THE BOSNIAN INFERNO
by
DAVID MONNERY


Further Titles in this series from Severn House

Peter Cave

THE INVISIBLE ENEMY

THE BOSNIAN

INFERNO

David Monnery

LIBRARIES & ARTS

This first world edition published in Great Britain 1994 by SEVERN
HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of 9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey SM1 1DF.

First published in the USA 1994 by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS INC."  of
425 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022, by arrangement with Bloomsbury
Publishing Plc.

Copyright (c) 1994 by 22 Books.

All rights reserved.  The moral rights of the author to be identified
as author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988."

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Monnery, David Bosnian
Inferno I. Title

823.914 [F]

ISBN 0-7278-4712-0

Typeset by Hewer Text Composition Services, Edinburgh.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hartnolls Ltd, Bodmin,
Cornwall.

Prelude.

Zavik, 17 July 1992

The knock on the door was loud enough to wake the dead, and John Reeve
had little doubt what it meant.

"I have to go now," he told his son, putting the book to one side.

The boy must have read the seriousness of the situation on his father's
face because he didn't object.  Reeve kissed him lightly on the
forehead and hurried down the new wooden staircase he'd just finished
installing in his parents-in-law's house.

Ekrem Abdic had already opened the door to admit the others.  There
were four of them: Tijanic, Bobetko, Cehajic and Filipovic.  One Serb,
one Croat and two Muslims.

Reeve knew which was which, but only because he had talked to them,
visited their homes.  If he had met them as strangers on the street,
wearing the same jeans and Tshirts they were wearing now, he would have
had no idea.  The dark Tijanic looked more like a stereotypical Muslim
than the blond Filipovic, whose father taught children the Koran at the
town's mosque.

"They're here," Tijanic said without preamble.

As if to verify the statement, a gunshot sounded in the distance, and
then another.

"How many of them are there?"  Reeve asked, reclaiming the Kalashnikov
from where it had been hanging on the wall, out of reach of the
children.

"I counted twenty-seven, so far.  One transit van and three cars, all
jammed full."

"Let's go," Reeve said.  He stopped in the doorway.

"No partisan heroics," he told his seventy-year-old father-in-law.

"If it looks like we've failed, just take the kids and head for
Zilovice."

The old man nodded.

"Good luck," he said.

The four men emerged into the early dusk, the town of Zavik spread
beneath them.  The sun had fallen behind the far wall of the valley,
but the light it had left behind cast a meagre glow across the steep,
terra cotta-tiled roofs.  The thought of the kids and their
grandparents struggling up the mountain behind the town produced a
sinking feeling in Reeve's stomach.

At least it was summer.  A light breeze was blowing down the valley but
the day's heat still clung to the narrow streets.  In the distance they
could hear a man shouting through a megaphone.

"They are all in the town square," Cehajic told Reeve.

"How many townspeople have gone over to them?"

"The five who disappeared this morning, but no more that we know of."

They were only about a hundred yards from the square now, and Reeve led
them down the darker side of the street in single file.  The voice grew
louder, more hectoring.  The leader of the intruders was demanding that
all weapons and cars be brought to the square immediately, and that
anyone found defying this order would have their house burnt to the
ground.

Reeve smiled grimly at the reference to weapons.

As far as he knew there had been only about seven working guns in the
town before the Serbs arrived, and his group was carrying five of them.
Two others were in the hands of Muslim ex-partisans like his
father-inlaw, and they intended defending their own homes and families
to the death.

The five men reached the rear of the building earmarked for their
observation post, and filed in across the yard and up the rickety steps
at the back.

The old couple who lived there waved them through to the front room,
where latticed windows overlooked the town square.  Once this room
would have housed a harem, and its windows had been designed so that
the women could look out without being seen.  As such, they served
Reeve's current purpose admirably.

Several hundred people were gathered in the square, most of them
looking up at the man with the megaphone, who was standing on the roof
of the transit van.

He wore a broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses and camouflage fatigues.  A
long, straggly beard hung down his chest.

On the ground in front of him two bodies lay side by side.  Reeve
recognized one as the town's mayor, a Muslim named Sulejman.  The other
looked like his brother.

Across to one side of the square, in front of the Catholic church, the
irregulars' cars were parked in a line.  All were Lada Nivas, and one
had the word 'massacre' spray-painted along its side.  Some of the
invaders were leaning up against these cars, while others stood between
them and the transit van, staring contemptuously at the crowd.  Most
were dressed like their apparent leader, though a couple had nylon
stockings pulled bank-robber-style across their heads, and several were
sporting Chetnik "Freedom or Death' T-shirts, the words interwoven
through skull and crossbones.

Their leader had finished addressing the crowd, and was now talking to
one of his cronies.  Both men glanced across at the two corpses on the
ground and then called over one of the men wearing a nylon mask.

"It's Cosic," Tijanic said, recognizing the local man by his walk.

The man listened to the irregulars' leader and then pointed to one of
the streets leading off the square.

"He's telling them where Sulejman lived," Reeve said.  He turned to
Filipovic.

"You keep watch.  One of us will be back as soon as we can.

The other four hurried back through the house, down the steps and into
the empty street.  Sulejman's house was halfway up the hill to the
ruined castle, and they reached it in minutes.

The big house was deserted either Sulejman had had the sense to move
his family away, or they had witnessed his death in the square.  Reeve
and his men walked in through the unlocked front door and took up
positions behind the colonnaded partition between hallway and
living-room.

The Serbs arrived about five minutes later.  There were three of them,
and they sounded in a good mood, laughing and singing as they kicked
their way in through the door.  Several were now carrying open bottles,
and not much caring how much they slopped on the floor.

"I expect the women are hiding upstairs," one man said.

"Come on down, darlings!"  another shouted out.

Reeve and the others stepped out together, firing the Kalashnikovs from
the hip, and the three Serbs did a frantic dance of death as their
bottles smashed on the wooden floor.

Tijanic walked forward and extracted the weapons from their grasp.

"I'll get these to Zukic and his boys," he said.

"Three down," Reeve said.

"Twenty-four to go."

"Daddy, help me!"  Marie insisted.

Her plea brought Jamie Docherty's attention back to the matter in hand.
His six-year-old daughter was busy trying to wrap up the present she
had chosen for her younger brother, and in danger of completely
immobilizing herself in holly-patterned sticky tape.

"OK," he said, smiling at her and beginning the task of
disentanglement.  His mind had been on his wife, who at that moment was
upstairs going through the same process with four-year-old Ricardo.
Christmas was never a good time for Isabel, or at least not for the
past eighteen years.  She had spent the 1975 festive season
incarcerated in the cells and torture chambers of the Naval Mechanical
School outside Buenos Aires, and though the physical scars had almost
faded, the mental ones still came back to haunt her.

His mind went back to their first meeting, in the hotel lobby in Rio
Gallegos.  It had been at the height of the Falkiands War, on the
evening of the day the troops went ashore at San Carlos.  He had been
leading an SAS intelligence-gathering patrol on Argentinian soil, and
she had been a British agent, drawn to betray her country by hatred of
the junta which had killed and tortured her friends, and driven her
into exile.

Together they had fought and driven and walked their way across the
mountains to Chile.

More than ten years had passed since that day, and they had been
married for almost as long.  At first Docherty had thought that their
mutual love had exorcized her memories, as it had exorcized his pain at
the sudden loss of his first wife, but gradually it had become clear to
him that, much as she loved him and the children, something inside her
had been damaged beyond repair.  Most of the time she could turn it
off, but she would never be free of the memories, or of what she had
learned of what human beings could do to one another.

Docherty had talked to his old friend Liam McCall about it; he had
even, unknown to Isabel, had several conversations with the SAS's
resident counsellor.

Both the retired priest and his secular colleague had told him that
talking about it might help, but that he had to accept that some wounds
never healed.

He had tried talking to her.  After all, he had told himself, he had
seen enough of death and cruelty in his army career: from Oman to
Guatemala to the Falls Road.  That wasn't the same, she'd said.  Nature
was full of death and what looked like cruelty.  What she had seen was
something altogether more human the face of evil.  And he had not, and
she hoped he never would.

Somehow this had created a distance between them.

Not a rift there was no conflict involved but a distance.  He felt that
he had failed her in some way.

That was ridiculous, and he knew it.  But still he felt it.

"Daddy!"  Marie cried out in exasperation.

"Pay attention!"

Docherty grinned at her.

"Sorry," he said.

"I was thinking about Mummy," he explained.

His daughter considered this, her blue eyes looking as extraordinary as
ever against the rich skin tone she'd inherited from her mother.

"You can think about her when I've gone to bed," Marie decided.

"Right," Docherty agreed, and for the next ten minutes he gave her his
full attention, completing the wrapping of Ricardo's present and
conferring parental approval on Marie's suggested alterations to his
positioning of the silver balls and tinsel on the tree.

And then it was bedtime, and his turn to read to Ricardo.  When he had
finished he stood for a moment in the doorway to Marie's room,
listening to Isabel reading, the bedside lamp making a corona around
his wife's dark head as she bent over the book.

He walked downstairs, blessing his luck for finding her.  Few men, he
reckoned, found one such woman in their lives, and he had found two.
True, with both there had been a price.  Chrissie had been killed in a
road accident only months after their marriage, sending him into a
downward spiral of drunkenness and self pity which had almost cost him
his career and selfrespect.  Like Margaret Thatcher, he had been saved
by the Falklands War, and in the middle of that conflict fate had led
him to Isabel, who came complete with a hurt he longed in vain to heal.
But he wasn't complaining now, at the grand old age of forty-two, Jamie
Docherty would not have swapped places with any man.

He went through to the kitchen, opened a can of beer and poured it into
the half-pint mug he had liberated from an officers' mess in Dhofar
nearly twenty years before.

"How about one for me?"  Isabel asked him from the doorway, a smile on
her face.

He smiled back and reached for another can.

She sat down on the other side of the kitchen table, and they shared
the silence for a few moments.  Her smile had gone, he noticed.

"What is worrying you?"  she asked suddenly.

You, he thought.

"Nothing really," he said, 'maybe the future.  I've never been retired
before.  It's a strange feeling."  He grinned suddenly.

"Let's face it, we haven't even decided which continent we're going to
live in."

"There's no hurry," she said.

"Let's get Christmas out of the way first."  She put down her
half-empty glass.

"You still want fish and chips?"  she asked.

"Yeah, I'll go and get them."

"You stay with the children.  I feel like some fresh air.

And some time on your own, Docherty thought.

"You sure?"  he asked.

"Si, noes problema."

Docherty continued sipping his beer, wondering how many other
households there were in Glasgow where all four occupants often moved
back and forth between English and Spanish without even noticing they
had done so.  He had become fluent in the latter during the half year's
compassionate leave he had spent travelling in Mexico after Chrissie's
death.

Isabel had acquired her bilingual skills before meeting him, during the
seven years of her enforced exile in England.

Still, their linguistic habits were hardly the strangest thing about
their relationship.  When they had met he had been a ten-year veteran
of the SAS and she one of the few surviving members of an Argentinian
urban guerrilla group.  If the Sun had got hold of the story their
marriage would have made the front page something along the lines of
"SAS Hero Weds Argie Red'.

In the public mind, and particularly on the liberal left, the Regiment
was assumed to be a highly trained bunch of right-wing storm troopers
There was some truth in this impression, particularly since the large
influx during the eighties of gung-ho par as but only some.  Men like
Docherty, who came from families imbued with the old labour traditions,
were also well represented among the older hands, and among the new
intake of younger men the SAS emphasis on intelligence and
self-reliance tended to militate against the rightist bias implicit in
any military organization.

On returning from the Falklands, conscious of Isabel's opinions,
Docherty had thought long and hard about whether to continue in the
Army.  Up to that time, he decided, none of the tasks allotted him by
successive British governments had seriously troubled his conscience.
When one arrived that did, then that would be the time to hand in his
cards.

So, for most of the past ten years he and Isabel had lived just outside
Hereford.  Her cover during the mission in Argentina had been as a
travel-guide writer, and a couple of enquiries were enough to confirm
that the market in such books was expanding at enormous speed.  She
never finished the one she was supposedly researching in southern
Argentina, but an offer to become one third of a team covering Chile
was happily accepted, and this led to two other books on Central
American countries.  It meant her being away for weeks at a time, but
Docherty was also often abroad for extended periods, particularly after
his attachment to the SAS Training Wing.  Whenever possible they joined
each other, and Docherty was able to continue and deepen the love
affair with Latin America which he had begun in Mexico.

Then Marie had arrived, and Ricardo two years later.  Isabel had been
forced to take a more editorial role, which, while more rewarding
financially, often seemed considerably less fulfilling.  Now with
Ricardo approaching school age, and Docherty one week into retirement
from the Army, they had big decisions to take.  What was he going to do
for a living?  Did they want to live in Scotland or somewhere in Latin
America?  As Isabel had said, there was no urgency.

She had recently inherited somewhat to her surprise - a few thousand
pounds from her mother, and the house they were now staying in had been
virtually a gift from Liam McCall.  The priest had inherited a cottage
on Harris in the Outer Hebrides, decided to retire there, and offered
the Dochertys an indefinite free loan of his Glasgow house.

No urgency, perhaps, but much as Docherty loved having more time with
Isabel and the children, he wasn't used to doing nothing.  The military
life was full of dead periods, but there was always the chance that the
next day you would be swept across the world to face a challenge that
stretched mind, body and soul to the limit.  Docherty knew he had to
find himself a new challenge, somehow, somewhere.

He got up to collect plates, salt, ketchup and vinegar.  Just in time,
for the ever-wonderful smell of fish and chips wafted in through the
door ahead of his wife.

"Cod for you, haddock for me," she said, placing the two bundles on the
empty plates.

"And I bought a bottle of wine," she added, pulling it out of the coat
pocket.

"I thought..."

The telephone started ringing in the living-room.

"Who can that be?"  she asked, walking towards it.

Docherty had unwrapped one bundle when she returned.

"It's your old CO," she said, like any English military wife.

"Barney Davies.  And he sounds like he's calling from a pub."

"Maybe they've realized my pension should have been twice as much,"
Docherty joked, wondering what in God's name Davies wanted with him.

He soon found out.

"Docherty?  I'm sorry to call you at this hour, but I'd appreciate a
meeting," Davies said.

Docherty raised his eyebrows.  It did sound like a pub in the
background.  He tried to remember which of Hereford's hostelries Barney
Davies favoured.

"OK.  What about?  Can it wait till after Christmas?"

"Tonight would be better."

"Where are you?"  Docherty asked.

"In the bar at Central Station.

The CO was in Glasgow.  Had maybe even come to Glasgow just to see him.
What the fuck was this about?

"I'm sorry about the short notice, but ..

"No problem.  In an hour, say, at nine.

"Wonderful.  Can you suggest somewhere better than this?"

"Aye, the Slug & Sporran in Brennan Street.  It's about a ten-minute
walk, or you can take a cab ..

"I'll walk."

"OK.  Just go straight down the road opposite the station entrance,
then left into Sauchiehall Street and Brennan Street's about three
hundred yards down on the right.  The pub's about halfway down,
opposite a pool hall."

"Roger."

The phone clicked dead.  Docherty stood there for a minute, a sinking
heart and a rising sense of excitement competing for his soul, and then
went back to his fish and chips.  He removed the plate which Isabel had
used to keep them warm.

"He wants to see me," he said, in as oft hand a voice as he could
muster.

"Tonight."

She looked up, her eyes anxious.

"Por qua?"  she asked.

"He didn't say."

Lieutenant-Colonel Barney Davies, Commanding Officer 22 SAS Regiment,
found the Slug & Sporran without much difficulty, and could immediately
see why Docherty had recommended it.  Unlike most British pubs it was
neither a yuppified monstrosity nor a noisy pigsty.  The wooden beams
on the ceiling were real, and the polished wooden booths looked old
enough to remember another century.  There were no amusement machines
in sight, no jukebox music loud enough to drown any conversation just
the more comforting sound of darts burying themselves in a dartboard.
The TV set was turned off.

Davies bought himself a double malt, surveyed the available seating,
and laid claim to the empty booth which seemed to offer the most
privacy.  At the nearest table a group of youngsters sporting punk
hairstyles were arguing about someone he'd never heard of -someone
called "Fooco'.  Listening to them, Davies found it impossible to
decide whether the man was a foot baller a philosopher or a film
director.  They looked so young, he thought.

It was ten to nine.  Davies started trying to work out what he was
going to say to Docherty, but soon gave up the attempt.  It would be
better not to sound rehearsed,

to just be natural.  This was not a job he wanted to offer anybody,
least of all someone like Docherty, who had children to think about and
a wife to leave behind.

There was no choice though.  He had to ask him.

Maybe Docherty would have the sense to refuse.

But he doubted it.  He himself wouldn't have had the sense, back when
he still had a wife and children who lived with him.

"Hello, boss," Docherty said, appearing at his shoulder and slipping
back into the habit of using the usual SAS term for a superior
officer.

"Want another?"

"No, but this is my round," Davies said, getting up.

"What would you like?"

"A pint of Guinness would probably hit the spot," Docherty said.  He
sat down and let his eyes wander round the half-empty pub, feeling more
expectant than he wanted to be.  Why had he suggested this pub, he
asked himself.  That was the TV on which he'd watched the Task Force
sail out of Portsmouth Harbour.  That was the bar at which he'd picked
up his first tart after getting back from Mexico.  The place always
boded ill.  The booth in the corner was where he and Liam had
comprehensively drowned their sorrows the day Dalglish left for
Liverpool.

Davies was returning with the black nectar.

Docherty had always respected the man as a soldier and, what was rarer,
felt drawn to him as a man.  There was a sadness about Davies which
made him appealingly human.

"So what's brought you all the way to Glasgow?"

Docherty asked.

Davies grimaced.

"Duty, I'm afraid."  He took a sip of the malt.

"I don't suppose there's any point in beating about the bush.  When did
you last hear from John Reeve?"

"Almost a year ago, I think.  He sent us a Christmas card from Zimbabwe
that must have been about a month after he got there and then a short
letter, but nothing since.  Neither of us is much good at writing
letters, but usually Nena and Isabel manage to write What's John..."

"You were best man at their wedding, weren't you?"

"And he was at mine.  What's this about?"

"John Reeve's not been in Zimbabwe for eight months now he's been in
Bosnia."

Docherty placed his pint down carefully and waited for Davies to
continue.

"This is what we think happened," the CO began.

"Reeve and his wife seem to have hit a bad patch while he was working
in Zimbabwe.  Or maybe it was just a break-up waiting to happen," he
added, with all the feeling of someone who had shared the experience.

"Whatever.  She left him there and headed back to where she came from,
which, as you know, was Yugoslavia.  How did they meet do you know?"

"In Germany," Docherty said.

"Nena was a guest worker in Osnabruck, where Reeve was stationed.  She
was working as a nurse while she trained to be a doctor."  He could see
her in his mind's eye, a tall blonde with high Slavic cheekbones and
cornflower blue eyes.  Her family was nominally Muslim, but as for many
Bosnians it was more a matter of culture than religion.  She had never
professed any faith in Docherty's hearing.

He felt saddened by the news that they had split up.

"Did she take the children with her?"  he asked.

"Yes.  To the small town where she grew up.  Place called Zavik.  It's
up in the mountains a long way from anywhere."

"Her parents still lived there, last I knew."

"Ah.  Well all this was just before the shit hit the fan in Bosnia, and
you can imagine what Reeve must have thought.  I don't know what
Zimbabwean TV's like, but I imagine those pictures were pretty hard to
escape last spring wherever you were in the world.

Maybe not.  For all we know he was already on his way.  He seems to
have arrived early in April, but this is where our information peters
out.  We think Nena Reeve used the opportunity of his visit to Zavik to
make one of her own to Sarajevo, either because he could babysit the
children or just as a way of avoiding him who knows?  Either way she
chose the wrong time.  All hell broke loose in Sarajevo and the Serbs
started lobbing artillery shells at anything that moved and their
snipers started picking off children playing football in the street.
And she either couldn't get out or didn't want to ..

"Doctors must be pretty thin on the ground in Sarajevo," Docherty
thought out loud.

Davies grunted his agreement.

"As far as we know, she's still there.  But Reeve well, this is mostly
guesswork.  We got a letter from him early in June, explaining why he'd
not returned to Zimbabwe, and that as long as he feared for the safety
of his children he'd stay in Zavik ..

"I never heard anything about it," Docherty said.

"No one did," Davies said.

"An SAS soldier on the active list stuck in the middle of Bosnia wasn't
something we wanted to advertise.  For any number of reasons, his own
safety included.  Anyway, it seems that the town wasn't as safe as
Reeve's wife had thought, and sometime in July it found itself with
some unwelcome visitors a large group of Serbian irregulars.  We've no
idea what happened, but we do know that the Serbs were sent packing
..

"You think Reeve helped organize a defence?"

Davies shrugged.

"It would hardly be out of character, would it?  But we don't know. All
we have since then is six months of silence, followed by two months of
rumours.

"Rumours of what?"

"Atrocities of one kind and another."

"Reeve?  I don't believe it."

"Neither do I, but .. . We're guessing that Reeve -or someone else with
the same sort of skills managed to turn Zavik into a town that was too
well defended to be worth attacking.  Which would work fine until the
winter came, when the town would start running short of food and fuel
and God knows what else, and either have to freeze and starve or take
the offensive and go after what it needed.  And that's what seems to
have happened.

They've been absolutely even-handed:

they've stolen from everyone Muslims, Serbs and Croats.  And since none
of these groups, with the partial exception of the Muslims, likes
admitting that somewhere there's a town in which all three groups are
fighting alongside each other against the tribal armies, you can guess
who they're all choosing to concentrate their anger against."

"Us?"

"In a nutshell.  According to the Serbs and the Croats there's this
renegade Englishman holed up in central Bosnia like Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now, launching raids against anyone and everyone, delighting
in slaughter and madness, and probably waiting to mutter "the horror,
the horror" to the man who arrives intent on terminating him with
extreme prejudice."

"I take it our political masters are embarrassed," Docherty said
drily.

"Not only that they're angry.  They like touting the Regiment as an
example of British excellence, and since the cold war ended they've
begun to home in on the idea of selling our troops as mercenaries to
the UN.  All for a good cause, of course, and what the hell else do we
have to sell any more?  The Army top brass are all for it it's their
only real argument for keeping the sort of resource allocations they're
used to.  Finding out that one of their elite soldiers is running riot
in the middle of the media's War of the Moment is not their idea of
good advertising."

Docherty smiled grimly.

"Surprise, surprise," he said, and emptied his glass.  He could see now
where this conversation was leading.

"Same again?"  he asked.

"Thanks."

Docherty gave his order to the barman and stood there thinking about
John Reeve.  They'd known each other almost twenty years, since they'd
been thrown into the deep end together in Oman.  Reeve had been pretty
wild back then, and he hadn't noticeably calmed down with age, but
Docherty had thought that if anyone could turn down the fire without
extinguishing it altogether then Nena was the one.

What would Isabel say about his going to Bosnia?

he asked himself.  She'd probably shoot him herself.

Back at the booth he asked Davies the obvious question: "What do you
want me to do?"

"I have no right to ask you to do anything," Davies answered.

"You're no longer a member of the Regiment, and you've already done
more than your bit."

"Aye," Docherty agreed, 'but what do you want me to do?"

"Someone has to get into Zavik and talk Reeve into getting out.  I
don't imagine either is going to be easy, but he's more likely to
listen to you than anyone else."

"Maybe."  Reeve had never been very good at listening to anyone, at
least until Nena came along.

"How would I get to Zavik?"  he asked.

"And where is it, come to that?"

"About fifty miles west of Sarajevo.  But we haven't even thought about
access yet.  We can start thinking about the hows if and when you
decide ..

"If you should choose to accept this mission .

Docherty quoted ironically.

the tape will self-destruct in ten seconds," Davies completed for him.
Clearly both men had wasted their youth watching crap like Mission
Impossible.

"I'll need to talk with my wife," Docherty said.

"What sort of time-frame are we talking about?"  It occurred to him,
absurdly, that he was willing to go and risk his life in Bosnia, but
only if he could first enjoy this Christmas with his family.

"It's not a day-on-day situation," Davies said.

"Not as far as we know, anyway.  But we want to send a team out early
next week."

"The condemned men ate a hearty Christmas dinner," Docherty murmured.

"I hope not," Davies said.

"This is not a suicide mission.  If it looks like you can't get to
Zavik, you can't.  I'm not sacrificing good men just to put a smile on
the faces of the Army's accountants."

"Who dares wins," Docherty said with a smile.

"That's probably what they told Icarus," Davies observed.

"Don't you want me to go?"  Docherty asked, only half-seriously.

"To be completely honest," Davies said, "I don't

now.  Have you been following what's happening in Bosnia'?"  about it
than I do."

"Not as much as I should have.  My wife probably

"It's a nightmare," Davies said, 'and I'm not using the word loosely.
All the intelligence we're getting tells us that humans are doing
things to each other in Bosnia that haven't been seen in Europe since
the religious wars of the seventeenth century, with the possible
exception of the Russian Front in the last war.  We're talking about
mass shootings, whole villages herded into churches and burnt alive,
rape on a scale so widespread that it must be a coordinated policy,
torture and mutilation for no other reason than pleasure, war without
any moral or human restraint ..

"A heart of darkness," Docherty murmured, and felt a shiver run down
his spine, sitting there in his favourite pub, in the city of his
birth.

After giving Davies a lift to his hotel Docherty drove slowly home,
thinking about what the CO had told him.  Part of him wanted to go,
part of him wasn't so sure.  Did he feel the tug of loyalty, or was his
brain just using that as a cover for the tug of adventure?

And in any case, didn't his wife and children have first claim on his
loyalty now?  He wasn't even in the Army any more.

She was watching Newsnight on TV, already in her dressing-gown, a glass
of wine in her hand.  The anxiety seemed to have left her eyes, but
there was a hint of coldness there instead, as if she was already
protecting herself against his desertion.

Ironically, the item she was watching concerned the war in Bosnia, and
the refugee problem which had developed as a result.  An immaculately
groomed

Conservative minister was explaining how, alas, Britain had no more
room for these tragic victims.

After all, the UK had already taken more than Liechtenstein.  Docherty
wished he could use the Enterprise's transporter system to beam the
bastard into the middle of Tuzla, or Srebenica, or wherever it was this
week that he had the best chance of being shredded by reality.

He poured himself what remained of the wine, and found Isabel's dark
eyes boring into him.

"Well?"  she asked.

"What did he want?"

"He wants me to go and collect John Reeve from there," he said,
gesturing at the screen.

"But they're in Zimbabwe .

"Not anymore."  He told her the story that Davies had told him.

When he was finished she examined the bottom of her glass for a few
seconds, then lifted her eyes to his.

"They just want you to go and talk to him?"

"They want to know what's really happening."

"What do they expect you to say to him?"

"They don't know.  That will depend on whatever it is he's doing out
there."

She thought about that for a moment.

"But he's your friend," she said, 'your comrade.  Don't you trust
him?

Don't you believe that, whatever he's doing, he has a good reason for
doing it."

It was Docherty's turn to consider.

"No," he said eventually.

"I didn't become his friend because I thought he had flawless
judgement.  If I agree with whatever it is he's doing, I shall say so.
To him and Barney Davies.  And if I don't, the same applies."

"Are they sending you in alone?"

"I don't know.  And that's if I agree to go."

"You mean, once I give you my blessing."

"No, no, I don't.  That's not what I mean at all.  I'm out of the Army,
out of the Regiment.

I can choose."

There was both amusement and sadness in her smile.

"They've still got you for this one," she said.

"Duty and loyalty to a friend would have been enough in any case, but
they've even given you a mystery to solve."

He smiled ruefully back at her.

She got up and came to sit beside him on the sofa.  He put an arm round
her shoulder and pulled her in.

"If it wasn't for the ninios I'd come with you," she said.

"You'll probably need someone good to watch your back."

"I'll find someone," he said, kissing her on the forehead.  For a
minute or more they sat there in silence.

"How dangerous will it be?"

she asked at last.

He shrugged.

"I'm not sure there's any way of knowing before we get there.  There
are UN troops there now, but I don't know where in relation to where
Reeve is.  The fact that it's winter will help there won't be as many
amateur psychopaths running around if the snow's six feet deep.  But a
war zone is a war zone.  It won't be a picnic.

"Who dares had better damn well come home, she said.

"I will," he said softly.

Nena Reeve pressed the spoon down on the tea-bag, trying to drain from
it what little strength remained without bursting it.  She wondered
what they were drinking in Zavik.  Probably melted snow.

Her holdall was packed and ready to go, sitting on the narrow bed.  The
room, one of many which had been abandoned in the old nurses'
dormitory, was about six feet by eight, with one small window.

It was hardly a generous space for living, but since Nena usually
arrived back from the hospital with nothing more than sleep in mind,
this didn't greatly concern her.

Through the window she had a view across the roofs below and the slopes
rising up on the other side of the Miljacka valley.  In the square to
the right there had once been a mosque surrounded by acacias, its slim
minaret reaching hopefully towards heaven, but citizens hungry for fuel
had taken the trees and a Serbian shell had cut the graceful tower in
half.

There was a rap on the door, and Nena walked across to let in her
friend Hajrija Mejra.

"Ready?"  Hajrija asked, flopping down on the bed.  She was wearing a
thick, somewhat worn coat over camouflage fatigue trousers, army boots
and a green woollen scarf.  Her long, black hair was bundled up beneath
a black woolly cap, but strands were escaping on all sides.  Hajrija's
face, which Nena had always thought so beautiful, looked as gaunt as
her own these days: the dark eyes were sunken, the high cheekbones
sharp enough to cast deep shadows.

Well, Hajrija was still in her twenties.  There was nothing wrong with
either of them that less stress and more food wouldn't put right.  The
miracle wasn't how ill they looked it was how the city's 300,000 people
were still coping at all.

She put on her own coat, hoping that two sweaters, thermal long johns
and jeans would be warm enough, and picked up the bag.

"I'm ready," she said reluctantly.

Hajrija pulled herself upright, took a deep breath and stood up.

"I don't suppose there's any point in trying to persuade you not to
go?"

"None," Nena said, holding the door open for her friend.

"Tell me again what this Englishman said to you, Hajrija said as they
descended the first flight of stairs.  The lift had been out of
operation for months.

"He came to the hospital, right?"

"Yes.  He didn't say much..

"Did he tell you his name?"

"Yes.  Thornton, I think.  He said he came from the British Consulate
..

"I didn't know there was a British Consulate."

"There isn't - I checked."

"So where did he come from?"

"Who knows?  He didn't tell me anything, he just asked questions about
John and what I knew about what was happening in Zavik.  I said,
"Nothing.  What is happening in Zavik?"  He said that's what he wanted
to know.  It was like a conversation in one of those

Hungarian movies.  You know, two peasants swapping cryptic comments in
the middle of an endless cornfield ..

"Only you weren't in a cornfield."

"No, I was trying to deal with about a dozen bullet and shrapnel
wounds."

They reached the bottom of the stairs and cautiously approached the
doors.  It had only been light for about half an hour, and the Serb
snipers in the high-rise buildings across the river were probably deep
in drunken sleep, but there was no point in taking chances.  The fifty
yards of open ground between the dormitory doors and the shelter of the
old medieval walls was the most dangerous stretch of their journey.

Over the last six months more than a dozen people had been shot
attempting it, three fatally.

"Ready?"  Hajrija asked.

"I guess."

The two women flung themselves through the door and ran as fast as they
could, zigzagging across the open space.  Burdened down by the holdall,
Nena was soon behind, and she could feel her stomach clenching with the
tension, her body braced for the bullet.  Thirty metres more, twenty
metres, ten .

She sank into the old Ottoman stone, gasping for breath.

"You're out of shape," Hajrija said, only half joking

"Whole bloody world's out of shape," Nena said.

"Let's get going."

They walked along the narrow street, confident that they were hidden
from snipers' eyes.  There was no one about, and the silence seemed
eerily complete.

Usually by this time the first shells of the daily bombardment had
landed.

It was amazing how they had all got used to the bombardment, Nena
thought.  Was it a tribute to human resilience, or just a stubborn
refusal to face up to reality?  Probably a bit of both.

She remembered the queue in front of the Orthodox Cathedral when the
first food supplies had come in by air.  A sniper had cut down one of
the people in the line, but only a few people had run for cover.  There
were probably a thousand people in the queue, and like participants in
a dangerous sport each was prepared to accept the odds against being
the next victim.

Such a deadening of the nerve ends brought a chill to her spine, but
she understood it well enough.  How many times had she made that sprint
from the dormitory doors?  A hundred?

Two hundred?

"Even if you're right," Hajrija said, 'even if Reeve has got himself
involved somehow, I don't see how you can help by rushing out there.
You do know how unsafe it is, don't you?

There's no guarantee you'll even get there Nena stopped in
mid-stride.

"Please, Rija," she said, 'don't make it any more difficult.  I'm
already scared enough, not to mention full of guilt for leaving the
hospital in the lurch.  But if Reeve is playing the local warlord while
he's supposed to be looking after the children, then .. ."  She shook
her head violently.

"I have to find out."

"Then let me come with you.

At least you'll have some protection."

"No, your place is here."

"But..."

"No argument."

Sometimes Nena still found it hard to believe that her friend, who six
months before had been a journalism student paying her way through
college as a part time nurse, was now a valued member of an elite anti
sniper unit.  Someone who had killed several men, and yet still seemed
the same person she had always been.

ometimes Nena worried that there was no way Hajrija had not been
changed by the experiences, and that it would be healthier if these
changes showed on the surface, but at others she simply put it down to
the madness that was all around them both.  Maybe the fact that they
were all going through this utter craziness would be their salvation.

Maybe they had all gone to hell, but no one had bothered to make it
official.

"I'll be all right," she said.

Hajrija looked at her with exasperated eyes.

"Well, if I'm not, I certainly don't want to know I've dragged you down
with me."

"I know."

They continued on down the Marsala Tita, sprinting across two
dangerously open intersections.  There were more people on the street
now, all of them keeping as close to the buildings as possible, all
with skin stretched tight across the bones of their scarf-enfolded
faces.

It was almost eight when they reached the Holiday Inn, wending their
way swiftly through the Muslim emplacements in and around the old
forecourt.  he hotel itself looked like Beirut on a bad day, its walls
pock-marked with bullet holes and cratered by or tar shells.  Most of
its windows had long since een broken, but it was still accommodating
guests, albeit a restricted clientele of foreign journalists and
ominous-looking 'military delegations'.

"He's not here yet," Hajrija said, looking round the lobby.

Nena followed her friend's gaze, and noticed an AK47 resting
symbolically on the receptionist's desk.

"Here he is," Hajrija said, and Nena turned to see a handsome young
American walking towards them.  Dwight Bailey was a journalist, and
several weeks earlier he had followed the well-beaten path to Hajrij
a's unit in search of a story.  She was not the only woman involved in
such activities, but she was probably, Nena guessed, one of the more
photogenic.  Bailey had not been the first to request follow-up
interviews in a more intimate atmosphere.  Like his bed at the Holiday
Inn, for example.  So far, or at least as far as Nena knew, Hajrija had
resisted any temptation.

Bailey offered the two women a boyish smile full of perfect American
teeth, and asked Hajrija about the other members of her unit.  He
seemed genuinely interested in how they were, Nena thought.  If age
made all journalists cynical, he was still young.

And somewhat hyperactive.

"Dmitri's late," he announced, hopping from one foot to the other.

"He and Viktor are our bodyguards," he told Nena.

"Russian journalists.

Good guys.  The Serbs don't mess with the Russians if they can help
it," he explained.

"The Russians are about the only friends they have left."

He said this with absolute seriousness, as if he could hardly believe
it.

"Hey, here they are," he called out as the two Russians came into view
on the stairs.

Both men had classically flat Russian faces beneath the fur hats; both
were either bear shaped or wearing enough undergarments to survive a
cold day in Siberia.  In fact the only obvious way of distinguishing
one from the other was by their eyebrows: Viktor's were fair and almost
invisible, Dmitri's bushy and black enough for him to enter a
Brezhnev-lookalike contest.  Both seemed highly affable, as if they'd
drunk half a pint of vodka for breakfast.

The two women embraced each other.

"Be careful," Hajrija insisted.

"And don't take any risks.  And come back as soon as you can."  She
turned to the American.

"And you take care of my friend," she ordered him.

He tipped his head and bowed.

The four travellers threaded their way Out through the hotel's kitchens
to where a black Toyota was parked out of sight of snipers.  The two
Russians climbed into the front, and Nena and Bailey into the back.

Two distant explosions, one following closely on the other, signalled
the beginning of the daily bombardment.  The shells had fallen at least
two kilometres away, Nena judged, but that didn't mean the next ones
wouldn't fall on the Toyota's roof.

Viktor started up the car and pulled it out of the car park,
accelerating all the while.  The most dangerous stretch of road ran
between the Holiday Inn and the airport, and they were doing more than
sixty miles per hour by the time the car hit open ground.  Viktor had
obviously passed this way more than once, for as he zigzagged wildly to
and fro, past the burnt-out hulks of previous failed attempts, he was
casually lighting up an evil-smelling cigarette from the dashboard
lighter.

Nena resisted the temptation to squeeze herself down into the space
behind the driver's seat, and was rewarded with a glimpse of an old
woman searching for dandelion leaves in the partially snow-covered
verge, oblivious to their car as it hurtled past.

Thirty seconds later and they were through "Murder Mile', and slowing
for the first in a series of checkpoints.  This one was manned by
Bosnian police, who waved them through without even bothering to
examine the three men's journalistic accreditation.  Half a mile
further, they were waved down by a Serb unit on the outskirts of
Ilidza, a Serb-held suburb.

The men here wore uniforms identifying them as members of the Yugoslav
National Army.  They were courteous almost to a fault.

"Hard to believe they come from Mordor," Bailey said with a grin.

It was, Nena thought.  Sometimes it was just too easy to think all
Serbs were monsters, to forget that there were still 80,000 of them in
Sarajevo, undergoing much the same hardships and traumas as everyone
else.  And then it became hard to understand how the men on the hills
above Sarajevo could deliberately target their big guns on the
hospitals below, and how the snipers in the burnt-out tower blocks
could deliberately blow away children barely old enough to start
school.

They passed safely through another Serb checkpoint and, as the two
Russians pumped Bailey about their chances of emigration to the USA,
the road ran up out of the valley, the railway track climbing to its
left, the rushing river falling back towards the city on its right.

Stretches of dark conifers alternated with broad swathes of
snow-blanketed moorland as they crested a pass and followed the
sweeping curves of the road down into Sanjic.  Here a minaret still
rose above the roofs of the small town nestling in its valley, and as
they drove through its streets Nena could see that the Christian
churches had not paid the price for the mosque's survival.  Sanjic had
somehow escaped the war, at least for the moment.

She hoped Zavik had fared as well.

"This must have been what all of Bosnia was like before the war,"
Bailey said beside her.  There was a genuine sadness in his voice which
made her wonder if she had underestimated him.

"How long have you been here?"  she asked.

"I came in early November," he said.

"Who do you work for?"

"No one specific.  I'm a freelance."

She looked out of the window.

"If you get the chance," she said, 'and if this war ever ends, you
should come in the spring, when the trees are in blossom.  It can look
like an enchanted land at that time of year."

"I'd love to," he said.

"I .. . I thought I knew quite a lot of the world before I came here,"
he said.

"I've been all over Europe, all over the States of course, to Australia
and Singapore .. . But I feel like I've never been anywhere like this.
And I don't mean the war," he said hurriedly, 'though maybe that's what
makes everything more vivid.  I don't know ..

She smiled at him, and felt almost like patting his hand.

The road was climbing again now, a range of snowcovered mountains
looming on their left.  She remembered the trip across the mountains to
Umtali while they were in Africa.  The children had been bored in the
back seat and she'd been short-tempered with them.  Reeve, though, had
for once been an exemplary father, painstakingly pr ising them out of
their sulk.  But he'd always been a good father, much to her surprise.
She'd expected a great husband and a poor father, and ended up with the
opposite.

No, that was harsh.

She wondered again what she would find in Zavik, always assuming she
got there.  The three journalists were only taking her as far as
Bugojno, and from there she would probably still have a problem making
it up into the mountains.  The roads might be open, might be closed at
this time of the year the chances were about fifty fifty

The car began slowing down and she looked up to see a block on the road
ahead.  A tractor and a car had been positioned nose to nose at an
angle, and beside them four men were standing waiting.  Two of them
were wearing broad-brimmed hats.

"Chetniks," one of the Russians said, and she could see the straggling
beards sported by three of the four.  The other man, it soon became
clear, wasn't old enough to grow one.

From the first moment Nena had a bad feeling about the situation.  The
Russians' bonhomie was ignored, their papers checked with a mixture of
insolence and sarcasm by the tall Serb who seemed to be in charge.

"Don't you think Yeltsin is a useless wanker?"  he asked Viktor, who
agreed vociferously with him, and said that in his opinion Russia could
declare itself in favour of a Greater Serbia.  The Chetnik just laughed
at him, and moved on to Bailey.

"You like Guns N' Roses?"  he asked him in English.

"Who?"  Bailey asked.

"Rock 'n' roll," the Chetnik said.

"American."

"Sorry," Bailey said.

"It's OK," the Chetnik said magnanimously, and looked at Nena.  His
pupils seemed dilated, probably by drugs of some kind or another.

"Leave the woman behind," he told the Russians in Serbo-Croat.

The Russians started arguing not, Nena thought, with any great
conviction.

"What's going on?"  Bailey wanted to know.

She told him.

"But they can't do that!"  he exclaimed, and before

Nena could stop him he was opening the door and climbing out on to the
road.

"Look .. ."  he started to say, and the Chetnik's machine pistol
cracked.  The American slid back into Nena's view, a gaping hole where
an eye had been.

The Russians in the front seat seemed suddenly frozen into statues.

"We just want the woman," the Chetnik was telling them.

Viktor turned round to face her, his eyes wide with fear.

"I think ..

She shifted across the back seat and climbed out of the same door the
American had used.  She started bending down to examine him, but was
yanked away by one of the Chetniks.  The leader grabbed the dead man by
the feet and unceremoniously dragged him away through the light snow
and slush to the roadside verge.  There he gave the body one sharp
kick.

"Guns N' Roses," he muttered to himself.

The Russians had turned the Toyota around as ordered, and were
anxiously awaiting permission to leave.  Both were making certain they
avoided any eye contact with her.

"Get the fuck out of here," the leader said contemptuously, and the car
accelerated away, bullets flying above it from the guns of the grinning
Chetniks.

She stood there, waiting for them to do whatever they were going to
do.

The CO's office looked much as Docherty remembered it: the inevitable
mug of tea perched on a pile of papers, the maps and framed photographs
on the wall, the glimpse through the window of bare trees lining the
parade ground, and beyond them the faint silhouette of the distant
Black Mountains.  The only obvious change concerned the photograph on
Barney Davies's desk:

his children were now a year older, and his wife was nowhere to be
seen.

"Bring in a cup of tea," the CO was saying into the intercom.

"And a rock cake?"  he asked Docherty.

"Why not," Docherty said.  He might as well get used to living
dangerously again.  There were some at the SAS's Stirling Lines
barracks who claimed that the Regiment had lost more men to the Mess's
rock cakes than to international terrorism.  It was a vicious lie, of
course the rock cakes were disabling rather than lethal.

"Is there any news of Reeve?"  Docherty asked.

"None, but his wife's still in Sarajevo, working at the hospital as far
as we know."

"Where's the information coming from?"

"MI6 has a man in the city.  Don't ask me why.  The Foreign Office has
got him digging around for us.

Docherty's tea arrived, together with an ominous looking rock cake.

"I'm hoping to take her with me," he told Davies.

"Even if they've separated I still think he's more likely to listen to
her than anyone else."

"Well, you can ask her when you get there ..

"Sarajevo?"  Docherty asked, his mouth half full of what tasted like an
actual rock.  Sweet perhaps, but hard and gritty all the same.

"It's not been a very good year for them," Davies said, observing the
expression on Docherty's face, and causing the Scot to wonder whether
the CO had racks of the damn things in his cellar, each bearing their
vintage.

"Sarajevo looks like the best place to begin," Davies continued.

"Nena Reeve is there, and your MI6 contact.

His name's Thornton, by the way.  There must be people from Zavik who
can fill you in on the town and its surroundings.  Plus, there's the UN
command and a lot of journalists.  You should be able to pick up a good
idea of what the best access route is, and what to expect on the way.
Always assuming we can get you into the damn city, of course."

"I thought the airport was closed."

"Opened again a couple of days ago for relief flights, but there's no
certainty it will still be open tomorrow.  If it's not the Serbs
lobbing shells from the hilltops it's the Muslims and Serbs exchanging
fire across the damn runway, and even if they're all on their best
behaviour it's probably only because there's a blizzard."

