Authors: Gerald Seymour
lated witness statements and reflected that they were conveniently tidy.
'You got your street map?'
Atkins unfolded his large-scale map of the city and spread it over their laid places. Mister pointed to the third witness statement, and the address of the discharged and disabled soldier. Atkins turned over the map and ran his finger down the street index; he said that the street, Hamdije Kaprazica, was in the Dobrinja district. 'It's about where I showed you from the plane when we came in. That's the old front line.'
'Could you find it for me?' Mister asked.
'Yes - what, in the morning?'
'Tonight. According to his statement, he was the last man to see Cruncher alive.'
The Eagle spluttered on his bread roll.
'You got a problem?'
'No problem, Mister, if that's what you want.'
'I'd like to see him and hear how it was with Cruncher just before he went into the river. He was a good friend.'
The waiter carried the tray to their table.
'I lost my leg in the war. It is taken off at the knee. The amputation was not done well. It was the circumstances of the operation. I cannot have an artificial one. The stump does not allow it. We were fighting here to hold the tunnel entrance at the airport. Do you have money for me?'
The room was a pit of filth. There was no electricity, no fire. In the brutal light of Frank's torch beam he could have been thirty or fifty. The face was sunken and pale, the hair was thinned through, and the hands shook perpetually. He was propped up on a bed of sacking, newspapers, and pillows that had no covers and leaked feathers. There was a stink of old faeces and urine. When the torch beam had roved across the room, searched for him, it had skipped over three syringes. Joey watched him and Frank translated: 'I have to have money. You want to know what I saw?
I say nothing without money.'
He held a crutch across his chest, as if to protect himself. His eyes were dulled in their sockets. His sleeves, both arms, were pulled up. Joey thought, from what he knew of pincushion arms, that the man would be finding it hard by now to get a fix on the veins. Joey pulled money from his pocket and handed it to Frank. The little wad of notes was tossed into the torchlight and onto the man's lap, above the stump.
Joey saw the money counted and there was a flash of what he thought was cunning in the lustreless eyes.
The notes were slipped under the bed of sacks and newspapers.
'Sometimes I go into town to buy. If I buy here, because I cannot defend myself, because I have a stump, sometimes I am attacked, for my money. I go to the old quarter. It is more expensive there, but I am not attacked. Also in the old quarter I can ask for money from foreigners. There are many foreigners there and sometimes they are kind . . . You want to know what I saw? And more money when I have told you . . . ? You are gentlemen, I think you will be kind.
I told the police what I saw. He was on the bridge. He was leaning over the rail, and sick. I thought it was alcohol that made him sick. He could hardly stand, and when his grip on the rail failed he nearly fell over it. The river was very high that night. I looked away.
Someone came and I went to them to ask for money. I was refused. I looked again for him, I didn't see him.
He must have gone into the river. Someone else came and they gave me money. I went to buy. It was two days later, when I was back at the bridge that the police stopped me and asked if I had seen anything, and they showed me the photograph of the man.'
The hands shook harder on the crutch.
Joey said icily, 'Will you ask him, please, what unit he was with when he lost his leg?'
The reply came through Frank. 'I was with the fighters led by Ismet Mujic. We had to hold Dobrinja, we—'
Joey swung on his heel. There had been a teacher at school who had tried to reintroduce Latin into the curriculum. Joey had been in the small class. Little of it remained with him. Julius Caesar had crossed the Rubicon river and had said:
'Iacta alea est.
' And they had translated Suetonius, who had quoted Caesar:
'Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.'
The step was taken and there was no drawing back from its consequences. And in English classes they had read Shakespeare's
Richard III:
'I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die.'
He went down the staircase.
There was light snow falling, but not heavily enough to settle.
Frank passed him and went to the back of the small truck. Its windows were painted over. His hand was on the door's handle.
'It's what you want?'
'It's what I want.'
'It breaks every rule in my life . . . '
'And mine,' Joey said. 'Just get on with it.'
Frank opened the door. Four men scrambled out.
They wore drab blue overalls and their faces were masked by balaclavas. Frank talked to them briefly.
