War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  ‘Why do you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Now you’re giving yourself a bad time because you realize you just came here to try and become famous. Well, don’t feel too bad. Spider started off like you and look at him now. He ended up championing the Common Man.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of him. It’s not wrong to want to make a difference.’

  ‘Wanting to make a difference is what drove him out of the job. He carried the flag for the underdog, the poor fucker who’d lost his home and his family and his cow because some bastard just drove their battalion through his back yard. In the end he thought it was his fault that the world didn’t care about things as much as he did. In the end he got compassion fatigue.’

  ‘What about you? Do you have a higher motive?’

  He laughed, deep in his chest. ‘No one could ever accuse me of that.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He stroked her hair. ‘I suppose I’m obsessed with evil. I document it. Not just really big evil, like Pol Pot. The evil in all of us. It’s in me too, only I keep it in check. I’m more a voyeur, I get my kicks out of watching. But then I’ve never had a stake in the game, so I don’t know what I’m capable of.’

  She was still shivering. He took a space blanket from the pocket of his fisherman’s warmer and unfolded it. ‘Always be prepared,’ he said. ‘I was a Boy Scout.’ He wrapped it around her. ‘Now you’re a classic case in point,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You did lose your home, your family, everything. You have just cause for a war, don’t you?’

  ‘You think I should open hostilities with Vietnam?’

  He laughed. ‘Not on your own. But I’m sure you’ve worked out who’s to blame for what happened to you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Then you probably have fantasies about getting even.’

  Jenny took a deep breath. She could hear her blood pounding in her ears. ‘My mother did not believe in revenge.’

  ‘She must have been a remarkable woman. It couldn’t have been easy surviving that long after the communists took over with a round-eye kid.’

  Was it possible that he knew? Had Webb told him? Was he just playing with her? She could hear the soldiers shouting and laughing outside. They were drunk. The candle flickered in the draught and crazy shadows loomed on the walls.

  Odile was there in the room. The soft, tired face was contorted into a scowl of rage. She was saying over and over: he abandoned us.

  ‘It couldn’t have been easy surviving all that.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t easy.’

  ‘You must be a very special woman to go through everything you have. Even more special to do what you’re doing now.’

  He turned her face towards him. His own face was half in shadow. There was stubble on his chin and grease from Milan’s Kalashnikov had somehow smeared across his forehead. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes,’ he whispered. ‘It’s like looking into the ocean.’

  She heard the sound of heavy boots in the corridor outside, the sound of drunken singing.

  The door handle turned.

  The door half opened, then jammed against the heavy wardrobe.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ryan whispered. ‘The bastards can’t get in.’

  She held on to him, terrified.

  ‘I’ll keep you warm,’ he said. He took her hands and cupped them in his own, blew on them, kissed them.

  She felt the heat of his body pressing against her. She pulled away.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

  He tried to kiss her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jenny ...’

  The candle guttered and died, betraying her.

  ‘You’re so beautiful, Jenny. I’ve never known anyone like you.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  He tried to kiss her again. She fought him off, used her nails, her fists, her knees.

  He yelled and retreated to the far end of the bed. ‘Christ, okay! What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I said no!’

  ‘Okay, okay. Jesus. You nearly had my bloody eyes out, you minx! What the hell’s wrong?’

  She could not see him in the darkness but she could hear his breathing.

  ‘Do you remember, years and years ago, there was a woman, a novice in the Carmelite order in Saigon? Her name was Odile.’

  He didn’t answer her. For a long time.

  Then she heard a long-drawn-out: ‘Oh, Jesus wept.’

  She heard him fumbling for his cigarettes. He struck a match, and his face was illuminated for a moment by the flame. He found another candle in his pocket, lit it, stood it in the melted wax of the first one, on the windowsill.

  ‘I don’t even remember your name,’ he said at last.

  Chapter 75

  He wondered what he should feel. Shame? Disgust? Guilt? But he felt none of those things. The emotion he was struggling with was sadness; he was sad for her, and for Odile. Sad also that it should come to this; trying to seduce his own daughter!

  He had never meant to hurt anyone, had never been intentionally cruel. But at the end of the day it didn’t matter what you intended, how it came out was all that mattered.

  ‘When did you know?’ he said.

  ‘Before I left to come to Zagreb. Uncle told me.’

  Typical of Spider to twist everyone on the screw before administering the coup. The shit. He had never even hinted at his little secret when they were all there in his house; he was like some mad fucking scientist, keeping his little specimens under his microscope, watching what they would do. His grand experiment in conscience.

  His own personal morality play using real people.

  ‘You must have been bloody pleased to see me, then, at the Intercon.’

  ‘I don’t remember how I felt.’

  ‘Quite a coincidence.’

  ‘That Uncle found me in the Philippines was the miracle. After that, everything else was inevitable.’

  Ryan stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have thought about it.’

  ‘Nothing ever works out quite the way you plan it.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that a fact.’

