Round the Bend (11 page)

Eight hundred dollars a month is at the rate of £2500 a year, a high wage for a ground engineer even in the East. In all his
later life, I never knew Connie to take the least interest in money. He always earned a good salary because he was first class at his job, but he lived on the Asiatic standard. I know that he had no money at the time of his death; I think he gave it all away. While he worked for me he preferred to be paid in cash each month. I don’t think he had a bank account at all.

It certainly wasn’t for money, then, that he left Siamese Airways and went to work for Dwight Schafter. I know now that he had been in close touch with the ecclesiastics of Buddhism while he was working in Bangkok, and he spoke once of his horoscope. My own belief is that he felt the need to go out into the wilderness for a few months, to get away from the crowd for a time to meditate on what he had learned of Buddhism. That is a possible explanation, and it certainly fits in with the life that Dwight Schafter offered him, a time of long periods of inactivity while Dwight was away flying, with only Asiatics for his company, upon the abandoned airstrip at Damrey Phong.

He had no illusions about the job. “I maintain aircraft,” he said, there in the beautifully finished cockpit of the Carrier, with the long rows of black-faced instruments in front of him below the windscreen. “I take no part in wars. I would not fly with you to any foreign country to deliver any load.”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Schafter, looking at him curiously. “I don’t want you for an air crew. I’ve got a C-47 and I’ve got this baby, and I guess there’s plenty for you to do keeping those two in the air. I want somebody that I can trust to stay back at the strip and keep the maintenance of the one ship going while I’m away with the other. I think I can trust you. What do you say?”

He said, Yes. He left Siamese Airways a week later. Dwight Schafter reappeared at Don Muang in a Dakota with a brown man called Monsieur Seriot as his co-pilot, and Connie got into it with his small luggage, contained in an old parachute pack and a tool chest. The Dakota cleared for Prachaub in Siam and flew towards the sea and down the coast of Cambodia into Indo-China. Two hours later they landed on the strip at Damrey Phong.

Damrey Phong lies on the river Kos about fifteen miles from the coast. It is about a hundred miles from the Siamese border,
and about a hundred and eighty miles as the crow flies from Saigon. It is a small Asiatic village of palm thatch houses, the homes of a purely rural community. Superimposed on this was the civilization of the airstrip, built for strategic purposes during the war. There were two houses built of wood in European style, and a store building; there had been a hangar, but the roof had fallen in with neglect and the remains of the wooden building were rapidly disintegrating. There was a wharf to which small coasting motor vessels could come up the river, and here there was a petrol store with a good stock of fuel and oil in drums. The Cornell Carrier was parked beside the strip.

The place was in territory held by the Viet-Minh forces in rebellion against the French, and the pattern of the operations was soon explained to Connie. The loads carried up till that time had been exclusively trench mortars, sub-machine guns, and small arms. They came from somewhere in the Philippines, he thought the island of Negros. The Dakota would fly there across the China Sea once every two or three days, a flight of twelve or thirteen hundred miles. It would return to Damrey Phong loaded with these arms, all of which were ex-American Army weapons, mostly in poor condition owing to neglect since the war. Consignments of ammunition arrived in the same way from time to time.

About half of these weapons and ammunition were sold to the Viet-Minh forces, but the supply was greater than they could pay for or recondition. The loads not required remained in the Dakota while it was refuelled, and it then took off again for some destination in Indonesia. This flight was made direct, but the empty Dakota frequently returned to the home airstrip via Bangkok to pick up any stores or spare parts that might be required.

Connie gathered that it was a very profitable trade.

Whoever financed it, indeed, found it so profitable that he was able to plough back profits into the business. Wherever the arms came from, there was larger stuff than sub-machine guns going for scrap price. There were anti-tank guns, bazookas, and seventy-five millimetre field guns, and ammunition for them, too, neglected and rusty maybe, but still capable of being put to use. These guns were worth their weight in silver to the Indonesians, and since the gold and silver mines of Bencoolen and Madoen were both in rebel
hands, there was little difficulty in paying for them in negotiable currency. The Cornell Carrier was just the aircraft for the job.

