Deep Black (27 page)

‘Hello, General,’ someone brayed behind us, in the kind of voice that could only have been shaped by Sandhurst, the Guards and a lifetime’s supply of Pink Gin.

It got worse. ‘Ah, David, old boy. Been back to the UK, have you?’ the general boomed, as if talking from the far side of a parade-ground.

‘Three weeks’ leave. New father and all that. Got there just in time to see the sprog drop.’

‘Splendid, splendid. I was a young major when the memsahib had her two. Away on exercise both times. Damned good thing, if you ask me. Boy or girl?’

‘Boy. Nine pounds six ounces.’

‘Marvellous. Prop forward in the making, what?’

They had a jolly good laugh, apparently oblivious to the rest of us, until one of the very important businessmen’s phones went off in his briefcase. Instant red face as he dug it out: the ring tone was the theme tune for
Mission Impossible
.

‘Anything cooking in my absence, sir?’

‘All rather rumbustious – as per. Just been to Oberammergau. Meeting about a meeting, you know the sort of thing.’

If he didn’t, I did. Guys like this could wring years out of meetings about meetings. A year or two of to-ing and fro-ing from Sarajevo would see him through to his engraved gold watch and lump sum.

Jerry gave me a grin. Either he’d spotted the look on my face or he finally felt within reach of the picture of a lifetime.

I gave him one in return, then went back to planning how I’d track down Ramzi Salkic, the man who might be able to get me to Hasan Nuhanovic, the man who might, in turn, be able to help me find out who had killed Rob.

Because when I did, I’d drop them.

64

We trundled past a line of Blackhawks. SFOR was stencilled in black on their airframes: Stabilization Force was what they’d christened the military presence in Bosnia these days. There were about twelve thousand troops on the ground, mostly supplied by NATO. By the look of it, most of the troops around here were German. Their box-like green Mercedes 4x4s were parked in neat lines outside their HQ at the other end of the airport. The UN was also still in Sarajevo, feeling as guilty as ever for having stood and watched as the Serbs bombed and shot its half-million inhabitants to fuck during the siege.

The airport had been rebuilt since the last time I was here, and the terminal looked as though it had only just been unwrapped. There were a couple of Ks of flat plain between the other side of the runway and the mountains, dotted with newly rebuilt houses amid a patchwork of freshly cultivated fields. During the war, the only way in or out of the city had been via this runway and up into the mountains. The Serbs had sealed off everything else.

I gazed across to what had once been an 800-metre sprint to avoid getting dropped by Serb snipers or caught by UN troops and sent back. The Serbs killed or injured over a thousand people along this stretch of tarmac. They certainly knew how to shoot: the majority of their victims were running targets at night, like Jerry and me when I was trying to get us back into the city.

We’d been thrown together when I’d thumbed a lift in one of the wagons trying to make it back into Sarajevo. I was on the road south of the enclave after the second Paveway job. Jerry recognized me from the hotel bar and persuaded his driver and another journo to pull in and pick me up. Dried blood covered the back of the car and was smeared down the tailgate window. It wasn’t an unusual sight around here, but these three were miserable enough to make me think that whatever had happened had happened pretty recently.

I sat in the back with Jerry. No one said a word as the front two smoked themselves through a packet of Marlboro and we all hoped the Serbs didn’t decide to use us for target practice.

About an hour from the city we got stopped. It looked pretty straightforward, a VCP manned by three bored-looking Serbs, one of them puffing on some waccy baccy. Usually, the best approach was to give them a few packets of cigarettes, smile a lot and take their picture. But that didn’t look like it was going to work today. They wanted us to roll down the windows. Then they wanted our cameras. I was the first to hand mine over: they were more than welcome to the pictures I’d taken.

Jason, the front passenger, put up more of a fight. He gabbled at them in Serbo-Croat, but eventually his went the same way. Jerry, however, had other ideas. A few weeks in the field, and he thought he could just get out of the car and start blustering and bluffing his way through. Then he went ballistic when one of the Serbs pulled the film out of his camera. Not a good move. The long and the short of it was, he was going to die. Everybody knew it but him. What the fuck did he think the Serbs were doing when they started slipping their weapons off their shoulders?

I didn’t care if he got himself killed. But it wasn’t just Jerry’s life at stake: we would all be witnesses.

I got out of the knackered Golf too, still grinning like an idiot. One of the Serbs stepped forward and it wasn’t the hardest thing I’d ever done to grab his weapon and drop all three of them. As Jerry and I stood there in the mud surrounded by dead bodies, a Golf sped down the road away from us. Fuck ’em, as far as I was concerned, it was safer on foot – I should have stuck to that from the start. We’d got stopped in this VCP, so it was odds on the VW would get stopped at the next. As word of what had happened here spread, the Serbs would open up on every vehicle that moved.

