Sunlit Shadow Dance (30 page)

Still it was as if what she was now was a
sweet twelve year old in an adult’s body, without the edginess of
maturity. Her boundaries were very contained things and she seemed
to live contentedly within them. Part of him, deep down, ached to
have a bit more of the old Susan back.

So he put in hard physical days outside and
loved the bare open Scottish hillsides even though a spring day
here rarely reached the temperature of an Alice Springs winter
day.

The day before Tom and Elinor were due to
leave Tom brought out two rifles and suggested Vic walk out with
him to try and bag a deer. He said that once he would have loved to
do this with Susan but now she seemed to have lost her desire for
the outdoor life. There was a wistfulness in Tom’s voice as he said
these words.

Vic looked at him sharply. Tom returned
his look. “Yes I know,” he said, “we should just be happy to have
our daughter back. Truly I am so grateful, and to you for your
part. But yet I miss the fire she used to have. She does not argue
with me anymore or challenge anything I say. She does not burst
with her uncontained energy of before. I would not lose what we
have for all the tea in China, but a part of me aches to have my
little fiery Susan back.”

Vic nodded, “Me too, sometimes I cannot
bear to sit around the house any more. I am a person used to doing
physical things. I suppose we could go off and travel, but I do not
want to break up her pleasure in rebuilding her family and
memories. But I find I want more, to work hard in something that
pushes me to the limits. The farm work is good, but easy on my
mind.”

Tom said, “Y
es I know and I have been
thinking about that. You are not the sort of bloke to sit around
twiddling your thumbs. I hear tell you’re a helicopter pilot, a
damn good one at that, so your friends say. Are you still up for
that?”

Vic nodded, not seeing where a job like that
would come from over here.

Tom continued, “Well I know a good few
people in the North Sea oil industry business, they have oil rigs,
lots of them, off the coast not too far east of here, out in the
North Sea. They use helicopters a lot to ferry people and goods out
and back. They use ships too, but often a helicopter is the best,
it gets in and out quickly with the bad weather out
there.

“
So I could ask around with some
of the big bosses I know, see if there are any jobs supplying the
rigs, even maintenance might be the go. I am not sure what you
would need to do to get a ticket to fly one, but I heard tell you
are also a qualified aircraft mechanic. So even that would be
something to get you out of here, and once there you never
know.

“
Anyway I will inquire if you
like. After that it will be up to you to impress them. Not that I
expect you to have too much trouble if you can fly like you can
box. Working a machine amongst the trees chasing cattle is probably
a bigger test than doing a ferry run to an oil rig.”

Vic said, “Thanks Tom, I would love if
you’d ask. I think I will need to do something soon or I will go
mad and I don’t want to tear Susan away from here, she seems so
happy back with her family again.”

Tom nodded and the talking was done. They
walked miles up and over the heather. Late in the day they got
their deer, two fine heads and headed back home, struggling under
the weight of the meat

Next day, true to his word, Tom
made some calls
and a visit to the helicopter base was arranged. The day
after Vic was on his way, driving to Aberdeen, two hours east where
he was to meet the head pilot.

His name was Jim;
he was standing in
the hangar as they stripped down a big jet turbine machine. He
began asking Vic odd questions as they watched the work. He quizzed
Vic on his maintenance skills and the need to see his ticket for
this. Then he asked about the machines he had flown, expecting from
the story that had come down from the big boss that Vic had only
flown the little stuff, light and maneuverable, but not really the
type for this work.

Vic told him he had
endorsements for most of the main types, having done a lot of work
for the mining companies with the heavy lift machines
used to bring
machinery and spare parts in and out of the remote NT and Kimberly
mines.

The work on the machine was finishing now,
so Jim said to the head mechanic, “Well roll her out, I want to
give it a test flight, just to be sure, before you sign her
off.”

“
Aye, aye sir,” the mechanic
replied.

Vic stepped back, expecting that his meeting
was done for now and he would hear more later.

Instead Jim turned to him and
said,
“Well
what are you waiting for, I imagined that you would want to get the
feel of your bum in the seat of a metal bird again, back in the
air.”

Vic strapped himself in the copilot seat
while Jim took the command seat. The sound of the turbines spinning
up was sweet music in Vic’s ears, then they were up and away. The
ground fell away and they climbed steadily heading out into a grey
eastern sky over an even greyer and lumpy ocean. They leveled at
1000 feet heading due east at about 150 knots.

Jim turned to Vic and said, “Over to you
sonny boy, put this old girl through her paces and show us what she
can do.”

Vic realized Jim had taken his
hands off the controls and now it was up to him. He had never flown
this exact type before but it was pretty similar to some other big
birds he had
worked, so he took the stick in hand and steadily pushed
her into a slow bank, then pulled back to feel how she responded to
a climb. She was slow and heavy and the engine revs began to dip.
So he piled on the power. Now she was responding as the turbines
roared up the range.

Vic felt fully alive for the
first time in ages
. He looked across at Jim with a grin. Do you mind if I
work her through the paces a bit more?

Jim nodded,
“Disappointed if you
don’t.”

So Vic focused all his
attention on getting to be as one with this huge bird, dialing up
the power to feel the limit of her climb, then a gentle bank
which
he
tightened sharply, the a dive and flare to pull her up down above
the waves. He kept her straight and steady and just above wave
skipping height as he pushed her forward, steadily increasing the
speed, until she was roaring through the spume just above wave tops
at over 100 knots. Then gradually he brought her back to the
original height, straight and level, almost exactly as she had been
ten minutes earlier when he first began.

