14 SEPTEMBER 1991
AN EARTHQUAKE woke Marin Katich. Windows rattled in their frames. Plates, cups and cutlery shivered and clattered on the wooden table. A faded tourist picture went askew on its hook. It showed the old monastery from the other side of the Danube. In his flimsy cot, Marin felt rumbling vibrations through the floor. Across the room the two boys threw aside their blankets and ran to the window.
Peering through it, the dark-haired one cried: ‘Jebi sa!’ Fuck it! Fear raised the boy’s voice a few octaves.
The lad next to him leant forward, a hand on his friend’s arm, with strands of dirty blond hair hanging over his face all the way to his gaping mouth.
‘Get back from the window!’ Marin yelled, for he had identified the sound now. As he struggled out of the cocoon of his sleeping bag, he felt a stab of sadness. They were just kids, volunteers who’d come in with him last night on the almost empty armoured bus. The boys had huddled together as the bus took heavy fire on the cornfield road. He knew only that they had grown up together and were still pupils at the same school. Their names were Vinko and Mirko—but he couldn’t tell one from the other.
‘Th-they’re on t-top of us!’ The second boy struggled to get the words out.
As Marin made for them, the boys turned and sprinted into the next room. From the edge of the second-floor window, Marin saw a huge metal shape moving below and recognised the profile immediately. T-55. A main battle tank. Above the roar of its massive engine the tracks were clanking and squealing as one side braked for the fast right-angle turn into Slavonska. Other tanks were queued up behind it, braking and jostling for space so as to make the same turn. Their hatches were down.
The house was on the corner of Slavonska Street and Trpinjska Road, the main route into the city. Trpinjska was jammed with armour as far as he could see. He understood immediately that he was looking at the main thrust of the Serbian assault on Vukovar. The seemingly endless column of armoured vehicles was moving slowly, turrets swivelling as their long guns searched for targets.
Over the mechanised roar, Marin heard a racket from the next room. Boys shouting. A window thrust up. He rushed to the doorway to find the dark-haired boy at the open window, a long tube on his shoulder. An RPG loaded with a conical rocket. The boy was in the firing position, sighting down, knees bent, braced for the shot. Behind him, his friend shoved shanks of hair back over the top of his head to clear his eyes before shouting: ‘Now! Now!’
Marin threw up his arms. ‘No!’
At that moment the dark-haired boy depressed the trigger and a puff of black smoke spat out the back of the firing tube into the startled face of the blond kid. Then came the explosion in the tube and a ball of flame and super-heated air shot out the back, completely enveloping the boy’s head. The boy screamed and went reeling crazily across the room, his face seared by the blowback in the confined space.
Marin saw the rocket spear out of the tube. A forty-five degree shot into heavy armour at such close range was unlikely to be effective. He ran forwards.
Krump!
The air vibrated with the force of the explosion. Through the window he saw a ball of smoke and flame rising above the turret of a T-55 that was halfway through its turn into Slavonska Street. Marin grabbed the shooter by the collar and hauled him back into the room. The boy went sprawling to the ground and dropped the weapon. His friend was screaming, hands up to the blackened, cooked skin on his face.
‘Get down and shut up!’ Marin shouted.
He crouched and scuttled sideways across the floor, pulling down the injured boy, who had severe burns on one side of his face that had welded his left eye shut. The kid was useless now, and a liability.
Marin grabbed the uninjured boy by the shoulders. ‘Which one are you?’
‘Mirko.’
‘Okay, Mirko. Wrap something around Vinko’s face quick as you can and try to keep him quiet. We have to get out of here.’ He had no idea how long it would take the tank crews to figure out where the attack had come from.
There was a stash of arms in the room. He grabbed a Kalashnikov, slung it over his shoulder, and filled his coat pockets with loaded mags. There were RPG rockets in an open box—high-explosive warheads, but not shaped-charge rounds that could penetrate the armour of a battle tank. The boy’s shot would have caused superficial damage only.
He heard the hydraulics of the turret mechanism as the tank reacted in the street below. They had very little time. Mirko was trying to stifle his mate’s screams. Then Marin saw two Zoljas leaning against the wall. That was a weapon that could do some damage. He grabbed one for himself and threw one to Mirko.
‘The RPG’s no good,’ he hissed. ‘Take this Zollie.’
‘I don’t know how to use it,’ said the boy, his young face contorted with remorse.
