Avenger (8 page)

Although it can if need be fight with lethal efficiency, the main tasks of the Det are to locate, track to lair, survey and eavesdrop the bad people. They are never seen and their planted listening devices are so advanced that they are rarely found.

A successful Det operation would involve tailing a terrorist to the main hive, entering secretly at night, planting a 'bug' and listening to the bad people for days or weeks on end. In this manner the terrorists would be likely to reveal their next operation.

Tipped off, the slightly noisier SAS could then mount a sweet little ambush and, as soon as the first terrorist fired a weapon, wipe them out. Legally. Self-defence.

Most of the Det operations up to 1995 had been in Northern Ireland where their covertly obtained information had led to some of the IRA's worst defeats. It was the Det who hit on the idea of slipping into a mortician's parlour where a terrorist, of either Republican or Unionist persuasion, was lying in a casket, and inserting a bug into the timber of the coffin.

This was because the terrorist godfathers, knowing they were 'under suss', would rarely meet to discuss planning. But at a funeral they would congregate, lean over the coffin and, covering their mouths from lip-readers behind the telescopes on the hillside above the cemetery, hold a planning conference. The bugs in the coffin would pick up the lot. It worked for years.

In years to come, it would be the Det who carried out the "Close Target Reconnaissance' on Bosnia's mass-killers, allowing the SAS snatch squads to haul them off to trial in The Hague.

The company whose name Steve Edmond had learned from Mr. Rubinstein, the Toronto art collector who had mysteriously recovered his paintings, was called Hazard Management, a very discreet agency based in the Victoria district of London.

Hazard Management specialized in three things and extensively used former Special Forces personnel among its staff. The biggest income-earner was Asset Protection, as its name implies the protection of extremely expensive property on behalf of very rich people who did not want to be parted from it. "Lhis was only carried out for limited-term special occasions, not on a permanent basis.

Next came Personnel Protection, PP as opposed to AP. This also was for limited time-span, although there was a small school in Wiltshire where a rich man's own personal bodyguards could be trained, for a substantial fee.

Smallest of the divisions in Hazard Management was known as L&R, Location and Recovery. This was what Mr. Rubinstein had needed: someone to trace his missing masterpieces and negotiate their return.

Two days after taking the call from his frantic daughter, Steve Edmond had his meeting with the chief executive of Hazard Management and explained what he wanted.

"Find my grandson. This is not a commission with a budget ceiling," he said.

The former Director of Special Forces, now retired, beamed. Even soldiers have children to educate. The man he called in from his country home the next day was Phil Gracey, former captain in the Parachute Regiment and ten years a veteran of the Det. Inside the company, he was simply known as "The Tracker'.

Gracey had his own meeting with the Canadian and his interrogation was extremely detailed. If the boy was still alive, he wanted to know everything about his personal habits, tastes, preferences, even vices. He took possession of two good photographs of Ricky Colenso and the grandfather's personal cellphone number. Then he nodded and left.

The Tracker spent two days almost continuously on the phone. He had no intention of moving until he knew exactly where he was going, how, why and whom he sought. He spent hours reading written material about the Bosnian civil war, the aid programmes and the non-Bosnian military presence on the ground. He struck lucky on the last.

The United Nations had created a military 'peace-keeping' force, the usual lunacy of sending a force to keep the peace where there was no peace to keep, then forbidding them to create the peace, ordering them instead to watch the slaughter without interfering. The military were called UNPROFOR and the British government had supplied a large contingent. It was based at Vitez, just ten miles down the road from Travnik.

The regiment assigned there in June 1995 was recent; its predecessor had been relieved only two months earlier and the

Tracker traced the colonel commanding the earlier regiment to a course at Guards depot, Pirbright. He was a mine of information. On the third day after his talk with the Canadian grandfather, the Tracker flew to the Balkans; not straight into Bosnia (impossible) but to the Adriatic resort of Split on the coast of Croatia. His cover story said he was a freelance journalist, which is a useful cover, being completely unprovable either way. But he also included a letter from a major Sunday newspaper asking for a series of articles on the effectiveness of relief aid. Just in case.

