Deep Black

65

Monday, 13 October 2003

The bus hissed to a stop outside the terminal and we all filed off. The plebs, which included Jerry and me, herded themselves towards the one passport-control box that was open. The general and his chums with the blue diplomatic passports went straight through the Diplomats and SFOR channel. I hoped his luggage was still in Oberammergau.

As we joined the queue my eyes started to close; they felt like they’d been dipped in grit. It had been a long journey. The drive from Baghdad to Turkey had gone OK, apart from the moment our fixer tried to overtake an American armoured convoy. He’d realized his mistake when he received three warning shots across the bonnet.

At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the Sunday Telegraph to explain the change of plan. We’d taken a flight to Vienna, then caught a connection here. Jerry’s card had taken a real beating, but the paper was going to pay him back, so what the fuck?

Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.

The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.

The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible Mark. We hadn’t been able to get any in Vienna, so we made a deal: thirteen euros for the trip to the hotel – far more than the eight-K journey was worth. During the war it had been Deutschmarks everyone wanted. Now, it was euros. This had to be about the only area of the world that wasn’t much fussed about the dollar.

Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of The Sound of Music, but ten years ago the Serbs had used them to bomb the shit out of the city.

Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautiful: the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.

The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.

‘Where you from?’

In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.

He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’

Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.

It was my turn. ‘You American?’

‘Australian.’

Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.