Avenger

by Frederick Forsyth

  When in April 1995 a fellow law student told me his brother and others were going to Bosnia to protect the Serbs up there, and needed a radio operator, I suspected nothing.

  I had done my military service as a radio operator, but miles from any fighting. I agreed to give up my spring vacation to help my fellow Serbs in Bosnia.

  When I joined the other twelve, I realized they were rough types, but I put this down to their being hardened combat soldiers, and blamed myself for being too spoiled and soft.

  The column of four off-roads contained twelve men, including the leader, who joined us at the last minute. Only then did I learn he was Zoran Zilic, of whom I had vaguely heard, who had a fearsome but shadowy reputation. We drove for two days, north through Republika Serpska and into Central Bosnia. We arrived at Banja Luka and that became our base, notably the Bosna Hotel where we took rooms and ate and drank.

  We made three patrols north, east and west of Banja Luka but found no enemy or threatened Serbian villages. On 14 May we drove south into the Vlasic range of mountains. We knew that beyond the range lay Travnik and Vitez, both enemy territory for us Serbs.

  In the late afternoon we were driving along a track in the woods when we came across two little girls in front of us. Zilic got out and talked to them. He was smiling. I thought he was being nice to them. One told him her name was Laila. I did not understand. It was a Muslim name. She had signed her own death warrant and that of her village.

  Zilic took the girls aboard the leading jeep and they pointed out where they lived. It was a hamlet in a valley in the woods: nothing much, about twenty adults and a dozen children, seven cottages, some barns and railed paddocks. When I saw the crescent above the tiny mosque I realized they were Muslims, but they clearly posed no threat.

  The others poured out of the jeeps and rounded up everyone in the hamlet. I suspected nothing when they began to search the cottages. I had heard of Muslim fanatics, Mujahedin from the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who also marauded through Bosnia and would kill any Serb on sight. Perhaps there were some hiding there, I thought.

  When the search was over Zilic walked back to the lead vehicle and took position behind the machine gun mounted on a swivel behind the front seats. He shouted to his men to scatter and opened fire on the peasants huddled in the rail-fence cattle pen.

  It happened almost before I could believe it had happened. The peasants began to jump and dance as the heavy bullets hit them. The other soldiers opened up with their sub-machine guns. Some of the peasants tried to save their children, throwing their bodies over them. A few of the smaller children got away in this manner, darting between the adults and reaching the trees before the bullets took them. Later I learned there were six who had escaped.

  I felt violently sick. There was a stench of blood and entrails in the air – you never get the stench in films from Hollywood. I had never seen people die before, but these were not even soldiers or partisans. One old shotgun, perhaps for killing rabbits and crows, had been found.

  When it was over, most of the shooters were disappointed. There had been no alcohol found, nor anything of value. So they torched the houses and the barns and we left them burning.

  We spent the night in the forest. The men had brought their own slivovitz and most got drunk on it. I tried to drink, but brought it all back up. In my sleeping bag I realized I had made a terrible mistake. These were not patriots around me, but gangsters who killed because they enjoyed it.

  The next morning, we began to drive down a series of mountain tracks, mainly along the face of the range, back towards the col that would lead us over the mountains to Banja Luka. That was when we found the farmhouse. It was alone in another small valley amid the woods. I saw Zilic in the first jeep rise from his seat and hold up his hand in a ‘stop’ signal. He gesticulated that we should cut our engines. The drivers did that, and there was silence. Then we heard voices.

  Very quietly we got down from the jeeps, took guns and crept to the edge of the clearing. About a hundred yards away were two grown males leading six children out of a barn. The men were not armed and not in uniform. Behind them was a fire-gutted farmhouse, and to one side a new, black Toyota Land Cruiser with the words ‘Loaves ‘n’ Fishes’ on the door panel. Both turned and stared when they saw us. The oldest of the children, a little girl of about ten, began to cry. I recognized her by her headscarf. It was Laila.

