began to learn what Eric had died for.
Ten
Ziv Zakopan, 9:30 p.m.
Sophie Payne regained consciousness as the helicopter landed in the clearing beyond the trees. Pain tore at the lining of her stomach like talons; pain rattled in her lungs with every breath. For hours now she had drifted in a delirium where the voices of her son Peter and the terrorist named Michael blended with the face of her dead husband. I'm coming, Curtis, she told him, and was vaguely irritated by his impatience, by the way his looming form twisted and vanished before her eyes. It seemed desperately important that she reach for Peter; she clung to him, and held him tight, and felt his thin, little-boy bones tremble in her arms. And then, when the darkness cleared and Curt's face receded, she knew that it was young Jozsef she clasped, not her son, and that her filthy sweatshirt was damp with his sweat and spatters of blood. The boy was burning with fever.
When Vaclav killed the rotors. Otto and Krucevic carried her from the chopper.
Jozsef whimpered as she was taken from him — he clung to her like a small bird, as though he knew that he would never see her again — but in her illness she was no proof against the men's strength. She squeezed his hands tightly once in parting and felt him press something small and hard into her palm. The rabbits foot. He had given her his most precious possession. She clenched her fingers around it and did not look back.
They dumped her unceremoniously on the ground. She lay there, curled in the fetal position, thinking of water. Cool water that trickled down the throat, still tasting of the ice it had once been. Water that gurgled over stones in the paddock at Malvern. It had its own language, that stream, an inconsequential chatter of horses' mouths dipped and lapping, the scarlet flit of a cardinal's wing, the slow, sinuous glide of a trout. Leaves spiraling in an eddy and the puncture point of a raindrop, Peter's boats made of empty egg cartons, a toothpick for a mast. Sophie's parched throat ached with the taste of blood.
The thin beam of a pocket torch picked out a tumbled stile, a heap of scattered stones. Otto heaved the latter aside with a grunt. Beneath them was a manhole cover fashioned of solid iron. It took Otto and Krucevic pulling together to haul the thing out. Rust stained their hands corrosive orange. Then Otto turned and looked at her. He smiled.
Oh, Michael, Sophie thought uselessly, you were wrong. I am going to die at this man's hands.
Slung over Otto's shoulder in a fireman's carry, she flailed out with her fists against his back... but she might as well have been the summer rain in the paddock stream, for all that she diverted him from his course. He dropped feet first into the manhole, his face against a ladder, so that her dangling head and back filled the passage's remaining space. Her legs were pinned between the tunnel wall and Otto's chest. There was barely room for one large man, much less the burden he carried; Sophie's hair snagged on old concrete, she smelled dirt and mold and felt the small creatures that live in mold scatter at their passage. Where his shoulder jutted into her abdomen, pain shot upward and radiated, as severe as the contractions of labor. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. She could not wipe it away.
They went down and down, Krucevic following, maybe thirty feet into the earth until the dying darkness at the tunnel's mouth became impenetrable and the air was stale and decades cold.
Otto dumped her on the tunnel floor. She retched, whimpered, and vomited blood. Somewhere above, Jozsef lay dreaming in the field. She had done this to him with her violent fingers, she had dashed to the ground the drugs that could have saved him, and he had watched her, silent, with the mute submission of a child whose life has always been determined by other people.
Would she have risked so much if the boy were her son?
The passage before them had once been concrete, or something more akin to the earth, like stone. She could see nothing until Krucevic's flashlight played over the wall in front of her. An archway, perhaps five feet high, yawned like the mouth of a whale. Beyond it, only darkness and the fear that thrives in darkness. It reeked as a catacomb reeks, as all the dead spaces where civilization ends. Uncontrollably, Sophie began to shudder.
She had thought that the vials of crushed antibiotic would force Krucevic's hand, that to save his son he would abandon his mad quest to purify Europe. She had not reckoned with obsession. And now Jozsef was dying. His blood on her soul.
Otto dragged Sophie forward, past openings narrow as cannon ports in the cold stone walls. Krucevic stopped suddenly and shone his beam into one of them.
“Welcome to Ziv Zakopan, Mrs. Payne.”
Sophie squinted against the light, pain shooting through her eyeballs. The beam picked out a heap of skeletons, innumerable, splayed across the dirt floor of the low-ceilinged space. They had probably been shot, and died where they lay:
Half a century later she had a snapshot of how it had been the moment of their murder.
“What is this place?” she croaked.
“It is the most hallowed ground of sacrifice in Bosnia,” Krucevic replied, “which is saying a good-deal. Do you know what happened here fifty-eight years ago?”
“The war”
“The war.” Krucevic's laughter was brittle with contempt. “Mrs. Payne, there has been war in these hills for centuries. But in 1942, Ziv Zakopan was a Croat place. It was part of the Independent State of Croatia, which for three glorious years ruled this country.”
“Ustashe,” Sophie muttered.
“Ustashe, which in the Croatian language is another word for fascist. Yes, Mrs. Payne. Ziv Zakopan was established with the help of Nazi commanders and with the leadership of our great Ante Pavelic, the father of independent Croatia. We swept the Serb hordes out of Bosnia, we threw their women and children oft our cliffs, we converted the Orthodox to the one true Catholic faith, and then we sent them to meet their God. There are the camps that everyone knows about Jasenovac, near Zagreb, and Stara Gradiska but at Ziv Zakopan, we destroyed our worst enemies, the partisans ruled by Tito, the faithless ones. We left them here to rot in the bowels of the earth, already less than human. And the world did not care.”
“No,” Sophie protested. The pain was growing inside her like a swarm of bees, angry and intense, on the verge of bursting.
“We would have known. This place...”
“This place has been buried for half a century, and it will be buried long after your name is forgotten,” he said implacably.
“Do you think they remember history in your country, Mrs. Payne? Everyone who knew about Ziv Zakopan is dead. Except for me.”
Half a century. Of being classified as Missing, Presumed Dead. Of no one knowing. Her gaze met the hollow eye sockets of a skull, inches from her face, flooded with Krucevic's beam. A thousand jaws, gaping wide in terror. No one walking in the fields above had even heard these people scream.
“Do you know what it means in English Ziv Zakopan?” Krucevic stared into her fevered eyes. “Literally it means, 'buried alive.' But a more elegant translation might be “Living Grave,” Mrs. Payne.”
Sophie knew, now, why she was here.
Otto dragged her away from the charnel pit.
They reached what must have been the central room, the command center, twelve feet by twenty, with two wooden tables and a scattering of chairs, some broken and canted on their sides. Krucevic stopped short in the entryway, sliding the beam around the walls, his breath rapid now and shallow with excitement.
“The Kommandant lived in Sarajevo, but his days were spent here his days and many of his nights. Underground, all hours are the same.”
“You can't know that. You're older than I am, but you probably weren't even born in World War Two.”
“I was three when the Kommandant was taken. Old enough to remember the door to the tunnel, to remember these fields.”
“Your father?” Sophie gasped.
“He denied them the final victory, Mrs. Payne. He died in captivity, by his own hand.” Impossible now to read
