Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (23 page)

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 …

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
, making 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.

After crossing the wadi they took up positions in an outcrop of boulders and Ali counted over two hundred men pass him by in the semidarkness. Some carried long tubes or other awkward loads, parts of the heavy longrange weapons.

Two hours before dawn the attack lines were ready. Two hundred fifty of the PFLO’s finest fighters, trained in Moscow and Odessa, took up position overlooking the silent village and its puny forts. A killer squad left the main body and silently climbed toward the only government watch-post north of the perimeter wire.

The Dhofar Gendarmes who manned the post were caught by surprise. Four were held fast while their throats were slit but others escaped into the night, and one, before he flung down his rifle the better to flee, loosed off a magazine to warn the
wali’s
men.

With speed the
adoo
forces spread out across the whole length of the perimeter wire and eight hundred yards to its north. Ali found himself immediately opposite the Dhofar Gendarmerie fort, the first main target of the attack along with the twenty-five-pound field gun dug into an adjacent sandbagged pit.

Ali checked and exhorted each of his men, then delved into his pack for the Chinese field cap of which he was so proud. He pulled it tightly down to his ears and gently checked the cocking lever of his AK47.

With a burst of sudden
son et lumière
the PFLO heavy mortars began the offensive as the first stirrings of dawn came to Mirbat.

Mike lay half awake, pleasantly aware that life was about to take on a rosy tint. Tomorrow 8 Troop would be relieved. In only a few days he would be home in his beloved Sussex. Idly he ran over the things to be done in preparation for the handover to G Squadron.

He heard the crump of incoming mortar bombs; another symbolic action by the
adoo
. Nothing serious was expected. There had been no warnings from the “green slime”—SAS argot for Intelligence.

When several heavy mortar rounds landed close by, Mike rose and fumbled in the dark for his spectacles. Donning shorts and rubber flip-flops he grabbed his FN rifle and clambered up a rickety ladder to the Bat-house roof.

The predawn sky crackled with high-velocity bullets. To his immediate front Mike watched a patch of perimeter wire disintegrate in a mortar explosion, while 12.7mm Spaagen rounds dug great chunks of masonry from the Dhofar Gendarmerie fortress and shrapnel screamed over the Bat-house. This was no low-key attack.

Mike was mentally well prepared. He had spent time over the previous month plotting imaginary reactions to hypothetical attacks on Mirbat. He knew exactly what to do and so did the men of 8 Troop. A lot of “muck” was already being flung at the fort, a sure sign that the building was a priority target for the
adoo
. The poorly armed Dhofar Gendarmes were unlikely to survive a frontal assault without immediate aid. If they fell, the twenty-five-pounder would go too.

Mike knew that his Fijian sergeant, a giant of a man named Labalaba, had already departed into the gloaming to help the single Omani gunner in the pit beside the
fort. Laba, as he was known, was a humorous soul, given to boasting that an ancestor of his had once feasted on the missionary John Wesley. He was one of a number of Fijians who had been recruited by the British Army when good jungle soldiers for Borneo service were at a premium.

Mike approached Corporal Bob Bennett, the quiet West Countryman in charge of the Bat-house mortars. Mike had established a close rapport with Bob over the previous three months.