Venice Black (Alex Polonia Thriller Book 1)

by Gregory C. Randall

  “Your husband is in prison?” Ehsan asked. “Why?”

  “Ehsan, it is not our affair,” Marika said.

  “That’s quite all right. It is the reason I’m here in Venice.” Alex told them the story.

  “And you think they are here for this money?” Marika asked.

  “There can be no other reason. They are opportunists.”

  A soft knock came from the door, and the maître d’ looked in and asked Marika something in Italian. She answered, and the man left.

  “Dinner will be in one hour.” Marika placed her hand on Alex’s knee. “After your troubled year, I am glad that you are here. This is a magical place to lose and then heal yourself. However, ours is a sad story that now has, I hope, a satisfactory ending. If you are interested, I will tell you.”

  “Not sure it is my place.”

  “Alex, the world, and most particularly the part of Europe to the east of us, is very different than your Cleveland. I think you will understand us better if I do. Is that acceptable to you, Special Agent Castillo?”

  “Ms. Jurić, I am here at your request. Yes, I would like to know more than what I’ve been told by my office in Washington. Please.”

  Marika smiled at the girl at the bar. “You can leave us for an hour, then return. I’m sure we can take care of ourselves until then.”

  “Yes, signora.”

  They waited until the woman left. Marika looked at Ehsan, then began: “Ehsan is not my biological child, but he has been my son for the last twenty-two years and will be for the rest of our lives. We are entwined like two vines that have become one. He is the love of my life.” She turned to Ehsan and touched his cheek. “Amore.”

  “Mother,” Ehsan replied.

  “It was in the spring of 1993 when we met under circumstances I would never wish on my worst enemy,” Marika began.

  The Lašva Valley, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1993

  The Lašva Valley was filled with a dense early-morning fog, the higher ridgelines barely visible through the mist. Our bus—filled with journalists and members of an EU relief agency, some my friends—had driven down from Zagreb that previous night. I was a twenty-year-old student journalist and had managed to secure a seat. After passing through Zenica, we were stopped by Croatian paramilitaries a kilometer east of Dubravica. They’d chosen the spot well: steep slopes rose from each side of the narrow two-lane road. The barricade allowed no room to pass. Flanking the road, sandbags were stacked almost two meters high, and behind each bunker was a pickup truck with a manned fifty-caliber machine gun mounted in the bed. The men at the weapons looked unfocused—I assumed they were drunk. These were, as I soon found out, dangerous men.

  I had spent the previous week trying to find a ride into this region of Bosnia. The reports of police actions in the region by Serbian troops were confusing. A school friend had offered the ride, and I’d jumped at the chance. The driver, an Englishman who was writing a book on the war, had rented the bus. There were about twenty of us. We all wanted to see for ourselves the depredations by the Serbs, to write articles for the Zagreb papers, and to tell the world what evil was happening to the Croats and Bosniaks living in this part of old Yugoslavia. Yet, these men at the barricade were Croats—rough men, hardened men, with ready AK-47s. The driver talked with the officer, who stood with one hand on his hip; the other hand held a pistol. The officer met the Englishman’s every statement with a shake of his head and, using the pistol, kept pointing back to the road we had just taken. The Englishman pulled a bundle of money from his coat pocket and waved it at the officer, but the man looked at the notes, pocketed them, and again shook his head and pointed with his pistol. Two other soldiers walked to the officer’s side and lifted their weapons. The Englishman raised his hands, backed away, and climbed into the bus.

  “Not a chance to get through. They say there are Bosniak insurgents ahead who will shoot anything that tries to go down the road. He will not let us pass. It is for our own protection and safety. We will have to find another way.”

  The Englishman slowly backed the bus up the road until he found a spot wide enough to turn the vehicle around. Just before he started back up the road, I stood and told him to stop. I walked to the front of the bus and turned to look back up the road out the rear window. The curve hid the barricade we had just left.

  “Let me out here. I’ll walk. I know these hills.”

