The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  The next morning it began raining, lightly at first, but it soon grew into a heavy downpour. They stopped to eat rations at the edge of a clearing, their American ponchos drenched and slick against their bodies. Hunkered down in the partial shelter of the black pines, the men reminded Marin of some exotic species of green tree fungus.

  It was in this place that they met the first people since the truck driver. Two rangy peasants with shotguns walked without warning into the clearing. The two men squatted down with the group after Ambroz Andric bid them to stop and take some food. When he learned they were both Croats, Ambroz launched into a political lecture about the evils of Tito’s regime and revealed to the incredulous strangers that this group of armed men was the beginning of an uprising.

  But the men were perplexed.

  ‘What are you—actors?’ the older of them asked. ‘Is this a performance, a joke?’

  Ambroz hastened to reassure them that this was no joke but the beginning of a revolution that would free their families from the yoke of communism.

  ‘Do we look like we are not free?’ asked the man. ‘We come and go in the forest. We can hunt. We live on our land. What would you free us from?’

  ‘From Tito’s oppression,’ said Ambroz, explaining that the Ustasha had finally returned to set all Croats free.

  The older man stood up at that and beckoned his friend to do so.

  ‘The Ustasha are long gone,’ he said. ‘They are dead or gone.’

  ‘Now we have returned,’ said Ambroz.

  The man took a cautious step back, a hand on his shotgun. He looked around at the band of men in the clearing. Sensing trouble, several of them reached for their weapons. Dropping his hand from the shotgun, the man reassured his friend with a touch and produced his friendliest smile.

  ‘So, you’ve come from the past, have you?’ he asked. ‘Well, we wish you no harm. We will leave you in peace.’

  Ambroz stood up. ‘Wait!’ he called.

  But the men had turned back into the forest and vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. Horvat wanted to go after them and there was a heated debate about it.

  In the end Ambroz won the argument with a point that even Glavas was forced to agree on: ‘We’re not here to kill our brothers. The moment we do that our cause is lost.’

  ‘What if they come back to kill us?’ asked Horvat and the question, which remained unanswered, exacerbated the dread that many of them were feeling. That no one wanted them here. That they would remain isolated and alone.

  The unhappy band had no way of knowing it, but the driver had already screwed up enough courage to report his encounter with them to the police. His wife had warned him that an investigation would connect him to the plot if he remained silent. She was far less concerned about threats from strangers than the sure retribution of the secret police. So, after agonising for a day, he presented himself to the regional police station in Bugojno late in the evening.

  When the sergeant on night duty was finally convinced the bizarre story was true, he summoned his commanding officer to the station. For the police in Bugojno it was the word Ustasha that transformed the driver’s disturbing intelligence from a local criminal incident into a national crisis. Calls were swiftly made to the security services in Belgrade. For the men at the top of those services, this was a confirmation of long-held fears, confirmation of an infectious outbreak with potential to destroy national unity. So critical was it that the spymasters decided to wake the president late at night to brief him.

  Tito, shaken from sleep, told them they were right to disturb him. He ordered the immediate formation of a crisis group of military and security generals to coordinate the manhunt. He demanded that the incursion be treated as a national emergency. An armed terrorist group had infiltrated their country and, according to the truck driver’s testimony, they proudly called themselves Ustasha. Ustasha, for Christ’s sake! The most reviled fascist group ever to emerge in the country’s history. The terrorists must be found and destroyed; anyone who might have offered them support must be rooted out and interrogated.

  Within hours thirty thousand members of the regional militia were mobilised under the direction of the army and the police. Their orders were to contain the threat; to surround the area; and to scour every town and village, every cave and crevice and crack in the mountain until every last terrorist was killed or captured.

  Bugojno was designated as the headquarters for the operation, and from there a spearhead military force was swiftly raised and sent into the forest on foot. On the driver’s evidence the terrorists had a 24-hour lead. And so the massive manhunt got under way.

