‘There’s an awful lot of levers in there.’
‘Trust me,’ said the kid.
It took about twenty minutes to work out what lever did which function. He began to shift dirt. It meant a bonus, but it was still not a career.
In January 1968 he turned eighteen and the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive. He was watching television in a bar in Camden. After the newscast came several commercials and then a brief recruitment film made by the army. It mentioned that, if you shaped up, the army would give you an education. The next day he walked into the US Army office in Camden and said:
‘I want to join the army.’
Back then every American youth would, failing some pretty unusual circumstances or voluntary exile, become liable for compulsory draft just after the eighteenth birthday. The desire of just about every teenager and twice that number of parents was to get out of it. The Master Sergeant behind the desk held out his hand for the draft card.
‘I don’t have one,’ said Cal Dexter. ‘I’m volunteering.’ That caught their attention.
The MS drew a form towards him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away.
‘Well, that’s fine, kid. That’s a very smart thing to do. Take a word of advice from an old sweat?’
‘Sure.’
‘Make it three years instead of the required two. Good chance of better postings, better career choices.’ He leaned forward as one imparting a state secret. ‘With three years, you could even avoid going to Vietnam.’
‘But I want to go to Vietnam,’ said the kid in the soiled denim. The MS thought this one over.
‘Right,’ he said very slowly. He might have said, ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’ Instead he said:
‘Hold up your right hand . . .’
Thirty-three years later the former hardhat pushed four oranges through the juicer, rubbed the towel over his wet head again, and took the pile of papers with the juice through to the sitting room.
He went to the technical magazine first. Vintage Airplane is not a big-circulation organ and in Pennington it could only be obtained by placing a special order. It caters for those with a passion for classic and World War II aeroplanes. The runner flicked to the small ads section and studied the wanted notices. He stopped, the juice halfway to his mouth, put down the glass and read the item again. It said:
‘AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.’
There was no Grumman Avenger Pacific-war torpedo dive-bomber out there to be bought. They were in museums. Someone had uncovered the contact code. There was a number. It had to be a cellphone. The date was 13 May 2001.
CHAPTER TWO
The Victim
Ricky Colenso was not born to die at the age of twenty in a Bosnian cesspit. It should never have ended that way. He was born to get a college degree and live out his life in the States, with a wife and children and a decent chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It went wrong because he was too kind-hearted.
Back in 1970 a young and brilliant mathematician called Adrian Colenso secured tenure as a Professor of Math at Georgetown University, just outside Washington. He was twenty-five, remarkably young for the post.
Three years later, he gave a summer seminar in Toronto, Canada. Among those who attended, even though she understood little of what he was saying, was a stunningly pretty student called Annie Edmond. She was smitten and arranged a blind date through close friends.
Adrian Colenso had never heard of her father, which both puzzled and delighted her. She had already been urgently pursued by half a dozen fortune hunters. In the car back to the hotel she discovered that apart from an amazing grasp of quantum calculus, he also kissed rather well.
A week later he flew back to Washington. Miss Edmond was not a young lady to be gainsaid. She left her job, obtained a sinecure at the Canadian consulate, rented an apartment just off Wisconsin Avenue and arrived with ten suitcases. Two months later they married. The wedding was a blue-chip affair in Windsor, Ontario; and the couple honeymooned in Caneel Bay, US Virgin Islands.
As a present, the bride’s father bought the couple a large country house on Foxhall Road, off Nebraska Avenue, in one of the most rustic and therefore sought-after areas of Georgetown. It was set in its own forested one-acre plot, with pool and tennis court. The bride’s allowance would cover its upkeep and the groom’s salary would just about do the rest. They settled down into loving domesticity.
Baby Richard Eric Steven was born in April 1975 and soon nicknamed Ricky.
He grew up like millions of other American youngsters in a secure and loving parental home, doing all the things that boys do, spending time at summer camps, discovering and exploring the thrills of girls and sports cars, worrying over academic grades and looming examinations.
