Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  Her dog would know the scent of Milan.

  Her torch found the jar of worms and the landing net and one of the rods. Her dog whined at the bank beyond the pool, and her torch showed the sliding marks of boots and bodies.

  She had the dog on a lead and she tugged it down into the fierce flow of the stream.

  "You sort of people, you always back a loser."

  The First Secretary said it drily. He drove his big Rover along the night-empty highway from Karlovac towards Zagreb. A heavy brute to drive, but it was weighted with armour plating on the side doors and with bullet-proof glass for the windows, and the self-sealing tyres that could absorb small shrapnel and low-velocity gunfire were unresponsive.

  Ham whined, "What'll happen .. . ?"

  "Good to know you care."

  "What'll happen to me .. . ?"

  "God, just for one moment, for one fleeting second of time, I thought you were concerned with someone other than your own miserable self. A constant disappointment, Freefall, you have been to me. What'll happen to you .. . ? You'll be shovelled on, like any other bag of rubbish that's dumped on someone else's front step. Nagorny Karabakh, wasn't it? Not Nagorno, best you learn how to say it first .. . They're welcome to entertain you. Myself, if I were you, I'd choose the Armenian side rather than the Azeris, but knowing your track record it'll be the Azeris because they're the losers."

  He prided himself that he retained some small influence in this awful corner of Europe. He had done an insignificant deal with the Croat military, a personal arrangement with the Intelligence Officer involving an insubstantial roll of German banknotes and the promise of future contact .. . Anyone could be bought in this awful corner, surprisingly cheaply in this case. He had won the release of Sidney Ernest Hamilton, code name Freefall, into his personal custody. Just the matter of handing in the wretch's uniform, his kit, his ID, and the Dragunov, and the little list of contacts for the moving on of black market supplies of Marlboro cigarettes, and he had been given the wretch in handcuffs.

  "Will you snitch him?"

  "I beg your pardon, try to speak English, please."

  "Shop him, tell the Serbs where to be waiting for him, will you?"

  "You should just stick to losing .. . Affairs of state aren't your business, Freefall, never were and never will be."

  "They'll make you watch. They'll put you in a chair so that you are comfortable, and they'll make you watch .. ."

  It was close to dawn. They could start to see the way ahead of them and there was no longer a need for her to shine the torch in front of her feet. Penn had stopped twice to rest and he had allowed Milan Stankovic to eat a small piece of bread and he had given him a broken piece of sharp cheese, and once he had unzipped the man's trousers and handled him so that he could urinate without messing his trousers. He felt exhaustion and Milan Stankovic also fought tiredness, but she still had strength and she set a pace that was hard, and from the side of her mouth she gave, briskly and without feeling, the interpretation of what he said.

  "When they have you sitting down and comfortable then they will put her down onto the floor and they will strip off the trousers from her, and they will take the knickers from the bitch, and they will all come to her, all serve her. What it's like when a big boar pig comes to serve a sow, big so that it hurts. One after the other, all of them in the village, old men, young men, me last of all, and they will make you watch .. ." He did not know how she could translate and how she could not cringe. He did not know how she could not turn on him and hit him. Each time that they made the short stops he would listen, and sometimes he would hear far distant shouts, and then they would press ahead faster. The decision that he had to make was where to lie up, whether they should go forward as the light grew and lie up until darkness at the bank of the Kupa river to wait for the inflatable to come across at the rendezvous point, or whether they should lie up through the daylight and then make the charge in the dusk to the river. He was not ready to make the decision, and he could not think clearly while the voice of the man droned on and while she gave her clipped interpretation. "Before they shoot her, we will play with you. Which do you prefer? Electricity .. . ? Fire .. . ? Knife cuts .. . ? Electricity on your balls, is that what you would prefer? Fire on your feet, on your body, needles from the fire under your fingernails? Knife cuts at your testicles and your penis, on your fingers, at your ears, the knife going into your eyes. The last you will know of the electricity and the fire and the knife will be from me. You will be crying for me to finish it, and you will be shouting for me to go to her with the electricity and the fire and the knife cuts .. . But you can let me go free .. ." Penn understood. He remembered the arrogant conceit, a long time ago, of an Irishman, not a big Provo but a second-rater from the feeble Irish National Liberation Army faction, who had been picked up when Five, their role as watchers completed, had deigned to call in the Anti-terrorist Branch for the formality of the arrest. The Irishman, skinny little creep, had been spreadeagled on the carpet of his pig-sty living room, and he had been silent, but the arrogance and the conceit had been large on his bloody face, as if to say they'd crack nothing out of him. "Is that what you want? Do you want to sit comfortably and watch all of the men, and me, screw the arse off her .. . before she dies? Do you want to let me go free? Do you want to feel the electricity wires on you and the fire burns and the knife cuts, they make pain but they don't make death, not till we are ready, do you want that? Or do you want to let me go free .. . ?"

  Ulrike spoke in his language, and his words withered.

  They heard vehicles. They were straining four-wheel-drive jeeps and they were manoeuvring in the slipping rutted mud of the loggers' track. They were crouched down and he held the knife so tight against the bulged adam's apple at the bearded throat of Milan Stankovic that the skin was nicked and he drew blood. They were away from the track, in the depths of the trees, and they could see the soldiers in the jeeps, and he could see the guns that the soldiers held. He held the knife so close against the throat of Milan Stankovic and the images were splayed in his mind, of Ulrike laid out on a floor of concrete and her legs held open, and the electricity wires clipped to his skin .. . The vehicles bucked on the track, and passed.

  His decision was taken. They would go on until they reached the Kupa river.

  "What did you tell him?"

  Ulrike said, "I told him that I wanted to hear him speak of his shame when he killed Dorrie Mowat .. ."

