“Ne,” Scarface screamed. “Ne, ne …”
Frankie stood over him and hurled the rock at his comrade’s head.
Scarface dropped back onto the rubble. After the pile of rocks and masonry settled again, there were no more sounds.
Frankie switched the piece of cinderblock to his right hand. This time he bent low and brought it down on the side of Scarface’s head, with all of his weight behind it. He swung with so much force he fell onto the body.
Green could not quite see the effect of the blow. But he heard the sound of a dropped pumpkin.
Frankie knelt over the man for a moment. Gasping. Then he smashed the chunk of cinderblock down again. Making sure. The shard trailed a spray of blood as it descended. Then more blood splashed upward, catching Frankie’s face.
When he stood back up, Frankie had blood on his face and hands, on his jacket and on the legs of his pants. His face had the blankness of an icon in an old church, with a saint’s huge eyes.
He let go of the cinderblock and glanced at Green.
“Martyr to the cause,” Frankie said.
Green was racing on adrenaline now. It brought his brain back to life. He understood why Frankie had done it. Killed the comrade he could not save and could not leave to be captured. With a shard of cinderblock instead of one clean shot. Because a stray animal can set off a mine, but only human beings fired rifles. At the sound of a shot, the other side would have shaken off their torpor and come at a rush to find out what happened.
Their world had begun to make sense to him. He felt as though he had realized something huge that could not be put into words. Something he needed to tell his own people.
Frankie had gone savage. He beat Green up to his knees with the stump of metal where the rifle’s stock collapsed forward. For a bewildered moment, Green imagined Frankie was going to beat him to death, too. But Frankie only wanted to get going. Before a patrol showed up. He made Green bend forward and touch his forehead to the earth, then he hurriedly tied Green’s hands behind his back again. Green’s wrists were already raw and Frankie pulled the cords so tight it made him wince.
Frankie knew the way now, in the daylight. He steered Green down rows of knee-high stumps that had been orchards and on into the forest. Cursing, yet keeping his voice low. He raged against the Muslims, the “Turks,” until the complaints were almost hypnotic.
“Fucking Turks,” he said, over and over. “Fucking goddamned animals. Fucking Turks.”
Finally, Green said, “How do you know it was the Muslims? How do you know it wasn’t the other side? Or even your own people?”
“You shut the fuck up. Just shut up. Only the Turks set booby traps like that. It’s the way they think. They don’t fight like men. They sneak. Fucking cowards. All they want to do is get Christian women doped up and fuck them. They need to be exterminated. Wiped from the face of the earth. Every one of them.”
Madness, Green thought as he listened. And I was wrong. We were all wrong. It’s not a little madness, not something you can reason away or treat. Not even with airstrikes. It’s a big madness. Devouring. Reason doesn’t exist here. It truly is another world.
“That bitch Daniela,” Frankie said. “Her goddamned father was half Turk. She was born a worthless slut. You see what happens?”
Madness, Green thought. It struck him with the force of revelation. That one word. Madness.
They were crossing a field of stubble when they heard the dogs. Yaps echoing up the valley. They were miles away. But they frightened Frankie.
He still has to get away, Green realized. After he kills me.
“Get going,” Frankie said. “Move it.”
Green watched for a place where he could make his break. Desperate now. With his hands tied behind his back, he could not outrun his captor. And he certainly could not outrun a bullet. He needed a change in the terrain. A bank he could roll down. Or another village. Some way to put some initial distance between them, or obstacles to make it hard to aim.
The land had flattened. In the forests, the trees were well-spaced, with very little underbrush. The fields had been harvested. Green never found his opportunity.
He sensed death coming. Thinking: This is how an animal must feel. He longed to just run. To take his last chance. But he marched along and went where he was told.
He could not tell if the dogs were gaining on them or not. There was so much distance between them. And, if they closed in, Frankie would certainly kill him first. Even if he didn’t, those people would do it and blame it on Frankie.
Green understood them now. He got the logic that was not the logic of his kind. It seemed a terrible waste that the knowledge would die with him. When it could be so useful to those who did not understand. To those who imagined sanity waiting to be awakened like some political Sleeping Beauty.
He did not really believe he would die. Not at every moment. Part of him could not conceive of such a thing. Something would happen. He would be saved. It made no sense for him to die like this.
No, he realized. It made all the sense in the world. In this world.
He heard vehicles. The grunt of military diesels. But these, too, were far away.
Frankie marched him faster.
The late afternoon light glazing the land was as beautiful as anything Green had ever witnessed. Indian summer weather back home. The best time of the year. Football games, in high school then at West Point. The scent and feel of the girls as they tested themselves against life. The safe, privileged world from which he came. Where you caught footballs, not bullets, and danger meant getting caught by your father with beer on your breath, then, later, missing your ride and overstaying your weekend pass. Or just an upperclassman in a bad mood.
He recalled the crisp mornings when the hills smoked above Wheeling, then the brilliant days when the wind swept down the Hudson. Young women who never gave a thought to gang rape in their lives, who had left the village a hundred years behind them. Who would never be killed because their father was half-something. His land of wonder.
