With his level of education, Don joined the infantry as a rifleman and he loved the life, the camaraderie and the sense of doing something with a purpose.
Another life altering experience was his first flight in a helicopter, a Blackhawk. While his buddies were staring out at the ground Don had been craning his neck to watch the AC, the Aircraft Commander, and his co-pilot.
It had just been an air experience flight, an introduction to the drills required to get on and off without walking into a rotor blade or grabbing hold of something you shouldn’t in order to climb aboard when fully loaded down with weapons and equipment. They had a short cross country hop to a wide green meadow where the aircraft had landed and shut down while they all had lunch, army style of course, but Don had sought out the AC, asking him about what it took to be an army helicopter pilot. The answers had been a little sobering but Don was not one to be easily put off.
Back home at that time his friends were marrying high school sweethearts and making babies, although not always in that order, and buying houses on the same street where their parents and grandparents lived. Don went home on leave after passing basic, but apart from attending his sister’s wedding the following year that was it, he never went back again.
The army ran further education courses and Don applied himself with a will. His first tour in Iraq was as a rifleman, but his second was in the left hand seat of a CH47 Chinook.
A chunk of metal taking off Don’s right leg below the knee during a hot extraction in Helmand province ten years later was the only reason he had left, not because he wanted to but because the army was downsizing and younger, 100 % fit AC’s were preferred over the prosthetic limb owning variety.
Lifting tree trunks out of the woods kept his mind focussed but flying personnel and equipment from A to B was as interesting as watching traffic signals change, at least he was still flying though.
‘My T Oak’ won the ESA contract to clear the jungle from around the facility and other small jobs appeared in-country too, mainly at the behest of the Governor’s office to clear trees around the small marine bases on the Suriname and Brazil borders, and the legion camps of course. Being a Vet and having seen combat went a ways to establish a cordiality with the normally frosty legionnaire’s that led to a respect for his flying skills, so it was to him and not his boss, that they had come to request assistance with boarding the fleeing freighter Fliterland a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Don’s ‘Pinnacle’ manoeuvre, keeping station on the moving vessel without making contact but close enough to drop off troops, had allowed fifteen Legionnaire’s to step off the lowered rear troop ramp and straight on to one of the bridge wings and seize the vessel.
Tonight, at the logging camps accommodation near the airstrip outside Kourou, Don had been dozing in front of the communal TV set with his prosthetic limb beside him, lightweight, strong alloy tubing instead of something pretending to be a living lower leg. The false leg sensibly allowed one handed operation in its attachment and removal as the designers realised the owner may not always be in a position to sit whilst performing those tasks. The free hand could prevent the owner from falling on his ass.
Don was called to the telephone in the office and told it was urgent, so having hopped one legged to the ‘phone Don attached it as he listened. On the other end was the legions operations centre and the duty watch keeper, a major, explained their Puma was still tied up on the border so could Don take the platoon of reservists from Kourou up to the Soyuz site as there had been an attempt to infiltrate all the launch pads. Once he had dropped them off he wanted Don to collect one of the Cayenne reservist platoons and deliver it to the ESA final assembly building.
Don was practically rubbing his hands together. All he needed was assurances that the company had been informed because they had torn him a fresh one after the Fliterland incident.
He roused his co-pilot and crew chief, a pair of French Canadians with attitude, that is to say they considered themselves more French than the French. It would be fair to say that Don’s enthusiasm for the evening’s unscheduled flying was not shared by them on any appreciable level.
Half a dozen members of the Kourou platoon were already at the airstrip when Don arrived, hobbling on his false leg but keen as mustard nonetheless.
The Chinook was only a half dozen years younger than Don but older than both his co-pilot and his countryman. He set them to carry out the pre-flight walkabout as he settled himself into the right hand seat.
Checking that nothing had fallen off since the aircraft had last been used was a job he had once carried out himself, religiously, but he was not that nimble anymore.
Don attached night vision goggles to his flight helmet; they were absolute essentials here in the equatorial tropics where day does not gradually become dark over a couple of hours, the transition will occur in scant minutes. Airfield lighting with a backup generator was also in short supply in these parts so that was another good reason to be able to see in the dark whenever necessary.
Cars were arriving all the time now, a pick-up truck with eight middle aged men crammed into the back was the last to arrive.
The platoon commander, a grossly overweight baker, and possibly his own best customer, was pulling on combat trousers over pyjama bottoms as the senior NCO got the men in three ranks and called the roll.
Don counted twenty three men in total, the Chinook seated fifteen but he would bend the rules under the circumstances and deliver them in one trip.
His co-pilot took his seat and buckled up as the crew chief finished seating ‘Pères Armée’ and stood outside the aircraft ready to spot any problem visually during the start-up.
Don spoke aloud as he ran through the ‘before engine start’ and start-up checklists because even under the circumstances he wasn’t about to bend the rules for that!
It was only thirteen miles to the Soyuz site, but forty five from there to Cayenne. He left the troop ramp down for the three minute hop to the launch pad.
No sooner had they left the ground when they were diverted south to check the jetty and bridge guard across the Kourou River. The four man guard of reservists were not answering their radio and there may be a problem at the gatehouse to the nearby ESA dock. The local gendarmerie patrol car was not answering its radio either or they would have sent that instead, he was told.
Don was enjoying himself. Not a problem, had been his response, he banked around and overflew the gatehouse and jetty.
“I found your police car…a bunch of armed men and two for-godamned-real submarines…we got ground fire from the bridge and the subs!” he reported a minute later.
“Far be it for me to tell you your job, but do you want me to put these guys on the ground at the clearing between the town and the jetty and then go fetch the rest from Cayenne?”
The Governor had been alerted to the Chinese troops in Foreign Legion garb and now on learning that there were two surfaced submarines at the jetty with more troops on the ground he could be forgiven for wondering, just briefly, if an invasion force had somehow been missed?