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

  Leftover fireworks crackled and fizzed intermittently around the little village, and Horsley’s dogs, a Dalmatian and a large Münsterlander, were decidedly edgy.

  Meier and Jake, with a duffel bag, skirted the front drive with its deep gravel noise-trap and, from the magnificent rear garden, spotted Sir Peter in the kitchen with his dogs. His wife was nowhere to be seen.

  “Keeps the dogs in there all night,” whispered Meier. “Got their baskets, rugs and food bowls by the Aga and no dog-flaps. We’re in luck.”

  Since Sir Peter’s diary was liable to be downstairs they decided to wait until he moved upstairs to bed. Meanwhile they moved to the spacious double garage, built as an attractive and entirely separate two-story unit, some distance from the main house.

  The garage swing doors were up and open. One car space was empty. The other was occupied by a shiny BMW Series 7.

  “Nip upstairs, Jake,” Meier ordered. “Check that there’s no one up there. I’ll get the machine’s vital statistics.”

  Meier opened the duffel bag and slipped into a boiler suit. He disappeared between the front wheels of the BMW with the bag. In a short while he was interrupted by Jake.

  “I think we have luck with this man.” He held out a black desk diary.

  Meier took off his gloves and the light from his headband flashlight lit up the diary’s pages. “Where did you get this?”

  Jake explained. He had mounted the stairs on the outside of the garage and, on the upper floor, entered an open-plan office by way of an unlocked door. There was obviously a noteworthy lack of crime in Houghton. Three large desks occupied the office above the garage, and Jake discovered that Sir Peter, his secretary and his wife all worked there. He could find no diary anywhere in or on the first two desks, but Lady Horsley kept hers open on her blotter, and Jake’s optimism was prompted by two of the entries, one for Monday, November 10: “Depart for Ma’s”; and one for Tuesday, November 11: “P. leaves at 3 p.m., Yelverton by 6 p.m.”

  “Looking very good.” Meier nodded and laid a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Well done indeed. Take a note of all the entries from today until November thirteenth, then replace the diary. I am nearly finished.”

  Meier noted that with the swing doors closed, and blackout cloth taped over the windows, the place would be light-proof. The walls were of solid brick but a sound baffle was needed to line the inside of the swing doors. He checked the power points and the BMW’s own jackset. They would need Tadnams men on outside watch and a mechanic to help with the work. He noted what he could see of the brake system, the Michelin XVS tires, 40,000 miles on the clock, registration 3545 PH, car type BMW 728i automatic.

  Meier and Jake finished their further ML executive checkups at 5 a.m., and by noon on November 8, de Villiers was able to select the file on Sir Peter Horsley from thirteen others. He was by far the most suitable.

  All equipment and tools were centralized at the Kent airstrip, a BMW 728i automatic with ABS braking system was purchased along with two “target practice” cars, and the fitting and control rehearsals began in earnest with two days in hand. Meier and Jake, seemingly tireless, were in their element.

  Early on Sunday morning Spike received a routine call from John Smythe, who was controlling the three-man Marman watch. There had been no sign of the Welshman nor of any other outside interest in their charge. “Keep at it,” Spike had told him.

  Smythe was a quiet, reliable sort and particularly appropriate for the work since he had followed the Welshman to London some nine years before. Still unmarried and self-employed, Smythe had become one of Spike’s key Locals in the Southeast, after moving to Reading in the early eighties.

  Mike Marman, after a late night, following drinks with his friend Poppo Tomlinson, had intended to spend that morning doing nothing very much with Julia. He surprised them both with a last-minute decision to go to church because it was Remembrance Sunday. They drove the 2CV to the Guards Chapel in Whitehall and joined a full and enthusiastically lugubrious congregation.

