Avenger

The Avenger

Frederick Forsyth

*

Synopsis:

A young American aid volunteer, Ricky Colenso, is brutally murdered in the former Yugoslavia. His grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond, is bent on revenge. The quest to find Ricky's murderer leads Edmond to Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who could bring the killer to justice. But what starts as a personal, domestic tragedy soon explodes into a terrifying drama on the centre stage of world terrorism.

From the battlefield of Vietnam via war-torn Serbia to the jungles of Central America, Avenger is packed with riveting detail, breathtaking action and political suspense, while in Cal Dexter we meet an unforgettable hero in the most dynamic Forsyth tradition.

PREFACE

The Murder

IT WAS ON THE SEVENTH TIME THEY HAD PUSHED THE AMERICAN boy down into the liquid excrement of the cesspit that he failed to fight back, and died down there, every orifice filled with unspeakable filth.

When they had done, the men put down their poles, sat on the grass, laughed and smoked. Then they finished off the other aid worker and the six orphans, took the relief agency off-road and drove back across the mountain.

It was 15 May 1995.

PART ONE

Chapter ONE

The Hardhat

THE MAN WHO RAN ALONE LEANED INTO THE GRADIENT AND ONCE again fought the enemy of his own pain. It was a torture and a therapy. That was why he did it.

Those who know often say that of all the disciplines the triathlon is the most brutal and unforgiving. The decathlete has more skills to master, and with putting the shot needs more brute strength, but for fearsome stamina and the capacity to meet the pain and beat it there are few trials like the triathlon.

The runner in the New Jersey sunrise had risen as always on his training days well before dawn. He drove his pickup to the far lake, dropping off his racing bicycle on the way, chaining it to a tree for safety. At two minutes after five, he set the chronometer on his wrist, pulled the sleeve of the neoprene wet suit down to cover it and entered the icy water.

It was the Olympic triathlon that he practiced, with distances measured in metric lengths. A 1500-metre swim, as near as dammit one mile; out of the water, strip fast to singlet and snorts, mount the racing bike. Then forty kilometres crouched over the handlebars, all of it at the sprint. He had long ago measured the mile along the lake from end to end, and knew exactly which tree on the far bank marked the spot he had left the bike. He had marked out his forty kilometres along the country roads, always at that empty hour, and knew which tree was the point to abandon the bike and start the run. Ten kilometres was the run and there was a farm gate post that marked the two-clicks-to-go point. That morning he had just passed it. The last two kilometers were uphill, the final heart-breaker, the no-mercy stretch.

The reason it hurt so much is that the muscles needed are all different. The powerful shoulders, chest and arms of a swimmer are not normally needed by a speed cyclist or marathon man. They are just extra poundage that has to be carried.

The speed-blurred driving of the legs and hips of a cyclist are different from the tendons and sinews that give the runner the rhythm and cadence to eat up the miles underfoot. The repetitiveness of the rhythms of one exercise does not match those of the other. The tri athlete needs them all, then tries to match the performances of three specialist athletes one after the other.

At the age of twenty-five it is a cruel event. At the age of fifty-one it ought to be indictable under the Geneva Convention. The runner had passed his fifty-first the previous January. He dared a glance at his wrist and scowled. Not good; he was several minutes down on his best. He drove harder against his enemy.

The Olympians are looking at just under two hours; the New Jersey runner had clipped two and a half hours. He was almost at that time now, and still two Ks to go.

The first houses of his hometown came into view round a curve in Highway 30. The old, pre-Revolution village of Pennington straddles the Thirty, just off Interstate 95 running down from New York, through the state and on to Delaware, Pennsylvania and Washington. Inside the village the Highway is called Main Street.

There is not much to Pennington, one of a million neat, clean, tidy, neighbourly small towns that make up the overlooked and underestimated heart of the USA. A single major crossroads at the centre where West Delaware Avenue crosses Main Street, several well-attended churches of the three denominations, a First National Bank, a handful of shops, and off-the-street residences scattered down the tree-clothed byroads.

The runner headed for the crossroads, half a K to go. He was too early for a coffee at the Cup of Joe cafe, or breakfast at Vito's Pizza, but even had they been open he would not have stopped. South of the junction he passed the Civil War vintage, white clapboard house with the shingle of Mr. Calvin Dexter, attorney-at-law, next to the door. It was his office, his shingle and his law practice, save for the occasions when he took time off and went away to attend to his other practice. Clients and neighbours accepted that he took fishing vacations now and then, knowing nothing of the small apartment under another name in New York City.

He drove his aching legs that last five hundred yards to reach the turning into Chesapeake Drive at the south end of town. That was where he lived and the corner marked the end of his self-imposed Calvary. He slowed, stopped and hung his head, leaning against a tree, sucking in oxygen to heaving lungs. Two hours, thirty-six minutes. Far from his best. That there was probably no one within a hundred miles who, aged fifty-one, could come near it was not the point. The point, as he could never dare to explain to the neighbours who grinned and cheered him on, was to use the pain to combat the other pain, the always pain, the pain that never went away, the pain of lost child, lost love, lost everything.

The runner turned into his street and walked the last two hundred yards. Ahead of him he saw the newspaper lad hurl a heavy bundle onto his porch. The kid waved as he cycled past and Cal Dexter waved back.

Later he would take his motor scooter and go to retrieve his truck. With the scooter in the rear, he would drive home, picking up the racing bike along the road. First he needed a shower, some high-energy bars and the contents of several oranges.

