Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

  From their SAF base at Defa, thirteen SAS men set out with two ex-PFLO guides. The ground was sodden and a clinging mist compounded the darkness of the night. The guides failed to find the Zakhir Tree and, shortly before dawn, the SAS men split into two groups, the better to find their target. Danny, a corporal, moved ahead with one guide and finally located the tree. He also spotted many fresh boot prints and smelled smoke-dried meat. On his way back to Sergeant Slatting’s SAS group he glimpsed an adoo patrol through the mist. All hell broke loose. The SAS killed three guerrillas, and their own man, Geordie Small, died of blood loss from the femoral artery. Heavily outgunned, and without the benefit of the surprise they had sought, Slatting’s group of seven men lay low in the mire of wet clay amid a jungle of thorn bushes.

  Tony Fleming was shot through the spine and lost the use of his legs. Two men dragged him to the center of their hideaway and, as they did so, a guerrilla leaped up some ten paces behind them. Slatting turned and killed him.

  A murderous crackle of bullets hid the noise of adoo with AK47s and grenades belly-crawling from bush to bush toward the SAS survivors. Branches snapped and broke all around, torn away by high-velocity bullets. To stand up was to invite instant death. The conditions of mist and thick scrub demanded instant reaction to any hostile movement. The adoo closed in with cunning and patience.

  Slatting and Danny between them accounted for four more of the guerrillas with their skilled sharpshooting. Beside them the fifteen-stone Tony Fleming lay white and still. They knew that to attempt a withdrawal, to move him, would kill him. Slatting radioed his officer. He and his men would stay where they were until they were overrun or until the SAF backup group could reach the Zakhir Tree.

  One of his men nudged Slatting. The SAF group had already arrived. Through a gap in the mist they could be seen advancing down the opposite side of the valley and directly toward their position. A “British” officer, fairskinned and peak-capped, led the assault, his men stretched out on either side in their green uniforms and shemaghs. A feeling of relief swept the beleaguered SAS but was dashed when the “U.S. Cavalry” turned out to be regular Yemeni troops from South Yemen in support of the adoo. Their fire was intense and within minutes every one of the SAS men was hit.

  A bullet passed through Slatting’s neck and knocked him down. He staggered to his knees but was wounded twice more. Unable to move, he lay listening to his comrades announcing their own injuries. All around them the adoo crawled closer. Some were already a mere twenty yards from the thorny SAS redoubt.

  Danny saw a movement and blasted an adoo from his cover with an M79 grenade. A minute later an adoo grenade exploded by Danny’s side but the shrapnel miraculously scythed by above him. The SAS medic crawled among the wounded, applying dressings and morphine-laden syrettes. SAS counterfire began to slacken and the adoo, encouraged, closed in. Slatting was struck by a fourth bullet but remained conscious.

  At 8:30 a.m. the armored cars and an SAF platoon under Captain Alex Bedford-Walker managed to work their way forward to a position overlooking the adoo and raked them with 76mm shell fire, killing many regular People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen troops and PFLO guerrillas, including Tama’an bin Amr.

  By 9 a.m. only the melancholy chime of the thornbird and the occasional low curse of tired soldiers sounded through the mist below the Zakhir Tree. The bodies of the guerrilla dead and dying remained among the bushes long after the armored cars had withdrawn to their Defa stronghold with the SAS wounded stretched across their engine decks.

  27

  … Tree-lined Silom Road is the business heart of Bangkok but, behind the high walls that skirt one section of its rod-straight length, a seminary of nuns inhabit a strict Carmelite convent, and it is this building that serves as a convenient marker for the entrance to the sex capital of the world, two great parallel roads, Patpong One and Two.

  Brothels are forbidden by Thai law, but 950, describing themselves as bars or clubs, thrive in Bangkok alone, with names such as Pussy Galore or Purple Pleasure. For gay visitors, Pretty Boy Lounge, the Golden Cock and many others await their patronage. The bustling pavements throng with pimps of both sexes trawling for clients. Inside the cramped neon dens their sharpend colleagues, clad only in high-heeled shoes, hypnotize with oiled buttock and sequined nipple. Most are under eighteen, many far younger and, unlike the majority of their European counterparts, they sport firm, lithe bodies that would cause lip-tremble in the most elderly of monks. They pose and pout from revolving carousels, or upturned fruit boxes, so that their shaven crotches gyrate at nose level to their audience.

