Horsley - Sounds from another room

SOUNDS FROM ANOTHER ROOM

SOUNDS FROM
ANOTHER ROOM

by
PETER HORSLEY

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by
LEO COOPER
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Peter Horsley

ISBN 0 85052 581 0

A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

Printed in England by Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

To
ANNIE
My Long-Suffering Wife

The author wishes to acknowledge the help of his wife, Annie, with the editing; his secretary, Mary Churcher, for all the many hours of typing; Leo Cooper of Pen & Sword Books Limited for all his kindness and patience; Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Bloomsbury Publishing Limited for their generous agreement for the use of the extract from The Feather Men; This England Magazine for their permission to reproduce the poem by John Magee; David Higham Associates for permission to publish John Pudneys poem Breakfast, and finally his lucky stars for having lived through it all.

Long introductions are tedious to reader and writer alike so this Foreword is short. My story is not the traditional saga of some minor military figure; it recounts a number of separate events, each true and of such intensity at the time that they altered the pattern of my life thereafter, like coral polyps shaping a reef.

I like to compare it to a house whose main rooms are the events I shall describe and the corridors between but the passage of time. The rooms themselves are of such variety they might have been designed by different architects and with each furnished in the style of its immediate tenants.

There is a mystery about the house, for on occasions there would appear to be a house within a house, one living in the present, the other in a parallel time and dimension. The whispers and sounds of the other occupants sometimes break through from the recesses of a distant and unknown room, though message and messengers remain tantalizingly elusive.

Both style and time may at times seem confusing but there is a reason for this. Orphaned early, I was a lonely child, often thrown back on my own resources and imagination. With no one close enough to whom I could reveal my innermost secrets, I became a compulsive scribbler, and remain one. So the book is a mixture of what I actually wrote at the time and what I have written since, from diaries and notes. For example, my school diaries are written exactly as they were at the time and The Storm was written shortly after the event.

Just ten years ago I was involved in a very serious accident which, at the time, seemed to have been caused by some quite inexplicable malfunction of my car. As I lay at the roadside, not far from death, the whole story of my life passed in front of me, like a film that was madly out of control.

A most remarkable explanation of the cause of that accident was later provided by Sir Ranulph Fiennes in his book The Feather Men. It appears that I was the innocent tool of a terrorist gang who had decided to use my car as a murder weapon. A former officer in the Special Air Service, Sir Ranulph is very familiar with the shadowy world of terrorism and I have no reason to challenge the facts as he gives them, even though several questions remain unanswered. As it was this extraordinary and devastating experience which triggered the idea behind this book of mine, he has very kindly allowed me to reproduce that story as my opening chapter.

It happened a long time ago in a far off desert country. The four sons of Sheik Amar Bin Issa were killed in an ambush in the South Yemen by British forces. The Sheik swore an oath of revenge on his sons killers.

The Clinic were a European gang of ruthless hired assassins who banded together to kill for money. The Sheik finally met the leader of the gang in Dubai and took out a contract on his sons killers a million dollars down payment, and a further million dollars for each of four films proving the assassinations; one stipulation of the contract was that the deaths were to appear accidental, arousing no suspicions of murder in the minds of relations or friends.

The Feather Men were a British group feather because their touch was light. They took into their grasp crimes which were beyond the powers of the ordinary police. The Feather Men relentlessly pursued the IRA in Northern Ireland, moving silently against those members who had escaped the hands of the law through lack of evidence. They also took under their wing the families of the SAS [Special Air Service] and established a body of watchdogs to look after their interests. The Feather Men were controlled by a committee of senior establishment figures under the chairmanship of Colonel Tommy Macintosh.

So far the Clinic had fulfilled half their contract by arranging the deaths of Superintendent John Milling, a former Marine, and a police officer in the Omani Police Air Wing in a helicopter air accident by tampering with the pilots collective control lever. After an unequal aerodynamic battle, the helicopter plunged into the sea, killing John Milling. They had then settled the fate of Major Mike Kealy, Special Air Service, who died of exposure in a climbing accident in the Brecon Beacons. He was leading a batch of SAS trainees on a forced march in atrocious weather conditions when he became separated from his charges. Kealy was then ambushed by the gang who drugged him and left him to die on the mountain in the cold and swirling fog. Later on they would deal with Corporal Mac, the last of the four, and even attacked Ranulph Fiennes himself close to his Exmoor Farm. He was only rescued by the intervention of the Feather Men who had been watching the gang as they circled his farm.

The Clinic now turned their attention to Major Michael Marman. They had broken into Marmans Clapham home while he was out shopping and had photographed his diary. During their escape, however, they were recognized by a member of the Feather Men who had been watching their unlawful activities for some time. Mike Marman was immediately warned that he was on the Clinics hit list as a former member of the Sultan of Omans Armed Forces. The Feather Men meanwhile arranged for John Smythe, an active watchdog, and a team of local volunteers to mount a round-the-clock surveillance of Marman.

The Clinic had then to decide how to dispose of Major Marman. After considerable argument between members of the gang, it was decided to dispatch him in a road accident. Meier, the technical member, had already perfected the Boston brakes method in America. This involved fitting a sophisticated device to the brakes of a lead car, controlled by radio from a following car and steering it into the victims vehicle travelling in the opposite direction. It had worked before in the States and Meier saw no reason why it should not work again.

While Meiers technical skill was undeniable, the gang recruited another member, Jake, a genius with cars and unethical devices. The gang leased an old disused airstrip in Kent and began to assemble the necessary tools and equipment to modify the brakes of the lead car. The plan began to take shape. First, Marman had to be caught alone on an open road. It is lucky, said Meier, that Marmans car is a very small Citroen 2CV which will crack open like an egg when it is hit. A day well ahead was chosen, after a study of Marmans diary and maps, Tuesday, 11 November, when Marman was due to visit an old friend, General Robin Brockbank, at Steeple Langford in Wiltshire. He should be driving back after lunch along the A303 at about 3.15 pm in time to reach his house in Clapham just before dark. If we allow him an average speed of fifty-five miles per hour, he will be, said Meier pointing to the map, somewhere along this dual carriageway between Winterbourne Stoke and Popham. If this plan does not work the first time, we will continue to look for a suitable time and place until it does.