On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures

  I would visit his ranch whenever school term was finished. His was a cattle ranch and, coming from London, he had much to learn about farming. As I was the son of a cattle rancher I thought myself an expert. I set about helping my friend the best I could about the nuances of caring for cattle, about the importance of dipping, of the various ticks and fleas cattle had to be protected against, the perennial problem of lions roaming across our ranch. His hands had not been too badly injured and he could use them quite well, but he appreciated a second pair as I heaved and pulled and shoved and pushed, helping him work the land.

  I got to thinking about how long a man could live a solitary life like this. Did he have family? Did he have other friends? What did a man do on his own at night, locked away in a prison he had made for himself? Did he want, one day, to have all the things other people dreamed about? Did he want to meet a woman and marry? He was in his twenties, with his entire life stretching before him. Had he given up on the rest of life already? And could a woman ever look at that scar tissue, those pinched eyes, and fall in love? These were questions I never asked.

  Then, as mysteriously as he had come into our lives, my pilot friend was gone. One vacation, when I turned up at the ranch, he was no longer there. Soon, a new owner would take up habitation and work his own cattle along the banks of the Kafue. My friend had left no forwarding address, no letter explaining why he had left. For a while, his disappearance was a mystery to be picked over by my family and our neighbors, but soon he was just one more ex-serviceman who couldn’t fall in love with Africa. I always wondered about that RAF man; perhaps Africa was too vast a space, constantly reminding him of the infinity of the sea and sky that nearly took his life, and perhaps he walked away from it all, seeking the oblivion he so nearly encountered during the war. Maybe he took his own life somewhere out in the bush, his body consumed by wild animals, leaving no trace but drops of blood in the dust, his spirit a wisp of smoke in the air.

  I was sad to see him go. I would never meet my friend again but his presence would linger in my memory, ghostlike, for many years.

  •••

  In 1973, almost thirty years later, the questions still preyed on my mind. I began to write the novel that would become Eagle in the Sky, my first novel set in the air, and the first that would make significant inroads into the all-important US market, climbing the New York Times bestseller list, something that wasn’t repeated for any of my books until Nelson Mandela was released in 1991. As Charles Pick used to say, anything that came out of apartheid South Africa was tainted by association. Also Americans, bless them, never really understood the map of Africa, and as a result were at a disadvantage when it came to understanding the setting of some of my books. Eagle in the Sky bucked that trend.

  Eagle in the Sky would be the story of David Morgan, a young man who has the world promised to him but wants something more, something he has made. Though his family expects him to live his life in the boardroom of their financial empire, he finds himself instead drawn to the skies and, forsaking his predictable, mapped-out future, he leaves Africa for Europe. As I began the novel, I knew Morgan would share the fate of my childhood friend. Badly injured in a fighter jet, he would spend the second part of the novel coming to terms with his injuries and finding redemption in the wild heartland of Africa. Being a Wilbur Smith novel, it was the love of a beautiful woman that would help David recover. I never knew what happened to my friend but, in the pages of my novel, I could give him the ending I hoped he had found. This love story—combining my enthusiasm for flight and my admiration for fighter pilots in general—would have its roots in personal experience. I had been in love with planes ever since I was a boy. I can still vividly remember the feeling of the wind in my hair, the ranch house dwindling beneath us, as my father took me up into the skies for the first time.

  •••

  My father had bought his Tiger Moth bi-plane soon after we’d moved to the ranch, and it was in that tiny plane that I’d had my first taste of travel in the air. Strapped into the open cockpit with my father, dressed in hat and goggles as if I was flying in the Battle of Britain, we had risen above the ranch, banked sharply over the bush, and come around in a great arc, following the Kafue river as it flowed into the greater Zambezi. My father had been fascinated by aviation ever since the first successful flights had been launched when he was a boy. Sometimes, if I caught my father in the right mood, I was allowed to take hold of the joystick myself, and feel, for a fleeting moment, the giddy thrill of being in charge of this plane, thousands of feet above ground. For a seven-year-old boy, the rush was incredible. I knew that one day I too would learn to fly.

  My father flew all over the ranch, but it wasn’t until much later that I eventually got my Private Pilot’s License (PPL). I wanted to pilot myself to the best hunting grounds in Africa, and not be beholden to anyone else’s schedule when I planned to enter the bush. Some of the most challenging hunting grounds in inland Africa were accessible only by plane.

  I learned to fly in Cape Town, in the mid-to-late 1960s, starting out in small bush planes. The Cessna 180 was a small American aircraft, seating four, and used all over the Africas by ranchers, hunters and small charter companies. It had handling characteristics similar to my father’s old Tiger Moth in the way it took off, in the throbbing of the engine, the alarming rocking sensation every time the wind caught, and I graduated quickly to long solo flights, crossing South Africa from one coast to another. I could steer the Cessna onto landing strips deep in the bush where the uneven runways tested my skills to the limit. But there is a world of difference between piloting a light aircraft like a Cessna 180 over the rolling African bush, and the supersonic jet fighters I wanted to write about in Eagle in the Sky. There was little chance that I could be allowed to fly a Mirage fighter jet—the French plane flown by air forces across Europe and beyond—so I would have to settle for the next best thing.

