Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) (27 page)

Hallett eased through the dark jungle of the shrubbery without a sound. He wore a green track suit and a gray scarf wrapped around his swollen throat. The wind was bitter and ice covered the nearby pond.

Rhododendrons crowded the house itself, a two-story 1930s building wedged between the road and the railway some two miles out of Hereford. Captain Tony Shaw of the SAS and his family were quartered there and Hallett watched their New Year celebrations with the Kealys fully aware that, unarmed as he was, he could do little but provide a warning if the Welshman and his colleagues decided to attack Kealy at this isolated spot.

A week later, on January 14, gaunt from lack of sleep, Hallett took yet another cup of black coffee from his vacuum flask. He was parked outside the rectory, observing the guests at the retirement party of the rector of Chobham. Everyone enjoyed themselves. Maggi Kealy’s father, the Reverend Roney Acworth, made a fine speech, and Hallett signed off. With the best will in the world and unswerving loyalty to Spike Allen, he simply had to get back to work or Rowntree would sack him.

“No
one
has shown the least interest in Kealy or his family,” he assured Spike, “since I met the Welshman at the hospital. My own opinion is that he, and any boyos with him, have been frightened off.”

Reluctantly Spike agreed. He was fully aware that
Kealy might still be in danger but his Locals did not grow on trees. Weeks spent alternating between their normal employment and long hours in the cold watching strangers for Spike did not endear the cause to them.

With a sigh, Spike telephoned Wallace, a farmer from Malvern who had alternated the Kealy watch with Hallett, and stood him down.

Their heavy bergen rucksacks on the backseat, the two SAS officers drove down the A465 to Abergavenny and, via Llangynidr, to the dam of Talybont Reservoir. Parking the Renault close by the weirs, they donned lightweight SAS combat jackets, DMS boots and their thirty-five-pound rucksacks. They set off with the long, easy strides of the experienced mountain men that they were, up the Tarthwynni Valley.

From a telephone a mile away in the village of Aber, Meier called de Villiers, who, with three regular Tadnams men, was parked beside the public telephone booth close to the Storey Arms Outdoor Center on the other side of the Beacons.

Meier returned to the Talybont weirs and clamped a bug beneath the dashboard of the Renault. The passenger’s window had been left slightly open, but even if all the windows had been closed, Meier would still have been inside the car in less than two minutes, leaving no signs of entry.

Before leaving Britain, Davies had marked an Ordnance Survey map with the detailed route of the SAS “endurance march,” with highlights where the track bottlenecked in especially remote reaches.

Midweek, midwinter, and during the hours of darkness it was safe to count on very few hill walkers being abroad on the Beacons. Such were the conditions required by Davies’s plan.

Well after dark Meier watched the two men arrive
back at the Renault. Neither showed signs of exhaustion. As they took off their boots and rucksacks their conversation centered on the Shah’s flight from Iran the previous week.

As Kealy closed the trunk on their wet equipment he said to his companion, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. We should give the selection lads a good run for their money on Thursday.”

“What time does it start?” the other SAS man asked.

“The three-tonners leave Hereford at 1:30 a.m. and the first walkers set out from here around 3 a.m.”

“The forecast is lousy.”

“I know but that’s unlikely to stop play.”

“What’s the standard weight these days?”

“Same as always,” said Kealy, “fifty-five pounds.”

“And the course?”

“Still forty-one miles to be done in a maximum of seventeen hours.”

As the Renault departed, the sound in Meier’s earphones faded and quickly disappeared. He switched off the receiver, for he had no need to hear more.

Over the next three days of deteriorating weather, the Clinic and their helpers familiarized themselves with the misty heights of the barren Brecon Beacons.

De Villiers had purchased his clothing and equipment from a government-surplus shop in the Strand. The owner had explained the various army-surplus items: Denison camouflage smock, OG trousers, KF shirt, khaki puttees, DMS boots and a Royal Engineers’ badge fitted to a standard black beret. Ancillaries included a poncho ground sheet, hexamin stove with fuel blocks, fifty-seven-pattern webbed belt with pouches, three plastic water bottles, mess tins, eating irons and a large rucksack of the type known to airborne soldiers as a bergen.

