Drove into town to the Safeway Market where a Western Union counter is located to pick up a money order sent to me by a European friend. As the counter lady was getting the cash, some INCREDIBLY fat thug positioned himself about 15 feet to my left and just stood there, staring into space. This asshole had the biggest, sloppiest gut hanging over his belt that I have seen on a human being in even distant memory.
I began staring at him intensely and shortly thereafter, he walked a few few feet to his right front facing a display of raw cabbage and appeared to take an intense interest in raw cabbages. Hell, I should have bladed his blubberous ass, but even striking him with my 6" Randall would have unlikely successfully penetrated that incredibly huge, bulging, bloated gut. I would have needed my machete to make a dent in that total piece of shit! Hell, I'd bet has hasn't seen his little dick for many years unless he looked at himself in a full-length mirror, and perhaps not even then! He was such a totally disgusting looking man, if you can call it a man. Fucking pitiful! How can anyone with a tiny modicum of self respect allow himself to deteriorate to that pitiful state? Utterly repulsive!
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The slime continues to ooze...
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
For a TI friend as promised, a story from another life. Fuck the DEA! Fuck the FBI! Fear is not a word in my lexicon!
The Second Trip
The late Big Walter and I headed south very early one September morning in 1978 in a Beech 18, bound for the north coast of Colombia, to load 1800 pounds of fine Colombian Gold and deliver it to the heart of the Everglades in the middle of the night and dump it to guys waiting below in swamp buggies. They had some very bright lights.
We damned near didn't make it back.
It was an ill-advised trip. On my initial trip down south, I had flown down via commercial airlines to Barranquilla and had been driven out about a hundred miles into La Peninsula de La Guajira to the strip to familiarize myself with the runway itself and associated landmarks. This time, I mistakenly took the boss's word for it and believed that I could locate a runway that I was totally unfamiliar with. It very nearly became a fatal mistake.
Flying the Caribbean in September and October is an iffy proposition. It's dead center in the middle of hurricane season. Towering cumulus clouds build very early in the mornings and can deteriorate into deadly thunderstorms by early afternoon, so we had scheduled our departure for about 0200 to avoid any problems.
Good weather forecasts are a necessity, and I had a guy who worked in the National Hurricane Center in Miami who kept me well briefed. He was also very well paid. His assistance was invaluable. We encountered several towering cumulus clouds and rain showers south of Haiti, but no hazardous conditions. We flew through a beautiful sky. The real hazards were yet to be encountered.
We crossed the Colombian coastline as scheduled. These were the days before GPS was available, and, for the life of me, I could not locate the strip. We had been advised to land at the other strip that we had landed on the previous month if we had problems, and we did.
In those days, there were at least a hundred landing strips in La Guajira, carved out of the jungle and cacti forests by dozers. We were looking for a needle in a haystack. That flight was a stupid thing to attempt. The penalty for landing on the wrong strip was death.
We spent about an hour looking for it, but we couldn't find it, and by now, we were down on fuel, so we headed for the other strip. We located it without any problems and landed the aircraft with about an hour's fuel remaining.
Now, the fun began.
We taxied back to the turnaround and loading area and I shut the Pratt's down. It had been a very long day, and it was about to get much longer.
There was the usual Guajiro pistolero guarding the strip, and he looked familiar, but, upon disembarking, I realized that I had never seen him before. This was not good.
He asked us who we were, and in my very limited Spanish, I replied that we had been there the month before and were looking for our friends. He asked me their names, and, due to my boss's paranoid nature, I had been given no names.
He called a friend out of the bush and told him to get his boss. The guy left in a Toyota truck, so we waited. It was about 1300 hours and we still had plenty of daylight left.
Around 45 minutes later, two truckloads of men arrived. We were standing by the aircraft, somewhat backed up by the open cabin door. The guys unloaded off the trucks and approached us. All had Browning Hi Power nine millimeters stuck in their belts. One guy walked up to me, and it quickly became obvious he was the translator. He smiled at me and said, "I just want you to understand I have nothing to do with what may transpire here today." That got my attention.
