Heart of Danger

  He hissed for her to be quiet.

  She pressed. "To you, now, he is an animal. When you have him, when he is taken, he will be weak, he will be human. You must not soften then, Penn, when he is weak, when he pleads ... I am sorry, Penn, but then you will have to be cruel .. ."

  His hand, freed from hers, was across her mouth. The sounds were the slight splashing of the paddle and the wash of the river current against the side of the inflatable. His hand dropped from her mouth. She eased back from him.

  "If you are weak then you betray so many. You walk for those who are dead, and for the dispossessed, the tortured. It will be, for you, difficult to be cruel .. ."

  She could see the dark high outline of the steep bank ahead. It had seemed important to her to tell him. Behind was the greater darkness, only a single light to see, far down river from where they had launched the inflatable. Perhaps it was why she had come, to give him the edge of cruelty .. . She had seen the convoys of UNPROFOR troops going through the Turanj crossing point and heading for Bosnia in their personnel carriers, she had seen the vapour trails of the American jets as they arced in the skies for their threatening flights over Bosnia, she had seen on the satellite television the politicians talk about the sanction of war crimes tribunals for Bosnia, and nothing happened, the misery continued, nothing changed. The darkness was around her, the blackness of the bank was ahead of her.

  Ulrike whispered, "It is left to the small people to do something .. ."

  He slapped her face, quite sharp, stinging her. Her anger surged a moment, then lapsed. He slapped her, she thought, to give her the reality. The reality was danger. She bobbed her head as if in apology, and he would not have seen it. He would believe he was responsible for her.

  The front of the inflatable hit the bank, then sidled into the broken reeds. He threw the backpack up the bank, and then she felt her arm taken roughly. He dragged her forward, had firm hold of her, then pitched her off the inflatable. She was in the void. Her fingers clawed into wet mud and her feet splashed in the water among the reeds, and his hands were at her hips and heaving her higher. She scrambled up the bank, fists and knees and toes. She heard the murmur of voices behind her, the time of the pick-up, and the place of the rendezvous. He jumped and he fell half onto her and his weight beat the breath from her chest. His hand scraped up across the fatigue jacket and found a grip by her armpit, and he pulled her up to the top of the bank.

  She heard the soft wash of the paddle in the water, fading.

  Seventeen.

  "Who is he?" "Some drone from the Stone Age." "What's he doing here?" "He comes in two days a month, he ferrets into files that weren't annotated at the time. He's supposed to get them into shape so they can go onto disk for Archive, only low-grade stuff. He was in Century way back, when there were carrier pigeons, one-time pads, when it was Boy Scouts time." Their voices murmured in Henry Carter's ears. "God, he stinks. Look there .. . Food grease. The wretched man's been eating in here. I suppose it's a sort of charity really, finding people like that a bit of work. Nothing that can be said to be useful?" "It's something about former Yugoslavia." "Out of which nothing good ever came." "It can't be important or they wouldn't have let him near it .. . I'm trying to remember what he did when he was here, certainly wasn't senior executive rank .. ." "Well, he's certainly noticeable now is it his socks? Extraordinary, really, there's a file that nobody is remotely interested in, and it gets dug out and worked all over, and then it's reburied on disk, and still nobody is remotely interested in it. Waste of time." Henry Carter, his head across his elbows on the desk, opened his eyes. He saw the day supervisor and a callow skinny young man that he assumed to be from In-House Management. The woman who was the day supervisor laughed, hollow. "Amazing, he's alive .. . Mr. Carter, you do not have permission to camp in here like a dosser. You do not have permission to eat hot fat-ridden food in Library." "So sorry." The young man said, "It's not exactly pleasant, Mr. Carter, for the people who work here to have a man who smells .. ."

  Most times, Henry Carter would have grovelled a further apology. But he had been dreaming .. . Because he had been dreaming he did not offer a second apology. His voice rose.

