Avenger (4 page)

"You were the best of us all, Willie," murmured the old man. McKnight was the first ace and double ace, the 'natural': nine confirmed kills in his first seventeen days of combat, twenty-one air victories when he died, ten months after his first mission, aged just twenty-one.

Steve Edmond had survived to become fairly old and extremely rich, certainly the biggest mining magnate in Ontario. But all through the years he had kept the photo on the wall, when he lived in a shack with a pick for company, when he made his first million dollars, when (especially when) Forbes magazine pronounced him a billionaire.

He kept it to remind him of the terrible fragility of that thing we call life. Often, looking back, he wondered how he survived. Shot down the first time, he had been in hospital when 242 Squadron left in December 1941 for the Far East. When he was fit again, he was posted to Training Command.

Chafing at the bit, bombarding higher authority with requests to fly combat again, he had finally been granted his wish in time for the Normandy landings, flying the new Typhoon ground-attack fighter-bomber, very fast and very powerful, a fearsome tank-killer.

The second time he was shot down was near Remagen as the Americans stormed across the Rhine. He was among a dozen British Typhoons giving them cover in the advance. A direct hit in the engine gave him a few seconds to gain height, lose the canopy and throw himself out of the doomed aeroplane before it blew up.

The jump was low and the landing hard, breaking both legs. He lay in a daze of pain in the snow, dimly aware of round steel helmets running towards him, more keenly aware that the

Germans had a particular loathing of Typhoons and the people he had been blowing apart were an SS-Panzer division, not known for their tolerance.

A muffled figure stopped and stared down at him. A voice said, "Well look here." He let out his pent breath in relief. Few of Adolf's finest spoke with a Mississippi drawl.

The Americans got him back across the Rhine dazed with morphine and he was flown home to England. When the legs were properly set, he was judged to be blocking up a bed needed for fresh in comers from the front, so he was sent to a convalescent home on the South Coast, there to hobble around until repatriation to Canada.

He enjoyed Dilbury Manor, a rambling Tudor pile steeped in history, with lawns like the green baize of a pool table and some pretty nurses. He was twenty-five that spring and carried the rank of Wing Commander.

Rooms were allocated at one per two officers, but it was a week before his room-mate arrived. He was about the same age, American, and wore no uniform. His left arm and shoulder had been smashed up in a gunfight in Northern Italy. That meant covert ops, behind enemy lines. Special Forces.

"Hi," said the newcomer, "Peter Lucas. You play chess?"

Steve Edmond had come out of the harsh mining camps of Ontario, joining the Royal Canadian Air force in 1938 to escape the unemployment of the mining industry when the world had no use for its nickel. Later that nickel would be part of every aero-engine that kept him aloft. Lucas had come from the New England top social drawer, endowed with everything from the day of his birth.

The two young men were sitting on the lawn with a chess table between them when the radio through the refectory hall window, speaking in the impossibly posh accent of the BBC news readers in those days, announced that Field Marshal von Rundstedt had just signed on Luneberg Heath the instruments of unconditional surrender. The 8th of May, 1945.

The war in Europe was over. The American and Canadian sat and remembered all the friends who would never go home, and each would later recall it was the last time he cried in public.

A week later they parted and returned to their respective countries. But they formed a friendship in that convalescent home by the English coast that would last for life.

It was a different Canada when Steve Edmond came home, and he was a different man, a decorated war hero returning to a booming economy. It was from the Sudbury Basin that he came. And to the Basin that he went back. His father had been a miner and his grandfather before that. The Canadians had been mining copper and nickel around Sudbury since 1885.

And the Edmonds had been part of the action for most of that time.

Steve Edmond found he was owed a fat wedge of pay by the air force and used it to put himself through college, the first of his family to do so. Not unnaturally he took mineral engineering as his discipline and threw a course in metallurgy into the pot as well. He majored in both near the top of his class in 1948 and was snapped up by INCO, the International Nickel Company and principal employer in the Basin.

Formed in 1902, INCO had helped make Canada the primary supplier of nickel to the world, and the company's core was the huge deposit outside Sudbury, Ontario. Edmond joined as a trainee mine-manager.

Steve Edmond would have remained a mine-manager living in a comfortable but run-of-the-mill frame house in a Sudbury suburb but for the restless mind that was always telling him there must be a better way.

College had taught him that the basic ore of nickel, which is pentlandite, is also a host to other elements; platinum, palladium, iridium, ruthenium, rhodium, tellurium, selenium, cobalt, silver and gold also occur in pentlandite. Edmond began to study the rare earth metals, their uses and the possible market for them. No one else bothered. This was because the percentages were so small their extraction was uneconomical, so they ended up in the slag heaps Very few knew what rare earth metals were.

Almost all great fortunes are based upon one cracking good idea and the guts to go with it. Hard work and luck also help. Steve Edmond's cracking idea was to go back to the laboratory when the other young mine-managers were helping with the barley harvest by drinking it. What he came up with was a process known now as 'pressure acid leaching'.

Basically, it involved dissolving the tiny deposits of rare metals out of the slag, then reconstituting them back to metal.

Had he taken this to INCO, he would have been given a pat on the back, maybe even a slap-up dinner. Instead, he resigned his post and took a third-class train seat to Toronto and the Bureau of Patents. He was thirty and on his way.

He borrowed, of course, but not too much, because what he had his eye on did not cost much. When every excavation of pentlandite ore became exhausted, or at least exploited until it became uneconomical to go on, the mining companies left behind huge slag heaps called 'tailing dams'. The tailings were the rubbish, no one wanted them. Steve Edmond did. He bought them for cents.

