The two men walked down the narrow street to the square. There were not many people on the street, but there were some, and Docherty was thinking that at least some semblance of normal life had been preserved here. The distant sound of a hundred children shouting and screaming suggested a school that was actually functioning.
They found the ‘General’ in a small room at the back of the old town hall. He turned out to be a handsome young Bosnian named Ajanovic, with wavy, light-brown hair and green eyes. He was about twenty-eight, Docherty guessed, and had probably been a lieutenant in the old Yugoslav Army. He also, it turned out, spoke excellent English, thanks to a six-month stint in Australia, where half his family had long since emigrated. Docherty took to him instantly, without knowing why, and was pleased to see his judgement vindicated over the course of their discussion.
Hadzic went through the events of the last few days: the discovery that Nena Reeve was in Vogosca, the idea for a joint rescue mission, the rescue itself. Ajanovic listened with great interest, offered them both cigarettes, and said that all of that was very clear, but what were Docherty and Co. doing in Sarajevo in the first place? Who were they?
Hadzic looked at Docherty, who decided to take a chance. They were regular British soldiers, he said, and they’d been sent in to make contact with another British soldier, who was apparently leading a small army of irregulars in the vicinity of Zavik…
‘That’s in Serb-held territory,’ Ajanovic said in his Australian-accented English.
‘We know.’
Ajanovic looked at him and smiled boyishly. ‘What a war,’ he said.
The UN wanted Reeve out, Docherty went on, and the Croats, and the Serbs. ‘And your Government,’ he added diplomatically. ‘Everyone is saying he makes it harder to get peace. And even if that only means he’s everyone’s excuse for continuing to fight, then it makes sense to get him out.’
‘Are you supposed to kill him?’ Ajanovic asked. ‘Terminate him with extreme prejudice,’ he enunciated carefully. ‘I saw that movie in Sydney. And this war is even crazier,’ he added.
‘He’s a friend,’ Docherty said simply.
‘Ah, I’m sorry. And his name is Reeve, so the woman is his wife, yes?’
‘Yes.’
Ajanovic leaned back in his chair. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘So what do you want from me?’
‘Three things, if possible. Some sort of authorization to get us as far as Serb territory, any intelligence you have of the military situation between here and Zavik, and a vehicle of some kind. The lorry we came in if nothing else. Something a bit smaller and more manoeuvrable would be better.’
‘You know the British UN base is only forty kilometres up the road, in Vitez?’
‘Aye. I was hoping to avoid involving them. You see…’
‘Yes, yes, I can see why,’ Ajanovic agreed. ‘But you do understand – what you are doing may be for the good of us all, but it will not help my people in this war, and it is hard to justify giving away anything which we might find useful.’
‘Aye, I understand that,’ Docherty said. He would have felt the same in the other man’s shoes.
‘But,’ Ajanovic continued, ‘there is a – what do you call it? – a transit van? A van with seats…’
‘Sounds ideal…’
‘Ah, there is a catch. It needs repair, and we have lost our mechanic. If you have one…’
‘We do.’
‘OK, it is of no use to us. As for the other things, I could write you a hundred authorizations but it would do you no good. I am the commander for this district, and that is all. I have no superiors giving me orders from outside, and no one outside will accept my orders. This is a war in compartments, yes? The next commander you meet may have you shot as spies.’ He shrugged and laughed. ‘I like the English,’ he said, ‘and I am grateful on my country’s behalf that you risked your lives for our women. So any information we have is yours. But your own people in Vitez will know more.
‘I will give you one more piece of advice. If you could travel as something other than what you are, it will be safer for you. Perhaps your people at Vitez can arrange for you to have journalists’ papers.’
Docherty thanked him, but didn’t see any reason to admit that they already had the various such accreditations Thornton had provided in Sarajevo. He asked where the van was, hoping it had the right number of wheels and an engine. Ajanovic left the room and came back a couple of minutes later with another uniformed soldier, this one barely out of his teens. ‘Kemal will show your man the vehicle,’ he said. ‘And our intelligence man works in the office next to this. His name is Akim, and I have told him to give you any information he has that you need. Do you know when you will be leaving?’
