The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

  I had taken off many times and landed each time but never jumped out halfway. Perhaps that was the answer. I asked around for a good parachute club. A friend in the armed forces advised me the best (by which I mean the safest) was the Combined Forces school at Netheravon in Wiltshire. Having been paid for by that ultra-generous philanthropist, the taxpayer, it had state-of-the-art equipment and had never lost a trainee to the forces of gravity.

  I was of course a civilian, but the RAF stretched a point and let me in, so on the given date I motored down there. Even that recently, things were far less formal than now. There was no medical, just the signing of that amiable document the “blood chit.” It simply said that I accepted that if I were to become a tent peg in the middle of a Wiltshire meadow, it would be entirely my fault and my estate could sue nobody.

  The course on which I found myself had thirty to forty volunteers, all drawn from various branches of the army and air force and all in their late teens and early twenties. In other words, they were all young enough to be my offspring. They seemed to have insatiable appetites and were able to consume up to half a dozen big meals a day. They also had terrifying levels of energy.

  Perhaps due to my age, a billet was kindly found for me in the officers’ mess, which was familiar enough because Netheravon is an air force base. On the first morning, I joined the three-day course in the main hangar.

  The CO was Major Gerry O’Hara of the Parachute Regiment but the instructors were Flight Sergeant Chris Lamb of the RAF and Corporal Paul Austin of the Royal Marines, both younger than me and slightly puzzled by my inclusion.

  We started with classroom explanations of the forces of gravity, wind drift, and speeds of descent. Then came lectures on the equipment yet to come. We would be using the Aeroconical ’chute; none of your flying wings or stunt ’chutes, which were for real experts. The Aeroconical was a simple dome of parti-colored fabric, and we would not even have to open it. There would be a static line attached inside the aircraft that would open the ’chute automatically as we jumped. The instructors would be in the airplane with us and would affix the static lines for us. Simple enough.

  We would be jumping over the airfield from the side door of a de Havilland Dragon Rapide from about three thousand feet, and descent speed would be about fourteen mph. The remainder of the “ground time” was dedicated to coping with the thump of impacting with Mother Earth at that speed and coming to no harm. This involved landing and rolling over at the same time.

  The rest of day one and the morning of day two were spent in the hangar, leaping from platforms, landing and rolling, until we could do it without feeling more than minimal impact. All this took place between pauses for the inevitable brews of tea, without which the entire British defense structure would collapse. Lunch breaks involved my going back to the mess for a served lunch with the attending stewards, while the youngsters repaired to their refectory for yet another massive fry-up. I failed to understand where they were putting it all. The trick came at the end of the second morning.

  The two instructors told us that the next morning would see the first jump. It was a lie, just in case of any middle-of-the-night disappearances. After lunch, the first of the two Dragon Rapides landed and we were told to draw parachutes. There was also to be a draw for the dubious position of “first out, first stick.”

  The elderly but still very serviceable biplanes were standing by, with propellers ticking over and side doors open as the draw was made. Due to cramped conditions inside, the “stick” would be sitting on benches down both sides of the interior and would rise to clip on static lines only at the last minute and on command. But the first man out would have to sit in the doorway all the way, clambering to his feet only when tapped on the shoulder by the jumpmaster. Then a hat was passed round.

  It was full of small scraps of paper, each with a pupil’s name on it. With his eyes closed, Chris Lamb groped inside and came out with a scrap. When unfolded, I was surprised, as the odds were thirty to one, that the name was mine.

  Only later, back on the ground with a chance to examine the hat, did I learn they had all got my name on them. The two rogues had calculated that if the old codger did not freeze in the doorway, none of the teenagers would dare do so, either. Freezing up and refusing to jump meant immediate RTU—return to unit.

  In reverse order of jump, we piled into the Rapide’s fuselage, the “last out” group disappearing toward the tail. I found I had no seat at all. I had to sit in the doorway with legs and feet in the slipstream. We took off and climbed sedately to a point three thousand feet above the airfield. I began to get the “skyscraper balcony” syndrome. The fields were postage stamps, the huge hangars thumbnails. I thought longingly of my home in Tilford.