"Lots of package tours, are there?"  Docherty asked.

"The more I know about this war the less I'm looking forward to seeing
any of my men involved in it," Davies said.

Docherty took a gulp of tea, which at least scoured his mouth of
cake.

"How many men am I taking in?"  he asked.

"It's up to you, within reason.  But I'd stick with a four-man patrol
..

"So would I. Are Razor Wilkinson and Ben Nevis available?"  Darren
Wilkinson and Stewart Nevis were two of the three men who had been
landed on the Argentinian mainland with him during the Falklands the
third, Nick Wacknadze, had left the SAS -and Docherty had found both to
be near-perfect comrade sing-arms.

"Nevis is in plaster, I'm afraid.  He and his wife went skiing over
Christmas French Alps, I think and he broke a leg.  Sergeant Wilkinson
is around, though.

And I think he'll probably jump at the chance to get away from
mothering the new boys up on the Beacons.

"Good.  I've missed his appalling cockney sense of humour."

"Any other ideas?"

Docherty thought for a moment.

"I'm out of touch, boss..."

"Do you remember the Colombian business?"

Davies asked.

"Who could forget it?"

Back in 1989 an SAS instructor on loan to the Colombian Army
Anti-Narcotics Unit had been kidnapped, along with a prominent local
politician, by one of the cocaine cartels.  A four-man team had been
inserted under cover to provide reconnaissance and then an entire
squadron parachuted in to assist with the rescue.  One of the
helicopters sent in to extract everyone was destroyed by sabotage and
the original four-man patrol, plus the instructor, had been forced to
flee Colombia on foot.  In the process two of them had been killed, but
the patrol's crossing of a 10,000-foot mountain range, pursued all the
way by agents of the cartel, had acquired almost legendary status in
Special Forces circles.

"Wynwood's in Hong Kong," Davies said, 'but how about Corporals
Martinson and Robson?  They've proved they can walk across mountains,
and it seems Yugoslavia or whatever we have to call it these days is
full of them.  And' the CO's face suffused with sudden enthusiasm "I
have a feeling Martinson has another useful qualification."  He reached
for the intercom.

"Get me Corporal Martinson's service record," he told the orderly.

Docherty sipped his tea, allowing Davies his moment of drama.

The file arrived, Davies skimmed through it, and stabbed a finger at
the last page.

"Serbo-Croat," he said triumphantly.

"What?"  Docherty exclaimed.  He could hardly believe there was a
Serbo-Croat speaker in the Regiment.

"You know what it's like," Davies said.

"The chances for action are few and far between these days, so the
moment some part of the world looks like going bad the keen ones pick
that language to learn, just in case.  If nothing happens, any new
language is still a plus on their record, and if by chance we get
involved, they're first in the queue.

"Looks like Martinson's won the jackpot this time," Docherty said,
reaching for the file to examine the photograph.

"He even looks like a Slav," he added.

"He's a medic, like Wilkinson, but that might well come in useful where
you're going.  And he's a twitcher, too.  A bird-watcher," Davies
explained, seeing the expression on Docherty's face.

"Bosnia's probably knee-deep in rare species."

"I'll keep my eyes open," Docherty said drily.  He had never been able
to understand the fascination some people had with birds.

"What about Robson?"

"He's an explosives man, and a crack shot with a sniper rifle.  Which
leaves you without a signals specialist, but I imagine you can fill in
there yourself."

"Those PRC 319s work themselves," Docherty replied, 'and anyway, who
will we have to send signals to?"

"Well, you might need to make contact with one of the British units who
are serving with the UN."

"But they wouldn't be able to get involved with this mission?"

"No, and in any case you won't be in uniform.  This mission is about as
official as Kim Philby's."

"So when it comes down to it we're just a bunch of Brits dropping in to
help out a mate."

Davies opened his mouth to object, and closed it again.

"I suppose you are," he agreed.

A little more than twenty miles to the south, Chris Martinson was
moving stealthily, trying not to step on any of the twigs spread across
the forest floor.  He halted for a moment, ears straining, and right on
cue heard the 'yah-yah-yah' laughing sound.  It was nearer now, but he
still couldn't see the bird.  And then, suddenly, it seemed to be
flying straight towards him down an avenue between the bare trees, its
red crown, black face and green-gold back looking almost tropical in
the winter forest.  It seemed to see him at the last moment, and veered
away to the left, into a stand of conifers.

The green woodpecker wasn't a rare bird, but it was one of Martinson's
favourites, and, since a day trip from Hereford to the Forest of Dean
never seemed quite complete if he didn't see one, there was a smile on
his face as he continued his walk.

Another quarter of a mile brought him to the crown of a small hill
giving a view out across the top of the trees towards the Severn
Estuary.  Some kind soul had arranged for a wrought-iron seat to be
placed there, and Chris gratefully sat himself down, putting his
binoculars to one side and unwrapping the packed lunch he had brought
with him.  As he bit into the first tuna roll a flock of white-faced
geese flew overhead towards the estuary.

It had been a good idea to come out for the day, Chris decided.  The
older he got the more claustrophobic the barracks seemed to get.  He
supposed it was time he got a place of his own, but somehow he had
always resisted the idea.  Flats were hard to find and you had all the
hassle of dealing with a landlord, and as for buying somewhere... well,
it would only be a millstone round his neck when he eventually left the
Regiment and did some serious travelling.

He had turned thirty that year, and the time for decision couldn't be
that far off.  And, he had to admit, he was getting bored with the same
old routines routines that only seemed to be interrupted these days by
a few hairy weeks in sun-soaked Armagh or exotic Crossmaglen.  Even the
birds in Northern Ireland seemed depressed by the weather.

He ran a hand through his spiky hair.  His life was in a rut, he
thought.  Not an unpleasant one in fact quite a comfortable one but a
rut nevertheless.  He hadn't really made any close friends in the
Regiment since Eddie Wilshaw, and the man from Hackney had died in
Colombia three years before.  And he hadn't had anything approaching a
relationship with a woman for almost as long.  The last one he'd gone
out with had told him he seemed to be living on a separate planet from
the rest of humanity.

He smiled good-naturedly at the memory.  She was probably right, and it
was no doubt time he started reaching out to people a bit more, but
..

A robin landed in a tree across the clearing and began making its
'tick' calling sound.  Chris sat there watching it, feeling full of
nature's wonder, thinking that life on your own planet had its
compensations.

Docherty could hear the familiar London accent before he was halfway
down the corridor.

and in hot climates there's one last resort when it comes to infected
wounds.  Any ideas?"

"A day on the beach, boss?"  a northern voice asked.

"Several rum and cokes?"

"I can see you've all read the book.

The answer is maggots.  Since they only eat dead tissue they act as
cleaning agents in any open wound ..."

"But boss, if I've just been cut open by some guerrilla psycho with a
machete I'm probably going to be a long way from the local fishing
tackle shop ..

"No problem, Ripley.  Once the wound gets infected you can just sit
yourself down somewhere and ooze pus.  The maggots will come to you.
Especially you.  Right.  Yesterday you were all given five minutes to
write down the basic rules of dealing with dog bites, snake bites and
bee stings.  Most of you managed to survive all three.  Trooper Dawson,
however," - a collective groan was audible through the room's open
skylight - 'used the opportunity to attempt suicide.

He didn't report the dog bite, so he may have rabies by now.  It's true
that in this country he'd need to be very unlucky, but the Regiment
does occasionally venture abroad.  And it doesn't really matter in any
case because the snake got him.  He not only wasted time trying to suck
out the venom, but managed to lose an arm or a leg by applying a
tourniquet instead of a simple bandage.  Of course he probably didn't
notice the limb dropping off because of the pain from the bee sting,
which he'd made worse by squeezing the poison sac.

In his mind's eye Docherty could see the expression on Razor's face.

"Well done, Dawson," Razor concluded.

"Your only worry now is whether your mates will bother to bury you. Any
questions from those of you still in the land of the almost-living?"

"What do you do about a love bite from a beautiful enemy agent?"  a
Welsh voice asked.

"In your case, Edwards, dream of getting one.  Class dismissed.  And
read the fucking book."

The Continuation Training class filed out, looking as young and fit as
Docherty remembered being twenty years before.  When the last man had
emerged he could see Darren Wilkinson bent over a ring binder of notes
on the instructor's desk.  Razor looked, like Docherty himself, as wiry
as ever, but there was a seriousness of expression on the face which
Docherty didn't remember seeing very often in the past.  Maybe life in
the Training Wing was calming him down.

Razor looked up suddenly, conscious of someone's eyes on him, and his
face slowly split open in the familiar grin.

"Boss.  What are you doing here?  If you've not retired I want my
twenty pee back."

"Which twenty pee might that be?"

"The one I gave to your passing-out collection."

Docherty sat down in the front row and eyed him tolerantly.

"I'm recruiting," he said.

"What for?"

"A journey into hell by all accounts."

"Forget it.  I'm not going to watch Arsenal for anybody."

"How about Red Star Sarajevo?"

Razor lifted himself on to the edge of the desk.

"Tell me about it," he said.

"Do you know John Reeve?"  Docherty asked.

"To say hello to.  Not well.  I never did an op with him."

"I did," Docherty said.

"Several of them.  We may not have actually saved each other's lives in
Oman, but we probably saved each other from dying of boredom.  We
became good mates, and though we never fought together again, we stayed
that way, you know the way some friends are you only need to see them
once a year, or even every five years, and it's still always like
you've never been apart."

He paused, obviously remembering something.

"Reeve was one of the people who helped me through my first wife's
death.  In fact if he hadn't persuaded me to get compassionate leave
rather than simply go A.W.O.L. I'd have been out of this Regiment long
ago .. . Anyway, I was best man at his wedding, and he was at mine. 
And we both married foreigners, which sort of further cemented the
friendship. You know my wife you were there when we met ..

"Almost.  I was there when you had your first argument.  About which
way we should be running, Ithink."

"Aye, well, we've had a few since, but..  ."  Docherty smiled
inwardly.

"Reeve married a Yugoslav, a Bosnian Muslim as it turns out, though no
one seemed too bothered by such things back in 1984.  He and Nena had
two children, a girl first and then a boy, just like me and Isabel.
Nena seemed happy enough living in England, and then about eighteen
months ago Reeve got an advisory secondment to the Zimbabwean Army.

I haven't seen him since, and I hadn't heard anything since last
Christmas, which should have worried me, but, you know how it is .. .
Then last week, two days before Christmas, the CO comes to visit me in
Glasgow."

"Barney Davies?  He just turned up?"

"Aye, he did."

"With news of Reeve?"

"Aye."

Docherty told Razor the story as Davies had told it to him, ending with
the CO's request for him to lead in a four-man team.

"And it looks like you said yes."

"Aye, eventually.  Christ knows why."

"Have they reinstated you?"

"Temporarily.  But since the team won't be wearing uniform, and will
have no access whatsoever to any military back-up it doesn't seem
particularly relevant."

Razor stared at him.

"Let me get this straight," he said eventually.

"They want us to fight our way across a war zone so we can have a
friendly chat with your friend Reeve, either slap his wrist or not when
we hear his side of the story, and then fight our way back across the
same war zone.  And we start off by visiting the one city in the world
which no one can get into or out of."

Docherty grinned at him.

"You're in, then?"

"Of course I'm fucking in.  You think I like teaching first aid to
ex-par as for a living?"

"I now pronounce you man and wife," the vicar said, and perhaps it was
the familiarity of the words which jolted Damien Robson out of his
reverie.

The Dame, as he was known to all his regimental comrades, cast a guilty
glance around him, but no one seemed to have noticed his mental absence
from the proceedings.

"You may kiss the bride," the vicar added with a smile, and the Dame's
sister, Evie, duly uplifted her face to meet the lips of her new
husband.  She then turned round to find the Dame, and gave him an
affectionate kiss on the cheek.

"Thank you for giving me away," she said, her eyes shining.

"My pleasure," he told her.  She seemed as happy as he'd ever seen her,
he thought, and hoped to God it would last.  David Cross wasn't the man
he would have chosen for her, but he didn't actually have anything
specific against him.

Yet.

The newly-weds were led off to sign the register, and the Dame walked
out of the church with the best man to check that the photographer was
ready.  He was.

"We haven't seen you lately," a voice said in his ear.  He turned to
find the vicar looking at him with that expression of pained concern
which the Dame had always associated with people who were paid to
care.

"No, 'fraid not," he replied.

"The call of duty," he explained with a smile.

The vicar examined the uniform which Evie had insisted her brother
wear, his eyes coming to rest on the beige beret and its winged dagger
badge.

"Well, I hope we see you again soon," he said.

The Dame nodded, and watched the man walk over to talk with his and
Evie's sister, Rosemary.

A couple of years before, after the Colombian operation, he had started
attending church regularly, this one here in Sunderland when he was at
home, and another on the outskirts of Hereford during tours of duty. He
could have used the Regimental chapel, but, without being quite sure
why, had chosen to keep his devotions a secret from his comrades.  It
wasn't that he feared they'd take the piss though they undoubtedly
would it was just that he felt none of it had anything to do with
anyone else.

He soon realized that this feeling encompassed vicars and other
practising Christians, and in effect the Church itself.  He stopped
attending services, and started looking for other ways of expressing a
yearning inside him which he could hardly begin to explain to himself,
let alone to others.  He wasn't even sure it had anything to do with
God at least as other people seemed to understand the concept.

The best he could manage by way of explanation was a feeling of being
simultaneously drawn to something bigger than himself, something
spiritual he supposed, and increasingly detached from the people around
him.

The latter feeling was much in evidence at the wedding reception.

It was good to see so many old friends: lads he'd been to school with,
played football with, but none of them seemed to have much to say to
him, and he couldn't find much to say to them.  A few old memories, a
couple of jokes about Sunderland town and football team and that was
about it.  Most of them seemed bored with their jobs and, if they were
married, bored with that too.  They seemed more interested in one
another's wives than their own.  The Dame hoped his sister..  . well,
if David Cross cheated on her then the bastard would have him to deal
with.

The time eventually arrived for the honeymooners' departure, their
hired car trailing its retinue of rattling tin cans.  Soon after that,
feeling increasingly oppressed by the reception's accelerating descent
into a drunken wife-swap, the Dame started off across the town, intent
on enjoying the solitude of a twilight walk along the ii se afront

It was a beautiful day still: cold but crystal-clear, gulls circling in
the deepening blue sky, above the blue-grey waters of the North Sea. He
walked for a couple of miles, up on to the cliffs outside the town, not
really thinking about anything, letting the wind sweep the turmoil of
other people from his mind.

He got back home to find his mother and Rosemary asleep in front of the
TV, the living-room still littered with the debris of Christmas.  On
the table by the telephone there was a message for him to ring
Hereford.

She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her head bowed down, on
the stinking mattress in the slowly lightening room.  The first night
was over, she thought, but the first of how many?

The left side of her face still ached from where he had hit her, and
the pain between her legs showed no signs of easing.  She longed to be
able to wash herself, and knew the longing was as much psychological as
it was physical.  Either way, she doubted if they would allow it.

This time yesterday, she thought, I was waiting for Hajrija in the
nurses' dormitory.

The previous morning, after the two Russians had been sent running back
towards Sarajevo with their tails between their legs, the four Chetniks
had simply abandoned their roadblock, as if it had accomplished its
purpose.  They had casually left the young American's body by the side
of the road, bundled her into the back seat of their Fiat Uno, and
driven on down the valley to the next village.  Here she could see no
signs of the local population, either alive or dead, and only one
blackened hulk of a barn bore testimony to recent conflict.  As they
pulled up in the centre of the village another group of Chetnik
irregulars, a dozen or so strong, was preparing to leave in a convoy of
cars.

The leader of her group exchanged a few pleasantries with the leader of
the outgoing troops, and she was led into a nearby house, which, though
stripped of all personal or religious items, had obviously once
belonged to a Muslim family.  Since their departure it had apparently
served as a billet for pigs.  The Chetniks' idea of eating seemed to be
to throw food at one another in the vain hope some of it went in
through the mouth.  Their idea of bathing was non-existent.  The house
stank.

What remained of the furniture was waiting to be burnt on the fire. And
there was a large bloodstain on the rug in the main room which didn't
seem that old.

Nena was led through to a small room at the back, which was empty save
for a soiled mattress and empty bucket.  The only light filtered round
the edges of the shutters on the single window.

"I need to wash," she told her escort.  They were the first words she
had spoken since her abduction.

"Later," he said.

"There's no need now," he added, and closed the door.

She had spent the rest of the day trying not to panic, trying to
prepare herself for what she knew was coming.  She wanted to survive,
she kept telling herself, like a litany.  If they were going to kill
her anyway then there was nothing she could do about it, but she
mustn't give them an excuse to kill her in a fit of anger.  She should
keep her mouth shut, say as little as possible.  Perhaps tell them she
was a doctor they might decide she could be of use to them.

The afternoon passed by, and the light faded outside.  No one brought
her food or water, but even above the sound of the wind she could hear
people in the house and even smell something cooking.

Eventually she heard the clink of bottles, and guessed that they had
begun drinking.  It was about an hour later that the first man appeared
in the doorway.

In the dim light she could see he had a gun in one hand.

"Take off the trousers," he said abruptly.

She swallowed once and did as he said.

"And the knickers."

She pulled them off.

"Now lie down, darling," he ordered.

p She did so, and he was looming above her, dropping his jungle
fatigues and long johns down to his knees, and thrusting his swollen
penis between her legs.

"Wider," he said, taking his finger off the gun's safety-catch only
inches from her ear.

He pushed himself inside her, and started pumping.  He made no attempt
to feel her breasts, let alone kiss her, and out of nowhere she found
herself remembering her father's dog, and its habit of trying to fuck
the large cushion which someone had made for it to lie on.  Now she was
the cushion and this Serb was the dog.  As smelly, as inhuman, as any
dog.

He came with a furious rush, and almost leapt off her, as if she was
suddenly contagious.

The second man was much the same, except for the fact that he didn't
utter a single word between entering the room and leaving it.  Then
there was a respite of ten minutes or so, before the group's leader
came in.  He stripped from the waist down, grabbed a handful of her
hair and lifted up her face to meet his own, as if determined to
impress on her exactly who it was she was submitting to.

She let out an involuntary sob, and that seemed to satisfy him.  He
pushed inside her quickly, but then took his time, savouring the moment
with slow, methodical strokes, stopping himself several times as he
approached a climax, before finally letting himself slip over the
edge.

The young one was last, and the other three brought him in like a bull
being brought to a heifer.  He couldn't have been more than fourteen
and he looked almost as nervous as he did excited.

"Come on," the others said, 'show her what you've got."  He unveiled
his penis almost shyly.  It was already erect, quivering with
anticipation.

"I think he's ready," the leader joked, and the other two grabbed hold
of Nena and pushed her back across the mattress, legs hanging out
across the floor.  Then they pulled them wide.

"That's where you aim for, Sergei," one of them said, running a finger
down her bloodied vulva.

"We've got her nice and lubricated for you."

He came when he was only halfway inside her, to the drunken jeers of
his companions.

After that they retired to the room next door, leaving her lying,
rolled up in a ball.  She tried to ignore the pain, wondering how they
could let her live after what they had done.  Did they think the war
would last for ever, that law and decency would never return, that they
were immune to any retribution?

They probably did.  She hoped they did, because what other reason could
they have for leaving her alive to tell the story?

And if they did make that mistake..  . She lay there trying to fix all
the details in her mind: the place, the faces, the tattoos, the names
they had called each other, the individual smells .

She could hear them talking in the next room, and laughing too.  She
started to cry, silently at first, then in great, wracking sobs which
seemed to go on and on and on.

Exhaustion must have driven her to sleep for a few moments, because she
suddenly woke to find the group's leader standing over her once more.

"You're in luck," he told her.

"The rest of the lads haven't come back, so you've had an easy night.

But I thought I'd come for dessert."

He pulled down his trousers and stood there, his cock hanging in front
of her face.  She could smell it, smell herself on it.

"Make it grow," he said with a leer, and she took hold of it, trying to
imagine she was back in the hospital, examining someone.  And in his
case, hoping to find something seriously wrong.

It swelled in her hand.

"Now suck," he said, looking down at her.  She didn't say no, but there
must have been something in her eyes, because he abruptly changed his
mind, pushing her back across the mattress, roughly pulling off her
jeans, and rolling her over.

"You'd bite it off, wouldn't you?"  he hissed into her ear, and thrust
himself into her anus.  She cried out involuntarily, which seemed only
to increase his ardour.  After a minute of energetic pumping he pulled
himself out rolled her back over, wedged her legs open with his own,
and rammed himself into her vagina, this time coming almost
instantly.

He exhaled noisily and lifted himself up, looking down at her.

"You enjoy it really, don't you.  All you Muslim whores enjoy it."

She said nothing, but she couldn't control the look in her eyes, and he
hit her once, as hard as she had ever imagined being hit, across the
side of the face.

Perhaps she had blacked out for a few seconds, because her next
conscious thought was of the door closing behind him.  And then she had
lain awake for what seemed like hours, feeling that a stain had been
etched into her soul, and that nothing would ever be the same again.
And when the morning light had appeared around the edge of the shutter
it had seemed the grey est of lights.

Now she sat there, hugging herself around the knees, waiting to find
out which fate awaited her death or more nights like the last.

They were awake in the room next door, and this morning she could hear
them talking, as the wind outside had died down.

"I like blondes," one man was saying.

"Fucking a blonde is .. . it's sort of cleaner, know what I mean?

Dark women feel dirtier somehow .

"Why can't we keep her?"  a younger voice asked.

"Listen to the kid.  Thinks he's a stud already."

"But why can't we keep her?"  an older voice asked.

"They expect us to look after the area, freeze our balls off on that
road.  We only get down to Stovic about once a month."

There were a few moments of silence, moments in which Nena tried not to
wonder what the alternative was to being kept.

"We're not keeping her," the group leader said.

"Keep a woman here permanently and we have to feed her, watch her, keep
her clean .

"What for?"

"Because they don't feel as nice if they've been rolling around in
their own shit," the leader said.

"She could do the cooking," someone objected.

"Yeah?  The moment you let her out of that room she needs a guard,
right?  Which means one of us will have to stay here.  It's not worth
it.  She's not that great a fuck, anyway.  All bones.  She's old enough
to be Koca's grandmother.  She's going to Vogosca."

Those last four words caused Nena to almost gasp with relief.  Vogosca
was a small, predominantly Serb town about four miles north of
Sarajevo, and though she didn't know what awaited her there it had to
be better than dying in this mountain village whose name she didn't
even know.

Hold on, she told herself, hold on.  She put her coat on and waited.

One of the men came to get her an hour or so later the one who had not
said a word as he raped her.

"You have to get washed," he said, and he prodded her out through the
house's back door.  The clouds were almost touching the ground, the
mountains completely obscured from view, but the snow still seemed
dazzling to her eyes.

"You can clean yourself with that," he said, pointing at the nearest
snowdrift.

She looked at it.

"What kind of men are you?"  she asked before she could stop herself.

He wasn't offended by the question.

"We are Serbs," he replied.

"Your men are taking our women just the same way."

She walked across to the snowdrift, took down the bloody jeans and
squatted in such a way that she could wash between her legs.

The snow made the abrasions sting, but somehow that seemed almost a
blessing.

After she had finished he took her round the outside of the house to
where the Fiat was parked and told her to get inside.  She sat alone in
the car for about ten minutes, and then he returned, climbed in and
started the car.

"Where are we going?"  she asked.

"Not far," he said.  Once they were outside the village he lit a
cigarette, and, after a moment's hesitation, offered her one.

"I don't smoke," she said.

"I'm a doctor," she added, without thinking.

"Yeah?"  he said, interested.

"I've got a pain in my chest right here," he said, tapping it with the
hand that held the cigarette and giving her an enquiring glance.

"That could be a lot of things," she said.  Hopefully lung cancer, she
thought.

"You think it could be serious?"  he asked anxiously.

"It could.  Why not just stop smoking," she said coldly.

"After the war's over," he said.

"It's too fucking nerve-racking without cigarettes."

After the war's over you'll be on trial for rape and murder, she
thought.

Another ten minutes and they had reached a larger village.  In its
centre both Serb irregulars and uniformed Yugoslav Army troops were in
evidence.  A tank sat to one side, its gun barrel depressed towards the
slushy ground, and on the other side of the road two empty armoured
personnel carriers were tilted against the verge.  Beyond the tank a
civilian bus was parked.  The indicator board still announced Travnik
as its destination, but the driver was wearing military uniform, and
the passengers were exclusively female.

Nena's abductor pulled her out of the car and pushed her on to the
bus.

"Only one this week?"  the driver asked sarcastically.

Nena was surveying her fellow-passengers.  There were about a dozen of
them, and they all seemed to be Muslims, ranging in age from the
mid-forties to just past puberty.  Every one of them appeared to be in
a state of semi-shock, as if the worst had already happened but they
didn't yet know what it was.

"Where are you from?"  Nena asked the woman nearest the front.

"No talking," the driver screamed at her.

The two women's eyes met in shared resignation, and Nena sat down
across the aisle from her.

At least three hours went by before a couple of uniformed soldiers came
on board, and the journey began.  Nena was growing increasingly
conscious of how thirsty she was one handful of snow in twenty four
hours was nowhere near enough to satisfy anyone.  Hunger was less of a
problem.  She realized that living in Sarajevo for the last few months,
she had grown accustomed to life on an empty stomach.

The afternoon dragged on, the bus coughing its way up hills and
rattling its way down them.  It was growing dark as they finally
entered Vogosca.  Nena had driven through the small town many times,
but couldn't remember ever stopping.  The bus drew up outside the
Partisan Sports Hall, and the twelve women and girls were ordered off.
A Serb irregular sporting the badge of the White Eagles gestured them
in through the front doors, and once inside another man pointed them
through a further pair of twin doors.

It was dark inside the room, but as Nena's eyes grew accustomed to the
gloom it became apparent that they were in a gymnasium; one, moreover,
that was already home to other women.  All around the walls they sat or
lay, thirty or forty of them, and as yet not one of them had uttered a
word.

"What is this?"  Nena asked, her voice echoing in the cavernous space.
As if in response someone started to cry.

"It's the shop window of a brothel," a dry voice said.

Chris Martinson pulled the jeep into the car park of Hereford Station
and looked at his watch.  The Dame's connection from Worcester was not
due for another five minutes, which probably meant a twenty-minute
wait.  A ferocious rain was beating a tattoo on the jeep's convertible
roof, and almost visibly deepening the puddles in the car park, but at
least it was relatively warm for the time of year.  Chris decided to
stay where he was until the train came into view under the bridge.

Sergeant Docherty had called him with the request to pick the Dame up
at the station, and though Chris had not had much to do with Docherty
during his eight years in the SAS the older man had left B Squadron for
the Training Wing before Chris won his badge he had managed to piece
together an impression of him from what others had said.  It would have
been hard not to, for Docherty was something of a legend the man who
had almost succumbed to personal tragedy, and then come home the hard
way from Argentina during the Falklands War, walking out across the
Andes with a new wife.

Chris had a good idea how hard that must have been, having been
involved in something similar himself in Colombia.  Only he had
neglected to bring a wife.

Docherty was not just known for his toughness though.  He was supposed
to be something close to the old SAS ideal, a thinking soldier.  There
were many in the Regiment who lamented the shift in selection policy
over the last decade, which seemed to put a lower premium on thought
and a higher one on physical and emotional strength.  Others, of
course, said it was just a sign of the times.  The Dochertys of this
world, like the George Bests, were becoming extinct.  Their breeding
grounds had been overrun by progress.

It suddenly dawned on Chris why Docherty had sent him to collect the
Dame.  The Scot had thought it would be a good idea for the two of them
to talk before being confronted with whatever it was they were about to
be confronted with.  To psych each other up.  Chris smiled to himself.
A thinking soldier indeed.

A two-tone horn announced the arrival of the train, seconds before the
diesel's yellow nose appeared beneath the bridge.  Chris jumped down
from the jeep and made a run for the ticket hall, his boots sending
water flying up from the puddles.

The Dame was one of the last to reach the barrier, his dark face set,
as usual, in an almost otherworldly seriousness, as if he was deeply
involved in pondering some abstruse philosophical puzzle.

The face broke into a smile when he saw Chris.

"Your humble chauffeur awaits," the latter said.

"I suppose the birds aren't flying today," the Dame said, eyeing the
torrential rain from the station entrance.

"How many miles away have you parked?"

Chris pointed out the jeep.

"Do you think you can manage twenty yards?"

The two men dashed madly through the half-flooded car park and
scrambled into the jeep.

"What's this all about?"  the Dame half-shouted above the din of rain
on the roof.

"No idea," Chris said, starting up the engine.

"But we're about to find out the briefing's due to begin in about
twenty-five minutes."

"You don't even know where we're going?"

"Nope.  They're playing it really close to the chest.  All I know is
that it's a four-man op."

"Who are the other two?"

"Sergeant Docherty and ..

"I thought he'd retired."

"He had.  He's been reinstated, presumably just for this one show."

"Christ, he must be about forty-five by now.  It can't be anything too
strenuous."

Chris laughed.

"I shouldn't say anything like that when he's around.  He didn't look
too decrepit the last time I saw him."

"Maybe.  Who's Number Four?"

"Sergeant Wilkinson.  Training Wing."

"I know him.  At least, I've played football with him.

He must be about thirty-five ..

"Hey, I've turned thirty, you know.

Someone obviously decided they needed experience for this one, and you
were just included to provide some mindless energy."

"Probably," the Dame said equably.

"Wilkinson always reminds me a bit of Eddie.  London to the bone.  A
joker.  He's even a Tottenham supporter."

"Yeah, well," Chris said, and both men were silent for a few moments,
thinking of their old comrade, who had died in the village by the
jungle river in Colombia.  Probably with some witty rejoinder frozen on
his lips.

"How was your Christmas?"  the Dame asked eventually.

"Fine," Chris said, though he'd spent most evenings desperately
bored.

"Yours?"

"It was great.  My sister got married yesterday, and I had to give her
away.  It was great," he said again, as if he was trying to convince
himself.

Chris looked at his watch as he turned the jeep in through the gates of
the Stirling Lines barracks.

"Time for a brew," he said.

The water-buffalo's head which reigned over 'the Kremlin's' briefing
room a memento of the Regiment's Malayan days seemed to be leaning
slightly to one side, as if it was trying to hear some distant mating
call.

Forget it, Docherty thought, you don't have a body any more.

He knew the feeling, after the previous night's evening in the pub with
old friends.  The good news was that he and Isabel couldn't be drinking
as much as they thought they were not if his head felt like this after
only half a dozen pints and chasers.

"Bad news," Barney Davies said, as he came in through the door.

"Nena Reeve seems to have gone missing.

She's not been to work at the hospital for the last couple of days.  Of
course, things being the way they are in Sarajevo, she may just be at
home with the flu and unable to phone in.  Or she may have been wounded
by a sniper, or be looking after a friend who was.  They're trying to
find out."

"MI6?"

"Presumably.  Did Robson get here all right?"

"Yes, boss," a voice with a Wearside accent said from behind him.  The
Dame and Chris filed in, swiftly followed by Razor Wilkinson.

Docherty got to his feet, shook hands with the new arrivals, and then
took up a position half-sitting on the table at the front, while the
other four arranged themselves in a semicircle of upright chairs.

He began by introducing everyone.

"You two have been recommended to me by the CO," he told Chris and the
Dame.

"Though you may wish he hadn't by the time we're finished.  We're going
to Bosnia, gentlemen," he added, almost as an afterthought.

He went through the whole story from the beginning, all the while
keeping a careful watch on the two new men's faces.

The mere mention of Bosnia seemed to have brought a gleam into the eyes
of the lad from Sunderland, and as Docherty talked he could almost feel
the Dame's intense eagerness to get started.

The Essex lad was a different type altogether: very cool and collected,
very self-contained, almost as if he was in some sort of reverie. There
were a couple of moments when Docherty wasn't even sure he was
listening, but once he'd finished his outline it was Chris who came up
with the first question, and one that went straight to the heart of the
matter.

"What are we going in as, boss?"  he asked.

"That's a good question," Barney Davies said.

"You'll be flying into Split on the coast of Croatia, and while you're
there waiting for transport to Sarajevo which may be a few hours, may
be a few days your cover will be as supervisory staff attached to the
Sarajevo civilian supply line.  Once you're in Sarajevo .  well, not to
put too fine a point on it, you'll just be one more bunch of irregulars
in a situation which is not too far from anarchy."

"But we have troops there, right?"

the Dame asked.

"The Cheshires and the Royal Irish."

"One battalion from each," Davies confirmed, 'and a squadron of
Lancers, but they're under UN control, and that means they can only
fire off weapons in self defence  Their own, not yours.  You should get
some useful intelligence from our people out there, but don't expect
anything more.  The whole point of this op, at least as far as our
political masters are concerned, is to restore our reputation as
peace-keepers, with the least possible publicity "You make it sound
like the Regiment has a different priority, boss," Razor said,
surprising Docherty.

"I think it might be fairer to say we have an additional priority,"
Davies said.

"Looking after our own.  John Reeve has been an outstanding soldier for
the Regiment, and he deserves whatever help we can give him."

There was a rap on the door, and an adjutant poked his head around
it.

"The man from the Foreign Office is here, boss," he told Davies.

"Bring him through," the CO ordered.

"He's going to brief you on the local background," he told the four
men.

A suited young man, carrying a briefcase in one hand and what appeared
to be a large wad of maps in the other, walked confidently into the
room.  He had longish, curly hair, circular, black-framed spectacles,
and the overall look of an anorexic Malcolm Rifkind.

"This is Mr.  Castle, from the Foreign Office's Balkan Section," Davies
said formally, as he walked across to make sure the door was firmly
closed.  Docherty suddenly realized how unusual it was for the CO to
introduce a briefing.  He wondered how many other members of the
Regiment knew of this mission.  If any.

"He is going to give you a basic introduction to what the newspapers
now like to call "the former Yugoslavia", the CO went on.

"I know you all read the Sun voraciously," he added with a broad smile,
'so most of what he has to say may be only too familiar, but just in
case you've missed the odd page of detailed analysis .. . Mr.
Castle."

The man from the Foreign Office was still struggling to fix his
unwieldy pile of maps to the Kremlin's antique easel.  Chris gave him a
hand.

"Good morning," Castle said finally, in a voice that was mercifully
dissimilar to Malcolm Rifkind's.

"Despite your CO's testimonial to your reading habits, I'm going to
assume you know nothing."

"Good assumption," Razor agreed.

Castle grinned.

"Right.  Well, Yugoslavia, roughly translated, means Land of the
Southern Slays, and these Slays originally came south to populate the
area more than a thousand years ago.  The peoples we now call the
Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims are all
descendants of these Slays.  They are not separate races, any more than
Yorkshiremen are a separate race from Brummies, no matter what Geoff
Boycott might tell you.  If you visited an imaginary nudist colony in
Bosnia you wouldn't be able to tell a Bosnian Muslim from a Slovene, or
a Serb from a Croat."

He paused for breath, and smiled at them.

"What these peoples don't have in common is history.  I'm simplifying a
lot, but for most of the last five hundred years, up to the beginning
of this century, the area has been divided into three, with each third
dominated by a different culture.  The Austrians and sometimes the
Italians were dominant in Slovenia, Croatia and along the coast,
imposing a West European, Catholic culture.  In the mountains of Bosnia
and Hercegovina here," he said, pointing at the map, 'there was a
continuous Turkish occupation for several centuries, and many of the
Slays were converted to Islam.  In the east, in Serbia and to a lesser
extent in Montenegro, the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its mostly
Russian cultural outlook, managed to survive the more sporadic periods
of Turkish domination.  In fact, fighting the Turks was probably what
gave the Serbs their exaggerated sense of identity.

"So, by the time we reach the twentieth century we have a reasonably
homogenous racial group divided into three cultural camps.  Rather like
what Northern Ireland might be like if a large group of Arabs had been
settled there in the seventeenth century, at the same time as the
Protestants."

"Christ almighty," Razor muttered.

"A fair comment," Castle agreed.  He seemed to be enjoying himself.

"The problem with people who only have cultures to identify themselves
is that the cultures tend to get rabid.

Since much of the last millennium in the Balkans has been a matter of
Muslim versus Christian there's plenty of fertile ground for raking up
old Muslim-Croat and Muslim Serb quarrels.  And in both world wars the
Russians fought the Austrians, which meant Serbs against Croats.  In
World War Two this relationship reached a real nadir the Croats were
allowed their own little state by the Nazis, managed to find home-grown
Nazis to run it Ustashi they were called and took the chance to butcher
a large number of Serbs.

No one knows how many, but hundreds of thousands.

"But I'm getting a bit ahead of the story.  Yugoslavia was formed after
World War One, partly as a recognition that these peoples did have a
lot in common, and partly as a way of containing their differences for
everyone else's sake.

After all, the war had been triggered by a Bosnian Serb assassinating
an Austrian archduke in the mainly Muslim city of Sarajevo."

Castle checked to see if they were awake, found no one had glazed eyes
yet, and turned back to the map.

"There are a few other minor divisions I should mention.  The Albanians
who are a different racial group have large minorities in the Serbian
region of Kosovo and in Macedonia.  Macedonians are not a separate
ethnic group, and their territory has been variously claimed by
Bulgaria which claims that Macedonians are just confused Bulgars and
Greece, which claims etc."  etc."  He grinned owlishly at them.

"It's a right fucking mess, then," Razor observed.

"But all their own," Chris murmured.

"At the end of the last war a temporary solution appeared communism. It
was the communists, under Tito, who led the guerrilla war against the
Germans, and after the war they took over the government.  The ethnic
tensions were basically put on ice.  Each major group was given its own
state in what was nominally a federal system, but Tito and the Party
took all the important decisions.  The hope was that the new secular
religion of communism would see the withering away of the old
national-religious identities everyone would have a house and a car and
a TV and be like every other consumer.

"But when Tito died in 1980 there was no one of the same stature to
hold it all together.  The system just about stumbled along through the
eighties, with the Party bosses holding it all together between them,
but when communism collapsed everywhere else in eastern Europe, the rug
got pulled out from under their feet.

"What was left was an economy not doing that badly, at least by other
communist standards, but a country with nothing to bind it together,
and of course all the accumulated grievances came pouring out.  Under
Tito the richer areas like Slovenia and Croatia had been forced to
subsidize the poorer ones, but they hadn't been given much of anything
in return.  The Serbs, who dominated the Party and the federal
institutions and particularly the national army had no interest in
changing things, and the power to stop those who had.

Not surprisingly the Slovenes and Croats decided to opt out.

"Slovenia presented no great problems, except that it set a precedent
if Slovenia could go, then why not Croatia?  The trouble was that
Croatia had a large Serb minority, and the Croat leaders made no effort
whatsoever to reassure it.

"By this time everyone was acting very badly, like a bunch of mad prima
donnas.  The Croats decided to secede from Yugoslavia, and their Serb
minority areas decided to secede from Croatia.  That was a year and a
half ago, the summer of 1991, and both secessions have stuck, so to
speak.

Croatia has been recognized as an independent state, but since the
cease-fire at the beginning of this year the Serb areas are nominally
"UN-protected" in other words under Serb military control.  There's no
foreseeable hope of Croatia taking them back.

"Which brings us to Bosnia your destination.  The most enthusiastic
Yugoslavs always thought of this as the heart of the federation.  It
was the most ethnically mixed area, the one where mutual tolerance, and
even mutual enjoyment, of the separate cultural traditions seemed most
deep-rooted.

It's mostly mountainous country, full of deep valleys and high passes,
with towns clustered in the hollows.  I travelled there several years
ago, and found it beautiful.

Most people do."  lie grimaced.

"But an awful lot has been destroyed in the last six months.

"Anyway, once Croatia and Slovenia opted out, the Bosnian Government
had an impossible choice to make either accept a subsidiary position in
a Serbdominated mini-Yugoslavia or try opting out themselves, with the
Yugoslav Army already encamped in their country and the Serb minority
committed to opposing Bosnian independence by force of arms.  They
chose the latter, no doubt hoping that the international community
would come to their aid.  No such luck.

"I should say one more thing about Bosnia-Hercegovina.  Each of the
three peoples Croats, Serbs, Muslims have areas in which they are the
majority, but there is intermingling everywhere.  There was no way, a
year ago, that you could have divided Bosnia tidily along ethnic
grounds.

Small villages were split two ways, sometimes even three ways let alone
regions.

"But of course the moment the international community started talking
partition quite mistakenly in my view the rush was on.  If a particular
town had forty per cent Serbs, forty per cent Croats and twenty per
cent Muslims, then the Serbs' chance of including it in a Greater
Serbia would be much improved if the other sixty per cent could be
persuaded to move on.  And if two towns like that were separated by an
area eighty per cent Muslim or Croat, then strategic necessity dictated
that they be moved on too.  This pattern is being repeated everywhere.
Since no one's too sure of what is theirs, they're grabbing it
anyway."

"Is this what they call ethnic cleansing?"  the Dame asked.

"Yes.  Wonderful phrase, isn't it?

The lucky ones are being simply moved on, but it looks like an enormous
number of men have been killed, and an equally vast number of women
have been raped, with the dual aim of humiliating them and making them
pregnant.  In both cases the Serbs seem the guiltiest party, by quite a
considerable degree."

"Isn't that like comparing Genghis Khan to Attila the Hun?"  Barney
Davies asked.

"No," Castle answered immediately.

"At least, there doesn't seem to be that sort of equivalence.  Why
should there be?  The Serbs in World War Two came nowhere near to
matching the record of the Croat Ustashi for atrocities.  And in this
war, though individual groups of Croat and Muslim soldiers have
undoubtedly been guilty of rape, the widespread reports of mass rape in
Serb-dominated areas suggest that there is a systematic policy being
coordinated from the top."

"Jesus," Chris muttered.

"At the moment," Castle continued, turning round to flip over another
map, 'this is the overall military situation on the ground.  The Croats
and Muslims have this' he traced an area with an index finger 'and the
Serbs this.  But of course the Muslim-Croat alliance is stronger in
some areas than others "Where's Zavik?"  Docherty asked.  He had looked
it up in an atlas, but he wanted to see where it was in terms of the
military situation.

"Here," Castle said, pointing to a spot about twelve miles behind Serb
lines.

"What sort of military units are we dealing with here?"  Docherty
asked.

"Regular Army divisions?"

"A good question.  Everything from regular units down to gangs of
bandits, with all the various possibilities in between.  The official
Bosnian Army is mostly Muslim but also includes Serbs and Croats. There
are also various exclusively Muslim militias, and even volunteer units
made up from Islamic veterans of Beirut, Iran, Afghanistan, etc."

"Wonderful," Chris murmured sarcastically.

"The Croatian Army has regular units in Bosnia, the Bosnian Croats have
their own army, and there are also private militias.  The worst of them
are basically reborn Ustashi they dress like designer storm troopers
and behave even worse.  It's basically the same story on the Serbian
side, with the old Federal Army now basically the Serbian Army, a
Serbian Army of Bosnia, the Serbian Police of Bosnia, and any number of
militias.  The most famous are the Arkanovci, who are led by a man who
calls himself Arkan and is wanted in about five European countries for
armed robbery.  Then there's the White Eagles and the Chetniks.  Croats
and Muslims, by the way, call all Serb irregulars Chetniks, after the
nationalist guerrillas from World War Two, and they do tend to look
alike the fashion here is broad-brimmed hats and long beards, so they
look like psychotic Australian Rasputins.  By the same token, all Croat
militiamen are called Ustashi, after the World War Two fascists."

"What are these bands of merry men armed with?"  Razor asked.  Even he
seemed subdued by Castle's account, Docherty thought.

"And how many men are we talking about?"

Chris wanted to know.

"Serbs about 70,000 fighters;

50,000 Croats; maybe 40,000 Muslims.

They all have APCs for moving men around, and the usual automatic
weapons.  The Serbs have some Soviet tanks, and as much heavy artillery
as they need, up to 155mm.  Plus, probably twenty combat aircraft Super
Galebs and Oraos.  Between thirty and forty helicopters Gazelles, for
the most part.  The Croats and the Muslims have no planes, no tanks
and, in the Muslims' case, not much artillery to speak of."

"No wonder they need their fedayeen," Docherty observed.

"Well, they can't get any weapons from outside because of the arms
embargo," Castle said.

"Any other questions?"

"Will it all have a happy ending?"

Razor asked.

"I doubt it," Castle said simply.

When he had gone, one question was uppermost in the Dame's mind.

"What weaponry are we taking in?"  he wanted to know.

"Whatever we can carry without looking too much like an Action Team,"
Docherty said.

"Certainly MP5s and High Powers.  Any particular requests?"

"An Accuracy International," the Dame said.

"Good idea," Docherty agreed, remembering the Dame's reported prowess
with a sniper rifle.

"How about a Chieftain tank?"  Razor asked.

"If you can carry it, you can bring it," Docherty shot back.

