Storm at Sunset Read online

  “I reckon they’re all nuts here, Ray,” said Nobby, what with that strange squadron leader and all this odd signage. “Got jungle fever or whatever it is you catch after too long in the sun.”

  And their impression was quickly confirmed as they made their way to the cookhouse, en route passing a group of airmen almost falling off their chairs with mirth as they apparently tried to translate an English fairy story into Hindi. One of the lad’s wives had, in puzzlement, packed up copies of the original and posted them in response to her husband’s request. Were they fighting a war out there, she’d wondered, or what?

  “Juldi juldi, Goldilocks. Quickly quickly.”

  “Tik hai, daddy bear. Good, good!”

  Roars of laughter came again from the airmen, and the sounds of hilarity followed the newcomers as they made their way through the scrub.

  The crew looked sideways at one another. So this, they thought, was what they’d travelled four thousand miles for?

  CHAPTER 5

  The next day but one found Keith Smith hunched down uncomfortably into the right-hand pilot seat of ‘G for George’, glancing over at his new skipper, whose grizzled features were rigid with concentration as he deftly steered the heavily laden Dakota along a tortuous track between towering cells of cumulonimbus cloud. They’d taken off with a torrent of spray rising above the wings, the metal-planked runway buckling and clanking with their passage, and Keith’s first operational trip from his primitive new base had reached the stage of preparing to drop the resupply cargo of ammunition and food to an army platoon up-country deep in the Burmese jungle. It was a routine run to a remote spot in the interior where unsung heroes had been left to sort out the remnants of a still-dangerous enemy army. Many such locations were fiendishly difficult to find in the endless treescape, but the new man had been reassured at the briefing that the rest of the crew had been to this one before and didn’t anticipate any trouble in pinpointing it again.

  Even though it was some weeks from the height of the monsoon season, the young co-pilot had been staggered by the flying conditions they’d encountered thus far. In view of the necessity of having the ground in sight for the sharp end of the mission – the drop – they’d crawled outbound below the weather in an attempt to maintain ground contact all the way. And, Keith supposed, they had more or less done so, although in the teeming rain and high humidity he could not in all honesty have said that he himself, with his meagre total of just over 100 flying hours, could have pressed on so far at low level. They had followed what had seemed like an interminable series of meandering valleys, the Arakan Hills on either side of them rising through the mist and indefinable cloud-base to disappear heavenwards to invisible heights.

  This was not Hurricane country, he’d acknowledged to himself, for the first time coming to the realisation that, perhaps, his old fighter buddies were not the only aircrew to possess special skills. Determined to make a go of his new calling, he’d been looking forward to getting his hands on the controls again. But in the current frightening conditions he was beginning to have doubts as to whether he was up to this transport job. His mind wandered to the image he and his Hurricane friends had loved to conjure up – of the shiny-arsed airliner crews eating their in-flight meals off china plates before donning their finely-fitting white cape leather gloves for landing. He whistled silently to himself as he mentally reassessed the reality of the current mission, the scale of the concentration required.

  Flight Lieutenant Ted Costain, his skipper, hadn’t seemed to have found anything out of the ordinary in the flight. He had simply clamped his ever-present pipe more tightly between his teeth and, with the help of the navigator, who had spent the outbound leg squatting awkwardly between the two pilots’ seats, crumpled map in hand, had calmly guided the war-stained Dak relentlessly towards their target area.

  When they’d first met at the flight briefing, the older man had given the impression of crustiness, but in the few minutes they’d had to spare before the arrival of the truck that would take them to the aircraft the young co-pilot had managed to engage him in conversation.

  “You must have been here a while, sir? I suppose there’s not much left that could surprise you out here. What’s the latest on the tour length … Fifty missions?”

  The skipper had considered. “Fifty missions? Seventy missions? They change the rules at the drop of a hat. All I know is that I feel I’ve been here forever. Two lots of Fifty missions? That’s what it seems to be at the moment, but I wouldn’t bet a pint on it staying that way. In any case, whatever the current rule seems to be, they’ll still get you. I thought I was going home years ago, but I’m on my third eastern tour now.”

