Bosnian Inferno

by David Monnery

  In the gymnasium Hajrija and Nena were going from woman to woman, explaining what was happening and where they were being taken. It seemed to be taking a lot of time, but Docherty knew that he couldn’t hurry the process. As Nena had explained it, slowly and carefully, as if she was talking to a child: ‘These women were put into buses once, given no explanation, and they ended up here – there’s no way we can just put them in another bus without telling them why and where they’re going.’

  The reactions of the women, as far as he could see, varied greatly. Some seemed in shock, blanked out, like mental patients. Others seemed simply tired, as if they’d been awake for days on end. Many were distraught, and found it hard to understand what they were being told. A few were simply brimming with anger.

  Nena’s state of mind was hard to gauge. Docherty remembered her mostly as a woman with a ready laugh, a bundle of enthusiasms, and a defiant willingness to wear her emotions on her sleeve. He had always known she must have a more introverted side – he knew from Reeve how seriously she took being a doctor – but it had rarely surfaced in her social persona. The woman he could now see across the dimly lit gymnasium bore little obvious relation to the woman he had known.

  What sort of people could do something like this? Docherty asked himself. He had always drawn a blank when trying to imagine the thought-processes of the men who had run the German concentration camps, and he found this no easier to understand. Anyone could turn off their humanity in the heat of the moment, or in longer periods of extreme stress, but this was something else. Evil was the word that came to mind, but it was only a word – it didn’t explain anything.

  ‘Boss,’ Chris said at his shoulder, ‘Kaltak just came back. The checkpoint’s ours, but they found a girl there – in bad shape. She’ll have to come with us.’

  Docherty cupped his hands round his nose. ‘Right,’ he said, and took the hands away. ‘How’s the Dame doing?’

  ‘He and Hadzic just got back with some petrol they stole from somewhere. They’re putting it into the bus now. They’ve taken out the lights. How are we doing here?’

  ‘Almost ready, I think.’ He looked at his watch. ‘The Serbs must be wondering where their women are.’

  ‘It’s a pity we don’t have time to raze that motel to the ground,’ Chris said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who’s going in what, boss?’

  ‘I want Razor driving the bus – he’s the maddest driver I’ve ever come across, and the best. And I think the Dame should ride shotgun. You and I’ll go in the lorry with the Bosnian laddies. And I guess we’ll have to take the two prisoners with us.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘We’ll all have to take the bus up to the checkpoint.’

  Hajrija was walking towards them. ‘We are ready,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Docherty said.

  She turned and said something to the women, who all started getting to their feet. Hajrija said something more, and they started filing out, silently. The few eyes turned towards the men were full of anger.

  Nena brought up the rear. She had shaken her golden mane loose, and looked more like the woman Docherty remembered.

  ‘What are you doing here, Jamie?’ she asked. ‘Is this just a coincidence, you being here?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We were looking for you, and we heard you were in this place…’

  ‘Why were you looking for me?’

  ‘Because of Reeve.’

  She looked at him. She had always liked Docherty, liked his Argentinian wife, and the way the two of them were together. She had even thought about them the other day when she was reflecting on her marriage to Reeve. Isabel and Jamie seemed to have got the crucial balance in any relationship, the one between independence and interdependence, about right. It was a hard thing to do. Certainly, she and Reeve had never managed it.

  She looked around at the empty gymnasium. ‘Aren’t SAS wives allowed to leave their husbands any more?’ she murmured, her voice a blend of weariness, flippancy and bitterness.

  The bus was ticking over in the Sports Hall car park. The women filed on board, filling up all but four of the forty-two seats. The two prisoners were ordered to sit in the aisle and did so, holding their hands over their heads as if expecting a rain of blows from the women they had guarded. Kaltak took the wheel, leaving the other seven members of the combined unit to squeeze into the seats and space at the front.

