Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (18 page)

John Milling closed the front door of the bungalow and settled into an armchair with his feet on the drawing-room table. In an hour or so he would go jogging along the coast road. This was not his normal practice on Thursday afternoons, but the pilot, James A. Sims, Jr., with whom he usually jogged or went scuba diving twice a week, was on leave. Jim was a tall, dark native of Tennessee and unmarried. John was looking forward to this outing since he found it hard going to keep pace with the athletic American and today he would accompany the forty-five-year-old George Halbert, a retired RAF navigator and one of the Air Wing’s fixed-wing pilots. George liked to drink and to keep fit so he indulged in binges of each activity on alternate months. He lived just down the street from the Millings.

The
Economist
magazine fell to the floor as John nodded off to the gentle rattle of the air-conditioning. Some minutes later he woke with a start at the chime of the
doorbell. Perhaps George had arrived early, the silly bugger, in the full heat of the afternoon.

Milling recognized neither of his visitors. Both wore slacks and clean white shirts, and the balding, shorter man with spectacles carried a briefcase. Both were profuse in their apologies. They had not realized Superintendent Milling would be resting. They would come back later. They were American military historians writing a definitive account of guerrilla wars in the mid- to late twentieth century. Colin Maxwell and Ted Ashley had suggested they seek Milling’s advice. John’s curiosity was pricked.

“Come in.” He waved them into the cool, curtained living room. “I can offer you a beer,
loomee
or iced tea.”

He indicated the armchairs and padded to the refrigerator in the kitchen. The bungalow was mostly open-plan. The refrigerator was tucked against a side wall in the kitchen and just out of sight of the living room. As Milling returned, grasping two beer cans and tankards, he noticed the snub-nosed revolver in the hands of the taller man.

“Put the beers down, Superintendent, and lie facedown on the floor.”

Milling did so.

“Now clasp your hands together, fingers interlaced, behind your back.”

One of the men bound his fingers and then his wrists together with a material that felt like electrical tape. Although there was no discomfort, the bindings were rock solid and did not respond to his subsequent attempts to dislodge them.

He was helped into one of the chairs and the armed man stayed behind him. The other set up an 8mm cine camera on a tripod, then moved around the bungalow bolting windows and doors. He moved a single venetian blind aside to allow more light onto Milling’s face.

Meier took his briefcase into the bathroom and quickly made his preparations. Two days earlier, while the Milling family were at the beach, with Cha Cha handling their barbecue, de Villiers had taken a plaster-cast impression of the corner of the shower plinth, six inches above floor level in the bathroom. Karim Bux had then prepared, with molten lead, a truncheon head shaped in the plaster-cast mold.

The death scenario was simple. Milling had decided to take a prejog shower, slipped on some spilled shampoo, tore the shower curtain loose in falling and struck the plinth corner with his occiput, the point where skull joins neck. The resultant depressed fracture of the skull would cause brain damage and death. Since only one blow could be struck, Meier had an ample supply of polythene in readiness to induce asphyxiation if necessary.

Satisfied that all was ready in the bathroom, Meier returned to the cine camera and gave the go-ahead to de Villiers, who moved the revolver and his head into frame, close behind Milling’s. He spoke slowly and clearly. “On October 18, 1969, you murdered Salim bin Amr Bait Na’ath in an ambush at the Dhofari village Qum. Do you admit this?”

Milling was silent for a moment, digesting this totally unexpected and preposterous accusation. When he replied his voice was controlled.

“In 1969 I was an army officer fighting communist terrorists. I remember leading part of my company for the Qum operations and I remember that two
adoo
were killed but
not
by me.”

Only the whirr of the camera and the faint clatter of the air-conditioning disturbed the silence. De Villiers tried again.

“As the officer in charge of the Qum ambush you were in overall charge of all your men. If, under your orders, one of them fired the bullets that killed Salim bin
Amr, you are as responsible for his death as if you had personally murdered him.”

The events, nearly eight years ago, came back to John Milling in a rush. He knew exactly what had happened, but if he gave a name he would endanger someone else. He took the middle course.

