Deep Black (33 page)

‘Here, over here!’

As I joined him, there was a burst towards the barns from further along the hill, parallel with the Audi. It had to be Nasir.

I kept us on the high ground, paralleling the road, trying to confirm who was up on the hill. Benzil was losing strength and spent more time in the mud than on his feet.

‘Nasir, Nasir!’

‘Over here, over here!’ It was Jerry. I still couldn’t see them.

‘Back in the car! Go, let’s go!’

I started dragging Benzil downhill. Each step was clearly agony for him, but that was tough shit: he’d have to sort himself out later.

He stumbled again and cried out. I grabbed a handful of coat and yanked him forwards as rounds thudded into the ground where we’d just been.

‘Come on! Come on!’

Three bodies closed in from my right. Salkic was with them as they scrambled downhill towards the car. The fire from the barns became more concentrated as they worked out what we were doing. Rounds hammered into the Audi’s doors and tyres.

‘Back up the hill!’

I was fighting for air, my clothes soaked with sweat, trying to climb and keep a grip on Benzil at the same time. Nasir was returning fire behind us. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Save the rounds! Salkic, where the fuck are you? Tell him to stop firing!’

We carried on climbing. There were no trees, nothing to haul ourselves up on; just mud, grass and rock. I slipped and fell. The AK barrel crashed against the stone, but it would survive. These things were built to be used and abused. I wasn’t so sure about Benzil.

There was still firing from below us, but the tracer was going high. They’d lost us in the dark.

I felt blood leaking down my legs after my tangle with the barbed wire. My throat was parched. I kept my grip on Benzil, kept pulling him upwards.

I yelled across at Jerry. ‘Keep up! We’ve got to keep together.’

Jerry came close, chest heaving and breath rattling in his throat. ‘Where . . . we . . . going?’

‘Fuck knows. Salkic?’

There didn’t seem to be anything leaking out of Jerry apart from sweat. ‘For a second there, I thought you were down for good.’

‘Bastards hit my fanny pack.’

Salkic appeared out of the gloom, fighting for oxygen and so angry he could hardly speak. ‘You are responsible for this! They must have followed me here earlier, and waited.’ He pushed me so hard in the chest I nearly fell over Benzil. ‘You lead them to me!’

Benzil remained in the mud as Salkic started gobbing off to Nasir.

I wasn’t too sure how this was going to play, so pushed down gently on the AK’s safety. Salkic heard the click and so did Nasir. His weapon swung up into the aim. Salkic gently pushed the barrel until it pointed at the mud. ‘God would not have let this happen if it were not for a reason. My job is to take you to Hasan. We serve him, so it will be done.’

I made sure they heard the safety click back where it belonged, then glanced back down at the hill. I could see torchbeams criss-crossing the ground. I waited a second or two for Nasir to calm down. ‘You know what’s the other side of this hill?’

Salkic thought for a second or two. ‘No. Just more hills?’

I checked Baby-G. We had about two hours at the most before first light. If we were caught out in the open in this terrain we’d be fucked.

Benzil was still on his knees, almost sobbing as he gasped for air.

Jerry, too, sank into the mud.

‘Salkic, ask Nasir if he knows.’ It was time to get sorted. ‘OK, I saw one man go down and there’s one by the Audi. Anyone see the other guy? We still got someone out there?’

The one missing would have to fend for himself. I had control of the most important two.

Salkic gobbed off again to Nasir.

I lifted the AK and pushed the magazine catch forward to release the two taped-up mags. I pressed down on the top round in the first mag with my finger. It stopped about two-thirds of the way down: I had about ten rounds left.

Salkic and Nasir were still in dialogue as I turned the mags over and pushed down on the second. It was full, so I slotted it into the mag housing and eased back the cocking handle to check chamber. ‘Anybody else got a weapon?’

Salkic translated. ‘He also has a pistol and two extra magazines. And he says there is a cave the other side of these hills. The aggressors used it to store supplies.’ Salkic took in another couple of gulps of oxygen before continuing. ‘He said that he isn’t sure which valley. It’s been many years since he has attacked it.’

Nasir muttered a few more words to Salkic, who hesitated before translating. ‘Do you know which man you saw dead?’

‘No.’

As Salkic mumbled back to Nasir there was a sudden burst of voice traffic on the radio inside his coat. He pulled it out, maybe hoping it was our missing man.

The radio might have belonged to him, but the gravelly voice that came out of it didn’t. Whoever it was started singing what sounded like a nursery rhyme. Then there was a short, piercing scream. The song continued for a moment, but was interrupted by more screams and the sound of sobbing.

Nasir went apeshit.

Images flashed through my own head of others I’d seen taken prisoner by the Serbs, men strapped to trees who’d choked to death on their own genitals.

Nasir started downhill as the fading screams were replaced by mocking laughter.

‘Salkic, turn that fucking thing off and get him back here!’

I didn’t care what the fuck he wanted to do down there, but now wasn’t the time. We needed a steady pair of hands on a weapon. Salkic ran ahead of him and held up a hand. I saw Nasir’s shoulders heave as Salkic took a step forward and wrapped him in a hug.

For several minutes they talked to each other in gradually gentler tones. The rest of us kept our distance. At least it gave Benzil time to rest.

The torches below us were still on the move. A vehicle emerged from one of the barns, manoeuvred its way past our Audi, and headed back towards Sarajevo.

Salkic still had Nasir in his arms. They mumbled some more to each other. Both men were crying.

At length, they turned and came back up to us. Nasir carried on uphill a little way before kneeling. There was silence; no one spoke.

I stood up, and helped Benzil to his feet. ‘We need to get going and be over this high ground before first light, out of their line of sight.’

