Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) Read online

“Yes, of course. I am sending out centenary details of Captain Kealy’s old school, Eastbourne College.”

  “I am afraid, in Captain Kealy’s case, I am not at liberty to give you his address, but I can give you that of his parents, which you could, of course, also obtain through Directory Inquiries.”

  “That would be most kind,” purred Davies.

  The following day he was on the road before dawn in a Ford Escort from Tadnams. From London he followed the A23 as far as Albourne, then turned east to the sleepy village of Ditchling under the shadow of the South Downs.

  Forge House was not difficult to find, being on the main road through the village and directly opposite the North Star pub. Davies parked in a side street and settled down to a cup of tea and fresh doughnut in the Tudor Bakery. Refreshed, he returned to the car and made ready his standard country gear consisting of basic bird-watcher’s ensemble, shooting stick, binoculars, and a camera with an indecently long lens attached.

  While parking by the North Star he noticed a blue Renault in the yard of Forge House, whereas a green Mini that he had seen there earlier was gone. A jumble of items packed the rear shelf of the Renault, and Davies picked out with his binoculars a seemingly innocuous pair of army puttees. These ankle wrappings, dating back to the First World War, are worn by many infantry units and are always khaki in color with the sole exception of those of SAS officers. Theirs, like the pair Davies spotted in the Renault, are light beige.

  Mike Kealy made his father a cup of tea and took it up to his room. The colonel hated illness and, confined to bed with influenza, he fretted to be out and about. Mike puffed up a pillow behind his father and sat on the end of the bed. He admired his father more than any man alive and was sorry he could not stay with him longer. His maternal grandmother had died ten days before and he had promised his mother he would be at the funeral in Frimley that afternoon.

  A gentle reminder from his father sent Mike up to his room to shave. As he looked up and removed steam from the mirror, he saw someone behind him. Without his spectacles he turned around. It was only the old bloodstained Chinese field cap that hung on the wall. He laughed. His aunt Olga had ticked him off only a week or two before about it.

  “Get rid of that terrorist’s hat,” she had said. “It will bring you bad luck.” Mike took leave of his father and drove the Renault north. His mother had gone ahead in the Mini to prepare things. He would have spent a day or two in Ditchling to help her but he needed to be in Hereford to look after his wife, Maggi.

  They already had a daughter of three, Alice, and now Maggi was about to give birth to twins, their doctor assured them. She had somehow contracted mumps with only two or three weeks to go, so Mike was treating her with kid gloves and felt uneasy to be away at all.

  After a year with his parent regiment in Germany and Northern Ireland, he was overjoyed to be given command of an SAS squadron. His MFO crates containing his personal belongings had recently arrived from Werle in Germany at his new quarters in Hereford. Several days of DIY operations, in between nursing Maggi, stretched ahead of him.

  He passed through Billingshurst and Loxwood. One thing that occupied his mind, apart from a natural worry about his adequacy to lead a squadron of Britain’s finest fighting men, was the question of his physical fitness. His recent desk job had allowed him time for routine jogging, but Mike was used to being at peak performance. Few men could outpace him in the hills with a heavy rucksack and rough going and he believed he should take over D Squadron in top personal condition. As soon as Maggi was recovered he would settle into a strict training regime.

  He arrived at St. Peter’s Church in Frimley at noon, just in time to join his mother in the front pew. After the service, with thirty or so relatives, they walked down the road to the White Hart pub for lunch. Later Mike drove to the nearby town of Chobham, where his father-in-law, the Reverend Acworth, was rector. After tea at the rectory he headed home with the gift of a corner cupboard protruding from the Renault’s trunk.

  Where the A49 enters the suburbs of Hereford, Mike turned right into Bradbury Lines, the Regiment Headquarters and married-quarters area, and up Bullingham Lane. Number 79 was fairly secluded, set back from the road by a circular cul-de-sac. When Mike needed to go into the main regimental compound he could either drive up the lane to the main gate and show his ID card or walk to a side entrance in the security fence and enter with his electronic card.

