One had been a garage, and one of the others probably a roadside restaurant. Maybe it still was, because two lorries were standing outside it. Through the binoculars Docherty could see that there was no one in either cab. Nor could he see any light or sign of life through the building’s windows. That was the good news. The bad news was that any approach would involve a ten-minute walk across open country. The two men lay there in the snow, considering the situation. Another lorry came into view on the main road, a large articulated vehicle, and drove through the junction in the direction of the coast. A man appeared in the doorway of the supposed restaurant, looked out, and then disappeared back inside.
‘We could wait for dark, boss,’ the Dame said doubtfully, ‘but the lorries might be gone by then.’
‘And we can’t leave the others stuck on an open road for the whole day,’ Docherty said. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have many options where this one’s concerned.’
The Dame smiled to himself, ‘Then let’s go, boss.’
‘Aye, but by the road, I think. Let’s just be two lonely soldiers trudging homewards in the snow.’
‘Pity we don’t know any of those Serb songs your mate Reeve was talking about.’
‘I want us to look natural, not wake up the town.’
They worked their way back to the road and started off down the slight slope towards the junction. There were fields on either side, with a few bare trees by the banks of a meandering stream. A large, black bird suddenly detached itself from a branch, and whirled up into the sky, cawing loudly.
The sound of an approaching vehicle grew louder, and then came into view to the right. It was another large lorry, and like its predecessor, sped on through the junction. If there was no checkpoint here, Docherty thought, then there was no reason for there to be any soldiers.
They crossed the stream by a stone bridge and left the road, working their way along behind the buildings that faced the main highway. These were fairly new affairs, long and windowless. Agricultural storage sheds of some sort, Docherty guessed. He halted at the end of the second, dropped to his haunches, and inched an eye round the corner. As he expected, the restaurant was visible across the highway. No name or sign was visible, but a Coca-Cola sign hung drunkenly from a single fixing beside twin entrance doors. The two lorries were parked side by side and roughly parallel to the highway, their rear ends no more than five yards from the doorway.
He gave the Dame the hand signal for follow, and slipped across the gap. The next building looked like someone’s house, but as was the case with so many of the Bosnian houses they had seen, no one seemed to be at home. They trudged their way through the untouched accumulation of winter snow, pushed aside an already rickety fence, and reached the next gap. Again Docherty edged his eye round the corner. This time part of a disused garage was in view – two old-fashioned petrol pumps wearing what looked like hats of snow.
They moved cautiously down the gap between the two houses, to where they could get a view up and down the highway. As Docherty had hoped, the doors and windows in the front of the restaurant were hidden from view by the two lorries.
The two SAS men jogged across the highway, Docherty keeping an open eye to the left, the Dame doing the same to the right. No one was in sight. Another ghost town, Docherty thought. Or at least he hoped it was.
They reached the space between the cabs of the two lorries. While the Dame kept guard Docherty hoisted himself up to see if there was a key in the ignition of the first lorry. There wasn’t, but there was in the second. He took off his gloves and felt the bonnet. It seemed faintly warm.
‘Check it out,’ he whispered to the Dame, and moved down between the two vehicles towards their rears. He sank to his haunches so that he could see the bottom half of the restaurant’s front door.
Behind him, the Dame climbed up into the cab and released the bonnet lock. It sprang loose with a sharp clunk. He sat there for a few seconds, ears straining for a sign that someone had heard, and then climbed back down. He leaned the MP5 up against a wheel and pushed up the bonnet. The engine was hot to the touch. He pushed the bonnet gently back down, just as the men emerged from the side door of the restaurant.
It all happened very quickly.
As one man shouted something in an indignant voice, the Dame considered and rejected the option of diving for the MP5. Maybe one of the Serbs was telepathic, because at that moment he saw the SMG, and pulled his AK47 into the firing position, screaming something as he did so. By this time the Dame’s Browning was clearing the holster on his right thigh.
