War Baby (38 page)

Webb slid down the wall onto his haunches. He felt suddenly dirty.

‘The fact is,’ Ryan said, ‘if I had another shot at it, I’d probably do it the same way again. I couldn’t miss the biggest story of my life. My one real bloody regret is I wasn’t Neal Davis, standing there in the palace grounds in Saigon when that North Vietnamese tank knocked the gates down. That’s what I really wanted. I’m not good at people. I’m good at photographs.’

Webb watched Jenny follow Grzic along the ward, taking notes, camera over her arm, shooting off flash-frame after flash-frame, her face tight with concentration. ‘And is it what she’s good at?’

‘She’s a lot like me, I’ve noticed. She’ll do anything for a good story.’

The bodies had been well preserved because it was cold in the mountains at night, even so early in the winter. They had been missing since going out on patrol two nights before. They had been found by their comrades that morning and brought to the morgue at the back of the hospital.

They lay in a row on the white-tiled floor. Their green camouflage uniforms had been stripped off and they lay in rigor, their skin taking on a translucent pallor, like waxworks. Every single one had been mutilated: ears and noses cut off, skulls fractured, teeth pulled out.

‘I have to tell myself they were dead when this was done to them,’ Grzic was saying, ‘but there are signs that they were still very much alive. I don’t know, young lady, perhaps you are more accustomed to this than I am. Before this war I took out tonsils and delivered babies. So can you tell me what sort of men could do such a thing?’

Jenny stared at the three bodies, remembered what Ryan had once told her at the orphanage in Otovac. ‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that they’re probably kind to their mothers and they go to church every week.’

* * *

The population of Jajce had lived in cellars for months on end, under shellfire day and night. All they had to eat was rice and pasta. When the lorries arrived from Travnik people ran from the basements to meet them, and this was how many were killed or wounded.

Just to venture above ground was to play cat and mouse with the watching snipers. Webb and Jenny spent their time crawling on their hands and knees through gardens, running between buildings, waiting to catch their breath before the next sprint, always aware that somewhere in the hills a Serb sniper might have them in the cross-hairs of his Kalashnikov.

It was on their third day in Jajce that it happened; they were making their way from the hospital back to the command post. Jenny pointed to something that had been scrawled in black paint on the whitewashed wall on the far side of the street:
Pazi snajper
. Beware sniper.

‘Ready?’ she asked him.

‘I was doing this before you were born young lady.’

She grinned. ‘That’s what worries me.’

Was she looking out for him now? ‘You first,’ he said. If there was a sniper watching the intersection, he would be alerted by the first runner; the second would lose the advantage of surprise. She knew what he was doing and she hesitated.

He pushed her in front of him. ‘Go!’

He winced at the pain in his back where he had jarred it on the wild drive into the city. It still made it difficult to run. He heard a sharp crack-crack echo around the street, and he saw Jenny go down. At first he thought she had been hit, but then he saw her scramble for cover behind a pebbledash wall.

He had no idea where the sniper fire was coming from. Should he run to the right or the left? There was no time to think about it. He leaped to his feet and went after her.

He felt something sting him in the buttock, close to his hip, but he kept running. He saw Jenny’s face, eyes wide, willing him on.

He tumbled on to the footpath behind the wall, bruising his knee. He leaned on one elbow, grinned at her. ‘Made it,’ he said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right.’ Except was something wet soaking into his fatigue pants. At first he was embarrassed, thought he had actually wet himself. Oh God, not in front of my daughter! He casually put a hand down to his side. When he brought it up, it was wet with blood. He couldn’t believe it. He’d been shot.

‘Look at this,’ he said in wonderment, and passed out.

* * *

The candle on Gerovic’s desk was a thick strip of wick floating in a cup of oil. They sat around it, watching the flame grow fainter, sharing a bottle of Lorza brandy. ‘You have to get out tonight,’ Gerovic was saying. ‘Our front lines are crumbling and there are rumors that the HVO may pull out and leave us.’

Jenny looked over at Ryan. The doctors had dressed his shoulder wound and put his arm in a sling. He sat slumped in the chair across the desk from Gerovic, massaging his aching shoulder, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion.

‘How is your friend?’ Gerovic asked.

