Heart of Danger

Ten.

It was as Ham had told him… Penn had moved on his stomach up from the river bank, trying to insert himself between the reeds where they were most thick. To spread his weight, was what Ham had told him, and not to walk where it was easiest, where boot marks could be most clearly seen. He had moved up the bank and there had been the open space that he assumed was a path, and he had rolled across the space, which was difficult with the backpack, and the pistol on his waist had bruised into his stomach. Past the open space, the path, he had found, as Ham had told him he would, a single low strand of barbed wire. He had found it because the barbs on the wire had suddenly trapped him, become embedded in the material of his camouflage tunic. Ham had told him that he should not shake the wire because it would carry empty tin cans, and he should not go beyond the wire because it marked the perimeter of an area where mines were buried. He had a sort of reassurance when the barbs of the wire caught at him, proof that Ham knew. He had picked the barbs off with small and careful movements, then crawled in the darkness along the length of the wire, threading the wire through the circle he had made with his thumb and forefinger until his hand was a mess of blood from the barbs. He led himself, on his stomach, along the length of wire until his hand felt the post and then the twine binding the wire to the post. From the post the wire twisted in direction and headed back and away from the river behind him. It was as Ham had told him… another path, going away from the river, and he had searched for a small stick, as he had been told to do, and he had held the stick loose in front of him as he had walked at the side of the path. Ham had said that he should be at the side of the path because the mud that would betray his boot weight would be in the centre of the path. He had held the stick loose in front of his knees because Ham had said, but didn't know, that there might be a tripwire slung across the path, at knee height, and a tripwire might rattle empty cans, or it might detonate a grenade. It was as Ham had told him… Penn stopped when he reckoned he had gone a full hundred yards from the river bank. When he had stopped, he groped with his fingers and found the barbed wire that ran two strides from the path, and he followed the barbed wire deep into the birch wood. He had sat down on the old leaf mould, and waited. They were desperate hours to wait, especially when the rain had started. The rain dripped from his head to his chest and his shoulders. He tried to ration how often he looked down at the luminous hands of his watch. Should have rested, should have catnapped, as Ham had told him, but he could not have slept and could not have dozed. He reckoned he heard each dribble and splatter of the rain coming down from the tall birches, and each minuscule shifting of his weight where he sat seemed a confined explosion of sound. He waited for the dawn. The dawn was late because of the low cloud. The dawn coming late meant that he would have to push faster when he moved off. When he could see where the weight of his boots would fall, then it was the time for him to move forward. There was no going back. There was no inflatable waiting at his bank of the Kupa river. There was no alternative to moving forward. There was nothing in his mind of sentimental crap, staying alive was going forward. As Ham had told him… the most dangerous part of the journey for him was the first five miles, and the worst of the most dangerous ground was what he would cover in the first mile. He tried to razor his concentration. The first mile was where the minefields were most closely settled, where the tripwires were, where the military ruled. The first five miles were where the patrols would be most frequent. It was the fucking contradiction, was what Ham had said, that he must move most carefully in the first miles, and move fastest. When he could see the path, Penn hoisted the backpack onto his shoulders and went forward. Not running, not jogging, but going with a brisk pace. When he had gone half a mile, twelve minutes going on thirteen, he realized the futility of the map drawn by Ham. He had no detail. The farmhouse was not marked on the map. The farmhouse was two-storey, brick-built from the ground up and then heavy-set planking for the upper floor. There was a wide balcony area at the front on the upper floor. He could see the man clearly. The man on the balcony did not bother to look out, to wonder if he were watched. The man opened the front of his trousers and urinated through the bars of the balcony and down onto the waste ground near to the front door of the farmhouse. And then Penn saw the woman, nightdress under her coat and above her black rubber boots, and she had the washing basket on the ground beside her and was starting to peg out the clothes a bloody early start for the old house chores and she bawled. Penn heard her voice, full of rich complaint, and was near enough then to see the man scratch, and ignore her, and yawn and stretch and belch, and still ignore the beat of her complaint, and turn to go back inside. Penn moved on. Each time that he stopped he tried to be certain that he was against the line of a thicker birch trunk. As Ham had told him… never to be in Silhouette, never to be the unnatural Shape, and Sound and Smell and Shine could bloody wait, it was Silhouette and Shape that mattered. At the back of the farmhouse were outbuildings and barns, a mess of slumped roofs and corrugated iron and abandoned harvest equipment and the corrals for cattle and pigs and sheep. Parked up amongst them were three military lorries and a jeep. He could no longer see the front of the farmhouse but the woman's yelling carried to him, and there were new cries of encouragement and jeers from young troops. So young. Half asleep and paddling around in the mud, the troops, but they had their rifles slung on their half-dressed bodies. Hesitation, to move or not to move, but the light was growing all the time… None of the training on the Five surveillance courses seemed relevant. He had only his instincts to protect him, and the guidance that Ham had given him, and the instinct and the guidance seemed damn all of nothing. Going so carefully, tree to tree, along the track, and knowing that if the movement were seen… holy shit.. . going carefully. One of the troops, a fresh-faced young boy, a straggle of beard on his chin, walked purposefully from the barns and up the field towards the track. Carried his rifle and a small entrenching spade, and three dogs gambolled and chased around him. Penn had to move, because the line that the trooper had taken would cross the track ahead of where he now stood. He had to risk the movement. Going forward fast, too fast, going from tree to tree, spurt rushes. Just a boy coming up the hill behind the outbuildings, probably a shy boy, probably looking for a place where a shy boy could dig his small pit and defecate and not be watched. There was a terrier dog and a cross-collie dog and there was a big, slow, heavy-coated dog. His last surge, and the terrier had its hackles up and the cross-collie barked, and the heavy-coated dog didn't seem to know what the hell was happening. The boy was twenty paces from him. Slow hands, trembling, feeling into the flap of the backpack, twisting his arm round, finding the paper holding the sandwiches that Ham had given him. Ham had said there was cheese and beef and pickle in the sandwiches. The terrier growling as the boy dug. Slow hands, clumsy, un peeling the newspaper from the sandwiches. The cross-collie barking as the boy lowered his trousers and the rifle was beside him. Penn put the sandwiches gently to the ground, on the wet dead leaves. The heavy-coated dog wagging its tail in vigour. Penn understood dogs because that was his childhood. Dogs had poor eyesight but had the sense of smell and the sense of hearing. They came close. It was his luck that the boy had his crouched back to him. They were close, and he looked into the sharp teeth lines of the terrier and the barking fangs of the cross-collie and the happy friendship of the heavy-coated dog. With his boot he edged the sandwiches closer to them. He went on his toes. He went in silence and behind him was the snarling for possession of his sandwiches. Penn went with his chest heaving and his legs leaden and his heart pounding. He went, and all the time that he moved he waited for the shout and the metal scrape of the rifle being armed, but he heard only the dogs disputing for his sandwiches.

