by Henry Porter
Ifkar nodded his understanding, but Naji felt less forgiving. His friend and the dog, which he loved as though he’d known her all his life, were both pretty badly hurt and would need rest and treatment. Their wounds weren’t going to heal themselves. As Ifkar was helped into his clothes, Naji paced up and down, hoping his mind would clear and he would have an idea what to do next.
His thoughts were suddenly interrupted when the man who’d been savaged by Moon jumped up as if he had been given a shot of adrenalin and, screaming his head off, ran to where his rucksack lay beneath the tree. He seemed to have completely lost his mind. He aimed a kick at the other man, who struggled to his feet. They hoisted their bags as best they could, shot crazed looks towards Naji and Ifkar, then staggered off towards the trees, one with blood oozing through the cream on his face, the other clutching his side and moaning with each step.
‘Zombies!’ said Rafiq. Everyone grinned except Naji, although that was exactly what the pair looked like. He knew they were on Captagon – the drug that allowed men to go on when others were dropping with fatigue. If it hadn’t been for Moon’s courage and Ifkar’s physical strength, he’d most likely be dead by now, because the pair had obviously been sent to find and kill him. But for the high wind on the top of the mountain, they would have heard that shot; maybe there had been more. But what really bothered him was that he had never seen these two in his life before. How many more like them were out there?
They had secured Ifkar’s pack around his left shoulder and were about to leave the walnut tree when Naji realised that the two men had taken the policeman’s phone. He had assumed it was on the ground, but somehow the man had kept hold of it while fending off Moon. With the phone had also gone his only means of contact with his sister and the one person who might be able to help him, Paul Samson. He cursed himself for not making sure it was in his possession while he held the gun. He could have waved it in the man’s face and made him hand the phone over. He felt like an idiot – as usual, he’d screwed everything up. As they took their leave of the group with muted goodbyes, his mind filled with guilt about Ifkar and Moon, who had been injured only because they were with him.
Fourteen
The moment Samson received the call from the boy he stopped in his tracks. He answered in a way that he hoped would give Naji confidence that he meant him no harm. But then he heard pandemonium break out on the other end, with yelling, a dog going wild and two cracks of a firearm. The gun echoed around the hills and Samson realised he was not too far away. He could see nothing, but he marked the position on the wooded slopes and set off in that direction.
To his astonishment, the phone call remained live. He heard two more shots quite close to the phone’s microphone, which also rang out in the forest and allowed him to confirm the direction of the gunfire. He stopped again, listening intently and trying – with no little anguish – to work out what was going on and who had been hurt. He heard a man groaning close to the phone, and in the background, several other people were speaking excitedly in Arabic. He waited, barely breathing. Then he heard the boy’s voice. Yes, he was pretty sure it was Naji. He had survived the attack and it seemed he and others were in control of the situation. Why the hell didn’t he speak? ‘Naji! Naji! Talk to me!’ Samson said urgently into the phone. ‘It’s Paul. What’s happening there? Naji, are you all right?’
No reply came.
He set off again, the phone pressed to his ear to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. For a good ten minutes little changed – he heard the same groans and chatter in the background. Then there was a rustling as someone picked up the phone. This was followed by a lot of yelling from one individual, most of it in Arabic, but he also thought he heard a few words of the local language. That was important – the woman in the store had mentioned that the two migrants whom she had served spoke some Macedonian, or seemed to know some Serbian – he didn’t remember which it was. He waited. There were now just two men talking; the agitation in their voices had subsided. He could hear them moving through the trees. One asked in Arabic, ‘Have you got the phone?’ When the other replied ‘Yes,’ he heard the first man say, ‘That’s all that matters,’ before the call was ended. The individual must have glanced at the phone and seen that the screen was lit. It was significant that these men set such store in possessing what they must believe was Naji’s phone.
It took him a further forty minutes to locate the empty clearing, where a perfectly symmetrical walnut tree stood like a child’s drawing in the centre of an expanse of grass. He saw that the grass was flattened under the tree where people had sat. Piles of green walnut husks were scattered about, along with cigarette butts, and there were spots of blood on the dead grass and a bloody rag discarded by the tree. He was no clearer about what had occurred, except that everyone who had been in this quiet, almost sacred place had apparently left alive. He listened to the forest for a few seconds but heard only the swaying of the trees and the call of a few birds. The temperature had dropped and the light was dimming. He needed to find a way down to Pudnik, but first he called Vuk.
‘Where are you?’
‘Am in Pudnik,’ said Vuk. ‘This shit town with shit people. Too many migrants here.’ He stopped to take an audible drag on his cigarette.
Samson shook his head. ‘The boy is probably headed to Pudnik. He’s with a tall guy and they have a big white dog. It’s late so they may look for somewhere to sleep.’
‘Okay, I watch for them.’
‘If I find the track I can see now on the satellite map, I’ll be with you in about an hour. Just let me know the moment you see them. By the way, I’m pretty sure they don’t have the phone any longer. I’ll explain when I see you. The priority is obviously to watch for the boy and call me if you spot him.’
