The Knives

This is a work of fiction, though it reflects some matters of public interest in the time when it was written. The UK government that it depicts is imaginary, and both the legislative framework and the political calendar within which that government conducts its business are not those of the UK, past or present – or, at least, not in every respect. Moreover, the geography of Westminster, and of many other places, has been re-imagined (the real Home Office is not found on ‘Shovell Street’, there is no such parliamentary constituency as ‘Teesside South’, nor towns near the Tees named Maryburn and Thornfield, et cetera). In other words, while I have borrowed things recognisable from life in the aid of plausibility, this story remains, of course, make-believe.

‘Gentlemen, these are your rules of engagement. You’ll carry them printed on a card in your pocket – I’d prefer you keep them etched behind your eyeballs. They are not hard to remember, they could even be of use to you in other places. One, you will at all times show purpose. Two, you have the means to protect yourselves, so use them. Three, do not tolerate aggression – if you are fired upon, return fire. Be that said – four – never give an order that can’t be obeyed. Five, in the unlikely event you find yourselves
notably
outgunned, and a safe route exists to remove yourselves – remove!’

Whitewashed and clean-stamped with call-signs on turrets, the trio of Warriors rumbled in convoy down raw muddy tracks lately carved for their passage through the Lašva Valley. Holding to a steady speed, keeping twenty yards apart, their heavy treads powered over the rough road – thirty-ton weight driving down dirt and loose stones, engines emitting full-throated roars.

From his jostled vantage, chest-high to the turret of Bravo Zero, Captain David Blaylock surveyed the Bosnian countryside. The sullen skies that had met the Yorkshire Regiment in late April were, today, a cool cloudless blue. In the air was the good resin smell of the conifers lining the roads and clustered on the hillsides. The modest villages, the thickets of wan, reviving birches, the hawthorn and the elm – in all, Blaylock felt, it wasn’t so wildly unlike North Yorkshire. Except that hardly a single bird was ever seen or heard. Except for his sharpened sense that round any bend, over any crest, one could come upon something dreadful –
foretold by the whistle and boom of mortar fire, or black smoke climbing in a billowing column over trees.

Blaylock had lived with this foreboding since the regiment’s arrival – their first ride into the valley, past ruined houses and hamlets with their mournful air of despoil. He was ready, now, for the sight of ruined bodies – men and women and children. He bore it, uneasily, as a platoon captain’s duty. Twenty-six years old, he commanded twenty-seven men.

A stubby pencil in hand, braced against the Warrior’s motion, Blaylock drew lines on tracing paper nestled into the fold of his logbook, hand-amending the company map of local routes and villages. His convoy was headed for Fazli
ć
i, then west to Suhi Dol, his mission to explore and log hitherto uncharted terrain that lay off the rebuilt roads, places that had yet to see a UN presence. Today, then – so Blaylock briefed the boys – was ‘Operation Show-A-Friendly-Face’.

Trev, his gunner, sat beside him in the turret, staunchly in charge of the Rarden cannon and the mounted machine gun. Down below was Cookie, the driver, a study in lip-bitten focus. In the back of the wagon, behind its metal cage, sat Gordy, Jinks and Chappo – keeping watch out of the Warrior’s raised back hatches, trying out their wit above the engine’s din for the benefit of Tamara, their dark-eyed and seemingly biddable Bosnian interpreter.

Up top Blaylock was just glad to be moving, breathing the air, away from the garrison at Stari Vitez – not stuck on guard or escort duty. The garrison, a disused school, was a crowded mud-hole – a Muslim enclave, moreover, within a Croat-held area, such that the sense of siege was palpable. Blaylock had yet to get comfortable with peering out through the mess window to see Bosnian forces in sniper positions, barrels trained on Croat lines half a mile away.

His men, he knew, were even more perplexed by a set-up far removed from what they had seen lately in Belfast. That had been a simple sketch on a chalkboard, Her Majesty’s armed forces
against skulking paramilitaries. Bosnia, though, was civil war – a two-way conflict that had recently and strangely split into three. And since they wore blue UN helmets on their heads, the Yorkshire Regiment declared for no particular dog in the fight.

Blaylock’s main piece of leadership before today had been a chore he found hateful: overseeing the safe passage of Muslim refugees – standing idly by, in other words, as miserable parents and dazed children were trooped off trucks and onto coaches for further ‘dispersal’, all their worldly goods in plastic bags, their wary eyes betraying that they had seen bad things and were braced for worse, that their sense of peril was in no way relieved.

