Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (14 page)

As they were leaving the chief clerk passed by. The adjutant stopped him. “Chief,” he said, “these gentlemen are inquiring about Dhofar for a history book. Maybe you can help them.”

The chief clerk told de Villiers all he could and that was enough. Captain Milling had indeed been in the northern
jebel
in October 1969 and had at that time led a dangerous mission involving the very first
adoo
informer to help the army.

“Was this action known as Operation Snatch?” Meier asked.

“That I cannot say, but I can assure you there were no other operations in the area at that time and John Milling was definitely the officer in charge.” He chuckled. “Nobody could mistake John, then or now; he is a giant of a man. Why don’t you go and see him for yourselves. I will phone him if you like.”

De Villiers hastily thanked the chief clerk. A phone call would not be necessary. They took their leave and headed back toward Ruwi. The sun dipped below the western
jebel
and the valleys receded into dim and cheerless voids.

The Marches is the ancient name for the country on either side of the Welsh-English border. Here the wild ridges of the Black Mountains give way to hop fields, orchards and high-flowering hedges. The deep gorge of the Wye cuts through the Forest of Dean, and the cathedral city of Hereford, Queen of the Marches, remains serenely prosperous through the deepest of recessions elsewhere in Britain.

Hereford, a somnolent little city, is the home and the heart of the SAS Regiment. Certain pubs in and around the town are patronized by SAS and ex-SAS men, but an outsider would not easily identify them, for the majority are quiet, affable individuals who take great pride in anonymity and, unlike special forces the world over, hardly ever become involved in public brawls.

In 1988 the Bunch of Grapes public house, on the north side of town, was closed because of structural damage and ceased to be a haven for SAS men in civvies. But on February 11, 1977, both bars throbbed with life and music. In a corner of the main downstairs public bar Bob Bennett, on leave from his regiment in Germany, held his mug of John Smith’s beer aloft and, with his friend Ken Borthwick, toasted the Queen.

“May she thrive for another twenty-five,” said Ken. “God bless her.” He was a member of the Territorial Army Volunteer Reserve and a policeman from neighboring
Worcestershire, but both men had met up at the Grapes to join friends for a Royal Silver Jubilee Party, one of thousands held across Britain that year.

“Cheers, boys.” The landlord, Tony Burberry, joined the toast. “Long time no see, Ken. How’s the Force?” Tony was a bluff, professional publican with no army ties of his own. His personal chemistry and an aptitude for discretion had first attracted the SAS fraternity to the Imperial, a pub where he was tenant in the mid-sixties. Then, when he moved to the Grapes, the SAS followed him. No man could wish for a better clientele, for they spent good money, drank sensibly, behaved well, and their reputation scared off the town’s less savory elements.

There was the downside, an ever-present fear of IRA bombs, but the boys kept their own security roster, and were more alert and capable than the most expensive security money could buy.

Tony knew three generations of SAS: the Malaya boys, the Borneo crowd, and more recently the Oman BATT men. Memories of the wars in which they had served bound them together as tight as ticks. Of course, they had all operated in other theaters of combat, fought skirmishes in those territories that had taken the fancy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for a while, but always in small groups of two, four or six. These groups did not exchange their war stories with one another, nor with anyone else for that matter, which left precious little mutual ground for reminiscence other than the three major campaigns of the postwar years where whole squadrons had acted together.

Bob Bennett, whose home was in Hereford, knew many of the local characters and discussed them with Ken Borthwick. Some of their party began to drift away to other pubs as the evening wore on. A Welshman with a local crumpet clutching his waist found some sitting
space at their table. The girl was very drunk but the Welshman still made sense. He crooned her a love song from the Valleys and was cheered by the crowd for his pains.

One of the drinkers, a bear of a man with a hand that completely eclipsed his pint beer mug, was a Fijian whom Bob recognized as an SAS sergeant. He and his friends began to swap memories of long-lost friends from Borneo days, and the Welshman was visibly enthralled. The conversation shunted around to talk of a Fijian named Labalaba whom everyone seemed to know, and then somebody mentioned Salalah.

“I was in Salalah,” the Welshman interjected, “posted to the Muscat Regiment from the Fusiliers. Small-arms instructor to help introduce the boys to the new FN rifle.” He beamed. “It’s really nice to meet people who were there too. Doesn’t happen very often.” He bought them a round. Bob Bennett was included but Ken took his leave.