There were about eight of them, and they gathered around us. The jefe, obviously the jefe, spoke to the translator. The translator asked us what we were doing there, so I told him the story of having landed there in October. He then asked for names, but I could not provide them, but I told him of a visit I had paid during the previous month to the jefe's ranch, down to the smallest detail, including roasted goat and blood pudding for dinner, and, after a lot of back and forth, the jefe said, "They are friends of ours." I heaved a sigh of relief and told them we were lost and had been advised to return to this strip in the event of problems.
Much conversation ensued among the group, mainly from el jefe, which, in case you haven't already figured it out yet, means "the boss" in Spanish.
After about five minutes of this back and forth, the translator told me they knew where our friends were. That eased tensions considerably.
El jefe told me to go with two pistoleros in a Toyota pickup to find our guys, so we loaded up and headed out, leaving Big Walter at the strip.
We headed down a dirt road, "amid the tall cacti", and made it about five miles, and then we got a flat.
I had been sitting in the middle between the two shooters. The guy on my right had layed his arm behind me on the seat back. The driver shut it down, and when the bandido on my right removed his arm, I saw he was holding a Walther P-38 in his left hand. That was not very encouraging, and those two guys obviously didn't know how to change a tire
So we sat there in the middle of the road, waiting on a miracle.
One arrived.
I have always lived with angels on my shoulders, and on that day, they must have been collecting overtime.
As we waited there in the bush in the middle of the road, the pistoleros amused themselves by shooting at small birds that landed in the road. They missed every time. I figured it was only a matter of time before they finally got pissed off and shot me.
About then, my savior arrived. He didn't sport a halo, or arrive in a burst of golden light, but pulled up ahead of us in a white Toyota Land Cruiser, the vehicle I have always called the Colombian Cadillac. In those days, anybody who was anybody drove one.
A slim, sharply dressed young guy popped out of the cab wearing a big smile, spoke in Spanish to the two shooters, and then he spoke bloody English to me! Miraculous!
I told him who I was, and that we were looking for our friends, and he knew exactly where they were! I would live!
After a lot of conversation in Spanish, we all piled into the Land Cruiser and headed for the Pan American Highway, which runs from Barranquilla to Maracaibo, Venezuela. We were located approximately equidistant between the two cities, out in the desert. There were several Colombian Army checkpoints on that road, because a state of war existed between the government and the bandidos of the Guajira.
The army would not venture deeply into the Guajira for fear of ambush. Since I obviously didn't have a visa, once we reached the highway, the guys dropped me off at a small village with a few roadside huts constructed of wattle with thatched roofs, and left me there on my own. They headed west.
I sat there on a log, wondering what what was going to happen next. Several curious children approached me and tried unsuccessfully to engage me in conversation. They were smiling and laughing at the bearded gringo. They cheered me up. I never allowed my morale to drop. I knew that things were totally out of of my control, so I just rolled with it.
About an hour later, after sitting on a felled tree during that time and fooling around with the kids, the Land Cruiser returned, accompanied by a truck load of pistoleros. I knew some of them, and I was relieved. About five minutes later or less, el jefe arrived, also with a truckload of pistoleros, followed by a third. I was saved.
I always carried a thousand dollars in hundreds in my boot tops for emergencies, so I tipped the original two shooters $200.00 each for not killing me and the Land Cruiser driver $500.00 for saving my tender ass. Smiles all around.
I climbed into the Land Cruiser with el jefe, whose name turned out to be one Ruben Quintero, and we headed back for the strip. Ruben, whose ranch I had visited the previous month, had a six pack of warm Venezuelan beer, and, my friends, a beer has never since tasted so good.
Chapter Two..
Upon our arrival back at the strip, Big Walter, all 250 pounds of him, hugged me enthusiastically. He had been wondering if I was still alive. I gave him one of Reuben's warm beers, and he thanked me profusely. To say the least, he was very relieved to see us, and later, I learned exactly why.
The two bosses conferred. After a conversation that lasted several minutes, Ruben informed me that Walter and I would stay the night and sleep in the airplane and depart in the morning for the strip. I had brought some gifts for him from Miami, one a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 and some ammo, and some Scotch whiskey, which I had previously learned he had a taste for.