And so in this morning’s task Blaylock felt a kind of liberty – there was no radio link to base, the umbilical cord had been thrown a bit wider, the challenge distinctly different.

Bravo Zero chuntered on through a small village of a dozen or so houses. Suddenly a flurry of children, all matted hair and holey pullovers, darted out of an alley between dwellings, waving their arms excitedly. To his left Blaylock saw Trev was digging into his pockets.

‘No sweeties, Trev, remember? Wrong message.’

Trev did as he was told. What Blaylock gave the expectant children instead was a smart salute, before the convoy left them in its roaring wake.

At the foot of the Bila Valley the Warriors rolled up to a Bosnian Croat checkpoint, a lean-to hut manned by three HVO soldiers and marked on the road by a blunt cordon of black anti-tank mines spaced out across the muddy track. Blaylock slid unhurriedly down from his perch and strode toward the men, smacking his logbook into his palm, Tamara hastening behind him.

‘
Doba dan, kako ste? Ja se zovem Captain Blaylock
. United Nations? You have to let us through. We are not involved in combat. Humanitarian purpose only, yes?’

The guardsmen waved surly hands, made surly noises. Blaylock inclined to Tamara and she murmured translations in his ear. It was the usual issue of local compliance – demands to see papers bearing the scrawled hand of local commanders, a tiresome delay. Blaylock had his standard-issue riposte good and ready.

‘No, no. We’re not at your disposal, okay? We don’t run back and forth fetching paper. Our way through has been agreed with your command, you’ve no right to stop the UN.’

The men coughed and spat on the earth in the manner Blaylock had come to consider singularly Slavic. Though he spoke the truth he couldn’t quite blame them for their suspicious minds. These Warrior tours were, after all, a kind of spying. So he watched them impassively while they conferred. They had the look of a peasant army – ill-sorted villagers, schoolteachers and bus drivers who had been handed rifles and pressed hastily into ragged green fatigues like schoolboy football bibs doled out of a bag. Less naïve to his eye, though, were the red-and-white chequered badges pinned to their camouflage vests, insignia that struck him as undyingly fascistic.

He had seen more menacing Croat forces on his travels – tough twenty-somethings, gun-toting spirit drinkers, bristling with skull-and-crossbones logos and commando accoutrements. Blaylock found it easy to imagine the worst of them. His view had been coloured by tales from the departing Cheshire Regiment about the miserable task of ‘clear-up’ after a massacre in a small Muslim village – extracting blackened bodies from burned-out houses in white bags while Croat neighbours looked on, hard-faced, their own hearths unscathed.

By contrast his encounters with Bosnian Muslims had been affable. These were the people from whom the army was renting its roof, who did the chores around camp. The Bosnian forces he met at checkpoints struck him as reasonable people, rightly aggrieved, and badly under-resourced for war. If Blaylock had not
exactly picked a side in this three-cornered fight, he had certainly formed an opinion.

The Croat guards began grumpily to poke their mines toward the roadsides with the toes of their boots. Blaylock was glad to see them roll over without a fuss. Insofar as he understood leadership in this strange moral quagmire, it meant sticking by the rules of engagement the Major handed down:
You will at all times show purpose, et cetera
.

With the way past the HVO checkpoint cleared, Blaylock clambered back atop his Warrior and pressed the intercom.

‘Cookie? Howay, let’s roll.’

‘Any chance of a piss-break, boss?’

At a suitable remove the convoy halted and Blaylock’s boys lined up like racehorses to urinate in spattering style up against the Warrior’s tracks. Out of sight Blaylock shared a smoke with Tamara, half a red Marlboro he didn’t much want. But the mood of the garrison seemed to have sucked everyone into the habit – this, and the sheer usefulness of smokes as checkpoint currency, the proffered gratis pack often pre-empting exchanges about ‘papers’.

Small talk with Tamara was fitful. Blaylock asked after her doleful little daughter, a recent visitor to the garrison. Tamara replied shyly. Blaylock could sense that she considered herself on duty at all times: this job was a big deal for her, maybe a ticket out of Vitez. She was a grafter and had, clearly, earned the respect of the troops, since Blaylock had overheard no unprintable nicknames for her, no excessive banter about her breasts or backside.

He kicked a stray rock as he waited for his men to zip up. From backgrounds only marginally tougher than his own, they seemed at all times ready to be led by him – so long, he felt, as he made plain his concern for their welfare.

