Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  Ten feet away was a Vietcong, on hands and knees. Between them was the source of light, a shallow lamp of coconut oil with a tiny wick floating in it. The VC had evidently been pushing it along the floor to accomplish his mission, checking out the booby traps. For half a second the two enemies stared at each other, then both reacted.

  With the back of his fingers the Vietnamese flicked the dish of hot nut oil straight at the American’s face. The light was snuffed out at once. Dexter raised his left hand to protect his eyes and felt the searing oil splash across the back of his knuckles. With his right hand he fired three times as he heard a frantic scuffling sound retreating down the tunnel. He was sorely tempted to use the other three rounds, but he did not know how many more were down there.

  Had the Badger and the Mole but known it, they were crawling towards the headquarters complex of the Vietcong’s entire Zone Command. Guarding it were fifty diehards.

  Back in the States there was, all this while, a covert little unit called the Limited War Laboratory. Throughout the Vietnam war they dreamed up splendid ideas to help the Tunnel Rats, though none of the scientists ever went down a tunnel. They shipped their ideas over to Vietnam where the Rats, who did go down tunnels, tried them out, found them gloriously impractical and shipped them back again.

  In the summer of 1970 the Limited War Laboratory came up with a new kind of gun for close-quarter work in a confined space. And at last they had a winner. It was a .44 Magnum handgun modified down to a three-inch barrel so as not to get in the way, but with special ammunition.

  The very heavy slug of this .44 was divided into four segments. They were held together as one by the cartridge, but on emerging from the barrel separated to make four slugs instead of one. The Tunnel Rats found it very good for close-quarter work and likely to be deadly in the tunnels because if fired twice it would fill the tunnel ahead with eight projectiles instead of two. A far greater chance of hitting the Vietcong.

  Only seventy-five of these guns were ever made. The Tunnel Rats used them for six months, then they were withdrawn. Someone had discovered that they probably contravened the Geneva Convention. So the seventy-four traceable Smith and Wesson revolvers were sent back to the States and never seen again.

  The Tunnel Rats had a short and simple prayer. ‘If I have to take a bullet, so be it. If I have to take a knife, tough luck. But please, Lord, don’t ever bury me alive down there.’

  It was in the summer of 1970 that the Badger was buried alive.

  Either the GIs should not have been down there or the B-52 bombers out of Guam should not have been bombing from 30,000 feet. But someone had ordered the bombers and that someone forgot to tell the Tunnel Rats.

  It happens. Not a lot, but no one who has ever been in the armed forces will fail to spot a FUBAR: fouled up beyond all recognition.

  It was the new thinking: to destroy the tunnel complexes by caving them in with massive explosions dropped by B-52s. Partly this had been caused by the change in psychology.

  Back in the States the tide of opinion was now comprehensively against the Vietnam war.

  Parents were now joining their children in the anti-war demonstrations.

  In the war zone, the Tet Offensive of thirty months earlier had not been forgotten. The morale was simply dribbling away into the jungle floor. It was still unspoken among the High Command, but the mood was spreading that this war could not be won. It would be three more years before the last GI would board the last plane out of there, but by the summer of 1970 the decision was made to destroy the tunnels in the ‘free strike zones’ with bombs. The Iron Triangle was a free strike zone.

  Because the entire 25th Infantry Division was based there, the bombers had instructions that no bomb should fall less than three kilometres from the nearest US unit. But that day High Command forgot about the Badger and the Mole, who were in a different division.

  They were in a complex outside Ben Suc, in the second level down, when they felt rather than heard the first ‘crump’ of bombs above them. Forgetting the VC, they crawled frantically towards the shaft going up to level one.

  The Mole made it and was ten yards towards the final shaft up to daylight when the roof fall came. It was behind him. He yelled, ‘Badger.’ There was no reply. He knew there was a small alcove twenty yards ahead because they had passed it coming down. Drenched in sweat he dragged himself into it and used the extra width to turn around and head back.

  He met the dirt pile with his fingertips. Then he felt a hand, then a second, but nothing beyond that except fallen earth. He began to dig, hurling the slag behind him but blocking his exit as he did so.

  It took him five minutes to liberate his partner’s head, five more to free the torso. The bombs had ceased, but up top the falling debris had blocked the air flues. They began to run out of oxygen.

  ‘Get out of here, Cal,’ hissed the Badger in the darkness. ‘Come back with help later. I’ll be OK.’

  Dexter continued scrabbling at the dirt with his fingertips. He had lost two nails entirely. It would take over an hour to get help. His partner would not survive half that time with the air flues blocked. He put on his flashlight and shoved the lamp in his partner’s hand.

  ‘Hold that. Direct the beam back over your shoulder.’

  By the yellow light he could see the mass covering the Badger’s legs. It took another half hour. Then the crawl back to daylight, squeezing past the rubble he had cast behind him as he dug. His lungs were heaving, his head spinning; his partner was semi-conscious. He crawled round the last corner and felt the air.

  In January 1971 the Badger reached the end of his second tour. Extension for a third year was forbidden, but he had had enough anyway. The night before he flew back to the States, the Mole secured permission to accompany his partner into Saigon to say farewell. They went into the capital with an armoured convoy. Dexter was confident he could hitch a lift back in a helicopter the next day.

  The two young men had a slap-up meal then toured the bars. They avoided the hordes of prostitutes but concentrated on some serious drinking. At two in the morning they found themselves, feeling no pain, somewhere in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon across the river.

  There was a tattoo parlour, still open and still available for business, especially in dollars. The Chinaman was wisely contemplating a future outside Vietnam.

  Before they left him and took the ferry back across the river the young Americans had a tattoo created, one for each. On the left forearm. It showed a rat, not the aggressive rat on the door of the hootch at Lai Khe, but a saucy rat. Facing away from the viewer but looking back over his shoulder. A broad wink, trousers down, a mooning rat. They were still giggling until they sobered up. Then it was too late.

  The Badger flew back to the States the next morning. The Mole followed ten weeks later, in mid-March. On 7 April 1971 the Tunnel Rats formally ceased to exist.

  That was the day Cal Dexter, despite the urging of several senior officers, mustered out of the army and returned to civilian life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Tracker

  There are very few military outfits more secretive than the British Special Air Service regiment, but if there is one that makes the tight-lipped SAS look like the Jerry Springer show, it is the Det.

  The 14th Independent Intelligence Company, also called the 14th Int, or the Detachment, or the Det, is an army unit drawing its recruits from right across the board, with (and unlike the all-male SAS) quite a proportion of women soldiers.

  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 operati
on.

  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. This 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 second-hand 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 paramilitaries 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 Land Cruisers; 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 Land Cruiser 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 apeshit. 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 Travn
ik, set up a small office-cum-living quarters and recruited a happy-to-be-employed Ibrahim as his guide and interpreter.

  He carried a satphone 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 Land Cruiser, 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 Land Cruiser 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 Land Cruiser 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 backcountry. 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 Land Cruiser. Nothing.