by Tony Wilson
Chapter 2
Just after the Hercules incident Teddy received a phone call, not a particularly uncommon occurrence you may think, except that apparently it had been quite vague, and was all the more unusual because it had originated in precision Switzerland. He was just about to settle down to a rather late breakfast; after all it was Saturday, with his now perfectly happy green fingered wife, when his mobile phone sounded off (it was the dam busters tone). It was one of his contacts from when the hunt had been on for the aircraft. He, the man in Switzerland, had just had a phone call from a lady, also in Switzerland. She, the said lady, had heard from a friend (that also lived in Switzerland) that he, the first man in Switzerland that is, was looking for Hunter aircraft. Apparently her husband had recently passed away and she was now left with a crashed Hunter and some odd bits and pieces - in Switzerland. As the address was way out in the sticks he hadn’t visited her yet but was he, Teddy, in Spain, still interested? ‘And if Teddy were to save him a trip then he would forgo the finder’s fee’ (what a sucker). He, Teddy, took down the ladies address and phone number and told him, the man in Switzerland, that he would look into it and of course he would still receive his finder’s fee if there was anything worth having (what a plonker), he was thinking ‘brake pads’, and immediately phoned Frau Englbund in Switzerland, who had just finished her breakfast and was starting to pack a suitcase.
‘Yes’ she still had ‘all those’ bits of junk but ‘no’ he couldn’t come and have a look at them on Monday, he could come today or no day, as she was flying to America tomorrow evening. He liked the sound of ‘all those’ bit of junk.
This is where I come in, Teddy phoned me, and as the sun was still definitely not over the yard arm I was sound asleep (I’m positive that he still hadn’t forgiven me for stealing his F6 the other day) and wondered if I would care to take a trip to Switzerland in the G450. I had never flown into a Swiss airport before and the one that he was thinking of using had an ‘interesting’ approach, so at eleven o’clock on the dot my Grumman smoothly lifted off with yours truly at the controls, and pointed itself in the general direction of Helvetia, that’s what the Swiss call themselves on their stamps. Beside me sat Teddy, half asleep and with a blob of marmalade on his shirt, and behind me, in my hand crafted bespoke cabin (it had been specially designed for my every personal convenience) was now just plain James Wood, ex Inspector of SO1 Special Protection Branch, Inma (she also came with the airfield – she cleaned, and things) and Topsy.
After he and David had been completely exonerated following the early demise of Tweedle Dee at the OK corral, during the attempted kidnapping by my daughters girl-friend!!!, James received a reprimand from his superiors for not shooting David and Charlie stone dead. Apparently he was on a ‘too lower a pay grade’ to think. David and Charlie had guns in their hands; he was there to protect the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, so he should have shot them both dead, just like that. The fact that they, the guns, were pointing in the wrong directions, and that he ‘knew’ that David was a good guy was totally irrelevant. At the inquest David had dropped a subtle hint that there might always be a job as my minder waiting, if ever he decided that he wanted to work for a living, so a few days later, after he, a highly trained Police Inspector, was sent out to buy a bottle of perfume for her Ladyships impending birthday, he made a decision, and on return he placed the bottle, his warrant card and side arm in front of his Lordship, turned and walked out - with his Lordship shouting at his retreating back ‘I presume you are resigning then’. I suppose as a judge he was trained to pick up on such subtleties - James never did receive recompense for the perfume, but was now my full time minder, as David was Directoring all over the place, and Charlie was usually showing Agnetha (his girlfriend) ‘something interesting’ in the store cupboard.
Inma had arrived into this world as one half of a single parent family; her father had been the fly-by-night deck hand on Carlos’s (my Captain of uniformed security guards) father-in-laws boat. The evening before that fateful final voyage he had finally convinced a rather pretty, if not slightly gullible local girl that ‘this next trip could very well be my last, if something terrible happened - and I am still a virgin’. That line usually worked, and this time was no exception - except that it came to pass that the first part became true, even if the second part wasn’t, and nine months later Inmaculada de Concepción De Silva Ennamora (thankfully Inma for short) arrived in San Miguel del Mar, but nobody believed her mother when she named her, she was just one half of an ‘easy’ family, but over the years the villagers slowly started to respect them both as her mother slaved away at every cleaning job that came to hand, no job was too small or too dirty. It wasn’t uncommon for her to have the thankless job of cleaning the front entrances of over a dozen apartment blocks at the same time, as well as holding down a full time factory job, and doing each one cheerfully. Inma was a bright young thing at school, but when the opportunity arose for her to go on to college she had to turn it down, it was time for her to start helping her mother bring in the bread full time, not just holidays. Her first job was at one of the local Hotels as a chambermaid and she loved it, meeting all those new people from far flung places, then disaster struck, San Miguel del Mar was on the decline so the Hotel closed. She then took over some of her mother’s more strenuous jobs as she (her mother that is) wasn’t getting any younger, and picked up a new one of her own, as part time office cleaner for the security firm that was looking after the old airfield, and when Thomas (a Brummy security guard/ex-teacher) started teaching his colleagues English she joined in with a vengeance, and so when Mr Michaels moved into his temporary accommodation on the airfield, Inma quickly volunteered her services as cleaner, and suddenly found herself permanently employed as a maid. Yet again she was over the moon, and as a ‘founder member’ of Mr Michaels happy band she found that she had some rather nice perks, like looking after him when he went off in the Grumman at short notice, and she had been the first one to take up ‘El Jefé’s’ (the Boss’s) offer of free flying lessons for anyone working for him when that nice ‘Teddy Bear’ joined them, and she quite often got some quality ‘stick’ time on these trips as well.
