Heart of Danger

Eighteen

She ran fast down the lane of the village, punishing herself, carrying the weight of her son.

She had pulled her coat from the hook on the door, she had left the dog in the kitchen, she had swept the food cooking in the pots off the stove. Fleetingly, she saw the Priest sitting bowed at his window table with the oil lamp lit and the chessboard laid out. She saw the wife of the Headmaster sitting hunched near to the barred window.

She ran through the stillness of the village, in the greying light, past the garage where gasoline used to be sold before the war and the sanctions, past the shop where food could be bought before the war and the sanctions. She ran through the silence of the village, her feet clattering the quiet.

She ran until she no longer had the strength to carry her son, and then she dragged him, his stumbling feet slipping in the potholes of the lane. She came to the building, used now by the Territorial Defence Force of Salika village, that had been filled with agricultural stores before the war and the sanctions. She went across the yard and past the barns where the big agricultural plant was kept, idle because it was impossible to obtain spare machinery parts and tyres and fuel. She burst into the office area. She saw the guns of the killers, and the playing cards, and the bottles heaped on the table of the office area. She was the acting headmistress of the school, and she was the woman who had been to university in Belgrade, and she saw the dislike of her in the faces of the killers.

They stared up at her from the chairs around the table that was heaped with their guns and their playing cards and their bottles.

Evica said in not more than a whisper, "Milan… Milan has been taken… Milan is captured…"

She looked into each of their faces, Branko's, Stevo's, Milo's, and she had never hidden that she despised each of them equally.

Evica did not plead. "You have to search for him… you have to find him… you have to bring him back to me…"

There was the stink of their bodies, and the smoke of their cigarettes, and the stench of the alcohol. She held Marko tight against her. And there had been first their amusement at the superior bitch fighting for breath, then the fuddled confusion of the drink, then they were listening.

Evica would not beg. "Search, because he had gone fishing… find him, gone fishing with Marko… taken across the river…"

From the postman, "By whom…?"

"I can't know."

From the gravedigger, "Who took him…?"

"I was not there."

From the carpenter, "Why…?"

"I do not know… you have to find him… Marko was there.. ."

The hand of the chief of the irregulars snaked out. A rough and calloused and large hand. The hand snatched at the shoulder of her son's anorak, and the boy was pulled from her. For a moment, she tried to hold the boy. She saw fear in the face of her son, and she could not protect him. The boy was dragged to the table, her grip on him was broken. And the time was rushing, and the darkness was closing.

Rough and guttural questions, small and frightened answers… They had gone fishing. They were fishing the big pool up the valley. There was no one near to them while they were fishing… She watched, and she realized the patience of the chief of the irregulars, that he let her son regain his confidence through the story of their fishing

… The big fish, the good trout, had taken the worm, stripped it from the hook. They had bent to put another worm on the hook. They had cast again into the pool.

The fish had taken the worm, taken the hook. A big fish, pulling at the rod, and his father helping him to hold the rod up… But the time was running and the darkness was gathering.

"Hurry, Marko, what you saw…"

And she was cut to silence by the slashed wave of the chief of the irregulars.

He stood amongst them, her son, and he told his story… The man had come from behind them as they held the rod together to fight the fish. His father had loosed the rod. He had looked round. His father was on the ground, on the grass of the field. The man was without trousers. The man knelt on his father and was binding his arms. The man had pulled his father up and hit him. He fought the man, he tried to kick the man's legs. A woman had come. He tried to stop them from taking his father. The woman had thrown him down, the woman had hurt him…

"What was he like, the man?"

Some of them already knew. She trembled. She remembered. She heard the voice that she had translated: "I have the evidence for my report that Dorrie Mowat was killed by, was murdered by, Milan Stankovic." She saw the face of the man, beaten and scarred and cut. They shared the guilt.

Pandemonium breaking out of the office area of the TDF headquarters. Shouts, cries in the night, and the gathering up of weapons, and the howling of awakened dogs. And who was the leader now

…? The one from the irregulars, but he did not know the terrain of the valley? The postman? The grave-digger? The carpenter? And was there a working telephone line out of the village? And where was the man to link the radio to Glina military? And where should the search begin, in the woodland across the stream, in darkness? At the deep pool where her Milan had been captured? She heard the babble of argument, and time was running.

