The Serbian Dane

by Leif Davidsen

  He was quite calm. The alcohol had gradually been sweated out of his system, and he always had his nerves well under control when preparing for or carrying out a mission. His mind was taken up solely with calculating, assessing and predicting what his enemies might do. It was as if there was no room for those demons and unforeseen thoughts to elbow their way to the fore.

  Getting out of the country had become easier. Planes were flying out of Belgrade again now that the embargo had been partially lifted. Milosovic had sold them for a couple of plane tickets. Although of course, he thought, that was only the down payment. But it spelled the beginning of the end for the Bosnian Serbs.

  It took a few moments, but eventually he got through to Belgrade.

  ‘Vuk here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Vuk,’ the voice on the other end said.

  ‘Warsaw tomorrow.’

  ‘One thousand deutschmarks, plus the ticket.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let me have the name you’ll be using.’

  ‘Sven Ericson, Swedish citizen.’

  ‘Spell it!’ came the distant sound of the black marketeer’s voice from his little apartment in Belgrade. The international embargo and sanctions had given rise to a whole new class of business people in Belgrade. Anything could be obtained. Anything could be fixed. You just had to know the right people. Vuk spelled out the name and hung up. It was getting dark outside. He shouldered his rucksack, switched off the light and locked the door behind him.

  There was no point in looking back. There was nothing in the apartment to say who had lived there. If anyone in the Bosnian Serbs’ self-appointed capital ever took it into their heads to search the place they would find no leads there. Vuk might as well never have existed. Only one person knew his address, and he would never be able to tell anyone. Emma had no idea where he lived. His heart sank briefly, but he fought back this little surge of longing.

  Vuk walked down the stairs and across to the car, a Russian Niva with Belgrade plates. It was parked in a side street, covered by a tarpaulin. He had been holding the little four-wheel drive in reserve for a month. It had a full tank and could handle the narrow roads that would take him that night into Serbia and to Belgrade. He had bought it on the black market, but the dealer had assured him that it was clean. New plates. The Ukrainian officer had returned to Kiev long since. He had reported it as being a write-off and been well paid to do so. So everybody had been happy.

  Vuk hauled off the tarpaulin, folded it and laid it on the back seat. He took out the bomb and placed it on the passenger seat. The car started at the third attempt. The engine sounded good. It made a hell of a racket, but that was a Niva for you. He had done a thorough check of the powerful little car himself. Vuk had learned very early on that it was always wise to have a set of wheels handy. The day was still warm, but there weren’t many people around. A couple of soldiers were sauntering along the street as Vuk drove up to the commandant’s Mercedes, which was parked, as usual, in a side street fifty yards from his mistress’s house. Vuk got out, but left the Niva’s engine running. He looked about him. The soldiers were gone. He was alone. Radovan would be sitting in the café round the corner. It was a shame about him, but in every war people are killed simply because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was not a soul to be seen. He checked his watch. Six-thirty. Half an hour from now Radovan would drive the Commandant home. He had commandeered a mansion in the hills, once the property of a wealthy Slovenian. It would take him forty-five minutes to get there. Vuk glanced up and down the quiet side street one more time, then dropped swiftly to the ground and attached the magnet to the underside of the car just below the fuel tank. The dark-grey tape made the bomb almost invisible, and Vuk knew that the Commandant tended to be a bit slack about security when he was in Pale, particularly after a couple of hours with his mistress. He would come out smelling of brandy and get into the back seat, puffing on his cigar. On the mountain roads up to the mansion it would all be over. The burn-through time on the detonator had a margin of two minutes either way.

  Vuk drove through the night. He kept to the minor roads and met no one. In this, the final phase of the war, most people stayed indoors. The negotiations that had now begun were being described as ‘peace talks’, but as far as Vuk was concerned they were ‘capitulation talks’. His people were going to be sold down the river. It was only a matter of months before they would be placed under Muslim and Croatian control. A couple of years back the situation had been very different. They had been all set to conquer almost the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but they had not been sure enough of their hand and had faltered at the crucial moment. Now Bosnia would build up a powerful government army, and those traitorous Serbs in Belgrade would sell them for the price of international recognition and the lifting of the blockade. They would also hand over one or two so-called war criminals to the ravening wolves in the west, to get themselves off the hook. He had made the right decision. It was time to get out.

  The border loomed out of the gloom just after Screbrenica. It was patrolled by a sleepy-looking border guard. Vuk reduced speed and rolled his window right down. The guard was little more than a kid. They were on Serbian territory; he could not see any Bosnian guards. Vuk put a hand to his brow in a sketchy salute and handed the guard his military pass signed by the Commandant, which could usually open any door. But to be on the safe side he had slipped a fifty-deutschmark note inside it. You never could tell these days, but it didn’t look as if security had been stepped up. He hoped, though, that by now the Commandant was in no position to verify his own signature. The guard took the money and gave back the pass with a limp, nonchalant hand before raising the barrier and allowing Vuk to drive into Serbia. Vuk put his foot down and headed for Belgrade.