  Zilic advanced towards the group with his gun raised, but neither made any attempt to fight. The rest of us fanned out and formed a horseshoe round the captives when we arrived close to them. The taller of the men spoke and I recognized American. So did Zilic. None of the others spoke a word of English. The American said, ‘Who are you guys?’

  Zilic did not answer. He strolled over to examine the brand new Land Cruiser. At that moment the child Laila tried to make a run for it. One of the men grabbed but missed. Zilic turned from the off-road, drew his pistol, aimed, fired and blew the back of her head away. He was very proud of his marksmanship with a pistol.

  The American was ten feet from Zilic. He took two strides, swung a fist with all his power and caught Zilic on the side of the mouth. If he had any chance of survival, that finished it. Zilic was caught by surprise, as he might have been, because no one in all Yugoslavia would have dared do that.

  There were two seconds of complete disbelief as Zilic went down, blood pouring from his split lip. Then six of his men were on the American with boots, fists, gun butts. They beat him to a bloody pulp. I think they would have finished him off, but Zilic intervened. He was back up, dabbing the blood off his mouth. He told them to stop the beating.

  The American was alive, shirt ripped open, torso red from kicking, face already swelling and cut. The open shirt revealed a broad money belt at his waist. Zilic gestured with one hand and one of his men ripped it off. It was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, at least ten of them, it turned out. Zilic examined the man who had dared hit him.

  ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘so much blood. You need a cold bath, my friend, something to freshen you up.’ He turned to his men. They were bewildered at his apparent concern for the American. But Zilic had seen something else in the clearing. The cesspit was brimming full, partly from animal slurry but also from human waste. It had once served both purposes. If the passing years had solidified the mixture, the recent rains had reliquefied it. On Zilic’s orders the American was thrown into it.

  The shock of the cold must have brought him to his senses. His feet found the bottom of the pit and he began to struggle. There was a cattle pen nearby with post and rail fencing. It was old and broken but some of the long poles were still whole. The men grabbed several and began to poke the American under the surface of the slime.

  He began to scream for mercy each time his face appeared above the slime. He was begging for his life. About the sixth time, maybe it was seven, Zilic grabbed a pole and rammed the end into the gaping mouth, smashing most of the teeth. Then he pushed downwards and kept pushing until the young man was dead.

  I walked away to the trees and vomited up the sausage and black bread I had eaten for breakfast. I wanted to kill them all, but they were too many and I was too afraid. While I was being sick I heard several volleys. They had killed the other five children and the Bosnian aid worker who had brought the American to that spot. All the bodies were thrown into the slime pit. One of the men found that the words ‘Loaves ‘n’ Fishes’ on each front door of the Land Cruiser were simply a decal with adhesive backing. They peeled off quite easily.

  When we drove away there was no sign, except the startlingly bright splashes of red, the children’s blood on the grass, and the twinkling of a few brass cartridges. That evening Zoran Zilic divided up the dollars. He gave a hundred dollars to each man. I refused to take them, but he insisted that I took a minimum of one note to remain ‘one of the boys’.

  I tried to get rid of it in the bar that evening, but he saw me and really lost his temper. The next day I told him I was g
oing home, back to Belgrade. He threatened me that if I ever spoke one word of what I had seen, he would find me, mutilate and then kill me.

  As I have long known, I am not a brave man and it was my fear of him that kept me silent all these years, even when the Englishman came asking questions in the summer of 1995. But now I have made my peace, and am prepared to testify in any court in Holland or America, so long as God Almighty gives me the strength to stay alive.

  I swear by Him that all I have said is the truth and nothing but the truth.

  Given under my hand, Senjak District, Belgrade, this 7th day of April 2001.

  Milan Rajak.

  That night the Tracker sent a long message to Stephen Edmond in Windsor, Ontario, and the instructions that came back were unequivocal:

  ‘Go wherever you must, do whatever it takes, find my grandson or whatever is left of him and bring him home to Georgetown, USA.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Pit

  Peace had come to Bosnia with the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, but over five years later, the scars of war were not even disguised, let alone healed.

