Asim reached for a glass of water. Seastrom sat up straight. He looked like a man who’d been shot between the eyes. Ever the diplomat, he nevertheless spoke with the utmost control. ‘Even if I could do as you say, the Security Council first has to authorise deployment of an operation. For that to take place the mission has to be defined, recommendations carried out, then a force commander appointed who arranges the management and logistics. This all takes time.’
‘Good God,’ Beckett cut in. ‘No wonder everything works at the speed of a snail.’
Seastrom continued undaunted. ‘My head would be placed on a spit by every government in the world. The organisation would fall into disrepute. The Security Council would never hear of it.’
‘It’s your damn job to tell the Security Council things they don’t wish to hear,’ Beckett barked. ‘So far, thirty-one people have died, including six Americans and twenty Ghanaian peacekeepers, and that’s a conservative estimate. The kidnappers mean business.’
Two spots of colour punctured Seastrom’s cheeks. He turned his ire on Beckett. ‘Since when did the British give in to the demands of hostage-takers? And what, pray, would the American ambassador to the UN make of such a proposal?’
Beckett studiously avoided Asim’s penetrating gaze. He cocked his head. ‘I thought you were on record as stating the Americans wield too much power inside and outside the Security Council.’
‘What I said is irrelevant in the current circumstances,’ Seastrom snapped, uncharacteristically failing to hide his fury.
‘Very well, we accept what you say,’ Asim said with a sleek smile. ‘Then how would the Council feel about a little deception?’
‘I don’t follow,’ Seastrom sharpened.
‘Play the terrorists at their own game. We send in bogus peacekeepers just as they did.’
Seastrom threw Asim a withering smile. ‘Who did you have in mind? British troops?’
‘Of course not,’ Beckett said. ‘Any country drawing the short straw would end up as the aggressor.’
‘Which is why we draw from every member state,’ Asim said with another sleek smile. ‘By my reckoning, it should run to at least a hundred and ninety-one men.’
‘A veritable Tower of Babel,’ Beckett said with an appreciative grin.
‘It won’t work,’ Seastrom protested. ‘It won’t be accepted.’
‘Make it acceptable. The British and Americans won’t put up a fight.’
‘You cannot speak for the Americans,’ Seastrom bit back, jaw grinding. ‘And what of China and Russia and France?’ he said, traces of impatience in his voice. ‘They will use their veto.’
‘Appeal to their heartstrings. The secretary general’s life is at stake here.’
‘Your faith in my powers of persuasion is flattering,’ Seastrom said with a thin smile. ‘Besides, the Security Council is as leaky as a sieve. Before you know it, America’s Secretary of State will be jetting off to Bosnia.’
‘Result,’ Asim said smartly. ‘This time they get involved at the beginning of hostilities rather than clearing up the toys at the end.’
‘And you wind up looking like useless fools for a second time,’ Beckett said with a scything smile.
The atmosphere in the room was dense and heavy. They’d reached an impasse. Both men looked to Seastrom to break it. Finally, he spoke.
‘I promise nothing, but I will try.’
‘Good man.’ Beckett flashed a genuine grin. ‘Think of it this way: here’s your chance to change the course of history.’
‘And if it fails?’
Neither Asim nor Beckett replied.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Within six kilometres of leaving the capital, Tallis encountered Serb militia. The young men manning a hastily thrown-together checkpoint were indistinguishable from other young men. Same low-slung jeans, T-shirts and trainers, rifles and machine guns swung loosely over shoulders the only stylistic departure.
Tallis slowed down, poked his head out of the window and smiled. ‘Josif sent me.’
The guy he took to be the leader, a lad not much older than twenty with cool blue eyes, took a drag on a cigarette and gave a classic I don’t give a fuckshrug.
Tallis tried again. ‘I’m heading for Bratunac.’
The shrug morphed into a threat. ‘Nobody goes there.’ To emphasise the point, he demanded that Tallis hand over the map he’d spread out on the front passenger seat. Tallis adjusted his sunglasses, gave the guy a level look. It made no difference. The map was snatched. He was turned back.
