Where's the Dragon Lady?

After more than 300 uneventful round trips between Caracas and New York, Venezuelan Airline Pilot Henry Peter Bush, 42, a bachelor and an uncured romanticist, was bored. He wanted to give up flying some day and write adventure stories. He took his accumulated leave and set off on a round-the-world trip (Europe, the Middle East. India). Last week he turned up in Tokyo with a headline-making story right out of Terry and the Pirates. He had just come back, he said, from flying 350 miles into Red China to bring out the 13-year-old son of a wealthy Chinese businessman.

Airman Bush said the adventure began when a fellow passenger on a Bangkok-Hong Kong commercial airline flight confided to him: "I've been contacted to find a pilot to fly someone out of China." The passenger, said Bush, turned out to be a British travel agent, based in Bangkok, by the name of Mike Sullivan. Pilot Bush and his new friend continued in time-tested fashion: they met a "beautiful Chinese girl" in a Hong Kong restaurant, and she begged them to undertake an "errand of mercy" to save the boy, who was being held as a hostage by the Chinese Communists. The two men took a four-hour boat ride across the Pearl

River estuary to the tiny Portuguese colony of Macao, and before anyone could say "Where's the Dragon Lady?" found themselves heading for Red China in an ancient, twin-engined amphibian PBY, Bush piloting, Travel Agent Sullivan at his side.

The trip itself, said Bush, was uneventful. They maintained an altitude of between 500 and 1,000 ft., were waved at by groups of people, finally put down on an unused airstrip at the confluence of two unidentified rivers near Changsha in Hunan province.

"We did not leave the plane," said Bush, "didn't even stop the engines." Almost as soon as Bush's PBY had put down on the strip, he said, a truck appeared and delivered the Chinese boy. Several hours later, Bush, Sullivan and their wide-eyed passenger landed in the water off Macao, and the boy was handed over to a power-operated black Chinese junk that came up alongside the plane.

Back in Hong Kong, a few hours later, Bush and friend once more met the beautiful Chinese girl and the tearfully grateful father of the boy. "He was," said Bush, "a clean-cut, distinguished-looking man," though they never got his name. The father offered the two men $10,000 apiece, which they both said they refused, but they did accept $800 gold wristwatches appropriately engraved in Chinese: ". . . You will be remembered forever." Then Bush went on to Tokyo, Sullivan back to Bangkok.

Though Portuguese authorities in Macao denied that any such flight had ever occurred and other officials expressed extreme skepticism, both Bush and Sullivan stuck to their stories. Their watches were all they had as proof. Naturally, they said, they could not produce the father, the boy or the beautiful girl.

Throughout all the assaults of doubting newsmen. Bush remained good-naturedly sure of himself. "Gee, at first I thought nothing of this," he said, as if surprised by the attention. "Queer things happen to us pilots. Why, down in Sydney, there was that business of the shark . . . but let's not go into that."

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