When he had gone past the farmhouse where the troops who guarded the front line were billeted, he looked back. The boy was walking down towards the farmhouse and with his bowels cleared the boy whistled. He wondered whether he could have knifed the boy. Just a shy boy, just a pack of farm dogs, and Penn understood what Ham had told him… a fucking dumb place to be.

He made ground, went hard, had to cover good distance before the daylight settled.

It was a response to the rejection.

The rejection was of him, not his wife, which made it wound the more. For his wife there was normality in Salika village. She was the nurse. She could still move amongst the people of the village, visit the elderly, examine the children, weigh the babies, while her husband stayed at home with his books and his loneliness. Each of the days that she had gone out, since his challenge at the school and his beating, the Headmaster had asked her what was said of him, how he was spoken of… She had thought she, too, would be rejected, and she was not, his wife could go into the homes of the village and talk, gossip, advise and drink coffee… and she answered him straight, always had spoken to him in frankness since the youth of their marriage. Simply nothing was said of him. It was as if, she had said the night before and that morning as she hurried his breakfast, he did not exist in the life of the village. His wife had gone to visit the two sisters who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, to offer them comfort instead of drugs that were no longer available. He was alone in his house. He was with his loneliness and the books that he could read when he held them as far as his arm would stretch in front of his face and when he sat close to the light of the window. 11 The Headmaster believed there were two women and one man who had cared about him, and the two women and the one man had now rejected him.

Evica Stankovic had taken over the running of the school and used his office as her own.

