Dead Centre - Andy McNab [62]
Apparently it had been a very strange season. Winter had started a month early, with heavy snowfalls in October. Spring had also arrived way ahead of time. The sun had shone almost continually and there had been weeks of bizarrely hot weather. Then December had had some of the best snow of the season.
‘But you know how I will remember this season most of all? As the one when the snow didn’t fall. We waited through January, February and now this month for the big dumps of snow that never came. That’s why we’re lucky we live in the Trois Vallées.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Wise leaders who invested heavily in snow cannons, reservoirs and piste groomers.’
‘Man-made snow doesn’t sound very eco-friendly.’
‘It’s economy-friendly. Without it, the Russians wouldn’t have brought their bling-bling.’
‘Good for business, are they?’
‘These days, they are the business.’
I stepped out into a landscape that looked white enough to me. The piste groomers must have been working their miracles.
I looked along just 525 metres of steeply rising runway. There was a vertical drop at the end. It was easy to see why Courchevel airport was rated one of the most dangerous in the world. There was no go-around procedure, the pilot had said. The hill was supposed to help to slow a landing aircraft.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not always.’
Add to that a hazardous approach through deep valleys that could only be performed by specially certified pilots, and often freezing conditions with black ice and heavy snow, and you had one of the most challenging landings on earth. Jets couldn’t use it. Larger propeller aircraft like the Twin Otter and Dash 7 could, but they had been phased out. Smaller Cessnas and helicopters had taken over.
A driver in his early twenties greeted me and led me to a car. He was smartly dressed in a black suit, shirt and tie. His gold-rimmed Ray-Ban Aviators glinted in the sun.
I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I climbed into the back. I’d listened to Talk Radio on my way to Bristol airport. The coalition’s austerity measures weren’t going down well. Prices at the petrol pumps were higher by the day. So was the number of unemployed. All in all, it had been another grey and gloomy day in Broken Britain. Yet in a parallel universe Frank’s plane had turned out to be a G6 Gulfstream, more airliner than private jet, and I was in a black Merc limo with darkened windows on the way from the ‘altiport’ at one of the world’s most upscale ski resorts to meet with one of the world’s richest men.
According to a brochure I found in the Gulfstream, Courchevel 1850 was the highest and most famous of the resort’s four centres, distinguished from each other by their height in metres. It was also the bit where the billionaires hung out. 1850 was in fact only 1747 metres above sea level, but the good burghers were keen to shaft arch-rivals Val d’Isère. Everyone wanted a slice of Russian action, and the Russians always flocked to the biggest, highest, priciest – anywhere, in fact, with est on the end. With five-star hotels charging $35,000 a night for a suite, chalets at $190,000 a week and restaurants that boasted more Michelin stars per head of population than anywhere else on the planet, they wouldn’t have been dis appointed. If there was snow, they were here – if they weren’t in Moscow making money, or in London spending it. And where the Russians go, the nouveaux riches from the emerging economies in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America follow.
I’d landed in Geneva and got straight on the Bell. The helicopter transfer company’s choice of aircraft gave me a big kick. It had starred in Airwolf, one of my favourite TV shows as a kid. It looked much the same: navy blue, sleek and menacing as it flew low between the mountains.
There had been property brochures in the Gulfstream, too. As I drove in the back seat of the air-conditioned, leather-upholstered luxury bubble, I knew I was passing ‘chalets’ that cost upwards of $5 million. We were a world away from the shabby, peeling shit-pits I’d left behind me in Easton. No clapped-out Ford Focuses, either.