Killer Elite

by Ranulph Fiennes

  In the back room of a Hatton Garden diamond dealer recommended by his Mauritius hotelier friend, Quinn deposited the jewelry and the three unset stones. He watched as the in-house setter deftly extracted the stones from the low-carat gold clasps and setting, turning the jewelry back into a mere scattering of polished diamonds.

  The dealer then spent half an hour checking every stone, his face registering neither pleasure nor disappointment. The Quinns were on hot coals but refrained from showing their impatience.

  At last the dealer gave a peremptory sigh. “The three stones that you kept separate are fine and I am prepared to give you $200,000.” He looked up at Mr. Quinn.

  There was a pregnant silence, broken at length by an exasperated Quinn. “And the rest? What will you give me for the rest?”

  The Jew’s heavily jowled face was expressionless, his grape-black eyes marbled by thick lenses.

  “Nothing, Mr. Quinn. I can give you not a cent for the rest of these items. You will not find a dealer anywhere in Europe who will buy these from you. They are all fakes. The chemical name is cubic zirconium. Since you are obviously no fraud yourself, I assume you have been duped by the person who sold you these stones.”

  The Quinns were devastated. Their world had collapsed and their dreams of a happy, secure future built on a lifetime of hard work turned quickly to bitter resentment, to blind hatred, and finally to an all-consuming desire for revenge.

  Quinn obtained an introduction to the London criminal fraternity through a lawyer friend of the dealer and, after parting with?500 in cash to a middle man, received a visit from a representative of Tadnams Light Removals. • • •

  A lack of current employment and an ever-gnawing curiosity about Anne Fontaine attracted de Villiers when his agent mentioned a South African job. He met up with the unfortunate Mr. Quinn and, having been briefed as quickly as possible, took a British Airways flight to Johannesburg.

  Within a fortnight de Villiers had homed in on the fairly common malpractices that had so impoverished his new client. He anticipated an easy job with no need to summon Meier or Davies.

  Krannie MacEllen, he discovered, had given Quinn real diamonds, but at a heavily overpriced value. He had to all intents and purposes stolen several hundred thousand dollars of Quinn’s money.

  The Johannesburg jeweler, a crafty craftsman, had substituted cubic zirconium for the real diamonds, knowing that once they were set, the fakes would be very difficult to detect, even by an expert, until removed from their settings. The refractive index of CZ, and therefore its fire and brilliance, matches that of real diamonds.

  De Villiers telephoned Quinn with his findings. Did he wish both men terminated? Quinn burst out that he wanted his diamonds or his money back. If that was not possible, then he wanted revenge. De Villiers pointed out that he dealt in removals, not retrieval work, but that for twice the initially agreed sum of $100,000 plus expenses, he would do his best. Either Quinn’s goods would be recovered or the guilty parties targeted.

  The fraudulent jeweler, being of a nervous disposition, gave de Villiers all of Quinn’s original stones that he still possessed and a cash payment in place of those he had sold. His personal policy was to yield and live to thrive another day.

  Krannie MacEllen appeared to be timidity personified on de Villiers’s first visit, promising he would collect a suitable amount of cash by the following day. De Villiers sensed trouble. Five hours before the agreed upon time for the cash handover, he arrived in a hired car and parked outside the Cinerama building, directly opposite the Star Cinema Complex and the Diamond Exchange that housed MacEllen’s office. De Villiers watched the plainclothes members of the Hillbrow Flying Squad slip a tight and unobtrusive net around the building. He gave them six out of ten for the subtlety and camouflage of their agents. MacEllen had blown his survival option.

  MacEllen and his family kept a powerboat by their riverside house-he called it their dacha-on the banks of the Vaal River outside the city. With or without friends, they went there most weekends to relax, float on air beds or cruise with a braiifleis, or barbecue, hamper.

  De Villiers bought himself diving gear and struck on a Sunday morning when the dealer and his rowdy colleagues were water-skiing.

  When MacEllen’s pudgy corpse was laid on the riverbank there were clearly no marks of violence nor any other reason to suspect a cause of death less mundane than a heart attack or severe cramp.

