Page 16 of One Minute Out

No... this didn’t look right at all.

Once all the girls were lined up by the bus, the man with the bloody wrapping around his head stepped in front of the group. He hadn’t been the leader of the Serbian security men. No, that man was nowhere to be seen now. This man, whatever his name was, had been just one of the junior guards before tonight.

She had no idea why he’d been promoted but wondered if that meant all the men above him were dead.

Maja’s Russian wasn’t great, but she knew enough to understand.

“There is a price to be paid for attempting to leave our care.”

Our care? Had Maja understood him correctly?

She fully expected the Ukrainian blonde to interject here, but when she did not, Maja realized the bravest of the group was as unnerved by these surroundings as she was.

The injured guard continued. “We have tried to treat you all with respect and kindness. And yet our kindness is rewarded with murder.” He repeated his assertion. “There is a price to be paid.”

Girls began to sob; this new leader looked around to the four men with him, motioned to a younger man with a thick black beard, and said something in their native language. The man handed his rifle off to a mate and walked up to the line of girls, looking at each one closely with a flashlight. He made a few sounds of disgust as he stepped from one to the next, but on the sixth prisoner, a nineteen-year-old Maja knew as Stefana, he stopped. With a violent motion he reached up and slapped her across the face, and as she fell towards the graveled parking circle, he grabbed her by the hair and began pulling her towards the trees.

She screamed, but this only caused him to pull her along more roughly.

A second guard and then a third grabbed girls from the line; these men held on to their rifles as they dragged the women into the darkened forest. The two Serbians watching the row of prisoners kept their weapons trained on them while the sounds of violent rape echoed around the trees.

Girls still in the line fell to the ground in despair. Maja cried, but she kept her feet.

The two remaining men talked while they guarded the group of twenty; they seemed to have a short argument, but soon one of them—not the new leader—slung his gun over his shoulder and walked forward. He was older, well into his forties, and he looked over a couple of the hostages standing by the bus, but quickly his flashlight’s beam centered on Maja herself.

He reached up and grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off-balance, began pulling her towards the woods.

“Ne! Ne! Ne!” No was one of the few words she knew in Serbo-Croatian, and she said it now, over and over, as panic threatened to overwhelm her.

But before the gangster could get her off the gravel and into the grass, the new leader of the group called out to him, and he stopped.

Maja could not understand, but whatever he said instigated an argument between the two. While the women in the woods continued to cry out, these last two men entered into a full-on shouting match.

But then it ended, and the man holding Maja’s arm yanked her back to the bus, where she was ordered to sit down on the gravel with all the others.

Save one. The older guard walked down the line, shined his light on more faces, and then grabbed another young girl. Despite her cries and pleas, he pulled her off into the woods while Maja looked on, mouth agape.

She didn’t understand. Why had she been spared?

She put her hands over her ears to drown out the pitiful cries from the trees, but a man in the forest shouted and she peered into the darkness. She saw a figure, a young Bulgarian girl of sixteen she knew as Diana, running off. She was naked other than socks, and she was sprinting, her long legs leaping over obstacles like a gazelle.

“No,” Maja whispered. And then she shouted it. “No!”

A Serbian guard rose to his feet, pulled his pants up and cinched them, and then reached down to the forest floor and retrieved his rifle. Other men shouted at him, two of them taking off in pursuit of the girl, but the man with the rifle leveled it, aimed carefully, and fired a single round, just seconds before Diana would have disappeared into thick foliage.

The gunshot echoed off the trees and into the night.

Maja watched in horror as the sixteen-year-old tumbled to the ground and lay still.

“No!” the girls sitting by the bus croaked out now.

Maja began weeping heavily, for the senseless death of the young girl, for the brutal rapes that were happening before her eyes, and for the fact that she had been singled out and spared the fate of the others.

She didn’t understand it, not any of it, but even though her brain was riddled with shock, that last part confused her most.

Maja vomited onto the gravel in front of her, over and over, while the mournful cries of the women around her resumed.

SIX

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