War Baby (37 page)

Webb shook his head.

‘Ryan’s talked to me a lot about her, told me all the things I never knew. I think I can let her rest now. Make up my own mind about things.’

‘That’s good, Jenny.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is good, isn’t it?’

Musiç was there to see them off when the convoy left for Jajce, a cigarette between his fingers. ‘Once you’re in,’ he said, ‘stay in the command post and don’t try and move around.’

Webb looked at Jenny. They had not come all this way to sit in a bunker.

He led the way to an ancient Citroen at the rear of the convoy. Webb volunteered to sit in the back; they both knew that was the most dangerous place to be because you couldn’t get out as fast if you were fired on.

‘We’ll try and get you out again,’ Musiç said. ‘But I can guarantee nothing.’

‘We’ll take our chances,’ Webb said.

‘Of course.’

They climbed in. Their driver started the engine, then touched the prayer beads that hung from the rear-vision mirror, for luck.

‘Stay alive,’ Musiç shouted as they drove off.

‘Insh’allah,’ Webb whispered under his breath.

Their driver’s name was Hajruhdin Hosiç. He conformed to the dress code of all non-observant Moslems: blue jeans, denim jacket, white socks and loafers. His hair was long on top and cut short at the sides. He might have looked like any fashion-conscious Levantine Arab except for the blood-soaked wound dressing on his forehead.

They followed the convoy of ambulances and trucks as they set off in the darkness down the road towards Jajce. Webb and Jenny put on their flak jackets and blue UN helmets.

As they passed the last checkpoint a Bosnian soldier waved to them. ‘Stay alive!’

‘That’s wearing a bit thin,’ Jenny said.

Webb shrugged. ‘I think they mean well.’

Hosiç turned off the headlights and the pace of the convoy slowed to a crawl.

‘This help just a little,’ he said. ‘Sniper has night sight, yes? Also they hear us on road, they send mortar and rocket. Boom-boom!’

Webb saw the silhouettes of wrecked and burned-out vehicles by the side of the road.

They drove on in morose silence, waiting for the cataclysm.

* * *

Time contains its own paradox; even Einstein knew about it and as far as Webb knew, Einstein had never been in a war zone. But he had decided that if someone wanted to live longer, they should spend their whole life in a war zone. He had known minutes of terror that seemed to last hours; while back in the tranquility of Lincoln Cove a weekend could pass in a few minutes.

The tension inside the car was palpable. On an impulse he reached forward and took Jenny’s hand. He felt the answering pressure.

There, that was it.

Redemption.

There was no way of knowing where they were. It was black outside and there was no moon. Sometimes Jenny had to put her head out of the passenger window to tell Hosiç how far they were from the edge of the road.

‘How much further?’ he said.

‘Nema problema,’ Hosic said.

No problem.

* * *

Problem.

A mortar round hit the truck directly in front of them. There was an orange rush of flame as the petrol tank exploded, flaring briefly in the darkness, and the dull thud of an explosion. Hosiç yelled out in alarm, braked hard. The fireball illuminated a dirt track through the trees. He gunned the engine and drove straight for it. The Citroen’s motor screamed in protest.

Stones and shrapnel metal pinged against the thin metal skin of the car. Webb twisted around and looked out of the back window. The truck was still in flames; he could see silhouettes in the darkness as the survivors scrambled clear.

There was another fireball further along the road. The Serbians had found the range.

The Citroen bounced over the track. Webb was thrown onto the floor, jarring his spine, and he yelled in pain. Jenny spun around, thinking he was shot. She shouted something at him, but he could not hear her over the scream of the car’s engine.

Hosiç changed down into first gear and pushed his foot flat to the floor. ‘
Nema problema
,' he shouted.

Right. No problem.

* * *

Ten minutes by Webb’s watch, ten long minutes of jarring pain in his spine, waiting for sniper fire or mortar fragments to blast through the windows, braced against every jolt and roll of the Citroen. Tree branches cracked against the windows as they careered along the track. Suddenly they were out of the forest and on to a tarmac road. Webb groaned with relief.

The black shells of bombed-out houses loomed from the darkness. No lights, no sign of life at all.

‘Jajce,’ Hosiç said.

