‘Right.’
‘So why not work our way round the roadblock we know is there, wait for dark, and then walk up the road?’
It was so obvious Docherty wondered why he hadn’t thought of it. He consoled himself with the thought that the Incas hadn’t managed to come up with the wheel. ‘Can anyone see a flaw in that that I can’t?’ he asked.
‘Sounds good to me,’ Razor said.
‘There is one problem,’ the Dame said slowly. ‘If we have to hang around somewhere until it gets dark then anyone following our tracks will have time to catch us up.’
‘Good point,’ Docherty agreed. ‘We’ll have to keep our eyes open.’
As it happened, it took them most of the remaining daylight hours to work their way around the Serb roadblock, and anyone following their tracks would presumably be making no better progress. They eventually reached a position on the edge of the trees just above the road, which was now hugging the eastern side of the valley. Chris was sent back fifty yards along their tracks to provide any advance warning of pursuit, while the other five retreated further into the trees for rest and refreshment. Since it was still light Docherty risked using the hexamine stoves to boil water for soup and tea.
They needed all the warmth they could get. The sky was clearing once more, and the temperature seemed to be dropping like a stone. After their struggle through the snow their limbs needed rest, but there was no doubting that it was warmer on the move, and once darkness had fallen they lost no time in getting started once more.
About twenty minutes later the sound of a vehicle on the road behind caused them to scurry up the bank and into the trees. A few moments later a lorry rumbled by, with two men sitting in the cab and another half dozen or so barely visible in the rear, their cigarettes glowing like fireflies.
‘Our chums from the roadblock,’ Razor observed.
‘Pigs,’ Hajrija said contemptuously.
They continued their march up the long road, the stars shining in the sky above the valley, the river singing its way across the stones. In any other circumstances, Docherty thought, this would be almost magical. He could be walking down a glen on New Year’s Eve, on his way to visit a warm and welcoming pub by the side of the loch.
Some hope. He turned to check on Nena, walking some five yards behind him. She seemed steady enough on her feet, and even managed a faint smile in his direction. She was strong, Docherty knew, and as far as he could tell her experience didn’t seem to have taken any great toll on her body. The mind was a different matter. He wondered how Reeve was going to react to the news that his wife had been repeatedly subjected to multiple rape, and realized that he didn’t have much of a clue. Reeve had often surprised him in the past, behaving badly when expected to behave well, rising above his usual self when Docherty had expected the worst. He hoped this would be one of the latter cases. The woman had been through more than enough already.
Four hours and twelve miles later they had skirted round two small villages – though no lights shone to suggest there might be anyone to watch or listen – and carefully approached the location of the roadblock they had been told about, only to find an empty stretch of road. Soon after they reached the spot where Hajrija’s track took off to the east, and started following it up a wider valley towards the first village, which she said was only a couple of kilometres away. She knew some of the people who lived there, and hoped for news of what was happening in Zavik.
They reached a slight rise overlooking the village about half an hour later. The moon was up now, reflecting in the tiles of the roofs and the bend of the river which enclosed most of the dwellings. There were no lights shining, but none could be expected at such an hour.
They walked carefully down towards the first house, keeping to the shadows beside the road. A burnt-out Lada by the side of the house offered proof that the war had come to call. The whole place felt dead, Docherty thought. He remembered villages in Dhofar which had felt as empty as this.
The door of the first house was open. Razor entered cautiously, and walked through the house, sweeping it with his torch. There was no one there – alive or dead.
They went through the next two houses with the same result.
‘They’ve gone,’ Hajrija said.
‘There’s no point in going through every house,’ Docherty decided. ‘We’ll just borrow one for a few hours, get some sleep, and move on at first light. We should be in Zavik by noon.’
Chris had the penultimate watch, and, when Docherty came to relieve him half an hour or so before dawn, he decided to walk up through the forest rather than try for a few minutes’ more sleep. Some chaffinches were soon chirping in the trees around him, but the dawn chorus as a whole was disappointing. Chris emerged from the forest above the other side of the village, and stopped for a moment in the shelter of the trees to check that there were no signs of life below. There were not, but several huge birds were lazily circling in the dawn sky. He fixed the binoculars on one of them, and saw a pale-grey head which hardly protruded at all from the yellow-brown body. A large, hooked beak adorned the head, while the tail was short, dark and square. It was a griffon vulture.
He watched it through the binoculars for a few moments, marvelling at the sheer size of the bird. Then the realization dawned – these creatures only came together for carrion. Chris started walking down through the houses, towards the centre of the village, above which the predators were circling.
He found a space where a building had been, and the charred wooden moon and star lying half-buried in the snow told him what it had been. He walked forward, expecting the worst, and found it. The snow lay across a pile of charred and half-consumed corpses. A large metal padlock, still locked around the two halves of an iron hasp, lay where the entrance had been.
Time and winter had taken the smell away from the vultures’ refrigerator. He walked round the site, conscious of the huge birds hissing in the sky above. At least fifty bodies, he reckoned. The whole village, perhaps.