Topsy was not a happy little bunny about coming along at first, he had much too much work to do at El Campo, even on a Saturday, but he was a natural manager and so quickly delegated. Grabbing his passport and an overnight bag - just in case (he had spent too long on MARTSU to fall for that one) and was now reclining in the sumptuous swivel rocker - he could definitely quickly become accustomed to this life.
Once we were on a steady heading I vacated the hot seat and let Inma take over, and as I stood in the galley dunking my pyramid into a mug of boiling water (I’m very fussy about how I take my tea), after first emptying two sachets of instant Cappuccino into my maids mug, and retrieving a chilled Perrier from the fridge for Teddy, I looked at my Crew Chief twirling in my favourite armchair, and my body guard snoring quietly on my settee, and thought ‘there is definitely something very wrong with this picture’, thank god it’s only a short flight, I won’t have time to get the Hoover out. Just before I could at least get a duster out it was time for me to take my place ‘upfront’ again, and as I settled into the still warm seat I looked out of the cockpit at the airfield that Teddy was pointing to, I had seen larger window boxes. I gulped and turned to Inma, ‘have I got any brown trousers on board?’
‘Roit sorry aar kid, yuz spare trazis r back yam’. ‘Aah kid’ apparently is Brummyeese for Boss.
I took one more look at that insignificant little blot on the Swiss landscape, tightened my seat straps, closed my eyes, and pushed the stick forward. When we came to a stop, inches from the foot of the appropriate mountain I opened them again, twisted the nose wheel steering knob, blipped the port engine (see I’m learning) and taxied smartly to arrivals; I hadn’t needed those extra trousers after all.
The local heavies that David had organised for us had two black ‘stretch’ Hummers waiting for
us, complete with tinted windows and snow chains. Now that worried me, the snow chains bit at least, thank god I hadn’t come in shorts and flip flops: apparently we were going above the snowline.
As we slid to a standstill in front of a very strange looking house Teddy commented on the fact that they didn’t seem to have many hangars in this residential area, and Topsy didn’t go much on the architecture, and they both had very valid points. The house in front of us seemed to have your average very picturesque three up, three down sort of Swiss chalets at either end, with a small block of council flats interconnecting them, very strange. We made our way up to a very unimposing door in the middle of the flats and were greeted by a very rotund, if not slightly henpecked looking woman. My ‘E’ grade ‘A Level’ result in French bears testament to my linguistic skills so Teddy, who apparently was an ardent skier in his spare time and could ‘speak the lingo like a native’ took the lead, as this must be Frau Englbund.
‘Please call me Frau Englbund, you must be the people coming to see about the junk, please hurry up I still haven’t finished packing yet, and don’t bring any snow into the house’, then she looked at me, half smiled and said ‘I’ve seen you on the television, you may call me Heidi’.
Plan ‘B’, use English.
‘You didn’t say you could speak English’ Teddy moaned, having struggled through a painful conversation with her over the phone a few hours earlier.
‘You didn’t ask’ she snapped, and disappeared inside, I was already starting to like her.
I followed Teddy through the front door, kicking the snow that had deigned to adhere to my Gucci’s off on the way across the snow porch, through another door, and into his back. He had stopped dead in his tracks. I looked over his shoulder and straight down the barrels of four 30mm Aden cannons, and attached to the cannons was a gleaming F58 Hunter, and it looked in absolute pristine condition. If the road outside had been long enough I would have quite happily gotten into it and flown it home. As I looked around it was obvious that originally there had just been the two chalets, but then a concrete slab had been laid in the gap between them, the Hunter had then been placed on it and the interconnecting part of the structure built around it. The gleaming F58 stood in centrally heated comfort, and was surrounded by an Aladdin’s cave of spare parts, and looking out of a rear window I saw that there were three very large store rooms in the huge garden, and I suspected that we would find yet more treasures out there, I just had to find out all about this beautiful aircraft.
Heidi finally took us into her cosy little lounge in one of the original chalets after I had promised her faithfully to personally fly her to America in the G450 if she missed her flight, to fill us in on the Hunters history.
