Killer Elite

PART 5
48

On Monday, October 22, I returned late from the most northerly of our tree plantations. It was a fine evening and, with the tractor lights to help, I completed the staking of the rabbit tubes. From the boundary gate, and for some twelve miles to the west, the high wilderness of Exmoor stretched unbroken along the coastline of North Devon. I loved the place, and although we had only been there six years we had planted 16,000, mostly deciduous, trees. My wife bred Aberdeen Angus cattle and St. John waterdogs and my job as European representative of the well-known, nonagenarian oil magnate, Dr. Armand Hammer, had helped us to turn the long-neglected land into a small working farm.

I was worried, for Dr. Hammer was not well and I could see the specter of unemployment looming ahead. To avert the likelihood of no income in the near future, I had begun, in my spare time, to write a novel about Iran. It was close to completion. Another three months perhaps and I would approach a literary agent.

The tractor descended the steep cleeve and the lights of our house flickered through the trees. All electrical power was supplied by a twenty-two-year-old generator. All water for the house and for the cattle arrived by gravity along a hose pipe from a distant spring. There were no deliveries of milk or papers. In short, a pleasantly cut-off atmosphere.

I put the tractor in its garage. As I looked east over the Brendon Hills, the entire countryside was dark. Not a single light was to be seen for seven miles, for the Exmoor folk sensibly build their homes down in the valleys.

We lived at 1,400 feet above sea level, and the winds that evening blew fresh over Hurdledown and Badge-worthy. My wife heard me removing my boots.

“What about the rubbish?” she shouted from the kitchen.

“What about supper?” I responded.

“It’ll wait,” she assured me.

Every Monday evening, when in Exmoor, I take the week’s accumulated rubbish in black bags to the stipulated roadside collection point a mile away. It is just about the only thing I ever do on a regular basis because my work in London, and lectures all over the place, run to no set schedule. The bags are best left out as late as possible before their early morning collection by the council truck. The foxes attack the bags and strew the contents all over the place if given more than a few hours’ notice of their presence.

At 8 p.m. I hitched the trailer, full of rubbish bags, to my wife’s ancient Montego estate and drove up the long, narrow lane known as the Drift Road. A trio of long-horned Highland cattle blocked the lane and ignored my hooting. I eventually edged them onto the verge. Then, on rounding the last bend before the lane reaches the moor road, I found a car parked in the middle of the lane. With the support of the local Master of Foxhounds, Captain Ronnie Wallace, I had agreed with the Exmoor Park Department to erect a large sign saying “Bridle Path Only” to keep cars out, so I was annoyed, to put it mildly.

Lovers, I presumed, hard at it in the back.

But the car, a black Volvo estate, was empty. I had no flashlight but I noticed an unusual modification to its front bumper, rather like an improvised steel snow-clearing blade.

I returned to the Montego intending to hoot loudly, since I presumed the occupants were nearby in the grass. Something, a noise or a brief flash of light, attracted my attention to the old barn on the far side of the hedge. My wife had rented this barn for some years for storing hay and had recently complained of missing bales. At?2.75 each this was serious, so I forgot the missing Volvo lovers and, fetching a tire iron from the Montego, climbed the five-bar gate and quietly entered the barn.

As I moved between the two tiers of bales, a flashlight was switched on immediately ahead, blinding me. A voice from behind the light ordered, “Drop it.”

As far as I could tell, four flashlights were being directed at me, and I was herded to the empty side of the barn.

“Sit down.”

I sat on a bale, totally bewildered. Perhaps these were hunt saboteurs. Such people had recently been active in the area. Since neither of us had hunted for years this explanation did not seem very likely. Maybe they wanted to steal the Montego. They were welcome. It was battered and scarred.

My eyes began to accustom themselves to the flashlight. I saw one of the men set up a video camera on a tripod and another threw onto my lap a copy of a book I had written many years before entitled Where Soldiers Fear to Tread.

The hay smelled very good, very sweet. I was sweating and realized that I felt afraid.

One of the men began to address me, his accent not dissimilar to that of my American godmother from Connecticut.

