The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  Marin concentrated on the assault group. In quick succession he shot the third and fourth man as they laboured uphill. Soldiers still coming up stopped to help the wounded.

  The attack on the left had slowed, but Lovric and his men were still being hit by heavy fire from the forest. Andric called out that he was going down to help the defenders on that side. As he climbed back into the cave, Marin heard familiar percussive thumps from the forest.

  ‘Get down!’ he yelled at Vegar as mortar shells began exploding on the mountainside.

  Again the mouth of the cave was being targeted, and Marin realised that the attackers knew exactly where they were. His ears rang from the multiple concussions. Limestone dust filled the air, stinging his eyes. There was a film of it on his face.

  He turned to Vegar, who appeared to be wearing ghostly theatrical make-up. Marin laughed, for surely this was the last act of their tragedy.

  Then a roaring noise came from below. A tongue of flame reached out, blossoming into a fireball that scorched the pale rocks at the cave entrance.

  A flamethrower!

  Marin had seen in Vietnam what these could do to a man. The enemy was pushing up on the left behind the surging flame. He heard screams and shouts inside the cave and swivelled the Steyr. Sighting into the flame, he felt its radiated heat on his face—the devil’s breath, exhaled in bursts of fire. During the brief pause between when the flame bloomed and dissipated in the burning air, he saw the dark outline of a demon with fuel tanks on its back. He targeted the shape and squeezed the trigger as another fireball leapt from the weapon.

  The line of flame suddenly twisted and bucked like an untended garden hose writhing on the ground, spurting its deadly stream in all directions. The demon with the flamethrower had gone down, with his hand locked on the trigger. Marin saw a nearby soldier, lit up like a torch, run screaming down the hill.

  A last flame shot into the air and then the rain fell again with a new intensity. It poured down on the demon’s body and extinguished the weapon’s pilot light. The soldiers retreated to the forest under the downpour, dragging their dead and wounded through the mud.

  The assault was over. Marin lay drenched on the ledge.

  Vegar turned to him, shouting over the rain. ‘They must have come in on the choppers to have gotten here so quickly.’

  Vegar’s face had been washed clean; his thin hair was plastered to his scalp and his eyes burned in sunken pits.

  Marin saw the skull beneath the skin and imagined a dead man was talking to him.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ he replied after a moment. ‘They carried the mortar bombs on their backs. Limited supply, or they’d still be dropping them. So, maximum fifty men?’

  ‘If we’re right.’

  ‘They took at least eight casualties. They won’t try that again soon.’

  ‘They’ll wait now for the main force to get here. If the weather hadn’t closed in, they’d have choppers up here strafing the shit out of us. But we’re trapped like rats. Put a fucking rocket into the cave and we’re all dead. Only thing keeping us alive right now is the fucking rain.’

  Marin was astonished to find that, apart from Ersek, they had all survived the assault. But most of the men were still cowering at the back of the cave. The explosions had rattled them, but it had been the hellfire that poured into the cave entrance, seeking them out, sucking the breath from their lungs, that had left them paralysed. Some clutched their unfired weapons as if they were a talisman against evil.

  While Vegar briefed the others, Marin found Lovric and took him aside. The man’s nerves were stretched thin from the battle, his eyes moist with emotion.

  ‘We were moments away from being overrun,’ Lovric said. ‘It’s a miracle we’re still alive.’

  ‘It’s only a matter of time now,’ said Marin. ‘Our only chance is to hope the storm keeps up and for us to try to escape after dark.’

  ‘And to split up.’

  ‘That’s what Vegar is telling them.’

  Marin nodded in the direction of the group huddled on the other side of the cave, now in loud argument.

  ‘It makes sense for smaller groups to go in different directions and split the search,’ he went on, grasping Lovric by the shoulders. ‘I have an idea, but you’re the only one I trust.’

  ‘You already know my answer,’ said Lovric.

  Marin looked around to make sure no one was in earshot.

