A Spy's Life (55 page)

Their eyes traversed the scene. In front was a turning place where a battered truck stood, leaking oil on to the snow. It was obvious its wheels had become locked in the freezing slush. Beyond this was a large digger with its arm resting on the ground. A lot of tracks were visible in the snow, but no other sign of the vehicles shown in the aerial photographs. To their left the land shelved gently to form a depression, at the head of which was an opening in the earth. From this fanned caterpillar tracks of the digger.

Harland scanned the treeless slope to their right and wondered about the squat shepherd’s hut that hugged an outcrop of rock about two hundred yards up. He saw that the track led across the plateau and plunged down on the north side of the mountain. Here the snow was untouched by vehicles.

Eva muttered something about the place having a bad air. Harland didn’t reply. He was listening intently to the mountains and he wanted to make utterly sure they weren’t being observed. His eyes swept the whole scene again, taking in possible hiding places and routes of escape.

Eva inhaled. Visibly steeling herself, she went forward to the excavated area.

She bent down, grasped hold of something and heaved backwards. He went to help her and saw that large conifer boughs had been laid across the opening in the ground. They worked together to pull them away without getting down into the pit or letting their eyes stray to the earth. Soon they could no longer avoid it. The sun had surfaced in the east and threw a cold light into the pit.

What they saw was unmistakable. Eva drew back a few feet and looked down. Many remains were down there but only in a few cases was the natural configuration of a skeleton intact. The digger had worked against the general orientation of the bodies. The teeth on the end of the bucket had clawed across them laterally, mixing up the bones and leaving sets of long striations across the ground. Harland counted the remains of about twenty people, but realised that the grave was much deeper than he had originally thought. Bodies had been piled on top of each other. When the massacre was over they had filled the hole with rubble and junk with the result that before reaching the bodies, the excavator had had to remove a layer that included chunks of road tarmac, a car door, old tyres, a fridge and a buckled bed frame.

He got out his camera and began taking pictures, half his mind knowing that the camera would act as a barrier between him and the horror. He aimed the camera at the digger and the truck, taking care to include the registration plates. He stopped. Eva had sunk to her knees at the grave’s edge. Her face wore an expression of measureless pity. He moved to her side and saw what she was looking at. At the side of the pit was the skeleton of a child – a small boy, judging by the shorts and faded red T-shirt still visible. His hands were tied behind his back with wire. His skull was averted to the left, the mouth open. A little distance away was the complete skeleton of a man.

‘Was that his father?’ she asked simply.

Harland took two more pictures but he was no longer able to distance himself from the scene. His eyes welled with tears of outrage and horror. He thought of the heat of that day, the certainty in each man and child’s mind that the soldiers were going to do this monstrous thing. He thought of Tomas and the stumbling, tearful old man who was tricked into believing he was going to be saved. The casualness and cruelty of the act struck him as though he were witnessing it at that very moment. He thought of the jeering soldiers and wondered how they might remember that day and whether it haunted them as it had Tomas.

He was determined that nothing should be lost. He walked around the grave, shooting from every angle, climbed into the bucket of the digger and focused on some bone residues. He took pictures of the far wall of rock where the men had been executed and the bullets had chipped at the surface, of the shell casings that had been exposed by the movement of the digger and glinted on the ground. He made studies of how the wrists of the victims were bound with fence wire, of the crumpled shoes, of a green and red checked shirt and a belt buckle, which might subsequently be used to identify the victims. Then he walked over to the truck and let down the tailgate, to be confronted by half a skull lying on a mass of earth and bone fragments. He photographed this from close up, from above and from a distance.

He dropped down to Eva, overpowered by a sense of shame – shame for Tomas, shame for himself, shame for all men. It was by far the worst thing he had ever seen. Eva looked at him and shook her head slowly. After a little while he said they ought to be going because it wouldn’t be long before the men would arrive to finish the job. He needed to get back to Sarajevo with the pictures before all trace of the massacre had vanished.

