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Why not an air strike – the intervention from the Opposition front bench had been predictable. Why not more direct military intervention?
‘The decision whether or not to launch an air strike is the sole prerogative of the United Nations.’ His delivery emphasized the point. ‘It is not the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government.’
He had held up his hand at this point, stopped the heckling from the other side of the House.
‘What is the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government is not only to ensure that its commitment to the United Nations Protection Force is fulfilled, but also to ensure the safety of the British contingent in UNPROFOR.’
One British life is a life too many, the Opposition knew he was going to say, and prepared its response. Why not a more positive position on Bosnia, he knew they would throw at him.
‘I have to tell the House …’ his voice was sombre now ‘… and it is right and proper that the House is the first to know, that there have been a number of British casualties during an incident in the Maglaj – Tesanj pocket.’
Even now, even on television, he could sense the sudden tension, the moment the mood in the chamber swung in his favour.
‘It is my sad duty this afternoon to inform the House that, in a reconnaissance operation ordered by UNPROFOR, and acting in their role as authorized military observers, two members of the Special Air Service have been killed in an incident near the town of Maglaj, and two others seriously injured. The injured men have been flown home and we are in negotiation to retrieve the bodies of the two others.’
Of course it wasn’t quite news; of course the press had been sniffing at the rumour. But he had done what he always did: got his retaliation in first, so that it was the others, rather than himself, who were now on the defensive.
‘I have nothing further to say.’
And then he had sat down. And no one, not even the Opposition front bench, had moved even a finger to ask him another question.
Tesanj was spread below him.
Most people were still keeping away from the areas known to be exposed to rifle fire, those that didn’t still darting furtively between doorways. A few hours of peace, then they’d come out, though.
Valeschov shifted his position slightly and studied the town, fixed in his mind the streets and the places they would be entering and leaving and where, therefore, they would be exposed to him. The food centres, of course, the radio station, the hospital.
All night, after they had returned from the graveyard on the hillside, Kara and Adin had slumped together in the corridor, occasionally talking, though not often, most of the time staring into the black and trying to struggle back from the abyss which engulfed them.
A nurse brought them tea, a mug each, made sure their hands were firmly gripping the handles, sat with them without speaking before she was needed elsewhere.
Perhaps they should have begun the journey back to Maglaj last night, after they had laid little Jovan to rest; perhaps it was right that they had delayed till this morning. There was, after all, a ceasefire, and the shells and mortars had stopped.
They finished the tea, fastened the backpack Adin had brought with him, and began to leave. Thanked the doctors and nurses who were on duty, and asked for their thanks to be passed to those who were resting. Then they left the hospital and stepped into the cold, shuffled rather than walked down the street.
An old couple leaving the hospital – Valeschov targeted them through the crosswires. At least a couple who looked old, but nowadays you couldn’t tell. Range four hundred metres, wind speed not enough to worry about. He followed them, played with them, as they walked down the street. But played with them without them knowing, and that was the problem.
Interesting job, being a sniper, gave you such power. Plus the decision of life and death over them, almost like being God, really. Like being the emperor in the old Roman games, thumb up or thumb down. But for you to have that power people needed to at least know you were there. Only then were they afraid, and that was what gave you the power.
And that was the problem today.
The old couple, for example. Hadn’t been his enemies before the conflict and wouldn’t be after. But they weren’t afraid of him, because they didn’t know he was there. And that irked. He didn’t need to kill them, perhaps didn’t even want to kill them. This morning, anyway, because last night he’d eaten well and slept better than he’d done for days. But unless they knew he was there they weren’t playing the game. Nobody was. And there was only one way people could be persuaded to play the game.
‘You want to see Jovan before we leave?’ Adin suggested. ‘You want to say goodbye to him, tell him we’ll be back?’
Because we will be back, because we’ll never leave him.
They were tight together, holding and supporting each other.
‘Yes,’ Kara told him. ‘I’d like to see Jovan before we leave.’
‘Me, too.’ Adin tried to smile.
The man or the woman, Valeschov wondered. It was like tossing a coin at the start of a football match, see who decided which way they’d play. Nothing personal, of course. Just part of the game. And the one thing he liked was the game. So after he’d killed them, or at least killed one of them, everybody would know he was there. And after that people would play the game again. He moved the rifle slightly, swung from the man to the woman then back to the man. The woman, he decided, and swung back again.
Kara heard the shout and turned. The doctor was standing in the doorway, his white coat flapping slightly and his hand raised to them. ‘Good luck.’