  A journalist friend, Andrew Drysdale—who would ultimately become editor-in-chief of the Cape Argus—introduced me to Dick Lord, a senior officer in the South African Air Force, who had started his career in Britain’s Fleet Air Arm before going on to help found the US Navy’s “dog fight school” made famous by the movie Top Gun. Dick got me some time on an air force flight simulator in Pretoria. I wanted to find out what it would be like to be in a dog fight flying a Mirage fighter jet against a Soviet MiG.

  Strapped into the simulator, the mock cockpit laid bare before me, I duly got airborne. Soon I was at two thousand feet, then five thousand, then ten. Intermittently, the intercom crackled in my headphones as the laconic major in charge of the simulation came over the air, reading out his orders.

  I was soaring high, seemingly at ease in my jet fighter, when the intercom burst into static once more, and the major said:

  “Mr. Smith, you are flying Mach 2 in a vertical dive and you are five hundred feet from the ground. What are you going to do?”

  I scanned the gauges. The last precious seconds I had were hurtling by. There had to be something here that could avert this catastrophe. I flicked a few switches, the sweat beading on my brow.

  I concentrated hard, let my instincts take over. I knew exactly what I had to do.

  Quick as a flash, I unstrapped myself, flung open the door of the simulator and looked him in the eye.

  “You take over, Major!” I exclaimed as, behind me, the simulated jet carved a crater into the ground.

  •••

  I had decided where my hero David Morgan would meet his fate. I was going to send him into the heart of the troubled Holy Lands, the wars being waged over control of the world’s newest and most controversial state: Israel. South Africans had played a major role in the formation of the Israeli Air Force, with Cecil Margo—later a South African Supreme Court judge—having drawn up the force’s blueprints at the behest of David Ben Gurion, Israel’s primary founder and first Prime Minister. Later, Margo was to turn down command of the fledgling force to return to Johann
esburg and work as an advocate—but the connection opened a door in my imagination, and through it David Morgan stepped.

  The question remained: how to see this world firsthand, how to learn all the vital details of life as an air force pilot in one of the world’s most incendiary places? Being a bestselling author had opened parts of Africa to me before, but in Israel my fame did not precede me.

  Aaron Sacks was a plastic surgeon I knew from Cape Town’s Jewish community. Fifty years old, educated and suave, he had made his fortune by being one of the most talented and highly regarded in his field. Though he lived and worked in South Africa, much of Aaron’s work had been carried out in Israel, where he treated pilots and other aircraft crew injured in accidents. Since its inception in 1948, Israel had been embroiled in a succession of wars with its neighboring nations. There had been the war of independence in 1948, the war of 1956, and the incredible Six Day War of 1967—all of them, sadly, providing work for a man of Aaron’s capabilities. With his connections to the Israeli military, I had an opportunity to see firsthand the environment into which I was sending my hero, and soon I was boarding a plane for Tel Aviv. I made many trips between 1972 and ’73.

  Tel Aviv was a new city, barely sixty years old, but already it had outgrown and overtaken the ancient port of Jaffa on whose borders it had been founded—an experiment in peaceful cohabitation between Jewish settlers and Jaffa’s mostly Palestinian population. That experiment had been tested time and again, but now it was one of the primary centers of the new Israeli state. This was a place, like the burgeoning cities of Africa, where the ancient and modern worlds met, a melting pot of peoples and cultures.

  At first, the military brass had been very tight-lipped. They lived their lives on a constant knife’s edge, waiting for the next call to arms—but, with introductions and favors, I gained permission to go into the air bases themselves. Shrouded in secrecy, I was escorted into a military transport and, after having spent long days with friends of Aaron Sacks, soaking up the nightlife and cafe culture of this complex city, I was driving through the desert scrub outside Tel Aviv, entering the restricted area where the Israeli air force prepared its defense of the nation.

  As we passed through layers of camouflage, flanked by armed guards, I was instructed that what I was about to see was shown only to a select few outsiders, and even then, only those whose histories had been vetted and declared safe. Here, security was so tight that even the parents of the air crews on base did not know what their sons did. Wives had no idea what their husbands were doing, brothers did not speak about their work to brothers and on no account was I to write directly about what I would see.

  It was a rare privilege. The air bases were new, precision-built buildings where combat pilots and ground crews spent their days in regimented silence, waiting for their orders. It wasn’t long before I understood the deadly earnestness under which they performed their jobs. War was no game or adventure as I might have thought as a boy. This was a tinderbox of a region, and the political consequences of making the wrong decision in a split second were inconceivable.

  Most of the crew and pilots who welcomed me were young men in their late teens or early twenties. For them, this was a duty they believed in with the passionate commitment of youth. Although they were warm and accepted me into their mess, sharing their life stories, allowing me to see the insides of a Mirage fighter jet, or experience their training missions through the flight simulators on base, there was always a distance between us—there were things I could and could not see. In a world where secrets are currency, I realized, a novelist is a spy. This was not like the gold mines of the Witwatersrand, where through casual gossip and workman’s banter I could build up the texture of the place, and I left knowing that, though I had gleaned enough to bring my novel to life, there was a world of detail an outsider could never fully understand.

