CHAPTER 11
About an hour into the flight, the loadmaster delivered body armor and helmets to his passengers. UN regulations required all crew and passengers to wear protective gear once they cleared the Adriatic Sea and started over disputed Balkan territory.
Given the risk of ground fire, it made more sense to sit on the vests than wear them, but Brenna dutifully pulled hers on, donned the helmet, and buckled the chin strap. If you wanted the ride, you followed the rules.
Grace, inexperienced with protective garb, accepted the loadmaster’s help, the expression on her face growing increasingly solemn.
Kav?ak lay about twenty minutes ahead.
Ringed by towering mountains, the city’s maze of narrow switch-backed streets wound through neighborhoods as ancient and diverse as history itself.
East and west, old and new intersected there.
Mosques, synagogues, cathedrals, and the former communist party headquarters all stood within blocks of each other.
Here, over forty percent of the citizens were ethnically intermarried.
Until the war, neighbors had just been Drago and Vera and Mediha.
They didn’t identify themselves as Christians, or Jews, or Muslims.
Contrary to General ?avi?’s inflammatory propaganda, their lives had already proven that peaceful coexistence was possible.
Not surprisingly, as a nation segregated along ethnic lines began taking shape around them, Kav?aks had declared themselves a separate city-state.
And so they sat, hunkered down, with General ?avi?’s Nationalist Army surrounding them. Cut off from food, water, electricity, and the outside world—endlessly shelled, shot, and starved—the Kav?aks grimly held on.
The alternative was genocide.
Their very diversity had left them with no safe place to go. Once blended, there was no return to segregation.
Brenna stirred as they banked, pinched her nostrils and blew out the pressure in her ears.
Grace turned toward her, her face inches away. “Brenna? What’s it like, on the ground?”
She studied Grace’s face. She had such an open countenance, keeping scant distance between her heart and her face.
Brenna regretted her churlishness, starting when she had gone to sign the contracts.
If your inexperience gets in the way of my safety, I will turn my back on you and walk away, she had spat.
Grace’s distrust had hurt her and she had lashed out.
But Grace hadn’t defended herself. Brenna had wounded her, and she’d taken the hit, letting that awful statement wash over her unchallenged.
The thought stung.
Brenna was becoming everything she despised.
Even so, Grace had brought her water, steadied her shaking hand, and held the bottle to her lips. Kindness ran river-deep inside her.
And nothing disarmed Brenna like kindness.
As for Grace’s question—how could she possibly explain what lay below?
Humanity turned barbaric? Language was too rational, too removed from the primitive way the body responded.
War was body chemistry running amok through the physical landscape.
It was the human spirit whipped in an instant from despair to elation.
War revealed the best and worst of people and irrevocably changed those who experienced it.
Grace would have to live it to understand it.
But, finally, Brenna answered. “They eat each other alive.”
The plane took a sharp dive and descended, touching down and racing down the runway.
The airport—a nondescript control tower, terminal, and two oblong out-buildings—was only used to airlift humanitarian aid into the city.
Foreign journalists and dignitaries, plus a handful of high-ranking Kav?ak politicians with UN transit cards, were allowed to catch rides, but the general populace was forbidden to leave the city.
Because of its geographic exposure, and because neither faction possessed military aircraft, the airport had no tactical value to either the Nationalists or the Separatists.
However, at the beginning of the war, when the Nationalists held overt control of the facility, they negotiated a deal for its use with the tiny UN contingent coincidentally headquartered in Kav?ak to carry out its peacekeeping mission in the disputed surrounding regions.
Undermanned and with little clout beyond its international role, the UN team was bullied by the Nationalists into agreeing that forty percent of all aid that landed there would be distributed to its own faction.
This, despite the fact that the Nationalists—unlike the encircled Separatists—already had free access to all the food, shelter, medical supplies, and weapons available in the world outside Kav?ak.
Thus, effectively, forty percent of the aid intended for the people inside the besieged city actually supported the army holding them hostage.
The terms of the agreement stipulated UN control of the airport, but the reality was that the airport remained open at the caprice of the Nationalists, who understood its inestimable political value.
The Herc braked hard and stopped.
The loadmaster threw off his seat belt, and lowered the cargo ramp. A blast of frigid air blew into the interior. The ground crew, breaths steaming in the cold, swarmed the aircraft.
Brenna grabbed her bags and sprinted across the tarmac, behind a barricade of stacked shipping containers.
The barriers, erected by the Canadian UN forces that now nominally controlled the airport, broke the sight lines between the disembarking passengers and the Nationalist tanks ominously encircling the southern perimeter of the facility.
The tanks, along with the Separatists who aimed back at them from the five-story apartment buildings directly behind the north side of the airport, put passengers in direct crossfire.
The front line was that close. The enemies separated by that little.
Brenna strode through an eight-foot high maze of sandbags, chain-link fencing, and barbed wire with Grace at her heels, her head instinctively ducked. They stopped at the reception area.
“Bienvenue, Brenna.” A young woman with straight, chin-length brown hair greeted Brenna as pleasantly as if she were serving coffees at a Van Houtte’s in Québec. Canadians, the joke went, were so polite they thanked the automatic doors.
Brenna reminded herself to exchange a pleasantry. “Bonjour,” she replied.
