Combat

A workman tossed him a skull.

Green had played football at West Point and should have made an easy catch. But the gesture was unexpected. He got a couple of fingers on the dirty bone, not enough to grip. The skull dropped on a flat rock and rolled into the dirt. Undamaged. Skulls are hard.

The excavating crew laughed and bantered in their own language. Green was supposed to understand, but the dialect was too thick. He smiled, unsure.

“Assholes,” Sergeant Crawley said. He canted his head toward the valley. “More company coming, sir.”

Green looked down through the trees. Autumn had chewed off most of the leaves on the mountainside, but he still heard the vehicle before he saw it. The putter and choke was a leftover sound of Socialism, from the days when nothing quite worked. Now freedom had come, and some things did not work at all.

A small, light-blue truck with a flat bed bounced up the track that led toward the mass grave. It would have to stop down below, where Green and his NCO had left the embassy’s armored Jeep Cherokee. Then the visitors would need five minutes to climb to the massacre site. Unless they were drunk. It was afternoon, and the drinking started early, and the men who drank carried guns. If the visitors were drunk, their climb would take longer.

Green picked up the skull and looked at it. He felt things he could not put into words. Except for the anger and disgust. He could express that. “Fuckers,” he said to himself. Then he climbed down into the ravine where the victims had been shot and lightly buried.

His orders were to observe, not to interfere. The embassy had gotten the report the day before. Yet another massacre site, this time in the mountains down south, outside the village of Melnica. The defense attaché, a small, brave man who did not look like a soldier and therefore had not been selected for promotion, had told Green:

“Take Crawley down there for a couple of days and have a look. Get plenty of Kodak moments and GPS the site. Joe Friday them when they give you the song and dance about NATO intervention and American neglect.”

Lieutenant Colonel Andretti had been passed over for promotion and was slated to retire, but the Army had asked him to extend his tour as attaché because the system that was forcing him out could find no replacement with his skills. Balkan expertise had long been a careerkiller, and now the military was scrambling. Andretti did what was asked of him, with his daughters in high school back in Springfield and their mother remarried. The dark circles under Andretti’s eyes reached halfway to his knees. He had been in-country for five years, and none of those years had been good ones.

“And Jeff,” the attaché had said as Green was leaving the office, “the cease-fire’s holding in that sector. There’s no war in Melnica at the moment. Don’t you and your cowboy sidekick go starting one, all right?” But Andretti was smiling, kidding. “Take care of yourself.”

Green slipped on a clot of leaves, almost dropping the skull again. He resurrected himself and spanked the dirt from his jeans with his free hand. Avoiding the exposed rib cages and hip bones, the femurs and decayed rags of clothing that had emerged from the pit, he made his way toward the foreman of the dig.

The foreman was the only man in uniform, if you called a mismatched collection of military scraps a uniform. He wore an unzipped camouflage-pattern jacket and a gray cap that reminded Green of the German mountain troops he had gotten to know back in his Garmisch days. But the resemblance stopped there. This man was unshaven, despite his captain’s insignia, and he carried two automatic pistols on a web belt cinched into his big belly. The calluses on his hands would have stopped a knife. Even his eyes seemed shabby.

The captain saluted Green, despite the American’s jeans and Gore-Tex jacket. Green had been open about his rank and purpose. He saluted back, although he would have preferred not to.

He had been trained in Russian, back when the Russians still mattered, and the local language — spoken by all sides in the fighting — was related. He could get through the basics, but could not conduct a geopolitical discussion of any nuance. Two months in-country had not been enough time to gain fluency, but Green understood more than he could form into words of his own.

“Major Green,” the captain said in mashed English. “Very bad things those people do. You see?” He reached down and picked up a faded rip of fabric. Once, it had been red. “You see?” he repeated, breath steaming in the cold. “Woman’s dress. No man’s clothes. Dress of woman. Who kills woman, child? Bad, bad.”

Green nodded. It was very bad. He offered the captain the skull.

The shorter man seized it and tossed it in his hands. “Maybe woman. Maybe very pretty.” He held up the skull. “Not pretty now.” Suddenly, his expression blackened. He tossed the skull onto a lattice of bones. “Why America stays away? Those people … they kill the little babies. Why America stays away?”

“I’ll report what I’ve seen to the embassy.”

“The American Army must come,” the captain said in his own language. “With American airplanes. Or there is no justice.”

“Listen …” Green struggled for words in a language he found as jagged and difficult as the mountains surrounding him, “ … you need to be careful … how you dig up the bodies. You’ll destroy …” He struggled to remember the word for evidence.

The captain snorted. “Look. You see? Everything is there. How many bodies? I count skulls, I know how many. How many those people have killed of my people. That is all I must know.”

Green rearranged what he wanted to say into words he could reach. “All this … should be done scientifically.”

The shorter man had a lunch of onions on his breath. The workers had sat around the edge of the pit, unbothered, as they ate.

“I fuck science in the ass,” the captain said. “Bullets. No science.”

Green turned away and took more photographs. The war, in a lull for several months, had left many massacres in its wake. Some sites contained a single family, others an entire village. Some graves held only male bodies, while others had seen equal-opportunity killings. Green had visited two other locations, but the digging had been finished days before he arrived. He had expected freshly uncovered bodies to stink and he had braced himself for it. But the corpses had been in the earth long enough to lose all of their liquid and most of the flesh, and the only smell was of the disturbed earth.

“Call me Frankie,” the man from the blue truck said in English. He had introduced himself as Franjo Sostik, late of Milwaukee and now the proprietor of an inn down in the village of Melnica. “No bedbugs or shit like that,” he told Green and Crawley.

Frankie had the kind of looks that draw women’s eyes, but he was reaching the age when he would no longer be able to convince women he was young. He wore a pullover with the sleeves crushed up above the elbows. His forearms were thick. Black hair grew down onto the back of his hands.

He gestured at the mass grave.

“Can you believe this?” he asked, talking mostly to Green, the officer, but including Crawley with a glance now and then. “Look at this. Like the fucking Middle Ages or something. Is this nuts, or what? I got to ask myself why I came back here.”

“Why did you?” Green asked.

Frankie lifted his shoulders and held out his hands, palms up, weighing the air. Black birds settled on the branches above the dead.

“What the fuck you going to do?” Frankie said. “I got relatives, family. They need me. But I don’t have to like it. No way, man, am I going to buy into this shit. When the war started, I said, ‘To hell with that shit. Frankie-boy’s a lover not a fighter.’” He made a spitting gesture, but his lips were dry. “Back in the States? I had me this woman, you know? Drop-dead gorgeous, man. We’re talking serious, high-energy pussy. And clean about herself. Not like the barnyard animals around here.” He raised a fist, protesting the fate that had brought him back to this place. “Christ, I love America. The States are my real home now. But what are you going to do? A man’s got to look out for his family.”

“You served, though, right?” Sergeant Crawley asked. “In the war?” The NCO’s voice remained casual, as if he hardly cared about the answer.

Frankie shook his head in disgust. “Naw. Not really. Not my style, man. I mean, what is this about, huh? Let those people stay on their side, I’ll stay on mine. Live and let live, you know? I mean … I carried a gun and all that shit. Kind of like National Guard stuff. Weekend warrior. But I was never in any real fighting. Melnica lucked out.”

Green looked down at the tangle of bones, at the workmen with their spades.

“Who are they?”

“Local guys. With nothing better to do.”

“I mean the bodies.”

Frankie shrugged. “Makes you want to puke, don’t it? I mean, who needs to kill women and children?” He nodded toward the top of the mountain. The new border lay on the other side of the ridge, in deep forest. “We might be stupid peasants. But those people are goddamned animals. Fucking sickos.”

“But the bodies … aren’t from Melnica?”

Frankie repeated the shrug. It was a gesture that seemed to refresh him, get him going. “Who knows? Maybe some of them. People disappeared. Drive down the road, never come back. Go up in the fields after the cows, never come back. We lost some. I lost family members myself. But I don’t want to make this a personal hate thing. The truth is those people could have been marched up here from anyplace in the valley. They’re ours, that’s all I know. From our valley. Our people didn’t do this shit.”

The valley. When the Cherokee came down the pass, with SFC Crawley at the wheel, the panorama had been pure tourist brochure: the river reflecting the sun, and the low fields, the slopes open for pasture below an uneven treeline and the leaves falling up above. Tan houses clustered in the villages, while here and there a farmhouse with a tiled roof stood alone. It reminded Green of Italy, where he had taken a girlfriend when he was stationed in Germany.

Then you reached the valley floor and saw the shell holes in the roofs and the burn scars, the windows shot out and the walls pocked by heavy-caliber rounds. Craters pitted the road and half the fields had gone to bracken. Ranks of stumps told where apple and plum orchards had been cut down, for spite, during a slow retreat. Bitterness seemed to have soaked down into the earth, it pierced the air like rot. In the towns, which had changed hands several times, the Catholic and Orthodox churches had been desecrated in turn. There had been few Muslims in the valley and their small mosques were gone without a trace. The Muslims were the Washington Redskins of the Balkan league.

Green already had a catalog of destruction in his head from other observer missions, but the fighting had been particularly cruel here. The combatants had tried to make the towns of their enemies uninhabitable. When they had been in a hurry, they had only destroyed the clinics, schools, and municipal buildings. When time permitted, they wrecked the houses, too, and blew in the water pipes in the towns.

Green had been a mech infantry company commander in Desert Storm, but no one in his entire brigade fired a round in combat. They just steered their Bradleys across the barren landscape, and the troops joked about the most expensive driver’s training exercise in the world. The worst thing about Green’s experience of war had been the need to wear MOPP gear in the desert heat. But he was a dutiful soldier, ambitious within the bounds of honor, and he had studied war since his plebe year at the Point. He wanted to understand, and he took what books could give. But nothing he had read had spoken of this kind of hatred.

There was an upside, though: the way the people refused to quit. The towns and villages were struggling back to life, with new glass in many of the windows, shops reopening, and posters for the coming election. No one wanted the war to reignite, though everyone said it would.

The Jeep passed a white UN vehicle, its occupants straining not to see anything.

Then, toward the end of the valley, up a mountain road with defensible approaches, the village of Melnica sat untouched, a museum display of a destroyed world. The war had taught the people to pay attention to little details, and they figured out from the license plate and vehicle make that Americans had come to visit. Everyone had been anxious to offer directions to the site of the mass grave, with the men interrupting one another and the children blooming from sullenness to giggles and greed. It had been difficult keeping volunteer guides out of the Jeep.

“Do they listen to you?” Green asked Frankie. The captain down in the ravine had given the innkeeper a vague salute, maybe just a wave, when he showed up.

Frankie spit. “They’re dumb shits. Uneducated. Dumb-dick farmers, you know? They don’t listen to anybody. But they figure I’m smart because I been to America. I mean, they’re good people. Just kind of stupid.” He gestured toward the riddle of bones. “They don’t deserve this shit. Nobody deserves this.” He nodded across the mountain again. “Those people … they’re not Europeans. They’re fucking animals.”

