The shepherd by frederick forsyth pdf

The best, most practical advice comes from the Bible, and in particular, 1 Peter It's in this short passage where leaders are exhorted to shepherd the flock among them. Unfortunately, most modern leaders have precious little experience tending sheep, and many of the implications that were well understood when Peter penned these words are lost on today's reader.

Light wear. Very light soiling. Also find First Edition Signed. Published by Bantam Books, New York, Used - Hardcover Condition: Fine. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First Illustrated Edition. New York: Bantam Books, Very clean hardcover book in unchipped dust jacket. Clean white boards with white cloth spine, blue lettering on spine. No bumping or wear. Binding is tight and square, pages and edges are clean and bright. Clean endpapers - no names, writing or marks. Illustrated with black and white drawings.

Clean dust jacket is unchipped, no tears, not price clipped; enclosed in new archival quality removable mylar cover. The tale of a young fighter pilot in his most desperate hour of need, a tale at once suspenseful and inspirational.

Published by London, Hutchinson Used - Hardcover. From Australia to U. First edition. Later issue jacket first had a price of 1. Ownership signature on the fly-leaf, coarse paperstock is showing age and discoloration, but is sound, and otherwise book is fine in like dustjacket price of 5. The publisher obviously has first editions of "The Shepherd" in stock in the mids, when it married them with these newly designed jackets.

Published by Hutchinson, Used Condition: Very Good Hardback. From New Zealand to U. The stars were no longer impressive in their brilliance; I thought of their hostility, sparkling away there in the timeless, lost infinities, of endless sub-zero space. The night sky, its stratospheric temperature fixed, night and day alike, at an unchanging fifty-six degrees below zero, became in my mind a limitless prison creaking with the cold.

Below me lay the worst of them all, the heavy brutality of the North Sea, waiting to swallow up me and my plane and bury us for endless eternity in a liquid crypt where nothing moved, nor would ever move again. And no one would ever know. At 15, feet and still diving, I began to realize that a fresh, and for me the last, enemy had entered the field. There was no ink-black sea three miles below me, no necklace of twinkling seaside lights somewhere up ahead.

Far away, to right and left, ahead and no doubt behind me, the light of the moon reflected on a flat and endless sea of white. Perhaps only a hundred, two hundred, feet thick, but enough.

Enough to blot out all vision, enough to kill me. The East Anglian fog had moved in. As I had flown westwards from Germany a slight breeze, unforeseen by the weather men, had sprung up blowing from the North Sea towards Norfolk.

During the previous day the flat, open ground of East Anglia had been frozen hard by the wind and the sub-zero temperatures. During the evening the wind had moved a belt of slightly warmer air off the North Sea and on to the plains of East Anglia. There, coming in contact with the ice-cold earth, the trillions of tiny moisture particles in the sea air had vapourized, forming the kind of fog that can blot out five counties in a matter of thirty minutes.

How far westward it stretched I could not tell; to the West Midlands, perhaps, nudging up against the eastern slopes of the Pennines? There was no question of trying to overfly the fog to the westwards; without navigational aids or radio, I would be lost over strange, unfamiliar country. Also out of the question was to try and fly back to Holland, to land at one of the Dutch air force bases along the coast there; I had not the fuel. Relying only on my eyes to guide me, it was a question of landing at Merriam Saint George or dying amid the wreckage of the Vampire somewhere in the fog-wreathed fens of Norfolk.

At 10, feet I pulled out of my dive, increasing power slightly to keep myself airborne, using up more of my precious fuel. Still a creature of my training, I recalled the instructions of Flight Sergeant Norris again. Of course, Sergeant. Unfortunately the Martin Baker ejector seat cannot be fitted to the single seat Vampire which is notorious for being almost impossible to bale out of, the only two successful candidates living lost their legs in the process.

Still, there has to be a first lucky one. What else, Sergeant? You mean towns, Sergeant. These people down there pay for us to fly for them, not to drop a screaming monster of ten tons of steel on top of them on Christmas Eve. There are kids down there, schools, hospitals, homes. You turn your aircraft out to sea. The procedures were all worked out. If, therefore, we have lost our radio, and cannot transmit our emergency, we try to attract the attention of our radar scanners by adopting an odd form of behaviour.

