Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Fontaine had survived but he would never walk again: a knobkerrie blow had done permanent damage to his spine.

De Villiers was given comfortable rooms on the attic level and ate his meals with the Fontaines. He enjoyed their company, for Jan was a well-educated man and, though opinionated and scornful of most other Afrikaners, he seemed to respect de Villiers for his North American outlook. Anne, his wife, was heavy going, for she had little to say and when she did begin to comment, Fontaine made a habit of speaking over her. De Villiers learned from the farm boys that madam had come to La Pergole from abroad when she was little and was taken in by Fontaine’s late parents. She wore her long blond hair in a bun and spent a great deal of time on horseback about the estate. De Villiers found her presence increasingly awkward, for she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

Fontaine, at sixty, was some thirty years older than his wife and openly jealous. De Villiers knew better than to show the slightest interest in Anne, since his existence in this paradise depended upon Fontaine’s continued support and approval. Nevertheless he found his nightly fantasies increasingly centered on Fontaine’s wife.

There were no children and de Villiers had glimpsed a look of utter loneliness on Anne’s lovely face. This turned his stomach with pity, a sentiment that did not normally impinge on his life.

The dreamy months passed by, amid the vines, the blue mountains and the wonderful, balmy climate of the Cape. The screaming images of ’Nam ceased to trouble de Villiers’s sleep and he learned to ignore the black rages into which pain and frustration increasingly drove Fontaine.

One summer evening when Fontaine was sedated in bed, de Villiers tried to draw Anne out. He asked her about horses, for he knew they were at the center of her life, but she remained reticent, even uneasy. At the end of the meal when the houseboy brought them coffee on the porch and the bullfrogs chimed from the vlei (swamp), she spoke to him in a low voice.

“The servants receive a tip when they tell my husband things. They do not miss a glance between us. Please be careful for both our sakes.”

“Of course,” he said. “I understand.” As he spoke their eyes locked for the first time in all these months and de Villiers knew that he had gradually come to love her.

There were days out in the fields when he felt his blood surge at the mere echo of distant cantering hooves. He began to hate his ailing benefactor Fontaine. When the doctor in Weinberg first muttered about hospitalization, de Villiers had consciously to hide his delight.

On New Year’s Eve, when the Cape was merry with bonfire parties and, after nightfall, the clatter of rifle fusillades, no flicker of revelry disturbed La Pergole. Farmers traditionally brought in the New Year by shooting the bounds, and the Fontaines’ neighbors were no exception.

The guns excited the dogs of Tokai and the surrounding homesteads. Their feral cousins, gone wild in the foothills, returned a primordial chorus in praise of the moon and sleep came hard to de Villiers. He pulled on his work shorts and wandered down to the porch. There he sat on the steps that faced north toward the mountains. Midnight came and with it a surge in the sounds of distant celebrations. This tailed away and soon the crackle of donnerball combs in the pinewoods close by was all that prickled the night.

She came without a sound, her bare feet smooth on the cold, red tiles. They kissed without a word, without preamble. He knew only that she must feel as he did and sensed the urgency of her need.

Hand in hand they walked through the garden and past the oleander terrace to the fringe of the woods. She led him to a place that she knew, her nightdress wet from the grass-tip dew.

“Do you love me?” she asked him, her face uptilted and her wonderful hair reaching down to the small of her back.

She has never been loved, de Villiers marveled to himself. He spoke in a whisper the better to retain the magic of it all.

They knelt together in the forest and the words of love tumbled out. Neither had known such depths of feeling before, for both had lived lives devoid of human warmth. The words that they exchanged were a necessary foreplay to their mounting passion. Their shared knowledge of what was to come was in itself sublimely sensual.

Then de Villiers smelled the sweat of the Zulu. He flung himself sideways but the giant’s cudgel glanced off his shoulder and a sharp pain shot down his arm. The Zulu padded back to the shadows and wheeled Fontaine into the glade.

“Samuel should have used his assegai,” he snarled, his lips rigid with fury. He wore a dressing gown of blue silk and a double-barreled twelve-bore shotgun lay across his wasted legs. Quite why he let de Villiers go, neither of them would ever know.

De Villiers was driven to Weinberg by a silent Samuel, his only possessions packed in the rucksack he had carried the first time he came to La Pergole nearly a year before.

Fontaine made it known throughout the tight-knit Cape community that de Villiers had somehow abused his hospitality. He would not easily find further employment within many miles of La Pergole, or, as important to him, Vrede Huis.

De Villiers knew the strict religious code of the Afrikaners. Anne would never leave Fontaine. The dream had been shattered even as it materialized and, with nothing to hold him in South Africa, he returned to New York.

A Marine Corps friend introduced him to an association that found work for Vietnam veterans. By 1971 he had entered the fringes of the contract-killing business and within four years he was working internationally for a U.S.-based agency. After a complex job in Greece, he teamed up with Meier and Davies and the Clinic was born…

In London de Villiers met up with his colleagues and explained the new job. Meier’s immediate reaction was, “How did this old sheikh get on to the agency?”

“Simple,” de Villiers replied. “He has a son at school in England who watched the movie The Day of the Jackal. The boy tells his dad that Europeans kill each other for cash. The sheikh then moseys along to his PLO friends, thick as flies in Dubai, whose office, as you know, has done business with the agency before. Bingo.”

“How do you rate our chances of finding the sheikh’s targets?” Meier asked.

De Villiers favored neither optimism nor pessimism since he found both equally unreliable.

“If it had been straightforward, I am sure Sheikh Amr would not have come to us. His sons were killed over a six-year period by government forces.” Meier and Davies listened intently, for they knew de Villiers disliked repeating himself. “The sheikh gave me an outline of each death and all four occurred in areas held by Omani units or British Army Training Teams known as BATTS. These are small, specialized groups of SAS men.”

“So our targets are either Brits or Omanis?” Meier pressed.

“Not quite true,” de Villiers spoke slowly. “BATTS include a smattering of Fijians and the Sultan’s Armed Forces [SAF] officers are Omani, Brit, Dhofari, Aussie, Paki, South African, Indian and Baluchi. Since our targets may by now be dead or retired from their military work, our search area could be quite wide.”

Davies whistled through his teeth. “It would be easier to locate four fleas on a rhino,” he murmured.

Meier grunted. “No one will pay you five million for that.”

“Remember,” de Villiers broke in, “we have no time limit other than the premature death of our targets before we can trace them. So we can continue with normal work as we wish and concentrate on the Dhofar targets when other business is slack.”

“It may be easier to trace men who are still in the forces,” Davies mused, “but, when retired, they’ll be a lot easier to hit.”