He learned another thing about war reporters: they liked to tease anyone who didn’t have the gene. When Jeff caught sight of the plane they’d be getting on he said, “Christ, it’s a Yak-40. You know the safety record of these things is abysmal.”
John said, “We’ll be fine as long as the crew isn’t—”
“Ukrainian?”
“Oh man, are they fucking Ukrainian? Shit, we’re screwed.”
Roberta the columnist looked unhappy. Mark tried to be impervious, but he had to admit that the scruffy pilot, copilot, and mechanic all looked like hard-drinking muleteers. He could imagine one of them whacking a faulty altimeter with a wrench, then giving the others a grinning thumbs-up.
“UN-issue, right?” Jeff was pointing at the blue protective vest someone had handed Mark that morning at headquarters.
“Yes.”
“Look, you should know, those UN vests suck. They won’t stop a high-powered round. You need ceramic panels, like mine has.” He unbuttoned the top of his shirt to show Mark a few inches of gleaming black armor. “A vest like this costs five hundred dollars. I forced my bosses to pay for it.”
“Thank you for the advice,” Mark said. The mechanic out on the tarmac was giving a grinning thumbs-up. The pilot popped the clutch and whipped the plane around, pointing it toward the runway. Mark tried to remember whatever he knew about aeronautics. The plane’s low-mounted wings and rear engines would presumably give the plane good lift at low speeds. It was probably designed for small airfields.
John and Jeff were talking about high-powered sniper rounds. “I saw a girl reporter in Sarajevo get hit square in the chest. Her armor stopped the round, but she went flying. She hit the ground, like, a dozen feet from where she’d been standing.”
The plane was accelerating. There had been no announcement about seat belts or lighted exits. “Hey man.” Jeff tapped Mark on the shoulder. “Once we’re in the air, you should sit on your vest.” He indicated his superior model, under his smug ass. “Any rounds would come from below, right?”
“That makes sense,” Mark said. The nose jerked up, the pilot floored it, and the wings carved a hyperbolic slice out of the wall of air. The asymptote was at an angle Mark would have thought impossible. Roberta let out a frightened moan. Or maybe that was Mark.
• • •
At an airport near a coastal city called Split, they transferred to a helicopter for the final leg to Mostar. Now they were in the hands of the British. One of the soldiers explained that Split was the headquarters for BRITBAT. A painful spasm went through Mark. “You gotta love it,” he said.
While they were waiting for the helicopter to take off, the same soldier talked about a massacre the BRITBAT troops had uncovered the previous year. (Susan had been right: the Croats had turned on their Muslim allies right around the time she arrived in Mostar.) “The Croat militias decided to take over three districts in central Bosnia. The local Croat men stayed behind to help find and kill their neighbors. The militias had marksmen in place to shoot villagers as they fled across the fields. Everyone here is fucking crazy. We’re supposed to keep them from doing what they want to do.”
They lifted off and the coast disappeared behind them. Sitting on his tissue-paper vest, Mark looked out the open side door at limestone ridges denuded of trees and dusty dark-green valleys between. Small villages of white houses, terra-cotta roofs. His view was partly obstructed by a soldier manning a machine gun.
“I hate helicopters!” Jeff said, off to the side. Worryingly, he looked like he meant it. He was huddled against the wall, his arms between his knees.
“Why?” Mark asked. They had to yell because of the noise.
“A helicopter is like a cartoon safe with a rotor attached! If a single bullet knocks out a blade, the thing falls like a rock!”
“Or like a safe, I guess!” Mark yelled.
Talking was too difficult, so no one said anything for the rest of the flight. Mark kept his eye out the open door, watching the ground fall away into a valley, then rise again as they crossed another ridge. He thought about how certain words are almost always used for certain situations, and no one seems to think about it. When helicopters hit a mountainside, they’re always said to have “slammed” into it. When they fall like a safe, they’re said to have “plunged.”
They crossed another ridge. The valley below them appeared to be empty of houses or roads. The soldier manning the machine gun sat up straight and did something that looked like flipping off a safety catch. Perhaps they’d entered an area known to have snipers. Mark leaned closer to the open door. He wondered if he would see a puff of smoke down there, whether he’d feel the bullet as it came out the top of his head. But nothing happened, because he’d always been the lucky one. After another twenty minutes they crested a round-topped mountain and suddenly Mostar lay below them.
The helicopter landed at an airport south of the city, where two UN jeeps picked them up. Mark sat with Roberta and Samantha as they drove to the city center. They were on the east side of the city, the Muslim side, which, as Mark understood it, had been pounded first by the Serbs, then pulverized by the Croats. He watched the concrete buildings go by, for the most part roofless, their walls perforated by artillery shells and pockmarked by bullets in a profuse stochastic pattern. On the sidewalks and roadbed he saw scarred dimples with radiating lines that showed where mortar shells had landed. They looked somewhat