  As they turned on to the main road Docherty cast a glance back up it, in the direction of the river and the motel. There was no sign of anyone coming to look for the lorry that hadn’t returned. Maybe they were in luck: maybe the Serbs were all too drunk or full of pills to care.

  They arrived at the checkpoint not much more than a minute later. Razor carried the heavily wrapped girl on board, and passed her on to Hajrija. Nena started to examine her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Docherty asked him.

  A bleak smile crossed Razor’s face. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  He didn’t look it, Docherty thought. ‘You’re driving the bus,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ Razor said, his eyes taking in the sea of barely lit women’s faces stretching to the back of the vehicle.

  ‘Just follow the lorry,’ Docherty said. ‘If you think you need a rest, give the Dame a turn.’ He gave Razor a few more instructions and then got down off the bus and walked across towards the lorry, noticing that someone had placed a bench and lighted lamp across the road behind them. Presumably it had been that way when they arrived.

  He climbed up into the cab where Hadzic and Began were already waiting, and nodded his assent to the question on the driver’s face. The lorry moved away, and in the wing mirror Docherty could pick out the dark shape of the unlit bus following some thirty yards behind. No one seeing the lorry’s headlights coming towards them would realize there was a second vehicle behind, not until it was halfway past them.

  They were heading down a winding valley now, the road crossing and recrossing the rushing river in the confined space. Somewhere at the bottom of this road they would come across the dividing line between Serb-controlled and Muslim-controlled territories. There would be checkpoints of some sort, maybe physical barriers, maybe even an exchange of fire in progress. And the sooner they reached it the less chance there was that they’d be expected, Docherty thought. He was still surprised that no one had come looking for the lorry in Vogosca. Maybe by now they had, and found nothing but the empty Sports Hall.

  He wondered whether they should stop and cut the telephone wires than ran along by the road, and decided it would be a waste of time – even if the telephones were operational, which he doubted, the Serbs would be using radio.

  He also wondered whether he should have put the bus in front. If they had to force their way through an unexpected roadblock the rear vehicle would be the most vulnerable. But then again, if they ran into enemy forces…

  Docherty told himself to stop worrying about decisions already taken.

  Behind him Razor was guiding the bus by the lights of the lorry ahead. It was a favourite trick of Docherty’s to disguise two vehicles as one, and they’d done something similar in Argentina, during their escape from the town where he and Ben had been taken prisoner. That had been a night to remember, all right. Like this one. Only this was different. Argentina had been hairy enough, but it had felt like an adventure. This one was getting to him. Had got to him.

  He glanced across to where the Dame was sitting, MP5 cradled in his lap, face showing no emotion. Razor wondered what was going on beneath the surface. Maybe nothing. Maybe the Dame was like he himself had been for so many years, someone who just let it happen, and dealt with it when it did. He had rather liked being that way.

  His mother had used to say to him: ‘One day you’ll get it.’ ‘Get what?’ he had wanted to know. ‘When you get it, you’ll know,’ she had said, affectionately enough. He knew he had driven her nuts, but she’d kind of liked him that way too.

 
He took a quick look in the rear-view mirror. Hajrija was sitting with the young girl on her lap, looking out of the window beside her.

  He realized he knew no more about her than he had about any of the other women he’d really fancied, and that for once it seemed to matter.

  The crescent moon was high in the sky now, shedding its thin light across a wider valley below. Lorry and bus passed under a bridge carrying the railway from Sarajevo, which turned in a long curve to run alongside the highway. On the left the river from Vogosca cascaded over stones to join with the broader Miljacka. On all sides a sharp line separated the darker mountains from the star-strewn sky.

  A road sign appeared in the lorry’s headlights.

  ‘Which way?’ Began asked his commander, slowing down.

  ‘Both roads go to Visoko,’ Hadzic told Docherty. ‘The main highway will be easier to drive, but we’ll probably meet less opposition on the smaller road.’

  ‘Let’s get off the highway,’ Docherty suggested. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past three.