‘What’s a G450?’ she said, took one look at a photograph of a G450 on Teddy’s proffered laptop, and promptly went on a go slow – packing wise.
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Her husband had been a very senior Aircraft Maintenance Officer in the Swiss Air Force, and he had spent virtually all his Air Force career on Hunter Squadrons, helping to keep, according to him, ‘the finest aircraft in the world’ airworthy. Then along came large black clouds in the shape of shiny new F/A-18 Hornet’s, and as they started at arrive, to replace the venerable Hunter, procedures started to change. One afternoon a new pilot had a problem with his Hunters landing gear and its right undercarriage collapsed. As the aircraft slid to a graceful halt on the runway its right wing and tail unit were damaged, but instead of sending the aircraft to the maintenance unit for repair, the airfields Senior Aircraft Maintenance Officer (SAMO for short) took one quick look at it, assessed it as ‘beyond economic repair’ and declared it scrap.
Hubby despaired at this travesty of justice and persuaded the SAMO to let him have it to train new mechanics on. ‘Good idea’, came the reply, so he was awarded 10 brownie points and it was loaded onto a trailer and deposited unceremoniously in an empty hanger.
Three weeks later a refuelling bowser found a patch of black ice and slid gracefully into another F58 (everything concerning the Hunter is graceful), impacting at the join between the left hand side of the cockpit and the left intake/wing, as the Swiss Navy didn’t have shares in the Hunter it was still ‘left’, and not ‘port’. Come to think of it they didn’t have shares in anything else either - Switzerland is a land locked Country. It looked nasty, what with instruments dangling from the carnage, and its engine seized up solid, so the same thing happened again, the SAMO took one look at it, assessed it, declared it scrap, hubby asked for it, was given 10 more brownie points and it was quickly towed to the once empty hangar, alongside his first acquisition, and it didn’t take hubby long to work out that between the two wrecks lurked a whole aircraft just craving to burst forth, so the first project for some wannabee maintenance supervisors and the next intake of trainee mechanics, under his personal supervision of course, was to turn the two into one and a half. Over time the work was completed and there stood one ‘as new’ hybrid F58 (and one very sick one). He was as proud as punch for what his men had achieved, but no one else on the airfield cared a jot, the new F/A-18’s were arriving in force and the Hunters were quickly becoming relics of the past. As the stores department needed more room for the F/A-18’s spares anything with a Hunter reference number on it was deposited unceremoniously in the ‘getting quite full’ hangar. Spare engines, ejection seats, drop tanks, maintenance manuals (unfortunately most of them were in English so they had never been used) and hundreds of boxes of various shapes and sizes. The Hunters weren’t the only things getting close to retirement, so was Hubby, and he wasn’t much looking forward to working on those noisy new machines, and then a series of unrelated events came together quite nicely for him.
First his favourite Uncle passed away and left him a tidy bit of money and a nice chalet up in the mountains. He visited it and found that the chalet next door was up for sale at a reduced price for a quick sale, and the space between the two would comfortably take a Hunter. He offered the asking price for the ridiculously under-priced chalet, and it was snapped up immediately. The vendor, who was a builder, even threw in a concrete base between the two properties as a ‘thank you’.
Returning to the base he quite openly put in a request to purchase ‘Hulk 112’, as his new hybrid fighter was now legally called. As he had sufficient brownie points they practically gave it to him ‘just as long as he got it off the Airfield at his own expense’, no one even bothered to go and have a look at it.
He then visited the stores department, where two Stores Officers were off sick and the third was covering for them, as well as doing his own jobs; one of which was assessing surplus and redundant stock. After finding that quite a few of the labels had fallen off the boxes in hubby’s hangar the vastly overworked Stores Officer quickly devised a fool proof system of assessing the price of the surplus stock. Measure the length of the box/crate/item and multiply it by ‘x’ Francs, swings and roundabouts he said, thus hubby became the proud owner of things like a box of 24 not so practical sets of aircraft foul weather blanks for the same price as two completely refurbished undercarriage assemblies. As ‘x’ was so low both box’s combined came to the same total as the bill for his and his wife’s recent anniversary dinner; and two brand new Rolls Royce Avon jet engines that were still in their delivery ‘cocoons’ cost him the equivalent of a new outboard motor each.
The next thing to fall into place was a new batch of Mechanics and Supervisors, so using ‘his’ own equipment the new team took off the wings, lifted the aircraft, retracted its undercarriage and gently loaded it onto his ‘never been used before’ road transportation cradle, and the wings were slotted into their very own padded cradles. They then sealed them all up against inclement weather and successfully passed that part of their training.