  “Not a chance, Marika, no way,” the Englishman said. “Too dangerous.”

  “Not your problem. I came for a story. I’m going to get it.”

  I secured my backpack, slung my leather camera bag over my shoulder, and pushed myself past the Englishman. Before he could stop me, I was down the steps and had jumped to the pavement. Ten seconds later I was climbing the hill above the bus. I turned to see the people staring out the bus’s small windows as I disappeared into the woods.

  I climbed and climbed, and five minutes later I reached a clearing high above the road and watched as the bus slowly accelerated and headed east back to Zenica. From across the valley, I heard a succession of concussive thumps. The first mortar shell exploded just in front of the bus, throwing pavement and debris in every direction. The second mortar exploded behind the bus, and the third and fourth shells hit the bus directly on its yellow roof. Before I could take another breath, the bus exploded into a ball of fire. I dropped to my knees. The fire consumed the bus and everyone on board. Two people, each ablaze, tumbled out and ran up the road. Another mortar explosion, this one at the front of the bus, mercifully put an end to their agony.

  All I could do was cross myself and say a prayer. There was nothing else. I slipped back into the trees and cried.

  For the next five hours, I snuck along a narrow cattle trail that skirted the woods high above the main road. Later I had to crawl through open pastures from one thick copse to another. I was certain there were snipers. The main road lay down a steep slope below me. I saw soldiers and military vehicles heading south. I scanned the vehicles with the long lens of my camera. None had any markings, but surprisingly, they all had Croatian license plates.

  At the next crossroad, there were direction signs for Ahmići and Busovača. The fog was lifting, and the spring warmth began filling the air. Through the telephoto lens, I noticed small smoke columns rising from the hillsides. There was no pattern—a column here, another there. I thought it odd that the villagers were starting their fireplaces. The day was warming: Why start a fire? A few minutes later, the columns of smoke grew larger and more furious.

  I looked up and down the road, which was clear. My map showed the farming village of Ahmići to the southeast and partway up the hillside. More smoke columns rose from the village. I bounded down the hill, stopped near the roadside, and hid among a thick tangle of thorny berry bushes just leafing out. I checked the road and bolted across. A minute later, as I climbed the hill, I saw three open military vehicles drive where I’d crossed. The men were loud as they passed a bottle among them. A woman in a truck bed tried to stand, but a soldier knocked her to the floor with the butt of his rifle. I took a half dozen photos of the vehicles before they disappeared.

  I pushed on toward the columns of smoke, a dozen of them now filling the sky. By this time, I knew these were burning buildings, not merely chimneys.

  I crested the hill above Ahmići and paralleled a fence line that enclosed a small sheep pasture. The vegetation along the fence line provided some cover. Once, I thought I heard screams, even gunshots; breathing hard from the climb, I found it hard to hear. I stopped near a slight fold in the hillside. Four houses stood clustered together with small outbuildings nearby. Five farmhouses were on fire. Soldiers stood in the road, watching them burn. They did nothing.

  From the first house, a man rushed out holding a child. A soldier calmly aimed and shot the farmer. The other soldiers continued to fire until neither body moved. Someone screamed from inside the building and ran out. The woman, wearing a hijab, fell as the soldiers fired again
. The soldiers continued climbing up the narrow lane, firing indiscriminately at farm animals and buildings. Behind and below them more farmhouses began to burn. No one was watching the hills above the cluster of farmhouses. I took photographs as fast as I could, changing my film twice.

  The men, interrupted in their business, stopped and waited for an open military vehicle that pulled up behind them. They saluted. A large man emerged from the truck with the letters “HVO” painted on its door. He pointed back down the lane, then up the road to the remaining houses. I took a dozen more photos, then continued along the fence line toward the upper end of the village. I was minutes ahead of this Croatian execution squad.

  The road abruptly ended at the last two farmhouses. Beyond, the hill sloped up through open pastures and disappeared into a thick woodland beginning to turn green. I knew it would be suicide to try and stop these murders. They’d thought nothing of killing women and children. I’d heard rumors of rape camps and even worse run by the Serbs, but these were Croats, my people.