  “Well I’m glad to be in expert hands.”

  “Expert? Lucky, more like. A new crew out here last week lasted only two trips. Disappeared into the jungle. God knows how or where, but we searched around their last known position and never found anything. He paused, seemingly miles away.

  “You get up, you fly, you go to bed. You get up you fly, you go to bed …” He stopped again for a moment. “It just goes on.”

  He’d fallen silent and a distant look had appeared in his eyes. The younger man felt the need to allow the skipper his thoughts and had remained quiet. Eventually, Costain had resumed.

  “Then one day you get up, you fly, you don’t come back. Or if you’re lucky you get up and someone tells you you’re going home today. It’s the luck of the draw.”

  The truck had drawn up at that point, bringing their conversation to a close, but Keith had remained thoughtful as they’d bumped off around the perimeter track to their dispersal. Without knowing it, he’d absorbed the first lesson; a little bit of the philosophical attitude he needed to survive had rubbed off on him. He considered himself lucky to have this wise old head guiding him, and he’d contentedly thrown himself into the flight preparation.

  Now, as they approached their goal, the reality of operational conditions was hitting home. The target eventually swam out of the surrounding watery depths. As the crew set up for the air-drops Keith and the nav went aft and joined the wireless operator and dispatcher in the rear fuselage, preparing the load for delivery. In view of the weather they’d be too low for parachutes to deploy, so the compact loads would have to be free-dropped, and the co-pilot’s role in this would be as a part of the dispatch team – heaving and humping packages in sequence up to the large door in the left side of the rear fuselage. Hole in the fuselage, in fact, for the planes were mostly flown with the doors permanently removed. Sheets of fine spray were swirling in, drenching the rear crew. Up front, Ted remained in control, orbiting the drop zone, windscreen wipers fighting a losing battle with the incessant downpour. The sliding window panel on his left was wide open to help him maintain contact with the DZ as he circled, and he too was soaked as he struggled to maintain orientation in the tight pattern amongst cloud-base, mountains and treetops. At least, Ted thought, there was no enemy opposition that day. Thank goodness the Jap forces were more or less played out now. On many similar earlier missions, the crew had had enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire to contend with.

  Nor, the skipper thought gratefully, were there any other Dakotas in the drop pattern; they had quite enough to cope with without having to worry about the positions of their own squadron’s aircraft. Their enemy today was only the tropical weather, and the captain squinted as the cloud-base seemed to get, if anything, even lower and the atmosphere even darker. The wipers thrashed wildly backwards and forwards, making little impression.

  The skipper would control the drop, and now, as he received the word from down the back that the loads were all in position and prepared, he flicked the switch which brought on the red ‘ready’ light in the cabin. Co-pilot and nav had now transformed into ‘kickers’ – both sitting on the floor opposite the open door, braced against the fuselage wall and resting the soles of their feet against the first load.

  ‘Green on’ – and the dispatcher’s arm dropped
as he yelled the instruction. With a mighty shove, the two of them straightened their legs and kicked the load cleanly out of the door. After a brief check that nothing had snagged on the aircraft’s tail-plane, they were up and positioning the next pack for the second drop.

  Another run. Red … Green … Shove.

  Yet another run. Round and round. Muscles aching, weariness bearing down on them. Despite his full absorption with the task in hand, Keith was beginning to feel the onset of queasiness in the hammering turbulence as the skipper hauled the Dak around in tight circles across the tree tops. At last the final load was gone and they moved away with some relief from the open doorway.

  “Well done, chaps – I’ll just tidy away back here, then I’ll get a brew on.”

  They scrambled back to their primary positions, Keith clambering into the right-hand seat and strapping himself in. “How’s it looking?” bellowed the nav over the skipper’s shoulder.

