Like its predecessor Bahama Crisis I found this an enjoyable read, not particularly thrilling, but civilised and nicely paced and intelligently plotted with a tidy line in humour and rising to a couple of exciting action scenes at the climax. It features Max Stafford, the first person narrator of Flyaway, the only repetition of a protagonist in Bagley’s oeuvre, and it was the last of Bagley’s novels to be published during his lifetime (the final two being published posthumously).
The plot
The plot starts in America, moves to London and then most of it is set in Kenya.
Ben Harden is ex-CIA like a lot of other guys in Gunnarsson security agency. He’s instructed to find out if an old guy in England, Hendrykxx, has any American relatives and finally tracks down some hippy kid in California, Hank Hendrix. As he drives away someone takes a pot shot at Hank which wings him in the shoulder, why? And when he gets back to New York, his fat rude boss, Gunnarsson not only doesn’t thank him but refuses to pay a bonus, provokes a fight, and abruptly fires Harden. Disgruntled Harden carries on digging and discovers the client for the search is a British law firm, and that Hendrix has an English cousin, Dirk Hendrick (note the different spellings of the name depending which country they live in). With nothing better to do he flies to London to visit the lawyer and then the cousin, to figure out why he got shot at and why he got fired.
Enter Max Stafford, ex-British Intelligence, now head of a large and successful private security firm. By vast coincidence he is friend to Alix Aarvik, the woman married to Dirk Hendrick, the English cousin. (Alix was sister to the main figure in Flyaway, Paul Aarvik, whose quixotic quest for his father is the narrative engine of Flyaway. Stafford and Alix nearly got together, but it didn’t quite happen and then she married Hendrick. She has just given birth to a bouncing blue-eyed baby boy and is still friendly enough with Stafford that she’s named the baby Max, after him.) After this American, Harden, comes visiting, asking her a load of questions, Alix calls Max. We meet Max and his tough, ex-Marines manservant, Sergeant Curtis, who quickly establish themselves as a tough but humorous double act.
The novel is 320 pages long and has many twists and turns. Briefly, Max discovers that Hendrykxx’s will, filed in Jersey for tax reasons, left a total of £40 million, £34 million to go to the Ol Njorowa charity in Kenya, the remaining £6 million to be split between living heirs (Dirk Hendrick and Hank Hendrix), provided they spend a month a year working at the charity.
Harden eventually meets Stafford who realises he is a useful guy to have around, especially when he tells the news that Gunnarsson has arrived in London, with a young dude he claims to be Hendrix, taking him to meet the various London lawyers involved in implementing the will – but it is not the same man Harden collared in California, it is an imposter!
In Kenya
The scene shifts to Kenya as Stafford, Sergeant Curtis and Harden fly out to investigate the charity. Almost immediately Sergeant Curtis introduces Stafford two local ‘fixers’, Peter ‘Chip’ Chipende and a Sikh, Nair Singh who come in very handy. Stafford takes a trip to the Ol Njorowa charity, which is an enormous compound surrounded by a ten foot barbed wire fence. Hmm, suspicious. He befriends one Alan Hunt, a research scientist, and his sister Judy, who show him round.
The abduction
When Gunnarsson arrives with the fake Hendrix, Stafford and Harden keep tabs on them, following them from a distance. That’s how they find out when the Gunnarrson tourist party is kidnapped by bandits from Tanzania, who often kidnap tourists, strip them bare, and release them into the wild. Stafford, Chip, Nair and Curtis trail the abductors into the bush, watching but not interfering as they carry out the usual stripping and stealing the tourists’ goods. But they are surprised when Hendrix is taken off a distance by two soldiers who then take out their guns and are on the point of executing the young dude when Chip and Stafford intervene, shooting the soldiers.
Stafford, Curtis, Chip, Nair and now Hendrix, make it back to the car and back to civilisation ie their tourist compound and hotels, knowing the other hostages will be released unharmed and told to walk home and that their Kenyan tour guide will be sure they get to safety. Meanwhile, under interrogation, the imposter ‘Hendrix’ reveals he is computer hacker Jack Corliss and that Gunnarsson blackmailed him into pretending to be Hendrix, he’s not even sure why. Chip places Corliss safe and secure in a police cell.