  ‘OK,’ Hadzic agreed. He said something in his own language to the driver, who took the right fork.

  The road ran across a small stretch of bare meadow and tunnelled into a mostly coniferous forest. Curves and dips followed for several miles, and then the road suddenly emerged above a small town, before descending through a succession of hairpin bends to cross the railway tracks and pass the sign that told them they were entering Semizovac.

  The town seemed dead at first, full of houses either burnt out or blown up, but as the lorry swung into the main square a line of military vehicles loomed into view, parked along one side. In the opposite corner a brazier was burning, with a soldier standing either side of it, their illuminated faces turned towards the unexpected arrivals.

  Lorry and bus left them staring, burrowing down the town’s main street.

  ‘I think this is the last Serb-held town,’ Hadzic said in English, than added something in Serbo-Croat to Began, who responded by pressing his foot down on the accelerator. In the wing mirror Docherty could see the bus regaining its normal distance as Razor responded.

  They seemed to be almost out of the town now, the road dipping suddenly to pass under the railway tracks. As they emerged from the underpass a tank loomed into view, its gun pointed down at the ground. Two armoured cars were parked beside it, also apparently devoid of occupants.

  On the tracks to their right a line of covered wagons seemed to be serving as barracks. And a couple of hundred yards further down the road two burnt-out cars had been used to narrow the channel for traffic. There were no lights, but moving figures were visible in the gloom. The pinpoint of a torch suddenly appeared, like a star that had slipped out of the sky.

  Docherty leant out of the window with his torch in hand and drew a circle in the air. In the bus behind Razor shouted ‘Now!’ at Hajrija, who passed on the news in Serbo-Croat. Most of the women responded, either burrowing down on to the floor in front of their seats or simply bending their heads down between their knees.

  Razor by this time had brought the bus up level with the lorry, the two vehicles accelerating side by side towards the barrier. Seventy yards, sixty…and still no flashes erupted from the Serb guns. Fifty, forty…and the lorry slowed abruptly, letting the bus into the lead.

  A single bullet passed through a window behind him, and he could hear a machine-gun open up, but they were ripping through the gap between the two hulks, metal screaming on metal down both flanks of the bus.

  In the lorry behind, Docherty was firing the MP5 blind, his head jammed as far back behind the window as he could get it. He had a flashing glimpse of trees and running men, a concrete building, another armoured car. Beside him Hadzic had his head down beneath the dashboard, but Began was sitting up behind the wheel, with only the look in his eyes to show that he wasn’t going on a picnic. As the bus ahead blasted its way through the gap he let out a great whoop, which seemed made up in equal parts of triumph and terror.

  His steering wasn’t quite as good as Razor’s, the lorry missing the car on the right by a foot or so and giving the one on the left an enormous side-swipe. It rocked on the road like a train on bad tracks, righted itself and sped on after the bus, the soldiers in the back still firing at the vanishing checkpoint.

  Another half a mile down the road they found the Bosnian Army waiting to welcome them to what, by Bosnian standards, was safe territory.

  One woman in the bus had been cut by flying glass, but everyone else was unharmed.

  11

  The bureaucratic niceties involved in relocating from one tribal patch to another took up the best part of an hour. The local Bosnian commander was not used to British soldiers emerging, guns blazing, from Serb-held territory, and he wanted more explanation than Docherty was prepared to give him. He spent several minutes reading the small print on their UN accreditation and then simply looked at Docherty, eyebrows raised, as if to say: ‘Surely you don’t take me for that big a fool?’

  At this point Hadzic took over, speaking so fast in his own tongue that Chris had trouble understanding what he was saying. At the end of it all the local commander looked at them, sighed, and handed back their papers with slight distaste. ‘OK, you can go,’ he said.

  ‘What the hell did Hadzic tell him?’ Docherty asked Chris.

  ‘I told him you were mercenaries,’ the Bosnian said from behind them. ‘And that we didn’t have so much help from the outside world that we could afford to antagonise men who had just saved thirty of our women from a Serb brothel.’

