Sandstealers

Krstic ordered the other Chetniks to leave her there, lying bruised and naked amid the corpses of her family. It was his punishment for her. The Chetniks were confused, but—as usual—Nermina was old enough to understand.

Rachel cried. She felt ridiculous and petty for having doubts about Danny: to unearth atrocities like these and recount them was journalism at its noblest. She wanted to meet survivors of ethnic cleansing like Nermina. She wanted to tell their stories to the world, so that it could know. Danny Lowenstein had not only been there and gathered this poor girl’s harrowing testimony, he had retold it with compassion.

She read a few more pages until the day overwhelmed her. She turned off her torch, put her hands between her thighs for some extra warmth, and drifted off into a half-sleep in which she gave thanks that the Bosnia Danny Lowenstein was describing with such power was no longer an ocean away: it was all around her.

4

Post-Liberation Baghdad, 2004

At the Hamra, a clunk announced the death for the day of the air-conditioning system. Baghdad had devoured its paltry quota of power. There was less electricity than in Saddam’s time: for all their billion-dollar programmes, the occupiers couldn’t keep the lights on. Soon, the last of the artificially cool air would be gone, chased out of the room by the high fever of an Iraqi summer’s day, as overheated as Bosnia’s winter had been frozen. The thermometer in the kitchenette said 122 degrees Fahrenheit and the Junkies wiped their fevered brows.

‘Drink, anyone?’ asked Edwin, his baldness reflecting the sunlight that cascaded through the window. He fetched a couple of large bottles of water from the fridge which, like the air conditioning, was lifeless, as if it had died in sympathy.

‘You know what, talking about that Vranac makes me want a glass of wine.’ Becky poured some red into a tumbler, even though it was still the middle of the morning. ‘Rach, you want some?’

‘No thanks. I’m giving it a rest.’

‘Ciggy?’

Rachel shook her head again.

‘God, that took me back.’ Rachel was still smiling fondly. For a while it had seemed they were in Bosnia rather than Baghdad.

‘Feels like a lifetime ago.’ Becky, having barely said a word, was starting to talk. The wine was helping. ‘We were babies really, you especially. I’d forgotten what a baptism of fire it was for you.’

‘I’d forgotten quite a lot of things,’ said Rachel.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Like what a sweetheart you were to me. And what a pig Danny could sometimes be.’

She said it straight, without humour, eyes locked into a steely stare at nothing in particular. Camille recoiled and studied Rachel more carefully. Who was she, this girl who seemed so endearing with all her naive ambition back then in Sarajevo? And a decade on, who had she become?

Munro came in and announced that First Cavalry had secured the area round al-Talha. They were offering to take him to the scene of Danny’s disappearance.

‘I’d like to come too,’ said Camille.

‘Not sure you’d find it very useful, and it might be quite upsetting. His car’s still there. Bit of a mess, apparently.’

Camille was irritated. Who was Munro to try and stop her? Danny was her brother, not his. She quietly insisted she would go and then, just to antagonise him a little more, she decided to invite Danny’s friends as well.

‘Maybe you guys want to tag along?’

Becky shivered again, the way she had when she first heard the news.

‘I don’t think so. Like he says, I’m not sure we would achieve much. Probably just get in the way’

‘Oh, I think we should,’ said Kaps. ‘There may not be another chance.’

‘Look, I just don’t want to, okay?’ Becky snapped.

‘Okay, Beck. It’s okay’ Rachel stroked her arm. ‘No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to.’

First Cavalry were taking no chances. Half a dozen Humvees with Mark-19 grenade launchers and .50-calibre machine guns formed an inner and outer ring around Mohammed’s car as if it were the Alamo. The vehicle still sat dead and useless where Abu Mukhtar’s boys had killed it.

In the end, all the Junkies had agreed to join Camille, even Becky. It was a question of supporting each other, sticking together. In a huddle they studied the car through their sunglasses. They were surrounded by a plain-clothes security detail from the embassy, requisite M16s on their hips, tight coils of plastic tubing sprouting from their ears and walkie-talkies glued to their mouths. Further away, nervy combat troops squatted on the road or lay face down in the dust and sand, pointing machine guns towards an enemy that could advance from any direction, at any time, in any form: a boy on a bicycle, a farmer pushing a wheelbarrow, a woman with flowers in her hands. The Holy Warriors of Iraq’s insurgency came in all shapes and sizes, and often with a belt of death tied around their waist.