‘That depends on how good our mechanic is,’ Docherty said.
‘Then we may meet again.’ Ajanovic offered his hand, and the two men shook. Docherty found himself hoping this man survived the war.
He and Hadzic walked back to the house, where the SAS men were in various stages of getting up. Razor was shaving, Chris rummaging through his bergen for a clean shirt, the Dame leaned up against the wall in his sleeping bag reading a Yugoslav tourist guide. ‘Having a nice holiday, are we?’ Docherty asked them.
‘This is a good B&B, boss,’ Razor observed, ‘except for the lack of beds and breakfast.’
‘Been out sightseeing, boss?’ Chris asked.
Docherty told them whom he’d seen. ‘There’s a boy out here wants to show you a van,’ he told the Dame. ‘It needs some sort of fixing, but I don’t know what. See what can you do.’
‘What if it’s unfixable?’ Razor asked.
Docherty shrugged. ‘I guess we fight Hadzic and his boys for the lorry.’
‘I’m game,’ Razor said.
‘Yeah, we all know which of his boys you’d like to wrestle,’ Chris murmured.
As if on cue, Hajrija appeared in the doorway. ‘Nena is here,’ she told Docherty. ‘She likes to talk to you.’
‘Where is she?’
‘In the street.’
Docherty walked out to find her leaning up against a wall, apparently lost in thought. She was wearing the jeans they had found her in, and a large coat that she had since acquired from somewhere. She looked cold.
‘Are you coming in?’ Docherty asked her.
‘No, I…I feel like being outside in the sunshine. You know? Can we walk?’
‘Aye, of course. Just let me tell the lads.’ He slipped back inside, told Chris and Razor to see Akim at the town hall and to start planning their route to Zavik, and re-emerged half a minute later to find her in the same position.
‘This way?’ he suggested, looking down the road towards the far-off mountains.
They started walking, in silence at first.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he eventually said. ‘I can only try and imagine what you’ve been through…If you want to talk, I can listen.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Not to a man. Not even to a good man,’ she added, looking straight ahead. ‘Tell me what you are doing here. Hajrija told me some of it, but I’m not sure she understands it completely.’
Docherty went through it all again, from the moment he had picked up the phone and heard Barney Davies talking to him over the bar chatter at Glasgow Central.
She listened in silence, and when he had finished turned to him with a perplexed look in her eyes. ‘Why did you say yes, Jamie?’ she wanted to know. ‘Why did Isabel let you?’
‘I’ve been asking myself the same thing,’ he said. ‘And you know, there’s a voice in my head saying “OK, you’ve been a soldier, you think you know what war is, well, you don’t. You’ve just been through soldiers’ games like Oman and the Falklands and Northern Ireland. You’ve been through wars where the rules get bent. But this is a war where there aren’t any rules.” I…’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘this is not what you need to hear right now.’
‘I asked
the question,’ she said.
They walked on for another minute in silence. ‘You’ll take me to Zavik, then?’ she asked eventually.
‘Only if you’re sure you want to go.’
‘I’ve already tried to get there once.’
He wondered how long the bitterness would colour her voice, and thought about Isabel. It had left his wife’s voice, but it had only been an outward manifestation of the breakages within. Her experience with the torturers would always be part of her.
They were almost at the edge of town. A hundred yards ahead their road joined the main highway, which bypassed Visoko to the north. Beyond that the wall of mountains bathed in the afternoon sunshine.
She shivered. ‘When do we go?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘That’s an Everly Brothers song,’ she said. ‘You remember Reeve loves the Everly Brothers?’
‘Aye.’ The idiot had sung ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’ at his own wedding reception. Badly.
‘I can’t believe he is doing what they say he is doing,’ she said.
‘No,’ Docherty agreed, but a small doubt nestled in the back of his mind. He knew what this war had done to him in a week. God only knew what it had done to Reeve in nine months.
