The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  Lovric laughed at the memory.

  ‘I tell you, Katich, Glavas is completely insane. If I hadn’t already sworn the oath, I would have walked away from the mission that very night; but I’m sure that Adolf would have sent Horvat to put a knife between my ribs. I have no doubt about that and I wouldn’t be the first. You must be very careful with Horvat. You know that, yes?’

  Eventually Vegar dropped into a crouch and put up a hand to stop them, and signalled they should conceal themselves in the darker parts of the forest. They waited. Some men pulled silenced weapons from their shoulders, a sign that at least a few were prepared to fight. Marin hoped that a hapless farmer didn’t come stumbling across them. He would surely be cut down in a hail of bullets.

  Then he heard a heavy vehicle coming their way. Vegar’s senses had again proved reliable. They were near a road. The vehicle was climbing, roaring through gear changes to maintain its speed on the hill. It was a truck, a big one, and its straining engine was thunderous in the quiet of dawn. When it passed, everyone began speaking at once, like chattering birds.

  Vili Ersek, one of the Europeans, was the first to bounce to his feet, his nerves clearly frayed. He walked in circles, swearing, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he cried. ‘If we stay here they will catch us.’

  ‘Quiet, Ersek!’ Ambroz commanded as Vegar moved towards him. ‘You’ll be the one who gives us away.’

  Vegar reached Ersek from behind and kicked his legs out from under him. As the man tumbled to the ground Vegar was on him like a predator to prey. There was a knife at Ersek’s throat before he could protest.

  ‘Another sound and I will end you myself.’ Vegar’s whispered warning was heard by all of them. ‘This is where we are meant to be,’ he said, climbing off Ersek. ‘That road is our first destination point. I have brought you here and we must stay here until it’s dark again. Do you understand?’

  Ersek nodded. Vegar stared down at him remorselessly.

  ‘If you shout again, I will bury you right here.’

  There was silence. No one had any doubt that Vegar would do it.

  Marin nodded at Vegar. He had been right to make the threat. The men must fear something more than the Yugoslavs. He went down on one knee and touched the soft ground. It would be easy to put Ersek in a shallow grave here. At night the wolves would come for his body. Wolves were smart enough to hide in the daylight, and now that was what the men must do. They were wolves now.

  They holed up for the day in a ditch hidden by thick undergrowth, just a short distance from the road. They ate cold rations and buried their waste. Cars and trucks occasionally droned past, waking them from fitful sleep.

  Marin had dozed off only to wake soaked in sweat, disturbed by violent dreams. The wolf had been there, huge and green-eyed, slipping in and out of the trees, stalking him. Stumbling through a frozen wilderness, Marin had come across bodies: Horvat with his throat torn out; Adolf Andric almost unrecognisable; the dismembered parts of others, the snow soaking up their blood like blotting paper. It seemed to him now that the wolf was not a good omen at all but a warning of the violence to come. He stayed awake, disturbed by that thought.

  Propped against his pack, Marin thought about the ill-defined plan his father had cooked up. He had little faith in it, and even less in the capacity of his comrades to carry it out.

  Glavas, the former baker, was snoring next to him. He was a huge man with a pale slab of a face like a lump of dough waiting for the oven. Marin imagined him in an apron, his thick forearms dusted in flour.

  He first met Glavas in Melbourne, where he had the reputation of being a violent standover man. Reports had filtered back to Sydney that he had extorted large sums from Croatian businessmen, but Ivo wasn’t too choosy: he was desperate for money for ‘Operation Phoenix’ and Glavas was an outstanding fundraiser.

  So Ivo had ignored the rumours and sent Marin south to collect the cash. Glavas wanted to meet at the Croatian Club, where he spent most of his days drinking and playing cards. Marin knew the club was under surveillance and pressured him to meet in a nondescript café across town. He found Glavas there, bent morosely over an espresso.

  ‘Fuck you bring me here for?’ the big man grumbled by way of a greeting. ‘Can’t even get a brandy.’

  ‘Marin Katich.’ He offered Glavas a handshake, which was ignored.

