-out. The blog can be found here.

  Like Aisha and Franco, there were many couples in mixed marriages across the sectarian divide in Bosnia whose lives were torn apart by the conflict. A harrowing story that illustrates the issues very starkly is one in the Chicago Tribune, to be found here.

  A large number of refugees from the war in the Balkans subsequently made their way to the US and other countries, who have all done their bit to accommodate the displaced and the persecuted, many of whom endured extreme ordeals during the conflict and then a tough period of adjustment in their new homeland. For those interested in reading some of their stories, a good starting point is an article in The Independent by one refugee, found here.