‘I’m going to report in,’ Docherty told him, ‘tell them what the situation is here, and ask if they can arrange to fly out however many of those kids Nena thinks need to go.’
‘OK,’ Reeve said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘And what’s my report card going to say?’
‘I’ll just tell them what’s happening. Tell them you’ve been looking after your kids, maybe offering some advice every now and then to the locals.’
‘Thanks, Jamie.’
‘Don’t mention it. And you have four volunteers for tonight,’ Docherty told him. ‘And then I think we’ll be on our way.’
‘Missing Isabel?’
‘You bet.’
‘I’ve been missing Nena. More than I thought I would.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you talked to her? I haven’t had a chance, yet. How is she, really?’
‘I don’t know, Reeve. But I don’t think people bounce back from what she’s been through. It’ll take a lot of time.’
At the hostel, Docherty’s departure left silence in its wake, as each of the other three men tried to make some sense of what he felt about the situation. For Razor there was the additional problem of what was going to happen between him and Hajrija. He hadn’t seen her since their rude awakening that morning, and had no idea where she was. He hoped she wasn’t regretting what had taken place the previous night.
He looked at the other two – the Dame sitting back with his eyes closed, Chris studying the map on the table – and wondered why there’d been no ribbing that morning. Maybe because they didn’t think they knew him well enough, but he doubted it. Maybe because they knew he was serious about her.
Would she stay on in Zavik? It was her home town, after all. The thought of staying here with her crossed Razor’s mind. He could certainly help out on the military and medical fronts – he wouldn’t just be in the way. It would mean throwing career and pension out of the window, but that thought didn’t deter him. If he’d been the type to care about things like that he wouldn’t be in the fucking SAS, would he?
But he’d have to go with the others, at least as far as Split. They’d come in together and they’d go out the same way. He owed them that much.
‘Assuming there’s no reply from International Rescue,’ he asked Chris and the Dame, ‘how do you think we’re going to get home?’
‘The way we arrived, probably,’ Chris said. ‘A long walk out of here, and then…’ He shrugged. ‘We could walk to the coast in a few days. We’ve still got enough emergency rations.’
‘We could,’ Razor agreed, ‘but I can’t say as I fancy it. Unless you two are willing to carry me in a sedan chair.’
The Dame opened one disdainful eye, and closed it again.
‘It was just a thought,’ Razor said. He heard someone come in through the door upstairs and hoped it was Hajrija.
The boots which appeared on the stairs belonged to Docherty. ‘You three could have a look at that map and come up with some suggestions for tonight,’ he said, working the case containing the PRC 319 out of his bergen.
‘I am, boss,’ Chris said in an aggrieved tone.
Docherty grinned. ‘Sorry.’ He went back up the stairs with the radio, and out into the rapidly darkening street. Not far away he found a large enough expanse of open ground and set up the system, pointing the two tuning antennae up into the western sky and searching out the correct frequency. The PRC 319 was capable of carrying voice transmissions, but Docherty decided, mostly on instinct, to use the burst facility instead. He typed out ‘Tito calling Churchill’ and sent it. Almost instantaneously the words ‘Churchill receiving’ appeared on the tiny screen.
Docherty started typing with one finger. ‘Tito group now in Zavik. Stop. No casualties. Stop. Our friend is here. Stop. Rumours unjustified. Stop. Town under artillery attack as of yesterday. Stop. Request helicopter extraction for seriously wounded children, numbering nine as of today. Stop. Will expect reply tomorrow 0700 GMT. Out.’
He packed up the set and squatted in the dark for an instant, looking up at the dark line of hills across the valley. Just one gun, he thought.
Better one less than one more.
15
They left the town shortly after nine o’clock, eleven men and one woman, walking in single file down the road which led up the valley to the west. Hajrija’s presence was not appreciated by all – the acceptance she had won from her comrades in Sarajevo was only hearsay as far as Reeve and his men were concerned – and Docherty had felt more than a little reluctant when called as a witness to her competence. He suspected she was every bit as good a fighter as any in Reeve’s unprofessional army, but the look on Razor’s face was not a pretty sight.
The latter had already tried to dissuade her, and failed utterly. ‘If you think I lie in bed all night waiting for you, you crazy,’ Hajrija had told him. Now, walking along behind her, Razor was consoling himself with the thought that at least she was thinking about being in bed with him.
The twelve of them had a long way to go that night. The fact that Reeve and Chris had drawn up virtually identical plans of action might have reflected their common SAS training, but it also pointed to the paucity of options open to them. There were two ways up the three hundred-yard slopes opposite the town, one obvious, one not so obvious. But any attacking force had first to cross the river, and here the options were more limited. With the road bridges already blown there was only one spot close to the town where a force could ford the icy waters with any ease, and if the Serbs had any sense at all they would surely have night glasses trained in that direction, particularly on the first night after beginning their bombardment.
So both the local ways up the slope were out. Instead, the two planners had recommended a four-mile walk up the valley to another crossing spot. From there they could climb up out of the valley, and then undertake a wide, flanking march around to the Serbs’ rear. Such an approach might be exhausting, but, Reeve and Chris had both decided, offered the only reasonable chance of surprise.