The man – Valeschov changed his mind. He swung the Dragunov and squeezed the trigger.
‘Thank you,’ Kara began to say and heard the crack, flinched and turned. Adin was falling backwards slightly, his fingers clutched at his chest and the pain and fear and bewilderment frozen on his face.
No … she was screaming, no sound coming out. Please God, no.
Adin was already crumpled on the ground. She crouched beside him, held his head in one arm and the hands clutching his chest with the other.
The doctor ran – away from the safety of the door and down the street. Sniper, someone shouted at him and grabbed him into a doorway. ‘It’s all right,’ Kara was whispering to Adin, to herself. ‘The doctor’s coming, soon you’ll be okay.’ He was trying to push her away, trying to tell her to seek shelter. She was pulling him, dragging him across the ice towards a doorway. Someone grabbed her and pulled her inside, someone else hauling Adin behind her and slamming the door shut as the sniper aimed again. The room was dark and cold, the people inside staring at her. The doctor came in through a door at the back and knelt down, pulled Adin’s coat open and checked the entry area in the chest, then nodded to the others to move Kara from the room. She was screaming, protesting; they held her and dragged her out. Only then did the doctor turn Adin over and take off his pack. The back of the coat was shredded and oozing thick blood where the bullet had exited. Christ what a mess, someone whispered. Still a pulse – the doctor checked. ‘Help me get him to the hospital.’ Three of them lifted Adin, and squeezed through the door at the rear, ran through the side streets – two holding his arms and one his legs – and into a door at the side of the hospital.
Kara ran with them, followed them through the door and down the corridor, heard them shouting for people to get out of the way. They turned left then left again, into an operating theatre. The doctor was already giving instructions and a nurse was cutting through Adin’s clothing, more doctors and nurses arriving. One of them took Kara by the shoulder and led her away, closed the door behind her and sat with her. Isn’t this the man who led the digging for the children? another asked. Didn’t he lose his son yesterday?
Stay alive, Kara prayed. The panic swept over her in waves: the cold and the fear and the sudden abyss.
Pulse, the first doctor pleaded; come on, where are you? Not much they could do about the wound anyway, they all knew, hardly anything they could do to counter the internal damage. Doesn’t matter, the doctor whispered to himself. I can do it, we can do it. Come on, my friend, he urged Adin. For Chrissake come on. No pulse – he was still checking for it. Perhaps there hadn’t been anyway, perhaps he’d felt it because he wanted to. Perhaps the pulse he’d felt was the last draining of Adin’s blood from his body.
Don’t leave me, my dear precious husband. Don’t leave me ever, but don’t leave me at the moment I need you the most.
Come on, the doctor was still saying, almost shouting. Don’t die. You haven’t died. You’re okay, you’re going to be okay. For Christ’s sake don’t give up, don’t stop your heart beating or your lungs breathing. For God’s sake help me to help you.
Not you, my wonderful Adin. Not you who was such a good father, such a great man. Not you who gave so much to so many. Who loved the flowers in spring and the snow in winter.
A nurse was still tying the lead surgeon’s face mask, the man bent over Adin. Slowly he stepped back from the operating table, peeled off his gloves, and shook his head.
When they carried Adin Isak to the hillside that night the moon was barely rising over the trees, the dark was as cold as ever, and the hole was already dug. Thin and shallow, because the soil was frozen hard and the men had difficulty breaking it open. Perhaps there’s always a hole, Kara thought; perhaps they’re always ready because there are always bodies to bury.
‘I’d like my husband to lie with his son,’ she told the men who accompanied her. For some reason there was no imam. Perhaps he was elsewhere, perhaps he himself had been killed.
They nodded their understanding and carried the body to the place where she and Adin had knelt the night before, then they laid it down and began to remove the soil from the small grave on the crest of the hill. When they came to the shroud containing Jovan’s body Kara lifted it out and held it while the men made the hole bigger. Then she kissed Adin goodbye and helped lay him in the hole, then Jovan, the father’s arm round the boy, as if they were lying together in the summer fields and looking up at the cloudless blue of the sky.
The moon was above her now, and the night was colder.
She sprinkled the soil back in, carefully and gently, then stood back and waited till the men had filled the hole, placed the wooden memorial at the head, and left her.
The snow was falling again.
From a pocket she took a pencil, and added Adin’s name to the one already on the wood.
