Chapter 18
Carol dropped anchor just above El Khabta, a small village on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which would have surprised a lot of people as I had told everyone that would listen that we were going to Gran Canaria. El Khabta was as close as we could get to the hangar without fitting wheels to the Lady S, so James and Aaron (who could speak passable Berber) went ashore with a pocket full of Dirham and US Dollars, and came back a couple of hours later with visa’s for all and sundry (‘please, just fill in your names, please Sir’), and a permit to fly anywhere we liked, apart from the disputed territories. Fortunately the hangar was well to the north so no one seemed in the slighted bit interested in the comings and goings of an eccentric rich European who wanted to fly around their desert and mountains taking photographs of sand dunes and rocks, just as long as the price was right, although the permit to fly, issued by a local shopkeeper who assured Aaron that he was the duly appointed local agent for issuing such permits, looked as though it had been hand written on the back of a receipt for a goat.
Half an hour later Twinkle lifted of the Lady S’s flight deck, with yours truly in the co-pilots seat, and Fred and a team of mechanics clutching some big boxes in the rear. I’d had yet another ‘full frank and meaningful’ with Teddy, he was seriously having problems getting his head around the simple concept of ‘pampering to my every whim’, when, after having had a quiet word in Topsy’s ‘shell like’(he had given me the names of four of his mechanics that had experience in working on vintage aircraft - and could also keep their ‘cake holes’ shut), Teddy had this quaint notion that the working up of ‘his’ display team had priority when it came to manpower, so yet again I had to ‘picturize him’. All the Hunters were now fully serviceable following my little mishap, and I had actually flown Lady S home, and that had been our first ‘full, frank and meaningful’, of the year, but I had a feeling in my bones that it wouldn’t be our last.
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John, my boss of aircraft maintenance had turned up unannounced at Robin’s home a week before I planned to return to Spain. He was mortified that he was even there but something was upsetting him, HHA had contacted him, telling him that the Lady S was ready for collection - even before Fred had started on her ‘journey of discovery’ in the cockpit, John had arranged for a Hercules to transport her – Lady S, not Fred - to Dorset, they had the specialists available there to repair her - but when he had informed Teddy, and suggested that he send a crew to prepare it so that I could fly it back, he had been ‘most emphatic’ that he was to do no such thing, it was the start of the workup to the new aerobatic season and he needed every mechanic to be available to work on ‘his’ aircraft, ‘that’ machine would just have to wait. John fully understood the concept of ‘pamper and whim’ so after the ugly showdown with Teddy he reluctantly decided to go behind his back.
To save dragging John into it I innocently rang HHA and enquired after the health of the Lady S.
‘Fine’ they said, ‘she was ready for collection, and they were positive that they had already let my technical staff know a few days earlier’.
I then rang Teddy, who off-handedly agreed that I might just be correct, ‘but could I ring him back in a few hours as he was in Zebedee busy getting the pilots back into the saddle after their holiday’, and almost hung up on me. The pilots being put through the mill were then treated to ten minutes of silence as I read him the riot act, or rather my version of it. He was my Head of Aviation Services, and as such I was without hesitation his number one priority, he tried to interrupt me at that point – big mistake, and thirty minutes later Fred and her team lifted off the runway in the back of the G450; he could finish breaking in the pilots mańana.
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As we flew deeper into Morocco the terrain started to get very sandy, and then hilly, until finally we came to that ‘lethal’ gash. Aaron had not exaggerated, and thankfully he had the controls, as I kept my eyes firmly closed until we were safely over it, and then we headed towards the plain.
As we circled around, the hangar came into view, and Aaron was mortified, outside the supposedly abandoned hangar were some tents and a Land Rover, and he quickly skidded to the hover. As we sat there three figures came out of the door, two with rifles cradled in their arms and one in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and they stood silently watching us, the situation had all the makings of a Mexican standoff.
‘Ok’ I fearlessly said ‘let’s taxi over and see what we have here then’, so he reluctantly lowered the undercarriage and gingerly eased Twinkle over to just in front of the men, and set her down, was this going to be his shortest period of employment ever, he nervously thought.