  Paul Austin had a word through the cabin door and the engine noise died. The whirling propellers still seemed about a foot away from my face and I wondered if I would not jump into the blades. It was easy to forget that even with engines throttled back, there was still a fifty mph slipstream out there and gravity would do the rest.

  There was a tap on the shoulder and I stood up. A fist with a raised thumb appeared, meaning “static line attached.” Then the final tap. Deep breath, lean forward, and kick. Within a second, it was all gone—engine noise, slipstream, airplane. Just silence and the soughing of a gentle breeze, the hemisphere of silk above, the harness tight all around the body, the feet dangling over nothing and the postage stamps very slowly coming closer.

  Then it became quite restful. Time for a good look around. Spectacular views over many miles of lovely countryside; surely one was not descending at all. But at fourteen mph, the airfield came up at a rush, then a huge thump as the jump boots hit the turf. Twist, roll, absorb the shock, turf under the backside then the shoulders, roll again, and stand, hauling in the billowing silk before it collapsed in an untidy pile. Then pick it all up and start the long walk back to the hangars.

  Willing parachute packers took it all away: collapsed ’chute, shrouds (which are not sheets but nylon lines), and canvas harness. Time for a relaxing cigarette, then the Rapide was landing for the second jump.

  I strolled over to the discarded hat and realized that mine was the only name on any of the scraps of paper, then had a few well-chosen words with Chris and Paul. But there had been three no-jumps, so the disgraced ones were being led away to change out of overalls and back into uniform. No second chances.

  On the second jump, I had a small problem. The landing was too heavy. A gust of breeze lifted the ’chute, then dropped me from too high up. A low click in the left ankle. On the walk back to the hangars, it began to hurt. I was damned if I was going to miss out on my three-jump certificate, so I hid the limp until we were back in the Rapide for the third time. At least now I had a bench to sit on.

  The third landing was a one-footer, then a Tilly (a blue RAF Land Rover) came to meet me. Someone in the group by the hangars with a pair of binoculars had seen the limp. At the medical bay, an RAF doctor cut the boot off with a scalpel. The meat was beginning to overflow the top of the boot and no one was going to try to pull it off for fear of having to cope with a very noisy author.

  That exercise cost me a new pair of top-of-the-range jump boots to replace the ones I had borrowed and ruined. Luckily, it was only a sprain and, duly strapped, I was able to hobble along to the celebratory piss-up.

  My Jaguar saloon had automatic shift, so the next morning I could drive home one-footed, using just the right one for all the controls.

  I got my certificate, signed by Gerry O’Hara, and it was suggested I should graduate to skydiving: coming out at ten thousand feet with a pull-your-own D ring and lots of time to plunge back to Mother Earth at one hundred miles per hour. But on balance, I have preferred to stick to skyscrapers and nice, fast elevators made by Mr. Otis.

  But I still have Major O’Hara’s piece of paper on the office wall, and fond memories of Netheravon and it
s cheeky jump instructors.

  THE AMAZING MR. MOON

  There must be a reason for it, but I have never met a man who has confronted the mighty rage of the oceans in a small boat who does not believe in God.

  Man spends most of his time running around in crowded cities convincing himself how important he is in the scheme of things. But there are five places where he can confront the reality of his utter insignificance.

  Two of these are the great deserts, of sand and gravel or snow and ice. Lost in these, he is but a speck of dust on a huge sheet of pure barrenness. Then there are the mountains, also clothed in snow and ice, peaks among which he will vanish to invisibility.

  The sky is a huge and lonely place, but here at least his lack of importance is short-lived, because when his fuel runs out, gravity alone will end his solitude. But most fearsome of them all is the towering, pitiless might of the enraged ocean. Because it moves.

  When, in 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, peering out of the jungle of Darién toward the west, saw a great expanse of blue water, it was calm, sparkling, seemingly friendly. So he called it El Mar Pacifico, the quiet sea, the peaceful sea, the Pacific. He had no idea what the Pacific could do when it is consumed with rage. The Indian Ocean is the same.

