Читать книгу Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness - Martin Bell - Страница 14

Tuesday 29 December 1992 – Divulje Barracks, Split

‘Once you’ve been checked off, grab your kit and take it off to your relevant messes and then be seated in the briefing room at 1700 hours. Right then, excuse ranks … Davidson.’

‘Here.’ Sue Davidson pulled her baggage from the mountain of kit which cluttered one of the corners of the foyer entrance to the HQ BRITFOR block. We were grouped around a youthful looking cavalry captain called Sam Mattock, one of the staff officers at the HQ. He’d met us at the airport and seen us onto a coach, which had ferried us the mile to Divulje barracks. As luck had it my fears had been unfounded and I’d been met off the Herc by one of the movers. Having dumped my gear into his Land Rover he’d clipped a pass onto my pocket and spirited me through one of the airport’s side gates and deposited me outside the Arrivals lounge. Sam had been waiting for me there along with another staff officer, Captain John Chisholm, whom I knew well from the Parachute Regiment. We’d had an hour’s wait before the R&R flight landed, bringing with it some of the Cheshires returning from R&R and the thirteen interpreters.

‘Edge.’

‘Sir.’ The Gloucesters colour sergeant retrieved his bags and disappeared into the darkness beyond the glass doors. Quickly the group thinned out, eager to seize a decent bunk and unpack.

‘Stanley.’

Silence.

‘Stanley.’ Still no one answered. Sam looked up from his clipboard staring directly at me, ‘Stanley’s you isn’t it?’ he said pointing with his pen.

‘No. It’s Laurel, Captain Laurel,’ I answered, wondering what was going on.

Sam scratched his head again with his pen. ‘There’s no Laurel on the list, just Stanley. That’s who we’ve got you down as, so that’s who you are. So, you’re present then?’

‘I suppose I must be,’ I mumbled, still thoroughly confused. After the last of the group had left I tackled Sam over the name. He said he’d never heard of a Laurel and insisted that I was to be Stanley. ‘Is that “ly” or “ley”?’ he’d asked. ‘ley’, I’d replied off the top of my head.

‘And what’s your Christian name?’

I told him ‘Milos’ and he just chuckled. ‘You can’t be that, I mean, it just doesn’t go … you know that and Stanley. You’ll have to have an English Christian name. What’ll it be?’

I was caught on the hop. It isn’t every day you’re asked for an instant Christening. I thought for a moment before blurting out, ‘Mike Stanley’. It sort of rolled off the tongue.

‘Mike Stanley it is then.’ Sam looked pleased as he annotated his list. ‘See you in the briefing room in half an hour … Mike!’ And that was it, just like that. Bye, bye Laurel, hello Mike Stanley.

Five o’clock turned out to be less a briefing, more an introductory session with a difference … in Serbo-Croat. Nick Stansfield, a highly capable captain in the Education Corps, led the proceedings. He spoke excellent Russian and good Serbo-Croat. He’d gone out to Zagreb earlier in the year and had migrated to Bosnia in October to work for Bob Stewart as his interpreter. Under his supervision the novice interpreters struggled through a few sentences while I sat at the back chatting to Nick Abbott, the corporal from the Anglian Regiment. Most of his extended family were Krajina Serbs and most of his cousins were in the ARSK, the Krajina Serb Army around Knin. He looked every bit a Dalmatian – swarthy, with black hair and dark eyes. He told me that Nick Costello, the ‘other one’, was also from Knin, also had cousins in the ARSK, and was currently up in Vitez as Bob Stewart’s interpreter.

‘What do you reckon? Do you think these people see through the Abbott & Costello nonsense?’ I was keen to learn the rules of the job as quickly as possible.

‘Well, people ask you where you’ve learnt the language, and you have to trot out the same old lie about university and coming here on holiday before the war. Throw in a few deliberate errors, struggle a bit and you might get away with it …’ He paused for a moment’s thought and then added, ‘… if I were you I’d keep your mouth shut here in Croatia. Save it for Bosnia.’

