by Andy McNab
She gave me her version of the eyebrow treatment. ‘You don’t believe in coincidences, remember?’
‘When I was in Bosnia with the Firm in ’ninety-four, there was a rumour about a Serbian brotherhood, a kind of secret society, forged among the killers on the hills surrounding Sarajevo, or maybe even before that. They don’t seem to advertise themselves on the net. I couldn’t find a single thing about them when I pressed the Google button in the Gatwick departure lounge.’
‘Most secret societies try to stay away from Facebook.’ I could see that her mind was whirring. I always loved it when that happened. Except when I was at the sharp end of any conclusions she came to. ‘I need to talk to Pasha …’
I liked the sound of that. Pavel Korovin was a good guy. He had been Anna’s editor at Russia Today, and they’d spent quite a bit of time saving the world together when we’d first met.
‘My guess is you needed to know this yesterday?’
I grinned. ‘Early last week would have been even better.’
She gathered her coat – the one that looked like a giant duvet – fur hat and gloves, kissed Nicholai on the top of his still not very hairy head, and made for the door. ‘Look after him, will you? I’ll try not to be too long. There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge …’
3
Not too long ended up being about two hours. When she whizzed back through the door the newshound in her couldn’t conceal its excitement, and the mother couldn’t hide her concern.
‘Where’s Nicholai?’
‘In his cot.’
‘You managed to make him go to sleep?’
I shrugged. ‘He was a bit knackered after we finished the obstacle course and the judo session.’
She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘Judo?’
‘Yup. Karate too.’ I threw some exaggerated martial-arts shapes. ‘The whole black belt, Seventh Dan thing.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Actually, we just had a man-to-man in the hot tub. Then he asked if he could have a bite to eat and get his head down. All that dinosaur riding takes it out of a guy.’
She gave me a glimmer of a smile, but I could see she’d switched into business mode.
She threw her coat, hat and gloves onto the settee and sparked up the Clooney machine again. With a couple of frothy cappuccinos on the go, we sat at the table and she took a dozen printed sheets of A4 out of her satchel. She shook her head when I reached for them. ‘Unless your Russian is a lot more fluent than it was a week ago, you’ll have to settle for the pictures.’
She fished a page full of images out of the pack and handed it across to me. They were an odd bunch, ranging from pre-revolutionary political cartoons of dastardly men with Rasputin hair, fizzing bombs and Cyrillic captions to more contemporary photographs of the kinds of guys you didn’t want pointing guns at you in the Black Mountains. And among them were two close-ups of someone’s neck freshly inked with the rose-coloured tattoo.
‘These are not good people, Nicholas.’
I looked up. ‘I was definitely catching that vibe.’
‘I’m being very serious. Do you know about the Black Hand?’
‘Sure. People used to whisper about them in Sarajevo. Pretty much kicked off the First World War by assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But I thought they’d all been rounded up and put in front of the firing squad the year before the Armistice.’
She sipped her coffee and flicked through the pages. ‘That’s certainly the official story. But they have very long memories in the Balkans, especially when there are scores to settle. And you don’t start a global conflict one minute, then disappear in a puff of smoke the next.
‘They were formed in 1901 – the usual cocktail of high idealism and low conspiracy, zealous altruism and criminal self-interest. After the 1917 trials they went to earth. The White Hand replaced them, apparently in opposition, but cut from similar cloth. They disappeared from sight too, many among the Allies, some time after arranging the 1941 Yugoslavian coup.’
She responded to my quizzical look by telling me a bit about the White Hand’s plot to stop Yugoslavia joining forces with Germany, Italy and Japan by accelerating seventeen-year-old Peter II’s accession to the throne. The Brits were also in it up to their eyeballs. Peter’s godfather was King George V, and he’d been to school in Wiltshire. It sounded like these guys had a finger in every pie.
‘There were splinter groups too, of course, guilty of varying degrees of extremism. One particular band was responsible for many of the endless mortar and sniper attacks on the people of Sarajevo and the other cities under siege during the war in Bosnia. Its members distinguished themselves by their brutality, and their badge of so-called courage.’
She picked up my crap drawing and coloured it in with a red felt-tip. ‘Red is the colour of power and energy in Serbian culture. These people go by the name of Crvena Davo – the Red Devils. And you were right: the tattoo is a representation of the Sarajevo Rose.’
When she’d finished, she gave me some serious eye to eye. ‘These people aren’t going to visit us here, are they?’
‘I’d be able to answer that more reliably if I knew what they wanted with me. But I didn’t come here in a straight line, and don’t worry, I’m not staying.’
Before feeding Nicholai she made us sandwiches. As we munched our way through them she threw me the question that I’d been grappling with since the Bolthole. ‘What possible connection could exist between a Serbian brotherhood and an accident at SAS HQ?’
‘I guess it’s still possible that there isn’t one, that they have their own agenda. But I think these guys are guns for hire, brought in by someone – or some people – pretty high in the chain of command to prevent whatever really happened there going public. Either way, I’m hoping I might find some answers in Belgrade.’
‘Pasha says he would be happy to help. He went to Bosnia when he was a student. With the convoys. Taking food and medical supplies in, and Muslim children out. He still has nightmares about it.’
‘He’s not the only one.’ I’d come across a few paramedics and UNHCR guys who’d done the same run, and they’d come away with PTSD big-time. There were about sixty thousand people in Goražde, including refugees – far too many to supply from the air.
‘He also made good friends. He’s got some names. One was the leader of a Muslim resistance group, but Pasha fears he and his family might have died when their village was overrun. Another is a translator. And there’s also an imam, I think.’
That made me chuckle. There had to be a priest somewhere in the mixture. They were starting to behave like London buses.
‘It’s good to hear you laugh, Nicholas. I was worried about you earlier, when you first held our son. What was going on out there? You looked like someone had trodden across your grave …’
It was worse than that. Much worse. I’d watched someone tread across his. But telling that to Anna would only freak her out. I shook my head. ‘Sometimes I’m just blown away by how important you guys are to me.’
Her hand briefly touched mine. ‘And that makes you sad?’
‘No. What makes me sad is knowing that you were right when you told me the best way of keeping you both safe is for me to stay away.’
I didn’t add that I was a little bit sorry that she was so much nicer to be with now I wasn’t fully in her life than she had been when I was.
4
Arbat Ulitsa was one of the oldest streets in Moscow. The tourist blurb claimed that it dated from 1493, but didn’t mention that Ivan the Terrible’s execution squads, the Oprichnina, had had their HQ there. Anna had told me that when she was busy educating me in life and literature. Tolstoy mentioned the Arbat in War and Peace as a key location; Napoleon torched it in 1812 during the Battle for Moscow. If you wanted to fuck over the Kremlin, this was your best route in.
In the middle of the nineteenth century it became popular with writers and artists. I wasn’t sure whether they’d have wanted to
gather at the Starbucks. It was in the same block as a pharmacy and a clothes store, on the ground floor of a rather severe precinct about a K to the west of Red Square. I arrived there half an hour early, via the Arbatskaya.
When we’d lived in the centre of town, I’d dropped by the Metro whenever I got the chance. It was an amazing place – a red-painted, concave-fronted blend of theatre, blockhouse and gun emplacement above ground, and a chandelier-decked cathedral beneath. I’d never forget my first trip to Grand Central Station in New York, but this place, with its epic moulded arches, marble floors and pillars, was something else again.
I headed for the Starbucks counter and got something big and frothy on the go. I told the barista my name was Nicholayevich. She just smiled and wrote Nic in the box on the side of the cup.
Pasha poked his head through the door as I ordered a refill. He was compact and intense, with bright, inquisitive eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. His tight, curly black hair was threaded with grey. If Hollywood had been looking for a sensitive but dedicated Bolshevik revolutionary for a remake of Doctor Zhivago, or maybe one of those mega-smart academics grappling with the mysteries of the mathematical universe, he’d have been perfect casting.
His English was a whole lot better than my Russian. It was a whole lot better than my English, come to that.
He ordered a double shot of espresso, shrugged off his coat and pulled up a chair. We exchanged small-talk, mostly about Anna and our boy, but he knew time was short. ‘So, Nicholai, she tells me you are … researching … the Crvena Davo?’ He wanted me to be in no doubt that there were other words he could have used instead of ‘researching’.
I told him that a friend of mine had come into contact with one of the brotherhood, and the experience hadn’t been good. So, yes, I did need to know more about them.
He’d been to Bosnia several times in the early nineties, and managed to get inside Goražde twice. ‘I was just a kid, really, and wanted to make the world a better place. As you may know from the name Korovin, or perhaps Anna has told you, I’m from a Muslim family, so eastern Bosnia seemed like a good place to start.’
There were a number of NGOs operating under the UNHCR umbrella, and he had joined a group of French, British and German volunteers dedicated to the task of taking food and medicine into the cities under siege. They didn’t make it if the Serb checkpoints weren’t in the mood, but they never stopped trying.
‘Of course there were many moments when we felt like we were banging our heads against a very big and very unforgiving brick wall, and we all knew the shelling would begin again as soon as we left, but most of us felt that if we managed to save one life, it was all worthwhile.
‘I’ll never forget the reception we had from the people of Goražde the first time we made it through. They clapped and cheered and embraced us. Old men with tears in their eyes. Women and children weeping with happiness.’
I remembered Trev telling me similar stuff. He’d set up an observation post on the roof of the Hotel Gradina when he’d been there in ’ninety-four. There was no electricity to spark up the lift system, and the stairwell was filled with people – live ones sheltering from the snipers and dead ones who either hadn’t managed to or had just run out of road.
‘They greeted us with flowers. I have no idea where they’d managed to grow them – the whole city was a wasteland, a mass of twisted metal and fractured concrete.’
Pasha paused, lost in the memory, then turned the intensity switch up another notch. ‘That was when I realized we weren’t only bringing them supplies. We were bringing them hope.
‘I never felt that when I was in Bosnia at the end of ’ninety-four. I was buried under cam-net on a series of hillsides, guiding in Paveway bombs with a laser target designator. I was what they used to call “the man in the loop”. It meant that I was on the ground, breathing their oxygen, while a nice girl in a bunker in Nevada pressed whatever buttons needed pressing. And if they decided that the target should live to fight another day, there was nothing I could do about it.
‘We took out a couple of their ethnic-cleansing supremos, but when it came to saving or improving the lives of the poor fuckers at the sharp end, I couldn’t lift a finger, just watched helplessly as women and children were raped and slaughtered in the streets. I had a ringside seat at the world’s ugliest circus.’
He gave me a sad smile. ‘Ah … the agony of men with guns who may not squeeze the trigger …’
‘Fair one. But you must have suffered the agony of men who have no guns.’
He didn’t need to think too hard about that. ‘Of course. Every minute of every day I was in the Balkans, and many since. But at no time, perhaps, as badly as when I first encountered the work of the Crvena Davo.’
5
Pasha’s eight-vehicle convoy had made it through the Serb cordon that surrounded Goražde for the second time in mid-June 1993. The UN had declared it a Safe Haven a couple of weeks earlier.
‘Those Safe Havens really were magic, weren’t they?’
There were six of them in the care of UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force, authorized by the Security Council to defend their citizens by ‘all necessary means, including the use of force; Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Žepa and Bihać were the other five. Goražde was the only one not to fall, but it clung to its so-called freedom by little more than its fingernails.
The UN didn’t cover themselves in glory in the nineties. They stood by and watched the genocide in Rwanda and, despite the sabre-rattling, did much the same in Bosnia. Ten thousand people died in Sarajevo during its four-year siege. More than eight thousand men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica in less than seventy-two hours in July 1995, right under the noses of their blue-bereted guardians. When the Canadian and Australian troops began to take down the snipers on the hillsides, they were withdrawn.
Pasha took a couple of deep breaths, but I could see that all these years later he was still vibrating with rage.
‘We arrived in Goražde a handful of days after more than fifty of the city’s inhabitants had been killed in a Serb artillery attack on a first-aid clinic. As we unloaded the trucks a woman stumbled towards me, carrying what looked like a bundle of rags. When she came closer, I saw of course it wasn’t rags. It was the body of a child. A little girl, she can’t have been more than four or five.
‘She had been hit by shrapnel from a mortar blast before we entered the city. She was bleeding from wounds in her cheeks, legs and chest, but alive. I think her mother confused me with someone who could perform miracles. We had brought food and bedding through the blockade, so of course we could mend her daughter.
‘I tried to explain I wasn’t a doctor, but either she couldn’t understand or she didn’t want to. Our translator, Aleksa, took charge immediately. She was only nineteen, even younger than me, but you know how such conflicts can bring out the best in a human being as well as the worst. She told me the first-aid centre was out of action, because of the shelling, so we must take the little girl to the hospital across the river.
‘I expressed some concern about the snipers in the surrounding hills. She said the child would die without proper medical attention, and we still had fifteen minutes left of our two-hour ceasefire. We didn’t have time to finish unloading and then drive, but we could probably make it on foot.’
Pasha’s jaw clenched and he lowered his eyes to examine what was left of his espresso.
‘I wrapped the child in one of the blankets we’d just brought in. I’ll never forget the look she gave me as I took her into my arms. A look of absolute trust. Everything would be all right now.
‘Her mother told us her name was Amina. In Arabic, Amina means “faithful”. Did you know that, Nick? It also means “protected”.’
He stopped again, and swirled the coffee dregs in his cup.
‘Aleksa, Amina, her mother and I arrived at the bridge across the Drina with about five minutes to go before the end of the ceasefire. It was about a hundred metre
s wide, a steel frame on two concrete supports, beneath which they had suspended a wooden walkway to protect pedestrians from snipers. I went first. I looked down at her and smiled, hoping that I appeared more confident than I felt.
‘Once we’d moved away from the bustle around the convoy, it was completely, eerily quiet. The little girl must have been in great pain, but she didn’t even whimper. The birds had stopped singing – maybe they’d forgotten how. All I could hear was the sound of our footsteps on the planks. And then, as we emerged on the far side of it, a single shot.’
6
Pasha pulled back the left sleeve of his fleece and then of the shirt beneath. There was a raised three-inch scar on the outside of his biceps, halfway between his shoulder and his elbow. ‘This is the path the bullet took after it went through Amina’s head …’
Try as hard as he might to put some distance between himself and that single traumatic event nearly two decades ago, I could see he was still struggling. It was written in every muscle of his face and upper body.
‘Anna said you still have nightmares.’
‘I have some good days. And, of course, Anna and I have witnessed and reported upon many other episodes of extreme brutality and corruption. But that’s the one which keeps coming back. The look of trust in that little girl’s eyes. The blood blossoming on her forehead as she lay in my arms at the end of that awful bridge. The touch of her mother’s hand on my cheek, so gentle, even though she knew her daughter was dead.’
‘It wasn’t your—’
He held up his hand. ‘Don’t, Nick. Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. Of course, deep down, I know that. In my head I know it’s not about blame. I know it shouldn’t be about guilt either. It’s about being in a world of shit and trying not to sink too deep. Yet in my heart I can’t stop wondering why the sniper in the hills chose to take her instead of me. And it’s her eyes I see when I close mine.’