Bosnian Inferno Read online

  So far, though, he could detect no signs that it had. And maybe it was the presence of Docherty, but he could feel all the old excitement at setting out on an operation. Hell, he thought, Docherty got the woman in Argentina – this time it’s my turn. Hajrija, you’re going to be mine, he silently told her back, and at that moment, right on cue, she turned her head to give him a quick smile. Razor thought how much he’d like to see her in sunshine, with considerably fewer articles of clothing on.

  Towards the rear of the column, the Dame was enjoying the darkness. He had always preferred the city to the country, and the sort of vast terrain which made many people gasp with wonder tended to make him feel uneasy. It was all too much, somehow. It was so fucking eternal. He preferred not to have to look at it.

  He thought about the other night, and the two men he’d killed beneath the high-rise. They’d never know who won this war, never know anything more. They wouldn’t catch Bosnia’s first appearance on the fucking Eurovision Song Contest. Life had just ended for them – just like that.

  But where were they now? It was hard to imagine those men in heaven, but he doubted if they’d done anything bad enough to warrant endless torture by fire.

  At the Holiday Inn he’d come across a guide to Yugoslavia, and one of the bits he’d read had been about a place called Medugorje, which was fifty miles or so to the south. In 1981 six of the village’s teenagers had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the place had suddenly become a place of pilgrimage, not to mention a tourist attraction.

  The Dame found it hard to believe that anyone had seen such an apparition, but then it wasn’t much easier believing six kids from a dirt-poor village had conspired to make the whole story up. And apparently the apparitions had continued on a regular basis, usually on Mondays and Fridays.

  He had laughed when he read that – it seemed such bullshit – but then it occurred to him that if there were no apparitions then why had none of the thousands of witnesses not blown the whistle on it all, and exposed the whole business as a fucking rip-off? Maybe it wasn’t, or maybe they were all so desperate to see something that they had. Maybe that’s what faith was, a sort of desperation. He could understand that. He knew death wasn’t the end of everything – it couldn’t be, or what was the point? There had to be a reckoning, a time to answer for what you had done. There had to be somewhere to wipe yourself clean.

  The path led them slowly but remorselessly upwards, winding around the rims of indentations in the mountainside, passing through large stands of conifers that clung to the slopes. The snow was deeper the higher they went, and the trail they left became ever more marked. The good news was that no one else had used this path lately, or at least not since the last snowfall two days before.

  About two hours into their journey Docherty and Hadzic agreed to call a halt. The column was now only some two hundred feet from the ridge top, and the two leaders thought it prudent to send scouts forward to check the situation. Chris and Kaltak were dispatched.

  They returned less than fifteen minutes later with some welcome intelligence. Each Serb gun emplacement was obviously allowed a fire for cooking and warmth just behind the ridge top, out of sight of the city below. The two nearest fires were a couple of hundred yards to the west of their path, and rather more than that to the east. They should have no trouble slipping through.

  The march resumed, with Chris out in front as lead scout. Five minutes later they crested the rise, and crossed what was obviously a much-used path along the top of the ridge. To left and right each of them could see the line of fires stretching into the distance. Ahead and below there was nothing but the ghostly light of the snow-covered slope falling away into darkness.

  They worked their way down it, using what looked like a snowed-over stream bed to make their tracks less obvious, and eventually reached the trees. This side of the mountain, unlike the slopes looking down on Sarajevo, was mostly covered in forest, and their hopes were high that they could find a suitable observation point overlooking Vogosca without leaving the shelter of the trees.

  It was almost two in the morning when they gave up any idea of finding such a spot. There just wasn’t enough light. They were relying on the Bosnians’ knowledge rather than eyesight to gauge where the small town was, and there was no way of judging what would be visible when daylight came. It was decided to make camp deep in the trees, and send a two-man team forward to set up an observation post just before dawn.

  For the moment the SAS men concentrated on seeking out and enlarging spaces beneath the lower branches of conifers where snow had built up around them, leaving a pocket of air beneath. The Bosnians watched with initial astonishment as the SAS men dug into the snow beneath the spreading branches on the lee side of the trees, and unearthed these living quarters.

  ‘Where do you learn this?’ Hajrija asked Razor. ‘There is no snow in England.’

  ‘Norway,’ he said. ‘NATO exercises.’

  An hour later two buttressed snow caves had been excavated, complete with removable doors. There were too many tracks for the hides to be completely secure, but they would only have to remain undetected for the nine or so hours of daylight.

  There remained the matter of choosing the recce team. Hadzic picked Hajrija, and Docherty named Razor, repressing a smile as he did so. ‘You know what we want,’ he told his second in command. ‘We’ll see you at dusk. Be good,’ he added in parting.

  She seemed pleased it was him, Razor thought, as they made their way back down through the trees, aiming for the spot which their map had suggested would be the most promising. Walking down, he couldn’t remember ever being in a darker place: the thick cloud cover, and lack of any moon, gave the snow nothing to reflect. The PNGs enabled them to avoid trees, but not much more, and he had to rely on all his dead-reckoning skills. Even then, once they had reached what he gauged was the correct location, there was nothing much to reinforce the supposition. Ahead of them the trees gave way to nothing but blackness; they could be staring out across the hollow which held Vogosca, or just gazing into an empty meadow. Only the dawn would tell.