On the stoop he picked up the bundle of newspapers, broke them open and looked. As he expected, there was the local paper, another from Washington, from New York the big Sunday Times and, in a wrapper, a technical magazine.

Calvin Dexter, the wiry, sandy-haired, friendly, smiling attorney of Pennington, New Jersey, had not been born to be any such thing, though he was indeed born in the state.

He was created in a Newark slum, rife with roaches and rats, and came into the world in January 1950, the son of a construction worker and a waitress at the local diner. His parents, according to the morality of the age, had had no choice but to marry when a meeting in a neighbourhood dance hall and a few glasses too much of bad hooch had led to things getting out of hand and his own conception. Early on, he knew nothing of this. Babies never know how or by whom they got here. They have to find out, sometimes the hard way.

His father was not a bad man, by his lights. After Pearl Harbor he had volunteered for the armed forces, but as a skilled construction worker he had been deemed more useful at home, where the war effort involved the creation of thousands of new factories, dockyards and government offices in the New Jersey area.

He was a hard man, quick with his fists, the only law on many blue-collar jobs. But he tried to live on the straight and narrow, bringing his wage packet home unopened, trying to raise his toddler son to love Old Glory, the Constitution and Joe DiMaggio.

But later, after the Korean War, the job opportunities slipped away. Only the industrial blight remained and the unions were in the grip of the Mob.

Calvin was five when his mother left. He was too young to understand why. He knew nothing of the loveless union his parents had had, accepting with the philosophical endurance of the very young that people always shouted and quarreled that way. He knew nothing of the travelling salesman who had promised her bright lights and better frocks. He was simply told she had 'gone away'.

He had accepted that his father was now home each evening, looking after him instead of having a few beers after work, staring glumly at a foggy television screen. It was not until his teens that he learned his mother, abandoned in her turn by the travelling salesman, had tried to return, but had been rebuffed by the angry and bitter father.

When he was seven his father hit upon the idea to solve the problem of a home and the need to search for work far and wide. They moved out of the walk-up tenement in Newark and acquired a second-hand trailer home. This became his home for ten years.

Father and son moved from job to job, living in the trailer, the scruffy boy attending whichever local school would take him. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, the Beatles over from a country Cal had never heard of. It was the age of Kennedy, the Cold War and Vietnam.

The jobs came and the jobs were completed. They moved through the northern cities of East Orange, Union and Elizabeth; then on to work outside New Brunswick and Trenton. For a time they lived in the Pine Barrens while Dexter Senior was foreman on a small project. Then they headed south to Atlantic City. Between the ages of eight and sixteen Cal attended nine grade schools in as many years. His formal education could fill an entire postage stamp.

But he became wise in other ways: street-wise, fight-wise.

Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet nine inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch. Once he challenged the booth fighter in a fairground sideshow, knocked him flat and took the twenty-dollar prize.

A man who smelt of cheap pomade approached his father and suggested the boy attend his gym with a view to becoming a boxer, but they moved on to a new city and a new job.

There was no question of money for vacations, so when school was out, the kid just came to the construction site with his father. There he made coffee, ran errands, did odd jobs. One of the 'errands' involved a man with a green eye shade who told him there was a vacation job taking envelopes to various addresses across Atlantic City and saying nothing to anyone. Thus for the summer vacation of 1965 he became a bookie's runner.

Even from the bottom of the social pile, a smart kid can still look. Cal Dexter could sneak unpaying into the local movie house and marvel at the glamour of Hollywood, the huge rolling vistas of the Wild West, the shimmering glitz of the screen musicals, the crazy antics of the

Martin and Lewis comedies.

He could still see in the television adverts smart apartments with stainless-steel kitchens, smiling families in which the parents seemed to love each other. He could look at the gleaming limousines and sports cars on the billboards above the highway.

He had nothing against the hardhats of the construction sites. They were gruff and crude, but they were kind to him, or most of them anyway. On site he too wore a hard hat and the general presumption was that once out of school he would follow his father into the building trade. But he had other ideas. Whatever life he had, he vowed, it would be far from the crash of the trip-hammer and the choking dust of cement mixers.

Then he realized that he had nothing to offer in exchange for that better, more moneyed, more comfortable life. He thought of the movies, but presumed all film stars were towering men, unaware that most are well under five feet nine. This thought only came to him because some barmaid said she thought he looked a bit like James Dean, but the building workers roared with laughter, so he dropped the idea.

Sport and athletics could get a kid out of the street and on the road to fame and fortune, but he had been through all his schools so fast he had never had a chance to make any of the school teams.

Anything involving a formal education, let alone qualifications, was out of the question. That left other kinds of working-class employment: table-waiter, bellhop, grease-monkey in a garage, delivery-van driver; the list was endless but for all the prospects most of them offered he might as well stay with construction. The sheer brutalism and danger of the work made it better paid than most.

Or there was crime. No one raised on the waterfronts or construction camps of New Jersey could possibly be unaware that organized crime, running with the gangs, could lead to a life of big apartments, fast cars and easy women. The word was, it hardly ever led to jail. He was not Italian-American, which would preclude full membership of the Mob aristocracy, but there were Wasps who had made good.

He quit school at seventeen and started the next day at his father's work site a public works housing project outside Camden. A month later the driver operator of the earthmover fell ill. There was no substitute. It was a skilled job. Cal looked at the interior of the cab. It made sense.

"I could work this," he said. The foreman was dubious. It would be against all the rules. Any inspector chancing along and his job would be history. On the other hand, the whole team was standing around needing mountains of earth shifted.