We do this by moving out to sea, then flying in small triangles, turning left, left, and left again, each leg of the triangle being of a duration of two minutes flying time. In this way we hope to attract attention. When we have been spotted, the air traffic controller is informed, and he diverts another aircraft to find us. This other aircraft of course has radio.

When discovered by the rescue aircraft, we formate on him, and he brings us down through the cloud or fog to a safe landing. I recalled the details better now. The rescue aircraft who would lead you back to a safe landing, flying wing-tip to wing-tip, was called the shepherd.

I glanced at my watch; fifty-one minutes airborne, thirty minutes left of fuel. The fuel gauge read one-third full. Knowing myself to be still short of the Norfolk coast, and flying level at 10, feet in the moonlight, I pulled the Vampire into a left-hand turn and began my first leg of the first triangle.

After two minutes, I pulled left again, hoping without a compass to be able to judge degrees, using the moon as a rough guide. Below me the fog reached back as far as I could see, and ahead of me also, towards Norfolk, it was the same. Ten minutes went by, nearly two complete triangles. I had not prayed, not really prayed, for many years and the habit came hard.

What do you say to Him when you want help? Please, God, make somebody notice me up here, please make someone see me flying in triangles and send up a shepherd to help me down to a safe landing.

Please help me, and I promise… What on earth could I promise Him? By seventy-two minutes airborne on my watch I knew no one would come. The compass still drifted aimlessly through all the points of the circle, the other electrical instruments were dead, all their needles pointing at zero. My altimeter said 7, feet, so I had dropped 3, feet while turning. No matter. The fuel read almost one-eighth full say ten minutes more flying time. I felt the rage of despair welling up.

I began screaming into the dead microphone. By then the anger had subsided and I had taken to blubbering like a baby from the sheer helplessness of it all.

Five minutes later I knew, without any doubt of it, that I was going to die that night. Just enormously sad. Sad for all the things I would never do, the places I would never see, the people I would never greet again. Out through the perspex I could see the moon was setting, hovering above the horizon of thick white fog; in another two minutes the night sky would be plunged into total darkness and a few minutes later I would have to bale out of a dying aircraft before it flicked over on its last dive into the North Sea.

An hour later I would be dead also, bobbing around in the water, a bright yellow Mae West jacket supporting a stiff, frozen body. I dropped the left wing of the Vampire towards the moon to bring the aircraft on to the final leg of the last triangle. Down below the wing-tip, against the sheen of the fog bank, up moon of me, a black shadow crossed the whiteness.

For a second I thought it was my own shadow, but with the moon up there my own shadow would be behind me. It was another aircraft, low against the fog bank, keeping station with me through my turn, a mile down through the sky towards the fog. The other aircraft being below me, I kept turning, wing down, to keep it in sight. The other aircraft also kept turning, until the two of us had done one complete circle. Only then did I realize why it was so far below me, why he did not climb to my height and take up station on my wing-tip.

He was flying slower than I, he could not keep up if he tried to fly beside me. Trying hard not to believe he was just another aircraft, moving on his way, about to disappear for ever into the fog bank, I eased the throttle back and began to slip down towards him. He kept turning; so did I. At 1, feet I knew I was still going too fast for him. I could not reduce power any more for fear of stalling the Vampire and plunging down out of control.

To slow up even more I put out the air brakes. The Vampire shuddered as the brakes swung into the slipstream, slowing the Vampire down to knots. And then he came up towards me, swinging in towards my left-hand wing-tip. I could make out the black bulk of him against the dim white sheet of fog below, then he was with me, a hundred feet off my wing-tip, and we straightened out together, rocking as we tried to keep formation. The moon was to my right, and my own shadow masked his shape and form, but even so I could make out the shimmer of two propellers whirling through the sky ahead of him.

Of course he could not fly at my speed; I was in a jet fighter, he in a piston-engined aircraft of an earlier generation. He held station alongside me for a few seconds, down moon of me, half invisible, then banked gently to the left.

