Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

  “I do not know your name, only your unenviable reputation. I will waste no time with preamble, for the pain will soon come again.”

  The sheikh explained that he owned an expanding chain of retail grocery outlets in the Gulf, Turkey and Iraq. Before long he would open new branches in Cyprus and Iran.

  “I have sufficient profit for reinvestment to pay $2 million annually to the Palestinian cause. My sons are at college in England, and last summer I had no thought of summoning a killer such as you.”

  The sheikh coughed and took minutes to recover from the pain. If this was his client, de Villiers reflected, he would need to have a contract agreed without delay, for the mantle of death clung close.

  The girl brought coffee in a silver dhille with an elegant beak, and tiny cups of fine china. When she was gone the sheikh continued.

  “Shamsa, my granddaughter, lost her father seven years ago fighting the Sultanate troops in Dhofar, my homeland. Three of her uncles have also been killed in that sorry conflict. Four of my six sons all killed and none have been avenged.”

  Sheikh Amr explained the background of his exile to Dubai. He made sure that de Villiers understood in depth the deadly seriousness with which his people viewed his failure, as their sheikh, to follow the edicts of the thaa’r.

  “I have visited Dubai on and off for a quarter of a century and I realize that Westerners, indeed Muslims from outside Dhofar, know very little about my country. The same is true in reverse of many of my fellow jebalis. They do not, for instance, share the historic hatred of the Muslim Arab for the Israeli, simply because Israel means nothing to them, does not touch upon their lives.” The sheikh paused to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead.

  “I must tell you that I have not yet seen the passage of fifty years. Some seven months ago I was in good health. Then came the first pains. Within weeks the doctors told me I had a malignant growth in my belly. They gave me a year at the most and I began to think afresh about my life. Bakhait, my eldest surviving son, is my life. He has the gentleness of his mother and my own instinct for business. I want above all for him and his brother to enjoy the success back at home that would soon have been theirs but for our exile; an exile that I have, by my own actions, brought upon them. I have given them everything—unlimited money, the best of educations, both Western and Koranic—yet what will this avail them where it matters most, in the land of their ancestors?”

  He sighed and made as though to lay his hand on de Villiers’s arm. But, remembering perhaps the nature of his profession, interrupted the gesture.

  “You are now the key to my sons’ future.” He paused. “Their passport back to Dhofar.”

  The previous August, when his sons returned for their summer holiday, the sheikh had told them of his new resolve. The thaa’r must go ahead. Neither son was committed to the absolutism of jebali traditions; both had been corrupted by their year in England and by their father’s own liberalism. Nevertheless when Amr demanded that Bakhait give his pledge to avenge the murder of his brothers, a pledge of honor to be repeated on his father’s grave, Bakhait did not hesitate. Devoted to his father and desperately grieved at the news of his sickness, he gave his word as Bakhait bin Amr al Jarboati that he would follow his father’s wishes to fulfill the thaa’r and then return to Dhofar and, if God willed it, to his rightful place at the head of the Bait Jarboatis.

  Dhofaris often passed through Dubai and called on family and friends living there. An increasing number flew to the United Kingdom for training in military, engineering, social services and other skills. Amr knew from them that, in the last year, his country had undergone enormous changes. The revolution was over, the new half-Dhofari sultan had granted Dhofaris everything that his father had withheld from them.

  Business opportunities were almost unlimited, and political power, at a level previously undreamed of, was now attainable. Young Dhofaris could now contemplate becoming ministers of Oman. But not Bakhait. Should he return to Dhofar—and there was no government ruling to stop him—he would forever need to watch over his shoulder, awaiting the bullet that would surely come.

  For three hours de Villiers was left alone with European magazines, chilled loomee juice and a plate laden with the best Sohar dates. Amr bin Issa, riven by deep stomach pains, had retired to his room. When he returned he appeared to be impatient for an answer from de Villiers.

  “Listen well,” he said, “for I am asking you to find and execute four men. The method of their killing must leave no suspicion in the minds of even their dearest friends.” If the sheikh expected surprise to show on de Villiers’s face he wasted his time, for he remained expressionless as usual.