Belfast had been useful in that line – for all its bone-chilling shifts of surveillance on top of Divis Tower, the tedium and perpetual
brew-ups, the observation post becoming a kind of confessional box. When Cookie had haltingly sought ‘a personal word’, Blaylock had heard him out soberly, without judgement, and had been much relieved a week later when it transpired that the lad had not, in fact, impregnated his girlfriend’s sixteen-year-old sister. Such cares were repaid the day Blaylock led his men into a terraced house purportedly rammed with IRA weapons and instead ran into a command-wire bomb-blast – mercifully mistimed. He had suffered no worse than to see his world turn white and then black for some moments; and when he swam back to his senses he found Cookie already bandaging up his bleeding foot.

This was leadership as Blaylock had come to understand it: not just to be the biggest dog with the loudest voice, but strong enough to show kindness and make mistakes – albeit never so weak as to let anyone give out shit. He would never forget his first weeks at Sandhurst, moments when the discipline was so inflexibly unforgiving he felt a gulf in his chest and the ground of his resolve giving way beneath him. Failure was inconceivable – the jack wagon back to County Durham would have stamped him indelibly as second-rate goods. And so he had rallied, ‘found his bollocks’, learned to take a bollocking from the Colour Sergeant, to swear he would do better then focus on nothing but that – to swallow the mindless neatness and oppressive order, to zone out the stinging rain and the leeching mud. He had dug just enough of what was needed from himself, and felt himself change in the process. A sense of kinship with his comrades – stoic, striving fellow sufferers! – had settled on his shoulders like the rain.

Now, in the mess at lights-out, when he studied his men stretched out in their vests and combats, Metallica bleeding from their Walkman headphones, he felt some kind of conservative instinct he thought he could call parental.

He trod his cigarette into the mud and banged his fist on the glacis plate. ‘Right then, you’s. Tie a knot in it.’

It was midday and five miles further on when Blaylock saw another checkpoint coming into view, markedly different from the last. Here was a barrier and sentry post, a guard-hut of nailed logs and planks with a clear plastic roof. Earth was banked at one side of the road, the bank of a stream ran opposite, the effect being to narrow the passage ahead.

Blaylock frowned to see significantly more bodies milling around the hut, too, more than a dozen men – surely surplus to requirements? They were dark-skinned, dark-browed, many bearded and with chequered
keffiyah
wrapped around heads, shrouding faces. Some wore fatigues, camouflage trousers and jackets, others were in loose khaki pants, embroidered waistcoats, banded turbans. Several appeared to be nursing assault rifles, others yet more hefty weaponry.

This was not regular Bosnian army. In wash-ups the liaison officers had spoken of ‘irregular forces’, mercenaries –
mujahedin
. Blaylock knew in his gut that he was looking at them now.

‘
Bloody hell, boss, Ali Baba and the forty thieves …’
Cookie’s vision of the road ahead from his driving seat, magnified ten times by the Warrior’s powerful raven sight, far outran Blaylock’s.

As the Warriors slowed up to stop thirty feet before the checkpoint, one of the guards hefted his weapon to his shoulder.

‘Geezer’s got an armed RPG there, boss.’

Blaylock swallowed, hoisted himself out and clambered down the slope of the Warrior’s glacis plate, trying to execute the move with assurance. Tamara hastened along beside him, her eyes notably wide. They passed a large muscular African man, staring at them from his perch on the grassy bank beside a heavy machine gun on a tripod. He wore a bullet belt draped across his chest, and a machete stood propped against one of his fatigue-clad legs. That knife troubled Blaylock – it was a spade-like blade of dull silver, maybe fifteen inches long, surely intended for the slaughter of beasts.

As he drew near, a handful of guardsmen jostled forward in the
manner of confrontation. One, with prominent teeth, close-cut dark curls and the gaunt mien of East Africa, came furthermost, shouting irately. ‘
Kuffar
’ was the word burning through the air.

Tamara looked anxious. ‘I can’t … what he’s saying?’

Blaylock, keeping eyes front, touched her arm lightly. Another man shouldered forward – bearded, eyes very blue, cheeks pockmarked under an Afghan hat of reddish felt. Blaylock extended a hand. But it only hung there, met by a stare, until he withdrew it.

‘My name is Captain Blaylock. United Nations protection force.’

Tamara began to translate. The Afghan put out a flat peremptory palm in her direction and shook his head at Blaylock.

‘Her, no, she not speak, she go.’

Blaylock looked steadily into his translator’s eyes as he addressed her. ‘Go back to the Warrior, Tamara, it’s okay.’