Scorpion Trail

by Archer, Jeffrey

  At the end of the road from the dock, market traders folded back striped rain-covers from their stalls. To the left a palm-lined promenade edged with Cafés and restaurants faced the harbour, golden in the morning sun.

  Beyond, a marina with its fretwork of rigging.

  Split wasn't quite what Alex had expected. No sign that a war raged nearby.

  'Pretty, don't you think?' McFee remarked. 'Used to be packed with tourists. Now the hotels are stuffed with refugees.'

  They headed out of town, along a wide dual-carriageway lined with slab-sided apartment blocks. Signposts pointed to the airport.

  'All we do today,' McFee reminded him, 'is get everything out of this truck and into the Bedford which is parked at a UN depot near the airport. Need to get you some accreditation too. And some fuel and food. By the time we're done it'll be too late to start the drive to Vitez. Carina risk getting stuck on the mountain in the dark. There's a Ladajeep out at the depot, which we can use as a runabout, and rooms booked in a hotel for us tonight.'

  Alex listened silently, miserable at his own ineptitude, his own inability to get life back under control.

  Lorna Sorensen had no reason to linger in the Adriatic port. She took the road that climbed from the surreal blue of the Dalmatian coast towards the tortured hills of Bosnia. Her Land Cruiser was stacked with boxes -vaccines and antibiotics mostly.

  Lorna shifted confidently through the gears. She'd driven the four-wheel-drive into Bosnia three times for CareNet. Beside her sat Josip, a Croat from Zagreb with a surname she'd never learned to pronounce. He didn't offer to drive; his efforts the first time she'd hired him as translator had resulted in two scrapes within minutes of each other.

  To Rescue Children from Darkness - that was the mission statement of CareNet of New England, an organization backed by Evangelical Christians, and directed by a computer freak. Their original intention had been simply to supply aid where it was needed, but the 'statement' was now being interpreted literally. Lorna's mission was to find an orphaned child and smuggle her to America. Under Bosnian law that was an illegal act.

  For the first three hours the road north was tarmac, the only hold-up a pause for fifteen minutes at the Croatia/Bosnia border.

  Ever since Belfast, uniforms had made Lorna shudder. But if she was scared now as the sour-faced official fingered her American passport, it would be on the way out of the country that she'd be truly quivering.

  Uniforms. Down the years they'd been the signposts to the causes she'd embraced. The London police breaking up anti-nuclear protests; the American military committing war crimes in Vietnam; the British soldiers crushing Irish freedom. She'd challenged all those uniforms, but the fear of them was as strong as ever.

  Her therapist had told her it was all because she'd had a tyrant for a father ...

  The border guards waved them through. A country at war, Bosnia looked no different at first. Then, the first sighting of a blackened house and further on a couple more.

  At Tomislavgrad, a Bosnian Croat bastion much shelled by Serb artillery, huge baulks of timber shielded windows and doors from shrapnel. Men in drab uniforms of green and brown gathered on street corners, faces sallow, eyes that smouldered. She drove past a homemade troop carrier, a slab-sided, steel armadillo, smeared with camouflage.

  Lorna turned east to the mountains, their wooded slopes blanketed with snow. Dark, swirling clouds hid the peaks through which they would have to thread their way. Small UN signposts marked this the only route into central Bosnia that was safe from Serb guns, a potholed lane at first that sliced through yellow-green meadows half-flooded with melt water.

  Lorna grimaced at the threatening sky.

  'We're going to need those snow chains, Josip,' she declared.

  The Croat grunted. He supposed she'd expect him to fit them.

  Lorna shivered. Not with cold but with fear. They were driving into a wilderness where the veneer of civilization that curbed man's nastier instincts elsewhere had long since crumbled.

  A squat, gun-toting man in grubby, olive-brown fatigues stepped into their path and held up a rough hand.

  Josip cranked down his window.

  'Dobrojutro . . .'

  The Croat HVO militiaman pushed him aside to look in the back of the vehicle.

  'Medicine . . .' Lorna announced.

