Marine D SBS

by Peter Cave

‘Jesus Christ,’ Martin groaned. He took a breath, forcing himself to remain calm and logical. He consulted his watch quickly. It was ten to eleven. ‘When would it have been taken? Got any idea?’

  Bright nodded. ‘It must have been in the last half hour. I was working on the two newest hulls until ten, and all three of the rigged boards were stacked inside the workshop door when I left. I came back to the common room, had a nightcap and then went back to lock up. That’s when I saw the rig was missing.’

  A blaze of anger surfaced briefly above Martin’s worries. ‘You mean the place was left unlocked?’

  Bright was apologetic. ‘I realized I’d forgotten – that’s why I went back. It was thirty-five minutes at the most.’

  Martin controlled his annoyance, letting it go. There was nothing to be gained now from recriminations. He looked away and thought quickly about the best plan of action, then turned to Bright again.

  ‘Look, I want you to round up your colleagues and assemble in the common room,’ he snapped. ‘Wait there until I get back and don’t go outside under any circumstances. Understand?’

  ‘OK,’ Bright said with a nod. He moved towards the door, with Martin close on his heels.

  Reaching the outside, Martin ran down the beach, finally intercepting Sergeant Graham, who was sharing patrol duties with Andy Donnelly. He gave the man a quick run-down on the situation, then asked: ‘See anything?’

  Graham shook his head. ‘Not a thing, boss.’

  Martin hadn’t expected any other answer. The men would have already reported in if they had noticed anything suspicious. ‘Right,’ he snapped. ‘Get back inside and shake everyone out. I want this entire base in a state of full alert – pronto.’

  ‘Got you, boss.’ The man responded at once, running back to the villas and leaving Martin to wait for Donnelly.

  Crewes was also missing, along with his wetsuit. To Martin it seemed logical to assume that the two disappearances were related. What didn’t make sense was why. He faced the assembled men with a look of bemusement on his face. ‘Any ideas, gentlemen?’

  Willerbey hesitated before speaking up. As the only witness to the exchange between Crewes and Randy earlier in the day, he had a pretty good theory but wasn’t sure whether to voice it or not. Torn between duty to his commanding officer and a sense of loyalty to a friend, he sought the compromise which would best serve both. On balance, it seemed best to tell the truth, he decided. Crewes was already in trouble, and his information could not make it worse. In fact, it might just help a little, if Martin chose to see his actions as personal initiative rather than disobedience.

  ‘I think I might know what’s happened,’ Willerbey said, speaking up. He went on to outline the background. ‘My guess is that young Havilland’s taunts stung him deeper than either of us realized,’ he concluded. ‘I suppose he’s just taken that rig out tonight and he won’t come back until he gets it right.’

  Martin felt a certain degree of relief, although he was still angry. At least the explanation pieced together logically, and if true, appeared to preclude any external and more sinister interpretation. There was only one aspect of the matter which remained unresolved. He turned to Graham and Donnelly. ‘But wouldn’t you two have seen him?’ he demanded.

  Donnelly looked slightly apologetic. ‘Not if he didn’t want to be seen, boss,’ he pointed out. ‘He could have waited until we were at opposite ends of the beach, then ran straight through the middle of us and launched. He probably paddled the board out of sight before he brought the sail up. He would have been gone in a matter of minutes.’

  Martin nodded to himself. Again the explanation seemed logical. If anyone was going to get past an SBS patrol, it was another SBS man. And Crewes was good at his job. One of the best. So the mystery appeared to be solved, he thought. He had one last word for Donnelly and Graham before dismissing the rest of the men.

  ‘Just tell Crewes to report to my quarters the minute he gets back,’ he said darkly.

  The trouble was, Crewes didn’t get back. A search party, sent out in the Rigid Raider at first light, recovered the board and rig drifting about two hundred yards offshore, some three miles further up the coast. It appeared undamaged and in working order, but there was no sign of Crewes. They swept the entire area for the rest of the day, but to no avail.

  It fell to Martin to break the inescapable conclusion to the men at another hastily convened evening meeting. His face was tired and drawn as he made the announcement.