I was slightly alarmed. ‘Why?’

‘Simple. You speak with an ekavski accent … obvious you’re from Serbia, whereas here they speak with an ijekavski Dalmatian accent. And the words are different too. What’s “bread”?’

‘Hleb,’ I replied.

‘No it isn’t. Here it’s kruh and in Bosnia it’s hljeb or occasionally kruh. They’ve become so politically correct here in Croatia. Serb words are out. Croatian words are in. And where there isn’t a dual, they’ve simply made up a new word rather than use one that the Serbs are also using … all politically correct words, thousands of them.’

‘For example?’

‘For example … helikopter … you know, in Serbia or Bosnia, but not here. Here it’s a zrakomlat!’

A what! A something-beater? I’d never heard the word zrak.

‘An air-beater … zrak-o-mlat … zrak? You’d know zrak as vazduh – air.’ Suddenly I felt completely out of my depth. Not only was my accent ‘Cockney’ while theirs was ‘Geordie’, but they had a range of words, old and invented, which I’d never heard before in my life.

‘Gets better than that. How about this, then? What’s a “belt”?’ He was really enjoying himself now.

‘I’m tempted to say kajs, but I’m sure I’d be wrong.’

Nick smirked, ‘Kajs in Serbia or Bosnia, but here in Croatia it’s a – wait for it – an okolotrbusnipantolodrzac!’

‘An around-the-stomach-trouser-holder! You’re kidding me!’ I was astonished.

‘Spot on. Got it in one. They’re at it all the time, making up new words. They’re creating a whole new language here. They’ve even got a huge Croatian to Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat to Croatian dictionary, just as if they’re two separate languages.’

‘Bad as that then?’

‘Yep. So, if you don’t know New Speak keep your mouth shut here in Croatia and Hercegovina, especially with your accent.’ That was enough for me; I made a mental note there and then to play the dumb foreigner in Croatia.

That evening Nick Stansfield dragged me off to a bar in Trogir, an enchanting fifteenth-century fishing town about four miles north of Split airport and Divulje barracks. Trogir is a mini-Notre Dame, perched on an islet linked to the mainland and to the island of Ciovo by two bridges. At its heart lies a labyrinth of narrow, twisting alleys, small continental-style bars and a variety of restaurants. Before the war it was a haven for tourists and drug addicts. While none of the former was in evidence, Trogir still featured as one of the main nodal points on the drugs route from the East into Europe. Not only was trade prospering, but the war had, according to Nick, allowed the local mafia to flourish and spread its tentacles into every bar and restaurant, including the small corner bar, King Bar, in which we were quietly drinking.

Nick was leaving theatre in a couple of days’ time, after almost a year in the Balkans. He was unsure what the future held for him once he got home. He even had the option to stay on, one which I was rather selfishly encouraging him to take as he was just about the only person out here that I really knew.

‘Trouble is, you can only play the odds game so long and then your luck’s up …’ I wasn’t sure what he was getting at but let him continue, ‘… I’ve followed people into the most frightening situations … Bob Stewart drove us straight into a fire-fight … I crapped myself … then in Sarajevo there was that much metal flying through the air that you spent most of the time cowering in a bunker …’ He paused. He was thinner than I remembered him. His voice trailed off, ‘… No. Eventually your luck just runs out.’ I knew he wouldn’t be staying.

At the bar a fat German was shouting something in his mother tongue. He was waving a wodge of Deutschmarks at an uncomprehending bar girl and stabbing a sausage-like finger at a crucifix and rosary beads hanging behind the bar.

‘I thought there were no tourists here, Nick, you know, the war and all?’

