The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  “Like Tony Soprano?” Sondergaard asked lightly.

  “Only without the class,” Eric agreed.

  The ambassador polished off his “tomato juice” and gestured to the server for a refill.

  “You need to remember whose mission this is,” he said sourly.

  “Yes, sir. Apologies for overstepping.”

  Wylie turned toward Sondergaard, now all charm and tact.

  “Madam High Representative, I hope we haven’t committed you to something you will have trouble delivering on.”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I think we’re in a better place than I had dared hope we would be at this point.”

  “My government certainly recognizes the importance of your initiative. Is there anything else I can do for you? Any way I can help?”

  “Well, there is one thing you could give me,” she replied.

  “Name it.”

  “Him.” She pointed at Eric. “Just for a month or two.”

  “He’s all yours,” the ambassador agreed without so much as a glance in Eric’s direction.

  “I’ll try not to break him.”

  “Don’t worry. I tried. I didn’t succeed.”

  MILAŠEVCI, BOSNIA

  OCTOBER 9

  2

  The drive from Sarajevo to Banja Luka was only about four hours, but it was a trip through hundreds of years of turbulent history. This was one of the world’s great civilizational fault lines, the blurry boundary between East and West, Christian and Muslim, Ottoman and Hapsburg. The Romans fought the Illyrians in the mountains that lined the road north. Soldiers loyal to Samuel of Bulgaria had patrolled these valleys in the late tenth century before losing a war to the Byzantine Empire. Most recently, Croat, Serb, and Bosniak forces in the wars of the 1990s had battled for control of the towns and villages that empire after empire had sacked and rebuilt in the same locations with the same geographic and strategic logic. The Balkans, Churchill had once observed, produced more history than they could consume.

  Eric and Annika sat in the back of the high-end Land Rover that was part of the EU mission’s vehicle fleet. The EU, Eric thought, for all of its shortcomings as America’s premier partner in global diplomacy, made excellent cars. Even traveling the rough mountain roads, the ride was smooth and quiet and the High Rep was using the opportunity to get briefed in advance of what was likely to be a critical meeting.

  “What do you know about Zoran Dimitrović?” she asked Eric.

  “Not enough,” he admitted. “He’s been on the political scene for some time, but up until recently, only in a decidedly minor-league role as the head of a marginal right-wing political party called the National Party. Then, about eighteen months ago, the RS government fell and there were new elections. The National Party took off. Dimitrović all of a sudden had money and that bought him new friends in the media, the police, and the business community.”

  “Where did the money come from?”

  “That’s the thing. Nobody seems to know. But Dimitrović and the National Party went from polling near the 5 percent threshold for making it into parliament to almost 40 percent. And it happened in the political equivalent of overnight. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’d be lying if I said I understood how it happened.”

  “I suspect that your ambassador would be able to offer an explanation,” she suggested slyly.

  “Sure. Just not one based on evidence. I could tell you that Dimitrović is really an alien overlord from another galaxy sent here to enslave us all, starting with Banja Luka. It’s an explanation, but not an especially likely one.”

  Annika laughed.

  “I like you, Eric,” she said.

  “Thank you, Madam High Representative.”

  “Oh, please don’t call me that. I hate it when people have to stop and take a breath before that god-awful title. Annika is fine.”

  “It does make it easier,” Eric agreed. “In truth, I appreciate the opportunity to work with you on this. What you’re doing . . . what we’re doing . . . is tremendously important.”

  “You see the same thing coming as I do, don’t you?”

  “War.”

  “Yes. What happened when Dimitrović came to power?”

  “Now the story gets really quite odd. Dimitrović was a nationalist, remember, a hard-liner. But he comes to power in the RS and almost immediately adopts a pro-Western agenda. He wants Bosnia in the EU and NATO. He scales back ties with Serbia. He works to strengthen the central government, even when that means agreeing to transfer some powers from the entity level to Sarajevo. That’s something we’ve been pushing for unsuccessfully for years. And this is all from a guy who’s rumored to have the Serbian cross tattooed on his behind.”

  “So it’s a Nixon-to-China story? The hard-liner looks to open up to the world, and because his nationalist credentials are unimpeachable, he’s inoculated against charges of being a sellout.”

  “That’s the way it looked to us,” Eric agreed. “For a while.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “For about ten months or so, Dimitrović was a dream partner for us. We were getting everything we needed out of the relationship. Then, about seven or eight months ago, something changed. Something important. And I’m sorry to be vague on this point. It’s just that we don’t entirely understand what happened. But the Dimitrović administration suddenly began to backtrack on all of its commitments. The RS pulled out of the joint institutions and stopped paying taxes into the central coffers. Police liaisons were withdrawn; the Serbs who had been working in various international organizations active in Bosnia quit in response to threats against their families; and trade ties were cut. And most worrisome, the paramilitaries reappeared like the dead coming back to life in some zombie movie.”

  “The same groups that were active during the war?” Sondergaard asked.

