Monday, 28 June 1972
A bloodless dawn crept over Mt Radusa. Marin Katich lay, cold and stiff, hidden in a cleft of the mountain. He had volunteered to take the last watch rather than lie awake in the claustrophobic cave. As the alien wilderness below came slowly into focus through the mist, blackbirds were startled into flight. Thousands of them rose from its depths, smudging the sky with dark patterns. This should have been a beautiful thing, but their cries filled him with a premonition of terror.
Marin gripped his cold weapon. Vili Ersek was sleeping next to him like a puppy. He kicked him softly, until Ersek opened his eyes.
‘Hey!’
‘Shut up,’ Marin whispered. ‘Go wake the others.’
‘What is it?’
‘Something’s moving down there. Be quick.’
They were above a cave and there was a hidden entrance that allowed Ersek to climb back inside it.
Blackbirds continued to swirl above Marin as he scanned the forest floor through his scope. He moved the rifle back and forth, adjusting for its different balance and weight with the suppressor screwed onto the barrel.
Ambroz Andric came scrambling up in a low crouch.
‘What is it, Katich?’
‘Something spooked the birds.’
Andric detached the scope from his own rifle and lay on the limestone ledge, searching the dark valley for movement. Ersek and Vegar crept up beside them.
‘Don’t let anyone else up here, for fuck’s sake,’ Marin whispered.
‘I’m not stupid,’ Vegar said. ‘Lovric has taken two men to a position on the other side of the entrance. See anything?’
‘Not yet.’
Marin was starting to think it had been a false alarm when Andric stiffened.
‘My two o’clock,’ he said.
Marin swung the Steyr to his right, caught movement in the scope and stopped. A figure in camouflage emerged from the forest cradling an automatic weapon. A big man. He was alone. A scout, perhaps.
‘He’s heading straight for the cave,’ said Andric. ‘Take him out, Katich.’
The man’s face filled Marin’s scope. He was older, with a big drooping moustache. Fifty or so. His father’s age. Marin let his breath out, his finger on the trigger. Probably had a wife and children.
He hesitated.
‘Katich!’ Andric snapped.
Still he hesitated. But then there was a sound to his right—a sound like someone stapling a thick pile of papers, the sound of a suppressed subsonic round. The old soldier in his scope wheeled and went down. Vegar had shot him.
They waited. The man didn’t move. Didn’t call out. No one else came out of the woods.
It began to rain. Vegar slapped Ersek on the shoulder. ‘Vili, here’s your chance.’
Ersek looked up apprehensively. ‘For what?’
‘To prove your worth. To prove you’re not a little coward.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Get down there and see if that Serb is really dead. And take his weapon and ammo and any food he’s got in that pack. We’re going to need it.’
‘How do you know he’s a Serb?’
‘He’s trying to kill us, isn’t he?’
‘I guess.’
‘So he must be a Serb.’ Vegar laughed. ‘Who else would chase a bunch of Croats up a mountain?’
Ersek produced an edgy smile and looked over at Marin, who refused to meet his eyes.
‘Get down there quick,’ said Vegar. ‘Or I’ll wipe that shit-eating grin off your face.’
They watched Ersek scramble clumsily down the steep slope, slipping on the wet limestone as the rain grew heavier. Marin followed him through the scope. On the forest floor Ersek ran crouched, his submachine gun in two hands. He hopped over a log like a rabbit and ran the short distance to the body. He checked for a pulse, turned his face up to them and gave a thumbs up.
‘Does that mean he’s dead?’ asked Andric.
Vegar shrugged. ‘We forgot to agree on a signal.’
‘That one’s counterintuitive,’ said Marin.
Vegar decided for them. ‘I say thumbs up means he’s dead.’
They watched Ersek strip the body of weapons, ammunition and a small pack. He looked up, wiped rain from his eyes and gave a second thumbs up. Then he rose to a crouch again and ran towards them.
As he hopped back over the log, a shot rang out from somewhere in the forest. The back of Ersek’s head exploded.
Marin flinched. Ersek’s body pitched forward into the ground, a tangle of dead limbs.
Vegar cried out, but his voice was quickly drowned by a torrent of fire from hidden positions in the forest. It was concentrated on the cave mouth, but bullets whined over their heads. The three of them flattened behind cover.