‘There aren’t. He’s probably one of those German businessmen who nip down from Munich in their Mercs for a spot of hunting for the cause.’ He laughed dryly.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘They think nothing of spending a long weekend down here with the hunting rifle taking pot shots at the Serbs on the Knin front line. Solidarity with their Croatian brothers. And then zip back to the office in Munich. Weird, but it happens. There’s weirder yet, but you’ll find out. Whole place is fucked up.’

The following day we once again found ourselves in the briefing room for a day of orientation briefings. As Brigadier Cumming was indisposed, we were welcomed instead by Major Richard Barrons, the Brigade Chief of Staff and a Gunner. His address was really an overview explaining that the UN’s mandated presence in the Balkans was to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to whomsoever the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, the lead aid agency in the Former Republics of Yugoslavia, FRY, saw fit. The UN Protection Force, UNPROFOR, was mandated to protect UNHCR and the aid. Then it got a bit more complicated. UNPROFOR 1 was the UN force charged with maintaining the peace in the four disputed UN Protection Areas, UNPAs, in Croatia, while UNPROFOR 2 was concerned solely with the protection of humanitarian aid in Bosnia-Hercegovina, B-H. Both UNPROFORs were commanded by an overarching HQ in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. UNPROFOR 2’s headquarters, known as HQ Bosnia Hercegovina Command, HQ BHC, was located in a hotel in Kiseljak in Central Bosnia. It was run on a day-to-day basis by BHC’s Chief of Staff, Brigadier Roddy Cordy-Simpson. The actual commander of BHC, the French general Philippe Morillon, had established himself in a small tactical HQ in Sarajevo in a building known as the Residency.

If that wasn’t enough, UN deployments within B-H were even more confusing. The French had two battalions, the Egyptians and Ukrainians one apiece in Sector Sarajevo. The Spanish had a battalion based in Mostar in Hercegovina and outposts up the Neretva river valley. The British battalion, BRITBAT, based on the Cheshires’ Battle Group, was centred on Vitez in Central Bosnia and had the largest Area of Responsibility, AOR, with a company in Gornji Vakuf, GV, and B Squadron of the 9/12 Lancers in a base at Tuzla airfield way up north. Not far from the British base at Vitez, the Dutch had a conscript transport battalion at Busovaca.

In addition to BRITBAT, which numbered about 800 troops, the British had insisted on the deployment of a National Support Element, NSE, logistics battalion and 35 Engineer Regiment, which was located at Tomislavgrad, TSG, in the south in Hercegovina. Their primary tasks were to open, widen and maintain routes running northwards and to keep the Cheshires supplied from points of entry at Split airport and harbour, where the Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ship Sir Galahad was moored. The controlling HQ for the NSE was in Divulje barracks: based on Cumming’s 11^th Armoured Brigade HQ, now called HQ BRITISH FORCE, BRITFOR, (he himself being Commander BRITFOR, or COMBRITFOR), it answered to the Joint HQ, JHQ, in Wilton. Thus the total British strength came to a shade over 2,400 troops.

Co-located at Divulje barracks was half a squadron of Royal Navy Sea King helicopters from 845 Naval Air Squadron, 845 NAS, who were known as ‘junglies’ and their French equivalent with their Pumas, known as DETALAT. Although they were unable to fly over the Croatian border into B-H, the junglies and DETALAT busied themselves conducting navigational exercises in preparation for the day when diplomatic clearance and the situation in B-H would permit the first proving flights north.

Somewhere over the horizon lurked the ships of a multinational flotilla, Op SHARP GUARD. High above both of us ran yet another operation, Op DENY FLIGHT, which consisted of two E3A Sentry AWACs, one above Hungary and the other above the Adriatic, which controlled fighter aircraft from NATO’s 5^th Allied Tactical Air Force, 5 ATAF, who were charged with preventing the warring factions in B-H from using their fixed and rotary wing military aircraft.

