THE HEART OF DANGER (58 page)

rods. Her dog whined at the bank beyond the pool, and her torch

showed

the sliding marks of boots and bodies.

She had the dog on a lead and she tugged it down into the fierce flow

of the stream.

"You sort of people, you always back a loser."

The First Secretary said it drily. He drove his big Rover along the

night-empty highway from Karlovac towards Zagreb. A heavy brute to

drive, but it was weighted with armour plating on the side doors and

with bullet-proof glass for the windows, and the self-sealing tyres

that could absorb small shrapnel and low-velocity gunfire were

unresponsive.

Ham whined, "What'll happen .. . ?"

"Good to know you care."

"What'll happen to me .. . ?"

"God, just for one moment, for one fleeting second of time, I thought you were concerned with someone other than your own miserable self.

A

constant disappointment, Freefall, you have been to me. What'll

happen

to you .. . ? You'll be shovelled on, like any other bag of rubbish

that's dumped on someone else's front step. Nagorny Karabakh,

wasn't

it? Not Nagorno, best you learn how to say it first .. . They're

welcome to entertain you. Myself, if I were you, I'd choose the

Armenian side rather than the Azeris, but knowing your track record

it'll be the Azeris because they're the losers."

He prided himself that he retained some small influence in this awful

corner of Europe. He had done an insignificant deal with the Croat

military, a personal arrangement with the Intelligence Officer

involving an insubstantial roll of German banknotes and the promise

of

future contact .. . Anyone could be bought in this awful corner,

surprisingly cheaply in this case. He had won the release of Sidney

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Ernest Hamilton, code name Freefall, into his personal custody.

Just

the matter of handing in the wretch's uniform, his kit, his ID, and

the

Dragunov, and the little list of contacts for the moving on of black

market supplies of Marlboro cigarettes, and he had been given the

wretch in handcuffs.

"Will you snitch him?"

"I beg your pardon, try to speak English, please."

"Shop him, tell the Serbs where to be waiting for him, will you?"

"You should just stick to losing .. . Affairs of state aren't your

business, Freefall, never were and never will be."

"They'll make you watch. They'll put you in a chair so that you are comfortable, and they'll make you watch .. ."

It was close to dawn. They could start to see the way ahead of them

and there was no longer a need for her to shine the torch in front

of

her feet. Penn had stopped twice to rest and he had allowed Milan

Stankovic to eat a small piece of bread and he had given him a broken

piece of sharp cheese, and once he had unzipped the man's trousers

and

handled him so that he could urinate without messing his trousers.

He

felt exhaustion and Milan Stankovic also fought tiredness, but she

still had strength and she set a pace that was hard, and from the

side

of her mouth she gave, briskly and without feeling, the

interpretation

of what he said.

"When they have you sitting down and comfortable then they will put her

down onto the floor and they will strip off the trousers from her,

and

they will take the knickers from the bitch, and they will all come

to

her, all serve her. What it's like when a big boar pig comes to serve a sow, big so that it hurts. One after the other, all of them in

the

village, old men, young men, me last of all, and they will make you

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watch .. ." He did not know how she could translate and how she could not cringe. He did not know how she could not turn on him and hit

him.

Each time that they made the short stops he would listen, and

sometimes

he would hear far distant shouts, and then they would press ahead

faster. The decision that he had to make was where to lie up, whether

they should go forward as the light grew and lie up until darkness

at

the bank of the Kupa river to wait for the inflatable to come across

at

the rendezvous point, or whether they should lie up through the

daylight and then make the charge in the dusk to the river. He was

not

ready to make the decision, and he could not think clearly while the

voice of the man droned on and while she gave her clipped

interpretation. "Before they shoot her, we will play with you.

Which

do you prefer? Electricity .. . ? Fire .. . ? Knife cuts .. . ?

Electricity on your balls, is that what you would prefer? Fire on

your

feet, on your body, needles from the fire under your fingernails?

Knife

cuts at your testicles and your penis, on your fingers, at your ears,

the knife going into your eyes. The last you will know of the

electricity and the fire and the knife will be from me. You will

be

crying for me to finish it, and you will be shouting for me to go

to

her with the electricity and the fire and the knife cuts .. . But

you

can let me go free .. ." Penn understood. He remembered the

arrogant

conceit, a long time ago, of an Irishman, not a big Provo but a

second-rater from the feeble Irish National Liberation Army faction,

who had been picked up when Five, their role as watchers completed,

had

deigned to call in the Anti-terrorist Branch for the formality of

the

arrest. The Irishman, skinny little creep, had been spreadeagled

on

the carpet of his pig-sty living room, and he had been silent, but

the

arrogance and the conceit had been large on his bloody face, as if

to

say they'd crack nothing out of him. "Is that what you want? Do

347

you

want to sit comfortably and watch all of the men, and me, screw the

arse off her .. . before she dies? Do you want to let me go free?

Do

you want to feel the electricity wires on you and the fire burns and

the knife cuts, they make pain but they don't make death, not till

we

are ready, do you want that? Or do you want to let me go free ..

.

?"

Ulrike spoke in his language, and his words withered.

They heard vehicles. They were straining four-wheel-drive jeeps and

they were manoeuvring in the slipping rutted mud of the loggers'

track.

