Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  Others were not so frugal. These included his deeply ghastly wife and equally appalling son and daughter. The Milosevic household made The Munsters look like Little House on the Prairie.

  Among those ‘full partners’ was Zoran Zilic, who became the dictator’s personal enforcer, a killer for hire. Reward under Milosevic was never in cash. It came in the award of franchises for especially lucrative rackets, coupled with the assurance of absolute immunity. The tyrant’s cronies could rob, torture, rape, kill, and there was absolutely nothing the regular police could do about it. He established a criminal-cum-embezzler regime, posed as a patriot and the Serbs and West European politicians fell for it for years.

  In all this brutality and bloodshed, he still did not save the Yugoslav federation or even his dream of a Greater Serbia. Slovenia left, then Macedonia and Croatia. By the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, Bosnia was gone, and by July 1999, he had not only effectively lost Kosovo, but also provoked the partial destruction by NATO bombs of Serbia itself.

  Like Arkan, Zilic also formed a small squad of paramilitaries. There were others, like the sinister, shadowy and brutal Frankie’s Boys, the group of Frankie Stamatovic – amazingly not even a Serb, but a renegade Croat from Istria. Unlike the florid and ostentatious Arkan, gunned down in the lobby of the Belgrade Holiday Inn, Zilic kept himself and his group so low-profile as to be invisible. But on three occasions during the Bosnia war he took his group north and raped, tortured and murdered his way across that miserable province until American intervention put a stop to it.

  The third occasion was in April 1995. Where Arkan called his group his Tigers and had a couple of hundred of them, Zilic was content with Zoran’s Wolves and he kept the numbers small. On the third sortie he had no more than a dozen. They were all thugs who had operated before, save one. He lacked a radio operator and one of his colleagues whose junior brother was in law school said his brother had a friend who had been an Army R/T operator.

  Contacted via the fellow student, the newcomer agreed to forgo his Easter vacation and join the Wolves.

  Zilic asked what he was like. Had he seen combat? No, he had done his military service in the Signals corps which was why he was ready for some ‘action’.

  ‘If he has never been shot at, then he surely has never killed anyone,’ said Zilic. ‘So this expedition should be quite a learning curve.’

  The group set off for the north in the first week of May, delayed by technical problems to their Russian-made jeeps. They went through Pale, the tiny former ski resort now established as the capital of the self-styled Republika Serpska, the third of Bosnia now so ‘cleansed’ that it was uniquely Serb. They skirted Sarajevo, once the proud host of the winter Olympics, now a wreck, and went on into Bosnia proper, making their base at the stronghold of Banja Luka.

  From there Zilic ranged outwards, avoiding the dangerous Mujahedin, looking for softer targets among any Bosnian Muslim communities who might lack armed protection.

  On 14 May, they found a small hamlet in the Vlasic range, took it by surprise and wiped out the inhabitants, spent the night in the woods and were back at Banja Luka by the evening of the 15th.

  The new recruit left them the next day, screaming that he wanted to get back to his studies after all. Zilic let him go, after warning him that if he ever opened his mouth he, Zilic, would personally cut off his dick with a broken wineglass and stuff both down his throat in that order. He did not like the boy anyway; he was stupid and squeamish.

  The Dayton Agreement put an end to sport in Bosnia, but Kosovo was coming into season, and in 1998 he was operating there also, claiming to be suppressing the Kosovo Liberation Army, in fact concentrating on rural communities and some seriously interesting loot.

  But he never neglected his real reason for allying with Slobodan Milosevic. His service to the despot had paid rich dividends. His ‘business’ dealings were a gangster’s charter, the right to do what every Mafioso has to dodge the Law to achieve and yet to do it with presidential immunity.

  Chief among the franchises that paid dividends of several hundred per cent were cigarettes and perfumes, fine brandies and whiskies and all forms of luxury goods. These franchises he shared with Raznatovic, the only other gangster of comparable importance, and a few others. Even with sweeteners to all the necessary police and political ‘protection’, he was a millionaire by the mid-Nineties.

