Scorpion Trail

by Geoffrey Archer

  ‘Dan. Dan Samson,’ Lorna lied, crossing her arms. ‘And that’s it, now. You keep your nose out of my personal life.’

  Her tone snuffed out the last flicker of light in his dream. Josip shrugged. His cause was lost. Game over.

  Suddenly he felt unpleasantly sober.

  ‘Maybe I have some brandy . . .’

  Lorna pushed back her chair.

  ‘Not for me. I’m going to bed. Alone!’

  Josip looked round for the waiter, ignoring the rebuke.

  ‘Goodnight, Josip.’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied dismissively.

  She closed the door to her room and slipped the chain. After a couple of brandies Josip might yet try again.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, pulled off her boots, then fell back onto the rough blanket that smelled of smoke. How the hell had she let herself get into that? Inventing a lover to put him off was one thing, but all that soul mate stuff?

  Just slipped out, your honour.

  And just because ‘soul mates’ was the way she and Alex Jarvis used to think of each other, it wasn’t necessarily him she’d meant. Who said she still thought about him?

  ‘I say. That’s who.’

  Her voice, echoed flatly in the cold, half-lit box, with its seedy wallpaper and plasticky furniture. A bedroom that smelled of strangers.

  Why, though? Why could she still think of him with love as well as with hate?

  Belfast 1973. A long, long time ago, but still sharp in her memory.

  On a scale of 1 to 10, what Alex had done to her there was 11+ for shittiness. A monstrous betrayal after his beautiful words and after the love-making that was so much more than just sex.

  All that stuff about her being the ‘spark that had been missing from his life’. Sure, she’d said those things about him too. The difference was she had meant them.

  She had fled home from Belfast and then discovered the hard Irishmen in Boston wanted her dead for ‘touting’ the secret of the jailbreak. They’d planned a little ‘accident’ for her, but her father was tipped the wink and bought them off. Being one of the richest Irish-Americans in New England had its advantages.

  Then, and this was the worst part for her, Lorna had found herself back in her father’s pocket, saddled again with the burden of filial obligation it had taken her years to shake off.

  She and her sister knew it as ‘The Gratitude Trap’ – never being able to say or do anything to contradict their father in case it was seen as lack of appreciation.

  A sense of failure and guilt had been pummelled into their brains since birth through paternal rebukes at any flaw in their performance and ridicule at their juvenile opinions.

  Lorna shivered. She’d crossed into adulthood devoid of self-esteem, conditioned to believe her only value was as her father’s vassal.

  Then she’d met Alex who’d told her she was just wonderful the way she was. He’d called her a star – clever, witty, beautiful. She! Lorna! No wonder she’d loved him so much.

  She’d felt a star, too, whizzing around Hampstead on the back of Alex’s BSA. A rebel, with Alex as James Dean. A little rough in his voice and manner, he would not have won Papa’s approval, which had served to heighten the thrill. The first challenge to her father she’d ever made.

  Her parents had been separated by then. Her mother, born in Britain, had brought her to London for a taste of English education and culture.

  Alex. He’d given her the strength to stand up to the old man – then thrust her back into his debt by betraying her.

  Alex. She remembered his smell when they first met. Almost feral. Something to do with the leather jacket he wore. But it was his eyes she’d fallen for, dark and tempting as chocolate. And the feel of his body. She’d nicknamed him Samson.

  Samson! Dan Samson! That was the stupid name she’d given Josip for her fictitious lover.

  Shit! Shit! Shit! She leaped from the bed.

  Had to wash all this stuff from her head. She tried the bathroom tap. Water. A miracle. Warm too.

  She turned on the shower, tossed her clothes at a chair, then climbed over the rim of the tub. The water smelled funny, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  She shampooed her hair then spread the foam down her soft skin; the water threatened to lose its heat. She rinsed herself quickly in case the flow died altogether, then huddled under the spray to savour the last of its warmth. Crossing her arms over her breasts, her fingers felt the nipples grow and harden.

  It was a while since she’d been with a man. Only once since leaving Rees, a divorcee she’d met at a party. Not a night to remember. He’d had the hands of a butcher.

  Alex’s hands had been something else.

