Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

  John’s face visibly relaxed, the tensions of his personal worries dropping away as the need for his flying skills became paramount. This was split-second flying deep in the heart of the most spectacular scenery in the world. The canyons of Colorado were mere runnels compared with the spiraling chines of the Akhdar.

  The atmospheric change within the ravine and its effect on the Bell was immediate as the hot air of the plains confronted katabatic gusts from the escarpment. John juggled his controls with the skill and delight of a teenager at an arcade video game. But this was very much for real, a test for any pilot.

  The floor of the valley, the Wadi Miyadin, zigzagged below, mostly in shadow, a crooked corridor of waterfalls, deep pools and enormous boulders tossed there by bore waves in years gone by.

  This was life at its best, an exhilaration John had experienced only from flying and from the heat of battle in Dhofar, now over six years ago; a lifetime away. John was disdainful of many of his expatriate colleagues in the Omani services. They seemed to care only about their pay and perks, showing little or no interest in this wonderful land and its friendly people. For his own part he regretted the disappearance of the old Oman. While he could appreciate the enormous benefits of the progress brought about by the accession of Qaboos, he missed the charm, the unique atmosphere that had drawn him back to this country. Omanis still wore their traditional white robes, the headdress known as a shemagh and curved waist daggers, but Polaroid sunglasses had sadly become part of the national dress. Cola bottles, telephone lines and motor scooters were infesting every corner of the land. All were doubtless blessings to the local people but a bit of a letdown to the romantic observer.

  John spoke and wrote classical Arabic. He could perhaps teach English in the mountains of Royalist North Yemen, where the only sign of twentieth-century progress to have shown itself had been deadly clouds of Tabun nerve gas from Egyptian fighters ten years before. Bridgie might find such a life a touch lonely to begin with but she would soon grow to love it, for she was plucky and adaptable. John had the knack of wishful thinking down to a fine art.

  The Bell climbed free of the shadows of the deeper ravines and John touched the controls to bank west over the pool of Salut, half hidden by groves of tamarisk and oleander, where camels and goats watered. Within minutes the view widened to an airy panorama of the jebel ramparts. Massive crags and cliff-hanging villages, cascades of plunging water and a slash of green where terraced orchards defied gravity.

  On a ledge below, John spotted the remains of an RAF Venom bomber, a casualty of the 1959 mountain rebellion. The sultan now kept a permanent army detachment at Sayq on the jebel but in ’58 a rebellious imam, with Saudi help, had taken and held the mountain fastness with a heavily armed force of seven hundred guerrilla fighters. For nine hundred years no invaders had ever taken the mountain by force, though many had tried. In 550 BC the Persians had first arrived and fought their way by sheer weight of numbers to the upper plateau. Even the easiest of the existing twenty-three access routes was no wider than a single-file pathway.

  In January 1959 two troops of SAS men, fresh from the Malayan jungles, surprised the imam’s fighters by a night ascent of a climbers’ route from Kamah village. The attack was led by Captain Peter de la Billière, who, in 1991, was to command the British forces in the Gulf War.

  John landed at Sayq Battle Camp. A messenger from the commandant ushered forward an Arab teenager with frightened eyes, a dirty dishdash (a checked skirtlike wraparound garment) and bare feet. This, said the messenger, was the husband of the evacuation case. John shook the boy’s hand and addressed him in his own tongue. He was of the Beni Riyam tribe and lived in Shiraija. His wife had been bitten by a cobra and was very sick. He had run up to the army camp but all three of the medics were on exercise elsewhere on the jebel.

  “Did you kill the snake?” John asked the young Arab and was relieved when he nodded. Knowing the geography of Shiraija, John could see the wisdom of helicopter evacuation to a hospital with a range of serums capable of countering the venom of most Omani vipers. Whenever evacuating snake-bite cases, he tried to give the hospital authorities the snake’s body along with the patient. This ensured the use of the correct serum without delay.

