Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'Damn right you can.'

July 1999

'It was a PMA2. That's the most common mine that was laid. It's anti-personnel and designed to wound not kill. It has one hundred grams of explosive detonated by five kilos of pressure.'

'But you miss the point, Herr Barnaby.'

In his Portakabin room, in the mine-action centre, in the Marshal Tito barracks, in Sarajevo, the Englishman thought it was against the German woman's nature to allow him to complete a sentence of explanation.

Barnaby – he never made it clear whether that was a given name or a family name – was experienced in deflecting the bullying tactics employed by the executives of international charities. Just as he never hurried when cleaning a minefield, so he never raised his voice or lost his temper. 'What point do I miss, Frau Bierhof?'

'You miss the point that the woman, the Bekir woman, was the last to be hurt – that is thirteen months ago.'

'The point continues to evade me.'

'Nothing has been done in thirteen months.'

Frau Bierhof, do you have any idea of the scale of the problem?' He asked the question without point-scoring rhetoric. Frau Anneliese Bierhof, Barnaby thought, was a woman unused to detailed rebuttal. As the director (Field Operations) of World in Crisis, from Hamburg, with millions of DMs to spend, she was a powerful hitter. He imagined her bludgeoning her will through endless committee meetings, dictating policy over the hesitations of those unfortunates who feared the jab of her pen at them or her gimlet glance.

She was a large woman with shoulders accentuated by the padding of her jacket. 'Allow me, please, as they appear in this office, to tell you the facts of life that must be taken into consideration.'

' I know the fact of life, Herr Barnaby. You will hear the "fact" that I acknowledge. In Germany today we have twenty-three families from the Muslim village of Vraca, and we have eighteen families from the Serb village of Ljut. The stabilization force of NATO reports to Berlin that the Bunica valley is peaceful and does not suffer inter-ethnic tension. Our government wants these people returned to their domicile. They refuse to return while there are still mines in the locality. The mines must be cleared. A start must be made. It is thirteen months since Frau Bekir was disabled, and that start has not been made. World in Crisis has the money in place, waiting to be spent, for the repair of their homes and the infrastructure of their villages – such as the electricity – but we must know that the mines have been removed. When will it happen? Why has thirteen months been allowed to elapse?'

He said quietly, against the rising crescendo of her voice, 'Because there are other places that have a higher priority.'

'That is not an answer that is satisfactory.' She paused, sipped at the bottled water she had brought with her.

Well, satisfactory or not, it was the answer she would have to accept. From his Portakabin, he co-ordinated the work of fifteen hundred de-miners, but the computer database held the locations of many thousands of minefields… Barnaby had worked a lonely life in minefields for most of the last twenty years. The only easy work in those twenty years had been the clear-up in Kuwait a decade before. Nice straight lines of anti-tank mines, TMMs, TMAs and TMRPs, laid with the exactness of potatoes in a flat field; find the end of a line and keep going until dusk.

Kuwait was the only place it had been easy, and in Kuwait there had been no shortage of money, If Frau Bierhof had been less confrontational, less antagonistic, he might have sympathized with her predicament. He knew, because the evidence of it littered his desk each day, that the pressure was on to expel the refugees from the European havens and send them whence they came.

It was thirteen months since a mine, what he classified as the 'nuisance' variety, a PMA2, had been detonated under the right foot of Lila Bekir, in her seventy-third year, and it was eleven months since he had been to the valley and seen her. She had been home from hospital a week. And she had been lucky

… If a woman of that bulk, of that weight, had come from anywhere in Great Britain and had lived the soft life, she would have died. She had hobbled to meet him on her crutch, had insisted on making coffee for him, and had served him a sweet cake filled with grated almond. She had told him, disparaging the men who had been there, that she had shouted at them that they should not come forward to help her, should not put their own lives at risk. After the blast, she had put the child on her back and had crawled to the safety of the fence. She had told him that she had reckoned her body would protect the child if she had detonated a second mine. She was as tough as an old boot. It was a miracle, from his experience, that gas gangrene had not set in. The calcaneus, the heel bone, was destroyed at the talus, where the tibia and fibula meet, and she would never walk unaided on that foot. The doctors treating her had decided against amputation at the mid calf. They had not believed a woman of that age would cope with a prosthetic leg.

There had been a wheelchair in the corner of her kitchen, but from the shiny newness of the frame and the clean tyres he had realized it had not been used, and he didn't think it ever would be. There had been no compelling reason for him to go and see the family, but his memory of the beauty of that valley had drawn him back. She was one of a few more than eleven hundred killed or wounded by mines since the guns had gone silent.

'Have you actually been there, Frau Bierhof?'

' I am familiar with the situation there.'

' I'm sorry – have you stood on the safety of the track that links Ljut and Vraca, and viewed the valley?'

' I don't have the time to stand in each ruined village. Every minute of my day is spoken for.'

He did not tell Frau Bierhof that the budget for de-mining, which he co-ordinated for the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was above twenty-five million American dollars. Nor did he tell her of the numbers of 'accidents' to the men who worked at his direction, who were careless, who would have no worthwhile pension; nor did he tell her of the men killed or maimed in 'incidents' – the pleasantry used to describe suicidal attempts to end the stress of the work. He went to his filing cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Like a card-dealer he flicked them, blown-up and in monochrome or colour, across his desk.

He told her about the Bunica valley.

Each time she interrupted him, he made a little gesture with his finger, tapped his lips, then went on.

He talked until she no longer interjected, brought the valley into the steaming heat of the Portakabin, and his voice was quiet against the murmur of the arching fan on the window shelf beside his desk.

He talked until she reached into the pocket of her shoulder-padded jacket, took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes.

He said, There are a thousand such valleys. I play God. I preside over committees that decide the order in which they should be cleared. Some are disgustingly ugly and ruined with factory complexes, some are as beautiful as this one. What they have in common is that they are all destroying lives… When I can justify it, the valley will be cleared.'

'Testicles were pinched, Mr Gough, and it hurt.'

' I'm sure it did, Mr Cork.'

'One to one with the minister – whatever thoughts we have of the relevance of our political masters – is not a happy experience. It was like being in the middle of an incendiary bomb attack. He was powerfully angry. Unity is his text for the day.'

'What does the minister want, Mr Cork? Does he want togetherness, or does he want Packer behind bars?'

'He wants a report.'

'We searched the property, of course, and didn't find anything of importance but, then, we didn't expect to… Tell him, Mr Cork, in your report that it's about flushing foxes from cover, driving them on to the guns.'