None seemed to look at Joey, as if he were un-important. They went towards the block's entrance, with purpose. He had not been introduced to them, dark, silent, smoking shapes in the back of the van, when Frank had collected him and they had driven into Dobrinja.
Frank had said they were on an unmarked frontier.
The blocks on the far side of the street were rebuilt, holes plugged, had new plastic windows and street-lights. The lights didn't carry the width of the street but died in the central grassy reservation. They stood in dank darkness. Frank told him that when they had drawn the map lines at Dayton that ended the war and provided the new ethnic boundaries, they had used a blunt pencil. The pencil's marking, on the map, was fifty metres wide: the east side of Hamdije Kaprozice was left in a no man's land, unclaimed by either the Muslim authorities or by the Serbs. Small gangs of men floated past them. In Britain, Joey never had as much as a truncheon when he was out on surveillance late in the night, only a long-handled torch.
He thought the no man's land was the territory of dealers and pushers. The only thing he had believed that the disabled soldier had said was that here, in the darkness, he might be attacked and stripped of the money he needed for heroin. He wondered how long, doing what he himself could not do, the men would be. He said, 'They won't hang around will they
- God, what a place - your thugs?'
'Not thugs, Joey. I call them the Sreb Four. If you don't know a man's story you don't call him a thug.
When you're not burdened with facts it's best to keep the judgements short. I met them in Sanski Most, that's the extreme west of the country. When people like me first arrive we're sent somewhere for a month's acclimatization before the permanent posting starts. They were about as far from home as is possible, because home was the east. Then I met up with them again in Sarajevo. They are cousins, and they are all from the village of Bibici, which is south of the town. It was an extended family. All the houses in the village were lived in by the family. They were all policemen. When the war started Srebrenica was besieged and they, as policemen, were at the front, in the trenches. The population in the town had gone from nine thousand pre-war to fifty thousand during the siege. Then it f e l l . . . That's a long story, why it fell.
I'm telling you this because you will never see these people again, and it'll be good for you to think of them when you're snuggled up warm in your bed at home and your biggest problem is remembering whether you've done a new lot of fucking lottery numbers for the weekend . . . The women and kids, they reckoned, would be shipped out under UN
supervision because Srebrenica was designated as a
"safe haven". Nobody at that time - least of all UN
generals and the politicians who directed them - had enough of a sense of honour to guarantee the haven, but the duplicity wasn't known then. The women and children would be protected. The men would fight their way out over the mountains, through forests.
The NATO planes, it was thought, would put down carpet bombing on the Serbs so that the men had a chance in the break-out. The fittest of the men, the best fighters and the best armed, were at the front of the column - the Sreb Four were at the front of the front, because they were the best. What they didn't know was that, behind them, their fathers, uncles, nephews, grandfathers, had been either rounded up in Srebrenica and butchered or were being killed, trapped and ambushed. They reckon they were betrayed, and I couldn't argue with it, not just by the UN and NATO but by their own people. What they think, the town was allowed to fall as a part of the end-game peace deal, they weren't given the guns and the reinforcements to hold it. The men of the family, all except the Sreb Four, were killed. Some of their women hanged themselves so that they wouldn't be raped, and some strangled their daughters so it didn't happen to them. They got out, and they're inseparable. They hate the Serbs for what was done to their families, and they hate the Muslim leaders for betraying them. They have been through hell, have walked through it, and come out the far side of it. You'll want to know what I did that makes them indebted to me -
not much, in truth. There's IPTF in Srebrenica, and I arranged for myself to have a day there. I took flowers and laid them in a warehouse where some of the women killed themselves, and in the factory at Potocari where the older men were shot, and in the woods where the younger men were caught and had their throats slit. I took photographs of where I'd put the flowers. That's all I did. What they are doing in there won't trouble them, after what they've seen, not an iota . . . So, don't go fucking soft on me.'
They came out. Joey thought that if he had been able to see their faces they would have been expressionless. There was no tension in their bodies and no laughter in their voices. They huddled round Frank, and told him quietly what they had learned.
Then one of them wiped his hands on the seat of his overalls, felt in his pocket and passed Frank the clean banknotes. He gave them back to Joey.
