Bosnian Inferno Read online

‘What about after dark?’ Razor asked. ‘I take it the night-life is a bit on the thin side?’

  ‘You could say that. There’s a curfew from ten p.m. to six a.m., and the whole city’s basically blacked out. But nowhere’s safe any time after dark. There’s no civilian reason for anyone to be on the street, so anyone out there is considered fair game.’

  ‘Kind of puts Belfast in perspective, doesn’t it?’ Chris said.

  Brindley grunted. ‘By the way,’ he added, pointing at the map, ‘this is where the British UN staff HQ is. If you need anything in the way of equipment there’s no harm in asking.’ He looked round. ‘Anything else you can think of?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Docherty said. ‘The first thing we have to do is find a woman. A particular woman,’ he added, in response to Brindley’s raised eyebrow. He explained about Nena Reeve. ‘But the FO already have someone working on that for us.’

  ‘OK,’ Brindley said, getting up.

  ‘We appreciate the help,’ Docherty told him.

  ‘You’re welcome. I wish we could do more, but soldiering for the UN – well, it’s all in a great cause but it’s like soldiering with both hands tied behind your back.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Any idea how long you’ll be staying?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘There is one piece of good news, gentlemen,’ Brindley said. ‘The bar here hasn’t run dry once.’ He reached for the door, just as someone rapped on it.

  Brindley again raised his eyebrows at Docherty, who shrugged.

  ‘Thornton,’ a voice said through the door.

  ‘The FO man,’ Docherty said. He opened the door to reveal a man of medium height with short, curly hair and the sort of dissolute face favoured by producers of epic serials when casting young wastrels and cads.

  ‘God, that’s a lot of stairs to climb,’ he said, coming in and flopping himself down on the edge of a bed.

  ‘Good luck, lads,’ Brindley told the SAS men, and shut the door behind him.

  Thornton seemed to be recovering his breath; enough at least to fish in his pocket for a cigarette. He lit up with a Zippo lighter and blew smoke at the ceiling. Docherty, who had grown to dislike the man intensely in something under a minute, restrained himself from tearing the cigarette out of his mouth. After all, with the amount of cold draught that was blowing in around the boarded-up window, they were more likely to die of hypothermia than passive smoking.

  ‘Welcome to Sarajevo,’ the MI6 man said. ‘Have you got a drink up here by any chance? No? Pity. How was the flight in? A bit on the bumpy side?’

  ‘Have you got some information for us?’ Docherty asked him.

  ‘No, not really. But I do have the names of several people in the city who know Zavik well. They should be able to fill you in…’

  ‘What about Nena Reeve?’

  Thornton took a drag on his cigarette and looked round for an ashtray. Razor reached for the one on the bedside table and handed it to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, nearly missing it with his ash. ‘The woman has vanished into thin air. I went up to the hospital and talked to her boss and some of her colleagues, but none of them have a clue. I looked round her room – on the quiet, of course – but there’s nothing there to suggest where she’s gone. Oh, and I checked out the morgue, just in case. No joy.’

  Docherty looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How do you rate our chances of getting to Zavik?’ he asked.

  Thornton shrugged. ‘I’ve got no information on the situation there…’

  ‘I’m more interested in how we get ourselves out of Sarajevo.’

  ‘Yes, I’m working on that. One of the Muslim militia leaders might be prepared to help out, if we can strike a decent deal. They’ll probably want a few SMGs, something like that. I was supposed to see him this morning, but my translator didn’t show up…’

  ‘You don’t speak Serbo-Croat?’ Docherty interrupted, trying to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

  If Thornton noticed, he didn’t seem perturbed. ‘No need in the old days – all the people who mattered spoke English. But don’t worry, I’ll get hold of him tomorrow.’

  ‘Good,’ Docherty said. ‘Is there any news of Reeve himself.’

  ‘Nothing lately. You know the stories, I suppose. The Croats say the Serbs burned all their people alive in Zavik, in their church of course. The Serbs say they know for certain he had a party of their irregulars shot in cold blood, and that his men have raped and killed their way through several villages in Serb-held territory. The Muslims claim he razed the mosque in Zavik and forced their children to eat pork. It’s all the usual stories rolled into one.’

