Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (42 page)

“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.”

P
ART
5

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 Hammer, 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 thorns 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.

Inch by inch I lifted my rifle. The sun was in the east behind the man, outlining him. Only his shadow falling on the thicket shielded my eyes, stinging with sweat, from the direct glare. He peered straight at me now. I remember thinking, He has seen us. He is weighing his chances.