He was neither brilliant like his father nor dumb. He inherited his father’s quirky grin and his mother’s good looks. Everyone who knew him rated him a nice kid. If someone asked him for help, he would do all he could. But he should never have gone to Bosnia.
He graduated out of high school in 1994 and was accepted for Harvard the following autumn. That winter, watching on television the sadism of ethnic cleansing and the aftermath of the refugees’ misery and the relief programmes in a far-away place called Bosnia, he determined that he wanted to help in some way.
His mother pleaded that he should stay in the States; there were relief programmes right at home if he wanted to exercise his social conscience. But the images he had seen of gutted villages, wailing orphans and the blank-eyed despair of the refugees had affected him deeply, and Bosnia it had to be. Ricky begged that he be allowed to get involved.
A few calls from his father established that the world agency was the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, with a big office in New York.
By early spring of 1995 three years of civil war as the old federation of Yugoslavia tore itself apart had gutted the province of Bosnia. The UNHCR was there in strength, with a staff of about 400 ‘internationals’ and several thousand locally recruited staffers. The outfit was headed up on the spot by a former British soldier, the full-bearded and restlessly energetic Larry Hollingworth, whom Ricky had seen on television. Ricky went to New York to inquire about procedures for enlistment.
The New York office was kind but less than enthusiastic. Amateur offers came in by the sackload, and the personal visits were several dozen a day. This was the United Nations; there were procedures, six months of bureaucracy, enough filled-out forms to break the springs of a pickup, and, as Ricky would have to be in Harvard by autumn, probably refusal at the end.
The dejected young man was heading down again in the elevator at the start of the lunch hour when a middle-aged secretary gave him a kindly smile.
‘If you really want to help in there, you’ll have to get over to the regional office in Zagreb,’ she said. ‘They take people on locally. It’s much more relaxed right on the spot.’
Croatia had also once been part of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but it had secured its separation, was now a new state, and many organizations were based in the safety of its capital, Zagreb. One of them was the UNHCR.
Ricky had a long call with his parents, got their grudging permission, and flew New York–Vienna–Zagreb. But the reply was still the same: forms to fill, only long-term commitments were really sought. Summertime amateurs were a lot of responsibility, precious little contribution.
‘You really should try one of the NGOs,’ suggested the regional controller, trying to be helpful. ‘They meet right next door at the café.’
The UNHCR might be the world body but that was far from the end of it. Disaster relief is an entire industry and for many a profession. Outside United Nations and individual government efforts come the Non-Governmental Organizations. There were over three hundred NGOs involved in Bosnia.
The names of no more than a dozen would ring a bell with the general public: Save the Children (British)
, Feed the Children (American), Age Concern, War on Want, Médecins Sans Frontières – they were all there. Some were faith-based, some secular, and many of the smaller ones had simply come into being for the Bosnian civil war, impelled by TV images beamed endlessly into the West. At the extreme bottom end were single trucks driven across Europe by a couple of beefy lads who had had a whip-round in their local bar. The jumping-off point for the drive on the last leg into the heart of Bosnia was either Zagreb or the Adriatic port of Split.
Ricky found the café, ordered a coffee and a slivovitz against the bitter March wind outside and looked around for a possible contact. Two hours later a burly, bearded man, built like a trucker, walked in. He wore a plaid mackinaw and ordered coffee and cognac in a voice Ricky placed as coming from North or South Carolina. He went up and introduced himself. He had struck lucky.
John Slack was a dispatcher and distributor of relief aid for a small American charity called Loaves ‘n’ Fishes, a recently formed offshoot of Salvation Road, which itself was the corporate manifestation in a sinful world of the Rev. Billy Jones, television evangelist and saver of souls (for the appropriate donation) of the fine city of Charleston, South Carolina. He listened to Ricky as one who had heard it all before.
‘You drive a truck, kid?’
‘Yes.’ It was not quite true but he reckoned a big off-road was like a small truck.
