Avenger (16 page)

The economic damage would take years more to recover from, but the social damage was far worse. Few could imagine that in less than a generation or two Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim would accept living side by side with each other again, or even a few miles apart, save in armed watchful compounds.

The international bodies spouted the usual blather about reunification and restoring mutual trust, thus justifying the doomed attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together again rather than facing the necessity of partition.

The task of governing the shattered entity went to the United Nations High Representative, a sort of pro-consul with near-absolute powers, backed by the soldiers of UNPROFOR. Of all the unglamorous tasks that fell to the people who had no time for posturing on the political stage but who actually made things happen, the least charming went to the ICMP the International Commission on Missing Persons.

This was run with impressive and quiet efficiency by Gordon Bacon, a former British policeman. To the ICMP fell the task of listening to the tens of thousnds of relatives of the 'disappeared ones' and taking their statements on the one hand, and tracing and exhuming the hundreds of mini-massacres that had taken place since 1992. The third job was to try to match statements with relics and restore the skull and bundle of bones to the right relatives, for final burial according to the religious creed or none.

The matching process would have been completely impossible without DNA, but the new technology meant that a swab of blood from the relative and a sliver of bone from the cadaver could provide proof of identity beyond doubt. By 2000 the fastest and most efficient DNA laboratory in Europe was not in some wealthy western capital but in Sarajevo, set up and run on tiny funds by Gordon Bacon. It was to see him that the Tracker drove into the Bosnian city two days after Milan Rajak had signed his name.

He did not need to bring the Serb with him. Rajak had revealed that before he died, the Bosnian aid worker Fadil Sulejman had told his murderers that the farm had once been his family home. Gordon Bacon read the Rajak statement with interest but no sense of novelty.

He had read hundreds before, but always from the few survivors, never from one of the perpetrators, and never involving an American. He realized the mystery of what he knew as the Colenso file might be solved at last. He contacted the ICMP commissioner for the Travnik zone and asked for the fullest cooperation with Mr. Gracey when he arrived. The Tracker spent the night in his fellow countryman's spare bedroom and drove north again in the morning.

It is a mite over two hours into Travnik and he was there by midday. He had talked with Stephen Edmond, and a swab of the grandfather's blood was on its way from Ontario.

On 11 April the exhumation team left Travnik for the hills, aided by a local guide. Questions at the mosque had quickly discovered two men who had known Fadil Sulejman, and one of them said he knew the farm in the upland valley. He was in the leading off-road.

The digger team brought with them protective clothing, breathing aids, shovels, soft brushes, sieves and evidence bags, all the needs of their grisly trade.

The farm was much as it must have been six years earlier, but a bit more overgrown. No one had come to reclaim it; the Sulejman family appeared to have ceased to exist.

They found the sewage pit without difficulty. The spring rains had been less than in 1995 and the contents of the pit had hardened to malodorous clay. The diggers pulled on garments like a fly fisherman's waders, and over-jackets, but seemed immune to the smell.

Rajak had testified that on the day of the murder, the pit was full to the brim, but if Ricky Colenso's feet had touched bottom, it must be about six feet deep. Without rain, the surface had receded two feet downwards.

After three feet of slime had been shovelled out, the ICMP commissioner ordered his men to throw out their shovels and resume with hand trowels. An hour later the first bones were visible and in a further hour of work with scraper and camel-hair brush, the massacre site was exposed.

No air had penetrated to the bottom of the pit, so there had been no maggots at work, since they depend on air. The decomposition was uniquely due to enzymes and bacilli. Every fragment of soft tissue was gone, and when wiped with a damp cloth, the first skull to emerge gleamed clean and white. There were fragments of leather, from the boots and belts of the two men; an ornate belt buckle, surely American, plus metal studs from jeans and buttons from a denim jacket.

One of the men on his knees down below called out and passed up a watch. Seventy months had not affected the inscription on the back: "Ricky, from Mom. Graduation. 1994'.

The children had all been thrown in dead and they had sunk on top of, or close to, each other. Time and decomposition had made a jumble of the bones of the six corpses, but the size of the skeletons proved who they had been.

Sulejman had also gone in dead; his skeleton lay on its back, spreadeagled the way the body had sunk. His friend stood and looked down into the pit and prayed to Allah. He confirmed his former classmate had been around five feet eight inches tall.

The eighth body was the big one, over six feet. It was to one side, as if the dying boy had tried to crawl through the blackness to the side wall. The bones lay on their side, hunched in the foetal position. The watch came from that pile, and the belt buckle. When the skull was passed up, the front teeth were smashed, as Rajak had testified.

It was sundown when the last tiny bone was retrieved and bagged. The two grown men were in separate bags, the children shared their own; the reassembly of six small skeletons could be done in the mortuary down in the town.

The Tracker drove to Vitez for the night. The British army was long gone but he took a billet in a guesthouse he knew from before. In the morning he returned to the ICMP office in Travnik. From Sarajevo, Gordon Bacon authorized the local commissioner to release the remains of Ricky Colenso to Major Gracey for transportation to the capital.

The swab from Ontario had arrived. In a remarkably fast two days the DNA tests were complete. The head of the ICMP in Sarajevo attested that the skeleton was indeed that of Richard "Ricky' Colenso of Georgetown, USA. He needed formal authority from the next of kin to release the remains into the care of Philip Gracey of Andover, Hampshire, UK. That took two days to arrive.

In the interval, on instructions from Ontario, the Tracker bought a casket from Sarajevo's premier funeral parlour. The mortician arranged the skeleton with other materials to give heft and balance to the casket as if it contained a real cadaver. Then it was sealed for ever.

It was on 15 April that the Canadian magnate's Grumman IV arrived with a letter of authority to take over. The Tracker consigned the casket and the fat file of paperwork to the captain and went home to the green fields of England.