After Docherty’s departure with Nena, Razor had found Hajrija standing in the garden, staring into space.
‘Hajrija,’ he said gently, but she jumped anyway.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said angrily when she saw it was him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I…’ He shrugged helplessly.
‘No, I am sorry,’ she said. She pushed her hair back from her eyes in characteristic fashion. ‘It is hard,’ she said, looking at him almost pleadingly. ‘To be with those girls after what happens to them. It breaks my heart. But I must be strong and make them happy, you understand.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you need a hug.’ He opened his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, and she burrowed her head into his neck, her tears running down inside his shirt.
‘Thank you,’ she said after a couple of minutes, pulling herself gently away.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, thinking he’d never seen anyone he desired half as much. ‘How’s the girl?’ he asked. ‘The one from the house…’
Hajrija looked distraught again. ‘Satka,’ she said. ‘Her name is Satka, and I forget to tell you – she wants to see you, “the man with the funny face” she calls you. She is…She is OK, I think. You know? Not sick.’
‘I know,’ he said. Not sick perhaps, but who knew what damage had been done?
‘We can go now,’ she said. ‘It is not far. Two streets.’
‘Why not.’
They went back into the house, where Chris was looking through his bird book as he waited for Razor.
‘I’ve got a house call to make,’ Razor told him. ‘I’ll meet you at the town hall in half an hour or so.’
Chris nodded and smiled knowingly at him.
‘I’m the man with the funny face,’ Razor shouted back over his shoulder as they left the house.
He didn’t feel like cracking any jokes once they reached the place where the women had been temporarily housed. It was a large building next to the mosque, part of a religious school, as Hajrija explained. Satka, along with nine of the youngest women, was sharing one of five mattresses in an upstairs room. When Razor arrived all the other women seemed to shrink away from him, despite the presence of Hajrija.
Satka, though, was pleased to see him, and they talked for ten minutes, with Hajrija translating. She was twelve, she said, and when the men had come to their village her mother had told her to hide. When she came out everyone was gone, and all the houses were burning. She’d stayed there for a couple of days but no one had come back, so she’d tried walking to the next village, and that was when the other men had found her and made her go with them in their car.
Up to this point she told the story almost as if entranced by her own narrative flow, but then abruptly she shifted into the third person, using ‘she’ instead of ‘I’ when describing how the men had hurt her and kept her tied up, right up to the moment when ‘she’ was rescued by the ‘man with the funny face’.
Razor listened, smiling encouragingly, and thought that never before had he fully understood the meaning of the phrase ‘a broken heart’. He wanted to promise this girl that he’d take her to England that very minute, but he knew that he couldn’t, and even that he shouldn’t.
At least she was alive, he thought, as they walked back down to the building’s courtyard. It wasn’t enough.
‘I think you need hug now,’ Hajrija told him, putting her arms round his neck.
After parting with Nena, Docherty let his feet carry him round the town. The temptation to stay another day was strong, and he could think of at least one good reason to reinforce the desire. They needed the rest, not so much from the physical stresses as from the emotional ones. None of them had ever been through anything like this before. So far the other three had performed in exemplary fashion, but the danger signs were there: a lack of jokes from Razor, almost total silence from the Dame, and his own tendency to let things slide, as evidenced by the fact that he was strolling round the town rather than doing what needed to be done.
Only Chris seemed to be taking it all in his stride. Maybe they should all take up bird-watching.
His stomach suddenly let loose an angry rumble, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten for about twelve hours. And presumably neither had the others. ‘The least you can do is keep your men fed, Docherty,’ he told himself out loud.
Back at their lodging he found Began brewing tea in the kitchen. ‘Where is Hadzic?’ Docherty asked. Began grinned and shrugged.
Docherty came out of the kitchen door just as Hajrija came in through the front. ‘Ah, I need you,’ she said.
‘I’m spoken for, love.’
She looked at him questioningly.
‘What do you need me for?’ he asked.