Outside in the sun, Becky looked more washed out than ever. She knew she shouldn’t have come: her first instincts had been right; this would go badly for her. She’d held Rachel’s hand tight throughout the journey, and then cried in her arms when she saw the shattered windscreen and the blood baked dry on Mohammed’s seat.

A team of soldiers had started work, examining bullet casings, tyre marks and footprints, taking endless photographs and video footage of the scene. Munro was making his own measurements of the tyre treads on the road, and the distance between the bullet holes. He was in a world of his own, and making no attempt to involve Camille or any of the others.

The Junkies started wandering around, eyes fixed on the dusty ground. They seemed to be searching, too. Kaps, in particular, was preoccupied. He paced up and down imaginary channels, methodically retracing his steps from time to time. Eventually, Camille saw him pick something up; a card, she thought.

‘Found anything?’

‘Nah. Thought it might belong to Danny, but it’s just rubbish.’

She saw him put it in his pocket anyway.

The Junkies stood together again, swaying a little, gently kicking up the sand, lost in thoughts and memories. Kaps wrapped a long, muscular arm round Becky while Edwin let his half-smoked cigarette fall to the ground and pulled Rachel to him, stroking her back with small circular motions of his hand. Not that she could feel it. They were all firmly encased in flak jackets and helmets and wet with sweat.

‘What if we never know what happened to him?’ asked Rachel. ‘You know, sometimes they don’t even find a body.’

‘We have to stay positive.’ Edwin, still holding her, had wrapped his kafiyeh round his head to stop it burning in the sun and slapped some factor-50 over his face. There were white smears of it where he’d failed to rub it in. ‘There may not be a body. My bet is he’s a hostage somewhere, and absolutely fine.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Kaps. ‘A five-star hotel. The Iskandariya Hilton.’

‘But they’ll kill him, won’t they?’ said Rachel, ignoring both of them. ‘When was the last time they let a hostage go?’

Camille was a few yards away, the other side of the car, scrutinising the little holes in it. She felt a wind whip up from nowhere; a summer dust storm was stirring. Grit and rubbish and clumps of vegetation started to swirl around in circles, and the palm trees bowed and bent. Camille lifted her head and saw a young shepherd approach. He looked about 16, dressed in grimy rags and disintegrating sandals; he’d been tending a small flock of sheep nearby. There was an untapped intelligence about him. On the assumption that he had come to murder rather than talk, he was being frisked at gunpoint by the soldiers but accepted the indignity. It was just how things were in the free Iraq.

One of the American officers, a major, agreed to hear what he had to say through an army translator. The shepherd boy talked for at least ten minutes, pointing and gesturing, intense, insistent. He spoke calmly but with determination: he had a story to tell. At the end of it, the major pulled out the Washington dollars he kept in a side pocket for rewards. He peeled away a couple of twenties and the boy took them without a smile. It was no more than he deserved.

‘What did that kid have to say?’ Camille asked the major.

‘That shepherd boy? Oh, nothing much.’

‘Come on, you were talking to him for ages.’

The major hesitated.

‘Okay, I’m not sure if I should be telling you this, but he says he was here when it happened, over on that hill back down the road. Kinda watched it, but only from a distance.’

‘And?’

‘Look, this may be garbage, but he says there was another car as well as Danny’s; two people inside it, he thought, one of them in a blue flak jacket—probably a Westerner. Pretty soon after the kid saw them go by, he heard gunfire from the bridge up here. He guessed they’d been shot up in some sort of ambush, except they managed to get the hell out. Drove back down the road to near where he was. Then he saw one of their tyres had been shot up.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘That’s not all. Seems that it was after this that Mr Lowenstein came through on the same bit of road and slowed down to talk to these guys in the first car. But how about this? The kid says they didn’t try and stop him, just let him push on straight ahead—into the same damned ambush. How d’you like that? He couldn’t believe his eyes.’

‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Camille.

When Munro came over she told him the shepherd’s story.

‘Mmm. Strange,’ he said wrinkling up his face. ‘Could be useful. Not sure I’d believe everything he says, though. He’s just a peasant.’