“You should tell them to be more careful,” Green said as a worker swung a pickax in the pit. “They’re destroying the forensic evidence.”

Frankie looked at him as he might have looked at a child. “They don’t want evidence, man. They want revenge.”

“Well, if they expect anybody to come to their aid, evidence matters.”

Frankie smiled. “Oh, come on. It’s like I tell them. When they start all that shit about America riding to the rescue. I tell them, ‘Hey, America doesn’t even know you exist. We might as well be in goddamned China or on the moon or something. Americans … they live good. They don’t need our shit. America got no interest in this.’”

Green had not been prepared for the display at his feet, for the rawness of it, and he was trying to keep his temper with the world. How could you prepare yourself for this? It was important not to show any emotion, he knew that. But every word he said felt phony and hollow and useless to him. He believed in justice, and he believed in the goodness of his country, and he only wanted to know who was right and wrong. But he had never been anyplace where right and wrong were so hard to figure out.

He wanted to do something. But he did not know what to do.

“Well, if they want anybody to get interested,” Green said, gone peevish, “it’s going to take evidence. Who killed who. When. Whose troops were in control at the time of the massacre. Ages and sex of victims. Proof that they were noncombatants. They need to wait until people get down here from the capital, people who know what they’re doing.”

Frankie looked at him with an expression close to wonder. “Major … Melnica lucked out, you know? Couple mortar rounds. No big deal. But we lost people. In ones and twos, like I told you. Some old farmer. A girl with no sense. Everybody got a missing brother or cousin or something.”

“All the more reason they should be careful. So they can identify—”

Frankie closed a hand over Green’s forearm. He had a powerful grip. “You don’t understand, man. These are mountain people. They don’t want … like for their daughter or something to become some kind of medical exhibit. The truth is … they don’t want to know exactly who’s in the grave. Not names and shit like that. They’ve had enough bad news.”

Sergeant Crawley, who had spent his career in Special Forces and had over a year in-country, said softly, “Different world, sir.”

Green understood that the NCO was telling him to back off and let it go.

A whistling noise came down the mountainside: wind sweeping along like a tide. The pitch rose and then, suddenly, cold air flooded through the trees and poured over the grave site. The captain down in the trench clutched his hat. The earth smell rose, and leaves tore away from their branches. The workmen paused and looked at the sky.

“Hard winter coming,” Frankie said. “Like these poor shits don’t have it tough enough already. So, hey, tell you what. You’re not going back today, right? I mean, you don’t want to drive that road in the dark. There’s still mines in the ditches. You got to stay at my place. ‘Yankee Frankie’s.’ I even got American music. Liz Phair, man. Hot little bitch like that. And Mariah Carey. All that shit.”

Sergeant Crawley, who wore a plaid wool shirt for this peculiar duty, spoke again. With the endless NCO suspicion in his voice: “How much you charge for rooms, Frankie-boy?”

Frankie smiled. “No charge for the room. If it wasn’t for America, I never would’ve been able to buy the place. You’re Frankie’s personal guests. You just pay for dinner, cause I got to pay the yokels for the produce and shit, keep the local economy going. But the room’s free. I even got running water. But no MasterCard or crap like that. This is hillbilly country, man. Cash only.”

Green wanted to be a good officer. He wanted to appear strong, impervious to physical discomforts. But the thought of a warm bed had more appeal than a fall night in the mountains crunched up in the Cherokee, engulfed by the decline of Sergeant Crawley’s digestive system. And it was standard practice to stay on the economy when there was no fighting in the area. The small talk with the locals sometimes paid off. Random facts led to revelation.

Green was imagining a warm room and dinner when a worker approached him with a bundle. The man laid the corpse of an infant, reduced to leather, at the American’s feet.

“I’ve been from Bolivia to Bumfuck, Egypt,” Sergeant Crawley said, “and nothing’s ever simple.” He sipped from his can of Coke. Hergestellt in Deutschland. The rule was no alcohol during a mission, and Green and Crawley both honored it, though grudgingly. The sign advertising Austrian beer was a wicked tease.

The room held half a dozen tables, a corner bench, and the bar. It was a poor man’s copy of a German Gasthaus, down to the Balkan kitsch that substituted for Bavarian kitsch on the walls. Business was slow, but the place was warm and surprisingly clean. An old R.E.M. disk whined in the background. America had had its effect on Frankie Sostik, who stood behind the bar, drying glasses and talking to a man with a scar that ran from his ear down across his cheek then back into the collar of his jacket. It was the kind of ragged slash inflicted during a hand-to-hand struggle.

Frankie and his customer were drinking shots. Leaning against the bar, Scarface looked like a made-for-television movie’s version of a thug. He showed no interest in the Americans. The only words Green overheard were “girls” and “cigarettes.”

“I know it isn’t simple,” Green said. Crawley was a helpful, closed man, hard to get to know. Shaped by the special ops world, he was a masterful soldier. He made Green, most of whose soldiering had been on training ranges and in schools, feel amateurish. Yet the NCO was never condescending, and he let Green take the lead without resentment. Crawley was a team-player in a world of yes-men who thought they were team players, and Green learned from watching him. In the two months they had been working together, they had spent enough time on the road and in the office late at night to know each other’s habits, health, and appetites. They disagreed, almost angrily, on politics and music. But the two men were becoming friends — even though Crawley, with an NCO’s reverse snobbery, still refused to call Green by his first name.

“Nothing’s simple until the shooting starts,” the sergeant said. “Then things have a way of coming clear. Shit, I wish I had a beer.” He settled his can on the cardboard coaster.

“Buy you one when we get back. Listen, I know it isn’t simple. But you saw the grave. And it’s not just one. And there don’t seem to be very many of them on the other side of the border.”

Crawley made a so-what face. “Most of the fighting was on this side of the border.”

“Most of the victims were ethnic—”

“Come on, sir. That’s only because these guys didn’t have the firepower. If these jokers had had the big muscle on their side, the atrocity ratio would have been reversed. I say to hell with all of them. We don’t have a dog in this fight.”

Green didn’t buy that. “When women and children are butchered, somebody has to be punished. We can’t just talk forever. For God’s sake, Bob. It has to be clear … that atrocities are unacceptable.”

The song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” came on the stereo.

“You really want our troops plopped down in the middle of this sewer,” Crawley asked, “trying to figure out who’s zooming who? These people have to settle their own business. What do you want, major?”

Helpless, Green looked down at the table and pruned his face. “Justice. For a start.”

The NCO began to laugh, then stopped himself. “Look, sir. It’s ugly. I’m not blind. And I’m not heartless. But I’m not stupid, either,” Crawley said. “We can’t fix this one, boss. Hell, we can’t even tell the players apart.”

Scarface dropped a pack of cigarettes on the bar and he and the proprietor lit up. Green sipped his Coke. The German stuff was sweeter than the Coke he was used to. He didn’t like it.

“We can’t just ignore genocide,” Green said. “I can’t.”

But the sergeant was in his stubborn mode. He was a good man, and honest to the nickel, Green knew, but his service and a string of failed marriages had hardened the NCO.

“Why not, major? We always ignored it before and did just fine.” His mouth hooked up on one side. “You see genocide, I see the local version of bingo night. Some of these jokers like things this way. I mean, those drive-by diplomats don’t understand that there really are evil fuckers in this world. Not everybody wants peace, boss. And people don’t execute women and children because they hate the work. Some guys like it.” Crawley had three years on Green, but he looked a decade older in the lamplight. “Or just look at it this way: we’ve got our means of conflict resolution, they’ve got theirs. We sue, they shoot. Every place I’ve been, people have their own way of settling scores. And, near as I can tell, this crap’s been going on forever in Mr. Frankie’s neighborhood. We just know about it now. Thank you, Mr. Turner.” The sergeant shook his head in naked sorrow. “I’ve been in seventeen years. And I’ve seen more damage done by ignorant men with good intentions … Christ, I ought to write a book.”

Back when the Soviet empire was coming apart, Green had been trained for special duties in the East. One of the bennies had been travel, and one of the trips had taken him to Eastern Europe, just as the locals were slipping their leash. In Poland, he had visited Auschwitz.

There were haunted places on the earth, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz were among them. The ghosts crowded you, and you felt a kind of cold that had nothing to do with thermometers. You felt the weight of death.

Auschwitz had been a benchmark for Green. He was not a particularly sentimental man, and his church attendance was erratic. But he wanted to believe in the goodness of mankind. And he believed that good men had to face down evil.

He believed that someone had to be at fault in the Balkans. Crawley was wrong about that. Genocide was not some kind of local folk tradition that had to be respected by outsiders. When the crime was a massacre of unarmed human beings, someone had to be punished.

Green longed to know who to punish. He knew that Crawley was right about some things, too. It was not simple. So Green went carefully. Waiting for clear evidence, for the muddle to sort itself out, and for more powerful men to decide what must be done.

The sergeant played with his empty soda can. They had eaten spiced sausages, green beans, and peppered rice, with crusty bread and goat cheese on the side. There had even been pudding for dessert. Frankie had pulled out all the stops, to the extent that the war had left him stops to pull. And, to Green’s relief, their host had let them enjoy the meal in peace, with no more tales of sexual conquests and the splendors of Milwaukee.

“What the hell,” Crawley said abruptly. “Maybe you’re right. I hope you’re right. Because I see us getting into this, God help us, no matter what Sergeant First Class Robert G. Crawley thinks about it. I mean, the president hasn’t consulted me personally on this one. And that guy Vollstrom, Mr. Negotiator, he’s just set on making his mark on history. We’ll be in it, alright. And then I’m going to retire on the spot and set up a concession business selling little touches of home to the GIs. You know, Hustler, Tattoo World, action videos.” He grimaced. “Maybe get this Frankie-boy to go in with me, take care of the local connections and pay-offs and shit. Start us a real nice whorehouse with the local talent. Because once we’re in, we ain’t getting out in no hurry. We’ll be here till the cows come home. And I figure I might as well make a profit on stupidity of such magnitude.”

“You’ll never retire.”

“Just watch me, major.”

“I wish I knew what was right.”

Crawley looked at him. “Sometimes, sir, right is just staying alive and keeping your nose clean.” He snorted. “Other times, the judge tells you to pay alimony. But it’s never like in those books you read.”

Green smiled. “And how do you know? If you haven’t read the books?”

“Oh, I read them alright. It just wasn’t a lasting relationship. Guard the fort, I got to take another piss. Army life’s been hell on my kidneys.”

When Crawley went past the bar, Scarface held out a glass and gave him a broken-toothed smile.

“Good,” Scarface said. “Slivovitz. Very good.”

The NCO waved him off. “I gave at the office.”

Scarface grumped his mouth for a moment, then knocked back the shot himself. He said something to Frankie in a low voice. Frankie laughed. Then they both stared across the room at Green.

“Hey, major,” their host called. “He wants to know what kind of man turns down a free drink.”

Green returned the stares.

“There are no free drinks,” he said.

Frankie laughed again. Frankie liked to laugh. “I told him Americans get this religious bug up their asses. It makes them crazy.”