  He reached Belgrade airport in the early hours. It lay still and ghostly in the soft, hazy, morning light. Time was when this had been a busy modern airport with connections to almost all of the world’s major cities, but in recent years the international embargo had reduced the number of daily departures and arrivals to a minimum. Now air traffic was slowly returning to normal, and Vuk could see several of the old Yugoslavian Airlines planes sitting on the tarmac, ready for take-off. There were only a few cars in the car park. Vuk drove the Niva in and parked it. He took the gun from his inside pocket, emptied the bullets out of it and pushed them and the gun under the passenger seat. He didn’t relish the thought of being unarmed, but he knew it was far too risky to carry a gun in an airport.

  He leaned up against the Niva with his rucksack at his feet and lit a cigarette. He felt a little groggy from lack of sleep, but that would soon pass. He had gone for several days before without more than a couple of hours’ sleep here and there, and he knew he could do it again. He heard a car door slam and saw a small, dark-suited man in his thirties walking towards him from a grey Ford Scorpio. Vuk straightened up and waited. He knew this man. He was known as the Snake, because he was said to have a cobra tattooed on his right buttock: a souvenir from prison.

  The Snake came up to Vuk and clasped his hand.

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re saying your commandant had a bit of an accident?’

  ‘These are dangerous times we’re living in,’ Vuk said.

  ‘They are indeed,’ said the Snake, handing Vuk a ticket. ‘With Yugoslavian to Vienna, then Lot to Warsaw. That’ll be two thousand exactly. You wanted them in a hurry, right?’

  Vuk slipped the ticket into his inside pocket. He knew it would be okay. It was a lot of money, but you were paying for quality, and the Snake had only survived as long as he had because he knew that the best way of securing future custom was to let it be known that the last transaction was always forgotten as soon as it was completed. Vuk gave the Snake the two thousand marks. The Snake didn’t count them, merely slipped the neatly folded notes into his inside pocket.

  ‘Do what you like with the car,’ Vuk said.


  ‘Is it hot?’

  ‘On the lukewarm side, maybe.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘There’s a hot piece under the seat.’

  ‘Right. I’ll have that collected.’

  Vuk handed him the keys and hoisted the rucksack onto his right shoulder.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ said the Snake.

  ‘Merci,’ said Vuk and stepped inside the terminal.

  Vuk slept on the plane to Vienna and had time for a quick shower and shave at the busy airport terminal before boarding a half-full flight to Warsaw. He ate some cheese and a roll, then slept again. Passport control at Warsaw was more thorough than he had expected, but his plane had landed at the same time as an SAS flight from Copenhagen. He left the queue he was in and joined the line of Swedish and Danish business people. It was strange but nice to hear Swedish and Danish spoken again. Particularly Danish. It brought back a lot of memories, but he quashed them and concentrated on gauging how carefully passports were being checked. When a Scandinavian passport was presented it was given only a cursory glance. When his turn came the female passport controller took only one look at his passport and at him. He gave her a big smile, and she couldn’t help but smile back.

  ‘Have a nice stay in Poland, Mr Ericson,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ he said, took his passport and entered Poland.

  Vuk went to the gents. He found a vacant cubicle, placed his rucksack on the floor. He got out his make-up box and a small mirror, blackened his hair with a powder dye. This done, he very carefully glued on his moustache and popped a baseball cap on his head. He returned the make-up box to the rucksack and got out the Russian passport. He waited until he was sure that all the people with whom he had arrived would be safely through baggage reclaim and on their way into the Polish capital. Then he emerged from the gents and made for the bank, where he exchanged some deutschmarks for Polish zloty.

  At the Avis desk he slapped his red Russian passport down on the counter along with his Russian driving licence. The Polish girl behind the counter gave him a sour look, but then her training gained the upper hand and he was treated to a bright Avis smile. He knew she was well aware that, as a Russian, he would be paying cash. Car-hire firms weren’t happy about taking anything but credit cards, but the business in both legitimate and somewhat shadier Russians travelling around Eastern and Western Europe was too good to pass up. So the odd car might go missing, but that was what you had insurance for. Both the passport and the driving licence looked all right, so the assistant decided not to call a superior. In any case the Russian had only asked for a medium-class car. When they meant to strip them down they always went for the luxury models.

  Nonetheless: ‘Cash or credit?’ she asked.

  ‘Cash,’ Vuk said and lit a cigarette while the girl was entering his passport and driving licence details on the rental form. Being Polish she had no trouble reading the Cyrillic script, and she probably remembered a fair bit of Russian from compulsory lessons at school but would never speak it. Vuk could well understand her. He said that, yes, he would pay for insurance. And he would want the car for two days. In true Russian fashion he pulled a roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket and counted out the appropriate amount. He was given the keys to a Ford Fiesta and within a matter of minutes he was on the road, heading south-west towards Wroclaw. Mr Ericson had arrived in Poland and then vanished into thin air. Mr Jenikov had hired a car, although no passport authority had registered his entry into the Polish Republic. Although this was actually less unusual than one might think. There was a lot of toing and froing of Russians and Ukrainians across the Polish-Ukrainian border. And the formalities were not always observed in the new, galloping market economy that had taken over from the planned economy to the east of the old Iron Curtain.