Marin snatched a look and saw two groups of soldiers, running from either side of the forest. ‘They’re trying to outflank us!’
Infantrymen in the forest kept up cover fire on the cave. They still had not spotted the defensive position above it. Marin swung his rifle to the attackers on the right. Lovric would have to deal with the threat on his side. The rain had stopped, but it was unnaturally dark under the low cloud cover.
Marin concentrated on the assault group. In quick succession he shot the third and fourth man as they laboured uphill. Soldiers still coming up stopped to help the wounded.
The attack on the left had slowed, but Lovric and his men were still being hit by heavy fire from the forest. Andric called out that he was going down to help the defenders on that side. As he climbed back into the cave, Marin heard familiar percussive thumps from the forest.
‘Get down!’ he yelled at Vegar as mortar shells began exploding on the mountainside.
Again the mouth of the cave was being targeted, and Marin realised that the attackers knew exactly where they were. His ears rang from the multiple concussions. Limestone dust filled the air, stinging his eyes. There was a film of it on his face.
He turned to Vegar, who appeared to be wearing ghostly theatrical make-up. Marin laughed, for surely this was the last act of their tragedy.
Then a roaring noise came from below. A tongue of flame reached out, blossoming into a fireball that scorched the pale rocks at the cave entrance.
A flamethrower!
Marin had seen in Vietnam what these could do to a man. The enemy was pushing up on the left behind the surging flame. He heard screams and shouts inside the cave and swivelled the Steyr. Sighting into the flame, he felt its radiated heat on his face—the devil’s breath, exhaled in bursts of fire. During the brief pause between when the flame bloomed and dissipated in the burning air, he saw the dark outline of a demon with fuel tanks on its back. He targeted the shape and squeezed the trigger as another fireball leapt from the weapon.
The line of flame suddenly twisted and bucked like an untended garden hose writhing on the ground, spurting its deadly stream in all directions. The demon with the flamethrower had gone down, with his hand locked on the trigger. Marin saw a nearby soldier, lit up like a torch, run screaming down the hill.
A last flame shot into the air and then the rain fell again with a new intensity. It poured down on the demon’s body and extinguished the weapon’s pilot light. The soldiers retreated to the forest under the downpour, dragging their dead and wounded through the mud.
The assault was over. Marin lay drenched on the ledge.
Vegar turned to him, shouting over the rain. ‘They must have come in on the choppers to have gotten here so quickly.’
Vegar’s face had been washed clean; his thin hair was plastered to his scalp and his eyes burned in sunken pits.
Marin saw the skull beneath the skin and imagined a dead man was talking to him.
‘That’s what I think,’ he replied after a moment. ‘They carried the mortar bombs on their backs. Limited supply, or they’d still be dropping them. So, maximum fifty men?’
‘If we’re right.’
‘They took at least eight casualties. They won’t try that again soon.’
‘They’ll wait now for the main force to get here. If the weather hadn’t closed in, they’d have choppers up here strafing the shit out of us. But we’re trapped like rats. Put a fucking rocket into the cave and we’re all dead. Only thing keeping us alive right now is the fucking rain.’
Marin was astonished to find that, apart from Ersek, they had all survived the assault. But most of the men were still cowering at the back of the cave. The explosions had rattled them, but it had been the hellfire that poured into the cave entrance, seeking them out, sucking the breath from their lungs, that had left them paralysed. Some clutched their unfired weapons as if they were a talisman against evil.
While Vegar briefed the others, Marin found Lovric and took him aside. The man’s nerves were stretched thin from the battle, his eyes moist with emotion.
‘We were moments away from being overrun,’ Lovric said. ‘It’s a miracle we’re still alive.’
‘It’s only a matter of time now,’ said Marin. ‘Our only chance is to hope the storm keeps up and for us to try to escape after dark.’
‘And to split up.’
‘That’s what Vegar is telling them.’
Marin nodded in the direction of the group huddled on the other side of the cave, now in loud argument.
‘It makes sense for smaller groups to go in different directions and split the search,’ he went on, grasping Lovric by the shoulders. ‘I have an idea, but you’re the only one I trust.’
‘You already know my answer,’ said Lovric.