‘I need to say I come to Zavik with you, yes?’
Docherty’s first thought was that this would make Razor’s day. His second was that it was impossibly irregular, his third that she’d be invaluable in several ways. His fourth, he expressed out loud: ‘Will Hadzic let you go?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I join up, I leave. No problems.’
‘It doesn’t quite work like that in the British Army,’ he said, ‘but if it’s OK with your boss, we’d love to have you along.’
She beamed at him. ‘That is good.’
‘You can ask Hadzic now,’ Docherty said, catching sight of the Bosnian commander through the open door, crossing the street towards them.
Hadzic seemed rather less sanguine about letting her go than Hajrija had led Docherty to believe, but after an animated five-minute exchange of opinions in Serbo-Croat he reluctantly acquiesced in the transfer of her loyalties.
‘Is there any spare food in this town?’ Docherty asked them both when they’d finished, ‘or do we have to break open some emergency rations?’
‘There is a place for soup,’ Hadzic said. ‘You want to go there now?’
‘When the others get back.’
Began called out something from the kitchen.
‘Who wants tea?’ Hadzic translated.
‘We do,’ Razor said from the doorway. Chris was behind him.
‘I come back later,’ Hajrija told them all, on her way out.
The three SAS men took their mugs of tea and sat round a large-scale map of the region, discussing the information Razor and Chris had managed to glean at the town hall. Zavik was about ninety twisting miles away, all but twenty-five of them through allegedly safe territory. The first thirty miles to Vitez followed the main highway, and the road south from there to Gornji Vakuf was apparently being kept open by the British UN contingent of Cheshires as a supply route for themselves.
‘With any luck we can hijack a Mars Bar shipment,’ Chr
is said.
Razor grunted. ‘The problems begin after that,’ he said. ‘The road to Bugojno is supposedly open, but the town’s probably being bombarded by the Serbs. Beyond there, we have a very dicey road to Kupres, which the Serbs seem to hold, and then the last stretch to Zavik, right up in the mountains. I’m beginning to think even an HAHO drop would be preferable to driving this fucker.’
‘We don’t seem to have that option,’ Chris said.
‘That’s why he’s suggesting it,’ Docherty said with a grin. ‘By the way, Hajrija is coming along for the ride.’
Chris shook his head. ‘The man’s in danger of charisma overload,’ he said.
Razor, though, didn’t seem so pleased. ‘Why, boss?’ he asked seriously.
‘She asked. I guess she wants to keep Nena company.’
‘And why did you agree?’
‘I think it will be good for Nena to have another woman along. And Hajrija knows Zavik. We already know she’s a good soldier.’
‘OK, boss.’
‘If you think I’ve made a wrong decision, say so.’
Razor smiled. ‘No, boss, I don’t think you made a wrong decision. I guess I just don’t like the thought…you know what I mean.’
‘Aye.’
‘If we’re gonna be walking over snow-covered mountains she’ll need some better gear than what she’s been wearing,’ Chris said.
‘Aye, so will Nena. I have a horrible feeling we’re going to have to visit the Cheshires after all.’
‘Maybe they’ll lend us a Warrior,’ the Dame said from the doorway.
‘No joy with the van?’ Razor asked.
‘It’s outside,’ the Dame said.
They filed out into the street, where a sorry-looking vehicle greeted their eyes. The VW Microbus had obviously seen some action, though whether in a war or a demolition derby was impossible to tell. The various wounds it had suffered had all been duly painted over, in a veritable kaleidoscope of different shades. The overall effect was of a mottled, rusty, hippie camper.
‘Far out,’ Razor said sarcastically.
‘The motor’s OK,’ the Dame said. ‘And it does about seventy.’
The interior had been customized, presumably to improve its troop-carrying capacity. Behind the solid front seat two wooden benches ran along either side of the vehicle. It was roomy enough, Docherty thought. Not as sturdy as the lorry perhaps, but easier on petrol and more manoeuvrable.
Bosnian Inferno Page 16