Vehicles groaned on the other side of the trees. Maybe a pair of football fields away. Abruptly, the motion sounds stopped and the engines went into idle.
Frankie shoved his gunbarrel into Green’s back and said, “Get down. Flat.”
Green got down. And heard voices. No dogs, except for those in the distance. But voices asked each other questions. He could not make out any words, but the intonation was universal. They were looking for something.
Green wanted to shout. To take his chances with those people. To take any chance left to him at all.
Frankie held the muzzle to his head.
The searchers remounted and drove away. Maybe it had just been a piss stop, after all.
“Get going,” Frankie said. “It isn’t far now.”
They passed through a glade where the earth was suddenly soft underfoot and the colors of summer held out. Dark greens hard as lacquer. And pale woodland ferns.
“Tell me one thing,” Green said.
“Shut up. Move.”
“Why’d you come back? From the States? For this?”
Frankie did not answer immediately. The ground rose slightly and hardened underfoot. The earth sounded cold under their boots again.
The yapping of the dogs had grown fainter, almost inaudible.
As they detoured around a clearing, Frankie answered him:
“Americans got no pride. No dignity. A man isn’t respected.”
“Lost your job? Girlfriend dump you?”
“Fuck you. You don’t know what it’s like. Big-shit officer.” They marched a dozen paces. “Here … things make sense. People respect you. For the right reasons. Not just because you’re some rich Wall Street fuck. Because of your family. Because of who you are. Because of who your old man was.”
From a treeline, Green glimpsed a paved two-lane road half a mile away.
That would be it.
Frankie paused for a moment, judging the landsca
pe, the safest approach. Before he got them moving again, he looked at Green. Measuring him.
“You think I’m some kind of nutcase. Right? You probably got your skull crammed full of that equal opportunity shit. All that equality crap just means niggers get to fuck your women and you can’t say nothing about it.” He pointed to the east with his rifle. “It doesn’t make sense to you that those people nailed my grandfather to a tree and skinned him alive and now I want to take a piece of their skins. Does it?”
Green wondered at the man. His teachers had been wrong. They did not even belong to the same species any more. All men were not created equal.
“My uncle … my father’s older brother …” Green said, “ … was killed by the Japanese. And I drive a Honda back home. We put the past behind us. That’s our strength.”
Frankie looked at him with raw disdain.
“That’s not strength,” he said. “That’s weakness.”
They followed a gulley between two fields. The beeches lining the depression had lost most of their leaves and Green ploughed through drifts of yellow and brown that rasped and splashed around his knees.
Apple cider. Sweaters. Parties. Kids goofy in their Halloween costumes. Vampires and ghosts. Ninjas. They had no idea what was frightening. The really terrifying creatures did not wear costumes or have horns or fangs or claws.
He worried that Frankie was right. That he would beg at the last minute. If he had to die … if he was going to die … he didn’t want the end to shame him.
What was he doing here anyway?
What on earth was he doing here?
He wished he had never become a soldier. Or that he had resigned his commission and married Caroline.
He had been so proud. Of his service, his rank. Of the achievements he had imagined held genuine importance.
This is what it came down to.
The leaves made a heart-wrenching sound as he crushed through them. Brutal with memories.
It was going to break his mother’s heart. And his father’s. His father had always been so proud of him. It was his mother who worried. About football injuries, or the wrong girl for him. About wars.
Did this even count as a war?
He decided he would fight at the end. No matter what. Even if he could only kick.
Unless he saw a chance to run.
He did not know what he would do.
Behind his back, Frankie was humming. Maybe the beauty of the afternoon had reached him, too.
The road had been built at an elevation above the fields, which lay in a floodplain. Its embankment rose before Green like a wall. The gulley narrowed to a culvert, with a half-blocked drainpipe showing daylight under the roadbed.
“Stop.”
Not here. Frankie would want to do it right up on the road. There was still time.
“The UN dicks are always on time, at least,” Frankie told him. “French colonel’s got himself one of their sluts over in the town. Noon to five, then he’s on the road again.”
Green waited. He sensed Frankie sniffing, sensing the world, listening.
Silence. No dogs, no motors. Not even a bird. Green shifted his weight and the leaves rustled. He tried one last time to work his hands free. Trying to do it discreetly. But the cords were ungiving.
“Okay,” Frankie said. “Get up there. Get going.”
The time to run would be just when he reached the flat of the road, while Frankie was still climbing the embankment. That would be his best chance. Run and jump down the other side. Then keep on running like hell. He couldn’t see yet, but he hoped the ground might drop even lower on the other side of the road. Maybe there would be some undergrowth. Anything that would give him a scrap of advantage.
He walked across a strip of ploughed-under field. With the air cold and thin in his lungs.
“God, please,” he prayed. “Please, help me now.”
He started up the embankment, struggling to keep his balance with his hands bound behind him.
