by David Poyer
“If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means there’s no place we’re going to be safe. Not in Bosnia. Out here, back in Sarajevo—same thing.”
While he was thinking about that she said, “One more thing we can try. Backtrack a couple of kilometers and check out the road to Brloznik. Jovie thinks he knows a way to get from there back to Zedanisko. That’d get us inside the Srebrenica enclave. If that doesn’t work, we’ll give up.”
But five minutes later headlights came over the hill behind them, moving fast.
* * *
They sat in what seemed to be a combination café and tire-repair business. A gas lantern hissed on the table. They hadn’t been beaten, yet, but there’d been a lot of gun waving and yelling when the militia or paramilitaries or whatever they were, Serbs anyway, Zlata whispered, had pulled them over. They’d jerked them out and shaken them down, taking money, watches, press cards, and the maps. Then ordered them to follow their VW Golf. To this hamlet, this office smelling of rubber and glue and stale beer, the only light on in town. The guy on duty had made a phone call when his buddies pushed the captives in. Where they’d waited since, wrists lashed behind them with plastic zip-ties.
Until a balding man with a large head strode in, followed by two bigger men carrying Kalashnikovs. He snapped at the guards, who scurried to place chairs. He placed a pack of cigarettes on the table. Lit one. Then threw a pistol on the table too. He looked them over.
“They tell me you’re spies,” he opened. In English, for some reason. Dan was about to answer when Zlata said, “We’re journalists. Going to Belgrade.”
“Same thing. Where are you going in Belgrade?”
Jovo said something in Serbo-Croatian. The guy slapped his face so hard his head snapped back. Then put out a boot and kicked him off his chair. “Spies, journalists, same fuck-ing thing,” he said again. “Stay down there when I kick you. What paper you write for?”
“I’m with Tanjug,” Zlata said. “Your own news agency, you fool.”
“I don’t believe you. How about him?” He jerked his head at Dan. “He’s a fucking American, right? What is he doing with you?”
“He told me he was a Canadian.”
“Yeah, I’m American,” Dan said, just to clear it up. “I told her Canadian. You can let her go. Like she said, she’s on your side.”
“I’ll decide who’s on my side.” The bald guy smiled, and it wasn’t nice. “The Muslims are using journalists to get NATO to bomb us. What are you doing on this road?”
Dan said, trying to sound calm, “We’re trying to find out what happened in Srebrenica. We want to talk to Serbs, not just Muslims. Find out the truth. Too many rumors going around right now. And they don’t make the BSA, if that’s who you are, look good.”
The commander didn’t seem disturbed by the prospect of bad PR. “We’re fighting your battle,” he said. He tapped ash and pointed the cigarette at Dan. “You don’t understand. Or you’d rather look away. Serbia has been the front line before. Over the centuries. We stopped the fucking Turks here. Kept them out of Europe. Stopped the Nazis too. Well, the Dutch left. They didn’t have the yahyahs for the job. Another few weeks and we’ll have everything cleaned up. Then you won’t have to do anything but cry for the poor Muslims.”
One of the men outside came in. He placed something in front of the bald guy. Dan tensed as he saw they were his maps.
“Whose are these?” he said after a time.
Dan swallowed with a dry throat. “Mine.”
He felt the barrel of a Kalashnikov against his ear. Another, banging into his other temple.
“These are military maps. Why don’t you tell me the fucking truth now,” the man said gently. “Who are you spying for? It’s the Germans, isn’t it?”
“Come on, droozhe,” Zlata coaxed. “There are no spies here. We’re all on the same side here.”
But Big Head said there was somebody else who would want to make that decision himself.
* * *
They were on the road an hour this time, but blindfolded. So Dan couldn’t have said where they ended up. Only that when the blindfolds came off they were in another room, this one sweltering, heated by a hissing pressure stove. Now and then came the grunt of heavy motors outside, the crunch of tires on shattered brick and crumbling asphalt.