She turned her face to him again. An act of commemoration was needed, she said. They must do something to recognise Tomas’s part in what had happened there. She did not use the words massacre or slaughter or war crime. What they were looking at didn’t have a word, but they both knew that it was the result of an incomprehensible hatred, just as evident in the treatment of the remains. Eva muttered that the people in the grave were no less loved now than they had been on the day they were killed. Harland hadn’t thought about it like that, and he realised how much she was feeling the loss of Tomas. He shook his head, not knowing whether it should be an act of commemoration or atonement.

At that moment they heard a loud report from the northern side of the mountain, not a gunshot but an explosion which sent two ravens wheeling into the air below them. They ran over to look down and saw the Isuzu on its side in flames about four hundred yards from them. The Bird and Ibro were nowhere to be seen. Harland took a few strides in the snow and then stopped, realising the car must have hit a mine. The road had been mined to protect the site from the curious but there wasn’t time to communicate this thought to Eva. He turned to see her gesturing up the hill to several figures who had issued from the stone hut and were now moving with difficulty through the snow down to the car.

Harland and Eva bent down and withdrew to the digger. Harland guessed the men had been sent to watch the site until the weather changed and work could begin again. They must have overslept or got bored – at any rate they hadn’t thought to look down to the plateau.

From where he stood he couldn’t see the car, but a little later the men, some of them dressed in old combat fatigues, reappeared, hauling Ibro along a bank of snow above the road. Their voices carried up the slope and it became obvious that they were moving directly towards them. Half of him wanted to run back down the way they’d come. But he couldn’t leave Ibro and The Bird. Without saying anything, they slipped back along the wall of rock, at the end of which they found a good hiding place in a crevice, behind some pine saplings. But it wouldn’t take two. He pushed Eva down and told her not to move, then scuttled around the top of the pit and down the other line of rock. He groped his way down to a point where the outcrop fell away into a void. He grasped hold of a narrow tree trunk and used it to swing round into a gap between two slabs. Below him was a drop of thirty feet.

Harland heard the voices come closer. A young man in a ski hat and leggings appeared and immediately noticed that the branches had been removed from the pit. He jogged to the edge, peered down and then shouted to the others. Two more came and finally a fourth man, dragging Ibro by the collar of his jacket. Harland saw he was cut on his head and bleeding from his right leg. He was prodded to the top of the pit and forced to kneel with his hands behind his head, whereupon they began questioning him. Much of it was abuse, but after a bit Harland recognised one or two of the words because of their similarity in Russian. He understood they were asking him who else had been in the car. Ibro looked up at his interrogators with silent contempt, for which he received several kicks and blows. At length they tipped him into the pit and told him to lie face down by a mangled skeleton. That gave them great amusement.

Harland waited with his face hugging the cold surface of the rock. If he moved a little he could just see where he’d left Eva. He prayed she wouldn’t do anything rash or betray her presence.

Suddenly the young man in the ski hat aimed his automatic weapon into the air and fired off a burst. Harland turned to see one of the pair of ravens crumple in mid-flight and fall to the ground. This seemed to upset two of his companions and they shouted and jabbed at him with their guns. A row ensued, but died as quickly as it had flared. It occurred to him that these men must have been in the paramilitary squad that had taken part in the massacre. They were being used to oversee the work because they could be relied upon to keep quiet. It was their crime as much as Kochalyin’s.

He became aware of the sound of a truck, grinding and labouring up the final stages of the track. A few seconds later it came into view, throwing up a jet of mud from its back wheels. It pulled up and another man in fatigues got out. The new arrival sauntered over to the pit to inspect Ibro and hurl a few insults his way. The others called him back. Cigarettes and a bottle of liquor were handed around and they fell to laughing and needling each other. It was the familiar, easy companionship of any group of men out on a job.

One of the five moved up to a flat piece of ground above the main plateau and pulled out a cellphone. He was obviously having difficulty getting a good signal and he paced around trying to find the best spot. Once or twice Harland thought he might be in danger of being spotted, but the man was too absorbed to notice him. After about ten minutes he shouted to the others and slid down the bank to rejoin them.

Harland was extremely cold. The muscles that had been torn in the top of his thigh after the air crash at La Guardia were playing up again. He rubbed his leg, clenched and unclenched his hands and worked his toes inside his boots. Then he looked at his gun, slipped the safety catch down towards the double action trigger and tried to estimate the number of rounds in the clip. He stared at the blotches of pale blue lichen on the rocks and padded the cleft in front of him with damp leaves so that he could look through without chafing his face. Occasionally he glanced over to where Eva was, but saw no movement.