‘That’s what I thought at first,’ said the major. ‘But he seemed pretty sure. Why would he make it up?’

Munro shrugged.

‘To collect some easy bucks? People can tell you a million different things in these villages.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

‘So does he have descriptions?’ Munro asked the major.

‘He said he was too far away. He remembers the car was red and white though, some sort of saloon.’

Munro wrote it down as if he had to, but walked away again to finish off his measurements. Camille decided he was surly and unhelpful. When he’d gone, she asked the major quietly, ‘Could the boy take us back there, to where he saw the other car?’

It was only a couple of minutes away. The major drove Camille in a Humvee along with the shepherd and the interpreter.

There was nothing to see, but Camille inspected the tarmac and tried to conjure up the picture painted by the shepherd. Down the road the Junkies were still embracing each other, but an orangey-brown cloud had billowed up and was enveloping the landscape. Wearily, because they’d had enough of desert days like this, the troops put on their sand goggles while the Junkies held hankies to their mouths and noses, and half-closed their eyes so the lashes could filter out flying dirt. Soon the wreck of Mohammed’s car was coated in sand. It seemed as though Iraq would like to bury it.

‘Okay, let’s get out of here now,’ the major said. ‘We can’t see shit and I hate being blind in a place like this.’

5

Sarajevo, 1994

When morning arrived in Sarajevo like an unwelcome visitor, Rachel wondered where to start. She had made it here, but what now? Where to go, what to see, who to talk to? It wasn’t as easy as it had seemed back in Arlington. She thought that breakfast might be the best place to begin so she went down to the dining room, a dingy ghost of what it once had been. The waiters were like apparitions too, in their white shirts and black bow ties. Their stoical demeanour insisted that, against all the available evidence, it was business as usual. They could have been restaurant staff on the Titanic.

The guests were dressed in fleeces, Puffa jackets and parkas. Rachel sat conspicuously alone, toying with a cold omelette, convinced everyone else was studying her solitude.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Danny approaching and her heart sank. She wondered if he was going to harangue her any more. He was carrying a helmet.

‘Good morning. Thought I might find you here.’

‘Oh. Hi there,’ she pretended she hadn’t noticed him coming over.

‘A present for you. I never use it. Just let me have it back when you leave.’

‘God, that’s so…’

‘I know, you’re pathetically grateful.’

It had a strip of silver gaffer tape across it with Lowenstein, A Rh+ scrawled in marker pen.

‘Obviously you’ll want to change the name tag.’

‘Obviously,’ she laughed, but he wound up the conversation before it had begun.

‘Okay then, see you around.’

Rachel played with her omelette for a couple more minutes, and was relieved when Becky arrived. She was heading up to Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters. They had an interview with Karadzic—‘the crazy doctor’, as she called him—and Rachel was welcome to come along if she felt like it.

‘’Course she feels like it,’ said a deep voice just behind her. ‘What else is she going to do here, hit the beach? Hello there, I’m Edwin Garland. Daily Telegraph. And you must be the young Rachel Kelly we’ve all been hearing so much about?’

She was getting used to shaking people’s hands.

‘Well, if you guys have got room…’

‘Sure we’ve got room,’ said Edwin. ‘We’ve got Bessie.’

‘Bessie?’

‘My armoured car. One of my predecessors christened it Bessie. To be honest, I’ve never been quite sure why.’

He was English, with a naked scalp that Rachel couldn’t take her eyes off. At first she thought it might be from some dreadful childhood alopecia, but then she detected a bluish haze of would-be stubble and decided he must shave it. In which case, how? Did he cover his head in foam every morning and scrape it with a blade, or use an electric razor? The thought of either made her wince, but the more she studied this brutal baldness, the more she realised it quite suited him, accentuating his heavy eyebrows and the dark brooding eyes beneath. It gave him an exotic look—of an eccentric adventurer, perhaps, or, less charitably, a convict.

In the car park, the underbelly of the hotel, Becky touched the same bit of wall she had when they arrived and banged her fist against Bessie’s thick armour.

‘She makes you feel…well, invulnerable. The only time you’re ever really safe in this city is when you’re deep inside her womb.’

Rachel struggled to open the passenger door: it was stiff and rusty and a dead weight she had to heave towards her.