This door revealed at last an older man, heavy, gray-haired, with small, very pale blue eyes and the peaked eyebrows and slab cheeks you saw in the States in pictures of union leaders in the coalfields. He was in utilities, a soft hat, black leather gloves. A brandy smell came in with him. No gold on his uniform, but from the way the others sprang to their feet Dan figured him for a general. And from the way Zlata sucked in her breath, one she feared.
He seemed to be in a jovial mood, though. He boomed out Serbo-Croatian. She answered, forcing a bright voice. Then he gave an order. The soldiers jerked Zlata and Jovan up and pushed them out an exit Dan hadn’t noticed till then. Leaving him alone, facing the guy.
Who banged the table suddenly with his fist, and shifted to English. “Okay, I know who those two are. But I don’t know who you are”—glancing at Dan—“other than you’re an American traveling with Ustasha agents. You’re out here where the wolves fuck. You carry military maps and you say you want to see the Turks. So what do I do with you?”
“I’d say let us go,” Dan said. “Those two aren’t spies.”
“Maybe not. They’re still traitors. But what about you? To me you look like professional military. Yes? Maybe we are the same, you and me.”
“Sure,” Dan said. Professional to professional sounded better than captor to spy.
“So let’s get to business, my Yankee friend. First we will shoot this Jovan. Then Miss Kovacevic. Who does not work for Tanjug, by the way. You will tell me then what you’re doing here, I think.”
“There’s no need to shoot anybody. I’ll tell you right now,” Dan said, feeling unreal, because it was too much like Iraq. The same old script, played out in another war-torn asshole of the world. But different, too.
He’d faced terrorists. He’d been interrogated by Iraqi secret police. But he’d never felt the aura of sheer evil coming off this heavy-cheeked, dough-faced man. Who sat like a sack of potatoes, a silent, hard-faced bodyguard behind him. He said he was professional military. But the feeling Dan got was “professional” the way Adolf Eichmann had been.
So he made it short: where he was from, what his orders were. It wasn’t a secret, or at least not one he wanted the others to die for. The Serbian blinked, processing it against politics and ideologies Dan had no idea of. “Your president wants to know what happened in Srebrenica.”
Dan didn’t bother with the distinction of Clayton versus De Bari. “That’s right.”
The Serb pondered, then turned his head. Spoke to the guy behind him, and hoisted himself to his feet. Started to leave, then turned back. “It’s not a crime to defend your people,” he said quietly. “That’s all we’re doing. Someday you’ll understand that.”
Dan didn’t answer. For a moment no one spoke. Then the general did.
“You want to know what happened to the Muslims in Srebrenica,” he said. “All right. I, Ratko Mladic, will show you what you have come so far to see.”
* * *
The jeeps jounced and swayed, bottoming out with jarring bangs on the rocks. His was in the lead, Zlata and Jovo’s trailing. The troops with them said nothing. They’d gone uphill, then down, over drops and ruts that made Dan wonder if they were on a road or a streambed. He couldn’t see, because they didn’t use headlights. One of the drivers had a tubular object he kept raising. He figured it was a night vision scope. So they suspected surveillance, or attack, from the air. He sat on his still-pinioned hands, trying to roll with the lurches.
Finally the tilt smoothed into valley land, soft soil under the tires instead of rock. They turned sharp and b
rakes ratcheted and the motors cut off. He caught the creak of frogs—it seemed late in the year for them but there they were—and the chuckle of a stream. The troops levered their legs over the side and fanned out, forming a perimeter.
“Izidji iz auta,” said a voice out of the darkness. Hands jerked him out of the seat and set him on his feet.
“How about taking these uh, cuffs off?” he said, but no one answered.
He smelled it before he saw it. At first he thought it was a poultry plant, some kind of animal-processing facility. The long line of a peaked roof against a graying dawn.
“Dan?” Zlata, sounding terrified. He dragged back against the hands of his guards. They resisted, then relaxed as the men from the other jeep pushed the journalists up.
