Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (16 page)

The regulations also ensured that no speeding could take place by stipulating a
minimum
time limit of two hours for the hundred-mile drive. Mason left the checkpoint
at 5:30 p.m., not at 4:30 as stamped on his pass by the warrant officer. He was therefore able to average a hundred miles an hour along the potholed corridor and still arrive at the “correct time” of 6:30 p.m. at the Helmstedt Volkspolizei checkpoint out of East Germany.

The East German border guards were perfunctory in their check, and the British NCOs at Checkpoint Alpha passed Mason through without a second glance. He then settled down to some serious autobahn driving via Hanover, Dortmund, and the Belgian border at Aachen, passing through that unmanned border post at 135 mph.

He reached Zeebrugge at 10:15 p.m. and caught the 11 p.m. ferry. On board he purchased twelve rolls of Kodak Tri-X film and four rolls of Ilford FP4 film, both 35mm, at the duty-free shop and slept for two hours.

After clearing Dover Customs at 4:30 a.m., he set off along the A2 and M2 to London, then, via the M4, to Heathrow, where, at 7 a.m., he drew up behind Patrick’s VW camper on the access road to the long-term car park.

Inside the curtained and locked rear of the van the two men drank black coffee from Patrick’s vacuum flask and Mason lit up a cigar and placed the .22 rifle, with all the other items that Patrick produced, on the camper’s kitchen table. He carefully explained to Patrick exactly what must be done over the next two hours.

Patrick switched on the car’s ignition to activate the extractor fan in the hope that it would deal with the cigar smoke before he died of asphyxiation and to ensure that their conversation was inaudible outside the van. A BBC newscaster wished them good morning with the news that thousands had died in an earthquake in Romania.

The rifle, Mason explained, had been manufactured by Stephen Grant & Son of 67a St. James’s Street, London, in the early 1930s. It had been made as a .25 rook
rifle and was later rechambered for .22 Hornet bullets. The outside of its barrel was octagonal, giving it an antique appearance that belied its efficiency. The action worked from a side lever and opened like a modern shotgun, being single-shot, not magazine-loaded.

To dismantle the weapon, Mason removed the wooden fore-end piece in front of the trigger guard and, breaking the gun by pushing down the side lever, he hinged the barrel down and away.

The camper’s built-in cooker had two gas rings over which Mason held a twenty-four-inch length of one-eighth-inch-diameter 8 SWG steel rod, and in his other hand, the barrel of the rifle. Patrick heated a black candle so its melted wax dripped down into an eggpoacher.

Mason smeared a chewed wad of gum with engine oil and pushed it into the barrel’s muzzle end. He then held the heated barrel upright with its muzzle on the floor and inserted the twenty-four-inch rod into the twenty-six-inch barrel until it disappeared. He shook the barrel lightly and the rod rattled audibly. Patrick then poured the melted wax into the barrel through a funnel so it filled the entire area between the rod and the inside wall of the rifled barrel. Once the rifle and the rod cooled down, the wax solidified and the rod was rigidly sealed into position.

Removing the wad of gum, Mason applied varnish with an artist’s brush to both ends of the captive rod, dabbed on gun-black as a final camouflage coat, and tapped both ends of the rod with a screwdriver. The effect was that of a police-plugged barrel. To all intents and purposes the weapon was now merely a decommissioned antique. As such, it could travel legally and document-free as air cargo. Mason reassembled the rifle, having first removed the firing pin and mainspring. Then he locked it into the plastic rifle case and stubbed out his cigar.

“The next stage,” he told Patrick, “will take longer.” He removed four cassettes of Ilford FP4 film with their plastic containers and began to force their tops off gently with a standard bottle opener. “I wasted hours when I first tried this with Kodak cassettes. They come off okay but they’re buggers to reassemble. Also the hollow area inside the spools of these Ilford cassettes is more spacious.”