Next SAMO sent him a memo ‘did he want Hulk 113?’ ‘No thank you very much sir’, everything of any interest to him had been stripped from it long ago and legitimately purchased by him thro
ugh the overworked Stores Officer, and so without leaving his office SAMO assigned Hulk 113 to the crusher. Hulk 112 had been used as a ‘test piece’ for a new batch of trainee aircraft paint sprayers and the different aircraft serial numbers, on the different parts of the aircraft had been ‘standardised’, so quite unintentionally any reference to the other ‘cannibalised’ aircraft was obliterated.
The final piece to slip into place was that the Commanding Officer of the base summonsed him to his office of a ‘quiet chat’. ‘As he (hubby) was getting fairly close to retirement it was just not going to be cost effective for the Air Force to send him to America to retrain on the F/A-18’s, would he consider early retirement’?
‘Too right sunshine (or words to that effect), but what about all my bits and pieces in the old hangar?’
‘Oh you can have the hangar rent free for a year, consider it part of your severance package, just switch out the lights and leave the keys at the Main Gate when you have finished with it’.
With plenty of time on his hands he had the firm that had taken Hulk 113 to the crusher, deliver Hulk 112 to its new concrete base between his two chalets, and they didn’t even bill him for the move as they thought it was just another part of their contract with the Air Force, and a new class of mechanics were persuaded to have an ‘adventure training’ weekend at his new home, with the promise of all the food that they could eat, and once the Hunter was out of its cradle, the wings were back on, and the whole aircraft temporarily covered, all the beer that they could drink as well.
Eventually the interconnecting building was carefully constructed around his beloved aeroplane, and he reverently uncovered it, and spent the rest of his days (which unfortunately weren’t that many) cleaning and servicing it as if it was still an operational aircraft, and cataloguing all his spares, by name, reference number, quantity, location, and invoice number on his battered old computer, and the last thing that he thought of, as he sat quietly in the cockpit, before he had his coronary was ‘I really must get around to removing those 30mm cannon shells from the gun pack’.
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After some frantic phone calls Teddy started tapping away on the late Hubby’s steam driven computer, Topsy started clambering over the piles of treasure-trove, James started making himself comfortable in a convenient ejection seat, and Inma disappeared out of the front door with Heidi and my bit of plastic for a trip to the local designer supermarket. We had decided to spend the night there; ‘there are plenty of spare beds’ Heidi had assured us, as we were definitely ‘time limited’, and neither Teddy, Topsy nor I wanted to leave, just in case someone else sneaked in and grabbed all the goodies.
As I wandered around the room looking at all the artefacts I realised that the only non-aircraft thing in the entire room was an old black and white photo above the door. We had been greeted by a younger version of that face when we arrived so it was safe to say that this had to be his wife’s mother, but why was it in hubby’s play room?, then I had an idea. Clambering into the cockpit I flicked on the battery, switched on the gyro gun sight and looked through it. Yes I was right; I was looking at a spot just between his mother-in law’s eyes, so I curled my finger around the trigger and thought ‘one quick squeeze’, then Teddy gave a whoop of joy. Blast I thought, perhaps another day, and vacated the cockpit and wandered over to him.
He pointed to the screen and highlighted was BRAKE PADS - Part Number - H/6537684 - Store Room C - Bay 3 - 1 box. His initial joy was now tempered after seeing that the quantity was only 1 box, but ‘beggars can’t be chooses’ I thought, and anyway I fancied a breath of fresh air so I jotted the details down, woke James (I’m sure he could sleep on a clothes line), took the key to ‘Store C’ from the keyboard by the rear door, and we made our way outside into the snow. Store Room C was stencilled above the door of the smaller of the rooms, and as I unlocked the door and swung it open I was hit by a waft of hot air, apparently the ‘stores’ were temperature controlled as well. The store looked large from the outside, but inside it was cavernous, and James quickly found the switch, the lights flickered on - and hundreds of boxes stared back at me. We made our way to Bay 3, which was clearly stencilled on the floor, and I placed the message pad down on a handy crate, and then we waded through the boxes that were stacked behind the crate, but no luck, no matching part number could we find, not even something close, so we decided that Herr Hubby had been fallible after all and had misplaced it. Never mind, perhaps we would find it one day; after all I still had a fabulous collection of goodies to scour through, and James had almost been totally underwhelmed by the whole experience. As we turned to leave I lifted the message pad off the crate and there it was P/N - H/6537684, the number that had so recently become etched in my brain, it wasn’t a box, it was a bloody great crate. Out came my phone, #5, and ‘Teddy, both of you get your backsides out here, NOW’, and closed the connection. Seconds later they careered into the store, expecting to find carnage, or at least mayhem, but all they found was me - open mouthed. I pointed to the number on the message pad, and then at the Part number on the crate, and Topsy kissed it, then went in search of a crow-bar. Inside it were hundreds of boxes of individual set of pads, and all of them were perfectly preserved. Obviously this had been one of the last stores requisitions that the Air Force had made before the decision had been taken to replace their fleet of Hunters. They must have been running low, so had ordered what must been at least five years’ worth of replacement pads for them, lucky old me.
