Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

…" He remembered the woman, in torment, sitting with her dogs beside the grave, and he remembered that the flowers on the grave had lost their brightness. He thought it a pity that the daughter, Dorrie, had been just a 'messer' and a 'tosser'. He thought that the work would have been more interesting, more fulfilling, if the girl had been worthwhile. There was nothing worthwhile that he had been told about the girl when he had sat beside the Aga in the kitchen and drunk the instant coffee.

"I won't even be able to get close to it, not even if I wanted to. The people who did it, killed the girl, are beyond reach, they're behind the lines… it's only to write a report."

He started to write after lunch. Henry Carter had clear handwriting, and much to be thankful for to a schoolmistress who had presided with an iron fist over a primary class more than fifty years before. He had never lost the art of legible copperplate handwriting. When he had completed the text, when the supervisor had gone for her mid-afternoon rest break, he would slip the sheet to Penny, a nice girl and respectful, and Penny would type it for him. The typed sheet would go with the file when he was ready to present it for transfer to the disk. It was always necessary, Henry Carter believed, to have background. One couldn't say when the file would be called for, when the material would be summoned up. It might be next year, but then it might not be for a decade. It might be that the person, young man or young woman, who would call up the file was now in short trousers or ankle socks. The war might be just history when the file was called for. He brushed the crumbs from his table, and he swirled his tongue round his mouth to try to lose the tang of the cheese and pickle. What surprised him… oh, yes, he could still sometimes surprise himself

… was that he had stayed with the file right through the statutory one hour of lunch break, he had not even taken the RSPB magazine from its postal wrapping. Onto clean paper, with a sharpened pencil, he wrote briskly. It would be good to have the background, helpful… OUTLINE: Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, amidst a wave of optimism for the future, the ethnic groups of the empire demanded again the nationhood that had been suppressed since the establishment of communist regimes after WW2. Communist centralism had failed significantly to blunt such demands. YUGOSLAVIA: Always artificial, originally dominated in part by the Ottoman empire and in part by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Achieved a bogus national identity between 1918 and 1941 which fractured on the German invasion. WW2: Pro and anti-Axis feelings polarized the principal ethnic groupings. Croats (RC and Europe-orientated) took Nazi side. Serbs (Orthodox and Slav) formed principal resistance (Chetniks and Partisans). Muslims (obvious) tended to regard this as others' quarrel and engendered both factions' hostility. Characteristic of Serb resistance v Croat fascism was horrific cruelty? 700,000 Serbs killed by the Croatians. TITO: Main resistance leader, communist Josip Broz Tito, by charisma and ruthless rule, bound the infant Yugoslavia together. The Serb majority were over-rewarded with bureaucracy jobs, plus internal security and military. Tito's death, can of worms unlidded again. POST TITO: Problems of different cultures, different ambitions, are not solved, nor much effort made in that direction; the adhesive is communist discipline. POST COMMUNIST COLLAPSE: Slovenes (less important) and Croats (critical) are anxious to achieve statehood. Croats are encouraged by Germans (sticky finger in the pie again), and name a date. No thought given to the fears of the several hundred thousand Serbs living within the area claimed for new republic of Croatia. Inside Serb-Croat population were strong memories of WW2 atrocities, also the knowledge that privileged status would end. Bosnia problem not dealt with, irrelevant to this file. THE WAR: Serb-Croat population formed Territorial Defence Force (ragtag militia) and was aided by Serb-controlled JNA (regular army). Principal Serb-Croat population areas were taken in military action, followed by 'ethnic cleansing' (removal or killing of Croat population in captured areas). Main effort of the war 6? lasted 5 months, cease-fire in January 1992, when 22 per cent of new Croatia had been lost to Serbs. (NB: DOROTHY MOW AT killed in December 1991 when Serb militia and JNA overran the Croat village of Rosenovici, Glina Municipality.)

SITUATION AT TIME OF PENN'S VISIT TO CROATIA: (NB: PENN arrived Zagreb 18 April 1993.) The indigenous Serbs occupying parts of former Croatia had declared a "Republic of Krajina'. Under the UN-brokered cease-fire agreement the territory was to be policed by a United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), but increasing Serb hostility to the international community severely handicapped UNPROFOR's ability to carry out its mandate. UNPROFOR designated four areas of responsibility as Sector South, Sector North, Sector West and Sector East (Glina Municipality in Sector North). Cease-fire line maintained by both combatants in high state of alert, with Serb advantage in numbers and quality of armour, artillery. In the Sectors ongoing brutality towards few Croats left behind in general flight. (NB: DOROTHY MOW AT body recovered 3 April 1993.) He read the paper back. A little wordy, his background material, but he did not think it possible for the events of that spring two years ago to be appreciated if the context were not known. He was thirty-four years old, and it was something he had wanted to do since he was a child. Penn gazed from the window of the great train. He could justify it because one of the senior instructors had remarked over a canteen dinner at the Training School, fifteen years back, that in the days of quality field operations it was always best to cross Europe by train. The instructor had said that border checks at night, sleepy frontier guards thumbing their thick books of the names of 'illegals', were never as sharp as at the airport immigration desks. The instructor had said that if an operative wanted to get unnoticed, unhindered, into eastern Europe, then the operative always stood a better than average chance if he took a rocking and winding and slow-hauling train. That was the justification, slight enough, but the hard reason was that Penn had always wished on the chance to take a great train through the mountains of central Europe. He gazed from the window into the night, and the mountains were dark shadows except where they climbed sufficiently for the spring snow to have lasted, and the steepling forests beside the track were a mass of black, and the rivers tumbled silver in the light thrown down from the carriages. The joy of the journey was gone with the coming of the evening. The joy had been the afternoon crawl through Austria, and the images stayed with him of the tall-towered and ruined castles that perched on crags, of the farms of toy-town neatness that were in the valleys below the track, and the miniature tractors that were out in the handkerchief fields pulling the manure carts from the wood-built cattle barns. It was not his style to think the clever thoughts, that he was traversing the no man's land between the civility of old Europe and the barbarity of new Europe. His style was to inhale the beauty, the majesty, of high mountains and sharp valleys and thick forest and brutal outcrops of rock, take the beauty and majesty into his mind and imagine the delight of walking there. He wondered if there would be the same deer, the same foxes, the same badgers, as there had been in the fields and woods and hills around the tied cottage of his childhood. A place for a man to be alone. So he had taken the chance to ride the great train. He had flown in the morning from Heathrow to Munich, crossed Munich by the airport bus, and bought his ticket at the Hauptbahnhof, and eaten a sandwich, and climbed onto the Mimara Express Salzburg, Villach, Ljubljana to Zagreb. It was his dream, it was a collection of postcard prints, and the dusk and then the evening had come; and he doubted that he would tell Jane when he made it back to Heathrow and Raynes Park and 57B the Cedars, that he had taken a great train over a track that cut a route through Austria. His briefcase was on the seat beside him. He reached for it… It was the briefcase that he had purchased, second hand, from the store in Gower Street, bought with pride thirteen years back. The briefcase had been black but long usage by a previous owner had frayed the flap and scuffed the edges and scratched the surface. The briefcase might once have belonged to a higher executive officer, even to a senior executive officer, but it had been purchased by a B Grade clerk, and it was his symbol that he belonged at the heart of the Security Service. The EIIR symbol, once gold, was worn, and it had been one of the games played by the B Grade clerk to imagine what secrets had been held in the briefcase… There were no damn secrets now.