Deep Black ns-7

by Andy McNab

  The bus driver turned the wheel sharp left and Jerry’s head jerked to the side, but his eyes never left the runway. He had shrunk into his own little world. I could see him gazing across the tarmac, maybe picturing the razor-wire entanglements, the sandbag sangars, the white APCs full of UN troops trying to stop us, and the Serb fire arcing towards us under the floodlights. But we weren’t going to go over all that now. Sarajevo was still too tense for talk of politics and war and, besides, the general and his sidekick were taking up too much oxygen as it was.

  New Dad turned to the young woman beside him.

  ‘General, have you met Liliana? Ministry of Internal Affairs?’

  ‘Oh, yes, rather.’ Liliana’s brown linen trouser suit must have cost her a packet on Fifth Avenue, and as far as the general was concerned, it was worth every penny. I could just imagine him leering at her over the tray of Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s cocktail party.

  ‘You’re with SFOR, General?’

  ‘Paddy’s military adviser, for my sins.’

  No wonder the peace process had been like wading through treacle.

  ‘It seems to me that only the British are carrying out the captures,’ Liliana said with a coy smile. ‘You’re so very good at it, how come you haven’t yet captured Karadic?’

  The general chuckled. ‘These chaps are jolly hard to ferret out, you know. Always on the move. But maybe that’s no bad thing, my dear. It’s best not to start with the most indigestible item on the menu. Go for something light to start with, what?’

  I switched my attention back to Jerry: his eyes still hadn’t left the other side of the runway.

  65

  Monday, 13 October 2003

  The bus hissed to a stop outside the terminal and we all filed off. The plebs, which included Jerry and me, herded themselves towards the one passport-control box that was open. The general and his chums with the blue diplomatic passports went straight through the Diplomats and SFOR channel. I hoped his luggage was still in Oberammergau.

  As we joined the queue my eyes started to close; they felt like they’d been dipped in grit. It had been a long journey. The drive from Baghdad to Turkey had gone OK, apart from the moment our fixer tried to overtake an American armoured convoy. He’d realized his mistake when he received three warning shots across the bonnet.

  At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the Sunday Telegraph to explain the change of plan. We’d taken a flight to Vienna, then caught a connection here. Jerry’s card had taken a real beating, but the paper was going to pay him back, so what the fuck?

  Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.

  The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.

  The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible Mark. We hadn’t been able to get any in Vienna, so we made a deal: thirteen euros for the trip to the hotel – far more than the eight-K journey was worth. During the war it had been Deutschmarks everyone wanted. Now, it was euros. This had to be about the only area of the world that wasn’t much fussed about the dollar.

  Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of The Sound of Music, but ten years ago the Serbs had used them to bomb the shit out of the city.

  Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautiful: the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.

  The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.

  ‘Where you from?’

  In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.

  He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’

  Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.

  It was my turn. ‘You American?’

  ‘Australian.’

  Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.

  66

  We hit the main drag that paralleled the Miljacka. The broad dual carriageway was heaving with vehicles, and every other one was a VW Golf. Volkswagen had had a factory here before the war, and every man and his dog seemed to drive one.

  The driver tore along Vojvode Putnika as if it was still Snipers’ Alley and he knew he was in somebody’s sights. The Serbs had enjoyed a good arc of fire from the high ground. Hundreds of Sarajevans had been killed in crashes as they drove through the city at 120 k.p.h.

  Jerry was still in his own world as we drove past a host of new construction sites alongside bombed-out reminders of the past. One was the concrete skeleton of what had been a brand new old people’s home. The first pensioners had only just moved in when the Serbs started lobbing shells at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when I last saw it; even the recently erected billboards couldn’t cover up what had happened.

  Despite everything, I liked Sarajevo. I always had. Like Baghdad, it was a grown-up place. It had been here for centuries. There were winding streets, and hundreds of dead ends and small alleyways that went nowhere in particular. Minarets poked up into the sky everywhere you looked, from small wooden mosques, brick ones the size of bungalows, and great big fuck-off ones as big as palaces. The majority of the city’s inhabitants were Muslim, these days, but there was still a scattering of Jews, Orthodox Christians, and even a few hippies who had forgotten to go home in the sixties.

  We passed the UN compound. Lines of white Land Rovers and Land Cruisers were parked outside a square block of concrete and glass. This part of the main had bristled with steel hedgehogs, X-shaped obstacles, placed in the road to prevent the Serb army’s two hundred and fifty or so tanks screaming into the city. Sometimes I’d been able to hear them revving from down town. The hedgehogs hadn’t been the only obstacles you had to try to avoid as you drove towards the airport. There was also any amount of falling concrete, burnt-out vehicles and, now and again, a body or two.

