Bosnian Inferno Read online

  Docherty leaned his head back against the plane’s metal skin and closed his eyes, his mind reaching forward towards their arrival in the Bosnian capital. What would it be like? Would they find Nena Reeve? And if they did, would she agree to come with them?

  He wondered again if this chosen course of action hadn’t been a mistake. A C-130 like this one could have dropped the four of them within easy reach of Zavik. Granted, they would never have got clearance for a flight out of Split, but these planes had a range of close on 3000 miles. The whole mission could have been mounted from the UK.

  Too much chance of political hassle, perhaps. And there was always a lot to be said for a thorough acclimatization. The town of Zavik, the immediate vicinity, the military situation in the area – all were complete unknowns. The chances of dropping a team into the heart of a battle zone might not be high, but it hardly seemed a risk worth taking.

  Against that, they now had to countenance a landing in Sarajevo and an overland odyssey to Zavik. If the latest reports were correct then most of the journey would be through Muslim-held territory, but even with snow on the ground the military situation seemed alarmingly fluid. If all four of them came through this without a serious scratch, Docherty thought to himself, then he’d retire once more a happy man.

  He glanced round at the other three. Chris was sitting opposite him, squinting in the dim light at the book he was studying – Birds of Southern Europe. His face even seemed relaxed when he was concentrating, which boded well. Already, after knowing the man less than forty-eight hours, Docherty had almost complete confidence in him.

  The Dame was another matter. He had stopped reading his novel – some thriller about submarines – and was staring blankly into space. His expression was usually as serene as Chris’s, but the similarity, Docherty thought, was at least partly superficial. Both men seemed supremely self-sufficient – most SAS men were – but Docherty sensed that for Chris there was little or no struggle involved in the process. The Wearsider, by contrast, had mastered the art of retreating into himself, and of functioning effectively in the world outside, but the self he retreated into seemed a troubled one.

  Which might bode ill for the patrol as a whole, or might have no effect whatsoever on the way the Dame handled himself. But it was something worth watching out for, that was certain. Like any decent football team, an SAS patrol had to grow into more than the sum of its parts. And it was up to the PC, the Patrol Commander, to make sure it did. He need not have been trained as a clinical psychiatrist, but he did need some idea of how to read other men.

  ‘How much longer, boss?’ Razor asked.

  Docherty looked at his watch. ‘Pilot said fifty-odd minutes, and we’ve been airborne forty-one. They’ll tell us when they come to make sure we’re strapped in.’

  ‘It’s that bad, is it, this Khe Sanh business?’

  ‘No worse than taking off in the Space Shuttle, so I’m told.’

  ‘Christ. Still, whatever it is, it’ll beat being dropped in the fucking sea.’

  Docherty smiled, remembering the look of blissful relief on Razor’s face when, ten years before, the boat had picked him out of the Atlantic swell. On that mission the Londoner had spent much of his time thinking up ‘mixed proverbs’; ‘time waits for an old fool’ had been Docherty’s personal favourite. Razor still seemed full of jokes, but there was something else there now, something more sombre underneath. Maybe he was just growing up, in the best sense of the phrase. He’d certainly lost none of his sharpness – the switch into Spanish in the restaurant had been brilliant…

  ‘Time to make your wills, gentlemen,’ the pilot said, appearing between the rows of crated foodstuffs. ‘Are you all strapped in like good lads? We don’t want you flying around inside the plane getting blood on everything. Good.’ He turned to go. ‘We’ll be on the ground in about five minutes,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘one way or another.’

  ‘I love the fucking RAF,’ Razor growled.

  ‘Don’t be surprised if the bottom of your stomach starts pressing up against the top of your head,’ Docherty told them, and the words were hardly out of his mouth before they came true. With a gut-wrenching suddenness the plane seemed to stop flying and start falling, as if a wing had snapped off or all four engines had chosen the same moment to die. Within seconds the SAS men could feel the pull of gravity weaken, and what Docherty could only describe as a breathlessness inside his head. So this is what space travel is like, he thought, and then, just as his body was adapting to its presence within a plummeting shell, the plane seemed to rear up like a bucking bronco, dropping his stomach down to his feet. For what seemed like a very long couple of seconds he felt on the verge of blacking out.