  One week after I returned from Tel Aviv, in October 1973, I was preparing to write my first chapter of Eagle in the Sky when war was, once again, declared in Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and, seizing the opportunity, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack, crossing the Suez Canal to occupy the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, territories Israel had occupied since the Six Day War six years before. Very quickly, the situation spiraled out of control. The Americans rushed to support Israel, while the Soviet Union aligned itself with the Arab states, and, once again the world was on the brink of catastrophe.

  The hand-to-hand fighting was intense, but it was the battle in the air, where pilots were still getting into dogfights, that caught my attention. Those young men I had met, whose world I had shared in the air bases of Tel Aviv, were now in battle for real. Some of them would not come back. Others would end up like my friend from my father’s ranch, or the character I was beginning to write about—trapped in a burning cockpit, disfigured or maimed by war, marked forever by one terrible moment in the sky.

  With the knowledge that the story was repeating itself somewhere out there, I picked up my pen and started to write.

  •••

  Eagle in the Sky was released in 1974 and became a tremendous success in the UK and particularly in the US. Perhaps there was something universal in David’s fall from grace and the redemption found in his falling in love that drew American readers to the novel.

  In the novel, David Morgan—handsome and gifted heir to a South African business empire—is blessed with a natural flying ability. Turning his back on the path his family mapped out for him, he joins the South African Air Force—but quickly tires of the routine and instead sets off for Europe to discover his true calling. In Spain, he falls in love with a beautiful Israeli academic, Debra Mordechai, and is drawn to Jerusalem to be with her. There he meets her father, a senior staff officer in the Israeli Defense Force, who—stunned at David’s skills in the skies—offers him a commission. Soon, though, disaster strikes.

  •••

  I too was about to quit flying. In 1974, I was somewhere above Milnerton, north of the heart of Cape Town, when it happened. Milnerton lagoon was spread out beneath me, strings of palm trees adorning its banks. Somewhere, up the coast, the stark outline of Table Mountain hung, black against the blue of the sky beyond, with strata of white clouds scudding over its peak.

  It had been a month since I last flew and, though I had been tentative at first, my hands were remembering and everything was falling into place. I had been in the air for several hours and now it was time to land, so I brought the plane around, setting my sights on the Ysterplaat aerodrome, just south of Milnerton beach.

  I began to descend. I had done it a hundred times before and until now all my descents had been safe. Below, the aerodrome was becoming bigger and bigger. I checked my panels: I was steady at ninety miles an hour, a perfect speed for coming over the fence to land.

  Suddenly there was a sensation like being thrust backward and forward at once, a twist in gravity, as if the plane had been plucked out of the air by some unseen hand. It took my rusty mind too long to put together a response, but I knew what had happened. I’d hit a wind shear—from out of nowhere, a headwind as strong as 40 miles an hour had rolled over the plane. In an instant, my airspeed had been slashed to 50 miles an hour, almost half what it had been. The plane wasn’t flying anymore. It was falling out of the sky.

  Instincts took over. They told me to pull back, somehow wrestle the plane up into the air—but that was the wrong thing to do. The only way out of this was to go full throttle, to put the nose down, to keep her airborne long enough that she didn’t land short.

  They say that, in moments like this, seconds last hours. But that is not how it felt as I grappled with the steering column and I fought to correct the plane’s path. Whether I had enough altitude left to recover was out of my hands. There was no way of controlling that now. I would find out soon enough.

  The ground reared up, too suddenly and too soon. The Cessna’s fixed landing gear touched
the runway once, rose, touched again, and again. The uneven descent dragged the plane around. I reined the joystick back to right us. Then we were scudding down the runway, the landing gear touching down properly at last, the speed diminishing as I allowed myself the luxury of breathing deeply.

  Somehow, by luck or hand of God, I’d managed to land safely.

  After some time, the plane came to a halt. When I stepped out onto the runway, to feel the air now unnaturally still, I looked back at the Cessna, sitting there with its propeller still turning, as if nothing had happened. I stared up into a sky that did not look as tempestuous as it had done minutes ago. And I decided, there and then, that my flying days were over. I did not want to go the same way as my friend from the ranch when I was a boy, or like David Morgan, or the countless pilots whose calls for help have turned to empty static as they crash somewhere out in the African bush. Flying was not like driving a motorcar, something that can be picked up and put down at will. I was flying once a month—but, unless you were flying two or three times a week, your responses started to dull. Your hands and fingers need to react instinctively. You must be aware of the world around you in three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. When things go wrong in the air, they go wrong very quickly. There are no second chances.

  I had ridden my luck long enough. From now on, if I wanted to fly, I would charter a plane, hire a professional pilot whose senses were being honed by flying a plane every day. If I wanted adventure in the skies, I would experience it in the pages of my books. For there was more to come, and ideas were forming for a Courtney novel set in the skies above war torn France—to feature a grieving French beauty, Centaine de Thiry, who loses her lover in another cockpit fire and finds herself stranded on Africa’s inhospitable Skeleton Coast.

  But that was a story for another day. Right now, I had never been more glad to be alive.