The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  She said nothing. She had seen people do this to themselves enough times for it not to disturb her. There was nothing she could do but hope he’d gotten the dose right.

  Petar tied off his arm with a piece of rubber and hit up in front of her. He let go of the rubber, sighed at the drug’s surge and rocked in the chair, nodding off, the fit still in his arm.

  She went and knelt beside him, slapping his face until he came around dreamily, calm now, his eyes pinned.

  ‘Where is Marin?’ she whispered.

  ‘I can’t say, I can’t.’

  ‘Tell me where he is, Petar. I need to know.’

  ‘Dead, for all I know, with the rest of them.’

  ‘Did he go to Bosnia?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’ He closed his eyes.

  She slapped him again, harder. ‘Did he go to Bosnia?’

  ‘Marin, the fucking hero—’course he did. Took my place. My place!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was ready. Done all the fuckin’ training … Fuck it.’

  Again his eyes drooped and closed. She slapped his face once more.

  ‘Don’t go away, Petar. What do you mean, he took your place?’ There was an edge to her voice.

  ‘He came here and took my place. “You’re not taking Petar, no way! He’s not going. I’ll go instead of him.” Fucking hero, my brother. Well, fuck him. Want to be a martyr? Go ahead. Fuck him. I hope he’s dead.’

  Petar nodded off again, deeper now, into oblivion. His breathing was steady. She felt his heartbeat and it was strong enough. His tolerance was obviously high. This wouldn’t kill him, but he would be out for some time. Anna stood and looked down at him. She had the answer she had been seeking. The pity she had felt for him was gone. He was a loathsome creature.

  She left him lolling in the rocking chair and began to search his room. She found a good deal of the historical material Jurjevic had sent him beside the bed. Some of it was scattered across the floor. The black-and-white photos were in his bedside drawer, like some sort of ghastly pornography. Snuff photos—which was what they were when the monsters took them back in 1941.

  Among them she found something else: a creased tourist pamphlet for the city of Zagreb, capital of the state of Croatia in Yugoslavia. She leafed through the photos of street markets and trams, the chequerboard roof of the cathedral and the cartoonish statue of King Tomislav, forever riding into battle outside the railway station. Finally, she turned to the back page and found a printed sticker: Adriatic Trade and Travel Centre, 668 George Street, Sydney 2001.

  It wasn’t forensic evidence of a bombing, but it was enough for her. She stomped around the bed to the rocking chair.

  Petar was unconscious. She tried slapping again—once, twice—but he barely stirred. She reached down in disgust and pulled the fit from his arm, then turned and jabbed it hard into the old plaster of the wall. It stuck there like a badly aimed dart. A trickle of his blood dripped down the wall.

  She couldn’t bear another moment in his presence. She closed the bedroom door, leaving behind the pamphlet and the documentary evidence of the dark inheritance his father had bequeathed him. From the kitchen she retrieved his journal, rationalising that he had forfeited any right to privacy. Gathering up her belongings, she left the farmhouse.

  From the hide high above her, the older man watched through the binoculars as she left the house.

  13.

  Monday, 21 June 1972

  It was after midnight when Marin Katich and his nineteen companions reached St Oswald, close to the border at a point high in the Austrian Alps. The persistent rain of the past few weeks had finally ceased and the town’s chocolate-box houses were washed clean of remnant snow. The old bus stopped at a white church with a high, pointed steeple. All twenty of them were spirited through a walled courtyard into the chapel to receive the priest’s blessing for the operation. Marin hated priests as a class, but this one was an especially smarmy prick, happy to send men off to die with God’s name on their lips, a last communion and some mumbo jumbo about their sacred mission.

  At 2 am they were taken as far as they could go in the bus. They tumbled out into a clear, dark night. Torches were forbidden. Starlight and a half moon lit their way. Old snow glimmered on the ground.

  Marin squinted into the darkness ahead. There was no way of knowing if trip-wires or mines lay in front of them. Maybe they were there, or maybe they were a myth. However, the Brotherhood’s intelligence on border patrols proved correct: twenty heavily burdened shadows passed into Yugoslavia unobserved.

