by FARMAN, ANDY
“Hey, Sandy.”
Sandy looked at her smirking at him and rolled his eyes, his face dropping.
“Hey, Nikki.”
Nikki addressed Sandy’s audience.
“I had the misfortune to be stuck in a life raft for several days with this guy, and I was ready to feed myself to the sharks rather than hear that line another time…only back then it was two Mig-31s, not five.”
The beers sat in front of Sandy were obviously war beers, tokens of appreciation for his service and warrior status, and their donors reclaimed them swiftly from a protesting Highlander.
“Och, come on now guys…the heat of battle and all that…”
Even the beer in his hand was snatched away
Sandy’s audience departed, leaving him crestfallen.
“Well thank you very much indeed Nikki, and after I shared the warmth of my Gaelic heart to keep you alive too!”
She bent to plant a peck on the top of his head.
“Your liver will thank me when you’re in your fifties, Sandy.” She took a now vacant seat at the table and they caught up on events since arriving at Pearl.
Sandy had discovered that the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm currently had over twenty pilots apiece waiting to fly their dwindling inventory of Sea Harriers. So, as he was still shown as attached to the US Pacific Fleet he had offered his services to the Navy and would be ferrying an AV-8B out to the USS Essex very early the next day, via a stopover in Hawaii.
“So are you a ferry pilot or something?”
“No Nikki, I’m joining one of your VMA Harrier squadrons. I’ll be showing US Navy aviators how the Fleet Air Arm does it.”
“VMA doesn’t mean Navy Scotty, they’re Marines.”
“Oh, grief!” Sandy groaned.
“It’ll do you good.” Nikki had said. “Spending all of your off duty hours running around, and around, and around the flight deck with a pack on your back.”
Sandy looked crestfallen.
“Sounds just like our marine pilots, wasting time by training to walk to war when they’ve got perfectly good aircraft to carry them there at a fraction of the effort.”
She hadn’t seen or spoken Sandy since the Hood had docked, so she was gratified to learn that he at least had been at Chubby’s funeral.
Very little was said about her late RIO, she had done all her crying aboard the Hood, and she had learnt that the Brits deal with the death of a colleague in combat in a very stoical fashion. There are no group hugs; no tears spilt into one’s beer, and in fact little outward displays of grief. They raise a glass to toast their fallen friends’ memory and that is all until the war is over, when the business of proper mourning begins.
Sandy’s friend had re-seated herself on a chair and listened quietly while they talked, merely nodding a ‘hi’ to Nikki when Sandy had introduced her as
“And this is Candy, she’s delicious.”
Not until Sandy had excused himself to visit the john had the girl really spoken.
“So you’re Triple ‘A’ then?”
Nikki had been unsure what the she was talking about, but if Sandy’s line shooting had included herself in his scoring then she was going to do some facial rearranging once he got back.
“Excuse me?”
“Lt Cmdr. Nikki Pelham, four kills…Almost an Ace.”
Much relieved, she had allowed a laugh to escape.
“So Lt Cmdr. you know Sandy pretty well, huh?”
“I guess as well as you can after sharing a life raft, a sub full of sailors and a three birth sailing boat occupied by six.”
“Okay, then at least that part of his story isn’t total BS, but did he really disarm and capture a Chinese aviator?”
Nikki laughed again.
“Sorry but no, the guy had already surrendered to an elderly English couple before they picked us up. There was absolutely no hand-to-hand combat involved. The guy was just a kid really, not much different from one of us.”
She saw Sandy emerged from the door leading to the head and decided to find out what relationship he had with this snake-hips-in-denim civilian before he returned.
“So, are you and Sandy, good friends?”
“We only hooked up this afternoon, but if I see you at breakfast I’ll let you know.” Candice had added a wink for emphasis, so on the premise that two’s company and three’s a crowd, Nikki had left them to it and retired for an early night.
The phone in her room had woken her just after she’d dropped off to sleep; informing her that she had a RIO, one Lt (jg) LaRue. C and they were to be in the briefing room at 1000hrs. This was to be her last night at Nellis AFB.
Sandy hadn’t been at breakfast in the mess hall, he had flown out at five a.m. Nikki went easy on the coffee and ate only toast and jelly, natural bodily functions were no respecters of long range flights and she loathed the pee tube. Having taken the edge off her appetite, she picked up her small canvas bag of belongings and headed out.
The shock of finding Candice, now in flight suit and sipping coffee, had caused Nikki to pause half way through the briefing room door, and check that she had in fact found the right room.
On seeing Nikki, Candice put the cup down and stood to deliver a smart salute.
“Ma’am, Lieutenant LaRue. I have been assigned as your Radar Intercept Officer, Ma’am.”
She had looked over at the briefing officer who had given a wry smile, shooting his eyebrows up in confirmation that this was no joke.
They had been briefed on their route through the air defence zones, radio frequencies, IFF codes and the tanker plan, where Nikki had kept an eye on her RIO, ensuring she was getting every detail down correctly and being reassured that this girl whom she had suspected the previous evening of being some kind of aviator groupie, seemed to have the competence she would have hoped for.
