‘Well, that’s fine, kid. That’s a very smart thing to do. Take a word of advice from an old sweat?’
‘Sure.’
‘Make it three years instead of the required two. Good chance of better postings, better career choices.’ He leaned forward as one imparting a state secret. ‘With three years, you could even avoid going to Vietnam.’
‘But I want to go to Vietnam,’ said the kid in the soiled denim. The MS thought this one over.
‘Right,’ he said very slowly. He might have said, ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’ Instead he said:
‘Hold up your right hand . . .’
Thirty-three years later the former hardhat pushed four oranges through the juicer, rubbed the towel over his wet head again, and took the pile of papers with the juice through to the sitting room.
He went to the technical magazine first. Vintage Airplane is not a big-circulation organ and in Pennington it could only be obtained by placing a special order. It caters for those with a passion for classic and World War II aeroplanes. The runner flicked to the small ads section and studied the wanted notices. He stopped, the juice halfway to his mouth, put down the glass and read the item again. It said:
‘AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call.’
There was no Grumman Avenger Pacific-war torpedo dive-bomber out there to be bought. They were in museums. Someone had uncovered the contact code. There was a number. It had to be a cellphone. The date was 13 May 2001.
CHAPTER TWO
The Victim
Ricky Colenso was not born to die at the age of twenty in a Bosnian cesspit. It should never have ended that way. He was born to get a college degree and live out his life in the States, with a wife and children and a decent chance at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It went wrong because he was too kind-hearted.
Back in 1970 a young and brilliant mathematician called Adrian Colenso secured tenure as a Professor of Math at Georgetown University, just outside Washington. He was twenty-five, remarkably young for the post.
Three years later, he gave a summer seminar in Toronto, Canada. Among those who attended, even though she understood little of what he was saying, was a stunningly pretty student called Annie Edmond. She was smitten and arranged a blind date through close friends.
Adrian Colenso had never heard of her father, which both puzzled and delighted her. She had already been urgently pursued by half a dozen fortune hunters. In the car back to the hotel she discovered that apart from an amazing grasp of quantum calculus, he also kissed rather well.
A week later he flew back to Washington. Miss Edmond was not a young lady to be gainsaid. She left her job, obtained a sinecure at the Canadian consulate, rented an apartment just off Wisconsin Avenue and arrived with ten suitcases. Two months later they married. The wedding was a blue-chip affair in Windsor, Ontario; and the couple honeymooned in Caneel Bay, US Virgin Islands.
As a present, the bride’s father bought the couple a large country house on Foxhall Road, off Nebraska Avenue, in one of the most rustic and therefore sought-after areas of Georgetown. It was set in its own forested one-acre plot, with pool and tennis court. The bride’s allowance would cover its upkeep and the groom’s salary would just about do the rest. They settled down into loving domesticity.
Baby Richard Eric Steven was born in April 1975 and soon nicknamed Ricky.
He grew up like millions of other American youngsters in a secure and loving parental home, doing all the things that boys do, spending time at summer camps, discovering and exploring the thrills of girls and sports cars, worrying over academic grades and looming examinations.
He was neither brilliant like his father nor dumb. He inherited his father’s quirky grin and his mother’s good looks. Everyone who knew him rated him a nice kid. If someone asked him for help, he would do all he could. But he should never have gone to Bosnia.
He graduated out of high school in 1994 and was accepted for Harvard the following autumn. That winter, watching on television the sadism of ethnic cleansing and the aftermath of the refugees’ misery and the relief programmes in a far-away place called Bosnia, he determined that he wanted to help in some way.
His mother pleaded that he should stay in the States; there were relief programmes right at home if he wanted to exercise his social conscience. But the images he had seen of gutted villages, wailing orphans and the blank-eyed despair of the refugees had affected him deeply, and Bosnia it had to be. Ricky begged that he be allowed to get involved.
A few calls from his father established that the world agency was the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, with a big office in New York.
By early spring of 1995 three years of civil war as the old federation of Yugoslavia tore itself apart had gutted the province of Bosnia. The UNHCR was there in strength, with a staff of about 400 ‘internationals’ and several thousand locally recruited staffers. The outfit was headed up on the spot by a former British soldier, the full-bearded and restlessly energetic Larry Hollingworth, whom Ricky had seen on television. Ricky went to New York to inquire about procedures for enlistment.
The New York office was kind but less than enthusiastic. Amateur offers came in by the sackload, and the personal visits were several dozen a day. This was the United Nations; there were procedures, six months of bureaucracy, enough filled-out forms to break the springs of a pickup, and, as Ricky would have to be in Harvard by autumn, probably refusal at the end.
The dejected young man was heading down again in the elevator at the start of the lunch hour when a middle-aged secretary gave him a kindly smile.
‘If you really want to help in there, you’ll have to get over to the regional office in Zagreb,’ she said. ‘They take people on locally. It’s much more relaxed right on the spot.’
Croatia had also once been part of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but it had secured its separation, was now a new state, and many organizations were based in the safety of its capital, Zagreb. One of them was the UNHCR.
Ricky had a long call with his parents, got their grudging permission, and flew New York–Vienna–Zagreb. But the reply was still the same: forms to fill, only long-term commitments were really sought. Summertime amateurs were a lot of responsibility, precious little contribution.