As he approached the top, he saw that it was hopeless. There was only another field on the other side, wide open for at least two hundred meters before it ended against the next treeline.
He got ready to run anyway.
But Frankie’s hands were not bound. He beat Green to the top and covered him with the rifle, moving just in front of him, stepping backward.
Without prompting, they both stopped in the middle of the road.
“This is it, motherfucker.”
Green stared at the man who would kill him.
Frankie wasn’t smiling now. “Turn around,” he told Green. “You’ve got one minute. Pray, or do whatever you want. One minute.”
The last blue sky.
Green took off. He ran harder than he had ever run on any football field. He ran and waited for the shot.
He heard the crack of a rifle.
But he was still alive, still running.
And the sound had not been right. It had not been close enough.
He ran a little farther. When there was no second shot, he stopped. And turned around.
Frankie lay crumpled in the roadway. With his brains strewn over the asphalt. His eyes were open and stunned.
Green saw them then. Emerging from the far treeline. Someone shouted to him to stay where he was. Men in grayish fatigues. Bearded men. Wearing those little caps that always made him think of the old Howard Johnson’s hot-dog rolls. Silly caps. Those people.
Green sat down hard in the middle of the road and waited.
The hand-over took place on the border that night, with no time wasted and the usual suspects in attendance: the rag-tag killers who had saved his life, a French colonel, and a Dutch major. The U.S. attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Andretti, was on the receiving end.
Driving back to the embassy, Andretti listened to Green’s story. Green did not sugarcoat it.
“I was sure they were going to kill me,” Green concluded, rubbing his foot. His feet stank, but Andretti understood. “First that sonofabitch Frankie, then me. And pin it on him. I guess my cynicism’s showing.”
The attaché snorted and offered him another Diet Coke from the cooler. Real gringo Coke. “You got lucky. One man’s misfortune … you want another sandwich?” Andretti’s rough skin gleamed as a flash of headlights lit the back of the sedan. “Couple of reporters just found the biggest mass grave of the war. Seven, eight-hundred bodies, minimum. UN, Red Cross, NGOs, the press—everybody’s all over those people. Even the Russians look like they’re ready to back airstrikes against their little bearded brothers.” He snorted again. The bad air in the capital city had given Andretti asthma at the back end of his career. “You were their good deed for the day. After a decade of atrocious ones. They had everybody they could muster out looking for you. Onelegged distance runners and one-armed paper-hangers. We had to jump up and down to keep them on their side of the border. They figured out what was happening quicker than we did. And they were not going to take that rap, if they could help it. They’ve got enough on their plate already.”
Green considered the universe, then condensed it.
“I keep thinking about Bob Crawley.”
The little attaché settled back into his seat. “You’ll think about him for the rest of your life, Jeff.”
The President’s special envoy, a former ambassador playing hooky from Wall Street, had flown into the capital city that morning. His visit had nothing to do with Green, whose disappearance had been a sideshow in the circus of international relations. Nicholas Vollstrom was in the middle of another round of shuttle diplomacy, with airstrikes in the offing if the villains of the moment did not back down and do his bidding.
The diplomats assigned to the region had been trying to communicate the complexity of the situation to the President’s envoy for months, but had failed. Now, with Vollstrom anxious to go wheels-up for Brussels, where he had a come-to-Jesus session with the SACEUR the next morning, the ambassador had the attaché usher Major Green into the embassy�
�s secure bubble. In a last attempt to inject some reality into the envoy’s view of the world.
Green had not even showered. There had barely been time to wash the last crusts of blood from his face in the men’s room and change into the suit he kept in the office for meetings with the local bureaucrats. He had seen Vollstrom getting into a limo once. And he had read plenty about him. In person, the president’s man was beefy, running to fat. He wore glasses and spoke in a loud, high-pitched voice.
Green tried to tell his tale soberly and efficiently. But less than a third of the way into the story, Vollstrom cut him off, thumping his fist down on the table.
“I’ve just spent the afternoon and most of the evening with the president of this republic. With whom I have built a relationship of trust. He briefed me personally on what you were doing down there, major. Clowning around, stirring up trouble. And it backfired on you. Got one of you killed. And now you want to shift the blame.” He grimaced in disgust. “You’ll be lucky if you aren’t court-martialed. Goddamned lucky.”
“Sir …”
The envoy leaned across the table toward Green. His neck swelled out of his collar and his face turned the color of raw meat.
“Get this straight, son,” he said. “There is no war in Melnica.”
RALPH PETERS is a novelist, essayist, and former soldier. His fiction includes Traitor, The Devil’s Garden, Twilight of Heroes, The War in 2020, and other novels. He is also the author of the acclaimed book on strategy and conflict, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? His commentaries on strategic themes appear regularly in the national and international media. He entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1976 and retired in 1998, shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, so he could write and speak freely. His military service and research travels have taken him to fifty countries, and his duties led him from an infantry battalion to the Executive Office of the President. His novella in this collection, “There Is No War in Melnica,” is based on his personal observation of the Balkans from 1972 to the present.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these novels are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
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