The Threat

by David Poyer

  Dan had gone over the pictures the remotely piloted surveillance drones had taken. They showed crowds. Detainees. Then empty fields. But no graves. No clue where they could have gone. That was the mystery. But he just said, “May I speak with this Nikolai?”

  “Impossible. Far too busy. It might just have been possible to get you in last week. The various factions would let an occasional truck through with supplies for UN Bravo. The Dutch unit there. But now—no. I am so sorry.”

  “What happened in Srebrenica, Colonel Fevrier?”

  The Frenchman blew out and scratched his scalp hard. “The local commander had seven hundred fifty men to cover the perimeter around the enclave. The Muslims refused to disarm. Went out at night raiding. Burned people alive, in their homes. These people are not as helpless as they portray themselves. Nasser Oric—ugly piece of work. Videotapes his victims. Both sides sniped at Bravo. Then three days ago the BSA—Bosnian Serb Army, Mladic’s troops—began to push in the perimeter. To try to stop the raids. The Dutch tried to call in air strikes, but they could not be provided until the town had been overrun.”

  So far every account Dan had heard differed. Sebold had said the UN special representative had refused to give permission for the air strikes, from the on-call carrier force in the Adriatic, until after the town fell. The reserve captain in Naples had said NATO air had actually been aloft, staged out of Italy and orbiting over the Adriatic; but by the time the request was approved in Zagreb, they were too low on fuel to go in. The Dutchman on the plane had said bitterly that his country’s contingent had requested support repeatedly and never gotten a reply. And Larreinaga had said the Dutch had cut and run, but admitted they had no heavy weapons, while the Serbs had tanks.

  He could see why Clayton wanted eyes on the ground, an unbiased report, if such a thing was possible.

  “I’m not here to assign blame,” he told Fevrier. “I don’t care who’s responsible. That’s a UN matter. All I want to do is get out there and see what happened.”

  “Once again, I can’t help you.” Fevrier stood. “We’ll fly you back to Naples tomorrow. Be ready an hour before dawn. That is the safest time. Before they have enough light, on that mountain over there, to aim.”

  * * *

  Larreinaga, encountered again downstairs, told him the only place to find a bed was the Holiday Inn. Dan walked over, staying close to the wrecked trucks and buses. The hills reverberated now and then to a falling shell or exploding mine. No one shot at him on the way, though.

  “You get one of the good rooms. No view,” the clerk joked. In the corridors he saw most had been wrecked, burned, their windows shattered. Some lay open to the wind, and all were unheated. The hallways smelled of shit. The few other guests who passed him wore coats.

  He was hungry and realized he’d missed a bet. He should have eaten at the headquarters. He had an MRE pack and a Snickers from his briefcase instead. Tried the faucet, but nothing came out. He changed into civvies, jeans, and a down-filled jacket. Looked at himself in the cracked mirror. Thought about shaving, then figured he’d blend in better if he didn’t.

  The electricity was out in the first-floor bar, but somebody had an accordion, and candles flickered on the tables. It felt like a bunker in Stalingrad. He got fruit juice that tasted as if it had been canned under Brezhnev. There were a lot of customers, all smoking harsh-smelling local tobacco and talking very loudly above the Polish-sounding music.

  He’d thought about this as he was changing, and decided he wasn’t going to be on the plane back in the morning. He wasn’t going to give up just because the French wouldn’t give him a ride. Or because he was scared, though he was. Somebody else must want to find out what had happened. He asked several people if they knew anybody who was trying to get to Srebrenica. They looked at him as if he were nuts and waved him off. Except the last, a gray-haired old man with one eye. He muttered, “The Gypsy bitch. See her? The one drinking shots, in the corner.”

  * * *

  She was small-boned and fine-featured, with black shining hair that fell in ringlets. Pale lipstick, and kohl pencilled around the eyes. A worn brown leather jacket, open just enough to show a zip-up blouse the color of plums. Black jeans. She and the mustached, ponytailed guy with her watched Dan approach. They were smoking. A bottle of clear fluid glowed in the candlelight. “Hi,” Dan said. “Speak English?”