  The sadness had evaporated. Now he felt angry, even bitter. Hardly justifiable in the circumstances, he decided, but there it was. He looked at Jenny, tried to fathom her expression, but her face was in shadow.

  ‘So what now?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Isn’t this the part where you castigate me for all my sins? Am I supposed to break down and cry for your forgiveness?’

  ‘Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘Not really.’ He looked at her, lying stiffly under the silver blanket. He thought she should be angry, but she just looked cold and frightened. ‘I didn’t mean to leave you or Odile behind. I got hit out at Newport Bridge. It just happened. After Saigon fell I couldn’t get back in. End of story.’

  ‘That’s it? End of story? You have no idea how we suffered!’

  ‘No, and I suppose I never will. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter stuff all because I can’t change the past. It’s done, it’s happened, and there you are.’ He finished his cigarette. ‘You must have been rapt when Spider told you he knew who your father was.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe he kept it from me for so long.’

  ‘Wouldn’t forgive him for it if I was you,’ he said. ‘And bugger him as well. He should have told me first, or just kept his mouth shut. But the way he played it, I reckon he deserves to suffer too.’

  He looked at her again. My daughter! Am I supposed to feel something?

  You dirty miserable bastard, Ryan, he thought. So much for Dorian Gray. Time gets you one way or the other.

  ‘So now what do we do?’ she said.

  ‘Now we just go to sleep.’

  But he couldn’t sleep. Instead he lay there all night staring
into the candle. He had to think this one through.

  * * *

  She woke while it was still dark, her insides in revolt. Probably a delayed reaction to the events of the previous day. The candle had gutted and died and it was black. Despite the space blanket her face, her fingers, even her feet inside her boots were numb with cold. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she made out Ryan’s silhouette, curled up on the end of the bed, his knees drawn up to his chest.

  She fought her own body’s needs. She could not imagine venturing out there to pick her way over the bodies of the sleeping soldiers, risk one of the sentries pawing at her. And then do what? Squat in the field, knowing that the Serbian snipers had night vision scopes on their rifles. Where was safe? If she got up she would have to wake Ryan and ask him to stand guard while she performed this most basic of bodily functions, and that would be just too embarrassing and humiliating.

  She tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible. She looked at the luminous dial of her watch. Five a.m.

  Dumb, she told herself. Dumb, dumb, dumb to think she could go green into a war zone and survive. Her stomach growled again.

  She would have to get up ...

  The decision to move was made for her. There was a heart-stopping bang, as if a truck had driven straight through the wall by their heads.

  Mortar attack.

  The Serbs were coming.

  Ryan was awake immediately. He grabbed her and dragged her on to the floor. Somewhere in the farmhouse someone was screaming.

  She fumbled in her pockets for her pencil torch, flicked it on. Ryan crawled across the floor to the door, heaved the wardrobe out of the way with his shoulder. They ran outside into the passageway.

  The barn had been hit by mortars and was on fire. One wall of the farmhouse had been blown in by a rocket. Green tracer bullets arced through the night. A Croat soldier lay on his back screaming; one of his comrades was bent down beside him trying to stop the bleeding from his shattered leg. Jenny saw the bright muzzle flashes of small-arms fire from the dark fields. As their new Croat friends returned fire the deafening concussion of small arms fire numbed all her other senses.

  A figure ran, crouching, from the barn ‘Americanski! Where are you?’

  ‘Milan!’ Ryan shouted. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The Chetniks are attacking. We have to get you out of here!’

  The soldier with the shattered leg had stopped screaming, was only half conscious of what was happening to him now. His friend was trying to fashion a tourniquet around his thigh with his belt. The fire in the barn illuminated the wounded man’s face for a moment. It was Danko.

  ‘He won’t be scoring any more goals,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Chetnik bastards!’ Milan grabbed his shoulder. ‘This way!’

  Ryan and Jenny followed him out of the back door. In the flicker of the burning bam they could see the black Golf in the farmhouse courtyard. Milan, his Kalashnikov over one shoulder, headed towards it.

  They were halfway there when Milan lurched to one side and fell. Ryan grabbed Jenny and threw her on the ground. The sound of automatic weapons fire echoed around the courtyard fractions of a second later.

  She remembered what Ryan had told her the previous evening about his first time under fire. God, listen to me just this once, get me out of this and it’s the last time I ever gamble with my life. But all she could think was: I need to find a toilet.

  Milan lay on his side. He did not appear to be in pain. He stared in dull surprise at the dark, glutinous mess of his intestines in his hands, tried to stuff them back into his body. He looked up at her and seemed embarrassed at being caught naked in this way. He gave a short barking laugh, and then lay still. It took Jenny a few moments to realize that he had died.

  Ryan had reached the Golf. ‘Jenny! Jenny, where are you?’

  She found Milan’s Kalashnikov lying in the frozen mud. I always said I would kill him one day if I ever found him, she thought.

  He was invisible to the naked eye in the darkness but was captured perfectly in the cross-hairs of the Kalashnikov’s night sight. He was coming back for her, crawling on his belly across the courtyard. The perfect revenge. No one would ever know it was her bullet that finally paid him back for what he had done to her mother.