  The brakes slammed on, and with a great jolt the wheels hit the runway. A few moments later they were taxiing along at a speed which would have had them arrested for speeding on the M40, the Hercules seemingly on the verge of shaking itself into a heap of scrap metal.

  From outside the plane there was the sound of a loud blast in the distance. And then another, much closer.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Welcome to Bosnia,’ Razor said.

  For another two or three minutes they sat in the belly of the taxiing plane, the sounds of shell fire audible above the noise of their passage. They had no way of seeing out, no real idea of how close the shells were landing, and there was nothing they could have done about it anyway.

  ‘Everyone OK?’ Docherty asked. He felt like he’d been picked up by a giant and given a thorough shaking.

  They all said they were.

  The Hercules rumbled to a standstill, and the pilot’s head popped up between the line of crates. ‘Journey’s end,’ he announced, in what for him seemed an almost funereal tone. ‘I don’t suppose you lads feel like helping us unload this beauty,’ he said, setting in motion the slow descent of the tail ramp.

  ‘Sorry, prior commitments,’ Docherty said drily, as he watched the wall of an airport building coming into view. The ground had only a light covering of snow, but shovelled mounds of the stuff offered evidence of previous falls. The air seemed as damp as it did cold.

  ‘That’s the international arrivals door,’ the RAF man said sardonically, pointing out a single red door marked ‘No Exit’ in English.

  ‘Thanks for the ride,’ Docherty said, and led the other three down the ramp. Once clear of the plane he could see, across the tarmac, the control tower with all of its windows boarded up. On both sides of the airfield slopes seemed to climb steeply away from the valley, their heights lost in cloud. It might have been one of the South Wales valleys on a bad day, if not for the occasional thump of artillery fire.

  They were halfway to the building when two UN soldiers emerged from it, demanding in rapid-fire French to see their identification. Docherty produced the UN accreditations. The two soldiers inspected each SAS man’s face with a thoroughness which any beautician would have envied, and then allowed them to pass.

  Inside the building they found a vast expanse of floor littered with broken glass and spent cartridge cases, and another UN soldier hurrying across the debris to meet them, plastic bag in hand, as if he was on his way home from the shops. ‘Sergeant Docherty?’ he asked tersely, while he was still some ten yards away.

  Docherty nodded. The officer was a Brit, a major in the Cheshires. He was wearing a flak-jacket under his greatcoat.

  ‘Good. My name’s Brindley.’ He looked round the vast building. ‘I’m just here to escort you to your hotel. Strictly against UN rules, but what the hell. Here’ – he delved into the plastic bag and pulled out four pale-blue berets – ‘just for the trip. We’ll have to pass through a few checkpoints, and it’s always better if they think they know who you are.’ He looked round at them. ‘OK. Let’s go. The earlier in the day you make this ride the better it usually is. Most of the snipers seem to sleep until mid-morning.’

  Chris and the Dame raised their eyebrows at each other.

  In
what had once been an elegant semicircular forecourt yet another jeep was waiting for them. This one was armoured, more like the vehicles they’d all used at various times in Northern Ireland. The level of respect accorded the UN was apparent in the line of bullet scars which stretched across the two large letters on the jeep’s flank.

  ‘Tighten your safety belts,’ Brindley advised. ‘And let me do the talking at the checkpoints.’

  They started off at a steady twenty-five miles per hour, with Major Brindley carefully negotiating the threefold problem of treacherous winter conditions, potholes and shell craters. Visibility seemed to be getting worse rather than better as the morning advanced, which Docherty supposed was good news. Nevertheless he felt an absurd pang of regret at being denied a better view of the countryside surrounding the city.

  They reached the first checkpoint within five minutes. It was manned by several Serbs in uniform, one of whom seemed on friendly terms with Brindley.