The Grapes emptied well after closing time and Bob followed the Welshman’s red Escort at a discreet distance. After dropping his girl off in the center of town the Welshman headed west on the A438 toward the village of Brobury. The Escort turned into the drive of Brobury House, at which point Bob parked by the roadside and disappeared into the shadows of the well-kept gardens. He knew the place well. It had recently been bought by an American couple.

The Escort passed by the main house and parked in front of two small cottages down a tarmac lane. Bob had seen enough. He returned home to Hereford and his wife, Lyn.

Spike Allen spent forty minutes six mornings a week jogging in Hyde Park. He seldom enjoyed the exercise but, in his mid-forties, he had to compensate for his love
of good food or join the pear-shaped majority. At 8:30 a.m., when he returned to his flat, his wife had already left for the British Museum, where she worked as a curator’s assistant.

As always, Spike checked his answering machine. He was to call a number in Worcester. The number was not that of a Local but it did figure on his Informant Sheet. This was a list of noncommittee individuals, mostly from the Midlands, Wales and the South of England, who volunteered pertinent information to which the committee might wish to react.

The number responded.

“Hallo, Ken. Spike calling back.”

Ken Borthwick, an ex-SAS sergeant-major and currently a detective constable, did not waste time on pleasantries. “Spike, you may think this is a long shot but here goes anyway. Last night I had a drink at the Grapes with Bob Bennett, an ex-B Squadron lad on leave from Germany. I left the pub early but Bob called me early this morning with a potential problem. He does not know about you or our connection. He called me merely because I’m with the Force and because I saw the Welshman before I left.”

“The Welshman?” Spike queried.

“Yes. He had a light Borders accent and made out he’d been with the Welsh Fusiliers. He mingled with some of the lads and said he’d been seconded to the SAF in the early seventies. Bob thought nothing of it at first but, for a Sultan’s Armed Forces man, this fellow was pretty damned ignorant. He kept referring to the lads down in Dhofar as SAS not BATT, and he told a story about an SAS officer whose name he had forgotten but whose batman was a cousin of his. Since no SAS officer has ever had a batman, this grated on Bob.”

“Hardly enough to brand the Welshman as undesirable,” Spike commented.

“True, but as the evening progressed the fellow kept muttering about Mirbat and in particular about the 1972 shindig there. Bob thought he was fishing and, since Bob was himself involved that day at Mirbat, he decided to follow the Welshman. He left him at a bed and breakfast on the Hay road.”

There was a pause. “So?” said Spike.

“So we may have another case like Tim Shand. Remember, the lad from G Squadron who the IRA traced to his home in Ross last year. We put a watch on him for a week but nothing happened, so we cleared out and, a month later, he found a key-set two-pound car bomb clamped to his Peugeot.”

“But,” Spike said, feeling he was missing the point, “I thought you said this Welshman was fishing for Dhofar, not Belfast, connections?”

“Poor Spike,” Ken’s voice oozed sympathy, “menopausal run-down and hemorrhoids of the brain. If
you
were trying to identify which of the Grapes clientele were with the Regiment and not merely ex-Army, would
you
sew your web of Belfast silk? ’Course not. Give the Provos a break, mate.”

Spike did not rise to this. “So you go along with Bob’s suspicions, do you, Ken?”

“In principle,” was the firm reply. “I saw the Welshman, only briefly, but I sensed unease and the guy had a hard, mean cut to his features. Listen, Spike, us boys in blue would not react to this sort of random suspicion without more evidence of intent. There’s no point in my even trying to alert my bosses. I’d merely get a lecture on the current lack of manpower and the sorting out of priorities.”

“Okay, Ken,” Spike sighed. “Give me the details of the bed and breakfast and I’ll do what I can.”

Spike ate a bowl of Alpen cereal laced with maple syrup and washed down with percolated Douwe Egbert
coffee. Mastication always helped him think. He decided on John Smythe, a freelance photographer who had left the SAS Territorials a year before because of a heavy demand for roof insulation. John was on the lump and dabbled in any highly paid work, normally scaffold erection, that could be done without the tax man’s knowledge. He had phoned Spike a couple of months before to complain that life was slow and what was the point of being a Local if Spike never called him.

