Following a traumatic experience in Bosnia, photographer Mitch Coltrane changes the subject of his photos, but unable to escape his past, he takes refuge in his obsession with a beautiful woman in a 1930s Hollywood picture. Reprint.
Double Image
By David MorrellWarner Books
Copyright © 1999 David Morrell
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780446606967
Chapter One
The pit smelled of loam, mold, and urine. It was three feet wide, sevenfeet long, and three feet deep, the size of a shallow grave. Coltranehad been lying in it for thirty-six hours, a rubberized sheet under him,an earth-colored nylon sheet suspended over him, anchored by deadbranches and further camouflaged by fallen pine needles. Two hundredyards below the wooded slope on which he was concealed, vehicles werearriving. Six big open-backed trucks jounced along a narrow road into aclearing in the deserted valley. With an echoing rumble, a bulldozer anda backhoe struggled to keep up. A few flakes of snow drifted to thefrost-hardened ground as the convoy stopped next to a rectangular area,roughly fifty by a hundred feet, where the ground had been disturbed.
Having waited so long, Coltrane frowned toward the increasingly darkclouds drifting into the valley and prayed that the weather wouldn'tturn against him. He raised one of the four cameras arranged before him,focused its zoom lens, and started taking photographs. Men in tatteredwinter clothes, clutching automatic rifles, jumped from the trucks andscanned the slopes around them. Despite the care with which Coltrane hadhidden himself, he tensed when they concentrated in his direction.Afraid he'd been spotted, he ducked his head and pressed himself harderagainst the floor of the pit. When the men changed their attention toanother area of the valley, Coltrane let out his breath, taking morepictures. A bandy-legged, heavy-chested, beefy-faced man with dense darkhair and a thick mustache waved directions to the bulldozer and thebackhoe.
Got you, you bastard. Coltrane pressed the shutter button, unable to getover his good fortune. Back in Tuzla, his contact on the UN inspectionteam had spread out a map and indicated a dozen areas that they intendedto investigate. Of course, they wouldn't get around to those areas untilthey finished with the dozen areas they were alreadyinvestigating. The schedule depended on the weather, which was due toworsen now that November was almost half over. By the time theinvestigators reached all the suspected areas, the men they wanted toprosecute would have eliminated the evidence against them.
Coltrane had chosen the most isolated spot, his compass and terrain mappreventing him from getting lost as he made his way, burdened by twoknapsacks, across streams and ridges toward this slope. Concealed amongbushes, waiting two hours, he had studied the rugged landscape for anysign that he had been noticed. Only after dark had he constructed hisprimitive shelter and crawled into it, exhausted, craving sleep butknowing that food had to come first, the cheese sandwiches and drysausage he had brought along. But even before eating, there was onething he knew he absolutely had to do: check his cameras.
Throughout the next day and night, Coltrane had remained in his coldhiding place, permitting himself movement only when he ate more sausage,drank from a straw inserted in his canteen, or turned onto his side,urinating into a plastic bottle. All the while, he had second-guessedhimself, telling himself that he was wasting his time, that he hadchosen the wrong location, or that nothing was going to happen inany location and he might as well hike out of here. The dingy barwhere his fellow photojournalists hung out in Tuzla was beginning toseem more and more appealing. But he hated to surrender to impatience.Giving up wasn't in his nature. And now he was overjoyed that he hadn't.Not only was he getting prime photos of what the UN inspection team hadsuspected was happening at various sites but he was also documenting theparticipation of the man they most wanted to nail.
Dragan Ilkovic. A perfect name for a monster.
The son of a bitch leaned his rifle against the front of a truck andbraced his hands on his powerful-looking hips, watching withsatisfaction as the bulldozer went to work, plowing earth. The backhoemoved into position behind it. Heart pounding against the rubber sheet,Coltrane kept rapidly taking pictures, glad that he had brought fourcameras, each with a different lens and film speed, some withblack-and-white film, some with color, so that he wouldn't have to wastetime changing film.
Below him, a man with a rifle shouted, pointing fiercely at what thebulldozer had exposed. The beefy-faced man hurried over, yellingcommands at the backhoe's driver. For a frustrating moment, thecommotion hid what agitated them, but the group quickly parted, some ofthem rushing to help unload a large piece of equipment from a truck, andColtrane reacted with horror, the small image in his viewfinderintensified by the magnification of his zoom lens.