  The farangs, foreigners, flock to “Sin City” in the hundreds of thousands, AIDS notwithstanding, for where else could they find such abundance of youth and beauty cheaply available and amenable to every conceivable deviance?

  Meier indulged in an annual tour of Far Eastern sex cities and seldom omitted a Bangkok visit, usually for a four-day stint. Giving himself wholly to the cause of sensual gratification from 5:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would sleep soundly for eight hours in his fifth-floor executive suite at the Bangkok Hilton. After breakfast in bed he would pass the day by the hotel’s spacious figure-eight outdoor pool with a supply of subscription magazines that were his greatest joy: high-tech electrical and mechanical engineering titles and a medley of publications for model cars and aircraft enthusiasts.

  On his first evening in Bangkok, Meier normally took in a sex show to stimulate the level of his prurience. This invariably consisted of pretty pubescents in the act and ladies with acrobatic genitalia opening Pepsi bottles, fire-eating, and causing bananas or Ping-Pong balls to disappear.

  October was the end of the rainy season, averaging eighty-four degrees of clammy humidity. Meier liked to be driven around town in the early evening like some fat vulture, beak a-dribble with anticipation, circling fields of carcasses before descent and satiation.

  For five hundred baht, on the second evening of his 1986 visit, Meier found an air-conditioned Mercedes with plastic flowers around its steering wheel and a less than normally talkative driver.

  But for the girls of the New Petchburi and Sukumvit Road area the tour was unimpressive. Straight streets, crazy cat’s cradles of overhead wires, smog from diesel pollution, a fetid river stench from the Chao Phraya, and everywhere giant billboards advertising Marlboro, Seiko and Sony. Young Thai bodies in their thousands nightly welcomed the humping farangs, Meier chuckled to himself, in order to balance the huge Thai import bill with their vital contribution to the nation’s invisible exports.

  The Mercedes dropped Meier at the soi, or small street, close to his hotel and in front of the Cleopatra Massage Parlor. Joining a small throng of tourists, he put on his spectacles and peered into a brilliantly lit auditorium in which sat a hundred or more bikini-clad Thai girls. Later there would be two or three hundred of them, but now, at 5:45 p.m., business was just beginning. Meier liked this best as he knew the girls were at their cleanest. He called for the general manager and asked for his favorite girl of the previous year. She had gone away, beamed the Thai flesh-keeper, but he would happily make recommendations.

  Meier settled on number 89, Voraluk, and her younger friend Tui. All the girls in the dazzling goldfish bowl sported handheld number plates to facilitate selection, and the pair gave beaming smiles when hailed to Meier’s side.

  The three took coffee together in a nearby lounge. Meier made no attempt to talk and merely sat with his coffee mentally devouring the girls. They did not mind and chattered merrily enough. When Meier rose, straightening the front of his safari jacket to cover any visible sign of his state of mind, the girls took his hands and, giggling, led him to the lift and thence to an upstairs room, on the way collecting condoms, key and hygiene items from a fat floor lady.

  The room was plush with sofa, bed, bath, and, on a section of tiled floor, an outsize air bed. Tui explored Meier’s mouth with her tongue while Voraluk undressed all three of them and bathed Meier thoroughly.

>   With a sweet-smelling unguent, Tui anointed the air bed and her own body. Meier was laid on the bed and the girls alternately massaged his body with great care and total intimacy. Voraluk lay beneath and facing Meier while the lighter Tui snaked her oiled body up and down over his back in the time-honored fashion of the Thai body-body massage. Her pubic mound, her stomach and breasts took over the work of the hands of a European masseuse. In a while the wonderful movement from above caused Meier to penetrate Voraluk, but Tui seemed to sense the event. She rose, disengaged them and turned Meier around. Then, with Voraluk still below him, she continued her massage for a further ten minutes. Her expertise lay in keeping her client at the very brink of release.

  The two girls dried Meier down, led him to the bed to attend his instructions and afterward showered him before returning him to the general manager’s office. He paid 6,000 baht and praised his host for the continued excellence of the Cleopatra.