The two guns fired simultaneously, the Dame’s ‘double tap’ piercing the man’s upper trunk as his automatic burst stitched fire across the Dame’s chest.
The Wearsider was already going down as the other Serbs opened up.
About five seconds had elapsed since the first shout, and Docherty had only moved a few yards down the corridor between the lorries. He saw the Dame fall, and sank to the ground himself. Six legs were visible beneath the lorry, and he opened up on them with the MP5.
Cries of pain told him he had hit at least some of them, but he was already rolling forward, under the lorry closest to the restaurant and out into the gap between the two. The Serbs leapt into view, two of them already down, one still on his feet. As the six eyes flashed towards him he opened up again with the silenced MP5, knocking the third man back across the other two.
He rolled again, into a small snowdrift at the foot of the restaurant wall, but no bullets came his way. As he got to his feet, he heard sounds through the wall behind him. He swung the MP5 round towards the front door just as it swung open, and a child stepped out. Somehow he didn’t squeeze the trigger.
A voice shouted a question in a foreign language. A woman’s voice.
Docherty strode across to the door, the small boy retreating before him, and edged his eye around the frame. A blonde woman was standing by a pile of chairs and table, frozen to the spot. She suddenly started screaming at him, though whether in anger or fear Docherty couldn’t tell. He marched past her, and found the side door they had neglected to notice. Outside the dead Serbs lay twisted together. Like the stupid tattoo they were all wearing, Docherty thought. Solidarity hadn’t saved these Serbs.
He glanced up and down the highway and saw nothing. The Dame was still breathing, but with difficulty and not, Docherty guessed, for long. Even if the heart had been spared the lungs seemed to have been shredded.
He lifted the Wearsider’s body up into the cab, and propped him up in the driving seat with the aid of the safety belt. Then he took the MP5 and burst the other lorry’s rear tyres.
As Docherty clambered back up into the cab the Dame’s eyes seemed to flicker open briefly, and what could even have been a smile twitched at his lips. Then the eyes closed again. Docherty felt the carotid artery. The Dame was dead.
As he let in the clutch the door of the restaurant burst back open, and the child stumbled out. He had come to wave goodbye.
His mouth set in a grim line, Docherty hurled the lorry as fast as he could down the treacherous road. He knew there was nothing to be gained from blaming himself for the Dame’s death, but he couldn’t help doing so. How could he have missed the side door? How could either of them?
Just concentrate on the job, he told himself. He could wallow in guilt later.
There was no choice but to drive through the village they had avoided on the way down. He roared through faster than the road warranted, but no one stepped out with an upraised hand, and no bullets pursued him. The village was alive, though, and he saw several people watch the lorry go by, their bodies still and their expressions vacant, as if they feared doing something which would cause him to stop.
Less than twenty minutes had passed when he found himself driving down through the forest towards the armoured car and lorry. He flashed the headlights twice as he approached, and Razor materialized from behind a tree, a smile on his face.
‘Hiya, boss,’ he said, and then
he saw the Dame. ‘Oh shit,’ he murmured, closing his eyes for a moment.
‘Aye,’ Docherty agreed. ‘Come on, let’s get out of this fucking country.’
With Razor on the running board, the lorry rolled on down the last hundred yards.
Chris leapt down from the armoured car and came across to meet it. ‘The clock beat the Dame,’ Razor said quietly, stepping to the ground.
Chris stopped in his tracks, opened his mouth to say something, and then saw his friend propped up in the seat. He walked round to the other side and looked at him. Docherty had closed the Dame’s eyes and the Wearsider seemed strangely at peace, as if he’d finally come to terms with something.
‘We’ll mourn him later,’ Docherty’s voice said in his ear.
Chris nodded. ‘Goodbye, mate,’ he said to the dead man, and turned away.
‘Razor, go and get Hajrija,’ Docherty ordered. ‘How are the children?’ he asked Chris.
‘As well as can be expected. Better, in fact.’