  Most of the men crossed the border in their troikas. That is to say, eighteen of them made the crossing in six groups, which left Juro Horvat and Marin to cross as a pair.

  Marin was sure that Ambroz Andric had put the sinister little Tasmanian on his case. Horvat was Andric’s lickspittle—a defective, acne-scarred creature; but not to be underestimated, despite his appearance. Marin knew the man’s reputation. Horvat had been sent to Hobart to train recruits in bomb-making and to pass on his signature skill of killing with a knife, having gained expertise in both disciplines in Europe. Marin felt his skin crawl every time Horvat was behind him. God forbid he would ever have to trust his life to him. The man was built for betrayal, designed to fail under pressure like fuse wire.

  During the crossing Horvat was hunched over, bent by the weight on his back. Each of them carried a heavy pack, stuffed with food and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They were armed with an assortment of automatic weapons, rifles and Browning pistols, all of which had been provided to them by the Brotherhood in Salzburg and paid for by funds raised in Australia.

  Marin couldn’t complain about that side of things. They had given him a fine Austrian weapon, a Steyr SSG 69 sniper rifle, the military version with the long barrel. It had been modified in a secret workshop to fit a hand-tooled suppressor. They had made silencers for the automatic weapons too, but he suspected they would overheat and malfunction in a firefight.

  Horvat was a thin man, stringy as a half-starved street dog, but strong. He managed to keep up with Marin, but he didn’t like the cold, and every time they stopped his teeth began to chatter. The ground was spongy in patches, where the rain had melted the snow cap away, and Marin felt soft moss on the mountain rocks when he leaned against an outcrop to get his bearings.

  Horvat slumped down beside him, uncomfortably close. His breathing was as ragged as an asthmatic’s. On the slope ahead was a stretch of icy snow; when Marin peered down, looking for some sign of the others, he caught a shadow moving stealthily across the whiteness.

  He grabbed Horvat’s arm. ‘Shhhh, stay quiet,’ he whispered. ‘There’s something there.’

  The shadow stopped, merging with a rock. Marin stared hard at the dark place on the snow. Had the movement been a trick of the mind? The concertina of the other man’s breathing started up again.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ wheezed Horvat. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘No, wait.’

  Marin slipped off his pack and crawled forward on to the icy ground. He felt the cold damp through his gloves and the knees of his fatigues as he crunched across the compacted snow until the dark smudge of the rock was about ten feet away. Then a shadow detached itself from the blackness and came towards him. As it got closer, he saw a creature with its head down under high withers. Its luminous green eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

  An ancient instinct froze Marin to the spot. It was a wolf, a wolf by God! It stopped a few feet short of him, close enough for him to make out yellowish teeth etched into its dark muzzle. It was a big animal and in Marin’s vulnerable position on all fours it stood taller than him. It smelled of soil and bracken and blood, fungal and moist.

  A strange stillness enveloped the two beings, man and wolf. Contained within it, Marin was not afraid. The wildness in the creature’s eyes was ineffable—neither alien, nor threatening.

  As if bidden by the creature, the wolf song rose from deep in Marin’s th
roat—the ojkanje, which his father had done his best to teach him. He sang it softly, aware of the silent mountains around them. In that moment he felt as if the wolf and he were together on this earth and that moment was all there was.

  Still singing, he rose to his knees and the wolf took a step back, cautious but not fearful. Marin was about to reach out to it when, without warning, the wolf’s eyes glowed red and for the first time he saw the whole of its grey heft illuminated—the upright ears, the width of its face, its rising hackles and flaring fangs. He turned to the source of the light, a torch.

  ‘Get down!’ Horvat yelled. The muzzle of his gun was pointed at Marin’s chest.

  ‘No!’ Marin cried.

  Then the wolf was gone. Vanished into the blackness.

  Still pinned in the beam of light, Marin stumbled to his feet and ran clumsily through the snow back to Horvat.

  ‘Turn it off!’ he demanded in a harsh whisper, grabbing Horvat’s arm and forcing the beam down. Then darkness returned and Marin was blinded, blinking to readjust his eyes. Vivid images of the wolf were imprinted there.