Marin looked around to make sure no one was in earshot.
‘You better hear me out. This will sound crazy,’ he said quietly. ‘When the others leave the cave we will go with them, but break away as soon as possible. None of them must know what we’re doing. If they’re caught, they will give us away.’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘There’s only one way for them to go. They will keep climbing and then head off in different directions. The best chance we have is to do the opposite. We’ll go back down the mountain.’
‘Straight into the arms of the enemy?’ said Lovric. ‘You are crazy.’
‘No. In the rain, in the dark, we can pass through them. It’s the last thing they will expect. Then we must find a secure place to hide during the day and let the main force pass. They’ll be looking forward, not behind them.’
Lovric considered this, shaking his head.
‘You really are a mad fucker.’
‘That’s been said before.’
Lovric clasped his arms around him and whispered in his ear. ‘I’m with you, brother.’
The storm continued to worsen. The lookouts reported no movement at all from the forest, but regular shots rang out, the army snipers having resolved to keep them pinned in their cavernous trap. The opening was sheltered by rocky outcrops, which created a dog-leg at the entrance; but still the occasional round got through and ricocheted, sending sparks off the walls.
Some of the men were stoically calm, some were strung out and some at the point of madness. Marin saw that many of them had reached the edge of endurance. They had seen how easily death had caught up with their companions and how patiently it waited for them. They had barely slept for days; they were wet and they were hungry.
Circling the cave, Kancijanic—a man so reticent that Marin had barely heard him utter a full sentence since they had crossed the border—came across Ambroz Andric and stopped in front of him, his face twisted with contempt. Andric was sitting on the floor, picking sardines out of a can with the point of his knife.
‘What do you want, Viktor?’ he sighed.
‘This is your fault, you fucking madman!’ Kancijanic shouted. ‘You and your halfwit brother and your imbecilic plans.’
Andric threw aside the can. As he tried to scramble to his feet, Kancijanic pushed him in the chest with both hands and he fell back on his arse. Men began to shout. Someone yelled, ‘Kill him!’, but it was unclear who they meant. Andric made it to his feet and went for Kancijanic with the knife.
Marin stepped in, blocking him and seizing hold of the arm with the knife.
‘No,’ he shouted in Andric’s face. ‘We can’t afford to fight each other.’
But Andric turned his anger on Marin. ‘I should have let Adolf kill you, daddy’s boy,’ he hissed, pulling free of Marin’s grip. ‘I’ll do it myself now.’
Vegar jumped to his feet behind Andric and wrapped his arms around his friend. ‘No, Ambroz,’ he spoke into his ear. ‘No.’
Now other men who had never spoken out climbed to their feet to challenge Andric. They’d had enough of his leadership and his stubborn delusions. Even here, trapped in this fetid cave, he had continued to insist that the common folk would hear of their brave deeds and climb the mountain to join them. They would have one hundred new recruits within days—that was his mantra—but they had all grown weary of it and they now openly abused him. Men who had once been frightened of their own shadows told Andric his words were shit. As his power diminished, they lost their fear and derided him and his plans. For his part Andric denounced them as motherless cunts, and wished only that they would die soon and think of their shame as they took their last breaths.
Marin was not surprised that Vegar remained loyal to Andric, but only two others, Rocco Buntic and Mirko Vlasnovic, agreed to stay with him as the group disintegrated. The original troikas had become meaningless and new alliances formed in the cave as men calculated who was most likely to survive. Marin saw the treacherous Horvat finally turn on Andric, a dog biting his master’s hand. Horvat announced he would abandon the group and try to escape. No one argued with him.
The rest of them, including Marin and Lovric, who of course had their own secret plan, agreed to follow Glavas. The demented general, despite everything, was ecstatic at finally having his own army. Marin listened to the pompous fool’s plan to march them west and then south to cross the Cetina River into Dalmatia. Watching the man pace up and down, he was reminded of the story Lovric had told him of Glavas haranguing the group of frozen corpses. Marin glanced at the pale, strained faces of the men around him. They might as well be corpses. No Croatian martyrs had risen from their graves to join their holy war, but he felt sure these men would soon be sharing eternity with them in the darkness.
The long day came to a melancholy end. As night fell, men who now found themselves in different camps hugged and said their goodbyes.