‘I think they call it a flesh wound,’ Ryan murmured, and he looked up at Jenny and gave her an unexpected grin.

‘He can’t walk,’ Jenny said. ‘The doctors think it may have splintered his hip.’

‘He’s still lucky,’ Gerovic said. ‘Look at these men.’ He nodded towards the soldiers sitting around the basement floor; one wore a black headband, another had on bright red sneakers, another a silver medallion fashioned in the shape of a peace sign and a sleeve rolled up to reveal a tattoo of the Bosnian lily emblem. They were listening to U2 on a small tape recorder. ‘Unforgettable Fire’. ‘These men are all going to die here.’

Ryan and Jenny stared at the floor.

‘Don’t leave your friend in our hospital,’ Gerovic said. ‘You must take him with you. We are evacuating the town tonight. After sunset I absolve myself of responsibility for all of you.’ He reached across the desk and shook their hands. ‘Z’viu Miru,’ he said.

Live in peace.

The evacuation started after nightfall. Almost the entire population of the town emerged from the basements and cellars to begin the exodus through the mountains towards Travnik. Suitcases, children’s plastic toys, bicycles, tables, old armchairs, wooden chairs, even wardrobes, were dragged up to the street and loaded onto the cars, trucks, tractor trailers and horse carts that were gathered for the journey through the pass, past the Serbian guns.

A man called Irfan agreed to let them travel with him and his family on the back of his wooden horse cart. Ryan and Jenny loaded Webb’s stretcher and then clambered on beside him. They set off in the darkness, headed back towards Travnik, along the perilous lifeline that had already become known as the Vietnam Road.

Jenny clung to the swaying sides of the tray. Dead animals lay stiff-legged and bloated in frozen ditches. A truck had lost its wheel and was skewed by the side of the road; a piano had tumbled off it and lay on its back. An old man was standing beside it, weeping, as if it were the body of his wife. A woman was trying to drag him away.

A death’s head image swam in front of Jenny’s vision in the darkness, underneath a single hand-painted word stark against the black forest:
Minen!

The cart jolted over a hole in the road. Webb cried out in pain.

She reached for his hand. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ she whispered.

Behind them Jajce was in flames. She heard the steady crump-crump of artillery fire.

A dawn sky the color of grease. The column stretched in both directions as far as she could see, a silent army of misery. In front of them was an old Volkswagen with a baby carriage tied to the roof; behind them an ancient carthorse pulled a family of seven who were crammed into the cart alongside some chickens and a few pieces of rickety furniture.

Irfan and his family were silent, even the children. They were conservative Moslems; Irfan wore a traditional waistcoat and a loose white linen shirt under his winter coat; his father had on a yarmulke-like cap of white loose-knit cotton. They sat together on the kickboard, while Irfan’s wife and four children clustered together in the tray. The youngest of the children, a girl, was clutching a large doll. The eldest, a boy aged about eight, held a water-filled plastic bag with a pet goldfish inside.

Jenny smiled at him but elicited no response. All the children’s faces were fixed with the same haunted stares.

Jenny thought of another exodus, a long time ago, in a leaking boat putting out to sea from Vung Tau. Perhaps this was how she had looked to others. She wanted to tell them that she knew how they felt. But what comfort would that be, even if she could?

They passed an old farmhouse; four blackened walls, the roof gone.

Webb winced at every jolt. The doctors had no morphine for him. He and Jenny had brought a few ampoules into Jajce with them as part of their kit but they had given them to the doctors at the hospital the very first morning.

It would be a long day.

* * *

Darkness fell just after five in the afternoon. The air turned frigid. Webb groaned again as the cart bounced over the potholed road. The road hugged the shadows of the pine trees.

Ryan took the last pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered them to Irfan and his father. They accepted but did not light them. Instead they put them in their coats. Irfan explained that they did not want to attract the attention of any sniper watching in the hills. Perhaps in the morning.

‘How is it, Spider?’

‘Never felt better,’ Webb grunted.

‘Grzic thinks the bullet may have splintered your hip,’ Ryan said. ‘That’s the bad news. The good news is it will give you something to talk about on David Letterman.’