With his hair cut short, army-style, de Villiers parked himself and his bergen on one of the wooden benches at Hereford railway station. The London train was due in twenty minutes. He opened a pack of Players No. 6 and offered a cigarette to the tall man in blue jeans and leather jacket slumped dejectedly beside him. De Villiers had selected him from among some twenty others over the past two days.

“Don’t mind if I do,” was the only response.

De Villiers produced a Ronson Storm lighter and lit their cigarettes. “Haven’t seen you around,” said de Villiers, glancing sideways at the man. “What went wrong?”

“One of their bastard staff,” the soldier grunted, “thought I swore at him yesterday on the Fan.”

“Did you?”

The man gave a half smile. “Maybe. I felt more knackered than I thought was possible on the second time ’round. All my blisters burst. Maybe it’s all for the best but I hate the thought of the lads back in Catterick. They’ll take the mickey something awful for months. I was so
sure
I’d make it. What about you?”

De Villiers was as charming as only he knew how, and as convincing. They traveled to Paddington together and exchanged cap badges, and by the time they went their separate ways there was little de Villiers had not learned about the SAS selection course to date and the expected horrors to come.

At 11:45 p.m. on the night of January 31 and in heavy rain, a Ford Transit van in its GPO livery backed up briefly against the perimeter fence to the rear of the SAS officers’ mess. From its roof de Villiers threw down his bergen and dropped down over the high fence, breaking his landing with a standard parachute roll.

Within seconds he was hidden behind the dark walls of the NAAFI, adjacent to the regimental cookhouse. With an hour or so to wait, he settled back under a
shrub, his poncho drawn over his beret. Even if Meier failed, the first stage of the evening’s plans were under way and the weather forecast was hopeful: severe gales and snow on high ground. Meier had tried to woo one of the Army Catering Corps cooks but was foiled by SAS Security. His plan had been simple: identify one of the white uniformed chefs by the bins at the rear of the cookhouse. Not difficult with binoculars from his car in Bullingham Lane. Track the man to his drinking spot in the evenings and bribe him, as part of a wager, to let a fellow soldier, Meier himself, into the camp in his company and wearing “whites.” But as Meier learned when he befriended a pimply ACC youngster, the SAS forbade the cookhouse personnel ever to leave camp in their uniforms. Instead there was a changing room within the cookhouse and any unrecognized cook entering the main gate would be challenged by the MOD Police to show his ID card. Furthermore, Pimples informed Meier that Scouse, the chief SAS cook, who had been there twenty years, was a terror who kept close tabs on all his staff however temporary their posting. One of his rulings was “no strangers behind the hotplate.”

Meier racked his brains, but nontechnical improvisation was not his forte and when by 10:30 p.m. that Thursday night he had no safe means of entry to the camp, he left the matter to de Villiers’s skill and drove south to Talybont.

Forty-five minutes after midnight, with the rain still drumming down, de Villiers recognized Mike Kealy emerging from the shadows to the right-hand side of the HQ block, the direction of the officers’ mess. Kealy was fully equipped but moved quietly and easily.

De Villiers swung his bergen over his back and followed Kealy to the nearby cookhouse. He climbed the
four stone steps immediately behind him and they entered together. Inside the well-lit, L-shaped room thirty or forty students and selection staff were already seated and stuffing themselves with food. There was little chatter or camaraderie, for this was the final test of Selection Week, a milestone in the careers of the lucky few.

De Villiers kept his belt kit on. He dumped his bergen beside Kealy’s and slipped a tiny radio bleeper into one of its side pockets. He joined the food queue at the hotplate, where the duty cook soon helped him to a large plate of mixed grill and a mug of hot tea. He had watched Kealy pass by the table where the instructing staff sat; the only animated group. The senior instructor, a giant of a man, greeted the major with a smile.

“Hallo, Lofty.” Kealy smiled and took a seat at one of the tables reserved for the students.

De Villiers, careful to avoid any eye contact with students or staff, sat close to Kealy, and when the latter went off to fetch a spoon, he reached across for sugar and palmed the contents of a packet of white powder into Kealy’s tea.

