Part Forty-Three of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: A Tale of Two Choppers…

Last time, the leader of the Khalistan Warriors – Ranjit Singh Chopra – and his devious scheme to get his hands on Shrimpleton Town AFC were about to become dramatically revealed live on stage on the pitch at the football club.

Skulduggery was clearly afoot.  It had always been a puzzle why a group of Sikhs with no obvious affinity to football whatsoever were so keen to take over Shrimpleton Town AFC in the first place. But were all Ranjit Singh Chopra’s carefully formulated plans to engineer a situation in which this had come about on the verge of being laid bare in front of an enraged crowd?

Could the Khallie Scallies and their ruthless leader be thwarted? Could Chopper still get away with his devious plotting? – or was his clever but very devious conspiracy to seize control of the football club just about to come apart at the seams in a way that few people could have ever anticipated?

Sadly for him – had he but known it – the leader of what was known in Barnsley as “T‘urban Guerrillas” wouldn’t be out of the woods by any means even if he was able to successfully hide his villainous intentions for the Shrimpies here in front of a live audience tonight.

Because beyond the confines of the football ground, unexpected and actually largely unsuspected adversaries were gathering: two groups of angry men – one commanded by a woman – and a single female separately, waiting patiently out in the darkness overlooking the Irish Sea…

But first things first. As we have seen, Ranjit Singh Chopra’s carefully written address to the large crowd thronging the Black Pool football ground had been interrupted by another unsuspected – and totally unanticipated – adversary.

This was Skip, the ageing Captain of the club.

He had repeated stressed the name of the Shrimpies’ home – The Black Pool – as if this was the key to understanding everything about the Khalistan Warriors’ involvement with the club he led on the football field. Then he had asked the assembled multitude to consider if the name in itself held a greater significance than might be immediately obvious…

Skip continued to implore the crowd to do exactly that for just a moment or two longer.

Then, with perfect timing, he continued:

“People laughed when islanders talked about seeing black pools of liquid on this site in the distant past, didn’t they? They said these people were Weirdoes; Witches – or just regular Nutters! But the name stuck – and for very good reason. What those people of yore were seeing was for real! So why would that be? What were they actually looking at?”

The crowd fell silent as the Captain of the Shrimpleton Town First Eleven – sorry – Seven continued:

“They were looking at Bitumen! If this stuff was real – we are told – then what happened to it? The answer is that people brought buckets and carted it all away! Bitumen is too precious to waste! But where does Bitumen come from, I ask you?”

Skip pointed with his free hand over his shoulder towards the darkness of the Irish Sea and continued:

“Over there are the rigs of the Morecambe Bay gas field. We are in direct line with them. And what does the presence of Natural Gas indicate?”

He paused again – and you could almost hear the cogs whirring in peoples’ heads in the crowd as he did so.

“It is a give-away sign of the presence of just one very special – and incredibly valuable albeit literally crude thing – which is all too acceptable in even the most sophisticated circles: black gold: CRUDE OIL!”

Murmuring started in front of him and quickly spread before he again chose his moment and added:

“Under my feet are millions of barrels of the stuff! Some has already seeped to the surface in the shape of Bitumen! Only Crude Oil can produce this precious black stuff! And our club is at the bottom of the Second Division of the Northern Counties Islands and Craggy Outcrops League because someone has realised this. And that someone wants our club to fail. He wants to get his greedy, self-interested hands on it!  Once he has the Black Pool – this sacred ground we are all standing on now – he is confident that he can make an absolute fortune out of it!”

Skip paused. He was getting good at this sort of thing. The crowd became increasingly agitated and – sensing this – he chose his moment to continue:

“Who could do such a devilish and very selfish thing? Would we, loyal supporters of Shrimpleton Town?”

“No!” was the response from a small section of the crowd. But Skip was growing into the role of public orator, the green roots of which we saw when he whipped-up the crowd at the Shrimpleton Arms just a few days ago:

“Was that `no!’? I can barely hear you! So I ask the same question again: Would we, loyal supporters of Shrimpleton Town ever do such a devilish and very selfish thing?”

The `NO!!!!’ this time was significantly louder – and from far more of the assembled multitude.

“Would we – proud natives of Cumberside Island – ever do such a devilish and very selfish thing?”

The response; “NO!!!” could probably have been heard in Arracrowe, three hundred miles or so away, so loud was it. So Skip seized on the collective outrage in the hordes in front of him and added:

“If we – loyal supporters of Shrimpleton Town or decent and honest Islanders – would not do such a devilish and very selfish thing… then who would? Could it be the businessmen of this island, hoping to make a fast buck?”

The audience virtually yelled the word “NO!” back at him at this point.

“So who does that leave?

Skip clearly didn’t need to be coached by anybody from the RSC, RADA or anyone other thespian organisations who are supposed to know all about the most effective way to address crowds. He continued:

“Could it be a group who have absolutely no interest in the Shrimpies at – despite what they might tell us all?”

He stopped dramatically once more, turning to point at the large Sikh who was still lying on the floor in the position Skip had pushed him into.

“So take a long, hard look at this charlatan…”

The Captain of Shrimpleton Town pointed straight at Chopper, who took this prompt to belatedly get back to his feet

“Because this charlatan and his partners in crime want to see our club go bust!”

There was consternation in the packed crowd.

“They have already rigged the Re-election meeting planned for two weeks from now with the same sort of bung they paid them to get their hands on the club in the first place! We need to stop them! We must stop them before…”

Yet again though, posterity will never know what Skip was going to say next.

As he had got up, Chopper had seen an empty beer bottle lying on the stage – a big one.  And he used it to strike the Shrimpleton Town Captain a sickening blow around the back of the skull, rendering him immediately senseless.

As Skip sunk to the floor and the crowd collectively gasped with shock, the big Sikh was already making his way towards the front of the stage and the men who were rapidly approaching to escort him away from it, roughly shoving anyone who got in the way to the ground. As a surge of rage swept through the onlookers, any thoughts of overpowering Chopper or his entourage disappeared as these men produced AK-47s and fired warning bursts into the skies. Some people screamed. Others panicked. There was a stampede towards the exits and safety.

So the football field was emptying rapidly as the armed men chaperoned Chopper back across it and towards the huge helicopter – whose twin rotors were already turning vigorously – and pushed him up the tailgate into it.

The motors roared and the Chinook started to climb into the dark, moonlit sky like a huge insect, turning as it rose towards the massive motor vessel sitting at anchor a mile out towards the east, following exactly the same route it had taken on the inbound flight.

Anticipating this, a group of men had gathered on the side of a cliff right beneath the aircraft’s flightpath. They had been there all evening and had been planning what was going to happen next ever since Cornelius Cumberlake had been savaged to death earlier in the week by virtually feral dogs.

As has been mentioned, Cumberside Island never had been sort of place where disputes between the islanders were handed over to the police or the Courts to sort-out: Cumbersiders did it themselves.

In the middle of the moonlit group was no less a figure than the Earl of Cumberlake himself. He was the angriest of the group, even though he hadn’t been directly involved in what had happened at The Black Pool on the night his son had died. Flanking him was the familiar large farmer – Roddy – who, we must remember, was the best shot on the island. Making up the five-some were two of the men who had been chased by dogs just a few night ago and the Master of the Hounds, Ned, who was still badly-shaken-up by an unwelcome encounter with his own canines at the same time – and had the stitches to prove it. In fact, the only one of the group who wasn’t nursing some sort of physical injury was the noble Earl himself. But he was more upset than he anticipated he could be by the loss of his only son and heir in the snow only a few short nights ago. But perhaps an even greater shock to him was that anybody would have the temerity to do such a thing, right under his nose on his island…

Even the fact that his men were all battered, bruised or otherwise hurt made the Earl almost insanely furious. There were his men.  Nobody messed with them without his say-so. Roddy, for instance, looked as if he had Botox treatment, so swollen were his lips and mouth after Lady Lynne had finally finished with him.

The big farmer remained furious about this too, as well he might and he wanted revenge more than anyone else. But he hadn’t fallen for the local gossip that newly-reformed Vegan hippy Psycho was responsible for what had happened to him or the Earl’s son Cornelius. Dave and he went way back. Besides which, Psycho had provided him with some very interesting information about the origins of The Black Pool which he had learned from Amos at the pub very recently indeed. Information that pointed in only one direction and provided the clue as to the identity of the real mastermind behind what had happened.

That soldier he had met the other night and the ferocious woman with him might have been personally responsible for the trauma he had suffered. But – as sure as eggs is eggs – they would only do what they did if they were mercenaries, wouldn’t they?

Mercenaries worked for other people. The tough ex-soldier might be working in cahoots with the oriental woman and the two men he had encountered at the same time. But just four people could not be responsible for a plot as big as the one which was unravelling before their eyes right here and now. The Earl had already guessed who the real brains behind the operation were: the only people who could possibly benefit from the demise of the island’s main football club: the Khalistan Warriors.

They had watched from the shadows as the Chinook arrived on the island earlier. Plotted its exact flightpath. Now they were standing right under it.

Ned was armed with a rifle, as was the Earl. Roddy had got his hands on an automatic weapon; his men had twelve-bore shotguns. They were all tracking the helicopter as it slowly lumbered its way towards them.

“On the count of three – let the blighters have it!” yelled the Earl, barely audible over the slow thud of the rotors, the roar of the engines and the general racket cause by the down-draught of the huge, whirling blades. “One… Two… Three!”

All six men opened-up simultaneously. Sparks flew off the skin of the aircraft as bullets and shot bounced-off or penetrated it. Ned and the Earl continued to fire as the other men re-loaded.

But if they expected this giant, ungainly beast to simply fall from the sky, the Earl and his little band of men were to be sadly disappointed. Because the pilot of the helicopter did two things none of them had anticipated. Instead of yawing violently away to the left or right to try and dodge the fire coming up from the ground, he turned on the landing lights at the base of the enormous machine. Then he set the helicopter to hover as the tail-gate – already not fully retracted – started to come down again.

On-board the Chinook, the men who had accompanied Chopper away from the football field were absolutely hopping mad. Hopping in more ways than one because two of them had been injured by grapeshot which had come through the floor of the aircraft and were skipping around, trying to staunch the blood which was seeping from around the pellets lodged in their skin. This increased the frenzy of all of them. They were already hyper following the events at The Black Pool but – as trained members of the Punjabi Popular Front – knew exactly how to respond. Ignoring the muzzle flashes from below, they took-up disciplined positions around the tailgate as it settled and the helicopter became a stable gun platform as it hovered maybe thirty feet above the ground.

Their target was bracketed directly beneath them in the fierce glare of the aircraft’s landing lights. Six men standing close together and offering one easy target. They should have spread-out. But, unlike themselves, these men were clearly amateurs. They would literally not know what was about to hit them.

Thirty feet below, the six men were still gamely firing away. The glare of the aircraft’s lights made it impossible to see clearly what they were firing at and they could not see the muzzles of six AK-47s as they appeared over the sides of the tailgate and started aiming at them.

A Kalashnikov of the sort the members of the Punjabi Popular Front were using can discharge 600 rounds in a minute. That’s ten bullets, each one travelling at twice the speed of sound – 1600 miles per hour – every second. All six PPF men had re-loaded with a cartridge which holds thirty rounds as soon as they had pushed their boss back onboard the Chinook. At a signal, they all fired at once: 180 bullets discharged at a stationary, dense target in just three seconds.

It took just a moment for the six soldiers to cease fire. But they didn’t open-up again. Not yet, anyway. As the smoke cleared, they could clearly see the result of their handiwork thirty feet below. All that was left of The Earl of Cumberlake and his men was a smoking pile of what looked pulverised meat.

You don’t mess with the Punjabi Popular Front…

Unless you represent an even more powerful organisation.

Seen from the sea, further little red lights started to chase the huge, lumbering helicopter as it started to pick up speed once more and head away from the coast. This was also tracer and it was coming from a headland opposite to where the Earl of Cumberlake and his men had positioned themselves earlier. Within seconds, overwhelming fire was going back in the other direction from the Chinook. No more tracer made its way upwards from the headland after that.

There, five of Siobhán Aleksandovna Kelly’s best men had been blasting away at the Chinook with automatic weapons as Siobhán herself fired at it with a large-bore shotgun. The weapon had been knocked out of her hands and over the adjacent cliff into the sea. Around her, four of her men were dead; the other one – Big Brendan – groaning as multiple mortal injuries slowly took their toll and he was unable to fire a rifle which had been rendered useless in any case, such was the accuracy and intensity of the fire returned by the Punjabi Popular Front men on board the helicopter. Siobhán had been hit in the shoulder and the leg and was bleeding profusely and in excruciating pain.

She cursed the Khalistan Warriors as she lay on her side and watched them make their escape into the darkness. The Chinook’s landing lights went out and it started level flight again, heading for Chopper’s huge yacht.

But it never got there. Sparks stared to spew from the port engine mounted to the side of the huge aircraft’s rear rotor pylon. It had received several direct hits from automatic fire directed at it by Roddy.

In theory, the loss of a single engine would not make the helicopter stall or even lose height: the engine on the starboard side of the rear pylon could still provide enough power to drive both fore and aft rotors.

But this theory is rendered irrelevant if there is only one rotor still available. And this suddenly became the reality just a split second after another red streak rose from the ground and – not unlike a large firework – homed-in on its target in the blink of an eye. The explosion it caused as it hit the Chinook ripped-off the port motor, taking the rear rotor with it as it ripped through the adjacent pylon and effectively sliced it clear away from the helicopter’s fuselage. The Chinook had effectively been torn in half but it still stumbled forwards, the body of the aircraft beginning to swing clockwise as the front rotor – no longer balanced by the one at the back – continued to turn in a counter-clockwise direction. Like a huge, rogue gyroscope loosened from its moorings, the heavy aircraft ploughed into the sea maybe 300 yards off the shore; the rotor still turning as it drove itself beneath the surface and disappeared into the inky depths.

An eerie silence settled over the scene as the previous cacophony produced by one of the largest helicopters the world has ever known suddenly stopped.

Onlookers on Chopper’s huge ocean-going palace were struck dumb with horror as they watched this happen, powerless to do anything to stop it or help once it did. In the bay, further out to sea in a smaller boat could be found a group of four people. Two Oriental-looking figures including a woman of extraordinary beauty with a man who could have run her close as a Screen Icon. With them was a younger woman whose eyes were rapidly turning red and whose face was already streaked with tears as Simran struggled to comprehend the appalling scene she had just personally witnessed.

They were in the same lifeboat from Lady Lynne’s yacht that they had used to make the reverse journey to Chopper’s enormous ship. Jay had stopped rowing within sight of her Ladyship’s very stylish boat as this drama started to unfold. Lynne, Simran and Nine all watched with growing disbelief first at the display of what might have been just fireworks as bullets were exchanged between the Chinook and the ground. Then they continued to stare upwards as the shooting match gave way to a trail of sparks from its port engine followed by flames and then the intense orange flash of an explosion before an enormous flying machine plunged slowly and lumberingly from the moonlit sky into the depths of the freezing ocean less than a mile away.

Lynne was struck dumb. Nine lowered his head. Jay continued to stare soundlessly. Simran cried uncontrollably, her entire body shaking. They had just witnessed the death throes of the leader of the Khalistan Warriors. But none of them had ever expected – or wanted – it to end like this…

Back on the island, someone who had looked on at ever-expanding circles of ripples on the surface of the sea which marked the last resting place of Ranjit Singh Chopra did not share their surprise: or their collective horror. There, a black-clad figure – a younger woman possibly even more stunning to look at than the Eastern beauty and Indian heart-throb in the boat with Jay – was talking on her mobile phone.

She was clearly a lot happier than the four people we have just mentioned. And the people she was speaking to in Lubyanka Square in Moscow were happier still.

Since Natasha Yurievna Kravtsova had arrived on Cumberside Island, the fate of the Khalistan Warriors had been sealed.

The Russian woman knew that the FSB had successfully obliterated much more powerful groups that them. The Warriors were as good as dead already as far as she was concerned even before she arrived on the island. If her auntie could become a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union as a result of flying hundreds of bombing raids against the Nazis as a pilot and a Flight Commander of the what the terrified Germans dubbed the `Night Witches’, Natasha had always believed that she would find dealing with these upstarts a far less demanding task.

And so it had proved

With a grim smile of self-satisfaction, Agent Kravtsova slipped-off the rubber gloves she had been wearing and stuffed them into the barrel of the canister from which she had just fired an infra-red guided rocket at the Chinook.

It was a Soviet-era 9K32 Strela-2 ­shoulder-launched SAM (Surface to Air Missile), known to NATO as a SA-7 Grail.

Lady Lynne would have been familiar with things like this because SA-7 Grails had first become notorious in the West because of their conspicuous success when used by the Viet-Cong to shoot down US aircraft during the war her parents had fought in. 

The weapon lived-up to its name.

Strela translates from Russian as `Arrow’ – and the rocket Natasha Yurievna Kravtsova had just fired had flown as straight as one right from her shoulder-balanced canister until catastrophic impact on the flying machine a few short moments later.

If the operative of the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation was in any way troubled that she was personally responsible for the mass murder of the soldiers, passengers and crew who had been making their escape from Cumberside in the American helicopter, it didn’t show.

She had been tasked with a job to do – and she had done it. Simple as that.

She walked to the edge of the cliff she had been perched upon and flung the remains of the Surface-to-Air weapon into the deep where it would never be discovered in the future. Then she made another phone call and returned to the Shrimpleton Arms.  

Natasha knew that the very first man she bestowed her utterly dazzling smile upon would buy her a drink. Several drinks if she so desired. It worked every time. She felt she deserved to celebrate a little after what she had just achieved.

And nobody ever seemed to notice her slip a little bit of powder into their final drink of the evening when they excused themselves and went to the loo. When they came back, she would `powder her nose’ – she thought the English expression so quaint but also appropriate given what she had just done – and either leave altogether or return to her room – alone; just as she had always planned. The powder she had spiked admirers’ drinks with made sure that they could never follow her because they would be unconscious.

Tomorrow, she would take the ferry and return to the mainland. The next day, she would be back in Moscow. And stay in Russia. Until next time her unique skills were required by the people who employed her.

But would there be a next time as far as anyone in the Kremlin with an eye on the Khalistan Warriors was concerned?

It’s a good question which we will consider in the concluding episode of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga next time – don’t miss it!

ACHTUNG!!!

Since I attempted to upload this to the internet a few moments ago, I received the following confirmatory note from Facebook about why what you have just read has been banned in India.

This is it:

So please try and control any dangerous terroristic urges you might have as a result of reading my clearly very subversive material.

Remember: Sat Sri Akal: Truth is Eternal!!!