“In that book, Captain Fiennes, you admit to shooting and killing a Dhofari named Salim bin Amr, on the morning of October 18, 1969. Is this true?”

I could not see the face of the speaker behind the flashlight. The man must have been crazy.

“If I wrote that in this book, then of course it is true,” I replied.

“So you admit to the murder of that person?” His voice was level and humorless. Not the voice of a nutter or a crank. My confusion was turning to apprehension.

“Of course not.” I could hear the edge of fear in my voice and feel it in the pit of my stomach. “I have never murdered anyone. Never. You are talking about military actions, not murder, and at least twenty years ago. This is absurd. What do you want?”

Unbidden, and in the space of mere seconds, my memory played back the long-ago events in Dhofar, twenty-one years ago almost to the day.

We sat in the center of the wide wadi Habarut, halfway between the two whitewashed forts and exactly astride the unmarked border between Dhofar and South Yemen. My companion was the garrison commander of the communist forces, who was threatening retaliation for an incident provoked by a Dhofari tribesman. I offered him two hundred Rothmans cigarettes. He settled for four hundred.

My signaler called. A Priority Message from my boss, Colonel Peter Thwaites: Go at once to Thamrait. We drove east through the heat-shimmer of the gravel steppes and reached the base by noon.

Tom Greening, the sultan’s Intelligence officer, was there with new orders. I was to go that night on to the jebel and, some fourteen miles into adoo-held territory, at the village of Qum, capture two communist leaders and bring them back to him alive. He introduced me to a Mahra tribesman, a decidedly shifty-looking character who, he said, would be our guide. My men were appalled. This jebali was an adoo spy. We would be led into a trap. We would be cut off and killed to a man in the military heartland of the adoo.

I could see my men’s point of view. Just one wounded man would put us in a potentially disastrous position. As twenty-six fit and able soldiers, my platoon normally relied on speed, night travel and silence to survive. We would set out ambushes and then withdraw without delay back to the safety of the desert. Our greatest fear was to be cut off on the jebel. We had no stretchers, no mules, no helicopter assistance and, in the area Greening had indicated, no other Army backup to help us.

But orders were orders, so we drove south to the well of O’bet at dusk and climbed to the escarpment. After some miles we entered the foliated region of the jebel and behind us I saw flares fired into the air.

My sergeant whispered: “We are cut off. We must return by a different route.”

But we marched on through the night with our heavy loads of ammunition and water. No compass could have guided us along the confusing route of camel paths that meandered up and down deep wadis where no Sultanate troops had previously been fool enough to wander.

Within the thick screen of thorn bush and creeper that crammed the defiles, there was no room to maneuver off the narrow paths. Mosquitoes attacked in whining clouds and a sticky heat emanated from the foliage. After ten hours we came to a place of skull-like stones that littered the fields of knee-high grass. We stumbled and fell. I began to fear that dawn would find us short of Qum.

Dark amorphous shapes blobbed the upper slopes of the surrounding hills: wild fig trees and cattle kraals of thorn. Twice we passed the acrid tang of burning dung. To the southeast a patch of spreading gray crept into the blue-black sky.

The guide raised his hand. The village, he indicated, was directly below us. I moved with speed to place the sections before first light. Four or five men to a group, each with a machine gun, each hidden in clumps of thorn above and around the unseen houses. At last, with my own four-man section, we burrowed into a hollow-centered thicket with a floor of stones.

We slept for an hour with one man on watch. On waking I saw hummingbirds hovering and darting in the chintz ceiling of our hide. Through a break in the thorns I looked south at the scattered huts below and the rolling green land all about us. Beyond the rim of the mountains the Plain of Salalah was edged by the distant blue of the Indian Ocean.

Four men in dark brown uniforms moved from hut to hut below us. Through binoculars we counted some sixty or seventy armed men to the immediate south of the village, a mile or so away. They were preparing some sort of fortification.

Since waking I had felt sick with stomach pains; nothing new, for they had come frequently in the desert. Perhaps the water or the goat meat caused the trouble. Normally I could rush to some bush or rock and squat behind it for relief and to wait for the pains to pass. Then the sickness would abate, leaving me weak and sweating. But now there was nowhere to go but outside the thorn walls. To emerge even momentarily would put us all in great danger.

