by Tony Wilson
Chapter 5
Where does the man who can go almost anywhere on the planet go for his hol’s, Island hopping of course. Not your deserted kind, the ones that have one or two people living on them, or possibly three. I had a folder full of invitations from the rich and famous that had bought Islands in the Bahamas and the Caribbean, from ones that could make it disappear, (along with the Statue of Liberty), to someone that couldn’t land his own jumbo jets on his, that was not very good planning now was it, perhaps he was a ‘Virgin’ when it came to buying up islands. Naturally I wouldn’t have that problem; I would just park the Lady S (the floating one) at the bottom of their garden, so Carol took the Lady S over the pond, and parked her in the short stay boat park in Florida where I joined them after a freebee trip on one of my ‘host to be’s’ Jumbo’s, no he wasn’t a circus owner - he was the one like a Virgin, wrong again it wasn’t Madonna - she’s next month.
First off it was a few days of heavy duty relaxation, and trying not to think of aircraft in any shape or form, it wasn’t easy but by the fourth day I was starting to think nautical again, so after saying goodbye to some of my older ‘new’ friends, and their clackety clacker machine disappeared off into the sunset, I looked at the flat calm sea, and the opportunity was just too good to miss, ‘Carol, full steam ahead’, and the Lady S was off like a whippet into the night. After an hour of letting the Lady S charge majestically through the inky black sea I suddenly realised that we might bump into something in the dark so I reluctantly told Carol to reduce speed to ‘sleeping speed’, the Lady S wasn’t going to sleep, I was. It was still a flat calm sea so I was going to take advantage of the fact, and use my large harbour suite at the stern of the ship, and I didn’t want to be shaken out of bed every five minutes by the vibration, and so as the sea air and/or Bacardi’s started to get to me I bade all and sundry a fond ‘nan-night’ and it was off to beddy byes for me.
That was ok for about six hours, and then I got cramp in my leg. By the time it had subsided I was wide awake so I limped up to the almost deserted bridge for a quick deco, quickly followed by Carol, David and James, can’t they trust me to be on my own for five minutes. It was still pitch black and we were off some obscure part of the North American coast line when the Second, or was it the Third Officer, who had his face glued to a radar screen commented that we were slowly overhauling what seemed to him to be a small coastal freighter, it was about eight cables in front of us. I had left my nautical conversion chart in my cabin but I knew that there were ten Cables in a nautical mile, which was in itself two thousand and twenty five yards long, which in plain English meant that ‘it’ was starting to get ‘close’. Carol was just about to ‘hang a right’ (move slowly to starboard) when he said ‘oh ho’.
I don’t like ‘oh ho’s’, especially in the dark.
When they were fitting out The Lady S for me in Germany, of course I wanted the best of everything for her, so one of her radars, the close range one, had just come off of the secret list. It apparently, according to the technician tweaking it, was a very close relative of the ‘type something or other’ sonar, the one that could hear a shrimp break wind (not a verbatim transcription) at a thousand meters, so this radar had no trouble picking out the rubbish being thrown over the stern of the freighter, not a problem in itself, not even worthy of one ‘oh’. The ‘oh ho’ came when it was thrown over again, and again and again.... In fact it was thrown over ten times and floated at evenly spaced intervals, with electronic radar reflectors at either end. The freighter obviously didn’t have any radar closely related to mine as he didn’t know that we were just behind him. If he had he wouldn’t have, according to Carol, just dumped a huge quantity of drugs in front of us. ‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘Guess work’ she said, ‘but based on sound logic. The freighter is running parallel to a desolate part of the coast, just outside territorial waters, with no running lights on, and the reflectors are of the type that ships, apart from those almost on top of them, won’t pick up, but aircraft will, and it is almost dawn’. She would bet her pension (who said she was going to get one?) that the packages were drugs wrapped in floatation bags, and strung together with stout rope, waiting for a seaplane owned by a drug smuggler to come and collect them as soon as it was light enough to land.
