The Khufra Run

The customs officer crossed himself. ‘Amazing. You are a true artist, Senor Jiminez, nothing less.’

‘One must think of the parents,’ Jiminez nodded to his underlings who replaced the lid, raised the coffin once more on the trestle and took it down the steps to the Otter.

The customs officer handed me the documents. ‘All would appear to be in order, Senor Nelson. I wish you a safe flight.’

He saluted and moved away and Jiminez glanced up at the sky. ‘A perfect night for it if the weather forecast is anything to go by’

‘Let’s hope so.’ I zipped up my flying jacket. ‘I wouldn’t like my passenger to have an uncomfortable ride.’

He permitted himself one of those brief graveyard smiles of his. ‘You know, I like you, my friend. You have a sense of humour where death is concerned. Not many people do.’

‘It takes practice,’ I said. ‘Lots of practice. I’ll be in touch.’

I went down the steps to the Otter where his men had just finished stowing the coffin. I climbed into the cockpit, did the usual routine check, started the engine and ran her down into the water. I took up the wheels and taxied down-wind, leaning out of the side window, checking the channel for boats before making my run.

When the moment came, she lifted like a bird as usual, everything suddenly light and effortless and as I stamped on the right rudder bar and swung out across the quay, Jiminez was still standing down there in the fading light staring up at me. I’d first flown the Otter for a film company who were doing all their location work in Almeria on the Spanish Mediterranean coast for the good and sufficient reason that it’s a hell of a sight cheaper than Hollywood these days.

When the film was completed they decided it wasn’t worth the expense of having the Otter shipped back to the States. As it became reasonably obvious that no one in the Mediterranean area seemed particularly anxious to buy a floatplane specifically designed to stand the rigours of the Canadian north, they let me have her cheap.

Most people thought I was crazy, but there was money to be made island-hopping in the Balearics. Ibiza, Majorca, Minorca, Formentera. At least I got by, especially in the season and there were always the extras to help things along, like this present trip, for instance.

It was a fine night, as Jiminez had predicted, with very little cloud and a full moon, stars strung away to the horizon. All very pleasant, but I had more pressing matters on my mind, switched over to automatic pilot and took another look at the chart.

There was no wind to speak of, certainly not more than five knots and I’d allowed for that in my original calculation. There was really very little to be done except to check my figures, which I did, then poured a cup of coffee from a flask and smoked a cigarette.

Thirty-eight minutes out of Cartagena, I took over manual control and went down to two thousand feet. Exactly three minutes later I got my signal right on the button, a blue light followed by a red, flashed half-a-dozen times, some private joke of Turk’s who swore it was taken from the old China Coast signal book and meant I have women on board.

I went down fast and banked across the boat, a forty-foot diesel yacht from Oran to the best of my knowledge, although the background details were not really my affair. The red light flashed again and I turned away into the wind, eased back on the throttle and started down.

The sea was calm enough and visibility excellent thanks to that full moon. A final burst of power to level out in the descent and I splashed down. I kept the engine ticking over and opened the side door. The motor yacht was already moving towards me. When it was twenty or thirty yards away, it slowed appreciably. I counted four men on deck as usual with another in the wheelhouse. I could see them quite clearly in the moonlight. A rubber dinghy was already in the water by the starboard rail, two of them dropped into it and paddled across.

They drifted in under the port wing and a tall, bearded man in yellow oilskins stepped on to the float, clutching a bulky package against his chest with both hands. He steadied himself for a moment then passed it up to me. As I took it from him, he dropped back into the dinghy without a word and they paddled back to the boat.

I took off again immediately and as I drifted into the air, the boat was already moving away in the general direction of the North African coast. Five minutes later and I was back at three thousand feet and dead on course for Ibiza.

As Turk had said, easy as falling off a log, and each time I repeated the performance we shared two thousand good tax free American dollars.

When I first met Harry Turk he was tied hand and foot to a tree on the edge of a small clearing in the jungle which was being used as a base camp by North Vietnamese regular troops operating behind the American lines. It was raining at the time, which was hardly surprising, as it was the middle of the monsoon season, but in spite of his incredibly filthy condition, I was able to make out that he was a Marine Corps sergeant, as they trussed me up beside him.

Before walking away one of the guards booted me in the side with enough force to crack two ribs, as I later discovered and I writhed around in the mud for a while. I had thought Turk asleep, but now he opened one eye and stared at me unwinkingly.

‘What’s your story, General?’

I said, ‘You’ve got it wrong. Squadron Leader. What you’d call a major.’

He opened the other eye at that. ‘Heh, since when have the British been in this war?’

‘They haven’t,’ I said. ‘I did pilot training on a short service commission with the R.A.F. then transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force a couple of years back. This is my second tour out here.’

‘What happened?’

‘I was hitching a lift on a Medivac helicopter to Saigon out of Din To when we came across a wrecked Huey in the corner of a paddy field with what looked like a survivor waving beside it.’

‘So you went down on your errand of mercy and discovered you’d made a big mistake.’