  ‘You better hear me out. This will sound crazy,’ he said quietly. ‘When the others leave the cave we will go with them, but break away as soon as possible. None of them must know what we’re doing. If they’re caught, they will give us away.’

  ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘There’s only one way for them to go. They will keep climbing and then head off in different directions. The best chance we have is to do the opposite. We’ll go back down the mountain.’

  ‘Straight into the arms of the enemy?’ said Lovric. ‘You are crazy.’

  ‘No. In the rain, in the dark, we can pass through them. It’s the last thing they will expect. Then we must find a secure place to hide during the day and let the main force pass. They’ll be looking forward, not behind them.’

  Lovric considered this, shaking his head.

  ‘You really are a mad fucker.’

  ‘That’s been said before.’

  Lovric clasped his arms around him and whispered in his ear. ‘I’m with you, brother.’

  The storm continued to worsen. The lookouts reported no movement at all from the forest, but regular shots rang out, the army snipers having resolved to keep them pinned in their cavernous trap. The opening was sheltered by rocky outcrops, which created a dog-leg at the entrance; but still the occasional round got through and ricocheted, sending sparks off the walls.

  Some of the men were stoically calm, some were strung out and some at the point of madness. Marin saw that many of them had reached the edge of endurance. They had seen how easily death had caught up with their companions and how patiently it waited for them. They had barely slept for days; they were wet and they were hungry.

  Circling the cave, Kancijanic—a man so reticent that Marin had barely heard him utter a full sentence since they had crossed the border—came across Ambroz Andric and stopped in front of him, his face twisted with contempt. Andric was sitting on the floor, picking sardines out of a can with the point of his knife.

  ‘What do you want, Viktor?’ he sighed.

  ‘This is your fault, you fucking madman!’ Kancijanic shouted. ‘You and your halfwit brother and your imbecilic plans.’

  Andric threw aside the can. As he tried to scramble to his feet, Kancijanic pushed him in the chest with both hands and he fell back on his arse. Men began to shout. Someone yelled, ‘Kill him!’, but it was unclear who they meant. Andric made it to his feet and went for Kancijanic with the knife.

  Marin stepped in, blocking him and seizing hold of the arm with the knife.

  ‘No,’ he shouted in Andric’s face. ‘We can’t afford to fight each other.’

  But Andric turned his anger on Marin. ‘I should have let Adolf kill you, daddy’s boy,’ he hissed, pulling free of Marin’s grip. ‘I’ll do it myself now.’

  Vegar jumped to his feet behind Andric and wrapped his arms around his friend. ‘No, Ambroz,’ he spoke into his ear. ‘No.’

  Now other men who had never spoken out climbed to their feet to challenge Andric. They’d had enough of his leadership and his stubborn delusions. Even here, trapped in this fetid cave, he had continued to insist that the common folk would hear of their brave deeds and climb the mountain to join them. They would have one hundred new recruits within days—that was his mantra—but they had all grown weary of it and they now openly abused him. Men who had once been frightened of their own shadows told Andric his words were shit. As his power diminished, they lost their fear and derided him and his plans. For his part Andric denounced them as motherless cunts, and wished only that they would di
e soon and think of their shame as they took their last breaths.

  Marin was not surprised that Vegar remained loyal to Andric, but only two others, Rocco Buntic and Mirko Vlasnovic, agreed to stay with him as the group disintegrated. The original troikas had become meaningless and new alliances formed in the cave as men calculated who was most likely to survive. Marin saw the treacherous Horvat finally turn on Andric, a dog biting his master’s hand. Horvat announced he would abandon the group and try to escape. No one argued with him.

  The rest of them, including Marin and Lovric, who of course had their own secret plan, agreed to follow Glavas. The demented general, despite everything, was ecstatic at finally having his own army. Marin listened to the pompous fool’s plan to march them west and then south to cross the Cetina River into Dalmatia. Watching the man pace up and down, he was reminded of the story Lovric had told him of Glavas haranguing the group of frozen corpses. Marin glanced at the pale, strained faces of the men around him. They might as well be corpses. No Croatian martyrs had risen from their graves to join their holy war, but he felt sure these men would soon be sharing eternity with them in the darkness.

