Kara’s Game

‘3216, you are cleared to land.’

There was a slight delay.

‘Thank you, Heathrow Tower.’ Not the captain this time.

It’s not the critic who counts … she remembered the words he had quoted at her, remembered again the corridor of the hospital. The doctors white with exhaustion, the nurses dropping with fatigue, and the United Nations still doing nothing to stop the shells falling on them. It’s not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better …

‘I can see Lufthansa 3216 …’ The radio reporter had slipped through the police cordon and was standing on Westminster Bridge. ‘Lufthansa 3216 is coming up the Thames towards me …’ The Boeing was suddenly in shot on the pictures from Parliament Square, suddenly approaching Westminster. Passing over Parliament and framed for one incredible moment between Big Ben and the Churchill statue.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, he had told her … Who strives valiantly and spends himself in a worthy cause … Who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly …

What had he said the motto was?

Who Dares Wins.

Finn left the building and stood on the tarmac looking east. Heathrow was like a ghost around him, the skies and runways empty.

So what are you really thinking, Finn?

You know what I’m thinking.

Tell me anyway.

I’m thinking about a winter night behind the lines in Bosnia. I’m thinking about how the United Nations blew Kev and Geordie John to Kingdom Come that night. How Janner and Max only survived because someone who didn’t know them risked everything to save them, even though she didn’t have to. I’m thinking about how I told her that I owed, that the regiment owed, and that none of us would ever forget. Because if you can’t help those who help you and yours, then who can you help? If you can’t be loyal to those who are loyal to you and yours, then who or what the hell can you be loyal to?

In the sky to the east he saw the first flash from the wing lights of the Boeing.

But that’s not all you’re thinking, is it, Finn?

No, it’s not all I’m thinking.

So what else, Finn?

I’m thinking about the other thing I said to her that night. About how I told her that the West would never help her people unless her people had something the West wanted. I’m thinking about what I said her people should do next time the United Nations let them down.

But there’s something else, isn’t there, Finn?

Okay, there’s something else.

So what is it, Finn?

You want to know? You really want to know?

Yeah, Finn. I really want to know.

I’m thinking that it’s her on Lufthansa 3216. Except it can’t be her, because she’s dead. But the hijacker on Lufthansa 3216 is doing exactly what I told her to do.

The Boeing was over the outer marker, over the approach lights. Next time the UN lets your people down, he’d told her …

The Boeing was over the lead-in lights, over the runway threshold. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, he’d said …

The tyres thumped on the tarmac. As long as the cause was a worthy cause, and the journey was just and right …

Hers was a worthy cause, which was why he’d told her. Hers was a just and righteous journey, otherwise he would not have set her upon it. Time to do it, she thought, time to take it to the last stage. Time to do what he’d told her, the way he’d told her. Change it all, he’d said; change the rules, the game, change everything.

Kara’s Rules. Kara’s Game.

Thanks, Finn.

Book One (#ulink_7ac0035b-2dad-5d08-bd26-65368ddfa141)

Bosnia … ten months earlier January 1994 (#ulink_7ac0035b-2dad-5d08-bd26-65368ddfa141)

1 (#ulink_ff749899-2010-543f-8273-1118f8c4ca40)

The bridge was the problem. Because that was where the snipers were waiting for you. And you had to cross because you were on one side and the food was on the other.

Please God, may they not be waiting today. Please God, may they not get me. Because today my husband is on the front line, and because he’s on the front line, probably only three hundred metres from the bridge, he cannot go for the food while I look after our son. Therefore I have to go, even though the food will only be a bowl of beans and a slice of dry bread. I cannot wait because my son has not eaten for two days and is crying with the pain. Because we have been under siege since August, and now it’s January. And the nights are long and dark and the days are so cold I sometimes think I’m going to die, and the shells have been falling on my dear sweet pretty little town for as long as I can remember. Therefore I have to go for food. But because my husband is on the front line, waiting for the next attack, there is no one to look after my son. So I have to take my precious little Jovan with me. Because unless he eats soon he will die. But in trying to reach the food the two of us might die anyway.