  “Many of them, yes. Not the Tigers, thank god. But the Yellow Wasps, the Scorpions, the Green Dragons. They’re all back and they’re playing a major role in the RS. It’s scary.”

  “What about the new group?”

  “The White Hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again, we know a lot less than I want to. It’s a new group, but an old name. The White Hand was the name adopted by a cabal of military officers back in the early part of the twentieth century. They were led by an army colonel who was looking for leverage in opposing a parallel secret military organization called the Black Hand that also sometimes went by the name Unification or Death.”

  Annika looked skeptical.

  “This is real history, I promise you. I know it all sounds terribly melodramatic. But the guys who did this were all absolutely invested.”

  “In what?”

  “Well, the Black Hand wanted to unify the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a single state modeled after German and Italian unification, all under a Serbian king. There’s good reason to believe that Gavrilo Princip, the guy who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and triggered the First World War, worked for the Black Hand. So it’s not like the group was just a footnote.”

  “And the White Hand?”

  “The White Hand won a power struggle with the Black Hand and gradually accumulated more and more power, mostly by exercising control over the king, Alexander Karadjordjević.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Tito. When the communists came to power, the members of the White Hand were imprisoned or executed. A few fled abroad.”

  “And now they’re back?”

  “It’s more likely that it’s a new group of people who have appropriated the name. The leader is someone who calls himself Marko Barcelona.”

  “Hardly sounds like a local name. Is he a Spaniard?”

  “It’s probably a nom de crime. Some of the gangsters in the ex-Yugosphere style themselves after th
e place they made their bones. Joca Amsterdam. Misa the Kraut. That sort of thing. Almost no one in that line of work uses their real name. Barcelona is one of the big points of entry for cocaine from South America. So the best guess is that he was somehow involved in the drug trade.”

  “Best guess?”

  “We know hardly anything about him. He uses the nickname Mali, which means little one in Serbo-Croatian. That could be meant literally or it could be a joke. Maybe he’s a dwarf. But maybe he’s two meters tall and a hundred and fifty kilos.”

  “It could mean he has a tiny penis,” Annika suggested mischievously.

  “Could be. Or maybe the name Tripod was also in the running. We don’t know. Mali is secretive beyond the point of paranoia. I’ve never seen a picture of him. I don’t know where he lives. Some people think he’s entirely fictional and the real leader of the White Hand is someone else altogether who is hiding behind a made-up character.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s for real, but I wouldn’t rule anything out. This place can be down-the-rabbit-hole weird. Whoever he is, the power that Mali and the White Hand have accumulated in a remarkably short time is real enough. The Hand does Dimitrović’s bidding, and the few politicians who have crossed the president have reason to regret it.”

  The Land Rover stopped. Eric leaned forward to get a look out the front window.

  “The road is closed,” the driver said to him in Serbo-Croatian.

  A row of oil barrels painted white stretched across the two-lane “highway” that connected Sarajevo and Banja Luka. There were no workmen anywhere in sight, no machinery and no indications of any major construction on the road up ahead. A sign with an orange metal arrow pointed the way to a detour on a dirt track that seemed to run up into the mountains and then parallel to the highway.

  “Something about this doesn’t feel right,” Eric said to Sondergaard.

  “I agree. What do you think we should do?”

  “Smart thing would be to turn back.”

  “Probably. But this meeting with Dimitrović is important. Without him, we don’t have a peace deal.”

  “What do you think, Munib?” Eric asked the driver.

  He shrugged. “Road needs the work. Maybe they have just yet no to start it.”

  Munib’s English was of the rough-and-ready variety, but he spoke it quickly as though speed would somehow compensate for the errors. After years in the region, Eric had no trouble with this particular variant of fractured communication.

  “We can try the detour. Take it slow and see what we find,” Eric suggested.

  Annika nodded. “I do want to get to Banja Luka,” she said. “There’s so little time to work with.”

  Eric understood her urgency. “Let’s try it, Munib.”

  The dirt track was rough but not especially difficult for the Land Rover. About two kilometers down the road, however, Munib had to stop again. Two sizeable logs had been laid across the road. A gray-green tarp strung up in the trees kept the sun and the rain off the three men sitting at a wooden table alongside the roadblock. Their guns were leaning casually against a tree.

  Instinctively, Eric turned to look through the rear window. There were two more men behind them. They carried their AK-47 rifles in their arms, not pointing the weapons at the Land Rover but not pointing them away either.

  “What do we do?” Annika asked. “Run?”

  “No, that would be a terrible idea. They’d be quite likely to shoot.”

  “So what should we do?”

  “Talk.”

  He opened the door and got out. Sondergaard was right behind him.

  The three guards stood. Two of the men retrieved their rifles, and the three guards walked toward Eric and Annika. It was likely, Eric knew, that the one man without a Kalashnikov was in charge. He looked to be a little older than the other two, in his twenties rather than his teens, and he had a full beard. The younger men looked more like they just had not shaved for a few days. They were wearing army uniforms, but they did not all match. Their boots, in particular, were an assortment of different styles. This was the trademark of the paramilitaries, a mixed assortment of clothing and weapons and equipment, whatever they had been able to scrounge or steal. There was a unit patch sewn on the left shoulder of their uniforms. It was shaped like a shield with a cartoon wasp, its stinger dripping blood. The Yellow Wasps.