  De Villiers made arrangements for Quinn to retrieve his diamonds and cash. He kept both the original killing fee and the subsequently agreed upon retrieval bonus. With time on his hands he took a South African Airways flight to Cape Town, intending to photograph the wildlife and some of the 2,500 species of mostly flowering plants that grew in the Cape mountains. For a week he camped out, exploring the Hottentots-Holland range. He came away happy, with what he knew to be superlative shots of baboons, dassies-the rock hyrax of the Bible-long-tailed sugarbirds and multicolored sunbirds, all against a riot of blurred background color.

  The urge that was de Villiers’s real reason for coming to the Cape grew steadily more undeniable during the days and nights in that lofty paradise, and on the eighth day he drove his rented Moke to Tokai. He would revisit the Vrede Huis ruins with a packed lunch, take some pictures and return to Cape Town.

  The ruins were unchanged and de Villiers again felt that intense feeling of belonging, but now a stronger, keener need interfered with his sense of well-being. All day he dallied at Vrede Huis, and for the first time in ten years allowed himself to think back to his days at La Pergole.

  In the late evening as rolling mists-the mythical pipe smoke of pirate Van Hunks-closed over Devil’s Peak and the ramparts of Lion’s Head, de Villiers found his feet and his heart were set for the distant spinney of silver trees, the landmark he had used many times to return to La Pergole through the vineyards.

  The Anglo-Arab stallion was Anne Fontaine’s favorite horse. Four evenings a week she rode around the estate, and in fine weather farther afield through the Tokai pinewoods and the gum groves of Platteklip. These outings were her only pleasure. She rode bareback in a thin cotton dress, the better to savor the power of the horse.

  Sometimes, and despite her surroundings, Anne wished that she had never been born. She craved children yet could have none; the doctors did not know why. She yearned for love and there was only jealousy. She craved sexual satisfaction but her natural sensuality was denied outside marriage because of the stern moral code of her formative years. Only once had she known a man with whom her loins could have run wild and Luther be damned.

  Within the cold walls of her marriage there had been a great deal of sex, all quick and mechanical. The remaining mystery was how disgust had not driven her permanently frigid.

  A crescent moon edged into view above the distant silver grove, and Anne murmured to the Anglo-Arab, pressing her thighs inward and gently shortening the rein. She would cool the stallion by walking the last mile of vineyard.

  Jan Fontaine was more often than not in the hospital these days, and because of his evil temper, changed from one clinic to another with an alacrity that depended on the flashpoint of the relevant staff. Anne dreaded each visit, the bedside interrogations, the increasing and irrational bitterness. Divorce was inconceivable to her, amounting almost to mortal sin, but many a time she found herself fighting off the wish that her husband would die.

  Anne had been a virgin bride, as was then expected. Her first sex with Fontaine had been a brutal shock. The man was sensitive only to his immediate lusts and these were quickly quenched, for Anne was satin-tight. The early years were hellish enough, but after his injury he could no longer perform an active role and things became even worse. Now he expected her to satisfy his urges as though she were a paid whore or some hotel call girl.

  The rhythmic motion of the horse faltered and Anne slipped easily to the ground to check his front hooves. She found a chip of granite in the frog and prized it loose with a nail file she ca
rried for that purpose. The stallion snorted, nosing the air, and Anne clearly saw the figure of a man on the sandy track to the house.

  She passed him by, attempting to avoid eye contact, for this was no time nor place to chat to a stranger. She would, on reaching home, alert Samuel to the presence of a trespasser on the estate.

  The man had stopped, statuelike, when he heard her approach, but only when she had thankfully passed him did she hear him call her name. She had heard that voice so many times in her dreams. Was it possible or was this the ghostly robber, Antje Somers, come down from his legendary lair in the foothills?

  Few words were spoken. Time ceased to exist. They were back in the forest clearing of ten years earlier. The stallion grazed beside the track and the world was far away.

  Their bodies moved as one in the moon shadows of a bamboo island. As wild as animals, as gentle as hedonists, as abandoned as their instincts dictated. Each had long nurtured fantasies of this act-the one through many killings, the other through a thousand hot nights of hopelessness.

  For three wonderful weeks they met in the evenings: out of sight of prying eyes, for there is no gossip machine, no jungle-drums telegraph system half so efficient as the Cape grapevine.

  When de Villiers was forced to leave for overdue work in Europe, he told her the date he would return.

  “I will live for that day,” she said, her eyes abrim with tears of pure love.

  De Villiers was a sensitive, loving human being when he left South Africa…

  20

  The khareef flies, as small as European midges or Canadian “no see-ums” but more aggressive, crawled over his forearms and sucked blood from his neck. His shirt was soaked with the monsoon drizzle and his spectacles were misted up. On June 1, 1972, Mike Kealy, SAS troop officer at the jebel outpost of Tawi Ateer, the Well of the Birds, was squatting in the orange mud in a glade above the camp. His SLR (self-loading rifle) lay within easy reach but his concentration was focused entirely on the iridescent plumage of the hummingbird that hovered less than two paces from his knees. Wingtip to wingtip, Mike estimated the body size as two and a half inches-a tiny masterpiece of nature-and he sorely regretted that for once he had failed to bring his camera.

  Khaki rivulets veined the clay soil around islets of fern and bidah gladioli. From the overhanging cliffs above to the edge of the clearing lianas fell in dank profusion. Tamarind trees and wild citrus shed their burdens of rain in a nonstop and rhythmic tattoo while all manner of crawling, hopping insects animated the undergrowth.

  Mike’s lifelong fascination with nature ensured that he was never bored during the long, gray days of the 1972 monsoon. At home on the Sussex Downs, around his home at Ditchling, Mike’s father had lovingly taught him all he knew about the then abundant fauna of the area. Mike’s only sister had died young, and the Kealys’ world revolved around their son. After Eastbourne College he had passed into Sandhurst, keen for a career in his father’s old regiment, the Queen’s Surreys.

  In 1965 he was commissioned and, after six years as an infantry officer, joined that small but elite group selected, from the many who try, to be SAS officers. With four months of intense specialist training under his belt, he was sent to B Squadron, then commanded by the jovial little dynamo Major Richard Pirie.

  Mike did well but he found life far more tense and competitive than during his years of infantry soldiering. Then, he had commanded mostly amenable teenagers on humdrum exercises. With the SAS he found himself appointed to 8 (Mobility) Troop, generally considered the regiment’s best. A dozen or more veterans of several wars and secret operations around the world constituted the twenty-seven-year-old officer’s new charges. These were men who accepted nothing at face value, who questioned orders with a cool appraisal based almost always on experience, whereas Mike’s thinking was often the result of classroom military dogma.

  His first few months with the troop were a far tougher test than even the SAS selection course. He was on sufferance from day to day and he knew it. Not a few aspiring young officers, elated by success at selection and proudly sporting their newly awarded winged-dagger badge, have found themselves unacceptable to their designated troopers. In such cases the officers always moved on, not the troopers.

  Unlike in infantry regiments, where each officer has a personal batman-orderly to attend to his needs, the SAS officer will often find himself cooking for his radio operator while the latter is busy with codes and ciphers on arrival at a “basha” (improvised tent) site for the night. One way of speeding the process of acceptance into a troop is, of course, for the officer to prove himself in battle. This was Mike’s first four-month tour in Oman, and so far the adoo had opened fire on his men only once.

  On June 8, 8 Troop were helicoptered down from the jebel to the coastal town of Mirbat. This village of fishermen’s shacks huddled in isolation on a stormy promontory under the shadow of a three-thousand-foot escarpment. Two small mud fortresses protected the jebel side of Mirbat, and the broiling monsoon breakers prevented any attack from the south. A tangle of barbed wire ringed the forts and the town from west to east, starting and ending in the sea.

  Mike and his eight men took over a lone mud hut known as the Bat-house between and slightly to the south of the two forts. The village itself squatted in poverty and squalor between the Bat-house and the sea.

  The sultan’s wali, or village headman, lived in the fort to the northwest of the Bat-house with a garrison of thirty ancient askars (militia). The second fort, seven hundred yards to the northeast of the Bat-house and mere yards from the perimeter wire, housed two dozen Dhofar Gendarmerie troops. These fifty-five men, armed with outdated bolt-action rifles, formed the wali ’s entire defense force. The small SAS presence was intended to provide only civil aid and military training. Their own defense consisted of two roof-mounted machine guns and a mortar pit close by the Bat-house.

