Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

  One day, de Villiers feared, Davies would arrive home to find his missus wrapped around some poor yuppie whose flat she wished to face-lift. The results, he reflected, would not be a pretty sight, for when in a rage Davies did not respect the niceties of civilized life.

  Although there was very little de Villiers did not know about his colleagues, his own circumstances and background were forbidden topics that both men had long since learned never to broach. They trusted de Villiers simply because he had always, to the best of their knowledge, played fair with them. He trusted them because he took the trouble to keep abreast of their problems and to know their limitations.

  In a world of deceit and back-stabbing, a profession where over ninety percent of practitioners work alone, the Clinic had managed to remain an effective and cohesive working group for four years. This was, of course, largely due to de Villiers’s personality, which was sincere and straightforward, giving the impression of a positive individual unlikely to suffer from anxiety or indecision. This stemmed from his character, which, unlike his mien, was extremely aggressive. Deep down de Villiers boiled with a sense of fury, a rage at the injustice of Fate and a desperate yearning for roots and a mother’s love.

  Was he normal? Can a contract killer be normal? Normal people certainly can and do perform outrageous or sadistic acts but not repeatedly, to order. Such people almost always appear callous, shifty, or aggressive in their everyday life. De Villiers’s ruthlessness, by contrast, did not show through in his day-to-day behavior. He could kill a young woman, by whatever means might suit the contract, before noon, and within minutes be enjoying the banalities of lunchtime gossip and the taste of good food.

  His Jekyll and Hyde character was able to support this duality without betraying a hint of outward unpleasantness. If he ever thought about it, de Villiers would claim that he killed purely to make a living. He would deny that there was an inner compulsion, a burning need to get even with Fate.

  Since de Villiers made a particular point of meeting would-be clients in person and carefully assessing possible contracts before accepting them, he took less leave than Meier and Davies. He averaged perhaps three or four weeks’ vacation a year, which he invariably spent hunting for rare species of game alone, equipped with the best photographic gear money can buy.

  De Villiers paid, adding no tip since the bill was clearly printed service inclus and he was ashamed of having enjoyed the excellent lobster. The others left to find separate cabs to favorite night spots. De Villiers reflected on lessons learned in Paris, on contacts made that might be useful in the future. After a second cognac he returned to the hotel at 31 Avenue George V and put through a call to a number in the Cape Province. There was no answer. He put the phone down and for a moment felt a touch of loneliness. He sat in the overplush bar for a while, indulging in his favorite activity: observing people. But the subject matter was poor. Two gay barmen, an aging Californian film star with her silent toy boy, and an off-duty receptionist picking his nose behind a copy of Paris Match.

  He passed through the silent foyer hung with fine Gobelin tapestries and tipped a porter who brought him an envelope on a salver. Back in his room, he exercised for twenty minutes and then, with an Evian from the minibar, lay back and read the message from Tadnams. He was to go immediately to their office in Earls Court and be ready to fly on to the Arabian Gulf.

  7

  … A scum-laden lake marks the northeasterly limit of safety for joggers in Central Park, New York City. Beyond the lake you wander at your own risk unless you are poor and black. This rule of thumb held good in the autumn of 1964 but the rich kid from Oklahoma had no knowledge of the dos and don’ts of Lower Harlem. Visiting his grandmother at her spacious apartment on Park Avenue, he had agreed to take her beagle for her evening walk in the nearby park.

  Some five minutes’ walk into the scrub and glades that cover the region between the museum and the central reservoir, he found a grassy space, unleashed the beagle and threw her rubber ball. The dog, whose bouncy days were increasingly rare, broke into a halfhearted trot to show herself willing. She halted by the ball and turned back to the boy, tail wagging and grinning as only beagles can, when the six-inch bolt penetrated her neck. She fell without a sound.

  The boy looked around. Three youths in bomber jackets stood in the shadows. One held a steel crossbow and, over his shoulder, an empty golfer’s bag.