As Tallis skirted Sarajevo once more, he saw no obvious signs of trouble. People went about their business as usual. They didn’t seem to be preparing for a fight. Yet as he looked into the eyes of strangers, he read tension, uncertainty and fear.
He took a wide detour, headed north, then turned east. He passed near Vares, a mining town in a mountainous region covered in pine forests. As Stella Diamond’s car, an aged black Seat Leon, wended its way through the hilly landscape, he could almost believe that the world was beautiful once again. Shafts of sunlight shimmered through the trees, gilding the narrow, winding road, speckling the earth. The sound of fresh running water murmured to him through the open window of the car. It all seemed so perfectly normal. And quiet. Too quiet.
For an hour he continued his solitary journey, taking a less travelled route via Banovici, a town lying in the foothills of the Konjuh mountain, where the atmosphere changed. Instead of thin and clear, the air felt tight and dense. As he rounded a corner, cars, lorries, tractors poured down the road, packed to bursting point with people and belongings. The unlucky ones, those without transport, were on the move, grey-faced, wild-eyed, hundreds of them, carrying anything they could. An old woman bent double carrying a sack on her back herded two small girls wearing headscarves. A teenage girl pushed a severely disabled youth in a wheelchair. A guy with dark, impenetrable eyes battered on the roof of the car, telling Tallis to turn back. Tallis asked what was wrong, but the man threw up both his hands in despair and was gone. Then someone let out a shout. The fatal chatter of machine gun fire could be heard in the distance. Tallis looked up. Plumes of smoke reached high into the air. Then there were flames. The town on the hill was being torched.
Turning back took two hours. By now the gush of people had turned into a frantic river, the road clogged with human cargo, abandoned footwear, the smell of panic mixed with the smell of cordite. Many begged for help, a lift to anywhere. Tallis felt shame for ignoring their cries, but he had one immediate objective: to find Fikret.
As he turned off the main route, traffic thinned and a sign appeared for Zvornik, a barely inhabited town in the Drina River Valley. Zvornik lay smack on the border with Serbia, and despite a major mine-clearance programme rural front lines in the past war were still mined.
Tallis drove slowly on. The road was getting narrower, more cart track than asphalt. It seemed that nothing and nobody had passed that way in quite a while. He slowed right down, edged the car forward, eyes scanning for red - or yellow -taped areas that would indicate danger. He travelled like this until even the sun fled behind a bank of cloud, refusing to come out. Then he encountered his first serious problem: more militia.
These were different from the young urban Serbs he’d run into near the capital. Older, their faces gnarled with histories of secrets, they were men of the land who knew it intimately, men who did not take kindly to a foreigner, especially a foreigner who could, with Tallis’s dark looks, pass for a Muslim. The door was wrenched open and he was dragged out of the car. Two of them pistol-whipped him round the head, demanding, on a gust of alcohol-tainted breath, to know who he was. Tallis explained that he was a British-born Croat.
‘What is your business here?’ The man who made the demand was wet-lipped with ruddy weather-beaten features. Dressed in an old camouflage jacket, an attempt, Tallis guessed, to give the impression of authority, he wore an old check shirt over a pair of pale green trousers made of twill. His boo
ts were filthy, as if he’d walked through a field of cowpats.
‘To join the reinforcements at the holding camp. Josif sent me,’ Tallis swiftly added.
‘What holding camp?’ Spittle beaded the corner of the man’s mouth.
Tallis removed his sunglasses, looked the old man in the eye. ‘Arkan,’ he said.
At once the dynamics shifted. The wet-lipped man offered a grunt of approval. The others backed off, returned to their cigarettes and booze. Tallis was tempted to push his luck, shoot the leader in the face, take out his comrades and steal their weapons. With odds severely against him, he did none of those things.
‘Stay on the main track,’ one of them called after him. ‘The area on either side is mined.’
He drove until he was far enough away from the checkpoint to pull over. After stopping to relieve himself in the road, he took out his binoculars and looked down on the outlying area at a confusing scene. In front, a typical building, large, painted white with a red roof, a school, perhaps. Outside portrayed a different picture: soldiers surrounding scores of people, a number energetically separating men and boys from the women.
