Field of Blackbirds - Clayton Jeppsen & Lindsey Jeppsen (me reader txt) 📗

questions, you can see that he needs to get to the hospital.”
The soldier took one step backwards and Milla applied pressure, ever so slightly, to the gas pedal. She didn’t dare look back as they drove away. She couldn’t believe it. Silently she thanked Lazar. Without even knowing it, for the second time, he had helped them escape.
Milla didn’t realize how fast she was going. The buildings of Sarajevo seemed to grow right before her eyes. And the wind, yes, it was the wind that forced tears to stream across her face.


Chapter 34.5 - Prayer of the Refugee


It was cold outside, but he was sweating. They were coming. The dust from the convoy circled behind them into a murky cloud of venomous rage. Ibrahim lay in the wash next to his comrades. They were just south of Zvornik. They thought if they met the Serbs here, it would at least buy a little more time for the refugees to get out of Srebrenica. They were armed with the weapons Lazar and Radenko had given them. The plan was to get the Serbs to think the resistance was greater than it actually was and cause them to break down and establish a line of defense. It would buy half a day maybe. Ibrahim checked his AK-47 for the third time and then placed it on the ground next to him.
“You each have two grenades. Stay as low as you can. When the first four trucks pass us, we’ll roll our grenades under the convoy. Then we’ll run like hell to the tree line. About twenty seconds is all we’ll have before they steady themselves and start firing on us. When we get into the trees, we can return fire.”

They were all just boys. Boys who had grown up watching their father’s die for the same causes. Just boys, who had been left behind, boys who had been told they were too young to fight. They were too young to be honorable; boys who were grouped in with women and children, the old, the sick and the helpless. The quandary was; circumstances had mutated their juvenile innocence into flamboyant vessels of destruction; aimless, misguided destruction, with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“If any of you want to turn back, you should do so now. I’ll understand.” Ibrahim felt a rush of valor when he stated the obvious, “Chances are; we wont make it out of this one.” Ibrahim studied the look of thrill and dutiful concentration on his comrades’ faces.
“All right then, pray with me my friends.”
Ibrahim knew there was an order to prayer. But the truth was, he didn’t pray regularly, not like his parents. He took a guess and faced north, hoping he was faced toward Mecca. The others imitated him. Ibrahim led the prayer.

“O Allah, I testify that there is no other God but You. You are the Supreme One and Muhammad is Your messenger. Whomever, among us You gave life, let him live with Islam. Whomever among us You took life from, let him die with faith. O Allah, purify us. Guide us among those whom You have guided. Support us among those whom You supported. Protect us from evil. Protect the Prophet’s nation from what he feared for it. With this, we were ordered and we are, Muslim. Our lives and our deaths belong to You, Allah. Have mercy on us. Have mercy on the refugees.” Ibrahim paused a moment, manifesting his emotions, manifesting his love. “Have mercy on my sister.” Ibrahim rolled over and threw his back against the edge of the gully. He pulled his ski mask tightly over his head and snapped two grenades from his jacket.

“For the refugee, for freedom, for peace and for a home without fear! Allah Akbar!” Ibrahim shouted.
“Allah Akbar!” they all cheered.

The rumbling of the earth was now in sync with the fear that was causing Ibrahim to shake in every limb. He felt the bits of rubble on his neck and shoulders as they inched off the roadway. The convoy was above them. Ibrahim pulled both pins from the grenades, but kept pressure on the switches.
“One,” he counted out loud and numbered the trucks as they passed, “Two, Three, Four.”
The peak of anxiety popped Ibrahim to his feet. The sense of duty introduced him to the climax of his life. Live or die, no other moment; no other act would be more defining than this. His peripheral spun into a dark blur. Ibrahim was on his own planet, staring at the knees of Goliath. A Goliath constructed of green, riveted, sheet metal and threatening to swallow him whole.
Worried they would burn holes in his hands, Ibrahim released the pressure on the grenades. He rolled one under the tank in front of him and the other under a supply truck that followed. Ibrahim leaped back down into the wash. He felt as though he was floating in slow motion, never to reach the earth’s crust. Ibrahim collapsed and rolled next to his rifle. A small wave of loose gravel accompanied him. And then the explosions, one after the other, shot flames over his head. Pressure forced Ibrahim to stay down longer than he wanted, but soon the weeds were whipping at his pant legs. He looked to his right and to his left. He wasn’t alone. The four of them were in a race for life. The trees appeared to be running from them. Ibrahim pushed harder. An entire meadow of air wasn’t enough to feed the hunger in his lungs.