I re-positioned the aircraft, taxing it up into the treeline as far as I could go to better conceal it. Colombian Army helicopters occasionally patrolled the area. We had some sandwiches in the cockpit that the contrabandistas had missed when they looted the airplane while I was gone. The rifle and Scotch were, of course, long gone. I told Ruben about it, and he just brushed it off.
Night fell. Ruben departed with his convoy, but left six pistoleros behind to guard us, and one with some aviation experience who would be our guide the next morning to direct us to the strip.
The Beech was parked slightly uphill. I was very tired by now, as was Big Walter, so we tried to get some sleep on the bare floor of the aircraft's cargo compartment. Hell of it was, due to the uphill angle, we kept sliding back toward the tail. I could hear the pistoleros murmuring outside and I felt secure for the first time since we had landed.
But Big Walter didn't. He was absolutely terrified.
Finally he sat up and said to me very emphatically, "They're gonna kill us! They're gonna kill us!"
I told him, "No, they are our bodyguards, here to protect us". He was on the verge of a nervous collapse.
It seems that, while I was out on my trek searching for Ruben, the bandidos who were with him at the strip had positioned him standing on a low tree stump, had given him a rolled joint and a gram of cocaine, stood back about ten yards, and began shooting at him, trying to see just how close they could get to him without actually hitting him. He wasn't hit, but he underwent this grueling test of courage for about two hours until the bandidos began to run low on ammunition.
He smoked the joint and snorted the entire gram, and stood there only moving minimally as a couple of dozen nine millimeter bullets missed him by inches. But he held on to his courage and glared back at them. He never lost it.
After telling me that we were going to be shot, he jumped out of the door and began walking around in circles, muttering to himself. I finally calmed him down and got him to return to the cargo compartment. He laid down and we both tried to get some sleep.
Suddenly, Walter began violently trembling all over. He was suffering a delayed stress reaction. He was shaking violently and his teeth were chattering. I spoke to him in a soothing voice, and lay down beside him and wrapped my arms around him to try to calm him. Eventually, the reaction passed and he drifted off to sleep.
Shortly thereafter, a bat chose this importune moment to fly through the open cargo door into the cabin. The bat's sonar must have been off, because he slammed into the opposite cabin wall, knocked himself silly, and ended up on the floor beside Walter, fluttering around. He regained his senses in a couple of seconds and flew into the cockpit.
Both of us absolutely lost it. We started screaming curses in two languages at the bat, calling him every name in the book. I had become fluent in Spanish profanity, and I utilized every word I knew in both English and Spanish on that hapless bat. Looking back on the incident after almost forty years has passed, it almost seems comical, but nobody was laughing that bitter night.
We both charged up to the cockpit door. The bandidos had stolen my flashlight, but I could hear him flopping around on the captain's side of the cockpit, wedged in behind the rudder pedals.
There was a can of Raid insecticide in the cockpit they hadn't stolen, and all I wanted to do by then was kill something or somebody. The unlucky bat suffered the consequences. I dumped the entire can of Raid into the cockpit and closed the accordion doors. I turned the cockpit into a gas chamber. It worked. Scratch one bat.
After an almost sleepless night, dawn came.
The pistoleros had brewed up a pot of strong Colombian coffee and offered us some. We accepted gratefully. No sugar, but by then, who cared? We sat in the cabin door, legs swinging freely, greeting the dawn gratefully, and enjoyed the Colombian heart-starter. Our guide, who spoke a bit of English, said it was time to go. So the pistoleros pushed the aircraft down the slope into the turnaround area. We were low on fuel and I was a bit concerned. I figured we had at least one hour's fuel remaining. I advised our guide, and he said the strip, la pista in Spanish, was less than thirty minutes away.
So we boarded our aircraft, I fired up the engines, lined it up on runway heading, ran up the engines to ensure smooth operation, and we launched into the sunrise.
Our problems were just beginning.