A trooper kicked open the door. The smell came strong. The creek was deafening in the quiet. The Serb gestured inside with his rifle. Dan hesitated, then went through.
He stood bent over, hands behind him, looking out over what the metal-gray predawn coming through the bullet-shattered window frames revealed. Behind him matches scratched as the soldiers lit up.
From one end to the other, perhaps a hundred yards in all, the concrete floor was covered with corpses. Fat flies rose sluggishly, then settled again on open eyes, on crosses carved into foreheads, on gaping groins, on the stewmeat bullets and bayonets and grenades had made of human bodies.
Behind him Zlata was gagging. Dan felt only the detachment of utter horror. He’d seen corpses before. He’d witnessed what explosives and fire made of human flesh on the battlefield, and what the sea and its creatures did. Death, and the dead, were not new to him.
But he’d never seen hundreds jumbled together three and four deep like some bizarre and monstrous lasagna. Old men, young, bearded, boys, some half naked, others in worn suits and gray hats. Their cheeks were sunken. Their bodies elongated. As if they’d been starved. He began to grasp what had been done to many of them. He hoped it had been after they were dead. He glanced at the roof, knowing now why the drones had seen nothing.
Which meant he was dead too. If they’d gone that far to hide what they were doing, they’d never let them return to testify.
“You wanted to see the Muslims,” one of the men said, working the bolt of his Kalashnikov. “Now you can be with them.”
Zlata began screaming as the men jerked her out of the building. Her screams continued for a long time before a shot clapped back in the trees.
Jovo stood white-faced, panting and looking sick. A Serb grabbed his ponytail and put a knee in his back. Dan felt them grabbing his own shoulders. Forcing him down. He struggled, but there seemed so little point to it that he stopped. He tried to commit himself to the unutterable God or Being he’d felt near now and then, in times of sorrow or danger.
An automatic clatter bounced off pocked walls, bloated faces. Jovo pitched violently forward onto the other corpses. He writhed, hands rictused behind him, the plastic cutting into his wrists. Then relaxed. Smoke curled up from the torn burned cloth of the back of his jacket.
“He was traitor,” someone said. “But shto si ti? What are you?”
Dan waited, bent, looking at the photographer’s face. Jovo was staring at him. As if saying, You brought me here. Aren’t you coming with me?
A second went by. Then another. The flies buzzed around as if bored. One landed on his open eye. He shook his head. It buzzed off.
The creak of rusty hinges. A door shutting. Footsteps, headed away.
Laughter. Another burst of gunfire, longer, rattling off the boles of trees.
Motors starting.
He knelt in the presence of so much death. He looked inside himself. He looked at Jovo’s motionless face.
He looked at nothing.
12
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they did! But why on earth would they ever let you go? After showing you that?” said Sebold, squinting in an expression Dan had never seen before from him.
He said slowly, hunched forward a little in his seat, “I don’t know. Maybe just Mladic saying ‘Fuck you’ to NATO. I hear he does things like that.”
“Then what happened?”
He took a deep breath and went on. Perfunctorily, because he’d already cabled back a report before flying out of Macedonia.
He’d trekked alone through the woods, across deserted fields crisp with late autumn, hearing the thunder of artillery in the hills, the distant fry-crackle of small arms. He headed west, the immemorial direction of escape. He tried at first to avoid roads, then realized he’d never make it out alive if he tried to do this cross-country. Remembering what Zlata had said. If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.
Somewhere in that lonely trek, he’d come to understand what she’d meant.
“I kept coming across bodies,” he said. “Nearly all men. Not as old, or as young, as the ones in the warehouse. And these were armed.”
The fighting-age men in the doomed pockets had tried to break out, either in some sort of last-spasm assault or, more likely, simply trying to escape. He hadn’t understood it then and didn’t now. Surely the fighters should have stayed with those they defended, their families, their homes. None of the bodies he’d come across, ambushed and machine-gunned in the fields, carried any food. But he’d picked up a rifle, a blanket, matches.
“You walked out?”
