Avenger By 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.

The Veteran

"Forsyth in top form ... the master storyteller has lost none of his touch." Daily Mail

Published 2003 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Frederick Forsyth 2003

For the Tunnel Rats You guys did something I could never force myself to do.

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 practised, 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 kilometres 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.