The short, stocky Serb sat on an upturned gas tin under a thick poplar tree at a farmhouse on the southern edge of the city. A spring rain had soaked the countryside for the past week, and the Serb’s shoes were caked with dark, gummy mud. So were the boots of his two companions, one of whom sat on the rim of a huge, cracking tractor tire while the other, standing, had propped one foot on the edge of a wooden trough as he leaned forward, his forearms crossed on his raised knee. Gnats hovered around them in humid air that was rich with the odors of damp earth and weeds.
The Serb’s two companions were brothers in their late thirties, farmers who seemed to be making only a scrabbly living off their small acreage. Around them was a mud-spattered stucco farmhouse with tiles missing from its roof, a derelict barn that had not seen meaningful use in nearly five years, a rusted-out flatbed Soviet-era truck, a twenty-year-old Russian tractor that had not been able to run for seven years.
“It’s the same stuff we used on the general in Bihac,” the Serb said. “Almost the same. Treat it the same way. I want you to get it out of the British sector, into Croatia, to Split.”
“Just the explosives. Not the detonators?” the standing man asked.
“Just the explosives.”
“And how much of it?”
“It would fit in a lunch pail.”
“Can we take it apart?”
“I don’t care how you do it, so long as you deliver to the address in Split the exact amount that I give you here.”
Both men nodded.
The short man reached into his shirt pocket and took out a piece of paper and handed it to the brother sitting on the tractor tire.
“That’s the address in Split,” he said. “Go there between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. Any even-numbered day. But only that hour. The woman there will take your package. She will open it and verify the amount. If all is fine, she will tell you where to go to get your money.”
“That day? Then?”
“Yes, that very moment.”
The two brothers exchanged looks. They had fought with the short man in Bihac and Mostar in 1992 and 1993 and had learned to trust him in a soldierly way before they were shipped to another front of the war. After they had all left the army, he had looked them up. This was the fourth smuggling job he had brought to them. So far, it was the most simple. And the most lucrative. And the most risky.
The brother standing with his leg on the trough turned to the short man.
“All right. When do we get the explosive?”
“Right now. I have it in the car.” He stood up. “But I have to know when you think you can deliver it. The woman has to know within one or two days.”
“Three days. We can get it to Split in three days.”
“Fine.”
In the distance thunder rolled from one side of the horizon to the other. They all looked up at the overcast sky.
“Goddamn it,” the older brother said, and took his foot down from the trough to follow the little Serb to his car.