  ‘Have there been no refugees from Zavik?’

  ‘None that we’ve found, either at the coast or in Zagreb. Whatever’s happening up there, it looks like the locals either can’t or won’t leave.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. There’s no telephone link, of course, and the place is off the beaten track, way up in the mountains. Since it’s inside territory the Serbs say they control, they presumably have it surrounded, or at least cut off. But no one knows for certain. There are rumours that the missing American – you hear about him? – ah, well, he disappeared about a week ago somewhere out there, and the story was that he was trying to get to Zavik.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Bailey, I think. The other Americans here can tell you about him.’

  Thornton reached for another cigarette, and found his packet was empty. ‘I’ll get hold of Muftic tomorrow,’ he said, getting up to leave and scratching his neck. ‘I’ll be in the bar downstairs tonight.’

  ‘How about eight o’clock?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Sure, I’ll be there all evening.’

  ‘I bet you will,’ Docherty muttered as the MI6 man’s footsteps receded down the hallway.

  ‘What a wanker,’ the Dame murmured.

  ‘The Cheshires can’t help, and this tosspot won’t,’ Razor said. ‘I think we’re on our own for this one, boss.’

  Docherty smiled. ‘Looks like it. But here’s the good news. If he only talked to the members of the hospital staff who can speak fluent English then there’s a good chance Chris can pick up something he didn’t.’

  It was approaching noon when Docherty and Chris left the hotel. Grey clouds still hung above the city, but they were higher now, and the crests of the hills on either side of the valley were visible. No shells had fallen on the city for a couple of hours.

  The hospital where Nena Reeve had worked was in the old town, a mile or so along the valley to the east. Docherty and Chris made their way up the gently sloping Marsala Tita, keeping as close to the walls as possible, hurrying from doorway to doorway on what looked vulnerable stretches, and sprinting like mad across the wide intersections.

  Docherty was taken back to his Glasgow childhood, of going shopping with his mother, and the two of them alternating walking and running between pairs of lampposts. Doing something similar on the streets of Sarajevo, at the grand old age of forty-two, it all felt a bit unreal, right up to the moment the sniper’s bullet whistled past his head and dug a large chunk out of the kerb across the street.

  He scuttled on across the intersection and looked up to find an old woman grinning toothlessly at him from a half-boarded window. She said something in Serbo-Croat which Chris translated as ‘that was a close one’. Docherty wondered if the intersection she lived by had replaced TV as her prime source of entertainment.

  The two men continued on their erratically paced way, leaving Docherty’s feelings of unreality at the crossroads, and both felt a deep sense of relief as they entered the old town, with its narrow, sheltered streets.

  Using Brindley’s map, they found the hospital with no difficulty. Its walls and windows had fared even worse than the Holiday Inn’s, and the main entrance was as littered with broken glass as the airport building’s. Uniformed Bosnian Government soldiers were much in evidence, though exactly what they thought they wer
e guarding seemed hard to fathom. Most of them simply stood there stony-faced as a steady stream of weeping visitors passed in and out.

  The UN accreditations got Docherty and Chris inside, and the latter’s linguistic skills won them directions to the chief administrator’s office. She sat behind a desk overflowing with paper, eyes red-rimmed in a gaunt face. They should see Dr Raznatovic, she said; he had been Dr Reeve’s boss.

  A young orderly – he couldn’t have been more than fifteen – escorted them through the maze, past patients lying in corridors, some of them with what looked simple fractures, some with gaping wounds and pain-racked faces, others with the serene expression of the dead. One corridor was slippery with blood, as if someone had been dragged along it.

  Dr Raznatovic was between operations, and clearly torn between impatience at having to answer Docherty’s questions and a wish to be helpful for Nena Reeve’s sake. He spoke perfect English, so it seemed unlikely that they would learn any more from him than Thornton had.

