Frederick Forsyth: Avenger

When Calvin was seven, his father hit upon an idea to solve the problem of a home and the need to search for work far and wide. They moved out of the walkup tenement in Newark and acquired a second-hand trailer. This became his home for ten years.

Father and son moved from job to job, living in the trailer, the scruffy boy attending whichever local school would take him. It was the age of Elvis Presley, Del Shannon, Roy Orbison, the Beatles, over from a country Cal had barely heard of. It was the age of Kennedy, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

The jobs came and the jobs were completed. They moved through the northern cities of East Orange, Union, and Elizabeth; then on to work outside New Brunswick and Trenton. For a time they lived in the Pine Barrens while Dexter Senior was foreman on a small project. Then they headed south to Atlantic City. Between the ages of eight and sixteen, Cal attended nine schools in as many years. His formal education could fill an entire postage stamp.

But he became wise in other ways; streetwise, fightwise. Like his departed mother, he did not grow tall, topping out at five feet, eight inches. Nor was he heavy and muscular like his father, but his lean frame packed fearsome stamina and his fists a killer punch. Once he challenged the booth fighter in a fairground sideshow, knocked him flat, and took the twenty-dollar prize.

A man who smelt of cheap aftershave approached his father and suggested the boy attend his gym with a view to becoming a boxer, but they moved on to a new city and a new job.

There was no question of money for vacations, so when school was out, the kid just went to the construction site with his father. There he made coffee, ran errands, did odd jobs. One of the "errands" involved a man who told him there was a vacation job taking envelopes to various addresses across Atlantic City and saying nothing to anyone. So for the summer vacation of 1965, he became a bookie's runner.

Even from the bottom of the social pile, a smart kid can still look. Cal Dexter could sneak unpaying into the local movie house and marvel at the glamour of Hollywood, the huge rolling vistas of the Wild West, the shimmering glitz of the screen musicals, the crazy antics of the Martin and Lewis comedies.

He could see in the television ads perfect houses with stainless-steel kitchens and smiling families in which the parents seemed to love each other. He could look at the gleaming limousines and sports cars on the billboards above the highway.

He had nothing against the hard hats of the construction sites. The men were gruff and crude, but they were kind to him, or most of them were anyway. On site he, too, wore a hard-hat, and the general presumption was that once out of school he would follow his father in the building trades. But he had other ideas. Whatever life he had, he vowed, it would be far from the crash of the trip-hammer and the choking dust of cement mixers.

Then he realised that he had nothing to offer in exchange for that better, more moneyed, more comfortable life. He thought of the movies but assumed all actors were towering men, unaware that most were well under five feet nine. This thought only came to him because some barmaid said she thought he looked a bit like James Dean, but the building workers roared with laughter so he dropped the idea.

Sports and athletics could get a kid out of the street and on the road to fame and fortune, but he had been through all his schools so fast he had never had a chance to make any of the school teams.

Anything involving a formal education, let alone qualifications, was out of the question. That left other kinds of working-class employment-waiter, bellhop, grease monkey, delivery van driver-the list was endless, but for all the prospects most of them offered, he might as well stay with construction. The sheer brutalism and danger of the work made it better paid than most.

Or there was crime. No one raised on the waterfronts or construction sites of New Jersey could possibly be unaware that organised crime, running with the gangs, could lead to a life of big apartments, fast cars, and easy women. The word was, it hardly ever led to jail. He was not Italian American, which would preclude full membership in the Mob aristocracy, but there were others who had made good.

He quit school at seventeen and started the next day at his father's work site, a housing project outside Camden. A month later the driver/operator of the bulldozer fell ill. There was no substitute. It was a skilled job.

Cal looked at the interior of the cab. It made sense. "I could work this," he said.

The foreman was dubious. It would be against all the rules. Any inspector chancing along and his job would be history. On the other hand, the whole team was standing around needing mountains of earth shifted.

"There's an awful lot of levers in there."

"Trust me," said the kid.

It took about twenty minutes to work out which lever did what function. He began to shift dirt. It meant a bonus, but it was still not a career.

In January 1968, he turned eighteen, and the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. He was watching television in a bar in Camden. After the newscast came several commercials and then a brief recruitment film made by the army. It mentioned that, if you shaped up, the army would give you an education. The next day he walked into the U.S. Army office in Camden and said, "I want to join the army."

Back then every American youth would, failing some pretty unusual circumstances or voluntary exile, become liable for compulsory draught just after his eighteenth birthday. The desire of just about every teenager and twice that number of parents was to get out of it. The master sergeant behind the desk looked bemused.

"I'm volunteering," Cal said. That caught his attention.

The master sergeant drew a form toward him, keeping eye contact like a ferret that does not want the rabbit to get away. "Well, that's fine, kid. That's a very smart thing to do. Take a word of advice from an old sweat?"

"Sure."

"Make it three years instead of the required two. Good chance of better postings, better career choices." He leaned forward as one imparting a state secret. "With three years, you could even avoid going to Vietnam."

"But I want to go to Vietnam," said the kid in the soiled denims. The master sergeant thought this one over. "Right," he said very slowly. He might have said, "There's no accounting for taste." Instead he said, "Hold up your right handÉ"

Thirty-three years later, the former hard hat pushed four oranges through the juicer, rubbed the towel over his wet head again, and took the pile of papers with the juice through to the sitting room.

There was the local paper, another from Washington, and one from New York, and, in a wrapper, a technical magazine. It was this he went to first.

*Vintage Airplane* is not a big-circulation organ, and in Pennington it could only be obtained by mail order. It catered to those with a passion for classic and World War II aeroplanes. The runner flicked to the small want ads section. He stopped, the juice halfway to his mouth, put down the glass, and read the item again. It said: "AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call."

There was no Pacific War Grumman Avenger, torpedo dive-bomber out there to be bought. They were in museums. Someone had uncovered the contact code. There was a number. It had to be a cell phone. The date was May 13, 2001.

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.