‘I am so sorry.’
They dismounted by the blackened firestack and Ricky waited as Fadil walked through the wet ashes, kicking here and there at what was left of the place he was raised in. Ricky followed him as he walked past the cattle pen and the cesspit, still brimming with its nauseous contents, swollen by the rains, to the barns where his father might have buried the family treasures to save them from marauders. That was when they heard the rustle and the whimper.
The two men found them under a wet and smelly tarpaulin. There were six of them, small, cringing, terrified, aged about ten down to four. Four little boys and two girls, the oldest apparently the surrogate mother and leader of the group. Seeing the two men staring at them, they were frozen with fear. Fadil began to talk softly. After a while the girl replied.
‘They come from Gorica, a small hamlet about four miles from here along the mountain. It means “small hill”. I used to know it.’
‘What happened?’
Fadil talked some more in the local lingo. The girl answered, then burst into tears.
‘Men came, Serbs, paramilitaries.’
‘When?’
‘Last night.’
‘What happened?’
Fadil sighed.
‘It was a very small hamlet. Four families, twenty adults, maybe twelve children. Gone now, all dead. Their parents shouted that they should run away, when the firing started. They escaped in the darkness.’
‘Orphans? All of them?’
‘All of them.’
‘Dear God, what a country. We must get them into the truck, down to the valley,’ said the American.
They led the children, each clinging to the hand of the next eldest up the chain, out of the barn into the bright spring sunshine. Birds sang. It was a beautiful valley.
At the edge of the trees they saw the men. There were ten of them and two Russian GAZ jeeps in army camouflage. The men were also in camo. And heavily armed.
Three weeks later, scouring the mailbox but facing yet another day with no card, Mrs Annie Colenso rang a number in Windsor, Ontario. It answered at the second ring. She recognized the voice of her father’s private secretary.
‘Hi, Jean. It’s Annie. Is my dad there?’
‘He surely is, Mrs Colenso. I’ll put you right through.’
CHAPTER THREE
The Magnate
There were ten young pilots in ‘A’ flight crew hut and another eight next door in ‘B’ Flight. Outside on the bright green grass of the airfield two or three Hurricanes crouched with that distinctive hunchbacked look caused by the bulge behind the cockpit. They were not new and fabric patches revealed where they had taken combat wounds high above France over the previous fortnight.
Inside the huts the mood could not have been in greater contrast to the warm summer sunshine of 25 June 1940 at Coltishall field, Norfolk, England. The mood of the men of No. 242 Squadron, Royal Air Force, known simply as the Canadian squadron, was about as low as it had ever been, and with good cause.
Two Four Two had been in combat almost since the first shot was fired on the Western Front. They had fought the losing battle for France from the eastern border back to the Channel coast. As Hitler’s great blitzkrieg machine rolled on, flicking the French army to one side, the pilots trying to stem the flood would find their bases evacuated and moved further back even while they were airborne. They had to scavenge for food, lodgings, spare parts and fuel. Anyone who has ever been part of a retreating army will know the overriding adjective is ‘chaotic’.
Back across the Channel in England, they had fought the second battle above the sands of Dunkirk as beneath them the British army sought to save what it could from the rout, grabbing anything that would float to paddle back to England, whose white cliffs were enticingly visible across the flat calm sea.
By the time the last Tommy was evacuated from that awful beach and the last defenders of the perimeter passed into German captivity for five years, the Canadians were exhausted. They had taken a terrible beating: nine killed, three wounded, three shot down and taken prisoner.
Three weeks later they were still grounded at Coltishall, without spares or tools, all abandoned in France. Their CO, Squadron Leader ‘Papa’ Gobiel, was ill, had been for weeks, and would not return to command. Still, the Brits had promised them a new commander, who was expected any time.
A small open-topped sports car emerged from between the hangars and parked near the two timber crew huts. A man climbed out, with some difficulty. No one came out to greet him. He stumped awkwardly towards ‘A’ Flight. A few minutes later he was out of there and heading for ‘B’ hut. The Canadian pilots watched him through the windows, puzzled by the rolling walk with feet apart. The door opened and he appeared in the aperture. His shoulders revealed his rank of squadron leader. No one stood up.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded angrily.
A chunky Canuck hauled himself upright, a few feet from where Steve Edmond sprawled in a chair and surveyed the newcomer through a blue haze.
‘I guess I am,’ said Stan Turner. It was early days. Stan Turner already had two confirmed kills to his credit but would go on to score a total of fourteen and a hatful of medals.
The British officer with the angry blue eyes turned on his heel and lurched away towards a parked Hurricane. The Canadians drifted out of their huts to observe.
‘I do not believe what I am watching,’ muttered Johnny Latta to Steve Edmond. ‘The bastards have sent us a CO with no bloody legs.’
It was true. The newcomer was stumping around on two prosthetics. He hauled himself into the cockpit of the Hurricane, punched the Rolls Royce Merlin engine into life, turned into the wind and took off. For half an hour he threw the fighter into every known aerobatic manoeuvre in the textbook and a few that were not yet there.
He was good in part because he had been an aerobatic ace before losing both legs in a crash long before the war, and in part just because he had no legs. When a fighter pilot makes a tight turn or pulls out of a power dive, both ploys being vital in air combat, he pulls heavy G-forces on his own body. The effect is to drive blood from the upper body downwards, until blackout occurs. Because this pilot had no legs, the blood had to stay in the upper body, nearer the brain, and his squadron would learn that he could pull tighter turns than they could. Eventually he landed the Hurricane, climbed out and stumped towards the silent Canucks.