Reveal
About half way through the novel there is a scene between Hendrick and Brice, the head of the charity, in which both are revealed to be South African spies. The charity is a front, as Stafford immediately suspected. Hendrick is in the psychopath league: having worked for South African intelligence for some time, he became intrigued by his long-lost grandfather and, using his contacts, tracked him down and found him to be a mafia-style businessman who’d amassed a fortune but was ill and going senile. Hendrick had the old man brought to Jersey and guarded by a couple of ‘carers’, while he suggested to his bosses rerouting the old man’s ill-gotten fortune into an operation to destabilise Kenya, by arming and motivating some of the many rival tribes and ethnic groups in that country. He gets the senile old man to sign a will that he, Hendrick, has created, as a token leaving money to living heirs, but really leaving most to ‘the project’.
It was bad luck the London lawyers followed their brief a bit too zealously and hired an American detective agency to track down a rumoured American cousin, very bad luck that they found him. Hendrick and Brice want to eliminate him as a wild card who will interfere with the operation, so it was they who organised for Gunnarsson’s party to be abducted by South African operatives posing as Tanzanian bandits, the sole aim being to execute Hendrix to get him out of the way.
But they hadn’t counted on the presence of Stafford and Chip to rescue Hendrix. And they also had no idea that greedy Gunnarsson from the States was himself operating a scam. Scenting a lot of money in Hendrix, Gunnarsson sacked Harden, murdered the remaining members of his ‘commune’ who would recognise him (in a house fire), and then murdered the real Hendrix himself (sealing his corpse in cement and dumped in Long Island Sound) before blackmailing Corliss to impersonate him.
Brice and Hendrick, and Stafford, have no part in this scam, which takes a long time to come to light, and confuses everyone including the reader, as we all think it must be part of an elaborate double-bluff by one of the conspirators.
Security agencies
There’s a light, comic element to the thriller, partly stemming from the jokey relationship between Stafford and Curtis, but the plot itself becomes faintly farcical when we learn that Chip and Nair are themselves working for Kenyan Intelligence who have long suspected something fishy about the Ol Njorowa charity. When Harden looks up old CIA contacts at the US embassy and Stafford finds himself being politely grilled by a ‘senior figure’ from the British embassy, Stafford himself points out that we appear to have members or ex-members of the CIA, MI6, BOSS (South African intelligence) and Kenyan intelligence all swimming in the same murky pool.
Interlude in a balloon
As part of the polite hospitable showing-round of the facilities, the ‘innocent’ scientist Alan Hunt and his sister ask Stafford if he’d like to accompany them in one of their balloon rides, which they do to photograph and research local land patterns. He says yes and there is a delightful description of a flight in a balloon – I would be surprised if it isn’t a straight description of something Bagley had experienced himself.
The plot justification is that Stafford takes aerial photos of the compound, which he gets the Kenyans to develop and analyse – he is particularly interested in the mystery building, the one where the research into animal migration is carried out, but most of the other researchers have never entered – but for the reader it’s pure fun, of a kind of carefree type you don’t get in the corralled, relentlessly focused and logical thrillers of, say, Frederick Forsyth or Robert Ludlum. It’s these rather extraneous details and ‘colour’ which makes Bagley’s thrillers feel more relaxed and enjoyable than their more modern, unforgiving counterparts.
Two climaxes
1. The island Towards the end of the book the two Kenyan agents set up a temporary base on an island in a lake not far from the charity compound. Here Stafford brings Hunt, the innocent scientist from the charity, to let him in on the secret and ask him to be their eyes and ears on the ground. But things start to get messy when Curtis, acting as lookout, spots Gunnarsson approaching in a hire boat. Gunnarsson comes ashore and is throwing his weight around about being tailed and watched and lied to when, unexpectedly, Nair arrests him and puts handcuffs on him. There is a big reveal where Gunnarsson explains that he knows nothing about the compound, he just switched Hendrix, hoping to stick with the impersonator and sooner or later get his hands on the £3 million. Aha. At last we understand the Hendrix impersonation is not part of the main conspiracy, just a sort of accidental detail.
