Bosnian Inferno

by David Monnery

  ‘We’ll wait for you over there,’ Razor said, nodding towards an area of empty seats. He and the Dame went and sat down, both feeling sombre.

  ‘It’s like something out of the Bible,’ the Dame said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Razor agreed. He studied the back of Hajrija’s head, which bobbed up and down as she talked to the two women.

  The Dame was remembering his sister’s wedding reception, and all the food they’d had to throw away. And all the petty problems everyone seemed so full of.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Razor asked.

  The Dame followed his gaze, and a slight smile crossed his face. ‘Not my type,’ he said.

  ‘Not mine either,’ Razor said. Or not usually, he thought.

  Hajrija’s shoulders suddenly slumped, as if she had just had bad news. Where Nena Reeve was concerned, Razor wasn’t sure whether no news was good news. They would soon know.

  But it was another ten minutes before Hajrija got to her feet, slowly walked across and sat down next to him. She had been crying, Razor instantly realized. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘No,’ she said and, half-falling forward, began sobbing into his chest.

  A minute or so later, and almost as abruptly, she raised her head and ran a hand defiantly through her hair. ‘I am sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Razor said.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘I have the news,’ she said, opening them again. ‘Nena is at Vogosca. The women here, they come from there, and they are leaving when Nena comes.’

  ‘When was that?’ Razor asked.

  ‘They think three days, but they are not certain.’

  ‘Why did the Serbs let them go?’

  Hajrija made a noise which was part sob, part laugh. ‘Because they are pregnant six months. You understand? Too late for abortion.’

  Back at the Holiday Inn, Docherty listened to what the women had told Hajrija. There were about forty women at Vogosca, most of them between fourteen and twenty-five, though there were a few older women, even a couple in their forties. They were kept at the Partisan Sports Hall, but each night different groups – which always included the youngest and prettiest – were taken to the Sonja Motel, about half a mile away, for the pleasure of the local Serb forces. The women Hajrija talked to had no idea how many guards there were around either the Sports Hall or the motel, but the town was full of Serb soldiers, uniformed and irregulars.

  ‘How long would it take to walk there?’ Docherty asked her. ‘Avoiding contact with the enemy,’ he added.

  She thought about it. If they could get through the Serb lines without being seen – a big if, considering they had little knowledge of where the Serb positions were – she reckoned they could reach the town in between four and five hours. But, she went on, thinking out loud, unless they managed to extract Nena from her imprisonment without raising the alarm, the Serbs would be waiting for them on their way back.

  ‘We wouldn’t be coming back,’ Docherty said. ‘We’d be heading straight for Zavik.’

  ‘But how can we leave all the other women behind?’ Hajrija asked.

  It was an impossible question. ‘I don’t know,’ Docherty said. ‘I don’t know if we should be thinking about Vogosca at all.’ He looked at the others, then turned back to Hajrija. ‘You said “we” just now. Would you come with us as a guide?’

  ‘Of course – she is my best friend. And I will ask others to come – good men. How many is the right number for this? Six? Ten? Twenty?’

  ‘Hold on,’ Docherty said, raising a hand. ‘She’s my friend too, but these three reprobates here have never set eyes on Nena Reeve. I want to know if they think I’m going over the top to suggest this little detour. The moment we start fighting alongside any of the local forces we’re going way beyond our instructions. In fact, we’ll be halfway to doing what we’ve been sent out here to persuade John Reeve to stop doing. Not to mention risking our necks in a country we hardly know at all.’

  ‘Seems to me, boss,’ Razor said, ‘that we have to get to Zavik. Which means we have to get out of this city. No one told us which route we had to take. And I’d rather trust my luck with Hajrija’s mob than go along with some deal that MI6 creep has done with someone we’ve never even met. And if we get to do good works on the way, then that seems like a bonus.’

  ‘You old softie. Chris?’

  ‘Seconded.’

  ‘Dame?’

  ‘Count me in.’

  ‘OK.’