  Damn! She hated the guy, remember? He’d screwed up her life. She recited the litany in her mind.

  After buying off the IRA, her father had forced her into hiding, to take a job with a law firm he knew in an out-of-the-way New England artists’ colony.

  All because you betrayed me, Alex!

  There, after years of frustration at her exile, she’d bedded some careless pot-thrower she didn’t even like, who had gotten her pregnant. Her contract with the law firm precluded motherhood for seven years, so she’d had to leave her job.

  Your fault, Alex.

  Two choices had faced her. To become a single parent and depend on her father for an income, or find someone to marry.

  No choice, Alex.

  The potter was out of the question, but there was someone else. A partner in the firm called Rees Sorenson. So keen was he to make her Mrs Sorensen, that this deeply Christian man overlooked the fact she was already pregnant.

  After what you’d put me through, Alex, maybe I deserved such a saint.

  The baby was born. They’d called her Julie.

  After a few months they’d realized something was wrong. Autism, the doctors called it. The child couldn’t communicate.

  For twelve years Lorna had cared for Julie, battling to break through to her, but when the girl reached puberty things had gotten out of control.

  Rees put Julie in a home for the mentally disturbed, Lorna had a breakdown, and their marriage disintegrated.

  All your fault, Alex! Every little part of it!

  Suddenly the bathroom went black.

  ‘Oh, hell!’ she screamed. ‘Damn! Damn!’

  She groped to turn off the taps, then felt for the rim of the tub. Where was the frigging towel? She banged her toe on the doorframe and cursed again.

  Somewhere she had a flashlight. She felt her way into the pitch-dark room. The power failure was total; no light spilled in from the window.

  She stooped forward and felt the edge of the bed, her heart pounding. Suppose Josip had gotten in while she was in the shower . . .

  She held her breath. All she could hear was the pumping of her own blood. What if he was there, holding his breath too?

  Silently she felt along the bed. Please, God, let the flashlight be on the bedside table.

  It was. She fumbled with the switch.

  ‘Thank you Lord,’ she breathed, waving the pale, orange beam round the room. It needed new batteries.

  Back in the bathroom, she rested the torch on the shelf so she could dry herself quickly before it died altogether.

  A quick teeth brushing before the water gave out, then her nightdress on and into bed.

  She bit her lip. What the hell was she doing in this crazy place?

  ‘I hate you Alex! I hate you,’ she moaned.

  Twelve

  Monday 28th March, 9.15 a.m.

  Vitez

  THE ROADWAY BETWEEN Dragana’s house and the UN camp opposite was lined with heavy vehicles, engines rumbling like ruminating beasts. Exhausts steamed like cattle-breath in the crisp morning air.

  A convoy of empty supply trucks was forming for the long drive to Split and a pair of Warriors twisted on their tracks, to bracket three white, armoured Land Rovers with ‘TV’ marked on their sides in black tape. The journalis
ts were being taken on patrol along the cease-fire lines. In public they expressed hope that peace would last, but privately they knew that only fresh violence would guarantee them a place on the evening news.

  Alex coaxed the Bedford out of the drive and turned left onto the road. He was glad of his boots and Barbour and had pulled on a tweed cap to keep his head warm.

  This was the first full day of his mission. With a little luck by the end of it he would have picked up the trail of at least one of the people he was looking for.

  As they headed northwest he looked across flat meadows glinting silver in the watery sunlight. Beyond, rose a snow-capped mountain range, a ski-centre in happier times. It reminded him of frosty mornings in the Highlands, out on the moors before dawn, waiting for the deer to leave their valley feeding grounds for the safety of the hills.

  ‘It’s beautiful here!’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes. Took me by surprise,’ McFee concurred. ‘You don’t expect it somehow, after all the butchery you see on TV. You think the place’ll be one big shit heap.’

  The road wound through hamlets, scarred by the occasional burned-out shop or house.

  ‘And then you see that sort of thing,’ Alex commented.

  ‘Beauty and the beast . . . eh?’

  Grey-faced young men, wearing the drab camouflage of the HVO, ambled wearily home, eyeing the truck for a lift.

