The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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curses, he told Squire that he had better ideas of his own.
‘I’ve got orders to contact the major i/c arsenal,’ Squire said.
‘Screw that, I have more genius in my arse than him in his head. Listen to my report.’
Slobodan had received a tip from an informant that a barge or barges had been sighted off-shore during the previous night, a few miles to the north. The barges were showing no navigation lights. All was obvious to Slobodan – you cut out the floors of the freight cars, remove the crates of arms, and steal them away by sea, not land. Sea is safer by night than land by day or night.
‘Barges don’t get far in one night. Come, we go see for ourselves in my fast car.’
Squire found himself packed into a tiny Zastava, bumping dangerously over the coast road, while Slobodan gave him an almost incomprehensible résumé of his family history, in which dismemberment figured rather largely.
After making a few enquiries, they stopped at a small bay west of Opatia, under the humped slopes of Mount Ucka. A black-clad widow-woman who lived up the mountainside swore she could see from her window a newly risen rock or a newly sunken ship under the surface of the Adriatic.
They parked the car and went down to examine the situation. The waters of the Kvarner Bay lapped a line of beach rare on this rocky coast. There were fresh but confused marks in the sand – someone had obliterated tell-tale signs with a sack. The steeply shelving shoreline would allow a shallow-draught barge to pull in to the beach without trouble, and under cover of dark unloading operations could be effected with little risk of discovery: this region, Istra, was under dispute between Yugoslavia and Italy, with parts still administered by British forces; many of the inhabitants had fled, leaving the country almost deserted. The ravages of incessant warfare were plainly seen.
Slobodan and Squire prowled the beach. On trees and bushes fringing the sand they found freshly broken branches, as if vehicles had moved in. They were searching among the bushes when they came on the body of a man dressed in fisherman’s clothes. His jersey was clotted with blood. He had been stabbed several times in the rib-cage. His beard was matted with mud and blood. Anger and pain still contorted his rigid face. Ants crawled between his teeth.
‘It’s Milo,’ said Squire. ‘Milo Strugar …’
‘Jebem te sunce!’ growled Slobodan, thrusting a rampant fist up at the sky. When he recovered, he stuck a cigarette into Squire’s mouth and asked, ‘What do you know of this man?’
‘Milo was my mentor, the first Serb to trust me. As to what he was working on hereabouts, it was secret. I know of it only in general.’ He hesitated, not entirely trusting the savage Slobodan, then plunged on, still overcome with shock. ‘Milo had a lead given him by a Croatian member of the Škupstina [Parliament], an old Partisan pal of his. That I know. I heard only that trouble of some kind was going on in Labin – the Croat spoke of a planned armed insurrection, aimed at getting rid of Tito and manned by disaffected Ustashe elements. Supported by high-level Soviet backing. Where is Labin?’
Slobodan dragged the cigarette from his mouth and pointed inland with fist and cigarette. ‘Twenty kilometres up in the hills, not more. Let’s go!’
Squire leaned over his friend’s torn body, but Slobodan grasped him roughly by the shoulder.
‘Cut out that girlie stuff. Weep for your pal later – first, revenge the bugger. Let’s get to Labin, stir up things there, find guys who’ll help us. These thugs here are desperate.’
Sten guns, magazines, old Cyrillic type-faces, carpenter’s tools, and hand grenades mingled on the back seat of Slobodan’s car. They had rattled noisily on the road from Rijeka. He threw a blanket over them before proceeding. They rattled again as the car accelerated in a pungent whiff of Jugopetrol. Milo Strugar’s body was left lying in the bushes with the ants as they headed up the steep tracks of Istra.
The season was late April. The sun made the hillsides blaze with warmth, exhaling a sweetness that reached them through the open windows of the Zastava. Bumblebees buzzed among short-lived flowers. They drove amid a stand of pines, in which the sun flickered as through a blind, and swerved round a gigantic bend to confront the characteristic landscape of Istra.
Among disorderly and tumbled hills of karst were contrasting patches of cultivation, or the thread of a river. Tender green larches shone from broken slopes, backed by darker pines and cypresses. Fertile and barren lay close, yet distinct. Uncompromising on extravagant bluffs, towns stood out, fortresses as well as villages, each with its Italianate steeple, each dilapidated and without sign of life, each the colour of the hillside it crowned. As the car wound along the road which linked the deserted towns, it passed an occasional donkey, led by a peasant whose ruddy face was powdered by the dust of the thoroughfare.
Squire scrutinized this landscape through field glasses, alert for movement. Istra could provide cover for a whole army. The lorries loaded from the barge could not be far off: they would travel by night, remaining in hiding by day. They drove past shells of houses that bore evidence of the bitter civil war which had still to die completely. Slogans painted crudely on their facades, reading ‘Mi Smo Hrvati’ and ‘Hocemo Tito’ (‘We are Croats,’ ‘We want Tito’), had provided their occupants with a kind of rough life insurance. The gutted facades threw back the sound of their passage as they roared by; the car could be seen and heard for miles. And the karst towered above them in a welter of flowering maquis and broken stone.
Labin appeared round a shoulder of mountainside, grey on the top of its appointed hill. It was perhaps five winding kilometres distant when Squire saw figures on a looming hillside to their right. Not sheep. Men, running. Two of them, three. They dived for cover behind a stone wall and were seen no more. Beyond the wall was a grey-roofed building, slotted into the dip between two hills.
‘Turn up to the right,’ Squire said. ‘Someone’s had a moment of panic up there.’ He felt his stomach knot unpleasantly. There was no knowing what they would meet.
Some metres further on, a track led off the road to the right. Without hesitation, without decelerating, Slobodan turned up it, belting between stone walls in a cloud of dust. Squire leaned back, grabbed a sten from the rear seat, rammed a magazine in it, and set it on Slobodan’s lap, muzzle forward. He selected another sten for himself and held it at the ready. His eyes searched the landscape for hostile movement. Without a word, steering perilously with one hand, Slobodan leaned back and picked up three hand grenades, which he stuffed into a pocket. He winked at Squire. Seeing the point of the operation, Squire also pocketed some grenades.
The narrow track twisted in a manner more suitable for sheep than cars. Twice, metal shrieked as they clipped the stone walls with their mudguards. Then they broke through into a farm yard. Some miserable pullets scattered before their bumper. Ahead and to their left were ruinous buildings. Slobodan braked, keeping the car in clutch and rolling slowly forward as the two men craned their necks for signs of life, stens pointing through the car windows. The farm building to their left had been a mean habitation at the best of times; now the ground-floor windows were roughly boarded up, and the words ‘Hocemo Tito’ painted on the stonework in inelegant red lettering, with a communist star for emphasis.
In its remote situation, it was a place that had already witnessed violence.
As the Zastava came level with the last window, a machine gun opened fire from the upper room. The rear side window of the car shattered and glass flew. Slobodan swore.
Without hesitation, he spun the wheel and sent the car speeding forward, turning left and shooting round the corner of the farm building. He pulled one of the grenades from his pocket. The car braked just before it ran into a wall of stone. With a yell at Squire, Slobodan jumped out of the vehicle and flung himself behind it. Squire followed, chased by another burst of fire from above.
Squire was still feeling numb. He watched as Slobodan pulled the pin from his grenade, stood to aim, and flung the grenade through the nearest upstairs window of the farmhouse. The grenade disappeared. A second of silence. Then it exploded. Cries and shouts sounded. Tiles clattered down.
Time