‘Impossible. Armija could shoot you for steal child, and HVO shoot her because she Muslim.’
‘So how do we do it? Ask Monika what’s happened in the past.’
Josip conferred.
‘She say sometimes UN fly children from Sarajevo, but only when television makes big story. Anyway, it impossible to take Vildana to Sarajevo. No. Monika say the only way is to hide her in a white truck. There are many go to Split empty.’
‘Hmm.’
Alex! He had a truck.
It was as if spring had arrived. Maybe this was the reason they were suddenly meeting again. Somebody up there making the breaks – like they’d done before.
She grabbed Josip’s arm.
‘Hang on here Josip. Get Monika to keep up the persuasion. I got to go see someone.’
She ran back down the path of broken bricks into the road. Two bearded men in fatigues watched her with cool curiosity, rifles slung lazily across their backs.
The truck was still there, just beyond her own Land Cruiser. Alex lounged against it. He spotted her and came her way. She slowed to a walk, hurriedly composing her thoughts.
‘The girl’s okay?’ he asked, seeing the concentration on her face.
She stopped a few feet away, hands behind her back and chin thrust forward in that intense way she had when there was something important to say. Her blonde hair stuck out spikily as if electrified by the energy inside her head.
‘Are you taking that truck back down to Split?’
He read her mind.
‘Well, yes, in a day or two. When we’ve handed out all the supplies we brought up.’
She nodded, her whole body rocking with the motion of it. Dare she trust him again?
The salt and pepper grizzle on his chin might have changed his appearance, but his eyes had the same directness she’d fallen for in that Hampstead pub.
Oh hell! She had to trust him. No alternative.
‘When you and I . . . all those years ago . . .’ she began hesitantly. She held out her right hand, fingers cupped as if holding something precious.
‘Ye-es,’ he answered, worried about what was coming.
‘We . . . we shared something, didn’t we?’
She saw his frown and nearly gave up.
‘This sounds crazy, but I’m talking about fate Alex. You remember,’ she floundered, unable to look him in the eye. ‘Things that are meant to be? We were believers, weren’t we? God, I must be mad standing in the middle of all this shit and talking such stuff . . .’
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘Well, you’ve got to admit it’s one hell of a coincidence, that we both end up here, doing the same sort of job?’
‘It certainly is,’ he nodded, his mind racing.
‘Okay. Here it is. In that house up the road, there’s one totally traumatized twelve-year-old child called Vildana. She needs psychiatric treatment, she needs surgery, and she needs to be gotten away from this place where there are people who want to kill her.’
‘I see,’ he nodded, listening intently.
‘But for a Muslim girl with no papers, there’s only one way you can get out from Central Bosnia.’ She pointed at the Bedford. ‘Hidden in the back of an aid truck.’
‘Ahh . . .’ He’d guessed right.
His pulse quickened. Maybe he would start believing in fate. This twelve-year-old girl could be the catalyst to bring him and Lorna together again. And she might lead him to Milan Pravic.
‘I’ll have to talk it through with Moray,’ he answered cautiously.
‘Can you do it now?’
‘It’d be better tonight. Over a drink.’
‘Okay, okay. I’ve got a lot of things to fix, anyhow. Now, look. How do we meet up tomorrow? Where do I find you?’
‘Come to Vitez in the afternoon. We’re in a house opposite the UN camp. Ask for Bosnia Emergency in the P.Info, that’s the press office. They’ll show you where.’
Behind him the Bedford coughed into life. McFee was making his point.
‘Okay. I’ll get there.’
They stood just inches apart, unable to bridge the gap, staring at each other awkwardly.
‘Tomorrow, then.’
‘Bye.’
He turned on his heel and pulled himself into the cab through the door that Ivan held open.
Thirteen
Central Bosnia
McFEE SIMMERED SILENTLY for most of the drive down from the village. Then, after they had dropped Ivan at the Travnik refugee centre, he let fly.
‘Look chum, there’s rules in this place. And thanks to you we just broke a whole set back there!’