  The long day came to a melancholy end. As night fell, men who now found themselves in different camps hugged and said their goodbyes.

  Andric and Vegar went up first through the shaft that took them out above the cave. One by one the men followed, each of them clad in their wet ponchos. The thunderstorm had passed, but the heavy downpour continued and they crawled through a small waterfall all the way up to the opening.

  Marin was the last to emerge, Lovric just ahead of him. As his eyes adjusted he made out the shapes of men climbing ahead of him low to the ground. Through the driving rain he heard explosions down below in the forest.

  ‘Get down! Get down!’ he yelled, and the call echoed up the chain of men. The sky above the cave was illuminated by two flares, blazing like green suns as they swayed down on small parachutes. More thumps came from below and mortar bombs exploded in a pattern near the mouth of the cave.

  Marin knew the escapees had not been seen or the bombs would have fallen around them, exposed on the open mountain. They lay still until the flares dimmed, and then began the steep ascent once more.

  Marin grabbed Lovric’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered when there was enough space between them and the last men in the group, and slithered down and off to the right.

  Lovric soon followed him. They made perhaps twenty metres before he heard the thump of the mortars once more. They slid through the mud to an outcrop as the illumination rounds again bathed the cave opening with green light. This time lines of tracers streamed up from positions in the forest as fire was poured into the cave.

  Marin looked up and realised that the climbing men had gone beyond the range of the flares and were in shadow. Their own situation was much more perilous.

  When the flares died, Marin and Lovric angled down across the mountain to get as far away from the cave as they could. The descent was much steeper on this path and in the darkness Marin began to fear that the rain would wash them into a crevasse or over a cliff edge. He dug his fingers into the cracks in the limestone and inched down metre by metre. It took them more than an hour, but somehow they found a path to the bottom.

  The attacks continued at random intervals. Using the firing positions as his reference, Marin took a compass bearing under his poncho, then they set off into the forest, skirting the concentration of soldiers. They only felt safe when they heard the gunfire faintly behind them.

  When the sky began to lighten, they knew that it was time to disappear. Lovric suggested traversing the slope until the woods thinned. He was looking for an area of bare karst, where they would be likely to find another cave.

  As they worked their way across the forest, they found clumps of mushrooms, chanterelles and morels, which they picked and stuffed into their pockets. By the time they reached the first clearing the rain had eased with the dawn. They were exposed on the steep slope, but Lovric soon found a narrow opening in the karst. He took off his pack and edged inside, with Marin following.

  The entrance was no more than five feet high, but it opened out to a larger space at the back which was miraculously dry. They laid their packs on the ground, shucked off their damp ponchos and emptied their pockets.

  They ate the mushrooms, along with a few salted biscuits, and washed them down with rainwater from their canteens. Marin was almost delirious with fatigue. He lay with his head on his pack and fell into a deep slumber.

  Anna Rosen came to him in his sleep, her breath on the side of his face, her voice whispering in his ear, urging him to come home. Marin had forced thoughts of her from his conscious mind, locked them away, and yet here she was and he felt her loss like the deep throbbing pain of an amputated limb.

  He woke, his heart thumping, startled by the noise of heavy choppers ascending from the valley. Two of them—the Mi-8s—which he presumed were returning, now that the weather had cleared, to drop reinforcements and ammunition, and to pick up the wounded and the dead. Then came two more, smaller machines: reconnaissance choppers, he was willing to wager.

  Lovric was at the front of the cave, peering up from the shadows. When the aircraft passed over he came back and slumped down against his pack.

  ‘They’ll stop at nothing now,’ he said. ‘Every man in every village and town will be searching until all of us are hunted down.’

  ‘How long were we asleep?’

  ‘An hour, maybe less.’