  Then he moved into prostitution, narcotics and arms dealing. With his fluent German and English he was better placed to deal with the international crime world than the others who were monolingual.

  Narcotics and arms were especially lucrative. His dollar fortune entered eight figures. He also entered the files of the American Drug Enforcement Agency, the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (arms dealing) and the FBI.

  Those around Milosevic, fat on embezzled money, power, corruption, ostentation, luxury and the endless sycophancy to which they were subjected, became lazy and complacent. They presumed the party would go on for ever. Zilic did not.

  He avoided the obvious banks used by most of the cronies to store or export their fortunes. Almost every penny he made he stashed abroad, but via banks no one in the Serbian State knew anything about. And he watched for the first cracks in the plaster. Sooner or later, he reasoned acutely, even the awesomely weak politicians and diplomats of Britain and the European Union would see through Milosevic and call ‘time out’. It happened over Kosovo.

  A largely agricultural province, Kosovo ranked with Montenegro as all that was left of Serbia’s fiefdoms within the Federation of Yugoslavia. It contained about 1,800,000 Kosovars, who are Muslims and hardly distinguishable from the neighbouring Albanians, and 200,000 Serbs.

  Milosevic had been deliberately persecuting the Kosovars for a decade until the once moribund Kosovo Liberation Army was back in being. The strategy was to be the same as usual. Persecute beyond toleration; wait for the local outrage; denounce the ‘terrorists’; enter in force to save the Serbs and ‘restore order’. Then NATO said it would not stand by any more. Milosevic did not believe them. Mistake. This time they meant it.

  In the spring of 1999 the ethnic cleansing began, mainly accomplished by the occupying Third Army, assisted by the Security Police and the para-militaries: Arkan’s Tigers, Frankie’s Boys and Zoran’s Wolves. As foreseen, over a million Kosovars fled in terror over the borders into Albania and Macedonia. They were supposed to. The West was supposed to take them all in as refugees. But they did not. They started to bomb Serbia.

  Belgrade stuck it out for seventy-eight days. Up front, the local reaction was anti-NATO. Behind their hands, the Serbs began to mutter that it was the mad Milosevic who had brought this ruin upon them. It is always educational to note how the war fever fades when the roof falls in. Zilic heard the muttering behind the hands.

  On 3 June 1999 Milosevic agreed to terms. That was the way it was put. To Zilic it was unconditional surrender. He decided the moment had come to depart.

  The fighting ended. The Third Army, having hardly taken a casualty to NATO’s high-altitude bombing inside Kosovo, withdrew with all their equipment intact. The NATO allies occupied the province. The remaining Serbs began to flee into Serbia, bringing their rage with them. The direction of that rage began to move from NATO to Milosevic as the Serbs contemplated their shattered country.

  Zilic began to slip any last vestiges of his fortune beyond reach, and to prepare his own departure. Through the autumn of 1999 the protests against Milosevic grew and grew.

  In a personal interview in November 1999 Zilic begged the dictator to observe the writing on the wall, conduct his own coup d’état while he had a loyal army to do it, and do away with any further pretence at democracy or opposition parties. But Milosevic was by then in his own private world where his popularity was undiminished.

  Zilic left his presence wondering yet again at the phenomenon that when men who have once held supreme power start to lose it, they go to pieces in every sense. Courage, will-
power, perception, decisiveness, even the ability to recognize reality – all are washed away as the tide sweeps away a sandcastle. By December Milosevic was not exercising power; he was clinging to it. Zilic completed his preparations.

  His fortune was no less than 500 million dollars; he had a place to go where he would be safe. Arkan was dead, executed for falling out with Milosevic. The principal ethnic cleansers of Bosnia, Karadzic and General Mladic of the Srebrenitsa massacre, were being hunted like animals through Republika Serpska where they had taken refuge. Others had already been snatched for the new war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. Milosevic was a broken reed.

