Deep Black

80

It looked like it had been a natural cleft in the rock that had been given a makeover with several crates of Serb high explosive: the mouth was now big enough to take a truck. Rubble was piled up on each side, and the tyre ruts in the track leading to it were smothered by grass and weeds.

The interior was cold and dank, but at least it gave us shelter from the wind. The walls glistened with slime and puddles of water splashed around our feet. Two rusty old cars and a skip full of wood had been abandoned just inside the entrance.

The further we went inside, the more it stank of mould and decay. The darkness and a couple of mounds of rock spoil, debris from the blasting operation that had widened the cave, gave us cover, but this was going to be as much of a tactical nightmare as I’d feared: a confined space and the only way out the way we had come in.

Benzil was suffering big-time. Jerry and Salkic lowered him on to the floor behind one of the mounds and tried to make him comfortable. He hardly even had the energy to apologize.

‘Don’t worry.’ I crouched beside him to move some stone away from his head. ‘It’s OK. Just rest.’

There was no reply. His breathing was shallow and worryingly fast.

Salkic collapsed the other side of him in the gloom. Jerry just dropped where he was and fumbled with the clips of his bumbag. I crawled up the rock pile and looked through the cave mouth, about forty metres away, at the brightening sky. It was still dark this far in, and should stay that way. My eyes were already adapting.

Nasir had put himself on stag at the top of the pile to my left, and was also staring intently towards the entrance. I looked around at the other three. It’s natural for people to bunch up in situations like this, and they were tearing the arse out of it. I got them to spread out a bit. If rounds started bouncing about in here I didn’t want the flat tops getting two hits for the price of one.

‘Fuck.’ Jerry showed me what was left of his Nikon. A round had entered the left-hand corner and exited top right. He tried the power button. Not that that would help, even if the battery pack was OK. The lens was shattered.

‘The phone, Jerry – is the phone OK?’

He nodded slowly, but I could see it wasn’t much consolation.

Nasir started gobbing off and I could see movement on the hill a couple of hundred metres or so from the cave mouth. ‘Here they come.’ I turned back to the others. ‘We got five.’

Jerry scrambled up to me. ‘Coming this way?’

‘Not yet.’

I felt it; the look on Nasir’s face said it. We were fucked.

Nasir settled himself into a fire position, scooping away some of the stone to make room for the curved magazine of his AK. The magazines on these things were so big and long that when you lay down you couldn’t fire them from the shoulder. It was part of the doctrine according to Dr Kalashnikov: the AK was intended to be gripped in front of a hero of the Soviet Union as he leaped from the back of an APC and charged gallantly forward on full automatic.

Nasir’s eyes never left the men on the track. He gobbed off something to Salkic.

‘What’s he getting so excited about?’

‘Nasir said I must never tell anyone where Hasan is, or his brother’s death would be in vain. He also wants to kill the aggressors.’

Nasir got the drift of what was being said and grunted. They were both grim-faced. As far as these boys were concerned, the war had never really ended.

I leaned into my pile of rocks, digging a space for my own magazine. ‘Ramzi, you’re the only one who knows?’

Salkic was taking deep breaths; Jerry slid back down to help Benzil into a more comfortable position. ‘The only one here.’

Nasir muttered something and I looked out. ‘They’re coming.’

I slithered down too.

‘Jerry, you got any idea how to use a pistol?’

He didn’t bother looking up, just nodded.

‘Good. Ramzi, tell Nasir to give him it.’

Nasir handed it over, along with a couple of mags. I couldn’t see the make, but it didn’t matter at this stage, as long as it went bang and Jerry knew how to point it and reload. Whether he had it in him to kill a fellow human being was something we’d be finding out soon enough. As for me, I’d always managed to be pretty calm at times like this, maybe because I could accept when I was in the shit, and had never been particularly bothered about dying. I just wanted to make sure I took as many of the fuckers with me as I could.

Nasir started muttering and I crawled back up my pile. The guys on the track had disappeared.

‘Where’d they go?’ I murmured to Salkic. ‘Ask him where they went.’

Salkic did so. They’d gone off to the right, into dead ground.

The Motorola sparked up. ‘Ramzi Salkic! Ramzi Salkic!’

The gravelly voice echoed round the cave.

I looked at Salkic for clues. His face was stony, but Nasir’s was contorted with rage. He immediately started shouting back, then he turned and yelled at me too, so vehemently that flecks of spit showered across my face. If the flat tops hadn’t known we were in here, they certainly did now.

Nasir rammed his weapon into his shoulder and fired off a burst.

I had to scream above the firing. ‘For fuck’s sake, stop! Ramzi! Get him to stop!’

Spent cases rattled on to the stones. The air was thick with cordite. Salkic tried to calm him down and at last he succeeded. Benzil stared up at me, eyes wide as saucers, trying hard not to look scared.

Return fire ricocheted off the walls as the flat tops shoved their automatic weapons around the edge of the cave and squeezed off. There was nothing any of us could do but curl up and hope.

Apart from Nasir, who yelled at the top of his voice and sprayed half a mag at nothing in particular.

‘For fuck’s sake, stop firing! Save ammo.’

Another long retaliatory burst came our way, filling the cave with sound heavy enough to feel.

Salkic shouted at him and tugged at his trouser leg, but I knew Nasir wasn’t listening: blind hatred had taken over from common sense. If only he’d kept quiet, we could have let them come in and maybe been able to drop one or two.

It stopped as quickly as it started. I raised my head just enough to look over the top of the mound but saw nothing. Benzil was still curled up below me, Jerry half covering him despite my instruction to spread out. Salkic was below Nasir, who was up on his knees straining to find a target, still wanting to kill the world and his dog. He turned to me with wild eyes, and let loose another stream of angry words and saliva. His echo was as loud as their gunfire.

I ignored him and kept my eyes on the cave mouth. If he’d wanted to top me he would have done it by now. I wasn’t sure what he was most sparked up about: his brother, me bringing the flat tops to Salkic, or that he wanted to kill everyone within reach. I hoped he still realized that if we were going to get out of here alive he’d need my steady pair of hands, as much as I’d need his not so steady ones. I waited until he’d finished and got his eyes back on stag.

‘What’s all that about, Ramzi?’

There was no answer. I turned and even in this light saw the glimmer of tears in his eyes.

Nasir tuned up again, venting his rage between Salkic, me and the cave entrance. Salkic reached up and put a hand on his leg, attempting to soothe him.

‘What’s going on, Ramzi? What the fuck is he saying?’

‘He’s blaming you because you led them to me in the mosque.’ Salkic’s face was a mask of pain. ‘Not only is his brother dead, but now they say they are collecting his brother’s wife, my sister, from Sarajevo. They have a family, two children.’