  “You’d better give the dawg his last rights, sonny.” The speaker had a crew cut and obviously spent a good deal of his time pumping iron.

  The boy went wild, and rushing at the bowman, swung hard with the beagle’s chain. By chance the linked end caught the youth across one eye and the bridge of his nose.

  “Scumbag bastard,” he cried out. He was temporarily blinded, but his friends pinned the boy against a tree to await his recovery. Through tears of pain, and fearing he had lost an eye, the bowman grunted his fury. “Strip the bugger and glue him to the tree. I’ll teach him who to mess with.”

  Using his shirt and their own belts, they lashed the boy’s arms so that he faced outward. His handkerchief was jammed into his mouth. He wet himself with fear. Two bolts stuck his right leg above the knee. A third entered his left thigh and he fainted. The jeers of the bowman’s friends probably saved his life by attracting the attention of a jogger. The newcomer wore track suit trousers and a loose, jungle-green T-shirt. As he entered the clearing he showed little interest in the boy, the dog, or the yobs. “Hi, friends.” He raised a hand in greeting as he slowed. “Which way is the reservoir?”

  As the bowman thought of a suitably unhelpful reply, the jogger’s hand whipped up and drove a finger into his good eye. This was followed immediately by a simple karate toe-kick, the ujima, to the groin of the nearest man. The third bomber jacket’s switchblade was out, but whipping the crossbow from the ground and finding it loaded, the jogger pulled the trigger. The file-sharpened bolt passed easily through the man’s guts and embedded itself in his spine. He screamed but the butt of the crossbow crashed down on the base of his neck and there was silence save for the chuckle of gray squirrels.

  The jogger knelt beside the beagle and gently felt for a heartbeat. Applying counterpressure around the entire hole, he withdrew the bolt and tied his vest around the dog’s neck. “You’ll live, girl,” he crooned as he stroked the bitch’s droopy ears. He laid her down and attended to the boy, suspecting heavy internal bleeding in the thigh.

  He found a traffic policeman on nearby East 85th Street, gave him his name, Captain Daniel de Villiers, and the address of the fellow Marine with whom he lodged. He stayed until an ambulance came, but feigned ignorance when asked about the state of the hoodlums, the boy, and the dog. He wondered to himself, would he have intervened were it not for the beagle? Cruelty to animals was a weak spot with de Villiers.

  There had been a stray cat at the boys’ orphanage in Vancouver, and later, an ill-fed parrot kept by his adoptive mother in the Bronx, a woman whom he never understood, since she beat him for the mildest infringement of her “good manners code” yet nursed him with apparent affection whenever he came home from school with a split nose or swollen eyebrow. When she died, coughing blood, de Villiers took a daytime job as a photographer’s assistant and cat-burgled by night. When the parrot died he was seventeen with savings in the bank and no ambition but to work with animals. He enlisted, but his phenomenal physique and propensity for measured thought attracted the attention of a Marine Corps recruitment sergeant long before he could home in on his original target, the U.S. Veterinary Corps.

  At twenty-three, with four harrowing years in Vietnam behind him, de Villiers might well have made the military his career. Perhaps he would have done so but for a long-festering desire to seek his roots, to find his family.

  For a year he held down a desk job at Bradley Airport, spending free weekends trekking in the Catskills with Marine friends. In the winter of 1964 he resigned his commission and cashed all his savings. His only clue was his fathe
r’s bible, his most treasured possession. The flyleaf was inscribed “For Piet from his loving mother. Vrede Huis, Tokai 1891 …”

  8

  In the days before the staff of SAS headquarters took on the responsibility for all British Special Force units, including the SBS (Special Boat Squadron), and moved to their current control center, they were located for many years close to Sloane Square. SAS senior administrators occupied the attic level of the central block of the Duke of York’s Barracks. Their offices gave on to a single central corridor reached only by a flight of concrete stairs surveyed by cameras, at the top of which were two steel doors to a vacuum-sealed “frisk chamber.”

