of brokers – planes are for sale all the time.’ He shrugged. ‘She’s a good buy. The Britannia is an excellent workhorse. She’s worth double, I guess.’
‘But even fifty thousand sounds suspiciously cheap for a big aeroplane.’
Tex shook his head. ‘A popular misconception. Planes are like ships. In Singapore there’re hundreds of freighters going rusty. You could pick up a good one for a hundred thousand dollars.’
Mahoney was staring at him. ‘And what is fuel to Europe going to cost?’
‘A few thousand pounds. But you can get a cargo to cover that; Rhodesians are screaming to export. My agents will get you a cargo tomorrow.’ He added, ‘She’s a bargain, but have your pal Pomeroy check her over.’
Mahoney wondered why the great Tex Weston was being so nice to him. ‘If she’s such a bargain, why aren’t you buying her?’
Tex smiled. ‘I’ve already got twenty. What do I need the hassle for? But it’s different for you, you’re an emigrant.’
The next week, Joe Mahoney and his patched-up Britannia took off for Lisbon with a cargo of tobacco. Mahoney had three big diamond rings and three enormous gold bracelets in his pocket. The pilot was a fifty-year-old American with a gravelly voice called Ed Hazeltine. Pomeroy had put up five thousand pounds of the price, for a piece of the action. Dolores, his clerk, had put up two thousand pounds. Pomeroy was co-pilot and engineer, though he was not licensed for Britannias. Mrs Shelagh Mahoney was not aboard: she would join her husband later, in Australia, when he had sold the aircraft, rings and bracelets and found them a place to live.
When they were over the Congo, in the moonlight, Mahoney said: ‘What’re you going to do when we’ve sold her, Ed?’
‘Look for another sucker who owns airplanes,’ Ed rumbled. He added: ‘If you sell her.’
‘You think that’ll be hard?’ Mahoney demanded.
‘Britannias?’ Ed said. ‘Nobody can make a living with these old things, except bus-stopping around Africa where nobody else wants to go.’
When they got to Lisbon there was a telex from Tex Weston offering to buy the aircraft for ten thousand pounds.
‘The bastard,’ Mahoney said.
He spent that day telephoning aircraft brokers all over Europe, but nobody wanted an old Britannia this week. He spent the next day selling a gold bracelet and feverishly telephoning freight agents, trying to find a cargo, because the most terrifying thing about owning an aircraft is how much it costs on the ground. The next day it took off for Nigeria with a cargo of machinery. Mahoney felt he had aged years. As soon as they were at a safe altitude he said grimly, ‘O.K., Ed, start showing me how to fly this thing.’
There was no cargo for the return flight awaiting them in Nigeria, although the Lisbon freight-agent had promised one. In desperation Mahoney went to the market place and bought seventeen tons of pineapples, as his own cargo.
‘So now we’re in the fruit business?’ Pomeroy said.
‘We’ve got to pay for the fuel somehow.’
‘Where to, boss?’ Ed said.
‘To wherever they like pineapples. To Sweden. And stop calling me boss.’
‘We ain’t got enough fuel for Sweden, boss.’
‘To England, then,’ Mahoney said.
As soon as they were airborne he climbed back into Pomeroy’s seat. ‘O.K., Ed, now you’ve really got to teach me to fly this bloody awful machine.’
‘Boss, you can’t operate this airplane with your private pilot’s licence, you’ve got to go to aviation school.’ ‘Start teaching me, Ed!’
It was a hand-written letter, in a brisk scrawl:
The Managing Director
Redcoat Cargo Airlines Ltd
Gatwick Airport, England.
Dear Mr Mahoney,
I read your letter to The Times about the escalating costs of aviation fuel. I will shortly be floating a company to build aircraft which will be very economical on fuel, and I am seeking all the moral support I can get. Plainly it is vital to build these aircraft in (to quote your Times letter) a hostile world of oil bandits holding us to ransom with ever-increasing fuel prices, a world full of poor countries plunging deeper into poverty and despair because of oil prices, becoming ripe for communist takeover as a consequence. I would like to meet you. Rest assured I am not asking you, or Redcoat Cargo Airlines, for money. I will telephone you.
Sincerely,
(Major) Malcolm Todd
The telephone call, from a coin-box, was equally brisk. So was the meeting, in a pub called The Fox and Rabbit. Major Todd thanked him for coming, bought him half a pint and got straight to the point, as if rehearsed. He was a grey-haired man, mid-fifties, with a cherubic face and bespectacled eyes that seldom left Mahoney’s; he stood very still while he spoke:
‘I have a Master of Science degree and until the year before last I was in the Royal Engineers. Five years ago I was given the task of formulating a plan for moving British troops to various battle-zones in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East; I had to assume that the Channel, Gibraltar and Suez were blocked by enemy navy, our airforce fully engaged in challenging enemy airstrikes, and that all ports, airfields and railways in Europe were in enemy hands.’
Mahoney was intrigued. The Major went on: ‘After considering every form of transport – and of course all methods of breaking blockades – I and my staff concluded that the quickest, cheapest and safest system would be the transportation of troops and armour by airship.’
‘By airship?’ Mahoney interposed.
‘Yes. We calculated that an airship with a lifting capacity of seven million cubic feet of helium – not hydrogen – could airlift almost a thousand men, at a hundred miles an hour, at a fraction of the fuel cost of any other vehicle, exposing the troops to less vulnerability-time en route. Remember that all airfields are assumed to be in enemy hands. An airship, however, can hover anywhere, like a helicopter, and lower its troops by scrambling net.’
Mahoney’s mind was wrestling with the image of being flown by airship into a hail of terrorist gunfire. The Major glared at him. ‘You’re thinking that because of its size an airship is vulnerable. But we’re talking about the airship as a troop carrier, not as an assault vehicle. As a carrier, it is no more vulnerable than a troop ship, or a train, or a convoy of trucks, and it goes much faster than all of them! A paratroop plane is also a big target for modern weapons, and when hit it crashes to earth with all her men! Whereas an airship, even if badly holed, would sink slowly as the gas escaped, giving the troops an excellent chance of survival.’ He paused briefly. ‘But there is another big advantage. Whereas your poor bloody paratrooper must often fly to his drop-zone through airspace dominated by the enemy, the airship can take a safe, circuitous route because it can stay airborne for days. To reach a battle zone in Germany, say, troops could be flown into the Atlantic, avoiding the Channel, swing over north Africa, and approach Germany from the east–even attacking the enemy from behind.’
Mahoney was fascinated. The Major continued:
‘Plus the advantage of costs. Such an airship would, on today’s prices, cost only about ten million pounds. A big troop plane, say a 747, costs sixty million pounds. The government, therefore, could afford to buy six airships in place of one 747. Expressed another way, it could afford to lose six airships before it cost the same as one 747. And