by Andy McNab
Twenty more, and the wind was driving freezing rain straight into our faces. My eyes were streaming. All we could do was keep our heads down.
I stopped for Jerry. He shuffled up alongside me and stood so close that his breath merged with mine as it got whipped away by the wind.
The closer we got to the ridge, the stronger the gusts became. The ambient temperature was low enough as it was, but the wind-chill took it close to freezing. I was beginning to feel light-headed.
I realized I was suffering from the first stages of hypothermia. We needed to get out of the wind and we needed to get off the hill.
When we finally got to the top, the wind was so strong it nearly knocked me over. And what I saw through the sheets of rain down in the valley nearly finished the job.
Acrane was lifting the Audis on to the back of a low-loader. SFOR troops swarmed around the wreckage of the truck, and they didn’t look in as much of a hurry as I’d have liked. We couldn’t go down there, but we had to get out of this fucking wind and rain. We had to go back to the cave.
We turned back uphill, leg muscles stinging as they tried to keep us moving. I made it to the top first, and looked down. Things this side of the valley weren’t much better.
Jerry drew level with me. ‘What’s wrong?’
I motioned him down beside me and pointed. Three sets of headlights were closing in on the cave. They were probably going to pick up the 4x4, and maybe stick some more flags around the place. Whatever, we couldn’t get back to the cave.
Jerry knew it too. ‘What now?’
‘Stay up here and get out of the wind. Soon as they leave, we go for the wagon. If it’s still there. . .’
We moved back the way we’d come. The rain made it almost impossible to see the farm and SFOR boys now, but that wasn’t altogether a bad thing. Just like with the snipers during the siege, if we couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see us.
We ended up in what looked and smelt like an old sheep hollow, worn away over the centuries. But if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for us. We wrapped ourselves around each other, our faces just inches apart, trying to share what little body heat we had left.
Lifting my head, I couldn’t see anything down in the valley now, just solid walls of rain. It came down so hard it felt like we were being attacked by a swarm of ice-cold bees.
‘We’ll wait until they’ve gone – or last light.’ My throat was dry and rasping. I was wet, cold and hungry. What wouldn’t I have given right now for a toasted cheese sandwich and a mug of monkey tea under the duvet, stretched out on the settee in front of the Discovery Channel?
Jerry’s head moved, which I took to be a nod.
As the minutes ticked by, the ground itself seemed to become colder and soggier. I could feel his body warmth at the points where he was making contact with me, but the rest of me was freezing. Every time he fidgeted to get comfortable, I could feel the cold attack the newly exposed area. At least we were in cover. It’s a psychological thing: get up against or under something and you begin to imagine you’re a bit warmer. You’re not, of course: you just think you are.
The wind howled against the lip of the hollow. The downpour was getting well into its stride, bouncing off my PVC coat like one long drum-roll.
86
At least two very cold hours must have passed with me listening to the wind and Jerry shivering and fidgeting constantly to get some kind of feeling back into his limbs. I wrapped him closer to me, for my benefit as much as his. ‘Listen, with that camera of yours fucked, it’s pointless you carrying on. Why not get down the hill to SFOR?’
He shook his head. ‘Fuck, no. Why give up now, when we’re so close?’
‘You got no reason to go now, and you’re in shit state.’
‘So are you. Besides, I can still interview him. You ever thought I might want to know who killed Rob?’
‘That’s not the only thing I want to talk to him about.’
Despite his misery, Jerry managed a brief smile. ‘What, like expenses?’
I looked down the hill. I still couldn’t see the barns. I watched the top of his shivering head for a long time, wondering whether to tell him. But why change the habit of a lifetime? Even as a kid, I’d lied about where I’d been and what I’d done – not just to my mum; to everyone. I didn’t want people to know things about me. It made me feel vulnerable. My stepdad would just use it as an excuse to fill me in. Why give people the rope to hang you with?
In the end, I just thought why the fuck not, as long as I left out who I really worked for. Perhaps if I carried on talking, I’d keep our minds off the cold. Jerry got everything, from the time I arrived in Bosnia to the time I left. I told him about the Paveway jobs. I told him about watching Nuhanovic at the cement factory, and listening to the screams of the girls being raped.
And, finally, I told him about Zina.
‘She knew I was there, she just kept crawling those last few feet to the hide, her eyes begging me for help, but I couldn’t do anything.
‘I could have saved more lives than even Nuhanovic. At least he had the bollocks to intervene. All I did was watch, put the job first . . .’
‘That’s why you want to see him? You feel guilty?’
He looked at me for a long time, shaking and trembling all the while. ‘You can’t beat yourself up about that sort of shit. Believe me. I mean, do I grab the girl who’s burning with napalm and try to put out the flames or do I take her photograph?
‘When we were here in ’ninety-four, I was a kid: Mr Idealism, Mr Humanity. I told myself I was a human being first and a photographer second.’ He gave an ironic little laugh as the rain fell down his face. His stubble had been washed clean. ‘It took me three fucking wars, man, to understand the answer to that question. I’m the guy who presses the shutter, nothing else and nothing more. The world needs those images to jolt people out of their cholesterol-lined comfort zones. That’s my contribution to humanity.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’re no different, man. You had to keep your distance; if it had gone right you would have saved a lot more people than you saw killed. This making sense to you?’
