In the fall of 1999, Trevor was sent to West Africa together with a group from the BBC to prepare an investigative report on war crimes committed by Foday Sankoh, former leader of the Revolutionary United Front, who was appointed vice president of Sierra Leone in 1997, and his ties to another infamous war criminal, then president of Liberia Charles McArthur Taylor, who was later indicted for crimes against humanity thanks to the materials collected and published by Trevor. In 2000, Sankoh was also accused of being a war criminal and indicted, while Charles Taylor was apprehended and held at the International Criminal Court in 2006.
From then on, Trevor was the top journalist covering the majority of military conflicts. His insightful reports and uncompromising articles were published by most of the European press.
In 2007, Trevor was covering wars in Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, and Sierra Leone, where he investigated Viktor Woud, an arms dealer from Russia, who was suspected of illegally selling arms and munitions to the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and UN-embargoed countries.
Trevor’s colleagues from Russia had told him that Woud could be a secret dealer for the Russian state arms export agency and a big player in Russia. They warned Trevor about investigating this story, as Woud's operations were directly linked to the newly emerging Russian mafia, which had global aspirations.
Nevertheless, he probed and published, and some of his reports were aired by top European channels.
Viktor Woud was arrested in 2008 in Thailand and extradited to the U. S. on November 16, 2010, where he was indicted. Finally, on November 2, 2011, a jury unanimously found him guilty of illegal arms dealing.
All these events were well covered by Trevor from the start of the investigation in 2007, although due to another trip to a collapsing Libya, he could only follow the trial of Woud online and through the reports of his colleagues.
His track record included reports from Baghdad during the Iraq War, Gaza Strip during the Gaza War and the Libyan cities of Benghazi and Misrata, which were nearly leveled by NATO airstrikes.
That is why Trevor was considered to be one of the most experienced journalists, the lead expert on Africa and the Middle East.
Working in the most unstable countries, Trevor needed trustworthy and reliable friends and partners.
Kate, a twenty-eight-year old journalist from Australia, was one person Trevor fully trusted. Kate was a graceful and sweet blonde with short tousled hair, a cheerful smile full of even white teeth, beautiful, full lips, as if painted by a master artist, and big green eyes. Despite appearing delicate, she always wore a light uniform and a felt hat.
Kate was one of those women who, despite approaching the age of forty, remained cute and cheery, like a teenager in appearance and behavior.
They met in early 2007 in Afghanistan.
A few days earlier, Trevor was captured by the Taliban in Musa Qala, Helmand Province. The abduction had been planned, even though he was on his way to meet one of their leaders for a special story.
There was a young blonde woman and two men, tired by the heat and hunger, already in the house where the bound prisoners were brought. Trevor gathered from the conversations he overheard that they were all journalists and that they had been held there by the militants for over a month.
A local driver and an Afghani reporter were captured together with Trevor. The next day, to intimidate others, two Afghanis were publicly executed in front of the prisoners. The Taliban were planning to demand a ransom for him and the other journalists.
For three days Trevor was brutally beaten in an attempt to break his will, but on the fourth day Mullah Saddam, a prominent Taliban field commander, arrived at the camp.
“Well, well, well. The big infidel is on his knees before the little Afghani mujahedeen?” Mullah taunted in bad English as he approached Trevor, who was lying helplessly, tied up in the dust.
“I am not a soldier; I am a journalist. And I am French,” replied Trevor, despite the agony of the ropes.
“Press?” The militant said with unconcealed malice, grabbing Trevor by the shoulder with one hand and striking his face loudly with the other. “I not ask you, dog, who you are.”
He took Trevor’s plastic ID card in his hands and inspected it with a satisfied smirk.
“Press is good. We need press, very need.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing from you. What can you? You are weak and sick. You can’t anything. Your master can! He pay me. Pay a lot.”
“Nobody will pay you a dime for me. I'm not important,” Trevor said quietly. He spat blood.
“Pay, pay a lot. You make video tomorrow. You ask him to pay,” hissed the Mullah, pressing his foot against Trevor’s face. “If not pay, you go home to Paris in pieces, we send to your office.”
The Mullah gave some instructions in Pashto to some militants. Trevor was lifted and dragged not to the pit, where he was held earlier, but to a clay shed, where the other prisoners were now being kept. It was at least dry there. He was thrown into a small room, separated from the rest of the prisoners by a double plank wall. They put shackles on his wrists and ankles, chained him to a wooden beam and gave him some food and a mug of water. To the militants, Trevor seemed broken and not dangerous.