  About a K ahead, a bombed-out tower block – what had been the parliament building – loomed above the city centre.

  ‘Nearly there, Sunny Side Up.’

  Jerry said it as I thought it.

  I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t heard that saying for nearly ten years.

  We hadn’t talked about Rob and Benzil at all. But then, there wasn’t a lot to say.


  The taxi pulled up outside the large yellow cube with a Holiday Inn sign. Last time I was here the ground had been covered with snow, and its nickname was born. It still looked much the same, just a whole lot quieter than when four thousand shells and mortar rounds a day were raining down on the city. To me, it brought back good memories of great chips, and sometimes even sausages when they were on the menu. At least until a sniper got the cook on his way to work one day.

  67

  The Holiday Inn had been forced to close before the war because it was bankrupt, but as all the other hotels in the city were bombed out one by one, it reopened. Even though the prices rose higher and higher the longer the siege went on, it was never short of guests. It didn’t seem to matter that its upper floors were constantly hammered by Serb artillery, rocket and mortar fire: just like the Palestine, it existed to make cash, and it remained the HQ and doss-house for the world’s media.

  Sometimes the power was on, sometimes it was off. Sometimes the rooms were freezing cold, sometimes they were too hot. Whatever, it had to be the only hotel in the world where the most expensive rooms were those without a view. The golden rule of survival was: if you see the sniper, the sniper sees you, and he wouldn’t necessarily be a Serb. This war had attracted weirdos from all over: the neo-Nazis, anyone else who didn’t like Muslims, and the ones who just liked killing people. They all came for a bit of war tourism, were escorted into fire positions on the high ground, and had a crack at anything that moved. There was even some avant-garde Russian writer caught on camera, sniping into the city.

  The Firm’s operations room above the café was about twenty minutes’ walk away – in peace time – but as much as two or three hours during the siege if the snipers were active and people were backed up on the street corners, waiting for the courage to make a run for it.

  When we checked in, the guys behind the desk took our passports as security, just like in the old days. I’d always hated that. I always wondered if it was going to be the last time I’d see it.

  The décor hadn’t changed much: still lots of grey ersatz marble covering just about every surface. Even the reception staff still behaved as if a smile of welcome would get them carted off to the gulags.

  The Holiday Inn was a lot quieter now that no one was getting shot at and no artillery shells were landing in the lobby, but just as busy. I wondered if it was still a haunt for journalists. Probably not. Sarajevo wasn’t that sort of place any more. There were new wars, new stories. Most of the people milling around looked as if they were here on business. Germans and Turks on cells headed for the lifts, wheeling their smart carry-ons behind them.

  A coffee area covered most of the ground floor, with square leather-and-chrome chairs huddled round low tables. In the far corner, the coffee-cum-drinks bar was trying hard to look like a large tent with a stripy canopy above the cappuccino machines and bottles of whisky. The hotel was hollow in the middle. All the rooms were built around the outside walls, so the ten-floor atrium looked like the inside of a state penitentiary. It reminded me of a trip I’d taken to Alcatraz with Kelly.

  We got into the lift and pressed for the first floor. Jerry and I were sharing a double this time. The only available singles were on the top couple of floors.

  Jerry was still in his own world as we got out and followed the landing. He had to start talking soon.

  Room 115 could have been any room in any chain anywhere in the world. It had been redecorated since the war, but dark-wood veneer was still king. And, just like the old days, I found myself looking straight out on to the wreckage of another burned-out building. Not too far beyond it lay the green slopes of Mount Trebevic, the sky above it a flinty blue.

  Before the war, Sarajevans used to escape the city heat by cable car to picnic on the mountainside. Then the Serbs came, and they covered Trebevic in land mines. Either I’d read this or seen it on the Discovery Channel, but I knew that most of it was still off-limits. It was known as ‘the lost mountain’.

  Jerry threw his new Istanbul bag on to the bed nearest the door. The canvas holdall was a lot smaller than the one he’d arrived with in Baghdad, that was for sure. His bumbag followed.

  I stretched out on the other and thought about finding this Ramzi Salkic guy.

  68

  At last, Jerry opened his mouth. ‘This may sound crazy, but the stuff Benzil and Rob told you about Nuhanovic – it’s kinda made me even more determined to get these shots. Maybe he really can stop some of the madness.’

  I looked down at the burned-out building. ‘That’s worrying. Last time you went off taking pictures in this place it nearly got me killed.’

  Jerry looked sheepish. ‘I know, I fucked up majorly. But it was worth it. We got to save someone’s life.’ His expression darkened. ‘Don’t you ever want to know what happened up there in the enclaves?’