  Docherty laughed. ‘I take it the man didn’t approve.’

  ‘He was regular army,’ Hadzic said. ‘Probably had a good career going for him before someone pulled the rug out from under his feet.’

  They walked back out to the vehicles, which were empty.

  ‘Where are they all?’ Docherty asked Razor and the Dame.

  ‘Having a bath,’ was the reply. ‘And then some food, I think. I could do with some breakfast myself,’ the Londoner added.

  They found the unit’s mess by following their noses. A train of coaches stood on the nearby railway line, and on the ground in front of them several men were busy keeping up the fire under two large tureens of bean soup. These had presumably been ordered for the women, but there seemed plenty to go round, and the SAS men were soon offered bowls of the thick, steaming liquid. The unit’s commander might not like mercenaries, but his cooks seemed more impressed by results than motivation.

  There was bread too, stale perhaps, but delicious once softened by the soup. And each man was given a cup of a hot, bitter-sweet liquid that they later discovered was supposed to be coffee.

  The women arrived in dribs and drabs, and were taken up into one of the coaches for their food. They all looked cleaner, and some looked readier to take on the world. Many, though, still seemed in shock. Nena was one of the stronger-looking. She glanced across to where Docherty was sipping coffee, perched on a pile of sacking, and a faint smile seemed to cross her lips, as if she was remembering another world.

  Light was showing over the rim of the eastern hills as they resumed their journey. It was a bitterly cold morning, but the local commander had donated a recent shipment of blankets for the women on the unheated bus, and the clear sky promised a sunny day.

  It was only about ten miles to Visoko as the crow flew, but the actual driving distance was more than twice that, and the drivers could rarely exceed twenty miles an hour on the winding snow-covered road. The sun had cleared the high horizon before they arrived, transforming the countryside for the four SAS men, who had only seen Bosnia under cloud.

  Docherty was reminded of the area around Aviemore in Scotland, until the road wound down into Visoko, where a tall minaret broke the surface of the steep-roofed houses.

  The cobbled town square would have looked untouched by the war, if the local military hadn’t picked the old town hall for its HQ. They drew up their vehicles in front of it, an
d sat waiting while Hadzic went in to report their arrival.

  Their last hosts had radioed ahead, and they were expected, though no mention seemed to have been made of British soldiers, mercenary or otherwise. A group of local women were waiting to take care of those rescued from Vogosca and their rescuers had been allocated a billet a hundred yards or so from the square.

  It was an old stone house, probably dating back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ‘Serbs lived here,’ Hadzic told Docherty as they pushed in through the unlocked front door, but he either didn’t know or wouldn’t say what had happened to them. Wherever the Serbs were now, most of their possessions remained in the house. There was a three-month-old newspaper lying open on the table in the kitchen.

  Hajrija having stayed with the women, the Bosnian men divided up the two bedrooms between them, leaving the SAS men to spread out their sleeping bags in the single large downstairs room. All were exhausted, but sleep only came easily for Chris. Each of the others found it hard to turn off their minds, which seemed intent on running endless replays of the previous night’s events.

  As usual Docherty woke first, at around two o’clock in the afternoon, and went in search of a toilet. He found it occupied by a whistling Bosnian, and ducked out through the back door in search of an alternative. There he found Hadzic cheerfully pissing against a wall, eyes squinting against the smoke from the upturned cigarette between his lips.

  It was a beautiful day, the sun high in a clear blue sky. Through a gap in the houses ahead, mountains rose across the valley, while above the roofs behind, a rock face rose almost sheer behind the town, before flattening out into pine-covered slopes. Some two hundred yards away the top of the minaret peeked up through the red-tiled roofs, looking strangely like a fairground rocket.

  ‘You come with me now to see the General?’ Hadzic asked.

  Docherty reluctantly turned his eyes away from the illusion of a world at peace. ‘Aye,’ he said.