Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

by Ranulph Fiennes

“I believe you have a book about the Dhofar war in 1969 written by an ex-Army officer.” De Villiers gave her the title. “Do you have a copy, please, or know where I can get one?”

  After several minutes the girl returned sounding pleased with herself. “We have no copies left. It went out of print in early 1977, was reprinted in ’78 and no copies have been available for eleven years. Sorry.”

  “Is there no way I can borrow or copy some sort of master copy of the book?”

  “Not with us but maybe a secondhand bookshop, you never know.”

  De Villiers could see he had run out of options. He contacted Tadnams for the first time in months and was relieved to find one of his old contacts. It was agreed they would “do a drag” for the book as soon as staff was available.

  In fact de Villiers found the book for himself in a run-down antique shop in Kilburn. The book was battered and dog-eared with various paragraphs heavily underlined, some pages removed, and comments scribbled in the margins by, de Villiers deduced, an ultra-left-wing student in the seventies.

  He was charged twenty-five pence for the book and went back to his hotel to read the key passages.

  There was no doubt in his mind. They should not have killed Milling. He could see only too clearly why the error had been made. At the time the Clinic knew only that their target was the white officer in charge of Operation Snatch. They had learned from Brigadier Maxwell and others that there was only one Army unit in the region of Operation Snatch and that the only officer from that unit involved in Operation Snatch was the then Captain John Milling … QED.

  The book, however, now revealed to de Villiers that the adoo had been deceived into making more or less the same false assumption as had the Clinic. The sultan’s Intelligence officer, one Tom Greening, was a clever sod who had secretly ordered up a roving desert unit from the South Yemen border zone and sent them by night to execute the ambush many hours away from their normal patrol area. Had the real Operation Snatch officer not written this book, Milling’s identification would never have been questioned.

  As it was, in light of this new information de Villiers had no option but to call Bakhait.

  “You are quite sure this is the man?” Bakhait asked.

  “A hundred percent,” de Villiers replied. “I have it in black and white.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I believe so.”

  “If he is, go ahead.”

  De Villiers telephoned Tadnams. They suggested he check the Who’s Who of International Writers. “It gives all authors’ updated addresses,” he was told.

  47

  Darrell Hallett had time on his hands. He had recently passed his yearly relicensing exams and continued success could mean promotion to Area Manager. Life-insurance sales was a highly competitive business and Hallett was determined to do well. Right now, however, after the exertions of the exams, he had given himself a few days’ rest. He took his rod and tackle down to the river and spent many happy hours with the latest Colin Thubron book in his lap and a straw in his mouth.

  Next day, October 5, the weather precluded fishing, so he decided to pursue his other great hobby, collecting travel books. His favorite topics were sailing, mountaineering and wild river journeys, but he also collected all books by certain travel authors and, where possible, had them signed.

  Hallett telephoned a number of publishers including Hodder & Stoughton, whose book list included more travel subjects than most of their competitors. Hallett was put through to Kate Farquhar-Thompson in the publicity department and he asked for a copy of a book about a Canadian river journey entitled Headless Valley. She disappeared, presumably to a computer.

  “Sorry about the delay,” she said cheerily. “It’s odd. Someone rang not long ago about the same author. He wanted his book on some Arab war. I’m afraid it’s the same for you as it was for him. We have no copies left. Headless Valley is out of print. You will have to try the secondhand shops. You could make a start with Foyles … okay?”

  She was about to hang up. He could hear her other phone.

  “Wait a second,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He paused, not quite certain what was niggling him.

  “Listen. Thanks very much for your advice … Can you tell me who called you about the Arab war book?”

  “No,” she replied after a pause. “Sorry, but it was two or three weeks ago and I get a lot of inquiries. I think he was foreign. Maybe American … I think he mentioned Amman or Oman.”

  He thanked her, hung up, and reached for a brown book on his top bookshelf. It was a long shot but Hallett believed in the saying “Better safe than sorry.” He called Spike.

