The Threat (20 page)

“That's not how you get the story,” Dan said.

She grinned, not too enthusiastically. “That's right. That's not how you get the story.” She stuck out her hand suddenly. It was small and very, very warm. “Zlata Kovacevic.”

*   *   *

He stopped in the basement of the house, at the dark entrance that opened like a hatchway to a lightless engine room. Tasting fear like stale crackers. On the way here, trotting across an intersection, someone had taken a shot at him. With a heavy weapon, a fifty-caliber at least, that had whiplashed past his head and blown chunks of brick and mortar off a wall.

He'd ducked and kept going, suddenly a lot more alert. But now, crouching, watching his breath puff out white in the cold air blowing from somewhere ahead, he felt even more vulnerable.

Past that door, he was on his own space walk. Beyond the protection of the military, his orders, beyond what Sebold or Gelzinis or Clayton probably expected him to do. Into a Heart of Darkness where no law prevailed. He hesitated, thinking this probably wasn't smart. Then thought, Fuck it. What did he have to go back to anyway? Without Blair?

He ducked his head and went in.

The tunnel, which Zlata said did not officially exist, was unlit and only five feet high. It would take them under the Serb lines to a BiH-held area on the other side. BiH meant Bosnian and Herzegovinian Army, the part-Croat but mainly Muslim side in this turmoil of a disintegrating country. He followed them, bent, feeling the rough concrete ceiling brushing the back of the stocking cap he'd bought, along with a field jacket with a ripped lining and a worn Yugoslav Army sleeping bag and some well-used boots.

He'd left everything that could identify him—uniforms, luggage, military identification, red passport, class ring, wedding ring—at the Holiday Inn, to be delivered to Buddy Larreinaga. He'd asked Zlata if he should buy a false ID. She said dollars would work better. They'd bullshit, bluff, and bribe their way through. He'd also asked if he should try to get a gun. They'd shaken their heads. Jovan had held up a battered Exakta. “Camera best weapon,” he deadpanned.

Zlata said the tunnel ran for a kilometer to Mount Igman. It started in the basement of a shelled-out house not far from the airport. Dan guessed it went
under
the airport, might originally have led to the fuel storage, from the smell of kerosene. He'd had to pony up 450 bucks to go through. He suspected that was for the three of them, though Zlata had insisted it was for him alone. Others were trudging through coming the other way, dragging heavy soft things or bent under bulky pack-frames. Also slung AKs and ammo boxes. Each meeting involved muttered negotiations and twisted contortions to squeeze past.

Jovo went first, then Zlata. She said to keep his head down. There were iron crossbars in the ceiling that would rip your scalp open. Also to not touch the wires that ran along the sides. “They are high tension and will kill you. Stay on the boards and keep going no matter how bad it gets.” He sucked bad memories in with the close, fuel-stinking air, breathed over and over by the parade of smugglers, or merchants, whatever their fellow Morlocks were.

Some minutes in he was splashing through liquid up to his ankles. The water, if it was water, was ice cold and stank of sewage. A pump was running somewhere. His heart was hammering. He blinked, sucking air but not getting much out of it. He kept trying to calculate how long it should take to walk a kilometer. But Jovo kept running into people coming the other way. He had the only flashlight but didn't use it much. Probably saving batteries.

Dan stood bent in the dark listening to the muttered, impenetrable exchanges. The sweat ran down his face and plopped in the water. He kept telling himself it was better than pulling himself backward through a wire conduit under the Tigris River.

It got deeper before it got shallower. But then he was back on duckboards again. Not long after, the air got a little fresher. Then he looked up and there was the sky, glowing faintly, and way up there a light moving against the stars.

*   *   *

He had maps, from Naples. They were xeroxes of UN military maps, with the boundaries of the enclaves and estimates of the current front lines inked in. Zlata had shown him her own treasure, a tattered, flimsy road map that looked as if it dated from about 1960. What she now demanded was more money. Another five hundred to rent or buy, the exact nature of the transaction was opaque, a Fiatish wreck that had once been blue but now was mostly rust. It had no doors or trunk lid, and a replacement hood had been hammered out of roofing iron by some shade-tree mechanic. The front tires were bald, but the back ones were oversized and had the knobby tread he was used to seeing on military vehicles.

