Deep Black by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page A

to Da Nang.
    I wondered about the kind of people who came to look at this sort of stuff. Suffering sold as art. It felt voyeuristic, almost perverted. What the fuck had Ezra been on? This wasn’t going to help me. Why would I want to see this shit? I felt myself getting angrier the deeper I walked into the gallery. But I couldn’t stop myself looking.
    Art Works’ walls and ceiling were brilliant white. Small halogen lights played on each photograph, caption and price tag. I walked down the first pier of frames giving each picture a cursory glance. Villages getting burnt to the ground. Armoured vehicles driving over bodies. Some of the killing done by Serbs, some by Muslims or Croats. It didn’t matter in Bosnia: everyone just slaughtered everyone else.
    Maybe I was wrong. Maybe if more people did come and look at this stuff close up, they’d stop thinking of war as a PlayStation game.
    The second pier was simply entitled ‘Children’. I wondered if this was what Ezra had wanted me to look at. I studied the first black-and-white, ten-by-eight plate under its perspex frame. A young woman, probably in her early twenties, held a baby in her arms. She was lying in the snow and mud at the base of a tree beside a road. It was obvious she’d been shot. There were bloodstained strike marks all over her, and splashes against the bark. Her eyes were wide open. She’d probably been sitting against the tree at the time she got hit.
    This particular execution had been carried out by Muslims. In the background was a group of women, some with small bundles of belongings, being helped on to a truck by a man. Somebody had painted a white arrow on the bark just above the blood splash, and daubed the words ‘Chetnik Mama’. It was hard enough wondering why they’d shot her, let alone stopped to paint a message. What was even worse was that the Muslims hadn’t killed the baby: hypothermia had. I kept my eyes on the girl, staring into her eyes for clues. Had she stayed conscious just long enough for her to know her kid was going to die as soon as the frost arrived that night?
    I rubbed a hand into my scalp and smelt it, wondering if the mother had been able to smell her child’s hair while taking her last breaths.
    I moved down the aisle, drawn to a particular plate four or five shots along. A drab image, with a flash of red in it.
    I stood in front of it and couldn’t decide if I should laugh or burst into tears. It was Zina, smiling at the camera, her arms out as she showed off her new jacket while walking along a mud track with a group of older women. Everything else was grey – the sky, the buildings behind her, even the old women and their clothes. But not her: she was a splash of colour and her eyes were bright as they looked into the lens, perhaps smiling at her own reflection.
    The caption simply said: ‘The Poppy’. The photographer was Finnish.
    Her full name was Zina Osmanovich, and the picture had been taken on her fifteenth birthday. Two days later she was grabbed by Serbs, it said, along with the rest of her village, and killed while trying to escape.
    Fifteen. I glanced down at Baby-G.
    I tried not to, but couldn’t stop myself looking back and staring into her eyes. The last time I’d seen them they were dull and glazed like those of a dead fish, her mutilated body covered in mud. Tears started to well.
    It had been nine years. What the fuck was wrong with me? I wanted to move, and yet I didn’t. In the end I just stood and gazed at her. I thought about her life and Kelly’s. How would things have turned out for them both? Would they have got married? Had kids of their own?
    I should have done something. They would both have been alive still if it wasn’t for me  . . .
    What? What could I have done?
    I felt a hand on my arm.
    ‘I’m not surprised you can’t tear yourself away from it,’ a voice behind me said. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ There was a sigh. ‘What I’d give to have taken a