They were crouched down and he held the knife so tight against the

bulged adam's apple at the bearded throat of Milan Stankovic that

the

skin was nicked and he drew blood. They were away from the track,

in

the depths of the trees, and they could see the soldiers in the jeeps,

and he could see the guns that the soldiers held. He held the knife

so

close against the throat of Milan Stankovic and the images were

splayed

in his mind, of Ulrike laid out on a floor of concrete and her legs

held open, and the electricity wires clipped to his skin .. . The

vehicles bucked on the track, and passed.

His decision was taken. They would go on until they reached the Kupa

river.

"What did you tell him?"

Ulrike said, "I told him that I wanted to hear him speak of his shame when he killed Dorrie Mowat .. ."

"What does it fucking mean, in a simpleton's terms?" He stood in front

of the wall map.

Not a military man, the Director of Civilian Affairs found the big

wall

maps, so beloved of the military, to be sanitized and cold viewing.

He

348

assumed that the neat laundered officers around him, the Canadian

colonel and the Jordanian major and the Argentine captain, could make

sense of the whorls and lines. The wall map, nine feet in height

and

equally broad, covered the entire area of former Yugoslavia and was

draped with a clear plastic sheet on which had been written in china

graph crayon the disposition of UNPROFOR units.

The Jordanian major held a long pointer and identified Sector North,

and then Salika village.

The Argentine captain said, "They have a mass of radio traffic, mostly out of Glina, but hooked in to Vojnic where they have Command and

Control, and linked to Petrinja and Lasinja and Skakavac and Brezova

Glava which are close to the cease-fire demarcation line. We have

the

situation reports, from our monitoring, of their units that have been

put to state red alert along the Kupa river. We have the transcripts

of the radio transmissions made by the field troops that are deployed.

We have visual confirmation of their movement from the Dan Batt fixed

observation posts, X-ray 9 and X-ray 11 .. ." "And it means .. .

?"

The Canadian said, "It means that he's coming, coming with his

prisoner, coming to the river. It means that he's being hunted."

"What chance .. . ?" "They've lost him in the immediate vicinity of

his snatch. They reckon to block him on the river." "I said, what chance .. . ?" "If the Serbs were to know where he planned to cross the river, no chance. They do not have that information ... He has

a

slight chance." He was looking up, and the tip of the pointer was

against the bland green of the map surface, cut only by the Kupa river,

no roads. He imagined it as a morass of swamp. The Director thought he was playing God Almighty with the life of a man coming to the river

with his prisoner, and he thought that the man coming to the river

with

his prisoner was playing God Almighty with the lives of all those

within reach of the artillery and the missiles. He turned his back

on

the map, went slowly and subdued out of the operations room. He

wondered what it was like, the swamp morass to which the man was coming

with his prisoner. It was a small farm, not more than five hectares,

where Zoran Pelnak and his wife lived. The farm gave, at best, a

hard

living and it was poorer now that his two sons were taken by the army.

Before the boys had gone, one to the garrison at Osijek and one down

349

in

the south at Gospic, Zoran Pelnak had had their help in the never

finished work of cleaning and deepening the drainage ditches that

cut

his land. The fields were too low set for good farming ground, too

near to the river that flooded its banks most winters, and most

winters

the farmhouse of brick and wood was set upon a small island in a

shallow lake. It was Zoran Pelnak's home, had been his father's

home,

and his grandfather's and his great-grandfather's home. His

great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had dug the

drainage ditches and cleaned them and deepened them. There were

three

fields for the farm and in two of them he harvested a hay crop and

grazed animals, and in one of them he and his wife grew their

vegetables for their own eating and for sale in the market at

Karlovac.

He and his wife could survive the isolation of their life on the farm

that fronted the north bank of the Kupa river. Their neighbours had

long gone, left their homes and their farms and their livestock,

abandoned them. He would not leave. He would not have cared to have gone to the graves of his great-grandfather and his grandfather and

his

father, sat on his haunches beside the stones, and explained why he

was

running from the drainage ditches they had dug. He moved slowly from

the front door of the farmhouse. From the porch of the door he could

see, across the field and the bog land where the cattle could go only

in summer, the far bank of the Kupa river and the trees. He moved

slowly from the rheumatism that came from living in a place so damp,

towards the barn where his four cows were bedded, and the pigs and

the

goats, and the hens. On the far bank, behind the trees, maybe the

bastard fuck Partizans watched him, and he was too old to care if

they

saw him. Zoran Pelnak knew most of what happened, each day and each

night, on the far bank of the Kupa river. He pressed on into the

barn,

and he hoped that the soldiers would soon be down from their camp

for

their well water, because the soldiers would help him lift down the

baled hay for the animals.

It was many hours since Evica had last heard the advance behind her

of

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the search party, and their shouts.

She guessed they would have turned by now, cold from the night, down

because of their failure. She guessed they would be heading back

to

their village, arguing between themselves, going back to food and

warmth. And going back to dispute the new command of Salika, and

to

fight for control of the diesel supplies and the sacks of seed

potatoes. Two would fall; she thought Branko and Milo would fall.

One

would rise; Stevo would command the village. She thought the wife

of

Stevo the most stupid woman she knew, and the wife of Stevo would