The heart of danger, p.28
The Heart of Danger, page 28
Benny said, "I was going to chuck you out."
"Because the shit's in the fan, because they'll be waiting at the crossing point…?"
"Because I'm not supposed to get involved."
"I reckon if I laid up for a couple of days, rested, then I reckon I could swim the river."
"Like hell you could," Benny snapped, short.
"There's a rendezvous tomorrow night, where there's going to be a boat, but I'm off line for the pick-up. I don't have a map for the location, but I reckon I could swim the river…"
He hadn't used his pencil torch from the dashboard, not since right at the beginning. From what Benny had seen, when he'd used the torch, the guy wouldn't make it to halfway, not against the current of the Kupa river. The rest of the drivers would kill him if they knew.
"You won't be swimming. You'll be staying bloody put…we'll see what's there, at the crossing point."
It was so slow for Milan to make the radio link with Glina militia. The man who knew the radio was away back at the greenhouse in Dragan's garden, and the procedure for transmission was written up in scrawl on the wall above the set. And an imbecile at the other end when he had made the contact.
"And it's a spy you lost? In Salika village, you lost a spy? What would a spy want with Salika village? A foreign spy…?" A bored man, sitting the night watch on the radio in the Glina barracks, nursing a bottle, and at last there was amusement for him. "A foreign spy has come to Salika village, that centre of military secrecy? Should they know in Belgrade that a foreign spy chose to visit Salika village…?"
Losing the minutes. Could not tell a bored man sitting the night watch on the radio at Glina barracks about a grave, about an investigator with evidence, about a young woman who had not shown fear.
Milan shouted, "If the crossing point is not closed, if the convoy is not searched, I will come for you, my friend, and I will flay the skin off your face…"
When the alarm clamoured for the Close Support platoon, Ham was on his bed in the dormitory quarters, and reading his best magazine. His mother sent it him, not often because most times the old cow forgot. Nagorno Karabakh, wherever the fuck it was, seemed the right place, and there were guys already there, but then there was also an article with photographs of guys who had made it down to Tbilisi, wherever the fuck that was…
The alarm shifted him. He was snatching webbing kit, going for the Dragunov marksman's rifle that was his personal weapon when Close Support platoon was on 'immediate', buttoning the flies on his camouflage trousers, running for the stairs of the old police station.
And no fucker in the lit yard taking the trouble to explain to him why the alarm had gone. He heard, among the bloody yelling, there was heavy radio traffic on the other side, there was a guy running on the other side, there was some sort of flap at the crossing point, something about a bloody convoy. It was all to do with their radio traffic, on the other side.
He was in the lead jeep going down sharp to Turanj. He thought about Penn, crazy guy.
They were slowing. The convoy manager was saying, distorted, in the cab, "I'm hooked into their radio. There's a problem, but I can't make sense of what it is, probably just that we're so delayed. They're saying they need to search the lorries. You know the form, guys, that we are not supposed to allow UN vehicles to be searched."
He lay behind Benny Stein's seat and the passenger seat. He had a rug that covered some of his body. He heard the sharp whistle of Benny Stein's breath and heard him mutter an obscenity. Going down through the gears, crawling.
The voice was saying, "What I'm thinking, guys, is that the laws of the game might just get bent a bit. If the choice is between bending or sitting here for the rest of the night high on principle, and since we've not any loose women from Knin on board…OK, guys?"
Penn said, "I'll do a runner, which door?"
The answer was very quiet, so calm. "What I'm seeing on my side is a big jerk with an ugly machine gun. And on the other side, three jerks with rifles, and what I'm seeing further up front doesn't get better."
Penn said, "I'm sorry—I mean that."
"Bit late, my old cocker. They've stopped ahead. We're all closing up."
So helpless. It had all been for nothing.
For nothing he had found the Headmaster praying in a grave. They were inching forward.
For nothing he had found Katica Dubelj, eyewitness. He waited for the grinding of the brakes.
For nothing he had found Milan Stankovic, war criminal.
"What are you going to do?"
"They're opening up the cabs ahead, my top cat's letting them in. You know what Oscar Wilde said? He said, 'In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.' Give it a go."
Penn was looking into Benny Stein's face, and it was calm, as if he was taking the kids out for a Sunday afternoon ride. Going very slow, and swinging the big wheel so that the lorry went out of the line that was pulling up, then straightening the wheel. Penn saw the hands go to the gear lever, then to the ignition, and the engine slurped to quiet. A silence around Penn, and the gentle rocking of the cab going forward. The pace of the lorry quickened. Benny Stein was winding down his door window. "Time to see if old Oscar had it right…"
They were rolling faster. Penn heard the first yell, and Benny Stein had his head out of his door window and was howling it into the night. "The brakes…the brakes are gone…no control because the goddamn brakes have gone!"
Going down the incline through Turanj. Penn saw the white sides of the freight lorries slipping by, quicker. All the time Benny Stein was yelling that his brakes had gone, and waving every miserable mother out of the road. Going by the Land-Rover, and Benny Stein was turning, side of his mouth, muttering about "Shit or bust", saying they'd either shoot or they'd laugh. They hit the checkpoint.
