Bosnian Inferno

by David Monnery

  There was a rap on the door, and Nena walked across to let in her friend Hajrija Mejra.

  ‘Ready?’ Hajrija asked, flopping down on the bed. She was wearing a thick, somewhat worn coat over camouflage fatigue trousers, army boots and a green woollen scarf. Her long, black hair was bundled up beneath a black woolly cap, but strands were escaping on all sides. Hajrija’s face, which Nena had always thought so beautiful, looked as gaunt as her own these days: the dark eyes were sunken, the high cheekbones sharp enough to cast deep shadows.

  Well, Hajrija was still in her twenties. There was nothing wrong with either of them that less stress and more food wouldn’t put right. The miracle wasn’t how ill they looked – it was how the city’s 300,000 people were still coping at all.

  She put on her own coat, hoping that two sweaters, thermal long johns and jeans would be warm enough, and picked up the bag. ‘I’m ready,’ she said reluctantly.

  Hajrija pulled herself upright, took a deep breath and stood up. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in trying to persuade you not to go?’

  ‘None,’ Nena said, holding the door open for her friend.

  ‘Tell me again what this Englishman said to you,’ Hajrija said as they descended the first flight of stairs. The lift had been out of operation for months. ‘He came to the hospital, right?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t say much…’

  ‘Did he tell you his name?’

  ‘Yes. Thornton, I think. He said he came from the British Consulate…’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a British Consulate.’

  ‘There isn’t – I checked.’

  ‘So where did he come from?’

  ‘Who knows? He didn’t tell me anything, he just asked questions about John and what I knew about what was happening in Zavik. I said, “Nothing. What is happening in Zavik?” He said that’s what he wanted to know. It was like a conversation in one of those Hungarian movies. You know, two peasants swapping cryptic comments in the middle of an endless cornfield…’

  ‘Only you weren’t in a cornfield.’

  ‘No, I was trying to deal with about a dozen bullet and shrapnel wounds.’

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and cautiously approached the doors. It had only been light for about half an hour, and the Serb snipers in the high-rise buildings across the river were probably deep in drunken sleep, but there was no point in taking chances. The fifty yards of open ground between the dormitory doors and the shelter of the old medieval walls was the most dangerous stretch of their journey. Over the last six months more than a dozen people had been shot attempting it, three fatally.

  ‘Ready?’ Hajrija asked.

  ‘I guess.’

  The two women flung themselves through the door and ran as fast as they could, zigzagging across the open space. Burdened down by the holdall, Nena was soon behind, and she could feel her stomach clenching with the tension, her body braced for the bullet. Thirty metres more, twenty metres, ten…

  She sank into the old Ottoman stone, gasping for breath.

  ‘You’re out of shape,’ Hajrija said, only half-joking.

  ‘Whole bloody world’s out of shape,’ Nena said. ‘Let’s get going.’

  They walked along the narrow street, confident that they were hidden from snipers’ eyes. There was no one about, and the silence seemed eerily complete. Usually by this time the first shells of the daily bombardment had landed.

  It was amazing how they had all got used to the bombardment, Nena thought. Was it a tribute to human resilience, or just a stubborn refusal to face up to reality? Probably a bit of both. She remembered the queue in front of the Orthodox Cathedral when the first food supplies had come in by air. A sniper had cut down one of the people in the line, but only a few people had run for cover. There were probably a thousand people in the queue, and like participants in a dangerous sport each was prepared to accept the odds against being the next victim. Such a deadening of the nerve-ends brought a chill to her spine, but she understood it well enough. How many times had she made that sprint from the dormitory doors? A hundred? Two hundred?

  ‘Even if you’re right,’ Hajrija said, ‘even if Reeve has got himself involved somehow, I don’t see how you can help by rushing out there. You do know how unsafe it is, don’t you? There’s no guarantee you’ll even get there…’

  Nena stopped in mid-stride. ‘Please, Rija,’ she said, ‘don’t make it any more difficult. I’m already scared enough, not to mention full of guilt for leaving the hospital in the lurch. But if Reeve is playing the local warlord while he’s supposed to be looking after the children, then…’ She shook her head violently. ‘I have to find out.’