  As a matter of record, Milosevic declared on 27 July 2000 the coming presidential elections for 24 September. Despite copious rigging and a refusal to accept the outcome, he still lost. Crowds stormed the Parliament and installed his successor. Among the first acts of the new regime was to start investigating the Milosevic period: the murders, the twenty billion missing dollars.

  The former tyrant holed himself up in his villa in the plush suburb of Dedinje. On 1 April 2001 President Kostunica was good and ready. The arrest moved in at last.

  But Zoran Zilic was long gone. In January 2000 he just disappeared. He said no goodbyes and took no luggage. He went as one departing for a new life in a different world, where the old gewgaws would have no use. So he left them all behind.

  He took nothing and no one with him, save his ultra-loyal personal bodyguard, a hulking giant called Kulac. Within a week he had settled in his new hideout, which he had spent over a year preparing to receive him.

  No one in the intelligence community paid attention to his departure, save one. A quiet, secretive man in America noted the gangster’s new abode with considerable interest.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Monk

  It was the dream, always the dream. He could not be rid of it and it would not let him go. Night after night he would wake screaming, wet with sweat, and his mother would rush in to hold him and try to bring him comfort.

  He was a puzzle and a worry to both his parents, for he could not or would not describe his nightmare, but his mother was convinced he never had such dreams until his return from Bosnia.

  The dream was always the same. It was the face in the slime, a pale disc ringed with lumps of excrement, some bovine, some human, screaming for mercy, begging for life. He could understand the English, as could Zilic, and words like ‘no, no, please, don’t’ are pretty international.

  But the men with the poles laughed and pushed again. And the face came back, until Zilic rammed his pole into the open mouth and pushed downwards until the boy was dead under there somewhere. Then he would wake, shouting and crying, until his mother wrapped him in her arms, telling him it was all right, he was home in his own room at Senjak.

  But he could not explain what he had done, what he had been a part of, when he thought he was doing his patriotic duty to Serbia.

  His father was less comforting, claiming he was a hard-working man who needed his sleep. By the autumn of 1995 Milan Rajak had his first session with a trained psychotherapist.

  He attended twice a week at the grey-rendered five-storey psychiatric hospital on Palmoticeva Street, the best in Belgrade. But the experts at the Laza Lazarevic could not help either, because he dared not confess.

  Relief, he was told, comes with purging, but catharsis requires confession. Milosevic was still in power, but far more frightening were the feral eyes of Zoran Zilic that morning in Banja Luka when he said he wanted to quit and go home to Belgrade. Much more terrifying were the whispered words of mutilation and death if he ever opened his mouth.

  His father was a dedicated atheist, raised under the communist regime of Tito and a lifelong loyal servant of the Party. But his mother had kept her faith in the Serbian Orthodox church, part of the eastern communion with the Greek and Russian churches. Mocked by her husband and son, she had gone to her morning service down the years. By the end of 1995, Milan started to accompany her.

  He began to find some comfort amid the ritual and the litany, the chants and the incense. The horror seemed to ebb in the church by the football ground, just three blocks from where they lived, and where his mother always went.

  In 1996 he flunked his law exams to the outrage and despair of his father who stormed up and down the house for two days. If the news from the academy was not to his taste, what his son had to say took his breath away.

  ‘I do not want to be a lawyer, father. I want to enter the Church.’

  It took time but Rajak Senior calmed down and tried to come to terms with his changed son. At least the priesthood was a profession of sorts. Not given to wealth, but respectable. A man could still hold his head up and say, ‘My son is in the Church, you know.’

  The priesthood itself, he discovered, would take years of study to achieve, most of that time in a seminary, but the son had other ideas. He wanted to live in seclusion and without delay. He wanted to become a monk, repudiating everything material in favour of the simple life.

  Ten miles southeast of Belgrade he found what he wanted: the small monastery of Saint Stephen in the hamlet of Slanci. It contains no more than a dozen brothers under the authority of the abbot or Iguman. They work in the fields and barns of their own farm, grow their own food, accept donations from a few tourists and pilgrims, meditate and pray. There was a waiting list to join and no chance of jumping it.