  ‘Yugoslav National Army uniforms,’ the major explained as they drove on. ‘They’re the most disciplined of the Serb forces. By a long way,’ he added as an afterthought.

  The next checkpoint was also manned by Serbs, but here only one was in uniform, and though he was clearly in charge, and coldly courteous in his examination of their credentials, the SAS men were more struck by the demeanour of the irregulars behind him. On their faces an overweening contempt was not masked by any obvious sign of intelligence. This, Docherty thought, was the rural version of the black-uniformed thugs they had seen in the Split restaurant.

  ‘See that?’ Brindley gestured with his head.

  The SAS men craned their necks. ‘Welcome to Hell’ the sign by the side of the road read in bloody red letters.

  ‘“Murder Mile” begins around that corner,’ Brindley went on conversationally, pointing ahead. ‘Though I doubt if we’ll have any trouble this morning.’

  He accelerated the jeep, as if uncertain of his own prophetic powers, and they were soon barrelling down a stretch of straight road between two expanses of open ground, the jeep lurching from side to side as Brindley wove his way round the shell craters. They could see nothing through the mist to either left or right, but somewhere out there someone was tracking the noise of their passage, because a bullet suddenly pinged viciously off the outside of the jeep just above Razor’s window.

  ‘Fuck a pig!’ he exclaimed. ‘How the fuck can they see us in this?’

  No one answered him, but Brindley trod down again, causing the jeep to lurch even more wildly. A dark shape loomed out of the mist – the burnt-out hulk of a car which hadn’t made it – and Brindley sent the jeep careering past it. For a moment the wheels seemed to lose their grip on the packed snow, but somehow they righted themselves, just as another bullet bounced off the back of the vehicle.

  ‘Almost there,’ Brindley said, and within seconds they were entering the relative safety of a street lined with industrial premises. The collective sigh of relief was still clouding the air when the jeep pulled into the forecourt of an apparently wrecked hotel. The sign still claimed it was the Holiday Inn, but there were gun emplacements in the garden and the face of the building had clearly been ravaged by shell fire. At least half the windows had been boarded over, and half the remainder offered mosaics of broken glass.

  ‘You’ll be staying here,’ Brindley said. ‘It looks better inside,’ he added, noticing their horrified expressions.

  ‘It could hardly look worse,’ Chris said.

  ‘Who stays here?’ Docherty wanted to know.

  Brindley eased the jeep round the building and into what seemed a reasonably sheltered parking space. ‘Only about a quarter of the rooms are full,’ he went on, switching off the engine. ‘With journalists mostly, though you’ll see the odd group of Croatians doing a passable imitation of Nazis. They tend to drink too much and start waving their guns around.’

  ‘We met some of them in Split,’ Docherty said.

  ‘Just ignore them,’ Brindley advised. ‘You’ll also notice lots of men huddling in corners, pretending they’re bona fide Balkans conspirators. They look more like fictional agents than real ones, and for all I know they’re residents of a local mental hospital that the Bosnian Government has sent back into the community. I always get the feeling that they’ve all read a chapter of The Mask of Dimitrios in their rooms before coming down to the bar to try out the gestures.’

  Docherty grinned. He was beginning to like Brindley.

  ‘And they’ll have a field day trying to work out who you lot are,’ the major added. ‘Four tough-looking Brit bastards with bergens full of God knows what. Maybe you’d better keep the berets for a while. I don’t suppose the UN will miss them.’

  They entered the hotel by a back entrance, and walked down a short corridor to the reception area. There were indeed several seedy-looking men in trilbies with the collars of their coats turned up. History repeats itself once as tragedy, and then again as farce, Docherty remembered. Who had said that?

  Brindley was dealing with the receptionist, a young man with an impudent smile and what looked like the barrel of an AK47 protruding out from under his counter. ‘Don’t stand in front of any open windows,’ the youth said, with all the animation of an air hostess demonstrating safety regulations, ‘we have lost several guests that way already.’

  ‘Room service with a bullet,’ Razor murmured.