  Leading the advance force was Army Captain Milos Popovic. They had not gone far before his radio man received a transmission from Bugojno, where the police had received fresh intel that a horse had been stolen from a field near map reference Kota 1390.

  Popovic drove his men hard through the remaining hours of darkness and reached the field in the morning. Following the trails beyond that point, the pursuers found footprints in the mud and the deep tracks of a burdened horse. They were closing in. Eventually his scouts reported sighting uniformed men with a horse up ahead, climbing across an open space towards the concealment of a thick forest.

  Popovic had his soldiers throw off their packs and run ahead. He wanted to cut off the armed band before they made their way deeper into the mountain and its hidden networks of caves. Reaching the forward scout, Popovic saw the distant group and pulled out his binoculars. A jolt of adrenalin ran through him as he saw the faces of the men, the weapons they carried, and the heavily laden horse they were pulling uphill. Throughout his life he had heard stories of the Ustasha terror: the sadism, the mass killings of Serbs, the concentration camps. Now here they were, in human form, and it was his job to destroy them.

  It was a poor strategic position from which to attack. Popovic conferred with his second-in-command. The enemy was on high ground and his men would have to cross a wide-open field to reach them. But it was agreed that, if he didn’t act now, the Ustasha would escape into the mountain.

  It was decided. Popovic signalled for his men to fan out into two groups; he ordered them to run up either side of the open hill, ready to stop and fire on his command.

  It was Adolf Andric who spotted the attackers. He was the lowest man on the hill. Having stopped for a piss, he was stuck behind the horse. He shouted a warning, gesturing wildly. Marin was not much higher, and turned in time to see Adolf take a bullet in the centre of his face before a volley of gunfire scythed across the side of the hill. Two other men were falling, cut down by the raking fire. A round slapped into the horse’s flank.

  Marin unslung his rifle and dived for cover behind a limestone outcrop. The horse wheeled past him, panicked and in pain, hurtling downhill until it tumbled headfirst into the ground, sliding and kicking. Much of their party’s ammunition and supplies had gone with it.

  There was sporadic firing now from their own position, behind and beside him. Vegar was firing short bursts from behind another nearby rock. Ambroz Andric ran to his brother’s body. Someone else was firing on full auto using a silencer—blatblatblatblatblat—and then it stopped, overheated.

  He saw men running away from the fight uphill in slow motion to the cover of the forest above them. One took a bullet in the back.

  Marin levered himself up, steadied the Steyr rifle and scanned the lower ground through his scope. The troops below were standing in the open, firing with no regard for their safety. Militia, not regular army—crazy-brave or ill-disciplined.

  Marin picked a target, a young man who appeared to be firing directly at him. He put a round through his chest. He felt nothing, merely chambering the next round and swivelling the weapon, searching for officers.

  A man with a radio. A tall man beside him standing upright, directing the fire—a captain’s insignia on his beret. Marin squeezed the trigger, watched the beret fly off in a red mist. The man collapsed like a puppet whose stri
ngs had been cut.

  Another man ran to the fallen officer. Marin shot him too and he slumped on to his comrade’s body. Two officers down.

  The radio man, staring wildly about, stripped the heavy transceiver from his back and dropped it as if it were radioactive before running off.

  He was not alone. With their leaders gone, there was a general panic among the attackers. They stopped firing; some dived to the ground; some whirled about in disarray; others flew back to the woods.

  Vegar called out to Marin, signalling a retreat. Ambroz Andric was trying to drag his brother’s body up the steep hill and Vegar ran to help him. On his way up, Marin saw the body of Ivan Prlic. Like Adolf Andric, he had been killed in the first volley; Marin took his weapon and spare ammunition.

  Lovric was bent over another body further up the hill that had been shot in the back.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘Fucking Glavas got out. He was the first to run. I’ll bet his weapon hasn’t been fired.’

  Marin nodded grimly. ‘They’ll regroup soon.’

  ‘I know. We’ve got to go. Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Lovric hit the ground with his fist. ‘So much of the ammo was on that fucking horse.’