“Six journeys, and this baby will be paid for,” said Dwight Schafter. “After that, it’s all clear profit.” When Connie got to Damrey Phong the Carrier had already made two trips, and was loaded and fuelled, ready to start on a third.

Connie settled down at this out of the way tropical village quite happily. He had two indifferent engineers under him, one a Burmese lad, and one a Chinese from Hong Kong. They messed together in one of the European style houses where these two engineers lived with two girls of the village serving as their wives, simple and attractive girls who did the cooking and housework for them, and who volunteered at once to bring along a selection of their friends for Connie to choose from. There was genuine kindness and good feeling behind the offer as well as the desire to ease the housework caused by a third man, but he refused and chose an older woman as his servant. He had not come to Damrey Phong for a domestic life.

Dwight Schafter and his co-pilot, Seriot, lived in the other house upon the strip, each with a local girl. These girls had an easy time, because their lords were hardly ever there. There was no other air crew; Schafter and his brown co-pilot flew every trip together, alternately in the Dakota and the Carrier. They were superb as a crew. They flew practically every day, long, difficult journeys with no meteorological reports except what they could glean by listening to the scheduled radio weather forecasts from Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, and Bangkok; they were very cunning at that. There were no ground aids to guide them on their way in the dark night; they always flew the last stages by night. Alone they had to make their landfall on dark, inaccurately mapped coasts, alone they had to find the secret airstrips where a few flickering flares of paraffin laid on the grass served as the sole help to them for putting down these large, heavily loaded aircraft. Over all was the continual danger of detection, and a quick burst of tracer into them from some defending fighter, unseen and unsuspected, that would end it all. They must have been men of iron, for they came and went over and over again, and showed no sign of any mental stress. It was a job to them
like any other job, except that it was an exceptionally good one.

In the thirteen weeks that Connie was with them at Damrey Phong the Carrier made eleven or twelve trips to Indonesia, loaded with two field guns every time. They kept no records or log books, and Connie could not recollect exactly how many journeys each machine had made. Between the Carrier journeys the Dakota flew in field gun ammunition and small arms, about the same number of trips. It took the Indonesians about that time to recondition the first guns. They got them into action against the Dutch Army after about two months, and raised a hornet’s nest for Dwight Schafter.

The Dutch were no fools, and they knew fairly well where all these arms were coming from. The trouble was that at that time they controlled only small areas of Java and Sumatra round about the larger towns, and it was fairly easy for a resolute pilot coming in by night to land upon an Indonesian airstrip to discharge his load. The Dutch Air Force pilots were ready and valiant in flying on night fighter patrols, but sheer bravery cannot replace the technical equipment necessary for a successful interception, and at that time they hadn’t got it. A number of Dutch Mustangs were lost on these night fighter patrols; the pilots, if they survived, were executed immediately by the Republicans, who fought their war according to an Eastern code. For a time the loss of aircraft and pilots was more serious to the Dutch than the continued landing of small arms, and the night patrols became infrequent.

When artillery appeared in rebel hands, the defence was galvanized again. Coincident with the increased activity, a few airborne radar equipments came to hand in Batavia, and these were fitted hurriedly in the B-25’s. For the first time the Dutch Air Force had a reasonable chance of intercepting Dwight Schafter on his night flights, and this, of course, was quite unknown to him. They saw him on the radar screen as he was going away one night, the first night they had used it operationally, but on that occasion they were unable to get within fifteen miles of him. They now knew his route, however, and they kept machines from Palembang continuously in the air from then on during the hours of darkness.
On the fifth night he came again in the Dakota, and they got him.

It was his habit to fly from Damrey Phong southwards and parallel with the east coast of Malaya and about a hundred miles offshore, checking his course by wireless bearings from the broadcasting stations of Bangkok and Singapore. He flew on on his course to Jogjokarta, the rebel headquarters in Java, passing somewhat to the east of the island of Banka, and it was here that the Dutch fighter first made contact with him. The pilot was under orders not to shoot the intruder down into the sea as it was necessary to get evidence, and so he held the Dakota in his radar and followed about three miles behind for an hour and a quarter till Dwight Schafter crossed the north coast of Java a hundred miles or so to the east of Batavia, making his usual landfall at a distinctive turn of the coast north of Tjerebon. There the Mitchell closed up on him, and shot him down upon the foothills of Mount Tjareme.