Chapter Three
The trip was short and uneventful. We arrived there within around twenty minutes. I could see the guys on the ground, our welcoming committee. I made a low pass up the strip to check it out. It was the worst strip you can imagine. It ran north to south. The prevailing winds were easterly. Although we were well south of the Inter Tropic Convergence Zone, the Trade Winds still blew from the east at about ten knots. The north end was blocked by power lines and the south end featured a small hill. The strip was short and uneven, about 2800 feet in length. I didn't like it, but I had no choice except to land, so we did, landing to the north, with a 90 degree crosswind from the east.
We taxied back south toward the small hill, and there was Ruben, accompanied by his partner, Domingo Rivera. We disembarked, I thanked our guide, tipped him a hundred bucks, and pressed on.
Several hundred gallons of fuel were added to our nearly empty tanks, and a couple of gallons of engine oil was provided for the thirsty Pratt and Whitney's.
As we were fueling, the cargo was quickly loaded, bales weighing in at about sixty pounds each. It was not yet 10:00 AM, so we had some time to kill so that we would arrive in the Miami area well past dark. We enjoyed some more great coffee and had an enjoyable conversation with those who spoke English. Domingo turned out to be a great guy, and we had a lot of laughs. Our relief at finally being among good friends was palpable. Walter was recovering well from his breakdown, and laughed and smiled with us.
Eventually, it became time to depart. We said our goodbyes, shook hands all around, and then we boarded the aircraft, taxied it to the top of the hill at the south end, and promptly got stuck.
This was the hill country, located in the eastern foothills of La Sierra Madre De Santa Marta, the northernmost peak in the Andes. Some of the world's best weed grows on her slopes. But, in that area, they get a lot more rain than in the deserts of La Guajira. There was a soft muddy spot at the top of the hill, and we had become mired in it. I won't express my thoughts here, but they can be adequately summarized in one word. Explanation point added.
So I shut the engines down, climbed out and checked out the situation. We were buried in the mud up to the main gear's wheel hubs. That's about four inches.
Ruben and Domingo were extremely concerned. Walter was near tears. I was also concerned, but evaluated the situation and arrived at a solution.
There we sat in broad daylight on the north coast of Colombia, stuck in the mud with a big load of weed on the bird, sweating Army helicopters.
So I asked Ruben to download the aircraft, and said to him, "Find me twenty Indians."
We waited for a couple more hours, but eventually, the requested twenty Indians arrived. I told Ruben, "Here's the plan. We get the Indians underneath the aircraft, on the count of three they put their backs into it, and pick up the aircraft and carry it fifty meters forward toward the north into dry dirt."
It was done as requested.
Uno. Dos. Tres. Arriba! Up it went.
These tough bastards literally picked up the airplane and carried it fifty meters downhill to dry land, carrying it on their bent backs. It was an incredibly impressive feat, picking up an 8500 pound airplane, but I had met some of these men before, macheteros and cold bloodied killers, but they were as tough as wire and I knew they could do it.
Meanwhile. Big Walter had been sitting on a pile of bales, repeatedly saying, "We're never gonna get out of here." I told him to have faith. I had the problem solved.
This move decreased our takeoff distance by the fifty meters, which made things marginal for an ordinary Beech 18, but our aircraft was different from most. It had JATOS installed. So-called Jet Assisted Takeoff Units, they were two solid fuel rocket motors installed aft of the engines in the after part of the engine nacelles, each one backing up its respective engine
JATOS were time-life items. They were basically solid fuel rocket motors. In other words, they had a life cycle of three thousand hours, after which they had to be replaced. The replacement cost was six grand, so it was not something you would use on a casual basis. But the time was up on these units and I had informed my boss, and he said, "Shoot 'em if you want to. We have to replace them anyway."
They are electrically fired off the aircraft's battery. There was a circuit test meter installed which verified the integrity of the firing circuits and the igniters, and an adjacent spring-loaded switch that fired them. Press a spring loaded meter switch, read the meter, and if the needle is in the green, you're good to go. The igniter switch had a metal flip-up gate covering it to prevent an inadvertent discharge.
We were sweating the power lines at the north end, so I told Big Walter, "Look. This is what we're gonna do. The firing circuits look good. We're gonna launch. When the indicated airspeed hits sixty knots, I'm gonna fire the rockets. They should blow us off the ground in a rather spectacular fashion. We're still gonna get out of here." He looked at me with some small hope in his expression and said, "Let's do it."