And that was the opportunity he was waiting for. The Taliban were convinced that a chained, starved, exhausted, beaten prisoner would only dream about getting some sleep, so they carelessly left only one armed mujahedeen near the shed, who as soon as it turned dark smoked some local weed and fell asleep against the wall.
Trevor had learned how to escape from any restraints during his service in the Legion. When he was sure that the camp was settled for the night, he easily freed himself from the shackles and climbed outside through a hole in the roof.
After taking out the guard and grabbing his assault rifle and grenade pouch, Trevor opened the other door of the shed and quietly ordered: “Come on out! Quick!”
However, only the girl rose and resolutely headed towards the exit.
From the darkness of the stuffy room came a coarse voice of a man: “Kate, think about it, you will be caught and executed. Don’t do it.”
But Kate confidently took a step towards the opened door and took Trevor firmly by the arm.
“Can you drive?” Trevor asked as they left the shed. He pointed to a white pickup truck and whispered, “Usually they leave the keys in the armrest. Turn on the engine and wait for me. If something goes wrong, the road to freedom is just behind that wall.”
Kate ran to the truck while Trevor poured gasoline over the other two vehicles and ammunition boxes stacked near a small tent. Alerted by the sound of the running engine, two militants rushed from a building only to be met with the blast of a grenade Trevor had thrown at their feet. Chaotic shooting burst from the building's windows. Trevor lobbed two grenades at the building and fired at the gasoline. In an instant, everything around him lit up. After unloading a full clip at the building, Trevor threw another grenade towards the ammo boxes, jumped into the open car door and shouted: “Go!”
“Where to?” Kate asked. Her hands were shaking as she grabbed the steering wheel.
“There!” Trevor yelled. He grabbed the wheel with one hand and pressed gas pedal with his left foot together with Kate’s foot, directing the vehicle at the clay fence. “Hold on tight!”
The vehicle tore through the wall and flew onto the sandy road to the deafening roar of detonating ammunition. A bright glow of fire rose over the village, lighting the way for the escapees.
“Now you can turn on the headlights,” Trevor said quietly after some time. The burning building disappeared behind the hill. “Sangin is maybe twenty-five kilometers from here, not more. Just drive to the river without stopping. There is a British base somewhere there… A patrol should see us.”
Trevor was slurring his words. Only then did Kate notice that he was pressing his hand to the left side of his chest. Blood was dripping through his fingers.
“Are you wounded? What’s wrong?” Kate asked.
But Trevor remained silent. He lost consciousness and his body went limp.
“Please, keep talking!” Kate shouted frantically, but she received no answer. Realizing that she was now essentially alone, Kate pressed her hand against Trevor's wound and stepped on the gas pedal.
Trevor woke up in a bed of a military hospital. Kate was sitting next to him in a white coat draped over a military uniform, with an open book in her hands, dozing.
“Where am I?” asked Trevor faintly.
“We are in Kandahar, on the US base,” Kate answered sleepily. She smiled.
“How long was I out for?”
“Almost three days. You had to have surgery, but it’s all over now.”
Trevor looked around, then glanced at Kate with a barely noticeable smile:
“I believe we haven’t had the chance to be introduced. I am Trevor Blanche.”
“I’m Kate, Kate Larsen. From Australia. I wanted to thank you for saving me.”
“No need, Kate. I am here thanks to you, so we are even.”
The next day, Trevor and Kate were transported from Afghanistan to Switzerland. In Zurich, Trevor continued to undergo treatment and spent all his free time with Kate. Trevor even tried to romance her, but after a few nights spent together Kate made it clear that she had no intention of starting a serious relationship with him, to avoid disappointment, she said, and thought it best to keep what they had uncomplicated. In truth, Kate was testing Trevor. She liked him a lot, but her female intuition told her he wasn’t into committed relationships, so she tried to instill a keeper’s instinct in him.
Trevor, however, easily accepted her terms and continued to regard Kate only as a colleague.
Initially, this irritated Kate, but she hid it well and always seemed happy to see him whenever they were set to work together.
In fact, this kind of relationship between a man and a woman should have ended once and for all after some time, but they were doing the same job. So, after two-, three-week trips, they would part and return to their respective homes, friends and families – to their own worlds.
Trevor had known Etienne, a cameraman, for more than a decade, ever since he worked in Sierra Leone. Etienne was French, but with some Scottish blood flowing in his veins, from this mother. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence at the foot of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, on the shore of Loch Linnhe, in the town of Fort William, where his mother was born and where her family still lived.