She shouted above their voices, "Cowards… you all share the guilt. It was not just him that did it… Idiots, if Milan is taken, your leader, it is all of you who are threatened. Murderers…"

In confusion, in disordered chaos, the village was armed, the link was made and interrupted and made again and interrupted again with Glina military, and the search party moved out into the lane in front of the old agricultural store, and the debate of tactics began.

They had no leader.

She remembered the man, what he had said and what he had seemed to be. '… Tell Dorrie's mother the name of the man who killed her daughter…" Dignified, brave, remote from the law of the bastard village that was her home, not intimidated by the violence threatening him. If that man had her Milan… Evica reckoned that the man and the woman who had taken her husband had a start on them of near to an hour.

At the first halt, an hour gone since they had moved into the haven of the tree line on the west side of the valley, he had given Milan Stankovic's pistol to Ulrike and he had shone the torch full into the face of Milan Stankovic and he had held the small-bladed knife against the bearded throat of the man.

She knew their language, she interpreted.

Into the wide grey-blue eyes he had said that, if they were trapped, if they were intercepted, if they could go no further, he would slit that throat. And at the rest stop, two minutes on his watch, he and Ulrike had taken their turn in watching him close and they had slipped on again their dry trousers. He had whisper growled the threat to slit Milan Stankovic's throat, and he did not think he was then believed.

He attempted to be cruel because it was what Ulrike had ordered of him.

And as the second hand of his watch was slipping for the end of the two minutes, he had summoned what he hoped was ferocity and he had told Milan Stankovic that if he shouted, screamed, howled, he would cut his throat.

Penn dragged him forward. Ulrike led with the torch cupped in the palm of her hand so that it made a short cone of light ahead of her feet. Penn had the knife close to Milan Stankovic's neck so that when they pitched or stumbled then the tip of the blade would waver against the fullness of the man's beard. It was not important to him that the man had spat contempt at him.

The man did not shout, but instead talked softly. He was not gagged because Penn had thought that if he were gagged with the torn strip off the tail of his shirt then his breathing would be impaired and he would not be able to go as fast as was required of him. A low and calm voice. He could hear the murmur of the voice and the staccato bursts of Ulrike's side-of-mouth interpretation. '… You think you can succeed, then you are a lunatic… The whole village will be coming, man and boy, guns… You are the stranger here, don't know the ways in the forest, they know them… You only took me because I had the boy with me, because I was distracted with the boy, if I had not had the boy you would not have taken me… You are shit, shit when you came the first time, shit now… They will be coming after you, coming close to you… It is our forest, not yours, why you have no possibility… You say you will kill me, you would not dare…" There was a change in Ulrike's voice. There was no longer an automaton translation, but something said softly in the man's language, and the man's words dried. Penn asked, "What did you tell him?" Ulrike said, not looking back, "You might not kill him, but I would. That's what I told him, that I would kill him. He may not believe you, he should believe me… and I asked him if he felt guilt." She was so strong