The plane touched down at Split airport soon after ten a.m. on Thursday
30 December 1992, and the bright sunshine and English summer
temperature which greeted them at the open door was a welcome change
from the freezing drizzle they had left behind in Oxfordshire.

In years gone by, Docherty reminded himself, thousands of Brits had
arrived here on package tours for a week of Mediterranean winter
warmth, armed with trashy novels and suntan lotion rather than Heckler
& Koch MP5 submachine-guns.

A quarter of a mile or so across the tarmac a long line of Hercules
C-130 transport planes were parked wing-tip to wingtip, each bearing
the UN logo.

Behind them the Dalmatian mountains rose up from the coastal plain into
a clear blue sky.

A tall, clean-shaven RAE officer sporting a pale-blue UN beret was
waiting for them at the bottom of the mobile stairway.

Flight Lieutenant Frobisher," he introduced himself, offering his hand
to each of the foursome in turn.

"Which are the bags containing the winter clothing and the you-know
what

"Those two," Docherty said, indicating the two large canvas holdalls
Chris and the Dame were carrying.  They'd been warned before leaving to
pack the Arctic clothing and the weaponry separately from the rest of
the equipment.

"I'll take care of them," Frobisher said, and carried the bags across
to where another RAE officer was talking to the pilot, dumped them at
his feet, and exchanged a few words.  Then he rejoined the SAS men, and
gestured them towards a white jeep parked a few yards away.

Docherty clambered into the front seat, while the other three squeezed
themselves into the back.

"The stuff will be kept here for you until you leave," Frobisher
explained.

"On one of those," he added, indicating the distant line of transport
planes, 'but when that will be depends very much on weather conditions.
Oh, it's lovely down here," he agreed, seeing their surprised faces,
'but up in the mountains it's a different kettle of fish altogether. Go
thirty miles east of here and the temperature will drop about twenty
degrees Celsius, that is.  Sarajevo's in the middle of a blizzard right
now, with ground visibility down to about six inches.  So don't expect
an imminent departure.  But don't not expect one either.  If a window
opens up we want you ready to go."

"So we're not staying out here?"

Docherty asked.

"There isn't anywhere, unless you fancy kip ping down for a week in a
C-130.  In any case, the Croats watch what's happening at this airport
like hawks, and the town's only twelve miles away.  We thought you'd be
a bit less noticeable there, so we booked you into one of the hotels.
As you can imagine there's quite a lot of vacancies this year."

He looked at Docherty, as if expecting formal approval of the
arrangements.

"Sounds good," the Scot said.

"Is there room service?"  Razor asked.

"I don't know," Frobisher said doubtfully, as if uncertain whether the
question was serious.  It seemed unlikely that he'd ever had dealings
with the SAS before.

Docherty had been expecting at least some formalities to mark their
official arrival in a foreign country, but Frobisher simply drove the
jeep around the end of the forlorn-looking terminal building, through
an open gate and out on to a wide highway that ran along parallel to
the coast, at times almost directly above the breaking waves.  In the
distance silhouetted islands loomed abruptly out of the shining
Adriatic, giving Docherty the impression of a warmer west coast of
Scotland.  On the other side of the highway sunlit slopes tumbled down
almost to the verge.  An almost idyllic setting, it was hardly what
they had been expecting.

"It doesn't look like the war's reached here," Chris observed.

"Not really," Frobisher agreed.

"There's no argument about whose territory this is.  Still, having said
that, Split is home to some of the nastier Croat groups, and there has
been trouble.  There was a lot of intimidation against the minorities
in the town a year or so back, people being fired from their jobs,
scared out of their houses, a lot of beatings, a few deaths.  Most of
the Serbs and Muslims upped and left, though God knows where they went.
The place doesn't have a nice feeling to it- at least I don't think so.
Looks nice, though," he added, then, pointing forward and to the
right, said: "That's it over there, on the peninsula."

It did look nice, too nice for beatings and deaths.  A lighthouse sat
on the end of the headland, and behind it the ground rose in a high,
wooded hill, which seemed to stand guard over the town nestling beneath
it.

"One of the Roman Emperors built his retirement palace here," Frobisher
said.

"Tottenham played Hadjuk Split in the UEFA Cup once," Razor added.

"Well, that's the last two thousand years taken care of, then," Chris
said.

Ten minutes later they were entering the outskirts of the town,
climbing up and across the peninsula's spine, and motoring down towards
the sea on its southern side.  Their hotel, which bore the
unpronounceable name of the Prenociste Slavija, was on one of the
narrow side-streets inside the walls of the old Roman palace.  Its
interior was less impressive than its location, but all of them had
stayed in worse.

"The rooms are booked for a week," Frobisher told them.

"There's no chance you'll be going in today, but if tomorrow looks like
a possibility I'll come by tonight and tell you.

The telephones are not what you'd call reliable," he added
cryptically.

"Anything else?  Ah yes," he answered himself, pulling something from
his pocket.

"This is a map of the town in case you need it.  The hotel is here' he
pointed to the spot 'and there's a decent enough restaurant here, just
inside the East Gate.  You've got money, I take it."

"Aye.  Dinars and dollars."

"I should forget the dinars.  Anything else?"

"How can we get hold of you?"  Docherty asked.

"Just take a taxi out to the airport.  The UN Operations HO is on the
second floor of the terminal building."

When Frobisher had gone, Docherty turned to find the other three
looking at him expectantly.

"Food, boss?"  Razor asked.

"Sounds good.  And then I think we'll go for a run, get used to the
altitude."

The others groaned in unison.

An hour and a half later, as the four men toiled their way up towards
the summit of Marjan Hill for the third time, the Dame was beginning to
revise his opinions about Docherty's readiness for retirement.

A few yards behind him Chris was wondering whether Docherty had planned
this demonstration with just such an aim in mind.

Was the Patrol Commander intent on dispelling any doubts the younger
men might have about his fitness?  If so, he had succeeded.

Bringing up the rear, Razor was breathing heavily but still smiling to
himself.  Running up and down a hill in the sunshine sure beat teaching
Continuation Training classes, he decided.

"That'll do," Docherty told them at the summit.

"I don't want to wear you out before we get there."  He looked at his
watch.

"OK, it's just gone four.  We'll eat at seven.  So you've got three
hours to lie in the bath, write a classical symphony or take a look
around.  And we'll meet up in the same restaurant."

The others nodded.

"I'll write the symphony," Razor said.

"Wilkinson's Fourth."

"Let's pray it's Unfinished," Chris muttered.

Docherty eyed them fondly.  There was nothing quite like bullshit for
cementing the relationships in a four-man patrol.

Docherty took a quick shower, dressed and went out on his own.  For
half an hour or so he wandered through the narrow streets of the old
town, inspecting the buildings with a slightly jaundiced eye.  As a
lover of Islamic and Spanish architecture the legacy of time spent on
active service in Oman and off duty in Mexico he found Graeco-Roman
styles too brutal and the later Renaissance architecture too florid by
half.  He was looking forward to seeing the minarets of Sarajevo,
always assuming there were any left.

He knew that most people would think it wrong to lament the loss of an
architectural heritage when so many people of all ages were being
killed every day, but, as his friend Liam McCall had pointed out, there
was no God-given limit on how many different things a man could lament
at the same time.

And the Serbs weren't destroying those buildings by accident.
Representing a thousand years of a culture's history, they were the
visual embodiment of the lives of countless generations of Bosnian
Muslims.  Destroy them, and the books and the pictures they contained,
and it was like erasing a people's memory.

He sighed.  Maybe he was getting too old for this game after all.

He emerged on to Titova Obala, the se afront promenade.  A couple of
hundred yards to his left he could see Razor and Chris walking in the
opposite direction, and smiled hopefully to himself.  A friendship
between those two could only strengthen the chemistry of the patrol,
which Docherty already considered as good as any he'd known.

He crossed the wide street and turned right along the sea wall, looking
out across the myriad boats lying at anchor across the harbour.  Many
seemed neglected, even dilapidated, and there was a sad air about the
whole scene, as there was about the town as a whole.

It was a Sleeping Beauty town, he decided, waiting for peace to kiss it
awake.

A tousle-haired man in a thick woollen sweater was leaning against the
harbour wall, staring out to where the sun was rapidly sinking behind
an arm of the harbour.  To Docherty's surprise he had a copy of that
day's Daily Mirror sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans.  It
had to have arrived on the same plane as they had.

"Good evening," he said, wondering whether he'd get an English
response.

"My God, the Scots have arrived," the man said with a smile and a
Midlands accent.  He was younger than Docherty, probably in his
mid-thirties.

"We understand what it's like being an oppressed minority," Docherty
said, 'so they called us in to sort things out.  My name's Jamie, by
the way."

"Jim," the man said, offering his hand.

"And what are you really doing here?"

"Admin work for the UN," Docherty lied.

"How about you?"

"I'm on the lorries.  The supply run to Sarajevo," he explained.

"Got back this morning, and I'll probably be going back Saturday."

"What's the situation like there?"  Docherty asked.

"Bloody terrible.  Imagine how bad it could get, and then imagine it
being ten times worse that's Sarajevo.  The people there the ordinary
people are bloody amazing, but .. there seem to be more
dyed-in-the-wool bastards per square foot in this country than you'd
find anywhere outside a Conservative Party conference.  I hope you're
not a Tory, mate."

Docherty grinned.

"No.  How about the journey no trouble on the road from irregulars?  Or
regulars, come to that?"

Jim shrugged.

"We have UN troops riding shotgun,

for what it's worth.  There's a lot of hassle, you know, having to get
free passage agreed each time, and being stopped every few miles to
have our papers looked at and the loads checked .. ."  He shrugged
again.

"But by God it's worth it when you see the faces at the other end."

Docherty found himself envying the man.

"It must be," he said.

"You know," Jim said, turning to face him, "I spent most of the last
ten years delivering fitted bathrooms to people who didn't really need
them.  Can you imagine what that's like spending your life doing
something completely unnecessary?  And then I saw this job advertised,
and I just had to take it.  My wife thought I was nuts, at least in the
beginning, and maybe I am, but for the first time in my life I'm
delivering something that people really need, and Christ it feels
good."

Walking back towards the hotel Docherty wondered, not for the first
time, how the same species could accommodate the utter meanness which
targeted minarets and the generosity of spirit which made a man like
Jim risk everything because helping people felt so good.  He would have
liked to talk to Liam McCall about it -they could have shared each
other's incomprehension.

The restaurant was not so empty as it had been at lunchtime: three
other tables were already occupied, and two more had 'reserved' signs
on them.  A family of four was seated at one of the occupied tables,
but the others contained only men, and young men at that.

None of them was wearing uniform, and it might have been Docherty's
imagination, but there seemed a hint of latent aggression in the air.
It smelt of what Isabel liked to call a 'testosterone overload
situation'.

Once again Chris translated the menu for them.  He and Docherty settled
for brodet mixed fish stewed with rice while the Dame opted for a
seafood platter and Razor for an anchovy pizza.  Four small glasses of
plum brandy served as aperitifs, and they ordered a large carafe of
Riesling to complement the meal.

"Here's to the taxpayer, who's paying for it all," Razor said, raising
his glass.

"In Sarajevo they're eating dandelion leaves," Chris said soberly.

"Christ, I hate greens," Razor complained, just as the door opened to
admit another group of four men.  The words 'designer storm troopers
went through all four SAS minds at the same moment.  Each of the
newcomers had hair cut close-to-stubble short and clean shaven faces.
Each was wearing a jet black uniform, black boots and black leather
mittens with silver studs.  Two of them were sporting Ray-Ban Aviator
shades, and one had a black sweatband around his head, presumably to
keep his non-existent hair out of his eyes.

Docherty's first impulse was to laugh out loud, but he restrained
himself.  For five reasons.  One was their need to remain as anonymous
as possible, the other four rested in low-slung holsters on each man's
thigh black, Czech-made Scorpion machine pistols.

"Jesus," Razor muttered under his breath.

"More like Hell's Angels," Docherty murmured.  He remembered gangs of
leather-clad rockers in the sixties who had walked into Glasgow cafes
and pubs with exactly the same cold-hearted swagger.

They had only been carrying bicycle chains and knives, and they had
scared the shit out of him.  Not so much because they were stronger, or
because there were more of them, but because their only means of
communication with each other was through finding strangers to
victimize.

The new arrivals took a table about fifteen feet away from the SAS
men.

"Keep the talk down and avoid eye contact," Docherty softly told the
others.

"We'll just enjoy our meal and get the hell out of here."

The food arrived sooner than expected, as if the waiter was also keen
to see them on their way as quickly as possible.  As far as Docherty
could remember, he was the only man who had heard them speaking
English, and another waiter was dealing with the black-clad irregulars.
Maybe there wouldn't be a problem.

Or maybe there would.

"You can tell how a man is by his friends," a voice said loudly in
English.

"A friend of Serbs is a pig," one of his companions agreed.  Docherty
could feel the eyes boring into the side of his head, and fought the
temptation to turn towards them.

"It is like they say there are two peoples in Europe who do not like to
wash the Serbs and the English," the first voice continued
conversationally.  Someone else laughed, and the other two followed his
cue, like an echo.  Presumably they didn't know enough English to join
in the baiting.

It was all so ludicrously childish, Docherty thought, like a thousand
scenes in a thousand bad Westerns.

Sure, there were bullies everywhere in real life, but they usually had
a better script than this.  He placed a forkful of fish in his mouth;
it tasted sourer than it should have.

He looked round at the others.  Razor was smiling to himself, revelling
in the luxury of having his back to the taunters.  Chris was managing
to look indifferent, but the Dame's mouth was set in a grim and angry
line.

"We took an English nurse in Knin," the voice said.

"She said she was a virgin."  He laughed.

"Not now.

Now she has a hundred men to remember."

Docherty took a deep breath.  He was confident they could cope with any
amount of bullshit, but could the shitheads in black cope with being
ignored much longer?  And if they couldn't then what form would the
escalation take?  And how the hell could they defuse the situation?

"De don de vie ne este vino?"  Razor asked suddenly, picking up the
bottle and examining it with great interest.  It had occurred to him
that all four of them were both semi-fluent in Spanish and relatively
dark complexioned

"Dalmatia," Chris said.

"Es bueno, si?"

"Si," Razor agreed.

Docherty smiled inwardly and said he had always liked Yugoslavian
wines.

The four SAS men launched into an enthusiastic discussion, in Spanish,
of the relative merits of different wines.  All of them were speaking
the Latin American variant, but Docherty doubted whether the Croats
would know the difference.  They had reverted to their own language, he
realized with relief.

"They're talking about their plans for tomorrow, Chris explained in
Spanish, as if reading Docherty's mind.

"I hope they include a run-in with the fashion police," Razor said.

They walked back to their hotel along the darkened street feeling
good.

"Jesus, I'm ready for a bed," Docherty said, as they walked in through
the front door, only to find Flight-Lieutenant Frobisher rising out of
the single, threadbare armchair to greet them.

"The weathermen say there may be a window around dawn tomorrow," he
said, 'so you'd better wait out at the airport."

Ten minutes later they were back in Frobisher's jeep, motoring out
through the empty streets of the port and on to the coast highway.  The
day's clear sky had given way to heavy, rolling clouds, with a hint of
rain in the air.  Their beds for the night turned out to be sackfuls of
rice in the belly of a Hercules C-130.

Dawn was still half an hour away when the transport plane rattled off
the runway and into the dark sky.

Docherty stared at the solid wall of the fuselage and remembered the
view they had enjoyed coming in to Split the previous morning, the
islands scattered across the deep-blue sea.

The R.A.F pilots had both seemed cheerful enough, and the younger of
the two had even relished telling them they were in for a "Khe Sanh'
landing at Sarajevo.  Docherty had not spoiled the other three's flight
by passing on everything he had heard about such landings from
Americans who'd served in Vietnam.  Just so long as they were all well
strapped in when the time came .

They were in their full Arctic gear now: thermal vests and long johns,
quilted under-trousers and jackets, thick woollen socks, gloves and
high neck combat boots, the latter a great improvement on their
Falklands-era predecessors.  As the quartermaster had told them: "You
might get shot dead but you won't get trench foot."

Goretex jackets normally completed the outfit, but for this trip they
were also wearing flak-jackets.

Both Serbs and Muslims had reportedly acquired the nasty habit of using
Sarajevo's runway for target practice.

Docherty leaned his head back against the plane's metal skin and closed
his eyes, his mind reaching forward towards their arrival in the
Bosnian capital.

What would it be like?  Would they find Nena Reeve?

And if they did, would she agree to come with them?

He wondered again if this chosen course of action hadn't been a
mistake.  A C-130 like this one could have dropped the four of them
within easy reach of Zavik.  Granted, they would never have got
clearance for a flight out of Split, but these planes had a range of
close on 3000 miles.  The whole mission could have been mounted from
the UK.

Too much chance of political hassle, perhaps.  And there was always a
lot to be said for a thorough acclimatization.  The town of Zavik, the
immediate vicinity, the military situation in the area all were
complete unknowns.  The chances of dropping a team into the heart of a
battle zone might not be high, but it hardly seemed a risk worth
taking.

Against that, they now had to countenance a landing in Sarajevo and an
overland odyssey to Zavik.  If the latest reports were correct then
most of the journey would be through Muslim-held territory, but even
with snow on the ground the military situation seemed alarmingly fluid.
If all four of them came through this without a serious scratch,
Docherty thought to himself, then he'd retire once more a happy man.

He glanced round at the other three.  Chris was sitting opposite him,
squinting in the dim light at the book he was studying Birds of
Southern Europe.  His face even seemed relaxed when he was
concentrating, which boded well.  Already, after knowing the man less
than forty-eight hours, Docherty had almost complete confidence in
him.

The Dame was another matter.  He had stopped reading his novel some
thriller about submarines -and was staring blankly into space.  His
expression was usually as serene as Chris's, but the similarity,
Docherty thought, was at least partly superficial.  Both men seemed
supremely self-sufficient most SAS men were but Docherty sensed that
for Chris there was little or no struggle involved in the process.  The
Wearsider, by contrast, had mastered the art of retreating into
himself, and of functioning effectively in the world outside, but the
self he retreated into seemed a troubled one.

Which might bode ill for the patrol as a whole, or might have no effect
whatsoever on the way the Dame handled himself.  But it was something
worth watching out for, that was certain.  Like any decent football
team, an SAS patrol had to grow into more than the sum of its parts.
And it was up to the PC, the Patrol Commander, to make sure it did.  He
need not have been trained as a clinical psychiatrist, but he did need
some idea of how to read other men.

"How much longer, boss?"  Razor asked.

Docherty looked at his watch.

"Pilot said fifty-odd minutes, and we've been airborne forty-one.
They'll tell us when they come to make sure we're strapped in."

"It's that bad, is it, this Khe Sanh business?"

"No worse than taking off in the Space Shuttle, so I'm told."

"Christ.  Still, whatever it is, it'll beat being dropped in the
fucking sea."

Docherty smiled, remembering the look of blissful relief on Razor's
face when, ten years before, the boat had picked him out of the
Atlantic swell.  On that mission the Londoner had spent much of his
time thinking up 'mixed proverbs'; 'time waits for an old fool' had
been Docherty's personal favourite.  Razor still seemed full of jokes,
but there was something else there now, something more sombre
underneath.

Maybe he was just growing up, in the best sense of the phrase.  He'd
certainly lost none of his sharpness the switch into Spanish in the
restaurant had been brilliant

"Time to make your wills, gentlemen," the pilot said, appearing between
the rows of crated foodstuffs.

"Are you all strapped in like good lads?  We don't want you flying
around inside the plane getting blood on everything.  Good."  He turned
to go.

"We'll be on the ground in about five minutes," he said over his
shoulder, 'one way or another.

"I love the fucking R.A.F," Razor growled.

"Don't be surprised if the bottom of your stomach starts pressing up
against the top of your head," Docherty told them, and the words were
hardly out of his mouth before they came true.  With a gut-wrenching
suddenness the plane seemed to stop flying and start falling, as if a
wing had snapped off or all four engines had chosen the same moment to
die.  Within seconds the SAS men could feel the pull of gravity weaken,
and what Docherty could only describe as a breathlessness inside his
head.  So this is what space travel is like, he thought, and then, just
as his body was adapting to its presence within a plummeting shell, the
plane seemed to rear up like a bucking bronco, dropping his stomach
down to his feet.  For what seemed like a very long couple of seconds
he felt on the verge of blacking out.

The brakes slammed on, and with a great jolt the wheels hit the runway.
A few moments later they were taxiing along at a speed which would have
had them arrested for speeding on the M40, the Hercules seemingly on
the verge of shaking itself into a heap of scrap metal.

From outside the plane there was the sound of a loud blast in the
distance.  And then another, much closer.

They looked at each other.

"Welcome to Bosnia," Razor said.

For another two or three minutes they sat in the belly of the taxiing
plane, the sounds of shell fire audible above the noise of their
passage.  They had no way of seeing out, no real idea of how close the
shells were landing, and there was nothing they could have done about
it anyway.

"Everyone OK?"  Docherty asked.  He felt like he'd been picked up by a
giant and given a thorough shaking.

They all said they were.

The Hercules rumbled to a standstill, and the pilot's head popped up
between the line of crates.

"Journey's end," he announced, in what for him seemed an almost
funereal tone.

"I don't suppose you lads feel like helping us unload this beauty," he
said, setting in motion the slow descent of the tail ramp.

"Sorry, prior commitments," Docherty said drily, as he watched the wall
of an airport building coming into view.  The ground had only a light
covering of snow, but shovelled mounds of the stuff offered evidence of
previous falls.  The air seemed as damp as it did cold.

"That's the international arrivals door," the R.A.F man said
sardonically, pointing out a single red door marked "No Exit' in
English.

"Thanks for the ride," Docherty said, and led the other three down the
ramp.  Once clear of the plane he could see, across the tarmac, the
control tower with all of its windows boarded up.  On both sides of the
airfield slopes seemed to climb steeply away from the valley, their
heights lost in cloud.  It might have been one of the South Wales
valleys on a bad day, if not for the occasional thump of artillery
fire.

They were halfway to the building when two UN soldiers emerged from it,
demanding in rapid-fire French to see their identification.  Docherty
produced the UN accreditations.  The two soldiers inspected each SAS
man's face with a thoroughness which any beautician would have envied,
and then allowed them to pass.

Inside the building they found a vast expanse of floor littered with
broken glass and spent cartridge cases, and another UN soldier hurrying
across the debris to meet them, plastic bag in hand, as if he was on
his way home from the shops.

"Sergeant Docherty?"

he asked tersely, while he was still some ten yards away.

Docherty nodded.  The officer was a Brit, a major in the Cheshires.  He
was wearing a flak-jacket under his greatcoat.

"Good.  My name's Brindley."  He looked round the vast building.

"I'm just here to escort you to your hotel.  Strictly against UN rules,
but what the hell.

Here' he delved into the plastic bag and pulled out four pale-blue
berets 'just for the trip.  We'll have to pass through a few
checkpoints, and it's always better if they think they know who you
are."  He looked round at them.

"OK.  Let's go.  The earlier in the day you make this ride the better
it usually is.  Most of the snipers seem to sleep until mid-morning."

Chris and the Dame raised their eyebrows at each other.

In what had once been an elegant semicircular forecourt yet another
jeep was waiting for them.  This one was armoured, more like the
vehicles they'd all used at various times in Northern Ireland.  The
level of respect accorded the UN was apparent in the line of bullet
scars which stretched across the two large letters on the jeep's
flank.

"Tighten your safety belts," Brindley advised.

"And let me do the talking at the checkpoints."

They started off at a steady twenty-five miles per hour, with Major
Brindley carefully negotiating the threefold problem of treacherous
winter conditions, potholes and shell craters.  Visibility seemed to be
getting worse rather than better as the morning advanced, which
Docherty supposed was good news.  Nevertheless he felt an absurd pang
of regret at being denied a better view of the countryside surrounding
the city.

They reached the first checkpoint within five minutes.

It was manned by several Serbs in uniform , one of whom seemed on
friendly terms with Brindley.

"Yugoslav National Army uniforms," the major explained as they drove
on.

"They're the most disciplined of the Serb forces.  By a long way," he
added as an afterthought.

The next checkpoint was also manned by Serbs, but here only one was in
uniform, and though he was clearly in charge, and coldly courteous in
his examination of their credentials, the SAS men were more struck by
the demeanour of the irregulars behind him.  On their faces an
overweening contempt was not masked by any obvious sign of
intelligence.  This, Docherty thought, was the rural version of the
black-uniformed thugs they had seen in the Split restaurant.

"See that?"  Brindley gestured with his head.

The SAS men craned their necks.

"Welcome to Hell' the sign by the side of the road read in bloody red
letters.

""Murder Mile" begins around that corner," Brindley went on
conversationally, pointing ahead.

"Though I doubt if we'll have any trouble this morning."

He accelerated the jeep, as if uncertain of his own prophetic powers,
and they were soon barrelling down a stretch of straight road between
two expanses of open ground, the jeep lurching from side to side as
Brindley wove his way round the shell craters.  They could see nothing
through the mist to either left or right, but somewhere out there
someone was tracking the noise of their passage, because a bullet
suddenly pinged viciously off the outside of the jeep just above
Razor's window.

"Fuck a pig!"  he exclaimed.

"How the fuck can they see us in this?"

No one answered him, but Brindley trod down again, causing the jeep to
lurch even more wildly.  A dark shape loomed out of the mist the
burnt-out hulk of a car which hadn't made it and Brindley sent the jeep
careering past it.  For a moment the wheels seemed to lose their grip
on the packed snow, but somehow they righted themselves, just as
another bullet bounced off the back of the vehicle.

"Almost there," Brindley said, and within seconds they were entering
the relative safety of a street lined with industrial premises.  The
collective sigh of relief was still clouding the air when the jeep
pulled into the forecourt of an apparently wrecked hotel.  The sign
still claimed it was the Holiday Inn, but there were gun emplacements
in the garden and the face of the building had clearly been ravaged by
shell fire.  At least half the windows had been boarded over, and half
the remainder offered mosaics of broken glass.

"You'll be staying here," Brindley said.

"It looks better inside," he added, noticing their horrified
expressions.

"It could hardly look worse," Chris said.

"Who stays here?"  Docherty wanted to know.

Brindley eased the jeep round the building and into what seemed a
reasonably sheltered parking space.

"Only about a quarter of the rooms are full," he went on, switching off
the engine.

"With journalists mostly, though you'll see the odd group of Croatians
doing a passable imitation of Nazis.  They tend to drink too much and
start waving their guns around."

"We met some of them in Split," Docherty said.

"Just ignore them," Brindley advised.

"You'll also notice lots of men huddling in corners, pretending they're
bona fide Balkans conspirators.  They look more like fictional agents
than real ones, and for all I know they're residents of a local mental
hospital that the Bosnian Government has sent back into the community.
I always get the feeling that they've all read a chapter of The Mask of
Dimitrios in their rooms before coming down to the bar to try out the
gestures."

Docherty grinned.  He was beginning to like Brindley.

"And they'll have a field day trying to work out who you lot are," the
major added.

"Four tough-looking Brit bastards with berg ens full of God knows what.
Maybe you'd better keep the berets for a while.  I don't suppose the UN
will miss them."

They entered the hotel by a back entrance, and walked down a short
corridor to the reception area.

There were indeed several seedy-looking men in trilbies with the
collars of their coats turned up.

History repeats itself once as tragedy, and then again as farce,
Docherty remembered.  Who had said that?

Brindley was dealing with the receptionist, a young man with an
impudent smile and what looked like the barrel of an AK47 protruding
out from under his counter.

"Don't stand in front of any open windows," the youth said, with all
the animation of an air hostess demonstrating safety regulations, 'we
have lost several guests that way already."

"Room service with a bullet," Razor murmured.

"Fourth floor," Brindley told them.

"It could be worse."  He led the way to the bottom of the stairs.

"The bar and restaurant are on the mezzanine and first floors,
gentlemen."

"What's the food like?"  Chris asked.

"Not bad, considering half the city are surviving on a diet of
dandelion soup and dog biscuits."

They started up the stairs.

"Someone found a spent bullet in their pizza the other day," Brindley
added conversationally.

"I didn't really think it was possible to feel homesick for
Walthamstow," Razor muttered.

Eight flights of stairs latter they found themselves outside rooms 417
and 418.  Both had curtains drawn across boarded-up windows and single
bare lightbulbs for illumination.

"I'm glad we're not staying in a dump," Razor said, testing out one of
the beds.

"Not bad," he admitted.

Docherty was examining the view though a narrow slit between board and
window frame.  The mist seemed to be lifting gradually, revealing
snowcovered slopes on the other side of the valley.

"I'd better fill you in on the local geography," Brindley said, as he
unfolded a large-scale map of the Sarajevo area and spread it across
the floor.  The four SAS men gathered around it.

"The city is more or less surrounded," Brindley began.

"Basically, the Serbs hold the high ground, which includes not only
these mountains but the upper reaches of the valleys to the north, east
and south.  The lower valley to the west is still contested
territory;

you could say the Serbs have a cork in the bottle, but it's not a very
tight-fitting affair."

"As the bishop said to the actress," Razor murmured.

Brindley eyed him with what might have been affection.

"There are a few complications in the general picture," he went on.

"Dobrinja, which we skirted round after leaving the airport, is a Serb
enclave in Muslim territory, a siege within the siege.  There are a
couple of others like it, and since the roads wind in and out of the
two sides' territories you can find yourself being stopped at
checkpoints every mile or so.  Which is more than a pain in the rear,
incidentally it drastically increases your chances of meeting some
trigger-happy irregular who's full of the wrong sort of pills."

"Where do they get them?"  Docherty asked.

"God knows.  But we know some of the militia leaders were heavies in
the Belgrade underworld not so long ago, and there's no reason why they
shouldn't have kept up their contacts with their old buddies.

This isn't such a big country, you know it just seems like one.  We're
not much more than a hundred miles from Belgrade as the crow flies."

By 'this country', Docherty realized, Brindley meant Yugoslavia.

"What about here in the city?"  he asked.

"Are there any safe areas?"

"Everything's in range of the Serb artillery, if that's what you mean.
The shelling is sporadic these days the visibility's often poor but if
you're above ground there's always the chance.  Snipers are more of a
problem.  Most of the high-rises have been deserted by the people who
lived in them, and the snipers have taken up residence instead.  They
shoot at anything that moves, small children included."  He looked up,
a mixture of disbelief and tired outrage in his eyes.

"It's hard to credit.  Still, at least you can take precautions against
them.  Once you're outside you'll soon get a good idea of which places
are safe and which aren't.

Nothing overlooks the narrow streets of the old town, for example, but
any wide street intersection is probably in someone's sights.  But
don't just take your cue from the locals some of them have become
incredibly blase.  You get the feeling that they've been playing
Russian roulette so long that they've almost begun to enjoy it."  He
shook his head, as if he was trying to shake such lunacy out.

"So, where you see a local run, you run, but when you see one walking
along with a big smile on his face, take a look around anyway.  He may
be sniper-happy.

"Christ, what a place," Razor exclaimed softly.

"These days it's about as far from Christ as you can get," Brindley
replied.

"But I don't want to give you the wrong impression.  Some kind of
normal life still goes on here, despite everything.  The shelling stops
for fifteen minutes, and it's like a rainstorm has stopped anywhere
else people come out.  You see women walking past all smartly dressed
with their handbags, people in cafes arguing about politics, people
looking round the shops those that have anything to sell.  The last
supermarket I went in had only razors and champagne."

"Nice combination," Chris said grimly.

"What about after dark?"  Razor asked.

"I take it the night-life is a bit on the thin side?"

"You could say that.  There's a curfew from ten p.m. to six a.m."  and
the whole city's basically blacked out.  But nowhere's safe any time
after dark.

There's no civilian reason for anyone to be on the street, so anyone
out there is considered fair game.

"Kind of puts Belfast in perspective, doesn't it?"

Chris said.

Brindley grunted.

"By the way," he added, pointing at the map, 'this is where the British
UN staff HO is.

If you need anything in the way of equipment there's no harm in
asking."  He looked round.

"Anything else you can think of?"

"I don't think so," Docherty said.

"The first thing we have to do is find a woman.  A particular woman,"
he added, in response to Brindley's raised eyebrow.  He explained about
Nena Reeve.

"But the FO already have someone working on that for us.

"OK," Brindley said, getting up.

"We appreciate the help," Docherty told him.

"You're welcome.  I wish we could do more, but soldiering for the UN
well, it's all in a great cause but it's like soldiering with both
hands tied behind your back."  He smiled ruefully.

"Any idea how long you'll be staying?"

"None."

"There is one piece of good news, gentlemen," Brindley said.

"The bar here hasn't run dry once."  He reached for the door, just as
someone rapped on it.

Brindley again raised his eyebrows at Docherty, who shrugged.

"Thornton," a voice said through the door.

"The FO man," Docherty said.  He opened the door to reveal a man of
medium height with short, curly hair and the sort of dissolute face
favoured by producers of epic serials when casting young wastrels and
cads.

"God, that's a lot of stairs to climb," he said, coming in and flopping
himself down on the edge of a bed.

"Good luck, lads," Brindley told the SAS men, and shut the door behind
him.

Thornton seemed to be recovering his breath;

enough at least to fish in his pocket for a cigarette.  He lit up with
a Zippo lighter and blew smoke at the ceiling.  Docherty, who had grown
to dislike the man intensely in something under a minute, restrained
himself from tearing the cigarette out of his mouth.

After all, with the amount of cold draught that was blowing in around
the boarded-up window, they were more likely to die of hypothermia than
passive smoking.

"Welcome to Sarajevo," the MI6 man said.

"Have you got a drink up here by any chance?  No?  Pity.

How was the flight in?  A bit on the bumpy side?"

"Have you got some information for us?"  Docherty asked him.

"No, not really.  But I do have the names of several people in the city
who know Zavik well.  They should be able to fill you in "What about
Nena Reeve?"

Thornton took a drag on his cigarette and looked round for an ashtray.
Razor reached for the one on the bedside table and handed it to him.

"Thanks," he said, nearly missing it with his ash.

"The woman has vanished into thin air.  I went up to the hospital and
talked to her boss and some of her colleagues, but none of them have a
clue.  I looked round her room on the quiet, of course but there's
nothing there to suggest where she's gone.

Oh, and I checked out the morgue, just in case.  No joy."

Docherty looked at him thoughtfully.

"How do you rate our chances of getting to Zavik?"  he asked.

Thornton shrugged.

"I've got no information on the situation there ..

"I'm more interested in how we get ourselves out of Sarajevo."

"Yes, I'm working on that.  One of the Muslim militia leaders might be
prepared to help out, if we can strike a decent deal.  They'll probably
want a few SMGs, something like that.  I was supposed to see him this
morning, but my translator didn't show up..."

"You don't speak Serbo-Croat?"  Docherty interrupted, trying to keep
the disbelief out of his voice.

If Thornton noticed, he didn't seem perturbed.

"No need in the old days all the people who mattered spoke English. But
don't worry, I'll get hold of him tomorrow.

"Good," Docherty said.

"Is there any news of Reeve himself."

"Nothing lately.  You know the stories, I suppose.

The Croats say the Serbs burned all their people alive in Zavik, in
their church of course.  The Serbs say they know for certain he had a
party of their irregulars shot in cold blood, and that his men have
raped and killed their way through several villages in Serb-held
territory.  The Muslims claim he razed the mosque in Zavik and forced
their children to eat pork.  It's all the usual stories rolled into
one.

"Have there been no refugees from Zavik?"

"None that we've found, either at the coast or in Zagreb.  Whatever's
happening up there, it looks like the locals either can't or won't
leave.

"That's it?"

"That's it.  There's no telephone link, of course, and the place is off
the beaten track, way up in the mountains.  Since it's inside territory
the Serbs say they control, they presumably have it surrounded, or at
least cut off.  But no one knows for certain.  There are rumours that
the missing American you hear about him?  ah, well, he disappeared
about a week ago somewhere out there, and the story was that he was
trying to get to Zavik."

"What was his name?"

"Bailey, I think.  The other Americans here can tell you about him."

Thornton reached for another cigarette, and found his packet was
empty.

"I'll get hold of Muftic tomorrow," he said, getting up to leave and
scratching his neck.

"I'll be in the bar downstairs tonight."

"How about eight o'clock?"  Docherty asked.

"Sure, I'll be there all evening."

"I bet you will," Docherty muttered as the MI6 man's footsteps receded
down the hallway.

"What a wanker," the Dame murmured.

"The Cheshires can't help, and this tosspot won't," Razor said.

"I think we're on our own for this one, boss."

Docherty smiled.

"Looks like it.

But here's the good news.  If he only talked to the members of the
hospital staff who can speak fluent English then there's a good chance
Chris can pick up something he didn't."

It was approaching noon when Docherty and Chris left the hotel.  Grey
clouds still hung above the city, but they were higher now, and the
crests of the hills on either side of the valley were visible.  No
shells had fallen on the city for a couple of hours.

The hospital where Nena Reeve had worked was in the old town, a mile or
so along the valley to the east.  Docherty and Chris made their way up
the gently sloping Marsala Tita, keeping as close to the walls as
possible, hurrying from doorway to doorway on what looked vulnerable
stretches, and sprinting like mad across the wide intersections.

Docherty was taken back to his Glasgow childhood, of going shopping
with his mother, and the two of them alternating walking and running
between pairs of lampposts.  Doing something similar on the streets of
Sarajevo, at the grand old age of forty-two, it all felt a bit unreal,
right up to the moment the sniper's bullet whistled past his head and
dug a large chunk out of the kerb across the street.

He scuttled on across the intersection and looked up to find an old
woman grinning toothlessly at him from a half-boarded window.  She said
something in SerboCroat which Chris translated as 'that was a close
one'.  Docherty wondered if the intersection she lived by had replaced
TV as her prime source of entertainment.

The two men continued on their erratically paced way, leaving
Docherty's feelings of unreality at the crossroads, and both felt a
deep sense of relief as they entered the old town, with its narrow,
sheltered streets.

Using Brindley's map, they found the hospital with no difficulty.  Its
walls and windows had fared even worse than the Holiday Inn's, and the
main entrance was as littered with broken glass as the airport
building's.  Uniformed Bosnian Government soldiers were much in
evidence, though exactly what they thought they were guarding seemed
hard to fathom.

Most of them simply stood there stony-faced as a steady stream of
weeping visitors passed in and out.

The UN accreditations got Docherty and Chris inside, and the latter's
linguistic skills won them directions to the chief administrator's
office.  She sat behind a desk overflowing with paper, eyes red rimmed
in a gaunt face.  They should see Dr.  Raznatovic, she said; he had
been Dr.  Reeve's boss.

A young orderly he couldn't have been more than fifteen escorted them
through the maze, past patients lying in corridors, some of them with
what looked simple fractures, some with gaping wounds and pain racked
faces, others with the serene expression of the dead.  One corridor was
slippery with blood, as if someone had been dragged along it.

Dr.  Raznatovic was between operations, and clearly torn between
impatience at having to answer Docherty's questions and a wish to be
helpful for Nena Reeve's sake.  He spoke perfect English, so it seemed
unlikely that they would learn any more from him than Thornton had.

"I don't know her well," he said, banging a tap in the hope of inducing
it to deliver some water.

"But she's a good doctor, and she stayed when many left.  I talked to
her sometimes when we worked together, but that was all.  Sarajevo is
not the sort of place you go out for a drink after work," he added with
a half-smile.

Docherty asked if Raznatovic knew of any closer friends that Nena had
had in the hospital.  He didn't, but suggested they try a sister on one
of the wards, Sister Rodzic.

The young orderly, who had listened to their questions with profound
fascination in his dark eyes,

escorted them on another trip through the corridors.  They found Sister
Rodzic almost asleep on her feet, and only too pleased to be given the
excuse for a few moments in a chair.

She didn't speak English, which was a good sign.  Still, it didn't seem
as if she could tell them anything useful either, until, as the two men
got up to go, she suddenly remembered something.

"There's a nurse in the emergency department," she said.

"Dzeilana Begovic.  I think Nena used to play squash with her
sometimes.

There are courts in the basement."

The orderly took them back down, leading them through a children's ward
where row upon row of pitifully thin children watched them pass with
doleful eyes.

They found Dzeilana Begovic literally up to her elbows in blood.  She
was having slightly more luck than Raznatovic with a tap, coaxing a
thin trickle of water from the pipes.

"Yes, I know Nena Reeve," she agreed, 'but I have no time to talk."

"It's important," Chris said, realizing how thin the words must sound
to someone engaged in work like hers.

She frowned, leaning forward on her arms against the wash-basin.

"OK,"

she said after several seconds, and looked at her watch.

"I'm off in an hour.

I will meet you in the Princip cafe as soon as I can.  It's on
Boscarsija," she added, and was gone.

"Where now?"  the orderly asked in Serbo-Croat.

"The mortuary, I suppose," Docherty said reluctantly.  He had seen his
share of war casualties, of blood and pain, but he still felt almost
stunned by what he had seen in this hospital.

"This way," the orderly announced, after Chris had translated their
destination.  He led them up two flights of stairs, along a long
corridor and across a bridge between two buildings which had lost all
of its windows.

They could smell the mortuary before they reached it, and the pungent
whiff of plum brandy on the attendant's breath was something of a
relief.

"We get twenty a day dead on arrival," the attendant told them proudly,
'and the ground's too damn hard to bury them, even if you can find
someone mad enough to show himself in the cemetery.  The Serb snipers
like shooting at funeral parties," he explained.

"We just want to check that a friend of ours isn't here," Chris said.

"Be my guests."

"Stay here," Docherty told Chris.

There was no need for both of them to do it.

He walked slowly down the aisles, between the ranks of corpses.  In
some of the wounds there was movement, and Docherty remembered Razor's
lesson about maggots they only ate dead flesh.  Well, that was the only
kind of flesh on offer here.  If they sealed the doors would the
maggots consume it all?

He walked back down the other aisle.  Nena Reeve was not there.  He
supposed it was something to be grateful for, that someone else's
friend had died instead of his.  He wondered how people would ever
recover from this, and for a second he glimpsed an understanding of the
scars on his own wife's soul.

"Thank you," he told the attendant.

The orderly walked them down to the main entrance, and Docherty tried
to give him a five-dollar bill, but the youth refused it.  Glancing
back over his shoulder as they went out through the main doors,
Docherty could see the boy staring after them, a look of awe on his
face, as if he'd just been privileged to meet visitors from another
planet.

Outside on Saraci Street they inhaled the cold mountain air with
unusual relish.  As Docherty consulted their map there was a sudden
loud explosion, followed almost immediately by another.

Smoke billowed into the air a couple of streets away to the west.

"This way," Docherty said, and the two men began to run.  At first they
thought the streets had magically emptied, but they soon realized their
mistake.  Every doorway held a group of people, sheltering from the
man-made storm.  The two SAS men found a niche for themselves,
alongside two youngish women.

Minutes went by, and there were no more explosions.

"Just trying to keep us guessing," Chris heard one of the women say.

"Bastards," the other said quietly.

People started drifting away from their places of shelter, some
shrugging their anxiety away, others casting nervous glances upwards,
as if they thought the sight of an incoming shell would give them time
to take evasive action.  Docherty and Chris continued on past several
badly damaged Islamic buildings and found Boscarsija Street.

The Princip Cafe was halfway down on the left, a European-style coffee
house half full of students reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes.
The walls were plastered with sepia photographs of days gone by, with
pride of place given to a large portrait of Gavrilo Princip, the
Bosnian Serb who had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June
1914, and set in motion the events that led to World War One.

Docherty wondered where the assassination had actually taken place, and
decided he would try to visit the location before they left.  It seemed
a thoroughly appropriate piece of tourism, he thought.  He and Chris
ordered two coffees, and found themselves sipping at a bitter,
nutty-favoured brew which tasted strangely likeable.  Inside the cafe
men and women sat talking and laughing with each other, and at first
the handguns laid casually down beside the coffee cups seemed
ludicrously out of place.  But gradually Docherty became more aware of
the restless eyes, the twisting hands and fingers, the hasty drags on
cigarettes.  Then it was the laughter which seemed unreal, more like a
nervous howl than a recognition of humour.

They had been waiting almost two hours when Dzeilana Begovic appeared,
looking drawn with fatigue.

"What do you want to know?"  she asked, after more coffees had been
ordered.

"You know Nena s missing?"  Chris asked in SerboCroat.

"Yes.  But I don't know where she's gone."

"Do you know any of her friends outside the hospital."

"Only Hajrija."

"Who is Hajrija?  What is her other name?"

"Her best friend haven't you spoken to her?  Her last name?  Let me
think.  It begins with M. Mejic?  No, Mejra, that's it ..

Chris told Docherty what he'd learned.

"Ask her where this woman works," Docherty said.

"She used to be a student at the journalism school," was Dzeilana's
reply.

"But she's in the Army now.