He turned to Jim and
said,
“Well
I am a bit rusty yet and she is a wee bit different from others I
have used but I feel I am starting to get her to sing like a bird
for me.”

Jim looked at him and nodded, “For someone
who has not flown in six months and with a new machine type in a
different place I think you have pretty much nailed it. I would
have been hard pressed to do it any better and I have over 1000
hours on type. We had better go and see my form filling secretary
to work out all the dozens of forms and papers we need to get you
on the books.”

It took a month until Vic was
fully legal and able to fly on his own
. In the meantime he shared copilot
and mechanic duties, going home twice a week for a day and night
with his beloved Susan Jane. The rest of the time he was a North
Sea pilot.

Jim seemed to have taken a special liking to
Vic and was always looking for opportunity to give him good jobs
and opportunities.

Summer passed with mostly good
weather
. Now
each week Vic typically flew 3 days doing ferry trips out to the
rigs and spent two days at base, checking his machine and arranging
trips or doing various training and certification courses. Most
weeks he had two days off at home, sometimes days together and
sometimes single days.

Susan was always glad to see Vic and their
days and nights together were a delight. But with all her family
around her need and dependence on Vic was much reduced.

Susan’s pregnancy was how
beginning to show
. In his nights with her Vic took great delight in placing
his hand on her belly, feeling tiny movements. It blew his mind
that he had created this new life inside her body.

It was a two to three hour drive from the
highland farm to Aberdeen so when at work Vic stopped over in a
small pub in the centre of town near the oil rig helicopter base.
He gradually got to know both other pilots and crew who flew and
maintained the machines along with others from the town,
particularly the fishermen who crewed the trawlers based
here.

They would tell tall tales of
win
ter
trips, huge seas and wild weather. Several had lost mates in storms
in that unforgiving place out over the horizon, called the North
Sea.

One of the
things Vic had undertaken in
his work was emergency rescue training. That way when ships got
into trouble in the bad weather, a not infrequent event for the
many sailing boats and fishing trawlers which plied the North Sea,
he could respond if he was closest to hand. He had been assigned a
crew for major search and rescue events of two others, a trained
observer who also served as winch operator and a rescue man, Reg,
who would strap himself to a line on the winch and go down when
required.

The three of them did a weekly
training run,
him holding a hover with the winch team practicing a
retrieval. They were getting pretty slick in this operation and
could scramble and be in the air in less than five minutes.
However, as Jim, old and experienced rescue pilot, told them, it
was one thing to do practice drills in good weather. It was
entirely different to do it for real in a howling gale.

In the autumn the first of the winter
storms came. This first storm was only a moderate event with force
five to six gale winds. So Vic continued his ferry operations, but
got his first taste of bad weather flying in this part of the
world. He marveled as the sea transformed from a one to two meter
rolling swell to a five meter broken lumpy ocean, whipped into
whitecaps. His skill was tested holding a flat hover over the rig
with a 40 knot nor-wester. But the big heavy machine rode the
buffeting well and his hands were now tuned to the slightest wind
changes.

H
e found he could hold it steady better
than most. He enjoyed the challenge of the wild weather, it was a
test for his skill and he rose to the test, improving with this
real life practice. Soon the weather settled again to a glorious
late autumn and he enjoyed his drives to and from the highlands,
watching the low slanting sun carved through a glowing sky adding
to the brilliant colors of the falling leaves along the
roadsides.

One day in
early November he was driving
back to Aberdeen and the weather was at its brilliant best when he
heard a news flash; sudden intensification of a low pressure system
in the mid-north Atlantic. It was located south-west of Iceland
with a bearing for the north of Scotland and Ireland. The bad
weather was set to intensify over the next twenty four hours. A
Force 8 wind event was predicted. They would not fly past Force 7
except for major emergencies so he thought he might end up sitting
in base. But they needed to be ready to mobilize for emergencies.
At the base there was frantic activity, seeking to jam several
ferry trips in today, so as to get machinery and people on and off
the rigs before the weather turned bad.

Vic flew four trips out and
back, mostly
carrying people to get the non-essentials workers off the
rigs, doing crew changes wherever possible before several days when
they may not be able to fly.

The next day the weather was bad, even in
the shelter of the port; gusting winds, driving rain and endless
grey skies. There were no flights as, even though the weather was
just within allowed flight limits, it was deemed unnecessary as the
essential work was done the day before.

So mostly they sat around the
base and listened to the radio, doing minor maintenance but
staying on high
alert lest a call out came. In the fading light of the four o’clock
news a new alert came out predicting a major intensification of the
system later tonight to a Force Eight or even Nine event. Shortly
after this a Mayday call came from a small fishing trawler in
trouble in the North Sea about 100 miles north-east of Aberdeen.
Vic was listed as the first responder so he called the crew and
they rolled the machine out of the hangar. He warmed up the engines
while they waited to see who would be given the task, whether a
boat nearby could respond or whether a helicopter would be called
in. This was a call that the full time helicopter rescue base would
normally respond to and he was waiting as a backup.

There was a static of chatter
across the airwaves, saying
the nearest ship able to respond was 1-2 hours
sailing time away and with heavy seas it may take longer. The
regular helicopter rescue machine was already out, having just done
another job. It needed to return to base to take on fuel before it
could get out that far. It was an estimated 45 minutes flying time
for Vic, however the weather was deteriorating and it was a
marginal call whether it was still safe to fly. In the meantime one
of the crew was on the phone back into town to see if he could get
better information about the fishing trawler, as it was Aberdeen
based. It turned out that several of the trawler’s crew were
locals, well known in the town.