He was staring at corpses, a soul-searing countless jumble of them. Thebodies had been thrown into the mass grave with such careless haste, sotangled among one another, that it was impossible to know which legbelonged to which torso, which arm to which shoulder to which neck towhich skull. The confusion became more manifest as the weight of thebulldozer crushed spines and rib cages. Clothes had disintegrated, fleshhad rotted, creating a common putrescent black mush from which graybones protruded and lipless mouths gaped in silent, eternal anguish.
During the war, this region in eastern Bosnia was supposed to have beena UN-controlled safe haven for Muslims. From hundreds of miles around,as many as fifteen thousand Muslims had hurried here, seekingprotection. The target had been too tempting for the Serbs, whosurrounded the area and bombarded it, forcing the UN troops tosurrender. Surprisingly, the Serbs had let the Muslim children go. Butthey raped the women — to breed the Muslims out of existence by forcingMuslim women to bear Serbian children. And as for the men. . . Coltrane's mouth filled with bile as he worked thecameras, taking more and more photographs of what remained after theSerbs had loaded the Muslim men into trucks and driven them to isolatedvalleys like this one, where they dug pits with bulldozers and backhoes,lined the Muslim men up on the edge of the pits, and shot them.
Some of the pits, like the one Coltrane photographed, held as many asfour hundred corpses, he had been told. It took a lot of hate anddetermination to get the job done, but the Serbs had been up to thechallenge. When they had finally shot the last Muslim in the back of thehead, they had used the bulldozers to spread earth over the bodies, andthat was that — problem solved, everything neat and tidy. Except, whenthe war ended and Bosnia had been carved into Serb, Croat, and Muslimregions, the UN had started talking about outrages against humanity. Awar-crimes tribunal was convened in the Netherlands, and suddenly a lotof Serb commanders, like Dragan Ilkovic down there, had become wantedmen. They had to be tidier.
The roar of a large machine attracted Coltrane's notice toward thecumbersome piece of equipment that the men had unloaded from one of thetrucks. It had a huge funnel on one side and a spout on the other. Itresembled the device that city cleanup crews used to pulverize fallentree limbs. In this case, the machine was a rock pulverizer thatDragan Ilkovic had brought from one of the many nearby mines. Thebackhoe was dropping bones into the funnel. The spout on the other sidewas spewing horrifying pebbles into the back of a truck. The pebbleswould be eliminated in a shaft in one of the mines, Coltrane's informanthad suspected. The trouble was, no one could prove that this sanitizingwas actually taking place.
Until now, Coltrane thought with fury. Abruptly he noted howquickly the clouds were darkening and thickening. The few flakes of snowhad become flurries. He had to work fast. He got a close-up of DraganIlkovic, switched to a wide-angle view, and felt his heart stop as thecamouflage sheet suspended over him was torn away.
* * *
Hands grabbed his arms and shoulders. Guttural voices barked. Coltranebarely had time to snag the straps on his cameras before he was jerkedfrom the pit. The hands spun him, bringing him face-to-face with twomuscular men wearing outdoor clothes, their features flushed with anger.The repeated clicks of his cameras must have alerted them as theysearched for intruders. Conversely, the clicks—amplified in theconfinement of his narrow shelter — had prevented him from hearingtheir footsteps creep toward him.
"Okay, guys, calm down." Coltrane had no hope that they understood him.But if his tone communicated his intent, the men had absolutely nointerest in calming down. Instead, they shoved him backward.
Coltrane made a futile placating gesture. "Look, I was only camping. Nohard feelings. Why don't I grab my stuff and leave?"
The men unslung assault rifles from their shoulders.
Several times, in Nicaragua at the start of Coltrane's career, later inLebanon and Iran, armed men had confronted him about photographs he hadtaken. Their attention had always been on his cameras. But thesemen barely glanced at his cameras. As they raised their weapons, allthey seemed to care about was his chest.
Jesus. Coltrane reacted without thinking. Pretending to stumble back, hetwisted as if to try to regain his balance, and kept twisting,spinning to face his attackers again, swinging his heaviest camera bythe end of its strap. The bulky zoom lens collided with the chin on theman to Coltrane's right, bone crunching. With a groan, the man lurchedto Coltrane's left, jolted against the second man, and threw off hisaim, the second man's assault weapon blasting chunks from a tree.
Coltrane rushed the men as they toppled into the pit. Swinging thecamera again, he cracked it across the second man's forehead. Bloodflying, the man collapsed.