One of the anti-sniper units.  I saw her in Emergency a few weeks ago,
with one of their men who'd been shot."

"How could we find her?"

"I don't know."

"You have no idea where she lives?"

Dzeilana searched her memory.

"No," she said eventually.

"Does Nena have any other good friends at the hospital?"

Chris asked.

"I don't think so..."

Chris questioned her for another five minutes, but she had no other
real leads to give them.

"Hajrija Mejra," Docherty murmured after she had left, having refused
their offer of an escort with a look which clearly said:

this is my town, and I know how to deal with it a damn sight better
than you do.  Still, she had smiled at them through the window as she
walked past.

"How do we go about finding an anti-sniper unit?"  Chris asked.

"Brindley or Thornton?"

Docherty grimaced.

"Thornton, I'm afraid."

The MI6 man seemed pleased with himself when Docherty found him in the
bar at seven that evening.

"Here's all the journalistic accreditations you'll need," he said,
passing a wad of papers across the table.

"UN, Bosnian Government, Croatian, local Serb.  The last one doesn't
travel well it's only good for the immediate area.  And I've done a
deal with Muftic.  Half a dozen MP5s for your team's safe passage
through to open country.  Delivery on completion.  He just wants
twenty-four hours' notice."

"That's great," Docherty said, his attention momentarily distracted by
the fact that a man in tails had just sat down at the piano and begun
playing a Chopin waltz.

"I need to get in contact with some people," he told Thornton.

"Do you know anything about Bosnian Army anti-sniper units?"

"Of course.  The creme de Ia creeme.  The beautiful Strivela ."  He
smiled at the thought.

"The name means "Arrow"," he explained.

"She's become a legend in her own time.  Gorgeous textile-design
student sees four year-old child shot down, pleads to be allowed to
join the anti-sniper unit, at first gets scorned by the men, then wins
them over by her bravery, sharpshooting ability, etc."  etc.  It would
make a great movie.

Probably will when this is all over."

"Is there only one unit?"  Docherty asked patiently.

"Two or three, I think."

"How can I reach them?"

Thornton took a sip of his whisky, trying to decide, Docherty thought,
whether to ask the reason for the request.  The fear of inviting more
work overcame the curiosity.

"One of them's based in the Starigrad Hotel, about a quarter of a mile
north of here, near the railway station.  The other ones, I don't know,
but they'll know at the Starigr ad."

"Thanks," Docherty said, getting up.

"Dawn would be a good time to pay them a visit," Thornton suggested.

Docherty walked across to the bar and inspected what was on offer.  He
chose a bottle of Glenfiddich, paid for it in dollars, and took it back
upstairs.  All three men were in his and Razor's room.

"You clowns may have forgotten it," he said, reaching for the grimy
glasses above the wash-basin, 'but this is New Year's Eve."  1-Ic
poured two generous shots into the glasses, and then two more into the
ones Chris fetched from the other room.

"Here's to us," Docherty said, 'and everyone we love back home."

* * *

A thousand miles away, in their Glasgow home, Isabel was sitting on the
couch, reliving in her mind's eye a scene from the morning on which he
had left.  She had come to their bedroom door and seen Marie seated at
the dressing-table, her father kneeling on the floor behind her,
lovingly running the comb through her dark hair.  He had become such a
gentle man, and though she knew the gentleness must always have been
there inside him, she knew that she and the children had helped to
bring it out.  Now a part of her was afraid that in some
impossible-to-know way it would make him more vulnerable.

"Please send him home to me," she whispered, pulling her knees up under
her chin and clasping herself tightly.

Docherty and Chris left the hotel at the first hint of light, leaving
behind a mutinous Razor and the Dame.

The PC could understand how frustrating it must be sitting in the hotel
while he and Chris had all the

'fun', but he could see no justification for risking an extra two lives
just to alleviate boredom.

"The moment something comes up which requires your talents, it's all
yours," Docherty told Razor.

"But who's going to charm the lovely Hajrija?"

Razor wanted to know.

"You two?"  he added disbelievingly.

Docherty grinned to himself as he followed Chris up the side of the
wide boulevard.  As on the previous morning the clouds were riding low
in the valley, and despite the growing glimmer of dawn, visibility was
still poor enough to deter any but the most determined sniper.

Halfway up the road a trio of burnt-out Japanese cars reminded him of
what a dangerous walk this would be in sunlight.  And then, as if to
scoff at his presuming to know anything, a brightly lit bus sailed
serenely past, crowded with people on their way to work.

"This place is like Alice in Wonderland," Chris said.

"You can say that again."

They crossed a meeting of five roads and found themselves in the more
densely built-up area around the railway station.

"There it is, boss," Chris said, pointing across the street to where an
unlit sign bearing the legend Starigrad Hotel hung from a dingy
three-storey building.

"Freeze," a voice grated behind them.

"Hands on your heads."

Chris rapidly translated the commands for Docherty.

"We're English," he shouted.

"We're looking for someone."

At least two pairs of footsteps came up behind them.

"Who?"  another voice asked.

"Her name is Hajrija Mejra," Chris said.

"Why do you want her?"

"We are looking for a friend of hers, and we think she might be able to
help us."

There was a silence lasting several moments.

"How did you know to look here?"  the first voice asked.

"A journalist told us this was where one of the units was based," Chris
replied, deciding that something close to honesty was probably the best
policy in this situation.

"Are you journalists?"

"No.  We are with the UN."

"You have papers?"  the voice asked, its tone changing from hostility
to mere caution.

"Yes."

"Let me see them," the man said, walking round to I; face them.  He had
long, brown hair surrounding a lean, bewhiskered face, and carried a
machine pistol in his left hand.  He looked, Docherty thought, like an
extra in a spaghetti western.

He examined their papers with interest and then led them into the
hotel.  The drabness of the outside was mirrored within, where more
pale, bearded men sat cleaning rifles on a black plastic sofa.  They
ignored the new arrivals.

The SAS men's interrogator had disappeared, hopefully to find Hajrija
Mejra.

A minute passed, and another.  He reappeared, leading a tall, slim
young woman in camouflage fatigues.

She walked gracefully, head held high, her face dominated by dark Latin
eyes.  Between twenty-five and thirty, Docherty guessed.  A woman
surrounded by men.

"I'm Hajrija Mejra," she said without preamble, in English.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Jamie Docherty," he said.

"This is Chris Martinson."

"What do you want?"  she asked simply.

"I was the best man at John and Nena's wedding," Docherty said, as if
that explained everything.

"I'm looking for Nena."

Her face broke into a smile, which quickly became a frown.  She looked
around.

"There is nowhere to talk here," she said.

"Come, follow me."

She led them across the lobby, up a single flight of stairs, and into
what had probably been a dining-room.

Now it contained six mattresses and small piles of personal belongings.
A man lay on one of the mattresses, listening to a Walkman.  He grinned
up at them.

"Beastie Boys," he said.

A door on the far side led through to a smaller room, which showed
signs of having once been an office.  A small brown couch stood under
the single, shuttered window, across from a desk, upright chair and
wall of empty shelves.

"Please, sit down," Hajrija said, offering them the couch and taking
the chair.

Docherty sat down, but Chris decided to stand, rather than squeeze in
next to him.

"Now," Hajrija said.

"I will tell you.

You know about the Russians?"

"What Russians?"

"The two journalists."

"All we know is that she's missing," Docherty explained.

"We don't know whether she's still in Sarajevo, or if not, where she's
gone, or when ..

"She is not in Sarajevo.  She leave here four days now.  With the two
Russians and my American journalist friend, Dwight Bailey ..

"Where were they going?"

"Nena and Dwight go to Zavik.  She hear stories... you must know them,
yes?"

Docherty nodded.

"She worries about her children.  And John, but she never says that.
Dwight hopes to get the big story about the Englishman fighting in our
war."

"And he never came back."

"No, but the Russians, they come back.  I go to see them at the Holiday
Inn and ask them what happens.  They say that they leave Nena and
Dwight in Bugojno and not see them again, but they do not speak the
truth."

"How do you know that?"

"I know.  They hide the truth.  I know.  I go to see the American
journalist friends of Dwight and they agree.  Something is smelly, they
say.  But they say there is nothing to do."

Docherty considered what she had told them.  Maybe she was wrong, and
Nena was already in Zavik.  If she was right, Nena could be anywhere,
always assuming she was still alive.

"Why are you looking for Nena?"  Hajrija asked.

"We are from the same regiment as John Reeve.

"Ha!  The famous SAS."

Docherty smiled.

"Aye.  Our political bosses are getting worried about what Reeve is
doing in Zavik, for all sorts of reasons.  We've been sent to find out
what is happening there, and if it turns out that Reeve has lost his
senses, I'm supposed to talk him back into them.  Or something like
that.  It seemed a reasonable enough notion when it was first put to
me."

He shrugged.

"We came to Sarajevo partly to talk to people who know something about
Zavik, and partly because we hoped Nena was here.  I thought she'd be
the best person to ask about Reeve's state of mind, and, if she was
willing to come with us, the best person to make him see sense."

Hajrija nodded.

"She understands him, I think.

Though she is still very angry with him at the moment.

Or she thinks she is angry it is hard to know."  She smiled to
herself.

"But I can tell you about Zavik - I am born there, and grow up there.
Nena is my friend since I am a small girl.  Our fathers are comrades in
the partisans."

"What we need is a good map of the town, and the area around it.  Could
you draw one?"  Docherty asked.

"Of course.  You go soon?"

"I don't know.  Do you know where these Russians are staying?"

"At the Holiday Inn."

"Probably down the corridor from us," Chris said.

"Maybe we should pay them a visit," Docherty decided.

"Do they speak English?"  he asked Hajrija.

"Some, I think."

"What are their names?"

"I only know Viktor and Dmitri.  But I come with you, yes?"  she said,
her mouth setting in an obstinate line.

She had probably had a hard time getting accepted as a woman fighter,
Docherty thought, but she needn't expect any opposition from him.  He
had married one.

"If you want," he said simply.

"I go to speak with my commander," she said.

"You wait here."

She was only gone a few moments, and returned dressed for the outside
world in a long, fur-lined anorak that had seen better days, though it
looked warm enough.

The two SAS men were not looking forward to the walk back down the
street, but they needn't have worried.  Hajrija led them by a slightly
longer, more circuitous route which only involved negotiating two open
spaces.  They sprinted across both without drawing fire.

At the Holiday Inn she tackled the receptionist with the insolent grin,
and came away with the Russians' room number.

"He no see them this morning," she said.

"They are sleeping still, I think.  Russians all lazy," she added
conclusively.

"Let's pick up Razor and the Dame first," Docherty said, as they headed
for the stairs.

"With any luck sheer weight of numbers will scare the truth out of
them."

"This "Razor" and "Dame"," she asked, 'they are people?"

"As far as we know," Chris said.

"They are nicknames," Docherty said, 'names that friends use."

"Silly names?"

"You could say that."

Razor had, appropriately enough, just finished shaving.  The Dame was,
as usual, deeply engrossed in a trashy novel.  Both men looked relieved
to be offered a reason to leave their rooms.

"Just follow my lead," Docherty said, as they climbed yet another
flight of steps.  The Russians were on the sixth floor, in a room at
the back of the hotel.

Docherty knocked on their door and waited, ignoring the questioning
voice inside the room.  When the door inched open he shoved it
backwards, pushing the man who had opened it back into the room.

"Viktor?"  he asked.

The other Russian looked up from the edge of the bed, where he was
sitting surrounded by what looked like bottles of pills, and said
something sharply in his native language.

"Who are you?"  he added, switching to English, as the other four
crowded in, herding his colleague towards the bed.  Razor closed the
door and leant on it, feeling like someone out of The Godfather.

Then the darker of the Russians recognized Hajrija.

"You again," he said.

"We have told you everything."

"You lied to her," Docherty said.

"We know that you lied," he bluffed, 'and now we want the truth."  He
casually reached under the hem of the Goretex jacket and pulled the
Browning High Power handgun out from its cross-draw holster.

The eyes of the two Russians on the bed opened wider.

"Who are you?"  the darker one asked again.

Docherty ignored the question.

"We want to know where you left the woman and the American," he said.

"Tell us the truth and you won't get hurt.  Keep lying and .. ."  He
shrugged.

"You cannot do this in the Holiday Inn," the fairer Russian
half-shouted, as if outraged by the damage such activities might do to
the hotel chain's international reputation.

"This is Sarajevo," Docherty said, 'and we can do just about anything
we want."

"We left them in Bugojno," the dark one said, and they both stared
defiantly back at him.

Hajrija had been right, Docherty thought: they were lying.  He wondered
how far he was prepared to go to force the truth out of them, and
realized he didn't know.  This war was already tugging at his notion of
who he was.

He mentally shook his head, and tried another tack.  If they were
lying, why were they lying?  To cover up misdeeds?  He doubted it.  To
cover up shame?  More likely.

"We are only interested in finding the woman," he said.

"Anything you tell us will remain a secret between us.  I promise you
that.  And I also promise you that if you do not tell us, one of you
you, I think," he said, looking at the fair one, 'will be thrown out of
that window there.

And then your friend here will tell us to avoid the same thing
happening to him."

"You will not do this," the dark one said.

"Lads," Docherty said, gesturing Chris and the Dame forward, and
catching the anxious look on Razor's face as he did so.

The two SAS men grabbed the Russian and pulled him to his feet.

Docherty watched with a stony face.

Talk, he silently pleaded with the Russian, please talk.  Don't call my
bluff.

They started dragging him towards the window.

"OK, OK, I tell you," the potential victim spluttered.

"They just say leave the woman behind ..

Chris and the Dame threw him back on the bed, turning away to conceal
their sighs of relief.

"The whole story," Docherty ordered.

The fair one shot a reproachful glance at his colleague and started
recounting what had happened.

"Do you know where he means?"  Docherty asked Hajrija when the
Russian's account reached the roadblock.

"Yes," she said, not taking her angry eyes off the two Russians, 'it is
thirty kilometres in the west."

Razor was watching her, and noticed the single tear that rolled down
her cheek when she heard of the American's death, a tear that she
didn't bother to wipe away, or even seem to notice.  Her face remained
unchanged, as if the part of her which grieved had no connection with
the rest of who she was.

He was struck by how lovely she was, and wondered at how he could feel
something like desire at such a moment.  He remembered something his
mother had said to him years before, that at heart he was a carer, and
how bizarre it was that he'd opted for a life in the military, who only
came into contact with needy people at the end of a gun.

The Russian finished his story, and then looked up with the unspoken
question in his eyes: which of you would have preferred to die than run
away?

Docherty had no answer for him.  He put away the Browning and started
for the door.

Hajrija had.

"You are cowards," she said.

"Not for running away, but for lying to me about my friend."  Then she
turned and strode from the room.

* * *

They reconvened in Docherty and Razor's room.

"Where is she likely to be now?"  Docherty asked Hajrija.

The woman took a deep breath.  There are three, how do you say,
possibilities?  One, she is dead.  Two, the pigs keep her where she is
taken.  Three, they move her to one of the brothels in the area."  She
ran a hand through her hair, anguish on her face.

"These brothels," Docherty asked gently, 'are there many?  Do you know
where they are?"

"We know some.  There is one in Visograd near border with Serbia, and
one in Vogosca, which is only a few kilometres away on other side of
mountain.  And there are many others.  The Serbs think they can make
every Muslim woman pregnant with a Serb baby .. ."  She shook her head,
as if she was trying to shake out the thought of her friend in the
beasts' hands.

"Is there any way we can find out if she has been taken to one of
these?"  Docherty asked, wondering how far he could take such a search.
Finding Nena, which had been a means to an end, was becoming an end in
itself.  And so it should, he told himself, for a friend.  But the
other three men in the room had never even met her.  Could he risk
their lives for something that was only marginally relevant to their
mission?

"I can try," Hajrija said.

"There are always new people coming to the city, and someone can know
something.  But what good will it do?  You cannot go and talk to
her."

"If she's only a few miles away we can try," Razor said.

"We are the famous SAS," Docherty told her with a wry smile.

* * *

An hour later Hajrija, Razor and the Dame were surveying the interior
of what had once been the city's skating rink.  Docherty had
reluctantly accepted the need for the other two men to have their turn
in the outside world.  And if they needed a translator, they had
Hajrija.

They didn't need one to describe this, Razor thought, as he studied the
scene in front of him.  Where there once would have been throngs of
skaters gliding across the ice, and room for thousands more in the
surrounding seats, there was now a refugee camp.

Across the thawed rink, scattered across the seats and aisles, small
groups of people were huddled listlessly together.  The only heat came
from a multitude of small butane stoves, and on most of these a
saucepan containing water and a few desolate bits of greenery was
quietly simmering.  Most of the adults seemed to be staring into space,
and only the younger children seemed unresigned to the passing hours.

"Most of them come from the city," Hajrija explained.

"The big buildings, yes, and some have shells destroy their homes.  We
look for people from outside."

They started working their way methodically through the hall, asking
the groups where they came from.  A few refused to say, but most seemed
happy to tell them what difference does it make now, their faces seemed
to say.  There was no one from Zavik, and none of those who had
recently arrived from Serb-held territory recognized the photograph of
Nena Reeve which Docherty had brought from home.

Until, that is, Hajrija stooped to ask two women who were sitting with
their backs to the rink wall, heads bowed as if they were deep in
thought.  At the sound of Hajrij a's voice both raised weary faces.

Then,

catching sight of Razor and the Dame behind her, they seemed to shrink
back into the wall.

"We'll wait for you over there," Razor said, nodding towards an area of
empty seats.  He and the Dame went and sat down, both feeling sombre.

"It's like something out of the Bible," the Dame said.

"Yeah," Razor agreed.  He studied the back of Hajrija's head, which
bobbed up and down as she talked to the two women.

The Dame was remembering his sister's wedding reception, and all the
food they'd had to throw away.

And all the petty problems everyone seemed so full of.

"What do you think of her?"  Razor asked.  The Dame followed his gaze,
and a slight smile crossed his face.

"Not my type," he said.

"Not mine either," Razor said.  Or not usually, he thought.

Hajrija's shoulders suddenly slumped, as if she had just had bad news.
Where Nena Reeve was concerned, Razor wasn't sure whether no news was
good news.

They would soon know.

But it was another ten minutes before Hajrija got to her feet, slowly
walked across and sat down next to him.  She had been crying, Razor
instantly realized.

"Are you OK?"  he asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

"No," she said and, half-falling forward, began sobbing into his
chest.

A minute or so later, and almost as abruptly, she raised her head and
ran a hand defiantly through her hair.

"I am sorry," she said.

"Don't be," Razor said.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath.

"I have the news," she said, opening them again.

"Nena is at Vogosca.  The women here, they come from there, and they
are leaving when Nena comes."

"When was that?"  Razor asked.

"They think three days, but they are not certain."

"Why did the Serbs let them go?"

Hajrija made a noise which was part sob, part laugh.

"Because they are pregnant six months.  You understand?  Too late for
abortion."

Back at the Holiday Inn, Docherty listened to what the women had told
Hajrija.  There were about forty women at Vogosca, most of them between
fourteen and twenty-five, though there were a few older women, even a
couple in their forties.  They were kept at the Partisan Sports Hall,
but each night different groups which always included the youngest and
prettiest were taken to the Sonja Motel, about half a mile away, for
the pleasure of the local Serb forces.  The women Hajrija talked to had
no idea how many guards there were around either the Sports Hall or the
motel, but the town was full of Serb soldiers, uniformed and
irregulars.

"How long would it take to walk there?"  Docherty asked her.

"Avoiding contact with the enemy," he added.

She thought about it.  If they could get through the Serb lines without
being seen a big if, considering they had little knowledge of where the
Serb positions were she reckoned they could reach the town in between
four and five hours.  But, she went on, thinking out loud, unless they
managed to extract Nena from her imprisonment without raising the
alarm, the Serbs would be waiting for them on their way back.

"We wouldn't be coming back," Docherty said.

"We'd be heading straight for Zavik."

"But how can we leave all the other women behind?"  Hajrija asked.

It was an impossible question.

"I don't know," Docherty said.

"I

don't know if we should be thinking about Vogosca at all."

He looked at the others, then turned back to Hajrija.

"You said "we" just now.  Would you come with us as a guide?"

"Of course she is my best friend.  And I will ask others to come good
men.  How many is the right number for this?  Six?

Ten?  Twenty?"

"Hold on," Docherty said, raising a hand.

"She's my friend too, but these three reprobates here have never set
eyes on Nena Reeve.  I want to know if they think I'm going over the
top to suggest this little detour.  The moment we start fighting
alongside any of the local forces we're going way beyond our
instructions.  In fact, we'll be halfway to doing what we've been sent
out here to persuade John Reeve to stop doing.  Not to mention risking
our necks in a country we hardly know at all."

"Seems to me, boss," Razor said, 'that we have to get to Zavik.  Which
means we have to get out of this city.  No one told us which route we
had to take.

And I'd rather trust my luck with Hajrija's mob than go along with some
deal that MI6 creep has done with someone we've never even met.  And if
we get to do good works on the way, then that seems like a bonus."

"You old softie.  Chris?"

"Seconded."

"Dame?"

"Count me in."

"OK."

Docherty turned to Hajrija.

"I

think around ten would be a good number, so if you can find four or
five good men men who can move quietly and won't start blazing away at
rabbits that would be ideal."

She grinned at him.

"Would you like to give them audition?"  she asked.

"No..."

"They may give you one," she said, on her way to the door.

"I come back this evening," she added over her shoulder.

They had waited, the ten of them, in the fourth-floor room of an
abandoned building, taking turns at training the nightscope on the
upper floors of the ten-storey high-rises half a mile away.  There were
six towers in the distant cluster, and from this vantage-point they
looked like an array of giant skittles leaning forward, with the three
at the rear looking out over the shoulders of the two in the middle,
and this pair standing over the lone tower at the front.

There were occasional glimmers of light in the bottom two or three
storeys of each building, but none above that.  A mixture of stubborn
long-term residents, refugees and people with nowhere else to go might
risk life close to the ground, but throughout the city the top floors
of such buildings were the exclusive preserve of snipers.  Hopefully
the man or woman they were looking for was still holed up in one of
these six buildings, biding his or her time.

This sniper's latest victim had been a fourteen-year old girl.  She had
been on her way home with the family bread when the dum-dum bullet had
almost blown her in half, the fourth child victim in as many days in
the same neighbourhood.  Hajrija's unit was out to get him, and it had
seemed like an ideal time to see what these Englishmen, the 'foreign
super-soldiers', were made of.

The five male members of the unit had all seemed friendly enough, if
somewhat sceptical of their guests' alleged prowess.

They were all in their twenties or thirties and, like most groups of
Bosnians, looked remarkably heterogeneous.  Two looked liked
stereotypical Muslim guerrillas Kaltak and the leader, Hadzic, were
dark-haired, moustached and with stubbly chins while Abdulahu was
strikingly blond, and might have been taken for a Scandinavian.  Began
and Lujinovic were both brown-haired and blue-eyed.  What all five had
in common were an unkempt look, eyes red-rimmed from exhaustion, and
the air of having been through the fire of combat and out the other
side.

They had been passing round the nightscope for four hours now, and it
seemed to Razor, whose shift it was, that the sniper was probably
either asleep or gone.  He started slowly scanning the top floor of the
target building once more, searching for the movement he didn't really
expect to find.

A small flare erupted in the corner of the nightscope, and vanished
almost as quickly.  Razor swung it back to where he thought it had
been.

There was nothing.  Had he imagined it?

No, there was another flare, fainter, much fainter than the last.  The
man's dragging on a cigarette, Razor realized.  The first, brighter
flare had been from a match or a lighter.

"Hajrija," he said softly, liking the sound of the name.  He passed her
the nightscope, saying: "Fourth building from the left, second floor
down, second window from the left."

She trained the scope.

"I

cannot see .. . oh yes, there's the bastard."  She flashed Razor a
smile in the dark, and got up to tell the others.

Two minutes later they were assembled and ready to go.  Hadzic led the
way, followed by Docherty.  The SAS men were all carrying the silenced
Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns, as well as Browning High Power 9mm
semi-automatic handguns.  Each Bosnian carried a Kalashnikov and a
Czech machine pistol, and Abdulahu had a Dragunov sniper rifle strapped
across his back.  All four SAS men were wearing Americandesigned
passive night goggles, or PNGs, while Hadzic sported a cruder
Soviet-made counterpart.

They marched down the stairs in single file, the sound of their steps
echoing in the empty building.  As they emerged into the night a series
of tracer bullets arced red across the sky in front of them, bright as
flares through the PNGs.

There was snow in the air now, falling desultorily for the moment, but
the flakes did not melt on impact.  The Bosnian commander led them off
at a brisk pace, down a long, sloping street towards the audible waters
of the River Miljacka.  About fifty yards short of the bank they turned
right through an area of abandoned factories, traversing several yards
and clambering through old holes in two high wire fences.  This was a
route the unit had often used before, Docherty realized.  Which made
him feel nervous.

They emerged on to a small road of houses, several of which had been
destroyed by shells.  None looked occupied.

A scrawny cat suddenly darted across the street.  its eyes bright-green
orbs in the PNGs, before disappearing into the space between two
high-rises.  The nearest of the towers was now not much more than three
hundred yards distant, looming above the expanse of open ground which
sloped upwards from the end of the street.  This looked to Docherty as
if it had once been used for allotments, but now only weeds and pieces
of broken cane poked through the thin coating of snow.

"That is Serb territory," Hadzic told Docherty, pointing forward.

"I used to live over there," he added bitterly, 'with my
fellow-Serbs."

Docherty showed his surprise.

"Oh, I am a Serb," the man said, 'though sometimes I am ashamed to be
so."  He waved his hands outward, as if to dismiss the subject.

"And over there is a Serb cemetery," he said, 'the only way in which is
not guarded or mined.  The dead make poor sentries," he added, 'even in
Sarajevo."

They started across the open ground, the snow falling more heavily now.
Soon there would be enough to leave noticeable footprints for any Serb
patrol, which didn't bode well for their return journey.  The cemetery
was set on a shallower slope, and surrounded by a low wall.  They
clambered across it, and advanced in single file up a path between the
rows of headstones.  A sudden flurry of tracer fire turned everyone's
head, and Docherty thought he caught a streak of red reflected in the
distant river below.

They reached the far side of the cemetery, where a higher wall offered
a good observation point.  Beyond the wall there was a wide and empty
road, and beyond that the nearest of the high-rises reared up from a
concrete sea.

"We can use the front building as cover," Hadzic said, 'but after that
we're in the open."

"Do they have night scopes  Docherty asked.

Hadzic shrugged in the gloom.

"Some of them do.

But this bastard has only killed people in daylight."

He turned to make sure everyone was ready, and led them across the dark
and empty road to the shelter of the first tower.  There they waited
another five minutes, scanning the neighbourhood for movement through
the PNGs until they were satisfied that they had not been spotted.

Hugging the wall of the building, they moved round to its rear, where a
line of rubbish containers offered convenient cover.  The doorway of
the target high-rise was now only an eighty-yard run away.
Unfortunately, as Docherty discovered when he trained his nightscope on
the doorway, two men were sitting just inside the glass doors, which
looked as though they were chained.  He passed the scope to Hadzic, who
swore softly under his breath.

"Something's moving out there," Razor whispered in Docherty's ear,
pointing out to the left.  Through the scope the mere impression of
movement focused into two men pushing bicycles.  Each had a rifle slung
across his shoulder, and one was carrying what looked like a billy-can.
Steam was escaping from around its lid into the freezing air, looking
through the PNGs like a cloud of green gas rising up from a witch's
cauldron.

The men were obviously expected.  The two guards unchained the glass
doors to let them in, and an indecipherable murmur of conversation
drifted across the snowy ground before the new arrivals, complete with
pot, disappeared into the building.

"Food for a sniper," Hadzic said, his voice brimming with suppressed
triumph.

"The bastard's up there all right."  He turned to Docherty, a knowing
look on his face.

"But we must still find a way in without waking up the whole
neighbourhood.  I think maybe this is where you Englishmen show your
skills."

Docherty looked at Hadzic, just to make sure he was serious.

He was.  He then examined the two soldiers once more through the
nightscope.  They were little more than faint silhouettes:

certainly there was no way Docherty could see their faces.

Which was fitting enough, he thought.  If they wanted the Bosnians'
help in rescuing Nena, then he had no choice but to order the killing
of these two men, whom he knew nothing about, whom he had never seen
before.  They were enemies of his friends, that was for sure.  And they
were holding guns in a war zone, which he guessed made them fair game.
It might not be the SAS's war, but tonight they seemed to be making a
guest appearance.

"Nema problema," he said softly.  It was the only Serbo-Croat phrase
he'd picked up so far.

The four SAS men squatted together to discuss how.

"There's only one safe approach," Chris said, 'on our bellies until
we're level with the front of the building, then we can move in from
the side."

"They haven't rechained the door," Razor said, 'but there's no way of
knowing how thick the glass is, and I don't reckon our chances of
getting them both before they get a shot off.  These guys' he patted
the silenced MP5 - 'just don't have the muzzle velocity."

"We'll have to get them outside," the Dame said thoughtfully.

"How?"  Docherty asked.

"Curiosity," Chris said, his eyes suddenly lighting up.

"And maybe hunger.  Let the Dame and I handle it.  OK, boss?"

Docherty hesitated, reluctant to let the two youngest

II

men bear the burden of starting this undeclared war, but from the
barely concealed eagerness on their faces it was clear that they had no
such doubts.  And their youth would come in handy when it came to
crawling swiftly and unobserved through a hundred yards of snow.

"OK," he agreed, and went back to brief Hadzic.

Ten minutes later, Chris and the Dame were standing against the wall of
the target building, around the corner from the doorway, having
successfully worked their bodies across the snow-covered concrete.
Watching through the nightscope, Docherty saw Chris take something out
of his pocket, but couldn't make out what it was.  He put it to his
lips and the noise of a duck quacking came wafting across on the night
air.

The two guards inside the vestibule heard it too.

They looked at each other, then out into the darkness.

One came to the door and pushed it open.

"Quack, quack," Chris went.

The man went back for his rifle, said something to his companion, and
emerged into the night.  He stood still, waiting for directions from
his intended prey.

"Quack, quack."

Chris was moving away from the building now, trying to convince the
guard his potential supper was getting away.

It worked.  As the Serb reached the corner of the block a hand reached
out, and something flashed bright green in Docherty's PNGs.  The man's
hand flew up, then just as swiftly fell lifeless beside him, and he
slumped forward into the snow, making only the slightest 'whumpf' as he
did so.

"Quack, quack, quack, quaaaaack!"

The other man emerged from the doorway, and seemed to hesitate.
Standing motionless by the wall,

virtually invisible to the guard, the Dame tightened his finger on the
MP5's trigger, prepared to risk only wounding the man with a silenced
shot rather than let him re-enter the building.

"Radic?"  the figure said, almost apologetically.

"Where the fuck are you?"  he added, stepping forward into the
darkness, holding his rifle at the ready.

Wanting to be sure, the Dame waited, the extended stock of the silenced
MP5 pressing into his shoulder, until the man was within twenty feet of
him.  Then, his training instructor's voice sounding in his head, he
aligned the sight on the centre of the Serb's head and squeezed the
trigger, maintaining the squeeze while firing and for a moment more.
The man's head flew back, his feet seemed to almost paw at the snow,
and he collapsed awkwardly on to the ground.

The Dame walked swiftly forward, confirmed that the Serb was dead, and
signalled to Docherty that the way was clear.  Then he and Chris went
in through the glass doors, and took up station at the bottom of the
stairs.  There were no signs of life in the stairwell, no indication
that the men who had brought the food were on their way back down.

The rest of the group joined them a few minutes later.

"Who will go up?"  one of the Bosnians asked Hadzic.

"All of us.  We don't know how many there are up there.  It is probably
just the three of them, but it could be a unit of ten.  But there is no
need for our English friends to tire themselves out," he added.

"They have done their bit."

"We wouldn't miss the climax," Docherty said.

All ten started climbing, as silently as they could manage.  At each
landing they stopped for a few seconds, ears straining in vain for the
sound of footsteps coming down.  On the eighth floor they waited for
longer, while Lujinovic scouted out the lay of the land.  He returned
five minutes later with the news that all the rooms seemed empty save
the one in question.  That one, number 96, had its door closed.  There
was music playing inside, and men talking as well, though he hadn't
been able to tell what they were saying.

Hadzic's grin was visible even in the dark.

They climbed the last flight of stairs, and walked down the corridor
towards the sound of the music.

It was Prince, the Dame realized, singing "Little Red Corvette'.  One
of his sisters had the CD back in Sunderland.

Hadzic and Began positioned themselves either side of the apartment
door, like cops in an American TV series.

"Need to find a love that's gonna last," Prince sang, as Kaltak
launched his foot against the door, and the chorus was drowned in
splintering wood as the three Bosnian soldiers burst into the room.

No gunfire greeted them.  By the time Docherty and the other SAS men
reached the front room three frightened-looking Serbs were being held
at gunpoint.

There was a heavy smell of marijuana in the air and several roaches in
an ashtray that was overflowing on to the pink carpet.  A large
tarpaulin had been hung across the window, with a narrow opening for
sighting and firing through.

The two men who had brought the food were still wearing their coats,
while the sniper seemed to be wearing about five layers of sundry
T-shirts and sweatshirts.  The top one bore the logo "Alice in Chains',
and featured Lewis Carroll's Alice hanging from a noose.  The fourfold
Cyrillic C logo "Only solidarity will save the Serbs' was tattooed on
his right hand.  The pupils in his pale-blue eyes were remarkably
dilated.

One of the Bosnians was tearing down the tarpaulin, revealing two
broken windows.  Then Began and Kaltak suddenly grasped the sniper's
hands, pulling them back behind his head, causing some reaction at last
in the lifeless eyes.  His legs squirmed away from the hands that were
trying to grasp them, but only for a moment.

"Shoot me," he cried out desperately.

"I only shot people.  Shoot me."

The Bosnians ignored him.  Grim-mouthed, they carried him to the
window, where, since they neglected to impart any energy into the
process, it was not so much a matter of throwing the sniper into the
night as of simply tipping him out.  His wail faded into a faint but
sickening sound, like that made by a boot crushing a ripe fruit.

The other two captives both started talking at once.  Hadzic stepped
forward and shot one in the head, then the other.

Nena Reeve sat in the gymnasium of the Partisan Sports Hall in Vogosca,
remembering good things about her estranged husband.

Perhaps it was more than a little perverse to choose this place and
time to remind herself of his better side, but she enjoyed the
ludicrousness of it all.  Soon after arriving at Vogosca, Nena had
decided that only her sense of the absurd would get her through such an
experience.  Take it all straight, and she'd go mad.

Mad with outrage, mad with sadness, just mad.

Across the gym two women were softly crying, like violins intertwining
a melody.

John, she told herself, think about John.

Why had she left him, really?  Because he was impossible.  And why was
that?  Because he didn't listen that was what it all came down to.  He
loved her, she knew that.  He loved looking after her, but always on
his own terms.  It was the same with the children.  He'd be wonderful
with them right up to the moment when they had wills and lives of their
own, and then he wouldn't know how to deal with them at all.

The recurrent thought that the children might be dead crossed her mind.
Though she'd always thought she'd know if anything happened to either
of them.  And John might be dead too.  The thought brought a sinking
feeling to her stomach.

Whatever their differences, they were not finished as a couple.  Not if
they both managed to survive this.

One of the women had stopped crying, but the other carried on, making a
low, moaning sound, as if she was mourning a death.

Perhaps she was.  Almost all of these women and girls would have had
men in their lives: husbands, fathers, lovers, brothers.  Where were
they now?  Some were known to be dead.  Some had been put to death in
front of their wives and daughters, often after witnessing their
violation.  Some would be in labour camps, and a few might have
escaped, across mountains, across borders to God knew where.  Whatever
had happened to them, wherever they might be, they were lost to these
women.

Talking was not allowed in the gym, but the guards were not always
inclined to enforce the rule, and the need for conversation, for
contact, often outweighed the risk of one more bruise.  Over the last
few days Nena had spoken to most of her fellow prisoners, heard the
stories of their abduction and humiliation.  All of them were Muslims,
and all but Nena herself were from villages that had been taken over by
Serb irregulars since the summer.  Separated from their families, they
had been loaded on buses like the one which had brought Nena, and
brought here to service the local fighters.

The lucky ones were taken out at night to a nearby motel where they
were raped by between one and a dozen men, and returned, crying, a few
hours later.

The younger ones had almost all been virgins, and thought that their
chances of ever finding a husband were now over.  They didn't believe
that any man would believe that they had had no choice.

The unlucky ones were taken out and not returned.

Usually, according to the few women prepared to talk about it, the
rapes were speechless affairs: the men were using the women to
demonstrate their dominance and as substitutes for masturbation.  Nena
heard several accounts of men who couldn't get an erection seeking
compensation by urinating on the woman.

She herself had not been molested since her arrival, and supposed she
owed such tender mercy to her age.

Hoping to encourage such neglect she had tied her blonde hair back in a
tight bun.  And every night when they came and took other women away
she felt guilty for her own good fortune.

But not on this night.  The man came with his torch, moving along the
wall from face to face, picking out one girl who seemed to be always
chosen, another who was selected almost as often, and finally, almost
hesitantly, bathing Nena's face in the beam.

"A blend of youth and experience," he muttered to himself, like a
football coach.

Nena's first reaction was surprise, her second a sense of emptiness
that came close to panic.  In the back of the van she told herself she
had survived the four men in the mountains, and she could survive as
many more here as she had to.

This had nothing to do with her.  It was like being shot by a total
stranger: it might hurt like hell, but if the bullet didn't kill you,
then the wound would heal.  There was no need for her mind to get
involved.

Just turn off, she told herself, looking at the blank faces of the two
younger women.  Just turn off.

And it worked as well as anything could have worked, at least until the
sixth and last man came into the motel room.  He was no younger than
the rest of them in his early twenties but he seemed to lack his
comrades' macho shell of assurance.  Seeing her laid out naked on the
bed, fresh bruises growing on her breasts and bloody between the legs,
he hesitated before reaching to undo his belt.

"Why are you doing this?"  she asked, breaking her own rule of silence,
and cursing herself for doing it.

"Your people are doing the same to our women," he said, but not with
any great conviction.

He might well believe it, she thought, but he didn't seem to find it a
good enough reason to reply in kind.

"Does that make it right?"  she asked him.

"What do you think your mother and sisters would say if they could see
you now?"

"I don't have any sisters," he said.  The belt was undone, but he had
made no move to drop his trousers.

"You have a mother," she said.

"I have no choice," he said, "I don't want to ..

"Then don't."

"We have to," he whispered fiercely.

"No one will know," Nena said.

"Think of your future.

How will you ever know love if this picture is in the back of your
mind?"

He closed his eyes.

"Shut up," he said.

"Just shut up.

II

The unit got back to the Hotel Starigrad shortly after dawn, tired but
mostly satisfied with the night's work.  Hadzic and Docherty agreed
that their combined unit would leave for Vogosca an hour before
midnight the following day.  The next thirty-six hours would need to be
spent gathering intelligence on the military situation between Sarajevo
and their destination, working out the safest route and possible
assault plans, and making sure that they had everything they needed,
both for this op and the subsequent mission to Zavik.

Razor and Hajrija were charged with acquiring the necessary maps, and
with interviewing refugees who knew anything of the current situation
in Zavik or its surrounding region.  Chris and the Dame were put to
work securing supplies.  Extra emergency rations would be needed for
the Bosnians, and since the party would have to spend at least one
night camping out in the snow, digging tools of some sort would also be
necessary.  Vogosca might be only four or five miles away as the crow
flew, but there was a Serb-held mountain ridge in the way, and no
chance of reaching the town, doing a proper recce, launching a rescue
and getting back to Sarajevo, all in one night.  The unit would have to
spend a whole day hidden up in the hills above Vogosca, ready to launch
their assault early the following night.

Docherty himself went to see Brindley at the HO of the British UN
contingent.  The major's makeshift desk was overflowing with pending
paperwork, and he seemed only too pleased for a chance to take a
break.

He led Docherty across a car park crammed with white UN vehicles and
into the steamy Portakabin which did duty as the unit's mess.  The
coffee was even worse than Docherty expected, despite the generous nip
of whisky from Brindley's hip-flask.

"So what have you lot been doing with yourselves?"  the major asked.

"Oh, just getting acclimatized," Docherty replied, wondering exactly
how much he should be telling the other man.

"Have you found the woman?"

"We've found out where she is."

"That's good."

"Not really.  She's in a Serb brothel in Vogosca."

"Oh Jesus .

"But not for long, we hope.  We're going after her..."

Brindley's eyes widened.

"Is that .. ."  he started to say.

"Is that what we're here for?"  Docherty completed for him.

"Probably not.  And that's why I'm here."  He paused, ordering his
thoughts.

"You know how hard it is for the UN to be involved in a war and still
not take sides ..

"You're not kidding."

"Well, I don't think there's any chance of us keeping our hands as
clean as you lot have to.  If we're going to have any chance of doing
what it was we were sent out here to do, then we can't afford to be
choosy about accepting help.  So our trip to Vogosca is a joint op
involving men from a Bosnian Army anti-sniper unit..."

"Oh boy," Brindley said with a smile.

Docherty smiled back.

"I wanted someone to know," he said, 'and you've been selected.  If we
don't come back, at least they'll be some facts for the Regimental
magazine."

"And after Vogosca?"

"Then we head for Zavik.  Just the four of us and Nena Reeve assuming
we've found her and she's willing to go.

"And then?"

"Depends what we find when we get there.  But I've no intention of
making it my permanent address.  If we say two days to Vogosca, another
three to Zavik and a couple of days there, then add three or four to
reach the coast .. . I'd like to be in Split again around two weeks
from now.

Brindley nodded.

"OK," he said.

"I take it you haven't called Hereford since you got here.  I could fix
it," he added.

"It might take a while, but there are ways .

"We could call them ourselves," Docherty said, 'but they know nothing
about the situation here, and there's nothing they can do to help us.
Anyway," he added with a grin, 'they don't like to be bothered."

Brindley wished them good luck as he and Docherty parted again in the
vehicle park.

The PC made his way back to the Holiday Inn, wondering what Barney
Davies would make of the decisions he was taking.  There was no way he
could officially agree to joint action with local forces, Docherty
knew, so there was no point in telling him.

The fact that HO had made no attempt to reach them since their arrival
in

Sarajevo seemed to suggest that the CO had an equally firm grip on
reality.

The combined unit's jump-off point was a house on the road to the
mountain village of Nahorevo, just inside the city's northern boundary.
The ten soldiers arrived in dribs and drabs throughout the day, so as
not to tip off any watchers in the hills that an operation was
imminent.  They sat around drinking dandelion tea, smoking cigarettes,
rechecking their equipment and reading one of several hundred copies of
Mad magazine.  The house's owner, a member of the anti sniper unit who
had been killed a few weeks earlier, had obviously been a subscriber.

They left the house at 2200 hours, following the Nahorevo road uphill
for a few hundred yards before turning on to a path which ran
diagonally up across the slope of the hillside.  The ridge-line was
still some five hundred yards above them.  And up there were some of
the Serbian guns that continued to pound what remained of Sarajevo.

There would also be some sort of encircling ring of troops, deployed to
prevent goods and men from either entering or leaving the besieged
city, but opinions in Sarajevo had differed as to how thick or thin
this cordon would be.  Hadzic was gloomy on the subject, and feared
that they might not find a way through without alerting the enemy.  His
main hope lay in the silenced MP5s.

Docherty was of a different opinion.  His experience told him that such
cordons often existed mostly in the mind, and only needed minimal
manning to reinforce a false impression of impregnability.
Historically, in most sieges, both sides tended to become stuck in the
roles of besieger and besieged, to the point where neither felt able to
cross the line between them.  The Serbs up above, Docherty thought,
would not be expecting anyone to try what they were trying.

Consequently, they would not be expending scarce manpower on blocking
off such a possibility.

Or so he hoped.  At least they were on the move, and in the right
direction, away from Sarajevo.  The evening before, in the bar of the
Holiday Inn, he had got into a conversation with a fellow Scot, a
journalist with one of the quality Sundays.  The man, who looked around
forty-five, had been pleasantly drunk, and most of the conversation had
been small talk, ranging from Celtic's fall from grace to the fate of
the SNP.  But like a cloud-laden sky parting briefly for sunshine,
their good-natured banter had parted to reveal a glimpse of something
close to despair.

"Say what you like," the journalist had said, 'but what has died in
this city is the belief that humans have learnt anything from this
century."

Docherty had wanted to disagree, but could think of no reasons for
doing so.  Nor could he now, climbing the dark path behind Hadzic and
Hajrija.  And with that realization came another question: if the world
was up shit creek without a paddle, then what the hell was he risking
his life for?

A friend?  He liked Reeve, but he had no sense of obligation to the man
that would outweigh his responsibility to Isabel and the children.