And we did.
The rest of the trip was routine. We crossed the Caribbean uneventfully and entered American airspace that night, fifty feet above the Gulf Stream and well below radar coverage, located our people, dropped the load, and went home.
I never saw either Ruben or Domingo again, but, over the years, I have always wanted to ask them how that takeoff looked. I never got the chance.
We beat the odds. Our lives were repeatedly in severe danger, but we survived.
Never quit. Never, ever quit.
I have lived several different lives. This is a story from one of them.
-The Second Trip
The late Big Walter and I headed south very early one September morning in 1978 in a Beech 18, bound for the north coast of Colombia, to load 1800 pounds of fine Colombian Gold and deliver it to the heart of the Everglades in the middle of the night and dump it to guys waiting below in swamp buggies. They had some very bright lights.
We damned near didn't make it back.
It was an ill-advised trip. On my initial trip down south, I had flown down via commercial airlines to Barranquilla and had been driven out about a hundred miles into La Peninsula de La Guajira to the strip to familiarize myself with the runway itself and associated landmarks. This time, I mistakenly took the boss's word for it and believed that I could locate a runway that I was totally unfamiliar with. It very nearly became a fatal mistake.
Flying the Caribbean in September and October is an iffy proposition. It's dead center in the middle of hurricane season. Towering cumulus clouds build very early in the mornings and can deteriorate into deadly thunderstorms by early afternoon, so we had scheduled our departure for about 0200 to avoid any problems.
Good weather forecasts are a necessity, and I had a guy who worked in the National Hurricane Center in Miami who kept me well briefed. He was also very well paid. His assistance was invaluable. We encountered several towering cumulus clouds and rain showers south of Haiti, but no hazardous conditions. We flew through a beautiful sky. The real hazards were yet to be encountered.
We crossed the Colombian coastline as scheduled. These were the days before GPS was available, and, for the life of me, I could not locate the strip. We had been advised to land at the other strip that we had landed on the previous month if we had problems, and we did.
In those days, there were at least a hundred landing strips in La Guajira, carved out of the jungle and cacti forests by dozers. We were looking for a needle in a haystack. That flight was a stupid thing to attempt. The penalty for landing on the wrong strip was death.
We spent about an hour looking for it, but we couldn't find it, and by now, we were down on fuel, so we headed for the other strip. We located it without any problems and landed the aircraft with about an hour's fuel remaining.
Now, the fun began.
We taxied back to the turnaround and loading area and I shut the Pratt's down. It had been a very long day, and it was about to get much longer.
There was the usual Guajiro pistolero guarding the strip, and he looked familiar, but, upon disembarking, I realized that I had never seen him before. This was not good.
He asked us who we were, and in my very limited Spanish, I replied that we had been there the month before and were looking for our friends. He asked me their names, and, due to my boss's paranoid nature, I had been given no names.
He called a friend out of the bush and told him to get his boss. The guy left in a Toyota truck, so we waited. It was about 1300 hours and we still had plenty of daylight left.
Around 45 minutes later, two truckloads of men arrived. We were standing by the aircraft, somewhat backed up by the open cabin door. The guys unloaded off the trucks and approached us. All had Browning Hi Power nine millimeters stuck in their belts. One guy walked up to me, and it quickly became obvious he was the translator. He smiled at me and said, "I just want you to understand I have nothing to do with what may transpire here today." That got my attention.
There were about eight of them, and they gathered around us. The jefe, obviously the jefe, spoke to the translator. The translator asked us what we were doing there, so I told him the story of having landed there in October. He then asked for names, but I could not provide them, but I told him of a visit I had paid during the previous month to the jefe's ranch, down to the smallest detail, including roasted goat and blood pudding for dinner, and, after a lot of back and forth, the jefe said, "They are friends of ours." I heaved a sigh of relief and told them we were lost and had been advised to return to this strip in the event of problems.
Much conversation ensued among the group, mainly from el jefe, which, in case you haven't already figured it out yet, means "the boss" in Spanish.
After about five minutes of this back and forth, the translator told me they knew where our friends were. That eased tensions considerably.