  Like many of his old Army friends, also at the service, Mike had pinned his three medals to his overcoat and wore them with pride. He should have had a fourth, the Distinguished Service Medal, but for the decidedly cold shoulder the authorities had shown him ever since his shooting up of the Midway officers’ mess in Dhofar. He chuckled to himself at the memory. Wall plaques, bottles and glasses had smashed into splinters. Officers and staff had jumped for their lives as Major Marman, with a wild yell, had sprayed the main bar with his Kalashnikov assault rifle set to fully automatic. A glorious memory. He had always hated overbearing senior officers, and that episode had given quite a few of them something to think about.

  Although Mike had listened in amazement to David Mason’s warning and his remarkable story about the killing of John Milling and Mike Kealy, both of whom he had known, he was not convinced. It was inconceivable that anyone could actually be plotting to kill him. Somehow David had gotten things wrong. Nevertheless Marman’s grin faded as he thought about it. Mason had asked him to mention the threat to nobody and he had agreed not to.

  During the sermon, Marman found his thoughts dwelling on death. So many of his best muckers from Army days were dead, killed in the war or in peacetime soldiering. Charles Stopford had recently crashed his Beaver plane into a hilltop at Dummer, the home village of Sarah Ferguson. Then, last weekend, he had called at Rose May’s and only one of his sons had come away with him. The elder son, Alistair, had stayed to comfort his mother. Rose May’s fiancé, Alan Stewart, had been killed earlier that week. A talented Thames TV news producer, on his last day’s coverage of the famine in southern Sudan, he had driven over a mine and died of the injuries.

  Rose May had said to Marman, “How strange life is. My peace-loving Alan is dead, yet you, after all your years of wars and bloodshed, are still alive and totally unscathed.”

  34

  On Monday, November 10, five men arrived at Park Court soon after midnight, having parked the dark blue Volvo estate car in a field at the northern end of the village. They carried tools and equipment in easily portable containers, apart from the pressurized diver’s bottle, which was slung over de Villiers’s shoulder, and the bulky curtains, which the two Tadnams men carried between them. They moved at well-spaced intervals, ready to fade into the shadows, but nothing and no one disturbed their progress to Sir Peter’s outhouse garage.

  Meier sprayed WD40 lubricant on the moving parts of the sliding doors before attempting to close them. The Tadnams men confirmed that Horsley and his dogs were asleep, then remained outside to keep watch and to warn against any noise coming from the garage.

  Meier and Jake had twice attached and removed the equipment using their rehearsal BMW 728i automatic. De Villiers had come along to help Meier and, perhaps, to reassure himself that the plan really was as sound as Meier had painted it.

  With the sound-baffle curtains in place against the sliding doors, and the blackout blinds taped to the windows, Meier assembled the thirty-two separate, labeled units together with the wires, cable and piping to connect them, while Jake laid out the tools and positioned the spotlights to be powered from one of the garage’s wall sockets.

  “You are sure you can detach everything afterward?” de Villiers asked.

  “No problem at all,” Meier replied, “but you don’t have to worry. Even if we cannot retrieve the device for some unforeseen reason, we can quickly prepare other sets. If the police should find all this in situ, they will merely conclude somebody is after Horsley, not Marman.”

  De Villiers murmured, “Would it not be easier to override Horsley’s steering rather than his brakes?”

  Meier nodded. “Easier when it comes to the action phase but not practical to install given our particular needs. We would require heavier gear and a lot more time. Then again, Horsley, if he survives the impact, must be confused, not suspicious, about what went wrong. To fiddle with the steering will not achieve this. Obviously, when the brakes on a wheel l
ock up and the car goes into a skid, the steering will not work properly. Afterward the driver will not be able to explain what went amiss. He will be confused and uncertain. Was there a brake failure or some other malfunction? He cannot tell.”

  Meier gestured at the equipment line. “The beauty of controlling the brakes is that, if Horsley survives, he will remember perfectly well that the car deliberately disobeyed the steering wheel. He will be mystified, of course, but not suspicious. Remember, also, that the gear must be as easy as possible to remove quietly and by flashlight tomorrow night. That would not be so were we to doctor the steering.”