Chris walked back down the road to the house they had borrowed for the night, and told Docherty what he had found. The PC closed his eyes for a second, then looked at the ground. ‘How long ago?’ he asked.
‘Hard to say. Weeks, at least. Maybe months.’
Twenty minutes later the whole party was staring dull-eyed at the scene of the massacre. There was no time to sift through the wreckage, or to disentangle what remained for burial. If the time for grieving ever passed, Docherty thought, then it had passed for those who had perished here.
They walked up the dirt track that led out of the village, into the innocence of the forest. The morning sunshine slanted down through the tall pines and lit the virgin snow that covered the more open parts of the forest floor, giving the Dame, again leading the way, the impression that he was walking through a huge cathedral. Images of the burnt mosque back in the village, the women on the bus, the sniper flung from the window…all passed through his mind and were somehow consumed by the beauty of the forest, like the heavenly sound of interweaving requiems.
Ten yards behind him, Docherty felt numb. This is Europe, he told himself. The house they had stayed in had been a European house, connected to an electricity grid, plugged in by radio and TV and cars to the rest of the continent. There had been a record player, and records ranging from Rachmaninov to Elton John. And the family who had listened to ‘Crocodile Rock’ had probably been among those herded into the time warp, taken back to an age in which they could be herded into a mosque and burnt alive.
Why? he asked himself. What had happened in this country? Were these people so different from all the other peoples of the world who could take the body’s needs for granted? Or was this just the place where the surface had cracked to reveal the rotten ooze welling up below?
For the first time in his life Docherty felt a stirring of fellow-feeling with his late father. The old union man hadn’t liked the way the world was going; he always said that people were getting more and more
of what they wanted, and less and less of what they really needed. And because they were getting what they wanted they couldn’t understand why they were so unhappy. And that made them angry.
Docherty wished he could feel angry, but felt something closer to despair.
They walked on through the forest for several miles, to where the track finally emerged in a high valley. They prudently waited for several minutes, scanning the surrounding countryside for signs of an enemy, but in this empty place there were none. They walked on, following an infant stream which trickled down between wide, snow-covered moorland slopes.
For half a mile or so the going was hard, but then they passed across a small crest and down into another, more sheltered valley, where bare trees gathered in the bends of a wider stream. They were now only about a mile from the next and last village on their route, and no one in the party was feeling particularly sanguine about what they would find when they got there.
Of the two women, Hajrija had been more affected by what they had found in the previous village, despite seeing more than her share of death and cruelty in Sarajevo. ‘It’s different,’ she told Nena. ‘In the city we are fighters against fighters, and the shelling, well, somehow it’s not personal. But to take people like that…to see their faces and hear them…’ She shook her head, refusing to let the tears flow.
Nena put an arm around Hajrija’s shoulder but said nothing. In her mind’s eye she could see her children being marched into the mosque in Zavik.
Behind them, Razor was wondering about himself and Hajrija, and about whether they would ever get the chance to be together. If they got out of this trip alive, then he would be going home to England and she…she might be going back to Sarajevo, or she might even want to stay in Zavik, if the town was still there. He could hardly send her love-letters at either address. And she could hardly come and visit him when the anti-sniper unit had their summer holidays.
What a fucking mess, he thought. And in any case, what did it say about him that he was worrying about his love-life after what they had just left behind? That he was an insensitive git? Or that he was more interested in life than death? Who the fuck knew?
A hundred yards ahead, the Dame gave Docherty the hand signal for halt before dropping to his knees and carefully advancing to the latest crest in the path. Reaching it, he lay flat in the snow and slowly scanned the valley below with his binoculars.
Docherty watched him, waiting for the thumbs-up to tell him that no enemy was in sight or suspected. Instead he saw the Dame’s shoulders slump momentarily, and then the Wearsider seemed to lie motionless for a minute or more, before placing his hand on his head to indicate he wanted Docherty to join him.
The PC wriggled forward, and found himself with a panoramic view of hills stretching away into the distance. A quarter of a mile away, the next village nestled in the valley below. He could see no sign of movement.
Docherty turned to the Dame, and saw tears running down his cheeks. With a sinking feeling he picked up his own binoculars and started scanning the village below. The first few houses seemed untouched, but then several came into view that had been burnt to the ground, and in the centre of the village, once more, there was the remains of what had probably been the mosque. He must have sealed his heart against this, Docherty thought, because he felt immune to grief.
And then he saw them, as the Dame had seen them, the crucified bodies on the side of the barn, and he felt the tears welling up in his own eyes.
They took down the corpses and, lacking the time to dig graves in the frozen earth, simply buried them beneath mounds of snow. Why, in any case, did these deserve graves when those bodies in the burnt-out mosque did not? They could not bury all the dead of this village, any more than all the dead of the last.
As before, a group of vultures hissed overhead, waiting for them to leave.
The road which ended here ran south down the valley, but they took the path to the east, which would lead them up over the last range of hills and down into Zavik’s valley. It was almost noon now, and the sky was clouding over again, the wind whipping up fine sprays of snow and flinging them at the walkers.
