For Valour

by Andy McNab

  A father and son were turning a pig on a spit in their front yard while their next-door neighbour did his best to breathe some extra mileage into an ancient tractor with a welding torch. Most of the advertising hoardings seemed to be celebrating local beers and politicians up for re-election. A few featured sultry women inviting us to enjoy a night out at Belgrade’s Grand Casino, or to invest in skimpy Italian underwear. Fuck knew where you were supposed to buy it out here, though: most of the shops only sold fruit and veg, motor mowers or plastic chairs.

  Rubbish spewed from every wheelie bin, but the polished marble roadside shrines shone in the sunlight and were covered with fresh flowers. Dogs appeared to roam at will, but they were well fed and didn’t look like they’d been bred to sink their teeth into the legs of passers-by or spread killer diseases. If Nicholai had been born in Serbia I’d have advised him to go into the headstone business or become a vet.

  I couldn’t read most of the graffiti any more easily than the Cyrillic street signs, but as I drove on I noticed one slogan being regularly repeated. At first I saw ‘HH’, alongside a crude graphic of a sniper sight. Then ‘HEAD HUNTERS’, written in English. I had no idea who these lads were, but I was pretty sure they weren’t in the corporate recruitment game.

  4

  As I moved further south and west into the hills I got the sense that my surroundings were becoming more prosperous. There was the same random arrangement of fresh paint, collapsing roof beams and rust-eaten wriggly tin, but the more ragged smallholdings were now rubbing shoulders with huge plum orchards and vineyards. And the weather-beaten Ladas and Yugos and Zastavas shared parking space with one or two very shiny 4WD Mercs and BMWs.

  The slopes steepened and the lush greenery gave way to sheer rock faces that soared upwards from each side of the road. I’d Googled this neck of the woods during my downtime at Istanbul airport, so I knew it had provided a refuge from the conflicts that had raged across the Balkans for at least the last seven hundred years. Catalan mercenaries, Ottoman Turks, you name it: if they were on your tail, one of the three hundred monasteries that once filled the Ovčar-Kablar Gorge was the safest place to be.

  I drove beneath an iron bridge, which carried the rail line from one tunnel to the next. This was the point at which the Morava River carved its way most dramatically between the two neighbouring mountains – the Ovčar and the Kablar – and Aleksa had told Pasha that she’d pick me up from a waterside café just beyond the hydro-electric dam.

  The Restoran Santa Maria was tethered to a jetty, with an off-road parking area above it. I got there about twenty-five minutes early, ordered a beer and a plate of homemade sausages, then sat and watched the ducks and herons doing the things that ducks and herons do when they’re a safe distance away from men with shotguns.

  The very smiley waiter poured me a glass of Lav and reappeared with enough sausages and chips to feed a medium-size family. It was no hardship getting them down my neck: they were freshly grilled and tasted great. ‘Beautiful, eh?’ He beamed and spread his hands. I nodded enthusiastically. I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the food or the view, but he was right about both.

  A small boat with an outboard motor chugged across the river towards me with a woman at the tiller and a couple of mop-haired boys in the bow. It wasn’t until she’d tied up close by and the kids had piled out onto the pontoon that I realized this was my two o’clock appointment.

  Aleksa was in her late thirties and had the slightly careworn look I’d come to expect in a country where everyone had a complicated past and nobody’s future was secure. Her light brown hair was drawn back in a loose plait and she wore no makeup. She shepherded her kids through the door and smiled as I got up to greet her.

  ‘Nick, you are so very welcome here.’ She gestured towards the boat. ‘I hope you don’t get seasick. Our home is just around the bend, on the other side of the river. I thought it would be easier to take you there in the boat. And the boys are very excited about having a British visitor.’

  The boys looked a lot more excited about rocketing around the café like heat-seeking missiles, but I took her word for it. Close up, I could tell that many things haunted her, even in this picture-postcard setting, but she had a still centre. I had no difficulty seeing what the nineteen-year-old Pasha had found so inspiring about her.