Marin hauled him up. ‘We have to get out NOW!’
Together they hoisted up the injured boy. Vinko was whimpering in shock. His face was wrapped in a heavy metal T-shirt on which two screaming demons fought over a bell: Hell’s Bells. Marin was struck by the weirdness of it. AC fucken DC! In Vukovar!
They hauled Vinko out of the room and down the stairs, barely making it beyond the first flight when an explosion rent the air behind them. One of the tanks had fired point blank at the offending window. The shell exploded on the inner wall, taking out part of the roof along with it. Marin’s ears rang and his head pounded as he dragged the boys towards the back door. Rubble and plaster rained down, making pale ghosts of them.
The boys staggered like drunkards, but they didn’t stop moving. They made it out of the house as a second explosion brought down the rest of the roof and blew a cloud of debris through the doors and windows. Marin imagined the hot breath of a monster at their backs. Moving at a fast hobble, they made it through the backyards of half a dozen homes while the tanks continued to reduce the corner house to a pile of rubble.
Marin’s biggest fear was infantry. He expected to be hunted down by foot soldiers, but there was no small-arms fire and he had seen no troops on the ground when he’d first looked through the window. It didn’t mean, however, they weren’t there somewhere.
They came to an open field and he led the boys into it. There was a stone barn at the far end, a copse of trees and a low wall. He dragged them over the wall where the boys slumped down, exhausted. Mirko’s wide eyes were glassy and unfocused. The injured Vinko was silent, mercifully deep in shock. Marin set the two Zolja rocket tubes against the wall, took the AK-47 off his back and crawled to a gateway to look back into the field.
Still no Serb infantry. He was puzzled. Perhaps they were waiting in reserve, expecting the Croats to retreat at the sight of the massed tank assault. If so, it was a bad mistake. Back on Trpinjska Road sporadic explosions continued.
Marin took out a cigarette pack, shook out two and lit them. He put one in Mirko’s mouth and watched as the boy dragged hard on it, coming to his senses. Both of them were useless to him now: one was out of the game, the other would have to take care of him. Little wonder military planners valued weapons that maimed, not killed; each injury tied up a number of opponents.
‘Mirko,’ he said, holding the boy’s shoulders, looking into his reddened eyes. ‘Do you think you can manage to get him to the hospital?’
‘Yes. They told us it’s through the cornfields, back towards Vukovar.’
‘Go now. Leave that Zollie. Take no weapons. You see any Serbs, act like you’re civilians caught in crossfire.’
‘Okay.’
‘Go! Go! Your mate is badly hurt. He needs you.’
•
When they disappeared into the cornfield, Marin took stock. He had the two Zoljas, the AK and plenty of ammo. He picked up one of the anti-tank weapons and hefted the heavy tube, examining the firing mechanism. It was simple enough, and he quickly worked out that it was designed to telescope out to nearly twice its length, bringing up the front and back sights. He knew these Zollies were single-use weapons: once you’d fired off the rocket already inside it, the tube was useless.
Marin sat with his back to the wall and lit another cigarette, listening to the distant rumbling of tanks. He had arrived the night before to join the defence of Vukovar, and now, this very day, the city was facing a massive attack. He supposed he was seeking redemption. When he was young, not much older than the two hapless boys struggling through the cornfield, he had seen men die as sacrificial lambs for the cause of liberating Croatia. It was almost twenty years since he had joined his father’s ill-fated military mission into Bosnia. He had not signed up back then because he was inspired by the cause that had driven his deluded companions to their deaths. Instead, he had insisted on going as a replacement for his damaged brother, knowing that Petar would surely have died if he had gone with the others. For most of the twenty volunteers it turned out to be a suicide mission; Marin had been the only survivor. In running battles, he had used his skill as a sniper to kill men from a distance. Yes, they had been his enemies and would surely have killed him if they could have, but their ghosts were unforgiving. They never let go of him.
•
Vukovar was completely different to the Bosnian fiasco. The people here had done nothing more than dare to seek independence from Belgrade’s totalitarian rule. The city had been under siege and a mere handful of defenders faced overwhelming odds: the entire force of the corrupted central state had been mobilised to crush them. The merciless man responsible for that, the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, sat at the heart of power in Serbia. Although the edifice of the Yugoslavian state was crumbling, Milosevic still controlled immense military power, and he had chosen to direct it against the Croat rebellion in Vukovar. If the independence movement was destroyed there, he reasoned, it would evaporate throughout the rest of Croatia, sending a message in blood to other fractious republics.