Thirty-six hours ago she had everything to live for, she thought. She had a husband and a son, and Jovan was going to live and Adin was alive and well and at her side.
Perhaps she should take the road to Maglaj tonight, perhaps she should wait till morning as she and Adin had waited till morning. But then perhaps the sniper would be waiting for her. Not that it mattered any more or that she cared any longer.
‘Goodbye, my husband. Goodbye, my son.’
She left the graveyard on the hillside and took the road to Maglaj. Her hands were frozen and she could no longer feel her feet. Sometime in the next hours she met a convoy coming the other way – men leading horses carrying wounded and injured to the hospital in Tesanj. Sometime, she was not sure when, she passed the turning and the track – hardly wide enough for goats – over the hill called Bandera. Sometime just after the light came up, she descended from the hills and entered Maglaj.
At ten, an hour before the food kitchen opened, she joined the line already forming outside; at eleven she shuffled in front of the vats containing the beans.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve just come back from the hospital at Tesanj and I don’t have a bowl.’
One of the women serving the beans shrugged, as if the problem was not hers.
‘Did Adin find you?’ another asked. ‘Where’s Jovan?’
‘Adin and Jovan are dead.’
The second woman gave her her own bowl and poured the beans for her, broke the bread for her and led her to a corner where she might be warm. At least where she might be less cold. When she finished the soup Kara thanked the woman, returned the bowl to her, and went outside.
I saw you running across the bridge the other day – the Canadian MacFarlane remembered her, even though in some ways he barely recognized her now. Her face was ashen, her eyes were dead, and she crossed the bridge slowly, almost numbly, as if she was immune to the sniper who might be waiting for her in the hills; as if she was challenging him to shoot her.
The bridge was behind her. She walked in a trance through the rubble of what had once been the old town, and climbed the hill to the house. Stood still and looked at it. Began to cry.
The roof had been blown apart and the walls were sagging, the windows and doors gaping open and the snow falling in.
She went through the garden and pushed her way into what had once been the kitchen. At least she would be able to live here, she told herself, at least this part of the house would be secure.
The furniture was wrecked and ice hung from the ceiling, the holes gaping in it.
She was aware of the cold again now, not aware of her physical actions. Slowly she searched through the rubble, found the tin in which she and Adin kept any deutschmarks they had been able to save; found the photograph of Adin and Jovan which had stood on the dresser, found the remnants of one of the food packs Finn had left them.
She could go to the new town, find a space in a basement and sit there for the rest of the war, sit there for the rest of her life. Her thoughts were as numb and automatic as her movements. Or she could make her way to Travnik, seek out her mother’s mother, her own grandmother, and stay with her. Except that Travnik was thirty kilometres from Zenica, and Zenica was nearly fifty kilometres from Maglaj and two front lines away – one from the Muslim pocket of Maglaj – Tesanj into the surrounding Serb/Croat-controlled countryside, and the second back into the Muslim-held land to the south. But the front lines at the points where she would have to cross might not be active, might not be carefully guarded, might not be mined. Or they might be.
Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered any more.
She packed the handful of items in a bag, left the house and walked down through the old town and back across the bridge. Either she had been doing things more slowly than she had imagined, or it was getting dark earlier.
The doctor was in the doorway of the medical centre. Sorry about Jovan and Adin, she said; where was Kara going, she asked. Travnik, Kara told her, I have a grandmother who lives there.
The town was a ghost, the doctor thought, Kara was a ghost. Already gone, already finished. Not on her way to join her grandmother in Travnik, because Travnik was eighty kilometres away through two sets of front lines. Kara was on her way to join her husband and her son.
Good luck, she told Kara. God go with you.
Kara thanked her, left Maglaj, and took the road back towards Tesanj. A quarter way along it, just after the light had faded and the night had closed in, she left the road and began the climb up through the snow and ice to the hill called Bandera and the first of the front lines.
5 (#ulink_ef87b3ab-c286-543c-bf0e-980fd6b4e21b)
The unmarked police Audi, two men in the front and one in the rear, was parked where it was always parked at this time of night: near one of the cab ranks on the edge of the Gare du Midi. Sometime tonight they’d score; sometime in the next hours the man in the rear would slip out, arrange to buy some dope – what sort didn’t matter, but headquarters was heavy on crack at the moment – then they’d make the bust.
On the edge of the Gare du Nord, close to the predominantly immigrant quarter, the pimps and hookers went about their business.