In twenty-four hours in Split, enjoying an unexpected boom as the main jumping-off point for central Bosnia, he had acquired a secondhand but tough off-road and a pistol. Just in case. It was a long, rough drive through the mountains from the coast to Travnik, but he was confident his information was accurate; he would run into no combat zone, and he did not.

It was a strange combat, the Bosnian civil war. There were rarely any lines, as such, and never a pitched battle. Just a patchwork quilt of mono-ethnic communities living in fear, hundreds of fire-gutted, ethnically 'cleansed' villages and hamlets and, roaming between them, bands of soldiery, mostly belonging to one of the surrounding 'national' armies, but also including groups of mercenaries, freebooters and psychotic para militaries posing as patriots. These were the worst.

At Travnik, the Tracker met his first reverse. John Slack had left. A friendly soul with Age Concern said he believed the American had joined Feed the Children, a much bigger NGO, and was based in Zagreb. The Tracker spent the night in his sleeping bag in the rear of the 4x4 and left the next day for another gruelling drive north to Zagreb, the Croatian capital. There he found John Slack at the Feed the Children warehouse. He could not be much help.

"I have no idea what happened, where he went or why," he protested. "Look, man, the Loaves 'n' Fishes operation closed down last month, and he was part of that. He vanished with one of my two brand new Landcruisers; that is, fifty per cent of my transportation.

"Plus, he took one of my three local Bosnian helpers. Charleston was not best pleased. With peace moves finally in the offing they did not want to start over. I told them there was still a lot to do, but they closed me down. I was lucky to find a billet here."

"What about the Bosnian?"

"Fadil? No chance he was behind it all. He was a nice guy. Spent a lot of time grieving for his lost family. If he hated anyone, it was the Serbs, not Americans."

"Any sign of the money belt?"

"Now that was stupid. I warned him. It was too much either to leave behind or carry around. But I don't think Fadil would kill him for that."

"Where were you, John?"

"That's the point. If I had been there it would never have happened. I'd have vetoed the idea, whatever it was. But I was on a mountain road in south Croatia trying to get a truck with a solid engine block towed to the nearest town. Dumb Swede. Can you imagine driving a truck with an empty oil sump and not noticing?"

"What did you discover?"

"When I got back? Well, he had arrived at the compound, let himself in, taken a Landcruiser and driven off. One of the other Bosnians, Ibrahim, saw them both, but they didn't speak. That was four days before I returned. I kept trying his mobile but there was no answer. I went ape shit I figured they'd gone partying. At first I was more angry than worried."

"Any idea which direction?"

"Uhuh. Ibrahim said they drove off north. That is, straight into central Travnik town. From the town centre the roads lead all over. No one in town remembers a thing."

"You got any ideas, John?"

"Yep. I reckon he took a call. Or more likely Fadil took a call and told Ricky. He was very compassion-driven. If he had taken a call about some medical emergency in one of the villages high in the backcountry, he'd have driven off to try and help. Too impulsive to leave a message.

"You seen that country, pal? You ever driven through it? Mountains and valleys and rivers. I figure they went over a precipice and crashed into a valley. Come the winter when the leaves fall, I think someone will spot the wreckage down below among the rocks. Look, I have to go. Good luck, eh? He was a nice kid."

The Tracker went back to Travnik, set up a small office-cum-living quarters and recruited a happy-to-be-employed Ibrahim as his guide and interpreter.

He carried a sat phone with several spare batteries and a scrambler device to keep communications covert. It was just for keeping in touch with head office in London. They had facilities he did not.

He believed there were four possibilities ranging from dumb via possible to likely. The dumbest of the four was that Ricky Colenso had decided to steal the Landcruiser, drive south to Belgrade in Serbia, sell it off, abandon all his previous life and live like a bum. He rejected it. It simply was not Ricky Colenso and why would he steal a Landcruiser if his grandpa could buy the factory?

