Killer Elite

14

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.

John spoke and wrote classical Arabic. He could perhaps teach English in the mountains of Royalist North Yemen, where the only sign of twentieth-century progress to have shown itself had been deadly clouds of Tabun nerve gas from Egyptian fighters ten years before. Bridgie might find such a life a touch lonely to begin with but she would soon grow to love it, for she was plucky and adaptable. John had the knack of wishful thinking down to a fine art.

The Bell climbed free of the shadows of the deeper ravines and John touched the controls to bank west over the pool of Salut, half hidden by groves of tamarisk and oleander, where camels and goats watered. Within minutes the view widened to an airy panorama of the jebel ramparts. Massive crags and cliff-hanging villages, cascades of plunging water and a slash of green where terraced orchards defied gravity.

On a ledge below, John spotted the remains of an RAF Venom bomber, a casualty of the 1959 mountain rebellion. The sultan now kept a permanent army detachment at Sayq on the jebel but in ’58 a rebellious imam, with Saudi help, had taken and held the mountain fastness with a heavily armed force of seven hundred guerrilla fighters. For nine hundred years no invaders had ever taken the mountain by force, though many had tried. In 550 BC the Persians had first arrived and fought their way by sheer weight of numbers to the upper plateau. Even the easiest of the existing twenty-three access routes was no wider than a single-file pathway.

In January 1959 two troops of SAS men, fresh from the Malayan jungles, surprised the imam’s fighters by a night ascent of a climbers’ route from Kamah village. The attack was led by Captain Peter de la Billiere, who, in 1991, was to command the British forces in the Gulf War.

John landed at Sayq Battle Camp. A messenger from the commandant ushered forward an Arab teenager with frightened eyes, a dirty dishdash (a checked skirtlike wraparound garment) and bare feet. This, said the messenger, was the husband of the evacuation case. John shook the boy’s hand and addressed him in his own tongue. He was of the Beni Riyam tribe and lived in Shiraija. His wife had been bitten by a cobra and was very sick. He had run up to the army camp but all three of the medics were on exercise elsewhere on the jebel.

“Did you kill the snake?” John asked the young Arab and was relieved when he nodded. Knowing the geography of Shiraija, John could see the wisdom of helicopter evacuation to a hospital with a range of serums capable of countering the venom of most Omani vipers. Whenever evacuating snake-bite cases, he tried to give the hospital authorities the snake’s body along with the patient. This ensured the use of the correct serum without delay.

John handed the generator spare to the commandant’s messenger, strapped the boy into the rear of the Bell with a set of headphones, and left for Shiraija. The village was no more than a mile from the Sayq camp but tucked into the upper reaches of a near-vertical ravine. The mountainside below fell away in giddy tiers of irrigated steps. Every layer was tended by artificial channels that overflowed from level to level to the very last of the tiny fertile orchards 3,000 feet below.

Plants and trees with exotic foliage hung heavy with fruit: figs, peaches, almonds, walnuts, berries, bananas and pomegranates, to name but a few. Sugarcane groves thrived on the lower tiers and lawns of lucerne waved in the cool, scented breeze at every level.

Crewman Ali conferred with the young Arab, who, face pressed to the Plexiglas, kept making downward motions. The girl must have been working in the very lowest of the orchards. John circled slowly, banking so the boy could see the terraces below. At length the young Arab shouted into the headsets so that both airmen winced. He had spotted his wife.

Six hundred feet above the victim’s location John found a lucerne bed just wide enough for the helicopter to land without the rotors smashing into the wall of the next terrace. The three of them scrambled down through the orchards to where the girl lay in long grass. Her face was tinted with the yellow dye of the saffron flower. He saw at once that she was dead. The poor lass, John thought: she had died alone and in great pain. Her body was rigid and arched, her eyes wide-open and her tongue extended. She looked so young to be married-no more than twelve, he estimated. Her throat glands were horribly puffed out, so John felt her wrist for a pulse. There was none. He touched one of her eyes but there was no reaction. The snake’s body, broken and battered, lay in the dirt. John saw that it was an eckis, not a cobra, and almost certainly, with its broad flat head, a highly poisonous Schneider.

The boy knelt beside the dead girl. His hands came together at his mouth and tears ran down his face. John clenched the boy’s shoulders and as the deep, dry sobbing began, held him close.

They carried the little body with care to the helicopter. John spoke with the Sayq duty signaler, and when they returned to the camp, a Land Rover with a stretcher and body bag awaited them.

John’s lasting memory of that day was the face of the boy, as lost and alone as a wounded gazelle. He and Ali were silent as they flew back to Seeb. John said nothing to Bridgie that evening, but he felt especially tender toward her and their three-year-old son, Oliver.