The Threat

The tunnel, which Zlata said did not officially exist, was unlit and only five feet high. It would take them under the Serb lines to a BiH-held area on the other side. BiH meant Bosnian and Herzegovinian Army, the part-Croat but mainly Muslim side in this turmoil of a disintegrating country. He followed them, bent, feeling the rough concrete ceiling brushing the back of the stocking cap he’d bought, along with a field jacket with a ripped lining and a worn Yugoslav Army sleeping bag and some well-used boots.

He’d left everything that could identify him — uniforms, luggage, military identification, red passport, class ring, wedding ring — at the Holiday Inn, to be delivered to Buddy Larreinaga. He’d asked Zlata if he should buy a false ID. She said dollars would work better. They’d bullshit, bluff, and bribe their way through. He’d also asked if he should try to get a gun. They’d shaken their heads. Jovan had held up a battered Exakta. “Camera best weapon,” he deadpanned.

Zlata said the tunnel ran for a kilometer to Mount Igman. It started in the basement of a shelled-out house not far from the airport. Dan guessed it went under the airport, might originally have led to the fuel storage, from the smell of kerosene. He’d had to pony up 450 bucks to go through. He suspected that was for the three of them, though Zlata had insisted it was for him alone. Others were trudging through coming the other way, dragging heavy soft things or bent under bulky pack-frames. Also slung AKs and ammo boxes. Each meeting involved muttered negotiations and twisted contortions to squeeze past.

Jovo went first, then Zlata. She said to keep his head down. There were iron crossbars in the ceiling that would rip your scalp open. Also to not touch the wires that ran along the sides. “They are high tension and will kill you. Stay on the boards and keep going no matter how bad it gets.” He sucked bad memories in with the close, fuel-stinking air, breathed over and over by the parade of smugglers, or merchants, whatever their fellow Morlocks were.

Some minutes in he was splashing through liquid up to his ankles. The water, if it was water, was ice cold and stank of sewage. A pump was running somewhere. His heart was hammering. He blinked, sucking air but not getting much out of it. He kept trying to calculate how long it should take to walk a kilometer. But Jovo kept running into people coming the other way. He had the only flashlight but didn’t use it much. Probably saving batteries.

Dan stood bent in the dark listening to the muttered, impenetrable exchanges. The sweat ran down his face and plopped in the water. He kept telling himself it was better than pulling himself backward through a wire conduit under the Tigris River.

It got deeper before it got shallower. But then he was back on duckboards again. Not long after, the air got a little fresher. Then he looked up and there was the sky, glowing faintly, and way up there a light moving against the stars.

* * *

He had maps, from Naples. They were xeroxes of UN military maps, with the boundaries of the enclaves and estimates of the current front lines inked in. Zlata had shown him her own treasure, a tattered, flimsy road map that looked as if it dated from about 1960. What she now demanded was more money. Another five hundred to rent or buy, the exact nature of the transaction was opaque, a Fiatish wreck that had once been blue but now was mostly rust. It had no doors or trunk lid, and a replacement hood had been hammered out of roofing iron by some shade-tree mechanic. The front tires were bald, but the back ones were oversized and had the knobby tread he was used to seeing on military vehicles.

Jovo said it was a “Ficho” and that it would get them there, if they could get there at all.

Though it took up most of the rest of his rapidly shrinking sheaf of twenty-dollar bills, they were on their way not long after midnight, running with the one working headlight, on sometimes and off sometimes according to a mysterious protocol worked out in the front seat. According to the road map it was only seventy kilometers, crow’s-flight, from Sarajevo to Srebrenica. Zlata said the roads should be decent for most of that way. The trouble was, it was all through Serb-controlled territory, or worse, past or through the outskirts of the zone of Muslim enclaves being imploded by the new Serb offensive: Gorazde, Zepa, Srebrenica itself. He huddled in the back and pretended to sleep as they approached the first checkpoint.

“JNA,” Zlata said tensely. “National Army. They might turn us back, but they probably won’t shoot us.”

Jovo said something and she replied; the car slowed. Raising his head, Dan saw oil drums, men in uniform carrying AKs, Soviet-style jeeps, a flag fluttering in the headlight over a sandbag-emplaced machine gun. Jovo reached behind him and got a bottle out. He drew the cork with his teeth as Dan pulled the blanket over his head.

* * *