Bosnian Inferno. David Monnery
don’t mess with the Russians if they can help it,’ he explained. ‘The Russians are about the only friends they have left.’
He said this with absolute seriousness, as if he could hardly believe it.
‘Hey, here they are,’ he called out as the two Russians came into view on the stairs. Both men had classically flat Russian faces beneath the fur hats; both were either bear-shaped or wearing enough undergarments to survive a cold day in Siberia. In fact the only obvious way of distinguishing one from the other was by their eyebrows: Viktor’s were fair and almost invisible, Dmitri’s bushy and black enough for him to enter a Brezhnev-lookalike contest. Both seemed highly affable, as if they’d drunk half a pint of vodka for breakfast.
The two women embraced each other. ‘Be careful,’ Hajrija insisted. ‘And don’t take any risks. And come back as soon as you can.’ She turned to the American. ‘And you take care of my friend,’ she ordered him.
He tipped his head and bowed.
The four travellers threaded their way out through the hotel’s kitchens to where a black Toyota was parked out of sight of snipers. The two Russians climbed into the front, and Nena and Bailey into the back.
Two distant explosions, one following closely on the other, signalled the beginning of the daily bombardment. The shells had fallen at least two kilometres away, Nena judged, but that didn’t mean the next ones wouldn’t fall on the Toyota’s roof.
Viktor started up the car and pulled it out of the car park, accelerating all the while. The most dangerous stretch of road ran between the Holiday Inn and the airport, and they were doing more than sixty miles per hour by the time the car hit open ground. Viktor had obviously passed this way more than once, for as he zigzagged wildly to and fro, past the burnt-out hulks of previous failed attempts, he was casually lighting up an evil-smelling cigarette from the dashboard lighter.
Nena resisted the temptation to squeeze herself down into the space behind the driver’s seat, and was rewarded with a glimpse of an old woman searching for dandelion leaves in the partially snow-covered verge, oblivious to their car as it hurtled past.
Thirty seconds later and they were through ‘Murder Mile’, and slowing for the first in a series of checkpoints. This one was manned by Bosnian police, who waved them through without even bothering to examine the three men’s journalistic accreditation. Half a mile further, they were waved down by a Serb unit on the outskirts of Ilidza, a Serb-held suburb. The men here wore uniforms identifying them as members of the Yugoslav National Army. They were courteous almost to a fault.
‘Hard to believe they come from Mordor,’ Bailey said with a grin.
It was, Nena thought. Sometimes it was just too easy to think all Serbs were monsters, to forget that there were still 80,000 of them in Sarajevo, undergoing much the same hardships and traumas as everyone else. And then it became hard to understand how the men on the hills above Sarajevo could deliberately target their big guns on the hospitals below, and how the snipers in the burnt-out tower blocks could deliberately blow away children barely old enough to start school.
They passed safely through another Serb checkpoint and, as the two Russians pumped Bailey about their chances of emigration to the USA, the road ran up out of the valley, the railway track climbing to its left, the rushing river falling back towards the city on its right. Stretches of dark conifers alternated with broad swathes of snow-blanketed moorland as they crested a pass and followed the sweeping curves of the road down into Sanjic. Here a minaret still rose above the roofs of the small town nestling in its valley, and as they drove through its streets Nena could see that the Christian churches had not paid the price for the mosque’s survival. Sanjic had somehow escaped the war, at least for the moment. She hoped Zavik had fared as well.
‘This must have been what all of Bosnia was like before the war,’ Bailey said beside her. There was a genuine sadness in his voice which made her wonder if she had underestimated him.
‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.
‘I came in early November,’ he said.
‘Who do you work for?’
‘No one specific. I’m a freelance.’
She looked out of the window. ‘If you get the chance,’ she said, ‘and if this war ever ends, you should come in the spring, when the trees are in blossom. It can look like an enchanted land at that time of year.’
‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘I…I thought I knew quite a lot of the world before I came here,’ he said. ‘I’ve been all over Europe, all over the States of course, to Australia and Singapore…But I feel like I’ve never been anywhere like this. And I don’t mean the war,’ he said hurriedly, ‘though maybe that’s what makes everything more vivid. I don’t know…’
She smiled at him, and felt almost like patting his hand.
The road was climbing again now, a range of snow-covered mountains looming on their left. She remembered the trip across the mountains to Umtali while they were in Africa. The children had been bored in the back seat and she’d been short-tempered with them. Reeve, though, had for once been an exemplary father, painstakingly prising them out of their sulk. But he’d always been a good father, much to her surprise. She’d expected a great husband and a poor father, and ended up with the opposite.
No, that was harsh.
She wondered again what she would find in Zavik, always assuming she got there. The three journalists were only taking her as far as Bugojno, and from there she would probably still have a problem making it up into the mountains. The roads might be open, might be closed – at this time of the year the chances were about fifty-fifty.
The car began slowing down and she looked up to see a block on the road ahead. A tractor and a car had been positioned nose to nose at an angle, and beside them four men were standing waiting. Two of them were wearing broad-brimmed hats. ‘Chetniks,’ one of the Russians said, and she could see the straggling beards sported by three of the four. The other man, it soon became clear, wasn’t old enough to grow one.
From the first moment Nena had a bad feeling about the situation. The Russians’ bonhomie was ignored, their papers checked with a mixture of insolence and sarcasm by the tall Serb who seemed to be in charge. ‘Don’t you think Yeltsin is a useless wanker?’ he asked Viktor, who agreed vociferously with him, and said that in his opinion Russia could declare itself in favour of a Greater Serbia. The Chetnik just laughed at him, and moved on to Bailey. ‘You like Guns ’N’ Roses?’ he asked him in English.
‘Who?’ Bailey asked.
‘Rock ’n’ roll,’ the Chetnik said. ‘American.’
‘Sorry,’ Bailey said.
‘It’s OK,’ the Chetnik said magnanimously, and looked at Nena. His pupils seemed dilated, probably by drugs of some kind or another. ‘Leave the woman behind,’ he told the Russians in Serbo-Croat.
The Russians started arguing – not, Nena thought, with any great conviction.
‘What’s going on?’ Bailey wanted to know.
She told him.
‘But they can’t do that!’ he exclaimed, and before Nena could stop him he was opening the door and climbing out on to the road. ‘Look…’ he started to say, and the Chetnik’s machine pistol cracked. The American slid back into Nena’s view, a gaping hole where an eye had been.
The Russians in the front seat seemed suddenly frozen into statues.
‘We just want the woman,’ the Chetnik was telling them.
Viktor turned round to face her, his eyes wide with fear. ‘I think…’
She shifted across the back seat and climbed out of the same door the American had used. She started bending down to examine him, but was yanked away by one of the Chetniks. The leader grabbed the dead man by the feet and unceremoniously dragged him away through the