This is Not A Drill
Page 5
I told him I was going to Afghanistan to write about the use of private military contractors and oil. He gave me his take on working in that part of the world, as many years ago he had been tasked with finding a flight crew who went down in the desert, and during his time drilling he had worked predominantly in the Middle East. So between his four years running the desert survival school in El Adem for the Air Force and fifteen years on rigs directional drilling in the desert, he had some good advice to give me and a few great stories as well. It wasn’t the first time he had suddenly opened up with insights into his past. The last time I was here I had a blast with him and a couple of his mates in London. I was only there for less than a day before the office phoned and told me to go back to the rig, but that short day was one of the best I’d spent with my dad.
Einstein once said: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’ My imagination has saved me, and tortured me, but only once did it run away and leave me sitting alone at a table with the only two men who really scared me. It was some ten years ago, and it started on a flight.
‘You don’t look nervous,’ she said with a smile, as we dropped out of the sun and into a typically British winter. I had been calming my nerves by chatting to the woman sitting next to me on the flight. Since we departed Singapore she had regaled me with everything from her messy divorce to her daughter’s academic prowess, and even better her ex-husband was paying for her daughter’s education. I was starting to appreciate her ex-husband’s side of the story after being married to this woman for twelve years. The in-flight movie was Silence of the Lambs, and I have to say it had me on edge because there I was trapped in a conversation about how scared she was after watching it. ‘It’s about time they made a film with a strong female lead who saves the day. I’d like to see my ex-husband in a cell like that one.’ The woman was opinionated and annoying in a way that just made you angry enough to fantasise about getting out of your economy-class seat and gaining instant access to first class, pausing on your way through the curtain to blow a raspberry at her.
But she was distracting me from the uneasy nerves that pulled at my gut. Yes, I suppose I didn’t look nervous, but nerves turn some people green and others into stand-up comedians. I was doing the latter. She was laughing so much that little bits of spittle would occasionally land on my face, only fuelling my desire to walk off. ‘God, that’s so funny,’ she spluttered, only just managing to stop her false teeth from landing on her tray table.
I gave her a convincing grin and thought about Dad. It was 1997, I was twenty-seven years old, and in a fit of impulse I was about to arrive unannounced in London where I planned to surprise him. We didn’t really know each other, but I’d slipped into the past and had forgotten that I was considered a ‘grown-up’ now. So the nerves that shook me as a boy in the presence of my father seemed to have manifested and turned me into a comedian at the thought of just turning up at his place.
Dad answered the phone in a strong voice, and sounded overjoyed when he heard I would be on the train within the hour. ‘I’ll be there to pick you up,’ he said.
The arrival hall in Heathrow spread out in front of me. All I had was a small grip bag, no check-in luggage, so I was one of the first people to pass through the big automatic doors and get the full onslaught of faces all registering blankly past me. There towards the back was Dad. He had surprised me in return by driving to the airport. He had grown a full beard and turned a little greyer, but otherwise looked happy and relaxed.
The drive to his London flat was filled with long tortured moments of awkward silence. He dropped me off, gave me the once-around his place and was out the door before I could string two words together. I wandered about the flat for a while, a bit baffled, and decided to make a cup of tea. And that’s when I saw the half-empty bottle of Macallan on the shelf. I had two big drinks and flopped down on the couch, feeling light-headed. The phone rang. It was Dad. He said he was at his club with some mates and that I should join them. He told me to go into his closet and find a shirt and tie. Seeing nothing for it, I grabbed a cab and was soon standing at the entrance to what looked just like a regular Victorian terrace house. I rang the doorbell and a man in a suit answered, gave me a wormy dyspeptic smile and asked if he could ‘help’ me. So it would seem that I had just arrived at a gentleman’s club in a Billabong T-shirt and jeans, and that’s not acceptable attire at a men’s club, so he gave me the pleb’s one-size-fits-all shirt, clip-on tie and sports jacket combo.
