Deep Black by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page B

shot like that . . . Wouldn’t you, Nick Collins?’

15
    I spun round to find myself face to face with a grinning, clean-shaven Arab, who had the whitest teeth this side of the Oscar ceremony.
    ‘Jeral!’ I shook my head with surprise and what I hoped looked like delight. Pointless pretending I wasn’t who he thought I was: we’d spent too long together in Bosnia.
    We shook hands. His face was still creased in a huge smile. ‘It’s been a few years, hasn’t it?’
    Jerry still had a touch of Omar Sharif about him, even though he’d put on a few pounds. There were specks of paint in his hair and over his watch, as if he’d been having an argument with a roller. ‘You haven’t changed a bit, mate.’ I glanced at the holes in his faded black jeans, and the black shirt that had obviously been ironed with a cold mess-tin. ‘And neither has your kit . . .’
    He rubbed the thinning patch on his head ruefully before giving me the once-over. He looked as if he wanted to say I hadn’t changed either, but couldn’t quite bring himself to tell that big a lie. In the end he just rubbed his head again and his expression became more serious. ‘By the way, I’m Jerry now. Arabic names haven’t gone down too well around here since 9/11. And things in Lackawanna don’t help . . .’
    He came from a steel town in upstate New York that had become part of the rust belt. His parents had been among the hundreds who’d emigrated from the Yemen to work in the factories, but were probably now existing on welfare. Lackawanna had been in the news quite a lot in recent weeks. Six Yemeni-Americans who’d been arrested for attending an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001 came from there – the first Made-in-the-USA Islamic extremists. If I had, I’d have changed my name too.
    I’d liked Jerry immediately. There was something that set him apart from the two distinct camps of journalists I’d come across in Sarajevo – the manic, gung-ho kids who’d turned up from all over the world in the hope of making their name, and the establishment figures who rarely risked leaving the basement of the hotel.
    The night I met him in Sarajevo, I was having a quiet beer at the bar of the Holiday Inn while waiting for another job. It was the only hotel still operating during the siege. I stayed there because it was where the media hung out, and I wanted to keep up my cover story.
    Jerry was arguing with a group of newsmen. He’d just made it back from Serb-occupied territory while some of the people around him hadn’t made it further than the front door. They just went down into the basement each morning, climbed into a UN APC, and hitched a ride to HQ. There they’d pick up a press release, take it back to the hotel, pad it out with a few quotes – usually from other journalists – and file it as from the front line. Jerry was one of the few guys I’d seen who chased the real stories.
    He’d broken away from the argument and come and sat next to me at the bar.
    ‘They got their heads up their asses, man.’ He took another swig of cat’s piss lager. ‘This isn’t one war – it’s hundreds.’
    I looked shocked. ‘You mean there’s more to this than Serbs versus Muslims?’
    For an American, he was quick on the uptake. His face lit up. ‘Just a little bit. I’ve heard there’s a Muslim-Croat thing going on, and Croat versus Serb. And as for Mostar . . .’ He let it hang. He was testing me.
    It was my turn to smile. ‘Versus the rest of the south. Tuzla?’
    ‘Versus the rest of the north, man. Like I said, hundreds.’ He extended his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Jeral. You with the networks?’
    We shook. ‘Nick Collins. Anyone with a chequebook.’
    Over the next couple of bad beers I’d discovered that, although he looked like Omar Sharif’s kid brother, he was born and bred in the States and couldn’t have been more apple pie if he’d tried. And he was the only fluent Arab speaker I’d ever come across who’d never