Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Atkins shouted, a pressing, ruthless yell, 'Stop right there. Now, come back. Retrace your steps.

Exactly…'

For a moment the Eagle stood statue still. Then he turned, fear on his face.

'Put your feet precisely where you walked, and move.'

The Eagle came back to them. In the bright sunlight, in the crisp wind, the sweat dribbled on his forehead.

Step by step, through the snow, until he reached the flagstones.

Atkins said, 'This was a military position, it would have been mined. You were walking on snow. You didn't know what was under it – could have been flags, concrete or earth. If it had been earth there could have been mines. You never walk off-road here, or off the hard core – not if you want to keep your legs. Of course it's been "cleared", but there's no such thing as guaranteed clearance, and won't be for a hundred years. Just don't go walkabout.'

They went in silence to the Toyota.

He drove them along a winding road, away from the memorial, that cut down into a valley. The traffic signs were now in Cyrillic script; he told them they were in Serb territory. They went past old women sitting on collapsible stools with big plastic bags by their knees. He said it was where they sold smuggled cigarettes from Italy, at eighty British pence a packet.

They went left and climbed, came to the crest of the hill. The road hugged the rim. Below them, again, was another view of the city. He drove on another hundred and fifty metres then pulled into what had once been a car park for a bungalow restaurant, but the building was wrecked and bullet-pocked, and its roof timbers were charred.

He slipped out of his seat and walked away from the Toyota. Mister and the Eagle followed him. He remembered watching, with image-intensifier binoculars handed him by French troops, a night attack up through the Jewish cemetery towards the trenches that were now in front of his feet. He stood on a narrow strip of cracked concrete. He had willed on, that night, those Muslim troops, civilians in ill-fitting uniforms and with outdated weapons, scrambling up the hill and advancing into the machine-gun fire from these trenches. He had shouted his support to them into the darkness, and they wouldn't have heard even the whisper of what he screamed over the volume and intensity of the gunfire. He thought of who he was now, and what he did now, and he spat the bile from his throat. He had not planned that memory or that thought.

'I can see the hotel, but I can't see my room,' Mister said.

The trenches were a metre wide and a metre and a half deep. Where the machine-guns had been sited, which had driven off that night attack, with the grenades and the bayonets, there were still heavy logs of pine laid flat to protect the Serb soldiers. The water in the pit of the trenches was frozen, and caught in the ice were dulled rusty cartridge cases. Further along, going east and in front of what had been the restaurant's conservatory dining area, the trench was reinforced by a twenty-metre length of half-moon concrete section. He could have told them, because it was what he had been told years back, that the section came from the Olympic Winter Games bobsleigh run, but he didn't bother.

Atkins said, 'The gunfire would have broken up their little kitchen gardens. Both sides grew cannabis plants right in front of their forward positions. The warlords, that's Serif and those on the Serb side, encouraged the planting of cannabis. They reckoned that stoned guys wouldn't think too much about the war, and they also reckoned they'd fight harder because they wouldn't want to abandon their crop.

Can you think what it was like up here in winter if you weren't drunk or stoned out of your mind? The little men fought, stoned, pissed and half dead with cold, and the big men – like Serif – got fat on their backs and their bodies. He's scum.'

'I do business anywhere I can find it, if the price is right.'

'I thought it might help you, Mister, to know where your new partner is coming from. I thought it might help you to know what sort of man he is, and what's his power base. He danced on graves… ' Atkins let his words die.

He turned. Neither of them had listened to him.

They were already walking back to the Toyota.

Didn't he know it? He was a fly in the spider's skein. He trotted after them to the vehicle.

'You all right, Atkins?'

'Never been better, Mister.'

'You know what? I reckon it's the tourist trail. They're doing the battlefield tour… It's not Utah or Gold Beach, or the Passchendaele Ridge or that farmhouse at Waterloo, but he's getting the Sarajevo scene. Don't you think?'

'How the hell do I know?'

'Just making conversation, sunshine… You'd be doing me a favour if you spat it,' Maggie said.

They were a clear quarter of a mile from where the Toyota was parked. Joey watched it through the binoculars.

He said, a recitation without feeling, 'I crossed a line. I broke every rule I'm supposed to abide by. I knew the illegality of what I asked for, and had other men who'd no scruples do what I was incapable of. I wanted it to happen.'

She shrugged. 'So that's all right, then – stop moaning.'

'What I did, and justified to myself, meant I walked outside my team.'

'Are you one of these "enthusiasts"? We weed them out at our place. Even if they've fooled the recruitment board, we spot them and chuck them. Their feet don't touch the ground. Don't, please, tell me you're an enthusiast.'

'You've a good sneer… No, I don't think I am.'

'But it's justified, the nasty work? Right, right – you've a sister who died of drugs, overdosed?'

'No, I haven't.'

'What's the other hackneyed drop of tripe – oh, yes.

"My best friend got to be a pusher. That's why I'm a crusader against drugs." Is that it?'

'I didn't have a best friend on Sierra Quebec Golf,'

Joey said simply. 'My best friend at school teaches maths in a comprehensive in Birmingham.'

'So, what justified last night?'

'Are you listening?' Joey breathed in hard. His mind was a tangle of snipped string, no knots. 'It's about him, who he is – and about me, about who I am.'

'A winner and a loser is what you told me.'

'He's the highest mountain. Why climb a mountain? Because it's there. It's there in front of you. It's in front of you, indestructible, and laughing at you because you are so small – pygmy fucking small. The whole team of Sierra Quebec Golf spent three bloody years and they fell off the bloody mountain, they're history. I want to climb the mountain, beat the bastard, sit with my arse on his nose, because it's there

… because he' s there. They say he's no fear, I want to see him scared. They say he's in control, I want to hear him scream and beg. I want – little, small me, and it's the only thing in my life that I want – to bring down the mountain. Is that an answer?'

Maggie touched his hand. 'I think it's better than most could give.'

She thought that the clerk in Warsaw, in the shadows when he kissed her, would have said something like that, about mountains, if she'd asked him, and the Libyan boy on the veranda in Valetta's moonlight. She'd wept for them both. God, was that her future, growing old and sad because young men fell off the crags on bloody mountains?

They were climbing back into the Toyota, made huge by the binocular lenses, and she eased the van forward.

There were others in her organization, and in every one of the foreign communities camped in the city, who didn't care. She loathed their company.

With the lorry driver, Monika headed for the village beyond Kiseljak.

She cared. If she had not then she might as well, as she often told herself, have stayed at Njusford, sheltered by the mountains and overlooking a bay that was classified by UNESCO as a 'preservation-worthy environment'. The bay was on Flakstodoya island, one of the Lofoten archipelago. It was the home she had rejected. Because she had needed to care she had left Njusford, turned her back on the little coral-painted house that had been her home. She had seen in Bosnia everything that brutality had to offer.