Rogue Hercules

by Denis Pitts

  ROGUE HERCULES

  Denis Pitts

  © Denis Pitts 1977

  Denis Pitts has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1977 by Hodder & Stoughton.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Book One

  Book Two

  Author’s Note

  The trouble about writing a topical book is that the headlines beat you all the way. Place names change — those in Mozambique will have to stay the way they were when I started — and it’s a reasonable bet that Rhodesia won’t be Rhodesia any more come publication.

  I’ve taken a lot of liberties with the language of the air for reasons of shorthand. I’m most grateful to RAF, Lyneham for their help and to my friendly neighbourhood arms dealer for his counsel.

  Thanks to Mary Livie-Noble who typed tirelessly and to Maureen Rissik and Amanda Hamblin at Hodders for their forbearance.

  Denis Pitts,

  Wiltshire and Jersey.

  From the air-conditioned passenger lounge in the ornately new terminal at Karachi International Airport, it is almost impossible to see the small groups of hangars which stand in the extreme north-west quadrant of the airfield complex, a mile from the end of the main runway. They form a sad, neglected set of buildings which had once been painted green and khaki air force camouflage. The paint has faded now, worn by time and sun to an uneven, mottled red.

  Most major airports have such an area. This one is guarded by day and night. Those leaving it are searched methodically.

  This particular set of corrugated iron buildings is surrounded by a twelve-foot fence of barbed wire. A small sign, placed discreetly so that no airline passenger can be alarmed, says: DANGEROUS CARGO.

  One aircraft completely fills the biggest of these hangars. She is fully loaded with fuel and cargo and she sits heavily on her squat, sturdy undercarriage. It is nearly dawn and shortly she will be brought to life.

  She is 97 feet long and the span of her high wings is 132 feet. She was built by Lockheed in Atlanta, Georgia, for the US Air Force at a cost of twelve million dollars and she has recently been bought as war-surplus for six million dollars. Her military markings have been removed and she has been sprayed an even shade of matt finish mud brown.

  Unlike her scheduled cousins who are lined up by the distant terminals, there is nothing sleek or beautiful about this aircraft. She was built as a tactical troop and freight transport and she is fat and ungainly with a black, bulbous nose and with two equally ugly fuel tanks drooping from her wings. But even here, under the harsh hangar neon strip lighting, you can see that she is brutally tough and functional, with talents not possessed by her commercial neighbours.

  Her makers named her Hercules.

  She is, in fact, a C 130 H (uprated from the F model by the addition of various avionics). She is powered by four Allison T 56-A7 turboprops, each of them capable of producing 4,050 engine horse power which would be sufficient to raise a Saturn rocket. Her Fairchild radios are VHF and ultra short wave. She houses a V-Cat radar in her nose. The maker’s serial number, stamped on a plastic disc on her air-frame, is L-382F-100-20.

  There are more than a thousand such aircraft flying with various air forces in the West.

  The nearest that this one comes to individuality is her radio call sign which is ‘Juliet Mike Oscar’.

  She is a veteran, a sky-mule, who has been kicked and cursed and rarely loved by her drivers; who has survived tropical storms, electrical storms, powerful updraughts and downdraughts, drunken captains and worthless engineers; who has freighted spent-out combat soldiers from Saigon to Honolulu to return with a consignment of condoms to Bangkok.

  She has risen under fire, almost vertically, from short jungle airstrips with a load of desperately wounded men, flying low like a fighter to dodge the Vietcong missiles. She has cracked her undercarriage under the weight of ill-gotten gold bars which a corrupt politician was taking from Vietnam.

  She ended her air force career with compassionate distinction by ferrying two hundred orphans to Hong Kong. Then she was laid up, her engines shrouded in polyester sheeting, and stood in an aircraft park in the base at Guam.

  There are gashes, badly painted over, in the cabin sound-proofing where shell fragments sliced through her during bombardments at Da Nang. She smells of constant use, of men.