  As with all oceans, the Pacific can be flat as a lake, or moved only by a gentle swell, blue under the sun, welcoming, gentle, inviting the mariner to share its calm and splendor. Or it can rise in terrifying mountains, lashed by deranged winds, prepared to seize that same mariner, crush his presumptuous craft, swamp him, consume him, and consign him in perpetuity to a cold black grave, where he will never be seen again. That is why men who sail the oceans hope there must, please, be Something even mightier Who will protect them and bring them home to safe haven.

  With hindsight, that twenty-twenty vision that we all have but too late, it was unwise of me to disregard the maps and go game fishing off the Mauritian coast in 1985.

  We had gone as a family, two parents, two small boys, to the Saint Géran Hotel on the east coast. The weather programs had mentioned a cyclone, but it was well to the north and heading in a straight line east to west, and a hundred miles north of the island. So I decided to go game fishing.

  The resident game boat Chico chugged out of the lagoon just after dawn, my favorite hour, through the usual cut in the reef and out to sea, heading east. At the helm was Monsieur Moun, whom everyone called Mr. Moon. He was elderly, dark, wrinkled—a Creole who knew his sea and his island and had never been anywhere else nor wanted to.

  It was a one-client charter and the wireman was his son, who was sharing the afterdeck with me to tend the four big marlin rods, the lines, and the lures, and who would help swing the catch aboard. The breeze was light, the swell gentle, the sky blue, and the sun hot—a recipe for paradise. We trolled patiently for two hours, always eastward until Mauritius was a dim smudge on the horizon. It was at about noon that the sea calmed even more, down to a flat and slightly oily sheen. Mr. Moon spotted the danger sign; I did not, too busy scanning the four lures astern for a hoped-for strike.

  I noticed only when his son began staring at his father, perched cross-legged upon his revolving office stool, adapted to a captain’s seat behind the wheel. Then I, too, followed his gaze. Mr. Moon was looking straight toward the north. Along the horizon was a very thin dark line, like a bruise between the sky and water. I realized it might be serious when he uttered a series of orders in Creole to his son, who began to bring in the four lines and the Chico swung in a circle and pointed back to the west. The smudge on the horizon, the island of Mauritius, had almost disappeared.

  I did not know what had happened to change both the mood of the sea beneath us and on the deck on which I stood. The cyclone had swerved through ninety degrees. It was roaring down from the north.

  The Chico was not one of those modern techno-wonders with two huge chunks of Japanese technology bolted to the stern, capable of sending a GRP-hulled fishing boat screaming across the sea at twenty knots in choppy water or thirty in flat. It was an elderly workboat of plywood with an internal chugger of an engine. A chugger it might be, but Mr. Moon moved the throttle to full ahead, max power. The chugger did its best and we increased speed to ten knots.

  The black line on the horizon widened to an inch and the sea changed from an oily calm, not to a snapping chop (that would come later) but a rolling swell that became ever deeper. At the top of the peaks one could see the horizon smudge, but seemingly no closer. In the troughs, the sea was no longer blue, but valleys of moving green, growing deeper and darker. Indian Ocean cyclones take no prisoners.

  Mr. Moon said nothing, and nor did his son. The lad took the rods out of the holders where they usually traveled and stowed them in the small forward cuddy cabin. The Chico pounded west as best she could, and with agonizing slowness the smudge became the principal mountain peak of the island. The northern sky darkened and clouds appeared, not white and fluffy, high against the blue, but dark and hunched like a fighter entering the ring.

  There was nothing to do but stand and watch. I tried to converse with Mr. Moon in his other native tongue, French, but he was too absorbed to reply. His gaze just flickered from the island to the cyclone, calculating speeds, angles, and engine revs. So I walked back to the stern and joined his son.