  ‘We’ll need more than that.’

  ‘You got any sleep pills? I’m full of adrenalin.’

  Marin reached into his pack. ‘No, but I’ve been saving this.’ He threw Lovric a battered flask. ‘My father made it.’

  Lovric held it up. ‘Here’s to your father.’ He took a long pull and handed the flask back. ‘The stupid prick that put us here.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Marin said.

  Lovric lay back on his pack and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t blame him. I don’t. I blame myself. I never told you this, but I left my son to come here. The boy is two years old. I ran from his mother and him. He was going to tie me down, you see, and put an end to the great adventure. That’s how big a fuckwit I am. Fathers can be such cunts, am I right?’

  ‘You are right.’

  *

  They slept fitfully, woken through the day by the comings and goings of helicopters and by distant gunfire. Before nightfall they checked their meagre supplies. They calculated that the food could be made to last three days, if they carefully rationed it. They shared a chocolate bar from a US ration pack. When it was completely dark, they resumed their climb down the mountain.

  In the early hours of the morning they reached the foothills and a large open space which, by Marin’s reckoning, was Kupresko Polje, the field of buttercups. He was about to step into it when he saw a light flicker and a red glow. Someone had lit a cigarette. A sentry? He held Lovric back, put a finger to his mouth.

  Marin knelt and rubbed mud on his face and hands; Lovric did the same. Marin led them to the edge of the field, which they began to cross on their bellies. Part way across he realised that the strange shapes he’d been seeing in the field were not rocks but tents, dozens of them, tent after tent. They were crawling through a large encampment. They must have stumbled into the territorial army’s forward operating base.

  They had no choice but to keep going. If there were sentries at the far end, they didn’t spot them. Marin avoided the pathways that he assumed were military supply lines and found a way back into the forest.

  In this way, exposing themselves only at night and hiding out during the day, they moved steadily south. As their food supplies dwindled, they risked raiding isolated farmhouses.

  After two nights’ walking, they thought they had put the main search parties behind them. But in the tiny village of Zahum they almost walked into an ambush. At the edge of the village Lovric spotted a militia outpost. They we
re able to backtrack and circle around it. But the incident disturbed Marin. If a place that small had soldiers waiting for them, where would they be safe?

  They hiked one night to Rama Lake and saw its famous blue waters—the mountain’s eye—gleaming black in the moonlight. After avoiding houses by the water, they climbed down from the lake, heading south through thick forest until they came to a small hamlet at the base of the mountain. It was after 3 am and Lovric decided these farmhouses were ripe for the picking.

  ‘It could be our last chance for a while,’ he whispered. ‘Since we’ll soon be back into the mountains.’

  ‘It’s not worth the risk,’ said Marin, still shaken by their close shave in Zahum. ‘We have enough food to take us through the mountains.’

  But Lovric was determined—the little white farmhouses were tempting, and they seemed so benign. He stripped off his pack, tucked a hessian bag into his belt and left his rifle. Taking out his Browning pistol, he crept into the back of the closest farmhouse.

  After a brief search of the outbuildings, he found a wooden hut with salamis and dried corncobs hanging from beams. He cut down bunches of each and was shovelling these into the sack when the farm dog sensed his presence and started up a maniacal barking.

  Marin, from about one hundred metres away, saw lights come on in several farmhouses; the dog’s alarm rang through the close-knit hamlet as effectively as an air-raid warning. He cursed and pulled the Steyr from his shoulder, peering into the pools of light and darkness. A silhouette passed fast through the scope—a figure running through the fields with a gun?

  Lovric cocked his pistol and sprinted into the courtyard, the booty in his other hand. The dog came at him out of the shadows, barking and snarling. When it bit his leg, he put a bullet in its brain.

  The gunshot ended all doubt and all sleep. Lights came on right across the low hillside in dwellings even Marin had not seen. His own position was exposed now and he jumped up. Shouldering the two packs, he retreated a further fifty metres into the forest.