  I scoffed my last sausage, handed the waiter fifteen euros and told him to keep the change. He couldn’t believe his luck. In the nineties there were times when you’d have needed a wheelbarrow full of dinars to pay even the smallest bill here. The local currency was stronger now, but you knew where you were with a pocketful of Western notes.

  The boys calmed down for long enough to introduce themselves. The six-year-old was Goran and his younger brother was Novak. I asked Aleksa if they got tennis gear for every birthday. She smiled and shook her head. ‘Mladen – my husband – plays whenever he gets the chance, but they couldn’t care less about tennis, I’m afraid. Only football. They’re mad keen Manchester United fans.’

  We stepped into the boat and Aleksa sparked up the outboard. A heron left his perch at the far end of the pontoon and took off across the river with a slow beat of its massive wings. A group of wood- and stone-built houses clung to the far shore but, apart from one old boy busy doing boaty things, I couldn’t see any sign of life.

  Aleksa steered us expertly across the murky but mirror-still water, following the river as it zigzagged left and right. The boys asked in halting English if Wayne Rooney was a friend of mine. I told them I’d seen a few Millwall games, but didn’t know much about football. They watched me with saucer eyes and wondered what kind of lunatic didn’t want to share the Man U magic.

  Maybe half a K later we pulled up alongside a dark-stained wooden jetty. I climbed out and tied up, then hoisted the boys onto dry land.

  The four of us walked up a path that led between two strips of lawn to a small white-painted, terracotta-roofed family house. Aleksa threw open the door and apologized for the fact that her husband would not be able to join us. Mladen was on a trip north, to Novi Sad. ‘He’s an engineer. He and his team rebuilt the Liberty Bridge after the bombing, and he goes up there from time to time to make sure it’s not falling down again.’

  She got a brew on and offered me some more homemade sausages. The boys were definitely up for it, but I was already stuffed.

  When I’d exhausted my Man U knowledge, which pretty much began and ended with a couple of stupid stories about George Best and Eric Cantona, Aleksa suggested that they went to their room and played. I said I’d catch up with them later.

  We took the brews into a sun room that looked out over the river, and I heard myself giving her a much clearer account of my difficulties with the Leathermen than I’d intended. After Pasha’s emotional account of their Goražde experience, I thought it would be insulting not to. I didn’t mention Sam Callard or the CQB link, but gave her the basics about Trev and my Bermondsey adventures.

  Aleksa warmed her hands on her steaming mug of tea and thought about where to begin.

  ‘The most important thing for you to bear in mind is that the Crvena Davo are a little bit like your Provisional IRA. They began as an offshoot of a politically motivated, revolutionary movement, but swiftly became criminals. Now they are more interested in profit than ideology.’

  ‘And in vengeance?’

  ‘Of course. They dress it up as a matter of honour, but there is no dignity in it. And, like many people in this … complicated part of the world, they have long memories.’

  I asked her if she minded me asking her some really bone questions. She smiled and told me I should go straight ahead, and be sure that she’d tell me if she wasn’t in the mood to answer.

  For starters, I wanted to get my head around how she now fitted into this landscape. ‘You’re a Bosnian Catholic, am I right?’

  She nodded. ‘Though I don’t go to church much, these days. My faith has been quite severely tested over the past few years
.’

  ‘And yet you live a hundred Ks this side of the border, and just a hundred and fifty from Goražde. That can’t be easy. Pasha told me about the little Muslim girl on the bridge …’

  ‘Where do you live, Nick?’

  I’d been asking myself that for longer than I could remember, but I gave her the simple answer. ‘London, mostly. South London.’

  ‘So, only a few miles from where your fellow countrymen killed their king a little over three hundred and fifty years ago, and where four of your own extremists murdered fifty-two people in 2005.’

  Fair one. Shit happened everywhere. No one was immune.

