Avenger (3 page)

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 in comer 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 Landcruisers 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 Suleiman, who acted as his guide, interpreter and navigator.

Each week through April and the first fortnight of May he dispatched 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 Suleiman 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 small holding 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 Landcruiser.

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:

"I am so sorry."

They dismounted by the blackened fire stack and Ricky waited as Fadil walked through the wet ashes, kicking here and there at what was left of the place he was raised in. Ricky followed him as he walked past the cattle pen and the cesspit, still brimming with its nauseous contents, swollen by the rains, to the barns where his father might have buried the family treasures to save them from marauders. That was when they heard the rustle and the whimper. The two men found them under a wet and smelly tarpaulin. There were six of them, small, cringing, terrified, aged about ten down to four. Four little boys and two girls, the oldest apparently the surrogate mother and leader of the group. Seeing the two men staring at them, they were frozen with fear. Fadil began to talk softly. After a while the girl replied.

"They come from Gorica, a small hamlet about four miles from here along the mountain. It means "small hill". I used to know it."

"What happened?"

Fadil talked some more in the local lingo. The girl answered, then burst into tears.

"Men came, Serbs, para militaries

"When?"

"Last night."

"What happened?"

Fadil sighed.

"It was a very small hamlet. Four families, twenty adults, maybe twelve children. Gone now, all dead. Their parents shouted that they should run away, when the firing started. They escaped in the darkness."

"Orphans? All of them?"

"All of them."

"Dear God, what a country. We must get them into the truck, down to the valley," said the American.

They led the children, each clinging to the hand of the next eldest up the chain, out of the barn into the bright spring sunshine. Birds sang. It was a beautiful valley.

At the edge of the trees they saw the men. There were ten of them and two Russian GAZ jeeps in army camouflage. The men were also in camo. And heavily armed.

Three weeks later, scouring the mailbox but facing yet another day with no card, Mrs. Annie Colenso rang a number in Windsor, Ontario. It answered at the second ring. She recognized the voice of her father's private secretary.

"Hi, Jean. It's Annie. Is my dad there?"

"He surely is, Mrs. Colenso. I'll put you right through."

Chapter THREE

The Magnate

THERE WERE TEN YOUNG PILOTS IN "A' FLIGHT CREW HUT AND another eight next door in "B' Flight. Outside on the bright green grass of the airfield two or three Hurricanes crouched with that distinctive hunch-backed look caused by the bulge behind the cockpit. They were not new and fabric patches revealed where they had taken combat wounds high above France over the previous fortnight.

Inside the huts the mood could not have been in greater contrast to the warm summer sunshine of 25 June 1940 at Coltishall field, Norfolk, England. The mood of the men of No. 242 Squadron, Royal Air Force, known simply as the Canadian squadron, was about as low as it had ever been, and with good cause.

Two Four Two had been in combat almost since the first shot was fired on the Western Front. They had fought the losing battle for France from the eastern border back to the Channel coast. As Hitler's great blitzkrieg machine rolled on, flicking the French army to one side, the pilots trying to stem the flood would find their bases evacuated and moved further back even while they were airborne. They had to scavenge for food, lodgings, spare parts and fuel. Anyone who has ever been part of a retreating army will know the overriding adjective is 'chaotic'.

Back across the Channel in England, they had fought the second battle above the sands of Dunkirk as beneath them the British army sought to save what it could from the rout, grabbing anything that would float to paddle back to England, whose white cliffs were enticingly visible across the flat calm sea.

By the time the last Tommy was evacuated from that awful beach and the last defenders of the perimeter passed into German captivity for five years, the Canadians were exhausted. They had taken a terrible beating: nine killed, three wounded, three shot down and taken prisoner.

Three weeks later they were still grounded at Coltishall, without spares or tools, all abandoned in France. Their CO, Squadron Leader "Papa' Gobiel, was ill, had been for weeks, and would not return to command. Still, the Brits had promised them a new commander, who was expected any time.

A small open-topped sports car emerged from between the hangars and parked near the two timber crew huts. A man climbed out, with some difficulty. No one came out to greet him. He stumped awkwardly towards "A' Flight. A few minutes later he was out of there and heading for "B' hut. The Canadian pilots watched him through the windows, puzzled by the rolling walk with feet apart. The door opened and he appeared in the aperture. His shoulders revealed his rank of squadron leader. No one stood up.

"Who's in charge here?" he demanded angrily.

A chunky Canuck hauled himself upright, a few feet from where Steve Edmond sprawled in a chair and surveyed the newcomer through a blue haze.

"I guess I am," said Stan Turner. It was early days. Stan Turner already had two confirmed kills to his credit but would go on to score a total of fourteen and a hatful of medals.

The British officer with the angry blue eyes turned on his heel and lurched away towards a parked Hurricane. The Canadians drifted out of their huts to observe.

"I do not believe what I am watching," muttered Johnny Latta to Steve Edmond. "The bastards have sent us a CO with no bloody legs."

It was true. The newcomer was stumping around on two prosthetics. He hauled himself into the cockpit of the Hurricane, punched the Rolls Royce Merlin engine into life, turned into the wind and took off. For half an hour he threw the fighter into every known acrobatic maneuver in the textbook and a few that were not yet there.

He was good in part because he had been an acrobatic ace before losing both legs in a crash long before the war, and in part just because he had no legs. When a fighter pilot makes a tight turn or pulls out of a power dive, both ploys being vital in air combat, he pulls heavy G-forces on his own body. The effect is to drive blood from the upper body downwards, until blackout occurs. Because this pilot had no legs, the blood had to stay in the upper body, nearer the brain, and his squadron would learn that he could pull tighter turns than they could. Eventually he landed the Hurricane, climbed out and stumped towards the silent Canucks.

"My name is Douglas Bader," he told them, 'and we are going to become the best bloody squadron in the whole bloody Air Force."

He was as good as his word. With the Battle of France lost and the battle of the Dunkirk beaches a damn close-run thing, the big one was coming: Hitler had been promised by his air-force chief Goering mastery of the skies to enable the invasion of Britain to succeed. The Battle of Britain was the struggle for those skies. By the time it was over, the Canadians of 242, always led into combat by their legless CO, had established the best kill-to-loss ratio of all.

By late autumn, the German Luftwaffe had had enough and withdrew back into France. Hitler snapped his anger at Goering and turned his attention east to Russia.

In three battles, France, Dunkirk and Britain, spread over only six months of the summer of '40, the Canadians had racked up eighty-eight confirmed kills, sixty-seven in the Battle of Britain alone. But they had lost seventeen pilots, the KIAs (killed in action), and all but three were Canucks.

Fifty-five years later Steve Edmond rose from his office desk and crossed once again, as he had done so many times down the years, to the photo on the wall. It did not contain all the men he had flown with; some had been dead before others arrived. But it showed the seventeen Canadians at Duxford one hot and cloudless day in late August at the height of the battle.

Almost all gone. Most of them KIA during the war. The faces of boys from nineteen to twenty-two stared out, vital, cheerful, expectant, on the threshold of life, yet mostly never destined to see it.

He peered closer. Benzie, flying on his wingtip, shot down and killed over the Thames estuary on 7 September, two weeks after the photo. Solanders, the boy from Newfoundland, dead the next day.

Johnny Latta and Willie McKnight, standing side by side, would die wingtip to wingtip somewhere over the Bay of Biscay in January 1941.