  He pulled his head back to eye her. She showed her UNPROFOR pass and tried to smile pleasantly. Not easy. The man and his Kalashnikov looked inseparable, his stare was bloodshot and lustful.

  He made a coarse remark to Josip, who laughed throatily. They were waved on.

  'Asshole!' Lorna hissed, imagining the innuendo.

  A convoy of trucks lumbered down from the mountain towards them, their tarpaulin covers crusted with snow.

  'Shit! Look at that! Lorna said. 'ChainsJosip. Here, I'll help you.'

  They pulled to the roadside and grappled with the heavy steel links in the cold mud. Between them it was done quickly. Lorna shivered again - the wind this time. She zipped up her dark green parka and wished she'd remembered to put on long johns under her jeans.

  She knew it was bad to keep throwing herself back into Bosnia. 'A misplaced devotion to the underdog', one friend had called it. 'An obsession with good causes', her sister had said. 'Might be a fatal obsession one day...'

  Thanks Annie!

  But she'd had no choice. Not when the appeal for help had been so direct; not when a child risked being murdered if she refused.

  Route Triangle. That's what the UN called this lifeline into central Bosnia. Formerly a narrow logging track, now made useable in all weathers by the muscle and machinery of the British Army's Royal Engineers. The way had been widened with dynamite and diggers, its surface toughened with stones and hardcore.

  The Land Cruiser jolted and rattled up the fierce gradients. Controlling the slithering machine took grit and concentration. Lorna enjoyed the driving. It took her mind off the terrors she suspected were to come.

  The track climbed through dark forests, their pine branches burdened with ever-thicker layers of snow. A blizzard swirled, forcing the Land Cruiser to a crawl. Soon they were halted by a line of trucks, stationary in the white and brown slush.

  'Hell! This is all we need,' Lorna snapped.

  'In this weather there will be many stops,' Josip assured her gloomily.

  'I hope you're wrong, Josip.'

  Melancholy bastard.

  'I'm gonna go take a look.'

  Her green Goretex boots sank into the icy gunge. She tucked her hair into the hood of her parka and leaned into the driving snow, glad of the thick ruffle neck she had on under the coat. Diesel fumes from the idling truck engines polluted the wind. Small flags painted on the doors told her the convoy was Danish. Young soldiers in their warm driving seats, plump and squat in bodyarmour and blue helmets, looked down at the slight, middle-aged woman with amused curiosity.

  She reached the rim of the rise where the track curved sharply to the left and down an incline.

  'Oh, God!'she breathed.

  A dark green bus had slewed sideways across the track. Standing around it were dozens of militiamen, stamping and shivering. A UN tractor had hooked to the front and was trying to pull it straight.

  'Shouldn't bloody be on this road in these conditions!'

  The voice beside her was Yorkshire. She could still recognize the accent, despite not having lived in England since the age of eighteen.

  Under his blue beret the engineer's face was pale apart from the red tip of his nose.

  'Who are those guys?' she asked.

  'HVO. We build this road so we can feed the victims of their war. They use it to get more guns in. Net result? More victims for us to feed.

  Bloody daft really. If we closed this road the war would stop within weeks.'

  'But innocent people would starve,' Lorna reminded him.

  The soldier gave her an oldfashioned look.

  'Innocent' Who's innocent in this place ... ?'<
br />
  He stomped across to the tractor, yelling at the driver to watch out that the bus didn't topple on its side. The driver ignored him and with a fierce tug pulled the vehicle straight. A muted cheer rose from the militiamen who piled back inside.

  British soldiers. Strange to hear their voices here. Lorna remembered them painfully well from Ireland. Still thought of them as the enemy.

  Couldn't help herself.

  She hurried back to the Land Cruiser.

  'Not long now,' she announced.

  Josip had wound down the window to smoke. The man was invaluable to her as a translator but nothing else. Like any male, he imagined she had bodily needs which she secretly longed for him to satisfy. She'd seen the calculating look in his eye.

  Lorna sat back in her seat to wait. It'd be a few minutes yet before the road would be clear enough to move.