  Above and behind the last stone farmhouse, I found a small corral and took photos as the two men reached the last house.

  “Out, all you Turks, out!” one of the soldiers yelled. “We won’t harm you. Out!”

  I wanted to yell, to scream, to tell them to run, to escape. The men just stood in the road, waiting. Three soldiers joined them, one carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.

  “Shoot the house,” one of the soldiers ordered.

  The soldier raised the RPG to his shoulder, but before he could fire, the door swung open. A man and a boy, maybe thirteen, stepped out. The soldier with the RPG lowered the weapon. The soldier giving orders waved the two to walk toward him. The boy tried to pull his father back into the house, but the man said something and continued to walk down the road. The boy stood at the door, watching. When the man reached the soldiers, one of them struck him in the head with a rifle butt. As the man tried to rise, the leader pulled his revolver and shot him in the back of the head.

  “Now you can shoot,” he ordered.

  The man with the RPG raised the weapon and fired. The grenade flew wildly high and over the building and hit the corral. When it exploded, a dozen sheep were killed; others screamed in agony.

  I flattened myself behind a pile of stones. The explosion was deafening. I looked up. The boy, still at the door, turned to run back inside. One of the soldiers shot him dead with a burst of four automatic rounds.

  “You idiot, can’t you fire that goddamn thing?” the squad leader yelled. “Again.”

  This time, after reloading the RPG, the soldier’s aim was better. He hit the upper floor of the structure; the stones fell on the doorway and the boy’s body, blocking any escape. One of the other soldiers retrieved two bottles from his knapsack.

  My ears still rang from the first rocket grenade. The man lit the cloth fuses on the Molotov cocktails and calmly walked to the farmhouse. He pitched the bottles through the shattered windows, and the rooms beyond exploded into flames. Smoke began to rise. As the fire raged, the rear door of the house swung open. A young woman stood in the opening, a child at her side. She leaned down and said something, and the boy shook his head. She said something again. He looked across the farmyard to the sheep pen, where dead animals lay everywhere. She pushed him, and the boy began to run. The woman looked up at the corral. I was positive she knew I was there. The child ran up the gentle hill as the woman looked at me again and began to follow her child. From the lane below, five automatic weapons began to fire indiscriminately at the blazing building. Bullets struck stone and wood; dozens pierced the house. A single bullet hit the woman in the head, and she fell. The child, not looking back, kept running.

  The men could not see the child; he was hidden by the building and now by the smoke that blanketed the farmyard. The child stopped when he saw the sheep and tried to get one to move. He didn’t understand.

  I stood. “Here, come here, child,” I said. “You will be safe.”

  The boy, surprised, again stopped and looked at me.

  “Now, boy. Now. We need to leave. Your mother will be here soon. Come.” I held my hand out.

  The boy turned and looked at his house, now completely engulfed, then back at me.

  “Please, child, please come.”

  He ran the last six meters. I reached through the barbed wire of the enclosure and pulled him to me. The barbed wire tore a ragged slash down my left forearm. We hid behind a pile of rubble; the boy looked at my arm and started to cry. I asked him to remain still. He did, and I was able to cut a piece of my undershirt and wrap it around the wound. It helped to slow the bleeding.

  I watched the soldiers work their way back down the hill until they were gone. We carefully navigated our way along fence lines until we reached the woods. Once there, we climbed toward the hillcrest. Through the trees and well into the night, I could still see houses burning.

  CHAPTER 14

  “How incredibly sad,” Alex said, a tear on her cheek. “What is the HVO?”

  “The Hrvatsko vijeće obrane, the Croatian Defense Council,” Marika answered. “It was a paramilitary organization of Croatians in Bosnia during the Bosnian War, fundamentally a disorganized army of thugs, murderers, and rapists. In the Lašva Valley, some took their retribution out on the defenseless Bosnian farmers.” Marika’s voice was shaking.