  "What does it fucking mean, in a simpleton's terms?" He stood in front of the wall map.

  Not a military man, the Director of Civilian Affairs found the big wall maps, so beloved of the military, to be sanitized and cold viewing. He assumed that the neat laundered officers around him, the Canadian colonel and the Jordanian major and the Argentine captain, could make sense of the whorls and lines. The wall map, nine feet in height and equally broad, covered the entire area of former Yugoslavia and was draped with a clear plastic sheet on which had been written in china graph crayon the disposition of UNPROFOR units.

  The Jordanian major held a long pointer and identified Sector North, and then Salika village.

  The Argentine captain said, "They have a mass of radio traffic, mostly out of Glina, but hooked in to Vojnic where they have Command and Control, and linked to Petrinja and Lasinja and Skakavac and Brezova Glava which are close to the cease-fire demarcation line. We have the situation reports, from our monitoring, of their units that have been put to state red alert along the Kupa river. We have the transcripts of the radio transmissions made by the field troops that are deployed. We have visual confirmation of their movement from the Dan Batt fixed observation posts, X-ray 9 and X-ray 11 .. ." "And it means .. . ?" The Canadian said, "It means that he's coming, coming with his prisoner, coming to the river. It means that he's being hunted." "What chance .. . ?" "They've lost him in the immediate vicinity of his snatch. They reckon to block him on the river." "I said, what chance .. . ?" "If the Serbs were to know where he planne
d to cross the river, no chance. They do not have that information ... He has a slight chance." He was looking up, and the tip of the pointer was against the bland green of the map surface, cut only by the Kupa river, no roads. He imagined it as a morass of swamp. The Director thought he was playing God Almighty with the life of a man coming to the river with his prisoner, and he thought that the man coming to the river with his prisoner was playing God Almighty with the lives of all those within reach of the artillery and the missiles. He turned his back on the map, went slowly and subdued out of the operations room. He wondered what it was like, the swamp morass to which the man was coming with his prisoner. It was a small farm, not more than five hectares, where Zoran Pelnak and his wife lived. The farm gave, at best, a hard living and it was poorer now that his two sons were taken by the army. Before the boys had gone, one to the garrison at Osijek and one down in the south at Gospic, Zoran Pelnak had had their help in the never finished work of cleaning and deepening the drainage ditches that cut his land. The fields were too low set for good farming ground, too near to the river that flooded its banks most winters, and most winters the farmhouse of brick and wood was set upon a small island in a shallow lake. It was Zoran Pelnak's home, had been his father's home, and his grandfather's and his great-grandfather's home. His great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had dug the drainage ditches and cleaned them and deepened them. There were three fields for the farm and in two of them he harvested a hay crop and grazed animals, and in one of them he and his wife grew their vegetables for their own eating and for sale in the market at Karlovac. He and his wife could survive the isolation of their life on the farm that fronted the north bank of the Kupa river. Their neighbours had long gone, left their homes and their farms and their livestock, abandoned them. He would not leave. He would not have cared to have gone to the graves of his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father, sat on his haunches beside the stones, and explained why he was running from the drainage ditches they had dug. He moved slowly from the front door of the farmhouse. From the porch of the door he could see, across the field and the bog land where the cattle could go only in summer, the far bank of the Kupa river and the trees. He moved slowly from the rheumatism that came from living in a place so damp, towards the barn where his four cows were bedded, and the pigs and the goats, and the hens. On the far bank, behind the trees, maybe the bastard fuck Partizans watched him, and he was too old to care if they saw him. Zoran Pelnak knew most of what happened, each day and each night, on the far bank of the Kupa river. He pressed on into the barn, and he hoped that the soldiers would soon be down from their camp for their well water, because the soldiers would help him lift down the baled hay for the animals.

  It was many hours since Evica had last heard the advance behind her of the search party, and their shouts.

  She guessed they would have turned by now, cold from the night, down because of their failure. She guessed they would be heading back to their village, arguing between themselves, going back to food and warmth. And going back to dispute the new command of Salika, and to fight for control of the diesel supplies and the sacks of seed potatoes. Two would fall; she thought Branko and Milo would fall. One would rise; Stevo would command the village. She thought the wife of Stevo the most stupid woman she knew, and the wife of Stevo would take her place as the village's queen. They would turn back when they reached the perimeter line of their vicious and ignorant world .. . And her village would become an armed camp, isolated, guarded close.

  The dog had the scent and moved easily ahead of her, loping on the trail on which her man had been taken.

  Marty was told it by an Austrian of UNCIVPOL, told that the balloon was up in Sector North. He was a good friend of the Austrian policeman because they had shared a house, when the snow had fallen in January on Bosnia, away down east in Srebrenica, and it had been goddamn cold because the house had only half a roof, a place where men became good friends. The Austrian policeman had been coming off duty, he had a new posting at the UNCIVPOL desk in the operations room, and he had told Marty that all hell was loose across in Sector North, and that the crossing points were closed at Turanj and at Sisak, that a bigshot guy from a village in Glina Municipality had been kidnapped, that it was some crazy stuff about a war crimes investigator, and more crazy that there was the German woman from the UNHCR Transit Centre at Karlovac in tow. The Austrian policeman had told him all of this and his eyes had been going past where Marty stood in the doorway of the converted freight container, hooked on the shining steel ring set in the floor of the container, and the chain that was padlocked to it, and the collapsible bed that was made up in the far corner behind Marty with the sleeping bag laid on it and the folded blanket and the handcuffs. And Marty had told him, dead serious, that because he was homesick he'd gotten a big brute of a bear, a proper grizzly, being crated in from Anchorage, and he had gotten rid of the Austrian policeman as fast as was half decent. He drove into central Zagreb.