Jovo said it was a “Ficho” and that it would get them there, if they could get there at all.

Though it took up most of the rest of his rapidly shrinking sheaf of twenty-dollar bills, they were on their way not long after midnight, running with the one working headlight, on sometimes and off sometimes according to a mysterious protocol worked out in the front seat. According to the road map it was only seventy kilometers, crow's-flight, from Sarajevo to Srebrenica. Zlata said the roads should be decent for most of that way. The trouble was, it was all through Serb-controlled territory, or worse, past or through the outskirts of the zone of Muslim enclaves being imploded by the new Serb offensive: Gorazde, Zepa, Srebrenica itself. He huddled in the back and pretended to sleep as they approached the first checkpoint.

“JNA,” Zlata said tensely. “National Army. They might turn us back, but they probably won't shoot us.”

Jovo said something and she replied; the car slowed. Raising his head, Dan saw oil drums, men in uniform carrying AKs, Soviet-style jeeps, a flag fluttering in the headlight over a sandbag-emplaced machine gun. Jovo reached behind him and got a bottle out. He drew the cork with his teeth as Dan pulled the blanket over his head.

*   *   *

Past the roadblock they waited for a long time as a column of trucks ground by, very slowly, with enormous noise and choking diesel smoke. The trucks hogged the road and there was no way past till they were gone. They were stenciled with the red cross. The canvas covers were snugged tight so he couldn't see what they carried. Then the night was empty again. The little car's motor whined. Something in the transmission knocked wildly whenever they went over thirty-five, but Jovo pushed it along a road that looked like the ones where Dan had grown up, except there were no guardrails, no center lines or white lines or reflectors. But the creeks down in the hollows were the same, and the trees too. Even the little towns they went through looked like Pennsylvania seventy years ago: little wooden and brick stores, little houses, dirt tracks leading off the highway instead of paved streets.

He saw only one signpost that whole way. It said Srebrenica, but someone had scrawled over it
CMPT
.

“What's CMPT?” he asked Zlata, thinking it was an acronym for some military force or political party.

She said tightly, “That's Cyrillic.
Smrt
means ‘death.'”

*   *   *

He was jerked awake by a burring growl from under the chassis. Which he recognized, but apparently his companions didn't. They were arguing. Finally Jovo took his foot off the gas and coasted to the roadside.

Dan threw the blanket back. “It's tanks,” he told them.

“Tanks?” Zlata sounded worried.

He explained that unless the treads were fitted with rubber pads, heavy armor made waffles out of asphalt roads. That was what they were hearing.

“Hmm, tanks,” she repeated. Then she and the Serb fell to arguing again. Maybe over whether they should turn back. Dan didn't get into it. They knew how dangerous this was better than he did. Meanwhile Jovo started up again. They kept going downhill, through heavy pine woods. He told himself that if tanks had rolled down this road, at least they'd be safe from mines.

Then the woods opened out to fields. A smell like burning and rot sucked into the car. The stink of war.

“Srebrenica?” he said.

“Not much farther,” Jovo said. His voice was high. The pitch of a frightened man.

“I remember this town,” the girl said. “The Muslims here were doing well. The fields were good. There was a factory that made screws.”

Dan could hardly tell it had been a town. Not one house stood. At the crossroads each shattered concrete-block wall was scarred with bullets. Below a daubed cross with C's on either side more scrawls flashed in their passing lights. JNA.

“What's the cross mean?”

“The C's are Cyrillic S's.
‘Samo sloga Srbina spasava'
—Only solidarity will save the Serbs. First they shell a village. The tanks blast down any walls still standing. Then they throw hand grenades into any places they think people might be hiding.”

Dan didn't ask where those people were now. He was afraid he knew. But then—where were the bodies?

*   *   *

They left the valley and twisted along hills, through hairpin switchbacks that left him nauseated. The smell came back as they passed burned homes, wrecked vehicles pushed or blown to the side of the road. Aside from that the blackness was total. No lights. No movement. Anything left living had hidden. Meanwhile Zlata was telling him about the rape camps. He could not believe what she said. It had to be propaganda, atrocity stories. Even the Nazis had not thought of such things.