I followed, keeping formation with him, for he was obviously the shepherd sent up to bring me down, and he had the compass and the radio, not I. He swung through degrees then straightened up, flying straight and level, the moon behind him. From the position of the dying moon I knew we were heading back towards the Norfolk coast, and for the first time I could see him well. Then I remembered that the Meteorological Squadron at Gloucester used Mosquitoes, the last ones flying, to take samples of the upper atmosphere to help in the preparation of weather forecasts.

I had seen them at Battle of Britain displays, flying their Mosquitoes in the fly-pasts, attracting gasps from the crowd and a few nostalgic shakes of the head from the older men, such as they always reserved on September 5th for the Spitfires, Hurricanes and Lancasters. Inside the cockpit of the Mosquito I could make out, against the light of the moon, the muffled head of its pilot and the twin circles of his goggles as he looked out of the side window towards me.

Carefully he raised his right hand till I could see it in the window, fingers straight, palm downwards. I nodded and quickly brought up my own left hand so he could see it, pointing forwards to my own control panel with one forefinger, then holding up my five splayed fingers. Finally I drew my hand across my throat. By common agreement this sign means I have only five minutes fuel left, then my engine cuts out. I saw the muffled, goggled, oxygen-masked head nod in understanding, then we were heading downwards towards the sheet of fog.

His speed increased and I brought the air brakes back in. The Vampire stopped trembling and plunged ahead of the Mosquito. I pulled back on the throttle, hearing the engine die to a low whistle, and the shepherd was back beside me. We were diving straight towards the shrouded land of Norfolk. I glanced at my altimeter: 2, feet, still diving. He pulled out at three hundred feet, the fog was still below us. Probably the fog bank was only from the ground to feet up, but that was more than enough to prevent a plane from landing without a GCA.

I could imagine the stream of instructions coming from the radar hut into the earphones of the man flying beside me, eighty feet away through two panes of perspex and a wind stream of icy air moving between us at knots. I kept my eyes on him, for mating as closely as possible, afraid of losing sight for an instant, watching for his every hand-signal. Against the white fog, even as the moon sank, I had to marvel at the beauty of his aircraft; the short nose and bubble cockpit, the blister of perspex right in the nose itself, the long, lean, underslung engine pods, each housing a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, snarling through the night towards home.

Two minutes later he held up his clenched left fist in the window, then opened the fist to splay all five fingers against the glass. Please lower your undercarriage. I moved the lever downwards and felt the dull thunk as all three wheels went down, happily powered by hydraulic pressure and not dependent on the failed electrical system. The pilot of the shepherd aircraft pointed down again, for another descent, and as he jinked in the moonlight I caught sight of the nose of the Mosquito.

It had the letters J K painted on it, large and black. Probably for call-sign Juliet Kilo. Then we were descending again, more gently this time. He leveled out just above the fog layer, so low the tendrils of candy-floss were lashing at our fuselages, and we went into a steady circular turn. I managed to flick a glance at my fuel gauge: it was on zero, flickering feebly. A jet fighter at feet without an engine is a death-trap with no chances for survival.

For two or three minutes he seemed content to hold his slow circular turn, while, the sweat broke out behind my neck and began to run in streams down my back, gumming the light nylon flying suit to my skin. Quite suddenly he straightened out, so fast I almost lost him by continuing to turn. I caught him a second later and saw his left hand flash the dive signal to me. Then he dipped towards the fog bank, I followed, and we were in it, a shallow, flat descent, but a descent nevertheless, and from a mere hundred feet, towards nothing.

To pass out of even dimly lit sky into cloud or fog is like passing into a bath of grey cotton wool. Suddenly there is nothing but the grey whirling strands, a million tendrils reaching out to trap and strangle you, each one touching the cockpit cover with quick caress then disappearing back into nothingness. The visibility was down to near zero, no shape, no size, no form, no substance.

Except that dimly off my left wing-tip, now only forty feet away, was the form of a Mosquito flying with absolute certainty towards something I could not see. Only then did I realize he was flying without lights. Sixty-six minutes of flying time, with the descent and landing - destination Lakenheath. No problem, all routine procedures.

Then, out over the North sea, the fog begins to close in. Radio contact ceases and the compass goes haywire. Suddenly, out of the mist appears a World War II bomber. It is flying just below the Vampire, as of trying to make contact Frederick Forsyth. He lives in Buckinghamshire, England. Search books and authors. Buy from….