… He wondered if she had ever felt weakness. And everything of her was denied him. He wondered where she had been five years before, when he had waited on the railway station for the delayed train and chatted to the stranger, Jane, and taken the taxi down to Raynes Park where Jane lived. He wondered if Ulrike Schmidt, who allowed no sentiment, would have looked at him then, admired him or wanted to share with him. His best friend, Dougal Gray, would have understood. Penn had heard that Dougal Gray, in Belfast, now lived with the separated wife of a policeman. In the heart of danger men and women were thrown together and thought they found love when they squirmed only for comfort. In a year, when Dougal Gray finished his extended tour, and was posted back to Gower Street there would be no chance that the separated wife of a policeman would up sticks to travel with him… There was no future. He had a hold of the wrists of Milan Stankovic that were knotted with the fine rope at the pit of his back. Each time that they had gone a hundred metres, each moment that they stopped, he strained for the sounds of pursuit, and Milan Stankovic was listening too, each time he bent his neck that he would hear better the first signs of the chasing pack. They went on into the depth of the woodland, climbing from the valley. There were some who said they should take cars and the jeep, and go up the road beyond Bovic towards the Pokupsko bridge where the Kupa river was the cease-fire line. There were others who said they should drive up the Vrginmost road and then take the turning towards the artillery position and fan out into the woods from there. And there was delay while the cars were filled with gasoline from the pump in the yard of the old agricultural store, and there were some who said they should go on foot into the woodland from the Rosenovici side of the stream, and others said they should go first to where the boy had told them his father had been taken. More delay for the argument. Some said they should wait for the army to come from Glina military, some said they should do the work for themselves. She listened. She wept. They decided. They had filled the cars with gasoline, but they would not use them. They would go on foot. They would go across the bridge and through the village of Rosenovici, and they would make a beating line through the woodland. She wept because she saw the wild excitement in torch-lit faces, as if they were away and off to drive a boar from thicket scrub, to rouse a deer for shooting. She watched the column of bouncing lights, raucously tailing away towards the bridge. Evica Stankovic realized how greatly she loathed them, all of them. And she wiped the tears off her face, and she led Marko away. She went to the house of the Priest. The Priest should have been her friend, as the Headmaster should have been her friend. She gave her son into the care of the Priest and his wife. She despised the man, as she despised herself. The Priest and the Headmaster and herself were the only three souls of the village with education, but amongst them only the Headmaster had stood up for what he believed. She told the Priest that Milan had been taken as a war criminal, and she saw the shallow sneer on the Priest's face, and she knew him to be an ambivalent bastard. He told a story in his low singing voice. It was the story of a Croat, the story of Matija Gubec, the leader of a revolt in the year of 1573 against the tyrant Franjo Tahi. He said it was the story of a little man who had risen to great power. '.. He wanted, Gubec, to be a big man amongst the peasants, and he made an organization of revolt. The sign of recognition with his people was a sprig of evergreen. The simple people followed him, but they were tricked by the superior intellect of the tyrant: they were told that while they went with the peasant rabble so the Turks were gathering to pillage their homes and they deserted Gubec. He was taken. He was brought to Zagreb. He was led to St. Mark's Square for a coronation. But the crown was iron, and the crown was heated by fire until the iron was white hot. He was crowned, and then he was dismembered. It is a story of long ago, before we were civilized, the story of a man who reached too far." He would have known that she was desperate for speed, and he had held her with the mincing words of the story, and with the tail of the story he had kicked her. So many times the Priest had walked to her house and wheedled for favours from her Milan and patted the head of her Marko. The chess, set was laid out on the table of rough stained oak… The Priest, the bastard, had not had the courage to stand beside his friend. When the Headmaster faced death then the Priest, the bastard, had stayed quiet. That the Priest dared taunt her was absolute proof of how alone she was. They blamed her, the Priest and his wife, for the humbling and the killing of a friend. She left her son there, whimpering, with the thin-boned fingers of the ambivalent bastard resting on the boy's shoulder. She went back to her home and she put on heavy boots and took the rusted bayonet down from the high wall hook, and she called for the dog to come with her. She knew the name of the dog, the name given it by the Ustase Croat people, and she took the big flashlight. With the dog at her heel she went away across the fields on the east side of the river. She could see their torches going through Rosenovici village, and she could hear them. She went alone with the dog, and she called it with its Ustase name to be close to her. She knew how it would be

… They would search a small area, the area around the villages, their own area. They were tribal. They would not move beyond the boundary of their own area. She could recall when some of the young men of the village had been volunteered for duty, last year, outside Petrinja, in the trenches facing Sisak, and they had drifted home within twelve days because it was not their own war, beyond their own area.

Her dog would know the scent of Milan.

Her torch found the jar of worms and the landing net and one of the rods. Her dog whined at the bank beyond the pool, and her torch showed the sliding marks of boots and bodies.

She had the dog on a lead and she tugged it down into the fierce flow of the stream.

"You sort of people, you always back a loser."

The First Secretary said it drily. He drove his big Rover along the night-empty highway from Karlovac towards Zagreb. A heavy brute to drive, but it was weighted with armour plating on the side doors and with bullet-proof glass for the windows, and the self-sealing tyres that could absorb small shrapnel and low-velocity gunfire were unresponsive.