They rattled across a bridge and Hosiç made two more hard turns. Then he slammed on the brakes and immediately jumped out of the car and threw open the doors.

‘Hurry, please hurry,’ he said.

‘
Nema problema
,’ Jenny said. Webb, if his back had not been causing him so much pain, would have laughed at that. He admired her nerve; it took a special kind of cool to make jokes under pressure. It reminded him of Sean Ryan.

Hosiç grabbed Jenny’s arm, dragged her into the shadows. Webb hobbled after them.

Jajce’s Command HQ was in the basement of a pizzeria, or what was left of it. The old shop above had been completely destroyed by shellfire. It was cold and dank and crowded with refugees who were all huddled together, shivering in their wet clothes. Soldiers were propped against the walls, glassy-eyed with fatigue. They smoked cigarettes, rifles cradled in their arms, staring listlessly at the walls.

The commander’s name was Gerovic. He looked up in amazement as they entered. He and Hosiç had a hurried and whispered conversation and then he turned back to Webb and Jenny.

‘Presna? You must be crazy.’

‘Hugh Webb, IPA. This is Jenny Ngai, she’s a freelancer.’

‘Crazy,’ he repeated. ‘Why would you want to come here?’

‘We want to tell the world your story,’ Jenny said.

‘Our story? Our story is easy. We are dying.’ He shook his head, reached for the cigarettes on the desktop and lit one. ‘You were lucky to get through. Two of the trucks and an ambulance were destroyed. But now you are here please make yourself welcome.’ He made a sardonic gesture that embraced the huddled and miserable humans crouched in the basement. ‘Enjoy our hospitality.’

The muscles in Webb’s back went into spasm. He winced and eased himself down on to the cold floor.

‘Are you hurt?’ Gerovic asked.

‘Jarred my back,’ Webb said. ‘I’ll be okay.’

Gerovic laughed, a short, humorless bark. ‘How can you be okay,’ he said, ‘when you have just fought your way into hell?’

* * *

Webb lay in the darkness, listening to the shelling. They had thrown their sleeping bags onto the cold cement floor and were curled up inside them, trying to stay warm. A few feet away, the Moslem commander pored over ancient maps of the city by candlelight, occasionally shouting orders into a telephone. After his initial chilly greeting he completely ignored them. He had too many other problems to worry about a couple of crazy journalists.

Webb felt Jenny curl her body against him, for warmth. ‘How’s Mickey?’ she whispered.

‘She’s fine.’

‘Are you still seeing each other?’

‘I’m too young to settle down.’

‘She’d be good for you.’

He didn’t answer her. She was quiet for a long time and he thought she had gone to sleep. But then she whispered: ‘Have you been worried about me?’

‘An understatement.’

‘Is that why you’re here?’

‘No. Yes. Partly.’

‘Well, that’s clear.’

‘Let’s say I’m mixing business with ... worry.’

She patted his shoulder. Infuriating girl. And yet, he was proud of her, prouder than he would ever care to admit. If there was one thing he had really got right in his life, she was it.

A massive explosion, very close, and the whole cellar seemed to lurch to the side. Women screamed. Dust and plaster fell from the ceiling. Then one of the soldiers said something, and his companions laughed. It had been close, but not too close. They were still alive.

‘I never ever thanked you, did I?’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘For everything. For the last ten years.’

It was the last thing he had expected to hear from her. He didn’t know what to say. Before she left the States, the old Jenny would never have dreamed of saying that.

‘It’s okay,’ he mumbled.

‘You’ve been a good father, Uncle.’

A while later she was asleep. There was a time when he too was able to sleep with the sound of shells exploding nearby, but not anymore.

* * *

But he did fall asleep eventually, waking with a start just before dawn. Something was wrong. It took him a few moments to realize what it was: the shelling had stopped.

He sat up, painfully. His back had stiffened during the night. He shook Jenny’s shoulder. Her eyes blinked open and she was instantly awake. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s stopped. Come on.’

They climbed out of their sleeping bags. Gerovic had his head on the table, asleep. The candle had burned down and the wax had leaked across one of the maps. They picked their way over the sleeping bodies of the soldiers and refugees. Only one of them was awake, an old man in a dressing gown and slippers, listening to Bach on a Walkman.