  ‘For the moment, Crewes will be simply listed as “missing”,’ he said gravely. ‘But I think we must assume him to have been drowned.’ Martin sighed deeply. ‘That will be all, gentlemen.’

  The men all filed out of the common room, with the exception of Willerbey. Martin looked at the man morosely for a few moments before asking: ‘Was there something else?’

  Willerbey nodded. ‘I just can’t bring myself to believe that he drowned,’ he stated emphatically. ‘John was one of the strongest swimmers I’ve ever known. That man would have swum home from the wreck of the Titanic.’

  Martin nodded sadly. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But perhaps he didn’t have a chance to swim for it. If he hit his head on the board as he fell, he could have been unconscious when he went in the water.’ He paused to look at Willerbey curiously. ‘Why, do you have some other theory?’

  The man looked uncertain. ‘Just a long shot, boss, but suppose he ran into some of the friends of our earlier visitors?’

  ‘Yes,’ Martin said with a heavy sigh. ‘That thought had occurred to me too.’

  After Willerbey had left the room, the CO sat alone with his thoughts for a good half hour. They were not good thoughts. In his mind a sense of anger fought for supremacy over gnawing worry. Losing a good man because of such a stupid and preventable accident was bad enough, but now the mission itself was in real jeopardy. What little margin for error Operation Windswept had ever had was being whittled away day by day.

  Anger finally won the battle. Martin rose from his seat, striding across the room and slamming his bunched fist against the wall with a bitter curse. It didn’t make him feel any better. He crossed to the drinks cabinet and poured himself half a tumbler of Scotch. Martin didn’t normally drink when he was in the middle of an operation, but tonight he felt like getting drunk.

  24

  Word had got around between Martin’s men about the source of the engines, so, with typical SBS black humour, the nickname ‘The Flying Lawnmower’ had stuck.

  Now, fully assembled for the first time on the top of the headland overlooking the bay and ready for its first test, the craft appeared even less aerodynamic than its namesake. A crazy geometry of irregular angles, struts and bracing cords, the machine looked unbelievably flimsy, hardly capable of supporting the engine and the rear-mounted propeller, which seemed to have been added as an afterthought. The transparent wings only served to accentuate this skeletal appearance, inspiring little confidence that they could provide enough lift to get the twin sections of the sailboard hull off the ground, let alone a pilot as well.

  Basically, it looked like something which might have been doodled on the back of a schoolboy’s exercise book, but Mallory seemed proud of it. Having served as packhorses to manhandle the various component parts up to their present site, Williams and Graham eyed the machine apprehensively as the American busied himself fussing about and making final assembly adjustments.

  ‘Jesus, can you honestly believe this fucking thing is going to fly?’ Graham asked his companion.

  Williams shot him a grin. ‘It’d bloody well better. It’s obviously no fucking good for cutting grass any more.’

  The two men giggled nervously as Mallory made what appeared to be the final adjustment to the rigging and stood back to admire his creation. Martin, who had been hovering in the background, stepped forward to join him.

  ‘Everything set?’

  Mallory nodded, an almost resigned expression on his face. ‘She’s all ready to go. T
his is the bit where pure theory goes out the window. Now we find out if this bird is an osprey – or an ostrich!’

  The light-hearted comment did nothing to dissipate the tension in the air. It was crunch time, and both men were fully aware of the fact.

  ‘Now you’re sure you want to test-fly this thing yourself?’ Martin asked, a trifle uncertainly. ‘I can ask for a volunteer to take her up for the first time if you’d prefer.’

  Mallory affected a brave grin. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I already booked my ticket in advance.’ It was his way of saying that he had test-flown every craft he had ever designed, and the Flying Lawnmower would be no exception to this sense of personal responsibility. He gave his bizarre contraption another fond once-over, then turned back to Martin. ‘Actually, there is one thing you can do for me. Have your men hold on to the wing-tips while I start the engine, would you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Martin said, passing the instruction to Williams and Graham. The two men took up position either side of the machine, holding it firmly in place as Mallory ducked beneath the wings and began to strap himself into the flying harness. Ready to fire up the engine, he glanced back at Martin with a slightly nervous smile on his face.

