FOURTEEN
‘There were three of us. Me, Carver and Floyd. We all met at Camp Bondsteel. It was the main NATO military base over there, and it was a hell of a place to be. I'd been in the Army for over ten years at that point. Went to the Gulf. Bosnia. Been in some good camps, and some pretty bad ones. But Bondsteel was the best military base I’d ever been to in my life. It had everything. A cinema, school-rooms, two cappuccino bars, football fields, recreation rooms. You name it, they had it. They had the best hospital in Kosovo too. They even had a Taco Bell and Burger King.'
He paused, taking a breath. Archer noticed the effort from talking was already causing more beads of cold sweat to form on the man's brow. Simple talking and having a conversation for this man was like going flat out on a treadmill on the highest setting.
'Most of that stuff was there to keep the troops entertained, you know? Back then, it wasn’t like it is now in Afghanistan, or Iraq. The action was few and far between, and it was pretty damn boring. NATO bombers were just about to start hitting Belgrade, but the Serbs and the Albanians were only interested in engaging each other. We were like an umpire on a tennis court, watching it go back and forth, trying to keep score.’
He winced again as he took another deep breath, the effort causing one of the drops of sweat on his brow to slide down the side of his head. He licked his lips with a dry tongue, then turned his head to the side, looking at a small table. There was a cup of water with a straw there.
Fox read what he wanted and moving forward, he picked it up, holding it closer as Fletcher took a drink.
'Thanks,' he said, leaning back in the bed, continuing. 'Anyway, the camp was the main base for the US Army in Kosovo. I was one of the only Brits on site, but that wasn’t intentional. I shouldn't even have been there in the first place. I'd taken two bullets, one in the leg and one in the chest from a sniper. We were out on a peace-keeping patrol when I got hit, and the nearest hospital was at Bondsteel. I was told I had to stay there until I was fit to travel and return to my battalion.’
He coughed. It seemed like his body just wanted him to shut up and lie back.
‘Once they’d patched me up and I'd recovered enough to be released from the hospital, I had a lot of time to kill. I was hanging around, waiting for some transport to be released to pick me up, but it was all committed elsewhere so I had to wait. Everyone there was US Army or Marine Corps and as I wasn’t officially there, there was no chance of me being called out on patrol or anything, nothing to break up the days, plus I was still recovering. Although there was stuff to do on site, I got bored as hell quickly, spending all my time alone. I watched all the movies they had, and got sick of Burger King. So, to keep busy, I used to do down to the shooting range.'
He paused.
'The standard weapon for my squad was the SA80,’ Fletcher continued. ‘Typical English weapon. Solid, straight-shooter, gets the job done. Zero glamour. Not the kind of gun you’d ever see in the movies. But the Americans, they did it different. They had M-16s and Berettas. I got friendly with the quartermaster down at the range and he let me work out with one of the M-16s.’
He paused, and licked his lips, his tongue already dry again.
‘It was a lot of fun. I’d never handled a weapon like that before. I spent all day there on the range, drilling the targets, getting used to the feel of the rifle. Given the amount of spare time I had, I got pretty good with it. Seeing as I never had to answer any roll call, I spent most of my days down there. Other soldiers would come and go, but there was one other guy who was always there, almost every time I was. His name was Floyd. David Floyd, a Private, US Marine Corps. Southern boy, out of Georgia. Spoke like one of those cowboys in the movies I used to watch as a kid. He was off the frontline too. He’d broken his ankle and was having to wait to heal up before he could return to duty.'
He paused.
'Now I came from a strong battalion in the British Army. We had some good shooters, believe you me. But Floyd was surgical. He was one of the best I’d ever seen. The quartermaster told me he was down there for hours every day. Soon enough, we got talking. People get to know each other on base, but I was a newcomer, an outsider. I didn’t know anything about him. Turned out he was a real loner. Didn’t have any friends there aside from one other guy.’
‘Carver,’ Jackson said quietly.
Fletcher nodded.
‘Yes. After we got friendly, he introduced me to Carver, who was his Captain. Should have told me something then. Officers and NCOs are not usually mates. It crossed my mind - why wasn’t Carver hanging out with other officers? Anyway, I’d heard about him from the quartermaster. Stay away from that a*shole, he said. For your own good. Carver had a bad reputation, and I mean really bad. There were all sorts of rumours about him, but the guy on the range wasn’t exaggerating. People hated him, mostly guys under his command. Floyd was the only one who seemed to have any time for him, but his men wouldn’t have pissed on him if he was on fire. He constantly punished them for trivial stuff, abused his privileges, stuff like that. There was even a rumour that he’d gang-raped some girl with two other guys back in Bosnia. From the sounds of it, it was a miracle that he’d never been fragged out in the field.’
‘Fragged?’ Chalky asked.
‘Killed by one of his own men,’ Jackson said.
