Rogue Hercules

by Denis Pitts

  ‘Kick us out?’

  ‘Come now, Captain, you are an intelligent man. We knew about you from the moment that you left Djibouti.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because the Reds had set you up perfectly. Your name would have been front page news all over Africa if that MIG had brought you down. There’s very little that happens on this continent that my agency doesn’t know about, Captain. The trouble is that it works in reverse, the other side keeps a pretty close watch on us. And that’s a very big aeroplane out there to hide.’

  Martin perched himself on a bar stool and gazed gloomily at his reflection behind the bottles. His face was pale; there was an added gauntness to it. He felt that he had aged a few more years since leaving Karachi. He sipped at the second beer.

  ‘So?’ He questioned.

  ‘So, Captain, I’m afraid that you and your crew are confined to this airport. We want you here for the shortest possible time. You will be given technical assistance for the damaged rudder tab in exchange for your telling our air force people about the way you brought down the MIG. Your co-pilot will have his hand attended to. But in the meantime you will speak to no one without my permission. As soon as your aircraft has been repaired and refuelled you will be escorted to your aircraft and you will take-off.’

  ‘I suppose that’s reasonable in the circumstances,’ declared Martin. ‘But tell me one thing. I thought that most arms for Rhodesia came from this country.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Eisenberg. ‘At any other time you’d be given a much warmer welcome. But right at the moment you are, I’m afraid to say, nothing more than an embarrassment. A dangerous embarrassment, considering the talks that are going on in our capital.’

  There was a “ping” on the Tannoy system followed by a short announcement in Afrikaans.

  ‘Excuse me, Captain. That was for me.’

  Martin drank more beer and walked to the window where he could see the activity increasing around Juliet Mike Oscar. There were more engineers on the gantry now. The slender rudder stinger was being lowered to the ground. From where he stood Martin could see little sign of damage. Stubbles, perched on tiptoe at the very top of the structure, was peering into the inside of the tail.

  The agent returned to the bar. He sat on the stool next to Martin and waited for the barman to get out of earshot.

  ‘The old joke about good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘They estimate that it will take six hours only to repair your aircraft. That’s good news. You should be away soon after lunch.’

  ‘Whose estimate?’

  ‘Your own engineer. The bad news is that I have orders from Pretoria which have come from the Prime Minister personally. I have to tell you, Captain, that if there is one single press inquiry about your mission involving the Republic of South Africa I must arrest you and your crew and impound the aircraft. It is the only way of avoiding embarrassment. My government cannot afford to face a charge of hypocrisy.’

  Martin spun round on his stool. The agent recoiled as though the aviator was going to strike him. Instead he was surprised to see the other man grinning broadly.

  ‘Do you know something, I haven’t felt quite so unwanted since I flew six crates of live rattlesnakes from Mexico to Chicago. Everyone was being really nice, but weren’t they all in a hurry to see me on my way!’

  ‘I don’t suppose that we could do much more than fine you and confiscate your load,’ said Eisenberg. ‘We know the owner of the aircraft, Mr Ragnelli. We’ve done business with him before. He’ll pay.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Martin.

  Eisenberg stood up. ‘Please wait here, Captain Gore, until the girl returns with your co-pilot,’ he said. ‘I’ll do all I can. I trust you to use your common sense and not talk to anybody. It’s in your own interest.’

  The agent began to walk away then he stopped. He turned and came back to Martin and took several rand notes from his wallet. ‘I know the rules about drinking and flying, Captain,’ he said. ‘But you’ve had quite a journey. Have some coffee on me.’

  *

  Natalia pressed her customs clearance form into the hands of a fat guard at the gate of the TWA terminal and went immediately to the news stand in the departures area. It was 2.30 pm in New York and the first edition of the Post had just arrived at John F Kennedy Airport.

  The page one headline told of a family slaying on the west side. She threw the paper angrily into a waste can.