Webb and Jenny crouched behind a wall, straining their ears to the icy silence. There was hardly a sound because almost everyone was living underground.

Light seeped into the eastern sky, and the mountains and the ancient castle loomed, forbidding, through the grey autumn haze.

Jajce was an ancient fortress town at the confluence of the Urbas and Pliva rivers. The ruins of an old castle loomed over shingle roofs and the white and green stucco dome of a mosque. It would have been a pretty town once. But before the war, they told him, the smog from the nearby factories had left a creeping chlorine haze over the town, obscuring the rose gardens and the whitewashed houses.

It was where Tito and the leaders of the Partisans had proclaimed themselves the legitimate government at the end of 1943, creating Yugoslavia. In honour of the event, some of the oaks and beeches on the surrounding hills had been cleared to spell out the name ‘Tito’ in letters climbing three hundred feet up the mountain.

But since his death bushes and new saplings had been allowed to grow over this natural monument and now the Serb artillery and snipers had found cover in the regrowth.

Much of the town had been leveled; the streets strewn with bricks and broken glass and empty shell casings. A tree lay across the road, splintered halfway up the trunk. Pieces of bitumen had been ripped out of the road by mortars, and a broken television set lay upside down on the footpath. Most of the buildings had been gutted to shells, the remaining walls pockmarked by shrapnel and blackened by fire. The stench of refuse and human waste permeated everything.

‘Christ, look at that.’

It was a dog, the only thing moving on the street. It had something in its mouth. Webb wasn’t immediately sure what it was, but as the wretched creature came closer it gave a cough and dropped its precious cargo on the ground. It was a human foot.

Jenny immediately scrabbled for her camera and ran off half a dozen quick frames. He watched her, with a feeling of both nostalgia and revulsion. He had been like that once, obsessed with finding the one great photograph that would explain the world to itself, something that would make those at home rebel and throw up their hands and cry ‘Enough!’

But that was before he realized that those images were the ones that people secretly enjoyed, and that they would never cry ‘Enough’ because there was never the supply to meet an insatiable demand.

An old woman came out and started adjusting sandbags in front of the shattered windows of her house. The garden was still flowering with the last of the summer roses, and a child’s three-wheeler lay on its side in the front yard. Webb photographed the old woman from across the street. Then she heard or sensed something that he could not, and ran inside.

The early morning fog had protected them from snipers and precluded accurate artillery fire. But as a yellow-white sun rose over the mountains, the mist began to bum off and the tormentors on the hillside lobbed the first of the day’s ordnance onto the town.

In the hush Webb even heard the sound of the shell leaving the barrel. A few seconds later there was an explosion on the other side of the town and a plume of smoke rose behind the pockmarked silhouette of the mosque’s minaret.

The next mortar landed a hundred meters away in the street. Sixty-millimeter, Webb guessed. There was a thud and a puff of white smoke.

They threw themselves on to the ground. ‘Where to?’ he shouted, desperately looking for shelter.

‘Over there,’ she shouted.

He looked up, saw someone in a green gown scuttling down some basement steps on the other side of the street. They stood up and ran, crouched over, braced against the next shell burst. Webb caught a glimpse of a skip full of bloody bandages, a swarm of black flies hovering above it.

A hospital.

Another mortar landed, closer this time. Shrapnel zipped over their heads. They scuttled down some stone steps and into the subterranean ward of Jajce’s hospital.

It took Webb a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

‘Well, bugger me,’ he heard a voice say. ‘The Spiderman returns.’

Webb would have known that voice anywhere.

It was Ryan.

* * *

There were two rooms with bare cement floors and walls, perhaps fifty or sixty soldiers and civilians crammed in side by side. There appeared to be no heating and no power. Webb stared. A few feet away a surgeon in a blood-spattered green gown was operating on the leg of a screaming child while a nurse held a torch; on the next cot a young woman with a chalk-white face stared vacant-eyed at the ceiling, two bloodied stumps where her legs should have been.

Somewhere, a man was screaming. The place stank of antiseptic and blood. A shell landed very close, and the walls shook. No one seemed to pay any attention.

Ryan was sitting on the floor, his back propped against the wall, shivering. He had just a thin woolen blanket around his shoulders, but, as always, he was grinning.