  Most aircraft have their quirks. Some want to steer left; others vibrate violently at a certain speed and altitude; some are incapable of landing gently; and others are so aerodynamically perfect that even the most hamfisted pilot cannot pancake them.

  Juliet Mike Oscar has no such vices. Her logbooks show her to be an exemplary, well-behaved aircraft with no flight eccentricities worth noting.

  You enter her from the port side. There are three steps up to the flight-deck which is large and capacious, the ample light tinted gold by the yellow side panels. Her control columns are grimy and stained black with the encrusted dirt from the hands of a thousand pilots and co-pilots. The perspex over the instruments has bloomed at the edges, making some of them difficult to read.

  Constant use of the engine condition levers and throttles has worn their plastic coverings away to reveal polished bare metal. A strip of dymotape over the ratio climb and descent meter on the co-pilot’s side declares BANG THIS BASTARD HARD AND BE SURE, and the altimeter on the navigator’s panel has a similar strip which states: BE WISE, ITS YOUR BALLS. ADD 100 FEET.

  The canvas seat covers have frayed, exposing foam rubber bulges; and the seat harnesses have been used so often that they could not possibly be expected to stop a 180 pound man at five times the weight of gravity from hurtling into the windshield.

  But she will fly.

  She has recently been registered in Spain under fabricated documents. Her four engines were due for a change 140 flying hours ago. Her airframe should have been thoroughly inspected and overhauled, according to the laws of the air, some 500 hours ago.

  The Certificate of Airworthiness, secured at present in the captain’s brief case, was granted only on the basis of a forged US part 191 certificate under which she had allegedly been maintained.

  She will fly. But she will fly illegally.

  She is technically in a ‘dangerous condition’. She would possibly have been allowed to fly on a very temporary certificate which would lay down stringent conditions in terms of minimum weight and fuel.

  The stated overload take-off weight allowed in the maker’s specifications for the H model is 175,000 lbs.

  With a full fuel load and a cargo of 40,000 lbs, ‘Juliet Mike Oscar’ will take-off this morning with an overall weight of 190,000 lbs.

  She is, sadly for such a veteran, illegal in every sense. She is improperly certified. She carries an outrageously unlawful weight. Her flight plan, which will be filed shortly at air traffic control, is entirely spurious.

  Her cargo is illicit.

  Her destination is criminal.

  Book One

  By the time he had reached his thirty-sixth birthday, Martin Gore could no longer be described as handsome. He had been handsome, certainly; indeed even now in the harsh strip lighting of that airport cafeteria it was possible to see why a former girlfriend had called him Byronic. His hair had been long and blond then, but now it had greyed in curious streaks. His nose, which had been long and aquiline, had been pushed out of true in two flying accidents. There was a thin scar two inches long along his chin, the result of a serious car crash. It was a strong, determined face but there was a hardness about it which seemed somehow artificial. It was a face which had known pain and fear, certainl
y, and yet the eyes were intensely alive and filled with humour. They were large eyes, brown and intelligent, constantly alert in that airport setting.

  The tenseness was accelerated now by fatigue and the archness of the neon. He sat, wearing a faded tan bush shirt, and scowled at the sourness of airport coffee which had clearly been reheated ten times or more that night. He had flown that questionable aircraft which stood now in the hangar for three days, and he had not slept properly at any of the planned rest points along the route. He was too aware of the volatile nature of the cargo, of the illegality of this flight which placed his whole flying career in jeopardy.

  It had not been an easy haul from Taiwan. The Chinese Criminal Investigation Department had sniffed too industriously and had forced them to fly before they were really ready; the French wireless operator, picked up at the last minute, had defected to a Bangkok bawdy-house with his first cash advance; and the flight over the Pamirs had been a savage mixture of updraughts and downdraughts which had meant long stretches at the controls and mind-rending concentration.

  Fatigue brought on layer after layer of irritation which he fought to keep back as he listened to his co-pilot and flight engineer.