  Swerving to avoid a mortar crater, they reached a road juntion and a chicane made of rusting tank-traps and a burned-out bus. To the left the UN’s Route Triangle led to the mountains and the coast. Straight on was to Travnik.

  ‘It’s eerie,’ Alex breathed. ‘Not a soul in sight. You feel you’re being watched.’

  ‘Aye. We’ve just crossed the front line. There’s probably a dozen rifle sights looking at us, so keep smiling.’

  ‘Bit dodgy on our own, isn’t it?’ Alex snapped, not wanting a repeat of yesterday’s nightmare. ‘Shouldn’t we have a UN escort?’

  McFee bristled.

  ‘Look, when I left you at P.Info last night I dropped into the officers’ mess,’ he blustered expansively. ‘They said Travnik’s wide open. No probs.’

  Officers’ Mess? Sounded like bullshit. But McFee had been out somewhere last night. Hadn’t got back to the house until after Alex was asleep.

  And another thing, he thought. They had no translator. How the hell was he going to ask questions about Milan Pravic if he couldn’t communicate.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be handy to have a local with us,’ he needled, ‘someone who speaks the language?’

  McFee pursed his lips.

  ‘Which local, that’s the problem. A Croat couldn’t come in here with us. And a Muslim couldn’t come back with us to Vitez.’

  ‘How do the UN manage?’

  ‘Och, well, they pay them good wages, stick ’em in a uniform and give ’em a nice wee plastic UN pass. But Bosnia Emergency hasn’t the money.’

  He ruminated for a moment.

  ‘But it’s something to work on. If we found a volunteer, maybe the UN could get her a pass.’ The thought that it could be a woman set McFee brooding.

  An ancient hilltop castle towered over the approach to Travnik. Beyond were minarets. Old shell cases littered the roadway.

  ‘This place has taken a pasting,’ McFee remarked, guiding Alex through the shrapnel-scarred streets of the old Muslim town. At a small park, dug up for fresh graves, women laid flowers. The road was full of men in uniform.

  ‘The bearded ones are Mujahedin,’ McFee mentioned under his breath. ‘Iranians, Palestinians, you name it.’ He shot a glance at Alex. ‘With that fungus on your own face, you’d better watch out they don’t recruit ye!’

  Alex manoeuvred the truck over a narrow river bridge and into a school yard, then swung down onto the tarmac. From behind barred windows faces peered, most of them blank with despair. Parked closer to the school entrance, its rear towards the door, was another white-painted truck.

  ‘Looks like Feed the Children have beaten us to it,’ Alex remarked, spotting the line of refugees passing aid boxes into the building.

  ‘Oh, hello, there.’

  It was the Englishman who’d shared their table in the cookhouse last night.

  ‘They’ve plenty of supplies here just now. But have a word with the director. She knows some other places.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Inside, class-rooms were stuffed with beds, mats and the meagre belongings of families. Weaving through the crush, Alex bit his lip. It was the first time he’d touched and smelled the human tragedy of Bosnia.

  They entered an office. Desks stacked with paperwork, half a dozen women struggling to make sense of it. Clucking about them like a mother hen was a matron in fawn cardigan and what looked like a Hermes scarf.

  She smiled and affected to recognize McFee when he introduced himself.

  ‘Full. No more room,’ she explained, brown eyes wide with astonishment. ‘Enough food for a week, maybe.’

  ‘You know somewhere else we could take our stuff?’ McFee asked.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Some people came last week but no space. They go to village near Guca Gora.’

  ‘Maybe you could send someone with us as a guide,’ Alex chipped in. ‘Someone who speaks English.’

  ‘Maybe. Perhaps . . .’ She looked at her watch. ‘Moment.’

  She bustled from the room shouting a name. Two minutes later she returned, leading a fair-haired youth with eyes of bright blue.

  ‘This is Ivan. He is refugee. He learn English at school. You bring him back?’

  ‘Of course,’ Alex assured her.

  They walked out to the truck, Ivan shooing away children unpicking the tailgate tarpaulin.

  They drove slowly through the town using the same road they’d come in on.

  ‘How old are you, Ivan?’ Alex asked. Squeezed between him and McFee, the boy’s diffidence reminded him so painfully of Jodie.

