Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

The hydraulic system of the Augusta Bell 205 A-1, a civilian version of the Vietnam-famed Huey, has two oil reservoirs feeding three hydraulic actuators or “jacks.” Each of these cylinders is attached to the gear box and to the nonrotating star that is situated on the mast and beneath the rotor head.

The jack that Meier intended to doctor was the one that assisted the pilot’s collective control level, the function of which was to lift the aircraft in its vertical plane.

The Bell maintenance manual made it clear that the relevant cylinder was situated to the rear and left-hand side of the static gear-box body. Meier located the hydraulic input pipe where it entered the collective jack and, using two open-jaw 5/8 AF spanners, disconnected the mating union and blocked off both pipe ends with blanking caps. There was a slight seepage of MIL-H-5606 hydraulic fluid from the jack, which Meier mopped up with a rag.

After resting his arms for a while and adjusting his spectacles Meier began the search for a lee-plug. In the casing of each cylinder there were four or five steel bungs, or lee-plugs, originally drilled so that the manufacturers could carry out interior fitments. Each hole was only 3mm in diameter, and since the head of each bolt had been chamfered flush with the cylinder wall and then sprayed with a light green paint, Meier realized that he might not find a lee-plug by touch alone. If unsuccessful he would sound-tap, but that was a time-consuming process.

After a number of false alarms he got lucky, locating a bung almost opposite his position and fairly low down the face of the cylinder. Between the lee-plug and the inner side of the hellhole’s bulkhead there was a gap of some nine inches in which Meier had to work; a challenge of the sort he loved best. Manipulating a right-angled drill head with a 3mm-diameter tungsten-steel bit, he removed the plug with total precision. This task alone took him two hours, for he had to ensure that no metal detritus entered the jack.

With painstaking care he tapped a thread into the wall of the hole he had exposed, greased it and screwed in his own homemade lee-plug. This steel bolt was a mere quarter millimeter longer than a standard 4mm-long lee-plug and, to the eye, no different in size or shape.

Meier’s substitute lee-plug had at this stage two important ancillary features: an alloy male thread welded around its entire length, like a coil around a magnetic bar, and a 2mm-square steel nut with a hole drilled through its center. The threaded lee-plug screwed into the hole in the nut for a distance of 0.25mm, the limit of the nut’s female threading. The nut was 1.5mm in depth and two small holes had been drilled into two of its opposing outer sides.

The skin of the hydraulic cylinder was itself 4mm thick. Meier tightened his two-part lee-plug into place using a torque spanner to avoid wrenching the alloy thread loose from its steel core. Then, producing his second homemade device, he placed it over the square nut so that male plungers in its base slotted home into the small holes drilled in the nut’s outer sides. The end of an open steel tube protruding from the base of the device entered the hole in the top of the nut with precision.

The apparatus was a miniature explosive hammer with just enough power to focus a 3,000 psi blow directly onto the cuckoo lee-plug, sheering its alloy thread and forcing it down into the oil-filled cylinder. The device measured four inches square and three inches deep. Its explosive unit contained a hollow ring primed with a fraction of an ounce of treated PE4 and a Kaynor. 008 detonator no bigger than a grease nipple. Slightly raised on the unit’s upper surface was a Seiko micro timerswitch. Meier had preset its twenty-four-hour alarm trigger, using the end of his ballpoint pen, for 1005 hours, at which time the helicopter was scheduled to be in flight with its load of police cadets.

With the device locked onto the bolt head, Meier positioned his third and last contrivance, a six-inch-square, two-inch-deep, pad of bulletproof Kevlar that clipped over the rest of his appliance. This would minimize damage to the inner wall of the bulkhead and help ensure that, once blown, all traces of the apparatus and the steel nut would fall down the hellhole and hit the ground well away from the subsequent crash site. The only item left behind by Meier would be the lee-plug, and that would be inside the punctured cylinder.

Meier knew by listening to the ROP engineers that Milling was a well-respected pilot and one who believed student-training flights should be realistic, low-flying “events to remember.” He estimated that some four or five seconds after the induced hydraulic leak, the helicopter would become accident-prone. The very next time the pilot attempted to pull out of a hedge-hopping routine he would find the collective control no longer gave the required instant response to gentle pressure. Suddenly there would be severe handling problems, not insuperable under normal high-flying conditions, but lethal in the wrong circumstances.

Meier spent another two hours recoupling the input pipe and cleaning up every sign of his presence. Very little hydraulic fluid had been lost, perhaps a quarter of a pint, and this would not be noticed. No topping up would be required. There would, Meier knew, be air in the pipelines, but the system would self-bleed as soon as the steering column was moved during preflight checks.

There was no shortage of rags and kerosene in the workshop, and by 4 a.m. Meier was scrubbed clean and dozing in the lavatory with a dozen greasy copies of Flight International magazine for company.

Cha Cha brought tea and gently woke John Milling.

“Six o’clock, sah’b.”

“Thank you, Cha Cha.” John smiled at the thought of the day ahead. “We go to beach today. Okay? You make us picnic. We take Oliver. You have free afternoon. Okay?”

The Kashmiri spoke little Arabic and even less English. “Okay, fine, sah’b. Excellent picnic but not today.”

“Not today?” John’s eyebrows rose.

“Not today.” The albino’s thin eyebrows mimicked John’s. “Today you fly helicopter. Telephone call from headquarters… so I bring you early cha.”

Milling’s heart sank. The bloody office had changed the duty roster again.

In deference to the Kashmiri he flung his wizaar about his middle and stomped to the telephone. A few angry words with the Duty Operations Officer confirmed his worst fears. Richard Shuttleworth or one of the others had been taken off cadet training and now his Sunday was ruined. Bridgie was surprisingly mild in her reaction. After they were all dressed and breakfasted he drove her and Oliver the short distance to the Royal Flight swimming pool and told her he hoped to be back for lunch. They were both disappointed by the dashing of their plans. John suspected a last-minute request by the Cadet Training Major that Milling, and only Milling, be in charge of the familiarization flights purely because he spoke fluent Arabic, whereas his brother pilots spoke little or none.

He drove to Air Wing HQ deep in thought. While still adamant that no word should reach Bridgie of the attempt on his life, if that is what it was, he was distinctly worried lest the two nutters show up again when she and Oliver were at home during the four or five days that remained before their leave in Europe. He made up his mind to see a discreet friend of his, a major in the local Criminal Investigation Department. Maybe some unobtrusive surveillance of his house could be arranged just for these four days. Yes, he would fix it first thing tomorrow.

At 7:20 a.m. Meier called Davies. Local anesthetic cream had eased his discomfort but he was relieved to hear de Villiers’s instructions, since he was bored stiff with the confines of the Gulf Hotel. He was to arrange three separate bookings for the earliest available flights, De Villiers to Amsterdam and the two of them to Paris.