  It may be thought that a Creole, descendant of the native Africans, cannot go pale. Not true. The lad had a sickly pallor. He was badly frightened and we both knew why. The island came into closer view as the old engine banged and hammered under its casting. It was clear our lives were going to depend on this old mariner. The island became more distinct, but so did the black-clouded fury behind us. Whatever speed it was moving at, it was well above ten knots, and we could go no faster. We rose on swell after swell, seeming almost stopped at the peak, then plunged down into the valley and up again.

  Somewhere ahead was the coast of Mauritius and the lagoon from which we had come. Between us was the reef and the gap in the coral through which we had to pass to stay alive. At last we saw it, but then my hopes plunged. It was clear I would probably not see my family again.

  For the wind had taken the waves and tormented them into a frenzy of white water. This white wall was slamming into the reef, where it exploded upward thirty feet. But the roaring crosswind from the north was pulling the wall like a curtain across the entry gap in the coral. The gap had vanished.

  If we hit the coral, the Chico and her three passengers would be torn to pieces. Coral may only be made of trillions of polyps, but it is hard as concrete and fanged with teeth that can cut steel. Few vessels that have ever hit a coral reef have not been torn open. I walked up the deck to stand next to Mr. Moon, hunched upon his stool like a brooding cormorant.

  His eyes were darting forward to the mountains of his native land, not behind to the menace from the stern.

  He was calculating angles from the mountain peaks behind the wall of foam to the dimly visible roof of the hotel. He was trying to work out where, in the liquid insanity ahead of him, lay the thirty-yard-wide gap where the coral grudgingly offered a free passage to an incoming boat.

  I turned to look behind and realized that if he missed it, we were dead. There was no possibility of turning away to find another haven down-coast. None either of turning back to sea. Behind us, the cyclone had caught up.

  There was a gigantic wave, a vertical wall of rolling green, twenty, maybe thirty feet high and foaming at the top as the base responded to the shallowing beach beneath, about to break forward and crash down. It was like the Empire State Building on its side, rolling at forty knots.

  I never saw the Chico hit the foam wall. One second it was in front of us and death behind, then the whiteness enveloped the boat, tumbling onto the afterdeck and frothing onto the scuppers. The whiteness cleared and there was blue sky ahead and above. Jagged shards of coral flashed past, barely six feet from the hull.

  The oc
ean spat the Chico like a cork from a champagne bottle into the lagoon and then the Empire State hit the reef with enough force to make thunder seem halfhearted. Observers on the shore later said the spray went up a hundred feet.

  The Chico slowed, engine back to cruise revs. Along the shoreline were gathered the full clientele of the hotel. I could see my wife with her hands over her face and two small boys jumping in the shallows. We tied up at the dock to meet an ashen-faced activities manager.

  The cyclone locked down the island of Mauritius for forty-eight hours, then passed through, as they all do, and a tropical resort island was restored, as they always are. Takeoffs were resumed from La Plaisance airport and we flew home to London.

  There is no way to reward a man like Mr. Moon, who wanted no reward at all, but I did my best. I also learned two things that day. If going out to sea, check the weather; and why men who go onto the ocean in small boats believe in God.

  BACK TO ZERO—START AGAIN

  It was on a bright, sunny morning in the spring of 1990 that I learned that financially I had been completely and utterly ruined.

  In 1988, my first marriage had sadly but amicably ended. In an uncontested settlement, my wife and I had split everything we had into two equal halves. Very shrewdly, my wife had taken the large London apartment in which we lived and a bloc of investment portfolios. The latter she encashed and invested in property, which increased hugely in value.

  I had taken the balance entirely in managed funds, all invested in a series of carefully chosen portfolios. In the same year, I acquired a small farm in Hertfordshire and moved there. In 1989, I met the lady who would become my second wife and to whom, twenty-six years later, I am still married.

  That spring morning, I was writing the first chapter of what would become The Deceiver. There was a knock on the study door. I was irritated because, when writing, I ask only to be left alone with strictly the typewriter and the coffee. Interruptions are confined to the outbreak of fire or some major crisis. But I replied with a curt “What?”