Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

The boy looked around. Three youths in bomber jackets stood in the shadows. One held a steel crossbow and, over his shoulder, an empty golfer’s bag.

“You’d better give the dawg his last rights, sonny.” The speaker had a crew cut and obviously spent a good deal of his time pumping iron.

The boy went wild, and rushing at the bowman, swung hard with the beagle’s chain. By chance the linked end caught the youth across one eye and the bridge of his nose.

“Scumbag bastard,” he cried out. He was temporarily blinded, but his friends pinned the boy against a tree to await his recovery. Through tears of pain, and fearing he had lost an eye, the bowman grunted his fury. “Strip the bugger and glue him to the tree. I’ll teach him who to mess with.”

Using his shirt and their own belts, they lashed the boy’s arms so that he faced outward. His handkerchief was jammed into his mouth. He wet himself with fear. Two bolts stuck his right leg above the knee. A third entered his left thigh and he fainted. The jeers of the bowman’s friends probably saved his life by attracting the attention of a jogger. The newcomer wore track suit trousers and a loose, jungle-green T-shirt. As he entered the clearing he showed little interest in the boy, the dog, or the yobs. “Hi, friends.” He raised a hand in greeting as he slowed. “Which way is the reservoir?”

As the bowman thought of a suitably unhelpful reply, the jogger’s hand whipped up and drove a finger into his good eye. This was followed immediately by a simple karate toe-kick, the ujima, to the groin of the nearest man. The third bomber jacket’s switchblade was out, but whipping the crossbow from the ground and finding it loaded, the jogger pulled the trigger. The file-sharpened bolt passed easily through the man’s guts and embedded itself in his spine. He screamed but the butt of the crossbow crashed down on the base of his neck and there was silence save for the chuckle of gray squirrels.

The jogger knelt beside the beagle and gently felt for a heartbeat. Applying counterpressure around the entire hole, he withdrew the bolt and tied his vest around the dog’s neck. “You’ll live, girl,” he crooned as he stroked the bitch’s droopy ears. He laid her down and attended to the boy, suspecting heavy internal bleeding in the thigh.

He found a traffic policeman on nearby East 85th Street, gave him his name, Captain Daniel de Villiers, and the address of the fellow Marine with whom he lodged. He stayed until an ambulance came, but feigned ignorance when asked about the state of the hoodlums, the boy, and the dog. He wondered to himself, would he have intervened were it not for the beagle? Cruelty to animals was a weak spot with de Villiers.

There had been a stray cat at the boys’ orphanage in Vancouver, and later, an ill-fed parrot kept by his adoptive mother in the Bronx, a woman whom he never understood, since she beat him for the mildest infringement of her “good manners code” yet nursed him with apparent affection whenever he came home from school with a split nose or swollen eyebrow. When she died, coughing blood, de Villiers took a daytime job as a photographer’s assistant and cat-burgled by night. When the parrot died he was seventeen with savings in the bank and no ambition but to work with animals. He enlisted, but his phenomenal physique and propensity for measured thought attracted the attention of a Marine Corps recruitment sergeant long before he could home in on his original target, the U.S. Veterinary Corps.

At twenty-three, with four harrowing years in Vietnam behind him, de Villiers might well have made the military his career. Perhaps he would have done so but for a long-festering desire to seek his roots, to find his family.

For a year he held down a desk job at Bradley Airport, spending free weekends trekking in the Catskills with Marine friends. In the winter of 1964 he resigned his commission and cashed all his savings. His only clue was his father’s bible, his most treasured possession. The flyleaf was inscribed “For Piet from his loving mother. Vrede Huis, Tokai 1891…”

In the days before the staff of SAS headquarters took on the responsibility for all British Special Force units, including the SBS (Special Boat Squadron), and moved to their current control center, they were located for many years close to Sloane Square. SAS senior administrators occupied the attic level of the central block of the Duke of York’s Barracks. Their offices gave on to a single central corridor reached only by a flight of concrete stairs surveyed by cameras, at the top of which were two steel doors to a vacuum-sealed “frisk chamber.”

In the early seventies some of the SAS office windows were declared vulnerable to high-tech snooping from the flats in Cheltenham Terrace, across the garrison running track. Protective screening was installed but security remained generally limp. Immediately below the attic level was an empty hall that the barracks authority hired out to more or less any public group looking for a spacious rendezvous. On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, 1977, Gordon Jackson and others of the cast of Upstairs, Downstairs, a BBC television series then showing worldwide, trooped out of the hall to make way for a meeting of a charity organization.

The two civilian security guards manning the barracks’ gatehouse were affable West Africans who, noting that the Hampstead Support Group of the Royal Chelsea Hospital were due to meet that morning, happily allowed entry to any individual who mentioned the name of that charity. “Know where to go?” was their only question.

First to arrive was Bob Mantell, formerly with 2 Commando and a retired City banker. He tidied away the crumpled script sheets and emptied the ashtrays, muttering under his breath about BBC wasters. He placed pencils and sheets of A4 paper in front of the battered chairs ranged around the rectangular table, the only furniture in the gloomy hall.

Others arrived alone or in groups. There were greetings-some hearty, some gruff. August Graves, a sixty-five-year-old cab driver and obsessive radio ham, made a great deal of noise before and after meetings, but unless goaded rarely opened his mouth during them. Yet his ability to find out anything about anyone in the Greater London area was nothing short of miraculous. He was also a conduit to various criminal minds, although he himself had never strayed from the straight and narrow. He arrived in the company of the don, who had recently retired from a senior position at Warwick University.

The twins, in their mid-seventies but looking older, had first met in prison around the time the Second World War broke out. They were given probationary leave to join the Royal Engineers and after the war became plumbers. While completing a job in the late sixties, they had met up with the founder. Like August Graves, they had street savvy and contacts that were of great value to the committee.

Jane, whose surname nobody ever used, arrived in heated debate with Bletchley, the chairman of the day, who was an old-fashioned and dogmatic Tory. “Turncoat,” Jane muttered. “He’s a traitor of the worst sort. Wilson has the decency to make him Home Secretary and look what he does-makes fools of us all. And for why?”

“Because, dear lady,” Bletchley rejoined, “he has the good sense to realize this country belongs to Europe. Heath is right. We cannot survive by ourselves now that the Commonwealth is gone, and your Roy Jenkins is one of the few socialists to acknowledge the fact. Good on him, I say. Hallo, Mantell. Everything ready, I see. Good man.”

Bletchley sat down at the head of the table and busied himself with his notes. At that stage, to outward appearances at least, he was still a well man.

Jane, a prim and righteous spinster, was fastidious and worshipped the founder. The previous two-monthly meetings had been held at the Hampstead house where Jane had selflessly nursed her mother until her death some years before. Jane, like the don, had worked with Intelligence during the Second World War. She took ten plastic mugs from her shopping bag and doled them out around the table, placing a four-pint vacuum flask of light coffee by her own place at the opposite end of the table to the chairman. To Jane little rituals were what life was all about.