  Five minutes later Natalia was in an embassy car driven at speed in a honking, roaring stream of traffic towards Manhattan.

  As the car emerged from the Queens Mid-town tunnel and turned into Third Avenue she ordered the driver to stop. She went to another news stand and bought a later edition of the same paper.

  Back in the car she scanned each news page thoroughly before slamming the paper on the floor as the car drew into the United Nations complex.

  *

  Eisenberg drove them to the waiting Hercules. Even as they approached her they could see that the gantry was being taken to pieces and they watched the massive rudder unit sway from side to side as Stubbles tested it from the flight-deck. Four fire engines flanked the aircraft, their blue lights flashing and their crews clearly at immediate readiness.

  ‘A trifle melodramatic,’ said Martin casually to Eisenberg.

  The South African did not reply. His friendly manner had disappeared. He was clearly tense and angry. He braked the car with unnecessary ferocity under the port wing and switched off the engine.

  ‘Before you get into that plane, all of you, I have three things to tell you,’ he said in a voice which was ice-like. He intended every word to be heard.

  ‘The first of these concerns a gross abuse of the hospitality which my Government has shown to you. Miss Francis was unwise enough to slip her escort and to make a telephone call to New York from the Royal Hotel in Durban. I do not know the substance of that telephone call, but I do know that she has rendered you all liable to imprisonment. Her behaviour has stretched my tolerance to its limit.’

  Harry rounded on the girl. He was livid and he raised his freshly bandaged hand against her face.

  ‘Stupid whore,’ he shouted. ‘Who were you calling?’

  ‘My brother,’ she said primly. ‘I wanted my family to know I was safe.’

  ‘Secondly,’ said Eisenberg ignoring them. ‘I should tell you that your very presence in the Republic has put my government in a most embarrassing position. I am instructed directly by the Cabinet to tell you that from the moment you leave this airport, you do not exist.’

  The tall South African drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and looked directly ahead.

  ‘You will not use your radio at any time. You will fly a direct course from Durban to Salisbury. Air traffic control zones have been notified that you will be passing through their territory and other aircraft will be steered clear of you. You will be escorted by two fighters of the South African Air Force.’

  Eisenberg turned and looked directly into Martin’s eyes.

  ‘If you divert from your course or use your radio for anything but the direst emergency, they have orders to shoot you down.’

  It was Martin’s turn to be frigid now. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said. ‘This is a civilised country.’

  ‘We aim to stay that way, Captain Gore. I am anxious that the world should remain completely unaware of any South African involvement in your mission. As you are aware, there has been serious rioting in some of our townships. We can do without pressure from the outside.’

  ‘What happens if we are forced to divert from our course by bad weather?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Don’t divert,’ said Eisenberg. ‘Don’t breathe a word into your radios.’

  ‘And item three?’

  ‘Don’t come back.’ He pulled a sheaf of paper from the inside of his jacket.

  ‘This is a telex message received an hour ago from the French authorities in Djibouti. All African police forces will have been ci
rculated with a description of you and your crew. You are wanted on a murder charge.’

  *

  There was little talk on that flight-deck during the last leg which took them high over Swaziland, the soft hills of the Transvaal stretching interminably away to their left. Harry had started to yell at Sorrel but Martin had silenced him. They had needed every ounce of energy for the Durban take-off. They were tired and the pain from Harry’s handmade concentration doubly difficult for him.

  Stubbles had logged six hours sleep out of the past thirty-six and was curled in the bunk within minutes of completing the post take-off engineering checks.

  Sorrel sat friendless and worked nonchalantly at a crossword in that morning’s Durban newspaper.

  Martin and Harry were equally tired. They were pleased to be able to take the Hercules to cruising height and leave the work to the autopilot, and even more pleased that there was no need, for the first two hours at least, for them to chat to men on the ground.

  They saw little of the two South African Hunters which sat ten thousand feet above them, but they could hear the two pilots talking with gruff good humour about football, food and women. They heard two other fighters move in to relieve the original escort, but the two new men were not loquacious.

