Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  They had no organization and no discipline.

  After they had drunk and told their jokes, they moved off again towards the tree line, but the heart had gone from the search. They did not go far into the birch trees that covered the hillside and they did not come near to the rock escarpment.

  They went back the way they had come and there were the marks of their boots in the wet grass and the trails where the two bodies were dragged.

  Ham watched. He wiped his face, furtive, and his tears smeared the camouflage cream. His eyes, all the time, held the broad and powerful back of the bearded man, who walked easily, walked without care. Piece of cake, if he had had the Dragunov SVD 7.62mm, not the Kalashnikov, piece of cake for a sniper first class.

  Ham murmured, "That's a right bastard .. ."

  The brother of the man who had been castrated whispered, calmly, "That is Milan Stankovic."

  "That right bastard needs sorting .. ."

  "He is Milan Stankovic, he commands the TDF unit at the village of Salika. He has grown the beard now because he would think that makes him more of the Serb soldier. It is, perhaps, ten kilometres from here, his village. He was a clerk. He was a junior clerk in the administration of the co-operative at Turanj. All the farmers in the region came to the co-operative with their produce, and it was marketed from there. We came, my brother and I, to the co-operative each week in the summer. It was the job of Milan Stankovic to check the paper we brought, to see that we did not cheat, and then to stamp the paper. To check paper and to stamp it, now he is an important man. He would have recognized immediately the face of my brother. Often we used to bring him the best cabbages, or carrots, or a side of meat, some cheese, because then he would check our paper and stamp it more quickly. We would always look after Milan Stankovic. He knew my brother .. . and he killed him. That is Milan Stankovic .. ." They were gone into the trees on the far side of the field. Ham sat. He understood enough of the war to believe that if the brothers, one dead and one living, had captured the bearded man who they knew, then another knife would have flashed, another knife would have gouged. He said, "Nothing we could have done, if anyone had fired we'd all have been gone .. . It's called SERE, guys, that's Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape .. ." They would lie up the rest of the day. At dusk they would move for the Kupa river. The streets were cheerful, the shops had good stock, the gutters were clean. The bars were full and the espresso machines rumbled, and the chairs of the pavement cafes were taken. The sun shone, warm enough for Penn to have turned on his heel after a hundred-yard walk, collected his room key again, and dumped his coat and his scarf and his gloves. A fine morning to walk, and for the second time he passed the taxi line in the road outside the hotel. It was all a culture shock for Bill Penn, and he had the guidebook to tell him that this was an old city, historic and finely preserved, and he could not square the city with what he had seen in his hotel room on the television from the satellite news. On the news, across country, was Srebrenica where a town was being shelled and starved to surrender, and on the same bulletin had been clear colour pictures of British squad dies hand-So ling charred bodies, and a young officer had said his men would need counselling if they were not to be scarred for the rest of their lives. And there had been film of an American aircraft carrier, across the water, taking off with the bomb loads in place for practice runs. A war in Bosnia across country, and nothing of it to be seen by Penn as he viewed, for the first time, the capital city of Zagreb. He walked quickly. He was not a tourist. He was on assignment. He had polished his black shoes in his room, he wore his charcoal-grey trousers and his blazer and he had brushed the flecks from the shoulders. He had his white shirt and a quiet tie, and he carried his old briefcase, and it was difficult for him to realize that the months had passed by, that it was not a 'government' assignment. He had a starting place but not yet a programme. He went up Haulikova and across Andrije Hebranga and up Preradoviceva and came to a wide square. He felt comfortable; he liked the feel of the place; he would write a good fast report; he thought that Jane would have liked the feel of the city .. . On Ilica, looking left, jumping out of the path of a damned tram, he saw the flag. Red and white and blue, and looking as if it needed a full wash and tumble, and hanging limp. It was an old building and there was an arched entrance