‘What d’you mean?’ Alex snapped, angry at McFee’s high-handedness.
‘That village was dead dodgy. Muj all over the place. The rule is get in, get the stuff off, and get out fast. It’s not the time to hang about so’s you can chat up old girlfriends!’
‘Christ, Moray! If you’d met someone you hadn’t seen for twenty years, what would you have done?’
Alex bit his tongue. Not a good time to pick a fight with McFee.
McFee weaved past the junction with Route Triangle. Ten more minutes and they’d be at the house. It was late afternoon.
‘I suppose the lassie will be warming your bed for ye, tonight,’ he needled sourly, hunched over the wheel, grubby and frayed.
Alex guessed they both looked like that by now. ‘I should be so lucky . . .’ he snorted.
They jolted on.
‘Women, eh?’ McFee mused bitterly. ‘Nothing but trouble . . .’
‘Yeh . . . Don’t know why we bother . . .’
McFee seemed to want to get something off his chest. Alex decided it might pay dividends if he were to play along.
The Scotsman whistled tunelessly for a second or two.
‘All that hassle for a few moments of pleasure . . .’ he sighed.
Alex sensed the imminence of a torrent of misogyny.
‘It’s a matter of luck,’ he answered vaguely. ‘Some you win, some you lose.’
‘Me? I lost . . .’ McFee continued, bitterly. ‘Picked a woman who was no use to any man, and waited too long before doing anything about it.’
‘How long were you married?’
‘Sixteen years. Didn’t get hitched until I was nearly forty.’
‘No kids, you said?’ Alex checked.
‘She lost a couple. Miscarried. Then refused to try any more. Pity. I really love kids. And after that, she didna want to know about sex . . .’
‘But you stayed with her sixteen years?’
‘Aye!’ McFee shook his head in disbelief. ‘Must want m’ head examined.’
‘But now you’ve split up for good?’
‘Oh aye!’ he chuckled. ‘She’d take a carving knife to me now, if she could . . .’
‘Why, what did you do to her?’ he asked, then wished he hadn’t.
McFee laughed awkwardly.
‘Well if a chap doesn’t get his oats at home, he has to go somewhere else.’
‘Ah. A girlfriend, eh? Nothing so dreadful in that.’
McFee didn’t answer. He looked as if he wanted to open up but there was something stopping him. They reached the outskirts of Vitez.
‘Quite a lot of “somewhere elses”, that was the trouble,’ he mumbled eventually. ‘Ladies o’ the night.’ There was a glint in his eye, almost like pride.
‘Sounds expensive,’ Alex remarked lamely.
‘Not at all,’ McFee answered. ‘It costs plenty if you take a lassie to a nice restaurant because you want to fuck her after. And she may not even oblige. My way costs the same, but removes the doubt . . .’
A grubby argument for self-interest that sounded well rehearsed.
‘And since you’re paying, you call the shots. Don’t have to worry about whether the earth moves for them . . .’ he added, his mouth twisting.
So, Moray was into hookers, Alex thought. Not often you met someone who’d admit to that. He couldn’t he
lp a sense of disgust.
He began to remember things. The girls McFee had chatted up in the London pub the evening he came down from Edinburgh. Must have gone with one of them when he slipped out of the boarding house in the middle of the night.
‘And as you said last night, I suppose out here the tarts come pretty cheap,’ Alex prodded, thinking of the woman from the camp kitchens with the gipsy eyes.
McFee bristled. ‘What I said’s between you and me, okay?’ He reversed the truck into the driveway to their house. ‘I don’t go telling everyone. Some people can take against you.’
The Scotsman looked flushed, as if fearful he’d said too much already.
‘Fine.’ Alex had heard enough.
Inside the house, McFee put the kettle onto the heat. Alex decided it was time to talk business.
‘So what’s the plan for the next few days, Moray?’ he asked, trying to sound casual.
‘It’s the Croats tomorrow. We’ll find a home for the other half of our supplies. Then we might head for Split the day after. There should be another bread van out from England soon. I’ll check at P.Info to see if there’s been a fax for us.’
