Heart of Danger

Fourteen.

When the big torches came and the guns, they would have him against the stream. Milan shouted orders among the babble of the men of the village. "Make a line… Search everything, coal sheds, tool sheds, the barns… Search your houses… Keep the line…" The men of the village stood in line as they had been told to, waiting for the big torches and the guns to be brought. Between shouting the orders, his eyes flicked down to his watch. Milan stood on the steps of the school building and behind him were the two swing doors into the hall. They had only their small torches, sufficient to light a way from their homes to the hall for the social evening, and they had no rifles until the firearms were brought from the locked armoury of the headquarters building… Five clear minutes lost… Five minutes lost since Branko had pushed his way back into the hall, licking at his wrist that was bitten, and Milo had followed him with his hands held across his groin. Five minutes lost since they had blurted that the bastard had gone… and been heard to crash through Petar's fence, and been heard to run into the greenhouse where Dragon brought on his spring lettuces. He had not seen it for himself and he must take their word on trust… Behind Petar's fence and Dragon's greenhouse was wire and then sodden fields, and then the stream. That was where they would get him, the bastard, when he came to the stream. The first orders he had given with his barely suppressed fury had been that they should run, shit quick, to the bridge, alert the bridge guards and get themselves across the fields on the far side of the stream. They alone had guns and a torch. They'd gone fast, scuttling in their goddamn shame. Five minutes lost and men were running back to the school steps with their torches, and Vuk was panting his way back from the armoury at the headquarters with an armful of rifles, with his pockets bulged by the magazines.

The line was formed.

It was a muddled story, it was something about the bastard breaking clear, and rolling under the lorry, and then going through Petar's fence, and then breaking Dragon's greenhouse… Where was the goddamn lorry? But Milan had to move the line. The torches caught at Petar's fence, and the broken glass of Dragon's greenhouse. There was the clatter in the line of rifles being loaded and cocked.

He glanced again at his watch. They should be in position now on the far side of the stream, and they would be raking the bank with their flashlights. They would drive the bastard to the bank… He gave the order for the line to move… and the minutes were crawling and lost.

Milan heard the curses from the line. The men wore their best trousers, and their best shoes, and their best sweaters or jackets. The women in their best dresses were streaming from the doorway behind him, and they carried away on plates the bread that had been baked for the evening and the fruit and the cheeses that had been taken earlier to the hall. It had been an attempt by his trapped village to throw off the mood, his own mood and everybody's, of being held prisoner, and the bastard had destroyed the attempt. He searched the faces of the women who carried the food home, because they had all heard his name given, and all heard the name of Dorrie Mowat, and the bastard had used the word that was coward. He searched the faces, and none met his, and the minutes on his watch were frittering away.

Evica was beside him, carrying in a linen cloth the food she had brought for the evening.

"Do you have him?"

The excitement of the chase, of being the king who gave the orders, slipped in him. "No."

Evica said, simply, "I could not help myself, when he looked at me, when he asked who had met her. He was so… so bold.