And with any luck they would also come across the road the Serbs must have constructed to get the gun up to the top of the hill. It wouldn’t do much good to take out one artillery piece if the enemy could just bring up another.
The walk was long but for the most part uneventful. The sky was full of broken cloud, and the quarter moon, when it rose, was bright enough to facilitate track-finding on their way out of the valley. Up on the rolling plateau it was almost too bright, combining with the snow to create a light that felt almost artificial. To Razor, walking at the rear, the column of black silhouettes against the moonlit white hills seemed like a scene caught by a camera’s flash and then for ever frozen, locked in a denial of darkness.
It was almost three by the time they reached the Serbs’ approach road. It had been a mere footpath on Reeve’s local map, but the Serbs had widened and smoothed it, cutting down trees and inserting makeshift vehicle-width wooden bridges where dips or water made them necessary. Judging by the overlapping tracks in the snow they were making considerable use of it.
When the party reached the first bridge Reeve sent two of his men forward as advance scouts. The rest waited while a third man rigged the bridge with Czech-made Semtex – part of Reeve’s Livno Armoury haul – and set up a time fuse. He did the same at the next, and the next, a formidable piece of construction that spanned a narrow ravine. Considering that Zavik had no apparent military value, Docherty thought, the Serbs were taking a lot of trouble over it. Someone had to be very angry – maybe Reeve had overdone it a little. But it was obviously too late to kiss and make up.
One of the two advance scouts returned with news of a sentry point a couple of hundred yards further up the mountain. The location had been chosen well, he said: the two men were on the far side of the next bridge, which crossed another long ravine. There was doubtless a way round it, but it would take time to find.
‘Are they just standing there?’ Reeve asked.
‘No, they’re sitting by one of
those braziers warming their hands and chattering on about what a bastard their commander is.’
‘Can we get a clean shot at them? Are they holding their guns?’
‘Yes and yes,’ the scout said.
Reeve turned to Docherty, who had been receiving a translation of all this from Chris. ‘We need your silenced MP5s,’ he said.
‘What’s the range?’ Docherty asked the scout, Chris translating the question.
‘From cover? About sixty yards.’
‘Too far,’ Docherty said, cursing the fact that they’d only brought one scope for the MP5s. ‘Dame,’ he said, ‘do you think you could take out two before the second man raises the alarm?’
‘No reason why not,’ the Wearsider said. Two more, he thought.
The scout led him up the widened path, which now ran diagonally across a forest-covered slope. A few minutes later they were joining the first scout, squatting down and staring out across a wide expanse of snow at the bridge and the two men by their brazier. It looked ridiculous, the Dame thought, just these two men on the side of a mountain sitting by a fire in the middle of the night.
He stood up, taking care to keep his body behind the trunk, and then inched himself slowly outwards, the MP5’s retractable stock cradled against his shoulder, the telescopic sight to his right eye. It didn’t feel as comfortable as the Accuracy International, but in this situation silence was everything. He examined the face of the Serb on the right, lit by the orange fire and big enough to fill the sight at this range.
He shifted the aim to the left and found the other face, which was laughing at something. He moved back swiftly to the first face, trying to accustom himself to the quick shift he would need. He was too close really: a hundred yards further back would have been better. Still, at that distance the gun would be reaching the limits of its effective range. And in any case he didn’t fancy crawling back through the snow.
He felt easier moving from the right target to the left than vice versa. He aligned the cross-hairs on the side of the right-hand man’s head, just above the ear. Aim by not aiming, he told himself, and let his grip slacken for a second.
Now. He squeezed the trigger once, smoothly slid his aim to the left, found the other target, squeezed again. He lowered the gun, and confirmed with his naked eye what his brain already knew. Both men were dead.
One of the two scouts was already scurrying back through the snow to collect the rest. The other was hurrying forward to check out his marksmanship. The Dame walked forward to join him, and they were both warming their hands on the brazier when the main party caught up with them.
Once the bridge had been rigged they resumed their climb, again through an expanse of forest. They were nearing the top now, but the scouts ranging fifty yards or so ahead found no more sentries. Instead they found a large clearing just below the ridge top. The gun which had done such damage sat to one side on its reinforced base, and the breakdown lorry which had presumably towed it up the mountain stood close by. On the other side of the clearing three transit vans were parked in a line, two of them in darkness, one showing a faint aura of light. Barely audible music seemed to be coming from the latter.
The snow had been mostly swept away from the clearing and the embers of a small fire were still glowing. Cooking utensils sat in a pile, and a pot had been filled with snow for whatever it was that Serb gunners drank for their breakfast.
‘What now?’ Docherty asked, as he and Reeve surveyed the scene from just inside the trees.
‘We can’t take prisoners,’ Reeve said, looking at Docherty as if he was expecting an argument.
Docherty had none. These men were responsible for the children screaming in Zavik’s makeshift hospital. And who knew what else, either in the past or the future. ‘Let’s do it quietly though,’ he said. ‘There may be more men on our route home, and I’d rather we surprised them than the other way round.’
