16 NOVEMBER 1991
MARIN MOVED FAST in a crouching run down the sunken road alongside the cornfield. An Osa tube bounced on his left shoulder. His Kalashnikov, hot from the recent engagement, was in his right hand. The skinny kid Ante Lovren was running in his peripheral vision, a missile held tight to his chest with a yellow glove. Jure Rebic was ten metres behind them, jogging with his sniper rifle at port arms. The deadly clatter of a heavy machine gun came in their wake. Tracers streaked over their heads.
Marin turned and saw that Rebic had slowed down.
‘Keep up, Rambo!’ he cried. ‘They’re on our tails.’
Rebic stopped and waved him on. ‘Go on! Don’t stop!’ he shouted. ‘If they come after us, I’ll make them pay.’
Now Marin stopped. ‘They’ll outflank you, Jure.’
‘Fuck off, you stupid insect, and get that Osa home,’ said Rebic. ‘We can’t afford to lose it.’
Marin knew Rebic was right. They were down to their last few missiles; they were no longer being resupplied and the tanks kept coming.
•
Rebic had woken him that morning with a report from a forward observer that a turtle—a T-84—was moving slowly towards their positions on the Trpinjska Road. A lone tank was unusual. The Serbs had recently changed their tactics, now sending tanks in groups of four to zigzag across the street, laying down smoke, firing into the walls of houses, pumping them full of tear gas and then ploughing into them. It was a demolition strategy to destroy concealed firing positions. Behind the tanks would come armoured personnel carriers, raking the streets and houses with heavy machine-gun fire.
Thanks to a lull in the bombardment it was a quiet morning, and they made a quick decision to go after the lone turtle. They lay well ahead of it, hidden on the edge of the sunken road. Rebic crawled into position with his rifle. Like Marin, he was an accomplished sniper; it was his job to take out the driver’s periscope, and then Marin and Lovren would rise quickly from the side of the road, load the tube and fire the missile.
Rebic hit his mark. But when Marin rose with the Osa, he immediately drew heavy fire from multiple positions ahead of the tank. An ambush. The lone tank was a decoy.
Bullets ripped through the air and tore up the ground in front of him. Marin and Lovren dropped down and returned fire. Attackers rose and moved forwards. Marin clocked them as Chetnik paras, Beli Orlovi, White Eagles. He knew they were in for a fight. The regular army was now using paramilitary troops like these to spearhead infantry operations.
The Chetniks were well organised and weaved their way towards them, keeping up cover fire as they came. When Marin saw they were in danger of being overwhelmed, he signalled for a fast retreat into the sunken road.
With Rebic now covering them, Marin and Lovren ran to the basement that served both as barracks and operational HQ for the Yellow Ants. Marin secured the precious Osa and pulled together a squad to go back for Rebic. They found him sauntering back down the sunken road as if he were returning from a football match.
‘They’re brave, but stupid,’ said Rebic, bug eyes popping with excitement. ‘I got their officer. Blew the fucking eagle right off his šajkača. Splashed them with his brains. They’ll have to wash him off their stinking uniforms. They ran around like headless chooks after that.’
Marin watched the Yellow Ants gather around to hug Rebic and pat his back. He was a bloodthirsty bastard, Rambo, but he was fearless.
•
When they were back safe in the basement, the bombardment began again, explosions loud and close. Pavlovic miraculously produced a smoked ham; he said it was the last one from his mother’s house. They sliced it up, shared it around and ate it on dry biscuits, washed down with warm gemnist.
‘Hey, Lovren,’ said Pavlovic, holding up a bottle of mineral water and peering into it. ‘Where’d you get this fucking Jamnica? Spoils the wine. It’s salty as a nun’s nasty.’
‘Scrounged a case of it from a basement like everything else, you ungrateful sod,’ said Lovren. ‘And don’t be blaspheming! My sister’s a nun.’
Pavlovic winked at him. ‘How do you think I know what it tastes like?’
When Lovren jumped up and lunged at Pavlovic, Marin caught him and pushed him back down.
‘Save it for the Chetniks,’ said Marin. ‘There’re plenty of them. Anyway, I didn’t know your sister was a nun.’
‘She’s not,’ said Lovren. ‘But that’s no excuse for blasphemy.’
An explosion rattled the building above them.
‘You think God’s going to help us out of this?’ asked Pavlovic. His edgy, animated body got moving and his arms waved about. ‘We’re fucking trapped here.’
‘He sent us a ham, didn’t he?’ said Marin.
‘My mother smoked that ham,’ said Pavlovic. ‘Not God.’
‘Well, praise be to your mum,’ said Marin. ‘It’s a fine ham. She wouldn’t have wanted the Chetniks to make a banquet of it.’