  Three days after Hallett’s call to Kate Farquhar-Thompson, Colonel Macpherson caught the 4:15 p.m. shuttle flight from Glasgow and reached his home in Archery Close at 6:30. Spike’s Mini was parked farther down the cobbled mews.

  After a dram, Macpherson led Spike through to an inner room.

  “So they are back again?” he asked.

  “There is that possibility, Colonel. It is a very slim lead; certainly not enough to enable us to entice the police into providing protection.”

  “But enough to raise your concern or you wouldn’t have brought me south in a rush.”

  Spike nodded. “I would hate to ignore it.”

  “Very well,” said Macpherson. “There’s nothing to be lost, providing we have no repetition of the A49 event. Strangely enough, I met your new ‘target’ about twelve years ago on an export promotion committee onto which I was inveigled by Campbell Adamson.”

  “I will check on his background right away and start to alert the Locals,” said Spike.

  “How many?” asked Macpherson.

  “That may depend on where the target lives, but in principle, I would like to give this high priority. Two teams of four if I can find them.”

  “I agree,” said Macpherson. “Give it all you’ve got. I had stopped hoping we would ever catch these people, but I would pay a high price to run them to earth. I blame the demise of the committee largely on them.”

  “If they are free, I thought Mason and Hallett could each lead a team since both have been involved in this since the beginning. Mason probably even knows, or knows of, the target. All those types who served in Oman met up at one time or another.”

  Macpherson nodded.

  “Anything new on Bletchley?” Spike asked.

  “I was going to tell you. Jane phoned just before I went north last week. She says Bletchley sounds pretty offhand when she calls, so she doesn’t press him with too many questions. One thing she did mention was a complaint he made about his fingers. She says he is finding it increasingly difficult to type and he may hire a secretary.”

  “Couldn’t Jane suggest herself for the job?”

  “My thoughts precisely. I put it to her but you know how reserved the dear lady is. I left it that there would be great benefits to all concerned if she were to become his assistant. She understands.”

  “What if he goes ahead with the book?”

  “Since there are no libel grounds to prevent him, we will just have to grin and bear it. Most of the Locals will be safe, but Mason, Hallett and others, whose signed reports were passed to Bletchley by Jane as part of those files, might be in trouble. God knows what he intends to say.”

  “So will we,” Spike said, “if Jane gets the job.”

  PART 5

  48

  On Monday, October 22, I returned late from the most northerly of our tree plantations. It was a fine evening and, with the tractor lights to help, I completed the staking of the rabbit tubes. From the boundary gate, and for some twelve miles to the west, the high wilderness of Exmoor stretched unbroken along the coastline of North Devon. I loved the place, and although we had only been there six years we had planted 16,000, mostly deciduous, trees. My wife bred Aberdeen Angus cattle and St. John waterdogs and my job as European representative of the well-known, nonagenarian oil magnate, Dr. Armand Ha
mmer, had helped us to turn the long-neglected land into a small working farm.

  I was worried, for Dr. Hammer was not well and I could see the specter of unemployment looming ahead. To avert the likelihood of no income in the near future, I had begun, in my spare time, to write a novel about Iran. It was close to completion. Another three months perhaps and I would approach a literary agent.

  The tractor descended the steep cleeve and the lights of our house flickered through the trees. All electrical power was supplied by a twenty-two-year-old generator. All water for the house and for the cattle arrived by gravity along a hose pipe from a distant spring. There were no deliveries of milk or papers. In short, a pleasantly cut-off atmosphere.

  I put the tractor in its garage. As I looked east over the Brendon Hills, the entire countryside was dark. Not a single light was to be seen for seven miles, for the Exmoor folk sensibly build their homes down in the valleys.

  We lived at 1,400 feet above sea level, and the winds that evening blew fresh over Hurdledown and Badge-worthy. My wife heard me removing my boots.

  “What about the rubbish?” she shouted from the kitchen.

  “What about supper?” I responded.

  “It’ll wait,” she assured me.