All this military effort was in support of United Nations High Commission for Refugees, whose in-theatre head, Jose Maria Mendeluce, a Spaniard, was based in Zagreb. He was charged with the provision of humanitarian aid throughout Croatia and B-H. UNHCR’s logistics operation was even more complex than UNPROFOR’s. Bought by the UN’s World Food Programme, WFP, using donor countries’ money, aid would be moved into theatre by a variety of means, most usually by sea or road, to UNHCR’s primary depots at Zagreb and Metkovic in Croatia, and Belgrade in Serbia. From those nodes the aid would be trucked into Bosnia. Aid from Belgrade travelled through Serbia, crossed the River Drina into B-H over the Karakaj Bridge near Zvornik, moved through Serb-held territory to the front line at Kalesija just east of Tuzla, where it was escorted over the line and into Tuzla by B Squadron 9/12 Lancers. That operation had been unofficially christened Op CABINET by an exasperated Major Allan Abraham, the Squadron’s OC, who had been heard to comment that it would take a Cabinet decision to get a line crossing approved by the Serbs.

The aid from Zagreb travelled south into B-H destined both for the Serbs in Banja Luka and the Bosnians in Central Bosnia. These convoys, bound for the UNHCR warehouse in Zenica, were frequently frustrated by the Bosnian Serbs and rarely managed to cross the front line at Turbe, just west of the Cheshires’ Vitez base. That crossing operation was christened Op SLAVIN after a footballer who never quite managed to get the ball over the line. The aid from the warehouse in Metkovic, a small town south of Mostar and just inside the Croatian border, usually made good progress up the Neretva valley but, because the road into Sarajevo disappeared into Serb-held territory, it slowed down as it negotiated a mountain route into Kresevo and onwards to the warehouse in Zenica. A second, and much more tortuous, route into Central Bosnia went via Split, TSG, along a mountain track which had been widened by the Royal Engineers, known as Route Triangle, through Prozor, GV, Vitez and thence to Zenica.

Aid almost never reached Sarajevo by road and had to be flown in by transport aircraft operating a Berlin Airlift-style shuttle from Ancona in Italy, Zagreb and Split and the USAF base at Ramstein in Germany. The airlift was by far the riskiest of operations. Sarajevo airport lay astride a hotly contested front line and was reputed to be ‘the most dangerous place on earth’. Aircraft were intermittently hit by small arms fire on approach and take off. An Italian transport aircraft had been shot down in August by a surface-to-air missile fired from somewhere in Central Bosnia and had crashed in the Fojnica valley killing the crew. Confusingly, the RAF contribution to the airlift was known as Op CHESHIRE – nothing to do with the Cheshires in Vitez.

Thus, UNHCR had distribution warehouses and offices in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Banja Luka, Metkovic, Split, Zagreb and Belgrade. From the B-H warehouses UNHCR handed over the aid to the local authorities who disposed of it as they saw fit. In addition to UNHCR there was a host of Non Governmental Organisations, NGOs all doing their bit; the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, Medicines Sans Frontieres, MSF, Caritas, Merhemet, to name but a few. Wackier still, there were one-man-band, go-it-alone outfits bringing aid from across Europe in broken down old lorries and vans. ‘The Serious Road Trip’ was one of these. In short the aid effort seemed to be a loosely co-ordinated patchwork of well-meaning do-gooders who exposed themselves to horrible risks for no return other than the satisfaction of having delivered some aid.

In addition to the military component, UNPROFOR also had a legion of civilians welded into the organisation: Civil Affairs officers, financiers, accommodation officers, communications officers, mechanics etc. all of whom were professional ‘UNites’ who seemed to drift around the globe from one mission area to another. We even had two civilians in HQ BRITFOR to assist Brigadier Cumming. Both were ‘ours’ in the sense that David Arnold-Foster, the Civil Secretary, was a senior MoD finance officer who controlled the purse strings and the Civil Adviser, from the Foreign Office, advised the Commander on political matters.

