Killer Elite

by Ranulph Fiennes

  On January 4 the Defa position was secured and the advance began. The SAS, after heavy fighting, secured an advanced position and finally Point 980. As over five hundred soldiers arrived at this feature, the SAS moved on to another hill, coded Point 604. As they prepared for the night, a small group went forward to lay trip wires and claymore mines just ahead of their position. Tony Shaw, close friend to Mike Kealy and about to take over the SAS squadron in Dhofar, was the point man and leader of the mine-layers. An adoo patrol attacked them and there were casualties on both sides.

  A great deal of confusion and indecision held up the advance the following day, and the overall Dhofar commander, Brigadier John Akehurst, summarily removed the officer in charge and replaced him with Major Patrick Brook, Mike Marman’s predecessor as Armored Car Squadron leader.

  Patrick Brook and the SAS major sent three of the companies east through dense scrub to gain positions above the caves before a final attack on Sherishitti. This move began on the morning of January 6, but the lead unit, Red Company DR, went a little too far south, a fact they recognized once they reached the wide, open valley that led to the caves. Their company commander, Major Roger King, suggested holding their position along the edge of the great clearing in order to give cover to a further advance by 2 Company JR across the open ground.

  Two Company’s acting commander, Captain Nigel Loring, arrived and surveyed the wide valley ahead. His firqat liaison man, an experienced SAS sergeant, advised him, “Don’t go across. It will be suicide. Go around the clearing.” But Loring could see that the open area was well covered from two sides by men of Red Company, and knowing that speed was of the essence, he stood up and led his men out into the sunny clearing, overlooked on the far side by the rocky hillside that was his objective.

  When Loring and his lead platoon were well into the open the adoo sprang their trap. The far slope exploded with sound. There was no cover, so wounded men were hit again and again until they lay still. Captain Ian MacLucas was hit by seven bullets. Nigel Loring was killed. The killing ground echoed with the groans and the entreaties of the dying. To break cover and enter the valley from either side would require an act of great courage.

  The Red Company soldiers and the SAS returned fire as best they could and certain individuals risked all in a crazy attempt to rescue the wounded. One of these was Sekavesi, the giant Fijian who had been with Mike Kealy at Mirbat. Another was Captain David Mason of Red Company, who, weaving from side to side, forced himself through the maelstrom of bullets, rockets and mortar explosions and spent two hours under fire to succor and rally the wounded. He finally staggered back with his friend, the wounded MacLucas. His escape unscathed was miraculous. Within months he was awarded the Sultan’s Bravery Medal.

  When all their wounded were retrieved, and only the dead left behind, the Sultan’s Forces withdrew to Point 980. Behind them they heard the single shots of the adoo firing into the bodies in the clearing.

  Jebel Regiment had suffered thirteen dead and twenty-two wounded. Ian MacLucas, saved by David Mason, was still a paraplegic in 1991. Many adoo, mostly of the Bin Dhahaib unit, were killed in Operation Dharab. One was Mahab bin Amr Bait Anta’ash, the second son of Sheikh Amr’s first wife. He was ripped apart by mortar fire from the SAS mortar position.

  Mac and Tosh Ash of the G Squadron SAS mortar group were both wounded by the same adoo bullet and evacuated by helicopter. Barry Davies was pulled back to take over command of the mortars.

  Mac felt a wave of tiredness and carefully laid the album down on the carpet. He was asleep, so Pauline answered the door the next morning when Jock called in, before returning to Aberdeen, to collect his photographs.

  As Jock left he noticed, as he had the previous evening, a black Volkswagen Polo parked close by the bus stop opposite Mac’s house. The driver, a woman in dark glasses, was reading a magazine and did not appear at all bothered when Jock walked purposefully in her direction.

  “Could you tell me the time?” He leaned over so that his face was close to hers.

  She smiled and wound down the window. “Nine-fifteen,” she said and returned to the pages of Cosmopolitan.