Andric and Vegar went up first through the shaft that took them out above the cave. One by one the men followed, each of them clad in their wet ponchos. The thunderstorm had passed, but the heavy downpour continued and they crawled through a small waterfall all the way up to the opening.
Marin was the last to emerge, Lovric just ahead of him. As his eyes adjusted he made out the shapes of men climbing ahead of him low to the ground. Through the driving rain he heard explosions down below in the forest.
‘Get down! Get down!’ he yelled, and the call echoed up the chain of men. The sky above the cave was illuminated by two flares, blazing like green suns as they swayed down on small parachutes. More thumps came from below and mortar bombs exploded in a pattern near the mouth of the cave.
Marin knew the escapees had not been seen or the bombs would have fallen around them, exposed on the open mountain. They lay still until the flares dimmed, and then began the steep ascent once more.
Marin grabbed Lovric’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered when there was enough space between them and the last men in the group, and slithered down and off to the right.
Lovric soon followed him. They made perhaps twenty metres before he heard the thump of the mortars once more. They slid through the mud to an outcrop as the illumination rounds again bathed the cave opening with green light. This time lines of tracers streamed up from positions in the forest as fire was poured into the cave.
Marin looked up and realised that the climbing men had gone beyond the range of the flares and were in shadow. Their own situation was much more perilous.
When the flares died, Marin and Lovric angled down across the mountain to get as far away from the cave as they could. The descent was much steeper on this path and in the darkness Marin began to fear that the rain would wash them into a crevasse or over a cliff edge. He dug his fingers into the cracks in the limestone and inched down metre by metre. It took them more than an hour, but somehow they found a path to the bottom.
The attacks continued at random intervals. Using the firing positions as his reference, Marin took a compass bearing under his poncho, then they set off into the forest, skirting the concentration of soldiers. They only felt safe when they heard the gunfire faintly behind them.
When the sky began to lighten, they knew that it was time to disappear. Lovric suggested traversing the slope until the woods thinned. He was looking for an area of bare karst, where they would be likely to find another cave.
As they worked their way across the forest, they found clumps of mushrooms, chanterelles and morels, which they picked and stuffed into their pockets. By the time they reached the first clearing the rain had eased with the dawn. They were exposed on the steep slope, but Lovric soon found a narrow opening in the karst. He took off his pack and edged inside, with Marin following.
The entrance was no more than five feet high, but it opened out to a larger space at the back which was miraculously dry. They laid their packs on the ground, shucked off their damp ponchos and emptied their pockets.
They ate the mushrooms, along with a few salted biscuits, and washed them down with rainwater from their canteens. Marin was almost delirious with fatigue. He lay with his head on his pack and fell into a deep slumber.
Anna Rosen came to him in his sleep, her breath on the side of his face, her voice whispering in his ear, urging him to come home. Marin had forced thoughts of her from his conscious mind, locked them away, and yet here she was and he felt her loss like the deep throbbing pain of an amputated limb.
He woke, his heart thumping, startled by the noise of heavy choppers ascending from the valley. Two of them—the Mi-8s—which he presumed were returning, now that the weather had cleared, to drop reinforcements and ammunition, and to pick up the wounded and the dead. Then came two more, smaller machines: reconnaissance choppers, he was willing to wager.
Lovric was at the front of the cave, peering up from the shadows. When the aircraft passed over he came back and slumped down against his pack.
‘They’ll stop at nothing now,’ he said. ‘Every man in every village and town will be searching until all of us are hunted down.’
‘How long were we asleep?’
‘An hour, maybe less.’
‘We’ll need more than that.’
‘You got any sleep pills? I’m full of adrenalin.’
Marin reached into his pack. ‘No, but I’ve been saving this.’ He threw Lovric a battered flask. ‘My father made it.’
Lovric held it up. ‘Here’s to your father.’ He took a long pull and handed the flask back. ‘The stupid prick that put us here.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Marin said.
Lovric lay back on his pack and closed his eyes. ‘I don’t blame him. I don’t. I blame myself. I never told you this, but I left my son to come here. The boy is two years old. I ran from his mother and him. He was going to tie me down, you see, and put an end to the great adventure. That’s how big a fuckwit I am. Fathers can be such cunts, am I right?’
