Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

De Villiers bought himself diving gear and struck on a Sunday morning when the dealer and his rowdy colleagues were water-skiing.

When MacEllen’s pudgy corpse was laid on the riverbank there were clearly no marks of violence nor any other reason to suspect a cause of death less mundane than a heart attack or severe cramp.

De Villiers made arrangements for Quinn to retrieve his diamonds and cash. He kept both the original killing fee and the subsequently agreed upon retrieval bonus. With time on his hands he took a South African Airways flight to Cape Town, intending to photograph the wildlife and some of the 2,500 species of mostly flowering plants that grew in the Cape mountains. For a week he camped out, exploring the Hottentots-Holland range. He came away happy, with what he knew to be superlative shots of baboons, dassies-the rock hyrax of the Bible-long-tailed sugarbirds and multicolored sunbirds, all against a riot of blurred background color.

The urge that was de Villiers’s real reason for coming to the Cape grew steadily more undeniable during the days and nights in that lofty paradise, and on the eighth day he drove his rented Moke to Tokai. He would revisit the Vrede Huis ruins with a packed lunch, take some pictures and return to Cape Town.

The ruins were unchanged and de Villiers again felt that intense feeling of belonging, but now a stronger, keener need interfered with his sense of well-being. All day he dallied at Vrede Huis, and for the first time in ten years allowed himself to think back to his days at La Pergole.

In the late evening as rolling mists-the mythical pipe smoke of pirate Van Hunks-closed over Devil’s Peak and the ramparts of Lion’s Head, de Villiers found his feet and his heart were set for the distant spinney of silver trees, the landmark he had used many times to return to La Pergole through the vineyards.

The Anglo-Arab stallion was Anne Fontaine’s favorite horse. Four evenings a week she rode around the estate, and in fine weather farther afield through the Tokai pinewoods and the gum groves of Platteklip. These outings were her only pleasure. She rode bareback in a thin cotton dress, the better to savor the power of the horse.

Sometimes, and despite her surroundings, Anne wished that she had never been born. She craved children yet could have none; the doctors did not know why. She yearned for love and there was only jealousy. She craved sexual satisfaction but her natural sensuality was denied outside marriage because of the stern moral code of her formative years. Only once had she known a man with whom her loins could have run wild and Luther be damned.

Within the cold walls of her marriage there had been a great deal of sex, all quick and mechanical. The remaining mystery was how disgust had not driven her permanently frigid.

A crescent moon edged into view above the distant silver grove, and Anne murmured to the Anglo-Arab, pressing her thighs inward and gently shortening the rein. She would cool the stallion by walking the last mile of vineyard.

Jan Fontaine was more often than not in the hospital these days, and because of his evil temper, changed from one clinic to another with an alacrity that depended on the flashpoint of the relevant staff. Anne dreaded each visit, the bedside interrogations, the increasing and irrational bitterness. Divorce was inconceivable to her, amounting almost to mortal sin, but many a time she found herself fighting off the wish that her husband would die.

Anne had been a virgin bride, as was then expected. Her first sex with Fontaine had been a brutal shock. The man was sensitive only to his immediate lusts and these were quickly quenched, for Anne was satin-tight. The early years were hellish enough, but after his injury he could no longer perform an active role and things became even worse. Now he expected her to satisfy his urges as though she were a paid whore or some hotel call girl.

The rhythmic motion of the horse faltered and Anne slipped easily to the ground to check his front hooves. She found a chip of granite in the frog and prized it loose with a nail file she carried for that purpose. The stallion snorted, nosing the air, and Anne clearly saw the figure of a man on the sandy track to the house.

She passed him by, attempting to avoid eye contact, for this was no time nor place to chat to a stranger. She would, on reaching home, alert Samuel to the presence of a trespasser on the estate.

The man had stopped, statuelike, when he heard her approach, but only when she had thankfully passed him did she hear him call her name. She had heard that voice so many times in her dreams. Was it possible or was this the ghostly robber, Antje Somers, come down from his legendary lair in the foothills?

Few words were spoken. Time ceased to exist. They were back in the forest clearing of ten years earlier. The stallion grazed beside the track and the world was far away.

Their bodies moved as one in the moon shadows of a bamboo island. As wild as animals, as gentle as hedonists, as abandoned as their instincts dictated. Each had long nurtured fantasies of this act-the one through many killings, the other through a thousand hot nights of hopelessness.

For three wonderful weeks they met in the evenings: out of sight of prying eyes, for there is no gossip machine, no jungle-drums telegraph system half so efficient as the Cape grapevine.

When de Villiers was forced to leave for overdue work in Europe, he told her the date he would return.

“I will live for that day,” she said, her eyes abrim with tears of pure love.

De Villiers was a sensitive, loving human being when he left South Africa…

The khareef flies, as small as European midges or Canadian “no see-ums” but more aggressive, crawled over his forearms and sucked blood from his neck. His shirt was soaked with the monsoon drizzle and his spectacles were misted up. On June 1, 1972, Mike Kealy, SAS troop officer at the jebel outpost of Tawi Ateer, the Well of the Birds, was squatting in the orange mud in a glade above the camp. His SLR (self-loading rifle) lay within easy reach but his concentration was focused entirely on the iridescent plumage of the hummingbird that hovered less than two paces from his knees. Wingtip to wingtip, Mike estimated the body size as two and a half inches-a tiny masterpiece of nature-and he sorely regretted that for once he had failed to bring his camera.

Khaki rivulets veined the clay soil around islets of fern and bidah gladioli. From the overhanging cliffs above to the edge of the clearing lianas fell in dank profusion. Tamarind trees and wild citrus shed their burdens of rain in a nonstop and rhythmic tattoo while all manner of crawling, hopping insects animated the undergrowth.

Mike’s lifelong fascination with nature ensured that he was never bored during the long, gray days of the 1972 monsoon. At home on the Sussex Downs, around his home at Ditchling, Mike’s father had lovingly taught him all he knew about the then abundant fauna of the area. Mike’s only sister had died young, and the Kealys’ world revolved around their son. After Eastbourne College he had passed into Sandhurst, keen for a career in his father’s old regiment, the Queen’s Surreys.

In 1965 he was commissioned and, after six years as an infantry officer, joined that small but elite group selected, from the many who try, to be SAS officers. With four months of intense specialist training under his belt, he was sent to B Squadron, then commanded by the jovial little dynamo Major Richard Pirie.

Mike did well but he found life far more tense and competitive than during his years of infantry soldiering. Then, he had commanded mostly amenable teenagers on humdrum exercises. With the SAS he found himself appointed to 8 (Mobility) Troop, generally considered the regiment’s best. A dozen or more veterans of several wars and secret operations around the world constituted the twenty-seven-year-old officer’s new charges. These were men who accepted nothing at face value, who questioned orders with a cool appraisal based almost always on experience, whereas Mike’s thinking was often the result of classroom military dogma.