War Baby (36 page)

He wondered what he should feel. Shame? Disgust? Guilt? But he felt none of those things. The emotion he was struggling with was sadness; he was sad for her, and for Odile. Sad also that it should come to this; trying to seduce his own daughter!

He had never meant to hurt anyone, had never been intentionally cruel. But at the end of the day it didn’t matter what you intended, how it came out was all that mattered.

‘When did you know?’ he said.

‘Before I left to come to Zagreb. Uncle told me.’

Typical of Spider to twist everyone on the screw before administering the coup. The shit. He had never even hinted at his little secret when they were all there in his house; he was like some mad fucking scientist, keeping his little specimens under his microscope, watching what they would do. His grand experiment in conscience.

His own personal morality play using real people.

‘You must have been bloody pleased to see me, then, at the Intercon.’

‘I don’t remember how I felt.’

‘Quite a coincidence.’

‘That Uncle found me in the Philippines was the miracle. After that, everything else was inevitable.’

Ryan stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have thought about it.’

‘Nothing ever works out quite the way you plan it.’

‘Well, isn’t that a fact.’

The sadness had evaporated. Now he felt angry, even bitter. Hardly justifiable in the circumstances, he decided, but there it was. He looked at Jenny, tried to fathom her expression, but her face was in shadow.

‘So what now?’ he said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Isn’t this the part where you castigate me for all my sins? Am I supposed to break down and cry for your forgiveness?’

‘Is that what you want to do?’

‘Not really.’ He looked at her, lying stiffly under the silver blanket. He thought she should be angry, but she just looked cold and frightened. ‘I didn’t mean to leave you or Odile behind. I got hit out at Newport Bridge. It just happened. After Saigon fell I couldn’t get back in. End of story.’

‘That’s it? End of story? You have no idea how we suffered!’

‘No, and I suppose I never will. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter stuff all because I can’t change the past. It’s done, it’s happened, and there you are.’ He finished his cigarette. ‘You must have been rapt when Spider told you he knew who your father was.’

‘I couldn’t believe he kept it from me for so long.’

‘Wouldn’t forgive him for it if I was you,’ he said. ‘And bugger him as well. He should have told me first, or just kept his mouth shut. But the way he played it, I reckon he deserves to suffer too.’

He looked at her again. My daughter! Am I supposed to feel something?

You dirty miserable bastard, Ryan, he thought. So much for Dorian Gray. Time gets you one way or the other.

‘So now what do we do?’ she said.

‘Now we just go to sleep.’

But he couldn’t sleep. Instead he lay there all night staring into the candle. He had to think this one through.

* * *

She woke while it was still dark, her insides in revolt. Probably a delayed reaction to the events of the previous day. The candle had gutted and died and it was black. Despite the space blanket her face, her fingers, even her feet inside her boots were numb with cold. As her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she made out Ryan’s silhouette, curled up on the end of the bed, his knees drawn up to his chest.

She fought her own body’s needs. She could not imagine venturing out there to pick her way over the bodies of the sleeping soldiers, risk one of the sentries pawing at her. And then do what? Squat in the field, knowing that the Serbian snipers had night vision scopes on their rifles. Where was safe? If she got up she would have to wake Ryan and ask him to stand guard while she performed this most basic of bodily functions, and that would be just too embarrassing and humiliating.

She tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible. She looked at the luminous dial of her watch. Five a.m.

Dumb, she told herself. Dumb, dumb, dumb to think she could go green into a war zone and survive. Her stomach growled again.

She would have to get up ...

The decision to move was made for her. There was a heart-stopping bang, as if a truck had driven straight through the wall by their heads.

Mortar attack.

The Serbs were coming.

Ryan was awake immediately. He grabbed her and dragged her on to the floor. Somewhere in the farmhouse someone was screaming.

She fumbled in her pockets for her pencil torch, flicked it on. Ryan crawled across the floor to the door, heaved the wardrobe out of the way with his shoulder. They ran outside into the passageway.

The barn had been hit by mortars and was on fire. One wall of the farmhouse had been blown in by a rocket. Green tracer bullets arced through the night. A Croat soldier lay on his back screaming; one of his comrades was bent down beside him trying to stop the bleeding from his shattered leg. Jenny saw the bright muzzle flashes of small-arms fire from the dark fields. As their new Croat friends returned fire the deafening concussion of small arms fire numbed all her other senses.

A figure ran, crouching, from the barn ‘
Americanski!
Where are you?’

