Above and Beyond

Cover

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Above and Beyond

By

Tony Wilson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Tony Wilson 2013

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover the other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

The moral right of Tony Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

Discover the rest of the titles in this trilogy by Tony Wilson

Road to Recovery

Onward and Upward

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tonyymelvawilson

http://www.tonywilson.es

ISBN: 978-1-56581-231-4

Cover designed by Tony Wilson

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Table of Contents

(Click on any chapter heading to return to the Table of Contents)

Cover

Title Page

License Notes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

About the Author

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Chapter 1

2 × 3 = 6 – (months), and six months is only about the length of time that I seem to be able to hang on to my new girlfriends for. Following the tragic death of my lovely wife Sheila in a horrendous accident just over six years ago I became indecently rich, spent nine months in various hospitals and then almost two years getting my life back together, but as I was now the ninth richest person on the planet it wasn’t quite as simple as that. I inherited a dilapidated airfield (El Campo) just outside San Miguel del Mar on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, engaged multitudes of staff, from ex-SAS to protect me, to my best friend Paul, who fortunately was an architect, to turn el Campo into a place worthy of kings. As well as having assassination and kidnap attempts against me I was also learning to fly, and life was starting to get quite hectic for me so I decided to go on a Caribbean cruise, where I heard about the Lady S, my new yacht ‘to be’. She was not your run of the mill four berth ‘Tupperware’ yacht, but a Destroyer, almost complete with guns (but she still has a sting-er (or two) in her tail), and finally, almost a year after being first introduced to her, I was able to take her on a quick trip – around Africa. On the way, first we encountered pirates (and that is when I first came to the attention of the world’s press) and then, on the final leg, just after we had scooted (it’s a nautical term – honest) into Gibraltar, just ahead of the ‘storm of storms’, I got talked into taking a couple of Royal Navy Sea King helicopters back out into the raging mid-Atlantic to rescue the crew of a stricken Tanker, accompanied by a television news crew. That was when I met Sandra, their anchor ‘person’, and after a ‘very’ public introduction we became inseparable, and for the first five glorious months it seemed that we never dined at the same table twice, we were definitely the ‘in couple’. From one President in the White House to the other one in the Kremlin, from Father Christmas in Lapland to a group of very friendly kangaroos in the outback (but that’s another story), we were definitely the most ‘sort after’, ‘must have’ guests on the planet, any excuse, no matter how feeble seemed to inspire an invitation. I have a Dutch deckhand on the Lady S so that warranted a state banquet in Holland, and my Filipino 2nd Chef got us the best seats in the house for a firework display that must have increased the Country’s gross national debt by at least 50%, but fortunately things eventually started to slow down; at that pace I wouldn’t have lasted out the year. We had all the tee-shirts and videos that we could carry, and photographs by the thousand, taken with us next to just about every other person on the planet, but finally I started to sense that Sandra might just be starting to miss her former life. It was little things - like she never started to go very far without her passport – even to the loo, and every spare minute that we had ‘we just had to keep up to date with the News’, then it happened; the UK Parliament decided to cock-up yet another expenses exposé - big time. She went apoplectic; of course she had no intentions of leaving me - BUT if she was over there she could definitely have done a better job of ‘that’ interview than Adam, and she would definitely have worn a better outfit than Kay (meow), so finally we sat down to have a ‘little chat’, and ‘little’ it was, it lasted two minutes and ten seconds, and then she was on the last stage out of Dodge (in the guise of my ‘big boys toy’ Grumman G450). Of course we would stay in constant touch, which we did, every hour on the hour, until the G450’s wheels connected with dear old Blighty, and then it was two days, then a week, and then it was time for another ‘little chat’.

‘We would of course remain the best of friends (and possibly with benefits)’, after all Alice (my Daughter) and Algernon (her Son) were making plans for their wedding so we would meet up there (subject of course to the political situation) ‘and Mr Prime Minister when are you going to resign over this expenses debacle’.

I realised of course that the last bit had not been directed at me when a very flustered PM tried to tell me all about his latest revamp of the new ‘Inner City transport policy’, then I heard a very unladylike ‘oh sh*t’ and the microphone, nee mobile phone went dead.

