The Abomination Page 28

  A farmer walked into the road and held up his hand for them to stop. Holly pushed her foot down on the accelerator, making him jump out of the way and scattering in all directions the geese his wife had been about to herd across the road. The geese honked indignantly, and the farmer yelled.

  “That should hold the Audi up for a few minutes,” Holly said, looking in her mirror. “Let’s try to put some distance between us. We turn off in a couple of miles anyway.”

  After two miles they got to the main road.

  “Looks like we lost them,” Kat said thankfully.

  “Looks that way,” Holly said. But Kat noticed that she kept checking her mirror anyway.

  Following the directions the Mother Superior had given them, they eventually came to a small bungalow set apart from the other houses. A young woman answered the door.

  “We’re looking for Soraya Imamović,” Kat said, producing her Italian ID.

  “That’s me,” the woman said in broken Italian.

  Kat did a double-take. She’d been expecting someone much older. This pretty, dark-haired woman couldn’t have been much older than she was.

  Seeing her confusion, Soraya looked wary. “What do you want?”

  “We want to talk to you about your daughter. And about Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton.”

  For a moment she thought Soraya might be going to close the door in their faces. Then, grudgingly, she held it open.

  “You can come in for ten minutes. Then I have to cook.”

  She sliced vegetables as they talked – more, Kat suspected, so that she didn’t have to look at them than because the vegetables needed chopping. That was fine: whatever got her to open up.

  “I need to talk to you about the Birds’ Nest camp,” Kat said, as gently as she could. “I know it’s hard for you, but I believe it may help us to understand what happened to Barbara and Jelena.”

  “They are dead?” Soraya asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’m sorry. They were good people.”

  Kat waited for her to go on.

  “Yes, I was with Jelena in the Birds’ Nest,” she said eventually. “It was after the Croats had to retreat. When the Serbs took this area, they were angry. They went from house to house, looking for the men. They took them to a sports ground and beat them until they’d decided who were the fighters. Then they took them into the woods and shot them. My father was there, and my brother.”

  Her shoulders sagged, but she continued quietly. “Then they came back for the women. We were ordered out into the street, to line up for them. They were playing a song on their truck – a Serbian marching song. We had to take off our clothes before the song finished, they said, or they would kill us.

  “When we were all naked, they made their choices. I was one. They raped us, right there in the street, with all our neighbours watching. Some who tried to resist, or who told them to stop, were killed.”

  She stopped, remembering. “Afterwards I thought, at least it’s over. I would rather be dead but at least I can choose how and when I kill myself. But they put some of us into the trucks and took us to a farmhouse, up on a hill. That was why they called it the Birds’ Nest – because it was high up. A long way from anywhere.”

  She was silent for a moment, chopping carrots. Kat saw that Holly was writing it all down as they’d agreed, the lengthy pauses giving her a chance to catch up.

  “There were eighteen of us. Some were Croats, some Bosniaks,” Soraya said at last. “Serb soldiers came every day, in trucks. Also policemen, firemen, town officials . . . They said, ‘We will turn you into a good Chetnik girl. You will have strong Serbian babies for us.’ But sometimes they killed a woman if they didn’t like her. So I think the babies were not as important as they said. I think it was just to . . . to. . .” She searched for the word.

  “Justify what they were doing?”

  “Da. Justify. Of course we all wanted to die. We were all good women, before.”

  “How old were you then, Soraya?”

  “Fourteen,” Soraya said matter-of-factly.

  Fourteen. Dear God. Trying not to let her horror show, Kat said gently, “And Jelena was there too.”

  “Yes. She was like our mother – the one who helped us. She said she had met a woman once, and that woman had made her a priest. So she blessed people and said prayers for them. When babies were born she baptised them. Even as a Muslim, I let her pray for me. We all did.”

  “How long did this go on for, Soraya?”

  “I told all this to the American woman.”

  “I know you did. I need you to say it again, so that we can use it as evidence.”

  Soraya reached for a cabbage and began to strip off the outer leaves. “It felt like my whole life. But it was only a few months. Then the Croatian Army came back and drove the Serbs away. There was a week of fighting – many people died. The Croats came into the camp and said. . .” She stopped, her hands motionless, remembering.

  “Yes, Soraya? What did they say?”

  “They said ‘All you Croat women, you can go home now.’”

  “What about you? Did you go home?”

  She shook her head. “I was a Bosniak,” she said quietly. “Muslim.”

  “They made you stay?”

  “Da. Different army, different uniforms. But every other way, the same.”

  “The Croatians raped you, just as the Serbs had done?”

  “Da,” she whispered. Her shell of composure was close to cracking, Kat could tell. After that, things would go one of two ways. Either she would be unable to talk through her tears, or she’d tell them to leave.

  “And what about men who were neither Serb or Croat?” Kat asked quietly. “Were there any of those?”

  Soraya nodded. “Not many, but enough. They would tell the soldiers they were too nice to us. They’d say, ‘No, not like that. Are you soldiers or children? Do you think the Serbs would treat your women this way? Do it like this.’” Tears began to rain down Soraya’s cheeks. Angrily, she brushed them away. “You have to go now. My husband will be home soon. He doesn’t like me to talk about this.”