  ‘It’s gone. Nothing we can do.’

  The two of them helped Andric and Vegar haul Adolf’s body into the forest, where the others had taken cover behind trees. The rain started again. There was no time to bury his brother, so Ambroz covered him with a poncho and said a prayer over the body. No one waited for him to grieve. They were already scrambling up the mountain as fast as they could.

  Marin assessed the situation. The first engagement had been inconclusive. The army had grabbed for the scorpion and been stung. The casualties they had taken would slow the pursuit, but not for long. To their motivations you could now add revenge.

  The momentum of the escape prevented Marin dwelling on the men he had killed, but he couldn’t avoid the flash-frame images: the disbelief on the young man’s face, like someone hit by a car they hadn’t seen; the officer’s beret flying off with the contents of his skull; the third man as motionless as a sleeping lover, draped over his commander’s body. Three more ghosts for him to haul up the mountain; three more to haunt him in his sleep.

  They stopped, exhausted when the adrenalin ran out. They needed to find a secure hiding place and lose themselves on the mountain. Lovric, who had previously hiked on Radusa, advised they should keep climbing to find the caves at higher altitudes. There was no time to lose.

  They took a steep route through the forest, avoiding the main trails and sticking to areas densely covered by black pine and mountain ash. The rain subsided to a cold drizzle that barely touched them on the forest floor where in the darkest reaches snow beds lay year round.

  After some hours Vegar called them to a halt and stood in silence, staring up through the treetops.

  ‘Shut up,’ he called when someone began chattering. Then they all heard what had stopped Vegar in his tracks—the deep grinding sound of heavy aircraft labouring against gravity to stay aloft. As the machines came closer, they discerned the rhythmic beat of rotor blades and the roar of large engines.

  ‘Take cover!’ cried Vegar.

  Soon the fearful noise echoing in the high mountains was all they could hear. The foliage over them was thick, but Marin could see patches of sky, pale as the limestone. He pulled the poncho over his head and crouched behind a thick tree trunk.

  The sound grew into an unbearable roar and he felt the downward crush of air shaking the treetops into madness. Moments later the undercarriages of two huge choppers crossed his vision. Then they were gone and he found himself shivering.

  ‘They’re Mi-8s,’ said Vegar. ‘Each of them can carry more than twenty men. If they’re putting troops on the mountain ahead of us, we’re in more trouble than we thought.’

  Buntic spoke up with a quavering voice. ‘Maybe we should split up now. We’ll be easier to find as a large group.’

  Marin looked over in surprise. The would-be interior minister of their imaginary government had been in a silent funk for days. No one replied.

  ‘Does anyone have a plan?’ Buntic asked.

  ‘I won’t stop you, Rocco, if you want to go off on your own,’ said Ambroz Andric.

  Buntic was shaking now, tears in his eyes, a man at the end of his tether.

  ‘How do I know you won’t shoot me in the back?’ he whimpered.

  Without warning Glavas barrelled over, put an elbow into his face and knocked him to the ground. Buntic sat there with blood pouring from his nose.

  ‘Buntic is just crying because his bum-chum, Prlic, was killed,’ said Glavas, glaring with disdain at the man on the ground. ‘One coward could destroy us all. Does he want to put his underwear on a stick and surrender? How long before he’d give us all up?’

  Andric stepped between them. ‘Leave him, Glavas,’ he said, before turning to address the group. ‘You all know what will happen if they catch us. They’ll put us on meat hooks. At least for now, you are masters of your own fate. Remember you swore an oath to the death. My brother died for that oath. I guarantee this: the people are with us. The army has turned them against us but, when they hear that twenty men stood against Tito’s mighty army, they will come to join us in their hundreds. Until then we must run and hide and stay alive.’

  There was silence as the diminished band of revolutionaries absorbed the idea that the only plan now was to play hide and seek.

