Sam and his prey crashed loudly and clumsily to the ground. Sam was fast and limber with tremendous lung power. He smartly twisted his man up into a functionless heap and lambasted the brother in the face with several hammer fist strikes. I observed all the while feeling no urgency to get up from my seat. I was proud of Sam — more so than usual.
Sam was in full agreement that we two should get the b’jesus out of there post haste. “Did you see me? How was I? What did I do right, what could I have done better, man?” Sam was shoving his amp meter way into the red, but understandably. “You beat his ass; that’s what you did right, Sam … I strenuously object to this line of questioning.
And so went Sam’s first and only fist brawl. As far as I know.
A Night Mission with the Iron Maiden
As the helo slowed to a hover, Sam crawled through the cargo hold, knife in teeth, and slashed the nylon straps that secured the Iron Maiden to the pod. The maiden swung free and wobbled a bit, but remained essentially level. Then Sam engaged the Petzl descender lowering the entombed kayak into the turbid water of Mott Lake. The maiden splashed in and Sam fed the remainder of the lowering rope out and into the water.
Sam turned to me quickly rendering a combat diver-style “OK” signal and gestured with a jerk of his chin to “come on.” Sam did a proper murky water surface dive, feet first. I, in my scurry to keep pace with Sam, did an inappropriate clear water surface dive head first through the cargo hold.
“What did you do that for?” Sam asked flatly of my helo exit.
Fully expecting his on-the-spot critique I had my cut-to-the-chase answer ready for him: “Because I’m a stupid mother-fucker, Sam!”
Satisfied with my nose-bleed level of humiliation, Sam waved his arms to the helo which banked hard and decelerated to, again, a hover over our position as a safety boat hooked and towed the Maiden to shore.
Sam motioned the co-pilot to creep lower and then reach up and grabbed onto a skid once he could. The helo rocked violently as the pilot counter Sam’s weight. He cleanly vaulted himself out of the water and onto a pod with a single acrobatic maneuver that would have prided the Flying Wallendas.
So, there was another thing I was totally unprepared for; another adventure from the Sam Foster Mystery Travel Agency. “Oh … how I hate that Sam Foster!” I thought as I clawed at the helo skid. I brought myself next to Sam on the pod and ventured a smug look as I nodded “OK” to him.
“Let’s go to the beach, hook her back up and do it again!” Sam called out from his expressionless face.
Sam was truly a Tier One, laminated card-carrying, Yankee bushwhacker — but I wasn’t dead yet. “I wouldn’t want it any other way!” I challenged.
After countless iterations both day and night, I did truly fancy myself master of climbing aboard a helicopter from a body of water. We flew back home in the wee hours, Sam staring at nothing in the blackness, no doubt mulling the betterment of his Iron Maiden kayak delivery cage, and me glancing over to Sam intermittently with the satisfaction that his travel agency had not bested me.
Sixty KIAS winds beat my face; my hair was dry, my ego stabilized, my heart was full.
The Iron Maiden, the Maiden of Iron, was not a user-friendly lass, not as such. She was high-maintenance in training to be proficient with her as a means of infiltration into a mission objective area. No men in Delta outside of the loyalty to Sam on his own team were willing to assume the burden it took to work with Her Majesty Maiden of Iron. It seemed certain that the concept would not survive the wrath of the landlubbers.
Sam crowbarred an Iron Maiden infiltration into our next mission profile. Then, in very much the fashion of Sam Foster, he spirited off on other adventures none of which had anything to do with the Iron Maiden voyage: “Good deal, Sam; bad deal, scram!” Oh, but by now I had to just laugh. It put me soundly in mind of the time Sam set up a two-week jungle training mission in British Guyana. What a suck-fest that would be. But Sam would be going on a three-week language immersion trip to Costa Rica, rather than on the jungle training mission.
On Sam’s first day back I greeted him: “Hola, buenos dias, Sam!”
“What?”
“That’s pretty much what I expected.”
The Iron Maiden mission went to me and my insanely capable first mate, his holiness, the Reverend Chill-D. Our Little Bird slowed its airspeed, flared its main rotor and came to a hover over a sheet of black in the black of night. Neither Chill-D nor I could see the water below us. I strained to reach my head as close to the pilot as I could as soon as he gave us the “go” signal — I was just a bit too hesitant:
“What’s our altitude, skipper!?
“You’re right about 20 feet!”
“Are you sure!?”
He just looked at me, the pilot did. I scrambled through the cargo hold and pulled the red parachute cutaway pillow that broke the kayak cage away from the helo pod. I squeezed the Petzl descender until the rope paid out completely through it. I (thought I) heard a splash below and spied the vague flash of churned water. I turned to call Chill-D over but he was already there. That truly was the essential description of Chill-D in short: “Already there,” I held a thumb up to him. He reached up and squeezed it in acknowledgment, the procedure for periods of low or no visibility.
Hoping I would not slam down on top of the Maiden I pushed off feet first and plunged with the Man of God, my brother of the cloth, the Reverend Chill-D right behind me.
“God is great,” thought I, “He’s just never around when you need him”
By God and with honor,
geo sends
All photos courtesy of the author George E. Hand IV, GeoPerspectives, LLC
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