Deep Black - Andy McNab [2]
The coffin-shaped scrape I’d dug after moving covertly into the area was about two feet deep and covered with camouflage netting. I adjusted it again to make sure the objective lens at the front end of the LTD [laser target designator] had a clear field of view to the factory. When Mladic arrived to do whatever he was going to do in the middle of nowhere, I’d call it in. The Firm, getting shelled to shit by the Serbs back in Sarajevo, would green-light a fast jet loaded with a 2000-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb. About fifteen or twenty minutes later, depending on how long it took the platform, as we said in the trade, to deliver, there’d be a top-level vacancy in the Serb high command.
After the hit, I’d get the fuck out as quick as I could. The Serbs weren’t fools; they knew these precision bomb strikes were man-in-the-loop technology and they’d be out looking for me.
Apart from the LTD and my daysack, everything from the sniper suit to the plastic bags of shit and petrol can of piss would stay in the hide. It wouldn’t matter if the Serbs unearthed it: this wasn’t the first time they’d been marked, and it wouldn’t be the last. They knew who was doing it, but would blame the Muslims anyway. I’d rather have left the LTD as well, but there was a difference between the Serbs knowing they were getting designated and being able to prove it.
After extracting myself from the immediate area, I’d just hit a road and become Nick Collins, freelance reporter, again. I carried a Sony Hi-8 video camera and a Nikon 35mm SLR in my daysack. On the way in to the job I’d mixed with the local population here and there to make sure I had plenty of shots. If I was caught, I wanted to look the part.
Nick Collins had an Irish passport for this job. Irish or Swiss, they’re the safest documents in the world. Who’s ever pissed off with Dublin or Berne? With a name like Collins but a London accent, I’d have to say I came from Kilburn. Dad just never got round to taking Brit nationality when he finished working for McAlpine in the early seventies.
Freelancers like me were two a penny out here. Young guys, and the occasional girl, trying to make their fortune with bang-bang pictures and footage that might be good enough to be syndicated round the world. I’d joined a cast of hundreds who’d booked an air ticket then headed to Dixons in search of a decent SLR camera and a few hundred rolls of film. Once in-country, they asked where all the chaos was and made for it like bees to a honeypot.
Shouts were coming from the factory. I raised my head slowly and squinted through the dull, grey light. A group of Serbs were playing football again to warm themselves up. They were in a ragbag of uniforms. Some had camouflage; some were in what looked like German army-surplus parkas. Some were wearing wellington boots with thick, knee-high socks folded over at the top; some had decent calf-height boots. I’d seen better dressed and better organized Serb troops; maybe these were the cooks and bottle-washers. Whatever, they had a new football today.
I’d watched as these guys killed two Bosnian ‘soldiers’ the morning before – an old man and a boy of about fifteen. They’d taken them into the factory. Judging by the screams, they’d probably interrogated them, then brought them outside and shot them in the chest. I thought it strange at the time; why not in the head? That was what normally happened. I found out why at afternoon kick-off.
The whole thing over here was a fuck-up from start to finish – if there ever was a finish. I thought about the young girl I’d met a few days before, shivering at the roadside with a much older woman. She spoke a bit of English, so I asked their permission to take some photographs to fill up another roll of thirty-six for my cover story. She smiled shyly and told me her name.
‘Where you going, Zina?’
She shivered again and motioned down the road. ‘Sarajevo.’
What could I say? She was jumping out of the frying-pan and into the fire. The Serbs had had the place under siege for over two years. As well as constant