‘Hope you don’t mind me hitching a lift. I feel a bit of a parasite.’

‘Well, we’re all parasites, I suppose, living off the blood of others. Spilt blood, usually. Anyway, glad to have you with us.’

At the last minute, someone from Reuters joined them too. He was called Kaps, apparently—Rachel was unclear if that was his Christian name or surname—and in stark contrast to Edwin, he had long, sandy brown hair down to his shoulders, gathered and tied up in a ponytail. He sat next to Becky in the back, closer than he needed to since the long bench seats that faced each other offered plenty of space. There was a wedding ring on his finger, but Rachel detected an air of possibility between them. Or impossibility.

They emerged on to Sarajevo streets buried beneath fresh falls of powdery snow.

‘He’s a bit of a nervous driver, aren’t you, Ed?’ shouted Becky from the back. He ignored her but she was determined to explain herself to Rachel: ‘You wouldn’t think he once drove tanks for the British Army. He wrote one of these off last year, you know; managed to skid it into the side wall of a little old lady’s home. The poor love thought the bang was a Serbian shell: just closed her eyes and prepared to die. And when she opened them, guess what? A handsome young Englishman stepping out from his Land Rover—in the middle of her fucking living room. She almost kissed him, she was so relieved.’

Edwin listened patiently but Rachel was embarrassed for him. The story was clearly Becky’s party piece, retold frequently and always at his expense.

‘Thanks for that recap, I’m sure Rachel’s absolutely fascinated.’

‘Of course she’s absolutely fascinated.’ Becky performed a caricature of his public school accent—Ampleforth: posh and very Catholic.

‘Okay, that’s enough. If you don’t want me to drive, I’ll turn round now.’

Edwin was serious. He’d had enough of being riled and Rachel saw for the first time how sensitive this former soldier could be. His scalp embodied the contradiction: it looked macho enough, but the delicate skin stretched across his skull spoke to her already of a dangerous vulnerability.

As they drove out of Sarajevo and over the hills into Radovan Karadzic’s lair, an empty Coke can rolled around irritatingly on Bessie’s floor. It was covered with the debris of assorted Junkie road-trips: Mars bar wrappers, half-eaten ration packs, film canisters and pages of ancient newspapers brought out from London long ago, now faded and mud spattered. Edwin rummaged through a stack of cassettes on the dashboard and picked out one labelled Songs of Sarajevo. To the sound of Seal performing ‘Crazy’—which Rachel would discover was their anthem—she gazed down on the crazy city they’d just left behind. From this height, it looked like easy pickings: a scrawny kid in the playground, smart but pitifully weak, beaten up by the bullies every day. The Serbs of the Yugoslav National Army—the third-biggest military machine in Europe—had their tanks and howitzers up in these hills. In their sights was brave, sophisticated Sarajevo, with its old Ottoman heart still beating, as bold a statement of multi-culturalism as you could find, a living example to the world. Mosques mingled with churches, Orthodox and Catholic. Now it was being blown apart, a foolish dream no one should ever have dared to entertain.

As they climbed higher towards Pale, there was an even thicker shroud of snow.

‘You know what’s really scary?’ Edwin said. ‘Just how easily Europe can turn her charms. It’s like the Nazis, plotting a holocaust in the forests of Bavaria. It looks so pretty, but behind the picture-postcard scenery, they’re busy coming up with clever plans to exterminate a people. There are no devils left in hell, they’re all up here in Pale. See these chalets, Rachel?’ Edwin was pointing as he drove. ‘It’s where the well-heeled of Sarajevo used to have their holiday homes. They’d pop up at weekends for a spot of skiing. And that’s the Panorama. Used to be one of the main resort hotels for visitors. Now it’s where the Serbs run the war.’

She took in its menace and held her breath. It was only a few miles south of Sarajevo, but it felt like another country.

Inside the Panorama, they shivered for more than 90 minutes. If it were possible, this was a place even more glacial than the Holiday Inn. The cold made their bones ache. Karadzic was in a meeting, they were told. He’d be with them when he could. Around them scurried sullen Chetniks, some with long hair and beards who hadn’t washed for days and looked as though they’d just returned from another busy day of ethnic cleansing. One or two glared contemptuously at the visitors, as if to say: Who the fuck let you Muslim-loving, do-gooding Westerners in here? What would you know about us, the proud people of Serbia? What could you possibly understand about the endless centuries of our suffering?