  After a minute the guy with the ponytail said, “Some.” He didn’t sound welcoming.

  Dan pulled out a chair. He perched on the first two inches, to show he didn’t plan to stay if they didn’t want him. After a moment the woman pushed the bottle his way. “You look sober,” she said. “Not a good way to see a war. Rakija. Smuggled in from Bradina.”

  “No thanks. They tell me you might want to go to Srebrenica.” He pronounced it Sebreneetsa too.

  She didn’t blink. Obviously used to strangers coming up and starting provocative conversations. “Who the hell are you?”

  He didn’t think it was a good idea to try to cross the Serb lines with a U.S. military ID in his wallet. “I work for a paper in Grand Centre, Saskatchewan.”

  “Where the heel eez ‘Saskatchewan’?” said Ponytail.

  “Canada. Western provinces.”

  The girl said, “What paper?”

  He’d been in Grand Centre but didn’t remember the name of the paper. But probably she didn’t either. “The Record. How about you?”

  “I work independent. Radio networks, mostly. Jovan here, Jovica, he sells pictures to whoever’s buying. Srebrenica? That’d take serious money. And a car.”

  “I have a little cash.” Four thousand dollars, to be exact, which Jonah Freed had counted out, and made him sign for, before he left the Eighteen Acres.

  “How much is a little?”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  “We’d need three.”

  “I guess I could get my hands on another thousand.”

  “Canadian?”

  “No, U.S.,” he said. She smiled, and he realized she’d just blown away his little facade.

  “I won’t ask who you really are. Gavorite li srpskohrvatski?”

  “Is that Bosnian?”

  “You really aren’t going to blend in.” She looked him up and down. “Though the stubble helps. But maybe that’ll be okay. Maybe that’ll even be better.”

  “So you’re going to blend in with the other side? As you put it?”

  “At least convince them we’re not Muslim.”

  “You speak Bosnian?”

  “Da, gavorim. And it’s not ‘Bosnian,’ it’s Serbo-Croatian. My mother was from Vlasenica.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Not too far from Srebrenica. As it happens. We had Muslim neighbors. Serb neighbors.”

  “So you’re a Croat?” Dan asked her.

  “Yes. But I can pass. And Jovo here, he really is a Serb. One of the good ones. So we should be okay. If we don’t run into the wrong people. Keep Jovo company while I go talk to somebody.”

  Dan looked at the guy again—she pronounced his name Yoh-vo—wondering just what kind of war it was, when not even the participants could tell enemy from friend.

  “We’ve got a ticket through the tunnel,” she said when she came back. “But that’s the easy part. Getting through the mountains, that’ll be hard.”

  “All we can do is try,” Dan told her.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she said, twisting a lock of hair so dark it was blue-black, looking straight at him. “They kill strangers here. Journalists too. The JNA kills them, the Muslims kill them, the Chetniks kill them. Not to mention we could drive over a mine. I don’t know your business in Srebrenica. And I don’t want to. But it’d be smarter for all three of us to just stay here and finish getting drunk.”

  “That’s not how you get the story,” Dan said.

  She grinned, not too enthusiastically. “That’s right. That’s not how you get the story.” She stuck out her hand suddenly. It was s
mall and very, very warm. “Zlata Kovacevic.”

  * * *

  He stopped in the basement of the house, at the dark entrance that opened like a hatchway to a lightless engine room. Tasting fear like stale crackers. On the way here, trotting across an intersection, someone had taken a shot at him. With a heavy weapon, a fifty-caliber at least, that had whiplashed past his head and blown chunks of brick and mortar off a wall.

  He’d ducked and kept going, suddenly a lot more alert. But now, crouching, watching his breath puff out white in the cold air blowing from somewhere ahead, he felt even more vulnerable.

  Past that door, he was on his own space walk. Beyond the protection of the military, his orders, beyond what Sebold or Gelzinis or Clayton probably expected him to do. Into a Heart of Darkness where no law prevailed. He hesitated, thinking this probably wasn’t smart. Then thought, Fuck it. What did he have to go back to anyway? Without Blair?

