Free The Untouchable by Gerald Seymour

smoothed stone and ricocheted upwards into the tractor's radiator.
    The tractor jerked to a halt. The bullet's discharge echoed through the valley, and then silence. The bullet had killed the engine. Silence hung over them, and over the dark ploughed fields, the lush green meadows, the vineyard that needed weeding and where posts and wires needed maintenance, over the water in the river, and over the villages of Ljut and Vraca.
    The war had now been alive in Sarajevo for a month.
    On that day in Sarajevo eight civilians would be killed and forty-nine injured by shells fired from tanks and artillery; the airport was closed; the maternity hospital lost power until barrels with a precious two hundred litres of kerosene were fed into an emergency generator; residential areas came under sustained attack. Tickets were issued, that day, for the rationing of basic foods . . . but it had been the first shot fired over the valley.

    A few metres short of the ford, the old man sat starkly upright on his motionless tractor.
    'You think he can hear you now?'
    'I don't know,' the retired policeman said sourly.
    'Try. Tell him he should go back. Tell him that if he approaches the river again he will be shot. Tell him this side of the river is now a prohibited area, under the control of the military.'
    Dragan Kovac shouted into the silence. He had no heart in what he was ordered to do, yet he was not a sensitive enough man to feel that the one shot had destroyed, perhaps fatally, the innocence of the valley in which he had spent his life and which was home to Husein Bekir. His friend across the river heard him out, then stood on the tractor's footplates and shook his fist at them, before trying to start the tractor again.
    There was neither a cough from the tractor's engine nor a turn-over whine. He watched the farmer step down clumsily, then turn away and start to trudge back towards his home and his village.
    'I don't think you need me,' Dragan Kovac said grimly.
    'Correct, I don't. But there is something you should not forget. We are here for your protection. If we are not here they will come across in the night and slit your throats as you sleep, and if they let you live you will be the servants of their religion. You will be dominated by fundamentalists.'
    'I suppose s o . . . ' What the officer said was only what they were forever repeating on TV and the radio.
    He saw the diminishing back of Husein Bekir, and the tractor marooned near the river, then went back to his home.
    The captain supervised the laying of the mines. The previous evening he had drawn a close-detail map of the village, the track down to the river, the fields, the mulberry tree and the riverbank. The two wheelbarrows carried forty-seven mines, and when each one was buried he drew a circle to identify its resting place on the map that filled the greater part of the printed page, marked Zapisnik Minskoeksplozivne Prepreke (MEP). Thirty-one of the mines were designated as PMA2, the remaining sixteen were classified as PMR3. They were anti-personnel mines. First the PMA2s were buried. They were circular, painted brown-green, and ten centimetres in diameter. They went into shallow pits, scooped out by trowels so that only the three-centimetre-wide six-pointed crown protruded. They would take a five-kilo pressure to detonate ninety grams of Hexogen/TNT. At a metre, on exploding, they were reckoned fatal; at five metres they would maim and mutilate, at twenty-five metres they were ineffective. The captain had six locations for them. They were settled in the ground, position noted, then armed. No mine markers or fences needed to be placed around them: the soldiers who would guard the village knew where they were.
    The PMR3s required more care to site. They stood thirty centimetres off the ground and were fastened to a wooden holding stake. From each the soldiers played out twenty-five metres of fine wire, tightened it, then staked the end. The trip-wire, taut, was six inches