Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘You are English? But you are not Press. What are you doing here? Why you persecute me? I know nothing.’

  There was a screech of car tyres outside the house, running feet up the steps from the pavement. Mrs Rajak held the door open and her husband charged in. He appeared at the door of the sitting room, rattled and angry. A generation older than his son, he did not speak English. Instead, he shouted in Serbo-Croat.

  ‘He asks what you are doing in his house, why you harass his son,’ said Stojic.

  ‘I am not harassing,’ said the Tracker calmly. ‘I am simply asking. What was this young man doing eight weeks ago in Banja Luka and who were the men with him?’

  Stojic translated. Rajak senior began shouting.

  ‘He says,’ explained Stojic, ‘that his son knows nothing and was not there. He has been here all summer and if you do not leave his house he will call the police. Personally, I think we should leave. This is a powerful man.’

  ‘OK,’ said the Tracker. ‘One last question.’

  At his request, the former Director of Special Forces, who now ran Hazard Management, had had a very discreet lunch with a contact in the Secret Intelligence Service. The Head of the Balkans Desk had been as helpful as he was allowed.

  ‘Were those men Zoran’s Wolves? Was the man who slapped you around Zoran Zilic himself?’

  Stojic had translated more than half before he could stop himself. Milan understood it all in English. The effect was in two parts. For several seconds there was a stunned, glacial silence. The second part was like an exploding grenade.

  Mrs Rajak emitted a single scream and ran from the room. Her son slumped in a chair, put his head in his hands and started to shake. The father went from white to puce, pointed at the door and started shouting a single word which Gracey presumed to mean ‘out’. Stojic headed for the door. The Tracker followed.

  As he passed the shaking young man he stooped and slipped a card into his top jacket pocket.

  ‘If you ever change your mind,’ he murmured. ‘Call me. Or write. I’ll come.’

  There was a strained silence in the car back to the airport. Dragan Stojic clearly felt he had earned every dime of his thousand dollars. As they drew up at international departures he spoke across the car roof at the departing Englishman.

  ‘If you ever come back to Belgrade, my friend, I advise you not to mention that name. Not even in jest. Especially not in jest. Today’s events never took place.’

  Within forty-eight hours the Tracker had completed and filed his report to Stephen Edmond, along with his list of expenses. The final paragraphs read:

  I fear I have to admit that the events that led to your grandson’s death, the manner of that death or the resting place of the body will probably never be illuminated. And I would be raising false hopes if I said I thought there was a chance that your grandson was still alive. For the present and the foreseeable future the only judgement has to be: missing presumed killed.

  I do not believe that he and the Bosnian accompanying him crashed off some road in the area and into a ravine. Every possible such road has been personally searched. Nor do I believe the Bosnian murdered him for the truck or the money belt or both.

  I believe they inadvertently drove into harm’s way and were murdered by person or persons unknown. There is a likelihood that these persons were a band of Serbian paramilitary criminals believed to have been in the general area. But without evidence, identification, a confession or court testimony, there is no possibility of charges being brought.

  It is with deepest regret that I have to impart this news to you, but I believe it to be almost certainly the truth.

  I have the honour to remain, Sir,

  Your obedient servant,

  Philip Gracey.

  It was 22 July 1995.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Lawyer

  The main reason Calvin Dexter decided to leave the army was one he did not explain because he did not want to be mocked. He had decided he wanted to go to college, get a degree and become a lawyer.

  As for funds, he had saved several thousand dollars in Vietnam and he could seek further help under the terms of the GI Bill.

  There are few ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ about the GI Bill; if an American soldier leaving the army for reasons other than dishonourable discharge wishes to apply, then his government will pay to put him through university to degree level. The allowance paid, rising over the past thirty years, can be spent by the student any way he wants, so long as the college confirms he is in full-time studentship.

  Dexter reckoned that a rural college would probably be cheaper but he wanted a university with its own law school as well, and if he was ever going to practise law, then there would be more opportunities in the far bigger New York State than in New Jersey. After scouring fifty brochures, he applied for Fordham University, New York City.

  He sent in his papers in the late spring, along with the vital Discharge Document, the DD214 with which every GI left the army. He was just in time.

  In the spring of 1971, though the sentiment against the Vietnam war was already high, and nowhere higher than in academia, the GIs were not seen as being to blame; rather as victims.

  After the chaotic and undignified pullout of 1973, sometimes referred to as a scuttle, the mood changed. Though Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought to put the best spin on things that they could, and though a disengagement from the unwinnable disaster that Vietnam had become was almost universally welcomed, it was still seen as a defeat.

  If there is one thing the average American does not want to be associated with too often, it is defeat. The very concept is un-American, even on the liberal Left. The GIs coming home post-1973 thought they would be welcomed, as they had done their best, they had suffered, they had lost good friends; they met a blank wall of indifference, even hostility. The Left was more concerned with My Lai.

  That summer of 1971, Dexter’s papers were considered, along with all other applicants, and he was accepted for a four-year degree course in political history. In the category of ‘life experience’ his three years in the Big Red One were considered a positive, which would not have happened twenty-four months later.