Regimental duty?  He'd done his share of duty.  The SAS wasn't a
religion, and Barney Davies wasn't the high priest.  No, he'd accepted
this job almost out of habit.  And out of curiosity.  And now he was
beginning to wonder whether it had been the stupidest decision of his
life.

A couple of Bosnians behind him, Chris was not wondering about what
might have been.  He rarely did.

In this life, he reckoned, you opened doors and then dealt with what
was on the other side.  And he loved opening them.  Of course there was
always the chance that he'd not beat the clock on this one, the way
Eddie and Anderson had failed to beat it in Colombia, but that was the
chance you had to take.  Knowing that was the one thing he and Eddie
had had in common, but it was so basic that it had made up for all the
things they had disagreed on.

Eddie had loved moments like this, walking across a mountain in almost
total darkness, senses attuned to every little noise, utterly alive in
every respect.  Christ did too.  He loved the idea that every place
they got to was somewhere he'd never been before.  Even Sarajevo had
been incredible.  Downright tragic, certainly, but fascinating.  It
hadn't looked like he'd imagined it, but then places never did.

So far, his only regrets regarding this op concerned the paucity of
birds he'd been able to see.  There had been the usual Mediterranean
coastal types around Split, but since their arrival in Sarajevo he'd
hardly seen any at all.  That said a lot for their intelligence, Chris
thought.  What birds in their right minds would want to winter in a
city pounded by sustained artillery fire?  Once they started out for
Zavik, though, who knew what he might see.  Maybe a booted eagle, or
even a l3onelli's eagle.

Twenty yards ahead, Razor was thinking about a different kind of bird.
Hajrija was walking in front of him, and, even bundled up like a bear,
she was offering the Londoner more than enough food for his fantasies.
No amount of clothing or equipment could quite disguise the grace of
her walk, and the long wisps of hair escaping from the woollen
balaclava seemed unbelievably feminine.  Physically she reminded him a
little of Maureen, which wasn't the best of omens.

Maureen had been a couple of years older than Hajrija, a divorced
occupational therapist who lived in Hereford with her six-year-old son.
She and Razor had met in a pub, and taken to each other immediately.
They didn't have any interests in common, but the sex was great and he
got on well with the kid.  Within three months they had arranged to get
married.  He couldn't remember ever having been happier.  Even his
mother's announcement that she was remarrying, and going off to
Australia for at least three years, had failed to really upset him.

Then the roof had fallen in.  Maureen had called off the wedding a
month before it was due to take place, and announced that, for the
boy's sake, she was going back to his father.  Razor had thought the
man lived in London, but it turned out he had been back in Hereford for
several months.

Six weeks later his mother, to whom he'd always been close, left for
Australia.  For the first time in his life Razor had felt uncertain of
his own judgement, rootless, and mortal.

That had been two years ago, and things had not changed much in the
intervening period.  He had acquired a sense of time passing, and a
tendency to reflect on the past, which he had never had before.  His
job in the Training Wing was interesting, even challenging, but seemed
to be leading to nothing more than a distant retirement.  And there was
always the chance that the loss of his happy-go-lucky self had made him
less of a soldier.

So far, though, he could detect no signs that it had.

And maybe it was the presence of Docherty, but he could feel all the
old excitement at setting out on an operation.  Hell, he thought,
Docherty got the woman in Argentina this time it's my turn.  Hajrija,
you're going to be mine, he silently told her back, and at that moment,
right on cue, she turned her head to give him a quick smile.  Razor
thought how much he'd like to see her in sunshine, with considerably
fewer articles of clothing on.

Towards the rear of the column, the Dame was enjoying the darkness.  He
had always preferred the city to the country, and the sort of vast
terrain which made many people gasp with wonder tended to make him feel
uneasy.  It was all too much, somehow.  It was so fucking eternal.  He
preferred not to have to look at it.

He thought about the other night, and the two men he'd killed beneath
the high-rise.  They'd never know who won this war, never know anything
more.  They wouldn't catch Bosnia's first appearance on the fucking
Eurovision Song Contest.  Life had just ended for them just like
that.

But where were they now?  It was hard to imagine those men in heaven,
but he doubted if they'd done anything bad enough to warrant endless
torture by fire.

At the Holiday Inn he'd come across a guide to Yugoslavia, and one of
the bits he'd read had been about a place called Medugorje, which was
fifty miles or so to the south.  In 1981 six of the village's teenagers
had seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the place had suddenly
become a place of pilgrimage, not to mention a tourist attraction.

The Dame found it hard to believe that anyone had seen such an
apparition, but then it wasn't much easier believing six kids from a
dirt-poor village had conspired to make the whole story up.  And
apparently the apparitions had continued on a regular basis, usually on
Mondays and Fridays.

He had laughed when he read that it seemed such bullshit but then it
occurred to him that if there were no apparitions then why had none of
the thousands of witnesses not blown the whistle on it all, and exposed
the whole business as a fucking rip-off?  Maybe it wasn't, or maybe
they were all so desperate to see something that they had.  Maybe
that's what faith was, a sort of desperation.  He could understand
that.  He knew death wasn't the end of everything it couldn't be, or
what was the point?  There had to be a reckoning, a time to answer for
what you had done.  There had to be somewhere to wipe yourself clean.

The path led them slowly but remorselessly upwards, winding around the
rims of indentations in the mountainside, passing through large stands
of conifers that clung to the slopes.  The snow was deeper the higher
they went, and the trail they left became ever more marked.

The good news was that no one else had used this path lately, or at
least not since the last snowfall two days before.

About two hours into their journey Docherty and Hadzic agreed to call a
halt.  The column was now only some two hundred feet from the ridge
top, and the two leaders thought it prudent to send scouts forward to
check the situation.  Chris and Kaltak were dispatched.

They returned less than fifteen minutes later with some welcome
intelligence.  Each Serb gun emplacement was obviously allowed a fire
for cooking and warmth just behind the ridge top, out of sight of the
city below.  The two nearest fires were a couple of hundred yards to
the west of their path, and rather more than that to the east.  They
should have no trouble slipping through.

The march resumed, with Chris out in front as lead scout.  Five minutes
later they crested the rise, and crossed what was obviously a much-used
path along the top of the ridge.  To left and right each of them could
see the line of fires stretching into the distance.

Ahead and below there was nothing but the ghostly light of the
snow-covered slope falling away into darkness.

They worked their way down it, using what looked like a snowed-over
stream bed to make their tracks less obvious, and eventually reached
the trees.  This side of the mountain, unlike the slopes looking down
on Sarajevo, was mostly covered in forest, and their hopes were high
that they could find a suitable observation point overlooking Vogosca
without leaving the shelter of the trees.

It was almost two in the morning when they gave up any idea of finding
such a spot.  There just wasn't enough light.  They were relying on the
Bosnians knowledge rather than eyesight to gauge where the small town
was, and there was no way of judging what would be visible when
daylight came.  It was decided to make camp deep in the trees, and send
a two-man team forward to set up an observation post just before
dawn.

For the moment the SAS men concentrated on seeking out and enlarging
spaces beneath the lower branches of conifers where snow had built up
around them, leaving a pocket of air beneath.  The Bosnians watched
with initial astonishment as the SAS men dug into the snow beneath the
spreading branches on the lee side of the trees, and unearthed these
living quarters.

"Where do you learn this?"  Hajrija asked Razor.

"There is no snow in England."

"Norway," he said.

"NATO exercises."

An hour later two buttressed snow caves had been excavated, complete
with removable doors.

There were too many tracks for the hides to be completely secure, but
they would only have to remain undetected for the nine or so hours of
daylight.

There remained the matter of choosing the recce team.  Hadzic picked
Hajrija, and Docherty named Razor, repressing a smile as he did so.

"You know what we want," he told his second in command.

"We'll see you at dusk.  Be good," he added in parting.

She seemed pleased it was him, Razor thought, as they made their way
back down through the trees, aiming for the spot which their map had
suggested would be the most promising.  Walking down, he couldn't
remember ever being in a darker place:

the thick cloud cover, and lack of any moon, gave the snow nothing to
reflect.  The PNGs enabled them to avoid trees, but not much more, and
he had to rely on all his dead-reckoning skills.  Even then, once they
had reached what he gauged was the correct location, there was nothing
much to reinforce the supposition.  Ahead of them the trees gave way to
nothing but blackness; they could be staring out across the hollow
which held Vogosca, or just gazing into an empty meadow.  Only the dawn
would tell.

It was still something between ten and twenty minutes away, so Razor
suggested they use the time digging out the blocks of frozen snow they
would need to cover the observation trench.

Hajrija agreed and, following his example, used the spade to cut out
blocks of snow half a yard square and roughly four inches thick.  Once
they had a dozen, Razor called a halt.

The faintest glimmer of light was now showing in the eastern sky, and
they both squatted on their haunches watching the blackness in front of
them slowly fade into browns, and the scene gradually swim into focus.
It was the town, and their positioning was almost perfect.  Razor
selected a sight some ten yards to their left and just inside the line
of trees, which gave them an overall view of not only the town but both
major access roads, and started furiously digging their trench.

Hajrija carried the thick snow tiles across and then helped with the
digging.  Ten minutes later, with sweat running freely inside their
winter clothing, they had a trench about eight feet long and about two
and a half feet wide.  Razor used the spade to cut a ledge along both
sides just below the upper lip, and between them they balanced pairs of
snow tiles against one another to make their roof.  Once this was
completed they used loose snow from the drifts beneath the trees to
smooth out the angular outline of the structure and disguise its
rectangular shape.  Only twenty minutes had passed since first light
when they took up residence, lying closely together side by side, their
eyes looking out through the observation slit.  The trench was designed
to sleep one while the other observed, but both were too interested in
what lay below for either to countenance sleep.

It was growing light enough now to pick out details.

To their left the main road from Sarajevo swung down from the mountain,
entering the town between two lines of dwellings and emerging on the
far side before swiftly dropping from sight into an unseen valley.

What looked like no more than a dirt track wound up into the hills to
the east, beyond the river which ran down through the heart of the
town.

This had no more than two hundred buildings, sprinkled apparently at
random around the church in the centre.  The only signs of
socialist-style construction were two four-storey blocks on the western
edge of town and a long, single-storey building on the road leading in
down the mountain.  That had to be the Sonja Motel, where the women
were taken.

The Partisan Sports Hall was easy to spot: a large, almost windowless
structure on the far side of the town, rising out of a complex between
the river and the main road.  So far, Razor thought, reality matched
their map.

He started a more thorough search with the binoculars, and found his
first signs of life, a soldier walking from the motel towards one of
the last houses on the road out of town.  There seemed to be a few
upright chairs under a tree by the road.  By day it had to be a
checkpoint, he decided.

He trained the binoculars on the road beyond the town and found
another, but the dirt track leading up to the right didn't warrant one.
The Serbs here weren't expecting any trouble, he thought.

"More men," Hajrija whispered by his side.

Razor followed the direction of her East German binoculars, down to
where several men were gathering in the forecourt of the Sonja Motel.
The faint sob nd of an engine starting drifted up from the town, and a
dormobile emerged into view from under the overhang of the motel's
roof.  The men all climbed aboard, and the vehicle moved out on to the
road, turning left, away from the centre of the town.  At the
checkpoint it slowed, and then accelerated away up the hill.

"The day-shift gunners," Razor thought out loud.  He turned to Hajrija,
whose face was uncomfortably close.  Her breath smelt faintly of the
plum brandy they had all imbibed after completing the shelters back in
the forest.  Her eyes were dull with fatigue.

"Do you want to sleep first?"  he asked.

"OK," she said.

"But you wake me, yes?"

Razor looked at his watch.

"It will get dark around five," he said.

"I'll wake you at twelve-thirty."

"OK," she said again, yawning.

He listened to her struggle her way into the sleeping bag in the
confined space, and then her breathing in the silence.  Just when he
thought she was asleep, the words 'you make a nice house' emerged
faintly from out of the darkness.

"Thank you," he said, and smiled to himself.

The next four and a half hours he spent struggling to stay awake and
alert, and noting down everything that happened in the town below,
adding detail to their map.  The amount of military traffic did not
seem high, and seemed to consist mostly of men returning from or
setting out for the Serb positions in the hills above Sarajevo.  The
exceptions were one lorry load of uniformed troops which arrived from
somewhere down the valley and two cars carrying irregulars sporting
broad-brimmed hats.  Chetniks, Razor guessed, though one brief glimpse
was not enough to ascertain whether they wore long beards.  Like
everyone else they disappeared into the Sonja Motel, which seemed to
function as the local barracks.

As for the Partisan Sports Hall, there seemed to be no movement around
it at all, and Razor began to wonder whether the women held there had
been moved in the week since their informants' release.  He could see
no sign of guards, but with any luck they were positioned out of sight
on the far side of the building.  The thought of this mission coming up
empty left a sinking feeling in his stomach.

At twelve-thirty he shook Hajrija by the ankle, eliciting what sounded
suspiciously like a Serbo-Croat curse.  She emerged by his side a few
minutes later, bleary-eyed and beautiful.

He concentrated on the job in hand, listing what he'd seen, and sharing
his anxiety about the Sports Hall.  Her face fell as he did so, but the
disappointment quickly turned to anger, and another indecipherable
curse escaped her lips as she ran a hand angrily through her tangled
hair.

"One day you must tell me what that means," Razor said.

She shook her head, ran the other hand through her hair, and managed a
faint smile.

"One day maybe," she said, 'now you go sleep."

"Gladly," Razor said.  He backed himself into the trench, found his way
into the sleeping bag, and the next thing he knew she was tugging on
his ankle and whispering that it was five o'clock.  He lay there for a
few seconds wondering where the light had gone and why he still felt
dog-tired.

Hajrij a's smile of welcome made him feel better for an instant, until
he made out the change in the outside world.  For the first time since
their arrival in Sarajevo the sky was clearing, and the last vestiges
of a visible sun were glowing orange above the mountains to the west.

"Shit," he said succinctly.

"It works for us too," she said.

"We have PNGs," Razor said.

"The women have not.  I think it will be more easy to get them away
from there if there is some light."

She had a point.

"Maybe you're right," Razor agreed, 'but we don't even know if they are
still here."

"Some are," she said.

"Take a look."

He trained the binoculars on the area of the Sports Hall.  A couple of
streetlights burned in the growing gloom, and just to one side of them
was.."  a bus.

"Ten women come in the bus," Hajrija said.

"About one hour now.  Two men come out and take them into the hall."

"I suppose that's good news," Razor said, aware of the irony.

"Yes," she said, in the same tone.

"OK," he said.

"What are we going to recommend here?

What's the best way in and the best way out?"

"The river to go in," she said.

"But out we not know how many people or where we are going.  If there
are thirty women .

"We shall need the bus," Razor completed the thought.

"And I agree, the river is the best way in.  How much longer do you
think we should stay here?"

"Thirty minutes?  It will be all dark then."

"Yeah, and it'll give us a chance to see what the lighting's like down
there," said Razor.

They both watched in silence for the next few minutes.

"Are you married?"  she asked out of the blue.

"No," he said.

"Are you?"

"No."

He asked a question that he'd been wanting to ask.

"That American journalist Bailey was he .. . more than a friend?"

"You mean, do I sleep with him?"  she asked, surprised.

"No.  I mean, were you in love with him?"

"Oh no.  But I like him.  He is was," she corrected herself, 'a nice
man.  He has innocence, you know?"

So had she slept with him, Razor wondered.  He decided to change the
subject.

"How did you get involved?"  he asked.

"In the Army, I mean?"

"Oh, that is an easy story," she said.

"I am a student of journalism, and it seems more important to fight for
what I believe than write it down."

"Makes sense."

"My boyfriend does not think so," she said.

"He say it is crazy for a woman to do this.  I tell him "fuck off"."

"Does he?"  Razor asked.

She laughed.

"Who knows?  I do not see for a long time.  But why I am in the unit, I
see children killed in the street and I know I want to fight the
bastards who do this."

"And the men accepted you?"

She grimaced.

"Not at the beginning.  But slowly, yes, they realize I can run as good
and walk as good and shoot better than any of them.  They learn now, I
think.  I am just one of the boys," she added sarcastically.

Razor found it hard to take that thought seriously.

She might be a better soldier than any of them, but a boy she certainly
wasn't.

Half a mile away Docherty was wondering why it seemed harder to sleep
when you were older and needed it more.  Or at least felt like you did.
All these young men he was surrounded by hardly seemed in need of
energy conservation, yet they slept like hairns.

He hoped it hadn't been a mistake sending Razor with the woman.  The
two of them obviously had something brewing between them, whether they
knew it or not, and on the spur of the moment he had felt like
indulging a romantic whim.  Hardly appropriate in retrospect, and he
hoped the two of them had risen above the temptation he had wilfully
put their way.

Still, something inside him remained unrepentant.

The business of being a soldier often involved putting the business of
being a human on hold, but there was something about this war and this
op, he felt, which made it more important than usual to keep the two
men inside him tied closely together.  If the human being slowed the
soldier down then that was too bad.

As his favourite strategist Liddell Hart had been fond of pointing out,
it didn't help to win the war if you lost the peace.  And whether
Liddell Hart had meant it or not, Docherty had always believed that any
decent peace must include the soldier's peace of mind.

It was almost fully dark now, or at least as dark as it was going to
get.  Docherty pulled himself out through the narrow exit and on to the
snow-covered forest floor.  As he expected, the patch of sky visible
between the treetops showed stars the sky had cleared during the day.
To his left the light seemed brighter, and he walked across to find a
clearing no more than thirty yards from their hides.  Here a few clouds
could be seen scudding across the sky, and the stars seemed as bright
as they ever did at this altitude.

Deneb flickered like a roseate diamond to the north, and directly above
the clearing the Milky Way looked like a jewelled scarf that someone
had tossed into the air.

Docherty stood there, revelling in the wonder of it all, thinking about
Isabel.  She'd be giving the kids their tea about now, and then maybe
watching the news while

II

they shared a bath.  He could see the kids in his mind's eye, splashing
water over each other.

He walked back down to the hides, grateful that they wouldn't be
needing the wretched PNGs that night.  If the clouds were anything to
go by there'd be a stiff breeze blowing out there in the open, and that
would make it that much easier to reach their target undetected.  In
Docherty's experience it was more often sound than sight which gave an
attacker away.

He arrived back just in time to see two shadowy figures approaching
through the trees, and froze in his tracks, just in case.

Then the taller of the two extended an arm into the air the prearranged
signal.  It was Razor and Hajrija.

Docherty gestured Razor into the British hide, and invited Hajrija to
bring Hadzic over for a conference.  Chris and the Dame were awake now
and, once the two Bosnians had arrived, all six of them huddled
together in the confined space, the much-amended map spread out on the
small portion of hardened snow left between them.

Three torches illuminated the map and faces surrounding it.

Razor and Hajrija took turns describing what they had discovered, and
then he outlined their recommended method of approach.

"OK," Docherty said.

"But let's start at the end and work backwards it usually helps.
Assuming we get the women out of the hail, where do we take them from
there?"  He looked at Hadzic.

"Where will they want to go?"

The Bosnian shrugged, or at least tried to.  It was difficult when both
shoulders were pinned by the person on either side.

"Somewhere safe," he said drily.

"The way I see it," he went on, 'there are two choices.  The first is
to take them back the way we have come, across the mountain to
Sarajevo.  But there are reasons not to do this.  We don't know what
condition the women will be in, and whether they can make such a
journey.  We do know that Sarajevo is not the best place to be in the
world right now.  So .. . I think the second choice is better.  We take
the bus and we drive it west.  We will have to go through the Serb
lines somewhere between here and Ilijas, but it will be three, four in
the morning, and if they are not expecting us our chances will be
good..."

"That's the main thing," Docherty agreed.

"We have to get out of Vogosca without raising the alarm.  Now,
remember what the women told Razor and Hajrija about the lorry coming
for them each evening around nine o'clock ..

"Remember to bring the blonde again the young one with the big tits,"
his friend shouted.

"I'll bring what I fancy," Dragan Kovacevic retorted, climbing
unsteadily into the cab and almost knocking his hat from his head.

"Christ, I'd better come with you," his friend said.

"The state you're in you'll probably come back with our
grandmothers."

He climbed into the driver's seat and belched loudly.

"That's fucking good beer," he said.

"Hey, I need a piss," he suddenly realized.

He climbed back down again and sent a long, steaming stream on to the
slush-covered gravel, sighing loudly as he did so.

"Come on, get a move on," Kovacevic said.

"What's your hurry?"  his friend wanted to know, lifting himself back
into the cab.

"The whores aren't going anywhere, are they?"  He untucked his shirt
and used it to dry his beard.

"It'll freeze solid," he explained, as the other man eyed him with
amusement.

"I'm going to cut mine off," Kovacevic said, turning the key in the
ignition and letting in the clutch.

"You see those boys from Goradze?  They all had lice crawling in
theirs.  It was disgusting."  He pulled the lorry out of the motel
forecourt and on to the road.

"What do you expect from that bunch?  They've been living around
fucking Muslims too long."

The lorry rumbled down the road into the dark town, its headlights
picking out the twin tracks of clear tarmac in the snow-covered road.

"I wonder what they all do at night," Kovacevic observed, his eyes
roaming across the darkened houses.

"No electricity for TV, no light for doing anything."

"They probably do what we do," his friend said with a grunt.

"Except they don't get such a varied menu," he added, laughing.

"You know, it's gonna be hard to get used to having only one woman
after all this is over," he went on.

"You .. ."  Kovacevic started to say.  A light was shining on the road
ahead, waving to and fro.  On the bridge, it looked like.  He braked,
wondering what sort of idiot could have ordered a checkpoint in the
middle of the town.

There only seemed to be one man though, his face shadowed by the hood
on his anorak.  He didn't appear to be carrying a gun, which was
strange for a checkpoint .. . "What the fuck?"  Kovacevic muttered,
pulling the lorry to a halt some ten yards from the waving
flashlight.

It was the last sound he ever made.  The windows imploded as the
silenced MP5s raked the cab with automatic fire, leaving an echo of
breaking glass to compete with the swift-flowing river in disturbing
the night's silence.

Docherty pulled open the cab door and yanked the bearded soldier out
and down on to the icy road.  Chris was doing the same on the other
side.  Razor and the Dame had taken up covering positions twenty yards
back up the road.  No lights had gone on in the nearby houses, but that
was presumably because of a lack of electricity.  No one had appeared
out of the darkness, which suggested either bad hearing or a healthy
instinct for survival.

The PC pointed the flashlight up-river, switched it on and off three
times, and then set about heaving the Chetnik's body across to the
stone parapet.  Once there, he lifted the shoulders up across it, and
then used the legs to lever the corpse out into space.  The splash was
barely audible above the sound of the rushing water.

The corpse from Chris's side followed it in, and Docherty had a
momentary memory of a Saint book he had read as a youth, in which the
hero had come across three men attacking one on a bridge like this in
Innsbruck.

Being the Saint, he had tipped all three into the icy river, only to
belatedly discover that they were policemen trying to arrest a thief.
The Saint's Getaway.  He had loved those books.

The six Bosnians loomed out of the dark like wraiths and, without a
word, clambered into the back of the lorry.  They were good soldiers,
Docherty thought.

He checked that all the berg ens had survived the journey and then,
signalling Razor and the Dame to join the Bosnians, picked up the
Chetnik's hat and climbed into the cab.  Chris was already waiting at
the wheel, broad-brimmed hat perched on his head, looking like anyone's
idea of a drunken Australian.

There was a rap on the cab's back window.

"Let's go," Docherty said.

"And keep it slow."

Chris obliged, rumbling past the town's neat orthodox church, several
official-looking buildings and an apparently empty supermarket with one
large window boarded up.  The road curved round to the left, and the

Sports Hall came into view.

"Where the fuck do they park it?"

Chris asked.

"Up against the side of the building," Docherty suggested.

There wasn't anywhere else he could see.

"But where's the fucking bus?"  This lorry would do at a pinch, but it
would be a real pinch, with thirty women to transport.

"It's round the back," Chris said, braking to a halt.

"Razor's new girlfriend saw them move it there."

"OK," Docherty said.  He took a deep breath.

"Ready?"

"Yeah."

"Then let's do it."

They got down from the cab, adjusted the hats as low across their faces
as they could without looking ridiculous, and started walking towards
the corner of the building.  The entrance was reportedly on the other
side, and they were just rounding the corner when they heard the sound
of a door opening.  Someone had heard the lorry arrive.

A man stepped out through the doorway, silhouetted against the dim
light that came from within.  Docherty didn't break step.

"Zdravo," the man said.

"Dobro vecer," Chris replied.

They were only a few yards apart.

"Koja..."  the man began, suddenly suspicious.

Docherty flicked open his coat and fired the MP5 from the hip.  The man
was still falling as Docherty sped in through the doorway.  Another two
men, both well into middle age, were looking up from a makeshift table,
cards spread around the yellow-glowing kerosene lamp.  Docherty's
finger tightened on the trigger, and then slowly unclenched itself.

"Tell them we're looking for a reason to kill them," he said to
Chris.

"And find out where the women are."  He went back outside, dragged the
body off into the shadows, and went to get the rest of the unit.

"The bus is round the corner," he told the Dame, who sped off to check
it out.

Lujinovic and Began started off up the road back into town; their job
was to provide early warning of any enemy approach.  Docherty didn't
know how long the Serbs at the motel would be prepared to wait for
their victims, but, always assuming they weren't all too drunk to
notice, he doubted if their patience would survive much more than half
an hour.

Abdulahu and Kaltak had clambered into the lorry's cab, with Razor
still seated in the back.  They were waiting to move off in the
opposite direction, towards the checkpoint a few hundred yards further
down the road, once any problems in the Sports Hall had been dealt
with.

Docherty led Hajrija and Hadzic round to the entrance.  Chris was
standing over the two Serbs, whom he'd ordered to lie flat on the
wooden floor.

"In there," he said, pointing towards double doors further down the
corridor.

"This is the key," he added, handing it to Docherty.

"Look after those two," the PC said.  He passed the key to Hadzic, and
followed the Bosnian commander and Hajrija down the corridor.  The
Bosnian turned the key and opened the door on to the darkened gym.
Almost immediately, it seemed, several invisible people started to
cry.

Hadzic stepped in with his torch, and the wailing seemed to go up a
notch in volume.

Sensing what was happening, Docherty went back outside to collect the
kerosene lamp.

"We are here to rescue you," Hadzic said in his native tongue, but
there was no response, save perhaps a muting of the keening sound.

"Nena, are you there?"  Hajrija asked, as Docherty came back in with
the marginally brighter light.

A sound like a sob escaped from Nena Reeve's lips.

"Hajrija?"  she said disbelievingly.

Hajrija shone the torch into her own face.

"It's me.

We've come to take everyone away from here."

Nena pushed herself up from the wall and walked across towards her
friend, slowly, as if she feared speed would dissolve the mirage.

"I can't believe it," she said, and at that moment she caught sight of
Docherty.

"This is a dream," she said.

"Hello, Nena," Docherty said.

Outside in the parking area the Dame had found the bus.  The
destination board read Foca, but presumably hadn't been changed since
the war began.  The tyres were worn, but snow-chains had been fitted,
which more than made up for them.  There was no key in the ignition. He
set about trying to hot-wire the vehicle, and a few minutes later was
rewarded with the motor chugging noisily into life.

Rather too noisily.  The Dame checked the petrol gauge, which seemed to
be hovering between a quarter and half full, before switching off the
engine and stepping back down to the ground.  He had a momentary
glimpse of a slim moon rising above the mountain before someone started
shouting at him in a language he didn't understand.

A uniformed soldier was hurrying towards him, doing up his coat as he
came.  The Dame just stood there, his mind utterly calm, as the man
strode up.  He watched the soldier's face turn from anger to surprise,
the body try and fail to apply the brakes, and then he stepped in like
a ballet dancer, taking the man around the neck with one arm and
pulling back, his knife slicing across the outstretched throat.

The warm blood gushed across his hand, and he let the body gently down
to the ground, before doing a panoramic turn, eyes searching the
shadows for other sources of trouble.  Satisfied there was none, he
pulled the body into the deeper shadow beneath the wall, and washed his
hand in a small drift of snow.  Looking down he had the momentary
illusion that the stain was spreading towards him.

Once Chris had given him the green light, Kaltak had started the lorry
down the road in the direction of the checkpoint.  They quickly left
the town behind, the road running between the river and a narrow
meadow, aiming for the mouth of the valley.  The lone house ahead was
unlit, but beside it a yellow light seemed to be hanging in the air
just above the road.  As they approached, it revealed itself as a
kerosene lamp perched on a wooden bench that was placed across the
highway.

The lorry slowed, one of the Bosnians rapped his knuckles on the cab's
window, and Razor leapt nimbly down to the road.  He reached the bank
of the river as the lorry came to a halt in front of the makeshift
barricade.  There was still no sign of life inside the house.

The Bosnians climbed down, and stood there waiting for a moment,
wondering what to do.  Razor asked himself whether they could trust the
men inside the house always assuming there were some not to wake up at
any time in the next hour.  The answer, unfortunately, was no.

Kaltak and Abdulahu had obviously reached the same conclusion.  The
latter climbed on to the lorry's running board, reached in, and blew a
short blast on the horn.  It sounded almost deafening to Razor, but he
doubted whether the noise had travelled across town to the motel.

For a moment it even seemed that the blast had failed to rouse anyone
inside the house, but the door abruptly banged open, and a man stepped
out, complaining loudly.  He had no hat on, but the bottom half of his
face was darkened by a beard.  Razor waited until he was out in the
open before knocking him down with a three-shot burst of the silenced

MP5.

At the same moment another man came through the doorway, also
apparently complaining, and ducked back instantly the moment he saw his
comrade fall.

Razor cursed and went after him, his mind registering the fleeting
impression that the man had not been carrying a weapon.  He leapt on to
the low veranda and rushed in through the doorway, moving swiftly to
his right to avoid being silhouetted against the lighter outside
world.

He could hear the man running up the stairs, and restrained himself
from instant pursuit.  Five seconds, ten, and his eyes were more
accustomed to the dark.

As he made out the foot of the staircase there were raised voices
upstairs, the thud of moving feet on the ceiling above.

Razor went for the stairs, climbing as swiftly and silently as he could
manage.  There was a faint light above, and three voices talking
excitedly to each other, or maybe only two.  The thought flashed
through his mind that this was a modern house, probably someone's pride
and joy before the present war.

He wondered what had happened to the people who had lived there.

Thumping footsteps gave the Chetnik away before his silhouette appeared
at the head of the stairs.  The SAS man fired an automatic burst, and
the man crashed backwards, his weapon bouncing past Razor down the
stairs.  By the time it reached the bottom another man had died. Driven
into view by his own inertia, unable to find a target for his AK47,
this Serb managed one shot before the MP5 took out his left eye and
threw him back on to his partner's body.

The sound of the shot echoed round the house, dying into silence. Razor
advanced carefully, ears straining for evidence that there was a third
man present.  He heard a whimpering noise, which was suddenly drowned
out by the entrance of his two Bosnian allies downstairs.

Razor put an eye cautiously round the top of the stairs.  The dim light
was coming from the room across the landing.  There were two other
doors, both shut.

He edged his way on all fours towards the half-open door, and gently
pushed it wide.  The whimpering grew louder, but no shots came out.

"You OK, English?"  one of the Bosnians whispered loudly from the
bottom of the stairs.

"Da," Razor whispered back, using half of his SerboCroat vocabulary and
wishing the other half was the SerboCroat for 'wait'.  The whimpering
inside stopped suddenly, and for a few seconds the only sounds to break
the silence were his own breathing.  Then the shot resounded inside the
room, followed in quick succession by the sharp thunk of something
metallic hitting the floor and the duller thump of something bigger.

Razor put his eye to the crack between door and frame, and then wearily
climbed to his feet.

"It's OK," he shouted down the stairs.  Inside the room he found the
youth he was about fifteen, he guessed crumpled on the floor.  The half
of his head that was missing was still sliding down the wall.  The AK47
which had put it there was lying in the middle of the room.

Why?  Razor asked himself.  He turned his head away, and found the
answer.  A young girl, younger even than the boy, was stretched out on
the bed, naked but for the sock stuffed in her mouth and the scarf that
had been tightly looped around her neck.

He yanked out the sock and undid the scarf, almost in a frenzy, wanting
to cry out something, anything.

He reached for the carotid artery and felt life.  The pulse was slight,
but she was breathing, almost desperately now, and even in this light
there was a blueness around the lips.  There seemed no external
injuries other than a redness around the vagina, and Razor turned her
over, moving one arm and leg outwards to stop her lying flat.  The
breathing seemed to ease.

Abdulahu appeared in the doorway, took in the scene and said something
in his own language, something that seemed to encompass surprise,
resignation and sadness.  He squatted down next to Razor by the bed.

"She OK?"  he asked.

As if in answer the girl's eyes opened, slowly at first and then wide
with fright.

Abdulahu said something and took her hand.  She began shivering.

Razor looked round for her clothes, but could see none.  He yanked the
curtain violently down from the window and covered her with that, as
her eyes seemed to search his face for understanding.  He turned away
and stood there for a minute, thinking furiously.

"You stay with her," he told the Bosnian, miming to reinforce the other
man's understanding.

Abdulahu nodded.

"She come with us," he said.

Razor walked out of the room to where the two dead men lay twisted
together and, on an impulse too strong to resist, lashed out a foot at
the nearest body.  Then, for the first time that he could remember in
his adult life, he simply lost control, kicking and kicking the
lifeless heads until Abdulahu gently pulled him away.

Back at the Sports Hall Docherty had heard the two shots in the
distance, but only faintly.  He very much doubted that they would have
been heard across the town, and his only real worry was that Razor or
one of the Bosnians had been on the receiving end.

In the gymnasium Hajrija and Nena were going from woman to woman,
explaining what was happening and where they were being taken.  It
seemed to be taking a lot of time, but Docherty knew that he couldn't
hurry the process.  As Nena had explained it, slowly and carefully, as
if she was talking to a child: "These women were put into buses once,
given no explanation, and they ended up here there's no way we can just
put them in another bus without telling them why and where they're
going."

The reactions of the women, as far as he could see, varied greatly.
Some seemed in shock, blanked out, like mental patients.  Others seemed
simply tired, as if they'd been awake for days on end.  Many were
distraught, and found it hard to understand what they were being told.
A few were simply brimming with anger.

Nena's state of mind was hard to gauge.  Docherty remembered her mostly
as a woman with a ready laugh, a bundle of enthusiasms, and a defiant
willingness to wear her emotions on her sleeve.  He had always known
she must have a more introverted side he knew from Reeve how seriously
she took being a doctor but it had rarely surfaced in her social
persona.  The woman he could now see across the dimly lit gymnasium
bore little obvious relation to the woman he had known.

What sort of people could do something like this?

Docherty asked himself.  He had always drawn a blank when trying to
imagine the thought-processes of the men who had run the German
concentration camps, and he found this no easier to understand.  Anyone
could turn off their humanity in the heat of the moment, or in longer
periods of extreme stress, but this was something else.  Evil was the
word that came to mind, but it was only a word it didn't explain
anything.

"Boss," Chris said at his shoulder, "Kaltak just came back.  The
checkpoint's ours, but they found a girl there in bad shape.  She'll
have to come with us."

Docherty cupped his hands round his nose.

"Right," he said, and took the hands away.

"How's the Dame doing?"

"He and Hadzic just got back with some petrol they stole from
somewhere.  They're putting it into the bus now.  They've taken out the
lights.  How are we doing here?"

"Almost ready, I think."  He looked at his watch.

"The Serbs must be wondering where their women are."

"It's a pity we don't have time to raze that motel to the ground,"
Chris said.

"Yeah."

"Who's going in what, boss?"

"I want Razor driving the bus he's the maddest driver I've ever come
across, and the best.  And I think the Dame should ride shotgun.  You
and I'll go in the lorry with the Bosnian laddies.  And I guess we'll
have to take the two prisoners with us."  He rubbed his eyes.

"We'll all have to take the bus up to the checkpoint."

Hajrija was walking towards them.

"We are ready," she said, almost accusingly.

"Are you?"

"Yes," Docherty said.

She turned and said something to the women, who all started getting to
their feet.  Hajrija said something more, and they started filing out,
silently.  The few eyes turned towards the men were full of anger.

Nena brought up the rear.  She had shaken her golden mane loose, and
looked more like the woman Docherty remembered.

"What are you doing here, Jamie?"  she asked.

"Is this just a coincidence, you being here?"

"No," he said.

"We were looking for you, and we heard you were in this place .

"Why were you looking for me?"

"Because of Reeve."

She looked at him.  She had always liked Docherty, liked his
Argentinian wife, and the way the two of them were together.  She had
even thought about them the other day when she was reflecting on her
marriage to Reeve.  Isabel and Jamie seemed to have got the crucial
balance in any relationship, the one between independence and
interdependence, about right.  It was a hard thing to do.  Certainly,
she and Reeve had never managed it.

She looked around at the empty gymnasium.

"Aren't

SAS wives allowed to leave their husbands any more?"  she murmured, her
voice a blend of weariness, flippancy and bitterness.

The bus was ticking over in the Sports Hall car park.

The women filed on board, filling up all but four of the forty-two
seats.  The two prisoners were ordered to sit in the aisle and did so,
holding their hands over their heads as if expecting a rain of blows
from the women they had guarded.  Kaltak took the wheel, leaving the
other seven members of the combined unit to squeeze into the seats and
space at the front.

As they turned on to the main road Docherty cast a glance back up it,
in the direction of the river and the motel.  There was no sign of
anyone coming to look for the lorry that hadn't returned.  Maybe they
were in luck: maybe the Serbs were all too drunk or full of pills to
care.

They arrived at the checkpoint not much more than a minute later. Razor
carried the heavily wrapped girl on board, and passed her on to
Hajrija.  Nena started to examine her.

"Are you all right?"  Docherty asked him.

A bleak smile crossed Razor's face.

"I'm fine," he said.

He didn't look it, Docherty thought.

"You're driving the bus," he said.

"Right," Razor said, his eyes taking in the sea of barely lit women's
faces stretching to the back of the vehicle.

"Just follow the lorry," Docherty said.

"If you think you need a rest, give the Dame a turn."  He gave Razor a
few more instructions and then got down off the bus and walked across
towards the lorry, noticing that someone had placed a bench and lighted
lamp across the road behind them.  Presumably it had been that way when
they arrived.

He climbed up into the cab where Hadzic and Began were already waiting,
and nodded his assent to the question on the driver's face.  The lorry
moved away, and in the wing mirror Docherty could pick out the dark
shape of the unlit bus following some thirty yards behind.  No one
seeing the lorry's headlights coming towards them would realize there
was a second vehicle behind, not until it was halfway past them.

They were heading down a winding valley now, the road crossing and
recrossing the rushing river in the confined space.  Somewhere at the
bottom of this road they would come across the dividing line between
Serbcontrolled and Muslim-controlled territories.  There would be
checkpoints of some sort, maybe physical barriers, maybe even an
exchange of fire in progress.  And the sooner they reached it the less
chance there was that they'd be expected, Docherty thought.  He was
still surprised that no one had come looking for the lorry in Vogosca.
Maybe by now they had, and found nothing but the empty Sports Hall.

He wondered whether they should stop and cut the telephone wires than
ran along by the road, and decided it would be a waste of time even if
the telephones were operational, which he doubted, the Serbs would be
using radio.

He also wondered whether he should have put the bus in front.  If they
had to force their way through an unexpected roadblock the rear vehicle
would be the most vulnerable.  But then again, if they ran into enemy
forces ..

Docherty told himself to stop worrying about decisions already taken.

Behind him Razor was guiding the bus by the lights of the lorry ahead.
It was a favourite trick of Docherty's to disguise two vehicles as one,
and they'd done something similar in Argentina, during their escape
from the town where he and Ben had been taken prisoner.  That had been
a night to remember, all right.  Like this one.  Only this was
different.  Argentina had been hairy enough, but it had felt like an
adventure.  This one was getting to him.  Had got to him.

He glanced across to where the Dame was sitting, MP5 cradled in his
lap, face showing no emotion.

Razor w@ndered what was going on beneath the surface.  Maybe nothing.
Maybe the Dame was like he himself had been for so many years, someone
who just let it happen, and dealt with it when it did.  He had rather
liked being that way.

His mother had used to say to him: "One day you'll get it."

"Get what?"  he had wanted to know.

"When you get it, you'll know," she had said, affectionately enough. He
knew he had driven her nuts, but she'd kind of liked him that way
too.

He took a quick look in the rear-view mirror.

Hajrija was sitting with the young girl on her lap, looking out of the
window beside her.

He realized he knew no more about her than he had about any of the
other women he'd really fancied, and that for once it seemed to
matter.

The crescent moon was high in the sky now, shedding its thin light
across a wider valley below.

Lorry and bus passed under a bridge carrying the railway from Sarajevo,
which turned in a long curve to run alongside the highway.  On the left
the river from Vogosca cascaded over stones to join with the broader
Miljacka.

On all sides a sharp line separated the darker mountains from the
star-strewn sky.

A road sign appeared in the lorry's headlights.

"Which way?"  Began asked his commander, slowing down.

"Both roads go to Visoko," Hadzic told Docherty.

"The main highway will be easier to drive, but we'll probably meet less
opposition on the smaller road."

"Let's get off the highway," Docherty suggested.  He looked at his
watch.  It was a few minutes past three.

"OK," Hadzic agreed.  He said something in his own language to the
driver, who took the right fork.

The road ran across a small stretch of bare meadow and tunnelled into a
mostly coniferous forest.  Curves and dips followed for several miles,
and then the road suddenly emerged above a small town, before
descending through a succession of hairpin bends to cross the railway
tracks and pass the sign that told them they were entering Semizovac.

The town seemed dead at first, full of houses either burnt out or blown
up, but as the lorry swung into the main square a line of military
vehicles loomed into view, parked along one side.  In the opposite
corner a brazier was burning, with a soldier standing either side of
it, their illuminated faces turned towards the unexpected arrivals.

Lorry and bus left them staring, burrowing down the town's main
street.

"I think this is the last Serb-held town," Hadzic said in English, than
added something in Serbo-Croat to Began, who responded by pressing his
foot down on the accelerator.  In the wing mirror Docherty could see
the bus regaining its normal distance as Razor responded.

They seemed to be almost out of the town now, the road dipping suddenly
to pass under the railway tracks.  As they emerged from the underpass a
tank loomed into view, its gun pointed down at the ground.

Two armoured cars were parked beside it, also apparently devoid of
occupants.

On the tracks to their right a line of covered wagons seemed to be
serving as barracks.  And a couple of hundred yards further down the
road two burnt-out cars had been used to narrow the channel for
traffic.

There were no lights, but moving figures were visible in the gloom. The
pinpoint of a torch suddenly appeared, like a star that had slipped out
of the sky.

Docherty leant out of the window with his torch in hand and drew a
circle in the air.  In the bus behind Razor shouted "Now!"  at Hajrija,
who passed on the news in Serbo-Croat.  Most of the women responded,
either burrowing down on to the floor in front of their seats or simply
bending their heads down between their knees.

Razor by this time had brought the bus up level with the lorry, the two
vehicles accelerating side by side towards the barrier.  Seventy yards,
sixty .. . and still no flashes erupted from the Serb guns.  Fifty,
forty and the lorry slowed abruptly, letting the bus into the lead.

A single bullet passed through a window behind him, and he could hear a
machine-gun open up, but they were ripping through the gap between the
two hulks, metal screaming on metal down both flanks of the bus.

In the lorry behind, Docherty was firing the MP5 blind, his head jammed
as far back behind the window as he could get it.  He had a flashing
glimpse of trees and running men, a concrete building, another armoured
car.  Beside him Hadzic had his head down beneath the dashboard, but
Began was sitting up behind the wheel, with only the look in his eyes
to show that he wasn't going on a picnic.  As the bus ahead blasted its
way through the gap he let out a great whoop, which seemed made up in
equal parts of triumph and terror.

His steering wasn't quite as good as Razor's, the lorry missing the car
on the right by a foot or so and giving the one on the left an enormous
side-swipe.  It rocked on the road like a train on bad tracks, righted
itself and sped on after the bus, the soldiers in the back still firing
at the vanishing checkpoint.

Another half a mile down the road they found the Bosnian Army waiting
to welcome them to what, by "Bosnian standards, was safe territory.

One woman in the bus had been cut by flying glass, but everyone else
was unharmed.

The bureaucratic niceties involved in relocating from one tribal patch
to another took up the best part of an hour.  The local Bosnian
commander was not used to British soldiers emerging, guns blazing, from
Serb-held territory, and he wanted more explanation than Docherty was
prepared to give him.  He spent several minutes reading the small print
on their UN accreditation and then simply looked at Docherty, eyebrows
raised, as if to say: "Surely you don't take me for that big a fool?"