  John handed the generator spare to the commandant’s messenger, strapped the boy into the rear of the Bell with a set of headphones, and left for Shiraija. The village was no more than a mile from the Sayq camp but tucked into the upper reaches of a near-vertical ravine. The mountainside below fell away in giddy tiers of irrigated steps. Every layer was tended by artificial channels that overflowed from level to level to the very last of the tiny fertile orchards 3,000 feet below.

  Plants and trees with exotic foliage hung heavy with fruit: figs, peaches, almonds, walnuts, berries, bananas and pomegranates, to name but a few. Sugarcane groves thrived on the lower tiers and lawns of lucerne waved in the cool, scented breeze at every level.

  Crewman Ali conferred with the young Arab, who, face pressed to the Plexiglas, kept making downward motions. The girl must have been working in the very lowest of the orchards. John circled slowly, banking so the boy could see the terraces below. At length the young Arab shouted into the headsets so that both airmen winced. He had spotted his wife.

  Six hundred feet above the victim’s location John found a lucerne bed just wide enough for the helicopter to land without the rotors smashing into the wall of the next terrace. The three of them scrambled down through the orchards to where the girl lay in long grass. Her face was tinted with the yellow dye of the saffron flower. He saw at once that she was dead. The poor lass, John thought: she had died alone and in great pain. Her body was rigid and arched, her eyes wide-open and her tongue extended. She looked so young to be married—no more than twelve, he estimated. Her throat glands were horribly puffed out, so John felt her wrist for a pulse. There was none. He touched one of her eyes but there was no reaction. The snake’s body, broken and battered, lay in the dirt. John saw that it was an eckis, not a cobra, and almost certainly, with its broad flat head, a highly poisonous Schneider.

  The boy knelt beside the dead girl. His hands came together at his mouth and tears ran down his face. John clenched the boy’s shoulders and as the deep, dry sobbing began, held him close.

  They carried the little body with care to the helicopter. John spoke with the Sayq duty signaler, and when they returned to the camp, a Land Rover with a stretcher and body bag awaited them.

  John’s lasting memory of that day was the face of the boy, as lost and alone as a wounded gazelle. He and Ali were silent as they flew back to Seeb. John said nothing to Bridgie that evening, but he felt especially tender toward her and their three-year-old son, Oliver.

  15

  Mason paid the cab driver at a point where the morning traffic, a honking mishmash of camels and motors, passed through a gap torn in the town wall. Matrah, an ants’ nest of commerce, had changed greatly in the year since Mason’s Omani service. A modern harbor, Port Qaboos, was under construction, and bulldozers were sweeping away much of the old town to make space for modern office units.

  Davies was not in a hurry and behaved like any expatriate worker newly arrived in so fascinating a city. He wandered at will through the babble of Asian building workers, gazed awhile at the old and the new in the harbor area, and ambled to the inner walled market of the Khojas, the Sur al-Lawatiyah. Generations of Khoja merchants, originally from Sind, had retained their language and customs while masterminding Matrah commerce from the tangled and labyrinthine corridors of the Lawatiyah.

  Mason was forced to close in or risk losing the Welshman. The narrow scented passageways seethed with humanity, and Mason began to sense a certain urgency and purpose to the hitherto random course of his quarry. A head and shoulders above most of the crowd, he managed to keep in touch, but only with difficulty and many a hostile glance from the white-robed denizens of the sooq.

  At a divergence of three corridors Mason was unable to wedge a passa
ge between two women in black-beaked Ibadhi masks. “Min fadlak,” he shouted, “indee mushkila,” but the women, both as heavy and round as Soviet shotputters, ignored him. Their fishwife gossip merely gathered strength, each talking, neither listening. Davies disappeared.

  A half hour search of every stall in the Lawatiyah and its adjacent streets proved fruitless, so Mason took a cab back to the Gulf Hotel. Davies would return there in due course and Mason had things to prepare that were better done without delay, now that Davies was showing signs of activity.