  The young veteran found a cheap, one-room walk-up in the Bronx, not far from campus, for back then Fordham was housed in a cluster of unglamorous redbrick buildings in that borough. He calculated that if he walked or used public transport, ate frugally and used the long summer vacation to go back to the construction industry he could make enough to survive until graduation. Among the construction sites on which he worked over the next three years was the new wonder of the world, the slowly rising World Trade Center.

  The year 1974 was marked by two events that were to change his life. He met and fell in love with Angela Marozzi, a beautiful, vital, life-loving Italian-American girl working in a flower shop on Bathgate Avenue. They married that summer and with their joint income moved to a larger apartment.

  That autumn, still one year from graduation, he applied for admission to the Fordham Law School, a faculty within the university, but separate in its location and administration, across the river in Manhattan. It was far harder to get into, having few places and being much sought after.

  Law School would mean three more years of study after graduation in 1975 to the law degree, then the Bar Exam and finally the right to practise as an attorney-at-law in the State of New York.

  There was no personal interview involved, just a mass of papers to be submitted to the Admissions Committee for their perusal and judgement. These included school records right back to grade school, which were awful, more recent grades for political history, a self-written assessment and references from present advisors, which were excellent. Hidden in this mass of paperwork was his old DD214.

  He made the shortlist and the Admissions Committee met to make the final selection. There were six of them, headed by Professor Howard Kell, at seventy-seven well past retirement age, bright as a button, an emeritus profes
sor and the patriarch of them all.

  It came to one of two for the last available place. The papers marked Dexter as one of those. There was a heated debate. Professor Kell rose from his chair at the head of the table and wandered to the window. He stared out at the blue summer sky. A colleague came over to join him at the window.

  ‘Tough one, eh, Howard? Whom do you favour?’

  The old man tapped a paper in his hand and showed it to the senior tutor. The tutor read the list of medals and gave a low whistle.

  ‘He was awarded those before his twenty-first birthday.’

  ‘What the hell did he do?’

  ‘He earned the right to be given a chance in this faculty, that’s what he did,’ said the professor.

  The two men returned to the table and voted. It would have been three against three but the chairman’s vote counted double in such a contingency. He explained why. They all looked at the DD214.

  ‘He could be violent,’ objected the politically correct Dean of Studies.

  ‘Oh, I hope so,’ said Professor Kell. ‘I’d hate to think we were giving these away for nothing nowadays.’

  Cal Dexter received the news two days later. He and Angela lay on their bed; he stroked her growing belly and talked of the day he would be a wealthy lawyer and they would have a fine house out at Westchester or Fairfield County.

  Their daughter Amanda Jane was born in the early spring of 1975 but there were complications. The surgeons did their best but the outcome was unanimous. The couple could adopt, of course, but there would be no more natural pregnancies. Angela’s family priest told her it was the will of God and she must accept His will.

  Cal Dexter graduated in the top five of his class that summer and in the autumn began the three year course in Law. It was tough, but the Marozzi family rallied around; Mama baby-sat Amanda Jane so that Angela could wait tables. Cal wanted to remain a day student rather than revert to night school, which would extend the law course by an extra year.

  He laboured through the summer vacations in the first two years but in the third managed to find work with the highly respectable Manhattan law firm of Honeyman Fleischer.

  Fordham has always had a vigorous alumni network and Honeyman Fleischer had three senior partners who had graduated at Fordham Law School. Through a personal intervention by his tutor, Dexter secured vacation work as a legal assistant.

  That summer of 1978 his father died. They had not been close after his return from Vietnam, for the parent had never understood why his son could not return to the construction sites and be content with a hard hat for the rest of his life.

  But he and Angela had visited, borrowing Mr Marozzi’s car, and shown Dexter Senior his only grandchild. When the end came it was sudden. A massive heart attack felled the building labourer on a worksite. His son attended the humble funeral alone. He had hoped his dad could attend his graduation ceremony and be proud of his educated son, but it was not to be.

  He graduated that summer and pending his Bar Exam secured a lowly but full-time position with Honeyman Fleischer, his first professional employment since the army seven years earlier.

  Honeyman Fleischer prided itself on its impeccable liberal credentials, avoided Republicans, and to prove its lively social conscience, fielded a pro bono department to undertake legal representation for no reward for the poor and vulnerable.

  That said, the senior partners saw no need to exaggerate and kept their pro bono team to a few of their lowest-paid newcomers. That autumn of 1978, Cal Dexter was as lowly in the legal pecking order at Honeyman Fleischer as one could get.

  Dexter did not complain. He needed the money, he cherished the job, and covering the down-and-outs gave him a hugely wide spectrum of experience, rather than the narrow confines of one single speciality. He could defend on charges of petty crime, negligence claims and a variety of other disputes that eventually came to a court of appeal.

  It was that winter that a secretary popped her head round the door of his cubby-hole office and waved a file at him.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Immigration appeal,’ she said. ‘Roger says he can’t handle it.’

  The head of the tiny pro bono department chose the cream, if ever any cream appeared, for himself. Immigration matters were definitely the skimmed milk.

