Read THE HEART OF DANGER Online
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Tags: #War Crimes; thriller; mass grave; Library; Kupa; Croatia; Mowatt; Penn; Dorrie;
trousers at the crutch. He did not tell Milan that he thought he
lied
with his smile. He squirmed in the wetness that he sat in.
Laughing. "We should go get the hag in Rosenovici. Lie up for her, like it was wild pig we were lying up for. Milan, you miserable
bastard, you should be with us .. ."
But the shoulders had ducked down, and he could not see the face,
whether it still smiled, whether it was still angered. For the old
American had come to Rosenovici, and Milan Stankovic ran scared.
The map had shown the escarpment of high rock in the trees. It was
where he had found the small torn shreds of the chewing gum wrapper,
and he recognized the brand name of the wrapper, and he knew that
Ham
had been there, as Ham had said he had. There was a field of winter
grass below the escarpment on which he lay. He could see the trails
across it and the flattened grass in the middle. He could not see
blood, but Ham had said he would not be able to see the blood. It
was
clear in Penn's mind, and the clarity killed the excitement that had
been with him through the length of the day. He looked down onto
the
flattened ground where two men, wounded, had been skewered with
knives,
and he looked down onto the trails in the field where the bodies of
two
men had been dragged and no point in further thinking on it, the
flattened grass and the trails in the grass, and Ham had not talked
of
the risk of capture. Penn moved down from the escarpment, down again
into the depth of the trees. The shadows were longer, the grey merged
with the falling gold of the evening. He had slept just, during the
length of the day when he had rested up, he had eaten a pie and not
yet
missed his sandwiches. It was two hours back that he had left his
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resting place through the day, a shelter made by an uprooted oak.
He
had slept just, then woken at the sound of children's voices, but
they
had not come near him. Penn checked the map when he had reached the
base of the escarpment rock. There was a plan, a fragile plan, in
his
mind. A better man, a Special Forces man, would not have moved across
the damned river without a solid plan locked in his head. He did
not
have that training. The plan grew. He would get to the village of
Rosenovici, he would walk at night along the route where they had
taken
Dorrie, where she had been. He would walk past the house where Katica
Dubelj had lived. He would look for her in her house, and only there,
nowhere else that he knew to look. It would only be a gesture, to
look
for Katica Dubelj, because he did not think she would speak English
and
he knew nothing of her language. He would find the disturbed grave
in
the corner of the field. It would be right for his report that he
had
walked the road through Rosenovici, and along the lane and into the
field. It would be important for his report that he had gone to seek
out Katica Dubelj ... It was not good enough for Penn that he should
take a name from a telephone directory and embroider a story. Basil
would have said he was a fool not to flick the pages of a directory.
Jane would have said he was an idiot. Dougal Gray, who had been his
friend in the Transit van, would have understood. With the plan he
reckoned it possible that he could look back into the eyes of Mary
Brad-dock, see her respect, and take her husband's money. He could
tell them that he had walked where Dorrie had been. He moved away
slower than before he had come to the escarpment, before he had seen
the flattened grass and the trails in the grass. He thought he could
move for another two hours before darkness came. "I'm so sorry to
trouble you .. . Tell me, please, is the crossing point at Turanj
open?" Ulrike Schmidt sat in her office. The Transit Centre was
awash
with the noise of shouting, screaming, laughing. The evening
cooking
smells filtered to her. Her assistant, a nice Ghanaian girl, but
happily scatty, stared across from her own desk, confused. Ulrike
had
never before rung the liaison office with the request for information
as to whether the Turanj crossing point was open, and her assistant
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knew it. "Thank you, but could you, please, make certain. Yes, I'll hold." She was thirty-nine years old. She held the telephone like a
conspirator, like a teenage girl who spoke by telephone to a teenage
boy and did not wish to be heard. When she went home, every two months
for a weekend, back to Munich and the apartment near the Hauptbahnhof,
then her mother and father told her of their pride. And her mother,
each time on the one evening that she was at home, before they went
to
dinner in a restaurant, would sidle into her room and ask her nervous
question. It was difficult to be truthful, and more difficult not
to
be truthful. No, she had no plans. No, there was not a particular
man. It was difficult to be truthful because her mother's face would
cloud and the question would not be repeated. The answer, always,
was
followed by the breezy excuse that life was too hectic, work too
ferocious, to share. There were flowers and there were invitations,
but there was no particular man. "Definitely, the crossing point
is
open. You have heard nothing about it being closed tomorrow? No
.. .
Thank you. It was just a rumour. I am so sorry to have troubled
you.
Good night." She put down the telephone, and her assistant was
watching her, puzzled. Ulrike blushed. She gave no explanation.
If
she had given her assistant an explanation, truth, then the girl might
just have climbed onto the central table in the office where the
computer was, and danced. Her assistant was scatty enough. But the truth was that a man she cared about was behind the lines, across
the
river, in the place where the stories came from of atrocity and
bestiality and torture. She cared because he took a road that was
different from the turned cheek and the fixed smile. The truth was
that if a man had been captured behind the lines then the border
crossing at Turanj would have been closed. The Serbs always closed
the
crossing point when they discovered incursion into their territory.