  ‘I do have a simpler answer, though. Mladen is a Serb. I first met him when he was constructing water wheels along the Drina. They only generated enough power to run a radio and one forty-watt bulb, but we should never underestimate the importance of a friendly voice and a single beam of light in a world of darkness. His family come from here. And you can see how beautiful it is.’

  She took a sip of her brew, hesitated, then put the mug down on the table beside her and got up. ‘But if you really want to try to understand this place, you must come with me.’

  5

  The hill rose sharply behind the house. The first seventy metres or so had been terraced – by some of Mladen’s mates and a JCB, I guessed – and each level had a specific purpose.

  The first contained the kind of veggie garden I’d only ever seen in magazines. The next one up had a set of mini goalposts at each end and the skid- and stud-marks said it had seen some serious footie action. Another was paved in old stone and brick; a table and chairs and a couple of teak sun-loungers were arranged around a barbecue that had been an oil barrel in a previous life.

  She guided me up to the final tier, just below the treeline. In pride of place stood a couple of very shiny black marble headstones beneath a cherry tree, surrounded by a white picket fence. An image of the dead had been etched at the centre of each.

  The one on the left was a memorial to Adrijana Vlašić, a striking woman with fire in her eyes and severe but immaculate hair. She was born on 12 August 1947 and died on 3 April 1999. Dragan, her husband, had had the world’s biggest moustache, but I guessed his wife had worn the trousers. He’d survived her by about six months. Fresh flowers decorated their graves.

  Aleksa dropped briefly onto one knee and crossed herself.

  ‘Your mum and dad?’

  She shook her head. ‘Mladen’s.’

  I looked again at the dates. ‘The NATO bombing?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Adrijana went to visit her sister in Novi Sad. They were going to do some shopping. She might have lived if the missiles hadn’t cut off the power to the hospital.’ She reached out and traced the etchings with her fingertips. ‘Dragan died of a broken heart.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  Her eyes were shining when she turned to me. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Nick. Though I imagine in other circumstances it might have been.’

  She gave me a glance that was penetrating enough to make me wonder what else Pasha had told her about me. ‘And that’s not why I brought you up here. I’m still trying to work my way through this. I was an interpreter during the war, as you know, based mostly in Sarajevo and Goražde, first for the NGOs, then later for your military.

  ‘I saw terrible things, of course. The assassination of Amina at the bridge across the Drina was among the worst, but there were others. And I knew that no one side was exclusively to blame.

  ‘I also saw the so-called peacekeepers in action – which meant not only failing to keep the peace, but standing by as the atrocities unfolded. You know that Edmund Burke quote, Nick? “All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing”?’

  I did, actually. It was one of Anna’s favourites.

  ‘But I still believed that you and the Americans had our best interests at heart.’ She sighed. ‘Then Kosovo exploded and NATO bombed our cities for seventy-nine days to teach Milošević, a genocidal lunatic, a lesson. Cluster bombs in residential areas, for Christ’s sake. Missiles with depleted-uranium warheads. And yet the Belgrade cab drivers now treat the wreckage on Vardarska Street as if it is as big a tourist attraction as the fortress and St Sava’s Temple.

  ‘Many, many civilians were killed. It was an ecological disaster too. Fifty thousand tons of crude oil went up in flames at Novi Sad refinery. Fifty thousand! Sure, Serbia’s major cities weren’t emission-free zones in the first place, but think of all the toxins floating around in the atmosphere when something like that happens.’

  She turned back to the headstones. ‘I guess what I’m trying to say is that, though I know Adrijana’s death is nothing compared to the massacres Milošević was responsible for, these small, private tragedies are often the ones that affect us most. And this one taught me, once and for all, that the guys in the white hats aren’t always on the side of justice and truth, and that Edmund Burke was right. Each of us, as individuals, must stand up for what we believe in.’