  ‘I don’t know her well,’ he said, banging a tap in the hope of inducing it to deliver some water. ‘But she’s a good doctor, and she stayed when many left. I talked to her sometimes when we worked together, but that was all. Sarajevo is not the sort of place you go out for a drink after work,’ he added with a half-smile.

  Docherty asked if Raznatovic knew of any closer friends that Nena had had in the hospital. He didn’t, but suggested they try a sister on one of the wards, Sister Rodzic.

  The young orderly, who had listened to their questions with profound fascination in his dark eyes, escorted them on another trip through the corridors. They found Sister Rodzic almost asleep on her feet, and only too pleased to be given the excuse for a few moments in a chair.

  She didn’t speak English, which was a good sign. Still, it didn’t seem as if she could tell them anything useful either, until, as the two men got up to go, she suddenly remembered something. ‘There’s a nurse in the emergency department,’ she said. ‘Dzeilana Begovic. I think Nena used to play squash with her sometimes. There are courts in the basement.’

  The orderly took them back down, leading them through a children’s ward where row upon row of pitifully thin children watched them pass with doleful eyes.

  They found Dzeilana Begovic literally up to her elbows in blood. She was having slightly more luck than Raznatovic with a tap, coaxing a thin trickle of water from the pipes. ‘Yes, I know Nena Reeve,’ she agreed, ‘but I have no time to talk.’

  ‘It’s important,’ Chris said, realizing how thin the words must sound to someone engaged in work like hers.

  She frowned, leaning forward on her arms against the wash-basin. ‘OK,’ she said after several seconds, and looked at her watch. ‘I’m off in an hour. I will meet you in the Princip Café as soon as I can. It’s on Boscarsija,’ she added, and was gone.

  ‘Where now?’ the orderly asked in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘The mortuary, I suppose,’ Docherty said reluctantly. He had seen his share of war casualties, of blood and pain, but he still felt almost stunned by what he had seen in this hospital.

  ‘This way,’ the orderly announced, after Chris had translated their destination. He led them up two flights of stairs, along a long corridor and across a bridge between two buildings which had lost all of its windows.

  They could smell the mortuary before they reached it, and the pungent whiff of plum brandy on the attendant’s breath was something of a relief. ‘We get twenty a day dead on arrival,’ the attendant told them proudly, ‘and the ground’s too damn hard to bury them, even if you can find someone mad enough to show himself in the cemetery. The Serb snipers like shooting at funeral parties,’ he explained.

  ‘We just want to check that a friend of ours isn’t here,’ Chris said.

  ‘Be my guests.’

  ‘Stay here,’ Docherty told Chris. There was no need for both of them to do it.

  He walked slowly down the aisles, between the ranks of corpses. In some of the wounds there was movement, and Docherty remembered Razor’s lesson about maggots – they only ate dead flesh. Well, that was the only kind of flesh on offer here. If they sealed the doors would the maggots consume it all?

  He walked back down the other aisle. Nena Reeve was not there. He supposed it was something to be grateful for, that someone else’s friend had died instead of his. He wondered how people would ever recover from this, and for a second he glimpsed an understanding of the scars on his own wife’s soul.

  ‘Thank you,’ he told the attendant.

  The orderly walked them down to the main entrance, and Docherty tried to give him a five-dollar bill, but the youth refused it. Glancing back over his shoulder as they went out through the main doors, Docherty could see the boy staring after them, a look of awe on his face, as if he’d just been privileged to meet visitors from another planet.

  Outside on Saraci Street they inhaled the cold mountain air with unusual relish. As Docherty consulted their map there was a sudden loud explosion, followed almost immediately by another. Smoke billowed into the air a couple of streets away to the west.

  ‘This way,’ Docherty said, and the two men began to run. At first they thought the streets had magically emptied, but they soon realized their mistake. Every doorway held a group of people, sheltering from the man-made storm. The two SAS men found a niche for themselves, alongside two youngish women.

  Minutes went by, and there were no more explosions. ‘Just trying to keep us guessing,’ Chris heard one of the women say. ‘Bastards,’ the other said quietly.