  ‘Don’t you guys have a special saying for a time like this?’ he asked. ‘Do or die? Shit or bust?’

  Martin smiled back. ‘Sink or swim,’ he confided. ‘Although in your case that’s not particularly apt, is it?’

  Mallory didn’t answer him. He started the engine, allowing it to tick over for a few seconds before revving it up and down gently a few times. Satisfied that it was running smoothly, he began to pull up the craft’s nose, yelling out to Graham and Williams above the grating roar of the engine.

  ‘Ok, let her go and stand clear.’

  The two Marines obeyed without hesitation, and with a certain amount of relief. Just standing there, the machine had a certain forbidding quality about it. Now, powered up, the throbbing engine caused the entire structure to chatter and vibrate like some monstrous and malevolent dragonfly. They retreated a good six feet either side of the wings as Mallory brought the nose up into the neutral position and poised himself to take a run at the edge of the headland.

  The engine revved up with a rasping, high-pitched noise which suggested something like ten thousand pigs farting inside an echo-chamber. Mallory began his run forward – straight towards the sheer drop-off point which would take him out over the beach some sixty feet below.

  It was a bitch of a launch, but Mallory had been expecting it and was prepared. Normally he would have equipped any microlight with a much more powerful engine, capable of taking off in much the same way as any conventional aircraft. The limitations of this particular design had not allowed for such luxury, however, providing merely enough power for thrust but little else.

  So he was more or less committed to a drop launch. Leaping out over the edge of the cliff, Mallory felt his stomach lurch sickeningly as he and the entire weight of the machine plummeted like a stone for nearly fifteen feet. Then the flaccid sails above his head cracked with a surge of uprushing air and billowed into shape. The sense of weight above him seemed to disappear. He was airborne, holding height, and the Lawnmower was in level flight.

  Mallory eased back on the A-frame, exchanging upward lift for a little more forward speed. Revving the engine to its full capacity, he took the machine down in a long, shallow dive to around twenty feet and then tried to level her up again before heading out over the open sea.

  The craft refused to respond. Dropping more rapidly now, with the increased power from the engine, the nose remained steadfastly down. The machine continued on an angle of descent which would take it nose-diving into the Aegean in just over twelve seconds.

  Mallory made one last attempt to bring the nose up by thrusting the A-frame away from his body with all his strength. There was a marginal decrease in the angle of dive, but not enough to prevent disaster. In desperation, he cut the engine back to idling power, flying the craft like an ordinary hang-glider. She came up sluggishly but surely, pulling into level flight again with the flotation boards virtually skimming the surface of the sea. Mallory increased power again, gently, fighting to hold the craft in the air long enough to build up to sufficient power for a gradual climb.

  It was touch and go for nearly half a minute as Mallory nursed the unwieldy contraption over the surface of the sea, pulling back on the motor-cycle style accelerator grip mounted on the control bar a centimetre at a time. Finally, he was two feet clear of the water – then three – and the Lawnmower was climbing steadily at an angle of about fifteen degrees.

  Having taken her up to around fifty feet, Mallory banked the machine round in a rather ponderous ninety-degree turn and headed back towards the beach, making a series of zigzagging course changes all the way. Finally cutting the engine some fifty yards short of the shoreline, he allowed the craft to take its own natural angle of glide and let it flop gently down on to the surface of the water about ten feet from the beach and float smoothly on to the shingle.

  Lindbergh himself could not have been treated to a more enthusiastic reception upon landing. Lieutenant-Colonel Martin, Williams and Graham had already made their way down to the beach from the launch point, where they had been joined by the rest of the men, Bright and Janice and even Pavlaski. Selina and Randy had been watching the flight too, but from a detached, somewhat aloof position over by the villas, sharing a pair of powerful binoculars.

  The assembled reception committee broke into a ragged chorus of cheers, whistles and shouts of congratulation as Mallory unstrapped his harness and pulled the Lawnmower up on to the beach.