At this point Hadzic took over, speaking so fast in his own tongue that
Chris had trouble understanding what he was saying.  At the end of it
all the local commander looked at them, sighed, and handed back their
papers with slight distaste.

"OK, you can go," he said.

"What the hell did Hadzic tell him?"  Docherty asked Chris.

"I told him you were mercenaries," the Bosnian said from behind them.

"And that we didn't have so much help from the outside world that we
could afford to antagonise men who had just saved thirty of our women
from a Serb brothel."

Docherty laughed.

"I take it the man didn't approve."

"He was regular army," Hadzic said.

"Probably had good career going for him before someone pulled the rug
out from under his feet."

They walked back out to the vehicles, which were empty.

"Where are they all?"  Docherty asked Razor and the Dame.

"Having a bath," was the reply.

"And then some food, I think.  I could do with some breakfast myself,"
the Londoner added.

They found the unit's mess by following their noses.  A train of
coaches stood on the nearby railway line, and on the ground in front of
them several men were busy keeping up the fire under two large tureens
of bean soup.  These had presumably been ordered for the women, but
there seemed plenty to go round, and the SAS men were soon offered
bowls of the thick, steaming liquid.  The unit's commander might not
like mercenaries, but his cooks seemed more impressed by results than
motivation.

There was bread too, stale perhaps, but delicious once softened by the
soup.  And each man was given a cup of a hot, bitter-sweet liquid that
they later discovered was supposed to be coffee.

The women arrived in dribs and drabs, and were taken up into one of the
coaches for their food.  They all looked cleaner, and some looked
readier to take on the world.  Many, though, still seemed in shock.
Nena was one of the stronger-looking.  She glanced across to where
Docherty was sipping coffee, perched on a pile of sacking, and a faint
smile seemed to cross her lips, as if she was remembering another
world.

Light was showing over the rim of the eastern hills as they resumed
their journey.  It was a bitterly cold morning, but the local commander
had donated a recent shipment of blankets for the women on the unheated
bus, and the clear sky promised a sunny day.

It was only about ten miles to Visoko as the crow flew, but the actual
driving distance was more than twice that, and the drivers could rarely
exceed twenty miles an hour on the winding snow-covered road.  The sun
had cleared the high horizon before they arrived, transforming the
countryside for the four SAS men, who had only seen Bosnia under
cloud.

Docherty was reminded of the area around Aviemore in Scotland, until
the road wound down into Visoko, where a tall minaret broke the surface
of the steep-roofed houses.

The cobbled town square would have looked untouched by the war, if the
local military hadn't picked the old town hall for its HQ.  They drew
up their vehicles in front of it, and sat waiting while Hadzic went in
to report their arrival.

Their last hosts had radioed ahead, and they were expected, though no
mention seemed to have been made of British soldiers, mercenary or
otherwise.  A group of local women were waiting to take care of those
rescued from Vogosca and their rescuers had been allocated a billet a
hundred yards or so from the square.

It was an old stone house, probably dating back to the days of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.

"Serbs lived here," Hadzic told Docherty as they pushed in through the
unlocked front door, but he either didn't know or wouldn't say what had
happened to them.  Wherever the Serbs were now, most of their
possessions remained in the house.  There was a three-month-old
newspaper lying open on the table in the kitchen.

Hajrija having stayed with the women, the Bosnian men divided up the
two bedrooms between them, leaving the SAS men to spread out their
sleeping bags in the single large downstairs room.  All were exhausted,
but sleep only came easily for Chris.  Each of the others found it hard
to turn off their minds, which seemed intent on running endless replays
of the previous night's events.

As usual Docherty woke first, at around two o'clock in the afternoon,
and went in search of a toilet.  He found it occupied by a whistling
Bosnian, and ducked out through the back door in search of an
alternative.  There he found Hadzic cheerfully pissing against a wall,
eyes squinting against the smoke from the upturned cigarette between
his lips.

It was a beautiful day, the sun high in a clear blue sky.  Through a
gap in the houses ahead, mountains rose across the valley, while above
the roofs behind, a rock face rose almost sheer behind the town, before
flattening out into pine covered slopes.  Some two hundred yards away
the top of the minaret peeked up through the red-tiled roofs, looking
strangely like a fairground rocket.

"You come with me now to see the General?"  Hadzic asked.

Docherty reluctantly turned his eyes away from the illusion of a world
at peace.

"Aye," he said.

The two men walked down the narrow street to the square.  There were
not many people on the street, but there were some, and Docherty was
thinking that at least some semblance of normal life had been preserved
here.  The distant sound of a hundred children shouting and screaming
suggested a school that was actually functioning.

They found the "General' in a small room at the back of the old town
hall.  He turned out to be a handsome young Bosnian named Ajanovic,
with wavy, light-brown hair and green eyes.  He was about twenty eight
Docherty guessed, and had probably been a lieutenant in the old
Yugoslav Army.  He also, it turned out, spoke excellent English, thanks
to a six month stint in Australia, where half his family had long since
emigrated.  Docherty took to him instantly, without knowing why, and
was pleased to see his judgement vindicated over the course of their
discussion.

Hadzic went through the events of the last few days:

the discovery that Nena Reeve was in Vogosca, the idea for a joint
rescue mission, the rescue itself.

Ajanovic listened with great interest, offered them both cigarettes,
and said that all of that was very clear, but what were Docherty and
Co.  doing in Sarajevo in the first place?  Who were they?

Hadzic looked at Docherty, who decided to take a chance.  They were
regular British soldiers, he said, and they'd been sent in to make
contact with another British soldier, who was apparently leading a
small army of irregulars in the vicinity of Zavik .

"That's in Serb-held territory," Ajanovic said in his
Australian-accented English.

"We know."

Ajanovic looked at him and smiled boyishly.

"What a war," he said.

The UN wanted Reeve out, Docherty went on, and the Croats, and the
Serbs.

"And your Government," he added diplomatically.

"Everyone is saying he makes it harder to get peace.  And even if that
only means he's everyone's excuse for continuing to fight, then it
makes sense to get him out."

"Are you supposed to kill him?"  Ajanovic asked.

"Terminate him with extreme prejudice," he enunciated carefully.

"I saw that movie in Sydney.  And this war is even crazier," he
added.

"He's a friend," Docherty said simply.

"Ah, I'm sorry.  And his name is Reeve, so the woman is his wife,
yes?"

"Yes."

Ajanovic leaned back in his chair.

"OK," he said.

"So what do you want from me?"

"Three things, if possible.  Some sort of authorization to get us as
far as Serb territory, any intelligence you have of the military
situation between here and Zavik, and a vehicle of some kind.  The
lorry we came in if nothing else.  Something a bit smaller and more
manoeuvrable would be better."

"You know the British UN base is only forty kilometres up the road, in
Vitez?"

"Aye.  I was hoping to avoid involving them.  You see..."

"Yes, yes, I can see why," Ajanovic agreed.

"But you do understand what you are doing may be for the good of us
all, but it will not help my people in this war, and it is hard to
justify giving away anything which we might find useful."

"Aye, I understand that," Docherty said.  He would have felt the same
in the other man's shoes.

"But," Ajanovic continued, 'there is a what do you call it?  - a
transit van?  A van with seats ..

"Sounds ideal ..

"Ah, there is a catch.  It needs repair, and we have lost our mechanic.
If you have one ..

"We do."

"OK, it is of no use to us.  As for the other things, I

could write you a hundred authorizations but it would do you no good. I
am the commander for this district, and that is all.  I have no
superiors giving me orders from outside, and no one outside will accept
my orders.  This is a war in compartments, yes?  The next commander you
meet may have you shot as spies."  He shrugged and laughed.

"I like the English," he said, 'and I am grateful on my country's
behalf that you risked your lives for our women.  So any information we
have is yours.  But your own people in Vitez will know more.

"I will give you one more piece of advice.  If you could travel as
something other than what you are, it will be safer for you.  Perhaps
your people at Vitez can arrange for you to have journalists'
papers."

Docherty thanked him, but didn't see any reason to admit that they
already had the various such accreditations Thornton had provided in
Sarajevo.  He asked where the van was, hoping it had the right number
of wheels and an engine.  Ajanovic left the room and came back a couple
of minutes later with another uniformed soldier, this one barely out of
his teens.

"Kemal will show your man the vehicle," he said.

"And our intelligence man works in the office next to this.

His name is Akim, and I have told him to give you any information he
has that you need.  Do you know when you will be leaving?"

"That depends on how good our mechanic is," Docherty said.

"Then we may meet again."  Ajanovic offered his hand, and the two men
shook.  Docherty found himself hoping this man survived the war.

He and Hadzic walked back to the house, where the SAS men were in
various stages of getting up.  Razor was shaving, Chris rummaging
through his bergen for a clean shirt, the Dame leaned up against the
wall in his sleeping bag reading a Yugoslav tourist guide.

"Having a nice holiday, are we?"  Docherty asked them.

"This is a good B&B, boss," Razor observed, 'except for the lack of
beds and breakfast."

"Been out sightseeing, boss?"  Chris asked.

Docherty told them whom he'd seen.

"There's a boy out here wants to show you a van," he told the Dame.

"It needs some sort of fixing, but I don't know what.  See what can you
do."

"What if it's unfixable?"  Razor asked.

Docherty shrugged.

"I guess we fight Hadzic and his boys for the lorry."

"I'm game," Razor said.

"Yeah, we all know which of his boys you'd like to wrestle," Chris
murmured.

As if on cue, Hajrija appeared in the doorway.

"Nena is here," she told Docherty.

"She likes to talk to you."

"Where is she?"

"In the street."

Docherty walked out to find her leaning up against a wall, apparently
lost in thought.

She was wearing the jeans they had found her in, and a large coat that
she had since acquired from somewhere.  She looked cold.

"Are you coming in?"  Docherty asked her.

"No, I .. . I feel like being outside in the sunshine.  You know?  Can
we walk?"

"Aye, of course.  Just let me tell the lads."  He slipped back inside,
told Chris and Razor to see Akim at the town hall and to start planning
their route to Zavik, and reemerged half a minute later to find her in
the same position.

"This way?"  he suggested, looking down the road towards the far-off
mountains.

They started walking, in silence at first.

"I don't know what to say," he eventually said.

"I

can only try and imagine what you've been through... If you want to
talk, I can listen."

"No," she said, "I don't want to talk about it.  Not to a man.  Not
even to a good man," she added, looking straight ahead.

"Tell me what you are doing here.

Hajrija told me some of it, but I'm not sure she understands it
completely."

Docherty went through it all again, from the moment he had picked up
the phone and heard Barney Davies talking to him over the bar chatter
at Glasgow Central.

She listened in silence, and when he had finished turned to him with a
perplexed look in her eyes.

"Why did you say yes, Jamie?"  she wanted to know.

"Why did Isabel let you?"

"I've been asking myself the same thing," he said.

"And you know, there's a voice in my head saying "OK, you've been a
soldier, you think you know what war is, well, you don't.  You've just
been through soldiers' games like Oman and the Falklands and Northern
Ireland.  You've been through wars where the rules get bent.  But this
is a war where there aren't any rules."  I .. ."  He stopped himself.

"I'm sorry," he said, 'this is not what you need to hear right now."

"I asked the question," she said.

They walked on for another minute in silence.

"You'll take me to Zavik, then?"  she asked eventually.

"Only if you're sure you want to go."

"I've already tried to get there once.

He wondered how long the bitterness would colour her voice, and thought
about Isabel.  It had left his wife's voice, but it had only been an
outward manifestation of the breakages within.  Her experience with the
torturers would always be part of her.

They were almost at the edge of town.  A hundred yards ahead their road
joined the main highway, which bypassed Visoko to the north.  Beyond
that the wall of mountains bathed in the afternoon sunshine.

She shivered.

"When do we go?"  she asked.

"I don't know yet," he said.

"Maybe tomorrow."

"That's an Everly Brothers song," she said.

"You remember Reeve loves the Everly Brothers?"

"Aye.  "Theidiothadsung'AlllHavetoDoIsDream' at his own wedding
reception.  Badly.

"I can't believe he is doing what they say he is doing," she said.

"No," Docherty agreed, but a small doubt nestled in the back of his
mind.  He knew what this war had done to him in a week.  God only knew
what it had done to Reeve in nine months.

After Docherty's departure with Nena, Razor had found Hajrija standing
in the garden, staring into space.

"Hajrija," he said gently, but she jumped anyway.

"Don't do that," she said angrily when she saw it was him.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I .. ."  He shrugged helplessly.

"No, I am sorry," she said.  She pushed her hair back from her eyes in
characteristic fashion.

"It is hard," she said, looking at him almost pleadingly.

"To be with those girls after what happens to them.  It breaks my
heart.  But I must be strong and make them happy, you understand."

"Yeah," he said, 'you need a hug."  He opened his arms.

"Come on," he said, and she burrowed her head into his neck, her tears
running down inside his shirt.

"Thank you," she said after a couple of minutes, pulling herself gently
away.

"You're welcome," he said, thinking he'd never seen anyone he desired
half as much.

"How's the girl?"  he asked.

"The one from the house Hajrija looked distraught again.

"Satka," she said.

"Her name is Satka, and I forget to tell you she wants to see you, "the
man with the funny face" she calls you.  She is ... She is OK, I think.
You know?  Not sick."

"I know," he said.  Not sick perhaps, but who knew what damage had been
done?

"We can go now," she said.

"It is not far.  Two streets."

"Why not."

They went back into the house, where Chris was looking through his bird
book as he waited for Razor.

"I've got a house call to make," Razor told him.

"I'll meet you at the town hail in half an hour or so."

Chris nodded and smiled knowingly at him.

"I'm the man with the funny face," Razor shouted back over his shoulder
as they left the house.

He didn't feel like cracking any jokes once they reached the place
where the women had been temporarily housed.  It was a large building
next to the mosque, part of a religious school, as Hajrija explained.
Satka, along with nine of the youngest women, was sharing one of five
mattresses in an upstairs room.  When Razor arrived all the other women
seemed to shrink away from him, despite the presence of Ilajrija.

Satka, though, was pleased to see him, and they talked for ten minutes,
with Hajrija translating.  She was twelve, she said, and when the men
had come to their village her mother had told her to hide.  When she
came out everyone was gone, and all the houses were burning.  She'd
stayed there for a couple of days but no one had come back, so she'd
tried walking to the next village, and that was when the other men had
found her and made her go with them in their car.

Up to this point she told the story almost as if entranced by her own
narrative flow, but then abruptly she shifted into the third person,
using 'she' instead of "I' when describing how the men had hurt her and
kept her tied up, right up to the moment when 'she' was rescued by the
'man with the funny face'.

Razor listened, smiling encouragingly, and thought that never before
had he fully understood the meaning of the phrase 'a broken heart'.  He
wanted to promise this girl that he'd take her to England that very
minute, but he knew that he couldn't, and even that he shouldn't.

At least she was alive, he thought, as they walked back down to the
building's courtyard.  It wasn't enough.

"I think you need hug now," Hajrija told him, putting her arms round
his neck.

After parting with Nena, Docherty let his feet carry him round the
town.  The temptation to stay another day was strong, and he could
think of at least one good reason to reinforce the desire.  They needed
the rest, not so much from the physical stresses as from the emotional
ones.  None of them had ever been through anything like this before. So
far the other three had performed in exemplary fashion, but the danger
signs were there:

a lack of jokes from Razor, almost total silence from the Dame, and his
own tendency to let things slide, as evidenced by the fact that he was
strolling round the town rather than doing what needed to be done.

Only Chris seemed to be taking it all in his stride.

Maybe they should all take up bird-watching.

His stomach suddenly let loose an angry rumble, reminding him that he
hadn't eaten for about twelve hours.  And presumably neither had the
others.

"The least you can do is keep your men fed, Docherty," he told himself
out loud.

Back at their lodging he found Began brewing tea in the kitchen.

"Where is Hadzic?"  Docherty asked.

Began grinned and shrugged.

Docherty came out of the kitchen door just as Hajrija came in through
the front.

"Ah, I need you," she said.

"I'm spoken for, love."

She looked at him questioningly.

"What do you need me for?"  he asked.

"I need to say I come to Zavik with you, yes?"

Docherty's first thought was that this would make Razor's day.  His
second was that it was impossibly irregular, his third that she'd be
invaluable in several ways.  His fourth, he expressed out loud: "Will
Hadzic let you go?"

"Of course," she said.

"I join up, I leave.  No problems."

"It doesn't quite work like that in the British Army," he said, 'but if
it's OK with your boss, we'd love to have you along."

She beamed at him.

"That is good."

"You can ask Hadzic now," Docherty said, catching sight of the Bosnian
commander through the open door, crossing the street towards them.

Hadzic seemed rather less sanguine about letting her go than Hajrija
had led Docherty to believe, but after an animated five-minute exchange
of opinions in Serbo-Croat he reluctantly acquiesced in the transfer of
her loyalties.

"Is there any spare food in this town?"  Docherty asked them both when
they'd finished, 'or do we have to break open some emergency
rations?"

"There is a place for soup," Hadzic said.

"You want to go there now?"

"When the others get back."

Began called out something from the kitchen.

"Who wants tea?"  Hadzic translated.

"We do," Razor said from the doorway.  Chris was behind him.

"I come back later," Hajrija told them all, on her way out.

The three SAS men took their mugs of tea and sat round a large-scale
map of the region, discussing the information Razor and Chris had
managed to glean at the town hall.  Zavik was about ninety twisting
miles away, all but twenty-five of them through allegedly safe
territory.  The first thirty miles to Vitez followed the main highway,
and the road south from there to Gornji Vakuf was apparently being kept
open by the British UN contingent of Cheshires as a supply route for
themselves.

"With any luck we can hijack a Mars Bar shipment," Chris said.

Razor grunted.

"The problems begin after that," he said.

"The road to Bugojno is supposedly open, but the town's probably being
bombarded by the Serbs.

Beyond there, we have a very dicey road to Kupres, which the Serbs seem
to hold, and then the last stretch to Zavik, right up in the mountains.
I'm beginning to think even an HAHO drop would be preferable to driving
this fucker."

"We don't seem to have that option," Chris said.

"That's why he's suggesting it," Docherty said with a grin.

"By the way, Hajrija is coming along for the ride."

Chris shook his head.

"The man's in danger of charisma overload," he said.

Razor, though, didn't seem so pleased.

"Why, boss?"

he asked seriously.

"She asked.  I guess she wants to keep Nena company."

"And why did you agree?"

"I think it will be good for Nena to have another woman along.  And
Hajrija knows Zavik.  We already know she's a good soldier."

"OK, boss."

"If you think I've made a wrong decision, say so."

Razor smiled.

"No, boss, I don't think you made a wrong decision.  I guess I just
don't like the thought ... you know what I mean."

"Aye."

"If we're gonna be walking over snow-covered mountains she'll need some
better gear than what she's been wearing," Chris said.

"Aye, so will Nena.  I have a horrible feeling we're going to have to
visit the Cheshires after all."

"Maybe they'll lend us a Warrior," the Dame said from the doorway.

"No joy with the van?"  Razor asked.

"It's outside," the Dame said.

They filed out into the street, where a sorry-looking vehicle greeted
their eyes.  The VW Microbus had obviously seen some action, though
whether in a war or a demolition derby was impossible to tell.

The various wounds it had suffered had all been duly painted over, in a
veritable kaleidoscope of different shades.  The overall effect was of
a mottled, rusty, hippie camper.

"Far out," Razor said sarcastically.

"The motor's OK," the Dame said.

"And it does about seventy."

The interior had been customized, presumably to improve its
troop-carrying capacity.  Behind the solid front seat two wooden
benches ran along either side of the vehicle.  It was roomy enough,
Docherty thought.  Not as sturdy as the lorry perhaps, but easier on
petrol and more manoeuvrable.

And a much more likely-looking transport for a group of journalists.
From what Razor and Chris had discovered it was beginning to look as
though the last stage of the trip was going to be difficult enough
without Serb opposition, let alone with it.

"What do you think?"  he asked the Dame.

"Does the engine seem reliable?"

The Dame looked at it.

"Yeah," he said, "I think so.  And I wouldn't say the same for the
lorry you lot came in."

"That settles it," Docherty said.

"We'll get off tomorrow morning at first light, and have lunch with our
fellow Brits in Vitez."

"I think we should call it Woodstock," Razor said, staring at the
Microbus.

Docherty had a sudden image of them all riding round Bosnia, flashing
peace signs at burnt-out villages.

Two streets away, their positions of a fortnight before strangely
reversed, Nena was trying to persuade Hajrija not to make the
journey.

"It's because of him, isn't it?"

she asked.

"Rija, this is no time to go chasing after a man."

"I am not chasing after a man," Hajrija shouted back, thoroughly
angry.

"I am coming with you because you are my friend, and the last time I
let you go off alone .. ."

She stopped herself.

"OK, I like him, but that's just a bonus.  It is not why I am coming.
Zavik is my home too, you know..."

"You have no family there any more."

"I have friends.  It's my home.  I have a right to know what's going on
there ..

"OK, enough," Nena said.

"I just don't want you to put yourself in danger, for me or the
Englishman ..

Hajrija burst out laughing.

"What do you think I was doing in Sarajevo," she wanted to know,
'modelling swimsuits?"

They left Visoko at dawn the next day, with Razor in the driving seat,
Docherty beside him, and the other four in the back with their gear.
The previous day's clear skies had been filled with hurrying clouds,
and except for those few occasions when the sun shone through, the road
down the Bosna valley twisted and turned in perpetual twilight.

There was not much conversation to lighten the journey, with each of
the travellers engrossed in thoughts of what had passed and what was to
come.

But neither were there any roadblocks to slow their passage.

Traffic was virtually non-existent on the main highway only two lorries
went up the valley as they went down and the signs of life were few:
smoke from a farmstead on the other side of the river, a man trudging
through snow high on the valley slope, a dog barking outside an
abandoned roadside cafe.

After driving about twenty miles they left the Bosna valley and its
highway, turning left up the Lasva valley.  Nearly ten miles of steady
climbing later they came into the small town of Vitez, where the
British UN Protection Force was based.  The depot was on the higher
side of the town, an affair of temporary barracks and vehicle pound,
surrounded by wire fencing still new enough to gleam.

Razor pulled up at the gate, where two Cheshires in UN berets waited,
their SA8Os held pointedly close to the firing position.  Through the
gates the new arrivals could see Warrior infantry carriers and Scimitar
armoured reconnaissance vehicles, all painted UN white.

Docherty climbed slowly out of the van, approached the two sentries and
introduced himself.

They were impressed enough by the SAS credentials to let him through to
see the duty officer, but insisted on the vehicle and its other five
occupants remaining outside the gate.  Serving under the UN flag did
not seem to have filled these soldiers with a warm glow of security.

Five minutes and two go-betweens later Docherty reached the office of
the unit commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Stewart, a tall,
fair-haired Yorkshireman.  As luck would have it he was also an ex-SAS
officer, whom Docherty had served with nearly twenty years earlier in
Oman, when Stewart was a hyperactive young lieutenant who had only just
been badged.

"Docherty!"  he exclaimed.

"What the hell are you doing here?  I heard they'd put you out to grass
months ago."

Even in his forties, Stewart found it impossible to sit or stand still.
As Docherty explained that his SAS patrol was on an undercover mission,
and that they would appreciate some unofficial help, Stewart paced up
and down his cramped little office like a caged tiger.

"We need Arctic gear for two, and the latest intelligence on the roads
between Vitez and Bugojno," Docherty said.

"And some breakfast wouldn't go amiss," he added.

"I dare say we can manage all that without breaking the UN Charter,"
Stewart said.

"I don't suppose you're going to tell me what you're up to in this neck
of the woods?"

The answer should have been no, but Docherty told him anyway.

Stewart was envious.

"We spend most of our time here wishing we could do more than just
watch it all happen.  It's like holding the coats of two men who've
decided to beat each other to death."  He reached for the door.

"Let's go and fill your order."

An hour later they were on their way again, having been supplied with
Arctic clothing for the two women both of whom, fortunately, were tall
an optimistic assessment of their road as far as Gornji Vakuf, and a
fry-up in the Cheshires' mess.  Cholesterol-rich it definitely was, but
the men hadn't had a better meal since Split, and the two women hadn't
eaten as well for months.  A couple of Cheshires at the next table
couldn't keep from commenting on the two women's appetite, and were met
with looks from the SAS men which would have silenced Cilia Black.

Razor's benign mood had been further lifted by the news that Tottenham
had won on the previous Saturday.  Sunderland and Celtic, however, had
both lost.

"I don't suppose you remember Tottenham's games against Rangers in
'62?"

Docherty asked Razor, as the latter steered the Microbus up the long
incline leading out of town.

"I was only four, boss."

"I was eleven.  I can't remember which European competition it was, but
they were really big games.  English and Scottish club teams had hardly
ever played each other before then, and then those two were drawn
against each other and there was this enormous expectation, enormous
curiosity, because no one really knew whether English teams were much
better than Scottish teams, or much the same, or vice versa."

"I take it we won."

"Oh aye, you won all right.  Five-two, I think, down in London.  But
Rangers played well enough to make people think they could turn it
round at Ibrox.  They had some great players then Willie Henderson, Jim
Baxter.  And then the second leg was only about five minutes old when
Jimmy Greaves ran half the length of the field and scored.  People who
were there said the silence was so deep you could hear sheep farting in
the Outer Hebrides.  Spurs won that one three two  Docherty smiled to
himself.

"I always remembered those games because I felt so torn.  Being a Scot
I wanted Rangers to win, and being a Celtic supporter I wanted to see
them thrashed.  I guess it was the first time I understood how
loyalties could cut across each other."

He looked out of the window.

"But it was a long time before I realized what a good thing it was that
they did.  Because people with only one loyalty have nothing to
restrain them."

"Like here in sunny Bosnia?"

"Aye."

A few miles further on they turned left, on to a small road which
climbed across the mountains towards Bugoj no.  In normal times this
would have been closed to traffic, but the UN Protection Force needed
it open for resupply purposes, and the necessary vehicles and equipment
had been brought up by road from Split two months earlier.  Piled snow
on either side of the twisting road offered evidence of the use to
which they had been put.

In the back of the Microbus the euphoria provided by breakfast soon
dissipated.  As they got nearer to their destination Nena was finding
her anxiety for her children beginning to grow, and Hajrija was finding
no reason to worry less about Nena.  Her friend still seemed locked
inside that mental shell she had grown to protect herself during
captivity, and Hajrija didn't know how to react.  Should she try
breaking it open from the outside or wait for Nena to free herself?

And there was also the Englishman to think about.

Feeling desire for a man didn't seem very appropriate after what her
best friend had just been through.

Sitting opposite each other by the back door, Chris and the Dame were
also in very different states of mind.  Since the bus ride from Vogosca
the Dame had been unable to shake the picture of all those traumatized
women and girls out of his head.  Memories of his sister's wedding
reception kept coming back to haunt him with their pettiness.  If
people only knew how bad it could get, then they wouldn't waste love in
the stupid way they did.  They would cherish it, look after each other,
thank God that their sisters and wives were not on a bus to somewhere
like Vogosca.

Facing him, Chris was watching the sky above the snow-covered moorland,
and occasionally catching sight of a hovering bird of prey too far off
to identify.  He wanted to stop the van, get out and climb into these
unknown hills, and feel as free as the birds that circled above them.

They reached Gornji Vakuf around eleven and turned off the main road to
Split, following another, wider road north-west towards Bugojno.  The
most recent hard intelligence available at Vitez had placed the Serbs
within a few miles of Bugojno, and there was an unconfirmed report that
long-range shelling of the town had begun in the last few hours.  The
small UN unit stationed there had been incommunicado for almost
twenty-four.

The SAS men found out why a few miles short of the town, when they came
upon the UN unit's two vehicles and five men eating an early lunch in a
convenient picnic spot beside the highway.  The town, the men from the
Cheshires told them, was now under almost continuous bombardment by
Serb artillery, and they had been ordered out by the overall UN
command.  The five Cheshires seemed pleased enough to be out of
immediate harm's way, but, as one of the younger men put it succinctly:
"What's the fuckin' point of it all?"

The major in charge had more recent information on Serb movements in
the area, but warned them not to take anything for granted.

"The bastards could be in the town square by now," he said cheerfully.
When Docherty asked him about Zavik the major raised a knowing eyebrow,
and said that there had been no news of the town for weeks.

"Which could mean that they're all still hung over from Christmas, or
it could mean that the Serbs have burned the place to the ground.  Who
knows?  I just want to get back to the Falls Road," he concluded, with
only the faintest trace of irony.

Another few miles down the valley they could hear the big guns firing
up ahead.  Razor stopped the Microbus on a convenient rise and all six
of them got out on to the road for a panoramic view of the distant
town.  Smoke was already rising from half a dozen buildings, and every
few minutes another flash.  of white light would be followed by the
sound of a shell exploding.

"I don't suppose there's a way round," Razor muttered.

"Not on this map," Docherty replied.

"The shells are landing about every three minutes," Chris said, looking
up from his watch as another white flash erupted, 'and they just seem
to be lobbing them in at random.  Our chances of being hit by one are
not much worse than our chances of being knocked down by a London
bus."

"Oh well, that's all right then," Razor said sarcastically.  He looked
round at the Microbus.

"Boss," he said more seriously, "I think everyone should get in the
back with the berg ens up against the windows.  And keep your heads
down, no matter how good the architecture down there used to be.  If I
see a one-winged, purple-crested parrot flying out of the smoke I'll
give you a shout," he told Chris.

"OK?"

They did as he suggested, and huddled together between the rows of
seats in the back.  Razor started off down the hill, trying to gauge
times and distances.  The town didn't look so big, and it shouldn't
take much more than five minutes to reach its centre, find the road
which they wanted, and drive back out again.  If he entered the town
just after a shell landed, then with any luck there would only be one
to avoid before they made their exit.

"You're a genius, Razor," he murmured to himself, easing his foot down
on the brake as the Microbus drove past the first houses.  At that
moment there was a loud explosion, a far louder one than he'd expected,
and half a house not fifty yards away seemed to rear and crash down
into the street ahead.  Razor moved slowly forward, poised on the
accelerator, and when the dust had cleared sufficiently for him to see
a path through the rubble, rammed his foot down.  And then he was
racing along the empty street towards the town centre, where a mosque's
minaret contested the sky with a Christian spire.

The road signs were still up, and he was swinging across the small
square towards the Kupres road, thinking the worst was over when
several bees seemed to whizz past his head.  Pretty solidly built bees,
to judge by the holes they had left in the windscreen.

Razor pulled down the steering wheel, first one way and then the other,
careering in violent curves down the road away from the square.  He
thought he heard other shots, but no more bees came through the cab,
and a minute later the Microbus was back in open country, beginning a
slow climb towards a distant cleft in the valley's side.

He could feel the adrenalin pumping through his veins.

"Is everyone OK back there?"  he called out anxiously, risking a glance
in the rear-view mirror in search of Hajrija.  She was there.  And
everyone else.

"What did you see?"  Docherty wanted to know.

"Nothing.  Not a soul," said Razor.

"Maybe they were all in their basements, or maybe the Serbs are just
firing at an empty town."

"Who fired at us?"

"No idea.  Didn't see them either."

"We'd better stop and make sure there's no real damage."

Razor brought the van to a halt just above a hairpin bend, and they got
down to make an examination.

Three bullets had passed through the vehicle, all of them in through
one of the door windows at the back and out through the windscreen to
Razor's right.  If Docherty had still been sitting in the passenger
seat there wouldn't have been much left of his head.  As it was, the
only lasting consequences of the attack were an increased draught of
cold air and an obscuring of the view through the affected windows.

They got back on board, Docherty resuming his front seat.  For the next
six miles the road clambered out of the valley in ever-tightening
spirals, the Microbus's wheels slipping and sliding far more than Razor
liked.

The way down was even more treacherous, and their progress often slowed
to no more than a crawl.  It was only when they reached their intended
turn-off that the way became easier, and not for a very comforting
reason.

Tracked vehicles had used this road not long previously; the Microbus
had obviously entered Serb-controlled or at best Serbcontested
territory.

According to the Cheshires they had met outside Bugojno there was a
checkpoint in the village of Dragnic, another six miles up this road.
They were planning to abandon the Microbus half a mile short of the
village and take to the hills, literally.  It would be a twenty-mile
hike to Zavik, across a 6000-foot range of snowcovered mountains, but
Docherty had no doubt that Hajrija and the four men could cover the
distance in reasonable time.  Nena, though, was a different matter. She
had told him she could do it, but... He was still worrying this over in
his mind when the tell-tale drift of smoke came into view, curling up
above the next rise.

"I see it," Razor said, as Docherty pointed forward.

"Stop short of the next crest," the PC said.

"And we'll go take a look."

They did, inching their heads above the skyline to see the roadblock a
quarter of a mile ahead: a car and a transit van nose to nose in the
middle of a river bridge, and on the bank beyond a blazing fire
surrounded by several men in the familiar broadbrimmed hats.

"I love barbecues," Razor said.

"Shit," Docherty muttered.  This had added another five or six miles to
their walk.

They had no other choices.  They couldn't ram a path through this
roadblock, and there was no way they could get within killing distance
of the enemy without being seen.  At least not before nightfall, and
that was five hours away.  Who knew what might appear on the road
behind them in the meantime?

Docherty glanced to the right, where the ground fell brokenly towards
the same river, and then rose up beyond it in pine-covered slopes. That
was the way they had to go.

He and Razor inched their way back from the crest, then hurried back
down to the van.

"Bad news, folks," Docherty said.

"We're on foot from here on."

They unloaded their gear.

"What about Woodstock?"  Razor asked.

Docherty thought for a moment, wondering whether to bury the Microbus
in a snowdrift, or drive it back to the top of the last rise and give
it a push.

"We'll leave it here," he decided.

"They're not going to follow us across country."

"Ready?"  he asked, looking round at them all.  Chris was smiling with
anticipation, the Dame poker-faced as ever, the two women tensely
determined.

"Dame, you take lead scout," Docherty said.

"Chris, you're Tail-end Charlie.  Nena, I want you and Hajrija between
me and Razor, OK?"

They hoisted the berg ens on to their backs and started off in order of
march across the sloping meadow, all but Nena holding an SMG cradled in
their arms.  The snow was about a foot deep, and the going was slow. At
this rate, Docherty thought, it would take about a week to reach Zavik.
 He hoped the forest would be easier walking.

They found a dry way across the river without much difficulty, and were
soon under the cover of the trees, where the going was not appreciably
easier.  After half an hour they seemed to have covered only about a
quarter of a mile.

Docherty called a halt.

"Any ideas?"  he asked.

"The plan was to get off the road about six miles further up, right?"
Chris said.

"And then take this track Hajrija knows across the mountains and in
through Zavik's back door?"

"Right."

"So why not work our way round the roadblock we know is there, wait for
dark, and then walk up the road?"

It was so obvious Docherty wondered why he hadn't thought of it.  He
consoled himself with the thought that the Incas hadn't managed to come
up with the wheel.

"Can anyone see a flaw in that that I can't?"  he asked.

"Sounds good to me," Razor said.

"There is one problem," the Dame said slowly.

"If we have to hang around somewhere until it gets dark then anyone
following our tracks will have time to catch us up."

"Good point," Docherty agreed.

"We'll have to keep our eyes open."

As it happened, it took them most of the remaining daylight hours to
work their way around the Serb roadblock, and anyone following their
tracks would presumably be making no better progress.  They eventually
reached a position on the edge of the trees just above the road, which
was now hugging the eastern side of the valley.  Chris was sent back
fifty yards along their tracks to provide any advance warning of
pursuit, while the other five retreated further into the trees for rest
and refreshment.  Since it was still light Docherty risked using the
hex amine stoves to boil water for soup and tea.

They needed all the warmth they could get.  The sky was clearing once
more, and the temperature seemed to be dropping like a stone.  After
their struggle through the snow their limbs needed rest, but there was
no doubting that it was warmer on the move, and once darkness had
fallen they lost no time in getting started once more.

About twenty minutes later the sound of a vehicle on the road behind
caused them to scurry up the bank and into the trees.  A few moments
later a lorry rumbled by, with two men sitting in the cab and another
half dozen or so barely visible in the rear, their cigarettes glowing
like fireflies.

"Our chums from the roadblock," Razor observed.

"Pigs," Hajrija said contemptuously.

They continued their march up the long road, the stars shining in the
sky above the valley, the river singing its way across the stones.  In
any other circumstances, Docherty thought, this would be almost
magical.  He could be walking down a glen on New Year's Eve, on his way
to visit a warm and welcoming pub by the side of the loch.

Some hope.  He turned to check on Nena, walking some five yards behind
him.  She seemed steady enough on her feet, and even managed a faint
smile in his direction.  She was strong, Docherty knew, and as far as
he could tell her experience didn't seem to have taken any great toll
on her body.  The mind was a different matter.  He wondered how Reeve
was going to react to the news that his wife had been repeatedly
subjected to multiple rape, and realized that he didn't have much of a
clue.  Reeve had often surprised him in the past, behaving badly when
expected to behave well, rising above his usual self when Docherty had
expected the worst.  He hoped this would be one of the latter cases.
The woman had been through more than enough already.

Four hours and twelve miles later they had skirted round two small
villages though no lights shone to suggest there might be anyone to
watch or listen and carefully approached the location of the roadblock
they had been told about, only to find an empty stretch of road.  Soon
after they reached the spot where Hajrija's track took off to the east,
and started following it up a wider valley towards the first village,
which she said was only a couple of kilometres away.

She knew some of the people who lived there, and hoped for news of what
was happening in Zavik.

They reached a slight rise overlooking the village about half an hour
later.  The moon was up now, reflecting in the tiles of the roofs and
the bend of the river which enclosed most of the dwellings.  There were
no lights shining, but none could be expected at such an hour.

They walked carefully down towards the first house, keeping to the
shadows beside the road.  A burnt-out Lada by the side of the house
offered proof that the war had come to call.  The whole place felt
dead, Docherty thought.  He remembered villages in Dhofar which had
felt as empty as this.

The door of the first house was open.  Razor entered cautkzrnsly, and
walked through the house, sweeping it with his torch.  There was no one
there alive or dead.

They went through the next two houses with the same result.

"They've gone," Hajrija said.

"There's no point in going through every house," Docherty decided.

"We'll just borrow one for a few hours, get some sleep, and move on at
first light.  We should be in Zavik by noon."

Chris had the penultimate watch, and, when Docherty came to relieve him
half an hour or so before dawn, he decided to walk up through the
forest rather than try for a few," minutes' more sleep.  Some
chaffinches were soon chirruping in the trees around him, but the dawn
chorus as a whole was disappointing.  Chris emerged from the forest
above the other side of the village, and stopped for a moment in the
shelter of the trees to check that there were no signs of life below.
There were not, but sevewal huge birds were lazily circling in the dawn
sky.  He fixed the binoculars on one of them, and saw a pale-grey head
which hardly protruded at all from the yellow-brown body.  A large,
hooked beak adorned the head, while the tail was short, dark and
square.  It was a griffon vulture.

He watched it through the binoculars for a few minutes, marvelling at
the sheer size of the bird.  Then the realization dawned these
creatures only came together for carrion.  Chris started walking down
through the houses, towards the centre of the village, above which the
predators were circling.

He found a space where a building had been, and the charred wooden moon
and star lying half-buried in the snow told him what it had been.  He
walked forward, expecting the worst, and found it.  The snow lay across
a pile of charred and half-consumed corpses.  A large metal padlock,
still locked around the two halves of an iron hasp, lay where the
entrance had been.

Time and winter had taken the smell away from the vultures'
refrigerator.  He walked round the site, conscious of the huge birds
hissing in the sky above.  At least fifty bodies, he reckoned.  The
whole village, perhaps.

Chris walked back down the road to the house they had borrowed for the
night, and told Docherty what he had found.

He closed his eyes for a second, then looked at the ground.

"How long ago?"  he asked.

"Hard to say.  Weeks, at least.  Maybe months."

Twenty minutes later the whole party was staring dull-eyed at the scene
of the massacre.  There was no time to sift through the wreckage, or to
disentangle what remained for burial.  If the time for grieving ever
passed, Docherty thought, then it had passed for those who had perished
here.

They walked up the dirt track that led out of the village, into the
innocence of the forest.  The morning sunshine slanted down through the
tall pines and lit the virgin snow that covered the more open parts of
the forest floor, giving the Dame, again leading the way, the
impression that he was walking through a ' huge cathedral.  Images of
the burnt mosque back in the village, the women on the bus, the sniper
flung from the window... all passed through his mind and were somehow
consumed by the beauty of the forest, like the heavenly sound of
interweaving requiems.

Ten yards behind him, Docherty felt numb.  This is

Europe, he told himself.  The house they had stayed in had been a
European house, connected to an electricity grid, plugged in by radio
and TV and cars to the rest of the continent.  There had been a record
player, and records ranging from Rachmaninov to Elton John.  And the
family who had listened to "Crocodile Rock' had probably been among
those herded into the time warp, taken back to an age in which they
could be herded into a mosque and burnt alive.

Why?  he asked himself.  What had happened in this country?  Were these
people so different from all the other peoples of the world who could
take the body's needs for granted?  Or was this just the place where
the surface had cracked to reveal the rotten ooze welling up below?

For the first time in his life Docherty felt a stirring of
fellow-feeling with his late father.  The old union man hadn't liked
the way the world was going; he always said that people were getting
more and more of what they wanted, and less and less of what they
really needed.  And because they were getting what they wanted they
couldn't understand why they were so unhappy.  And that made them
angry.

Docherty wished he could feel angry, but felt something closer to
despair.

They walked on through the forest for several miles, to where the track
finally emerged in a high valley.

They prudently waited for several minutes, scanning the surrounding
countryside for signs of an enemy, but in this empty place there were
none.  They walked on, following an infant stream which trickled down
between wide, snow-covered moorland slopes.

For half a mile or so the going was hard, but then they passed across a
small crest and down into another, more sheltered valley, where bare
trees gathered in the bends of a wider stream.  They were now only
about a mile from the next and last village on their route, and no one
in the party was feeling particularly sanguine about what they would
find when they got there.

Of the two women, Hajrija had been more affected by what they had found
in the previous village, despite seeing more than her share of death
and cruelty in Sarajevo.

"It's different," she told Nena.

"In the city we are fighters against fighters, and the shelling, well,
somehow it's not personal.  But to take people like that ?  to see
their faces and hear them.."  She shook her head, refusing to let the
tears flow.

Nena put an arm around Hajrija's shoulder but said nothing.  In her
mind's eye she could see her children being marched into the mosque in
Zavik.

Behind them, Razor was wondering about himself and Hajrija, and about
whether they would ever get the chance to be together.  If they got out
of this trip alive, then he would be going home to England and she she
might be going back to Sarajevo, or she might even want to stay in
Zavik, if the town was still there.  He could hardly send her
love-letters at either address.  And she could hardly come and visit
him when the anti sniper unit had their summer holidays.

What a fucking mess, he thought.  And in any case, what did it say
about him that he was worrying about his love-life after what they had
just left behind?  That he was an insensitive git?  Or that he was more
interested in life than death?  Who the fuck knew?

A hundred yards ahead, the Dame gave Docherty the hand signal for halt
before dropping to his knees and carefully advancing to the latest
crest in the path.

Reaching it, he lay flat in the snow and slowly scanned the valley
below with his binoculars.

Docherty watched him, waiting for the thumbs-up to tell him that no
enemy was in sight or suspected.

Instead he saw the Dame's shoulders slump momentarily, and then the
Wearsider seemed to lie motionless for a minute or more, before placing
his hand on his head to indicate he wanted Docherty to join him.

The PC wriggled forward, and found himself with a panoramic view of
hills stretching away into the distance.  A quarter of a mile away, the
next village nestled in the valley below.  He could see no sign of
movement.

Docherty turned to the Dame, and saw tears running down his cheeks.
With a sinking feeling he picked up his own binoculars and started
scanning the village below.  The first few houses seemed untouched, but
then several came into view that had been burnt to the ground, and in
the centre of the village, once more, there was the remains of what had
probably been the mosque.  He must have sealed his heart against this,
Docherty thought, because he felt immune to grief.

And then he saw them, as the Dame had seen them, the crucified bodies
on the side of the barn, and he felt the tears welling up in his own
eyes.

They took down the corpses and, lacking the time to dig graves in the
frozen earth, simply buried them beneath mounds of snow.  Why, in any
case, did these deserve graves when those bodies in the burnt-out
mosque did not?  They could not bury all the dead of this village, any
more than all the dead of the last.

As before, a group of vultures hissed overhead, waiting for them to
leave.

The road which ended here ran south down the valley, but they took the
path to the east, which would lead them up over the last range of hills
and down into Zavik's valley.  It was almost noon now, and the sky was
clouding over again, the wind whipping up fine sprays of snow and
flinging them at the walkers.

