The charge score moved up to eight.
About two hours after leaving Pretoria, we landed at the army base at Amsterdam. Without a word to me, the fuming but warmer general stormed off with the base commanding officer to attend to whatever visiting brass do before important parades.
At lunch in the pongo officers’ mess, I suggested to the general’s aide, the colonel, that because the general parade was being held at the local rugby stadium and not at the base (I had been told that the crowd would number in the thousands, far too many to be accommodated at the base itself), perhaps I should collect the general from the rugby stadium and prevent any further wasting of time by waiting for him to return to the base.
Agreeing with me that this seemed like a fine fence-mending idea, the aide chatted to the general, who agreed wholeheartedly. I overheard him say to the colonel, ‘That is the first decent suggestion that the blue-job shithead has made all day!’ or words to that effect. ‘Just make sure that he doesn’t fuck up the parade in the process!’
So, after lunch, I asked my brother Mark, who just happened to be doing his national service at the army base and who’d met my aircraft when we’d landed, to arrange a two-way radio connection between my chopper and the rugby stadium so I could keep abreast of the parade’s progress and time my arrival to coincide precisely with its conclusion.
After doing a check of the communications link between my helicopter and his handheld radio transceiver, and making sure it worked, Mark left to go to the stadium. I waited, smiling quietly to myself, chuffed that through my personal ingenuity I might still rescue a sticky situation and get the general home to Pretoria without further delay, hopefully staving off any punitive reaction from him along the way.
The first sign of impending trouble occurred when I tried to call my brother over the radio at the stadium but failed to make contact with him. I tried numerous times, without any success, so, being a resourceful chap, I made another plan.
I called out to a group of pongo corporals who were standing close by, one of whom had spoorsnyer (tracker) flashes on his shoulders and asked them to indicate to me exactly where the rugby stadium was in relation to where we were parked. The tracker, puffing his chest out confidently, pointed in the direction of the stadium and said, ‘It are about three clicks (kilometres) that way, Lieutenant!’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘I grew big in Amsterdam, Lieutenant. Of course I am,’ he stated categorically and with great indignation.
Satisfied that I had got the best directions possible, from the person best qualified to give them, my revised plan to neatly pluck the general up from his current position now focused on my avoiding, at all costs, flying over the stadium during the general’s parade. When I gauged that the parade was well under way, I would take off, give the stadium a very, very wide berth and climb up to, and land on, one of the many hills that surround the town of Amsterdam, from where I could view proceedings down in the rugby stadium far below.
After taking off at what I estimated to be the appropriate time, I turned at right angles to the direction shown by the resident tracker corporal and proceeded, at slightly above treetop height (around 35 metres above ground level), towards a distant hill.
So, there we were, cruising along and enjoying the view when suddenly, looking down, I saw a vast sea of startled and wide-eyed faces, 10 000 of them I was told later, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the tiered seating of the main grandstand of the Amsterdam rugby stadium. They were all looking up at me, some with their hands over their ears to block the deafening screech of the 880-shaft-horsepower Alo III, passing just a few metres above their heads.
I’m no rocket scientist, but I generally know when I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the Border War, when someone shot at me with ill intent, the pace at which events unfolded always instantly slowed down to super slow motion.
The same thing happened at that moment.
Each detail of the scenery now passing so agonisingly slowly below was scorched into my mind. Blind panic took hold as my eyes moved from the sea of faces across to the athletics track running around the periphery of the rugby field and then on to the small VIP platform facing the massive crowd and upon which sat Amsterdam’s mayor, his wife, the base’s OC and the colonel.
AWOL, count 2.
Standing at the rostrum, a metre or two from the other VIPs, was the general. His face was contorted by a terrible rage. I could see flecks of foamy spittle and his jaws were open so wide that I could almost see the remains of his lunch.
‘Hier kom kak (Here comes shit),’ said Johnny.
Making my untimely intrusion a lot worse was the fact that the general had been about to conclude his speech. To rub salt into the festering wound caused by my ceremony-destroying fly-by, after the Alo had departed the scene the general had resumed his oration, but not a single person in the audience paid him any further heed. Instead, they fixed their eyes on my little bird while I sought a suitable hilltop perch. There is little that will piss off an entertainer more than losing his audience as he is about to deliver the closing pitch.
Insubordination, count 5, brought the total number of charges to ten.
I landed on the hilltop, but there was not much said between Johnny and me. I stopped the rotor blades from spinning but left the engine at flight idle and waited until the parade started its closing act, the general salute. Then I got things going again, took off and swept down the hillside towards the rugby stadium.
To add further complication to an already calamitous day, positioning the Alo for its final approach and landing into the wind, like any well-trained pilot would and must do, necessitated my flying directly over the heads of the troops marching off the parade ground.
Perhaps I should have increased the height above them to 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 metres), but I figured that might put me in a dangerous position should the engine fail at that point, so I flew over the departing parade at a height of no more than 12 feet (3.6 metres) or so. The resulting chaos, as berets were scattered to the four winds and the well-ordered ranks of young soldiers disintegrated, did not please the general.
Malicious Damage to State Property, count 2.
As I slowed to a crawl in preparation for landing in front of the VIP platform, a cloud of tinder-dry flakes of Kikuyu grass mixed with fine red dust swept up by the rotor wash instantly robbed me of any visual references whatsoever. To avoid a serious situation from developing in the vertigo-inducing conditions, I immediately reduced engine power and thumped the Alo onto the ground, still in one piece and not hard enough to damage it.
My brother, who had managed to scramble to the edge of the rugby field, where he had a clear view of the events unfolding in the stadium proper, later told me that the cloud of grass and dust completely filled the stadium. From my vantage point in the cockpit I could see little, but deep down I knew then that I was unlikely to get away lightly with what had just happened.
As the choking fog of dust and grass slowly cleared, I espied the general making his way to the aircraft, coughing and spluttering madly. I knew it was him only because I recognised the spectacles on his face and the murderous anger in his eyes. Gone were the shiny rank insignia, the buffed shine on his shoes; the rest of him was just red dust and tiny flakes of Kikuyu grass. Even his teeth were red…
Malicious Damage to State Property, count 3.
I could clearly hear his roaring tirade above the screech of the Alo’s engine, and I knew instinctively that he wasn’t complimenting me on my skill at landing the aircraft in zero-zero conditions (when a pilot cannot see his hand in front of his face, but the sun is still shining).