I could not help myself when he faced me… What does it mean, the man coming to make a report…?" There was a shout. He did not answer her. Milan ran across the road. At the side fence in Petar's garden he was shown the plastic box. There was a single bread roll in the box, with squashed tomato and pressed cheese in the cut in the roll and half a bar of chocolate. He felt his nerves squirm in his belly. Another shout. The torches showed him the way. He climbed the fence between Petar's plot and Dragon's garden. Milan saw the broken glass pane on the roof of Dragon's greenhouse, and more torches shone inside the greenhouse. On the trays of spring lettuces was the fire extinguisher amongst the plants and the shards… It had been gone, it had been buried, and some nights he could even forget it, and the bastard had come to bring back for him the face of the young woman… He was shouting. Who saw the lorry? Was it just one lorry? What colour were the lorries? Which way did the lorries go, towards Glina or towards Vrginmost? The minutes slipping on his watch. Were the white lorries from a convoy of the United Nations? Milan Stankovic ran. He ran like the athlete he had once been. He ran for his life, and for the bastard's life. Hoarse, chest heaving, Milan scrambled into the office area of the headquarters. The minutes slipping. '… They all bad-mouthed her back in England. She was just a horrid young woman. There seemed to be a story about her for every year of her life, the stories seemed to queue up to foul-mouth her. Her mum told the stories worst, like it was something she had to get release from. The way of the release was to find out what happened to her. There was no release until her mother knew what happened to her, who killed her. They were throwing money at it because they'd cash coming out of their ears. "Just go there, Mr. Penn, and write a bloody report, and then we can forget little Miss Dorrie who was an awkward bitch", it was something like that…" Benny listened. Sometimes the voice behind him stopped, when the radio came on, when the convoy manager had some crap to tell them from up front. He drove carefully, and the whole of the convoy was going fast. '… And I came here, and it was all lies that had been said about her. Perhaps, at home, she had just been a bloody nuisance, perhaps she was just a bloody cuckoo child in a second marriage, perhaps she just got in the way, perhaps she didn't start to live until she was at Rosenovici… I came here to pocket the money and write a report, good bromide stuff, a few names and a few quotes, good money. You know how it is, Mr. Stein, when you're sucked into something, it's like you're being pulled towards a cliff. Why did this one killing in one village matter? Can't answer it… Best I can do, it's something about that young woman. I learned about her, each time I was told about her then I was pushed closer to that bloody cliff.. ." Grabbing for the telephone, whirring the handle of the field set that linked to the Glina military, hearing the deathly response of silence… Milan pushed it aside so that it fell useless to the concrete floor. He turned to the radio set that was the back-up, that sometimes functioned. When they had powered out of that God-awful village then the cab radios had gone ape shit Each driver, and the convoy manager, wanting to know what the fuck was going on, what was the shooting. Benny hadn't given them a laugh, hadn't given them anything until right at the end of the exchanges. He'd waited to the end, then pressed his 'speak' switch, and he just said he'd seen nothing, because they'd have kicked him half to death if they'd known. Benny listened. '… She was just brilliant. I don't think I'm just some mooning bloody sheep. She was incredible. It wasn't just that she stayed with the wounded because she loved one boy. You see, Mr. Stein, Dorrie could have carried out one boy. She was a tough little thing, made of barbed wire. She could have put one boy on her shoulder and she would have stood a good to middle chance of hiking him into the woods and finding a hole in their lines, but that would have been walking out on the other boys. She was just brilliant because she gave all of them her courage. I was dragged to that cliff, dragged over that cliff… I looked him in the face, I looked into the face of the man who used a knife on her, the man who shot her. It was like she'd given me the courage, like she was with me, to look into his face and not be afraid… I don't suppose that makes much sense, Mr. Stein." Benny said, "I was going to chuck you out." "Because the shit's in the fan, because they'll be waiting at the crossing point…?" "Because I'm not supposed to get involved." "I reckon if I laid up for a couple of days, rested, then I reckon I could swim the river…" "Like hell you could," Benny snapped, short. "There's a rendezvous tomorrow night, where there's going to be a boat, but I'm off line for the pick-up, I don't have a map for the location, but I reckon I could swim the river…" He hadn't used his pencil torch from the dashboard, not since right at the beginning. From what Benny had seen, when he'd used the torch, the guy wouldn't make it to halfway, not against the current of the Kupa river. The rest of the drivers would kill him if they knew. "You won't be swimming. You'll be staying bloody put… we'll see what's there, at the crossing point…" It was so slow for Milan to make the radio link with Glina militia. The man who knew the radio was away back at the greenhouse in Dragon's garden, and the procedure for transmission was written up in scrawl on the wall above the set. And an imbecile at the other end when he had made the contact. '… And it's a spy you lost? In Salika village, you lost a spy? What would a spy want with Salika village? A foreign spy…?" A bored man, sitting the night watch on the radio in the Glina barracks, nursing a bottle, and at last there was amusement for him. "A foreign spy has come to Salika village, that centre of military secrecy? Should they know in Belgrade that a foreign spy chose to visit Salika village…?"

Losing the minutes. Could not tell a bored man sitting the night watch on the radio at Glina barracks about a grave, about an investigator with evidence, about a young woman who had not shown fear.