  “Soraya, could you identify any of the foreigners you saw? Could you identify this man, for example?” Kat held out a photograph.

  Soraya looked at it. “Sergeant Findlater,” she said in a flat, expressionless voice.

  “He raped you?”

  “Da.”

  “And you became pregnant? How can you be sure the baby was his?”

  “At the time I wasn’t sure. But later, yes. She looked just like him.”

  “What happened after you fell pregnant?”

  “Jelena came back. She spoke to the people in charge. She made a deal for me.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  Silently, Soraya pulled up the sleeve of her sweater. On her forearm was a stećak tattoo.

  “If I became Catholic,” she said. “The baby, too. If I was baptised, if the baby was baptised, she could go to an orphanage.”

  “Jelena converted you?”

  “She helped me. It was the only way.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Da. Jelena, she baptised us both. Then I was a Catholic. When people said, ‘You are a dirty Muslim pig’, I say, ‘No, I am a dirty Catholic pig’. So everyone was happy.” She wiped her eyes in the crook of her elbow. “Eventually, the war was over. I kept my side of the deal. Every week, I knelt down in church. No one could take my little girl away from the orphanage or say I was lying. I even meet Droboslav. A Catholic.” From the way a faint smile tried to fight the tears, Kat gathered that Droboslav was her husband, and a good man. Thank heaven for that.

  “And Jelena? You still saw her?”

  “She brought me news. How Melina was doing. Some photographs. She was beautiful, my little girl. I couldn’t go and see her but it was OK. Terrible but OK.”

  “Until Jelena got angry.”

  “She wanted to tell Melina who she was. Where she came
from. Maybe she was right. Maybe not. Melina got angry. When she left the orphanage, she started seeing a man. A kazneno.”

  “A gangster?”

  She nodded. “There were stories about girls who disappeared . . . I told her, be careful. She said I had abandoned her, I had no right to tell her what to do. After she was gone, I went to the police. They said, ‘She is not a proper Croatian. A good Croatian girl would not have done these things. It must be her bad Bosniak blood.’ They were happy to be rid of her.”

  “What did Jelena say about that?”

  “Jelena said she would try to find her. She said our story would make people understand what really happened here in Croatia. But I think she was wrong. People just want to forget.” She glanced at the clock. “Please, I want you to go now.”

  “May we take some of your hair? It’s for—”

  “I know. DNA. I already gave some to the American woman. But you can take more if you want. It’s only hair.”

  Fifty-six

  AS THEY LEFT Soraya’s house a small van pulled up. A man in mechanics’ overalls jumped out, looked at them suspiciously, and strode into the house. Through the window Kat saw a tearful Soraya collapsing into his arms. He caught Kat’s eye over her shoulder and scowled.

  “Time to move,” she told Holly.

  Their next destination was the Birds’ Nest itself, to take the photographs Roberta Carlito had asked for. The road wound upwards through chestnut woods. Apart from the occasional farmer working his tiny fields by hand, and a few plumes of smoke rising from distant fires, the countryside seemed eerily deserted.

  At one of the bends they paused and looked back down towards the valley. There were no cars following them up the hill.

  Holly still seemed unusually preoccupied. Kat glanced across at her as they drove on. “You think they were wrong to tell Melina where she came from, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do, yes,” Holly admitted. “I appreciate it’s a tricky situation, but to be told that your father was a rapist and that your mother gave you up to be raised in a different faith . . . That’s pretty tough at any age. Personally I’d rather start with a clean slate.”

  “I’d agree if it didn’t affect anyone else. But if telling Melina means that Findlater can be caught, I’d say that changes things.”

  “It comes down to a judgement call, doesn’t it?” Holly said. “Is one girl’s welfare more or less important than justice for something that happened before she was even born?”

  “I think both are important. Getting the evidence about Findlater and the William Baker conference to the ICTY is only half the job. Once we’ve done that, we have to do everything in our power to help Melina too.”

  Soraya had told them that the Birds’ Nest was situated on an abandoned farm, the only one up on the ridge. Even so, it took them a good half hour of investigating the numerous little tracks running into the woods before they spotted a ragged metal fence.

  They left the car and went closer on foot. The farm consisted of a derelict cottage and four or five dilapidated animal sheds. A small barn to one side had been gutted by fire.

  “Not a lot to see,” Holly commented. She raised her camera anyway, firing off some pictures.

  Kat took a step and felt something small and round turn under her foot. Pushing aside the ivy with her toe, she saw something glint. Bullet casings. A little further on, she almost tripped on the edge of a rusty chain. She pulled it free of the undergrowth. The other end was fastened to a tree.

  Kat shivered. Perhaps it was simply the power of suggestion – knowing what terrible things had happened here – but there was something about the place that spooked her. It was a similar feeling to the one she’d had walking round the old asylum at Poveglia.

  “Let’s go round the other side,” Holly said.

  From the back, the dilapidation was even more apparent. Old farm equipment rusted into the weeds. A pile of tangled iron struts showed where another building had collapsed into the forest floor.

