by Steve Reeder
“I’d have thought they would have had enough of that this weekend,” Cole muttered to Franz.
“Actually, I don’t think they’ve had the time to do any horizontal belly-dancing yet. They left the air-base on Friday evening and drove straight down to Durban so Bomber could visit his folks, and this morning they drove back again; Which only leaves Saturday unaccounted for. I’m betting there was a Harris family evening out at a restaurant, and even if Tanya was invited, and I guess she would have been, the chances of a shag that night would have been slim, don’t you think?” Cole grunted a reply that could have been anything. Franz handed the bottle back to Cole. “And if he gets any more shit-faced then he’s not going to be much use to her tonight either.” That thought cheered Cole up. “Charlie, you still haven’t properly explained what happened with the flight. Care to tell me what went wrong?”
Cole dragged his attention from the couple on the bean-bag. “I didn’t want anyone to remember me at Grand Central, where he kept his plane, so I asked him to fly across to that small airport near Brakpan – it’s just a ten minute flight – to pick me up there. And he agreed to do that after much whining about it. Anyway, I was waiting there when he came in to land and he fluffed the landing; caught a wheel on something or - who knows, anyway he bent his plane.”
“Was he okay?”
“I guess so. I didn’t hang around to find out. I was so pissed off at him that I just left, and had to walk three kilometres to find a bus too! Obviously I had left my car here at the flat.”
Franz handed Cole the bottle and watched him drain it. Across the small living room Smit had begun to snore, his head falling back on the top of the back of the sofa. Next to him Freeman was staring vacantly at the ceiling. Tanya giggled as Bomber slid his hand under her top and only put up a token resistant to his fumbling.
“Is that the spare room?” Franz asked Cole, pointing at the door closest to the kitchen area.
Cole nodded, “There is even a bed in it, although there are no sheets; An old duvet, but nothing else.”
Franz levered his lanky frame off the sofa. “I don’t think they are going to care about pillows,” he said.
Crossing to the corner only required three steps. He bent down and lifted the girl off of Bomber’s lap.
“Hey!” Bomber protested.
Tanya giggled drunkenly. “Are we going to dance, Corporal Franz?” she asked, slurring her words and attempting to put her arms around his waist. But Franz picked her up and putting her over his right shoulder, he turned and strode towards the bedroom. Tanya squealed thrashed her legs about.
“Hey!” Bomber shouted again as he struggled to get up. “Where the hell are - she’s my girl.” He knocked over Reece’s half empty beer, tried and failed to right the bottle, and chased after Franz.
Franz dumped the giggling girl on the bed and met Bomber coming through the doorway, pulled him inside and then left the room, closing the door behind him. He could hear Tanya laughing with delight.
“This is why they made you a corporal,” Reece said without opening his eyes, “international man of decisive action is what you are, old boy.”
“Fucking A, man. Fucking A,” Freeman intoned.
Cole staggered through to his room and closed the door firmly behind him.
The bell on the timer pinged loudly, shattering the silence of the morning. Tanya opened the oven door, prodded the reheating pizzas and decided that they could do with another few minutes. She reset the timer to five and closed the door again. On the far side of the kitchen counter the six young men sat in silence nursing monumental hang-overs around the worn and scarred table. Each had a mug of coffee before him, some already empty, others hardly touched. No-one had said a word since Charlie had suggested that last night’s uneaten pizzas should be good enough for breakfast. There had been four pizzas but Tommy Freeman had got the munchies at four in the morning and devoured one, leaving a trail of crumbs from the kitchen counter to the bean-bag where he had fallen asleep afterwards.
Now Tanya took the opportunity to finally study each of them. Franz Coetzer was tall and lanky with sandy brown hair and a pleasant face. She had noted that he was quiet spoken, thoughtful and seemed to be trusted by the men, who had also spoken about him being fiercely brave in battle. He was from Pretoria, had one sister and a long-time girlfriend and planned to study aero-engineering once his army days were over. Bomber Harris – well she knew him well by now and was getting to know him better all the time. She smiled and then blushed at the memory of last night. She liked his face although he was not classically handsome, certainly not like Sean, but then neither was any man she had ever met. Bomber’s hair was very short and dark and she had begun to imagine how it was going to look as it grew longer – once he was finished with the army. She hoped that it would curl just a little bit. His body was slim but strong and well-tanned. John Smit was a big man, six foot three and powerfully built with massive forearms and hands. She decided that his sandy hair and freckled face was attractive in an odd way and he would probably grow on a girl, she thought. He was the son of a farmer turned businessman if she had heard correctly, and had two older brothers. He had no girlfriend and some of the men in the unit apparently thought he was gay, but she knew with a woman’s intuition that he wasn’t, but he would probably be very shy, she thought. Thomas Freeman was a slim man, just under six feet tall with dark hair and the fading remains of acne across his left cheek. He was a smoker with a habit of occasionally firing up a joint. Last night he had told her that he had plans to travel after the army and wanted to settle in Hollywood where he hoped to get into the movie business, and fancied himself as a leading man in a movie. His acting on stage had earned him credits at school plays, which had also got him girls, he had laughingly told her. She decided that she didn’t really like him. She wondered why no-one ever call either Franz or Steffen by anything but their surnames; must be a male thing, she decided. And thinking about Steffen concerned her, he didn’t sound like someone who could fly an aeroplane and take the sorts of risks that they were all taking. He was, according to Bomber, short and skinny with a mop of dark-blond hair that, Bomber reported, the higher ranks were always telling him to get cut. Acne still dotted his rather too-round face.
