Avenger Read Online Free Page A

climbed, degenerated into a track, and went on climbing. Beech, ash and oak in their spring leaf enveloped them. It was, thought Ricky, almost like the Shenandoah where he had once gone camping with a school party. They began to skid on the corners and he admitted they would never have made it without four-wheel drive.
    The oak gave way to conifers and at five thousand feet they emerged into an upland valley, invisible from the road far below, a sort of secret hideaway. In the heart of the valley, they found the farmhouse. Its stone smokestack survived, but the rest had been torched and gutted. Several sagging barns, unfired, still stood beyond the old cattle pens. Ricky glanced at Fadil's face and said:
    "I am so sorry."
    They dismounted by the blackened fire stack 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, para militaries
    "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 hunch-backed 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