The women were feeling the strain now.  Unlike the four SAS men,
neither had been forced to endure walks of nearly thirty miles across
the Brecon Beacons, and both had developed blisters from wearing boots
that were slightly too large for them.  But they didn't complain, and
they kept up with the pace.

The weather conditions continued to deteriorate.  As Docherty halted to
check the map against a world of snow and mist and pale, shadowy pines,
one which seemed devoid of any reference points, Hajrija arrived at his
shoulder to tell him where they were: only a hundred yards or so from
the crest of the last ridge.

The view when they reached it was disappointing, merely one more white
meadow below, and a hint of tree-covered slopes through the mist
ahead.

"You can't see the town from here," Hajrija said, 'but it's down there.
This is where a lot of the townspeople come to ski on winter
Saturdays," she added.

"Or used to.  There's a lodge down there, just above the trees.  It was
the only shelter up here."

They moved slowly down the slope, waiting for the lodge to swim out of
the murk.  When it did so the binoculars revealed no sign of life. They
advanced on it carefully nevertheless, watching for tell-tale tracks in
the snow.

There was a musty smell inside, but no bodies.  Cigarette ends and beer
bottles littered the floor of the main room, and there were several
cartridge cases arranged in a neat line along one of the window ledges
Fighting men of some description had been here, but not for a while.

If the only shelter on the hills behind the town was unoccupied in this
sort of weather, Docherty reasoned, then it seemed unlikely that there
were any enemy units between them and the valley below.  It was a
comforting thought.

He put it to Hajrija, who agreed.

"In which case," Docherty said, 'our first contact will probably be
with Zavik's defensive perimeter.

Assuming it has one.  So where would it be."

Hajrija shrugged.

"There is only one easy way down.  It is a very how you say?"  she drew
hairpins in the air with her finger.

"Winding," Docherty supplied.

"Yes, the Beatles.  The long and winding road.  But this is short and
steep and winding."

"There is no other way?"

"There's the Stair," Nena said.

"Not in the winter," Hajrija objected.

Nena shrugged.

"Maybe not.  There is a long climb down past the waterfall," she said
to Docherty.

"We used to go up and down it when we were children, mostly because our
parents said we should not.  In winter it will be slippery and maybe
impossible."

"Which do you think will be safer?"  Docherty asked the two women.

"The road," Hajrija said flatly.

"Yes, I think so," Nena agreed reluctantly.

"Though anyone below will be able to see us coming down the road long
before we can explain who we are."

They set off down the mountain, following the narrow road through a
wide swathe of pines and out alongside another meadow.  Then there were
more trees and the road suddenly fell away.  About two hundred yards
below, the roofs of a town were dimly visible above the intervening
trees, tucked inside a sharp bend of the pale-grey river.  Docherty
turned the binoculars on the road down, and found what looked like an
ominous gap.

He passed the binoculars to Hajrija.

"There is a bridge there before," she said.

"Will there be a way across?"

"Not an easy one," Nena said.

"The road crosses a stream there, almost like a waterfall.  It is a
long way down."

"The Stair, then."

"There is no other way."

They left the road and hiked across the bottom of the meadow, and
worked their way up across a tree-covered ridge and down into another
cleft in the mountain face.  This one was even steeper, and the depth
of the snow varied wildly, making progress extremely slow.  Docherty
alternated between imagining how beautiful this would be in the summer
and cursing the difficulty of their passage.

After an hour which seemed like three they arrived at the head of the
Stair.  The waterfall, no doubt deafening in spring, was barely audible
above the wind, and with good reason.

Only a trickle of water was actually falling the rest was frozen in mid
flight waiting for spring to set it free.

The Stair itself was easier than the SAS men had been led to expect.
Flat rocks had been inset into the steeply sloping ground beside the
waterfall, and though some were definitely slippery, and almost any
slip potentially fatal, there was always a handhold to spare.

Every twenty yards or so, there was a larger ledge to rest on.

Descending such a path with a fully laden bergen wasn't anyone's idea
of fun, but after what they'd seen that day just being alive seemed
like something to be thankful for.  Hajrija was less than twenty feet
from the bottom when they all heard the voice from below.

"Keep coming, and keep your hands away from your guns," it said in
Serbo-Croat.

Chris quickly translated the order, but in any case no one was going to
risk opening fire on probable friends whom they couldn't even see.

"If it wasn't for the women you would be dead by now," the voice said
cheerfully.

It wasn't until they were all off the Stair that the three men stepped
out from behind the overhanging rock.  Each was carrying a Kalashnikov
in firing position.

"Jusuf!"  Hajrija said, recognizing the face of the oldest man.

"You can put down the guns."

The man stared at her in bewilderment for a moment, and then
recognition dawned.

"Hajrija Mejra?

I did not see the girl inside the uniform.  Where in God's name have
you come from?"

"Sarajevo.  And you know Nena."

Jusuf's eyes grew even wider.

"Yes, yes, of course.

Does the Commander know you are here?"

"My children," Nena asked, heart in mouth, 'are they are they well?"

"Yes, yes, I think so.  My boy has the chicken pox but..."

The sense of relief took Nena's breath away.

"Where is Reeve?"  Hajrija asked.

"At the HO' I think."

"And where is that?"  Hajrija asked patiently.

"First you must tell me who these men are," he said obstinately.

"They are English.  They are friends of Reeve."

Jusufs face lit up.

"That is wonderful news," he said.

"Did he know you were all coming?"

"No, but if you take us to him..."

Nena Reeve strode purposefully across the town she had grown up in,
towards the house on the hill where she had been born.  The mist seemed
to be thickening again as darkness began to fall, but from what she
could tell the town seemed much the same as it had always been.  There
were no scars of war, and there were people on the streets, even a
couple she recognized.  She hurried past them, head down the last thing
she wanted to do now was stop and explain herself to mere
acquaintances.

There were no lights showing in her parents' home, but the house itself
looked the same as it always had.

She pushed open the front door, and felt the warm air of life on her
face.  Voices sounded from the kitchen at the back, children's
voices.

She stood a second by the parlour door, feeling almost limp, and then
turned the old handle and walked across the threshold.  By the light of
the single kerosene lamp she could see the four faces turned towards
the door those of her father, mother, son and daughter.  There was a
moment of stunned silence, and then both children cried out in unison:
"Mama!"

On the other side of town John Reeve and two of his fellow-officers in
the Zavik Militia were poring over a map in the back room of the Youth
Hostel which served as their HO.

"Hello, Reeve," a familiar Scottish voice said from the doorway.

Reeve looked round, utter astonishment on his face.

"Jesus Christ," he said, 'the fucking cavalry's arrived."

Docherty grinned at him.  Reeve wasn't wearing any sort of uniform, but
he appeared fit and well.  There were no weapons visible, but the looks
of the other young men, the maps on the table and wall .. . the scene
had all the makings of a military unit which knew what it was doing.
And it was about as far removed from Brando's camp in Apocalypse Now as
Docherty 'could imagine.

He wasn't surprised, but he had been prepared to find the worst, and
this wasn't it.

The two men shook hands, and Docherty introduced Razor, Chris and the
Dame.  Reeve in turn introduced the two Bosnians.  The taller of the
two, a serious-looking man with short, black hair and a pronounced
Slavic face, was named Latinka Tijanic.  The other man, also
dark-haired, but with a rounder face and moustache, was Esad Cehajic.

"So what the fuck are you doing here?"  Reeve asked.

"We've come to see you, but At this moment Hajrija, who had been
talking to their escort outside, appeared in the doorway.

"Hajrija?"  Reeve said, staring at her with renewed astonishment.  The
last time he's seen her she'd been a student in jeans and T-shirt.

"Zdravo, Reeve."

"How are you?  How is Nena?"

"I was just about to tell you," Docherty said.

"She came with us.

She went straight on up to her folks' place.  Are they OK?  And the
children?"

"They're fine.  All of them."  Reeve seemed momentarily stunned.

"Jesus, Jamie, what's she doing here?

How did you all get here?"

"It's a long story.  Maybe ..

"I'd better get over there," Reeve said suddenly.  He grabbed his coat
and looked around.

"Lads, make yourselves at home.  Esad, look after them, will you?

I'll be back."

"How are you, Nena?"  her father asked, when the children finally
allowed him the opportunity.  He looked older, Nena thought, whereas
her mother looked much the same.  He had been a schoolteacher by
profession, but his life's vocation from the years as a partisan in
World War Two to his years as Mayor of Zavik -had been the Party and
the idea of Yugoslavia.  The collapse of everything he had fought and
worked for must have been terrible for him, Nena realized.  The erasure
of a life.

"I'm fine," she said.  Two years before she might eventually have told
her parents what had happened to her, but not now.  There would be no
point.

"But what has happened here, Papa?"  she asked, partly to move the
conversation away from herself.

"We have fought them, that is what has happened," her father said.

"Your Reeve has been wonderful, Nena.  Without him I dread to think how
things would have gone."

There must have been a trace of irony in her expression, because her
father gave her an aggrieved look.

"This is a good man," he insisted.

"I know," she said.

"Sowhy..

She was saved by the good man's arrival.  There was a rare look of
uncertainty in his eyes, Nena thought, as she got up, fighting her own
reluctance, to embrace him.

"How are you?"  he asked.

"Fine.  Tired.  Happy to see these two," she said, putting an arm
around each child.  They were looking wary, perhaps remembering the
arguments which had been so frequent the last time their mother and
father had been together.

"Are you sure you're OK?"  he asked.

"I'm just exhausted.  It was a hard journey."  Now that she knew
everyone was safe all she wanted to do was sleep.  In a proper bed, for
a long time.

At the Youth Hostel Esad had made the visitors the best coffee they'd
had since leaving England.  They sipped at it gratefully, sitting in
silence and resting their aching legs.  Hajrija, meanwhile, was
conducting an animated conversation in her native tongue with the
serious looking Tijanic, and Razor was torn between pleasure at her
obvious happiness to be home and more than a slight stirring of
jealousy.  The darkness seemed to have gone from her eyes, he thought.
She seemed so natural here, but it made him wonder whether the months
in the anti sniper unit had wrought changes inside her, hardened her in
some way, or whether she had somehow managed to keep her real self at a
distance from it all.

And that made him think about what the years in the Army had done to
him.  He knew men in the SAS who had been unable to cope with what they
were required to do some who had simply decided it wasn't for them and
left, others who had turned themselves into machines but he had never
felt pushed in either of those directions.  His defence had been not to
take it too seriously; to stay loose and not get wound too tight by it
all, the way the Dame seemed in danger of doing.  When the feeling was
there, you had to let yourself feel it, and then get on with the job in
hand.

He was a survivor, he thought.  And he had the feeling she was too.  If
only... "There is a cafe," she said suddenly in English.

"It is open, with food and drink.  Not far.  Not steaks and wine, you
understand, but maybe music."

"I could eat a horse," Razor said.

"There'll probably be one on the menu," Chris said.

They turned to Docherty.

"Go and eat," the PC said.

"I'll wait here for Reeve to come back."

Outside darkness had fallen, and the mist still clung to the valley
floor, making it hard to see each other, let alone the direction they
were supposed to be taking.

Hajrija grabbed hold of Razor's hand.

"Make chain," she said, and they did so, unable to think of a less
embarrassing alternative.  Chris found himself remembering a game they
played at school, the chain of tagged kids reaching and twisting for
one of the un tagged to release them with a touch.

Hajrija led them unerringly down one street and then another, buildings
occasionally looming through the patchy mist, until a hazy light
announced their destination.  The words Rena's cafe on the glass door
stood out against the yellow light within.

"What?!?"  Razor exclaimed.

Inside, a large poster of the cast of Allo, Allo took pride of place
behind the serving counter.  The three Englishmen gazed at it
open-mouthed.

"It is big hit on Yugoslav TV," Hajrija explained.

"Like the Fools and Horses.

Del-boys and lovelyjubbly," she added gratuitously.

The cafe was empty when they arrived, but the menu surpassed
expectations by containing both cheese and beer, and their own arrival
seemed to trigger an avalanche of customers.  The beer was strictly
rationed to two bottles a customer, but this didn't seem to get in the
way of the good feeling which encompassed everyone there.

Men and women, old and young, talked in groups and pairs, sometimes
reaching out to join in other conversations which caught their ear.
Razor had grown up the only child of a single parent, but this was what
he had always imagined a huge family gathering would be like.  A sort
of chaotic warmth.

"This is how it used to be," Hajrija said, her breath brushing his
cheek.

Rene stared down at him from the poster.

"I will only say this once," Razor murmured to himself.

Reeve arrived back at the hostel looking more subdued than when he'd
left.  He didn't seem surprised to find only Docherty.

"Well, Jamie, this is a surprise," he said, lighting a cigarette and
blowing smoke at the ceiling.

"Aye, I expect it is," Docherty agreed, thinking that Reeve seemed much
the same as he'd ever been.

"I don't suppose it's a coincidence that you and Nena have turned up
here together.

You didn't just run into each other on Sarajevo Station, I suppose?"

Docherty smiled without much humour.

"She's had a bad time, Reeve.  A really bad time."

Reeve took a drag on the cigarette.

"Sarajevo used to be a lovely town," he said mildly.

"She didn't tell me anything," he added.

"So why are you all here?"

"To check you out," Docherty said bluntly.

"Our beloved Government has been getting stick from all sides about
this lunatic Brit in the Bosnian hills ..

"You're kidding.  What's it matter to John Major, for Christ's sake?
It's not as if any of those bastards care what's happening here.

Docherty looked at him.

"You are still a serving soldier in their Army.  They may not give a
flying fuck about Bosnia but they have to care about that."

Reeve grinned.

"Tell 'em I resign.  Tell them I've taken out Bosnian citizenship and
I'm as entitled to my piece of the war as any other Bosnian."

"Have you?"

"You're joking.  How the hell do you think I'd do that by post?  On the
phone?"

"Aye, OK."

"I mean, this is hard to believe," Reeve went on.

"They actually sent you and three other guys into all this just to tell
me to keep a low fucking profile?  It's like infiltrating a patrol into
Saddam Hussein's palace to steal his bog paper.

"We weren't sent to tell you to keep a low profile," Docherty said
calmly.

"We were sent to find out what's been going on.

Reeve stubbed out his cigarette, walked across to a cupboard and pulled
out two glasses and a bottle.

"OK," he said, unscrewing the top and pouring two respectable shots of
plum brandy, "I'll tell you."

Docherty leaned back in his chair and sipped at the brandy.  It was
good.

"You know why I came back here'?"

"To see the kids."

"And you know about Nena and me splitting up?"

"Aye."

"Well, when I came to see them she took the chance to go to Sarajevo,
and then because of the war she couldn't get back here.  Didn't want to
either, from what I could tell.  Doctoring's always been important to
her, and she knew her parents were here to look after the kids if I
left."

"Why didn't you?"

"The Serbs came to call, like they did everywhere else around here.
Only we stood up to the bastards all the town, most of the local Serbs
included and kicked them back out again.  We knew they'd try again, so
we had to get ourselves organized properly, do some thinking about how
to defend the place, and how to survive in a siege.  And I was the only
one with any real experience of anything like that.  I couldn't
leave."

"You became "the Commander"."

"It's not like it sounds.  No one else here could have handled it.
Plus, I was English, so there didn't have to be any arguments about
whether a Serb or a Croat or a Muslim should be top dog."  He smiled.

"I became sort of a mini-Tito," he said.

"And I've done a good job."

"I bet you have.  Did you blow the bridge on the road behind the
town?"

"Yeah, but only as a precaution.  The Serbs can't get people in numbers
up on this side of the valley.  We blew the bridges over the river
further down, and they can't get anything across.  They could try from
the back - I suppose that's the way you came in but there are no roads
and nowhere to shelter, and nothing much to build a shelter with.  They
couldn't get any heavy guns up there."

"So what have they tried?"

"After the first visit they left us alone for a week, then tried
surprising us in the middle of the night.  We killed about twenty of
them, and they left us alone for a couple of months after that.  Except
of course they blocked up flue valley at both ends so nothing could
come in or out.  That was around August, and there was plenty of food
in the town, but we had to start thinking about how we were going to
survive the winter.  We could cut down trees behind the town for fires,
but the only generators we had needed oil, and there was hardly any
left.  So'he opened his palms 'we had to steal some.

"By this time I'd got a pretty good training programme going.  I based
it on what we taught the Dhofaris in Oman, remember?  Once they were
ready I took some of the lads on a recce, and we found the Serbs' local
fuel depot in Sipovo.  Nicking two tankers was easy enough the depot
wasn't even guarded and we managed to bluff our way back through their
roadblock.  You can get a long way around here singing the right songs
and sporting the right tattoos."  Reeve grinned reminiscently.

"Plus, of course, about a third of our men don't have to pretend they
really are Serbs."

Docherty grinned back, relief spreading through him.  Reeve hadn't been
driven off the rails by the madness around him.  In fact, as far as
Docherty could tell, he seemed more insulated from it all than anyone
they had met since leaving Split.

Reeve poured another two measures of plum brandy and lit another
cigarette.

"The weaponry situation wasn't too good either," he said.

"We had plenty of Kalashnikovs, and a couple of mortars we stole from
the Serbs, but only a few SMGs and hardly any explosives.  Luckily, we
had an ex-Yugoslav Army officer in town - a Croat who could lead us
straight to an armoury outside Livno.  The Croat Army was pissed off
when we stole half their ordnance, but what the fuck?"  He laughed.

"The main problem was carrying the goddam stuff back over the hills. We
didn't think the Serbs would fall for the bluff twice, though God knows
there's enough of them popping acid that they probably wouldn't have
noticed.  Probably just see pretty patterns as we went past."

"How did you manage to piss off the Bosnian Goveminent?"  Docherty
asked.

"And the UN?"

"Ah, that was a bit naughty," Reeve admitted.

"We stole one of their supply shipments mostly food."

"You what!?"

"They had plenty to spare, Jamie.  It was when they were still using
the Kupres road to supply Vitez.  The idiots left the key in the
ignition when they stopped for a picnic lunch.  They ran along behind
us for about a quarter of a mile, shouting at us to bring it back."

Docherty laughed.

"I talked to the commander at Vitez, and he didn't mention it," he
said.

"I'm not surprised," Reeve said.

"It hardly adds lustre to the Cheshires' image, does it?"

"And the Bosnian Government?"

"We borrowed one of their armoured cars from Bugojno.

It's not exactly state-of-the art I'm afraid it was probably abandoned
by the Red Army in 1945.  But it works.  We just drove it home through
the Serb roadblock and I mean through it all hatches down.  They didn't
know what to make of it either, watching this armoured car blithely
totalling one of their beloved Toyotas."  He took a gulp of the
brandy.

"I've got to like this stuff.

Where were we?"

"Stealing an armoured car."

"Yeah, well.  I don't see how the Bosnian Government can object to us
doing their job for them.  They should be holding us up as a shining
example.  Izetbegovic is fond of saying that Bosnia was overflowing
with brotherly love and tolerance before the Serb shit hit the fan.  I
don't know how much of that is wishful thinking on his part, but Zavik
is definitely Bosnia as it ought to be.  We've got Serbs, Muslims,
Croats, Jews, even a few Albanians, and yours truly, all getting along
with each other.  You take a walk through the town tomorrow morning
you'll find a mosque, an Orthodox church and a Catholic church, all in
the same square, all open for business."

"What about the Serbs outside the town?"  Docherty wanted to know.

"Are they still keeping their distance?"

"No, they're hatching something.  And they're more or less all around
us now.  Sooner or later they're going to drag some guns on to the
hills opposite and start throwing shells at us.  If they can be
bothered.  I hope they can't."  He took a last drag on the cigarette.

"And of course there's always a chance that peace will break out."

"I wouldn't hold your breath," Docherty said mildly.

"And I wouldn't be too optimistic about reconciliation," he added.

"We've been in 'this country about a week, and I've seen things to
trouble my sleep until I die."

"Like what?"

Docherty told him about the villages in the hills, the hospital at
Sarajevo, the women at Vogosca.

"What were you doing there?"  Reeve asked.

Docherty cursed himself for the slip, but decided there was no going
back.

"Rescuing Nena," he said.

Reeve looked at him, sudden bleakness in his eyes.

"Oh Christ," he said.

"She wasn't there long," Docherty said, realizing as he did so how
ludicrous it sounded.

Reeve was getting slowly to his feet.

"I should be with her," he said.

"I

"Maybe you should let her come to you," Docherty said gently, wondering
if she would.

A quarter of a mile away, Nena lay in her old childhood bed in the
house on the hill, curled up like a foetus, unable to sleep.  Her mind
was whirling around, and she seemed to lack the will to stop it.  It
was like a waking dream, a sort of seamless merging of scenes and
people.

There was Docherty at their wedding, still treating Isabel as if she
was an invalid, and there was Reeve on the day their son was born,
looking like a boy himself, so young and proud, and there were the
crucified bodies on the wall, the man and the woman and the two
children, and there she was in the gymnasium at Vogosca with the waves
of crying ebbing and flowing like a sea of sadness.

"Will you ever be the same again?"  a voice asked, and she answered,
angrily: "No, of course not!"  and then there was silence for a moment,
a silence of snow and blue sky.

Then the voice asked: "Will you ever be happy again?"  and she said:
"Yes, yes, I promise!"  and she wondered if it was a promise she could
keep.

They had been told to take their pick of the empty rooms at the youth
hostel, and Hajrija picked out one on the first floor.

"Razor, can I talk with you," she asked, beckoning him in.

"Sure," he said, surprised but daring to hope.

She pushed the door shut behind him and stood there, not saying
anything, just looking at him, waiting.

In the dark she looked so serious, he thought.  So sad.  He leaned
forward and kissed her on the lips, and felt her arms reach around his
neck, and her body press into his.

They kissed for what seemed like minutes, and then finally managed to
shed their jackets and hats and belts before kissing for several more.
They shed their boots and half tripped on to the narrow bed, slowly
disentangling themselves from the top half of the Arctic gear, and
lying there half-naked, oblivious to the cold.  He kissed her breasts
and raised his face to hers.  In the darkness of the room all he could
see was a faint glow on either cheek and two excited eyes that shone
deep and dark.

They made love as if they never would again, and then sank into an
exhausted sleep.

Soon after dawn, as they were disentangling themselves for the third
time, the window blew in, swiftly followed by the sound of an enormous
explosion.

The first Serb shell had landed on Zavik.

They gingerly slid out from under the glass-strewn blanket.

"Are you OK?"  Razor asked, holding her naked body against his own.

"Yes," she answered.  She was shivering, and not all from the cold.

"Some couples feel the earth move," Razor murmured.

"We seem to hear the sound of breaking glass."

The bombardment continued throughout the day.  At first a shell would
land every few minutes, but from mid-morning onwards the gaps became
longer, as if the Serbs were either growing bored or intent on
conserving ammunition.  The previous day's mist had lifted, revealing a
layer of clouds which grew more broken as the morning progressed.
Whether this improvement in visibility was a good thing, Docherty was
unable to decide.  It presumably gave the Serbs more chance of hitting
what they were aiming at, but since they were apparently content with
landing their shells anywhere in the town, that didn't seem such an
important consideration.  For the townspeople, he suspected, a first
taste of artillery bombardment in yesterday's mist would have been even
more unnerving than what they were having to endure.

Most of the town's population reckoned by Reeve at just over two
thousand were now sheltering in their own or a neighbour's basement or
cellar, listening to each crack of man-made thunder and wondering where
on their mental map of friends and acquaintances each particular blow
had fallen.

One of the first shells had landed on the school.

Two children had been crushed by a falling roof, and another dozen
injured, some of them seriously.  About the same number of adults had
been injured during the confusion of the first hour, and three men and
two women had been killed, all in their beds, when their houses
exploded around them.

Once the initial shock had subsided the more or less regular gaps
between shells gave people a chance to move around in relative safety.
It was Sarajevo without the snipers, Nena Reeve thought bitterly, as
she hurried down the street towards the youth hostel.

Optimistically, as it turned out.  She arrived in the hostel's basement
at the same time as one of Reeve's young soldiers, who had come with
the news that a man had just been shot dead in the main square.

Almost certainly by a sniper.

"What are you doing here?"  Reeve asked, seeing her standing in the
doorway.

"I assume you need doctors," she said.

"Christ, yes.  Hold on a minute."  He barked rapid fire orders at two
men, both of whom Nena suddenly recognized as the sons of an old
friend.  The last time she'd seen them they were about sixteen, and on
their way to university in Belgrade.

Reeve stood up.

"We'll wait for the next shell and then I'll take you over to the
hospital," he said.

"Hospital?"

"We've cleared out one of the underground crypts in the old castle ..
."  He raised a hand.

"I know it's not the ideal place, but it's safe from shelling.  And
it's the best I could think of at a moment's notice."

She looked at him.

"You really are running this town, aren't you?"  she said.

"Just about."

"What about your career?  The SAS?"

He shrugged.

"I couldn't leave the children at the beginning, and then I became kind
of indispensable all round.  I haven't had many choices, Nena .. ."  He
grinned suddenly.

"But in any case .

There was the thud of an explosion, some distance away.

"Come on," he said.

They went up the stairs, out into the street and turned uphill towards
where the old ruined castle looked out over the town from its perch
just beneath the cliff top.  Away to the right the frozen waterfall was
glistening in the sunlight.

"And some things are more important than the SAS," he added, as if to
himself.  This was not the time to ask her about herself, he thought.

"You never used to think so," she said.

"No, I'm sorry, that's not fair."

"Maybe it is," he said, as they reached the castle entrance.  The booth
where tourists had bought their entrance tickets was lying on its side
in the snow like a badly made toboggan.

"How many other doctors are there in the town?"

she asked.

"Two," he said.

"Dr.  Muhmedalisa, remember him?

He should be here.  And then there's old Bosnic.  He should have
retired ages ago, but .. . His eyesight's more or less gone altogether,
I'm afraid ..

They walked down steep stone steps and found themselves in a large,
medieval-style chamber.  Two oil stoves had been brought in to provide
heat, and a man was busy trying to shut off the draughts.

Mattresses had been arranged in two rows along either wall, and most
were already occupied.  The only doctor visible was patiently trying to
undo a new bandage, holding it up to within an inch of his eyes.  At
the other end of the room a young girl was screaming in pain.

Nena went to look at her.

"Where's Muhmedalisa?"  Reeve asked Bosnic.

"He was killed about two hours ago," Bosnic said curtly.

"Oh shit."

"That child needs morphine," Nena said, hurrying up.

"Where are the drugs?"

"What we have are there," Bosnic said, peering at her myopically.

"You're Nena Abdic, I remember your voice.  You're a nurse."

"A doctor now."  She was looking through the box.

"There's hardly anything here," she said.

"It's all there is," Reeve said.

"Won't Jamie and the others be carrying medical kits?  And at least one
of them should have medical training.  That's the way it works, isn't
it?"

"I'll go and find out," Reeve said.

"Welcome home," he added, as the girl started screaming again.

An hour later Chris and Razor were both helping out at the improvised
hospital, and the SAS medical kits had been added to the town's supply.
Docherty and the Dame were halfway up the mountain by this time,
accompanying Reeve and Tijanic on a mission with two objectives.  First
they wanted to pinpoint the location of the Serbs' artillery piece, and
second that of the sniper.  In case they discovered the latter, the
Dame had brought along the Accuracy International.

They hadn't needed to take the Stair; a couple of extended planks were
available on the town side of the blown bridge.  After they had walked
across, another of

Reeve's men had retracted the makeshift crossing and settled down to
await their return.

It took them half an hour to reach the top of the toboggan meadow, and
another to find a suitable place to sweep the far side of the valley
with their binoculars.  The gun wasn't immediately visible, but they
had doubted whether it would be, even from the crest above them.

The Serbs would have taken care to camouflage it at the very least, and
probably to remove it completely from any possible enemy line of
sight.

It was the Dame who found it, behind the crest of a hill away to the
right of the town.  He had the rifle's telescopic sight trained in just
the right direction to catch a shimmering in the cold air as the Serb
gun fired.  As he patiently waited to confirm his suspicion, a head
momentarily popped up above the horizon.  A minute later the same
shimmering accompanied the sound of the gun firing.

They marked a line in on Reeve's map and then moved a few hundred yards
through the trees to the east.  From there they were able to draw an
intersecting line and plot the exact location of the gun.

Then they started scouring the whole far side of the valley, looking
for the sniper.  Two hours of lying in the snow later, they were
beginning to despair of finding him when Reeve let out a quiet whoop of
triumph.

"Start at the top of the minaret," he said, 'and go straight up until
you hit the track on the hill.  Just to the right there's a group of
trees.

The one on the right-hand end just moved, and none of the others
did."

The Dame cradled the Accuracy International to his shoulder and stared
through the sight.  He thought he could detect a darker shadow inside
the tree but he wasn't sure.

"Too far away," he said.

"And in any case

I can't get a clean shot from here.  If I miss he'll just disappear
into the trees."

"How about from down in the town?"  Docherty asked.

"No reason why not."

Back in Zavik, Docherty and Reeve visited the hospital, where the
situation, though far from good, had at least improved since the
morning.

"There have only been a couple more wounded this afternoon," Razor told
them.

"Are any of these in danger?"  Reeve asked, looking round.

"Quite a few."

"We can't treat them here," Nena said, coming over to join them.

"We don't have enough medicine, and I don't have the right kinds of
skills."  She looked exhausted, Docherty thought, but something else as
well.  There was more than a trace of her old self present having
others to take care of had at least been good for her.

"There's nowhere else to take them," Reeve was saying.

"You can give me a shopping list of medicines and I'll try and fill it,
but we're talking about a minimum of several days.  I can't risk the
few men I've got on half-thought-out operations."

"If you don't, then some of these children will be at risk."

"OK, OK.  But first we have to deal with the gun up there, or there'll
be more and more wounded to deal with.  Are you and your boys in on
this, Jamie?"

Docherty gave him a wry smile.  It was a question he'd been expecting
since their location of the Serb gun.

"Probably," he said.  He looked at Reeve.

"But we're here in the first place because our bosses were pissed off
at one Brit taking sides in this war.  I think I'd better talk to the
others before we add four more to the charge sheet."

"Fair enough," Reeve said equably.

"Are you two needed here?"  Docherty asked Razor and Chris.

"Not at the moment," Nena answered for them.

The three SAS men waited several minutes for the sound of a shell
landing, then hurried back down to the hostel, taking care to make use
of all the available cover.

"Where's the Dame?"  Chris asked Docherty.

"Out hunting," the PC said.

It had taken the Dame fifteen minutes to find what seemed a suitable
location, in the upstairs room of an empty house on the western edge of
the town.  The tree in question was now only three hundred yards away,
just within the limits of the Covert PM variant of the Accuracy
International.  He erected the built-in bipod support, put his eye to
the Schmidt & Bender telescopic sight, and there was the Serbian
sniper, or at least the edges of his body.  The man was perched about
ten feet up in the cedar tree, but mostly hidden behind the trunk, his
rifle resting against a convenient branch.  When he next went to use
it, the Dame would have him.

The minutes went by.  The Dame thought he could see cigarette smoke
drifting out from behind the trunk, and had a mental picture of his
dead father lighting one of the forty Players No.  6 he had smoked each
day.  Every time he had lit one up at home his mother had coughed, just
the once, to register her disapproval.  What with the all the new stuff
about passive smoking, he supposed she'd been right.

There was movement in the tree, and the man's face came into view, a
hand putting the cigarette to his mouth.  The light was beginning to
fade and there was a slight glow as he dragged on it.  The man was an
amateur, the Dame thought.

He watched as the Serb picked up his rifle which looked suspiciously
like a British Lee-Enfield and slowly scanned the town across the
river, looking for a target.  An almost imperceptible tightening of the
shoulders told the Dame he had found one.

The SAS man wriggled his shoulder to make sure the rifle's butt was
comfortable, worked the bolt action, aligned the cross-hairs above the
bridge of the Serb's nose, and squeezed the trigger.  A black hole
appeared where it was supposed to, and then the man was gone.  The Dame
shifted the telescopic sight downwards, through the cloud of snow that
was still falling from the disturbed branches, and found the dark shape
lying motionless beneath the tree.

One more, he thought.  One more.

He packed up the rifle and went back down through the empty house.  At
the doorway something strange made him pause.  Then he realized: no
shell had landed on the town for quite a while.  Maybe the bastards had
run out of them.  Maybe they were having their tea break.

Back at the hostel he found the other three having one.

"Did you get him?"  Docherty asked.

"Yep," he said, looking round.

"Where's my cup of tea?"

Razor did the honours.

"OK," Docherty said, when the requisite cup had been poured and
sugared, 'we have some decisions to take."  He grunted.

"Like decide what the fuck we're doing here."

"What are the choices, boss?"  Chris asked seriously.

"This is not our war.  I mean, I don't know who's in the right.  Does
anyone?"

"Ah, c'mon," Razor said.

"You've just spent the day trying to patch up kids who've been hit by
indiscriminate shell fire.

You know that's not right."

"Sure," Chris said.

"And what happened to those women, I know.  But what I don't know is
whether we've just seen one side of all this.  You were there when they
threw the sniper out of the window.  That wasn't right either."

"He'd shot half a dozen kids!"

"I know.  But my point is, I think the whole country's gone mad."

"But..."

"Aye," Docherty interjected, 'the whole country has gone mad, and it's
not up to us to sort it out.  Like Chris says, it's not our war.  But
.. . we're here, and I don't think we can just walk away from what we
see with our own eyes.  It may be only one side, but right here, right
now, there's a town being destroyed for no other reason than that it
wants to live in peace."

"What are you saying we ought to do, boss?"  Razor asked.

"I'm not.  I don't know.  And it's different for me - I don't have a
future with the Regiment to worry about..."

"Fuck that for a game of soldiers," Razor said.

"Yeah," Chris agreed, 'that's not a problem."

"Anyway, us three can say we were just following orders," Razor said
with a grin.

"Be my guest," Docherty agreed.

"Problem is, I still haven't got any orders for you to follow."

"OK," Razor said.

"Try this.  We're not hanging around to win the war for anyone, but
we're not just making a run for good ol' Blighty.  So we're going to do
what we can and then head home.  So what can we do?"

"Take out the Serb gun," the Dame said.

"Aye.  And maybe do something about those children.  I have a feeling
it's time I reported in.  And I'm going to ask if someone can arrange
choppers to take out the badly wounded and any other children whose
parents want them to leave."

"You think there's any chance they'll agree to that?"

Chris asked doubtfully.

"Split's less than an hour away, and I can't see how anyone could see
it as anything other than a humanitarian mission..  ."  He shrugged.

"But I expect they'll say no.  I can only find out by asking."

"What are you going to say about Reeve?"  Razor asked.

Docherty shrugged.

"I'll just tell them what's happened here.  If they ask me, I shall say
that in my opinion Sergeant Reeve has acted in the best interests of
the people here and in the best traditions of the Regiment."

"You're not going to mention the Cheshires' lorry load of frozen oven
chips then, boss?"  Razor asked.

The PC grunted.

"I don't think so," he said, laughing.

"But I'd better talk to Reeve first, in any case.  And I'll tell him
we're on for tonight."  He paused.

"If any of you don't want to be involved in this, that's fine," he
said.

"If

I wasn't a friend of Reeve's I'm not at all sure whether I'd be
going."

"We are, boss," Razor said.

"I don't like people who can't even be bothered to aim their
artillery," Chris remarked.

Docherty found Reeve standing alone, smoking a cigarette, outside the
entrance to the makeshift hospital.

"You're not running short on them, then?"  he asked.

"These?  No, we were lucky.  There was a delivery lorry here a few days
before the blockade was tightened.  The driver was a Serb and wanted to
risk it, but we dissuaded him."  Reeve smiled.

"He married one of the local girls a few weeks ago a Croat.  It's been
an education, Jamie, this war.  I wouldn't have missed it for the
world."

"I'm going to report in," Docherty told him, 'tell them what the
situation is here, and ask if they can arrange to fly out however many
of those kids Nena thinks need to go."

"OK," Reeve said, after a moment's hesitation.

"And what's my report card going to say?"

"I'll just tell them what's happening.

Tell them you've been looking after your kids, maybe offering some
advice every now and then to the locals."

"Thanks, Jamie."

"Don't mention it.  And you have four volunteers for tonight," Docherty
told him.

"And then I think we'll be on our way."

"Missing Isabel?"

"You bet."

"I've been missing Nena.  More than I thought I would."  He grimaced.

"Have you talked to her?  I haven't had a chance, yet.  How is she,
really?"

"I don't know, Reeve.  But I don't think people bounce back from what
she's been through.  It'll take a lot of time."

At the hostel, Docherty's departure left silence in its wake, as each
of the other three men tried to make some sense of what he felt about
the situation.  For Razor there was the additional problem of what was
going to happen between him and Hajrija.  He hadn't seen her since
their rude awakening that morning, and had no idea where she was.  He
hoped she wasn't regretting what had taken place the previous night.

He looked at the other two the Dame sitting back with his eyes closed,
Chris studying the map on the table and wondered why there'd been no
ribbing that morning.  Maybe because they didn't think they knew him
well enough, but he doubted it.  Maybe because they knew he was serious
about her.

Would she stay on in Zavik?  It was her home town, after all.  The
thought of staying here with her crossed Razor's mind.  He could
certainly help out on the military and medical fronts he wouldn't just
be in the way.  It would mean throwing career and pension out of the
window, but that thought didn't deter him.  If he'd been the type to
care about things like that he wouldn't be in the fucking SAS, would
he?

But he'd have to go with the others, at least as far as Split.  They'd
come in together and they'd go out the same way.  He owed them that
much.

"Assuming there's no reply from International Rescue," he asked Chris
and the Dame, 'how do you think we're going to get home?"

"The way we arrived, probably," Chris said.

"A long walk out of here, and then..."  He shrugged.

"We could walk to the coast in a few days.  We've still got enough
emergency rations."

"We could," Razor agreed, 'but I can't say as I fancy it.  Unless you
two are willing to carry me in a sedan chair."

The Dame opened one disdainful eye, and closed it again.

"It was just a thought," Razor said.  He heard someone come in through
the door upstairs and hoped it was Hajrija.

The boots which appeared on the stairs belonged to Docherty.

"You three could have a look at that map and come up with some
suggestions for tonight," he said, working the case containing the PRC
319 out of his bergen.

"I am, boss," Chris said in an aggrieved tone.

Docherty grinned.

"Sorry."  He went back up the stairs with the radio, and out into the
rapidly darkening street.  Not far away he found a large enough expanse
of open ground and set up the system, pointing the two tuning antennae
up into the western sky and searching out the correct frequency.  The
PRC 319 was capable of carrying voice transmissions, but Docherty
decided, mostly on instinct, to use the burst facility instead.  He
typed out "Tito calling Churchill' and sent it.  Almost instantaneously
the words "Churchill receiving' appeared on the tiny screen.

Docherty started typing with one finger.

"Tito group now in Zavik.  Stop.  No casualties.  Stop.  Our friend is
here.  Stop.  Rumours unjustified.  Stop.  Town under artillery attack
as of yesterday.  Stop.  Request helicopter extraction for seriously
wounded children, numbering nine as of today.  Stop.  Will expect reply
tomorrow 0700 GMT.  Out."

He packed up the set and squatted in the dark for an instant, looking
up at the dark line of hills across the valley.  Just one gun, he
thought.

Better one less than one more.

They left the town shortly after nine o'clock, eleven men and one
woman, walking in single file down the road which led up the valley to
the west.  Hajrija's presence was not appreciated by all the acceptance
she had won from her comrades in Sarajevo was only hearsay as far as
Reeve and his men were concerned -and Docherty had felt more than a
little reluctant when called as a witness to her competence.  He
suspected she was every bit as good a fighter as any in Reeve's
unprofessional army, but the look on Razor's face was not a pretty
sight.

The latter had already tried to dissuade her, and failed utterly.

"If you think I lie in bed all night waiting for you, you crazy,"
Hajrija had told him.  Now, walking along behind her, Razor was
consoling himself with the thought that at least she was thinking about
being in bed with him.

The twelve of them had a long way to go that night.  The fact that
Reeve and Chris had drawn up virtually identical plans of action might
have reflected their common SAS training, but it also pointed to the
paucity of options open to them.  There were two ways up the three
hundred-yard slopes opposite the town, one obvious, one not so obvious.
But any attacking force had first to cross the river, and here the
options were more limited.  With the road bridges already blown there
was only one spot close to the town where a force could ford the icy
waters with any ease, and if the Serbs had any sense at all they would
surely have night glasses trained in that direction, particularly on
the first night after beginning their bombardment.

So both the local ways up the slope were out.

Instead, the two planners had recommended a four mile walk up the
valley to another crossing spot.  From there they could climb up out of
the valley, and then undertake a wide, flanking march around to the
Serbs' rear.  Such an approach might be exhausting, but, Reeve and
Chris had both decided, offered the only reasonable chance of
surprise.

And with any luck they would also come across the road the Serbs must
have constructed to get the gun up to the top of the hill.  It wouldn't
do much good to take out one artillery piece if the enemy could just
bring up another.

The walk was long but for the most part uneventful.

The sky was full of broken cloud, and the quarter moon, when it rose,
was bright enough to facilitate track-finding on their way out of the
valley.  Up on the rolling plateau it was almost too bright, combining
with the snow to create a light that felt almost artificial.  To Razor,
walking at the rear, the column of black silhouettes against the
moonlit white hills seemed like a scene caught by a camera's flash and
then for ever frozen, locked in a denial of darkness.

It was almost three by the time they reached the Serbs' approach road.
It had been a mere footpath on Reeve's local map, but the Serbs had
widened and smoothed it, cutting down trees and inserting makeshift
vehicle-width wooden bridges where dips or water made them necessary.
Judging by the overlapping tracks in the snow they were making
considerable use of it.

When the party reached the first bridge Reeve sent two of his men
forward as advance scouts.  The rest waited while a third man rigged
the bridge with Czechmade Semtex part of Reeve's Livno Armoury haul and
set up a time fuse.  He did the same at the next, and the next, a
formidable piece of construction that spanned a narrow ravine.
Considering that Zavik had no apparent military value, Docherty
thought, the Serbs were taking a lot of trouble over it.  Someone had
to be very angry maybe Reeve had overdone it a little.  But it was
obviously too late to kiss and make up.

One of the two advance scouts returned with news of a sentry point a
couple of hundred yards further up the mountain.  The location had been
chosen well, he said:

the two men were on the far side of the next bridge, which crossed
another long ravine.  There was doubtless a way round it, but it would
take time to find.

"Are they just standing there?"  Reeve asked.

"No, they're sitting by one of those braziers warming their hands and
chattering on about what a bastard their commander is.

"Can we get a clean shot at them?  Are they holding their guns?"

"Yes and yes," the scout said.

Reeve turned to Docherty, who had been receiving a translation of all
this from Chris.

"We need your silenced MP5s," he said.

"What's the range?"  Docherty asked the scout, Chris translating the
question.

"From cover?  About sixty yards."

"Too far," Docherty said, cursing the fact that they'd only brought one
scope for the MP5s.

"Dame," he said,

'do you think you could take out two before the second man raises the
alarm?"

"No reason why not," the Wearsider said.  Two more, he thought.

The scout led him up the widened path, which now ran diagonally across
a forest-covered slope.  A few minutes later they were joining the
first scout, squatting down and staring out across a wide expanse of
snow at the bridge and the two men by their brazier.  It looked
ridiculous, the Dame thought, just these two men on the side of a
mountain sitting by a fire in the middle of the night.

He stood up, taking care to keep his body behind the trunk, and then
inched himself slowly outwards, the MP5's retractable stock cradled
against his shoulder, the telescopic sight to his right eye.  It didn't
feel as comfortable as the Accuracy International, but in this
situation silence was everything.  He examined the face of the Serb on
the right, lit by the orange fire and big enough to fill the sight at
this range.

He shifted the aim to the left and found the other face, which was
laughing at something.  He moved back swiftly to the first face, trying
to accustom himself to the quick shift he would need.  He was too close
really:

a hundred yards further back would have been better.  Still, at that
distance the gun would be reaching the limits of its effective range.
And in any case he didn't fancy crawling back through the snow.

He felt easier moving from the right target to the left than vice
versa.  He aligned the cross-hairs on the side of the right hand man's
head, just above the ear.  Aim by not aiming, he told himself, and let
his grip slacken for a second.

Now.  He squeezed the trigger once, smoothly slid his aim to the left,
found the other target, squeezed again.  He lowered the gun, and
confirmed with his naked eye what his brain already knew.

Both men were dead.

One of the two scouts was already scurrying back through the snow to
collect the rest.

The other was hurrying forward to check out his marksmanship.  The Dame
walked forward to join him, and they were both warming their hands on
the brazier when the main party caught up with them.

Once the bridge had been rigged they resumed their climb, again through
an expanse of forest.  They were nearing the top now, but the scouts
ranging fifty yards or so ahead found no more sentries.