The landlady came in with fresh bread and home-made curd cheese.
‘Dobar dan, Dragana,’ McFee greeted her.
‘Dobar dan, Dobar dan!’
They brewed the tea and ate the food.
Alex noticed McFee looked preoccupied, as if the man regretted letting even a small amount of daylight shine on the dark secrets of his sex-life.
He cleared his throat. The issue of Lorna’s orphan could wait no longer.
‘If we join a convoy on the way south,’ Alex began innocently, ‘do we get much hassle? Road blocks, searches and so on?’
McFee seemed not to hear. Then he began to focus.
‘Er . . . well I’ve only done the trip once,’ he reminded him. ‘Had a clear run that time. Why?’
No point in prevaricating.
‘So if there was a good reason to smuggle someone out of here through the front lines, in the empty truck, it should be possible . . .’
Too blunt, Alex thought. Damn!
McFee raised an eyebrow, startled.
‘Oh aye! And if you wanted to smuggle grenades in with the supplies on the way up, that should be possible too. Only you’d never do it. Because if you got caught you’d be dead. And every aid organization in Bosnia would become suspect. You’d screw it for everybody.’
‘There could be exceptions though, like a child who would die if she didn’t get medical treatment?’
McFee looked at him suspiciously.
‘What are you on about? It’s yon lassie, isn’t it? Yon Lorna.’
‘Well, yes, actually. She’s got a big problem on her hands and needs our help.’
‘God almighty! You only spent a few minutes with the woman and already she’s got you jumpin’ through hoops . . . What’s this all about?’
This wasn’t going the way he’d intended.
He told McFee about the girl Vildana. The Scotsman’s eyes seemed to fill with mist.
‘And all of this came out when you bumped into Lorna this afternoon?’
Alex nodded.
‘I wonder! You sure you didn’t fix all this up before? I’m beginning to think I’m being set up by you twose.’
‘Come off it, Moray!’
‘Well, whatever . . . The answer’s no. Major Mike would go through the roof. It’s just not on, chum.’
‘There’s no reason Mike should ever know about it . . .’ Alex pressed.
‘Don’t even think about it! It’s too bloody dangerous. For us, for the kid and for Bosnia Emergency. You’ll have to tell the lassie to try it on in her own car.’
‘There’s not a lot of room to hide in a Land Cruiser,’ Alex responded.
McFee was adamant. ‘There’s no way, Alex. No way.’ His scowl warned not to press the point any further.
He sat hunched on the sofa, the troubled look back in his eyes. He jiggled his foot nervously. Suddenly he stood up.
‘I’m just off out for a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if there’s any messages and find out where’s the best place to take the stuff for the Croats tomorrow. See you later.’
Alex raised a hand. He watched McFee amble to the door, seeing him in a new light now. For some reason it was hard to respect a man who had to pay for sex.
There was a roundness to McFee’s shoulders, a bit of a stoop. He had the look of someone living amongst shadows.
Alex pulled out a cigarette, tapped it on the arm of the sofa, then lit up.
He felt angry with himself. Should have handled things better. Smuggling the girl out was something he had to do. It wasn’t just her future that depended on it.
But McFee had the power to block him. He was the boss out here. Unless Alex could think of a way to change that . . .
Fourteen
The Same day – Monday 28th March
The Barren Desert, Iran
DR HAMID AKHAVI sat in the back of the Nissan as it turned out of the security gates and headed for Yazd down the service road built by engineers from the Revolutionary Guards. He removed his black-framed spectacles and polished the lenses.
Dasht-e-Lut is the name given to the expanse of sandblown hills and plains in the heart of Iran, a place of lingering death for any life caught under the blast of the summer sun. An isolated, lonely place, six hundred kilometres from the nearest neighbouring state, as far from an enemy attack as it is possible to get – the reason it had been chosen as the site for a nuclear bomb factory.