  Jock thanked her and returned to his car. The accent was Midlands with no foreign inflection, but that was no guarantee. Why was she there, and been there the previous day? Only a keen, suspicious eye would have picked up any significance in her presence, only somebody who knew of Mac’s uniquely hazardous status. Knowing the various terrorist organizations who might have good reason to fear and therefore to hate the SAS, Jock was fully aware that a man with Mac’s history and health would be a prime target for any of these groups.

  Distinctly uneasy, Jock stopped off at a pay phone in town and called his old comrade-in-arms and longtime friend Detective Constable Ken Borthwick of the Worcester Police. He would know whom to alert.

  38

  They met on a bench overlooking the Serpentine and surrounded by noisy Canada geese. Spike had not been in touch with Mason for almost a year and the latter was pleased at the short-notice summons.

  “Do you remember the events of January, February and March 1975 on the Dhofar jebel?”

  Mason was surprised by the question but he had good reason to recall the period with clarity.

  “I lost some good friends at the time. Do you want a potted history?”

  Spike nodded.

  “I was attached to Jebel Regiment for the disastrous attack on Sherishitti, an adoo weapons store, and I worked closely with their officers. Later, in mid-February, at a base called Hagaif, the soldiers from one of the companies involved at Sherishitti mutinied against their major and forced him to leave by night alone in his Land Rover into enemy territory. Three weeks later two of the remaining Hagaif officers and the pilot of their helicopter were shot down and killed. I knew all of them well.”

  Mason paused to light a cigar.

  “Four days after the Hagaif mutiny, at my own base close to the Yemen border, I spent the hairiest night of my life. Seven men from another company set out on a patrol via a narrow track below a cliff face. The adoo had sewn the track with PMN plastic mines and three of the men were hurt, two losing feet and a great deal of blood. A second group were sent to help but they too ran into mines and only added to the casualties. With another officer, I took a small unit out around midnight and carefully made it some seven hundred feet down the cliff to the first wounded man. There was little we could do but haul the mine victims up on stretchers. One died just before dawn. When I came to one of the wounded he held up the remains of his leg for me to dress. All he said was, ‘ Al lahham, al qadam, kull khallas. ’ The meat, the foot, all finished. “At every step we knew that our own feet might be blown into fragments. A bad night to remember.”

  Mason looked up and saw that Spike was waiting. “That was it. A period of setbacks, or so it seemed at the time. Soon after my friends crashed at Hagaif, two other Bells were shot out of the sky with further fatalities and an SAS Land Rover was destroyed east of Hagaif by a landmine.”

  “Did you know the occupants?”

  “Of the Land Rover?… Yes, probably, but not well enough to remember their names.”

  “Well, the driver was the finest mortar man in the regiment.” Spike took a sheet of A4 from his briefcase and scanned it. He put on spectacles to do so. Anno Domini, Mason thought wryly. “You will find his full name and personal details in a file I will give you.” Spike tapped his case. “When the Land Rover was blown up, he was thrown forward and badly injured. At the FST unit in Salalah the surgeon diagnosed that the part of his brain controlling his character had been damaged. I will call him Mac, the nickname used by his friends then and now. He appeared to recover very quickly and was soon able to rejoin his squadron out in Belize, sent there to counter the Guatemalan threat. He was promoted to sergeant but had increasing problems with concentration. His attention simply wandered from the job at hand.”

  Spike handed the file to Mason and continued. “About a year after t
he mine injury, the SAS were forced to retire Mac. He received a handsome Army pension and continued treatment by the very best military medicos. A rehabilitation course-he chose welding-was not a success and Mac retired to his home in Hereford and a succession of local jobs. His condition has slowly deteriorated but he still holds down a job and lives with his family and may well continue to do so for years to come.”

  Spike swiveled on the bench, looking directly at Mason. “As an Irishman, Mac is careful to keep a low profile-ex-directory and so on. I was called on Saturday night with a warning that somebody is having Mac watched. The police have checked that there is no evidence of known terrorist involvement, so they are not interested.”

  Mason was nodding. “You think it’s our friends again?”

  Spike gazed out over the water. “Milling… Kealy… Marman… all dead… Smythe missing. This may be our chance to catch the people responsible. Maybe not, but it is worth an effort.”