  It was still something between ten and twenty minutes away, so Razor suggested they use the time digging out the blocks of frozen snow they would need to cover the observation trench. Hajrija agreed and, following his example, used the spade to cut out blocks of snow half a yard square and roughly four inches thick. Once they had a dozen, Razor called a halt.

  The faintest glimmer of light was now showing in the eastern sky, and they both squatted on their haunches watching the blackness in front of them slowly fade into browns, and the scene gradually swim into focus. It was the town, and their positioning was almost perfect. Razor selected a sight some ten yards to their left and just inside the line of trees, which gave them an overall view of not only the town but both major access roads, and started furiously digging their trench.

  Hajrija carried the thick snow tiles across and then helped with the digging. Ten minutes later, with sweat running freely inside their winter clothing, they had a trench about eight feet long and about two and a half feet wide. Razor used the spade to cut a ledge along both sides just below the upper lip, and between them they balanced pairs of snow tiles against one another to make their roof. Once this was completed they used loose snow from the drifts beneath the trees to smooth out the angular outline of the structure and disguise its rectangular shape. Only twenty minutes had passed since first light when they took up residence, lying closely together side by side, their eyes looking out through the observation slit. The trench was designed to sleep one while the other observed, but both were too interested in what lay below for either to countenance sleep.

  It was growing light enough now to pick out details. To their left the main road from Sarajevo swung down from the mountain, entering the town between two lines of dwellings and emerging on the far side before swiftly dropping from sight into an unseen valley. What looked like no more than a dirt track wound up into the hills to t
he east, beyond the river which ran down through the heart of the town.

  This had no more than two hundred buildings, sprinkled apparently at random around the church in the centre. The only signs of socialist-style construction were two four-storey blocks on the western edge of town and a long, single-storey building on the road leading in down the mountain. That had to be the Sonja Motel, where the women were taken.

  The Partisan Sports Hall was easy to spot: a large, almost windowless structure on the far side of the town, rising out of a complex between the river and the main road. So far, Razor thought, reality matched their map.

  He started a more thorough search with the binoculars, and found his first signs of life, a soldier walking from the motel towards one of the last houses on the road out of town. There seemed to be a few upright chairs under a tree by the road. By day it had to be a checkpoint, he decided.

  He trained the binoculars on the road beyond the town and found another, but the dirt track leading up to the right didn’t warrant one. The Serbs here weren’t expecting any trouble, he thought.

  ‘More men,’ Hajrija whispered by his side.

  Razor followed the direction of her East German binoculars, down to where several men were gathering in the forecourt of the Sonja Motel. The faint sound of an engine starting drifted up from the town, and a dormobile emerged into view from under the overhang of the motel’s roof. The men all climbed aboard, and the vehicle moved out on to the road, turning left, away from the centre of the town. At the checkpoint it slowed, and then accelerated away up the hill.

  ‘The day-shift gunners,’ Razor thought out loud. He turned to Hajrija, whose face was uncomfortably close. Her breath smelt faintly of the plum brandy they had all imbibed after completing the shelters back in the forest. Her eyes were dull with fatigue. ‘Do you want to sleep first?’ he asked.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you wake me, yes?’

  Razor looked at his watch. ‘It will get dark around five,’ he said. ‘I’ll wake you at twelve-thirty.’

  ‘OK,’ she said again, yawning.

  He listened to her struggle her way into the sleeping bag in the confined space, and then her breathing in the silence. Just when he thought she was asleep, the words ‘you make a nice house’ emerged faintly from out of the darkness.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and smiled to himself.

  The next four and a half hours he spent struggling to stay awake and alert, and noting down everything that happened in the town below, adding detail to their map. The amount of military traffic did not seem high, and seemed to consist mostly of men returning from or setting out for the Serb positions in the hills above Sarajevo. The exceptions were one lorryload of uniformed troops which arrived from somewhere down the valley and two cars carrying irregulars sporting broad-brimmed hats. Chetniks, Razor guessed, though one brief glimpse was not enough to ascertain whether they wore long beards. Like everyone else they disappeared into the Sonja Motel, which seemed to function as the local barracks.

  As for the Partisan Sports Hall, there seemed to be no movement around it at all, and Razor began to wonder whether the women held there had been moved in the week since their informants’ release. He could see no sign of guards, but with any luck they were positioned out of sight on the far side of the building. The thought of this mission coming up empty left a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  At twelve-thirty he shook Hajrija by the ankle, eliciting what sounded suspiciously like a Serbo-Croat curse. She emerged by his side a few minutes later, bleary-eyed and beautiful.

  He concentrated on the job in hand, listing what he’d seen, and sharing his anxiety about the Sports Hall. Her face fell as he did so, but the disappointment quickly turned to anger, and another indecipherable curse escaped her lips as she ran a hand angrily through her tangled hair.

  ‘One day you must tell me what that means,’ Razor said.