  “That’s all right,” Ehsan said. “Mother, it’s okay.”

  “These men and other Croats living in Bosnia had decided to cleanse Bosnia and Herzegovina of all Muslims. While this was also the policy of the Serbs, this ethnic cleansing was a regression to the worst of man’s behaviors—cultural and social genocide. They acted no differently than the SS during World War II.”

  “I assume that this Attila Kozak was a member of the HVO,” Alex continued.

  “Yes, initially. He was a colonel but in time took over an internal battalion of thugs, the Wolf’s Head Battalion,” Marika said. “He is one of the men responsible for massacring the people in Ahmići and the surrounding valley. Over a hundred were killed. Some believe even more, but their remains could not be found in their burned-out homes.”

  “He was arrested?”

  “No. He, like hundreds of others, escaped or was never charged. The EU wanted the big fish, the leaders. The true assassins, those pulling the triggers and throwing the grenades, went back to their families and jobs after the truce. For them, it was like nothing ever happened. They even have reunions. I cannot think of what they talk about.”

  “This is the information that Marika and Ehsan have pieced together,” Agent Castillo said to Alex. “Her photos, affidavits from witnesses, even interviews expressing remorse from a few of the soldiers who participated. She is handing this information over to me and I am to get it to the State Department. They will decide what to do with it.”

  “What’s the urgency?” Alex asked. “Seems that even after all this time a few days won’t make that much of a difference.”

  “For a conviction, yes,” Marika said. “But Attila Kozak is a candidate for president of Croatia. He has a sizable right-wing following, with significant support from religious and cultural organizations both inside and outside the country. He is attending the EU conference on Thursday and intends to use it as a platform to show how he can lead his country and expand Croatia’s role in the European Union.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing for Croatia?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe, but the thought of this man, a man with the blood of defenseless men, women, and children on his hands, leading our country is more than many of us can stand. I do not trust him; many of us believe he is in this for himself. He needs to be shamed and shunned by the European community. He needs to be stopped. This is a forum where it can happen.”

  “This is an opportunity to set things right, to honor those who were murdered, and to hopefully find some peace for the survivors,” Ehsan said. “Like Simon Wiesenthal’s work hunting down Nazi war criminals.”

&nb
sp; “I assume you are that little boy?” Alex asked, looking at Ehsan.

  Before either Ehsan or Marika could answer, there was a soft knock on the door, and the manager said that dinner was ready. They all took their seats. There was little gaiety even as the conversation turned to the changes in Venice, the current Carnevale, and the general state of Europe’s finances.

  “A pox on all their heads,” Marika said. “Ehsan, our guests care little for our economic issues here in Europe. I’m sure the problems in the United States are just as daunting.”

  “Yes, they are, but I am on vacation,” Alex said. “I do not want to think about the world, Cleveland, or even my ex-husband. For the next two weeks, and for the first time in years, it’s me time.”

  “Me time?” Ehsan asked as he sipped his sparkling water.

  “Yes, me. As in not having to take care of anyone else but me for the next few days. See things, do things, and enjoy things I want to do.”

  “I envy you,” Marika said. “It has been many years since I had that opportunity. I needed money to raise my son and give him the education he deserved. I could not do that on a journalist’s salary. I had an idea for a software system—I developed one of the first programs to help coordinate money exchanges throughout Eastern Europe. I made it work, and it was successful. A German company stepped in and bought my business. The sale gave me the freedom to go back into journalism full time. It has also allowed me the time to investigate Kozak.”

  “And to answer your question,” Ehsan said, turning to Alex, “yes, I am that same eight-year-old boy. We escaped over the mountains to Zenica. I remember a bus ride, clean clothes, wonderful food, and a warm bed with sheets whiter than the snow. Twenty-two years later I am an attorney in Milan with an international NGO that tracks down and brings war criminals to justice. My work extends across the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa, from Turkey to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia.”

  “Are you a Muslim?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, Mother taught me about my religion and my history. But it was my decision to return to my religious heritage. I am at peace with that decision.”