As the afternoon progressed things got quite busy for us, and my minders were more than happy to let us get on with it, apparently their firms mobile site office had arrived so they were snug as bugs in a rug outside. When Inma returned laden down with shopping she placed the receipt and my card on the desk and whispered to me that whilst chatting to Frau Englbund, she had mentioned to her on several occasions that she was not very happy about spending the remainder of her time on this planet ‘living in a mausoleum, in this god forsaken backwater’, she much preferred ‘people watching’ from under the arcades around Berne. ‘She didn’t know if this bit of information was of any use, but hoped that it might be’. It was brilliant news, Topsy and I had been trying to work out how to get the Hunter out. He had done a stint on MARTSU at HMS Daedalus, Lee-on-the-Solent, in Hampshire; and in the not so distant past it had been the Royal Navy’s specialist Mobile Aircraft Repair, Transport and Salvage Unit. Half the unit had been ‘Tiffies’ (spit) that would go off and carry out complicated repairs to an aircraft for a squadron, and the other half worked for a living. They specialised in the transportation of aircraft (of all three services) by road (lorry), sea (in a freighters hold) or air (inside a cargo plane or under a helicopter). It didn’t matter if they were in one piece or had ‘arrived’ on terra firma in several bits (crashed), they prided themselves in delivering them to wherever they had to go, in the same condition as they were in when they arrived ‘on site’ to pick them up. It could be in the middle of a field, a nice warm hangar, or Fort William car park, it didn’t matter, ‘have lorry (and cranes, and motorbikes for escorts) will travel’. There was no way that we (and again I use that term very loosely) could safely dismantle the building and take the aircraft out the front way, anyway new buildings and roundabouts had been built in the ensuing years and Topsy doubted that a ‘Queen Mary’ (specialist aircraft transportation trailer) could make it safely up here, but ‘out back’ was a totally different kettle of fish. With some judicious prodding and poking we deducted that the part of the rear wall just behind the Hunter may have been designed to be removed, allowing the Hunter to be pushed outside, and also that the sheds had been positioned wide enough apart to allow her to squeeze between them. Topsy reckoned that it would then take him about 10 minutes to ease the rear fence out of the way, using a chain saw, and then it was out into a meadow that was straight out of the ‘Sound of Music’, then ‘perhaps we could airlift it out’ he suggested.
It sounded like a good i
dea to me, although I must admit that I was starting to get just a tad bit worried when Topsy informed me, as we were heavy into discussed the intricacies of the operation that one of his favourite sayings was ‘If it won’t go, don’t force it – hit it with a bigger hammer, the other one apparently was ‘if all else fails – read the instructions’.
It became obvious to me that a lot of people were beavering away in the background supporting my merry little band when a couple of Solicitors suddenly arrived out of nowhere. I grabbed the friendliest looking one and went to find Heidi. She agreed that she didn’t much care for her home/hangar, she was really a City bird at heart, so she readily agreed in principle (and in writing) that I could not only have the aircraft and all the spares, but that I could purchase her home/s as well. That way it didn’t really matter if Topsy had to adjust part of it while ‘easing’ the aircraft out, either with his chain saw or a sledgehammer. I gave a written undertaking to have everything independently verified and valued, but Teddy had given me a very ‘off the cuff’ figure of what the aircraft and the bits and pieces that he had seen so far were roughly worth, so when I told her that the final total would be at least ‘X’ francs (with a lot of zero’s) (and most likely a lot more), she slid gracefully under the table in a dead faint. We revived her and then I mercilessly continued, ‘and that does not include ‘top dollar’ for your home’. This time she didn’t faint, she grabbed the phone and postponed indefinitely her flight to America, after all she was only going over there to see her children, grandchildren and great grandchild - there was serious house hunting to do over here. ‘And ‘no’ she did not want to go and live in America, the kids might want her to babysit, she was definitely way too old for that sort of nonsense’. The property agents were most likely all shut by now, she moaned ‘but she couldn’t wait until they opened up on Monday’.
‘Shall I see if my staff at El Campo can speed things up?’ I asked. Speed things up, she was off viewing six furnished apartments at two o’clock the next morning.
