It was where Tito and the leaders of the Partisans had proclaimed themselves the legitimate government at the end of 1943, creating Yugoslavia. In honour of the event, some of the oaks and beeches on the surrounding hills had been cleared to spell out the name ‘Tito’ in letters climbing three hundred feet up the mountain.
But since his death bushes and new saplings had been allowed to grow over this natural monument and now the Serb artillery and snipers had found cover in the regrowth.
Much of the town had been leveled; the streets strewn with bricks and broken glass and empty shell casings. A tree lay across the road, splintered halfway up the trunk. Pieces of bitumen had been ripped out of the road by mortars, and a broken television set lay upside down on the footpath. Most of the buildings had been gutted to shells, the remaining walls pockmarked by shrapnel and blackened by fire. The stench of refuse and human waste permeated everything.
‘Christ, look at that.’
It was a dog, the only thing moving on the street. It had something in its mouth. Webb wasn’t immediately sure what it was, but as the wretched creature came closer it gave a cough and dropped its precious cargo on the ground. It was a human foot.
Jenny immediately scrabbled for her camera and ran off half a dozen quick frames. He watched her, with a feeling of both nostalgia and revulsion. He had been like that once, obsessed with finding the one great photograph that would explain the world to itself, something that would make those at home rebel and throw up their hands and cry ‘Enough!’
But that was before he realized that those images were the ones that people secretly enjoyed, and that they would never cry ‘Enough’ because there was never the supply to meet an insatiable demand.
An old woman came out and started adjusting sandbags in front of the shattered windows of her house. The garden was still flowering with the last of the summer roses, and a child’s three-wheeler lay on its side in the front yard. Webb photographed the old woman from across the street. Then she heard or sensed something that he could not, and ran inside.
The early morning fog had protected them from snipers and precluded accurate artillery fire. But as a yellow-white sun rose over the mountains, the mist began to bum off and the tormentors on the hillside lobbed the first of the day’s ordnance onto the town.
In the hush Webb even heard the sound of the shell leaving the barrel. A few seconds later there was an explosion on the other side of the town and a plume of smoke rose behind the pockmarked silhouette of the mosque’s minaret.
The next mortar landed a hundred meters away in the street. Sixty-millimeter, Webb guessed. There was a thud and a puff of white smoke.
They threw themselves on to the ground. ‘Where to?’ he shouted, desperately looking for shelter.
‘Over there,’ she shouted.
He looked up, saw someone in a green gown scuttling down some basement steps on the other side of the street. They stood up and ran, crouched over, braced against the next shell burst. Webb caught a glimpse of a skip full of bloody bandages, a swarm of black flies hovering above it.
A hospital.
Another mortar landed, closer this time. Shrapnel zipped over their heads. They scuttled down some stone steps and into the subterranean ward of Jajce’s hospital.
It took Webb a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
‘Well, bugger me,’ he heard a voice say. ‘The Spiderman returns.’
Webb would have known that voice anywhere.
It was Ryan.
* * *
There were two rooms with bare cement floors and walls, perhaps fifty or sixty soldiers and civilians crammed in side by side. There appeared to be no heating and no power. Webb stared. A few feet away a surgeon in a blood-spattered green gown was operating on the leg of a screaming child while a nurse held a torch; on the next cot a young woman with a chalk-white face stared vacant-eyed at the ceiling, two bloodied stumps where her legs should have been.
Somewhere, a man was screaming. The place stank of antiseptic and blood. A shell landed very close, and the walls shook. No one seemed to pay any attention.
Ryan was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the wall, shivering. He had just a thin woolen blanket around his shoulders, but, as always, he was grinning.
Jenny knelt down beside him, immediately solicitous. Webb felt a stab of - what? Jealousy?
‘I’m all right,’ Ryan said. Webb had never doubted it for a moment. ‘Got some mortar frags in my shoulder.’
Jenny pulled back the blanket. There were bloody dressings on his shoulder and on his arm just above the elbow. His face was grey in the candlelit gloom. Webb guessed he was in considerable pain.
Another wound, another chapter in the legend.
‘Can’t believe it,’ Ryan said. ‘Ever since I lost my lucky green towel that time in El Salvador I haven’t had a scratch.’
There was a commotion on the stairs, and a soldier ran down the steps, clearing the way for two stretchers. Webb glimpsed what looked like a piece of raw steak from a butcher’s shop window lying on one of the stretchers. On the second he saw a chalk-white face and a hand hanging limply over the edge.
He had been away too long. Once he wouldn’t have looked twice.
He knelt down and peered under the dressings on Ryan’s arm. ‘Has this been cleaned?’
‘Doctors are busy, mate. I told them not to worry about me until all the bullshit dies down a bit.’
‘How long have you been sitting here?’
‘Since last night. How long have you been here?’
‘Since last night.’
‘I mean in Bosnia.’
‘I flew into Zagreb about a week ago.’
‘New chum, eh?’ Ryan looked at Jenny. ‘Been showing him the ropes?’
Jenny looked at Webb, apparently amused.
‘You need to get these wounds debrided,’ Webb told him.
‘I know that, Spider, but this isn’t Walter Reed. Got a gasper?’ Webb searched his pockets, brought out a packet of Marlboro and put one between Ryan’s lips. He lit it for him and he dragged in the smoke gratefully. ‘Some of these blokes have been drying out tea bags - after they’ve used them for cha ten times - and then wrapping them in bits of newspaper and trying to smoke the bastards. I keep telling them it’s bad for their health but they won’t listen.’
‘Some people just don’t know how to take care of themselves.’
‘I had a bet with Croz you wouldn’t be able to stay out of this one. One way or another he’ll come over, I said. Probably spend a day holed up in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, then he’ll write a book and get on the Letterman show in his UN flak jacket.’
‘I’ve never jammed my fist into a frag wound before but you’re tempting me.’
‘Mate, if we could get some grass and a couple of tea girls it would be just like the old days. How have you been? How’s Mickey?’
‘She’s all right.’
He turned to Jenny. ‘You look buggered.’
‘So do you.’
She took off her helmet. Her hair and her bandanna were soaked with perspiration. She wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of her sleeve, then reached for Ryan’s hand, squeezed it. Webb noted the unspoken intimacy between them and felt another stab of bitterness.
Two orderlies went past, hefting bins overflowing with bandages saturated with bright red blood. In the corner a baby was being born. A nurse held a candle for the doctor just above the woman’s thighs. The woman’s screams drowned out every other sound for a few minutes.
‘Even in the midst of death we are in life,’ Ryan said. ‘Remember that night in the Central Highlands? Those Special Forces blokes were up there with the Yards, they’d been under siege for three months. Can’t even remember the name of the place.’
‘Que Trang.’
‘Right. Que Trang. Jesus. We spent the whole night getting creamed by Charles but the next morning they sent a chopper for us and two hours later I was lying in a
nice clean bed in the 71st Evac at Pleiku wondering how to have my eggs at breakfast. Now that was the way to run a war. It was civilized. Not like this bullshit.’
‘I heard you’d left the network.’
‘Yeah. After the bread queue massacre in Vase Miskin Street. The bastards wouldn’t show the pictures. They edited it back to the sound bites and a map of Bosnia with a fucking little yellow star over Sarajevo. The network said it was too distressing for their viewers to watch. Too distressing! Of course war’s fucking distressing. How distressing do they think it is to have your wife or your son end up without their legs or their face because some bastard on Trebevic decides to lob a mortar on you?’
The shelling had begun in earnest above them, a tattoo of mortar and artillery rounds, setting the floor and walls shaking, a steady attrition of noise.
‘Anyway, welcome to Jajce, mate,’ Ryan said. ‘It looks like the three of us are the only representatives of the foreign media at this time. Let me point out a few of the sights. See that bloke over there, the one lying on his back, staring at the ceiling? He’s not really as bored as he looks. The doctors say he’s brain dead but the bastard won’t die. He went out about a week ago to bury his two sons who’d got killed in the shelling the day before and a sniper picked him off as he was kneeling next to the graves. Right through the head. It’s a real bugger how that sort of thing can stuff up the wiring.
‘And if you look to your left you’ll see an old girl without any legs. She’s more embarrassed than anything because she’s a good Moslem and the doctors keep peering at her thighs. What’s left of them, anyway.
‘The bloke on the floor asleep next to her is her son. He’s doing all right except for the fact that his mother’s the last one of his family left alive.
‘Directly in front of us that twelve-year-old boy has lost his right leg. But the real bummer, from his point of view, is that most of his balls went with it. He won’t even get in the Sistine Choir because he’s a Moslem. Just wasn’t his day.’
‘Stop it, Sean,’ Jenny said, gently.
Ryan nodded. ‘You’re right, I talk too much, don’t I? Sometimes you can spend too bloody long in a place, right?’
Webb had been watching Jenny through Ryan’s rant. Several times she had raised her camera to take photographs, but changed her mind and lowered it again.
A man in a soiled green surgical gown and plastic overshoes saw them and came over. His face was etched with exhaustion, there were deep lines carved into it like charcoal strokes. His hands were stained with blood.
‘More journalists?’ he said.
Ryan nodded.
‘How is your arm?’
‘It’ll keep.’ He introduced Webb and Jenny. ‘This is Dr Grzic. He’s responsible for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.’ He nudged Jenny with his foot. ‘You’re not here to gawk. Go and do some work.’
She hesitated.
‘Doctor Grzic, can you show this young lady what life is like on the workshop floor?
‘Of course.’
‘See if you can get him on the front cover of Time,' Ryan said to her. ‘Maybe then they’ll send him some anaesthetic and IV fluids.’
Jenny got up and went with Grzic. Ryan finished his cigarette and asked for another. As Webb lit it for him, he whispered: ‘Well, a nice bastard you turned out to be, mate.’
‘You’re going to lecture me about ethics?’
‘You should have told me.’
‘Why?’
Ryan made a sound, something between a broken laugh and a cough. ‘You would have loved it. Did she tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘I tried to seduce my own daughter. Shit.’
‘Had to happen eventually. Law of averages. You’ve populated half of Asia.’
‘I can’t believe I have a daughter that age. We’re getting old, Spider.’
‘That’s not so bad if you consider the alternative.’
‘Depends on your point of view. I’m pissed off with getting shot at, and I’m bored when I’m not. Also the women I fancy are related.’
‘Not funny.’
‘I’m not joking, mate. That time I was in New York it felt like I was in a time warp. I’d stayed the same and everyone else had moved on. So what do I do? I scuttle back here and spend my life living in holes in the ground, like this one. Like a fucking cockroach. Only place I feel at home these days.’
‘She’s forgiven you,’ Webb said, his own mind heading down an entirely different path.
Ryan frowned, took a moment to follow this non sequitur. ‘It hasn’t done her any harm.’ He paused, and then: ‘You look disappointed, mate.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘Christ, you carry a grudge a long time. I’m glad it wasn’t you I left behind in Saigon. I’d hate to see you really annoyed.’
‘You’re right,’ Webb said, and the sadness hit him like a wave. ‘You’re right, I set you up.’
‘Mate, it was Odile I scorched, not Jenny. If it’s any consolation to you, I’m sure Odile is waiting for me down there in the hot place with the whips and the burning oil. But that’s between us.’
‘You know what amoral means?’
‘For Christ’s sake. What do you want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Jenny’s turned out all right, thanks to a nice twist of fate, and thanks to you.’
‘I appreciate the credit.’