The Corporal shifted her attention to Grace, who, like Brenna, extended her travel documents. The soldier accepted them, but did not examine them. Instead, she asked Brenna, nodding in Grace’s direction. “Elle travaille avec vous?”
“Oui,” she replied. “She’s working with me on this trip.”
The young woman keyed some data into a computer, handed back their documents, and raised a hand in the direction of the terminal lobby. “The Colonel waits for you.”
Colonel? Grace thought. Who was this Colonel everyone kept mentioning?
She walked into the terminal, past a hand-painted sign that said “Maybe Airlines,” and stopped.
Armed soldiers guarded every doorway and counter in the departure area.
Mothers begged, children cried, and old men gestured vehemently.
Kav?aks were clamoring to get out. But… Weren’t they forbidden to leave?
“Brenna!” An authoritative voice carried across the commotion.
The lobby fell silent.
Like everyone else, Grace turned to the source of that confident voice, and watched as a distinguished man in uniform strode across the arrival area toward Brenna. He was fifty-ish, trim, and silver-haired. Reaching her, he slipped possessive hands around her waist.
Yep, Grace thought. She’s gorgeous. Who wouldn’t want her?
Brenna hugged the officer warmly.
An irrational pang of envy jabbed Grace’s chest.
When Brenna pulled back, she exchanged kisses on each of the Colonel’s cheeks in the French-Canadian manner.
Motioning Grace closer, Brenna introduced her. “Luc, this is Grace Alcott, EBS in Washington, D.C. We’re working on a documentary together. And this is Colonel Luc Morriseau, Battalion Commander of the Canadian unit responsible for the airport.”
Colonel Morriseau took Grace’s hand.
Though French, Egyptian, and Ukrainian UN forces held sway in the city of Kav?ak itself, the delicate task of keeping the airport open fell on this man’s shoulders.
The most highly regarded members of the multi-national forces, the Canadians had a long tradition of participating in peace-keeping missions around the globe.
Highly disciplined and proven to keep their equanimity under the toughest circumstances, they perversely took pride in being equally hated by all sides. His job couldn’t be easy.
Grace nodded respectfully. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Come,” Luc said, motioning them to follow.
He led them down a set of stairs to an unmarked door, pushed it open, and crossed a large room divided into cubicles.
At his office, he pulled a key ring out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and showed his guests in.
“It is right here,” he told Brenna, lifting the cover of a gray metal cabinet over his desk. “Your camera. Just as you left it.”
“Great,” she said. She eased it off the shelf, flipped the power lever on. When the LCD monitor brightened, her fingers played over the switches and dials on the sides and front of the unit.
Morriseau threw Grace a look. “Like a mother picking up her child from day care, non? Has to check for herself that the baby is well.”
Apparently satisfied by the indicators in the viewfinder, Brenna switched the unit off and straightened. “You have sandbags piled to the sky out there, and there’s—what?—a couple hundred people camped out in the lobby? What’s going on?”
A flicker crossed the Colonel’s face. “We are expecting a major offensive. ?avi? vows to take the city within the week.”
Brenna’s face turned white.
“After all this time?” Grace asked, “What’s the sudden rush?”
Morriseau frowned. “Perhaps the U.S. Special Envoy intends to draw new borders based on the territories each faction already holds when the treaty is signed.”
“Just what we need,” Brenna groaned. “More photo opps.”
“Oui.” Like so many Montrealers who spoke English and French with equal ease, the Colonel blended his languages. But his lilt was pure French Canadian. He gently placed a palm on the side of her neck. “It will be difficult, hein?”
Outside his office, across the cubicles, the door burst open. A fresh-faced Corporal with bright red splotches on his cheeks clattered in, blowing on his hands, stomping his booted feet.
“This is Corporal Michael Stanford,” Morriseau said. “He will take you downtown. We’re down to a van right now. Bullet-resistant glass, but that’s it. You can wait for an armored personnel carrier, but it could be some time.”
Brenna shrugged. “Can’t take pictures through peepholes.”
The soldier—tall, bony-faced, and wiry-strong—came to attention in front of the Colonel. “Sir.”
Morriseau put a fatherly hand on the Corporal’s shoulder. “Two riders on rounds with you this morning.”
“Yes, sir.” The youth nodded self-consciously. “Take your bags, Ma’am?”
“No thanks,” Brenna said. She turned to Morriseau. “But, Luc? I put some personal... luggage… in the cargo hold. A couple of wooden crates. Toothpaste and underwear, that sort of thing. I was wondering if you might pop them in the next APC to the hotel.”
“Let me see,” Morriseau frowned. “Humans in the van. Personal effects in the APC. These underwear, they are very valuable?”
Grace looked from the Colonel to Brenna. They were speaking in code.
“Exactly,” Brenna said, straight-faced. “Very expensive, valuable underwear for my personal use. Not subject to Nationalist quotas.”
Morriseau nodded, reluctantly.
Brenna squeezed his forearm. “Thank you. Again.”
The Colonel turned to Grace, pulled out his wallet, and handed her his business card. “If you need to confirm any of your facts.”
“Thanks,” Grace said, and slipped it inside her jacket pocket. She shook Morriseau’s hand in parting and followed the Corporal. Before she was out of earshot, she overheard Morriseau’s goodbye to Brenna.
“You will be the end of my career.”
“Oh,” she said, walking backwards away from him, her camera in her hand and her bags over her shoulders, flashing him a brilliant smile. “You know you want to.”