  It had never been a rich province. No Dalmatian coast to attract the tourists; no mineral reserves; just low-tech agriculture in the farmlands between the mountains and the forests.

  The economic damage would take years more to recover from, but the social damage was far worse. Few could imagine that in less than a generation or two Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim would accept living side by side with each other again, or even a few miles apart, save in armed watchful compounds.

  The international bodies spouted the usual blather about reunification and restoring mutual trust, thus justifying the doomed attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together again rather than facing the necessity of partition.

  The task of governing the shattered entity went to the United Nations High Representative, a sort of pro-consul with near-absolute powers, backed by the soldiers of UNPROFOR. Of all the unglamorous tasks that fell to the people who had no time for posturing on the political stage but who actually made things happen, the least charming went to the ICMP – the International Commission on Missing Persons.

  This was run with impressive and quiet efficiency by Gordon Bacon, a former British policeman. To the ICMP fell the task of listening to the tens of thousands of relatives of the ‘disappeared ones’ and taking their statements on the one hand, and tracing and exhuming the hundreds of mini-massacres that had taken place since 1992. The third job was to try to match statements with relics and restore the skull and bundle of bones to the right relatives, for final burial according to the religious creed or none.

  The matching process would have been completely impossible without DNA, but the new technology meant that a swab of blood from the relative and a sliver of bone from the cadaver could provide proof of identity beyond doubt. By 2000 the fastest and most efficient DNA laboratory in Europe was not in some wealthy western capital but in Sarajevo, set up and run on tiny funds by Gordon Bacon. It was to see him that the Tracker drove into the Bosnian city two days after Milan Rajak had signed his name.

  He did not need to bring the Serb with him. Rajak had revealed that before he died, the Bosnian aid worker Fadil Sulejman had told his murderers that the farm had once been his family home. Gordon Bacon read the Rajak statement with interest but no sense of novelty.

  He had read hundreds before, but always from the few survivors, never from one of the perpetrators, and never involving an American. He realized the mystery of what he knew as the Colenso file might be solved at last. He contacted the ICMP commissioner for the Travnik zone and asked for the fullest cooperation with Mr Gracey when he arrived. The Tracker spent the night in his fellow countryman’s spare bedroom and drove north again in the morning.

  It is a mite over two hours into Travnik and he was there by midday. He had talked with Stephen Edmond, and a swab of the grandfather’s blood was on its way from Ontario.

  On 11 April the exhumation team left Travnik for the hills, aided by a local guide. Questions at the mosque had quickly discovered two men who had known Fadil Sulejman, and one of them said he knew the farm in the upland valley. He was in the leading off-road.

  The digger team brought with them protective clothing, breathing aids, shovels, soft brushes, sieves and evidence bags, all the needs of their grisly trade.

  The farm was much as it must have been six years earlier, but a bit more overgrown. No one had come to reclaim it; the Sulejman family appeared to have ceased to exist.

  They found the sewage pit without difficulty. The spring rains had been less than in 1995 and the contents of the pit had hardened to malodorous clay. The diggers pulled on garments like a fly fisherman’s waders, and over-jackets, but seemed immune to the smell.

  Rajak had testified that on the day of the murder, the pit was full to the brim, but if Ricky Colenso’s feet had touched bottom, it must be about six feet deep. Without rain, the surface had receded two feet downwards.

  After three feet of slime had been shovelled out, the ICMP commissioner ordered his men to throw out their shovels and resume with hand trowels. An hour later the first bones were visible and in a further hour of work with scraper and camel-hair brush, the massacre site was exposed.

  No air had penetrated to the bottom of the pit, so there had been no maggots at work, since they depend on air. The decomposition was uniquely due to enzymes and bacilli.