  Tui reappeared in a smart blouse and skirt and drove Meier in her own Toyota to the Fish Supermarket in Sukumvit Road. With a trolley, they plundered displays of red mullet, snapper, grouper, sea bass and many other species. A uniformed attendant cooked the fish on the spot and they drank their meal down with glasses of local sanuk amid a bustle of farangs. Meier took his leave of Tui, for the urge was again upon him, and summoned a three-wheel tuk-tuk to take him to the Grace Hotel, locally known as the Pussy Supermarket. This adjoins the Arab ghetto in Soi Nana Nua, an ugly block of dirty skyscrapers sprinkled at base level with a smattering of mosques and pseudominarets.

  Meier passed through the dingy lobby of the Grace wrinkling his nose at the shish kebab and curry odors from the adjacent Arab restaurant, a place of rice and belly dancers. He descended a staircase and entered a dimly lit basement lined with a long, narrow bar and prowled by over two hundred freelance prostitutes.

  Every manner of client dallied at the bar, drank in the many small booths or propped up the pillars that gave the Coffee Shop its aspect of subterranean nastiness. Cigar smoke swirled around these pillars like fingers of mist about stalagmites, and everywhere were hungry eyes and stiffened loins. It was the sort of noisome chamber of erotica Meier loved. He took a whiskey to a vacant booth and let the atmosphere sink in.

  The low, predatory babble of Western businessmen and robed Arabs was punctured from time to time by the crude shouting of British, Dutch or German yobs and crescendos of “yeah, yeah” from the jukebox.

  Lone druggies and alcoholics were out of place, for this was the court of the sex goddess. Tarts of every age and background were on offer, slowly sweeping the cavern for business. Many were part-timers moonlighting for extra cash, to buy a car perhaps, or new clothes for their children. In Bangkok there are over 200,000 girls and an unknown number of boys living wholly or partly by sex earnings. Since an income from prostitution can be ten times that of a standard city job, small wonder many succumb to the temptation despite the dangers.

  For an hour Meier turned down the callers at his booth, narrowly eliminating a dark thirty-year-old with large firm breasts and wasp-waist clad in a crocodile jumpsuit. He settled for an elfin-featured thirteen-year-old in a school uniform. She led him to a tiny room, some blocks away from the Grace Hotel, where she kept a baby in a brightly colored cot.

  Meier stayed until 1 a.m. and marveled at her skill. She spoke passable American English in her singsong way and told him he was big. Many farangs, she said, were smelly, and Japanese so small she had to use a special small condom like a finger stall; normal-sized ones, she said, just slid off.

  Back at the Hilton, Meier was welcomed by the general manager, a charming man who had recently moved from a major Hong Kong hotel that he had run for many years. Meier ordered a Mercedes for the morrow to take him to Pattaya Beach, down the coast of the Gulf of Siam: a place of sun and sand as well as sex.

  At 10:30 a.m. he was woken with breakfast and the Bangkok Post. He was especially interested in the London kidnapping of Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu and extremely annoyed when a loud knocking on the door of his suite turned out to be an unexpected call by de Villiers.

  “Try to look happy to see me.”

  Meier grunted and wiped crumbs from his lips.

  “To what do I owe this enormous pleasure?”

  De Villiers, it transpired, had been at work in Melbourne when a call had come through from Davies. He had decided to fly via Bangkok just in case Meier proved reluctant to withdraw from his Thai pursuits, as had happened on previous occasions.

  “We leave for London on this evening’s flight.”

  Meier canceled his Mercedes, silently cursing both Davies and de Villiers …

  28

  Douggie Walker had managed the Antelope pub for a good many years. Like his soppy black labrador, Sam, who loved the clamor and life of the main downstairs bar, Douggie was a large and amiable figure. The Antelope’s clientele on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 1986, was as rowdy as ever, a mix of all backgrounds, with always a good many strangers to add to the atmosphere.

  At the bar Douggie recognized a gang of ex-Army Regulars and accepted the offer of a pint from Keith Ryde, one of several Oman Army officers who used the pub as a rendezvous, usually at lunchtime.

