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.’