Barely has this settled before another boat is seen approaching, which turns out to carry Brice, head of the charity, and Hendrick, with a handful of goons from the charity compound. The others hide while Nair and Gunnarsson put on an act for the visitors, pretending that Nair has just arrested Gunnarsson for fraud and embezzlement. But Brice suspects it’s a play-act and trips big clumsy Gunnarsson and, as he falls, the handcuffs come off, showing they were never locked, as Brice suspected.
Nair and Gunnarsson turn and run, pursued by Brice and goons. Stafford, Curtis, Harden and Hunt, watching from cover, make a break for it, cosh the goon guarding the boats, and quickly fire them up and cruise along the side of the island to rescue their team, despite errant gunshots from Brice’s boys.
Nair turns and hits his pursuer, then makes it out into the water, wounded by a gunshot but is hauled safely into one of the boats. Gunnarsson comes to a grotesque end as his blundering disturbs an enormous hippopotamus which chases him into the water and, in one movement, bites him in half. Yuk.
2. The base On impulse Stafford says now is the time to raid the compound, while Brice is away marooned on the island. He gets Hunt to smuggle him, Curtis and Harden into the base in the trailer of his Land Rover and to park outside the mystery building, the one where the research into animal migration is carried out and where Hunt and the rest of the researchers have rarely if ever been.
Briefly – our guys enter and find everything disappointingly innocent-looking, until someone takes a pot shot at them. This alerts Stafford to the trapdoor in the floor. He persuades Hunt to get the burner from the balloon and, carefully lifting the trapdoor from behind, to fire it into the cellar; there are more shots from the cellar which stop when the awesome and terrifying flame thrower gets going. Our team seem on the verge of success when there are shots from behind them – Brice and Hendrick have gotten off the island somehow and entered the building all guns blazing. Pandemonium! Shots are fired in all directions, then Curtis (who had been acting lookout on the roof) appears behind one baddy and disables him, when – BOOM! – everything goes black.
Epilogue
Stafford wakes up in hospital. Their flame thrower gimmick set off some of what turns out to be the big stockpile of arms and ammunition which was in the concealed basement. Harden was burned, Hunt wounded, Sergeant Curtis survived unscathed and pulled our guys to safety, Brice got a broken arm, Hendrick and the man in the basement were both killed, Stafford was badly concussed. Chip from Kenyan intelligence brings him grapes and ties up all the loose ends; the Kenyan authorities will hush it all up but use their knowledge of this secret South African operation as a bargaining chip.
In a final and very odd few paragraphs, Stafford reflects that every time he gets involved with Alix Aarvik he gets into serious trouble.
He made a mental note that the next time Alix appealed for help or advice was the time to start running. (p.320)
Neither Bagley nor Stafford take any account of the fact that his friend Alix has just lost her husband. We know he was a rotter, a ruthless amoral South African spy, willing to murder his own grandfather and other innocent bystanders in the cause – but all Alix will know is that her husband – and the father of her newly born baby – is dead, and he life will be in ruins.
Therefore, it is disconcertingly unthinking and heartless of Bagley/Stafford to end the book on such a light-hearted note. A jarring indication, perhaps, of the disregard for emotions and feelings which characterises the thriller/adventure genre as a whole.
Computers
Seems almost as soon as they were invented computers started to be hacked. When Hardin is kicked off the Hendricks case, he asks a colleague at the detective agency to hack into the company’s computer to find out who commissioned the case. There follows a conversation where the colleague points out that Gunnarsson boss checks the log of computer use and would spot the query and know it’s from him, so no dice.
Later we discover the young dude brought in to impersonate Hendrix is really Jack Corliss (p.148), a computer worker for a New York bank who was fiddling the books but discovered by Gunnarsson and blackmailed into impersonating Hendrix.