  "Not important? Of course not ... A waste of time. Of course .. . You wouldn't have the faintest idea. It shouldn't have been asked of him. No human being in their right mind would have driven Penn back across that river. That river, it's what European history is stuffed solid with. It's a barrier, it's a demarcation line, beyond that river is the sort of danger and risk that you in your smug and complacent little lives would not comprehend. It's always the people who are smug and complacent who send young men across rivers, through minefields, into the heart of danger, and in their arrogance they never pause to consider the consequences. Now, if you will please excuse me I have work to get on with .. ."

  They backed off.

  None of the women at their consoles lifted their heads to stare at him.

  They left him at his desk.

  The memory of the dream was with him. It was a damnable dream, a nightmare. What he knew of those young men who pressed forward towards the heart of danger was that they were frightened of spitting back into the faces of those who urged them further down the road. They were compelled towards the brink of the precipice, dragged towards the edge. He seemed to have seen in his dream the young man going forward as a shadow shape in darkness, and he still saw Penn, and the image of Penn shut out the languid movement around him of the personnel of Library. He coughed some phlegm from his chest into the mess of his handkerchief, he had more bronchial problems now than ever before. God, and he needed to be out of London, needed to be on the old railway line at Tregaron, needed to be alone with the big kites manoeuvring above him .. . but not before the file was prepared, the matter was settled.

  The day supervisor was a few paces behind him, stood back as if she were nervous that the 'old drone' still had enough teeth in his old mouth to bite.

  There was the hissing of the air freshener aerosol.

  He was drawn back towards the pain of the memories. The memories were of men who had trusted him. Johnny Donoghue, schoolteacher, persuaded to travel into East Germany, had trusted him. Mattie Furniss, pompous and decent, had trusted him .. . but the damned job took precedence over trust .. . Almost as if he wished that this young man, fleshing in the file, had trusted him. What they said, the old men of Century and the new men of Vauxhall Cross, was that there was no escape from the job, and never would be. He smelled the fragrance that fell around him. He seemed to feel, not just at his feet and in his shoes, but across the whole of his body, the cold damp of the great Kupa river. He led her up the bank. Penn held Ulrike's hand as he took her up the bank and beyond the line of the reeds. He did not hold her hand because he thought she was weak or because he thought she needed comfort. He held her hand so that he could dictate the speed of each step that she took, and so that he could communicate the need for absolute quiet. In the darkness, with the black depth of the river behind them, it seemed to him an age before he was satisfied and prepared to move forward. Perhaps it was two minutes, perhaps three, but he was crouched down and she was kneeling close to him and he held her hand and he could hear, just, the heave of her breathing. He could not hear the soft splash of the paddles any longer, and there was no sound from back across the river to tell him that Ham had successfully reached the other bank and had taken the inflatable out of the water and had dragged it to the hiding place among the scrub in the swamp ground ... it was not good to think of the swamp ground on the other side of the river. To think of safe territory was facile, dangerous. Penn released Ulrike's hand. His fingers ran the length of her arm and across her neck and he touched the hair on her head and he brought her head close to him so that her ear was against his lips. He whispered, so quietly, into her ear that she was not to speak. On no account should she speak. To speak was to hazard them, no bloody way should she open her bloody mouth. Again, his hand took hers. They began to move forward
. He did not want her too close to him so that she stumbled against him, nor so far back that she might lose contact with him and then hurry to regain it. He went the way he had gone before, and it had to be that way because Ham knew no other route. He led her across the path that was set back from the river's bank, and he groped down with his free hand so that he could find the single strand of wire and he made the circle of his thumb and forefinger around the wire and soon he had reopened the scratches in his hand. They went faster than he had gone the last time .. . She stepped on a twig which his own boots had missed, and he jerked her arm hard as if it were a capital sin to step on and break a twig when moving in the total darkness of a night forest.

  They made good time.

  A lone dog barked at the farmhouse, and there was one small lamp burning in the outbuildings. All the while that they moved he held tight to her hand, controlling her. He had told Ham they would be in fast, there for the minimum time, out fast, and he should have the inflatable waiting. Ham had nodded. "Don't you worry on it. Piece of cake, squire."

  They were past the farm, they were far behind the lines.

  "Where do they come back to?"

