Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

From their SAF base at Defa, thirteen SAS men set out with two ex-PFLO guides. The ground was sodden and a clinging mist compounded the darkness of the night. The guides failed to find the Zakhir Tree and, shortly before dawn, the SAS men split into two groups, the better to find their target. Danny, a corporal, moved ahead with one guide and finally located the tree. He also spotted many fresh boot prints and smelled smoke-dried meat. On his way back to Sergeant Slatting’s SAS group he glimpsed an adoo patrol through the mist. All hell broke loose. The SAS killed three guerrillas, and their own man, Geordie Small, died of blood loss from the femoral artery. Heavily outgunned, and without the benefit of the surprise they had sought, Slatting’s group of seven men lay low in the mire of wet clay amid a jungle of thorn bushes.

Tony Fleming was shot through the spine and lost the use of his legs. Two men dragged him to the center of their hideaway and, as they did so, a guerrilla leaped up some ten paces behind them. Slatting turned and killed him.

A murderous crackle of bullets hid the noise of adoo with AK47s and grenades belly-crawling from bush to bush toward the SAS survivors. Branches snapped and broke all around, torn away by high-velocity bullets. To stand up was to invite instant death. The conditions of mist and thick scrub demanded instant reaction to any hostile movement. The adoo closed in with cunning and patience.

Slatting and Danny between them accounted for four more of the guerrillas with their skilled sharpshooting. Beside them the fifteen-stone Tony Fleming lay white and still. They knew that to attempt a withdrawal, to move him, would kill him. Slatting radioed his officer. He and his men would stay where they were until they were overrun or until the SAF backup group could reach the Zakhir Tree.

One of his men nudged Slatting. The SAF group had already arrived. Through a gap in the mist they could be seen advancing down the opposite side of the valley and directly toward their position. A “British” officer, fairskinned and peak-capped, led the assault, his men stretched out on either side in their green uniforms and shemaghs . A feeling of relief swept the beleaguered SAS but was dashed when the “U.S. Cavalry” turned out to be regular Yemeni troops from South Yemen in support of the adoo. Their fire was intense and within minutes every one of the SAS men was hit.

A bullet passed through Slatting’s neck and knocked him down. He staggered to his knees but was wounded twice more. Unable to move, he lay listening to his comrades announcing their own injuries. All around them the adoo crawled closer. Some were already a mere twenty yards from the thorny SAS redoubt.

Danny saw a movement and blasted an adoo from his cover with an M79 grenade. A minute later an adoo grenade exploded by Danny’s side but the shrapnel miraculously scythed by above him. The SAS medic crawled among the wounded, applying dressings and morphine-laden syrettes. SAS counterfire began to slacken and the adoo, encouraged, closed in. Slatting was struck by a fourth bullet but remained conscious.

At 8:30 a.m. the armored cars and an SAF platoon under Captain Alex Bedford-Walker managed to work their way forward to a position overlooking the adoo and raked them with 76mm shell fire, killing many regular People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen troops and PFLO guerrillas, including Tama’an bin Amr.

By 9 a.m. only the melancholy chime of the thornbird and the occasional low curse of tired soldiers sounded through the mist below the Zakhir Tree. The bodies of the guerrilla dead and dying remained among the bushes long after the armored cars had withdrawn to their Defa stronghold with the SAS wounded stretched across their engine decks.

… Tree-lined Silom Road is the business heart of Bangkok but, behind the high walls that skirt one section of its rod-straight length, a seminary of nuns inhabit a strict Carmelite convent, and it is this building that serves as a convenient marker for the entrance to the sex capital of the world, two great parallel roads, Patpong One and Two.

Brothels are forbidden by Thai law, but 950, describing themselves as bars or clubs, thrive in Bangkok alone, with names such as Pussy Galore or Purple Pleasure. For gay visitors, Pretty Boy Lounge, the Golden Cock and many others await their patronage. The bustling pavements throng with pimps of both sexes trawling for clients. Inside the cramped neon dens their sharpend colleagues, clad only in high-heeled shoes, hypnotize with oiled buttock and sequined nipple. Most are under eighteen, many far younger and, unlike the majority of their European counterparts, they sport firm, lithe bodies that would cause lip-tremble in the most elderly of monks. They pose and pout from revolving carousels, or upturned fruit boxes, so that their shaven crotches gyrate at nose level to their audience.

The farangs, foreigners, flock to “Sin City” in the hundreds of thousands, AIDS notwithstanding, for where else could they find such abundance of youth and beauty cheaply available and amenable to every conceivable deviance?

Meier indulged in an annual tour of Far Eastern sex cities and seldom omitted a Bangkok visit, usually for a four-day stint. Giving himself wholly to the cause of sensual gratification from 5:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would sleep soundly for eight hours in his fifth-floor executive suite at the Bangkok Hilton. After breakfast in bed he would pass the day by the hotel’s spacious figure-eight outdoor pool with a supply of subscription magazines that were his greatest joy: high-tech electrical and mechanical engineering titles and a medley of publications for model cars and aircraft enthusiasts.

On his first evening in Bangkok, Meier normally took in a sex show to stimulate the level of his prurience. This invariably consisted of pretty pubescents in the act and ladies with acrobatic genitalia opening Pepsi bottles, fire-eating, and causing bananas or Ping-Pong balls to disappear.

October was the end of the rainy season, averaging eighty-four degrees of clammy humidity. Meier liked to be driven around town in the early evening like some fat vulture, beak a-dribble with anticipation, circling fields of carcasses before descent and satiation.

For five hundred baht, on the second evening of his 1986 visit, Meier found an air-conditioned Mercedes with plastic flowers around its steering wheel and a less than normally talkative driver.

But for the girls of the New Petchburi and Sukumvit Road area the tour was unimpressive. Straight streets, crazy cat’s cradles of overhead wires, smog from diesel pollution, a fetid river stench from the Chao Phraya, and everywhere giant billboards advertising Marlboro, Seiko and Sony. Young Thai bodies in their thousands nightly welcomed the humping farangs, Meier chuckled to himself, in order to balance the huge Thai import bill with their vital contribution to the nation’s invisible exports.

The Mercedes dropped Meier at the soi, or small street, close to his hotel and in front of the Cleopatra Massage Parlor. Joining a small throng of tourists, he put on his spectacles and peered into a brilliantly lit auditorium in which sat a hundred or more bikini-clad Thai girls. Later there would be two or three hundred of them, but now, at 5:45 p.m., business was just beginning. Meier liked this best as he knew the girls were at their cleanest. He called for the general manager and asked for his favorite girl of the previous year. She had gone away, beamed the Thai flesh-keeper, but he would happily make recommendations.

Meier settled on number 89, Voraluk, and her younger friend Tui. All the girls in the dazzling goldfish bowl sported handheld number plates to facilitate selection, and the pair gave beaming smiles when hailed to Meier’s side.