  Horvat broke the spell. The bronchial rasp of his breathing punctuated his high voice. ‘What … the fuck … was that … about?’

  ‘Keep your voice down! It’s bad enough you used the torch.’

  ‘That thing would’ve torn your throat out.’

  ‘Keep it down, I said. Have you forgotten where you are?’ Marin tightened his grip on Horvat’s wrist until the man winced. ‘That light can be seen for miles. Come on, we’ve got to move.’

  He let him go, shouldering his pack. Horvat didn’t move.

  ‘I saved you from that thing,’ he said.

  ‘Bullshit! Let’s get out of here. Now!’

  A few hundred metres further down, they stopped. Ahead of them, across a final stretch of icy snow, was the dark mass of the forest.

  ‘Where are they?’ Horvat’s breathing was ragged again.

  Marin took a frog-shaped tin toy from his pocket. He pressed it rapidly, making half a dozen clicks, and then waited. A moment later a barely perceptible echo of the noise came from the tree line. He tapped Horvat on the shoulder.

  ‘Come on, this way.’

  They moved quickly downhill towards the sound and found the others huddled together at the forest’s edge. When Ambroz Andric saw them, the last two shadows, he pocketed his clicker. The D-day paratroopers carried the same things to identify each other in the dark. It had been Andric’s one good idea.

  ‘What took you so long?’ he hissed. ‘And what the fuck was that light?’

  Marin peered at the outline of Andric’s face, but it was too dark to read anything in it. ‘We ran into a wolf.’

  Horvat wheezed and then rasped. ‘Katich decided to crawl up and sing to it.’

  ‘You used a torch, Katich? Are you insane? You could get us all killed. I should put a bullet in your head right here before you do.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. It wasn’t me.’

  Andric turned and grabbed Horvat by the shoulders. ‘Is that true, Juro?’

  ‘I saved his life. That’s what I did. The fucking beast was big as a lion.’

  ‘A wolf, you say, up here? It’s hard to believe.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed it, either. But I saw it and Katich there kneeling in front of it singing, I tell you.’

  The shadow crouching next to Ambroz Andric broke into laughter.

  ‘Heh, heh, heh!’

  Marin recognised the loud sneering laugh of Ambroz’s brother Adolf, crackling like gunfire.

  ‘What did I tell you? He’s a fucking werewolf, this one! A werewolf. You know what the gypsies say? Never trust a man with green eyes. I knew there was something wrong with him.’

  ‘No,’ another voice chimed in. It was Pavlovic, the leader of the German youth wing. ‘A wolf has welcomed us. That is a good omen, by God!’ Pavlovic came over and grabbed Marin in a clumsy embrace. ‘The wolf chose you, Katich. You’re our good luck charm.’

  ‘Keep it down, you damn fools!’ another voice whispered urgently from the darkness. It was Paul Vegar, the one man apart from Marin who’d had actual military training. He had been in Vietnam too.

  There was a faint glow from his position and Marin saw that Vegar was crouched under a blackout sheet using a torch to take a compass reading. The glow was extinguished and he whispered again. ‘We need to get away from here as fast as we can.’

  ‘You’re right, Vegar,’ said Ambroz Andric, standing up. ‘Which way?’

  Vegar’s dark shape rose from the ground and moved swiftly ahead of them. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  As they started down the mountain, Marin watched the dark shapes of the Andric brothers. Until now they had been careful to keep their hostility under wraps, but the tension of being here had at last sharpened their nerves and loosened their tongues.

  As Horvat fell in behind him, Marin felt his back tingling from the man’s proximity. He sensed the others around him, knowing he would need to find allies in the group. He had joined them too late to know any of them well.

  One thing Marin was sure of was that Ambroz Andric had had it in for him from the moment he pulled Petar out of the operation. Andric was both ambitious and possessed of an inflated sense of his own intelligence. Magnifying the threat was his brother, Adolf, a cruel psychopath who backed his every move. Ambroz was the schemer, Adolf his hammer.