Although Hertford, John Smythe’s hometown, was close to Hitchin and a recruitment basin for C Squadron, 21 SAS, Spike had received no calls in that area for many months. He would leave Hallett, the usual West Country Local, alone, but respond to Borthwick’s call by putting Smythe on to the Welshman.

At 5 p.m. Muscat time de Villiers took a booked call to England from one of the booths at the Cable & Wireless office in the town center, the only available way of placing an international call from Oman.

Davies, at Brobury House, was waiting and explained in cryptic terms that the SAS were a closed-mouthed, hypersuspicious crowd of bastards and he had nothing to report.

“Never mind,” said de Villiers, “
we
have positive identification and need you over here like yesterday. The office will give you details but you must speed up your visa by going to the embassy soonest.”

Two hours after Smythe was installed with binoculars, vacuum flask and his car radio tuned to Radio 4, the red Escort turned right out of the drive of Brobury House and sped east.

Smythe had learned a good deal about surveillance merely through past failures. He now carried a box of accessories to improve his results. When Davies parked the Escort in Trebovir Road, close to Earls Court underground
station, Smythe stayed with the car. Once the Welshman was gone, he took a slightly crushed Coca-Cola can from his box of tricks and placed it in front of one of the Escort’s rear tires. Back in his own car, he settled down to sleep as soon as he had switched on the receiver unit of his Coca-Cola gizmo. A green light pulsed at him. It would continue to pulse until a set of contacts in the can were mated by pressure. The light would then go out, to be replaced by a series of beeps loud enough to waken Smythe from the deepest of slumbers.

On February 27, 1977, eight of the committee met at Bob Mantell’s home in Richmond, a quiet semidetached house close to the East Sheen Gate to Richmond Park.

The meeting had been called by Spike at short notice and absentees included Bletchley, who had been hospitalized for a checkup, according to his housekeeper.

Colonel Macpherson, who detested meetings on Sundays, was in a testy mood and keen to speed up procedures. This suited Spike. He explained the Hereford background to Smythe’s surveillance activities.

“The day after the Welshman arrived in London, he visited 64 Ennismore Gardens, the Omani Embassy, and our Local followed him into the Visa Section. After a long wait, during which both men filled in No Objection Certificate application forms, the Welshman was summoned into the inner office. Mr. Alfred Jones was the name called out by the Omani official. We have no further details other than the number of his rented Avis car and a rather poorly focused photograph taken by our Local.”

“When does this Welshman Jones fly to Oman?” Macpherson asked.

“That is the reason I asked for this snap meeting,” Spike replied. “Calling myself Alfred Jones, I telephoned
Gulf Air Reservations and asked for confirmation of when my secretary had booked my flight to Muscat. I said she was sick and had taken my diary out of the office.” Spike paused to check his notes. “Jones is scheduled to fly to Muscat via Doha and Dubai on Gulf Air Flight 006 next Saturday.”

“Do we have contacts in Oman?” Michael Panny asked.

“No one,” Spike said, having checked with Mantell. “But I have a friend at Kendall’s who handles contract officers’ liaison with the Omanis. He can fix visas for me without too many questions being asked.”

“Why should we need a visa?” Macpherson’s bushy white eyebrows were raised.

“We have only one suspect,” said Spike, “the Welshman, whose current whereabouts are unknown because our man lost him shortly after he left the embassy. Either we have someone follow the Welshman when he catches his flight for Muscat or we drop the matter.”

“Never mind dropping it,” the don commented acidly. “I can’t see why you picked it up in the first place.”

“Then you have no business with your intellectual airs, Don.” August Graves was, as ever, Spike’s dependable ally. “Even I can see this Welsh geezer is up to no good.”

Macpherson, seeing a slanging match shaping up, cut in. “Spike has taken the effort to get this far. Now we must decide if we should follow up. We have a chance surveillance of a possible IRA threat to one or more of our Hereford fraternity developing into something very different. So now we have a conundrum. Why should anyone go to the trouble of fishing around SAS-frequented watering holes with the apparent intention of identifying SAS soldiers through their involvement with some long-past incident in Dhofar? And why should this same character then rush down to the Omani Embassy
with the likely intention of going to Muscat as soon as he can get a visa?” Macpherson looked around the room. “Any ideas?”