“Whoever you are, you are crazy. Nobody is
murdered
in battle. Soldiers eliminate their enemy in military, not moral, circumstances.”

De Villiers did not hesitate. “You could have accepted the surrender of Salim bin Amr. There was no need to shoot him down. You will now be executed as decreed by the father of the man you murdered.”

A part of Milling’s mind toyed with the idea that these men were mad, obsessed with some vendetta, or even involved in some weird Esther Rantzen-inspired joke. But Meier’s eyes, the hard, flat tones of de Villiers’s voice and the quiet economy of movement of both men, militated against such theories.

“There
was
an officer who ambushed a Marxist commissar at Qum. I remember the event but not the name of the officer.” John remembered the name very well but was damned if he would reveal it. “If you do not believe me, check it out for yourselves. The officer wrote a book about that ambush and the events leading up to it. He clearly described the whole affair.”

“Do you have this book?”

Again John found he could not save his own skin at the expense of another man. The book was some two paces behind his chair with many other titles on Arabia.

“No,” he replied, “but it is easily obtainable through the Family Bookshop in Muscat.”

De Villiers had seen it all before. Faced with imminent death, most people find rational thought elusive, but there are many who remain cool and capable of creating a web of deceit in their bid to stay alive. Knowing that
Milling was indisputably the only British officer in the area and that Salim bin Amr died at the hands of a white Caucasian, de Villiers was unmoved by Milling’s evasions. He looked at Meier, who nodded. The film was in the can.

De Villiers took no chances, since Milling was unquestionably fit and powerful. The revolver remained out of sight and out of reach.

“Stay on your knees and go to the shower room.”

Milling hobbled in a kneeling position into the bathroom and was tied facedown over the lavatory seat. The barrel of the revolver nudged past his lips and against his teeth. A wad of lavatory paper was then forced into his mouth. Behind him he heard one of the men opening the briefcase and then, a wonderful sound, the loud chime of his doorbell.

Meier and de Villiers acted without hesitation. With the briefcase closed again, they shut Milling into the bathroom and quietly left the bungalow via the kitchen door. After crossing the rear courtyard, they vanished through a gate in the wall and made their way over wasteland to the nearby Seeb road junction where Karim Bux and Davies were waiting.

George Halbert, on receiving no response to the doorbell nor to his repeated shouts, went to the rear of the house and entered through the kitchen door, to find his friend in the bathroom. With a bread knife he quickly cut through the tape.

“What on earth have you been doing?” Halbert was amazed.

“Good question,” John replied. “Very good question.”

He filled the basin and plunged his face into the cold water. He needed time to think. If he told George, everyone would know in no time, including Bridgie, and that must be avoided at all costs. The doctor had warned them that she must avoid shocks of any sort or she might
lose the baby. She must not become distressed, and he well knew how she would react to the news of an attempt on his life. He dried his face and changed into jogging gear.

“I suspect those buggers from MAM HQ,” he told Halbert. “We messed them about a bit at the Blackpool Beach”—the nickname for a local beach—“party last week and they probably thought it would be clever to tie me to my own loo for a while.”

“I’m surprised you let them.” Halbert sounded unconvinced.

“They must have come in through the kitchen and caught me dozing. There were five of them.”

John made an effort to appear normal to Halbert, chiding him for the state of his girth, but his thoughts kept dwelling on the nightmare visit by the “historians.” He tried to telephone Colin Maxwell and Ted Ashley but both men were out. He decided to warn the officer who in reality had killed the
adoo
, as soon as he returned to the UK.

That evening John was especially attentive to Bridgie. They went to a St. Patrick’s Day hooley at the house of some Irish friends where many rebel songs were sung and John began to relax. Though nominally a Protestant, he was no political animal, and happily joined in the singing.

Bridgie left for a breath of fresh air. She was of the O’Neill Wallis family and a believer in the usual Celtic superstitions. She stopped short in the hall with a small gasp of horror. A vase of flowers gave color to an alcove in the side wall. But what a color, and in an Irish house. They should have known better.

Bridgie clasped her hands about her stomach as a shiver ran down from the nape of her neck. St. Patrick’s Day, and the flowers were red and white. A sign for sure of an impending death.