Ham whined, "What'll happen…?"

"Good to know you care."

"What'll happen to me…?"

"God, just for one moment, for one fleeting second of time, I thought you were concerned with someone other than your own miserable self. A constant disappointment, Freefall, you have been to me. What'll happen to you…? You'll be shovelled on, like any other bag of rubbish that's dumped on someone else's front step. Nagorny Karabakh, wasn't it? Not Nagorno, best you learn how to say it first

… They're welcome to entertain you. Myself, if I were you, I'd choose the Armenian side rather than the Azeris, but knowing your track record it'll be the Azeris because they're the losers."

He prided himself that he retained some small influence in this awful corner of Europe. He had done an insignificant deal with the Croat military, a personal arrangement with the Intelligence Officer involving an insubstantial roll of German banknotes and the promise of future contact… Anyone could be bought in this awful corner, surprisingly cheaply in this case. He had won the release of Sidney Ernest Hamilton, code name Freefall, into his personal custody. Just the matter of handing in the wretch's uniform, his kit, his ID, and the Dragunov, and the little list of contacts for the moving on of black market supplies of Marlboro cigarettes, and he had been given the wretch in handcuffs.

"Will you snitch him?"

"I beg your pardon, try to speak English, please."

"Shop him, tell the Serbs where to be waiting for him, will you?"

"You should just stick to losing… Affairs of state aren't your business, Freefall, never were and never will be."

"They'll make you watch. They'll put you in a chair so that you are comfortable, and they'll make you watch…"

It was close to dawn. They could start to see the way ahead of them and there was no longer a need for her to shine the torch in front of her feet. Penn had stopped twice to rest and he had allowed Milan Stankovic to eat a small piece of bread and he had given him a broken piece of sharp cheese, and once he had unzipped the man's trousers and handled him so that he could urinate without messing his trousers. He felt exhaustion and Milan Stankovic also fought tiredness, but she still had strength and she set a pace that was hard, and from the side of her mouth she gave, briskly and without feeling, the interpretation of what he said.

"When they have you sitting down and comfortable then they will put her down onto the floor and they will strip off the trousers from her, and they will take the knickers from the bitch, and they will all come to her, all serve her. What it's like when a big boar pig comes to serve a sow, big so that it hurts. One after the other, all of them in the village, old men, young men, me last of all, and they will make you watch…" He did not know how she could translate and how she could not cringe. He did not know how she could not turn on him and hit him. Each time that they made the short stops he would listen, and sometimes he would hear far distant shouts, and then they would press ahead faster. The decision that he had to make was where to lie up, whether they should go forward as the light grew and lie up until darkness at the bank of the Kupa river to wait for the inflatable to come across at the rendezvous point, or whether they should lie up through the daylight and then make the charge in the dusk to the river. He was not ready to make the decision, and he could not think clearly while the voice of the man droned on and while she gave her clipped interpretation. "Before they shoot her, we will play with you. Which do you prefer? Electricity…? Fire…? Knife cuts…? Electricity on your balls, is that what you would prefer? Fire on your feet, on your body, needles from the fire under your fingernails? Knife cuts at your testicles and your penis, on your fingers, at your ears, the knife going into your eyes. The last you will know of the electricity and the fire and the knife will be from me. You will be crying for me to finish it, and you will be shouting for me to go to her with the electricity and the fire and the knife cuts… But you can let me go free…" Penn understood. He remembered the arrogant conceit, a long time ago, of an Irishman, not a big Provo but a second-rater from the feeble Irish National Liberation Army faction, who had been picked up when Five, their role as watchers completed, had deigned to call in the Anti-terrorist Branch for the formality of the arrest. The Irishman, skinny little creep, had been spreadeagled on the carpet of his pig-sty living room, and he had been silent, but the arrogance and the conceit had been large on his bloody face, as if to say they'd crack nothing out of him. "Is that what you want? Do you want to sit comfortably and watch all of the men, and me, screw the arse off her… before she dies? Do you want to let me go free? Do you want to feel the electricity wires on you and the fire burns and the knife cuts, they make pain but they don't make death, not till we are ready, do you want that? Or do you want to let me go free…?"