Next up was that Sulejman had persuaded Ricky to take him for a drive, then murdered the young American for his money belt and the vehicle. Possible. But as a Bosnian Muslim without a passport, Fadil would not get far in Croatia or Serbia, both hostile territory for him, and a new Landcruiser on the market would be spotted.

Three, they had run into person or persons unknown and been murdered for the same trophies. Among the out-of control freelance killers wandering the landscape were a few groups of Mujahedin, Muslim fanatics from the Middle East, come to 'help' their persecuted fellow Muslims in Bosnia. It was known they had already killed two European mercenaries, even though they were supposed to be on the same side, plus one relief worker and one Muslim garage owner who declined to donate petrol.

But way out top of the range of probabilities was John Slack's theory. The Tracker took Ibrahim and, day by day, followed every road out of Travnik for miles into the back-country. While the Bosnian drove slowly behind him, the Tracker scoured the road edges over every possible steep slope into the valleys below.

He was doing what he did best. Slowly, patiently, missing nothing, he looked for tyre marks, crumbled edges, skid lines, crushed vegetation, wheel-flattened grass. Three times, with a rope tied to the Lada off-road, he went down into ravines where a clump of vegetation might hide a crushed Landcruiser. Nothing.

With binoculars he sat on road edges and scanned the valleys below for a glint of metal or glass down there. Nothing. By the end of an exhausting ten days he had become convinced Slack was wrong. If an off-road that size had swerved off the road and over the edge, it would have left a trace, however small, even forty days later. And he would have seen that trace. There was no crashed vehicle lying in those valleys around Travnik.

He offered a reward for information big enough to make the mouth water. Word about the prize spread in the refugee community and hopefuls came forward. But the best he got was that the car had been seen driving through town that day. Destination unknown. Route taken, unknown.

After two weeks he closed his operation down and moved to Vitez, headquarters of the newly resident British Army contingent.

He found a billet at the school which had been converted into a sort of hostel for the mainly British Press. It was on a street known as TV Alley, just outside the army compound but safe enough if things turned nasty.

Knowing what most army men think of the Press, he did not bother with his 'freelance journalist' cover story, but sought a meeting with the colonel commanding on the basis of what he was, ex-Special Services.

The colonel had a brother in the Paras. Common background, common interests. Not a problem, anything he could do to help?

Yes, he had heard about the missing American boy. Bad show. His patrols had kept a look out, but nothing. He listened to the Tracker's offer of a substantial donation to the Army Benevolent Fund. A reconnaissance exercise was mounted, a light aircraft from the Artillery people. The Tracker went with the pilot. They flew the mountains and ravines for over an hour. Not a sign.

"I think you're going to have to look at foul play," said the colonel over dinner.

"Mujahedin?"

"Possibly. Weird swine, you know. They will kill you as soon as look at you if you're not a Muslim, or even if you are but not fundamentalist enough. May fifteenth? We'd only been here for two weeks. Still getting the hang of the terrain. But I've checked the Incident Log. There were none in the area. You could try the ECMM sitreps. Pretty useless stuff, but I've got a stack in the office. Should cover May fifteenth."

The European Community Monitoring Mission was the attempt of the European Union based in Brussels to horn in on an act that they could influence in no way at all. Bosnia was a UN affair until finally, in exasperation, taken over and resolved by the USA. But Brussels wanted a role, so a team of observers was created to give them one. This was the ECMM. The Tracker went through the stack of reports the next day.

The EU monitors were mainly armed forces officers loaned by the EU defence ministries with nothing better to do. They were scattered through Bosnia where they had an office, a flat, a car and a living allowance. Some of the situation reports, or sitreps, read more like a social diary. The Tracker concentrated on anything filed 15 May or the three days following. There was one from Banja Luka dated 16 May that caught his eye.