El jefe told me to go with two pistoleros in a Toyota pickup to find our guys, so we loaded up and headed out, leaving Big Walter at the strip.
We headed down a dirt road, "amid the tall cacti", and made it about five miles, and then we got a flat.
I had been sitting in the middle between the two shooters. The guy on my right had layed his arm behind me on the seat back. The driver shut it down, and when the bandido on my right removed his arm, I saw he was holding a Walther P-38 in his left hand. That was not very encouraging, and those two guys obviously didn't know how to change a tire
So we sat there in the middle of the road, waiting on a miracle.
One arrived.
I have always lived with angels on my shoulders, and on that day, they must have been collecting overtime.
As we waited there in the bush in the middle of the road, the pistoleros amused themselves by shooting at small birds that landed in the road. They missed every time. I figured it was only a matter of time before they finally got pissed off and shot me.
About then, my savior arrived. He didn't sport a halo, or arrive in a burst of golden light, but pulled up ahead of us in a white Toyota Land Cruiser, the vehicle I have always called the Colombian Cadillac. In those days, anybody who was anybody drove one.
A slim, sharply dressed young guy popped out of the cab wearing a big smile, spoke in Spanish to the two shooters, and then he spoke bloody English to me! Miraculous!
I told him who I was, and that we were looking for our friends, and he knew exactly where they were! I would live!
After a lot of conversation in Spanish, we all piled into the Land Cruiser and headed for the Pan American Highway, which runs from Barranquilla to Maracaibo, Venezuela. We were located approximately equidistant between the two cities, out in the desert. There were several Colombian Army checkpoints on that road, because a state of war existed between the government and the bandidos of the Guajira.
The army would not venture deeply into the Guajira for fear of ambush. Since I obviously didn't have a visa, once we reached the highway, the guys dropped me off at a small village with a few roadside huts constructed of wattle with thatched roofs, and left me there on my own. They headed west.
I sat there on a log, wondering what what was going to happen next. Several curious children approached me and tried unsuccessfully to engage me in conversation. They were smiling and laughing at the bearded gringo. They cheered me up. I never allowed my morale to drop. I knew that things were totally out of of my control, so I just rolled with it.
About an hour later, after sitting on a felled tree during that time and fooling around with the kids, the Land Cruiser returned, accompanied by a truck load of pistoleros. I knew some of them, and I was relieved. About five minutes later or less, el jefe arrived, also with a truckload of pistoleros, followed by a third. I was saved.
I always carried a thousand dollars in hundreds in my boot tops for emergencies, so I tipped the original two shooters $200.00 each for not killing me and the Land Cruiser driver $500.00 for saving my tender ass. Smiles all around.
I climbed into the Land Cruiser with el jefe, whose name turned out to be one Ruben Quintero, and we headed back for the strip. Ruben, whose ranch I had visited the previous month, had a six pack of warm Venezuelan beer, and, my friends, a beer has never since tasted so good.
Chapter Two..
Upon our arrival back at the strip, Big Walter, all 250 pounds of him, hugged me enthusiastically. He had been wondering if I was still alive. I gave him one of Reuben's warm beers, and he thanked me profusely. To say the least, he was very relieved to see us, and later, I learned exactly why.
The two bosses conferred. After a conversation that lasted several minutes, Ruben informed me that Walter and I would stay the night and sleep in the airplane and depart in the morning for the strip. I had brought some gifts for him from Miami, one a Winchester Model 94 .30-30 and some ammo, and some Scotch whiskey, which I had previously learned he had a taste for.
I re-positioned the aircraft, taxing it up into the treeline as far as I could go to better conceal it. Colombian Army helicopters occasionally patrolled the area. We had some sandwiches in the cockpit that the contrabandistas had missed when they looted the airplane while I was gone. The rifle and Scotch were, of course, long gone. I told Ruben about it, and he just brushed it off.
Night fell. Ruben departed with his convoy, but left six pistoleros behind to guard us, and one with some aviation experience who would be our guide the next morning to direct us to the strip.