Milan shouted, "If the crossing point is not closed, if the convoy is not searched, I will come for you, my friend, and I will flay the skin off your face…"

When the alarm clamoured for the Close Support platoon, Ham was on his bed in the dormitory quarters, and reading his best magazine. His mother sent it him, not often because most times the old cow forgot. Nagorno Karabakh, wherever the fuck it was, seemed the right place, and there were guys already there, but then there was also an article with photographs of guys who had made it down to Tbilisi, wherever the fuck that was… The alarm shifted him.

He was snatching webbing kit, going for the Dragunov marksman's rifle that was his personal weapon when Close Support platoon was on 'immediate', buttoning the flies on his camouflage trousers, running for the stairs of the old police station.

And no fucker in the lit yard taking the trouble to explain to him why the alarm had gone. He heard, among the bloody yelling, there was heavy radio traffic on the other side, there was a guy running on the other side, there was some sort of flap at the crossing point, something about a bloody convoy… It was all to do with their radio traffic, on the other side.

He was in the lead jeep going down sharp to Turanj. He thought about Penn, crazy guy.

They were slowing.

The convoy manager was saying, distorted, in the cab, "I'm hooked into their radio. There's a problem, but I can't make sense of what it is, probably just that we're so delayed… They're saying they need to search the lorries. You know the form, guys, that we are not supposed to allow UN vehicles to be searched…"

He lay behind Benny Stein's seat and the passenger seat. He had a rug that covered some of his body. He heard the sharp whistle of Benny Stein's breath and heard him mutter an obscenity. Going down through the gears, crawling. The voice was saying, "What I'm thinking, guys, is that the laws of the game might just get bent a bit. If the choice is between bending or sitting here for the rest of the night high on principle, and since we've not any loose women from Knin on board… OK, guys?" Penn said, "I'll do a runner, which door?" The answer was very quiet, so calm. "What I'm seeing on my side is a big jerk with an ugly machine gun. And on the other side, three jerks with rifles, and what I'm seeing further up front doesn't get better." Penn said, "I'm sorry, I mean that." "Bit late, my old cocker… They've stopped ahead. We're all closing up." So helpless. It had all been for nothing. For nothing he had found the Headmaster praying in a grave. They were inching forward. For nothing he had found Katica Dubelj, eyewitness. He waited for the grinding of the brakes. For nothing he had found Milan Stankovic, war criminal. "What are you going to do?" "They're opening up the cabs ahead, my top cat's letting them in. You know what Oscar Wilde said? He said, "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." Give it a go." Penn was looking into Benny Stein's face, and it was calm as if he was taking the kids out for a Sunday afternoon ride. Going very slow, and swinging the big wheel so that the lorry went out of the line that was pulling up, then straightening the wheel. Penn saw the hands go to the gear lever, then to the ignition, and the engine slurped to quiet. A silence around Penn, and the gentle rocking of the cab going forward. The pace of the lorry quickened. Benny Stein was winding down his door window. "Time to see if old Oscar had it right…" They were rolling faster. Penn heard the first yell, and Benny Stein had his head out of his door window and was howling it into the night. The brakes… The brakes gone… No control because the goddamn brakes had gone. Going down the incline through Turanj. Penn saw the white sides of the freight lorries slipping by, quicker. All the time Benny Stein was yelling that his brakes had gone, and waving every miserable mother out of the road. Going by the Land-Rover, and Benny Stein was turning, side of his mouth, muttering about "Shit or bust', saying they'd shoot or they'd laugh. They hit the checkpoint. The cab of the lorry clipped the corner of the sandbag wall. He had his head down and he had his hands over his head, and he would have said, and reckoned he'd not lied, that Benny Stein had twisted the wheel the necessary fraction to take out the corner of the sandbags. The cab lurched, and Penn bounced, and he thought there was a popping of tyres, as if there had been a chain with spikes on the road. They were waiting for the shooting, or the laughing. They went clean through the UN barrier, broke the pole across the road. And the cab pitched worse, and he felt the tyres shredding, and all the time Benny Stein was yelling himself hoarse that the brakes had gone. The lorry jerked and he saw the wall loom against the cab's passenger side window, and that slowed it, and Penn saw Benny Stein's hand furtively slip to the brake handle, and he saw his foot pump the brake pedal, but gently so that the ripped tyres did not scream. They came to rest. Penn croaked, "That, Mr. Stein, was style…" "Get out. You told a good story." "I said that I was sorry