  Fate intervened in the meeting with the Iguman, Abbot Vasilije. He and Rajak Senior stared at each other in amazement. Despite the full black beard, flecked with grey, Rajak recognized the same Goran Tomic who had been at school with him forty years before. The abbot agreed to meet his son and discuss with him a possible career in the Church.

  The abbot’s shrewd intelligence divined that his former schoolmate’s son was a young man torn by some inner turmoil that could not find peace in the outer world. He had seen it before. He could not create a vacancy for an instant monk, he pointed out, but men from the city occasionally joined the monks for the purpose of a religious ‘retreat’.

  In the summer of 1996, with the Bosnian war over, Milan Rajak came to Slanci on extended retreat to grow tomatoes and cucumbers, to meditate and to pray. The dream ebbed away.

  After a month Abbot Vasilije gently suggested that he confess, and he did. In whispered tones, by the light of a candle by the altar, under the gaze of the man from Nazareth, he told the abbot what he had done.

  The abbot crossed himself fervently and prayed: for the soul of the boy in the cesspit and for the penitent beside him. He urged Milan to go to the authorities and report against those responsible.

  But the grip of Milosevic was absolute and the terror inspired by Zoran Zilic no less so. That the ‘authorities’ would have lifted a finger against Zilic was inconceivable. But the killer’s promised vengeance would, when carried out, raise not a ripple on the water. So the silence went on.

  The pain began in the winter of 2000. He noticed that it intensified with each body motion. After two months he consulted his father who presumed some passing ‘bug’. Nevertheless, he arranged for tests at the Belgrade General Hospital, the Klinicki Centre.

  Belgrade has always boasted medical standards among the highest in Europe and the Belgrade General was up there with the best. There were three series of tests, and they were seen by specialists in proctology, urology and oncology. It was the professor heading the third department who finally asked Milan Rajak to visit his suite of rooms at the clinic.

  ‘I believe you are a trainee monk?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you believe in God?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I sometimes wish I could are Alas, I cannot. But you must now test your faith. The news is not good.’

  ‘Tell me, please.’

  ‘It is what we call colorectal cancer.’

  ‘Operable?’

  ‘I regret. No.’

  ‘Reversible? Chemotherapy?’

  ‘T
oo late. I am sorry, deeply sorry.’

  The young man stared out of the window. He had been sentenced to death.

  ‘How long, professor?’

  ‘That is always asked, and always impossible to answer. With precautions, care, a special diet, some radiotherapy . . . a year. Possibly less, possibly more. Not much more.’

  It was March 2001. Milan Rajak went back to Slanci and told the abbot. The older man wept for the one who was now like the son he had never had.

  On 1 April the Belgrade police arrested Slobodan Milosevic. Zoran Zilic had disappeared; at his son’s request, Milan’s puzzled father had used his contacts high in the police force to confirm that Yugoslavia’s most successful and powerful gangster had simply disappeared more than a year earlier and was now living somewhere abroad, location unknown. His influence had disappeared with him.

  On 2 April 2001, Milan Rajak sought out from his papers an old card. He took a sheet of paper and, writing in English, addressed a letter to London. The burden of the letter was in the first line.

  ‘I have changed my mind. I am prepared to testify.’

  Within twenty-four hours of receiving the letter three days later, and after a quick call to Stephen Edmond in Windsor, Ontario, the Tracker came back to Belgrade.

  The statement was taken in English, in the presence of a certified interpreter and notary public. It was signed and witnessed:

  Back then in 1995, young Serbian men were accustomed to believe what they were told, and I was no exception. It may be plain today what terrible things were done in Croatia and Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, but we were told the victims were isolated communities of Serbs in these former provinces, and I believed this. The idea that our own armed forces were carrying out mass murder of old people, women and children, was inconceivable. Only Croats and Bosnians did this sort of thing, we were told. Serbian forces were only concerned to protect and rescue Serbian minority communities.