  Every Monday evening, when in Exmoor, I take the week’s accumulated rubbish in black bags to the stipulated roadside collection point a mile away. It is just about the only thing I ever do on a regular basis because my work in London, and lectures all over the place, run to no set schedule. The bags are best left out as late as possible before their early morning collection by the council truck. The foxes attack the bags and strew the contents all over the place if given more than a few hours’ notice of their presence.

  At 8 p.m. I hitched the trailer, full of rubbish bags, to my wife’s ancient Montego estate and drove up the long, narrow lane known as the Drift Road. A trio of long-horned Highland cattle blocked the lane and ignored my hooting. I eventually edged them onto the verge. Then, on rounding the last bend before the lane reaches the moor road, I found a car parked in the middle of the lane. With the support of the local Master of Foxhounds, Captain Ronnie Wallace, I had agreed with the Exmoor Park Department to erect a large sign saying “Bridle Path Only” to keep cars out, so I was annoyed, to put it mildly.

  Lovers, I presumed, hard at it in the back.

  But the car, a black Volvo estate, was empty. I had no flashlight but I noticed an unusual modification to its front bumper, rather like an improvised steel snow-clearing blade.

  I returned to the Montego intending to hoot loudly, since I presumed the occupants were nearby in the grass. Something, a noise or a brief flash of light, attracted my attention to the old barn on the far side of the hedge. My wife had rented this barn for some years for storing hay and had recently complained of missing bales. At £2.75 each this was serious, so I forgot the missing Volvo lovers and, fetching a tire iron from the Montego, climbed the five-bar gate and quietly entered the barn.

  As I moved between the two tiers of bales, a flashlight was switched on immediately ahead, blinding me. A voice from behind the light ordered, “Drop it.”

  As far as I could tell, four flashlights were being directed at me, and I was herded to the empty side of the barn.

  “Sit down.”

  I sat on a bale, totally bewildered. Perhaps these were hunt saboteurs. Such people had recently been active in the area. Since neither of us had hunted for years this explanation did not seem very likely. Maybe they wanted to steal the Montego. They were welcome. It was battered and scarred.

  My eyes began to accustom themselves to the flashlight. I saw one of the men set up a video camera on a tripod and another threw onto my lap a copy of a book I had written many years before entitled Where Soldiers Fear to Tread.

  The hay smelled very good, very sweet. I was sweating and realized that I felt afraid.

  One of the men began to address me, his accent not dissimilar to that of my American godmother from Connecticut.

  “In that book, Captain Fiennes, you admit to shooting and killing a Dhofari named Salim bin Amr, on the morning of October 18, 1969. Is this true?”

  I could not see the face of the speaker behind the flashlight. The man must have been crazy.

  “If I wrote that in this book, then of course it is true,” I replied.

  “So you admit to the murder of that person?” His voice was level and humorless. Not the voice of a nutter or a crank. My confusion was turning to apprehension.

  “Of course not.” I could hear the edge of fear in my voice and feel it in the pit of my stomach. “I have never murdered anyone. Never. You are talking about military actions, not murder, and at least twenty years ago. This is absurd. What do you want?”

  Unbidden, and in the space of mere seconds, my memory played back the long-ago events in Dhofar, twenty-one years ago almost to the day.

  We sat in the center of the wide wadi Habarut, halfway between the two whitewashed forts and exactly astride the unmarked border between Dhofar and South Yemen. My companion was the garrison commander of the communist forces, who was threatening retaliation for an incident provoked by a Dhofari tribesman. I offered him two hundred Rothmans cigarettes. He settled for four hundred.

  My signaler called. A Priority Message from my boss, Colonel Peter Thwaites: Go at once to Thamrait. We drove east through the heat-shimmer of the gravel steppes and reached the base by noon.

  Tom Greening, the sultan’s Intelligence officer, was there with new orders. I was to go that night on to the jebel and, some fourteen miles into adoo-held territory, at the village of Qum, capture two communist leaders and bring them back to him alive. He introduced me to a Mahra tribesman, a decidedly shifty-looking character who, he said, would be our guide. My men were appalled. This jebali was an adoo spy. We would be led into a trap. We would be cut off and killed to a man in the military heartland of the adoo.