The wind began to whistle unfamiliar tunes around them. Fresh dirt popped up in front of them.
“Almost there! Almost there!” Ibrahim muttered.
And then, the haunting sound of a waking dragon was spewing it’s fire and lead. He heard the screams around him.

He was only a boy, a nautilus entrepreneur of hope to whom some . . . . . . owed their lives.

God save the Refugee!


Chapter 35 – Until the End


No thrashing brush, not even the twisting snap of a branch. No fall of step. He moved like a ghost through the forest, leaving the fray between nature and beast unseen, unchallenged. The vacillating blood in his veins; the steadiness of his breathing was the metronome to which he kept pace.
Goran buried himself deep in the thicket, not willing to share any secrets with dawn’s lethargic light. He waited, deliberating all that Nikola had pledged; a temptation willing to satisfy his gluttonous desire for power and possession. Goran devoured every crumb. He removed his binoculars from his pack and began measuring his prey from afar. He recognized Lazar and Radenko, but not the others. He didn’t care why Nikola wanted them dead. He had to admit, he never trusted the lawyer from Montenegro. And the Corporal, he had nothing against him. But he wouldn’t lose sleep rendering him forever silent in a bed of dirt. Seven kills, it was nothing.

************

Radenko lowered his voice a little, attempting to alienate the others from the conversation. Lazar was still flipping through the papers in the briefcase.
“You know we’ll be lucky to make it out of this one, Lazar.”
Lazar didn’t respond. It was a perplexity that had a death grip on his conscience since volunteering for the mission. He knew all along what they would do with their freedom. Even though he had already found Milla, the pain still resonated as she drifted a little further into the center of his life.
Radenko was content with carrying the conversation. There was something he had wanted to share with Lazar for some time now. It was a peculiar feeling, admonishing him that later, time would not be on his side.
“Hey Corporal, did I ever tell you why I became a lawyer?”
Lazar looked amused. “I have to say, I was a little curious.”
Radenko passed the picture of Mary and Jesus to Lazar.
“This picture was my mother’s. She kept it next to her bed under a lamp. As long as I could remember, it was there. She was very religious. My father was religious too, but not like her. She always put God first. We went to church every Sunday. We prayed before every meal and we read passages from the Bible daily. I even attended an Orthodox school for some time when I was little. Her favorite study was the ‘B attitudes’. She had the kindest heart. She was everything lovely, everything that kept us together. And she was more than everything to my father.”
Radenko paused for a moment, looked upward a little, attempting to keep the tears from falling.
“Then one day she got sick. Some days she would be her normal self; happy, funny and spontaneously energetic. Then other days she would lie in her bed and cry. My father would go into her room and spend the whole evening in there. I usually played with my friends across the way. I didn’t understand why sometimes she was sick and other times she was fine. Finally she had to live at the hospital. She was only there for a few days when we got the call. I knew what was happening, but I didn’t let my Father know that. I was angry at her for leaving us, as if it were her choice. Why did she let herself get sick? Why couldn’t she fight harder? If she really wanted to, she would stay us. Then I was just mad at everyone. For years I was this way. My father stopped going to church. He lost faith. He felt God should have left her alone. All she did was love God and obey Him. Why did He have to take her? It’s a bitterness that still eats at him. He hasn’t been happy since that time.
Finally my uncle Petrovich, my mother’s younger brother, had enough of my moping and wasting my