The Priest had missed another evening when he might have called by. To counter the agony of his rejection the Headmaster determined, that morning when there was still insufficient light for him to sit in his window and read, that he should pray to the good God, if the good God was there. He did not believe that the good God was known to his former friend, the Priest who rejected him. Their bond had been intellectual, not religious. He resolved that he would struggle in his own way, to find the necessary words of prayer. He was a communist, of course, and he would not have been elevated to the Headmaster's position if he had not been a member of the Party; he did not know the way of prayer. His mother and his father, dead so long, knew of prayer and he would try to summon the memory of them. He would go in darkness to that place of evil. He would pray alone where evil had been done. He would pray in that place of evil for guidance as to how he should utilize the secret he held. If they had not been sitting on the track, if they had not been squabbling over cigarettes, if they had not been scuffling for the bottle, Penn would have walked into the patrol, into the arms of the five militia men. But they were sitting on the track and one yelled as he snatched the cigarettes and one shouted as he grabbed the bottle. First statue still, rock still, stone still, then retreating back along the track, cat careful, cat cautious. He edged back up the track from them, testing each footfall, looking behind him to be certain there was no dried wood that he might step on. He slunk away from the track and into the depth of the trees, and he lowered his weight down slowly and then he knelt and then he lay on his stomach and there was a thick bush of holly between himself and the track. He heard their laughter and their cursing. They were moving again, coming to that part of the track closest to where he lay. Not daring to move… He could have been pitching up for work at Alpha Security, first in and climbing the stairs to the office above the launderette, he could have been hearing the wail as the shutters went up on the shops beside the launderette. He could have been going to work with the smell of Jane on him, and the taste of Tom's food from the kiss on the cheek. He could have been going in to collect the Legal Process to serve, or going in from the night-time watch on a husband's cheating, or going in to meet a builder whose competition knew the contracts he was bidding for… Not daring to move, and seeing the young faces of the militia men. Ham hadn't told him what to do if he were bounced. Ham hadn't been through the capture bit. Each one of them had a knife at his belt. They went by him close enough for him to see that. They went off down the track. He had almost walked into them. He felt a true excitement. The excitement was an exhilaration. Truth was that he had never before known such excitement. The blood pumped in him. They wouldn't have known what he meant, about the excitement, at Alpha Security, how it coursed in him and lifted him. The excitement was danger. They wouldn't have known what he meant in A Branch. The excitement was his own. He would move for another hour, and then rest up till the dusk. "Nothing I can do for you, Mr. Jones. It's the pressure of space…" The Danish woman in Administration (Property) deflected him. "We all have our little crosses, Mr. Jones. Better we learn to accept them and live with them

…" The Libyan man in Administration (Headquarters) put him down. "Can't help you, Mr. Jones. My good fortune, I don't have a dog in that fight…" The Canadian man in Administration (Finance) moved him on. "It's sardine time here, Mr. Jones. You're lucky to have what's been allocated you without sharing…" The Swiss woman in the Civilian Affairs Office (Central Directorate) dismissed him. "The question is one of protocol, Mr. Jones. Protocol dictates container accommodation as suitable for your work…" The Ethiopian man in the Civilian Affairs Office (Deputy Director) was contemptuous. "You people, your job, your end game it pisses' me off, Mr. Jones. If I put it bluntly then perhaps you'll understand me better…" The Irish man in the Civilian Affairs Office (Director) kept a pleasant smile and spat through his teeth. It had taken Marty all morning to get that far. He had been shuffled up the ladder, and with each put-down he could have tossed in the towel and gone back to the ovenlike container on the far side of the parade ground at the Ilica barracks. But not that morning, no sir… There was a big photograph on the wall of the office of the Director of Civilian Affairs. The photograph was labelled as "Co. Cork Where God comes to Holiday'. The Director liked to show the photograph to his visitors, show them where he was reared and where his parents still lived. Marty thought the seascape of cliffs and the Atlantic was second-rate compared to the mountains and fiords of Alaska. He had not come to talk about Co. Cork, he had come to demand better accommodation for his work than a pressure cooker steaming goddamn freight container. He had been told outside by the willowy German secretary to the Director that there was no possibility of entry without an appointment, and when the meeting inside had broken he had simply elbowed his way inside, sat down, challenged for attention. '… You, your work, Mr. Jones, is an obstruction to what we attempt to achieve." "I want a proper room. I am integral to the United Nations' effort in former Yugoslavia. I want decent accommodation." While he had waited outside there had been a multinational bicker in the English language between the secretaries with German, Swiss French, Scandinavian and Indian accents, about desk space. He had filed an affidavit the last evening, from an eyewitness, who had seen prisoners of the Serbs beheaded by a chain-saw. Rome was not built in a day, that sort of crap, but sure as hell the UN empire was putting in a spirited challenge. He had transferred to disk the statement, the last evening, of an eyewitness who had seen a man castrated after a cable had been tied between a motorcycle and his scrotum, and the motorcycle had been ridden away, and the man had died from blood loss. The secretaries had air conditioning and they had window light. His work was pissed on. The goddamn secretaries were looked after and he was not. "I am a busy man, Mr. Jones, so do me the favour of bugging out of here and going back to your quite adequate work area."