to the inner courtyard, and a brass plaque at the side door. Of course the embassy was Perm's start point. He saw the posters on the stair walls. Edinburgh Castle, British butterflies, a Cotswold village, badgers outside a sett, Buckingham Palace, it was the world to which he had once belonged .. . Inside a small lobby, and the Englishwoman at the desk smiling and asking him with studied politeness, "Can I help?" "My name's Penn, Bill Penn. I'd like to see one of your diplomats, please. It's in connection with Miss Mowat. It's about the late Miss Dorothy Mowat." It was as if he had sworn, or unzipped his flies, because the smile was suddenly gone from her. She gestured for him to wait, and her face was cold. He wondered if she had been here, Dorrie, turning the faces cold. He thought that Mary Braddock would have been here, sitting on the hard chairs in the small lobby and turning the pages of the English magazines, killing the smiles. He could see the Englishwoman blurred through the frosted glass of the adjacent office. He wondered if anyone had jumped when Mary Braddock had come the first time to start a search for her daughter and failed. The blurred shapes meandered across the face of the glass and towards the door. He thought the papers would have been sorted here, stamped here, duplicated here, for the repatriation of the corpse. The Englishwoman stood in the door and gestured Penn forward, and stepped aside. The room had been large once, perhaps the salon of a well-proportioned apartment, but it was now sub-divided into rabbit hutches. There was a tall man, in shirtsleeves and braces, rather young. He didn't offer a handshake. Cigarette smoke curled from an ashtray. He didn't give his name. The desk was a confusion of paper. He stood. "I'm the First Secretary. Who do you represent, Mr. Penn?" "I represent Miss Mowat's mother. I've been hired by Mrs. Mary Braddock." "And what are you, Mr. Penn?" Pederast, no ... pusher, no ... pimp, no ... private investigator, yes .. . "I am a private investigator, I have been employed by Mrs. Braddock to examine the circumstances of her daughter's murder." "Why do you come here?" Penn bridled. "As a starting point. She was British, I'm British, natural enough to attend Her Britannic Majesty's talking shop .. ." "We gave Mrs. Braddock every possible help, she left here knowing as much as it was humanly possible to know." "Can't accept that. She wrote a note, Mrs. Braddock, of what she had been told, which I read. She had been told nothing. If she hadn't been told nothing, then I wouldn't be here. Because .. ." It was a sharp little voice, reedy. "We have a full load of work and about half the staff necessary to accomplish it... No, don't interrupt, listen. Mrs. Braddock was told everything about her daughter's death that it was possible to discover, everything. I wouldn't imagine that private investigators have too much time to read newspapers. If you read a newspaper regularly then you would know that there was a pretty horrible war going on down here, and facts, truths, tend to be rather a long way down the order of priorities. Where Miss Mowat died only a lunatic would have been. She died because she was a fool. As regards facts, in that dirty little war some 20,000 Croatians lost their lives, more than 30,000 were wounded, 7,000 are missing presumed dead, 250,000 have fled their former homes .. . Do I make myself clear? There has been an earthquake here of human misery, and against the reality of that destruction the demands of a mother for a fuller investigation into the death of one young lunatic woman is quite unreasonable. First day here, is it? Well, get yourself a map, Mr. Penn, learn a bit of geography. Where she died is behind Serb lines, where she was killed is closed territory. I wouldn't want to see you or hear of you again, Mr. Penn, because if I see you or hear of you again then it will mean you have caused trouble. I've enough to concern me without freelancers interfering in sensitive areas and making trouble .. ." He had torn a sheet of paper from a notepad. He wrote fast on it, passed the paper to Penn. '.. . I imagine you have to justi
