Bosnian Inferno

‘I counted twenty-seven, so far. One transit van and three cars, all jammed full.’

‘Let’s go,’ Reeve said. He stopped in the doorway. ‘No partisan heroics,’ he told his seventy-year-old father-in-law. ‘If it looks like we’ve failed, just take the kids and head for Zilovice.’

The old man nodded. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

The four men emerged into the early dusk, the town of Zavik spread beneath them. The sun had fallen behind the far wall of the valley, but the light it had left behind cast a meagre glow across the steep, terracotta-tiled roofs. The thought of the kids and their grandparents struggling up the mountain behind the town produced a sinking feeling in Reeve’s stomach.

At least it was summer. A light breeze was blowing down the valley but the day’s heat still clung to the narrow streets. In the distance they could hear a man shouting through a megaphone.

‘They are all in the town square,’ Cehajic told Reeve.

‘How many townspeople have gone over to them?’

‘The five who disappeared this morning, but no more that we know of.’

They were only about a hundred yards from the square now, and Reeve led them down the darker side of the street in single file. The voice grew louder, more hectoring. The leader of the intruders was demanding that all weapons and cars be brought to the square immediately, and that anyone found defying this order would have their house burnt to the ground.

Reeve smiled grimly at the reference to weapons. As far as he knew there had been only about seven working guns in the town before the Serbs arrived, and his group was carrying five of them. Two others were in the hands of Muslim ex-partisans like his father-in-law, and they intended defending their own homes and families to the death.

The five men reached the rear of the building earmarked for their observation post, and filed in across the yard and up the rickety steps at the back. The old couple who lived there waved them through to the front room, where latticed windows overlooked the town square. Once this room would have housed a harem, and its windows had been designed so that the women could look out without being seen. As such, they served Reeve’s current purpose admirably.

Several hundred people were gathered in the square, most of them looking up at the man with the megaphone, who was standing on the roof of the transit van. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses and camouflage fatigues. A long, straggly beard hung down his chest.

On the ground in front of him two bodies lay side by side. Reeve recognized one as the town’s mayor, a Muslim named Sulejman. The other looked like his brother.

Across to one side of the square, in front of the Catholic church, the irregulars’ cars were parked in a line. All were Lada Nivas, and one had the word ‘massacre’ spray-painted along its side. Some of the invaders were leaning up against these cars, while others stood between them and the transit van, staring contemptuously at the crowd. Most were dressed like their apparent leader, though a couple had nylon stockings pulled bank-robber-style across their heads, and several were sporting Chetnik ‘Freedom or Death’ T-shirts, the words interwoven through skull and cross-bones.

Their leader had finished addressing the crowd, and was now talking to one of his cronies. Both men glanced across at the two corpses on the ground and then called over one of the men wearing a nylon mask. ‘It’s Cosic,’ Tijanic said, recognizing the local man by his walk.

The man listened to the irregulars’ leader and then pointed to one of the streets leading off the square.

‘He’s telling them where Sulejman lived,’ Reeve said. He turned to Filipovic. ‘You keep watch. One of us will be back as soon as we can.’

The other four hurried back through the house, down the steps and into the empty street. Sulejman’s house was halfway up the hill to the ruined castle, and they reached it in minutes.

The big house was deserted – either Sulejman had had the sense to move his family away, or they had witnessed his death in the square. Reeve and his men walked in through the unlocked front door and took up positions behind the colonnaded partition between hallway and living-room.

The Serbs arrived about five minutes later. There were three of them, and they sounded in a good mood, laughing and singing as they kicked their way in through the door. Several were now carrying open bottles, and not much caring how much they slopped on the floor.

‘I expect the women are hiding upstairs,’ one man said.

‘Come on down, darlings!’ another shouted out.

Reeve and the others stepped out together, firing the Kalashnikovs from the hip, and the three Serbs did a frantic dance of death as their bottles smashed on the wooden floor.

Tijanic walked forward and extracted the weapons from their grasp. ‘I’ll get these to Zukic and his boys,’ he said.

‘Three down,’ Reeve said. ‘Twenty-four to go.’

1 (#uc566587f-f47b-55da-a7c2-242ef5bb2108)

‘Daddy, help me!’ Marie insisted.