It was, but it wasn’t making me feel any better. I still wanted to square things with Nuhanovic.
‘You remember that Kevin Carter shot in my apartment? You know, the kid and the vulture?’
I nodded, realizing that I’d just rubbed my soaking hair and sniffed my hands like some kind of addict. It was a while since I’d done that stuff.
‘Three months after taking it, the poor fuck connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and took a few deep sucks. The problem for Kevin was he wasn’t able to tell the world if that girl survived. He was honest about it. He admitted he sat there for twenty minutes, just hoping the vulture would spread its wings. When it didn’t, he took the picture anyway – then he sat under a tree, crying, talking to God, and thinking about his own daughter.
‘When he got back to the States, he started getting midnight hate calls for not helping the girl. Even one of the fucking papers wrote – I’ll never forget it – “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.” The girl began to haunt him.’
I knew how he felt. I couldn’t get Zina’s mud-and blood-covered face out of my head, and I couldn’t get the smell of Kelly off my hands.
‘It wasn’t fair to attack him. If I’m zooming in on someone dying, I’m composing an image, maybe even a work of art, but inside I’m screaming, wanting to go cry under a tree. Thing is, Nick, these suburban do-gooders, with their Gap and flat-pack lives, saw one little girl. Kevin was surrounded by a famine, and that kid, she was just one of hundreds he’d seen dying that day. If he hadn’t taken that shot, not one of those fat fucks back home would even know where the Sudan was.’
We lay huddled a while longer as the rain lashed down.
‘You know what, Nick? I wanted to get Fikret into the car and put him on
a plane to the States – but what do you do when you see hundreds like him, everywhere you turn? I still think about that little fuck, wonder if he survived. Maybe he’s playing soccer right now. Maybe he’s lying in a mass grave. It tears me apart some days.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think I can imagine what you went through, you know. Just don’t beat yourself up over it.’
He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘The whole world is fucked up, man. You did what you felt was right. Hindsight is for those fucks who’ve never been out there, never had to make those kinds of choices. Since having Chloë, I’ve done a lot more thinking about that shit.’
‘Tell me about it.’
He looked surprised. ‘You got a kid?’
I rubbed my frozen hands together. ‘Her name’s Kelly.’
Maybe Ezra had been right. Maybe there was a right moment for everything to come out; maybe I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried. It certainly felt that way.
I started to tell him everything.
‘Her mother and father were my friends, my only friends. Her little sister was my goddaughter. Kelly was only nine when they were killed, in their house, just outside DC. I was too late to save them. Just by minutes. Kelly was the only one left. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she was all I had left too.’
The rain started to ease a little while I fumbled my way through the day I’d discovered the bodies, and the weeks Kelly and I were on the run together afterwards, and how she’d ended up with Josh and his family in Maryland. ‘He’s a minister now in some happy-clappy church . . .’
I told him about me being shit at the job of looking after her, totally inconsistent, and how I felt a bit of me died when I signed her over permanently to Josh’s care, convincing myself it was the best thing for her.
Shivering and shaking, Jerry seemed to understand. ‘How do you ever recover from something like that?’
‘She never really—’
I felt a hand touch my shoulder. It must have taken a lot to move it from the warmth of his armpit. ‘I mean you, man. How the fuck do you hold it all together?’
Good question. Fucked if I knew the answer.
We lay there in the rain for maybe another twenty minutes. I checked Baby-G: 16:28. The rain had eased just enough for me to make out the headlights moving down the valley back towards Sarajevo. ‘Not long till last light, mate. Maybe we’ll get a fire going in the barn, even boil up some water. Then it’ll be smiles all round.’
87
My clothes stuck to my freezing wet skin. My hands were so cold, it took for ever to get the key into the old brass padlock and give it a turn. Jerry shivered behind me, waiting until the lock came off and the double corrugated-iron doors creaked open.
It was a little warmer inside than out, but not much. I couldn’t even console myself that we were out of the wet. It had stopped raining just as we got to the bottom of the hill.
‘Go find the wagon,’ I said. I wanted to keep Jerry moving.
I fumbled about for a light switch as he ventured further in, but didn’t find one.
‘Got it! Over here!’
Keys in hand, I stumbled towards the tapping noise he made against the bodywork. I eventually bounced off a high-sided wagon. I felt my way round the left-hand side and got the door open. The interior light came on to reveal a VW van and my vaporizing breath.
The van was one of the newer, squarer models but it was just as rusty and battered as any old surfer’s Combi. The back was full of empty hessian and nylon sacks, lengths of baling twine and handfuls of straw. The cab floor was littered with newspapers, sheets of paper, pens, drinks cans, all the usual shit.
I jumped in and unlocked the passenger door for Jerry, then turned the ignition. The diesel engine fired after a few protesting shudders. I flicked on the headlights. The inside of the barn was high, with a corrugated-iron roof, and the floor would have been big enough to fit a dozen vehicles, if they didn’t mind parking on piles of sacks and bits of old farm gear.