  Docherty turned to Hajrija. ‘I think around ten would be a good number, so if you can find four or five good men – men who can move quietly and won’t start blazing away at rabbits – that would be ideal.’

  She grinned at him. ‘Would you like to give them audition?’ she asked.

  ‘No…’

  ‘They may give you one,’ she said, on her way to the door. ‘I come back this evening,’ she added over her shoulder.

  8

  They had waited, the ten of them, in the fourth-floor room of an abandoned building, taking turns at training the nightscope on the upper floors of the ten-storey high-rises half a mile away. There were six towers in the distant cluster, and from this vantage-point they looked like an array of giant skittles leaning forward, with the three at the rear looking out over the shoulders of the two in the middle, and this pair standing over the lone tower at the front.

  There were occasional glimmers of light in the bottom two or three storeys of each building, but none above that. A mixture of stubborn long-term residents, refugees and people with nowhere else to go might risk life close to the ground, but throughout the city the top floors of such buildings were the exclusive preserve of snipers. Hopefully the man or woman they were looking for was still holed up in one of these six buildings, biding his or her time.

  This sniper’s latest victim had been a fourteen-year-old girl. She had been on her way home with the family bread when the dum-dum bullet had almost blown her in half, the fourth child victim in as many days in the same neighbourhood. Hajrija’s unit was out to get him, and it had seemed like an ideal time to see what these Englishmen, the ‘foreign super-soldiers’, were made of.

  The five male members of the unit had all seemed friendly enough, if somewhat sceptical of their guests’ alleged prowess.

  They were all in their twenties or thirties and, like most groups of Bosnians, looked remarkably heterogeneous. Two looked liked stereotypical Muslim guerrillas – Kaltak and the leader, Hadzic, were dark-haired, moustached and with stubbly chins – while Abdulahu was strikingly blond, and might have been taken for a Scandinavian. Began and Lujinovic were both brown-haired and blue-eyed. What all five had in common were an unkempt look, eyes red-rimmed from exhaustion, and the air of having been through the fire of combat and out the other side.

  They had been passing round the nightscope for four hours now, and it seemed to Razor, whose shift it was, that the sniper was probably either asleep or gone. He started slowly scanning the top floor of the target building once more, searching for the movement he didn’t really expect to find.

  A small flare erupted in the corner of the nightscope, and vanished almost as quickly. Razor swung it back to where he thought it had been.

  There was nothing. Had he imagined it?

  No, there was another flare, fainter, much fainter than the last. The man’s dragging on a cigarette, Razor realized. The first, brighter flare had been from a match or a lighter.

  ‘Hajrija,’ he said softly, liking the sound of the name. He passed her the nightscope, saying: ‘Fourth building from the left, second floor down, second window from the left.’

  She trained the scope. ‘I cannot see…oh yes, there’s the bastard.’ She flashed Razor a smile in the dark, and got up to tell the others.

  Two minutes later they were assembled and ready to go. Hadzic led the way, followed by Docherty. The SAS men were all carrying the silenced Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns, as
well as Browning High Power 9mm semi-automatic handguns. Each Bosnian carried a Kalashnikov and a Czech machine pistol, and Abdulahu had a Dragunov sniper rifle strapped across his back. All four SAS men were wearing American-designed passive night goggles, or PNGs, while Hadzic sported a cruder Soviet-made counterpart.

  They marched down the stairs in single file, the sound of their steps echoing in the empty building. As they emerged into the night a series of tracer bullets arced red across the sky in front of them, bright as flares through the PNGs.

  There was snow in the air now, falling desultorily for the moment, but the flakes did not melt on impact. The Bosnian commander led them off at a brisk pace, down a long, sloping street towards the audible waters of the River Miljacka. About fifty yards short of the bank they turned right through an area of abandoned factories, traversing several yards and clambering through old holes in two high wire fences. This was a route the unit had often used before, Docherty realized. Which made him feel nervous.