  “A few more shots. Then let’s go,” she said, just as Holly raised a hand.

  “What was that?”

  They listened. It came again. A woman’s voice, coming from the direction of the derelict cottage.

  Hairs rose on the back of Kat’s neck and along her forearms. For a moment she thought: a ghost. Then she heard a male voice, the sound of an engine. She exchanged a look with Holly. They crept to the corner of the gutted barn.

  Parked in front of the cottage was a van. Two men were escorting a young woman towards one of the sheds. The door closed behind her.

  The men got back into the van. Holly raised the camera and took a series of pictures as it drove off. Then the two of them turned back to the shed. There were small, high windows along one side.

  Peering in through the gloom of the late-afternoon light, they saw five young women sitting on an upturned animal trough, waiting. On the concrete floor next to them were five suitcases.

  They pulled back to the woods to confer.

  “It’s the pipeline,” Kat said. “The one that trafficked Melina from Brezic all the way to Italy. This must be part of it.”

  “I guess the factors that made this an appealing location in wartime still apply. It’s remote and secure. And I bet local people still know to stay away.”

  “Melina could have been kept in the very same place her mother was,” Kat said, struck by the horrific coincidence.

  “What do we do?”

  “For them? I’m not sure there’s much we can do, right now. If they’re like the girls I spoke to in Venice, they’ll have been spun some story about working as nannies or cleaners. They’ll trust the traffickers, not two foreign women who turn up telling them it’s all lies. And if they warn the traffickers about us, things could get nasty.”

  They got back to the car and reversed along the track.

  “This is why it matters,” Kat said suddenly.

  Holly looked at her. “Why what matters?”

  “This is why old crimes have to be pursued just as much as new ones. Otherwise, they just repeat themselves.”

  When they reached the road, Holly turned the car round. Kat leant forward, pointing. “Wait. What’s that?”

  A mile or so below them, troops were jumping down from three trucks and spreading out into the fields. There was a flash, and a dull “crump” echoed from the woods.

  “Must be the army exercise we saw earlier,” Holly said.

  “Holly,” Kat said slowly, “could they be here because of us?”

  “I don’t see how. But just to be safe, let’s avoid them. There was a turning about a mile down the hill. We’ll take that, then double back to the main road.”

  Fifty-seven

  US AIR FORCE pilot Major Peter Bower edged the joystick further forward, the instruments in front of him reacting immediately as his aircraft straightened. He had another forty minutes of flying left. After that, even if the flight wasn’t over, he’d get up from his seat, stretch, and hand the controls to another pilot. Then, putting on his sunglasses against the glare of the early-morning sun, he’d stroll out of the air-conditioned Flight Centre into the dry heat of the Nevada desert and get himself some breakfast at the BX, which he would eat while reading his emails and surfing the net on his tablet computer. After an hour and a half he’d come back on shift and be assigned a different flight, perhaps one over Afghanistan. He preferred the Afghan flights. Everybody did: you knew that the drone you were piloting was involved in a real mission, as opposed to the endless exercises that characterised NATO’s European operations.

  Like this one. “I have the target,” he reported, his voice professionally calm. “One pale small Fiat automobile. One Predator, four missiles. Awaiting orders.”

  “Copy that,” Linda Jessop said to his right. She was operating the sensors – the various cameras, satellite links and imaging systems that were their drone’s eyes and ears. Although like many sensor operators Linda was technically employed by a pri
vate contractor rather than the Air Force, the two of them had flown together for about four years. In all that time they hadn’t left the ground once.

  Nor had they actually set eyes on the aircraft they were flying today, although they were very familiar with the model. The Pentagon had purchased over three hundred and sixty Predator UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, usually known as drones – and was currently using them in conflicts all over the world. Peter and Linda flew live missions almost every day. Together with their colleagues, they had been responsible for the deaths of over 2,500 people since the start of the so-called War on Terror.

  The Predator they were piloting this morning had been launched from Aviano Air Base in Italy, before flying a few hundred miles to Croatia to take part in a small-scale evade-and-resist exercise. The Hellfire missiles were therefore disarmed: any instruction to fire them would result in a simulated laser strike, a “kill” in name only.

  Mistakes using Predators were vanishingly rare. At every step of the way orders were checked and double-checked. It was, Major Bower liked to boast to his friends, the safest and most accurate way to wage warfare ever invented – at least, for the aircrew.

  “Targets acquired,” Linda confirmed.

  The voice of his controller filled his headphones. “Pilot, Sensor: you are cleared to engage.”

  Even though it was only an exercise, Peter Bower felt the familiar small jolt of adrenalin that came from being given the command to fire. Despite what some people claimed, you never treated it as a video game. He had flown too many conventional airborne sorties and seen too many targets disappear under his crosshairs not to appreciate what his orders meant for those on the receiving end.

  Quickly the two of them ran through the pre-launch checklist. On a good day they could do this in twenty-one seconds: coding the weapons, confirming their status, arming the laser and locking on to the target.

  Today was a pretty good day: twenty-one and a half.

  “Three, two, one,” he counted. “Rifle.” Next to him, Linda pressed a red button on the side of her joystick. “Three, two, one. Impact.”