fy an inflated fee. I don't suppose you speak fluent Serbo-Croat, no? That's an interpreter. Second is the name of the man who runs the Croatian war crimes unit, he won't know anything, but he'll be impressive on your report. By the by, do you know how Mrs. Braddock came to know that her daughter was here? A demand for money. Do you know how she came to know her daughter was missing? The money wasn't collected, it was sent back. Didn't she tell you? We're not talking about a very caring young woman, you know ... Go away, Mr. Penn, and I suggest you allow the dead to sleep." He walked to the door and opened it for Penn. Penn took himself past the Englishwoman to the main door. He went out onto the street, numbed. It was as if a cold wind had come. The hunger strike was spreading on the third floor. Men were smoking more in the sleeping rooms and she had shouted and threatened. She had more families coming from Bosnia in the morning and the accommodation area was already saturated. She had received, smiling and cheerful and a sham, a delegation that afternoon from the Swedish Red Cross. It was close to midnight and she was exhausted. She had had the police in, accusing the children of stealing in the town. Men from Prijedor, on the second floor, had been close, almost, to a riot at the counter for "Onward Movement'. Another day ending for Ulrike Schmidt as she slipped, dead on her feet, out from the high heavy doors of the Transit Centre. She went to her car, parked in the square, and she did not look back at the old barracks building that was the Transit Centre for Bosnian Muslim refugees. The end of another eighteen-hour day and she had no need to look back on the building. The building consumed her attention, eighteen hours a day. She slumped behind the wheel of the little Volkswagen Beetle, bit at her lip, turned the ignition key. Ahead of her was a cold supper in the fridge of her apartment, a night's heavy and unrewarding sleep, the clamour of an alarm clock. That was the life of Ulrike Schmidt, paid by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to administer the Transit Centre at Karlovac. The men were on hunger strike because they had been promised entry with their families to Austria, the papers were in place, but the visas were delayed. The members of the delegation of the Swedish Red Cross were disarming and friendly, but adamant that they could offer only medicines, not entry permits. If the men smoked in the rooms of the barracks where the floors were covered with mattresses, where each family made personal boxes from hanging blankets, then the fire risk was just appalling. If the police came in and demanded the right to search, and if the police took away children for thieving, then there would be fighting. And if more families came in the morning, and the resident families had to be pushed into making room for them ... if more entry permits were not available at the "Onward Movement' counter .. . She drove away. She left it behind her, for six hours, the misery of 2,400 refugees who were her charge. Ulrike Schmidt had told the delegation of the Swedish Red Cross that the Bosnian Muslim refugees were the most traumatized people in the world. She had told them that where they stood, grasping their fact-sheets, was the most traumatized place in the world. How did she cope? she was asked by a severe-faced woman from Gothenburg. "When you fall over you have to pick yourself up, wipe off the dirt, start again." And she had smiled, and they had all laughed, and they did not understand what was her life for eighteen hours of the day. She drove through the deserted streets of the front line town towards her apartment. It was the day a letter usually came from her mother in Munich. Her life, her emotions, were shared only with her parents who wrote to her once every week. She allowed no one else access to her emotions. The jeep passed her. Her headlights caught the open back of the jeep, and then the vehicle, arrogantly driven, cut across her. She braked. She slowed. There were four men in the back of the jeep. Her headlights snatched at their faces that were indistinct from the dirt and the camouflage cream. The jeep stopped hard outside the sandbagged entrance to the old police station. She was at crawl speed. Three men out of the back of the jeep, jumping down, pulling after them their weapons and their backpacks. One man left in the jeep. As she went by him she looked into his face. The man sat in the open back of the jeep and his hands were locked onto the barrel of his rifle. He was older than the others and he had weight at the jowls and the cheeks of his face. The eyes were full of fear and shock. She saw the trembling of the body of the man and he blinked into the headlights of her car, and he had made no movement to climb down from the jeep. She saw the filthy uniform that was mud-covered and soaked wet. Ulrike Schmidt understood. She drove on. The fear and the shock and the trembling belonged to those who came from behind the lines, across the Kupa river. After her six hours, after the alarm had gone in the morning, she would be at the crossing point at Turanj and she would meet the new party of refugees, for whom she had no space at the Transit Centre, and she would see the same fear and shock and trembling in those who had come from behind the lines.