  “Further,” said the sheikh, leaning forward, “you must remind each man when you identify him of his personal responsibility for the death of my son. You will film everything, the warnings and the executions, and for each audiovisual film that you hand to me or, after my death, to my son Bakhait, you will be paid the sum of one million American dollars by check from my account at the Bank of Dubai. When all four films have been satisfactorily received, we will pay you off with a final payment of a like amount.” He paused. “Do you have any questions?”

  De Villiers remained impassive. He thought he had heard every motive under the sun as to why one man should wish to kill another. This was merely a variation on the fairly common theme of revenge. But with what a difference! He could see why the sheikh wished for “no foul play” methods, since suspicion of a chain of connected murders might lead to the involvement of Interpol and thence Royal Oman Police interference. If Amr became suspect his family might be exiled officially by the Sultanate and that would defeat the whole purpose of the killings.

  De Villiers also understood why the sheikh needed evidence on film. He must show those who had exiled him solid proof of the “trial” and termination of the guilty parties. But, from de Villiers’s point of view, the act of warning intended targets that they were about to be killed added a whole new dimension to the act. He could picture the reaction of Meier and Davies when they learned of this particular contractual requirement. On the other hand the fee was exceptional.

  “I have two questions,” de Villiers said. “Who are these men and by when must they be killed?”

  Sheikh Amr explained.

  PART 2

  10

  … All night the fires raged along the upper ramparts of Table Mountain. Dogs howled in the valleys, and de Villiers sat naked on his windowsill to catch the breeze and savor the night scent from the bougainvillea terrace below. He could not remember a time when he had been so happy as these past few months at the estate of La Pergole.

  In the Cape spring of 1969 he obtained a temporary job as groundsman at the Kenilworth racetrack and, using his one-room flat there as a base, combed the Tokai district in search of Vrede Huis and the de Villiers family.

  He found a good many folk sharing his name but none who remembered Vrede Huis. For months he persisted and had all but exhausted his options by the time he came to La Pergole. The estate owner, Jan Fontaine, was a dyed-in-the-wool Boer despite his name but he was proud of his war medals from General Smuts and the British king. He had served in the desert with the First Army and made good friends with the Yanks. He liked the look of the tall young foreigner who was searching for his Boer origins and agreed to take him to Vrede Huis.

  “You mean the house exists?” De Villiers was skeptical as ever, yet his face flushed with eagerness.

  “Hold it, man. Don’t get excited.” Fontaine raised a restraining hand. “I can take you to the old place, yes, but it is only rubble these days. I have been here forty years and even in the thirties the roofs were gone, and the doors. Our Kaffirs have long used the materials for their homes. I know nobody who remembers the original occupants.”

  A scarred Xhosa from Transkei, a good six feet six inches tall and houseboy to Fontaine, had wheeled his master out to the battered Chevrolet and helped him transfer to the passenger seat, his legs trai
ling doll-like since he was paralyzed from the waist down. The Zulu drove.

  “Where to, Baas?” he grinned.

  “The old place by the quarry, Samuel.”

  They drove down the avenue from the house, past spacious stables and along narrow dusty lanes to the main Fontaine vineyards, stretching as far as de Villiers could see to the west and east. Ahead the land climbed gradually to the forests of Tokai and the foothills of Table Mountain.

  The scenery took away de Villiers’s breath. This was his homeland but even were it otherwise, he decided, he would want to live here forever. It was surely the most beautiful land in the world.

  Vrede Huis, when they bounced their way into its clearing, was an anticlimax, for there were not even ruins, merely low heaps of rubble overgrown with bracken and thick clumps of bamboo clustered with the hanging nests of weaver birds. Lizards sunned themselves on the rocks, and carpets of flowering nerine colonized what had probably been a central courtyard. De Villiers wandered into a glade behind the bamboos, a place of wild strawberries, moss and seeded mulberry trees. In the face of a carved granite stone he traced the single word VREDE.