‘I not fucking idiot – I know this,’ Vuk protested, before the connection dropped in the middle of another sentence about Samson’s car. Samson redialled but didn’t get through. He walked to the northern side of the clearing and plunged into the woods. After ten minutes of searching, he found a path. He took a couple of tumbles on the way down, cracking his knee, but by chance found a shortcut and, far away in the gloom of the forest, glimpsed two figures making their way down to the town. Despite the pain in his knee he forced himself on and saw them twice more. He noticed that they did not have a dog with them.
When he reached Pudnik, it was almost dark. Straddling a dirty, fast-flowing river, the town had an abandoned air, with several communist-era factories standing empty and unlit on the outskirts. As he hurried to the centre, Samson noted hints of winter in the activities of the townsfolk – hearths being fired up, wood being chopped and stacked, welders working on a snowplough under clamp lights.
Along the way he made multiple calls to Vuk to say that he had arrived, but they produced no response and he eventually found his way to a draughty market square, next to a bus station, where migrants stood in groups around makeshift braziers or sheltered behind the awnings of stalls set up for the following day’s market.
At the bus station, a young couple were operating a hot drinks stand that was doing a brisk trade in soup and coffee. He bought a black coffee and listened to migrants’ stories of being terrorised by police dogs and forced at gunpoint over Bulgaria’s border with Macedonia. Now they had to find their way into Serbia, without the correct papers, and then head north to Croatia, but their number had been swollen by fresh arrivals from the south. These were people who had been blown off course on their trek north. They were sheltering in a large warehouse adjacent to the bus station. It was rumoured that buses would arrive to take some, or all, of them from Pudnik to the official border crossing with Serbia, north of Kumanovo. No one had any idea what to expect. Their faces were pinched with strain, their clothes filthy.
All the time he kept an eye on the road for the boys and the dog, but as the evening wore on he became certain that they’d camped somewhere in the fore
st, where they would be far better off than these people. They were doing it their own way and were probably even more determined now to avoid contact with other migrants. Yet he was certain of one thing: they couldn’t make progress to the north without at some stage passing through the town. The terrain was just too challenging to choose any other route.
He was also sure that the two men he had seen on the mountain and in the forest must be in the crowds somewhere, so he focused his energies on finding them. He checked the huge warehouse and discovered another mass of people under a tin roof that groaned and shuddered in the wind. It was too dark to see properly, and people shrank from his gaze. Outside, he called Vuk again and left a testy message on his voicemail. He was tired and short-tempered and there was something about Vuk’s boozy nonchalance that got under his skin. Where the hell was he? He cast about, dimly aware that he was slipping into autopilot. In Syria he had noticed that when he was caught up in the chase, his decisions often came without any conscious deliberation – and it worried him that he relied too much on his instincts. He was feeling a profound frustration from not catching up with Naji that day and now, as he saw three buses roll into the station, he feared he would lose the two men who had attacked the boy. Although they still represented a considerable threat, he thought that they were more likely to try to escape with what they believed was the prize they’d been sent by ISIS to retrieve – Naji’s phone. But then, it wasn’t Naji’s phone, and they may already have discovered that, which meant they were still a danger to him.
He watched the buses pull up and the huddled crowds stir and begin to gather around them expectantly, but the doors remained firmly shut. It was a desperate scene made more stark and dramatic by the floodlights that cast long, grotesque shadows across the market.
He called Vuk again. This time he picked up.
‘Where the fuck are you?’
‘I have good surprise for Mr Samson.’
He sounded drunk. Samson ignored the remark about the surprise. ‘Listen, there’s an officer called Arron Simcek from the Macedonian Administration for Security and Counterintelligence. He was the man on the helicopter when we handed over Al Kufra, with the cropped hair and black leather jacket. Get hold of him and tell him that there are a couple of likely terrorists here in Pudnik. In the meantime, he has to make sure that this crowd don’t board the buses going to the Serbian border, so he should talk to the local police. Then he needs to get here as soon as possible. How far is it from Skopje?’
‘Maybe one hour and half hour.’
‘Where are you? You’re meant to be here, watching for the boy.’
‘I get car and make surprise for Mr Samson.’
Samson held his temper. ‘Just get hold of Simcek and tell him to meet me in the bus station at Pudnik.’
Fifteen minutes later a police squad car drifted into the station. Samson was pleased to see two police officers get out and talk to the bus drivers. A further hour and a half passed before three unmarked cars and two police Range Rovers tore into the station. Armed men rapidly cordoned off the area and Samson went over to talk to Simcek, who listened with scepticism, his gaze shifting from Samson’s face to the crowd in front of them.
When Samson finished, he said, ‘The reason we came was because of Al Kufra, who has proved useful to us. But if you don’t know what these men look like, how are we to find them? There are two, maybe three hundred people here.’
‘I have an idea,’ said Samson. ‘It worked for Al Kufra. First we need to get everyone together out here.’
