Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness. Martin Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ not. Moments later he grabbed the FN and lurched past us out onto the patio where he pumped four rounds into the night sky. The hubbub in the restaurant eased momentarily but quickly picked up again, much to the man’s annoyance. Then he resumed his position at the bar and continued drinking. So did we.

      With dinner over we were on our feet, mixing and chatting, pints of beer in our hands, all waiting for midnight. I found myself standing in front of a man dressed in tartan trousers, dinner jacket and bow tie. The Brigadier! I forced sobriety into my voice and introduced myself. The Brigadier was without doubt the most charming, easy, urbane man I’d ever met.

      ‘Don’t worry about Split,’ he said as though he’d read my thoughts, ‘we won’t be spending much time here. I’m deploying a small tactical headquarters to Fojnica in a couple of days’ time and we’ll be doing a lot of travelling, you, me and Corporal Fox.’

      As midnight approached we found ourselves out on the patio. It was freezing. Neanderthal-man was out there, too, pumping the odd round skywards between swigs of beer. I just prayed he’d keep that thing pointing in the right direction. At midnight the sky erupted with multi-coloured streaks of tracer arcing into the air. As far as the eye could see, right down the coast to Split, a madness of gunfire heralded 1993. That night nine people were killed by spent rounds falling to earth. They even found one stuck in the skin of one of 845’s Sea Kings.

      Nearby, Trogir was rocking with automatic gunfire. Our man went berserk. He’d flipped onto auto and was spraying the night with long, raking bursts of automatic fire. His body shook and juddered in sympathy with his weapon as he staggered around the patio. The magazine empty, he dug a fresh one from his jacket pocket and, once he’d inexpertly loaded it and wrenched the cocking lever back, he continued to blast the opposite shoreline with another long, raking burst. Then the FN jammed. Neanderthal-man was hunched over it, furiously tugging at the cocking handle, his face black and contorted with the effort. It had jammed solid.

      John Chisholm sallied forth to his rescue, grabbing the weapon from the startled hood. ‘Issallaright mate, I know about these things, lemme help you.’ He flipped off the magazine and tugged at the lever. Nothing. ‘Weapon’s filthy, bet he’s never cleaned it … jammed solid …’sno problem … jus’ needs a little force.’ With that he placed the butt on the ground and stamped on the cocking handle as hard as he could; with such force, in fact, that the weapon broke, the working parts shot out of the back and smashed against the wall, cracking and shattering the breech block.

      The world went silent. We gazed in horror at the broken rifle, then at the smashed breech block and finally at its owner, who was staring in shock and amazement at the bits and pieces. Oh, shit! That’s it. We’re dead. He’s going to rip us apart. Slowly he sank to his knees, collected up the pieces and, turning, sat down heavily, cross-legged, clutching the FN’s shattered innards. He looked up at us in utter bewilderment. We stood there transfixed by the ghastly horror of it all, dreading what was to come. His gaze went back to the broken metal that his massive paws were nursing. Then his shoulders heaved and he let out a huge sob and burst into tears, blubbering over his broken toy.

      Seizing the moment, we fled into the night before his grief turned to blind fury.

SIX Operation Bretton

       October 1997 – The Nelson Arms, Farnham, UK

      ‘You’ll love this one, Nix …’ I’m reading the list of instructions I’ve found in the box of pills that Ian’s given me, telling her about the side-effects – nausea, excessive sweating, mood swings and so on. I’m exhausted from the ride back from seeing Ian in Gosport, exhausted from digging up the dead.

      She doesn’t laugh. ‘How did it go?’

      ‘It went, Nix. Hours of insane rambling and a packet of pills.’

      ‘They’ll do you good. Honestly they will. I’m so pleased you’ve taken this first step. Everything will get better. I promise. It will.’

      ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see.’

      Will it get better? ‘You know, Nix, you take a rifle out of the armoury. You use it and eventually if you don’t clean it it’ll stop working. So you clean it: you pull the barrel through, scrape off the carbon, oil up the working parts, and it works. Easy. Humans aren’t any different … how do you clean this shit out of your mind? I mean, what do you use to pull your brain through with?’

      ‘Ian will help you do that. He’s your pull-through … you must stick with him.’ Nix was an Army officer for seven years so she knows all about pull-throughs. I’m bored of psychobabble. I’ve had it all afternoon, evening and now here in the pub. I want a rest from it. But I can’t help it and I start rambling again.

      ‘Wait! Milos, stop! Where does that fit in? Was that with Rose?’

      ‘Rose! No, Nix! I’ve already told you … with Cumming … at the beginning.’

      ‘Oh. Right. With Cumming.’ She’s confused.

      ‘That’s right. Cumming, Nix … when we were travelling around in January 1993.’ I’m getting edgy.

      Nix looks exhausted – huge bags under her eyes. She’s trying to understand, but it’s confusing. I know it’s confusing – so many people, so many stories. I have to take it slowly. If she can’t get it, what hope have Plod got?

      ‘Right. We start touring. Brigadier Cumming, Simon Fox the driver, and me. The three of us in the Discovery plus that ridiculous little RB44 truck with the satellite dish that doesn’t work. It followed us around like a puppy. After that New Year’s Eve party on Ciovo island we were supposed to drive straight up to Fojnica where this Tactical HQ is established on one of the floors of a hotel there. But we don’t, because that day, the 4^th, we wake up to discover that someone has blown up one of the bridges on Route Pacman just north of Mostar. Pacman is the major aid route north and now no aid is running. No one’s sure how the bridge has been destroyed so we jump into the Discovery and zip down the Dalmatian coast. Absolutely spectacular – the Dinaric Alps just drop vertically into the Adriatic and this road is simply a scar on the rock, sometimes hundreds of feet above the sea. Offshore are these enormous long, flat, grey islands lying there like hump-backed whales. They’ve got names like Hvar and Brac … there are more further north, hundreds of islands. Forget Mozambique, this is the most stunning coastline in the world. At Ploce, which is a big marshy port, we cross the Neretva river and swing north following the river valley. At Metkovic we cross into Hercegovina and stick on our body armour and helmets; it’s SOP for all troops in B-H to wear the stuff.’

      ‘And the bridge?’

      ‘It was buggered. We get to it eventually after passing Mostar, which was pretty trashed itself. It’s not hard to see why; the Serbs are sitting on a massive escarpment to the south and dominating the town and the road. They can drop a shell or mortar round just about anywhere they want. The road we’re on is pitted with craters. But they don’t dominate the bridge because that’s in a tight gorge with sheer rocky sides rising hundreds of feet. We reach the bridge which is a concrete affair, one span of which the Jugoslav National Army had dropped as they had retreated over it, so the bit that’s been blown up is the wooden repair to the span which the Royal Engineers have constructed. We get chatting to the HVO soldiers there. One, a battalion commander, blames it on the Muslims on the other side, which baffles me because they’re supposed to be allies. One of the soldiers then tells me that the Chetniks (an extreme wing of СКАЧАТЬ