  Davies had long since drained his vacuum flask and the doughnut was a distant memory, so he was delighted when Kealy finally came home to roost. The fact that his married quarters were within SAS home territory did not please Davies at all, and he left Bullingham Lane as soon as he had seen Kealy carry the corner cupboard into number 79 and place newspaper over his front windshield against overnight frost.

  Leaving the Ford three streets away, Davies, complete with bird-watcher gear and a flashlight, threaded his way through gorse and scrub to the rough ground immediately behind the Kealys’ back garden. He noted a high water tower close by as a convenient marker and drove west to search for a suitable bed and breakfast. That night he settled for a retired couple in Stretton Sugwas. In December there were vacancies aplenty and he would change his base nightly as well as his identity.

  Davies telephoned de Villiers in New York. “I have located our person,” he said, “and will need you here in three weeks.” He gave contact details and settled down to bore himself stiff with an old Reader’s Digest. Tomorrow, with extreme caution, he would begin the search for a pattern to Kealy’s lifestyle.

  23

  The long antiseptic corridors, as in all major hospitals, served as thoroughfares for two types of inmate: the sick and listless in pajamas with too much time on their hands and the rushed-off-their-feet doctors and nursing staff for whom there were never enough hours in the day.

  In the Maternity Ward of Hereford General Hospital a new doctor made his way, rather more slowly than most, from the staff toilets to the postnatal wing. There was a rapid turnover of doctors and surgeons at the hospital and no identity check at the various hospital entrances.

  Two years before, in Belfast’s Catholic Mater Hospital, the MP, Mrs. Maive Drumm, had been assassinated in her hospital bed by men wearing doctors’ white coats. Since few hospital-based crime novels escape the cliché of criminals masquerading as medical staff, the trick might be considered dangerously overworked. But if it works, why not use it? Davies certainly had no qualms about plagiarism. He approached a junior nurse in the reception of the Postnatal Ward and learned both the location of Mrs. Kealy’s bed and the fact that she had produced twins the previous evening.

  Maggi Kealy was awake and surrounded by flowers. Davies arrived with clipboard, stethoscope and wearing the ubiquitous white coat. He bent over the chart at the end of her bed and made an entry on his clipboard while attaching a small bug to the underside of the bed frame. The bug was fitted with a superstick tab, not a magnetic clamp, to minimize transmission interference.

  “All seems to be well, Mrs. Kealy. Rest, while you may.” He grinned and left her cubicle congratulating himself on his easy bedside manner. Following the copious array of signs, he made for the General Medical Ward and approached the duty sister there. He had come from the Geriatric Unit, he explained, and needed a supply of insulin and chlorpropamide. They had run short. Chlorpropamide is used by diabetics not requiring insulin.

  He was given both drugs and signed two sets of forms to acknowledge receipt.

  Three weeks of pussyfooting and freezing his toes off in the scrub behind Kealy’s house had led Davies to the firm conclusion that Kealy could never be dealt with inside the SAS citadel of Hereford. Twice Kealy and his wife had spent some time in their back garden, and on each occasion they were nursing a sick rabbit. Kealy had been complaining that he never had time to keep fit and that once the babies were born he would spend more time on the Brecon Beacons. Hills that Davies also knew well, these were the main SAS training grounds where a small number o
f unfortunates had over the years died of exposure in their keenness to pass SAS selection. Davies had formulated a simple plan to put before de Villiers on his arrival.

  Darrell Hallett failed to find any trace of the Welshman in the many hotels, motels and guest houses he visited around and about Hereford, despite his photographs of Davies by the Gulf Hotel swimming pool. Eventually he had given up and set about shadowing the postman Bob Bennett. Again nothing. Only an Afghan hound had shown any untoward interest in Bennett. So he switched to Kealy.

  At 4 p.m. on Boxing Day Kealy, carrying his young daughter, Alice, arrived at Maggi’s bedside. Hallett parked two ranks away from Kealy’s Renault and settled down to watch for anyone with an unhealthy interest in Kealy or his car.