‘You read a map?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you want a fat salary?’
‘No. I have an allowance from my grandpa.’
John Slack twinkled.
‘You don’t want anything? Just to help?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, you’re on. Mine’s a small operation. I go and buy relief food, clothes, blankets, whatever, right here on the spot, mainly in Austria. I truck-drive it down to Zagreb, refuel and then head into Bosnia. We’re based at Travnik. Thousands of refugees down there.’
‘That suits me fine,’ said Ricky. ‘I’ll pay all my own costs.’
Slack threw back what remained of his cognac.
‘Let’s go, kid,’ he said.
The truck was a ten-ton German Hanomag and Ricky got the hang of it before the border. It took them ten hours to Travnik, spelling each other at the wheel. It was midnight when they arrived at the Loaves ‘n’ Fishes compound just outside the town. Slack threw him several blankets.
‘Spend the night in the cab,’ he said. ‘We’ll find you a billet in the morning.’
The Loaves ‘n’ Fishes operation was indeed small. It involved a second truck about to leave for the north to collect more supplies with a monosyllabic Swede at the wheel, one small, shared compound wired with chain-link fencing to keep out pilferers, a tiny office made out of a workman’s portable cabin, a shed called a warehouse for unloaded but not yet distributed food aid, and three locally recruited Bosnian staffers. Plus two new black Toyota Land Cruisers for small-cargo aid distribution. Slack introduced him all round and by afternoon Ricky had found lodging with a Bosnian widow in the town. To get to and from the compound he bought a ramshackle bicycle from the stash he kept in a money belt round his waist. John Slack noticed the belt.
‘Mind telling me how much you keep in that pouch?’ he asked.
‘I brought a thousand dollars,’ said Ricky trustingly. ‘Just in case of emergencies.’
‘Shit. Just don’t wave it around or you’ll create one. These guys can retire for life on that.’
Ricky promised to be discreet. Postal services, he soon discovered, were non-existent, inasmuch as no Bosnian state existed so no Bosnian Post Office had come into being and the old Yugoslav services had collapsed. John Slack told him any driver running up to Croatia or on to Austria would post letters and cards for everyone. Ricky wrote a quick card from the bundle he had bought in Vienna airport and thrown into his haversack. This the Swede took north. Mrs Colenso received it a week later.
Travnik had once been a thriving market town, inhabited by Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Their presence could be discerned by the churches. There was a Catholic one for the departed Croats, an Orthodox one for the also departed Serbs, and a dozen mosques for the majority Muslims, the ones still called Bosnians.
With the coming of the civil war the triethnic community which had lived in harmony for years was shattered. As pogrom after pogrom was reported across the land, all inter-ethnic trust evaporated.
The Serbs quit and retreated north of the Vlasic mountain range that dominates Travnik, across the Lasva river valley and into Banja Luka on the other side.
The Croats were also forced out and most went down the road ten miles to Vitez. Thus three single-ethnic strongholds were formed. Into each poured the refugees of that particular ethnic group.
In the world media the Serbs were portrayed as the perpetrators of all the pogroms, though they had also seen Serb communities butchered when isolated and in the minority. The reason was that in the old Yugoslavia the Serbs had had the dominant control of the army; when the country fell apart, they simply grabbed 90 per cent of the heavy weaponry, giving them an insuperable edge.
The Croats, also no slouches when it came to slaughtering non-Croat minorities in their midst, had been granted irresponsibly premature recognition by the German Chancellor Kohl; they could then buy weapons on the world market.
The Bosnians were largely unarmed, and kept that way on the advice of European politicians. As a result, they suffered most of the brutalities. In late spring 1995 it would be the Americans who, sick and tired of standing by and doing nothing, would use their military power to give the Serbs a bloody nose and force all parties to the conference table at Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Agreement would be implemented that coming November. Ricky Colenso would not see it.