  People started drifting away from their places of shelter, some shrugging their anxiety away, others casting nervous glances upwards, as if they thought the sight of an incoming shell would give them time to take evasive action. Docherty and Chris continued on past several badly damaged Islamic buildings and found Boscarsija Street.

  The Princip Café was halfway down on the left, a European-style coffee house half full of students reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes. The walls were plastered with sepia photographs of days gone by, with pride of place given to a large portrait of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, and set in motion the events that led to World War One.

  Docherty wondered where the assassination had actually taken place, and decided he would try to visit the location before they left. It seemed a thoroughly appropriate piece of tourism, he thought. He and Chris ordered two coffees, and found themselves sipping at a bitter, nutty-favoured brew which tasted strangely likeable. Inside the café men and women sat talking and laughing with each other, and at first the handguns laid casually down beside the coffee cups seemed ludicrously out of place. But gradually Docherty became more aware of the restless eyes, the twisting hands and fingers, the hasty drags on cigarettes. Then it was the laughter which seemed unreal, more like a nervous howl than a recognition of humour.

  They had been waiting almost two hours when Dzeilana Begovic appeared, looking drawn with fatigue.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked, after more coffees had been ordered.

  ‘You know Nena’s missing?’ Chris asked in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘Yes. But I don’t know where she’s gone.’

  ‘Do you know any of her friends outside the hospital.’

  ‘Only Hajrija.’

  ‘Who is Hajrija? What is her other name?’

  ‘Her best friend – haven’t you spoken to her? Her last name? Let me think. It begins with M. Mejic? No, Mejra, that’s it…’

  Chris told Docherty what he’d learned.

  ‘Ask her where this woman works,’ Docherty said.

  ‘She used to be a student at the journalism school,’ was Dzeilana’s reply. ‘But she’s in the Army now. One of the anti-sniper units. I saw her in Emergency a few weeks ago, with one of their men who’d been shot.’

  ‘How could we find her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You have no idea where she lives?
’

  Dzeilana searched her memory. ‘No,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Does Nena have any other good friends at the hospital?’ Chris asked.

  ‘I don’t think so…’

  Chris questioned her for another five minutes, but she had no other real leads to give them.

  ‘Hajrija Mejra,’ Docherty murmured after she had left, having refused their offer of an escort with a look which clearly said: this is my town, and I know how to deal with it a damn sight better than you do. Still, she had smiled at them through the window as she walked past.

  ‘How do we go about finding an anti-sniper unit?’ Chris asked. ‘Brindley or Thornton?’

  Docherty grimaced. ‘Thornton, I’m afraid.’

  The MI6 man seemed pleased with himself when Docherty found him in the bar at seven that evening. ‘Here’s all the journalistic accreditations you’ll need,’ he said, passing a wad of papers across the table. ‘UN, Bosnian Government, Croatian, local Serb. The last one doesn’t travel well – it’s only good for the immediate area. And I’ve done a deal with Muftic. Half a dozen MP5s for your team’s safe passage through to open country. Delivery on completion. He just wants twenty-four hours’ notice.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Docherty said, his attention momentarily distracted by the fact that a man in tails had just sat down at the piano and begun playing a Chopin waltz. ‘I need to get in contact with some people,’ he told Thornton. ‘Do you know anything about Bosnian Army anti-sniper units?’

  ‘Of course. The crème de la crème. The beautiful Strivela…’ He smiled at the thought. ‘The name means “Arrow”,’ he explained. ‘She’s become a legend in her own time. Gorgeous textile-design student sees four-year-old child shot down, pleads to be allowed to join the anti-sniper unit, at first gets scorned by the men, then wins them over by her bravery, sharpshooting ability, etc., etc. It would make a great movie. Probably will when this is all over.’

  ‘Is there only one unit?’ Docherty asked patiently.

  ‘Two or three, I think.’

  ‘How can I reach them?’

  Thornton took a sip of his whisky, trying to decide, Docherty thought, whether to ask the reason for the request. The fear of inviting more work overcame the curiosity.