Startled voices echoed from the valley. Coltrane jerked his gaze in thatdirection. The small figures below had heard the gunshots. They wereglaring toward this slope, some of them pointing, others shouting. Theheavy-chested man grabbed his rifle and scrambled toward the slope.
Coltrane raced toward the ridge top, entering the dense fir trees on theopposite side. Shadows enveloped him. His cameras banged against him.The one he had used as a weapon was smeared with blood. The lens hadshattered. If only the camera isn't cracked, he hoped. If only the filmhasn't been exposed to light. Despite the frenzy of his descent, hepressed the rewind button and heard a whir, relieved that the motorhadn't been damaged. Immediately, he lost his balance, a mat of firneedles slipping out from under him. His back struck the ground so hardthat his teeth snapped together. He fought to dig in his heels toprevent himself from sliding faster down the slope, but the needles keptgiving way. He tumbled, walloped to a stop against a tree, and grimacedfrom a sharp pain on his right side, finding where the camera had rammedagainst him.
Have to get the film, protect the film. Hands trembling, he freed acatch at the side of the camera, flipped open the back, and pulled outthe rewound film. His elation lasted barely a second as shouts crestedthe ridge behind him. Fear rocketed through him. Struggling to catch hisbreath, he shoved the film into a pocket, dropped the damaged camera,and charged down the remainder of the incline.
Even on a sunny day, the massive fir trees in this region were denseenough to filter light, but this had not been a sunny day, the darkclouds massing, turning the afternoon into dusk. The air became colder.Snow started falling again, at first sporadically, then steadily, agentle blanketing that made a whisper as it settled through the firboughs.
Behind him, the shouts became more angry. A staccato burst of gunshotsshredded tree limbs.
Coltrane reached an ice-rimmed stream, almost tried to leap across butrealized it was too wide, and veered to the left. For certain, hecouldn't just jump in and wade to the opposite bank. The water was socold that it would give him frostbite or hypothermia. He had to try tofind a fallen log that bridged it. But the stream widened as he ranalong it, and there weren't any logs. The color of his clothing — brownwoolen pants, a green ski jacket, a matching knit cap that he had pulleddown around his ears — had been chosen to help him blend with theevergreen forest. He tried to assure himself that at least he had thatadvantage. The thought didn't give him much confidence when anotherstuttering burst of gunshots riddled the trees. Despite the unfamiliarlanguage, the tone of the shouts behind him left no doubt that the menwere cursing.
Slowed by the slippery accumulation of snow, Coltrane saw a fir treeclose to the stream and noticed that one of its boughs — dead, aboutnine feet off the ground — extended over the water. He leapt. Hisleather-gloved hands fought for a grip on the bough. The snow made thebark slick. Straining, he tightened his fingers, dangled, felt theawkward weight of his remaining three cameras hanging from his rightshoulder, and struggled hand over hand across the bough.
Behind him, closer, branches cracked. Footsteps thundered. He dropped tothe ground on the opposite side of the stream, straightened, and raceddeeper into the forest. Determined to get the film from his cameras, hepressed their rewind buttons. Without warning, something yanked himbackward. The jolt had such force that he thought he'd been shot. Butinstead of falling, he hung on an angle, his boots on the ground, hisbody suspended over the gathering snow. A moment of disorientationcleared and he realized in dismay that a stout branch had snagged one ofhis camera straps. The branch had torn the right shoulder on his skijacket. It had gouged his skin. He slipped painfully free of the strap,heard the camera's rewind motor stop whirring, opened its back, stuffedthe roll of film in a pocket, abandoned the tangled camera, and chargedonward.
If I can just keep going. The snow's falling harder. It'll fill mytracks, he thought. Behind him, heavy splashes told him that some of hispursuers had jumped into the stream, too impatient to wait in line to gohand over hand on the branch. Wails followed, the icy water shockingtheir bodies. At least some of them will be slowed, Coltranetried to assure himself.
But he was also slowing. The forest sloped upward. Gasping forbreath, he struggled higher, the pain in his ribs getting sharper.Although he had jettisoned two cameras, he still had two others andcontinued to fear that something would happen to the film in them.Grabbing one as he ran, he pawed open its back and yanked out itsrewound film, only to moan in despair when he dropped the cylinder intoa drift. Rushing, he stooped to fumble through the snow and retrieve it,shoving it into the jacket pocket where he had put the others.
