Meeting gun-runners on a Serbian night train

by Stuart
(Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany)

“Have a nice holiday – in the Balkans”!
The crusty Bulgarian railway clerk laughed hysterically through the window after we’d paid for our passage to Belgrade. She wasn’t inspiring a lot of confidence.

There were three of us overlanding back to Germany from Istanbul around Christmas. From Sofia, the plan was to take a night train up to the Serbian capital before jumping on the first bus to Sarajevo for New Year’s Eve.

It was the kind of train that lets you know you’re really in Eastern Europe – red Cyrillic script scrawled down the exterior, wood for the heater stacked up in the aisles and our own private compartment with three bunk beds in a row.

We had a couple of beers and smiled about how rustic the whole thing was, made it into Serbia and went to sleep.
The boarder control guys weren’t gonna be our only guest that night, however.

About two in the morning. Knock on the door. “Passaporte controle!”
“Haven’t we already done this?” I thought but opened the door anyway. In came two fortysomething brutes in beanies and tracksuits – not the normal bureaucrat costume even in the Balkans!

One of the pair turned on the light and used the ladder (ostensibly there to access the top bunk) to climb up to the top of the cabin, where he unscrewed the long light fixture and put it the side.

He reached in and pulled out a slender, triangular object wrapped in plastic. Now I’m not “gun” type of guy and if someone ever thrust one into my arms and told me to take out a target I’d probably end up dead before you could say “Don’t mention the war”! But from the second that first bag emerged I was in no doubt that this was the butt of gun.
A big gun.

He passed it down to his sidekick, who stowed in a long sports bag. He then made a little comedic rat-tat-tat gun mime for the benefit of my buddy in the top bunk. No-one was smiling now.

The three of us stayed deathly quiet as more illicit gear came out of the ceiling compartment – first more butts, then boxier sections that must have been the “middle” of the rifles and finally bags of long metal sticks, obviously the barrels.

The whole process seemed to take forever and the bag was filled with enough firearms to declare war on your neighboring village.
The gun-runners seemed nervous as hell, but in no way hostile. Regardless, the three of us were comprehensively shit-scared.

The top guy reattached the light, jumped down and they were off with only a brief warning that we should lock our compartment door.

We didn’t need to be asked twice and the rest of the night was passed in anxious sleep. I kept wondering if they were going to come back and pop in our asses.

After all, the twosome didn’t wear anything to hide their faces, and must have been just as sure we weren’t going to go to the cops as we were sure we needed to skedaddle out of Serbia ASAP.

I’m sure Belgrade is a beautiful, peaceful city with plenty of normal, moderate folks and perhaps one day I’ll go back there. But for now I can’t help thinking of it in terms of the gun-smugglers on the night train.