Yes, Green thought. Except we don’t butcher each other over it.

Scarface caught the word “crazy.” He tapped a finger against his temple, grinning. His teeth looked like he had been in a thousand fistfights and lost every one.

“Yeah,” Green agreed. “We’re crazy, alright.”

Scarface muttered again, but he did not lose his smile.

“He says you’re crazy for not bombing those people over there. With your Star Wars airplanes.”

“Tell him we don’t want to spoil his fun. He looks like he could handle them all himself.”

Scarface liked that. But he was disappointed that Green would not accept a shot of plum brandy in the interests of eternal friendship with America.

“He says, how you going to fight if you don’t drink?” Frankie translated.

Green was tired of the game. But he had no excuse for turning his back until Crawley returned. So he said, “Tell him I’m like you. Tell him I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Frankie hooted, then translated. Scarface chuckled. It was the sound of a forty-year-old Ford starting up.

“He says that’s worse. Lovers need to drink even more than fighters. Women need to be afraid of you.”

A woman appeared in the doorway. Early to mid-twenties, she wore jeans and a purple roll-collar sweater. Dark blond hair fell over her shoulders, and her hair and the sweater glistened from the light rain that had drifted over the village. Even at a distance, Green could see that she wore too much makeup, but so did every woman in the Balkans who didn’t walk with a cane. By any standard, the woman was attractive. She did not look like village goods.

She considered Green, then walked hastily to the bar. Scarface grunted at her, but she ignored him and spoke to Frankie. He shrugged his shoulders, his favorite gesture, and the woman nodded and smiled uncertainly.

She turned toward Green. But her steps faltered. It seemed as if she were giving herself orders to keep going. As though she were afraid. A few feet away, she stopped, briefly met his eyes, then looked down.

Up close, she was genuinely lovely. Green hoped she was not a hooker. He did not want any part of that, and he did not want her to be that sort. There was something about her that made you want better things for her. She did not look strong. And war sent people down ugly paths.

“May I … speak with you?” she asked. Her voice was low, almost masculine in pitch, but it quaked. “I heard that you have come, and wish to practice my English, please.”

Good opening for a hooker, Green thought sadly. But the night wasn’t going anywhere. If she wanted to sit, he didn’t mind the company.

“Please,” he said, rising slightly. “Have a seat.”

She brushed by him and he smelled the musk of her, and the wet wool of the sweater. After she sat down, Scarface and Frankie lost interest.

“I am Daniela,” she said.

“I’m Jeff.”

“Cheff?”

“Right. ‘Daniela’ sounds Italian.”

She smiled. Her teeth were straight and fairly white, a blessing by local standards. Odd, how you noticed different things in different situations, Green thought. In the Balkans, you checked out their teeth.

“I think my parents have taken it from a film. Is it a pretty name, do you think?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

Sergeant Crawley came back in, wet. Green realized the NCO had been checking the lock-up on the Cherokee and getting the last of the gear into their room, which was in a double cabin out back. With a good lock on the door. Crawley had little ways of shaming him by taking care of duties they should have shared.

The NCO did a fast intel estimate and headed for the bar instead of the table. Green heard him ask for another Coke.

“I do not ask about my name’s attractiveness because I seek flattery,” Daniela said. “But for practice.”

“Practice is very important.”

A thick strand of hair fell forward and she flipped it back over her shoulder. The corner of her mouth began to twitch and she quickly set her fingertips over it. Her fingers were rough and scarred, and cuts striped the back of her hand. The sight startled Green. The hand did not match the rest of her.

When she removed her fingers from her lips, the twitch had stopped.

“So … are you a teacher?” Green asked. Trying to figure her out.

She shook her head. “There is no school now. Maybe next year. Do you have a cigarette, please?”

From Belfast to Belgrade, the women of Europe still had not gotten the word. They all smoked.

“I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.”

She looked down, embarrassed at having asked for something, sensing a greater error she did not understand. “I’m sorry. There is no need.”

But Green called to his host, “Frankie? Got a pack of cigarettes?”

“German okay?”

Green looked at the woman. She kept looking down.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Whatever,” Green said to Frankie. Then he asked the woman, “Would you like something to drink?”

She raised her face. There was a little struggle in her eyes, manners at war with appetite. “I think so,” she said. “Perhaps there is coffee?”

Frankie dropped off a rose-colored pack of cigarettes and a box of matches with Cyrillic lettering. Leftovers. And yes, there was coffee.

Green opened the pack and held it out for the woman to help herself to a cigarette. Then he laid the pack down on her side of the table and lit a match for her.

Those scarred hands.

She closed her eyes and sucked the smoke deep. As if it fortified her.

“You wish to know what I do?” she asked.

“If you want to tell me.”

“But I cannot. You see, there is nothing to do now. I live with my mother. My father is gone. In the war. We do not know any facts about him. But we have hope.” She stilled the twitch at the corner of her mouth again. “I have studied at the university until the war’s beginning. I studied English literature. But I do not speak so well now. There is no opportunity here.”

“You speak English very well.”

“Perhaps you know the books of Mr. George Orwell?”

Green remembered reading 1984 and Animal Farm in high school. But he was not certain he was prepared for a literary discussion.

“I think they are very true, the books of Mr. Orwell,” she went on. “I cannot agree with the people who say 1984 is wrong because the year has come and is gone. The year is not important. I think it is like walking toward the horizon, you see. This 1984 is always ahead of us, no matter how far we go. I think there are always too many people who would like us to behave in such a way.”

Green could only remember Big Brother. And the mask with the rats.

“And I think that Animal Farm is very important. There are many such pigs.”

Green read regularly, but most of the books he chose were histories or biographies. The last novel he could remember reading was a thriller he had picked up in an airport, a story about Washington intrigue and POW/MIAs seized by the Russians during the Korean War. It had not impressed him.

“But I like Mr. Thomas Hardy as my favorite,” the woman said, smoke frosting her thick, damp hair. “He is so romantic and sad. But there is an unfortunate lack of books now.”

“Maybe you can go back to the university?”

She looked into the smoke. “I would like that very much. But it is difficult. I think the war will come back. And only the people who make black-market business have money.” She lifted her head and managed to meet his gaze for several seconds. Her eyes were green, almost gray in their lightness of color. She touched her fingertips to the side of her mouth and looked down again.

“But I think it is not polite to talk so much about my person. We will talk about you now, Mr. Jeff. Where are you from?” She smiled.

“Wheeling, West Virginia, ma’am.”

She nodded. “Wheeling is very beautiful.”

That was news to Green. “Ever been to the states, Daniela?”

She shook her head. A decided no. “But I know it is beautiful, and the people are very happy. Except for the Negroes, who are in the cities. Are there Negroes in Wheeling?”

“Some.”

“Are you afraid of them?”

“Not particularly.”

She considered that. “I think they are violent people. I do not like violent people.”

“Not all blacks are violent,” Green began. “In America—” He caught himself. It was hardly the time or place for Race Relations 101. “Anyway, Wheeling’s not the most beautiful city in the United States. But there’s pretty country nearby.”

“I think it must be beautiful. I would like to see it very much.”

The conversation went dead for a moment. Then Frankie brought the coffee, brewed by invisible hands in a back room. It smelled like instant. But even that was a rare treasure in these parts. In the capital city, though, the war had brought wealth to a new class and you could get espresso, which was the new name for the Turkish coffee that had been brewed in the region for centuries. In the capital city, there were late-night cafes and discos, all smoke and loud Euro-pop, where young men with sleek black hair wore suits with padded shoulders, and the women, faces bitter as coffee grounds, wore short dresses and brutal high heels. Everybody had a deal in the works.

Daniela lit another cigarette before she drank. “Thank you. I think you are a gentleman. Perhaps you are married?”

Green smiled at the transparency of the question. These were direct times.

“No. Not married.”

“Then, perhaps, you are divorced?” She pronounced the last word with three syllables.

“Nope. Never married.”

“That is very strange, I think. And you are an officer?”

“Yes.” I am an officer. And, yes, it’s very strange. And I would have married Caroline, and she would have married me, and it was all very beautiful when she flew over to visit and we went to Italy, but it was not beautiful enough. Because she would not give up her career for me, and I would not leave the Army for her. And that was love at the end of the century.

“Why have you never been married?”

She leaned toward him, cigarette between the fingers of her closed fist, head leaned against her wrist. Green wished he could wash the makeup from her face. She was very pretty, maybe beautiful in the way it took a little while to see. It was sad because he sensed she had put on the makeup, which she would have hoarded, especially for him. She made him feel lonelier than he had felt in months.

“Just never found the right woman,” he said. “I’m a challenge.”

She was not having any of that. “Perhaps this woman will find you,” she said firmly. “I think you are a lucky man. You are looking to me like a lucky man.”

By local standards, Green figured, he was very lucky, indeed.

“You are living in the capital?” she said. She sipped her coffee with the daintiness of a cat.

“When I’m not on the road.”

“You have been there long?”

“Just over two months.”

“You will stay for a long time?”

“I’m on a six-month TDY.”

She put down the cup, which was chipped around the rim, and looked at him quizzically.

“It means I’m a loaner model. Only temporary. Six months.”

She thought about that. “Six months is very long sometimes. I think time is longer in the winter than in the summer. Do you have a girlfriend in the capital?”

Green wanted to be serious, but he could not help smiling.

“No girlfriend.”

“You do not think our girls are pretty?” Another cat-sip of coffee.

“Very pretty. But I haven’t had much time off.”

“I went to university there. If I lived there now, I would show you everything.”

He almost said, “Maybe you’ll get up there sometime,” but stopped himself. He did not want her to read it as an invitation. But he did not want her to leave the table, either.

“It seems like a pleasant city,” Green lied. With its obese Habsburg architecture, and its fierce grayness, and the leaden food. The people looked down as they walked, and only the whores and hustlers met your eyes.

“Do you know the cathedral?”

Green nodded. He had gone there, a dutiful tourist. The ornamentation had seemed squalid and fussy at the same time.

“I think it is beautiful,” she said.

“Are you religious?”

She laughed for the first time. If sound had color, her laugh would have been amber. “Oh, no,” she said. “Only the old people are religious now.”

“And the people who made the war?”

Her mouth began to twitch again. It was a slight movement, but he could tell that it shamed her. She did not laugh this time.

“They have no religion. For them it is only words. It is an excuse they make.”

“Would you like another coffee?”

She shook her head. “I think it is very expensive. One cup is enough, you see.”

“Daniela … what’s your last name? Your family name?”

“Kortach. And yours?”

“Green. Jeff Green. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

She smiled and stared off to the side of his face. “Zelen. That is ‘green’ in our language. Zelen.”

He nodded. Really, he was the one who needed to practice his language skills. But he was tired. And the girl was lovely. And she did not seem to be a hooker. Just another soul washed up and stranded by the war.

You could not let yourself get too close. But it was difficult sometimes.

“I think I must go now,” she said. “It has become late. And this is not a good place for a woman. The people in the village … they are not open of mind like the city people. They think bad things.”

“You should go then.”

The words saddened her. He had only meant to be polite, but had said the wrong thing.

