Cover
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Above and Beyond
By
Tony Wilson
Copyright © Tony Wilson 2013
License Notes
The moral right of Tony Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
Discover the rest of the titles in this trilogy by Tony Wilson
Road to Recovery
Onward and Upward
https://www.tonywilson.es
ISBN: 978-1-56581-231-4
Cover designed by Tony Wilson
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Table of Contents
(Click on any chapter heading to return to the Table of Contents)
Cover
Title Page
License Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
About the Author
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Chapter 1
2 × 3 = 6 – (months), and six months is only about the length of time that I seem to be able to hang on to my new girlfriends for. Following the tragic death of my lovely wife Sheila in a horrendous accident just over six years ago I became indecently rich, spent nine months in various hospitals and then almost two years getting my life back together, but as I was now the ninth richest person on the planet it wasn’t quite as simple as that. I inherited a dilapidated airfield (El Campo) just outside San Miguel del Mar on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, engaged multitudes of staff, from ex-SAS to protect me, to my best friend Paul, who fortunately was an architect, to turn el Campo into a place worthy of kings. As well as having assassination and kidnap attempts against me I was also learning to fly, and life was starting to get quite hectic for me so I decided to go on a Caribbean cruise, where I heard about the Lady S, my new yacht ‘to be’. She was not your run of the mill four berth ‘Tupperware’ yacht, but a Destroyer, almost complete with guns (but she still has a sting-er (or two) in her tail), and finally, almost a year after being first introduced to her, I was able to take her on a quick trip – around Africa. On the way, first we encountered pirates (and that is when I first came to the attention of the world’s press) and then, on the final leg, just after we had scooted (it’s a nautical term – honest) into Gibraltar, just ahead of the ‘storm of storms’, I got talked into taking a couple of Royal Navy Sea King helicopters back out into the raging mid-Atlantic to rescue the crew of a stricken Tanker, accompanied by a television news crew. That was when I met Sandra, their anchor ‘person’, and after a ‘very’ public introduction we became inseparable, and for the first five glorious months it seemed that we never dined at the same table twice, we were definitely the ‘in couple’. From one President in the White House to the other one in the Kremlin, from Father Christmas in Lapland to a group of very friendly kangaroos in the outback (but that’s another story), we were definitely the most ‘sort after’, ‘must have’ guests on the planet, any excuse, no matter how feeble seemed to inspire an invitation. I have a Dutch deckhand on the Lady S so that warranted a state banquet in Holland, and my Filipino 2nd Chef got us the best seats in the house for a firework display that must have increased the Country’s gross national debt by at least 50%, but fortunately things eventually started to slow down; at that pace I wouldn’t have lasted out the year. We had all the tee-shirts and videos that we could carry, and photographs by the thousand, taken with us next to just about every other person on the planet, but finally I started to sense that Sandra might just be starting to miss her former life. It was little things - like she never started to go very far without her passport – even to the loo, and every spare minute that we had ‘we just had to keep up to date with the News’, then it happened; the UK Parliament decided to cock-up yet another expenses exposé - big time. She went apoplectic; of course she had no intentions of leaving me - BUT if she was over there she could definitely have done a better job of ‘that’ interview than Adam, and she would definitely have worn a better outfit than Kay (meow), so finally we sat down to have a ‘little chat’, and ‘little’ it was, it lasted two minutes and ten seconds, and then she was on the last stage out of Dodge (in the guise of my ‘big boys toy’ Grumman G450). Of course we would stay in constant touch, which we did, every hour on the hour, until the G450’s wheels connected with dear old Blighty, and then it was two days, then a week, and then it was time for another ‘little chat’.
‘We would of course remain the best of friends (and possibly with benefits)’, after all Alice (my Daughter) and Algernon (her Son) were making plans for their wedding so we would meet up there (subject of course to the political situation) ‘and Mr Prime Minister when are you going to resign over this expenses debacle’.
I realised of course that the last bit had not been directed at me when a very flustered PM tried to tell me all about his latest revamp of the new ‘Inner City transport policy’, then I heard a very unladylike ‘oh sh*t’ and the microphone, nee mobile phone went dead.