  In the early seventies some of the SAS office windows were declared vulnerable to high-tech snooping from the flats in Cheltenham Terrace, across the garrison running track. Protective screening was installed but security remained generally limp. Immediately below the attic level was an empty hall that the barracks authority hired out to more or less any public group looking for a spacious rendezvous. On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1977, Gordon Jackson and others of the cast of Upstairs, Downstairs, a BBC television series then showing worldwide, trooped out of the hall to make way for a meeting of a charity organization.

  The two civilian security guards manning the barracks’ gatehouse were affable West Africans who, noting that the Hampstead Support Group of the Royal Chelsea Hospital were due to meet that morning, happily allowed entry to any individual who mentioned the name of that charity. “Know where to go?” was their only question.

  First to arrive was Bob Mantell, formerly with 2 Commando and a retired City banker. He tidied away the crumpled script sheets and emptied the ashtrays, muttering under his breath about BBC wasters. He placed pencils and sheets of A4 paper in front of the battered chairs ranged around the rectangular table, the only furniture in the gloomy hall.

  Others arrived alone or in groups. There were greetings—some hearty, some gruff. August Graves, a sixty-five-year-old cab driver and obsessive radio ham, made a great deal of noise before and after meetings, but unless goaded rarely opened his mouth during them. Yet his ability to find out anything about anyone in the Greater London area was nothing short of miraculous. He was also a conduit to various criminal minds, although he himself had never strayed from the straight and narrow. He arrived in the company of the don, who had recently retired from a senior position at Warwick University.

  The twins, in their mid-seventies but looking older, had first met in prison around the time the Second World War broke out. They were given probationary leave to join the Royal Engineers and after the war became plumbers. While completing a job in the late sixties, they had met up with the founder. Like August Graves, they had street savvy and contacts that were of great value to the committee.

  Jane, whose surname nobody ever used, arrived in heated debate with Bletchley, the chairman of the day, who was an old-fashioned and dogmatic Tory. “Turncoat,” Jane muttered. “He’s a traitor of the worst sort. Wilson has the decency to make him Home Secretary and look what he does—makes fools of us all. And for why?”

  “Because, dear lady,” Bletchley rejoined, “he has the good sense to realize this country belongs to Europe. Heath is right. We cannot survive by ourselves now that the Commonwealth is gone, and your Roy Jenkins is one of the few socialists to acknowledge the fact. Good on him, I say. Hallo, Mantell. Everything ready, I see. Good man.”

  Bletchley sat down at the head of the table and busied himself with his notes. At that stage, to outward appearances at least, he was still a well man.

  Jane, a prim and righteous spinster, was fastidious and worshipped the founder. The previous two-monthly meetings had been held at the Hampstead house where Jane had selflessly nursed her mother until her death some years before. Jane, like the don, had worked with Intelligence during the Second World War. She took ten plastic mugs from her shopping bag and doled them out around the table, placing a four-pint vacuum flask of light coffee by her own place at the opposite end of the table to the chairman. To Jane little rituals were what life was all about.

  Last to arrive were Colonel Tommy Macpherson, Chairman of the London Branch of the CBI, together with Michael Panny and Spike Allen. “The good news or the bad?” Panny addressed the room in his normal jovial manner. He was a man who set much store by feeling popular. Most of the others detested him but, an ex-commercial lawyer and a mine of City information, he was Bletchley’s protégé and as such an unavoidable fixture. Nobody replied.

  “Well, the bad news is Roy Jenkins has resigned. The good that those foul-mouthed Sex Pistols have been sacked by their own record company.”

  Spike sat beside Bletchley, whom he disliked, a fact nobody would have suspected since Spike showed about as much emotion as a basking cobra. Spike preferred the alternate meetings when Macpherson was chairman. He knew there would be trouble about the Bristol job so he had decided to report on Islington first.