She touched her fingers to the side of her mouth. “How long will you stay in Melnica?”

“We go back tomorrow.”

She seemed to shrink into her sweater. As if he had slapped her and she was cowering under the threat of the next blow. He made her for a lonely girl desperate for any chance to get out. Suffocating here. With her memories of books and the greater world. Willing to risk her reputation for a slim chance of escape, in a place where reputation still mattered in a way it had not mattered for a century in his own country.

“Perhaps you will come again,” she said.

“Perhaps.”

“Then you will visit with me. To practice English.”

“Yes.”

“I hope very much that you will come again.”

She stood up. He stood, as well. Old manners. And the miseries of West Point, with its fascist etiquette.

She thrust out her hand to show she was a Western girl. He took it, and let go too soon. Afraid of himself, of doing something foolish. Even if she was a fairy-tale princess, he was in no position to play Prince Charming. A ghost of warmth remained in his grip.

She turned away and he called, “Daniela?”

But he only wanted to give her the rest of the pack of cigarettes to take along.

“I don’t smoke,” he explained.

Her eyelids fluttered. Too quickly. “I think that is good, not to smoke” she said, turning away again.

She didn’t just leave. She fled.

Crawley came over to the table and repossessed his seat. He looked at Green through the veil of smoke the woman had left behind.

“Don’t go native on me,” the NCO said.

The men at the bar laughed over their own little joke. You could hear the liquor level in their voices. Frankie came over to the table and stood before the two Americans. But he only looked at Green.

“You like her?”

“She’s a pretty girl,” Green said cautiously.

Frankie grunted. “She’s a fucking nutcase. They got her during the war. Gang bang.” He punched his fist rhythmically into his palm. “Twelve, fifteen of them.” He laughed. “Hell, maybe a hundred. They kept her up in the woods for a couple of days. Now she’s the town slut. Would’ve been better if they’d cut her throat.”

Green looked down at the tabletop. The last of the smoke curled and drifted.

“Hey,” Frankie said, “you want to fuck her? I’ll send her to your room. You can both fuck her. Won’t even cost nothing.”

“Life sucks, then you die,” Crawley said. He sat on his bed checking his 9mm. The oiled-paper blinds were drawn down as far as they would go. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. Commo gear and everything else that could be removed from the Jeep covered the floor between the old iron beds. “Those sausages are doing a number on my stomach. What the hell kind of peppers do they put in them?”

Green was not in a talking mood.

Finally, the NCO laid the pistol on the blanket. “Look, boss man. I’ve been around the block. I understand the mope you got on, all right? A good-looking woman all cozy at your table, batting her eyes and getting all soulful with you. Then you find out her life’s gone off the rails. Way off. And now you don’t want to take her home to meet your parents anymore. But you feel bad about feeling that way, ’cause we’re all supposed to be sensitive New-Age guys or something, and, yeah, she got dealt a bad hand.” He slapped his palms down on his knees. “Well, let me tell you something. Life ain’t fair. If it was, you’d feel as sorry for some pot-bellied creepo as you do for the Sweetheart of the Balkans. But you don’t, and I don’t. And nobody else will, either.”

The sergeant clicked his tongue in a parody of shame. “When they packed my ass off to eastern Zaire — that one really got to me. Not for the right reasons, though. Much as I hate to admit it, those people didn’t seem real. Not the way your blondie does. Oh, they smelled real enough. Cholera ain’t no air freshener. But even the little kids. In my brain I knew they were human just like me, but it didn’t move me the way it should have. Not the way American kids would’ve done. And you know what really flipped me out? This black captain honchoing our A-team? He had the same goddamned reaction. Couldn’t relate to people in funny clothes talking mumbo-jumbo and crapping themselves to death. And that’s how we get along. There’s plenty of suffering out there. We could just about start a genocide-of-the-month club. So we’re kind of programmed to pick and choose. And you’ve got to do it that way. Sometimes you just have to turn your back. Because there’s so much suffering it’ll just rip you to shreds if you let it. And if you try to fix everything, you end up fixing nothing. So stay in your lane. And be prepared to keep on marching past other people’s misery.”

Green snapped the clip back into his own pistol. You didn’t make a big thing of it, but you did not go unarmed into Indian country. “Rack time? Listen … Bob … maybe I’m not the right man for this. I mean, that grave today. The little kid who looked like a piece of beef jerky. Then the girl, on top of everything else. My feelings do get in the way. It’s sloppy, I know it. Intellectually, I understand. But I can’t help it, goddamn it. And I’m not sure I want to help it. Maybe I’m not the right guy for this mission.”

“There is no ‘right guy,’” Crawley said. “You’ll get over it. You get calluses where you need them.” He laughed to himself, a rusty-pipes sound. “Want to turn off that light?”

“Door locked?”

“Door’s locked, I’m locked and loaded, and the carburetor’s under the bed. I would’ve taken off the tires, major, sir, but it was raining and I’m delicate.”

“Screw off, Crawley.”

“Sweet dreams, Romeo.”

But Green did not have any dreams at all. He lay awake for a time, thinking unhappily about the woman, then disgusted about the way he found himself thinking of her. He decided that Crawley was probably right, that every emotion was driven by biology. But he could not make himself accept the idea. He recognized that there was something cheap and selfish — too easy — about his sense of sorrow, but he still believed it would be worse to feel nothing at all. And he figured Crawley felt more than he was willing to let on. You couldn’t go through this and feel nothing. Then Green thought of the woman — Daniela — again. He expected bad dreams. But it had been a long day and when he fell asleep there was nothing on his channel.

The first blast shook the walls and woke him. After a stunned instant, he heard Crawley yell, “Get down,” and he rolled off the bed.

He landed on the commo gear and pack frames, all knees and elbows and a thin t-shirt. Then he remembered to reach back under the pillow and grab the pistol. The next explosion hit close, but they got lucky. The concussion shattered the windows without blowing them in, and the blinds channeled the falling glass.

“Fuck me to tears,” Crawley said. “Mortars. Fuck me to tears.”

“You all right?”

The night was black between the flashes.

Green felt the NCO reaching over him and smelled the man’s familiar smell. Then the mattress from his bed fell on him.

Crawley was tucking him in.

“Just stay down,” the sergeant said. “I’ve been through this shit before.”

This time, Green heard the whistling before the impact.

Close

The floor shook and the remaining glass blew out. Stings pierced his socks, down where the mattress did not reach.

“What—”

“They know we’re here,” Crawley whispered. “This ain’t no accidental timing. Let’s hope they’re just saying hello.”

A woman’s voice shrieked in the distance. Instantly, Green thought of Daniela. But he made himself focus on business again. He was shaking. But he was ready to go, to move, to act. He just wasn’t sure what to do.

“Get your gear on, sir,” Crawley told him. “Jeans, boots, jacket. In case we have to run. You hear any more whistling, get back under that mattress.”

Green fumbled in the darkness. He had positioned his jeans at the bottom of the bed so he could find them easily. But pulling off the mattress had made a mess of that plan.

Then they heard the shots.

“Oh, shit,” Crawley said.

The shouting began.

“You think this is about us?” Green rasped. He had his jeans now, feeling for the leg holes.

“I know it’s about us. I just don’t know what they’re out to prove. We need to un-ass this place.”

A smaller explosion sounded nearby. Grenade. Then the automatic weapons fire kicked in again. The screaming resumed, and there were male shouts now. Green yanked on his hiking boots. His fingers were unsteady. But they did as they were told.

“Maybe something about that grave,” Crawley said. “I don’t—”

Something struck the wall inside the room. It was a flat sound, followed by the clang of metal on metal.

“Shit,” Crawley yelled. Then he landed on top of Green, covering the major’s body with his own, barrel chest grinding Green’s head into the floor.

The grenade’s blast lifted the sergeant away and stunned Green. He did not even know if he was wounded. He felt as though he had been thumped on every side of his head at once. There was an avalanche in his ears. His body was numb. Then he tasted salt and wet, and sensed the pulsing from his nose.

He could not move, but did not know what that meant. Time warped and would not go forward.

“Bob?”

The sound of his own voice seemed slow to Green. It lingered in the air, surrounded by a bronze roar. In another world, automatic weapons continued to fire. Rounds struck metal. He imagined he was inside a big metal room. There was laughter.

His head hurt. It was so bad his mouth stayed open in a scream without sound. He imagined his skull shrinking, squeezing his brain.

The door swung open. Green wanted to rise, to defend himself. But his body would not move. He could think again. But none of his parts would go. He wondered if that meant he had been paralyzed. The thought stunned him.

Boots. Rampaging through the room. He only realized his eyes were open when a flashlight found them. His neck muscles recoiled.

“On zhiv.” The voice seemed pleased and angry at the same time. He heard it over the enormous, constant ringing. “On zhiv.”

Zhiv. Alive. That was him. A string of obscenities followed.

Suddenly, his arm moved. Without his command. Or maybe he had intended to move it a long time before. Somebody inside him, a ghost from a previous life, reached for the pistol.

A boot came down on his forearm.

Whatever else he had lost, he had not lost his language skills. He understood the words, “American scum.”

“Bob?” he called again. It was hard to keep focus. “Sergeant Crawley?”

He had to spit the blood from his mouth. Gagging.

Outside the cabin, a man laughed again. A woman’s wail colored the distance.

Rough hands yanked Green to his feet. To his astonishment, he found he could stand. But the darkness would not hold still and he nearly toppled. The sound in his ears rolled and rolled. Instinctively, he raised a hand to wipe the slime from his mouth and chin, but a gunbarrel forced the hand back down.

Someone threw something at him, shouting. He had been unprepared. The object — heavy fabric — hit his chest and fell.

The skull. He remembered the skull.

The voice commanded him to pick up the object and put it on. It was his jacket.

That was when he realized they were not going to kill him right away.

Someone thumped him between the shoulder blades and told him to get outside. Green stumbled toward the different darkness. Dizzy. Nauseated. The air was damp and cold, with the smell of a rifle range. His ears still pushed sounds away, making them small and hard to hear. But he could see clearly.

Where was Crawley?

Dark figures in masks. A fire in a house beyond the inn.

Green bent and hacked up the blood he had swallowed. Then he wiped his face with his hand. No one stopped him this time.

The Jeep rested on flattened tires, shot up. The vehicle’s armor was light, intended to stop assassins with pistols and sloppy shooters during a drive-by, and really all it meant was that you could not roll the windows down. Now the Cherokee looked like a butchered animal.

Green was afraid. And ready to puke from his lack of equilibrium. But training counted for something, however useless. He noted the assortment of weapons the men carried. Belgian FNs, Kalashnikov variants, one jagged little HK. He counted seven raiders, then an eighth man came out of the shadows. There was still screaming and clatter up in the street, so there would be more of them. Their uniforms were as confused as their armaments, ranging from full cammo to jeans and leather jackets. The only thing they had in common was the black commando mask each man had pulled down over his head and neck.

Two of the men tied Green’s hands behind his back with rubbercoated wire. They were good at their work. Then a tall, thin man with a young voice barked at him in dialect. When Green didn’t respond, the man shoved the butt of his rifle into his gut, driving him back against the Jeep.

