The Threat

Jovo stood white-faced, panting and looking sick. A Serb grabbed his ponytail and put a knee in his back. Dan felt them grabbing his own shoulders. Forcing him down. He struggled, but there seemed so little point to it that he stopped. He tried to commit himself to the unutterable God or Being he’d felt near now and then, in times of sorrow or danger.

An automatic clatter bounced off pocked walls, bloated faces. Jovo pitched violently forward onto the other corpses. He writhed, hands rictused behind him, the plastic cutting into his wrists. Then relaxed. Smoke curled up from the torn burned cloth of the back of his jacket.

“He was traitor,” someone said. “But shto si ti? What are you?”

Dan waited, bent, looking at the photographer’s face. Jovo was staring at him. As if saying, You brought me here. Aren’t you coming with me?

A second went by. Then another. The flies buzzed around as if bored. One landed on his open eye. He shook his head. It buzzed off.

The creak of rusty hinges. A door shutting. Footsteps, headed away.

Laughter. Another burst of gunfire, longer, rattling off the boles of trees.

Motors starting.

He knelt in the presence of so much death. He looked inside himself. He looked at Jovo’s motionless face.

He looked at nothing.

12

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad they did! But why on earth would they ever let you go? After showing you that?” said Sebold, squinting in an expression Dan had never seen before from him.

He said slowly, hunched forward a little in his seat, “I don’t know. Maybe just Mladic saying ‘Fuck you’ to NATO. I hear he does things like that.”

“Then what happened?”

He took a deep breath and went on. Perfunctorily, because he’d already cabled back a report before flying out of Macedonia.

He’d trekked alone through the woods, across deserted fields crisp with late autumn, hearing the thunder of artillery in the hills, the distant fry-crackle of small arms. He headed west, the immemorial direction of escape. He tried at first to avoid roads, then realized he’d never make it out alive if he tried to do this cross-country. Remembering what Zlata had said. If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.

Somewhere in that lonely trek, he’d come to understand what she’d meant.

“I kept coming across bodies,” he said. “Nearly all men. Not as old, or as young, as the ones in the warehouse. And these were armed.”

The fighting-age men in the doomed pockets had tried to break out, either in some sort of last-spasm assault or, more likely, simply trying to escape. He hadn’t understood it then and didn’t now. Surely the fighters should have stayed with those they defended, their families, their homes. None of the bodies he’d come across, ambushed and machine-gunned in the fields, carried any food. But he’d picked up a rifle, a blanket, matches.

“You walked out?”

“Picked up on the way. A German helicopter.”

He’d heard it the second day. Had knelt quickly, pulling up handfuls of dried hay, scrambling to build a fire. He’d thrown the blanket on it to make smoke. Jumped and waved as it circled, gradually dropping as the pilot saw he was alone.

“Well, we’re glad to get you back,” the director said. “You haven’t been home yet, have you? But this might be something — don’t go yet. Will you be in the building? Where can I reach you?”

Dan said his office, and left.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about being back. He felt as if he were still back in the silent hills. He kept thinking that if he hadn’t gone into a bar in Sarajevo, two brave, even heroic people would still be alive. He kept telling himself he hadn’t killed them. Mladic had. But he couldn’t convince whoever in his heart was keeping score.

If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.

He stopped in the cafeteria and got the largest black coffee they sold. Staffers stepped out of his way as he headed for the cashier. Conversations died. He realized it was his clothes. He was still wearing the jeans and field jacket, since he’d left his own stuff in Sarajevo. The Germans had given them a cleaning, taken out the dirt and bloodstains, but the jacket was still worn, obviously foreign, and scorched where he’d got too close to the fire.

Postponing the office another couple of minutes, he stopped in a restroom. Washed his hands, making the water as hot as he could stand. It felt good, so he kept doing it. He stared at himself in the mirror. Could this be the same asshole who’d worried about anything else but being alive?

Why him? Why so fucking many others, and not him?

* * *