All was going spectacularly well; we opened up the other store rooms and found enough drop tanks to equip all my aircraft and a huge amount of special tools, ground equipment and specialist slings. The first thing that Topsy insisted on was that all the aircraft slings were to be sent off for testing, and so as the sun started to set over a nearby mountain a helicopter whisked them all off to the hastily re-opened testing house. Hopefully they would be back, complete with their certificates by Tuesday, but it was nearly a moot point, Herr Bloken....., Herr Blicken......, Herr Bloodngutts arrived. He was from Customs (with a capital C), and didn’t we just know it. It was his Saturday off, he had been dragged ‘off piste’ and so his new purpose in life was to make my life a misery. There was absolutely no way on Gods little green (or white in winter) earth that I was going to get even a box of hair grips out of Switzerland if he had anything to do with it, so he made himself comfortable in front of the antiquated computer and exclaimed ‘oh good, I have one just like this in the office’. Why did I not doubt him in the slightest? And as we all sat around watching him, first he sorted all the items on the computer out chronologically, then alphabetically, then numerically and finally by date of invoice, he liked that; I think it must have looked prettier. Then he sorted out the invoices; fortunately he settled for ‘date order’ as well, that saved us at least an hour.
Item one on the computer HAWKER HUNTER F58 (complete) - Reference number - Hulk 112 - Room 1. ‘Where is room one?’ He demanded.
‘You are sat in it’ I snapped, just controlling myself enough to refrain from grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, dragging him out of his seat and ramming his nose into the side of the aircraft that was parked right in front of him, I might have dented it, and so he slowly got up and walked around it (twice), noting all the planes serial numbers in his note book, then eased himself back down and laboriously wrote about half a page in another note book, and then placed the invoice to one side with a sneering ‘the reference numbers don’t tally’. It was going to be a long night. As he slowly continued his ministrations Inma and Heidi tried to ease the situation by bringing in a pile of bacon butties. ‘None for me thank you’ he muttered, head down in a pile of invoices, ‘I have brought my own sandwiches’ (with his winning personality he most likely automatically assumed that they were seasoned with strychnine).
‘Good job’ I thought, ‘I wasn’t going to offer you one anyway’.
Halfway through my second butty, this one with brown sauce on it, I made up my mind to return to El Campo, but before I could put thoughts into words the front door burst open and my local minders poured in, formed up on either side of the entrance and then stood rigidly to attention. The leader of the crew was physically shaking, and a ‘suit’ walked smartly in. You can tell a lot from a man’s suit, and this one told me that this one was only his owner’s work-a-day suit, but it was still twice as good as my Sunday best. The owner of the suit walked up to me, shook my hand and politely informed me that the ‘President of the Federation’ had asked him personally to officially welcome me to Switzerland on his behalf, and then strolled over to Herr Bloodngutts and ‘reamed him another rectal orifice’, Topsy’s words not mine. As neither one of us could understand a word that was being said in the very one-sided conversation I let the tone generate a mental picture: and Topsy’s description seemed pretty accurate to me. On completion ‘the suit’ then came and bade me farewell, safe journey home (did he know something about that postage stamp airfield?) and hoped to have the pleasure of meeting me again soon, but perhaps in grander surroundings, and then, as we shook hands prior to his departure, his chauffer darted in and took a photograph, obviously the ‘suit’ had a vacant space on his mantelpiece. The whole episode had taken less than ten minutes.
As I watched the back of ‘the suit’ stride out of the door, I casually turned to Teddy and whispered ‘the money must have arrived then’. It is surprising what reaction you get when you deposit a couple of billion Euros in the right bank, especially when there is a ‘post it’ note stuck on top of them saying ‘these will stay here for at least five years ‘if’ me and my new ‘personal’ aeroplane, and all the bits and bobs that go with it are out of your Country within a week’. It took us five days.
Herr Bloodngutts collected up all the invoices, removed a seal from his briefcase and started stamping and signing away as though his life depended upon it, and from the tone of the conversation that I had just witnessed I wouldn’t have been surprised if it, or at the very least, his career had. Half an hour later he was finished and he, his untouched sandwiches, and briefcase scurried out of the door, to the accompaniment of profuse apologies about the ‘terrible misunderstanding’, and Teddy walked over to the desk and picked up the last receipt to be stamped, signed and cleared for export, and showed it to me, it was Inma’s supermarket receipt. I could now legally export my bacon butty; too late - it was stowing away in my stomach. That would definitely be framed and end up on my mantelpiece.
Later that evening I sat in the cockpit of my new ‘best friend’ and had a long chat with her. We agreed that her little mishaps had been ‘preordained destiny, designed in the greater scheme of things to bring us together’, so we conveniently put them to one side. She then promised to look after me, if I looked after her, and a deal was struck, and I then thought that that was enough of the Bacardi and full fat cokes (sod the calories). What was the reason for my stiff B & C’s, there was absolutely no way that I was going to fly the G450 off that postage stamp that the Swiss called an airfield. The landing had been bad enough, so I was determined to make sure this evening that there was not going to be enough blood left in my alcohol system to permit me to take the controls the following day...... so the next morning I left Topsy and a growing number of helpers early, I nearly said ‘bright and early’ but that would have been a downright lie, but promised to be back when ‘my’ aircraft was ready to move out into the wild blue yonder.
