death, could see the panicked groups at the water stand-pipes, the groups round market stalls, and the schoolchildren, and could decide on which to call down the shells of the heavy guns.
'You couldn't hide from it, could you?' Mister said.
'Only if you'd done a deal, Mister.' Atkins remembered how much the blue beret men had hated the warlords – Caco, Celo and Serif. 'Some could, because they did deals. Serif, yes, he'd fight one day a week, and six days a week he'd be trading across the front line, particularly before the tunnel was dug. Drugs, ammunition, jewellery if they could steal it, food, alcohol, they all went back and forth across the front line. That was the other side of the war… '
'Am I hearing you right, Atkins, ammunition?'
'The Serb warlords sold the Muslim warlords – the likes of Serif – ordnance that was fired back on their own men. They achieved power by holding the line, and made themselves rich by trading.'
Mister had straightened up and he stared hard at Atkins. 'You're telling me not to trust him?'
'Not as far as you can kick him, Mister. Here, you trust nobody.'
'Ink on paper?'
'Worthless… Nobody.'
Atkins saw, first time he'd seen it, a pensive scowl cutting Mister's face. He had engineered the occasion.
They could have gone to monuments in the city to the Ottoman time of greatness and seen mosques and galleries that were half a millennium old. They could have gone to the Imperial coffee-house, the interior unchanged since Austro-Hungarian rule. Instead, he had taken them to see the front line and had prepared the message he wanted to pass on. Mister was thinking.
They were walking back from the barracks' parade-ground, away from the gun slits and the view of Mister's bedroom far below. The Eagle wandered ahead of them then veered off the flagstones, his shoes sinking in the snow as he went to examine the marble of the memorial. Atkins had told them when they'd arrived that the memorial was for Tito's fighters killed in the world war.
Atkins shouted, a pressing, ruthless yell, 'Stop right there. Now, come back. Retrace your steps.
Exactly…'
For a moment the Eagle stood statue still. Then he turned, fear on his face.
'Put your feet precisely where you walked, and move.'
The Eagle came back to them. In the bright sunlight, in the crisp wind, the sweat dribbled on his forehead.
Step by step, through the snow, until he reached the flagstones.
Atkins said, 'This was a military position, it would have been mined. You were walking on snow. You didn't know what was under it – could have been flags, concrete or earth. If it had been earth there could have been mines. You never walk off-road here, or off the hard core – not if you want to keep your legs. Of course it's been 'cleared', but there's no such thing as guaranteed clearance, and won't be for a hundred years. Just don't go walkabout.'
They went in silence to the Toyota.
He drove them along a winding road, away from the memorial, that cut down into a valley. The traffic signs were now in Cyrillic script; he told them they were in Serb territory. They went past old women sitting on collapsible stools with big plastic bags by their knees. He said it was where they sold smuggled cigarettes from Italy, at eighty British pence a packet.
They went left and climbed, came to the crest of the hill. The road hugged the rim. Below them, again, was another view of the city. He drove on another hundred and fifty metres then pulled into what had once been a car park for a bungalow restaurant, but the building was wrecked and bullet-pocked, and its roof timbers were charred.
He slipped out of his seat and walked away from the Toyota. Mister and the Eagle followed him. He remembered watching, with image-intensifier binoculars handed him by French troops, a night attack up through the Jewish cemetery towards the trenches that were now in front of his feet. He stood on a narrow strip of cracked concrete. He had willed on, that night, those Muslim troops, civilians in ill-fitting uniforms and with outdated weapons, scrambling up the hill and advancing into the machine-gun fire from these trenches. He had shouted his support to them into the darkness, and they wouldn't have heard even the whisper of what he screamed over the volume and intensity of the gunfire. He thought of who he was now, and what he did now, and he spat the bile from his throat. He had not planned that memory or that thought.
'I can see the hotel, but I can't see my room,' Mister said.
The trenches were a metre wide and a metre and a half deep. Where the machine-guns had been sited, which had driven off that night attack, with the grenades and the bayonets, there were still heavy logs of pine laid flat to protect the Serb soldiers. The water in the pit of the trenches was frozen, and caught in the ice were dulled rusty cartridge cases. Further along, going east and in front of what had been the restaurant's conservatory dining area, the trench was reinforced by a twenty-metre length of half-moon concrete section. He could have told them, because it was what he had been told years back, that the section came from the Olympic Winter Games bobsleigh run, but he didn't bother.
Atkins said, 'The gunfire would have broken up their little kitchen gardens. Both sides grew cannabis plants right in front of their forward positions. The warlords, that's Serif and those on the Serb side, encouraged the planting of cannabis. They reckoned that stoned guys wouldn't think too much about the war, and they also reckoned they'd fight harder because they wouldn't want to abandon their crop.
Can you think what it was like up here in winter if you weren't drunk or stoned out of your mind? The little men fought, stoned, pissed and half dead with cold, and the big men – like Serif – got fat on their backs and their bodies. He's scum.'
'I do business anywhere I can find it, if the price is right.'
'I thought it might help you, Mister, to know where your new partner is coming from. I thought it might help you to know what sort of man he is, and what's his power base. He danced on graves… ' Atkins let his words die.
He turned. Neither of them had listened to him.
They were already walking back to the Toyota.
Didn't he know it? He was a fly in the spider's skein. He trotted after them to the vehicle.
'You all right, Atkins?'
'Never been better, Mister.'
'You know what? I reckon it's the tourist trail. They're doing the battlefield tour… It's not Utah or Gold Beach, or the Passchendaele Ridge or that farmhouse at Waterloo, but he's getting the Sarajevo scene. Don't you think?'
'How the hell do I know?'
'Just making conversation, sunshine… You'd be doing me a favour if you spat it,' Maggie said.
They were a clear quarter of a mile from where the Toyota was parked. Joey watched it through the binoculars.
He said, a recitation without feeling, 'I crossed a line. I broke every rule I'm supposed to abide by. I knew the illegality of what I asked for, and had other men who'd no scruples do what I was incapable of. I wanted it to happen.'
She shrugged. 'So that's all right, then – stop moaning.'
'What I did, and justified to myself, meant I walked outside my team.'
'Are you one of these 'enthusiasts'? We weed them out at our place. Even if they've fooled the recruitment board, we spot them and chuck them. Their feet don't touch the ground. Don't, please, tell me you're an enthusiast.'
'You've a good sneer… No, I don't think I am.'
'But it's justified, the nasty work? Right, right – you've a sister who died of drugs, overdosed?'
'No, I haven't.'
'What's the other hackneyed drop of tripe – oh, yes.
'My best friend got to be a pusher. That's why I'm a crusader against drugs.' Is that it?'
'I didn't have a best friend on Sierra Quebec Golf,'