Was I mortified over the loss of Sandra? Of course I was, well until I had poured three very hefty Bacardi and Diet Cokes down my throat, by the way do you know that there are no calories in alcoholic drinks if you mix them with a diet mixer, the same as there are no calories in chips (French fries for our Colonial Cousins) if they are taken from someone else’s plate, and there are definitely no calories in a bar of chocolate if you can eat it all in one go without closing your eyes - but I digress, as Caroline (my Director without portfolio, and the wife of my Security Director - David) poured me my fourth almost neat diet coke I started to see her point of view. After the tragic loss of Sheila I had started to enter a black hole, emotions wise, and needed something drastic to snap me out of it, and one of the many words that you can use to describe Sandra was drastic, along with devastating, and delightful, (but definitely not dainty) so, according to Caroline, she was the right woman for me, at the right time, to ‘snap me out of it’. Apparently now that I had ‘tested the water’ I was over the worst, and after shaking off a hangover that I was deservedly going to have in the morning ‘the world was going to be my oyster’, and thinking of all the subtle (and not so subtle) hints that I’d had over the past couple of years I fell asleep thinking ‘so many women – so little time’, or possibly not; I swapped her for seventeen Hawker Hunters (a fair swop I think), sixteen of them were for my new aerobatic display team, and one was for me. I then took a Caribbean break on the Lady S and ended up taking on some drug dealers, which proved to be bad career moves on their part, although I lost Charlie (my Deputy Director of Security) metaphorically, and his fiancé, physically, in doing so.

I, and a few others then took the Farnborough International Air-show by storm, and on return I almost bumped into the next love of my life, Sasha, which normally wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except that we were both about a thousand feet above El Campo, but in different aircraft. Sasha was Aristocracy, with a capital A, but I found out that we had different blood colours when, six months later, her coven descended on el Campo in force and told me to pour the tea, so I placed a contract out on them (it seemed like a fair enough response to me at the time), but I didn’t wait around to find out what happened, ‘plausible deniability’.

I then hit the media headlines again when I got involved in the recovery of quite a few vintage aircraft from their desert hideaway, and when I wouldn’t give some of them to a media tycoon’s son (who couldn’t even fly), my young grandson was almost blinded by one of his photographers, so I closed his newspaper group down and had him locked up in prison, again a fair response, I think. I was definitely getting used to having all this money.

Following that I got into miniature railways where size apparently isn’t important, (well it is, but in the opposite direction) and then I met Breena that was to be the next ‘love of my life’ (you may have noticed that her name does not begin with the letter S, wrong, its short for Sabrina {but she was only a 34C}) and I thought she was definitely the ‘love of my life’ but unfortunately six months later, as we visited an art gallery in London, Breena and one of my body guards were killed, and two others seriously injured, and my entire ‘being’ shut down for six months, but not before I fleetingly met Sigourney, yes it starts with S, and so does her twin sister – Simone.

Now back to the maths, or the math as they say in America (ugh), 2 × 3 = 6 - (months). When I had originally playfully raised the point that she was only half my age, Sigourney had quipped back that ‘if it was only a matter of mathematics, then her identical twin Sister Simone could always make up the numbers’.

‘Wishful thinking’ I thought, BUT, one side effect of the new medication that had got me back into the land of the living was an increase in my libido, big time, and she must have mentioned this to Simone because two months later I was having a ’dawn strike’ (it’s a Navy thing) with ‘Sigourney’ when two things happened simultaneously, one, in the half-light I noticed that her hair had grown quite significantly - overnight, and two, the short haired version returned early from her morning jog with a twisted ankle, and coitus interruptus’ed us. She didn’t believe that I was an innocent bystander (well maybe I was an ‘actively engaged’, innocent bystander) in all of this, and took off, literally, in the G450, but I always say ‘waste not – want not’ so Simone stayed on for a further two weeks. Another of my sayings is ‘a bird in the hand etc etc’, but then Simone and I started to flag (intellectually, not physically). Sigourney, not realising this, had this idea, ‘she was missing it me’, and it became ‘two birds in the hand are worth none in the bush’, and for a further two weeks I was blissfully happy (although I didn’t know which way to turn – literally) but the twins were anything but (with each other – not me) and I was quickly reduced to passing messages between them, as I lay between them. I then received three ultimatums, the two from them were ‘it’s me or her,’ and the other one was from my Doctor, ‘give them both up or you won’t last another week’ – the mind is willing, but the flesh is weak, so it was decision time again, and as it had run the norm (‘three’ {months} × ‘two’ {persons} = ‘six’ {months/persons}) – I loved algebra at school - I reluctantly waved them both goodbye – in separate aircraft, although I had also factored into the equation that the Mk2 version of my medication (without the ‘unfortunate’ side effect) would be arriving by the next winged messenger. Perhaps I could salt a bottle or two of the good stuff away for special occasions!!!!!