Tallis felt as though someone had shoved dirt in his mouth.
He adjusted the lens, zoomed in, trying to pick out Fikret’s face from the many, his task made hopeless by the sheer sea of humanity. At the sight of a young lad being pulled away from his screaming mother, Tallis was flooded by a torrent of vivid emotions and the helpless guilty dread that possesses bystanders to evil.
Running a hand over his chin, estimating the odds were roughly a hundred to one, he tried to work out his options. Although the soldiers were few in number, they were heavily armed against a populace that was defenceless. With regard to himself, he was one man with a pistol and nine bullets in the chamber. Flaring with fury and frustration, he recognised that this was what it had been like for the Dutch peacekeepers put in a similarly impossible situation almost two decades before.
Without warning, the heavy throaty clamour of engines roared across the land. He glanced to the west. Accompanied by a United Nations Protection Force, a humanitarian convoy of UN lorries moved at speed, flanked by a number of 4x4s emblazoned with the single word policija. The soldiers had seen it too, many of them stopping briefly before shrugging and returning to their duties.
The convoy ground to a halt, and soldiers wearing iconic blue helmets clattered out, weapons raised. Meanwhile, police officers poured out of their vehicles, one of them yelling at a group of Serb soldiers. A fierce verbal exchange took place. Tallis lifted the binoculars to his face and saw that the police were forming a thick buffer between the Serbs and the peacekeepers. He zoomed in on what he took to be the senior police officer, then ran for the car and started the engine.
By the time he’d driven down the hillside and joined the fray the mood had turned ugly. Emboldened by past triumphs, the Serbs goaded the peacekeepers; the peacekeepers, to Tallis’s astonishment and encouraged by the crowd of refugees, threatened immediate attack. Tallis wondered what the hell had happened to neutrality and the upholding of international law. It would take only one trigger-happy individual to set a full-scale battle in motion.
Knowing that at any second the place could light up, he pushed his way through to the front, his eyes scouring the desperate faces for Fikret.
‘Holy shit! What are you doing here?’ Jon said.
‘Could ask the same. Did the world take a weird turn in my absence, or am I imagining this?’ Tallis was thinking about chains of command, who was who, whether the Alliance happened to be there, or whether they were drafted in as part of the peacekeeping operation. He glanced around, amazed by the sight of so many nationalities squaring up to the small contingent of Serbs. In years to come, and providing nobody pushed the nuclear trigger, he imagined scholars would report that the Third World War started in Bosnia.
‘Nope,’ Jon said. ‘And you’re right, the world has gone stir-crazy, which is why we’re doing our bit to help these guys keep the peace.’ He flashed a grin at the UN contingent’s commanding officer, a tall, lean guy with blond hair who had the chiselled appearance of coming from a long line of military. ‘Hey, you,’ he yelled as one of the Serb soldiers prised a young couple apart. ‘Stop right there.’ The soldier turned, threw a gesture. Tallis felt the ground shift as the peacekeepers, under their commander’s order, surged forward behind the Alliance, as if prepared to shoot. Fired up, the refugees turned into a baying mob, the outnumbered Serbs snarling back, though many seemed genuinely bewildered by the hostile stance taken by the peacekeepers. Still no shots were fired.
‘Pardon me.’ Jon stepped aside, gesturing with his chin towards one of the Serb officers striding towards them. ‘Looks like they want to do business.’
Tallis followed Jon’s gaze, registered with shock the tall, slim man with silver-grey neatly cut hair and gold-rimmed spectacles, the man who had offered generous advice and had spoken so disparagingly of the Muslims. Josif caught his eye, blinked and frowned, his bloodless lips sliding apart to speak. Oblivious, Jon said something, Josif replying, distracted. Next, both men walked towards a plum tree. With their fate in their hands, everyone watched, apart from Tallis, who turned in time to see one of Josif’s men raise his weapon and fire. Tallis let out a shout, spun round, watched dumbfounded as Jon took a round of bullets to the chest and fell.