The Beech was parked slightly uphill. I was very tired by now, as was Big Walter, so we tried to get some sleep on the bare floor of the aircraft's cargo compartment. Hell of it was, due to the uphill angle, we kept sliding back toward the tail. I could hear the pistoleros murmuring outside and I felt secure for the first time since we had landed.
But Big Walter didn't. He was absolutely terrified.
Finally he sat up and said to me very emphatically, "They're gonna kill us! They're gonna kill us!"
I told him, "No, they are our bodyguards, here to protect us". He was on the verge of a nervous collapse.
It seems that, while I was out on my trek searching for Ruben, the bandidos who were with him at the strip had positioned him standing on a low tree stump, had given him a rolled joint and a gram of cocaine, stood back about ten yards, and began shooting at him, trying to see just how close they could get to him without actually hitting him. He wasn't hit, but he underwent this grueling test of courage for about two hours until the bandidos began to run low on ammunition.
He smoked the joint and snorted the entire gram, and stood there only moving minimally as a couple of dozen nine millimeter bullets missed him by inches. But he held on to his courage and glared back at them. He never lost it.
After telling me that we were going to be shot, he jumped out of the door and began walking around in circles, muttering to himself. I finally calmed him down and got him to return to the cargo compartment. He laid down and we both tried to get some sleep.
Suddenly, Walter began violently trembling all over. He was suffering a delayed stress reaction. He was shaking violently and his teeth were chattering. I spoke to him in a soothing voice, and lay down beside him and wrapped my arms around him to try to calm him. Eventually, the reaction passed and he drifted off to sleep.
Shortly thereafter, a bat chose this importune moment to fly through the open cargo door into the cabin. The bat's sonar must have been off, because he slammed into the opposite cabin wall, knocked himself silly, and ended up on the floor beside Walter, fluttering around. He regained his senses in a couple of seconds and flew into the cockpit.
Both of us absolutely lost it. We started screaming curses in two languages at the bat, calling him every name in the book. I had become fluent in Spanish profanity, and I utilized every word I knew in both English and Spanish on that hapless bat. Looking back on the incident after almost forty years has passed, it almost seems comical, but nobody was laughing that bitter night.
We both charged up to the cockpit door. The bandidos had stolen my flashlight, but I could hear him flopping around on the captain's side of the cockpit, wedged in behind the rudder pedals.
There was a can of Raid insecticide in the cockpit they hadn't stolen, and all I wanted to do by then was kill something or somebody. The unlucky bat suffered the consequences. I dumped the entire can of Raid into the cockpit and closed the accordion doors. I turned the cockpit into a gas chamber. It worked. Scratch one bat.
After an almost sleepless night, dawn came.
The pistoleros had brewed up a pot of strong Colombian coffee and offered us some. We accepted gratefully. No sugar, but by then, who cared? We sat in the cabin door, legs swinging freely, greeting the dawn gratefully, and enjoyed the Colombian heart-starter. Our guide, who spoke a bit of English, said it was time to go. So the pistoleros pushed the aircraft down the slope into the turnaround area. We were low on fuel and I was a bit concerned. I figured we had at least one hour's fuel remaining. I advised our guide, and he said the strip, la pista in Spanish, was less than thirty minutes away.
So we boarded our aircraft, I fired up the engines, lined it up on runway heading, ran up the engines to ensure smooth operation, and we launched into the sunrise.
Our problems were just beginning.
Chapter Three
The trip was short and uneventful. We arrived there within around twenty minutes. I could see the guys on the ground, our welcoming committee. I made a low pass up the strip to check it out. It was the worst strip you can imagine. It ran north to south. The prevailing winds were easterly. Although we were well south of the Inter Tropic Convergence Zone, the Trade Winds still blew from the east at about ten knots. The north end was blocked by power lines and the south end featured a small hill. The strip was short and uneven, about 2800 feet in length. I didn't like it, but I had no choice except to land, so we did, landing to the north, with a 90 degree crosswind from the east.
We taxied back south toward the small hill, and there was Ruben, accompanied by his partner, Domingo Rivera. We disembarked, I thanked our guide, tipped him a hundred bucks, and pressed on.
Several hundred gallons of fuel were added to our nearly empty tanks, and a couple of gallons of engine oil was provided for the thirsty Pratt and Whitney's.