The rain had blown over and a few tough stars shone between the clouds. But most of the light came from flashlights, a couple of them big and rectangular like the kind a conscientious driver might keep in the trunk of a car back home.

“Get the other one. Let’s get going.” Green understood that.

There was a brief, low-voiced argument. Then the thin man and another gunman in a ragged Bundeswehr parka slung their weapons behind their backs and went into the cabin.

They lugged Crawley’s body outside, belly down, and dropped him on the gravel. His back was shredded, the blood dark as wine under the beams of light. His neck was broken and he had bled from the mouth. The sergeant’s pants were stained. As if he had been hung.

A stocky man bent over the corpse. Crawley’s hair was cut very short and the man lifted the head by an ear. A big hunting knife extended from his right fist. He took a practiced stance and swung the knife down like an executioner’s axe. He knew his business, but it still took four hacks to separate Crawley’s head from his body.

The butcher laughed and held up the head, giving some sort of cheer Green did not understand. If he could have killed all of them, slaughtered them, Green would have done it. But he just stood against the wrecked Jeep, hands bound, helpless.

The man bent down again and cleaned his knife on Crawley’s shoulder, then sheathed it. He took the head in both hands, stretching out his arms, and shook out as much of the blood as he could. Bits of pulp splattered the earth. When the gore tapered to a few drips, another of the men held out a plastic shopping bag and the butcher dropped the head in it.

Routine business.

Green closed his eyes, but it did not help.

A muzzle prodded his bicep.

“Hajdemo!” Let’s go.

He did not understand the rules. His captors carried their weapons at the slack, unworried about a counterattack from the villagers. And there had not been much of a fight, really. There was so much Green could not explain. He wondered if Melnica had survived because it had cut some kind of deal not to resist.

They forced him to walk through the spread of Crawley’s blood.

In the street in front of the inn, Green saw the woman, Daniela. On her knees. Begging.

The four men encircling her laughed.

“Hajdemo!”

Two of the raiders lifted Daniela to her feet. One of them kicked her.

Green did not even think to protest. He had trouble walking straight. And his hearing still had an underwater feel.

The column turned up the street that led to the mountain. In a little barn, a cow gave an annoyed moo. The houses remained shuttered and blacked out.

Daniela was four places ahead of him in the line. She was not bound, but she did not try to flee. Instead, she pleaded with the men to let her go back to her mother. She sounded like she was ten years old. Except for the occasional joke, the gunmen ignored her.

It was cold. Green had not had the presence of mind to zip the jacket before they bound his hands. And even the thought that he might die soon did not make the cold any less a bother. His feet stung and itched and hurt.

Much of life was adaptation to your environment. Even the shorter, stockier gunmen were accustomed to climbing. Green kept himself in good shape, but his legs soon strained at the steepness and pace. When he slowed even a little, a muzzle jabbed him in the back.

He had seen them cut off Crawley’s head. It had been indescribably real, immeasurably repugnant. Yet now, on the mountainside, the death was already hard to believe. He remembered the NCO saying something about the attack being aimed at them. And Green remembered the man covering him with his body. The things men did. The marvel of courage. He doubted his own bravery, that he would have done such a thing. He had-thought of himself as a real hotshot, a first-rate officer. Now he hardly felt like a soldier at all. He felt as though he had been faking it his entire career.

He saw himself as a failure and an ass, and he was afraid. Fighting the tears in his eyes. Glad of the darkness.

They pushed through a grove of evergreens. The wet branches slapped him and soaked through his jeans. But the pine smell was gorgeously alive.

He saw the pulp of Crawley’s hacked neck. He saw the head, with the sleepy look of the open eyes.

That was how it looked.

Green fantasized about escaping, trying to imagine how it might be done. But his hands were tied, and the trail was steep, and he did not know the way. They would catch him. In moments. And perhaps kill him for annoying them.

The girl sobbed and kept climbing.

He did not know exactly where the border lay. Somewhere over the crest. But he realized that was where they were going. He was a prisoner of the people from the other side.

Despite the muzzle prodding him, he had to turn from the path and gag up more of the blood he had swallowed. His nosebleed had stopped, though not the dizziness.

Yes. The people from the other side. The butchers. The men who made the mass graves. It was as if they had sensed where his sympathies were headed. And came for him to make him pay.

But what was the angle? What did they hope to achieve? Their leaders were telling every lie imaginable to fend off the NATO airstrikes that had been threatened because of the cease-fire violations. What could they hope to gain by killing Americans? Or kidnapping them?

He knew that not everything had logic here. Or perspective. Perhaps they imagined he was much more important than he was. Or maybe this was just a renegade band with its own lunatic agenda. The attaché had warned him, just after Green signed in at the embassy, that the big warlords could not always control the little warlords, and the little warlords could not always control the militias, and the militias could not control the smugglers, except when they all worked together. And when they were not collaborating with somebody on one of the other sides.

Maybe it was the gravesite. Maybe that was why they had come after him and Crawley. Maybe there was more to it. Maybe he had seen something he did not even realize he had seen. Or maybe they were afraid he might see something and bring down the UN and the NGOs and a major investigation.

What had Crawley said? Something about that. Green could not remember.

He needed to sit down. Just for a minute.

The gunbarrel stabbed his kidneys.

The trees fell away and the trail grew rockier. It made walking difficult. Green stumbled again and again. His legs ached. Then it was so rough for a stretch that he could not think about anything but his footing. He wondered if they would shoot him if he turned his ankle and could not go on. The muzzle kept poking his back.

“Fuck you,” he said finally. But he sounded pathetic to himself. The metal bore rammed him again, and he kept marching.

Toward Crawley’s head. Floating in the darkness. It was there whether his eyes were open or closed.

He saw the knife descending. Chopping. Hacking. Through flesh so recently alive.

It seemed to Green as though there must be a way to reverse time and undo the damage. How could Crawley be dead? So easily?

That was what the textbooks failed to convey. You read the words. And understood nothing.

Just below the crest, with a high wind blanketing the sound of their voices, the raiders stopped for a powwow.

Witch’s sabbath landscape. Rocks pale, the scrub and lichen dark. Blacker clouds in a black sky. And the shrieking wind.

The dark men clustered, masked heads bobbing. Green found himself standing hardly a body length from the woman.

She was looking at him.

This time he was the one who was ashamed, the one who looked away.

He wondered why she didn’t run for it. Perhaps she knew they would kill her if she did. She would know the local rules. And dying was the worst thing for most human beings, no matter what the books said.

He hated his helplessness more than he hated his captors now. When he looked up, the woman was still watching him. He could not make out any of the details of her features. Except for her eyes. They gleamed.

The tall, thin gunman broke from the huddle and strode over to Green. Roughly, he undid the cords binding Green’s wrists. Then he said something.

Green didn’t get it. The dialect.

The man chuckled and tried another word.

He was telling Green to take a piss, if he needed to.

“Stay on the trail,” he said. “Landmines.”

Green tried to guess how long they had been marching, how far they had come. Still no hint of light in the sky. He felt as tired as at the end of a marathon field exercise, as though he had not slept for days. Only his brain was alive, fueled on fear. Eyes wide, body dead.

No. Not dead. Crawley was dead. That was what dead meant.

The man bound Green’s wrists again.

Daniela was squatting with her face in her hands.

“Don’t fly away, little bird,” the gunman told her.

Then the discussion ended. Three of the men headed back down the trail. Rear guard? Green wondered.

The nine who remained shoved and cursed, far more than necessary, to get their prisoners moving again.

They crossed over a saddle between two outcroppings of rock. The footing was even more treacherous going down the eastern side of the ridge. Green fell once, landing on his backside and bound hands. Rock bit his knuckles.

The man behind him kicked him to his feet. Then they entered the treeline again, going deep into more dark, wet pines, and the trail leveled, traversing the side of the mountain. The party followed it into a draw that was shielded from the wind, a natural refuge. It was so overgrown and deep-set that Green missed the outline of the huts at first. It was a partisan camp. Maybe, Green thought, it had been one for centuries. And a smuggler’s lair between wars.

Except for the footfalls and grumbling of the raiders, the world had gone silent.

They gave him another chance to empty himself, an odd courtesy, then tied him, sitting down, to the trunk of a dead tree. The wood was as hard as stone.

“We stay now,” a new voice told him, in English.

“What do you want with me?”

“We stay now,” the man repeated. “One day.” He hitched up his trousers and shadowed off.

The gunmen must have been tired, too. But they were not too tired for the girl. They pulled her toward one of the huts. She fought them now. But only until they beat her to the ground. Then she gave up and let them drag her.

“American,” she called. She had forgotten his name. “Help me.”

Green closed his eyes.

But his hearing had returned unmercifully. The sounds were worse with his eyes shut, and soon he opened them again. The men felt secure enough to light a small stove in the open and they sat around it, sharing a bottle and waiting their turn. The night was so quiet in the glen that Green could hear the bounce of an old-fashioned bed. Sometimes the girl cried out, begging them to stop, not to do any more. Then she would cry for her mother again. One of the men cursed her, and Green heard the sound of fists. The girl screamed, then whimpered, and finally went quiet. The bed started up again.

Green wept. He did not understand this world.

He remembered her scarred hands.

She had told him she was not religious. But when one of the masked men led her out in the morning light, barely able to walk, bleeding and naked from the waist down, she prayed. First she prayed standing. Then, when they nudged her over to the edge of the rocks, she prayed on her knees. Green made himself watch, in penance for his helplessness. He could not see her face now, only the torn purple sweater not quite covering her rump and the bare, dirty soles of her feet. But he heard her, the mumbled familiar rhythms. She was still praying when one of the men put a pistol to the back of her head and fired.

The raiders untied Green’s hands and offered him a share of their breakfast. Sliced salami, bread, and gruel. He shook his head.

The man with the tin dish in his hand laughed and told his comrades:

“He’s angry. He wanted to fuck her, too.”

“He can still fuck her,” another man answered.

They had not buried her. They only kicked her body off the rocks.

A squat man rose from the cluster around the little stove. He had a businesslike stride. He undid the rest of the cords binding Green. When Green stretched out his legs, it felt so good it made him close his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw the man standing before him, holding out the tin plate. There were stains around the mouth of the man’s commando mask.

“Pojesti.”

Green shook his head again. It was only a slight movement.

“Pojesti.”

“No. Fuck you.”

With the speed of a professional fighter, the man dropped the plate and punched Green just below the eye. It knocked his head back against the tree.

He had never been hit so hard. He slumped over. It felt as though his neck had snapped.

The man kicked the plate with its remnants toward him.

“Pojesti.”

The instant the man turned, Green launched himself. He hit him behind the knees in a perfect beat-Navy tackle and scrambled on top of him as soon as the man’s torso thumped the ground.

Green landed one fist. Then they were all on him. When he woke up, he was tied to the tree again. He had to twist his body as hard as he could not to puke on himself.