  ‘Fourth floor,’ Brindley told them. ‘It could be worse.’ He led the way to the bottom of the stairs. ‘The bar and restaurant are on the mezzanine and first floors, gentlemen.’

  ‘What’s the food like?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Not bad, considering half the city are surviving on a diet of dandelion soup and dog biscuits.’

  They started up the stairs.

  ‘Someone found a spent bullet in their pizza the other day,’ Brindley added conversationally.

  ‘I didn’t really think it was possible to feel homesick for Walthamstow,’ Razor muttered.

  Eight flights of stairs latter they found themselves outside rooms 417 and 418. Both had curtains drawn across boarded-up windows and single bare light-bulbs for illumination.

  ‘I’m glad we’re not staying in a dump,’ Razor said, testing out one of the beds. ‘Not bad,’ he admitted.

  Docherty was examining the view though a narrow slit between board and window frame. The mist seemed to be lifting gradually, revealing snow-covered slopes on the other side of the valley.

  ‘I’d better fill you in on the local geography,’ Brindley said, as he unfolded a large-scale map of the Sarajevo area and spread it across the floor. The four SAS men gathered around it.

  ‘The city is more or less surrounded,’ Brindley began. ‘Basically, the Serbs hold the high ground, which includes not only these mountains but the upper reaches of the valleys to the north, east and south. The lower valley to the west is still contested territory; you could say the Serbs have a cork in the bottle, but it’s not a very tight-fitting affair.’

  ‘As the bishop said to the actress,’ Razor murmured.

  Brindley eyed him with what might have been affection. ‘There are a few complications in the general picture,’ he went on.

  ‘Dobrinja, which we skirted round after leaving the airport, is a Serb enclave in Muslim territory, a siege within the siege. There are a couple of others like it, and since the roads wind in and out of the two sides’ territories you can find yourself being stopped at checkpoints every mile or so. Which is more than a pain in the rear, incidentally – it drastically increases your chances of meeting some trigger-happy irregular who’s full of the wrong sort of pills.’

  ‘Where do they get them?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘God knows. But we know some of the militia leaders were heavies in the Belgrade underworld not so long ago, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have kept up their contacts with their old buddies. This isn’t such a big country, you know – it just seems like one. We’re not much more than a hundred mile
s from Belgrade as the crow flies.’

  By ‘this country’, Docherty realized, Brindley meant Yugoslavia. ‘What about here in the city?’ he asked. ‘Are there any safe areas?’

  ‘Everything’s in range of the Serb artillery, if that’s what you mean. The shelling is sporadic these days – the visibility’s often poor – but if you’re above ground there’s always the chance. Snipers are more of a problem. Most of the high-rises have been deserted by the people who lived in them, and the snipers have taken up residence instead. They shoot at anything that moves, small children included.’ He looked up, a mixture of disbelief and tired outrage in his eyes. ‘It’s hard to credit. Still, at least you can take precautions against them. Once you’re outside you’ll soon get a good idea of which places are safe and which aren’t. Nothing overlooks the narrow streets of the old town, for example, but any wide street intersection is probably in someone’s sights. But don’t just take your cue from the locals – some of them have become incredibly blasé. You get the feeling that they’ve been playing Russian roulette so long that they’ve almost begun to enjoy it.’ He shook his head, as if he was trying to shake such lunacy out. ‘So, where you see a local run, you run, but when you see one walking along with a big smile on his face, take a look around anyway. He may be sniper-happy.’

  ‘Christ, what a place,’ Razor exclaimed softly.

  ‘These days it’s about as far from Christ as you can get,’ Brindley replied. ‘But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. Some kind of normal life still goes on here, despite everything. The shelling stops for fifteen minutes, and it’s like a rainstorm has stopped anywhere else – people come out. You see women walking past all smartly dressed with their handbags, people in cafés arguing about politics, people looking round the shops – those that have anything to sell. The last supermarket I went in had only razors and champagne.’

  ‘Nice combination,’ Chris said grimly.