  The talk was of a yuppy named Jeremy Bamber who two days earlier had been jailed for life for the callous murder of five members of his own family. Hoping to inherit a fortune, he had intended that his sister be blamed. A heated conversation developed on the topic. Douggie, Ryde, “Smash” Smith-Piggott and Jackson could be counted on, under the gentle influence of Benskin’s draft bitter, to escalate the most unlikely of subjects into a major debate. Mike Marman was normally in the thick of it all but that evening he felt a touch subdued and decided to go home for a quiet read and an early night.

  On the wrong side of forty and unemployed, he was temporarily feeling a touch sorry for himself. His mood probably stemmed from his last meeting with his fiery but beautiful ex-wife, Rose May. The previous weekend he had called at her Kensington flat to take their sons out for the day. There had been a fierce argument that still tasted bitter to him. Sometimes they seemed to hate each other but then he would notice afresh her blond hair and goddesslike figure, her classic Slav features and those lovely, faraway eyes and wonder how he and Rose May had ever grown apart.

  She was born Rose May Cassel-Kokczynska, of a Swedish mother and a dashing Polish officer who had taken part in the last recorded cavalry charge against German tanks in 1939, spent the war years in Soviet camps, then settled in England, where Rose May was born. When Mike met her, on vacation in Sardinia, she was head teacher at her own Montessori school in Kensington.

  He was at first everything that Rose May had dreamed of: a charming, handsome cavalry officer, regimental skier, communist-fighter, and an unashamed lover of the good life. When she knew him better she found he needed mothering and this was doubly attractive.

  Marman looked about the Antelope, searching for he knew not what. I should not have left the Army, he thought; that was when things started to go seriously wrong between us. He looked at his watch: 6:15 p.m. He would have to hurry if he was to make it back for his favorite part of the day: a hot bath listening to Radio 4. He took his leave of the others and left.

  At the door to the pub, Marman was suddenly aware of a brawl going on fifty yards down Eaton Terrace and right beside his pride and joy, a brand-new, red and black Citroën 2CV. Two men were slugging it out on the narrow pavement, right against his car. Breaking into a run and ignoring the huddle of jeering bystanders, Marman found his car key and got in. He would be bloody annoyed if there were any dents. The 2CV might look like an upturned bucket but it was highly economical and that was increasingly important after six months without a job. One of the combatants, a black man with a bald and bleeding skull, bounced back against the passenger door as Marman, swearing, pulled away and accelerated out of Eaton Terrace, vaguely aware of blue lights flashing to his rear.

  Past Battersea
and well into Clapham, he turned into Blandfield Road. Since his divorce three years ago he had grown close to a lovely girl named Julia, but they lived their separate lives and Marman had purchased his Clapham terraced house with his Army savings. There were usually a couple of art students renting a bedroom, but that evening his only current tenant was out on the town, so he had the house to himself.

  Marman’s house was directly opposite the shop of a friendly greengrocer who often looked after his keys and mail. Marman parked as close to home as he could and let himself in. He flung his blazer and tie on to the sitting-room table, poured himself a whiskey and rushed upstairs. As usual, he left the front door ajar, for he was a sociable sort and few days passed by without some friend or other dropping in. Marman was not worried by security. As he often said, “There’s nothing worth stealing, except for my radio, and if they want to get in, a lock won’t stop ’em.” Within minutes Marman was in a foaming Badedas bath with his drink beside him and the radio drowning out all other sounds.

  Meier double-parked immediately outside 9 Blandfield Road and, at 7:05 p.m., as soon as the signature tune of The Archers began, he nodded. “Davies says Marman never misses the program and likes to listen in his bath. The door is half open. The camera is all set.”

  De Villiers carried two plastic salesman’s bags, one containing brochures about life insurance. Once in the sitting room, he went directly to the blazer. Davies had assured him that Marman’s black Economist diary was normally kept inside the inner pocket. De Villiers swore silently after glancing at the handwriting: it was too small for the 1600 ASA film in the Olympus XA4 to cope with without using a tripod or flash. The result might prove too grainy, when enlarged, to be legible. Better to play it safe, especially as there was little danger of interruption. Meier, in the car outside, would find a pretext to stall any visitor and they knew only Marman was at home.