Was I mortified over the loss of Sandra? Of course I was, well until I had poured three very hefty Bacardi and Diet Cokes down my throat, by the way do you know that there are no calories in alcoholic drinks if you mix them with a diet mixer, the same as there are no calories in chips (French fries for our Colonial Cousins) if they are taken from someone else’s plate, and there are definitely no calories in a bar of chocolate if you can eat it all in one go without closing your eyes - but I digress, as Caroline (my Director without portfolio, and the wife of my Security Director - David) poured me my fourth almost neat diet coke I started to see her point of view. After the tragic loss of Sheila I had started to enter a black hole, emotions wise, and needed something drastic to snap me out of it, and one of the many words that you can use to describe Sandra was drastic, along with devastating, and delightful, (but definitely not dainty) so, according to Caroline, she was the right woman for me, at the right time, to ‘snap me out of it’. Apparently now that I had ‘tested the water’ I was over the worst, and after shaking off a hangover that I was deservedly going to have in the morning ‘the world was going to be my oyster’, and thinking of all the subtle (and not so subtle) hints that I’d had over the past couple of years I fell asleep thinking ‘so many women – so little time’, or possibly not; I swapped her for seventeen Hawker Hunters (a fair swop I think), sixteen of them were for my new aerobatic display team, and one was for me. I then took a Caribbean break on the Lady S and ended up taking on some drug dealers, which proved to be bad career moves on their part, although I lost Charlie (my Deputy Director of Security) metaphorically, and his fiancé, physically, in doing so.
I, and a few others then took the Farnborough International Air-show by storm, and on return I almost bumped into the next love of my life, Sasha, which normally wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except that we were both about a thousand feet above El Campo, but in different aircraft. Sasha was Aristocracy, with a capital A, but I found out that we had different blood colours when, six months later, her coven descended on el Campo in force and told me to pour the tea, so I placed a contract out on them (it seemed like a fair enough response to me at the time), but I didn’t wait around to find out what happened, ‘plausible deniability’.
I then hit the media headlin
es again when I got involved in the recovery of quite a few vintage aircraft from their desert hideaway, and when I wouldn’t give some of them to a media tycoon’s son (who couldn’t even fly), my young grandson was almost blinded by one of his photographers, so I closed his newspaper group down and had him locked up in prison, again a fair response, I think. I was definitely getting used to having all this money.
Following that I got into miniature railways where size apparently isn’t important, (well it is, but in the opposite direction) and then I met Breena that was to be the next ‘love of my life’ (you may have noticed that her name does not begin with the letter S, wrong, its short for Sabrina {but she was only a 34C}) and I thought she was definitely the ‘love of my life’ but unfortunately six months later, as we visited an art gallery in London, Breena and one of my body guards were killed, and two others seriously injured, and my entire ‘being’ shut down for six months, but not before I fleetingly met Sigourney, yes it starts with S, and so does her twin sister – Simone.
Now back to the maths, or the math as they say in America (ugh), 2 × 3 = 6 - (months). When I had originally playfully raised the point that she was only half my age, Sigourney had quipped back that ‘if it was only a matter of mathematics, then her identical twin Sister Simone could always make up the numbers’.
‘Wishful thinking’ I thought, BUT, one side effect of the new medication that had got me back into the land of the living was an increase in my libido, big time, and she must have mentioned this to Simone because two months later I was having a ’dawn strike’ (it’s a Navy thing) with ‘Sigourney’ when two things happened simultaneously, one, in the half-light I noticed that her hair had grown quite significantly - overnight, and two, the short haired version returned early from her morning jog with a twisted ankle, and coitus interruptus’ed us. She didn’t believe that I was an innocent bystander (well maybe I was an ‘actively engaged’, innocent bystander) in all of this, and took off, literally, in the G450, but I always say ‘waste not – want not’ so Simone stayed on for a further two weeks. Another of my sayings is ‘a bird in the hand etc etc’, but then Simone and I started to flag (intellectually, not physically). Sigourney, not realising this, had this idea, ‘she was missing it me’, and it became ‘two birds in the hand are worth none in the bush’, and for a further two weeks I was blissfully happy (although I didn’t know which way to turn – literally) but the twins were anything but (with each other – not me) and I was quickly reduced to passing messages between them, as I lay between them. I then received three ultimatums, the two from them were ‘it’s me or her,’ and the other one was from my Doctor, ‘give them both up or you won’t last another week’ – the mind is willing, but the flesh is weak, so it was decision time again, and as it had run the norm (‘three’ {months} × ‘two’ {persons} = ‘six’ {months/persons}) – I loved algebra at school - I reluctantly waved them both goodbye – in separate aircraft, although I had also factored into the equation that the Mk2 version of my medication (without the ‘unfortunate’ side effect) would be arriving by the next winged messenger. Perhaps I could salt a bottle or two of the good stuff away for special occasions!!!!!
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