Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

‘Yes?’ The Argentinian officer on duty looked up from a sheaf of photocopies.

‘It’s OK,’ Baring said. ‘I’m waiting to speak to him .’ He nodded in Danby’s direction.

‘Wait outside, please. This office is for UN personnel only.’

Baring looked at the Argentinian, who looked back at him with an insolent expression. Before Baring could respond, Danby replaced the receiver, walked over to the desk and told the Argentinian, ‘I’ll handle this.’

Baring didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t expect to be handled, by Danby or by anyone else.

Danby motioned him into the office past the front desk. ‘You were at Otes too?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I heard about what happened to your colleague.’

‘My colleague?’

‘The interpreter, the one who was driving Dr Barnes.’

‘Ah.’ Baring hadn’t been thinking about that. He’d been thinking about being sent on a fool’s errand to Ilidža while a story was breaking at the airport.

‘Why weren’t we told about the airlift closing down? Why wasn’t I told?’

‘You’re among the first to know,’ Danby said.

They were interrupted. The sergeant who had failed to prevent Miro’s evacuation came into the office. Danby addressed him in French. Baring, who was proud of his language skills, listened carefully. ‘You have exceeded your authority,’ Danby told the sergeant. ‘I’ve spoken to your superior. This is a disciplinary matter.’

The sergeant opened his mouth to protest but Danby stepped forward. He was beginning to get back in gear after a rocky twenty-four hours. He’d enjoyed telling Rocard on the phone that his airport troops were about to be made a laughing stock around the world. He’d enjoyed explaining to the major that if the major was very, very cooperative Danby might be able to minimise the damage. He gave Rocard a detailed account of French troops tussling over a sick child and capitulating to a British aircrew. Now he stepped forward. His face was very close to the sergeant’s face. ‘There will be disciplinary action!’

The Argentinian watched intently, until Danby glanced at him and the man looked quickly down at his forms.

‘What’s going on?’ Baring asked.

Just then, Brad and Anna came out of a separate office and walked towards the front door. ‘Thanks, Jim,’ Anna said. She patted Danby’s arm.

Baring didn’t like to see press officers being thanked by other journalists. He hurried out of Movement Control after Brad and Anna.

‘You knew about the airlift,’ he told Brad.

Brad walked to the edge of the airstrip and Baring caught up with him.

‘You knew about the airlift,’ he repeated, ‘and you sent me off with a cock-and-bull story about a witness in Ilidža.’

When Brad turned to face him, Baring was surprised by the altered expression on the other man’s face. Baring wondered if he was drunk.

‘What do you mean a cock-and-bull story?’

‘You sent me to Ilidža because you wanted the airport story for yourself, the airlift shutdown and the little boy’s evacuation. What was Anna thanking Danby for?’

‘You went to the Strand?’

‘No.’

‘I told you to go to the Strand. There was a witness waiting there! He saw everything. He wanted to talk!’

‘I didn’t go to the bloody café. You sent me there to get me out of the way!’

Brad continued to look at Baring. Anna joined them on the edge of the tarmac and Baring glanced at her, anticipating support. She stood beside Brad.

‘What the hell were you playing at?’ Baring persisted. But Brad continued to look at him and Baring realised with a shock as powerful and unpleasant as a hammer blow that it was not a look of resentment or anger, but one of pity. As he grasped this, he understood that there really had been a witness; there really had been a scoop, and he had thrown the opportunity away.

Baring turned towards the terminal and began walking, slowly at first but then at a faster pace until he had almost broken into a run.

‘We should go back too,’ Anna told Brad gently. ‘We should file.’

Ten miles to the west the Hercules secured a cruising altitude of 20,000 feet. The growl of the plane’s engines was replaced by a rhythmic hum.

They had arranged the cot in front of Terry and Mrs Pejanović, and strapped it with canvas belts to the steel ribbing on the floor.

Mrs Pejanović looked down at her son and she knew everything was changed. ‘I worry about the journey,’ she said. ‘This has been terrible for him.’

‘He’ll be in hospital in London tonight,’ Terry said. ‘He is going to get well again.’

Terry looked through the tiny porthole. Between clouds could be seen the tips of snow-clad hills, tiny hamlets dotting the winter landscape. Then she looked back at Miro. She bent forward and touched his forehead with the palm of her hand.

‘ Dobro ,’ Terry smiled. ‘Everything is going to be fine.’

He looked at her, uncomprehending, and closed his eyes.

Kevin Sullivan covered the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991 and the war in Bosnia in 1992/93. He was seriously wounded in a land-mine explosion in early 1993. While recovering, he wrote an early draft of The Longest Winter . He now lives in Sarajevo with his wife and daughter.

I am grateful to the people I had the privilege of getting to know in Sarajevo during the winter and spring of 1992/93, people who in many cases responded to the ugliness of conflict with extraordinary grace and courage. Among those who made this time memorable in the most positive way were my future mother-in-law and my late brother-in-law, and a host of their neighbours whose common characteristic in the face of shelling and shortages appeared to be a boundless supply of black humour. After I was wounded, my brother Gerry dropped everything to come and fetch me from a field hospital in the Balkans, and my sister Pat and her husband Jim gave me space to write the opening chapters of The Longest Winter , while letting me watch hours of a diverting but, alas, short-lived Spanish soap opera. Friends who have offered support and advice on this project include Dzemal Bećirević, Peter Maass, Jelena Sesar, Erika Paine, Alexandra Stiglmayer, Chris Bennett, Herbert Pribitzer and Marina Bowder. I am grateful to Peter Buckman at the Ampersand Agency for selling the manuscript and to Joel Richardson at Twenty7 Books for buying it; also at Twenty7 many thanks to Claire Creek, an assiduous and sensitive editor. Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to my daughter Katarina, who resourcefully contends with the daily challenge of having parents who are writers, and my wife Marija, whose patience and fortitude made this book possible.

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Twenty7 Books

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Copyright © Kevin Sullivan, 2016

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The right of Kevin Sullivan to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.