  He ducked his head and went in.

  The tunnel, which Zlata said did not officially exist, was unlit and only five feet high. It would take them under the Serb lines to a BiH-held area on the other side. BiH meant Bosnian and Herzegovinian Army, the part-Croat but mainly Muslim side in this turmoil of a disintegrating country. He followed them, bent, feeling the rough concrete ceiling brushing the back of the stocking cap he’d bought, along with a field jacket with a ripped lining and a worn Yugoslav Army sleeping bag and some well-used boots.

  He’d left everything that could identify him—uniforms, luggage, military identification, red passport, class ring, wedding ring—at the Holiday Inn, to be delivered to Buddy Larreinaga. He’d asked Zlata if he should buy a false ID. She said dollars would work better. They’d bullshit, bluff, and bribe their way through. He’d also asked if he should try to get a gun. They’d shaken their heads. Jovan had held up a battered Exakta. “Camera best weapon,” he deadpanned.

  Zlata said the tunnel ran for a kilometer to Mount Igman. It started in the basement of a shelled-out house not far from the airport. Dan guessed it went under the airport, might originally have led to the fuel storage, from the smell of kerosene. He’d had to pony up 450 bucks to go through. He suspected that was for the three of them, though Zlata had insisted it was for him alone. Others were trudging through coming the other way, dragging heavy soft things or bent under bulky pack-frames. Also slung AKs and ammo boxes. Each meeting involved muttered negotiations and twisted contortions to squeeze past.

  Jovo went first, then Zlata. She said to keep his head down. There were iron crossbars in the ceiling that would rip your scalp open. Also to not touch the wires that ran along the sides. “They are high tension and will kill you. Stay on the boards and keep going no matter how bad it gets.” He sucked bad memories in with the close, fuel-stinking air, breathed over and over by the parade of smugglers, or merchants, whatever their fellow Morlocks were.

  Some minutes in he was splashing through liquid up to his ankles. The water, if it was water, was ice cold and stank of sewage. A pump was running somewhere. His heart was hammering. He blinked, sucking air but not getting much out of it. He kept trying to calculate how long it should take to walk a kilometer. But Jovo kept running into people coming the other way. He had the only flashlight but didn’t use it much. Probably saving batteries.

  Dan stood bent in the dark listening to the muttered, impenetrable exchanges. The sweat ran down his face and plopped in the water. He kept telling himself it was better than pulling himself backward through a wire conduit under the Tigris River.

  It got deeper before it got shallower. But then he was back on duckboards again. Not long after, the air got a little fresher. Then he looked up and there was the sky, glowing faintly, and way up there a light moving against the stars.

  * * *

  He had maps, from Naples. They were xeroxes of UN military maps, with the boundaries of the enclaves and estimates of the current front lines inked in. Zlata had shown him her own treasure, a tattered, flimsy road map that looked as if it dated from about 1960. What she now demanded was more money. Another five hundred to rent or buy, the exact nature of the transaction was opaque, a Fiatish wreck that had once been blue but now was mostly rust. It had no doors or trunk lid, and a replacement hood had been hammered out of roofing iron by some shade-tree mechanic. The front tires were bald, but the back ones were oversized and had the knobby tread he was used to seeing on military vehicles.

  Jovo said it was a “Ficho” and that it would get them there, if they could get there at all.

  Though it took up most of the rest of his rapidly shrinking sheaf of twenty-dollar bills, they were on their way not long after midnight, running with the one working headlight, on sometimes and off sometimes according to a mysterious protocol worked out in the front seat. According to the road map it was only seventy kilometers, crow’s-flight, from Sarajevo to Srebrenica. Zlata said the roads should be decent for most of that way. The trouble was, it was all through Serb-controlled territory, or worse, past or through the outskirts of the zone of Muslim enclaves being imploded by the new Serb offensive: Gorazde, Zepa, Srebrenica itself. He huddled in the back and pretended to sleep as they approached the first checkpoint.

  “JNA,” Zlata said tensely. “National Army. They might turn us back, but they probably won’t shoot us.”