It had not been until after they had disconnected from a tanker 500 miles off the West Coast and Nikki had set a course for the tanker they would meet several hours hence that they could relax.
“So tell me lieutenant, how did that hot date go?” There had been a few seconds before a reply had been forthcoming.
“Begging your pardon ma’am, but that friend of yours is one sick puppy.”
It had taken her back a bit.
“Say what?”
“My momma didn’t bring me up to get butt naked with no cross-dresser with a shiv.” Nikki had been lost for words until Candice had explained.
“We sneaked back to his room and he went into the bathroom, so I got comfortable, if you know what I mean?”
Nikki had a fair idea.
“You got naked?”
“Yes’m…and then he came out the bathroom in a skirt…”
The scene, or how it must have been, jumped into Nikki’s mind.
“A kilt.”
“Whatever ma’am, but he had some dead animal hanging off the front of it….”
“A Sporran.”
“Okay, it looked like road kill, but if you say it was a dead Sporran, then that’s what it was. He had a knife too, a shiv, stuck in the top of one of his socks.”
“It’s called a Dirk, Lieutenant…Sandy was wearing traditional Highland dress.”
“Well I don’t know why their women folks put up with it. A man should be a man and not go dressing up in women’s things!”
Nikki killed the intercom and sat there with her shoulders shaking in helpless laughter for several minutes.
When she had gotten it out of her system she’d flicked the intercom back on.
“Hey, LaRue?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“They call you Candy or Candice?”
“I prefer Candice, Ma’am.”
“Okay, so do I, so from now on unless there’s brass or unfamiliar company about, then I’m just Nikki, okay?”
She had decided that this RIO would do but she had ensured the intercom was switched off before saying a final goodbye to her previous RIO.
Acros
s the room Candice murmured something in her sleep that snapped Nikki out of her reflective mood and then she too closed her eyes and slept.
RAF Gütersloh, Casualty embarkation area:
Despite the pounding head, throbbing shoulder and broken ribs that made each breath painful, Ray Tessler felt like a fraud as he sat amongst more seriously wounded men and women who waited for the Royal Air Force Tri-Star air ambulance to begin loading. He reasoned it out for himself in his head, frequently, that with broken fingers he couldn’t handle a weapon so he would be a liability on the firing line, but having told himself that he took one look at a seriously burned corporal from the Royal Tank Regiment, hooked up to saline drips on a gurney nearby, and felt like a fraud all over again.
The hospitals nearest the fighting were shedding themselves of those already in the beds, in order to cater for those that would soon require them. Ray was going back to the UK on a civilian aircraft pressed into service to evacuate those wounded who didn’t need the air ambulance facilities, but they shared the embarkation area, a large hangar that the heaters struggled to warm.
A door opened at the back of the hangar to admit more evacuees, and Ray saw a friendly face, that of the driver of the Warrior he’d been in when he’d been injured. Ray raised an arm to wave, and immediately regretted it, but the Guardsman saw him and made his way over, one arm heavily bandaged and limping as he went.
Ray had come to the battalion as a battlefield replacement, vacating a desk job at RHQ to join the unit just before it was relieved at Magdeburg, for its advance to contact towards the Soviet airborne drop zones. The Warriors driver on the other hand, had been with the battalion for three years and had seen every fight it had been in since the start of the war.
“How you doing, sir?”
“Not bad. I feel like I’ve been stuffed into a washing machine and put through a fast spin cycle, but otherwise I’m okay…how’s yourself?”
“They dug a half dozen bits of metal out of me, but apparently the grenade that did it was far enough away it’ll just leave some interesting scars I can blag a few free beers off of in the pub back home.”
Ray nodded.
“You going to St George’s too?”
The young Guardsman looked at the label tied though the buttonhole of a breast pocket on his combat jacket.
“Yes sir, looks that way but the doctor thinks it shouldn’t be long before I get a few days leave.”
Ray had been told something similar, and there was nothing he was looking forward to more than holding his wife and kids again. St Georges’ hospital in south London was only a few miles from the family’s married quarters, and if for some reason the doctors there kept him in then his wife could easily find her way there.
The line for the seriously wounded began to move as RAF personnel wheeled the patients out to the waiting aircraft, and an hour later it was their turn.
Ray managed to get himself seated beside the other Coldstreamer, over the objections of an Airman with a list attached to a clipboard. Ray switched on his Sergeant Major persona and the airman hurried away, amending the written seating plan with a biro as he went.
The flight into Gatwick airport passed swiftly, but they found they still had to go through Customs when they got there. Ray and the Guardsman had only the dirty and rather ragged combat gear they wore, but they still had to go through the ‘Nothing to declare’ channel and submit to a body search to ensure they didn’t have some lethal souvenir from the battlefields concealed about them before they joined the queue being checked off at the exit to the Customs hall.
It wasn’t as if anyone could have gone missing between Germany and Gatwick, but Forces Movement Control has their way of doing things, and that includes head counts at every opportunity, checking the face and the photo on the individuals I.D card, the MOD Form 90, matched the details on the clipboards.
Ray didn’t pay any attention to the military policemen stood near the exit until his name was checked off the list by a Staff Sergeant with the cartwheel emblem of Movements worn on an armband. The man looked over his shoulder at the nearest RMP.