Early Wednesday morn
ing a large helicopter wheezed its way up the mountain and deposited James, Teddy and I ignominiously in the meadow, it was at the limit of its performance so how on earth was the lift ever going to take place later on? Everything had been removed from the stores and ‘hangar’ and transported to the airport for onward shipment, trouble free of course, and Heidi had spent her first night in her new penthouse apartment that overlooked her favourite arcade. It’s surprising how quick property vendors can move when the hint of a ‘suit’ is standing over them, and the end wall had been slid aside on its concealed runners to enable ‘my’ aircraft to be pushed outside. Topsy had even had his wish and removed the fence ‘his way’.
The previous day Topsy had gone out ‘scrounging’ and found a supplier of steel ‘I’ beams which when lain on their sides in front of each wheel made a perfect track to stop the wheels from sinking into the soft snow. He even designed ‘fishplates’ which easily fitted over the ends of the beams to interlock them, stopping one end of a beam flying up in the air when a wheel reached the other end, very ‘lateral thinking I’m sure’, but I bet it was a ‘tiff’ (spit) that manufactured them, but finally everything was ready. First my ’cab’ was spun round, and then she was pushed carefully out of her home, she was not going to enter the world ‘*rse first’ Topsy declared. A Sno-Cat then towed her along the tracking and an hour ahead of schedule my beautiful new toy sat quietly in the middle of the meadow awaiting Julie Andrews; (sorry I just couldn’t resist that) her ride out of there.
Half an hour later what sounded like a cement mixer full of scrap iron being dragged sideways over cobble stones quickly came into view. I was wrong, it was a machine created in a scrap yard by an eccentric engineer, and made to look like an upside down four poster bed. As it came closer I realised that it was in fact one of Russia’s world beating ‘sky cranes’, Topsy had picked up the telephone on Saturday evening, dialled yellow pages and asked for ‘Russian sky canes please’. After a quick chat with the pilot (English is the language of the skies) it was decided that he would prepare the Hunter for its short flight to my little Swiss airfield, but ‘no’ he didn’t need to take the wings off, weight would not be a problem, even at this altitude, and it was agreed that the helicopter would arrive at eleven o’clock, the pilot would then assess the situation, under-sling the load (my baby was now being called a ’load’, humf) and then there would be test flights to check the aerodynamic stability of the said load, and only when the pilot was absolutely satisfied then ‘it’ would then be flown to the requisite airfield. She should be on her way by three o’clock Topsy confidently stated (with his fingers crossed behind his back). The helicopter, and I use that word very loosely, circled once (that was the ‘assessing’ part out of the way) came to the hover above my baby, and totally ignoring all Topsy’s marshalling signals lowered itself around her. As my beloved sat there, her nose sticking forlornly out from between this praying mantis’s front legs, her wings poking out at the sides, and her tail disappearing into the shadow cast by this monster it looked as if I would never see my beauty again, and then a hook slowly descended to just above the recently certified sling. Topsy was given a ‘leg up’ and quickly slipped the slings shackle onto the hook and then vacated the vicinity. As we all stood and watched in awe the Hunter was plucked smoothly off the ground, but the helicopter never moved. Steadying lines were quickly attached to her by a crewman and then finally the monster rose effortlessly into the air; I doubted if it even noticed my new beloved underneath it. That was the slinging part of the exercise over with. The Sky Crane flew off for a few hundred meters, circled once, did a figure of eight and then came back and gently touched down, and my Hunter was lowered to within a foot of the ground, it wasn’t looking good. Topsy strolled over, he would normally have ducked and darted in but it was really a waste of energy what with the thrashing blades so high above him, and plugged his ‘electric hat’ into a convenient inter-com jack on one of the trellis-work legs. A minute later he was back, ‘the Pilot would like the undercarriage retracted, the nose cover removed and twenty-five kilo’s placed in the jet pipe’. James was sent off to find a suitable ‘twenty-five kilos’, the cockpit cover was slid off, and a ladder was clipped onto the side of the fuselage. Topsy connected the battery, the hood was slid back and I gingerly climbed up the ladder as my only true love swayed gently in the breeze - of the down wash. I reached in, switched on the battery master switch, and selected ‘up’ undercarriage. Absolutely nothing happened until Topsy started wa pumping away on the hydraulic systems hand pump. First the three green lights turned red (under carriage unlocked and unsafe), and then after three ‘clunks’ the lights, one at a time, went out, the undercarriage and associated doors were now up and locked. I quickly fell off the ladder (my heart’s desire was of course suspended in mid-air, and the length of my legs had not been adjusted accordingly) and it was removed, the hood was closed, the battery disconnected, and a sack of potatoes was wrapped in the cockpit cover and stuffed unceremoniously into the jet pipe. ‘How heavy is twenty-five kilos?’ James asked Topsy as he handed him the bag of tatties. ‘Don’t know, never did the metrification course, but this looks about right’. Again we all stood back, and after the love of my life was again raised up, and the steadying ropes tightened, the helicopter yet again took to the air, but after one quick circuit it was back on the ground.