Ulrike spoke in his language, and his words withered.

They heard vehicles. They were straining four-wheel-drive jeeps and they were manoeuvring in the slipping rutted mud of the loggers' track. They were crouched down and he held the knife so tight against the bulged adam's apple at the bearded throat of Milan Stankovic that the skin was nicked and he drew blood. They were away from the track, in the depths of the trees, and they could see the soldiers in the jeeps, and he could see the guns that the soldiers held. He held the knife so close against the throat of Milan Stankovic and the images were splayed in his mind, of Ulrike laid out on a floor of concrete and her legs held open, and the electricity wires clipped to his skin … The vehicles bucked on the track, and passed.

His decision was taken. They would go on until they reached the Kupa river.

"What did you tell him?"

Ulrike said, "I told him that I wanted to hear him speak of his shame when he killed Dorrie Mowat…"

"What does it fucking mean, in a simpleton's terms?" He stood in front of the wall map.

Not a military man, the Director of Civilian Affairs found the big wall maps, so beloved of the military, to be sanitized and cold viewing. He assumed that the neat laundered officers around him, the Canadian colonel and the Jordanian major and the Argentine captain, could make sense of the whorls and lines. The wall map, nine feet in height and equally broad, covered the entire area of former Yugoslavia and was draped with a clear plastic sheet on which had been written in china graph crayon the disposition of UNPROFOR units.

The Jordanian major held a long pointer and identified Sector North, and then Salika village.

The Argentine captain said, "They have a mass of radio traffic, mostly out of Glina, but hooked in to Vojnic where they have Command and Control, and linked to Petrinja and Lasinja and Skakavac and Brezova Glava which are close to the cease-fire demarcation line. We have the situation reports, from our monitoring, of their units that have been put to state red alert along the Kupa river. We have the transcripts of the radio transmissions made by the field troops that are deployed. We have visual confirmation of their movement from the Dan Batt fixed observation posts, X-ray 9 and X-ray 11…" "And it means…?" The Canadian said, "It means that he's coming, coming with his prisoner, coming to the river. It means that he's being hunted." "What chance…?" "They've lost him in the immediate vicinity of his snatch. They reckon to block him on the river." "I said, what chance…?" "If the Serbs were to know where he planned to cross the river, no chance. They do not have that information… He has a slight chance." He was looking up, and the tip of the pointer was against the bland green of the map surface, cut only by the Kupa river, no roads. He imagined it as a morass of swamp. The Director thought he was playing God Almighty with the life of a man coming to the river with his prisoner, and he thought that the man coming to the river with his prisoner was playing God Almighty with the lives of all those within reach of the artillery and the missiles. He turned his back on the map, went slowly and subdued out of the operations room. He wondered what it was like, the swamp morass to which the man was coming with his prisoner. It was a small farm, not more than five hectares, where Zoran Pelnak and his wife lived. The farm gave, at best, a hard living and it was poorer now that his two sons were taken by the army. Before the boys had gone, one to the garrison at Osijek and one down in the south at Gospic, Zoran Pelnak had had their help in the never finished work of cleaning and deepening the drainage ditches that cut his land. The fields were too low set for good farming ground, too near to the river that flooded its banks most winters, and most winters the farmhouse of brick and wood was set upon a small island in a shallow lake. It was Zoran Pelnak's home, had been his father's home, and his grandfather's and his great-grandfather's home. His great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father had dug the drainage ditches and cleaned them and deepened them. There were three fields for the farm and in two of them he harvested a hay crop and grazed animals, and in one of them he and his wife grew their vegetables for their own eating and for sale in the market at Karlovac. He and his wife could survive the isolation of their life on the farm that fronted the north bank of the Kupa river. Their neighbours had long gone, left their homes and their farms and their livestock, abandoned them. He would not leave. He would not have cared to have gone to the graves of his great-grandfather and his grandfather and his father, sat on his haunches beside the stones, and explained why he was running from the drainage ditches they had dug. He moved slowly from the front door of the farmhouse. From the porch of the door he could see, across the field and the bog land where the cattle could go only in summer, the far bank of the Kupa river and the trees. He moved slowly from the rheumatism that came from living in a place so damp, towards the barn where his four cows were bedded, and the pigs and the goats, and the hens. On the far bank, behind the trees, maybe the bastard fuck Partizans watched him, and he was too old to care if they saw him. Zoran Pelnak knew most of what happened, each day and each night, on the far bank of the Kupa river. He pressed on into the barn, and he hoped that the soldiers would soon be down from their camp for their well water, because the soldiers would help him lift down the baled hay for the animals.