Richard Barrons completed his address by telling us that somewhere, high above this tangle of military and civilians, Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance of the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia, ICFY, were conducting a frantic shuttle diplomacy effort to end the war in B-H and were currently negotiating with the leaders of the warring factions in Geneva. A Vance–Owen Peace Plan, the VOPP, would shortly be announced.

It was time for a break. That was lecture one over. It couldn’t possibly get any more complicated, could it?

Wrong. Within five minutes Major Chris Lawton, the S02 G2 Intelligence, or Military Information as the UN euphemistically calls it, had us in a double arm lock. He was attempting to explain the background to the conflict, which seemed to have started with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and was giving us a detailed picture of who was doing what to whom – how, where and why. The UN/international community side of it was bad enough, but what the locals were up to and why was almost impossible to follow.

The universal bogeyman was the Serb, but it seemed there were three different types of Serb. There were the Serb Serbs, from Serbia proper beyond the River Drina, led by their president, Slobodan Milosevic. Their army was still called the Jugoslav National Army, JNA, or what was left of the Federal Army now that Slovenia, Croatia and B-H had seceded. There were the Krajina Serbs of Croatia who, refusing to acknowledge Croatia’s secession, had revolted, fought a six-month war with the Croats, and were now established in their breakaway Republika Srpska Krajina in the UNPAs: UN Sectors North, South, East and West. Their army was known as the Army of Republika Srpska Krajina or ARSK. Finally, there were the Bosnian Serbs who, like the Krajina Serbs, had refused to recognise the secession of B-H and were now locked in a civil war with those who had voted for secession. Their leader was Dr Radovan Karadzic and the army commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, BSA, was General Ratko Mladic. Received wisdom suggested that the revolts of both the Krajina Serbs and Bosnian Serbs had been orchestrated by Milosevic himself in order to achieve a dream of creating a Greater Serbia. All three were universally termed the aggressor, particularly by the media.

The Croatian president was Franjo Tudjman and the Croatian army was called the Hrvatska Vojska, HV. Then there were the Croats of B-H led by Mate Boban in his Hercegovina HQ at Grude, not far from Mostar. Their army was called Hrvatsko Vece Odbrane, the Croatian Defence Council or HVO. Politically, they aspired to the creation of their own mini-statelet called Herceg-Bosna and closer ties with Croatia proper with whom they shared a common border, the western border of B-H. They therefore effectively controlled the access into B-H and access to the Adriatic from B-H. They were in alliance with the Muslims of Bosnia led by President Alija Izetbegovic whose army, Armija Bosne i Hercegovine, Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina, ABiH, was commanded by General Sefer Halilovic. The alliance was shaky in the extreme and only held together in the face of the common enemy – the Serb.

Along an impossibly long and convoluted front line, in red on the map, which snaked through Croatia, swung north into B-H near Split, meandered northwards creating bulges and salients, looped around Tuzla and then wandered south-westwards to the east of Mostar before swinging south towards Dubrovnik, the HV and ARSK stared at each other across a bleak no-man’s-land in Croatia, while the HVO and ABiH fought the BSA in World War One-style trench warfare in Bosnia. Sarajevo was besieged by the BSA. To the east the Muslims were besieged in a large pocket backed up against the river Drina at Gorazde, while in the north-west corner of B-H they were holding out in a sizeable but isolated pocket called Bihac. Somewhere in and amongst all this the UN was either attempting to keep the peace in Croatia or trying to deliver aid in B-H.

It was all thoroughly confusing.

The greatest shock was the revelation that the UN was not particularly popular in Croatia. In fact the Croats called it ‘Serbprofor’ on account of the fact that they viewed the UN as protectors of the Krajina Serbs in the UNPAs. The British in particular seemed to have been singled out for particular hatred and a number of off-duty soldiers had been set upon by local louts in Trogir and Split. Officially the UN was tolerated, mainly because of the huge sums of hard currency being injected into the local economy through the hire and leasing of barracks, warehouses and port facilities. Indeed, the local hotels up and down the Dalmatian coast survived only because the UN was desperate for over-spill accommodation. Thus it was a love-hate relationship – they loved the colour of our money but hated us.

