Deep Black - Andy McNab [85]
Once we’d got to the other side, Jerry went to find himself a new set of documents and I leaked back into the city. I saw him a couple of times afterwards in the Holiday Inn, but kept well away. I couldn’t stand him trying to thank me. He couldn’t get his head around the fact that I’d been saving my own skin, not his.
His stuff never made it back, and neither did Jason and the driver. I passed their two charred bodies and the burnt-out wreck of their car on the road about two weeks later.
The bus driver turned the wheel sharp left and Jerry’s head jerked to the side, but his eyes never left the runway. He had shrunk into his own little world. I could see him gazing across the tarmac, maybe picturing the razor-wire entanglements, the sandbag sangars, the white APCs full of UN troops trying to stop us, and the Serb fire arcing towards us under the floodlights. But we weren’t going to go over all that now. Sarajevo was still too tense for talk of politics and war and, besides, the general and his sidekick were taking up too much oxygen as it was.
New Dad turned to the young woman beside him.
‘General, have you met Liliana? Ministry of Internal Affairs?’
‘Oh, yes, rather.’ Liliana’s brown linen trouser suit must have cost her a packet on Fifth Avenue, and as far as the general was concerned, it was worth every penny. I could just imagine him leering at her over the tray of Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s cocktail party.
‘You’re with SFOR, General?’
‘Paddy’s military adviser, for my sins.’
No wonder the peace process had been like wading through treacle.
‘It seems to me that only the British are carrying out the captures,’ Liliana said with a coy smile. ‘You’re so very good at it, how come you haven’t yet captured Karadic?’
The general chuckled. ‘These chaps are jolly hard to ferret out, you know. Always on the move. But maybe that’s no bad thing, my dear. It’s best not to start with the most indigestible item on the menu. Go for something light to start with, what?’
I switched my attention back to Jerry: his eyes still hadn’t left the other side of the runway.
65
Monday, 13 October 2003
The bus hissed to a stop outside the terminal and we all filed off. The plebs, which included Jerry and me, herded themselves towards the one passport-control box that was open. The general and his chums with the blue diplomatic passports went straight through the Diplomats and SFOR channel. I hoped his luggage was still in Oberammergau.
As we joined the queue my eyes started to close; they felt like they’d been dipped in grit. It had been a long journey. The drive from Baghdad to Turkey had gone OK, apart from the moment our fixer tried to overtake an American armoured convoy. He’d realized his mistake when he received three warning shots across the bonnet.
At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the Sunday Telegraph to explain the change of plan. We’d taken a flight to Vienna, then caught a connection here. Jerry’s card had taken a real beating, but the paper was going to pay him back, so what the fuck?
Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.
The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.
The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible