Green was afraid. And ready to puke from his lack of equilibrium. But training counted for something, however useless. He noted the assortment of weapons the men carried. Belgian FNs, Kalashnikov variants, one jagged little HK. He counted seven raiders, then an eighth man came out of the shadows. There was still screaming and clatter up in the street, so there would be more of them. Their uniforms were as confused as their armaments, ranging from full cammo to jeans and leather jackets. The only thing they had in common was the black commando mask each man had pulled down over his head and neck.
Two of the men tied Green’s hands behind his back with rubbercoated wire. They were good at their work. Then a tall, thin man with a young voice barked at him in dialect. When Green didn’t respond, the man shoved the butt of his rifle into his gut, driving him back against the Jeep.
The rain had blown over and a few tough stars shone between the clouds. But most of the light came from flashlights, a couple of them big and rectangular like the kind a conscientious driver might keep in the trunk of a car back home.
“Get the other one. Let’s get going.” Green understood that.
There was a brief, low-voiced argument. Then the thin man and another gunman in a ragged Bundeswehr parka slung their weapons behind their backs and went into the cabin.
They lugged Crawley’s body outside, belly down, and dropped him on the gravel. His back was shredded, the blood dark as wine under the beams of light. His neck was broken and he had bled from the mouth. The sergeant’s pants were stained. As if he had been hung.
A stocky man bent over the corpse. Crawley’s hair was cut very short and the man lifted the head by an ear. A big hunting knife extended from his right fist. He took a practiced stance and swung the knife down like an executioner’s axe. He knew his business, but it still took four hacks to separate Crawley’s head from his body.
The butcher laughed and held up the head, giving some sort of cheer Green did not understand. If he could have killed all of them, slaughtered them, Green would have done it. But he just stood against the wrecked Jeep, hands bound, helpless.
The man bent down again and cleaned his knife on Crawley’s shoulder, then sheathed it. He took the head in both hands, stretching out his arms, and shook out as much of the blood as he could. Bits of pulp splattered the earth. When the gore tapered to a few drips, another of the men held out a plastic shopping bag and the butcher dropped the head in it.
Routine business.
Green closed his eyes, but it did not help.
A muzzle prodded his bicep.
“Hajdemo!” Let’s go.
He did not understand the rules. His captors carried their weapons at the slack, unworried about a counterattack from the villagers. And there had not been much of a fight, really. There was so much Green could not explain. He wondered if Melnica had survived because it had cut some kind of deal not to resist.
They forced him to walk through the spread of Crawley’s blood.
In the street in front of the inn, Green saw the woman, Daniela. On her knees. Begging.
The four men encircling her laughed.
“Hajdemo!”
Two of the raiders lifted Daniela to her feet. One of them kicked her.
Green did not even think to protest. He had trouble walking straight. And his hearing still had an underwater feel.
The column turned up the street that led to the mountain. In a little barn, a cow gave an annoyed moo. The houses remained shuttered and blacked out.
Daniela was four places ahead of him in the line. She was not bound, but she did not try to flee. Instead, she pleaded with the men to let her go back to her mother. She sounded like she was ten years old. Except for the occasional joke, the gunmen ignored her.
It was cold. Green had not had the presence of mind to zip the jacket before they bound his hands. And even the thought that he might die soon did not make the cold any less a bother. His feet stung and itched and hurt.
Much of life was adaptation to your environment. Even the shorter, stockier gunmen were accustomed to climbing. Green kept himself in good shape, but his legs soon strained at the steepness and pace. When he slowed even a little, a muzzle jabbed him in the back.
He had seen them cut off Crawley’s head. It had been indescribably real, immeasurably repugnant. Yet now, on the mountainside, the death was already hard to believe. He remembered the NCO saying something about the attack being aimed at them. And Green remembered the man covering him with his body. The things men did. The marvel of courage. He doubted his own bravery, that he would have done such a thing. He had-thought of himself as a real hotshot, a first-rate officer. Now he hardly felt like a soldier at all. He felt as though he had been faking it his entire career.
He saw himself as a failure and an ass, and he was afraid. Fighting the tears in his eyes. Glad of the darkness.
They pushed through a grove of evergreens. The wet branches slapped him and soaked through his jeans. But the pine smell was gorgeously alive.
He saw the pulp of Crawley’s hacked neck. He saw the head, with the sleepy look of the open eyes.
That was how it looked.
Green fantasized about escaping, trying to imagine how it might be done. But his hands were tied, and the trail was steep, and he did not know the way. They would catch him. In moments. And perhaps kill him for annoying them.
The girl sobbed and kept climbing.
He did not know exactly where the border lay. Somewhere over the crest. But he realized that was where they were going. He was a prisoner of the people from the other side.
Despite the muzzle prodding him, he had to turn from the path and gag up more of the blood he had swallowed. His nosebleed had stopped, though not the dizziness.
Yes. The people from the other side. The butchers. The men who made the mass graves. It was as if they had sensed where his sympathies were headed. And came for him to make him pay.
