Avenger

Fifty-five years later Steve Edmond rose from his office desk and crossed once again, as he had done so many times down the years, to the photo on the wall. It did not contain all the men he had flown with; some had been dead before others arrived. But it showed the seventeen Canadians at Duxford one hot and cloudless day in late August at the height of the battle.

Almost all gone. Most of them KIA during the war. The faces of boys from nineteen to twenty-two stared out, vital, cheerful, expectant, on the threshold of life, yet mostly never destined to see it.

He peered closer. Benzie, flying on his wingtip, shot down and killed over the Thames estuary, September 7th, two weeks after the photo. Solanders, the boy from Newfoundland, dead the next day.

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"You were the best of us all, Willie," murmured the old man. McKnight was the first ace and double ace, the "natural"; nine confirmed kills in his first seventeen days of combat, twenty-one air victories when he died ten months after his first mission, aged just twenty-one.

Steve Edmond had survived to become extremely rich, certainly the biggest mining magnate in Ontario. But all through the years he had kept the photo on the wall, when he lived in a shack with a pick for company, when he made his first million dollars, when (especially when) *Forbes* magazine pronounced him a billionaire.

He kept it to remind him of the terrible fragility of that thing we call life. Often, looking back, he wondered how he had survived. Shot down the first time, he had been in hospital when 242 Squadron left in December 1941 for the Far East. When he was fit again, he was posted to Training Command.

Chafing at the bit, bombarding higher authority with requests to fly combat again, he had finally been granted his wish in time for the Normandy landings, flying the new Typhoon ground-attack fighterbomber, very fast and very powerful, a fearsome tank killer.

The second time he was shot down was near Remagen as the Americans stormed across the Rhine. He was among a dozen British Typhoons giving them cover in the advance. A direct hit to the engine gave him a few seconds to gain height, lose the canopy, and throw himself out of the doomed aeroplane before it blew up.

The jump was low and the landing hard, breaking both his legs. He lay in a daze of pain in the snow, dimly aware of round steel helmets ru

A muffled figure stopped and stared down at him. A voice said, "Well, lookee here." He let out his pent-up breath in relief. Few of Adolf's finest spoke with a Mississippi drawl.

The Americans got him back across the Rhine dazed with morphine, and he was flown home to England. When the legs were properly set, he was judged to be blocking up a bed needed for fresh incomers from the front, so he was sent to a convalescent home on the South Coast, there to hobble around until repatriation to Canada.

He enjoyed Dilbury Manor, a rambling Tudor pile steeped in history, with lawns like the green baize of a pool table and some pretty nurses. He was twenty-five that spring and carried the rank of wing commander.

Rooms were allocated at one per two officers, but it was a week before his roommate arrived. He was about the same age, American, and wore no uniform. His left arm and shoulder had been smashed up in a gunfight in northern Italy. That meant covert ops, behind enemy lines, special forces.

"Hi," said the newcomer, "Peter Lucas. You play chess?"

Steve Edmond had come out of the harsh mining camps of Ontario, joining the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1938 to escape the unemployment of the mining industry when the world had no use for its nickel. Later that nickel would be part of every aircraft engine that kept him aloft. Lucas had come from the New England top social drawer, endowed with every advantage from the day of his birth.

The two young men were sitting on the lawn with a chess table between them when the radio through the dining hall window, speaking in the impossibly posh accent of the BBC newsreaders in those days, a

The war in Europe was over. The American and Canadian sat and remembered all the friends who would never go home, and each would later recall it was the last time he cried in public.

A week later they parted and returned to their respective countries. But tley formed a friendship in that convalescent home by the English coast that would last for life.

It was a different Canada when Steve Edmond came home, and he was a different man, a decorated war hero returning to a booming economy. His father had been a miner and his grandfather before that. The Canadians had been mining copper and nickel around Sudbury since 1885, and the Edmonds had been part of the action for most of that time.

Steve Edmond found he was owed a fat wedge of pay by the air force and used it to put himself through college, the first of his family to do so. Not u

Formed in 1902, Inco had helped make Canada the primary supplier of nickel to the world, and the company's core was the huge deposit outside Sudbury, Ontario. Edmond joined as a trainee mine manager. Steve would have remained a mine manager living in a comfortable but run-of-the-mill framehouse in a Sudbury suburb but for the restless mind that was always telling him, "there must be a better way."

College had taught him that the basic ore of nickel, which is pentlandite, is also a host to other elements: platinum, palladium, iridium, ruthenium, rhodium, tellurium, selenium, cobalt, and silver and gold also occur in pentlandite. Edmond began to study the rare earth metals, their uses, and the possible market for them. No one else bothered. This was because the percentages were so small their extraction was uneconomical, so they ended up in the slag heaps. Very few knew what rare earth metals were.

Almost all great fortunes are based upon one genius idea and the guts to go with it. Hard work and luck also help. Steve Edmond's idea was to go back to the laboratory when the other young mine managers were helping with the barley harvest by drinking it. What he came up with was a process now known as "pressure acid leaching." Basically, it involved dissolving the tiny deposits of rare metals out of the slag, then reconstituting them back to metal.

Had he taken this to Inco, he would have been given a pat on the back, maybe even a slap-up di

He borrowed, of course, but not too much, because what he had his eye on did not cost much. When every excavation of pentlandite ore became exhausted, or at least exploited until it became uneconomical to go on, the mining companies left behind huge slag heaps called "tailing dams." The tailings were the rubbish; no one wanted them. Steve Edmond did. He bought them for pe

He founded Edmond Metals, Emsknown on the Toronto Exchange simply as Emmys-and the price went up. He never sold out, despite the blandishments, never took the gambles proposed to him by banks and financial advisers. That way he avoided the hypes, the bubbles, and the crashes. By forty, he was a multimillionaire; and by sixty-five, in 1985, he had the elusive mantle of billionaire.