  In his bathroom he reassembled the ten rounds of ammunition with his Lyman crimping tool and heated the rifle barrel over a flat iron obtained from the chambermaid. The black wax melted and he knocked the steel rod loose. Later he would pull the barrel through with petrol-soaked swabs. After packing a travel bag with the detached stock and the barrel, he added some clothing and equipment, then ordered a taxi.

  “Muaskar al Murtafa’a,” he instructed the driver, referring to the Northern Headquarters complex of the Sultan’s Armed Forces. At the security gate his taxi was waved past; Mason looked like the officer he had once been. Over four hundred British officers and NCOs worked for their Omani superiors within the sprawling barracks, and the turnover rate was such that no one knew everyone else.

  In the lavatory of the officers’ mess, Mason changed into the uniform of the Desert Regiment, which differed from that of other SAF regiments only in the color of beret and belt. He was pleased that during his time back in Europe he had not put on weight. He walked through the camp, returning salutes as appropriate, to the lines of the Motor Transport Section. Hundreds of Bedford lorries, Land Rovers, and Land Cruisers were parked beside a like number of civilian Datsuns and a smattering of Mercedes for use by more senior officers.

  A fairly strict vehicle sign-out procedure existed, but Mason had ignored all red tape in days when resources and manpower were smaller and control much tighter, so he found a Datsun with keys in the ignition and drove back to the Gulf Hotel without troubling the “official channels.” He left the car in the hotel parking lot, far enough away from the main entrance for the SAF number plate not to be noticeable, and in any case it appeared to be one of many white Datsuns. He entered the foyer. Davies’s key was still missing from its pigeonhole, so Mason settled down with a Scotch and slightly stale Newsweek in a far corner of the lobby. Without his brown Desert Regiment beret, he was merely an army staff officer taking it easy.

  The Khoja merchant was as fat as a sumo wrestler and his bald scalp glinted under the fluorescent bulbs as a result of daily application of scented unguent. He was solicitous in the extreme and twice interrupted the meeting with offers of more coffee before de Villiers bade him leave them in peace.

  He emerged from the majlis, the inner room used for entertaining and business, glad that he had overcharged the supercilious sons of bitches. He joined their “local representative,” Karim Bux, in the small room immediately behind his stall.

  “This tall man was English?” Karim Bux asked the Khoja. “You are certain?” The merchant shrugged. “It is as I told you. My sisters saw only this tall foreigner behind your friend, so, as instructed, they blocked his way. He spoke to them in good Arabic but like an Ingleezi.”

  Karim Bux sipped at his loomee. Despite the fans, the cushioned room was rank with the smell of lovemaking and he wished de Villiers would hurry up. He decided to make no mention of the man who had followed Davies. There was always a smattering of Europeans about the Lawatiyah. The Khoja and his sisters were probably merely fishing for an extra tip.

  Karim Bux was Tadnams’ only agent in the subcontinent and had plenty of overdue work in Delhi. He objected to his current role in Oman, for he was not accustomed to playing second fiddle to Europeans. But he kept his feelings to himself for Tadnams paid him well and he knew his three charges were veterans, possibly with influence in Earls Court.

  Davies leafed through the photographs of John Milling, his wife, and two other men: they showed the men in uniform, or simply relaxing by the seaside. “Big fellow, this Milling, looks like some Greek god,” Davies commented.

  De Villiers shrugged. “Tomorrow we will test his immortality.”

  Davies was content with the plans. He preferred methods that the Clinic had successfully used in the past, and de Villiers had, in Milling’s case, settled for a simple domestic accident.

  For two weeks the Millings had been subjected to an intensive and annotated study. It was the custom of the Clinic to spot repetitive patterns of activity in their prospective targets’ lives or, if none were apparent, to gain access to some pointer to their future plans such as an office wall chart, a diary or a personal secretary who could be encouraged to gossip.

  Once a pattern or a specific intended activity was identified, the Clinic would select a time and place where the target would be alone and vulnerable to an accident.

  On arrival in Oman, de Villiers had settled in at the Intercontinental Hotel and Meier at the Falaj Hotel. De Villiers looked after Milling’s home life and Meier his Police Air Wing activities.