  Mason agreed and Spike promised him the support of three other Locals, including Hallett. He told Mason to warn Mac without alarming him unduly; also to give him an ankle-buzzer, a single-frequency alarm transmitter, which Spike handed to Mason in an envelope.

  “Search the local hotels for the Sumail men. The old photos may be a bit out of date but better than nothing.”

  When Mason left, Spike remained with the geese. The committee, he knew, would not approve. They would veto any further action involving the Dhofar-connected killings. That was why he had not asked them. For the first time he had instigated action by Locals without committee approval or even awareness. If they should find out, Spike realized, there would be a move to get rid of him. But they need never know, and he was damned if he would miss out on this chance to catch the killers.

  39

  In November 1986 Sheikh Bakhait received a video and file on the death of Major Michael Marman. A check for $1 million was paid to de Villiers, who passed on an appropriate amount to Davies.

  Meier’s death caused neither man undue concern but they were baffled by the origins of Smythe. His car, his clothing and his behavior had shed no light on his identity. The binoculars that he carried were almost antique, certainly not equipment on issue to field agents of Special Branch or the Secret Intelligence Service. They agreed that the two men who had previously crossed their path, during work on the sheikh’s contract, had been similarly difficult to classify.

  De Villiers shrugged. “We will get nowhere hypothesizing. Whoever they are, they cannot know our identities and they have only one more chance to intercept us.”

  De Villiers returned to Anne at La Pergole, tasking Davies to concentrate on locating the sheikh’s fourth man to the exclusion of all other work. This Davies proceeded to do with the utmost care. Not $1 million but $2 million were at stake for the completion of the sheikh’s contract. Even so, Davies was thoroughly wary.

  He spent an unprecedented amount of time in Cardiff with his wife and, since this frustrated her normal philandering, he found her difficult to please without maintaining a shower of expensive gifts, weekend flights to exotic spots and healthy checks for the business. In between bouts of wife-cosseting, Davies rented a small flat in Hereford and, over a five-month period, frequented a number of local pubs known to be haunts of the SAS. He perpetuated his standard cover as an insurance salesman and became known as a congenial divorcee who liked nothing better than to dispense alcoholic largesse and enjoy good company. Determined to raise no suspicions, Davies asked no questions and merely bided his time, listening and waiting for the right contact.

  Sheikh Amr had been specific. His son had died fighting Sultanate troops near Sherishitti on that fatal day in January 1975. Together with two other jebalis of the Bin Dhahaib unit he had been killed by a mortar barrage from the army position on the twin bald hills to the east of Zakhir. De Villiers’s discovery of the book SAS Operation Oman had revealed that the man in charge of the mortars on that day was not, as they had thought, a Sultan’s Forces soldier but rather an SAS mortar controller.

  In May 1987 Davies joined two of his Hereford pub acquaintances for a meal at a fish and chip shop called Chancers. He was introduced to the owner, a friendly, hard-drinking fellow who also owned an adjacent wine bar and upstairs restaurant. Davies became a regular patron of the wine bar and a confidant of its owner, Tosh Ash, ex-member of G Squadron SAS.

  Tosh and his wife had in 1986 purchased the Golden Galleon fish and chip shop and the adjoining premises. They had worked hard to convert the site and lived in a comfortable flat above the restaurant. By the following spring the place was a proper little gold mine and the wine bar attracted many of the older SAS men of Tosh’s generation, who enjoyed the atmosphere of the long, narrow bar, audiovisual jukebox and ceiling-suspended monitor screens, as well as palatable wine at good prices.

  Despite Davies’s growing friendship with Tosh and the fact that he was not after information that could conceivably be described as classified, let alone secret, the months passed with no sign of progress. Davies knew that, to an SAS man, secrecy is a fetish. All his careful preparations would be wasted were he to ask a single question out of place. So he kept his patience and explained the delay as best he could when de Villiers made inquiring phone calls.