  Colonel Tommy Macpherson and Bletchley were, with the founder, the initiators of the committee. Now eight years and many successes later, Macpherson looked at Bletchley and wondered how the founder, such a magnificent judge of men, had chosen him at all. And yet he too had originally thought the man was sound. Come to think of it, he really had been a first-class mover in the early days and a great source of inspiration. It had been he who had first coined the phrase “the Feather Men”—“because our touch is light.” Somewhere along the line, however, Bletchley had undergone a subtle change.

  Although he had known the founder for over forty years, and despite the fact that both men were from Highland clans, had served during the war in the Special Forces and been POWs in Germany (the founder in Colditz), Macpherson never really knew the inner workings of the founder’s brilliant mind. His precise motives for starting the committee were lost in the mists of time but there had been rumors of a tragedy. They concerned someone close to the founder, whose death in 1968 could have been prevented but for the inadequacy of the police. The latter’s scope and budget, not their efficiency, had been to blame. There were not enough police in the right place at the right time.

  The very decency of democracy hinders the prevention of numerous crimes. In Belfast, the British Army knows the identity of a dozen or more IRA killers but the law forbids the forces of the law to “take them out.” So the killers will strike again and again. This principle also applies to drug pushers, muggers, and other such predators at large throughout the United Kingdom.

  The founder knew his limitations; he was not about to take on the evils of the nation as a whole. He stuck to his own niche, since charity begins at home. He was intimately involved with the family of SAS regiments, regular and territorial, and would set up a body of watchdogs to look after the well-being of the two-thousand-plus ex-members of the Artists Rifles Regiment and other SAS units. This body would also respond to cries for help that were beyond the scope of the existing regimental associations.

  It is a sad fact of life in democratic societies that there are no-go areas where crime thrives and innocent citizens are preyed upon yet where the police are powerless to act.

  In the early 1950s, 21 SAS Regiment was based close to St. Pancras station and headed by the famous wartime commando, Colonel Charles Newman VC. Newman was one of a number of ex-Special Forces daredevils including Colonels Lapraik, Sutherland, and Bill Macpherson, who successively commanded 21 SAS. The last-named, soon to be Chief of the Clan Macpherson, was a relation of Colonel Tommy Macpherson.

  One day a veteran sergeant approached Colonel Newman and complained that his family had been threatened by local hoodlums in Notting Hill. Newman called a meeting of half a dozen stalwarts, and a deputation in civilian dress visited the source of harassment. The tactic worked and reached the ears of the founder. Technically no law of the land had been breached, for the Notting Hill gangsters did not call the SAS men’s bluff and no violence took place.

  All matters for committee business were collated by Bob
Mantell from diverse sources about the country, mostly ex-SAS men in various professions, including the police. Wherever Mantell could persuade the injured party to deal with the problem through the police he would do so, but in nearly every case the police had already been approached and had been unable to help.

  After the usual preamble, Bletchley began the meeting with a short list of minor cases to be handled and of actions that appeared to have been ineffective. After an hour, business moved on to two topics labeled by Bletchley as “tender.” Both were the territory of Spike Allen.

  Spike was no great wordsmith. “Islington,” he said, looking up very briefly from his papers, “worked well. The info from August proved reliable and the Mercedes has already been returned to our friends together with £1,000 in cash for the inconvenience.”

  Bletchley nodded. “The police?” he asked quietly.

  Spike was ready for him. “Our Local checked at the Upper Street Station. Mr. James had reported the theft to them immediately after the car disappeared. He explained how he knew that the Davenham Garage’s service department were in league with the Islington mob and how it was safe to deduce the car would, over a period of at least three hours, be repainted at their spray shop.”

  Spike checked backward through his report. “The police called him back two days later with the usual refrain. There was no sign of the car and the police had no power to inspect Davenham’s service depot without a warrant.”