“Got another one here, corporal.”
He had not returned Ray’s I.D card, but had stuck it under the spring clip of his clipboard instead.
Two RMP lance corporals started towards him, and Ray asked the Staff Sergeant what he had meant by ‘another one’.
“Just go with them when they get here, sarn’t major, sir.” The Staff Sergeant put up a hand to rest on Ray’s chest, preventing him from passing the checkpoint.
Bringing his good hand up to the restraining hand on his chest, Ray curled his fingers around the Staff Sergeants thumb and bent it backwards, just enough to elicit an “Ow!” from its owner.
“I said, what do you mean by ‘another one’, Staff?” He kept a hold on the thumb, adding a touch more pressure.
“Coldstreamers…fuck sake sarn’t major, leggo of my hand!”
Ray let go of the thumb and the Movements NCO tucked the clipboard under one arm in order to massage the offended digit. “The RMP are picking up all members of 1CG when they come back to the UK…I don’t know why and I don’t think they do either.”
The RMP NCOs arrived and one stood by Ray without speaking whilst the other spoke to the Movements Staff Sergeant, discussing Ray as if he wasn’t present. He consulted a list of his own, and upon it were two columns, naming those who had been at Leipzig and those who had joined after that particular battle. Finally he took the I.D card from the Staff Sergeants clipboard.
The figure in the ragged combat jacket and trousers, stained with blood and ingrained with dirt did not look a lot like the picture on the I.D card.
The left side of Ray’s face was swollen and bruised black and blue, with shades of yellow thrown in. Somewhere between the makeshift mine going off under the Warrior and here, Ray’s solitary badge of rank, a smaller version of an RSMs coat of arms, had been torn from the front of his smock, but his rank was clearly displayed on the lists both the Staff Sergeant and the RMP carried.
“Is your regimental number, 27130087?”
Ray looked at the military policeman and felt his temper start to rise, but he didn’t reply.
“I said, is your number 27130087?”
The line of servicemen from the flight had come to a halt, and whilst some were impatient to get on there were others obviously curious about what was unfolding.
CSM Tessler felt embarrassed about being questioned in such a fashion by an arrogant junior NCO who’s own uniform was pressed and pristine, having been nowhere near a battlefield.
Ray’s companion on the flight, the young Guardsman, had now been stopped by the same staff sergeant, who again signalled to more of the waiting military policemen. However, having double-checked his identity another RMP lance corporal withdrew a pair of handcuffs from a pocket, and made to put them on the Guardsman’s wrists.
Confused at the turn of events the Guardsman resisted and a small scuffle broke out, during which the wounded soldier let out a cry of pain as his injured arm was grabbed.
This was too much for Ray who pushed past his own pair of RMPs, who were still waiting for an answer to their question, and placed himself between the Guardsmen and the RMP trying to cuff him.
“This man, unlike yourselves, has fought in every one of our brigades actions since day one of the war…so you will treat him with some fucking respect or I’m going to start back-squading teeth!”
This young NCO wasn’t used to having his authority questioned. He hadn’t managed to cuff the Guardsman either, who had managed to get free and now stood a half dozen paces away looking angry and not a little frightened. Another ragged form had placed itself in the way, obstructing him and he was now in no mood to mess about. Setting his feet, his hands started to close into fists.
Ray wasn’t exactly in his best fighting form, although as he saw the RMP prepare to take a swing he resolved to go down throwing punches and to hell with Queens Regulations
, but he was reprieved when their audience began making angry noises at the treatment of wounded soldiers by the forces of military law and order. Surging forward they placed themselves in front of the wounded Guardsman, and Ray found himself flanked by men who like himself carried injuries from recent combat, but who were fully prepared to give the Red Caps a good kicking if they forced the issue.
Angry jeers brought a young lieutenant from a side office where he took in the tableau of impending mayhem, and cursed himself for not being present when the flight had arrived. His RMP detachment was made up of young men and women rushed through training at Chichester and then given their single stripe at its conclusion. The Corps more experienced soldiers were across the channel, keeping the MSRs in operation and even manning traffic points in the middle of air raids. His detachment lacked seasoning and experience; otherwise this confrontation would never have come to pass. As he viewed the servicemen facing off against his young military policemen he noticed the figure stood front and centre. Despite his appearance he had the air of command about him.
The RMP lieutenant pulled on his beret and he strode over to the exit.
“What’s going on here, and who are you?” He addressed the question to Ray, who gritted his teeth as he pulled his feet in as best he could, coming to attention and identifying himself, before explaining what had occurred.
The RMP officer let him finish before swivelling around to take in the junior NCO with the handcuffs, and then turning back.
“It seems that someone got a little ahead of themselves…however, we have orders to detain you for questioning about matters of which I have not been given the details.”
“Thank you sir.” Ray answered, impressed with the RMP officers calm disposition when a small riot had been in the offing just moments previously.
“Are we under arrest, sir?”
“Not to my knowledge, sarn’t major…but that may well change later once we’ve handed you over to SIB.” Looking levelly at Ray he went on.