‘You are right.’
*
They slept fitfully, woken through the day by the comings and goings of helicopters and by distant gunfire. Before nightfall they checked their meagre supplies. They calculated that the food could be made to last three days, if they carefully rationed it. They shared a chocolate bar from a US ration pack. When it was completely dark, they resumed their climb down the mountain.
In the early hours of the morning they reached the foothills and a large open space which, by Marin’s reckoning, was Kupresko Polje, the field of buttercups. He was about to step into it when he saw a light flicker and a red glow. Someone had lit a cigarette. A sentry? He held Lovric back, put a finger to his mouth.
Marin knelt and rubbed mud on his face and hands; Lovric did the same. Marin led them to the edge of the field, which they began to cross on their bellies. Part way across he realised that the strange shapes he’d been seeing in the field were not rocks but tents, dozens of them, tent after tent. They were crawling through a large encampment. They must have stumbled into the territorial army’s forward operating base.
They had no choice but to keep going. If there were sentries at the far end, they didn’t spot them. Marin avoided the pathways that he assumed were military supply lines and found a way back into the forest.
In this way, exposing themselves only at night and hiding out during the day, they moved steadily south. As their food supplies dwindled, they risked raiding isolated farmhouses.
After two nights’ walking, they thought they had put the main search parties behind them. But in the tiny village of Zahum they almost walked into an ambush. At the edge of the village Lovric spotted a militia outpost. They were able to backtrack and circle around it. But the incident disturbed Marin. If a place that small had soldiers waiting for them, where would they be safe?
They hiked one night to Rama Lake and saw its famous blue waters—the mountain’s eye—gleaming black in the moonlight. After avoiding houses by the water, they climbed down from the lake, heading south through thick forest until they came to a small hamlet at the base of the mountain. It was after 3 am and Lovric decided these farmhouses were ripe for the picking.
‘It could be our last chance for a while,’ he whispered. ‘Since we’ll soon be back into the mountains.’
‘It’s not worth the risk,’ said Marin, still shaken by their close shave in Zahum. ‘We have enough food to take us through the mountains.’
But Lovric was determined—the little white farmhouses were tempting, and they seemed so benign. He stripped off his pack, tucked a hessian bag into his belt and left his rifle. Taking out his Browning pistol, he crept into the back of the closest farmhouse.
After a brief search of the outbuildings, he found a wooden hut with salamis and dried corncobs hanging from beams. He cut down bunches of each and was shovelling these into the sack when the farm dog sensed his presence and started up a maniacal barking.
Marin, from about one hundred metres away, saw lights come on in several farmhouses; the dog’s alarm rang through the close-knit hamlet as effectively as an air-raid warning. He cursed and pulled the Steyr from his shoulder, peering into the pools of light and darkness. A silhouette passed fast through the scope—a figure running through the fields with a gun?
Lovric cocked his pistol and sprinted into the courtyard, the booty in his other hand. The dog came at him out of the shadows, barking and snarling. When it bit his leg, he put a bullet in its brain.
The gunshot ended all doubt and all sleep. Lights came on right across the low hillside in dwellings even Marin had not seen. His own position was exposed now and he jumped up. Shouldering the two packs, he retreated a further fifty metres into the forest.
Through the Steyr’s scope he saw Lovric running towards the woods. Then a blast came from the darkness. Shotgun pellets sprayed across Lovric’s left shoulder, spinning him around. His left arm went limp; it hung by his side and he dropped the sack of food. Lovric was motionless, illuminated by a porch light at the back of the house, his left side a bloody mess. When he began to move a voice from the farmhouse called out to him to stop.
Marin watched Lovric turn towards a small figure, framed in the doorway by a kitchen light. The Browning was in his good right arm and he threw it up. The figure stepped into the light and the image resolved into a boy, perhaps thirteen years old, with pimples on his face, a mop of black hair, wide eyes full of terror. He had a hunting rifle at his shoulder trained on the thief in his yard. Lovric hesitated and Marin knew he would not shoot the boy.
Fathers can be such cunts.
When Lovric lowered the pistol the boy shot him in the forehead.