‘We were caught in the crossfire of two heavy machine guns. I was the only one who got out in one piece.’

He nodded gravely. ‘Well, as my old grannie used to say, you’ve got to look on the bright side, General, and thank the good Lord. If you’d been taken by the Viet Cong instead of these regular troops they’d have strung you up by your ankles and cut your throat.’

I think it was that remarkable composure of his which impressed me most from the start, for when he closed his eye and went back to sleep, his face, which I could see clearly pillowed on his right arm against the tree trunk, was as serene and untroubled as any child’s.

I fell asleep myself in the end in spite of the torrential rain and the cold and awakened again at around three o’clock in the morning to find a hand over my mouth, Turk whispering in my ear as he cut through my bonds. By some means known only to himself, he had managed to break free and had used his belt to garotte the sentry, which gave us an AK assault rifle and a machete between us when we made a run for it.

They were hot on our heels within a matter of hours which was only to be expected and in a brush with a fourman patrol, I took a bullet through the right leg, making me something of a liability from then on. Not that Turk would leave me, even when I did the gallant thing and ordered him to. Not then nor during the five days of hide and seek that followed, until the afternoon we were spotted in a clearing by a Medivac helicopter and winched to safety.

He visited me a couple of times in hospital, but then I was flown back to Australia for treatment. I took my discharge six months later when it became obvious to all concerned that I was going to be left with a permanent limp.

As for Turk, there was a brief period when his face seemed to stare out at me from every magazine and newspaper I bought which was right after he’d been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a party of frogmen into Haiphong harbour to blow up four torpedo boats. I wrote, care of Corps Headquarters in San Diego, but after a while, my letter came back with a note to say he’d taken his discharge and they didn’t have any forwarding address.

So that was very much that, until the night I was driving along the Avenida Andenes on the Ibizan waterfront and almost ran over a drunk lying in the middle of the road. Or at least I thought he was drunk until I got out and turned him over and found he was just another hippie, stoned to the eyes.

He had the usual Jesus haircut, a scarlet headband holding it in place, giving him the look of some Apache Indian, an impression reinforced by the lean, ravaged face, deeply tanned by the Ibizan sun.

He wore a linen kaftan and a silver chain belt at his waist, jeans and open sandals. You could have seen dozens like him any day of the week sitting at the tables of the open-air cafes along the waterfront, but in this case there was a significant difference. The Medal of Honor on the end of the silver chain about his neck.

Even then I didn’t recognise Turk in this gaunt, ravaged man, until he opened his eyes, gazed up at me unwinkingly in the light of the headlamps and without any kind of surprise at all said gravely, ‘And how’s every little thing with you, General?’

I didn’t live in Ibiza town myself at that time. I was operating out of a tiny fishing village called Tijola on a creek near Port Roig a few miles further along the coast. I didn’t need to take Turk home with me as it turned out. He had a boat moored down by the breakwater in Ibiza harbour, a thirty-foot seagoing launch, the Mary Grant, from which he operated as a freelance skin-diver, although he seldom ventured beyond the Botafoc lighthouse, preferring to earn his bread in more devious ways.

But much of this I was to discover later and on that first night, I only knew that he had changed almost beyond recognition. That he was a sick man was obvious and when I got him down to the saloon he was barely able to stand.

He sank into a chair, head in hands for a moment, then stood up slowly and leaned on the table. ‘You’ll have to excuse me for a minute, General, I need an aspirin or something.’

He went into the aft cabin leaving the door slightly ajar, enough for me to see his reflection in a mirror on the cabin wall when I peered in. He had rolled up his left sleeve and was tying a cord around the forearm. As he took a hypodermic from a drawer, I turned away.

He came into the saloon rubbing his hands together briskly, an entirely different person just like the after man in the patent medicine adverts. He took a bottle of brandy from a cupboard and found a couple of reasonably clean glasses.

He pushed one across to me and raised the other in a kind of mock toast. ‘To you and me, General,’ he said. ‘Together again - the old firm.’

And then he started to laugh uproariously.

For a year now he had been going downhill a little bit more each day, slowly being eaten alive by some worm within him. Whatever it was, he never discussed it. He lived entirely in the present moment, blotting out past and future with either a second bottle of whatever came to hand or another fix, involving himself in one vaguely crooked scheme after another.

Like this present affair, for example. When he’d first come to me with the offer I’d turned it down flat thinking it must be drugs, had to be, and that was something I wouldn’t have touched if I’d been starving.

But I was wrong for he had got permission from his principals, whoever they were, to open the first package to prove to me that it consisted of dozens of neatly wrapped packets of good American dollar bills. So that was all right. I was just a middle-man, helping to move large sums of money illegally between countries, part of some complicated exchange process by which someone, somewhere, finally made a fortune.

I was still thinking about it all when I made my landfall. I called up the control tower at the airport which was something the authorities insisted I do, in spite of the fact that I didn’t use their facilities. There was the usual interminable delay before I was given the all clear to land and turned in to make my final run.