"A dog couldn't work in there."

But he was an Anchorage boy. Anchorage bred them stubborn. What he had learned from twenty-two months in New York, turning round paper on member nations' subscription debts, and what he had learned in Zagreb had given him a deep-running hostility to the fast-created empire. They had the good apartments, and the good allowances, and the good life, while Marty Jones survived in a stinking hot goddamn oven.

"Maybe a dog would be doing something more useful than your war crimes shit. Let me tell you a few facts of life, young man. War crimes talk is just a sedative for the poor punters outside of here who've joined the "Can't We Do Something Brigade". There will be no war crimes tribunal. You may want to jerk yourself off each night at the thought of Milosevic, Karadic, Mladic, Arkan or Seselj, standing in the dock without a tie or a belt or shoe laces it won't happen. Like it or not, and don't patronize me by thinking I like it, it c? nnot happen because I need those bastards, and all the rest of the grubby little murderers that walk this godforsaken corner of earth. I need them to sign a peace treaty for Bosnia, then a peace treaty for occupied Croatia, and I'm not going to get them to sign if there's a sniff of handcuffs in the wind…"

"Then you give the world over to anarchy, intolerable anarchy."

"I need a lesson from you? Where have you been? You have been fucking nowhere. Peace between Egypt and Israel if the Brit buggers were still hammering for Begin to be tried for terrorism, for Sadat to be tried for making war? Peace in Namibia if half the South African Defence Force were to be wheeled in front of a court on genocide charges? I know reality because I have faced reality…"

"Your argument is morally bankrupt."

He faced the big, gross-set Irishman. He would screw him down, screw him down hard, if the opportunity ever came his way. Screw him down so that he screamed.

"And your office is a converted freight container, so fuck off back there…"

Marty went back in the sunlight across the parade ground, back to his video and audio tapes and his computer disks.

The gravedigger, Stevo, had been on the expedition to the church at Glina, but it was not personal to him.

It was personal to Milan Stankovic and the postman, Branko, and the carpenter, Milo, but not to him because no one from his family had died in the fire of the church.

They were ahead of the buses, it was usual for Milan to have a car when he needed it, and the fuel to go with it. Before the war, before the rise of Milan, they would all have been on the buses for the annual journey to the church at Glina. Since the war, the gravedigger had not been able to make the particular long journey that was personal to him. His own mother and father had been murdered in the Crveni Krst concentration camp that had been sited at Nis, near to Belgrade. He knew that Milan, and he was grateful that Milan had tried, had last year attempted to arrange the long journey for him, but there had been shelling on the road that week, near to Brcko, and all traffic had been halted. His father had died in the big breakout, 12 February 1942, from the camp at Nis, machine-gunned against the wall by the Croat Ustase guards, and his mother had died at the hands of the Croat Ustase killing squads on the hill called Bubanj that was near to Nis where a thousand were killed each day, and they were buried now, together, amongst the trees on the hill called Bubanj.

The buses would be far behind them now, and the old Mercedes with in excess of 150,000 kilometres on the clock powered them home. He knew it was not the ceremony at the ruin of the church that affected Milan. It was not the ceremony and the prayer and the singing of the anthem and the reciting of the poem of the Battle of Kosovo that left Milan sullen and quiet, because he had been that way for too many days since the digging in the field at the end of the lane in Rosenovici.

And the others in the car had taken the bastard mood from Milan Stankovic.