‘Problems, problems, problems,’ Topsy muttered as he wandered back up to his favourite undercarriage leg. He had a few more words with the pilot and was out again, with a look of absolute amazement on his face. ‘The pilot says the load is OK now, and it seems such a pity to go so few kilometres after so much trouble (?), would I like them to take her straight to England’. HHR were already collecting another aircraft for me, so they wouldn’t be arriving at my tiny airfield for at least four days, then the wings would have to come off and the whole lot transported by road and ferry, so ‘Yes please’ I said, and with a quick nod from Topsy the monstrosity, with my precious under it, lifted off and headed down the mountain - ten minutes before it was due to arrive. ‘Do they know the delivery address’ I asked Topsy’.
‘Don’t know’, he absentmindedly muttered ‘but I suspect it (IT) will get there safe and sound’.
As we walked back towards the empty house Topsy asked me what I would be doing with it.
‘I don’t know, but now that you have decimated the fence I suppose I will have to have the rest of it knocked down as well’.
At that Teddy chipped in ‘it would be a nice place to have a ski lodge’.
‘Whilst you are in my employ my boy you won’t have time for that sort of nonsense’, I still hadn’t fully forgiven him, and as we continued on towards it, I thought of my beautiful little butterfly battling gallantly onward under that nasty machine, without a driver and open to the elements, given half a chance I would have stowed away on board (my, my, aren’t we getting all nautical) just to keep her company - as Topsy daydreamed about brake pads, and Teddy mentally designed ‘his’ perfect lodge.
Three days later I stood on a wet and windy hard standing in Dorset, watching the clackety clacker machine appear out of the mist. It had had to go the ‘pretty’ way to England - ‘you are not flying that thing over my City’ etc, plus they ‘had’ to stop at every service area to top up, and for the occasional drop of ‘shut eye’. After lowering her beautifully sculptured undercarriage legs, ‘it’ lowered my soot covered light of my life gently to the ground, and as the hook was swiftly disconnected, the Airport Manager, who was standing soaked to the skin beside me (never blindly believe the weather forecast, just look out of the window) started to speculate on how many world records must have been shattered this trip, especially as the last part of it had been carried out ‘solo’. Apparently at the first pit stop this side of the English Channel the co-pilot and crewmen had all grabbed their bags and disappeared, shouting ‘asylum, council house, leather jacket and taxi please’. I was amazed, one man controlling this leviathan - he must b
e superhuman. As the monster gently lifted off from around my baby (she looked awfully small and dejected after her terrible ordeal with that nasty machine) it slid smoothly sideways and settled back down and started to shut down. I just had to wait and shake hands with this giant among men, and after the machine had finally entered the state of utter silence, and I could start to think clearly again, my first thought was ‘the Airport Manager lied to me, he wasn’t alone, the pilot had had his young daughter along for the ride’. She clambered nimbly down the spiders legs, as only a fit young teenager can do, ran spritely across to me and shook my hand (???).
‘Mr Michaels, how nice to meet you a week early’.
‘A week early?’ I asked. The only thing that I had on next week was the start of the Team Leader and Flight Commanders interviews, and then it dawned on me - ‘Natasha Shladakoff?’
She smiled, touched the tip of her chin with an index finger and gave a cute curtsy. ‘The one and only’ she replied.
I had asked Teddy to explain why he had placed this young woman; she was in fact twenty nine years old, on the pile.
His only comment was ‘after she gave a solo display in a Mig 29 at Farnborough three years ago they considered rewriting the books on ‘The Theory of Flight’, that was good enough for me.
‘Will you be waiting for a replacement crew to arrive before you leave, or take a British one with you’ I asked.
‘Neither’ she replied, ‘a new Russian crew would only claim asylum when they arrived in England, and a British crew would most likely be shot as spies when we arrived in Russia, I will fly it back myself; after all I have my automatic pilot’, and reaching down into a bulging pocket of her flight suit she pulled out a bunch of ‘bungee rubbers’, the type that hold suitcases down on a car roof rack. ‘The red and green ones are for the cyclic stick, the blue one is for the collective stick and the green one is for the rudder pedals.
‘Oh yes’ I said, feigning shock, ‘and what’s the purple one for?’
‘For when I go to the toilet, the door lock is broken’.
I had certainly met my match in the humour stakes I thought, and as she went off to supervise the re-fuelling I turned to Teddy, ‘I wonder what those bungees are really for?’
‘Most likely her auto-pilot’ he said with a straight face ‘you’ve never flown a Russian aircraft have you’.
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