The Threat

“Sure,” Dan said. Professional to professional sounded better than captor to spy.

“So let’s get to business, my Yankee friend. First we will shoot this Jovan. Then Miss Kovacevic. Who does not work for Tanjug, by the way. You will tell me then what you’re doing here, I think.”

“There’s no need to shoot anybody. I’ll tell you right now,” Dan said, feeling unreal, because it was too much like Iraq. The same old script, played out in another war-torn asshole of the world. But different, too.

He’d faced terrorists. He’d been interrogated by Iraqi secret police. But he’d never felt the aura of sheer evil coming off this heavy-cheeked, dough-faced man. Who sat like a sack of potatoes, a silent, hard-faced bodyguard behind him. He said he was professional military. But the feeling Dan got was “professional” the way Adolf Eichmann had been.

So he made it short: where he was from, what his orders were. It wasn’t a secret, or at least not one he wanted the others to die for. The Serbian blinked, processing it against politics and ideologies Dan had no idea of. “Your president wants to know what happened in Srebrenica.”

Dan didn’t bother with the distinction of Clayton versus De Bari. “That’s right.”

The Serb pondered, then turned his head. Spoke to the guy behind him, and hoisted himself to his feet. Started to leave, then turned back. “It’s not a crime to defend your people,” he said quietly. “That’s all we’re doing. Someday you’ll understand that.”

Dan didn’t answer. For a moment no one spoke. Then the general did.

“You want to know what happened to the Muslims in Srebrenica,” he said. “All right. I, Ratko Mladic, will show you what you have come so far to see.”

* * *

The jeeps jounced and swayed, bottoming out with jarring bangs on the rocks. His was in the lead, Zlata and Jovo’s trailing. The troops with them said nothing. They’d gone uphill, then down, over drops and ruts that made Dan wonder if they were on a road or a streambed. He couldn’t see, because they didn’t use headlights. One of the drivers had a tubular object he kept raising. He figured it was a night vision scope. So they suspected surveillance, or attack, from the air. He sat on his still-pinioned hands, trying to roll with the lurches.

Finally the tilt smoothed into valley land, soft soil under the tires instead of rock. They turned sharp and brakes ratcheted and the motors cut off. He caught the creak of frogs — it seemed late in the year for them but there they were — and the chuckle of a stream. The troops levered their legs over the side and fanned out, forming a perimeter.

“Izidji iz auta,” said a voice out of the darkness. Hands jerked him out of the seat and set him on his feet.

“How about taking these uh, cuffs off?” he said, but no one answered.

He smelled it before he saw it. At first he thought it was a poultry plant, some kind of animal-processing facility. The long line of a peaked roof against a graying dawn.

“Dan?” Zlata, sounding terrified. He dragged back against the hands of his guards. They resisted, then relaxed as the men from the other jeep pushed the journalists up.

A trooper kicked open the door. The smell came strong. The creek was deafening in the quiet. The Serb gestured inside with his rifle. Dan hesitated, then went through.

He stood bent over, hands behind him, looking out over what the metal-gray predawn coming through the bullet-shattered window frames revealed. Behind him matches scratched as the soldiers lit up.

From one end to the other, perhaps a hundred yards in all, the concrete floor was covered with corpses. Fat flies rose sluggishly, then settled again on open eyes, on crosses carved into foreheads, on gaping groins, on the stewmeat bullets and bayonets and grenades had made of human bodies.

Behind him Zlata was gagging. Dan felt only the detachment of utter horror. He’d seen corpses before. He’d witnessed what explosives and fire made of human flesh on the battlefield, and what the sea and its creatures did. Death, and the dead, were not new to him.

But he’d never seen hundreds jumbled together three and four deep like some bizarre and monstrous lasagna. Old men, young, bearded, boys, some half naked, others in worn suits and gray hats. Their cheeks were sunken. Their bodies elongated. As if they’d been starved. He began to grasp what had been done to many of them. He hoped it had been after they were dead. He glanced at the roof, knowing now why the drones had seen nothing.

Which meant he was dead too. If they’d gone that far to hide what they were doing, they’d never let them return to testify.

“You wanted to see the Muslims,” one of the men said, working the bolt of his Kalashnikov. “Now you can be with them.”

Zlata began screaming as the men jerked her out of the building. Her screams continued for a long time before a shot clapped back in the trees.