Deep Black - Andy McNab [84]
The airport had been rebuilt since the last time I was here, and the terminal looked as though it had only just been unwrapped. There were a couple of Ks of flat plain between the other side of the runway and the mountains, dotted with newly rebuilt houses amid a patchwork of freshly cultivated fields. During the war, the only way in or out of the city had been via this runway and up into the mountains. The Serbs had sealed off everything else.
I gazed across to what had once been an 800-metre sprint to avoid getting dropped by Serb snipers or caught by UN troops and sent back. The Serbs killed or injured over a thousand people along this stretch of tarmac. They certainly knew how to shoot: the majority of their victims were running targets at night, like Jerry and me when I was trying to get us back into the city.
We’d been thrown together when I’d thumbed a lift in one of the wagons trying to make it back into Sarajevo. I was on the road south of the enclave after the second Paveway job. Jerry recognized me from the hotel bar and persuaded his driver and another journo to pull in and pick me up. Dried blood covered the back of the car and was smeared down the tailgate window. It wasn’t an unusual sight around here, but these three were miserable enough to make me think that whatever had happened had happened pretty recently.
I sat in the back with Jerry. No one said a word as the front two smoked themselves through a packet of Marlboro and we all hoped the Serbs didn’t decide to use us for target practice.
About an hour from the city we got stopped. It looked pretty straightforward, a VCP manned by three bored-looking Serbs, one of them puffing on some waccy baccy. Usually, the best approach was to give them a few packets of cigarettes, smile a lot and take their picture. But that didn’t look like it was going to work today. They wanted us to roll down the windows. Then they wanted our cameras. I was the first to hand mine over: they were more than welcome to the pictures I’d taken.
Jason, the front passenger, put up more of a fight. He gabbled at them in Serbo-Croat, but eventually his went the same way. Jerry, however, had other ideas. A few weeks in the field, and he thought he could just get out of the car and start blustering and bluffing his way through. Then he went ballistic when one of the Serbs pulled the film out of his camera. Not a good move. The long and the short of it was, he was going to die. Everybody knew it but him. What the fuck did he think the Serbs were doing when they started slipping their weapons off their shoulders?
I didn’t care if he got himself killed. But it wasn’t just Jerry’s life at stake: we would all be witnesses.
I got out of the knackered Golf too, still grinning like an idiot. One of the Serbs stepped forward and it wasn’t the hardest thing I’d ever done to grab his weapon and drop all three of them. As Jerry and I stood there in the mud surrounded by dead bodies, a Golf sped down the road away from us. Fuck ’em, as far as I was concerned, it was safer on foot – I should have stuck to that from the start. We’d got stopped in this VCP, so it was odds on the VW would get stopped at the next. As word of what had happened here spread, the Serbs would open up on every vehicle that moved.
Jerry had left everything but his camera in the car: money, passport, press pass. That didn’t worry him as much as the rolls of film he’d lost, but it should have. There was no way he was going to get back into Sarajevo without UN help. He was fucked.
So we’d spent the next seventy-two hours cold, wet and hungry, working our way round Serb positions and down to the free sector to the south of the airport. The last stretch, the sprint across eight hundred metres of exposed runway, took us five lung-bursting