THE HEART OF DANGER (35 page)

was

beyond that field. The minefield was no problem. There was a quiet around him because the tractors were gone now, and the harsh voices

of

the women, and the shouting of the children was stilled.

Penn, in sight of the break of the tree line, coming to the open

greyness of the field, saw the cat.

There had always been cats at the tied cottage, semi-wild and only

fed

in the worst of the winter. Penn knew cats.

It was a big brute with nothing handsome about it.

The cat was black-coated but the white flash at its chest alerted

Penn

to its advance.

Penn stopped. The cat was a distraction. Couldn't help but watch

the

cat, and if he was distracted by the big brute then he might blunder

in

the dropping light against the fine khaki wires that were the

antennae.

He stopped and the antennae wires, motionless, were squared about

him.

The big brute came fast towards him. The throaty growl of the cat

called to him. He could see its ribcage.

The cat crossed open ground, a dozen paces from him, and at the centre

of the open ground was the spike of the antenna's wire. Penn reckoned

the cat would have been a household pet or a farmyard ratter, and

the

cat had been abandoned in the flight from the village, perhaps by

one

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of those who now lay as skeletons deep in the woods.

The big brute hesitated because Penn stood still. He could see the

knots and the burrs in the cat's coat.

The throated growl had become a purring roar. Penn knew cats .. .

On

the carpet floor of dead leaves there were no stones for him to throw

at the cat. Unless he moved past an antenna wire he would not be

in

reach of a dried branch to throw at the cat. He could not shout at

the

cat, he was too close to Salika, down through the trees and across

the

river, he could not shoot the cat with his Browning 9mm automatic

pistol. Penn knew the way of an abandoned cat that had found a

friend.

The cat arched its back. The purr riddled the wood. A cat with a

friend always wanted to show its pleasure by arching its back, then

finding a surface to rub against, and the surface nearest the cat

was

the needle-thin antenna of the mine.

Penn cooed at the cat. The back of the cat was against the antenna.

Penn slipped to his knees, and stretched out his hand and he murmured

his love for the cat. The antenna wavered as the vigour of the cat

was

arched against it. Ten pounds of high explosive in the mine below

the

antenna, maybe twelve pounds,

enough high explosive to take the wheel off an armoured personnel

carrier, enough to immobilize a tracked vehicle. Penn urged the cat,

gently, to come to him. The cat left the antenna and the wire swayed

like a dying metronome. Penn's heart pounded. The cat, wary,

circled

Penn, and there were antennae on either side of him, and an antenna

wire behind him. He cooed, murmured, urged the cat to come to him.

Again the high arch of the back, again the fur bedded against the

wire,

to his right .. .

The cat came to him.

One movement .. .

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The cat was against his knee.

One chance .. .

The cat howled its pleasure.

If he missed the one moment, the one chance, Penn thought the cat

would

sc udder out of his range and find an antenna wire to snuggle

against.

Penn grabbed the cat with two hands. No friendship, no love, he held

the cat tight. The cat bit at his wrists and its back claws slashed

at

his upper arms. Penn held the cat as if his life depended on it,

as if

his life rested on an antenna wire not being bent over. He tramped

in

the last light past the antennae, through the final trees, going

towards the field with the cat hacking and spitting at him.

He was through the minefield.

Penn threw the cat hard away from him.

He stepped over the barbed wire strand.

The cat snarled, as if its friendship had been betrayed, and stayed

back from him, and there were no antennae for the cat to arch

against.

"All right, you old bugger, I'm sorry. Please, don't do that to me again, but I apologize."

The cat watched him. He took a slice of ham from the paper bag in

his

backpack and tore it into quarters, and flipped the meat towards the

cat.

The cat dived for the food.

In front of Penn was the field. He could see the small wall of earth

in the corner of the field. He could make out, just, the outline

of

the broken roofs of the village and the jagged rise of the church's

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tower.

It was what she would have seen, where Dorrie had been .. .

It was warm for the late afternoon.

Benny Stein sweated.

It was hard going, getting the sacks of seed out of the back of the

Seddon Atkinson lorry, but best to be in there with the local Knin

'coolies' because that way their sticky fingers couldn't pilfer so

bad.

Best not to make it easy for them.

A pretty little town, Knin, pity about the people, and when they'd

done

the unloading then he'd try to find the energy to climb the long zigzag

road from the warehouse by the football pitch down on the river and

get

up to the old fortress above the town. He was good at photography,

prided himself, but the Canon with the 125mm lens was back at the

hotel

in Zagreb, and if he'd pulled out a camera up by the old fortress

then

the guns would have been raised and they'd have been bawling. It

was

the people that spoiled Knin, and the people didn't seem to him to

have

any bloody gratitude for him hiking down their way with his lorry

and

fourteen others.

He sweated, he heaved a sack of seed. He brought it down from the

tail

of the Seddy. He carried it to the trailer. They were good guys

who

worked with him, good crack.

Sweating, gulping, "Heh, wasn't that the Hun Frau at Turanj? Wasn't that the Frau there?"

A good guy, packed in stockbroking to make five hundred quid a week

driving a lorry into Sector North, "Too old, Benny, you are, for

looking at skirt .. ."

"Too bony for me, the Frau. What was she there for?"

