Gerald Seymour - Heart of Danger

The Argentine captain said, "They have a mass of radio traffic, mostly out of Glina, but hooked in to Vojnic where they have Command and Control, and linked to Petrinja and Lasinja and Skakavac and Brezova Glava which are close to the cease-fire demarcation line. We have the situation reports, from our monitoring, of their units that have been put to state red alert along the Kupa river. We have the transcripts of the radio transmissions made by the field troops that are deployed. We have visual confirmation of their movement from the Dan Batt fixed observation posts, X-ray 9 and X-ray 11…" "And it means…?" The Canadian said, "It means that he's coming, coming with his prisoner, coming to the river. It means that he's being hunted." "What chance…?" "They've lost him in the immediate vicinity of his snatch. They reckon to block him on the river." "I said, what chance…?" "If the Serbs were to know where he planned to cross the river, no chance. They do not have that information… He has a slight chance." He was looking up, and the tip of the pointer was against the bland green of the map surface, cut only by the Kupa river, no roads. He imagined it as a morass of swamp. The Director thought he was playing God Almighty with the life of a man coming to the river with his prisoner, and he thought that the man coming to the river with his prisoner was playing God Almighty with the lives of all those within reach of the artillery and the missiles. He turned his back on the map, went slowly and subdued out of the operations room. He wondered what it was like, the swamp morass to which the man was coming with his prisoner. It was a small farm, not more than five hectares, where Zoran Pelnak and his wife lived. The farm gave, at best, a hard living and it was poorer now that his two sons were taken by the army. Before the boys had gone, one to the garrison at Osijek and one down in the south at Gospic, Zoran Pelnak had had their help in the never finished work of cleaning and deepening the drainage ditches that cut his land. The fields were too low set for good farming ground, too near to the river that flooded its banks most winters, and most winters the farmhouse of brick and wood was set upon a small island in a shallow lake. It was Zoran Pelnak's home, had been his father's home, and his grandfather's and his great-grandfather's home. His great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had dug the drainage ditches and cleaned them and deepened them. There were three fields for the farm and in two of them he harvested a hay crop and grazed animals, and in one of them he and his wife grew their vegetables for their own eating and for sale in the market at Karlovac. He and his wife could survive the isolation of their life on the farm that fronted the north bank of the Kupa river. Their neighbours had long gone, left their homes and their farms and their livestock, abandoned them. He would not leave. He would not have cared to have gone to the graves of his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father, sat on his haunches beside the stones, and explained why he was running from the drainage ditches they had dug. He moved slowly from the front door of the farmhouse. From the porch of the door he could see, across the field and the bog land where the cattle could go only in summer, the far bank of the Kupa river and the trees. He moved slowly from the rheumatism that came from living in a place so damp, towards the barn where his four cows were bedded, and the pigs and the goats, and the hens. On the far bank, behind the trees, maybe the bastard fuck Partizans watched him, and he was too old to care if they saw him. Zoran Pelnak knew most of what happened, each day and each night, on the far bank of the Kupa river. He pressed on into the barn, and he hoped that the soldiers would soon be down from their camp for their well water, because the soldiers would help him lift down the baled hay for the animals.

It was many hours since Evica had last heard the advance behind her of the search party, and their shouts.

She guessed they would have turned by now, cold from the night, down because of their failure. She guessed they would be heading back to their village, arguing between themselves, going back to food and warmth. And going back to dispute the new command of Salika, and to fight for control of the diesel supplies and the sacks of seed potatoes. Two would fall; she thought Branko and Milo would fall. One would rise; Stevo would command the village. She thought the wife of Stevo the most stupid woman she knew, and the wife of Stevo would take her place as the village's queen. They would turn back when they reached the perimeter line of their vicious and ignorant world… And her village would become an armed camp, isolated, guarded close.

The dog had the scent and moved easily ahead of her, loping on the trail on which her man had been taken.

Marty was told it by an Austrian of UNCIVPOL, told that the balloon was up in Sector North. He was a good friend of the Austrian policeman because they had shared a house, when the snow had fallen in January on Bosnia, away down east in Srebrenica, and it had been goddamn cold because the house had only half a roof, a place where men became good friends. The Austrian policeman had been coming off duty, he had a new posting at the UNCIVPOL desk in the operations room, and he had told Marty that all hell was loose across in Sector North, and that the crossing points were closed at Turanj and at Sisak, that a bigshot guy from a village in Glina Municipality had been kidnapped, that it was some crazy stuff about a war crimes investigator, and more crazy that there was the German woman from the UNHCR Transit Centre at Karlovac in tow. The Austrian policeman had told him all of this and his eyes had been going past where Marty stood in the doorway of the converted freight container, hooked on the shining steel ring set in the floor of the container, and the chain that was padlocked to it, and the collapsible bed that was made up in the far corner behind Marty with the sleeping bag laid on it and the folded blanket and the handcuffs. And Marty had told him, dead serious, that because he was homesick he'd gotten a big brute of a bear, a proper grizzly, being crated in from Anchorage, and he had gotten rid of the Austrian policeman as fast as was half decent. He drove into central Zagreb.

Marty thought of the photographs on the walls of the freight container, pictures of the weak and the outnumbered and the defenceless who had been caught behind the lines.

He parked among the new black BMWs in their sleek rows, the wheels of the fat cat bastards who were doing fine.

He went up to her room.

Marty Jones told Mary Braddock that Penn was coming with his prisoner towards the river… he looked for her excitement… that Penn had taken Milan Stankovic away from the village of Salika… he watched for her triumph… that a huge manhunt was in progress in Sector North between the village of Salika and the Kupa river… he expected to see her flinch… that the whole of the goddamn place beyond the cease-fire line was alive, roused… he expected to see her wilt.

"I want to look into his face. I want him to know that he murdered my daughter. I want to be there when he's brought across."

"That's positive thinking, ma'am, and positive thinking is always good. Could just be premature thinking. Do you have any appreciation of the odds against…?"

"Penn'll bring him across the river, I don't doubt it."

He felt almost an anger. She was sitting in an armchair and her legs, narrow and fine, were crossed in elegance, and Ulrike Schmidt, the best woman he'd known, was hacking through a bucket of hell with Penn and the prisoner, and the jaws of the goddamn trap were closing tight, as they had closed on those who were photographed on the walls of his converted freight container. One thing to goddamn talk about it, one thing to make the great goddamn plan, quite another to… "Ma'am, it's not a picnic."