  One cold autumn evening Tosh asked Davies up for a drink in his flat above the restaurant. Over a stiff whiskey Tosh poured out his woes. Life was a bastard. His health was giving out and the wife was being awkward, very awkward. Davies, having listened to local gossip, thought there might be good reason for such awkwardness but he said nothing. Tosh became maudlin. Without prompting from Davies, he began to reminisce about the Army. The finest days of his life. How he wished he was back. He mentioned many weird names in various parts of the world that meant nothing to Davies until the word Sherishitti dropped from heaven into his lap. He was ready for it. “That was where you attacked the cave system, wasn’t it, Tosh?”

  Tosh was surprised. Did Davies know about Sherishitti?

  Davies laughed. “Your memory is going. You told me all about the event a month ago.” To prove it he reeled off all that he knew by heart from many readings of the Jeapes and Akehurst accounts of the action. “I think,” he ended, “that you said you were controlling the mortars on Hill 985.”

  “No, no, no,” Tosh exclaimed. “That was poor old Mac, the best mortarman in the British Army. I was with him”-he subconsciously felt for the old wound in his wrist-“and we were both hit by the same bullet. But he was the boss with the tube, not me.”

  “Why poor Mac? Did he die?”

  Tosh shook his head.

  “No, though sometimes I think he wishes that he had. His skull was damaged some weeks after Sherishitti and he’s never been the same since. A proud man, Mac, still keeps a job down, over at Sun Valley Poultry, however sick he’s feeling.”

  Tosh filled their glasses and they drank to Mac and other absent friends. “He comes in here from time to time. You’ve probably seen him.” Tosh reached for a black book entitled This Is the SAS, by Tony Geraghty, and thumbed through it. “That’s Mac.” He indicated a photograph of Prince Charles inspecting four SAS soldiers back in 1970. “The fellow on the right with the sharp nose.” Tosh chuckled to himself, his mood beginning to lift as his domestic worries receded. “You should have seen old Mac with a mortar. He could aim by sheer instinct, ignoring the aiming marker, and I never saw him miss a target.”

  Tosh sighed and stood up. “Give either of us a mortar nowadays and we’d be hard-pressed to hit an advancing regiment. You ought to see poor Mac on his bike. Wobbles all over the place. Bloody lethal to himself and everyone else. Mind you some days he’s quite okay; it all depends on his pills. Up at the factory they say he gets so drowsy sometimes, the other lads have to cover up for him.”

  Davies told Tosh he was unlikely to call again for a while owing to pressure of work. That night he called de Villiers to come at once.

  Three days of observation outside Sun Valley Poultry reve
aled nine possible Macs but only one whose features tallied with Tosh’s photograph. Davies followed the man to Salisbury Avenue and, on the third day, noticed the cyclist’s problems with balance. Outside the factory that evening Davies heard the words, “See you tomorrow, Mac,” shouted by a colleague, and knew he had his man. The watch on the Salisbury Avenue house was maintained by the Tadnams people, allowing Davies to establish the movements of Mac, his wife, his daughter and all callers to the house.

  In the last week of November, soon after the arrival of de Villiers, a car with a doctor’s sign on the rear window parked outside Mac’s house and Davies followed the driver back to Sarum House surgery in Ethelburt Street. At 2 a.m. on Wednesday, December 2, de Villiers let himself quietly into the surgery, leaving no trace of entry. There was only one Mac with the correct address in Salisbury Avenue, and de Villiers photographed the relevant details on his medical file.

  “He has epilepsy,” he told Davies back in their car. “He may die in a few days or after many years.”

  “Are you saying we’d better hurry?” Davies asked.

  De Villiers ignored the question.

  “What’s the prognosis, to date?” continued Davies.

  “Easy. He spends many weekends at home and often alone. The best time is Saturday morning at 8:15 a.m. The wife will have gone to work and the daughter to ride her pony. The only other possibility is on his bicycle, but that is a definite second best as he usually travels at the busiest times of day.”

  De Villiers drove to London to collect the necessary equipment.

  Davies never returned to Chancers. Tosh Ash died eight months later. His body was found by the seaside in Spain. It seemed that he had taken his dog for a coastal walk and, when another dog attacked his, he died of a heart attack.