In I went. The building was old and smelled like a church would if the congregation smoked cigars. It was full of middle-aged men sipping brandy who looked over their glasses at me while folding copies of the Financial Times. Dad was at the back in the corner with another man. They were just sitting there, looking at a bottle of wine lying over to one side in a silver cradle.
‘Nice outfit,’ Dad said and shook his head at me. I was introduced to his mate, Mick. He was heavy-set, his nose had been broken a few times, his voice carried a gravely tone, and he looked me in the eye when I shook his hand. I liked that. He had an Irish accent and could, I was to discover, drink his own bodyweight in alcohol.
Eventually I had to ask about the wine. They had just purchased it at auction. I reached out towards it. ‘Please don’t do that,’ said a sharp pronounced voice from behind me. I can’t remember his name, but I nearly jumped when I turned and saw him; he looked just like Hannibal Lecter from the in-flight movie. He gave me a look that ever so discreetly suggested that if I did touch the bottle he would wait until the wine had breathed, then eat my liver. So I just sat there and sipped on my beer.
I had another two beers and, after being offshore on the rig for more than a month prior to this, combined with Dad’s whisky, I was suddenly quite pissed. Nevertheless, for all the jokes and stories I could feel something else going on, like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d been around some heavy guys on the rigs by that time, older men who included me in the conversation in the bar after the job but not yet to the point of telling me who they were plotting against. I could smell the same guarded undertone here; there was a slightly sinister edge to the table, and I felt like I’d just interrupted their plot to do a bank job or something. We continued with polite conversation that passed the wait, the wait for the ‘Corker’.
‘He’s a specialist, and besides I want to see his technique.’ Dad was making no sense to me as he chatted with the others. What the fuck is a ‘Corker’? I was thinking.
Dr Lecter picked up on the giant question mark above my head as he puffed occasionally on the end of his cigar. He leaned in towards my right ear and said, ‘The Corker will be here soon. He will open the bottle using his own method . . . that will be as entertaining as it is rewarding. Clarice, would you like to try the brandy?’
Fuck, he sounds just like him too. I was having deja vu. And did the motherfucker just call me Clarice? I nodded at him.
‘This really is a special day, young Paul.’ The Doctor had a thin smile and a bright gold pin buried in the middle of a dark red neck tie. I felt like the prey before the giant angler fish, caught in the twinkle of bioluminescence before death. ‘Do you have your father’s passion for single malts?’ He poured me a glass of brandy and pushed it across the table.
‘Thank you, yes, I love it. I always pick up a bottle duty-free when I crew-change back home,’ I said. The brandy tasted like money. I don’t belong in here, I thought.
‘I’ve known your father for many years. You’re a lot like he was at your age. I suspect working on the rigs agrees with you. He was also an adventurous soul in his past, although now, I dare say, he’s slowed down a bit.’
‘I’m not running the London marathon, but I’ll kick your arse any time,’ Dad said and grinned over the table at Dr Lecter, who smiled and shucked the end off a thin cigar. He replaced the silver cutter back in his black waistcoat pocket and struck a match.
‘He still figures larg
ely in your value system, even though you have not spent much quality time together.’ The cigar spat flames from its end as the Doctor puffed and rolled it around between pursed lips. I was mesmerised.
‘What line of work are you in?’ I changed the subject and finished another brandy, banging the glass down on the table by accident.
‘I was in the service with your father, and now I practise medicine.’
‘Oh really, what kind?’ I tried to sound sober.
‘Psychiatry,’ he said.
Oh Christ. Do you eat people? I wanted to say. And why aren’t you locked up in a perspex-walled dungeon? This was entirely too weird.
‘This is a celebratory drink, a one of a kind, for a one-of-a-kind criminal. It’s good you arrived like this. Why don’t you tell him now, Allan?’ he eyeballed Dad.
Dad stopped talking and suddenly became serious. He looked across the room. ‘The Corker’s here,’ he said.
My jaw slightly agape, I swivelled my head in the direction of the door. There stood a middle-aged short, balding man in a blue suit. He saw us and smartly walked over. In his right hand he held an old-fashioned black leather doctor’s bag.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ he quipped as the bag’s catch sprang open. His hands, manicured and soft, laid out a series of objects in a well-rehearsed method.