Jenny knelt down beside him, immediately solicitous. Webb felt a stab of - what? Jealousy?

‘I’m all right,’ Ryan said. Webb had never doubted it for a moment. ‘Got some mortar frags in my shoulder.’

Jenny pulled back the blanket. There were bloody dressings on his shoulder and on his arm just above the elbow. His face was grey in the candlelit gloom. Webb guessed he was in considerable pain.

Another wound, another chapter in the legend.

‘Can’t believe it,’ Ryan said. ‘Ever since I lost my lucky green towel that time in El Salvador I haven’t had a scratch.’

There was a commotion on the stairs, and a soldier ran down the steps, clearing the way for two stretchers. Webb glimpsed what looked like a piece of raw steak from a butcher’s shop window lying on one of the stretchers. On the second he saw a chalk-white face and a hand hanging limply over the edge.

He had been away too long. Once he wouldn’t have looked twice.

He knelt down and peered under the dressings on Ryan’s arm. ‘Has this been cleaned?’

‘Doctors are busy, mate. I told them not to worry about me until all the bullshit dies down a bit.’

‘How long have you been sitting here?’

‘Since last night. How long have you been here?’

‘Since last night.’

‘I mean in Bosnia.’

‘I flew into Zagreb about a week ago.’

‘New chum, eh?’ Ryan looked at Jenny. ‘Been showing him the ropes?’

Jenny looked at Webb, apparently amused.

‘You need to get these wounds debrided,’ Webb told him.

‘I know that, Spider, but this isn’t Walter Reed. Got a gasper?’ Webb searched his pockets, brought out a packet of Marlboro and put one between Ryan’s lips. He lit it for him and he dragged in the smoke gratefully. ‘Some of these blokes have been drying out tea bags - after they’ve used them for cha ten times - and then wrapping them in bits of newspaper and trying to smoke the bastards. I keep telling them it’s bad for their health but they won’t listen.’

‘Some people just don’t know how to take care of themselves.’

‘I had a bet with Croz you wouldn’t be able to stay out of this one. One way or another he’ll come over, I said. Probably spend a day holed up in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, then he’ll write a book and get on the Letterman show in his UN flak jacket.’

‘I’ve never jammed my fist into a frag wound before but you’re tempting me.’

‘Mate, if we could get some grass and a couple of tea girls it would be just like the old days. How have you been? How’s Mickey?’

‘She’s all right.’

He turned to Jenny. ‘You look buggered.’

‘So do you.’

She took off her helmet. Her hair and her bandanna were soaked with perspiration. She wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of her sleeve, then reached for Ryan’s hand, squeezed it. Webb noted the unspoken intimacy between them and felt another stab of bitterness.

Two orderlies went past, hefting bins overflowing with bandages saturated with bright red blood. In the corner a baby was being born. A nurse held a candle for the doctor just above the woman’s thighs. The woman’s screams drowned out every other sound for a few minutes.

‘Even in the midst of death we are in life,’ Ryan said. ‘Remember that night in the Central Highlands? Those Special Forces blokes were up there with the Yards, they’d been under siege for three months. Can’t even remember the name of the place.’

‘Que Trang.’

‘Right. Que Trang. Jesus. We spent the whole night getting creamed by Charles but the next morning they sent a chopper for us and two hours later I was lying in a nice clean bed in the 71st Evac at Pleiku wondering how to have my eggs at breakfast. Now that was the way to run a war. It was civilized. Not like this bullshit.’

‘I heard you’d left the network.’

‘Yeah. After the bread queue massacre in Vase Miskin Street. The bastards wouldn’t show the pictures. They edited it back to the sound bites and a map of Bosnia with a fucking little yellow star over Sarajevo. The network said it was too distressing for their viewers to watch. Too distressing! Of course war’s fucking distressing. How distressing do they think it is to have your wife or your son end up without their legs or their face because some bastard on Trebevic decides to lob a mortar on you?’

The shelling had begun in earnest above them, a tattoo of mortar and artillery rounds, setting the floor and walls shaking, a steady attrition of noise.