  Every fragment of soft tissue was gone, and when wiped with a damp cloth, the first skull to emerge gleamed clean and white. There were fragments of leather, from the boots and belts of the two men; an ornate belt buckle, surely American, plus metal studs from jeans and buttons from a denim jacket.

  One of the men on his knees down below called out and passed up a watch. Seventy months had not affected the inscription on the back: ‘Ricky, from Mom. Graduation. 1994’.

  The children had all been thrown in dead and they had sunk on top of, or close to, each other. Time and decomposition had made a jumble of the bones of the six corpses, but the size of the skeletons proved who they had been.

  Sulejman had also gone in dead; his skeleton lay on its back, spread-eagled, the way the body had sunk. His friend stood and looked down into the pit and prayed to Allah. He confirmed his former classmate had been around five feet eight inches tall.

  The eighth body was the big one, over six feet. It was to one side, as if the dying boy had tried to crawl through the blackness to the side wall. The bones lay on their side, hunched in the foetal position. The watch came from that pile, and the belt buckle. When the skull was passed up, the front teeth were smashed, as Rajak had testified.

  It was sundown when the last tiny bone was retrieved and bagged. The two grown men were in separate bags, the children shared their own; the reassembly of six small skeletons could be done in the mortuary down in the town.

  The Tracker drove to Vitez for the night. The British army was long gone but he took a billet in a guest house he knew from before. In the morning he returned to the ICMP office in Travnik.

  From Sarajevo, Gordon Bacon authorized the local commissioner to release the remains of Ricky Colenso to Major Gracey for transportation to the capital.

  The swab from Ontario had arrived. In a remarkably fast two days the DNA tests were complete. The head of the ICMP in Sarajevo attested that the skeleton was indeed that of Richard ‘Ricky’ Colenso of Georgetown, USA. He needed formal authority from the next of kin to release the remains into the care of Philip Gracey of Andover, Hampshire, UK. That took two days to arrive.

  In the interval, on instructions from Ontario, the Tracker bought a casket from Sarajevo’s premier funeral parlour. The mortician arranged the skeleton with other materials to give heft and balance to the casket as if it contained a real cadaver. Then it was sealed for ever.

  It was on 15 April that the Canadian magnate’s Grumman IV arrived with a letter of authority to take over. The Tracker consigned the casket and the fat file
of paperwork to the captain and went home to the green fields of England.

  Stephen Edmond was at Washington Dulles to receive his own executive jet when it touched down on the evening of the 16th after a refuelling stop at Shannon. An ornate hearse took the casket to a funeral parlour for two days while final arrangements for interment were completed.

  On the 18th the ceremony took place at the very exclusive Oak Hill Cemetery on R Street in Northwest Georgetown. It was small and private, in the Roman Catholic rite. The boy’s mother, Mrs Annie Colenso, née Edmond, stood with her husband’s arm around her, weeping quietly. Professor Colenso dabbed at his eyes and occasionally glanced over at his father-in-law as if he did not know what to do and sought some guidance.

  Across the grave the 81-year-old Canadian stood in his dark suit like a pillar of his own pentlandite ore and looked unblinkingly down at the coffin of his grandson. He had not shown the report from the Tracker to his daughter or son-in-law and certainly not the testimony of Milan Rajak.

  They knew only that a belated eyewitness had come forward who recalled seeing the black Land Cruiser in a valley, and as a result, the two bodies had been found. But he had to concede that they had been murdered and buried. There was no other way of explaining the six-year gap.

  The service ended, the mourners moved away to let the sextons work. Mrs Colenso ran to her father and hugged him, pressing her face against the fabric of his shirt. He looked down and gently stroked the top of her head, as he had when she was a small girl and something frightened her.

  ‘Daddy, whoever did this to my baby, I want him caught. Not killed quickly and cleanly. I want him to wake in jail every morning for the rest of his life and know that he is there and will never come out again, and I want him to think back and know that it is all because he cold-bloodedly murdered my child.’