Exhausted as he was, Benzil’s only concern was for others. ‘Is Nasir all right?’

‘He will be,’ Salkic said, ‘but give him time. The man they just killed was his youngest brother.’ He paused. ‘And my brother-in-law.’

79

Nasir was lead scout.

Benzil was next. He was in a bad way, but we had to place him up there so we could keep an eye on him and go at his pace. He tried his best; Jerry, Salkic and I took it in turns to hitch his arm round our necks to help keep him upright.

Nasir was a totally steady hand. He was an old sweat, doubling back from time to time to mutter an encouraging word.

Benzil would just nod and agree. ‘Yes, yes. Thank you.’

After ten minutes or so, he had to stop again. ‘I’m so sorry, Nick. I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about it. Just try and keep going the best you can.’

There was a burst of fire in the valley below us as they cabbied at shadows.

Wind buffeted the summit, clawing at my face, cooling my sweat. At least the plastic coat kept it at bay as we started to slip and slide downhill.

The line was starting to get strung out, and not just because of Benzil. Jerry and Salkic were feeling the pace. Nasir was still up front, slowing down at regular intervals for the rest of us to catch up.

The valley gradually took shape before us as first light seeped into the eastern sky, and what I saw was not good news: next to no cover, just mud and stones. There wasn’t even a road.

I stopped and waited for Salkic to draw level with me.

‘We’re going to be fucked out here on open ground.’ I nodded at Nasir. ‘Ask him how far to the cave.’

We were in shit state. My jeans were in shreds; my legs shiny with blood and sweat. Everybody was caked in mud.

Salkic and Jerry were still struggling to keep Benzil upright as we stumbled downhill.

Nasir’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the landscape below us. I could see he was getting worried, and so was I. I didn’t want to use a cave: it was obvious cover, and would probably have only one point of entry and exit. If they followed us, they would check it out for sure. But as I looked around us, I realized that if we couldn’t outrun them, it was probably our only option.

Nasir started gobbing off. Salkic nodded and turned back to me. ‘Not far, near the bottom. I know the cave he is talking about now. My father also fought there.’

This side was much steeper, and we stumbled after Nasir as he picked his way through the mud and rock, trying to find an easy route down. He stopped after another couple of hundred metres and pointed east. I followed the direction of his finger and could just make out a dark shadow on the side of the hill.

A second later, there were two high-velocity cracks above us. I looked up and saw the first of our pursuers crossing the skyline. Fuck it, the decision had been made for us.

80

It looked like it had been a natural cleft in the rock that had been given a makeover with several crates of Serb high explosive: the mouth was now big enough to take a truck. Rubble was piled up on each side, and the tyre ruts in the track leading to it were smothered by grass and weeds.

The interior was cold and dank, but at least it gave us shelter from the wind. The walls glistened with slime and puddles of water splashed around our feet. Two rusty old cars and a skip full of wood had been abandoned just inside the entrance.

The further we went inside, the more it stank of mould and decay. The darkness and a couple of mounds of rock spoil, debris from the blasting operation that had widened the cave, gave us cover, but this was going to be as much of a tactical nightmare as I’d feared: a confined space and the only way out the way we had come in.

Benzil was suffering big-time. Jerry and Salkic lowered him on to the floor behind one of the mounds and tried to make him comfortable. He hardly even had the energy to apologize.

‘Don’t worry.’ I crouched beside him to move some stone away from his head. ‘It’s OK. Just rest.’

There was no reply. His breathing was shallow and worryingly fast.

Salkic collapsed the other side of him in the gloom. Jerry just dropped where he was and fumbled with the clips of his bumbag. I crawled up the rock pile and looked through the cave mouth, about forty metres away, at the brightening sky. It was still dark this far in, and should stay that way. My eyes were already adapting.

Nasir had put himself on stag at the top of the pile to my left, and was also staring intently towards the entrance. I looked around at the other three. It’s natural for people to bunch up in situations like this, and they were tearing the arse out of it. I got them to spread out a bit. If rounds started bouncing about in here I didn’t want the flat tops getting two hits for the price of one.

‘Fuck.’ Jerry showed me what was left of his Nikon. A round had entered the left-hand corner and exited top right. He tried the power button. Not that that would help, even if the battery pack was OK. The lens was shattered.

‘The phone, Jerry – is the phone OK?’

He nodded slowly, but I could see it wasn’t much consolation.

Nasir started gobbing off and I could see movement on the hill a couple of hundred metres or so from the cave mouth. ‘Here they come.’ I turned back to the others. ‘We got five.’

Jerry scrambled up to me. ‘Coming this way?’

‘Not yet.’

I felt it; the look on Nasir’s face said it. We were fucked.

Nasir settled himself into a fire position, scooping away some of the stone to make room for the curved magazine of his AK. The magazines on these things were so big and long that when you lay down you couldn’t fire them from the shoulder. It was part of the doctrine according to Dr Kalashnikov: the AK was intended to be gripped in front of a hero of the Soviet Union as he leaped from the back of an APC and charged gallantly forward on full automatic.

Nasir’s eyes never left the men on the track. He gobbed off something to Salkic.

‘What’s he getting so excited about?’

‘Nasir said I must never tell anyone where Hasan is, or his brother’s death would be in vain. He also wants to kill the aggressors.’

Nasir got the drift of what was being said and grunted. They were both grim-faced. As far as these boys were concerned, the war had never really ended.

I leaned into my pile of rocks, digging a space for my own magazine. ‘Ramzi, you’re the only one who knows?’

Salkic was taking deep breaths; Jerry slid back down to help Benzil into a more comfortable position. ‘The only one here.’

Nasir muttered something and I looked out. ‘They’re coming.’

I slithered down too.

‘Jerry, you got any idea how to use a pistol?’