‘Anyway, welcome to Jajce, mate,’ Ryan said. ‘It looks like the three of us are the only representatives of the foreign media at this time. Let me point out a few of the sights. See that bloke over there, the one lying on his back, staring at the ceiling? He’s not really as bored as he looks. The doctors say he’s brain dead but the bastard won’t die. He went out about a week ago to bury his two sons who’d got killed in the shelling the day before and a sniper picked him off as he was kneeling next to the graves. Right through the head. It’s a real bugger how that sort of thing can stuff up the wiring.

‘And if you look to your left you’ll see an old girl without any legs. She’s more embarrassed than anything because she’s a good Moslem and the doctors keep peering at her thighs. What’s left of them, anyway.

‘The bloke on the floor asleep next to her is her son. He’s doing all right except for the fact that his mother’s the last one of his family left alive.

‘Directly in front of us that twelve-year-old boy has lost his right leg. But the real bummer, from his point of view, is that most of his balls went with it. He won’t even get in the Sistine Choir because he’s a Moslem. Just wasn’t his day.’

‘Stop it, Sean,’ Jenny said, gently.

Ryan nodded. ‘You’re right, I talk too much, don’t I? Sometimes you can spend too bloody long in a place, right?’

Webb had been watching Jenny through Ryan’s rant. Several times she had raised her camera to take photographs, but changed her mind and lowered it again.

A man in a soiled green surgical gown and plastic overshoes saw them and came over. His face was etched with exhaustion, there were deep lines carved into it like charcoal strokes. His hands were stained with blood.

‘More journalists?’ he said.

Ryan nodded.

‘How is your arm?’

‘It’ll keep.’ He introduced Webb and Jenny. ‘This is Dr Grzic. He’s responsible for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.’ He nudged Jenny with his foot. ‘You’re not here to gawk. Go and do some work.’

She hesitated.

‘Doctor Grzic, can you show this young lady what life is like on the workshop floor?

‘Of course.’

‘See if you can get him on the front cover of Time,' Ryan said to her. ‘Maybe then they’ll send him some anaesthetic and IV fluids.’

Jenny got up and went with Grzic. Ryan finished his cigarette and asked for another. As Webb lit it for him, he whispered: ‘Well, a nice bastard you turned out to be, mate.’

‘You’re going to lecture me about ethics?’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Why?’

Ryan made a sound, something between a broken laugh and a cough. ‘You would have loved it. Did she tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘I tried to seduce my own daughter. Shit.’

‘Had to happen eventually. Law of averages. You’ve populated half of Asia.’

‘I can’t believe I have a daughter that age. We’re getting old, Spider.’

‘That’s not so bad if you consider the alternative.’

‘Depends on your point of view. I’m pissed off with getting shot at, and I’m bored when I’m not. Also the women I fancy are related.’

‘Not funny.’

‘I’m not joking, mate. That time I was in New York it felt like I was in a time warp. I’d stayed the same and everyone else had moved on. So what do I do? I scuttle back here and spend my life living in holes in the ground, like this one. Like a fucking cockroach. Only place I feel at home these days.’

‘She’s forgiven you,’ Webb said, his own mind heading down an entirely different path.

Ryan frowned, took a moment to follow this non sequitur. ‘It hasn’t done her any harm.’ He paused, and then: ‘You look disappointed, mate.’

‘I suppose I am.’

‘Christ, you carry a grudge a long time. I’m glad it wasn’t you I left behind in Saigon. I’d hate to see you really annoyed.’

‘You’re right,’ Webb said, and the sadness hit him like a wave. ‘You’re right, I set you up.’

‘Mate, it was Odile I scorched, not Jenny. If it’s any consolation to you, I’m sure Odile is waiting for me down there in the hot place with the whips and the burning oil. But that’s between us.’

‘You know what amoral means?’

‘For Christ’s sake. What do you want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jenny’s turned out all right, thanks to a nice twist of fate, and thanks to you.’

‘I appreciate the credit.’

‘She’s a nice kid. She’s one of us now. Like Croz, or Cochrane.’

‘That’s it? Is that all she gets from you?’

‘What am I meant to feel? It’s just biology, Spider.’

Webb shook his head.

‘It’s over now, you haven’t got any more rabbits in the hat. At least I fucking hope not. So let it go. She has.’