Mason used a modeling knife to cut away the main central portion of the take-up spool. He retained only the now truncated ends, each of which looked rather like a miniature black top hat. He set Patrick to work on a second Ilford cassette and turned his attention to the components of the ten .22 Hornet bullets. First the empty cases, new and unprimed. These he prepared one by one with Eley primers by placing a primer onto a Lyman ram tool and pushing it firmly down into an empty case held in the slot of a Lachmiller priming clamp. When five of the cases were primed, he bound them into a tight bundle using surgical tape. He then positioned an Ilford spool “top hat” on either end of the bundle and forced it into the original Ilford cassette casing. The caps, which he had earlier removed by bottle-opener leverage, he now replaced by simple pressure until they once again mated over and around the “top hats.” Since the Hornet cases were exactly thirty-five millimeters in length, they fitted with precision into the space vacated by the film.

The finished cassette looked as good as new, although it now weighed thirty-three grams instead of twenty. When Mason had primed the remaining five empty cases, he fed them into the guts of the cassette that Patrick had successfully doctored. Cutting five inches of film leader from one of the discarded films, he inverted it to protrude in the normal manner. Loading the cassette into one of his Olympus OM-1 cameras, he made sure that
the leader covered the camera’s take-up spool without actually entering the winder slot. After closing the camera he pulled back the film-advance lever a dozen times. Although the film itself did not move, the exposure-counter window now registered 12. He fed the second camera with the other five disguised bullet cases. On the security X ray, the intricate components of the cameras would disguise the presence of the cartridge cases.

Only the bullets themselves and the gunpowder remained to be dealt with. Mason used small balance scales to weigh out eleven grains of IMR 4227 gunpowder, which he poured into a small, square plastic bag labeled “Silica-gel Desiccant.” He sealed the bag with instant glue and repeated the process twelve times, allowing two extra bags for damage or wastage at a customs inspection. The bags went into a side pocket of Mason’s camera case. If inspected for drugs, the gunpowder was tasteless and, like silica gel, hygroscopic. The case also contained a fold-away developing tank, trays, chemicals, paper, and the parts of an enlarger.

The ten Hornady forty-five grain (2.9 gram) .22 Hornet hollow-point bullets fitted perfectly into the central space of two packets of Polo mints that Mason put into his trouser pocket.

Thirty more minutes were spent checking and packing all the equipment, and at 8:50 a.m. Patrick left Mason at the Terminal 3 Departure Lounge. The Gulf Air check-in counter took his large suitcase and the rifle case as cargo baggage and he passed through to Emigration.

At the X-ray machine, Mason placed his hand luggage on the conveyor belt and entered the walk-through metal detector, which bleeped loudly at him. A security officer had him empty his pockets onto the side table and try again. Next time the machine was silent but he was “patted down” and the contents of his pockets were checked item by item. These consisted of keys, wristwatch, steel
Parker pen, coins, sunglasses, penknife, handkerchief and Polo mints. All were passed as innocent.

Mason’s hand baggage was opened by an efficient lady in a well-filled gray sweater. She switched on his razor, dictaphone, and radio and inspected his cameras and lenses with care. She ignored the silica-gel bags and various other small, harmless-looking items.

As soon as Mason finished with Security he headed for the toilets in the Departure Lounge, where he taped a polythene bag to the inside of one of the cisterns. The bag contained all his “guilty” items, including bugging gear, firing pin, Polos and doctored cassettes. He reloaded his cameras with genuine Ilford film.

No sooner was he seated behind a newspaper in the Departure Lounge than his name was called out on the Tannoy. He must return to Security. Once there he was taken to a side room and confronted with his rifle case. This he unloaded, explaining that the gun was a decommissioned antique for which he had an exchange-buyer in Muscat. He intended to bring back a six-foot-long matchlock if the sale went well.

The officers seemed satisfied but rechecked all Mason’s gear. This went ahead without a hitch and he returned to the toilets to retrieve his equipment. He recalled that the previous year he had felt guilty during the recheck en route to Cyprus. This time he had been troubled by no such twinges.

Davies had still not boarded by the time of the last call for their flight, but Mason spotted and identified him with considerable relief soon after it was made. The Welshman traveled First Class, Mason in Economy.

The TriStar was half full until Doha but then filled up, mostly with Asians, for the final legs to Dubai and Muscat. It touched down at Seeb International Airport shortly before midnight. The night air was cool, and Davies was met by a cab driver holding a name board.
While Davies returned to await his baggage amid a milling bustle of Asians, Mason asked the Welshman’s driver if he was free.

“Sorry, sah’b, I take another man to Gulf Hotel. But no worry. Many more taxi outside for you.”

