Bosnian Inferno

by David Monnery

  There was Docherty at their wedding, still treating Isabel as if she was an invalid, and there was Reeve on the day their son was born, looking like a boy himself, so young and proud, and there were the crucified bodies on the wall, the man and the woman and the two children, and there she was in the gymnasium at Vogosca with the waves of crying ebbing and flowing like a sea of sadness.

  ‘Will you ever be the same again?’ a voice asked, and she answered, angrily: ‘No, of course not!’ and then there was silence for a moment, a silence of snow and blue sky. Then the voice asked: ‘Will you ever be happy again?’ and she said: ‘Yes, yes, I promise!’ and she wondered if it was a promise she could keep.

  They had been told to take their pick of the empty rooms at the youth hostel, and Hajrija picked out one on the first floor. ‘Razor, can I talk with you,’ she asked, beckoning him in.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, surprised but daring to hope.

  She pushed the door shut behind him and stood there, not saying anything, just looking at him, waiting.

  In the dark she looked so serious, he thought. So sad. He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, and felt her arms reach around his neck, and her body press into his.

  They kissed for what seemed like minutes, and then finally managed to shed their jackets and hats and belts before kissing for several more. They shed their boots and half tripped on to the narrow bed, slowly disentangling themselves from the top half of the Arctic gear, and lying there half-naked, oblivious to the cold. He kissed her breasts and raised his face to hers. In the darkness of the room all he could see was a faint glow on either cheek and two excited eyes that shone deep and dark.

  They made love as if they never would again, and then sank into an exhausted sleep.

  Soon after dawn, as they were disentangling themselves for the third time, the window blew in, swiftly followed by the sound of an enormous explosion.

  The first Serb shell had landed on Zavik.

  They gingerly slid out from under the glass-strewn blanket. ‘Are you OK?’ Razor asked, holding her naked body against his own.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. She was shivering, and not all from the cold.

  ‘Some couples feel the earth move,’ Razor murmured. ‘We seem to hear the sound of breaking glass.’

  14

  The bombardment continued throughout the day. At first a shell would land every few minutes, but from mid-morning onwards the gaps became longer, as if the Serbs were either growing bored or intent on conserving ammunition. The previous day’s mist had lifted, revealing a layer of clouds which grew more broken as the morning progressed. Whether this improvement in visibility was a good thing, Docherty was unable to decide. It presumably gave the Serbs more chance of hitting what they were aiming at, but since they were apparently content with landing their shells anywhere in the town, that didn’t seem such an important consideration. For the townspeople, he suspected, a first taste of artillery bombardment in yesterday’s mist would have been even more unnerving than what they were having to endure.

  Most of the town’s population – reckoned by Reeve at just over two thousand – were now sheltering in their own or a neighbour’s basement or cellar, listening to each crack of man-made thunder and wondering where on their mental map of friends and acquaintances each particular blow had fallen.

  One of the first shells had landed on the school. Two children had been crushed by a falling roof, and another dozen injured, some of them seriously. About the same number of adults had been injured during the confusion of the first hour, and three men and two women had been killed, all in their beds, when their houses exploded around them.

  Once the initial shock had subsided the more or less regular gaps between shells gave people a chance to move around in relative safety. It was Sarajevo without the snipers, Nena Reeve thought bitterly, as she hurried down the street towards the youth hostel. Optimistically, as it turned out. She arrived in the hostel’s basement at the same time as one of Reeve’s young soldiers, who had come with the news that a man had just been shot dead in the main square. Almost certainly by a sniper.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Reeve asked, seeing her standing in the doorway.

  ‘I assume you need doctors,’ she said.

  ‘Christ, yes. Hold on a minute.’ He barked rapid-fire orders at two men, both of whom Nena suddenly recognized as the sons of an old friend. The last time she’d seen them they were about sixteen, and on their way to university in Belgrade.

  Reeve stood up. ‘We’ll wait for the next shell and then I’ll take you over to the hospital,’ he said.