By the time Ricky reached Travnik, it had stopped a lot of shells from Serb positions across the mountains. Most of the buildings were shrouded with planks leaning against the walls. If hit by an ‘incomer’ they would be splintered to matchwood, but save the house itself. Most windows were missing and were replaced by plastic sheeting. The brightly painted main mosque had somehow been spared a direct hit. The two largest buildings in town, the gymnasium (high school) and the once famous Music School, were stuffed with refugees.
With virtually no access to the surrounding countryside and thus no access to growing crops, the refugees, about three times the original population, were dependent on the aid agencies to survive. That was where Loaves ‘n’ Fishes came in, along with a dozen other smaller NGOs in the town.
But the two Land Cruisers could be piled up with five hundred pounds of relief aid and still make it to various outlying villages and hamlets where the need was even greater than in Travnik centre. Ricky happily agreed to back-haul the sacks of food and drive the off-roads into the mountains to the south.
Four months after he had sat in Georgetown and seen on the television screen the images of human misery that had brought him here, he was happy. He was doing what he came to do. He was touched by the gratitude of the gnarled peasants and their brown, saucer-eyed children when he hauled sacks of wheat, maize, milk powder and soup concentrates into the centre of an isolated village that had not eaten for a week.
He believed he was paying back in some way for all the benefits and comforts that a benign God, in whom he firmly believed, had bestowed upon him at his birth simply by creating him an American.
He spoke not a word of Serbo-Croat, the common language of all Yugoslavia, nor the Bosnian patois. He had no idea of the local geography, where the mountain roads led, where was safe and where could be dangerous.
John Slack paired him with one of the local Bosnian staffers, a young man with reasonable, school-learned English, called Fadil Sulejman, who acted as his guide, interpreter and navigator.
Each week through April and the first fortnight of May he despatched either a letter or card to his parents, and with greater or lesser delays, depending on who was heading north for re-supplies, they
arrived in Georgetown bearing Croatian or Austrian stamps.
It was in the second week of May that Ricky found himself alone and in charge of the entire depot. Lars, the Swede, had had a major engine breakdown on a lonely mountain road in Croatia, north of the border but short of Zagreb. John Slack had taken one of the Land Cruisers to help him out and get the truck back into service.
Fadil Sulejman asked Ricky for a favour.
Like thousands in Travnik, Fadil had been forced to flee his home when the tide of war swept towards it. He explained that his family home had been a farm or smallholding in an upland valley on the slopes of the Vlasic range. He was desperate to know if there was anything left of it. Had it been torched or spared? Was it still standing? When the war began, his father had buried family treasures under a barn. Were they still there? In a word, could he visit his parental home for the first time in three years?
Ricky happily gave him time off but that was not the real point. With the tracks up the mountain slick with spring rain, only an off-road would make it. That meant borrowing the Land Cruiser.
Ricky was in a quandary. He wanted to help, and he would pay for the petrol. But was the mountain safe? Serbian patrols had once ranged over it, using their artillery to pound Travnik below.
That was a year ago, Fadil insisted. The southern slopes, where his parents’ farmhouse was situated, were quite safe now. Ricky hesitated, and moved by Fadil’s pleading, wondering what it must be like to lose your home, he agreed. With one proviso: he would come too.
In fact, in the spring sunshine, it was a very pleasant drive. They left the town behind and went up the main road towards Donji Vakuf for ten miles before turning off to the right.
The road climbed, degenerated into a track, and went on climbing. Beech, ash and oak in their spring leaf enveloped them. It was, thought Ricky, almost like the Shenandoah where he had once gone camping with a school party. They began to skid on the corners and he admitted they would never have made it without four-wheel drive.
The oak gave way to conifers and at five thousand feet they emerged into an upland valley, invisible from the road far below, a sort of secret hideaway. In the heart of the valley, they found the farmhouse. Its stone smokestack survived, but the rest had been torched and gutted. Several sagging barns, unfired, still stood beyond the old cattle pens. Ricky glanced at Fadil’s face and said: