THE RED THREAD

It seemed a long day. Flight Lieutenant Jack Walters ran his eye over the controls, routinely checking for height, bearing. horizon, airspeed and engine temperatures. The twin engine Avocet droned through the afternoon sky on its flight down towards the Malay peninsular from north-east Thailand to Singapore.  The Avocet is a turbo-prop engine aircraft,  a jet engine driving a propeller.
 Miles to the east the Vietnam war raged on, but below, the ricefields of Cambodia had looked deceptively peaceful, as they caught occasional glimpses of their plane reflected in the water of the paddifields. However, death had stalked that beautiful land too, as the Khmer Rouge wreaked its terrible revolution. The year was 1966.
In a few days it would be Jack's thirty-first birthday. There was a bit of a bash laid on at lunchtime in the Mess, it having become a tradition for the officers in 389 Squadron. He was not scheduled for any flights that day, He would catch up on his paperwork and be there, hopefully, when Suzi, his wife, went into Alexandria hospital. When she went in, for the birth of their first child, he would be able to take a couple of weeks leave before he went back to flying duties once more. It was all organised.
They left the Cambodian coast behind on their southerly route and headed out over the sea towards Malaya and Singapore.  It was a five-hour flight from Ubon. They had flown up some replacement Engineers for the Airfield Construction Regiment, along with a load of equipment. The airfield was being built eighty miles north of Ubon, at Long Nok Ta, on the Thai frontier with Laos. The runway was to be ten thousand feet long, the same as Heathrow, on the on the side of the Mekong river. The existing airstrip at Long Nok Ta was too short for the Avocet and the new main runway was still under construction, so everything went up north from Ubon by road. Now they were empty on the return leg, no passengers or freight, except for some surveying gear that needed repair. 
Jack and Ken his co-pilot, who doubled as navigator, sat side by side in the flight deck, the flight engineer in the seat behind Jack. There was no air steward, passengers being given bottled drinks and a meal pack when they boarded for the flight up.
Both Jack and Ken loved their work and their service life. Ken was unmarried and lived in Mess, so he kept Jack up with the latest Mess news. Jack used the Mess for lunches and attended the monthly dining in nights. He lived out of station in a bungalow along with other Brits and they had they own social life there.
The first sign of trouble came when a warning light lit, indicating oil overheating in the port engine. The Fight Engineer did some routine tests, but the trouble would not clear.  "Sorry skipper, could be a faulty sensor, but we can't assume that, perhaps trouble with the pumps."
Jack frowned. This was not good news, they were still two hours from home and the nearest airfield was Ipoh or Butterworth, each a good hour away. At the best they would be stranded away from home whilst the engine was repaired. The trouble was that that both airfields were on the west side of Malaya and they were miles to the east. There was an airstrip of sorts at Tregganau on the north east coast, but Jack was not sure it could take the Avocet. He certainly did not want to turnaround and fly back to Phnom Penn in Cambodia, the worst of all solutions.
The temperature indicator now showed serious overheating and Jack made the decision to shut the engine down and fly on with the remaining, starboard engine, which the plane was capable of doing. The Avocet normally flew at ten thousand feet, the maximum allowable without oxygen and that is the height they were at. He knew that they would probably lose height, and the lower denser air would create more drag. And they had to get over the Malayan main range mountains to make the airfield.  It was not going to be easy. The air of tension in the plane grew as they became aware of their situation. The unaccustomed change in engine noise was unsettling. Jack thought of Suzi back in Singapore and how she would cope if he did not get back for the birth.
They had met back in the UK on the airfield where he was a pilot officer on first posting. They had spent a training day visiting some of the other facilities on the base. That was where he saw Suzi packing parachutes. She was a Corporal in the WAAF, a pretty brunette. He stood close to her while she explained how the forty foot long chute was laid out on a table, folded into pleats, and then folded from bottom to top, so as fit into the pack. The drogue, which pulled the main chute out, was packed last.
He was fascinated to see how the final closure was made with a split pin through the loops, which allowed the drogue to escape and then the main chute.  The split pin itself was held with one red thread, to prevent it accidentally pulling out. It broke when the ripcord was pulled, allowing the pin to come out and the canopy to be released. The chute was white nylon, unlike the Army khaki chutes. With ejector seat aircraft the chute was built in to the seat. In the Avocet the chutes for every crew member were stacked in a rack near the crew and could be grabbed at short notice.
 He had met Suzi shopping in town a few days later and they struck up a friendship, which had to be pursued off base. Eventually she left the WAAF and they married.  Their first child had been a long time in coming.. He was desperate to be there for the arrival. He chewed his lip with anxiety, then shook himself, " I must concentrate on the plane ", the thought, "Put everything else out of my mind".
 The plane's airspeed had fallen, and they had lost height. He had radioed Butterworth, the Australian Air Force base, with the details of their situation and they kept permanent radio watch with him. As they approached the Malay coast Jack's heart sank as the sky ahead came up black from horizon to horizon. A major tropical storm lay ahead right in their path, there was no avoiding it. Butterworth had advised them of storms, and these were to be expected as a daily occurrence in those latitudes, but this one was different.
 They flew into the blackness as the lightning flashed about them, the Avocet heaved and shuddered in the torrential downpour. Things were not good. Although they had crossed the coast, they had yet to cross the main range that ran down the length of Malaya, separating them from Butterworth. They would be lucky to clear the peaks. If they came down and lived through it, they would be lost in the impenetrable jungle and would probably die of starvation.
 They consulted together and the decision was taken to try and restart the port engine so that, all being well they could gain height. Jack bit into his lip with tension as the engine burst into life and the idling propeller picked up and became a blur. The plane started to gain height and for a while all was well. Then, without warning the engine burst into flames, which streamed out behind and in a few seconds the port wing was on fire. It was too late to activate the automatic extinguishing system. There was just time to send out a Mayday, to which Butterworth responded, before Jack gave the order to bale out. They grabbed a chute each and struggled into the straps. They managed to wrench open the door, dived into the blackness, each now alone, falling through the air.
 Jack rolled over and over in the plane's slipstream, judging when he would be clear and able to pull the ripcord.  The thought flashed through his mind that he was going to break the red thread that Suzi had shown him that day some years ago. He reached down feeling for the ripcord handle, pulled, and jerked as the canopy snapped open. The red thread had broken, and his life would be saved. Jack caught sight of the other two clearing the storm as they neared the ground. As luck would have it they were not separated, falling together on to open land. They appeared, by pure chance, to have come down on ground cleared for crops on the edge of a village. They heard the distant crump of the plane falling into jungle a mile or so away. "My poor Avocet", thought Jack, then remembering that they could so easily have gone down with the plane, a rush of gratitude that they were all three alive and uninjured for a moment overwhelmed him.
 Suzi, back in Singapore, had felt her waters break that morning and had immediately phoned her neighbour and friend, who had volunteered to take her into Hospital, if required. She had already packed a bag against this contingency, so before long was on her way to Alexandria Hospital.  The baby was not long in coming, she had got there only just in time. She hardly had a moment to take in her surroundings, the details of the labour ward. "You have a fine little boy" the nurse told her. The cord, red and bloody was cut and tied, and the baby handed to her. For a moment she thought of the red thread that saved a life, she had tied so many of them in her time. Here a new life had arrived, a red thread had broken and the life commenced. She wished that Jack could have been there. But he would soon be back, only a matter of a couple of hours or so.
Jack and the rest of the crew were picked up by helicopter an hour or so after they had landed. The local villagers had come out and taken them in, giving them drink and food, full of excitement at what had occurred that day in their village.  The crew had bundled up their chutes, thrusting them into the packs as a temporary measure.
  As they left, climbing in to the rescue helicopter, the village chief came forward and not speaking English, proffered Jack a parting gift, a short spear, around the neck of which a Red thread was tied, for decoration.
 Now years later. That spear hangs in Jack's hall, complete with red thread. His son, now in his mid thirties tells his friends the tale of the day his father came by it and the red threads that saved and made lives that day.
        Max Frost
        24 April 2004