  ‘Hospital?’

  ‘We’ve cleared out one of the underground crypts in the old castle…’ He raised a hand. ‘I know it’s not the ideal place, but it’s safe from shelling. And it’s the best I could think of at a moment’s notice.’

  She looked at him. ‘You really are running this town, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘What about your career? The SAS?’

  He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t leave the children at the beginning, and then I became kind of indispensable all round. I haven’t had many choices, Nena…’ He grinned suddenly. ‘But in any case…’

  There was the thud of an explosion, some distance away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  They went up the stairs, out into the street and turned uphill towards where the old ruined castle looked out over the town from its perch just beneath the clifftop. Away to the right the frozen waterfall was glistening in the sunlight.

  ‘And some things are more important than the SAS,’ he added, as if to himself. This was not the time to ask her about herself, he thought.

  ‘You never used to think so,’ she said. ‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not fair.’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ he said, as they reached the castle entrance. The booth where tourists had bought their entrance tickets was lying on its side in the snow like a badly made toboggan.

  ‘How many other doctors are there in the town?’ she asked.

  ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Dr Muhmedalisa, remember him? He should be here. And then there’s old Bosnic. He should have retired ages ago, but…His eyesight’s more or less gone altogether, I’m afraid…’

  They walked down steep stone steps and found themselves in a large, medieval-style chamber. Two oil stoves had been brought in to provide heat, and a man was busy trying to shut off the draughts. Mattresses had been arranged in two rows along either wall, and most were already occupied. The only doctor visible was patiently trying to undo a new bandage, holding it up to within an inch of his eyes. At the other end of the room a young girl was screaming in pain.

  Nena went to look at her.

  ‘Where’s Muhmedalisa?’ Reeve asked Bosnic.

  ‘He was killed about two hours ago,’ Bosnic said curtly.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘That child needs morphine,’ Nena said, hurrying up. ‘Where are the drugs?’

  ‘What we have are there,’ Bosnic said, peering at her myopically. ‘You’re Nena Abdic, I remember your voice. You’re a nurse.’

  ‘A doctor now.’ She was looking through the box. ‘There’s hardly anything here,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all there is,’ Reeve said.

  ‘Won’t Jamie and the others be carrying medical kits? And at least one of them should have medical training. That’s the way it works, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll go and find out,’ Reeve said. ‘Welcome home,’ he added, as the girl started screaming again.

  An hour later Chris and Razor were both helping out at the improvised hospital, and the SAS medical kits had been added to the town’s supply. Docherty and the Dame were halfway up the mountain by this time, accompanying Reeve and Tijanic on a mission with two objectives. First they wanted to pinpoint the location of the Serbs’ artillery piece, and second that of the sniper. In case they discovered the latter, the Dame had brought along the Accuracy International.

  Th
ey hadn’t needed to take the Stair; a couple of extended planks were available on the town side of the blown bridge. After they had walked across, another of Reeve’s men had retracted the makeshift crossing and settled down to await their return.

  It took them half an hour to reach the top of the toboggan meadow, and another to find a suitable place to sweep the far side of the valley with their binoculars. The gun wasn’t immediately visible, but they had doubted whether it would be, even from the crest above them. The Serbs would have taken care to camouflage it at the very least, and probably to remove it completely from any possible enemy line of sight.

  It was the Dame who found it, behind the crest of a hill away to the right of the town. He had the rifle’s telescopic sight trained in just the right direction to catch a shimmering in the cold air as the Serb gun fired. As he patiently waited to confirm his suspicion, a head momentarily popped up above the horizon. A minute later the same shimmering accompanied the sound of the gun firing.

  They marked a line in on Reeve’s map and then moved a few hundred yards through the trees to the east. From there they were able to draw an intersecting line and plot the exact location of the gun.

