Instead, we climbed slowly. The rope went tight enough to choke me each time Goos took another step, and I tried to follow him precisely as he talked me through it, right foot, then left. We paused on each rung. Given my aversion to heights, I made it a point not to look down. My heart was banging so hard I could feel it throbbing in my temples. Our pleasant lunch in the shadow of the monastery seemed a swallow away from forcing itself back up on me, which could prove lethal if Goos or I moved the wrong way in response.
When Goos reached the top, the English-speaking guy had his automatic rifle pointed. Stepping over the top rung, Goos stumbled. The rope burned into my neck suddenly and for a second I saw black, while my forehead crashed against the ladder. The other Chetnik at the top grabbed the rope to keep me from falling off, then pulled me up as if he were reeling in a fish. Once I had my feet on the top of the tank, I saw that Goos’s noose had been removed, but his hands were again zip-tied behind him. They did the same to me. In the meantime, the leader and his lackey arrived.
There was a three-quarter moon, providing considerable light. The dome of the tank was steep, probably to keep rainwater from accumulating, and it was edged with a steel band about six inches high. The surface was studded with little metal footholds that rose in ranks all the way to the top. The leader used them to climb up to a door in the dome, which he propped open.
Goos had sunk to one knee while all this was going on. The temple that had been pistol-whipped was toward me, still glistening at the small laceration. That side of Goos’s face was streaked with three lines of clotted blood, black in this light, but it was clearly his side giving him the greater pain.
“Broken ribs?”
He nodded rather than speak. I’d been there once, after a car accident. For an injury that was rarely life-threatening, it was astonishingly painful and left you reluctant to breathe.
“This here is the salt vat,” he said. “It’s full of water, supersaturated with salt. Hydrochloric acid basically. Won’t be much trace of us in a few weeks.” He said it almost casually.
So that was the plan. Throw us in with our hands tied. Let us drown as our flesh was burned away. Maybe the beating would be better. What I really wanted to do was make them shoot me now.
The leader returned and pointed the AK. I sat down beside Goos, causing the fellow with the Zastava to grunt in Serbo-Croatian. He was telling me to stand up and I shook my head no. I saw the rifle barrel coming and ducked under it as it swept over my head, but having gotten down, there was no way to avoid the muzzle as it returned on the backhand swing, catching me solidly on the ear and the temple. It probably wasn’t an availing angle for him, because the pain didn’t feel overwhelming.
There was some growling around and the English speaker was back.
“If you walk up there, we will shoot you in the head before you go into the tank. Otherwise, we will drag you and throw you in there alive.”
“And why should we believe that?” I asked from the ground. These guys weren’t humanitarians. If we walked up, I was pretty sure they’d throw us in anyway, while we were still breathing. Maybe they’d stand around for a few minutes to laugh as we screamed.
I took a second trying to figure why they seemed intent on getting us to walk up to the top of the tank, and recognized we finally had some advantage. Dragging a man struggling for his life up an incline was dangerous for them. Even beating us with the fierceness of the blows Goos had received on the ground risked catapulting the assailant right off the dome if he lost his balance. They couldn’t shoot us either as we lay there, for fear of blowing holes in the tank, with God knows what consequences. In a while, they’d find solutions for these problems, but right now we were a little safer than we’d been down below. The guy who spoke English walked away to confer with the leader.
“Don’t move,” I told Goos.
“And I was just about to run for the next tram, mate.”
I laughed a little, which had a weird sweetness to it.
The stalemate with our captors continued for a couple of minutes. Then, as I lay there against the steel rim of the tank, I could see lights sweep up the road. I heard gravel spurning, and in a second, the thud of a car door. In the dark, a voice echoed. They had phoned for assistance, apparently.
“Nikolai,” a man called below. He repeated the name several times and the leader walked over to the ladder and looked down. The man on the ground said something else and Nikolai protested, but stepped onto the ladder. I could hear the two arguing as Nikolai descended. Their voices quieted once he was on the ground.
When Nikolai climbed back up in a few minutes, he whispered to the others. There was a new plan. All four came over to me first. One of them administered a solid shot with the metal stock of the AK that caught me in the mouth, and they pulled me up to my knees. I was bleeding inside my lip, which within seconds felt like it had grown to the size of a grape. One of them held me upright while another suddenly placed a ski mask over my head. I felt the muzzle of the AK braced hard against my temple as I realized that they’d placed the mask on backward so I couldn’t see. It stunk of sweat and cigarette smoke, and my breathing was stifled. I’d been hooded, just like the familiar pictures of men in their final instants before execution. Even now, there was something to learn: Blindfolding the doomed man was not for his sake. The sudden blackness geared up my fear to an absolute level, where fright itself was physically agonizing. The mask was meant to spare the executioner the beseeching look of the condemned, to keep any last-minute fellow feelings from standing in the way.
From the sound of his breathing, I recognized that Goos had been positioned beside me, both of us kneeling with our feet against the rim of the tank as we faced the crown of the dome. I took it they had realized they were going to have to shoot us here and drag us up to the tank door themselves. I thought of plunging down on my face again, but I was satisfied that dying right here was the best we could do.
In the meantime, I could hear footfalls on the ladder again and, occasionally, the clanging of a rifle barrel on the iron. Two or three of our captors were heading down. They were going to leave one man up here to finish the job. I felt the Zastava pressed harder against my temple as the executioner, probably the English speaker, prepared to shoot.
“God no, please,” I said, but I didn’t get out more, because I was shocked by the wet heat of my own pee soaking my lap. I would never say I was concerned about self-respect at that moment, but I did care about self. I had come too far in the last few years to die without wrapping both arms around who I was, and I sunk inward. I had solemn fervent thoughts about my boys, which rose in my heart like a silver beacon, and then, as I knelt there waiting for the bullet, I unexpectedly thought about my father. And what do you say now, Dad? I suddenly asked him. He’d abandoned who he was to be safe from the return of history’s monsters, and yet here I was, about to die at the hands of the same kind of ghouls. In this life, there was no place beyond the reach of evil.
Time wore on. I was amazed by every second. Another, I thought, another. I heard something from the side of the tank that sounded like one of the AKs banging again on the ladder rungs. Then the gravel popped below as one of the cars drove off, quickly followed by a second, even a third, perhaps, judging from the engines’ whines.
The night wind whipped across us and I was abruptly aware that my hands were numb from the ties. The urine on my lap and left pants leg was cold now.
“Are you here, Goos?”
“Yay, mate.”
“Are they gone?”
Goos spoke up boldly, something in Serbo-Croatian, shouted into the night. The silence afterward lingered.
“Gone,” he said. “I just said ‘Your mother’s cunt is wide as a river from all the men that have been in it.’ Would have earned us a proper spanking if they were still here.”
“Did you understand anything of what the guy who drove up was saying to Nikolai?”
“Not much. He told him to come down. When Nikolai objected, the other one said it was an order. But I couldn’t understand anything they said on the ground, except that they were cross with one another.”