Her plea brought Jamie Docherty’s attention back to the matter in hand. His six-year-old daughter was busy trying to wrap up the present she had chosen for her younger brother, and in danger of completely immobilizing herself in holly-patterned sticky tape.

‘OK,’ he said, smiling at her and beginning the task of disentanglement. His mind had been on his wife, who at that moment was upstairs going through the same process with four-year-old Ricardo. Christmas was never a good time for Isabel, or at least not for the past eighteen years. She had spent the 1975 festive season incarcerated in the cells and torture chambers of the Naval Mechanical School outside Buenos Aires, and though the physical scars had almost faded, the mental ones still came back to haunt her.

His mind went back to their first meeting, in the hotel lobby in Rio Gallegos. It had been at the height of the Falklands War, on the evening of the day the troops went ashore at San Carlos. He had been leading an SAS intelligence-gathering patrol on Argentinian soil, and she had been a British agent, drawn to betray her country by hatred of the junta which had killed and tortured her friends, and driven her into exile. Together they had fought and driven and walked their way across the mountains to Chile.

More than ten years had passed since that day, and they had been married for almost as long. At first Docherty had thought that their mutual love had exorcized her memories, as it had exorcized his pain at the sudden loss of his first wife, but gradually it had become clear to him that, much as she loved him and the children, something inside her had been damaged beyond repair. Most of the time she could turn it off, but she would never be free of the memories, or of what she had learned of what human beings could do to one another.

Docherty had talked to his old friend Liam McCall about it; he had even, unknown to Isabel, had several conversations with the SAS’s resident counsellor. Both the retired priest and his secular colleague had told him that talking about it might help, but that he had to accept that some wounds never healed.

He had tried talking to her. After all, he had told himself, he had seen enough of death and cruelty in his army career: from Oman to Guatemala to the Falls Road. That wasn’t the same, she’d said. Nature was full of death and what looked like cruelty. What she had seen was something altogether more human – the face of evil. And he had not, and she hoped he never would.

Somehow this had created a distance between them. Not a rift – there was no conflict involved – but a distance. He felt that he had failed her in some way. That was ridiculous, and he knew it. But still he felt it.

‘Daddy!’ Marie cried out in exasperation. ‘Pay attention!’

Docherty grinned at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about Mummy,’ he explained.

His daughter considered this, her blue eyes looking as extraordinary as ever against the rich skin tone she’d inherited from her mother. ‘You can think about her when I’ve gone to bed,’ Marie decided.

‘Right,’ Docherty agreed, and for the next ten minutes he gave her his full attention, completing the wrapping of Ricardo’s present and conferring parental approval on Marie’s suggested alterations to his positioning of the silver balls and tinsel on the tree. And then it was bedtime, and his turn to read to Ricardo. When he had finished he stood for a moment in the doorway to Marie’s room, listening to Isabel reading, the bedside lamp making a corona around his wife’s dark head as she bent over the book.

He walked downstairs, blessing his luck for finding her. Few men, he reckoned, found one such woman in their lives, and he had found two. True, with both there had been a price. Chrissie had been killed in a road accident only months after their marriage, sending him into a downward spiral of drunkenness and self-pity which had almost cost him his career and self-respect. Like Margaret Thatcher, he had been saved by the Falklands War, and in the middle of that conflict fate had led him to Isabel, who came complete with a hurt he longed in vain to heal. But he wasn’t complaining – now, at the grand old age of forty-two, Jamie Docherty would not have swapped places with any man.

He went through to the kitchen, opened a can of beer and poured it into the half-pint mug he had liberated from an officers’ mess in Dhofar nearly twenty years before.

‘How about one for me?’ Isabel asked him from the doorway, a smile on her face.

He smiled back and reached for another can.

She sat down on the other side of the kitchen table, and they shared the silence for a few moments. Her smile had gone, he noticed.

‘What is worrying you?’ she asked suddenly.

You, he thought. ‘Nothing really,’ he said, ‘maybe the future. I’ve never been retired before. It’s a strange feeling.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Let’s face it, we haven’t even decided which continent we’re going to live in.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ she said. ‘Let’s get Christmas out of the way first.’ She put down her half-empty glass. ‘You still want fish and chips?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I’ll go and get them.’

‘You stay with the children. I feel like some fresh air.’

And some time on your own, Docherty thought. ‘You sure?’ he asked.

‘Sí, noes problema.’