For an hour we had been forced to beckon passing villagers into our thicket at gunpoint for fear that, having spotted us, they might alert the adoo. The tiny hide was overcrowded. I built a parapet of rocks around my backside, between me and the others, and lowered my trousers just as my insides seemed to give way to an agonizing flood. At once the flies swarmed into the thicket. I used rocks instead of paper and collapsed the little “cubicle” onto the results of my personal crisis. Not a moment too soon.

As I wiped the sweat from my eyes I sensed movement outside the hide. Quietly I slid my rifle toward me and released the safety catch.

A narrow goat trail ran between our thicket and the top of a steep, grassy slope. Two tall men were approaching fast along it. I noticed their dark clothes and the glint of guns in their hands; also the polished red badge on the cap of the second man. It was not the tiny Mao button badge worn by many of the adoo but the hexagonal red star of a political commissar.

These were our men. I was sure of it. There was no time to think. They were fifteen yards away; soon they would see us. The first man stopped abruptly, seeming to sniff the air. His face was scarred, his hair close shaven. I watched fascinated as the Kalashnikov, its ugly round magazine cradled in his elbow, swung around as the man turned to face us. A Kalashnikov is an unpleasant weapon; a touch of its trigger will squeeze off a long burst of hollow-nosed 7.62 bullets that tear bone apart and pass through a man’s guts as they would through papier mache.

Inch by inch I lifted my rifle. The sun was in the east behind the man, outlining him. Only his shadow falling on the thicket shielded my eyes, stinging with sweat, from the direct glare. He peered straight at me now. I remember thinking, He has seen us. He is weighing his chances.

My voice seemed to come of its own volition. “Drop your weapons or we will kill you.”

The big man moved with incredible speed, twisting at the knee and bringing the Kalashnikov to bear in a single, fluid movement. I squeezed the trigger automatically. The guerrilla was slammed backward as though caught in the chest by a sledgehammer. His limbs spread like a puppet and he cartwheeled out of sight down the grassy slope.

Behind him the other man paused for a moment, unsure what to do. I became aware of his face beneath the jungle cap.

He looked sad and faintly surprised. His rifle, a Mark IV. 303, was already pointed at my stomach when a flurry of shots rang out. Two of my section fired simultaneously.

The man’s face crumpled into a bloody pulp, the nose and eyes smashed back into the brain. Bullets tore through his ribs and a pretty flowering thorn bush caught his body at the top of the grassy slope.

My signaler crawled on his belly from the thicket. There might be other adoo behind these two. Expertly he searched the corpse, bringing back rifle, ammunition and a large satchel stuffed with documents.

I glanced south: the bush was glinting with movement, dark forms scurrying toward us through the scrub. There was little time for making decisions; the other sections would be awaiting orders.

I flicked the national radio switch, no longer bothering to whisper.

“All stations! Five! Withdraw now… over.”

Fatigue forgotten, the men needed no encouragement and broke from their hides to fan out in a long, straggling line. Speed was their only hope and they moved with the wings of fear. Shots sounded from behind but no intercepting group materialized in front of us and the adoo never quite caught up with our retreat.

Back in Thamrait the soldiers slept like dead men but I found sleep elusive. I had often shot at people hundreds of yards away, vague shapes behind rocks who were busy firing back; but never before had I seen a man’s soul in his eyes, sensed his vitality as a fellow human and then watched his body ripped apart at the pressure of my finger.

I tried to force away the image of his destruction but his scarred face stayed watching me from my subconscious. A part of me that was still young and uncynical had died with him and his comrade, the commissar, spread-eagled on a thorn bush.

The memory passed as quickly as it came. The man behind the flashlight spoke again. “The need for justice is not eliminated by the passage of time. You will go now back to your car and drive to the point where you dispose of the bags every week on Monday evening. You will get out and unload the bags. No more, no less. Do nothing stupid, for we will have you covered at all times.”

One of the man’s colleagues hissed for silence, whispering, “I saw movement by the roadside.”