To complete our confusion, we learnt next that a number of independent organisations were floating around FRY, each with its own reporting chain of command. The Brussels-led European Community Monitoring Mission, ECMM, which had been monitoring the collapse of Yugoslavia from the start, had small teams of ECMM monitors, all seconded or retired military officers, dotted throughout FRY and its bordering countries. Dressed from head to toe in white, their remit was to hob-nob with local politicians, assess the political, economic and military situations in their areas and to report back to Brussels via their Zagreb HQ in the Hotel I. In parallel, the UN had its own unarmed Military Observers, UNMOs, again, dotted about in small teams and reporting the military situation up their own separate chain of command to HQ UNPROFOR in Zagreb.

Finally, not to be outdone, BRITFOR had its own version of information gatherers and liaison officers called United Kingdom Liaison Officers or UKLOs. They were armed and consisted of eight teams each of one captain, one Royal Marines driver and a peculiar mini four-tonner known as a Renault-Bowden 44 (RB44). Each carried a satellite communications dish in the back which, in theory, could track satellites and communicate on the move. The cab resembled Concorde’s flight deck and sported radios, computers and a fax machine. Each of the teams was thus independent, could range throughout Bosnia and communicate with Split. The concept was flawed, however, as there was no room to carry an interpreter. The Cheshires, who had their own liaison officers, unkindly christened them ‘Cumming’s Commandos’. Lastly, there were the international mass media, for the most part reporting from Sarajevo or Central Bosnia, each to their own editors or desks.

From what we could gather from the blizzard of information presented by Richard Barrons and Chris Lawton, Croatia and B-H were full of people either trying to kill each other, or trying to stop them doing it, or trying to feed those being killed; and, lastly, there were lots of people charging around gathering all sorts of information and telling disparate groups and organisations all about it. A perfect nuthouse.

All we really wanted to know was who we’d be working for, where and when we’d be off.

Sam Mattock, our original contact on arrival at Split, brought us all down to earth. We were all farmed out to various locations. To my intense disappointment, I was to stay in Split as COMBRITFOR’s interpreter. ‘Up country’ was where things were happening and the last thing I thought I’d be doing was hanging around Divulje barracks kicking my heels. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut.

The remainder of the day was spent drawing Arctic clothing from the quartermaster’s stores and being processed into theatre, largely a matter of paperwork and queuing: the issue of blue UN ID cards, the filling out of next-of-kin forms and the surrender of our medical records to the Orderly Room. In return we were given a UN PX card which entitled us to buy spirits, wine and tobacco each month. Another card recorded the receipt of the only financial allowance in theatre – telephone money rated at $1.28 a day. This was supposed to offset the personal costs of phoning home. We were also issued, as medical aid, a 15mg morphine autojet syrette in its green polythene sleeve, which lived around one’s neck taped to the ID disc chain. Finally we signed for a pistol and thirty-nine rounds of 9mm ammunition, though these were kept locked in the armoury and only issued when needed.

Divulje barracks was a large camp situated between the airport and the bay. Pre-war it had been home to a JNA air defence regiment and a seaborne special forces unit. As the rump of the JNA withdrew from Croatia into Bosnia and Serbia they had smashed up their barracks, ripped out fittings, broken windows, and, to ensure that they remained uninhabitable, had mined and booby-trapped the buildings and un-Tarmaced areas. When BRITFOR had first arrived the entire force, less the Cheshires’ Battle Group, which deployed straight up country, had been accommodated in the Hotel Medina while the Royal Engineers made Divulje habitable and safe in a rudimentary way.