Joey had crossed a river.
'Turn him over,' Mister said.
A little spear of light from the pencil torch followed Atkins's boot as it tipped the man over from his stomach to his back.
The Eagle, behind Mister, gasped. Mister could see the eyes through swollen lids and the mouth through split lips, but the rest of the facial features were lost in a sea of blood. Mister knew a great deal about beatings - fists, cosh-sticks, boots - it was what he had done in the past, and he felt cheated because he would have done it again, there, that night.
'Is he gone?'
Atkins knelt beside the man and felt the pulse at his neck. As he straightened, he shook his head.
'If he's not gone now then he will be soon,' Mister said.
'We should get out of here, Mister,' the Eagle hissed.
'It's not a healthy place.' Atkins's pistol had been in his hand from the moment they had left the Toyota, and it had been between his legs as soon as they had driven into Dobrinja.
'In our own time. You never know when you're watched, so you never run. You never let anyone see you run. Gives us something to think about - eh, Eagle - who'd have done a fancy job like that . . . A druggies' fight, or my friend with the puppy dogs and the pretty boy? Let's go, let's go to bed.'
It w a s past m i d n i g h t w h e n the chief investigation officer took a call from G o u g h , received a p e r e m p t o r y apology for the lateness of the hour, a n d w a s alerted to a fax sent to him. The C I O apologized to his wife, slipped into a dressing-gown a n d w e n t d o w n to his h o m e cubicle office.
He read:
From: SQG12/Sarajevo, B-H
To: SQG1/London
Timed: 00.18 15.03.01
Message Starts:
Para One - Target One in contact with Ismet Mujic, a.k.a. Serif. Sweetener supplied is anti-tank missile launcher (make and origin unknown). Box 850
have hotel bug in place for Target One, as yet no result - also location beacon on Target One's vehicle. Target One is accompanied at all times by Target Two (Eagle) and Target Three (Atkins).
Believe (not confirmed) a-tml brought to B-H in overland charity shipment from Bosnia with Love.
Para Two - From information received, I learn that Dubbs, a.k.a. the Cruncher, was murdered by Ismet Mujic, plus associates. It's choice, exclaimer.
Cruncher was taken to niteclub/restaurant, the Platinum City, owned by IM. In the party was Enver - toy-boy partner of IM. I learn that, during dinner, Cruncher's sexual preferences were made obvious: he reached under the table and squeezed Enver's testicles - to demonstrate, I presume, his availability. His host, no doubt used to providing said demonstration himself, took offence.
Eyewitness was begging outside Platinum City, regular pitch, heard the accusations made in the street as Cruncher was taken out, saw a chop-hand blow to back of Cruncher's neck by IM, saw goons put Cruncher from bridge into Miljacka river.
Regret that eyewitness declined to provide sworn/signed statement of above.
Para Three - Full permission for intrusive surveillance from Judge Zenjil Delic, signed and stamped. God knows why, haven't got round to asking Him.
Para Four - My observation: Target One is unaware of current surveillance. Opinion is shared by Box 850.
Message Ends
He m i n u t e d a little note for himself. He would speak to G o u g h in the morning. Past experience told h i m that d a n g e r b e c k o n e d w h e n f o o t m e n w e r e c o n f i d e n t that their trailing p r e s e n c e w a s n o t observed.
Chapter Nine
It was the spring day, in Sarajevo, when nothing much happened. There was a fast snow blizzard at dawn that hurried down the Igman slopes to envelop the city, then a bright, cold morning, then a bright, warm afternoon, then an overcast dusk, and rain in the evening.
The longest queue in the city, from dawn to dusk, was outside the high, guarded gates of the German embassy on Mejtas Buka. Every day on which it was open the queue was there. In the hunt for visas and escape it stretched down the street and round the corner. A few at a time were admitted to the hidden buildings behind the wall. Many of those who queued would fail to reach the front of the line before the offices closed. Few of those allowed inside would be given entry to a Promised Land. Down by the Miljacka river, a shorter queue of men jostled at the door of the Slovenian embassy, also looking for a route out of a doomed country.