And because it was not personal to him, where they had been, the gravedigger, Stevo, thought it right to break that bastard mood. He leaned forward. The radio in the car played, faint and r distorted, and the singer was Simonida with the one-string gusla to back her. He tapped Milan's shoulder. "Milan, I love you… Milan, if you were dead, I would dig the best hole for you… Milan, why are you now such a miserable bastard…?" The gravedigger thought he could break the mood with mischief. '… Milan, you are a miserable bastard, you are a miserable bastard to be with. If you want me to, Milan, I will go and dig a hole, as deep as I can dig it, so that I have to chuck the earth up over my shoulder, and you can go and lie in the hole and I will chuck the earth back on top of you, and that might cure you of being such a miserable bastard…" He had reached forward, and his fingers worked at Milan's shoulders, like he used to see the postman's fingers, Branko's, at Milan's shoulders when he loosened him before a big match of basketball. '… Milan, you are a miserable bastard to be with, and you make everyone else a miserable bastard. Look at us, we are all miserable because you are a miserable bastard…" And the man pulled himself forward, and broke the grave-digger's hold on his shoulders. And he thought he could play Milan because he had the sort of black humour that would make Milan laugh. The gravedigger was on the crest, and he could not see Milan's face. If he had seen it he might have sat back into the seat, let the springs tickle his arse, but he could not see it. "You know why you are such a miserable bastard, Milan? You are a miserable bastard because you are scared…" The gravedigger could not see Milan's face, and he could not see his hands. '… You are Scared. Have been scared since that old American came and farted over at Rosenovici. Why are you scared? Then he saw Milan's face. He saw the erupted anger. He saw the hands and he saw the pistol. The face was against his, bright red and flushed. One hand coming past his eyes and locking into his old straggled hair and pulling his head forward. One hand holding the pistol and driving it through his teeth, grating them, until the foresight ground against the roof of his mouth. And he had seen Milan kill, and he could not doubt that Milan would kill. And he had seen a bastard Ustase killed by a bullet fired from a pistol deep in the mouth, and seen the crown of the head, where the hair was thinning, lift off. And the postman had swerved the car, gone half into a ditch and come out, and the carpenter cowered away against the far window of the back of the car.

And the anger was gone. The foresight of the pistol scraped the roof of the gravedigger's mouth and against his teeth and nicked at his lip. And the smile was there, as if Milan was saying that he was not scared.

Stevo's mouth was raw agony and he could feel, already, the wet of his trousers at the crutch. He did not tell Milan that he thought he lied with his smile. He squirmed in the wetness that he sat in.

Laughing. "We should go get the hag in Rosenovici. Lie up for her, like it was wild pig we were lying up for. Milan, you miserable bastard, you should be with us…"

But the shoulders had ducked down, and he could not see the face, whether it still smiled, whether it was still angered. For the old American had come to Rosenovici, and Milan Stankovic ran scared.