Mason relaxed. Spike already had him booked into the Muscat Gulf, the best of the only three available hotels in all Oman. There was now no need to worry if Davies’s bags appeared before his own.

Bill Bailey, Chief Superintendent of the Air Wing of the Royal Oman Police, watched the helicopter disappear toward the mountains on an emergency medical evacuation requested by the Army. He had sent John Milling because no one knew the Jebel Akhdar better.

Most of Bill Bailey’s helicopters were Augusta Bell 205s, modeled by the Italians on the American Huey and extremely reliable even when flown well beyond their specified limits. They were designed to carry, under normal conditions, a maximum of twelve fully equipped men but Bill had once counted twenty-four Dhofaris, all with bundles of personal gear, spill out of one.

Bill knew John Milling of old, for both men had served with the Royal Marines in Europe. John had not been his normal cheerful self the last couple of days, and Bill put this down to the recent news of the death, in a helicopter crash, of Queen Noor of Jordan. During a royal visit to Oman the previous December, John had flown Queen Noor to all the main places of interest and grown to like her. Most of his pilots, Bill knew, would simply have said, “How sad.” But John took such things very much to heart. If he liked you, he was the most loyal of friends. A bit of a romantic too, Bill had always thought. It was probably due to his genes: he came of a devoutly Protestant family from Ballymoney, in Northern Ireland, where his father was the North Coast Warden for
the National Trust. Tall and very good-looking, John had conquered more than one heart on his travels over the years.

The reason for his current introspective mood had in reality nothing to do with the late Queen of Jordan and everything to do with his wife. Bridget, or Bridgie as she was generally known, was seven and a half months pregnant with their second child and showing worrying signs of a premature delivery. With the leaden heat of the Oman summer less than a month away, John was anxious for Bridgie to have the child in Europe, and until then he must ensure she was treated like porcelain.

A natural sportsman, John had rowed at Henley for his school and then joined the Commandos. After service in the Far East he was seconded in 1969 to the Sultan’s Forces and decorated for bravery under fire. For a while he flew helicopters in the West Indies until, leaving the Royal Marines in 1975, he joined the Air Wing of the Royal Oman Police. After eighteen months his restless soul was already becoming bored. He sought new and distant horizons.

The Bell flew through the Sumail Gap. To the south lay many hundreds of miles of sand and igneous rock, the Wahiba and Sharqiya regions; to the north the great escarpment of the Jebel Akhdar and Nakhl. On landing at Izki camp, John collected a generator spare part, then, departing slightly from his official flight plan, flew north for the lush gardens of Birkat al Mawz, Pool of the Plantains. To the delight of his Omani crewman Ali, they headed for a valley that cleft the sheer face of the Jebel Akhdar, ten thousand feet high.

John’s face visibly relaxed, the tensions of his personal worries dropping away as the need for his flying skills became paramount. This was split-second flying deep in the heart of the most spectacular scenery in the world.
The canyons of Colorado were mere runnels compared with the spiraling chines of the Akhdar.

The atmospheric change within the ravine and its effect on the Bell was immediate as the hot air of the plains confronted katabatic gusts from the escarpment. John juggled his controls with the skill and delight of a teenager at an arcade video game. But this was very much for real, a test for any pilot.

The floor of the valley, the Wadi Miyadin, zigzagged below, mostly in shadow, a crooked corridor of waterfalls, deep pools and enormous boulders tossed there by bore waves in years gone by.

This was life at its best, an exhilaration John had experienced only from flying and from the heat of battle in Dhofar, now over six years ago; a lifetime away. John was disdainful of many of his expatriate colleagues in the Omani services. They seemed to care only about their pay and perks, showing little or no interest in this wonderful land and its friendly people. For his own part he regretted the disappearance of the old Oman. While he could appreciate the enormous benefits of the progress brought about by the accession of Qaboos, he missed the charm, the unique atmosphere that had drawn him back to this country. Omanis still wore their traditional white robes, the headdress known as a
shemagh
and curved waist daggers, but Polaroid sunglasses had sadly become part of the national dress. Cola bottles, telephone lines and motor scooters were infesting every corner of the land. All were doubtless blessings to the local people but a bit of a letdown to the romantic observer.