  They finally came into sight with a series of spectacular line-abreast loops and rolls from which they eventually broke and fought a mock dogfight immediately ahead of the lumbering transporter.

  ‘Clever bastards,’ said Harry, with grudging admiration.

  The fighters peeled away and Juliet Mike Oscar crossed the Limpopo River and entered Rhodesian air space.

  ‘Did you see the weapons they were carrying?’ said Martin. ‘They really meant it.’

  ‘I had no doubt of that from the very beginning,’ said Harry. He was having difficulty holding the slide rule in his right hand while he adjusted it with his left. He held it up to the perspex screen.

  ‘One hour and seven minutes to touchdown,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell them we’re coming?’

  ‘You’re sure we’re in Rhodesian air space?’ said Martin.

  ‘Five minutes in.’

  ‘All right, tell them we’re coming up the drive.’

  It was then that Martin saw the revolver, held in a slim, carefully manicured hand, touch the back of Harry’s neck and rest immediately below the hair line.

  ‘You’ll say nothing to anybody.’

  Sorrel’s voice was completely composed through their earphones. Martin turned and saw her in the engineer’s seat. There was a half-smile on her face and her chin was thrust slightly forward, emphasising the determination.

  ‘Listen very carefully,’ she said. They sensed that she had been rehearsing this moment for the past two hours. ‘In the first place, we are not going to Salisbury or any other airport in Rhodesia. My instructions are to deliver this load to an airstrip on the Angolan border and that’s exactly where you are going to take me.’

  ‘Now wait a minute . . .’ Martin’s brain, already shredded by fatigue, was reeling.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Just in case you have any thoughts of doing anything heroic, I’m telling you that this is a US police short-stop revolver that fires a simple revolving missile. It’ll blow most of his head off, but it won’t damage the fabric of the aircraft.

  ‘We’re not landing in Rhodesia because Mr Ragnelli doesn’t want us to land in Rhodesia.’

  ‘You talked to him?’

  ‘Of course I did. If this consignment gets to Rhodesia, Captain Gore, apart from the fact that there’ll be no money anyway, all four of us will spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders for Ragnelli’s hit men.’

  ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘There’s no deal. We leave the arms with a Ragnelli customer in Angola. They’ll refuel you and you deliver the aircraft to Zaire. In Kinshasa there will be economy class tickets which will take us back to Brussels.’

  ‘Why no cash in Rhodesia?’

  ‘Because I’m the only one who knows the code which will get it out of the bank. And I’m not risking my neck for a few lousy bucks.’

  Martin was looking at the revolver. It was squat and the barrel was fat and short. He turned to the girl. She was relaxed. She smiled at him.

  ‘It’s a hair trigger,’ she said. ‘I’ve fired it over a hundred times in demonstrations for Murphy. So don’t risk Harry’s head.’

  From the corner of his eye, Martin saw that Stubbles was fast asleep in the bunk.

  ‘You won’t get any help from the little guy,’ said the girl softly. ‘He’s crashed. Not a hope.’

  ‘Bitch,’ said Martin. He had nothing else to say.

  ‘Of course I’m a bitch,’ she spat. ‘A surviving bitch. Steer two eight zero and stay close to the Botswana border.’

  ‘You’ve worked that out?’

  ‘It isn’t that difficult. Your immediate destination is the Victoria Falls. Then you fly along the Caprivi Strip until you pick up a beacon on one one three megahertz. It will be transmitting the letter “R” at thirty second intervals. You identify yourself by flashing your landing lights in the letter “G”.’

  ‘All that in one telephone call from Ragnelli?’

  ‘We’ve been operating the procedure for months. They are regular customers.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘UNITA. They fought the Cubans in Angola.’

  Martin sighed heavily.

  ‘Okay,’ he said with supreme reluctance. ‘Take the gun away from Harry’s head and I’ll turn left.’ Slowly she brought her hand down and sat, almost primly, the revolver on her lap.