  A few mortars and rockets were occasionally fired at Mirbat by night, but by the time 8 Troop were due to hand over to a new SAS team, Mike had still undergone no baptism of fire. A roster of guard duties was rigidly followed but the months of inactivity tended to reduce a man’s alertness.

  The Eagle’s Nest, the summit of Jebel Samhan, towered 6,000 feet above Mirbat. At dusk on July 18, seventy men picked their precarious way down its mist-swathed face, all heavily laden with weapons and ammunition.

  Ali, second son of Sheikh Amr bin Issa, led the sixth and last subunit of the Wahidaat a Wasata wa Sharqeeya. The previous week his men had completed the nerve-racking task of locating and removing the many PMN plastic antipersonnel mines the PFLO had previously sown on the vertiginous trails.

  Every man was proud to be a part of this historic attack. Omani and Ingleezi blood was to gush and the shock troops of the PFLO would be heroes for years to come.

  Ali was himself from Arzat country to the west and knew little of this arid region north of Mirbat. For three days he and his men had worked out of the cavernous hollows of the upper Samhan. The jebel here is limestone on a bed of chalky dolomite. Erosion had worn away the softer strata into innumerable crags and winding tunnels.

  Ali’s heart was proud as he led his men down the precipitous and slippery route. In places there were fixed ropes, further evidence of the intricate preparations involved with the operation.

  The previous morning Ali had heard the news on Radio Aden of a major reverse. The perfidious President Sadat had ordered the Soviet supporters of Islam out of Egyptian territory. So be it: tomorrow the PFLO would show the world what Arabs could do without a single Soviet adviser.

  Ali did not stop to consider the arsenal that his men and other converging PFLO units were carrying that night. The grenade and rocket launchers, the heavy mortars, the motley array of machine guns of various calibers, the recoilless antitank weapons and their personal AKM and AK47 rifles-all were of Soviet origin.

  The PFLO leaders had laid their plans with care. The attack coincided with maximum mist cover from the khareef, mak
ing it all but impossible for government airplanes to support the Mirbat garrison.

  A diversion the previous day had drawn out the Mirbat firqat, the fifty or so ex-PFLO turncoats normally based in the village. These men were now several hours’ march away to the north, an important factor since, unlike the askars and Dhofar Gendarmes in the two Mirbat forts, they were all armed with fully automatic rifles.

  The “Ingleezi” element would be a pushover since they were less numerous than the fingers of a single man.

  Long before midnight Ali’s men crossed the ravine of the wadi Ghazira. Ali remembered a visit to this wadi when he was a child. His foster father had brought him and his brother Tama’an down from Qum to see the great flood. They had quivered with fear, long before they reached the wadi, at the distant reverberating roar of the storm water descending from the escarpment. He would never forget that noise, the very sound of God. No man alive who had heard and seen those floods could ever swallow the Marxist claptrap about Allah being merely an invention of British imperialists. They had clung to their father’s waist, their mouths agape at the boiling maelstrom that filled the forty-foot-high gorge, changing its shape forever, destroying everything in its path and driving its plunder of dark detritus far out into the Indian Ocean. Looking back at the mountainside, they had gasped at the glistening sheets of falling water, Niagaras spumed by the wind and plunging down from the jebel to the drainage wadis as though it was once again the beginning of time.

  Ali was called back. One of his men, crossing the wadi, had been bitten by a snake, a large cobra. He bade the man, a black freed slave from Darbat, to remain still. They would return for him after the attack was over. Meanwhile he apportioned the man’s spare ammunition among the others. Each man carried well over a hundred pounds of lethal hardware. Ali trod with extra care now. In these days of mines, one was inclined to forget the snakes. Yet a venomous cocktail of vipers infested the scrub of these coastal wadis, including the rare Thomasi, with its sharply etched black rings, the Boulenger or Spotted Rhodorhachis, which climbs near-vertical rock as fast as a windblown leaf, the minute, almost invisible, thread snake, and sixty or so other equally unfriendly species.