…" "It was because you talked a good story. Get lost." Benny Stein's hand, fleshy, reached and caught at Penn's collar, and he was dragged through the gap between the seats, and shoved out of the open door. He lay in the road beside the ribboned front tyre. The door above him was scraped. The fender in front of him was dented deep. "Thank you," Penn called back up at the slammed door of the cab. He crawled to the side of the road, to the heaped rubble of a collapsed house. Benny had jumped down from the cab and was striding towards the broken pole of the United Nations block, and the wrecked sandbags of the Serb block. So tired, and all the pain was back with him. He looked past the soldiers, and the woman was running with flapping legs, towards him. She came across the road from where she had been standing beside a car. He saw in the lights of the crossing point her concern, and Ham had broken clear of the group of soldiers and was ambling towards him. There was shouting back up the hill, and he heard Benny's voice, loud. They all danced for Dorrie… He danced for her, and Ulrike Schmidt who gazed into his face, and Ham who walked towards him with a wide smile, and Benny Stein who was yelling hard about the failure of his brakes… She had touched them and they danced for her. "You're a fucking mess, squire. How was it?" And if Ulrike had not had hold of his arm, and if Ham had not taken him under the armpit, he would have gone down. Evica said, "So, he could be this side of the line, or he could have gone…?" Milan lay fully dressed, still in his suit, on the top blanket of the bed. Evica pressed, '… So, he could have been in the lorry that crashed the checkpoint?" The dirt of his suit, and his shoes, would be on the top blanket. Milan said, empty, "I don't know." Evica held his hand, and on the hand was the mud of Petar's garden and Dragon's garden. "What will happen to us, if he went through the line?" All that he had, all that he leaned on, was the wife beside him and the child sleeping in the next room. Milan said, "What I was told was that one day they will come for me… In a month, in a year, when I am old, one day. Perhaps their children will come for our child, one day… We have to wait, for the day they come." "Because we cannot run…?" "Cannot run anywhere. Because of what has happened, of course I have known there will be revenge one day. But it was vague, just in my head. But it was said to me direct, at the liaison meeting, and you know his wife, and he said that one day, direct, if it were not him that came for me then it would be his son that would come for our Marko. It would go on for ever, as long as the memory lives of what was done. Like a curse on us, and on Marko. Maybe I did not believe him, and then the Englishman came, and I was named. It had been a safe world before the Englishman came. We on our side of the line, they on theirs. They could not come across the line and reach us. They could sit in Karlovac town, they could say what the shit they wanted, but they could not touch me, and then the Englishman came to us, to me… I believe him, the Liaison. I believe now that they will come for me one day, or that his son will come for our Marko. If I had known I would not have…" "Not have killed her, but then you thought you were safe." "Not have killed the girl." Evica said, "He made me remember her. Two afternoons and I remember them, when she came to our shop for food because their own shop had nothing. It was three weeks before the fight… It was after the children had gone home…" "You told me." '… And she sat in my room at the school, and we talked in English. I told her there would be no fighting between our village and her village, I told her there was no quarrel between us. She spoke of her home, and her mother, what her home was like and what her mother did…" "We cannot run and we cannot hide." Through the gap of the curtains, Evica saw the first light of the new day. She said, sad, "We have to live. We have to wait, as she waited in the field, but we have to live…" Soft, gentle fingers moving on the wounds… A woman's fingers, and tender… He was in the cellar, and there was only the light of a small tallow candle… He was the wounded, and the face of the young woman was above him, and her fingers dabbed, sweet, at the wounds with sharp iodine and salted water… She touched him and she had no fear

