Squire scrutinized this landscape through field glasses, alert for movement. Istra could provide cover for a whole army. The lorries loaded from the barge could not be far off: they would travel by night, remaining in hiding by day. They drove past shells of houses that bore evidence of the bitter civil war which had still to die completely. Slogans painted crudely on their facades, reading ‘Mi Smo Hrvati’ and ‘Hocemo Tito’ (‘We are Croats,’ ‘We want Tito’), had provided their occupants with a kind of rough life insurance. The gutted facades threw back the sound of their passage as they roared by; the car could be seen and heard for miles. And the karst towered above them in a welter of flowering maquis and broken stone.
Labin appeared round a shoulder of mountainside, grey on the top of its appointed hill. It was perhaps five winding kilometres distant when Squire saw figures on a looming hillside to their right. Not sheep. Men, running. Two of them, three. They dived for cover behind a stone wall and were seen no more. Beyond the wall was a grey-roofed building, slotted into the dip between two hills.
‘Turn up to the right,’ Squire said. ‘Someone’s had a moment of panic up there.’ He felt his stomach knot unpleasantly. There was no knowing what they would meet.
Some metres further on, a track led off the road to the right. Without hesitation, without decelerating, Slobodan turned up it, belting between stone walls in a cloud of dust. Squire leant back, grabbed a sten from the rear seat, rammed a magazine in it, and set it on Slobodan’s lap, muzzle forward. He selected another sten for himself and held it at the ready. His eyes searched the landscape for hostile movement. Without a word, steering perilously with one hand, Slobodan leaned back and picked up three hand grenades, which he stuffed into a pocket. He winked at Squire. Seeing the point of the operation, Squire also pocketed some grenades.
The narrow track twisted in a manner more suitable for sheep than cars. Twice, metal shrieked as they clipped the stone walls with their mudguards. Then they broke through into a farm yard. Some miserable pullets scattered before their bumper. Ahead and to their left were ruinous buildings. Slobodan braked, keeping the car in clutch and rolling slowly forward as the two men craned their necks for signs of life, stens pointing through the car windows. The farm building to their left had been a mean habitation at the best of times; now the ground- floor windows were roughly boarded up, and the words ‘Hocemo Tito’ painted on the stonework in inelegant red lettering, with a communist star for emphasis.
In its remote situation, it was a place that had already witnessed violence.
As the Zastava came level with the last window, a machine gun opened fire from the upper room. The rear side window of the car shattered and glass flew. Slobodan swore.
Without hesitation, he spun the wheel and sent the car speeding forward, turning left and shooting round the corner of the farm building. He pulled one of the grenades from his pocket. The car braked just before it ran into a wall of stone. With a yell at Squire, Slobodan jumped out of the vehicle and flung himself behind it. Squire followed, chased by another burst of fire from above.
Squire was still feeling numb. He watched as Slobodan pulled the pin from his grenade, stood to aim, and flung the grenade through the nearest upstairs window of the farmhouse. The grenade disappeared. A second of silence. Then it exploded. Cries and shouts sounded. Tiles clattered down.
Time seemed to move very slowly. Smoke drifted from the window in a leisurely fashion. And Squire regained his ability to move.
Someone was firing at the Zastava from the lower floor, taking pot-shots through the boarded windows with a revolver. Squire left the shelter of the car at a run, throwing himself down against the front of the building. One of the boards blocking the window by the front door was broken. He crawled to a position beneath it. Rising, he lobbed a grenade through the hole. Pressing himself against the stonework, he waited in fierce anticipation, teeth clenched. As the explosion came, he moved to the door. He kicked it in and burst forward, firing his sten, all strictly according to the training manual. It came like second nature.
Smoke, dirt, whirling particles of straw, billowed in his face. Through the filth, he saw that the meagre room contained six men. All were in a demoralized state. The two nearest Squire had suffered directly from his grenade. Their uniforms were torn and bloody. They sprawled on the floor groaning, surrounded by blood and guns. Squire kicked the guns out of the way. At the other end of the room were four men who had been sitting round a table, drinking coffee from a metal flask; one was hurt and clutched his face, moaning; the other three offered no resistance and climbed nervously to their feet at the ferocious sight of Squire, raising their hands above their heads.
Pointing the sten at them, he went forward, satisfied to see them cower back. They were dressed in rough civilian clothes. All were young and pallid of face. They had no guns. It occurred to him that they might be drivers. He made them undo their belts and throw them out of the nearest window, through a broken board. They stood facing him, holding up their trousers and shaking visibly, faces ghastly. They plainly expected to be murdered. He felt no compassion.
He whistled through the board to Slobodan, who whistled back and pointed upstairs. The important people would be up there. Squire blazed away experimentally through the boards above his head. Oaths sounded. Through the loose boards in one of the rear windows, he saw a body go by — someone had jumped for it. Slobodan’s sten chattered. He wouldn’t let them get away.
There was nothing for it but to rush the stairs, hoping the enemy there were also temporarily demoralized. He ran up the steps in a crouch, yelling, firing from the hip. He flung himself flat as he entered the room. Bits of tile went flying as Slobodan fired from below.
A narrow-faced man with a mole on one cheek, his eyes narrowed, fired point blank at Squire and missed. He was crouching behind a wooden crate. His uniformed sleeve had snagged on a bent nail. As he jerked his arm to free himself, Squire half-rose and swung his sten. He caught the narrow-faced man hard across the eyes with the barrel.
He staggered to his feet. Another uniformed man, who had been taking cover behind an upturned wooden bed, rose and jumped from the window. A shot and a shout sounded. Slobodan was in control out there.
‘Okay, Squire?’ he yelled. ‘Want help?’
Slobodan’s first grenade had effectively wrecked the room. Maps and a leather briefcase lay on the floor, against a shattered vodka bottle. In one corner, the walls were splattered with blood; a man lay there, his head hidden. He twitched faintly. Squire went over and kicked him, but he was completely out of action. That left only the narrow-faced man, who had fallen face-down over the packing case.
Squire prodded him in the ribs with his gun. ‘Up!’
Despite the blow with the sten, which should have cracked the front of his skull, the man still had fight in him. He had concealed a broad-bladed military knife in his right hand. As he came up from the crate, he struck at Squire with a practised underarm stroke. Squire swerved to save his ribs and kicked the man on the shin. The man fell back onto his other leg, his face suffused with blood, his pupils dilated with the determination to kill. He charged in again, knife first. The bullets from Squire’s gun caught him full in the chest. He staggered backwards over the crate and fell to the floor among shards of roofing tiles. His left leg kicked for a moment.
Squire went and leaned against the nearest wall, panting and trembling. He slung the sten over one shoulder and wiped repeatedly at his face with his hand. Sweat poured from him. ‘Father, father, I’m sorry…’ When he realized he was repeating the phrase over and over, like a mantra, he tried to take control of himself. A fit of sneezing overcame him.