As we were fueling, the cargo was quickly loaded, bales weighing in at about sixty pounds each. It was not yet 10:00 AM, so we had some time to kill so that we would arrive in the Miami area well past dark. We enjoyed some more great coffee and had an enjoyable conversation with those who spoke English. Domingo turned out to be a great guy, and we had a lot of laughs. Our relief at finally being among good friends was palpable. Walter was recovering well from his breakdown, and laughed and smiled with us.
Eventually, it became time to depart. We said our goodbyes, shook hands all around, and then we boarded the aircraft, taxied it to the top of the hill at the south end, and promptly got stuck.
This was the hill country, located in the eastern foothills of La Sierra Madre De Santa Marta, the northernmost peak in the Andes. Some of the world's best weed grows on her slopes. But, in that area, they get a lot more rain than in the deserts of La Guajira. There was a soft muddy spot at the top of the hill, and we had become mired in it. I won't express my thoughts here, but they can be adequately summarized in one word. Explanation point added.
So I shut the engines down, climbed out and checked out the situation. We were buried in the mud up to the main gear's wheel hubs. That's about four inches.
Ruben and Domingo were extremely concerned. Walter was near tears. I was also concerned, but evaluated the situation and arrived at a solution.
There we sat in broad daylight on the north coast of Colombia, stuck in the mud with a big load of weed on the bird, sweating Army helicopters.
So I asked Ruben to download the aircraft, and said to him, "Find me twenty Indians."
We waited for a couple more hours, but eventually, the requested twenty Indians arrived. I told Ruben, "Here's the plan. We get the Indians underneath the aircraft, on the count of three they put their backs into it, and pick up the aircraft and carry it fifty meters forward toward the north into dry dirt."
It was done as requested.
Uno. Dos. Tres. Arriba! Up it went.
These tough bastards literally picked up the airplane and carried it fifty meters downhill to dry land, carrying it on their bent backs. It was an incredibly impressive feat, picking up an 8500 pound airplane, but I had met some of these men before, macheteros and cold bloodied killers, but they were as tough as wire and I knew they could do it.
Meanwhile. Big Walter had been sitting on a pile of bales, repeatedly saying, "We're never gonna get out of here." I told him to have faith. I had the problem solved.
This move decreased our takeoff distance by the fifty meters, which made things marginal for an ordinary Beech 18, but our aircraft was different from most. It had JATOS installed. So-called Jet Assisted Takeoff Units, they were two solid fuel rocket motors installed aft of the engines in the after part of the engine nacelles, each one backing up its respective engine
.
It was an
option offered by Beechcraft because of the anemic single engine
performance available from that type of aircraft.JATOS were time-life items. They were basically solid fuel rocket motors. In other words, they had a life cycle of three thousand hours, after which they had to be replaced. The replacement cost was six grand, so it was not something you would use on a casual basis. But the time was up on these units and I had informed my boss, and he said, "Shoot 'em if you want to. We have to replace them anyway."
They are electrically fired off the aircraft's battery. There was a circuit test meter installed which verified the integrity of the firing circuits and the igniters, and an adjacent spring-loaded switch that fired them. Press a spring loaded meter switch, read the meter, and if the needle is in the green, you're good to go. The igniter switch had a metal flip-up gate covering it to prevent an inadvertent discharge.
We were sweating the power lines at the north end, so I told Big Walter, "Look. This is what we're gonna do. The firing circuits look good. We're gonna launch. When the indicated airspeed hits sixty knots, I'm gonna fire the rockets. They should blow us off the ground in a rather spectacular fashion. We're still gonna get out of here." He looked at me with some small hope in his expression and said, "Let's do it."
And we did.
The rest of the trip was routine. We crossed the Caribbean uneventfully and entered American airspace that night, fifty feet above the Gulf Stream and well below radar coverage, located our people, dropped the load, and went home.
I never saw either Ruben or Domingo again, but, over the years, I have always wanted to ask them how that takeoff looked. I never got the chance.
We beat the odds. Our lives were repeatedly in severe danger, but we survived.
Never quit. Never, ever quit.
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