The powder, ground down from four 250 mg. tablets of chlorpropamide, would not have an immediate or predictable effect. After an hour or two Kealy would begin to feel sweaty, weak, and increasingly disorientated, for chlorpropamide is a drug that promotes the action of insulin within the body. Kealy’s blood sugar would slowly fall below a tolerable level and would leave him dangerously vulnerable to the elements. The effects of hypoglycemia would steadily increase to a peak, or from Kealy’s point of view a nadir, somewhere between three and six hours after ingestion.

Many of the students were loners. Some were veteran sergeants, even sergeant-majors, from airborne units with years of service behind them. If these men passed
into the SAS they would enter as mere troopers and take their chances of promotion alongside far younger and less experienced soldiers.

Initially over 150 soldiers from throughout the British Army had signed on for selection. After a week’s introduction to navigation and other basic skills, they were subjected to three weeks of softening up with ever-increasing grades of difficulty. They had fallen like flies, for the SAS selection staff watched every move and circled vulturelike to pounce on the merest whiff of weakness. The unfortunates found themselves waiting on Hereford station with a one-way ticket back to their own regiment.

The fifth and last week had been a killer and, for the forty weary and blistered survivors now congregated in the cookhouse, this was the final act. Known simply as “Endurance,” the test involved each individual traveling alone over forty-one miles of difficult terrain with fifty-five pounds of equipment. Seventeen hours was the maximum time allowed but even if a man completed the course far more quickly he might still fail selection—with no reason ever given. Courses of over 160 selectees had ended without a single man entering the SAS. No wonder then that the trainees gulped down their food in an introspective mood, paying little attention to one another. De Villiers felt happier when the instructors, saying nothing, rose from their table and the students followed suit.

Outside in the semidarkness de Villiers kept close to Kealy. When the two three-ton Bedford lorries stopped by the Guard Room, the trainees collected their rifles and then mounted up with their bergens. De Villiers, in the rain and the shadows, moved around but did not enter the Guard Room.

The chief instructor rode in the cab of the leading lorry. Kealy, apparently keen to be treated no differently
from the trainees during his self-imposed fitness jaunt, climbed into the back along with nineteen others, including de Villiers.

The vehicles whined their way through the outskirts of Hereford, dodging heaps of litter caused by the national strike.

“Guess who’s joining the strike tomorrow?”

Disembodied voices in the back of de Villiers’s lorry.

“I didn’t know anyone was still at work.”

“Yeah, well, the gravediggers are all out as from tonight. Die now and yer old lady’ll have to clear a space in the deep freeze.”

“Not in Hereford,” said a Welsh voice. “All our diggers are part-time. Most of them are the local fire service laddies.”

By the time they reached Pontrilas at the eastern edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park most of the passengers had fallen silent in the canopied darkness. A mile from the Talybont Reservoir’s dam and close to the northern rim of Talybont Forest, the training sergeant-major halted the lorries in a car park beside Tarthwynni River. There was no shouting of orders. Each man had received his detailed instructions back in Hereford. The bergens were weighed on spring scales, and Lofty, the training sergeant-major, waved the trainees off one by one into the night.

De Villiers moved into the bushes, and when Kealy set out, one of the first to go, he followed some fifteen yards behind. He did not switch on his tracker unit for the bleeper but kept in touch with Kealy’s outline, different from the students’ because of his old-fashioned bergen. Most of the students also sported Denison cam smocks but Kealy wore the shorter SAS windbreaker. With only a fifteen-pound bergen load, and fit though he undoubtedly was, de Villiers still found it hard work to keep up.

All the trainees carried three-quarter-length foul-weather
coats made of plastic-coated nylon. “Don’t ever march in ’em,” was the training sergeant-major’s advice. “You’ll get as wet from your own sweat as you ever will from the rain. Then, next day, any downwind opposition will smell you a mile off. Just use them when you’re leaguered up and it’s pissing down.”

Although few of the remaining trainees knew one another by name, some had become aware of Kealy’s identity. He had joined in their hill-slogging tests on two previous occasions and the word had spread that he was a regular SAS officer with a remarkable record. Kealy kept to himself. The muted adulation of the trainees, the sidelong glances and whispered comments as the news spread of a hero in their midst, made him feel awkward and embarrassed. Even so, the advantages of training alongside these eager “wannabees” outweighed the doubts because they were at peak fitness and many were ten years his junior. He knew that by measuring his own performance directly against theirs, he would be sure that he could match the stamina of any man in the squadron he was about to command.