They managed five more miles, he guessed, before Jovo slowed again. This time the headlight showed civilian trucks. A group around a fire. Dan ducked again as they unslung weapons, moved toward the car.

He listened to a palaver that didn't take long and ended with shouting. Then the Ficho began backing up. Fast.

“They said there's fighting ahead,” Zlata explained. “And not to come back or they'll take us for a walk in the woods. These are Mladic's extremists. The Tigers. The Dragons. Psychos, killers out of the prisons. Not people we want to discuss things with, okay? Jovica says we're not getting any farther.”

“I'm getting that feeling too,” Dan said. In the middle of a war zone, unarmed, he was ready to admit it. This hadn't been a good idea.

“If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means there's no place we're going to be safe. Not in Bosnia. Out here, back in Sarajevo—same thing.”

While he was thinking about that she said, “One more thing we can try. Backtrack a couple of kilometers and check out the road to Brloznik. Jovie thinks he knows a way to get from there back to Zedanisko. That'd get us inside the Srebrenica enclave. If that doesn't work, we'll give up.”

But five minutes later headlights came over the hill behind them, moving fast.

*   *   *

They sat in what seemed to be a combination café and tire-repair business. A gas lantern hissed on the table. They hadn't been beaten, yet, but there'd been a lot of gun waving and yelling when the militia or paramilitaries or whatever they were, Serbs anyway, Zlata whispered, had pulled them over. They'd jerked them out and shaken them down, taking money, watches, press cards, and the maps. Then ordered them to follow their VW Golf. To this hamlet, this office smelling of rubber and glue and stale beer, the only light on in town. The guy on duty had made a phone call when his buddies pushed the captives in. Where they'd waited since, wrists lashed behind them with plastic zip-ties.

Until a balding man with a large head strode in, followed by two bigger men carrying Kalashnikovs. He snapped at the guards, who scurried to place chairs. He placed a pack of cigarettes on the table. Lit one. Then threw a pistol on the table too. He looked them over.

“They tell me you're spies,” he opened. In English, for some reason. Dan was about to answer when Zlata said, “We're journalists. Going to Belgrade.”

“Same thing. Where are you going in Belgrade?”

Jovo said something in Serbo-Croatian. The guy slapped his face so hard his head snapped back. Then put out a boot and kicked him off his chair. “Spies, journalists, same fuck-ing thing,” he said again. “Stay down there when I kick you. What paper you write for?”

“I'm with Tanjug,” Zlata said. “Your own news agency, you fool.”

“I don't believe you. How about him?” He jerked his head at Dan. “He's a fucking American, right? What is he doing with you?”

“He told me he was a Canadian.”

“Yeah, I'm American,” Dan said, just to clear it up. “I told her Canadian. You can let her go. Like she said, she's on your side.”

“I'll decide who's on my side.” The bald guy smiled, and it wasn't nice. “The Muslims are using journalists to get NATO to bomb us. What are you doing on this road?”

Dan said, trying to sound calm, “We're trying to find out what happened in Srebrenica. We want to talk to Serbs, not just Muslims. Find out the truth. Too many rumors going around right now. And they don't make the BSA, if that's who you are, look good.”

The commander didn't seem disturbed by the prospect of bad PR. “We're fighting your battle,” he said. He tapped ash and pointed the cigarette at Dan. “You don't understand. Or you'd rather look away. Serbia has been the front line before. Over the centuries. We stopped the fucking Turks here. Kept them out of Europe. Stopped the Nazis too. Well, the Dutch left. They didn't have the
yahyahs
for the job. Another few weeks and we'll have everything cleaned up. Then you won't have to do anything but cry for the poor Muslims.”

One of the men outside came in. He placed something in front of the bald guy. Dan tensed as he saw they were his maps.

“Whose are these?” he said after a time.

Dan swallowed with a dry throat. “Mine.”

He felt the barrel of a Kalashnikov against his ear. Another, banging into his other temple.