Mason was not in the best of moods on Friday, March 18. For twelve days the Welshman had lounged about the hotel as though on holiday with all expenses paid. He had chatted up the Gulf Air hostesses who invariably overnighted at the Gulf Hotel, and scored with at least two. Mason, from a sixth-floor window, had photographed him by the poolside, using an Olympus OM-1 with a 300mm telephoto lens. Since his own bathroom was impossible to black out, he had developed the Tri-X film in the nearest broom cupboard with reasonable results. In every other respect his Omani outing had been a failure, a waste of time, for he had nothing at all to report to Spike.

On the only day the Welshman had ventured beyond the hotel confines, Mason had promptly lost him in the Lawatiyah. He had returned to his room at 6 p.m., by which time Mason, no locksmith, had borrowed the Welshman’s key at the time of midday prayer and returned it before the receptionist was back at work. In the one and a half minutes Mason was inside the Welshman’s room, he taped one of his voice-activated transmitters, smaller than a matchbox, to the underside of the bedside table. The nine-volt battery gave twenty-four hours of continuous transmission, or three hundred on standby. More than enough for Mason since he would have to return to his regiment in Berlin by the following Tuesday at the latest.

Mason’s mood was not improved by the fact that Davies netted a third Gulf Air hostess that night and evidence of the Welshman’s considerable virility and remarkable imagination was delivered via the earplugs of his receiver unit on and off through the small hours.

At 7 a.m. both men swore when Davies’s phone buzzed. It was a summons to a rendezvous with de Villiers. Mason heard enough to understand that the Welshman was shortly to be collected from the hotel by a third party.

He dressed in his SAF uniform and, carrying his two prepacked travel bags, made his way to the far end of the car park. Wearing Polaroid sunglasses and his green SAF
shemagh
, he sat back in the Datsun and waited.

Davies emerged at 8 a.m. and walked down the road until out of sight of the hotel. A few minutes later Mason watched as a light brown Nissan pickup collected the Welshman. He followed at a discreet distance, thankful that the rutted dirt roads of his day had given way to tarmac, eliminating the dust cloud that acted as a smoke signal to any moving vehicle.

Some miles south of Seeb the Nissan veered west onto the Nizwa road, which it followed as far as the Sumail Bridge. Here the Welshman’s driver took a series of side tracks running behind the village of Fanjah and skirting a dense wall of aged date palms.

Mason required all his concentration to shadow the Nissan without being seen. At length, in rocky scrubland, it eased to a halt in a gravel wadi bed between thickets of acacia and thorn. Mason swerved from the track at once and switched off, the Datsun well concealed by low
ghaf
.

The larger of Mason’s travel bags served as a knapsack since its handles were designed to fit over the shoulders. There was no waist belt but his hands were free to carry the .22 Hornet rifle and a lightweight Zeiss monocular. He removed his Polaroid glasses. He had wandered this
terrain with his cameras when based at nearby Bidbid and knew the area as well as any local, most of whom seldom ventured beyond the cool and verdant Sumail.

Since there was no habitation nor point of any interest that satisfied the Welshman in these rocky steppes, Mason assumed that he and his companions were there to meet someone. He saw three men climb out of the Nissan but did not notice Karim Bux squatting in the shade of the acacias, chewing tobacco. Mason wore an ancient pair of Clark’s suede desert boots, “brothel creepers” as they are fondly known, by far the most cool and efficient footwear commercially available for patrol work in sand or on rocky ground. He approached the Nissan soundlessly and found its cab locked. On the front seat he noticed a battered bolt-action .303 of the type carried by many Omanis both as a symbol of their independence and for rough shooting in the hills.

Mason followed the Welshman’s group to a flat plateau where he watched them kneel by a mound of earth similar to a large anthill with its crown excavated into a crater. Other similar spoil-heaps dotted the plateau at intervals, and Mason knew them to be the openings of short vertical shafts giving access to a
falaj
or underground water canal.

Mason took a dozen photographs of the Welshman’s two accomplices. One wore spectacles and a white, floppy hat; the other was a tall, athletic character who hauled at a rope, lifting a suitcase from the shaft.