  ‘Unsafe? I will personally attest to that fact. She is altogether unsafe.’

  The flight engineer was a small man with a heavy growth of black beard. His name was George Sroka but he had been known for most of his adult life simply as “Stubbles”.

  ‘How unsafe?’ asked the co-pilot, a squat and yet powerfully built black man called Harry Black.

  ‘Unsafe like the booster hydraulic system reservoir is bleeding like it was mugged, the aileron linkage is corroded and creaks like a haunted house in the movies, and you’ve heard the way she screams on take-off. Like with agony and perturbation.’

  As a child in the Bronx, Stubbles had been taught by his father, a Polish-born barman, that it was important that he should learn a new word every day. He had done this all his life but he had never quite succeeded in fitting his new words correctly into sentences. But he knew every bolt, washer, bulb and the bearing of an Allison engine, and every duct and spar and wire of the Hercules airframe. He was a brilliant engineer.

  ‘Are you saying that we shouldn’t fly any further?’ asked Martin.

  ‘If you will recount several conversations which we had in Taiwan, Captain, you will know too goddamn well that we shouldn’t have flown at all,’ said the engineer. ‘You gave me five days and a parsimonious allowance of dollars with which to get that aged bucket into an airworthy state. I gave you as far as Karachi. Now the guarantee has expired.’

  The captain looked directly into Stubbles’ eyes and saw genuine worry. Flight engineers are a cautious race, often given to over-exaggeration for the sake of safety. He knew Stubbles. The little man was not being overcautious now.

  Martin turned to Harry who merely shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘All the instruments are registering properly,’ declared Martin almost defensively.

  ‘Captain, I hear things in those engines that you don’t hear either of you.’ Stubbles voice was normally high-pitched. Now it squeaked.

  Martin thumbed through the flight documents on the table in front of him.

  ‘Will we make Cyprus?’ he demanded sharply.

  Stubbles sighed heavily.

  ‘I guess we can,’ he murmured. ‘But I have to tell you the truth, don’t I?’

  Martin sat very still and placed his two index fingers on either side of his nose. The other two watched him intently. They could see that he was struggling in his mind against the natural airman’s reserve which normally dictated their flying.

  They were a strange combination, this crew. Martin was English and patrician, Harry was languid, a Texan, and Stubbles was ever alert and querulous like a sparrow. They neither appeared to fit easily together nor, as a crew, did they have any recognisable place among their easily categorised flying brethren.

  They were part of the demimonde of the air, contract men, freelancers, mercenaries indeed, respected by scheduled flyers for their ability to fly, but shunned on the ground because they seemed to earn too much money and spend it freely.

  They in turn had an equally contemptuous distaste for the flyers with gold bands on their arms who flew to rigid rules, who drank ostentatious orange juices in front of passengers and who demanded precedence at meteorological counters and the other airport offices.

  Martin had closed his eyes while he thought. For a few moments the other two watched him closely and wondered if he had fallen asleep.

  Then he looked directly at Stubbles.

  ‘We’re going to Cyprus,’ he said in clipped tones. ‘There’s money waiting for us in Cyprus. Are you coming?’

  ‘You bet, Captain,’ said Stubbles looking around the cafeteria. ‘I’d hate for to be left in this mausoleum.’

  They were about to order more coffee when Martin looked up and saw the girl coming towards them.

  *

  She walked across the airport concourse with an easy, athletic stride, a slender girl of mid height with a healthy tan and no make-up, her blonde hair clipped short, her wide, blue eyes alert and intelligent. She showed no sign that she had been travelling since noon the previous day in a complicated series of changes between Brussels and Pakistan.

  This was the only time that the normally hectic Karachi airport was quiet during the twenty-four hour cycle. An old Pakistani dozed fitfully behind the giant silver coffee stall; two women, match-thin in their drab grey saris, dragged wet cloths over the cigarette strewn marble floor; even the gaudy souvenir shops were closed. Soon the building would wake again, however, for dawn arrives early in Pakistan and pilots prefer dawn for take-off in those hotter latitudes.