BRITFOR occupied five large, three-storey buildings in the north-eastern corner of the camp. Three were Messes – officers’, warrant officers’ and sergeants’, and 845 NAS. Another served as the HQ building while the fifth belonged to the HQ’s signal squadron. A central cookhouse fed all ranks on a rotational basis. Each of the long rectangular blocks was identical in build: three storeys high, at the end of each floor a large room, accessed by stone stairs, with a walk-out balcony. The room led to a long, gloomy corridor off which were a mass of rabbit hutch rooms or offices, depending on the function of the building. In the south-western corner of the camp was the helicopter dispersal area, hangars and 845’s Portakabin offices.

The remainder of the camp’s buildings were given over to an HV unit of dubious identification. At least part of the unit was HOS, reputed to be the fanatical element of the HV and identified for the most part by its predilection for black uniforms and even blacker operations. A number of their members were foreigners from European countries including the UK and Eire. We were warned to keep well away from them. All official business was conducted between HQ BRITFOR and the camp’s HV commandant. The relationship was never an easy one and I suspect the Croats tolerated the British only because the latter had cleaned up the camp and were now paying through the nose for the privilege of using it. The pretence of mutual tolerance was only ever evident in that British and HV troops jointly manned the front gate.

Sam Mattock was immensely friendly, cheerful and likeable, and always did his best to make me feel part of the team. When he told me of a New Year’s Eve party to which I was invited, I wasn’t too keen to go. I knew no one except John Chisholm, who, I discovered, was in charge of the United Kingdom Liaison Officers, UKLOs. Sam assured me that the Villa Sanda, on Ciovo island, was ‘an interesting place’ and that the evening would be a good laugh. On the grounds that it would at least be a good way to meet people, I reluctantly accepted his invitation.

The restaurant was humming, crammed to capacity. The BRITFOR group was seated at a long table running the length of the room. Brigadier Cumming was at the far end, barely visible through a haze of smoke and a forest of green wine bottles. The more junior staff officers were seated at the other end, noisily cracking into the most enormous lobsters I’d ever seen. The rest of the restaurant was given up to two equally large parties of Croats who were doing their best to ignore us. The evening had started in the Mess, then a minibus had shuttled the party of about thirty to the Villa Sanda, about twenty minutes drive from Divulje. By the time we reached the restaurant, we were pretty well lubricated.

The waitresses were all stunning, absolutely gorgeous, smiling and grinning, plump breasts bouncing above platters as they skipped between the tables. Must be something in the water I decided. They were all like that even in Split itself. With nothing to do during the day, five of us had begged a lift into Split, some twenty kilometres away, on the pretext that we needed ‘to look for dictionaries’ and had spent most of the afternoon sitting at an outdoor café on the southern harbour, watching the world and the women of Split sauntering by. There hadn’t been one who couldn’t have instantly appeared, without cosmetic alteration, on the front cover of a Western glossy. Small wonder that a Split girl had won Miss Europe that year and that the city would hang onto the title for the next four years, despite the war. It was definitely the water.

‘Hey, Sam.’ I caught his attention. He was sitting three down from me. ‘These women! What do they do with the ugly ones? Send them up to the front line?’

His mouth full, eyes laughing, he said, ‘You haven’t worked it out, have you? Why do you think they keep disappearing upstairs?’

I had no idea. ‘I suppose there’s a restaurant upstairs … I dunno.’

Sam sniggered. He could barely contain himself. ‘They’re pros, Mike, y’know, whores … restaurant downstairs, knocking shop upstairs. Probably doing the bizzo with their clients between courses!’ He was almost shouting.

‘You’re kidding!?’

‘Nope. It’s true. Whole place is mad. It’s the war. They’re not even locals, these girls. They’re Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, y’know … The Wall comes down, nothing at home but a depressed economy and … flutter, flutter, flutter down here to the war where there’s easy money … place is run by the mafia like everything else …,’ he paused for a moment, his fork hovering inches from his mouth,‘… but it’s still the best restaurant in Trogir and it’s got its very own night club.’