He was now certain that The Bird must have been killed in the explosion, which meant their only option was to sit tight and wait until the men had finished their work that evening. Why the hell didn’t they get on with it? What were they waiting for, these cowherds and mountain men?

Another fifteen minutes passed. Harland pricked up his ears. He thought he’d picked up a faint throbbing in the air. Yes, it was the beat of a helicopter coming in from the north. He searched the sky and saw a Sikorsky rise above the wall of rock where Eva was hidden and curl up to the plateau. For a moment it hovered directly above him and he feared he would be spotted. He glanced over at Eva and saw a hand grasp a sapling to prevent it from being blown over in the downdraft. A leg of tan corduroy, however, was exposed for a few seconds. He raised the Glock and darted a look towards the trucks. The Serbs were shielding their eyes from the whirlwind of snow and grit. Thank God. They hadn’t noticed her.

The helicopter swung into the wind, and landed with its pointed snout slightly raised at the place where one of the men had used his phone. He remembered the rosette-shaped swirl in that exact same spot on the satellite picture. The helicopter had visited this place before.

In the corner of his eye he saw a movement. Ibro was using the distraction of the helicopter to haul himself down the pit on his belly. His shoulders were doing all the work; his right leg made no movement at all. The young man who had first noticed the disturbance of the branches caught sight of him and whipped round to spray the ground ahead of him with a well-aimed burst of automatic fire. The ricochets zinged into the rocks around Harland. Ibro’s head slumped down. His arms remained crooked in a push-up position. Harland was pretty sure he hadn’t been hit.

The helicopter’s rotor slowed with a whine and the blades began to droop towards the ground. Eventually the engine was shut down and the cabin doors opened. A smell of aviation fuel reached his nostrils. He didn’t dare to look up because he thought any movement would be seen from the helicopter. So he just held on, his right cheek pressed to the rock, watching the clouds out of his left eye and trying to ignore the insistent nagging of a bladder that had not been emptied since Sarajevo.

Harland picked up the murmur of respectful greetings. He lifted his head a fraction and saw that three men had got out of the helicopter, while the pilot remained at the controls. They had moved down the bank to the plateau and been led to the far side where they stood, looking down the side of the mountain. He could not see their faces but it was plain that an explanation was being given by the man who had made the telephone calls. He seemed anxious to please and there was much gesturing in the direction of the Isuzu.

Harland worked his head between the crack and looked out. The group had moved in his direction and spread out to reveal a figure standing squarely by the grave’s edge. He wore a dark grey overcoat and a black cap with ear flaps. His gloved hands were clasped in front of him as he contemplated the prone figure of Ibro.

Oleg Kochalyin was shorter than Harland had imagined, but he possessed a palpable presence. To Harland, now lying in excruciating discomfort, he completed the dismal fear of the old quarry, a fear that penetrated his being and made him weak and nauseous. He moved his eye from the crack and for a few seconds consciously stilled his panic. Then he glanced up and saw that the darkened sky, which he had somehow attributed to Kochalyin’s arrival, was in fact caused by a bank of low cloud that had snuffed out the sun and shrouded in mist the summit of the mountain.

He looked back at the group. Kochalyin had not moved and, as far as he could tell, had said nothing. He just stood taking everything in, his eyes flicking about him. He pointed to the branches pulled from the grave by Harland and Eva and asked something in Russian. The men did their best to follow what he was saying, then struggled to explain their failure to find out who had moved the branches. They looked at each other and fell silent. Suddenly, from above them, there was a noise which seemed to roll down the hill. It was a loud phut rather than a bang, followed by a more impressive rumble. Something had blown up inside the hut. The men shouted. He speculated that one of them had left the cooking gas on when they rushed to investigate the landmine explosion. At any rate, a fire had taken hold quickly and smoke was streaming from the door and one tiny window. Three of the men set off to rescue their possessions, paying no heed to the voices that ordered them to stay. Ultimately, thought Harland, these mountain men did exactly what they pleased.