The map had shown the escarpment of high rock in the trees. It was where he had found the small torn shreds of the chewing gum wrapper, and he recognized the brand name of the wrapper, and he knew that Ham had been there, as Ham had said he had. There was a field of winter grass below the escarpment on which he lay. He could see the trails across it and the flattened grass in the middle. He could not see blood, but Ham had said he would not be able to see the blood. It was clear in Penn's mind, and the clarity killed the excitement that had been with him through the length of the day. He looked down onto the flattened ground where two men, wounded, had been skewered with knives, and he looked down onto the trails in the field where the bodies of two men had been dragged and no point in further thinking on it, the flattened grass and the trails in the grass, and Ham had not talked of the risk of capture. Penn moved down from the escarpment, down again into the depth of the trees. The shadows were longer, the grey merged with the falling gold of the evening. He had slept just, during the length of the day when he had rested up, he had eaten a pie and not yet missed his sandwiches. It was two hours back that he had left his resting place through the day, a shelter made by an uprooted oak. He had slept just, then woken at the sound of children's voices, but they had not come near him. Penn checked the map when he had reached the base of the escarpment rock. There was a plan, a fragile plan, in his mind. A better man, a Special Forces man, would not have moved across the damned river without a solid plan locked in his head. He did not have that training. The plan grew. He would get to the village of Rosenovici, he would walk at night along the route where they had taken Dorrie, where she had been. He would walk past the house where Katica Dubelj had lived. He would look for her in her house, and only there, nowhere else that he knew to look. It would only be a gesture, to look for Katica Dubelj, because he did not think she would speak English and he knew nothing of her language. He would find the disturbed grave in the corner of the field. It would be right for his report that he had walked the road through Rosenovici, and along the lane and into the field. It would be important for his report that he had gone to seek out Katica Dubelj… It was not good enough for Penn that he should take a name from a telephone directory and embroider a story. Basil would have said he was a fool not to flick the pages of a directory. Jane would have said he was an idiot. Dougal Gray, who had been his friend in the Transit van, would have understood. With the plan he reckoned it possible that he could look back into the eyes of Mary Brad-dock, see her respect, and take her husband's money. He could tell them that he had walked where Dorrie had been. He moved away slower than before he had come to the escarpment, before he had seen the flattened grass and the trails in the grass. He thought he could move for another two hours before darkness came. "I'm so sorry to trouble you… Tell me, please, is the crossing point at Turanj open?" Ulrike Schmidt sat in her office. The Transit Centre was awash with the noise of shouting, screaming, laughing. The evening cooking smells filtered to her. Her assistant, a nice Ghanaian girl, but happily scatty, stared across from her own desk, confused. Ulrike had never before rung the liaison office with the request for information as to whether the Turanj crossing point was open, and her assistant knew it. "Thank you, but could you, please, make certain. Yes, I'll hold." She was thirty-nine years old. She held the telephone like a conspirator, like a teenage girl who spoke by telephone to a teenage boy and did not wish to be heard. When she went home, every two months for a weekend, back to Munich and the apartment near the Hauptbahnhof, then her mother and father told her of their pride. And her mother, each time on the one evening that she was at home, before they went to dinner in a restaurant, would sidle into her room and ask her nervous question. It was difficult to be truthful, and more difficult not to be truthful. No, she had no plans. No, there was not a particular man. It was difficult to be truthful because her mother's face would cloud and the question would not be repeated. The answer, always, was followed by the breezy excuse that life was too hectic, work too ferocious, to share. There were flowers and there were invitations, but there was no particular man. "Definitely, the crossing point is open. You have heard nothing about it being closed tomorrow? No… Thank you. It was just a rumour. I am so sorry to have troubled you. Good night." She put down the telephone, and her assistant was watching her, puzzled. Ulrike blushed. She gave no explanation. If she had given her assistant an explanation, truth, then the girl might just have climbed onto the central table in the office where the computer was, and danced. Her assistant was scatty enough. But the truth was that a man she cared about was behind the lines, across the river, in the place where the stories came from of atrocity and bestiality and torture. She cared because he took a road that was different from the turned cheek and the fixed smile. The truth was that if a man had been captured behind the lines then the border crossing at Turanj would have been closed. The Serbs always closed the crossing point when they discovered incursion into their territory. If the crossing was still open then he stayed free. It was the end of the day, and the end of the map. There was a brisk rain shower falling into the upper branches of the trees. The last of the light showed Penn where he should spend the night. No mines laid off the track because there were tractor ruts and the tread of worn trailer tyres. A small tin hut had been abandoned beside the clumsy heaps of cut wood, and Penn judged it was where the timber men sheltered from heavy rain and where they made their coffee and ate their food. The men who came to the hut would be the same as the timber men on the estate of his childhood, who had talked with him and amused him, and they would kill him if they found him. Too dark for him to move further, and the hut was the final point on Ham's map. He squatted down in the hut, then curled onto his side, closed his eyes. In six hours, three at dawn and three at dusk, he had covered twelve miles according to Ham's map. It was important that he should sleep. Ham had said that where the map ended was six miles from Rosenovici, perhaps seven but not more. He would go forward, blind, in the first light of the morning. She was old, and Ham could not afford a girl. She was old enough and cheap enough to look for trade in the side streets off the square behind the big earth ramparts of Karlovac. It was usual for her trade to be with the Muslim men of the Transit Centre. Ham did not know her, he had not been with her before. It didn't matter to him that she was old, but it was important that she was cheap. Chicken shit pay from the army, and the slimmest cut left in his pocket from selling on the imported cigarettes, she had to be cheap. He lay on the bed. He could see she was old from the single unshaded bulb, hanging down from the ceiling, and he could see the flab ridges of her waist after she had unbuttoned her blouse, and the wide weight of her buttocks after she had peeled down her knickers. She smoked while she undressed, not the imported cigarettes that he handled but the loose filled sort that came from the factory in Zagreb. He had heard a child cry out in the night, from behind a closed door, and she had shouted back at the child. When she was naked, the prostitute straddled Ham on the bed, heavy above him, and her last gesture before earning the money that she had whipped from his hand and buried in her bag was to reach across him and grind out her cigarette.