‘Milan!’ Ryan shouted. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The Chetniks are attacking. We have to get you out of here!’

The soldier with the shattered leg had stopped screaming, was only half conscious of what was happening to him now. His friend was trying to fashion a tourniquet around his thigh with his belt. The fire in the barn illuminated the wounded man’s face for a moment. It was Danko.

‘He won’t be scoring any more goals,’ Ryan said.

‘Chetnik bastards!’ Milan grabbed his shoulder. ‘This way!’

Ryan and Jenny followed him out of the back door. In the flicker of the burning bam they could see the black Golf in the farmhouse courtyard. Milan, his Kalashnikov over one shoulder, headed towards it.

They were halfway there when Milan lurched to one side and fell. Ryan grabbed Jenny and threw her on the ground. The sound of automatic weapons fire echoed around the courtyard fractions of a second later.

She remembered what Ryan had told her the previous evening about his first time under fire.
God, listen to me just this once, get me out of this and it’s the last time I ever gamble with my life.
But all she could think was: I need to find a toilet.

Milan lay on his side. He did not appear to be in pain. He stared in dull surprise at the dark, glutinous mess of his intestines in his hands, tried to stuff them back into his body. He looked up at her and seemed embarrassed at being caught naked in this way. He gave a short barking laugh, and then lay still. It took Jenny a few moments to realize that he had died.

Ryan had reached the Golf. ‘Jenny! Jenny, where are you?’

She found Milan’s Kalashnikov lying in the frozen mud. I always said I would kill him one day if I ever found him, she thought.

He was invisible to the naked eye in the darkness but was captured perfectly in the cross-hairs of the Kalashnikov’s night sight. He was coming back for her, crawling on his belly across the courtyard. The perfect revenge. No one would ever know it was her bullet that finally paid him back for what he had done to her mother.

Bosnia, October 1992

‘Working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval and the awful truth is that for correspondents war is not hell. It is fun.’

Nora Ephron

‘It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It’s the one that says: “To whom it may concern.’”

resident of Belfast

A late afternoon sun glittered on the minarets of the ancient Ottoman town. Travnik had been the capital of Bosnia in the days when the province had been a possession of the ancient Ottoman empire. Now, with the Croatian border closed, it had become the lifeline to the beleaguered Moslem outposts of northern Bosnia.

The Moslems would have been swamped by the Serbs if it had not been for the intervention of the Croatian army. Even so, the Serbs had managed to acquire two-thirds of the province and the Moslems had been trapped in enclaves around Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac and Travnik.

Travnik serviced the besieged towns of Jajce and Maglaj through narrow and perilous corridors that bulged through the front lines into Serb-held territory. The town of Jajce, twenty-five miles to the north of Travnik, had been under siege for five months. Reinforcements hiked in through the woods; ambulances and ammunition trucks made their way in by night, under constant fire from Serb mortars and snipers.

Every day more refugees poured down from the mountains after journeying for days on horse-drawn carts or marching on foot, with their families, their dogs and their farm equipment, bringing tales of rape, looting and murder.

Webb arrived in Travnik on the back of a United Nations truck. The town was full of soldiers; Croats in camouflage fatigues with the red and white chessboard shoulder flashes; black-shirted HOS militia; Moslem
armija
in ragtag uniforms, leather jackets, baseball caps, jeans, running shoes. He saw a smoke-blackened wall scrawled with graffiti, in English, for the benefit of the Western journalists:
Please Help Bosnia Now!

Then there were the refugees; blank stares in the faces of the old men, terrified old women, the gaunt, bewildered faces of the children.

It was like he had never been away.

He had promised himself that he was finished with it all. But a part of him always knew that one day he’d come back, find another war, another outrage. He needed to satisfy himself that he had not gone soft; he still felt that this was the highest calling in his profession, and like an ageing sports star, he missed being at the heart of it, in the action not watching from the bleachers.

Most of all, after so many years away from the front lines, he had gone stale. He had nothing new to write about. He was returning to the sharp end to rescue his career.

He told himself that it was only incidental that Jenny was also here. Against all odds she had survived in Croatia and Bosnia for almost a year now as a freelancer, had even achieved a limited fame, at least within her own profession. She had sold photographs and feature pieces to a number of British and US newspapers and magazines, and the previous month her byline had even appeared in the New York Times.

Her letters to him had been less prolific; a few scribbled notes from Zagreb or Dubrovnik or Sarajevo to say she was still alive, nothing more. She had not mentioned Ryan.