… He loved her, the young woman who cared for the wounded in the cellar… Penn stirred, his eyes flickered. The fingers with the cotton wool were close to his eyes… God, and his face hurt. It was a woman's room, bright and alive, and the candle in the cellar was gone, and there were flowers on a table across the room from the bed. Ham sat on the floor, his back against a neat chest, and he held the long-barrelled rifle across his knees. Ulrike flashed her smile, nervous and short, embarrassed, and she was pushing up from beside the bed, as if she had been kneeling close to him as she had cleaned his face wounds and sterilized them. Ham said, "You cut it fine, squire.. . You got through before they'd organized. Their communications are piss-awful, you wouldn't have got through half an hour later… That driver did you well, there's not another fucker other than me and the lady knows you were up aboard… How much did you drop the driver, squire?" Penn said, "I told him why I'd gone." He said that he wanted to go back to Zagreb, make his report, and buy the biggest bottle of Scotch in the city, and they said that they'd share it. It was morning. They helped him to dress, Ulrike carefully and Ham roughly, and the pain of the kicks and the punches had stiffened to each corner of his body. He thought he would always remember, long after he had written the report and drunk the Scotch, the image of a cellar and wounded men, and a young woman without fear. He went hunting trouble first thing. Marty had talked it through with the doctor from Vukovar, his landlord, and the doctor had steeled him to it. He had talked it through because the long-distance telephone call had woken them both in the apartment, and half the night they had sat over coffee, and the doctor had toughened him to it. It was raining soft, like it did in the spring in Anchorage when the snow melted, as Marty strode across the central grass towards the steps and doors of A block. He had gone hunting trouble before opening up the converted freight container. There would need to have been a GI provost on the door of the suite of the Director of Civilian Affairs to have stopped him. The goddamn phone call, in the bad half of the night, hadn't been from Geneva, but goddamn New York. Marty went past the secretaries to the door and didn't knock, he went on in. They were round the Director's desk. Marty saw on the sleeves of their uniforms the insignia of Canada and Jordan and Argentina. They had a big map over the desk, and the Director was with them and looking at the map's detail through a magnifying glass, and a cigarette hung from his lips. And they turned, the soldiers and the Director, in annoyed surprise. He hammered, "I just wanted to say that I am not prepared to be treated like crap any more. And I just wanted to say that I find it incredible that one United Nations agency is active in blocking the work of another United Nations programme. I find it shameful that you have gone behind my back to sabotage my work…" "What the fuck are you talking about?" "I am talking about getting pitched out of my cot in the goddamn middle of the night by New York, to tell me that my work is causing offence, my work is a nuisance. I will not tolerate that goddamn crap … I will not tolerate you crawling behind my back to get New York to order me to cool it. Are you with me?" "If you go now you can go down the stairs on your feet… If you wait one minute, you'll go down the stairs on your face." "Because I am inconvenient…?" "Because … listen to me, you silly young man, listen hard… There were refugees supposed to be coming through Turanj crossing point today, but the crossing point is closed. There was an aid convoy supposed to be going through Turanj today, but its passage has been cancelled.. ." "That's not my problem. My work is to prepare war crimes…" "Listen… I'll tell you my problem. They have a maximum alert along their line, they are leaping about like they've pokers up their arses. Our movement is quite restricted. Why…? There is some garbled story about a war crimes investigator, captured and escaped…"

"I know nothing…"

"Too fucking right… I doubt you know the length of your dick. My job is to" keep our access into Sector North. And all this is after I suggested to New York that I could do without a wet-behind-the-ears puppy giving me shit from the high moral ground."

"Where?"

"Glina Municipality…"

Marty looked at the map, where the magnifying glass rested. "Where?"

"The rumour is he was picked up in Rosenovici…"

He swayed. He felt the cold on him. He remembered what he had seen, the man in the Transit Centre, the man with Ulrike. He remembered the lecture he had given, goddamn patronizing, and the answer, "I've just a report to write, then I'm gone." He remembered the Bosnian Muslim woman that the man had talked to, and she had been in Rosenovici. He rocked.

"It's just a rumour… I am a busy man. Do you wish to leave on your feet or on your face?"

Marty had no more anger. He let himself out, quietly.

It was the irregulars, from Glina town, who interrogated the Headmaster.

