by Andy McNab
Benzil carried on praying above us as Salkic talked me through the approach to Nuhanovic’s house, explained the whole security set-up. His voice was measured, almost robotic. ‘I am now going to do the two things I wish most: protect Hasan and avenge my sister.’
Benzil protested. ‘Enough people have died. Please, let’s wait for SFOR.’
Salkic was scarily calm. ‘I do not fear joining my sister in paradise, if it is God’s will.’
Jerry and I exchanged a glance. More of that fatalist shit.
He told Nasir exactly what he had told us, and by the tone of the exchange Nasir wanted to go with him. Salkic wouldn’t hear of it. Nasir had to stay with us. They embraced each other, then he nodded to each of us in turn and got to his feet. Hollering and shouting at the flat tops, he started down the cave.
He reached his sister and knelt down. His shoulders shook as he stroked what was left of her head.
Very gently, he turned her on to her stomach. Please, let there be a rig on her. I couldn’t see anything. Salkic was in the way.
Then I heard the rasp of gaffer-tape. Nasir muttered in Serbo-Croat, but I got the gist. I watched as Salkic removed three egg-shaped hand grenades from her back. A string was attached to the middle one. The way she’d fallen must have prevented them detonating it.
‘Jerry, she was rigged.’
Nasir looked at him and nodded. It wouldn’t be much consolation, but he’d done the right thing.
Jerry looked stunned. Nothing had registered with him, one way or the other. He was probably still rerunning her death in his head video.
Salkic had much the same expression as he wrapped a grenade in each of his hands and pulled out the pins. Then he scooped her into his arms. Leaning back to take her weight, he began to stagger towards the daylight.
We watched him all the way to the end of the cave, where he took a couple of steps to his right and disappeared.
84
We all froze. Would they drop him on sight?
Maybe ten seconds later we knew the answer. The first of the grenades kicked off, then the second. I was up and running before the echoes had stopped. I could only hope Nasir was close behind. Fuck knows what I was going to do if I found myself alone when I got out into the open. I’d just have to make the best of the confusion and take on whoever was left moving.
There was no time for anything fancy: just butt into the shoulder, a deep breath and out into the grey light.
I swung right and immediately saw movers – two, three, I couldn’t be sure. Smoke hung low around the impact points.
I double-tapped into centre mass of a crawling flat top. A burst from behind me knocked another off his feet. Nasir was with me.
There was more firing behind us and to the right. Single shots, 9mm. Jerry was taking on the scabbed-up 4x4. The body at the wheel jerked and slumped. It was Goatee, the blood-drenched Motorola still in his hand.
I ran past Salkic. He was lying next to his sister: he must have dropped her and thrown the grenades at the wagon, then got dropped himself. He looked as though he might still be alive, but I didn’t check: there was a runner down in the low ground beyond the 4x4, maybe a hundred and fifty metres away. I sat with my back against a wheel, brought my legs up, shoved my elbows into the sides of my knees to make a platform for the weapon, rammed it into my shoulder and took aim.
My first shot missed. Nasir knelt alongside me as I took aim again. His first round went high. The guy was nearly two hundred metres away now, following the line of the valley. I took two big breaths to oxygenate myself, squeezed first pressure and held the foresight about three body-widths behind him. One more breath, let it out, hold . . . I moved the foresight past him to the left until it was one body-width in front, then took up second pressure. The butt kicked back into my shoulder and this time he went down. His screams took a while to reach us. I watched for a moment as his legs thrashed on the ground. I could have given him one more but, fuck it, I might need the round.
Nasir raised his head suddenly and searched the sky. I heard it too: the throbbing of rotor blades.
I checked for Jerry. He was kneeling by Salkic, and it looked like the two of them were having some kind of profound moment. There wasn’t time for that shit. He’d been sliced up by strands of steel-wire shrapnel from the grenades. He was in a bad way, but he was alive.
‘Jerry, go and get Benzil!’
He looked up and shook his head. ‘Wait.’
‘No, now – no time! The fucking heli – go get him out!’