He also noted that she no longer used the name Jenny Webb for her work; she had reverted to her mother’s name, Jenny Ngai. He told himself it wasn’t personal, she just wanted to establish her own professional identity.

But it hurt.

When Crosby approached him again with another lucrative offer he delayed only a day or so before accepting. The money really wasn’t the issue. He would have come here for free.

Most of the Western media were concentrated in Sarajevo, which had now been under siege for over six months, but Webb had instead chosen Travnik. He had heard, through Crosby, that Jenny was here, trying to get inside Jajce. He was determined to find her. Too many things had been left unsaid and life was too tenuous to let it be any longer.

* * *

Samir Musiç was shouting orders at the men standing around his desk. His skin was grey with exhaustion and there were plum-colored rings under his eyes. The last few months had taken a heavy toll. As commander of the
armija
controlling the corridor in and out of Jajce, he carried a heavy burden of responsibility.

He was twenty years old.

His headquarters was inside a former restaurant called the Blue Water. A stream rushed under a bridge right outside the front door, and Webb tried to imagine romantic lunches in more peaceful times. Now the surrounding buildings had been requisitioned as a barracks and the courtyard was a chaos of wounded men and field gear, the stench from the latrines overpowering.

Musiç’s office was thick with cigarette smoke, his wooden desk littered with butts and
sjlivovica
bottles. There was a single battered black field telephone. The tattered map tacked on the wall behind him was covered with red stencil marks.

He turned away from the shouting match around him and looked up at Webb. His face told the story immediately: another problem he could do without. But innate Moslem asense of hospitality overcame his fatigue. ‘Journalist?’ he said, glancing at the UNPROFOR badge on Webb’s lapel.

‘Hugh Webb. I’m with IPA.’

‘Sit down, sit down. Drink?’ He picked up a bottle of
sjlivovica
and splashed two fingers into a glass. He returned his attention to the bedlam around him. Half a dozen of his junior officers were vying for his attention. He shouted over the top of all of them, issuing his final orders. The men trooped out in sullen compliance.

He looked back at Webb. ‘One of the Croat HVO tried to rape a Moslem refugee girl last night.’

‘The HVO? The ones in the black uniforms?’

‘Fascists, of course. But in a war you cannot choose your comrades.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘Two of my
armija
caught him and now my officers want to shoot him. I told them they have to hand him over to his own commander for justice. It’s not good for morale to go shooting your allies. You agree?’ He poured himself some of the plum brandy and raised his glass. ‘
Jivili
. To life.’

‘
Jivili
,’ Webb agreed. The
sjlivovica
had a kick like a horse.

‘What can I do for you, Mister IPA?’

‘Your English is very good,’ Webb said.

‘Before this war I was an English student in Zagreb. I wanted to be travel guide, you know? But this year Thomas Cook does not want to go to Jajce.’

‘I do.’

He looked weary, as if he had feared this all along. ‘Why do you want to go there? It is just people living in holes and dying in their own shit. Even if I can get you in, maybe I cannot get you out.’

‘I’m a journalist. I get paid to take risks.’

‘How much do they pay you for your life? One million US? Two million?’

‘If I told you, you’d get depressed.’

He lit a cigarette. ‘So what will you do if I can get you inside Jajce?’

‘I want to take photographs, write about it. It is important the world knows what is happening here.’

‘The world? The world sees what is happening inside Sarajevo, yes? And what does the world do about it? The world does not care about us, Mister IPA.’

‘Someone has to listen.’

Musiç leaned forward. ‘Then you tell them what we need is not their sympathy, we want more
boom-boom
. The Chetniks have plenty of
boom-boom
. They have arms factories, they have the Russians and Greeks to help them, they have the old Yugoslav army that our taxes helped pay for. If it is not for the HVO - that bunch of fascists pigs - we will all be dead long ago. Who does this arms embargo hurt? Only Bosnia. We have no one to help, we have no coast to smuggle in what we need. Tell them in your newspaper we do not want the world and Mister Bush to cry for us. We just want them to untie our hands so we can defend ourselves.’ He lit another cigarette from the remains of his first. ‘Every night I send ambulances and lorries to Jajce with medicines and supplies. The last two nights they have had to turn back. But we will try again tonight. If you want to go, you can go. With the other crazy journalist.’

Webb swallowed hard. ‘The other journalist?’