David quickly disappeared off of the bridge, and Carol ‘darkened ship’, not with a quick coat of quick drying paint, but by having all the navigation and external walkway lights switched off, along with our own electronic radar reflectors, and slowed to a crawl. One of the things noted on the Lady S’s sea trials was that as she had originally been laid down as a ‘stealthy-ish’ warship her radar signature was very weak, so electronic ‘boosters’ were fitted, so that passing liners and super tankers wouldn’t run us down in the dark. Once the freighter was well clear Carol inched the Lady S up to the packages, and as I looked down at them I ‘felt’ a presence. Glancing sideways I noticed that it was Pierre, my sea going Senior Sergeant wearing the latest in nautical ‘night time’ attire, a black jump suit, flak jacket, Kevlar helmet and big boots, I hoped they wouldn’t mark the deck. He was also carrying the latest in seamen’s knives, made by Bowie, and a Steyr AUG assault rifle, made by Steyr. David had obviously thrown a wobbly at the first mention of drug smugglers, and as soon as Carol’s worst fears were proved right she was on the radio to the Coastguards but ...
‘Thank you for your call madam but all our sailors are busy on a wild goose chase at the other end of the World at the moment, will you please leave a message after the bell, and we might get back to you later’.
Eventually, when they and the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) realised that they had been ‘slipped a crippler’ (another one of Topsy’s sayings) and sent on a wild goose chase, they said they would dispatch a Coastguard vessel post haste.
‘How long is post haste?’ Carol asked.
’About two hours’ they said, ‘will you just keep the drugs in sight, but please don’t attempt to retrieve them (which of course would have been the sensible thing to do), apparently we might ‘contaminate the evidence’ (if the North Atlantic Ocean couldn’t do it, what chance did we have?), so the Lady S slowly started circling the drugs, and once the sun came up I found that going around in circles had its advantages, and one of them was that you could stand still and still get an all-round tan. Just as I was about to ring Topsy and tell him the good news about this new form of ‘bronzying’, another ‘oh ho’ came from the bridge. As we all looked at the blip that had appeared on my ‘little’ radars ‘big brother’ we could all tell that it was heading in our direction, and as we watched, the fairly big blip split into two, one medium sized blip and a small one, and as they came into view we thought ‘oh - they must be on their way to a War Bird convention’, but as there was nothing but Africa behind us we then assumed that the drugs must be their intended destination.
The larger of the two was a PBY-5a Consolidated Catalina; I could tell it was a -5a because it had large wheels tucked into the sides of its fuselage. It was a World War 2 era amphibian that could alight on either land or sea, and it looked as though it had just rolled off the production line. The smaller aircraft was as equally immaculate, it was a Supermarine Spitfire, and as I was getting quite knowledgeable on these sorts of things I knew that it was one of the earlier marks as it had eight dummy .303 machine gun ports in its wings. ‘Very realistic’ I thought. As they circled the Lady S, Carol called them up on the VHF radio and asked them what their intentions were? They obviously weren’t very honourable as a torrent of foul language erupted out of the speaker above our heads. I thought ‘language Timothy, ladies present’, but I doubted that anyone up there was named Timothy - Chuck or Clint maybe, but definitely not Timothy. ‘Go forth and multiply’ the voices continued ‘and leave the pretty little packages to us’. As you can image it was not a literal translation.
‘Or what?’ Carol asked.
‘You will ** ** ** well regret it bit**’.
‘Very intimidating’ I thought as I slipped out onto the bridge wing to watch the display, but the second time around the pilot remembered to select the right switches and eight rows of splashes came leaping towards me.
Two things then happened simultaneously; Pierre, who had just collected his new toy from down below stepped from the hangar, sighted and pressed the trigger on the stinger. Its missile then streaked off in the direction of the Spitfire, and the other thing that happened was that Charlie cannoned into my back. As I landed up against the steel side plating, bullets hammered on the other side of it, and then started to fly over my head, and Charlie, who was unfortunately still in mid-air, let out a grunt of pain and rolled away to one side. I heard, rather than saw the Spitfire explode, and then Agnetha erupted onto the bridge wing and started to rip Charlie’s clothes off. As they were getting married in three weeks time I had ‘invited’ them along on this trip more as a ‘honeymoon rehearsal’ rather than serious work, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected, but may-be just a tad public. Because of his ‘almost’ marital situation Charlie had not been given a routine ‘shake’ when I had appeared on the bridge a couple of hours earlier, but never one to be left out of things, when he woke up and found black suited sailors running around the ship, he was dressed and on the bridge in two shakes of a gnats tail (?), and just in time to see me disappear out of the door.
