'And also, Mr Packer, we can't figure out what Cruncher – sorry, Mr Dubbs – was doing there, a dangerous place like that. Why would he have been in Bosnia?'
The door was closed in his face.
Early summer 1992
'Who is he?'
'It is Husein Bekir.'
'What does he think he's doing?'
'I think he's bringing apple trees. He tried to bring them last autumn, but the water rose too quickly and defeated him. It is the first time the water has been down.'
'Tell him to go back.'
The regular army unit had moved into Ljut the previous afternoon, and in the early evening the captain, Vokic, had used the time to reconnoitre the land leading down from the village to the natural barrier of the river. His orders stated that he should prepare the village as a defensive position, and deny the enemy the chance to take it and so dominate the road behind. In the late evening a woman had come down the hill to Dragan Kovac's house and cooked a meal for him and the retired policeman. Then the two men had sat on the porch, waved away the flies, and drunk brandy.
Captain Vokic was a professional soldier of the Yugoslav National Army; looking on to the valley in the falling light he had been struck both by its beauty and by the simplicity of its defence. At first light, while Dragan Kovac still snored on a cot bed in the living room, the captain had risen from his host's bed, offered to him with enthusiasm, washed, shaved and eaten a plate of bread, cheese and an apple. He had gone up to the village and found his senior NCO and a detail of troops, commandeered two wheelbarrows, and supervised the unloading of the mines from the lorries into the wheelbarrows.
An old tractor, pulling a rattling trailer, was coming down the road beyond the river heading for the ford, where the river flow boiled and charged over the shallow stones. It came towards the fields in front of where the retired policeman now stood beside the captain. In the sunshine the fields glistened with dew and the light caught the brightness of the wild flowers.
'He has bought the fields. They belong to him. He bought them, and his grandfather, and his grandfather's grandfather.'
'He does not come across the river – tell him.'
Dragan Kovac did as he was ordered by the captain. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed into the early-morning air. His friend, Husein Bekir, was not permitted to cross the ford, and should go back. But the tractor kept coming. The instruction was ignored. The captain peered through his binoculars into the early-morning light. He saw a short, thin little man hunched over the tractor wheel. The exhaust fumes hung in a trail behind the tractor's slow advance.
It kept on coming towards the Bunica river.
'I think he is deaf. I think he cannot hear me over the noise of the tractor.'
The captain turned, pointed to the rifle slung on a soldier's shoulder, then reached out his hand for it. He took it, armed it, heard the bullet engage in the breech, depressed the safety, and aimed.
The retired policeman protested: 'He is a friend, he is deaf, he owns the fields.'
Dragan Kovac was not to know that the aim taken by the captain was into mud and grass on the track in front of the tractor. The captain squinted over the open sights, then fired a single shot. His shoulder rocked on the recoil. There was a momentary disturbance in the track, five or six paces in front of the tractor, but the high velocity bullet did not bury itself, a spent force, in mud. It hit a smoothed stone and ricocheted upwards into the tractor's radiator.
The tractor jerked to a halt. The bullet's discharge echoed through the valley, and then silence. The bullet had killed the engine. Silence hung over them, and over the dark ploughed fields, the lush green meadows, the vineyard that needed weeding and where posts and wires needed maintenance, over the water in the river, and over the villages of Ljut and Vraca.
The war had now been alive in Sarajevo for a month.
On that day in Sarajevo eight civilians would be killed and forty-nine injured by shells fired from tanks and artillery; the airport was closed; the maternity hospital lost power until barrels with a precious two hundred litres of kerosene were fed into an emergency generator; residential areas came under sustained attack. Tickets were issued, that day, for the rationing of basic foods… but it had been the first shot fired over the valley.
A few metres short of the ford, the old man sat starkly upright on his motionless tractor.
'You think he can hear you now?'
'I don't know,' the retired policeman said sourly.
'Try. Tell him he should go back. Tell him that if he approaches the river again he will be shot. Tell him this side of the river is now a prohibited area, under the control of the military.'
Dragan Kovac shouted into the silence. He had no heart in what he was ordered to do, yet he was not a sensitive enough man to feel that the one shot had destroyed, perhaps fatally, the innocence of the valley in which he had spent his life and which was home to Husein Bekir. His friend across the river heard him out, then stood on the tractor's footplates and shook his fist at them, before trying to start the tractor again.
There was neither a cough from the tractor's engine nor a turn-over whine. He watched the farmer step down clumsily, then turn away and start to trudge back towards his home and his village.
'I don't think you need me,' Dragan Kovac said grimly.
'Correct, I don't. But there is something you should not forget. We are here for your protection. If we are not here they will come across in the night and slit your throats as you sleep, and if they let you live you will be the servants of their religion. You will be dominated by fundamentalists.'
'I suppose s o… ' What the officer said was only what they were forever repeating on TV and the radio.
He saw the diminishing back of Husein Bekir, and the tractor marooned near the river, then went back to his home.
The captain supervised the laying of the mines. The previous evening he had drawn a close-detail map of the village, the track down to the river, the fields, the mulberry tree and the riverbank. The two wheelbarrows carried forty-seven mines, and when each one was buried he drew a circle to identify its resting place on the map that filled the greater part of the printed page, marked Zapisnik Minskoeksplozivne Prepreke (MEP). Thirty-one of the mines were designated as PMA2, the remaining sixteen were classified as PMR3. They were anti-personnel mines. First the PMA2s were buried. They were circular, painted brown-green, and ten centimetres in diameter. They went into shallow pits, scooped out by trowels so that only the three-centimetre-wide six-pointed crown protruded. They would take a five-kilo pressure to detonate ninety grams of Hexogen/TNT. At a metre, on exploding, they were reckoned fatal; at five metres they would maim and mutilate, at twenty-five metres they were ineffective. The captain had six locations for them. They were settled in the ground, position noted, then armed. No mine markers or fences needed to be placed around them: the soldiers who would guard the village knew where they were.
The PMR3s required more care to site. They stood thirty centimetres off the ground and were fastened to a wooden holding stake. From each the soldiers played out twenty-five metres of fine wire, tightened it, then staked the end. The trip-wire, taut, was six inches above the ground. Inside the ribbed metal container, which would fragment into shrapnel, was a core of TNT. They could kill anyone within a twenty-five metre radius of the detonated charge. The positioning of each was marked on the captain's map, and the location of two PROMs and their trip-wires.
As the war stretched out its greedy arms to them, the villages and the valley were now contaminated.
Chapter Three