He founded Edmond Metals, known on the Toronto Exchange simply as Emmys, and the price went up. He never sold out, despite the blandishments, never took the gambles proposed to him by banks and financial advisors. That way he avoided the hypes, the bubbles and the crashes. By forty he was a multi-millionaire and by sixty-five, in 1985, he had the elusive mantle of billionaire.

He did not flaunt it, never forgot where he came from, gave much to charity, avoided politics while remaining affable to them all, and was known as a good family man.

Over the years there were indeed a few fools who, taking the mild-mannered exterior for the whole man, sought to cheat, lie or steal. They discovered, often too late from their point of view, that there was as much steel in Steve Edmond as in any aero-engine he had ever sat behind.

He married once, in 1949, just before his big discovery. He and Fay were a love match and it stayed that way until motor neuron disease took her away in 1994. There was one child, their daughter Annie, born in 1950.

In his old age, Steve Edmond doted on her as always, approved mightily of Professor Adrian Colenso, the Georgetown University academic she had married at twenty-two, and loved to bits his only grandson Ricky, then aged twenty, away somewhere in Europe before starting college.

Most of the time Steve Edmond was a contented man with every right to be so, but there were days when he felt tetchy, ill at ease. Then he would cross the floor of his penthouse office suite high above the city of Windsor, Ontario, and stare again at the young faces in the photo. Faces from far away and long ago.

The internal phone rang. He walked back to his desk.

"Yes, Jean."

"It's Mrs. Colenso on the line from Virginia."

"Fine. Put her through." He leaned back in the padded swivel chair as the connection was made. "Hi, darling. How are you?"

The smile dropped from his face as he listened. He came forward in the chair until he was leaning on the desk.

"What do you mean "missing"? .. . Have you tried phoning? .. . Bosnia? No lines .. . Annie, you know kids nowadays don't write .. . maybe it's stuck in the mail over there .. . yes, I accept he promised faithfully ... all right, leave it to me. Who was he working for?"

He took a pen and pad and wrote what she dictated.

"Loaves 'n' Fishes. That's its name? It's a relief agency? Food for refugees. Fine, then it'll be listed. They have to be. Leave it to me, honey. Yes, as soon as I have anything."

When he put the phone down he thought for a moment, then called his chief executive officer.

"Among all those young Turks you employ, do you have anyone who understands researching on the internet?" he asked. The executive was stunned.

"Of course. Scores."

"I want the name and private number of the chief of an American charity called Loaves 'n' Fishes. No, just that. And I need it fast."

He had it in ten minutes. An hour later he came off a long call with a gleaming building in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of one of those television evangelists, the sort he despised, raking in huge donations from the gullible against guarantees of salvation.

Loaves 'n' Fishes was the pompadoured saviour's charity arm which appealed for funds for the pitiful refugees of Bosnia, then gripped by a vicious civil war. How much of the donated dollars went to the wretched and how much to the reverend's fleet of limousines was anyone's guess. But if Ricky Colenso had been working as a volunteer for Loaves 'n' Fishes in Bosnia, the voice from Charleston informed him, he would have been at their distribution centre at a place called Travnik.

"Jean, do you remember a couple of years back a man in Toronto lost a couple of old masters in a burglary at his country home? It was in the papers. Then they reappeared. Someone at the club said he used a very discreet agency to track them down and get them back. I need his name. Call me back."

This was definitely not on the internet, but there were other nets. Jean Searle, his private secretary of many years, used the secretaries' net, and one of her friends was secretary to the Chief of Police.

"Rubinstein? Fine. Get me Mr. Rubinstein in Toronto or wherever."

That took half an hour. The art collector was found visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to stare, once again, at Rembrandt's Night Watch. He was taken from his dinner table, given the six-hour time difference. But he was helpful.

"Jean," said Steve Edmond when he had finished, 'call the airport. Get the Grumman ready. Now. I want to go to London. No, the English one. By sunrise."

It was 10 June 1995.

Chapter FOUR

The Soldier

CAL DEXTER HAD HARDLY FINISHED TAKING THE OATH OF allegiance when he was on his way to boot camp for basic training. He did not have far to go; Fort Dix is right there in New Jersey.

In the spring of 1968 tens of thousands of young Americans were pouring into the army, 95 per cent of them unwilling draftees. The drill sergeants could not have cared less. Their job was to turn this mass of shorn-to-the-skull young male humanity into something resembling soldiers before passing them on, just three months later, to their next posting.

Where they came from, who their fathers were, what their level of education was, were all of glorious irrelevance. Boot camp was the greatest leveller of them all, barring death. That would come later. For some.

Dexter was a natural rebel, but he was also more street-wise than most. The chow was basic but it was better than he had had on many construction sites, so he wolfed it down.

Unlike the rich boys, he had no problem with dormitory sleeping, open-doored ablutions or the requirement to keep all his kit very, very neatly in one small locker. Most useful of all, he had never had anyone clear up after him, so he expected nothing of the sort in camp. Some others, accustomed to being waited upon, spent a lot of time jogging around the parade square or doing press-ups under the eye of a displeased sergeant.

That said, Dexter could see no point in most of the rules and rituals, but was smart enough not to say so. And he absolutely could not see why sergeants were always right and he was always wrong.

The benefit of signing on voluntarily for three years became plain very quickly. The corporals and sergeants, who were the nearest thing to God in basic training camp, learned of his status without delay and eased up on him. He was, after all, close to being 'one of them'. Mama-spoiled rich boys had it worst.

Two weeks in, he had his first assessment panel. That involved appearing before one of those almost invisible creatures, an officer. In this case, a major. "Any special skills?" asked the major for what was probably the ten thousandth time.

"I can drive bulldozers, sir," said Dexter.