  ‘I know who the fuck you are. Thought your old man would want to meet me himself.’

  ‘Ivo sends his apologies. The troubles in Melbourne have drawn a lot of heat.’

  ‘We’re in a fucking war here, you tell him that. We’re not pussies down here.’

  ‘I’ll tell him, of course, but his message to you is that things need to quieten down.’

  ‘Who the fuck …?’

  ‘Hear me out, Glavas!’

  ‘No, I won’t! You upstart cunt. You blow in here and tell me what to do? This town is crawling with Tito’s agents. That’s where the trouble comes from.’

  Marin hesitated so as to control his own anger. ‘And each time one of them is found dead, there are more police banging on doors and tapping our phones,’ he said. ‘You get that, don’t you? We know it was you who tried to blow up Marjan Jurjevic. Every one of us will be under 24-hour surveillance if this keeps going.’

  ‘I am just saying the bosses in Sydney haven’t got a clue what’s going on here.’

  ‘They do, Glavas, they do. But right now there’s only one operation that counts. That’s what you’ve been raising money for.’

  ‘Fuck them! They should come here and see things for themselves!’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘You’re not them. You’re just a messenger boy. We should send your head back to them, like in the old days.’

  Marin stiffened. He locked unblinking on the man’s eyes.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’ he asked quietly, waiting until Glavas dropped his eyes.

  ‘No, I just think they should see for themselves what is happening here.’

  ‘They sent me here to do that. There’s a chain of command. You know that. You’ll get to see them soon enough. And if you talk to them like that? You’ll be lucky to survive the meeting.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Glavas reached down for the tattered sports bag at his feet and dropped it on the table. ‘Cunts need me. Twenty thousand dollars in there.’

  When Marin reached for the bag, Glavas pulled it back on to his lap. ‘Not so fast,’ he said, his stupid face full of slyness. ‘I want something in return.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘They have to make me a general.’

  *

  When it was dark, Vegar and the Andric brothers crept up to the roadside. Eventually Marin saw a high beam, lighting up the forest below. Then came the rumbling of a big motor and three shadows climbed up on to the road. When Ambroz Andric was lit up by the headlamps Marin saw he was wearing a peaked cap with some kind of insignia on it. The other two were behind him, weapons held across their bodies.

  Andric waved the truck down. When it stopped, he drew his pistol and moved swiftly to the driver’s door. The figure inside raised his arms and shuffled into the middle to let Ambroz behind the wheel. Vegar leapt on to the running board as Ambroz crunched the truck into gear and drove it into the cutting ahead.

  Marin rose with the rest of them, and rushed through the undergrowth to meet the truck. When he reached the small clearing Adolf Andric had hauled the driver out of the cab and on to the ground. He had a gun on him and was dancing around the man, hooting like a child.

  ‘Woo! Woo! Here’s our ride, boys! Here’s our ride!’

  Ambroz kicked the driver’s leg. ‘Give me your papers,’ he demanded.

  The man was from Sarajevo. There was fear in his voice when he spoke. ‘What kind of police are you?’

  ‘You will hear more about us soon enough,’ Ambroz told him. ‘But we are not police. We are revolutionaries. You’ll see what fl
ag we follow. We are Ustasha and these men are the beginnings of a great Croatian army.’

  Glavas took him by the arm and moved him away from the man. ‘Save your speeches, Andric,’ he said quietly. ‘We should cut this one’s throat and bury him in the forest.’

  Marin tensed, ready to intervene.

  ‘No,’ said Andric. ‘That would curse us from the beginning.’

  He turned his back on Glavas and ordered the men to unload the truck. Marin saw the general’s seething anger. They unloaded the truck, concealed the goods in a ditch and covered them with bracken. When the driver protested, Glavas knocked him unconscious with a rifle butt and threw him in the back of the truck.

  The rest of them climbed in with their rucksacks and weapons. Marin made himself a place next to the driver and in the occasional flashes of torchlight saw that the man was conscious again, as wide-eyed as a trapped animal.