Etienne absorbed Scottish traditions into every cell in his body. He was extremely proud of the history of Scotland, which he deeply respected and considered his own. That was why, at the age of 35, his French heritage could only be found in a few traits on his slender face. Even the tattoo on his left shoulder bore the words of Scotland’s motto in Latin: “Nemo me impune lacessit”[8].
Etienne was not a talkative sort, or showed feelings at the drop of a hat. In fact, he was careful to hide all emotion. He even joked with a stony face, while his highest praise was a curt “Not bad”.
Trevor valued his friendship with Etienne. They had worked side by side for many years. Etienne accompanied Trevor on almost all of his journeys.
In addition, Etienne has been seeing Kate for over a year; they spent a lot of time together. Trevor thought it odd to see the tall, lean Frenchman with an aquiline nose and long hands tenderly treat the small Kate, who was a foot shorter than him. Trevor had been observing them with a smile, comparing their relationship to a dance of fire and ice. It was clear that Kate’s hot heart was melting the ice that covered Etienne's heart.
Trevor began working with Dan eighteen month ago. Dan was a short, open-hearted young man, a pacifist and a bit of a ladies man. Only twenty-five, he was accepted to Les Mondes as a promising, young and ambitious reporter immediately upon graduating from Tampere University. Rochefort, chief editor of Les Mondes, took the young reporter under his wing. Rochefort appointed Dan as Trevor’s assistant, and Dan ended up accompanying Trevor and Etienne on several trips to the Middle East. A rumor went around that Dan was a distant relative of Rochefort, or even a love child from a long abandoned liaison. Be that as it may, Rochefort was clearly concerned about the future of this young man and he was helping him to find his own place in journalism.
After Etienne and Kate made their relationship official and Kate had moved to Paris to live with him, Dan became Trevor’s buddy during his sojourns to the nightlife of Paris and Zurich.
Dan, too, was secretive about his past. He never spoke about it, but he was happy to be useful to his more experienced colleagues and closely watched Trevor, acquiring the essential skills of a hardened war correspondent. It was Dan, as Trevor’s assistant, who was lately covering the USA v. Woud trial, the scandalous case of the biggest illegal arms dealer in history, tried by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Chapter 3
Trevor was sitting on the veranda of a busy restaurant watching an elderly couple talking quietly at the table near the entrance. He was amused by how the man was stealthily feeding a small dog that was sitting under the table.
Trevor flipped through a fresh newspaper, trying to find the latest news on the Woud trial, but seeing nothing asked the waiter for the bill. That was when the encounter happened that turned his life upside down, inadvertently exposing that part of him which he had not even guessed existed.
Trevor was surprised to hear someone speak in Serbian. A man and a woman, clearly tourists, were talking to one another. They had two children with them, close to the age of seven. The man’s voice sounded familiar. Trevor was ready to swear that he knew the man well. He shoved the newspaper aside and stared at the retreating silhouettes of the family. The woman was walking ahead, holding the children by their hands. The man was inspecting the cobblestones engraved with the names of cities, incidentally turning towards Trevor. He was a short, stout man, about fifty, balding, with thick glasses, and dressed in a well-worn but clean suit and an oversized navy raincoat.
Suddenly it dawned on Trevor that he knew the man. He got up and shouted in Serbian: “Jovan? My friend, Jovan, it is you!”
The man glanced back. His wife also noticed the stranger who was loudly calling after her husband. Both children immediately clutched their mother.
“Jovan, hey! It’s me, Trevor. Don’t you recognize me, old man?”
“Teo?!” the man responded, throwing open his arms. “Trevor! Well, I didn’t expect to see you here! It’s been a while! It is a small world, I guess!”
The friends hugged tightly.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” said Trevor. “How long has it been? Ten? Twelve years?”
“Teo, fifteen years at least! You were serving in the Legion back then,” Jovan responded slowly, tears of sincere joy fogging his glasses. “I forgot how you look. Let me see you!”
Jovan wiped his glasses and after putting them back, he scanned Trevor. Grabbing his shoulders, he joyfully exclaimed: “You are a real badass, and you still look cool. Haven’t changed a bit! Right, Anna? This is Trevor… Teo, a friend I once told you about."
Jovan’s wife held out her hand and gave Trevor an appraising look.
Anna was a tall, slim, conventionally attractive woman with no makeup, dressed in a cheap grey coat and long black skirt, which could not hide her aristocratic posture. Trevor took immediate notice of her wonderfully manicured and well-cared-for hands, although he was taken aback by her contrasting appearance.