  Not really. He had tried to tell me enough times nine years ago, on the way back into the city. I’d already known as much about the atrocities as I wanted to. I’d told him to keep it for his grandchildren.

  I helped myself to a Coke from the minibar. ‘You went up there because the papers were offering a hundred grand for a picture, right?’ What the fuck? He obviously wanted to tell me, so why not listen? At least he was talking.

  ‘Yup, a hundred grand. Fuck, I’d have run all the way naked with a rose up my ass for that kind of dough. Soon as we heard, Jason and I got a driver and set off north.

  ‘That road was seventy-five Ks of Dodge City. Two relief workers driving trucks had been killed a couple of days before on the same stretch. We were kinda hyper.

  ‘Three miles south of the enclave, we hit a Serb checkpoint. Jason was cool at that sort of stuff. He just pulled out a carton of two hundred and did some trading.

  ‘The village we came into had been totally fucked, man. I mean, every house had been hit. The Serbs had been pounding these guys for months. It was getting dark and we really started to freak, so we tried the UNHCR.’

  I collapsed back on my bed and Jerry sat up on the edge of his to keep eye-contact. His face was alive for what seemed the first time in many days.

  ‘We found some nurses. A Frenchwoman, Nicole, was in charge. We expected to be fucked off with all the usual shit about UN regulations and journalists, but they were cool.

  ‘They told us the UN had tried parachuting food and medicine into the place at night. The women and children would hear the chutes open and run outside, waiting for the food to land. It was dark and they had tin cans on sticks with candles burning inside them. The Serbs just picked them off, firing at the lights.’ Jerry shook his head sadly. ‘Fuck, man, there was a story every way you turned.

  ‘In the morning Jason and I walked down into the village to look at their hardware. These Muslims were fighting back with anything they could get their hands on. Guys were fighting from trenches in gardens, from cellars. They were like ants, everywhere. I got sixteen rolls that morning.

  ‘Then all hell broke loose. We were walking back up the hill to the house when we started taking incoming. There was this young boy, no more than ten, just staggering about, bleeding and crying. His mother had a huge chunk of shrapnel in her back. The grandmother was trying to help.

  ‘Jason ran to fetch Nicole while I went to see what I could do. Not much, as it turned out. She was dying.

  ‘The boy had shrapnel in his hand. Nicole and her team did what they could for the two of them, but even I knew the mother needed surgery, and fast. Nicole wanted to take her to the UN base a couple of Ks away down the road. We had a vehicle, they didn’t. How could we just stand by and do nothing?

  ‘We got to the house, carrying the woman between us. The driver was up for it so we threw the back seats down and got her in. Jason and I got in with her; the kid and the grandmother sat in the front.

  ‘We’d only driven a mile or two out of the village when we ran into a Serb patrol. They told us to turn back – this lot were all of “fighting age”, even the grandmother
. Luckily there was one carton of cigarettes left, and Jason did the deal.

  ‘Within half an hour, we were at the base. The boy’s name was Fikret, and he wanted to play for Manchester United when he grew up. He was a good kid.’

  By now the empty Coke can was resting on my chest. His voice faded, and I turned to see him staring at the floor. ‘That it?’

  ‘The doctor said the mother’s only chance was to get to a proper hospital. She’d have to be evacuated in one of their APCs, but Fikret and the grandmother couldn’t travel in the APC as they weren’t wounded. UN regulations. Fuck that. He could have allowed them to travel if he’d had the balls.

  ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell Fikret. He was busy. His mother was swinging in and out of consciousness, and he was holding her hands, stroking her hair.

  ‘The APC turned up, and that UN fuck still wouldn’t let them travel with her. I gave him a hug. He cried on my shoulder for a bit, then he got himself together and explained what was happening to the grandmother.

  ‘As soon as the APC had left, we were all escorted off the base. We couldn’t drive them back to the village because we had nothing left to trade if we ran into the Serbs again. He knew that, and just took his grandmother’s hand and headed home. My last shot was of their backs as they walked up the road.’

  I threw the Coke can at the waste-bin and just clipped its edge. In the old days I’d have lobbed it to the nearest Muslim so he could make a hand grenade. It seemed a waste of metal to follow UN regulations and crush it so that I didn’t break the arms embargo. ‘And that’s when you picked me up?’

  ‘Yup. And I know you don’t want to hear it, but I need to say thanks for saving my life.’

  ‘Thank-you accepted.’

  He smiled. ‘I know you don’t mean it, but it makes me feel better. You want a coffee or something? I’ll go down.’