‘But we clicked straight away when we met,’ Fletcher continued. ‘He seemed OK to me. Never gave me any grief. Anyway, we became a trio, me, him and Floyd. The three of us would meet up and go shooting together at the firing range. I wasn’t due to be picked up and taken out of there for a few weeks, so I had a hell of a lot of spare time on my hands and I spent most of it with the other two.’
He paused.
‘Soon enough, we started spending more time together outside of the range. Carver had access and privileges that Floyd and I didn’t, being a Captain. He used to go to the stores and get bottles of Jack. We'd get loaded up in his room.’
He paused and swallowed.
The room was so quiet, every man heard it.
‘So one night, we were in Carver’s room. We had some metal going on the speakers, and killed two bottles of whiskey between us. As it normally did, the conversation turned to shooting. Floyd had never even fired his weapon in combat before. He was your typical jarhead. He’d been there for almost a year and hadn’t even taken a shot at the enemy. And Carver had only ever shot at two enemy combatants in his entire career, killing neither, which pissed him off something special. It was eating away at him, just like this cancer in my gut.'
Pause.
'So Carver suddenly said that he wanted to go hunting.’
Fletcher coughed, then shook his head and looked at Cobb.
‘Worst decision of my life,’ he said. ‘One of those moments where you'd give anything to go back and make a different choice, you know? I was drunk out of my mind. I said yes and so did Floyd, figuring we’d just fire off a few rounds out on the plains and drive back. So Carver got into a Humvee and fed the guard on the gate some bullshit excuse about a late-night rendezvous and we went out there, M-16s a piece, stacks of spare clips in the back of the wagon.'
He paused again. Archer saw the man’s eyes weren’t focused on anyone in the room anymore. His mind was back in that vehicle and reliving the drive that night. From the look on the guy’s face, Archer guessed it had happened thousands of times since.
'Floyd was wasted, full of bravado and out for blood, and so was Carver,’ he said. ‘He almost ran us off the road three times he was so tanked. Sitting there in the back of the truck, I started to realise that all those warnings about Carver were right. He was crazy, out of control.’
He stopped, taking a breath. His rising emotions weren’t helping his sick body. In the room, no one made a sound.
‘In that area, the Kosovo army, the KLA, were taking on the Serbs in the valleys. One of their units had evacuated all their women and children out to a township fifteen miles from our camp, to keep them well back from the firing line. Carver knew all about it from the latest reports. So he took us on the dirt track and headed straight there.’
He paused again, closing his eyes.
‘Soon enough, we arrived, and stepped out of the truck,' he said, swallowing, his voice starting to tremble slightly. 'There were only three men in that town guarding the women and the kids. Two of them came up and asked what we were doing there. They weren’t being aggressive, they were just doing their jobs.'
He swallowed hard again.
'Floyd started arguing with them, but then Carver just lifted his rifle and shot them both in the head. Bang bang. Two shots. Killed them both.'
Pause.
'And from there, the floodgates opened,’ he said. ‘The two of them just went berserk. They were going hut to hut, through mag after mag. They hosed down kids as they ran up the street, reloading fast whenever their clips clicked dry. They shot pregnant women. And laughed as they did it. I stayed where I was by the Humvee, my rifle in the truck. I couldn’t believe what they were doing. I thought it was a bad dream. But I couldn’t stop them. They would have turned around and shot me too.’
He blinked, tears in his eyes.
‘A lot of the women and kids tried to run to the hills for cover, but they were all mown down. The pair of them must have killed close to thirty, forty people, probably more. All of them women and children apart from three guards.’
The room was silent.
‘Afterwards, when everyone around us was either dead or dying and their bloodlust was satisfied, both of them began to realise what they had just done. They started to panic. Carver said we should head straight back to camp and pretend it never happened. Deny all responsibility. He said he could get us out of it, and would come up with some back-up plan that could cover us. So we jumped in the Humvee, turned around and left as quickly as we came. Leaving behind a camp littered with dead bodies and soaked in blood.’
He swallowed.
‘But we never made it back. The last surviving guard or someone else must have called in the attack over a radio from somewhere. Our Humvee got hit by a bazooka as we were driving back to Bondsteel and the next thing I knew we were captured.’
‘By who?’ Archer asked. ‘The KLA?’
Fletcher shook his head.
‘Yes and no. Technically they were KLA at the time. They were a renegade Special Forces Unit. I found out later that the KLA expelled them after the war for stuff they did.’
‘Why were they expelled?’
Fletcher blinked.
‘War crimes. Back at Bondsteel, we’d all heard tales about them. They were called the Black Panthers. Entire Serbian villages were being found deserted in the area, clothes and possessions still inside the houses. Everyone gone, vanished, no blood, no bodies, no traces, never seen or heard from again. That was their handiwork. No one knew why or what had happened to the people. Word had spread. They were close to being expelled by the time they kidnapped us, but later the KLA commanders said they were too savage for their organisation, that their interests weren’t the same as the liberation’s anymore.’
He paused.
‘The Black Panthers. Albanian Special Forces. Some of the toughest bastards on the planet. And it turned out the people in the camp we murdered were their wives and children.’