Avenger

2 The Victim

Ricky Colenso was not born to die at the age of twenty in a Bosnian cesspit. It should have never 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 kindhearted.

Back in 1970, a young and brilliant mathematician called Adrian Colenso secured tenure as an associate professor of math at Georgetown University. He was twenty-five, remarkably young for the post.

Three years later, he gave a summer seminar in Toronto, Canada. Among those attending, even though she understood little of what he was saying, was a stu

Professor 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, D. C. Miss Edmond was not a young lady to be denied. 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, in the U. S. 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 the District. It was set in its own wooded two-acre plot, with pool and te

Baby Richard Eric Steven was born in April 1975 and was 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'd 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 from high school in 1994 and was accepted at Harvard for the following autumn. That winter, watching on television the sadism of ethnic cleansing and the aftermath of the refugees' misery and relief programs in a faraway place called Bosnia, he determined that he wanted to help in some way.

His mother pleaded that he should stay in the States; there was plenty to do right at home if he wanted to exercise his social conscience. But the images he had seen of gutted villages, wailing orphans, and the blankeyed despair of the refugees had affected him deeply, and Bosnia it had to be.

A few calls from his father established that the world agency for him was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with a big office in New York. Ricky begged that he be allowed to join for the summer at least and went to New York to enquire about procedures for enlistment.

By early spring of 1995, as the old federation of Yugoslavia tore itself apart, three years of civil war had gutted the province of Bosnia. The UNHCR was there in strength, with a staff of about four hundred "internationals" and several thousand locally recruited staffers. The outfit was headed up by a former British soldier, the full-bearded and restlessly energetic Larry Hollingworth, whom Ricky had seen on television. He wanted to join and help in some way.

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 filledout forms to break the springs of a pickup, and as Ricky would have to be in Cambridge 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 middleaged 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 organisations 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 – Vie

"You really should try one of the nongovernmental organisations," suggested the regional controller, trying to be helpful. "They meet right next door at the cafŽ."

The UNHCR might be the world body, but that was far from the end of it. Disaster relief is an entire industry and, for many, a profession. Outside of the United Nations and individual government efforts come the nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). There were over three hundred NGOs involved in Bosnia.

The names of no more than a dozen would ring a bell with the general public: Save the Children (British), Feed the Children (American), Age Concern, War on Want, MŽdecins Sans Frontieres-they were all there. Some were faith based, some secular, and many of the smaller ones had simply come into being for the Bosnian civil war, impelled by TV images beamed endlessly into the West. At the extreme bottom end were single trucks driven across Europe by a couple of sturdy youths who had had a collection round in their local bar. The jumping-off point for the drive on the last leg into the heart of Bosnia was either Zagreb or the Adriatic port of Split.

Ricky found the cafŽ, ordered a coffee and a slivovitz against the bitter March wind outside, and looked around for a possible contact. Two hours later a burly, bearded man, built like a trucker, walked in. He wore a plaid mackinaw and ordered coffee and cognac in a voice Ricky placed as coming from North or South Carolina. He went up and introduced himself. He had struck lucky.

John Slack was a dispatcher and distributor of relief aid for a small American charity called Loaves-n-Fishes, a recently formed offshoot of Salvation Road, which itself was the corporate manifestation in the sinful world of the Reverend Billy Jones, television evangelist and saver of souls (for the appropriate donation) of the fine city of Charleston, South Carolina. He listened to Ricky as one who had heard it all before.

"You drive a truck, kid?"

"Yes." It was not quite true, but he reckoned a big off-road was like a small truck.

"You read a map?"

"Of course."

"And you want a fat salary?"

"No. I have an allowance from my grandpa."

John Slack's eyes twinkled. "You don't want anything? Just to help?"

"That's right."

"OK, you're on. Mine's a small operation. I go and buy relief food, clothes, blankets, mainly in Austria. I truck it down to Zagreb, refuel, and then head into Bosnia. We're based at Travnik. Thousands of refugees down there."

"That suits me fine," said Ricky. "I'll pay all my own costs."

Slack threw back what remained of his coffee and cognac. "Let's go, kid," he said.

The truck was a ten-ton German Hanomag, and Ricky got the hang of it before the border. It took them ten hours to Travnik, spelling each other at the wheel. Around midnight they arrived at the Loaves-n-Fishes compound just outside the town. Slack threw him several blankets.