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.
16
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.
The three men returned by their outward route carrying the suitcase and, having passed the rocks where Mason hid, stopped in the shadows of the first camelthorn bush that they reached.
As they settled down, Mason, crouching below the silhouette of the rock outcrop, circled 180 degrees until, approaching their position with the sun behind him, he monkey-crawled in the dirt of the scrub to within twenty paces of the bush.
Camel thorn is sharper and tougher than any rose thorn, and Mason could get no closer even when he eased his travel bag along the ground behind him. He unzipped it and removed a pocket-sized bug gun. He could hear conversation but no
words were clearly audible, so he loaded a transmitter dart and cocked the powerful crossbow mechanism. He could see his target at ground level only and he aimed at the roots of a thorn tree close to the floppy hat, which lay in the dirt near its perspiring owner. The dart struck the ground quite close to the hat and, donning the earphones of his receiver, Mason was soon able to tune into the conversation.
The transmitting bug’s position was by no means ideal and Mason could distinguish the words of only one man. A German accent, he guessed, but could not be sure. The meeting lasted some forty-five minutes. Mason learned little, although a few bits of information were of immediate interest. The speaker was a worker at a police helicopter hangar, his boss was called Chief Superintendent Bailey and he was to fix his machine to crash on the morning flight.
Mason felt elated. He would locate the relevant police chief and warn him of his danger. Meanwhile, if he glued himself to Floppy Hat instead of the Welshman, he might yet identify the leader and the motivation behind their activities.
He kept well behind until he heard the Nissan drive off. Then he broke cover and jogged, as fast as the rifle and travel bag would allow, to the Datsun. Placing the rifle beside him, he leaned sideways to throw the travel bag onto the rear seat. This action may well have saved his life, for a bullet shattered the windshield. Mason reacted with speed. Grabbing travel bag and rifle, he dropped from the passenger door to the ground and slithered into the scrub.
Almost immediately a second bullet smashed into the bodywork of the Datsun. Mason spotted the only possible position of cover from which his car was visible, a jumble of rock no more than 150 yards to his front and across the low wadi. The sun favored neither party but Mason was a marksman and the. 22 Hornet was his favorite weapon.
With such a small-caliber bullet he needed a head shot. He took careful aim at the most likely rock. In a few seconds he saw a dark face and white-shirted shoulder appear just left of his aiming point. He realigned in an instant and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle was zeroed for a hundred meters, so the 45-grain hollow-point bullet, muzzle velocity 2,400 feet per second, required two and a half inches’ elevation aim-off. There was no further sound. No movement. Mason left his bag in the scrub and loped across the wadi, having reloaded his rifle.
The body was that of an Asian. He must have been in the Nissan with the others. Mason shrugged. He noticed that the bullet had entered an inch or so higher than his aiming point. Intended to hit the thinnest part of the skull, the left eye socket, the bullet had in fact penetrated the eyebrow and the thicker bone and sinus cavity beneath, and gone into the brain.
There was no pulse at the carotid artery under the jaw. A drop of blood had issued from the wound, and a thin trickle from one ear, but there was no exit wound: the bullet, probably fragmented, was somewhere inside the skull. A quick body search revealed only a Parker pen and a tin of tobacco. Mason had begun to consider whether to dispose of the dead man or to attempt to catch up with the Nissan when that vehicle reappeared at speed around the nearest bend in the wadi.
Uncertain whether the men were armed, Mason took no chances. Wedging the Asian’s. 303 behind a rock, he struck west and directly away from the negotiable floor of the wadi. He headed, by a circuitous route, for the plateau of the falaj mounds, the only solid cover within miles.
No bullets chased him but he did not look back until, reaching the mound with the hidden suitcase, he found a climber’s rope affixed to a steel peg and disappearing down the falaj shaft. Before lowering himself, he spotted the three men not far behind.
The falaj system was developed in Persia in 400 BC and introduced to Oman two thousand years ago. The diggers were known as muqanat, “men of the killers,” for many died of rockfalls or escaping gases. They were often young boys, blinded at birth, who developed an uncanny accuracy when digging through solid rock with simple tools, so that the narrow channels ran straight and dipped only imperceptibly to maintain gravity. Some falaj were up to 150 feet deep and fifty miles long, taking water under the hottest of deserts with little loss from evaporation.
Since the last of the Persian invaders were expelled, centuries had passed in which many falaj, especially minor offshoots to long-abandoned villages, became neglected and partially blocked. Mason had no way of knowing how far he would be able to travel within this falaj but he was certainly safer below than aboveground in his present circumstances.
He reached the canal floor, or rather a heap of spoil and a goat carcass, some eighteen feet down. The diameter of the shaft had been sufficiently narrow to enable a tall man to chimney his way upward without help from a rope, and Mason assumed other shafts would be no wider. He headed south in the knowledge that the canal would gradually rise as it led away from the mountains.
