Deep Black - Andy McNab [86]
Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of The Sound of Music, but ten years ago the Serbs had used them to bomb the shit out of the city.
Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautiful: the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.
The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.
‘Where you from?’
In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.
He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’
Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.
It was my turn. ‘You American?’
‘Australian.’
Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.
66
We hit the main drag that paralleled the Miljacka. The broad dual carriageway was heaving with vehicles, and every other one was a VW Golf. Volkswagen had had a factory here before the war, and every man and his dog seemed to drive one.
The driver tore along Vojvode Putnika as if it was still Snipers’ Alley and he knew he was in somebody’s sights. The Serbs had enjoyed a good arc of fire from the high ground. Hundreds of Sarajevans had been killed in crashes as they drove through the city at 120 k.p.h.
Jerry was still in his own world as we drove past a host of new construction sites alongside bombed-out reminders of the past. One was the concrete skeleton of what had been a brand new old people’s home. The first pensioners had only just moved in when the Serbs started lobbing shells at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when I last saw it; even the recently erected billboards couldn’t cover up what had happened.
Despite everything, I liked Sarajevo. I always had. Like Baghdad, it was a grown-up place. It had been here for centuries. There were winding streets, and hundreds of dead ends and small alleyways that went nowhere in particular. Minarets poked up into the sky everywhere you looked, from small wooden mosques, brick ones the size of bungalows, and great big fuck-off ones as big as palaces. The majority of the city’s inhabitants were Muslim, these days, but there was still a scattering of Jews, Orthodox Christians, and even a few hippies who had forgotten to go home in the sixties.
We passed the UN compound. Lines of white Land Rovers and Land Cruisers were parked outside a square block of concrete and glass. This part of the main had bristled with steel hedgehogs, X-shaped obstacles, placed in the road to prevent the Serb army’s two hundred and fifty or so tanks screaming into the city. Sometimes I’d been able to hear them revving from down town. The