  They drove south-east through the night, Glavas at the wheel because he insisted he knew the route. As he drove, sometimes with caution, sometimes recklessly, the general griped on and on to Adolf Andric about the mercy his brother had shown to the driver.

  A little after 3 am they reached Gracanica, deep inside the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the last town before the wild forests at the base of Mt Radusa. Glavas drove slowly through the town, which was his place of birth, and then a few more kilometres on to a hidden place at the edge of the woods, where the men unloaded their packs and weapons.

  Marin climbed out of the stifling truck box and stretched his limbs. In the darkness he checked the Steyr rifle—loaded, safety on, ready. The shadows of his comrades milled around him, anonymous shapes. No one was saying much, but he felt their nervous energy and, in some cases, their fear. Despite his own deep misgivings, he was elated at having come so far, to the estranged heart of the mother country, where the night would allow them to disappear like ghosts into the wilderness.

  Like ghosts.

  Most, if not all of them, would surely end up as ghosts before this was finished. Marin was under no illusions about the likely consequences of him taking his brother’s place. His father liked to quote from The Odes of Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—‘It is sweet and right to die for your country.’ It was an exhortation to the young warrior to brace himself under cold skies and plunge through a tide of blood.

  A memory surfaced from his childhood. Ivo, the great dark shape that blocked the sun, his younger self clinging to him in the churning surf, body tight against his father’s. The man he knew and didn’t know.

  The truck driver was now cowering on the ground, convinced his number was up. In the torchlight Marin saw Adolf Andric haul the man to his feet. Marin tensed as Horvat came up behind. There was the glint of a moving knife and then the blade was poised at the driver’s throat, pressing against his carotid artery.

  Holding the torch in the man’s face, Ambroz spoke into the silence. ‘Careful now,’ he told the driver. ‘Don’t move, or God’s work will be done for us.’ He pulled the man’s identity card from a pocket and read it in the torchlight. ‘Habernik? You’re a Catholic?’

  The man gave a nod, his throat straining against the blade, a millimetre from extinction.

  ‘A believer?’

  A nod again.

  ‘You have children? How many?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Their names?’

  ‘Leon … Dora … Marta …’

  ‘Your wife’s name?’

  ‘Marija.’

  ‘Very well. Now, you realise that, for us to have come all the way here—armed and ready to start a revolution—we must have people everywhere. Everywhere! And such people would not hesitate to kill Leon and Dora and Marta if you were to betray us. And they would make your children’s mother watch as they did it, and then they would kill her …’

  Habernik nodded so vigorously that the knife drew blood.

  ‘Don’t cut your own throat, Josip. I intend to let you live. You will remain here until dawn. Don’t even think of leaving—we will know. Then climb back in this old bomb and clear off home. Go and see your wife and your children, and remember that their lives now depend on your silence.’

  The driver slumped to the ground, weeping as the twenty men slung on their knapsacks in the moonlight and walked towards the forest.

  At dawn the peaks of Mt Radusa were ahead of them. They walked into a stretch of alpine grassland overlaid with buttercup. In the crevices of pale limestone karst outcrops, the protruding bones of the Dinaric range, there were patches of mountain violet.

  Marin was set off kilter by the sudden rush of colour. The whimsical Pavlovic ran into the meadow, laughing as he picked a bunch of yellow and purple flowers, until Adolf Andric screamed at him to stop. Others, wary of exposure, started moving to the edge of the field. But the foothills of the mountain were ahead and there was no choice but to cross the wide space as quickly as possible.

  Vegar took the lead and broke into a trot, submachine gun slung across his chest. The others shifted their burdens and fell in behind him, a single line snaking across the field, the sweet smell of crushed buttercups under their boots.

  When they reached the other side, sheltered by a thick forest of black pine and tall stands of beech, Marin found himself next to Lovric.

  ‘My parents brought me there when I was a child,’ Lovric said. ‘That field we crossed is Kupresko Polje. Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘There are many such polje in these mountains. They were created in a past age, when the caves and caverns collapsed and the land sunk down.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were a geologist.’

  ‘Geology, my friend, is the only thing that’ll save us in these mountains—they are riddled with limestone caves and tunnels. The partisans used them to hide from the Wehrmacht. But, of course, the local people know where they all are.’

  Marin looked at Lovric and dropped his voice. ‘You mean the people we’re expecting to flock to our banner?’

  Lovric clasped an arm over Marin’s shoulder and whispered in his ear. ‘Yes, the very ones who will lead the army to us. These fools are marching to their deaths. You and I need to think of an escape plan.’

  Before Marin could answer, he noticed Horvat hovering nearby. Andric’s spy was still on his case.

  ‘Hey, Juro!’ Marin called to him. ‘Come give me a hug. That little arse of yours is looking better every day.’

  Horvat’s right hand moved so fast that Marin barely registered its purpose, until he saw the glinting menace of the knife.

  ‘How about I cut your balls off, funny man?’

  Marin didn’t move.

  ‘Put that away, Horvat,’ said Lovric. ‘Save it for the enemy. They’ll be here soon enough.’

  Horvat squinted at them and sheathed the knife with another rapid movement.

  ‘I know this,’ he hissed. ‘The worst enemies are the ones within.’

  With that the little man stepped back, turned and walked away.

  *

  After a short hike they came across an empty chapel in a clearing. Ambroz Andric called a halt and ordered them inside to say a prayer for the mission. The moment the prayer was done, Glavas stepped forward to address them.

  ‘Now there is no going back,’ he said, his voice unnaturally loud in the confines of the chapel. ‘We should recommit ourselves, here in the sight of God.’

  Glavas took the crucifix from around his neck, knelt down, put it to his lips and laid it on the stone floor. Then he placed his pistol next to it.

  ‘Someone bring what we need,’ he demanded.

  Men came forward to place the sacred objects in a tableau. Crucifix, pistol, dagger, grenade—they all knew what was coming.

  Glavas, still on his knees, stared at them. Then he stretched out his arms in a messianic gesture. Marin caught Lovric’s eye and the single thought—the man’s insane—passed between them. Glavas lowered his arms and several men sank
to their knees, then a few more, until all twenty of them were kneeling on the ground.

  ‘I swear by almighty God,’ Glavas began, and waited for them to repeat the line. ‘That I will uphold the principles of the Ustasha, and unconditionally execute all orders in the name of the Poglavnik …’

  Marin had been sixteen when he took the oath. It had been done at night, illuminated by flaming torches in the bush at Khandalah. His father, Branko Kraljevic and Vlado Bilobrk were among the witnesses. Back then he had been moved by the ritual, but now, despite the imminence of peril, despite the closeness of death, he felt nothing save for his own insincerity as he mumbled the words.

  ‘I swear that I will fight in the ranks of the Ustasha for Croatian independence and to defend Croatian national freedom. I accept that the penalty is death if I violate this oath or reveal the secrets of the Ustasha to anyone. So help me God! Amen!’

  ‘Amen,’ Marin repeated, nodding to himself, for only God could help them now. His brief sense of elation had drained away. He knew that Lovric was right, and that it would not be sweet and right to die in this company.

  They left the chapel and walked into the heavily forested hills. The sun was gone; the weather was closing in. Mt Radusa, ahead of them, was shrouded by low clouds. According to Lovric, the trail they were on was one of the old ‘tobacco routes’ used by smugglers to take tobacco from Herzegovina to the north.

  Eventually the way grew steeper and the forest closed around them. Marin walked with Lovric, a sense of companionship forming between the two men. Lovric would stop from time to time to point out edible herbs or medicinal plants—winter savoury, thyme, nettle, leopard’s bane and mountain tobacco. Marin found his knowledge oddly comforting. It reminded him of walking in the bush back home with Lewis. Back home! The thought came to him unbidden.

  One time Lovric stopped and picked a handful of purplish fruit from a low plant. ‘It’s bearberry. You can eat it.’ He ate a few himself and handed the rest to Marin. The purplish berries were sour but tasty.

  During their first day on the mountain they made one recruit, a horse they found tied up in a field. It was a small, scraggly creature and became a hostage really, for no one could judge its will. They loaded the poor thing with supplies and ammunition.