Stephen Edmond was at Washington Dulles to receive his own executive jet when it touched down on the evening of the 16th after a refueling stop at Shannon. An ornate hearse took the casket to a funeral parlour for two days while final arrangements for interment were completed.

On the 18th the ceremony took place at the very exclusive Oak Hill Cemetery on R Street in Northwest Georgetown. It was small and private, in the Roman Catholic rite. The boy's mother, Mrs. Annie Colenso, nee Edmond, stood with her husband's arm around her, weeping quietly. Professor Colenso dabbed at his eyes and occasionally glanced over at his father-in-law as if he did not know what to do and sought some guidance.

Across the grave the 81-year-old Canadian stood in his dark suit like a pillar of his own pentlandite ore and looked unblinkingly down at the coffin of his grandson. He had not shown the report from the Tracker to his daughter or son-in-law and certainly not the testimony of Milan Rajak.

They knew only that a belated eyewitness had come forward who recalled seeing the black Landcruiser in a valley, and as a result, the two bodies had been found. But he had to concede that they had been murdered and buried. There was no other way of explaining the six-year gap.

The service ended, the mourners moved away to let the sextons work. Mrs. Colenso ran to her father and hugged him, pressing her face against the fabric of his shirt. He looked down and gently stroked the top of her head, as he had when she was a small girl and something frightened her.

"Daddy, whoever did this to my baby, I want him caught. Not killed quickly and cleanly. I want him to wake in jail every morning for the rest of his life and know that he is there and will never come out again, and I want him to think back and know that it is all because he coldbloodedly murdered my child."

The old man had already made up his mind.

"I may have to move heaven," he rumbled, 'and I may have to move hell. And if I must, I will."

He let her go, nodded to the professor and strode away to his limousine. As the driver eased up the slope to the R Street gateway, he took his phone from the console and dialled a number. Somewhere on Capitol Hill a secretary answered.

"Put me through to Senator Peter Lucas," he said.

The face of the senior senator for New Hampshire lit up when he got the message. Friendships born in the heat of war may last an hour or a lifetime. With Stephen Edmond and Peter Lucas, it had been fifty-six years since they sat on an English lawn on a spring morning and wept for the young men of both their countries who would never come home. But the friendship had endured, as of brothers.

Each knew that, if asked, he would go to the wire for his friend. The Canadian was about to ask.

One of the aspects of the genius of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was that although a convinced Democrat he was quite prepared to use talent wherever he found it. It was just after Pearl Harbor that he summoned a conservative Republican who happened to be at a football game and asked him to form the Office of Strategic Services.

The man he summoned was General William "Wild Bill' Donovan, the son of Irish immigrants, who had commanded the Fighting 69th Regiment on the Western Front in World War I. After that, as a trained lawyer, he had become Deputy Attorney General under Herbert Hoover, then spent years as a Wall Street legal eagle. It was not his law skills that Roosevelt wanted; it was his sheer combativeness, the quality he needed to create the USA's first foreign intelligence and Special Forces unit.

Without much hesitation the old warrior gathered around himself a corps of brilliant and well-connected young men as his gofers. They included Arthur Schlesinger, David Bruce and Henry Hyde, who would all go on to high office.

At that time Peter Lucas, raised to wealth and privilege between Manhattan and Long Island, was a sophomore at Princeton, and he decided on the day of Pearl Harbor that he too wanted to go to war. His father forbade any such thing.

In February 1942, the young man disobeyed his father and dropped out of college, all taste for study gone. He raced around trying to find something he really wanted to do; toyed with the idea of fighter pilot, took private flying lessons until he learned that he was constantly airsick.

In June 1942 the OSS was established. Peter Lucas offered himself at once and was accepted. He saw himself with blackened face, dropping by night far behind German lines. He attended a lot of cocktail parties instead. General Donovan wanted a first-class aide-de-camp, efficient and polished.

He saw at short range the preparations for the landings in Sicily and Salerno in which OSS agents were wholly involved, and begged for action. Be patient, he was told. It was like taking a boy to a sweet shop but leaving him inside a glass box. He could see but he could not touch.

Finally, he went to the general with a flat ultimatum. "Either I fight under you, or I quit and join the Airborne."

No one gave "Wild Bill' Donovan ultimatums but he stared at the young man and maybe saw something of himself a quarter of a century earlier. "Do both," he said, 'in reverse order."

With Donovan's backing all doors opened. Peter Lucas shrugged off the hated civilian suit and went to Fort Benning to become a 'ninety-day wonder', a fast track commission to emerge as a Second Lieutenant in the Airborne.

He missed the D-Day Normandy landings, being still in parachute school. When he graduated, he returned to General Donovan. "You promised," he said.

Peter Lucas got his black-faced parachute drop, one cold autumn night, into the mountains behind the German lines in northern Italy. There he came across the Italian partisans who were dedicated communists, and the British Special Forces who seemed too laid-back to be dedicated to anything.

Within a couple of weeks he learned the 'laid-back' bit was an act. The Jedburgh group he had joined contained some of the war's most skilled and contented killers.

He survived the bitter winter of 1944 in the mountains, and almost made it to the end of the war intact. It was March 1945 when he and five others ran into a stay-behind squad of no-surrender SS men they did not know were still in the region. There was a firefight and he took two slugs from a Schmeisser sub-machine gun in the left arm and shoulder.

They were miles from anywhere, out of morphine, and it took a week of marching in agony to find a British forward unit. There was a patch-up operation on the spot, a morphine-dazed flight in a Liberator and a much better reconstruction in a London hospital.

When he was fit enough to leave, he was sent to a convalescent home on the coast of Sussex. He shared a room with a Canadian fighter pilot nursing two broken legs. They played chess to while away the days.