  She dreaded the stretch beyond the mountains, where they'd need to don their bodyarmour. One shattered town after another. Villages whose houses were blackened skeletons. Front lines to be crossed, marked by barriers of land mines. And the risk of some madman tanked up on brandy, taking a shot at her with his Kalashnikov.

  At the end of the journey awaited the dead, steel town of Zenica, cold and silent, blacked out by power cuts. She knew what it felt like there; like being in a trap. And the crazy thing was she was spending nine hours battling to get into it. , The HVO bus that had blocked their path emerged slowly over the brow of the hill, then crept gingerly past them, the driver grimacing with the effort of avoiding a repeat performance in the slush.

  'Okay, guys,' said Lorna, 'let's get this show on the road again.'

  Josip finished his cigarette, threw the butt into the snow and wound up his window.

  Inside the bus, thirty-seven men slumped back in their seats, rifles wedged between their knees. They'd just come from Hell. A fortnight in the icy trenches north of the Makljen Ridge. Two weeks of pounding from mortars and twenty millimetre cannon. Fourteen days and nights preventing the Muslim-led Bosnian army seizing their strategic positions.

  Sleep, when it had come in the trenches, had been brief and fitful. Only when exhaustion had so blurred their vision they could no longer shoot straight had they been taken out and replaced with fresher men. Their reward - a respite from the war zone, a few days of R & R.

  One man in that bus however had not been in the Makljen trenches. He sat at the back, speaking to no one, head resting against the window, the stare in his eye as cold as the glass he looked through.

  His journey had already been longer than the others', and it would take him further. In his case it wasn't exhaustion that had merited a ticket from the battle zone, but an excess of zeal.

  Clean shaven, in his early thirties, with untidy fair hair, he had eyes of ice blue and a hawkish nose. Put him in a suit and he could have sold cars or insurance. Put him in uniform, however, and he had killed. Killed again and again. Killed with such relish and with such disregard for the 'civilized' rules of war, he'd become an embarrassment to those he fought for.

  Getting him this far had not been easy. The Vitez 'pocket' where he'd served the Bosnian Croat militia was surrounded by Muslims. Crossing the lines had meant hazarding precious assets, but to his superiors getting him out of there had been worth the risk.

  He could remember every detail of that day in Tulici. The terror in the old men's eyes, the snivelling of the children, and the off-white flesh of the young woman whose warm but lifeless orifices he'd filled with his seed.

  No remorse. How could there be when the killings had been so long overdue? Why pity such creatures after what they'd done to him, his land and his people? What else could they expect after opening their doors to Islam's foreign savages?

  'You've played your part, Milan. Time for others now' - that's what the HVO had told him.

  Others! Some of those he'd led into Tulici couldn't look him in the eye afterwards. One man who'd been with him there had cracked up. When Pravic had heard the UN were asking for names, he'd had to shoot him dead to ensure no one talked.

  He'd left his country once before, along with thousands of others seeking an escape from poverty. Most of the burned houses in Bosnia had been built with money earned abroad. However, when the war here had started in 1992, he'd returned from Germany to fight the Serbs. Then as the months passed, the Muslims who'd once been his neighbours became the new enemy in the struggle for land.

  He had a sister living now in the Croatian capital Zagreb. He would stay there until things cooled. Maybe he'd go abroad again for a while.

  This war that had started as a scrabble for land however, was turning into the endgame of a struggle begun centuries before. He'd be back.

  Nine

  Saturday 26th March

  Germany

  Dieter Konrad, a one-time assassin with the Stasi, the former East Germany's secret police, was anxious. Time was short. He drove fast up the A2 from Leipzig to Berlin, keeping a lookout for police cars. With enough anthrax in the boot of his Merc to kill the inhabitants of a small town, the last thing he wanted was to be stopped by the law.

  The murder he'd been forced to arrange was Just seven days away, the location - Zagreb. There was one man, and one man only who had the skills he needed for the killing, and so far he'd not been able to find him.

  Konrad was nearly sixty, a slack-faced, weary man too old for this business. It should have ended for him when the Wall came down, but he'd been trapped by his past.