  She waved in the direction of the boys. They’d changed into their Man U strip and were demonstrating some serious moves around the goalmouth below us. ‘If we don’t, what kind of world will we pass on to them?’

  I’d never kidded myself I could change the world. I just hoped I could protect Anna and Nicholai’s bit of it. I’d always known that the guys in the white hats were the ones you really had to watch: they had a nasty habit of stabbing you in the back when you least expected it. But I was moved by her passion, and her distress. And I’d begun to understand her intense desire to save her boys from going through the shit that she’d been through.

  We walked back into the sun room and she sparked up a new set of brews.

  ‘Do you have kids, Nick?’

  Once again, I found her question difficult to avoid. I told her about Anna and Nicholai and coming to the conclusion that they were both safer if my world didn’t come knocking at their door. And for all her determination to be there for Goran and Novak, she was the first to really understand.

  Her expression softened. ‘Anna sounds quite wonderful. I’m also sure that Nicholai will have your strength. I hope he will come to understand, as she does, that there are some battles that have to be fought on one’s own …’

  I couldn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘I just hope he won’t grow up thinking I’m a complete prick who did a runner at the first available opportunity, and never did anything useful, like build a bridge or help one bunch of people understand what the other bunch is really saying.’

  ‘I’m sure he will forgive you for that.’ She reached across and touched my arm. I looked up and saw that her eyes had begun to sparkle. ‘But I’m not so sure he’ll be so understanding when he finds out that you’re not a close personal friend of Wayne Rooney.’

  6

  I managed to steer the conversation away from me, and back to the Crvena Davo. Aleksa’s careworn face returned. Like Pasha, she still found it difficult to cut away.

  ‘I heard many things about them, and we were never far from the things they did, particularly in Sarajevo. At one point during the siege they transported some of the wealthier and more twisted inhabitants of Belgrade – at a price, of course – to the hillsides around the city for a weekend’s hunting. Only it wasn’t bears and boars and game they shot. It was human beings – women, and children like Amina.’

  I’d heard that rumour too. But this was the first time I’d heard that the Leathermen were behind it.

  ‘It was only later that I saw them up close. I was the interpreter for one of the UN legations during the run-up to the Dayton Accords in late ’ninety-five. It meant spending an unhealthy amount of time making peace with people I’d have preferred to stake out in the dust and watch being eaten by soldier ants. But we kept telling ourselves it was for the Greater Good.’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I never fancied wearing the blue beret. Where did you go to meet them?’

  ‘They don’t have an HQ
, sadly – or your NATO friends could have sent them a missile from the Adriatic. We met them in the hills, a different place each time.’

  ‘Who was in charge?’

  ‘There was probably a hierarchy at the beginning, but one of the challenges of coming to any kind of agreement with them was that they operated like a loose federation rather than a single entity. I always thought of them as a series of roughly connected snake pits – it didn’t matter how many you killed, there were always enough left over to keep spreading their poison. I don’t know whether that was intentional – to make them less easy to identify and undermine – or accidental.’

  It wasn’t a big surprise. I hadn’t expected them to be under the supreme command of an Osama bin Laden figure whom I could locate, interrogate and kill. But it didn’t make my mission any easier.

  ‘Who was on the UN team?’

  ‘Oh, a mixed bag of American and British military and so-called strategic experts. I worked most closely with an English colonel, very smart, very courteous. Special Forces, I think, though of course he never said. He wanted to stake them out in the dust as well, and didn’t mind them knowing that. They really respected him.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to my next question, but I had to ask it. ‘Can you remember the colonel’s name?’

  She looked at me like I was a dickhead schoolteacher and she was the smartest kid in the class. ‘Of course! I saw him again a couple of weeks ago. The Crvena Davo called him Hladno Oružje. It used to make them laugh.’

  I had to admit that my Serbian had never been as good as her faultless English.

  She smiled again. ‘Sorry, Nick. Hladno Oružje means “cold steel”. The colonel’s name was Steele.’