Schafter and Seriot were quite prepared for such a thing to happen; it was one of the occupational hazards of their way of life. The first thing that they knew was a long burst of tracer fire into the port wing. The engine stopped with a rending jerk that shook the machine through; it may have fallen out. Fire broke out immediately from the pierced petrol tanks.

They had their drill for this contingency all worked out. Both flew in parachute harness. Escape was by the door at the aft end of the cabin, and the cabin was always loaded with an avenue down the middle to provide a clear run. Seriot was flying the aircraft at the time and Schafter was at the navigator’s table. Schafter plucked him by the arm and nodded, and then turned and ran aft to snap on his parachute and jettison the door. The brown man at the wheel counted ten slowly, trimming the aircraft as he counted; then he left his seat and ran down the fuselage after his captain, snapped on his parachute, and followed Schafter into the black void below. The Dakota went on for a few seconds burning fiercely, then it fell over in a spiral dive and went down in a shapeless mass of flame. The ammunition started going off before it hit the ground, and for a time made an interesting display upon the forest slopes.

Seriot reached the ground uninjured, landing in some paddy fields on the edge of the forest. Schafter had bad luck; he fell on the tree tops which checked him, and his parachute collapsed. He was perhaps fifty feet from the ground. The top branches broke beneath his weight after a moment and he fell through the branches to the forest floor, clutching at every branch as he fell. Finally he dropped helplessly from a height of about twenty feet and fell across a root. He broke his thigh in two places.

That was the end of it for him. That part of Java is fairly well populated and villagers found him before dawn; then the Dutch, moving quickly in trucks, threw a cordon round the district and picked him up without much difficulty. Seriot put on native clothes supplied by the villagers and attempted to get through to Jogjokarta, but the Dutch were too clever and he was arrested a day later.

Schafter was now in hospital in Batavia; when he was well enough to appear in court he would be tried and sentenced. Seriot was in jail in Batavia, awaiting trial, but as he was an employee he would not be tried before his captain.

News of this disaster came to Connie Shaklin at Damrey Phong within twelve hours, by way of broadcast news from Singapore and from Bangkok. He had the Carrier at Damrey, and he was working on it when the news came in. He had a short talk with his two engineers. Clearly the party was over, and all that there was left for them to do was to wind it up and disperse. The only real problem was, what should become of the Cornell Carrier, an aeroplane which only a short time before had cost nearly seventy thousand pounds, and was presumably worth about that figure still.

In Dwight Schafter’s absence, Connie was responsible at Damrey, and he took his responsibilities seriously. He paid the month’s wages out of money that had been left with him by Schafter, and went to Bangkok, travelling by fishing vessel up the coast. It took him about four days. In Bangkok he went to the Dutch Embassy and explained the position, well aware that they could not proceed against him upon Siamese territory. He said that there were stocks of fuel, tools, and spares for the Dakota at their base in Indo-China and he wanted instructions from Dwight Schafter
as to the disposal of these assets, which were the property of this American citizen. He did not tell them anything about the Carrier.

His request added one more headache to the many headaches that Dwight Schafter had given the Dutch. It was impossible for them to be too high-handed with the donors of Marshall Aid, and the United States consul had already intervened to ensure that this criminal awaiting trial should be imprisoned with all the amenities proper to an American citizen. The question of his assets upon foreign territory was quite outside the jurisdiction of the Dutch. In Java they cogitated over it for twenty-four hours and then decided not to irritate the State Department any further. They instructed their Ambassador to give Shak Lin a visa for a visit to Batavia to interview his boss in hospital, and promised that he would be allowed a safe conduct to depart out of Dutch territory at will. To make assurance doubly sure, Connie Shaklin went to the American Embassy in Bangkok and told them all about it before flying down to Batavia.