They were the men of Arkan, who was Zeljko Raznjatovic, and they called themselves the Tigers, and they were men freed from gaol cells in Belgrade. They had come at first light from Glina, and they had taken control of the headquarters building in Salika. They had come to the village because he was known to them, because Milan had once posed for a photograph in front of the War Memorial with their leader, Arkan

… it was as if his only function that morning was to make them coffee. They had taken his room and his radio and his desk, and they stubbed out their cigarettes against the bared stomach of the Headmaster. The screaming rang in Milan's ears. It was the agonized screaming of the man who had taught him at school, of the man who had been Evica's friend. With the cigarettes, crushed and stubbed out,

Milan heard of the Englishman's journey of discovery, and of Katica Dubelj who was the journey's guide. After the screaming and the telling, the irregulars of Arkan took the Headmaster from the cell of the headquarters and out into the road that cut the village. They wore plain belted one-piece uniforms of grey-green, and when they came out into the road they had put black hoods over their faces so that only their mouths and their eyes were visible. Out in the road they did not need Milan to bring them coffee, so they sent him from house to house in the village to get the people to come and watch, and he did as he was ordered, until there was a small crowd in front of the Headmaster's home. He could not face his own people, nor could he face the Headmaster who was made to stand in front of the door of his home, nor could he face the weeping wife of the Headmaster who was held back by the irregulars. They shot him first in the legs, and then in the stomach, so that death would be slow.

When the Headmaster died, the men of the village and Milan, led by the irregulars, were climbing the track in the woods, going where the Headmaster had told them they should go.

Ulrike drove the car, and Ham talked all the way. Ham talked his bullshit, of battles and fire fights, and Ulrike drove and said nothing, and Penn lay across the back seat of the car.

He was leaving behind him Dorrie's place. He was quitting Dorrie's war.

The boot print was sharp in the mud of the track, and the man had worn military boots when he had been brought to the school. They had the clear tread of the boot to tell them that the Headmaster had not lied when the cigarettes had been stubbed out against his stomach, and the evidence quickened their pace up the track through the trees. There was a light rain falling in the trees and heavy cloud coming from beyond the hill, and Milan could see the rain, later, would be heavier. He was at the head of the column and walked immediately in front of the leader of the irregulars. His own people were behind him and he could not see their faces and he did not know what their enthusiasm for the work was. It was where the Headmaster had said it would be, the cave entrance between the two large rocks, and in the worn mud close to the entrance was the boot print squashed over the lighter traces. Milan could smell her… There were many torches crowded into the narrow cleft of the cave's entrance, and the beams caught her. There was laughter behind Milan. The torches found her cringing back at the far wall of the cave, like a trapped rat. There was more laughter behind Milan. Milan turned. He called forward Milo who had the scratches on the cheeks of his face, and he gestured forward Stevo who had the bruised privates. There were many pressing behind him to see the trapped rat that was Katica Dubelj who had fed him and most of them with their lunches at the school… She was the trapped rat and her mouth seemed to snarl at the torch lights, and she had no teeth, and she was the evidence. He knew that the man had not been found, and he knew that a lorry with failed brakes had crashed the checkpoint at Turanj, and he knew that his name was on a file in Karlovac, and on another file made by the Political Officer at Topusko, and the trapped rat was the eyewitness. He wondered if he would tell Evica…

The hand of the leader of the irregulars was on his shoulder, pushing him into the cave.

"You're not telling me, in honesty, that you wrote it up…?"

"Of course I wrote it up, Arnold, I wrote up what you told me."

"Georgie, it was in confidence…"

Georgie Simpson didn't like to face him. Not that he would have described Arnold Browne as a friend, not really possible for Six men to be friends with Five men, but he was almost fond of the man. They had nothing in common, not hobbies, not holidays, not career paths, but he had come rather to enjoy their weekly session and weekly lunch. That would all be behind them now, the sessions and the lunches, there would be different men given the job and few enough confidences exchanged then… He didn't like to face him because Arnold Browne made no attempt to hide his quite positive anguish.

"I'm not proud, and I'm not a happy man. I put a memorandum in, I reported our conversation… This morning, Arnold, and I might face a firing squad for telling you, this morning I was summoned on high. I was instructed to telephone you, arrange an extraordinary meeting, I was to pump you, Arnold. You said your man was "dogged"…"

"You reported my confidences back, you should know what I said."