  Marin blamed his father for allowing such men to assume leadership positions. Ivo was blind to their faults. Ambroz had won Ivo over by flattery. He paid lip-service to Ivo’s authority while hiding his true face. From time to time, the clouds parted and Marin saw the truth. For Ambroz, Ivo Katich was an old man whose time had passed. It had pleased Ambroz greatly to have Petar under his control, to order around like a pet dog—but Marin had robbed him of that pleasure. In doing so, he had undermined the man’s tenuous grip on leadership, an unpardonable sin.

  On the long descent of the mountain the sure-footed Vegar displayed the quiet confidence of a military professional, stopping from time to time to check his map and then calling for the others to follow his lead. It took them three hours to reach the base of the mountain.

  As the terrain levelled out, the sky began to lighten and the men in the forest around Marin took form in their green camouflage. They wore the uniforms of US NATO troops, stripped of insignia. He had argued against that choice, for surely the territorial forces in Yugoslavia had that uniform keyed into their training manuals as ‘enemy’.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Ambroz Andric had told him. ‘They don’t look to the West at all. They are conditioned only to expect a Soviet invasion. Anyway, by the time they realise we’re in the country, we will have a much larger force of men bringing their own uniforms and weapons.’

  It was useless to argue with him. Marin only hoped that they would stick to the plan of operating mostly at night. He had made sure to pack a set of civilian clothes in the bottom of his rucksack.

  Now at first light at the foot of the Slovenian Alps, he wondered how long it would be before someone spotted this motley group of revolutionaries and ran to the local police. As the faces of his comrades clarified in the gloomy predawn it was clear that many were having the same doubts. He saw in those faces the fault lines of the operation—the men most likely to crack. After one night some were already haggard and looking around with anguished expressions, as if seeing each other for the first time and being astonished, as if roused from a dream, to find they were really here.

  Marin knew little of the group chosen by the European leadership. There was Buntic, who called himself Rocco, creeping through the forest with wide fearful eyes. He had been sent by the leaders in Germany to join the group on a promise that he would be made interior minister in the revolutionary government.

  Walking next to Buntic was a man whose whole body seemed to be writhing with anxiety. Ivan Prlic was another of the German Croats, born in a village south of Dubrovnik. He jumped at every sou
nd. Marin watched him bond with Buntic as weak men sometimes do, in an alliance of cowards. Prlic was another liability.

  There were other émigrés in the group recruited by the German leadership who might prove more useful. But who could say which man would meet the challenge and which would succumb when facing death?

  The leadership vanguard was drawn from the Australian group, simply because that was where the operation had been planned and funded. Marin knew his own countrymen better than the others, but that was not to say he had more trust in them. There were strong bonds between the Andric brothers, Horvat and Paul Vegar. They were all part of the movement’s Melbourne faction.

  Their group also included the big thug Ilija Glavas, a headstrong man who now steamrollered a path through the undergrowth, heedless of the noise. Glavas demanded they refer to him as ‘General’. He had paid for that right. It was an honorary rank, or rather an imaginary one, which no one took seriously, not even Ilija Lovric, the one man Glavas had personally recruited.

  When he was a young man, Glavas had trained as a baker in Bosnia; but his qualifications were not recognised in Australia, so he had worked as a night watchman in a mortuary in Camberwell. Marin had learned these scant details from Lovric. Then one night in Salzburg, after a long drinking session, Lovric told Marin a bizarre tale.

  When they were still training for the mission in Melbourne, Glavas had summoned Lovric at 2 am to a meeting at the mortuary. He arrived to find that Glavas had hauled three corpses out of the body fridges and propped them up against the wall. He was made to watch the general haranguing the corpses as if they were his troops, exhorting them to intensify their efforts to free the homeland and be prepared to sacrifice their lives to the cause.

  ‘So what should I have done, Katich? What would you do?’ Lovric asked him. ‘I decide it is better to humour him. I say to him, “General, these ones have already given their lives.” But he just shakes his finger in my face and tells me that I must get used to the dead. Get used to them, he says, for we will create such a clamour in Herzegovina that Croatian martyrs will surely rise from their graves to join us.’