‘She’s a nice kid. She’s one of us now. Like Croz, or Cochrane.’
‘That’s it? Is that all she gets from you?’
‘What am I meant to feel? It’s just biology, Spider.’
Webb shook his head.
‘It’s over now, you haven’t got any more rabbits in the hat. At least I fucking hope not. So let it go. She has.’
Webb slid down the wall onto his haunches. He felt suddenly dirty.
‘The fact is,’ Ryan said, ‘if I had another shot at it, I’d probably do it the same way again. I couldn’t miss the biggest story of my life. My one real bloody regret is I wasn’t Neal Davis, standing there in the palace grounds in Saigon when that North Vietnamese tank knocked the gates down. That’s what I really wanted. I’m not good at people. I’m good at photographs.’
Webb watched Jenny follow Grzic along the ward, taking notes, camera over her arm, shooting off flash-frame after flash-frame, her face tight with concentration. ‘And is it what she’s good at?’
‘She’s a lot like me, I’ve noticed. She’ll do anything for a good story.’
Chapter 79
The bodies had been well preserved because it was cold in the mountains at night, even so early in the winter. They had been missing since going out on patrol two nights before. They had been found by their comrades that morning and brought to the morgue at the back of the hospital.
They lay in a row on the white-tiled floor. Their green camouflage uniforms had been stripped off and they lay in rigor, their skin taking on a translucent pallor, like waxworks. Every single one had been mutilated: ears and noses cut off, skulls fractured, teeth pulled out.
‘I have to tell myself they were dead when this was done to them,’ Grzic was saying, ‘but there are signs that they were still very much alive. I don’t know, young lady, perhaps you are more accustomed to this than I am. Before this war I took out tonsils and delivered babies. So can you tell me what sort of men could do such a thing?’
Jenny stared at the three bodies, remembered what Ryan had once told her at the orphanage in Otovac. ‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that they’re probably kind to their mothers and they go to church every week.’
* * *
The population of Jajce had lived in cellars for months on end, under shellfire day and night. All they had to eat was rice and pasta. When the lorries arrived from Travnik people ran from the basements to meet them, and this was how many were killed or wounded.
Just to venture above ground was to play cat and mouse with the watching snipers.
Webb and Jenny spent their time crawling on their hands and knees through gardens, running between buildings, waiting to catch their breath before the next sprint, always aware that somewhere in the hills a Serb sniper might have them in the cross-hairs of his Kalashnikov.
It was on their third day in Jajce that it happened; they were making their way from the hospital back to the command post. Jenny pointed to something that had been scrawled in black paint on the whitewashed wall on the far side of the street: Pazi snajper. Beware sniper.
‘Ready?’ she asked him.
‘I was doing this before you were born young lady.’
She grinned. ‘That’s what worries me.’
Was she looking out for him now? ‘You first,’ he said. If there was a sniper watching the intersection, he would be alerted by the first runner; the second would lose the advantage of surprise. She knew what he was doing and she hesitated.
He pushed her in front of him. ‘Go!’
He winced at the pain in his back where he had jarred it on the wild drive into the city. It still made it difficult to run. He heard a sharp crack-crack echo around the street, and he saw Jenny go down. At first he thought she had been hit, but then he saw her scramble for cover behind a pebbledash wall.
He had no idea where the sniper fire was coming from. Should he run to the right or the left? There was no time to think about it. He leaped to his feet and went after her.
He felt something sting him in the buttock, close to his hip, but he kept running. He saw Jenny’s face, eyes wide, willing him on.
He tumbled on to the footpath behind the wall, bruising his knee. He leaned on one elbow, grinned at her. ‘Made it,’ he said.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I’m all right.’ Except was something wet soaking into his fatigue pants. At first he was embarrassed, thought he had actually wet himself. Oh God, not in front of my daughter! He casually put a hand down to his side. When he brought it up, it was wet with blood. He couldn’t believe it. He’d been shot.
War Baby Page 40