Foreigners Ply Road of Mercy in Bosnia : Balkans: International drivers take risks to keep essential supplies flowing to besieged enclaves.

“Car comin,’ ” says the voice on the 12-wheeler’s CB radio. It is nearly dawn, and the truckers’ foreign legion is rolling.

In a few seconds the car drifts past in the opposite direction. Trucker Allan Sherry lights up. “I’m 33. Never smoked until I came to Bosnia,” he says.

In the truck, a cassette tape plays. “Hail, hail, rock ‘n’ roll, deliver us from the days of old.”

Sherry is a burly Australian with a red brush beard and two silver earrings in his left ear. He’s driving a dusty 12-wheeler, a dump truck loaded with 500 camp stoves for refugees near the U.N.-designated “safe area” of Tuzla in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“Truck comin’, farm cart on the right at the curve ahead,” the convoy leader radios.

As the international community struggles to meet the basic needs of people trapped by the ethnic hatreds of bloody Bosnia-Herzegovina, a rough-cut fraternity of international truckers delivers the goods across some of the toughest roads on earth. Machismo daubed with surrealism on the canvas that is Bosnia.

The tape plays. “Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire.”

Without the international truckers who challenge Bosnian truculence--and their own common sense--on behalf of private relief agencies and the United Nations, everything that is bad in Bosnia today would be infinitely worse.

A sign flashes past: Sarajevo, 48 kilometers. Not today.

Sherry downshifts as Route Acorn offers the first of its many nasty climbs.

For many, the brawny white trucks the world has sent to Bosnia are literally life-giving. For others, the war-makers, they are big, lumbering targets.

The tape plays. “They said you was high class, but that was just a lie.”

The international drivers--perhaps 200 in all--are Britons and other Western Europeans, together with Australians, Russians, Ukrainians. Their on-air language is English, their working conditions hill to hill, a big rig on a bad road.

In the past 2 1/2 years, about 15 international drivers have died in accidents, and about half a dozen in shootings.

Before Sherry completed an exhausting two-day round trip in north-central Bosnia between the cities of Zenica and Tuzla on Saturday, he had driven under Bosnian Serb guns, sweated out a dozen unpredictable checkpoints and blown four tires in a single afternoon on the rocks of an unpaved mountain track.

“Three cars comin’, road’s clear after the red one,” the convoy leader says.

Convoys are a serious business. Everybody wants one. In Bosnia, trucks and their cargoes are hijacked nearly every day. Nobody travels alone. The radio link among the convoy drivers is reinforced by an hourly situation report from the convoy leader to his base.

The tape plays. “Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

“It’s brilliant. I love the work, driving these roads . . . but we certainly don’t do it for the money,” says Michael Taylor, operations director for International Rescue Committee, the largest U.S. relief group in Bosnia.

It is the very depth of ethnic division in the former Yugoslav federation that has created the market for international drivers: They can go anywhere that they are brave or foolish enough to drive without anybody caring much what passport they carry. Not true of Croats, Muslims or Serbs.

“Cows all over the road,” radios the convoy leader, a fiercely tattooed Marc Holmes. The 25-year-old Englishman is in a Land Rover, running well ahead of the trucks. “Summer you eat dust all day,” he said, “. . . in the winter you can get six feet of snow in the mountain passes--something happens every trip in the winter.”

Sherry, Chris Wilson and David Lawson are driving Route Acorn and then turning onto Route Mario--a couple hundred miles in all. Six hours? Eight? Depends on the road, the weather. The anger. When central Bosnia erupted in multi-sided factional warfare around 18 months ago, one convoy took nine days to go 300 miles.

The tape plays. “Temperature’s risin’, jukebox is blowin’ a fuse.”

Acorn is a tough nut. It climbs over steep mountains on overworked dirt tracks with sharp turns and long drops. Mario has nasty checkpoints and a stretch under Bosnian Serb guns where flak jackets and helmets are mandatory. Everywhere, there is spectacular mountain, farm and forest country that any tourist would pay to savor in a safer country. And nary a guardrail.

“Beautiful country full of beautiful women, and all the guys want to do is fight,” says Sherry, a contented few inches from eternity on a Hail Mary turn.

“Kids on both sides of the road,” the radio warns.

The tape plays. “Sweet little sixteen, her wallet’s full of pictures.”

The roads, like the international drivers and their task, are a product of war. As front lines change, engineers among U.N. peacekeeping troops have improved roads and created new unpaved routes to keep the humanitarian pipeline safe from the guns where possible.

“I’m here for the adventure, for the self-analysis--how do I behave when I’m pushed to the limits? And because what I do is helping somebody else,” says Taylor, an Englishman who went abroad to drive trucks when he lost his farm after a divorce.

Some traffic slides by--a tractor, old cars, a horse cart, a U.N. armored car, a convoy of empty Italian aid trucks going too fast. Sherry’s convoy grinds past a monastery with chickens in the graveyard. It passes a village where nearly all the houses have been destroyed.

The tape plays. “Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”

“I’ve never had a normal job since I was 17, gunner in the [Royal Air Force], in the Parachute Regiment, body-guarding. When I leave I’ll find something else outrageous,” Holmes muses as the convoy stops for a break by a mountain stream. Helping? “That’s really it, isn’t it?” he says shyly. “But some guys, for the right money, they’d join the fightin’. . .”

This from Lawson: “This ain’t Route 66, is it? I’d make more home in London, but this is more fun.”

“I’m here because this is where crazy people come,” says Wilson, an Australian from Broken Hill.

For putting his life on the line on the roads of a war-torn country, an international driver may get $1,500-$2,000 per month. It’s more than it sounds, because few pay taxes and all get free accommodation and food.

“The salary goes right into the bank and it mounts up. Every few months we go off and spend it all in a week or two. What that means is that we have to come back to make some more, doesn’t it?” says Sherry, battling a reverse hairpin.

The tape plays. “Riding along in my automobile.”