His eye was swollen and it left Green with a narrowed view of the world. And his feet itched and burned. It seemed ridiculous to him that, waiting to be executed, he should be so bothered by his feet.

Except for a pair of sentinels, the men drifted into the huts to sleep out the day. Eventually, Green slept, too, head drooped above the lashings that bound him to the tree. He half-woke a few times — once he felt crazed by the unreachable itching and cramping of his feet — but every part of him had worn down and the need to sleep finally slammed him down like a whisky drunk.

He dreamed he was back in Wheeling, buying a new car. Except that the car lot was one he recognized from Copperas Cove, in Texas, and he could not square that because he knew he was in Wheeling. A woman he had dated at Fort Hood appeared, excited him, and vanished. There was a problem with the paperwork at the dealership. He needed to prove something and could not. Buying the car was a major commitment, and he needed to get it done before he thought too much about it. He recognized his weakness, knew he was watching himself in a dream.

He woke to twilight and the smell of grilling meat. The sky was deep and cloudless. The fragrance of mutton, a vivid living smell of death, made his stomach ache.

In the shadow of the trees, the gunmen sat and ate, pulling the meat from the skewers with their fingers and gnawing bread torn ragged from a loaf. They shared an oval brandy bottle. Only five of them left now. The tall, thin boy who had marched him up the mountain was gone, Green could tell that much even though the men still wore their stocking masks.

Three of the remaining men stood up and slung their weapons over their shoulders. Green could not make out what was said, but he sensed it was a parting. And he was right. The brandy went around one more time, then the men marched off in a file. Ten minutes later, Green saw their shrunken figures emerge from the treeline, climbing toward the pass. The man at the rear turned around, as if he sensed that he was being watched. In the dying light, Green saw the white dot of an unmasked face.

The masks had only been for him.

He wondered, for a moment, if he had gotten it all wrong. If these men were not ethnic warriors at all, but only bandits imagining a fat Yankee ransom.

Again, he thought of Crawley’s severed head.

Not ransom.

One of the pair who had stayed behind to mind him stood up and swaggered toward Green. He was stocky, with a submachine gun slung across his back. Not one of Green’s earlier abusers. He untied Green and pointed toward the little grill and his companion, who sat cradling an airborne-variant AK. Watching.

Green stumbled at first, almost fell. His legs were numb. And he still had difficulty with his balance.

The man who had untied him grabbed Green from behind, taking a fistful of his jacket collar. Abruptly, he steered Green toward the huts. A bolt of panic shot through Green’s chest and stomach, piercing right down to his bowels.

Was this it?

No. It couldn’t be. They had killed the girl over by the rocks. That was the killing place.

Something else.

What?

Green felt himself shaking. He hated it, did not want to seem a coward, but could not control his body. He felt supernaturally alert, but not in a way that engaged reality. His dream had been more real than this.

He understood it now. Why the people had walked to the ovens at Auschwitz. Because you did not know what else to do, afraid that any action you took would only make things worse. And because you were drugged on hope, even as you faced the executioner.

The gunman shoved him between the huts, prodding him toward a trough that caught the water from a mountain spring. He told Green to wash his face.

The water was beautiful, and delicious.

Afterward, the gunman herded Green to the little stove then pushed down on his shoulder. Green sat. The second raider fingered his rifle, watching everything through the slits in his mask. The stocky one bent down behind Green. A strong-handed man, he jerked Green’s left ankle back and tied it to his left wrist, hobbling him but leaving his right hand free.

The stocky man lifted a last skewer of mutton from the grill and pushed the meat off with dirty fingers. The chunks fell on the flattened grass in front of Green.

This time Green ate. The men gave him bread, and offered him their plum brandy. He almost accepted it. But finally shook his head. When the last of the meat was gone, Green licked his fingers. Wanting more.

In the gloaming of the little draw, the stocky man reached toward his comrade, straining to grasp the brandy bottle. And Green saw a flash of pale skin below the mask.

A scar traced down the gunman’s neck, from below his ear into his collar.

It was not the smartest thing Green ever did or said. But he was far beyond cool judgment. He spoke to the man on the other side of the stove, the one with the collapsible-stock AK.

“Why’d you kill the girl, Frankie?”

The jerk of the head confirmed it. Even Scarface understood English well enough to understand what had happened.

After a moment, Frankie reached up and peeled off his mask. He ran his hand back over his liberated hair.

“Fucking shit things anyway,” Frankie said.

Scarface spoke rapidly. In a tone of alarm. But Frankie made a dismissive gesture.

He looked at Green. “It doesn’t matter now. We’re going to kill you. You know that.”

But Green refused to think about his own death. He kept his eyes on Frankie. “You sonofabitch. Why kill the girl?”

Scarface pulled off his mask and shook his head hard. But he let Frankie do the talking.

“What the fuck do you care? You have plans to marry her or something?” He laughed and said something in dialect to Scarface. Scarface laughed with the old Ford rumble Green remembered.

“Look,” Frankie said, “this isn’t America. People here have values. You can’t just go slutting around in a village like that. That bitch was damaged goods.”

“You said she was raped.”

Frankie rolled his eyes in the glow of the stove. “And that’s supposed to make it all right?” He breathed out heavily, a killer’s sigh. “You’ll never understand. We have to purify our race. A woman who’s been raped … by those people … she doesn’t belong here anymore. Anyway, Daniela was nothing but a slut.”

“She was one of your people, for God’s sake. She was educated. She could have helped you rebuild …”

Frankie leaned on his gun. “She was a whore, man. Nobody around here’s going to marry a whore. And no whore’s going to teach our kids. Shit, she was even ready to go away with you last night. All you would’ve had to do was ask.” His eyes burned. “Do you know it’s a scientifically proven fact that every man who screws a woman leaves his trace in her, his mark? Then, when she has a baby, the baby’s got traces of all of them, of every one who’s been in her. That’s why those people rape. To infect our genes.”

“That’s nuts.”

“It’s science,” Frankie said. “Science.”

Green closed his eyes. He wished he had not eaten the mutton. “You’re sick,” he said. “You gang-rape one of your own people … put a bullet in her head … and that’s okay? That’s some kind of good deed? To keep the race pure? What fucking race? You’re all fucking the same, for Christ’s sake.”

Frankie’s tone turned to disgust. “Don’t make some big drama out of it, man. She was a disgrace to our people. Our country’s going to be built on racial purity. Outsiders don’t understand. We can’t allow genetic pollution. None of their filth. And no Turk filth, either.” Frankie glanced at Scarface. “Look at Ivo here. He was her goddamned cousin, man. And he was all for blowing her fucking head off. He understands.”

“You’re sick,” Green repeated.

“Yeah? And you’re going to be dead.”

In despair, Green spoke aloud to himself. “What … in the name of God … is this all about?”

Frankie grinned. “Which God? Ours, or theirs?”

“Nothing personal,” Frankie told him as they went down the trail in the darkness. Scarface walked point, weapon at the ready. Green followed. Frankie brought up the rear. A three-quarter moon lit the path where it broke out of the trees. The fields shone silver. Frankie spoke in a softened voice, as though listening for danger all the while. “You’re a sacrifice for a greater cause. You should be proud.”

“Fuck you.”

Frankie gave a snorting laugh. “Yeah, well. We owe you. I got to admit. Maybe we’ll put up a little monument to you somewhere when all this is over. ‘Major Jeff Green, who brought America into the war and rescued our people with his sacrifice.’ Kind of nice, when you think about it. I mean, what the fuck, man. Your death’s going to have meaning. Not like most of the poor suckers who get wasted around here.”

“America won’t intervene because of one major.”

“Oh, yeah?” They passed through another belt of low pines and a branch caught Green across the mouth. “Anyway,” Frankie went on, “it’s not just you. You’re just going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. All the atrocities and that shit. Those people have it coming. And your people know it. They just need a little push.”

They marched down the mountainside. Green thought hard. His mind went too fast or too slow, but never just right. Ideas trotted by, then galloped off before he could harness them. And Sergeant Crawley was always with him. Crawley and the girl.

“All this … even the mortars on your own village,” Green said. “It was all staged. To look like the other guys killed us, or kidnapped us, or whatever.”

“Hey, first prize, Mr. Fucking Wizard.”

“And you’re taking me across the border …” Green had trouble getting the next words out, “ … so … you can kill me on their side. So I’ll be found where the guilt will seem indisputable.”

“Man, you should be on Jeopardy! or something. You know I miss American TV? Baywatch and shit. And, by the way, I appreciate your consideration. In not biting it back at the inn. We would have had to lug your dead ass over the mountain, which would have been a significant hassle. And the corpse wouldn’t have been nice and fresh for those UN fucks to find.”

They passed along the high end of a meadow. The autumn night had a scent of rotting apples. Again, the smell of death made Green feel vividly alive.

“And the head? Sergeant Crawley’s—”

“It’ll turn up. We’ll be sure to let your people know.”

Scarface dropped to one knee and readied his rifle. Frankie put a hand on Green’s shoulder and shoved him down. His voice was only a whisper now.

“Fuck around, and you die right here.”

But there was nothing. Only the mountain ghosts.

They came down into a dead world and there was no more talking. The moon had passed its apogee, and the air was colder in the foothills than it had been on the mountainside. Fields of weeds paled with frost. Green put his pride on hold and asked if he could zip up his jacket. His hands were raw with the cold, but he knew he could do nothing about that. Frankie slapped him hard on the back of the head for opening his mouth, but whispered to Scarface to hold up for a minute. Instead of releasing Green’s hands from behind his back, Frankie closed up the jacket himself.

“All comfy?” he asked. “Now shut the fuck up.”

They came to the head of a cart track and Scarface consulted Frankie. Then they both nudged Green into the underbrush.

He wondered how deep into the country they planned to take him before they killed him.

“Got to stay off the roads,” Frankie said. “Lazy fuckers are all sleeping. They aren’t worth shit unless they got artillery behind them. But they drop mines all over the place.”

They skirted a farmhouse, and saw the sky through its burned-out windows. It truly was a dead place, with not even a stray dog. The weather had put down the insects. And if there were forest animals, they had learned to lie low. Black, burned-over patches scarred the fields in the moonlight.

They crossed a stream by stepping on rocks. Ivo got a wet foot and started cursing. Frankie told him to shut up in the same tone he had used on Green.

“I guess you’re some big deal?” Green said. “Local warlord, the big stud back from America.”

“You shut the fuck up, too, smart guy. I told you.”

“What have I got to lose?”

Frankie’s head shook, silhouetted by the fading moonlight. “Man,” he whispered, “you really don’t understand shit, do you? I mean, really? You’ll be begging me. For just one more minute. Just five more seconds of life, man. Everybody does. Except the crazy ones. Like Daniela. The crazy ones know better.” He laughed, pleased at his vision. “But you. You remind me of this old guy. This doctor fuck. Thought that made him safe. He stayed behind in a clinic to take care of their wounded. Then he makes this big scene when we start waxing the fucks. All this big-shot, big-shit dignity of human life crap. I took that shitbird outside myself. And when he finally got it through his skull that all that education and what the fuck wasn’t going to save him, he starts begging. Like some little kid. ‘Please, don’t kill me yet. Oh, please, not yet. Just one more minute, just one more minute.’” Frankie gave Green a punch on the shoulder to get him moving again. “I bet that’s how you’ll be. You still think your fucking passport or the cavalry’s going to rescue you. But you’re already dead, pal.”