Milosevic’s power resided in the so-called Peoples’ National Army (the JNA), which was made up of tens of thousands of professional troops and conscripts drawn from every part of Yugoslavia. Its vast mechanised divisions included many hundreds of tanks and artillery battalions. It was a force that had been amassed decades earlier, designed to resist a Soviet invasion. As well as the armoured divisions, there was an air force of MiG fighter planes, ground-attack aircraft and helicopters. Added to this formidable array were newly formed Serbian paramilitary formations, and Marin knew that these men, led by such criminals as the psychopath Arkan, would give no quarter, would obey no rules and would treat Croatian civilians—men, women and children—as enemies to be slaughtered.
Marin believed that the fate of Vukovar and its people was a cause worth fighting for; even worth dying for. He understood that this was the fight for which he had been raised from infancy. No matter what he thought about his father’s motives in inculcating this idea in him, no matter how much he distrusted Ivo, and no matter that the old man had succumbed to the darkness in his soul, Marin reasoned that he was not like his father; that he was not, in essence, his father’s son. He longed to find in this war the kind of clarity that his whole life had lacked. He longed for a purpose, something pure to believe in. Here he had found it.
•
Marin crushed the cigarette and pulled out his city map. He saw that his instincts had been right. An unchecked armoured assault down Trpinjska Road from the north would soon threaten the city centre. But the map showed a canal running behind the fields, which should provide cover much of the way back to the road. He had no idea where to find the other defenders, but he resolved to do whatever he could. There was no time to waste. He strung the two Zoljas over his shoulder, checked the Kalashnikov, and ran in a crouch to the canal. Once in it, he moved quickly towards the road.
But as he got closer, a massive explosion rocked him. A torrent of flame and smoke rushed into the clear sky. Marin climbed the bank, lifted his head above the edge and saw a burning tank in the middle of Trpinjska, its turret half blown off. A blackened, smoking creature emerged from a hatch like a charred chrysalis and rolled off the hot steel deck to the ground, writhing there until a burst of automatic fire tore it up.
Marin could see that caught behind the destroyed tank were six others now backing and turning, tracks squealing. They were twitching, as live animals do in response to danger. Their long guns shivered, their machine guns sprayed blindly into the nearest buildings.
From the ground floor of a house behind the tanks came the flaming arc of a missile. It hit the last tank and up it went. Marin heard an explosion and a secondary blast as the tank’s munitions detonated, incinerating the crew inside. He registered horror at their fate, but felt at the same time a surge of elation that the defenders were holding their ground.
Then a man darted out into the street and threw a package into the moving tracks of one of the tanks now trapped between the burning wrecks. As the fellow turned to run, the package exploded too soon and his flimsy figure was catapulted through the air. But his sacrifice was not in vain: the makeshift bomb shattered the tank’s track and the remaining length of it wheeled off as the thing tried to back away, its metal tread buckling and screeching until it juddered to a halt.
Two men ran onto the road and dragged the body of the first attacker back into a house. Again Marin was surprised at the absence of infantry to defend the tanks. The Serb commanders must have thought this would be a picnic. They had counted on the opposition melting away at the mere sight of the tanks.
‘You there! Stay where you are!’
Marin turned slowly, cursing himself for his carelessness: he had been caught, completely vulnerable. It was too late to bring his weapon to bear. His back tensed. Facing his inquisitor, he raised his arms away from the AK. The man had a short-barrelled automatic weapon slung on his back and a walkie-talkie in his right hand. He wore a neat grey uniform. A patch on his shoulder read Policija—so, paramilitary police.
‘Move slowly, friend. I don’t want to shoot you if I don’t have to.’ The man spoke calmly. ‘Who are you?’
‘Illija Lovric,’ said Marin, using the alias he had lived under for years, the name of an old comrade who had died on the Bosnian mission in 1972. He carried false papers under that name. He could have reverted to Marin Katich, for this was perhaps the one place it would be safe to do so, but he didn’t want to exist here under the shadow of his father’s connections to the wartime Ustasha. Marin knew that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sons of the diaspora had come here to join the fight for Croatian independence and he had seen that many of them identified strongly with the old Ustasha, its ideology and its imagery.
‘When did you get here?’ the man asked.
‘I came in last night from Zagreb.’
‘The Cornfield Road?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was it?’