I pressed down on the cigarette lighter, then threw the gear shift into reverse, backing up so the lights covered as much of the place as possible. The fuel gauge showed half full. The cigarette lighter clicked back up. ‘Check it, mate. See if we can get a fire going.’
I left it in neutral, engine running, the exhaust chugging against the concrete block wall. I was beginning to feel more energized as I jumped down on to the hard compacted earth. Fuck carbon monoxide – I just wanted to get the cab warm and be able to see my way around.
Concealed behind piles of cardboard and wooden crates, Salkic had promised, were six cans of diesel. I pulled away the crap until I found them, and lifted each one to check it was full.
Jerry gathered empty polythene sacks and lumps of wood, straw, cardboard, anything that would burn. He made a pile big enough to give us some heat but not so high we torched the place, then ran back to the van. He got some newspaper going in the cab, and brought it over. We were soon warming our hands and faces and inhaling the stink of burning plastic.
I used a rusty old knife to rip arm- and neck-holes in a couple of the sacks and handed him a set. ‘We need to get our clothes a bit drier, mate.’
I’d always hated peeling off wet things and exposing my skin to the cold, but the fibres had to be wrung out so they could do their job and trap a little air.
We ended up looking like Cabbage Patch dolls, but at least the sacking gave us an extra layer against the cold. By the time we’d put our clothes back on top, all the dirt inside had turned to mud, but at least it was warmish mud. The fire was helping.
There were enough combustibles lying around for us to have stayed all night drying kit, but I wanted to get on the road just as soon as we could.
‘Have a look round for something to boil up some water. Be good to get something hot down us before we go. I’ll fill up the tank.’
Jerry moved off into the shadows as I picked up my AK and both our bumbags.
I kept the engine on now. If I closed it down it might not start again, so why take the risk? I dumped the bumbags on the passenger seat, folded some cardboard into a cone and shoved it into the tank. After doing the smell and taste test to make sure it was diesel, I emptied in the first can.
It couldn’t take all of the second, so I slung it in the back along with the three full ones. I was already fantasizing about heading up the road, the heater going full blast and a stomach full of hot water. What more could anyone want?
I went to the cab and leaned inside to check if the footwell heaters were doing their stuff. Nothing yet. The bumbags were just inches from my face, and through the nylon of Jerry’s I could see what was left of his camera. Jerry had been lucky. The Nikon had probably saved his life. I unzipped the bag and pulled out the camera. Part of the lens fell on to the seat.
The round had ploughed through the casing. The body looked as if it was about to break in half. As I held it in my hands, that was exactly what happened. And, digital or not, I knew enough about cameras to see at once there was something inside this one that shouldn’t have been.
I managed to slide a finger between the battery and its casing. The blue plastic disc was about the size of a 50p piece; it was cracked and chipped, but I could see clearly what it was, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with taking pictures.
My hands began to shake as I pulled out the Thuraya and powered it up. I pulled out the download cable and checked if anything else was in there that shouldn’t be, then hit the menus.
This time, Jerry had fucked up with his opsec. Registered on the call list were Salkic’s sister’s number and the hotel’s, and one other, at least twenty digits long. It wasn’t any source’s land-line number in DC, Virginia or Maryland, or any normal cell number. They, too, have area codes.
Who the fuck had he been calling? I’d seen him in the al-Hamra with the cable attached. Had he been downloading pictures? Of who? Of what? To ID us for the attack?
Fuck the blue device for now. I could deal with that la
ter.
There was a shout from the shadows. ‘Hey, I got a can without a hole! It’s gonna need one mean clean, though.’
88
I jumped out of the van, AK in hand. I pushed the safety all the way down and got the butt into the shoulder. Taking deep breaths to calm myself, I leaned into the weapon and aimed at the noise coming towards me from the darkness.
He moved into the van’s lights, using them to inspect the tin can in his hands. His shadow danced along the far wall.
I stayed behind the headlights, waiting for him to get closer.
‘Stand still. Hands up, both up.’
‘Hey, it’s me.’ He held up the can, squinting into the beams. ‘I got us a kettle.’
‘The pistol. Where’s the weapon?’
‘My jacket. Nick, what’s—?’
‘Shut the fuck up. Drop the can. Kneel down and put the pistol on the floor.’
He did as he was told and I moved forward, weapon up, still in the shoulder, releasing first pressure.
‘What’s happening, man, what I do wrong?’
I came at him out of the beams, my boot connecting with his head before he had a chance to get up again. He hit the floor and I kicked the pistol away from him, then carried on kicking him wherever I could reach: head, arms, legs, back, anywhere he left exposed.
When he raised his hands to protect himself, I got him in the guts and he puked up bloodstained bile.
‘You haven’t been calling a DC source, have you?’ I didn’t give him time to answer, just kicked him towards the fire. ‘You download from the al-Hamra to that fancy number?’
He tried to get to his knees again.
‘That why the phone and camera were rigged up, was it?’
I kicked into the mass below me. He collapsed by the fire, falling into the embers and spreading them across the mud. He rolled back towards me, desperate to get away from it, and tried to curl into a ball. I could smell burnt hair.