I shoved him out of the way and took hold of Salkic’s head, making sure I got eye-to-eye.
Jerry stood up, pumping his arms as he started to run back towards the cave. The Daewoo was still clutched in his hand.
‘Put the fucking safety catch on!’
He stopped, fumbled with the weapon, then disappeared into the cave mouth.
‘Ramzi, listen to me. We’re going to go and hide until SFOR have lifted you, OK? Ramzi, you hear me?’
I shook Salkic’s head gently, trying to get him to listen. ‘You take Benzil and Nasir with you, all right? Jerry and I will take cover until you’ve gone. You understand?’
He did his best to nod. I went and picked up one of the flat-tops’ AKs and took off the magazine. He had no spares either. ‘Nasir, Nasir!’ I pulled him over to me. ‘Ramzi, tell him what’s going on.’
The helicopter was still hidden by cloud, but getting closer. If the cave was well known from the war, they’d be heading straight for us on GPS.
Salkic muttered some more stuff to Nasir and I ran back up the hill, my body wet with sweat.
Benzil was slumped just inside the cave, with Jerry doing his best to keep him going. ‘Benzil, SFOR are coming. You go back with Salkic and Nasir, OK?’
He shook his head. ‘No, no, I must see—’
‘No time. You’ll slow us down. Go back to the city, get sorted out, just lie your arse off about what’s happened. We’ll come for you after we’ve met him. If he wants to see you now, he’ll still want to see you in a few days.’
The rotor blades were getting lower.
Benzil muttered something I couldn’t make out above the din. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Flecks of my saliva splashed on to his cheek. ‘Listen to me! Make up a story. We’ll get back to the city and we’ll find you. Just don’t tell them we’re here, got it?’ I pushed him out towards the entrance. ‘And make sure you square the story with Salkic.’
He didn’t have time to answer. Nasir appeared and started to drag him out. I wanted to thank him for firing at the runner and not me, but there was no time for nods or handshakes. It wasn’t as if we’d become best mates or were now in some sort of brotherhood thing.
I grabbed Jerry and shoved him to the back of the cave to give him the facts of life.
We lay curled up as small as we could behind the rock pile and listened as the heli came into a hover just outside.
85
A second helicopter appeared about half an hour after the first, probably to ferry in more troops and pick up the bodies. The pilot landed about a hundred metres from the cave but didn’t close down. The wind had picked up, hurling rain in all directions; he’d keep the rotor blades turning in case the thing didn’t restart.
We listened to it for at least twenty minutes while the clearing party was at work. They were German, by the sound of it. One or two yodelled into the cave just to hear the echo. A couple ventured further inside, but nowhere like all the way to the back. Maybe they didn’t like the dark; maybe they didn’t like the idea of stepping on any mines or booby traps. About the only bit of luck we’d had in the last twenty-four hours was not tripping any of that shit ourselves.
I gave Jerry a shake the moment the heli had lifted off. ‘Better go and get that wagon while we still have the chance.’
When we got to the cave mouth, I had to laugh. The 4x4 had been cordoned off with blue and white scene-of-crime tape; it was practically gift-wrapped in the stuff. Some of t
he empty shell cases even had little flags stuck into the mud beside them.
The smile soon wiped itself off my face as we left the efficient German crime scene behind us. According to Salkic, the vehicle he’d have used to take us to Nuhanovic was parked in the biggest of the barns at the ambush site. The wind was bitterly cold and sliced into every millimetre of my exposed wet skin. I kept my arms tight against my sides and pulled up the collar of my coat to conserve as much warmth as I could. If I had to move my head I’d turn my whole body. I didn’t want the slightest bit of wind or freezing rain down my neck.
We’d been going no more than twenty when I turned to check on Jerry and my foot slipped. I went down, and as my knees hit the rock they felt like they were on fire. I hoped I hadn’t smashed a kneecap, but there was fuck all I could do about it. Black cloud cover was more or less total now. No wonder the heli pilot hadn’t wanted to hang around.
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 – “Th
e 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.