  Marin knew that there had never been any other plan. They were here to become martyrs. His father had sent them for that purpose. Ivo would grieve for his death, because the wrong son had made the fatal pilgrimage, but he would still rejoice in his martyrdom. Until then, however, while blood flowed in their veins, they must find the deepest, darkest cave to crawl into.

  It was Lovric who eventually found it, below Idovac, the highest peak of Mt Radusa.

  14.

  Just after dawn Al Sharp and his armed response team clambered into a flat-bottomed boat at the Eden wharf. He had hired a local fisherman, Bob Johnson, to ferry them upriver. Two teams would converge on the Khandalah farmhouses from different directions in a coordinated operation. Sharp’s team by water, the other by road.

  There was a low fog hanging over Twofold Bay as their boat slapped against the swell. Sharp winced each time they breached a wave and his three men braced themselves, cradling their armalite rifles to avoid bashing them on the aluminium hull.

  ‘Hold on,’ Johnson cried out as they hit rougher water. Sharp saw the fisherman wreathed in fog, grinning at his discomfort. He had never liked the open ocean, and the bay was exposed to its uncertain conditions.

  ‘Maybe you should slow down a bit!’ he cried out.

  The fisherman ignored the advice and called over the whine of the motor and the thump of the hull: ‘My grandfather used to hunt whales out here.’

  Sharp shook his head. ‘Rather him than me.’

  ‘I can tell that.’

  ‘I never liked boats.’

  ‘We’re nearly out of the chop.’ Johnson peered through the fog. ‘River mouth’s comin’ up.’

  Soon the boat was through the swell and on to the river, its surface still and glassy. Sharp began to glimpse wild green banks through veils of thinning mist. Prehistoric was how it felt to him, strange and beautiful.

  He glanced at the set faces of his men and sensed their minds were concentrated on the near future and the possibility of armed resistance. Anna Rosen’s account had begun with gunshots, so they knew there was at least one rifle and an unstable suspect prepared to use it. They assumed Petar Katich was alone, but they had no way of knowing if there might be others. There were rumours the place had been used for military-type training for would-be guerrillas.

  ‘It’s a few miles upstream,’ said Johnson. ‘So what’ve the Katiches been up to, then?’

  ‘You know them?’ asked Sharp.

  ‘The family’s had that place a long time. Keep to themselves, pretty mu
ch. They do a bit of pig huntin’, so I believe.’

  ‘Anything strange about them?’

  ‘Wild country up ’ere, mate. Nothin’ much counts as strange.’

  ‘No rumours, then?’

  The fisherman thought for a moment. ‘Groups of strangers turn up from time to time, all men. Like I said, they seem to like their pig huntin’.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Who knows. No one’s gonna ask armed men too many questions, are they?’

  ‘What do the neighbours think of them?’

  ‘There was an old bloke called Lewis who had the property next to them on the river. Heard he was close to the Katich boys. The father’s a bit of a ratbag, so they say—went off the rails after his wife left him. Lewis took the boys in hand when they were stayin’ ’ere. Good bloke, Lewis. He passed away last year. His place’s gone to wrack and ruin since then.’

  It was the most revealing exchange Sharp had had with Bob Johnson and the fisherman suddenly seemed to regret it. He said little more, even when Sharp tried to coax him, and they motored up the river in silence as the fog rose to reveal a serene wilderness.

  ‘We’re here,’ he eventually whispered, cutting the motor. They drifted through lingering fingers of mist and put the boat ashore on a low sandbank that jutted into the river.

  ‘You just follow the path uphill,’ said Bob to Sharp as the men nimbly disembarked and checked their weapons.

  ‘You stay right here, Johnson,’ Sharp told him. ‘I don’t want you approaching the farmhouses under any circumstances. If you hear gunfire, just stay put and keep out of sight.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me. I’ve got a thermos of tea. I’ll sit ’ere and have a smoke.’

  The armed police spread out and climbed through the bush until they sighted two rustic buildings on the hilltop. Sharp called them to a halt, took out his walkie-talkie and clicked the Send button three times to communicate that they were in place.