As if on cue the door burst open and one of the local yobbos barged his way into the restaurant. He was a Neanderthal – six foot four, thickset, huge head with black, close-set, unintelligent eyes and a skinhead crop. He wore jeans, trainers and a cheap blue and white donkey jacket with a fluffy white fake fur collar. The black FN assault rifle, which he slammed down on the small wooden bar, completed this picture, but the bar girl seemed to know him and a glass of beer miraculously appeared in his paw. He glared around the restaurant, fixing those horrid little eyes, so full of contempt and hatred, on the British table. Clearly his entrance hadn’t caused the stir he’d expected as celebrations continued unabated. He gulped down his beer and demanded another. Sitting at the end of the table I was nearest him. I just hoped he wasn’t going to go mad with that rifle and demand that we empty our wallets.

Fortunately not. Moments later he grabbed the FN and lurched past us out onto the patio where he pumped four rounds into the night sky. The hubbub in the restaurant eased momentarily but quickly picked up again, much to the man’s annoyance. Then he resumed his position at the bar and continued drinking. So did we.

With dinner over we were on our feet, mixing and chatting, pints of beer in our hands, all waiting for midnight. I found myself standing in front of a man dressed in tartan trousers, dinner jacket and bow tie. The Brigadier! I forced sobriety into my voice and introduced myself. The Brigadier was without doubt the most charming, easy, urbane man I’d ever met.

‘Don’t worry about Split,’ he said as though he’d read my thoughts, ‘we won’t be spending much time here. I’m deploying a small tactical headquarters to Fojnica in a couple of days’ time and we’ll be doing a lot of travelling, you, me and Corporal Fox.’

As midnight approached we found ourselves out on the patio. It was freezing. Neanderthal-man was out there, too, pumping the odd round skywards between swigs of beer. I just prayed he’d keep that thing pointing in the right direction. At midnight the sky erupted with multi-coloured streaks of tracer arcing into the air. As far as the eye could see, right down the coast to Split, a madness of gunfire heralded 1993. That night nine people were killed by spent rounds falling to earth. They even found one stuck in the skin of one of 845’s Sea Kings.

Nearby, Trogir was rocking with automatic gunfire. Our man went berserk. He’d flipped onto auto and was spraying the night with long, raking bursts of automatic fire. His body shook and juddered in sympathy with his weapon as he staggered around the patio. The magazine empty, he dug a fresh one from his jacket pocket and, once he’d inexpertly loaded it and wrenched the cocking lever back, he continued to blast the opposite shoreline with another long, raking burst. Then the FN jammed. Neanderthal-man was hunched over it, furiously tugging at the cocking handle, his face black and contorted with the effort. It had jammed solid.

John Chisholm sallied forth to his rescue, grabbing the weapon from the startled hood. ‘Issallaright mate, I know about these things, lemme help you.’ He flipped off the magazine and tugged at the lever. Nothing. ‘Weapon’s filthy, bet he’s never cleaned it … jammed solid …’sno problem … jus’ needs a little force.’ With that he placed the butt on the ground and stamped on the cocking handle as hard as he could; with such force, in fact, that the weapon broke, the working parts shot out of the back and smashed against the wall, cracking and shattering the breech block.

The world went silent. We gazed in horror at the broken rifle, then at the smashed breech block and finally at its owner, who was staring in shock and amazement at the bits and pieces. Oh, shit! That’s it. We’re dead. He’s going to rip us apart. Slowly he sank to his knees, collected up the pieces and, turning, sat down heavily, cross-legged, clutching the FN’s shattered innards. He looked up at us in utter bewilderment. We stood there transfixed by the ghastly horror of it all, dreading what was to come. His gaze went back to the broken metal that his massive paws were nursing. Then his shoulders heaved and he let out a huge sob and burst into tears, blubbering over his broken toy.

Seizing the moment, we fled into the night before his grief turned to blind fury.