Jerry had left everything but his camera in the car: money, passport, press pass. That didn’t worry him as much as the rolls of film he’d lost, but it should have. There was no way he was going to get back into Sarajevo without UN help. He was fucked.

So we’d spent the next seventy-two hours cold, wet and hungry, working our way round Serb positions and down to the free sector to the south of the airport. The last stretch, the sprint across eight hundred metres of exposed runway, took us five lung-bursting minutes. We must have had at least a couple of mags emptied at us.

Once we’d got to the other side, Jerry went to find himself a new set of documents and I leaked back into the city. I saw him a couple of times afterwards in the Holiday Inn, but kept well away. I couldn’t stand him trying to thank me. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that I’d been saving my own skin, not his.

His stuff never made it back, and neither did Jason and the driver. I passed their two charred bodies and the burnt-out wreck of their car on the road about two weeks later.

The bus driver turned the wheel sharp left and Jerry’s head jerked to the side, but his eyes never left the runway. He had shrunk into his own little world. I could see him gazing across the tarmac, maybe picturing the razor-wire entanglements, the sandbag sangars, the white APCs full of UN troops trying to stop us, and the Serb fire arcing towards us under the floodlights. But we weren’t going to go over all that now. Sarajevo was still too tense for talk of politics and war and, besides, the general and his sidekick were taking up too much oxygen as it was.

New Dad turned to the young woman beside him.

‘General, have you met Liliana? Ministry of Internal Affairs?’

‘Oh, yes, rather.’ Liliana’s brown linen trouser suit must have cost her a packet on Fifth Avenue, and as far as the general was concerned, it was worth every penny. I could just imagine him leering at her over the tray of Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s cocktail party.

‘You’re with SFOR, General?’

‘Paddy’s military adviser, for my sins.’

No wonder the peace process had been like wading through treacle.

‘It seems to me that only the British are carrying out the captures,’ Liliana said with a coy smile. ‘You’re so very good at it, how come you haven’t yet captured Karadic?’

The general chuckled. ‘These chaps are jolly hard to ferret out, you know. Always on the move. But maybe that’s no bad thing, my dear. It’s best not to start with the most indigestible item on the menu. Go for something light to start with, what?’

I switched my attention back to Jerry: his eyes still hadn’t left the other side of the runway.

65

Monday, 13 October 2003

The bus hissed to a stop outside the terminal and we all filed off. The plebs, which included Jerry and me, herded themselves towards the one passport-control box that was open. The general and his chums with the blue diplomatic passports went straight through the Diplomats and SFOR channel. I hoped his luggage was still in Oberammergau.

As we joined the queue my eyes started to close; they felt like they’d been dipped in grit. It had been a long journey. The drive from Baghdad to Turkey had gone OK, apart from the moment our fixer tried to overtake an American armoured convoy. He’d realized his mistake when he received three warning shots across the bonnet.

At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the
Sunday Telegraph
to explain the change of plan. We’d taken a flight to Vienna, then caught a connection here. Jerry’s card had taken a real beating, but the paper was going to pay him back, so what the fuck?

Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.

The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.

The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible Mark. We hadn’t been able to get any in Vienna, so we made a deal: thirteen euros for the trip to the hotel – far more than the eight-K journey was worth. During the war it had been Deutschmarks everyone wanted. Now, it was euros. This had to be about the only area of the world that wasn’t much fussed about the dollar.

Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of
The Sound of Music
, but ten years ago the Serbs had used them to bomb the shit out of the city.

Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautiful: the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.

The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.

‘Where you from?’

In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.

He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’

Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.

It was my turn. ‘You American?’

‘Australian.’

Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.

66

We hit the main drag that paralleled the Miljacka. The broad dual carriageway was heaving with vehicles, and every other one was a VW Golf. Volkswagen had had a factory here before the war, and every man and his dog seemed to drive one.

The driver tore along Vojvode Putnika as if it was still Snipers’ Alley and he knew he was in somebody’s sights. The Serbs had enjoyed a good arc of fire from the high ground. Hundreds of Sarajevans had been killed in crashes as they drove through the city at 120 k.p.h.

Jerry was still in his own world as we drove past a host of new construction sites alongside bombed-out reminders of the past. One was the concrete skeleton of what had been a brand new old people’s home. The first pensioners had only just moved in when the Serbs started lobbing shells at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when I last saw it; even the recently erected billboards couldn’t cover up what had happened.

Despite everything, I liked Sarajevo. I always had. Like Baghdad, it was a grown-up place. It had been here for centuries. There were winding streets, and hundreds of dead ends and small alleyways that went nowhere in particular. Minarets poked up into the sky everywhere you looked, from small wooden mosques, brick ones the size of bungalows, and great big fuck-off ones as big as palaces. The majority of the city’s inhabitants were Muslim, these days, but there was still a scattering of Jews, Orthodox Christians, and even a few hippies who had forgotten to go home in the sixties.