Instead they found a large clearing just below the ridge top.  The gun
which had done such damage sat to one side on its reinforced base, and
the breakdown lorry which had presumably towed it up the mountain stood
close by.  On the other side of the clearing three transit vans were
parked in a line, two of them in darkness, one showing a faint aura of
light.  Barely audible music seemed to be coming from the latter.

The snow had been mostly swept away from the clearing and the embers of
a small fire were still glowing.  Cooking utensils sat in a pile, and a
pot had been filled with snow for whatever it was that Serb gunners
drank for their breakfast.

"What now?"  Docherty asked, as he and Reeve surveyed the scene from
just inside the trees.

"We can't take prisoners," Reeve said, looking at Docherty as if he was
expecting an argument.

Docherty had none.  These men were responsible for the children
screaming in Zavik's makeshift hospital.  And who knew what else,
either in the past or the future.

"Let's do it quietly though," he said.

"There may be more men on our route home, and I'd rather we surprised
them than the other way round."

"Semtex under each van, then," Reeve said, as if he was decorating a
stage.

"And one for the gun."

"A fifteen-minute fuse for the vans, a couple more for the gun,"
Docherty suggested.

Since both were demolition specialists, Reeve and the Dame supervised
the laying of the charges.  The latter approached the dimly lit van
with appropriate caution, but the two men inside seemed fast asleep,
oblivious to the Thin Lizzy tape playing on the van's stereo.  Even
outside the tightly shuttered van the smell of marijuana filled the
cold air.

In ten minutes they were finished and the twelve person patrol was on
its way again, crossing the ridge top and starting down the slope on
the quick route home.  Once again two men were sent ahead to scout for
the enemy.

The path wound steeply down through trees, and the going was easy
enough to suggest it had been used with some regularity in recent days.
After fourteen and a half minutes had passed on his watch Reeve halted
the column, and they all waited in silence, hoping that nothing had
gone wrong.

The first explosion was out by only two seconds, sending a yellow-white
flash into the sky behind them.

An image of the transit vans exploding in three simultaneous shafts of
light came to Docherty's mind, and in his imagination he looked across
the clearing to where the gun was still standing.

The second explosion was louder than the first, but not as spectacular.
With grim smiles on their faces, and renewed caution, the twelve
resumed their journey down the slope.  About ten minutes later they
emerged from a stand of trees to find the town spread out below them in
the moonlight.  Perhaps it was this which took the edge off their
alertness, or maybe it was just that everything had gone too smoothly.
Either way, they were halfway past the Serb observation platform before
they knew it was there.

It had been dug into the mountainside to give the Serbs a panoramic
view of the town and valley below, and the radio link with the camp on
the hilltop gave the gunners at least the option of directed fire.  The
explosions above had woken the two men who manned the platform, and the
failure of their efforts to raise their superiors had made them jumpy.
It might just be a lot of stoned fun going on up on the hill maybe
someone had fired a Croat from the gun or something but it might be
something dreamed up by the English lunatic in the town below.

They had been watching and waiting for several minutes, when the first
shadows walked into their line of sight.  Despite this, one Serb was
surprised enough to shout rather than shoot.  The other was either
quicker of thought or more prone to violence, because he opened up
immediately, killing one of Reeve's men, wounding another in the
shoulder and giving Razor a second parting in his dark hair.  The shock
made the Londoner slip on the snow, and he went down flat on his
back.

It seemed as if the whole party opened fire at the same moment, and in
retrospect Docherty reckoned it a minor miracle that no one had been
killed or wounded by friendly fire.  The observation post, though, was
riddled with enough bullets to kill ten, let alone two.  And any chance
of surprising any Serbs lower down the path had been shot just as
comprehensively.

Razor's scalp hurt like hell, but there wasn't much blood, and he
received some compensation from Hajrija's instant appearance at his
side as he lay in the snow.  Chris made quick examinations of both him
and the man with the shoulder wound, and found nothing which would
prevent them from walking.  The party resumed its downward progress,
with two men carrying the body of their dead friend.  Reeve and
Docherty spent the journey waiting for the scouts to report Serbs on
the path ahead, but if any had been deployed there, they had apparently
gone.  An hour before dawn the troop forded the river below the broken
bridge and re-entered the town.

The injured men were accompanied to the castle crypt, where Nena was
found dozing fitfully on one of the few empty mattresses.  After she
and Chris had applied the necessary dressings, Docherty took her to one
side, and told her he'd asked for nine of the children to be air-lifted
out.

"Why nine?"  she wanted to know.

"It seemed like a convincing number.  I don't think they'll come
anyway, but if they do, then we can ask them to take as many as you
think should go."

"Nine was a pretty good guess," she said looking round.

Her eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion, Docherty noticed.  He expected
his own were too.

"If they don't come, most of those nine are going to die," she said
quietly.

It was getting lighter outside as Docherty walked back down to the
hostel.  Most of the townspeople were probably in their basements by
now, waiting for the bombardment to resume.  Well, they would be spared
that, at least for the time it took the Serbs to repair their road,
replace their personnel and find another gun.  Weeks, he guessed.  And
then Reeve would go back up the mountain and destroy that one too.

The really different thing about this war, Docherty thought, was the
lack of air power involved.  It had to be the first war in Europe since
World War One in which the aeroplane hadn't played a decisive role.

Maybe that explained the medieval feel of the whole business.

It didn't explain crucifixions, though.

At the hostel he found all the others had disappeared to their beds,
keen to grab back at least some of the sleeping hours they had lost.
Docherty made himself some tea and sat in the basement room, thinking
about his children, and wondering what they would think of their
father's life when they were old enough to understand it.  If they ever
were, he thought wryly.  When it came to the bigger picture he seemed
to grow more confused as he got older, not less.

A sign of growing wisdom, as Liam McCall would say.  But not an excuse
to stop looking.

At five to eight he collected the PRC 319 and went back up the hill to
set it up for reception.  At precisely 0800 Central European Time the
words "Churchill calling Tito' appeared on the tiny screen.

"Tito receiving' Docherty typed out, and waited, hoping against hope.

"Tito group return base soonest.  Stop.  Require Friend to accompany.
Stop.

No air assistance possible.  Out."

"Bastards," Docherty murmured.

He packed up the radio and took it back to the hostel, then went up to
the castle to tell Nena the bad news.  She took it more stoically than
he expected, but then he guessed she was used to such news after her
months working in the Sarajevo hospital.  Back at the hostel he set his
alarm for noon, and sank into an exhausted sleep.

Almost instantly, it seemed, he was woken by the clock.  The sun was
shining full on his face, and outside he could hear people talking.
From the window he could see two women walking away down the street, as
if the previous day's bombardment had been just a bad dream.

He went to wake the others, but found their rooms empty.

Chris and Razor were in the basement, drinking tea and waiting for him.
Both looked pointedly at their watches as he came in.

Docherty poured himself a cup and sat down.

"I've got bad news," he began.

"We know, boss," Razor said.

"Nena told us.  But Reeve has had an idea."

"That sounds ominous," Docherty murmured, just as Reeve himself
appeared on the stairs, the Dame behind him.

"It seems to be OK," the Wearsider said.

"Both cab windows are broken, so it's going to be a bit on the cold
side "What's OK?"  Docherty asked.

"The cigarette lorry," Reeve explained.

"The one you're taking the kids to Split in."

Docherty looked at Razor, whose bandaged head gave him the look of a
punk pirate.

"It's the only way, boss.  If we can't fly the kids out, we have to
drive them out, it's as simple as that."

Docherty supposed it was.

"And we've got something else to show you," Reeve said.

They all trooped up the stairs and out into the Street.  In front of
the lorry stood an extremely basic-looking armoured car one which
looked old enough to have done service with Rommel in the desert.  Its
gun was obviously long gone, but it looked robust enough to shoot
Niagara Falls.  More surprisingly, given its age, the white vehicle
bore the letters UN on its side.

"I told Reeve we had UN berets," Razor explained.

"We'd already painted it white for winter camouflage," Reeve added,
'but the logo is still wet."

Docherty looked round at them.

"Let me get this straight.  We're going to use this antique to escort a
lorry load of children to Split, passing through at least one Serb
blockade, and possibly several others, en route?"

"That's about it," Reeve agreed.

Docherty shook his head and smiled.

"I like it."

"We thought you would," Razor said.

"I assume there's no problem with fuel?"

"Nope."

"So who's coming on this jaunt?"

It was Reeve who answered.

"Eight children and two adults they're a husband and wife, and they're
in their seventies.  Their basement ceiling collapsed on them
yesterday.  And Hajrija wants to come with you.

She thinks it'll be easier to get back to Sarajevo from Split."

"What about Nena?"

"She's staying here.  She says there's nothing more she can do for the
ones you're taking, and you have Chris and Razor.  Zavik needs her
more."

And so do you and the kids, Docherty thought.  He was glad they would
at least have the chance to try again.

"When do we leave?"  he asked.

"You're the boss," Razor said.

Night or day, Docherty wondered.  He was fed up with darkness.

"Dawn tomorrow," he decided.

Later that evening Docherty visited Nena at her parents' home.  She had
managed to catch a few hours' sleep, and looked more like the woman he
had known in years gone by, one with life in her eyes and a tendency to
laugh.  Not surprisingly, the children were still intent on
monopolizing their mother, and there was not much opportunity for the
two adults to share a serious conversation.

But there was one thing Docherty felt he had to say.

"If you ever decide to send the children out of here," he said, 'but
can't or don't want to leave yourself, then we'll be happy to look
after them for you."

"I can't imagine letting them go again," she said, 'but thank you."

"And as for Reeve," Docherty said, 'you know him better than I do ..

"I think we know different sides."

"Aye, maybe.  But I know he's missed you, because he told me so.  What
that means..  ."  He shrugged.

"Just thought I'd pass it on."

She smiled ruefully at him.

"We'll see," she said, just as her son imposed his head between theirs
and began talking nineteen to the dozen.

An hour later Docherty and Reeve were drinking each other's health in
Rena's Cafe.

"Didn't London even bother to mention me?"  Reeve wanted to know.

"Oh aye, they bothered.

"Require Friend to accompany."  The friend is you."

"What do they expect you to do tie me up and throw me over your
shoulder?"

"Christ knows.  Who bloody cares?"

"What are you going to tell them?"

Docherty grunted.

"That you're more valuable here than they'll ever be anywhere.  And
that they can go fuck themselves."

Reeve grinned.

"You know, I didn't think it was possible that you could grow more
insubordinate with age, but you've managed it."  He raised his glass.

"Here's to the journey."

The sun was still hidden behind the mountains, the town still far from
awake, as the convoy began threading its way out through Zavik's narrow
streets towards the road that ran west up the valley.  A Renault Five
containing Reeve and three of his men led the way, followed by Docherty
and the Dame in the armoured car, with the lorry bringing up the rear.
Razor was driving the lorry, while Chris and Hajrija served in the back
as combination nurses and tail-gunners.

The number of passengers had dropped over the past twenty four hours.
The old woman had passed away in the night, and her husband's
determination to live seemed to have died with her.  It had taken all
of Nena's persuasive powers to get him aboard the lorry.

One of the nine children had also died, and another two were withdrawn
by parents unable to bear the thought of dispatching their only child
into the void beyond the valley.  Of the six that remained, four had
been orphans since the first hour of the Serb bombardment forty-eight
hours before, and the other two came from large families.

Half a mile outside the town the convoy passed through the inner ring
of Zavik's de fences an apparently unmanned checkpoint where the road
was hemmed in between a steep cliff and the river.  The guards, Reeve
had told them, were stationed out of sight above the road.  With a
flick of a detonator switch they could send half the cliff down on top
of any hostile intruder.

They continued on up the winding valley, with all concerned keeping
their eyes skinned for signs of an enemy presence.  Reeve had sent
scouts back up the mountain the day before, and they had found vultures
hovering over the three burnt-out transit vans, but no sign that the
Serbs below had discovered what had happened to their mountaintop
unit.

It was this chronic lack of coordination between the various bands of
irregulars which gave Docherty hope for the break-out attempt.  As long
as they could deal with the enemy piecemeal, they had a fighting chance
of making the coast.  But if one band managed to get word back to
another, and give the other time to prepare a hot reception, then
getting through might well prove impossible.  There were simply too few
of them, particularly since they also had six children to protect.

The convoy reached the checkpoint which marked the outer ring of
Zavik's de fences

Here the road was constrained between trees and the river, and two of
the former had been cut down to block the road.

The ropes and pulleys used to lift them aside were operated by men
hidden deep in the trees a technique which Docherty remembered Reeve
using in a jungle exercise in Brunei twenty years before.

Sunlight was now slipping down the slopes across the river, and the
only definite Serb checkpoint was not much more than a mile away.

According to Reeve, it was usually manned by only three or four men,
and then only out of habit.  Why, after all, would anyone want to break
out of Zavik into Serb territory?

The convoy came to a halt a quarter of a mile from the checkpoint, and
the occupants of the Renault transferred to the armoured car.  The
vehicle was quite spacious inside, its Soviet makers having dispensed
with luxuries like seats and equipment, but with six men aboard it was
still something of a tight squeeze.

Docherty was reminded of the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers' A
Night at the Opera, and hoped that they would burst out with as much
alacrity, and rather more control, when the time came.

The armoured car rumbled down the road with its hatch down, the Dame
peering forward through the open slit as he drove.  Some way behind,
Razor was edging the lorry slowly forward, letting the distance between
the two vehicles lengthen.

As the leading one rounded a bend in the valley, the Dame saw the
checkpoint up ahead.  No attempt had been made to block the way, but
two cars were parked between the road and a house set back from it.
There were no people in sight.

The Dame picked up speed slightly, causing the armoured car to shudder
violently for a second.  The sound of its passage would be enough to
wake the dead, he thought.

It woke the Serbs.  One man half-clambered, half-fell out of one of the
car doors, a rifle in his hand.  He stood there for a moment, peering
at the strange white object rumbling towards him, and then opened his
mouth wide, presumably to shout.  It was impossible to hear anything
above the din of the armoured car.

As if by magic, three other figures emerged from the two cars at the
exact same moment.  Two were carrying

Kalashnikovs, one an SMG.  The Dame relayed this information to the men
crowded in behind him.  It was a pity the armoured car had no gun, the
Dame thought, as he slowed the vehicle down.

The four Serbs had fanned out like Western gunfighters, but the
expressions on their faces were more amused than hostile.  The Dame
could almost hear the thought running through their minds: the fucking
UN busybodies had gone and got themselves lost in the mountains.

The armoured car came to a full stop.

"They're ten yards away," the Dame said, 'at ten o'clock, eleven
o'clock, noon and two o'clock.  The man at eleven o'clock has the

SMG."

"Ready?"  Docherty asked.

"Steady.  Go!"

In the same instant both side doors and the hatch swung open.  Docherty
was up through the latter like a jack-in-the-box, swinging the Browning
toward the eleven o'clock position, fine-tuning his aim and firing
before the man with the sub-machine-gun had time to raise it.  He fell
back, hitting the ground with the SMG still gripped in his lifeless
hand.

Less than a second later the other three had joined him in death. Reeve
and his three men had thrown themselves out through the side doors, and
before the surprise had time to die on the faces of the Serbs, the
attackers had rolled to a halt in the snow, guns already blazing.

The sound of the river re-emerged as the echoes of gunfire faded down
the valley.  Reeve and his men went to check out the house but, as
expected, found no one there.  Razor, meanwhile, was bringing the lorry
forward on Docherty's signal.

"You know where you're going, then?"  Reeve said.

"When you get to the crossroads go left, follow that road for about
twelve miles and you'll reach the main road to the coast.  Once you're
on that I reckon your chances of getting hassled are less, especially
with such a finely drawn UN logo.  You could be in Split for lunch."

Docherty offered Reeve his hand, wondering if they'd ever see each
other again.

"Good luck, Reeve," he said.

"Seconded," Razor said from the lorry cab.

You too.  Now get going."

Docherty climbed back aboard the armoured car and gave the Dame the
nod.  With a great whoosh of black smoke the vehicle started off, the
lorry behind it.  In the latter's side mirror Razor had a last glance
of Reeve and his men walking back down the valley to where they had
left the Renault.

Behind them the bodies of the four Serbs lay sprawled and already
forgotten in the snow.

The road continued up the ever-narrowing valley, until slopes seemed to
rise up ahead of them as well as to either side.  The crossroads
finally appeared.  The straight-ahead road was no more than a dirt
track, the one across the river rendered unusable by the destruction of
the bridge which had carried it.

Their road climbed up through the trees in a succession of hairpin
bends, emerging on to a snow swept plateau.

The armoured car, which had struggled up the steep incline, now found a
new lease of life, and Docherty's worries about its staying power
receded somewhat.  He was riding with his balaclava-clad head out of
the hatch, prepared to endure the stinging-cold wind if it meant having
advance warning of any trouble on the road up ahead.

For the first few miles he might have been travelling in Antarctica.
There were no signs of human habitation;

the road itself offered the only proof that humans had ever passed that
way.  A polar bear sunning itself in a meadow wouldn't have seemed out
of place.

They soon left the barren heights, winding their way down into another
forested valley.  The armoured car enjoyed descending even more than
riding on the flat, and for the next few miles they made excellent
speed.  Docherty was just beginning to take Reeve's idea of lunch in
Split seriously when disaster struck.

The two vehicles were nearing the bottom of a long, curving slope when
the armoured car suffered a tremendous jolt, strong enough to almost
launch Docherty out through the hatch.  The PC was still thanking his
lucky stars that no permanent damage had been done to the vehicle when
the horn sounded behind them.

The lorry was limping to a halt by the side of the road.

Docherty walked back to where Razor was examining the underside of the
vehicle.

The Londoner got back to his feet with a grim look on his face.

"The front axle's fucked," he said.

"I'm sorry, boss, I didn't see the trench until it was too late."

"Neither did the Dame," Docherty said, looking around.

The road ran uphill in both directions, and everything else was
forested slope.  The wind had got up, and it seemed to have grown
appreciably colder since their departure from Zavik.  He wondered what
the fuck were they going to do now.

Chris emerged from the back of the lorry looking sombre.

"One of the kids got a knock on the head where he was already wounded,"
he reported.

"Doesn't look good."

Razor went to take a look, leaving the other three SAS men standing in
the road.

"Any suggestions?"

Docherty asked.

"Could we all get into the armoured car?"  Chris asked.

"Not unless you're into breaking the number of people in an armoured
car record.  You might be able to get all the patients in, but not in
the sort of comfort they'd need to survive a sixty-mile journey.  And
we'd be sitting ducks on top."

"We could take the armoured car and go looking for another lorry," the
Dame suggested.

"How far are we from the main road?"  Chris asked.

"About nine miles last time I looked," Docherty said, taking the map
out of his pocket and unfolding it.

"Yeah, I reckon we're about here," he said, pointing with a finger.
Between seven and nine miles."

"Boss, I think someone's going to have to walk," Chris said.

"The temperature's going down like a stone.  I was already getting
worried about how cold it was in the back of that lorry, and with this
wind .. . I think the kids should be moved into the armoured car, where
there's a heater."

Docherty blew into the hands he was holding over his nose.

"OK," he said eventually.

"I can't think of a better plan.  Can either of you?"  he asked Razor
and Hajrija, who had just appeared beside them.

They couldn't, and for the next fifteen minutes Hajrija and the four
SAS men ferried the wounded from one vehicle to the other, with Chris
dividing up the small space between them, and keeping up a constant
conversation with each child as he did so.

The old man, once he realized how small the space was, adamantly
refused to take up any of it.  It took an almost superhuman effort on
Hajrija's part to make him sit in the cab of the lorry, whose heater
was fighting a losing battle with the broken windows.

"Say, three hours to get there, and, at best, twenty minutes to get
back," Docherty told those who were staying.

He and the Dame set off up the road, one ten yards behind the other,
their MP5s cradled in their arms.

Once they were gone Razor and Hajrija took up stations about a hundred
yards either side of the stranded vehicles.

They had no idea what the chances of traffic were, but there had to be
some, and anything which passed would inevitably see both lorry and
armoured car.

It might have been possible to get the latter off the road, but only at
the expense of either lengthening the ferrying of the children or
jolting them around inside.

Chris was left to look after them, which presented some difficulty.
There was no room for him to get in with them, and he didn't think it
would be wise to shut them up in the dark, no matter how warm they
might then be.  He compromised by keeping the hatch open, and talking
to them through it.

It was mostly a one-sided conversation.  Nearly all the children were
in considerable pain, and their powers of concentration greatly
diminished.

What amazed Chris was their fortitude though none was older than ten he
heard no whining and saw very few tears.  While telling a funny story
he even had the feeling that some of the children were forcing
themselves to smile out of sheer generosity.

As he looked down at their upturned faces, eyes bright in the gloom of
the armoured car's belly, he had the feeling that here was a sight
every soldier should see.

And it tore at his heart.

As the morning passed Docherty and the Dame ate up the miles.  The road
ran roughly south down the widening valley, keeping close to the river,
and such houses as they saw in the distance were perched on the lower
slopes.  Several times the PC thought he saw far-off moving figures,
but none appeared before them on the road, and no vehicles passed in
either direction.

After an hour and a half's walking they found themselves looking down
on a village which straddled the road, and which Docherty thought it
prudent to bypass.  The resulting trudge across forested slopes added
an extra hour, and it was almost eleven o'clock before they came in
sight of their destination.  From a convenient hilltop they surveyed
the cluster of buildings which marked the spot where their road met the
main highway to Split.

One had been a garage, and one of the others probably a roadside
restaurant.

Maybe it still was, because two lorries were standing outside it.
Through the binoculars Docherty could see that there was no one in
either cab.  Nor could he see any light or sign of life through the
building's windows.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that any
approach would involve a ten-minute walk across open country.  The two
men lay there in the snow, considering the situation.  Another lorry
came into view on the main road, a large articulated vehicle, and drove
through the junction in the direction of the coast.  A man appeared in
the doorway of the supposed restaurant, looked out, and then
disappeared back inside.

"We could wait for dark, boss," the Dame said doubtfully, 'but the
lorries might be gone by then."

"And we can't leave the others stuck on an open road for the whole
day," Docherty said.

"I'm afraid we don't have many options where this one's concerned."

The Dame smiled to himself, "Then let's go, boss."

"Aye, but by the road, I think.  Let's just be two lonely soldiers
trudging homewards in the snow.

"Pity we don't know any of those Serb songs your mate Reeve was talking
about."

"I want us to look natural, not wake up the town."

They worked their way back to the road and started off down the slight
slope towards the junction.  There were fields on either side, with a
few bare trees by the banks of a meandering stream.  A large, black
bird suddenly detached itself from a branch, and whirled up into the
sky, cawing loudly.

The sound of an approaching vehicle grew louder, and then came into
view to the right.  It was another large lorry, and like its
predecessor, sped on through the junction.  If there was no checkpoint
here, Docherty thought, then there was no reason for there to be any
soldiers.

They crossed the stream by a stone bridge and left the road, working
their way along behind the buildings that faced the main highway. These
were fairly new affairs, long and windowless.  Agricultural storage
sheds of some sort, Docherty guessed.  He halted at the end of the
second, dropped to his haunches, and inched an eye round the corner. 
As he expected, the restaurant was visible across the highway. No name
or sign was visible, but a Coca-Cola sign hung drunkenly from a single
fixing beside twin entrance doors.  The two lorries were parked side by
side and roughly parallel to the highway, their rear ends no more than
five yards from the doorway.

He gave the Dame the hand signal for follow, and slipped across the
gap.  The next building looked like someone's house, but as was the
case with so many of the Bosnian houses they had seen, no one seemed to
be at home.  They trudged their way through the untouched accumulation
of winter snow, pushed aside an already rickety fence, and reached the
next gap.

Again Docherty edged his eye round the corner.  This time part of a
disused garage was in view two oldfashioned petrol pumps wearing what
looked like hats of snow.

They moved cautiously down the gap between the two houses, to where
they could get a view up and down the highway.  As Docherty had hoped,
the doors and windows in the front of the restaurant were hidden from
view by the two lorries.

The two SAS men jogged across the highway, Docherty keeping an open eye
to the left, the Dame doing the same to the right.  No one was in
sight.

Another ghost town, Docherty thought.  Or at least he hoped it was.

They reached the space between the cabs of the two lorries.  While the
Dame kept guard Docherty hoisted himself up to see if there was a key
in the ignition of the first lorry.  There wasn't, but there was in the
second.  He took off his gloves and felt the bonnet.  It seemed faintly
warm.

"Check it out," he whispered to the Dame, and moved down between the
two vehicles towards their rears.  He sank to his haunches so that he
could see the bottom half of the restaurant's front door.

Behind him, the Dame climbed up into the cab and released the bonnet
lock.  It sprang loose with a sharp clunk.  He sat there for a few
seconds, ears straining for a sign that someone had heard, and then
climbed back down.  He leaned the MP5 up against a wheel and pushed up
the bonnet.  The engine was hot to the touch.  He pushed the bonnet
gently back down, just as the men emerged from the side door of the
restaurant.

It all happened very quickly.

As one man shouted something in an indignant voice, the Dame considered
and rejected the option of diving for the MP5.  Maybe one of the Serbs
was telepathic, because at that moment he saw the 5MG, and pulled his
AK47 into the firing position, screaming something as he did so.  By
this time the Dame's Browning was clearing the holster on his right
thigh.

The two guns fired simultaneously, the Dame's 'double tap' piercing the
man's upper trunk as his automatic burst stitched fire across the
Dame's chest.

The Wearsider was already going down as the other Serbs opened up.

About five seconds had elapsed since the first shout and Docherty had
only moved a few yards down the corridor between the lorries.  He saw
the Dame fall, and sank to the ground himself.  Six legs were visible
beneath the lorry, and he opened up on them with the

MP5.

Cries of pain told him he had hit at least some of them but he was
already rolling forward, under the lorry closest to the restaurant and
out into the gap between the two.  The Serbs leapt into view, two of
them already down, one still on his feet.  As the six eyes flashed
towards him he opened up again with the silenced MP5, knocking the
third man back across the other two.

He rolled again, into a small snowdrift at the foot of the restaurant
wall, but no bullets came his way.  As he got to his feet, he heard
sounds through the wall behind him.  He swung the MP5 round towards the
front door just as it swung open, and a child stepped out.  Somehow he
didn't squeeze the trigger.

A voice shouted a question in a foreign language.  A woman's voice.

Docherty strode across to the door, the small boy retreating before
him, and edged his eye around the frame.  A blonde woman was standing
by a pile of chairs and table, frozen to the spot.  She suddenly
started screaming at him, though whether in anger or fear Docherty
couldn't tell.  He marched past her, and found the side door they had
neglected to notice.

Outside the dead Serbs lay twisted together.  Like the stupid tattoo
they were all wearing, Docherty thought.

Solidarity hadn't saved these Serbs.

He glanced up and down the highway and saw nothing.  The Dame was still
breathing, but with difficulty and not, Docherty guessed, for long.
Even if the heart had been spared the lungs seemed to have been
shredded.

He lifted the Wearsider's body up into the cab, and propped him up in
the driving seat with the aid of the safety belt.  Then he took the MP5
and burst the other lorry's rear tyres.

As Docherty clambered back up into the cab the Dame's eyes seemed to
flicker open briefly, and what could even have been a smile twitched at
his lips.

Then the eyes closed again.  Docherty felt the carotid artery.  The
Dame was dead.

As he let in the clutch the door of the restaurant burst back open, and
the child stumbled out.  He had come to wave goodbye.

His mouth set in a grim line, Docherty hurled the lorry as fast as he
could down the treacherous road.

He knew there was nothing to be gained from blaming himself for the
Dame's death, but he couldn't help doing so.  How could he have missed
the side door?

How could either of them?

Just concentrate on the job, he told himself.  He could wallow in guilt
later.

There was no choice but to drive through the village they had avoided
on the way down.  He roared through faster than the road warranted, but
no one stepped out with an upraised hand, and no bullets pursued him.
The village was alive, though, and he saw several people watch the
lorry go by, their bodies still and their expressions vacant, as if
they feared doing something which would cause him to stop.

Less than twenty minutes had passed when he found himself driving down
through the forest towards the armoured car and lorry.  He flashed the
headlights twice as he approached, and Razor materialized from behind a
tree, a smile on his face.

"Hiya, boss," he said, and then he saw the Dame.

"Oh shit," he murmured, closing his eyes for a moment.

"Aye," Docherty agreed.

"Come on, let's get out of this fucking country."

With Razor on the running board, the lorry rolled on down the last
hundred yards.

Chris leapt down from the armoured car and came across to meet it.

"The clock beat the Dame," Razor said quietly, stepping to the
ground.

Chris stopped in his tracks, opened his mouth to say something, and
then saw his friend propped up in the seat.  He walked round to the
other side and looked at him.  Docherty had closed the Dame's eyes and
the Wearsider seemed strangely at peace, as if he'd finally come to
terms with something.

"We'll mourn him later," Docherty's voice said in his ear.

Chris nodded.

"Goodbye, mate," he said to the dead man, and turned away.

"Razor, go and get Hajrija," Docherty ordered.

"How are the children?"  he asked Chris.

"As well as can be expected.  Better, in fact."

"Well, let's start shifting them."  As he walked round to the back of
the lorry it occurred to him that he had no idea what was inside it. He
swung one of the doors open to reveal wall-to-wall pinball machines.

"Christ almighty," Docherty muttered.  Of all the things he'd seen
since landing in Split this took the biscuit.  In the middle of a
medieval war someone had been scouring the country and presumably
restaurants like the one he'd just returned from and either buying up
or stealing pinball machines.

A sudden rage filled him, and he leapt up into the lorry and began
tearing the restraining ropes from the mute machines.  The first one
crashed down into the road, and the second followed.  Soon there was a
pile rising up beneath the tailgate, and he had to move the lorry
forward to free it from their grasp.

He sat in the cab for a few seconds, letting the rage subside.

"You OK, boss?"  Razor asked him through the open window.

"Aye," Docherty said.  He wanted to see Isabel, he thought.  He wanted
to see her that very moment.

It wasn't possible, so he got down from the cab and helped ferry the
children from the armoured car to their new temporary home.

"What about the Dame?"  Chris asked when they were finished.

"Wrap him in his sleeping bag, and put him in with the kids," Docherty
decided.  He was wondering whether it was worth taking the armoured car
any further.  It really needed a crew of two a navigator and a driver
and he wanted both Chris and Razor in the same vehicle as the children.
Hajrija, when asked, said she was willing to try driving, but no, she
had never actually driven anything, even a car.

There was also the chance of the ludicrous UN camouflage doing more
harm than good.  Anyone with half a brain wouldn't be fooled for more
than a few seconds, and anyone in a real UN vehicle might decide the
deception had hostile intent.  Besides, driving along in the damn thing
felt a bit like robbing orphans in a Mother Teresa mask.

He decided to abandon it, along with the mound of pinball machines. The
old man too was left behind, in the cab of the broken lorry where he
had fallen asleep and died.

With Razor at the wheel, Hajrija and Docherty beside him in the front
seat, and Chris in the back, they set out once more.  It was now the
middle of the afternoon, and the wind had dropped again, leaving a
slowly moving cloud mass to block out the sun.

They reached the junction within an hour of Docherty's last visit.
Everyone had their guns at the ready as Razor turned on to the highway,
but nothing moved in the cluster of buildings.  The four dead men still
lay in their tangled pile, and Docherty could see no sign of the woman
or child.

The road soon started climbing up across a vast plateau, a thin strip
between a sea of snow and the leaden sky.  Two other lorries appeared,
growing from dots in the distance to juggernauts thundering by, their
drivers staring straight ahead, not risking eye contact.

After not much more than an hour the road was winding down towards
Livno, and there they met their first checkpoint, manned by Croatian
regular army forces.  The officer in charge inspected their UN
accreditations, no doubt took note of the pale-blue berets, and
declined to make an issue of the fact that Hajrija was obviously only
along for the ride.  When he saw the children in the back, his face
even softened, and they were waved on through.

"So far so good," Razor said.

"And we're in Croat territory from now on, right?"

"Looks like it," Docherty agreed.  If it hadn't been for that one
mistake, they would all have survived.

There was now only one more mountain range to cross, and the road ran
steadily uphill, a huge lake below and to their left.  The character of
the country was changing too even under the snow this land seemed more
barren, with only a few twisted trees and sharp outcrops of dark rock
jutting up out of the white overlay.

"This is Hercegovina," Hajrija told them.

"There is nothing here," she added.

"Even the water is in rocks, you understand?"

It was limestone country, Docherty realized.  Where the rivers ran
underground and people went pot holing for reasons that only they
knew.

In the far distance he could see a large bird hovering in the air, and
wondered idly what it was.  Chris would know, he thought, and for a
passing moment even wondered whether to stop the lorry and let the
twitcher out of the back to identify it for him.  You're getting
senile, he told himself.  And that was yet another reason for this
being the last mission of his soldiering career.

"Boss," Razor said, interrupting the PC's reverie.

Docherty focused his attention on the two cars blocking their passage a
couple of hundred yards ahead.  The road was clinging to the side of a
bare valley, and all around them precipitous slopes either rose to the
sky or dropped to the depths.  A wooden cabin had been erected in a
rare piece of flat land adjoining the road, maybe as a hunting cabin,
maybe a roadside cafe.  From its roof fluttered the red-and-white
checked flag of the Croats.  Standing outside its doors was a transit
van which had been plastered with metal sheets, apparently by a gang of
deranged welders.

What the fuck was anyone doing up here?  Docherty asked himself.
Nothing good, was the likely answer.

He turned and rapped three times on the partition, giving Chris the
signal for possible danger.

Razor sized up the two cars blocking the road as he slowed the lorry.
They looked ripe for pushing aside, but to do so at speed might well
kill one or more of the children.

"Stop twenty yards short," Docherty told him, as the first figure
emerged from the cabin.

Like the men they'd seen in the Split restaurant he was dressed all in
black, from the polished boots to the peaked leather cap.

He was carrying an Uzi, as were the three identically dressed men who
followed him out through the door.

Four again, Docherty thought.

In this country the bastards did everything in fours.  He loosened his
anorak, checked the butt of the Browning in the cross-draw holster, and
stepped down to the road.

"United Nations," the leading Croat said, mouthing the two words as if
he had just learnt them.  He had short, dark hair and a handsome,
clean-shaven face.  Only the yellow teeth would have hindered a career
in Nazi propaganda films.

Docherty passed over the UN and Croat accreditations and examined the
three men behind the leader.  Between them they had enough intelligence
for a cabbage, he decided.  One was still listening to the Walkman
clipped to his belt.

"I speak English," the leader said, looking at Docherty.

"Good," the PC replied.  What do you want, he thought - a diploma?

"What is in truck?"  he asked.

"Sick children."

"I see," the leader said, and strode off up the road, only missing half
a step when he saw Hajrija in the cab.  Razor smiled down at him.

At the rear of the lorry Docherty called out a warning to Chris, and
slid the back door up.  The Croat surveyed the improvised ambulance.

"Where are children from?"  he asked.

"Many places," Docherty said.  He signalled with his eyes for Chris to
join them in the road.

The Croat walked back down the other side of the lorry and stared in at
Hajrija.  The other three men in black had moved closer, but the Uzis
were still loose in their hands.

"The woman is not United Nations," he said.

"Sheis..

"The children are Muslims," the Croat said.

"But you can go.  Only leave the woman."  He smiled up at Razor, who
smiled back at him.

There were a few pregnant seconds of silence.

"I said, leave the woman behind, motherfucker!"

Razor took Docherty's signal, pulled the Browning up from under the
window and shot the man through the forehead.

Docherty and Chris were both drawing their Brownings at the same
moment, the lessons of the Regiment's "Killing House' training ground
flashing through their minds, as they took out the three fumbling
targets in front of them.  Only one Uzi was fired, a short burst at the
sky, as its holder fell backwards.

Epilogue.

They arrived in Split early in the evening, with the sun hanging low
over the sea like a tourist postcard.  The children were passed over to
the care of the town's hospital, and hopes were high that all would
recover.

Where they would end up seemed to be anybody's guess.  Once fit,
Docherty guessed, they would just become one more group begging a home
from a reluctant rest of Europe.

The SAS men were made to wait almost thirty-six hours, without
explanation, for a flight home to the UK.  After enduring an
irritatingly lengthy stopover in Germany, they arrived at R.A.F Brize
Norton shortly after nine in the morning.  Rain was falling from a dull
sky as they walked across the tarmac.

Barney Davies was there to meet them, along with an MoD man in civilian
dress named Lavington.

Before the tired returnees knew what was happening they found
themselves being corralled into a small office.  A tray had been set
out with cups and a percolator full of coffee.

Docherty dropped his bergen on the floor.

"I'm going to ring my wife," he said, and started back for the door.

"Can you do that afterwards, please?"  the MoD man asked coldly.

Docherty stopped, turned and stared at him.

"She has already been informed that you're all right," Lavington
said.

"I want to hear her voice," Docherty said quietly, and walked out of
the office.

Lavington watched him go, a thoughtful look on his face, then turned
his attention to Hajrija.  Having apparently satisfied himself that she
wasn't a member of the SAS, he asked the others who she was and what
she was doing there.

"She wanted to see if England really was full of pricks like you,"
Razor told him, at which point Barney Davies suggested they all have
some coffee.

Out in the building's foyer Docherty was listening to the phone ring in
Liam McCall's Glasgow house.

"Hello?"  a voice answered in the familiar husky accent.

"Isabel," he said.

"Jamie," she said back, remembering how she'd felt when Barney Davies
rang her two evenings before.  Then she'd just uttered the two words
'dios gracias' and almost collapsed with relief.

"Where are you?"  she said now, her voice so happy it made him want to
sing.

"Brize Norton.  I'll be home tonight.  Somehow or other."

"I can't wait," she said.

A few minutes later he was walking back to the office, wondering if it
was worth even being polite.  Probably, he thought.  The others had
careers to think about.

He found everyone drinking coffee in strained silence.

After pouring himself a cup he sat down opposite Lavington.

"Let's get on with it, then," he said.

"Very well," the MoD man said stiffly.

"This is only a preliminary debriefing, of course.  First, where is
John Reeve?  Your orders were clear-to bring him home.

"He didn't want to come," Docherty said.

"And there was no way we could have brought him against his will, even
if I had thought that doing so was in anyone's best interests.

Which I did not."

Lavington pointed out that they were paid to obey the Crown, not
formulate policy on their own.  Docherty told him that in the SAS they
tended to believe that the man on the spot was usually the man best
placed to take decisions.

"John Reeve is looking after his children," he added, 'as any father
would."

"If you could get out with a lorry load of children," Lavington
insisted, 'then so could he."

"He also has a wife and her parents to worry about..."

"And a private army to lead."

"He has no such thing," Docherty lied.

"He may have given them some advice in the early days, but that's all.
And I might add that we didn't all get out with the children.  One of
my men is still on the plane, in a coffin."

Lavington looked at him.  He could see they were all tired, he said.
The debriefing would have to be postponed.  After telling Barney Davies
that he would call the next day the MoD man made his exit.

"Is that who sent us?"  Razor asked disgustedly.

"No, I sent you," Davies said.

"His masters sent the message you received in Zavik.  I'm sorry about
that, but the MoD and the politicians were adamant, and there was
nothing I could do."  He gave them a wintry smile.

"I assumed you would ignore the part about Reeve, unless he really did
need putting in a strait-jacket."

"He's one of the sanest men in Bosnia," Docherty said, 'though that's
not saying very much."

"And is he running an efficient private army?"  Davies asked.

Docherty grinned at him.

"What do you think?"

Three days later Docherty was back in Hereford for Corporal Damien
Robson's memorial service.  Many of the men who had served with him
were in attendance, including Chris and Razor.  Joss Wynwood, who had
led the patrol out of Colombia four years earlier, flew back from Hong
Kong to be there.

An appreciable number of family members had also driven down from
Sunderland, and after the service they were given a guided tour of the
Stirling Lines barracks by Docherty and Barney Davies.  Most walked
around with a sort of wide-eyed wonder, as if they couldn't believe
that their relation really had lived and worked there for the past
seven years.

From the conversations he had with several of them, Docherty got the
impression that the Dame, though undoubtedly much loved, had been even
more of a mystery to his family than he had been to his comrades in
the

SAS.

The day after the service Chris Martinson drove down through Hayon-Wye
and up into the Black Mountains.  He had binoculars and book with him,
but on this day his heart wasn't in it.  Even the sudden appearance of
a merlin only produced a brief burst of enthusiasm.

Over the last week he had been turning several important things over in
his mind, trying to arrange them in some sort of pattern which made
sense of his life, both now and in the future.

The Dame's death had not shocked him how could a soldier's death ever
be surprising?  but some of the things they had seen in Bosnia
continued to haunt him.  The Sarajevo hospital for one, and the faces
of the children they had brought out of Zavik and left to an uncertain
future in Split.

He was over thirty now, and more than half convinced that it was time
to consider a change of career.  He already possessed sufficient
medical skills to be useful in much of the Third World, and he had
written off for more information about how to turn these skills into
whatever qualifications he might need.

Chris didn't know how or why, but the time in Bosnia had tipped some
balance in his mind.  When it came down to it, he felt more comfortable
helping children than he did killing evil men.  He was not running away
from the world as it was.  He didn't just want out.  If anything, he
wanted in.

He looked up at the grey clouds scudding across the Welsh sky and
wondered about the bird life in India.  Or Africa.  Or anywhere he
could feel needed.

Razor was also aware that his life had reached a crossroads, and a
happy one at that.  He could still hardly believe that Hajrija had come
to England with him, or how much they had enjoyed each other in the
days that had followed.

He guessed he had the long wait at Split to thank.  If she hadn't read
all those English papers, and got so incensed at their reporting of the
war in her native country, then she might not have come.

"Why don't you go back to journalism, then?"  Docherty had suggested.

"Come back to England with us and start pestering them with the
truth."

Maybe she had just been waiting for the excuse, but she had come in any
case, and they had enjoyed what felt like a four-day honeymoon in a
Hereford hotel, emerging to eat and drink and ride round the wintry
countryside, going back in to make love and talk and make love again.

Razor couldn't remember ever feeling happier, and the only shadow on
this happiness was a slight but persistent sense of guilt.  How could
something so good, he asked himself, have come out of something so
bad?

A week or so later David Owen and Cyrus Vance came up with their peace
plan for Bosnia, which involved breaking the country into ten
semiautonomous and ethnically based cantons.  The central government,
although remaining in existence, would have little in the way of real
power.

John and Nena Reeve heard the news as they sat round the kitchen table
listening to the World Service.

"Maybe it means peace," Reeve said.

Nena disagreed, but she didn't say so.  Reeve had always had a child's
naivety when it came to politics.

They were both living in her parents' house, but despite parental
disapproval were not sharing his bed.

She had eventually told him the full story of what had happened to her,
almost as much to hear herself tell it as for him to hear.

He had not disbelieved her, or accused her of not resisting; he had not
behaved the way most of the Muslim women expected their men to behave.
For that she supposed she was grateful, but she had expected nothing
less, and rather hoped for more.

When it came down to it he didn't know how to react.  He wanted to
help, but he didn't know how to give himself, and that was all she
wanted.  He was still a child in more than politics, she reluctantly
admitted to herself.

She looked across the table at him, and he grinned at her.  This is the
child who saved a town, she thought.

* * *

The trouble with being a soldier, Docherty thought to himself, was that
you tended to see your comrades at their best and other people at their
worst.  Which, all in all, engendered a somewhat warped view of
humanity.

He stared out at the islands and highlands silhouetted by the rising
sun, and wondered whether humankind could claim any credit for its
collective sense of what was beautiful.

The family was on its way back from a long weekend in Harris, where
they had stayed with Docherty's friend, the retired priest Liam
McCall.

They had been lucky to hit one of those rare calms in the Hebrides'
winter storm: the children had been able to run wild on the beach
without being blown away to the mainland, and at night, while they
slept the sort of sleep only fresh air exercise could induce, the three
adults had been able to talk and work their way through a couple of
bottles of malt whisky.

Docherty had so far been reluctant, without really knowing why, to tell
his wife much of what had happened in Bosnia, but in Liam McCall's
cottage, with the two people he cared for most in the world ready to
listen, he found himself going through the whole story.

"The centre cannot hold .. mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," Liam
had murmured, quoting his beloved Yeats.

"Aye," Docherty had agreed.

"In Bosnia there was no sign of any centre that I could see."  He had
stared into the whisky glass and said, surprising himself:

"And I think I've lost my own, at least for a while."

"I lost mine a long time ago," Isabel had said softly.

"But you can live without one.  You can even love without one."

For a second he had felt almost terrified, catching a dreadful glimpse
of a world in which there was nothing to hang on to.  And then his eyes
had met Isabel's in a sharing that seemed infinitely sad.

Here now, on the deck of the ferry, with the sunlight dancing across
the waves, the love of his life by his side, and their children running
riot somewhere else on the ship, that world seemed far away.

But then the light was always brighter, coming out of the dark.