Green got the sense that his captors knew the way, but not precisely. Darkness took its toll, and they seemed to wander for a while. He remembered his own confusion at Ranger camp, exhausted in the darkness, trying to follow an azimuth in the mountains of northern Georgia. And he recalled his pride in meaningless achievements. It really was nothing but vanity.

There was no training in the world for this.

The march led past a field of staggered crosses, slapped together from wood scraps. Each cross had two horizontals, the lower one wider.

“We didn’t kill enough of them,” Frankie said.

They came to a hamlet before dawn. The moon was down and the darkness had the texture of flannel. But you could still see that every structure had been destroyed. On both sides of the lane, broken walls rose and rubble narrowed the passage. The earth crunched underfoot.

Frankie and Scarface had a discussion that turned into a spat. Green got the words “patrols” and “stay.” Abruptly, Scarface threw up his hands, giving in. Frankie turned to Green.

“We’re going to hang here and check out some property. Find some little fixer-upper. See if we can get a good deal.”

They went carefully behind the ruins, nervous of booby traps. They sent Green in front now, telling him where to go.

The only structure that offered a decent hiding place was a barn. It stank, although the village must have been destroyed months, if not years, before. But the sky had begun to gray and it was time to go to ground.

In order to avoid leaving traces outside, they took care of their needs at the back of a stall. Then Scarface tied Green to a post where the barn door opened, making no attempt to hide him from anyone who might come nosing inside. Scarface was in a surprisingly good mood, considering that he had spent all night walking through Indian country and had just lost an argument. He tried his bits of English on his captive.

“Door open,” he said. “See American.” He cocked his fingers into a play pistol and put the index finger to Green’s temple. “Bang, bang.”

“What’s he’s trying to say,” Frankie explained, “is that anybody comes around here, they bust in the door and they’re going to shoot anything they see alive. So they shoot your ass. And give us time to unload on them. That’s how this shit goes down.”

“Then what?”

“What?”

“Then what happens? All the killing. Daniela. Me. All the others. What’s the point anymore? There’s a cease-fire down here. You’ve got your shitty little country. What more do you want?”

“I want those people dead, man. All of them. They still have our land. It was ours for centuries. I want it back.” He made a whistling sound. “And you saw what they did to our people. That grave. Those people are savages. You can’t live with them.”

It was Green’s turn to smile, to share what he had figured out. Maybe Frankie would kill him. But he would not die fooled.

“Yesterday, you mean?”

“Yeah. Like that. Women. Little babies. Those people are fucking animals.”

“Except the bodies in that grave weren’t your people. Were they, Frankie? That’s why you were going at them with pick-axes, wrecking the evidence. You wanted to show us another mass grave, to pile it on. But you didn’t want us to look too hard. Because the corpses weren’t your people at all. And you knew where the grave was because you did the killing.”

Scarface looked at Frankie. Frankie’s face had gone mean in the gray light.

“Americans can’t understand,” he said at last, “what’s it’s like here. It’s kill or be killed. Them or you. There’s no choice.”

“Women and children? That’s real hero’s work, Frankie.”

“Women have babies. Babies grow up to kill you. Children don’t forget.”

“So everything’s okay. Anything for the cause. Butcher people. Massacre your neighbors.” Green glanced back and forth in the murky light that filtered through the walls and the little window. “Destroy villages like this.”

Frankie laughed. Green still did not get it.

“This village? We didn’t do this, man. Those people did it for us.”

Green looked at him. With a question on his face.

Frankie put on an expression that pitied Green’s naivete. “This was a Muslim village, man. Nobody gives a shit about those scum. Me, I almost like them, in a way. ’Cause those people spend so much time and energy killing them. A bullet in a Turk’s head means one bullet less for mine.”

Green leaned back against his post. Scarface said something to Frankie. Frankie nodded. Scarface stood up and drew a dirty rag from his back pocket.

“Too much talk,” Frankie explained. “Got to be quiet now.”

As Scarface approached him with the gag, Green said, “You’re wrong. This wasn’t a Muslim village. You can smell the pig shit.”

Frankie laughed. Green’s was the funniest act of the season.

“I didn’t say they were good Muslims,” Frankie told him.

They did not wait for the twilight this time. The afternoon was falling golden through the window when Scarface kicked Green awake, tore off the gag, and untied his hands. Then Scarface pulled a heel of bread from his jacket pocket and dropped it in Green’s lap. Green was so dry he could hardly chew or swallow. But he tried not to waste a crumb. This time, he took a swig of the brandy when it was offered.

“They’re lazy fuckers, those people,” Frankie explained. “They wrap up their patrols by the middle of the afternoon. Then they get fucking drunk. They have no culture. Just appetites, you know? They’re not Europeans. But at least it makes things easier for us.”

They let Green go to the back of the stall alone.

“Take a good one,” Frankie called. “’Cause it’s going to be your last. We just got time to get to the highway and take care of business before the UN trucks come back.” After a moment, he added, “They’re stupid, too. I hope those dickheads don’t just drive over your body and turn all this into a waste.”

Scarface muttered and walked off. He opened the door and brilliant light poured into the barn.

“He’s just checking if the coast is clear,” Frankie said. “Then it’s time for our walk.”

The explosion shook the birdshit from the rafters of the barn. Frankie grabbed his rifle and took off, abandoning Green. After a delay of a few seconds, the screams began.

Green had never heard such an intensity of shock and pain in a human voice. Even the girl’s cries had not been as piercing.

The window was set high, at the back of the barn. It was small. But Green thought he could fit through it. He was just pulling himself up to the sill, when he heard the voice behind him.

Frankie had come back. “Get the fuck down. Get out here. Now.”

The sunlight was hard as metal. Scarface lay on a pile of rubble. Thrown there. He had no legs.

He was screaming and rocking, trying to tourniquet himself with a belt. The only words Green could decipher were “Help me, help me.”

Scarface looked up from the shreds of meat and bone and rags where his legs had been. Looking at Frankie.

Frankie stood there. Fingering his rifle.

Scarface pleaded. He was nothing but a little pile of bloody meat. Sprawled on blown cinderblocks, broken beams, and masonry. The ultimate bed of nails.

“You.” Frankie said, turning to Green. “Get down. Lie down.”

Green stared at him.

Quick as a boxer, Frankie slammed him on the shoulder with his weapon, then beat him across the back. The barrel cracked against a rib and the sight tore through Green’s jacket.

“Get down, motherfucker. Lie down on your goddamned belly.”

Green lay down. A couple of body-lengths away, Scarface shrieked and begged.

“Spread out your arms and legs,” Frankie told Green. “Do it.”

Green did it.

“Now don’t move. Or you’re history.”

Green understood more of what Scarface was saying now. The man was pleading with Frankie to make Green carry him back over the mountain, to help him stop the bleeding, to do something, anything …

Frankie picked up a chunk of cinderblock.

Green could just see Scarface’s eyes. The terror. The legless man scuttled and twisted, trying to bring his weapon around. But Frankie threw the cinderblock.

It struck Scarface in the chest, stunning him for a moment.

Frankie shoved his AK behind him, grabbing a rock with one hand and another piece of cinderblock with the other. He was quick.

“Ne,” Scarface screamed. “Ne, ne …”

Frankie stood over him and hurled the rock at his comrade’s head.

Scarface dropped back onto the rubble. After the pile of rocks and masonry settled again, there were no more sounds.

Frankie switched the piece of cinderblock to his right hand. This time he bent low and brought it down on the side of Scarface’s head, with all of his weight behind it. He swung with so much force he fell onto the body.

Green could not quite see the effect of the blow. But he heard the sound of a dropped pumpkin.

Frankie knelt over the man for a moment. Gasping. Then he smashed the chunk of cinderblock down again. Making sure. The shard trailed a spray of blood as it descended. Then more blood splashed upward, catching Frankie’s face.

When he stood back up, Frankie had blood on his face and hands, on his jacket and on the legs of his pants. His face had the blankness of an icon in an old church, with a saint’s huge eyes.

He let go of the cinderblock and glanced at Green.

“Martyr to the cause,” Frankie said.

Green was racing on adrenaline now. It brought his brain back to life. He understood why Frankie had done it. Killed the comrade he could not save and could not leave to be captured. With a shard of cinderblock instead of one clean shot. Because a stray animal can set off a mine, but only human beings fired rifles. At the sound of a shot, the other side would have shaken off their torpor and come at a rush to find out what happened.

Their world had begun to make sense to him. He felt as though he had realized something huge that could not be put into words. Something he needed to tell his own people.

Frankie had gone savage. He beat Green up to his knees with the stump of metal where the rifle’s stock collapsed forward. For a bewildered moment, Green imagined Frankie was going to beat him to death, too. But Frankie only wanted to get going. Before a patrol showed up. He made Green bend forward and touch his forehead to the earth, then he hurriedly tied Green’s hands behind his back again. Green’s wrists were already raw and Frankie pulled the cords so tight it made him wince.

Frankie knew the way now, in the daylight. He steered Green down rows of knee-high stumps that had been orchards and on into the forest. Cursing, yet keeping his voice low. He raged against the Muslims, the “Turks,” until the complaints were almost hypnotic.

“Fucking Turks,” he said, over and over. “Fucking goddamned animals. Fucking Turks.”

Finally, Green said, “How do you know it was the Muslims? How do you know it wasn’t the other side? Or even your own people?”

“You shut the fuck up. Just shut up. Only the Turks set booby traps like that. It’s the way they think. They don’t fight like men. They sneak. Fucking cowards. All they want to do is get Christian women doped up and fuck them. They need to be exterminated. Wiped from the face of the earth. Every one of them.”

Madness, Green thought as he listened. And I was wrong. We were all wrong. It’s not a little madness, not something you can reason away or treat. Not even with airstrikes. It’s a big madness. Devouring. Reason doesn’t exist here. It truly is another world.

“That bitch Daniela,” Frankie said. “Her goddamned father was half Turk. She was born a worthless slut. You see what happens?”

Madness, Green thought. It struck him with the force of revelation. That one word. Madness.

They were crossing a field of stubble when they heard the dogs. Yaps echoing up the valley. They were miles away. But they frightened Frankie.

He still has to get away, Green realized. After he kills me.

“Get going,” Frankie said. “Move it.”

Green watched for a place where he could make his break. Desperate now. With his hands tied behind his back, he could not outrun his captor. And he certainly could not outrun a bullet. He needed a change in the terrain. A bank he could roll down. Or another village. Some way to put some initial distance between them, or obstacles to make it hard to aim.

The land had flattened. In the forests, the trees were well-spaced, with very little underbrush. The fields had been harvested. Green never found his opportunity.

He sensed death coming. Thinking: This is how an animal must feel. He longed to just run. To take his last chance. But he marched along and went where he was told.

