exposed runway, took us five lung-bursting minutes. We must have had at least a couple of mags emptied at us.
Once we’d got to the other side, Jerry went to find himself a new set of documents and I leaked back into the city. I saw him a couple of times afterwards in the Holiday Inn, but kept well away. I couldn’t stand him trying to thank me. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that I’d been saving my own skin, not his.
His stuff never made it back, and neither did Jason and the driver. I passed their two charred bodies and the burnt-out wreck of their car on the road about two weeks later.
The bus driver turned the wheel sharp left and Jerry’s head jerked to the side, but his eyes never left the runway. He had shrunk into his own little world. I could see him gazing across the tarmac, maybe picturing the razor-wire entanglements, the sandbag sangars, the white APCs full of UN troops trying to stop us, and the Serb fire arcing towards us under the floodlights. But we weren’t going to go over all that now. Sarajevo was still too tense for talk of politics and war and, besides, the general and his sidekick were taking up too much oxygen as it was.
New Dad turned to the young woman beside him.
‘General, have you met Liliana? Ministry of Internal Affairs?’
‘Oh, yes, rather.’ Liliana’s brown linen trouser suit must have cost her a packet on Fifth Avenue, and as far as the general was concerned, it was worth every penny. I could just imagine him leering at her over the tray of Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s cocktail party.
‘You’re with SFOR, General?’
‘Paddy’s military adviser, for my sins.’
No wonder the peace process had been like wading through treacle.
‘It seems to me that only the British are carrying out the captures,’ Liliana said with a coy smile. ‘You’re so very good at it, how come you haven’t yet captured Karadic?’
The general chuckled. ‘These chaps are jolly hard to ferret out, you know. Always on the move. But maybe that’s no bad thing, my dear. It’s best not to start with the most indigestible item on the menu. Go for something light to start with, what?’
I switched my attention back to Jerry: his eyes still hadn’t left the other side of the runway.
65
Monday, 13 October 2003
The bus hissed to a stop outside the terminal and we all filed off. The plebs, which included Jerry and me, herded themselves towards the one passport-control box that was open. The general and his chums with the blue diplomatic passports went straight through the Diplomats and SFOR channel. I hoped his luggage was still in Oberammergau.
As we joined the queue my eyes started to close; they felt like they’d been dipped in grit. It had been a long journey. The drive from Baghdad to Turkey had gone OK, apart from the moment our fixer tried to overtake an American armoured convoy. He’d realized his mistake when he received three warning shots across the bonnet.
At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the
Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.
The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.
The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible Mark. We hadn’t been able to get any in Vienna, so we made a deal: thirteen euros for the trip to the hotel – far more than the eight-K journey was worth. During the war it had been Deutschmarks everyone wanted. Now, it was euros. This had to be about the only area of the world that wasn’t much fussed about the dollar.
Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of
Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautiful: the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.
The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.
‘Where you from?’
In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.
He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’
Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.
It was my turn. ‘You American?’
‘Australian.’
Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.
66
We hit the main drag that paralleled the Miljacka. The broad dual carriageway was heaving with vehicles, and every other one was a VW Golf. Volkswagen had had a factory here before the war, and every man and his dog seemed to drive one.
The driver tore along Vojvode Putnika as if it was still Snipers’ Alley and he knew he was in somebody’s sights. The Serbs had enjoyed a good arc of fire from the high ground. Hundreds of Sarajevans had been killed in crashes as they drove through the city at 120 k.p.h.
Jerry was still in his own world as we drove past a host of new construction sites alongside bombed-out reminders of the past. One was the concrete skeleton of what had been a brand new old people’s home. The first pensioners had only just moved in when the Serbs started lobbing shells at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when I last saw it; even the recently erected billboards couldn’t cover up what had happened.
Despite everything, I liked Sarajevo. I always had. Like Baghdad, it was a grown-up place. It had been here