  “Not so bad. We’re established outbound down this valley, here.” Ted craned over and indicated the general area on the nav’s map. “But I don’t like the weather.” He gestured upwards. “I think we’re going to have to climb through it.”

  The nav nodded. “Okay, you’ll be relatively clear of terrain in this direction once you get above about 3,000 feet. Looks reasonable just to the right of the nose. Is that a slightly lighter patch I see over there?”

  Costain agreed. He had no wish at all to plough through the heaviest of the storm clouds. He’d had plenty of experience of tropical weather and was wary of the forces present in those mighty build-ups. “Yep.” He inched the Dak to the right towards what he thought was a gap between cells, eased the yoke back, and applied the power. The now-light aircraft responded immediately and leapt away from the ground, burying its nose into the heavy overcast. The turbulence level increased at once, the aircraft bucking and heaving like a cork in the sea, but they soon cleared the safety altitude beyond which he knew they were above all of the adjacent terrain. Ted relaxed a little, establishing the aircraft in a steady climb. “I need to stretch my legs and ease springs. Happy Keith?”

  The young man nodded. “Yes thanks skipper – I have control.”

  “You’ve got her.” Ted unstrapped and climbed out of the seat, disappearing down the back to use the makeshift facilities – which amounted to a funnel tacked to the bulkhead and feeding into a rusty pipe which vented to the outside airstream.

  The Dakota popped out into the clear at 10,000ft, the machine now tiny and insignificant in an airy valley between towering cumulus tops reaching endlessly up into the high heavens. Keith trimmed the aircraft into its cruise configuration and was chewing on a chocolate bar, relaxing, when the skipper returned. The two of them chatted briefly as they proceeded back towards base, but soon their concentration shifted to the business of getting back onto the deck.

  “There’s a glimpse of terrain down below, nav. Can you get a pinpoint?” The skipper was looking to begin a spiral down into a convenient canyon between build-ups.

  The nav consulted the map for a few moments.

  “Yep, we’re certainly in the vicinity of Ramree, skip. Down you go.”

  The wing dropped and the Dakota buried its nose steeply. Within just a couple of minutes, they established themselves below the cloud-base and the nav confirmed their position. Not far to go now.

  “We’re close enough now to break comms silence, I think,” said the skipper. “WOp, will you make contact with the airfield please?”

  The WOp twiddled dials and worked away for a couple of minutes before reporting back.

  “Shocking static, skipper. But through the crackles I gathered that there’s a violent storm overhead. They’ve asked us to stand off for a few minutes.”

  That would not be a problem. Although the airmen were keen to get back on the ground, the trusty old Dak still had ample reserves of fuel and they were confident that the storm would soon blow through. They established themselves in an orbit over the sea and prepared to wait it out.

  Endless rain continued to form a curtain of water beneath the overcast, but they nevertheless relaxed in the relatively smooth air. Then without warning the sky became suddenly as black as night as a great hand grabbed the plane. The drumming on the fuselage instantly increased two or threefold as the squall hit, and the pilots gripped the controls, their knuckles white. Lightning flashed and the aircraft shuddered once, violently, before running into turbulence the like of which none of them had experienced before. The machine felt as though it would break apart within a minute. The yokes thrashed against their stops, the pilots struggling to regain a grip on the flailing controls. Instinctively, their training drew their eyes to the airspeed indicators, which were showing unflyable speeds. Within almost less time than they could register, the gauges read zero. Fearing the stall they knew must follow, the pilots both pushed forward on the yoke and rammed throttle and RPM levers as far forward as they would go. But simultaneously, the needle on the vertical speed indicator snapped up to maximum climb, and the altimeters started winding up at a rate too high to read.

  “Hang on tight,” yelled the skipper over his shoulder to the rear crew – his attention immediately snapping back to the instrument panel in front of him. It was pitch black outside, and in the turbulence Keith flapped for the instrument lighting switches. Ted knew that they had fallen into the grip of a monster. One of the afternoon’s massive cumulonimbus cells had them in its maw, and there was nothing they could do about it save to ride it out and wait and see when the storm chose to spit them out. To his right, the sweat was shining on Keith’s face, pale in the semi-darkness.