  ‘Then let me come with you. At least you’ll have some protection.’

  ‘No, your place is here.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘No argument.’

  Sometimes Nena still found it hard to believe that her friend, who six months before had been a journalism student paying her way through college as a part-time nurse, was now a valued member of an élite anti-sniper unit. Someone who had killed several men, and yet still seemed the same person she had always been. Sometimes Nena worried that there was no way Hajrija had not been changed by the experiences, and that it would be healthier if these changes showed on the surface, but at others she simply put it down to the madness that was all around them both. Maybe the fact that they were all going through this utter craziness would be their salvation.

  Maybe they had all gone to hell, but no one had bothered to make it official.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said.

  Hajrija looked at her with exasperated eyes.

  ‘Well, if I’m not, I certainly don’t want to know I’ve dragged you down with me.’

  ‘I know.’

  They continued on down the Marsala Tita, sprinting across two dangerously open intersections. There were more people on the street now, all of them keeping as close to the buildings as possible, all with skin stretched tight across the bones of their scarf-enfolded faces.

  It was almost eight when they reached the Holiday Inn, wending their way swiftly through the Muslim gun emplacements in and around the old forecourt. The hotel itself looked like Beirut on a bad day, its walls pock-marked with bullet holes and cratered by mortar shells. Most of its windows had long since been broken, but it was still accommodating guests, albeit a restricted clientele of foreign journalists and ominous-looking ‘military delegations’.

  ‘He’s not here yet,’ Hajrija said, looking round the lobby.

  Nena followed her friend’s gaze, and noticed an AK47 resting symbolically on the receptionist’s desk.

  ‘Here he is,’ Hajrija said, and Nena turned to see a handsome young American walking towards them. Dwight Bailey was a journalist, and several weeks earlier he had followed the well-beaten path to Hajrija’s unit in search of a story. She was not the only woman involved in such activities, but she was probably, Nena guessed, one of the more photogenic. Bailey had not been the first to request follow-up interviews in a more intimate atmosphere. Like his bed at the Holiday Inn, for example. So far, or at least as far as Nena knew, Hajrija had resisted any temptation.

  Bailey offered the two women a boyish smile full of perfect American teeth, and asked Hajrija about the other members of her unit. He seemed genuinely interested in how they were, Nena thought. If age made all journalists cynical, he was still young.

  And somewhat hyperactive. ‘Dmitri’s late,’ he announced, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘He and Viktor are our bodyguards,’ he told Nena. ‘Russian journalists. Good guys. The Serbs don’t mess with the Russians if they can help it,’ he explained. ‘The Russians are about the only friends they have left.’

  He said this with absolute seriousness, as if he could hardly believe it.

  ‘Hey, here they are,’ he called out as the two Russians came into view on the stairs. Both men had classically flat Russian faces beneath the fur hats; both were either bear-shap
ed or wearing enough undergarments to survive a cold day in Siberia. In fact the only obvious way of distinguishing one from the other was by their eyebrows: Viktor’s were fair and almost invisible, Dmitri’s bushy and black enough for him to enter a Brezhnev-lookalike contest. Both seemed highly affable, as if they’d drunk half a pint of vodka for breakfast.

  The two women embraced each other. ‘Be careful,’ Hajrija insisted. ‘And don’t take any risks. And come back as soon as you can.’ She turned to the American. ‘And you take care of my friend,’ she ordered him.

  He tipped his head and bowed.

  The four travellers threaded their way out through the hotel’s kitchens to where a black Toyota was parked out of sight of snipers. The two Russians climbed into the front, and Nena and Bailey into the back.

  Two distant explosions, one following closely on the other, signalled the beginning of the daily bombardment. The shells had fallen at least two kilometres away, Nena judged, but that didn’t mean the next ones wouldn’t fall on the Toyota’s roof.