He tried to think of his Karen. It was always best when he closed his eyes and thought of Karen. But he could not find her in his mind. The pillow sunk below his head. She felt for him, opening his trousers. He could not find Karen in his mind. He saw the thin and faded wallpaper of the room on the sixth floor of the block on Mihovilica that was away from the old walls of Karlovac and near to the river and the bridge that carried the main road to Zagreb, and there was a narrow framed picture, not straight, of the crucifixion, and there were a child's plastic toys on the floor near to the chair where discarded clothes had been dumped. The bed heaved as she worked harder with her fingers. Couldn't help her, couldn't respond to her, couldn't think of Karen. Because the bed heaved, iron springs screaming, the child behind the closed door cried out again, and the woman ignored her child. Her face was above him, she had the waist of his trousers down to his knees, and his pants pulled back, and he could not respond to her. There was contempt at the woman's mouth. She had already been paid, and her interest was going.

Couldn't think of Karen.

He could only think of Penn.

He, had checked at the operations centre before going out of the barracks in the old police station. Casual questions. Was it all quiet over there? Any balloons going up over there? Bored answers. It was all quiet over there, just a sniper, two rounds, near the milk factory that was across the river where they had the salient, nothing else. He was thinking of Penn, and Penn should now be at the end of the map because that was the schedule drawn for him, and Penn should now be holed up in the woodcutters' hut. The shiver came to him, and he thought of Penn who was alone, and the thought shrivelled him. The big mouth with the thick lipstick rim hovered above Ham, and he could not turn the face and the bagged eyes and the grey-flecked hair into the face of his Karen. And the big mouth with the thick lipstick rim curled at him in disgust because he could not respond. He hit her. He smacked with a closed fist into the side of her face. Faces replacing the pain in hers. The face of the barman that he had punched in the bar at Cullyhanna because the barman had back-chatted the patrol. He was hitting her with both fists, belting feverishly into the flab lines of her stomach. The face of the Irish sales representative who had jogged his arm, spilled his pint, in the pub in Aldershot, put on the floor with the fag ends and the beer puddle and kicked. She was off the bed and whimpering in the corner, crouched among the clothes she had dropped. The face of Karen, when he had belted her, when she'd cried, when she'd packed, when she'd gone out of the front door with her bag and his Dawn. All the faces, fleeting, gone… Penn's face stayed. He pulled up his pants and his trousers. Ham left the door of the bedroom open behind him, and the door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried. He jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he was the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in the aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful villages, was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along. The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.

And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only one of fifteen Seddon Atkinsons in the lorry park that was contrary. Two engineers worked with Benny Stein to get the tricky girl road worthy for the morning, and two more of the drivers had come back after their hotel dinner to the lorry park out by the Zagreb airport to see if the tricky girl would ride in the morning across the Turanj crossing point and down through Sector North and on into Sector South.

If it had stood up and slapped his face, Benny Stein would not have recognized a compliment, but it was one hell of a big compliment to him that two engineers were prepared to work as long as it took through the night to get the tricky girl road worthy and two of the other drivers had come the long drag out of the city centre to check how they were doing.

Past midnight, and the convoy manager had joined them to peer down into the exposed engine space, and leaning forward behind the convoy manager was the convoy administration manager, quite a crowd to get the tricky girl road worthy Not that Benny Stein, long-distance lorry driver, overweight, middle-aged, stubbed height, shiny bald head that was alive with oil smears, would have noticed. An aid convoy going down through Sector North and on into Sector South might not be safe if Benny Stein wasn't in the line, might not be fun. When the transmission was fixed, when he'd gunned the engine, when he'd driven round the lorry park lunatic fast, when he'd crashed the gears, done the emergency stops, when he'd put the tricky girl through the hoops, Benny Stein pronounced himself satisfied.

He tried not to think of the past, but to concentrate on the present.

The image of the fox was the past.

Penn's present was each footfall of ten strides, then the listening and the silence, then the moving again. He could not kill the image of the fox. The present was going forward in the dawn and he had slept too poorly to have wanted to eat before there was enough light for him to leave the timber men's hut, and he counted himself lucky that the rain showers that had beaten on the tin roof of the hut had been cleared by the wind. Ham's map was finished, and the map bought in the shop in Karlovac was too small a scale to help him with much beyond the lines of the roads. He could get a rough bearing from the early movement of the sun and that was sufficient to guide him. He was deep in the woods and going well, but always there was the prickle of nervousness at his back.