  The pilot, however, did not appear to share their enthusiasm. He walked up the beach away from the machine, his face set.

  Martin detached himself from the crowd and hurried to Mallory’s side. ‘Problems?’ he asked, his tone betraying a note of concern.

  Mallory chewed his lower lip. He looked almost worried – and certainly disappointed. ‘She’s a real mean bitch,’ he said gloomily. ‘Even worse response than I feared, and it’s virtually impossible to make any degree of flight rotation with the engine at anything over half power. There ain’t an ounce of forgiveness in her.’

  ‘It looked all right to me,’ Martin said, trying to inject a more optimistic note into the conversation.

  Mallory grunted. ‘It might have looked all right. It felt like shit.’

  Martin was thoughtful for a second. ‘Is there anything you can do? A bit of fine-tuning, perhaps?’

  Mallory shook his head slowly. ‘Not without going right back to the drawing board, and we don’t have time for that, do we?’ He stared at the ground for a long time, then said: ‘Basically, what you see is what you’ve got. She’s lumpy, cumbersome, and she leaves absolutely no margin for error. The pilot makes one single mistake, and he’s fucked.’

  ‘But it flies,’ Martin pointed out. There didn’t seem to be very much more that he could say.

  Mallory let out a short, bitter snort. ‘Yeah, so does a fucking chicken.’

  He’d had enough, Martin decided. It was time to be more positive. ‘Look, we weren’t expecting Concorde,’ he pointed out. ‘Right from the start we agreed this thing was going to be a bad compromise at the best. The worst of both worlds, I believe were your own words.’ He looked hard at Mallory. ‘This is right on the line – will that machine make the flight to the distance and specifications we originally discussed?’

  The American’s response was somewhat evasive. ‘Will it, or could it?’ he replied. ‘There’s a difference.’

  It was a hell of a time to be arguing over semantics, Martin thought rather testily, but it seemed the only way forward. He decided to humour the man. ‘OK then – could it?’ he said in a tone of exaggerated patience.

  Mallory nodded faintly. ‘With a lot of luck and everything going in our favour, yes, I’d say that the original objectives remained a distinct possibility,’ he admitted grudgingly.


  ‘And you can teach my men how to handle it, learn to compensate for its performance flaws?’ Martin pressed, eager to build on the American’s slim concession.

  Another guarded nod preceded Mallory’s response. ‘To a certain degree, yes. But don’t forget that I’ve only flown the damn thing for five minutes myself so far. God only knows what other little bugs are likely to show up when we start testing it under more difficult conditions.’ His eyes narrowed slightly. ‘To be perfectly frank, man, I can’t help feeling you’re either ignoring or deliberately evading the real issue here.’

  ‘Which is?’ Martin asked.

  Mallory nodded over towards the Lawnmower, standing by the water’s edge. ‘Try to remember what we’re actually dealing with here,’ he urged. ‘That contraption is a highly unstable, potentially lethal piece of experimental machinery. If we manage to get through any sort of training programme at all without a serious accident, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle. And I was never a great believer in miracles.’

  Martin smiled wistfully. ‘Nor I, Mr Mallory. But I wasn’t evading the point, believe me. I can assure you that I’m fully aware of the dangers involved here.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you are,’ Mallory conceded. ‘But are you really prepared to take that sort of responsibility on your shoulders?’ It was a pointless question. Mallory knew the answer even as he spoke the words.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have the luxury of choice,’ Martin replied firmly. ‘It goes with the territory. Surely you understand that?’

  The American stared at him glumly for a few seconds, nodding faintly to himself. ‘Yeah,’ he sighed. ‘And I’m sorry to have to pile even more weight on the load you’re already carrying, but it needs to be said.’

  ‘So say it, and get it off your chest.’

  ‘In my opinion, if you continue with this project someone is going to get killed,’ Mallory said bluntly.

  Martin accepted the man’s opinion with a look of blank stoicism. ‘Someone already has,’ he said solemnly, thinking of John Crewes.