Chaos ensued.
At once, Alliance men let rip with everything they had, the peacekeepers dropping back, melting away out of the kill-zone, their weapons undischarged. Tallis sprinted forward, each bone and muscle in his body vibrating. He scooped up a rifle dropped by a fallen Serb. Above the noise of firepower, the screams of panicked refugees. Many broke free and stampeded for sanctuary in the school. Others fled into a nearby field, where UN soldiers were already waiting to ferry them to safety. Some unfortunates never made it, caught and killed in the vicious crossfire. Out of the corner of his eye, Tallis spotted Josif tearing down the other side of the hill, running towards a truck parked under a clutch of trees.
Tallis hurtled after him, let off a high warning round. Josif twisted to one side and kept running, sprinting through a field of young bullocks, scattering them. Tallis dodged and increased speed, gaining ground until Josif, breathless, suddenly spun to a halt and turned. With his sleek body bowed, he stood panting, blue eyes burning. Tallis knew he could capture him. Part of him badly wanted to. It was how he would normally do things. Aside from ethical issues, it was always better to take a man and pump him for information. Tallis’s eyes flicked to the lorry, no more than twenty metres away. Easy enough to shoot out the tyres, he reasoned. But if he did that, Josif was a dead man. The Americans would not stand idly by with their leader dead. One of the Alliance would kill him. Tallis locked on to Josif’s hunted gaze and jerked his head.
‘You are showing me mercy?’ Josif called.
Back in the days when he had a life, when he trusted his paymasters, when he had faith in himself, he would have let Josif run and take his chances. Those days were over.
Tallis nodded and smiled then shot him in the head, turned and walked away.
And felt nothing.
By the time he made it back up the hill it was over. A massacre had been averted. The aggressors had taken a terrible beating that would reverberate through the region and the world. He didn’t like to consider the political or military consequences. In any case, that wasn’t his job any more.
He picked his way through the dead and dying in search of Fikret. In the midst of so much confusion it occurred to him that any witnesses called to account would have a tough job deciphering who did what and when. Technically, the peacekeepers had played no part. They had maintained strict rules of engagement. No mandate had been breached. Would others see it that way? A brilliant political sleight of hand, would it be enough to obtain the release of the secretary general without actually acceding to the kidnappers’ demands? He never doubted that Beckett and Asim were supremely clever men. I
t was typical of their handiwork to do one thing but suggest another.
Tallis looked around him. He knew what he’d seen. Whatever the truth the outcry from, not least the Serbs, would be vocal and vicious, and potentially dangerous. He fervently hoped the gamble was worth it, that Chatelle’s life would be spared.
Feeling a tug on his arm, he looked into the face of a youth, not much older than Fikret.
‘Some of the soldiers got away on foot,’ he told Tallis, pointing in the direction of a wooded valley. ‘They’ve taken prisoners with them.’
And perhaps Fikret was one of them, Tallis thought as he broke into a run.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Turkey: the Black Sea.
Temel Aksu motored into the small harbour of Amasra, cut the engine and let his boat drift towards the buoy.
It was five-thirty in the morning and he liked this part of the day best. At that time he could fully appreciate the tranquillity and lush greenery of his surroundings. With its wet climate, limited sunshine and deep, chilly waters, this particular corner of the Black Sea region was underdeveloped as a tourist area. Temel, a simple-minded, uneducated man who had never travelled much further than his immediate surroundings, appreciated the lack of commercialism. He was wary of foreigners. Foreigners meant crime.
He took out a boathook, grabbed hold of the buoy and looped a thick rope through the mooring ring. Next, he lowered a small rubber dinghy with oars over the side, securing it to a cleat on the boat. Satisfied, he examined his modest catch. His net consisted of black sea turbot and gurnard. Occasionally he’d snare small shark. It wasn’t much of a living, but it was the only thing he knew. Fortunately his wife supported their income with the money she made from the sale of tablecloths and thick woollen socks. That was the other thing about the climate; temperatures could plummet in the winter months.
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