Roman Candle by Phil Ward

Author:Phil Ward [Ward, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Military Publishers LLC
Published: 2012-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

14

WORLD’S GREATEST POUNCER

SQN. LDR. PADDY WILCOX, CAPT. HARRY SHELBY AND CDRE. Richard “Dickey the Pirate” Seaborn were standing around a table at remote Camp Croc looking at a map of Abyssinia. They were in the process of selecting the second staging base for Force N, to be called “N-2.” Now it was time to move up the chain of lakes closer to the heart of Italian East Africa—closer to where Force N should be. Their first effort at N-1 had been successful even though they had been forced to fly in the base security company and all the supplies with just the three Commodores. The Royal Navy was being difficult about parting with a Catalina to augment their aging fleet of amphibians.

Tasked with flying training missions for Maj. Sir Terry “Zorro” Stone’s parachute battalion as well as ferrying supplies into N-1, the old Commodores were being stretched to the limit of their endurance. Maintenance was a looming issue that was certain to grow even worse as time went by.

The Canadian bush pilots were performing their mission brilliantly. The pilots were flying around the clock, dropping trainee parachutists by day and doing intruder resupply missions to the secret base on Lake Margherita by night.

The bush pilots represented the textbook, picture-perfect example of “Right Man, Right Job,” even if their demeanor was a tad unconventional militarily. Their uniform of choice was Hawaiian shirts with khaki pants tucked into beat-up, pointy-toed cowboy boots, topped off with teardrop-shaped Ray-Ban aviator glasses, which the pilots virtually never, ever removed—even at night. Headgear consisted of a wide assortment of baseball caps—no two alike.

They were a rowdy, hard-drinking crew when off duty; getting drunk and sniping at the yellow eyes of crocodiles they spotlighted in the lake at night with their personally-owned revolvers, for which the choice of grips tended to run to mother-of-pearl. They never killed any of the giant reptiles but always trooped back from their safaris along the bank of Lake Rudolf claiming to have given a few “migraines.” When not flying, drinking or shooting their pearl-handled revolvers at crocodiles, the pilots spent their time racked out.

Captain Shelby eventually became so concerned with the pilots’ safety that he assigned a squad of askaris to accompany them on their nocturnal anti-crocodile expeditions to make sure they did not accidentally stumble over one lying on the bank in the dark and get more than they bargained for. True to form, the pilots accepted the escorts with good cheer, nicknaming the askaris “The Benevolent Lake Rudolf Bush Pilot Protection Detail.”

The askaris reported back that the Canadians tried to get them drunk—every night. The bodyguards claimed they never accepted anything to drink.

There were several candidate islands that appeared on paper to be suitable for the second clandestine resupply base, N-2. After deliberation, which was not a particularly well-informed process due to the almost total lack of hard intelligence about the lakes in the chain, Lake Ziway became the leading contender. Selecting it as the best location for N-2 was a guess, actually.

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