  Already there were two or three slip-crews gathering. They sat, paper pale and yawning in the restaurant area, some coughing on their first cigarettes of the day, some wincing, like Martin, at the reheated coffee.

  Years of experience could not accustom them to this time of waiting. They talked little. Some read gaudy-covered paperbacks. Others glanced idly at the stewardesses’ legs and wrestled with unformed fantasies of fast-fading memories.

  Most of the men, however, preferred to follow the blonde girl appreciatively with their eyes as she crossed the hall. The stewardesses, trained to walk with clip-clop uniformity, envied the ease of her movements and the simplicity of her blue bush shirt and slacks. A bright red kerchief was tucked into her shirt.

  She carried an airline overnight bag which was slung casually over her shoulder. There was a slim document case under her arm.

  The name of this girl was Sorrel Francis. She was twenty-four years old, the youngest daughter of a Barberton, Ohio mining family. At the age of sixteen she had been a beauty queen, and when she was eighteen she had worked her way through university in New York as a part-time call girl. Now she was the secretary and the mistress of the man responsible for the arms that were being shipped in Juliet Mike Oscar.

  ‘There’s been a change of plans,’ she said directly. ‘I’m glad I got here in time or you would have had a two-thousand-mile unnecessary journey.’

  ‘You knew we weren’t due to leave until the morning,’ said Martin. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘These arms are not going to Cyprus,’ she said. ‘We don’t think they can pay for them.’

  ‘Great,’ said Harry. ‘What the hell sort of organisation are we working for? An out-of-date chicken coup of an aircraft which scares me rigid on every take-off — and now a change of plan. Where do we go now, back to China?’

  ‘Rhodesia.’

  Harry blinked several times.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ he said softly.

  ‘We have a buyer in Rhodesia,’ said Sorrel. ‘The goodies in the back of your aeroplane are exactly what he wants.’

  ‘That’s sort of illegal,’ said Harry. ‘There’s an international embargo on selling knickers to Rhodesia, let alone missiles and mortars.’

 
Martin said nothing. He looked at the girl evenly. She continued.

  ‘Your bonus if this load had got to Cyprus would have been fifty thousand dollars. If you can get it to Salisbury, Rhodesia, within the next forty-eight hours, your bonus will be one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

  The girl looked at the men, awaiting a reaction. It came from Martin.

  ‘Just a few observations,’ he said. ‘Firstly, Rhodesia is a long, long way away. We need to consider whether we can make Rhodesia in this aeroplane. Secondly, like Harry says, the world doesn’t like Rhodesia which means that we cannot stop over on the way should we need to repair any one of twelve thousand component parts which might go wrong, and probably will, along the route.’

  Harry said quickly, ‘We could make it all right. A lot of Hercs make it. Right down the coast of Africa and slide in low over Mozambique. It’s only two hundred miles. They’ve got no radar, no air force, except for a handful of MIG trainers that they can’t fly. It’s a milk run. It happens all the time.’

  ‘That’s what Murphy said in Brussels,’ said Sorrel.

  ‘Did he?’ said Martin. ‘Your boss doesn’t have to fly that garbage can out there. He also appears to have failed to take into account the fact that Rhodesia is dominated by a white minority and that Harry is a black man. He might have some sensitivity in that direction.’

  ‘Murphy thought on that, too,’ said the girl. She reached into her document bag. ‘I’m authorised to pay you off, Harry. Ten thousand dollars in cash.’

  ‘And who will co-pilot — even if Harry did take the money?’ said Martin harshly.

  ‘Surely there are plenty of out-of-work flyers around here,’ said Sorrel.

  ‘I suppose that’s what Murphy said.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Christ, the man’s a shit. Of course we can’t get anyone else. We’re under-crewed as it is.’