Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

While parking by the North Star he noticed a blue Renault in the yard of Forge House, whereas a green Mini that he had seen there earlier was gone. A jumble of items packed the rear shelf of the Renault, and Davies picked out with his binoculars a seemingly innocuous pair of army puttees. These ankle wrappings, dating back to the First World War, are worn by many infantry units and are always khaki in color with the sole exception of those of SAS officers. Theirs, like the pair Davies spotted in the Renault, are light beige.

Mike Kealy made his father a cup of tea and took it up to his room. The colonel hated illness and, confined to bed with influenza, he fretted to be out and about. Mike puffed up a pillow behind his father and sat on the end of the bed. He admired his father more than any man alive and was sorry he could not stay with him longer. His maternal grandmother had died ten days before and he had promised his mother he would be at the funeral in Frimley that afternoon.

A gentle reminder from his father sent Mike up to his room to shave. As he looked up and removed steam from the mirror, he saw someone behind him. Without his spectacles he turned around. It was only the old bloodstained Chinese field cap that hung on the wall. He laughed. His aunt Olga had ticked him off only a week or two before about it.

“Get rid of that terrorist’s hat,” she had said. “It will bring you bad luck.” Mike took leave of his father and drove the Renault north. His mother had gone ahead in the Mini to prepare things. He would have spent a day or two in Ditchling to help her but he needed to be in Hereford to look after his wife, Maggi.

They already had a daughter of three, Alice, and now Maggi was about to give birth to twins, their doctor assured them. She had somehow contracted mumps with only two or three weeks to go, so Mike was treating her with kid gloves and felt uneasy to be away at all.

After a year with his parent regiment in Germany and Northern Ireland, he was overjoyed to be given command of an SAS squadron. His MFO crates containing his personal belongings had recently arrived from Werle in Germany at his new quarters in Hereford. Several days of DIY operations, in between nursing Maggi, stretched ahead of him.

He passed through Billingshurst and Loxwood. One thing that occupied his mind, apart from a natural worry about his adequacy to lead a squadron of Britain’s finest fighting men, was the question of his physical fitness. His recent desk job had allowed him time for routine jogging, but Mike was used to being at peak performance. Few men could outpace him in the hills with a heavy rucksack and rough going and he believed he should take over D Squadron in top personal condition. As soon as Maggi was recovered he would settle into a strict training regime.

He arrived at St. Peter’s Church in Frimley at noon, just in time to join his mother in the front pew. After the service, with thirty or so relatives, they walked down the road to the White Hart pub for lunch. Later Mike drove to the nearby town of Chobham, where his father-in-law, the Reverend Acworth, was rector. After tea at the rectory he headed home with the gift of a corner cupboard protruding from the Renault’s trunk.

Where the A49 enters the suburbs of Hereford, Mike turned right into Bradbury Lines, the Regiment Headquarters and married-quarters area, and up Bullingham Lane. Number 79 was fairly secluded, set back from the road by a circular cul-de-sac. When Mike needed to go into the main regimental compound he could either drive up the lane to the main gate and show his ID card or walk to a side entrance in the security fence and enter with his electronic card.

Davies had long since drained his vacuum flask and the doughnut was a distant memory, so he was delighted when Kealy finally came home to roost. The fact that his married quarters were within SAS home territory did not please Davies at all, and he left Bullingham Lane as soon as he had seen Kealy carry the corner cupboard into number 79 and place newspaper over his front windshield against overnight frost.

Leaving the Ford three streets away, Davies, complete with bird-watcher gear and a flashlight, threaded his way through gorse and scrub to the rough ground immediately behind the Kealys’ back garden. He noted a high water tower close by as a convenient marker and drove west to search for a suitable bed and breakfast. That night he settled for a retired couple in Stretton Sugwas. In December there were vacancies aplenty and he would change his base nightly as well as his identity.

Davies telephoned de Villiers in New York. “I have located our person,” he said, “and will need you here in three weeks.” He gave contact details and settled down to bore himself stiff with an old Reader’s Digest. Tomorrow, with extreme caution, he would begin the search for a pattern to Kealy’s lifestyle.

The long antiseptic corridors, as in all major hospitals, served as thoroughfares for two types of inmate: the sick and listless in pajamas with too much time on their hands and the rushed-off-their-feet doctors and nursing staff for whom there were never enough hours in the day.

In the Maternity Ward of Hereford General Hospital a new doctor made his way, rather more slowly than most, from the staff toilets to the postnatal wing. There was a rapid turnover of doctors and surgeons at the hospital and no identity check at the various hospital entrances.

Two years before, in Belfast’s Catholic Mater Hospital, the MP, Mrs. Maive Drumm, had been assassinated in her hospital bed by men wearing doctors’ white coats. Since few hospital-based crime novels escape the cliche of criminals masquerading as medical staff, the trick might be considered dangerously overworked. But if it works, why not use it? Davies certainly had no qualms about plagiarism. He approached a junior nurse in the reception of the Postnatal Ward and learned both the location of Mrs. Kealy’s bed and the fact that she had produced twins the previous evening.

Maggi Kealy was awake and surrounded by flowers. Davies arrived with clipboard, stethoscope and wearing the ubiquitous white coat. He bent over the chart at the end of her bed and made an entry on his clipboard while attaching a small bug to the underside of the bed frame. The bug was fitted with a superstick tab, not a magnetic clamp, to minimize transmission interference.

“All seems to be well, Mrs. Kealy. Rest, while you may.” He grinned and left her cubicle congratulating himself on his easy bedside manner. Following the copious array of signs, he made for the General Medical Ward and approached the duty sister there. He had come from the Geriatric Unit, he explained, and needed a supply of insulin and chlorpropamide. They had run short. Chlorpropamide is used by diabetics not requiring insulin.

He was given both drugs and signed two sets of forms to acknowledge receipt.

Three weeks of pussyfooting and freezing his toes off in the scrub behind Kealy’s house had led Davies to the firm conclusion that Kealy could never be dealt with inside the SAS citadel of Hereford. Twice Kealy and his wife had spent some time in their back garden, and on each occasion they were nursing a sick rabbit. Kealy had been complaining that he never had time to keep fit and that once the babies were born he would spend more time on the Brecon Beacons. Hills that Davies also knew well, these were the main SAS training grounds where a small number of unfortunates had over the years died of exposure in their keenness to pass SAS selection. Davies had formulated a simple plan to put before de Villiers on his arrival.

Darrell Hallett failed to find any trace of the Welshman in the many hotels, motels and guest houses he visited around and about Hereford, despite his photographs of Davies by the Gulf Hotel swimming pool. Eventually he had given up and set about shadowing the postman Bob Bennett. Again nothing. Only an Afghan hound had shown any untoward interest in Bennett. So he switched to Kealy.