Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

In the half-light gloom, Mister cut a pathetic and pitiful figure, but compassion had long ago been sluiced from Joey. He saw the pleading in Mister's eyes and knew that he had won. He faced Mister.

He could not reach into the future.

He would lead his prisoner to the trees, take him up the path and past the skeleton, up to the crest of the hill, and he would permit him to dress except for his shoes and his socks, and would sit the dog down near to his prisoner. In the morning, when the vehicles came, he would commandeer – beg or borrow – a ride to Sarajevo's airport, and he would fly back to Heathrow. There he would hand his prisoner into the custody of the SQG team, and he would go back to the bed-sit on the top floor of the house in Tooting Bec, and he would sleep. He did not think he would ever again return to the Custom House. He had left the uniform behind, he was not a part of the culture. It was the price he paid – the taking of Mister did not come cheap – he would be shut out. He looked over Mister's body. There was no power, no threat. He had no sight of the future.

Joey went forward to take Mister's arm and to bring him out.

His first step was onto matted grass, and a thistle stem that broke under his trainer shoe. His second was on to a patch of ground that was bare. He was looking into Mister's face. His third step was snagged.

Joey felt the restraint, and kicked his foot forward to break the snag.

Barnaby kept the mines on a shelf in his prefabricated office in the Marshal Tito barracks – and when he had visitors, potential donors to the mine clearance programme, he always lifted them down and explained, without emotion, their mechanisms.

'This is the anti-personnel bounding fragmentation mine, which is proven as the most deadly of all those used in the Bosnian war. It has either a trip-wire or a pressure-activated role, but it is more usual in the trip-wire mode. We call it PROM. As you see, ladies and gentlemen, it has a bottle-shaped body, steel, and the fuse is in the bottle's neck. The inside of the bottle has internal grooving, which better aids the shrapnel spread, fragmentation. But this is a clever mine. On a trip, or pressure, its first reaction is to fire a small black powder charge that throws upwards the main charge, held by a tether, a further twenty-five centimetres. That's the "bounding" factor. It carries nine hundred grams of explosive and the main charge detonates – not at ankle level – to cause maximum damage to upper thighs, genitalia, and the vital organs of the lower stomach. The lethal radius is twenty-five metres; the PROM has caused more casualties to our personnel than any other mine.

This evening, in your hotel, when you order a good little Slovenian red, look at the bottle the waiter brings, and remember the other bottle I've shown you, the PROM, exactly the same size, but a killer.'

Barnaby put the deactivated mine back on the shelf.

The faces of his audience, as he would have predicted, were limp. He doubted many would order wine that evening with their dinner.

A woman visitor paused at the door and looked back at the shelf. He asked her if she would like to handle the PROM. A little shudder crossed her face, but she nodded. He took it down and passed it to her.

She held it as though unconvinced that it had been made safe.

He said quietly, because dispassionate factual description worked better with potential donors than melodrama, 'The tether mechanism, the jump before scattering the shrapnel, is what makes it particularly effective. When it's on a trip-wire it only takes a three-kilo pull to fire it. If your foot snags the wire, you'd hardly feel it.'

Her fingers trembled as she gave it back to him.

October 2001

Dougie Gough wrote the name in his notepad: Dragan Kovac. He poised his pen and waited for the translation.

' I am a retired sergeant of police and so I am familiar with the style of statement that an esteemed gentleman such as yourself would expect… The memory of that day is very clear to me… I now know that the older man was called Packer, and the younger man was Cann. The man, Packer, had stripped off his clothes, he had surrendered. The combat between the two was over. Packer had submitted. It was last light.

Cann came with a dog to bring him out of the minefield – that he came into the field was the final marker of his victory. Packer was naked and the dog was near him, guarding him, and Cann set off the mine. It was a PROM, with a trip-wire. Cann went down. I had a fine view of it from the porch of my house. Packer snatched up some of his clothes and ran, as if he had a sense of liberty. He ran for the river. When Packer was nearly at the river, the dog caught him. I went from my house, down the track to the riverbank and called the dog – I am familiar with police dogs. I had with me my long-handled axe. It was becoming dark but there was light enough for me to see that the dog was injured by some of the shrapnel the mine had thrown, and that the dog had bitten Packer's arm. I took them, Packer and the dog, back to my house. The dog guarded him, and 1 had my axe and I waited for help to come. Then he cried out, Cann did, in the field.

The dog heard it. It limped away, went back into the field. I was left with the prisoner. I had the axe but I am an old man, I have been retired many years.

I could not keep the prisoner – I was not to blame for his escape. The dog went back into the field and from the time it reached Cann he did not cry out again. You should believe me, I could not have kept the prisoner.'

He was retired now, had 'gone early'. But a telephone call had come to the bungalow on the outskirts of Kilchoan, the chief investigation officer himself, and the request had been made that he should attend the small ceremony as the Custom House representative. A young diplomat, Hearn, had met him at the airport and had driven him to the valley. He had not been able to understand the speeches and he had wandered off. It had been his wife who had suggested he should take his walking-boots. He had sat on the riverbank and changed from his brogues to his boots then used the highest stones to cross the river. He had walked across a ploughed field, newly turned but not yet sown, and across a grazing field where his advance had scattered goats, sheep and two dry cows.

He had passed the skeletons. He did not have to be told where to go. The target that drew him forward was a waist-high cairn of stones. It was similar country and he felt comfortable, small fields, wooded slopes and distant mountains, to that which bounded the road approaching his home on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. He stood quietly by the stones and soaked the place of its images, and he'd said the same quiet prayer that he spoke in his mind each Sunday in the quiet of the chapel at Kilchoan. When the ceremony was over, a drifting procession had followed him to the cairn. The diplomat translated the words of the rugged, bluff, self-serving man who wore an old uniform greatcoat and a policeman's cap. He knew he must play the part of a sponge to their stories. There was an official report, which had been drawn up by the embassy half a year earlier, but it had carried no sense of soul in its typed pages. The retired policeman saluted him and stepped back. An old man, his cheeks nicked from the shave to mark the importance of the ceremony in the village, came forward to take Kovac's place, and beside him, hobbling with him, was a German shepherd dog with its left front leg off at the knee.

He wrote the next name: Husein Bekir (farmer).

' I came from my home and I waded over the ford, and I thought I would be swept away, and then I went up the track past Kovac's house – the old fool was whining that it was not his fault that the prisoner had escaped from him – and I followed the de-miners who had been called out. We went on a path they had made between their tape and the trees at the far side of my fields. They had big lamps with them. They worked as fast as they dared to make a corridor across the field. When they had gone half-way the light from the lamps showed him. I had been told he was called Joey a silly name. He was on the ground, on his side. He was alive then. They went faster, I think they took great risks. They found one mine, a small one like the mine that has crippled my wife, and a trip-wire but it had become disconnected from the PROM or the PMR2, and then they stopped. Why? Because of the dog. The dog was beside Joey. It guarded him.