Without A Song

Chapter Three: News from home

It was February 1998 and I was back in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It had been a long heady holiday for Sue and me. It had been a long three weeks in a five star hotel on the Red Sea shores. Three years earlier I'd arrived in the high deserts of this proud nation where the mountainous peaks of The Escarpment run up the western spine of Saudi Arabia. Here the daily climate can vary from hot to dry, cold to wet but rarely humid. Our cotton and wool uniforms of light khaki beige came in both shorts and long trousers, short and long-sleeved shirts, thin woollen jumpers and Thunderbird jackets. Matching socks and steel-capped suede boots completed the set. A fair proportion of us would be getting our hands and knees dirty in a variety of forms. Engineers and technicians would be soaked in fuel, water and oil. LOX engineers looked like sawtooth doctors from Victorian England. Outback engineers like myself needed protection from reptiles, sand or the bush muck. We also received a few sets of overalls in a deep shade of khaki green, tough flexi-soled boots and assorted bags in which to carry the tools of our trade.

Once up and moving from the canteens our morning shifts often started by scraping frost from our vehicles windscreens. The height of the mountains and the thinness of the air brought cold and warmth in dramatic measure. Transport for the masses came by way of white American school buses like you saw on the telly, of the type favoured for the American high school run. I swear the shape and fixings in those buses never changed since I first watched them on tv, back in Geelong. In no time at all, after you had safely negotiated the hair-raising drive that dropped to the foothills of the mountain, the days became a scorching forty-nine degrees centigrade. Later in the

day if you're still on the road when the sun went behind any one of the multitudinous peaks, the temperature will sink faster than the Titanic. Always ready for the new challenges and armed with new skills I got stuck into teaching the RSAF graduates how to work and to stay alive underground, underwater or hanging from a radio aerial in a storm-force wind, planning building projects or passing exams. Every one of us was an expert in our own fields, in some cases in more than one field! Occasionally I found myself wondering if folks really knew what my peculiar skillset was or anything of my background. To Patrick Merryweather I was to be a spook again but neither he nor I knew whose side I was on. If FlightPath had a role set aside for me I wondered how much the boots on the ground were aware of my past. If they did they must have been asking themselves what I was doing amongst them. Theoretically I could've found work almost anywhere in the world, so why was I here? The Aussie DoD ministry wanted me here, the Poms were happy to accommodate them so if anyone had raised red flags I couldn't see them. Fortunately no-one asked any silly questions of me. If they asked elsewhere then they got their answers from elsewhere too. Here, high to the west of the Arabian Empty Quarter was just one answer but like all answers what you got depended very much on the way the original question was posed. I'd gained much from my many experiences working with the British and Australian regiments, their air forces and their cultures but never would I forget them either. They stood me in good stead for what I would meet out there but there was so much more hidden from view. I never expected to use those skills again, that information was tucked far away inside my curriculum vitae.

From the Akhbar airbase Saudi Arabian pilots and their American and British instructors flew either the American F15 Eagles or British Tornado IDS bomber aircraft. The ProspectAero Corporation from America and FlightPath supported the training of all Saudi Arabian pilots, aircraft technicians or ground engineers on their airfields. I never really thought much about it at the time but on reflection it seemed that wherever the two governmental allies went

then so did ProspectAero and FlightPath. This would often lead to suggestions that the two companies were really the military arms of the UK and USA. Countries masquerading as civilian companies by stealth.