‘We’re so glad you could come. Can we offer you a drink?’ asked Dr Lecter.
‘Thank you, no,’ replied the Corker.
‘This is something you won’t see very often, Paul.’ Dad leaned back in his tub chair is if he was about to get a lap dance.
The table was cleared of empty glasses, and on it sat a Bunsen burner connected to a small silver gas canister, a French garrotte of platinum wire, and a high ball of ice water, into which the Corker coiled up a pheasant feather.
His tools ready, the Corker carefully slid the bottle in its cradle so it sat directly in front of him. The wine was French, if memory serves, a 1945 Château Pêtrus—not that it meant anything to me at the time. I just wanted to see how this little fat man was going to open the bottle with the assorted kit on the table in front of him. Especially the feather, couldn’t wait to see what he did with that feather.
What did Dr Lecter mean by criminal? Who’s the criminal? I didn’t know it, but I was about to have the best time I’d had in years, with these characters. I later learned that the celebration was due to the three of them successfully tracking down a particularly nasty con artist who had taken an elderly friend of theirs, Bill, to the cleaners. Once a mountain of a man, Bill had become frail and his wife had passed away. Susceptible and in bad health, he had been duped in the worst possible way. The poor old boy had bought into the con, and as a result he had lost his life savings, his home, even the car. The con was clever, but this time it was played out on the wrong man. Dad, Mick and Dr Lecter, all ex-military, financially independent and bored silly, decided to go after the bastard. They had a real soft spot for Bill, himself a decorated veteran of the worst parts of World War II. The con man was systematically tracked from Dorset in England’s south all the way to the north of Scotland, where they eventually caught up with him, in disguise, his features changed and posing as a priest in a small town. They recouped Bill’s savings, his house was saved, even the car was returned. The con man had an epiphany, no doubt at the thought of Dr Lecter making soup out of his brain, and turned himself in, God bless him, and as I understand it he’s still languishing in prison. Bill has since departed our world, but I know he went with his affairs in good stead and a smile on his face.
The cigar Dr Lecter gave me was making my head feel five pounds lighter, and I forgot the whole ‘don’t inhale’ thing. Nimble fat little fingers adjusted the flame jetting from the tip of the Bunsen burner, heat sending invisible waves into the air that distorted Dad’s face across the table. I laughed, but it turned into a cough. ‘He’s turning green,’ Mick said and looked at the Doctor, but he was fixed on the Corker’s hands slowly winding his fingers around the polished wooden ends of his wire garrotte. He pulled the wire taut with a ‘twang’, looked at me briefly and started to heat the wire in the flame until it glowed white hot.
‘How’s that cigar, Paul?’ I heard the Doctor ask me through the brown cloud around my head.
‘It’s great,’ I replied, my head swimming in cotton wool. ‘Cheers.’ My glass bounced off his with an unmistakable crystal ‘ping’. The brandy was like slipping into a warm bath.
‘Was it rolled on the thigh of a pretty girl?’ I asked. I’m used to Marlboros and Mekong whisky in the back room of some oilfield bar while semi-naked dancing girls gyrate up and down on a pole. Instead, I was sitting there in London in the middle of the old-boy network, drinking vintage brandy and puffing on Cuban cigars while a little bald man opened a bottle of wine with a feather . . . oh yes, the feather.
Once the platinum wire was ready, the Corker wrapped it once around the glass neck, pulling it taut, then in one fluid move he dropped the garrotte and pulled the feather from the glass. It sprang into a metre-long rainbow of wet icy colour that he gently stroked across the hot neck of the bottle. It literally jumped apart, the little man catching the severed top in his free hand. I picked up the top of the bottle; the glass was perfectly cut. The top had been dipped in wax, but I could see the cork inside and it looked intact. The Corker packed up his tools, bid us good day, turned on his heel and was gone. His job was, evidently, done.
I was on a rig a week later telling the story to some mates, who grabbed a blow torch and some baling wire and set off to try it out. It didn’t work.