Therefore, when I reach the bridge and begin to run across it, I will pray that the sniper who killed old man Samir yesterday and little Lejla the day before, is looking the other way, or moving position as the snipers do, or warming his fingers round a mug of hot coffee, or glancing up and downing a slivovic.

Therefore when I begin to run across the bridge I will hold my little Jovan in my left arm, so that my body will be between him and the sniper. And when I try to make it back across the bridge I will hold Jovan on my right, so that I am again between him and the sniper. Please God, protect me. Please God, may the shells not fall again until I and my little son are safely home.

Dear God, why did you decree that I should be born a Bosnian? Dear God, why have you allowed the warmongers to tear my country and my people apart? Dear God, why have you decreed that the governments of the world do nothing; that the United Nations should stand back and allow this carnage?

She made sure the coat was wrapped tightly round the boy, that his gloves were on his hands and the scarf round his head, and pulled on her own coat and boots. Even though it was mid-morning the room was dark – just the glimmer from the makeshift candle on the table. They had lived in the semi-basement since the siege had started and the shells had begun falling. At first, and in the heat of summer, herself and Adin in the double bed and Jovan in his next to them. Now, in the cold, the three of them slept together. When Adin was not on the front line defending the town. Two days at the front and one off – that was the way the men fought now. Not just the soldiers but everyone. Sometimes she woke at night – when, that was, she was able to sleep – and imagined him staring into the black, the wire to the land mines clutched in his hand for the moment the enemy tried to storm the town.

She opened the door and checked outside. The snow was frozen hard, the sky was a deep grey, and the sound of small-arms fire rattled in the distance, at the head of the valley where the men were positioned. It was the usual pattern – shelling for an hour as the winter night broke into day, a handful of shells in the middle of the few hours of light, then a last barrage as the light left them. Always the snipers in the middle, though, like the tripwires in no man’s land.

She lifted the boy in her arms, picked up the tin pan and lid, went outside, and closed the door. There was one other person in what had once been a street, scurrying as she herself was already scurrying, scarf wrapped round her head and tin container clutched in her hand. She nodded at the other woman and hurried after her, feet slipping on the ice and the air almost freezing her lungs.

The boy’s face was already white with cold, and the houses around her were shell-damaged and wasted. Some families had moved, of course: across the bridge to the new town, but the new town was already packed with refugees.

Maglaj – pronounced Maglai – was nestled on either side of the river which had once flowed gently down the valley between the pine-covered hills rising to the west, north and east. Across the bridge, on the west side, was the new town with the shops and the school. On the east was the old quarter, its streets narrow and winding, the minaret of the mosque rising above the red-tiled roofs, and the cluster of more modern houses in the trees beyond.

She and Adin had come here eight years ago, after they both graduated from the University of Sarajevo, she in languages and he in chemistry. Until the conflict he had worked in the paper factory, just down the valley to the south of the new town, and she had taught in the school, on the northern edge. For three years they had dreamed of the day they would have a child, had almost despaired. Even now she remembered the morning the doctor had told her she was pregnant, even now she remembered how she had left school early and gone to the paper factory because she could not wait till evening for Adin to know.

The small-arms fire stopped, abruptly and without warning, and she froze, knew that the shelling was about to descend on them again, that she’d got it wrong. The rattle began again and she hurried on, her feet slipping on the ice which covered the bricks and the rubble, till she came to the last group of houses before the bridge.

The river was some seventy metres wide, and the bridge which spanned it rose slightly in the centre, so that from where she now stood she couldn’t see the other end. The people were huddled in a line in the shelter of the wall, thin and tired and cold like herself. Only one other with a child, and all carrying shiny tin pots with the lids firmly on.

She held the boy against her and stood at the end.

‘Sniper?’ she asked.

‘Sniper,’ the man at the front nodded. He was rocking backwards and forwards, as if gathering momentum, as if winding up his courage. As if the fraction of a second he would save when he launched himself from the cover of the building would save his life.

Don’t worry, she whispered to Jovan, soon we’ll have food.