Her study of the men was interrupted when Reece coughed loudly, peered into his mug and found it empty. He put it aside and addressed Cole. “So, Charlie, you mentioned a new plan last night?” The other’s stirred and focused on Cole.
“It is not so much a new plan as much as a new starting point. I suggest that we leave from here rather than from Ruacana,” Cole told them.
There was a moment’s silence while the others digested this.
“But that won’t work, Charlie,” Freeman scowled. “The exchange only happens on the last day of the month, and like it or not the rest of us are going to be back on the border long before then.”
“Unless you not,” Cole said quietly. “If you don’t go back then we can leave out using a local pilot to get the plane to Ondangwa. We just rent one here and - ”
“Whoa! Charlie, some of us, and by that I mean everyone except you, would have to go AWOL if we were to stay here,” Bomber interjected.
“Well we always kind of were going AWOL when you think about it, Bomber,” Reece said.
A squabble of general indecision broke out, fuelled no doubt by the amount of alcohol that had been consumed the previous night. Tanya sighed heavily, distributed slices of slightly burnt pizza and left them to it, opting instead for a long hot shower. By the time she returned there seemed to be some consensus amongst the boys.
“Have you boys made up your minds?” she asked, trying not sound too much like her mother.
“Ja,” Franz told her, “We are going along with Charlie’s plan.”
“We are going to have to get Steffen back from the border though, and that is going to be your job,” Cole said.
“My job? How am I going to do that?”
“Ste
ffen lives with his grandmother because his folks were killed in a car wreck ten years ago,” Reece informed her, “And earlier this year she had a bit of a health problem. Someone phoned the regiment and they brought Steff back on leave for a week or two. She got better, but the point is that if someone phones the regiment again and tells them that the old girl is in a bad way and Steff should really be there with just in case - ”
“Won’t they check to see if that is true?”
“I don’t think so, but we can handle that anyway.”
“The other problem is going to be weapons,” Freeman said. “But Smitty says that he can sort that out.”
“My pa het het baie van die wapens op sy plaas,” Smit told her.
Tanya looked blackly at him and shook her head.
“You Durban girls need to learn to speak Afrikaans,” he said, but softened the comment with a slow smile. “My father keeps lots of guns, and I can get us some from the farm.”
“And the plane? Where are you going to get one of those from, or can Steffen hire one?”
“No, he can’t, he doesn’t have the licence for it but that is not a problem. Tell her, Charlie,” Reece said.
“Tanya, when I was hanging around Grand Central Airport looking for that idiot pilot, I had a look around. Eskom, the electricity utility guys, have their own airline for flying all their big-wigs around the country, and they operate from Grand Central with offices right next to the terminal building. I had a look in one of the hangers and there were at least twelve six to sixteen-seat aeroplanes parked there, and there must have been more on duty across the country. The security is almost non-existent, so I think we can take one.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. There were never more than two security guys hanging around at night and they left at six in the morning when the hangers were opened up for cleaners and so on, but the office staff never turned up before eight-thirty, apart from one junior staff-member who has the pilots sign the aircraft out and, hopefully, make sure that the planes are fuelled and ready. I did see several planes take off from there at dawn, so it is not unusual. I think we can get Steff into one of them, pretend to be Eskom executives and - Bob’s your proverbial uncle.”
“And if it doesn’t go that well?”
“Then we wave some guns around and – well, let’s face it, once we are off the ground there is nothing anyone can do except put out a bulletins to airfields to watch out for us, but we won’t be landing in any place in South Africa.”
“Don’t you need some sort of clearance from the control tower to take off?”
Cole grinned. “Grand Central doesn’t have a tower. The pilots just talk to each other on radio!”
“I know this sounds a bit fly-by-night, Babes,” Bomber said, “But it’s no more dangerous that the way were going to do it from the border.”
“Less so, in fact,” Franz said. “There are more things that can go wrong up there than from here.”
Tanya lapsed into silence; the boys had made up their minds. Cole suggested another round of instant coffee and convinced Smit that he should make it.
“Why do you call him Mad Dog?” Tanya asked suddenly. “I mean your friend on the border.” Freeman and Bomber broke into howls of laughter and the others grinned madly. “Oh! Now you’ve got to tell me,” Tanya said sternly, “There is a story behind this?”
“Sean, you tell the story,” Franz said and turned to Tanya, “Sean was right there at the time.”