  Meier squatted down by his prefabricated devices. “If all this had to be mounted as a single unit, it simply would not fit under the hood. We attach everything in nooks and crannies. Even if Horsley should lift the hood, say to check the oil, he would notice nothing.”

  De Villiers could see that Meier was already convinced that success was the only possible outcome.

  “The difficulty with my system is the unpredictable behavior of the four individual brakes. I have used radio control with model cars, boats and airplanes of my own design, some scaled to half life size, but nothing has required as much practice to perfect as this system. This week, in Kent, we have rehearsed on tarmac and on uneven grass, and I can now predict the reaction of most drivers to the sudden realization of an imminent collision. I should also stress that we can abort right up until the last moment if the actual meeting point is marred by any form of obstacle, static or moving, between the two cars.”

  “Exactly what is your plan in layman’s terms?” De Villiers was keen to comprehend as much as possible, and Meier was delighted to expound.

  “You will maintain permanent radio contact with me as you travel east behind Marman’s car. You will keep me informed of his exact position as he continues to come closer to Horsley. Jake will drive me in the Volvo and ensure that, at the moment when I take over control from Horsley, our Volvo has a clear, uninterrupted view of the BMW. I will then steer the BMW to head-on impact with Marman’s Citroën.”

  Meier removed a notebook and pen from his black boiler suit and drew a diagram of a standard braking system. “We assume that this model may have antilock ABS brakes since they were developed as an option in 1978. Because of its personalized registration plate, we have no idea of its year of manufacture. Therefore my system can cope with ABS or non-ABS models. Very few British drivers chose the ABS option but Horsley may just be one of them.”

  Meier ran his finger along his diagram. “The key part of a braking system is the master cylinder, full of brake fluid and connected to a brake-fluid reservoir, so it is always topped up. When you press the brake pedal, that pressure, assisted by an air vacuum from the engine inlet manifold, forces the fluid out of the cylinder, down a narrow pipe, and against a piston that in turn forces the brake pads to clamp on to the brake disc. This is of course repeated down three other pipes to the three other discs. Release the brake pedal and the fluid is allowed back into the cylinder.

  “If ABS units are fitted, they are positioned between master cylinder and piston and powered by an electrical supply from the car battery. Since we will not want the ABS to work when I take control, I will, by radio control, cut the electrical supply to the ABS unit. What do you know about radio control?”

  “Nothing,” said de Villiers.

  “The key kit is a servo motor or actuator which, on receiving a signal from a small radio receiver will cause a lever to move through ninety or even 180 degrees and mechanically turn a valve, or a switch, on or off. So the actuator is controlled by the receiver, which in turn receives its orders from a transmitter up to several hundred yards away. My transmitter consists of a board with four joysticks to control each of the BMW’s four brakes. As I pull at a particular stick, the corresponding brake is applied as hard as I wish. This is achieved by two ‘proportional’ control transmitters, but I will also use a single channel transmitter to activate my entire system and to deactivate the ABS system if we find there is one. The latter transmitter is capable of operating several actuators and relays all at once … All understood?”

  De Villiers nodded. “Clear as Mississippi mud.”

  “In that case,” Meier said, “you will have no problem with my braking system.” He rapidly sketched a more complex diagram on a fresh page of his notebook. “The source of power I will use to substitute the pressure from Horsley’s foot is this little air cylinder, ten inches long by two and a third inches in diameter. It is a standard retail item as used by experienced scuba divers and contains half a liter of compressed air pressurized to two hundred bar for emergency use.”

  Meier’s index finger moved down his diagram. “Next we have another item of scuba equipment, a ‘first stage regulator,’ which is a device for distributing air at different pressures to different parts of a diver’s paraphernalia. We will be using it to split the air four ways, each to a separate system for each brake. From each outlet in this regulator, air will flow into a separate motorized air valve, whenever I cause its tap to open. When I close the tap, by a movement on a joystick, air will escape and the brake will be released as much or as little as I wish.”