‘My name is Douglas Bader,’ he told them, ‘and we are going to become the best bloody squadron in the whole bloody Air Force.’
He was as good as his word. With the Battle of France lost and the battle of the Dunkirk beaches a damn close-run thing, the big one was coming: Hitler had been promised by his air-force chief Goering mastery of the skies to enable the invasion of Britain to succeed. The Battle of Britain was the struggle for those skies. By the time it was over, the Canadians of 242, always led into combat by their legless CO, had established the best kill-to-loss ratio of all.
By late autumn, the German Luftwaffe had had enough and withdrew back into France. Hitler snapped his anger at Goering and turned his attention east to Russia.
In three battles, France, Dunkirk and Britain, spread over only six months of the summer of ’40, the Canadians had racked up eighty-eight confirmed kills, sixty-seven in the Battle of Britain alone. But they had lost seventeen pilots, the KIAs (killed in action), and all but three were Canucks.
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. Be
nzie, flying on his wingtip, shot down and killed over the Thames estuary on 7 September, two weeks after the photo. Solanders, the boy from Newfoundland, dead the next day.
Johnny Latta and Willie McKnight, standing side by side, would die wingtip to wingtip somewhere over the Bay of Biscay in January 1941.
‘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 fairly old and 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 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 fighter-bomber, 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 in 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 legs. He lay in a daze of pain in the snow, dimly aware of round steel helmets running towards him, more keenly aware that the Germans had a particular loathing of Typhoons and the people he had been blowing apart were an SS-Panzer division, not known for their tolerance.
A muffled figure stopped and stared down at him. A voice said, ‘Well lookee here.’ He let out his pent 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 room-mate 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 Airforce 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 aero-engine that kept him aloft. Lucas had come from the New England top social drawer, endowed with everything 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 refectory hall window, speaking in the impossibly posh accent of the BBC newsreaders in those days, announced that Field Marshal von Rundstedt had just signed on Luneberg Heath the instruments of unconditional surrender. The 8th of May, 1945.
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 they 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. It was from the Sudbury Basin that he came. And to the Basin that he went back. 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 unnaturally he took mineral engineering as his discipline and threw a course in metallurgy into the pot as well. He majored in both near the top of his class in 1948 and was snapped up by INCO, the International Nickel Company and principal employer in the Basin.
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 Edmond would have remained a mine-manager living in a comfortable but run-of-the-mill frame house 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, 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 cracking good idea and the guts to go with it. Hard work and luck also help. Steve Edmond’s cracking 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 known now 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 dinner. Instead, he resigned his post and took a third-class train seat to Toronto and the Bureau of Patents. He was thirty and on his way.
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 cents.
He founded Edmond Metals, known 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 advisors. That way he avoided the hypes, the bubbles and the crashes. By forty he was a multi-millionaire and by sixty-five, in 1985, he had the elusive mantle of billionaire.
He did not flaunt it, never forgot where he came from, gave much to charity, avoided politics while remaining affable to them all, and was known as a good family man.
Over the years there were indeed a few fools who, taking the mild-mannered exterior for the whole man, sought to cheat, lie or steal. They discovered, often too late from their point of view, that there was as much steel in Steve Edmond as in any aero-engine he had ever sat behind.
He married once, in 1949, just before his big discovery. He and Fay were a love match and it stayed that way until motor neuron disease took her away in 1994. There was one child, their daughter Annie, born in 1950.
In his old age, Steve Edmond doted on her as always, approved mightily of Professor Adrian Colenso, the Georgetown University academic she had married at twenty-two, and loved to bits his only grandson Ricky, then aged twenty, away somewhere in Europe before starting college. r />
Most of the time Steve Edmond was a contented man with every right to be so, but there were days when he felt tetchy, ill at ease. Then he would cross the floor of his penthouse office suite high above the city of Windsor, Ontario, and stare again at the young faces in the photo. Faces from far away and long ago.
The internal phone rang. He walked back to his desk.
‘Yes, Jean.’
‘It’s Mrs Colenso on the line from Virginia.’
‘Fine. Put her through.’ He leaned back in the padded swivel chair as the connection was made. ‘Hi, darling. How are you?’
The smile dropped from his face as he listened. He came forward in the chair until he was leaning on the desk.
‘What do you mean “missing”? . . . Have you tried phoning? . . . Bosnia? No lines . . . Annie, you know kids nowadays don’t write . . . maybe it’s stuck in the mail over there . . . yes, I accept he promised faithfully . . . all right, leave it to me. Who was he working for?’
He took a pen and pad and wrote what she dictated.
‘Loaves ‘n’ Fishes. That’s its name? It’s a relief agency? Food for refugees. Fine, then it’ll be listed. They have to be. Leave it to me, honey. Yes, as soon as I have anything.’
When he put the phone down he thought for a moment, then called his chief executive officer.
‘Among all those young Turks you employ, do you have anyone who understands researching on the internet?’ he asked. The executive was stunned.
‘Of course. Scores.’
‘I want the name and private number of the chief of an American charity called Loaves ‘n’ Fishes. No, just that. And I need it fast.’
He had it in ten minutes. An hour later he came off a long call with a gleaming building in Charleston, South Carolina, headquarters of one of those television evangelists, the sort he despised, raking in huge donations from the gullible against guarantees of salvation.