It was many hours since Evica had last heard the advance behind her of the search party, and their shouts.

She guessed they would have turned by now, cold from the night, down because of their failure. She guessed they would be heading back to their village, arguing between themselves, going back to food and warmth. And going back to dispute the new command of Salika, and to fight for control of the diesel supplies and the sacks of seed potatoes. Two would fall; she thought Branko and Milo would fall. One would rise; Stevo would command the village. She thought the wife of Stevo the most stupid woman she knew, and the wife of Stevo would take her place as the village's queen. They would turn back when they reached the perimeter line of their vicious and ignorant world… And her village would become an armed camp, isolated, guarded close.

The dog had the scent and moved easily ahead of her, loping on the trail on which her man had been taken.

Marty was told it by an Austrian of UNCIVPOL, told that the balloon was up in Sector North. He was a good friend of the Austrian policeman because they had shared a house, when the snow had fallen in January on Bosnia, away down east in Srebrenica, and it had been goddamn cold because the house had only half a roof, a place where men became good friends. The Austrian policeman had been coming off duty, he had a new posting at the UNCIVPOL desk in the operations room, and he had told Marty that all hell was loose across in Sector North, and that the crossing points were closed at Turanj and at Sisak, that a bigshot guy from a village in Glina Municipality had been kidnapped, that it was some crazy stuff about a war crimes investigator, and more crazy that there was the German woman from the UNHCR Transit Centre at Karlovac in tow. The Austrian policeman had told him all of this and his eyes had been going past where Marty stood in the doorway of the converted freight container, hooked on the shining steel ring set in the floor of the container, and the chain that was padlocked to it, and the collapsible bed that was made up in the far corner behind Marty with the sleeping bag laid on it and the folded blanket and the handcuffs. And Marty had told him, dead serious, that because he was homesick he'd gotten a big brute of a bear, a proper grizzly, being crated in from Anchorage, and he had gotten rid of the Austrian policeman as fast as was half decent. He drove into central Zagreb.

Marty thought of the photographs on the walls of the freight container, pictures of the weak and the outnumbered and the defenceless who had been caught behind the lines.

He parked among the new black BMWs in their sleek rows, the wheels of the fat cat bastards who were doing fine.

He went up to her room.

Marty Jones told Mary Braddock that Penn was coming with his prisoner towards the river… he looked for her excitement… that Penn had taken Milan Stankovic away from the village of Salika… he watched for her triumph… that a huge manhunt was in progress in Sector North between the village of Salika and the Kupa river… he expected to see her flinch… that the whole of the goddamn place beyond the cease-fire line was alive, roused… he expected to see her wilt.

"I want to look into his face. I want him to know that he murdered my daughter. I want to be there when he's brought across."

"That's positive thinking, ma'am, and positive thinking is always good. Could just be premature thinking. Do you have any appreciation of the odds against…?"

"Penn'll bring him across the river, I don't doubt it."

He felt almost an anger. She was sitting in an armchair and her legs, narrow and fine, were crossed in elegance, and Ulrike Schmidt, the best woman he'd known, was hacking through a bucket of hell with Penn and the prisoner, and the jaws of the goddamn trap were closing tight, as they had closed on those who were photographed on the walls of his converted freight container. One thing to goddamn talk about it, one thing to make the great goddamn plan, quite another to… "Ma'am, it's not a picnic."

"He didn't have to go… He never met my daughter, of course not, but he talked some unpleasant rubbish about loving her. I find that repulsive. I don't need lectures in motherhood. But I have the right to demand the punishment of my daughter's killer… He took our money."

It was like a dismissal. He said he would go ring the mercenary down in Karlovac.