  De Villiers seemed to be happy, so Meier continued. “For each wheel there is then my own design of master cylinder, which I have modified by capping off three outlets and using just one to channel brake fluid to the brakes. A more complex modification, achieved by the excellent Jake, has been to enable the cylinders to operate on air pressure alone, without either mechanical pressure or normal vacuum assistance. Each of my cylinders is topped up by its own brake fluid reservoir.”

  Meier picked up one of four small valves. “These are critical to my system. A simple change-over valve which, at the switch of a lever, will divert brake fluid from one routing to another. When on Normal, the BMW’s master cylinder will relay Horsley’s foot pressure to the brakes, but when I switch it to Remote, my system will take over. On my control board I have a single master-switch transmitter that will, at the chosen moment, change the four valves to Remote, and, as appropriate, isolate all four ABS systems. From that moment, I will be in control of each of the four brakes.”

  The three men set to work to the pattern preestablished by Meier and Jake. There was little noise and no unanticipated problem.

  The brake fluid was drained into a drip tray, and the brake lines, disconnected from the master cylinder, were connected to outlets from the change-over valves. These last were preconnected to the modified cylinders and to their servo motors. The wiring to the receivers was also already in place.

  Separate lines from the change-over valves, labeled “Normal,” were connected back to the BMW’s master cylinder. Then came the tricky job of tracing the positive wires from each ABS system and fitting the electric relays in series for connection to the single channel receiver. Using specialist tapes, Meier and Jake clamped the many new units firmly in place and, via a voltage transformer, affixed the receivers and servo motors to the car battery. The system and the five reservoirs were then topped up with brake fluid when set both at Normal and at Remote.

  With the car’s own jack in position and one wheel off the ground, de Villiers spun the wheel manually. Meier, as though by magic, then stopped the rotation by touching a temporary remote transmitter control. All four wheels were tested in this manner and the air cylinder then topped up to two hundred bar from the fully pressurized fifteen-liter driver’s bottle.

  Meier then set the system to Normal, the three remote transmitters to Off, the three receivers to On, and the air cylinder’s hand valve to fully open. The system was primed.

  By the time every visible sign of their presence was removed and the swing doors were open again, the only trace of the eight-hour visit was a faint smell of brake fluid mingled with sweat, and even that had dissipated by dawn.

  35

  John Smythe had no dependents and lived easily on his means as a freelance photographer. He was never happier than wh
en doing a job for Spike. He remembered Mantell, who first recruited him, but Spike epitomized the sort of person he would himself like to be. He never considered the possibility of being paid for his time and seldom passed his expenses to Spike. Smythe hero-worshiped his Nottingham coal-miner father, and knew he would have approved, if he were still alive, of everything Spike stood for. He felt he was doing his bit for Blighty, for the well-being of his fellow citizens and, as Spike had once put it, acting as a freelance ferret-man to seek out those vermin the official gamekeepers do not catch.

  He was slightly uneasy about the day ahead since none of the four Locals cooperating over the Marman watch could help out until the evening, so he was entirely alone for the day. To follow a mobile “mark” without being spotted requires great concentration and quick reactions; a far more demanding task than can be imagined by someone who has not tried it.

  Marman had left Blandfield Road at 11:05 a.m., filled up the 2CV with 3-Star leaded petrol at a fuel station on the M3, and arrived at Steeple Langford in Wiltshire’s Wylye Valley at 12:45 p.m. Smythe parked well away from the entrance to the drive of Manor House and sat himself down at the upper rim of a cow field. There was a blustery autumn wind but he wore a battered Barbour jacket and tweed cap. He had, as always on jobs for Spike, an old gas-mask carrier containing a coffee flask, cheese sandwiches, and his late father’s binoculars.