I raised my head above the dodger just in time to see a shower of confetti, no piece larger than a ‘tickler paper’, flutter into the sea. It was the waste of a beautiful aeroplane but those ‘dummy’ guns were just a little too realistic for my liking.
Charlie was very lucky, as he had flown serenely through the air, a bullet had entered the neck of his flak jacket. It had then travelled down its entire length, fortunately doing no serious damage on its journey, and then exited, after first taking a quick bite out of his nether regions. Doctora Clara insisted on putting a couple of stitches ‘where the sun don’t shine’, after politely informing Agnetha that get well kisses were just not going to work, but she could try again after she had finished!!!
As all this was going on the Catalina was still circling above us, and it transpired later that they were furiously talking to ‘El Gordo’ back at the ranch, and he was beside himself. Apparently the pilot of the Spitfire was his only son, and the drugs bobbing around in the water were his ticket into the super league of the drug running fraternity. The crew of the Catalina weren’t exactly sure which event was causing him the most grief, but one thing was clear, if they didn’t return with the drugs then their only alternative was to fly into the nearest mountain - so they devised a daring plan. On either side of its fuselage, just aft of the parasol wing, the Catalina had a large glass bubble. Crewmen of old could fire machine guns out of them, or if they were in the surveillance mode they could scan the oceans from them, or in the rescue role they could pull survivors inboard through them, they were really very handy things to have, and so a modern day use for one of them was to stand Tweedle Dumb the third (TD3 for short), a distant cousin of the O.K. Corral one, in the open hatch, with a long piece of rope. He tied one end of the heaving line to a grappling hook, and the other end tightly around his wrist; it would be more than his life was worth if he let go of the rope, and the creative pilots idea was to dart in before the ‘Nancy’ green boat got its ‘knickers out of its twist’, land, taxi passed the drugs, then TD3 would fling out the hook, snag one of the connecting lines and then they could taxi away faster than that wreck could go, and retrieve the drugs at their leisure. It sounded like a good plan - in theory, but the Lady S was just starting to turn about and head back towards the drugs, but the pilot thought he saw his ‘window of opportunity’, and barrelled in. He lowered the tip floats, and that ended the good news, first he was ‘too high’, so he shoved the control yoke forward to lose some height, then he was ‘to fast’ so he pulled up, and this went on for a few seconds before he carried out what could only be described by an onlooker as a controlled crash. It shook the aircraft up, jolted the co-pilots false teeth out, and knocked TD3 off his feet. The aircraft was going way too fast as it approached the drugs but TD3 didn’t realise this as he struggled to his feet and looked out of the blister. He saw the drug bundles slipping quickly by, and threw the hook. Unfortunately for him it hooked the rope securing the last bundle, I say unfortunately because at any other time it would have been a brilliant throw, but as the Catalina was travelling way too fast the coiled up rope quickly disappeared out of the blister. TD3, never the brightest bulb in the box totally forgot that the end of the rope was still tied securely to his wrist, and ten large bundles of drugs, in a straight line make a very good impersonation of a sea anchor (a small canvas ‘parachute’ device attached to the end of a rope, that when thrown over the bow of a stationary boat brings the said boats bow into wind), (Lesson over). First the rope went taut, then his arm was yanked out of its socket, and finally, just before his arm was completely ripped off, he was yanked bodily out of the Catalina. This is where David enters; he had been watching what the bobbing amphibian was trying to do, but rightly guessed that it was really going way too fast to do it. He scrutinized the planes blister for signs of more machine guns but saw none, so as a magnanimous gesture he let it continue on, but just in case he had a finger wrapped casually around the trigger of a Browning .50 calibre M2 heavy machine gun - that just happened to be now mounted on the bridge wing. The Spitfire had caught them all out, who would have thought that one would still have its real guns fitted in this day and age, so he was taking no chances this time, but as the Catalina started to rise back into the air, after TD3 had ‘abandoned ship’, he briefly squeezed the trigger, and the amphibian lost its ‘dual trade’ status, its starboard wing tip float disintegrated. He had taken many lives in his time, but he had never killed wantonly, so he just made sure that the miscreants would not be able to land on water again, well not until the float had been replaced anyway, so with the float damaged and TD3 ‘absent without leave’ the crew set course for dry land, praying feverently as they went that they could blame it all on him and possibly survive to see another sun rise.