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Chapter 2

Following the demise of the twins I returned to my second true love (or should that be my third?) – my Hawker Hunter Mk6D. The D was for Display – a special designation given to all my Hunters – the single seat Mk6’s and the two seat Mk 7’s by the CAA, and confusingly named Lady S as well - if the President of the USA can call every aircraft that he fly’s in ‘Air Force One’ then I can go one better, everything that I am sat in/stood on (aircraft, ship, golf buggy etc.) is ‘Lady S’, but it now seemed that even she was starting to spurn me. The first time it was over nothing, or rather a ‘zero’, - on her altimeter. As my strength returned I started to return to my old habit of playing with the clouds, and then performing some minor aerobatics for the gathered throngs on a local deserted beach, but this day I spotted a cruise liner first. An acquaintance of Carol’s (Lady S’s Captain) told her that cruise liners were now altering course just on the off chance of seeing the ‘green diamonds’ at play, so it became an unwritten rule that anyone spotting a liner should give it a couple of minutes quality time, and so I decided to buzz this lucky one at fifty feet, although instead of indicating fifty feet I noticed that the altimeter read almost five hundred feet as I flashed by down its port side, which was very naughty of it. If I had gone straight from cloud chasing to aerobatics along the deserted beach I doubt if I would have noticed the difference when I set myself up for the ‘grand finale’ inside loop, of course using the altimeter, and I undoubtedly would have run out of ‘air’ before I bottomed out, and as the Hunter is not known for its amphibious qualities, the ‘sea’ would have been very unforgiving. After giving the liner a much reduced ‘treat’, I returned to El Campo trying not to look at the altimeter, although I quickly realised that it was a very ‘accurate’ inaccuracy.

John, my Aircraft Engineering Manager was perplexed, in all his experience he had never come across a fault quite like this one. When my aircraft had been upgraded by HHR to the ‘glass cockpit’ standard, a new radar altimeter had been fitted, along with the upgraded communications and GPS-aided Navigational suite, so in theory my aircraft had one of the most up-to-date cockpits in the aviation industry, although it was surrounded by a geriatric fifty year old airframe, but it had still been four hundred and ninety-five feet out, exactly, at sea level, but not throughout its entire range. Above four thousand feet it progressively became more accurate, and by ten thousand feet it was spot on, so if I had joined formation with other aircraft above that altitude I wouldn’t have noticed the inaccuracy. Not only was I, John and all my pilots worried, but so was the CAA (the Civil Aviation Authority) so everything that could be, was removed from Lady S, for onward transfer, via one of the specially modified drop tanks, into Gatwick Airport (south) terminal, home of the CAA. New components were then dispatched from the manufacturers in England, fitted into the Lady S, and voilà, after a check test flight I was back in business.

Two days later I decided that again I needed some Hunter therapy so I joined her at her new outdoor home. She was now kept on a small hard-standing all of her very own at the end of the main aircraft line, when she wasn’t in the hangar (I think Topsy, my new joint Director of all things Aviation, had put her there so that she wouldn’t clutter up his hard-standing). In truth it was to give the passengers on my new railway a ‘photo opportunity’ of her (and me when I clambered into her). I quickly kicked the tyres and lit the fire and was feeling that all was well with the world - or at least my little part of it, as I was marshalled forward. I lightly squeezed the brake lever to check that the brakes were OK (well ok’ish, perhaps she needed new pads), and then I was off, straight towards the rest of the aircraft, but all was not lost, a new white line had been painted on my tarmac to protect them, (I can call it my tarmac – because it is), all I had to do was follow it, simple. I wasn’t really going ‘too’ fast as I approached the bent strip of paint but I wasn’t hanging about either, so when a Plane Captain and his helper, who had just dispatched his aircraft off into the wild blue yonder suddenly started running towards me, signalling for me to stop, I stopped, or at least I tried to. Any pilot will tell you that if anyone - irrespective of what he/she does or who he/she is - whether he/she is the Station Commander or his/her driver, the postman/woman, or the dust cart driver signals you to stop – you stop – end of story. What I hadn’t seen was that my Plane Captain (ess) had been absentmindedly watching me taxi out, and the sun had reflected off something on my starboard (right) undercarriage, that shouldn’t have reflected, and it looked alarmingly like hydraulic fluid. She franticly waved to her mate (it is pointless trying to shout above an Avon), and pointed at me, with her thumb down. Chas (her mate) signalled me to stop, so I did, or rather, as I have already said, I tried to, but the brake handle, after a slight resistance, went all limp in my hand as I tried to squeeze the life out of it. I then continued serenely on towards the other aircraft, franticly shutting the Avon down as I went (unfortunately the Hunter does not have nose wheel steering). Chas’s helper was carrying two very heavy wooden chocks, with about three feet (almost a meter) of substantial chain link dangling from one side (to lock the two chocks together on a wheel) and dropping one he swung the other one around by the chain and flung it in my direction, ‘perhaps it was a new Olympic