“Picked up on the way. A German helicopter.”
He’d heard it the second day. Had knelt quickly, pulling up handfuls of dried hay, scrambling to build a fire. He’d thrown the blanket on it to make smoke. Jumped and waved as it circled, gradually dropping as the pilot saw he was alone.
“Well, we’re glad to get you back,” the director said. “You haven’t been home yet, have you? But this might be something—don’t go yet. Will you be in the building? Where can I reach you?”
Dan said his office, and left.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about being back. He felt as if he were still back in the silent hills. He kept thinking that if he hadn’t gone into a bar in Sarajevo, two brave, even heroic people would still be alive. He kept telling himself he hadn’t killed them. Mladic had. But he couldn’t convince whoever in his heart was keeping score.
If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.
He stopped in the cafeteria and got the largest black coffee they sold. Staffers stepped out of his way as he headed for the cashier. Conversations died. He realized it was his clothes. He was still wearing the jeans and field jacket, since he’d left his own stuff in Sarajevo. The Germans had given them a cleaning, taken out the dirt and bloodstains, but the jacket was still worn, obviously foreign, and scorched where he’d got too close to the fire.
Postponing the office another couple of minutes, he stopped in a restroom. Washed his hands, making the water as hot as he could stand. It felt good, so he kept doing it. He stared at himself in the mirror. Could this be the same asshole who’d worried about anything else but being alive?
Why him? Why so fucking many others, and not him?
* * *
He hesitated at his door, unable for a moment to recall the code, then punched it clumsily into the lock. Bloom, Harlowe, and Lynch were solicitous and welcoming. He brushed off their questions. Instead he asked what was going on. Lynch said Ihlemann was still on maternity leave. They might not see her for a while; the Army was sending someone over from the temp pool until they found out. Meilhamer was over on the Hill, talking to staff about the upcoming HIDA hearings. Bloom said he’d been doing the advancing for the Bogotá conference. Dan said he wanted to see the plan, maybe talk with the Colombian and U.S. security people.
Lynch was reaching for another paper, starting to tell him something about airplanes, when the phone rang on the office assistant’s desk. Dan was closest, so he got it. “Counterdrug.”
“Lenson? Mrs. Clayton here. In my office, please.”
“Right now? I’m not
in a proper—”
“I understand you’ve been through a lot. Sorry. My office.”
He said he’d be right there.
* * *
He got there as Clayton came striding out. “Come with me,” she snapped. Dan followed her down a narrow corridor, no more than three feet wide, past the vice president’s office. They turned at the chief of staff’s and the hallway widened. The curved wall of the Oval Office came into sight. A couple of protective service agents watched them approach. One was the round-faced African American who’d stared at Dan that first time he’d met the president. Clayton turned into a reception area. Two more agents stood there, and a somber-suited group of older men. She nodded to the secretary, and said to the suits, “I’m sorry, gentlemen. A national security matter. If you’ll give us a few minutes, please.”
Dan followed her into curved spaciousness. He seemed to glide across the floor, as if on slick tires through wet clay. He was surrounded by whiteness and light, as if he were approaching God. A marble mantel. Shell-shaped moldings above the bookcases. The only touches of color were the banners behind the desk, the Stars and Stripes and the deep blue presidential flag. Those, and to the left and right of the fireplace, two paintings. One was a brilliant Georgia O’Keeffe of sunflowers, too bright a yellow to look steadily at. Dan remembered reading that Letitia De Bari had donated it from her collection. The other, an oil of a little girl holding a black kitten and giggling in the sunlight. The daughter the De Baris had lost years before to leukemia.
The president hung up a phone as they approached. He shifted in a high-backed chair, eyes flicking to Dan, then back to the poised little woman whose heels tapped across the parquet before falling silent on a beautiful oval carpet.
The man, Dan thought, who was probably sleeping with Blair. For a second hate flared. Then it guttered away, like a candle flame cupped by an inverted glass.
“Mr. President,” the national security adviser said. “Something you ought to hear.”