  Then they started scouring the whole far side of the valley, looking for the sniper. Two hours of lying in the snow later, they were beginning to despair of finding him when Reeve let out a quiet whoop of triumph. ‘Start at the top of the minaret,’ he said, ‘and go straight up until you hit the track on the hill. Just to the right there’s a group of trees. The one on the right-hand end just moved, and none of the others did.’

  The Dame cradled the Accuracy International to his shoulder and stared through the sight. He thought he could detect a darker shadow inside the tree but he wasn’t sure. ‘Too far away,’ he said. ‘And in any case I can’t get a clean shot from here. If I miss he’ll just disappear into the trees.’

  ‘How about from down in the town?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘No reason why not.’

  Back in Zavik, Docherty and Reeve visited the hospital, where the situation, though far from good, had at least improved since the morning. ‘There have only been a couple more wounded this afternoon,’ Razor told them.

  ‘Are any of these in danger?’ Reeve asked, looking round.

  ‘Quite a few.’

  ‘We can’t treat them here,’ Nena said, coming over to join them. ‘We don’t have enough medicine, and I don’t have the right kinds of skills.’ She looked exhausted, Docherty thought, but something else as well. There was more than a trace of her old self present – having others to take care of had at least been good for her.

  ‘There’s nowhere else to take them,’ Reeve was saying. ‘You can give me a shopping list of medicines and I’ll try and fill it, but we’re talking about a minimum of several days. I can’t risk the few men I’ve got on half-thought-out operations.’

  ‘If you don’t, then some of these children will be at risk.’

  ‘OK, OK. But first we have to deal with the gun up there, or there’ll be more and more wounded to deal with. Are you and your boys in on this, Jamie?’

  Docherty gave him a wry smile. It was a question he’d been expecting since their location of the Serb gun. ‘Probably,’ he said. He looked at Reeve. ‘But we’re here in the first place because our bosses were pissed off at one Brit taking sides in this war. I think I’d better talk to the others before we add four more to the charge sheet.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Reeve said equably.

  ‘Are you two needed here?’ Docherty asked Razor and Chris.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ Nena answered for them.

  The three SAS men waited several minutes for the sound of a shell landing, then hurried back down to the hostel, taking care to make use of all the available cover.

  ‘Where’s the Dame?’ Chris asked Docherty.

  ‘Out hunting,’ the PC said.

  It had taken the Dame fifteen minutes to find what seemed a suitable location, in the upstairs room of an empty house on the western edge of the town. The tree in question was now only three hundred yards away, just within the limits of the Covert PM variant of the Accuracy International. He erected the built-in bipod support, put his eye to the Schmidt & Bender telescopic sight, and there was the Serbian sniper, or at least the edges of his body. The man was perched about ten feet up in the cedar tree, but mostly hidden behind the trunk, his rifle resting against a convenient branch. When he next went to use it, the Dame would have him.

  The minutes went by. The Dame thought he could see cigarette smoke drifting out from behind the trunk, and had a mental picture of his dead father lighting one of the forty Players No. 6 he had smoked each day. Every time he had lit one up at home his mother had coughed, just the once, to register her disapproval. What with the all the new stuff about passive smoking, he supposed she’d been right.

  There was movement in the tree, and the man’s face came into view, a hand putting the cigarette to his mouth. The light was beginning to fade and there was a slight glow as he dragged on it. The man was an amateur, the Dame thought.

  He watched as the Serb picked up his rifle – which looked suspiciously like a British Lee-Enfield – and slowly scanned the town across the river, looking for a target. An almost imperceptible tightening of the shoulders told the Dame he had found one.

  The SAS man wriggled his shoulder to make sure the rifle’s butt was comfortable, worked the bolt action, aligned the cross-hairs above the bridge of the Serb’s nose, and squeezed the trigger. A black hole appeared where it was supposed to, and then the man was gone. The Dame shifted the telescopic sight downwards, through the cloud of snow that was still falling from the disturbed branches, and found the dark shape lying motionless beneath the tree.

  One more, he thought. One more.