  In the Bosnian War, the Wasps had been responsible for the ethnic cleansing and looting of Zvornik. They were indiscriminate, killing Serbs as easily as they killed Muslims or Croats. The Wasps’ original leadership was still incarcerated in The Hague, found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of crimes against humanity. That someone would seek to revive the Yellow Wasps seemed itself a crime.

  Eric could hear the two men with rifles arguing fiercely with each other in Serbian. Their disagreement was about him.

  “He’s a Turk, just look at him,” said the soldier with a pronounced belly and the forearms of a butcher.

  “Fuck you. No way. He’s a Gypsy, a fucking Gypsy. He’s practically black.” The second Wasp was lanky and thin and pale. He looked less like a real soldier and more like a university student acting in a play about a virulently nationalist paramilitary.

  Eric and Annika stopped, and let the triad of soldiers come to them.

  The leader spat into the dirt. A few flecks of spittle clung to his beard.

  “What’s your business in the independent state of Republika Srpska?” he asked.

  “Independent state?” Eric replied. “Last I looked, the RS was part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

  “Not for long,” the Yellow Wasp officer answered. “This is the border checkpoint. You need a visa if you want to cross.”

  “This is Annika Sondergaard, the European Union’s High Representative, and my name is Eric Petrosian. I’m the political counselor at the American embassy in Sarajevo. We have a meeting with President Dimitrović in Banja Luka, and I don’t think he would appreciate your shaking down his guests.”

  “I’m not interested in what Dimitrović thinks,” the Wasp replied. That in itself was a very interesting data point.

  “Who do you work for then?”

  “None of your damn business.”

  Eric translated the brief exchange for Annika’s benefit.

  “I say we turn back,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  “We’ll be returning to Sarajevo,” Eric said to the Wasps. “But you will be seeing us again.”

  The two armed men raised their weapons, and when Eric looked over his shoulder, he could see that the men behind him were now pointing their guns at the Land Rover. Their driver, who remembered the war all too well, kept his hands visible on the steering wheel.

  “Not with that nice car,” the Wasp captain said. “You can walk back to the road from here.”

  In his eyes, Eric could see the same frightening mixture of avarice and nationalist fervor that had led Bosnia down the road to hell two decades earlier. He could feel his anger rising. He sure as hell was not going to give in to this kind of blackmail and intimidation.

  Eric took a step toward the Wasp captain.

  “You had better tell your men to put those guns down,” he advised, with what he hoped was a confident smile. “It could get them killed.”

  “By you? A Gypsy?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t do that kind of thing. But, you see, I work for the government of the United States of America. There are people I work with who do that sort of work regularly.”

  “I don’t see them here,” the Wasp said sneeringly.

  Eric pointed up into the clear blue sky.

  “Do you see that little black dot?” he asked.

  Despite himself, the Wasp leader looked where Eric was pointing.

 
“No.”

  “Look carefully. It’s very small. But it’s there.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s an unmanned aerial vehicle. You might call it a drone, but don’t do that around the people who fly it. They’re very sensitive. In any event, it’s monitoring us. The woman I’m traveling with is rather important. If you shoot at us, the Reaper pilot controlling that aircraft will hunt you down and kill you in these mountains. I’d hate for something like that to be necessary.”

  “I don’t believe you,” the captain said, although it was clear that he was less than 100 percent certain. “The bombs would kill you too.”

  “These are the very latest Reapers,” Eric replied. “They’re equipped with more . . . personal . . . capabilities. It wouldn’t take more than a few seconds, and from what I’ve been told, there should be very little pain. The rounds it fires are remarkably accurate but also quite large. Again, I’d really be sorry to see something like that prove necessary.”

  Without waiting for orders, the two armed men in front of them lowered their weapons. The captain gestured palms down to the two behind them, and Eric knew that they had lowered their guns as well.

  “I have a little gift for you,” Eric said.

  He pulled something out of his pocket and extended his hand. The Wasp captain reached out, and Eric shook hands with him, pressing something into his palm as he did so.

  The paramilitary leader looked at it. It was a coin with an American flag on one side and the Great Seal of the United States on the other.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “It’s a challenge coin,” Eric explained. “If you can produce the coin the next time we see each other, I have to buy you a drink. If you don’t have it on you, you buy me one. We’re friends now.”

  The Wasp smiled, showing a mouth full of yellow-brown teeth. He pocketed the coin.

  “Now, why don’t you ask your boys to move those logs so we can get on our way to Banja Luka.”

  The Wasp nodded and patted the pocket where he had placed the challenge coin.

  He barked instructions to his subordinates, who were soon pulling on the ropes that opened a gap in the log barrier.