  The needles on the instruments momentarily slowed and became almost readable; their ride appeared to be topping out at 12,000ft.

  “Stay on the controls with me,” yelled the skipper as the two of them struggled to make sense of the crazy attitudes they were seeing on the instruments. Then the yokes were snatched out of their hands again by unseen forces and smashed first to the rear right stop and then to the front left. In an instant they were hanging in their straps and the altimeter was unwinding. Turn needle and slip ball were showing max deflection – and the violently oscillating motion told them that the aircraft was in an inverted spin. The rush of airflow ebbed and flowed with the violently rotating motion, and a colossal lightning flash and a clap of thunder added to the nightmarish conditions in the heart of the storm cell. The deafening clatter now was of hail, lashing onto the fuselage, and through it they could hear the metal fuselage structure groaning. Their heads were on the ceiling, but as Costain continued to wrestle with the thrashing controls, the negative G suddenly came off and the instruments showed signs of regaining some semblance of ordered flight. The altimeter continued to unwind, with the airspeed increasing and the heading somewhere near steady. They were out of the spin and recovering in a steep dive. Airspeed was now nearly 300 knots – far faster than the old Dak was ever designed to fly – but now was not the time to worry about that. Both pilots heaved back on their sticks, conscious now of the hard, sharp mountains lurking dangerously close below them.

  Concern for the terrain below evaporated almost immediately as the storm seized them again, with the up-draught and the zero-speed climb beginning once more. Once again they were wafted skywards as though the aircraft was no more than an autumn leaf. The full sequence repeated itself. At the zenith as they re-entered their inverted spin, a crash from somewhere behind them signalled that equipment had come dislodged from its stowage and was being flung from end to end of the cargo hold. Or maybe it was the WOp bouncing around – they heard a muffled scream which suggested he’d made violent contact with some sharp corner of the fuselage. In the eerie half-light the co-pilot’s features were stretched and grim.

  Down … down … down again, thunder roaring, lightning scorching their vision and casting outlandish shadows across the cockpit in instant snapshots. In the glare, Keith glanced back at the wing and saw the leading edge glistening with a
thick coating of ice. Immediately he registered that some of the deafening cracking and banging he’d been hearing had been ice fragments breaking off the whirling propellers and smashing against the fuselage. Now at last he was believing some of the more exotic meteorological theory he’d been taught – of the extraordinary temperature variations which could be present in tropical storm clouds.

  “Lower the wheels and flaps,” yelled the skipper.

  Keith had no idea why that would help, and hesitated, uncertain.

  “Put them down – come on – don’t bugger around. The kite can’t withstand this for much longer. The extra drag might stabilise us a bit.”

  Struggling in the violent oscillations, Keith forced his hands across to the landing gear and flap controls and hit them. Somewhat to his surprise, the indicators told them that the services had responded.

  “Won’t do them any good, being extended at this speed,” croaked the skipper. “But I’m running out of ideas. We’ve got to settle things somehow and get out of this beast.”

  In the spins they’d had no opportunities to fly any sort of escape heading from the storm. The transport had no radar to help them see a way out, and most of the gyro instruments had toppled and were near useless. But now the skipper’s unconventional manoeuvre seemed to be working. The pilots’ heads snapped back to the centre. The disorienting rotation ceased, the G force returned to positive, and the aircraft seemed to be recovering into a stable dive. Check the height.

  Christ! The altimeters showed them descending through 4,000 feet. Where were they now? Hard to say with any accuracy after that ride, but there were almost certainly hills higher than 4,000 feet around that area. Once again for Ted that terrible choice. He was caught between a fearsome storm, which might kill them, and lethally hard rocks which certainly would. He had to go up again; reluctantly, he pulled on the yoke, committing them once more to the giant’s embrace.