  A sign at the Air Wing perimeter gate announced maintenance works by J&P Contractors, so Meier went to their recruiting office in Azaiba. His excellent references, including seven years with Mercedes, probably helped, but electrical and mechanical engineers were anyway much sought after. As luck would have it, that morning J&P had sent a European engineer home on compassionate leave. The company’s considerable connections in high places enabled it, under the current circumstances, to circumvent the normal immigration rule that would have required Meier to leave the country while his work-permit application was being processed. He was able to start work within a few hours of the initial phone call to J&P’s sponsor’s office. He was assigned to the maintenance team handling the contract for the Royal Flight and Police complex, including the current alterations to the Police Air Wing workshops.

  Subsequent comparative studies indicated that, while Meier was keen and confident that he could sabotage Milling’s helicopter in such a way as to produce “accidental death,” a more certain method would be a visit to the target’s home at a time of day when he was normally alone.

  Davies was to provide backup and removal facilities, while the other two would complete the killing in a manner they had carefully prepared and rehearsed.

  The Clinic agreed to all the details and Karim Bux dropped them off, each within walking distance of their separate hotels.

  At 3:45 p.m. John Milling, a green and white wizaar wrapped about his waist, watched his wife set off for her usual Thursday shopping spree at the Matrah Cold Store supermarket.

  He felt a pang of quite unnecessary jealousy as his friend Geoff Leggatt, six feet four inches tall, helped Bridgie into the front passenger seat. Even seven and a half months pregnant she was stunningly attractive. The long slim legs, the golden blond hair, the large green eyes and the sparky Irish temperament had earned her the tag of the loveliest, sexiest girl in Oman.

  Cha Cha, their albino Kashmiri houseboy, sat in the back with three-year-old Oliver, whose features already showed the Milling stamp. Geoff slammed the door and waved to John. They had been friends since schooldays in Enniskillen. Four years ago John had fallen headlong in love with Bridgie, who was then Geoff’s girlfriend. A passionate affair followed, punctuated by Bridgie’s worldwide travels, for she was then a BOAC hostess. Geoff accepted the situation and they all remained the best of friends. He had called in at their home in Seeb a week earlier on his way to teach English in Japan.

  John Milling closed the front door of the bungalow and settled into an armchair with his feet on the drawing-room table. In an hour or so he would go jogging along the coast road. This was not his normal practice on Thursday afternoons, but the pilot, James A. Sims, Jr., with whom he usually jogged or went scuba diving twice a week, was on leave. Jim was a tall, dark native of Tennessee and unmarried. John was looking forward to this outing since he found it hard going to keep pace with the
athletic American and today he would accompany the forty-five-year-old George Halbert, a retired RAF navigator and one of the Air Wing’s fixed-wing pilots. George liked to drink and to keep fit so he indulged in binges of each activity on alternate months. He lived just down the street from the Millings.

  The Economist magazine fell to the floor as John nodded off to the gentle rattle of the air-conditioning. Some minutes later he woke with a start at the chime of the doorbell. Perhaps George had arrived early, the silly bugger, in the full heat of the afternoon.

  Milling recognized neither of his visitors. Both wore slacks and clean white shirts, and the balding, shorter man with spectacles carried a briefcase. Both were profuse in their apologies. They had not realized Superintendent Milling would be resting. They would come back later. They were American military historians writing a definitive account of guerrilla wars in the mid- to late twentieth century. Colin Maxwell and Ted Ashley had suggested they seek Milling’s advice. John’s curiosity was pricked.

  “Come in.” He waved them into the cool, curtained living room. “I can offer you a beer, loomee or iced tea.”

  He indicated the armchairs and padded to the refrigerator in the kitchen. The bungalow was mostly open-plan. The refrigerator was tucked against a side wall in the kitchen and just out of sight of the living room. As Milling returned, grasping two beer cans and tankards, he noticed the snub-nosed revolver in the hands of the taller man.

  “Put the beers down, Superintendent, and lie facedown on the floor.”