  Dexter sighed and buried himself in the details of the new file. The hearing was the next day.

  It was 20 November 1978.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Refugee

  There was a charity in New York in those years called Refugee Watch. ‘Concerned citizens’ was how it would have described its members; ‘dogooders’ was the less admiring description.

  Its self-appointed task was to keep a weather eye open for examples of the flotsam and jetsam of the human race who, washed up on the shores of the USA, wished to take literally the words written on the base of the Statue of Liberty and stay.

  Most often, these were forlorn, bereft people, refugees from a hundred climes, usually with a most fragmentary grasp of the English language and who had spent their last savings in the struggle to survive.

  Their immediate antagonist was the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the formidable INS, whose collective philosophy appeared to be that 99.9 per cent of applicants were frauds and mountebanks who should be sent back whence they came, or at any rate somewhere else.

  The file tossed onto Cal Dexter’s desk that early winter of 1978 concerned a couple fleeing from Cambodia, Mr and Mrs Horn Moung.

  In a lengthy statement by Mr Moung who seemed to speak for them both, translated from the French which was the French-educated Cambodian’s language of choice, his story emerged.

  Since 1975, a fact already well known in the USA and later to become better known through the film The Killing Fields, Cambodia had been in the grip of a mad and genocidal tyrant called Pol Pot and his fanatical army the Khmer Rouge.

  Pot had some hare-brained dream of returning his country to a sort of agrarian Stone Age. Fulfilment of his vision involved a pathological hatred of the people of the cities and anyone with any education. These were for extermination.

  Mr Moung claimed he had been headmaster of a leading lycée or high school in the capital, Phnom Penh, and his wife a staff nurse at a private clinic. Both fitted firmly into the Khmer Rouge category for execution.

  When things became impossible, they went underground, moving from safe house to safe house among friends and fellow professionals, until the latter had all been arrested and taken away.

  Mr Moung claimed he would never have been able to reach the Vietnamese or Thai borders because in the countryside, infested with Khmer Rouge and informers, he would not have been able to pass for a peasant. Nevertheless, he had been able to bribe a truck driver to smuggle them out of Phnom Penh and across to the port of Kampong Son. With his last remaining savings, he persuaded the captain of a South Korean freighter to take them out of the hell that his homeland had become.

  He did not care or know where the Inchon Star was headed. It turned out to be New York harbour, with a cargo of teak. On arrival, he had not sought to evade the authorities but had reported immediately and asked permission to stay.

  Dexter spent the night before the hearing hunched over the kitchen table while his wife and daughter slept a few feet away through the wall. The hearing was his first appeal of any kind, and he wanted to give the refugee his best shot. After the statement, he turned to the response of the INS. It had been pretty harsh.

  The local Almighty in any US city is the District Director, and his office is the first hurdle. The Director’s colleague in charge of the file had rejected the request for asylum on the strange grounds that the Moungs should have applied to the local US Embassy or Consulate and waited in line, according to American tradition.

  Dexter felt this was not too much of a problem; all US staff had fled the Cambodian capital years earlier when the Khmer Rouge stormed in.

  The refusal at the first le
vel had put the Moungs into deportation procedure. That was when Refugee Watch heard of their case and took up the cudgels.

  According to procedure, a couple refused entry by the District Director’s Office at the Exclusion Hearing could appeal to the next level up, an Administrative Hearing in front of an Asylum Hearing Officer.

  Dexter noted that at the Exclusion Hearing, the INS’s second ground for refusal had been that the Moungs did not qualify under the five necessary grounds for proving persecution: race, nationality, religion, political beliefs and / or social class. He felt he could now show that as a fervent anti-Communist – and he certainly intended to advise Mr Moung to become one immediately – and as head teacher, he qualified on the last two grounds at least.

  His task at the hearing on the morrow would be to plead with the Hearing Officer for a relief known as Withholding of Deportation, under Section 243(h) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

  In tiny print at the bottom of one of the papers was a note from someone at Refugee Watch that the Asylum Hearing Officer would be a certain Norman Ross. What he learned was interesting.

  Dexter showed up at the INS building at 26 Federal Plaza over an hour before the hearing to meet his clients. He was not a big man himself, but the Moungs were smaller, and Mrs Moung was like a tiny doll. She gazed at the world through lenses that seemed to have been cut from the bottoms of shot glass tumblers. His papers told him they were forty-eight and forty-five respectively.

  Mr Moung seemed calm and resigned. Because Cal Dexter spoke no French, Refugee Watch had provided a lady interpreter.

  Dexter spent the preparation hour going over the original statement, but there was nothing to add or subtract.

  The case would be heard not in a real court, but in a large office with imported chairs for the occasion. Five minutes before the hearing, they were shown in.

  As he surmised, the representative of the District Director re-presented the arguments used at the Exclusion Hearing to refuse the asylum application. There was nothing to add or subtract. Behind his desk, Mr Ross followed the arguments already before him in the file, then raised an eyebrow at the novice sent down by Honeyman Fleischer.