  The Mercedes traversed the flatlands south of the Elbe, a landscape of cabbage fields and dead industry. It would be dark when he reached Berlin, and the traffic heavy, but he could still make the meeting with Fraulein Pocklewicz at six.

  Gisela Pocklewicz. A Berlin hooker, she alone knew where to find the creature he needed. The man in question had once been her lover and protector. Konrad had never probed their relationship, but he knew her clients were people who got their pleasure through pain.

  The woman was one of the last of his old underworld contacts still prepared to take his money. Dunkel was the name he used with her, as he had with the scientist Kernmer in Leipzig. It meant darkness. During his Stasi days, the satanic quality of the name had appealed to him.

  It had broken Siegfried Kernmer to do him this last service today. Meeting in a deserted wood, the biologist had given him the bottle of bacteria in a shopping bag, his eyes dead as buttons.

  Konrad had taken no pleasure in threatening violence to Kernmer's grandchild in order to secure his cooperation. Ideology and duty had worked in the past, but the world had moved on.

  One hundred and thirty-six kilometres to Berlin, it said on a road sign, andjust five to Dessau, where he had some shopping to do.

  When the Cold War ended, so had Konrad's privileged life with the Stasi.

  Not everything was lost however. He'd skimmed a profit from the money for his missions abroad and bought a house in the Harz mountains. He'd hoped to retire there, to fish and hunt boar, but his wife refused to leave her friends and the opera in Berlin.

  Next exit Dessau and the huge D-I-Y warehouse he needed. He swung the Mercedes into the tight slip road. The car park was half full. He pulled in beside a Trabant which wallowed under the stack of goods on its roof-rack.

  Inside, he made for the aisles marked Tools and Safety Equipment, looking for protective masks. He prodded through the packaging to reject those that were flimsy, choosing a type that covered the full face, made of soft rubber. He took two from the rack and headed for the tills.

  Just before the Stasi headquarters were stormed by East Berliners in January 1990, Konrad had tried to find and destroy documents detailing the murders he'd carried out for his masters. He'd suspected he'd not been totally successful.

  For months he had lived in fear of arrest, hiding out at the house in the Harz. One day, walking in the woods, he'd been approached by a tall man he'd never seen before who had a face like crumpled leather. Schiller was the code name he'd used. He'd claimed
to work for the BND.

  Schiller had revealed that amongst the Stasi papers uncovered in Berlin, they'd found enough evidence against Konrad to get him jailed for life.

  He had offered a deal. Konrad could avoid prosecution on one condition - to continue to kill, but for him.

  Konrad had had enough of executions, but prison was no option for a man of his age. He'd accepted.

  That had been three years ago. Since then, Schiller had paid him a regular retainer but had made no demands - until a week ago.

  The contract was to eliminate an Iranian and a Russian. A poisoning, Schiller had said, because death must occur after the victims had returned to their own countries. It had to be an untraceable murder - something Konrad was skilled at.

  He had demanded half a million marks for expenses, and to his astonishment was told he could have it.

  Schiller wouldn't tell him who he was acting for, nor why the men had to die. But Konrad read the newspapers. He reckoned lie could smell plutonium.

  On the Berlin ring road the traffic thickened. It was just before four p.m.

  He'd made better time than he'd expected. There was one more purchase he needed to make, at a small shop in Kreuzberg. Might just get there before it closed.

  He joined the long queues on the Mariendorfer Damm. Berlin had become a building site in the rush to reinstate it as the nation's capital. Diggings pockmarked every crossroads.

  He squeezed the car into a small space near the Kottbusser Tor, then pressed a neatly trimmed, false moustache onto his upper lip, using a mirror from the glove locker to ensure it was straight. He slipped on heavy-rimmed spectacles then set off on foot.

  This was a quarter for night creatures, the air scented with Dener.

  kebabs. Bars stayed open here until dawn and between open sites razed for redevelopment, tenements were homes for squatters and refugees.

  A little further, and the cafes were interspersed with galleries and craft stores. He pushed on the door of a small shop with easels in the window.