As TD3 broke surface his luck briefly took a turn for the better, he had no life jacket on, he couldn’t swim, and he had one useless arm, but his good arm came in contact with a very buoyant bundle of drugs, so he hung on for dear life. The Lady S hove-to close by and quickly lowered a sea boat. He was then unceremoniously dragged into the small craft, searched, and when it was found that he was really quite seriously injured, he was treated marginally better, not that it stopped his mouth. ‘El Gordo would be doing ‘this’ to everyone, and ‘that’ to everyone’; he only shut up when Doctora Clara finally slipped a needle into his arm. His shoulder was a mess, but yet again he had a lucky break (or was it a dislocation), Lady S had a top of the line sick bay, and Doctora Clara Botella had been a first rate trauma surgeon in the Spanish Navy, although the horrors that she had encountered in Afghanistan made her give up full time surgery and go back to general practice. She still kept her hand in at a local hospital, but never slept properly for weeks afterwards. By the time TD3 was out of surgery (he refused to give his name) the Coastguard Cutter had arrived, and photographed and retrieved the drugs. They reckoned that it was a substantial amount; in fact it could be the substantialist amount that they had encountered in many a long year.
As there was a death involved, we had to return under escort to the Coast Guards Clearwater Air Station with them for a full investigation, and so the Cutters ‘Master-at-Arms’ (head policeman) came on board the Lady S to escort his ‘prisoners’ back to port (RHIP), although TD3 was going nowhere anytime soon, he was firmly shackled to a bed in the sick bay, with nothing in reach but a disposable bed pan (he was certainly no
t going to use one of my shiny stainless steel ones), and if the Master-at-Arms had only but known it, I reckoned that the other prisoner, ‘Lady S’, could easily have bested the Cutter in a fair fight.
The Air Station, which is tucked away in a corner of the St Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, fortunately had sea access, so I didn’t have to fit wheels to the sides of the Lady S, but it was still a media scrum when we arrived, and everyone in authority that visited me only seemed interested in a free lunch rather than the boring facts of the case, so Marcel was kept busy making eggs ‘sunny side up’, grits and brownies. Within twenty-four hours he was adamant that although he was only a couple of meters away from the ‘land of plenty’, they would try and get him ashore at their peril, he was mortified that he might catch something unspeakable - culinary wise, and the local Chief of Police, who was ‘political’ rather than ‘practical’ (he could talk the hind legs off a donkey) (but had his heart was in the right place - his wallet), was, after one ‘full english breakfast’ (with all the trimmings) - mine, although my tinnitus would never be the same again. Over the next few days things settle down and fortunately everyone accepted the fact the Pierre had ‘accidentally shot’ the aircraft down with a signal flare when he had tripped over a ring-bolt on the flight deck, and the Catalina’s ‘pristine’ bullet ridden float, that they had retrieved from the scene, was sent to a local museum as proof of an old ‘war story’ by a local hero of his encounter with a U-Boat.
The only sad (ish) thing that occurred was that TD3, who had flatly refused to say anything after regaining consciousness committed suicide in solitary confinement. The Detective investigating his death commented that this grossly overweight fifty year old man had been an athletic marvel; he could have ‘gone for gold’ at the Olympics. Apparently TD3 had balanced on the end of his bunk, sprung three feet upwards, two feet forward, and then did a half twist to enable him to tie a piece of cord three times around a light fitting so he could then hang himself with it, and all this with one arm strapped up. How the cord had gotten into the cell could not be explained at the present time as the night supervisor of the cell block was ‘out of State’ choosing his new pickup truck.
A week later we were released; I think they had handcuffed our anchor cable to a buoy, completely exonerated from the non-crime of the century. El Gordo had not lost a son, Spitfire, or TD3. His son was alive and well and away on business in his aeroplane; he had been speaking to him on the telephone only moments before the police had arrived ‘by appointment’. His Catalina had been destroyed in a fire at a nearby disused airfield weeks before, and he had never heard of TD3 – prove otherwise.
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