  Jovo said something and she replied; the car slowed. Raising his head, Dan saw oil drums, men in uniform carrying AKs, Soviet-style jeeps, a flag fluttering in the headlight over a sandbag-emplaced machine gun. Jovo reached behind him and got a bottle out. He drew the cork with his teeth as Dan pulled the blanket over his head.

  * * *

  Past the roadblock they waited for a long time as a column of trucks ground by, very slowly, with enormous noise and choking diesel smoke. The trucks hogged the road and there was no way past till they were gone. They were stenciled with the red cross. The canvas covers were snugged tight so he couldn’t see what they carried. Then the night was empty again. The little car’s motor whined. Something in the transmission knocked wildly whenever they went over thirty-five, but Jovo pushed it along a road that looked like the ones where Dan had grown up, except there were no guardrails, no center lines or white lines or reflectors. But the creeks down in the hollows were the same, and the trees too. Even the little towns they went through looked like Pennsylvania seventy years ago: little wooden and brick stores, little houses, dirt tracks leading off the highway instead of paved streets.

  He saw only one signpost that whole way. It said Srebrenica, but someone had scrawled over it CMPT.

  “What’s CMPT?” he asked Zlata, thinking it was an acronym for some military force or political party.

  She said tightly, “That’s Cyrillic. Smrt means ‘death.’”

  * * *

  He was jerked awake by a burring growl from under the chassis. Which he recognized, but apparently his companions didn’t. They were arguing. Finally Jovo took his foot off the gas and coasted to the roadside.

  Dan threw the blanket back. “It’s tanks,” he told them.

  “Tanks?” Zlata sounded worried.

  He explained that unless the treads were fitted with rubber pads, heavy armor made waffles out of asphalt roads. That was what they were hearing.

  “Hmm, tanks,” she repeated. Then she and the Serb fell to arguing again. Maybe over whether they should turn back. Dan didn’t get into it. They knew how dangerous this was better than he did. Meanwhile Jovo started up again. They kept going downhill, through heavy pine woods. He told himself that if tanks had rolled down this road, at least they’d be safe from mines.

  Then the woods opened out to fields. A smell like burning and rot sucked into the car. The stink of war.

  “Srebrenica?” he said.

  “Not much farther,” Jovo said. His voice was high. The pitch of a frightened man.

  “I remember this town,” the girl said. “The Muslims here were doing well. The fields were good. There was a factory that made screws.”

 
Dan could hardly tell it had been a town. Not one house stood. At the crossroads each shattered concrete-block wall was scarred with bullets. Below a daubed cross with C’s on either side more scrawls flashed in their passing lights. JNA.

  “What’s the cross mean?”

  “The C’s are Cyrillic S’s. ‘Samo sloga Srbina spasava’—Only solidarity will save the Serbs. First they shell a village. The tanks blast down any walls still standing. Then they throw hand grenades into any places they think people might be hiding.”

  Dan didn’t ask where those people were now. He was afraid he knew. But then—where were the bodies?

  * * *

  They left the valley and twisted along hills, through hairpin switchbacks that left him nauseated. The smell came back as they passed burned homes, wrecked vehicles pushed or blown to the side of the road. Aside from that the blackness was total. No lights. No movement. Anything left living had hidden. Meanwhile Zlata was telling him about the rape camps. He could not believe what she said. It had to be propaganda, atrocity stories. Even the Nazis had not thought of such things.

  They managed five more miles, he guessed, before Jovo slowed again. This time the headlight showed civilian trucks. A group around a fire. Dan ducked again as they unslung weapons, moved toward the car.

  He listened to a palaver that didn’t take long and ended with shouting. Then the Ficho began backing up. Fast.

  “They said there’s fighting ahead,” Zlata explained. “And not to come back or they’ll take us for a walk in the woods. These are Mladic’s extremists. The Tigers. The Dragons. Psychos, killers out of the prisons. Not people we want to discuss things with, okay? Jovica says we’re not getting any farther.”

  “I’m getting that feeling too,” Dan said. In the middle of a war zone, unarmed, he was ready to admit it. This hadn’t been a good idea.