Two men went out to check. I could see little, my vision impaired by the flashlight.

It must have been a false alarm, for the men returned and I was prodded back to the Montego’s driving seat, one man climbing into the seat beside me. My brain raced. I remembered the old Army maxim taught during resistance to interrogation training: make your escape move as soon as possible after being caught. Desperately I tried to concoct a workable plan.

My passenger spoke. He had a hard, East London accent. “Wait until the Volvo moves out. Then go. They will turn left out of the lane. You go right and down the hill as you normally do. Do not exceed fifteen miles per hour.” My brain continued to race, but in neutral. No plan of action materialized. I felt like a rabbit in the presence of snakes.

I counted four men climbing into the Volvo immediately ahead. As the fourth closed his door, it happened. From the lane’s T-junction with the road some fifteen yards ahead an intense white light beamed down the lane. My eyes hurt and I turned away, clutching at them and fearing I was blinded. I expected the sound of bullets and shrank back behind the steering wheel. But I heard only the noise of breaking glass and a quickly cut-off scream.

The passenger door of the Montego was flung open and the man beside me disappeared as though sucked from the car. The all-consuming light was switched off and the night was black as pitch, the silence punctured only by the sound of oaths and muffled violence. This tailed away but for the scuff of rubber soles on tarmac. Then a car started up and someone climbed into the Montego. I felt a hand grip my shoulder and a friendly voice said, “Cheer up. They’ve all gone. You’re in no danger.”

My vision slowly began to return.

“Thank you, officer,” I said. “Are you from Dulverton, or Minehead?” I found myself naming the two district police stations.

“Don’t you worry where we’re from. Just hang on right there a minute and I’ll explain.”

Dimly I saw a vehicle reverse into the lane with only its side lights on; almost certainly a Range Rover, judging by its silhouette. On its roof an orange glow and the glinting parabola of a satellite dish, probably the light source. Doors slammed and the vehicle accelerated away. A large van then reversed toward us, similar to a standard high-roofed Transit laundry van. The back doors were opened and an interior roof light revealed an empty, cell-like cargo space lined with mattresses.

Four men approached the Montego, all with dark ski goggles hanging loose around their necks and carrying what appeared to be police truncheons. Their faces were streaked with black lines and unrecognizable. The man beside me spoke rapidly and the others dispersed. Soon I watched as five figures, all with their hands on their heads, entered the rear of the van. The doors were closed and the vehicle drove off, heading north toward Porlock.

“Come back for a drink,” I said, trying to make out the features of my rescuer. “I would like my wife to meet you. I really can’t thank you enough. Who were those people?”

“Call me Spike.” He shook my hand. “Don’t be surprised but I am not from the police and nor are my men. We are your friends and we have hunted those men for a long time. A very long time. Who were they? Well, that will take a wee while to explain.”

“Whoever you represent, Spike, I will forever be grateful, but come back to the house-”

He lifted his hand. “Do you trust me?” he asked quietly.

“Of course.”

“Listen. I have a great deal to do and very little time. I must ask you to speak to no one at all about all this. Your car is undamaged. No one has touched you. The police will think you have had a bad dream, to put it politely, if you tell them what happened. They will ask what has been stolen and they will look for motives.”

He paused but I said nothing. I could see the sense of his words.

“On Thursday you will be driving to London. Correct?”

“Why, yes. How do you know?” I asked.

“Never mind. Come to this address at 11:30 p.m.,” he said, scribbling on the back of a card and giving it to me, “and I will personally explain everything. Until then tell no one, not even your wife. There’s no point in upsetting her. Remember this, you are no longer in any danger. All those who wished you ill are accounted for. Okay? Do you agree?”

I felt I could trust this man. His features were clearer to me now. He had a large, careworn face. His gravelly voice was North Country and steady.

“No problem,” I told him. “I will see you on Thursday and talk to no one.”

He shook my hand again. “You’d better dump the rubbish and get back home or your wife will think the Highland cows got you.” He smiled and left. His car must have been along the Porlock Road.

I emptied the trailer and returned home. My wife seemed to notice nothing amiss. “Your supper’s in the oven,” she said.