Computers, hacking, and security issues – all well-known in 1981.
Related links
Fontana paperback edition of Windfall
Bagley’s books
1963 The Golden Keel – South African boatbuilder Peter ‘Hal’ Halloran leads a motley crew to retrieve treasure hidden in the Italian mountains by partisans during WWII, planning to smuggle it out of Italy and back to SA as the golden keel of a boat he’s built for the purpose.
1965 High Citadel – Pilot Tim O’Hara leads the passengers of a charter flight crash-landed in the Andes in holding off attacking communists.
1966 Wyatt’s Hurricane – A motley crew of civilians led by meteorologist David Wyatt are caught up in a civil war on the fictional island of San Fernandes just as a hurricane strikes.
1967 Landslide – Tough Canadian geologist Bob Boyd nearly died in a car wreck ten years ago. Now he returns to the small town in British Columbia where it happened to uncover long-buried crimes and contemporary skulduggery.
1968 The Vivero Letter – ‘Grey’ accountant Jeremy Wheale leads an archaeology expedition to recover lost Mayan gold and ends up with more adventure than he bargained for as the Mafia try to muscle in.
1969 The Spoilers – Heroin specialist Nick Warren assembles a motley crew of specialists to help him break up a big drug-smuggling gang in Iraq.
1970 Running Blind – British secret agent Alan Stewart and girlfriend fend off KGB killers, CIA assassins and traitors on their own side while on the run across the bleak landscape of Iceland.
1971 The Freedom Trap – British agent Owen Stannard poses as a crook to get sent to prison and infiltrate The Scarperers, a gang which frees convicts from gaol but who turn out to be part of a spy network.
1973 The Tightrope Men – Advertising director Giles Denison goes to bed in London and wakes up in someone else’s body in Norway, having become a pawn in the complex plans of various espionage agencies to get their hands on vital secret weapon technology.
1975 The Snow Tiger – Ian Ballard is a key witness in the long formal Inquiry set up to investigate the massive avalanche which devastated the small New Zealand mining town of Hukahoronui.
1977 The Enemy – British Intelligence agent Malcolm Jaggard gets drawn personally and professionally into the secret past of industrialist George Ashton, amid Whitehall power games which climax in disaster at an experimental germ warfare station on an isolated Scottish island.
1978 Flyaway – Security consultant Max Stafford becomes mixed up in Paul Billson’s quixotic quest to find his father’s plane which crashed in the Sahara 40 years earlier, a quest involving extensive travel around North Africa with the charismatic American desert expert, Luke Byrne, before the secret is revealed.
1980 Bahama Crisis – Bahamas hotelier Tom Mangan copes with a series of disastrous misfortunes until he begins to realise they’re all part of a political plot to undermine the entire Bahamas tourist industry and ends up playing a key role in bringing the conspirators to justice.
1982 Windfall – Max Stafford, the protagonist of Bagley’s 1978 novel Flyaway, gets involved in a complex plot to redirect the fortune of a dead South African smuggler into a secret operation to arm groups planning to subvert Kenya, a plot complicated by the fact that an American security firm boss is simultaneously running his own scam to steal some of the fortune, and that one of the key conspirators is married to one of Stafford’s old flames.
1984 Night Of Error – Oceanographer Mike Trevelyan joins a boatload of old soldiers, a millionaire and his daughter to go looking for a treasure in rare minerals on the Pacific Ocean floor, a treasure two men have already died for – including Mike’s no-good brother – and which a rival group of baddies will stop at nothing to claim for themselves, all leading to a hair-raising climax as goodies and baddies are caught up in a huge underwater volcanic eruption.
1985 Juggernaut – Neil Mannix is the trouble shooter employed by British Electric to safeguard a vast transformer being carried on a huge flat-bed truck – the juggernaut of the title – across the (fictional) African country of Nyala towards the location of a flagship new power station, when a civil war breaks out and all hell breaks loose.
Books & Boots 