‘Well, let’s start shifting them.’ As he walked round to the back of the lorry it occurred to him that he had no idea what was inside it. He swung one of the doors open to reveal wall-to-wall pinball machines.
‘Christ almighty,’ Docherty muttered. Of all the things he’d seen since landing in Split this took the biscuit. In the middle of a medieval war someone had been scouring the country – and presumably restaurants like the one he’d just returned from – and either buying up or stealing pinball machines.
A sudden rage filled him, and he leapt up into the lorry and began tearing the restraining ropes from the mute machines. The first one crashed down into the road, and the second followed. Soon there was a pile rising up beneath the tailgate, and he had to move the lorry forward to free it from their grasp.
He sat in the cab for a few seconds, letting the rage subside.
‘You OK, boss?’ Razor asked him through the open window.
‘Aye,’ Docherty said. He wanted to see Isabel, he thought. He wanted to see her that very moment.
It wasn’t possible, so he got down from the cab and helped ferry the children from the armoured car to their new temporary home.
‘What about the Dame?’ Chris asked when they were finished.
‘Wrap him in his sleeping bag, and put him in with the kids,’ Docherty decided. He was wondering whether it was worth taking the armoured car any further. It really needed a crew of two – a navigator and a driver – and he wanted both Chris and Razor in the same vehicle as the children. Hajrija, when asked, said she was willing to try driving, but no, she had never actually driven anything, even a car…
There was also the chance of the ludicrous UN camouflage doing more harm than good. Anyone with half a brain wouldn’t be fooled for more than a few seconds, and anyone in a real UN vehicle might decide the deception had hostile intent. Besides, driving along in the damn thing felt a bit like robbing orphans in a Mother Teresa mask.
He decided to abandon it, along with the mound of pinball machines. The old man too was left behind, in the cab of the broken lorry where he had fallen asleep and died.
With Razor at the wheel, Hajrija and Docherty beside him in the front seat, and Chris in the back, they set out once more. It was now the middle of the afternoon, and the wind had dropped again, leaving a slowly moving cloud mass to block out the sun.
They reached the junction within an hour of Docherty’s last visit. Everyone had their guns at the ready as Razor turned on to the highway, but nothing moved in the cluster of buildings. The four dead men still lay in their tangled pile, and Docherty could see no sign of the woman or child.
The road soon started climbing up across a vast plateau, a thin strip between a sea of snow and the leaden sky. Two other lorries appeared, growing from dots in the distance to juggernauts thundering by, their drivers staring straight ahead, not risking eye contact.
After not much more than an hour the road was winding down towards Livno, and there they met their first checkpoint, manned by Croatian regular army forces. The officer in charge inspected their UN accreditations, no doubt took note of the pale-blue berets, and declined to make an issue of the fact that Hajrija was obviously only along for the ride. When he saw the children in the back, his face even softened, and they were waved on through.
‘So far so good,’ Razor said. ‘And we’re in Croat territory from now on, right?’
‘Looks like it,’ Docherty agreed. If it hadn’t been for that one mistake, they would all have survived.
There was now only one more mountain range to cross, and the road ran steadily uphill, a huge lake below and to their left. The character of the country was changing too – even under the snow this land seemed more barren, with only a few twisted trees and sharp outcrops of dark rock jutting up out of the white overlay.
‘This is Hercegovina,’ Hajrija told them. ‘There is nothing here,’ she added. ‘Even the water is in rocks, you understand?’
It was limestone country, Docherty realized. Where the rivers ran underground and people went potholing, for reasons that only they knew.
In the far distance he could see a large bird hovering in the air, and wondered idly what it was. Chris would know, he thought, and for a passing moment even wondered whether to stop the lorry and let the twitcher out of the back to identify it for him. You’re getting senile, he told himself. And that was yet another reason for this being the last mission of his soldiering career.
‘Boss,’ Razor said, interrupting the PC’s reverie.