On the other side of the city, in the haute de la ville, the Upper Town, the industrialists, the bankers, the diplomats and the Eurocrats attended their functions and passed the evening over cocktails and secret deals.
Brussels.
Eleven at night.
Rue Léopold, one of several named after the nineteenth-century Belgian king, appeared empty, and the night above was black. The road and pavements, with their occasional discreet but expensive boutiques, had just been swept, and the windows of the apartment blocks were curtained. In the past minutes snow had fallen – not heavily, but enough for the first white to have settled on the tarmac of the road and the grey of the pavements.
The lookout was sunk like a shadow in the recess of a doorway fifty metres down the road in the direction from which the car would approach.
The car turned up the street, its Mercedes engine a low rumble – driver and one other in the front, and a third man in the back. The man in the doorway tensed slightly and swept the street. The Mercedes turned right, into the car park below the apartments, the three men glancing round as they descended the ramp. The sound now was different, almost hollow, and the lighting was subdued. The lift was in the far corner, on the left. The driver swung in a circle so that when he stopped by it the Mercedes was facing out, towards his exit point. The door of the lift opened and the next two men appeared. The front passenger and the man in the rear seat left the car and stepped into the lift.
‘Secure,’ the first man whispered in the motorola. The chip of the set had been replaced, the frequency pre-set to one not used in Belgium.
The second Mercedes slipped out of the night and up the street – same model, same colour, same registration number.
Everyone played their games, Abu Sharaf had long known. The Israelis, with their snatch teams or platter bombs or rocket launchers opposite flats or suites where they knew their enemies were plotting against them. The British and the French and the Americans. Plus those who were supposed to be on one’s own side. Even the three men he would meet that night, though in the end they would agree. Because unless they had already decided to agree there would have been no meeting.
He left the car, stepped the two paces to the lift, and was whisked to the third floor.
The politician and the secret policeman were waiting, relaxed and comfortable in the soft luxury of the suite, both smiling and both smartly dressed Western-style. Only the holy man to come, Sharaf thought, but the holy men had kept the world waiting from the time the first man had thought of the first religion.
He shook their hands, accepted the sweet thick coffee an aide offered him, and sat down. The suite had been electronically swept for bugs, and when the meeting began the advisers and minders would leave the room.
‘He’ll be here soon.’ The secret policeman was in his early fifties, the same age as the politician but some ten years older than Sharaf. His suit was smartly cut, and the fold of the lids gave his eyes a slightly hooded appearance.
‘Insh’allah.’ Sharaf sat down. ‘God willing.’
The door opened and the holy man entered, the man Sharaf knew to be his closest adviser on his right, and his minder on his left. Two of the newcomers – the holy man and his adviser – were dressed traditionally, but the minder was wearing a suit.
The holy man was the same age as the politician and the secret policeman. He greeted them, nodded to the aide and minder to leave, then took his place in one of the chairs.
‘The world is once again at an interesting time and place.’ The holy man sat forward slightly and summed up the starting point of their previous discussions, the others allowing him the chairmanship, perhaps because it was his by right, perhaps because he represented the religious rather than the secular, and without the religious the secular which they represented could not develop, or not so easily.
Therefore they allowed him the moment: the politician who played the intrigues of the region with the experience of a juggler, the secret policeman who ruled it with a rod of fear, and the man whom the West would describe as the terrorist mastermind, the new Carlos, the new Abu Nidal.
Of course Sharaf had not always held such importance. Nor was his name generally known to the great public of the East and the West, though he was under no illusions that their intelligence services had him on their computers, and that when the time was right they would try to turn him, or take him out, depending on the secret dealings and hidden agendas of the Middle East. For that reason Sharaf was always careful, even when meeting those he considered his allies. Perhaps especially when meeting those who called themselves his friends.
‘The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire … the agreement between Israel and the Palestinians … the Iran-Iraq conflict and the Gulf War.’
The holy man’s eyes were small and sharp.
‘The new situation in South Africa … the talk of peace in Northern Ireland … the decision by certain states to abandon a certain line of struggle.’
To cease support for what the West called terrorism.
So the world appeared to be at peace. Yet at the same time the world was closer to war than it had ever been.
He sat back and indicated with a wave of his right hand that perhaps it was the politician who would best lead the discussion from that point.
The politician talked for less than thirty seconds then passed the chairmanship to Sharaf. It was the way their meetings always progressed, wreathed in formalities and allusions, just as the smoke from their cigarettes was wreathed above the table.