The camera he had just unloaded blew apart, the explosive force throwinghim onto the snow. He felt intense heat, then bitter cold along his leftside. Nausea swept through him as he realized that a bullet meant forhis back had struck the camera, deflected off it, and sliced through hisleft side. He rolled toward the cover of a fir tree as the far-off crackof a rifle echoed through the forest. He had to find where the shooterwas to avoid his line of fire. Struggling to his feet, he risked aglance through an opening in the trees, toward the direction from whichhe had come. Snow settled on his eyes, making him blink repeatedly. Thewind stopped. The snow eased just for a moment, and he shivered at thesight of a bandy-legged, bulky-shouldered man on a ridge across fromhim, Dragan Ilkovic's thick features braced against the sights on hisrifle.
Ilkovic fired again, the bullet whizzing past Coltrane, tearing up snowand earth. Enraged, Ilkovic switched his rifle from single shot to fullautomatic, releasing a burst that went wild as the snow swirled back ingreater force. Ilkovic vanished in the storm, and Coltrane felt abone-deep chill. Clutching his bleeding side, stumbling higher up theslope, he fled the louder noises of his pursuers.
* * *
The wind had worsened to a gale by the time Coltrane reached the top. Ifnot for his injuries, he might have hurried over the crest, in whichcase he would have died, for the other side of the slope was a cliff,its bottom invisible in the gusting snow. Which way? Right or left? Asfar as his limited vision allowed him to determine, the cliff continuedin both directions. But whichever way he chose, following the ridgelinewas predictable. All his pursuers would have to do would be to separateand outflank him.
I can't go back the way I came, he thought. He saw an outcrop ten feetbelow him, squirmed over the edge, ignored the pain of his injuries, andhung to the agonizing limit of his arms. When he released his grip andhit the ledge, he fell to his knees, then his chest, hugging the rock.He feared he was going to pass out.
But he couldn't allow himself to give in to weakness. He had to get farenough down the cliff that his pursuers wouldn't be able to see him inthe snowstorm. Pulse racing, he peered over and saw another ledge, butit was farther down than the first one had been. Even hanging by hisarms, he would still have to drop several yards, and the force of thelanding would almost certainly throw off his balance, plunging him overthe edge. As the angry voices rushed closer to the top, he imagined whatwould happen when his hunters got there. Staring down, their sullenfaces would break into smiles when they saw him crouching helplessly tenfeet below them. Their grins would broaden when they opened fire. He hadto — The snow gusted at an object that weighed on Coltrane's injuredshoulder: his remaining camera. He frowned at its nylon strap. If hedidn't get off this ledge in the next thirty seconds, he wouldn't begoing anywhere again. Frenzied, he extended the strap to its maximumlength, about four feet, hoping it would hold him. His lungs heaved somuch that he feared he might faint when he looped the strap over anoutcrop and squirmed down, pretending he was clutching a rope. Itwouldn't get him to the next ledge, but at least it would get himcloser. The snow buffeted him. Trembling, he eased lower, the ledge notyet close enough to drop to, almost a body length away. Spasms shudderedthrough him — because he hadn't moved his hands to get lower. Thestrap had done it for him. It had stretched. It groaned. Everyimpulse urged him to hurry, but he didn't dare. Any strong motion mightcause the strap to stretch to its breaking point. Closer.
The strap broke. Scrabbling against the cliff face, he felt the windshove him into space. He fell, clawed at the rock, and landed, half on,half off the ledge. The wind struck him harder. His gloves lost theirgrip. Slipping over, he tensed in panic, his stomach soaring toward histhroat as he anticipated his impact on the rocks far below. Withstartling abruptness, he jolted to a stop much sooner than he expected,his legs buckling, his body collapsing. It took him a moment to realizethat he had landed on another ledge. He might have passed out. Hecouldn't tell. One thing he did know was that, as he lay on his back,blinking upward through the thickening snow, he couldn't see the top ofthe cliff, which meant that he couldn't be seen, either.
But he didn't dare rest. The snow might lessen at any moment and revealhim. He had to keep moving. Another wave of nausea swept through him ashe forced himself to sit up. When he peered over the side, his visioncleared enough for him to see that the next ledge was only four feetdown. Wincing, he lowered himself onto it. The next time he peered down,he discovered he was on a slope that led to the bottom.