Docherty focused his attention on the two cars blocking their passage a couple of hundred yards ahead. The road was clinging to the side of a bare valley, and all around them precipitous slopes either rose to the sky or dropped to the depths. A wooden cabin had been erected in a rare piece of flat land adjoining the road, maybe as a hunting cabin, maybe a roadside café. From its roof fluttered the red-and-white checked flag of the Croats. Standing outside its doors was a transit van which had been plastered with metal sheets, apparently by a gang of deranged welders.
What the fuck was anyone doing up here? Docherty asked himself. Nothing good, was the likely answer.
He turned and rapped three times on the partition, giving Chris the signal for possible danger.
Razor sized up the two cars blocking the road as he slowed the lorry. They looked ripe for pushing aside, but to do so at speed might well kill one or more of the children.
‘Stop twenty yards short,’ Docherty told him, as the first figure emerged from the cabin. Like the men they’d seen in the Split restaurant he was dressed all in black, from the polished boots to the peaked leather cap. He was carrying an Uzi, as were the three identically dressed men who followed him out through the door.
Four again, Docherty thought. In this country the bastards did everything in fours. He loosened his anorak, checked the butt of the Browning in the cross-draw holster, and stepped down to the road.
‘United Nations,’ the leading Croat said, mouthing the two words as if he had just learnt them. He had short, dark hair and a handsome, clean-shaven face. Only the yellow teeth would have hindered a career in Nazi propaganda films.
Docherty passed over the UN and Croat accreditations and examined the three men behind the leader. Between them they had enough intelligence for a cabbage, he decided. One was still listening to the Walkman clipped to his belt.
‘I speak English,’ the leader said, looking at Docherty.
‘Good,’ the PC replied. What do you want, he thought – a diploma?
‘What is in truck?’ he asked.
‘Sick children.’
‘I see,’ the leader said, and strode off up the road, only missing half a step when he saw Hajrija in the cab. Razor smiled down at him.
At the rear of the lorry Docherty called out a warning to Chris, and slid the back door up. The Croat surveyed the improvised ambulance.
‘Where are children from?’ he asked.
‘Many places,’ Docherty sai
d. He signalled with his eyes for Chris to join them in the road.
The Croat walked back down the other side of the lorry and stared in at Hajrija. The other three men in black had moved closer, but the Uzis were still loose in their hands. ‘The woman is not United Nations,’ he said.
‘She is…’
‘The children are Muslims,’ the Croat said. ‘But you can go. Only leave the woman.’ He smiled up at Razor, who smiled back at him.
There were a few pregnant seconds of silence.
‘I said, leave the woman behind, motherfucker!’
Razor took Docherty’s signal, pulled the Browning up from under the window and shot the man through the forehead.
Docherty and Chris were both drawing their Brownings at the same moment, the lessons of the Regiment’s ‘Killing House’ training ground flashing through their minds, as they took out the three fumbling targets in front of them. Only one Uzi was fired, a short burst at the sky, as its holder fell backwards.
The man with the Walkman had got entangled in his earphone wires, and yanked the cassette player off his belt with the Uzi. The last sound to echo in the silence was of a spilt cassette tape landing in the middle of the road.
Docherty looked around. In the cab Razor had his arm around Hajrija. Chris had disappeared, probably to reassure the children. Another four men lay dead in front of him.
He walked across and began pulling the corpses out of the road. The tape caught his eye, and he picked it up. The writing was in English. The album was called Cowboys from Hell, by a group he’d never heard of called Pantera. One song was called ‘Psycho Holiday’, another ‘Message in Blood’.
He looked at the four black-clad Croats, who had taken so much more trouble with their clothes than they had with their hearts or minds. If he looked inside the cabin, he’d probably find some sort of dope, some German beer or American Pepsi, a few hard-core porn magazines. All these men had needed for their perfect life was a woman toy, and they had just died trying to steal one.
Bosnian Inferno Page 23