But what was the angle? What did they hope to achieve? Their leaders were telling every lie imaginable to fend off the NATO airstrikes that had been threatened because of the cease-fire violations. What could they hope to gain by killing Americans? Or kidnapping them?
He knew that not everything had logic here. Or perspective. Perhaps they imagined he was much more important than he was. Or maybe this was just a renegade band with its own lunatic agenda. The attaché had warned him, just after Green signed in at the embassy, that the big warlords could not always control the little warlords, and the little warlords could not always control the militias, and the militias could not control the smugglers, except when they all worked together. And when they were not collaborating with somebody on one of the other sides.
Maybe it was the gravesite. Maybe that was why they had come after him and Crawley. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe he had seen something he did not even realize he had seen. Or maybe they were afraid he might see something and bring down the UN and the NGOs and a major investigation.
What had Crawley said? Something about that. Green could not remember.
He needed to sit down. Just for a minute.
The gunbarrel stabbed his kidneys.
The trees fell away and the trail grew rockier. It made walking difficult. Green stumbled again and again. His legs ached. Then it was so rough for a stretch that he could not think about anything but his footing. He wondered if they would shoot him if he turned his ankle and could not go on. The muzzle kept poking his back.
“Fuck you,” he said finally. But he sounded pathetic to himself. The metal bore rammed him again, and he kept marching.
Toward Crawley’s head. Floating in the darkness. It was there whether his eyes were open or closed.
He saw the knife descending. Chopping. Hacking. Through flesh so recently alive.
It seemed to Green as though there must be a way to reverse time and undo the damage. How could Crawley be dead? So easily?
That was what the textbooks failed to convey. You read the words. And understood noth
ing.
Just below the crest, with a high wind blanketing the sound of their voices, the raiders stopped for a powwow.
Witch’s sabbath landscape. Rocks pale, the scrub and lichen dark. Blacker clouds in a black sky. And the shrieking wind.
The dark men clustered, masked heads bobbing. Green found himself standing hardly a body length from the woman.
She was looking at him.
This time he was the one who was ashamed, the one who looked away.
He wondered why she didn’t run for it. Perhaps she knew they would kill her if she did. She would know the local rules. And dying was the worst thing for most human beings, no matter what the books said.
He hated his helplessness more than he hated his captors now. When he looked up, the woman was still watching him. He could not make out any of the details of her features. Except for her eyes. They gleamed.
The tall, thin gunman broke from the huddle and strode over to Green. Roughly, he undid the cords binding Green’s wrists. Then he said something.
Green didn’t get it. The dialect.
The man chuckled and tried another word.
He was telling Green to take a piss, if he needed to.
“Stay on the trail,” he said. “Landmines.”
Green tried to guess how long they had been marching, how far they had come. Still no hint of light in the sky. He felt as tired as at the end of a marathon field exercise, as though he had not slept for days. Only his brain was alive, fueled on fear. Eyes wide, body dead.
No. Not dead. Crawley was dead. That was what dead meant.
The man bound Green’s wrists again.
Daniela was squatting with her face in her hands.
“Don’t fly away, little bird,” the gunman told her.
Then the discussion ended. Three of the men headed back down the trail. Rear guard? Green wondered.
The nine who remained shoved and cursed, far more than necessary, to get their prisoners moving again.
They crossed over a saddle between two outcroppings of rock. The footing was even more treacherous going down the eastern side of the ridge. Green fell once, landing on his backside and bound hands. Rock bit his knuckles.
The man behind him kicked him to his feet. Then they entered the treeline again, going deep into more dark, wet pines, and the trail leveled, traversing the side of the mountain. The party followed it into a draw that was shielded from the wind, a natural refuge. It was so overgrown and deep-set that Green missed the outline of the huts at first. It was a partisan camp. Maybe, Green thought, it had been one for centuries. And a smuggler’s lair between wars.
Except for the footfalls and grumbling of the raiders, the world had gone silent.
They gave him another chance to empty himself, an odd courtesy, then tied him, sitting down, to the trunk of a dead tree. The wood was as hard as stone.
“We stay now,” a new voice told him, in English.
“What do you want with me?”
“We stay now,” the man repeated. “One day.” He hitched up his trousers and shadowed off.
The gunmen must have been tired, too. But they were not too tired for the girl. They pulled her toward one of the huts. She fought them now. But only until they beat her to the ground. Then she gave up and let them drag her.
“American,” she called. She had forgotten his name. “Help me.”
Green closed his eyes.
But his hearing had returned unmercifully. The sounds were worse with his eyes shut, and soon he opened them again. The men felt secure enough to light a small stove in the open and they sat around it, sharing a bottle and waiting their turn. The night was so quiet in the glen that Green could hear the bounce of an old-fashioned bed. Sometimes the girl cried out, begging them to stop, not to do any more. Then she would cry for her mother again. One of the men cursed her, and Green heard the sound of fists. The girl screamed, then whimpered, and finally went quiet. The bed started up again.