Webb grimaced. ‘That really ... irks you ... doesn’t it?’

‘I never wanted to be famous, Spider. I’ll settle for being a legend.’

The light faded. There were occasional shouts in the darkness, sounds of explosions ahead. No one spoke.

* * *

The shell landed less than fifty metres away, without warning. A hot sliver of shrapnel struck their horse just behind the shoulder and it reared in pain and panic, then staggered sideways, losing its footing on the broken edge of the road. It went down, pulling the cart with it.

Webb screamed as he was thrown into the mud.

Ryan had been asleep. Suddenly he found himself rolling down the muddy embankment beside the road. He landed in a shallow pool of freezing slush. He scrambled to his feet, groggy from exhaustion, went searching for his dressing gown on the bathroom door of his room in the Intercontinental when he remembered where he was.

‘Jesus. Jesus H!’ He staggered, disoriented in the dark, fumbled in his jacket for his pencil light and flicked it on. Irfan was kneeling beside his horse, crying, his hands dark with blood.

‘Fuck,’ Ryan said.

Webb lay a few yards away, his body twisted, screaming. Jenny knelt beside him, trying to roll him on to his uninjured side. He went to help her, slipped in the mud and dropped the torch.

More shouts. Someone was collecting the family’s bags from the road and transferring them to their own cart. Irfan howled in rage and launched himself up the bank. Another shell burst close to the road, a hundred meters away.

If only Letterman could see them now.

They painstakingly collected what the looters had left. Irfan’s son had cut his head on a rock and Ryan helped dress the wound with a dressing he kept in one of the pockets of his fishing vest. The boy was still holding the plastic bag with the goldfish. It was intact.

The remains of the family’s possessions were gathered in a sorry pile by the side of the road: a few plastic bags of clothes, a pram, some blankets, a suitcase with broken locks held together with string.

The horse, still whimpering, lay beside the road, dying. There was nothing they could do for her.

Ryan down knelt beside Webb. ‘Spider.’ He lit a match and shone it on his face.

‘Just bugger off,’ Webb murmured. ‘I’m tired. I hurt. I want to go to sleep.’

‘If we leave you here, you’re going to die,’ Ryan said. ‘The only way to get you out is for us to carry you on the stretcher the rest of the way. But my shoulder’s buggered so I can’t.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘I’m telling you you’re going to die.’

Webb closed his eyes.

‘Spider?’

‘Go away, Ryan.’

‘I wouldn’t really leave you, mate. I just don’t know how we’re going to bloody shift you.’

Jenny knelt down beside them. ‘Sean,’ she said.

He turned around. Irfan was standing beside them with the pram. He gave a sheepish smile. ‘Perhaps if it will help your friend,’ he said.

* * *

Webb lay sprawled in the pram, arms and legs dangling over the sides, head lolling backwards. The fall had reopened the bullet wound, and the bottom of the pram was pooled with fresh blood. They had rejoined the column on foot, Irfan and his father leading the way, his wife waddling behind with the children and the bags. Ryan and Jenny took the rear, taking turns to push the pram.

‘Like taking baby for a walk,’ Ryan said. ‘Bloody ugly baby, but.’

Shell bursts flashed around the horizon. A blood moon rose over the hills; rockets arced across the sky. There was fresh blood on the asphalt, sticky underfoot.

The column ground to a halt. People started screaming in panic. A truck tried to turn around on the road and got bogged in the mud. People rushed past them, heading back towards Jajce.

‘What’s going on?’ Ryan shouted to Irfan.

‘Serb, boom-boom,’ he said, trying to explain with his few words of English. ‘No can, no can.’

But Ryan understood. The Serb artillery had trapped them in a bottleneck. They could not go forward; they could scarcely go back.

He saw an old man dragging his horse and cart off the road, up a mud track through the pine forest. Impossible for cars or trucks to follow, but on foot...

He pointed the way.

Irfan helped them drag Webb and the ancient pram down the embankment and up the muddy slope. Ryan threw the helmets and the flak jackets into the bushes; they were too heavy to carry now. He even ditched the spare cameras. He was too exhausted now to care about how much they cost. It was just about staying alive now.

I’ve got out of worse messes than this, he told himself. I can do it again.