  They emerged on to a small road of houses, several of which had been destroyed by shells. None looked occupied. A scrawny cat suddenly darted across the street, its eyes bright-green orbs in the PNGs, before disappearing into the space between two high-rises. The nearest of the towers was now not much more than three hundred yards distant, looming above the expanse of open ground which sloped upwards from the end of the street. This looked to Docherty as if it had once been used for allotments, but now only weeds and pieces of broken cane poked through the thin coating of snow.

  ‘That is Serb territory,’ Hadzic told Docherty, pointing forward. ‘I used to live over there,’ he added bitterly, ‘with my fellow-Serbs.’

  Docherty showed his surprise.

  ‘Oh, I am a Serb,’ the man said, ‘though sometimes I am ashamed to be so.’ He waved his hands outward, as if to dismiss the subject. ‘And over there is a Serb cemetery,’ he said, ‘the only way in which is not guarded or mined. The dead make poor sentries,’ he added, ‘even in Sarajevo.’

  They started across the open ground, the snow falling more heavily now. Soon there would be enough to leave noticeable footprints for any Serb patrol, which didn’t bode well for their return journey. The cemetery was set on a shallower slope, and surrounded by a low wall. They clambered across it, and advanced in single file up a path between the rows of headstones. A sudden flurry of tracer fire turned everyone’s head, and Docherty thought he caught a streak of red reflected in the distant river below.

  They reached the far side of the cemetery, where a higher wall offered a good observation point. Beyond the wall there was a wide and empty road, and beyond that the nearest of the high-rises reared up from a concrete sea.

  ‘We can use the front building as cover,’ Hadzic said, ‘but after that we’re in the open.’

  ‘Do they have nightscopes?’ Docherty asked.

  Hadzic shrugged in the gloom. ‘Some of them do. But this bastard has only killed people in daylight.’ He turned to make sure everyone was ready, and led them across the dark and empty road to the shelter of the first tower. There they waited another five minutes, scanning the neighbourhood for movement through the PNGs until they were satisfied that they had not been spotted.

  Hugging the wall of the building, they moved round to its rear, where a line of rubbish containers offered convenient cover. The doorway of the target high-rise was now only an eighty-yard run away. Unfortunately, as Docherty discovered when he trained his nightscope on the doorway, two men were sitting just inside the glass doors, which looked as though they were chained. He passed the scope to Hadzic, who swore softly under his breath.

  ‘Something’s moving out there,’ Razor whispered in Docherty’s ear, pointing out to the left. Through the scope the mere impression of movement focused into two men pushing bicycles. Each had a rifle slung across his shoulder, and one was carrying what looked like a billy-can. Steam was escaping from around its lid into the freezing air, looking through the PNGs like a cloud of green gas rising up from a witch’s cauldron.

  The men were obviously expected. The two guards unchained the glass doors to let them in, and an indecipherable murmur of conversation drifted across the snowy ground before the new arrivals, complete with pot, disappeared into the building.

  ‘Food for a sniper,’ Hadzic said, his voice brimming with suppressed triumph. ‘The bastard’s up there all right.’ He turned to Docherty, a knowing look on his face. ‘But we must still find a way in without waking up the whole neighbourhood. I think maybe this is where you Englishmen show your skills.’

  Docherty looked at Hadzic, just to make sure he was serious. He was. He then examined the two soldiers once more through the nightscope. They were little more than faint silhouettes: certainly there was no way Docherty could see their faces.

  Which was fitting enough, he thought. If they wanted the Bosnians’ help in rescuing Nena, then he had no choice but to order the killing of these two men, whom he knew nothing about, whom he had never seen before. They were enemies of his friends, that was for sure. And they were holding guns in a war zone, which he guessed made them fair game. It might not be the SAS’s war, but tonight they seemed to be making a guest appearance.

  ‘Nema problema,’ he said softly. It was the only Serbo-Croat phrase he’d picked up so far.

  The four SAS men squatted together to discuss how. ‘There’s only one safe approach,’ Chris said, ‘on our bellies until we’re level with the front of the building, then we can move in from the side.’

