Andy McNab - Deep Black

I bent under the scaffold pole and carried on to the main entrance. Two more Aussies were on stag in the driveway. As I nodded at the Iraqi on the door, I looked up at Rob's room. The light was on and Jerry was on that fucking phone again. He disappeared from view as I went inside. If the CPA were tracking it, we'd be in the shit.

The old man was chatting to a few locals at the counter, every one of them with a cigarette on the go. I got a cursory look up and down, but they'd seen enough blood and sweat in their lives not to be too concerned at a little more splashed about on some white guy. Through the glass door by the lifts, the underwater lights filled the air with a blue glow. The poolside tables were crowded. The world's media were back from a hard day at the office.

A good friend was dead, and what might have been the best job I'd ever be offered had been shot to fuck. But at least I was in one piece and Jerry was alive; I supposed I had done what Renee wanted me to – so far. We still had a way to go.

I got to the door and put my hand on the knob. It was locked.

'Who is it?' Jerry sounded worried.

'Nick. Open up, quick, quick!'

He fumbled with the lock and the door half opened. 'Fuck, what's happened to you, man?'

I walked in and closed it behind me. A fuzzy BBC World was conducting a silent interview with Blair.

Jerry's camera was on the coffee-table with the cable attached.

'Who you talking to? You sending pictures?'

'Just testing the kit. What the fuck's happened?'

'The car got hit. The other two are dead. Get your stuff together, quick. We're getting out of here before curfew. Test or not, you had the fucking thing on – they'll find us.'

This time, we had a forty-seater minibus to take us across the tarmac. Jerry sat next to me, his right leg sticking out into the aisle because I'd taken up too much room. I was knackered and wanted to lean against the window as I listened to Now That's What I Call Mosque 57 playing on the tape-machine. The driver bopped away in time with the music as he spun the wheel with his elbows. I could just hear the rotors of two Blackhawks; I turned my head and watched them hover the last few feet before hitting the pan alongside about another eight of the dull green things. My hands, knees and elbows were scabbing up nicely after my tour of Baghdad's back alleys, and in a few days, I knew, I'd have a hard time trying to resist picking them.

Jerry hadn't said much since we left the al-Hamra. That was OK, I needed time to think.

The bus was full of self-important businessmen checking their mobiles as they roamed for the new signal, and others holding their diplomatic passports firmly in their hands like some sort of talisman. I never knew why, but the people who have one always think it gives them better protection than body armour.

'Hello, General,' someone brayed behind us, in the kind of voice that could only have been shaped by Sandhurst, the Guards and a lifetime's supply of Pink Gin.

It got worse. 'Ah, David, old boy. Been back to the UK, have you?' the general boomed, as if talking from the far side of a parade-ground.

'Three weeks' leave. New father and all that. Got there just in time to see the sprog drop.'

'Splendid, splendid. I was a young major when the memsahib had her two. Away on exercise both times. Damned good thing, if you ask me. Boy or girl?'

'Boy. Nine pounds six ounces.'

'Marvellous. Prop forward in the making, what?'

They had a jolly good laugh, apparently oblivious to the rest of us, until one of the very important businessmen's phones went off in his briefcase. Instant red face as he dug it out: the ring tone was the theme tune for Mission Impossible.

'Anything cooking in my absence, sir?'

'All rather rumbustious – as per. Just been to Oberammergau. Meeting about a meeting, you know the sort of thing.'

If he didn't, I did. Guys like this could wring years out of meetings about meetings. A year or two of to-ing and fro-ing from Sarajevo would see him through to his engraved gold watch and lump sum.

Jerry gave me a grin. Either he'd spotted the look on my face or he finally felt within reach of the picture of a lifetime.

I gave him one in return, then went back to planning how I'd track down Ramzi Salkic, the man who might be able to get me to Hasan Nuhanovic, the man who might, in turn, be able to help me find out who had killed Rob.

Because when I did, I'd drop them.

We trundled past a line of Blackhawks. SFOR was stencilled in black on their airframes: Stabilization Force was what they'd christened the military presence in Bosnia these days. There were about twelve thousand troops on the ground, mostly supplied by NATO. By the look of it, most of the troops around here were German. Their box-like green Mercedes 4x4s were parked in neat lines outside their HQ at the other end of the airport. The UN was also still in Sarajevo, feeling as guilty as ever for having stood and watched as the Serbs bombed and shot its half-million inhabitants to fuck during the siege.

The airport had been rebuilt since the last time I was here, and the terminal looked as though it had only just been unwrapped. There were a couple of Ks of flat plain between the other side of the runway and the mountains, dotted with newly rebuilt houses amid a patchwork of freshly cultivated fields. During the war, the only way in or out of the city had been via this runway and up into the mountains. The Serbs had sealed off everything else.

I gazed across to what had once been an 800-metre sprint to avoid getting dropped by Serb snipers or caught by UN troops and sent back. The Serbs killed or injured over a thousand people along this stretch of tarmac. They certainly knew how to shoot: the majority of their victims were running targets at night, like Jerry and me when I was trying to get us back into the city.

We'd been thrown together when I'd thumbed a lift in one of the wagons trying to make it back into Sarajevo. I was on the road south of the enclave after the second Paveway job. Jerry recognized me from the hotel bar and persuaded his driver and another journo to pull in and pick me up. Dried blood covered the back of the car and was smeared down the tailgate window. It wasn't an unusual sight around here, but these three were miserable enough to make me think that whatever had happened had happened pretty recently.

I sat in the back with Jerry. No one said a word as the front two smoked themselves through a packet of Marlboro and we all hoped the Serbs didn't decide to use us for target practice.

About an hour from the city we got stopped. It looked pretty straightforward, a VCP manned by three bored-looking Serbs, one of them puffing on some waccy baccy. Usually, the best approach was to give them a few packets of cigarettes, smile a lot and take their picture. But that didn't look like it was going to work today. They wanted us to roll down the windows. Then they wanted our cameras. I was the first to hand mine over: they were more than welcome to the pictures I'd taken.

Jason, the front passenger, put up more of a fight. He gabbled at them in Serbo-Croat, but eventually his went the same way. Jerry, however, had other ideas. A few weeks in the field, and he thought he could just get out of the car and start blustering and bluffing his way through. Then he went ballistic when one of the Serbs pulled the film out of his camera. Not a good move. The long and the short of it was, he was going to die. Everybody knew it but him. What the fuck did he think the Serbs were doing when they started slipping their weapons off their shoulders?

I didn't care if he got himself killed. But it wasn't just Jerry's life at stake: we would all be witnesses.