  He tried to back his head away, twist his neck away, but the interrogator's punch came too fast for his reaction. The punch caught him on the tip of his nose and his eyes watered.

  They had been waiting for him at the old police station. Ham had done as he had been told to do, driven Ulrike's car to her apartment block, parked it, pushed her keys through her letter box and then walked back to the old police station, where they had been waiting.

  "Where is the rendezvous on the river, when is the rendezvous?"

  Her hand came up fast from beside the trouser pocket of her fatigues and took him behind the ear, jack-knifing his head forward, and as his head bucked her other hand with the clenched knuckles drove into his lips.

  Two of the military police had been waiting for him when he had come back into the yard behind the old police station and they had taken his arms with no explanation, and marched him up the steps and into the room of the Intelligence Officer who fronted as Liaison. "Don't be boring, don't be slow to help yourself, don't believe that I won't hurt you." The interrogator hit, as if his head was a punch ball in a gymnasium, with the left-right combination, and each blow was harder and there was the first warm trickle of blood from his upper lip that ran sweet to his gums. The two military policemen had pushed him in through the door of the Intelligence Officer's room, and he had seen the First Secretary and tried to raise something of a cheerful smile to be met only by cold hostility, and the Intelligence Officer had gazed at him like he was reptile's dirt. He had seen the chill in the eyes of the interrogator. She wore fatigue uniform, baggy because it was too large for her smallness, and she had a heavy pistol holster belted to her wa sped waist. The woman had motioned him to the chair, and when he had sat on it, straight-backed, she had hit him the first time. "You can be a very sensible man, Ham, or you can be a silly man .. . Where, when, is the rendezvous?" She punched straight into the fullness of his mouth, and the wide dulled gold of her wedding ring clipped the cap of his front tooth and broke it. He reckoned the interrogator was a pretty woman, but 'fanny' always looked good in uniform, always looked best with a webbing belt and a holster. She had no cosmetics and there was a great weariness at her bagged eyes, and her breasts were heavy in their fall into the fatigue tunic when she stretched her back after each blow, like they'd suckled children. He couldn't see the First Secretary because the bastard was behind him, and he couldn't see the Intelligence Officer because he was away to the right of him, and his right eye was already closing from the interrogator's blows. He could read her face, and her face was iced calm. From what he read in her face, the fanny was bloody tired, but she would go on hitting him until she dropped, and she wouldn't care if she rasped her fists, and she wouldn't care if she hurt him. He thought she was without mercy. He knew that sort of fanny, in the Defence Force, all the fucking same. All the same because they'd had a man killed somewhere on the fucking line, some time in the war, and they'd parked the kiddies with their mothers, and they'd put on the uniform, and they hated. There was no mercy from the fucking women. The women were the fucking worst. He had his hands up, tried to cover his face.

  "You don't leave here, Ham, before I have the time and the place of the rendezvous. When, where .. . ?"

  Because he tried to protect his face, he did not see the short swing of the interrogator's boot. She kicked him hard, boot into his shin, toecap onto the bone of his leg. He cried out.

  He didn't doubt her. He seemed to see himself bloodstained and screaming and cringing. He seemed to see the guys who had been behind in the open field amongst the trees. He seemed to see her with the knife bent over the guys who had been wounded and could not save themselves. All the goddamn same, fucking Serb bastards and fucking Croat bastards. He did not know how long it had been, whether he had been in the chair in the Intelligence Officer's room for half an hour or an hour. A goddamn awful pain in his leg. And Penn was nothing to him, goddamn nothing. He should come first, second, tenth, he should come ahead of goddamn Penn every fucking time. He owed Penn nothing.

  "Come on, Ham, what's the time and what's the place?"

  She had hold of his head. The interrogator's fingers and sharp nails seemed to be able to take a grip on the folds of the skin over his scalp, and she shook his head until he thought his mind would explode.

  Dumb and stupid enough to let himself get hacked around, kicked around. He owed Penn nothing .. .

  Ham told where he was to be waiting to take the inflatable across the Kupa river to collect Penn and the German woman and the eyewitness, and the prisoner.