It was a recklessness that pushed Penn forward. Thought through, well considered, he would have made the decision to lie up through that long day, and then after the fall of dusk complete the last charge for the river bank. He did not ask her for her opinion, and she did not challenge his decision. He was drawn towards the river bank, goaded towards it. So tired, and wanting only to be there, where he could gaze out across the slow depth of the water, he was driven towards it, towards the danger of the last barrier… The sun was up above them and slanted down diffused by the upper branches… The danger would be at the last obstacle and that was where they would set their men, where they would run their tripwires, where they would make their ambushes… He had now used the gag cloth, wedged it between Milan Stankovic's teeth and knotted the ends tight against the shaggy long-grown hair at the back of his neck. Milan Stankovic accepted the gag, and at the last stop of two minutes Penn had thought he had seen the first slipping of his arrogance, the first breaking of the conceit, as if fear had begun to gnaw at the man, and Penn heard the breaking of a branch behind him. They were away from the path. They were far into the cover of the trees, and Ulrike had heard what he had heard and swung on her hips to look into his face. They were frozen. The movement of the forest woodland was around them, and both were straining to hear the sound again of the breaking of a branch, and Penn held the knife hard against Milan Stankovic's throat. She broke the moment of stillness. She moved on. He went after her, pushing the man forward, and he did not know if they were followed… He would not tell her that it was all ahead of them, that the worst was in front of them. The day supervisor scowled down at him. "Oh, you're so kind, thank you so much… and another thing, I'd be very grateful if you could get me a few guidebooks, former Yugoslavia…" God, what a miserable woman. '… Yes, I'm very nearly through… Those books that get to the second-hand shops, full of photographs, I'd appreciate it so much." Henry Carter smiled his sweetest. She walked stiffly away, and he regretted that he had insufficient courage to call after her and request a beaker of coffee… If she brought him coffee she would probably accompany the visit with a further dose of that obnoxious sickly air freshener… As a major favour, she had brought him a set of photocopied newspaper clippings. He was, indeed, nearly through. Perhaps he was nit-picking, perhaps he was far beyond his brief, but he did not care. A job worth doing, that sort of thing. He was sifting the clippings, believing they had a place in the file even though they were dated months after the events that consumed him. The Secretary General of the United Nations, should know what he was talking about, guaranteeing his organization's support for the international war crimes tribunal: We will put on trial those who have contributed to civilian suffering and it will not be forgiven… will deal not only with the people accused of committing the crimes, but also those who inspired the human rights violations… We have to denounce it… civilians are being bombed, starved and mistreated and children are targeted by killers in the shadows. Good solid stuff, and a pity that no one had bothered to tell the bureaucrats in their offices above Library, and not told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and not told UNPROFOR. Worth entering in the file because Penn, that ordinary and decent man, and maybe a bit of a clairvoyant and most certainly blessed with common sense, would not have believed a word of it. He grasped at another clipping and wrote a brief summary to go into the file with the clipping, and hoped quite fervently that, one fine day, the file would be examined by a mandarin or an apparatchik with enough honesty to feel humility… some chance. FRITS KALSHOVEN: Dutch academic, had been appointed to job of Chief Prosecutor, but resigned. Cited 'refusal of Great Britain and France and Germany and Italy to co-operate'. Noted positive attitude of United States of America, Canada and Norway. Also blamed 'obstruction' of sister UN agencies.

Ah, getting better… Gratifying to read it. Another clipping, another digest. Henry Carter squirmed, but it was necessary for the full picture to be drawn if it were ever to be understood why Penn had made that desperate and poorly considered expedition behind the lines, into the heart of danger. Leave it to those bastards to sort out and a man may as well wait for his Bath chair… More brave talk.

A new PROSECUTOR named: Ramon Escovar-Salom (Venezuelan attorney-general). Total budget of $30 million. Eleven judges appointed (nice work if you can get it!), at salary of $150,000 per annum, payable regardless of whether charges are brought.

The voice was cold behind him.

"I have your guidebooks, Mr. Carter. I have also to tell you that I will be complaining, most forcibly, to In-House Management about the demands you have placed upon us, and your quite disgusting lack of personal hygiene."

Henry Carter breezed, "Not much longer, nearly finished."