Georgie Simpson ignored the sarcasm, no citations to be won here, best ignored. "You said your man would go to the end of the road… We have a listening post at Zagreb airport. We monitor Serb radio traffic principally. We have 2,500 troops in Bosnia, we have to know what's planned. Please don't interrupt me, Arnold, please don't. The radios are monitored twenty-four hours, but obviously we're not wasting our time interpreting whether General Mladic wants express delivery of new loo paper, soft tissue. We have trigger words. When a trigger word comes up then the transmission gets classified Immediate for analysis. Obviously their tongue-twisted version of "British" is a trigger. It's been pretty shambolic transmission, but we picked up "British spy" and "British investigator", captured then escaped, and the transmission was coming out of a village called Salika, and there was a name… What I'm telling you, Arnold, in confidence, is that Salika is adjacent to Rosenovici, and the name of the spy, investigator, is Penn…"

He thought he might have smacked poor Arnold Browne across the bridge of the nose, to make his eyes water.

"What are you going to do?"

"Your people are out of their depth, Arnold. They are meddling in matters beyond their remit… Our station officer, Zagreb, if your dogged Mr. Penn gets safe back to base, will pick him up by the scruff of his neck and throw him on the first plane to Heathrow. And your lovely lady will be told by my hairy-arsed director to cease interfering. Your Penn is a busted flush, I'm afraid, and we'll be taking his legs off at the knees… Sorry, Arnold, but it's a sharp game, ours, and that's the way it'll always be…" corner.

Penn dictated and Ulrike typed and Ham whined away in the corner. He was rambling, contradicting himself, coming to stand behind her and reading what she had down on paper and changing it. It was full of errors because it was an old stand-up typewriter that she had begged from reception and the arms were forever sticking because it had been on the floor of the back office and was clogged with muck. Ham was muttering to himself, wallowing in his own pity, and they ignored him except for when he filled the glasses.

"No, I need what Alija said before I have what Sylvia said, and what Alija said should be in direct quotation, because she is the more important eyewitness. "The women who were with me, they said she was so brave. The women said she was an angel…"I want that in direct quote."

"So, where then does Maria go, does she go after the American? You know what this will do, Penn, when it reaches them? It will break them, you know that…? Right… for the top copy, Maria and then Alija and then Sylvia, and then your journey…"

Ham said, splashing the drink from the bottle, "Get it down you, squire, 'cause you bloody earned it, and don't leave yourself short of credit. Take the bloody credit for what you did. We never got the bloody credit for what we did, the Internationals, when we held those fuckers at Sisak. If they'd broken us at Sisak, where Billy and Jon Jo were zapped, where Herb who was A.W.O.L. from the Guards was fragged, where the big Oz guy went, they'd have been in fucking Zagreb for tea. Didn't give us any bloody credit… You make double bloody certain, squire, those posh smart arses know what you did…"

Slow going in the hotel room, the writing of Penn's report.

And what it would do to them, that was not his problem.