  Harry had not uttered a sound since he had felt the pressure on his neck. He stared ahead and shook himself slightly.

  ‘Two eight zero,’ he said and switched the auto pilot off. They watched the compass spin slowly to the required course.

  ‘And what about our hosts on the ground?’ said Martin. ‘They’re watching us, you know, every move we make.’

  ‘You’ll just have to keep out of their way,’ snapped the girl. ‘You were prepared to take the chance over Mozambique.’

  ‘The Rhodesians have a sophisticated air defence system,’ Martin said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They will have plotted us on radar long before we entered their air space, they will have watched that turn and, right at this moment, they’ll be smelling a double-cross.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, dear girl, they are surrounded by hostile forces and if they think for a moment that these weapons are going to the guerrillas, they won’t hesitate to blow us out of the sky.’

  ‘Then you had better get down good and low. That’s what you’re good at.’

  It was then that Martin’s temper snapped.

  ‘You haven’t the slightest bloody idea, have you?’ he shouted suddenly. ‘This poor, ancient airframe has been submitted to stresses which would have automatically grounded it for months in any air force. It was dangerous when we set out, it’s been bent by missiles, strained in that landing at Djibouti and the rudder is held together with piano wire and string. If I have to make any sharp manoeuvres at low level, I could kill all of us…’

  Martin was interrupted by a stern and unyielding voice from the ground.

  ‘Unidentified aircraft on two eight zero resume your original course and contact Bulawayo Radio immediately.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I would guess it was our reception committee. We’ll go down, make a normal descent and fly up the border.’

  They were losing height steadily when they heard the same deep and ominous voice again. It said simply, ‘Unidentified Aircraft, you are trespassing in Rhodesian air space. Unless you resume your original course and height immediately, you make yourself liable to retaliatory action.’

  Five minutes later, as they continued to descend, as the altimeter read ten thousand feet, Martin saw a number of flashes in the deepening evening gloom ahead and to the left of them and then saw small white
puff-balls grow in the sky.

  ‘Flak,’ he said simply. ‘Somebody wake Stubbles.’

  ‘I’m awake,’ said the engineer. He was half way across the flight-deck, trying to adjust his eyes in the difficult light. ‘Excuse me, miss, I’d better take over.’

  Stubbles did not see the gun until Sorrel stood up and eased her way out of his seat. She beckoned him to sit down. He blinked at her.

  ‘No one can say this flight is not lacking in bewilderment,’ he said.

  Martin had turned the aircraft steeply to the right. But almost immediately, there was another cluster of puff-balls straight ahead of them.

  ‘Hold on!’ he shouted and put the Hercules into a steep side-slip to the left. Stubbles had just completed fastening his harness at that moment. The three men were secure in their seats.

  Sorrel Francis could not hold on. She rose vertically and then flashed horizontally across the spacious flight-deck and crashed her head against the sharp corner of a storage box. Her skull was crushed instantly. As the three men fought to control the fast plummeting aircraft, she lay dead on the plastic-covered floor. There was a surprised expression on her face.

  *

  Darkness hid them as they flew low over the Botswana border. Martin relied heavily on the forward radar to keep them safely over the undulating countryside below. He was not expecting any further fire from the ground, but he could not be sure for a moment that Rhodesian fighters were not scanning the sky for them.

  The navigation light switches remained at “off”. The cabin interior lighting was left to the very minimum. Martin had only time for a momentary glimpse in the eerie glow behind him to see Harry and Stubbles lifting the girl’s body and placing it in the bunk. Stubbles covered her with a sleeping bag. Harry swabbed the blood from the floor.

  No one said a word. They flew steadily south-west until they were a hundred miles into Botswana. Martin brought Juliet slowly up through a thin layer of cirrus and they were suddenly flying into a black night in which every star and planet twinkled and glowed so vividly that they felt as though they were flying among them.