204

A good guy, a banker who had dropped out of gilts, taken a money cut

to

run a truck into Sector North, "Getting fruity, Benny? Getting the hots? She was waiting for a refugee bus .. ."

"You know what? She had that look, a lot of broads give me that look.

Half Hackney's broads, most of Palmers Green's, they have a sincere

romantic problem 'cause of me. I take cold baths, I walk away from

it,

too bloody complicated for me, but she had love. You know the Argie

one .. . ?"

The tickle of laughter from the one-time banker and the onetime

stockbroker. Benny recited,

'.. . An Argentine gaucho named Bruno,

Once said, "There is something I do know:

A woman is fine

And a sheep is divine,

But a llama is Numero Uno!"

'.. . Well, you know what I mean .. . Perhaps she's got a big fellow, a big NigBatt guy, and she's pining. There's not a refugee bus

scheduled through today .. . that's all."

He knew when the refugee buses came through. Refugees were something

from Benny Stein's past. He'd had his little laugh from the Frau,

and

he thought her the grandest woman he had ever met, and when they were

not driving, nor doing maintenance, then he would hitch a ride down

to

Karlovac and head for the Transit Centre, and his last project had

been

carpentry for the little desks and low stools of the kindergarten

.. .

He understood about refugees because his grandparents had walked out

of

Czechoslovakia fifty-five years before and his father had walked with

them, and all they had owned was stacked in an old pram that they

had

pushed as they had walked. He'd thought, looking at the Frau's face,

205

that it wasn't just a bus arrival she waited for.

He had walked into a gate, and he had ripped the shins of his trousers

on fallen wire, and he had cracked his knee on a dropped gravestone,

and he had been in the ditch.

It was black dark in the village and Penn had a little chat to himself,

waspish.

It was imbecile to be padding about the ruin of the village in the

black dark, and he should get a better grip of himself, slow down,

stop

the charge. Do it like he had done it as a child, when he had gone

early in the morning into the top copse where the keeper bred the

pheasant chicks in the summer, and sat under the widespread oak and

waited for first light when the sow brought her badger young from

the

sett. Going back to the basics of his life .. . The only course where he had beaten the graduate intake into Gower Street had been the rural

surveillance course and crawling up in the wood's night, so quiet,

that

when he had put his hand from behind over Amanda Fawcett's mouth she

had squealed and wet her jeans. The only time he had won an

instructor's praise, and Amanda Fawcett, stuffy bitch with a 2.1 out

of

Sussex, had had to wear her shirt tails outside her trousers for the

rest of the morning, and a fucking malicious grin she'd given him

on

his last day, coming out of Administration when he'd given in his

ID.

And Amanda bloody Fawcett, graduate, General Intelligence Group,

paper

pusher, wouldn't have made it a hundred yards off the river bank ..

.

After the little chat to himself, Penn stood a long time quite still,

and he allowed the night sounds of the village to play around him.

The owl's shout, the whine of a swinging door, the creak of a dislodged

roof beam, the motion of the stream against the piles of the bridge,

voices that were distant and brought on the wind.

He stood in what he thought had been a square and the only building

clear to him by its size was the mass of the body of the church. There

were lamps lit in the windows of the houses across the stream where

a

community lived, breathed, and he could see sometimes a wavering

206

torch

on the move. There was an occasional small beam thrown up from the

bridge, and it was from the bridge that he heard the young men's voices

larking their boredom at guard duty. He stood quite still. He

thought

that when Dorrie had crossed the road, where he was now, with the

torn

lengths of the women's clean clothes, she would have had flares to

light her way, and there would have been buildings burning. He could

not see the farmhouse outline where the cellar had been, where she

had

run to. He had the map in his mind.

When he had calmed himself, then he moved again.

He went slow and he had one arm outstretched in front of his face

and

his other arm in front of his legs. Twice his fingers brushed into

low

rubble and once his fingers caught at a lowered telephone wire. It

was

a rough lane that he took, and sometimes his lower hand flicked

against

the taller weeds that grew between the ruts of the lane. He tried

to

make each stride a measured one, and he counted each stride that he

took because Alija had told him that the house of Katica Dubelj was

150

paces from the square. There was a new sound catching at him, and

he

could not distinguish it. A few paces from Katica Dubelj's house,

where it should be, and the new sound was there again. He had counted

out his strides, and he groped off the lane and his fingers found

a

fence set around with clinging thistles and sharp nettles. He

tracked

the fence and he came to the wall of the house of Katica Dubelj. He

came to the door. If she were alive she would come back to her home

every night, or every third night, or one night in each week, if she

were alive ... It was what Penn thought, what had brought him to the

village of Rosenovici, that there was the small, minimal, chance she

would come. It was past the house of Katica Dubelj that Dorrie had

been marched to the field, with the wounded, to the grave. He would

wait through one night for her to come, if she were alive .. . His

fingers were off the stone, then into the void, then feeling the rough

plank surface of the door .. . It was the sound of a man who cried

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out.

Penn was drawn forward. The words of a man with pain in his mind.

At

the end of the lane was the broken strut of a gate, across the entrance

to a field. He had that sense of the openness beyond the gate that

his

fingers rested against. He heard the words cried staccato and

growing

in his eyes was the failing light of the torch beam. The shapes were