Everything around him was the colour of sand – the long, concrete-capped laboratories with their deep, underground workshops; the accommodation block where he lived with his wife and child; even this car taking him to the airport.
Just sand – that’s what they hoped the spy satellites would see, and the pilots of the Israeli planes if they ever braved such an expanse of hostile airspace to attack the plant.
The bomb meant ‘power’.
To the east, possession of it had made equals of Pakistan and India. To the west, the Jews believed it guaranteed their survival, and fear of its acquisition by the madman in Baghdad had struck terror into the hearts of the Americans and the fat sheikhs in the Gulf.
The nights were cold here at this time of year. Icy even. It was late afternoon and the sun had warmed the air to a comfortable twenty degrees. Hamid’s wife hated life in the desert compound; nothing to do but talk to other mothers and watch television. She’d asked to be given work at the site even if it were only typing, but the guards who controlled everything had refused. Security grounds, they’d said.
Hamid looked out of the car window at the hostile, grey-brown landscape. He’d resolved one day to live somewhere green, with water and flowers always in sight. But not yet. Not until the regime released him from the burden they’d placed on his shoulders.
Thirty-three years old now, with black hair and a thin moustache, he’d been just eighteen when the mullahs overthrew the Shah. On television, the world had watched the mob choke Tehran’s streets to welcome Khomeini back. He’d been in that crowd, a passionate believer in change from the corrupt old ways.
Later, at university, his brilliance had shone. The Islamic leaders decided he had a talent they could not afford to lose. They had inherited a nuclear programme from the time of the Shah – reactors at Bushehr, only half built. Publicly they’d stopped the programme, proclaiming it ‘unislamic’, but privately Hamid and a cadre of others were coached in the art of the atom, ready for the day when the priests recognized where power truly lay.
He’d been sent to Russia to learn to handle and machine nuclear materials, an isolated, often lonely life in Gorky, but one which had relieved him of his obligation to fight on the bloodstained frontier with Iraq.
To get the bomb before Iraq – that’s what sustained him through these difficult days in the desert. Soon all his years of study, all his assiduous contact-building wo
uld pay off. Hamid was on the threshold of a deal that could give his nation that bomb within two years.
His elation was tempered with fear, however. Fear that the mullahs would still be in power when his bomb became a reality. Like most of the educated in Iran, Hamid had long since ceased to believe that power was safe in clerical hands.
That Iran should become a nuclear power – he was a believer. So long as the bombs were used for power-play and not to kill. But whether the mullahs would embrace such constraints – that was the question he couldn’t answer.
He slipped off the jacket of his clerical-grey suit, hung it on the door-handle hook, then loosened the collar of his white shirt. Over an hour’s drive to the airport at Yazd, another hour for the flight to Tehran. There’d be a day or two to wait in the capital before the military jet took him out of the country. They’d not told him the date he would travel. Security again.
He was excited by his mission, but afraid too. The authorities had placed absolute trust in him, but if he failed, their revenge would be uncompromising.
A month ago he’d confided his worries in his sister in Tehran, breaking all the rules of security. He’d told her about his work, and about the Russians with plutonium for sale. Told her so that if he disappeared one day, someone could tell the outside world why.
Unfortunately for Hamid, in a careless moment she already had.
Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow
It wouldn’t be cheap making the Iran deal work. Colonel Pavel Kulikov already had six people on his payroll at the weapon dismantling site near Sverdlovsk, and the advance payment he’d squeezed out of the Iranians would soon be exhausted.
In his late forties, with hair the colour of brushed aluminium, he strode purposefully across the departure concourse in his smart, grey biznisman suit, looking up at the indicator board for word on the flight to Zagreb. His baggage trolley bore a suitcase whose contents could get him court-martialled.
He had no qualms about what he was doing. The nuclear genie escaped the bottle long ago. Nothing could stop its spread. Thanks to him it might happen faster, that was all.
In his world, it was every man for himself now, loyalty to the State a thing of the past. Loyalty to oneself was all a Russian could afford these days.
Scorpion Trail Page 15