There were numerous rockfalls but none entirely blocked the way. Mason was aware that various types of viper and water snake infested the Omani falaj system but he kept his mind on other things. A loud shout or a rifle shot might trigger a major rockfall.
Perhaps nobody would follow him. Well past the second vertical shaft he waited and listened, cursing silently when he clearly heard a clatter of rocks down the tunnel behind him. He increased his speed and blundered into a waist-deep pool where the channel floor was faulted. Beyond this and close to the third vertical shaft, Mason’s head, bent forward and low, made painful contact with an earthen wall.
Swearing aloud, he rubbed his scalp. At the same time he felt apprehension surge through his stomach, a fairly rare experience since he was blessed with an unusually high threshold of fear. The cause of his dread was the sound of hornets, many hundreds of them, stirring in anger. Two years earlier, on a patrol in central Oman, Mason had witnessed the agonizing death of two young Omani girls attacked by jebel hornets in a deserted hovel. The nest had hung from the ceiling like some giant inverted cone of mud. Now the memory made him fall to the tunnel floor and scrabble forward. To his relief the way was clear, with sufficient space beneath the nest to make his way forward. Knowing the smell of his fear would leave a scented trail, he forced himself to lie calm and still along the damp surface of the channel. He was not stung and the nest quietened down. Gingerly he continued, and minutes later heard the terrified screams of his pursuers roaring down the echo chamber of the tunnel. The sound of splashing water followed, and then silence but for an occasional low moan.
Two shafts to the south Mason came to a pile of spoil that helped him gain a chimneying position at the base of the man-made tube. He waited patiently for two hours, then, with his back and his arms inching up one side, his braced feet up the other and his rifle hanging below him from its strap, he reached the surface panting and filthy.
The plateau was lifeless in all directions, a midday heat shimmer raising inverted mirages to the south. He returned cautiously to the Datsun, collected his bag from the bushes, knocked away the remnants of the windshield and drove back to the main road. There was no sign of the Nissan. Mason took his second travel bag down to the wadi a mile upstream of Fanjah and, washing with care, changed into the standard expatriate uniform of cotton slacks and shirtsleeves.
From the pocket of his dirty Army trousers he took the empty case of the only bullet he had fired and buried it in the wadi bed. Lighting a Montecristo cigar, he cleaned the Rigby thoroughly and sat back to enjoy life in general and especially the magnificent view of the great mountains to the north.
At 3 p.m., back in his hotel room, Mason telephoned Inquiries. There were two numbers for Chief Superintendent Bailey of the Royal Oman Police Air Wing. He took both and tried the home number first.
The Baileys’ Kashmiri houseboy, Said, who spoke good English, answered and apologized that the sah’b was out and would be quite unobtainable for the rest of the day.
“But this is very urgent.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Could you give him a message?”
“Very happy, sir. Yes, a message.”
“Please tell him he must
on no account go flying tomorrow morning. In fact no flying at all until he has spoken to me on this number.”
He gave the Kashmiri the hotel number and his room extension, but not his name.
Mason had been prebooked into the Gulf Hotel as “MOD VIP ex-Kendall,” and on arrival had told the receptionist his passport was at the British Embassy for renewal. Three subsequent and generous tips to receptionists for minor services had helped avoid any reminders about the passport. He had called himself Mr. D. Messon and given the management to understand he would be staying for a further three weeks.
The Kashmiri repeated Mason’s message back to him and then added, “Chief Superintendent Bailey will not be flying tomorrow, sir. You must not worry about that. He is not to fly for at least two more days.”
“Are you certain of that?” Mason was bewildered.
“Certain sure, sir. Oh yes indeed, he will not fly. I know his program. I look after him.”
Mason thanked the Kashmiri. The man sounded honest and reliable. There was nothing more he could do to warn Bailey until the next day. At no stage in the Sumail had his face been visible to the Welshman or his cronies. Of that he was certain. Nothing would connect him with the dead Asian and he felt fairly sure that the opposition would dispose of the body themselves. That evening, when traffic in and out of Northern Headquarters was at its busiest, he returned the Datsun to the Motor Transport Section and borrowed a Land Rover in its place. If anyone noticed the soiled state of his uniform they might feel disdain but not suspicion.
After an excellent dinner, Mason settled back in his room to an evening of Tolkien and listening for the return of the Welshman.
Bridgie wore a cleverly cut white dress that accentuated her narrow shoulders and superlative cleavage while playing down the current size of her midriff. She was a touch troubled by John’s mood. He was as gentle and attentive as ever where she was concerned, but definitely out of sorts for some reason. He had been a touch upset by his recent Jebel Akhdar mission but this was altogether different. If she did not know him better she might have thought him nervous. This and the memory of the St. Patrick’s Day omen made her especially anxious when John failed to turn up at the embassy dinner. The ambassador, Sir Peter Treadwell, was leaving, and his wife had laid on a splendid affair, a distant echo of the Raj.
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