The women were feeling the strain now. Unlike the four SAS men, neither had been forced to endure walks of nearly thirty miles across the Brecon Beacons, and both had developed blisters from wearing boots that were slightly too large for them. But they didn’t complain, and they kept up with the pace.
The weather conditions continued to deteriorate. As Docherty halted to check the map against a world of snow and mist and pale, shadowy pines, one which seemed devoid of any reference points, Hajrija arrived at his shoulder to tell him where they were: only a hundred yards or so from the crest of the last ridge.
The view when they reached it was disappointing, merely one more white meadow below, and a hint of tree-covered slopes through the mist ahead.
‘You can’t see the town from here,’ Hajrija said, ‘but it’s down there. This is where a lot of the townspeople come to ski on winter Saturdays,’ she added. ‘Or used to. There’s a lodge down there, just above the trees. It was the only shelter up here.’
They moved slowly down the slope, waiting for the lodge to swim out of the murk. When it did so the binoculars revealed no sign of life. They advanced on it carefully nevertheless, watching for tell-tale tracks in the snow.
There was a musty smell inside, but no bodies. Cigarette ends and beer bottles littered the floor of the main room, and there were several cartridge cases arranged in a neat line along one of the window-ledges. Fighting men of some description had been here, but not for a while.
If the only shelter on the hills behind the town was unoccupied in this sort of weather, Docherty reasoned, then it seemed unlikely that there were any enemy units between them and the valley below. It was a comforting thought.
He put it to Hajrija, who agreed.
‘In which case,’ Docherty said, ‘our first contact will probably be with Zavik’s defensive perimeter. Assuming it has one. So where would it be.’
Hajrija shrugged. ‘There is only one easy way down. It is a very – how you say?’ – she drew hairpins in the air with her finger…
‘Winding,’ Docherty supplied.
‘Yes, the Beatles. The long and winding road. But this is short and steep and winding.’
‘There is no other way?’
‘There’s the Stair,’ Nena said.
‘Not in the winter,’ Hajrija objected.
Nena shrugged. ‘Maybe not. There is a long climb down past the waterfall,’ she said to Docherty. ‘We used to go up and down it when we were children, mostly because our parents said we should not. In winter it will be slippery and maybe impossible.’
‘Which do you think will be safer?’ Docherty asked the two women.
‘The road,’ Hajrija said flatly.
‘Yes, I think so,’ Nena agreed reluctantly. ‘Though anyone below will be able to see us coming down the road long before we can explain who we are.’
They set off down the mountain, following the narrow road through a wide swathe of pines and out alongside another meadow. Then there were more trees and the road suddenly fell away. About two hundred yards below, the roofs of a town were dimly visible above the intervening trees, tucked inside a sharp bend of the pale-grey river. Docherty turned the binoculars on the road down, and found what looked like an ominous gap. He passed the binoculars to Hajrija.
‘There is a bridge there before,’ she said.
‘Will there be a way across?’
‘Not an easy one,’ Nena said. ‘The road crosses a stream there, almost like a waterfall. It is a long way down.’
‘The Stair, then.’
‘There is no other way.’
They left the road and hiked across the bottom of the meadow, and worked their way up across a tree-covered ridge and down into another cleft in the mountain face. This one was even steeper, and the depth of the snow varied wildly, making progress extremely slow. Doc
herty alternated between imagining how beautiful this would be in the summer and cursing the difficulty of their passage.
After an hour which seemed like three they arrived at the head of the Stair. The waterfall, no doubt deafening in spring, was barely audible above the wind, and with good reason. Only a trickle of water was actually falling – the rest was frozen in mid-flight, waiting for spring to set it free.
The Stair itself was easier than the SAS men had been led to expect. Flat rocks had been inset into the steeply sloping ground beside the waterfall, and though some were definitely slippery, and almost any slip potentially fatal, there was always a handhold to spare. Every twenty yards or so, there was a larger ledge to rest on.
Descending such a path with a fully laden bergen wasn’t anyone’s idea of fun, but after what they’d seen that day just being alive seemed like something to be thankful for. Hajrija was less than twenty feet from the bottom when they all heard the voice from below.
‘Keep coming, and keep your hands away from your guns,’ it said in Serbo-Croat.
Chris quickly translated the order, but in any case no one was going to risk opening fire on probable friends whom they couldn’t even see.
‘If it wasn’t for the women you would be dead by now,’ the voice said cheerfully.
It wasn’t until they were all off the Stair that the three men stepped out from behind the overhanging rock. Each was carrying a Kalashnikov in firing position.
‘Jusuf!’ Hajrija said, recognizing the face of the oldest man. ‘You can put down the guns.’
The man stared at her in bewilderment for a moment, and then recognition dawned. ‘Hajrija Mejra? I did not see the girl inside the uniform. Where in God’s name have you come from?’
‘Sarajevo. And you know Nena.’
Jusuf’s eyes grew even wider. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Does the Commander know you are here?’
‘My children,’ Nena asked, heart in mouth, ‘are they…are they well?’
‘Yes, yes, I think so. My boy has the chickenpox, but…’
The sense of relief took Nena’s breath away.
Bosnian Inferno Page 18