  She shook her head, ran the other hand through her hair, and managed a faint smile. ‘One day maybe,’ she said, ‘now you go sleep.’

  ‘Gladly,’ Razor said. He backed himself into the trench, found his way into the sleeping bag, and the next thing he knew she was tugging on his ankle and whispering that it was five o’clock. He lay there for a few seconds wondering where the light had gone and why he still felt dog-tired.

  Hajrija’s smile of welcome made him feel better for an instant, until he made out the change in the outside world. For the first time since their arrival in Sarajevo the sky was clearing, and the last vestiges of a visible sun were glowing orange above the mountains to the west. ‘Shit,’ he said succinctly.

  ‘It works for us too,’ she said.

  ‘We have PNGs,’ Razor said.

  ‘The women have not. I think it will be more easy to get them away from there if there is some light.’

  She had a point. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Razor agreed, ‘but we don’t even know if they are still here.’

  ‘Some are,’ she said. ‘Take a look.’

  He trained the binoculars on the area of the Sports Hall. A couple of streetlights burned in the growing gloom, and just to one side of them was…a bus.

  ‘Ten women come in the bus,’ Hajrija said. ‘About one hour now. Two men come out and take them into the hall.’

  ‘I suppose that’s good news,’ Razor said, aware of the irony.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in the same tone.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What are we going to recommend here? What’s the best way in and the best way out?’

  ‘The river to go in,’ she said. ‘But out – we not know how many people or where we are going. If there are thirty women…’

  ‘We shall need the bus,’ Razor completed the thought. ‘And I agree, the river is the best way in. How much longer do you think we should stay here?’

  ‘Thirty minutes? It will be all dark then.’

  ‘Yeah, and it’ll give us a chance to see what the lighting’s like down there,’ said Razor.

  They both watched in silence for the next few minutes.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked out of the blue.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’

  He asked a question that he’d been wanting to ask.

  ‘That American journalist Bailey – was he…more than a friend?’

  ‘You mean, do I sleep with him?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘No. I mean, were you in love with him?’

  ‘Oh no. But I like him. He is – was,’ she corrected herself, ‘a nice man. He has innocence, you know?’

  So had she slept with him, Razor wondered. He decided to change the subject. ‘How did you get involved?’ he asked. ‘In the Army, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, that is an easy story,’ she said. ‘I am a student of journalism, and it seems more important to fight for what I believe than write it down.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘My boyfriend does not think so,’ she said. ‘He say it is crazy for a woman to do this. I tell him “fuck off”.’

  ‘Does he?’ Razor asked.

  She laughed. ‘Who knows? I do not see for a long time. But why I am in the unit, I see children killed in the street and I know I want to fight the bastards who do this.’

  ‘And the men accepted you?’

  She grimaced. ‘Not at the beginning. But slowly, yes, they realize I can run as good and walk as good and shoot better than any of them. They learn now, I think. I am just one of the boys,’ she added sarcastically.

  Razor found it hard to take that thought seriously. She might be a better soldier than any of them, but a boy she certainly wasn’t.

  Half a mile away Docherty was wondering why it seemed harder to sleep when you were older and needed it more. Or at least felt like you did. All these young men he was surrounded by hardly seemed in need of energy conservation, yet they slept like bairns.

  He hoped it hadn’t been a mistake sending Razor with the woman. The two of them obviously had something brewing betwe
en them, whether they knew it or not, and on the spur of the moment he had felt like indulging a romantic whim. Hardly appropriate in retrospect, and he hoped the two of them had risen above the temptation he had wilfully put their way.

  Still, something inside him remained unrepentant. The business of being a soldier often involved putting the business of being a human on hold, but there was something about this war and this op, he felt, which made it more important than usual to keep the two men inside him tied closely together. If the human being slowed the soldier down then that was too bad.

  As his favourite strategist Liddell Hart had been fond of pointing out, it didn’t help to win the war if you lost the peace. And whether Liddell Hart had meant it or not, Docherty had always believed that any decent peace must include the soldier’s peace of mind.

  It was almost fully dark now, or at least as dark as it was going to get. Docherty pulled himself out through the narrow exit and on to the snow-covered forest floor. As he expected, the patch of sky visible between the treetops showed stars – the sky had cleared during the day. To his left the light seemed brighter, and he walked across to find a clearing no more than thirty yards from their hides. Here a few clouds could be seen scudding across the sky, and the stars seemed as bright as they ever did at this altitude. Deneb flickered like a roseate diamond to the north, and directly above the clearing the Milky Way looked like a jewelled scarf that someone had tossed into the air.

  Docherty stood there, revelling in the wonder of it all, thinking about Isabel. She’d be giving the kids their tea about now, and then maybe watching the news while they shared a bath. He could see the kids in his mind’s eye, splashing water over each other.

  He walked back down to the hides, grateful that they wouldn’t be needing the wretched PNGs that night. If the clouds were anything to go by there’d be a stiff breeze blowing out there in the open, and that would make it that much easier to reach their target undetected. In Docherty’s experience it was more often sound than sight which gave an attacker away.