  Chapter 76

  Bosnia, October 1992

  ‘Working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval and the awful truth is that for correspondents war is not hell. It is fun.’

  Nora Ephron

  ‘It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It’s the one that says: “To whom it may concern.’”

  resident of Belfast

  A late afternoon sun glittered on the minarets of the ancient Ottoman town. Travnik had been the capital of Bosnia in the days when the province had been a possession of the ancient Ottoman empire. Now, with the Croatian border closed, it had become the lifeline to the beleaguered Moslem outposts of northern Bosnia.

  The Moslems would have been swamped by the Serbs if it had not been for the intervention of the Croatian army. Even so, the Serbs had managed to acquire two-thirds of the province and the Moslems had been trapped in enclaves around Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac and Travnik.

  Travnik serviced the besieged towns of Jajce and Maglaj through narrow and perilous corridors that bulged through the front lines into Serb-held territory. The town of Jajce, twenty-five miles to the north of Travnik, had been under siege for five months. Reinforcements hiked in through the woods; ambulances and ammunition trucks made their way in by night, under constant fire from Serb mortars and snipers.

  Every day more refugees poured down from the mountains after journeying for days on horse-drawn carts or marching on foot, with their families, their dogs and their farm equipment, bringing tales of rape, looting and murder.

  Webb arrived in Travnik on the back of a United Nations truck. The town was full of soldiers; Croats in camouflage fatigues with the red and white chessboard shoulder flashes; black-shirted HOS militia; Moslem armija in ragtag uniforms, leather jackets, baseball caps, jeans, running shoes. He saw a smoke-blackened wall scrawled with graffiti, in English, for the benefit of the Western journalists: Please Help Bosnia Now!

  Then there were the refugees; blank stares in the faces of the old men, terrified old women, the gaunt, bewildered faces of the children.

  It was like he had never been away.

  He had promised himself that he was finished with it all. But a part of him always knew that one day he’d come back, find another war, another outrage. He needed to satisfy himself that he had not gone soft; he still felt that this was the highest calling in his profession, and like an ageing sports star, he missed being at the heart of it, in the action not watching from the bleachers.

  Most of all, after so many years away from the front lines, he had gone stale. He had nothing new to write about. He was returning to the sharp end to rescue his career.

  He told himself that it was only incidental that Jenny was also here. Against all odds she had survived in Croatia and Bosnia for almost a year now as a freelancer, had even achieved a limited fame, at least within her own profession. She had sold photographs and feature pieces to a number of British and US newspapers and magazines, and the previous month her byline had even appeared in the New York Times.

  Her letters to him had been less prolific; a few scribbled notes from Zagreb or Dubrovnik or Sarajevo to say she was still alive, nothing more. She had not mentioned Ryan.

  He also noted that she no longer used the name Jenny Webb for her work; she had reverted to her mother’s name, Jenny Ngai. He told himself it wasn’t personal, she just wanted to establish her own professional identity.

  But it hurt.

  When Crosby approached him again with another lucrative offer he delayed only a day or so before accepting. The money really wasn’t the issue. He would have come here for free.<
br />
  Most of the Western media were concentrated in Sarajevo, which had now been under siege for over six months, but Webb had instead chosen Travnik. He had heard, through Crosby, that Jenny was here, trying to get inside Jajce. He was determined to find her. Too many things had been left unsaid and life was too tenuous to let it be any longer.

  * * *

  Samir Musiç was shouting orders at the men standing around his desk. His skin was grey with exhaustion and there were plum-colored rings under his eyes. The last few months had taken a heavy toll. As commander of the armija controlling the corridor in and out of Jajce, he carried a heavy burden of responsibility.

  He was twenty years old.

  His headquarters was inside a former restaurant called the Blue Water. A stream rushed under a bridge right outside the front door, and Webb tried to imagine romantic lunches in more peaceful times. Now the surrounding buildings had been requisitioned as a barracks and the courtyard was a chaos of wounded men and field gear, the stench from the latrines overpowering.

  Musiç’s office was thick with cigarette smoke, his wooden desk littered with butts and sjlivovica bottles. There was a single battered black field telephone. The tattered map tacked on the wall behind him was covered with red stencil marks.

  He turned away from the shouting match around him and looked up at Webb. His face told the story immediately: another problem he could do without. But innate Moslem asense of hospitality overcame his fatigue. ‘Journalist?’ he said, glancing at the UNPROFOR badge on Webb’s lapel.

  ‘Hugh Webb. I’m with IPA.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down. Drink?’ He picked up a bottle of sjlivovica and splashed two fingers into a glass. He returned his attention to the bedlam around him. Half a dozen of his junior officers were vying for his attention. He shouted over the top of all of them, issuing his final orders. The men trooped out in sullen compliance.

  He looked back at Webb. ‘One of the Croat HVO tried to rape a Moslem refugee girl last night.’

  ‘The HVO? The ones in the black uniforms?’