‘Semtex under each van, then,’ Reeve said, as if he was decorating a stage. ‘And one for the gun.’
‘A fifteen-minute fuse for the vans, a couple more for the gun,’ Docherty suggested.
Since both were demolition specialists, Reeve and the Dame supervised the laying of the charges. The latter approached the dimly lit van with appropriate caution, but the two men inside seemed fast asleep, oblivious to the Thin Lizzy tape playing on the van’s stereo. Even outside the tightly shuttered van the smell of marijuana filled the cold air.
In ten minutes they were finished and the twelve-person patrol was on its way again, crossing the ridge top and starting down the slope on the quick route home. Once again two men were sent ahead to scout for the enemy.
The path wound steeply down through trees, and the going was easy enough to suggest it had been used with some regularity in recent days. After fourteen and a half minutes had passed on his watch Reeve halted the column, and they all waited in silence, hoping that nothing had gone wrong.
The first explosion was out by only two seconds, sending a yellow-white flash into the sky behind them. An image of the transit vans exploding in three simultaneous shafts of light came to Docherty’s mind, and in his imagination he looked across the clearing to where the gun was still standing.
The second explosion was louder than the first, but not as spectacular. With grim smiles on their faces, and renewed caution, the twelve resumed their journey down the slope. About ten minutes later they emerged from a stand of trees to find the town spread out below them in the moonlight. Perhaps it was this which took the edge off their alertness, or maybe it was just that everything had gone too smoothly. Either way, they were halfway past the Serb observation platform before they knew it was there.
It had been dug into the mountainside to give the Serbs a panoramic view of the town and valley below, and the radio link with the camp on the hilltop gave the gunners at least the option of directed fire. The explosions above had woken the two men who manned the platform, and the failure of their efforts to raise their superiors had made them jumpy. It might just be a lot of stoned fun going on up on the hill – maybe someone had fired a Croat from the gun or something – but it might be something dreamed up by the English lunatic in the town below.
They had been watching and waiting for several minutes, when the first shadows walked into their line of sight. Despite this, one Serb was surprised enough to shout rather than shoot. The other was either quicker of thought or more prone to violence, because he opened up immediately, killing one of Reeve’s men, wounding another in the shoulder and giving Razor a second parting in his dark hair. The shock made the Londoner slip on the snow, and he went down flat on his back.
It seemed as if the whole party opened fire at the same moment, and in retrospect Docherty reckoned it a minor miracle that no one had been killed or wounded by friendly fire. The observation post, though, was riddled with enough bullets to kill ten, let alone two. And any chance of surprising any Serbs lower down the path had been shot just as comprehensively.
Razor’s scalp hurt like hell, but there wasn’t much blood, and he received some compensation from Hajrija’s instant appearance at his side as he lay in the snow. Chris made quick examinations of both him and the man with the shoulder wound, and found nothing which would prevent them from walking. The party resumed its downward progress, with two men carrying the body of their dead friend. Reeve and Docherty spent the journey waiting for the scouts to report Serbs on the path ahead, but if any had been deployed there, they had apparently gone. An hour before dawn the troop forded the river below the broken bridge and re-entered the town.
The injured men were accompanied to the castle crypt, where Nena was found dozing fitfully on one of the few empty mattresses. After she and Chris had applied the necessary dressings, Docherty took her to one side, and told her he’d asked for nine of the children to be air-lifted out.
‘Why nine?’ she wanted to know.
‘It seemed like a convincing number. I don’t think they’ll come anyway, but if they do, t
hen we can ask them to take as many as you think should go.’
‘Nine was a pretty good guess,’ she said looking round.
Her eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion, Docherty noticed. He expected his own were too.
‘If they don’t come, most of those nine are going to die,’ she said quietly.
It was getting lighter outside as Docherty walked back down to the hostel. Most of the townspeople were probably in their basements by now, waiting for the bombardment to resume. Well, they would be spared that, at least for the time it took the Serbs to repair their road, replace their personnel and find another gun. Weeks, he guessed. And then Reeve would go back up the mountain and destroy that one too.
The really different thing about this war, Docherty thought, was the lack of air power involved. It had to be the first war in Europe since World War One in which the aeroplane hadn’t played a decisive role. Maybe that explained the medieval feel of the whole business.
It didn’t explain crucifixions, though.
At the hostel he found all the others had disappeared to their beds, keen to grab back at least some of the sleeping hours they had lost. Docherty made himself some tea and sat in the basement room, thinking about his children, and wondering what they would think of their father’s life when they were old enough to understand it. If they ever were, he thought wryly. When it came to the bigger picture he seemed to grow more confused as he got older, not less. A sign of growing wisdom, as Liam McCall would say. But not an excuse to stop looking.
At five to eight he collected the PRC 319 and went back up the hill to set it up for reception. At precisely 0800 Central European Time the words ‘Churchill calling Tito’ appeared on the tiny screen. ‘Tito receiving’ Docherty typed out, and waited, hoping against hope.
‘Tito group return base soonest. Stop. Require Friend to accompany. Stop. No air assistance possible. Out.’
Bosnian Inferno Page 21