Reece controlled his laughing and addressed Tanya. “Roughly a week after we arrived up at Ruacana for our first posting to the border area, we were on a combat patrol just south of the borderline. Mad Dog was with us because two of our guys were ill with dodgy stomachs; there was a bug going round the camp at the time. So anyway, three days into the patrol and Mad Dog was complaining about being constipated – bitching and moaning like an old lady he was – from the time we broke camp in the morning, you see?” Tanya nodded. “Anyway, about noon, maybe just before, we ran into a large group of the enemy; over thirty of them, or so it seemed, and we knew straight away that we were in trouble because there was only the nine of us. Franz, being the clever and fearless leader that he is suggested in a slightly panicky voice - ” Franz grunted an objection but didn’t interrupt. “ - that we immediately preform what is known in the business as a tactical advance to the rear, and pretty damn quickly too.”
“A what?” Tanya asked.
“That we run like hell!” Freeman laughed.
“Well, not quite,” Reece continued. “Headlong flight would just have got us killed. So we used a tactic that goes like this; half the guys stay returning fire while the other half runs back fifty metres or so and then, they take stop and give covering fire while the first lot retreated back behind them by another fifty metres and we all repeat this until we get ourselves out of trouble. The trick is of course to try and keep the enemy at bay by at least two hundred metres because their weapons – the AK47 – are not as accurate at that distance as the R4 rifles that we use.” He looked to Tanya to see that she was following. “And this was working well for the first kilometres or so. In fact, we had hit four or maybe five of them without any casualties on our side.” At the point the men all began to laugh again leaving Tanya looking bemused. “But then there was Mad Dog,” Reece said dramatically. “He was just off to my right as we made the run and he took cover behind an ant-hill - there are some bloody big ant-hills up there. So, we are busy firing, giving the others cover to retreat back behind us when, all of a sudden, Mad Dog says he need to have a shit, and the time is now!” At this Smit and Bomber began to cry with laughter.
“Nothing like being shot at to scare the shit out of you!” Bomber howled.
“So he screams at us to stand fast and next thing you know he has his pants down and he having a dump right then, in the middle of this battle, behind this ant-hill,” Reece continued. Tanya stared wide-eyed at Reece, her hands over her mouth in disbelief and amusement. “So we’re all verbally abusing the poor fellow, and then it gets worse!” Franz was laughing so hard his side was aching. “While he was dumping his stuff, large red ants had come out and, being a bit angry at being shat on, were climbing over his trousers and into his boots and began to bite the crap out of him. Meantime, the enemy have caught up to us and began to out-flank us, getting around the side where they could now shoot at Mad Dog. One of the bullets takes a small chunk out of his arse because he was standing up and ripping the rest of his clothes off to get rid of the ants, and when he got hit in the arse he went a bit wild. Next thing we know Mad Dog is screaming insults and charging at the enemy, stark naked except for him weapon and screaming his head like a berserk Viking of old!”
Reece was by now, laughing so hard that could not continue. Tanya stared at the men, not sure whether to believe Reece or not. When they finally got control of themselves she asked, “What happen?”
“The terrs were so startled, or maybe scared shitless by this madman, that they ran away!” Bomber said.
“Anyway, somewhere between then and us arriving back at Ruacana someone had called him a Mad Dog, and the name stuck.”
The next week flew by. Bomber was visiting Steffen’s grandmother’s house the day Tanya called the regiment and told them the story of the old lady’s supposed illness. If anyone in the regiment had called the house to check then Bombed would have taken the call, but the Adjutant said that he knew all about Steffen’s home situation so he accepted Tanya’s story and told her that Lance Corporal Steffen would be on the morning flight back to Pretoria. Bomber thanked the slightly confused old lady for the tea and cookies and reported their success to Franz and Cole.
Reece and Freeman both lived in the east of Johannesburg and spent much of their time away from the flat doing what soldiers normally do when on a two week pass. Smit returned to his father’s house on the outskirts of Pretoria and returned the following Monday with a cache of weapons.
“At some point Pa is goin
g to notice that they are gone but hopefully not too soon,” he told Cole.
“The five pistols I can see your dad wanting, but why does he have two AK47s with ammo?”
Smit shrugged. “What is happening with Steffen?”
“Sean picked him up from Wonderboom and took him home to see his gran. He was a bit pissed off at us after hearing what we did; he was really worried that she did have something wrong, but he’s okay now.”
“So he’s still in?”
“Oh yeah, he’s still on board and told me that he can fly anything up to a twenty-seater job. But Sean is going to drive him out to the air force base where he flies with the army flying club. Apparently there are two ten-seater craft there and he’ll get one of the instructors to take up for a few hours instruction.”
“Where are the others now?”
“Bomber took Tanya home to Durban and he’ll stay there for a few days. Franz is back in Cape Town at his parent’s place but he’ll be back at the same time, and Sean is shagging my upstairs neighbour.”
Smit shook his head ruefully. “I swear that guy’s dick is going to wear out. Come on, let’s stash these guns, I’ve got to take the truck back to Pa before he notices that it’s gone.”
One week later all six soldiers plus Charlie Cole gathered in Cole’s flat. In two hour’s they were due at Wonderboom airport and the first of two flights back to Ruacana. Two hours and five minutes from now and they would be Absent-Without-Leave and eventually the Military Police would be informed.
Franz looked around the room. “Last chance, guys. Are we all in?”
His question was greeted with a chorus of affirmation and raised coffee mugs.