Lovric crumpled to the ground. A farmer with a shotgun jumped a fence, ran into the yard and shouted something at the boy. Then he put a round into Lovric’s chest for good measure. Marin had the man in his sights. He held the target for a moment, but then he lowered the rifle, picked up the packs and withdrew into the deep darkness of the forest.
Working by torchlight under his poncho, Marin emptied Lovric’s pack, taking from it the food, a few useful items and a wallet he found tucked away in a pocket. He buried the rest, including Lovric’s rifle. The militia would come to collect his body and they would search the area forensically. Best they found nothing.
He took another compass bearing, got to his feet and headed south as fast as he could. There was no time to lose. No time to grieve.
He moved at double time for two hours, stopping only to check the compass. South, always south—go far enough and you’ll hit the Adriatic.
Before dawn he found another hiding place in the narrow, concealed entrance to a small cave. The faint stench of some long-dead animal clung to its walls. Lying there on his back, he allowed himself to think of Lovric and for the first time he felt the despair, which he had held at bay for so long, come gnawing at his entrails.
There was security, but no comfort, in the darkness. He pulled out a torch; after all, he had two of them now. He could afford a little light. He dug around in the pack and found his father’s brandy, and the wallet he’d retrieved from Lovric’s pack. He flipped it open and, behind the plastic window, he saw the little boy, the son Lovric had left behind. The boy had a cheeky grin, which was to be expected, but he was destined to grow up with an unfulfilled longing. The loss of a father, a piece of his soul missing forever. Marin didn’t even know the boy’s name. He drank all the remaining brandy and fell asleep, overwhelmed, at last, by exhaustion.
Marin slept undisturbed for ten hours and woke with the inkling of a plan that centred on a single idea. Hungry and dehydrated, he drank half the water in his canteen, then ate two apples, a pear and a large chunk of the remaining salami. He pissed into a pannikin and put it where he wouldn’t knock it over. Then he emptied his pack and peered at the contents in the dim light.
He set aside his military gear. He stripped down to his underwear and boots, and pushed the pile into the darkest corner. He wiped the Steyr clean of fingerprints and laid it on top of the pile. He felt no reluctance leaving it behind—the weapon had killed enough people and he had no intention of staging a final shootout if the army tracked him down. He did the same with the Browning, his spare ammunition and every piece of equipment that might carry prints.
Moving awkwardly in the small space, he dressed himself in the jeans and T-shirt he’d stowed at the bottom of the pack and pulled on the jumper he’d brought for the cool mountain nights. He took the photograph of Lovric’s son and slipped it into his passport. Then he wiped the wallet clean and threw it on to the pile.
He refilled the pack with the remaining food, the canteen, torches and spare batteries, a filthy sleeping bag, tin plate, utensils and the few books he’d brought with him. The pack looked like something a young Western tourist might have picked up in an army disposal store, but he decided he would ditch it at the first opportunity. In the pocket of his jeans was a roll of US dollars, to which he added the stash of Yugoslavian dinar he’d found in Lovric’s pack.
That night Marin climbed high into the glacial valley between the peaks of the Cvrsnica and Vran mountains. Then, crossing the saddle, he began a slow descent, making it to the foothills before dawn. Here he crawled into a cave to see out the day.
When night fell he set out for Posusje, a large town straddling the main road to Mostar, which was a further fifty-odd kilometres to the south-east. His plan depended on reaching Mostar, but he had no idea how he could make such a long journey.
As he came closer, by his reckoning, to Posusje, the forested country gave way to cultivated farmlands. He entered a wide field of waist-high crops laid out in long neat lines. He stopped to pinch off some leaves, crushing them in his hands.
The sweet fragrance of a fresh pack of Drum.
He looked around at this vast crop, recalling what Lovric had told him about the tobacco routes through the mountains. For years the smugglers had made a killing. The rich tobacco of Herzegovina became so popular that Joseph Stalin used to crumble cigarettes from the region into his pipe. Lovric told the story with a punchline. ‘A smooth, clean taste …’ he had mugged, holding an imaginary pipe. ‘Number one choice of dictators everywhere.’
On the edge of the tobacco fields Marin found a series of large wooden buildings. He scouted around for dogs. There were none, because no one lived here. Two of the buildings were tobacco barns with unlocked doors, racked from top to bottom with drying leaves. He concluded that none were ready to be smoked. He knew it was a foolish risk, but what better place to top up his tobacco pouch?