‘Some girl. Very young, very beautiful. Maybe Russian, maybe Chinese, but she has this American accent. She is crazy too. She should be home making babies.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She has a room in the barracks on the other side of the courtyard. Go and talk to her if you want.’ As Webb got up to leave, Musiç shouted after him: ‘You can talk to her about how you will both die in Jajce.’

* * *

Jenny stopped to fill her water bottle from the Ottoman freshwater tap in the main street. They said Suleiman the Magnificent had once passed this way. How many other armies had travelled over this ground? she wondered. The Serbs, Croats and Moslems had been fighting over this land for centuries. As in Palestine, its savage tribes would always find a new season in which to fertilise its soil with blood.

When she looked up he was standing on the other side of the square.

Less of a surprise than it might have been; she had received a fax from him two weeks ago at the Intercon in Zagreb, telling her he had taken the contract with IPA. He was wearing the old Vietnam utility she had seen in his drawer at home, camou pants, and a new UN flak jacket. He looked ill at ease in it; he had been away from the action for too long.

She was still not sure how she felt about seeing him again. Bitterness had become a redundant emotion in her life, she had harbored too much of it and the taste of it had turned rank. Now the sight of him touched her in some way. She remembered that he had always been there for her and now here he was again, her guardian angel, in the shape of the old veteran in a young man’s game.

‘Hello uncle,’ she said and smiled.

* * *

Refugee children played in the glow of the bonfires. Looted cars and
armija
patrols were silhouetted by the flames.

Webb and Jenny sat around a campfire in the courtyard, drinking coffee. Webb thought she looked thinner, tired, and much older. Her long black hair had been lopped to shoulder length and was kept out of her eyes with a red bandanna. She wore loose fatigues under a Kevlar jacket, and had a blue NATO helmet hooked on to her belt. Her fingernails, which at home were always polished and carefully manicured, were broken and dirty.

He was shocked at her appearance, but not surprised. He knew the physical cost of endless months in the front line.

He had missed her so much, had worried about her endlessly. And now she was here and he couldn’t find the words to say any of the things he had wanted to tell her.

He did not know how to start to repair the damage.

She had learned to make coffee in the Bosnian manner; double-boiled in a
dzezva
, and so thick it slithered into the cup like oozing mud. Tradition then required that you dip a sugar cube into the brew and suck on it slowly before drinking the coffee black and bitter.

They talked about the war, and she told him about some of the battlefields she had seen: Osijek, Vinkovci, Sarajevo, Srebenica, Gorazde. She was as delighted as a child to hear that he had seen and read some of her features in major newspapers, proudest of all of the photograph she had taken of a Bosnian Serb pressing the barrel of his Kalashnikov into the neck of an old Moslem as he lay cowering on the ground in Mostar. That had appeared as a full-page color photograph in Time.

As she talked she glossed over the dangers and the close calls; Webb remembered how he had always done that, too. You didn’t want to think about it, and talking about it just made it worse next time.

But there was still this formality between them. The convoy that would be leaving in an hour for Jajce, and there was so much he wanted to say to her. Instead their conversation drifted into long silences; they desultorily picked up threads of conversation from a few minutes before, then turned their attention back to the convoy’s preparations going on around them.

Finally Jenny said, ‘You haven’t asked me about Ryan.’

‘Haven’t I?’

‘Don’t you want to know?’

He shrugged. ‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘He got into Jajce a week ago. No one’s heard from him since.’

Webb nodded but said nothing.

‘He helped me a lot the first few weeks.’ She stirred the embers of the fire with a stick. ‘He quit the network.’

‘I heard.’

‘He’s back working for Time.’

Another long and uncomfortable silence.

‘Did you tell him?’ His voice sounded hoarse, not his own.

She nodded.

They both waited for the other to speak.

‘I wanted to kill him,’ she said, at last.

‘I guess I can understand that.’

‘And if you’d been standing next to him...’

He took a deep breath. ‘I never forgave him for what he did to you. I decided not to tell you because I thought it would only hurt you. I was right, wasn’t I?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I saw my mother a few days after I got here,’ Jenny said. Webb felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, hearing Odile’s name invoked on this other faraway battlefield.

‘Just my imagination, of course,’ she said. ‘Like I often imagined her when I was in Lincoln Cove. I’d ask her what she thought of the house, this boyfriend, that new date. And when you told me about Ryan I imagined she still hated him. But then I realized it was me, not her. She never did get around to hating him, did she?’