  Viktor started up the car and pulled it out of the car park, accelerating all the while. The most dangerous stretch of road ran between the Holiday Inn and the airport, and they were doing more than sixty miles per hour by the time the car hit open ground. Viktor had obviously passed this way more than once, for as he zigzagged wildly to and fro, past the burnt-out hulks of previous failed attempts, he was casually lighting up an evil-smelling cigarette from the dashboard lighter.

  Nena resisted the temptation to squeeze herself down into the space behind the driver’s seat, and was rewarded with a glimpse of an old woman searching for dandelion leaves in the partially snow-covered verge, oblivious to their car as it hurtled past.

  Thirty seconds later and they were through ‘Murder Mile’, and slowing for the first in a series of checkpoints. This one was manned by Bosnian police, who waved them through without even bothering to examine the three men’s journalistic accreditation. Half a mile further, they were waved down by a Serb unit on the outskirts of Ilidza, a Serb-held suburb. The men here wore uniforms identifying them as members of the Yugoslav National Army. They were courteous almost to a fault.

  ‘Hard to believe they come from Mordor,’ Bailey said with a grin.

  It was, Nena thought. Sometimes it was just too easy to think all Serbs were monsters, to forget that there were still 80,000 of them in Sarajevo, undergoing much the same hardships and traumas as everyone else. And then it became hard to understand how the men on the hills above Sarajevo could deliberately target their big guns on the hospitals below, and how the snipers in the burnt-out tower blocks could deliberately blow away children barely old enough to start school.

  They passed safely through another Serb checkpoint and, as the two Russians pumped Bailey about their chances of emigration to the USA, the road ran up out of the valley, the railway track climbing to its left, the rushing river falling back towards the city on its right. Stretches of dark conifers alternated with broad swathes of snow-blanketed moorland as they crested a pass and followed the sweeping curves of the road down into Sanjic. Here a minaret still rose above the roofs of the small town nestling in its valley, and as they drove through its streets Nena could see that the Christian churches had not paid the price for the mosque’s survival. Sanjic had somehow escaped the war, at least for the moment. She hoped Zavik had fared as well.

  ‘This must have been what all of Bosnia was like before the war,’ Bailey said beside her. There was a genuine sadness in his voice which made her wonder if she had underestimated him.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

  ‘I came in early November,’ he said.

  ‘Who do you work for?’

  ‘No one specific. I’m a freelance.’

  She looked out of the window. ‘If you get the chance,’ she said, ‘and if this war ever ends, you should come in the spring, when the trees are in blossom. It can look like an enchanted land at that time of year.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘I…I thought I knew quite a lot of the world before I came here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been all over Europe, all over the States of course, to Australia and Singapore…But I feel like I’ve never been anywhere like this. And I don’t mean the war,’ he said hurriedly, ‘though maybe that’s what makes everything more vivid. I don’t know…’

  She smiled at him, and felt almost like patting his hand.

  The road was climbing again now, a range of snow-covered mountains looming on their left. She remembered the trip across the mountains to Umtali while they were in Africa. The children had been bored in the back seat and she’d been short-tempered with them. Reeve, though, had for once been an exemplary father, painstakingly prising them out of their sulk. But he’d always been a good father, much to her surprise. She’d expected a great husband and a poor father, and ended up with the opposite.

  No, that was harsh.

  She wondered again what she would find in Zavik, always assuming she got there. The three journalists were only taking her as far as Bugojno, and from there she would probably still have a problem making it up into the mountains. The roads might be open, might be closed – at this time of the year the chances were about fifty-fifty.

  The car began slowing down and she looked up to see a block on the road ahead. A tractor and a car had been positioned nose to nose at an angle, and beside them four men were standing waiting. Two of them were wearing broad-brimmed hats. ‘Chetniks,’ one of the Russians said, and she could see the straggling beards sported by three of the four. The other man, it soon became clear, wasn’t old enough to grow one.