  He packed up the rifle and went back down through the empty house. At the doorway something strange made him pause. Then he realized: no shell had landed on the town for quite a while. Maybe the bastards had run out of them. Maybe they were having their tea break.

  Back at the hostel he found the other three having one.

  ‘Did you get him?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Yep,’ he said, looking round. ‘Where’s my cup of tea?’

  Razor did the honours.

  ‘OK,’ Docherty said, when the requisite cup had been poured and sugared, ‘we have some decisions to take.’ He grunted. ‘Like decide what the fuck we’re doing here.’

  ‘What are the choices, boss?’ Chris asked seriously. ‘This is not our war. I mean, I don’t know who’s in the right. Does anyone?’

  ‘Ah, c’mon,’ Razor said. ‘You’ve just spent the day trying to patch up kids who’ve been hit by indiscriminate shell fire. You know that’s not right.’

  ‘Sure,’ Chris said. ‘And what happened to those women, I know. But what I don’t know is whether we’ve just seen one side of all this. You were there when they threw the sniper out of the window. That wasn’t right either.’

  ‘He’d shot half a dozen kids!’

  ‘I know. But my point is, I think the whole country’s gone mad.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Aye,’ Docherty interjected, ‘the whole country has gone mad, and it’s not up to us to sort it out. Like Chris says, it’s not our war. But…we’re here, and I don’t think we can just walk away from what we see with our own eyes. It may be only one side, but right here, right now, there’s a town being destroyed for no other reason than that it wants to live in peace.’

  ‘What are you saying we ought to do, boss?’ Razor asked.

  ‘I’m not. I don’t know. And it’s different for me – I don’t have a future with the Regiment to worry about…’

  ‘Fuck that for a game of soldiers,’ Razor said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Chris agreed, ‘that’s not a problem.’

  ‘Anyway, us three can say we were just following orders,’ Razor said with a grin.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Docherty agreed. ‘Problem is, I still
haven’t got any orders for you to follow.’

  ‘OK,’ Razor said. ‘Try this. We’re not hanging around to win the war for anyone, but we’re not just making a run for good ol’ Blighty. So we’re going to do what we can and then head home. So what can we do?’

  ‘Take out the Serb gun,’ the Dame said.

  ‘Aye. And maybe do something about those children. I have a feeling it’s time I reported in. And I’m going to ask if someone can arrange choppers to take out the badly wounded and any other children whose parents want them to leave.’

  ‘You think there’s any chance they’ll agree to that?’ Chris asked doubtfully.

  ‘Split’s less than an hour away, and I can’t see how anyone could see it as anything other than a humanitarian mission…’ He shrugged. ‘But I expect they’ll say no. I can only find out by asking.’

  ‘What are you going to say about Reeve?’ Razor asked.

  Docherty shrugged. ‘I’ll just tell them what’s happened here. If they ask me, I shall say that in my opinion Sergeant Reeve has acted in the best interests of the people here and in the best traditions of the Regiment.’

  ‘You’re not going to mention the Cheshires’ lorryload of frozen oven chips then, boss?’ Razor asked.

  The PC grunted. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, laughing. ‘But I’d better talk to Reeve first, in any case. And I’ll tell him we’re on for tonight.’ He paused. ‘If any of you don’t want to be involved in this, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘If I wasn’t a friend of Reeve’s I’m not at all sure whether I’d be going.’

  ‘We are, boss,’ Razor said.

  ‘I don’t like people who can’t even be bothered to aim their artillery,’ Chris remarked.

  Docherty found Reeve standing alone, smoking a cigarette, outside the entrance to the makeshift hospital.

  ‘You’re not running short on them, then?’ he asked.

  ‘These? No, we were lucky. There was a delivery lorry here a few days before the blockade was tightened. The driver was a Serb and wanted to risk it, but we dissuaded him.’ Reeve smiled. ‘He married one of the local girls a few weeks ago – a Croat. It’s been an education, Jamie, this war. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’