  He realized then that he did not mind the disappearance of the de Villiers clan. If his cousins had died out, so be it. He would in time buy this site from Fontaine, build another Vrede Huis and raise a family to continue his bloodline. The fact that his savings were hardly enough to purchase a secondhand car did not detract from the scope of his plan.

  Since his lonely orphan days in Vancouver, de Villiers had recited to himself, as a Jew might the lineage of Moses, his known parental history as lovingly passed on by his parents during his Alaskan childhood. When Jan Fontaine asked him the fate of the original de Villiers owners of Vrede Huis he was able to reply almost by rote. Of Matje and Anna, his great-grandparents, he knew little save that they lived in South Africa and came from voortrekker stock. But his grandfather had been his boyhood hero.

  In 1897, a year of declining relations with the British, Matje’s youngest son Piet responded to a romantic call from the far side of the world, his chance to make a fortune in the Gold Rush. Working his passage to Seattle in the autumn he joined the main body of the Klondikers, as the ’97 prospectors came to be known, from the Indian Thron-diuck or “Hammer-water.” On a crowded sternwheeler, the Skagit Chief, Piet followed the Inside Passage route north. Young Danny had heard the tales a hundred times from Piet’s son. Swirling mist and deep green water, calving glaciers, killer whales and sudden clearings with Indian villages and grotesque totems. Past Wrangel and Sitka and Juneau until they reached Dyea: a narrow sand bay subject to a twenty-foot tidal bore that had trapped many a Klondiker trying to haul his year’s supply of goods from ship to shore up the mile-long reach of that lethal inlet.

  Piet made it to the beachhead and began the nightmare haul, one human ant in a struggling file of 40,000, sliding and cursing in the mud and snow. Faltering souls would repeat the refrain: “Seventeen dollars an ounce. Seventeen dollars an ounce.” The trail was marked by the frozen corpses of emaciated packhorses.

  By the spring of 1898, Piet and all his stores had reached the foot of the Chilkoot Pass. A 3,250-foot-high climb in four demanding miles. Piet made this exhausting portage thirty-eight times. On April 3, carrying his twenty-sixth load, he was struck by an avalanche of wet snow that buried an area of ten acres of the pass to a depth of thirty feet. Several hundred Klondikers were swept off the precarious ice steps known as the Scales. Piet clawed his way to the surface but many, unconscious or upside down, stayed where they were. Sixty-three bodies were recovered and the Rush went on.

  At Lake Bennett Piet and four colleagues fashioned themselves a boat from two twenty-foot logs and, when the ice broke up on May 29, they joined 7,000 other such boats, all overloaded, all heading north for gold. There were whirlpools, sharpened snags, ice blocks, windstorms that whipped up five-foot waves and, all day long, mosquitoes. Old hands told stories of Yukon mosquitoes so large that they carried off eagles as food for their young.

  In the White Horse Rapids, Piet’s boat, thankfully laden with none of his stores at the time, sank and three of his friends were drowned. He spent the winter in the mud, bars and bordellos of Dawson City. That year Piet found no gold though he tried his luck at Bonanza and Eldorado, at French Hill and Cheechako.

  In the summer of ’99 he decided on a change of scenery and responded to a new Rush—to Nome. A paddlesteamer took him and hundreds of others as close to the shoreline as the skipper dared and, after a two-week wait off the shallow beach, Piet gained a place on a landing barge. He waded his gear in for the last hundred yards.

  The beach was black with men and women sieving the sand for gold. At Nome there was no law except force of personality. No legal claims existed in the tide flats but a man could work the sand within a shovel’s length of where he stood. For miles there was no forest, so Nome consisted entirely of tents. There was no sewage system. The public lavatories cost ten cents per visit and their effluent drained into the drinking-water supply. Typhoid and malaria were rampant and the local bar was owned by Wyatt Earp.

  Piet’s luck was consistently bad, and when on September 7, 1900, his tent, all his gear and most of Nome were washed out to sea by a great storm, he finally called it quits and settled at the mouth of the Yukon in a village where the fishing was good. He married a nurse at the mission, and Daniel de Villiers’s father was born before the year was out.

