The Bulgarians

The Bulgarians turned out to be worthy allies, back at the house they found a Romanian Klashnikov hidden under a cupboard. they looked it over and put it back.Though they could not understand us we managed to get across our interest in the weapon and they were kind enough (having both been soldiers of the soviet) to run us through correct maintenance of the A.K 47.
Its not a hard weapon to master but we went further than a field strip for good measure.
The A.K that we trained on was a supposedly ‘faulty’ one that we had found under a cupboard. It was surprising that they seemed to have a supply of ‘faulty’ weapons and a fair of home made explosive devices, but they had nothing for us?
Our Bulgarian friends (Stojan and Ivan) also taught us the most important thing, which was how to make the local coffee, as thick as tar, bitter as acorns with a kick like a mule not your pissy Nescafe this stuff and nothing like the poison that had been given to me in the mountains outside Zagreb.
Amongst the other stuff we found in the house, was a strange looking locally made grenade. It was a steel cylinder with a machined shell possibly filled with T.N.T, it was primed with a lightable fuse, what kind of fuse it was and how long it burned for was not known. So we decided to leave it well alone. Occasionally power would come on though it was irregular and we kept the lights to a minimum, a lot of jokes were made about the consequences of lighting the funny candle on the top shelf.
It was during one of these power cuts that we found the true worth of our Bulgarian friends. The power cut out just as two strangers from the local command came to visit us. We didn't know who they were and there English was not that good.
You have to understand these were uncertain times, you had Serbs loyal to Croatia, Croats loyal to Yugoslavia it was a mish mash of paramilitaries loyal to no one and everyone.
Our visitors were well armed, dirty and had a rather bad attitude not friendly not threatening but as they had all the guns the balance of power was on their side, all of a sudden the power went off. Leaving us in the dark with no candles, in fact they even made a joke of it. However when the power came back after a minuet of darkness their smiles disappeared, Stojan stood behind one with an axe in his hand, (I have little doubt he would of used it) whilst Ivan had the other in his A.K sights now who was laughing?
After all our friends didn’t speak English or Croatian they relied on body language and tone of voice, and our visitors came over as piss taking, cocky bastards.
our visitors had a change of heart and attitude they became more respect full and friendly the intimidation was gone from them. They had come to see Mark and Mark was not there so they decided to leave and find him in the town or where ever he may be.
That evening the Journalist returned, he said that the next day we would move down onto the front and a house had been made available for us to use.