  Vuk stopped at a supermarket in a small town. He bought bread, sausage, cheese, some apples and two large bottles of mineral water before continuing westwards along a good highway as twilight descended on the flat Polish countryside. He bought a couple of bottles of cola when he stopped for petrol. He paid cash. In the middle of the night he stopped at a lay-by, ate his bread and sausage and drank one of the bottles of mineral water. He locked the car doors and slept for four hours. He was woken twice by the hiss of hydraulic brakes as a couple of big Polish trucks pulled in.

  It was another beautiful morning. The light shifted from rosy to pale blue, and dew sparkled on the meadows. There was no sign of movement in the two trucks. The drivers were obviously sleeping. Vuk brushed his teeth with mineral water, ate the last of the bread and cheese. He was dying for a cup of coffee. He brushed most of the black powder out of his hair, leaving it more of a mousy-brown colour. He was stiff all over, so he did some stretching exercises and twenty press-ups.

  Before driving on he changed into his black jeans and swapped the pale-grey Reeboks for a pair of plain black sneakers. But he kept on the red checked shirt. He didn’t want to show up in a border town dressed all in black. He stopped at a modern-looking fast-food joint, had a coffee and a cheese roll. He gave his order in German and used a foul-smelling, antiquated toilet, where he managed to brush some more of the black dye out of his hair and washed his face. His eyes were a bit bloodshot, and he had a faint headache, but otherwise he was feeling pretty good. He was running on adrenalin. Traffic was light. Mostly old Polish cars and the occasional farm vehicle. The fields had been harvested and in a few places ploughing had already begun. He saw horses pulling a plough and one or twice he overtook a flat-bottomed cart drawn by a single sturdy horse. The day was warm with a light scattering of cloud. In a small town not far from Wroclaw he called in at the local post office and obtained the number for a hotel booking service in Berlin. He called the number and was given the names of several small family hotels in the centre of the city. The first two were fully booked, but the third could fit him in. He said that he was calling from Denmark and would like to book a room for two, or possibly three, nights in the name of Per Larsen. He spoke English to the receptionist.

  He munched apples as he drove, and listened to a Polish channel playing pop music. By the time it was really dark the first German FM stations were coming through loud and clear on the car radio. He listened to the news. It was the usual stuff: isolated skirmishes in Bosnia, negotiations, political infighting in Germany, hold-ups on the motorway. There were more and more juggernauts driving in both directions. It wouldn’t be too long before he hit the start of the long queue of trucks waiting to enter the EU at Görlitz, so he turned off and drove into the centre of the Polish border town, Zgorzelec, and parked in a small square. It was a dusty, run-down place, but there were signs here and there that the work of rebuilding and renovating the old houses had begun.

  He made sure the car was securely locked. It would have to sit here for at least a couple of days, if it didn’t get stolen that very night. But that wasn’t his problem. He shouldered his rucksack and walked off. He noticed groups of gaudily dressed gypsies or Romanians hanging around one corner of the square. A Polish patrol car cruised past them, and they huddled together like a flock of startled chickens.

  With his dark hair, cap, jeans and leather jacket, Vuk looked like a Polish farm labourer on his way into town, like so many others, to have a beer or two. And maybe a chat about all the weird, raggle-taggle foreigners who were streaming into their town in the hope of finding a way over the border into the EU’s land of milk and honey. He dropped the car keys through a grating and strolled back out of the town. On the outskirts he drew a small compass from his pocket and took his bearings: south-west. It should be just under five miles to the border and the Oder-Niesse line – the narrow shallow river course which separated the affluent west from the poor, newly liberated part of Europe. It wasn’t the ideal evening: a three-quarters full moon lit up the flat terrain from time to time, but he noted with satisfaction that heavy black clouds occasionally blocked out its pale light and plunged the stubble-fields into darkness. In any case, he
had no choice. And he did not expect to be the only one out there that night. He ripped up his Russian passport and driving licence and let the fragments fly out behind him like confetti. A light west wind caught the fragments and swept them off across the fields. The route he had chosen had been a long and tortuous one, but Vuk had learned that all tracks had to be thoroughly erased, in an age when anyone travelling across the continent invariably left an electronic trail behind them, in the form of passports and credit cards, automatic ticket registration and online booking systems.

  He smelled the river before he saw it. He cut across the field and into a little copse. Then he heard voices. Talking in whispers. These people didn’t realize how far a whisper could carry at night. He also spotted the red glow of a cigarette. It was a good way off, but he shut his eyes anyway to preserve his night vision. They were Romanian voices. He heard a loud shushing sound, and when he opened one eye a peek the glow from the cigarette was gone. A child’s voice said something, then whimpered. As an adult hand clenched round a childish arm, no doubt. Vuk drew back a little from the Romanians, although still staying close enough to keep track of them. They were too inexperienced and too scared to keep perfectly quiet.