Eventually, the man himself strode in, beaming at them from beneath the shocking mane of his wild grey-white hair.

Rachel had read so many profiles of him, seen him so often on the television, this self-proclaimed poet and psychiatrist, and now he was coming up to her, offering his hand in greeting. She took it and, after the briefest hesitation, shook it. At last she felt part of the war whose every twist and turn she’d followed. Day one, and she was meeting the man who had masterminded the entire conflict, its very architect. Already there was something to tell her children, and for them to tell theirs: that she’d had face time with one of the principal characters of late twentieth-century Europe.

‘Hello, sir, Rachel Kelly. From the United States.’

The others introduced themselves, too, but Rachel noticed how they avoided shaking hands, nodding awkwardly instead with thin, noncommittal smiles.

‘Shall we go through?’ asked Karadzic in his flawless English, so familiar from the television bulletins. ‘It’s rather cold out here.’ He didn’t bother to apologise for being late; he didn’t even mention it.

For the next half an hour the Führer of Pale explained, over a table laden with French cognac and fine cheese, how the loss of every life was to be regretted, but how the Muslims had made the war inevitable. We wanted to live in peace, he said, but you have to understand, they are trying to launch an Islamic Jihad right here, in the heart of Europe. For the good of Christianity, for the sake of world civilisation, they must be stopped. We will defeat them, even if the only friends we have left are God and the Greeks. Remember this, he said as he puffed on a Cuban cigar, soon they will not need to count the dead in Sarajevo, they will need to count the living.

Rachel wrote down every word, her hand soon stiff with cramp.

Towards the end, he offered them some coffee and it was then that Rachel made her cataclysmic error—a ‘crime’ Danny Lowenstein would call it when he heard. As Karadzic bade them all farewell, he managed to kiss her quickly on both cheeks. She felt his skin on hers, cold and slightly rough. She inhaled the smell of his aftershave and thought it curious he should bother with such vanities in a civil war. It all happened before she realised what he, or she, was doing.

That night it was supper in the dining room. Becky had pushed three tables together and about a dozen of the press corps were sitting round them. Rachel, exhausted but elated after her debut day in Pale, was ravenous. She didn’t care what the menu offered, she’d have whatever there was and more.

As she walked in, he was at one end, presiding, the king at his banquet. Taking off her coat, Rachel wondered if she might contrive to sit close to him, but he was already sandwiched in by Edwin, Kaps and Spinoza, one of the photographers she’d seen in Split. The four of them were hunched up together and laughing raucously. Danny was the master raconteur, with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes, the most trivial incident embellished to make it funnier. Fragments of a story drifted over to her, something about him hiding from the KGB in a hotel room before the fall of communism. Lithuania, she thought she heard him say.

‘So I knew they were looking for me, and they were banging on my door going, “Meester Lowenstein, can vee talk to you?’” Danny’s ridiculous Russian accent provoked more hilarity. ‘And I’m butt naked, but I jump out of bed and hide in a cupboard in the bathroom, and my heart’s pumping. And I hear them unlock the door and then this big bear of a guy’s opening the cupboard and I think I’m toast—and of course it’s the fucking room service I forgot I’d ordered, and the waiter’s looking at me in all my glory, saying, “Do you vont some mayonnaise?’”

Then the stand-up comic turned shrewd political analyst—Rachel noticed how effortlessly he could change gear. He spoke quickly, oozing confidence. Even when he digressed down labyrinthine side alleys, his sentences were so crafted he might have written them beforehand. His voice rose above everyone else’s, dazzling, demanding to be heard.

‘You see, Milosevic’s great trick is to demonise everybody else. The Slovenes? Secessionists. The Croats? Fascists. The Bosnians? Islamic fundamentalists. The Albanians? Terrorists. And d’you know what he is?’

A nationalist, of course,’ said Edwin.

‘No, not even that. An opportunist. He’s just ridden to power on the back of this whole notion of a greater Serbia. What was he under Tito? Just another dreary apparatchik, going nowhere fast. What future would he have had in a free, democratic Yugoslavia? Absolutely none.’