‘God abandoned us when he killed Blago,’ said Pavlovic and there was muttering among the Yellow Ants, some agreeing.
At the back of the room, where he lay on a pile of flour sacks, Jure Rebic suddenly opened his eyes.
‘Pavlovic, you fucking numbskull,’ he said, roused to anger. ‘God didn’t kill Blago Zadro. He was just too reckless for his own good.’
‘Too fucking brave,’ said someone.
‘Sure,’ said Rebic. ‘But it was a fucking Serb who killed him, and you should save every single bullet to kill one of them. That’s God’s message. An eye for an eye.’
‘How many of them are there?’ said Pavlovic, hunching his shoulders. ‘How many bullets do we have left?’
After an especially loud explosion, Rebic crept up the stairs, propped open the door and scanned the street with his riflescope.
‘Hey, Pavlovic,’ he yelled.
‘What?’
‘Isn’t your mother’s house just over the road?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘Because there’s a huge hole in the roof,’ said Rebic. ‘And I’m looking at a dozen hams hanging in there, that’s why, you lying cunt.’
They crowded up the stairs, to be sure that Rebic wasn’t joking, but sure enough, the absence of tiles now revealed a row of pinkish hams hanging in the rafters.
Pavlovic had tears in his eyes. ‘I was saving them for my mum,’ he said. His comrades took pity on him.
‘That’s nothing but a feast for Chetniks,’ said Rebic. ‘No way your mum’s coming back for those.’
When it was safe, a party of heavily armed scroungers climbed into the roof and retrieved the hams. They ate well that night, laughing like fools, until Matic broke one of his molars on a piece of shrapnel nestling deep in the ham.
•
The men’s morale was boosted by their feast, but Marin knew that Pavlovic had been right. They had very little ammunition left and only one missile for the Osa. They couldn’t destroy tanks with hams. He knew they could only hold out for one or two days more.
Looking around at the small band of men in the shelter, Marin had a powerful sense of déjà vu. It took him back to Bosnia in 1972 and the hours he’d spent trapped in a cave on Mount Radusa. Huddled inside were the remnants of the twenty Croatian insurgents who’d come to start a revolution against Tito. Now they were trapped like rats and they knew that they had no choice but to split up and run from the soldiers sent by Belgrade to destroy them. Those men had finally turned on each other and degenerated into a barely sane, demoralised rabble. Marin had been just twenty years old when he’d taken his brother’s place on that doomed mission. And he had been the only survivor.
Now, twenty years later, Marin felt a deep responsibility for the men under his command. He wondered what Blago Zadro would have done. Would he have asked them to fight to the last soul, to defend their neighbourhoods to the end? He found himself cursing Zadro for his crazy-brave recklessness.
Poor Blago had been out in the open on the street, heedless of danger, directing an attack on a group of tanks as he had done so many times before, issuing orders on his Motorola, which turned out not to be a magic wand after all. A raking burst of machine-gun fire from an unexpected direction cut Zadro down and that was it. He was gone, quick and simple. It was the end that Zadro himself had long expected and perhaps even welcomed. But his men had been shocked to find that he was mortal after all, and many of them felt as if they’d been suddenly orphaned.
The Yellow Ants and the Desert Rats had got together at the Mustang Bar that night to mourn and to drink and sing in his honour. They made up songs about Zadro, the Bata shoe factory worker who became a national hero. They carried a speaker outside and turned it towards the enemy in a display of defiance, to show that their spirit was unbroken. During the long night, they heard the Chetniks, close by in their own lines, getting more and more drunk as they tried to drown out the Croats with their own contemptible, mocking songs. Close to dawn, Marin took Jure Rebic up to a sniper’s position inside a partly destroyed roof. Eventually, a drunken Chetnik popped his head up to shout abuse at the Croats, and Rebic put a bullet in his face. Marin and Jure each took a slug of rakija, and had then gone back down to their men before the mortars began to fall.
•
Now Marin went to a private space with Zadro’s old Motorola. He knew what he had to do. They’d been under siege for eighty-seven days: eighty-seven days of the Serb bombardment; eighty-seven days of hunting and killing tanks; eighty-seven days of being hunted and killed themselves. The survivors had done everything that was humanly possible, except dying. It was time for them to retreat from Borovo. When Marin got through to Jastreb—the Hawk—their commander in the centre of the destroyed city, he got no argument but only praise and God’s blessing. It was Jastreb who gave the order: break out if you can, take as many men as possible, Vukovar is about to fall.
Marin took Jure Rebic aside first and told him the score.
‘Where will we go?’ said Rebic.
‘I’ve got a plan.’