Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Mason’s mood was not improved by the fact that Davies netted a third Gulf Air hostess that night and evidence of the Welshman’s considerable virility and remarkable imagination was delivered via the earplugs of his receiver unit on and off through the small hours.

At 7 a.m. both men swore when Davies’s phone buzzed. It was a summons to a rendezvous with de Villiers. Mason heard enough to understand that the Welshman was shortly to be collected from the hotel by a third party.

He dressed in his SAF uniform and, carrying his two prepacked travel bags, made his way to the far end of the car park. Wearing Polaroid sunglasses and his green SAF shemagh, he sat back in the Datsun and waited.

Davies emerged at 8 a.m. and walked down the road until out of sight of the hotel. A few minutes later Mason watched as a light brown Nissan pickup collected the Welshman. He followed at a discreet distance, thankful that the rutted dirt roads of his day had given way to tarmac, eliminating the dust cloud that acted as a smoke signal to any moving vehicle.

Some miles south of Seeb the Nissan veered west onto the Nizwa road, which it followed as far as the Sumail Bridge. Here the Welshman’s driver took a series of side tracks running behind the village of Fanjah and skirting a dense wall of aged date palms.

Mason required all his concentration to shadow the Nissan without being seen. At length, in rocky scrubland, it eased to a halt in a gravel wadi bed between thickets of acacia and thorn. Mason swerved from the track at once and switched off, the Datsun well concealed by low ghaf.

The larger of Mason’s travel bags served as a knapsack since its handles were designed to fit over the shoulders. There was no waist belt but his hands were free to carry the. 22 Hornet rifle and a lightweight Zeiss monocular. He removed his Polaroid glasses. He had wandered this terrain with his cameras when based at nearby Bidbid and knew the area as well as any local, most of whom seldom ventured beyond the cool and verdant Sumail.

Since there was no habitation nor point of any interest that satisfied the Welshman in these rocky steppes, Mason assumed that he and his companions were there to meet someone. He saw three men climb out of the Nissan but did not notice Karim Bux squatting in the shade of the acacias, chewing tobacco. Mason wore an ancient pair of Clark’s suede desert boots, “brothel creepers” as they are fondly known, by far the most cool and efficient footwear commercially available for patrol work in sand or on rocky ground. He approached the Nissan soundlessly and found its cab locked. On the front seat he noticed a battered bolt-action. 303 of the type carried by many Omanis both as a symbol of their independence and for rough shooting in the hills.

Mason followed the Welshman’s group to a flat plateau where he watched them kneel by a mound of earth similar to a large anthill with its crown excavated into a crater. Other similar spoil-heaps dotted the plateau at intervals, and Mason knew them to be the openings of short vertical shafts giving access to a falaj or underground water canal.

Mason took a dozen photographs of the Welshman’s two accomplices. One wore spectacles and a white, floppy hat; the other was a tall, athletic character who hauled at a rope, lifting a suitcase from the shaft.

The three men returned by their outward route carrying the suitcase and, having passed the rocks where Mason hid, stopped in the shadows of the first camelthorn bush that they reached.

As they settled down, Mason, crouching below the silhouette of the rock outcrop, circled 180 degrees until, approaching their position with the sun behind him, he monkey-crawled in the dirt of the scrub to within twenty paces of the bush.

Camel thorn is sharper and tougher than any rose thorn, and Mason could get no closer even when he eased his travel bag along the ground behind him. He unzipped it and removed a pocket-sized bug gun. He could hear conversation but no words were clearly audible, so he loaded a transmitter dart and cocked the powerful crossbow mechanism. He could see his target at ground level only and he aimed at the roots of a thorn tree close to the floppy hat, which lay in the dirt near its perspiring owner. The dart struck the ground quite close to the hat and, donning the earphones of his receiver, Mason was soon able to tune into the conversation.

The transmitting bug’s position was by no means ideal and Mason could distinguish the words of only one man. A German accent, he guessed, but could not be sure. The meeting lasted some forty-five minutes. Mason learned little, although a few bits of information were of immediate interest. The speaker was a worker at a police helicopter hangar, his boss was called Chief Superintendent Bailey and he was to fix his machine to crash on the morning flight.

Mason felt elated. He would locate the relevant police chief and warn him of his danger. Meanwhile, if he glued himself to Floppy Hat instead of the Welshman, he might yet identify the leader and the motivation behind their activities.

He kept well behind until he heard the Nissan drive off. Then he broke cover and jogged, as fast as the rifle and travel bag would allow, to the Datsun. Placing the rifle beside him, he leaned sideways to throw the travel bag onto the rear seat. This action may well have saved his life, for a bullet shattered the windshield. Mason reacted with speed. Grabbing travel bag and rifle, he dropped from the passenger door to the ground and slithered into the scrub.

Almost immediately a second bullet smashed into the bodywork of the Datsun. Mason spotted the only possible position of cover from which his car was visible, a jumble of rock no more than 150 yards to his front and across the low wadi. The sun favored neither party but Mason was a marksman and the. 22 Hornet was his favorite weapon.

With such a small-caliber bullet he needed a head shot. He took careful aim at the most likely rock. In a few seconds he saw a dark face and white-shirted shoulder appear just left of his aiming point. He realigned in an instant and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle was zeroed for a hundred meters, so the 45-grain hollow-point bullet, muzzle velocity 2,400 feet per second, required two and a half inches’ elevation aim-off. There was no further sound. No movement. Mason left his bag in the scrub and loped across the wadi, having reloaded his rifle.

The body was that of an Asian. He must have been in the Nissan with the others. Mason shrugged. He noticed that the bullet had entered an inch or so higher than his aiming point. Intended to hit the thinnest part of the skull, the left eye socket, the bullet had in fact penetrated the eyebrow and the thicker bone and sinus cavity beneath, and gone into the brain.

There was no pulse at the carotid artery under the jaw. A drop of blood had issued from the wound, and a thin trickle from one ear, but there was no exit wound: the bullet, probably fragmented, was somewhere inside the skull. A quick body search revealed only a Parker pen and a tin of tobacco. Mason had begun to consider whether to dispose of the dead man or to attempt to catch up with the Nissan when that vehicle reappeared at speed around the nearest bend in the wadi.

Uncertain whether the men were armed, Mason took no chances. Wedging the Asian’s. 303 behind a rock, he struck west and directly away from the negotiable floor of the wadi. He headed, by a circuitous route, for the plateau of the falaj mounds, the only solid cover within miles.

No bullets chased him but he did not look back until, reaching the mound with the hidden suitcase, he found a climber’s rope affixed to a steel peg and disappearing down the falaj shaft. Before lowering himself, he spotted the three men not far behind.

The falaj system was developed in Persia in 400 BC and introduced to Oman two thousand years ago. The diggers were known as muqanat, “men of the killers,” for many died of rockfalls or escaping gases. They were often young boys, blinded at birth, who developed an uncanny accuracy when digging through solid rock with simple tools, so that the narrow channels ran straight and dipped only imperceptibly to maintain gravity. Some falaj were up to 150 feet deep and fifty miles long, taking water under the hottest of deserts with little loss from evaporation.