The cab of the lorry clipped the corner of the sandbag wall. He had his head down and he had his hands over his head, and he would have said, and reckoned he'd not lied, that Benny Stein had twisted the wheel the necessary fraction to take out the corner of the sandbags. The cab lurched, and Penn bounced, and he thought there was a popping of tyres, as if there had been a chain with spikes on the road. They were waiting for the shooting, or the laughing.
They went clean through the UN barrier, broke the pole across the road. And the cab pitched worse, and he felt the tyres shredding, and all the time Benny Stein was yelling himself hoarse that the brakes had gone. The lorry jerked and he saw the wall loom against the cab's passenger side window, and that slowed it, and Penn saw Benny Stein's hand furtively slip to the brake handle, and he saw his foot pump the brake pedal, but gently so that the ripped tyres did not scream. They came to rest.
Penn croaked, "That, Mr. Stein, was pure style…"
"Get out. You told a good story."
"I said that I was sorry…"
"It was because you talked a good story. Get lost."
Benny Stein's hand, fleshy, reached and caught at Penn's collar, and he was dragged through the gap between the seats, and shoved out of the open door. He lay in the road beside the ribboned front tyre. The door above him was scraped. The fender in front of him was dented deep.
"Thank you," Penn called back up at the slammed door of the cab.
He crawled to the side of the road, to the heaped rubble of a collapsed house. Benny had jumped down from the cab and was striding towards the broken pole of the United Nations block, and the wrecked sandbags of the Serb block.
So tired, and all the pain was back with him. He looked past the soldiers, and the woman was running with flapping legs, towards him. She came across the road from where she had been standing beside a car. He saw in the lights of the crossing point her concern, and Ham had broken clear of the group of soldiers and was ambling towards him.
There was shouting back up the hill, and he heard Benny's voice, loud. They all danced for Dorrie… He danced for her, and Ulrike Schmidt who gazed into his face, and Ham who walked towards him with a wide smile, and Benny Stein who was yelling hard about the failure of his brakes. She had touched them and they danced for her.
"You're a fucking mess, squire. How was it?"
And if Ulrike had not had hold of his arm, and if Ham had not taken him under the armpit, he would have gone down.
Evica said, "So, he could be this side of the line, or he could have gone…?"
Milan lay fully dressed, still in his suit, on the top blanket of the bed.
Evica pressed, "So, he could have been in the lorry that crashed the checkpoint?"
The dirt of his suit, and his shoes, would be on the top blanket. Milan said, empty, "I don't know."
Evica held his hand, and on the hand was the mud of Petar's garden and Dragan's garden. "What will happen to us, if he went through the line?"
All that he had, all that he leaned on, was the wife beside him and the child sleeping in the next room. Milan said, "What I was told was that one day they will come for me……in a month, in a year, when I am old…one day. Perhaps their children will come for our child, one day. We have to wait, for the day they come."
"Because we cannot run…?"
"Cannot run anywhere. Because of what has happened, of course I have known there will be revenge one day. But it was vague, just in my head. But it was said to me direct, at the liaison meeting, and you know his wife, and he said—direct—that one day, if it were not him that came for me then it would be his son that would come for our Marko. It would go on for ever, as long as the memory lives of what was done. Like a curse on us, and on Marko. Maybe I did not believe him, and then the Englishman came, and I was named. It had been a safe world before the Englishman came—we on our side of the line, they on theirs. They could not come across the line and reach us. They could sit in Karlovac town, they could say whatever the shit they wanted, but they could not touch me, and then the Englishman came to us, to me. I believe him, the Liaison. I believe now that they will come for me one day, or that his son will come for our Marko. If I had known I would not have…"
"…not have killed her. But then you thought you were safe."
"Not have killed the girl."
Evica said, "He made me remember her. Two afternoons and I remember them, when she came to our shop for food because their own shop had nothing. It was three weeks before the fight. It was after the children had gone home…"
"You told me."
"And she sat in my room at the school, and we talked in English. I told her there would be no fighting between our village and her village. I told her there was no quarrel between us. She spoke of her home, and her mother, what her home was like and what her mother did…"
"We cannot run and we cannot hide."
Through the gap of the curtains, Evica saw the first light of the new day. She said, sad, "We have to live. We have to wait, as she waited in the field, but we have to live…"
Soft, gentle fingers moving on the wounds…a woman's fingers, and tender. He was in the cellar, and there was only the light of a small tallow candle. He was the wounded, and the face of the young woman was above him, and her fingers dabbed, sweet, at the wounds with sharp iodine and salted water. She touched him and she had no fear. He loved her, the young woman who cared for the wounded in the cellar.
Penn stirred, his eyes flickered. The fingers with the cotton wool were close to his eyes…God, and his face hurt.
It was a woman's room, bright and alive, and the candle in the cellar was gone, and there were flowers on a table across the room from the bed.
Ham sat on the floor, his back against a neat chest, and he held the long-barrelled rifle across his knees. Ulrike flashed her smile, nervous and short, embarrassed, and she was pushing up from beside the bed, as if she had been kneeling close to him as she had cleaned his face wounds and sterilized them.