‘Hot,’ said Marin. ‘We took heavy fire.’
‘That’ll be the last transport. You got here just in time. We can use those Zollies. Come with me.’
Marin glanced back to the Trpinjska Road. The surviving tanks were in retreat, rapidly backing out around the smoking hulks of the disabled machines.
‘Come on!’ the policeman repeated. ‘The boys have stopped them here. The attack has split into side streets. We have to hit them in Slavonska.’
Marin climbed back down into the canal. The man clapped him on the shoulder and stared into his face for a moment. Marin saw no hint of fear in the man’s eyes, but he caught a spark of something like ironic humour.
‘Good man,’ the policeman said. ‘No stupid questions. I like that.’ Then he turned away, walking fast down the canal. Marin kept pace by his side. ‘Name’s Blago Zadro. I’m in charge of this zone, if anyone is.’
Zadro was a short, slim man—in his forties, Marin guessed, roughly the same age as himself. The policeman had a perfect Roman nose, bow-shaped lips and neatly combed dark hair. He looked more like a French actor than a military leader—a quirky lead perhaps, playing the role of a municipal mayor during the Nazi occupation, an unlikely man forced to rise to the occasion. The Motorola crackled and Zadro spoke into it, telling someone that he was on his way to Slavonska Street. He told them that the tanks must not get through. They must be stopped at any cost.
Zadro led them towards the sound of a battle. Close now, they climbed to look over the edge of the canal. This was Slavonska Street. At the far end, perhaps three hundred metres away, a disabled tank was smoking and crackling with secondary explosions. Were it not for the burning tank, Slavonska would have seemed like an ordinary suburban street with a single row of two-storey houses on either side. As Marin had already learned, behind those houses was farmland; there were patches of forest and cornfields left to grow high during the long summer. Most of the houses were white with steep red-tiled roofs and narrow front yards fenced in and gated. They were the simple homes of ordinary folk in the Borovo district: farmers, shopkeepers, mechanics, shoe factory workers. Marin knew that many of the men had sent their families west to stay with relatives in safer towns, and then stayed to defend their own neighbourhoods. Their cars were still parked on either side of the street—nothing fancy, mostly locally built Yugos. In a gap between vehicles, he saw three men crouched behind a Second World War vintage howitzer. It had armour plating around the short barrel and was sandbagged, but it was still exposed in the street.
‘Brave boys,’ said Zadro. ‘Our Borovo artillery is from ancient history.’
The telltale roaring and clanking started up again at the end of the street.
‘Here they come,’ cried Zadro.
Marin saw the long barrel of a gun emerge first as a tank crawled from behind the burning wreck. As soon as it cleared the obstacle, the tank spat a ball of flame and the heavy body of the machine rocked back on the recoil. Again, Marin thought of it as a living thing, a great beast bracing itself for a shock. The wall of a white house exploded twenty metres beyond the men cowering behind the howitzer. The moving tank gathered itself, fired again, and another shell flew over the heads of the crew into the disintegrating white house. Rubble rained on their backs, but the men at the gun moved methodically, without panic, aiming and firing down the centre of the street at the oncoming tank. They missed by a wide margin and, as they scrambled to reload, the tank fired again, hitting a small yellow car, which flipped and tumbled away behind the defenders.
It was a duel fought with fierce intensity. The howitzer fired and missed again, and the tank continued to rumble towards it, its machine gun raking the street ahead. Another tank now made its clanking way around the smoking wreck and Marin saw that the lopsided battle would soon be over. He began to climb out onto the street, but the policeman hauled him back by the collar.
‘Wait!’ Zadro yelled.
As Marin rocked back onto his haunches, two men with RPGs on their shoulders rose from the front garden of a house adjacent to the approaching tank. From close range, both fired into the tank tracks. Behind the smoke rising from the dual explosions, the men ducked back inside the house. The turret gun wheeled towards them and blew a huge hole through the front wall. Marin hoped the men had had the sense to relocate.
They had stopped the tank’s forward motion. The driver tried to reverse, but it was crippled. The howitzer’s crew re-set their gun and fired again into the vulnerable moving turret. This time an explosion enveloped it in flame.
A third tank cleared the wreckage. Two of them now came fast down the long straight road in staggered formation. The brave howitzer had drawn them out and both fired at it on the run. One shell passed high over the crew, the other struck close by, raising a torrent of concrete and shrapnel that knocked the howitzer onto its side and sent the men sprawling to the ground.