The wine was savoured and sniffed, held up to the light and rolled about on tongues. I stuck to the brandy, the wine would have been wasted on me anyway.
Dad was enjoying himself. He came back from the bar with a bottle of Macallan and before long I was hearing stories.
There were three that I have never forgotten.
5 THE OLD MAN
It was 1960, my father was a navigator in the RAF, flying on B Flight of 3 Squadron based at RAF Gelsenkirchen in West Germany. It was there that he met my mother, but that’s another story. At the time, he was flying the Javelin Mk 5 all-weather night fighter, a delta wing two-seat interceptor which flew in the 1950s and 1960s. It was B Flight’s turn for night flying, and Dad and his pilot, Lieutenant Bill Swettenham, flew a routine sortie of practice interceptions through the early evening of a cool clear April dusk. Later in the night they were briefed for a second mission, where they would go up with another Javelin and practise interceptions, taking alternate turns at being the target. The flight commander, Squadron Leader Peter Stark, was the leader in the other Javelin, with Flight Lieutenant John Lomas in the back cockpit.
Dad was young and full of beans, this was his first operational flying tour, he loved his job and really enjoyed the challenge of chasing unseen targets on airborne interception radar. His face lit up with recall as the ashtray became Stark’s Javelin in his right hand with Dr Lecter’s silver Dunhill lighter in pursuit between his thumb and index finger. This night was good, Dad said, the weather was excellent, visibility eight miles with minimal cloud cover, and the two jets played cat and mouse for almost an hour. It was during their return or ‘recovery’ to base that problems for the leader began to show. Interceptions were completed at height in those days, as the potential threat came from high-level Russian bombers. The procedure for recovery was to return overhead to base at height, in this case about forty thousand feet, go into a dive circle, then the first aircraft would dive more steeply in the direction opposite the active runway to about ten thousand feet while the second aircraft would complete one orbit in the dive circle and follow the leader down two minutes later. This separation was made so that the aircraft would land separately two minutes apart, giving the controllers maximum practice.
Dad and Bill were halfway down the dive descent behind the leader when he transmitted a short, garbled radio call to the tower saying that he had serious hydr
aulic problems and that two of his three hydraulic pumps had failed.
‘Pumps one and three,’ said Mick and winked at Dad.
‘That’s right.’ Dad looked back at me. I was keeping up with the story so far but it had suddenly got a bit technical, as these stories sometimes do.
Dr Lecter’s gold pin drew closer. ‘If Squadron Leader Stark had lost his number two and three pumps, then he would have lost all his flying controls and immediately ejected.’
‘Right again.’ Dad was back on the ashtray with the Dunhill closing fast. So John and Peter were now hurtling towards Earth with only half their flying control, making the aircraft soft to handle and very slow to react. Peter no longer had airbrakes, flaps, undercarriage lowering or wheel brakes for landing.
Peter Stark was a big man. South African by birth, he had joined the SAAF in World War II and had extensive flying experience. ‘He was imperturbable and only spoke when he had something to say,’ the Doctor said as he put his feet up, leaned back in his chair and disappeared into a cloud of cigar smoke.
‘Indeed,’ Dad agreed, ‘and right now he was busy. We used our airbrakes to control speed on the descent, but Peter was going in hot. Although he got a good radar pick-up and clear directions to the airfield, he had no flaps to limit his approach speed.
‘Without hydraulics to lower his undercarriage, he had used the emergency air bottle provided for this eventuality to get his wheels down, but once they are down the wheels cannot be raised again, even on the ground.’
The lead Javelin’s radio contacts were infrequent and broken, but Peter managed to touch down just after midnight on runway 27 heading west. ‘Just how fast Peter was going must be left to conjecture but he landed bloody fast,’ Dad said. ‘Our normal touchdown would be around 145 knots. I reckon he was at more than twice that speed. He literally had no means of slowing down and must have been worried that pump two might also fail at any time. If that happened he would have been too low to eject. The relief must have been massive when he knew he was on the ground.’