If
the crossing was still open then he stayed free. It was the end of
the
day, and the end of the map. There was a brisk rain shower falling
into the upper branches of the trees. The last of the light showed
Penn where he should spend the night. No mines laid off the track
because there were tractor ruts and the tread of worn trailer tyres.
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A
small tin hut had been abandoned beside the clumsy heaps of cut wood,
and Penn judged it was where the timber men sheltered from heavy rain
and where they made their coffee and ate their food. The men who
came
to the hut would be the same as the timber men on the estate of his
childhood, who had talked with him and amused him, and they would
kill
him if they found him. Too dark for him to move further, and the
hut
was the final point on Ham's map. He squatted down in the hut, then
curled onto his side, closed his eyes. In six hours, three at dawn
and
three at dusk, he had covered twelve miles according to Ham's map.
It
was important that he should sleep. Ham had said that where the map
ended was six miles from Rosenovici, perhaps seven but not more. He
would go forward, blind, in the first light of the morning. She was
old, and Ham could not afford a girl. She was old enough and cheap
enough to look for trade in the side streets off the square behind
the
big earth ramparts of Karlovac. It was usual for her trade to be
with
the Muslim men of the Transit Centre. Ham did not know her, he had
not
been with her before. It didn't matter to him that she was old, but
it
was important that she was cheap. Chicken shit pay from the army,
and
the slimmest cut left in his pocket from selling on the imported
cigarettes, she had to be cheap. He lay on the bed. He could see
she
was old from the single unshaded bulb, hanging down from the ceiling,
and he could see the flab ridges of her waist after she had unbuttoned
her blouse, and the wide weight of her buttocks after she had peeled
down her knickers. She smoked while she undressed, not the imported
cigarettes that he handled but the loose filled sort that came from
the
factory in Zagreb. He had heard a child cry out in the night, from
behind a closed door, and she had shouted back at the child. When
she
was naked, the prostitute straddled Ham on the bed, heavy above him,
and her last gesture before earning the money that she had whipped
from
his hand and buried in her bag was to reach across him and grind out
her cigarette.
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He tried to think of his Karen. It was always best when he closed
his
eyes and thought of Karen. But he could not find her in his mind.
The
pillow sunk below his head. She felt for him, opening his trousers.
He
could not find Karen in his mind. He saw the thin and faded wallpaper
of the room on the sixth floor of the block on Mihovilica that was
away
from the old walls of Karlovac and near to the river and the bridge
that carried the main road to Zagreb, and there was a narrow framed
picture, not straight, of the crucifixion, and there were a child's
plastic toys on the floor near to the chair where discarded clothes
had
been dumped. The bed heaved as she worked harder with her fingers.
Couldn't help her, couldn't respond to her, couldn't think of Karen.
Because the bed heaved, iron springs screaming, the child behind the
closed door cried out again, and the woman ignored her child. Her
face
was above him, she had the waist of his trousers down to his knees,
and
his pants pulled back, and he could not respond to her. There was
contempt at the woman's mouth. She had already been paid, and her
interest was going.
Couldn't think of Karen.
He could only think of Penn.
He, had checked at the operations centre before going out of the
barracks in the old police station. Casual questions. Was it all
quiet over there? Any balloons going up over there? Bored answers.
It
was all quiet over there, just a sniper, two rounds,
near the milk factory that was across the river where they had the
salient, nothing else. He was thinking of Penn, and Penn should now
be
at the end of the map because that was the schedule drawn for him,
and
Penn should now be holed up in the woodcutters' hut. The shiver came
to him, and he thought of Penn who was alone, and the thought
shrivelled him. The big mouth with the thick lipstick rim hovered
above Ham, and he could not turn the face and the bagged eyes and
the
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grey-flecked hair into the face of his Karen. And the big mouth with
the thick lipstick rim curled at him in disgust because he could not
respond. He hit her. He smacked with a closed fist into the side
of
her face. Faces replacing the pain in hers. The face of the barman that he had punched in the bar at Cullyhanna because the barman had
back-chatted the patrol. He was hitting her with both fists, belting
feverishly into the flab lines of her stomach. The face of the Irish
sales representative who had jogged his arm, spilled his pint, in
the
pub in Aldershot, put on the floor with the fag ends and the beer
puddle and kicked. She was off the bed and whimpering in the corner,
crouched among the clothes she had dropped. The face of Karen, when
he
had belted her, when she'd cried, when she'd packed, when she'd gone
out of the front door with her bag and his Dawn. All the faces,
fleeting, gone .. . Penn's face stayed. He pulled up his pants and
his
trousers. Ham left the door of the bedroom open behind him, and the
door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried.
He
jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he
was
the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in
the
aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off
through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful
villages,
was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along.
The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat
flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.
And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only