  I could see my men’s point of view. Just one wounded man would put us in a potentially disastrous position. As twenty-six fit and able soldiers, my platoon normally relied on speed, night travel and silence to survive. We would set out ambushes and then withdraw without delay back to the safety of the desert. Our greatest fear was to be cut off on the jebel. We had no stretchers, no mules, no helicopter assistance and, in the area Greening had indicated, no other Army backup to help us.

  But orders were orders, so we drove south to the well of O’bet at dusk and climbed to the escarpment. After some miles we entered the foliated region of the jebel and behind us I saw flares fired into the air.

  My sergeant whispered: “We are cut off. We must return by a different route.”

  But we marched on through the night with our heavy loads of ammunition and water. No compass could have guided us along the confusing route of camel paths that meandered up and down deep wadis where no Sultanate troops had previously been fool enough to wander.

  Within the thick screen of thorn bush and creeper that crammed the defiles, there was no room to maneuver off the narrow paths. Mosquitoes attacked in whining clouds and a sticky heat emanated from the foliage. After ten hours we came to a place of skull-like stones that littered the fields of knee-high grass. We stumbled and fell. I began to fear that dawn would find us short of Qum.

  Dark amorphous shapes blobbed the upper slopes of the surrounding hills: wild fig trees and cattle kraals of thorn. Twice we passed the acrid tang of burning dung. To the southeast a patch of spreading gray crept into the blue-black sky.

  The guide raised his hand. The village, he indicated, was directly below us. I moved with speed to place the sections before first light. Four or five men to a group, each with a machine gun, each hidden in clumps of thorn above and around the unseen houses. At last, with my own four-man section, we burrowed into a hollow-centered thicket with a floor of stones.

  We slept for an hour with one man on watch. On waking I saw hummingbirds hovering and darting in the chintz ceiling of our hide. Through a break in the thor
ns I looked south at the scattered huts below and the rolling green land all about us. Beyond the rim of the mountains the Plain of Salalah was edged by the distant blue of the Indian Ocean.

  Four men in dark brown uniforms moved from hut to hut below us. Through binoculars we counted some sixty or seventy armed men to the immediate south of the village, a mile or so away. They were preparing some sort of fortification.

  Since waking I had felt sick with stomach pains; nothing new, for they had come frequently in the desert. Perhaps the water or the goat meat caused the trouble. Normally I could rush to some bush or rock and squat behind it for relief and to wait for the pains to pass. Then the sickness would abate, leaving me weak and sweating. But now there was nowhere to go but outside the thorn walls. To emerge even momentarily would put us all in great danger.

  For an hour we had been forced to beckon passing villagers into our thicket at gunpoint for fear that, having spotted us, they might alert the adoo. The tiny hide was overcrowded. I built a parapet of rocks around my backside, between me and the others, and lowered my trousers just as my insides seemed to give way to an agonizing flood. At once the flies swarmed into the thicket. I used rocks instead of paper and collapsed the little “cubicle” onto the results of my personal crisis. Not a moment too soon.

  As I wiped the sweat from my eyes I sensed movement outside the hide. Quietly I slid my rifle toward me and released the safety catch.

  A narrow goat trail ran between our thicket and the top of a steep, grassy slope. Two tall men were approaching fast along it. I noticed their dark clothes and the glint of guns in their hands; also the polished red badge on the cap of the second man. It was not the tiny Mao button badge worn by many of the adoo but the hexagonal red star of a political commissar.

  These were our men. I was sure of it. There was no time to think. They were fifteen yards away; soon they would see us. The first man stopped abruptly, seeming to sniff the air. His face was scarred, his hair close shaven. I watched fascinated as the Kalashnikov, its ugly round magazine cradled in his elbow, swung around as the man turned to face us. A Kalashnikov is an unpleasant weapon; a touch of its trigger will squeeze off a long burst of hollow-nosed 7.62 bullets that tear bone apart and pass through a man’s guts as they would through papier mâché.