  ‘Seventeen. But if someone ask, I am sixteen, okay?’ There was fear in his eyes.

  ‘Okay,’ Alex frowned. ‘But why?’

  ‘Huh. If seventeen, they put me in army! Then I dead like my father.’

  He drew a finger across his own throat.

  Back past the castle and out onto the Vitez road again, Ivan directed him up a lane that climbed through bare woods of birch and chestnut. They reached a muddy village, slowing for a pony-cart piled with silage.

  Then, round a bend, the Bosnian Army flag drooped above a café. Bearded soldiers lounging on chairs followed the truck’s passing with suspicious, unwavering eyes.

  ‘No stop! No stop!’ Ivan gibbered. ‘Mujahedin . . .’

  Alex put his foot down. Out of the village, the ground fell away steeply to the right.

  ‘I thought the Mujahedin were on your side,’ he checked. The boy was pale with fear.

  ‘Crazy peoples. Arabs. Not Bosnians . . .’

  A little later, Alex asked how much further it was. Ivan counted on his fingers.

  ‘Three more village, I think.’

  It took twenty minutes to reach the scruffy hamlet of Duba. Ivan leaned from the window and asked an old man directions.

  ‘He say the refugees are in the school. I show you.’

  Always the schools, Alex thought. War had wrecked so many aspects of life here. Outside a dismal pre-fab a crowd milled, elderly men in caps and women in shawls, but young families too, some decanting from a mudspattered bus, hugging the few belongings they’d seized in their moment of flight.

  As the Bedford pulled up, faces turned as one, and the mob descended on them like gulls on a rubbish tip.

  ‘Christ!’ Alex yelled. ‘They’ll take the truck apart!’

  ‘Ivan!’ McFee growled. ‘Find the person who’s in charge of this place.’

  Alex switched off the engine and pocketed the key.

  ‘Come on, Moray,’ he barked. ‘Let’s see if we can hold them off.’

  The truck was surrounded.

/>   Alex squeezed to the ground, pressed to the side of the vehicle by the throng. Some youths had already undone the tarpaulin at the back.

  ‘Now, hang on a minute, chaps!’ McFee’s bellow rose up from the midst of the crowd. ‘Ooof!’

  Hell! Someone’s thumped him, Alex thought.

  He elbowed his way to the tail-gate. McFee leaned against the rear wheel-arch nursing his chin. A scuffle had broken out. Whoever had hit McFee was being restrained, and punched in return.

  Boxes poured out of the back of the truck. Some in the crowd ripped them open where they stood. Others clutched them in their arms like trophies and elbowed their way back to the school.

  Suddenly a shot rang out. Alex dropped to the ground. Then came the rattling crack of automatic fire. Women screamed. The crowd melted away at a crouch.

  A middle-aged man in Armija uniform strutted towards the truck, blasting Kalashnikov rounds into the sky. Close behind were two other soldiers, and Ivan.

  ‘Good lad,’ Alex breathed, clutching the boy by the arm.

  ‘Your friend. He is hurt?’

  ‘You all right, Moray?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  The middle-aged soldier helped McFee to his feet and dusted him down. He babbled away in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘He says “sorry for what happened”,’ Ivan translated. ‘These people have no food for three days.’

  ‘Tell him we understand,’ Alex soothed. ‘I’d have done the same.’

  ‘He say the people of this village not want refugees,’ Ivan continued. ‘They tell them “go away”. Give nothing to eat. Only for themselves.’

  ‘Well, tell them they’re welcome to all the stuff we’ve brought,’ Alex replied. ‘There’s food and warm clothing. But ask him to make sure it’s shared out fairly.’

  Ivan turned to the officer to translate.

  ‘Da. Da.’ He nodded, gesticulating at his juniors. They scurried off to muster a gang of box-handlers.

  Alex began collecting the broken boxes into a sack, vaguely aware that another vehicle, a white jeep of some sort had pulled up outside the school.

  ‘I’ll gi’ ye a hand in a minute, Alex,’ McFee called. ‘Just get my breath back.’

  From some of the boxes the contents had already been looted. Alex bent to gather up the torn cardboard.