The past was the image of the fox.

There had been chickens inside a walled and roofed wire cage at the bottom of the tied cottage's garden. It had been his job through his childhood, each evening, to feed the chickens and to collect the eggs. It was easy enough for a fox to approach the cage, to sniff the wire mesh of the cage. But approaching the cage, sniffing the cage, didn't fill the gut of the fox. The fox had to find a way through the wall of the cage, scratch back the loose seams of the wire, dig frantically under the wire, chew at the frame of the door, if the fox were not to go hungry. And scratching, digging, chewing, aroused the frightened screams of the chickens. It was easy enough to get close but the bloody awful bit, for the fox, was doing the business. With the cackle of the chickens came his father with the shotgun, and the dogs from the shed and the big flashlight from the shelf beside the kitchen door. Three foxes were killed near the chickens' cage during his childhood, two shot by his father when caught in the flashlight, one trapped by the dogs against the panel fence by the fruit bushes. One fox had made it in. It was the night when his father and his mother had taken him to the pantomime in Chippenham, a foul wet night, and before the expedition to Chippenham he had fed the chickens fast under the rain and not latched properly the gate frame, not hooked the chain onto the bent nail. Penn couldn't count on it, that the frame door to Rosenovici would have been left open. It was easy enough for him to get there, but when he roused the chickens… But he was trying not to think of the past.

Penn could hear the sounds of tractors.

He had been going along the side of a hill that was close set with trees. He had no path to guide him, no trail. He could move well and quietly on the mat of damp leaves. He was drawn forward towards the engine sounds of tractors.

Suddenly, he was looking into the valley. There had been a fine rock in front of him, weather-smoothed and lichen-coated, and the rock had blocked the valley from him. Past the rock, and he saw the valley. There was a stream going fast, well swollen, that cut the valley into halves. Two tractors worked in the grass fields on the far side of the stream from him, and both pulled old laden manure spreaders. The fields on his side of the valley were unworked and weeded up.

He saw the contrast, and he understood.

His eyes tracked the progress of the stream past a pool where the water ran slower with the white spume giving way to dark depths, and he thought it would be a place for trout. Beyond where the tractors heaved out manure there were cultivated strips and he saw women working, dark shapes in the early morning mist wrapped in thick coats against the cold and bent over hoes and forks. On his side of the stream there were no cultivated strips, no women, nothing planted.

His eyes moved on, attracted to the soft colours further down the valley. The apple trees were in blossom, there were cattle grazing across the stream and children played amongst routing pigs and a dog drove sheep along a track, and it was all on the far side of the stream.

Yes, he understood.

He saw the smoke climbing from the chimneys of the village across the stream, and when he squinted his eyes and shaded them from the low sun he could see the shape of the houses and the block of the church and the brightness of flowers. He saw a car pass another car. His gaze roved across from Salika, over a linking bridge, rested on the twin village that was his side of the stream. He saw at first the mirror image, then the reality came. The broken church, the small houses without roofs, the foliage of brambles and nettles growing high in a lane. It was difficult for him at that distance, more than a mile, to see the detail of Rosnovici. But he saw that one village lived and one village had died. And at the edge of his vision, blurred by mist coming off the dew on the grass, he thought he saw a grey-black scar in a corner of the field that was immediately before the village that had died.

A cock pheasant faced him.

He saw nothing that was danger. The valley was at gentle peace. He knew the fox would have thought the chickens' cage was a place of gentle peace until the birds screamed and the gun came and the dogs were loosed. It was where Dorrie Mowat had been… and where Dorrie Mowat had been knifed and bludgeoned and shot to death.

The cock pheasant rose up on its clawed feet, beat its wings, shouted the warning.

He looked again across the stream to the ruin of Rosenovici. He had taken the money, and when he had taken the money he had given his commitment. He wanted to earn his own pride… He sat in the shadow of the big rock, where he could see down the valley, where he would wait through the day. When he could no longer see the apple blossom, and when the tractors had driven back to the living village, and when the women had trudged home, and the children, then he would move again and work his way under the cover of coming darkness towards the village that had died… He wanted to make a report that would earn his own pride.

The cock pheasant careered away in noisy flight down the length of the valley at gentle peace.