‘Now!’ shouted Zadro and hit Marin hard on his shoulder. As he scrambled onto the street, looking for a firing position, the surviving crew of the maimed tank came tumbling out of its damaged turret. Marin saw a man run into the street firing full automatic bursts at the escaping tank crew. Several of them went down.
‘Go!’ the man shouted to him. ‘I’ll bring the tanks this side. You kill them.’
Marin reached cover beside the now-abandoned tank and went down on one knee. He put one Zolja down and telescoped the other into its firing position. The two tanks bore down fast on his position, tearing up the street. The air seemed to vibrate from the tremendous power of their engines and a tremor of fear passed through Marin’s body.
He yelled at the top of his voice, allowing a primal scream to escape from him, like a physical thing. The tanks’ machine gunners fired steadily to the left, drawn that way by the lone fighter, and it gave Marin a moment to prepare. As he drew a bead on the first behemoth, he was startled to see a tiny orange vehicle come hurtling out of a side street and swing into its path. It was a Zastava 750, a toy car, someone’s absurdist statement. Marin paused in disbelief. He thought of the man with shopping bags, who stopped a tank in Tiananmen Square, but there was no mercy here. With a sickening, grinding scream, the great beast accelerated right over the top of it.
As the tank tipped back down from the orange wreckage and the crushed remains of the driver, Marin fired. The missile hit it sweetly, tore through its armour and caused a massive internal explosion. He took shelter as steel shrapnel rained down.
He felt a hard thump on his arm and looked up to see a gibbous-eyed man with a crazy grin. It was the fellow who had risked his life to give him cover.
‘Fire and move!’ the man yelled. ‘Follow me!’
Marin scooped up the second Zolja and ran after the man to the left side of the street and through the door of the nearest house. He followed his guide to the back of the house and outside again. The man stopped and leant in close. His breath smelled incongruously of peppermint.
‘Another turtle to fry!’ he said, before haring off through the backyards with their torn-down fences. They came out of a house behind the last of the tanks that had ventured into Slavonska Street. The panicky machine was rapidly backing out of the killing zone. The loss of three tanks, all smoking hulks, had halted the assault. But Marin had no intention of ending the lesson here.
He telescoped the Zolja and knelt by the front gate of the house. The tank was about one hundred metres away when his missile ploughed into its vulnerable rear. A column of flame, perhaps fifty feet high, burst through the turret hatches. The machine was a giant Roman candle—and yet it kept rolling towards him. He heard men screaming inside. A low hatch flew open and two blackened, wretched creatures scrambled from what had become a slow-moving coffin.
Marin dropped the empty tube and ran towards them, but his companion was nearer, weapon already at his shoulder. He shot down the flailing men with two short bursts, whooping for the sheer joy of it. Then he walked over to the crumpled bodies in their still-smoking uniforms and put a bullet in each of their heads. The flaming tank rolled on past them, crunched into a parked car and stopped.
‘We need to go,’ the man said. ‘We can’t stay here.’
Marin stared at him. ‘We could have taken them prisoner,’ he said.
‘Are you crazy? Did you see what their mates did to poor old Tunic? Crushed him like a bug in his little Fico. They would have killed us without blinking.’
‘They might have had intel.’
‘It was a mercy killing. You burned them up; I ended their misery. Anyway, no use crying over spilt blood. We have to report to Blago. You know him?’
‘Yes.’
‘The command post is not far. I’ll take you.’
He followed the fellow into the house and they made their way back down the passageway through the backyards. Marin’s battlefield euphoria had gone. He was silent, brooding on the killings. His dreams would be full of the screams of burning men. His own ghosts were restless, clamorous. They seemed to be speaking all at once. He could make nothing out except their remorseless anger. Then the man beside him brought him back to reality.
‘You’re a strange one,’ he said. ‘What’s your name, new guy?’
‘Lovric,’ said Marin. ‘Illija Lovric.’
‘You’re not from Vukovar, I think. Not with that accent.’
‘I grew up in Australia.’
‘Oh! I always wanted to go to the Australian Open.’ The man stopped, clapped Marin on the shoulder, took his right hand and pumped it briskly. ‘I’m Jure. Jure Rebic, from Split. Not so far as Australia. No kangaroos there. It’s only famous for a rabbit.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The greatest rabbit on the tennis circuit.’
Marin puzzled about this for a moment, and then it came to him. ‘Ivanisevic?’
‘Goran, yes, of course, the great Zec. I could have been his manager, but I had some trouble over a little South American import business …’
Rebic paused and, when Marin looked at him in confusion, he put a finger up to one nostril and gave a loud sniff. ‘Ha!’ he cried. ‘Got your attention now. Colombian marching powder works real good in battle. Keeps you running, fast as the rabbit, faster than bullets. You need anything, anything, come see me.’
‘I’ve got no money.’
‘Ah, money’s useless here anyway unless you’ve got dollars or deutschmarks. You got them?’
Marin shook his head and Rebic laughed.
‘Okay. Get me a ham—liberate a good Dalmatian ham, I’ll give you a gram. Just don’t tell Blago. He’s not a real cop, but the uniform might give him ideas.’
‘Not a real cop?’
‘Hell, no. He’s a politician. They made him a cop so he could train up the locals as a military outfit. Belgrade has the army, Zagreb has the cops. That’s how they did it, under the noses of the fucking Serbs. Mind you, we’re still outnumbered a million to one.’
•
The command post was in an innocuous house on a quiet street that had not yet been visited by tanks. The place was full of men fresh from the battlefield. There was a pub over the road—the Mustang Bar—and someone had procured bottles of bourbon. A bottle was tossed to Rebic as the two of them entered, and he passed it straight away to Marin.
‘The Australian first, boys,’ he announced. ‘This is Illija Lovric, our new comrade. He deserves a drink. Got here last night and destroyed two tanks this morning. Ziveli!!’
‘Ziveli!’ said Marin.
He took a nip from the bottle and passed it back to Rebic. There were shouts of approval and welcome. Several of the fighters came up to greet him, among them a big man, so tall that Marin found himself looking up at him; there were few men in that category. The giant wore a camouflage jacket over a Hawaiian shirt and old blue jeans; a black pork pie hat was moulded onto his large head. He clapped Marin hard on the shoulder and addressed him in English.
‘You don’t look much like no koala bear,’ he said in a low growl that Marin realised could easily turn threatening. But the giant only smiled and gripped his hand. ‘I’m Zjelko. What will we call you? Maybe Bondi Boy? I bin to that beach. Many years ago.’
‘Illija.’
‘That’s no good. That’s any old name.’
Marin thought for a moment and opted for the truth: ‘When I was younger, they called me Cvrčak.’
‘Cvrčak! That works too good. We love insects. My little band of brothers, see, we’re the “Yellow Ants” Zutri Mravi. You join us, yes? Kill some more tanks. Jure is one of us. We call him Rambo.’
•
Marin watched Blago Zadro move among his men. He still clutched the walkie-talkie in his right hand and he waved it like a wand, bestowing praise on one man, offering heartfelt commiserations to another who had lost a close friend, brotherly love to the next, a kind uncle’s smile to the one after that. Marin realised his first impression of the man had been right. Zadro had the unfeigned charisma of a natural leader. A politician, Jure Rebic had said. That was true enough, but there was something simple about him. Zjelko the giant told him that Zadro had no military training at all, far from it; before all this started, he’d been an ordinary worker at the Bata shoe factory, but not an ordinary man, as it turned out. He had been shrewd enough to devise a strategy to stop the tanks.
‘Brothers,’ said Zadro, addressing them all. ‘These days will be the hardest. Some more of us will die, but today we have pushed back their attacks, we are destroying their tanks. You see how much material damage they have done to us, but we showed them our strength, we showed them our courage and we showed them that we know how to fight for our homes. These are our homes here. We have placed our flag and no one will take it. This will never be someone else’s land. Now come. Come, Zjelko, bring your Yellow Ants, and bring over the Rats. Let’s have our picture taken for history.’
‘Where’s my hat?’ said Zjelko, throwing his huge arm over Zadro’s shoulder. Someone tossed him the hat, another brought over a bottle of Jack Daniels, which quickly passed from hand to hand.
‘Come on, Rambo.’ Zadro drew them into a tight group in front of the bar. ‘And you too, handsome,’ he called to Marin. ‘One picture. A group picture.’
Marin found himself welcomed into this band of men whose courage could not be doubted. He felt he was finally home.
‘Here we are,’ Blago laughed, calling the camera in closer. ‘Get the shot. The brigade of the Mustang Bar, the Mustang Ustashi from Trpinjska. Ha ha ha ha!’