The third building was much larger; it appeared to be a storehouse. It was locked, of course, but he was determined now. He took off his pack and used a drainpipe to climb up to the wooden slats of an air vent, where he was able to wriggle his way through. Once inside, he flicked on his torch. The walls were stacked high with neatly compressed, yellowed bundles of dried tobacco. In the open space in the middle was a truck.
Marin went around to the back of the vehicle. It was packed with identical bundles of tobacco. He immediately understood the implications. It wasn’t here to unload: it was packed and ready to go.
A way out! A way out, by God! But where was the truck going? Maybe there were papers in the front? He shone the torch, revealing a sign, neatly painted in yellow letters edged with black on the green enamel, beneath the window. Fabrika duhana Mostar d.d. Mostar.
Mostar Tobacco Factory. Mostar! Marin could barely believe his luck. Lovric must have been sitting on his shoulder as an angel. After considering his options, he scanned the walls and found a door, which he unlatched and propped open while he retrieved his pack.
It took him an hour by torchlight to unpack the truck and create a large enough space for him to crawl into backwards, leaving two bundles of dried tobacco to be pulled back in to reseal the hiding place. He had no idea what time the driver would come to make the return journey, so he pissed in a far corner. He drank a little water and climbed on to the back shelf of the truck.
He left just enough of a gap to allow a flow of air, but the sickly sweet smell of the tobacco was intense. He fell asleep wondering if he’d ever again enjoy rolling a cigarette.
He woke to the sound of a door slamming, followed by the whirr of the ignition until it caught with a roar. There followed a series of rapid growls as the driver pumped the accelerator and then let it idle. Marin heard the diesel’s steady ticking before the truck was finally crunched into gear and driven out of the building.
The journey was uneventful. There were no roadblocks as far as he could discern. He was bumped around and tossed from side to side but, for the first part, he felt the elation of an escapee who has left mortal danger behind.
Then he began worrying about how to get out of the truck unnoticed at the other end. It would all fall apart if he were discovered. A simple phone call to the police and he would be a fugitive, trapped in a city with every eye on the lookout.
Eventually the truck slowed and jerked along in low gears, in what Marin assumed to be city traffic. After some time, the brakes squealed and the truck wheeled left, bumping into a driveway, then it turned right sharply and stopped. He heard the handbrake engage, the door open and slam shut, footsteps retreating … and then nothing.
Marin pushed the loose bundles of tobacco aside and listened for the sound of men. The truck appeared to be in a warehouse loading dock. It was quiet, apart from passing traffic. He paused, straining to hear anything that he may have missed. He froze there for a moment, his limbs unwilling to move. Still he heard nothing.
He shuffled forward on his elbows and climbed carefully out of the hiding place, dragging his pack behind him. He lowered himself to the ground, paused again to look around once more, straining to hear any human activity. There was nothing. The driver had left the truck unattended.
He crept out of the covered dock into the sunshine. Beside the old factory building there was a line of fir trees in an unkempt garden, and he walked through it unchallenged and out the front gate into a busy street. At the first intersection he looked up at the street sign—Marsala Tita.
‘You’re fucking kidding,’ he said, and laughed out loud. The absurdly simple final leg of his escape had spilled him out on to Marshal Tito Boulevard, or Avenue or Drive or whatever. Of course they’d name every main road after the murderous old tyrant. If Lovric was still on his shoulder, this was surely his last joke. He started laughing again.
A man on the street stared at him as if he was crazy. Maybe he was. Marin saw a middle-aged woman looking askance and he stopped. When he showed her his palm, as if to say ‘no worries’, he noticed a tremor in it. He dropped his shaking hand, made a fist of it and walked on, anxious not to draw a crowd. Further down the road he asked a passer-by in English where he could find Stari Most.
‘You want bridge?’
Yes, the bridge. Of course, the bridge. The famous fucking bridge. He smiled the harmless smile of a foreign backpacker and nodded. How was the man to know he had recently transformed from terrorist to tourist?
Straight ahead, the fellow indicated: straight down this road, maybe two kilometres. You can’t miss it.
