Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men)

When I wrote this book twenty years ago, it was published under the title
The Feather Men
and became a bestseller. With the full cooperation of the families of the dead men portrayed as my leading characters, I used their real names and as much of their lives as made sense. Representatives of the families saw a draft of the book before it was printed and signed each page of the text that mentioned their next of kin. Readers were left to make up their own minds whether it was a true story.

In deciding to republish this book to tie-in with the film
Killer Elite
, which is based on
The Feather Men
, we were faced with a dilemma. Should we change all the names—or other details—to match the film?

That didn’t seem right, because some characters are played by American actors and, as always happens, the filmmakers have taken their usual (understandable) liberties with the original text to make it work as a film.

In the end, I decided we should publish the text unchanged.

Ranulph Fiennes, 2011

P
ART
1

Daniel had never left home before. Vancouver in the clean, crisp summer of 1945 was full of wonder to this prospector’s son from a remote village on the Arctic coast of Alaska. The reason for this happy visit was the end of the war in Europe and the return of his father by troopship that day.

Amid whirling bunting and the cheering of proud relatives, the veterans clambered off the Canadian Pacific steam train, some to renew their previous lives and loves, many to face the bitter realization of unattainable dreams or unexpected betrayals.

Daniel did not notice that his father was thin and gaunt, for he was still a great bear of a man and he bore gift-wrapped parcels of exciting shapes.

A taxicab took the family to their cheap lodgings close to Lion’s Gate bridge. After tea and once the first waves of excitement were spent, Father made his long-planned pronouncement.

“We have six days before the steamer takes us home, my hidjies.” Nobody knew why he called them that—only that it had a good, warm meaning. “And we will never forget these days, because the Hun are smashed forever and we are together.”

The deep, flaky bilberry pie did the rounds again and everyone slept well despite their excitement, all six to the single bedroom.

The days flickered by in a kaleidoscope of happiness. They watched folk skiing on the lower slopes of Mount Grouse, on long planks of wood that looked impossible to control. Many skiers came to grief and Dan and his family laughed till the tears came.

They took a horse and cab to the wharves, bought toffee apples and walked hand in hand to watch the tradesmen at the sugar factory, and the trawlers with their brawny crews. Thousands more soldiers and sailors returned on giant troopships and the family joined the welcoming crowds. They saw the zoo and a pantomime, gazed at the sleaze of Gas Town and sang with gusto on the Sunday, for Mother and Father were keen Presbyterians, he with his Dutch Reform Church upbringing and she with a background of Wyoming and pioneer stock.

The Sunday before they were to take the steamer north, Father sprang his big surprise … There was a traveling circus in town and, dammit, they would check it out that very night.

Before the great event they squeezed into a packed church and joined in the songs of praise and the prayers of thanksgiving of the Vancouver people for the deliverance of their loved ones.

Then to the circus.

Clowns, elephants that could count, a giraffe, bears in kilts, dwarves, a sasquatch monster from the forests of the Rocky Mountain Trench, black fuzzy men, balloon shoots for prizes, and coconuts from the South Pacific propped on posts.

Even at five, brought up among Eskimo children, Daniel could throw the wooden ball straight and true. And he could shoot a light gun with fair accuracy providing he could take his time. He glowed with pride at his armful of coconuts and wooden teddies.

They cried with delight inside the sparkling waterways of the Canal of Love; they oohed and aahed with
delicious horror in the House of Screams as ghouls of sacking and animal bones swished by on unseen pulleys.

Everyone but seven-year-old Naomi, who hated heights, was awed when Father pointed to the monstrous Roller-Wheel with its eighteen swinging gondolas. Daniel sat on his narrow seat, filled with curiosity and sticky-lipped with candy floss. An Indian and a grinning Chinaman, both in top hats, checked that the family were all strapped in. Because he was so little he was jammed in beside eleven-year-old Ruth, his eldest sister. In front of him sat Naomi, his mother’s hands clenched about her and, at the prow of the gaily painted craft, just behind the carved redskin figurehead with its fearsome features, sat their father, beaming with pride and forever glancing over his shoulder to check that his brood were “having the finest time of their lives,” especially his dear wife, to whom he had sworn that very morning, as he held her close, that he would never, never leave her again … not for the Commonwealth nor yet for the King himself.

As other families took their seats, the great twinkling wheel rotated in fits and starts until all the gondolas were filled with laughing, or gaping, passengers.

Then a whistle blew, the Chinaman waved a flag and two gates of steel clanged shut below them. Daniel smelled hot oil and roasted chestnuts. The cool air lifted Naomi’s golden hair. Dad shouted, “Hold on, my love. Hold tight, my little darlings … try to kiss the stars.”

The wheel spun ever faster and Daniel loved the speed, the height, the newness of it all. Only when Naomi screamed did the intense wonder that he felt begin to fade. And as his other sisters started to moan, even big Ruth, he knew that he too should be sensing fear. But he felt only more aware, more able to observe and consider. The giddy, lurching passage of the gondola was not as before. Something had changed. They were out of kilter with the mother wheel. He saw sparks in growing
streams and a broken spar. Their cockleshell had come away from its housing on one side and as they swung over the top of the great arc and began the downward rush, so the remaining hinge-spar split and they were free, cartwheeling through space.

Nobody heard their screaming as they fell, for the carousels and the brass bands, the loudspeakers and sideshow criers produced a cacophony of sound that would have drowned out the knell of doom. And nobody saw the lace bonnet of young Anna, who clung by herself to the rearmost seat, glide and dip away like a falling kite.

The gondola crashed through the canvas of a small marquee. Ruth’s body and the whim of chance saved Daniel’s life. He was thrown against a pile of clothing. The wind was knocked out of him and his legs were broken but he remained fully conscious.

He saw the wrecked and green-painted prow, the head of a warrior, deeply impaled in the bowels of a fat Gypsy lady. He saw that his mother and Naomi had landed, tightly embracing, on the Gypsy’s table. Their heads had come together with such force that the gray hair and the golden hair seemed to sprout from a single pulp. They were mercifully still but for their stockinged legs, which jerked in time with the billowing canvas of the ruined tent. Of sister Anna he could see no trace: perhaps an angel had caught her in the air and she was saved, as he was. He could feel no pain, only a desperate need to gulp for more air.

He thought he heard his name whispered aloud. Father was staring down at him, attached by one arm to the shattered upper end of the main tent pole. But now he was foreshortened, like the circus dwarves, for his torso had been severed at the waist. Daniel could see this all so clearly, for his father’s remains were close above him and the mouth, agape beneath the thick moustache, did indeed seem to pout with the shape of Daniel’s name.

• • •

From that moment until the present day, whenever de Villiers felt the images of that night hover at the fringes of his mind, he clenched his fists and forced them away.

With the passage of years, the warmer human emotions, with which he had been genetically blessed, remained in place on the far side of his self-imposed shutter. By excluding his sensitivities, de Villiers had retained his sanity. He was, but for his chosen profession as a contract killer, a pleasant enough human being …