Behind us the passenger door flew open and Fred was down the steps like a racing greyhound, and she covered the ground between us and the figure in the brightly colored shirt in milli-seconds, removed the tea-towel covering his face and started kissing him, now that did surprise me, I didn’t realize that Fred and Topsy were an item.
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Life was looking pretty good to Topsy, he had a job to die for, a blossoming relationship with Fred, was obviously in Mr. Michael’s inner sanctum as he knew all about Morocco, in fact the only blot on his landscape was something that David had just said – ‘they (David, Pierre and himself) would most likely be ‘dropping in’ to have a ‘recce’ in four days’ time’, somehow he didn’t think it was anything like ‘dropping in’ to see Aunty Maude for a cuppa on the way back from Margate. Earlier that morning Pierre had ‘dropped in’ to pick up his Passport, which was now never very far from his person after he had picked up an on-the-spot fine for not having it on him at a Guardia Civil checkpoint, which had then been doubled as he was ‘brassic’, and the Officer had to ‘escort’ him to the cash point to pay it, and now it lay back on his desk. ‘I wonder what he needed it for?’ he mused, and opened it up – and promptly had a ‘flash forward’ - at precisely this time in four days’ time he would be stepping off the brow of the ferry from Almeria in Spain onto terra firma an Nador in Morocco, it must be true, the visa and entry stamps into Morocco were already in his passport (although the ink was still wet), and unbelievably the flash forward turned out to be almost spot on; the only difference was in the mode of transport.
David knew somebody, who knew somebody that knew how to contact the operators of a couple of C130 Hercules transport aircraft that specialized in doing peculiar things (for civilian aircraft anyway), and now, at the appointed time and date Topsy very reluctantly found himself standing on the edge of the loading ramp of one of the Hercules, although it was not one small step onto Moroccan soil, it was many thousands of feet, the aircraft in question was flying at eight thousand feet and he wasn’t holding on to anything, but apparently he was perfectly safe though; David was making sure of that, he had Topsy clipped to his stomach. Then David leaned forward and Topsy thought that the end of his world was nigh. Eventually, over his helmet intercom David persuaded him to open his eyes - briefly, and he found himself looked at a grinning Pierre a few feet away. They were all free falling towards the ground at an alarming rate so he decided to close his eyes again, then suddenly David opened the parachute of their tandem rig and a few moments later he gently touched them down a few feet from a ‘palletized’ Land Rover, and then Pierre followed suite, a few feet from them (Topsy was still not into metrification).
About half an hour earlier during ‘their’ flight from Gran Canaria to Mauritania one of the planes had mysteriously lost cabin pressurization so had to descend to below ten thousand feet (and unfortunately off the rather basic air traffic control radar screen covering that area), and the other one of course had to keep in company (for safety reasons), and as David detached him, the aircraft that they had only recently vacated came in low, very low, and out of its open loading ramp came a parachute, attached to yet more pallets which all came safely to a standstill about twenty meters away. Topsy was convinced that its wingtip had passed over his head, a
nd then both aircraft continued on their way to Mauritania, nobody in Morocco any the wiser as to their where-a-bouts.
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As he shut the engines down I explained to Aaron about ‘plausible deniability’, and that for the past week or so Topsy, David and Pierre had been pottering about in the hangar.
Along with the Land Rover, on its own special air drop pallet, David and his team had sufficient food and liquids (of various kinds) on the remaining pallets to sustain them for at least a month (in case of any unforeseen circumstances), as well as a satellite communication system, portable generators, floodlights, tents (with portable air con of course), fuel, video and still camera’s, a small steam roller, and a few luxuries to make their stay more comfortable, although I hadn’t a clue where the rifles had come from. Why on earth did they need a steam roller I thought? (It was actually diesel driven), to compact the sand and iron our any bumps on the ‘landing strip to be’, to ensure that it would be firm enough to take the Hercules at a later date.
When the blades finally came to a halt I exited the helicopter and went to look inside the hangar. Topsy had rigged the floodlights so it would give me a good first impression, and what an impression it was, I had seen all the photos, and even a video, but it did not prepared me for what met my eyes.
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