Chapter 4

With the memory of the airport customs lady placing her fingers up into my vagina and into my tight rear door looking for God knows what, I walked a bit stiffly to the train for the ride down into Belgrade and the interview with a former high-up in the Yugoslav Communist Party.

This post Tito Balkans was a complex situation to say the least.

It was sort of an introductory course of the later breakup of the Soviet Union into fragments of its greater glory. The clans and families were fighting each other with savage intensity and War Crimes were more the norm than the exception on all sides.

I never could understand why the Americans would want to interfere in this civil war that was destined to be both bitter and divisive to all sides. I was eternally grateful to be a citizen of the UK and not the United States because they were not much appreciated in Serbia with countless civilian causalities due to the use of American air power to restrain the Serbs from murdering their former partners.

I checked into my hotel in the downtown area and was due to report for an interview with the Minister of the Interior the following morning. The newspapers were filled with claims of Bosnian War Crimes and I imagined it would be the same on the other side. The U.N. peacekeeping force was still in the making and I hoped that I would be out of there before it came into being and started to enforce the European Union solution on the civil war.

I visited the British Embassy which was in walking distance from my hotel and the security chief there told me that the American Embassy was closed up and they were helping to take care of their interests as best they could under the circumstances.

He was a nice man in his fifties and retired from military service.

Of course, he made a pass at me and I in a moment of weakness submitted to his persistence and bent over his desk to give him a nice diddle of my bum and other goodies as he was quite polite and had a good attitude about my being only half his age and still naïve enough to think I might get more information with honey instead of a negative attitude.

He thanked me most profusely and told me that his communication section had just learned that the Chinese Embassy had been hit by an American Cruise missile supposedly by accident but it was not near the intended target which was the Serbian intelligence building which was several miles away.

He was nice enough to give me some photos taken by a local contract worker of the destruction and also an internal report of the collateral damage caused by the errant missile. I was able to use their sat line to file my report with the head office and I promised him to give him a second round at my bottom later that night. Of course, I had no intention of keeping that promise because I might be naïve but I was not stupid.

The newly appointed minister of foreign affairs was so young I felt absolutely like his aunt Nancy and not an attractive young hotshot correspondent from the BBC. I knew I could walk down the street in Piccadilly and most males eyes would be focused on my tight skirt that showcased my nicely rounded bum no matter which angle you were looking at it from.

I could tell after a short fifteen minutes that this guy had no interest in the feminine gender and was probably as gay as songbird in spring.

Still the security guard in the room was scoping out my rack and I sat up straighter in my chair so he could see just how perky they were inside my thin silk blouse. It was a frustrating afternoon and one that I knew would not get me any kudos from the home office.

I did a human interest story about a family that was now homeless as a result of the American bombing and made certain I had plenty of good photos on my phone that could be used with the story if necessary. I was not sure the station would run any of it because the politics about the whole Balkans area changed like the weather. The fact that I really liked the story was almost a sure signal that they would not like it because I tended to not conform to the organizational structure at the station.

That was probably why they were sending me everywhere from Tahiti to Timbuctoo to gather the odd stories that they filled the empty space with when nothing of importance was going on.

I received notice at the hotel that the Supervisor had arranged for me to travel out of the city to the contested region inland that was the scene of recent nasty fighting and accusations of genocide on both sides of the civil war.

There was a phone number for me to call to contact the driver and I saw it was a stringer we used before when things were a lot calmer in the area and my only concern was what kind of wine I would buy at the restaurant and where the hell was the toilet paper that was scarcer than hen’s teeth and unavailable at any store or bathroom.

His name was Tom and he looked a lot older than he did just a couple of years ago when things were all sunshine and light. I could tell from his eyes that he had been drinking and I hoped he was in a sober enough condition to handle the mountain roads we had to transverse to check out the troubled area.

The vehicle was a Land Rover with extra water and gas on the back and I suspect he had a couple of guns stashed somewhere on board to meet any contingency as long as it was not a direct confrontation. I noticed his wedding ring was not on his finger any longer but I didn’t have the nerve to ask him about it because I wasn’t certain if she had been killed or it was something more normal like a divorce or something of that nature.