So he continued on Marsala Tita. It was a long, wide street with old buildings on either side, three or four storeys high. There was a stream of one-way traffic heading in his direction. Ahead of him a green mountain dipped steeply into a gorge through which, he knew from the map, the Neretva River ran. Taking his bearings, he figured the river was to his left.
It was still early, but a hot summer’s day was brewing. Marin took off his jumper and shoved it in the top of his pack. He stopped at an optometrist to buy a pair of sunglasses, replica Ray-Bans, and there he saw himself for the first time in a mirror. He’d washed in a riverbed a day ago, but the dirt seemed to be ingrained. With his ragged beard and red eyes, he looked like a hippy coming down from a mushroom trip. Further along he found a pharmacy and bought himself shaving gear, a tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush and a bottle of aspirin.
As he got closer to the old town, he started to see other foreigners. He heard a couple talking with American accents and approached them to ask if they knew a good place for breakfast. The young man was a TV version of a Yank, with a flat-top crew-cut, a freshly pressed shirt and chinos. He regarded Marin with alarm, as if Charles Manson had just tapped him on the shoulder. But his girlfriend was more than happy to give Marin directions to a ‘really cool place’ above the river. When she smiled at him, her boyfriend gave her a hard look. Best to wash and shave as soon as possible. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention.
But first he needed to eat. The smell of meat cooking somewhere on a grill was an irresistible lure. He had never been this hungry. He followed the girl’s directions into a side street and down a set of stairs that led to a terrace café. And there he stopped.
As hungry as he was, Marin was nonetheless transfixed by the scene in front of him. He’d seen pictures, of course, but no two-dimensional photograph could possibly convey the sense he had of having walked into the medieval past, into a still thriving corner of the Ottoman Empire. The fine, high arch of Stari Most, the Old Bridge, rose nearly thirty metres above the blue-green river, flanked by stone towers and minarets. The bridge, the towers and the surrounding buildings seemed to flow up organically from their footings in the raw, rocky banks of the river, all rendered from the same pale limestone. Behind his sunglasses, tears welled up as Marin was assailed by a wave of unexpected emotion.
He allowed an imperturbable Bosnian waiter to lead him to a table by a low stone wall overlooking the gorge. He ordered Turkish coffee and burek which came quickly. The waiter poured the sweet, silted black drink from a beaten-copper pot. His father, despite his hatred of the Turks, still made coffee like this. And with his first taste of the burek, Marin’s eyes moistened again as he remembered his mother in the kitchen, pressing spiced meats into a soft pastry, and the fragrance of them cooking in the oven. All around him in the bright sunshine young tourists chattered like songbirds. He had the strange feeling that he had stepped on to a stage set. He closed his eyes to blink away the tears and saw again, in the darkness, Lovric crumpling to the ground.
When Marin had finally devoured a long meal of many courses, the waiter, encouraged by a large tip, led him to a bathroom with a basin and a mirror. The steaming hot water seemed an incredible luxury and he stripped to the waist. He shaved off the ragged beard and washed away the accumulated sweat and grime, until the creature in the mirror more closely resembled the young Western wastrels en route to Istanbul, Tehran and Kabul on the hippy trail. It was a good enough impersonation. He cleaned up his mess and left the place.
Nearby he found a phone box with an intact local directory. He located the name he was looking for and an address on Ulica Gojka Vukovica. It was a short walk to the house and, by chance, there was a small café across the road from it. He took an outside table, pulled from his pack a battered copy of Sevastopol Sketches and settled down to wait.
Before midday the traffic dwindled to a few passing cars and then, echoing down the near empty street, came the call to prayer from a nearby mosque. The muezzin’s song, though redolent of the supplanted Ottoman faith, was not jarring to him. It seemed natural enough in this anachronistic place, yet he still felt offended by the idea that God was peering down at his puny undertakings from high above the minaret.
Then the front door of the house opened and an old man, wearing a good suit and a crimson fez, stepped into the street, dutifully answering the call to prayer. The man passed close by: he was a handsome, well-made fellow with white hair and pale blue eyes.
Marin waited a short while before crossing the road and knocking on the door. It was opened by a middle-aged woman who looked at him with a puzzled expression until he said: ‘Hello, Mother. It’s Marin.’