  ‘They haven’t rechained the door,’ Razor said, ‘but there’s no way of knowing how thick the glass is, and I don’t reckon our chances of getting them both before they get a shot off. These guys’ – he patted the silenced MP5 – ‘just don’t have the muzzle velocity.’

  ‘We’ll have to get them outside,’ the Dame said thoughtfully.

  ‘How?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Curiosity,’ Chris said, his eyes suddenly lighting up. ‘And maybe hunger. Let the Dame and I handle it. OK, boss?’

  Docherty hesitated, reluctant to let the two youngest men bear the burden of starting this undeclared war, but from the barely concealed eagerness on their faces it was clear that they had no such doubts. And their youth would come in handy when it came to crawling swiftly and unobserved through a hundred yards of snow. ‘OK,’ he agreed, and went back to brief Hadzic.

  Ten minutes later, Chris and the Dame were standing against the wall of the target building, around the corner from the doorway, having successfully worked their bodies across the snow-covered concrete. Watching through the nightscope, Docherty saw Chris take something out of his pocket, but couldn’t make out what it was. He put it to his lips and the noise of a duck quacking came wafting across on the night air.

  The two guards inside the vestibule heard it too. They looked at each other, then out into the darkness. One came to the door and pushed it open.

  ‘Quack, quack,’ Chris went.

  The man went back for his rifle, said something to his companion, and emerged into the night. He stood still, waiting for directions from his intended prey.

  ‘Quack, quack.’

  Chris was moving away from the building now, trying to convince the guard his potential supper was getting away.

  It worked. As the Serb reached the corner of the block a hand reached out, and something flashed bright green in Docherty’s PNGs. The man’s hand flew up, then just as swiftly fell lifeless beside him, and he slumped forward into the snow, making only the slightest ‘whumpf’ as he did so.

  ‘Quack, quack, quack, quaaaaack!’

  The other man emerged from the doorway, and seemed to hesitate. Standing motionless by the wall, virtually invisible to the guard, the Dame tightened his finger on the MP5’s trigger, prepared to risk only wounding the man with a silenced shot rather than let him re-enter the building.

  ‘Radic?’ the figure said, almost apologetically. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he added, stepping forward into the darkness,
holding his rifle at the ready.

  Wanting to be sure, the Dame waited, the extended stock of the silenced MP5 pressing into his shoulder, until the man was within twenty feet of him. Then, his training instructor’s voice sounding in his head, he aligned the sight on the centre of the Serb’s head and squeezed the trigger, maintaining the squeeze while firing and for a moment more. The man’s head flew back, his feet seemed to almost paw at the snow, and he collapsed awkwardly on to the ground.

  The Dame walked swiftly forward, confirmed that the Serb was dead, and signalled to Docherty that the way was clear. Then he and Chris went in through the glass doors, and took up station at the bottom of the stairs. There were no signs of life in the stairwell, no indication that the men who had brought the food were on their way back down.

  The rest of the group joined them a few minutes later. ‘Who will go up?’ one of the Bosnians asked Hadzic.

  ‘All of us. We don’t know how many there are up there. It is probably just the three of them, but it could be a unit of ten. But there is no need for our English friends to tire themselves out,’ he added. ‘They have done their bit.’

  ‘We wouldn’t miss the climax,’ Docherty said.

  All ten started climbing, as silently as they could manage. At each landing they stopped for a few seconds, ears straining in vain for the sound of footsteps coming down. On the eighth floor they waited for longer, while Lujinovic scouted out the lay of the land. He returned five minutes later with the news that all the rooms seemed empty save the one in question. That one, number 96, had its door closed. There was music playing inside, and men talking as well, though he hadn’t been able to tell what they were saying.

  Hadzic’s grin was visible even in the dark.

  They climbed the last flight of stairs, and walked down the corridor towards the sound of the music. It was Prince, the Dame realized, singing ‘Little Red Corvette’. One of his sisters had the CD back in Sunderland.