Because Mrs. Chadwick had the flu, Mary worked in the kitchen alone. Most times, when there was dinner for friends, Mrs. Chad-wick came in to help. Mary was happier alone actually… Other friends, of course, had daughters still at home who would flick the recipe pages and find the outrageous and get the exotic into the Aga. The sun was going down, slanting through the window and onto the wide pine table… She hadn't a daughter… She worked briskly at what she did best, boring food. She had the clock on the wall to guide her, and if she worked briskly then everything would be in place, and there would still be time for her in the last light to walk the dogs through the village to the church… The report was two sheets, closely spaced typing, and there were Penn's last notes handwritten in the margin. He glanced down at the two sheets, and the words were a jumble for his eyes. There was precious little left in the bottle, and there was precious little down on two sheets of typing paper… precious little to tell of eleven days. They were all allocated their lines, and they had caps for the typing of their names. He should have felt an elation, should have felt proud and strutted the length of the room. But there was only an emptiness… He should have wanted to share his pride. He had no conceit. It did not seem significant to him that he had made the march, learned, and ultimately broken clear from the certainty of death… He had been close to Dorrie and he thought that he had joined the queue of those who had failed her. In his terms, her life was worth just a report. It was the measure of how she had driven him, mocked him, that his best effort was just a report. It was as if, in his mind, she had given him the one chance of his life to walk alone from the herd, to walk tall above the herd, and he had failed to take that chance. He felt a failed man, not a changed man. The old disciplines were supreme. A clear and brief report sent immediately, a fuller report to follow, just what he would have done after a week's session in the surveillance team, what he would have done for a client of Alpha Security… He would never forget her, and now he would turn his back on her. He would go back to the office above the launderette, and the maisonette that was too small. People liked to say there was one bloody chance in this bloody life and they were probably bloody well right. He glanced down at the sheets of paper and Ulrike looked up at him and she waited for him to nod his satisfaction. He wondered whether the report would be read in the kitchen or taken to the old elegance of the sitting room, whether she would take it upstairs to Dorrie's bedroom. Just a mass of words now, blurred by the Scotch, but the names with the caps were highlighted. Three lines for the Croatian war crimes investigator, seven lines for the American Professor of Pathology, five lines each for Maria and Alija and Sylvia, four lines for the Croatian Liaison Officer… Three lines for Ham who had gotten him there, four lines for Benny Stein who had taken him out of there… fifteen lines for the Headmaster, twenty-one lines for Katica Dubelj, and on the lower half of the second page were twenty-five lines that quoted the words and described the body and face, and the village, of Milan Stankovic. Under the long paragraph concerning Milan Stankovic, killer of Dorrie Mowat, there had been room for Ulrike to type his name. Penn nodded. He was satisfied. He took the room's gratis biro and he scribbled his signature above his own typed name, and then he wrote the fax number with the international code at the top of the first sheet. It was his report and he was finished. He put his hand, momentarily, on Ulrike's shoulder, and he felt the hardness of her bones, and he took his hand away in shyness because he could remember the soft fingers that had dabbed the iodine into the cuts on his face. The road had turned. At the point that the road had started she had been a horrid young woman, and he could see, the last time that his tired eyes speed-read across the two pages, the words 'courage' and 'bravery' and 'love' and 'angel'… He hoped that she would read it in the bedroom, alone, where she could not be seen… Just bland bloody words that filled two pages of a report and they did no justice to so many, and they short-changed the Headmaster and Katica Dubelj… just a bloody inadequate report. No place for the fear, no space for the terror… Just a report, something that money could buy when it was thrown at a problem. He hoped she would read it in the bedroom, alone, because his report might just break Mary Braddock. "You still with us, squire?" Ham slurred. "Still with you, Ham." "Let me give you my advice. Good advice from real combat…" Ham belched, and he was rolling across the room, and the last of the bottle was going on the desk and on the typewriter's keys. "It's just a fucking job, squire… What you need, squire, is a little of the old home comfort, a lot of the old bottle… You need to get well pissed, have a bit of a cuddle, forget it because it was just a fucking job…"

He saw the kind care of Ulrike, different to the stand-off mischief love of Dorrie. Perhaps it was 'old home comfort', perhaps it promised 'a bit of a cuddle'. Probably it was getting 'well pissed'.. . He might ring Jane in the morning, and he might not. He might get a plane in the morning, and he might wait until the afternoon… The city moved noisily below the window of the hotel room. It would be a long time, Penn thought, before he heard again a silence like that of Rosenovici village, and the lane past Katica Dubelj's house to the field, and the grave pit in the field.

"Don't come back empty, squire."

Penn let himself out of the room. He walked down the corridor towards the wide central staircase, and the sharpness of the pain in his body was replaced by a stiff ache that was everywhere. There was a television crew in the lobby with their boxes around them and their light meters and clipboards and their self-importance and they noticed him as he came down the stairs, and the plasters and the cuts and the bruises and the grazes seemed to amuse them.

He asked for a bottle of Scotch at the reception, soonest, charged to his room, and he gave the woman on reception the two sheets of paper for the fax.

"Yes, send it now, please…"