Green wept. He did not understand this world.
He remembered her scarred hands.
She had told him she was not religious. But when one of the masked men led her out in the morning light, barely able to walk, bleeding and naked from the waist down, she prayed. First she prayed standing. Then, when they nudged her over to the edge of the rocks, she prayed on her knees. Green made himself watch, in penance for his helplessness. He could not see her face now, only the torn purple sweater not quite covering her rump and the bare, dirty soles of her feet. But he heard her, the mumbled familiar rhythms. She was still praying when one of the men put a pistol to the back of her head and fired.
The raiders untied Green’s hands and offered him a share of their breakfast. Sliced salami, bread, and gruel. He shook his head.
The man with the tin dish in his hand laughed and told his comrades:
“He’s angry. He wanted to fuck her, too.”
“He can still fuck her,” another man answered.
They had not buried her. They only kicked her body off the rocks.
A squat man rose from the cluster around the little stove. He had a businesslike stride. He undid the rest of the cords binding Green. When Green stretched out his legs, it felt so good it made him close his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw the man standing before him, holding out the tin plate. There were stains around the mouth of the man’s commando mask.
“Pojesti.”
Green shook his head again. It was only a slight movement.
“Pojesti.”
“No. Fuck you.”
With the speed of a professional fighter, the man dropped the plate and punched Green just below the eye. It knocked his head back against the tree.
He had never been hit so hard. He slumped over. It felt as though his neck had snapped.
The man kicked the plate with its remnants toward him.
“Pojesti.”
The instant the man turned, Green launched himself. He hit him behind the knees in a perfect beat-Navy tackle and scrambled on top of him as soon as the man’s torso thumped the ground.
Green landed one fist. Then they were all on him. When he woke up, he was tied to the tree again. He had to twist his body as hard as he could not to puke on himself.
His eye was swollen and it left Green with a narrowed view of the world. And his feet itched and burned. It seemed ridiculous to him that, waiting to be executed, he should be so bothered by his feet.
Except for a pair of sentinels, the men drifted into the huts to sleep out the day. Eventually, Green slept, too, head drooped above the lashings that bound him to the tree. He half-woke a few times—once he felt crazed by the unreachable itching and cramping of his feet—but every part of him had worn down and the need to sleep finally slammed him down like a whisky drunk.
He dreamed he was back in Wheeling, buying a new car. Except that the car lot was one he recognized from Copperas Cove, in Texas, and he could not square that because he knew he was in Wheeling. A woman he had dated at Fort Hood appeared, excited him, and vanished. There was a problem with the paperwork at the dealership. He needed to prove something and could not. Buying the car was a major commitment, and he needed to get it done before he thought too much about it. He recognized his weakness, knew he was watching himself in a dream.
He woke to twilight and the smell of grilling meat. The sky was deep and cloudless. The fragrance of mutton, a vivid living smell of death, made his stomach ache.
In the shadow of the trees, the gunmen sat and ate, pulling the meat from the skewers with their fingers and gnawing bread torn ragged from a loaf. They shared an oval brandy bottle. Only five of them left now. The tall, thin boy who had marched him up the mountain was gone, Green could tell that much even though the men still wore their stocking masks.
Three of the remaining men stood up and slung their weapons over their shoulders. Green could not make out what was said, but he sensed it was a parting. And he was right. The brandy went around one more time, then the men marched of
f in a file. Ten minutes later, Green saw their shrunken figures emerge from the treeline, climbing toward the pass. The man at the rear turned around, as if he sensed that he was being watched. In the dying light, Green saw the white dot of an unmasked face.
The masks had only been for him.
He wondered, for a moment, if he had gotten it all wrong. If these men were not ethnic warriors at all, but only bandits imagining a fat Yankee ransom.
Again, he thought of Crawley’s severed head.
Not ransom.
One of the pair who had stayed behind to mind him stood up and swaggered toward Green. He was stocky, with a submachine gun slung across his back. Not one of Green’s earlier abusers. He untied Green and pointed toward the little grill and his companion, who sat cradling an airborne-variant AK. Watching.
Green stumbled at first, almost fell. His legs were numb. And he still had difficulty with his balance.
The man who had untied him grabbed Green from behind, taking a fistful of his jacket collar. Abruptly, he steered Green toward the huts. A bolt of panic shot through Green’s chest and stomach, piercing right down to his bowels.
Was this it?
No. It couldn’t be. They had killed the girl over by the rocks. That was the killing place.
Something else.
What?
Green felt himself shaking. He hated it, did not want to seem a coward, but could not control his body. He felt supernaturally alert, but not in a way that engaged reality. His dream had been more real than this.
He understood it now. Why the people had walked to the ovens at Auschwitz. Because you did not know what else to do, afraid that any action you took would only make things worse. And because you were drugged on hope, even as you faced the executioner.
The gunman shoved him between the huts, prodding him toward a trough that caught the water from a mountain spring. He told Green to wash his face.
The water was beautiful, and delicious.
Combat Page 85