People were flushed out of the warehouse and moved from the far corners of the marketplace. Speaking through an interpreter, Simcek asked for silence, as though he was going to make an announcement. He held up his hand, waiting for people to stop moving and the children to settle down. When eventually the only thing anyone could hear was the sound from an eddy of leaves by one of the stalls, he told his men to take up positions in the crowd. He nodded to Samson, who took out his phone and dialled the number. A muffled ringing came from deep within the crowd, way off to Samson’s right. Two uniformed officers immediately descended on a man whose face was hidden by a hood, then grabbed the individual standing next to him. Samson watched as the men were pushed at gunpoint to the front of the crowd. Simcek pulled back the hood of one to reveal a swollen and badly lacerated face, then removed the second man’s beanie. This one sported a bruise on his face and was clutching his right arm with his left.
Samson was surprised that such an unimpressive pair constituted the assassination team sent into the mountains to kill Naji. They were handcuffed and taken away in Simcek’s vehicle.
*
After leaving the group at the walnut tree, Naji and Ifkar went deep into the forest and found a shallow dip in the land, at the end of which was a large flat rock that looked like a massive gravestone. Naji felt the ground by the rock – it was bone dry, thanks to the many dense pines above it. He told Ifkar to rest while he stretched his plastic sheet across a frame of sticks to make a roof. He cut pine boughs for the sides of the shelter and laid some under the plastic to create a springy bed. At the end he built a fire against the flat rock, so it would reflect the heat. Ifkar and Moon huddled close to one side of the fire and Naji began cooking the rice, beans and salted lamb they’d bought that morning. By juggling their odd collection of receptacles he managed to get the ingredients hot and edible more or less at the same time. Ifkar congratulated him, but the pain was showing in his face and every time he bumped his arm or moved it he suppressed a cry. When they’d finished, Naji boiled water to clean his and Moon’s injuries, but by that time it was dark and very hard to see. After the one of the most exhausting and terrifying days of their lives, all three slept soundly in the snug shelter.
*
Samson woke to the sound of Vuk’s Zippo lighter, which was followed by a mixed aroma of lighter fuel and cigarette smoke that reached him before he opened his eyes.
It was 6.30 a.m. and he had fallen asleep sitting on a couple of wooden pallets, a few metres from a police van that remained on the road between the bus station and the market square. The other vehicles had long since departed with the two suspects. He’d waited until he was sure that Naji was nowhere around and then, having had no word from Vuk, settled on the pallets out of the wind to smoke and wait for dawn. He had been asleep for no more than hour, but in that time the market had begun to come to life with stallholders unloading goods and produce.
‘Surprise for you. I have surprise for you,’ announced Vuk.
Samson clambered to his feet, stretched and took in Vuk’s grey stubble and bloodshot eyes. ‘Where the hell were you? I was calling your bloody phone all night.’
Vuk shrugged, as though this had as much to do with him as the weather. ‘I have surprise for you.’
Samson put up his hand to stop him. One of his two phones was vibrating in his pocket.
There was no caller ID. ‘Yes,’ he said into the phone.
‘We understand you’re still in Macedonia,’ said Sonia Fell.
‘And good morning to you, Sonia.’
‘We’ve learned that you were involved in the arrest of two men in the north. The Chief wants to know what you’re still doing in-country?’
‘In-country! We’re not in a fucking war zone, dear!’
‘He wants to know why you’re still there,’ she said stiffly. He could tell this really got under her skin.
‘I mean this in the politest possible way, Sonia, but it’s none of his goddamn business. I thought we’d been through this. I’m a free agent.’
‘Are you still in pursuit of Firefly? Have you got to him?’
‘No.’
‘No to which question?’
‘Both.’
‘Then what are you doing? Is Vuk with you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re in Macedonia illegally. You can
be arrested.’
‘I doubt it. Simcek has just taken delivery of two suspects, as you know. They were in possession of a phone that belonged to the policeman who was stabbed, which may suggest to the authorities that they were responsible for that attack. The men may also have local links, which the Macedonians rightly believe is important for their own security. And, by the way, I make that three suspects I’ve brought in this week. What’s your score, Sonia? Are you still watching that . . . ?’
‘Refrain from discussing operational details,’ she snapped. ‘All we need to know from you is whether you’re going to leave today of your own free will or whether we are going—’
‘There’s something I’ve never understood about this,’ said Samson wearily. ‘This investigation is all my work – I’ve got you so far! Why are you now so keen for me to leave? What the hell is the problem?’
‘I cannot answer that question. I am simply telling you that unless you leave you will be—’
‘Sorry, didn’t hear that, Sonia. You’re breaking up, Sonia. Can you repeat that?’
‘Unless you agree to leave now you will be—’
‘Hello? Hello! Can you hear me, Sonia? Oh damn! I’ve lost you.’
He ended the call and turned to Vuk. ‘What do you know about Bosnia?’
Vuk pouted doubtfully. ‘They are waiting. They are watching. They not tell Vuk Divjak nothing because Vuk not work for them. My people, they say your people watching houses and factory in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Big-time operation – many, many people. This everything I know.’
‘So they’re sure Al-munajil and the other two are there?’