Ham said, "You cut it fine, squire. You got through before they'd organized. Their communications are piss-awful—you wouldn't have got through half an hour later. That driver did you well—there's not another fucker other than me and the lady knows you were up aboard. How much did you drop the driver, squire?"
Penn said, "I told him why I'd gone."
He said that he wanted to go back to Zagreb, make his report, and buy the biggest bottle of Scotch in the city, and they said that they'd share it.
It was morning. They helped him to dress, Ulrike carefully and Ham roughly, and the pain of the kicks and the punches had stiffened to each corner of his body. He thought he would always remember, long after he had written the report and drunk the Scotch, the image of a cellar and wounded men, and a young woman without fear.
He went hunting trouble first thing. Marty had talked it through with the doctor from Vukovar, his landlord, and the doctor had steeled him to it. He had talked it through because the long-distance telephone call had woken them both in the apartment, and half the night they had sat over coffee, and the doctor had toughened him to it.
It was raining—soft, like it did in the spring in Anchorage when the snow melted—as Marty strode across the central grass towards the steps and doors of A block. He had gone hunting trouble before opening up the converted freight container. There would need to have been a GI provost on the door of the suite of the Director of Civilian Affairs to have stopped him. The goddamn phone call, in the bad half of the night, hadn't been from Geneva, but goddamn New York.
Marty went past the secretaries to the door and didn't knock, he went on in. They were round the Director's desk. Marty saw on the sleeves of their uniforms the insignia of Canada and Jordan and Argentina. They had a big map over the desk, and the Director was with them and looking at the map's detail through a magnifying glass, and a cigarette hung from his lips. And they turned, the soldiers and the Director, in annoyed surprise.
He hammered, "I just wanted to say that I am not prepared to be treated like crap any more. And I just wanted to say that I find it incredible that one United Nations agency is active in blocking the work of another United Nations programme. I find it shameful that you have gone behind my back to sabotage my work…"
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"I am talking about getting pitched out of my cot in the goddamn middle of the night by New York, to tell me that my work is causing offence, my work is a nuisance. I will not tolerate that goddamn crap…I will not tolerate you crawling behind my back to get New York to order me to cool it. Are you with me?"
"If you go now you can go down the stairs on your feet If you wait one minute, you'll go down the stairs on your face."
"Because I am inconvenient…?"
"Because…listen to me, you silly young man, listen hard…there were refugees supposed to be coming through Turanj crossing point today, but the crossing point is closed. There was an aid convoy supposed to be going through Turanj today, but its passage has been cancelled…"
"That's not my problem. My work is to prepare war crimes…"
"Listen…I'll tell you my problem. They have a maximum alert along their line. They are leaping about like they've pokers up their arses. Our movement is quite restricted. Why…? There is some garbled story about a war crimes investigator, captured and escaped…"
"I know nothing…"
"Too fucking right…I doubt you know the length of your own dick. My job is to keep our access into Sector North. And all this is after I suggested to New York that I could do without a wet-behind-the-ears puppy giving me shit from the high moral ground."
"Where?"
"Glina Municipality…"
Marty looked at the map, where the magnifying glass rested. "Where?"
"The rumour is he was picked up in Rosenovici…"
He swayed. He felt the cold on him. He remembered what he had seen, the man in the Transit Centre, the man with Ulrike. He remembered the lecture he had given, goddamn patronizing, and the answer, "I've just a report to write, then I'm gone." He remembered the Bosnian Muslim woman that the man had talked to, and she had been in Rosenovici. He rocked.
"It's just a rumour…I am a busy man. Do you wish to leave on your feet or on your face?"
Marty had no more anger. He let himself out, quietly.
It was the irregulars, from Glina town, who interrogated the Headmaster. They were the men of Arkan, who was Zeljko Raznjatovic, and they called themselves the Tigers, and they were men freed from gaol cells in Belgrade. They had come at first light from Glina, and they had taken control of the headquarters building in Salika. They had come to the village because he was known to them, because Milan had once posed for a photograph in front of the War Memorial with their leader, Arkan…it was as if his only function that morning was to make them coffee. They had taken his room and his radio and his desk, and they stubbed out their cigarettes against the bared stomach of the Headmaster.
The screaming rang in Milan's ears. It was the agonized screaming of the man who had taught him at school, of the man who had been Evica's friend. With the cigarettes, crushed and stubbed out, Milan heard of the Englishman's journey of discovery, and of Katica Dubelj who was the journey's guide.
After the screaming and the telling, the irregulars of Arkan took the Headmaster from the cell of the headquarters and out into the road that cut the village. They wore plain belted one-piece uniforms of grey-green, and when they came out into the road they had put black hoods over their faces so that only their mouths and their eyes were visible.
Out in the road they did not need Milan to bring them coffee, so they sent him from house to house in the village to get the people to come and watch, and he did as he was ordered, until there was a small crowd in front of the Headmaster's home. He could not face his own people, nor could he face the Headmaster who was made to stand in front of the door of his home, nor could he face the weeping wife of the Headmaster who was held back by the irregulars.