The snow rose above his ankles. Shuffling through it, his legs keptthreatening to give way, but he refused to let them surrender. I have toget the film out of here, he urged himself. The air dimmed, the snowbecoming gray, his vision narrowing, his thoughts blurring. When hestumbled into a fir tree, its icy needles stinging his face, he realizedthat he must have been walking half-asleep. He could barely see his handin front of his face. If he didn't find shelter, he was going to freezeto death. Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled weakly beneath thedrooping boughs of the snow-laden fir tree. In the space under them, hereached ground that was bare except for fallen needles, and he had justenough room to slump with his back against the trunk. The bark smelledsharply of resin. Except for that, in the gathering darkness, hearingthe wind outside, he had the sensation of being in a tent.
He passed out.
* * *
A smothering blackness surrounded him, so absolute that he feared he'dgone blind or was in hell. Immediately his pain jerked him fully awake.Muffled, the shrieking wind seemed far away. It was night. The denseblanket of snow on the needled branches made the air around him feelheavy, compressed. He licked his dry, cracked lips. Completelydisoriented, racked with pain, he feared he was going to die in here.
He took off his right glove and mustered the strength to reach under theleft side of his jacket. There, his sweater and his thermal underwearwere soaked with a warm sticky liquid. His gentle touch made himshudder. The wound seemed as long as his hand, as wide as a finger. Thedeflected bullet had gouged a furrow along his side. And kept going? hewondered. Or was it still inside him? Had it hit only fat, or rupturedthe abdominal wall?
He had never felt so powerless and alone. His feeling of isolationincreased when he reached for the comfort of a camera and recalled thathe had started out with four of them and not one of them remained. But Ihad the fourth camera with me on the cliff. Didn't I take it off thestrap and cram it into a pocket? In dismay, he pawed at the jacket butdidn't feel the camera. What he did feel were three cylinders of film.The fourth camera and, more important, the film inside it were lost tohim.
He fought to rouse his spirit. Hey, I saved the other three rolls.That's still a lot. If I can get them out of here...
The sentence didn't want to be completed.
Yes? he asked himself. If I can get them out of here?
Are those photographs worth dying for?
This time, he didn't hesitate. Are you kidding me? The UN inspectionteam is desperate to get its hands on evidence like this. The film willprove that the atrocities committed here were much worse than anyoneimagined. That bastard Ilkovic will finally have to pay for what he did.
Maybe.
Coltrane felt uneasy. I don't understand.
Oh, the photos you took are shocking enough to get Ilkovic convicted,all right. But what if the politicians become involved and declare anamnesty for the sake of peace in the region? What if nothing changes?Are your pictures worth getting killed for?
Coltrane didn't have an answer. Again, he groped for the reassuringtouch of a camera. A homicide detective friend of his had once jokedthat Coltrane felt about cameras the way police officers did aboutbackup guns — naked without one. "Come to think of it," the detectivehad continued joking, "cameras and guns both shoot people, don't they?"But it wasn't the same at all, Coltrane insisted. His kind of shootingdidn't kill people. It was supposed to make them immortal. That was thereason he had become a photographer. When he had been twelve, he hadfound a trove of photographs of his dead mother and had fantasized thatthey kept her alive.
Those pictures of his mother had been beautiful.
As shivers seized him and his consciousness faded into a place that wasdespairingly even darker, he managed one last lucid thought.
Then why have I been taking ugly pictures for such a long time?
* * *
Hearing a rumble, he woke in alarm. His first panicked thought warnedhim he was about to be smothered by an avalanche. But the moment heraised his head, trying to move, the pain that radiated from his leftside almost made him pass out. The rumble increased. As hisconsciousness fought to clear itself, he understood that he had to bewrong, that the ridges here weren't steep enough for avalanches.Besides, the rumble seemed to come from below him rather thanfrom above. It didn't make sense. What was causing the noise?
Find out. Spots swirled in front of his eyes as he placed hishands on the ground, barely aware of the fir needles under his knees. Hecrawled from beneath the snow-covered boughs, the glare of sunlight offdrifts nearly blinding him. The air was shockingly cold, pinching hisnostrils.
When he squinted below him, he feared he was hallucinating, unable tomake himself believe that he was on a hill above a road, that the rumblecame from a convoy of tanks that had NATO markings. He wobbled like atightrope walker, struggling for balance as he waved his arms and wadedas fast as he could down through snowdrifts, which wasn't fast at all,but it didn't matter, because the lead tank's driver had seen him andwas stopping, soldiers jumping out as he fell and tumbled to the bottom,the soldiers blurting German as they rushed to help him.
Three days later, against a UN doctor's orders, he was on a plane home.From hell to the City of Angels.
Continues...
Excerpted from Double Imageby David Morrell Copyright © 1999 by David Morrell. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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