  Twenty minutes passed and Hallett found his attention continually drawn to the occupant of a Ford Escort four cars away from and parallel with his own. The man wore a doctor’s coat but what niggled Hallett were the earphones and something about his profile. It came to him in a while that the Escort had a perfectly good radio antenna, so why the headphones? Furthermore, Mason’s excellent telephoto lens had obtained first-class side views of the Welshman and, apart from the fact that the man with headphones was balding, he was the spitting image of Hallett’s quarry.

  Determined to check out this coincidence, Hallett quietly reversed his car, circled the car park, which was full to capacity, and drew up again facing the Escort from two car spaces away. He watched the man through his binoculars, then glanced at the Muscat photograph. He felt his excitement mounting. It could not be a mere coincidence. This was the Welshman.

  Davies must have sensed rather than seen Hallett’s interest in him, for he was engrossed in the conversation between the Kealys. He realized he was glimpsing a world of tender togetherness, of selfless love between two humans that he would never know for himself. His eyes were focused in the middle distance, his mind far away, when that sixth sense possessed by many people who live on the edge swung his gaze to the car that had moved around from behind to opposite him and from which no driver had emerged.

  To Davies, Hallett’s binoculars might just as well have been a gun. He tore off the earplugs, started the car and screeched into reverse. Hallett was faster still. The two cars made for the exit but Hallett swung his Avenger violently across the path of the Escort. Yorkie bars cascaded forward onto him. Davies, fearing a police ambush, decided escape was more likely on foot. He dashed for a side door in the nearest hospital block, with Hallett, unencumbered by coat and suit, gaining ground fast.

  Davies came to bay in a first-floor lavatory. He was out of breath. Hallett, a street fighter since childhood, automatically assumed a boxer’s stance. Davies kicked out and contacted Hallett’s kneecap. Hallett’s guard dropped briefly and Davies lanced a direct blow, straight as a snooker stroke, at Hallett’s neck with the handle of a broom he had snatched up. Hallett snarled in pain but resisted the urge to finger his neck. His boxer’s straight right caught Davies in the nose and mouth, splitting his upper lip. As he closed in, the door opened and two cleaning women with buckets entered. Both screamed and Davies knocked them out of the way as he lurched from the room.

  Hallett tried to talk to the women but his throat felt mangled. To swallow was excruciating. He followed the Welshman as best he could but the corridors were thronged with merry people involved in a Boxing Day party. By the time Hallett reached the car park there was no sign of the Escort. He rang Spike’s number and croaked his report to the answering machine. Kealy was definitely at risk. He should be given closer protection at once.

  De Villiers and Meier were ill at ease. Davies’s description of his attacker at the hospital did not tally with their idea of police surveillance. Yet, if not from the security services, who was the man? Was he from the same stable as the tall man in the Sumail falaj?

  De Villiers had sent Davies back to the United States. He would now be a liability in Britain and might lead the unknown hunters to Tadnams or the Clinic. All the same, Davies had done well and de Villiers quite liked the method that he had suggested, and for which he had begun to prepare.

  The hospital tapes confirmed Davies’s opinion. Mike Kealy had told his wife that the regiment wanted him in Belfast for a week’s introduction to the work he and his new squadron would be doing there. Once he returned, there would be a week or two before he started his Irish tour of duty. “I must get some more hill training in before then,” he told his wife.

  “But you’re superfit already, my love,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No, that’s sadly not so, but I’ll up the daily training and then do a couple more weekends in the Brecons. If I round that off with an endurance march with the selection students, I should be back on course and fit for Armagh or wherever.”

  His wife knew better than to argue. Mike had always been a fitness fanatic. He bounced Alice on his knees and they talked about the twins and the future.

  The Clinic listened carefully to the tapes and looked at the many photographs Davies had taken of the Kealys, their home in Hereford, their car, the two main entrances to the SAS barracks, and even Forge House in Ditchling. Davies’s written report was efficient and thorough. His conclusion was to the point. Major Kealy could not safely be terminated at his place of work nor in his home. There remained his stated intention to train on the Brecon Beacons. Davies’s method was based on his knowledge of those hills during the winter months.

  24

  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.