He could not tell if the dogs were gaining on them or not. There was so much distance between them. And, if they closed in, Frankie would certainly kill him first. Even if he didn’t, those people would do it and blame it on Frankie.

Green understood them now. He got the logic that was not the logic of his kind. It seemed a terrible waste that the knowledge would die with him. When it could be so useful to those who did not understand. To those who imagined sanity waiting to be awakened like some political Sleeping Beauty.

He did not really believe he would die. Not at every moment. Part of him could not conceive of such a thing. Something would happen. He would be saved. It made no sense for him to die like this.

No, he realized. It made all the sense in the world. In this world.

He heard vehicles. The grunt of military diesels. But these, too, were far away.

Frankie marched him faster.

The late afternoon light glazing the land was as beautiful as anything Green had ever witnessed. Indian summer weather back home. The best time of the year. Football games, in high school then at West Point. The scent and feel of the girls as they tested themselves against life. The safe, privileged world from which he came. Where you caught footballs, not bullets, and danger meant getting caught by your father with beer on your breath, then, later, missing your ride and overstaying your weekend pass. Or just an upperclassman in a bad mood.

He recalled the crisp mornings when the hills smoked above Wheeling, then the brilliant days when the wind swept down the Hudson. Young women who never gave a thought to gang rape in their lives, who had left the village a hundred years behind them. Who would never be killed because their father was half-something. His land of wonder.

Vehicles groaned on the other side of the trees. Maybe a pair of football fields away. Abruptly, the motion sounds stopped and the engines went into idle.

Frankie shoved his gunbarrel into Green’s back and said, “Get down. Flat.”

Green got down. And heard voices. No dogs, except for those in the distance. But voices asked each other questions. He could not make out any words, but the intonation was universal. They were looking for something.

Green wanted to shout. To take his chances with those people. To take any chance left to him at all.

Frankie held the muzzle to his head.

The searchers remounted and drove away. Maybe it had just been a piss stop, after all.

“Get going,” Frankie said. “It isn’t far now.”

They passed through a glade where the earth was suddenly soft underfoot and the colors of summer held out. Dark greens hard as lacquer. And pale woodland ferns.

“Tell me one thing,” Green said.

“Shut up. Move.”

“Why’d you come back? From the States? For this?”

Frankie did not answer immediately. The ground rose slightly and hardened underfoot. The earth sounded cold under their boots again.

The yapping of the dogs had grown fainter, almost inaudible.

As they detoured around a clearing, Frankie answered him:

“Americans got no pride. No dignity. A man isn’t respected.”

“Lost your job? Girlfriend dump you?”

“Fuck you. You don’t know what it’s like. Big-shit officer.” They marched a dozen paces. “Here … things make sense. People respect you. For the right reasons. Not just because you’re some rich Wall Street fuck. Because of your family. Because of who you are. Because of who your old man was.”

From a treeline, Green glimpsed a paved two-lane road half a mile away.

That would be it.

Frankie paused for a moment, judging the landscape, the safest approach. Before he got them moving again, he looked at Green. Measuring him.

“You think I’m some kind of nutcase. Right? You probably got your skull crammed full of that equal opportunity shit. All that equality crap just means niggers get to fuck your women and you can’t say nothing about it.” He pointed to the east with his rifle. “It doesn’t make sense to you that those people nailed my grandfather to a tree and skinned him alive and now I want to take a piece of their skins. Does it?”

Green wondered at the man. His teachers had been wrong. They did not even belong to the same species any more. All men were not created equal.

“My uncle … my father’s older brother …” Green said, “ … was killed by the Japanese. And I drive a Honda back home. We put the past behind us. That’s our strength.”

Frankie looked at him with raw disdain.

“That’s not strength,” he said. “That’s weakness.”

They followed a gulley between two fields. The beeches lining the depression had lost most of their leaves and Green ploughed through drifts of yellow and brown that rasped and splashed around his knees.

Apple cider. Sweaters. Parties. Kids goofy in their Halloween costumes. Vampires and ghosts. Ninjas. They had no idea what was frightening. The really terrifying creatures did not wear costumes or have horns or fangs or claws.

He worried that Frankie was right. That he would beg at the last minute. If he had to die … if he was going to die … he didn’t want the end to shame him.

What was he doing here anyway?

What on earth was he doing here?

He wished he had never become a soldier. Or that he had resigned his commission and married Caroline.

He had been so proud. Of his service, his rank. Of the achievements he had imagined held genuine importance.

This is what it came down to.

The leaves made a heart-wrenching sound as he crushed through them. Brutal with memories.

It was going to break his mother’s heart. And his father’s. His father had always been so proud of him. It was his mother who worried. About football injuries, or the wrong girl for him. About wars.

Did this even count as a war?

He decided he would fight at the end. No matter what. Even if he could only kick.

Unless he saw a chance to run.

He did not know what he would do.

Behind his back, Frankie was humming. Maybe the beauty of the afternoon had reached him, too.

The road had been built at an elevation above the fields, which lay in a floodplain. Its embankment rose before Green like a wall. The gulley narrowed to a culvert, with a half-blocked drainpipe showing daylight under the roadbed.

“Stop.”

Not here. Frankie would want to do it right up on the road. There was still time.

“The UN dicks are always on time, at least,” Frankie told him. “French colonel’s got himself one of their sluts over in the town. Noon to five, then he’s on the road again.”

Green waited. He sensed Frankie sniffing, sensing the world, listening.

Silence. No dogs, no motors. Not even a bird. Green shifted his weight and the leaves rustled. He tried one last time to work his hands free. Trying to do it discreetly. But the cords were ungiving.

“Okay,” Frankie said. “Get up there. Get going.”

The time to run would be just when he reached the flat of the road, while Frankie was still climbing the embankment. That would be his best chance. Run and jump down the other side. Then keep on running like hell. He couldn’t see yet, but he hoped the ground might drop even lower on the other side of the road. Maybe there would be some undergrowth. Anything that would give him a scrap of advantage.

He walked across a strip of ploughed-under field. With the air cold and thin in his lungs.

“God, please,” he prayed. “Please, help me now.”

He started up the embankment, struggling to keep his balance with his hands bound behind him.

As he approached the top, he saw that it was hopeless. There was only another field on the other side, wide open for at least two hundred meters before it ended against the next treeline.

He got ready to run anyway.

But Frankie’s hands were not bound. He beat Green to the top and covered him with the rifle, moving just in front of him, stepping backward.

Without prompting, they both stopped in the middle of the road.

“This is it, motherfucker.”

Green stared at the man who would kill him.

Frankie wasn’t smiling now. “Turn around,” he told Green. “You’ve got one minute. Pray, or do whatever you want. One minute.”

The last blue sky.

Green took off. He ran harder than he had ever run on any football field. He ran and waited for the shot.

He heard the crack of a rifle.

But he was still alive, still running.

And the sound had not been right. It had not been close enough.

He ran a little farther. When there was no second shot, he stopped. And turned around.

Frankie lay crumpled in the roadway. With his brains strewn over the asphalt. His eyes were open and stunned.

Green saw them then. Emerging from the far treeline. Someone shouted to him to stay where he was. Men in grayish fatigues. Bearded men. Wearing those little caps that always made him think of the old Howard Johnson’s hot-dog rolls. Silly caps. Those people.

Green sat down hard in the middle of the road and waited.

The hand-over took place on the border that night, with no time wasted and the usual suspects in attendance: the rag-tag killers who had saved his life, a French colonel, and a Dutch major. The U.S. attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Andretti, was on the receiving end.

Driving back to the embassy, Andretti listened to Green’s story. Green did not sugarcoat it.

“I was sure they were going to kill me,” Green concluded, rubbing his foot. His feet stank, but Andretti understood. “First that sonofabitch Frankie, then me. And pin it on him. I guess my cynicism’s showing.”

The attaché snorted and offered him another Diet Coke from the cooler. Real gringo Coke. “You got lucky. One man’s misfortune … you want another sandwich?” Andretti’s rough skin gleamed as a flash of headlights lit the back of the sedan. “Couple of reporters just found the biggest mass grave of the war. Seven, eight-hundred bodies, minimum. UN, Red Cross, NGOs, the press — everybody’s all over those people. Even the Russians look like they’re ready to back airstrikes against their little bearded brothers.” He snorted again. The bad air in the capital city had given Andretti asthma at the back end of his career. “You were their good deed for the day. After a decade of atrocious ones. They had everybody they could muster out looking for you. Onelegged distance runners and one-armed paper-hangers. We had to jump up and down to keep them on their side of the border. They figured out what was happening quicker than we did. And they were not going to take that rap, if they could help it. They’ve got enough on their plate already.”

Green considered the universe, then condensed it.

“I keep thinking about Bob Crawley.”

The little attaché settled back into his seat. “You’ll think about him for the rest of your life, Jeff.”

The President’s special envoy, a former ambassador playing hooky from Wall Street, had flown into the capital city that morning. His visit had nothing to do with Green, whose disappearance had been a sideshow in the circus of international relations. Nicholas Vollstrom was in the middle of another round of shuttle diplomacy, with airstrikes in the offing if the villains of the moment did not back down and do his bidding.

The diplomats assigned to the region had been trying to communicate the complexity of the situation to the President’s envoy for months, but had failed. Now, with Vollstrom anxious to go wheels-up for Brussels, where he had a come-to-Jesus session with the SACEUR the next morning, the ambassador had the attaché usher Major Green into the embassy’s secure bubble. In a last attempt to inject some reality into the envoy’s view of the world.

Green had not even showered. There had barely been time to wash the last crusts of blood from his face in the men’s room and change into the suit he kept in the office for meetings with the local bureaucrats. He had seen Vollstrom getting into a limo once. And he had read plenty about him. In person, the president’s man was beefy, running to fat. He wore glasses and spoke in a loud, high-pitched voice.

Green tried to tell his tale soberly and efficiently. But less than a third of the way into the story, Vollstrom cut him off, thumping his fist down on the table.

“I’ve just spent the afternoon and most of the evening with the president of this republic. With whom I have built a relationship of trust. He briefed me personally on what you were doing down there, major. Clowning around, stirring up trouble. And it backfired on you. Got one of you killed. And now you want to shift the blame.” He grimaced in disgust. “You’ll be lucky if you aren’t court-martialed. Goddamned lucky.”

“Sir …”

The envoy leaned across the table toward Green. His neck swelled out of his collar and his face turned the color of raw meat.

“Get this straight, son,” he said. “There is no war in Melnica.”

About the Author

RALPH PETERS is a novelist, essayist, and former soldier. His fiction includes Traitor, The Devil’s Garden, Twilight of Heroes, The War in 2020, and other novels. He is also the author of the acclaimed book on strategy and conflict, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? His commentaries on strategic themes appear regularly in the national and international media. He entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1976 and retired in 1998, shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, so he could write and speak freely. His military service and research travels have taken him to fifty countries, and his duties led him from an infantry battalion to the Executive Office of the President. His novella in this collection, “There Is No War in Melnica,” is based on his personal observation of the Balkans from 1972 to the present.