  The giant Xhosa’s shadow fell across de Villiers as he wheeled Fontaine into the clearing.

  “You like it here, de Villiers?” Fontaine did not wait for a reply. “Since the skollies did me in, I have needed a strong hand to be my foreman on La Pergole. What about it?”

  De Villiers did not hesitate. There was nothing to lose; everything to gain. If he did not like it, he could leave.

  Fontaine did himself a favor, for de Villiers had only to be told once. He was a quick learner and a willing worker. The estate’s mixed bag of Cape coloreds and blacks found their new foreman unbiased, so they worked well for him, and recognizing the cold alertness in his manner they did not try to fool him. After some months he learned that it was not skollies, roughnecks, who had crippled Fontaine but his own predecessor as foreman, an Afrikaner who, cursed by Fontaine in front of the men for some inefficiency, had attacked him one dark evening and left him for dead on the floor of the stables.

  Fontaine had survived but he would never walk again: a knobkerrie blow had done permanent damage to his spine.

  De Villiers was given comfortable rooms on the attic level and ate his meals with the Fontaines. He enjoyed their company, for Jan was a well-educated man and, though opinionated and scornful of most other Afrikaners, he seemed to respect de Villiers for his North American outlook. Anne, his wife, was heavy going, for she had little to say and when she did begin to comment, Fontaine made a habit of speaking over her. De Villiers learned from the farm boys that madam had come to La Pergole from abroad when she was little and was taken in by Fontaine’s late parents. She wore her long blond hair in a bun and spent a great deal of time on horseback about the estate. De Villiers found her presence increasingly awkward, for she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  Fontaine, at sixty, was some thirty years older than his wife and openly jealous. De Villiers knew better than to show the slightest interest in Anne, since his existence in this paradise depended upon Fontaine’s continued support and approval. Nevertheless he found his nightly fantasies increasingly centered on Fontaine’s wife.

  There were no children and de Villiers had glimpsed a look of utter loneliness on Anne’s lovely face. This turned his stomach with pity, a sentiment that did not normally impinge on his life.

  The dreamy months passed by, amid the vines, the blue mountains and the wonderful, balmy climate of the Cape. The screaming images of ’Nam ceased to trouble de Villiers’s sleep and he learned to ignore the black rages into which pain and frustration increasingly drove Fontaine. />
  One summer evening when Fontaine was sedated in bed, de Villiers tried to draw Anne out. He asked her about horses, for he knew they were at the center of her life, but she remained reticent, even uneasy. At the end of the meal when the houseboy brought them coffee on the porch and the bullfrogs chimed from the vlei (swamp), she spoke to him in a low voice.

  “The servants receive a tip when they tell my husband things. They do not miss a glance between us. Please be careful for both our sakes.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I understand.” As he spoke their eyes locked for the first time in all these months and de Villiers knew that he had gradually come to love her.

  There were days out in the fields when he felt his blood surge at the mere echo of distant cantering hooves. He began to hate his ailing benefactor Fontaine. When the doctor in Weinberg first muttered about hospitalization, de Villiers had consciously to hide his delight.

  On New Year’s Eve, when the Cape was merry with bonfire parties and, after nightfall, the clatter of rifle fusillades, no flicker of revelry disturbed La Pergole. Farmers traditionally brought in the New Year by shooting the bounds, and the Fontaines’ neighbors were no exception.

  The guns excited the dogs of Tokai and the surrounding homesteads. Their feral cousins, gone wild in the foothills, returned a primordial chorus in praise of the moon and sleep came hard to de Villiers. He pulled on his work shorts and wandered down to the porch. There he sat on the steps that faced north toward the mountains. Midnight came and with it a surge in the sounds of distant celebrations. This tailed away and soon the crackle of donnerball combs in the pinewoods close by was all that prickled the night.

  She came without a sound, her bare feet smooth on the cold, red tiles. They kissed without a word, without preamble. He knew only that she must feel as he did and sensed the urgency of her need.

  Hand in hand they walked through the garden and past the oleander terrace to the fringe of the woods. She led him to a place that she knew, her nightdress wet from the grass-tip dew.