  From the first moment Nena had a bad feeling about the situation. The Russians’ bonhomie was ignored, their papers checked with a mixture of insolence and sarcasm by the tall Serb who seemed to be in charge. ‘Don’t you think Yeltsin is a useless wanker?’ he asked Viktor, who agreed vociferously with him, and said that in his opinion Russia could declare itself in favour of a Greater Serbia. The Chetnik just laughed at him, and moved on to Bailey. ‘You like Guns ’N’ Roses?’ he asked him in English.

  ‘Who?’ Bailey asked.

  ‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ the Chetnik said. ‘American.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Bailey said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ the Chetnik said magnanimously, and looked at Nena. His pupils seemed dilated, probably by drugs of some kind or another. ‘Leave the woman behind,’ he told the Russians in Serbo-Croat.

  The Russians started arguing – not, Nena thought, with any great conviction.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Bailey wanted to know.

  She told him.

  ‘But they can’t do that!’ he exclaimed, and before Nena could stop him he was opening the door and climbing out on to the road. ‘Look…’ he started to say, and the Chetnik’s machine pistol cracked. The American slid back into Nena’s view, a gaping hole where an eye had been.

  The Russians in the front seat seemed suddenly frozen into statues.

  ‘We just want the woman,’ the Chetnik was telling them.

  Viktor turned round to face her, his eyes wide with fear. ‘I think…’

  She shifted across the back seat and climbed out of the same door the American had used. She started bending down to examine him, but was yanked away by one of the Chetniks. The leader grabbed the dead man by the feet and unceremoniously dragged him away through the light snow and slush to the roadside verge. There he gave the body one sharp kick. ‘Guns ’N’ Roses,’ he muttered to himself.

  The Russians had turned the Toyota around as ordered, and were anxiously awaiting permission to leave. Both were making certain they avoided any eye contact with her.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here,’ the leader said contemptuously, and the car accelerated away, bullets flying above it from the guns of the grinning Chetniks.

  She stood there, waiting for them to do whatever they were going to do.

  The CO’s office looked much as Docherty remembered it: the inevitable mug of tea perch
ed on a pile of papers, the maps and framed photographs on the wall, the glimpse through the window of bare trees lining the parade ground, and beyond them the faint silhouette of the distant Black Mountains. The only obvious change concerned the photograph on Barney Davies’s desk: his children were now a year older, and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Bring in a cup of tea,’ the CO was saying into the intercom. ‘And a rock cake?’ he asked Docherty.

  ‘Why not,’ Docherty said. He might as well get used to living dangerously again. There were some at the SAS’s Stirling Lines barracks who claimed that the Regiment had lost more men to the Mess’s rock cakes than to international terrorism. It was a vicious lie, of course – the rock cakes were disabling rather than lethal.

  ‘Is there any news of Reeve?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘None, but his wife’s still in Sarajevo, working at the hospital as far as we know.’

  ‘Where’s the information coming from?’

  ‘MI6 has a man in the city. Don’t ask me why. The Foreign Office has got him digging around for us.’

  Docherty’s tea arrived, together with an ominous-looking rock cake. ‘I’m hoping to take her with me,’ he told Davies. ‘Even if they’ve separated I still think he’s more likely to listen to her than anyone else.’

  ‘Well, you can ask her when you get there…’

  ‘Sarajevo?’ Docherty asked, his mouth half full of what tasted like an actual rock. Sweet perhaps, but hard and gritty all the same.

  ‘It’s not been a very good year for them,’ Davies said, observing the expression on Docherty’s face, and causing the Scot to wonder whether the CO had racks of the damn things in his cellar, each bearing their vintage.

  ‘Sarajevo looks like the best place to begin,’ Davies continued. ‘Nena Reeve is there, and your MI6 contact. His name’s Thornton, by the way. There must be people from Zavik who can fill you in on the town and its surroundings. Plus, there’s the UN command and a lot of journalists. You should be able to pick up a good idea of what the best access route is, and what to expect on the way. Always assuming we can get you into the damn city, of course.’